Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

*

Wasn’t it Santayana who said: every artist holds a lunatic in leash? I was back in the park with what was left of the life of your favourite writer, whose five volumes of letters and whose big thick journal I had removed from the book box by the front door when you were busy loading the van, and the space left by which I had filled with my Stieg Larsson Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books, which I knew you hated, and which I had disguised by placing all those volumes of that book Pilgrimage on top of.

I went most evenings after work now to the park, before I got the bus home. I went at lunchtimes too. James makes me ashamed for real artists. He’s a pompazoon . Who was James? I didn’t care. I never knew what she was talking about, but I loved it. She was so much herself, and she was different every time, could change her air like the horse can change colour in The Wizard Of Oz. It crossed my mind to ask her, did she know what The Wizard Of Oz was. Maybe the book. She’d definitely died before the film. Strange to think she never knew Judy Garland or the tune of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, or that song about the munchkins. I wondered if anybody in your work circles had ever written a paper about that. What would it be called? Ultra-Modern Future-Memory: A Study Of Things That Happened After My Ex-Wife’s Ex-Wife Died And How They Feature In The Work Of My Ex-Wife’s Ex-Wife.

What makes Lawrence a real writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sands of the seashore. Oh, I know about you and Lawrence, I said, because a friend of mine told me a story about that. But she was off like a butterfly on to the next flowerhead. Nathaniel Hawthorne — he is with Tolstoi the only novelist of the soul. He is concerned with what is abnormal. His people are dreams, sometimes faintly conscious that they dream . Right, I said. I get that. Right. The intensity of an action is its truth. Is a thing the expression of an individuality? No, I said. Well, maybe sometimes it is. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Maupassant — his abundant vitality. Great artists are those who can make men see their particular illusion . I like that, I said, looking her right in the eyes. She did have extraordinarily clear and piercing eyes. I want to remember , she said, how the light fades from a room — and one fades with it.

And one what? I said. Fades, did you say?

The sky is grey — its like living inside a pearl today , she said.

She said such beautiful things that often they left me with nothing to say. She leaned forward on the table, shook her head, held her face in her hands.

I have been feeling lately a horrible sense of indifference , she said.

Indifferent? I said. You? No way.

A very bad feeling , she said. Neither hot nor cold; lukewarm.

Doesn’t sound at all like you, I said.

Nearly all people swing in with the tide , she said, and out with the tide again like heavy seaweed. And they seem to take a kind of pride in denying Life.

Yes, I said. Much better to be hot or cold, like you and your friend, what’s his name. The delivery man. DHL.

Mentioning him to her was usually a good way to get her up and talking and excited. But she placed her hands on the edge of the table in fists that were little and bony.

I woke up early this morning , she said, and when I opened the shutters the full round sun was just risen. I began to repeat that verse of Shakespeare’s; lo here the gentle lark weary of rest, and I bounded back into bed. The bound made me cough. I spat — it tasted strange — it was bright red blood.

I felt myself go pale.

You what? I said.

Since then I’ve gone on spitting each time I cough a little more , she said.

No, I said.

Perhaps it’s going to gallop — who knows — she said, and I shan’t have my work written. That’s what matters … unbearable … ‘scraps’, ‘bits’ … nothing real finished.

I saw then how ill she looked, and how thin, and how far too young. I had to look away in case she saw, by looking at me, what I was seeing.

I began reading the songs in Twelfth Night in bed this morning early , she said.

Right, Twelfth Night, right, yes, I said.

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. The spinsters and the knitters in the sun. And the free maids that weave their thread with bones. Do use to chant it — it is silly sooth. And dallies with the innocence of love. Like the old age , she said.

She saw how close to tears I was.

Come away, come away death, etc , she said.

Then she gave me a sly look from under her fringe.

I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class , she said.

*

And here it fell. Sepulchral.

That’s the actual real line from the story you were telling me about once. I’ve read the story now. I’ve read all her stories, from the one at the start of the book where the girl is in the emptied house and the little birds flick from branch to branch, to the one at the end of her life about the poor bird in a cage, and that one about the fly that gets all inked. Oh, the times when she had walked upside down on the ceiling, up, up glittering panes floated on a lake of light, flashed through a shining beam!

I sat down in front of my computer in what was once our house and I typed the word WING into the subject heading. Then I wrote this.

Hello.

I wanted to tell you that I found out a thing that might be of use to you, well a couple of things, well three things altogether.

1: I was speaking to a lady from New Zealand at work because of our New Zealand contract and I told her I was reading your ex-wife and she told me an amazing story, and then she sent me a newspaper clipping, and this is what it says in short, that your ex-wife maybe was actually given birth to in a hot-air balloon. Yes I know it sounds unlikely and like I’m lying but I have the newspaper to prove it and I knew it would interest you. It says in it that her mother was pregnant with her and on the day your ex-wife was born she had actually booked to go up above Wellington in a balloon with a man called Mr Montgolf who was charging five shillings a shot. Anyway on 15 October 1888 a newspaper called The Dominion reported that the flight the day before took ‘much longer than expected because of the medical condition of one of its female occupants … fortunately this young woman had recovered by the time the balloon landed’. Which means, the paper implies, that your ex-wife might have been born with both feet off the ground.

2: You know the story you told me about, the one with the word sepulchral in it? The one about the past-it lady who goes to act as an extra in films. Can you remember, I wonder, that there is a moment when she is filling in a form to see if she is the right sort of extra and it says, ‘Can you aviate — high-dive — drive a car — buck-jump-shoot?’ And you know how your ex-wife also did quite a lot of extra-work in films in the war years and once even caught a quite bad cold from doing a long shoot in evening dress in January? Well, I went looking for whether there was any chance of seeing her on any of these films, so far I have been unsuccessful. But I have discovered, by chance, that in the mid-1920s loads of those films, hundreds and hundreds of them made by the British film industry in the earlier years, were melted down and used to make the resin that was painted on the wings of aeroplanes to make them weather resistant. So now when you think of your ex-wife it is possible to think of those pictures of her moving as maybe really on the wing.

Also I remember that one of the things you were working on was a book by her friend and rival Virginia Woolf about a plane that all the people in London look up and see, that’s writing words in the sky above them, and I remember you gave a paper about it somewhere. Well, I have deduced that because they started coating the wings of planes in or before 1924 with melted films, it is perfectly possible that the wings of the plane all those people are craning their necks and looking up at in Virginia Woolf’s famous novel which if I am right is the one that was published in 1925, could actually be coated in melted-down moving pictures of your ex-wife. It is funny to me too because I have a sense that Virginia Woolf always thought your ex-wife a bit flighty.