The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither
AUP $34.99
Commonplace books are literary scrapbooks - "salads of many herbs" as one compiler put it. They are eclectic, idiosyncratic repositories of bits and pieces that have taken a person's fancy. In Elizabeth Smither's case - she, a poet, novelist and essayist - what has taken her fancy are lines of poetry and little extracts from books, some profound, some light, some simply little word-concentrations of beauty.
She has stored away, like a squirrel, little treasures from a sparkling array of writers and thinkers from St Augustine to Monty Python. There is Anthony Hecht: "Like trailing silks, the light/ hangs in the olive trees ...". And John Steinbeck: "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them and pretty soon you have a dozen."
But it's the resonances and relationships that inspire and reflect in her own life that makes this book an autobiographical project. The quotations sit amid her pages, and around them she builds little word-pictures, mini-essays of her own life - a life lived in quiet moments, in writerly busy-ness, in friendships, in quirky little observations that may mean something universal or perhaps only mean something to her.
For instance, Smither's memory of her friend Francine's tarte tatin: "The apples were simply halved - sweet, yellow-fleshed apples, like breasts. I made it over and over after she left until everyone was exhausted by it, as if we'd spent the night at a strip club." Googling Smither during the reading of this book, I came across something she wrote in the Listener in 2006: "The authentic life can only be discovered in fragments."
So this is a different kind of diary, and a different kind of autobiography, far more elliptical than a mere chronological record of thoughts and doings, and one that can elevate to poetry the quiet moments of pause in an otherwise busy life, when - for instance - the tyre markings of a hearse are seen on the dewy grass of a cemetery; or when, after visiting the Venerable Bede's tomb at Durham Cathedral and remarking on the "living ooze" of dahlia sap on the polished limestone, Smither spies a large water rat clambering up the banks of the river Durham. Such juxtapositions charm her.
"It's as if I am building a fix on the world that includes the high and the low, the small and tender, the towering. It would be wrong to call them signs, though to a susceptible mind they could seem that ... I wonder if there comes a time when all the juxtapositions of a life add up and there is a moment of final epiphany in which someone says: 'I have it'."
A commonplace book reveals its author in surprising ways. This one reveals Smither as someone who doesn't miss a trick, who doesn't suffer fools and who can be briskly cool. Sometimes I wasn't sure I warmed to her. But then she'll hit you with something wonderful - the word "torschlusspanik", for instance - or a fleeting insight into one of her many long friendships, and all is harmony once more.
If you're the kind of person whose heart beats just a little faster at the promise of "a writer's journey through quotations" with all that suggests about meandering musings on life's great and small themes, then by all means pick up this book. It is, indeed, a promise fulfilled.
Margie Thomson is an Auckland reviewer.
