Meeting Merle and Liana again after decades

Merle, a fabulous
character

Pressing on with re-reading the forgotten and neglected on my bookshelves, I took down Paule Marshall's early short stories and Martha Gelhorn's Liana, both published by Virago. I was in my first job in the 1980s and although I wasn't highly paid, I was single, so my pay packet was my own. And I bought books endlessly. It was a good decade - Virago and The Women's Press were pumping out the work of exciting writers like Marshall,  championed by Langston Hughes, the great poet of the United States. She died just over a year ago. 

In her introduction to Merle and other stories, Marshall quotes Czeslaw Milosz saying "Language is the only homeland." From this she explores the importance to her of the spoken word and women at the kitchen table. I'm fond of the kitchen as a place of poetry but had forgotten Marshall's essay. Or perhaps I didn't feel its relevance at the time I first read the book. I do now. I don't have Marshall's experience of growing up with a language that was so markedly different spoken and written. But I am interested in the lines that are drawn around what we write about and how the kitchen table is, even now, regarded as somehow inferior as a landscape for writing. 

But I've promised a dear friend to stay off the soapbox for a bit. So what struck me about the title story, Merle, this time round was how complete it is, how intense and affecting. Merle's story still matters, is still relevant, is frighteningly prophetic. I'm going to rediscover her novels next, also on my shelves. Sadly Marshall's disappeared from Virago's list, as has the great US journalist Martha Gelhorn, whose novel Liana I also dragged out of the block of green spines. 

I was uncomfortable sometimes reading Liana - Gelhorn doesn't hold back from showing white disgust towards the poverty of black rural life in the Caribbean. Liana is her vehicle for exploring power and race, and she does it unflinchingly. But it's good, sometimes, to feel discomfort about something else with the pandemic raging. 

I'm no novelist and I'm sure those of us who write poems can be proud of other achievements, but what compelled me, re-reading these two writers, was the truth of their characters. I believed in these women, both of them flawed and therefore, at times, difficult to like. 

And I'm grateful to Marshall (RIP) for bringing that Milosz quote to my attention, for reminding me of the poet's responsibility - to explore the language of home, whatever that is, and by doing that, find the equivalent truth to these novelists' creations.