Three instances of being in the world
I am four or five years old and we have arrived at a campsite in southern France or possibly Spain. It is late July. I am looking at the incredibly bright night sky and ask my father which of those stars we came from. I am confusing our voyage over the English channel with intergalactic travel. I realise my mistake before he corrects me, but perhaps I am not wrong either.
I am nineteen and have taken LSD in my friend Guy’s house in Finsbury Park, north London. I am wearing a sleeveless woollen jumper that once belonged to my Taid, and am staring at myself in the mirror of a dresser that stands in the hall. I have just been to the bathroom and I stop by the dresser before rejoining the others in the front room. I stare in the mirror for a long time thinking: this is who you are. Somehow the fact that I am wearing this jumper seems significant and I feel close to my Taid and very much a part of my ancestry, the chance incumbent in a long line of ancestors. This has never occurred to me before. The earthy tones of the sweater; brown, amber, a hint of grey-green, appeal to me. Life feels like a priceless gift and I am wholly there for a moment, even though, looking into the mirror, I know there is darkness in there too. This is who I am, I think.
And in August this year, pausing on a peak above an undulating ridge in the Black Mountains, I am struck by the notion of looking out over a landscape as though it were an image in a book and peeling back the image before me from the top right hand corner to reveal another seemingly identical image, and then beginning to turn the pages and finding more and more iterations — each one minimally different and yet the same — and we inhabit one of them; and I begin to imagine the many worlds we might inhabit and the multiple lives we might, hypothetically, live, but as contingency dictates we are landed with one life, which takes place in whatever world it is that we have been allocated, and there comes to us one day the knowledge that we will eventually leave it behind, the knowledge that, as Rilke put it, we are offered this gift ‘Just once; no more. And we too, / just once. And never again.’
Ongoingness: Manguso, Didion, Woolf
The question of whether or not to keep a diary, or journal, is one that has perplexed me, on and off, for much of my adult life. If you do decide to keep a record of the everyday, what form should it take? What should go into it? Crucially, what kind of artefact should it be: an expensive leather-bound Italian volume, or a cheap supermarket note pad? Too often, whatever its design, it dissolves into a series of injunctions; things to do, places to go, suggestions of ways to become a better person, and shopping lists.
When teaching, on the other hand, I readily recommend students to read Joan Didion’s brilliant essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ – but then a notebook is not quite the same thing as a diary, is it? And Didion is quite clear on the way she uses her own notebook:
‘. . . [T]he point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?’
Sarah Manguso (Photo: Joel Brouwer)
Sarah Manguso is a writer I have been pressing on anyone who will listen since discovering her in the summer, while on a residency in Canada. The writing defies easy categorisation, and is marked by a graceful minimalism. I have just finished Ongoingness, a reflection on the past, and on the diary that she no longer feels the need to maintain with the same obsessive zeal with which she began it as a teenager (and sustained for twenty-five years). With wit and admirable brevity, she succeeds in saying more in a few pages than many writers manage in a lifetime.
One of the many interesting reflections to emerges from Manguso’s book is that quality of forgetfulness that allows us to continue in the rut of accustomed thought, even when our circumstances have changed. One may even be inclined, on occasion, to forget as momentous a change as having had a baby. She writes:
‘Since the baby was born I still occasionally wonder whether I should have a baby, whether I should get married, whether I should move to this or that city I’ve already moved to, already left. All the large questions still float about me, and in its sleep- deprived dampened awareness of the present moment, my memory treats these past moments as if they’re all still happening.’
How that resonates! How often the momentous events of one’s life seem to be happening to someone else, to a distinct other or avatar, while our more familiar self goes about its business, oblivious. Not only births, but deaths, can be dissolved in everyday forgetfulness. There are times, for example, when I think to myself that I must call my father, to tell him about something that has just happened, some small detail that will interest him – only to remember that he is no longer with us, that he died three and a half years ago.
‘I’ve never understood so clearly that linear time is a summary of actual time, of All Time, of the forever that has always been happening.’
And on the following page, this – which has happened to me also:
‘In class my students repeated what they claimed I’d said during the previous class, and, not remembering the words as my own, I found myself approving of them vaguely.’
While this latter example might be put down to simple forgetfulness, I find it hard to conceive of myself as such an inherently forgetful person, when I can, on certain occasions, remember events in their minutest detail. It is almost as alarming as when my iPhone tells me ‘You have a new memory’: only to be presented with a series of photographs taken in 2016 in a place called ‘Great Britain.’
Returning to Manguso’s book, her ‘Afterword’ considers whether or not she should have included excerpts from her quarter century of diaries in the text of Ongoingness. She decided against it, she writes, because ‘the only way to represent the diary in this book would be either to include the entire thing untouched – which would have required an additional eight thousand pages – or to include none of it. . . The only way I could include my diary in this book then, was to refer to it and then continue on.’
And this memorable line from her interview with The White Review: ‘Writing has always felt good to me. It provides an escape hatch for the internal mess.’
She also says in that interview, in answer to the question: ‘Was the process of writing Ongoingness a necessary distinction between yourself now, and the self you were recording in the diary?’ with: ‘I wrote Ongoingness to record the particular experience of losing a continuous anxiety of long duration. When I was done with it, the worry had dissipated. So, yes, there is a before and an after, but it’s the same as with all my books.’
Manguso also says that ‘Ongoingness is a book about learning to inhabit time instead of just ceaselessly documenting it’ – which might suggest that having a child presents one with the reality of someone else depending utterly on one, that one has to be constantly present and correct rather than on the periphery, recording stuff. Personally, becoming a parent made me conscious of my presence in the world more forcefully than anything else I’ve experienced.
Keeping a diary should be a gentle, rather than obsessive, pursuit. You need to record and observe with a quiet detachment rather than an obsessive appropriation. You are never going to record everything of import, as Sarah discovers in her own book: ‘I began to understand that keeping a diary was, as we say, neither necessary nor sufficient.’ She ends the interview, appropriately enough, with a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s ‘Sketch of the Past’:
‘These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.’
No ideas but in things
The young Marcel Proust
Since I began teaching creative writing, some fifteen years ago, I have become accustomed to the sad refrain from younger writers that although they fervently wish to write – or perhaps ‘become a writer’, which may or may not be the same thing – they don’t have anything to say.
It was with some pleasure, therefore, that I noted, during my leisurely (i.e. very slow) re-reading of Proust, the following passage:
‘. . . since I wanted to be a writer some day, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning, I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.’ (The Way by Swann’s, Lydia Davis translation).
But interestingly – at least for my purposes – the suggestion is made that the answer to his lack of inspiration might be found in the things around him, the very things, in other words, that are distracting to him:
‘ . . . suddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on stone, the smell of the road would stop me because of a particular pleasure they gave me, and also because they seemed to be concealing, beyond what I could see, something which they were inviting me to come and take, and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover . . . I would concentrate on recalling precisely the line of the roof, the shade of the stone which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me so full, so ready to open, to yield the thing for which they themselves were merely a cover. Of course it was not impressions of this kind that could give me back the hope I had lost, of succeeding in becoming a writer and a poet some day, because they were always tied to a particular object with no intellectual value and no reference to any abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and so distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt each time I looked for a philosophical subject for a great literary work.’
It is noteworthy here how Proust (through his young protagonist, Marcel) disavows any connection between these ‘objects with no intellectual value’, and his frustrated desire to write. For it is that very particularity, that sense of thingness (which always, as Proust suggests, is a cover for something else, something ineffable) that so often provides the starting point for a writer, if only he or she would look.
‘No ideas but in things’: the line by William Carlos Williams has been taken up as a mantra by teachers of poetry to students obsessed, like the young Marcel, with trying to convey deep philosophical concepts, and instead sinking in a morass of tired imagery, expressed through endless clichés of emotion and language.
I think this is the notion I was trying to convey in my post of 29th August. You can simply be drawn in by some aspect of the inanimate world without knowing why. Not that everything is a metaphor, precisely, nor even that every object is a cover for something else (Borges reminds us that a stone might want just to be stone, a tiger a tiger), but that, using Ricardo Piglia’s thesis of the short story as an analogy, every account, every story conceals within it another telling, a secret story, and it is the quest for this other story that leads young Marcel, in his walks with his grandfather near the beginning of A la recherche du temps perdu to understand that this great, almost suffocating desire to be a writer – a desire that one observes (though perhaps in a less astutely articulated form) in many young students of creative writing who likewise find difficulty in finding subject matter to accommodate their ambitions – might encounter a solution by looking at ‘things’ in the world, rather than heading straight for the ‘idea’.
Finally, an insight from Jane Smiley, in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, which drily sets to rest the maddening condition familiar to all writers of wanting to start a piece of writing, but managing to find any number of things to prevent them from doing so:
‘My definition of “inspiration” is “a condition of being stimulated by contemplation of the material to a degree sufficient to overcome your natural disinclination to create.”’
A Journey into Memory
Bouillon: Panorama
When I remember things from childhood or early adulthood, it often feels as though I am a passive subject, a receptacle or vessel, and the process of remembering becomes one in which memory is seeking me out, digging its way into my sense-making apparatus, rather than there being any sort of ‘I’ trying to make sense of the things remembered.
I am all too aware that as far as memories are concerned, it is the act of construction (more accurately reconstruction) that matters, of making the bits fit our self-narrativisation. In other words, as Gabriel García Márquez put it: ‘Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.’
In his memoir, Other People’s Countries (subtitled A Journey into Memory), Patrick McGuinness asks fascinating questions about the way that identity is rooted in memory, more specifically in the way that we remember. “Trying to remember is itself a shock, a kind of detonation in the shadows, like dropping a stone into silt at the bottom of a pond: the water that had seemed clear is now turbid (that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word) and enswirled.” On reading this passage, which comes on Page 7 of the book, I found it noteworthy that McGuinness comments on the fact that he has not used the word ‘turbid’ before, which immediately casts suspicion on the observation, because one wonders whether, by commenting on memory’s cloudiness and turbidity, he has merely dislodged an existing memory, and is therefore, perhaps, not ‘using the word for the first time’ at all. And how telling that his use of the word ‘turbid’, and his comment on that usage, should immediately be followed by a neologism, ‘enswirled’.
These are nice illustrations of the way that language, our use of it, and its use of us, can be an element in the process of remembering. I am thinking in particular of those laden words which, when they crop up, immediately bring with them a sequence of memories and associations. I remember reading somewhere that our memory of language is the best reason why one should not translate into a language that is not our mother tongue. Words carry their own baggage with them: when you hear certain words, they spark off a whole sequence of associative meanings and memories, stretching back to childhood, that would simply not be available to an individual who has learned a language as an adult.
Childhood is the source of many of these word-memories. Like smells or taste (Proust’s oft-cited madeleine), words, long forgotten or unused, are capable of eliciting entire submerged worlds. But is it the memory of the word itself that achieves this, or the memory of a memory? As McGuinness speculates:
‘And as with so much of that childhood, I seem to remember not the things themselves but the memories of the things, as if the present I experienced them in was already slowing up and treacling over, fixing itself in a sepia wash.’
There are so many good things in this book, things that make you reach for a pencil, or else just stop in your tracks and reflect about the words you have just read. You can dip in, pick a page at random, and come out with some crystallized memory, or some jewel of detailed observation.
Other People’s Countries is, on one level, about a house in Bouillon, in the Ardennes region of Belgium. The house belonged to McGuinness’ family (his mother was Belgian) and was the author’s own childhood home. The book is divided into many short chapters: in this way they resemble the rooms of a large house, perhaps Quintilian’s House of Memory. I’ll conclude with one of my favourite chapters, titled ‘Keys’, which follows in its entirety:
‘Watching an old police procedural, probably a Maigret, sometime in the early eighties while convalescing from glandular fever (an illness I experienced more as convalescence than as actual illness: I felt as if I was simply recovering from something, rather than actually having the something to recover from in the first place), it came to me: a thief pushing a key into putty so that it’s outline would be caught in the relief and he could copy it, then burgle the house.
That was memory, I realised: a putty with which you make another key, which would open the same door, but never quite as well. In no time, you’d be burgling your own past with the slightly off-key key that always got you in though there was less and less to take.’
Dubious categories
In Agota Kristof’s wonderful novel The Third Lie, Claus – or is it Lucas, his anagrammatic twin (the two central characters are indissoluble, or aspects of one and the same person) – spends his nights writing in a notebook. One day, his landlady asks:
“What I want to know is whether you write things that are true or things that are made up.”
I answer that I try to write true stories but at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t – I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened.
After writing a book of creative nonfiction (I love the way a genre is defined by what it is not – as though ‘fiction’ were somehow the default mode of prose writing), one rather smug person of my acquaintance informed me that he had enjoyed the memoir, but had not been so taken by the fictional parts.
Were there fictional parts? I asked. Oh yes, this keen critic observed, of course there were.
Needless to say, this got me wondering. I could have retorted by quoting Joan Didion, who once wrote:
“Not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.”
Or I might have cited Gabriel García Márquez:
“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
The point is, there is a fine distinction between the literalism of ‘what really happened’ – which is in any case not provable – and the way in which I happen to remember, conjecture and write. Does it simply boil down to a distinction between ‘true things’ and ‘things that are made up’? That seems horribly reductive. What about all the stuff that happens in between?
In the documentary film Patience, Christopher MacLehose tells an anecdote about the publication of Max Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. Sebald was required to state what category of work the book should be shelved under – a standard requirement made by booksellers, and he was dismayed that he had to choose a category: did he want the book filed under biography, history, apocalypse studies, memoir, travel or fiction? – All of them, he said, all of them.
Villa Ocampo
Victoria Ocampo was one of the great patrons of the arts of the first half of the twentieth century. She first published Borges in her magazine Sur and she hosted and promoted writers and artists from around the world on their visits to South America. Among others Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus, André Malraux, Indira Gandhi, Drieu La Rochelle, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Camus and Graham Greene were guests at the Villa Ocampo, and Lorca’s Romancero Gitano was published by her.
Yesterday, along with Cees Nooteboom and his wife Simone, Minae Mizumura, and the Argentinian novelist Inés Garland (who kindly drove us there), I was a guest at the Villa Ocampo. We had lunch, and then received a guide from the house manager, the exteremely well-informed Nicolás Helft, who presented me with a 1961 issue of Sur that contains the Spanish translation of a short story by Nabokov ‘Scenes from the life of a double monster’ (which appears, in English, in Nabokov’s Dozen) as well as poems by Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The piano that Stravinsky played, with his picture
The house itself is spectacularly lovely, even if the interior veers towards the state of a mausoleum, with rooms kept intact from the era in which they enjoyed their greatest glory. The grounds, filled with great trees and green lawns, once spread down to the River Plate, several blocks away, but is now considerably smaller (though still ample). The odour of privilege wafts around the corridors and up the stairwells. I would not have liked to have got the wrong side of Victoria (and those who crossed her often lived to regret it). So I sat in her chair and meditated on the state of being Victoria Ocampo for a minute or two, and for a brief moment felt the thrill of something like victory. This was quite alarming, although not unpleasant.
Blanco tries out Victoria Ocampo's chair (photo by Simone Sassen)
For those who understand Spanish, here is a link that connects to Jorge Fondebrider’s website Club de Traductores de Buenos Aires and a video of my interview and reading from Monday evening.
How to write a novel in 13 points
Enrique Vila-Matas in the 1970s, when he was a lodger in the house of Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras (1914-1996)
Sometimes people ask really difficult questions. One of them, which crops up a lot, is ‘Who is your favourite living novelist’? First of all, it’s assumed it will be someone who writes in English, because the British and the Americans don’t read much translated fiction, whereas I do. The extraordinary arrogance of a publishing industry in which only 3% of fiction is non-English – leaving 97% for the English-language writers, might indicate a degree of imbalance, but no one apart from professional translators, who bang on about it the whole time, seems to be too bothered.
Other European countries do not suffer this degree of cultural solipsism, and translated works account for a much higher percentage of published works. Between 30% and 60% if the statistics are to be believed, though I read recently that in Italy 70% of published fiction is in translation. Unbelievably, these statistics receive comments such as one I heard from an English writer recently “Ah but the Italians can’t write fiction!” I could hardly believe my ears.
The fact that extraordinary novels are regularly published in the Hispanic world has filtered into the reading public’s consciousness since the rise of magic realism and the Latin American ‘boom’ generation writers, comprising García Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa – as well as their pale imitators such as Isabel Allende and the Brazilian Paulo Coelho – and more recently, the extraordinary international success of Roberto Bolaño. But even the compiling of such a list makes me uneasy. We in the UK have suffered nearly thirty years in which every new production from the tedious triad of Amis, McEwen and Rushdie is treated as though it were a gift of greatness, and perhaps we have lost all perspective of what is truly interesting in the world.
So, to cut to the quick, my favourite Spanish-language novelists – no, make that international novelists – all of them a few years younger than the three named above, would be Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías and Enrique Vila-Matas. Bolaño, sadly, is no longer with us, and has received plenty of attention (both in the media and in this blog), and I am going to do a separate post on Javier Marías, so I would like to spend a little time on Enrique Vila-Matas, whose non-fiction novel Never any end to Paris was published by New Directions in the USA last week. I will be reviewing it when my copy arrives, but I have read the book in Spanish so I have a head start. The book describes Vila-Matas’ apprenticeship as a writer in Paris, the city to which he moved (from his native Barcelona) as a young man in the 1970s. He had the good fortune to rent a room in the apartment building belonging to the fabulous novelist and film-director (and alcoholic of epic and tragic proportions) Marguerite Duras. Early in the story Enrique bumps into Duras one day on the building’s stairway. Nervous and stammering, he asks her in his substandard and broken French for some advice on the novel he is writing (his first):
“Some advice, that I need, help for the novel.” Marguerite understood perfectly this time. “Ah, some advice”, she said, and she invited me to sit down in the foyer (as if considering me to be very tired), slowly put out her cigarette in the entrance hall ashtray, and headed, somewhat mysteriously, towards her office, from which she returned after a minute with a sheet of paper that resembled a medical note and which contained instructions that might – she told me, or I understood her to say – be useful to me in the writing of novels. I took the note and headed out onto the street. I read the instructions on it a little later, on the Rue Saint-Benoît, and felt at once the whole weight of the world on me, even today I recall the immense panic – the shudder, to be more precise – that I endured on reading them: 1. Problems of structure; 2. Unity and harmony; 3. Plot and history; 4. The time factor; 5. Textual effects; 6. Verisimilitude; 7. Narrative technique; 8. Character; 9. Dialogue; 10. Setting; 11. Style; 12. Experience; 13. Linguistic register.
Since I will review the book in due course, I won’t begin to summarize the hilarious convolutions and torments that the aspiring writer brings upon himself in his quest to fulfil Duras’s daunting stipulations while striving to imitate his literary heroes (notably Hemingway) in certain aspects of literary life – and not only quaffing and revelry – but I would urge anyone – especially anybody who wants to learn about the writing life – to read the book.
Incredibly, only two other of Vila-Matas’ novels are available in English, both of them superbly translated by Jonathan Dunne. (The new book is translated by Anna McLean, and the above extract was my own hurried version, so she cannot be held responsible). These are Bartleby & Co. and Montano, published in 2004 and 2007 respectively. Bartleby & Co. inspired me profoundly during the writing of The Vagabond’s Breakfast, or rather it induced a state of mind that I could only render into prose by means of an extended metaphor. I reproduce the section below, with apologies to those readers who already know the passage. I realise it’s a bit of a cheat putting extracts from my own books on the blog, but a) it might help sell a few copies, and b) I need to pack for my holidays and have, as always, done absolutely nothing until the last minute. So, off we go:
While trying to avoid writing one afternoon, I decide that I want to clear my desk, in fact to clear it and thoroughly clean it. I begin by brushing and then wiping the poorly varnished surface with an anti-bacterial cloth. It still looks dirty; ingrained gubbins of all varieties spread across the desktop. I reach into the low cupboard that extends beneath the eaves of this attic room, find sandpaper and apply myself to the task, scraping away with fixed determination. I begin thinking of the story I am supposed to be writing, of the book review I have promised to deliver, of the poems that lie unfinished in a drawer, but mostly I fall to thinking about the very act of writing, and how it consumes my life in so many ways, most of them satisfying in one sense or another; I like to write, I enjoy what my friend Niall Griffiths calls the glorious mix of exhaustion and exhilaration that come at the end of a good session, the almost trancelike state one enters when entirely absorbed in the life of a character or a place, of having captured some small truth and transcribed it successfully so that a total stranger, on reading it, can nod or laugh in recognition of something shared, or something learned, though possibly always known. But the downside, the part that most writers dread, is the seemingly interminable agony one enters when, for some reason or other, one is kept from writing, either by illness, other work, or a general reluctance to face the blank screen; or else besieged by the feeling that whatever one writes has been said before, and probably better, elsewhere, and yet the terrible arrogance of the author, the desire to act God, that insistent striving to give voice, will not subside.
In this condition, I find myself considering the plight of Bartleby, as described by Enrique Vila-Matas in his book of that name. Bartleby is the type of those who are conditioned to write, for whom writing is default behaviour, and yet who, when asked to perform a particular job or favour, will answer, as a matter of principle, I would prefer not to, regardless of the question, and who, in similar vein, will courageously decline to write at all, although deemed to be a ‘writer’ in the eyes of the world. Vila-Matas has researched the type well:
“For some time now I have been investigating the frequent examples of Bartleby’s syndrome in literature, for some time I have studied the illness, the disease endemic to contemporary letters, the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness that means that certain creators, while possessing a very demanding literary conscience (or perhaps precisely because of this), never manage to write: either they write one or two books and then stop altogether or, working on a project, seemingly without problems, one day they become paralysed for good.”
Vila-Matas does not regard the state of being a Bartleby to be quite beyond hope. There is a glimmer on the horizon, and he contrives, in some way, to conjure an (as yet) invisible text out of the footnotes he has prepared for it. “I wonder if I can do this,” he writes. “I am convinced that only by tracking down the labyrinth of the No can the paths still open to the writing of the future appear. I wonder if I can evoke them.” He occupies himself, over the course of the book, by investigating these writers of the No, giving cameo performances to writers with an overdeveloped sense of the absurdity of their vocation, or with an extraordinary capacity for prevarication and delay.
The list of writers that Vila-Matas compiles of Bartlebys past and present is extensive and includes such luminaries as Rimbaud, Walser, Gil de Biedma and Salinger, even Beckett. There is a peculiar sense in which these writers turn the act of not-writing into a virtue, of which it is hard not to be envious. One of the most outstanding examples is Joseph Joubert, a Frenchman who lived in the eighteenth century and who “discovered a delightful place where he could digress and end up not writing a book at all.” Although he lived to be seventy, Joubert “never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, single-mindedly searching for the right conditions. Then he forgot this purpose as well.” Ah, the nefarious comforts of silence! Some of Vila-Matas’ writers of the No, such as Robert Walser, the shy and reclusive author of The Walk, turn not-writing itself into a topic of their oeuvre (Walser spent the last twenty years of his life as the inmate of an asylum for the insane, as such institutions were then known). The dedication with which Walser and others pursued their calling raises the frightening possibility that I am not yet good enough, or sufficiently dedicated, to be a Bartleby; that despite my good intentions, to fail so self-consciously, and in so spectacular a way as to provoke the admiration of other, more orthodox writers (those who put pen to paper) is itself an achievement beyond my skills and powers of endurance.
By now I am scrubbing so hard that most of the surface is spotless; the dirty varnish is gone and I am sanding raw wood. The desk is a large one; I have covered a big area and am still going strong. The thought occurs to me that if I just keep on sandpapering that desk, it will eventually cease to exist. I could entirely transform my room (the desk, as I have said, is substantial) and in the process, as I scrape away in this alchemical act of molecular disassembly, of making something disappear, of making nothing out of something, I will consider the book I am writing, measuring it out in my mind, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, so that by the time I have rasped away the last grains of sawdust from the last chip of wood, being all that remains of what was once my desk, I will be ready to continue. True, I would no longer have a desk to write it on, I would have to sit in the armchair and use a notebook or the laptop, but that would surely be a small loss compared with the relief of knowing the outcome of my story. And at least I have the laptop, which is just as well, seeing as my handwriting has become quite illegible, I can hardly make it out, and even when I concentrate and force myself to write very slowly the result resembles nothing but a spider-trail of flattened hieroglyphs. My typing isn’t up to much either, but at least I can read what I have written and stand a much better chance of guessing my own intentions despite all the typos and unintentional neologisms that occupy the screen, underlined in green and red. It is frustrating, but I have to put up with this disability, just as I endure the laborious task of reading, for even though reading remains a pleasure, it is one that stretches my powers of concentration to the limit and recently it took me three weeks to read a short novel, simply because I had to re-read every paragraph several times in order to retain the gist of whatever was going on, and neither was it a particularly demanding book; the same thing happens whether I am reading philosophy or a detective novel. This is hard for me, since I have always had good powers of retention, and it feels strange and disempowering to be struggling through the page like a seven-year old, and remembering not a thing.
From The Vagabond’s Breakfast (pp 56-59)
Dog on a Blog
What is this? A picture of a dog? But hey, it’s Blanco’s birthday, as well as mine – we share so many things; underwear, shirts, an inability to remember names – and you can do what you want on your birthday.
I never really intended getting a dog. Indeed have always felt quite hostile to the urban dog, and its owners. And as for those groups of dog owners who congregate eagerly in the park discussing the various merits of their canine companions, I give them a wide berth. But like other humans, I have a deep, cave-dwelling canine affinity and in my drinking days was known to befriend and hug many a stray and confide inebriated nothings into their doggy ears, when everyone else had long since stopped listening to me. The dog doesn’t mind, he thinks you’re just being friendly, even if you smell of mustard gas he doesn’t mind, because he probably does as well.
A German Shepherd once saved my life, when I slipped in the snow and started rolling down an Alp. Honestly. It was in Haute Savoie. He bounded down the hill through the snow and lay cross-ways in my path to stop me from rolling over a precipice. He had followed me from my friends’ remote home on a winter’s evening when, already well-oiled, I just had to walk five kilometres to the nearest bar. So on arriving in the village I took him to the Bistro instead and ordered him a raw steak. A group of local firemen eating their dinner were well impressed. That dog was called Flambard.
So, when I was ill, five years ago, and vegetating at home, unable to concentrate for long periods of time, and therefore read or write, because of a nasty condition called encephalopathy, I decided that a dog would be a good thing, and would force me to get more exercise. So I found a puppy, long since grown into a 25 kilo mad rollicking slavering beast, quite incapable of rational thought for even a moment, desperately affectionate, extremely fond of rolling in horse shit and insanely OCD where balls and sticks are concerned. Bruno Blanco, now approaching fifth birthday, pictured above in characteristic pose, quite mental, full-on, full-speed, even features in a literary work, albeit briefly. Still has a set of bollocks, even though Mrs Blanco has more than once suggested he might be better off bereft of them. I am fond of long walks in the hills, and for that reason alone a dog is a good thing. I wonder if I might cite a poem by Jane Kenyon? Let’s see. Thanks to John Freeman for passing it on.
After an Illness, Walking the Dog
Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road-
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s Lace
and goldenrod bend low.
The top of the logging road stands open
and bright. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.
Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.
A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
– the designated optimist –
imagines to the end that he is free.
Jane Kenyon
Otherwise: new and selected poems (Graywolf, 1996)
The Liver Transplant
The Blanco torso, two weeks after transplant, with 51 metal clips. What surgeons refer to admiringly as 'a beautiful scar'.
When I told people I was going to write about my experiences of liver disease and the transplant that followed my terminal diagnosis, it should not have come as a surprise that many readers were interested to hear about the process of the operation itself. So – with apologies to those of you who have already read ‘The Vagabond’s Breakfast’ – I am reproducing part of the section when I have been summoned to the hospital for the transplant.
Incidentally, I was recently asked to write a magazine article on the question of ‘presumed consent’ – whereby citizens are required to ‘opt out’ of the organ donor scheme, rather than the current system, where they ‘opt in’, by acquiring a donor card, thereby making known their availability as a potential donor. This is a fascinating and complex matter, with far-reaching ethical ramifications, and one that I will be addressing in this blog at a later date.
At this point in the narrative, I have been introduced to the anaesthetist and the surgeon who is to carry out the eight-hour operation, and I am being wheeled towards the theatre on a trolley bed:
Being manoeuvred down hospital corridors on a trolley bed has little to recommend it: you are now indisputably cast in the role of subject – you have become the one to whom things are done. This sense of utter helplessness is a challenge both to dignity and identity: you are simply the poor sod on the trolley whom passers-by will avoid looking at too closely. In the lift the other passengers stare at the ceiling, and I think of Hannibal Lecter. And then, the thought occurs to me that I spent ten years studying and writing about the subjectivity of the patient, that I have a PhD in the narrative construction of illness experience, have published in learned journals and even written a couple of books on the subject. None of this can help me now. I am in a post-discursive zone. I have reached the End of Theory.
Once inside the operating rooms, the situation becomes increasingly non-negotiable: the anaesthetist greets me by name but I have difficulty recognising him, transformed as he is by mask and surgical overalls. The surgeon too pops up with a consoling reminder: “I realise this is a big thing for you, but just remember that for us here, this is what we do every day.” He smiles. I do not panic. I am calm. I reason that if something does go wrong, I probably won’t know about it. Then the anaesthetist approaches once more, gives me an injection, and as he pulls away, the world goes with him.
I thought I had woken from a dream of the sea, but the waking was a part of the dream and instead I found myself upon a makeshift raft, the ocean swelling placidly around me, sharing tuna sandwiches with my dog. We rock unsteadily on the raft. I scour the horizon for any hint of land. Night is falling. I can hear nothing, and the gravity of silence makes me turn: a massive liner is bearing down, a million lights ablaze along the bows, lights that flicker into knowledge of something vast, unstoppable.
Coming to in Intensive Care, I nudge close to the surface several times before breaking through the last waves of sleep and opening my eyes. It is the afternoon of the next day. I am parched and my throat hurts, but I am evidently alive. I ask for water from the patient and fastidious Filipino male nurse who hovers at my bedside. My intake is restricted to occasional sips, which I swill around my mouth before swallowing for maximum lubrication, but I am impatient to drink, and inevitably take in more water than I am permitted. My nurse chides me gently, tells me again to take small sips.
I have often wondered, prior to the operation, how it would feel to be in a hospital bed immediately post-op, knowing that another person’s liver lies inside my body. At this same hospital, in February, I met successful, long-term transplant patients, and in spite of their apparent normality and good health, in spite of what I had been told about the advances made in transplant surgery, I could not help but regard these survivors as freakish cyborgs; insubstantial beings held together by pins and tape – and now I was one of them. Awkwardly, I pull back the bedclothes to look at my torso. Below the gauze bandage I follow the contours of a ridge that snakes across my stomach where the metal clips are planted (later, when the bandage is removed, I count fifty-one). Even more than during recent weeks, I feel at a remove from my own physical person, this immovable object to which I am attached and which now contains a large element of the not-me. The singularity of this sensation is perhaps due to the fact that nothing in my experience has been remotely similar: I have nothing to gauge it by. This lump inside my body is almost palpable otherness, and yet, if I did not know that I had received another man’s liver, would I feel any different? Would I know? Because of the drugs I am being fed, the only area of real discomfort in my body centres on my sore throat and the intolerable dryness of my mouth. Otherwise, it is too early for me to register any emotion other than relief that I have come through and am being told the operation has been a grand success.
I endure my thirst with a martial, dogged humour. Rose sits by my side, a warm and subtle presence, and I enjoy the visit of the surgeon, Professor W, and ask him when the monstrous battery of farts that issues forth from me might ease up. He tells me – and this is a little alarming – that the new liver was uncommonly large, coming in at 1.2 kilogrammes (the average liver weighs 0.7 kg). He says that with time it will shrink to accommodate to my body size, just as, if I had received a smaller organ – or half an organ, which is commonly the case – it would grow to fill the designated space. I have a sudden desire to mourn my old liver. It served me well, I think, sentimentally, before it finally gave up the ghost. Professor W says he had a hell of a job getting it out, which, quite apart from serving as a metaphor for the extinction of a past life, evokes some horrible imagery. I like the Prof – he has a nice sense of the macabre which he can’t quite keep in check, like his smile when discussing my prolific flatulence, marking him out as someone I might get along with well in civilian life.
At night, my temperature rises suddenly and I feel the onset of fear for the first time since entering the hospital; a dense fear, cloudy and dull, loitering, it seems, just to the back and to the left of me, like the devil. I am feverish. I fear I might have contracted some iatrogenic infection such as MRSA; I fear my body might be rejecting the new liver. I do not manage to sleep much that night, in spite of the medication, anxious in case my temperature continues to rise, putting me at threat of I know not what. There is a remote possibility of having to undergo more surgery if things go wrong, even a chance that I might require another new liver, for which an emergency, Europe-wide call would have to be sent out; but when my temperature is taken the next morning, it has fallen. I am off the critical list. That evening I am transferred to the Special Care unit, a half-way house between Intensive Care and the general ward. The following afternoon I manage to get out of bed and into an armchair. My father and sister visit, and they bring my daughters, Sioned and Rhiannon, who never take their eyes off me. I am tired and in considerable discomfort, but am overjoyed to see them.
Only a day later I am in a two-bed room on the liver ward and learning to walk with a Zimmer frame. That first night on the ward, I sleep a full eight hours, wake the next morning with a sense of levity and grace, and walk to the bathroom without assistance. A week to the day after surgery, I leave the hospital. The consultant who signs me out tells me this equals the record for turnaround on a liver transplant. I am irrepressible and quite barking: mad as a hatter, says the ward sister, Julie, approvingly. On leaving, I thank all the staff who have tended me. I vow to myself that I will never again complain about the National Health Service. As a parting gift they give me a blue plastic container for all my pills, with sections designating the days of the week. I take my pills four times a day. I swallow them down with water, tea or apple juice. They make me whole again. No, that’s a lie; they suppress my immune system in order to prevent me from rejecting the new liver. Before long I will have forgotten life without pills, but that is a small price to pay.
From ‘The Vagabond’s Breakfast’ (Alcemi, 2011)
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