Proust, Middlemarch and Mash December 19, 2010
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming..., dogs, Writing a book.Tags: Individuation, Middlemarch, Nigella, Proust, Recherche, self
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I’ve now spent two days reclining rather than declining on my bed, watching the snow fall and reading or re-reading ‘Middlemarch’. And worrying.
I worry about the birds, and the fact that I’ve recently learnt that they require fresh water to keep their plumage warm in this big freeze. I worry about my ferruginous dog Lucy and that at nine she is growing old and is troubled by low frequency sounds that are undetectable to me, which means that now she not only has a fly phobia but a DVD watching phobia. Rather, she starts to tremble whenever we turn our plasma on. I worry that I don’t have enough time to write this blog. I worry that the book that I am trying to co-author is not yet a book although I know it could be one. One of the things that I have discovered in researching for this book, which is an autopsy on doctors, or on one exceptionally distinguished one: ‘First Do No Harm: inside of the doctor’s head’ is that doctors are just as frightened of illness as me, and that most of them try to avoid, at almost any price, going to their doctor and all requests for testing, scanning, blood-letting and scoping. I worried, until I started writing this blog that I would never write another word.
I have reluctantly got up for meals and felt obliged – now that my rigorous work time table has stopped until January – to stay on after eating and sort the kitchen out, which is no easy task as my husband, John consults a variety of cookery books before he agrees to mash the potatoes. Not because he doesn’t know how to mash them, but because he still wants to uncover the very best combination. This combining also requires that he use every cooking utensil that we possess. At the moment he seems to move between Nigella’s practical and democratic ‘Kitchen’, where all the dishes work and ‘The Complete Robuchon’. How complete do you have to be to mash potatoes, and how many pots are necessary, and how many Michelin stars do you have to win, I sigh as it takes me much, much longer to clean up the dishes than to eat my delicious meal and mash.
In fact we are soon off to Paris to avoid Christmas…
We were finally to have sampled the mythic Yannick’s table as hitherto our visits have always coincided with his absence, or the legendary restaurant being closed for tile restoration. I could just as easily sit and look at the fabulous tiled floor, or imagine Proust flirting with the waiters, ah, but that was just around the corner, as eat any meal, that is except breakfast when I still watch the waiters, but we have now cancelled our legendary booking because our grand children do not approve of lunch. In fact they are not out of bed, and would be most indignant at breakfasting before noon, even at ‘Angelina’s’ and there is no way we could justify the mythical price of even one a la carte Yannick asparagus in the evening. My comment is not fair to Dan, for if there is one thing likely to make him rise before noon, it is Paris. And, worrying about the result of his Trinity entrance and discussing which restaurant he wants
Grandad, the 80's
‘Grand Dad’ to book for dinner.
While I’m happy to stay hotel-home, eat club sandwiches with Portia, and people watch. But she’ll no doubt want to go clubbing with her mum. In fact we’ve all agreed to go clubbing together.
In a way I rather wish I hadn’t started re-reading ‘Middlemarch’ before we are due to go because whenever I am properly committed to reading a novel, which isn’t that often, other than when I’m re-reading Proust’s ‘Recherche’, I become anti-social. I’m finding with ‘Middlemarch’, and I cannot remember when I last read it, that although I do not have any memory of the plot at all, my brain still seems to know what is going to come next, not in advance but only page-by-page. I have no idea what will happen to Causabon, but I rather think he will have to die, and with any luck he wont return from Rome. I don’t know who bores me most: Causabon or those relentless foreign policies of Monsieur Norpois. Only last week I should never have dreamt that Proust’s ‘Recherche’ would drop off my linguist-deaf tongue – or rather my pen in such a languid manner – as I should never dare pronounce it, but since my Proustian partner managed to inveigle me, except he doesn’t inveigle – and would I think detest the word – anybody into doing anything. But, it was through his magic that I ended up, far less reluctantly than I could, to begin with, have imagined, doing a gig on Proust at the Royal Society of Literature, and being privileged to hear Christopher Prendergast and Ian Patterson jousting over whether Proust and Art were, or were not life savers and could, or could not, redeem the Time. And, just for your benefit Christopher, oh heavens I can’t even initial your surname because they both start with ‘P’, so just for your benefit Prof, I don’t believe in Redemption either, well not through Proust, nor Love, not through anything except perhaps Individuation and the Self.
Finishing Proust and the experience of things November 1, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming....Tags: breath, Leonardo da Vinci, neurosis, Proust, The Varieties of Religious Experience, therapist, time, William James
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Proust doesn’t often do tenderness: he is as ruthless with his readers as he is with the unmasking of his characters. He does sentimentality, but then some of us know that sentimentality masks sadism and Proust is a creative if deadly sadist, which is also what makes him such a corrosive witted satirist. The nearest he comes to tenderness is through his observations of Nature but even then he’s carrying out an autopsy as his eye dissects any object only to expose a time lost iridescence. ‘Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.’ Proust.
Finishing Finding Time Again on Friday was traumatic and I’ve only just recovered from vertiginous sensations of inspiration and despair at my own mortality. I think that the first time around I read the masked ball sequence I couldn’t have been ready to embody – and that is what Proust asks his reader to do, to embody and not observe or applaude art – the physical impact on my own descending mortality of Time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour. How can one read Proust’s dissection of mortality without Shakespeare’s monument to time chiming into consciousness?
Proust makes it clear that there can be no escape from the masked ball of time and organic decay and it’s my guess that he would see our present day obsessions with Botox, liposuction and cosmetic lasers as futile cul de sacs of vanity. Although, that’s not to say he might not have recourse to them himself. As he describes, the longer anyone remains looking ‘Good for their age’, the worse is that final descent into their failure of helplessness, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything. Yes, everything, except perhaps time, wears out.
Oh, Heavens, I could write for hours on my experiences of reading Proust but I wanted to write about other things, like falling in love, even in its non refulgent state, with the young maple sapling my landscape gardening friend, Special Branch bought me last Wednesday. Its full name is Acer Palmatum Westonbirt Red. When Special Branch left Westonbirt Aboretum he told me that the sapling was still in an open-leaved crimson glory. He had a shock when he opened his van for by the time they had made the short journey to London its maple sensibility had been compromised and its leaved tendrils were contracted into what might be described as an arthritic screetch of bruised agony.
Its demise provided me with an example of what Proust is always writing about: ‘because at that moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law, which means that one can only imagine what object is absent’. Now, I could not perceive, but only imagine, what my sapling had looked like before it went into shock and I shall have to wait for another year to pass before it finds its time again.
I don’t think there’s going to be much time today to write about finding the experience of things, but I have almost caught up with my Proust reading partner who has embarked on William James, The Variety of Religious Experience without waiting for me to finish Proust, (and it’s possible that he only finished first because my handbag was stolen and I didn’t have any reading glasses for a week and my brain anyhow felt like punctured seaweed).There are two thoughts that have come to me from James’ first lecture. First of all I should declare that even though I am an experienced psychotherapist I am also still a neurotic, but in Proust and James’ company that’s no bad thing to be. And, there is a caveat: I am a conscious neurotic and it’s in unconsciousness that the cliff falls of much of our un-deciphered neuroticism and depressive sufferings reside.
I adored James’ image of religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: ‘Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee, my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with the roaring all night long; as the heart panteth after the water brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God.’ And, as James goes on to say, the foundation in many non-Christian countries of all religious discipline consists in the regulation of inspiration and expiration. It might also be true to say that these two involuntary and mainly unconscious acts are, when brought into mindfulness, also at the foundations of psychological health.
We can never escape our breathing, after all it’s the first and last thing that any of us ever do, our greatest commonality, and yet too many people expend their lives forgetting that they breathe. Not only is its perversion the loadstone of James’ metaphor, its health is also the foundation of any meditation. In the search to understand beyond the mechanics of consciousness more and more neurobiologists and psychologists are being drawn towards the study of meditative practices and the conscious orientation of our bodily dimensions. Children need to be taught how to orientate themselves in space, to use their body compasses of cognition.
Perhaps, we need to return to Leonardo. Of all of Leonardo’s known discoveries, his discovery of the cause of heart disease through a build up of cholesterol could have saved millions of lives. This would have happened if his discoveries were ever taken seriously at the time and published by his peers. Leonardo had worked out that a substance carried though the blood and produced by what we eat imbeds itself in the arteries and blocks natural blood flow.
Like Proust we need to remember to look forward and backwards.
Quote/Word of the week August 28, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming..., Holistic health.Tags: brain, mind, Proust, psyche-soma, qualia, tears
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The sorrow that hath no vent in tears makes other organs weep. Sir Henry Maudsley.
WORD OF THE WEEK: Qualia: (from Quale 1675: The qualities of a thing).
These are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are a category of universals. They are ineffable ; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
For example as in Proust’s discussion of sensation in The Prisoner and The Fugitive:
‘Sometimes I thought that the reason was that the things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyze them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us specific ecstasy we feel from time to time and which, when we say, ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbour, in whom the sun and weather set off quite different vibrations.’
Quotes/Word of the week. August 6, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming....Tags: John Keats, poetry, Proust
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Antiquarian shop in Paris, John Haynes C 2008
WORD OF THE WEEK: Lambent (Latin lambent, lambens, present participle of lambere to lick)
Tongue of fire; 1647, Softly radiant 1717, Eyes with interior light,1867, (SOED). Exhibiting lightness or brilliance of wit; clever or witty without unkindness. (Word, net, web, Princetown.)
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon, 8 April 1818: (Haydon later committed suicide on June 2, 1846)
Believe me Haydon your picture is a part of myself – I have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in Art (judging from Poetry) ever to think I understood the emphasis of Painting. The innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty.
THE PRISONER AND THE FUGITIVE MARCEL PROUST:
There is in our body a certain instinctive sense of what is good for us, as in our hearts of what is right, which no doctor or medicine or theology can replace.
Consolations of Proust August 2, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming....Tags: Clause 28, Consolations of Proust, Freud, Hazlitt, homoeroticism, Jung, neurasthenia, neurotics, Proust
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Photograph by John Haynes 2007
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Proust.
Too many people have written knowledgeably on Proust for me to want to do any more than make idiosyncratic notes.
1) How I came to read Proust: My husband, John began to read In Search of Lost Time over forty years ago and it took him another ten years to finish the novel while I was still absorbed with nappies. I felt he had joined an exclusive group of bores, like ‘Mr. Norpois’, from whom I was self-excluded. I thought Proust was an elitist, drone. John continued to swoon at – and even bake – Madeleine’s and compared ‘Maman’s’ over analyzed kiss with his regressive longings for his own mother when they were both evacuated from Mitcham to the posh Devon cousins at the Church House Inn, during the war. His mother was bullied by her sister in law to ignore her son’s night terrors, and however often John rang the derelict servant’s bell nobody ever understood his desperation for his mother to come upstairs to say goodnight to him.
Today, on our walk in Regent’s Park with Lucy and her pack, we started arguing about which was the best translation of Proust, and then John recalled the first time he came across his name. He had de-mobbed from his national service, (Heavens, he still looks almost a boy) and was living in a tatty room at the top in Hampstead. The Everyman, in Hampstead, was John’s favourite cinema and the manager, by chance, occupied the bedsit next door so he had free tickets. It was in the Everyman’s loos that John came upon a graffiti listing of famous gay men and a scribbled phrase of Proust. As with many of the most important things in life, it was years later that he brought his first copy of Moncrieff’s translation.
My resistances to Proust remained in place until I met Christopher www.christopherpotter.co.uk (recounted in my first blog: ‘Birth-pangs of writing a book’) but when I discovered he moved between NY and London like a dervish, not to mention his sea-long summers in Provincetown, we decided that one of our ways to maintain inter-continent contact and defects of loneliness to control was by reading the same books. To begin with it was The White Leopard. It must have been in December 2007 when Christopher suggested Proust – he had the literary lead – and I bleated, ‘Of course’.
As much preparation and research went into which edition to read as if we had been boarding the Queen Elizabeth. I was relegated to lower deck, intimidated and without his knowledge of all the editions, which included an esoteric and doomed translation by Sylvia Townsend Warner for Gallimard. We, rather he, finally settled on the new Penguin translation edited by Christopher Prendegast who has employed a different translator for each volume, even though C. wobbled at volume one being translated as The Way By Swann, but then he was soothed by its cover illustration of a detail from Vertige. The quality of the paper and the font mattered to him in almost the same fastidious ways as when he was at the publishing helm. We set sail at last: life was now occupied, enriched, consoled and transformed to such an extent by Proust’s genies that we have almost completed our second annual crossing of this mind-blowing work. Proust is not just for Christmas but also for life.
2. My responses: I have screamed with laughter, turned emotional somersaults, become insanely bored at the salons, green with envy at Proust’s genius versatility and the way even a paving stone, let alone a mind, emotion, wave, or perspective, animates under his observation. I have also learnt more about human psychology from this novel than from all the psychology books that I have read. If I was mayor for the day I would recommend that everybody working in mental health have a sabbatical to try and read Proust. The only person who I think can rival his modernist knowledge of the psyche is Nietzsche.
It’s alarming – when the cards are down – and you discover that both Freud and Jung plagiarized at a rate of knots. Forget the plagiary perils of students and the Internet; they don’t compare and their cribbing is obvious. Perhaps, Freud and Jung were arrogant enough to think that nobody else, at least in psychiatry, never as exulted a study as philosophy, read enough to discover their rarified sources, which included Coleridge and Hazlitt amongst many, many others. I couldn’t believe it when I discovered that Jung’s pivotal theory of Individuation was lifted out of Nietzsche, who at least had the decency to attribute the origins of his ideas to ‘the Greats’.
Excuse my diversion, but please sample Hazlitt in one of his essays in The Common Reader on dreams and his theory about repression, written in 1800, one hundred years before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published.
It may be said (in our dreams) that the voluntary power is suspended, and things come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we keep out of our thoughts at other times. We may be aware of a danger that we do not choose, while we have the full command of our faculties, to acknowledge to ourselves; the impending event will then appear to us as a dream, and we shall most likely find it verified afterwards. Another thing of no small consequence is, that we may sometimes discover our tacit and almost unconscious sentiments, with respect to persons or things in the same way. We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken from our passions and our imagination wanders at will. When awake we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams we are off our guard, they return securely and unbidden. We make this use of the infirmity of our sleeping metamorphoses, that we may repress any feeling of this sort that we disapprove in their incipient state, and detect, ere it be too late. Infants cannot disguise their thoughts from others; and in sleep we reveal the secret to ourselves.
Roll over Freud.
3) A cornucopia of Proust : Proust is more sophisticated on dreams, theories of sleep and emotions, than he is on sexuality, particularly his own, but maybe more on that soon.
When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of ones dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating ones dreams from ones life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on. (Within A Budding Grove.)
Proust was a connoisseur not only of love, lift-boys, bell-boys, nature, jealousy, family, salon gossip, waiters, the self, the face, the voice, music and art, contemporary medicine, the Dreyfus Affair, more waiters, scatology, (when push comes to shove I think he preferred the whiffs of the latrine in the Bois, to the linden fragrances of a tilleul, or Francoise’s hollandaise sauce).
His sleep erotica slaps you in the face way before Maman’s first kiss on page two of the novel!
Sometimes as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed of the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was on the point of offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, tried to return to itself inside her. I woke up.
Miriam Rothschild, I have been told, referred to Proust as the first urban naturalist; he was also an autopsist of sado-masochism, emotional life, pain, and an explorer of perspectives, changing political horizons, technologies and the ocean. He adored swifts. He was a satirist who never stopped ridiculing psueds, and he knew that it takes one psued to recognize another. Whatever his eye alighted on provokes awe and devotion in me.
He was suspicious of the medical profession, and particularly psychiatrists, (both his father and brother were doctors). Below is a picture of Dr Achilles-Adrien and his son Dr Robert Proust.
Proust probably lived each day in terror of dying, in particular like his mother and father from a stroke, and he immortalized this condition, perhaps through a compound of his observations of his parents experiences, in his tragic, hilarious and unsentimental account of ‘Grandmother’s’ illness and then his graphic anatomy of the frenzy of her death.
Despite the received view that within the confines of his novel ‘Maman’ was the principle influence on Marcel, she was not and it was ‘Grandmother’ who absorbed, nourished and influenced him most of all. Proust’s biological father Achilles Adrien Proust, who in the novel mainly inhabits the shadows, was not only a founder of the discipline of public health medicine but that he also published a seminal study of neurasthenia; within it, it seems, that he rebuked his wife for molly-coddling Marcel and arresting his emotional development. It sounds rather as though there was a rebarbative duel of wills going on here between father and son. There is no mention in the novel of a brother.
Where does Proust disappoint me? In his observations and caricatures of homosexuality where, perhaps without Proust knowing it, he comes close to the absurd, and to Freud’s singular theory of homosexuality as a perversion. Perversion in its etymology means to turn away from a true version: ‘Pervert: 3, to turn a person, the mind away from the right opinion, or action, to lead astray.’ SOED, and thus the inflation of psychoanalytic theory intimates if not declares that through its treatment a person may be restored to the non perverse sexuality of their ‘true’ self. Proust, through his myopic and effete constructs of homosexuality, and the implicit terrors of his own sexual appetites, falls into hard line with institutes of psychoanalysis. Historically, In the UK, before the advent of the Equal Opportunities legislation on sexual orientation as late as 2003, it was still impossible to be a declared homosexual and apply to train to the Institute of Psychoanalysis to become a psychoanalyst.
In a Squirrel Nutkin tale, homosexuality was seen by Freud and his school to be the consequence of an immature and perverse arrestment of sexual development. In private, it was joked that although homosexuals were not admitted for training to the London Institute of Psychoanalysis, it was full of them. An even more dismal state of shipwreck was declared when an eminent member of the London Institute, an international medical authority on sexuality and a training analyst, both publicly defended and endorsed Clause 28.
Not the happiest place to end, but I have discovered that there can be no assigned ending to Proust; he will just go on inspiring, amusing and perhaps most importantly consoling me for as long as I go on breathing.
John’s Paris selection for Proust, copyright John Haynes 2007
Quote/word of the week July 30, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming....Tags: Albertine, Anacoluthon, Proust
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‘The human face is truly like that of a god in some Oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces side by side, but on different planes and never all visible at once.’ Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
WORD OF THE WEEK: Anacoluthon, (1856) A want of grammatical sequence, the passing to a new syntactical construction before the original one is completed.
I fear that like Proust’s Albertine I am inclined to anacoluthons, although I hope not to lies.
‘The cruelty was turned on me. Not as a refinement of style, but to cover her (Albertine) careless lies she used unexpected leaps of syntax which resembled what grammarians refer to as anacoluthon, or something like that…I wished I could remember the beginning of her sentence so as to decide myself when she shifted ground what the ending would have been. But as I had been listening for the end I could hardly remember the beginning…’ Marcel Proust: The Prisoner And The Fugitive.
BIRTH PANGS OF WRITING A BOOK June 15, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Uncategorized, Writing a book.Tags: Beyond Black, Christopher Potter, Hilary Mantel, Insomnia, Proust, Wolf Hall
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My first blog entry is being written on a TGV from Avignon to St Pancras, which is bringing me back to London and to work. Except, it’s hard to call something you feel so passionate about ‘work’ but it is and of an intense kind, else I should be full of misgivings about returning to the city. Except, ever since the July 2005 terrorist attacks I’ve realized how much I love London, and how I dread more harm to her. I was in the centre of the city when it happened and heard the serial explosions. In fact I was so close to King’s Cross that I could not get home except by walking and for hours there was too much dread in the air to do that. Now there is a delay in getting my blog online because my web designer, Darius is Iranian and his impromptu website has become a principal organ for communicating samizdat information across terror stricken Iran and this blog is not high on his priorities. It happens that I have young patients who have recently come here from Iran to conduct research who reminded me – before the violence began – that behind many of the foreboding and closed forecourt doors, men and beautiful bare-shouldered women still dance, swirl, drink and abandon themselves to the elegance of their glorious and sensual Esfahan, which means ‘half the world’s ancestry.’
I’ve decided to accompany the travails of writing my new book with an attempt to blog its journey from conception to publication. Travelling towards Lille we are already delayed and will probably miss our Eurostar connection. (I like the name, Eurostar and begin to wonder what the person is like that created it.) French Rail’s efficiency is no longer what it used to be and it is becoming more like South Eastern Network, by the week, which must be a sure sign of France’s self predicted social decline. Her inhabitants now seem to do very little else than moan about their services, and are in crisis at the thought of any changes to their health provision. On the way out our TGV was without any refreshments, due its manager said morosely, ‘To a lack of takers’. Everybody is moaning about EDF, so why have they now become my London electricity supplier, I wonder.
It’s a blazing day and Avignon’s TGV station was hot, 40 C and without air conditioning, or any distractions and our train so delayed that I thought I’d get a panic attack, or perhaps I mean that I thought I’d overheat, and there was nowhere to escape to. Scary, when only yesterday morning we woke up in our hill village to what felt like a Siberian chill. Next time, I find myself muttering, it will have to be the car. I even begin to think of Victoria’s drafts and plurality of grubby alternative distractions with affection
Last time I went to our house in France – the autumn of 2008 – I decided to write a novel whose two central characters have haunted me since childhood. The blank page petrified but by the end of three weeks I had produced forty thousand words and was even beginning to fantasize that my oblique, and elliptical ‘symbolist’ prose might turn out to be a Booker. I’m rarely tempted to read the Booker winners; I’m not too keen on the requisite plot, or page turning pace that usually harnesses a winner, although this year I have the highest hopes that Hilary Mantel – who wrote the forward to my last book – Who is it that can tell me who I am? The journal of a psychotherapist, and who astonished me when she dedicated Beyond Black to me (perhaps because she couldn’t think of anybody who was more temperamentally suited to its blackness) – will be short-listed and win this year’s Booker for her astonishing Wolf Hall. There is nobody that I can think of who writes English prose with more refinement and sensibility than Hilary, or with more subtle wit. I would like to say ‘will’ but it won’t fit in as it does when thinking about Will’s sonnets, which have become a daily alternative food for me. Sedation, if you like from the presence of Time’s sickle hour, and fickle glass. I’m convinced that Shakespeare would have approved of Hilary’s fiendish will and werewolf imagination.
I write long letters to Hilary, although we don’t manage to meet that often; the reason that my letters are long is because I permit myself the luxury of not reading them through, but just writing out my mind, and that’s what I intend, unlike in my book, to do with this blog. I want to write spontaneously. I have to warn whoever reads it that I type like one of Hilary’s fiends. In fact, when I left school that’s all my mother thought I was good for, to become a secretary and I was force-fed to learn to type. I never became a secretary, well I did become a temporary medical secretary but that came to a terminal ending when I was dispatched to Bart’s Hospital’s Department of Morbid Anatomy; I had no idea what that meant until I found I was typing up post mortem reports in the morgue. I had nightmares for months and months about a little boy who was born it seemed, from his post mortem, without anything being in the right place. I’ve never forgotten the jigsaw of his perverse body.
I have matured into an Olympian typist, and I feel sorry for my friends because my words tumble onto the page at an alarming rate. When my then fifteen year old grandson, Dan, about whom you may be hearing a great deal more, depending on whether we are talking or not, told me two years ago that he wanted to become a writer, I sent him off with his grandfather – who was in the process of changing from being a theatre photographer who had spent his ‘developing’ life in a toxic darkroom, to digital production – on a week’s typing course in the Tottenham Court Road. Dan wasn’t pleased then, but he is now; in fact he’s the only person that I know who types faster than me and uses ten fingers.
I’ve gone off the point – or become ‘anacoluthon’ – to use an obscure Proustian term, which I adore and which I understand to mean: to write long and discursive sentences whereby the person reading them will be drawn away from their initial intent only to lose their way down all sorts of cul de sacs; some of which might be spurious. It can also be used as a form of sophistry.
The novel I began last autumn now seems a long time ago, although I did manage to write three thousand words every day, sitting at an open window and looking beyond the Southern Rhone vines into the horizon of the distant alps, with a patch-worked kaleidoscope of birdsong and butterfly wings between us. My glance was transported towards our hedge of oleanders and past a lost hoopoe parading its myth on the lawn. I am fascinated by oleanders, or the Rose of Provence: they are her endogenous fauna …Oh, but French Rail has just announced that envelopes will be given to allow its frustrated passengers future discounted travel, which must mean that we have already missed our Lille connection.
Writing my novel also exacerbated my predisposition to insomnia and no doubt there will be more on insomnia sometime later but I must return to the phenomenon of the oleander. They are beautiful but poisonous – even skin contact with their innocent blooms can cause an irritable lesion and not only to humans but to cats, dogs and insects too. In fact everything, except humans, avoid coming into contact with the blooms. Even the bees and butterflies give them a miss and pass straight across to the lavender. How do all these organisms, except for our human intelligences, work that one out?
And then there are the timeless distractions of house martins and swifts but if I allow myself to get carried away on their mysteries I shall never get to either of my destinations. I’ve just remembered that when Dan was less than two we were sitting eating jelly tots under an ancient yew tree in Sussex when he mistakenly ate some of the softly inviting red berries. It was Easter Sunday and within less than an hour we were under the jurisdiction of Charing Cross Hospital’s dangerous poison centre: Dan was commanded to swallow charcoal and being stomach washed. Dan’s father, Jay, was furious. He came from Nigeria and couldn’t understand, or believe, how such an innocuous yet violent berry could exist without a national ‘alert’ and railed that in Nigeria everybody was educated to know when something was poisonous. I did, as it happens, know that yews were poisonous but not that they could so easily be confused for red jelly tots, nor turn toddlers into more post mortems.
On this current trip I have, for the first time in years, slept deeply. There does not seem to be an explanation. Except, sleeping deeply, for an insomniac carries risks: the peril of waking up. Normally, I don’t have to make that Stygian journey because I’m never properly asleep but only in a sleep like trance. To be asleep means that one has to wake up and if you are subject to black dreams and forgotten fears then, very likely, the mood, if not the memory of those dreams accompanies your waking. That’s one reason why I sometimes think that I prefer to suffer from insomnia rather than to experience a deep REM sleep; I don’t have the stress of waking up. My husband was thoughtful to remind me that Proust suffered too. Proust describes waking into strange territory: those shadows and unfamiliar crevices of light that provoke the testing of all one’s wits, and senses. Are they still reliable I ask myself. Last night we were staying in my almost favourite European hotel, L’Hotel Europe in Avignon with its ancient two hundred and sixty year old plane tree conjuring the tutelary spirits of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Picasso who all once sat beneath its healing shades, and where our bedroom seemed, to my nocturnal waking, to have another life, if not a will, of its own:
‘A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in them in a second the point of the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed up to his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken. If towards morning after a bout of insomnia, sleep overcomes him as he is reading, in a position too different from the one in which he usually sleeps, his raised arm alone is enough to stop the sun and make it retreat, and from the first minute of his waking he will no longer know what time it is he will think he has only just gone to bed…I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing shirt collars, gradually recomposed my self’s original features.’
(From the inspiring Penguin translation where each volume has a different translator: The Way By Swann’s, Lydia Davis, 2002)
Last autumn I returned to London with a throbbing and entrenched insomnia and 40,000 words of my novel written, to begin with, in the second person voice of a female character who was not me but somebody I have always wanted to morph into. When I showed it to my agent she was less convinced of its commercial appeal, except I showed it to her far, far too soon, in the way that all wannabe novelists want a quick fix of validation to feed their narcissism. I didn’t get one. I knew things weren’t great when her first murmurings of approval were not followed by anything more for weeks and weeks, and when her Word came it was one that I didn’t want to hear, and it did not mirror her initial murmur. Her agency, rather like a haughty professor, has a reputation for gesturing to their expectant clients their waste paper bin. I’ll have to ask her if I’m allowed to name her, as I don’t want to be served for libel on my first attempt to blog.
Another knowledgeable friend who I’ll call C for now had already warned me not to show it to anybody prematurely and that if I was in any doubt to consign it to my bottom drawer and let it mature which is what I then did. Except, the damage was already done, and I haven’t set eyes on the text again. When I’m in London and working full time there isn’t much time left for writing fiction which is a different process to writing non fiction, particularly if you are, like me a psychotherapist and your daily bread is listening to other people’s narratives, or like Wendy, helping them to learn how to construct them, so that lost ‘children’ can go home. Some other time, perhaps, I’ll elaborate on why I find the two genres so different with non-fiction fitting into your life and fiction taking command of it.
Actually, his name is Christopher Potter and if you want to know about him you can refer to his own blog: christopherpotter.co.uk where you can read about his earth-moving book, published in March, called You Are Here: a portable history of the universe. You can also read in his recent article in the Mail on Sunday about the nervous breakdown he had which precipitated his move from being one of London’s most successful publishers, (including Hilary’s) to becoming a cogent narrator of stories about the sensibility as well as the pluralistic scientific theories and poetry of our universe. It’s incestuous because I met Christopher at the launch lunch for Beyond Black in a restaurant called Passionne in Charlotte Street, which has since been credit-crunched and if my new book, not the incubating novel, gets a contract, rather than another dustbin gesture, I am going to dedicate it to him and to Hilary.
By the time this trip came around I had every intention of resurrecting my novel, but when the time came I couldn’t, or wouldn’t open the Word file. Even the thought precipitated panic: I had an advance nausea that I should find its incubation had produced the textual equivalent of a hibernated tortoise transformed into squamous liquid. I couldn’t go there, not yet. Not at all, I soon discovered and that is how the book that I am about to embark on writing happened. And why the novel is still dishabille in my bottom drawer.
I’m not going to say what my new book is about, well not until I have a firm contract to write it, but I am going to blog about the process of writing it, and I am prepared to let on that it’s a book in the genre of serious but popular psychology. And, that since arriving home, I’ve had a preliminary ‘thumbs up’ from my agent. And, that reading Christopher’s account of his nervous breakdown and addiction to brown paper bags precipitated my ideas for another book. I even noticed that French greengrocers still use brown paper bags and I have stocked up on some, just in case.
Now I winge when I think of the state of my first proposal that I sent to Christopher for his informal comments. I thought it was great then, but now its original content seems more like one of those dreams when you wake up and find that you are naked. My thoughts were still inchoate and yet I deceived myself to think they were clever and entire. I was wrapped up in the idea of making a mark. I think a ‘good’ editor must be rather like a ‘good’ therapist they find ways to help you to bring out what was already there.
My next blog will be about the terrors of starting from scratch, the terror of beginnings, of not knowing if anything will happen, except another miscarriage of intelligence, for ‘In each human heart terror survives/The raven it has gorged:’ (Shelley)
MORE PANGS
I have spent most of my weekend reworking my proposal along my agent’s recommended lines. For me it is the equivalent of a recreational activity, I relax when I am writing, just as long as something is happening to the blank page. Before the agent gave me a three-line whip in a concentrate of feedback – imagine if she had read it through before I had re-seamed its fibers through another experienced eye – she seemed enthusiastic, unlike with my novel. I even found her commitment to use her red editing mark reassuring.
I find the process of most beginnings frightening and with writing it always feels as though one is turning one’s viscera into canvas. As a therapist one of the most familiar tunes that I listen to, is how scared people are, and it makes no difference how successful they are, in fact it often makes it worse, of being unmasked, or of being found out to be the ‘scam’ they secretly fear/feel themselves to be. Writing a proposal, to begin with, evoked identical feelings in me. My first two attempts were all about trying to convince myself, and anybody else who was unfortunate enough to read it, which was only my unofficial editor, that I knew my subject and that I was full of interesting things to say. With any book one writes, its not until one has written it that one begins to know the subject and by then it’s too late. At the same time that’s what’s most stimulating about writing non-fiction you are pupil and master at the same time, but you’ve got to be able to convince any prospective publisher that you are master at the moment when you probably know least of all about anything except the intuitions that reside inside your head and which foolishly you don’t always trust.
I thought that I could throw out my proposal with far more grace and ease than the terror involved in returning to my novel. I thought that I could do it single-handed. Well, it has taken me at least sixty eight hours solid writing, and that does not account for the research time, nor the nocturnal involuntary thought processes that have gone into writing and rewriting my proposal. Its seven thousand words have cost me more energy than writing an equivalent length lecture, which I shall anyway never be doing again as I have learnt that a spontaneous delivery of almost anything will always leave a longer lasting imprint on an audience.
When you are writing fiction it’s possible to let your thoughts get lost in space; to roam other horizons as there is the thought that wherever your involuntary thoughts settle their object might later become incorporated into the fiction. (l now love – or rather value – because it can often inflict pain, anything that I experience inside me as involuntary, but that’s a topic for another blog.) Last autumn my writing focus kept being distracted, in involuntary ways, by the swifts who were preparing for their migration and my ignorance of their Eluysian mysteries. I love the idea of migration; it makes me think of adolescent love when one still longed to migrate into the biology of another body. Nowadays, it might be the transmigration of souls that I think more about.
Mindless, among unborn thought, my concentration moved across the vines until I saw an arced infantry of swifts soaring in more measure than I can recall when they eclipsed my daylight. Not one battalion, not two, but possibly seven, and each one as impossible to estimate as a hedgerow of hawthorn. Another infantry of monochrome bird preceded the cavalry. Thousands of thoughts were also assembling and soaring beyond their horizon; somersaulting into one collective of white flashed black word energy. And then they were gone towards a Prussian blue Mediterranean. And I had written another five hundred words.
Back to the proposal, which was, to begin with, only a scam of lists and ideas that I had assembled off the Internet; I was still too afraid to rely on my own intuitions, which I could only tolerate if they were buttressed with external affirmations. I almost wore out Wikipedia with a bulimic search for a patchwork authority. But I was ignorant and arrogant and by the time I came to its conclusion I was so impressed with my ‘Emperor’s Clothes’ and worn out of content that I thought I might just throw in an Gerald Manley Hopkins entire sonnet to conclude with the sensations of what it feels like to have a nervous breakdown. Now, I will limit myself to his most sensory lines of an eclipsing and falling sickness of terror.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/
May who ne’er hung there.
My editorial confidant irritably wrote back from his summer-seashore unimpressed, to say that he didn’t think that ‘just a sonnet’ as my conclusion would do at all.
Now, after hours more work I’ve followed my agent’s phallic pen and I have sent my revised version back to her. Most exciting was that her responses provoked new thoughts in me. Any further ideas now will be consigned to my exciting Notes file. I, like the weekend, am spent. One thing’s become clear to me – that only when I can inhabit the structure that I have written as something legitimately conceived of inside me – am I ready to write. Imagine, if I hadn’t had somebody to confide my stammering steps towards my authority to; somebody I trusted enough to allow them to break through my narcissism and to tell me that I could do better, much better, but that ‘the better’ was worth working towards, and not on any account to serve it up to the agent this time until I was certain that I couldn’t go any further on my own. And now I cannot.
