desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness
– from The Beauty of the Husband, p. 38[1]
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?
833 words a day 