Does anybody still read Jeanette Winterson
and other pressing items
In this Notebook:
Twilight of an idol
Pro-Israeli culturati make mistakes too (I don’t mean the TFCA meltdown, which was just embarrassing to read about)
Sam Kahn on what’s wrong with fiction today
“You’re walking back they/them-ing? After all that? There were six of you and you made everyone change their shit for you, and now you’re walking it back? So help me god if the Brooklyn bitch with a boyfriend is walking that back now. Not on my watch.”
Kavanagh, Winterson, Barnes
I’ve recently come across and quickly read Barnes’ slender 2013 volume about the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh. It’s written in the familiar Barnes-ian hybrid of fiction, reportage and memoir, and the first two thirds are set in the fin de siecle Britain and France and the early days of ballooning, before the aviation in heavier-than-air machines became standard. It’s one of those short and eccentric technological dead ends which historians don’t bother too much with but Barnes found something of interest in the buoyant gas movement and parked the story between a British army captain who was an early ballooning enthusiast, and Sarah Bernhardt. Another central character in this Edwardian menagerie is a French aeronaut who was the first to take aerial photographs of any territory, though his love life was less interesting (he loved his wife, was uxurious - one of Barnes’ favourite words; he is a guardian of it - but she died well before him, leaving him bereft and short of a story arc in Barnes’ book).
The British officer falls hard for the famous actress who is continuously courted by an army of potential and former lovers. He is her favourite for a while, but she declines his marriage offer and tells him that her heart prefers to explore and be free. Rather than becoming one of the male harem of the exes who continue to convene with her backstage, the captain leaves France and takes years to recover. He marries adequately but not particularly happily.
In the third, memoir part, Barnes writes as Barnes about the period of not even two months of events that transpired from Pat’s diagnosis to her death, and the days and years following. It took several years and a number of other books for Barnes to get his marital grief book together, and what he comes up with is quite oblique. Some motifs, but not many, recur from the historico-fictional section of the book in the memoir part. Oh I see how the fact about ballooning being always at the mercy of winds can be useful in trying to describe grief, you find yourself thinking. The rest you will have to guess or remain agonistic about: we have no clue if for example the detailed rendering of the Bernhardt-Colonel Fred Burnaby courtship and dance of commitment bear any resemblance to what took place between young Pat and Julian.
There’s a single phrase in the book (“sometimes difficult love”) that’s a place marker for whatever marital complications might have taken place between the two in their three decades together. Due to an indiscretion of the third party, one such complication has been public knowledge for a long while now: the period in the eighties when Kavanagh left Barnes to live with Jeanette Winterson.