son and heir #10: many happy returns
The paperback of Henry Henry is coming out this month (the UK one today, the US on the 20th). The novel has been published for about a year. The world in which I have privately lived is being translated now into other people's lives. Writing Henry Henry was something I felt I absolutely must do, and once I had written it, I felt it absolutely must be published. I have an equally powerful sense of how little it matters.
Over the past year I've been writing the foreword to McNally Editions' reissue of a lost English modernist novel, Philip Owens' Picture of Nobody, published in 1936 by the original version of my own publisher, Jonathan Cape. It's a strange mosaic, rearranging fragments of Shakespeare's life, plays, and sonnets into a portrait of an obscure young poet in a dismal interwar London. When his first long poem is published he is paid almost nothing, the work is given almost no notice, the publishing house collapses, and the poet must go on submitting himself to successive indignities, hoping that if he just keeps working, something will come of it. When the novel ends, the reader knows that Owens' poet will never become William Shakespeare as we know him. Philip Owens never became Shakespeare, either (he died in 1945). I look at the copies of Henry Henry on one of the shelves in K's house, then at the few first editions of interwar literature I've collected -- Beverley Nichols' Crazy Pavements, published by Jonathan Cape in 1927; Elizabeth Bowen's To the North, Victor Gollancz, 1932; the E.P. Dutton & Co edition of Siegfried Sassoon's Picture Show, which bears the inscription:
To Leslie
Because it's
Jean's birthday
and ... --Whenever my thought is worn threadbare in spots -
God I don't -- or -- ... -- three cheers
for the triplicate dots.
D.
In May five years ago I was a bit less than halfway through the first draft of Henry Henry. I was living alone in a studio apartment in a decrepit wooden low-rise that in even slightly warm weather became punishingly hot. I took a lot of long walks, at sunset when everyone was walking their dogs and past midnight when the cats came out to wander. I smoked a lot and took pictures of interesting light. There's a picture in my camera roll of a notebook open on my desk, two facing pages almost filled with cursive:
Now the sunrises were late, and Hal woke in the dark before seven, enjoying Percy in bed with him. [something scratched out] By seven fifteen Percy was out of bed and in the shower, using Hal's soap, drying himself off with the soft blue towels Henry had [a smaller scratching-out] ordered for the flat when Hal moved in. Percy made him kiss even when they both had morning breath; then he would come in and kiss him again, clean-mouthed, before going off to class or his [words cropped out at the edge of the image]
The wall (landlord white) behind the desk (black particle board, acquired secondhand from another grad student) is illuminated by an off-screen lamp. A wine glass is moist with condensation, three-quarters filled with something amberish, a couple of melted ice cubes. I think it must have been whiskey and ginger ale. I have gathered that this is the kind of thing people like to know about authors. At least I can supply these details more easily than I can answer questions like 'why did you write this novel' (I don't know) or 'what makes this novel relevant to the reading public' (I don't know) or 'how did you research all of the British stuff' (astral projection). To me the novel is less proof of my vocation than a portal. Things pass in and out of it. Someone will drink Pimm's or smoke a Marlboro Red and think of Hal, and the imaginary Hal will be real for a moment, enjoying mortal pleasures.
K and I went to London last week, and I spent a sunny Friday reading archives of the Catholic AIDS Link newsletter at the Wellcome Collection, which is very near where I was living in May ten years ago. I was always going back and forth across Russell Square, and up and down in the lift at the tube station, and through the card-swipe Perspex gates in the Senate House Library. I bought the first edition of Crazy Pavements. I wrote a paper on Foucault and the rhetoric of facial disfigurement at the same cafe (now closed) where I eavesdropped on the blonde girl in the tie-dyed t-shirt and pink rain jacket, an outfit I remembered long enough to give to Philippa in one of the first chapters of Henry Henry.
Near the end of the novel Hal thinks, Once a real thing had passed into memory, it was just as unreal as a dream. Maybe this is the delusion of a person who remembers being hurt and wonders why it should matter when it isn't happening now. In Shakespeare's Richard II, the exiled Henry Bolingbroke asks, 'O, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?' So why should anyone shiver in the summer's heat just because they remember wallowing naked in the snow? Hal would be thirty-three now, the same age Jesus and Richard II were when they died. His hairline would have receded a little. His twenty-three year old self, Henry's forty-five year old self, Philippa's sixteen year old self, would live in the same world as the ghosts of Richard and Mary, which is connected somehow to the world in which they are all just characters, and to the world of our own past, in which they are still real and living people.
Didn't King Richard II realize that commissioning the Westminster portrait was a sort of surrendering of the self, rather than an exercise of control? Now I'm looking at this picture of him and writing things about him that he could never have conceived. It must be worse for Henry V, who never even saw the picture everyone imagines when they think of Henry V. I feel compelled to keep writing so I don't die before I'm finished, but I'm not sorry my prose isn't immortal. Fairly often I imagine the sun burning out and think, Thank God none of this is forever! Let it all go in peace.
Henry Henry is also available in hardback, as an audiobook, and translated into Spanish.