No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (8 page)

“they leave their mark”

“
Vienna while in Prague
”

“who really cares … whether any of that stuff survives?”

“I disagree entirely”

“it all goes back to the father, see”

“what survives of that era? I noticed the other day … what’s his name?”

“
Bergsonne
”

“So-so”

If I should awaken
,
I will try to go back to sleep
.

Since the reader will find throughout this effort a lot of unnecessary, perhaps superfluous, punctuation, reflecting the anxiety and indecision of the writer, it wouldn’t be entirely presumptuous to include a preface [note the inconsistency of this regime]. For what it’s worth: I wasn’t trying to write something experimental (much less spontaneous) when I commenced this journal. I was trying to find a structure in the mass of [modest, always modest!] narrative/cyclical intermittencies.

NO

Cryptodermia/deafness

There are none so deaf as those who will not hear

Strum away

Occupation

Auden, poem on Melville

As though his occupation were another island

When he saw them again, on that morning in August after returning from a visit to the city, he found them quite as submissive and conceited as ever; and he, once again trapped in their especial variety of conversational antechamber (in which they oft belabored him with successions of halting effusions), sought escape by firing off—or more properly, stammering—a bêtise on the “perfumed scent” of his butler’s arrhythmic respiration, which was indeed perceptible to him in more than one—and
to
more than one—sense. Not that George Smith’s exhalations were any more perfumed or arrhythmic than usual, but his master, having grown accustomed to the salubrious air of the city, and being somewhat distracted by his servants’ tedious divagations, judged his Butler’s breath to be, on this occasion, especially noisome, which contrasted starkly with that natural air of unbending courtesy that poor old George exuded in his manner, the odor of which, in its many persuasive nuances, would, in fine, have made any other man feel at home in his company.

Interruption: explanation/reasons/stylistic(s)

A story in the style of Henry James—perhaps unnecessary. Telling a genuine anecdote from his life (it’s in Leon Edel)—try to make convincing and meaningful for the ever-vigilant eye of
Agraphia, or
else discard. Don’t just parody
,
like Beerbohm (hopefully
,
I can pull it off). Try anyway
.

Could proceed as follows:

When George had finally left, it was only the two of them at home, and he, nonetheless longed to evade that situation too, and by the same exaggerated dissimulation that proved useful in his escape from their suffocating antechamber. But Lydia Smith wouldn’t leave his side, debriefing him, as was customary, concerning his engagements for the coming hours, one of which, she supposed, would be a luncheon; and accumulating in the course of her routine interrogation, was that mixture of “perfection and sherry” he’d once mentioned in a letter to his brother (a letter in which, with customary—or simply epistolary—reserve, he’d avoided giving too many details), which continued accumulating as they settled his provisional itinerary for the coming days.

Keep the action slow
,
focus on preferences:

He would have preferred—he muttered to himself, before repeating it aloud to Lydia—a simple dish, something
botanical
: vegetables, greens… and so he continued, spouting synonyms in triplicate until he made of simplicity a conundrum. Then, ignoring his interlocutor’s indifference at this attempt to impose on their quotidian yet another one of his literary manias—and resisting the urge to answer the snub with a boast on his palatial refinement—he informed her that he would be dining alone this afternoon. His friends would only arrive the following day, while his gentleman acquaintance might arrive
as soon as
Thursday afternoon; on which day, in the event he should be alone—and safe, after all—(for there was always the possibility his friend might decline the invitation, or else arrive late, or else leave early), he would then
also
prefer a simple botanical collation (greens, vegetables), for he always ingested complicated fare when dining out. And, for him, dining out was not unusual.

He saluted Burgess with an expansive wave through the window, and when Max entered, he also saluted him, although he refrained from leaning over to do so. Nonetheless, after uttering some preliminary endearments that would have been unintelligible to Max even had he been human, his master stooped to pet him—a complicated act, from his altitude, especially given that his characteristically slight but by no means willowy frame had lately expanded to the dimensions of a prosperous entrepreneur—at which point, Lydia, with the finesse of an accomplished supporting actress, seized the opportunity to make a discreet if nonetheless theatrical exit. He straightened back up. Now steady, and with his eyes closed, he recalled again the scent of Lydia’s breath—perfection and sherry—and judged it less offensive and noisome than that of George.

To be continued?

“Dos de Nosotros” gives an account of Nurlihrt’s reflections on adultery:

He doesn’t really care, he insists, but as with any issue where what’s really going on and how it’s reported vary depending on their respective subjects and objects—when we criticize others, it’s called invective; when others criticize us, it’s called abuse [Kingsmill]—adultery is a question best examined, dispassionately, with neither pleasure nor circumspection, as part of a larger phenomenon, in this case called—without bandying words, and
sans musique
—jealousy.

He doesn’t really care, he insists, and insists I pay such close attention that I feel remiss in not taking notes as he tells me about Elena’s imperturbability yesterday after he took her hands in his and remarked, “Cold hands, warm heart! Is there anyone in particular on your mind?”

He doesn’t care. He looks at me, idly curious—putting on a mask of indifference to shield himself from the pain he knows he causes: “And what about Sabatani, Dos,” I asked, “after the storm, when I got back the day before—remember? You know, I couldn’t help but think of the enduring and astonishing validity of what Powell said about women, that their greatest show of fidelity was to start fights with their lovers.”

The nearest some women get to being faithful to their husbands is being disagreeable to their lovers
.

A.P.

Terror that
X-Positions
might end up looking like those hated novels
62: A Model Kit
or Revol’s
Mutaciones bruscas
(Sudden Changes).

Both of which I read so fondly when I was at the cusp of adolescence. But it
does
resemble them, sad to say. We can’t escape our early influences—there’s my attempt at rationalization. And more: there’s no denying the pressure exerted upon us at that most crucial moment—at the threshold between childhood and adolescence—by our reading. Just plain reading. The burden of those early devotions—like stamp collecting. And, even worse, the fact that your writing forever advertises every last baffling and muddy trace left behind by that confessional devotion: a sort of damper placed on your entire life, a humiliating expulsion of those errors you accumulated in the name of experience. To quote Lope de Vega’s fundamental, eternal, infrangible enjambment: “That I have loved at other times / I cannot deny.”

1971. Girri /
El Carapálida: Diary of a Book. In the letter
,
ambiguous forest

We return to James

Lydia—perhaps because she had a genuine faith in his judgment, or because she was being indifferently compliant, or because something had alerted her to the exigencies of the day—had left before the end of his oration. It was startling, a miracle of indecisiveness. Even his questions were somewhat vacuous, empty, so that they sounded like irresolute twangs redoubling in an echo chamber. But it mattered not in those instances how obvious those empty spaces were, how provisional, how inane the suspense they induced in the hearer, for they reflected his own unwholesome diet, his discipline of misgiving, his false modesty.

In the study with Max, his first thought was that he need not wait for George’s traps to fulfill their function, that Max could catch the rat on his own … And he recalled an anecdote of Doctor Johnson’s—or only half-recalled, rather, according to his customary mode of recollecting—: It was strange, uncanny really, especially for it being a piece of prose, and more so because he managed to remember all the subtleties of accent and rhythm, the variable cadences of the piece, and yet none of its sense. No, it wasn’t entirely strange: it was a confirmation of what he had believed his entire life, without realizing it, and certainly without regard for metrics or prosody; something that was difficult to explain without exhaustive preamble, for the belief required much correction and refinement over the years, during which time it grew like the spider’s web that eventually ensnared him, disrupted his life. Life, with its senseless task. To grumble every day and night scratching one’s head in an effort to apprehend what makes as much sense, superficially, as a black dog barking in the street. Because the substance of an event was never fully captured in the considered act of describing or defining as much as by a fleeting grammatical discharge, which reveals as much as can be revealed respecting an event’s fugacity or fixity,
above all
that mobile quality, that acoustic quality, imitated again and again, although the meaning was lost, or was relegated to the limbo of one’s memory.

Miracle of verbal effusiveness and emotive inhibition that so irritated Mailer (and, I suppose, Gorey too), “The Pupil” begins as follows:
“The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated …”

Let’s see if we can finish it today:

In the afternoon he dictated all he could to Miss Weld, everything he only half-recalled, with inadequate words, words like fading echoes and fragments of that immense inexpressible reality—intimations, as the ruffle of a curtain after closing on a scene—and worse even, of the ever diminishing recollection of what was said and of what transpired. Nevertheless, when Miss Weld had finally retired for the day, her hand stiff as usual, the late afternoon etched a sunset so false, so painterly, only a mawkish poet or adolescent (and perhaps the two are kindred) would, in attempting to exalt the scene, succeed in making it the more factitious. Although he was himself infected, he dared to admit to himself that the story he wanted to tell was in fact different to the one he dictated, and that his impulsive nature was an impediment to his telling it, that this was what led him to hide it beneath a bushel of vagueness, of imprecision, and that he searched in his pockets and found, to his dismay, only a dead mouse, a cork, and a fragment of eggshell. Was it his stifled imagination or someone else that told him this?

The story he’d originally wanted to tell was about a single house, and he certainly tried writing it in the past, but his attempts and successes had always been greatly divergent, and this was chiefly on account of that impulsive nature. The story he
now
wanted to tell should have excluded all impulsiveness, or not (it didn’t really matter in the case of dictation, these documents acted only as spurs for his notebooks); he could keep it hidden in the background, in that empty mansion where spontaneous feeling takes refuge, and vapid, passionless words take their place on the page, battling it out like specters of slain soldiers. In this sense, the narrative mansion should be the opposite: there, the real forces would be
acting
, while successive proprietors and tenants, being subject to the passivity of the age—of any age, in fine—and poised on the threshold of an event, would have that freedom, that readiness that is so easily confused with aplomb, to respond to each daily challenge, each setback, in its proper manner, and with galling perfection. Critics and friends had already rebuked him for his honeyed volubility, and also that “nothing to say” which the terricolous Hardy suspected lay behind his ponderous, Tyrian diction. Critics and friends …, including one close friend, and one very distant critic, whose irreverence towards him snuffed out any possibility of friendship, for he accused him of the Pelagian heresy, after observing how little inclined he was to revision, lambasting his works for their serpentine, argentine oracy, and the author for his belief that they were “conceived without original sin.” Another deviant tendency to be discouraged, he tells himself while inspecting, beneath the ponderous drapes, the motes of dust Lydia herself had so stridently taken exception to, but whose presence he takes as evidence of her distracted state of mind that afternoon.