Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

 This is a book that’s been sitting on my shelf for an age, which I’ve tried to read before and failed and yet heard good thing after good thing about it. So in the spirit of #TBR20 I decided to give it another try.

Good Morning, Midnight is a book about an older woman, a woman past her prime. On the face of it she’s lonely, discarded. She has little money, is living in Paris it seems in some kind of exile, she is past her prime, no longer exactly pretty or desirable. It is a claustrophobic kind of story, the kind where you see quite intimately her thoughts and experiences making for a discomforting read. I think this is why I struggled so much with it the first time around, but it is worth the effort of bearing with it.

The story jumps around a bit from her present in Paris, to the times she’d been in Paris before, to a marriage which fell apart after the death of her child. The protagonist is a drinker, and it’s not clear if she drinks because she’s an alcoholic or to expunge the daily deprivations and humiliations of life from her mind. She’s hypersensitive, always fearful of judgment or criticism from the people around her, from being exploited. These fears seem ridiculous, yet it soon becomes apparent they are not without reason.

There are some interesting dichotomies presented in the story. One the one hand you get the sense that the woman is lonely. She is old, she is alone, she is terrified of the man in the next room in the shabby hotel she is staying in. She spends much of her time by herself, drinking in the selection of bars she’s deemed ‘friendly’ or watching movies alone at the cinema. Yet as the novel progresses, you begin to wonder if this isn’t her choice? Whilst she seems lonely, she also seems to hate people. In fact she expresses this herself in some depth:

“’You want to know what I’m afraid of? All right. I’ll tell you…I’m afraid of men – yes, I’m very much afraid of men. And I’m even more afraid of women. And I’m very much afraid of the whole bloody human race…Afraid of them?’ I say. ‘Of course I’m afraid of them. Who wouldn’t be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas?’

She spends much of her time prowling the streets of Paris, remembering past humiliations and difficulties. She seems almost paralysed by her fear, her hatred of other people; unable, because of this, to fulfil her desires. Yet it’s not clear what her desires are. Does she want to be in a relationship? Does she want to be like others? Does she want to drink herself to death? Her inability to decide, to follow through on her decisions is a constant battle she has quietly with herself all of the time.

There’s a sense that this is a character out of control, yet at times she shows cast iron control. This is another dichotomy in the book. Because we see the endless bubbling, the violence of her thinking, this creates a sense of madness, of ‘raving’ as she refers to it herself. Yet at the same time she is able to parcel her day into neat little packages of events, she seems outwardly respectable. A quiet women having a drink in a bar, repulsing (to a degree) the approaches of men. Is she raving, or is she just perceptive? She cannot accept the strictures of society, does not want to ‘play the game’ of men and women, of social acceptability. She is caught between wanting to be herself and wanting to be what she’s expected to be. It is a battle her mind seems incapable of winning.

The moments I most enjoyed in this book were the moments of extremely sharp perception, of judgement. Like here, as she observes the behaviour a mother and daughter in a fashion shop she worked in at the time:

“’Come along, mother, do let’s go. Don’t be silly, mother. You won’t find anything here.’

There is a long glass between the two windows. The old lady complacently tries things on her bald head.

The daughter’s eyes meet mine in the mirror. Damned old hag, isn’t she funny?...I stare back at her coldly.

I will say for the old lady that she doesn’t care a damn about all this. She points to various things and says:

‘Show me that – show me that.’ A sturdy old lady with gay, bold eyes.

She tried on a hair-band, a Spanish comb, a flower. A green feather waves over her bald head. She is calm and completely unconcerned. She was like a Roman emperor in that last thing she tried on.

‘Mother, please come away. Do let’s go.’

The old lady doesn‘t take the slightest notice, and she has everything out of both cases before she goes. Then: ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’m very sorry. I’m so sorry to have given you so much trouble.’

‘It’s no trouble at all, madame.’

As they go towards the door the daughter bursts out. A loud, fierce hiss: ‘Well, you made a perfect fool of yourself, as usual. If you want to do this again, you’ll have to do it by yourself. I refuse, I refuse.’

The old lady does not answer. I can see her face reflected in a mirror, her eyes still undaunted but something about her mouth and chin collapsing…Oh, but why not buy her a wig, several decent dresses, as much champagne as she can drink, all the things she likes to eat and oughtn’t to, a gigolo if she wants one? One last flare up and she’ll be dead in six months at the outside. That’s all you’re waiting for, isn’t it? But no, you must have the slow death, the bloodless killing that leaves no stain on your conscience…”

The bloodless death. This is something that the book is concerned with, our protagonist seeking, it seems, her own death. Death by excess, death by accident. Yet it is the bloodless death she seems to be on the path towards.

Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent book, it is mind-bending and somewhat difficult to read in a raving mad yet insightful kind of way. It is extremely intense writing, so much so that I felt like I was rattling through it and not taking it in. Making it a candidate for a judicious re-read, I think. It is challenging, the protagonist isn’t, and isn’t prepared to be, the woman people think she should be. This creates a terrible internal conflict that through the excellent prose of Jean Rhys we are able to see and experience with unforgiving intensity.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

I’ve had two books by Rebecca Solnit hanging around my library for some considerable time now: this one and Wanderlust, a history of walking. I’ve tried reading Wanderlust once or twice and it’s an interesting read, but a little dense and difficult to read alongside the kind of fiction I’ve been reading recently. That being said, I’ve been interested in reading Solnit for a while, perhaps on account of her excellent journalistic pieces, so it seemed like the right time to turn my mind to this book. Perhaps, like A Book of Silence the year before, January is the right time for reading this kind of intelligence.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a series of essays centred around the idea of being lost, getting lost and loss. The ways in which the word can be interpreted and the way it can happen. Loss as a choice and loss as an event. The many and varied ways people deal with loss, or don’t. The value of being lost, of allowing oneself to become lost, to invite it into your life. It’s a fascinating concept and the book shows what a great intelligence can do with such a defined subject matter.

Each essay deals with a slightly different subject, with every other essay being on the subject of ‘The Blue of Distance’, with blue forming a repeating theme of much of the book (including the cover). As Solnit explains:

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses amongst the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colourless, shallow water appears to be the colour of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue of the horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is the colour blue.”

Throughout the book Solnit explores both the idea of physical loss – being lost in a wilderness, in an abandoned city or an abandoned place, being physically withdrawn from your environment by an act of violence (e.g. kidnap) or choice, loss of environment and species – as well as the idea of figurative loss which is, in my opinion, the more interesting concept of the two (though both are interesting). In the figurative sense, Solnit explores ideas like loss of love, absence of personal or familiar history, loss of memory or a change in memory, loss of language, absence (or presence) of faith, loss in art. Onto this broad canvas Solnit brings her personal story, so that the book never feels entirely abstract, however abstract its subject matter. Lost, Solnit explains, has two disparate meanings: “Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.”

In every chapter, Solnit asks us to consider loss, being lost, losing things not as a terrible event (though it can be) but as an opportunity and perhaps an opportunity we should be actively seeking. As she explains here:

“The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”

She asks us to consider the transformative power in seeking out the unknown, the gaps in things: knowledge, maps, ideas, structures.  In Solnit’s world a lack of knowledge is not a terrible event, it is not a failure but an opening. She also demonstrates how artists the world over – artist like Woolf, Thoreau, Yves Klein – have used the idea of loss and being lost as a crux for their art, for discovering their art and themselves. She asks us to consider “Leave[ing] the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a book stacked to the brim with wisdom. There are so many little notation marks in my book, too many to discuss here. I loved the story of Yves Klein, the artist who embodied the idea of ‘lost’, and how he sold artwork that offered the buyer access to the ‘Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’ which required the artist to throw away half of the money which he had been paid and the owner to destroy even the receipt so they had, in the end, exactly nothing. A fabulous idea that could, perhaps, only exist in the art world (though some entrepreneurs may prove otherwise). I loved her exploration of abandoned places, the story of her Aunt and the pictures she saw but then went missing. It is a book which blends the personal with the abstract, the sublime with the material. In her chapter about the Turtle Man, which is also about Buddhism and dreams and Death Valley and tortoises, amongst other things, I read this following passage which struck me as a profound message I ought to integrate into my own life:

“It’s okay to realise that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realise that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows other to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place.”

I think I’m pretty okay with the unknown, but recently, perhaps, I feel myself becoming more set in my views. Or perhaps I am simply translating the unknown into a different kind of ‘known’ to make it more palatable. I’m also not great at asking for help, but trying to see it as a generous act makes it easier, I think, to swallow. What Solnit has reminded me is how growth resides in embracing the unknown, in seeking and finding alternative views and exploring them open-mindedly. It was a timely reminder, delivered with beauty and vision.

Yes, there is wisdom in this book. There is wisdom and knowledge and there is also the absence of knowledge, an invitation to allow the unknown to enter into your life. “How will you go about finding things the nature of which is unknown to you?” Solnit asks right at the beginning, channelling (or mis-channelling, as it turns out) a quote from Meno. Reading this excellent book would be a fine place to start.

Reading Woolf: Flush

This is going to be a very short review, because I didn’t really like Flush at all. In fact I read it in a single day, perhaps not in the best frame of mind as my son was in A&E having been run over by a cyclist (my son’s fault, as it happens). Fortunately my son was fine, but the book wasn’t. Sorry Mrs. Woolf, not your best.

Flush is the story of a cocker spaniel dog, the property of the renowned poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (famed for the lines “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”). Through Flush we learn something of the life of EBB and her relationship with fellow poet Robert Browning whom she married against the wishes of her family, resulting in her disinheritance. Flush walks a fine line between representing the life of the dog, his jealousies and desires, against the backdrop of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. I’m not sure the balance is entirely right. What we know of Flush’s life has been constructed by Woolf from Barrett Browning’s various correspondences. There are some apparent inaccuracies, but not knowing much about Elizabeth Barrett Browning beyond her poetry, I wouldn’t have know this had it not been pointed out in the introduction.

 

We join Flush at the beginning of his life, born to the family of Barrett Browning’s contemporary Mary Russell Mitford. Mitford gave Flush to the sickly Barrett Browning as a companion, and at first Flush was excessively spoiled: fed delicacies from Elizabeth’s plate, fussed over and kept indoors. At first Flush chafes against this treatment, but later he learns to love it, to recognise his spoiled nature. Everything changes, however, when Elizabeth starts corresponding with Robert Browning. Suddenly her affections turn and Flush finds himself in the cold.

Perhaps the most significant incident in the book is Flush’s kidnapping at the hands of a Whitechapel gang. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pays a ransom for him, against the wishes of both her family and Robert. There is the sense that this event affects both Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning intensely. Following this Elizabeth and Robert marry in secret then escape to Italy where Flush is free to roam again.

That’s pretty much the crux of the story. Barring the Whitechapel event it’s all very pedestrian and there’s not a great deal to grab the attention. Consequently I found myself quite bored reading this book. It lacked the power, the intensity of others of Woolf’s work like, say, To the Lighthouse which also focuses on quite a small event but is different entirely in character. Instead Flush is a fussy book, a little formless and lacking Woolf’s keen eye and insight to lift it beyond being a mildly interesting view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. There were elements of the book I intensely disliked, for example the focus on Flush’s ‘breeding’ and class, and I get the sense that Woolf was trying very hard to make this a book from a dog’s perspective without really giving serious thought to how different that perspective would be. Consequently it is a book that feels too heavily overlaid with human concerns and one wonders why she didn’t simply write a book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning as that would, I think, have made a much more interesting subject.

In the end Flush felt like a failure. It’s not a terrible book, but it’s not a particularly good one either. In reading Woolf’s diaries it is apparent that at the time of writing and editing Flush she was also absorbed in writing The Pargiters (what became The Years) and perhaps because of this Flush feels like an interlude, thrown out, perhaps, to bring in some income whilst Woolf worked through the difficulties in bringing The Years to life. A huge disappointment following The Waves and perhaps not surprising that Woolf herself referred to it as a ‘silly little book’, an opinion I’m not in disagreement with.

Flush receives a disappointed 4 out of 10 Biis. 

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata (tr. Edward M Seidensticker)

“Though August had only begun, autumn insects were already singing.

He thought he could detect a dripping of dew from leaf to leaf.

Then he heard the sound of the mountain.”

This poetic novel by one of Japan’s truly great writers, Yasunari Kawabata, reflects on the life of an old man named Shingo who lives in Tokyo with his family. Shingo is old, his world is changing and it seems increasingly out of his control. One night Shingo wakes and hears the sound of the mountain, as described here.

“It was like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth. Thinking that it might be in himself, a ringing in the ears, Shingo shook his head.

The sound stopped, and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him, as if he had been notified that death is approaching. He wanted to question himself, calmly and deliberately, to ask whether it had been the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, or a sound in his ears. But he had heard no such sound, he was sure. He had heard the mountain.

It was as if a demon had passed, making the mountain sound out.”

Shingo lives with his wife Yasuko, his son Suichi and his son’s wife Kikuko. Yasuko and Shingo have another daughter, Fusako, whose marriage is in trouble. But concerning Shingo more is the trouble in the marriage between Shuichi and Kikuko. Shuichi is having an affair with another woman, a matter which causes Kikuko much pain and humiliation. Shingo is extremely fond of Kikuko and in a sense this fondness is the pivot around which the story unwinds. From his gentle interactions with Kikuko we learn of a man who is paralysed by age, by a dwindling memory, by a failure to understand the world around him including his children, by choices he had made which it seems he wishes he could unmake. Though not unhappy in his own marriage, Shingo’s mind still lingers on Yasuko’s beautiful sister, a woman with whom he had a relationship before his marriage to Yasuko. In fact it was only after the sister had died that Shingo married Yasuko, albeit that the sister had been married to another man. The difficulties in the relationships between Shuichi and Kikuko, as well as the failure of Fusako’s marriage, bring this all into Shingo’s mind.

The Sound of the Mountain is a delicate and complex novel. Though apparently ‘light’ on story, there is a depth to it and a strength of character which comes through more on reflection. Each chapter is based around a small event or observation: The Cherry in Winter, The Bell in Spring, The Voice in the Night; and each chapter brings out something of Shingo’s life or surrounding relationships. Supporting each observation or event is a memory or dream; dreams figure extremely heavily in this novel and serve to draw out a particular aspect of Shingo’s character – his inaction, his failing memory, his desires for Kikuko who may, it seems, serve as a metaphor for Yasuko’s sister for whom Shingo has never ceased to care. There is a haiku-esque quality to the book, both in style and in substance, like in this passage here:

“The moon was in a blaze. Or so, just then, it seemed to Shingo.

The clouds around the moon made him think of flames behind Acala in a painting, or a painting of a fox-spirit. They were coiling, twisting clouds.

But the clouds, and the moon too, were cold and faintly white. Shingo felt autumn coming over him.

The moon, high in the east, was almost full. It lay in a blaze of clouds, it was dimmed by them.

There were no other clouds near the blaze in which the moon lay. In a single night after the storm the sky had turned a deep black.

The shops were shuttered. The town too had taken on a melancholy aspect in the course of the night. People were on their way home from the movie through silent, deserted streets.

‘I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m going to be early.’ Shingo felt a lonely chill pass over him, and a yearning for human warmth.

And it was as if a crucial moment had come, as if a decision were forcing itself upon him.”

It is quite beautiful, made more so by there being so much left unsaid. I got the impression that Shingo, here, serves to represent pre-war Japan, whereas Shuichi, with his apparent cruelty and disregard for his kind and beautiful wife, represents post-war Japan. Between the old and the new there is a failure of understanding. There is a suggestion that the new is somehow soulless, lacking something. But then there is also the sense of something degraded in the old. In between this, Shingo feels himself powerless to act, to fulfil the role that is expected of him which, perhaps, no longer really exists.

The Sound of the Mountain is the kind of novel that reminds me of all the things I’ve loved about Japanese literature: its delicacy, its beauty and frailty, its unflinching gaze which still manages to be, somehow, just a little bit oblique like watching a scene through a fine gauze curtain. In this novel Kawabata confronts the complexities of human relationships, the difficulties of aging and attaining fulfilment, guilt and degradation, all with a level of refinement and delicacy that you almost don’t realize that’s what you’re reading about. It’s powerful stuff, beautifully written. A haiku of a novel, puzzling and rewarding all at the same time.