18 Wittgenstein’s Mistress-David Markson

“There is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.” -Leonardo

Allow me to introduce you to the crazy intelligent Kate: as unreliable a narrator as you’ll ever find. She begins her story by acknowledging her search for another living being (the cover holds the first sentence of the novel). Believing she is alone in the world she tells her story of living in museums around the world, traveling to the battlegrounds of ancient Greece, and revisiting locations of personal history. Along the way she leaves messages in the hope that somebody else exists.

The problem for the reader: is she the only living woman, or is she mad? The writing style is stream-of-consciousness, and it’s as good as Joyce on crack. She is sitting at a typewriter, over the span of several months, writing an autobiography. Where a day’s worth of writing ends you have to be told by Kate. She offers that she was mad during many moments of her solitary journey, but her honesty seduces the reader to trust what she is writing now. Much of her surroundings appear tangible: clothes dried in the sun, a jar to fetch water from a stream, a canoe, the beach, and the forest. Many of the objects she describes in her house must be real, an atlas, a painting, and half empty bookshelves:

“There is space. Many of the shelves up here are half empty.
Although doubtless when I say they are half empty I should really be saying they are half filled, since presumably they were totally empty before somebody half filled them.
Then again it is not impossible that they were once filled completely, becoming half empty only when somebody removed half of the books to the basement. I find this second possibility less likely than the first, although it is not utterly beyond consideration.”

These philosophical questions pepper the novel, but Kate seems to have an answer for each of them, and you start to trust and understand her point of view. Logical impossibilities that she answers in her madness:  

“Once, when I was listening to myself read the Greek plays out loud, certain of the lines sounded as if they had been written under the influence of William Shakespeare. One had to be quite perplexed as to how Aeschylus or Euripides might have read Shakespeare...Finally it occurred to me that the translator had no doubt read Shakespeare.”

Her actions also seem quite realistic. She travels around the world in any car that still has gas and a working battery. Early in her search she carries baggage and objects, transferring them each time a car runs out of gas. At one point she drops hundreds of tennis balls down The Spanish Steps. Sounds fun, but  she stops carrying things and begins leaving things, forgetting.

Kate makes countless classic allusions to Greek dramas, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. More of her allusions are to artists and paintings: Van Gogh, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso, De Kooning, Magritte, and El Greco. The facts she presents, alongside possible encounters of individuals that lived in the same town during the same time periods, lose value as she tries to connect the lives of masters, apprentices, students, and offspring. At many points you think she is just showing off her knowledge of obscure details about artists, the name of Rembrandt’s cat for example. But she can’t remember the name of her own cat, and obviously “one does not name a seagull.”

She claims to have lived in the Met, the Tate, and the Louvre. While in these museums she burned frames of paintings to keep warm, but also hung her own paintings between the masters. Kate clearly has knowledge of art history, but she offers small truisms that you believe until you can no longer trust her sanity. The reader’s trust turns to sympathy. And with that sympathy you question everything she says. Kate has some facts, but they are not remembered accurately. According to Kate the following was said by Leonardo, sadly, it was not:

“There is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.” -Michelangelo  

p.s. What happened to 10-17? number 9 was read so long ago and the post so horrible...I'll try to keep up. 

The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark

The Hothouse by the East River is Muriel Spark's "New York" book, begun in the late sixties during the brief period of her life that she lived there, but not finished and published until after she moved to Rome. New York seems not to have agreed with her: According to Martin Stannard's biography, these 140 pages came excruciatingly slowly, were frequently put away to write other novels and then resumed. The book itself is fraught with anxiety, especially the anxiety of mental illness, and Spark's New York is a sort of cramped fever dream.

The main character, Elsa, is mentally ill, according to her husband and children. Therapy has been ineffective, and what's worse is that madness seems to be catching: One by one, the other characters realize that Elsa's shadow points in the wrong direction:

And Paul, still standing in the middle of the carpet, then looks at her shadow. He sees her shadow cast on the curtain, not on the floor where it should be according to the position of the setting sun from the window bay behind her, cross-town to the West Side. He sees her shadow, as he has seen it many times before, cast unnaturally. Although he has expected it, he turns away his head at the sight.

What Spark cannily does not point out is that every time this anomaly is pointed out, Elsa's shadow is pointing toward the East River. It is not the river that is important, but the East: Elsa's shadow points toward Europe, where she and her husband Paul once worked for a secret World War II program broadcasting British propaganda using German war defectors. Elsa suspects that one of these defectors, perhaps planning to kill them, has appeared in New York, posing as a shoe salesman.

This is the nature of Elsa's madness: she is stuck in time. Even in New York, her life revolves around her time in this secret program, it points backward--not only does her shadow symbolically reach toward it, but its backwardness suggests the reversal of the earth's path around the sun, and the reversal of time itself. Nothing is as real or relevant as this period of her life:

[Paul says,] "You did call me yesterday, you know. Don't you remember?"

"What has yesterday got to do with me?" she asks.

Time in Hothouse is the mirror-image of time in The Girls of Slender Means, where each individual moment is viewed as a single point in a long expanse: here, the expanse rests on a single point.

The themes are the same, then, but the approach is different: Hothouse is much more experimental, from the use of present tense to the loose absurdism, in which Spark isn't quite comfortable. I liked some of it, especially this moment, about one of Elsa's friends who breeds silkworms, keeping them in her bra for warmth:

Garven screams. His eyes are on the Princess's bosom. He screams. Under the protective folds of her breasts the Princess, this very morning, has concealed for warmth and fear of the frost a precious new consignment of mulberry leaves bearing numerous eggs of silkworms. They have hatched in the heat. The worms themselves now celebrate life by wriggling upon Princess Xavier's breast and causing Garven to scream.

But ultimately Hothouse is underserved by Spark's style, which is too brisk and controlled to really allow absurdism to flourish. The twist, too, is deeply unsatisfying--and perhaps you may figure it out yourself if you think on the image of worms, celebrating life.

What is more interesting to me is the relation of Hothouse to Spark herself, who once worked in a program like Elsa's, and who suffered from a form of madness brought on by diet pills. Spark thought that T. S. Eliot was embedding messages to her in his works and in newspapers; in Hothouse Elsa's husband Paul believes the German defector/shoe salesman is scrawling messages for them on the bottom of shoes. Are we permitted to draw the line, and wonder if Spark's own mental illness is connected to her time in the propaganda program, which made a business of messages and codes? Did Spark herself feel anchored to her wartime experiences? It does Hothouse no credit that these questions point toward a story far more interesting than the one she published.