My Grandmother's Glass Eye by Craig Raine

Author:Craig Raine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

The sun, like Salome,

will dance a thousand times

round the earth – the Baptist’s head.

(tr. Max Hayward)

Mayakovsky specialises in Big Soup, sometimes successfully:

Do you see –

the sky is Judas once again,

clutching in his hand a few treacherous stars.

(tr. James Womack)

Or:

Again in song I glorify

men as crumpled as hospital beds,

and women as battered as proverbs.

(tr. Max Hayward)

When it works, this kind of metaphor, confident in the justice of its far-fetchedness, is boldly assertive. No fidgety explanations, not one footnote about the thirty pieces of silver.

The need for economy.

The need for speed.

In How Fiction Works, James Wood puzzles away in the chapter on detail at why he likes Bellow’s detail but dislikes that of Nabokov (and Nabokov’s admirer, Updike): ‘Bellow notices superbly; but Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself.’ This is mis-described – a hastily improvised, superficially plausible reason, but it is wrong. For a start, Nabokov can be superb and the equal of Bellow. ‘The tennis court was a region of great lakes’ is our touchstone. But we could supply other examples without troubling to ransack the Nabokov oeuvre. ‘Rolling the words on my tongue with the glazed-eye solemnity of a tea-taster’. ‘… at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling.’ The governess’s candle: ‘a groggy flame squirms and ducks’. ‘… that flat, fallow leaf (the first casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench!’ All from Speak, Memory.

It’s perhaps worth noting that James Wood is always uneasy in the presence of writing that is so brilliant it requires only quotation and somehow renders the critic (aka James Wood) redundant – even in the case of Bellow. In his introduction to Bellow’s short stories, Wood mounts a thin case for the universality of Bellow’s detail, importing a (for Wood) saving abstract quality into Bellow’s unalterably concrete specifics.

And yet, I agree with Wood’s verdict on his chosen examples in How Fiction Works. It is the explanation which misses the mark. His first example is from Nabokov’s short story ‘First Love’: ‘an elderly flower-girl, with carbon eyebrows and a painted smile, nimbly slipped the plump torus of a carnation into the buttonhole of an intercepted stroller whose left jowl accentuated its royal fold as he glanced downward sideways at the coy insertion of the flower’. The second example is Updike on rain from Of the Farm: ‘Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain.’

Neither passage is good. But neither passage fails because it is ‘propaganda on behalf of good noticing’ – Wood’s disguised way of agreeing with the dunces who dismiss ‘writing’ as showing-off. The two passages fail because they are laboured, ponderous, toiling.

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