Dear..

Last week I read The City and the House Natalia Ginzburg, an epistolary novel between a group of Italian friends after one of them, Giuseppe, sells his house and moves to America to live with his brother. This novel was a great comfort to me because it’s a novel about people making mistakes and life often feels like one mistake after another. Giuseppe regrets his move almost immediately and tries to make the best of his bad decision. Another one of his friends leaves her husband for an unreliable man. The form of letters is the perfect structure for examining mistakes because you can see people lying to themselves and justifying themselves through their communications with friends; what their friends can sense and what they can’t, what they are withholding from one friend but not from another . Another letter novel I read not to long ago is The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood, one of my favourite authors ( I wrote an introduction to the rerelease of The Fate of Mary Rose) A series of spiralling letters from one woman to various people, they have the energy of that friend who copy and pastes the same frantic WhatsApp message and sends it to a dozen different friends. Most are about her teenage stepdaughter Renata, who lives off package mix cakes which when digested cause her to clog the toilets and who the narrator blames for not being able to paint despite living in a big apartment and with a nanny for her own daughter Sally Ann (everyone has an almost deliberately ugly name in this book) . The narrator’s husband, Arnold wants a divorce and sheds himself of all responsibility for Renata because he believes she isn’t his biological daughter and her own mother is in an institution and can’t care for her.

‘Recently she has been baking far more than her usual quota of instant cakes. Now, when she gobbles them down, it’s as if she is hoping in some camel-like way her body will be able to store them up and enable her to survive the desert future he fears must lie ahead.

She has also been leaving a really grotesque amount of unfleshed paper in the toilet bowl whenever she uses the bathroom. In my silent way, I must have conveyed to her the fact I am only living for the day when I can force her to join the unwilling Arnold.’

The narrator is cruel and her dislike of Renata is all about taste: She is a bourgeois bohemian artist, and to her Renata feels like a tacky interloper in her life who watches tv and prefers instant food, bringing the culture of her husband’s ex wife. Is her fixation on Renata a way of covering the fact she isn’t actually motivated to paint, or has she been unfairly given all the domestic responsibilities by a man who has run off to Paris with yet another woman? How does she react when her problem goes away?

The other night I was in discussion with novelist Nina Allan and critic Niall Harrison for the release of The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G Ballard, written by Allan and her late partner Christopher Priest. It is a biography in which due to tragic circumstances, the biographers make themselves known, and interweave the parallels of their lives beautifully together with Ballard’s. We also touched on The Recollections, a series of great essays by Priest, examining his process of writing, the New Wave of science fiction, New Worlds magazine and being in the Best Young British Novelist cohort of 1983. The essay on this final topic is hilarious and salty, and the first thing I turned to in the collection. He recalls:

I wish I could have met him and really recommend these essays!

In the Ballard biography I underlined this bit about Ballard wanting to live like Magritte:

me too! I am tired of my damp bohemian life in scotland I want to live in a mock tudor house in a London suburb and shop at Waitrose or just excessively eat in restorants as Ballard and his coherts did and have more cats and some dogs too and exotic tulips . I developed scabs all over my lips from stress the past few weeks and the pain of them was so intense I was basically rubbing parcetomol on them. Ludwig at least, is living his best bourgeois life of sunbathing in the overgrown drying green of my building.There are dozens and dozens of bluebells there and many bees.

At the moment I am reading Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark and I think it is the funniest Spark ever. I have never been to Venice but I love anything set in Venice in the 60s/70s/80s and this book has something of the film adaptation of Don’t Look Now

here is a Venetian hotel bedroom:

The room was large with some comfortable chairs besides a huge ornamental bed; this bed was shaped like a swan, with gilded black swans heads forming the foot-posts. At the top of the bed two swans, quilted in body, met face to face with black lacquered heads and golden eyes and beaks.The ceiling was painted in a bright blue and white skyscape.Across this several cherubs blew puffily at a white-grey prancing horse and a very flesh-coloured nude classical rider whose biceps were so large as to be not really healthy.

The man staying in this room with his mistress phones his wife:

He phoned from Paris on his way to Venice. Sounded guilty, really guilty. I said, “Is your woman there with you?” He said, “You mean my colleague?” I said, “I mean your woman.” He said, “You must be referring to my platonic friend.”

I went to see Ben Lerner speak on his new wonderfully short novel I shall write about this on the novella substack. I am doing a lot of marking/editing of other people’s work at the moment and it is so much fun I feel like William Shawn or something and its making me a better writer too I think.

I received my copy of The Little Review with my story The Apostle Clock in it and lots of really good poems by various people its a nice wee magazine which I find helpful keeping on my nightstand so I don’t reach for my phone first thing in the morning to read the news with coffee. What i was thinking of doing too is having a night book and a morning book because sometimes you don’t want to sink back into the book you read just before sleeping? it can feel like staying in your pajamas too long.