A Terrible Battle Was Waged Each Night…

Mrs H and I went on a quick holiday last week, lest the accumulated horror of dealing with human rights violations and the British Government drive her insane, and I follow her down the balmy road to Bonkersville in an effort to finish book the second and keep her functional at the same time. We went to the Italian Lakes, which are brainbendingly stunning.

Each night, on the shores of Bellagio, a strange and appalling battle takes place, unseen by most and unacknowledged. It is the battle of the Mute Duck and the Lake.

Every evening, at about the same time, the Mute Duck (this is not a nickname, by the way, it’s a variety of duck) appears just to the left of the ferry landing and just to the right of the watertaxi. It stares at the water, and the water laps at the shore. There’s a whisper of showdown music: one of them will blink, it seems, and one of them will die. The Duck, or the Lake, will be just that bit too slow, and lead will fly and blood will squirt.

Or perhaps it’s an internal struggle. Perhaps the Duck is afraid of the water – some ancient watery trauma keeps this noble, silent bird from its natural home. Perhaps the Duck is broken in the head, and has no idea what this giant sussurating thing is, stares at it in distrust and incomprehension each night, before waddling away.

It’s an unequal battle. The Lake is vast and cold, and very, very deep. It’s a glacial lake, carved out of Europe’s stony centre and cupped by mountains. It’s not a body of water to take lightly. There are secrets, and there are shadows, and the skulls of unwary poets and rash mobsters mottle its inky floor.

Set against this, just an ordinary Mute Duck. An escapee, most likely, from some rich garden on the shore. A transplanted bird, bereft and without support. A lone, voiceless featherhead pitted against an enemy so vast and ancient that the Roman villas all around are barely a blink in its geological eye.

In the end, we couldn’t stand it any longer. We asked for the Story of the Duck.

Long ago, it seems – long enough ago that no one quite remembers when it happened – a wealthy man bought a villa on the lake, and stocked its gardens with birds. Among their number were two Mute Ducks.

The man was improvident and unwise. His fortune ebbed. His villa fell into disuse, and the painted, ludicrous birds he had bought began to die away, taken by foxes and cats and too stupid to feed themselves. Or perhaps rumour is unkind, and they were just unsuited to the climate. 

The Mute Ducks, though, were another matter. Theirs was a strong bond, for such birds are faithful, and these in particular were tempered to one another by captivity. One night in winter, when the lake was as high as it has been this century, almost as high as it was in 1868, they contrived an escape from the arboretum cage in which they lived, and flew out and up above the lake, silent and triumphant in the high, clear sky.

And so they lived. On the shores of Como, in the Centro Lago, they nested and fed and wandered, and were beset by children, and pecked at cats, and ate the leavings of tourists and the crumbs from the tables of princes. If they had offspring, those offspring wandered away or returned home by some route, or went to other lakes, or live quietly in gardens on the shore. It is not known. The two Mute Ducks, though, were seen, and were loved.

Then, in Spring, there was only one.

The mourning of Mute Ducks is silent, of course. They do not wail, they simply sit, and stare, as if they will die. Sometimes they do. The remaining duck sat, and walked, and flew, and was alone, and from Bellagio to Varenna, from Tremezzo to Colìco and Mennagio to Lenno, the lake lost a fraction of its joy. It was just a little grey. They say the gardeners at the Villa D’Este drew a black mark on the jetty, just above the waterline, and renewed it every month when the Lake washed it away. In memoriam.

But nothing lasts forever – not even grief. An unlikely friend emerged; a white goose. The Mute Duck and the White Goose were together a span of years, waddling this way and that. The White Goose, of course, was not mute. It gave voice to its demands, and the Mute Duck grew a little portly in its company. The gardeners at the Villa D’Este cleaned the mark from the jetty.

In Spring, there was only one.

It is not known whether it was swans or foxes, or a bad winter. Perhaps it was a careless driver, on the land or the water. Perhaps the Lake itself reached up and swallowed the White Goose, or perhaps the lovers quarreled. As I say, it is not known.

But every evening, the Mute Duck stares at the Lake as if it is afraid, and angry, or just confused. Perhaps it simply does not understand where the White Goose has gone, or why it is the only Mute Duck in Centro Lago. But it flinches when the waves lap at the shore, and it does not touch the water, ever, and when you approach it, there’s a pathetic gratitude and a trenchant hope in the bird, as if you might, from some unexpected pocket, provide it with a friend.

I swear to God: I would have, if I could. I’ve never seen such naked need.

Now the air is dirty and the sex is clean – and your coffee makes my hair turn green…

The Kinkster is a man who sees life, and sees it whole. It’s a shame we can’t have him come in and adjudicate this mess over the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Derek Walcott has withdrawn, Ruth Padel has had to resign. The question of who is an appropriate teacher of poetry seems to be rather more complex than the question of who can impart an understanding of the form…

(Before I go on, a brief declaration: I’ve met Ruth Padel a couple of times, and I like her. I haven’t met Derek Walcott. It seems entirely plausible to me that I’d like him, too.)

The whole discussion is odd. It was odd enough when Clive James – who has now acknowledged that he wants the gig, surely making himself a less than disinterested observer – proposed that “Derek Walcott is unlikely to be a menace to young women at the age of 75″. I mean, ooooookay, thanks for sharing, but someone should tell Silvio Berlusconi…

Cheap shots aside, though: who said it was desirable – or even possible – for a poet to have a perfectly respectable, untroubling approach to the world? Aren’t poets supposed to be drunk on life, as Rumi put it? To be consumed with passions too great to contain?

Yeats wrote:

I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of my heart.

What part of the foul rag-and-bone shop is safe for students of poetry? And why should students of poetry be safe, anyway? Beauty has always been dangerous, artistic endeavour has always been associated with madness and excess. Paul Verlaine shot at Arthur Rimbaud; Rimbaud reputedly once introduced himself as “alcoholic, syphilitic, pederast and poet”. And as for what he has to say about poets in general…

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses… He exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of…?

It’s not just Rimbaud. TS Eliot had a nervous breakdown; Sylvia Plath committed suicide; Pushkin died in a duel; Mandelstam was constantly unfaithful, baited Stalin until he was arrested, and died in a correction camp. Coleridge was perpetually stoned, Byron slept with everyone he could catch and caught plenty of other things besides, Shelley held up incest as an ideal union.

And in the face of all this, we are invited to believe first that Derek Walcott’s apparently lecherous but otherwise not frightfully exciting behaviour of years ago is a terrible threat to students and thus a bar to his appointment to the job – which the woman who brought the original suit against Boston University incidentally does not believe – and second that Ruth Padel’s involvement in exposing said behaviour is a terrible sin which therefore bars her appointment to the job. Never mind the frankly ludicrous doublethink, where did we acquire this appetite for the small, the squeaky clean, and the safe? I’m not saying that all poets should be touched with madness, and nor am I dismissing the seriousness of full-on sexual harassment where it occurs – just that it’s ludicrous to assert a love of poetry and complain about the wildness which goes with it.

Poetry is a jungle, but we seem to think we can get the same joy from a box of cut flowers.

Music and writing…

I’m not musical. Whatever the music thing is, I don’t have it.

The closest I come would be if you dressed me in a suit made of bits of xylophone and pushed me down a flight of carefully-calibrated stairs. I’ve long ago given up on notions of playing an instrument, or even being able to carry a tune in a reliable way. I can imitate – I can do funny voices and, given enough time, I can learn a plausible impression of a specific person doing a specific performance of a song. I can’t embellish it, though; if I stray from the text, I get hopelessly lost. And indeed, I need the words. The words are my cue for the notes. I find it impossibly hard to learn a tune in isolation.

Except this piece of Mozart – the adagio from the Clarinet Concerto in A Major. I know this one. It was the first piece of music I ever loved, and I still love it. I tried to learn to play it – I can still manage a few bars, although the experience of pressing my upper set against a vibrating single-reed mouthpiece is more than I can stand for long.

I can’t play music – but music plays me, that’s for sure.

I’m perplexed by writers who seek total silence to work. I understand the need to focus, and distractions at the wrong moment make me furious and occasionally rude. Silence, though, is so fragile – anything can interfere with silence. A bird. A tap. A distant car, a plane, the wind, the builders next door. Your own heartbeat, even. Silence, in most places and most cases, is an illusion. What it means is a situation where the noises are not the kind of noises which upset or unsettle you, bring you out of the weird writer’s trance where you burn calories using only your naked brain and the product is words. It is, without wishing to sound like a lunatic or a zen-wannabe, a state of mind.

Actually, that’s a connection I hadn’t made before; a friend of mine was long ago made a monk in a zen monastery. When he left the place, he felt he was forsaking his commitment to zen. The abbot told him the reverse was true: he was putting his zen to the test. It’s easy in here, the abbot said. The question is, can you do it out there?

Music is better than silence for me; it’s a flow of sound I know and feel safe with.

If I know the course of a piece music, it’s not about to jolt me out of the writing.

To be honest, on a good day and when I’m really into the story, an earthquake couldn’t jolt me out of the writing. I wrote ten pages of The Gone-Away World next to a couple dissolving their marriage in a restaurant while their five year old screamed and flailed in fury because they weren’t paying attention to him. I finished the same chapter on a train populated by utterly plastered supporters of a very unsuccessful football team.

Then, too, the white noise of chatter and bustle is appealing. Sometimes I balance music and ambient noise so that I can still hear the cars and the people, but the music takes the edge off, so the circular saw which someone’s using right now two houses down isn’t a problem.

Apart from that, I use music to control my mood.

I don’t always feel like writing.

I’ve always been told, though, that that’s how you separate the pros from the others; if you’re a pro, you write when you’re mourning, when you’re hung over, when you’re getting married the following morning, when you’re waiting for your trial date.

I’m not a machine. Sometimes that discipline eludes me. Music helps. Sandi Thom, for example – she makes me want to smile. Being happy can make all the difference, can loosen the knot and let me start working. Once I start, it’s fine.

Sometimes, of course, it’s the other way around. It’s not always easy to write something crushingly depressing. My life is by and large a happy one. It will have its rough patches; those are pretty inevitable, alas. But all the same, I don’t have much to complain of. So I look for something like the soundtrack to Fargo to take me in the right direction.

I said something rather daft a year or so ago.

I was nervous, doing my first live public appearance, and I was glib. I said:

I think if you write in isolation, you get isolated writing.

And, inevitably, there was Ross Raisin sitting next to me, and he had to reply that he needed seclusion to do his thing, and I felt like a jerk, because I had just described his writing in what might appear to be a disparaging way. Ross is a nice guy, however, so he did not come round to my house and set me on fire, and nor did he take me to task right there in front of all the nice people and ask me what the hell I was talking about.

But actually, it occurs to me in retrospect that I may have been lucky with my smart mouth. God’s Own Country is a story about an isolated person; it’s about disconnection and alone-ness and their eventual consequences.

I don’t want to write that kind of story. It’s not me. I like noise and clatter. I like to be able to stretch to the full range of situations and emotions – I want to make you laugh, cry, scream, smile, and so on. I believe I need to own all the emotional directions you could go in reading in order to immerse you and give you what you opened the book for.

For that, I need music – even if, for some reason, I rarely mention it.