Saturday 28 April 2007

American novels


These were my reactions to four quite different American novels read as I travelled across the States in May of last year.

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is a fine work of literature. I feel quite confident in this opinion, despite having come across many derogatory references to it or its author, and few that claim any serious classic status for it. Although the descriptions are journalistically detailed, and utterly specific to a certain (now historical) time and place - I'm glad at least to have made the acquaintance of New York before starting in on it - the satire is not dated at all. On the contrary, it is on a universal level, quite worthy of the Roman satirists or of Schiller's definitions of the genre. This is a function of the essential simplicity of the book's plot: for whatever subplots Wolfe is spinning through the sultry Manhattan streets, we remain planted in the expensive patent leather shoes of his anti-hero Sherman McCoy, facing his inexorable downfall. There are no twists and no buffoonery: we are made to share his perspective and his horrible, pit-of-the-stomach sensation (over hundreds of pages) - "no, no, this is all a terrible mistake". In this sense the novel possesses more of a kinship to tragedy than to to the crime thriller - we are not being thrilled, we are being sickened. And yet even while looking through Sherman's eyes and feeling his self-pity, we know that the situation is not tragic (it is simply not serious enough: Sherman is not going to lose his life, and by the end of the book he seems to have gained more of a genuine purpose in it than he had to begin with). It is blackly comic; and Sherman is a dupe and a self-deluding fool, by the time of his final abasement a figure of pure slapstick mockery. The chasm between these two perspectives is the true measure of the book's understanding of human nature.

To take only one of the subtler examples: Wolfe depicts his hero at two high-society cocktail parties hosted by friends of his wife. At the first he is virtually ignored, made to feel small and dull: he cannot understand the treatment he receives, and why the other guests do not recognise him as a man of power, a financial "Master of the Universe". At the second, however, which occurs after news of Sherman's involvement in a hit-and-run incident in the Bronx has hit the papers, he is feted, the hostess and assembled dignitaries hang on his lips, their eyes gleaming with wonder and curiosity. Sherman finds it even harder to figure out what is going on here than he did at the first party. In the taxi home his puzzlement spills over, he tries to get some kind of explanation out of his wife - and receives nothing but a pitying shake of the head in reply, with the answer "Sherman, you're too easily pleased". Pleased with what, then? With the attention he has been given, the apparent social "success". But he can only take pleasure in that because he is so blinded by vanity as to think that the other guests are actually responding to him as a person, an individual with his own profound worth - which they recognise. Doubt plagues him because he cannot understand why they should be according him this recognition now, with all the scandal surrounding his name, and not when his achievement was still untarnished. Yet this doubt does not disturb in the least the innocence of his vanity, his assumption that his self-worth is what is at stake in such a scenario. (That is the awful, snakelike truth of this scene, that vanity and innocence pair perfectly with one another, in adulthood just as once in early childhood.)

The natural corollary of his wife's rebuke - that he can be "easily pleased" because he is shallow - is thus in one important sense untrue. Sherman is far more concerned to understand and to be understood at a deep level than anyone else at the soiree: the problem is that the other guests are shallow. They don't see anything of Sherman's character at all, either as he wishfully imagines it or as it really is (a mass of petty vanities: Wolfe demonstrates with clinical precision, the scalpel of prose slitting and probing a repulsively decayed yet still familiar psychology, how a man's life can be spent in almost every minute worrying about his self-respect). All that attracts them to him is the wish to hear the latest gossip from the horse's mouth, and to indulge a little vicarious nostalgie de la boue. The sadness of his wife's shake of the head finally symbolises, for me, this truth: what good would it even do Sherman if he saw what was happening? Why renounce the comforting illusions of vanity, if it merely permits one to fraternize with superficial and cynical people in the full knowledge of how superficial and cynical they are? Would the shock of that knowledge not make Sherman himself so cynical that any chance of redeeming such a situation, such a life, would be lost?

While Wolfe shows how minute observation of the details of a particular time and place can enhance writing's universal import as well as its satiric punch, the beginning of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence made me wonder if Wharton was not too close to the society she describes. She lavishes impressive powers of recall some thirty years after the fact (one is reminded of Proust!) on the fashions, turns of phrase and social customs of people one cannot to begin with feel any sympathy towards, so taken up are they by the strangely dutiful (and titularly "innocent") vanities of late-nineteenth-century New York. Characters who say things like "Oh my dear, how can you possibly countenance someone who wore black at their coming-out?" make you roll your eyes in disbelief. Yet the overall tone is not satirical, or at least ceases to be after one of the most effective "flash-forwards" probably ever written in a novel. The hero Archer has married, decided to renounce his great love the Countess Olenska, and raised children happily with his dignified but blinkered wife. The age in which her views and values seemed so firm, so self-evident has slipped quietly into the past, even before she herself dies as one of its last representatives - and Archer, who never represented it, but who has nonetheless defined the course of his life by an act thoroughly typical of its buttoned-up moral code, is invited by his son to accompany him to Paris. There, of course, Ellen Olenska still lives, the Count now dead, nothing standing in the way of a meeting and re-awakening of their love - and how does Wharton end the book? With a masterstroke, one of the most shattering endings I can remember reading; one unexpected but at the same time (as soon as one reflects on it) inevitable. For after all how could the lovers' meeting be played in a fashion that would do justice to the expectations, longings and frustration of two lifetimes?

One solution would have been to cut the novel short with Archer waiting, poised on the threshold. This I am sure Wharton could have managed well and movingly, but there is still something dissatisfying about it, not only because it's a "trick" that's often been used, but because it would end on a note of prospection, when the mood of the final section and of the novel as a whole is one of retrospection. So instead Archer lets his son go in ahead to meet Ellen and the assembled party, promising he will follow - and he never does. Seated on a bench on the other side of the street, he looks up to the brightly-lit windows of Ellen's apartment in the deepening dusk, and when the shutters are finally drawn down by the servants he returns alone to his hotel. Wharton shares little or nothing of what is going through his head, but she does not need to: the poignancy and dignity of the act are enough. With such a final image one can easily forgive Wharton that her style is not as "refined" as Henry James', or that the earlier part of the book had its longueurs and lapses into romantic cliche.

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo's Underworld portrayed the same America, I concluded after finishing them; even if Underworld is seven times the length of the Pynchon and in quite a different style. Bigger doesn't mean better: Pynchon's novel is the more successful for me, and more convincing in its imaginative delineation of the modern American "frontier", California. I forget the book's date, but it startled me: I had expected it to be twenty years later. All the themes of the American collective unconscious are there: motels, TV, freeways, shrinks, shootings, garbage, kitsch, paranoid hermeneutics, underground networks of conspirators, and the sense that in a completely interconnected universe "every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important" (that's E. M. Forster, quoted by Zadie Smith in an epigraph to White Teeth, but it's a very American-flavoured idea). In this last symptom of modernity lies a particularly crucial difference from the bourgeois world of experience of nineteenth-century Europe, essentially not much changed in 50s America. If you read Balzac or Flaubert's minute descriptions of bourgeois interiors you couldn't exactly maintain they thought trifles unimportant; but those details contain no promise of redemption, they merely confirm the deadlocked pattern of a "respectable" existence which can only be broken by a major catastrophe or by crime (adultery, suicide). In the networked world, freed from respectable isolation by automobiles and the media, one can find genuine meaning in the smallest observed thing, such as the logo on a postage stamp, and experience epiphanies at the most unpromising of moments, such as driving down a freeway (both of these prompt illuminations for Pynchon's heroine Oedipa Maas).

The excellence of Pynchon's book lies in spotting this era-defining change in consciousness without overplaying it: The Crying of Lot 49 remains short, light, disorientingly inventive, and comic to the core. Underworld, however, falls into the trap inherent in any attempt to conjure with "epiphanies". DeLillo's style portentously expects an epiphany at every juncture, and given how many junctures (not to mention disjunctures) there are in the jigsaw-puzzle plot, this makes for a superfluity of irritatingly "significant" moments. Not only the disconnections in the narrative, jumping back and forth from coast to coast and decade to decade, but the disconnections of DeLillo's sentences seem to want to enforce a plenitude of sensation and significance at every point. He writes very beautifully, there's no doubt of that. Often the prose is as densely worked, the words as carefully chosen as poetry, and sustaining that level of attention to the world and words over 800 pages is pretty miraculous. But also close to monotonous - because the intensity never slips, even as the tone and syntax are subjected to constant variation.

DeLillo's ambition in terms of theme causes similar problems. His "Great Post-War American Novel" must include: baseball (check) - B52s (check) - the Cuban missile crisis (check) - immigrants (check) - AIDS (check) - civil rights marchers (check) - teenagers, graffiti, urban deprivation, casual sex, Frank Sinatra, Vietnam protests, housewives making Jell-O, Sputnik, serial killers, waste disposal, TV replays, condoms, heroin, Arizona deserts, Russian nuclear tests, road trips, conceptual art and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (check, check, check, check...!). This is not quite as indiscriminate a list as it sounds: there's a reason why Korea and Vietnam don't really feature, for instance, which is that DeLillo clearly wants to keep the Cold War cold, stressing the dark potential of the symbolic (Sputnik or the first Soviet bomb tests) rather than the messy, blazing, meaningless realities of actual combat or its traumatic aftermath. But despite some degree of selection the list of themes touched on sounds suspiciously like the contents page from a twentieth-century history textbook (Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, for example). In the weakest section of the novel, subtitled "Selected fragments public and private in the 1950s and 1960s", DeLillo abandons his plot(s) to fill in 150 pages with a kind of free empathetic chronicle of all the "big stories" he hasn't managed to cover so far. It's almost as if he has deliberately covered all the historical bases so as to give himself the best possible shot at the title "Best American Novel of the 20th Century" - which he only narrowly missed in a New York Times Book Review critics' poll a year ago (Underworld came second to Toni Morrison's Beloved). Martin Amis in fact took DeLillo to task for the novel's looseness and "disparate" quality; yet it could only sound like a weak caveat beside its manifest skill, ambition, and sheer size.

I feel odd making these criticisms, because (as will unavoidably emerge in any future postings to this blog on critical topics) I don't find unity, especially narrative unity, an important aesthetic criterion; I like fragmentary forms, and enjoy skilled poetic craftsmanship on a local level more than anything. Moreover, much of my experience has been guided by the search for epiphanies of one sort or another (not that there's anything special in that). In these respects, Underworld ought to be a favourite book of mine. But - dazzling, multi-layered work though it is - it doesn't have the sustaining warmth that I need from a writer of fiction, and remains in the end strangely loveless and lustless, as if the desire for vision, stretched taught over the frame of every line, had finally shrivelled and gone slack. The central character, Nick Shay, looks back from the mod-con, cleaned-up, west-coast lifestyle he now leads to his gritty, driven, improvised existence as a teenager on the streets of New York, and feels a kind of regret. So cool and unemotional has he been, though - less a character than a perceiving machine to drive the aesthetic energy of DeLillo's sentences - that by this stage we find it hard to sympathise with the feelings DeLillo wants to claim for him. For a real literary epiphany, one might conclude, insight alone is not enough: it must occur in a human context, one that is after all built largely by the conventional apparatus of character and dramatic movement that modernism wished to escape from.

Monday 23 April 2007

Sicily in the spring


I've just returned from a week-long holiday in Sicily – four days in Syracuse (Siracusa) and three in Palermo – and thought I would record some impressions.

Studying the Blue Guide to Sicily on the plane already gave me an impression of the island as offering almost a crash course in architectural history. (The book itself, like a lot of older guidebooks, is rich in detail and judgement about art and architecture, but deals with restaurants and transport in a few throwaway sentences; very different from the Lonely Planets and Rough Guides our generation has got used to!) Sicily has examples of every style from Doric temples to Baroque, and even some good modern design (the Venetian Carlo Scarpa, an unfairly talented designer who could sketch with both hands simultaneously, left his distinguished mark on the Palazzo Abbatis in Palermo). What I wasn’t quite prepared for was the impact of these styles being layered on top of or mixed up with each other. The duomo in Syracuse is a strange architectural palimpsest: to see the columns of a Greek temple emerging from the wall of a Romanesque church is a truly uncanny experience, not at all a successfully “unified” one of course, but a sort of perceptual flicker between feeling oneself loosely surrounded by spaced rows of ancient columns and tightly bound in by thick Norman walls. The façade is Baroque, recently restored to gleaming splendour at the centre of the main piazza. Some examples of this eclecticism, on the other hand, verge on the nauseating: La Martorana in Palermo had many of its Byzantine mosaics obliterated and replaced by Baroque fresco, styles that really have nothing in common with one another, and in juxtaposition produce a sort of fairground gaudiness.

Another effect of the passage of history could be felt in the texture of the stone used for many of the buildings and sculptures – the light, friable, originally volcanic tufa. It erodes easily and becomes “sunburnt”, so that the Baroque town of Noto, which is almost all built from it, is now after a few centuries almost the colour of apricots:


Meanwhile the ornamentation on the facades – once perhaps as crisp and dazzling as some of the churches in Rome – has become soft and fuzzy, as if it had lain underwater or become overgrown with some organic substance. (This impression of calcification, of living growth and movement arrested yet preserved, is striking travelling through the landscape of central Sicily. Lampedusa in his great Sicilian novel The Leopard described it as "comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.") One bust in tufa of an old man that I saw in the archaeological museum in Syracuse had been dredged up from the bay, which can only have accentuated its boniness, the sunken cheeks and ridged brow. Of the more ancient of these sculptures scarcely anything of the form remains – the friezes from “Temple E” at Selinunte, now in the archaeological museum in Palermo, are decayed beyond recognition. The effect is haunting in conjunction with the knowledge that Selinunte itself (which I did not visit) was once one of the largest cities in the ancient world, a Greek colony with its own “acropolis” of five temples and a population of 100,000; it was (e)rased in three catastrophes, sackings by the Carthaginians and Romans and then an earthquake in the medieval period as coup de grace. The lust for utter destruction, apparently without reasoned or ideological motives, must be one of the most regrettable and incomprehensible things about the ancient world. One would love to know more about the lost cities of Tyre and Carthage (brutally sacked by Alexander and the Romans respectively), and the seafaring Phoenician civilisation that produced them, whose language was so similar to Hebrew that they were mutually intelligible and which left us the word “Bible” (the Greek root biblos is from the name of the Phoenician city Byblos, famous for its papyri).

Papyri were one of the many things on this trip that reminded me of the East, in this case of Egypt. Near the Fonte Aretusa (the subject of Greek myth and a Latin ode by Horace), with its clump of papyrus plants:


we also found what looked uncannily like a banyan tree, with its aerial roots that drop down and fix themselves in the soil to form (given time) new “trunks”. (Calcutta’s botanical gardens have one of the largest examples in the world: it gives the impression of entering a small forest, and indeed the tree is so old and the secondary trunks so numerous that the original central stem has died away.) In fact it was not a banyan, but an originally Australian member of the same genus (Ficus microcarpa): in the Piazza Garibaldi in Palermo were two century-old exemplars. Their twisted branches look disturbingly animal, like muscles or tentacles:


Then there are the fruits: the loquats (Italian nespole), indigenous to China and already ripe in April in Sicily, with an acidic but sweet flavour, not at all bitter; the oranges, which were still bitter and unripe, at least when plucked from the tree; and the chinotto, also thought to be originally Chinese (hence the name), and available everywhere as a type of Fanta, which looks like Coca-Cola but is much more herby and interesting. Almonds are common, processed into milk as well as a very tasty granita, which may well have had a dash of almond liqueur when I tried it (although the owner of the gelateria wasn’t letting on).

The most intriguing example of eastern influence is by a long way the art of medieval Sicily. Here stylistic mixing is unquestionably successful on every level: the styles reflect the cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the Norman kingdom that produced the great cathedral at Monreale near Palermo, as well as the many smaller churches and palazzi in Palermo itself. Many of these have a serene and dignified simplicity one would perhaps not associate with an eclectic approach:

Monreale is however a good deal less restrained. Inside a Romanesque structure, the iconic art of Byzantine mosaic, dazzling and affectingly naïve at the same time, crowns a dado striped with the elegant, aniconic, geometrical patterns of Arabic art. These are echoed in the columns of the cloister and burst out in the splendid exterior of the apse:


More subtle but also more daring was the geometrical sensibility I believed I could feel in a Sicilian painting of the later medieval era, the anonymous Triumph of Death in the Palazzo Abbatis. Across the swathe of collapsing figures down the right side of the picture the trapezoidal motif of the fountain at the top seems to be echoed in tiny details of drawing, from foreheads to eyelids to lips, all with delicately raised corners. And yet this fascination with abstract “lines of beauty” was present side-by-side with naturalistic, fully modelled and directly expressive figures of an almost Renaissance type. The composition as a whole does not “work” but this does not matter in the least: it is there, like a tapestry, entirely for the sake of the details.

Such a richness of styles and aesthetics made me curious about the culture which produced this artistic flourishing. So on my return I did a little reading, and discovered a historical personality of a cosmopolitan and enlightened cast of mind such as one simply doesn’t expect to meet with in the medieval era (if one isn’t a medievalist, I suppose). The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, stupor mundi (the astonishment of the world) and ruling much of it himself from Palermo, was half-German and half-Sicilian, combining a rough and energetic temperament with indefatigable curiosity about the arts and sciences. His education, which was eclectic and largely self-conducted due to political circumstances and the early death of his mother, took place in and was formed by Palermo in the late twelfth century, of which his early twentieth-century German biographer Ernst Kantorowicz gives a wonderfully poetic sketch:

“unsupervised, the eight-, nine-year-old boy roamed through the alleys, markets and gardens of the half-African capital at the foot of Mt Pellegrino, where a bewildering variety of peoples, religions and customs interpenetrated: mosques with their minarets and synagogues with their domes stood there next to Norman churches and cathedrals, that in turn were decorated with golden mosaics by Byzantine masters, and whose structure incorporated Greek columns in which Saracens had engraved the name of Allah in Kufic letters. Round about the city in the exotic gardens and vivaria of the Conca d’oro lay the summer palaces and fountains of the Norman kings that once so enraptured the Arabic poets, and in the markets the people in all their colourful variety went about their business: Normans, Italians, Saracens, Germans, Jews and Greeks. The youth depended on intercourse with all of these and soon learnt their customs and languages. Perhaps there for some time a wise imam might have taken over the direction of the youth’s education…we do not know.” (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Munich 1961 [1927], pp. 30-1)

One should interpolate here that Kantorowicz, a member of the poetical circle of Stefan George, was much criticised by other historians for this sort of speculative description, however successful it was in conjuring up the “tone” of the period. What seems to be more generally accepted is that Frederick’s open-minded attitude and cultural and linguistic adaptability (he spoke half a dozen languages) had a great deal to do with his environment as an adolescent, for no other European monarch or kingdom of this era came close to it. The court he eventually established in Palermo included figures from many countries and areas of scholarship: Michael the Scot, an astronomer learned in Hebrew and Arabic, who was assisted by the Provencal Jew Jacob ben Anatoli in translating Aristotle; the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci, who introduced the modern system of Arabic numerals to Europe from Algeria; or the Italo-Byzantine poet John Grasso, who produced violent tragedies on classical Greek models. Frederick himself corresponded with Arabs and Jewish scholars in Spain, wrote a Latin treatise on falconry with some unusually accurate illustrations, and sponsored and allegedly contributed to the first school of Italian poetry, the “Sicilian school”, which fixed Italian as a literary language for the first time and coincidentally gave birth to the most prestigious European lyric form, the sonnet. (Given Dante’s acknowledged debt to Sicilian sources in his efforts to establish the dignity of the Italian vernacular, it seems rather ungrateful of him to cast Frederick into the sixth circle of his Inferno as an “Epicurean heretic”.)

Still more surprising was Frederick’s attitude to religion. He seems to have been more or less atheist according to many sources (one of which, quoted by Thomas Curtis van Cleve, lists his many talents and virtues, and concludes that he would have been a great Christian emperor – if he had only been Christian!), merely jovially sceptical according to others, and at all events tolerant and respectful of Judaic and Islamic tradition (the robe he wore at his coronation was embroidered in Kufic script). This emerged most strongly when he was called upon to do the duty of a medieval emperor and lead a crusade. The venture scarcely got off the ground before Frederick was excommunicated by the pope (twice!), thus nullifying the sacred purpose of the entire expedition. When he arrived at Jerusalem, accompanied by his Arab tutor and a small army containing Saracens alongside Christians, he spent five months in friendly negotiations and feasting with the Egyptian sultan in control of the city, Al-Kamil, reportedly enjoying hearing the call of the muezzin in the morning, and finally signed a truce by which he crowned himself “King of Jerusalem”. He then left and the city returned to Muslim control a few years afterwards. It was apparently the only “successful” crusade since the first – and considerably less bloody than any.

This cosmopolitanism went hand-in-hand with a rational and highly inquisitive attitude to knowledge: van Cleve notes that “it was [his] quality of cosmopolitanism, together with his intellectual honesty – his insistent search for truth as opposed to tradition – that was so clearly expressed in Frederick’s alleged remark: ‘One should accept as truth only that which is proved by the force of reason and by nature.’” (p. 305) Although many texts by Aristotle were translated (with their Arabic commentaries) at his court, he did not treat them as the quasi-infallible word of “The Philosopher” that they became for later Christian thinkers, but felt quite free to disagree with the Greek sage when he felt his own observations were superior, especially on his favourite topic of falconry.

One wonders why this episode in history has not received more attention, given the current debate about Islamic-Christian relations. (I could find hardly any literature devoted to it on the shelves of the major London bookshops, and David Abulafia’s soberly critical effort at debunking the Frederick “myth” is the only biography available via Amazon.) It seems to provide another strong example of how close contact between cultures and religions, even on an unequal and authoritarian basis (which Frederick’s rule was, after all), is not only socially viable but can foster many virtues: tolerance, intellectual curiosity and independence, and artistic inventiveness. Other examples would be the court of the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar in India, or late-twentieth-century New York: Norman Sicily would I think bear comparison with these.

I suppose I shouldn’t end an entry on Sicily without some mention of the Mafia, but to be honest, it didn’t really inform my experience of the trip to any great degree (in contrast to my brother, who’s at the age where it exercises enormous fascination, and imagined mafiosi around every corner). There were a few reminders of its continuing grip in Palermo: fly-posted stickers urging resistance to the pizzo (the “tax” or protection money shopkeepers pay), and a large iron monument near the harbour dedicated to “those fallen in the struggle against the Mafia” ( – one wondered how much bravery even the erection of the monument itself must have demanded). All that really came across was a certain aspect of the Sicilian temperament that I imagined as belonging to that way of life – an occasional tight-lipped, unforthcoming, almost owlish air to people (maybe here I’m merely recollecting the title of Leonardo Sciascia’s, the Sicilian crime novelist’s, most famous book, The Day of the Owl – but another story of his, Equal Danger, had some of this quality in its oblique style). On the other side, an almost childishly direct and naïve quality was equally evident, in the faces and animated conversations of pensioners on the bus to Monreale, in some of the art, or the ceramics with their bright colours and smiling suns – as if Sicily was after all a beamingly happy country, unafflicted by poverty, corruption and social ills. Perhaps that very contrast of temperaments is what is characteristically Sicilian. I would have to spend longer there to find out.

child and city


I wrote this "imaginary memoir" ("imaginary" meaning not fictitious, but that it deals solely with images and imagination) a few years ago.

I could have called this “Reminiscences de Londres”, as Liszt called his operatic fantasies “Reminiscences”, being as they were patchworks of vivid, remembered highlights and invented, reflected shadows and transitions, not memory but a mask for forgetfulness. There are no grand themes, however – I would be deceiving the expectation. I will dig, and hope to find images under my feet.


To begin, the ground itself is an image, for the child. Much more than for the adult – how we like to find ourselves in the sky, to see the city and the infinite calling to us in the dawn. In my second decade I became entranced by lights and by skies: I would fall on my bed on returning home and leave the blind up so that the amber glow of midnight would be the backdrop to my dreams. Sounds only acquire their magic because they create a vision of lights unseen: birds calling at daybreak, the swish of cars with their headlights in the rain; and the rattle of the train two images, not only lighted empty compartments glowing on the viaduct, but the view one has, perhaps, just experienced from them on one’s journey home, of constellations of light spread over the city, detached from material objects, floating as if on water. For a true city-dweller, the constellations of the night sky will never hold the mind so strongly – the astronomy of lamps is his avocation. He will not escape it; they are rediscovered wherever he goes, on ferries leaving the French coast, on Cornish hills, on a plane above Mumbai, India, the same glimmering net. There is that Pisarro that hangs in the National Gallery, of the Montmartre boulevard, from a perspective at once impossible and ideal, for the spectator is there in the space right over the cafés and cabs and life of the street, its lamps smudged and winking in the rain, while the night sky, dominating the upper half of the canvas, reflects the whole in luminous, towering obscurity. Only van Gogh still painted stars.

But in my first years I may have seen the stars, or felt them; as I felt the ground. For I only began to look up quite recently. I try and remember what it was like to be pushed in a pram, and it isn’t the sensation of lowness, looking up at the world, that comes back to me. No, it’s the foot-strap, a piece of stretched plastic I kicked and worried at. It even had a texture, maybe a logo of some sort, that I tried to feel with the soles of my shoes. Textures were the real world, the real experience – tarmac, skin, cork on the bathroom floor. (I imagined faces or patterns in that for a long time, as I did in sheets or jumpers tossed onto chairs.) I can recall the waxed floors of school corridors, where they gave way to carpet in the library, and yet what was on the walls or what colour they might have been escapes me entirely. We dug in the soil, grubbing around the bases of the little avenue of trees that ran along the side of the playing field, uncovering roots, digging up occasional bits of plastic or pottery that we would use to scrape away more of the earth.

I rediscovered this pleasure much later, on a boating holiday at the age of fourteen. While friends disappeared to search for a field to host their kick-about, I was attracted by a tree near the mooring place, with its bole and clumped knot of roots awakening something again, a need to burrow and feel the intimacy of the earth with its comforting closeness, its restful presence to the fingers. I was too old to indulge those sensations; my returning companions found and mocked me. But my interest was in any case by then tainted with archaeology – I had unearthed a fragment of blue and white ceramic, I wondered what dish it had belonged to, who had owned it, how it had found its way among the roots of this tree. Capitulating to the power of distance, of the grown-up dream of conquering time through the object, I was beginning to raise my eyes, to look far off and see Rome on the horizon. My grandfather, a retired palaeologist, assumed I would be interested in dinosaurs and cavemen, and gave me picture books on them. I never read these, since I preferred his explanations of how to make flints and the boxes of them he had collected from Oxford gravel pits; at home I would gather pebbles from the terrace, assort them in wooden printer’s boxes, and when I tired of them, pulverize them with a heavy stone, which I called my “anvil”.

It was not the collecting instinct that drove me to put each pebble in its own compartment, although I was aware of it, and knew that were I made differently, the unique difference and character of every item in my collection would exert an unparalleled fascination; rather, it was the order in miniature, over which one had power, including the power to destroy. There would be no point in having a collection of large things, like my parents’ books in their tall cases that stood against the wall of my room – and similarly an aversion developed in me towards “large” games or rituals. Thus for many years I would have rather (and did) construct model or board games of tennis or basketball, than attempt to play those sports myself, which seemed, in a curious inversion of logic, to be somehow pointless. My passion for military history was likewise focused on toy soldiers and diagrams in books, their logical purity, miniature ranks and columns intersecting, outflanking, eliminating each other. The helmets and life-size dioramas in the museums certainly formed no part of it; and yet I resisted, then, the stage of final abstraction represented by chess or geometry, where the visual is no more than a point of access to an order composed of concepts.

If I began by associating the image of the city with skies and distances, then my ground-loving child’s mind was unable to grasp it. But then it never really encountered it, since the essence of the city is the night, all that a child cannot know. There is only one way to picture his fearful security of unknowing: the strip of light under the bedroom door, and although Walter Benjamin asserts that this, too, belongs to the city, I cannot agree with him. For all my pastoral soil-digging, the incomprehensible, contemptible worldview of adults was paradoxically their appreciation of the country, the walks and picnics and “isn’t it beautiful up here”, to which I would respond with brief, sullen words, finding my enthusiasm only in plotting the terrain like a military strategist, filled with cannon and units of cavalry. Sublimity for me was quite impossible.

I say this to counteract, finally, the effect of my revisiting the scenes of my childhood, through which I sought a kind of Proustian, synoptic memory, a total image or Idea that could somehow encompass a decade in a brief flood of feeling. I did not receive it, needless to add; either because it could not exist there or because I needed it too much – first love still fresh, treading the grey North London afternoon, a fragment of a Chopin sonata that seemed to possess the secret of nostalgia in its few notes circling and imprinting itself on every vision of the streets. On the road with the house where I used to go after school to play, I passed a girl of my own age, and realised suddenly that it could have been my playmate of ten years before; I could not tell whether the shock was of recognition or of startled, vertiginous pleasure in the mere possibility. I wished the moment could expand and fill with the Romantic pathos of time and memory, like that wonderful, disconcerting episode recounted by Berlioz towards the end of his memoirs, in which he met again by chance the object of his childhood adoration, now an elderly spinster, and tried in vain in despairing, unanswered letters to express and even to live over again in retrospect the passion he had once felt. Such a recuperation may be impossible, the connections broken – it is as if one meddled in the affairs of someone else, a self entirely past.

I wonder now whether the infant’s gaze is completely lost, whether it survives among the broken images of our culture. As a city-dweller, and a myopic one at that, the stars were not a field for my speculation – but they have been, still are for the astronomers, astrologers, constellation-finders. Does their stare not fix itself eventually on the galaxies of the night sky just as mine did on the cork tiles in the bathroom or the stains on the wet pavement? This stare is in reality not seeing but feeling, a sensation not a vision: it brings things close and one is ‘amongst the stars’ as if they were under one’s fingers like Braille. Leonardo advised the painter in search of inspiration to look at the plaster on the walls of old rooms – for him this way of seeing was not a reduction of the imaginative power but the first, preparatory stage in its development.

Yet confinement threatens us when our childish impulse puts the larger world into miniature illustrations, traces inconsequential patterns and then arbitrarily rejects the world outside them; is this the link between fundamentalism and kitsch, that they are both too small, cautious, and blind because they have no wish to open their eyes? There are afternoons after rain in the city when clouds part and sky and streets are filled with light; and although this scene means much to me now, I sense also its proximity to those mechanical, Victorian symbols of transcendence and breakthrough, the sinner redeemed by a glimpse of God’s radiance, Senta and the Flying Dutchman transfigured in levitating embrace, the cheap Catholic icon paintings of Lourdes. The point at which the Turnerian sublimity of light drops into cliché is when the scene loses its depth, and the sky and the buildings are seen insubstantially as if they were the thin paper backdrop to a staged tableau.

Similar is that other childhood conception of the world according to the geometry of a snow-shaker paperweight, a little glass dome that goes over one’s head and stops at the horizon; asking oneself what is behind the glass like wondering what is at the end of the rainbow, but to be contemplated only on a clear summer’s day whilst lying back in the grass and gazing straight up at the ‘infinity’ of deep blue sky that isn’t infinite at all, only impenetrable like the bottom of a pond you might try and poke with a stick but would never succeed in reaching. This is as little connected with the city as the adult who gazes not straight up but towards the horizon is immersed in it, seeing only the cold dawn above the chimney-pots or the final hints of colour on the traces of cloud at dusk, the sounds and perfumes already turning in the evening air. Perhaps I must conclude, in the end, that I did not find the city as a child, that the memories I have from before my tenth year are not of London, the city I came to love afterwards, and that they will not even coalesce into one image, but remain stubbornly separate, each still buried under its own stone.