A Reading Diary (13 page)

Two Decembers ago, I sat in the Grand Hotel in Poitiers, waiting for the owners of the house to agree on a date for the signing, and read
The Wind in the Willows. I’
ve picked it up again, to celebrate our second Christmas in the house. I don’t remember when I read it first, or what I thought of it then, but I’ve always felt a fondness for it, without knowing precisely why. Reading it now, I realize that my choice was exactly right.
The Wind in the Willows
is all about home. In the midst of something like despair (would we ever find the right place?) and nostalgia (remember the view from the kitchen window of the small house in Toronto? Remember the fireplace? The tin mouldings on the ceiling?) I come across this line: “We’re going to find that home of yours, old fellow,” (this is Rat speaking) “so you had better come along, for it will take some finding, and we shall want your nose.”

Nose, of course, is what we always need.

There is something like snow in the air, but not quite, just enough to remind us of December in Canada. We miss the snow. Rat: “Snow makes everything look so very different.”

We sit in the kitchen, under the stained beams. The main one was replaced soon after we moved in, over a year
ago, a memorable operation. It was rotten, held up by a wooden column that looked like a gallows, and so soft that we could stick a knife into it as if it were butter. A new beam was needed, and the carpenter discovered one in a nearby village. It’s five metres long and almost two centuries old; five men were required to carry it.

There is an image in the back of my mind (an engraving?) of people transporting the skeleton of a whale from Portsmouth to London.

According to Alan Bennett,
The Wind in the Willows
is Mole’s
Bildungsroman
. Mole is content as long as he isn’t adventurous. Contentment requires a certain lack of curiosity.

I remember that, shortly after I left Buenos Aires in 1968, I became convinced that I would never live in the same place for more than two years at a time. So I spent periods of two years in Barcelona, Paris, London, Milan, Tahiti. … Then I settled in Canada and everything changed.

Now I’m suddenly flooded by the certainty of places I won’t live in, things I won’t do, roles I won’t play: a huge cosmic pageant that excludes me completely.

Unutterable relief.

I like Mr. Badger very much. He doesn’t mind a certain neglect of manners, “nor did he take notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once. As he did not go into Society himself, he had got the idea that these things belonged to the things that didn’t really matter.”

Note: It might be useful to compile a list of “things that don’t really matter.” Such a list would enormously alleviate my daily lot of worrying.

Toad, on the other hand, I don’t like. He is exactly like a certain kind of schoolmate who always used to appear, under different names and guises, in all my classes, annoying because a braggart and pitiful because a coward. And a snob, too. Mavis remembers being horrified by Toad’s attack on the barge-woman he meets during his ignominious escape. “You common, low,
fat
barge-woman!” he shouted; “don’t you dare to talk to your betters like that! … I would have you know that I am a Toad, a very well-known, respected, distinguished Toad! I may be under a bit of a cloud at present, but I will
not
be laughed at by a barge-woman!”

Very cold but sunny. For a few hours this morning every leaf of grass, every twig was covered with brilliant fur-like frost. The garden looks uncanny.

When Rat and Mole, lost in the snowstorm in the Wild Wood, finally knock on Mr. Badger’s door, they hear “the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from inside,” which seems to Mole “like some one walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down-at-heel.” That shuffling sound reminds me of the terrifying moment in Kipling’s story “The Wish House” when the unseen creature that is able to grant wishes moves behind the closed door like “a heavy woman in slippers.” The sound that is comforting in
The Wind in the Willows
turns nightmarish in “The Wish House.”

Richard Outram tells C. that Barbara, his wife, died last night. Her engravings, with Richard’s poems, hang upstairs in the house. C. has a fiery landscape by her—orange, yellow and purple—in his office; it illuminates the room. It seems impossible that we will never see her, speak with her, again. Ever.

I am furious at the taking away of things, at these brutal changes. And the older I get, the faster changes happen: friends disappear, landscapes clutter. I want my friends to be there always, I want the places I like to stay the same. I want there to be certain fixed points in the universe on which I can count. I don’t want to keep missing voices, faces, names. I want to be able to move around blindfolded. I don’t want to have to learn my way around a room again and again. I want to be able to start conversations without any kind of preamble or introduction.

There is a long passage in
The Wind in the Willows
, at the end of the chapter in which Mole finds his old house again, that I want to quote in its entirety:

The word “nostalgia” was invented on 22 June, 1688, by Johannes Hofer, an Alsatian medical student, by combining the word
nostos
(“return”) with the word
algos
(“pain”) in his medical thesis
Dissertatio medica de nostalgia
, to describe the sickness of Swiss soldiers kept far away from their mountains.

Kenneth Grahame is masterly at describing comfort. “The Badger’s winter stores, which indeed were visible everywhere, took up half the room—piles of apples, turnips, and potatoes, baskets full of nuts, and jars of honey; but the two little white beds on the remainder of the floor looked soft and inviting, and the linen on them, though coarse, was clean and smelt beautifully of lavender.” Reading a description like this, especially in my adolescence, made me fantasize for hours of a place of my own, and what it would look like.

Thirteen years before writing
The Wind in the Willows
, Grahame had a dream. He found himself in “a certain little room, very dear and familiar … solitary, the world walled out, but full of a brooding sense of peace and possession … All was modest—O, so very modest! But all was my very own, and what was more, everything in the room was exactly right.”

A few times I have had that sense of “everything in the room” being “exactly right.”

I can tell what it will be like to live in a certain house as soon as I cross the threshold. The empathy (or lack of) is immediate. In the sixteenth-century picaresque novel
El Lazarillo de Tormes
, the hero notes, “There are unhappy and ill-rooted houses that stick their misfortune onto those who live in them.” The same is true for places that are joyful.

This evening we start wrapping Christmas presents.

Grahame wisely divides adventurers into those who like their adventures orderly and those who prefer the thrill of chaos:

I think I am like Mole in this.

Explaining “home”: In today’s
New York Times
, the announcement that the Bush administration has recruited “prominent American writers” to explain the United States to Muslim countries. In spite of “congressional fears of the government propagandizing the American people,” writers such as Richard Ford, Julia Alvarez, Robert Pinsky, Sven Birkerts, Robert Olen Butler and Bharati Mukherjee agreed to contribute to an ail-American Festschrift. True, at all times great writers have lent their voices to political propaganda (Virgil’s
Aeneid
was for Augustus a handy justification for his claim to divine power), and yet it still astonishes me to see with what naïveté writers as intelligent as Pinsky allow their work to be used by their government. Phrases such as “being an American, and a writer no less, has served me very well indeed” (Richard Ford) will do little to temper the loathing that American policies have bred in most countries around the world.

Chesterton on patriotism: “ ‘My country right or wrong’ … is like saying, ‘My mother drunk or sober.’ ”

Ovid’s
Tristia
, the poems he wrote after he had been exiled to the dreadful outpost of Tomis by Augustus, are mostly in the form of letters to friends and enemies, lamenting his absence from Rome and his loneliness in the barren, treeless landscape.
The Wind in the Willows
is the reverse of Ovid’s
Tristia
.

I have never felt in exile, unlike so many of the writers I’ve met. I remember the Cuban group in Paris, clustered around the novelist Severo Sarduy, always conscious of not being in the place they had been compelled to leave. Sarduy was very aware that exile had made him nostalgic for a country that no longer existed, perhaps had never existed, at least as he remembered it—a country created by layers and layers of memory, embroidered, corrected, reshaped. He believed that even the places we live in become transformed through our prejudices, whims, limited experience, through the fact that we walk one route and not another from our house to the baker’s, or that we choose one café, one park, one grocer from the variety of sites that make up a certain city. In this sense, every place is imaginary.

Sarduy used the description Columbus gave of Cuba (which the admiral believed was India) to describe a visit he himself made to India, nostalgic for Cuba.

For the exile, time back home has come to a stop. For him, every custom, every catchphrase, every ritual is reverently preserved. In this Sleeping Beauty homeland, childhood friends, unchanged of course, still mourn our departure, billboards still advertise the same brands. Ovid compares his death in exile to that of the dying swan uttering its final notes amidst the surrounding silence. “My own death shall be like this,” he says, “but I myself shall perform my last rites.”

Cortázar, who left Buenos Aires for Paris in 1951, once said that exile was the best way of ensuring devotion to your country. Ovid: “As long as I’m in Tomis, I’ll write complaints.”

Charlotte comes looking for her cat. The cat has decided to make herself at home in our place. Every so often Charlotte comes and picks her up, but five minutes later the cat is back. She walks into the garden, tail in the air, yawns luxuriously and then curls up in a perfect circle inside an unused lavender pot, or decides to nap in the stone flower
box and stretches out to the edges in a curiously precise rectangle.

Ancestors of Mole, Toad and Rat: archaeologists in Mexico have discovered Olmec artifacts carved more than 2,500 years ago, depicting speaking animals.

Still on the subject of exile: “To me literature is forever blowing a horn, singing about youth when youth is irretrievably gone, singing about your homeland when in the schizophrenia of the times you find yourself in a land that lies over the ocean, a land—no matter how hospitable and friendly—where your heart is not, because you landed on those shores too late.” Josef Skvorecky in Toronto, writing on his beloved Czechoslovakia.

I notice that I hurry through Toad’s adventures. In the chapter called “The Return of Ulysses” the reclaiming of Toad Hall from the weasels has a certain epic grandeur, but Toad behaves like a spoiled brat, and has more of sulky Achilles than of the subtle King of Ithaca.

On the other hand, I can read the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” a hundred times. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish
I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever.”

Pages like this take place without translation into meaning, swiftly, and then we are back in the realm of reasoning and understanding.

Christmas preparations.

A friend gives me a reproduction of the “Map of the Wild Wood and Surroundings” that Shepard drew for the endpaper pages of Grahame’s book.

Cookham Dene, on the Thames, is the setting for
The Wind in the Willows
. Here Grahame lived when he wrote the book, with his wife and their son, Alastair, known affectionately as Mouse. Apparently,
The Wind in the Willows
was first told to the four-year-old Alastair after “a bad crying fit on the night of his birthday,” episode after episode, till midnight. Years later, Alastair was killed in Oxford, in an unexplained accident. Suddenly, the book becomes an elegy.