Skinny Dipping

§71 [21.i.24.a : Sunday] My books are in disarray. Yesterday, three boxes containing the materials & parts to build three bookshelves arrived. Alice and I ran out of shelf space for our books a few years ago. Every shelf in the house is double stacked. I’ve already put one of the shelves together and will assembled the other two later today, then the process of putting my books back into some order can begin.

Not only are the books of my library scattered about in piles, needing arranging, but the books I’ve written need to be put into some order. While in Oregon last week, I began working on “The Plan”. I’ll spare you the details, but “The Plan” is an arrangement of twenty years of writing (the contents of my archive, a vast and private literature) into some kind of order. It seems incredible that I’ve written so much. At roughly two pages per day, one can make quite a pile of papers in twenty years : something like 7 millions words. (Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 1.5 millions words. This is not a boastful comparison, but rather a fact that brings shame : to have written so much, and to what purpose?)

Back in July, when I was talking with David about the writing life, I posed a question: do I spent the next N years writing new books or do I spend those years trying to make something of my archive? In reality, it will be a little of both. (It’s never either/or.)

At the end of the summer I came up with a (small “p”) plan to revise my Magnum Opus and just as I got started on the restructuring, revising, and rewriting, I couldn’t resist the urge to write something new. (The result of that three or four weeks of spontaneous typing was a novelette with the working title, “Material Conditions”.) I don’t regret having written a new novelette, but … it’s like a Lévy flight. I start something which I think will be BIG and then I get kicked into a new orbit which results in something small, dashed off, written on the run.

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[21.i.24.b] Alice woke up, so I stopped writing this diary entry to make breakfast. Afterwards, I brewed another cup of coffee and have been catching up with V.W.’s letters. I’ve forgotten about the letter since November. In Letter #1432, V.W. writes (after she and L. lost their tempers): “Are we really like that? we said. Are we middle aged and content? Do we look like old cabbages?” A little wilted on the outside, but fresh and crisp in the middle? Some mornings, like today, I don’t feel so crisp on the inside.

In the next letter, to Gerald Brenan, she writes: “I am coming to the age when I sit staring at the fire saying ‘I’m so busy: I’m so fearfully hard at work: I’ve not got a word to throw at a dog:’ and so I do nothing.” That’s how I feel, how I’ve felt since… last November? I really was sitting, staring at the fire last night, thinking I should get back to… what? when I have so many projects, both reading and writing, and when the reading projects take up so much time : I spent three full days just typing up my reading notes for one novel, and three chapters from two nonfiction books. Everything I want to do, all the tasks I invent for myself, take up so much time. V.W. writes to Brenan: “And in God’s name, what do you mean by ‘working working working at my novel’? How does one ‘work’ at one’s novel?” For the last twenty years, I’ve equated work with actual typing. But there’s so much more that needs doing (than mere typing) when “working working working” at one’s novel. But what do I really know about the business? (only busyness, it seems)

I was pleased to see a familiar name mentioned in V.W.’s letter: Theodora Bosanquet, who was Henry James’ secretary and whom V.W. called “an astute and bold American”. Miss Bosanquet sent a manuscript to Hogarth Press which V.W. had on her desk to be read. I only know of Miss Bosanquet from Jacques Roubaud, who has named his succession of typewriters, “Miss Bosanquet I” up to  “Miss Bosanquet VI”, all after James’ secretary.

What V.W. says about letter writing, I could just as well apply to my writing of novelettes: “Please believe that I could write better if I took a little more time. But novelette writing is now a mere tossing of omelettes to me: if they break and squash, can’t be helped.” And this about Joyce’s Ulysses: “What about your defence of Joyce? … I rather agree that Joyce is underrated: but never did any book so bore me.” I really shouldn’t admit this, but I want to like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake more than I actually do. (I hope Rasan never reads this. We’ve been celebrating Bloomsday each year for more than a decade now. And how many times have I read Ulysses? six or seven?) Which is not to say that I dislike either book at all. I want to like them a great deal, but … the idea of Finnegans Wake is what excites me. I’d rather write Finnegans Wake than be tasked with reading it. But still, I return to both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake again and again for … what? out of sense of obligation? Who’s obliging me? The books I’m passionate about, the book that both dizzies and seduces me is The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I could spend the rest of my years reading only The Book of Disquiet. And why not?

In the Letters there’s a rather helpful biographical note concerning the V.W.’s and L.W.’s moved to 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury. They’ve left Hogarth House and installed the press in the basement of #52. The move will be completed by 15 March when V.W. will resume work on The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway.

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Now I’m in the third month of my publication project and I feel as if I’ve been neglecting it in favor of writing other material that is somehow not part of the publication project … yet? Why am I casting around for how to resume work on my Magnum Opus when I could be revising the next chapters for leadworth & manna? I know what I need to do, but how I dislike being deflected from my comfortable ways. How nice it is to sit here each morning and write for the desk drawer! No one will judge. No one will object.