Love, Life, Art

I’ve just read the best book of the year so far: The Orchard, by Drusilla Modjeska. It’s a hybrid flower of a book, combining autobiography, fiction and stories about art and artists in ways that leave exquisite gaps for the reader to fill in. At its heart is an undefined question about women’s experience and the way it is transmuted into creativity, and it’s written in beautiful, limpid prose that is crystal clear in intent but fades dreamily away at the edges. There are very, very few books that I finish with the desire to instantly start all over again, but this was one of them.

The book comprises three long essays, topped and tailed by sections that introduce and conclude the fictionalized autobiographical story that weaves in and out across its entire length. The story focuses on the abiding friendship that joins four women; the unnamed narrator, who we take to be Modjeska but this is by no means a sure thing; Ettie, a wise and feisty octogenarian who could have been a fine painter but who gave it up for gardening, Clara, Ettie’s granddaughter although she is unaware of it, her mother having been the product of Ettie’s adulterous liaison, and Louise, a good friend to them all. These women love and support one another through the ups and downs they face, whether they are in their relationships, in their working lives, in illness or in confronting the past, recognizing that to some extent, there are similarities between their trajectories through a certain kind of feminine destiny. Stories echo one another and repeat themselves, particularly in love, and the first long essay intertwines a classic story of a man and his mistress, told by Louise, with parallel narratives from the lives of her friends and from women artists. The basic story is thus interpolated with variations on the theme: Ettie and Clara’s strange relationship to one another, Louise’s own discovery of her husband’s infidelity and the stories of Stella Bowen, an Australian painter best known (the narrator says ruefully) for her liaison with Ford Maddox Ford, and Artemisia Gentileschi, a 17th century Italian painter who was raped by her art tutor. All the stories are gently placed under the banner of Virginia Woolf’s thoughts on the difficulty women have in telling their stories of love. ‘How can she write about a love affair when the world of criticism and opinion favours a man’s facts, or his myths, over a woman’s romance, her fantasies, her gossip? When a man writes, or speaks of love, it is to affirm his right to a narrative in which his sexual destiny and his right to tell the tale are in happy partnership. When a woman writes of love it is a risky business, for her agency with the pen contradicts her prescribed destiny as a woman.’ All the different stories and opinions gathered together here glance off of one another like a hall of mirrors, but the figure reflected into infinity is that of the woman who continues to define herself more through her relationships than through her work. To be truly creative, the narrator suggests, this phase has to be transcended, or lived through, until a self freed from compliance and neediness emerges in her own right.

I loved the first section but the second was even better. It concerned a period in the narrator’s life when she suffered an illness that caused a temporary loss of sight. This event is the catalyst for a series of reflections on the nature of suffering, the experience of isolation that illness can bring, the symbolism of blindness and the wisdom that can emerge through convalescence. Modjeska has the perfect tone for writing about upsetting, even traumatic, experience, as it is at once lucid and astute, but coolly serene, distanced and insightful. It’s like having an intellectual nurse lie a cool hand across a fevered forehead. And the jumble of memories, stories and artworks that she brings together to describe this period in her life correspond precisely to the many levels on which one has to work to restore hope and vitality to the self after a lengthy and troubling illness. When the narrator first falls ill she calls for Ettie to come and help her, and Ettie’s robust sense of survival, of the importance of calling on the resources of the intellect to do more than survive, comes shining through:

‘The fear is enough,’ she said, encouraging me to dwell there, to learn its shape, to feel its edges. ‘Don’t build on it with memories and slights.’ She had spoken to the doctor, she knew the risk, and she knew that total darkness was the fear I conjured, and not the prospect I was offered. ‘What is the fear?’ she asked. ‘What is its real nature?’ It was not a question I could accept with grace, and I wept afresh when she said that if I shifted my way of seeing (she used that word), what this episode offered was an opportunity.
‘For what?’ I wept.
‘For solitude,’ she said. She was right: for years I had avoided that empty space we call solitude, filling up my life with work and lovers, distractions of every sort. ‘Go into it,’ she said, ‘and you’ll find it richer than you expect.’

The third essay concerns the narrator’s visit to her old boarding school on a trip to England with Clara. In this section it is the education of women that is at stake, and a particular form of education at that. The narrator cites Virginia Woolf again, and her envy of the learning her brothers were allowed to undertake that she was not. It was exactly this education, the narrator recalls, that she was given, but she uses her memories to argue that Woolf did not know what she was asking for. On the one hand, Woolf had exactly the kind of flexibility of mind she herself admired, regardless of her home tutoring, and on the other, the narrator suggests that rigorous intellectual discipline is not necessarily going to produce the curious creativity Woolf values. But this is also about the awfulness of old-style boarding schools, the casual cruelty of girls and mistresses alike, the rigid hierarchy, the absence of privacy, freedom and affection. It conjures up a lost era, one we can be pleased to see the back of, but one that shaped a generation of women, like it or not.

And so this book stitches together, loosely, dreamily, issues of women’s education, their creative and romantic sensibilities, their strength in suffering and solitude, drawn from the sisterhood. I loved the way that the narrator’s experience of life was interwoven with the experience of other lives, be they of friends or of other female artists, who loved and suffered and left behind their wisdom and their visions in the work they produced. Each woman may speak from a different place, but they all contemplate what it is to be a woman, to have a specific place in the world that is part history, part biology and part unique individuality. When their voices blend together, as they do in this book, the result is a loving, respectful, attentive sorority with hands outstretched to catch the tears of each and every woman when they fall. I think you could call it girl power.

The Absent Classics

The one thing I never expected, when I began blogging, was that it would lead to meeting so many talented, creative people. When I read about the effects of the current recession on publishers, who are already doing the headless chicken act and running around telling editors to refuse further submissions, it makes me ever more glad in my heart that the internet exists and provides a free, readily available playground for all kinds of artists, writers and general creative spirits (who were never that interested in the mainstream in the first place). One of those profoundly creative people is Ella over at Box of Books, who is the author of The Absent Classic series. These are the dinkiest little books ever, which she not only writes herself, but hand makes herself and even – in this latest edition – illustrates herself.

This is where I wish that I had photographic skills and could show you one, or indeed the technical skills to post the picture after I’d taken it. But they are hardback books, as big as my hand, colourwashed and varnished or covered with a fine translucent jacket and attributed to phantom authors who rejoice in names like Josephina Winterbottom and Augustus Pigeon. The most recent, A Guide to Lost Colors, claims to be an appendix to a much larger work, The Encyclopedia of Manufactured Pigments, written by the famous art historian, the above-mentioned Pigeon, whose work was discredited when it came to light that it had been written while his eyesight was swiftly degenerating. The book in our hands was an additional fragment, willed by Pigeon to an enthusiastic publisher, that is an autobiographical account of his early apprenticeship in art history. Even in these few lines, the character of the book, and of the series of absent classics, springs into focus; quaint, eccentric, charming, scholarly. But they are also subversive, parodic, entertaining and cunning; things are never quite as they appear, and the stories told raise as many questions as they answer.

There is a fascination with the structure of the quest in the absent classics that works at so many levels: the series itself is intended to supplement canonical works with missing fragments of texts. These fragments are always seeking a graft onto the main work (which is the real absent text, of course) that will make their value and meaning clear. But the stories themselves are episodic quests for information that perpetually eludes the seeker. In the previous volume of the absent classics, Folktales of the Bezai, the story recounted is a classically structured parable concerning a young boy who makes a deal with a malign tree to release the peacock trapped inside it. The peacock’s freedom is bought at the cost of a rose bush, an impossible object in this hostile terrain, but young Anah sets off courageously on his adventures nevertheless, working his way through dangers and riddles in a chain of consequences that echo those of the great questors, like Hercules and Odysseus before him. In A Guide to Lost Colors, the young Augustus Pigeon, sickly, innocent but dedicated, finds himself a mentor in the kindly Dr Voorhies, whose incapacitation in a wheelchair means that the young man is required to be his mobile researcher. Pigeon’s task is to locate color pigments in old Dutch masters whose composition has not yet made it to the great Voorhies Register of colors. This task sets him off on a trail of extraordinary paintings, most often found in extraordinary locations.

This is where the absent classic series comes into its own, with the inventiveness and the wit that bubble over in each scenario. Like the painting Pigeon discovers in the stately home of Lord Grayers, whose wife and her sister exist in a state of covert, catty warfare. ‘I had never before been afraid of a lady,’ Pigeon writes, ‘but there was something horrible in the way they both fixed their eyes on one, and moved their fingers as they spoke. Facing the two of them, with their jewelry, perfume, glossy dark hair, and unnatural thinness, I felt like a blue-backed housefly being sized up for lunch.’ The story skips lightly through a series of exotic locations peopled with eccentrics and hung with strange allegorical paintings, which are reproduced in the text as exquisite pen and ink line drawings. The tale is also accompanied by footnotes and an introduction, supposedly added in at a later date, that add to the hybrid, fragmentary feel of the book and provide one of the surreptitious counterpoints to the quest story that draws the reader forward. For in the way that the footnotes question the story told, or provide a different interpretation of events, our sense of certainty is played with. Furthermore, each picture Augustus finds meets with a calamitous end, so the objects of his quest continue to elude him. Similarly in Folktales of the Bezai, each episode of Anah’s adventures ends with a maxim of such ridiculousness that it is impossible to extract a meaning from them. This is what makes me call The Absent Classics fundamentally cunning; what they give with one hand, they pickpocket back with the other, providing the reader with richly drawn tales whose central objects and meaning are glimpsed only to crumble, implode or fade discreetly away. They are, in other words, delightful narrative teases, beautifully put together and slyly resistant to mastery.

You can subscribe to The Absent Classics at Box of Books, and you can find there other examples of Ella’s inventiveness, including this illustrated poem, which is one of the best things I’ve seen on the web all year. I’ve had a wonderful year on this blog for meeting authors, getting to know Gabriel Josipovici, Rosy Thornton, Anne Brooke and Deborah Lawrenson. It is a trend I sincerely hope will continue.

On Judgment

With all this silly fuss over dancing competitions, I’ve found myself thinking ever more about the concept of judgment and why it should trigger such violent responses. I’ve also been considering the way these competitions (Strictly Come Dancing, American Idol, the X-Factor, Dancing with the Stars) are all similarly set up to be compelling and frustrating at the same time, and why that particular structure should inevitably lead to its eventual implosion. Now you might wonder, justifiably, why I would bother to analyze the clash between argumentative judges and stubborn public voters in a light entertainment programme, but I think it has an awful lot to say about our modern fear of judgment, our fraught relationship with authority, and the brutal manipulativeness of the media. Not the least being the way that all three have got out of hand and are heading on a collision course to disaster.

The issue, I think, resolves around the clash between judgment and justice. Now you might think the two go hand in hand, that judgment occurs so that justice can be done, and indeed you would be right, in an ideal world. But look at the differences: judgment (over there in the sharp suit with the briefcase) is carried out by an expert or an authority, a bloodless summing up according to the rules, and as such it can be thought too heartless, too cerebral. Justice (flowing gown, mystic tiara and set of scales) is the deep-rooted sense of restoring order and harmony to the world, a desire so profound in human beings that it is located in the same part of the brain as our responses to food. Justice is spiritual nourishment if you like, and something instinctual, instinctive, an emotional response rather than a purely intellectual one. When all goes well, judgment and justice are complimentary, mutually supportive, and they may work to temper each other; justice may step in and plead for compassion when judgment seems unreasonably severe, whilst judgment can bring the power of cool reason to hot-headed outrage at seeming injustice. Where justice respects knowledge, and judgment respects humanity, all is well.

The problem arises when judgment falls closer to its alternative meaning, which is: ‘a calamity held to be sent by God’. So we’re talking thunderbolts here, plagues and boils, the wrath of God unleashed for hidden crimes of being rather than doing. Everyone gets these two versions of judgment mixed up because we all have a part of the brain known as the superego, or the internalized voice of authority. Now no matter how kind and gentle parents are, there are always going to be times when reprimands fall on children with the full force of divine intervention. Children suffer from being too young to know the rules, and so inevitably they come as a nasty shock. The voice of the superego inside our heads is the amalgamated voice of a thousand ticking-offs. It keeps us on the straight and narrow, reprimanding us for slacking at work, thinking unpleasant thoughts about other people and generally running up a series of unfortunate errors that could easily have been avoided. But there’s always something excessively harsh and unreasonable about the superego – it’s all whip and no carrot. Divine judgment was always mitigated by mercy, by benevolence, but there’s no compassion inside that part of our heads. The superego is the voice of moral outrage, of the whistle-blower and the tattle-tale, the first to kick you when you’re down and to insist you deserve your misfortune. But there’s also something deeply compelling about the calamitous voice of the superego; it’s the sensationalized, finger-pointing form of judgment. Ever since the advent of Simon Cowell on our television screens, the voice of the superego has been regularly gracing (although that’s not the word) the judging panel on all competitions. Just pause and think for a moment about his shock tactic rudeness and the dual effect it has on the viewer who both recoils in horror and ruefully acknowledges a kernel of truth. Television game shows now require that kind of voice amongst the judges because it’s compellingly gruesome to see people suffering those kind of just-not-good-enough humiliations in public. And in any case it corresponds to something that was always already inside our head – we just didn’t believe it was okay to say it out loud.

So, the kind of judgment based on divine fury makes for compulsive television viewing, but it removes the graciousness of judgment, its illuminating, enriching qualities. There is no reason to fear judgment, not even when it has a critique to deliver, as the power of reason, the beauty of knowledge, are essential, glorious parts of humanity, the parts that rise us up above the animals and give us access to science, to art, to wisdom and learning. By contrast, judgment that thinks it’s God is corrupt and bloated, overinflated, full of itself. It’s also contagious. The more the spirit of unreason inhabits judgment, the more the spirit of justice goes into overdrive, ready to right the wrongs. Emotional, crusading justice pushed beyond its own gentle boundaries starts to take on the contours of the mob. Like the time a few years back in the UK when a tabloid newspaper published the names and addresses of known pedophiles. Feeling that such people had not been punished enough, vigilante mobs took to the streets, hunting down not just those who appeared in the paper, but a few unfortunate pediatricians as well in their dyslexic fury.

When we translate unreasonable judgment and crusading justice onto a television competition, the result is Socrates’ fable of the unjust city. For Socrates the unjust city is like a ship in the ocean, crewed by a powerful but drunken captain (the people), a group of untrustworthy advisors who try to manipulate the captain into giving them power over the ship’s course (politicians), and a navigator (the philosopher) who is the only one who knows how to get the ship to port. Socrates argues that the only way the ship will reach its destination – order, or what he would call ‘the good’ – is if the navigator takes charge and guides by the information on his maps rather than by spin or desire. If we transfer the inmates of that ship to the small screen, we can equate the group of untrustworthy advisors to the judging panel and the drunken, powerful captain to the people at home, ready to do battle with their remote controls and mobile phones. But where is the philosopher? The closest we come is the game show host, who does indeed try to embody the voice of serenity, but only as referee between judges and public, not as an individual with any grasp on the programme’s ultimate direction. Socrates’ parable shows what is vitally missing from the so-called judgment of such television shows and that’s the figure of the philosopher. There is no one whose role is to guide by the information on the maps – no one, in other words, with access to a little objective truth.

And here we hit an obstacle that has been growing in society for probably fifty years or so, which is that people don’t feel too good about ‘truth’ as a concept any more, mostly because of its associations with the kind of authoritarian power that got us all into two world wars. Can you imagine anyone agreeing to conscription any more? In a way, this is a good thing, but it comes at the cost of deep suspicion regarding official sources of truth and authority. The internet is a prime example of the democratization of information now reaching a zenith. And this is fine, except that the extremely important borderline between judgment and opinion gets blurred. Everyone has an opinion, that’s indisputable, but not everyone has the same access to expertise. This doesn’t make opinions less valuable, but it can make them difficult to evaluate unless the speaker is willing to confess honestly to his or her level of educated insight. Opinion, in other words, is getting a bit too big for its boots, because people refuse to admit that their own judgment has insufficient basis in knowledge or experience. That’s a bad thing to say these days – opinion is becoming a sacred concept. Partly because we turn now only to the law and to medicine for valued adjudications, and both of them will argue ferociously for judgments that are partisan best guesses; and partly because of the mass media. The media loves nothing more than to appeal to people’s sense of justice, not because it cherishes it as one of the most honorable qualities of humanity, but because the powerful emotions it arouses make people spend money – on buying newspapers or casting phone votes. And for that reason, if absolutely none other, I would refuse to play the games the media holds out for me and respond to the emotional manipulation that’s thrust before my face. Whatever I think of a dancer on a televised contest, it’s only my uneducated opinion and whilst it’s fun to have and valuable to me, it’s not worth starting a fight over.

Given that we’re in a bit of a mess these days over authority and judgment, truth and opinion, I think it’s about time we stopped focusing these television programmes on the pointless cannon fodder of (would-be) celebrities and put something worth arguing about in the frame. I’d like to see a whole run of television shows called Strictly Come Big Business, and Lawyer Idol in which hedge fund managers and legal eagles have to justify their actions and decisions. Even better would be Dancing with the Media, in which newspaper editors produce the information behind their ‘informed judgments’. If we’re going to turn judgment and justice into something ugly, we might as well do it at the heart of our culture’s opinionated forms of misrepresentation.

The Spirit of the Thing

I think that last week, one of those impish spirits that rule the universe must have stubbed a toe, mid-flight, on the Cumbrian mountains, sending ripples down through the earth’s crust that finally shuddered to the surface in the village pond opposite my windows. Because for some reason last week, everything was slightly off kilter. Not in a disastrous or alarming way, by any means, but just as if events were struggling to catch up with the meaning they usually embody, like a picture that’s out of register.

The whole working week was a bit of a struggle, not least because my son was poorly with a nasty cold and so stayed home. Not that he was the least bit of trouble, but because he was unwell I kept him company during the day, and working to a background accompaniment of World of Warcraft mixed with whatever is on the television tends to scramble my brainwaves. But it wasn’t just that. I was trying to put together yet another version of the motherhood proposal and the stuffing has gone out of the project for me at the moment. Most sensible advice to aspiring writers suggests you go where the energy is, which is fine until you reach the fourth or fifth rewrite and are heartily sick to death of what you absolutely must do. Writing guides tend to fall silent at that point. Still, by Friday I had cobbled something together and now I’ll let it sit for a while and stew before returning to it in a week or so. It may not be the fault of the project, of course. I don’t feel that my writing is working particularly well at the moment, which happens from time to time as the year waxes and wanes. I’m going to research magic realism for a while now, and I hope that it will perk my imagination up. I have some utterly gorgeous French novels to read that cannot fail to inspire.

And then midweek the UK was gripped by hysteria because a portly 64-year-old ex-political commentator resigned from a television dancing competition. You’ll probably have heard about this, yes, even you at the back in Uruguay. I don’t know if this is a cultural feature in other countries, but we have a system here for derailing a straight fight, which is called the public phone vote. I’ve watched Strictly Come Dancing for about five series now and every time there is some unfortunate soul who lasts far, far longer in the competition than is truly wise because the chance for the average viewer to both witness humiliation and effect rescue is too good to pass up. It’s all the fun of watching your favourite Christian in the amphitheatre, knowing that with a press of a button you can send the lion down the trapdoor, if need be.

This year the ‘worst’ competitor was a man called John Sergeant, whose incompetence was mitigated by a kind of Winnie the Pooh cuteness. The judges were rude as they always are, the public voted for him in droves and then the pack split: half considered him to be a delightful tool for undermining the judges, the other half considered the joke was flat and that he was spoiling the chances of other, talented competitors. The battle lines were drawn up on the message boards of the internet and then spread into other sectors of the media, where vitriol and flaming reached such a fever pitch that John Sergeant, wily ex-political commentator that he is, staged a tactical withdrawal. Well, quite. The public was perfectly willing to kill him off when the competition reached the stage of demanding two dances a week from each contestant, and the prospect of having to undergo three or four in the final must have been daunting. I hear he is heading off to give a series of lectures on a cruise ship next week, which must seem a better prospect.

The rights and wrongs of this situation are beyond me, but I do know it all boils down to what you consider the spirit of ‘entertainment’ to be. I know that I am tediously aligned with the law, and for relaxation I still like to be presented with a view of an orderly world. I watch Strictly Come Dancing for the same reason that I love to shop in John Lewis – on the grounds that it’s impossible to imagine anything truly unpleasant happening there. Seeing the tempers mount on the message boards has been a disconcerting experience for me, revealing the war-mongering heart of folk who were supposedly enjoying a gentle, old-fashioned Saturday teatime programme. I know some people find a big old row thrilling spectator sport, but I hate the conflict and the excess. All those folk on the message boards screaming in capital letters ‘It is all supposed to be a bit of harmless fun!’ are clearly, to my mind, somewhat lacking in irony. But actually I think it’s emotional displacement from worrying about the credit crunch and the state of the mortgage and not having put by a little nest egg for a rainy day, etc. There’s a certain frenzy to this conflict that seems completely over the top.

Anyhow. Not to worry, I thought yesterday. I had voted to participate in Cam’s virtual Thanksgivings celebrations and decided to take the opportunity of a friend’s visit to hold an English version of the dinner. I proceeded to spend an age studying recipes on the internet for something I could recreate with UK ingredients. Not as easy as you might think, when whole turkeys are only readily available at Christmas and then they come in industrial sizes only. Unwilling to leave my poorly son home alone, I gave up an unequal fight and decided to get a chicken from the supermarket a few doors down the road. As luck would have it I had a bag of sweet potatoes, but there was no point even looking for a pumpkin. The recipes were all such a strange mix of sweet and savoury that I ended up making my own version. There was only one person I knew who would consider eating a combination of sweet potatoes, a bag of brown sugar and a vat of marshmallow. ‘Yum,’ said my son. ‘Now that’s a vegetable dish I could get behind.’ Telling you what I made instead will have to be a description rather than a recipe, as well, I’m afraid. But in the end I pot-roasted a chicken, which I prepared by wrapping bacon rashers over its carcass with sprigs of fresh thyme. Surrounding the chicken in the dish I placed three-quarters of a butternut squash and a bigish sweet potato, cubed, along with some chilli, a few whole cloves of garlic and some chopped fresh sage. I poured a little hot chicken stock over the vegetables and then slow cooked it in the oven for a couple of hours, taking the lid off for the last twenty minutes or so to crisp up the bacon. When I came to serve it, I mashed the vegetables together along with one of the roasted garlic cloves (you could add as many or as few as you wished). It was a very simple version, but it tasted delicious.

So I had my meal, but what about the thanksgiving? It was not as easy as I’d hoped to find the emotional ingredients for a celebration meal, either. I had told my husband we’d be having a Thanksgiving dinner ‘Oh? Great,’ he said, sifting through the day’s mail. I might as well have told the pot plants. ‘I’m going to cook a Thanksgiving dinner, like they have in America,’ I told my son. ‘Uh-huh,’ he replied, managing the almost implausible feat of paying less attention to me than my husband. When my friend arrived, she was brimming over with excitement about a possible new relationship. It’s fair enough to say that her mind was not exactly on the meal. Of course, it’s not just that I’m a hopelessly un-forceful hostess (although I am that), I’m also a disorganized one. I hadn’t been able to get candles or crackers, as I’d hoped, to dress the table and make it look pretty, and people need a few tangible markers to indicate a celebration. Even more problematic, we don’t do Thanksgiving over here in the first place and so have no clear concept of what it means. I had thought I might ask everyone to name something they were grateful for this year, but as the others got stuck into my son’s maths homework, discussing why five to the three over eight to the minus three didn’t result in two to the one (or something), I realized this was just not the social moment to do so. My family and friend were happy, and had enjoyed the meal, and if the spirit of thanksgiving didn’t exactly put in an appearance, well, perhaps the ripples emanating from the boot of that other clumsy spirit sent it off course a bit and it landed, unexpectedly, on the dinner table of a family in Hemel Hempstead. I hope they all had a nice time.