Maybe while missing the Modern Library Rousseau, I came across a Modern Library copy of a novel by Hugh Walpole, "Fortitude". According to Wikipedia and Walpole's own introduction it was his first successful foray into print, if being published and then neglected is worse than never being published at all.
It is a coming-of-age story. The young hero in fact keeps asking if things are to be like in David Copperfield. Wikipedia also briefly sketched the details of Walpole's life- b. New Zealand, part of a "renowned homosexual coterie" that included Evelyn Waugh.
A reader testily objects that Waugh, twice married, could not have been part of a homosexual coterie. The response is that whether Waugh was homosexual or not, he was part of the coterie. I knew nothing of the coterie, nor Walpole's proclivities when I bought this edition. I liked the terse title, and as always, the full cloth binding, the discreet black central medallion with the title, and the marvelous size and heft of it.
As for coming of age novels, they do cause personal recollections to compete, which is not terribly conducive to the author's engendering a new world.
My childhood is brought back. I always, always claim it to have been unclouded. Ridiculously, fortuitously happy. Few could ever be that untroubled. I do recall as Walpole depicts, refuge in the coat closet at school or church. I remember how teachers would ferret you out with almost greater prejudice, with true anger. The smell of lunch sacks, rubber. Strange homes in the fabric.
Other things: at the parties my parents would take their children to, waiting in the room where the coats were piled for us to leave. Even in our own home, waiting near the bed where the coats were- occasionally even under them. I pile everything I can on me in winter to get the right weight on my ankles when I sleep. I never felt this need before I stayed with Al in his freezing house by the Cascade foothills. Or until he stayed in my bed. He had the weight distributed so evenly over the expanse of his bed, two sheets, each is whipped over the bed and allowed to billow and settle, then be tugged to an accurate center. Two comforters, or a blanket and a comforter. The heat would be turned off. Everything electrical turned off and watched to see if it was still inflammable. As cold as it would be, still the weight of all that on top of me would be smothering, restricting. I would pull myself free of a part of it and he would tuck it back around me to keep the bedcovers balanced. Eventually I found I desired it myself and tried to recreate it in my own chaotic bed.
In my bed there was and is always a squalid tangle of thrift store NFL sheets. "Now isn't that better," he would ask, flattening each out. "You're just like Rat-Girl, burrowing a nest in the middle of the bed." His rat, Rat-Girl, has been dead ten or twelve years now. Either he left her on the window sill for the seagulls to carry away, as the seagulls persecuted the square beneath his window, where the less addled bums scattered scraps from the sandwiches that were handed out--- or I proposed it as befitting a creature more wild than domesticated- a sort of Viking funeral. He might have flushed her or put her in a dumpster. Still the former story stays with me for some reason. Who knows why some things remain behind, ecen if they never happened...The unlabelled image of a seagull in a horned Viking helmet is pointlessly and inexplicably filed somewhere in my memory.
What a strange existence that causes one thing to be almost death to you which would save you later and before, and to have it again and again and to forget it again and again. When a little warmth or a cool breeze makes such a difference. How have our minds evolved to accomodate such viccissitudes?
Rousseau makes it apparent that the evolution of an individual can be depicted as a product which eclipses its ingredients. He suggests that writing abbout one portion of his life allows it to then be forgotten, expunged forever. Simultaneously, he implies that each stage uniquely leads to the eventual result, his sad fate. The next episode almost exclusively and uniquely leads to that same fate, and the next. Someone somewhere accused Rousseau of being all revelation and conversion. there is a passage from something online which says it better:
"If it is true that Rousseau desires to present himself to the world as a tragic hero, the victim of sinister plot, it is also true that this ultimate downfall would at least provide closure and a sense of meaning to his life. But without this definitive ending, the final significance of the various events he has described must remain indefinite. Tragedies, like all teleological structures, reveal their meanings only backwards. Without reaching that decisive point, everything remains tentative, almost meaning something in so far as it alludes to this future event, but still open to radical and revelatory change through what transpires in the final act. Rousseau's story, and perhaps the life that it reflects, is trapped in this highly-charged but indeterminate state until its plot can be resolved. "
I mentioned the pile of coats in part because nothing would seem as deadly to me now. How hot it is here, and Seattle is probably one of the most temperate cities in the country. Because of this there is no air-conditioning except in grocery stores, theaters.
My friend Liz does not even own a fan. She is afraid that her nine-month old will put his fingers in to where the blades are. He probably would. She can sleep with her windows open. I live in a house so poorly designed that screens cannot cover the windows unless they could be pulled off every time the windows are opened or closed. But I have fans. It is madness to suffer from the heat or cold.
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