WORDS: LILY NI DHOMHNAILL
Aunt Emily Dickinson and Uncle Herman Melville and Uncle Waldo Emerson. Before I read all those people I was experiencing all my formative and normative years in the middle of that very landscape
Paul Harding’s Enon is a retrospective novel. A man paralyzed by grief looks back on the lives of his daughter, his grandfather, George (protagonist in Harding’s first novel, the award-winning Tinkers), and his Puritan ancestors. On another level, an author explores the landscape of his childhood and engages with his literary forefathers. So much remembering lends itself less towards plot, and more towards images of the past. The story sprang, Harding tells me, from the sudden solitary glimpse of a man in a graveyard:
“…like a very intricate paper cut-out silhouette, this steep little hill that was sort of studded with gravestones, with the figure of the man at the crown of the hill, skulking across the top of it. You know, underneath the moon sort of thing. And when that vision flashed in my head I just knew all at once that it was Charlie Crosby — the grandson of the guy who’s in Tinkers — … and that his daughter Kate was buried down at the bottom of the hill.”
A dramatic start.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “more than I bargained for!”
Pulitzer Prize winner and Guggenheim Fellow, he talks about writing as if he is being directed by the story, not the other way around. Of Enon he says:
“… the characters started talking to each other all the time and I kept muzzling them … I thought ‘I’m Paul Harding the author of Tinkers in which there is little to no dialogue and no quotation marks.’ I had this weird idea that that was ‘my thing,’ like my little trademark. … [But] you can never preserve your own conceits at the expense of the story, so I did let them talk and they talked so much that I couldn’t follow them without quotation marks so I put the quotation marks in.”
He laughs when I use the word “archaic” to describe his language.
“All I do is write formally, in correct English, and that sounds archaic for all the world these days.”
But it is archaic — delightfully so. He uses words like “aspic” and “orneriness” with absolute ease. His style is by no means obsolete, however, because he slips these trinkets, little traces of an earlier time, in and around descriptions of hard drugs and whiskey binges. Besides, the risk of appearing dated is evaded by the unique, dynamic style of his writing. He writes with the cadence and flourish of a poet, and some passages could nearly be lifted out of the book and called poems. Has he ever considered writing verse?
“I tried to write poetry but I could never figure out where to put the damn line breaks. So I just decided that I would write what I think of as poetry but it would look like prose. So it sort of occupies this slightly marginal or overlap position, which doesn’t really bother me because descriptions like prose, or poetry, or prose as poetry, or lyric poetry, those are all just subsequent to the creation of the stuff. So I don’t care if somebody calls it a hot fudge sundae, I’ve found the rhythm I can write in so I just kind of do it.”
Even as he creates a form that is undeniably his own, he is extremely aware of the vast literary tradition that precedes him. Born in Massachusetts, both of his books show clear Transcendental influences, his protagonists all harbouring Emersonian speculations on the soul, its relation to nature and the universe. Enon, especially, with its gothic New English landscape, is an unmistakable nod to Hawthorne. How does Harding feel about his rich literary genealogy?
“I sort of love it. I feel like there’s a sort of DNA to it. I kind of feel like all these Transcendentalists are all my great aunts and uncles. Aunt Emily Dickinson and Uncle Herman Melville and Uncle Waldo Emerson … Before I read all those people … I was experiencing all my formative and normative years in the middle of that very landscape. And so then when I finally got old enough to read Thoreau and all these people who make use of that landscape, I suddenly just had this astonishing cathartic experience realizing that there was this philosophical, artistic, aesthetic, intellectual tradition that preceded me, and that in some ways I was heir to that if I chose to be, and I did choose to be, because I’m just really very provincial in that way.”
And does he find that he can still link back to the ghosts of these writers from centuries ago, even in a modern setting?
“Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that’s one of the cool things about the act of reading itself … if you’re reading for example Emily Dickinson, or anybody who’s dead and gone, when you read her writing on the page there’s something synchronous about it; all of a sudden time is foreshortened and you and whomever you are reading, if their writing touches you, become contemporaries.”
Enon, Harding’s second novel, is now available in hardback and paperback for €14.40 // €11.67 and in eBook format.
