Very little is happening on the other side of the page (if the surface you read, with these letters on it, can be called that). A day in the office, much as it was yesterday and the day before. It's gone humid outside. That thick humidity is in my head, too. No energy. Nothing can be done. To the carpet, then, by the bookshelf. The green, coarse carpet, 'spicy' as my sister would have said when she was young (she used that word to refer to our dad's stubble which she'd feel against her cheek as he picked her up when he came home from work), and from there, the books.
Leiris's Nights as Days, Days and Nights. A book of dreams - like Cixous', like Adorno's. A dull genre; or lively only when the writing is very good. Doesn't Blanchot recount a dream in a letter to Monique Antelme? About a murder by pickaxe, recalling Trotsky's. And his father - he is there, too. Why would you need to recount such a dream, and to another? But I'm too tired to consider this question, and to follow it where it leads. Leiris's book - I had to have it, and it arrived, bought for me secondhand from the Gloucester Road Bookshop.
I wonder idly whether the third and fourth volumes of Leiris's autobiography have been translated, and about what must lose itself in that particular translation, for Scraps and Scratches seemed flat somehow, and unextraordinary. Manhood - now wasn't that more immediate? Wasn't it more lively?
Bookshelves - but what is more repugnant than a bourgeois and his books? A museum of books, books he might have wanted when he was younger and could not afford. Here they are now, all of them. A 'collection', even a 'library'. And I wonder what it mean to read books as some of them must have been written - in a sovereign neglect, carelessly; a reading that is one part of the full breadth of a life, as some people I suppose must live. Yes, to read, but only as relief, only as something catches your eye, to read lightly, glancingly, and then putting the book aside unannotated, and never intending to read it again: this is what I dream of, and what I envy.
I am weighed down by my books, I think to myself. There are too many. Tarkovsky's diaries next to Leiris; the Jabes volumes I never really read, still with stickers from Compendium Books (I preferred the reader, From the Book to the Book); a biography of Debord ... And more, and many more, adjacent in the 'imaginary museum' of my office bookshelf. The imaginary library, that, like the plate filled books Malraux assembled, would testify to the treasures of all our civilisations here, today, at the end of history.
What else to feel but Blanchot's 'museum sickness', this library fever that my imaginary sovereign reader would never tolerate? He would put the book down, unannotated, and go elsewhere. Like my imaginary writer - like Burroughs', in a volume of essays I also have here, lounging around Singapore and Rangoon 'smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit'; sniffing cocaine in Mayfair; penetrating 'forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy', and living 'in a native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle'.
The next book along: Gert Hofman's The Film Explainer, about which I always intended to write. What marvellous dialogue! What exclamation marks! Hofman is certainly the master of those! And next, two volumes of Homer, in Everyman editions. Who gave me those? Ah yes, I remember. One whose library - that's what he called it - I often envied. But didn't I resent, too, those still books that year by year turned yellow in the dark light of his flat? Books whose spines would crack if you opened them. And didn't I deserve Pynchon's V more than its owner?
The next book - by coincidence is by Malraux. I must have bought Lazarus in preparation for reading Lyotard's biography, which sits unread beside it. Pass by them, feel vague guilt; I should know more about him, Malraux. Should have an informed judgement. But he was never that appealing a character, for all that he resembled my imaginary writer. He used to take dinner with Balthus when the painter ran that museum in Italy - but in what town? What museum?
I should open the volume of Balthus that sits further up on the shelf. A book I bought and read in San Francisco, going to bed very early, jetlagged. San Francisco, where I'd ride the bus to Green Apple Books and found a nice volume that collected Kafka's 'The Judgement', 'Metamorphosis' and 'Letter to His Father' under the heading The Sons. As he had wanted, apparently, though I can't imagine that (but I must have it wrong).
And what next? Worthern's D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, first in the three volume Cambridge biography, and the only one, to my knowledge, issued in paperback. I found the volumes in my first weeks in this city discounted in a secondhand shop. And read them in my previous flat, enjoying living alone, every evening. The world's only Lawrence fan, who still carries the books with him: it's a lonely business.
Just now, walking outside, I thought of Kangaroo, and the miracle that Lawrence could write such a book almost immediately upon reaching Australia: almost immediately, and in five weeks! What a marvel! And the opening chapters are particularly good, I remember. In that light late Lawrence style, what's better? And remember the lovely paragraphs that end it, Kangaroo - the character (what was his name?) watching the sea crash and foam against the rocky shore. Nothing better, and making up for the great sag through the middle of the book, and its daftnesses. There's always something to make up for Lawrence's daftnesses, I think to myself. And remember the poem 'The Fish' and how much I like it. And the Last Poems, which I know almost by heart.
No more books. Get up from the carpet. Get in your swivel chair. Work! That's what I told myself, but I wrote a little instead (these words). But I hadn't intended to write of books at all. I'd thought to try to convey the sense of a life on the other side of these words, away from them. Of conjuring a sense of what is also lost by writing - this living, breathing moment, this moment - and now this one - sagging like old bunting from the proper minutes of my life. It's as if I would let writing see what it should not - that I would break some rule of writerly decorum ...
How many times have I attempted to find an idiom in which this other kind of telling would be possible? But enough, the afternoon must roll on, and I with it. Roll on, its great wheels turning through all our lives, and through the sky. The afternoon! And now, having broken the surface - written - it is already time to sink under again and disappear into the other side of the page. For a moment - but for how long? - I was with Leiris writing his dreams, at the arm of Malraux as he ate with Balthus in the Medici's palace (was that it?), I was dreaming with young Burroughs of writers' lives, and with Lawrence, I'd arrived freshly in a new continent ...