Kathleen flew home from London yesterday. For the first time in a month, we had been alone together in Ocean Beach last Thursday night, and in our Yorkville apartment on Friday night; then, off she went to London. In a new development, we talked across the Atlantic via cellphone. It was surprisingly convenient: I hadn’t imagined — I’d never thought about it — that there would no need for international dialing or country codes. When I made one of our scheduled calls (two a day), Kathleen almost always answered right away.It was assuring.

There was a bit of fracas on Monday, when we lost our connection in the middle of a chat, owing to “busy circuits,” it turned out. Before it turned out, I was plunged into a nightmare of anxiety by the recollection of Britain’s heightened terror alert. When I got through to reception at Kathleen’s boutique hotel in the City, a nice man there indulged me by running upstairs and tapping at Kathleen’s door. (I haven’t yet asked her why she didn’t pick up the house phone.) All was, of course, well.

The outbound traffic to Heathrow was so bad yesterday that Kathleen, a tad worried about making her flight, put off calling me until she reached the airport. (She did not, again I don’t know why, answer my call to her. [NB: Just one!] I expect she didn’t hear it. Kathleen hasn’t worked out the balance between creating as little disturbance with one’s phone as possible and setting ringtones at audible levels.) By then, I was ready to jump into Lake Havasu.

This wild fretfulness reminds me of Anthony Powell on love — something from his Writer’s Notebook, I think. Love is like seasickness, the misery of which you cannot remember as you walk the gangplank to dry land. Perhaps that is true of all miseries. It might also be true that miseries experienced repeatedly, but at widely-spaced intervals, become more intense with time, each recurrence accumulating all prior unhappiness. My wanting to know that Kathleen is all right when she is traveling did not come out of nowhere, but is the response to a trauma that occurred about twenty-five years ago. We were on opposite coasts, and the trauma was different for each of us — very different — but for me, the more passive observer, it was severe and unforgettable. A third postulate for this paragraph might be that miseries brought on by other people’s misery remain sharper than those that, like love or seasickness, well up in the course of events and then subside.

I was talking to my English friend yesterday. She is old enough to remember waiting for new installments of A Dance to the Music of Time, just as today’s readers are waiting for translations of Knausgaard, a writer who, intentionally or not, recapitulates Powell’s narrative dexterity, especially with respect to temporal shifts. These shifts, between a narrative “now” and variously-distanced narrative “thens,” are difficult to describe, because, if they’re well done, they go unnoticed, and the naive reader is left with the very mistaken impression of chronological order. When I say “go unnoticed,” I mean that the well-played shift fills in the story with a necessity — whether by providing information that it is now, and only now, important to reveal, or by shifting the focus in order to create a sense of depth and resonance — that resets all clocks to “now.” That’s why, I surmise, so many reviewers of My Struggle wrote as if Knausgaard began at the beginning and proceeded to tell you every damned thing that he’d ever done in his life. This was just as ridiculously inaccurate as the claim that there was felt to be a national need, in the Norwegian workplace, to declare “Knausgaard-free” days, so that people could get on with their work.

Anyway, my English friend said, “You’re the only who gets Powell over here.” How right or wrong was she to say that? To be fortuitously specific, how close a comparison might be made between English Anthony and American Dawn. Dawn Powell is always being rediscovered by literary readers, but she has never flown a banner to compare with Proust’s madeleine. Most people haven’t read Proust, but most people know a little something about his existence, if only the fact of it on the literary field. Is that as untrue of Anthony Powell as it is of Dawn? I know that it’s not true in England, where literary readers are more concentrated in certain localities and also somewhat more homogenous. (Homogenous in avoiding rubbish.) I should think that Anthony Powell is better known to American readers, literary and otherwise, than Dawn Powell, but is he?

And how would one go about finding out? How, for beginners, do you set up a Google search for an author that bypasses all the commercial links? I’ve been asking around, and getting a lot of shrugs.

I have reached Books Do Furnish a Room, the tenth novel in A Dance to the Music of Time. The title has an amusing explanation. A new character, the literary journalist Bagshaw, is said to have chilled the ardor of an adulterous lover by entering the library in which she awaited him, unclothed, by remarking, “Books do furnish a room.” This then became Bagshaw’s epithet, shortened to “Books.” Thus the stage is set for another amorous encounter in the world of books, the tumultuous, essentially rebarbative romance of the improvident but gifted writer, X Trapnel and Pamela Flitton, by now the wife of the “frog footman,” Kenneth Widmerpool. From the first reading, I have a dim recollection of personal belongings tossed into the canal at Little Venice, associated with somebody’s unhappy end. Neither Trapnel nor Pamela is an attractive person, and I found this book hard going last time. But now I am enjoying it, as a very black comedy.

Meanwhile, strange to say,  there are other books. Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog is about to appear, as is the author himself at a downtown bookshop that I haven’t visited in a while; I shall have to show up for that. Brian Morton has a new book, too, and his appearance will be at the more convenient West Side Barnes & Noble. Mr Morton and I have exchanged notes over the years, with the occasional proposal of getting together (he teaches in the town where I grew up). Now, I hope, the matter will be arranged neutrally and effortlessly. I am too old to want to hunt down Ben Lerner, but of course I’ll be reading 10:04; I wonder if I ought to re-read Leaving the Atocha Station first.

I’ve just re-read what I had to say about reading Leaving the Atocha Station in 2012. Nothing very substantial!

Meanwhile, I’m wondering, in light of all of this, why I think that Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station are really good novels that everyone ought to read, even though they are so focused on individual male points of view that it’s hard to imagine Garth Risk Hallberg giving either of them the time of day. Is it just that they’re both superbly well-written? And what would that mean?

Talk about twaddle!

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Daily Blague news update: The Human Case.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2014 at 10:54 am.