Literary Tourette’s

‘For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.
Oh talking voice, that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?’

Some books are all about the voice, and never more so than Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. In it, Pompey Casmilus, a cumbersome name hard to reconcile with its mercurial, skipping persona, recounts her life as it occurs to her – we hear about her work as a private secretary, about her days lived tranquilly with her aunt, the noble Lion, her failed love affair with Freddy, who wants the kind of marriage and orthodox existence that fleet-footed, butterfly minded Pompey cannot countenance, and about a moving constellation of friends and acquaintances, even odd German strangers who try to pick her up on trains. (‘So then he leant across, very magnetic in the eyes and said: I know everything you are thinking. Phew-oops dearie, this was a facer, and a grand new opening gambit I’d never heard before. I could only think to say: Well, well, well’.) And no matter what the subject, whether death, religion, Nazi Germany, lost love or Russian drama, Pompey’s voice plays and toys with it, casting it around in her curious combination of slang and quotation and foreign idioms, all thrown in for light-hearted if serious-minded fun. If you like the voice, this is a book you’ll love, but if you don’t like it, then as Pompey herself predicts ‘Foot-on-the-ground person will have his grave grave doubts, and if he is also a smug-pug he will not keep his doubts to himself, he will say: It is not, and it cannot come to good.’

Stevie Smith is best known for her poetry, and perhaps best of all for the poem that begins:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I must say that whole tracts of my life would have to pass by unarticulated if I hadn’t had the phrase ‘not waving but drowning’ to hand. This is Stevie Smith’s particular talent, the throwaway remark that lands a hefty punch, a casual joke that reveals something peculiarly profound. Her poems, like her prose, are often superficially artless, catchy as a music hall lyric, bound up with a strange chameleon grace that bends them in and out of different speaking voices. Her life was notably identical to Pompey Casmilus’s – she lived a maiden’s existence with her aunt, having lost her parents early, she was private secretary to two magazine publishers for twenty years, and she had many friends whom she loved dearly and satirized shamelessly. Late on in life she discovered a talent for live poetry reading, where her girlish, charming and expert performances always won over her audience. According to critic Ian Hamilton ‘To hear them chuckling over her cute spiritual despairs was a fine bonus for her old age, and she took particular pleasure in upstaging the beatniks at the avant-garde poetry rallies she for some reason kept getting invited to throughout the 1960s.’ There was enough that was genuine and startling about Smith’s work to hook her reader, but there was a fine, laughing, ludic quality to her writing too, that faced up to hardship and sorrow but never quite took them seriously.

I really loved this book, although I didn’t always understand it, or follow Pompey’s rollercoaster of thought with sympathy. But she sounded so like my students when they are off on a riff, naïve and knowing, erudite and yet childish. I couldn’t help but laugh at her silly slang and her razor sharp perceptions. I’ll tell you who else she reminded me of, and that’s Gertrude Stein. The singing phrases and contorted yet rhythmic repetitions were so like Stein’s translations of the spoken voice into prose. But Stevie Smith’s preoccupations are far more metaphysical than Stein’s, her voice more lyric and whimsical. By the end of the novel, I felt the key to it was the ‘rhythm of visiting’ that is so precious to Pompey that it prevents her from marrying.

‘I have traveled and come and gone a great deal. I am toute entière visitor. That is what I am being all the time. […] That is the very highest pleasure to me, that it is a visit that comes to an end, that may recur, that may again come to an end and be renewed. The rhythm of visiting is in my blood.’

Inside Pompey’s mind and, therefore, on the yellow pages of her novel, there is nothing but endless visiting, as thoughts and memories arise and go away, some abandoned the moment they get too boring for Pompey to care, some cherished and waved off with regret. No topic may dominate, no emotion or mood may reign supreme. Instead, all is transience and charm and serious distraction. Just like the moment when Pompey’s grief about Nazi Germany is immediately and wholly replaced with book lust when she spots her sleepy train companion abandoning his copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We are all waving and drowning, waving and drowning, on an endless loop, Stevie Smith suggests, and if we can permit ourselves to grow accustomed to it, that very ambivalence may be our saving grace.

Road Trip Rescue

Thank you so much for your kind words yesterday about my back. It’s feeling much better now, just a bit stiff. Instead my poor son has gone down with a nasty throat virus-thingy so I am still writing from a medical ward. We’re obviously just having one of those collective low-health moments.

But I am also behind with my reviews, which is at least something I can fix. So, moving swiftly on to another comic novel, and one that takes as its basis the tragic question of what can be done for children who have never known stability. It’s odd, isn’t it, how funny novels are so often built on heartbreaking premises? Canadian writer, Miriam Toews has carved herself a niche for dealing with the problems of adolescence and in The Flying Troutmans, her fifth novel, she rewrites the buddy road trip to moving and amusing effect. Hattie Troutman is living in Paris and has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Just as well, then, that she has something to distract her, in the form of a phone call from her 11-year-old niece, Thebes. Hattie’s sister, Min, has long been a clinical depressant and it turns out she’s having a particularly dark episode, unable to eat, unable to be touched, unable to get out of bed. Her children, Thebes and her 15-year-old brother, Logan, don’t know what to do with her any more and need some adult intervention. Hattie’s lived with Min’s problems all her life, and whilst she doesn’t have any solutions, she knows that she’s the only person left to do anything at all. She flies back to Canada, sees Min into hospital, and finds herself with two disturbed, disruptive and suffering children on her hands.

Hattie’s solution is to take off in the family’s decrepit van to cross America in search of the children’s long-lost father. Thebes sits in the back with purple hair, filthy clothes, a vast bag of art supplies and the anxiety-induced need to talk incessantly. She passes her time in metaphysical discussion and the manufacture of novelty-sized cheques for anyone who’ll have them. Logan, by contrast, is on the verge of shutting down. He prefers to tune his family out, his headphones pumping music by scary-sounding groups whilst he carves messages into the dashboard with his knife. His only other need is to find a basketball court every now and then to practice shooting. As they drive and bicker and bond their way to California, Hattie’s narrative intersperses the present with memories of Min’s childhood and its wearying series of psychotic moments. Although Hattie has all the hallmarks of adulthood, it’s clear that growing up alongside Min and feeling the inevitable burden of responsibility has prevented her from finding her direction in life. She desperately wants to lift the troubles from the shoulders of her niece and nephew, and give them courage and purpose and hope, but on this road trip, it’s a case of the blind leading the blind.

Toews’ characters are all people who don’t have anything if they can’t quite manage to have each other. These aren’t kids with plans and ambitions, and Hattie has nowhere else to be, no work to love, only the dull ache of dissatisfaction with her life choices. Toews understands that you can only be yourself if you can leave your family behind, and you can only do that if your family is strong and stable enough to let you go. Otherwise, there is little to be had of interest and engagement outside the family bonds, all routes lead back to the place of origin and its contagious flaws. But in her three characters, she does an amazingly good job of producing entertaining and lovable neurotics. She captures tremendously well the love-hate scrapping of siblings, their boundless and yet pointless creativity in the games they play, their breathtaking ability to stick the knife in, and their deep, protective love. It was only about halfway through the book, in a moment when I suddenly felt claustrophobic with the story, that I realized how unflinching Toews’ focus is on her characters. They are rarely interspersed with other people and barely get out of the van. And yet it was the only moment of claustrophobia I suffered. The pace and the whipcrack dialogue and the incident keep coming until you are cheerfully bound up with them, hoping as much as they do that some kind of redemption lies at the end of the route.

This is a beautifully written book, consistently funny and poignant and troubled. It does have a very particular emotional ideology that it buys into, however. It belongs to the school of thought that suggests you can never properly intervene on behalf of another, but if you just keep going, if you let life unfold, things will come right. There is a strong but unspoken belief in the resources of the world that powers the positive side of this narrative. We are never invited to wonder where Hattie’s money comes from, or how the family feed themselves, or whether Thebes will run out of art supplies in the middle of the desert. The search that matters is the quest for good enough love, love that will not falter or flinch, love that asks for nothing special in return. The essence of good parental love, in other words. Everything is subordinate to that particular search, but also complicit with it. If we look, the story suggests, we will find. It’s a lovely message, and one that keeps what could have been a desperately sad book in a funny, charming, hopeful place. I’m not entirely sure that the story is plausible, but who cares, I wanted it to be true and maybe there really is a way to turn every life around, regardless of the damage it’s sustained. This is a big-hearted book that acknowledges the power of the world to wound, only on condition that we never lose sight of its equal potential to heal.