Honeycomb in the jar

I’m sitting here wondering if Amos Oz or Ngugi wa Thiongo will win the Nobel prize for literature, due to be announced on Thursday. A spokesman on the prize panel this week informed the world that Europe remains the centre of the literary world, dismissing writers based in the United States. “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature… That ignorance is restraining.”

What?! Like many others, I was staggered by this nonsense. I have grown up loving the diversity and brilliance and courage of American writers, from Flannery O’Connor to William Faulkner, Richard Ford to Raymond Carver, Louise Erdrich to Toni Morrison to Elizabeth Bishop, Djuna Barnes to Tennessee Williams to Paul Bowles, James Baldwin to Denis Johnson. Shirley Hazzard. Emily Dickenson. Adrienne Rich. Robert Lowell. And I could go on for another six or seven entries.

I do feel no major publishing house in Europe, the UK or the US invests enough in translation and we are missing out on many Kafkas and Tolstoys. But that is another issue.

Boo sucks then to the Nobel prize committee and I am drinking a puzzling blend of organic cranberry and kiwi fruit. A gift from my housemate. It tastes as if it needs something, and I don’t mean vodka! Some cloudy apple or fresh lime juice… and I am spooning up honey dripping off a delectable honeycomb from a nearby farm, sent to me in a large beehive-shaped jar. Hedonism in sobriety.

A mangled laptop has arrived from S in Wales. The South African customs port authority has taken it apart even though it is an old secondhand computer. I wonder if they were looking for kiddie porn or just wanted to throw it around like a football for a while. Now I shall have to battle with them for the next few months because the monitor has been almost wrenched away from the keyboard. Well, I suppose it is the thought of the sender that counts.

The kitchen is full of wild African bees who have detected the scent of honey. I shall have to stay out of the kitchen until the piercing whine fades. How fondly I recall the gentle buzzing golden bees of English country gardens! These bees are busily evolving into hornets with world domination tendencies. So fierce and beautiful and dangerous I wish I could video tham doing mad kamikaze figures-of-eight over the closed honey jar. Darth Vaders with glittering wings and pointy arses. How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

The Love of a Good Woman

All afternoon I have been curled up on the sofa reading the Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald and feeling overcome with admiration and sadness. Furious too that the Letters are so badly edited — but what can anyone expect from a fond but clueless son-in-law? Sad for the lost unproductive years treading water in that marriage to the lovable alcoholic Desmond, sad that so many letters went to the bottom of the Thames when her houseboat sank (twice), sad she had to scrabble so for money. But the asides and comments are priceless even at their most nattering and mundane, the mind of a genius given free expression. She was also an Englishwoman of a certain generation and cultivated temperament, and fond of trivia.

I don’t care, I mine those letters for the wry erudite sentences that could only come from the author of The Blue Flower. I loved her novels Innocence and At The Gate of Angels, but The Blue Flower is the elusive masterpiece.

She writes for the voiceless, not in the post-modern and political sense of those silenced by oppression or marginalised from the First World, but for those who are unable to articulate their understanding of the world, unable to make sense of their own lives. Those bullied and tormented by the knowing and sly and wilfully ignorant. The hapless innocents of the world who somehow come through despte all the odds. Just what one might expect from the niece of Ronald Knox, that great witty Catholic apologist who knew how common and garden miracles might be if you knew where to look.

So she lived in council flats and dyed her hair with teabags and was intimidated by her lunatic publishers and overlooked by the smarter literati. And just went on writing her brilliant novels. Showing all of us how little we really know about the historical novel or human motivations or, the great unmentionable, love.