From source

Breathing pure air

I love lists and pounced on the Guardian’s latest hundred best novels of all time. I quickly reflected that I have to read My Brilliant Friend, that I still don’t want to read Tristram Shandy, and that justice for Moby Dick, the book this letter is named after, languishing in fifteenth!

My slower musing, though, was that I must keep at the classics. In the year I started my first novel I read deeply from Hemingway, Roth, Joyce, Lawrence, as well as fair bits of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Faulkner, Austen, and many various classics, read simply because I had never read them.

Lately much of my reading is spent reviewing new releases, researching articles, and learning history and politics. Journalism is a fine way to raise your profile and I’d never begrudge having to train up a bit. But will I find answers to “To be or not to be?” in The life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 by Norman Gash? Maybe, but it will require some intricate cogitation.

At the Greek coast this week I have kept it simple and read great novels at the pace of one roughly every seventeen Kalamata olives. Jay Cartwright of The Inbetweeners assures his friends the weed he can buy is “pure shit from source”: you’ve got to read pure shit from source. This week I quickly felt that my imagination was back to burning the right wood.

First place on the Guardian list is Middlemarch, by George Eliot, whom I love despite her causing me several humiliations.

At school I was not good enough at English to do Silas Marner and was left with Jekyll and Hyde. That actually turned out ok because my mum instantly said “oh right, where they’re the same person” and no one else knew the twist. I realised I could delight my teacher by wondering if different things were really the same thing. “The moon is mentioned, and the moonlight is sort of its own light, but isn’t it also just a reflection of sunlight?” “Windows… they’re kind of like outside and inside at once.” “Salt – it’s just that it comes out of the sea, but in a way the sea wouldn’t be the sea if it didn’t contain salt…” That kind of formula.

Then in my first weeks at the NS it was only me and an arts editor in the office and she mentioned George Eliot. I thought it would be impressive to say that I liked The Mill on the Floss more than Middlemarch, and that I indeed felt myself quite similar to a character named Maggie Tulliver. The editor cracked up and said “Yeah! I mean is there anyone left who doesn’t identify with Maggie Tulliver?”

This week I read Scenes of Clerical Life, Eliot’s first book of fiction, published when she was thirty-eight. Sometimes first attempts are encouraging, as you can see the seams and lessons. And Clerical Life is a little more stagey than the masterpieces. But still the plunges into the deepest depths of emotional intelligence are completely breathtaking. Try to read the close of the second part, “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story”, and not cry!

So her corpus still daunts. Happily, though, the edition I bought included a diary excerpt. Eliot describes her first forays into fiction: “It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel”. But, “as the years passed on I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel, just as I desponded about everything else in my future life. I always thought I was deficient in dramatic power, both of construction and dialogue… I deferred it, however, after my usual fashion with work that does not present itself as an absolute duty.”

Her partner George Henry Lewes had a nice cheery attitude: “It may be a failure - it may be that you are unable to write fiction. Or perhaps, it may just be good enough to warrant your trying again. You may write a chef-d’oeuvre at once – there’s no telling.”

That’s the spirit – there’s no telling! I will resume weekly word count tallies in the comments and hope you’ll join in – 2967 for me this week, and hopefully 500 more this morning before I head off for a long walk in practise for the Canterbury Pilgrimage!

Thanks for reading as ever folks. Please share Peaceable Land!

GM