Desk Notes No.12

The lyric essay, Henry James and a chronicle of uncertainties

Mar 26, 2023

Dear friends,

As this is my twelfth newsletter, marking a whole year of Desk Notes, I’d like to say a big thank you for reading and subscribing. I appreciate all of your support.

This month, I’ve managed to make a few forays into the garden with some pruning and tidying. It means I’m able to enjoy the blossoming fruit trees from my window guilt-free, but the tasks are piling up and I’ll have a lot to do in April. I blame the unsettled weather, and a week of snow, for putting the garden on pause.

I have to confess, it’s been handy having an excuse to stay indoors, because I’ve been busy studying the lyric essay. This online course with Cambridge ICE has been a challenge to say the least, but I’ve enjoyed learning about a style of non-fiction writing that combines the lyricism, shape and imagination of poetry. Many of the pieces we’ve read are experimental and radical, inviting the reader to do much of the work to interpret the themes and emotions of the text. I’m utterly convinced by the narrative potential of using borrowed forms (from prescriptions to knitting instructions and estate agent listings) and of incorporating found material (newspaper reports, lists, prose fiction). I’ve found myself gravitating towards the braided essay, in which three or more different strands are woven together to develop (and sometimes alter) their separate meanings.

Print - The Aspern Papers; The Lesson of the Master; The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James; and To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Screen - The filmography of Alejandro G. Iñárritu including new film Bardo: False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths, along with Amores Perros; 21 Grams; Babel; and Biutiful

Print

The Aspern Papers; The Lesson of the Master; The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

This year I’m following the London Review of Books’ podcast series on the long poem and the short story. Chosen this month were three short stories by Henry James. After a difficult time reading What Maisie Knew a few years ago I’d almost sworn off James for good, so I was surprised just how much I enjoyed this collection. All the stories explore the relationship between writers and critics, writers and readers, and the craft of writing itself. The longest story of the bunch, The Aspern Papers takes us to Venice, where splashing gondolas and faded glamour set the scene for lost potential. The elderly Miss Bordereau and her niece, Miss Tita, have become detached from the world, wiling away their days in a decaying property. The story’s narrator - an obsessive literary critic consumed by thoughts of long dead poet Jeffrey Aspern - believes Miss Bordereau has papers pertinent to his research. He will do almost anything to get his hands on them.

It turns out that the convoluted prose style I associated with James is confined to his later works. The settings here are painted beautifully and the characters exquisitely drawn. Miss Tita is innocent, naive, even infantile - traits that sit awkwardly with her advancing years. Our much younger narrator confesses he will make love to her, in an effort to wheedle the papers. There is darkness behind the romantic setting and a sense that the impoverished women might be playing him too. The narrator’s game is a dangerous one: there is a very real risk the women might burn their treasure.

This theme of missing or lost material appears again in The Figure in the Carpet when a famous writer, Mr Vereker, claims there is a ‘general intention’, an elaborate ‘scheme,’ that no critic has yet discovered in his twenty novels. James pulls us so deep into the critics’ lust for the breakthrough that I became almost as fixated myself, turning each page with runaway curiosity. That these stories still feel so relevant has much to do with the way James probes the inevitability of history — that there are some things we will never know, some things that will be forever lost. My thoughts turn to Emily Brontë’s burned second novel and to the two decades of papers torched by Charles Dickens.

It’s fitting that James should have written so often about novelists’ lost papers. Colm Tóibín calls on writer, Philip Horne, to suggest James may have written around 40,000 letters during his lifetime many of which could still be in private hands. But what rights should we have over an author’s private life? Particularly when they were so keen to hide it from public view. Tóibín writes that:

After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received. He often added an instruction to the letters he wrote: ‘Burn this!’ To one correspondent, he wrote: ‘Burn my letter with fire or candle (if you have either! Otherwise, wade out into the sea with it and soak the ink out of it).’

There remains much about James we still don’t know including a great deal of speculation about his bachelordom. In The Lesson of the Master an eminent but floundering novelist, St George, attempts to convince his protege that marriage curbs creativity. If he wants to be successful Paul Overt should shun marriage and dedicate his life to prose.

‘Well all I say is that one’s children interfere with perfection. One’s wife interferes. Marriage interferes’
‘You think then the artist shouldn’t marry?’
‘He does so at his peril - he does so at his cost.’
‘Not even when his wife is in sympathy with his work?’
‘She never is - she can’t be! Women don’t know what work is.’

This put me in mind of another book I read recently, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. There’s a beautiful chapter at the start of the novel where Woolf takes us inside the perspective of William Bankes, “childless and a widower.” Bankes is thinking about his old friend, philosopher Mr Ramsay, who lives by contrast in, “a welter of children.” The children, “gave [Ramsay] something… but they had also, his friends could not help but feel, destroyed something,” writes Woolf. Ramsay had become domestic, feeding mouths on the salary of philosophy, rather than attending to the matter of philosophy itself. Like St George, Ramsay produced his best work as a youth and was unlikely ever to write another masterpiece. Instead, he requires constant nurturing and affirmation, his ego massaged by the ever attentive Mrs Ramsay. What’s interesting about To The Lighthouse is the way it presents this expectation of female sympathy as something of a burden for its women, exploring the sometimes awkward complexity of male-female relationships.

Screen

The filmography of writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu:

Bardo: False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths, now screening on Netflix

21 Grams, now screening on ITVX

Amores Perros; Babel; Biutiful all available to rent

While working on braided essays this month, which weave together three or more separate threads, my thoughts travelled back to the work of my favourite filmmaker, Alejandro González Iñárritu. It was his 21 Grams that sparked my interest in writing about film when it screened at my university cinema in 2004. The film explores the relationship between a tormented ex-con, a heart transplant patient, and his donor. It’s tragic and the most literal of Iñárritu’s so called ‘death trilogy’, but I was transfixed by the way the story is told. All of the films in this collection - Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel - are comprised of three interconnected story strands with interwoven chronologies and perspectives; an incredibly rich way of telling a story. The chopped up chronology of 21 Grams imitates memory and suggests the unpredictability of life. As the ending begins to crystallise we’re still not entirely sure how we’ll arrive there.

While 21 Grams tells the same story from three different perspectives, Amores Perros (2000) tells three distinct stories loosely tied together by an accident of fate. Iñárritu has questioned the critics’ labelling of his trilogy, which is not just concerned with literal death, but with the death of ideals: with hopes and dreams, and with the passions that keep us alive. In Amores Perros, a perfume model deals with the loss of her legs; a man lusts after his brother’s wife; and an absent father contemplates his guilt. As an expression, ‘Amores Perros’ translates to ‘that which is good and desirable in life and that which is miserable’. Its transient connections, its unexpected, fleeting crossovers, suggest a metaphysical presence in the universe.

But it was with Babel (2006) that Iñárritu most overtly tackled this theme. The film’s title recalls the Bible passage in which God gives people different languages so they cannot understand each other. Once again, it is an accident of fate that draws the film’s stories together. Babel opens in Morocco where two boys are left in charge of a rifle. Their father instructs them to ward off jackals while the family’s goats graze on the mountains. Distracted, the boys begin shooting at targets. The youngest aims at a coach on the road below and accidentally shoots an American tourist (Cate Blanchett). These actions have repercussions for a Mexican nanny in San Diego and the daughter of a Japanese hunter in Tokyo. There are echoes and reverberations between the stories - grief, shame, adolescence, sexuality, parenthood. Notably, Iñárittu closes Babel with a dedication to his children, ‘the brightest lights in the darkest night’.

This thread of fatherhood, lies at the heart of Iñárritu’s fourth film, Biutiful (2010). Hands down the most moving film I’ve ever seen. It traces the last days of a middle-aged man dying of prostate cancer, the relationships with his young children and his own deceased father. In a departure from his trilogy, it is the first of Iñárritu’s films to be told in a straight line, but it remains thematically rich. Uxbal (a career-best Javier Bardem) also works as a middle-man between counterfeit goods producers and the illegal-immigrants working as street sellers. As with the rest of Iñárritu’s early filmography, this economic and global issue is explored at a micro-level, as an intimate examination of people desperate to survive, with emotions inherent to the human condition: guilt and moral duty. There’s a poignant contradiction in the film’s title, between Barcelona’s reputation as an attractive capital city and its disadvantaged inhabitants. This is the film I would like my politicians to watch; a film I can barely sit through but continue to think about with unavoidable regularity. One scene, involving a group of trafficked workers, is so harrowing that I’ve been unable to shake it. After my first viewing it kept me awake at night for weeks. I have always thought Biutiful could not be bettered, but I might just have been proven wrong.

Bardo, Iñárritu’s latest, screened at last year’s London Film Festival and is now available to stream on Netflix. The Academy were never going to like it — a Spanish language drama about a Mexican filmmaker who is accepted by the American establishment only for him to reconsider his part in it as selling out. It’s hard to escape the sense that Bardo echoes Iñárritu’s own experience. His star studded English language flicks Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) ran away with Oscar nominations. They’re both gorgeous, artfully made films, but I don’t feel the desire to re-watch them with anything like the same frequency I do his early work.

For Iñárritu fans, Bardo is cinematic treasure, revisiting familiar themes of fatherhood, borders, identity and the fragility of life. But it combines those threads with a lightness of touch, a comic sensibility. In the opening scene a woman gives birth and the doctor holds the baby to his ear:

Doctor: He doesn’t want to come out
Mother: What?
Doctor: He wants to stay inside
Mother: Why?
Doctor: He says the world’s too fucked up

That the doctor then proceeds to push the baby back inside, should give you an idea of how strange and destabilising Bardo is. You can’t trust anything you see. The entire film appears to take place in a bizarre dream space, each scene sucking you so far in you forget to question what it is you’re watching. In one scene Iñárritu physically shrinks journalist Silverio, turning him into a veritable man-child in the presence of his own (dead but curiously alive) father. It’s immensely moving. In another, a colleague accuses him of having a midlife crisis:

“You couldn’t check your ego, you even put yourself in the movie, cabrón. You used historical figures to talk about yourself. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

It’s almost as if Iñárritu is having a conversation with himself. Of course, you could argue that the entire project is self-indulgent and navel-gazing, but it’s hard to deny how right Iñárritu is about the press, history, memory, truth — universal themes, whether you’ve seen his early work or not. Over the course of Bardo’s 159 minutes, he builds layer upon layer, becoming more and more meta — are we watching Silvio’s docu-fiction perhaps? What is doc-fiction anyway? Like all of Iñárritu’s best films, Bardo gives his audience space to make their own interpretations, guided only by an elaborate title, that suggests life is a, “chronicle of uncertainties.”

Have you read anything by Henry James, what did you think? Have you seen any of Iñárritu’s films? I’d love to hear what you’ve been doing this March, so let me know what I’ve missed in the comments. Wishing you all a happy Easter.

Found Material

Discussion about this post