Here’s to the ‘wreathed trellis of a working brain’: that’s what Keats called it in Ode to Psyche. Here’s to what George Mackay Brown said about how he spent his days: ‘I assure you, there are few jobs in life like the leafing and blossoming of the imagination.’ Here’s to what Clarice Lispector (in her 1977 novel, The Hour of the Star, translated by Giovanni Pontiero) said: ‘So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.’ Here’s to what Edwin Morgan said: ‘Forget your literature? — forget your soul.’ He said this in a poem called Retrieving and Renewing. Here’s to what David Constantine said in his work on why the arts matter: ‘no society that I know of has done without poetry, which must mean it can’t be done away with (some have tried) or done without.’ Here’s to this poem by Paul Eluard, translated by Stuart Kendall, about the nature of storytelling, or of all telling:
I told you for the clouds
I told you for the sea tree
for each wave for the birds in the leaves
for pebbles of noise
for the familiar hands
for the eye that becomes a face or a landscape
and the sleep that renders the sky from its color
for the entire drunken night
for the grid of the roads
for the open window for an uncovered face
I told you for your thoughts for your words
every caress every confidence endures
Here’s to the place where reality and the imagination meet, whose exchange, whose dialogue, allows us not just to imagine an unreal different world but also a real different world — to match reality with possibili
That’s as far as you got. That was it over.
I’d read all of you, now.
And now the hand that traces these words, falters, as it approaches the conclusion of its task; and would weave, for a little longer space, the thread of these adventures.
I woke up at about eleven the next morning. When I came downstairs, Oliver! was still on freeze-frame. The screen had been glowing that same picture, of the moment the window in the undertaker’s cellar opens in the snow, out into the living room all night.
I switched it off. I got my new copy of Oliver Twist down off the shelf. (I had a new copy now, I’d shelved it next to the old fallen-apart copy. I hadn’t actually opened the new copy yet.) I’d decided, last night, as I was falling asleep, that I’d finally finish that novel, that when I woke up it would be the first thing I’d do.
The first thing I noticed when I flicked the brand-new copy open was the word Mudfog. It was in the very first line, the word. It was the name of the place Oliver was born. But in my other copy Dickens had made a point of not mentioning the name of the place that Oliver was born. I remembered that from starting this book last summer — all those months ago.
Mudfog. I went and got my old falling-apart copy off the shelf to check. ‘Among other public buildings in the town of Mudfog.’ ‘Among other public places in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning.’ I held the old copy in one hand and the newer copy in the other and I laughed. It was as though there was an argument, a discussion, literally happening between the copies, like the book itself, Oliver Twist, was weighing up and still undecided about the things it was going to say.
I made coffee. I phoned up work and told them I’d overslept. They put me straight through to Sandra. I got reprimanded quite sharply down the phone then congratulated on being honest enough not to make up a cold or a flu.
Come in by 2 pm and I’ll pretend it didn’t happen, she said.
Can I come in after I’ve finished Oliver Twist? I said.
After what? she said. Now you’re really pushing your luck. No you can’t. Come in right now.
Oh. Okay, I said.
There was a pause.
Well how many pages exactly have you got to go? she said.
Not much, I said. Twenty pages. Thirty. Well, thirty-seven.
It’s good, Oliver Twist, she said. Okay, but be in here as soon as you’re done.
When I came off the phone to work, I went online (really quickly) and looked up some local language schools. I wrote an email to one and asked did they teach basic Greek and could they teach someone like me from scratch. They wrote back very fast and very keenly. I suppose in this recession not very many people are taking language classes or thinking about learning new languages.
Soon I’d know a new alphabet; soon, working from a book meant for five-year-olds, I’d be learning how to say some very simple sentences. Concurrently I’d also be learning a whole other kind of Greek since my teacher would turn out to be an Aliki Vougiouklaki fan, having grown up with her films like I grew up with Oliver! and would use songs from these films to teach me as well as this basic grammar book, which meant that soon, along with the verbs for to have and to want, along with sentences like I have a book, I have a pencil, I want a notebook, I’d know the words for unkissed boy and be able to say things like the swallows have written it on the skies, for the first time, my heart is shining inside me and a lemon tree will bloom in the neighborhood. That last line, about the lemon tree, is from the song called Ypomoni, or Patience, it’s written by Stavros Xarhakos and Alekos Sakellarios, and, roughly translated (by me myself actually), it goes:
Neighborhood, your streets are narrow
Frost and gray skies
Life is dark, day and night
For company, cloudy skies
Patience.
Have patience and the sky will become more
blue
Have patience: a lemon tree will bloom in the
neighborhood.
But that wouldn’t be till the summer. For now, this lunchtime, with all the birds in the trees mad with spring outside, I poured my coffee into the favorite mug, came through to the study, curled myself into the armchair and I read to the end.
Then I went back nearly a hundred pages and read again the bit where the Artful is in court and how after his trial he leaves the courtroom ‘establishing for himself a glorious reputation’ as he goes; ironic, of course, and at the same time completely true. In fact, glorious reputation is the last we hear of him.
You know what I really like? I said out loud in the empty room. It’s how Dickens, when he sums up near the very end of the book what’s happened to all the people in the gang, well, in the whole book, when he lists the characters one after the other and tells us what became of them, he never directly mentions the Dodger. It’s like the Dodger’s given not just the story the slip, but given Dickens the slip too.