People say that life's the thing, but he prefers reading
Philip Glazebrook
REFLECTIONS ON BLUE WATER by Alan Ross £18, pp. 245 The reader of Alan Ross's Reflections on Blue Water will learn much of many books as they turn up in the flow of conver- sational writing, books so thoroughly gut- ted for us that I already think I have read most of them myself. Take Bunin, whether Above Marina Grande, Capri' by Jane Rye you know the man or not: he comes under scrutiny because he wrote 'a mildly enter- taining' story set in part on Capri. A six- page précis of the plot is followed by four examples of how this Bunin started other stories. It is interesting. I cannot fathom quite why, but it is, and so are a hundred other digression into the lives or works of writers who have spent time among the islands in the gulf of Naples. Ross carries a full cup, which overspills with information of a literary kind all along the way. What is not so clear is where he is going with the cup, and what is in it. What does he mean by the Reflections of his title? Books and writers as the Blue Water reflects them, or the meditative consideration of himself?
It is not necessary to have these ques- tions answered before you can enjoy and admire the page-by-page writing of an intelligence through whose searchlit terri- tory an uncountable multitude of books has passed, each one paying the tribute levied from it by sharp analysis and a retentive memory. You feel that Ross is a writer pri- marily because he is a reader: the reader, the quoter, the analyser of the world's liter- ature, is under pressure to blow off accu- mulated steam by writing. The range and number and quality of his own books are astounding. He must always have a pen in his hand. He can know only what busy authors only know, the private reality of being in the middle of writing a book. The matter of books, whether reading them or writing them, pushes the here-and-now off stage. Ross is melancholy: instead of rumi- nating on his state of mind and its causes he takes down Anatomy of Melancholy from the shelf to find out what depression is like in a book, and plunges into that digressive work with energetic cries which make the reader wonder why he always thought Bur- ton a bore and his book a dull one till Mr Ross told him differently. He makes books sound interesting.
Interesting, but not all we were promised on an early page; that, on this winter visit to Capri in 1948, he intended to keep a journal `to make sense of the peace and my own feelings'. I looked forward to this main dish as I consumed the snacks, but it never arrived. On page 153 Ross lets fall that he `never felt happier than when coming into port after a successful patrol'. Does he mean happy because it was safely over, or happy because it had been such fun? In either case he might have felt guilty about his happiness, which he seems to imply that he was. Where are the Reflections? Again, of the half-dreams of a sleepless night he writes:
The Arctic [where he had been posted at war's end] still seems to retain its images, the clank of steel doors and the crackle of flame, a ship half-capsized is life preferable with or without security?
I listened, but there was nothing more. Back to books. Let Douglas, or Lawrence, or Neruda fill in for our author, who has tiptoed away to record the existence of another little beach on the far side of the island whose sand is the colour of a meringue.
So much of the book is concerned with the exact geography of the islands, and with finding the means, the words, the refer- ences, exactly to describe each prospect that Alan Ross seems to be contesting with all the other Capri-visiting writers for ownership — for the conquest of these islands by verbal imperialism. Look at the reiterated attempts, almost an obsession, to describe the sea, the hills, the sky — espe- cially at sunset — with the perfect accuracy which puts sea or hills or sunset into the writer's possession. The chosen words must hit the bull's-eye to have this power. Ross tries and tries again throughout the book, just altering by a fraction the focus of his rifle's telescope: the green of the sunset sky is peppermint one day, pistachio another, marzipan on a third: for the sand he tries `biscuit' as well as 'meringue'. He quarters every island, views ever mountain, visits every beach; and everywhere he is at pains to forge a key of words which makes places his captive territory. Verbal imperialism gave us Hardy's Dorset, Wordsworth's Lakes, Bennett's Five Towns. It works. In a small way we all have our personal corners of the earth to which certain words are the key.
It is wrong to complain that such an interesting book isn't even better, but I should so much have liked to learn more of the inner man. Reflections on Blue Water is an ambiguous title. An alternative would be The Oxford Book of Digressions.
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