Category: Claire-Louise Bennett

Dispatches

From Claire-Louise Bennett, Galway, Ireland

Greetings from Galway. The sun is out again today. Winter has finally receded. I am very glad I have a balcony and feel a bit ashamed that until recently I referred to it as my crap balcony. It doesn’t have any furniture on it, I just throw some cushions down and sit with my back against the wall. The man in the flat below used to be in an Irish showband. He often goes over to London for quite long stretches, I think he has a flat there. He is in his flat here for the moment, he plays country music now and then. A couple of days ago a parcel came for him and since he wasn’t home I took it from the postman. He seemed to be gone for a while and I began to feel concerned – in normal circumstances he has a routine which involves going to the bakery on the corner first thing and sitting up at the window with the Irish Mirror and a coffee – but obviously he wasn’t doing that today. Probably he was just out for a walk. He always wears a hat, sometimes a big purple one. I read his full name on the parcel and gave it a shake before putting it down on my stairs. It seemed to me that there were boots inside. Marty is big into his boots. Though in fact the boots themselves would be fairly small because Marty is quite a compact kind of fellow. Once a white and blue towel I use for drying my hair fell off my balcony while I was at the bar across the street and Marty posted it back through my letterbox. I found that really weird. Who stuffs a towel through a letterbox? When I gave him his parcel, which I handed to him through his window, I asked him if he was doing alright and told him to give me a shout if he needed anything. I saw that Bonehead was on the windowsill. Bonehead is a white cat with two identical black marks on top of her head between her little white ears. I don’t think she belongs to Marty. She has a nest on top of one of the scrappy shrubs down below. I might read a bit when I’m on the balcony. I drink a lot of tea. There’s a dandelion, liquorice, and lemon one I find really soothing at the moment. I’m drinking it now actually. I’m not on the balcony now, but I know it’s there. Thank god. My crap balcony! I will go out on it in a little while and lean over the railing to see if Marty has opened his window yet.

I don’t watch TV series, and I’m not drawn to movies so much at the moment. I love listening to music and always have done. Sound really takes me in, shifts me around, shakes integral images out of me, loosens me up. Here’s a playlist of stuff I’m into right now. It’s a bit of a mix – I hate the word eclectic, especially in relation to music – and probably its variety is a reflection of where I’m at at the moment. So many distinct and incompatible feelings and ideas are coexisting and overlapping throughout my mind and psyche. It’s strange to be host to so many apparently contradictory sensations and thoughts. It actually reminds me very much of how I felt all the time when I was really young, and that is adding a whole other dimension to what’s already going on. Some areas of myself feel expansive and calm and quite radiant, while others feel compressed and scabrous and dreadful. Yes, that’s how I felt for a long time when I was young! Pied and dappled, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might put it. Music helped me then and helps me now to move into and through these different zones and densities without too much distress or idealism or attachment. I hope you enjoy some of the tracks here and are keeping well, wherever you are. x

Listen here.

Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond.

 

Large Issues from Small: Meditations on Still Life

Claire-Louise Bennett on still lifes, ‘the essence of simple things’, and the poetics of space for frieze:

When I was very young, I made drifting lists that were triggered by the things on my bedroom floor, migrated outside to name those things that I imagined inhabited the dark – wolves, moths, fireflies, greying tennis balls tucked beneath black conifers – before turning inwards to tentatively alight upon that strange menagerie of internal phantoms that has been skimming across my marrow since day one. Writing was – and is still, to some degree – a way of linking the inner, the outer and the beyond along the same imaginative continuum. As Bachelard put it: ‘Large issues from small.’ Yet, despite the vibrant poetics that his meditation upon familiar space brings forth, the home and its accoutrements are still routinely thought of in predominantly domestic terms, amounting to nothing more than an environment characterized by habit, drudgery, tameness and unvarying outcomes. Seen from that dour angle, it’s hardly a strata of life that seems worth reporting on. In recent years, visual and performance-art practices have done a great deal to foreground the aesthetic value of the events, tasks and items that constitute daily life. Challenging the hegemony of fine art and its emphasis on beauty, religion and greatness, everyday aesthetics alert us to those myriad responses, from disgust to consummation, that calibrate our day-to-day environments and the activities they are host to. While this is a crucial and exciting turn, I feel that some of the artworks that have emerged from this discourse often present an estranged pastiche of ‘everyday life’, and reinforce generic ideas of the domestic. Too much of the human role is apparent in them, perhaps. I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s people who subdue things, rather than the other way around. Liberated from their customary function, objects regain a marvellous ambivalence which hints at their belonging to a limitless system far more generative than the one they are assigned to through their routine encounters with individuals. An unoccupied stage set has often seemed to me to transmit a greater dramatic charge than the play that comes to pass upon it. Perhaps it is for similar reasons that some of the artworks I like best are still-lifes from the Renaissance period.

The absence of human subject matter in still life meant that, as a genre, it wasn’t held in as high regard as portraiture, landscape or history painting; in my view, it is the very eschewing of a blatantly anthropocentric theme that makes these canvases so singular. And the more stripped down the compositions the better. Among my favourites is a still life, or bodegón, by the Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán. He completed Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber around 1602, at a time when most artists were exclusively occupied with depicting religious tableaux, battle scenes, royal figures and so on. Here, in this arrestingly austere arrangement, a quince hangs from a thin string at the top-left corner of an apparently paneless window; its outstretched leaves make it look winged and restless, as if at any moment it might take flight and disappear upwards out of the frame. Suspended beneath it is a cabbage, whose downcast aspect brings to mind Cyrano de Bergerac’s defence of vegetable life in his novel A Voyage to the Moon (1657): ‘To massacre a man is not so great a sin as to cut and kill a cabbage, because one day the man will rise again, but the cabbage has no other life to hope for.’ Below, on the unmarked sill, a cleaved melon has come to rest. The seeded surface of its hacked interior is the only area in the painting that is free from shadow; yet, here, unadulterated light seems indecent, intrusive, exposing the disarrayed pips and the dent of the severing blade to disquieting effect. Beside the melon is a slice of itself, one end in the merciful umbra of its bigger portion, the other end rent from its stippled skin. A year or so after he completed the painting, Sánchez Cotán joined a Carthusian monastery, part of a Catholic order whose emphasis on contemplation meant that the monks passed their days in silence and solitude. Perhaps only a painter with the capacity for hermetic spiritual dedication would feel moved to wrench these humble comestibles away from the raucous chaos of a muggy kitchen and present them in isolation. As De Bergerac, writing less than 50 years later, said: ‘Plants, in exclusion of mankind, possess perfect philosophy.

Another Spanish painter who created still lifes that transcend the daily round is Francisco de Zurbarán. It is not surprising to discover that the artist was very much influenced by Sánchez Cotán. As in Sánchez Cotán’s windowsill, the table of his Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) is placid and unmarked: there are no traces of human tasks, no nicks in the wood, no stains from previous repasts and neither of the table’s two ends can be seen. There is a similar precise ordering of objects and, like his predecessor, Zurbarán conjures mesmerizing black backdrops that pull our attention through the tangible elements onto an amorphous metaphysical plane. A metal dish of four citrons stands in front of this darkness, the fruit nosing the static air like deracinated moles. On the right is a saucer, upon which a cup of water stands askew, watched by a pale rose poised on the rim. Between both is a basket piled with coy oranges and a sprig of spiky blossom. The light on this arrangement seems to be coming from behind my left shoulder, picking out the protuberant lemons, some of the huddled oranges and one side of the obstinate cup, where it stops. The light does not, or cannot, penetrate the darkness behind; we could be anywhere. I do not consider what hand gathered and organized this produce, nor what mouth will consume it; again, these fruits are not for eating. This is not a slice of life.

(…)

Fitzcarraldo Editions: March 2016 Events

29 March: Claire-Louise Bennett will join KJ Orr at Burgh House on March 29 to discuss Pond and Orr’s short story collection, Light Box (published by Daunt Books). From 7pm. Tickets here.

30 March: Claire-Louise will also be in conversation with novelist Luke Williams at Waterstones Islington. From 7.30pm. The event is free, but please reserve a seat by emailing events.islington@waterstones.com

Fitzcarraldo Editions: November 2015 Events

10 November: Will Self and Gregor Hens will be in conversation at the London Review Bookshop. From 7pm. Tickets here.

12–15 November: Fitzcarraldo Editions will have a stand Offprint Paris, at the Beaux-arts de Paris. Further details here.

16 November: Claire-Louise Bennett presents Pond at an event chaired by Lauren Elkin at Shakespeare and Company, Paris. From 7pm.

17 November: Claire-Louise Bennett and Joanna Walsh discuss their books, Pond and Hotel, with Katherine Angel in the London Review Bookshop. From 7pm. Tickets here.

19 November: Claire-Louise Bennett reading followed by a Q&A with Charlie Fox at a Novel Writers event at Spike Island, Bristol. From 6.30-8pm. Tickets here.

Fitz Carraldo Editions