Between 'The Day' And 'Deep-Night Clarity'

I finished reading a collection of Saul Bellow stories last night. Most books by Bellow, there's rarely a page where something doesn't resound or resonate, where something doesn't ring a bell. I was reading 'Cousins' the last in the collection I have and, what with the sun flung well below the horizon some-many hours previous, I was flagging — when Bellow struck this one. It was more like an alarm bell:

Sleep is out of the question, so instead of going to bed I make myself some strong coffee. No use sacking out; I'd only go on thinking.

Insomnia is not a word I'd apply to the sharp thrills of deep-night clarity that come to me. During the day the fusspot habits of a lifetime prevent real discovery. I have learned to be grateful for the night hours that harrow the nerves and tear up the veins—"lying in restless ecstasy." To want this and to bear it, you need a strong soul. [1]

Review: For Esmé — With Love And Squalor by J. D. Salinger (1953, 215pp)

This review contains a few excerpts from the book but doesn't spoil any surprises.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have a confession to make. The Catcher In The Rye was a very important book for me. I read it one summer as a still tender nineteen-year-old, working in a quiet pub, saving for my move to university in the autumn. I'm sure many of its readers will know what I'm talking about when I say the novel's narrator Holden Caulfield seemed to perfectly embody my own naive cynicism while simultaneously showing up everything that was wrong with it.

For Esmé — With Love And Squalor is the UK title for a collection of Salinger's short pieces, which in the US is simply called Nine Stories. All nine will be of interest to anyone who was impressed or moved by Salinger's most popular novel, but they might also provide an interesting taster for readers who've yet to be swayed by The Catcher In The Rye's often earnest admirers.

Snow Day

With all this beautifully disruptive and prohibitive snow about, I've been reminded on several occasions of one of my favourite books.

Philip Larkin's A Girl In Winter is a vivid portrait of England and a warming love story that unfolds slowly and sensuously. I'd like to write a review so that I could explain just why I think this novel is worth reading but, as I don't have time, I'll have to settle for sharing a meteorologically relevant passage. This is in fact the book's opening:

There had been no more snow during the night, but because the frost continued so that the drifts lay where they had fallen, people told each other there was more to come. And when it grew lighter, it seemed that they were right, for there was no sun, only one vast shell of cloud over the fields and woods. In contrast to the snow the sky looked brown. Indeed, without the snow the morning would have resembled a January nightfall, for what light there was seemed to rise from it.

It lay in ditches and in hollows in the fields, where only birds walked. In some lanes the wind had swept it up faultlessly to the very tops of the hedges. Villages were cut off until gangs of men could clear a passage on the roads; the labourers could not go out to work, and on the aerodromes near these villages all flying remained cancelled. People who lay ill in bed could see the shine off the ceilings in their rooms, and a puppy confronted with it for the first time howled and crept under the water-butt. The out-houses were roughly powdered down the windward side, the fences were half-submerged like breakwaters; the whole landscape was so white and still it might have been a formal painting.