Note to myself

Nicholas Spice on Peter Carey's ventriloquism in Parrot and Olivier in America: "But the laws of fiction are harsh and you can’t sacrifice interest to characterisation."

It says a lot about the central voice in my novel that I have to keep reminding myself of this.

Michael Wood on Christopher Isherwood

"‘I am a camera.’ This statement is often taken as a simple assertion of a documentary impulse or desire. ‘I am a camera with its shutter open,’ the full sentence goes, ‘quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ But of course cameras don’t say ‘I’, and don’t tell us they are not thinking. Isherwood likes the complication lurking in such simple figures. The hero of his later novel, A Single Man (1964), says he is ‘like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about’. Just before the statement about the camera and its passivity Isherwood had written this amazing paragraph (the opening of Goodbye to Berlin), where the unthinking apparatus takes interesting omissions of verbs, launches a generalisation and manages to turn a simile into a historical judgment:

'From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.'

Some camera. And yet of course the metaphor is not meaningless, or damaged by all this mental activity. It is an introduction to the Isherwood of the stories, a person whose self is in his observations, not his (fortunately rare) dips into introspection. The person who is a camera at the start of this book becomes a city at the end:

'Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.'"

Foreign countries

From page 257 of The Line of Beauty:

"[...] but it was only play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language."

Replace "language" with "accent", and you have the subject of my novel. I don't know whether to be disheartened; is it bad that the best novelist in the world can summarize my novel-in-progress in a single sentence? Does it mean that he has already explored the subject in countless unpublished novels, and found it an unrewarding one, about which nothing worthwhile can be said?

But surely this is too pessimistic. Maybe I can take it to mean, instead, that I am on the "right" track. It's almost as if Hollinghurst were my research advisor, and can only suggest research topics, i.e., subjects for my novel, by alluding obliquely to them in his own novels. I imagine us in an office together, sitting across the table from each other, he with his beard and the suggestive smile he wears on the dust flap of The Line of Beauty, me with a backpack, not bothering to conceal my lack of sleep. "Don't you think Wani 's saying 'Now there's a line of beauty for you!" is a little too legible? " I'll say. And he'll say "Don't quote bloody James Wood at me. "Legible"! Now don't let me see you until you've read my Bajazet translation."

Chopin's Ballade No. 1

Explained devastatingly by Rubinstein.

A note

From a novel I'm currently reading: "Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.'' These lines were written in the eighties, but could have been written at any time in the past fifty years. They are the kind that make you want to say: what, you don't think that death can be the sole subject of a sentence? That the only way you can work in a (major) character's death is by referring to it in a sub-clause? The goal of such sentences is to avoid a certain sentimentality; but in doing so they lapse unavoidably into mannerism. Death is sentimental, and to pretend otherwise is to be a sophist, and a self-consciously literary one at that. Hollinghurst, as usual, is instructive when it comes to dealing with death:

It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road; it was the six liter Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tires of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.

[Later, at the funeral:]

I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again.