Reading Malamud

There's a large shop near Waterloo Station that sells remaindered and discounted books. It's a lucky dip: what can I get today that looks interesting for £2.99? The only time I don't pretty much know what I want, the author if not the title.

That's how I came to read Dubin's Lives by Bernard Malamud, attracted by the nice green cover, to tell the truth. A name I was only vaguely aware of, and I'd never read any of his eight novels (all are out of print in the UK). And, oh, it's rather wonderful! A late novel, published in 1976, and he died in 1986, it's really fine writing. The opening pages, which paint a Vermont landscape and William Dubin's inner landscape on his daily walk through it, are as close to perfect an opening to a novel as I've ever read and what follows didn't disappoint.

(I love this photo, which I found on the web - uncredited. Very painterly)

His style reminds me of no one else. Such a strong, particular use of prose, often skirting the sense, taking several passes at it. Disconcerting, but it weaves in the end an exceptionally rich and satisfying picture. Hasn't he said this already?, you think. No, he said something a little different, and complementary: a pentimento, a shadow line.

I gather that his earlier novels sit squarely in the great American tradition of second-generation Jewish immigrant literature; this one doesn't necessarily, I think - although there is a back story, and the back story sheds subtle but important light on the foreground story.... It does, I suppose, sit within a tradition of American novels with laconically gloomy, lost, self-deprecating middle-aged male protagonists. But it's infinitely warmer and more redemptive than most of these, whilst just as lacking in self indulgence. (I was recently reading Richard Ford and I really, really couldn't take him. He's too casually grim). It's very funny too: read it with a wry, aching smile.

The skill and depth of the writing in Dubin's Lives is such that I wasn't put off, as I might have been, by the 1970s hippy morality of the tale (aging male writer has affair with a woman his daughter's age. His wife finds out, has an affair with her psychotherapist. Inconclusive ending). The characters are complex, believably confused and changeable, sweetly drawn, and reap bitter rewards for stupidity and hypocrisy. Malamud's morality is not really of the '70s at all (though critics suggest the story may well have autobiographical elements), but something older, darker and more ambivalent.

A tense, riveting few pages where the protagonist gets hopelessly, dangerously lost - entirely his own fault - in a blizzard in the fields right near his house (deeply metaphorical) stay with me particularly strongly. I could pick out many more sections. The long, meandering whole, often claustrophobic, but often spacious, hangs together exceptionally well. It was so good that, having torn through the novel once, I started again right away and more slowly. Might I really get a handle on the wretched habit of devouring books without chewing? [This is not a happy metaphor in the context of beginning the same book again. Ed.] Writing of this quality and lucid complexity just might help me to do that. It's sobering to wonder if such a lengthy, dense, inward and circular work, but so full of life, would now get published. I suppose it might, if the writer had a long and prestigious career behind him, as Malamud did by 1976, but I do wonder.

I've no idea if I might like Malamud's other novels as much as this. But what an unexpected gift to chance upon something so very, very good. Perhaps someone who knows his work would like to suggest which of his other books I should read?

Impression, cat

The colours made me think of an impressionist painting - and the photos were blurred anyway...

Canale

click to enlarge

I'm cat-sitting in West London, a foreign country to me. I've lived in North and South London, worked and had many friends in East London, but West: where's that? So I'm taking the opportunity to explore a bit, went to Little Venice, where I've never been in all my 27 years in the city, and for a walk along the Grand Union Canal. On a sunny, blowy, sometimes stormy afternoon, it was varied, surprising and - with its still, dark water full of reflections and bordered by the chaotic backs of things - rather wistful.

surprising

Last look

OK, with one last look at the place, I'm going to change the subject.

Potager

click to enlarge

Kind of edenic, isn't it? Which is why I can't yet quite let go of the two weeks I spent at Gaia House. Stillness and beauty are an amazing and profound combination within which big thoughts and feelings, as well as big, clear ponds of no-thought and no-feeling, arise.

Strong colours, strong light

Strong light and shadow on everything, flowers emerging from the bushes like spotlighted jewels. Deep green in the shady gardens and along the lane between the trees, then coming out into wide, intense sunlight, blue sky and golden, prickly hay as the path slopes up across the fields.

Strong light on the countryside a pleasure; strong light on me not so easy to take - quickly sweaty and burning, but not so much that as the light on responses, thoughts, habits; in the long hours of quiet, the seeing myself and the 'ouch. I do that. yes'.

Buddhism is a psychological method, a patient feeling into the self, not in order to be self-obsessed, but in order to breath beyond the self, to see that self and all the rest are not different - all you have to do is be, stop flinching.

Stop the inner chatter. Go into the moment. And it grows more and more intense. Beautiful. Frightening. But if you stay with it, the fear dissolves.

Countryside in black and white

Not obvious. What has stayed with me most strongly is the green, green, green and the many bright colours of the flowers and butterflies. But when I think a little more, the blocks of dark and light and the strong outlines stay with me just as strongly - the contrast and clarity in many things that I seem to have brought back with me from the powerful, open spaces of the countryside, and that other common relationship of light and dark: those dappled places beneath the trees where you can scarcely tell them apart, but where it's important to remember there is both.

Less is more

The retreat, which was not an organised event but a self-directed stay in a silent retreat centre, was not demanding, with just a few hours of sitting meditation every day and many hours of sleeping and reading and walking in the countryside. With lots of rest and only very, very whole, whole foods, no alcohol, no coffee etc, it was really as much of a rest and detox cure as a meditation retreat. I left Devon a little less grey-white in the face and flabby in the belly, and feeling healthier than I had for rather a long time, got on the train for a 4 ½ hour journey – crowded train, very hot day, air-conditioning not working properly – and got off in London with all the symptoms of a lousy cold, which has had me rather ill for the past week.

Perhaps the discomfort and high fever, along with the usual major backlog of work that follows a holiday, account for the tone of my blog posts. Reading the comments, I thought: oh dear, do I sound depressed? I’m not actually depressed. More the opposite, actually. I’ve noticed for some years now this rather disconcerting syndrome: when I’m ill I get more done, and with less anguish! I can see exactly why this is. It’s because with only about 25% of my mind available it just all gets on with the job in hand, perhaps a bit slowly and perhaps not very imaginatively, but gets it done. Out of action is the other 75% which normally busies itself frantically with reflection, self-reflection, reaction, over-reaction, thinking it all through again and again, assessing and reassessing the many alternative approaches and priorities, rejection, anger, boredom, obfuscation… Aiee. Are many people like this, I wonder?

Sunset?

A friend asked me: why don't you write the kind of stuff you used to write on your blog? Well, I suppose it's either because I grow more overworked and older and tireder and have less energy for it by the day, or because I can only write about myself and there isn't anything left to say, or a bit of both. Which is quite depressing, isn't it? Ho hum. (there was a man, a long, long time ago, who used to say 'ho hum' a lot. I was talking about him to the same friend yesterday. Funny how these things, long forgotten, come back to you.)

Light

Retreat lets in the light, light on the awful, destructive absurdity of the way I carry on, the way a lot of us carry on, the abuse of body, heart/mind and environment.

I read this while I was away:

The most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small daily acts of courage which help to preserve a person's self-respect and inherent human dignity.
Aung San Suu Kyi