… what I need is soothing lullabies, and I have found them in abundance in my Homer. How often do I lull my tumultuous blood to rest; for you have seen nothing as changeably unquiet as this heart.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Sorrows of Young Werther
The last days of 1979: a new government, a new decade and the prospect of leaving home within the year. Home was in trouble, only I wouldn’t find out why till my father left six months after I did. There was much that I had refused to notice or had been told but would not hear.
Among my friends nothing was said but we knew that we were separating. I could feel life opening and wanted more than anything to go off into it but as yet I had no idea what life might be. I still did no work and in any exam argued in one direction and then in the other. I had unpicked my handwriting so as to render it completely unfeminine (nothing rounded) and illegible. I was warned I might fail on my handwriting alone.
I was trapped in Youth, which was different from adolescence. Youth meant being sensitive but out of control, pretentious, ambitious and overwhelmed, having feelings too big to know what to do with, wanting every feeling to be that big, wanting others to feel big things for you and then being terrified if this came to pass. Youth takes for granted the heart’s lead, as Werther admits: ‘I am treating my poor heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted.’
Daniel and I discussed the world, but only in theory – Barthes and Foucault. We could go no further without talking about what was wrong, which was that neither of us knew how to manage what we felt. One day we were on a coach going to see a band and I experienced a terrible shock. It was like what you feel when someone jumps out on you, a lurch of nerves, only usually it’s over in a moment as you make sense of the situation (and laugh at the joke). My nerves kept lurching. I couldn’t move or speak and was having difficulty breathing. My heart skittered, my bowels melted, my bones fused. Yet nothing had happened. The coach was quietly proceeding along the motorway and Daniel was holding my hand. Nothing had happened but my mind had chosen that moment to open a trapdoor in itself.
So much could not be said. Was that why my body started screaming? Daniel tried to help and he tried, too, to talk about his own difficulties and while I wanted more than anything to hold onto him and say that I understood and everything would be alright, I was speechless. We lay in each other’s arms but all we did was listen to music.
We didn’t decide to stop being in touch only all of a sudden we weren’t. I longed for him to phone me but never thought of phoning him myself. Christmas passed. I watched old films late at night and wept. Why did I not contact Daniel? Nothing had been said. We had simply stepped back.
On New Year’s Eve, I went to see Joy Division at the Electric Ballroom. Ian Curtis was an epileptic whose spasmodic, quivering bursts of dance emulated fits and sometimes were fits. He was twenty-three, the same age Goethe had been in 1772 when he met Charlotte Buff, on whom Werther’s beloved is based. I imagined that Werther had Ian Curtis’s pathetic beauty and the same doom-laden voice. Like his idol Jim Morrison, Curtis could, through tone alone, enlarge what he sang into the epic. These young men were alienated; it was a word the music papers used a lot, and which I understood from Shakespeare to mean a stepping out of the human net, letting go of the human scale and finding yourself unable to function out there and unable to get back. Hamlet:
… I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myselfe a King of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreames.
Ian Curtis spoke to me of feeling beyond what a single person could bear, of something fundamental and archetypal – not a boyfriend who wouldn’t pick up the phone but a man on an odyssey who takes twenty years to come home, or a man who mourns his wife so powerfully that he enters death in order to find her. I wasn’t so interested in the woman who waits. I identified with the fated hero who cannot help who he is and what he has to do. I wasn’t in love with Werther, I was Werther, until he shot himself and took all night and several pages to die.
I was Ian Curtis, too. Watching the lightning pass through him as he shook on stage, I thought of my panic attacks which were also electrical, a long moment of shock. I was about to go into the world and it kept pulling itself out from under my feet. Four months later, Ian Curtis hanged himself and I realised that he was not Werther but a man in pain. I wasn’t twenty-three but seventeen, and I was a girl. My pain erupted into panic every time I tried to walk away.