What I'm Reading to Flee Existential Despair
Virginia Woolf, Deborah Levy, Zadie Smith-- a woman has to drown herself in the greats.
Because I’m worried that I can’t cover my bills next month, I can’t think straight enough to write, but I can read, and I’ve been doing so with abandon.
I’ve always been mad for British author, Deborah Levy. Her writing, especially her essays, are an elliptical prosaic tearing down of one’s self to build anew in a time when you think you can’t start over again. I first encountered Levy years ago with her masterpiece Swimming Home, and although I had tepid feelings about her recent work, Hot Milk, her writing puts my heart on pause. I have zero dollars in my bank account and I just went negative to order her latest, August Blue, because I firmly believe you have to surround yourself with delicious beauty until the very end. I loved her latest New Yorker interview. Here are some gems I enjoyed:
On writing about shame & pleasure in her memoirs:
“There is certainly a lack of shame in the living autobiographies. They’re not written with the shame of a shipwrecked marriage; they try to write themselves out of societal shame. And my characters take pleasure in small things. It’s a suffering world and a nourishing one; it contains many things that are of sustenance.”
On who Levy writes to (and for) in her works, her audience:
“Who else am I writing to? I’m in conversation, I think, with a generalized contemporary anxiety. “August Blue” is not really about finding an identity; it’s about losing one. It contains my rage about the old composition of the suffering world. It’s about how badly we need a new language, and how hard it is to make it. I don’t just mean a literary language or musical language.
[While writing the book,] I was watching films of the third generation of dancers who followed Isadora Duncan. Duncan was the mother of modern dance and broke through all the ballet conventions. Hers is a very easy language to mock: I would find myself doing the mocking and the admiring in equal measure. But then I decided it was much more interesting to respect it. To respect it would be to move, as Duncan often does, upward and outward, instead of only inward and downward. And so, having come from those pandemic years of inward and downward, I thought, Yes, what we have to do is move upward and outward. I repeat that in the novel, because it’s somewhere for Elsa to get to as well. Upward and outward. With the help of a possible double.
And finally…this:
“The truth is that it’s extremely hard, extremely painful, to feel things, and so the failure to access feelings, to actually get somewhere near them, is one of my subjects. Some people don’t want to go there. Fair enough; I have a lot of respect for that position. This idea that we all have to go there is rather punitive.”
It’s ironic that Levy opens the interview making a correlation to Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers in the midst of ruin and seeing beauty in the midst of the COVID pandemic. I caught wind of The Paris Review’s feature on Virginia Woolf’s “Forgotten Diary,” her two years in convalescence that marked the end of her Edwardian style to what we know as her modernist, experimental masterpieces.
Woolf was a major influence on me as a writer in my early years (The Waves brought me to me knees in my 20s and should I ever get my fucking books out of storage I can’t wait to re-read it now as a woman in a different phase of her life) because I didn’t quite know how to manipulate structure and time. I leaned on her as a storyteller who can juxtapose a good story with a good plot with experiments in form. She also gave me comfort that one doesn’t need to write from A to Z. There are many routes from A to Z, not just the linear ones.
I also appreciate seeing writers in transition and this diary is just that. Woolf:
"Mostly she records things she can see or hear or touch. Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary’s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs."
Postscript:
I’ve ordered Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue because I often find that poets who write memoir come at it with a different and fascinating vantage point than prose writers.
I’m also reading this new profile of Lorrie Moore (although she was unkind every single time I’ve met her, but her writing still applies) and Zadie Smith’s latest in the The New Yorker.
For my paid subscribers, I shared a very personal and brutal essay. I didn’t want it all over the internet for when folks google me, hence why it’s behind a paywall. It would be strange to say I hope you enjoyed it because how could one enjoy such a thing, but you know what I mean.