Loitering With Herons – 07/09/2024

Dear Reader,

‘All stories are true.
Some would disagree.
All narrators are Cretan liars.’
– My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss

Last week I was mesmerised by finding Gwen John everywhere, building a portrait of a portrait artist from fiction, biography and poetry. The possibilities of writing shone.

I thought about how so many of the books we have read in our book groups might be called biography or memoir and yet they are also history, science, natural history, philosophy, travel writing, fiction and more.

Black Girl From Pyongyang, for example, is a personal story which becomes an examination of how thorough historical and political research ought to be conducted and what prejudices and assumptions are brought to the communication of this research. On Chapel Sands appears to be a true crime book yet is in fact art criticism and a love letter to a mother. The Little Virtues, is a collection of essays offering cultural history of post-war Italy, obituary and a reflection on parenting all of which resonate eighty years on for everyone I know who has read them.

Labels can be useful but perhaps the most accomplished writing knows how to toy with them and when to tear them up.

And so, to Sarah Moss (good surname, no relation) whose latest book has captivated me, as her writing always does. (If you have not read her novels, The Tidal Zone is an excellent place to start.) My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir, a superb work of literary criticism, an essay on health and bogus ‘wellness’, and a heartening storm of rage in a kind and fragile teacup.

My Good Bright Wolf is also an autobiography in discussion with itself, and a wolf, about the impossibility of writing a life. Knowing that she cannot give a forensic family history, she tells her lineage in fairytale style. Her father is the Owl, her mother the Jumbly Girl. Recording her parents’ harsh treatment from early childhood, she allows another voice to challenge her at every step, pointing out contradictions and other viewpoints. Setting down long ago conversations as she recalls them, she notes also that she is a novelist and given to making things up.

Yet none of this interferes with total absorption in her story. She has found a way to build an awareness in the reader of the limitations of writing and writer, particularly when claiming any one thing to be true, and in doing so frees both from those limitations. She’s a Cretan rhapsode committed to examination of veracity.

Annie Ernaux explores these difficulties in A Woman’s Story, her account of her late mother, which she calls a cross between literature, sociology and history, admitting that fiction has its role too.

She writes of the fantasy person created by making statements which freeze her mother in images, though at times she has to do exactly that. She tries to capture the real woman who existed independently and had a history before she brought her daughter into being, though she struggles to be her mother’s archivist, to be anything but her daughter. She is obsessed by finding an immutable order for her words which would convey a truth, though she cannot say what that truth involves.

The result is a gift for her mother, a woman who hated to be a recipient, and for the reader, who will not.

At the beginning of A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh Nguyen asks, ‘where, on the thin border between history and memory, can I remember myself?’ Nguyen was four when his family fled Vietnam for America. Their search for refuge finds the opposite, facing racism and violence frequently – his parents are shot when working in their grocery store, are robbed at gunpoint in their home and feel they must change their names to something more ‘American.’

Like Moss, the author allows multiple voices to contribute, shown in the way he presents text aligned left or right. His family’s experience is personal. It is also political and common, a history commenting on present and future.

Partita / A Winter in Zürau by Gabriel Josipovici is a tête-bêche book, two texts bound together so that the book has no back cover but two front ones. Starting from one side, you might read Partita first, the story of a man forced to leave his home when his lover’s husband shows up. From each brief sanctuary across Europe, he is forced to escape, though echoes of art and music pursue him. As do some secret police.

Flip the book over and you begin with A Winter in Zürau, an account of Kafka’s diagnosis with tuberculosis. The blood is terrifying but the diagnosis an opportunity to flee from Prague, his father, his restrictive day job and his engagement.

Of course you can read it the other way around. But you’ll never be able to change which one you read first and that will influence how you read the second. Flip a coin to see how you wish to start. With the biography or the fiction? And which is which?  

Faraway the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Leser, is a novel which takes the reader on a walk through Paris retracing the steps of Hồ Chí Minh, who was not at that time (possibly 1917, 1918 or 1919) known by that name. Names, like dates, are regularly uncertain despite meticulous research. The unnamed narrator (or is it a biographer and Andras himself?) searches for evidence of the man who would become the leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and finds the echoes and foreshadows of other protest movements on the Parisian streets.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie is a novel – and a play – about Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Both believed they had visions of God. The former risks charges of heresy to share her devotion to Him, the latter becomes an anchorite and faces danger, even in seclusion, as a woman with a certain religious authority. They left behind written accounts, whose survival from the 14^th century, despite attempts to suppress them, is remarkable.

Through fiction, Mackenzie offers an understanding of the historical women and their significance while also creating the space to hypothesise on how their manuscripts endured.

Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus is formed of two lyric poems, one as the poet, or the voice in the book, prepares to become a father and one after the birth. It is a recording of who he was as well as who he will become and a song for an unnamed person yet to arrive.

The cormorant of Elizabeth’s Parker second poetry collection wings its way through poems about ancestry, family rituals passed down the generations and painful memories of new loss and grief. The bird is bound up in the poet’s experiences of daily life in Bristol but also separate, so that it too gets its un-anthropomorphised biography. Do come and see Elizabeth next Saturday at our monthly poetry reading.

Perhaps the greatest memoir writer – deserving of particular admiration since it must be hard to type with such fluffy paws – is local resident, Jack. His second book Jack-Jack, How to Train Your Human has just come out and is a searing indictment of human fallibility (why does companion Ben keep throwing away the stick he also appears to want?). We hope that Jack has continued to keep his human proficient in bringing him treats.

Meanwhile, Chronicles of A Lizard Nobody by Patrick Ness, illustrated by Tim Miller is so wonderfully absurd that I can only assume every word of it is true. If Partita felt like falling through an apple into a Magritte, while a clock melts over you, this feels like watching shy lizards try to discipline a pelican. Which is what it is. Plus some badly-behaved seals really not helping. An adventure story unlike any other…

On writing fictional biography and biographical fiction, there may be no better comment than Muriel Spark’s novel Loitering With Intent. Fleur Talbot finds herself working with a group of aspiring memoir writers. ‘I think they probably lived out their lives on the principle that what they were, and did, and wanted, should above all look pretty. Typing out and making sense out of these compositions was an agony to my spirit until I hit on the method of making them expertly worse; and everyone concerned was delighted with the result.’ She alights on a truth about their lives through, extravagantly, making it all up. Fleur goes on her chaotic way, rejoicing.

May your weekend be full of Spark,
Lizzie

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