David Hackbridge Johnson

THE BOOKS THAT BREATHE ON THE SHELVES:

Thoughts on Marías and Gawsworth

By David Hackbridge Johnson

(see below for older posts including essays on Frances Cornford, Iain Sinclair, Apocalypse poetry, and others)

With magpie plumage, albeit frayed at the edges and missing a few vital feathers, the seeker of shiny objects can still spot a five pence piece from the lofty branch. The downward swoop is less elegant than of old but the beak is sure and nabs the silver. This scenario holds for a certain type of book lover, one happy enough to go along with the author’s plot devices, scenarios, gambits, epiphanies, as the jargon goes, yet one sufficiently distractible by light-shafts of what lies beyond the confines of the page – fragments of connective tissue so to speak which adhere to certain shiny words, resonant phrases, and that by doing so set off wild and sometimes personal digressions – the book at this point being set down as the beak nips and nudges at the coinage to the ignoring of the overall landscape.

These silvery attractions that stop the actual reading of a book have to be scrawled in a margin or on the frontispiece. Each might be enclosed by a poorly executed bubble, or emphasised by a star – or, in very special circumstances only, marked ‘V. Important’ in heavy pencilling with a squiggly arrow leading to a further, perhaps illegible, aperçu. Books riddled with such glitter find themselves growing an additional text, a booklet of increasingly disassociated utterance, oddly Talmudic, divorced from the structure of the book’s entirety. Certain books become so festooned with arrows, rings and stars (or even space stations) that they might find themselves in that pile of literary works that never leaves the bedside shelf. They must accompany sleep – must by osmosis penetrate the skin of the sleeper. Must breathe in harmony. Books may pass in and out of the shelf – more due to cramping or toppling than any sense that an item is rejected – they may merely pass from the shelf to the stacks that surround the bed like the skirt of an hovercraft. A current sweep of spines reveals: Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems, Illeasa Sequin’s Complete Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats’ Vision, Ruthven Todd’s Tracks in the Snow, Charlotte Mew’s The Farmer’s Bride. Some books are available at all times: Llewelyn Powys’ Earth Memories, John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, a selection of William Blake, Ezra Pound’s Translations, Edward Thomas’ Collected Poems A modest little volume joins them in recent weeks – John Gawsworth’s Lyrics to Kingcup. The name Gawsworth can always be borne in the minds of the curious.

Javier Marías is a writer whose books are accruing such marginalia – several stars, doubly-underlined passages and the odd ‘V. Important’ – so that he is liable to find himself among the bedside chosen. Copious pencillations abound – indicating those scintillating fragments that stand out on the ground, even from the highest branches. Returning to these thin extractions one finds a disjointed poem-of-sorts:

‘you can still say not yet, not yet’,

‘haunt….thread’,

‘banknote makers’,

‘a ridiculous death’ (c.f. Heinrich Böll),

‘bottomless well of detail’,

‘nexus’,

‘less hypothetical years’,

‘in usufruct’,

‘Toby Ryland’s laugh’.

And culled from Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me: ‘books….breathe….shelves’. All these annotations meant a pause in reading; ‘nexus’ stirred many diversions into strange areas of thought not now recalled, the banknote makers (Bradbury and Wilkinson) were thoroughly researched, with a lengthy sojourn spent with those notable printers’ ‘Dummy Lady’ stamps; but the reference to Heinrich Böll has now slipped the mind; there are so many appallingly ridiculous deaths in Böll that perhaps a general point was being made. Eventually the book may be picked up again; perhaps Marías sympathises with the reader thrown off the scent in this way, since as a novelist he is much prone to diversions. He encourages a reading habit that mimics his fiction.

Marías’ 1989 novel All Souls progresses, or rather doesn’t, via digressions of one sort or another. The first tableaux set the reader up for an institutional novel (it is set among the dreamy spires of Oxford) with many of the usual tropes: professorial boors, power-hungry lecturers, footsy under the table at restaurant dinners, a sexually incontinent Warden, adultery on the cusp of discovery – all very Kingsley Amis or David Lodge – the august portals of Academe witness to an extensive footprint of the dull, the lusty, and the damned – all frothing in billowing gowns and soiled shirt-fronts. If the novel was set on this course and this course only, it would have missed the point of its very opening – we learn that some characters that we have yet to meet are, by the time of writing, already dead. Death comes to the novel in many ways in its later pages – by which time we reframe the academic slap-stick as itself an elaborate diversion.

Death as a principle character – invisibly seated at High Table so to speak – is not confined to All Souls; Marías’ novel from 1994, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, starts very shockingly with the death of a married woman, Marta, as she and her lover Victor undress to make love. They are lovers that hardly know each other and she dies ‘inopportunely – undeservedly so’ with Victor, not her husband by her side. Victor’s confused thoughts about what to do – should he flee as if he were a murderer?, should he phone someone? – are combined with a kind of stock taking of Marta’s belongings and her interaction with them, like an obsessively detailed description of a still life – a nature morte as the French say. Victor’s subsequent staging of the flat, his laying out of Marta’s body, his decision to go to the funeral, to know the dead women through that part of her life that was forbidden to him by the nature of their illicit affair, form the strange substance of the novel; as if Victor feels compelled to remain attached to the woman by means of threads that connects them beyond her death – the ‘haunt….thread’ passage now marked in the frontispiece of the magpie’s copy.[1] This inability to let go becomes a meditation on the dead lover, her actions, her thoughts, her belongings – the very clothes she hung over a chair prior to making love. This stock-taking or inventory of property left behind after the vacation of a body – these passages near the start of the novel are unbearable for the bereaved reader, for anyone who in the aftermath of a death has taken those same inventories; each item telling a story of its interaction with a living, breathing form. Objects are haunted by the one who touched them. Touch them again and shafts of light illuminate the dead.

So a theme of death can be said to inhabit both Tomorrow in the Battle and All Souls, and the digressions, lists of objects, mind-rambles are distraction tactics from the enclosing dark. There is a haunting in All Souls. Innocently enough, the unnamed Narrator of this novel, who is on a two year contract at Oxford University and has plenty of time on his hands due to his light workload, spends his free time trawling through second-hand bookshops. He develops a list of neglected authors he wishes to hunt down, the most familiar being the writer of supernatural fiction, Arthur Machen. Including Machen on his list leads to a conjuration, for it is not long before the Narrator finds himself being followed around all the bookshops by a man and a dog – the dog with an amputated foot and its owner seeming to limp as if in sympathy. A bibliomaniac and his familiar. Eventually this strange duo, the man introducing himself as Alan Marriott, arrive at the Narrator’s home in order to tempt him into Machenalia. One notes at this point that ‘Alan Marriott’ was one of the many pseudonyms used by real-life collector and writer on strange fiction, Roger Dobson.[2] Marriott manages to extract from the Narrator the small sum required to become a member of the Machen Company; he also asks that the Narrator look out for two vanishingly rare books: Machen’s Bridle and Spurs, and John Gawsworth’s Above the River (with an introduction by Machen). The curious appearance of Alan Marriott (he never appears as a speaking character in the novel again) triggers a haunting in Marías’ Narrator; he is not only drawn into the Machen Company and the quest for rare books but also hooked by the name Gawsworth, born, Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong in 1912. Nothing that he learns of Gawsworth leads him to a conclusion that a great writer has been unaccountably neglected – on the contrary, he finds the poetry rather minor – he even eschews most of the available second-hand Gawsworth volumes on grounds of their exorbitant price (although he does buy the slim volume Backwaters) – but somehow the writer’s life and the myths surrounding it initiate an enchantment. The Narrator culls information from divers sources and builds up what amounts to a brief ‘Life of Gawsworth’, consisting of his fugitive appearances in bodily form and in print.[3] We learn of Gawsworth’s precocious early volumes, both as poet and editor; most notable is his rediscovery of forgotten writers of the ’Nineties who are persuaded out of their dim abodes and back into print. And all this when Gawsworth was still a teenager. After the Second World War, which Gawsworth spends in Africa and India, his literary world gradually dissipates and alcohol takes control. Lawrence Durrell spies him taking a shopping trolley of empties back to the off licence to claim the refund needed to buy more drink. Then end comes in 1970, Gawsworth’s star long since having gone out. The Narrator’s equating himself with Gawsworth – does he really think he is doomed to such a failure? – seems weak as a reason for introducing all this factual information, yet Marías’ purpose becomes clear and stands as a vindication of Gawsworth’s inclusion.

Towards the end of All Souls, Gawsworth becomes fictional; Marías weaves him into the tragic tale told by Clare Bayes (the married woman the Narrator has taken as a lover) as she recounts the suicide of her mother as a consequence of a discovered affair. It is a tale set in India during the war. As a three-year-old, Clare has dim memories (they are fleshed out by her nanny) of her mother meeting her lover Terry Armstrong (Gawsworth perhaps?) after the break-up of her parents’ marriage. They are on the iron bridge that spans the River Yamuna (or the River Jumna; Clare is not sure which); they can be seen from the bottom of the family garden; Clare’s mother is noticeably pregnant even from a distance, and Armstrong is seemingly drunk. Clare’s mother falls between the iron girders into the river and drowns, while Armstrong crushes himself into those same girders as an act of clinging on. Put like this we might be in a pulp melodrama – the marvel of the writing is the way Marías is able to spool out the tale as a recollection of a child’s recollection – the older Clare seeing her younger self and recounting to her lover the threads of memory that have survived and become embedded, woven into the emotional postures she must now take to avoid a repetition of that tragedy that she beheld with her uncomprehending child’s eyes. The adult Clare must avoid the desperate passion that leads to a leap into the void. The child Clare waiting at the bottom of the garden for the late-night mail train, the distressed lovers on the ironwork bridge, her mother jumping, the lover not, he, Gawsworth, exiting fiction and slipping into his tenuous reality, one made of fragments and myths: a cart full of beer bottles, the Fitzrovian debauch, the lost volumes of poems, the decades of uncertain abode – friends’ floors and park benches – all these resonate as so many overtones, bell-ripples, baring suffering across the years in sad concentric rings. With the telling of this tragedy which we read as one that lassoes many characters, Marías moves beyond mere virtuosity into a realm of trance – the tragedy evolves in relived memory like a slow-motion film that cannot be switched off. The mother sinking and not rising, again sinking and not rising, again – not rising, even though we ‘see’ her death only once in recalled time, we cannot but re-run the film, as Clare has spent her life doing. We wonder at the staggering Gawsworth (is it him?) with his hip flask of booze, about to exit from the appalling crisis into a featureless future, one that limping Alan Marriott and his crippled dog will one day seek to retrieve as a crumpled past. All of the above is supposition of course, since, as the Narrator conjectures, there might have been hundreds of Terry Armstrongs suitable for the roll of war-time lover. But deep down he and reader want him to be Gawsworth – his existence gains another layer of myth thereby. These pages that recount Clare’s story are the most powerful in the novel. The doomed love of Clare’s mother and Terry Armstrong seems to overshadow the rest of the book.

If I might be allowed, there is a Chain of Yearning whose links consist of certain books, pieces of music, poems, paintings, that set the heart in a certain mode of exquisite pain and longing. Marías’ books are some of those links, not just because of the actual longings and even deaths that occur in his books but because it might be said that characters are yearning for life in the midst of it – as the haiku of Basho has it: ‘Even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I yearn for Kyoto’. There is a yearning for life in the face of a death that cannot surely be tolerated. Even Marías’ finicky itemisations can be infused with longing – Marta’s belongings in Tomorrow in the Battle, the Narrator’s rubbish-bin contents in All Souls – they speak of bodies that have interacted with objects, leaving a trace on each one; a touch, a kiss, a body inside a dress, the angle of a wrist when depositing a bottle top in the bin. Marías uses time, both past and present, to project these effects of the immanence of death, its occurrence and the remains it leaves in the form of interrupted or abandoned content.

We find that time (‘Time’ as it used to be intoned by the poets) as an instrument of yearning, is acutely employed in those works of science-fiction that can invent means by which time-travel is possible; Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip is a moving example, with its notion of fractured time and mental disturbance; in Christopher Priests’ A Dream of Wessex, two young people, Julia Stretton and David Harkman, who barely know each other in ‘real life’ are put in a machine whereby they enter a projected future-topia, one where their desire for love can be enacted on an island idyll separated utterly from the dynamics of failed relationships and late capitalist politics. Their yearning causes this idyll to come about and even though they realise its projective nature they choose to remain in the dream of a Wessex literally cut off from the mainland by the exhilarating Blandford Sound and the vast Somerset Sea. When their island is turned into a filthy industrial wasteland by the projections of Paul Mason, a man stricken with ambition and jealousy, they can only reassert it by the convictions of their now fulfilled longing; Priest’s description of the gas pipes and sewage pools rolling back to reveal the beautiful bay of Dorchester encapsulates the wonderful moment where love moulds its own landscape.

Outside the Sci-Fi realm Marías makes his own time machines in the memories and reveries of his characters, often by means of the obsessive fixing of details undertaken by his narrators, as mentioned above; observations of specific parts of faces, inventories of objects – as if time might stop as long as this fixing continues. In All Souls, the Narrator succumbs to eavesdropping – one of several such overhearings in the book – upon Clare, her son Eric, and her father Tom. The Narrator comes to notice the identical nature of their eyes – as if this one physical attribute might gain for them a certain immortality as others fall away – another kind of time machine that preserves an organ of looking through many generations. Marías’ ultimate human time machine is Will, the almost nonagenarian porter of the Institutio Tayloriana, who, being beset by a type of dementia, relives a particular day of his life as if were happening again in the present. As if his entire life was a pack of cards to be shuffled upon rising each morning. Here is a life of disordered days that seems random to onlookers, yet to Will seems merely devoid of remembering – if he is living the day in 1962 when his wife passed away, he lives it with immediacy, with all its wounds again open.

To return to yearning and the links of its chain. The All Souls Narrator who longs for Clare whenever he cannot see her, learns from her of the impossibility of their continuing love – in a telling contrast to Christopher Priest’s lovers in A Dream of Wessex, she gives geographical separation as her main reason why they should part – Clare and the Narrator are not able to create a projection in which their love can thrive beyond its confines of a strictly limiting and ultimately disposable adultery – they make no island for their love. The short academic tenure of the Narrator delineates the reach of passion. Yearning with a sell-by date. The Narrator leaves his Oxford home of two-year’s duration with a nod to his final leavings in the rubbish bin – those other things, albeit minutiae, which are disposed of – the earlier disquisitions on refuse now falling into place by the shutting lid of the bin. From happy delusion (Priest) to curtailed fulfilment (Marías) to the desperate and doomed-from-the-start loves excited by, to give yet more examples, (and these might be ne plus ultras of longing) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Olalla in the story of that name, and Joseph Conrad’s Alice Jacobus in A Smile of Fortune – these types of love and yearning are links in a chain that also bind feeling into the intensity of a haunting. It is a haunting that begins when the one, must turn away from the other, leaving only memories of Clare, Olalla, or Alice. Or it is the haunting of Terry Armstrong, turning away from the site of his lover’s suicide, leaving the iron bridge as John Gawsworth. Or in Robert Aickman’s extraordinary short story, ‘The Real Road to the Church’ (from his collection Cold Hand in Mine), it is the desolate Rosa who sees her soul carried by ‘the porters’ across a threshold and longs for a reuniting that will end the hollowness inside her. The power in these books lies in way they fire that haunting in the reader, not just for their authors’ fictional lovers (although I do dream of Olalla’s ‘beautiful and meaningless orbs’), but perhaps for real ones, lost in death, or far away.

Javier Marías is the ideal novelist for the magpie reader; he puts in the glinting digressions that a distractible bird longs for – anything to get out of a smooth-running plot – that relentless machine of fiction. By opening up windows of fact inside his books, Marías offers glimpses of fiction and reality striking each other – éclats of strange conjugations and speculations. His books breathe on the shelves because he has left the threads to his characters protruding – pull on them and they still lead to hands and eyes, to stuff thrown away, to longings and regrets. And they pull up the dead so they might speak.

[1] Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, p. 66 – 67.

[2] Alan Marriott is mentioned as a Dobson pseudonym in a short video made by R. B. Russell about the poet C. W. Blubberhouse: https://youtu.be/9rWCUB1OteQ (last accessed 28.vi.2021). What is effectively a memorial album, The Library of the Lost, a selection of Dobson’s essays edited by Mark Valentine, which includes writing on Gawsworth and Machen, was published by Tartarus Press in 2013, with a brief memoir of Dobson by Javier Marías. Dobson didn’t have a dog. Other pseudonyms used by Dobson include, Donald Carlus, Robert Manchester and, one Ian Armstrong….

[3] All Souls, p. 102 – p.112.

Pages