On ‘If on a Winter’s Night Some Travellers…’ by Marion Halligan

In Marion Halligan’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night Some Travellers…’, the author describes a photograph of her baby daughter, Lucy, dressed in red. ‘There is a picture of Lucy sitting almost on the hearth, holding up an orange.’ Halligan calls the orange ‘…an object of admiration, of wonder.’ Her recollection of the still image is just a brief pause (amid the stream of recollections that form Halligan’s piece) but it stayed with me – and kept appearing to me – until I recognised it as a kind of touchstone within the text. Lucy not quite on the hearth is a perfect small example of the aliveness of the writer’s notations. And Lucy holding up the orange – a vivid round thing that must exceed her palm – I equate this with Halligan signalling and heralding…not the orange especially but things, ‘wonderful things’.

… If baby Lucy is making a sound while holding her object, she is probably not saying ‘look, my world’ but she could be saying, ‘look, my whole thing’…

‘If on a Winter’s Night Some Travellers…’ details a frugal life lived by a small family (for a time, around 1967) in a place named Alassio; its structure is linear and also a series of little circles made around a store of memories. Contemplating its apparent simplicity relative to the pleasure it gives, I’ve decided upon the noun – rather, all of the nouns – as its essential elements.

Halligan strews nouns, like crumb after crumb let fall off a large panettone (‘from the shop on the saleta, delicious it was’). I follow, and I eat: all of the italicised beauties (panini, Vesuvio, bombola) and a hundred more ordinary beauties, too (butter, terracotta, a bath, ‘even geraniums’). There is an effect that these nouns have singularly and cumulatively: they remind me of life.

It has made me feel romantic (and maybe unwittingly Derridian) about nouns. I’ve accumulated a collection of handwritten notes on the capacity and dimensionality of nouns. One suggests that my love of reading has stemmed from love of the noun (the starting point of all that I might imagine). Others say things like ‘the noun does everything’ – naming (and framing) the particular without stifling the object’s potential to be multiple. When I picture Lucy’s ‘whole thing’, I’m not thinking of whole as in complete and finished, I’m thinking of ‘all’ and ‘infinite’ and ‘marvellous’; the ‘object of wonder’ – in a baby’s hand, in a photograph, in an archive, and now here.

Since reading her piece, the phrase ‘Halligan mode’ has often come into my head. I think of a person (bright, generous, quick and sharp) clipping her way ahead (of you, of me) throughout…a large house? As she goes, she is pushing open windows, pointing out trinkets, as well as broken bits and hazards, and holding up oranges – saying, ‘look at this thing’, and ‘look, the world’.

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.