Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist (2014)

'Types of Americans' is one way I want to approach this. When you're on the tube in London, people from elsewhere can stand out. Most Australians, for example, unless they're longtime resident, are like sore thumbs. Americans, too, but that's a slightly more complex story. I divide them into AIMs and AAMs. AIMs are Americans of International Mores and AAMs are Americans of American Mores. AIMs are often quite indistinguishable from locals and have a sense about them of slotting right in. AAMs are a different story altogether, though they are not some sort of clunky cliche of Americanness. They have a wealthy gloss about them, and combine it with a kind of knowing and intelligent wryness which demands respect. But AAMs are also somehow preoccupied with their 'smart' and 'well-heeled' lives, whereas AIMs are happy to be rougher round the edges. Anyway, almost all of Ellen Gilchrist's characters in these stories are AAMs. I've read volumes of hers in the past and realise now that these people, perhaps except where she's gone historical, are her central preoccupation. There's one story here which is the epitome of it, called Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, where a group of women going on holiday to Italy are caught up in a terrorist emergency at Heathrow. Each of them is a notable in some way, and perhaps calls the governor of their state or mayor of their city by his first name, for example; somehow they look out at the world through wryly privilege-acknowledged but not quite ground-level aware eyes. Their doctor friends are not just GPs, but more likely are authoring a key text, or taking up a lucrative professorship, maybe. They are intelligent enough to be aware of their privilege, but not enough to do any serious sheep-from-goat-separating on the basis of it. They're just a little over-comfortable. And this is of course combined with their Southernness in this Gilchristian context, which has a tang to it. The other thing that strikes me from this reading of Gilchrist after such a long break is that she suffers from Oates' Disease. The major criticism I think which can be made of Joyce Carol Oates comes in the lack of differentiation in the voices of her characters. Other than that, much of her work is supremely powerful. This volume has made it obvious that Gilchrist has the same problem. Too many of these characters sound like one another in conversation. And she adds a further subtlety to the problem - even the rhythms are often the same. The conversations in Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (again it's the perfect example) are strange things indeed, with staccato recountings of life history in ways which feel removed enough from real speech to cause the reader to confirm their disbelief rather than suspend it. Now, with all those cavillings expressed, what I must emphasize is the fact that Gilchrist is, even so, an incredibly limpid storyteller, who manages, through some sort of magic, to make the ordinary details of these people's lives fascinating. One can drop into these pages, and feel surrounded by an atmosphere, sometimes of direct engagement with the scary parts of life and death, sometimes with warm Southern penumbra which soothe.

Commonplace Book

'...trying to bring lucidity into minds whose natural element was an amiable confusion, making himself hot, and exhausting his own spirit. Caroline saw Robert always with a slight frown, which came from his inability to make other people see. She loved him for trying - but what is the inability to make other people see, except one's own inability to accept other people as they are?'

from The Visit to Vallado, a chapter in Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson

The True History by Lucian (c125-180)

Lucian was apparently a Syrian (in the ancient sense) and probably wrote in Syriac, but all of our records of his work are from Ancient Greek translations. This is a simple, splendid and short satire of the tall tales recorded as truth by ancient writers. He mentions a good many of the writers he has in his sights as the narrative progresses. Wow, what a narrative. Thinking about all the things that might have appeared fascinating and liberating to a mind of those times, Lucian seems to attempt a good proportion of them. Visiting the moon, sailing through air rather than water, all manner of strange creatures, all sorts of exigencies coming out of things being composed of elements they shouldn't - fire-waves, grapes full of milk, dreams being corporeal (and then again not). The satire is fairly straightforward, almost like saying "look, we can all make things up!"; it doesn't appear to me to have lots of layers, but the results are great mind-freeing fun. This 1958 adaptation-translation by Paul Turner appeared while John Cowper Powys was still alive. I wonder if he read it, and it helped to fuel the beautiful crazed short fantasies that he had already begun writing and that constituted his late-life wonder. But I guess, given his predilections, he was probably already all-too-familiar with this book. This is a spirited and airy flowering of nonsense-imagination, stacked full of the gods, heroes, and literary figures like Homer and the ancient historians - lovely releasing stuff.

Commonplace Book

'"...We let our children see us drink. Then we let them drink, thinking they will learn how to drink intelligently, but most of them never do. They learn to use drugs and alcohol for props, for courage, for macho, for pain. They use amphetamines for study. In the high-octane lives we prepare them for there may not be a way to withstand the pain except getting high. You can't teach young people to meditate. It's unnatural. So we have this culture and we are killing ourselves and our children with it even when we aren't at war..."'

from Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a piece in Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist

Commonplace Book

'He lifts his eyes again, and again their keen search investigates the depths of my soul; but no human eye can rightly read the secrets of any other human spirit: they find what they expect to find, not what is there..'

from Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXXVI)

My Life and Times: Octave One, 1883-1891 by Compton Mackenzie (1963)

By this stage Mackenzie was in part an old relic, and the ageing process was speeding up as the revolution that marked the 60s gathered pace. He was in the last period of his productivity, still producing comic novels every couple of years. He was also still reasonably prominent, in the backwash of the success of Whisky Galore 15 or so years earlier - the just postwar world that it typified was only now beginning to look a bit crumbly. He had been many and varied things earlier in his career and I guess they can be discussed when the autobiography gets there. This first volume is strictly to do with his early childhood, attached to his father's repertory company and its constant caravan of movement and interaction with aged stage-stars and literary ones and, as well, up and comers of those times. So there is opportunity for him to name-drop a little, which one can tell he likes. But he also provides a sound glimpse into the 1880s version of a child's world - jealousies, toys, night fears, puzzling over adult motivation. There are also recurring tropes here which give a window onto his internal nagging preoccupations: his nurse is depicted as an eternally thoughtless, conformist killjoy, determined to restrict in the name of something which even she doesn't quite understand - disappointment and curtailment of pleasure as a life lesson; psychology and psychiatry are consistently regaled as foolish misapprehensions by him, anticipating where such charlatans might interpret his actions as significant, and belittling their conclusions. The fact that he does these things in a pre-eminently reasonable tone, like an 'if you think about it sensibly, or have the right inside information, these things couldn't possibly be true', is testament somehow to a kind of holding off of challenge by utilizing bluff dismissal. I both get this, and see equivalents of the same very human behaviour in myself and others, and also wonder whether something else was going on - he does seem so very keen to make sure it is his interpretation which wins out. He mentions in the postscript that he is worried that the book is not interesting or entertaining enough, and claims in his usual forthright (or is it mock-forthright?) way that he ought to be excused, after a lifetime of being an entertainer, for writing for himself only for once. I can gainsay him in terms of interest and entertainment - this book is quite happily so. But I do need to add in the next breath that it doesn't produce thrills and excitement - if there was any poetry to Mackenzie, it is long gone.