So it is that time of the random-number-of-years cycle, when I have to go and get my eyes tested, because I’ve stepped on my glasses, or I realise that they are so old and scratched that I can hardly see through them.
Off I tottered, and went through the usual routines of having puffs of air blown at my eyes, of having very steampunk-looking frames attached to my face, and of being asked pressing questions about whether the letters are clearer with this lens or with this one, and unable to escape the residual fear that my answer is in some way wrong.
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| Eye Test Chart by George Mayerle, via The Public Domain Review |
Then I was packed off to choose a frame. As I moped about, picking up first one and then another (unable to see the effect, because I’m so short-sighted that if I got close enough to the mirror to see, my breath fogged it up), what came to mind was a scene from The Big Sleep.
Philip Marlowe/Humprey Bogart is in a bookshop, dodging the rain and spying on another bookshop. He starts flirting with the bookseller, eventually cracks open a bottle of rye, and asks if she really needs to wear her glasses. Naturally when she takes them off, and unclips her hair, he’s all bowled over, as though she wasn’t already gobsmackingly beautiful.
I whiled away the minutes during the final part of the routine procedure—the wallet-extraction—calling to mind other writers who have sported glasses, these necessary implements, these disfigurements of underlying radiance, or short-cut signifiers of intellectual superiority.
Here we go, then: five of my favourite bespectacled authors, sporting their face furniture with panache.
1. Samuel Beckett. Beckett is, among other things, my style icon. When I went to a local hairdresser to get my hair cut short, I brought a photo of Sam. You do the hair, I said, I’ll work on the wrinkles. I am never not impressed by the forcefulness of Beckett’s writing: maximum meaning and resonance packed into the minimum number of words.
2. Susanna Clarke. Piranesi is one of the most elegant books I’ve read in recent years; streamlined, proportionate, and complicated. The voice of the character is restful, without duplicity, endlessly curious; while all around are the strange, the eerie, and the threatening. It’s a remarkable combination.
3. Shirley Jackson. I would read anything by Shirley Jackson. Her writing has a great clarity, and a great toughness. The first thing I read by her was The Haunting of Hill House, but possibly the coldest and most impressive was the short story 'The Lottery'. I’d pay good money to see Philip Marlowe tell her to take off her glasses.
4. M. John Harrison. M. John Harrison must, at this stage, be the patron saint of the underappreciated genius. Having read The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, I find it difficult to believe that any work of his is out of print (as The Course of the Heart is). I am a late convert, having come across him through the Weird Studies podcast. The Sunken Land is undramatic but inexorably unsettling; his focus seems to be the exact point where things fall apart; not in an apocalyptic way, but in the sense of having his eye always on the point where what seemed to be a unified thing disintegrates into its different parts. His ‘anti-memoir’, Wish I Was Here, is my latest purchase. Apart from glasses.
5. Muriel Spark. At the virtual launch we had for Bibliotheque des Refusés, one of the guests (hi, Siobhán!) said my sense of humour was ‘sharp and deep—like a stiletto’, and there is something quite stiletto-like about Spark’s writing. The Abbess of Crewe is a favourite: all that duplicity, all that smooth, concealing rhetoric… I love Memento Mori, too, with its uncanny aura and its many almost gleefully unpleasant characters.
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