The mad March rain
Eight things I've loved this week, including the weather, Graham Greene, Frank Kermode and Shulamith Firestone
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
Some of you might have read this as a kid. It’s the first in a series of twelve books by Joan Aiken. A recent article in the Times (in a great column where they revisit old books) reminded me of it. It is brilliant! Aiken is a born storyteller, if ever there were. The pages turn themselves. It opens with Sylvia, a young orphaned girl, being sent to live with her rich cousin Bonnie Green on her countryside estate in the north of England, where wolves still live. (It takes place in an imagined period of English history, in the early 19th century; James III is on the throne.)
Shortly after Sylvia arrives, Bonnie’s lovely father departs, taking her very ill mother south for a cure. He leaves the estate, his daughter and his niece in the hands of Miss Slighcarp, a fourth cousin. But Miss Slighcarp has nefarious intentions…
I’ve just finished the second book in the series, Black Hearts in Battersea, which is written for older readers and is even better. Bonnie’s friend Simon goes off to art school in London, only to find himself entangled with plotters aiming to put a Hanoverian prince on the throne. (In real history, a Hanoverian prince assumed the British throne – as George I – in 1714. There were 56 heirs closer to the throne than him, but they were all Catholic, and therefore by a 1701 act of parliament, prevented from becoming monarch. Charles III is George’s 8x great-grandson.) It’s a rollicking, rich read. And there are ten more books to go!
Aiken revives some excellent lingo and customs: ‘havey-cavey’ meaning shifty; ‘jobberknoll’ meaning fool; ‘loblolly’ meaning scaredy-cat; ‘they’re all for Habbakuk’ meaning, I think, they’re finished; and meals of whortleberries and chitterlings and singed sheep’s head (!?!)
Curiously, Aiken had a go at completing Sanditon, the novel Jane Austen left unfinished at her death. I tried to read Aiken’s version but it’s quite unreadable. She attempts to write in Austen’s style and it doesn’t work. Snaps for ambition though! (I do recommend Austen’s Sanditon – all 12 existing chapters – though its sudden end is poignant. It hurts, actually. She died far too soon.)
Onto matters which Austen would perhaps not have enjoyed (in her last home, which she shared with her mother, sister and a friend, she was let off nearly all household chores so she had time to write – the only tasks allotted to her were laying out and clearing up breakfast):
This article on loading your dishwasher properly by Tom Whipple
After an unmentionable Instagram interview last week about a certain high-profile couple’s domestic division of labour, the practice of dishwasher-loading has been much in discussion. Well, one man – and possibly only one man – has a PhD in it. Raúl Pérez Mohedano, a University of Birmingham engineer, wrote a 300-page thesis on optimal loading, ‘using radioactive tracers and positron emission particle tracing to track a full wash cycle’.
His findings? Big items need less careful stacking, don’t tesselate crockery closer than 20mm, and all dishwashers have a serious design flaw, because they’re square while the cleaning device is circular – so really everything should be stacked radially out from the centre.
Yet, even when it comes to his contribution not all peer reviewers have been kind. On the Extreme Dishwasher Loading Facebook group, which has 29,000 members, there was disquiet in particular about figure 3.3b of his thesis, which showed his loaded dishwasher — and hence was a testament to his credibility as a stacker.
One member spoke for many when she described it as “showroom stacking”, lacking in heterogeneity. Like much laboratory science, she questioned its real-world validity. “A real pro would adeptly deal with 500 differently sized and shaped items, some of flimsy plastic, others absurdly heavy earthenware plus large and unwieldy utensils.”
A Miele product manager gave some obvious tips – don’t overcrowd, keep similar cutlery away from each other, point blades down (people have been killed by tripping over and being impaled on knives in the cutlery basket). But the comments are priceless.
The End of the Affair, a 1999 adaptation of Grahame Green’s 1951 novel
The film stars Ralph Fiennes, playing novelist Maurice Bendrix, opposite Julianne Moore, who plays Sarah Miles, the wife of a civil servant whom Bendrix is shadowing for research. Bendrix and Sarah have an affair.
Pivotal scenes in the story are told twice – first through Bendrix’s eyes, then through Sarah’s, or sometimes those of the private detective whom Bendrix hires to follow her. The whole story is a riff on storytelling and writing. The private detective steals Sarah’s journal, and when the latter reads the truth about why Sarah broke off their affair, he goes after her and successfully rekindles it. (A rare story of when reading someone else’s diary pays off?!)
The opening of Greene’s novel is remarkable:
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.'
For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry - I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.
The narrator’s perspective undoes itself; as soon as he chooses a moment from which to look ahead – the Common, 1946 - he then can’t commit to it, and immediately jumps forward to a point from which he can look back – ‘this is a record of hate’. But all the talk of hating gives the game away; someone able to parse their own hate that well is also, the reader may wager, able to love very well, too.
Incidentally, the narrator’s deliberation about where to write from reminds me of Kierkegaard’s statement that temporal life ‘can never properly be understood, precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards’.
There is a good New Yorker long read about Greene here.
Shulamith Firestone:
But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.
The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction by Frank Kermode
I was put onto this by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. (Kermode was an English professor and critic who published extensively.) I was reading the elegies to Kermode in the LRB following his death in 2010, and Phillips called The Sense of an Ending one of the best books he had ever read.
Kermode commissioned Phillips to write a biography of Winnicott for the Fontana series Kermode edited. Phillips got the commission after sending Kermode a two-page essay on tickling (which itself later became the book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored). The pair met over dinner. Phillips:
At the very end of the evening I said to him ‘ironically’, i.e. with rising panic, ‘How do you actually write a book?’, and he replied very straightforwardly, as though it was a good question: ‘Immerse yourself in the material, and the book will write itself.’ Which I did, and it did.
Kermode was extremely, extremely well-read. This makes his writing incredibly rich, but sometimes you have to go slowly. I’m dipping in and out of various sections. But I loved the second and third paragraphs of the first chapter:
You remember the golden bird in Yeats’ poem - it sang of what was past and passing and to come, and so interested a drowsy emperor. In order to do that, the bird had to be ‘out of nature’; to speak humanly of becoming and knowing is the task of pure being, and this is humanly represented in the poem by an artificial bid. ‘The artifice of eternity’ is a striking periphrasis for ‘form,’ for the shapes which console the dying generations. In this respect it makes little difference - though it makes some - whether you believe the age of the world to be six thousand years or five thousand million years, whether you think time will have a stop or that the world is eternal; there is still a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance in relation to it - a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end.
The physician Alkmeon observed, with Aristotle’s approval, that men die because they cannot join the beginning and the end. What they, the dying men, can do is to imagine a significance for themselves in these unremembered but imaginable events. One of the ways in which they do this is to make objects in which everything is that exists in concord with everything else, and nothing else is, implying that this arrangement mirrors the dispositions of a creator, actual or possible:
…as the Primitive Forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which without Discord or Confusion lie,
In that strange Mirror of the Deitie.
Such models of the world make tolerable one’s moment between beginning and end, or at any rate keep us drowsy emperors awake. There are other prophets beside the golden bird, and we are capable of deciding that they are false, or obsolete. I shall be talking not only about the persistence of fictions but about their truth, and also about their decay. There is the question, also, of our growing suspicions of fictions in general. But it seems that we are need them. Our poverty – to borrow that rich concept from Wallace Stevens – is great enough, in a world which is not our own, to necessitate a continuous preoccupation with the changing fiction.
Alkmeon’s observation brings to mind the psychoanalyst Darien Leader’s statement that, in its simplest form, a mood is just a ‘failure to connect two ideas...the mood won't dissipate until the connection is made’.
The rain! The rain. Oh the misery of the rain! March rain. A very wet March.
I’m wearing waterproof over-trousers for walks on the heath. One feels invincible. It can make walking in the rain quite fun. Plus, there’s always someone doing mad things in March rain on the heath – running in short shorts, while also possibly pushing a baby in a buggy; dogs jumping into cold ponds, thrilled; fishermen sitting on benches by the boating pond; and women going for a swim in the ladies’ pond. Also, the rain in England seems to be getting weaker???
I do spend a lot of time ‘in nature’. (A kind of strange phrase – all the planet is nature. As Sarah Moss said about people described as ‘living off the land’ – where do the rest of us get our food from, if not the land?) But since I moved to the heath five years ago I have become far more aware of the seasons, and especially of the changing of the seasons, than ever before. The beginning of March is a strange and exciting time. There are days, like today (Tuesday), which feel like they have a lid on them: the sky is dense and grey; all is wet; and yet the air is mild, the daffodils are out and the birds are back from the south and happy. I feel sad winter is departing, but excited for the change.
Publishing every day
Things have been rumbling through my mind recently about publishing more often. I read this convincing piece by Cory Doctorow about the value of blogging every day. (It’s not the usual bollocks ‘build your brand’ type advice – as Doctorow says, ‘virtually every sentence that contains the word ‘brand’ is bullshit’.) But he recommends blogging daily for several reasons, including 1) it keeps a log of your train of ideas and associations over the weeks, months and years, especially if you tag posts properly so they’re thoroughly searchable, and 2) it forces you to get your thoughts into shape for others to read, which in itself is valuable. Plus, writing is fun, as we all know. And publishing every day minimises the starting apathy, which my favourite Stephen Nachmanovitch (have you all read Free Play yet?) describes:
I am, in the beginning, an object at rest; I have to come up against some big laws to get off that immobile place. Attempts to conquer inertia are, by definition, futile. Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness. Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.
So, Doctorow is onto something. I may start publishing more regularly.
A year of drawing
I came across this beautiful post by Austin Kleon (an American artist whose blog I love) about his son, who started drawing aged two and has never stopped. It’s worth reading the post – it’s short and sweet – but I particularly loved this:
Kleon’s son doesn’t care at all what happens to his drawings after he’s finished with them; it’s the doing of them which affords him pleasure. Kleon and his wife sweep up the filled sheets of paper with a broom when their son is finished for the day. As Brahms said, the mark of an artist is how much they throw away.
Until next time.