Postscript
Rumpled
P. J. Kavanagh
T took an old friend, newly arrived from the US, into the garden yesterday and he stopped and said, 'What garden? Where's the flowers?' For a moment I was able to see it through his eyes: small apple trees growing in the midst of seeding grasses, the occasional poppy, the occasional wind- blown rose. He was not to know that the grasses were not rank, were free of thistles and docks, because of years of July scy- thing, and that grass allowed to grow and stand and seed is a rare sight round here. Nor could he know that sometimes in this June of shifting lights I have been surprised and moved, especially at evening, by the gracefulness of the different kinds of grass- heads (they have begun to smoke, with blown seeds) and by the contrast between the long grass and the smooth, mown paths. I particularly enjoyed the shadows they threw, and the way they surrounded the apples that were plumping among them. I was not always moved, these things come and go, but always surprised. I did not blame my friend for his teasing (and genuine) retraction. He had expected flo- wer beds, a more evident imposition of order, and what he found — I saw it with his eyes — could be considered a mess.
The trouble is that nothing stands still,
or stays the same. The night before, there had been a wind, with some rain, and when we looked out of the window in the morning at the fields, and down into the garden, it was clear that the world had become rumpled, and I had not fully taken this in. So now, where I saw tall grasses, my friend observed a newly arrived dis- order. Perhaps I did not want to see it, because it heralds scything time, an arduous business, though I try to persevere in this low-tech fashion by telling myself it keeps me fit.
So June has passed, as always, without being wholly grasped and absorbed. It always escapes that way because there are so many other things to do, like work. Perhaps it should escape, you can't always be standing looking at a thing; you have to look away and then — perhaps be sur- prised.
The major distraction has been the long-promised writing of a long Introduc- tion to the work of a dead writer, a task I dread above all others. I told A.S. Byatt about this dread and she said it was the kind of job she most enjoyed. Antonia Byatt is a bright woman, with the kind of brightness I like, and lack. She would be able to impose order (though not too much); my friend would recognise any garden of which she was in charge, and would feel at home. But how do you impose order on the work of a writer's whole life? You may have confidence in your selection from it but how do you sit down and sum it all up? Terrifying. Never- theless, it had to be done and June had to look after itself for a while.
It is a problem of tone and rhythm. It is difficult to know whether to pitch an Introduction at people who know some- thing about the writer, or people who know nothing. And rhythm goes to pot because you can't just follow your train of thought, you have to get facts right, stop- ping to check dates and book titles and the spellings of names of friends, and then you suddenly see that a generalisation needs to be qualified or someone will jump on you, you keep popping these in until the whole thing, instead of gliding smoothly, de- velops square wheels. Tone and rhythm are so important in writing that a writer who thinks he has just about hit the right pitch and beat is often surprised that people are more interested in what he said than how he said it, for it was the latter that was the real difficulty.
This is because the tone and the rhythm — the How — to some extent suggest and dictate the content — the What. You can be trapped for 5,000 words by the wrong opening sentence. No wonder my hand shook. However, I emerged blinking, rum- pled, in time to take my friend into the garden which we had clearly not summed up sufficiently well for him. And I must get out my scythe for the grass and, one day soon, begin to cut the doubtless rambling, overblown Introduction. At the moment I am quite relieved by it, it seems to stand 11P, but things can change overnight.
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