Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The temptation I can only partly resist in this review is to let José Saramago write it. This is how he opened his Nobel Prize lecture in 1998:

  The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o’clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife. My mother’s parents lived on this scarcity, on the small breeding of pigs that after weaning were sold to the neighbours in our village of Azinhaga in the province of Ribatejo. . . . In winter when the cold of the night grew to the point of freezing the water in the pots inside the house, they went to the sty and fetched the weaklings among the piglets, taking them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death. Although the two were kindly people, it was not a compassionate soul that prompted them to act in that way: what concerned them, without sentimentalism or rhetoric, was to protect their daily bread, as is natural for people who, to maintain their life, have not learnt to think more than is needful.

  Living and working with his grandparents as a boy gave him the experience that underlies this novel, its inspiration, its motivation, and its tone. In the Nobel talk he summarised it thus:

  Three generations of a peasant family, the Badweathers, from the beginning of the century to the April Revolution of 1974 which toppled dictatorship, move through this novel, called Risen from the Ground, and it was with such men and women risen from the ground, real people first, figures of fiction later, that I learned how to be patient, to trust and to confide in time, that same time that simultaneously builds and destroys us in order to build and once more to destroy us. [Margaret Jull Costas, his trusted translator, gives us the title as Raised from the Ground, and the family name remains in Portuguese, Mau-Tempo.]

  Saramago left journalism and began writing novels late in his life, as if a fine old apple tree should suddenly grow heavy with the golden fruit of the Hesperides. This novel, published in 1980, when he was fifty-eight, is and is not an “early work.” It hasn’t the complex depth of many of his later books, and its style is still fairly conventional (there are periods, and paragraphs), but the narrative voice is unmistakable: a mature, quiet voice, conversational and easy, often ironical or endearingly humorous, that flows forward always weaving and interbraiding with itself, seeming to hesitate or wander but never losing impetus, like a big river running through a dry land.

  The breadth of his thought and sympathy, the difficult balance between the patience and trust he speaks of and his passionate political conviction, give the novel a wider focus than most such testimonies of human injustice. In a passage that describes the beating of a man held as a striker, the place of torture is not, as usual, seen as a a place apart, an unspeakable secret—because nothing can be kept secret. Nothing human is outside nature. Everything is connected. Everything can be spoken. Everything can speak. An ant on the floor sees the man and thinks, “His face is all swollen, his lips cut, and his eyes, poor eyes, you can’t even see them for the bruises, he’s so different from when he first arrived.” When the guards throw water on the victim, we follow the water on its long travels through the depths of the earth, into the clouds and rain, into the earthenware jug from which it is “poured from on high onto a face, an abrupt fall, abruptly broken as it runs slowly over lips, eyes, nose and chin, over gaunt cheeks, over a forehead drenched in sweat . . . and thus it comes to know this man’s as yet still-living mask.”

  Though he includes so much in his vision, Saramago knows what to leave out. How well he knows it, and how rare that knowledge is! He never plods. No flat lists of details. None of the mechanical dialogue that clogs so much contemporary narrative. None of the luxurious lingering on suffering, misery, torture, that’s hailed as gritty realism and pitiless truth-telling, but is more often, for both writer and reader, a self-indulgence in sadistic fantasy. The only fantasy in this novel could be seen as its unexpectedly hopeful ending. Saramago had a very high regard for truth; I think he chose to stop the story on a high point, not because he believed the ideals of social justice would ever be fulfilled—I’m not sure he “believed in” anything, in that sense—but because he judged a rational hope more useful than despair, and because he sought beauty in his art. His great book Blindness makes the same turn to the light at the end. But then Seeing turns away again. . . . He knew what darkness is.

  Death in modern novels is almost habitually violent. People used to die in novels the way they mostly do in real life, prosaically and inevitably, without being shot, knifed, blown apart, or otherwise murdered; but we like our fictional deaths seen as spectacle, not felt as an experience we’re going to share. There’s a death scene near the end of this book; it’s just a man, after a lifetime of overwork and some damage from torture, dying of old age at sixty-seven. We see his death through his own eyes. I think it beats any death scene in any novel I know. Saramago’s truth-telling arises from a rare combination of intelligence, fierce artistic courage, and intense human tenderness.

  In his Nobel talk he said,

  The only thing I am not sure of having assimilated satisfactorily is something that the hardship of those experiences turned into virtues in those women and men: a naturally austere attitude towards life. . . . Every day I feel its presence in my spirit like a persistent summons: I haven’t lost, not yet at least, the hope of meriting a little more the greatness of those examples of dignity proposed to me in the vast immensity of the plains of Alentejo. Time will tell.

  Time now gives us English-speakers the chance to see how well he worked to serve and deserve such greatness in this early novel. We already know how faithfully he followed that austere and summoning spirit through all his work.

  José Saramago: Skylight

  Published in the Guardian, June 2014

  José Saramago submitted the manuscript of Skylight to a Lisbon publisher in 1953. Receiving no response at all, and apparently never seeking one, he was plunged, says his wife, Pilar del Rio, in her introduction, “into a painful, indelible silence that lasted decades.” He did, however, make a reputation as a journalist and editor before he returned to writing fiction in 1977 with the deceptively titled Manual of Painting and Calligraphy. In 1989, having published three novels, he was at work on a fourth when the publisher to which he had sent Skylight wrote him that they had rediscovered the manuscript and would take it as an honor to print it. He went at once and brought it home. His wife tells us that he never read it and said only that “it would not be published in his lifetime.” We must assume that he said nothing about what was to be done with it after his death.

  An old humiliation might be at the root of his neglect of the manuscript; or perhaps, given his late second start, he didn’t want to spend time and thought in a return to this more conventional early work. In any case, I think his wife’s decision to publish it now was sound. Not only does it illuminate the slow development of a radically original artist, but it is an interesting novel in its own right. The translator is the irreproachable Margaret Jull Costa.

  Had the manuscript been accepted, and successful, would Saramago have kept the fine indifference to opinion that let him gradually discover his own incomparably idiosyncratic idiom, style, and subject matter? No telling.

  Paragraphed and punctuated conventionally, Skylight follows a familiar fictional formula: a set of characters thrown together in one place at one time: in this case, a small working-class apartment house in Lisbon around 1950. Six flats; fifteen people, ten of them women. None of them is financially very secure and some are barely getting by; their lives are fragile, frugal, hard. Adriana and Isaura just manage to support their mother and aunt. In the evening all four women listen with yearning intensity to Beethoven on the radio, while young Claudinha next door plays jazzy ragtime. Claudinha’s parents are unhappy in marriage. Emilio the salesman and his Spani
sh wife loathe each other. Brutish Caetano and diabetic Justina, haunted by the loss of her child, go past hatred into open violence.

  The explicit sexuality of the book (which may have kept it from being considered for publication in Salazar’s Portugal in 1953) is remarkable now only because it is so compassionate. Saramago’s sympathy with the two sisters whose sexual desire can find no outlet is deep and subtle, as is his respect for Lidia, a kept woman who, while despising her keeper, respects her own professionalism in the most despised of professions. By a stunning reversal of erotic power, Saramago even manages to redeem the tiresome, pornish cliché of a woman responding to rape with passion.

  Frustration, moral squalor, insecurity, all in close quarters, inevitably breed competition and malice. Moving from character to character, the loosely plotted story includes a good deal of meanspirited evildoing, quite in the tradition of Balzac and the naturalists. It also includes considerable dry humor, and at least one tranquil domestic scene revealed suddenly as almost visionary:

  Then they had supper. Four women sitting round the table. The steaming plates, the white tablecloth, the ceremonial of the meal. On this side—or perhaps on the other side too—of the inevitable noises lay a dense, painful silence, the inquisitorial silence of the past observing us and the ironic silence of the future that awaits us.

  The strongest character in the book is Silvestre the cobbler. In later Saramago novels careful, honest workmen like him will appear, always significant, always wearing their significance lightly. Silvestre is married to Mariana, “so fat as to be comical, so kind as to make one weep”—a thoroughly good marriage of calm-souled, generous people. The reactionaries who now control his country crushed Silvestre’s fierce social and political hopes, but not his spirit. He is a patient man, and his patience, his contentment, come across as far more than mere accommodation to defeat.

  On the edge of poverty, Silvestre and Mariana rent their spare room to a lodger, Abel. He’s about the age of the author of the book, thirty-one or thirty-two, and it’s hard not to read him as to some degree a portrait of the artist as a young man. Purposefully avoiding close connection or commitment to anyone or anything, Abel appears a literary type of his time: the young writer who holds himself aloof, guarded, perceptive, inherently superior, essentially joyless. Though he wins his arguments with Silvestre, Abel strikes me as younger than he thinks he is and perhaps not as wise as he thinks he is. Are his existentialist poses a bit self-indulgent? Silvestre earned his disillusionment the hard way, staking himself on committed radical action. Abel isn’t going to waste his life on illusions. But where will his non-commitment take him? Is he a realist reserving himself to act when action can succeed, or an idealist denying his own paralysis?

  In their last argument Abel gets the last word, in fact the last words of the book: “The day when we can build on love has not yet arrived.”

  In the final silence after this statement I sense an unspoken refutation or qualification, which is the fact of Silvestre’s life, a hardworking, responsible life built, in the most modest, limited, practical way, on love.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner: Dorset Stories

  2006

  A whole region or domain of English literature is populated by great eccentrics. I imagine a hilly, spacious landscape of farm and forest, with no cities or main roads, but many beautiful, isolated houses, each occupied by a hermit of genius: Thomas Love Peacock, George Borrow, Forrest Reid, T. H. White, Sylvia Townsend Warner. . . . It is not that these writers were unaware of the literary fashions and techniques of their time, not at all; they knew quite well where the bright lights were, but they preferred to cultivate their garden.

  Such purity of aim keeps their work singularly fresh, but puts it at risk both during the author’s life and after. Fictions that can’t be conveniently shoved into publishers’ or critics’ pigeonholes get such diminishing labels as “marginal” or “feminist” or “regional,” which permit professors to ignore them and pundits to snub them. And Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work suffered an extra measure of estrangement. In the 1930s, the New Yorker very cannily asked her for first refusal of her stories, and the arrangement lasted till her death in 1978. The large circulation and literary cachet of that magazine ensured that she became well known as a story writer in America. But in England, though the stories were reprinted in collections by British publishers, she appears to have been considered chiefly as a novelist, and her novels were mostly not published in America. This division of her reputation was surely harmful in the long run. Whatever the cause, her books seldom found publishers who kept them in print.

  When I heard that Black Dog Books was about to publish a collection of her Dorset stories, under that title, I couldn’t wait to see it. If any of her volumes of stories were in print in England, they hadn’t made it over to the States; here, her reputation very largely died with her. Indeed, it’s surprising that she ever was a New Yorker star, her work being very British in tone, style, locale, and sense of humor.

  I had the great good fortune to be introduced to Sylvia Townsend Warner late in her life, in her damp, tobacco-smoke-varnished Naiad of a house, which was in Maiden Newton, on the river Frome, and also, from time to time when the river flooded, in it. She was very old, very tired, very kind. I told her I couldn’t remember the name of her story about the family who go on a picnic and end up wandering along a footpath—a middle-aged man playing a fifty-pound music box; a lady carrying a birdcage; a girl dressed as Gainsborough’s portrait of Arminella Blount; and a cadaverous small boy in a bloodstained Indian shawl. Because we’ve been following the perfectly plausible story, we have thought nothing odd at all about the music box, the costume, the birdcage, the blood—until the marvelously funny final reversal of point of view.

  Sylvia laughed, remembering the story, but she couldn’t remember its name or what book it might have been collected in. (It is “A View of Exmoor,” in One Thing Leading to Another—which might well be the collective title of all her stories.)

  That is one of her most gently funny tales. Others are less gentle; some are unbearably cruel. The very late stories about elves, collected as Kingdoms of Elfin, are among the strangest of her works; there is a lordly, icy, anguished indifference in them that chills the blood. Critics who confuse fantasy with whimsy and believe that only realism can deal with pain and cruelty should be exposed to Townsend Warner. She can cast a cold eye with the best of them.

  So I was hoping for a selection of major stories that might reestablish Townsend Warner’s reputation on the level it deserves. The Dorset Stories are not that. They are short occasional pieces, semi-memoirs, and minor tales, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, only a couple of them developed fully as short stories. Many are mildly or not so mildly satirical, and quite funny; several have a dry, understated poignancy that lingers long in the mind. They are well chosen, and wisely arranged to give a certain narrative unity. The book is handsome, elegantly presented, and Reynolds Stone’s woodcuts are in excellent harmony with the text. It is a charming book, and though too slight to serve well as an introduction to her work, will be a treasure to those who already know her. And I recommend it to anyone who would appreciate a wry glance at village life and character, not unkind, but—like all her writing—drastically unsentimental, undeceived.

  After this review was published, I found that in 1988 Viking and in 2000 Virago had published a Selected Stories, giving a good sample of her shorter work, including “A View of Exmoor,” the great story of incest called “A Love Match,” and “On the Stroke of Midnight,” perhaps her most unflinching statement of the impossibility of escape, the inevitability of loss and grief. Yet so little notice was taken of these collections that I didn’t know, in 2006, that they existed.

  Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, reprinted from time to time, is a dazzling display of the extraordinary wit and tough-mindedness of her fantasy; her historical novel The Corner That Held Them is harsh and splendid in its realism. She, who wrote
an unsurpassable biography of T. H. White, was as fortunate in her biographer, Claire Harman. And then there are her poems; her letters, full of wit and fire and charm; and her diary, the record of a generous mind, a fiercely observant eye, and an intransigently faithful heart.

  Jo Walton: Among Others

  2013

  The beautifully titled novel Among Others is, I suppose, a fairy tale, since there are fairies in it, or anyhow beings called fairies. They aren’t visible to everyone, yet can affect the lives of people who don’t see them, or don’t believe in them. In that, they play in modern industrial England something like their role in the folklore of the past. They don’t, however, fit conventional notions of fairylikeness. They aren’t the tall Fair Ones who carry you off under the hill, nor yet the tiny Peaseblossoms and sprites the Victorians loved, and they are most definitely not Tinker Bell. Descriptions suggest that the great illustrator Arthur Rackham was one of the people who could see them:

  In the same way that oak trees have acorns and hand-shaped leaves and hazels have hazelnuts and little curved leaves, most fairies are gnarly and grey or green or brown and there’s generally something hairy about them somewhere. This one was grey, very gnarly indeed, and well over towards the hideous part of the spectrum.