I grew up not knowing that language was for everyday purposes. I grew up with the Word and the Word was God. Now, many years after a secular Reformation, I still think of language as something holy.
My parents owned six books between them. Two of those were Bibles and the third was a concordance to the Old and New Testaments. The fourth was The House At Pooh Corner. The fifth, The Chatterbox Annual 1923 and the sixth, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.
I found it necessary to smuggle books in and out of the house and I cannot claim too much for the provision of an outside toilet when there is no room of one’s own. It was on the toilet that I first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, and perhaps that was the best place, after all. We kept a rubber torch hung on the cistern, and I had to divide my money from a Saturday job, between buying books and buying batteries. My mother knew exactly how long her Evereadys would last if used only to illuminate the gap that separated the toilet paper from its function.
Once I had tucked the book back down my knickers to get it indoors again, I had to find somewhere to hide it, and anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy-seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress. But as my collection grew, I began to worry that my mother might notice that her daughter’s bed was rising visibly. One day she did. She burned everything.
Not everything. I had started to shift my hoard to a friend’s house and I still have some of those early books, faithfully bound in plastic, none of their spines broken.
My fortunes improved when my mother approved a job for me at the Public Library. She reckoned that I would be unable to read and work at the same time and that she would benefit from unlimited supplies of large print mysteries. I think too, that she hoped that simply being around books would cure me of my obsession for them, rather in the way that retired astronauts are advised to lie and look at the stars. In practice, I went to the library even when I was not working, and sat uninterrupted in the Reading Room, under a stained-glass window that told me that ‘Industry and Prudence Conquer’.
Weekly sackfuls of Ellery Queen seemed to have a sedating effect on my mother. My father continued with The Beano. At the library, dutifully stamping out wave upon wave of sea stories, and the battered blossoms of Mills and Boon, I realised what I had known dimly; that plot was meaningless to me. This was a difficult admission for one whose body was tattooed with Bible stories, but I had to accept that my love-affair was with language, and only incidentally with narrative.
Mulling over my new freedom from the gross weight of how to get from A to Β, I came across Gertrude Stein in the Humour section. I do not know why she had been branded with a purple giggle-strip and heaped unalphabetically alongside Alan Coren. Our system in the library was not to alphabetise popular genres, on the grounds that if you want a Western you want one, and the gun is mightier than the pen-name. I had noticed Stein kept being taken out one day, and returned the next, and when I borrowed her myself I realised why. I returned her to her rightful place, under S, in the literature section. Only one man complained that he could no longer find ‘those nonsense books by Steen’. He was a vet.
What will happen when there are no more Public Libraries and the world is on CD-Rom? Where will we go, we exiles from actuality? What will happen to vets who read Miss Steen and young girls looking for visions beyond their allotted lens? In the homogeneity of screen and disc who will find the disruptiveness of the page? And will we invent fabulous stories of lost libraries where rooked urchins gather books from mile high branches of crazy shelves?
As I was about to embark on two years undisturbed with the poets, I was disturbed, and by my mother, in the Reading Room. She had found out about my secret life and come to have a showdown by the photocopier. She said ‘The trouble with books is that you don’t know what’s in them until it is too late.’
I challenged her with her own taste in murder mysteries and received the reply that if you are expecting a murder it isn’t a shock. This helped my theories on plot but it didn’t help my position by the photocopier. My mother knew that books would lead me astray and she was right. A short time later I left home. I took nothing with me; the things I loved had already gone.
I wake and sleep language. It has always been so. I had been brought up to memorise very long Bible passages, and when I left home and was supporting myself so that I could continue my education, I fought off loneliness and fear by reciting. In the funeral parlour I whispered Donne to the embalming fluids and Marvell to the corpses. Later, I found that Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ had a soothing, because rhythmic, effect on the mentally disturbed. Among the disturbed I numbered myself at that time.
The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.
The psyche and the spirit do not share the instinct of the damaged body. Healing is not automatically triggered nor is danger usually avoided. Since we put ourselves in the way of hurt it seems logical to put ourselves in the way of healing. Art has more work to do than ever before but it can do that work. In a self-destructive society like our own, it is unsurprising that art as a healing force is despised.
For myself, when I returned to my borrowed room night after night, and there were my books, I felt relief and exuberance, not hardship and exhaustion. I intended to avoid the fate of Jude the Obscure, although a reading of that book was a useful warning. What I wanted did not belong to me by right and whilst it could not be refused to me in quite the same way, we still have subtle punishments for anyone who insists on what they are and what they want. Walled inside the little space marked out for me by family and class, it was the limitless world of the imagination that made it possible for me to scale the sheer face of other people’s assumptions. Inside books there is perfect space and it is that space which allows the reader to escape from the problems of gravity.
In 1978 I packed all of my wordly goods into the back of my Morris Minor van and drove to Oxford. For the first few weeks I suspected that I had been dropped into the middle of a special practical joke. Not only did everybody read books, they were expected to read books, and given money to read books. Did I really not have to prepare my essay in the toilet?
I spent three years doing what modern governments more and more want to stop students doing; reading widely and thinking for themselves. The move towards intensively taught shorter courses will help to produce passive, materially minded young people who believe that everything is a means to an end, but who illogically therefore, do not believe in an after-life. If this is the only life we have, then it had better be an end itself hadn’t it?
The worst nineteenth-century drudge could at least depend on eternal life. The twentieth-century robot depends on lasting until retirement.
I like to live slowly. Modern life is too fast for me. That may be because I was brought up without the go-faster gadgets of science, and now that I can afford them, see no virtues in filling the day with car rides, plane rides, mobile phones, computer communication.
If you deal in real things, those things have a pace of their own that haste cannot impose upon. The garden I cultivate, the vegetables I grow, the wood I have to chop, the coal I have to fetch, the way I cook, (casseroles), the way I shop, (little and often), the time it takes to read a book, to listen to music, the time it takes to write a book, none of those things can happen in microwave moments. I am told that the values I hold and the way I live are anachronisms paid for by privilege. It is a privilege to make books that people want to read but why would it be more appropriate, less anachronistic, for me to spend the money I earn on a flashy lifestyle instead of funding my own peace and quiet?
One of the casualties of progress is peace and quiet. My great-grandparents, who worked a twelve-hour day in a Lancashire cotton mill, could at least walk to the Heights behind their cottage, and find silence under their feet and a long view of hills. I was able to escape the crash of evangelical fervour and hide in those same hills at the top of our street where stone gave way to grass and the sound was the sound of the wind. Those hills have taken a relief road through their belly now; not a cut and cover, too expensive, and who cares about hills when you could have cars? The factory workers have stereos and satellite TV, and what they once got out of silence they can now get out of noise. Yes? No?
Silence and noise do not seem to me to be equivalents. When I was growing up, without a bathroom, without a car, without a telephone, without central heating, without a record player, without money, silence was free and not far away. Now it is a marketable commodity and more expensive than a good seat at Covent Garden.
When I was growing up, the noisiest noise I ever heard was a tambourine and a male voice choir. This may explain why I love women and dislike Verdi operas. It was certainly a factor in my recent decision to leave London.
I do not mean that London has become a focus for hymn-singing testosterones and their tinkly wives, I mean that I cannot afford to live in a place that cannot afford silence.
How shall I live?
When I wrote Art & Lies, I said it was a question and a quest. Handel, Picasso, Sappho, each fleeing a dead city, and a life they can no longer bear. The dead city is a London of the future, a potential place without values. I do not think it possible (or moral) to write a book that is made to affect others without being affected oneself. I did not put my life into Art & Lies, as people commonly understand the artist at work, but I have put Art & Lies into my life. The question ‘How shall I live?’ had to be addressed to myself.
Books push their writer forward. The writer has to have ready the accumulation of what she is, at the point of the book, but the book, itself, will prove more than its writer. The act of writing, itself, is an evolution; from the Latin, Volvere, volvi, volutum, to roll. The unrolling of the secret scroll, the thing suspected but not realised until present. The being-book gives off heat and urges out of the writer new ideas, new imaginations, previously inchoate. This sense of complicity, the working together of writer and word is a process more confident and more obvious the more the writer learns to trust what it is she does. For tightrope walkers everywhere, trustfulness of the rope is a certainty that comes out of discipline, to others it is just a rope. To you it is life-line and communication cord. To walk it to its end, and disappear, rewards the unseen hours in the dust.
The rope is hand produced; the writer makes it as she walks it, just as, in Sexing the Cherry, Fortunata escapes the house that celebrates ceilings but denies floors, by cutting and retying the rope as she descends. Impossible? Certainly, but art is impossible. There is no biological reason for it to exist, no laboratories specially funded to carry on its experiments, no particular approval from the world at large, no education that can guarantee its being, no common consent that it matters, not much money, and even those who do well do never so well as dross merchants or professional footballers. And yet … Is it because human beings are tantalised by the impossible or is it that even the late twentieth century cannot quite believe that its real life is in silicon chips and stocks and shares?
To live for art (Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, as Callas sings in Puccini’s Tosca), is to live a life of questioning. And if you believe, as I do, that to live for art demands that every other part of life be moved towards one end, then the question ‘How shall I live?’ is fierce. The choices I am making are choices that allow me to go on working at maximum output and with utmost concentration. If my partner needed to live on the coast for her health’s sake, no-one would be surprised that I should go. Should there be any surprise that I am returning to a quieter existence for the sake of my work?
Quieter than what? I do not go out except to the opera and to the local shops. I never accept party invitations although I do send them. My day is simple: Get up, light the fire, and while it and my thoughts are catching, grind the coffee and have a wash. I have to admit that I dislike baths, probably as a result of never having had one until I was fourteen. I would not like the reader to assume that I smell. I am fastidious if unbathed. It troubles me very little to live without conveniences, although my partner does insist on an inside toilet.
I remember a journalist calling once, and remarking on the blazing fire in the red library. ‘Is that for effect?’ she said. I told her that in England one has to keep warm somehow and she asked why I couldn’t afford what she called ‘real heat’. Although there are clear differences between myself and D. H. Lawrence, I share with him the suspicion that there is something immoral about central heating. The surest way to put Lawrence into a rage was to sit him by a radiator, and Richard Aldington tells of how Lawrence often preferred to lurk in the hall than subject his virility to anonymous heat. I have been lighting my own fire since I was a tiny girl and I hope to do so on the day that I die. There is no comfort to be had from a radiator and no-one I recall has yet had a vision while staring into the white enamel.
Comfort and visions. The solace of the fire is an ancient one and evolution is a very slow process. I do not want to live in exile from my evolutionary environment; the land, the seasons, other creatures, and certain rituals; paper and twigs, and on my knees as generations before me, and the same pleasure felt at the first flames.
There are people who tell me that I am cut off but to what are they connected?
My connections are to the earth under my feet and the words that fill both hands. And not hands only, mouth, liver, gut, bowel, mind, blood, cunt.
Moreover, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would be invaluable …
For my belief is that if we live another century or so – I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals – and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogy, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928)
That is where I am in history.