THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY: John Lucas reflects on variousness in this personal memoir by Graham Caveney
The Body in The Library: Memoir of a Diagnosis
Graham Caveney
Peninsula Press, London, 2024
ISBN: 9781913512620
£12. 99
As a student of Philosophy and English Literature at Reading University in the latter half of the 1950s, I was wonderfully well taught by men and women who for the most part were deeply knowledgeable about and committed to the subject(s) they professed. One, Harry Parkinson, an expert on Leibniz whom I occasionally met in a pub where staff and students regularly mingled, and who shared my love of jazz as well as of cricket, told me that he was envious of anyone who could play a musical instrument well enough to perform in front of an audience. He knew that at the time I was playing trumpet with the university jazz band, though my attainments were at best what a sceptical Australian listener would call ‘average’. Still, emboldened by what I took to be his discreet form of commendation, I told him that, following up on the recommendation he had offered our tutorial group the previous week, I was beginning to read the 17th century philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in the edition I’d borrowed from the University library.
‘The Pensées?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘The Pensées.’
And was I profiting from the experience?
I could hardly say that I wasn’t, but I did offer some remark to the effect that from what I’d so far read it seemed to me that unlike his contemporary, Descartes (or of course Leibniz), Pascal ran ideas together in a confusing – and confused – manner, one that made it difficult to follow his line of argument, although I was prepared to admit that what I thought of as the author’s confusions could be my own. Perhaps – well, probably – I simply hadn’t fathomed what Pascal was trying to tell the reader. Mighty big of me.
But I was let off lightly. The problem wasn’t mine alone, I learned. ‘Fortunately, Blaise allows all his readers a get-out clause,’ or so my tutor suggested. ‘Confusion is a condition brought about by the Fall. Blame Adam and Eve.’
Well, it was getting on for seventy years ago, and I’ve no doubt misremembered much if not most of that conversation; but the gist of it remains, including my tutor’s quotation from Louis MacNeice, about the world being crazier and more of it than we think. Especially that quotation, because Graham Caveney also quotes MacNeice’s words in The Body in the Library. He turns to them at the moment he reflects on, celebrates and puzzles over his newly drug-free self and the ‘meaning of life.’
I eat, I teach, I sign on. I go to the movies and to AA meetings. Afterwards I sit in coffee
shops and read. Outside the window walk men with umbrellas, gangs of women on hen
nights, pigeons, policemen, boys in hoodies vaping. I think of that phrase from Louis
MacNeice, the drunkenness of things being various. He would know. ‘World is crazier
and more of it than we think,’ he wrote, ‘incorrigibly plural.’ It is a Friday night in
Nottingham and I am five years sober.
The charivari that is the world after the Fall.
Much of Caveney’s beautifully written, searching book is, I want to say, Pascalian, not so much in its puzzling over and engaging with variousness – important though that is – but in the manner of its engagement. George Saintsbury thought the content of the Pensées ‘of a very chaotic character – of a character so chaotic indeed that the reader is almost at the mercy of the arrangement, perforce an arbitrary arrangement, of the editors.’ Saintsbury, whose Commentary I kept at my elbow while making my difficult, hesitant way through Pascal’s work, is inclined to attribute the responsibility of what he calls ‘the peculiarly disjointed and fragmentary condition of the sentiments expressed by Pascal’ to the author’s acceptance of ‘universal doubt’, which, good Anglican as I assume Saintsbury to have been, he thinks is sufficient to explain, if not entirely to justify, the work’s higgledy-piggledyness. It was after all Dryden, a poet Saintsbury greatly admired, who asserted in Religio Laici that ‘Points obscure are of small use to learn/But common quiet is mankind’s concern.’ No such concern motivates the Pensées.*
Might the same be said of The Body in the Library? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Each of the book’s many short sections is prefaced by a quotation, all of them taken from poets and novelists of some distinction, none of them offered as would-be ‘proof’ of Caveney’s own writerly status. Nor are they linked each to each in an orderly fashion, and though you could probably derive a kind of connected narrative from them all, it wouldn’t achieve much. The acceptance of disconnection, of variousness, is more to the point.
Still, having said that, I should add that there is a plot line glimmering through The Body in the Library. In fact there are two. One has to do with the uncertain progress of Caveney’s incurable cancer, the other, acting as a kind of defiant, even joyous riposte, concerns the development of his love for, and eventual marriage to, his partner, Emma, to whom the book is dedicated ‘forever.’ ‘Reader, I fucking married her.’ So there. And this dedication explains why the book’s final short section, preluded by a quotation from MacNeice’s ‘Spring Sunshine’ – ‘The hammerings/Of those who hang new pictures’ – allows for the possibilities entertained in The Body in the Library’s ‘Postscript’, where we are told that a letter from Caveney’s oncologist to his patient ‘roughly translated means that I am still in remission.’ Still hanging new pictures.
The letter arrives at a time of year which Caveney himself is careful to avoid calling Spring, though it is, he says, a time when the clocks go forward, and when it feels ‘as though I have regained my sight without knowing I had lost it.’ The sound of hammerings is not necessarily that of nails being driven into coffins. Nor need it signify, in MacNeice’s words, the invitation ‘to hide one’s head in the warm sand of sleep/And be embalmed without hustle or bother.’
Sufficient to the day is the sound of Emma’s voice as she reads to her husband from Anita Brookner’s Look at Me while they take a train back to Nottingham from Ilkley via Leeds. (They have been to the birthday party of an old friend: another year gone, another year arriving.) ‘For once a thing is known it can never be unknown’, Emma reads, ‘It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.’ Brookner’s witty melancholy, her always graceful, sometimes apparently blank-eyed registering of what Frost called life’s matter-of-fact, her acceptance of the unacceptable, feels ever-present in The Body in the Library, so much so that I was surprised to realise that Caveney only twice uses quotations from her fiction to prompt sections of his own pensées. Nevertheless, Emma’s reading from Look at Me is, I want to say, definitive. Writing at its truest is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. Pascal, that pitiless, compassionate, speculative chronicler of the human condition, would have agreed.
*Footnote: It should be noted that following his conversion to Rome, Dryden, as ‘The Hind and the Panther’ makes plain, was more than ready to acknowledge that common quiet is a poor alternative to faith, is an evasion or ducking away from difficult truths.
Aug 26 2024
THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY
THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY: John Lucas reflects on variousness in this personal memoir by Graham Caveney
As a student of Philosophy and English Literature at Reading University in the latter half of the 1950s, I was wonderfully well taught by men and women who for the most part were deeply knowledgeable about and committed to the subject(s) they professed. One, Harry Parkinson, an expert on Leibniz whom I occasionally met in a pub where staff and students regularly mingled, and who shared my love of jazz as well as of cricket, told me that he was envious of anyone who could play a musical instrument well enough to perform in front of an audience. He knew that at the time I was playing trumpet with the university jazz band, though my attainments were at best what a sceptical Australian listener would call ‘average’. Still, emboldened by what I took to be his discreet form of commendation, I told him that, following up on the recommendation he had offered our tutorial group the previous week, I was beginning to read the 17th century philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in the edition I’d borrowed from the University library.
‘The Pensées?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘The Pensées.’
And was I profiting from the experience?
I could hardly say that I wasn’t, but I did offer some remark to the effect that from what I’d so far read it seemed to me that unlike his contemporary, Descartes (or of course Leibniz), Pascal ran ideas together in a confusing – and confused – manner, one that made it difficult to follow his line of argument, although I was prepared to admit that what I thought of as the author’s confusions could be my own. Perhaps – well, probably – I simply hadn’t fathomed what Pascal was trying to tell the reader. Mighty big of me.
But I was let off lightly. The problem wasn’t mine alone, I learned. ‘Fortunately, Blaise allows all his readers a get-out clause,’ or so my tutor suggested. ‘Confusion is a condition brought about by the Fall. Blame Adam and Eve.’
Well, it was getting on for seventy years ago, and I’ve no doubt misremembered much if not most of that conversation; but the gist of it remains, including my tutor’s quotation from Louis MacNeice, about the world being crazier and more of it than we think. Especially that quotation, because Graham Caveney also quotes MacNeice’s words in The Body in the Library. He turns to them at the moment he reflects on, celebrates and puzzles over his newly drug-free self and the ‘meaning of life.’
I eat, I teach, I sign on. I go to the movies and to AA meetings. Afterwards I sit in coffee shops and read. Outside the window walk men with umbrellas, gangs of women on hen nights, pigeons, policemen, boys in hoodies vaping. I think of that phrase from Louis MacNeice, the drunkenness of things being various. He would know. ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think,’ he wrote, ‘incorrigibly plural.’ It is a Friday night in Nottingham and I am five years sober.The charivari that is the world after the Fall.
Much of Caveney’s beautifully written, searching book is, I want to say, Pascalian, not so much in its puzzling over and engaging with variousness – important though that is – but in the manner of its engagement. George Saintsbury thought the content of the Pensées ‘of a very chaotic character – of a character so chaotic indeed that the reader is almost at the mercy of the arrangement, perforce an arbitrary arrangement, of the editors.’ Saintsbury, whose Commentary I kept at my elbow while making my difficult, hesitant way through Pascal’s work, is inclined to attribute the responsibility of what he calls ‘the peculiarly disjointed and fragmentary condition of the sentiments expressed by Pascal’ to the author’s acceptance of ‘universal doubt’, which, good Anglican as I assume Saintsbury to have been, he thinks is sufficient to explain, if not entirely to justify, the work’s higgledy-piggledyness. It was after all Dryden, a poet Saintsbury greatly admired, who asserted in Religio Laici that ‘Points obscure are of small use to learn/But common quiet is mankind’s concern.’ No such concern motivates the Pensées.*
Might the same be said of The Body in the Library? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Each of the book’s many short sections is prefaced by a quotation, all of them taken from poets and novelists of some distinction, none of them offered as would-be ‘proof’ of Caveney’s own writerly status. Nor are they linked each to each in an orderly fashion, and though you could probably derive a kind of connected narrative from them all, it wouldn’t achieve much. The acceptance of disconnection, of variousness, is more to the point.
Still, having said that, I should add that there is a plot line glimmering through The Body in the Library. In fact there are two. One has to do with the uncertain progress of Caveney’s incurable cancer, the other, acting as a kind of defiant, even joyous riposte, concerns the development of his love for, and eventual marriage to, his partner, Emma, to whom the book is dedicated ‘forever.’ ‘Reader, I fucking married her.’ So there. And this dedication explains why the book’s final short section, preluded by a quotation from MacNeice’s ‘Spring Sunshine’ – ‘The hammerings/Of those who hang new pictures’ – allows for the possibilities entertained in The Body in the Library’s ‘Postscript’, where we are told that a letter from Caveney’s oncologist to his patient ‘roughly translated means that I am still in remission.’ Still hanging new pictures.
The letter arrives at a time of year which Caveney himself is careful to avoid calling Spring, though it is, he says, a time when the clocks go forward, and when it feels ‘as though I have regained my sight without knowing I had lost it.’ The sound of hammerings is not necessarily that of nails being driven into coffins. Nor need it signify, in MacNeice’s words, the invitation ‘to hide one’s head in the warm sand of sleep/And be embalmed without hustle or bother.’
Sufficient to the day is the sound of Emma’s voice as she reads to her husband from Anita Brookner’s Look at Me while they take a train back to Nottingham from Ilkley via Leeds. (They have been to the birthday party of an old friend: another year gone, another year arriving.) ‘For once a thing is known it can never be unknown’, Emma reads, ‘It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.’ Brookner’s witty melancholy, her always graceful, sometimes apparently blank-eyed registering of what Frost called life’s matter-of-fact, her acceptance of the unacceptable, feels ever-present in The Body in the Library, so much so that I was surprised to realise that Caveney only twice uses quotations from her fiction to prompt sections of his own pensées. Nevertheless, Emma’s reading from Look at Me is, I want to say, definitive. Writing at its truest is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. Pascal, that pitiless, compassionate, speculative chronicler of the human condition, would have agreed.
*Footnote: It should be noted that following his conversion to Rome, Dryden, as ‘The Hind and the Panther’ makes plain, was more than ready to acknowledge that common quiet is a poor alternative to faith, is an evasion or ducking away from difficult truths.