Ali Smith, Autumn

As we feel our way into how to adjust to our new circumstances, wherever we are in the process, I’m appreciating the pieces that writers are sharing to help us look after each other. One of the writers in my current advanced novel-writing class told us that Toni Morrison’s essay “Peril” had helped her through a very hard time right after the election. It’s an intensely useful reminder of how authoritarian governments respond to artists, as well as a reminder of why we have to keep reading and writing: “…stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected.” Another writer then shared a Vaclav Havel poem that led me to his writing on hope (as quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, currently available as a free e-book from Haymarket Books) not as “an estimate of the situation” but “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” So as a way of reclaiming our minds and, yes, the hope Havel describes, I want to share some delight with you, from Ali Smith’s first novel in her seasonal quartet, Autumn, about friendship and mortality, bureaucracy and Brexit, “arty art,” time, loss, and the real-life artist Pauline Boty.

Smith collages voices and language—her writing is such a pleasure to read: so honest about family, friendship, the process of making art and making a life, and the ways big historical events touch our small private lives. Smith always reinvents what’s possible in the novel and in writing about real life. Rereading Autumn makes me think about how current events slide into history, as everything we’ve experienced since 2016 (when this book was published) pushes the unlikely and even unbelievable to new levels. In Autumn, the friendship between Elisabeth, a precocious and forthright child, and her older neighbor, Daniel, persists through their lives and opens up the world for her. He’s her friend, yes, but also teacher and alternate parent and guide.

At the start of the book he’s in his endgame, and we have some of his dreams and memories, so even though it is more her book than his, this window into life before death gives us some of the most rich and remarkable chapters in the book. Here is a whole sequence of paragraphs from Daniel’s POV, which begins as a memory of his sister, who died young, and then takes off (Smith’s writing often gives a sense of flying/falling):

But he has some pages, still, of the letters from when she was nursing their mother. She is eighteen. The clever forward-slope of her.

It’s a question of how we regard our situations, dearest Dani, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all. But in that Augenblick there’s either a benign wink or a willing blindness, and we have to know we’re equally capable of both, and to be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it. So it’s important – and here I acknowledge directly the kind and charming and mournful soul of my dear brother whom I know so well – not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.

Dearest Dani.

What has he done with the time?

A few trivial rhymes.

There was nothing else for it, really.

Plus, he ate well, when the rhymes brought in the money.

Autumn mellow. Autumn yellow. He can remember every word of that stupid song. But he can’t remember,

dear God, he can’t.

Excuse me, dear God, can I trouble you to remind me of my little sister’s name?

Not that he thinks there’s a God. In fact he knows there isn’t. But just in case there’s such a thing:

Please, remind me, her name, again.

Sorry, the silence says. Can’t help you.

Who’s that?

(Silence.)

Who’s there?

(Silence.)

God?

Not exactly.

Well, who?

Where do I start? I’m the butterfly antenna. I’m the chemicals that paint’s made of. I’m the person dead at the water’s edge. I’m the water. I’m the edge. I’m skin cells. I’m the smell of disinfectant. I’m that thing they rub against your mouth to moisten it, can you feel it? I’m soft. I’m hard. I’m glass. I’m sand. I’m a yellow plastic bottle. I’m all the plastics in the seas and in the guts of all the fishes. I’m the fishes. I’m the seas. I’m the molluscs in the seas. I’m the flattened-out old beer can. I’m the shopping trolley in the canal. I’m the note on the stave, the bird on the line. I’m the stave. I’m the line. I’m spiders. I’m seeds. I’m water. I’m heat. I’m the cotton of the sheet. I’m the tube that’s in your side. I’m your urine in the tube. I’m your side. I’m your other side. I’m your other. I’m the coughing through the wall. I’m the cough. I’m the wall. I’m mucus. I’m the bronchial tubes. I’m inside. I’m outside. I’m traffic. I’m pollution. I’m a fall of horseshit on a country road a hundred years ago. I’m the surface of that road. I’m what’s below. I’m what’s above. I’m the fly. I’m the descendant of the fly. I’m the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the fly. I’m the circle. I’m the square. I’m all the shapes. I’m geometry. I haven’t even started with the telling you what I am. I’m everything that makes everything. I’m everything that unmakes everything. I’m fire. I’m flood. I’m pestilence. I’m the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I’m the vein in the leaf. I’m the voice that tells no story.

(Snorts.) There’s no such thing.

Begging your pardon. There is. It’s me.

This is an exhilarating flight with just enough information to ground us. We know where the memory is in time (“…when she was nursing their mother. She is eighteen”) and get to read a bit of the letter, full of a precocious eighteen-year-old’s wisdom, which may not be so different from anyone else’s but still feels so young. We feel Daniel’s unhappy frustration as he cannot get back the essential fact of her name. Then there’s the surprise: the free-floating conversation with himself about time and memory which turns into a conversation with—who? (We don’t always know, in the remarkable, associative conversations here, who is talking, though we can often make a reasonable guess.) And then this finishes with a spectacular paragraph that’s a prose poem in itself, an assertion of the “I” of the world, in its glory and horseshit: “I’m everything that makes everything.” Everything’s assertion of itself.

The chapter goes on. I am so tempted to give you the whole thing, but I hope you will find and read the book if this calls to you—much of the novel veers closer to the conventional, but it all has this quality of freedom, of making its own rules as it goes to meet the challenges of the time. It captures—with a hope-filled orientation and a joy in beauty—what feels like the scattered, urgent, unexpected mixture of tones of our moment (the moment that has just passed, the moment we are in now).

In a conversation with Amy E. Elkins for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Smith said this about her seasonal quartet (she’d just published Spring, so she had a sense by this time of how to describe her project):

I’m writing these books instinctually, to a deadline, trying to allow the moment to pass through me and them like we’re a porous skin surface, with the novel form itself — a revolutionary and ever-hopeful, ever-socially-analytical form — as the mast to which we’re tied through the storm. Culture is porous like us, and it enters us as much as we make it. I’ve no idea how these books will read in 10, 20 years. I can’t think about it, I can’t even consider it. The books began as an experiment, a project, an attempt to ask, 1. why the publishing industry generally waits so long to publish a manuscript after it’s finished, and 2. why we don't allow the novel more to be what it says it is, novel, the latest thing, which is where it gets its name from, and is what people thought of it when the form first appeared.

Sometimes, when people run into trouble in novel-writing, it’s not because they know too little about their books but because they know too much, are trying too hard to figure out how the pieces connect before ever writing them, have too clear and commanding an outline. When writers abandon the approach of sinking in and writing instinctually, letting the characters surprise them, it all stops being fun. Smith, no matter how serious the times she’s describing, flies through these pages, allowing social analysis and the personal and poetry to emerge, surprising us as readers as well as herself as a writer. Surprising us into seeing the world again, into the stillness that’s not paralysis but art.

News

Writing

Right now, I’m working through a nuanced and memorably great (weird but there it is) set of copyedits for my next book of fiction, Marriage to the Sea. Although I’m taken aback to find out how little I know about what should be hyphenated, and mystified by some of my many references, in rereading as I go I remember that I love these characters and their journeys. I’m actively looking forward to sharing them with readers (who may know some of them from Hungry Ghost Theater). Meanwhile, here’s my newest flash piece, “Earthly Delights” in the new issue of Image Journal.

Upcoming class

If you’re interested in working on a novel in progress in community, I’ll be teaching a Stanford Continuing Studies online class on invention and revision starting in January. Registration opens Dec. 2. Course description, details, and signup link here.

Submission call

Four Way Books, which publishes gorgeous books, and where everyone has made the editing process of Marriage to the Sea a total pleasure, has a fiction open reading period (book-length novels, novellas, flash fiction, and short story collections) through November 30, so if you have a book you’re ready to share, take a look at their guidelines here.

MPP contributor news

It’s always exciting to see new and forthcoming books from past MPP contributors (and if I’m missing anything, please let me know):

New and Recent:

Charles Baxter, Blood Test: A Comedy (https://charlesbaxter.com/)

Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Tell the Rest (https://www.lucyjanebledsoe.com/)

Maw Shein Win, Percussing the Thinking Jar (https://www.mawsheinwin.com/)

Forthcoming:

Marcy Dermansky, Hot Air (https://www.marcydermansky.com/)

David Haynes, Martha’s Daughter (https://hayneswrites.com/)

[name of author], Afterword