First of all, colossal
apologies for taking so long to reply to your last email. It’s been Christmas – you may well have
noticed – which necessitated a great deal of cooking, eating, washing up,
planning of the next meal, etc, etc.
Besides that, an excellent crop of new books and movies has made its way
into the house, and I’ve been dipping into those with appetite and glee (Renata
Adler’s selected journalism, After the
Tall Timber, has been a highlight so far, and a lot of energy’s been poured
into clearing my schedule to watch Abel Gance’s five and half hour silent
masterpiece Napoleon, which the BFI
have just released in a new print)*, a fact which has necessitated ignoring the
outside world – or the close approximation of the outside world that the
interweb provides, at any rate – for the last couple of weeks. But rest assured! I have not neglected your previous missive,
and have been turning its more salient and meaty points over in my mind as best
I can between bouts of competitive potato-eating and Harry Potter marathons.
To address some of your
concerns: yes, you’re probably right that Woolf’s novels will outlast her
diaries and letters, without a doubt.
Indeed, the diaries and letters as literary artefacts are explicitly
dependent upon the high critical regard in which the novels are held. (This is probably as true of other great
literary journal-keepers like John Cheever and James Schuyler and Christopher “I’m
. . . a writer” Isherwood, though the picture is greyed and blurred a little by
the Goncourt brothers, whose journals are afforded the serious attention and
respect which have long been denied their no-longer-read-at-all-by-anyone-anywhere-even-academics
novels.) Perhaps it’s simply a matter of
particularity, even perversity, on my part: I simply don’t want (or don’t think
I want) that sense of finish, of ‘luminosity’, that you’re seeking and finding
in Woolf’s work: I’m genuinely more interested in her quotidian thoughts on
what she’s reading at any given point, what she had for breakfast on Saturday,
the particularities of tiny mundane detail, provided for their own interest and
pleasure and nothing more.**
Perhaps, if I were in a
less controversial or contrarian mood – but when’s that ever likely to happen? –
I might temper my argument, and suggest that my impatience with ‘trad. fic’ –
and my concomitant drift towards the fringes (essays, diaries, novels that
break apart under the strain of their own construction) – is really in part a
reaction to a certain arrogance on the part of Fiction, considered as a
monolithic bloc: an arrogance that sees itself as the final arbiter of the ‘literary’,
and that views other forms not as important and vital genres in their own
right, but rather as little more than jerry-built adjuncts to Fiction’s self-confessed
pre-eminence in the field of Wordery.
That’s probably yet another
straw man, I’m sure – I should probably start charging by the penny, I’m
putting together so many hay-stuffed effigies: at this rate, by the end of the
month, I’ll have, well, some pennies, anyway – but I still think I’m raising something
resembling a valid point, however grumpily and idiosyncratically I might
express it. Why mine Woolf’s diaries for
what gems of information they can express about her ‘real’ work? Can’t we treat them as a pre-eminence in and
of themselves? Hmm? There was a very good article by Geoff Dyer
in the Guardian fairly recently (actually over a year ago now, but by my standards,
that’s recent) that touched on this issue.
(You can read it here if you wish.) Dyer raises a whole host of other points
beside, but one of his observations struck me particularly, pertaining to the
differing values one expects, respectively, from fiction and non-fiction: fiction,
according to the schema Dyer lays out, is a refuge if you’re after style and
joy; non-fiction, however, can be viewed as a rather more austere and utilitarian
harbour, providing nought but facts and content. (The French Riviera vs. Portsmouth, basically.) “In a realm where style was often functional,”
writes Dyer, “nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”,
as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a
reliable car.”
Dyer, of course, is
sketching out this clichéd view of non-fiction to provide a semi-ironic
backdrop for his advocacy of the more recent advances in the field – and many
of the names that get referenced in the article have popped up on my own radar,***
in many instances producing in the process some pretty unforgettable and
forthright emerald blips: yes, I am running this metaphor into the ground,
thank you for noticing – but I would say that this cliché does still pertain to
a certain extent. If I am overzealous in
my non-fiction boosterism, I feel it’s somewhat warranted: over-correction is
better than the complacency of no correction at all.
This reply, I realise, is
already radically breaching the limits of what’s reasonable, both quantitatively
and qualitatively, so I should probably sign off soon, but before I go, and as
a means of providing a little bit of gravy for the next mind-meal you send my
way, one of the books that snuck into the house over the festive break was The Storm (1704) by Daniel Defoe. I’ve only glanced at and dipped into it so far
– not least because it’s not actually mine, but my good lady’s, and there’s a
whole Byzantine edifice of social etiquette pertaining to the matter of who
gets to read books first in any given household, the complexity of which would
make a medieval Japanese nobleman’s head spin clean off his shoulders – but what’s
notable, aside from its subject matter, is the sense that Defoe is both
creating and defining a form, and simultaneously defending it aesthetically,
even as he calls it into being. We could
probably call that genre ‘long-form journalism’ or ‘literary non-fiction’, depending
on our mood, but whatever it is, it feels alarmingly contemporary. Discuss.
Yours, as ever,
Simon
PS: Happy New Year, by the
way!
*My hope is that there’s a
revolution-tinged secular holiday which is celebrated in France some time in
the next few weeks with which can coincide my screening of the movie, to really
make an event of it. I don’t want to
have to wait till Bastille Day, for God’s sake.
**I’m probably the only
reader – I’m certainly in a minority of readers, anyway – who gets far more
excited by technical details in a writer’s biography than the endless, prurient
cataloguing of their turbid emotional lives: how many words got written on
August 16th, say?; what kind of pens did they use, and where did
they buy them?; had they read Proust before or after they began work on their
third novel, etc, etc?
***Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys, in particular, is now
a personal favourite of mine: genuinely one of the best things I have read in
some years. I was planning to re-read it,
so that I could more properly answer your perfectly reasonable request for some
concrete detail regarding my reading habits and preferences, but realised I’d
lent the book to a friend – oh, the hubris! – and so can’t fulfil my duties in
this instance. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, too, feels like a
game-changer, though everyone and their maiden aunt has written about that, and
extensively, so I’ll limit my comments to say simply that I enjoyed it
immensely. H is for Hawk, if you’ve not read it, should wing its way to your ‘must
read’ pile pretty soon, too.
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