Tirra Lirra by the River (23 page)

The possibility of regret for an artistic life unlived is unspoken and terrible. It is so hard for any artist to know how much they need the constraints of their tower, and how much they need the freedom—at the risk of lostness, or lost focus—outside it. But at the same time this is Nora’s victory: she sees that she made something out of what looked like nothing, like entrapment, like waiting. Though, in typical fashion, hers is a silent victory. Nora cannot utter the words even to kind, perceptive Betty Cust, because to do so would be to admit to having had an ambition, like the Lady of Shalott’s, to be both in the world
and in the artist’s tower, using the world as material. Then, as now, this is to court psychological and financial danger, and it may also still be to bring a curse down on your head. Whether you are cursed or not will probably depend on what you find yourself able, in your own time and place, to draw out of ‘the compression of a secret life.’

I didn’t consciously think about this book for thirty years. But, as Nora says, ‘I did not know that such infections can enter the blood, and that a tertiary stage is possible’. I wrote a novel with a wry old narrator who deals with her Australian carer in the present tense, while reexamining and reassembling the puzzle of her past. There are words, scenes and a whole tone of caustic hope-hedging that I can see now are shocking echoes of the pattern this novel imprinted on me.

Which leaves me experiencing an impulse like an alcoholic at AA who must go back through all their acquaintances, hunt them down on Facebook or in life and apologize for what they did when they were drinking, even if they can’t remember what it was. Is it even possible to go back through all your reading and acknowledge what you took, though you didn’t know you took it? If I am honest, I should add that I have also secretly long considered myself at the same time a skinny misfit Frankie Addams, fallen off the known world, and a great fat lugubrious Louie Pollitt, plotting her escape from it.

My old-woman narrator, Ruth, possibly puts it better than I can: ‘Some memories may not even be my own. I heard the stories so often I took them into me, burnished and smothered them as an oyster a piece of grit, and now, mine or not, they are my shiniest self.’

The oyster no more chooses the grit that gets into its shell than we choose which books get under our skin. Nor, I suppose,
can I be any more accountable than a bicuspid for the shape and colour of what I might, years later, cough up. And it is in this way, in the end, that I feel that though I did not steal anything and I cannot give it back, what I can do is acknowledge, in gratitude and awe, what I owe. Or, as Nora puts it, ‘Imagination is only memory at one, or two, or twenty, removes’—and to know that is to repudiate those moves.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

	AFTER MIDNIGHT by Irmgard Keun	978-1-935554-41-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE by Ödön von Horváth	978-1-935554-47-9 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE LATE LORD BYRON by Doris Langley Moore	978-1-935554-48-6 $18.95 / $21.50 CAN
	THE TRAIN by Georges Simenon	978-1-935554-46-2 $14.00 / $16.00 CAN
	THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP by W. H. Davies	978-1-61219-022-8 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	FAITHFUL RUSLAN by Georgi Vladimov	978-1-935554-67-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE PRESIDENT by Georges Simenon	978-1-935554-62-2 $14.00 / $16.00 CAN
	AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE by Cheikh Hamidou Kane	978-1-61219-054-9 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet	978-1-61219-056-3 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE MADONNA OF THE SLEEPING CARS by Maurice Dekobra	978-1-61219-058-7 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	THE BOOK OF KHALID by Ameen Rihani	978-1-61219-087-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	YOUTH WITHOUT GOD by Ödön von Horváth	978-1-61219-119-5 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN