The Loveliest Month

It strikes me as a bit cheap on the part of the weather gods that we are only allowed one May in a calendar year. I love it so; the crisp new leaves bursting out of their buds, long, pink-tinged evenings, soft, mild light at dawn and dusk with vibrant blue skies in the bright stretch of the day. Just the right amount of heat. Yesterday was the first day that Mr Litlove and I could enjoy sitting outside in the garden. And so we did our yearly inventory, reclining on garden chairs with cups of tea, making our way around the borders plant by plant as if they were schoolchildren in class, deciding how each was coming along, whether they needed help and in what form.

the gorgeous Manteau d’Hermine

My main worry was a philadelphus, a gorgeous version called Manteau d’Hermine, which had been squeezed on either side by some rather boisterous ferns (and this is the only definition of ‘leaning in’ that I will countenance). So I had my eye on that, and on Mr Litlove generally, who sheds his gentle, mild-mannered nature to turn rogue with a pair of clippers in his hand. Anything that looks as if it might commit the crime of ‘getting beyond itself’ risks a severe scalping despite all my pleading. And for the first time in my life, I thought to myself, my goodness how incredibly middle-aged we have become. Normally, on the inside, I feel about 17, but there I was, regarding plants I had seen grow from seedlings into this mature garden, and it seemed so long since it had been just a vision in our minds.

When we first moved into the house the garden was a long, thin, isosceles triangle whose only beauty was a large cherry tree, all too near to the back windows. One dank and chilly autumn day, Mr Litlove hired a rotavator and dug all the scrubby, weedy grass up, shoulders straining against the handles, wellies sinking in the mud. Early in the afternoon there was a power cut, and when he went into the kitchen, now shrouded in darkness, the kitchen clock still read half past two. Mr Litlove then congratulated himself on having finished the job with so much of the afternoon still ahead of him, and I felt quite confirmed in my belief that he was an undiagnosed dyslexic. It’s funny to think we hadn’t been married that long then, three or four years at that point. We bought a climbing rose, the luscious Mme Alfred Carrière with clotted cream blooms that blushed charmingly pink as they burst their buds. And in the supermarket, my son – then an angel-faced toddler with white-blonde hair and dark blue eyes – picked out a red rose he liked the look of. I didn’t hold out much hope for it, but both plants grew and flourished on the sunny south-facing wall.

Mme Alfred Carriere in all her glory

Then we decided to have an extension on the house, and a garage and workshop at the far end of the plot. The garden shrank to a lop-sided square and the plants suffered. The cement mixer took up residence in the middle of a flowerbed, and bushes started to die mysteriously, until I put two and two together and stopped providing the builders with so much tea. We had to move the red rose and feared it had died, but the white fought gallantly against the chaos and flowered vigorously, scattering velvet petals over the garish headlines of The Sun that the workmen read in their breaks. Mr Litlove had his first stretch of unemployment, the difficult one, where we assured each other we would manage fine, while mentally totting up columns of figures in the restless small hours of the morning. We weren’t particularly fine at all, for I was beyond tired and working hard, both of us too aware that mine was the only incoming salary. And we didn’t like each other much, having swallowed all sorts of things we should have said in those anxious, frantic years of early parenting and new careers. Things were coming to a head, though we didn’t know it then. Instead, Mr Litlove used his time to lay a patio, and to pave the area outside the kitchen, and to construct a beautiful winding path in a herringbone pattern of grey brick.

Several years later, when Mr Litlove was made redundant for the second time, our lives had completely turned around. The crisis had passed and now I was off work too, the first of three years I would take out with chronic fatigue. I can remember the feel of the grey brick path beneath my bare feet as I ventured outside after months laid up indoors, still weak and unwell but silently comforted by the beauty of the flowers, the orange blossoms of the philadelphus, the dancing buds of the fuchsia, the bough of the white rose, heavy with unfurling flowers, that was big enough now to reach out to me from its spot on the back wall. And the red rose we feared lost was starting to grow again, its tentative feelers offering hope. This time around Mr Litlove painted the house. To the extent that I believe in past lives, I feel convinced he must once have been a Lord of the Manor. It would be such a perfect job for him, to have a whole estate to tend to, one that he would survey from the saddle of a fine black stallion, issuing grand orders about the guttering on his tenants’ cottages. He would have married a version of me, one whose nature would have led her, not to teach, but to strap on a bonnet and go visiting the sick and the poor. From whom I daresay Regency-me would have caught diptheria and died. So there is much to be said for the 21^st century and having reached the era of self-indulgent middle age.

Imagine him weatherbeaten and mossy, with a bird on his head, and you’ll have our version

The last change in our garden was the arrival of Hermes – or Mercury, I never know which to call him. He stands on one leg as if he had just bowled a googly, though one arm is raised above his head with a beckoning finger (happily, the first), while his other hand holds a strange implement the size of a very large spatula, which I believe may be the Greco-Roman prophecy of a television ariel. He came from the grand and lovely garden of Mr Litlove’s grandparents, and I vividly recall his arrival in the back of a moving truck. Two men arrived with him, papers in hand. ‘One small garden statue – Mercury,’ one of them read. ‘I’m not sure ‘e made it intact, luv. Ever since Bury we’ve ‘eard somefink rolling around in the back.’ His mate tipped me a wink. ‘Makes you wonder what dropped orf.’ I confess I held my breath as they went to unload him, fearful of the ribaldry he might unleash in the delivery men, and so I was most relieved when the loose item in question turned out to be the television ariel, which has never quite sat right in his hand ever since.

And now here we were, all these years later, with our son grown, and the university behind me, but still together and (for me) in better health than I had been in pretty much all that time. ‘I can remember planning this garden,’ Mr Litlove told me, ‘imagining what it would look like as I sat here, or stood in the kitchen at the sink. And it looks very much as I hoped it would.’ And I thought of our entwined lives that had suffered their own versions of frost and drought, disease and blight, but were still growing strongly together. I would never have imagined the road we would take to get here, but yes, our life looked pretty much like I’d hoped it would. How beautiful, how precious, how terrifying that felt.

The Examined Life

Best book of the year so far is Stephen Grosz’s compilation of case stories from his thirty years as a psychotherapist, The Examined Life; How We Lose and Find Ourselves. Freud once wrote that he was surprised how his case histories read like short stories, which was a tad disingenuous but never mind. Grosz’s read like little parables, only wrapped around a moment of revelation or understanding, and the result is moving and enlightening.

Recounted with grace and clarity and mostly in the space of a few pages, the stories introduce us to a particular patient or occasionally a particular theme. There’s the patient in an affair with a married man who absolutely refuses to see that he will never commit to her, the widow lurching from one silly, pointless crisis to another as a way of distracting herself from her grief, the small boy who behaves as outrageously as he possibly can, spitting in the therapist’s face every session, the man who is boring as a subversive form of aggressing others. All life is here, in its misshapen splendour, and the beauty of every story is that we get to see these people through the compassionate eyes of Stephen Grosz. There’s neither pity nor irritation, simply sympathetic interest backed up by a razor sharp intelligence. When we reach the moment of higher understanding, when for instance, Grosz realises that the small boy’s spitting is designed to provoke his anger, because that anger tells them both that he can change, that he isn’t as permanently broken as both of them fear, it’s like the moment Kafka talks about, when the book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.

I often think that one of the fundamental goals of life is to be seen – and ideally accepted – exactly as we are. The point of therapy is to make us see and accept ourselves, but the lure of the therapist is wrapped up in the longing for someone else to do it. Indeed, in one of the stories, in which a man with HIV keeps falling asleep in his sessions, Grosz becomes aware that healing his patient is about holding him alive in his own mind. It’s easier for the man to accept the possibility of his death if he knows he lives on elsewhere. So, if one of our goals is to be seen properly by others and mentally held safe there, then one of our biggest basest fears is that our image will simply deteriorate in the minds of others, that they will fail to give us the benefit of the doubt, or their own anxieties and aggressions will deform or distort our true and constant portrait. For me, this is why psychotherapy is so fascinating: it shows us what we can really give one another that matters, and in its practice it shows us how these important things can so easily be bent out of shape or changed into some mutant version of their original, valuable intentions. Still considering this essential notion of being held in thought in other people’s minds, Grosz talks about paranoia and shows how it is used to ward off the altogether more painful belief that other people are actually completely indifferent to us. I suppose it’s a version of Oscar Wilde’s saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

There have been doubts expressed about the ethics of publishing case histories, even though it’s been common practice ever since psychotherapy began. But for anyone who worries about such things, there’s a little note at the back of the book in which Grosz explains that he sought permission from every patient he mentions and let them read the relevant part of the manuscript. I find a tear in my eye every time I read his comment that all were willing to share their experience, and most expressed a hope that their story would help others. This is the whole point of accepting that we are flawed, mistake-oriented creatures who often find supposedly simple things almost impossible to do: from this perspective, we are in touch with our humility. And humility breeds compassion. Both are absolutely essential for loving and being lovable. Everyone should read this book and feel it chip away any ice around their hearts, to let our admirable human capacity for love and compassion flow through.

 

Winner and Mini Reviews

And the winner of William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise is: Ruthiella!

I was very unscientific – I wrote all the names on slips of paper and pulled one out of a bag. I’m terribly impressed by the bloggers who know how to do that random number generator thing, but it is quite beyond me. Ruthiella, if you could email me with your address, I’ll pop the book in the post for you.

Well, I struggle along here, still plagued by anxiety but practising, practising ways to live with it. I am as fastidious as a cat over my emotional life, it seems, and I do not appreciate the current state of messiness. But still, I’ve been reading Harriet Lerner’s excellent book, The Dance of Fear, which I warmly recommend to other anxiety sufferers. She suggests we bring as much patience, curiosity and good humour as possible to bear on the situation, and I liked that list of qualities. I’m also reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking and finding it almost painful in its accuracy. But I’ll review that properly another day. And finally, I’m listening to The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope, which after a slow start I’m loving. So much plotting and manipulating, so many schemes and intrigues! I think the literature of the 19^th century was designed to be listened to.

I realised there were a few books I’d read in recent weeks that I should review in brief: First off, P. D. James’ A Mind to Murder. Adam Dalgliesh is managing to survive the publication party for his latest book of poems when he’s called away to investigate a murder at the psychiatric clinic over the road. The office manager, an overbearing spinster with a stiffly starched code of morals, has been found stabbed through the heart. This is a very classic crime novel, in which we are introduced to a selection of suspicious folk connected to the clinic as doctors, nurses and administrators, whilst Dalgleish does his thing with the usual elegance and panache (though he makes a fair few mistakes in this one). I find I read P. D. James for the excellent ordinariness of her prose. She is not a lyric writer, nor a quirky one, nor one with an eye for a felicious turn of phrase. But every sentence is neatly turned and well crafted, the events follow one another with satisfying causality, characters are evoked with precision and insight and the whole zips along on its well-oiled rails with pleasing orderliness. I was surprised to note how old this novel is – first published 1963 – as it doesn’t feel it, apart perhaps from a few rather old-fashioned treatments at the clinic. Another advantage of that resolute ordinariness may be this timeless quality.

Martin Davies’ The Year After is a very recent publication, although it harks back in time to the end of WW1. It’s Christmas, 1919 and Tom Allen has just been demobbed. Uncertain what to do with himself in a mournful London, he accepts an invitation to visit Hannesford Court, the home of the Stansbury family with whom he was very friendly before the war broke out. The Stansbury clan were one of those starry families, rich, sociable, blessed. Tom had fancied himself in love with the oldest daughter, Margot, although he had not been in the charmed circle surrounding the eldest son, Harry. He had been a hanger-on, a marginalized member of the happy-go-lucky group, invited for his reliable good manners. Now, Harry is dead, as is his best friend, Julian, who was Margot’s husband. The eldest surviving son, Reggie, a difficult, temperamental young man, is in a convalescent home with horrific injuries. So the Hannesford Court that Tom returns to is, inevitably, not the same as before, even if making valiant attempts to resemble its former glory. This is partly a romance, and partly a mystery story, as Tom tries to find out what happened to a German guest at the Summer Ball before the start of the war. I thought this sounded just the ticket when I picked it up – country house novel, family secrets, hidden crimes – but the elements fail to cohere. It suffers from being not quite enough of anything, and the mystery in particular is a bit limp, given that Tom is returning from the horrors of the First World War against which a small domestic incident pales somewhat. It is quite a nice meditation on the difficulties of picking up life again, after the trauma of the war, and Martin Davies is a very good evocative writer. But it was all a bit meh, alas.

If you want to write a first person narrative, then look no further than Raymond Chandler. The High Window was the first Philip Marlowe novel I read and Chandler is every bit as brilliant as people say. Marlowe is called to the home of Elizabeth Murdock, a bitter and contemptuous old woman who is still trying to call the shots in her wayward family. It turns out that an heirloom has gone missing, a very valuable coin called the Brasher Dubloon, and Mrs Murdock suspects the nightclub-singer wife of her son, a starlet who rejoices in the name of Linda Conquest. This is a very convenient suspicion, as Linda has recently separated from her husband and disappeared, and it suits Mrs Murdock to throw the blame outside the walls of the family fortress. But of course, as soon as Marlowe goes digging, the bodies pile up and the quarry comes ever closer to home. It’s not just that the prose is fantastic – and it is – it’s what Chandler does with it that’s so clever. Every sentence moves the story along, adds to the characterisation of Marlowe, and says something about the action and the time. I loved the way that this supposedly badass private eye is shown to be so tender in his human sympathies by the way he reacts to the people he comes across. There’s a fine ethical conscience at work, sifting the bad guys from the unlucky ones. Well, they’re called modern classics for a reason, and if there isn’t such a term as Golden Age Noir, there ought to be, and Chandler could wear the crown and the sash.

Recovering

Well, my friends, what I learned these past couple of weeks is that anxiety is a hostage situation. I’ve often written about anxiety on this site, partly for the people who pass by here who suffer from it too, and partly for people who are lucky enough never to have experienced it (and who might quietly think that it’s a big old fuss about nothing). I’ll tell you what it’s like. Imagine that you are waking up one morning in your own bed. In the first dawning of consciousness, all is well, but then some almost imperceptible doubt creeps in; something feels different, unaccountable. The hair on the back of your neck rises, a shiver runs down your spine. You turn over and there, beside you, is an intruder, masked in black, pointing a gun against your head.

That’s how anxiety feels at its higher levels: as if you were actually in mortal danger. And because the lizard brain shouts long and loud and doesn’t much care if it’s wrong or not, it can be very hard to convince yourself that actually all is well, even if frustratingly, you are perfectly aware that there are no real threats in close proximity at all.

I used to dream about the gun man a great deal. He’d pop up in any old dream and turn it suddenly into a nightmare. But over the years, what was interesting was the way he gradually posed less of a threat. I reached the point where I’d have postmodern dreams, running the ending over and over in my mind, until the gun man was out of the house, or I remembered not to open the door, or I was in a place of safety or even, sometimes, until the point where I’d try to disarm him. My therapist at the time believed that the gunman represented my ability to force myself to do just about anything. Most people, he said, had a pretty fierce internal drive to self-preservation, where they would quickly stop doing anything they didn’t enjoy or found too taxing or that took too much time and energy out of their lives. Not me! Funnily enough, it was quite true that I didn’t have that instinct for most of my adult life, or was able to override it. It was useful. I got a lot done that way, and did all sorts of things I was afraid of, hoping that feeling the fear and doing it anyway would work for me. I have to confess that it never did, though. I just felt more afraid the next time I had to do it and I daresay those emotions accumulated and ganged together to mug me, as emotions will.

These days, of course, my life has changed completely. There is very little that I make myself do and I give myself a great deal more permission to say no. And of course, with typical contrariness, what does fate do? My son and my university career entered my life at almost the same time – I’d been a month into my PhD when he was born. Now, they are both leaving it, almost simultaneously. Rather than having far too much to do, and too many roles to juggle, I’ve suddenly got whistling wide open spaces. No university any more (and I still need to clear my room), and my son is impatient, as is only right and correct, to be free to start his own life. I used to feel too responsible, too important, and now I’m feeling oddly irrelevant.

Don’t think for a moment that I don’t realise what a great opportunity this is for me to try new things and redefine myself. I’ve been looking forward to it, and the time will come when I enjoy it. BUT. And it’s a big, big but, there can be no moving forward without some mourning, some processing of what has been lost. We concentrate far too much in our society on being happy all the time. I believe that the very insistence on skipping lightly and neatly over every negative is what keeps us persistently and quietly miserable. I can hardly say that I’ve enjoyed being anxious, but that anxiety took me by the scruff of the neck and reminded me that I’m in transition here, and there will be no skipping until a darn sight more processing has been done. Well, okay then!

So, the best news from all this is that I am finally feeling better enough to start reading again. It took me all week to get through a Lee Child thriller, that’s how bad it’s been. But I think I finally have my reading mojo back, and so I hope to be around next week with some proper reviews.