A Reading Diary (6 page)

Ana Becciú wrote this in
Ronda de noche:
“Love happens when we stroke a textured surface, when something is told with the hands or with the mouth. The mouth uses stories to stroke, causes scattered textures to appear, textures that can be read out loud. But almost no one knows how to read.”

The perfect first paragraph of J. R. Ackerley’s Indian journal, concerning the maharajah who employed him at his court: “He wanted someone to love him—His Highness, I mean; that was his real need, I think. He alleged other reasons, of course—an English private secretary,
a tutor for his son; for he wasn’t really a bit like the Roman Emperors, and had to make excuses.”

Title for a doctoral thesis: “The Novel as Obstacle Course.”

The Lama believes that every obstacle in his way will be removed; Kim, that he himself is capable of either removing it or going round it. I read yesterday in Max Brod’s biography that Kafka disliked Balzac and had noted with disapproval the motto Balzac had engraved on his walking-stick: “Je casse tout obstacle” (“I shatter every obstacle”). Kafka then added his own motto: “Every obstacle shatters
me.”

Natural obstacles and political obstacles: Kipling obviously despises the white man who knows nothing of the land he lords it over. The boy who is placed in charge of looking after Kim at the barracks beats him out of contempt and ignorance. The boy “styled all natives ‘niggers’; yet servants and sweepers called him abominable names to his face, and, misled by their deferential attitude, he never understood. That somewhat consoled Kim for the beatings.”

“There is no sin so great as ignorance,” Creighton Sahib says later.

Years ago, Michael Ondaatje asked if I remembered the name of a certain British sergeant in Kim, because he wanted to use it in the novel he was writing.

“Read him slowly,” says the English Patient to Hana, “you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot.”

On page 20 of my edition of
The English Patient
a French gun is mentioned, made in “Châttelrault.” It should be “Châtellerault,” a town famous for its arms factory, close to which I now, years later, live. Unfortunately, the greed of local authorities has turned Châtellerault into a bleak commercial centre, ignoring the beautiful sixteenth-century buildings (the house in which Descartes’s father lived, for instance) and the elegant bridge over the Vienne, and laying out a huge parking lot, after cutting down all the trees.

Kipling constantly turns the story to the point of view of the native characters: in
Kim
the British are outsiders attempting to rule, most of the time lost among the ancient alien cultures. He also understands that those over whom foreign
rule is imposed (whether by Britain or by Rome) will always attempt to “drag down the State.” In “A Pict Song” he wrote:

The contempt shown by the invader renders all collaboration suspect. Rabindranath Tagore, in a letter addressed to the Viceroy of India, relinquishing his knighthood after the Amritsar Massacre of 1919: “The universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers. … The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.”

In August, the newspapers seem devoid of news.

In my dreams, I’m never older than eighteen. The sixty-nine-year-old Mme du Deffand, writing to Horace Walpole: “I forget that I have lived, I am only thirteen.”

I have the sense of having learned nothing since my late adolescence. The discoveries I made before are the ones that still hold; the rest seems trivial, unessential or at best a gloss. Kipling speaks of “the first rush of minds developed by sun and surroundings, as well as … the half-collapse that sets in at twenty-two or twenty-three.”

Outside, the heat is fierce. Inside the house, because of the thick walls, it is wonderfully cool. I remember the same sensation in the hot Buenos Aires summers, lying in the almost dark, behind the grated iron shutters that allowed the air to blow through. Even sensations like these, felt now, are not new.

Adulthood defined by Kim’s friend, the horse dealer: “When I was fifteen, I had shot my man and begot my man.”

Looking back at my adolescent readings, the essential, the most frightening question I remember is spoken “in a languid, sleepy voice” by the hookah-smoking Caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland:
“Who are You?” The active form of that question appears halfway through
Kim:
“What am I?” And then, a few chapters later: “Who is Kim-Kim-Kim?”

Kipling: “A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating
their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free over speculation as to what is called identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.”

Identity and place dissolve into what I remember or think I remember. As soon as I turn my head, it all becomes memory and changes accordingly. After the nightmarish tests in the house of Lurgan Sahib, Kim must use all of his will to affirm the reality he knows (“It is there as it was there,” he insists). Reality is that which Kim knows he sees (even if his eyes deny it), in all its kaleidoscopic strangeness.

A brilliant touch: the woman who stains Kim’s skin to darken his colour “for protection” in the Great Game (thereby changing his outer identity) is blind.

Other than my Bombay Edition, I have a number of Kipling books collected over time in many places. Two items I’m particularly fond of: a slim, badly tattered copy of
Under the Deodars
, Nifi 4 in Wheeler’s Indian Railway Library, costing one rupee and published in Allahabad in 1888, when Kipling was twenty-three years old; and a red-bound pocket edition of
Stalky & Co
. which the twenty-five-year-old
Borges had bought upon his return to Buenos Aires in 1924, and which he gave me as a parting gift when I visited him in 1973.

A sort of autobiography could be written following the objects that have been given to me by friends. Here, in my writing room:

• a bronze statuette of Ganesh, elephant-headed god of beginnings, given to me by a long-lost friend after I received my first computer in 1984
  
• a glass pear which belonged to C.’s grandmother, which he gave me when we first met
  
• an Indian woven-metal pencil holder, a gift from Rohinton and Freny
  
• a Vietnamese stone box inlaid with signs I can’t read, from Isabel Huggan, for my fiftieth birthday
  
• a paper column painted like a sky, from a set designed by Michael Levine for
  Frühlings Erwachen
  
• two pens—one a quill, the other a dipping pen—given to me by my two daughters
  
• a small clay snake made by Liza Detrick
  
• a leather book-weight given to me by Barbara Moon
  
• a stone coaster which Lenny Fagin brought me back from India
  
• an incense dish made by Bodge Hall, which she gave me on the death of Rob Read, which now carries
  stones from the Sybil’s cave near Naples, from the Tessellated Pavement in Tasmania, from Colpoy’s Bay in Ontario, from a path in the Vosges Mountains and from the road outside my house in Calgary, as well as a ceramic bean given to me by Katherine and a Maya clay pendant that Ron Wright brought back for me from the Yucatán
  
• a small ebony arm, said to be part of the model followed in carving one of the gigantic Moors holding torches inside the Church of San Zaccaria in Venice
  
• a box holding postcards, hand-painted by the owner of the
  tabac
  across from our flat in the Alsatian village of Selestat, where I spent a year researching in the humanist library
  

In his autobiography, Kipling lists the objects he keeps on his writing-desk. “Like most men who ply one trade in one place for any while, I always kept certain gadgets on my work-table, which was ten feet long from North to South and badly congested. One was a long, lacquer, canoe-shaped pen-tray full of brushes and dead ‘fountains’; a wooden box held clips and bands; another, a tin one, pins; yet another, a bottle-slider, kept all manner of unneeded essentials from emery-paper to small screwdrivers; a paperweight, said to have been Warren Hastings’; a tiny, weighted fur-seal and a leather crocodile sat on some of the papers;
an inky foot-rule and a Father of Penwipers which a much-loved housemaid of ours presented yearly, made up the main-guard of these little fetishes.”

A letter with a return address I don’t recognize, forwarded by my American publisher. Out of nowhere, someone whose name now means nothing to me writes to say that we met when I was eleven or twelve years old and that something I did then has stayed with him all these years. I wonder at the long, late results of things I have forgotten doing or saying—unimportant, casual things.

Half an hour later, I pick up
Kim
where I left off reading yesterday and find these words spoken by the Lama: “Thou hast loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far.”

The last day of the month.

In Spanish the word for “waiting,”
espera
, shares the same root as “hope,”
esperanza
. Gide in his
Journal
says this:
“Sala de espera
. What a beautiful language, one that confuses waiting with hope!”

The end of
Kim
is about waiting, and finding that one has achieved what one has been striving for almost without knowing it. The Lama’s final vision is like that of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who, sometime in the sixth century, looked up from his prayers and saw in the darkness outside his window that “the whole world appeared to be gathered into one sunbeam and thus brought before his eyes.”

The last line in Patrick White’s
The Tree of Man:
“So that, in the end, there was no end.”

C. accompanies our neighbour, Mme H., to the cemetery of our village, to look for the tomb of the marquis who lived in the castle here during her childhood. She is seventy-seven years old and has trouble keeping her balance when walking. The cemetery is a small enclosure, transferred to the outskirts of the village during the eighteenth century. When they find the mausoleum, C. helps her descend the narrow stairs and switches on a flashlight to help her read the dates. His death is later than she thought. “Mon
dernier marquis!”
she sighs.

What I remember most of Chateaubriand’s
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
is not his mourning for the passing of the French aristocracy but the sustained elegiac tone. And the vastness. The two volumes of La Pléiade are daunting; to feel more comfortable amidst two thousand pages, I refer to my pencilled notes at the back.

I always write in my books. When I reread them, most of the time I can’t imagine why I thought a certain passage
worth underlining, or what I meant by a certain comment. Yesterday I came across a copy of Victor Segalen’s
René Leys
dated Trieste, 1978. I don’t remember ever being in Trieste.

Encouraged by Mme Récamier to write his memoirs, Chateaubriand sets out to cover almost an entire century, from his birth in 1768 to 1841, barely seven years before his death. His is a daunting project: to recall his childhood in St-Malo, his adolescence in Combourg, his military career in Paris and his witnessing of the French Revolution, his voyage to the New World, his painful exile in England, his early sympathy for Napoleon’s ambitions, his later disenchantment with the emperor and his final role as Foreign Affairs minister under the Bourbons. Above all, his attempt to establish possession over the years gone by.

Few autobiographers allow time itself to hold the foreground; most are too fascinated by the progress of their own fond person. To read Chateaubriand is to witness the subjective and yet comprehensive unfolding of a society’s change: of customs, prospects, ethics, conventions. He stands (as in the famous portrait by Girodet) on the farther shore, looking at the aristocratic trappings that have been taken from him, and I can’t sympathize with that loss. But at the same time he tells of a deeper loss due to age, to experience, to a twist in desire, and to this loss I feel intimately
close. In his youth, he recalls, he was “troubled by a longing for happiness”; now, in his old age, he quietly observes “the reflections of a dawn whose sun I will not see rise.”