'underneath, or alongside a reader’s conscious response to a text,whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need'

- Diana Athill quotation from her memoir

"Somewhere towards the End"

- Here is a blessing of a book, something given and redeeming like divine grace is supposed to work for believers. Except Diane Athill’s memoir, "Somewhere towards the End” is written by an atheist in her in her late eighties and pretends to nothing more than one woman’s pleasure in taking on the mystery, the pain and satisfaction of life. Some books do nourish the heart that lives day after day, just as others sap the life-force. This is not meant as a criticism for when it comes to writing I think writers have as much choice over their life-vision as say the shape of their faces. Let’s just say there’s no comparison between Athill’s humane wit and intelligence and the bleak dislike of human nature, or the narcissistic highkicks of market successes like Houllebecq, Anita Brookner, Martin Amis ..though perhaps the comparison isn’t fair since “Somewhere towards the End" is not fiction.
The natural voice talking can be more generous than what comes out in the art of fiction which can never be other than what is truly in the heart. She herself meditating the power of the written word later in a discussion of the bible suggests an answer that could just as well refer to her own book, “I think that underneath, or alongside a reader’s conscious response to a text, whater is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.”
Maybe Athill’s memoir feels so generous because rather than a writerly ego pressing needily for our admiration we are in the presence of a natural sense of proportion in all things. She herself points out that this finesse is the end-product of decades of ...life. She is now so old that with everything – including the market and critical success of her memoir, which is simply “fun,”
“none of it mattered at the deepest level, so all of it could be taken lightly”This comment is prefaced by an anecdote about accidentally bumping into an old schoolfriend who was never a beauty but has been ‘transformed’ by another’s loving vision of her as a seductive and beautiful woman,
“when you are young a great deal of what you are is created by how you are seen by others and this often continues to be true, even into middle-age” What pleasure to read of aging as a liberating process rather than a decline into emotional scelorosis and fixation on bygone grievances! Everybody knows that today we live in a sort of intergenerational apartheid with old people tucked away in nursing homes or hitting the headlines through scientific discussion of Alzheimer’s. In effect Athill’s book redresses a balance we have all been in need of for a long time. Her outlook in old age reaps the openness that has characterised most turning points in her life. The most oft-quoted incident of this trait (in book reviews I’ve read) being the ménage-à-trois she lived with an ex-lover playwright and director and his new girlfriend, an up-and-coming actress also to become a good friend of her own.
“certainly if I had still been in a physical relationship with him it would have pained me to see them together but because by then I had fully acknowledged withn my self that the sex between us was gone for good, it didn’t worry me.”
When this relationship came to an end in turn and the girlfriend left for a new life with another man the whole group including the children born to the couple remained in close, loving contact.
“noone could live through the sixties without hearing possessiveness condemned, even if they didn’t condemn it themselves. It’s true that many people are so neurotically possessive that they can’t bear seeing someone enjoying something even if they don’t want it for themselves, but I was not, and still am not, possessive like that – not because I had trained myself out of it but simply because wasn’t made that way. Luck not virtue for which I am grateful, having witnessed the miseries of jealousy.”
This sounds inhumanly self-controlled. However Athill makes no bones at the start of the book about earlier relationships in which she has had her heart broken, with ‘a sudden blow’ ‘from which it mended best’ compared to ‘slow strangulation’ the ‘worst sort’ of heart-break so what is speaking is the voice of collected experience. In fact, all her freedom in disloyalty, her pleasure in following her own desire outside the usual social models of male-female ‘pairing off’ is the result of a long trip during which she experienced as she says, the self-loss that woman endure since,
“sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often that it does that of young men because so much more of a woman than of a man is used by sex. ..every act of sex performed by a woman has the potential of changin her mode of being for the rest of her life. He simply triggers the existence of another human being; she has to build it out of her own physical substance, carry it inside her bond with it whether she likes it or not and to say that she has been freed from this by the pill is nonsense...Because of all this when they are at the peak of their physical activity woman often disappear into it, many of them discovering what kind of people the are apart from it only in middle age, some of them never. I had started to have glimpses of myself earlier than most, as a result of being deprived of marriage and child-bearing, but notwith the clarity I discovered once sex had fallen right away....”
My first query when reading this paragraph was at the equation of motherhood and sex as a decoy from true ‘selfhood’...Not that old early-feminist dilemma again with one feminine identity fatally cancelling out the other! Surely the whole point of Athill’s memoir is that it’s not the relationship itself but how it is lived out in a unique way apart from other peoples’ perceptions that provides the key to selfhood. How different would her reactions have been if her own children had been involved? Somehow you get the sense that she would have worked out an interesting childhood for them The only minor blind spot in the book is when she associates her own childlessness – in passing - with the lack of a maternal instinct. A ‘nub of coldness’. A damning little comment in contrast to her warm description of the need of ‘oldies’ in a state of decay and soon dead to keep up their morale with harmonious contact with the young, flitting in and out of our awareness’
“They (the young) are ‘beginning’ – the years ahead are long and full of who knows what.. a reminder ...enables us actally to feel again that we are not just dots at the end of thin black lines projecting into nothingness, but are parts of the broad, many-coloured river teeming with beginnings, ripenings, decaying, new beginnings – are still parts of it, and our dying will be part of it just as these children’s being young is, so while we still have the equipment so see this, let’s not waste our time grizzling...”
Athill’s ‘river of being’ is one of the book’s two great metaphors to be taken away and kept like the gem it is of useful wisdom - the secret of a real short-cut to acceptance through unnecessary pain. The other great metaphor is a gardening one. She loves gardens one of her many interests. Her partner on the other hand is in a state of physical decay with kidney and heart problems and severe diabetes has now given up interest in life and lies eating cream cakes, half-reading libary books and when hospitalised waiting for her to arrive in order to ‘move his bowels’. She helps him with cleaning himself up, observing herself with some surprise as she does so without being being bothered or disgusted,
“what (…) ..keeps me and, I am sure, innumerable other old spouses or spouselike people in similar situations, going through the motions of care? The only answer I can produce appears in the shape of a metaphor: in a plant there is no apprent similarity between its roots and whatever flower or fruit appears at the top of its stem, but they are both part of the same thing, and it seems to me that obligations which have grown out of love, however little they resemble what they grew out of, are also part of the same thing. How, if that were not so; could they be so effortlessly binding in spite of being so unwelcome? One doesn’t in these situations, make a choice between alternatives because there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. Perhaps a wonderfully unsefish person (and they do exist) gets satisfaction from making a good job of it. If you are a selfish one, you manage by contriving as many escapes and compensations as you can while still staying on the job. It’s not an admirable solution, but I don’t suppose that I am the only old person to resort to it.”
That plant flower so far away from its root – yes I see that around me in many relationships every day. Yes human beings so often compared to animals are also very like plants.

To return to my inital quotation from Athill’s reflexion on the power of the written word, what this memoir ‘assuages’ for me personally is the need so rarely met, to have words put on the experience of irreligiosity. “faith” she says, “the decision to act as thoughyou believe somethng you have no reason to believe, hoping that the decision will bring on belief and then you will feel better - that seems to me mumbo-jumbo”She does go on though with characteristic fair-mindedness to analyse our debt to the advantges of a social sysem of common good basd on the best of religious feeling...perhaps this i an Anglo – Anglican concept of ‘religion’? From where I am in France at least, social progress from the eighteenth century illuminaries onwards is a side effect of the separation of the state from the church along with the feudal system and divine right of monarchs. Athill’s best contribution to the description of the atheistic outlook is her pointing out the sense of joy and mystery that surrounds it rather than the nihilism and depression that most people associate with lack of belief in a deity,
“we on our shortlived planet are part of a universe incaluably ordinary in that there it is and incalculably mysterious in that it is beyond our comprehension..(this) does not feel like believing in nothing and would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter.”
By far the best line is her repeating a phrase uttered by another student whilst punting one night after a party at the end of her time at Oxford, why believe in a First Cause, he puts to her,
‘might is not be that beginnings and endings are things we think in terms of simply because our minds are too primitive to conceive of anything else?”
She hears this sentence and looks up at the starry sky with a thrill of wonder at the natural world that lasts all her life.

And... oh... Yes. I find myself leaving the most important aspect of this book to the very end. The deep reason why you pick it up to read in the very first place since you know it is written by a near-nonogenarian in her right mind ...I mean the search that is always there in us, for words on how to die. Or how to live so close to “the end” in the title. Now here’s a lesson I personally have been lucky enough to be able to close my eyes to for the best part of four and a half decades. Modern occidental life doesn’t rub your nose in death. Athill herself didn’t see a cadavre until her seventies.
The first lesson in her chapters on death placed near the start of the book so that she can move on to other aspects... is how like giving birth it sounds. Like when you are pregnant and wrapping your mind around what will happen to you and all you can do is turn to family antecedents to weigh up your probability of having a good time or not. The stories you hear from those around you of good ones and bad ones. The sense too that there’s not much point in wasting too much time over what we cannot control because “whatever happens I will get through t somehow, so why jib at it.” Athill’s own family members died suddenly or like her mother after a long life and peacefully without prolonged pain. A good death is when someone you love is there to help you when you are frailest – ‘usually a daughter,’ she says. She also points out that it’s normal that there should be this system of inter-generational aid
“for people to look after children when they are young and to be looked after them when they are old, is the natural order of events - though stupid or perverse parents can dislocate it. My mother was not stupid or perverse.”
All very neat and packaged, like all her philosophy it’s the end-result of years’ reflexions and experience.
As for the wider questions as to what makes people ‘stupid and perverse’, well, she is very fair about that too. An unfortunate event can bludgeon any human being’s self-esteem that’s all there is to it. The recipe for happiness is luck as well as intelligence and ..more luck...
“if one has no money or ill-health, a mind never sharpened by an interesting education or absorbing work, a childhood warped by cruel or inept parents, a sex life that betrayed one into disastrous relationships...if one has any one, or some or all of those disadvantages or any one, or some, one of all of the others that I can’t bear to envisage, then whatever is said about old age by a luckier person such as I am is likely to be meaningless, or even offensive. I can only speak to and for the lucky. But there are more of them than one supposes, because the kind of fortune one enjoys , or suffers, does not come only from outside oneself. Of couse much of it can be inflicted or bestowed on one by other, or by things such as a virus, or climate, or war, or economic recession; but much of it is built into one genetically, and the greatest good luck of all is built-in resilience.”
As an example she quotes an interview in ‘the Guardian’ in which a 103-year-old woman pianist, an Austrian holocaust refugee who has lost her only son still manages to finds beauty in life. She has the great good luck of being born creative, Athill points out with admiration. Also of being gifted with the insight that reads experience as a passionate mix neither one extreme nor the other. Everybody in the world, says the pianist, is
“half good and half-bad...(only there are) situations in which the good comes out and in which the bad comes out..”
Athill sees herself as a lot farther down on the scale of iconic courage. One of my favourite anecdotes from the book is her reminder to herself of the danger of over-enjoying her own reflection in the eyes of the younger people she is fond of. She reminds herself of a honeymoon couple in their late forties she saw when she was around nineteen, “smooching on the dance floor ....(...) thinking with disgust ‘I suppose that old people must ‘make love’...but they ought to have the decency not show it..’and I was a kind, well brought-up girl who would not have dreamt of betraying that response if I had been face to face with them.” Her own response to that young girl in the young people around her is vivid after nearly a century of life lived,
“I am convinced that one should never, never expect them to want one’s company or make the kind of claims on them that one as on a friend of one’s own age.” She finishes up, “Enjoy whatever they are generous enough to offer, and leave it at that” That’s exactly the balance of sharpness and right contentment so near to both our enjoyment of Athill’s book and her own satisfaction with life.

Reading as a silent, vital act of resistance

..an act of self-nourishment. In this last instalment from her reading of Nancy Huston's book, 'L'Espece Fabulatrice' blog-author 'A' explains Huston's belief that fiction contains a spirtual substance and ultimately a true civilising' force at the opposite extreme of those destructive illusions leading ultimately to war and the 'dismemberment' of human societies.

(as usual, scroll down to read in English)

'Il arrive que l’on puisse tirer parti d’un vent contraire. Ainsi, alors que la vie ne pouvait plus s’épanouir normalement, hors les murs du logis familial, puisque tout le pays –l’Iran- s’est trouvé plongé dans l’adversité d’une révolution mensongère et d’une guerre interminable, un ami me confiait qu’il avait saisi là l’opportunité de prodiguer à ses enfants une éducation selon ses vœux. Les arts y tenaient une grande place. Et il ajoutait qu’en toutes circonstances, ses meilleurs amis restaient les livres et la musique. Ses paroles étaient sans amertume ni malice. Son regard avait l’éclat d’une joie solide.

Il est étrange que, le plus souvent, nos plaidoyers en faveur de la lecture et des livres passent les mots. Tout se passe comme si l’on éprouvait quelque peine ou quelque remords à mettre nos lectures dans la balance. Face au réel, elles font toujours si peu de poids. Mais certains silences sont éloquents parmi lesquels je compte celui de mon ami iranien. Il est vrai aussi qu’entre lecteurs on peut s’entendre à demi-mots, mimant peu ou prou l’acte de lecture solitaire et silencieux. Pourtant, parfois, il me semble que tout irait mieux en le disant.
C’est pour pallier au silence insensé qui entoure ce livre que je soutiens qu’il est urgent de lire et de faire lire L’espèce fabulatrice. Il est urgent d’en rédiger des traductions, d’en proposer la lecture dans les écoles. Il est essentiel d’écouter ce qu’un auteur contemporain nous dit du roman, de son rôle dans nos vies, dans les sociétés, dans la civilisation. C’est urgent y compris dans une république européenne dont le président vilipende publiquement un roman de l’âge classique, La Princesse de Clèves, pour le motif que son étude au programme d’un concours administratif lui paraît… superflue.


A la fin des entretiens avec Matthieu Galey [Les yeux ouverts], le critique littéraire demande à Marguerite Yourcenar (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x428t_yourcenar-portrait_school) pourquoi la fiction est le moyen qu’elle a choisi pour transmettre une certaine expérience, un certain regard. Yourcenar répond non sans une subtile ironie : « Vous avouerais-je que je n’ai jamais eu le sentiment d’écrire de la fiction ? ». L’aveu peut ne pas surprendre entièrement si l’on évoque le soubassement historique de la plupart de ses écrits. Mais cette érudite n’est pas exactement auteur de livres d’histoire. Il se trouve que la singulière proximité entretenue avec ses personnages rend simplement impossible ou impensable leur assimilation à des êtres de fiction. Pour l’auteur, ils sont des compagnons de chaque jour.

Ainsi, lorsque la vieille dame malicieuse dit « mais voyons, je n’écris pas de fiction », j’entends à l’autre extrémité d’un invisible lien, Nancy Huston considérer que les romans ont une mission civilisatrice.
Si Marguerite Yourcenar fait l’économie du concept de fiction, c’est afin de souligner cette réalité propre aux personnages de romans. Si Nancy Huston accentue ce même concept, c’est afin d’en faciliter au lecteur l’approche, puis l’appropriation.

Comme en témoigne L’espèce fabulatrice, la réalité humaine est pleine de fictions « involontaires et pauvres », malveillantes et contreproductives. Il importe que l’on puisse en bâtir de riches et de complexes. Il importe que les lecteurs se familiarisent avec ces fictions qui ont la vertu des remèdes, qu’ils s’approprient ces possibilités nouvelles d’existence que l’art du roman sait montrer. Rien de tel que les romans, dit Nancy Huston, pour permettre de retravailler les «fictions identitaires reçues ». Rien de tel que les romans pour agrandir son propre univers, se rendre capable de repérer les fictions néfastes et se libérer de leur emprise.
« Nous avons intérêt à savoir en quoi lire nous fait du bien. » (Page 181).
Il importe d’apprendre à faire de cette substance que contiennent la littérature et surtout les romans, notre aliment privilégié. Un apprentissage et une pratique qui doivent rendre capable de plus d’empathie, qui doivent aider à diffuser la vertu de la sollicitude loin, très loin des dispositifs guerriers, sécuritaires, intolérants qui démembrent les sociétés humaines."

And in English;

Sometimes an ill wind does blow some good. Thus once upon a time when life could nolonger go on as usual outside the family home since the whole country – Iran – was plunged deep in the suffering of betrayed revolution and endless war, a friend confided in me that he had used this very opportunity to provide his children with exactly the sort of education he wished for them. The arts and humanities played a major role in his ideas. He added that whatever the circumstances, books and music always turned out to be his best friends. His words were entirely free of bitterness
or spite and his eyes shone with deep joy as he spoke.

It’s curious how much more than often the best defence of books and reading goes beyond words. As if in some way it hurts or affects us to weigh up what we read. Faced with blunt reality our reading matter pulls so much less weight. Nevertheless, certain silences, including those of my Iranian friend, have their own eloquence.
Readers can often come to mutual understanding through hints and indirect allusion, thus in some way miming that solitary, silent act of reading. Nevertheless, sometimes it seems to me that it would be so much better to put words on the experience.

It’s in order to remedy the scandalous silence surrounding Nancy Huston’s book that I am writing to point out the importance of reading, and having others read The ‘Espece Fabulatrice’ Translations should be made of this book, it should be suggested as reading matter in schools. It’s essential to listen to what a contemporary writer has to tell us about the novel and the role of fiction in our lives, in various societies and in civilisation; and all the more important in a European republic whose president goes out of his way to publicly vilify a classical novel ‘The Princess of Cleves’ pretexting that its presence on the syllabus of a civil service programme strikes him as …unnecessary.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/31/princess-cleves-sarkozy-lafayette)

At the end of a series of interviews with Matthieu Galey in ‘les yeux Ouverts’ - in English ‘Eyes wide open,’ the literary critic asks Marguerite Yourcenar why she chose fiction to vehicle a certain type of experience and outlook. Yourcenar’s response is not without its own subtle irony, “May I confess that never once have I had the impression of writing ‘fiction’ “ The confession is not entirely surprising if we consider the historical basis of most of her writing. Yet the learned writer is not exactly a ‘historical’ novelist. It so happens that the unique closeness she maintains with her characters simply makes it impossible or unthinkable to assimilate them to fictional beings. Where Yourcenar is concerned they are her everyday living companions.
So in the malicious old lady’s reply ‘come, come I don’t write fiction’ I hear Nancy Huston, as at the other extreme of an invisible link, holding out the civilising mission of all novels. If Marguerite Yourcenar is so keen to cut back on the concept of fiction in her work, she does so in order to insist upon the sort of reality peculiar to characters in novels. Nancy Huston on the other hand, accentuates the same concept so as to facilitate the reader’s approach and appropriation of that very idea.

As is borne out in the ‘Espèce Fabulatrice’, human reality is full of ‘poor, involuntary fiction’, which is both malevolent and counter-productive. What’s important is our capacity to fabricate rich and complex fiction out of this substance. It’s equally important that readers should familiarise themselves with those fictions that act as remedies, that they appropriate those new possibilities of living that the art of the novel knows so well how to show us. There is nothing like novels, says Nancy Huston, to help us work out the “received notions” of our own “identity fictions.” There is nothing like a novel for enlarging one’s own universe, for allowing us to take note of our own more dangerous ‘fictions’ and finally freeing ourselves of their illusory hold on us.

‘we would do well to know how exactly reading does us good’ (p181)

The key question is how to make of this special substance in literature and especially in novels, our main source of nutrition. This should involve a learning process and practice that will render us more capable of empathy, which will help us to diffuse solicitousness as a virtue in itself, far, very far indeed from the machinery of war and security systems with all their intolerance and dismemberment of human societies.

a biography of Jane Austen..sisters, a witch and hard times

I’m still in a biography-reading phase - despite everything that’s being said on this blog about fiction as the truest expression of life and truth. Last week I finished reading Claire Tomalin’s book on Jane Austen - in French – though for some reason I don’t feel the language matters in factual writing. I like Tomalin’s technique at the start when writing pulls you in at once - like a novel - with its description of the icy weather and piled snow around the parsonage at Steventon on the December day of Jane’s birth. Astonishingly a (middle-class) woman who had given birth 1775 wouldn’t leave her bed or her room for a whole month – or even go out of the house for three months! What cossetting when you think of the three days at most that modern women spend in bed before getting back to running a home and other children without much unpaid help..and another surprise, the three month old newborn is then farmed out to a village wetnurse who looks after it day and night, freeing the mother to get on with her social life and the education of other children. What a contrast to our contemporary, guilt-bound delicacy of the mother-child bonding process kept up by constant bodily closeness - and maternal self- abnegation for at least the first three years of life.

Tomalin makes much of this different experience of childhood to explain Jane Austen’s hardiness later in her letters’ references to child mortality. The most famous is her comment on a young neighbour dead a few days after childbirth, “inexplicably according to the doctors – could it be that she caught sight of her husband-” a remark that shocked generations of commentators. The ‘braying of Harpies’ EM Forster is supposed to have said. The fact was, as Tomalin makes clear, that arranged marriage to ugly old widowers in exchange for social status or even livelihood was part of the harsh texture of eighteenth century life and why wouldn’t women be allowed to rail against it and say the truth to each other in private? The abandonment of the useless and the powerless was as normal as death by childbirth. One Austen brother, George, was simple-minded and left to grow up with the village wet-nurse rather than integrated into the family scene with his brothers and sisters by mournful, guilt-ridden parents. “Poor Animal!’ Jane Austen notes in a letter to her sister after a niece has died giving birth to her eleventh offspring. Flagellation and corporal punishment was a fact of life in the navy where the brothers trained as officers and hunting a way of country life for the bourgeoisie . Guilt in general did not seem to have the mental sway and neurosis-hatching power of Freud’s era a century later.
The constraints surrounding a well-born woman are also those of the biographers investigating Jane Austen’s life centuries later. A woman had so little public identity and like the theocratic societies we know of today the Austen sisters were totally dependent on their brothers’ timetables and whims to transport them from one place to another. When Jane was twenty-five and had written – but not published – first versions of three of the six novels, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, her parents decided to give up the family home to her eldest brother and his family and move to temporary rooms in Bath. Tomalin points out that the result of this decision in which Jane had no say at all, was to stop her writing for more than ten years. It wasn’t until her mid-thirties when her wealthiest brother accorded her mother and sister a cottage at Chawton on one of his country estates that she was able to stop a life of incessant transition from country house to country house of various relatives and settle down in her own space and routine to write again, producing Emma and Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Austen’s letters of course – or what remains of those which her sister didn’t destroy, are all that a biographer has to base her work on, along with a few mostly conformist diaries and memoirs which give us a sense of the social round of balls, weddings, funerals. Cassandra, Jane’s sister also left us that big, dark-eyed enigmatic facial portrait that everyone knows, featuring a young, pinched –lipped woman with brown curls escaping from under a very eighteenth century bonnet.

The biography is very well-researched on family relationships and social connections so we get a rich idea of life around a bourgeois parsonage at the end of the eighteenth century. It feels a lot less gloom ridden than the Bronté’s life later in Yorkshire. There’s a lot of noise and horseplay for one because Jane Austen was the seventh child after five boys and a girl. The family home was also a country boarding school for boys. So contrary to the old maidish look of the famous portrait she grew up steeped in boys’ lives and activities. The young men around her were not academics but pragmatic hunters, naval officers, military careerists. Later in life she knew exactly what do when it came to looking after nephews who had lost their mother in childbirth or were running wild between governesses. Unlike other childless writers, eg Woolf, this was not a woman deprived of that human dimension of life with children but a woman with major hands-on experience of children’s needs, tantrums, dreams and games . All of which goes a long way to explain, I think, that rich understanding of human nature that we get in her writing about what is usually agreed to be a ‘very enclosed’ world. Jane Austen was the first to set up this idea in her own reference to working ‘with the finest of brushes’ on ‘two inches of ivory,’ but there is no doubt as to the broad, solid sanity of her vision. The novels are the production of a strong character enmeshed in social contact. The famous ‘inches of ivory’ quotation interestingly was to a nephew who had taken up novel writing. As soon as she began to have some success the nieces and nephews closest to her took to their pens and got her to read and critique their work. They must have admired her and turned thirstily to her for inspiration as among the cohorts of dress-making, birth-giving, tea-partying women around them. An point of note on the setting of the novels is that the Abbeys and Manors of Austen’s writing with their well-endowed heiresses have very little to do with the noisy parsonage where she grew up knowing she was not much of a financial catch for any local squire. Her subject range may have been ‘narrow’ in reference – but like today’s Hollywood family sagas the wealth of its setting was also her own enjoyable escapism from the material limits of her own life.

Why would I like my daughters to read this biography? One reason is Jane Austen’s life demonstrates the use and value of resilience in a milieu and time when lack of strength was deadly. Nor just brute strength but finesse of spirit that combats depression in the face of loss and disapppointment in love as is documented in the novels. What the biography gives us outside Austen’s fiction is evidence of a unique binary relationship between two sisters, the backbone of Jane Austen’s life and unwritten in the novels although from Sense and Sensibility onwards there are pairs and groups of sisters. Tomalin gives us from Austen’s letters, the strange domestic detail of the two sisters sleeping in the same room at night in the cottage at Chawton because Jane likes reading out loud at night to her sister as they both get undressed for bed. As a biographer Tomalin feels she has to point out to the modern reader that she doesn’t think this relationship is in any way sexual. Here is another reason I’d like my daughters to read this biography – to consider subtleties unhighlighted today with what we imagine to be our western/modern monopoly on freedom and pleasure. Or in other words the mystery of love in all its forms.
It’s Cassandra, Jane’s sister of course, whom all the biographers blame for destroying so much evidence that we end up ‘taking leave (of Jane) probably much as she would have liked, as an acquaintance rather than a close friend.’ Tomalin describes the relationship betwen the two sisters in moving detail at Jane Austen’s death. She has been ill from some undefined long illness for nearly two years, some sort of intestinal cancer for which the doctors have no prescription in the end but laudanam. Cassandra sits out the last days, motionlessly for six hours on the bed holding Jane’s head between her hands on a pillow placed on her knees after convulsions nearly throw her sister out of the bed,
‘She was the sun of my life,’ Cassandra writes more movingly to a niece after her sister’s death, ‘she who brightened and embellished all my joys and soothed my sorrows. I never hid the least thought from her and it’s as if I’ve lost a part of myself.’
Cassandra lives to be remembered by her great-nieces as an old woman wrapped in black silk with a big nose and a gentle smile. Her own end comes suddenly one day of a brainstorm when visiting a brother and naval Captain to say to goodbye to him and his family as they put on board ship for the Antilles. In the middle of the chaos of packing cases and departing relatives she collapses and no knows what to do with her. Certainly the ship cannot be put on hold or the Captain’s travel plans delayed. Everyone goes on their way and she is left in another brother’s house to finish dying. Some individuals, - a maiden aunt counted less than others of course but in general we get the feeling that individual counted little compared to today. What mattered was the fabric of society as a whole which each person represented to a greater or lesser degree.

However. Let’s end on a strangely alternative note - the last words of a French ‘witch’ Eleonore Galigai de Concini to her judges when condemned to die at the stake. She is quoted by Voltaire and by Austen in her last letter to a governess who had become a lifelong friend,

“My spell has been the power that stong souls must have over weak spirits.”

How on earth does Jane Austen end up quoting a 17th century sorceress? Tomalin talks a lot in the biography about the influence of a glamorous cousin Eliza who married into a French family, and lived a life of greater social and material freedom than any that the Austen sisters could ever have imagined. Unlike the ‘eventless’ life of the Austens, this Eliza is a biographer’s dream, frequenting French aristocracy, escaping the French revolution, choosing men for love not social survival. She would surely have read Voltaire and discussed his ideas with Jane who writes in this last letter, “Galigaî de Concinci forever!”
The six great novels of social comedy which survive today are but tips of the ice-berg. The gift of the biographer is to let us see some infinitely suggestive glimpse further below the surface.

we are essentially fiction-makers living in the (tangled) web of our own various story-lines...

..this is in no way a value-loaded statement but a (very simplistic) paraphrasing of Nancy Huston's work 'L'Espèce Fabulatrice.' One blog-reader returns to this book to unwind what Huston means when she talks about how we make our own meaning out of reality..
(for the English version just scroll down)

Le fait est que nous avons tendance à « fabuler » dans la plupart des circonstances : spontanément ou par un long détour, nous mettons au point de petits arrangements avec la réalité.

Il faudrait s’entendre sur ce que recouvre cette action de « fabuler ». Fabuler, c’est bien-sûr, raconter une histoire ; c’est plus largement en passer par le discours – quelle que soit la forme qu’il prenne – pour interpréter, appréhender, signifier, exprimer, comprendre. L’écueil majeur ici est que dans un sens aussi large fabuler soit affecté d’une ombre, d’une signification négative. Si l’on fabulait sans cesse, on ne serait jamais dans la réalité.

Précisément. Telle est la réalité humaine. Le « réel-réel », la réalité brute compte en vérité pour bien peu. En général, prétexte à autre chose ou matière à interprétation. Alors, nous fabulons. Mais ce n’est pas pour autant de l’air, ce n’est pas du rien : c’est au contraire l’une des manifestations de l’essence même de l’humanité.
Nancy Huston indique trois registres dans lesquels son observation est corroborée :
- A l’échelle de l’espèce, la fiction est un stratagème ou une ruse archaïque visant sa survie et sa perpétuation.
- A l’échelle de l’individu, la fiction est une tendance innée, un mécanisme du cerveau, tout autant qu’une structure de la représentation ou de la conscience.
- A l’échelle sociale, la fiction est un dénominateur commun à tous les groupes humains.

C’est bien toute la réalité humaine que la romancière drape dans l’idée de fiction. Une dernière retouche lui permet de rappeler la contingence radicale du monde : sa justification sur un plan métaphysique ou plus simplement sa signification , ne préexiste pas à l’action humaine : « L’Univers comme tel n’a pas de Sens. Il est silence. Personne n’a mis du Sens dans le monde, personne d’autre que nous. » ( L’espèce fabulatrice p.15). Plus loin : « Le réel est sans nom. » ( idem p.18).

Quel bénéfice y a-t-il à baptiser fable ou fiction toute la réalité humaine, ou la réalité telle que nous l’appréhendons ? A quoi bon mettre au jour le coefficient d’irréalité que porte le langage humain dès lors qu’il s’accomplit en récit ou en histoire ?
Quelques éléments pour nourrir le questionnement :
« […] nous avons besoin que [du] sens se déploie – et ce qui le fait se déployer, ce n’est pas le langage mais le récit. » ( p.16 ).
« Parler ce n’est pas seulement nommer, rendre compte du réel ; c’est aussi toujours, le façonner, l’interpréter et l’inventer. » ( p.18).


in English:
"The fact is that in most cases we tend to ‘make up stories’, either spontaneously or taking a long detour as we do it, we organise our own interpretations of reality
It’s important to be clear on what we mean by this ‘story-telling’. Of course we mean ‘telling a story’, in a wide sense it means working out a personal argument or presentation of sorts – to interpret, make sense of, signify or express. The main trap here is that story-telling is always affected by a shadow, or negative meaning. If we tell stories all the time then we lose contact with reality.

Which brings us to the most important point; - such is the nature of human ‘reality’. ‘True-reality’ or the ‘raw-truth’ in fact counts for very little and in general is but a pretext or material for yet more ‘fabulation.’ And so we go on making up our stories. However having said this, our tendency to ‘fabulation’ around reality is not mere air or nothingness. On the contrary, it is one of the essentials outward signs of human nature itself.

Nancy Huston points out three levels at which she observes this activity :

- for the human species, fiction is a strategy or archaic ruse aimed at self-perpetuation and survival.
- where the individual is concerned fiction is an innate tendency a brain mechanism as much as a structure to do with imaging or consciousness.
- on the social level, fiction is a common denominater in all human groups

The novelist includes the whole of human reality in her concept of fiction. A final adjustment enables her to recall the radically contingent nature of the world: its justification on a metaphysical level or more simply its meaning does not pre-exist human action itself,

“The universe as such has no Meaning. It is silence. Nobody ever put Meaning into the world, noone that is except us” (p15) Further on “reality is nameless.” (p18)

What use is there in baptising ‘fable’ or ‘fiction’ all of human reality, or even reality such as we understand it? What is the point in updating ‘the unreality index’ inherent in human language as it accomplishes itself in story or recital?

Finally, a few more quotations to take us further on the subject:
“(…)our only need it that meaning opens out and applies itself – and what makes it open out thus is not language itself but story-telling” (p16)

“Talking is not only naming, or recounting reality, it’s also the manipulation, interpretation and invention of this very reality.”

diaries, sex and narcissistic indulgence...

Journal writing is always highly self-obsessed, Henry Miller says to his lover and diarist Anais Nin. “you are a narcissist. That is the raison dêtre of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. ...I don’t know of any other woman writing so frankly.” Her answer was that narcissists are supposed to love themselves whereas she ..she doesn’t finish the sentence. The four letter L-word is more taboo for her than any other because of the lies she suspects around it. In fact her diary writing is above all obsessed with worrying away at the truth of the self in sexual relationships. Including a double-edged confessional compulsion which means making her lovers read her diary. And then writing in it about their reactions. (Now there’s a neat idea for a blog.)

From time to time I am glad to leave fiction for reading biography or diary writing. It’s a taste that I personally have acquired with age. I don’t remember reading biography with the same interest in my twenties. The accumulation of experience makes you keener not on gossip but in how people describe what happens to them. How they process life.

Next week for international womens’day on March 8th the local mediatheque theatre here in Antibes will host readings in French from the Diaries of Anais Nin. I’d read her late diaries written in her seventies when she was dying of cancer but not the most famous one which provided the material for the film based on her affair with Henry Miller which I read this week. “From her unexpurgated diary” nudges the blurb on the front cover. Ok. ‘Henry and June’ is on one level about a lot of sex, about 'talk melt(ed) into caresses, into deft, acute core-reaching fucking'. In ‘Henry and June’ Nin who is married to a banker and living in a green leafy villa in a nice suburb of Paris meets Miller at her editors where she is working on a book on D.H.Lawrence. They have ‘Lawrentian’ sex which takes place for Nin at least in a sensualist credo of freedom and truth-to-the-self which includes pushing him and herself to betrayal, noting very carefully her own ‘lies’ – the times when she says what she doesn’t feel, pretends pleasure, or enjoys herself with someone she doesn’t love passionately. Her navel-gazing is always lightened by her honesty. She doesn’t run away from her own despair when Miller compares her ‘light’ and ‘freshness’ to his being ‘satiated’ with ‘experience and pain.’ “the word ‘satiation’ terrified me. It seemed like the first drop of poison poured into me” The diary is above all Nin’s attempt to mirror what is happening to her. The writing is, not as Miller tells her, sealed off in its own narcissism. Even if she’s always noting her effect on others and their compliments, detailing her own clothes and perfume (‘mitsouko’ which Miller tells her is too light and flowery) with the soft-sell tone of a fashion columnist, her jewels sandals, big rings, painted fingernails. Miller tells her (and she notes), she’s ‘living some kind of a lie which is not a lie exactly but a fairy tale.’

She observes the rise and fall of each feeling and its contradiction; elation and depression, violent energy and depletion, lust and tiredness. Her own childlike beauty and her nose-job in a private clinic. Her exotic attraction to June, Henry’s wife, which goes nowhere. Repugnance, irritation, jealousy too because like a lot of free-thinking, freedom-intent women of the time Nin was intent on living her sexual relationships outside the confines of monogamy and childbirth. In fact she gave up all her energy to this ‘project’ - and the practice and the telling of it in her diaries – which is why Alice Walker remarks on the book jacket that this writing is ‘profoundly liberating’ and taboo-breaking.

In the end Nin’s diaries are more intriguing for the names she drops than for her quest for sexual truth and blossoming. Sex loomed so large for her because she was living in another age. Another more tightly moral or hypocritical culture where erotic gestures were iconoclastic in themselves because banished from the surface of bourgeois life. Obscenity is nolonger such a big deal as in the era when brothels were legal. When Nin goes to look at the women, and make them act for her like a male client with power to buy, her aestheticism has a fascist slant out of touch with everyday reality. In another brothel to which she takes her husband she complains of the ugliness of the women’like a herd.’ Her freedom is a sort of aesthetic aristocrat’s spurning ordinary constraints like her complaints about Miller’s frayed cuffs and second-hand suits. She loves comfort - insists one of the differences between herself and Miller is that she would come out of the depths of depression for the finesse of a 'lacquered tea-tray' or 'silk stockings.'

Still, I would be glad for my daughters to read Nin’s diaries – when they ‘come of age’ to understand. Nin is close to the life force behind a frank search for happiness. The diaries read like she had a better time in her arrangement with ‘Henry and June’ than her contemporary Simone de Beauvoir (who also lived an ‘open’ ‘authentic’ relationship with Sartre, tried to fall in love with his women too as Nin first fell into a sort of infatuation with Henry’s June.) De Beauvoir and Sartre were each the other’s ‘diary’ with their agreement to recount each other the details of their affairs with others. I think Nin’s honesty to herself about sex is one of the reasons for the sense of fulfilment her diaries give off. Plus unlike Sartre and de Beavoir erotic sensuality not philosophy was the basis of their relationship with life and writing as well as each other. Literature-making and talk of Proust with Miller in Place Clichy must have been closer to blood and guts reality, to the sweet and sour taste of life than existential revolution.
Anaîs Nin and Simone de Beavoir – the two names side by side is like comparing a cocktail with a grainy expresso café dished out over the zinc counter of a brasserie in the Latin quarter. I wonder if they ever met up, accidentally or otherwise. Each woman certainly knew in her own way what it was to make a life around a man’s contradictions, as Nin writes of Henry Miller,
‘at moments he can say the most delicate or profound things. But his softness is dangerous, because when he writes he does not write with love, he writes to caricature, to attack, to ridicule, to destroy; to rebel. He is always against something. Anger incites him. I am always for something. Anger poisons me.’

Going back to an old favourite….

Now, here’s something I know at this point in my life - ‘going back’ is an impossible exercise. Any return to a childhood scene, to a setting pervaded with the joy of some moment of success or romantic love is doomed to disappointment. First - obviously, because of the water in the river never being the same twice and all that. And second – deliberately ‘going back’ is trying too hard for something which, like happiness, depends to a large extent on giving up to sheer accident. On letting go of preconceptions, expectations.
However. Exceptional books prove the exception to this rule. It’s always worth knowing which titles work this way in other peoples’ lives.

‘A Long Way from Verona’ by Jane Gardam is a slim novel I’ve read now many times over the years – in very different circumstances too – as a thirteen year old in northern Ireland, then an undergrad in ‘English lit’, later in Spain, in Paris. And now with a daughter the same age as I was when I first read it. I’ve had this book in several editions bought or borrowed, lost or lent in turn. I’ve never found out there’s a more exact meaning to the title then that I construed in my own reading. ‘Verona’ is an arcardian ideal with Shakespearian overtones. A high literary ideal in contrast with the self-betrayals, the ridiculous blindnesses of ordinary life. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. Not for the ideal but the funniness and pain of the contrasts, the contradictions we have to live with. Like the pastor father of the narrator, a social campaigner and in wartime England who is always gentle in spite of the bitter truths doled out him by the narrator/his adolescent daughter
“ ‘oh stop being such a parson’ I said, ‘stop being so ..pleased when I am difficult so you can be understanding. You’re only thinking of you not me.’
His great big face went quite dead and he sat back. ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about’ he said to Ma.”
Part of the special flavour of this book is how the narrator gets across what it is like to live with your own prickliness for other people. It’s a great source of comedy, and makes the narrator very likeable. Other people are irritating, especially, as she herself says of herself, she's unlikeable because she always has to speak out and tell the truth.
Each time I’ve read ‘A long Way from Verona’ almost at one sitting, with emotion but also pleasure in symmetry - the sort of delight you associate with excellent music where your inner, unconscious ear predicts the cadence before it falls. (this particular joy you don’t get from the re-readings of Dostoevsky’s baggy translations every decade or so). In ‘a Long Way from Verona’ this inner expectancy is satisfied in the plot, the language, and also in how every human trait in the book is balanced by its opposite. For instance a writer called Arnold Hanger visits her school. ‘Down with school!’ English is life!’ he shouts as he is being led away by the headmistress. When I was thirteen it was a phrase I loved in the book and one that got out of my daughter a (short) laugh of approval when I read her the first chapter. (I wanted to read it aloud by the way, because although she is bilingual I thought there were very English tones she might miss..in fact it is a very ‘English’ work. It prones a very Anglo phelgmatic good-heartness in the face of the worst, like the over-worked mother who’s supposed to be batty and loveable shen she boils the fish with the linen on washing day.) The writer – visitor who changes the heroine is one of the book’s many idealists whose lives are pitiful in contrast to what they believe so deeply. This writer reads the main character’s ‘writings’ and changes her life by returning them to her with the message ‘Jessica Vye you are a writer beyond all possible doubt!’ Later, towards the very end of the book there comes a moment, beautifully orchestrated – not a climax, a throwaway moment but also a vital detail, when Jessica has read her way through enough of English literature to know what is genuine. She’s in the house of one of her parents’ friends and picks up a book she sees lying open to find it ‘full of phrases like ‘the pastel twilight’ and ‘the clear and lonely call of the curlew’ then looks at ‘the photo of the author on the front...a pipe stuck out of the side of an awful, honest sort of face. Something about his silhouette reminded me of someone.’ Of course we know what’s coming. She’s an adolescent now, depressed by the nihilism in Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure,’ she’s had her first crush (on an upper class boy with communist convictions that fall apart when they are caught in an air-raid together) - but she’s still enough of child to have grown-ups talk over her head,
“ ‘ Still we mustn’t lose heart’,” said Mrs Jamieson brightly, as I turned over the book to see who’d written it.
It was by Arnold Hanger.”

By this stage no comment is necessary to feel the deflation of that moment. In ‘A Long Way from Verona’ we love the characters because they go on anyway, fired by mentors, by ideals that are continually being caught out and disappointed. Occasionally the thirteen year old protagonist brushes up against real, murderous violence. A schoolteacher and fairy godmother figure who understands her completely is killed when the school is destroyed in a blitz. She wanders into a park out of school one day and meets a shellshocked Italian demob wielding a knife but too disturbed to do her any harm. But traumatising violence stays on the edges and is always healthily counterbalanced by the love and wisdom of eccentrics, by an unruffled best friend. Love and luck rule - despite our own endless thorniness with others and despite the inevitable anti-climax of living out your dreams.

How long to stay with a book.

Daydreamer welcomes this post from blogauthor *Tracy Wren*

There aren't any book police out there making you finish the book.  Just as there aren't any cinema police stopping you from leaving the theatre or from sneaking into the theatre on the other side of the hall.  The answer to your question - how long to read a book - is, as long as you want to.  The old surrealists never wanted to finish watching a movie.  They just wanted to experience an emotion, a color, a movement of light.  That was enough for them. Even if I were on a train going through Siberia, I wouldn't finish an obnoxious book.  On the other hand, I would never read past the first ten pages of a book I didn't like in the first place.  Any book I brought with me on a long train journey, would hold some merit, from my point of view.  There are too many fabulous books out there that I want to read, and many I'd like to read again.

How do you decide a book is worth reading? When do we allow ourselves to abandon a book halfway through?

The questions are an outgrowth of a very late night conversation last Saturday in the ‘Blue Lady’ a bar frequented by yachties swabs and all, near the port of Antibes. We’d just been to a one-man show at a café-theatre in the old town. The discussion over a bottle of rosé, veered from why the stand-up comic had made us laugh – or not, to taste in humour -the best funny films- to Woody Allen and why we should like him or not – to the difference generally speaking - between ‘the film and the book’ to what is it that makes you choose a good book? Our choice is reglemented by media-hype, affirmed an unconditional Woody Allen fan. Marguerite Duras for instance, he went on (Duras keeps popping up in this blog – is she a sort of Gallic couterweight to V Woolf?) who would ever read the minor, more inaccessible novels like ‘Lol V Stein’ if the critics and sale records hadn’t canonised her for landmarks like ‘Le Barrage contre le Pacifique’ and ‘Le Marin de Gibraltar?’

My own answer is reading for me is quintessentially social. It’s like moving in a circle of acquaintances. I turn from one book to another the way I talk to one and then another person in a room. The approach to the ‘conversation’ is based - very egocentrically and banally - on what we have in common. The ‘other’ –the writing - subject matter or author, resembles me in some way. Or has some relation with someone else we both know. Maybe another writer with a similar or totally opposed outlook. Or from the same time period. Or country. When I was living in Paris and read about events there during Algerian war of independence I went looking for Algerian writers. I was half-looking for ideas to flesh out my own experience in France and from growing up on the edge of a sectarian community in northern Ireland. I found Assia Djebar and Yasmina Khadra. Also Rachid or Rahim Memmouni?? Is that the right spelling? Some faces stay in your mind longer than others. All the above writers exposed me to depths and aspects of writing and experience totally outside my personal sphere. In some cases getting to know them was a memorable encounter which I took into myself. (And maybe my personality too - in the way Freud says we are all of us but “precipitates” of what other people leave in us.) However in other cases, I read pages of prose the way you walk past strangers in the street, noting a detail here and there but also uncaring, unnable to relate.

And why should this ambivalence be otherwise? Why are we so mesmerised by the aura of a ‘good book’ – a question which our fellow rosé drinker at the ‘Blue Lady’ was getting at when he spoke of the difficulty of making a personal choice. I don’t allow myself to give up on a book, he said too, with a groan. Is this guilt some sort of genetic memory leftover from the reverence of monotheistic religions for ‘the holy book? As if starting to read is a moral commitment to some sort of integrity. Why the bafflement and dullish self-doubt when we can’t get reaction out of ourselves? Or when an ‘official’ great like Thomas Mann (whose ‘Dr Faustus’ I’ve never been able to read), or a fashionable name like Murakami leaves us cold – I loved ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ but couldn’t get past the first chapter of ‘Kafka sur le Rivage. ’ Following a holiday in Croatia, I read a collection of testimonies from the war in Bosnia which until today has left me unable to read the pre-war classic ‘The Bridge over the Drina’ lent me by a friend from the same part of the world. We don’t want to accept that even the god and goddess writers have their duds. Did anyone out there read Doris Lessing’s ‘Love, again?’ - without cringing? Books that live beyond a feat of wordy distraction have their own time and place. Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ for instance, taken in non-stop stretched out on a sunbed the summer I was fourteen was just right for the sort of adolescent I was in 1978 and certainly marked me for life. Whereas trying to get through Henry James’ ‘Portrait of a Lady’ two summers later was a waste of time. Many more years of the heart were necessary for me to admire the finesse and understanding of those paragraph wending, winding sentences.

Of course, as a sometime fiction writer and lifelong ponderer on how to write a good one, all books are relevant to me. What have they got that I haven’t is what I want to know! Are all readers writers? There’s definitely that spice of jealousy in the company I keep with books. And a real tang of nostalgia too when I step into a bookshop, as if for a place where I used to be happy as I will never be again, in childhood maybe, the new paper smell as strong as the whiff of Proust’s madeleine.

If I may be allowed to digress from the written word – concerning Woody A. I have to say I love the earlier work, where Diane Keaton is young, but then I went off him around the scandal surrounding his affair with his adoptive daughter. All those lovably muttering, humbled self-portrayals of the later films like ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’ feel like so many pleas for titillating sympathy. (In parenthesis the scenarios set in London ring false. Brits don’t sound like the characters in ‘Matchpoint’ – film which the French adore. And they are definitely embarrassingly NOT like the brothers in ‘Cassandra’s Dream’). Of course not liking the films because of the gossip rags drooling over his personal life goes to prove the point above on our ‘manufactured’ choices, mere reflexes of mediatised hype. So how should we allow ourselves to personally censor our reading and other choices? What I mean is how moral should we be in separating a good book from the opinions or lifestyle of the author? Personally I have never been able to get through Céline, to return to the TS Eliot I used to love, or to touch much of Pound because of all of these writers’ anti-semitism. On the other hand I would never vote for these books to be burnt in a public place. How do we estimate the human price of a work of art? I was very impressed in my early twenties and in the depths of a literature degree by Bruno Bettelheim's 'The Informed Heart' where he cites the ravages wrought on the children/family of geniuses. Einstein's unvisited daughter wasting away in her mental home, Joyce's daughter, Beethoven's nephew? Was it worth it? wondered Bettleheim. Couldn't we have swopped the ninth symphony for one person's release from suffering? He was writing in the post-second world war period when thinkers wondered over photos of piled corpses about the connection between art and human rights. Today I like Bettelheim's question but think it has to be left at just that - a question which should never be put aside - and for which the answer is a mystery.

Nevertheless our personal taste is inescapably moral too. Everyone has his or her limits. There are people in the world (my partner included) who were once so steeped in a propaganda system that they read every single line of print as a kind of trick working out its hidden ideology on the reader. Even your enemies influence you, goes a Persian proverb. That’s one extreme. The opposite is that we forget how good writing seduces us into an illusion of universal truth. Soaks the reader in one single human being’s feel of the world and makes us feel this is the whole, the sum total. The despair of Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure,’ or the brilliant jagged anger of Plath’s Esther Greenwood in the ‘Bell Jar’ for instance, the violent erotic pessimism of D.M Thomas in ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ or Michel Houllebecq’s ‘Atomised’

Books don't 'hold a mirror up to nature’, as we learned in our annotated school Shakespeare. The bard was just a bit true. The inner ‘world’ of books no matter – and especially - how brilliant it may be – is but a tiny part of the whole. Not a vision just the dazzle in a shard of broken mirror flashing off the sun.

So I nolonger stay to the end with the books I don’t like. I give myself permission to devour, to love a book, to go off it. Hey, whose feelings am I hurting here? To go back to my earlier analogy, if the choice of a book can be compared to how we approach another person, our only ‘moral’ obligation is not to lie to ourselves - at the very least in our heart of hearts – about what we are really feeling as we read.

the stories we tell ourselves

Is the fiction we read simply a more artful form of the stories we tell ourselves to interpret our lives? One blog-reader posits the question and initiates a discussion of the French-Canadian writer and thinker Nancy Huston, (to read this post in English just scroll down)

Au printemps 2008, Nancy Huston a publié L’espèce fabulatrice, un essai magnifique et précieux. Pour commencer à en parler, j’emprunte un chemin de traverse.
Vendredi soir. Après une épuisante semaine de labeur, vous rentrez enfin chez vous. Mais, pour l’instant, votre voiture est immobilisée dans un embouteillage. Cela va durer longtemps et dans votre exaspération, vous en voulez particulièrement au conducteur qui vous précède. Son comportement, selon vous, ne fait qu’aggraver votre situation. Il vous ralentit. A la limite, il vous empêche de rentrer chez vous.
Bien-sûr, de votre place, vous ne pouvez prendre la mesure ni de la foule automobile qui vous précède, ni de l’ampleur de l’accident qui, en aval, ralentit le flux et contrecarre vos projets.
Mais enfin, ce type devant, il le fait exprès, autant que ces tard-venus qui essaient d’usurper votre place dans la file, de gagner quelques mètres. Bref, à n’en pas douter, chaque minute passée ou perdue décuple votre rage que spontanément vous tournez vers les autres conducteurs.
Tout naturellement, vous avez tendance à rendre les autres, tous les autres, responsables d’une situation qui vous contrarie, vous accable.
Mais vous pourriez aussi bien, au lieu de vous retrancher ainsi de vos semblables, considérer que vous êtes, comme dans la vie, partie prenante d’un ensemble de circonstances qui vous dépassent. Vous pourriez, peut-être plus profitablement, vous considérer comme un élément dans un vaste ensemble, comme une partie d’un grand tout, reliée à toutes les autres et animée d’une même volonté d’avancer. Vous pourriez donc, dans cet état d’esprit, faire corps avec tous les autres et au moins y gagner en sérénité.
Cette situation plausible permet de postuler notre tendance spontanée à fabuler. D’un état d’esprit à l’autre, il s’agit toujours d’une histoire que l’on se raconte à soi-même ou d’une interprétation élaborée à partir de ce qui nous arrive.
Tout cela ne dépasserait pas le stade de l’anecdote si cet imaginaire n’avait dans le réel des conséquences très concrètes : un poing levé ou un geste bienveillant, c’est tout un comportement qui découle…d’une fiction.

In the Spring of 2008 NH published ‘L’espèce fabulatrice’* a magnificent, valuable essay. A short digression will serve as an introduction, (*note from ‘daydreamer’ - I find this title very difficult to translate – ‘the Storytelling Species’ is literal and clumsy, ‘the Fabulists’ far from exact though sounds better on the ear)

It’s Friday evening. After a hard week’s work you’re finally on your way home. But for the minute your car is stuck in a traffic jam. This is going to take a while and in your exasperation you bear a particular grudge against the driver in front of you. You find his behaviour particularly annoying. He's slowing you down. The least that can be said is that he's the one stopping you getting home.
Naturally from where you are in the car you have no way of making out either what’s going on in the crowd of cars jammed in front of you or any details of the accident far ahead which is slowing down the traffic flow and stalling all your personal plans.
Hell, the guy in front must be acting this way on purpose, just like all those late-comers trying to snitch your place in the traffic so as inch a few metres ahead. To cut a long story short, every minute you waste increases the fury you direct against all the other drivers.
Your natural reflex is to blame someone else. To hold anyone and everyone responsible for whatever situation is irritating or for some reason getting on top of you. However, instead of cutting yourself off from your fellow human beings you could just as well bear in mind that just as in life itself you are part and parcel of an overall set of circumstances beyond your control. Perhaps it would be more to your advantage to see yourself as an element in a vast whole, as part of a larger unit, linked to all the other elements, all of whom are inhabited by the self-same fervent will to move forward. Looking at it this way you will at least join forces with everyone else and gain some peace of mind.
This very plausible sort of situation shows how spontaneously we tend to tell ourselves stories. From one state of mind to another we are forever embroiled with some story or interpretation we’ve built up out of what is happening to us.
And none of all this would ever get beyond the stage of mere storytelling if the imagination did not have such concrete consequences on the here and now; a raised fist or a kind gesture - all forms of behaviour that take their source in …works of fiction.

‘remember: work quickly, keep on going, faster than laziness’

notes Duras somewhere in her writer’s diaries. I like this idea of ‘laziness’ being like a rival dogging your feet, you have to keep ahead of it, keep writing at a pace or risk falling behind and that eternal laziness will lope on past you and win the day.
But for some reason I find myself making excuses and shying away from a post to sum up my reaction to Djavann’s ‘demi-roman’ or half-novel. ‘Comment peut-on devenir français?’ Here’s what I’ve done in the last two days instead; watched films, gone shopping at the January sales, experimented a curry recipe, played umpteen ‘Happy Families’ with my younger daughter, drunk litres of coffee with partner ever ready to chat, changed books at the mediatheque...the list is endless.
My reticence to read is not as much out of laziness as dread of confronting yet again, – even at on the second-hand level of reading - all those old sterotyped ideas on the effort of that journey from one community and identity to another.
Not to mention all the energy expended and inner debate that goes along with making that crossing as carefully as possible so as not to lose too much on the way.
In ‘Comment peut-on devenir Français?’ the student heroine Roxanne, spends two years wrestling with and cajoling the French language with dictionaries, notebooks, classes at the Alliance Française and Cours de civilisation at the Sorbonne, and all the emotional powers in her possession. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that we understand her terrible Kafkaesque solitude is not because of swopping her native Persian culture andt language for French but because of a trauma lived out in Iran before she fled the country. I won’t say here what happened to her. People read for the story and despite the depressiveness it gives off, this is a book out of all those around today, that’s worth reading, a book I would hope will be read by as many people as possible. Certainly by my own daughters...(though in parenthesis – what daughter eagerly reads the books her mother wants her to read? The secret with my elder daughter is to say nothing and leave the book lying around for her to graze on and then devour if she feels like it. Plus I have to add that she declares herself allergic to books dealing with the harder side of life.

“a beautiful, difficult love story; Roxanne’s encounter with the French language”

- goes the blurb from the magazine Elle on the back of the book. Well. The story of Djavann’s refugee Roxanne living in her attic chambre de bonne or Parisian boxroom and passionately obsessing with mastering the French language at a level byond any ordinary French citizen touches more complicated depths than the sentimentality of this line would have you believe. But then maybe reviewers are often paid to spare readers’ consciences if a book is to sell.. In the end I have to say that the book plunged me into that mix of idealism and despair I dreaded from the book’s title and the writer’s origins. However, the portrayal of Roxanne's first years in Paris is so precise and courageous that the reading experience is inimitable. As the title offputtingly suggests, the text is somewhat a tract as well as a novel. The middle section of the book is a series of letters addressed to Montesquieu, a sort of echo of les Lettres Persanes, and compares lay European and theocratic muslim society. This argumentative part of the book is touching and brilliant in its literary references and use of language, though I resisted having to read through all the arguments in favour of a lay society already outlined in ‘Bas les Voiles!’ The tactic of waging war against religious fanatics on the issue has always seemed to me to turn ourselves a grotesque mirror image of the religious fanatics who impose their will on women, ‘take it off!” = “put it on!” (I have in mind here a series of 'magnum' photos of Algerian women forced to unveil for identity shots during the war of independence and the expression in their faces is one of unforgettable humiliation. Particularly one woman in her sixties with long grey hair you can tell from the look in her eyes forced to gaze in the direction of the camera that she's maybe never ever in her life gone unveiled in public with strangers. My own ideal is mutual tolerance of difference. Woolly-sounding words meaning it would be good to be able to go about here, there, everywhere, as we are, bareheaded or covered head to foot if that’s the way we need to be for the minute.... Let’s live as we are without disguise with real affection for the other’s way of being /looking. It was good to find out that Djavann’s fictional narrative takes a more fluid position than the angry revindications of ‘Bas les voiles!' Roxanne works for a journalist who decides - to her incomprehension - to accompany her Tehranian husband to Iran and wear the veil ‘to try out a medieval lifestyle and understand better how the world works.’ The character is a journalist who intends to send back reports to French newspapers on different aspects of Iranian society – maybe it could be argued that she is a personality who takes her identity and confidence from some freedom outside signs of frontiers – and why not?

“Marius, Cosette and Jean Valjean, (she) was thinking about Victor Hugo, yes Victor Hugo with whom she had been secretly in love since the age of twelve."

Djavann is so good at what it’s like to be a foreigner in Paris on the outside of the language and yet so fantastically imbued with the literature. When I first went to the Luxembourg gardens on a September afternoon with a ham and baguette sandwich in my bag, my head was full of Camus’ l’Etranger which I knew almost by heart. Djavann’s Roxanne goes there (with beer and baguette in her bag) thinking about Victor Hugo.

Then there are countless other details that capture the gradual wearing down of this initial infatuation. The anaesthetising exhaustion of getting up at daybreak to queue for at the Prefecture for a carte de séjour, until when her turn comes she is,
“well beyond any anxiety. Had they guillotined her in the middle of the Conciergerie she would not have felt the least thing. Her neurons were out of order like sometimes happens with automatic cashtills. Not a single bit of information penetrated (her brain. )And she went on sitting on the red plastic chair.” (my translation) I’ve been talking about this book all week – in the week since I’ve read it – especially to friends I know settled in France from elsewhere – an Iranian/German couple, one an architect turned antiques dealer, the other a nurse, a Bosnian Serb taught music at home, who lived in Berlin for years before ending up a dental receptionist in the south of France. I give these details of their professions because Djavann expresses so precisely and ironically what it’s like to reinvent yourself as an adult in a language other than the one in which you grew up, studied and won recognition as a younger self,

“the first person ‘I’ was Roxanne the persophone, the second person ‘tu’was Roxanne the apprentice francophone and there was also a third Roxanne – Roxanne the referee who never gave up reproaching the persophone Roxanne for her sheer inability to become Roxanne francophone...(..)she punished the least fault, struck out with truncheon blows at Roxanne’s faltering memory”Then later, “She didn’t have a real voice. An artificial, hoarse sort of voice emerged from her throat. It was like she wasn’t talking but imitating how French people spoke, like a parrot....(....)
Djavann’s has that twisted humour of extreme situations I recognise from Marjane Satrapi’s famous Perseopolis, when describing extreme situations,
“(her)Persian grew quieter and quieter, slipped away. (Her) words of Persian got rarer and rarer and deserted (her)without being replaced by words in French. An emptiness, a word-ache grew out of this state of being, a ‘no-word’s land’”
I was going to say I’d like my daughters to read this and understand what it was we wanted to spare them when bringing them up in three languages, French, English and Persian. But of course even with three languages they’re still aliens in some other land. In fact I’ve just realised that this ‘gift’ - as indeed so much of what we think we "give" our children – is to ourselves. Ours is the ‘word-ache’ we’ve healed in giving them access to English and Persian along with French - their fluency breaks the silence of our own exile, voluntary or forced as the case may be.

someone else’s bookshelf

“Help yourself to any books you want” said the hostess suddenly as an afterthought. Conventional politesse but with a down-to-earth note, like ‘this is your scarf isn’t it, don’t forget to take it with you.’ This was at the end of a long January evening with its bottles of red wine, and dinner improvised out of contributions of nems, quiches, sushi, humous dips, lots of leftover Christmas chocolate, with happy, then squally children playing hide and seek around handsome furniture from China and Iran, countries where the couple had lived for a few years. (‘He’ works for the French car company Peugeot ). I had briefly checked out the well-stocked library corner – a lot more densely packed, neatly organised and new-looking than my own since rather than buy books I use the local mediatheques in Antibes and Valbonne for reading matter in English and French. My bookshelves feature a lot of yellowing sentimental attachments to poetry volumes, over-thumbed teenage copies of Dostoevsky and over annotated authors studied years back . Luckily I’m not starved since the mediatheques are well-stocked, international libraries – the sort that you would only find in capital cities ten years back.

I had definitely absorbed too much good red wine to make a cerebral choice at the time - perhaps the advantage was I’d made an uninhibited one and picked up writers I’d censor for myself when fully sober. I did know I was looking for some writing in between pure factual or prose fiction. I’d considered Yasmina Reza and Chahdortt Djavann’s books before in bookshops and libraries without going as far as taking one home to read. Picking a book off someone else’s bookshelf is different though, like seeing a face you know by sight at a friend’s house so now the acquaintanceship might become personal. Iran is what I had in common with the couple whose house we were in that evening through their having lived there and my partner being Iranian. We hadn’t talked much about that link though and the glaring black hole in any conversation of mine about Iran being that I myself have never visited the country. So the choice of Djavann’s book out of the hundreds of similar paperbacks, was motivated by the underlying curiosity in that place- where-I’ve-never-been. I’m always pulled despite myself, to other people’s readings of Iran.

Reza and Djavann are writers whom I know of from media coverage. They both have fairly high profile personalities in France. Especially Reza for her prolific output in theatre, her interviews on cultural chat shows and most recently from being allowed to follow Sarkozy around and make a book out of his electoral campaign which resulted in the book ‘l’Aube, le Soir ou la Nuit’ ‘Dawn, Evening or Night’ because .’tragedy has no place. Nor any particular time. It (happens)’s dawn, evening or night ‘ – there in this quotation you get the fatal hubris full on. Reza will actually use her genius as a playwright (doesn’t the French dramaturge sound so much more potent) to paint a portrait of a Sarkozy of Shakespearean dimensions an excuse for taking on all the big questions - love, ambition, solitude, the transience of passing time - in that terse poetic style, all barricades up and gruff beating heart anyway underneath it all that is her speciality. Here I have to say that I didn’t know she’d written this book until after I’d read the borrowed novella that evening and then started looking her up on the net for some more precise details. I have to confess that if I’d known she was such a glitterati I’d not have bothered to take that slim novella - the first she wrote - home to read. I have an innate prejudice against artists who hold up a mirror to the powerful of the world. OK Shakespeare wrote his tragedies about tyrants but he was living under a regime similar to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in terms of human rights and had to save his skin by currying favour on a regular basis.

is it relevant to discuss the mindset a reader brings to a book?

Surely it’s an essential process, more honest - if you believe as I do that books have the power to change you as much as lived experience. The thing is I forget I belive this - that’s the problem. Actually it’s one of the reasons I’m writing this blog on my spare afternoon a week. To remember that books do adjust your reflection on your own life, the quality of how you meet others. As well as to an extent at least, how you develop your relationships with other people. How you formulate yourself.
Chahdortt Djavann is renowned in France for her vehement arguments in favour of a lay culture and against the effect on women of islamic fundamentalism in muslim countries, particularly Iran where she grew up. She is the author of the book “Bas les voiles” that excited a lot of attention in France, officially a lay country since the legal separation of church and state in 1905. And so my initial approach to “Comment peut-on devenir français?” ‘How can one become French?” by Djavann was more than a little clouded. Firstly in my ignorance I didn’t recognise the reference to Montesquieu’s satire on Europeans in ‘les Lettres Persanes’ written in 1721, ‘comment peut-on être persan’ is what the crowds of Parisians mutter when two Persians Rica and Uzbek who’ve been forced to flee their country for political reasons stroll through the Tuileries dressed in their traditional robes. The worst thing about ignorance is that it sends you back to the limits of your own experience for every value judgement and so reading the title brought back my own personal saturation with the emotion around assimilation in France – plus the recurrent media feasting when every now and then high school girls try to wear the ‘islamic headscarf’ to school. I know what it’s like as an immigrant - or apatride - who - on good days - lives out with pleasure (most of) the ways of another language and social culture. Assimilation in a process linked as much to time and nature as the erosive patterns of sea and wind on a coastline. Any implication of a moral imperative therein, smacks of homogenisation, no worse, eugenics - and makes me want to kick something, soon.

Both are writers for whom I felt a similar mélange of interest and tired antipathy. Without reading a single word of their work - it has to be repeated - so I must be talking about myself here. My interest - of course was because of their status as successful writers with a challenging, if not arrogant take on experience. My resistance came from the impression I got that each woman in her own way aligns herself with a certain sort of media appetite for the opinions she puts forward. .

In Reza’s case it was for what I sensed from extracts of her theatre of conventional relationships not exactly the valet hiding in the wardrobe while the mistress of the house seduces the man she doesn’t know is her brother-in –law sort of thing. But nearly. And also that she produces very much a “man’s woman”sort of writing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Marguerite Duras for instance does the same. Except that Duras is such a figurehead of twentieth century French fiction that before you have time to lose yourself in preconceptions based on her personality/media representation, you experience the writing first. Its music and - to pick up on my last post on Woolf ‘s ideas – and to what happened when I actually read the slim volume of Reza’s entitled in French “Une désolation” (maybe “Desolation” or “ A Grief” in English) - the plunge into writing that feels full of great endurance, openness to life, free of taboo.
The novella is the inner monologue that a successful, retired businessman relegated to the good life in the suburbs of Paris, addresses to an absent hippy son from a former marriage who has ‘done nothing’ with his life except ‘be happy’on some island in the Pacific. I would say that the choice of this framework – the tension and longing in addressing an absent child is only trace of the woman writer. The language is spare - bleached would be a better word (Reza’s reviewers like it too - blanchi in French) to describe the corrosive intelligence behind the curt phrasing and perfect ear for the ping-pong of how the mind moves back and forward presenting and hiding itself in conversation. As I read it I remembered a tv interview with Reza in which she talked at length about her relationship with her father. She got all her juice from him I remember her saying. This understanding of theirs must have given her that insider’s position you can’t fake with the septugenarian’s voice in this book, a whale of an ego, full of angry, ironic grief for the ‘times of destructive passion’ in his own life. He is nolonger in love with his present wife because she has‘chosen happiness’ and ‘effort’ and positivity every morning over her French toast. His days are warmed by his faithful affection for a lifelong friend who sits at a window contemplating the seasonal changes in a tree in the middle of the Parisian traffic. He remembers the sheer lack of choice in his obsessive desire for a married woman and their futureless affair conducted in doorways and hotel rooms. The nearest he gets to grief in the altruistic sense of the word is in mourning the death of a self-made business friend who used all his energy to perfect his flat in the middle of Paris whilst wondering all the time ‘what next’

It’s the tone particular to French – the language and people that I hear everyday, in myself too - a sort of deliberate shrugged -on philosophic mockery. The other side of the coin is a relish of the here and now, la bonne chère they say, a sort of pagan revelry in food and flesh. At its worst a Gallic parochial xenophobia and in its flower as in Reza’s narrator – who knows the world outside France and has lost the love of his son, it provides a keen, very funny reflection on the saccharine compromise of any ‘life-solution’ It’s charismatic in its air of full-on honesty and that is maybe for the first book – for now that I know of her admiration for Sarkozy - not the person but what he stands for - I have a feeling that every book of Reza’s will keep up this unvaried punchy macho attitude to despair. Fun - if you don’t mind spending all your time around strong egos half in love with themselves and their own domestic tragedies. There is that seductive tone of intelligent Woody Allen-esque bafflement too, the one that you like to give yourself up to its making you laugh over and over again at the pitiful misery of life’s illusions. Reza’s protagonist is Jewish too, though cutting off from friends who buy a retirement home in Israel is part of his refusal of ‘the solution’ of his rancid pity for any of those “poor souls” who hope for ‘some accomplishment’, who take up a political stance to explain their own degradation, “optimistes en tutu!”
“Everyday the world shrinks me a little bit more and today the world shrinks in me. That’s the way it goes. Little by little death gains ground. You get used to it. You get used to death. You’re not as upset as all that to join in the rhythm of the universe.”

Reza’s writing is a joy in particular delight for an outsider to the French language like me, with its ear for ironic self-portraiture artfully baked in, as it were to every pause and word. It creates a sense of affection for the character that I don’t feel so much in English. I wonder if that’s because I’m so much inside the language or if it’s that I haven’t lived in an English speaking country for so long.

If you come to the writing first and it's powerful

your pre-reading prejudices and inner babble of opinions and ideas - of which mine include that writing by women from the erotic point of view of men is a cop-out, there’s enough of that around and a woman doing it won’t teach me anything new…melt into irrelevance. That’s the definition of good writing – it shuts you up. You get peace and quiet away from yourself for a while. What a relief!. Suffice it to say that when I finished this book I stocked up on all the prose by Reza I could find at the médiatheque – I’d rather see the theatre than read it. Two similar slim one-voice volumes, an off-beat form, novella-size, between monologue and prose “Schopenhauer’s sled” and “Adam Haberburg”.They’re sitting there on the corner of my desk as I write and I’m looking at them every now and then …and yet – and yet mingled insidiously with that nice sense of anticipation that comes over me when I know I’m going to get to spend time reading a good writer is the niggardly streak of disappointment since I found out about her writing on the presidential campaign. I know I will insist now that she prove her human touch somewhere again. That she shows us something else as well just all that cool, hemmed in verbosity and psychological sleight-of- hand that just tickles you into smirking out loud.

the reading habit

The only two times in my life I can remember setting a book aside not out of distaste but out of a sheer sense of irrelevance was during in the days following the births of my two daughters. Otherwise ‘the need to read’ - hey, there are worse escape routes – is always there. A mental reaching out for sustenance - the metaphor is telling. Yes, the reading habit is a sort of nourishment akin to food. (So when is reading ‘toxic’? And is this a value judgement amounting to censorship?) I don’t want to sound overly moralising on ‘the value’ of bookishness. I’ve lived with and loved non-readers all my life, just like I’m a non-skier, non-roller-blader, non-chess player and so on. Still it’s good to see this reading trait emerge in my first daughter to whom I have unwittingly handed on so much. She reads indiscriminately, with relish like a foodlover tucking into a meal when she goes to replenish her pile of books from the mediatheque around the corner from where we live. At the minute the she’s finishing ‘The Summer of the Sisterhood’ – what she calls ‘one of those chatty-girly books.’ She’s read all the ‘Twilight’ series, the gothic remake of Romeo and Juliet about a girl in love with a vampire. This Christmas she was caught up in ‘Jane Eyre’ which she liked (she said) because of the atmosphere. Jane is ‘passionate’ she said, (a judgement influenced by French language and culture - where you’re allowed to talk about ‘passion’ with the sort of detachment that would make pre-ados elsewhere cringe). Jane is a rebel too, so she liked that. The shrieking voice from the attic is ‘gothic’ – wild, anarchic and ‘cool’. I promised her the sequel’ to Jane Eyre in one of my favourite books ever – Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ written from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic. She also read ‘Girl with a Pearl Ear-ring.’ which she liked for its historical setting in Renaissance Amsterdam. She had never realised that Catholics and Protestants could be at war with each other (isn’t such innocence an achievement for the daughter of a woman who grew up in the sectarian atmosphere of northern Ireland a generation back). Nevertheless she thought the servant-girl heroine was “too lucky” – her adolescent heroines are always ugly or unlucky at the start. I don’t think she got the erotic tension between the painter and his model – or maybe she did but couldn’t/wouldn’t put words on it to me. I was a bit surprised that she chose this book from my bookshelf in the first place. It turned out that Vermeer’s painting had turned up in an American soap opera she and her sister watch on You-tube in their week-end ‘screen time’. A character had stolen the Vermeer painting.

virginia woolf

Today at the end of a proliferous second generation of great contemporary women writers it’s difficult to understand how twenty-five years back the sensitivity in Woolf's writing could be such a relief and a release from the official ‘canon’ of English writing that mattered. Doris Lessing complained that Woolf was 'such a Lady she left so much out.' Her poetic side puts people off, as well as her Edwardian class-consciousness – all that talking about the charwoman’s rough red hands and so on. However for me her sensitivity burns through all these social attitudes. She was aware of the price you pay for living outside the ordinary run of happiness. In Mrs Dalloway the portrayal of mental breakdown for the sufferer and those around him is portrayed with great delicacy and detachment too, without the anger or nihilism that leaves such a depressing aftertaste as in the work of Sylvia Plath or Ken Kesey. Woolf might have been in many ways prisoner of her class and time but she understood like that other Edwardian, EM Forster, what it was like to suffer under the perception of the moral majority. She reacted with defensive snobbery to middle class philistines and the working class in her notebooks and diaries and even wrote an essay ‘Am I a Snob?’ but the root of her distaste for so many people was always that for a certain sort of sensitive nature any group mentality, working class or other constituted a stifling moral majority fatal to her work and thought.
What I reacted to when I first read Woolf all those years back was her commitment to the poetic feel of everyday. Her writing was about sensitivity itself, the ‘shower of atoms,’ the feel of minute by minute consciousness outside the usual narrative themes of life, erotic desire ending in coupledom, motherhood and so on. Not that this always works when she walks the tightrope between poetry and prose. ‘To the Lighthouse’ is one of the most beautiful and saddest books I’ve ever read for the pain of loss and time going by after the death of the mother Mrs Ramsay. But when I picked up ‘The Waves’ in the library recently I didn’t get that far into it. Maybe I should try again. It seems that when I read I do need what Raymond Carver calls somewhere the ‘feel’ of autobiography. Whereas ‘the Waves’ is beautiful but bodiless. Still it occurs to me that not many of today’s greats like Toni Morrison, AL Kennedy, Zadie Smith do justice to Woolf’s almost asexual, but passionate mental texture of woman’s experience without being sucked into the swirl of erotic relationships. Maybe that’s because they’re prose artists - you have to look to poetry for a similar intensity.

‘A Room of One’s Own’

During the end of year holidays in January we switched round furniture and beds in our three and a half room appartment. We have high ceilings which give an illusion of space but only 84m of floorspace. How to accommodate everyone’s various needs in their own private space; starting with our daughters, one ado needs a place where no-one can come in, her little sister a big table to spread out the collection of miniature dolls or ‘pollies’ she talks to for hours on end, their father relaxes by reading online newspapers or listening to hours of Persian music online; their mother wants an uninterrupted space to daydream – not to mention work at writing. After a week of thinking over various configurations of furniture and what-will-happen-when-we-have-houseguests (which happens fairly often since we host family from abroad) /sleepovers (a vital necessity in an ado’s social calender) we managed to create; a duplex for the elder daughter in half a backroom, a study for me behind closed double doors that separate off the bookshelf corner in the living room, a computer corner/ futon flop down area behind by wooden Indian screens - for listening to music and doing nothing in the second biggest room which will also function as a guest room. So far everyone is happy, gets to listen to the sort of music they like without BEING INTERRUPTED, and in my case even start writing posts to ‘Dalloway’s Daughters’.
Circumstances seem to collude in pointing to the obvious place to start for this blog is by talking about ‘A Room of One’s Own’ the essay which Woolf wrote in 1929 for a talk addressed to undergraduates on the opening of the first women’s colleges of Newnham and Girton at Cambridge. I unearthed my copy of this essay - the same yellowing edition I had read years ago as a student and sat up reading it one night after everyone had gone to sleep.

feminism and – or – the ‘creative mind’

I think Woolf might been the first woman to get herself labelled feminist by writing explicitly about the connection between women’s lives and writing. And yet her feminism was a fight against this sort of labelling, this relegating of a human being to one specificity merely because as a woman she claimed the right to express that feminine trait of her being.
“anything written with conscious bias is doomed to death.(..)Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished.”
Does she really mean a sort of drawing-room gender bending? The fantastical biography Orlando bears out this ideal of living - aristocratically - beyond sexual difference with Orlando going from being a young man in Queen Elizabeth's court in love with a Muscovite princess; to life as Lady Orlando, encountering the eighteenth century writers Pope, Addison, and Swift and finally experiencing childbirth.
In a ‘A Room of One’s Own’ people always remember the sketch of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ - the bard’s girl-twin whom Woolf imagines ended up buried at a London crossroads because there is no way that in sixteenth century England a middle-class woman of Shakespeare’s gifts would get an education, or escape early marriage to run away to London and make her way in the theatre as Shakespeare did, without being destroyed by sexual abuse. What is less well-known is this essay is also a discussion on what it is that makes the ‘creative mind’ ‘incandescent’ capable of 'bringing forth' as she says ‘without impediment.’ Looking out her window as she writes at the end of the essay, Woolf sees a man and woman walk down a street towards each other, get into a London taxi together and drive off. She reflects on the ‘happy ending’ effect of those physical opposites, male and female coming together, ‘one has a profound if irrational instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction; the most complete happiness.’ This is interesting – maybe it’s what’s behind that gut reflex with which most women these days in groups in seminars or around dinner tables for instance, (with or without, the presence of men), refuse to identify themselves as feminists. Perhaps it’s merely an instinctive refusal of separatism within the sexes. Again maybe this reflex is connected to time and place. I remember in my first months in France one of my bosses in a language school where I once taught in Paris (English, gorgeous, bilingual and a quietly self-avowed feminist – well she did give up researching a phd on Simone de Beauvoir to earn her living and cast off man after man) - explaining to me that for French women ‘le regard masculin’ is extremely important. Sexual freedom in the public arena - compared for instance to what they call “le puritanisme anglo-saxon” goes with this pressure to be judged on sexual attractiveness, to constantly measure one’s value in aesthetic terms.
Compare this attitude to Iranian women who apply face make-up as we haven’t in this part of Europe since the early seventies - it’s a statement of course of the right to do what they feel like. They refer to themselves as feminists – at least the one I know best does, who happens to be my sister-in-law – without any defensiveness at all. With a big ironic grin which means you’d be naîve not to develop some feminist ruse to laugh off what a woman has to put up with every day under a regime where one woman is officially worth two men.