Books – Page 3 – My Own RE:public

Bon voyage

On hearing last week that a digitized version of Virginia Woolf’s personal copy of her first novel The Voyage Out is now freely available, I read around the many reports including at the BBC (a Radio 4 news report had been my first source), and linked to a timely article by Mark Byron from the University of Sydney (where the original resides) in The Conversation. This article I have now republished here.

Here now is the link to the University of Sydney library – with a well formatted web version of Woolf’s book; also available for download as pdf. The accompanying description alerts one to Woolf’s revisions in Chapter 16 (pp.249-267 [web-tool/pdf 262-284] with typed paste-ins on pages 254 and 256) and Chapter 25 (pp.398-432 [411-445] with a number of deletions) in preparation for the book’s US publication in 1920.

Original copy published by Duckworth & Co., London, 1915.

A glance to her diary is informative in this regard. Virginia Woolf writes on 28th November 1919, that two parties are interested in both The Voyage Out and Night and Day and their publication appears likely, and a footnote confirms that to be the case – with George H. Doran of New York becoming Woolf’s first American publisher [see The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 1]. Then, the on 4th February 1920 she writes:

The morning from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know – such a harlequinade as it it is – such an assortment of patches – here simple & severe – here frivolous & shallow – here like God’s truth – here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn – & then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole i like the womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences – & my word, what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find, vulgarisms – crudities rather – that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D. – I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two (1920-1924)

Woolf’s tone in the private space of her diary suggests, irrespective of the blush, some pride in her younger self. Remember, as “Melymbrosia”, her book first started taking form as early as 1907, and remember, too, as Virginia surely would have, her severe mental illness during many of those preceding years. That Virginia must be respected.

At the Internet Archive is a copy of the Doran first edition, and it appears to me those corrections suggested by Woolf’s annotations in this newly ‘found’ treasure were adopted only in part – the paragraphs she suggests in Chapter 16 were indeed included (quite how, and what if anything was omitted only a more thorough look on my part will reveal) but those in Chapter 25 that she (?) suggested be deleted seem to remain in full in the US publication. This latter is particularly interesting; I could imagine Woolf mulling over whether Rachel’s feverish state may be interpreted as something close to her own mental agonies over the years. Leaving aside the veracity of my hypothesis and Woolf’s intentions, I have always found Rachel’s torment through those days and nights extraordinarily vivid. It must have been lived. Virginia lived through it. Rachel did not.

Virginia’s book has made quite a ‘voyage’ of its own. Presumably beginning in a room of her own (though the writing and editing of her first novel predates her actually having a room of her own – that did not come her way until 1919) in London and/or Sussex, onwards to her literary estate and its executors, somehow turning up in a bookshop in Lewes from whence it was sold in 1976 – were they mad, or was this simply a failure to predict the market potential? – to an Antipodean university, whereupon it was promptly (?) lost into the cavernous depths of the science section – were THEY mad? An ABC report explains the chain of events up until the book’s reemergence in 2021. To which we can only say: god bless literate, curious and alert Metadata Service Officers!

One poet many voices

“Exit Hector, Again and Again: How Different Translators Reveal the ‘Iliad’ Anew” by Emily Wilson, The New York Times, June 28, 2023.

In English alone there are about 100 translations of Homer’s Iliad; to which we may add Emily Wilson’s new translation (to be published in September presumably). Her excellent comparative essay in The New York Times shows the range of interpretive possibilities of Homer’s epic poem through the ages – from the original to George Chapman in 1611 through to the contemporary culminating with that of her own (a sneak preview if you will!), in various metrical forms and not, rhyming and not – and exemplified in the memorable scene when Hector bids farewell to Andromache and his baby son (book 6. 482-497).

Wilson shares her translation of this passage. Again, as she did with Ulysses, she uses the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and Milton, and her vocabulary choices and turn of phrase in this small sample already recall to me very much that work. And reminds me how very much I have been looking forward to her Iliad.

When wetted boughs break

*Joan Didion in Los Angeles on August 2, 1970*

Essays are a favorite ‘filler’ if you will – ideal reading material when time is limited, on train or plane, when sleep escapes. And, there can’t be much better than those from Joan Didion who so magnificently chronicled the America of the sixties through to the new millennium. And (courtesy Amazon Prime), that is to whom I have flown of late. And, as coincidence would have it, in the form of her legendary collection, “The White Album”, from which this NYT piece last week springs, and in which the writer and academic, Timothy Denevi, is inspired by the release by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum of the Jean Stein Personal Papers that includes an audio recording of an interview Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, gave to Jean Stein in 1971.

The first and title essay of the collection has almost legendary status; in the first instance for its opening sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” (An oft quoted statement that has come to profoundly mean anything – or nothing at all!) But, more generally, for its sweeping panorama of the social and cultural landscape of the sixties and seventies told through diverse narratives – I mean, the whole kit and caboodle are touched upon: Vietnam, Black Panthers, Manson, The Doors, Joplin, and so forth, and including of course dead Kennedys. And it is on this latter, specifically the circumstances behind why we find Didion watching Robert Kennedy’s funeral on television at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968, and that seemingly corresponding to an appalling mental health diagnosis revealed in this opening section of her essay, that has evidently been speculated upon by a faction out there in literary nirvana that could be labelled (Denevi does so) as Didionologists. Now, I haven’t ever given too much thought to the whys and wherefores of her brief mention of being in Hawaii at this time, but presumably for the über Didion fan there must be more to the story.

And they were not wrong it seems. For, in considering the interview with Stein, it is clear from Denevi’s article that it was there in the glaring light of Hawaii in that first week of June 1968 that Joan Didion became overwhelmed by the darkness engulfing her country, became acutely aware of its cemented inequalities and lack of cohesion and, as observed by her in Hawaii, the delusional state of her fellow country men and women – their obsessions; their consumerism; their opportunism and an extreme self-possession: JFK, MLK, RFK – well, WTF, not my problem.

A whole nation was in the midst of a breakdown and belonged on the couch. Hardly to be wondered that it was there that Didion soon landed on her return to Los Angeles. Nor that, upon reflection and with or without a clinical diagnosis, she would have found her symptoms unsurprising.

[…] By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 15). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Dunne and Didion revealed in the Jean Stein interview the profound affect Bobby Kennedy’s murder had upon them, and how they saw it as the culmination of years of societal disturbance, what Dunne called “the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry”.

Unfortunately, Stein’s audio tapes are not available on-line so I can only give credence to Tim Denevi’s version, but a very thoughtful, well-informed one it appears to be. He may not be one of those above mentioned -ologists, but he is obviously an admirer of Didion and well-versed in the cultural time that she has come to personify. A really interesting read, to which I would only add two further vignettes from the essay.

Firstly, towards the end of that horror year, one cold rainy morning, Didion was driving between Sacramento and San Francisco on her way to report on the latest campus “revolution” when a line from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: Petals on a wet black bough began pulsating in her head. At the end of the day she considers whether “[the petals] represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie…”. An interesting interpretation. A very famous line for sure, but she doesn’t say whether it may had been planted there by a particular episode, the state of society in general or at least as she saw it or her state of mind – these last two being the sort of same thing anyway. This perhaps something else for the Didionologists!

And, then, in August 9 1969, Didion is in a swimming pool in Beverley Hills when she hears about the murders at the Tate Polanski house on Cielo Drive. Contradictory, seemingly bizarre, reports and rumours spread like wild-fire. Everyone is appalled, but …

I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 42). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Towards the end of the essay, Joan Didion writes that many in Los Angeles believed this day to be the abrupt end of the sixties. She says: The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Annie’s story …

One could I suppose wonder whether there comes a point where all the small and greater stories of any one life have been told – memories revisited and retold, enough secrets divulged. Should such a point of saturation exist (a hypothetical I may well argue against), it seems that, in the case of Annie Ernaux, it has not yet been reached.

*Das andere Mädchen* (2022) and *Der Junge Mann* (2023) pub. Suhrkamp

Corresponding with an excellent magazine piece (subscription) by Rachel Cusk in The New York Times last weekend, I had coincidentally borrowed two slight – very slight – installments in that aforesaid life; both published in translation only quite recently in Germany.

In Das andere Mädchen (L’autre fille, NiL Éditions, 2011), Ernaux gives life to the no-memory-of a sister she didn’t have; for the death from diphtheria of she named Ginette predated her own birth. Written (mostly) in a mini Briefroman form addressed to this at first unknown sister – and always aware of the irrationality of this exercise – that no-memory becomes essential to her real memories: of discovering as a ten year old, and only through chance, of Ginette’s existence, and the realization that Ginette’s death is for Annie existential (her parents only intended to have one child); of her parents who never spoke of their loss; of their fear of losing another; of their expectations for Annie, the replacement. It is almost as if her whole childhood was lived in the haunting shadow of another.

L’autre fille (only sixty or so pages) has not been translated into English. (Perhaps due in this instance to the smaller French publishing house rather than Gallimard?) A translation note unto myself: Given that the book builds on that overheard conversation which ends with Annie’s mother stating that Ginette was “viel lieber als die da”, that is, “much more lovable/better/preferable as [Annie]”. I can only say: good luck with that one!

Did I say: slight, very slight? Now, Der Junge Mann, is really very slight – about thirty pages, each formatted, shall we say, ‘opposite of condensed’. In the French original, Le jeune homme, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, this life fragment (you see I am grappling with what terminology to apply to these Ernaux-esque episodes!) was written in the last year of the last millennium and revolves about Annie Ernaux’s relationship with a thirty year younger student called only A. – Ernaux was in her mid-fifties – that has presumably not long ended. (Here, at UK Vogue – surprisingly! – is an excerpt.)

The age difference matters – not only in the public space (no, the French are not immune to the dictates of societal norms) but also in their private interactions; to paraphrase: i would like you to have my baby, he says at one point … well, that is just not going to happen, her obvious reply. (Though, she who had two children in her twenties and had never contemplated anymore, did find herself idly wondering what, with all the new technology and stuff, that would be like!) And age is often a determinate of the power balance. In this relationship, had the age difference been the other way round, the young man (then no longer young – even for a bloke !) would have had more options in which to exercise power (and at the same time without eliciting the glares of disapproval afforded an older woma), but against the norm here it is clear that Annie is control. She instigated this thing and she will end it.

The question remains: was this for Ernaux simply an arrangement of convenience (for her )? One that fulfilled not only her physical needs – for sexual intimacy and the rituals and familiarity of a partnership – but, importantly, her intellectual needs as a writer whose sharpest tool was that of memory? In that respect A. offered a convenient conduit to her past. He was from a similar working class provincial milieu (she says that, but Ernaux’s experience, born in 1940 and growing up in the immediate decades after, surely were substantially different to a young man born, say, in 1970?); as she did, he, too, is studying in Rouen with the minimum of resources and an uncertain future. Observing him at a place she once was, had a way of stimulating feelings and emotions that she had thought long left behind. The most startling of these the abortion that she had as a student, and in the hospital to be seen from A.’s window. The book ends with the end of the relationship and Annie having written down the trauma of that experience, published the next year in France as L’événement and written about by me in this post.

These works continue Annie Ernaux’s excavation of her person and her past; with each shifting the perspective of the story we thought we knew that came before. I would be surprised if they were to be the last.

English translations of Ernaux’s work are available through Seven Stories in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the U.K.

May 14 2023: Some days later, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, I have found myself making a connection between Annie’s story about her sister (in L’autre fille) and that other which told about her abortion as a young woman (inspired during the time frame covered in Le jeune homme and explicitly written about in L’événement). Both of these forms of absence, have, it seems to me, moved Ernaux to reflect upon what is left behind in the gaps of unrealized, or not wholly so, lives. I have often talked about Ernaux’s writing of her own life, but perhaps, here, the imperative was to write and memorialize two ‘lives’ that were, to various degrees fleeting, but, nevertheless, profoundly influenced the course of her life.

What’s in a name

*RSC* production – Garrick Theatre, London, 2023

With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!

Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.

I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.

Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.

Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.

And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.

A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.

International Booker

Further to my previous post, it is pleasing to note that Leïla Slimani will chair this year’s International Booker Prize, awarded to a work of translated fiction. And am just as pleased that amongst others she will be joined on the judging panel by Parul Sehgal, who I often read when she was at The New York Times and that I see now is a writer and critic at the New Yorker.

The longlist will be announced on 14th March, the shortlist of six books on 18th April and the winning title at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, 23rd May, 2023.

Just one night

Elsewhere I have written on Leïla Slimani, and will briefly do so again. Last night I read (as always in the German translation of Amelie Thoma with the title Der Duft der Blumen bei Nacht) Slimani’s slim ‘summing-up’ of her voluntary ‘locking-up’ – for one night only – in the Venetian Punta della Dogana; this being her contribution to her French publisher’s ongoing collection, “Ma nuit au musée”. Now, this, an idea that I initially found somewhat contrived – “Mickey Mouse” even, more suited to the ‘low’ culture of Disneyworld than the ‘high’ of the traditional European museum. Whereby that with vertical graduations of culture is relative and a matter of taste and circumstance: I remember, Orlando, circa. 1990, babe in arms, man at side; a memory as sunny and warm as the atmosphere in which it was created and lives still. Modest, perhaps, but nonetheless a highlight of this life.

Slimani herself is not absolutely convinced of the ‘higher’ purpose of the project nor of her qualification to speak on the contemporary art in the midst of which she will be stranded. But she is struggling with her novel and there is something about being alone, being ‘locked-up’, that is appealing enough to lead her to accept the proposal, reasoning her acquiescence as a consequence of her literary inheritance and ambitions; literary heroes – so many loners amongst them; her own unresolved conflict between an overwhelming desire for solitude and a peculiar restlessness. All this may well be so, but during her night of self-imposed confinement, other more personal motivations come to the fore.

*View of Punta della Dogana from the Bacino di San Marco.*

So it is that Slimani’s meditation on her own particular art of writing is embellished with those of others – for instance, Tolstoy, Woolf, Rushdie, Adnan – and, on this night, run parallel with her confrontation with forms of visual art that are not easy and are open to interpretation. And her interpretations can not be but reflective of her experience living between worlds; the Morocco of her childhood and the France of her adulthood, and always the Francophone which is her linguistic home and the Arabic which was never gifted her – but the essence of which is always there, somewhere.

When considering the 17th century building in which she now finds herself and the greater plight of Venice and the Notre Dame fire in Paris on the previous day, Slimani reflects upon the transient nature of cities and the structures that inhabit them. And she wonders where the life-enriching transcendent is to be found in an increasingly secular society, when religion and the sacred is abused, demolished? Always there in the poetic, in literature, she suggests. And whether with her own turn of phrase or extending upon those of others, her musings are thoughtful and clearly formulated – and very revealing of her writing life and the price paid for her obsession.

And personally revealing. Perhaps this was not Slimani’s intent, but somewhere through that night she is struck by the irony that she should choose this bizarre form of confinement for just one night, whilst years previously her father had been confined, imprisoned – no choice there, and unjustly so claims his daughter. And even when not actually deprived of their freedom, there was a generation of Moroccans like her parents who had been condemned to a life sentence anyway – a life in the shadow of colonialism, lives lived in a land claimed by others. Slimani writes with understanding and empathy of their plight – without reproach nor bitterness; only too aware of the later freedoms granted to her through circumstance.

We know Leïla Slimani returns to Paris, freed – for a time, at least – of the not so brutal, but also not trivial, shackles that freedom brings, and with the realization that in the whole scheme of things her burdens are governed by choice – and are to be endured or thrown asunder. She is fit again to write of those which are greater; borne by others in another place, another time. Tell another story. (The second of the trilogy, Regardez-nous danser, was published last year.)

Pugin

Should one not be adequately informed, by virtue of professional or personal interest, in the social and cultural history of Victorian England (and the Georgian that preceded it), one could be forgiven for not easily placing the name Pugin (says she absolving herself!). That is, to be precise: Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin^[a] (/ˈpjuːdʒɪn/PEW-jin; 1 March 1812 – 14 September 1852). And so pasted from Wikipedia; for, having come to the end of a fabulous biography, I now realise I have been saying – in my head anyway – quite correctly (by chance!) the first syllable but consistently mispronouncing the last syllable with a hard ‘g’. And for reasons I can’t say, for there is that rule dependent upon the following vowel and in days gone I certainly had a penchant for an icy gin and tonic of a summer evening. Too long a stay in Germany perhaps, where the g of Germany and gin is confined to words derived from other languages – like, for instance, ‘Germany’ and ‘gin’!

As mentioned previously, in a weaker moment last year I relented and, despite my modest budget, subscribed to the London Review of Books. The reading of a random piece here and there or a rare purchase at a Hauptbahnhof en route from here to there had become a bit tiresome. And I haven’t regretted doing so; even when some articles tend to veer too left of my (fading) scope of vision. While sometimes delivery has been tardy (unfortunately a digital only sub. is not offered so it is always the case that I have an online version for a significant time before the hard copy turns up) and this year has seen a hefty price hike, I am sticking with it for the moment. During the year gone I have discovered some really excellent pieces of writing – from people known to me and not, about subject matter with which I am familiar and that which I’m not.

Rosemary Hill is an example of such an ‘unknown’ (to me) with whom I have been glad to become acquainted. As it transpires, Hill is not only a regular contributor to LRB, but a widely respected writer and cultural historian. Early in the year gone, I was impressed by a ‘Diary’ piece in which Hill, inspired by the 1921 census becoming available and an interest in discovering her father as the baby he then was and the family that surrounded him, explores her familial roots in South London and in doing so vividly illustrates the conditions under which the ‘working-classes’ lived at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Then later I listened to a series of podcasts hosted by Rosemary Hill on Romantic Britain coinciding with her new book Time’s Witness (I await the paperback – remember, the modest…meager budget – ordered and due in a couple of weeks) which led to the discovery of her 2008 Wolfson History Prize winning book God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007), of which an immaculate paperback copy fell into my hands.