Companions
Page 34
Camilla talked at great length about her romance; I underlined the following in The Unicorn by Murdoch, which Camilla has also lent me (so when she rereads it, she can find herself there): ‘With that pride which accompanies falling in love at what passes as an advanced age he was but too eager to display it to everyone.’
In fact she wrote to him and told him how much she had fallen for him that night, at the hotel in New York.
‘If only you knew,’ he replied, ‘how many people are falling for me.’
Afterwards he listed and described a number of these women, one of whom was his wife, still madly in love after twenty-five years of marriage. He could not have done her a bigger favour; who wants to be one among many, one person in a chorus of sighs. The love (Camilla’s) subsided in one afternoon; nearly. As it does with the characters in A Severed Head, where the next one is generally better than the first. And here I place a pensive (but with the beginning of a smile?) round yellow micro-face. I am the only admirer of smileys among the companions.
BY THE BANKS OF THE BOOKCASE
[Camilla]
I stand by the banks of the bookcase and observe that a good deal of flotsam has drifted in since I last made my rounds, but I also discover that a good deal of what I require is missing. My Gogols are missing, Dead Souls, The Overcoat as well as Vladimir Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They is missing, and The Lover is missing, The Illusionist is missing, and Murdoch, beloved Murdoch is missing.
When Charles and I were getting divorced, we took the books down from the shelves (mouldy dust covered those most seldom read) to then build three towers in the living room, one for him and one for me and one for the second-hand bookseller with the white hair and beard. A few made desperate attempts to abscond by leaping from the towers, each attempt always resulted in broken spines snapped necks – and several times the suicidal ones at the very top dragged the books beneath them along in the fall. I swept up the dead and dying into a pile of their own. During the process of division the towers sometimes collapsed and some landed in the wrong place – which is why I am now missing some. And so once again I have to take the heavy route to the second-hand bookstore (from where I always depart with more than I set out for) to see if I can buy some of my old books back. Those that ended up with Charles by mistake are obviously lost for ever.
John Bayley and Iris Murdoch spent their entire marriage living in a sinful mess because Iris Murdoch was a hoarder, just like Charles, and just like him she loved rocks and gathered them in great quantities; dust beget rocks, which draw their life from water and light, a death-like quality; as soon as something had entered their home, she could not let go of it again, they lived among piles, accumulations of junk that they had to take with them when they moved; when Iris Murdoch got Alzheimer’s she even picked up cigarette butts, dead worms, bits of paper from the street and brought them home. This did not particularly bother John Bayley, Elegy for Iris is the account, it could be said, of a happy marriage, about each side’s joy at living together. This joy, it is understood, had to do with them not being ridden by some idea of development; they did not envisage their marriage or their love life changing or leading anywhere. When Iris Murdoch got Alzheimer’s, the illness forced change upon their marriage, their roles were drastically changed – this change or development tragically and ironically became the chief concern.
Back to the joy of being together (before Iris Murdoch grew ill):
‘We were together because we were comforted and reassured by the solitariness each saw and was aware of in the other.’
— John Bayley, Elegy For Iris
(I often look up words even when I know what they mean, because I enjoy reading the explanatory examples accompanying the references. Like now, ‘solitariness’: ‘It was the overwhelming solitariness of his existence that caused the marooned sailor to go mad.’ What a gift – driven to distraction considering how the madness of the marooned sailor manifested itself, did he run screaming up and down the deserted beach? (When men scream, things have truly gone wrong.) Had he collected piles of sticks but long since forgotten the meaning of fire? Or were the piles of sticks intended as a sign to God? And who was there to attest to his madness? Could the sailor, until he definitively sailed into his own darkness, see it for himself and account for it?)
I don’t know if I have ever felt like that about another person – in any case I have never considered someone’s solitariness in that way: as a mirror of my own. Charles’s solitariness – I felt trapped with it (in the same house as it), and I felt locked out from it / with no access to him, because his solitariness was so great. If I had accepted it as a condition, not as something I had to confront, change, it might have been easier. And the same goes for my solitariness. If I had not wanted it to be redressed: by the marriage. Well.
If I were to ask Alma if a person can take the liberty to write anything at all about another person, what would she say?
‘I would say yes,’ Alma said, ‘it is only a matter of tactfulness. You have to be tactful – and put yourself on the line too, place yourself in exposed positions, pass judgement on yourself (Ibsen believed a person did that automatically when writing).’
I ask, because I am not certain that I have enjoyed reading about how John Bayley had to fight to take Iris Murdoch’s trousers off before they went to bed every night – when she grew ill, she wanted to sleep fully dressed. Nor do I like to read about how disgusting he finds her odour. Had that been necessary to write… and what things has he not written about; where has he drawn the line. In any case he passes judgement on himself by writing about his fits of anger, which arise when he can no longer endure hearing his wife repeat ‘When are we going,’ or when he gets far too upset about her watering their potted plants to death.
‘The part you do not like to read,’ Alma said, ‘is that these things happen to a person; that a woman who has written twenty-six novels, whose headstrong mystical alluring worlds you have loved residing in, ends up only being able to find peace by watching Teletubbies on TV, emitting a musty odour, the same as that of the house. And you do not like reading about how angry a person can get from living with someone who is ill, worn to the bone. And anyway can I be spared this didactic conversation, it’s unworthy. Let’s talk about your foetus, or let’s talk about Gogol,’ and she pulled Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol out of her bag and slammed it down on the table.
‘So you had it! Would you be so good as to find me a good word.’
‘Alright, how about: Nose. There you go.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jacques Testard with all my heart for publishing Companions in English, and Paul Russell Garrett for his fine translation.
I am also very grateful that my agent Laurence Laluyaux has succeeded in bringing Companions outside the borders of Denmark and into the world.
I want to thank my Danish publisher of many years, Jakob Malling Lambert, for all his enthusiasm and support.
And finally I want to thank the translator Roger Greenwald, who previously translated some pieces from Companions which appeared in various literary magazines and in the Best European Fiction 2013 anthology; and allowing us to reproduce his translation of ‘Three Little Chinamen’ in this edition.
Permissions
By order of appearance:
‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, Faber & Faber, 2001. Copyright © 1943 T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and the T.S. Eliot Estate.
‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, Ariel, Sylvia Plath, Faber & Faber, 2010. Copyright © 1965 Sylvia Plath. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and the Sylvia Plath Estate.
‘The Bee Meeting’, Ariel, Sylvia Plath, Faber & Faber, 2010. Copyright © 1965 Sylvia Plath. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and the Sylvia Plath Estate.
Ada, Vladimir Nabokov, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Copyright © 1969 Vladimir Nabokov. Reproduced by permission of the Vladimir Na
bokov Estate.
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, Vintage Classics, 2001. Copyright © 1961 Iris Murdoch. Reproduced by permission of Ed Victor Literary Agency and the
Iris Murdoch Estate. Iris, John Bayley, Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2012. Copyright © 1999 John Bayley. Reproduced by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd.
About the Author
Christina Hesselholdt, born in 1962, studied at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen. Her first novel, Køkkenet, Gravkammeret & Landskabet [The Kitchen, the Tomb & the Landscape], was published in 1991. She has written fifteen books of prose, and received critical acclaim and awards for her books, including the Beatrice Prize in 2007 and the Critics’ Prize in 2010. She was included in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2013. Companions is her first book to appear in English. Her latest work, Vivian, a novel about the photographer Vivian Maier, was published by Rosinante in 2016. It won the Danish Radio Best Novel Award 2017 and has been shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2017.
Paul Russell Garrett translates from Danish and Norwegian. He serves on the management committee of the Translators Association and is Programme Director for a new theatre translation initiative, [Foreign Affairs] Translates!
Copyright
Fitzcarraldo Editions
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Copyright © Christina Hesselholdt, 2015
Originally published in Denmark by Rosinante in 2015
Translation copyright © Paul Russell Garrett, 2017
Originally published in Great Britain
by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017
The right of Christina Hesselholdt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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