Peaceable Land 1 - Intro
As the stamp said to the letter...
In all literary London, the adjective considered more damning than any other, so far as I can tell, is ‘grand’. If a fellow has become ‘a bit grand’ in his column lately he could have done little more grievous. Unfashionably, however, I think of literature very grandly. I think of it no less grandly than Captain Ahab did of his “war upon the horrors of the deep”.
for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceable land, for forty years to make war upon the horrors of the deep!
As you see, to make his war he forsaked peaceable land, and peaceable land is our title here. So this page is for relaxed writings, and is to be consumed in various attitudes of Chill. Perhaps cracking pistachios, in blue jeans, at a wooden table. Perhaps across long views of crisp metropolitan mornings, taking espresso at an outdoor table. Perhaps in the afterhiss – soft explosion! – of a 330ml beer bottle, uncapped at last.
That was a try for a list where each item has its own angle. Not a great one – I now see they all involve food or drink, but to save agony I am keeping a three-draft rule. In my mind was a bit from On The Road. I’ll put it in at length at the bottom. The ability to do that will be one of the nice things about a page like this.
Mentioning On The Road always makes me think about how we must not scorn our younger selves. The energy that first read gives you is undeniable – it got my pal a girlfriend, and even if he might facepalm at the book now, he still loves her.
That’s an idea that could be good for a few hundred words. That would be a medium week. Medium week’s might also see, I suppose, a bit of chirpy flaneurism, maybe a comic diary. Quite likely a bad replication of whatever I’m reading that week (comic diaries at the moment).
Good weeks would see pieces that didn’t quite fit in the NS but that lots of love went into – I have a nice emotional one on Nabokov, for instance. Weeks of manic busyness I don’t really have, but weeks of outrageous sloth, which I sometimes do, might just see clippings I liked. I will try hard not to miss a week.
There might even be, it now strikes me, weeks of both great writing and outrageous sloth at once: if I can persuade any of my many very talented friends to do an entry for me. I know several master journalists from the NS, and I do go around giving them oranges most days to encourage a vague sense of debt…
I like Sunday mornings for posting. There might be exceptions if a post has a ‘hook’ date that could win listings on aggregator sites, for instance my Grand Unified Theory of the Sally Rooney universe would make sense exactly 1/2/3 months before her novel comes out, and December 1st would suit my GUT of Richard Curtis.
So the day might shift. But the email system makes your missing nothing very easy, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it…
No pressure. But I hope you do. I also hope, I want to say, that you will comment or write in if you have really any thoughts at all. Sometimes I wonder if all my involvement with literature is just the search for one person who will say yes I feel like that too. It needn’t be of the degree you get from great novels – remember this is but peaceable land. Don’t be deterred from writing, that is, by any idea that your sense of communion is not ‘grand’ enough! Anything will do! Thanks!
GM
Afterbirth
My most recent article in the NS.
What the stamp said to the letter is: revealed in the email you get after subscribing.
The full speech of Ahab, that inveterate but very vertebrate (sorry) sailor. The versions I’m finding say “peaceful” rather than “peaceable”.
“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!”
The passage from On The Road. Now only the use of posture for Jane Lee seems inventive, but it had force at the time.
All my other current friends were ‘intellectuals’ – Chad the Nietzschean anthropologist, Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and his critical anti-everything drawl – or else they were slinking criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the New Yorker. But Dean’s intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his ‘criminality’ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, ‘so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,’ and ‘so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!’ – and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, ‘It is your portion under the sun.’