Smith - Artful

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There but for the

Artful

Ali
Smith

T HE P ENGUIN P RESS
New York
2013

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First American edition

Published in 2013 by The Penguin Press,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Ali Smith, 2012

All rights reserved

constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Smith, Ali.

Artful / Ali Smith.

pages cm

Originally presented as four lectures for the Weidenfeld
Visiting Professorship in European comparative literature at
St Annes College, Oxford, in January and February 2012.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60583-7

1. LiteratureHistory and criticismTheory, etc. 2. Comparative
literature. 3. Authorship. I. Title.

PN441.S585 2013

809dc23

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any
printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate
in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the
authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

for Xandra Bingley

Emma Wilson

and

Sarah Wood

This book began life as four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St. Annes College, Oxford, in January and February 2012. The lectures are published here pretty much as they were delivered.

I owe a great debt of thanks to everyone at St. Annes for making this book happen at all, and for looking after me there with such care, cleverness, and grace. Huge thanks for their kindness to Tim Gardam, Sally Shuttleworth, Matthew Reynolds, and Lord Weidenfeld.

Dont try to hold on to the wave

Thats breaking against your foot: so long as

You stand in the stream fresh waves

Will always keep breaking against it.

B ERTOLT B RECHT

translated by Gerhard Nellhaus

The wind doth blow today, my love,

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love,

In cold grave she was lain.

Ill do as much for my true-love

As any young man may;

Ill sit and mourn all at her grave

For a twelvemonth and a day.

T he twelvemonth and a day being up, I was still at a loss. If anything I was more at a loss.

So I went and stood in our study and looked at your desk, where the unfinished stuff, what youd been working on last, was still neatly piled. I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at randommy study, my desk, my books, now.

The book I took down today happened actually to have been one of mine originally. It was a Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, the old Penguin edition Id had at university, with a spine whose orange had almost completely faded and a jolly engraving of drunks and children in a pub on the cover, which was beginning to peel away from the spine. It would probably stand one more read. Id not read Oliver Twist since, oh god, when? way before we even first knew each other, Id had to, for university, so that made it thirty years.

That gave me a shake. A twelvemonth and a day can arguably be called short, but thirty years? How could thirty years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black and white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on Top of the Pops singing Life on Mars; it was the size of a grown woman with four children, one of them nearly old enough, if the woman started very early, to be doing A-levels. They definitely werent called A-levels any more.

Maybe I might try to read Oliver Twist, the whole thing, from start to finish. I hadnt read anything, I hadnt been able to, for well over a twelvemonth and a day. I opened the book at chapter 1, page 45, which Treats of the Place where Oliver Twist was Born, and of the Circumstances attending his Birth (thats quite a lot of pages before he was even born, forty-four. But I didnt really want to read someones introduction, my introduction days were over thank god; there are some good things about getting a bit older), and I sat down in the armchair by the window.

There was a draft by this window. Thered always been a draft by this window because one year when we painted it then left it a little open to dry we couldnt get it to close completely again without cracking the paint, and you never wanted to crack it because youd painted it so carefully, so we never did. I knew that if I sat there for any length of time Id end up with a really sore neck and shoulder even though right now it was summer. Summer: a couple of times in the twelvemonth and a day Id wondered if the seasons would ever be new again, brand-new time, rather than just seem to be following each other nose to tail like paint-peeling wooden horses on an old carousel.

I looked across the room to the other window, where Id always thought it would be better to have that chair anyway. The light would be better there and it also happened to be closer to the desk, which meant Id be able to angle the anglepoise and carry on reading when it got dark.

But it was your chair, this chair, even though wed bought it on my credit card (and it still wasnt paid off; how unfair that a chair we saw online and bought on a credit card and had delivered in a van would, could, did, last longer than us). And wed had the argument about moving it several times and youd always won that argument.

I think it was the thought of the extra day past the twelvemonth, a single new day on top of the heap of gone days, gone months. I dropped the book onto the seat of the chair and I started dragging the chair across the room.

It was heavy, much heavier than it looked, so I stopped halfway and stood behind it and pushed. Partly the pushing was difficult too because one of the rugs caught under it and got dragged across the room and I had the feeling I was maybe scuffing the floorboards quite badly with one of its legs, yes I was, look, I could see a gouge appearing beneath me as I pushed. But it was my floor, I could do what I liked to it, so I kept pushing even though the rug was still rucked up under it and all the other rugs in the room had messed up too.