Solid gold creativity

What have I been doing in my conspicuous absence?  Discovering the joys of reading again, for one thing. In the last month or two, I’ve read some great books: Post Office by Charles Bukowski, Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Marukami, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and Mary by Nabokov, all of them, except for Marukami, first novels.

I‘d never read Bukowski before and had no idea about him except for some vague association with Norman Mailer.  Post Office leapt off the library shelf the day after I’d been pondering all things postal, and how such things have been a theme in my life. 

I’ve worked at the Post Office, the genuine article located at 148 Old Street, London EC1V 9HQ, spiritual home of Rowland Hill who revolutionised the postal system with the introduction of “uniform penny postage” in 1840, and the novelist and Postal Surveyor, Anthony Trollope, who designed and implemented the pillar box in the 1850s (for a country as keen on its mail as Britain, this was strangely belated; Paris had had roadside letterboxes since 1653).

I’ve conducted mail experiments in Italy, a country with a postal system the antithesis of Royal Mail, posting one part of a letter in one postbox and another part in another postbox.  I’ve written a thesis on email, referring to the works of Martin Heidegger (himself once an employee of the Freiburg Post Office), Jacques Derrida’s Le Carte Postale and Bernhard Siegert’s Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, a book featuring among other postal fascinations, a facsimile of the “Whizz Bang” or “Quick Firer” postcard sent home by millions in World War 1.  All the soldier had to do was cross out the sentences that didn’t apply:

I am quite well.
I have been admitted into hospital {sick/wounded} and {am going on well/hope to be discharged soon}.
I am being sent down to the base.
I have received your {letter dated…/telegram dated…/parcel dated…}.
Letter follows at first opportunity.
I have received no letter from you {lately/for a long time}.

But it’s in the last month that my postal career reached its peak.  For I set myself the task of letterboxing 5,000 flyers while campaigning for election to my local Council.  With the help of a couple of friends it took over 10 days, and was both fascinating and tedious. What I discovered is that letterboxes speak. Their presence, absence, location, congregation, shape, size, covering and material are eloquent on the state of mind of their owners.  I also discovered that each street is the scene of a battle: a battle between deliverer and deliveree, the one intent on offloading, the other on thwarting the offloading.

Back to Bukowski. Post Office was very enjoyable: full of juice, transporting, unexpectedly triumphant:

I was shacked but the shackjob was gone half the time, off somewhere, and I was lonely all right.  I was lonely for that big ass standing beside me.

‘Chinaski!  Take route 539!’  The toughest in the station. Apartment houses with boxes that had scrubbed-out names or no names at all, under tiny lightbulbs in dark halls.  Old ladies standing in halls, up and down the streets, asking the same question as if they were one person with one voice: ‘Mailman, you got any mail for me?’

The whiskey and beer ran out of me, fountained from the armpits, and I drove along with this load on my back like a cross, pulling out magazines, delivering thousands of letters, staggering, welded to the side of the sun.

I never saw G.G. again. Nobody knew what happened to him.  Nor did anybody ever mention him again. The ‘good guy’.  The dedicated man.  Knifed across the throat over a handful of circs from a local market — with its special: a free box of a brand name laundry soap, with the coupon, and any purchase over $3.

It’s no surprise to find Bukowski was writing from experience; some of the details are similar to those I discovered in my letterboxing stint.  He worked at the Post Office in Los Angeles, first for three years, then later, for over a decade, just like the narrator, Henry Chinaski.  And just like the narrator, he resigned to write the novel.  He finished it less than a month later.

Sputnik Sweetheart I chose for the name of course. How to resist? Like Bukowski, it was my first time with Marukami.  I read SS in little more than a day, something I haven’t done for years. The surreal events and fey characters should not work as compulsively as they do. With its loose ends and Greek island setting, it reminded me of The Magus by John Fowles.  It’s also one of the most relaxing books I’ve ever read.  I’ve now started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the same author to see if it can match it. 

Northanger Abbey has been a bit dulled by the subsequent Buk and SS.  The only thing that’s still quite sharp is how irritating I found Catherine Morland.  And that John Thorpe made me squirm, perhaps in memory of the John Thorpes I have endured myself. Probably one should comment on its famous self-consciousness: Austen’s playing with the literary conventions of the Gothic novel of the 1790s. But for me, the stranger thing is how this exaggerated artificiality manages to produce such realism. For despite the fact Austen completed the novel over 200 years ago, and that the genre with which she is experimenting is so localised in time and culture, she produces a heroine who could be sitting next to you on the bus tomorrow morning.  She’d be the one talking on her mobile the entire trip. 

Lastly, I read Nabokov’s Mary. In a foreword to the English translation, Nabokov talks about the tenderness he still felt towards this first book, his tone indulgent like that used for the favoured child.  He would have known it only reflected glory.  For the virtuosity, the observational power, are there already. The minute calibration of taste is not as evident as in later works, but this rawness only increases the charm.  It also has the peerless quality that belongs to all of his works, the quality of nourishing the reader at every level: word, phrase, chapter, book.

Wonderful sounds came from outside — twittering, distant barking, a creaking pump.

But only when Ganin stepped ashore and saw a blue-clad Turk on the quayside asleep on a mountain of oranges …

At night, on board ship, he watched the empty white sleeves of searchlights filling in and sinking again across the sky …