Learning to See

What, then, is a literary life?

It began, like so many things planned in advance, with a sigh. ‘We shan’t do this again next year’ we told ourselves on the train. Like actuaries of enjoyment, we must have reckoned that the costs – financial, temporal and shall we say psychic? moral? – were greater than the profits, which in these sort of ventures are always much harder to specify. One pays one’s fare, reserves one’s seat, packs one’s picnic hamper, gathers some company, perfumes one’s pulsating wrists, and ties one’s bow tie tightly. What do we go to such lengths for?

An acquaintance of mine, a woman of considerable beauty and charm, would say that the quest is for ‘total bliss’. So I reflect on the conditions of my satisfaction and find I think myself richer if an afternoon or an evening crystallises itself the next morning into a piece. Such a deposit into my shabby jewellery box, still empty but for a few false gems, a few poor and damaged rings and ungainly chains, I realise, is my bliss. And as one has to live and dare if one is to speak the truth, as Horace and Kant teach us, so I must hunt for jewels which I could, in the ordinary course of life, scarcely afford. Some of these baubles I have offered up to you, dear reader, in the course of the three months I have written this diary; and what I have done has been simple: I’ve gone out and observed people, my surroundings and my self, that tyrannical abstraction, and I’ve reported it all to you. ‘Report’ is not the verb, since my accounts would satisfy no tribunal, could have left the pen of no officer or journalist. My accounts are selective, idiosyncratic, partial, governed not by some judicial or scientific sense of veracity but by unwavering interest.

I can think of but one other circumstance that reliably provokes my bliss: love. And in the events that we were about to undergo, at our destination, love was perhaps the last thing I expected to encounter. I had been smitten by Stéphanie D’Oustrac ever since I had been shown the film of her singing ‘Je vole’ from Les Paladins, but that video was now almost twenty years old; it seemed natural to expect her charms to have faded in the intervening years. And when the lights revealed her on stage, lying prostrate with her enormous hair covering her head, an arm extended grasping a telephone receiver, I thought my fears were confirmed: the gorgeous oh-so-French singer had been transformed into Helena Bonham-Carter, who in my mind, with her unkempt looks, always plays a witch. Yet as she rose up to the tune of Poulenc’s marimba ringtone, as she tried to fend off malicious intruding women from the telephone line to her gorgeous beloved Joseph, as her ardour and anguish, her folie amoureuse, rose higher and higher, I couldn’t help but weep. Love is like this, it is ravishing in the moment, a ‘total bliss’ which only becomes known to us once the moment has passed and consciousness sets to work. Last night I fell in love with Stéphanie and today I weep out of joy for having had this love awakened and out of anguish that that moment of bliss should have passed. As soon as she had taken her last, profound bow, her hair falling over her head again, I became consumed with a need to see her once more, to come back, night after night to the same seat by the stage, and let her fan the flame of this love. I wanted her image to inscribe itself on my soul; I wanted to learn her every gesture, to dedicate my life to paying tribute to her exquisite art. Once she had left Glyndebourne I would follow her in a carriage across France, stopping to watch her every performance, loving her across the plunge of the orchestral pit. The love for women on stage is delusional; I had felt it once before, yet I wouldn’t dare cross the divide that separates actress from audience. I am only too conscious that it is a fantasy I love: La voix humaine, not Stéphanie D’Oustrac. Yet the theatre creates the conditions for a prodigious courtship, such one-woman pieces trapping the beautiful creature in a fairytale tower, turning me into a chivalrous knight at its base.

During the dining interval, after laying out the plans for my mad pursuit, I became conscious of my inability to carry them out. I’d have to have the mad courage of Don Quixote, but I can’t be Don Quixote on account of my damnably prudent nature. Humanity learns something over the centuries, and what may have been possible in the past is not necessarily so in the present. Yet one must remember it is literature we speak of here, and just as Don Quixote made the mistake of thinking chivalrous romances were accounts of an exquisite reality, so we run the risk of thinking that Cervantes was simply reporting the adventures of a real fool. Expensive, ruinous passions are in most cases best left to the imagination, at least when they conform so closely to literary models. Still, one cannot separate living from telling, courage in one from honesty in the other. I remain intrigued by the idea one can find in Susan Sontag’s The Benefactor, the idea that we have a duty to live out our fantasies. It is better to be Don Quixote, she seems to say, than it is to be Cervantes – and yet she says this in a book. The lingering feeling I have is that her writing suffered from her desire to realise fantasy in life rather than in literature.

What then is a literary life? Sontag held it to be the privileged life of leisure, of delectation, as did the contemporary she most publicly admired, Roland Barthes. Her model was the adventure writer, the brave man who went around the world and told of his encounters with leopards, of dangerous passages through ravines, of waterfalls sweeping him away, of evading death and encountering all manner of natives. Barthes was not so literal: writing was not just an excuse and a means to travel, to live without petty obligations of career or home. Barthes sought to discover pleasures where he was, to reveal the beautiful corners of what would appear to be a quiet, ordinary life. I myself keep returning to what Malte says in Rilke’s Notebooks: ‘I’m learning to see’. I may add with the touch of the finest pathetic glove that the things I’m so slowly and clumsily learning to see are rapidly receding from view. This elementary melancholy fact of sensuous life has, to my embarrassment, only recently become evident to me, and it is perhaps damning evidence of the torpidity of my earlier life that I shouldn’t have felt it a painful problem sooner. I could describe my life until now as a search for a moment so blissful I’d find its passing devastating; it seems only recently that I’ve finally had it, and had it multiple times over. I’d like to think I have at last been admitted to the grounds of literature and given that supreme literary task of recollection, recovery, recherche.

Let me then recall more of the evening at the Opera, perhaps the last one of the season. We were bussed in to a precise schedule, as the middle-classes are made to these days. Our shaded and secluded picnic-spot in the farthest reaches of the garden had one of its sides rudely claimed by a couple of couples whose apparent greed made them do nothing to soften the injury of their appropriation. Still we had a royal feast, tasting the most evocative foods: dipping an oar of crispy potato into a sea of caviar; eating paté that payed homage to a duck’s muddy life and Winslade cheese that had trapped the fragrance of a rainy forest in its weeping core; slicing soft-boiled eggs spilling their golden yolks erotically over a perky leaf. The ladies on the bench by the lake responded to ‘good afternoon’ with ‘and to you too!’. But we couldn’t quite forget the party beside us as they flung their plastic bags around and posed for pictures. The women couldn’t seem to stop talking; it was remarkable how their entire existence seemed to be devoted to issuing little commands, questions and comments: ‘should we have the quiche now perhaps?’, ‘is that glass yours?’, ‘move that bag away’, ‘it was awful cheap’, ‘honestly that’s what I thought too’. It was only when undressing at home that I realised how I share in this busytalk when tasked with attempting to direct my own life: ‘did you close the window?’, ‘I’ll be with you in a moment’, ‘oh I’ve forgotten my glass upstairs’, ‘have you seen my cufflinks?’. Such vehement dislike as I felt to those women had to have been some exaggerated reflection of my own slavish habits. After weeping at the feet of my muse, after eating like a king, being so supremely free and devoted to the capital joys of life, I found myself in front of my humble bathroom mirror flossing my teeth. One must be grateful to creatures who so perfectly concentrate and exhibit an entire way of being in their manners. When I picture the women now, especially the one whose eyes were particularly glassy like only the most repressed housewife’s can be, the one with the big nose and thin blond hair, the one who kept showing me the still labelled soles of her Clarks wedges, I can only say, as Henry James would say: my poor dear! I commend you for your frankness in so boldly revealing us your anguish.

Busywork, calculations, plans, jobs, mortgages creep up on one and may turn us all into the nervous wives of naval officers that do not look one in the eye, so cocooned are they in the chrysalis of their own trivialities. Yet they weren’t the only people there whose gaze looked elsewhere: some fifteen minutes before the beginning of the performance, a couple marched across the lawn with a bell-boy dragging their picnic hamper in tow. The man resembled the figure in the GigaChad meme, while the woman looked like an average monied Middle-Eastern follower of the Kardashians. Everything they did seemed oddly mistimed: they managed to uncork their champagne just as the five-minute bell tolled and had only taken to setting up their picnic table thirty minutes into the interval. Sometime into their meal, as I glanced over, did I see the reason for their strange arrhythmia: the woman was fiddling with a camera that was set up on the table streaming their meal, their audience being elsewhere. Technology creates new possibilities, but it makes us, as Heidegger insisted, forget being which is always there in front of us, disappearing. The first duty of literature is to rediscover how to live, ‘progress’ be damned: it is to be satisfied in one’s apparent humility, not envious of sham brilliance, not greedy for recognition, and certainly never simply complaining.

As I wrote two weeks ago, the world rewards the one who looks carefully many times over: any calculus that says otherwise must be discarded. When we got off the bus at the station, we stepped into a small crowd of thirteen year old boys, cheerful and excited, one of which accosted me asking ‘how was glynde tonite one outta ten?’ I think of Stephanie, my love, and shout back a resounding ten to genuine astonishment. As we rolled out of Lewes, I thought I couldn’t wait to be back here again.