Ali Smith - Artful

This book began life as four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in January and February 2012. The lectures are published here pretty much as they were delivered.

I owe a great debt of thanks to everyone at St. Anne’s for making this book happen at all, and for looking after me there with such care, cleverness, and grace. Huge thanks for their kindness to Tim Gardam, Sally Shuttleworth, Matthew Reynolds, and Lord Weidenfeld.

‘The wind doth blow today, my love,

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love,

In cold grave she was lain.

‘I’ll do as much for my true-love

As any young man may;

I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave

For a twelvemonth and a day.’

The twelvemonth and a day being up, I was still at a loss. If anything I was more at a loss.

So I went and stood in our study and looked at your desk, where the unfinished stuff, what you’d been working on last, was still neatly piled. I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at random— my study, my desk, my books, now.

The book I took down today happened actually to have been one of mine originally. It was a Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, the old Penguin edition I’d had at university, with a spine whose orange had almost completely faded and a jolly engraving of drunks and children in a pub on the cover, which was beginning to peel away from the spine. It would probably stand one more read. I’d not read Oliver Twist since, oh god, when? way before we even first knew each other, I’d had to, for university, so that made it thirty years.

That gave me a shake. A twelvemonth and a day can arguably be called short, but thirty years? How could thirty years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black and white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on Top of the Pops singing Life on Mars; it was the size of a grown woman with four children, one of them nearly old enough, if the woman started very early, to be doing A-levels. They definitely weren’t called A-levels any more.

Maybe I might try to read Oliver Twist, the whole thing, from start to finish. I hadn’t read anything, I hadn’t been able to, for well over a twelvemonth and a day. I opened the book at chapter 1, page 45, which Treats of the Place where Oliver Twist was Born, and of the Circumstances attending his Birth (that’s quite a lot of pages before he was even born, forty-four. But I didn’t really want to read someone’s introduction, my introduction days were over thank god; there are some good things about getting a bit older), and I sat down in the armchair by the window.

There was a draft by this window. There’d always been a draft by this window because one year when we painted it then left it a little open to dry we couldn’t get it to close completely again without cracking the paint, and you never wanted to crack it because you’d painted it so carefully, so we never did. I knew that if I sat there for any length of time I’d end up with a really sore neck and shoulder even though right now it was summer. Summer: a couple of times in the twelvemonth and a day I’d wondered if the seasons would ever be new again, brand-new time, rather than just seem to be following each other nose to tail like paint-peeling wooden horses on an old carousel.

I looked across the room to the other window, where I’d always thought it would be better to have that chair anyway. The light would be better there and it also happened to be closer to the desk, which meant I’d be able to angle the anglepoise and carry on reading when it got dark.

But it was your chair, this chair, even though we’d bought it on my credit card (and it still wasn’t paid off; how unfair that a chair we saw online and bought on a credit card and had delivered in a van would, could, did, last longer than us). And we’d had the argument about moving it several times and you’d always won that argument.

I think it was the thought of the extra day past the twelvemonth, a single new day on top of the heap of gone days, gone months. I dropped the book onto the seat of the chair and I started dragging the chair across the room.

It was heavy, much heavier than it looked, so I stopped halfway and stood behind it and pushed. Partly the pushing was difficult too because one of the rugs caught under it and got dragged across the room and I had the feeling I was maybe scuffing the floorboards quite badly with one of its legs, yes I was, look, I could see a gouge appearing beneath me as I pushed. But it was my floor, I could do what I liked to it, so I kept pushing even though the rug was still rucked up under it and all the other rugs in the room had messed up too.

I got my breath back and I picked up that book again, mine, not yours, and sat down in the chair in its new place; it opened at a picture of a boy down on the ground and another standing as if he’s just punched him, a woman at the open door aghast, another holding the small boy back from punching again. The words underneath said Oliver plucks up a Spirit . Yes, the light was much better here. The rugs, all skewy now, looked like creatures, a mess of dogs asleep in random places on the floor. I quite liked that. I liked the thought that the room was full of new and unexpected sleeping dogs.

Among other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, it boasts of one which is common to most towns, great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born, on a day and date which I need not take upon myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. For a long time after he was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared, or, if they had, being comprised within a couple of pages, that they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography extant in the literature of any age or country.

First: why wouldn’t Dickens name the town this was happening in? Then: the word workhouse reminded me of my father telling me once that at one point his mother (my grandmother) worked in a workhouse laundry. That’s how close this anywhere of a place was to me now all those years in the future. Then: how can a birthday mean nothing? Then: a reminder that time will tell. Then this phrase: item of mortality: three words that mean a baby, a person; more — the item of mortality could mean the whole book, like I was somehow holding an item of mortality in my hands. Then: this world of sorrow. When I read those words I felt again the weight of my own sorrow, the world I carried on my own back; and at exactly the same time the fact that someone somewhere sometime else had thought of the world as a world of sorrow too made the weight on my own back feel a bit better.