A couple of nights ago I woke again some time after midnight and was awake a long time. I read more of the short stories in Binocular Vision (2011) by the American, Edith Pearlman.
In Britain today we have an acknowledged handful of top writers - mostly men: Ian McEwan and Martin Amis are the two I prefer, heading into old age now. Sebastian Faulks has never quite fitted with them for me though I'm not sure why. Then I read an article that suggested he " is an accomplished novelist writing well below his abilities". He "headed for middle market" apparently though anyone who remembers the reams of psychiatric terms in Human Traces (2005) will know there was nothing particularly "middle market" about that. It was akin to the whaling terminology in Moby Dick - not chick lit.
Occasionally I come across a jewel like Helen Simpson in her stories on motherhood Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2001). But a lot of the fiction I most enjoy comes from 20th and 21st century North America.
Compulsive too are the stark, humane, cameos of real life in and around New York by the journalist Joseph Mitchell in My Ears are Bent (1938). Though he continued to be employed at the New Yorker between 1964 and his death in 1996 he published nothing more. The Wikipedia entry for Mitchell gives the following account of this period, which left me with mind astonished and empty bar the questions everybody wants to know:
In a remembrance of Mitchell printed in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, his colleague Roger Angell wrote:"Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained."
Mitchell's writing reminds me a little of the British novelist Patrick Hamilton, also writing in the nineteen thirties and forties. A modern reviewer acknowledged his "novelistic genius" and says truly that "no one has written better about pubs" - nor I think, more realistically about the rougher end of real life at the time. Yet I was startled to read the same person here say "Some, however, find his fatalistic bleakness overwhelming – Hangover Square (1941) is undeniably one of the most depressing books ever written". I think that is an overstatement or perhaps it is just how I take my writers. It occurs to me now that Simpson, Mitchell, Hamilton - John Williams, for Stoner (1965) is perhaps another - all write in ways that are perceptive, humane, funny, sometimes very sad. They often write about people who are marginalised, those without a voice, or without much voice. Their writing has a feeling about it that is not unlike much tango music (and some vals).
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January, 2015:
A: What do you think of Amor Cobarde [vals, 1933]? I thought I wanted to call it a bit twee but I feel it wash over me and think it's lovely. One of the things I like about tango music is that it feels imperfect and perfect all at once. I listened to a tango in the car right after a beautiful, perfect Mozart aria and also another next to a polished big band swing piece. The tango, which was a Donato, sounded so...earthy, so rough in a way, in comparison, but so...I don't know, human, in a musical way.
B: Very true.
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Insomnia is a private thing. It is hard to know who has it, what it is like for them and what they do about it. My children are young and I am grateful I am really only a poor sleeper. I have read of real insomniacs, seen the blitzed faces of sufferers and a bridled mania roiling beneath. Among the stories in Binocular Vision there is a piece called "Granski". As good fiction does it gives privileged insight into the life of another:
At night the kitchen became Gran's domain. Here she endured her famous insomnia. She read books about extinct mammals and examined her childhood collection of bird skeletons. "My cat brought me the corpses." She smoked. She worked chess problems and played an old flute. By day the flute rested on a table in the big useless front hall; the instrument, too, caught the light.
Reassuring, somehow, to be in company with a fellow insomniac, better really a fictional one.
I can believe it when I read Edith Pearlman is reckoned one of the world's best short story writers. The writers, also the people actually, I most admire see the significance in things that most of us do not. Some, like this writer show you quietly and clearly. Despite that perceptiveness, that unflinching awareness, I see no harshness and that is an art. Rather there is gentleness and humour.
Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Man Booker prize in 2014.
In contrast, that is an unflinching, harrowing tale somehow described as a love story. The context is the building of the Burma-Siam Death Railway during the Second World War where Flanagan's own father was a prisoner of war. Brutality is inherent in the telling of the horror of that time and place but here is the comparison with other good fiction - the book is about more besides and more than a love story but what that "more" is isn't exactly said. Sometimes I think fiction is the art of restraint, of at most the suggestion implicit in showing; an art of revelation in another. Perhaps it is an element of the art of life or, for that matter the art of dancing tango. Not, of course, the kind of tango danced in class. There is of course no guarantee that it will be tango music - or any music - in class at all.
A propos, I had a very cross email from some tango dance teachers that evening. Class tango people. I have taken classes with many different teachers. Nobody but me knows all of the teachers with whom I have taken lessons. A brief mental count comes up with twenty at a bare minimum, not including all the visiting Argentines. These particular teachers didn't like me having an opinion and saying it and they wanted me to cease and desist. I won't say in what way exactly because that might expose them and despite the email I have no animosity that way. But lord, how I dislike being being pushed around and told what to do and say or not to do and not to say. Last time a teacher challenged me about a newspaper article that was apparently "disrespectful" about tango dance teachers this is what happened. That piece was more read than any other by a stretch so if asking me to stop saying an opinion which if it has a purpose might be a proposal of disabuse, then the aim of this recent missive could hardly have been more misguided.
After the stories I remembered Bob Finch's blog and enjoyed reading his account so far of his and his wife's current stay in Buenos Aires, after which I fell, relaxed, into sleep.
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