Fait Accompli

I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) ‘a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking’. I, too, like novels that don’t look like novels.

<<To know an author, personally, is too often to destroy the illusion created by his works; if you withdraw the veil of your idol’s sanctuary, and see him in his night-cap, you discover a querulous old crone, a sour pedant, a supercilious coxcomb, a servile tuft-hunter, a saucy snob, or at best, an ordinary mortal. Instead of the high-minded seeker after truth and abstract knowledge, with a nature too refined to bear the vulgarities of life, as we had imagined, we find him full of egotism and vanity, and eternally fretting and fuming about trifles.>>
                                                                                                                                                                    — Edward Trelawny

<<He knew from the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of Prometheus the many horrors that can ensue when the highest degree of indignation is achieved and, in the name of justice, retribution is exacted and a cycle of retaliation begins.>>
                                                                                                                                                                             — Philip Roth

‘I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg. The weather was magnificent. I found that I could not think. No idea presented itself to my imagination, which had been so lively a moment before. A melancholy, which was not without charm, captivated me entirely… Tears ran down my cheeks, which had no cause in my thoughts and which no amount of reasoning could halt. Finally, seven o’ clock came and the drum woke me from this strange ecstasy. I walked home.’

I don’t know what the novel is about, though.

Once a month I run a hot bath, rise out of it a pink, pectoral-fin-flailing seahorse, towel myself speedily, and finger my balls in search of incipient tumours.

Maysie sent me a link about the London Word Festival’s ‘fib’ competition (a fib is a poem based on the Fibonacci Sequence), suggesting I enter. So I wrote this:

‘Entente Cordiale’

I
hide
behind
platitudes,
safe in the knowledge
that we’re speaking the same language.

‘No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.’

— And if you say a turtle stalks
This stream, debating as he walks
Where best to burrow in the slime,
To wait the proper snapping time;
Remember that I say the snails
That leave their little hollow trails
Along the bottom that stays white
Are tiny beasts that do not bite.

I’m reading Like A Fiery Elephant, and it is every bit as brilliant as the critics said. Quoted from Albert Angelo:

I hate these women who only want bits of me. I offer her the enormous totality of me, and she says, yes, I’ll have the conversation bit, and the company bit, but not the bed bit, nor even the handsonmybigtits bit. I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger.

‘In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London’s Bohemia. His literary magazine The New Reviewwas published from a barstool in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules, and editorial meetings would commence promptly at opening time. One day, there came through the door a failed poet with an equally heroic reputation for dissipation. To Ian’s undisguised surprise, he declined the offer of a hand-steadying cocktail. “No,” he announced dramatically. “I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like having blackouts and waking up on rubbish dumps. I don’t like having no money and no friends, smelling bad and throwing up randomly. I don’t like wetting myself and getting impotent.” His voice rising and cracking slightly, he concluded by avowing that he also didn’t like being repellently fat, getting the shakes and amnesia, losing his teeth and gums, and suffering from premature baldness. A brief and significant silence followed this display of unmanly emotion. Then Ian, fixing him with a stern look, responded evenly by saying, “Well, none of us likes it.”’