Write your diary as a writer, he said. I read the extract from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. Much of it contains her analysis of Ulysses. She doesn’t think much of it, although she promises to read it again. I wish I had her fortitude.
Sept 6th ‘I finished Ulysses and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water.’
I have never finished Ulysses. Every five years or so I pick it up and try again. It’s a book that I imagine other people imagine I have read. I have it my hands now. It’s a paperback edition, a Penguin Modern Classic. It smells of fade and stain and heavy use. The smell is a lie. I’m sure I bought it new. According to the publishing details, it must have been around 1985 in Edinburgh. I was a student, but I was not studying literature. I was a heavy reader. With no television and no sporting skills and no Internet, that’s what I did. We read and we drank and we played records and we went to gigs and we shouted Can’t Pay Won’t Pay on anti-poll tax marches.
I have packed up and carried that book to three flats in Edinburgh in the 1980s. To four houses in New Zealand in the 1990s. To five flats this century in the UK. In each of those moves I decided to keep that book. My fingers would have danced around the cover. I would have opened a random page while I stood in front of several half-filled cardboard boxes. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float.
The words said nothing to me then and they don’t now. I didn’t care about Buck Mulligan or Stephen Dedalus. Sometimes I prefer my literature spare, at other times resplendent. But whatever the style, I scorn the lavish use of adverbs and similes. You may smart at my use of lavish. Give him a break you may say. At least James Joyce finished and published the damned book. A masterpiece, one of the most famous and celebrated works in modern literature. Look in your draft folder. Ah, but I respond. Check it out yourself. The following adverbs appear on the first page: solemnly, coldly, smartly, sternly, briskly, gravely, and quietly.
I can’t believe I have just gone through Joyce’s most famous work looking for adverbs. I am beyond petty. I am also cold and I need to go outside and oil my wretched knee with an hour’s cycle.
Why haven’t I taken Ulysses to a charity shop? The same reason I still have shoes and boots I could wear before I was run over by a truck eleven years ago. I am waiting for the new improved me. The person that reads the classics and enjoys them. The person that finishes writing the dozen or so half-arsed short stories sitting in her draft file. The person who has a life plan and delivers it. There is nothing to suggest this new me will ever materialise. My writing flits between fragments and oddments and remnants and lost buttons and broken zips. It conjures wisps but never consummates.
I’ll put Ulysses back on the glass shelf in my bedroom. Later I’ll pick up Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. It’s a perfect day for the fact that.
SANDERLINGS 