Checkout 19: A Novel by Claire-Louise Bennett (2022)
Checkout 19: A Novel by Claire-Louise Bennett (2022)
II. Bright Spark
I was with him. I’d done it, I’d crossed over a boundary. I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. I was with him-and he was with me. All weekend I felt him with me, wherever I went, all day and at night. He was with me very strongly when I lay in the dark, it was almost as if I was made of him. Writing could do that. Here was a way of reaching someone, of being with them, when you were not and never could be. Here was where we met. Here was where the distinction between us blurred. When he returned my story to me the following Tuesday the paper was covered with him-touching it was like touching his skin. My fingertips slowly spread out and up the pages. Here and there in pencil he had written comments, brief and encouraging. They meant nothing to me, but I liked to see his handwriting beside mine, sometimes overlapping mine. It was unlined paper. I wrote with a fountain pen. I still do (65-6).
III. Won’t You Bring In The Birds?
She also had a lot of books in English, one of which was The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. It had a dreadful cover that featured the artwork Pinel Freeing the Insane from Their Chains, which was painted by Tony Robert-Fleury in 1876. One woman at the very edge of the picture is on her knees, gratefully kissing the plump ringed fingers of Pinel, her saviour. Pinel stands with his cane held gallantly to his chest, looking at the pretty young woman at the centre of the tableau who is being released from her shackles. Her hair is loose and tousled, and her dress is falling off her shoulders. Meanwhile on the ground behind her a woman is depicted in a hysterical arc-de-cercle posture, gasping, and pulling at her clothes, gratuitously revealing a pert breast. It is a very lurid kind of scene-the way these distressed and vulnerable women are sexualised made my skin crawl. However, since Natasha said I could borrow it I felt obliged to take it back to my house a few doors down, up to my bedroom-which was the same room in my house as Natasha’s bedroom was in hers-and make notes from it in bed during the afternoons while wrenching open pistachios one after the other and drinking Ribena through a tiny purple straw. I collected tokens from the Ribena cartons which was fairly organised of me and eventually received a free Dino bubble watch for my efforts. I was very pleased with it, until somehow, inexplicably, Dino turned over. His underside was flat and pale blue like Blu-Tack and entirely featureless, it looked just like Blu-Tack, and despite patiently flipping that watch over and over, ankles crossed and a cigarette sloped in my free hand, in a kind of relaxed yet dogged trance, Dino never came back round and was eventually buried beneath the bedside heap of sliding pistachio shale. The things I read in that book by Elaine Showalter were absolutely harrowing and upset me a great deal. It described in painful detail various so-called therapeutic practices that have been used on women in order to bring them back to their senses-and back into line. These depictions were vivid and sickening and they shot right in beneath my skin, into that place between the nerves that is not me or even mine, that unseperate place where my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother are softly present, like supple shadows overlapping in a sacred alcove. I had known from a young age that my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother had both spent time in psychiatric units and I knew my grandmother had had electroconvulsive therapy, maybe she was still having it then, when I was grown up in London, reading Showalter’s book upstairs in bed, I don’t know. Showalter’s study argues that cultural notions about how women ought to conduct themselves have made women mad-a point of view I shared, though in a more nascent unspecified form. It was just a feeling really. As I read on this feeling soon began to deepen and darken emphatically and as it did so another feeling surged upwards with such force it winded me and that feeling was very distinct, it was outrage, it was outrage because it was obvious wasn’t it, so absolutely obvious, that if a person has no autonomy, no income, has so many restrictions imposed upon the course of their life and their daily round, is belittled, undermined, ignored, is misinterpreted on and on, is in the dark sexually, goes up to bed without knowing when or if their husband will come home, spends hours and hours and hours alone or with three children all under the age of six, of course they are going to go out of their mind. What are they supposed to do? Carry on cooking and cleaning day in day out and open their legs with a smile whenever it’s required, just as normal? Surely only an incapacitated sort of person with barely any of their faculties intact would be capable of putting up with conditions such as these. And there you have it. I didn’t finish reading The Female Malady. It was unbearable. It roused in me an inherent anger that was ancient and bloodthirsty. After having several extremely violent nightmares I returned it to Natasha and admitted I couldn’t finish it and she confessed to me that it had overwhelmed her also and she hadn’t been able to finish it either (99-101).
Many years later I will come across a phrase in a slim book with a black and white cover which I will take to my heart at once: “the glow of grime.” The glow of grime. Just a few words yet how they soothed me. On and on I experienced gaping periods of time when I was flattened by a sense of doom. Quashed completely by deep despair and anxiety which was relieved now and then by anguished though relatively merciful bouts of sobbing. I had no small children, no errant husband-I had plenty of friends, was getting educated-the world, I was told again and again, was my oyster-I could go anywhere, be anything. Yet in my heart I was bereft, grieving-homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn’t exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless. Ridiculous really. Ridiculous, yet so acute and abiding. At such times I could see no way ahead. “I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it,” wrote Junichiro Tanizaki, the author of In Praise of Shadows, “while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealise it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.” A place that values worn and sullied objects. That favours darkness, patina, and fragility. Indeed, compared to the West’s obsession with light-filled rooms, sparkling appliances, spotless surfaces, and having the latest thing, such a place sounded like paradise to me. Tanizaki suggests that these esthetic differences are indicative of attitudes to light and dark on a deeper level. He surmises that in the West we are fearful of shadows and seek to banish them, while the Japanese are more inclined to “guide shadows towards beauty’s end,” and in doing so are able to live cheek by jowl with phantoms, mysteries, the ancient, and the chimerical. I don’t believe for one moment that cultural ideas about how women should live and behave have ever been any better in Japan, not at all, but that doesn’t detract from the virtue of Tanizaki’s notion of “visible darkness”-a perhaps inadvertent inversion of Milton’s “darkness visible” which indeed flips the hellish connotations of that chilling oxymoron by inferring that the blackness within you is stilled, is transfixed perhaps, when it has in its gaze the blackness without. That preternatural and particulate place, “where always something seemed to be flickering and shimmering [...] This was the darkness in which ghosts and monsters were active, and indeed was not the woman who lived in it, behind thick curtains, behind layer after layer of screens and doors-was she not of a kind with them?” According to Tanizaki’s evocative descriptions, the home is not so much a boundaried static place, sealed off and impervious to external and previous influence-Japanese interiors are permeable and transmogrifying, infinitely capable of “luring one into a state of reverie.” Yes, that sounds like the kind of place where I might feel at home. Modern homes, now frequently referred to as bases and living spaces, are becoming lighter and brighter, homogeneous in their increasing need to be increasingly operational. And who, exactly, is doing most of the work required day in day out to ensure that all these homes are unfailingly lighter and brighter and operational? Convenience replaces ritual, devices replace daydreaming, spotlights replace shade, and the discord between one’s inner world and their immediate surroundings goes through the roof. Fastened, by so many cables and leads to its functions, possessions, and gadgets, switch by switch some cosmic link is short-circuited, and the house is no longer a doorway to other worlds. And whoever lives inside there is bewildered to her wit’s end that she experiences such a penetrating and abiding- almost accusatory-sense of estrangement in a place where she is surely supposed to feel inspired and at ease. When everything is illuminated and the shadows have been sanitised, where goes the creature inside and what happens to her need for reverie? Perhaps she takes to her bed, perhaps she throws furniture, perhaps she draws on the walls, perhaps there is suddenly a duck, perhaps one day she simply leaves it all behind her. Communing with the dark, in all its primordial and transformative potency, is somewhat unsettling, certainly. But who on earth wants to keep their feet on the ground on and on? It seems to me entirely indefensible that anyone ever thought it necessary and correct to send an electric current blazing through the furrows of anyone else’s mind in order to dazzle the intimate blackness at its core into rapid extinction (102-5).
I’d read The Bell Jar in the bath in the first year of university but when Dale, who wasn’t my boyfriend and never would be but often behaved just as if he were which now and then didn’t bother me a great deal especially if for one reason or another I was the worse for wear, asked me in the second year of university if I’d read it I lied and said I hadn’t read it. I can’t remember if there was any particular reason why I lied to him about that. I think I lied to him and other men about a lot of little things on a daily basis or was at least vague oftentimes as a way of keeping something of myself back from them. I didn’t believe it was a good idea to let them in on everything. Dale spoke about Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton just as if they were two brilliant yet hell-bent girls who would be a bad influence on me if I had anything to do with them for even five minutes. He gave them their due, I mean he revered them both, but strongly intimated that I’d do well to give their high-octane poetry a wide berth for the time being. His familiar yet guarded way of talking about them amused me and he could see I was amused and I in turn could see that my amusement really riled him. He thought I was laughing at him, and perhaps I was. Sometimes he’d realise being wound up like that made him seem ridiculous and stuffy and his whole demeanour would abruptly change, become invigorated, boisterous even-in an instant he’d have his jacket halfway on and two cigarettes in his mouth and with a lot of jostling and hooting and a pair of gin and tonics to boot he’d bundle us out the door, and off we’d go, a couple of tots, off into town for hijinks. On other occasions, no, he would not shake out of it. On the contrary. His mood would blacken tighten harden and he’d stand there with heels dug in daring me to pit myself against him. And that amused me too, in a malign sort of way that was fearsome to endure yet impossible to overthrow. The pair of us stiffened just like that in a haunted impasse. There was no getting out of it. Centuries and centuries of mutual obsession and vengeance fastened us to the spot. We were not quite ourselves. We were not quite ourselves. We were the drama. Dale wrote poetry and read poetry and had plenty of poetry books, including volumes by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath-which he made sure to keep out of my reach. Probably if I got my hands on them and read them all up something terrible would befall me or else something terrible but infinitesimal already woven into me would get notions and take over and what on earth then? Women can’t withstand poetry, seemed to be Dale’s view. Women are beautiful and tender creatures and poetry breaks them, of course it does. Poetry rips right through you, makes shit of you, and a man can be made shit of and go on living because no one really minds, not even the man. The man likes it in fact, likes to be made shit of so that he can sit there and drink his head off and declaim one epithetical thing after another and all the other interminably taciturn men believe he is an exceptional man, a man taking a hit for them all, a hero really, a ramshackle hero they’d love to raise up upon their shot-to-fuck shoulders or else roll about in the muck with, for wasn’t he a down-to-earth sort of a fellow after all? But it’s dreadful to see a woman who’s been made shit of due to her messing about with poetry. And what kind of a woman anyway is drawn towards poetry? Only a warped sort of a woman who wants to be made shit of, or else has been made shit of already and wants to lay out the nuts and bolts of it and in that way not keep it at arm’s length any longer. Dale didn’t think that that was any kind of rehabilitation so did not encourage me to read poetry by those women, showed me instead his own very neat handwriting and terse yet tender verses, and I remember that as well as being an acolyte of Bukowski he was a fan of e. e. cummings whose phoney lowercase initials and self-deprecating tone I couldn’t stand-making yourself small really was the most sly and loathsome ploy for insinuating yourself into a woman’s knickers-and there was that suffocatingly drippy line of his about such small hands, and that made me snigger, more than once, because Dale did in fact have very small hands and he often fell asleep with a cigarette in the left one-the right one being employed by a glass of beer around the clock-and he had burns in various states of slow repair all over that hand and if you said anything to him about them he would be satisfied you’d noticed yet look at you mock sternly as if you were only a daft goose who could never quite grasp what it was to be a poet and made shit of and on such occasions Dale would be inclined to call me “woman,” which, I presumed, was his way of getting across that he was a man. Poor Dale and his two-litre bottles of dark ale and Columbo coat and neat handwriting and a suitcase full of band T-shirts pressed just so by mother. We were so very young then. It was a very long time ago and it’s peculiar to think he has been alive ever since-that even now he is alive still somewhere (145-8).
... mostly it was books by women I was reading, and that’s the way it’s stayed. Admittedly, to begin with, many of the books I read by women were written when this or that woman was sad or was reflecting upon a time when she had felt sad and when I say sad I’m being coy of course, but what else can I say? Adrift? At odds? Displaced? Out of sorts? Out of her mind? At her wit’s end? From another planet? Anna Kavan, for example, she doesn’t want the day, she’s not interested in all of that, because for one thing she went to school during the day and that wasn’t where she belonged, there’s too much reality in the day for another thing, everything is visible, on and on, for miles in every direction, and hardly any of it is especially engaging, that’s how I read it anyway, that light in the wrong place can be a poison, that she felt quite at home in the dark-“Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place”-the dark, where sleep has its house, yes, and I read that last October in my own bed when sleep could find no house in me at all, probably because of the loathing that crawled all over my unsheltered heart, so many creepy little legs tickling incessantly against my heart so it squirmed and shuddered, felt stripped really of any privacy at all, of any dignity, I felt so bad for it, yet there was nothing I could do, I sat up in bed helplessly my hands either side like small screwed-up paper balls and my tray beside me with its tea and its water and three or four toothpicks while my heart squirmed and shuddered not that far in, and there she was, Anna Kavan, or someone she had made up, a narrator who I suppose wasn’t entirely unlike her, there in the dark, her dark strange words shining in the dark-“My home was in darkness and my companions were shadows beckoning from a glass”-giving dimension to the dark, such strange words, yet not at all unreal, not at all unfamiliar to me either, and as I read on those horrible little probing legs lifted away like the psychopathic teeth of a cartoon cog, no further molestation, just shadows, shadows then, slow and supple and overlapping, close and curious, companions really, yes, and not as sad as all that, perhaps sadness is not integral to the shades at all, it just feels that way because they have been neglected for so long because even now no one understands and welcomes them and no one ever will, they are misconstrued and distorted and feared, for so long and for evermore I expect-it’s no wonder is it that they have about them an air, an abiding air, of sadness. No. No. No it isn’t. Certain written words are alive, active, living-they are entirely in the present, the same present as you (149-51).
Amongst the millions of words of poetry and philosophy and theory and prose that were desecrated was a sentence by the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1821 had written in his play Almansor the words: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”-“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” It is a very well-known aphorism, and it is probable that even if I had not yet seen the photographs of the book-burnings when I first imagined the fire down in the square outside of Tarquin Superbus’s home I would already have come across this famous line. Then again, it is one of those lines one feels one has always known, was perhaps born knowing. Because of course I’ve always known deep in my bones that it is a very bad business to destroy books, that burning them is especially appalling, is undoubtedly a sacrilegious act that stirs up and unleashes malignant and merciless forces in humankind which twist and maim and sully and eventually eliminate everything they search out and drag callously into their abominable sphere of methodical humiliation and unsparing processes of eradication (165-6).
IV. Until Forever
Is there anything worse that can befall a young woman than to be robbed of impulse? Than to have her pounding promise laid to waste (188)?
II. Bright Spark
I was with him. I’d done it, I’d crossed over a boundary. I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. I was with him-and he was with me. All weekend I felt him with me, wherever I went, all day and at night. He was with me very strongly when I lay in the dark, it was almost as if I was made of him. Writing could do that. Here was a way of reaching someone, of being with them, when you were not and never could be. Here was where we met. Here was where the distinction between us blurred. When he returned my story to me the following Tuesday the paper was covered with him-touching it was like touching his skin. My fingertips slowly spread out and up the pages. Here and there in pencil he had written comments, brief and encouraging. They meant nothing to me, but I liked to see his handwriting beside mine, sometimes overlapping mine. It was unlined paper. I wrote with a fountain pen. I still do (65-6).
III. Won’t You Bring In The Birds?
She also had a lot of books in English, one of which was The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. It had a dreadful cover that featured the artwork Pinel Freeing the Insane from Their Chains, which was painted by Tony Robert-Fleury in 1876. One woman at the very edge of the picture is on her knees, gratefully kissing the plump ringed fingers of Pinel, her saviour. Pinel stands with his cane held gallantly to his chest, looking at the pretty young woman at the centre of the tableau who is being released from her shackles. Her hair is loose and tousled, and her dress is falling off her shoulders. Meanwhile on the ground behind her a woman is depicted in a hysterical arc-de-cercle posture, gasping, and pulling at her clothes, gratuitously revealing a pert breast. It is a very lurid kind of scene-the way these distressed and vulnerable women are sexualised made my skin crawl. However, since Natasha said I could borrow it I felt obliged to take it back to my house a few doors down, up to my bedroom-which was the same room in my house as Natasha’s bedroom was in hers-and make notes from it in bed during the afternoons while wrenching open pistachios one after the other and drinking Ribena through a tiny purple straw. I collected tokens from the Ribena cartons which was fairly organised of me and eventually received a free Dino bubble watch for my efforts. I was very pleased with it, until somehow, inexplicably, Dino turned over. His underside was flat and pale blue like Blu-Tack and entirely featureless, it looked just like Blu-Tack, and despite patiently flipping that watch over and over, ankles crossed and a cigarette sloped in my free hand, in a kind of relaxed yet dogged trance, Dino never came back round and was eventually buried beneath the bedside heap of sliding pistachio shale. The things I read in that book by Elaine Showalter were absolutely harrowing and upset me a great deal. It described in painful detail various so-called therapeutic practices that have been used on women in order to bring them back to their senses-and back into line. These depictions were vivid and sickening and they shot right in beneath my skin, into that place between the nerves that is not me or even mine, that unseperate place where my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother are softly present, like supple shadows overlapping in a sacred alcove. I had known from a young age that my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother had both spent time in psychiatric units and I knew my grandmother had had electroconvulsive therapy, maybe she was still having it then, when I was grown up in London, reading Showalter’s book upstairs in bed, I don’t know. Showalter’s study argues that cultural notions about how women ought to conduct themselves have made women mad-a point of view I shared, though in a more nascent unspecified form. It was just a feeling really. As I read on this feeling soon began to deepen and darken emphatically and as it did so another feeling surged upwards with such force it winded me and that feeling was very distinct, it was outrage, it was outrage because it was obvious wasn’t it, so absolutely obvious, that if a person has no autonomy, no income, has so many restrictions imposed upon the course of their life and their daily round, is belittled, undermined, ignored, is misinterpreted on and on, is in the dark sexually, goes up to bed without knowing when or if their husband will come home, spends hours and hours and hours alone or with three children all under the age of six, of course they are going to go out of their mind. What are they supposed to do? Carry on cooking and cleaning day in day out and open their legs with a smile whenever it’s required, just as normal? Surely only an incapacitated sort of person with barely any of their faculties intact would be capable of putting up with conditions such as these. And there you have it. I didn’t finish reading The Female Malady. It was unbearable. It roused in me an inherent anger that was ancient and bloodthirsty. After having several extremely violent nightmares I returned it to Natasha and admitted I couldn’t finish it and she confessed to me that it had overwhelmed her also and she hadn’t been able to finish it either (99-101).
Many years later I will come across a phrase in a slim book with a black and white cover which I will take to my heart at once: “the glow of grime.” The glow of grime. Just a few words yet how they soothed me. On and on I experienced gaping periods of time when I was flattened by a sense of doom. Quashed completely by deep despair and anxiety which was relieved now and then by anguished though relatively merciful bouts of sobbing. I had no small children, no errant husband-I had plenty of friends, was getting educated-the world, I was told again and again, was my oyster-I could go anywhere, be anything. Yet in my heart I was bereft, grieving-homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn’t exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless. Ridiculous really. Ridiculous, yet so acute and abiding. At such times I could see no way ahead. “I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it,” wrote Junichiro Tanizaki, the author of In Praise of Shadows, “while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealise it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.” A place that values worn and sullied objects. That favours darkness, patina, and fragility. Indeed, compared to the West’s obsession with light-filled rooms, sparkling appliances, spotless surfaces, and having the latest thing, such a place sounded like paradise to me. Tanizaki suggests that these esthetic differences are indicative of attitudes to light and dark on a deeper level. He surmises that in the West we are fearful of shadows and seek to banish them, while the Japanese are more inclined to “guide shadows towards beauty’s end,” and in doing so are able to live cheek by jowl with phantoms, mysteries, the ancient, and the chimerical. I don’t believe for one moment that cultural ideas about how women should live and behave have ever been any better in Japan, not at all, but that doesn’t detract from the virtue of Tanizaki’s notion of “visible darkness”-a perhaps inadvertent inversion of Milton’s “darkness visible” which indeed flips the hellish connotations of that chilling oxymoron by inferring that the blackness within you is stilled, is transfixed perhaps, when it has in its gaze the blackness without. That preternatural and particulate place, “where always something seemed to be flickering and shimmering [...] This was the darkness in which ghosts and monsters were active, and indeed was not the woman who lived in it, behind thick curtains, behind layer after layer of screens and doors-was she not of a kind with them?” According to Tanizaki’s evocative descriptions, the home is not so much a boundaried static place, sealed off and impervious to external and previous influence-Japanese interiors are permeable and transmogrifying, infinitely capable of “luring one into a state of reverie.” Yes, that sounds like the kind of place where I might feel at home. Modern homes, now frequently referred to as bases and living spaces, are becoming lighter and brighter, homogeneous in their increasing need to be increasingly operational. And who, exactly, is doing most of the work required day in day out to ensure that all these homes are unfailingly lighter and brighter and operational? Convenience replaces ritual, devices replace daydreaming, spotlights replace shade, and the discord between one’s inner world and their immediate surroundings goes through the roof. Fastened, by so many cables and leads to its functions, possessions, and gadgets, switch by switch some cosmic link is short-circuited, and the house is no longer a doorway to other worlds. And whoever lives inside there is bewildered to her wit’s end that she experiences such a penetrating and abiding- almost accusatory-sense of estrangement in a place where she is surely supposed to feel inspired and at ease. When everything is illuminated and the shadows have been sanitised, where goes the creature inside and what happens to her need for reverie? Perhaps she takes to her bed, perhaps she throws furniture, perhaps she draws on the walls, perhaps there is suddenly a duck, perhaps one day she simply leaves it all behind her. Communing with the dark, in all its primordial and transformative potency, is somewhat unsettling, certainly. But who on earth wants to keep their feet on the ground on and on? It seems to me entirely indefensible that anyone ever thought it necessary and correct to send an electric current blazing through the furrows of anyone else’s mind in order to dazzle the intimate blackness at its core into rapid extinction (102-5).
I’d read The Bell Jar in the bath in the first year of university but when Dale, who wasn’t my boyfriend and never would be but often behaved just as if he were which now and then didn’t bother me a great deal especially if for one reason or another I was the worse for wear, asked me in the second year of university if I’d read it I lied and said I hadn’t read it. I can’t remember if there was any particular reason why I lied to him about that. I think I lied to him and other men about a lot of little things on a daily basis or was at least vague oftentimes as a way of keeping something of myself back from them. I didn’t believe it was a good idea to let them in on everything. Dale spoke about Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton just as if they were two brilliant yet hell-bent girls who would be a bad influence on me if I had anything to do with them for even five minutes. He gave them their due, I mean he revered them both, but strongly intimated that I’d do well to give their high-octane poetry a wide berth for the time being. His familiar yet guarded way of talking about them amused me and he could see I was amused and I in turn could see that my amusement really riled him. He thought I was laughing at him, and perhaps I was. Sometimes he’d realise being wound up like that made him seem ridiculous and stuffy and his whole demeanour would abruptly change, become invigorated, boisterous even-in an instant he’d have his jacket halfway on and two cigarettes in his mouth and with a lot of jostling and hooting and a pair of gin and tonics to boot he’d bundle us out the door, and off we’d go, a couple of tots, off into town for hijinks. On other occasions, no, he would not shake out of it. On the contrary. His mood would blacken tighten harden and he’d stand there with heels dug in daring me to pit myself against him. And that amused me too, in a malign sort of way that was fearsome to endure yet impossible to overthrow. The pair of us stiffened just like that in a haunted impasse. There was no getting out of it. Centuries and centuries of mutual obsession and vengeance fastened us to the spot. We were not quite ourselves. We were not quite ourselves. We were the drama. Dale wrote poetry and read poetry and had plenty of poetry books, including volumes by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath-which he made sure to keep out of my reach. Probably if I got my hands on them and read them all up something terrible would befall me or else something terrible but infinitesimal already woven into me would get notions and take over and what on earth then? Women can’t withstand poetry, seemed to be Dale’s view. Women are beautiful and tender creatures and poetry breaks them, of course it does. Poetry rips right through you, makes shit of you, and a man can be made shit of and go on living because no one really minds, not even the man. The man likes it in fact, likes to be made shit of so that he can sit there and drink his head off and declaim one epithetical thing after another and all the other interminably taciturn men believe he is an exceptional man, a man taking a hit for them all, a hero really, a ramshackle hero they’d love to raise up upon their shot-to-fuck shoulders or else roll about in the muck with, for wasn’t he a down-to-earth sort of a fellow after all? But it’s dreadful to see a woman who’s been made shit of due to her messing about with poetry. And what kind of a woman anyway is drawn towards poetry? Only a warped sort of a woman who wants to be made shit of, or else has been made shit of already and wants to lay out the nuts and bolts of it and in that way not keep it at arm’s length any longer. Dale didn’t think that that was any kind of rehabilitation so did not encourage me to read poetry by those women, showed me instead his own very neat handwriting and terse yet tender verses, and I remember that as well as being an acolyte of Bukowski he was a fan of e. e. cummings whose phoney lowercase initials and self-deprecating tone I couldn’t stand-making yourself small really was the most sly and loathsome ploy for insinuating yourself into a woman’s knickers-and there was that suffocatingly drippy line of his about such small hands, and that made me snigger, more than once, because Dale did in fact have very small hands and he often fell asleep with a cigarette in the left one-the right one being employed by a glass of beer around the clock-and he had burns in various states of slow repair all over that hand and if you said anything to him about them he would be satisfied you’d noticed yet look at you mock sternly as if you were only a daft goose who could never quite grasp what it was to be a poet and made shit of and on such occasions Dale would be inclined to call me “woman,” which, I presumed, was his way of getting across that he was a man. Poor Dale and his two-litre bottles of dark ale and Columbo coat and neat handwriting and a suitcase full of band T-shirts pressed just so by mother. We were so very young then. It was a very long time ago and it’s peculiar to think he has been alive ever since-that even now he is alive still somewhere (145-8).
... mostly it was books by women I was reading, and that’s the way it’s stayed. Admittedly, to begin with, many of the books I read by women were written when this or that woman was sad or was reflecting upon a time when she had felt sad and when I say sad I’m being coy of course, but what else can I say? Adrift? At odds? Displaced? Out of sorts? Out of her mind? At her wit’s end? From another planet? Anna Kavan, for example, she doesn’t want the day, she’s not interested in all of that, because for one thing she went to school during the day and that wasn’t where she belonged, there’s too much reality in the day for another thing, everything is visible, on and on, for miles in every direction, and hardly any of it is especially engaging, that’s how I read it anyway, that light in the wrong place can be a poison, that she felt quite at home in the dark-“Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place”-the dark, where sleep has its house, yes, and I read that last October in my own bed when sleep could find no house in me at all, probably because of the loathing that crawled all over my unsheltered heart, so many creepy little legs tickling incessantly against my heart so it squirmed and shuddered, felt stripped really of any privacy at all, of any dignity, I felt so bad for it, yet there was nothing I could do, I sat up in bed helplessly my hands either side like small screwed-up paper balls and my tray beside me with its tea and its water and three or four toothpicks while my heart squirmed and shuddered not that far in, and there she was, Anna Kavan, or someone she had made up, a narrator who I suppose wasn’t entirely unlike her, there in the dark, her dark strange words shining in the dark-“My home was in darkness and my companions were shadows beckoning from a glass”-giving dimension to the dark, such strange words, yet not at all unreal, not at all unfamiliar to me either, and as I read on those horrible little probing legs lifted away like the psychopathic teeth of a cartoon cog, no further molestation, just shadows, shadows then, slow and supple and overlapping, close and curious, companions really, yes, and not as sad as all that, perhaps sadness is not integral to the shades at all, it just feels that way because they have been neglected for so long because even now no one understands and welcomes them and no one ever will, they are misconstrued and distorted and feared, for so long and for evermore I expect-it’s no wonder is it that they have about them an air, an abiding air, of sadness. No. No. No it isn’t. Certain written words are alive, active, living-they are entirely in the present, the same present as you (149-51).
Amongst the millions of words of poetry and philosophy and theory and prose that were desecrated was a sentence by the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1821 had written in his play Almansor the words: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”-“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” It is a very well-known aphorism, and it is probable that even if I had not yet seen the photographs of the book-burnings when I first imagined the fire down in the square outside of Tarquin Superbus’s home I would already have come across this famous line. Then again, it is one of those lines one feels one has always known, was perhaps born knowing. Because of course I’ve always known deep in my bones that it is a very bad business to destroy books, that burning them is especially appalling, is undoubtedly a sacrilegious act that stirs up and unleashes malignant and merciless forces in humankind which twist and maim and sully and eventually eliminate everything they search out and drag callously into their abominable sphere of methodical humiliation and unsparing processes of eradication (165-6).
IV. Until Forever
Is there anything worse that can befall a young woman than to be robbed of impulse? Than to have her pounding promise laid to waste (188)?