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.
He decided he must resolve the matter sooner rather than later. He sat down to write: Wednesday afternoon he’d summon a coach and tell George, or even better, Burgess, that he’d be visiting Wharton or Agassiz. He would prefer that Miss Theodora Bosanquet absented herself, for she cultivated an annoying habit of interjecting on every serious discussion with dreamy sentimentalities: the poor woman. Then he’d proceed directly to Addison & Ibbetson’s office to consult the guide on contract waivers (taking for granted such a thing exists). After reading the various articles, he’d choose the most relevant, this being the one that suggests the most lenient way of terminating domestic service (supposing the archive had such a classification) in a house in the suburbs, roughly the same size as his. This last point should have been given the most attention, because the amount of redundancy is calculated according to how much work is done, on average, over the course of a period, and payment is then given both for the present period and the following one.