It is with their own flesh that they feed their books

In her essay 'How Do Salamanders Die?' in HEAT 9, New Series, the French-Australian writer Catherine Rey contends that 'writers work on themselves, on their own souls, it is with their own flesh that they feed their books.' And, a little later: 'all novels are autobiographies and all autobiographies are novels.'

But we must 'never forget that something dangerous lurks behind the finest texts'; Michel Leiris's preface to L'Age d'homme, she writes, has helped her to 'live and write'. She quotes:

What goes on in the field of literature...is it not bereft of value if it remains 'aesthetic', anodyne, free of sanctions, if there is nothing in the act of writing a work which would be the equivalent... of what is for the torero the bull's steely horn, which alone -- by virtue of the physical menace it harbours -- confers a human reality on his art and prevents it from becoming something other than the futile grace of a ballerina?

In the only two books that have been translated into English so far -- The Spruiker's Tale and Stepping Out -- there is cruelty, anger, rebellion. Catherine Rey's writing is energised by a voice so continuous, so charged, it is almost without breath:

Plenty of artists will palm off adulterated goods on you wrapped up in pretty packaging -- art is a means of buying yourself a conscience on the cheap, the charlatans who get rich on the world's misery know this. But writing doesn't deliver you from anything, writing is not a form of salvation, writing doesn't wash away your filth. What you write is you, so much so that the older you get, the less you hide. The more you have a duty to refuse to divert, in Pascal's sense of the term, for diversion creates distance whereas what's required is precisely the opposite: what you need to do is to get nearer to yourself. And not to be afraid of giving yourself to be read, for you have to know how to give. To reject clichés and to lay your cards on the table by revealing the inner things, indiscreet, shameless things, that we normally conceal. Otherwise literature's a dead loss. (Stepping Out, p. 179)

'I write because they haven't yet cut out my tongue,' concludes the narrator of Stepping Out. 'I write because I'm still not frightened.'

It is really no more than a gesture sketched to banish memory

In W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, he comments on the 'rather unreal effect' of the eyewitness reports of the fire-bombing of German cities towards the end of the Second World War -- an unreal effect that suggests to him the workings of 'rumour-mongering and invention'. He analyses the clichés:

The reality of total destruction, incomprehensible in its extremity, pales when described in such stereotypical phrases as 'a prey to the flames', 'that fateful night', 'all hell was let loose', 'we were staring into the inferno', 'the dreadful fate of the cities of Germany', and so on and so forth. Their function is to cover up and neutralize experiences beyond our ability to comprehend. The phrase 'On that dreadful day when our beautiful city was razed to the ground', which Kluge's American investigator encountered in Frankfurt, Fürth, Wuppertal, Würzburg and Halberstadt alike, is really no more than a gesture sketched to banish memory. (p. 25)

It is as if the over-use of this second-hand language is the one thing that assures the speaker or writer that they have at last found an approved expression against which the inexplicable peculiarities of their own experiences might be elided.

Far be it from me to doubt that witnesses of the time remember a great deal, and that it can be brought to light in interviews. On the other hand, the records of such interviews run along surprisingly stereotyped lines. Among the central problem of 'eyewitness reports' are their inherent inadequacy, notorious unreliability and curious vacuity; their tendency to follow a set routine and go over and over the same material. (p. 80)

Via Steve at The Cosmos Zoo, I came across Daniel Mendelsohn citing the instance of a bereaved mother who declares on the local news network her almost meaningless but presumably heartfelt desire for 'closure' after her child was shot accidentally during a drive-by shooting.

It could only be that the cliché is the first thing to hand -- the one that you can cover yourself with quickly -- but one with the additional benefit that it still connects to ideas so seemingly grand that your job in finding words to match the immensity of an occasion can be seen to have been done thoroughly and well.

How he was adapting the Gothic novel to local conditions

It was more than half my life ago that I first read Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm. White was still, then, living at 20 Martin Road opposite Centennial Park. One of my university lecturers claimed to live just a few doors away from him and had once brought him one of her supposedly legendary and very Canadian lemon meringue pies. I can imagine that White, whose books testify to his fascination with the humblest of culinary products -- baked custard, chops, mutton fat and cabbage -- might have scraped off the fluff and given it to his dogs (Manoly probably wouldn't have liked it), just to see if the lemon part underneath wobbled.

I have reread White since then. Perhaps two years ago I reread what I liked to think of as my favourite White, The Solid Mandala, but having discovered, after seeing Judy Davis in Benedict Andrews's version of Chekhov's The Seagull at the Belvoir, that she was soon to appear alongside Geoffrey Rush and Charlotte Rampling in a screen adaptation of The Eye of the Storm that was already in post-production -- I realised it was imperative to reread the book before the film filled over the detail, and now, like my father who will always say the concert he has just heard is the best concert he has ever been to, I'm in danger of revising my favourite White.

The texture of White's writing is unmistakable. Among hedgings of modals, transitive verbs without objects, third conditionals and lopped off clauses -- 'She should have disliked; instead he had not shed his admiration, first for his client's wife, then for the widow' --'if his head was still his to use, it wouldn't be for long' --'There on the staircase everyone was stuck as usual the night that Athol Shreve.'  (p. 26, 294, 90) -- the vivid plasticity of his images is often startling:

Before returning home, she had taken a brief holiday in Suffolk: the frosted roads, the hedgerows with their beads of scarlet bryony on withered umbilical cords, her own solitariness (when hadn't it been? though never a colder, harder one) shocked any smugness out of her. (p. 167; all quotations are from my 1982 reprint of the 1973 Penguin edition)

This last sentence is actually from the very chapter of this book, chapter 3, which was sent by the Australian newspaper in 2006 as a supposed first chapter to twelve publishers and three literary agents as a hoax. Not only, as the Australian probably predicted, was the material rejected by all who bothered to reply, none of the editors or agents recognised White's characteristic writing style notwithstanding the obvious anagram of his name (Wraith Picket) and the near identical title (The Eye of the Cyclone). Since The Eye of the Storm was published in 1973, the same year that White became the first (and still only) Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fact that they failed to recognise the work that is emblematic of this achievement, let alone acknowledge its worth, is sobering indeed.

Despite his seeming irrelevance to the contemporary literary publishing scene in Australia, a simplified version of one aspect of White's writing has lived on in Australian popular films and television shows of the last twenty years. When White writes about seemingly ordinary, uneducated Australian characters, he uses dialogue and free indirect discourse to present easily hurt, self-absorbed, naive men and women whose compulsion to make awkward, heart-felt declarations is only partially realised in their acts or their speech. These characters pick their way through unheroic, even thoroughly disappointing settings, which are nonetheless animated by a curious will of their own: 

Outside 'Miami Flats' the street was looking extra livid: the fluorescence had not yet been switched off to accommodate the light of morning. She walked briskly, but suspicious, as though expecting to skid on something: one of the empty milk bottles left to roll in the gritty shallows. Crossing the Parade she avoided glancing to the right because of the PHARMACY sign, and soon afterwards arrived at 26 Gladys Street, where Mrs Vidler was scrubbing the step.

She looked up: a large brown-skinned woman with suds to halfway up her arms. 'Vid and I might worry about you, love, if we thought there was any cause for it.'

'For all you know, I could have been prostituting myself at the Cross.' Flora Manhood was that exasperated she added for good measure, 'A Negro.'

Viddie laughed for the joke. 'Mr Pardoe called and left a message.'

'What message?' She could hardly bear it.

'Vid put it in yer room.'

Flora went in, and there was the envelope, exactly in the centre of the Vidlers' cleanly table.

She wouldn't open it at once, but did sooner than she intended because what was the use?

Dear Flo,
You can only misunderstand me. I honestly love you. COL ( p. 182 - 183)

Here, and in other scenes such as the Warrawee dinner, the Watson's Bay lunch and the evening at Snow's in 'Miami Flats', it is not difficult to recognise the origins of the so-called 'quirky' or 'off-beat' Australian comic films of the 'nineties, such as Muriel's Wedding and Strictly Ballroom, as well as the eponymous Kath and Kim duo of the long-running television series -- whose names, I am yet to be convinced otherwise, could only be a direct reference to the photographic images of Prowse's estranged wife and daughter -- 'These 'ull make yer laugh!' -- in White's much later novel, The Twyborn Affair. The Eye of the Storm abounds in characters with exaggerated features and accents, such as Athol Shreve 'the turncoat politician and tame social bull' (p. 92) and the afternoon nurse Flora's overweight, albino cousin Snow with her unzipped trousers and her girlfriend Alix, 'a clotted-creamy woman, with the necklaces of Venus, and black hair built up high' (p. 176):

'And now there's my friend Alix. Alix was sold on the idea from the start. She'll be home any moment.' Snow looked at her wrist. 'She's a sales-lady -- at Parker's in the lonjeray.' (p. 175)

Empurpled, obese, drunken characters collapse in gutters, flail through broken rickety chairs and shake the plaster from the ceilings of their own bathrooms. I lost count of the farts. White must have been describing his own literary approach when Dorothy, the daughter of the dying, matriarch Elizabeth Hunter -- mother, mummy, with all its suggestive opulence and dessication -- overhears at a North Shore dinner party an 'Australian Writer' describe to his neighbour 'how he was adapting the Gothic novel to local conditions.' (p. 282)

What is different or extra to the Kath and Kim take on this 'Gothic' approach is the clarity of White's observations, the dark to very dark tones of his irony, the almost Proustian analysis of motives and associations, and the subtlety of his literary resonances and references, which include Shakespeare, Joyce and even Winnie the Pooh -- '"We shall be late if we don't make a move." Late for what, she could not have told...' (p. 418) -- as well as Stendhal, whose impossibly admirable, incestuously driven heroine, 'the Sanseverina' in The Charterhouse of Parma, haunts 'Bill' Hunter and, later, his daughter Dorothy.

And in addition to all this, there is an extraordinary feel for Sydney as a place: for the still palpable sleaze of the red brick flats behind Anzac Parade, the industrial grey of Botany, the scruffy edges of Centennial Park, the heavy azalea-fringed mansions of Warrawee; this achievement reminding me of the evocations of the city in Christina Stead's For Love Alone and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, a writer whose significance White celebrated when she became the first recipient of the Patrick White Award, which he set up with his Nobel prize winnings for those Australian writers who have received inadequate recognition for their contribution to Australian literature.

It says: a whole form of literary pretence is over

In his interview by Bibliokept, Lars Iyer describes what it means to be 'posthumous' as a reader and a writer, referring to the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig's use of the term and then, resisting Rosenzweig's presumption of an enduring culture of literary master-works, locating us all as posthumous to it:

Reviewing Jean-Luc Godard’s film Every Man For Himself, Pauline Kael writes, ‘I got the feeling that Godard doesn’t believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn’t really believe in movies anymore, either’. Without agreeing with Kael’s assessment of Godard, I’d like to paraphrase her formulation: I think literary writers want to write literary fiction without believing in literature – without, indeed, believing in anything at all.

It seems to me that the literary gestures are worn out – the creation of character, plot, the contrivance of high-literary language and style as much as the avoidance of high-literary language and style, and the abandonment of most elements of the creation of character and plot. The ‘short, elliptical sentences’ of which the blogger of Life Unfurnished writes, the ‘absence of fulsome description’, the ‘signs of iconoclastic casualness’, the ‘colloquialisms’, the ‘lack of trajectory’, the ‘air of the incidental’: all are likewise exhausted.

What, then, is to be done? As writers, as readers, we are posthumous. We’ve come too late. We no longer believe in literature. Once you accept this non-belief, once you affirm it in a particular way, then something may be possible.

And yet despite or even because of this resistance -- the affirmation of his non-belief and its ability to flower into what he calls a 'legitimate strangeness', particularly through the work of blogging -- Iyer retains what many might see as an unexpected faith in the century old possibilities of the avant-garde:

Spurious is a book on its hands and knees. For me, it feels like the last book, the last burst of laughter before the world ends. But it also feels like the first one, because it has loosened the hold of the past. It says: a whole form of literary pretence is over.

An enviable energy -- perhaps the only way to blog, to write.

I was only cured of this mania much later

Since The Life of Henry Brulard is still lying next to this computer, I thought I should add to to Scott Esposito's thoughts 'On How Writers Write' the following observations by Stendhal/ Beyle. On the one hand he laments:

I always waited for the moment of inspiration to write.

I was only cured of this mania much later. [...] This folly seriously affected my productivity; even in 1806 I waited for the moment of genius to write.

[...] If, around 1795, I had spoken of my intention of writing, some sensible man would have told me: "Write something every day for a couple of hours, genius or no genius." Such a remark would have induced me to make good use of ten years of my life which I have idiotically spent in waiting for genius. (p. 144-5)

And yet later:

About 1794, I was foolishly awaiting the moment of genius. Something like the voice of God speaking from the burning bush to Moses. This silliness made me waste a lot of time, but may perhaps have prevented me from being satisfied with the semi-commonplace as are so many writers of talent (for instance M. Loeve-Veimars). (p.229 - all italics are Stendhal's)

And of course a book exists only as a consequence of antitheses

This is what happens when you move from the page onto your own staked paths through the embedded white screens of the internet: an inevitable resonance. Here Stendhal (Beyle), fuelled by contempt, intent on his focus on what 'appears' to him 'at certain moments':

I declare once again, and once for all, that I supremely and sincerely despise M. Pariset, M. de Salvandy, M. Saint-Marc Girardin and the other braggarts, the mercenary and Jesuitical pedants of the Journal de Débats; but that doesn't make me think myself any closer to the great writers. I don't consider myself to have any genius, which would guarantee my worth, other than that of painting a faithful likeness of Nature, which appears to me so clearly at certain moments; in the second place, I am sure of my perfect honesty, of my adoration for the truth; and in the third place I am sure of the pleasure I take in writing, a pleasure which reached frenzy in 1817, at Milan, at M. Peronti's, Corsia del Giardino. (p.188)

And Douglas Robertson's translation of Krista Fleischman's interview with Thomas Bernhard just after the release of Woodcutters in 1984:

FLEISCHMANN:  Woodcutters—the book is subtitled “An Excitation.”

BERNHARD: Yes, because the style of the book is somewhat excited; its very subject, musically speaking, can’t be written about in a peaceful key, and has to be written about in an excited key.  You can’t write about this stuff in complete calm, as you do in conventional prose; instead, you sit down and straightway you’re excited by the very idea itself, and when you actually start writing, you’re still excited by the style.  The book is written in an excited style.

FLEISCHMANN:  And would you say the excitement increases the closer one gets to the conclusion? 

BERNHARD: An excitation is something that keeps increasing until the very end.  And so the book naturally ends in a state of total excitation by the city of Vienna, in embraces and annihilation all at one go, in a hug-like chokehold on Vienna, and [in my saying] Vienna, you are the best and at the same time the most horrible of all cities, as I daresay anybody else would about his home town.

FLEISCHMANN: So [the excitation emerges] out of [these] antitheses?

BERNHARD: Well, yes; those are the basis of a person’s existence; and of course a book exists only as a consequence of antitheses.  If a book, even a book that’s not an excitation, is one-sided, then it’s simply worthless.

FLEISCHMAN: Was it the period you [were writing] about that excited you so much?  Or was it something else that got you so riled up?

BERNHARD: [It was] my memory [of it].  Thirty years after the fact it’s certainly not the period [itself] that excites you, but the memory [of it], which you make present to yourself, and then you notice that it’s all basically [composed of a bunch of] more or less open wounds; you squirt a bit of poison into them, and the whole thing catches fire, and then an excited style materializes.  And then, you know, certain people cross your path and when you see them, they, you know, drive you crazy, and then you introduce them into just this genre of book, namely an excitation.

FLEISCHMANN: But surely with distance one ought to be able to write about the past more composedly.

BERNHARD: That’s the big cliché about contemplating the past, and it’s obviously totally false.  Old people can write books like that when they’re sitting paralyzed in their armchairs, but it’s not my mode, not yet; maybe the day after tomorrow I’ll still be excited; whenever I write anything, even something peaceful, I’m still basically excited.  In any case, excitation is a pleasant condition; when your blood is sluggish, excitation gets it moving, pulsing; it keeps you alive, and consequently keeps the stream of books flowing.  Without excitation there’s absolutely nothing; you might as well stay in bed.

Only in opera buffa can I be moved to tears

Although Stendhal's autobiographical fragment, The Life of Henry Brulard, was eventually published in 1890, I haven't yet been able to ascertain whether Proust ever read it. Had he been aware, for instance, that Stendhal compares a novel to 'a fiddle-bow, the reader's soul is like the violin which yields the sound' -- and this in a context where he writes about the extraordinary effect on his 'crazy' soul of 'Séthos (a dull novel by the Abbé Terrasson)'? In these memoirs, the effect is everything:

I cannot see things as they really were, I only have my childish memories. I see pictures, I remember their effects on my heart, but the causes and the shape of these things are a blank. It's still just like the frescoes of the [Campo Santo] at Pisa, where you can clearly make out an arm, but the piece of fresco beside it, which showed the head, has fallen off. I see a sequence of very clear pictures, but I only know what things were like in so far as they affected myself. And even this aspect of things I remember only through the recollection of the effect it produced on me. (p. 138)

We have a sense that Stendhal as a man was often overwhelmed by his reactions to things and people. For many years he considered himself as someone who hated 'Nature' for no other reason than the disingenuous praise heaped on it by his father and his hated aunt, Séraphie. Grenoble, where he grew up, provokes an almost physical disgust:

Everything that is mean in vulgar in the bourgeois way reminds me of Grenoble, everything that reminds me of Gr[enoble] fills me with horror, no, horror is too noble a word, with nausea. (p. 70)

He has strong reactions to certain writers: 'I loathe almost equally descriptions in the manner of Walter Scott and the bombast of Rousseau' -- reactions he might even, later, come to regret, as when he writes that 'the rhythmic and pretentious phrases of MM. Chateaubriand and Salvandy made me write Le Rouge et le Noir in too clipped a style.' And yet this very antipathy also enlivens him:

I am neither timid nor melancholy when I write, and run the risk of being hissed; I feel full of courage and pride when I am writing a phrase which will be spurned by one of those two giants of 1835, MM. Chateaubriand or Villemain. (p. 187)

He was writing these memoirs, it must be remembered, at the end of 1835 and into the early months of 1836.

And yet for someone so seemingly led by his passions -- or perhaps because of it -- he intensely dislikes the emotional manipulation of certain kinds of writing or even 'real life' experience:

Only in opera buffa can I be moved to tears. Opera seria, by deliberately setting out to arouse emotion, promptly prevents me from feeling any. Even in real life a beggar who asks for alms with piteous cries, far from arousing my compassion, makes me consider, with the utmost philosophical severity, the advantages of a penitentiary.

A poor man who does not say a word to me, who does not utter lamentable and tragic cries as they do in Rome, and who crawls along the ground eating an apple, like the cripple I saw a week ago, touches me immediately, almost to the point of tears. (p. 307)

Perhaps the moment that, for me, most anticipates Proust in la Recherche is where he writes about his obsession with the actress Mlle Kubly and the poor quality posted bills that advertise her appearances:

What transports of pure, tender and triumphant joy when I read her name on the bill! I can still see that bill, the shape of it, the paper, the printed letters.

I went to read that beloved name in three or four of the places where it was billed, one after the other: at the Jacobins' Gate, under the vault of the Garden, at the corner of my grandfather's house. I did not merely read her name, I gave myself the pleasure of re-reading the whole bill. The somewhat battered type used by the bad printer who produced this bill became precious and holy to me, and for many long years I loved it more than finer lettering. (p. 188 - 189)