This anecdote’s been rattling around my head for a while. It’s related in Jane Smiley’s splendid Penguin Lives study of Charles Dickens. At the time it occurred Dickens was in the planning stages of Little Dorrit–a successful author but feeling increasingly restless in his marriage. He receives a letter from his first love, Maria Beadnell, whom he loved ardently as a young man and who refused him. She is now Mrs. Winter and aged forty-four. His reply is warm and charming. Correspondence flies. She confesses that in the decades since he last saw her she’s grown “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” He responds that he doesn’t believe it.
A meeting is arranged, and as Smiley describes it, “[it] was not a success. Mrs. Winter was as she described herself and, in addition, extremely talkative.”
It’s the letter that Dickens sends after this meeting that I find so horrifying and amusing. Horrifying on Mrs. Winter’s behalf–for obvious reasons.* Amusing because it’s such a perfect specimen of a writer who’s having trouble writing and is in bad temper, on a rampage and behaving badly. Dickens sends it to explain why he must miss a planned engagement:

You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to care about, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. “It is only half an hour”–“It is only an afternoon”–“It is only an evening”–people say to me over and over again–but they don’t know that it is impossible to command oneself to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes, or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a day away. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.

I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web Sudoku for an hour.
* In one last burst of writerly bad behavior, Dickens went on to write Mrs. Winter into Little Dorrit as the character Flora, who is portrayed as “fat,” “foolish” and “flirtatious” albeit ultimately “kindhearted.” Poor Mrs. Winter! To her great credit, she seems to have acquitted herself with grace and good humor throughout the entire episode.

I’ve resisted doing this list as it pretty much exhausts all my cocktail party ammo — but for the sake of unity I’ll follow Terry and OGIC into the breech. Forgive me if any of this duplicates anything I already have nattered on to you about online or in person.
1. I once rode an elevator with W.S. Merwin after a reading. I was supposed to try to get an interview with him. Choked.
2. My taste in music is an ongoing source of embarrassment to me — and my stepkids.
3. I love reading in the bath.
4. I like to eat out and before I go to sleep I often lie in bed and re-play really great meals I’ve had. (My stepdaughter does this too.)
5. My mother is named after the French painter LeBrun.
6. I recently learned that both my (half) sister and I share an affection for the word “haberdashery” and both associate it with our dad.
7. I wish there was a game show devoted to questions about Jane Eyre. Not only because I think I’d do well, but also because it’d be a pleasure to meet all the other contestants.
8. I’m easily agitated by movie violence, especially if there are guns waving around even if they’re only there for comic effect (e.g., Return of the Pink Panther). It’s a ridiculous and (thus far) un-masterable fear …
9. … I do, however, really enjoy well-choreographed fight scenes. A few favorite cinematic/tv ones are Jackie Chan with the wooden shoes in Who Am I?, the T. Rex v. King Kong fight in Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, and the fight between Buffy and Angel at the end of “Becoming” part 2.
10. I was diagnosed as dyslexic as a kid. So was my sister. As adults, we both fetish-ize books and reading. I don’t think it’s unrelated.
11. My dyslexia was caught early and I became a reading maniac. My favorite way to read as a kid was hanging upside down from the furniture around the house, like a bat. It hurts my back to think about this now.
12. I’ve flown on the Concorde.
13. My mom is dog crazy. One Christmas a family friend gave her the Christopher Guest movie Best In Show, i.e., the definitive film about dog craziness, as a present. Later, the friend asked my mom what she thought of the movie. My mom answered, “Those were some beautiful dogs.”
14. I have trouble with depression and trot around outside a lot to keep it in check. Sometimes this makes me feel like a melancholic dog that needs a lot of walking or gives way to molt.
15. I’m a member of the Unitarian Church in Asheville. My husband Lowell isn’t. When I’m behind on my tithing and we have to write a big check to catch up, he says it’s like “paying off a bad gambling debt.”
16. The minister who married us conducted Carl Sandburg’s funeral service in 1967.
17. The first sports event I remember watching with any interest was the 1992 Kentucky-Duke game that ended with the Laettner bucket.
18. I always seem to live in places that start with “A”: Appleton, Amherst, Austin, Atlanta, Asheville.
19. Our household’s favorite baseball player is Julio Franco, who retired last year. You know those Little League pitchers who are secretly 26 years old? When he was last playing, Julio’s age was officially 49 but you knew if they cut him open and counted the rings it’d turn out to be more like 80. I love him for that and for never, ever swinging at a first pitch. It made me sad that there wasn’t more hoopla when he retired.
20. When I visit a new city, I like to walk the entire length of — or as far as I can go — either north-south or east-west. Not into the suburbs, just to the edges of whatever map I have. Really prolonged, non-destination-oriented walking. Some of my best travel experiences have happened walking this way (Boston, Santiago, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Minneapolis).
21. I love libraries and can get pretty wound up talking about their importance. Short version: God bless librarians and God bless the right to knowledge and beauty.
22. One of my earliest report cards said, “Carrie enjoys talking to [best friend] too much during class time.” True — all through school. Through work. Through life. A terrible habit, but I’ve been exceptionally fortunate in the friends I’ve made along the way.
23. I think a lot of life is like an awkward scene out of a Barbara Pym novel. Instance: In college I was going somewhere off-campus and ended up walking beside a guy — very elegant, fine-boned, blond — who I often sat next to in Nabokov seminar and who was headed to the same destination. Felt very Cossack-y jostling along beside him. Said, “So, I see you keep falling asleep in class — HA HA!” and he looked at me, very embarrassed, and said he couldn’t help it, he had a condition.
24. Lowell’s and my current big, quixotic plan is to figure out how we can live in a bigger city (preferably abroad) for one to three months a year. Preferred spots to start: Boston, Edinburgh or Antwerp.
25. If I played roller derby, my roller derby name would be Steph N. Wolf.

Fair warning: I’ve been immersed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge-related reading for the past month or so and am spilling over with observations & anecdotes. Buckle up!
In Early Visions, the first of his two-part biography of STC, Richard Holmes gives the genesis of “Kubla Khan,” and what it got me thinking about is the ways in which the kingdom described gets mapped and re-mapped as it goes from source material to poem and then to interpretation of the poem.
When he published “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge explained in an attached note that its inspiration came from John Purchas’s Pilgrimage, a nine-volume anthology of travel stories and folk tales published in 1614 (“Kubla Khan” was written in 1797). Here’s the relevant paragraph of the Purchas, which Holmes quotes in full:

In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddows, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the midst thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place. Here he doth abide in the months of June, July, and August, on the eight and twentieth day whereof, he departeth thence to another place to do sacrifice in this manner: He hath a Herd or Drove of Horses and Mares, about ten thousand, as white as snow; of the milke whereof none may taste, except he be of the blood of Cingis Can. Yea, the Tartars do these beasts great reverence, nor dare any cross their way, or go before them. According to the directions of his Astrologers or Magicians, he on the eight and twentieth day of August aforesaid, spendeth and poureth forth with his owne hands the milke of these Mares in the aire, and on the earth, to give drink to the spirits and Idols which they worship, that they may preserve the men, women, beasts, birds, corne, and other things growing on the earth.

So that was the source. Now read the poem. Then here comes the next layer of imagining of the kingdom, in the mind of the reader/ critic — in this case, Ted Hughes, whose book of essays Winter Pollen includes a wonderful study of the poem:

Looking at the paradise depicted in what I called the Overture, one gets the impression of a great sphere, or perhaps an ovoid, broader at the bottom.
The ‘sunny pleasure dome’, with its gardens, woods, and river valley, is at the top. A little below, tucked in somewhat under the dome, beneath a forested overhang, removed from the direct sunlight that falls on the dome but mysteriously open to the moon, a deep fold encloses the sources of the river. These are the upward, outward features, like the hair and splendid brow, with the spiritual eyes, and beneath it the sensuous perhaps rather crude mouth, of an exotic humpty dumpty.

[Read more…]

“I eventually went up into that little side valley where the rhododendron thickets are and there I sat. I began to read and I read about an hour. Twice rabbits came to within ten feet of me–quivering with nerves–almost ready to drop in nervous breakdown they look when they know something’s wrong but not what. I read on 100 pages then was interrupted by a cat. A black and white cat. It sat within fifteen feet of me, on a rock, and began to stare me out–very offensive. When I threw a sod at it, it just flattened and went on staring. I couldn’t go on reading–the cat completely disturbing the landscape. It wasn’t an interesting wildcat, and while it was there no interesting wild thing would come near, so I moved off and came home, ousted by a cat.”
October 1956 letter from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath, Letters of Ted Hughes

The bit of description that follows below has been in my head all week, since hearing about John Updike’s death. It’s from Witches of Eastwick, which I re-read a couple months ago and which, if I’m honest, is the novel of his that I feel the greatest true affection for. (Who knows where, once all the sifting & shaking is done, Witches will stand in the Updike canon; but I hope it doesn’t get struck for all the more Important Ones.)
This sentence stuck because its construction so resembles a really marvelous, elaborate marble run, and it seemed like on this week, even while we pay tribute to Updike’s Zeus-ian stature (first among writers, 60+ books, with enough good ones and bad ones in there to fuel a dozen mortal careers), it’s also nice to stop and appreciate him at this, a sentence level:

Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street, its trendy shops with their perfumed candles and stained-glass shade-pulls aimed at the summer tourists and its old-style aluminum diner next to a bakery and its barber’s next to a framer’s and its little clattering newspaper office and long dark hardware store run by Armenians, was intertwined with saltwater as it slipped and slapped and slopped against the culverts and pilings the street in part was built upon, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-wheat bread and filtered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette.

* * *
A few tributes I’ve enjoyed:
• Lorrie Moore’s appreciation in today’s New York Times, which contains a beautiful, just-right description of Updike’s criticism as “part rose, part snake.”
• Martin Amis in The Guardian; it’s interesting to read this one, with its observation about Updike’s love for James Joyce, back to back with a story like “A&P“.
• Joseph O’Neill for Granta. (Via TEV.)

“The local bookshop is run by an Englishman and his wife who is about 20 years older than he, very cute, really, with dyed bright pink hair. They play chess in the corner and very much dislike being interrupted by a customer. The other day a man I knew went in to buy a book and asked for it timidly. Hugh, the Englishman, said, ‘Good heavens, man! Can’t you see I’m about to make a move?’ When I first went in this year the wife asked me in her jolliest way what I was doing now? Writing or what? I said writing, and she replied ‘Ha-ha–always something!'”
Jan.1, 1948 letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, Words In Air

My friend R. recently introduced me to Tom Jobim’s “Águas de Março.” It’s a wondrous little song, and an especially nice one to listen to on a day like today, when you may find yourself back at a desk feeling simultaneously tamped down and stretched thin. Here it’s performed by Elis Regina (and provided with English subtitles). If you like it, you may want to get Elis & Tom — the album was new to me, but probably isn’t to many About Last Night Readers and, evidently, if you grew up in Brazil in the ’70s your house had a copy.*

* After seeing that last “if you grew up in Brazil in the ’70s” observation a few different places online, I’ve been amusing myself trying to think of what the album’s American equivalent would be, ubiquity-wise: Music Box Dancer? Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Aloha From Hawaii?

The woods near our house are well populated with crows. This fall may have been tough on squirrels, but the crows appear to be flourishing; the ones I see are mammoth, glossy beasts. They’ve been around all year but with the leaves gone and the sky so gray, the woods seem emptier lately and I notice them more.
When I see a crowd of them, I sometimes think about David Copperfield’s childhood home, The Rookery, which gets explained in the first chapter of the novel this way:

“In the name of Heaven,” said Miss Betsey, suddenly, “why Rookery?”
“Do you mean the house, ma’am?” asked my mother.
“Why Rookery?” said Miss Betsey. “Cookery would have been more to the purpose, if you had had any practical ideas of life, either of you.”
“The name was Mr. Copperfield’s choice,” returned my mothe. “When he bought the house, he liked to think there were rooks about it.”
The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind, some weather-beaten ragged old rooks’-nests burdening their higher branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy sea.
“Where are the birds?” asked Miss Betsey.
“The—-?” My mother had been thinking of something else.
“The rooks–what has become of them?” asked Miss Betsey.
“There have not been any since we have lived here,” said my mother. “We thought–Mr. Copperfield thought–it was quite a larger rookery; but the nests were very old ones, and the birds have deserted them a long while.”
“David Copperfield all over!” cried Miss Betsey. “David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust because he sees the nests!”

Rookeries are, of course, all over English novels and as a kid I somehow formed the impression that they were a man-made addition to the grounds of a home, like a super-gothic chicken coop. Looking it up this morning I see it’d be hard to cultivate crows for picturesque advantage:

Rooks and jackdaws like to roost together, but prefer to build their nests in different sites: Jackdaws prefer holes in trees whereas rooks nest in colonies in tall trees called rookeries.

Human structures are seldom used. For rooks to leave a rookery was considered a bad omen for those who owned the land.

That last bit adds to the doomed chord sounded in that opening passage in David Copperfield: Not only had the rooks abandoned the home, they took all the luck with them.