#736

My Pain (to be read out loud)

(for J.)

What do I say?
What do I say to the pain,
“Pain, go away”?

You are my pain;
you define what I am.
What would I do without you?

We have been together so long
like a wartime couple who married too young
and stayed together for the sake of the kids.

But this is the nineteen-nineties –
I don't need to take this. (Did I say that?)
Yes; go away. Go away now!
It won't be the same
but then
it never should have been.


5 June 1994
 
 

Three years is a long time to go without writing poetry. Prose helps but it’s not the same. Not by a long chalk. A lot's happened since I wrote ‘Pillow Fight’ in August 1991. F. and I are no longer together, I’ve quit my job, moved away, lost almost all my friends and am in the middle of my second major depression. I’d like to say this is the lowest point in my life but I’m not sure it was. I suppose for some people there’s a day where they hit rock bottom and the only way is up but, for me, it took a long time to bottom out, months in fact. This isn’t a particularly good poem but I can’t really skip it because of its significance. Saying you’re going to stop drinking or taking drugs is one thing and I’m not saying it’s easy but saying you’re not going to hurt any more is another thing completely. Rodman Philbrick said, “Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of everything, even pain.” Well, this is me starting this process and it took about eighteen months before it dawned on me I was no longer depressed.

 

As for who J. was, I’ll come back to her. Yes, it’s a her. You knew it was going to be another her. Where would my life be without all the hers in it?

#735

Pillow Fight

"It's all right," William said (talking to my chest),
"When it's not all right I scream into my pillow.

"It's full of breasts you see –
I rip them out of magazines and papers
(we're not allowed scissors).

"They're like sponges, (I read it in a book) –
you must see – they soak up the pain."


16 August 1991
 
 

On the surface I can see how people might assume this poem is a natural follow-on to ‘Grief at Parting’ (#734) and I’m not saying there’s not a connection but William had already expressed an interest in women’s breasts in ‘The Lady Doctor’(#620). When I came to write my first novel (around November 1993) I decided to make Jonathan a mastrophile and the same is true of Joe, the dead father in my new novel Left, but before you tar me as a latter day Russ Meyer can I just state for the record that I’m not obsessed with breasts. I mean I like them—what red-blooded male doesn’t?—but from a writer’s point of view I’m far more interested in them because of the symbolism that goes with them. I had originally intended Jonathan to be a bum man but it was much simpler with boobs. It’s lazy writing on one level, to go with the obvious, but why make things hard for our readers? Men are hard-wired to be drawn to breasts. We don’t shake our heads when we learn this. We might not be proud to announce to the world that our dad has a complete collection of Juggs in his wardrobe but better that than Heavy Rubber Fetish Magazine.

#734

Grief at Parting

I let the moment go.
I left your lap and your breasts, my sister's breasts,
to rest my weary head on dreams and colder memories
not strong enough to be weak or honest enough to want
and afraid to ask as I wasn't sure.

What am I supposed to do with all these feelings?


4 August 1991
 
 

I only vaguely remember the event that triggered this poem but not what it’s about. I know it takes its title from a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, ‘The Melancholy of Departure’ but I’m not sure why. And I’m not even sure if it’s the 1914 painting (‘Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure)’) or the 1916 painting (‘The Melancholy of Departure’); I suspect the former and that’s the image I’ve used. The date puzzles me too. I remember being with my sister but not in 1991.

I was upset. I don’t know why I was upset—so many things to choose from—but we were on the couch in her flat only it couldn’t have been the couch because the couch was against the wall. Had she rearranged the room? So how exactly did this work? Was my head in her lap? I was crying (I think I was crying) and she went to comfort me. Was my head on her shoulder or in her lap? The shoulder makes more sense. After a time she either lifted or lowered my head so that it rested on her right breast. It wasn’t her simply shifting because she was uncomfortable; it was a deliberate action. I never understood why she did that—there’s nothing remotely maternal about my sister—but it’s a gesture that’s always touched me. We’ve never talked about it but I doubt she’d have any answers. It clearly felt right at the time. It wasn’t sexual and it was an awkward position (she didn’t have much of a bust to rest anything on) which is probably why I moved. Is that how my head ended in her lap? You would think I’d remember something like this with crystal clarity but far from it.

 

This is the first original poem in over a year. I wrote one more on 16 August and then nothing—no poetry at least—for three years. This was the start of my second major depression.

#733

The Insides of Words

I gave her some hollow words to fill and she asked what with.
I suggested the truth but the romantic in her wasn't too keen.
So she left them empty on a shelf.
She said they meant something to her.

One day a spider made a web in them to catch flies.


6 April 1991
 
 

Hollow words. Empty words. Beats me why so many people struggle with poetry. “Your words don’t ring true.” Words don’t ring. And yet we know exactly what that means. I’ve written poems for people for decades and yet few of the recipients have ever got them. I’m not talking about pearls before swine—I would never be that condescending—but most of them would’ve been just as happy (more so even) with a card from Clintons and a bar of Dairy Milk.

Suicide

Birth befalls me
Life occupies me
Death completes me
– Édouard Levé, Suicide

 
 

‘The Death of the Author’ is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. It has nothing to say about dead authors or even suicidal authors. So why bring it up? Barthes’ essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated. He has a point up to a point and I couldn’t help thinking of him when I read these lines addressed to a man who has recently killed himself:

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?

Silvia Plath, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Anne Sexton: the list is not short and yet it’s impossible once you realise the author of the book you have in your hands has killed himself not to look for clues. In 2013, for example, an article appeared in The Telegraph talking about how the notes for Plath’s last poem ‘Sheep in Fog’ “show the poet's increasing fragility as she approached the date she took her own life.” The LitHub article The Suicide Note as Literary Genre is also worth a read. Why the fascination? Because life’s precious and people go to extraordinary lengths to stay alive—e.g. Aron Ralston, who amputated his own right forearm with a dull pocketknife in order to extricate himself from a dislodged boulder—and yet others for no good reason—no good reason we can see—give it all up. Some we can understand—Arthur Koestler committed suicide when he was seventy-seven on discovering he had terminal leukaemia—but it’s the young, those who have, as the cliché goes, so much to live for that bemuse and confuse us.

 

I’ve never seriously contemplated suicide. I’ve thought about it because I’m a writer and writers—well this writer—thinks about all sort of shit but just because I’ve thought about something doesn’t mean I’m going to do it or even write about it. As it happens one of my characters is a suicide. The protagonist in my novella Exit Interview has killed himself and the book has him sitting down with Saint Peter who conducts a pretty bog standard exit interview with him. It was never intended to be a treatise on the meaningfulness and the wonderfulness of life but, obviously, a few pertinent questions get asked and the nice thing about it being a work of fiction is that I can have my suicide answer these as best he can. That doesn’t happen in the real world and it certainly doesn’t happen in Édouard Levé’s novel.

 

The book opens with the following paragraph:

One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She stays outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot. She rushes into the house, cries out your name, notices that the door to the stairway leading to the basement is open, goes down, and finds you there. You’ve put a bullet in your head with the rifle you had carefully prepared. On the table, you left a comic book open to a double-page spread. In the heat of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book falls closed before she understands that this was your final message.

We never learn the name of the man who’s taken his own life nor do we ever learn who’s telling us his story. No one’s named in the book apart from, oddly, the narrator’s brother. We only know the suicide as “you” and it takes a while to get used to the narration in the second person especially since we know he’s a) talking to a dead man and b) describing things he cannot possibly have been be privy to. There’s less dialogue than in an Anita Brookner novel but it works. There’s no suicide note or at least what was to pass for one is lost and so the only words we have that offer any clue are the handful of short poems discovered after his friend’s death that the narrator sees fit to include after he’s finished his story; almost every line ends with the word “me”. And this is where we need to remember Barthes and not read into the poems but how can you not?

 

Why did he do it? Let’s just say for a minute he could answer that question: what would he be able to say that would make us go, “Yeah, I get that. I’d have done the same”? Do you remember the scene in Educating Rita where Trish, Rita’s Mahler-loving flatmate, attempts suicide and when asked why all she can offer up is a weak, “Darling, why not?” No doubt after hours and hours of therapy—and thousands upon thousands of words—we might get something that makes some sort of sense out of her actions and that’s what this book is really attempting to do. The narrator puts himself in his friend’s place and explains his friend to his friend albeit in absentia. The odd thing is who’s decided to do this investigation. We don’t learn a great deal about the narrator but this is a start:

I haven’t seen your wife since. I hardly knew her. I met her four or five times. When the two of you got married, you and I stopped seeing each other. I see her face again now. It has remained unchanged for twenty years. I’ve retained a fixed image of her from the last time I saw her. Memory, like photographs, freezes recollections.

[…]  

The first time I saw you, you were in your bedroom. You were seventeen years old.

As the suicide is twenty-five when he dies this means our narrator has barely seen his friend over the last five—and presumably critical—years and only knew him for the three before that. He doesn’t seem especially qualified to start out on a task like this but who are we to deny him? When I learned that my first girlfriend had died I immediately sat down and wrote a poem for her even though we hadn’t spoken in over twenty years. You can’t help how you feel.

If you were still alive, would we be friends? I was more attached to other boys. But time has seen me drift apart from them without my even noticing. All that would be needed to renew the bond would be a telephone call, but none of us are willing to risk the disillusionment of a reunion. […] But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice. Your responses satisfy me better than those the others could give me. You accompany me faithfully wherever I may be. It is they who have disappeared. You are the present.

You are a book that speaks to me whenever I need it. Your death has written your life.

 

Some of the things the narrator tells “you” are things the man would’ve been well aware of—they’re there for us in just the same way detectives in cop shows spell things out just a little too thoroughly—and mostly he dwells on the time his friend was alive but at the start of the book he does share some details concerning how people reacted to his death, like the young man’s father:

Your wife only remembered later that before falling from the table, the comic book you had left there was open. Your father bought dozens of copies, which he gave to everyone. He came to know the text and the images of this book by heart; this was not at all like him, but he ended up identifying with the comic. He is looking for the page, and on the page for the sentence, that you had chosen. He keeps a record of his reflections in a file, which is always on his desk and on which is written “Suicide Hypotheses.” If you open the cupboard to the left of his desk, you’ll find ten identical folders filled with handwritten pages bearing the same label. He cites the captions of the comic book as if they were prophecies.

I can see me doing that. Edwin Shneidman, “a father of contemporary suicidology”, wrote, “Suicide notes are cryptic maps of ill-advised journeys.” Where does the suicide think he’s going? Journeys feature quite a bit in Suicide. How many of them are accurate or even took place who can tell? At one point the narrator describes in detail his friend wandering round Bordeaux and then the next day…

You went back out, and set off at random into the town. But your steps spontaneously led you to the same locations that you had strolled through the day before. You paid less attention to what you were looking at; the places no longer had the attraction of novelty. You then decided to walk taking the first street on the right, the second street on the left, the first street on the right and so on, without deviating from this method, so as to not let yourself be guided by the appeal of whatever turned up. You passed the day in this way, looking on your map from time to time at where chance was leading you.

He stops to eat and then…

Rather than resuming your random walk, you returned by the shortest route to the city centre. When you got close to your hotel, it was still too early for dinner. You decided to take the same route as the day before, to verify if what you had seen was now anchored in your memory. You didn’t look at the map, you didn’t hesitate once over changes in direction.

Did any of this happen? Unlikely. Our narrator’s trying to imagine the kind of man his onetime friend was becoming:

When you travelled, it was to taste the pleasures of being a stranger in a strange town. You were a spectator and not an actor: mobile voyeur, silent listener, accidental tourist.

Is this how suicides feel, out of place? I found an article online with one of the usual ponderous titles that academics see fit to give their works but this one included the wonderful expression “thwarted belongingness;” I suspect its author was a frustrated poet. But it’s a good expression especially for the kind of person we find described within these pages. He doesn’t belong. Others are a struggle. We learn this right at the start when our narrator is granted access to his friend’s bedroom; no one was allowed in his room up until then.

A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is decomposing in the earth.

The man we see described in this book is not the man he once was. He was never that man. The man we see described is part-ideal and part-enigma. His friend’s filled in the blanks imaginatively. He’s begun the task of mythologizing him. Sylvia Plath is now a myth according to The Herald several dozen other online sources and yet I found this sentence on the ironically short-lived site The Myth of Sylvia Plath interesting:

[H]er tabloid-worthy life and tragic end can not and should not define her: a deeper look into her work and those who read and study it show a constantly morphing poet who defies categorization.

They’re right. Her death shouldn’t define her and there will be a few lucky individuals who’ll encounter her poetry and not know anything about her but once they do it’ll be hard not to reassess what they’ve read; the need to look at it again with different eyes will be hard.

 

Which brings me to Édouard Levé. In the Afterword Jan Steyn, the book’s English translator, writes:

Édouard Levé committed suicide on October 15, 2007. Ten days earlier he had given a manuscript to his editor; it was a novel entitled Suicide, the same you hold in your hands.

Suicide’s reception in France has been deeply influenced by the circumstances of the author’s death. Although it is a fictional work, written in the second person about a friend of the narrator’s who had committed suicide twenty years earlier, its title and subject matter ensure that, despite reports that Levé did leave a suicide note, the present text is taken as a sort of literary explanation of his decision to die.

Levé was forty-two when he died and every line of Suicide makes us wonder why.

Your suicide has become the foundational act…Your final second changed your life in the eyes of others. You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different character than the one he appeared to be playing.

I was lucky. I’d forgotten all about Levé’s suicide by the time I got round to reading the book. I never thought for a second that the author of the book I was reading might be dead due to anything other than misfortune or natural causes. Now I see it all in a very different light but rather than looking for a reason—which may or may not be there—I was struck by his awareness of how others would react to his death:

Your mother cried for you when she learned of your death. She cried for you every day until your burial. She cried for you alone, in her husband’s arms, in the arms of your brother and your sister, in the arms of her mother and your wife. She cried for you during the ceremony, following your coffin to the cemetery, and during your inhumation. When friends, many of them, came to present their condolences, she cried for you. With every hand that she shook, with every kiss she received, she again saw fragments of your past, of the days she believed you to be happy. Faced with your death, scenarios of what you could have lived or experienced with these people, gave them a feeling of immense loss: you had, by your suicide, saddened your past and abolished your future. Your mother cried for you in the days following your funeral, and she cried for you again, alone, whenever she thought of you. Years later, there are many, like her, whose tears flow whenever they think of you.

One of the things they say to potential suicides is, “Think of others.” That might be a spouse or a parent or a sibling or even work or classmates. Well, clearly, even if Suicide is not Levé’s actual suicide note it does show that he was aware of the potential—dare I say inevitable?—consequences of his actions. Another thing people say—although they don’t usually get to say it to the person they’d most like to—is that suicide is a selfish act. It is on one level but the real question is: Is selfishness necessarily a bad thing? That’s one I’ve struggled with my whole life. Here’s what the narrator thinks his friend’s thoughts might have been on the matter:

This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s painful commotion.

No one would suggest for a moment that suicide is an ideal solution to life’s problems. It’s a desperate measure. Here are twenty-seven thoughts culled from Reddit on a very divisive subject.

 

As far as books go Suicide doesn’t sound like it’d be much fun to read and it was never going to win Comedic Novel of the Year 2008 but it’s not all doom and gloom. It focuses mostly on a life lived and what it’s like to be different. And the extrapolated/imaginary “you” we get to know is most definitely different and interesting and puzzling. In The Rules of Attraction Bret Easton Ellis wrote: “What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.” This is why we don’t get why most people kill themselves. Because we’re not in their heads. Because we could never be in their heads. There are no answers in Suicide. The real questions we should be asking are, perhaps, a little clearer though.

 

The Afterword is particularly helpful if you’ve not read anything else by Levé (which most of us won’t have although Autoportrait and Works have since been translated) because it helps us understand the kind of man he was and how all his prose works are interlinked—Autoportrait, for example, includes the opening scene of Suicide—and probably could/should be read as a single text. Not that I expect it would make things much clearer. To illustrate: Levé was also a photographer and might even be better known for that than for his writing. He produced a series called Pornography in which his models position themselves in the kinds of poses you’d expect from a work called Pornography with one exception—they’re all fully clothed. He did a similar thing with the series Rugby (a photo from which was used for the Folio edition of Suicide). Another series called Homonyms consists of neutral frontal portraits of “ordinary” people who happen to share a name with someone famous. Expectation thwarted seems to be a thing with Levé. Amérique, published in 2006, comprised of images of arbitrary parts of obscure American towns named after grander world cities like Florence, Berlin, Amsterdam or Paris.

 

For the record Levé didn’t shoot himself in a basement. He hung himself in his Paris apartment after receiving confirmation that Suicide was going to be published.

 

  Further Reading

In Search of Édouard
Loevenbruck: photographs
533 Ideas: The conceptual, playful, maddening books of Édouard Levé
Seven Questions for Translator Jan Steyn on Edouard Leve’s Suicide

#732

An Early Fall

My feelings are leaves and it's Autumn.
Why do you tear them down?
Why won't you let the winds of change do their job?
They do it well.

Why hasten the Winter when Spring is so long in coming?
 

On the whole I’d say I’m quite good at letting go. At first I wasn’t—none of us are at first—but I learned although not quickly. Life is cyclical and it’s best to enjoy the moment even though you know it’s going to end. This has a sort of anti-O.-Henry feel. In ‘The Last Leaf’ an old painter paints a leaf on an ivy vine to give a dying girl hope. In my version someone clambers up the stepladder and tears off the last few, in modern parlance ripping off the Band Aid. I’m not sure this poem’s about any specific event. I’m just watching something come to an end too quickly for my taste.

#731

The Present

She made me a present of the past.
I had one already but it wasn't much of one.
The memories had got a bit dusty from lack of use.
One or two had even disappeared.
They're probably still boxed-up in the loft.
Or maybe they got given away when we moved.


6 April 1991
 
 

The only thing I have from B., the only thing she gifted me, is her copy of The Faber Book of Modern Verse. Everything else I took, mainly photographs. Taking’s not stealing, not exactly—it’s not as if I was lurking in the bushes—but taking’s not receiving. When you take something you don’t generally ask permission. Most of what I got from B. I took. She gave me her time, yes; she gave me hugs; she gave me trust; she gave me a reason to keep going… No. No, I took that.

 

I don’t have a loft. All my photos of her are in an Iron Mountain storage box in a cupboard in Carrie’s office. I had reason to go through the box about a year ago and, as you do, ended up looking at every picture in it. There are no photos of the two of us. That was remiss of me. I should’ve found a way to wangle that; it wouldn’t have been hard. My favourite was taken in Edinburgh, a posed photo and the image of her I hold in my head. I got a copy professionally framed and gave it to her mother.

#730

A Return to Orwell's Café

There was very little on the board to play with
apart from love.
She'd used him before but never to any great effect.
He was always last to go.

The glasses were still empty.
There was no meaning left to it all
as I peered in the window.


6 April 1991
 

This is a follow-on to ‘Orwell’s Café’ (#592). When I wrote this I was thinking about the scene in the final chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens. Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the café.

[…]

A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him.

This is where Michael Radford’s film adaptation (staring John Hurt), the extremely popular 1954 BBC version (staring Peter Cushing) and the 1956 adaptation (staring Edmond O'Brien) all differ from the novel. In the book as Winston’s sitting alone in the café he remembers his last meeting with Julia is in “the Park”:

He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest in him. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.

The 1956 film comes the closest but you’d hardly call the setting a park—just a few isolated trees and benches (more of a garden than a park)—although it is March and so you’d expect it to be bare. In this version Winston finds himself in the park and notices Julia sitting by a tree. So it’s very much an accidental encounter.  

 

 

The 1954 version is set in the café. Julia’s already seated when Winston arrives and is shown to her table as if he’s been expected but he's surprised to see her there. No chess set and the waiter’s a bit too chatty for my taste. In this version the couple both look as if they’ve been through the mill; Winston walks with a limp and Julia seems like she’s aged twenty years.

 

 

In the 1984 adaptation—what most people regard as the definitive version—it’s Winston who’s in the café with a chess set in front of him when Julia arrives. He thanks her for coming and so clearly he’s gone out of his way to make contact. That bothers me because although they talk about meeting again we know (and they know) they never will, not purposefully in any case, so the idea that he’s arranged a reunion doesn’t quite work.

 

 

I can understand why scriptwriters do what they do—their time’s limited—and so we shouldn’t be surprised when they try to do two things at once but what’s missing from them all films is Winston’s sudden and urgent need to get back to the café:

He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the everflowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer recognizable from behind.

I can imagine Hurt acting the above scene and I’m a little sad it was lost even if I do understand why.