In 2015, Ali Smith compiled a collection of short stories as a response to the UK’s cost cutting measures that targeted its public library system. Interpolated between the stories, we find statements by ordinary members of the public reflecting on what libraries have done for them and how those libraries have enhanced their communities. Although, the book addresses the situation in the UK, Smith includes one interpolation from the Canadian context coincidentally concerning a library in Toronto. It’s a brief reminiscence from Miriam Toews about watching her mother enter the library then settle herself by a sunny window and fall asleep. The brief shift to another country is not so terribly jarring given that we face precisely the same cost cutting mania here. In our case, the chief maniac is Doug Ford who, as a Toronto city councillor, displayed open hostility to the Toronto Public Library system and drew the ire of such luminaries as Margaret Atwood. Now that he’s premier of Ontario, he has expanded the scope of his hostility to target the entire province. He exemplifies the failure of imagination that views all human interactions through an economic lens and refuses to acknowledge that many of life’s goods are unquantifiable using money as the measure.
Although Ali Smith could probably identify similar figures in her own Tory-beset Brexit-mad nation and wag her finger accordingly, she remains remarkably non-polemical. Instead, she offers gentle reminders that words matter; books matter; reading matters; the deep engagement that literacy fosters matters. Famously, the Nazi party burned books, beginning in May, 1933 with the seizure of Magnus Hirschfeld’s library at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. You can learn more about Hirschfeld’s work in Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind and, more recently, in Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom. The lesson drawn from such incendiary acts is that democracy is somehow tied to books; freedom depends upon the ready access to the knowledge that books represent. I can understand how the historical example of book burning can lead library advocates to such a conclusion, but I think this is a dangerous tack to take. As the rise of Trump illustrates, democracies are quite capable of using the democratic process to divest themselves of their freedoms including the freedoms embodied by books. (In fact, it was through the democratic process that Nazism first gained a foothold in Germany.) In my estimation, it’s safer simply to declare literacy a good in its own right, and never mind the vagaries of a fickle electorate. As Lear declares: “O reason not the need!” Something that’s a good in its own right needs no justification.
But on to the stories. I have a soft spot for the absurd exchanges that arise as the neat strictures of our modern lives try to cope with the unruly vagaries of ordinary people trying to lead their ordinary lives. Modernity is all about sleek ads for SUV’s that show off curved lines and reflective surfaces, but ordinary people drive cars with dings in the bumper because the car had a defective parking brake and lurched forward into a pole. There is friction between design and life in the real world; concept and execution; desire and (dis)satisfaction. Ali Smith experiments with these strange duets and, if she were a composer, she might have spun out her stories as a theme and variations. In her stories, characters routinely find themselves in situations that our neat strictures have no way to accommodate and the results are deliciously absurd.
For the “theme” story of her theme and variations, we open with a piece ironically titled “Last”. The narrator debarks a train at the end of the line and, looking back, realizes that a passenger in a wheelchair is trapped in the otherwise empty train. She follows a path, “the kind that people make in places where paths aren’t supposed to be,” down to a hole in a barbed-wire fence with a No Trespassing sign and threat of fine for unauthorized entry. The narrator enters anyways because no one else seems inclined to do anything. There, she finds three boys playing and, together, they help the trapped woman escape from the train. Along the way, the narrator punctuates her account with wordy ruminations. She wonders how the train authorities arrived at the precise wording of their No Trespassing sign and at the etymologies of the words it uses. The phrase “travelling etymologies” comes to mind and she decides this would be a good name for a rock band. A little later, she riffs on the etymology of the word aloof which takes her to the story of Daedalus and Theseus and Ariadne and on to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Once the woman is freed, the narrator concludes with a litany of arcane etymologies that includes the word “last” of the title. My choice of the word “litany” doesn’t understate the mood of this passage, for the narrator seems to invest her wordy preoccupations with a spiritual import.
If you think I’m making too much of it by suggesting a spiritual dimension to Smith’s verbal obsessions, consider the opening of her story, “The poet.” There, a girl throws a book across the room and breaks its spine, “which was one of the worst things you could do, maybe a worse thing even than saying a blasphemous curse, no, than saying a blasphemous curse in a church, or near a church, to break a book.” Smith is in good company. After all, the Gospel according to John opens with: “In the beginning was the Word.” Although ours is a secular world, even to this day, the Logos has a powerful hold on our imaginations.
Then we have “The human claim” which sees our narrator, Ms Smith, engaged in an investigation as to the final disposition of DH Lawrence’s ashes. However, the arrival of a credit card bill interrupts her efforts. She discovers a substantial charge for Lufthansa tickets. After a frustrating exchange with an automated phone navigation system which threatens to turn into an infinite loop, Ms Smith reaches a real person “from somewhere that had the sound of very far away.” He in turn hands her over to someone else and so it goes. There are forms to complete, and more frustrating telephone calls, the usual challenges when trying to get anyone to take responsibility for anything. Perhaps the greatest frustration is that the frustration itself, coupled with the indignity of being scammed, so utterly consumes her that it is impossible to focus on the task at hand, namely her investigation of a literary curiosity. “I picked up a book but couldn’t concentrate to read.” In the end, her investigations lead nowhere; it’s probably impossible to learn with any certainty what happened to DH Lawrence’s ashes. And although Barclaycard credits her for her loss, the resolution is likewise unsatisfying. She’ll never know who scammed her or how. And she’ll never really recover a sense of dignity. The process of seeking redress has reduced her to an infantile whining at automated systems.
In the same vein, we have “After life” in which a man discovers that the news has reported him dead. Twice. On the first occasion, the man enjoys the attention and leverages it for a family celebration and fun exchanges at the office. But on the second occasion, ten years later, no one appears to care. In the intervening years, with the rise of social media and the prevalence of cell phones and a general callousness seeping into our post-millennial world, even the most robust among us may have cause to doubt our own existence.
When Smith isn’t exploring the absurdities of modern life, she’s stepping sideways into the not-so-very-different world of the vaguely magical. In “The beholder” the narrator goes to the doctor complaining of difficulty breathing. When the doctor asks how things are going in her life, she assures him everything is fine:
“…well, my dad died and my siblings went mad and we’ve all stopped speaking to each other and my ex-partner is suing me for half the value of everything I own and I got made redundant and about a month ago my next-door neighbour bought a drum kit, but other than that, just, you know, the usual.”
As one would expect, the doctor prescribes an antidepressant and sends her on her way. But she returns with a growth on her chest. The growth proves to be of the arboreal variety, and with proper watering and a heaping of manure for fertilizer, she soon sports a rose bush where you’d expect a supernumerary nipple. A gypsy suggests the tree is a “young licitness” which she hears as “Young Lycidas” which prompts her to think of John Milton which causes her to reflect on the fact that Milton invented so many words we use still today: fragrance, gloom, lovelorn, padlock. Magically, the story’s tone shifts and the it ends with soaring phrases that leave me spellbound. Thinking of her rose petals:
“But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards.”
On the lighter side of the street, there is “The ex-wife” which reads as a complaint by one spouse to another. The ex-wife is the name the complainer gives to Kathrine Mansfield who is the object of her partner’s literary obsession. One evening, as the complainer is walking home from work and ruminating about a difficult day, she encounters Kathrine Mansfield’s ghost in a park. They begin to meet this way regularly. It’s hard to complain about your partner’s “infidelity” when you’re carrying on with the same woman yourself.
This story reads as prelude to “The definite article”. Again, the narrator has had a difficult day at work and her head is filled with the words that crowd the corporatespeak lexicon: “urgent, ensure, feasibility, margin, assessment, management, rationalization, developmental strategy, strategic development, current climate, project incentive, core values…” She wanders into Regent’s Park and soon finds herself transported into the past, in the days when Cromwell felled all the trees for their wood, then advancing forward and watching as various luminaries drift, ghostlike, before her eyes. In a way, this is what all good books do sooner or later. They raise the dead and parade them pageant-like before our eyes. Almost a form of ancestor worship, we converse with these writers, and their stories enrich us.
For more about Ali Smith’s books:
Read about her 2022 novel, Companion Piece.
Read about her Seasonal Quartet, a tetralogy published between 2016 and 2020.