Green, Lively, and Full of Decay

This long-cherished flash of proxy orifice returned to me when I was reading Claire-Louise Bennett’s new and third novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. The book felt like putting on a jacket you haven’t worn in a while, an old waxed jacket, and feeling around in its deep pockets, discovering a little pebble-like part of yourself: Oh, there’s that bit of yearning I’d lost track of. There’s that bit of yearning that’s tracked me like a dog after a fox. That it’s an old waxed jacket is important, because Bennett’s sentences seem oddly rigid, firmly shaped, like a garment that would hold the ghost of your body after you’ve slipped it off. At the same time, they appear to fray at the creases, revealing the hidden warp and weft of thought. (They also evoke a place where it rains a lot, clearly written between long green walks, necessitating a durable outer layer of precise vocabulary.) I remembered the holey sock when I was thinking about Bennett’s attention to detail, which is really attention to desire.

In her first novel, Pond (2015), Bennett meticulously catalogues the daily present of a writer living alone: her fluttering pulsations, soaring immensities, and domestic esoterica. Unapologetically wordy and embodied, Pond presents the jumbled inner lexicography of thought as an ardent and immediate sensation. It is a book about the “now,” heightened by solitude. Though widely admired for its wry humor, logophilic shimmer, and sheer unlikeliness, it also met with bemusement. I am surprised, looking back, how many reviews describe the experience of reading the book as “insane” (even if “pleasantly” so, per The New Yorker) or “a little bit mad” (per The Globe and Mail), as if the combination of verbosity and isolation in a woman is inherently pathological. Critical perplexity was assisted by the fact that no one could decide how to categorize Pond on a formal level; a critic at Harper’s Magazine writes that it was “presented as a collection of short stories, yet it feels as much like a novel, a memoir, and, at times, a series of prose poems.” (I’ve decided to call it a novel here, but that’s a thing I like to interpret as broadly as possible: gossip, therapy, sports commentary, to-do lists—all novels to me.) In her next work, Checkout 19 (2021), Bennett turns toward the past, the childhood and adolescence of someone who will become a writer, the foundations of the literary house in which Pond resides. It is a book about the “then,” multivocal. Following these experiments, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is about writing into and out of aging relationships, how sex hovers outside time, how the conditions of intimacy are often a past-present-future amalgam. It is about how our loving tug-of-war between “then” and “now” lives inside an unavoidable “next”; we are small creatures on the huge, indifferent tongue of a whale. Desire swallows time, and vice versa.

Undulating and prickly, a virtuosic sex scene in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye opens with cold, gray weather, twenty minutes after “a quick biblical shower.” The narrator’s body appears in a state of unexpected exposure: “Feet bare inside court shoes that could be described as cheap and ill-fitting. Sort of baggy around the instep could slip a finger in quite easily.” There is no comma between instep and could. Is the narrator rushing forward, eagerly, lustfully (Joyce-fully, perhaps), no time for grammatical convention, for full sentences or stuttering punctuation marks? Or is there no barrier between what could happen and what did? Perhaps the scene wants us to know that right away, wants us to know that this is a sexual event pressed into language, slipped into a novel, made abstract via memory or invention—and thus the difference between fantasy and action is negligible. On the page, as in the dream, there is not necessarily a dividing line between the hole and the finger that might be put inside it.

The slit repeats: “Corinthian columns. Broad enough for us to disappear behind. The grooves of the column right behind me and one leg, the left leg, lifted, lifted up and out. The shoe gaping midair, possibly seen.” Desire is architectonic, angles among other angles—a leg cutting a line across space, a furrow in marble. Strangely, it is the empty space, the consequence of gaping, that Bennett notes as visible. The lovers are made public not by fucking against a building in London’s gloomy financial district but by the blank air between the narrator’s heel and her dangling pump. Nothing draws attention like a void, if my teenage attachment to Clémenti’s tiny absence-of-sock proves anything at all. I say the lovers, but the other person in this encounter has not fully materialized. He edges into the scene slantways, displacing the narrator’s own hand, her self-enclosed gesture: “The crotch of my knickers, black. The black crotch I take hold of either side and pull across, or perhaps he did that. Perhaps he took hold of the crotch of my knickers. Yes, he did that.” Not quite an afterthought but an amendment, as if she would like to tell the story without him there at all, until she can’t. As the narrator describes his erection in her hand, body parts shuffle: “I couldn’t do it my fingers did it. My fingers are mine, all mine, every one, and curled them about from there to there and enclosed it tight all along.…Like listening then. Just like listening. Whole body biding, breath held eyes too, and there it was, solid and astir. As if like a low branch it had been that way forever.” Again, commas, otherwise abundant, sometimes flutter away, blown off their perch by a sharp exhale. The scene comes in the middle of a novel rife with characters, but even though I read the whole thing twice through in quick succession, I’m not sure exactly who it is with her against the column. That is not the sort of specificity Bennett is very concerned with.

The high-priority specifics of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye include the densities of practical, daily pleasures, mostly food-related, like buying “decent sausage rolls from the counter and a big bag of crisps” on the way to the sea, swimsuit underneath clothes, or getting “sardines and oranges and yogurt and pears, and Earl Grey tea bags” on a trip into town; the particularities of dreams, like the one about “that French medieval town with its castle and the organised gardens and walled terraces and elaborate topiary and the view of the vineyards directly below and the little wet scraps of meat I have in my hand for the little grey dog I cannot find”; the knotted conversations between men and women who might be in love, or were once, or could be again, dialogue that circles around and under itself, time tugging the loops tighter and tighter; the wretched absurdity of having to celebrate Christmas (an ongoing issue—annual, even!—that also appears in Pond); the feeling of certain phrases in your mouth when you first encounter them as a child, the way familiar words with new, strange meanings (“so-and-so has a chip on his shoulder,” etc.) can occasion “little flares going off inside of you, briefly illuminating that dark innermost space, plethoric and phantasmal, that you don’t know very much about but sometimes feel yourself sinking into”; the variations, in the most musical sense, of arousal that can surface all at once, “the thick hunger and the shrouded depths of that hunger and the variegated history of that hunger and the chthonic force of that hunger”; and the shifting terrain of epistolary correspondence, the transformation of an email over the weeks it has been read and reread, the performance of the email as a piece of theater to different friends, the contrasts between a letter, an email, and a scanned handwritten letter inside an email, all the emails that go unwritten but fantasized about, all the people one might be in touch with, all the people one might be.

I’m not being facetious when I say the epistolary novel should probably be the dominant form of our historical moment. It isn’t, not by a long shot, but it should be. After all, epistolizing is what many of us spend most of our time doing: reaching out, circling back, saying hi, jostling between the telegrammatic fizz of the text message, the courtly tones of the business email, the lackadaisical skywriting of social media, and so on. To me, it would make some poetic sense if the novel were returned to one of its originary forms, beamed back into the Pamela mother ship as we teeter nervously on the cusp of a new epoch of literacy (or anti-literacy). Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is not, in the more traditional sense, a found collection of letters, but it does confess to being a journal that recounts an unnamed novelist’s faltering correspondence with two aging men. Her former A-level English teacher, Terence Stone, has written to her out of the blue to compliment her writing. Her ex-boyfriend Xavier, who was significantly older than her during their romantic relationship, is now undeniably elderly, approaching death. He is withholding communication after the “HELL”—his word—of reading her last book. A third, more ghostly figure hovers between these two: another teacher at her sixth form, Robert Turner, whom she had “dealings with” as a teenager, is unable to answer for the violations and heartbreak of the past, as he’s suffering from dementia. The eighteenth-century epistolary novel offered a form in which a singular event could accrue many perspectives without disturbing the sanctity of the first-person account, as the same story could be told differently in letters to and from different people. In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, Bennett allows the singular mind of her narrator to occupy this variousness, drafting, drifting, reiterating, and revising as it does. Much of the novel is about writing that lingers in a state of potentiality: the unsent (because only thought) missive and its version of reality, which tunnels inward rather than outward. “He’s an old man for goodness sake—he has a summerhouse! He has grandchildren! Be nice. Be pleasant,” the narrator admonishes herself while composing a response to Stone. “An old man! But, dear Lord, there is no such thing as an old man.”

Just as the narrator superimposes the at-hand Stone over the spectral Turner, she also pastes Stone over the protagonist of the book she is currently reading, J.-K. Huysmans’s 1891 novel, The Damned (Là-bas). It is as if every discrete text she encounters gets digested into a single mushy unit once it is read or remembered, all the ingredients becoming interchangeable once they’ve entered the long blur of her mind. In The Damned, a novelist, Durtal, disillusioned with the realist fiction of his moment, embarks on writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, an infamous sadist and serial child murderer of the 1400s, drawing Durtal into a subterranean world of fin de siècle devil worshippers. Daydreaming about the seemingly very pleasant Stone having his own predilection for the dark arts, Bennett’s narrator writes:

All of this deducing and surmising has been gaining ground in my mind in the month or so since sending the accursed email, and evidently this latter hypothesis has attained a great deal of traction in my imagination, because not long after conceiving it I returned to the book and through no conscious effort on my part Monsieur Durtal had, in my susceptible grey matter, taken on the physical appearance of Terence Stone, as he looked some thirty years ago, which is how long it’s been since I last saw him.

A classic Bennett seven-clause sentence, with at least as many descriptors for the act of thinking.

The Damned also hinges on an unexpected correspondence: Durtal receives a letter from the beguiling Madame Chantelouve, who has just finished reading his latest book. This is the same reason Stone gives for initiating contact with the narrator in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye: “He goes on to say that on discovering I’d written several books he furnished himself with copies of the first two just as soon as he could and read them both double-quick.” Bennett’s narrator characterizes Madame Chantelouve as “an extremely sensitive woman with an inflammatory imagination who is very capable of conjuring up, with just a few scraps of reality and torrents of lust, captivating chimeras of the male variety.” Identifications tangle: “Mme Chantelouve’s inventive prowess is, I must admit, not entirely alien to me,” the narrator notes. And what, then, of her waning men? Mere chimeras? What of Stone, a new face on Durtal’s head, a disembodied voice for the memoryless Turner? I laughed when I thought about the “accursed email” being like Bataille’s “accursed share,” the inevitable excess energy of daily life that must be uselessly, rhapsodically expended. Writing is the bonfire onto which her glut of fantasy can be thrown. Ultimately, it is through the literal pen that Bennett’s narrator most firmly grasps her allegiance with Madame Chantelouve: they both use green ink, a detail she includes in her response to Stone, as across their messages they have been riffing on the color green.

In Pond, the narrator also writes in green—or rather she intends to. A chapter begins with the sputtering engine of self-reflexivity: “This is being written with green ink—though in fact it is not, not yet.” The writer has loaded a fountain pen with a cartridge of green ink, but the words descend to the page coated in the remnantal blue-black of previous notations. As the transcription unfolds, she rereads an old love letter that “attests to something that did not happen, that could not happen,” wading into the memory of sustained impossibilities, waiting for the words she is using to turn green mid-sentence. They never do. Like Bennett, Huysmans emphasizes the bodily nature of the textual object, the page as a kind of physical transmission, the sentence as an erotic displacement. The color of Madame Chantelouve’s ink, “thin, myrtle-green, almost pale,” hooks Durtal’s attention, and with some care, he detaches “some flakes of face-powder, perfumed with heliotrope, clinging to the side” of the letter. “Undoubtedly a blonde,” he concludes after inspecting the tint, “brunettes tend to go for a darker shade such as ‘Rachel.’” The eidolic feminine form conjured by the material traces of the written word causes Durtal to descend deeper into writing, a kind of spiritual chasm: “I wrote her an even more roundabout, even more insistent letter. Trying to lure her into the abyss, I ended up falling in myself.” His reply is not included in the novel, only described. Roundabout, insistent, alluring, suspended precariously over the gaping bliss-oblivion of more and more language…Forgive my susceptible gray matter for the shuffling of references, but it sounds like Durtal is describing Bennett’s style, not his own. More than a century apart, with nimble and uncompromising eccentricity, Huysmans and Bennett have both written novels about writing itself—words and their doubling, desirous, dire consequences.

before she decides to reference Madame Chantelouve’s green ink in an email to Stone, the narrator considers another allusion for their back-and-forth: “the greening power of God,” viriditas, a theological principle elucidated by the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. She figures Stone has probably “been meaning to read her visionary texts for aeons and has never quite got around to it.” To Hildegard, “greenness” was God’s truest embodiment—the sprout, the seed, the dense forest—and wherever there was green, there was life and therefore holiness. She imagined that the soul, too, could be “greened” by good works. At first glance, this couldn’t be further in vibe from the acidic enticements of Madame Chantelouve, but like the inner slush of interchangeable patriarchs, the greens and their meanings eventually start to merge. “Dear Terence Stone,” a message, presumably undelivered, begins, “Green is life is poison is sickness is peace…is absinthe is tarnish is labyrinth is melancholy…is lush is infection is solitude is beginning is asparagus…is mould is freshness is vitality…is mildew is vile is rampant is the colour of my ink yes, the colour of my ink.”

Bennett has described her writing as rooted in a distinctly phenomenological approach, focused on the physical honesty of unfolding firsthand experience. She prioritizes the rustle of thought, the stark insight of skin, the earnestness of immediate surroundings, and, most importantly, how all three sometimes contradict and complicate one another. It is not metaphorical to say that her words are green and full of liveliness and decay. They are actually, visibly, truly green. Liveliness and decay, too, are real things: passionate kisses from very old men, big bouquets stuffed in the toilet bowl because there’s no room in the sink, coming across someone you once loved among headstones wearing “duck egg blue. Raspberry pink. Lovely shirt. Very nice. Very nice. Very him in fact,” and noticing that he stares right through you. The wearer of the shirt is Turner, draped in color, dislodged from chronology: “He didn’t know who we were, did he? No he didn’t. He didn’t know who he was.…Whatever our big idea had been we had to let go of it there and then. We did, and we felt it go. Yes. Off it went.…It went and we were left in a sort of nowhere place and we weren’t sure who we were there.” Across her novels, Bennett uses the first-person plural when she is describing a moment of selfhood that feels especially multitudinous and unfastened. In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, she repeats herself so much that I sometimes had the impression, reading onward, that I was returning to the beginning of the novel, again and again. The detail about Turner’s shirt had already been mentioned one hundred pages earlier: “I remember what he was wearing, I mean I can see it—a duck egg blue and raspberry pink striped collarless shirt tucked into a pair of grey marl jogging bottoms.…The shirt was lovely and very him.” When the shirt reappeared, I felt its familiarity, as if this were my own memory, as if I had already thought about that blue and that pink. I, too, had seen them in my mind. I was tilling the soil. Duck eggs, raspberries. Other recollections trailed after it, bare-heeled. As if I had already chosen those words, the words to describe exactly what it felt like to be forgotten.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is bookended by kisses. Or, rather, it begins with the refusal of one kiss, absent and unconsummated (Xavier, too old, asks the narrator if she will kiss him, and she politely declines, still intertwined yet unattracted), and it ends with a second (Xavier and the narrator’s first kiss). Some relationships are annular, echoic, ceaseless even after they’re over. When Xavier goes to kiss the narrator for the first time, at the very close of the novel, “she is not her, she is the situation, and the situation pulls things from her that exceed her direct experience and personally gained understanding.…She is all the ages.” She has, in a manner of speaking, exceeded the phenomenological. When she is against the column with the unclear man, feeling his erection in her hand, “he was all the bodies he’d ever been and that undid me I can’t tell you. I felt them all and that undid me, all the bodies he’s ever been.” Bennett’s palindromish sentences thrum into the eternity of a single instance, holding the note, casting off false linearities. When writing a story, why begin from the premise that things end? And yet, like the color of her ink, bright-leafed and moldering, something’s emergence must also contain its demise. The not-kiss at the start of the novel is slipped under their tongues in the last scene, passed between their mouths like coins for the ferry across the River Styx. By the end, I started to feel that the title, too, read the same backward and forward: Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. Bye-Bye, Big Kiss. Flesh, Absence. Sock, Hole. Life, Death. Green, Green.