Have just returned from Book Club to be told by the babysitter that something has been moving in the dishwasher. She fears it may be a mouse. But I should beware. She's heard that snakes can get into dishwashers. I pretend to be calm. But the truth is, I saw a long, grey tail disappearing out of sight just outside the kitchen window the other day. And I fear it is a rat. The worst thing is, it's a new dishwasher. A 'Smeg' in fact. That'll teach me. Did you see the 'Wallace and Grommit Movie'? Their fridge was a 'Smug'.
At Book Club we were discussing Anais Nin's 'A Spy in the House of Love'. When I began reading, I was somewhat shocked at the purple prose. I mean, hey, wasn't I writing that stuff aged 21? But as I read on, I have to admit that the innovation of Nin's work struck me. That she was probably the first to write about a woman's sensual life in this way. And whilst her central character Sabine is hugely egocentric and thus not particularly interesting per se, Nin's way of describing her psyche has a certain interest; not least the comparison of Sabine to a Futurist painting, the divided self, the many selves. I was left with a sense of pity at Sabine's love-addiction. And confess to being wooed, in the end, by the hypnotic rhythm of the prose. I can't help but wonder what Nin might have achieved if she'd allowed herself to look beyond the Self. In truth, perhaps I see my own worst faults in Nin, perhaps that's why I find myself at once drawn to the writing and repelled by it. Though I don't write like that any more (influenced in my twenties by Djuna Barnes, Stevie Smith, de Beauvoir, Woolf and Gertrude Stein, it probably, nonetheless, came out like Anais Nin) I may be guilty, sometimes, of writing characters who obsess about their own small lives. It's something I'd like to move away from. However true these characters may be, I often feel that characters with a broader perspective, a less subjective view would interest me more these days.
In my own subjective little universe however, there is the matter of the rat...
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