Back To The Writers’ Group

You may remember that a month ago I went to a meeting of the local writers’ group for the first time. It was interesting enough to warrant a second trip and for me to think that this time I should bite the bullet and take something of my own to read out. So yesterday evening, I didn’t let the rain and the dark and the freezing cold or even the threat of snow deter me, despite the huge temptation to stay warm indoors, cuddled up with a book. Instead I ventured out to yet another new location, this one on the far side of town near the hospital. Don’t you hate having to track down unfamiliar houses in the dark? I’d been told very firmly to approach the house from one direction, as it had a horseshoe-shaped drive that we were all to park along, facing forward. It was, apparently, number 300 in the road, and I drove along at five miles an hour, thankful the rain and the cold and the dark had kept everyone else sensibly indoors, peering at gateposts and house signs and the big wheelie bins that sometimes have the house number daubed in white paint on the side. In the end, running out of houses before the entrance to the hospital, I turned into a driveway, thinking I could always turn around and retrace my route, only to find I had arrived at my destination. But then I wasn’t so sure. The person who entered the house in front of me looked like he might have spent the previous week sleeping on one of the benches in front of the hospital. He was warmly greeted by our hostess, who then turned to look at me with some suspicion. Disconcerted, I blurted out some explanation about having contacted the group leader, wondering whether I had arrived by mistake at a gambler’s anonymous meeting.  ‘Have you wiped your feet properly?’ she asked.

Like the last time, I entered another sitting room full of unfamiliar faces. Only one person I recognized from the last meeting was there, and we smiled at each other with gratitude. I made a more careful choice of chair this time, on the grounds that anyone can make a mistake, but to make it twice is unreasonable. This one was a rocking chair, and it was comfy with cushions, but I later discovered that agitated rocking whilst nervously waiting for my turn made me feel seasick. Still, it was better than before. Our host for the evening was an elderly lady who had evidently lived in her house for many, many years. The room was choc-a-bloc full of furniture and ornaments that clearly had a history attached to each one, abstract brass plaques on the walls that must have come from foreign travel, black and white photographs of attractive young girls who were probably now bringing up children or grandchildren of their own. The fluted glass bowls on the coffee tables held twisted cheese straws that everyone was politely ignoring, and I thought of my son, who adores them, and who would have hoovered them up in about five seconds flat.

Then we got onto the reading. There were eight people to read and a quick calculation told me I’d be going 6th. The first man to read produced the introduction of a non-fiction book he was beginning to write on folk music, proposing that it was a way of uncovering a kind of hidden history of Britain. The next woman read a really excellent scene from a historical detective fiction novel, in which a retarded boy charged with carrying an important message was set upon by a gang of teenagers out to cause trouble. Then came the woman who I knew from last time, who read some more of her parallel world novel, which hadn’t improved much in the interim. It was the same set-up as before, ten minutes reading followed by five or so of questions and the most vociferous member of the group was turning out to be the homeless-looking type who’d preceded me through the doorway. He had an extraordinary style of giving critique, which consisted in rapping out a number questions to the person who had read, carefully avoiding any eye contact, picking up on tiny points of grammar as well as overarching issues of intention, genre and content. Then he would subside back in his seat with a hangdog look on his face that made it seem incredible to think he had spoken at all. If anyone attempted to interrupt him in full flow, he would sigh loudly with irritation and keep talking. If he didn’t like the passage being read he would slump back onto the sofa with exquisite boredom. So I couldn’t wait to hear what he was going to read. I wasn’t disappointed. He introduced it as surreal fantasy and handed us all copies of the typescript. The story concerned the adventures of Leonard the mutant lemon (one of a new superrace who had taken over the world, humans being consigned to theme parks) who in a series of brief vignettes, fell in love with a lime, fought off an attack of marmite soldiers, discovered existentialism, married, saved the earth from an alcoholic dragon, etc. It was extraordinary, and I had to applaud him silently for having produced a piece of writing that was destined to foreclose all possible questions while the audience sat in mild shock. I must also say that the way he read it, in a droll, dead-pan style, made it quite amusing at times, although the text didn’t quite stand up to the cold light of day when my son (who finds it hard to believe a grown-up would write such a thing) introduced it to his friends today.

There was only one more person to read before me and I was beginning to feel nervous. Why should it be that one gets an attack of anxiety before having to read a small passage of writing out loud? It makes no sense at all, really. Next up was an older man who read in a rich, rolling Dutch accent. By dint of keeping his head down and reading steadily and rhythmically, without notable paragraph breaks, he managed to read for much longer than anyone else. It was a family story, this part concerning a man whose unfaithful wife had died and a painting that he seemed to both loathe and hold very dear. It was very well written but the story was so smooth it made no impact on me at all. The only thought I had in my head was that it could do with a good edit. He was obviously well known to certain members of the group, who asked him where he was in the narrative. He was still in 1776, he said, where he had been all summer, apparently. But he hoped to make it to the present day by Christmas. When someone suggested that some of the phrasing sounded a little strange, he replied ‘Would you have felt that if you had not known I was Dutch? I don’t think so.’ Oh okay, I thought, someone who won’t change a comma in his precious work. It then transpired that he had written a whopping three hundred thousand words of this novel. But, he declared, he wrote in such a pared back to the bone way that any thought of an edit was out of the question. ‘I have been over and over this section,’ he said ‘and it would be impossible to take any single word out of it.’ Pass it over here, I thought to myself, but it did not seem worthwhile, or polite, to say so.

So, finally, my turn had come. I was just reaching for my pages when the young man in the leather jacket interrupted. He was so sorry but his wife had been away for a while and was expecting him home, and he was off on travels himself the following day, and in any case, he had to leave soon, so could he possibly read next? It wasn’t okay at all; I was longing to get it over with, but what can you say in such circumstances? I felt, as I usually feel, that he had considered it perfectly fine to jump the queue before a woman, whereas he would not have done so to a man. But I could be being unfair; none of us could have guessed that the Dutchman would read for so long. Anyway, we were then subjected to a strange and disturbing passage about a young man who seemed to be suffering from an unexplained plague of flying scarab beetles digging into his flesh, but who then ended up rollicking in the ocean with some nubile maidens. It made no sense, but guess what? He told us that in a few pages his narrator would wake up to find it had all been a dream. I have no patience with writers who insist that readers are happy to wait for chapter three to explain everything that’s happened so far. Waiting for the incomprehensible to fall into place is not a readerly delight, just a pain in the neck.

And so, finally, finally, I picked up my pages and shuffled them, only for the Dutchman, who was seeing the man in the leather jacket out, to reappear apologetically in the doorway. We had all parked in a neat row according to orders, but now we were going to have to shuffle cars so the young man could leave. Inevitably, I found myself back in the freezing cold, reversing my car into the narrow straits of an unfamiliar garden, trying to avoid a row of little white stones like shark’s teeth bordering the curved lawn, and a range of bicycles that were just longing to topple like a row of dominoes if I grazed one. By the time I returned, the party was warming up a bit and the other writers were laying waste to the cheese straws. ‘Do you mind if we munch while you read?’ our hostess asked. I wouldn’t have cared by that point if they’d done the can-can. I finally read my passage, had some interesting feedback, and was much entertained fending off the homeless man’s questions, which he hammered out as fast as I could answer them. I love answering questions. It’s a shame I can’t find a job that means I do it all the time. The last reader of the evening was another elderly lady who was writing a psychological thriller. Her passage saw her detective going undercover in a mental hospital. It was again quite accomplished, but hard to follow because she had a sort of unfortunate speech impediment. We were all rather pooped by that point anyway, so I felt a bit sorry and wished I could have read the typescript. But then we were shrugging on our coats and leaving with the ill-concealed haste that afflicts strangers cooped up together for a whole evening. I returned home and read the adventures of Leonard the lemon to my husband and son, who were amused and baffled in equal measure. Is there anything more extraordinary than the products of the human imagination when let loose? It’s a long, slightly nerve-wracking evening at the writers’ group, but never let it be said that it’s not an entertaining one.

Family Happiness

The domestic world – the inner circle of the family in its messy glory – regularly gets a hammering at the hands of most seasoned reviewers as it’s not usually considered a topic for serious literature. Instead it’s become the home of the Aga-saga, as they were once called over here, the province of the middle-class housewife and her trivial concerns about happiness, duty, good behaviour and surface appearance. For some reason, lost in the mists of old prejudice which no one looks at too closely because we’re not supposed to have those old prejudices any more, the subject area is usually consigned to supermarket-novel oblivion. Only Jane Austen managed to marry domesticity with literature in a way that satisfied everyone. So it’s not surprising that when contemporary authors approach the minefield of the domestic with wit, flair and some quality writing, the analogy with Austen is inevitably broached. I’d like to think, however, that there are good writers who tackle family stories with charm and a finely-honed linguistic scalpel who are not like Austen but just like themselves. And Laurie Colwin, despite the Austen analogies, is one of them.

Colwin’s novel, Family Happiness, is a simple story. It concerns Polly Solo-Miller, a good girl from a good family, living a good life according to the rules instilled in her during childhood, who suddenly finds herself having an affair with a reclusive painter named Lincoln. For Polly, whose sense of identity is completely bound up with obedience and virtue, this is nothing short of a cataclysmic disaster, but the fact that Lincoln is essential to her existence shows her something is seriously wrong in her life philosophy. The novel charts the implosion of her cherished beliefs and the intriguing compromises she will make to find her own individual way of living. Much as the family happiness of the title refers to the threat hovering over her own much-loved husband and two children, the family with the real clout here is Polly’s clan, the tribal Solo-Millers with their unbreachable code of conduct. The portraits Colwin paints of Polly’s relations, her magisterial father, dominating her with ‘Daddy’s Horizontal Flicker of Disapproval’, and her delicious monster of a mother, manipulating her tenderly with love and a metaphorical whip of criticism, are exquisitely done. So, too, are the subplots that concern Polly’s two brothers, the younger one, Henry, slobbish, impatient and juvenile, the older, Paul, tyrannical, cold and charmless. Polly, sandwiched in between these unlovely boys, has been handed the role in the family script of the reliable one, the legible one, the one who will continue the family traditions in the way that best pleases her parents. Polly finds, however, that she has paid very dearly for approval, as perfection and excellence as a matter of course are not easy states to reproduce without a gradual build-up of resentment.

Colwin writes so wonderfully well about the inequality of family relations and the way that some siblings get to wear a far more lightweight mantle of expectations than others. The oldest brother, Paul, is a good case in point and will turn out to be a real thorn in Polly’s side as the narrative progresses. ‘No one, except for Henry, Sr., who had his son’s admiration, knew quite what to do with him. He treated his mother with the tender but essentially distant courtesy you might give to a mildly insane but well-meaning relative. Polly he accepted as if she were a piece of pleasing wallpaper, and Henry, Jr., he ignored as if he were a mess on the rug. His place in the family was absolutely firm and no one expected anything of him. They were thrilled to see him when he showed up.’ Colwin is equally sharp-eyed on the brutality of family love, it’s blackmailer’s demands: ‘It always surprised Polly that other women, who were not so good at making things sweet, whose households were not so sparkling and comfortable, whose children were not so well turned out, behaved as if they, too, deserved love. […] Polly believed that one wrong move and people ceased to love you. Other people – her parents, her brothers, Gwen Stern, Paula Peckham – had some magic charm that allowed them to live any way they wanted. These effortless beings existed on some higher plane. Next to them, Polly was a drudge, the one who could be counted on to do the donkey work without complaint.’ Whilst this sounds like a construction in Polly’s imagination, it is nevertheless true in its way. When Polly forgets about her childrens’ spring break, her mother’s voice becomes ‘formal and demanding, as if to get a confession from a crook’, and when she is forced to leave a restaurant early because she feels too ill to remain there, her mother complains that ‘this is most upsetting’ and her exit is not accompanied by good wishes but her fretful calls of ‘Darling, really.’ Mild sayings perhaps, but ominous omens to one as steeped in the family code as Polly.

And so the novel charts Polly’s slow, painful extrication from the suffocating coils of family happiness, or at least from the kind of picture-book happiness that she, and she alone, is expected to produce with unfailing perfection. And into the forbidden space that is opened up by her affair with Lincoln will be poured all the sorrow and impossibility of her present, pent-up existence. It would be interesting, I think, to compare the novels of adultery across different countries, as infidelity is represented with such intriguing variations. In French novels, adultery is a necessary escape (think Madame Bovary), in German novels it is a way of subverting rules that is inevitably doomed to failure (think Effi Briest), in Russian novels it is claustrophobia and tragedy (think Anna Karenina), and in American novels, if Colwin is anything to go by, its epicenter is to be found in overwhelming guilt. The puritanical spirit is so strong, still, that adultery can only be represented if the female participant is damaging herself with self-reproach. Polly’s endless self-recriminations were the only place, for me, where the narrative stagnated occasionally, but the purity and beauty of the writing was always enough of a pleasure to pull me through. What the excessive self-reproach also suggested to me was that there is something deeply subversive about the central concept of this novel. To posit perfect family happiness on traditional lines, with loving bonds between all family members and a sense of deeply ingrained ideology being handed down through the generations, and then to blow it sky high as a structure ruinously built out of the blood and bones of female self-denial, remains a dangerous thing to do. Perhaps that’s why novels that take such a risk are best fobbed off with labels like middlebrow and ‘women’s fiction’. The art of defamiliarisation, one of the main provinces of literature whereby stories show us the old and familiar but in new and disconcerting ways, could surely not, in their pages, be manipulated with such unnerving skill.

The World of Work

These past couple of weeks I’ve felt more like a travel agent than an academic. There’s a location I’m trying to sell, an oasis of calm contemplation and satisfying solitariness, rather like one of the smaller Greek islands, that we might call the land of work. It’s nice there. There’s a certain spaciousness, some peace of mind, and on a good day, pretty spectacular views. I find it’s necessary to sell it as a location because students (and troubled students most of all) have a very different concept of what the world of work might look like. In their minds it’s more like Hieronymous Bosch’s images of hell: a blazing cavern of claustrophobia and incarceration where demons stand over you with pitchforks and whips. Work is all about enforcement and obligation, about submitting to painful shackles and humiliating punishment. It’s little wonder they don’t like to go there very often, or if they do, the result is anxiety and distaste. The transition to university is such an awkward one to make, because ostensibly the environment of learning remains constant, but the person who inhabits it is suddenly very different. Up until university, education is part and parcel of the child’s desire to become an adult, to master the world, to gain attention of a good kind, to try out rituals of competition, to gain a sense of self-worth. But the child who makes it to university may well be forgiven for thinking that he or she has actually now attained all of these goals. What are they supposed to do about work in that case? It’s all too easy for what was once a journey up a necessary ladder to look like a form of self-imposed torture, and the relationship to work has to be remade from scratch.

Of course, this situation is by no means applicable only to students. Any one works for a living is obliged to figure out a similar equation. What do we expect work to do for us? Well, pay the bills, I hear you shout. Which is true, but if work is only about paying the bills then it’s probably time to move on. It isn’t providing all the important and helpful things, like purpose, and interest and a sense of shared responsibility. Work offers us roles we can play and people we can be, competent, admirable people, efficient or useful or just plain needed. But those roles are complicated, I think, when the issue of being a ‘success’ creeps into the working environment. Then work always risks being bound up with unresolved parts of our identities, problematic parts, because the notion of success is based on a wish for the future to look different to the present, for us to have attained something that we lack right now. It is, in other words, a way of being a child again, with part of our qualifications for adulthood still missing. We still, despite all our efforts, have yet to ‘make it’.

One of the most complicated of all the success stories is the one of becoming a writer. It’s probably why writers make such fabulous biographical subjects, as their lives are inevitably fraught with psychoses, harnessed to the cause of abstract success. I write this with some irony, and some humility, you understand, being in the sorry position of starting to think about how I might become this fabled beast, the successful writer. The truth is anyone can be a writer – it’s the simplest thing in the world to pick up a pen or settle down behind a keyboard. Getting other people to read you is the next hurdle, and then getting people to like what you read is a further frontier. To actually get people to pay for what you write is so far off this particular map that it might as well be in a different galaxy. I have no idea how anyone ever manages to make any money doing this, and rather suspect it may all be a myth. So, to set oneself the goal of being successful opens up a huge space between the person who writes and their future ideal, and the real question is: what happens in this space? Often an intense psychodrama gets acted out, of longing for approval and horror of rejection, other people may be reasonably cursed for their lack of insight or intelligence, and there may be more wailing and wishing than words put on pages. The more the focus lies on the attainment of success, the more the pleasurable activity of writing itself recedes, and the less likely it is that the writer inhabits a peaceful Greek island of calm and contentment. But this isn’t to say that they are not being successful on the sly, finding a way to give voice to injustices, insecurities and rebellions that maybe never got enough of an airing before. But what do I know? There must be a way to write healthily and happily, and maybe even to publish it, too, without courting negativity.

What I’m starting to discern from my students is that work is no fun if the demons with pitchforks are sitting on your shoulder and whispering evil nothings in your ear. I’m thinking that the pursuit of the top mark is a fundamentally self-punishing desire that speaks volumes about insecurity and should be distinguished from pride in one’s work or intellectual integrity. I’m thinking that one should always go where the energy is in whatever one is doing, and then gently unite curiosity and interest to the kind of discipline that is firm, not tortuous. And I think that any trip into the world of work begins with the metaphorical purchase of a ticket to an island of serene contemplation, to a state of mind that is relaxed, open, ready, and receptive, where success and failure are understood to be mirages of dehydration. We can’t always make it there, this is life after all, but it’s the best location I’ve ever found to work in.

Seizure

I picked up Erica Wagner’s novel Seizure because I was so attracted to its premise – a woman unexpectedly inherits a coastal dwelling from a mother she had thought long dead – but what I got was an unearthly blend of Celtic folklore, abandoned children, forbidden love and a strange, incantatory prose style that shut the reader out of understanding and into mystical dreaming as much as it told a coherent tale. This is by no means a book that will be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is a bold and ambitious attempt to write the lyric borderline between reality and fantasy, and it is a continually intriguing if occasionally frustrating story of siblings attempting to heal their broken past.

So, the story focuses on Janet, a woman prone to disconcerting mental seizures. We are told that they used to affect her in childhood and have returned to haunt her recently, a harbinger, in other words, of an emotional storm heading her way that will occasion the same intensity, the same loss and recapture of herself, the same disorientation as the electrical storms in her mind. Beyond this symptom, her life is suspiciously quiet, as she lives with a musician, Stephen, whom she loves without deep connection. When the extraordinary summons from the lawyers arrives, informing her that she has inherited a property on the demise of a mother she had thought died when she was three, she sets off north in search of answers. What’s confusing but also fascinating about this narrative is that answers do not appear in the format we expect. Instead, she arrives at the house, a primitive place of stone floors and outside toilets, to find it already inhabited by a strange man, and one who claims he’s been waiting for her. Interspersed with Janet’s account are chapters narrated through Tom’s viewpoint. Tom is a garage mechanic with a craftsman’s feel for metal and a slightly menacing temperament; he’s also suffering from premonitions that a woman he’s long been waiting for is going to come to him. Interpolated into both accounts are stories that transport us into their respective childhoods and reveal troubled tales of parental abandonment. Tom has been brought up by a mother whom he adores, and who tells him terrifying tales from Celtic legend. But her elusive quality and her restlessness cause him the anguish of the uncertain child, bound ever more tightly to her through fear of caprice and indifference. Janet’s father, by contrast, is tenderly portrayed as a man who has never quite recovered from the loss of his wife, and whose undeniable love for his daughter is shaped and tainted by grief. In no time at all the reader has figured out their relation to one another and is wondering how their reunion will play out. The twist the story then takes into the erotic is a step out of narrative convention and into a kind of fantastic freefall that leaves all the usual responses to family breakdown far behind.

Let me assure you that this is not the kind of book you read for the plot; if you do it will seem implausible and odd. Instead, it’s better to see that what happens gives shape to poorly understood, deeply buried, barely perceptible but highly influential events in the protagonists’ pasts. The segments of narrative that recount Janet’s and Tom’s childhood are some of the most powerful in the book and show each being shaped in turn by the stories their parents tell them, stories that enter their bloodstreams as their only legacy and compass in an incomprehensible world. These stories, of a love that can never be overcome, of elemental and mystical forces, of strange transformations, are carried over into the adult relationship Tom and Janet feel compelled to enact, putting them in touch with wounds that hurt no less for being illogical. I was puzzled for a while by the highly evocative but unspecified geography that Wagner gives to the narrative. The cottage Janet inherits is somewhere in the north, her home with her father somewhere in America. But it struck me that the positioning in the novel was that of a child, who feels the world around them with tremendous intimacy but with no sense of placement. Instead children know they are ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’, their identity forged by bonds of relationship to people and context. Ultimately it became part for me of the atmosphere of dark fairy tale that lies across the narrative, a Grimm’s tale that collects both redemption and violence into its folds without being entirely clear which is which. What makes this novel both so brave and so disconcerting is the transfer of the primordial and the visceral into an otherwise clear-cut adult landscape, but what exactly might be done about this subterranean realm of experience remains enigmatic; this is a book interested in the clash of fierce forces, not in their serene synthesis or their harmonious resolution.

Erica Wagner is an astute and gifted writer, and the prose is beautifully wrought in places. I felt she was at her best describing the childhoods of her characters with their legendary dimensions, and the daily sunlit world of reality that they both left behind. The indeterminate land of the cottage where they found themselves somewhere between myth and reality was perhaps less convincingly done, but probably because this is a hard place to hold a reader, suspended between fantasy and reason. I will say again that this is not a book to everyone’s taste, but it is unashamedly unique and combines some compelling ideas in unusual permutations. If you like your prose sculptured, and your incest legendary, if you are attracted to the notion of human spirits inhabiting the skins of seals or just fancy reading something completely different, it is well worth your time.