Perfect Stranger

J. Kavanaugh P.

Description

'It's hard to think of a memoir that describes the experience [of love] with as much honesty, passion and precision.' David NichollsFirst published in 1966, this extraordinary memoir has collected a passionate band of devotees. Written with a poet's precision, it is a funny, absorbing and brilliantly portrayed rite of passage - from school playing fields to war's battlefields, holiday camps to writers' hang-outs, Brighton to Paris, Korea to Oxford, Barcelona to Jakarta ... Driving the narrator is a desire to recount the effect of a singular young woman; the love of her and the loss of her.A joyous and movingly wise evocation of youth, travel and love; those moments of maximum brilliance, at the edge of possibility.

Sujets

• Anglais
• English
• Memoir
• Idioma inglés
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: September Publishing
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910463062
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Also by P. J. Kavanagh
POEMS
Presences: New and Selected Poems (1987)
An Enchantment
Collected Poems
Something About: Poems
New Selected Poems (2014)
PROSE
People and Places: A Selection 1975-1987
Finding Connections
Voices in Ireland: A Traveller s Literary Companion
A Kind of Journal
NOVELS
A Song and Dance
A Happy Man
People and Weather
Scarf Jack
Rebel for Good
Only by Mistake
EDITED
Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney
The Essential G. K. Chesterton
The Oxford Book of Short Poems, with James Michie
A Book of Consolations

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Published in 2015 by September Publishing
First published in Great Britain in 1966 by
Chatto Windus Ltd
Copyright P. J. Kavanagh 1966, 1991, 1995, 2015
The right of P. J. Kavanagh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder
A copy of this book has been given to the British Library
The epigraph on pxii is from Eclogue between the Motherless by Louis MacNeice, published by Faber Faber in Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice
Typeset by e-type
Printed in China on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Everbest Printing Co Ltd
ISBN 978-1-910463-01-7
eISBN 978-1-910463-06-2
September Publishing
www.septemberpublishing.org
Foreword
F ROM TIME TO time, since this book was first published, some twenty-five years ago, I have been asked to write a sequel, and I have always gone through the same two re-actions to this request. The first is astonishment, that anyone having read the book should think such a thing possible; and the second reaction, which comes later, is that after all it is a reasonable suggestion, the book is a kind of narrative and everyone likes to know the end of a story.
But the story does end in this book, in a particularly final fashion; therefore any unsatisfied curiosity the reader might feel must be about me, about how my story continued. So why, therefore, the surprise?
The answer lies in the motive for writing this book in the first place and (pretentious phrase, but I hope to make its meaning clear) the relationship of a writer with his work. Although it may sound naive, it simply never occurred to me, putting these pages together so long ago, that I was writing a book that booksellers and librarians would feel impelled to put in the category Autobiography . If the idea had struck me I should have stopped at once. What I was concerned with trying to express were two facts which had borne heavily upon me during the previous years; they seemed to contain a shape which demanded expression: the facts of love and death, great events we can all share. But they are not abstractions, they happen to people, and therefore to give them force and colour the people to whom they happened must be described. They are in a sense impersonal events (the impersonality I hope to explain in a moment) that impinge on personalities. But it is not the personality that is the significance.
I felt I had been shown something it was my duty to show, and share with, others. In order to do this I had to show myself, but myself was not the point (though I greatly enjoyed the showing). And, as I wrote, something else happened which suggested I was on the right track. I felt the events of the narrative - in many cases even the words - selecting themselves. The book (and this of course was a subjective experience and is not a claim) was dictating its own shape, was becoming a thing, quite apart from me and, though it could hardly be more personal, was acquiring yet another kind of impersonality. Therefore it has always been obvious to me that to add to it or change its shape in any way would be to tamper with a shape the material had demanded, and thereby reduce the whole attempt to the level of a reminiscence.
I hardly expected anyone to understand this. I barely understand it myself. Yet it is so. When someone who had just written and published a painful personal memoir said to me recently that he had written it with tears pouring down his face as you must have written The Perfect Stranger , I could only stare at him with astonishment, and was so startled I blurted out something like, No, on the contrary, I wrote it roaring with laughter , which is not entirely true, but is nearer the truth. So is it when people tell me how moving they found the book. That is kind of them and I do see, because of the book s nature, why they would hesitate to say they found the book funny, but it would give me greater pleasure. For that is what I found, was surprised by, as I wrote: some kind of healing laughter below the surface, nearly out of earshot, but not quite.
However, I do say at the end, the rest of my life will be a memorial to what happened (and the first title I gave the book was A Memorial ), and the reader has the right to wonder what kind of memorial, if any, is still in process of construction. If I knew, I would say. But when a poet-friend, finishing the book, hissed at me with the kind of aggression, even antagonism, that friendship can contain at important moments, Yes. But what happened next? , there was something in the force, the italicization, of the question that I appreciated and understood. He meant What kind of insight? What source of extra knowledge? did these events grant.
The truth is, I have been sustained by these events, in a world transformed by them. Whether I have taken from them the full sustenance they contain or whether I have turned too often aside and failed in concentration, I do not know. But the sustenance remains a miracle. That is why any account of my subsequent life which was not a wholehearted examination of this mystery would only be prattle.
As far as curriculum vitae goes, a year or two after the time at which this book ends I became a professional actor, because I needed intense occupation in the company of other people, and because I had some talent in that direction and very little in any other. Some years after, I remarried and had two children and set up, as I had always wanted to do, as a writer . (My first act, that decision taken, or partly taken, was to begin The Perfect Stranger .) So it has gone on ever since, working, writing, raising a family; now, twenty-five years on and with some hesitation, writing this. But all of it has been a continuation of the glimpse, the gift I was given by another person, and never a separation from that.
I have written about this in fragments, in poems and articles and broadcasts and novels, thinking of them as bricks, as piece-by-piece additions to the monument. It has been a pleasure, as well as a frustration - because it is immensely difficult - to try and express some part of what I have termed the impersonality , but what is better called the suprapersonality that I sense at the heart of everything.
Whether such an unbroken link with the past is surprising to others I do not know. To some it may even seem creepy, but it is certainly not that, to me. However, it has sometimes struck me that my thinking is almost mediaeval, in the sense that it instinctively refers everything which happens in this world to something which exists beyond it. At times this has made me impatient with myself because it can be over-simple, an evasion - Let others worry about petty things, I m in on the Big Secret. That is a caricature of this type of mind, but it acknowledges a danger. What is true is that what I found in this particular young girl, and saw confirmed through her, belonged to this nexus of supernatural beliefs and at the same time belonged very firmly to this world. This is what made her departure from it so difficult to interpret. I could have come to hate this arbitrary deity, or lose faith in it, but that has not been the case. I record this fact with surprise.
Is this way of thinking, I came to ask myself, anything to do with being Irish ? (Although born and brought up in England all my forbears were Irish.) It clearly had something to do with being a cradle-Catholic - and was it therefore mediaeval in that sense? In order to clear my mind about this faith that the past continues in the present I went in search of those forbears, in Van Diemen s Land, in New Zealand and in Ireland itself. The resulting book was called Finding Connections , and although it is true we never find such things fitting as precisely as connections in a garden-hose, or the plugs in an electrical extension, we are all in some part the results of currents flowing through us from outside, and from the past. In fact, I realised while I was on that journey that what I was doing twenty-odd years later was the same as I was doing in this book, trying to find some of the elements that made up the man to whom these things happened, in order to communicate these things, through his own person, but in a way that made them transcend the personal.
However, if a proper sequel to this book ever came to be written it would have to be explicitly theocentric, mystical, and I believe such matters are best presented obliquely, not from the corner of the mouth, but intended to be caught by the corner of the eye; it is what art is for. The hope of art is that someone will come across some piece of it that has managed to get itself expressed and will exclaim, with sudden surprise, Why, that is what I feel, too!
So the memorial continues to be built and whatever is wrong with it is my fault. Of the abiding value of the materials, which are not mine but come from without - and in that sense are impersonal - there is no doubt. That assurance may be taken away and the world become a blank. Even then the memory, and the things that have arisen from it, would remain