Miss Anne Carson: A Web of Words

 

desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness

– from The Beauty of the Husband, p. 38[1]

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One feels that Anna Carson is a Miss because of the precocious brilliance that she possesses, but actually Anne Carson is far from it, she is a Mrs, and indeed that is what The Beauty of the Husband is all about.

Many of my friends ‘discovered’ Anne Carson before me. In fact, I have to give credit to a friend urging me towards Autobiography of Red about two years ago, but I was not ready for it then. I am a firm believer that there are times when we can be, because of the stages of personal development that we then face, especially well-primed for a text. I am glad that, for example, I read Germaine Greer or someone like John Fowles as an adult. I think that in the case of the former, if I were a child, I would not understand the adult content of the book and in the case of the latter, the finely crafted texture of the prose would have been lost on me.  However, there are exceptions, the enduring appeal of a writer like Neil Gunn and the vernacular heave and sway of his prose style would be equally enchanting to a clever child as it is to an adult.

But I have praised Neil Gunn enough elsewhere. Now I want to think about Anne Carson. I borrowed a copy of The Beauty of the Husband from the English-language poetry section of the National Library of Iceland in Reykjavik. I took it away with me for my ‘final’ work camp in East Iceland, knowing that long novels and books were not well-suited to my very busy schedule.  I became quickly absorbed in the story – unusual for narrative poems, which I can often find difficult and unapproachable. The story was basically about the relationship between Carson and her husband. It was not a conventional relationship (which relationships ever are?), but a troubled, problematic, passionate and brilliant one. As Carson delineates the story of the love growing, ebbing, transforming, diminishing – much like an Elizabethan sonnet cycle – the reader is drawn into a privileged, dangerous, sensual world in which Carson and her husband play a very ‘high-level-game’ with language.

I remember once in Ghent watching a band of young jazz musicians. Their knowledge of the musical scores, instruments and indeed music as a whole was so far-reaching that at any given point they could trade instruments with each other and happily carry on. I saw the same thing in Húrra and Kex Café in Reykjavik. When I mentioned this to my friend Joachim, he smiled as though I were taking such wizardry for granted. Yes, but it is a very high level sort of game.

Couples tend to create worlds and then lose themselves there. It is called infatuation.  However, I am already old enough to know that the result of this kind of accelerated vortex of fascination is disastrous. Getting lost is never fun and even when you are two you can feel alone. Alone is a soft way of putting it, it’s more like being cut adrift on an ocean or being a castaway on an island: it’s absolute. So many of these worlds (highly secretive, ornate and private) simply disappear, fly off record like planets spinning off into other solar systems. But what Carson does in The Beauty of the Husband is capture the whole fluttering, temporary and fierce organism, for a moment on the page. I haven’t lost you yet, have I?

The Reykjanes Peninsula

‘A ewe on the road’ by Nigel Johnson

Before embarking on my last work camp with SEEDS, I managed to book a week off to enjoy a round-the-island road trip with a friend from Belgium, Alverro, and my father, along the  route number 1.

Although many exciting things happened to us on the trip and we managed to spend some time in the north and north-east – the only part of Iceland that was entirely unknown to me at that point – I want to write about our experiences in the Westfjords and especially on the Drangsnes Peninsula.

Unlike other parts of Iceland, where driving in the summer along mainly empty roads allows you to make quick progress even if you do obey the strict 90 km/h speed limit, in Westfjords the going is always slow. This is mainly because long stretches of the coastal road are unasphalted gravel tracks but also because the coastal road keeps faithfully to the waving fringes of the jagged land mass (a shape the Lonely Planet describes as a ‘lobster’s claw’), torturously bending & weaving around the deep fjords.

I was already familiar with the stretch from the Flokulundar hot-pot to Isafjörður as I have driven it with Marina only a few weeks before. After the 6 km single-lane tunnel that acts as the formidable rite-of-passage-way to Isafjörður, the road was quite new to me. My guidebook ranked the Reykjanes Peninsula route north of Isafjörður as one of the most attractive stretches of driving in Iceland – and I was not disappointed. This was one of the least inhabited parts of the Westfjords and that is already one of the most remote regions of Iceland.

Our four-by-four Toyota scooted along merrily under bridges carved through rock, along a road elevated just above sea level, so that the Atlantic ocean was always to our left: glittering, pensive, elephant-grey. North of us, and every moment drawing nearer, was the fabled Hornstrandir Peninsula, an outstretched arm of the Westfjords that is now entirely uninhabited and has no roads at all. The only human beings that ever cross that peninsula go by foot and intrepid and courageous they are as even in summer very deep snow lies in that desolate, blasted peninsula and there are no shelters or places to buy provisions.

For weeks now, my mind had been enchanted by the magical name of the Hornstrandir; I wanted desperately to go there, especially when I discovered that they have an arctic fox research centre where volunteers and hardened scientists rub shoulders together in a brave crusade to  track the movements of the twitchy little mammals. However, at that point it wasn’t practicable, especially as the only means of transport there and back was a ferry from Isafjörður which was very expensive (about £70 each way).

Yet, winding about the highly picturesque comb-like undulations of the Reykjanes peninsula, I could enjoy Hornstrandir from afar. All I could really make out were the misty silhouettes of vast, snow-covered mountains. Nearby, there was that continual glittering disc of water, fields of ceramic blue lupins and a moody overcast sky. It leant the whole landscape a romantic, dramatic appearance; I was reminded of Exmoor, all that rooty soil, rock and silence. At one point Alverro made a call to stop. Go back, he cried, you won’t regret it!