Light On Dark Water

Reading at the Grand Babylon

I had intended to include this in last week’s journal, but had already gone on too long. So, picking up from there:

I took two books to the conference with me, and had made a pact with myself not to turn on the television. I have made and broken such pacts before, but this time I kept it. Well, mostly: I did turn the TV on twice, once out of curiosity to see if they had any good movies, which they didn’t, and once to check out of the hotel; I didn’t watch anything. It might have been wise to do something similar regarding the Internet, though I couldn’t stay off it completely, since I needed to log in to my work systems regularly, and of course once online one tends to wander around.

Anyway, the two books were Ross Macdonald’s The Ivory Grin and Ronald Blythe’s Out of the Valley. The first is a mystery/private-eye novel in the classic style, set in postwar southern California; the second is a journal written by an Anglican clergyman and covering a year in the English countryside. Which is to say, both of them involve worlds utterly different from mine. And they could hardly have been more different from each other, and from the place where I was staying.  That world, in some ways stranger than the other two, also a strong fictive component—the simulated Texas with its artificial and un-Texan climate—I began to feel that I actually existed in some purely mental realm from which I chose alternately one of three fictional worlds to inhabit. 

***

It’s very likely that The Ivory Grin was the only remaining book in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series that I had not read, certainly the only unread one in my possession. For that reason I had been in no great hurry to read it. Macdonald is one of my favorite writers, and I liked having one book yet to discover. But I decided that I was not likely to have a better circumstance than the isolation of airports and airplanes and hotel rooms.

The Ivory Grin doesn’t seem to be as well-known as some of the other Archer books, and I suppose I would count it as a lesser one, too. Its people and story are not as vivid and memorable as some of the others, but it differs from all of them in one interesting respect: as far as I can remember, this is the only one which deals much with race, and in which important characters are black. One of the murder victims is a “colored girl,” and her boyfriend, also colored, is accused of the crime. Macdonald’s treatment of these characters doesn’t seem quite as skillful as is usual for him. I suspect he simply didn’t know them that well, not the way he knew the white middle-class Californians who comprise most of the people in his books. Still, it’s an interesting picture. As a Southerner I’m accustomed to thinking of strictly enforced racial segregation as a feature of the past of my region only. Though I know that racial prejudice existed in the rest of the country and that de facto segregation was common, I have tended to accept the assumption of others that the South was much much worse. Well, if Macdonald’s picture is accurate, it wasn’t that much worse, at least as compared to California. It is perfectly clear that there are many places the black characters simply cannot go. And the fact that one of them is light-skinned enough to “pass” is a factor in the plot.

Whether Macdonald was attempting to make some sort of social statement here I have no idea. There is no evidence at all of any self-conscious effort of that sort. But the statement is there, merely by virtue of the facts.

***

I haven’t finished the Blythe book; it’s longer and more substantial. I’ve only reached September in this journey through the year. But it’s the sort of book you can put down for a while and pick up again later without having to reorient yourself. It consists entirely of pieces of a few hundred to a thousand words, like newspaper columns, which is exactly what they are. It seems the author writes a weekly column for the Church Times, and this book consists of those columns for the years 1997-1999. Its organization is a little odd, actually: it’s the weekly journal entries of several years organized into a single year, so that in each chapter we get ten or twelve pieces all dealing with affairs of that month in different years. It may sound as if that would be confusing, and there are moments when it is, a little, but overall it feels quite natural. There is little to no narrative thread connecting one week or one month to another, so the thematic grouping works.

It is in essence a real journal, in that it chronicles the events of each week, and the reflections provoked by the events. The circumstances described are ones which I suspect many of us—myself at any rate—supposed must not exist any longer in England. The picture painted seems of another time: the comfortable and as far as I can tell fairly orthodox Anglicanism, the countryside with its ever-shifting weather and natural life, the country people, the little fairs and festivals, the long walks, the little clubs and societies devoted to nature or to little-known artists, the air of slight eccentricity which  names like Bottengoms Farm (Blythe’s residence) and Little Horkesley  inevitably suggest to an American.

March, which means we paid-up members of the Wild Flower Society can begin registering this year’s plants in our Field Botanist’s Book.

The weather and landscape are observed with great precision and enthusiasm. But what really makes the book is the way all sorts of other things are pulled in from other places and times, within one paragraph and sometimes within one sentence. Present time is intertwined with historical and liturgical time so that the events of any particular week are thoroughly linked to the past and to the faith. Faulkner’s famous remark about the past—not dead, not even past—seems more true here than I think I have ever encountered it. Events and people of a thousand or more years ago sit alongside those of today. Medieval bishops are referenced as if they had only just vacated their cathedrals; historical events are local anecdotes. And literature and those who made it are a constant living presence, as is the faith. I think it would be more effective for me to illustrate this than to describe it. This is roughly half of one of the July entries:

So off we go to Colchester to see the Roman wall, which was being built at exactly the same moment as St. Paul concluded his Letter with a fascinating roll-call of first Christians, and so courteously…. And there in the museum are their inkpots and necklaces, even their sandals with the hollows made by their weary feet, for the Romans appear to have been proto-joggers and road worshippers generally, always stepping it out, counting the milestones and going straight. Jane comes to the cavalry officer’s gravestone and there is the familiar figure of Longinus, a Roman I have known all my life, mounted and stern, and she falls in love with him at once…. With millions-of-year-old mammals being dug upon the car radio, that Letter from Paul to the Romans was posted only the other day. The faith is so young….

At 6 a.m. the sun arrives in the wood with rapier-like beams, cutting into its interior and making the leaves jump with its brilliance. At breakfast I read the farming press. What grumpy news this week? Colossal machines rumble past my gaze. We potter along behind one such in a lane lined with mallows—cut satin, as the poet John Clare describes them. I have never seen so many. Wild flowers are back in abundance. Stephen Varcoe comes to talk about—the way we all talk and the difficulties of singing dialect, and how did Thomas Hardy talk? He has just returned from New Zealand where the lanes are lined with marijuana, not mallows, he says. Trinity 6. Anthony will be reading Romans 6. “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.“

There are pretty frequent references that I don’t get, sometimes local, sometimes historical or literary. “George Herbert was given the task of begging the government not to drain the fens around Cambridge, as such a process it was thought would spoil the Backs.” The Backs? A glossary would be useful for Americans, and maybe for others: who is St. Botolph? But this is no deliberate quaintness, rather the genuine article. I seem to detect an occasional hint of Anglican anti-Romanism, but perhaps I’m over-sensitive; if it’s there, it’s pretty mild.

The entries give the impression of being dashed off, but they are far from artless. They should be savored, but I have to admit that I tend to start eating them in rush, like potato chips or popcorn, hardly finishing one before I think “just one more.” 

I’m grateful to Rob G for having sent me this book. He’d recommended Blythe before in comments here, and I did intend to act on the recommendation, but hadn’t. I’ll be reading the other two in the series in time.

If you’re wondering what the Church Times is like, have a look. And here, it appears, is a blog where the continuing diary seems to be published: the latest entry is last Friday.