Work Adventures Childhood Dreams
Patience Gray
Prospect Books, £30, 434pp
Patience Gray's 1986 Honey From A Weed was set in Mediterranean landscapes where she smithed silver and cooked in austere local styles; it described, with recipes, an almost gone way of life - droughts, fuel dearths, fastings, feastings. It was an original work, close to John Berger documenting peasant land before the final wild asparagus is rooted out, or perhaps Norman Lewis hearing the last voices from an old Spanish sea before the Germans throw down their towels.
Honey made me speculate about Gray - there was something obliquely intriguing about this woman and her basil plants among the quarries of Carrera and Naxos, her past mentioned only in rare parentheses as she reduced the tomato crop to vats of sanguine sauce. The presence of her partner Norman, called "the sculptor" or "the man of stone", lent her sexiness - he was clearly worth the lack of plumbing in the barns on rocky outcrops where they dwelt. Gray's dishes might just about be approximated with ingredients from Waitrose, but her life was evidently savoury beyond imitation. I was very curious what she might write away from the pot of fava beans.
Well, over a decade later, here are Gray's collected fascicoli - "little bundles" or pamphlets, which are her anti-autobiography. These are not scenes arranged in any linear time. Each bundle ties together a discrete event - an encounter with a spooked TS Eliot at a Sussex cocktail party, a gate never opened into a Palladian villa garden in the Veneto - but Gray does not foreshorten her life along the usual convergent lines of narrative. Perhaps the crucial paragraph of the book is her observation aboard a bus of an Italian landscape from a crazy angle that verifies the pre-perspective conventions of Gothic art: what is important zooms up big and close, the rest falls away, small.
And that's how she treats her past. From far back, there looms a childhood scene of the 1920s: her father, a reverberatingly military man, lately arrived from Mesopotamia to set up a pig farm on heavy clay near Basingstoke, forces Gray's governess to walk a tusked boar; the swinish promenade ends with tears in a ditch. From the middle distance of 1958, there is a vignette of Gray's appointment as women's-page editor on the Observer: the phone call interrupts her ironing of a dress in which to fly to Naples, mission unspecified.
Soon a certain George Seddon arrives from the Guardian to tell her "he had discovered Observer readers to be mostly working men living in Victorian back-to-backs in the Midlands" - so the paper begins "to sing the deceptive but seductive joys of acquisition" and Gray is dismissed: much she cares.
There is an episode from 1964, set in a haunted Venice of flotsam on dazzling waters; Gray walks a roof parapet to find sanctuary after the greedy trafficking in artworks at the Biennale. After a long day on the Rialto among collectors and contessas, she remarks that "the study of what human beings can do without has hardly begun". This is her core belief: the necessary desire for less; the richness of the empty; the ultimate luxury of the minimal.
Summarising Gray can make her style sound merely anecdotal and her adventures averagely picaresque, which they never are: not even when she couriers an early package tour on the Orient Express, aided only by Mr St Leger, paragon, ex-commando and expert at petit-point. As she writes, the alarms and excursions of Dalmatia 50 years ago drop away, and Gray remembers how happiness "hummed about the pockmarked sunstruck walls of Diocletian's Palace".
She seems often surprised by happiness, which, she writes, "embraces the traveller like a cloak". Perhaps her childhood, spent on tiptoe to avoid provoking more parental reverberations, and her own solitary young motherhood (she discreetly bore and raised two children around 1940) left her unprepared for happiness, although she has a great capacity for enjoying it.
And also for reveries, those subterranean, subaquatic connections now mostly impermissible in print. This book, with sketches and snaps strewn through the text, was originally put out by an Italian house, Edizioni Leucasia, and feels almost like samizdat publishing, because Gray writes of moments unvalued in an acquisitive age.
There is a powerful undertow to all her memories: she mislays a key so archetypal it might be an icon for all locks, for the act of unlocking: she wounds her knee in the Alpes Maritimes and subsides on a clump of marestails, an ancient styptic that heals the cut in hours. And after the death of her friend Irving Davis - bibliophile, insect lover and cook, whose kitchen familiar was a bluebottle - she attends a party for the posthumous sale of his volumes; a bluebottle sips from her glass of champagne.
These are not stories of enormous changes, nor of journeys with urgent appointments to keep (and there is only a single recipe, moreover one that, in its reliance on technique impossible to learn from the page, proves the pointlessness of cookbooks). But Gray's bundles are subtly marvellous, and she gets "very close to the music of what happens".
