New Statesman Scotland - Come back, Midtown Mermaid
Whenever I have to deal with my books, I think of Doris Lessing who, at the Edinburgh Book Festival some years ago, mused aloud on how it came about that, although all she had been interested in since the age of 14 was the reading and writing of books, she had books not only shelved but climbing up her walls demanding to be read. She never did say how she was guided to read one novel rather than another, but I like to think that it was simply a matter of following her nose down an interesting trail - for now that the clean line of tradition has been questioned, we can all follow our reading interests and inclinations till they run into the sand. And having forgotten the connections that brought our eclectic libraries into being, we are free to set up new literary riffs across space and time: Cormac McCarthy meet Patrick White; Bruce Chatwin will be joining us soon.
"What else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?" asked Walter Benjamin in an essay entitled Unpacking My Library. I haven't been unpacking my library, but I've been humphing armfuls of it around to allow a new window to replace an attic frame that was not only rotten, but whose runnels resembled a wasps' graveyard. In the humphing and the humphing back, I was seized by the contradictory desires to chuck half the books out and, on the other hand, to share knowledge of my gems. So this is a very late Christmas recommendation and my two choices, against the grain, are neither fiction nor poetry.
The first is Marc Chagall's My Life, a wonderfully quirky autobiography that takes us from his childhood in the Russian town of Witebsk to success as a painter in Paris, and his return to revolutionary Russia in 1917 to be appointed commissar for fine art in Witebsk. Composed in short, vivid paragraphs, My Life shares with Chagall's paintings a freshness of eye and a fearlessness regarding the direct portrayal of emotion:
" . . . I do not wish to praise or overpraise my mother who is no more. Can I speak of her at all? . . . At times I would rather not speak but sob . . . I rush through the cemetery gate. Lighter than a flame, an aerial shadow, I hasten to shed my tears . . . I see the river flowing away into the distance, the bridge beyond, and close at hand, the eternal barrier, the earth, the grave."
My Life is still available, though not in my OUP edition; Chagall's prose is probably too close to poetry for that publisher's liking.
Chagall was of course famously unsuited for his post as commissar; in place of the authorities' choice of socialist realism, Chagall produced posters of giant green cows. Cows feature prominently in many of his paintings and appear as central to village life. Chagall would therefore have appreciated my second book choice - one of those serendipitous, random purchases that Annie Proulx admits to hoarding to give the proper texture to her stories. It is the Herd Book of the Ayrshire Cattle Herd Book Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 48 (1925).
Chagall would have liked the poetry of this description of the perfect Ayrshire udder: "Long, wide, deep, but not pendulous, nor fleshy; firmly attached to the body, extending well up behind and far forward; quarters even; sole nearly level and not excessively indented between teats, udder veins well developed and plainly visible." I myself bought the book for the poetry of the names - for Eshott Stately Queen, Midtown Mermaid and Auchengibbert Bloomer; for Kirkland Grand Master, Threapwood Royal Realm and Chapmanton Masterman. Are farm animals still blessed with such positive, regal names? Names that blare pride in place and in the seed tucked into a "well-developed and strongly carried scrotum". Or are they called Nobody's Child or Going For A Song?
We have had our novels of urban despair in Scotland, but who is chronicling what is happening in our countryside, as say John Berger did for the peasants he lived among in France? Perhaps we owe it not only to those who farm, but as an elegy to the sorry beasts themselves. The poet George Szirtes ends his tribute to Chagall, "The Green Mare's Advice to the Cows", with these lines:
Dead cows, contented cows. It pays
To trust their unaffected ways
And leave their ghosts a land to graze.
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