Hard at work translating the Marguerite Duras book, a book of absence and suspension. Three figures moving through space. The sounds of the beach. The cry of the gulls.
A book nestled in a constellation of novels and films Duras made from 1964-1973; but a novel that has never yet been translated into English.
While I work on this book, reading and then writing Duras anew, the triangle on the beach opening and then closing, I see relations in a new way.
Three texts I had written in 2002, 2003, and 2004 and left where they lay, in folders in drawers. Not sure whether they are novels or essays or prose poems.
Absence lies in the intersections between these three. Should I have to say.
Or choose.
At some point the three texts come together in the same space–one after the other? Or interleaved?
Quinn, from my novel Quinn’s Passage, is present in these pages. At the end of that novel he is washed out to sea; it is so important to me that no one knows what becomes of him and so this new work is suspended in time as well–as one could not say, must not say, whether it comes before or after Quinn’s Passage.
The first third (2002) tells the narrative story of a group of performers staging an opera. The second third (2003) is the private correspondence between one of the musicians and his former lover, long since departed. The third third (2004) is a series of meditations on absence and the end of intimacy written in a notebook after I read Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule.
While I was writing these meditations, three things happened.
A huge summer storm came.
I went to a family wedding, an always alienating experience for me.
The entire Northeast, nearly, was affected by the blackout.
An essay in fictional form? Fiction that reaches towards the essay, as characters are present, and plot.
My memoir Bright Felon, written completely in prose and labeled on the back cover as “Lyric Essays,” is reviewed by Publishers Weekly as my “third collection of poetry.”
So this new book, beginning in narrative, shifting to correspondence, traveling through lyric arrives halfway to nowhere, neither novel nor essay nor memoir.
Outside in the yard, Marco is picking flowers, queer ones, long-stemmed and fragrant.
I am no good at gardening because I always argue about why one plant is a weed and one isn’t. It isn’t about beauty, which would be the easiest distinction to make.
Trees on the other hand, I like. Dutifully I cared for our plum tree, two pear trees and peach tree. The plum was devoured by japanese beetles despite my every care, while the peach tree, so limp in the beginning, so terrible looking, thrived.
The second pear tree, my dear one, thick with pears in its first year, pears I couldn’t bear to stip off though I was warned I must, was torn down to a single bare branch by one of our summer storms.
Downstairs in the kitchen, while I write this, the rice burns. By the time I smell it, it’s already too late.
But we improvise with noodles. There’s an eggplant from the garden in our supper. And the flower arrangement is beautiful, weirdly vertical.
I wonder how the three pieces will exist in the same sphere. The novel-portion at the beginning quivers a little. The letters in the middle hold the two halves together. The essays at the end want to be fiction: they are written in third person, telling about a novelist who cannot write his book.
Other books like this: The Art Lover by Carole Maso. The Vice Consul by Marguerite Duras. Passages by Ann Quinn. The Power Book by Jeanette Winterson.
I should be so lucky.
The first thing, should I be brave enough, is just to see these three texts in relation, to wonder what that initial instinct was to, after seven years, allow them to drift toward each other.
It’s possible there is a fourth, unwritten or unseen text, that could be a hundred pages long, a hundred lines long, a hundred syllables, a hundred words or a hundred letters, that somehow tells it.
Though it is too late and dark tonight, tomorrow I will go and check the little pear tree for new growth.