The Resumption of Reading: My Reading Trajectory Reappraised

Those of you kind enough to pay attention to these scribbled notes will know that towards the end of last year the path of my reading had lead me, ineluctably, to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, Crime and Punishment.

As the dark nights stretched out I began to make may way through the great length of this great novel. Only, somehow, in the darkness of those evenings I lost my way and eventually ground to a halt. I feared I would take a wrong interpretative step. The light from the lamp on my bureau guttered and flickered. It then became dim, turning from an amber glow to a sickly pallor.

I admit that I had made myself a map along the way – a list of character names. However, it was no good returning to this document without a compass and the time to re-orientate myself.

It is now starting to get a little lighter. The crocuses have emerged from the ground. And now, in this growing brightness I am resuming my reading. Although the text is a dark one – thematically, and in terms of its setting, I feel that this new springtime light will help guide me to the end of the text.

I’m picking up the action with 100 pages to go. Raskolnikov has just chatted to Porfiry, who has shown his hand.

I will write again when I’ve finished the novel.

The Colour and Consistency of Amber

It is too dark in here. The light that my brass lantern causes to seep across the desk seems to have the colour and consistency of amber. I cannot turn it up any brighter so I have just lit a number of tall candles. However, the wicks are already starting to burn low and the flames are guttering and flickering. The dark shadows next to the bookcases seem to be growing deeper and denser with each passing minute. They are pulling things into obscurity even as I write. I cannot see the corners of my room anymore.

It is not light enough to read with any care or precision. Françoise has already chastised me for attempting to work in this gloom. ‘It will only damage your eyes. You have to wear those glasses as it is because of all that close work you do. I wouldn’t work in this light.’ Of course, she doesn’t realise the obligation that these texts have placed me under this evening. How could she? I am only just beginning to realise it myself. And in any case, I am starting to believe that this darkness could bring with it some enlightenment. Maybe by losing my bearings, by being unable to see the critical and theoretical signposts, I will happen across a new path to meaning. Maybe.

A draught has just blown in through the sash of my study window. For a moment it seemed as though it had brought some of the night sky in with it. Actually, I can see that it just blew out one of the candles.

Reading Trajectories

My reading is usually fairly wide ranging – both by necessity and by choice. This attitude has not made for a very coherent bookshelf but it has helped me immensely in my work as a literary critical detective.

However, over the last few weeks a certain pattern seems to have emerged from the vagaries of my choices.

The last few texts I have read are:

1.     Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux camellias

2.     Alphonse Daudet, Letters from my Windmill

3. Anatole France, Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet and Other Profitable Tales

4.      Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

5.      Cara Black, Murder in the Marais.

The next book I will be reading will be Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic, Nausea.

I drew up this reading record last night for my own benefit. When I did so it occurred to me that all these volumes have one thing in common. And that one thing, or place, is Paris.

I will limit myself to just two comments about this fact.

Firstly, let me say that I hadn’t really intended to read two books by Anatole France at all. I bought one in a small shop in Oxford, the other on an antique stall in Yorkshire. Strangely enough, they each cost the same amount – £4. They were also in a similarly poor condition: their spines were ripped and their pages slightly damp to the touch.

 They are just the kind of volumes that Françoise chastises me for buying. ‘But why,’ she says, ‘do you insist on filling your study with these musty old books when you could buy pristine new copies of the same texts.’ She is right as always. I am sure that I could have bought modern critical editions of these works.

My interest in old Anatole really only lies in his complicated and somewhat patronising relationship to Proust – he wrote the ‘Preface’ for the younger man’s Pleasures and Days. France’s style is easy going and at times quite lyrical (at least in these translations) but is nothing compared to that of his one time acolyte. It lacks the insight, precision and even the directness of Proust.

The second thing I would wish to say about this unlooked for connection is that my own writing has caused me to think about Paris. So perhaps the coincidence is really no coincidence at all.

Now, however, my focus has shifted. Another text lies in front of me – and it is one that is set in a different city in a different country. St Petersburg. (I am looking at the small globe in my study as I write these words. Leaning the candle towards its surface I can see the dot that represents the city).

The text is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. This is a text that has, in a sense, always been there ahead of me. It is now almost time to confront it.

In the Clearing: a space to think and write.

I have finally managed to create a kind of clearing in my study. I will now be able to look around me and get my philosophical bearings.

I thought I had understood the literary materials I had been working on. I had made perfect kinds of non-sense of them. The case was almost closed. It soon sprung open again. The more I thought, the more I had to read. And the more I read, the more I needed to read. And the more I needed to think and write.

The mystery novels were soon buried under a mass of other materials. Texts piled up on texts. I pushed  various objects to the back of my desk. The photos of Proust and the old Broadwood piano were shoved away. One old postcard fell down the back of a bookcase. I did not retrieve it.

There, on the floor, were copies of works by Plato and Aristotle, arranged in piles. To my right, all the documents relating to one of my previous projects had spilled out of a folder and had not been replaced. Sheets of lined paper covered in faded, hand-written notes; copies of paintings; music; manuscript paper; the letters of some great author.

Now, though, I have got everything in something like an order.

Françoise is very happy with this change. She attributes this miraculous event to her own influence, her own pervasive sense of propriety. When she came into my study a few moments ago she almost fell over herself with surprise. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s about time. I told myself you needed to have a good sort out. How could you ever have expected to get any work done with all that paper sitting around?’ I told her that I was a critic, a detective-critic, and that all these documents were essential to my thinking. Her face lit up with a smile that told me that she felt nothing if not sorry for me. ‘You call yourself a writer,’ she continued, her tone one of supreme condescension, ‘and yet you never write. You tell me that you are reading and yet you never read. All you ever seem to do, so far as I can see, is take books off the shelves – books that I will only have to put back.’ These were, I admit, hard words to hear – hard because true. Françoise sees through me.

I’m sitting in the clearing I have created for myself. I am calm.

The philosopher Heidegger speaks of standing in the clearing – a space in which Being is revealed. My clearing is not that kind of clearing. It is just a space in which to write.

The Notebooks of Fictional Detectives

I have become increasingly interested in the notebooks of fictional detectives.

Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn, the central character in Ngaio Marsh’s mystery novels, is always writing in his. And then there is Columbo, who makes scribbled notes whenever he can remember which pocket his book is in, and whenever he has a pencil.

How I would love to pour over these hasty memorandums, these jotted references to times and dates, names, lists of clothing and motives.

Of course, in one sense I have been reading these notebooks – they are the classic murder mystery itself, en abyme. The whole of the plot is worked out between their covers.

As a literary critical detective I am a compulsive keeper of notes. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been given two splendid books especially for use in my critical investigations (see the post for 12^th January 2011 below). They are on my desk now, next to my mug of tea and a Ngaio Marsh omnibus.

I record odd metaphors, flashes of creative-critical insight and echoes between texts and contexts.

And this blog is itself a kind of notebook.

Clues...

I am in a fevered state of intellectual activity. My mind is beset by a series of critical, literary and philosophical problems. I find that even the piano keyboard cannot now calm my nerves.

The clues are scattered all about me, here in my study. It is just that I cannot yet see how all the ideas fit together. When I know that, the case will be closed and all that will remain will be for me to write up my findings.

Below is a list of some of the clues I am busy analysing.

1. Sherlock Holmes’ plunge over the falls of Reichenbach in ‘The Final Problem’

2. Franz Liszt’s trip to the Swiss valley of Chamonix in the summer of 1836, on which vacation he was accompanied by Countess Marie d’Agoult, George Sand and her family and Major Adolphe Pictet.

3. The name ‘Mr Fellows’.

4. The concept of the empty house.

5. The figure of Hamlet on the castle walls.

6. The train journey from London to Canterbury.

7. The difference between the abstract and the concrete.

Some of these clues might turn out not to be clues at all; the sole purpose of others might be to lead the critic astray. This is something that I will have to contend with as I pursue my investigation. And of course, there remains the possibility that amongst these fragments of ideas there lies the one thought that will unlock the whole case.

I shall continue to think.

The Road to Whitby. The Road to Sherlock’s.

The road dropped away beneath us. About two hundred yards ahead it turned sharply to the right and vanished behind a mass of green. I confess I was anxious that we might not make it to our destination, that our little carriage might not survive the journey. I enjoy conducting research in the field but being thrown bodily onto the moors would not have been ideal.

I had escaped the claustrophobia of my study once more, perchance to read, to think and detect. I was on the hunt for clues and found them in abundance. My travelling companion and I were heading for the sea.

In York, the gothic Minster throws long shadows.

To my delight, there are great, musty stores of texts hidden in these patches of gloom, shops where you can find yellowing volumes whose stitched spines are coming unpicked. As I rummaged through the shelves a pattern of correspondence seemed to emerge. I bought a copy of the letters of Felix Mendelssohn and, most crucially of all, texts on Liszt. The green covers of old murder mysteries spoke out but were in no condition to be handled. They lay as dead on the shop tables as the bodies they describe slumped at the bottom of staircases. Their backs were broken.

From York we struck out into the wilderness, braving uneven road surfaces and uncertain conditions. We remained undeterred, however, and eventually came to rest in a strange hall of mirrors, a room of kitsch reflection and cultural detritus that stirred the imagination.

And then, finally, we arrived in Whitby. I stood on the East Terrace and looked across to the ruined Abbey, much as Mina Harker does in Dracula. I effected the literary pose. However, there were no eyes piercing the night, no ‘brooding presences’, no entranced women in white.

We, too, examined those gravestones, worn by the weather to look like melted stone. We too sat on Lucy’s favourite seat and looked at the harbour as the storm clouds passed out at sea. The gulls carved ever-widening gyres in the sky.

Whilst in Whitby, whilst living inside its literature, we took tea, my companion and I, in Sherlock’s Coffee Shop. Here, a violin was suspended from the right hand wall. A shelf was covered in medical bottles and jars. A deerstalker hung on a coat peg. And the cake...

Even though the literary critical detective, like the literary detective himself, can exist on little rest and even less food, cake never hurts. And here, in Sherlock’s, I had my fill.

That night I slept with the curtains open so as to be able to see the abbey.

We have returned. I am back at my writing desk and find myself dreaming of gravestones. My thoughts are rolling like thunderclouds and here in this room lit by a solitary candle. I might just experience the lightening strike of a critical idea.