2010
Every so often, someone announces the demise of the memoir; the genre has had its day, we’re told. But the bookshops are still stuffed with them: writers’ self-explorations, sickbed journals, the confected “life journeys” of celebrities, written by ghosts. I wonder about ghost-writing: what is it like to be so bad with words that you can’t articulate the facts of your existence, and have to bring in someone else to do it? The ghost may do some fact-checking, but what are the chances of emotional truth, when a filtering sensibility intervenes, one that is trained to find shape and meaning in the shapeless mess of one damn thing after another? Shape is being crafted, we suspect, and meaning forced.
Readers seek emotional truth, as well as names and dates, but how it is generated is a puzzle. Everyone who has ever written a memoir (and emerged from the process with a scrap of dignity) must have put themselves through a fierce interrogation of their more operatic emotions. When we try to grasp the slippery realities of our early lives, we cannot help but think that highly charged emotion is validating in itself. If I am so upset about it, it must be true; I couldn’t counterfeit such deep feeling. Or could I?
Susan Hill dealt with the subject cogently in her novel The Beacon. Brief and seethingly ambiguous, it tells how a family falls apart when one of the siblings, a journalist called Frank, publishes a memoir about a childhood in which his parents singled him out for punishment and often locked him in a cupboard under the stairs. Frank’s memoir becomes a bestseller, then a film, but his brothers and sisters do not recognize his account of abuse and of their collusion in it. Their childhoods, they insist to each other, were ordinary, innocent; till Frank rewrote history.
The author is clever enough to leave our minds humming with doubt. Her description of Frank at work on his memoir is striking. When the book is still in his head he thinks of it as organic, “like a shrub in the earth.” The act of writing itself stirs up further memories. The book, he thinks later, arrived on the page “like some effusion he had not been able to suppress.” The simplicity of the process, the easy flow, seems a guarantee of integrity. He is writing to repossess his own life; he has no detailed sense of what, how and where he has fabricated. The spirit of it is true, he convinces himself. He feels sadness on behalf of the person he never was.
A few years ago I was writing a novel, Beyond Black, about a professional psychic, and I haunted platform “demonstrations” by mediums and Psychic Fayres where fortune tellers sat cheek by jowl in public spaces, in “function rooms” smelling of drains, sports centers smelling of feet and in the damp back rooms of pubs. Against a mounting roar of prediction, rising and echoing in the rafters, money changed hands for tarot reading, aura reading and once, in my case, for “past-life regression.” I didn’t necessarily think I had a past life, but I wanted to know how it would feel if I did. Regression is somewhat recherché and there was no choice of practitioners that day, so I held hands with the one available, who had a flabby, damp palm; I took an irritable dislike to the man, whom in my mind I called Twerp, because no more up-to-date term of abuse seemed to fit so well. Twerp began by boring me into a stupor; I was spiraling up into the universe, he suggested, up and up, round and round, until (after twenty minutes of this) I descended into a field. What did I see? A wall, I said, mutinous. Why didn’t I rise up and look over the wall? I did, and my past life began.
What is hard to convey about the next hour is how my attention was riven, split. One part of me was in the roaring room, despising Twerp, annoyed with myself for producing a past life that was, in the light of my background, predictable: born in the north to a family of millworkers, I had produced a child of the early industrial revolution, a miserable illegitimate infant called Sara, of an age to clutch her mother’s skirts. Go on to when she’s twelve, Twerp suggested; irritated by the interruption, my fantasy obeyed him. The next moment, I was so shaken by sobs that I could hardly stay in my chair. Crying hard, with a rending, tearing feeling inside my chest, I told Twerp that my mother was dead and I was running away. On a hill above the town, I looked down on the sooty world I had known, turned my back on it and commenced a new chapter in my penny novelette.
I very much wanted to know how Sara got out of her plight—friendless, uneducated, destitute. But Twerp wanted her to be twenty-one now, and so she was: “Are you courting, Sara?” Now it wasn’t just me who was cross with Twerp; Sara was nettled too. As she crossed the Atlantic in an emigrant ship, as she set herself up as mistress of a small sewing workshop, as—enterprising even in her fifties—she set off to the west to found a new business, she had little time for courtship. Her one dalliance, with a small-town trader, foundered when he wouldn’t show her his account books; she suspected a takeover rather than a marriage was in prospect, and guarded her assets fiercely. What became clear, as her life opened up, was how little her personality owed to mine. I could not predict her reactions, but I could certainly feel her emotions: I relished the quiet triumph of her later life when, a benefactor to her community, a stalwart of welfare committees, she lived in comfort in a house on a hill with the real love of her life, a white bull terrier called Billy. She wanted to tell Twerp about Billy, but all he cared about was the possibility of late-blooming romance.
If Sara had slapped him, what sort of a defense would I have had to a charge of assault? For part of a Saturday afternoon, she occupied my body space and had my voice at her disposal. Hypnotized, I was aware of everything around me, and especially the damp palm of Twerp, yet I was on board ship, I was in a railway car, I was in an alien land. I was still inside Sara, or she inside me, when she reached her seventies and her heart failed. I was with her after her death; Twerp suggested she would meet her unknown father. From the afterlife, Sara was briskly dismissive. And I, having lived seventy-odd tumultuous years, and died on a stacking chair in a public hall, was a wreck. Did I believe in Sara? As a past self, no; but as a construct she had vitality, force, the steady heartbeat of reality; she was the most successful, convincing, rounded character I have ever made. What I felt, my hand lying in Twerp’s, seemed utterly genuine.
Two things I learned. One: beware of “effusions.” Two: if only I had applied myself, I could have been Catherine Cookson.