Notes on a Writing Life 39
July 14 2022
Dear All,
Do the books we choose to take with us on our journeys and vacations set the mood for us? And, why do we choose what we choose?
I’ve been thinking about endings. Last books, unfinished books, books that don’t see the light of day, and here I am in Hardy country (Dorset, England) where I usually feel I must re-read the old curmudgeon, often coming back to the ironies of “The Return Of The Native.” This year I have a new novel called “The Chosen” by Elizabeth Lowry, about the death of Hardy’s first wife, Emma, and the decision he made to stop writing fiction after the terrible, mean-spirited reviews he had for “Jude The Obscure” (sex, always too much of it, also infanticide – “done because we are too menny.”) In the novel I’m reading, Hardy is blocked, guilt-ridden, sleepless, and takes to eating jam with a spoon for his lunch while his wife haunts him from the attic. Only after her death can he write the love poems to her that made his name as a poet. “The Chosen” is thoughtful and beautifully written, but does post a warning to writers obsessed by their work.
My other choice was Geoff Dyer’s “The Last Days of Roger Federer” which turns out to be more about Geoff Dyer than Roger Federer (who got up and played some more stunning sets after the book came out) but also about Lawrence and Nietzsche and Bob Dylan and many other people whose last days, or last works, are under scrutiny.
I also found a book a few weeks ago in a used bookstore in Venice, “The Tide Is Right” by Hugo Charteris and was intrigued as it had apparently been suppressed before its initial publication in 1957 by an aristocratic English family threatening the publisher. The writer went off to Africa, the book was suppressed and was only published later by Dalkey Archive in the US. It interested me mostly because of its suppression – what could they have objected to? Not sex or child murder, but simply the embarrassing behavior of a certain upper-class bunch of people who thought they should be immune…
Wimbledon and Westminster have also claimed a lot of my attention during the first half of July – last days on the courts of Rafael Nadal, perhaps, and certainly last days – prolonged in a Trumpish way - of Boris Johnson, who doesn’t want to move house.
We are having perfect summer days – in England, a heat wave. Why do English summer days somehow feel elegiac? Is it because we know they can’t last? Because the summer holidays always came to an end and we were sent back to school? Because everything feels elegiac when you start thinking of Last Things?
Next, I’m going to read a thriller…
Affectionately, Ros