The Anatomy Lesson

The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is. – Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson

 

“The Anatomy Lesson is about the imprisonment of self-absorption, of inscribing the guilt in the flesh; it is also about hurting fathers and needing their blessings.” So wrote Alan Cooper in Philip Roth and the Jews. He’s not wrong but it’s about much more and being Jewish at the end of the twentieth century is certainly a focal point (Roth may not be the quintessential Jewish writer but he’s certainly never managed to escape his Jewishness); it’s about self-identity (and especially loss of self-esteem), grief, remorse, celebrity (which isn’t quite the same as either fame or infamy), sensitivity, purposelessness and, according to Roth himself writing in Reading Myself and Other Stories, “physical pain and the havoc it wrecks on one’s human credentials.” For me, however, the book is quite simply about that cliché of all clichés: a novelist with writer’s block. It’s a subject I address in my own novel, The More Things Change, where my protagonist complains, “Someone should invent a new word, wroter, past tense of writer, one who once wrote but no longer writes.” That sentence could be slipped seamlessly into The Anatomy Lesson.

 

Roth puts it baldly: “[Zuckerman] had nothing left to write, and with nothing to write, no reason to be.” If you’re not a writer what are you? Many people aren’t writers and get by just fine. Most people aren’t writers but writing’s like sex—and Roth’s had a lot to say on the subject over the years—once you’ve had a taste you can’t claim your virginity back:

[W]hat became colossal was the next page. He thought he had chosen life but what he had chosen was the next page. Stealing time to write stories, he never thought to wonder what time might be stealing from him. Only gradually did the perfecting of a writer’s iron will begin to feel like the evasion of experience, and the means to imaginative release, to the exposure, revelation, and invention of life, like the sternest form of incarceration. He thought he’d chosen the intensification of everything and he’d chosen monasticism and retreat instead. Inherent in this choice was a paradox that he had never foreseen. When, some years later, he went to see a production of Waiting for Godot, he said afterwards to the woman who was then his lonely wife, “What’s so harrowing? It’s any writer’s ordinary day. Except you don’t get Pozzo and Lucky.”

Again, it’s as I wrote in The More Things Change: “Writers don’t have lives. They have on-going research” or as Terence Davies has Emily Dickinson tell her sister-in-law in A Quiet Passion: “You have a life, I have a routine.”

 

Nathan Zuckerman’s routine, at the start of The Anatomy Lesson, is nothing less than stultifying:

When he could no longer bear sitting up, he stretched supine upon the playmat, his head supported by Roget’s Thesaurus. He’d come to conduct most of the business of his waking life on the playmat. From there, no longer laden with an upper torso or saddled with fifteen pounds of head, he made phone calls, received visitors, and followed Watergate on TV.

[…]

Writing the last page of a book was as close as he’d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn’t happened in four years. He couldn’t remember when he’d written a readable page.

Zuckerman has been in pain for eighteen months. Why he’s been unable to write for the previous thirty months is another matter particularly since he’d had no problem writing for the twenty years prior to that. In fact most people would’ve described him as a successful novelist especially following the furore that accompanied publication of his latest and best-known novel, Carnovsky.

 

As everyone knows (or assumes) Roth is Zuckerman and Carnovsky is Portnoy's Complaint, the novel that turned Roth into an overnight celebrity, sparking a storm of controversy over its explicit and candid treatment of sexuality—containing detailed depictions of masturbation using various props including an empty milk bottle, a sock, a baseball mitt and, famously, a piece of liver—coupled with its irreverent portrait of Jewish identity (at one point he famously screams at his therapist: “LET'S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!”) but as Roth was quick to remind the journalist Daniel Sandstrom, “Whoever looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer’s ‘thoughts’ violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel.”

 

In the real world Portnoy’s Complaint, despite having its fans, was not, as you can well imagine, universally praised. Far from it. On 31 March 1969 the National Literature Board of Review deemed it “‘obscene,’ ‘filthy’, and entirely inappropriate for Australian readers” [their punctuation] and it was classified as a prohibited import. Even reviews of the book were targeted by the censor. Private imports of the book were also confiscated. In The Anatomy Lesson we learn that Carnovsky has received its harshest review from the critic Milton Appel:

Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn’t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.

Zuckerman never quite recovers from the assault and since he can’t work on fiction finds himself obsessing over Appel:

[L]ong after the reasonable quarter hour had passed, he remained shocked and outraged and hurt, not so much by Appel’s reconsidered judgment as by the polemical overkill, the exhaustive reprimand that just asked for a fight. This set Zuckerman’s teeth on edge. It couldn’t miss.

What brings things to a head is an offhand remark made by Appel in a letter to Zuckerman’s friend Ivan Felt:

Why don’t you ask your friend Nate Zuckerman to write something on behalf of Israel for the Times Op Ed page? He could surely get in there. If I come out in support of Israel there, that’s not exactly news; it’s expected. But if Zuckerman came out with a forthright statement, that would be news of a kind, since he has prestige with segments of the public that don’t care for the rest of us. Maybe he has spoken up on this but if so I haven’t seen it. Or does he still feel that, as his Carnovsky says, the Jews can stick their historical suffering up their ass? (And yes, I know that there’s a difference between characters and authors; but I also know that grown-ups should not pretend that it’s quite the difference they tell their students it is.) Anyway, brushing aside my evident hostility to his view on these matters, which is neither here nor there, I honestly believe that if he were to come out publicly, it would be of some interest. I think we’re at the point where the whole world is getting ready to screw the Jews. At such points even the most independent of souls might find it worth saying a word.

Unwisely Felt forwards a copy of the letter to Zuckerman and this proves to be something of a tipping point. From then until the end of the book Zuckerman goes into free-fall. All writers struggle with self-doubt—as Zuckerman puts it, “[D]oubt is half a writer’s life. Two-thirds. Nine-tenths. Another day, another doubt. The only thing I never doubted was the doubt”—and one day we’re all convinced it’ll win. Zuckerman decides to give up on writing and, at the late age of forty and with no talent for (or interest in) science, to go to medical school (his father who died in the previous novel, Zuckerman Unbound, had been an obstetrician):

A year’s grind as an undergraduate, four of medical studies, three of residency and at forty-eight he’d be ready to open an office. That would give him twenty-five years in practice—if he could depend on his health. It was the change of professions that would restore his health. The pain would just dwindle away…

While he’s waiting on the dwindling beginning pain killers, vodka and marijuana would have to suffice:

Percodan was to Zuckerman what sucking stones were to Molloy—without ’em he couldn’t go on.

No sooner has the suggestion been made, though, than we readers know he’s going to fail and fail dismally. The real question is: Will he ever write again? As the actor in Roth’s 2009 novel The Humbling (who has a similar problem (he’s lost his “magic”)) notes, “The reconstruction of a life ha[s] to begin somewhere.” That somewhere is usually rock bottom and Zuckerman hits it face first and I’m not being metaphorical.

 

Interestingly, Roth writes, again in Reading Myself and Others, that he included the character of Milton Appel in the book “not … because I was once demolished in print by Irving Howe [but] because half of being a writer is being indignant. And being right. […] Show me a writer who isn’t furious about being misrepresented, misread, or unread, and who isn’t sure he’s right.” I get where he’s coming from—I would be lying if I said I didn’t—but most of us suffer the slaps and bite our tongues. Were it not for the pain and his attempts to self-medicate no doubt Zuckerman would’ve done so too—seethe for, as he puts it, “fifteen minutes” and then get on with the next book. 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint was followed in quick succession by Our Gang (1971), The Breast (1972) and The Great American Novel (1972) so, yes, there are autobiographical elements to this book but only as a springboard, nothing more. Zuckerman is “an act.” As Roth explains, “Céline pretended to be a rather indifferent, even irresponsible physician when he seems in fact to have worked hard at his practice and to have been conscientious about his patients. But that wasn’t interesting.”

 

If he hadn’t decided to name the book The Anatomy Lesson a good title would’ve been Referred Pain. The epigraph to the novel, taken from the Textbook of Orthopaedic Medicine by James Cyriax, M.D., states: “The chief obstacle to correct diagnosis in painful conditions is the fact that the symptom is often felt at a distance from its source.” It’s a good choice because although it’s undeniable that Zuckerman is in pain the source of that pain proves elusive:

Since the pains had begun in earnest eighteen months before, he’d waited his tum in the offices of three orthopaedists, two neurologists, a physiotherapist, a rheumatologist, a radiologist, an osteopath, a vitamin doctor, an acupuncturist, and now the analyst.

Oh, and a decent old dolorologist he bumps into whilst waiting in line to cash a cheque.

 

The pain stops him in his tracks and forces him to look at himself and in particular at the validity of his chosen profession. Why do we write? I suspect all writers fall into two camps, the storytellers and the answer seekers. I’m firmly one of the latter and I suspect Roth is, too, from what he says at the start of his Paris Review interview given shortly after publishing The Anatomy Lesson. He writes it out and in doing so (hopefully) the true source of the pain or the itch or the niggle or whatever the hell’s bugging him comes to light and can be exorcised. “Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening;” he says in the interview, “fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.” The Anatomy Lesson is certainly not a kneejerk response to the mixed reviews Portnoy’s Complaint got—fourteen years separate the two books—but when reading this I was reminded of Eric Morecombe who kept a newspaper clipping from 1954 in his wallet that read: “Definition of the week:- TV Set: The box they buried Morecambe and Wise in.” Things like that don’t go away:

Everybody wants to make pain interesting—first the religions, then the poets, then, not to be left behind, even the doctors getting in on the act with their psychosomatic obsession. They want to give it significance. What does it mean? What are you hiding? What are you showing? It's impossible to suffer just the pain, you have to suffer its meaning. But it's not interesting and it has no meaning—it's just plain stupid pain, it’s the opposite of interesting…

I related very strongly to this book. Not to all of it. But most of it. You don’t have to be a writer to get it. The fundamental fear the book tackles is one everyone can understand (e.g. when someone is diagnosed with some form of dementia): what if you can no longer be you?

 

This is my tenth Roth and my fifth Zuckerman novel. Oddly enough I’ve never read Portnoy’s Complaint although I did locate a copy of the 1972 film adaptation featuring Richard Benjamin which I didn’t think much of and did nothing to encourage me to check out the source material. I will, however, keep plodding my way through the remaining Zuckerman novels.

 

And just as an aside (for those few who might’ve read my novel The More Things Change) when Jim notices the copy of The Anatomy Lesson on his bookshelf it is not the Roth novel despite the fact Jim is also a forty-year-old writer who can’t write. When I wrote the first draft of the novel I hadn’t read anything by Philip Roth. What I’m actually referencing is the Saga of the Swamp Thing comic by Alan Moore.

The Meursault Investigation

[T]he absurdity of my condition … consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly. – Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

I was probably eighteen the first time I read The Outsider. Knowing me I picked it up because it was a slim volume—that and I related to the title (could never quite get used to Americans calling it The Stranger but if you’ve ever wondered why the difference you might want to check out this Guardian article). I’ve read it since—twice, I think—and unlike some of the books I relished in my teens, like Catcher in the Rye, it’s a book I found I grew into rather than away from, but even on a first read I knew this one was a bit special and so dashed out and bought The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague, The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom (books were a lot cheaper back then)—they’ve all got something but I can see why for most people The Outsider stands out although I do have a soft spot for The Plague.

 

As soon as I heard about The Meursault Investigation I knew I wanted to read it but expected to be disappointed. I’m delighted to report I wasn’t; far from it in fact. Of course it’s been done before—to my mind most notably in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead but also in Wild Sargasso Sea, Mary Reilly and Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—minor characters are given a voice but few authors have had as little to work with as Kamel Daoud. His novel focuses on “the Arab”, the man Meursault shoots on the beach in The Outsider. What do we know about him for sure? That he wore blue dungarees; that he had a friend who played “a reed,” that he owned a knife and on at least one occasion in his life lounged on a beach. Not much. Even calling him “the Arab” isn’t especially helpful. It would be like a soldier in the British Raj talking about “the Indian” because at the time of the shooting this was French Algeria, one of France's longest-held overseas territories, and it continued as such until 1962. As Daoud points out:

Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes. In our neighbourhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period.

In even the poorest crime novel we generally find out something about the victim. Who he or she was matters. It goes to motive. Detectives do like to arrest criminals but I suspect solving a crime involves more than identifying the guilty party. It’s not enough to know who and how but in Meursault’s case the why ends up focusing on his character and in particular his relationship—or lack thereof—with his recently-deceased mother. It almost feels as if that is why he ends up being condemned to death and the murder of the Arab is evidence of that. Much has been written about this and I’m not going to add to the screeds out there.

 

When I first read about Daoud’s book I assumed we were going to go back in time and get the Arab’s story up to the point where he gets shot. Not so. The narrator is his brother who was seven at the time; now he’s in his eighties. An investigator—or reporter or student (it’s never quite clear)—tracks him down in Oran where he lives and over the course of several days (and many glasses of wine) listens to his story. At first I was ready to be disappointed until I could see where Daoud was going with this. Our narrator—who we learn is called Harun (Aaron)—has in many respects taken on the mantle of his dead brother, Musa (Moses), or at least become custodian of the dead man’s memory. (In the Bible Aaron acts as spokesman for his brother.) No, ‘taken on’ is too weak. He’s been forced by his grief-stricken mother to become his brother for all intents and purposes—“my mother imposed on me a strict duty of reincarnation”—although the more we get to know him, the ‘him’ Harun describes for us—the more we realise he actually comes to have in common with Meursault:

I was looking for traces of my brother in the book, and what I found there instead was my own reflection, I discovered I was practically the murderer’s double.

The book he’s referring to is a novel entitled The Other although who exactly the author is is unclear. At one point it seems to be Meursault who must’ve been either pardoned or jailed because the brother says, “When the murderer leaves prison, he writes a book that becomes famous, in which he recounts how he stood up to God, a priest, and the absurd” but that contradicts what he says elsewhere: “Why the murderer was so relaxed after being sentenced to death and even after his execution…” [italics mine] Maybe ‘Meursault’ is a non de plume.

 

Clearly, though, Harun is an unreliable narrator and concedes as much when he talks about his relationship with the student Meriem (the girl from Constantine who, in 1963, first introduces him to the book), which he admits to elaborating—“[I]t’s a big fib. From beginning to end. The scene’s too perfect; I made it all up,” later adding:

Do you find my story suitable? It’s all I can offer you. It’s my word. I’m Musa’s brother or nobody’s. Just a compulsive liar you met with so you could fill up your notebooks … It’s your choice, my friend.

That’s the problem with eyewitness testimony. It’s so easy to cast doubt on it. And the more you think about it the less you can trust the “facts” but, of course, neither he nor his mother were eyewitnesses and so all they’re left with are their imaginings. “As a child, I was allowed to hear only one story at night,” he recounts, “one deceptively wonderful tale. It was the story of Musa, my murdered brother, who took a different form every time, according to my mother’s mood.” His mother keeps newspaper clippings “religiously folded in her bosom” and, once her son has learned to read French, insists he read and reread them to her:

“Here, take another look, see if they don’t say something else, something you didn’t understand before.” That went on for almost ten years, that routine.

[…]

With two paragraphs, I had to find a body, some alibis, and some accusations. It was a way of continuing Mama’s investigations, her search for Zujj [Zoudj is Algerian Arabic for two], my twin. That led to a strange book—which I perhaps should have written out, as a matter of fact, if I’d had your hero’s gift—a counter-investigation. I crammed everything I could between the lines of those two brief newspaper items, I swelled their volume until I made them a cosmos. And so Mama got a complete imaginary reconstruction of the crime, including the colour of the sky, the circumstances, the words exchanged between the victim and his murderer, the atmosphere in the courtroom, the policemen’s theories, the cunning of the pimp and the other witnesses, the lawyers’ pleas … Well, I can talk about it like that now, but at the time it was an incredibly disordered jumble, a kind of Thousand and One Nights of lies and infamy. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, but most often I was proud. I was giving my mother what she’d searched for in vain in the cemeteries and European neighbourhoods of Algiers. That production — an imaginary book for an old woman who had no words—lasted a long time.

So this is where the confabulation begins. Needless to say when he learns of the existence of the novel Harun says nothing to his mother. By then she’s quit pestering him with the clippings. She may even have finally thrown them away. Why stir her up needlessly? Because it’s only a novel. Yes, only a novel. Not the truth. At least not the whole truth.

And here, we come to an interesting twist in literary reception of both The Stranger and The Meursault Investigation: it’s important to note that, when the Algerian audience discusses The Stranger, Meursault and Camus are often seen as one and the same. As noted at the recent Contemporary French Civilization at 40 conference, in Algeria, The Stranger is understood to be a roman à clef if not outright confessional memoir. – Jennifer Solheim, ‘The Art of Making Ghosts Live: on The Meursault Investigation’, Fiction Writer’s Review

Memoirs passed off as novels are not unknown and semiautobiographical novels are downright commonplace. Is it possible, is it just possible, that Camus shot a man on a beach in Algiers and got away with it? Imagine if that were true and you were the victim’s brother. Wouldn’t you want to understand how he could’ve done it? And what would be the best way to do that? To do the same? Surely no one would go out of his way to gun down a total stranger simply to get some kind of closure:

These days, I’m so old that I often tell myself, on nights when multitudes of stars are sparkling in the sky, there must necessarily be something to be discovered from living so long. Living, what an effort! At the end, there must necessarily be, there has to be, some sort of essential revelation. It shocks me, this disproportion between my insignificance and the vastness of the cosmos. I often think there must be something all the same, something in the middle between my triviality and the universe!

But often enough I backslide, I start roaming the beach with a pistol in my fist, scouting around for the first Arab who looks like me so I can kill him.

Well that’s not what happens; something else does; one day, the very next day after the Algerian War of Independence ends, he gets his chance to fill Meursault’s shoes. What would you do? This book may well have started off as one thing but it soon becomes its own thing and it doesn’t matter if you’ve never read The Outsider or seen the 1967 film version (which I recall being quite good) or even heard of Camus; it stands on its own feet. Granted its fragmented and sometimes repetitive approach to storytelling may not be to everyone’s tastes but it’s appropriate to the subject matter.

 

One of the major themes in The Outsider is Meursault’s take on God. These days we accept atheism as a norm—I’m always a bit sceptical when I read that two-thirds of the UK population identifies as Christian and wonder where they’re all hiding—but in 1942 things were quite different. In The Outsider Meursault is interrogated by the examining magistrate in his office:

[B]efore I could get the words out, he had drawn himself up to his full height and was asking me very earnestly if I believed in God. When I said, “No,” he plumped down into his chair indignantly.

That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning. “Do you wish,” he asked indignantly, “my life to have no meaning?” Really I couldn't see how my wishes came into it, and I told him as much.

You can’t really imagine a conversation like that taking place nowadays. But what if these were Muslims? In The Meursault Investigation we discover that Harun has also come to question the faith into which he was born:

Sometimes I’m tempted to climb up that prayer tower, reach the level where the loudspeakers are hung, lock myself in, and belt out my widest assortment of invective and sacrilege. I long to list my impieties in detail. To bellow that I don’t pray, I don’t do my ablutions, I don’t fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine—and what’s more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I’m free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.

As you might appreciate lines like that did not sit well with some and a Facebook fatwa (issued by Abdelfatah Hamadache, a radical Islamist preacher in Algeria who leads an obscure Salafist group known as the Islamic Awakening Front) resulted. After filing a criminal complaint against the imam the man backed down but, as you can well imagine, the kerfuffle did nothing to harm the book’s sales. Hamadache was eventually sentenced to six months imprisonment by a court in Oran and fined 50,000 dinars ($460).

 

Some have suggested that The Meursault Investigation will become essential reading for students studying The Outsider. I can see that. It goes a long way to making Camus relevant in today’s increasingly absurd world and, of course, it continues Algeria’s story into the present giving not only “the Arab” but all “Arabs” a voice.

 

You can read an extract from the book here.

 

***

 

Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for the Quotidien d’Oran—the third largest French-language Algerian newspaper. His articles have appeared in Libération, Le Monde and Courrier International and are regularly reprinted around the world.

A finalist for the prix Goncourt, The Meursault Investigation won the prix François Mauriac and the prix des cinq-continents de la Francophonie. International rights to the novel have been sold in twenty countries and a film adaptation is supposedly slated for release later this year but I can find no details online.

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

Miss Christie Regrets

[L]et me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays’. – George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder

 

This is the fifth book by Guy Fraser-Sampson I’ve reviewed. The first three were his Mapp and Lucia novels Major Benjy, Lucia on Holiday and Au Reservoir. I enjoyed all of them and it was obvious Guy had read Benson’s original books with care because he mimicked Benson’s style perfectly although not slavishly. The fourth book was a detective novel, Death in Profile, which, while set in the present, was written in the style not of an individual author but a genre, the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction; so we’re talking of the likes of Agatha Christie (Poirot and Miss Marple), Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn), Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey) and Margery Allingham (Campion) to name the four Queens of Crime but there are plenty of others like, for example, Ronald Knox (creator of Miles Bredon) who argued that a detective story “must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.” [bold mine]

 

As I mentioned when I reviewed Death in Profile I really haven’t read much crime fiction at all but I have watched an awful lot of it on TV and still do. We’ve only just finished the last series of Father Brown (created by G. K. Chesterton) who predates the authors above but as Dale Ahlquist reminds us in his lecture ‘The Innocence of Father Brown’ “whenever you think of the great detectives of mystery fiction’s golden age—Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, or Nero Wolfe—remember their parentage. Remember that they had a father. His name was Father Brown.” Father Brown is not naïve but then neither is he cynical; he’s decent and thoughtful. Most importantly he’s observant. It’s what distinguishes detectives from readers of detective fiction because if the clues are “clearly presented” the reader should have every bit as much of a chance of solving the mystery as the detective even if we do mostly fail to put the pieces together. What’s irritating—and Christie’s particularly guilty of this—is holding back the vital clue right until the dénouement; that’s unfair. As Joan Acocella notes in an article in The New Yorker:

[I]n truth, the guessing that we are asked to do is almost fruitless, because the solution to the mystery typically involves a fantastic amount of background material that we’re not privy to until the end of the book, when the detective shares it with us. Christie’s novels crawl with impostors. Letty is not really Letty; she’s Lotty, the sister of Letty. And Hattie isn’t Hattie. She’s a piece of trash from Trieste, who, with her husband, Sir George, killed Hattie (who was also married to him) and assumed her identity. The investigator digs up this material but doesn’t tell anyone till the end.

Let me be clear then: everything you need to solve the first murder in Guy’s new novel is there on the page and if, like me, you can’t add two and two don’t gripe. The second murder is different in that the crime was committed in 1937. No one expects the murderer to even be alive. Or any witnesses. What keeps us interested in this second case is working out how it’s connected to the first and the link is tenuous: the first victim had been researching the building in which the corpse of the second victim is discovered. Surely though this is nothing more than a bizarre coincidence. As is pointed out in the novel, however, “[J]ust because there’s a coincidence doesn’t mean there’s a correlation […] Correlation is not causation.” That said, “Jung said that coincidence is all around us but … most of the time we don’t realise it.” Besides this is fiction. No one can sneeze in a novel without me thinking, Aha! Foreshadowing!

 

There’s no doubt that Agatha Christie is well-loved and if a new adaptation comes on the TV I always record it even when it’s one of popular ones and I can remember who did it. I’m always perfectly willing to suspend disbelief one more time and buy into her world view the same way as I do with Last of the Summer Wine or anything by PG Wodehouse. As John Banville notes in his contribution to a lengthy article on Christie in The Irish Times entitled ‘Agatha Christie: genius or hack?’:

Christie is certainly a kind of genius, but one cannot help feeling she would have been better off employed in Bletchley Park as a code-breaker, or working for a manufacturer of board games. Her plots, while highly ingenious, are also wildly improbable, if for no other reason than that the characters who drive them are not characters at all, but marionettes, jerking lifelessly on the ends of their all too visible strings. Her worst fault, however, is that we never feel the slightest twitch of sympathy for, or empathy with, the victim, lying there in the library in a neat puddle of blood. Who could possibly care?

In this respect Guy falls into line. The body in the library (actually it’s a museum) is never more than that, as is the body from 1937 which turns up in a suitcase. We learn bits and bobs about them, wee details necessary to keep us interested and also to misdirect us, but never for a second did I find myself caring about them. Neither is real. No one really died. They’re simply clues, a part of the puzzle.

 

The first murder is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to see one of the detectives on Death in Paradise being tasked with solving. We never witness the actual murder; a body is discovered, maybe a little blood, nothing gruesome like we’ve got used to in the likes of Dexter. There are only a handful of suspects and all have watertight alibis. In the building when the body was discovered we have Karen Willis and her boyfriend Peter Collins (both of whom were introduced in Death in Profile) who’ve visited the museum to see an exhibition of works by Constable and then we have the buttery staff; the assistant manager, Jack Bailey; his wife Sue and Professor Hugh Raffen. Since Karen Willis is a detective sergeant she’s immediately ruled out and can confirm where her boyfriend and everyone else in the buttery was at the time of the murder so we’re left with three possibilities unless a stranger happened to wander in, a “passing tramp,” for example, “a regular device in Golden Age detective fiction.” The victim is one Peter Howse and his only living relative turns out to be a nephew who has a decent motive and isn’t the slightest bit upset when he learns of his uncle’s passing but, of course, denies any involvement and the police have no way to place him at the scene of the crime or thereabouts.

 

Howse had been preparing an exhibition on the Isokon building on Lawn Road, Hampstead, a concrete block of thirty-four flats designed by architect Wells Coates which opened on 9 July 1934 as an experiment in minimalist urban living and is now widely recognised as one of the finest achievements of Modern Movement architecture. The building’s list of illustrious former residents includes Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and, surprise, surprise, Dame Agatha Christie. On the surface this seems of as little relevance to the murder enquiry as the fact Professor Raffen has been working on a book about Britain’s vanishing railways until that is a body is discovered behind a wall that shouldn’t have been there in a basement at the Isokon.

 

What follows is a police enquiry that’s probably far closer to a real life investigation than anything penned by Miss Christie or her contemporaries. If anything it’s a little dull and by the numbers which is what, I imagine, most police work is like: suspects are interviewed, doors knocked on, phone calls made, superiors kept appraised, lines of inquiry followed and dots joined. What is interesting is the more we learn about the 1937 murder the more light is shed on the death of Howse until the identity of the murderer becomes blindingly obvious and we all know to be wary of the obvious culprit in any murder mystery. There’s always someone early on in an investigation that we can point the finger at and it’s never him just like it’s never the narrator (Ronald Knox’s First Commandment of Detective Fiction) except in the case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where it was.

 

The problem with rules is that they encourage predictability. If a Chinaman appeared in any of Father Knox’s stories you could immediately rule him out (Rule #5) and so why bother with one? Rules also encourage expectation. One thing I hate about so much detective fiction is its formulaic nature. I know on TV if a show’s in two parts at the end of the first part we’ll very likely be left with a second death. What I liked about Guy’s handling of these two deaths is how he uses our preconceptions of how a Golden Age novel should play out to put one over on us.

 

The second murder is not the kind you normally associate with the Golden Age of detective fiction although I do have to wonder if Guy wasn’t tipping his hat to John Dickson Carr’s 1948 novel The Skeleton in the Clock when he decided to include a body in a suitcase. (Cold Case fiction has only really taken off in recent years thanks to advances in forensic science but even in the 1940s a medical examiner would’ve be able to tell if a skeleton’s feet were too big.) But there’s another thread introduced here. Once the corpse has been identified suddenly a whole new can of worms is opened: espionage and although spy novels are generally considered a separate genre there is some overlap; Agatha Christie herself wrote three full length spy novels, N or M?, Murder In Mesopotamia and They Came To Baghdad. A few reviewers have mentioned John le Carré’s name and I can see why but if you’re coming to this hoping for another Smiley’s People you’ll be disappointed; it has more in common with A Murder of Quality.

 

As I noted at the start of this article most detective writers tend to get associated with one character (or in Christie’s case two) and one of my concerns when I reviewed Death in Profile was this: “[W]hat we have here is an ensemble cast with no charismatic lead but that’s not really an issue because the story drifts from one character to the next seamlessly and efficiently like handing over a baton in a relay.” I did wonder if a shining star would come to the fore in the second novel but no one really stands out. I found myself lumping all the males into a single amorphous blob: the detective. It probably didn’t help that I could remember little or nothing of the first book although that’s nothing to do with Guy’s writing; I forget everything. There are numerous nods to the first novel and they did help jog my memory but not enough. At the start of the book the publisher has added this comment:

Miss Christie Regrets is the second volume of the Hampstead Mysteries. Readers are invited to sample the series in the correct order for maximum enjoyment.

I have to agree. Yes, the murder-solving stands alone but the relationships of the police officers have moved on and if you haven’t read the first book there’s room for confusion especially when it comes to the… let’s go with open love triangle… involving Karen Willis, Peter Collins and Bob Metcalfe. Romance subplots are common enough—and that is all this is—but it does serve to flesh out the characters a bit and it’s interesting to see them develop. Christ! They’re so British. I was somewhat sorry to see Guy was unable to utilise Peter Collins as much as he had in the first book. I’m a big fan of the oddball consultant—from Sherlock Holmes to Lucifer—but Collins really doesn’t get much chance to shine here. Maybe next time.

 

One thing I liked about Christie is that her characters age and so by the time we get to Curtain Poirot is an old man. In an interview in 2016 Guy talks a bit about his relationship with his characters:

One could get into a very arcane discussion about what is or is not a ‘series’. In my view it should be one long narrative spread across several books. Very few detective ‘series’ would qualify under this description, though Wallender might be an obvious one which does, mixing professional and personal issues. I can see the argument for writing stand-alone books featuring the same characters because then it doesn’t matter in which order people read them but again, I wanted to be different.

[…]

 I wanted to create a cast with whom the reader can empathise, and care about what happens to them as they go through life. In order to do this, you have to set them against a personal background. The more of the books you read, the more deeply you will understand, and hopefully like, the characters.

I do have to say that this book did feel as if it was a part of something bigger and not simply the second in an on-going series. I’m genuinely curious to see where these characters go. Several reviewers expressed regret at not having read Death in Profile first.

 

The book’s not perfect. I enjoyed all the nods to Golden Age authors although they felt a little strained at times as many had to be explained for the benefit of less-well-read colleagues. There’s nothing wrong with the book’s core mystery (ten out of ten there) but I think it could’ve done with one final run through before going to press. The Yorkshire Ripper case, for example, is mentioned four times and twice someone observes that people don’t usually crawl into suitcases to die. There are perhaps, too, too many adverbs for modern readers’ tastes. No one simply says anything. They say it “ruefully,” “savagely,” “mournfully,” “resignedly,” “diffidently” or even “jocularly.” The biggest problem I had though was with the copyediting. There were dozens—and I do not exaggerate—of errors: periods instead of commas, apostrophes the wrong way round, extra spaces, miscellaneous problems with quotes, times written without colons to separate hours and minutes and even three bona fide typos that I noticed. This was in the e-book and it’s always possible that an old version was uploaded but I found them terribly distracting.

 

The third book in the series, A Whiff of Cyanide, will be released on 2 June 2017 and I’m quite looking forward to it.

 

***

 

Guy Fraser-Sampson is an established writer, previously best known for his Mapp and Lucia novels, which have been featured on BBC Radio 4 and optioned by BBC television. His debut work of detective fiction, Death in Profile, the first in the Hampstead Murders series has drawn high praise from fellow crime writers as well as from readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

He currently works as a board adviser (and sometimes invests in) various entrepreneurial businesses, and has previously held various senior level investment positions, including a spell as Investment Controller with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and ran for several years the international operations of a leading US fund manager. For the past several years he has been designing and teaching a number of post-graduate modules at Cass Business School in the City of London.

 

Guy appears regularly on radio and television in the UK and is also in demand as a keynote and after dinner speaker.

 

He is married with two grown-up sons and divides his time between London (NW3 naturally) and East Sussex.

Dear Reflection: I Never Meant to be a Rebel

Autobiography is fiction, and fiction is autobiography. Factual truth is irrelevant to autobiography. – Robert Elbaz

 

Before we get into my article here’s a short blog post from Jessica from March 2010 to set the scene:

Many meaningful memories meander through my mind, but as I jot them down, I fear they will subconsciously mutate, malfunction, morph into fiction rather than fact. Especially when I retrace the times that made me miserable, I frantically fight off fate's fundamental message to me, in fear that I may feel its familiar unfathomable fiery force again. If only there was a way to write these memories down, and maintain a fictitious distance from them, my memoir wouldn't make me miserable, it would make me motivated to tell others my story.

As a fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Browning (as she was still known at the time) wrote in her second autobiographical essay, ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, “To be one's own chronicler is a task generally dictated by extreme vanity…” and I guess that’s the first obstacle any prospective autobiographer has to overcome: “Why would anyone be interested in your life?” If there’s one question I would ask anybody contemplating starting a memoir or a full-blown autobiography that would be it because it doesn’t matter what we’ve been through there will be someone out there whose story will completely eclipse ours. That doesn’t invalidate what we’ve experienced but it should make us question its greater worth. Of course it’s natural—healthy, even—for us to examine own lives and to spend some time (although maybe not too much time) mulling over our choices and there’s nothing inherently wrong in committing our conclusions to paper (because we forget so quickly) but, seriously, who else bar a few close family members cares what we did when we were wee?

 

The dedication to Jessica Bell’s memoir is:

For everyone except myself.

This struck me as odd and intriguing. Most writers no matter what they say write for themselves first and foremost—writing is all about self-expression after all—and if others appreciate it and, even better, are willing to pay to read what you’ve written then you’ve won a watch. Like Will Self said in this 2012 Guardian article:

I don't really write for readers. I think that's the defining characteristic of being serious as a writer. I mean, I've said in the past I write for myself. That's probably some kind of insane egotism but I actually think that's the only way to proceed—to write what you think you have to write. I write desperately trying to keep myself amused or engaged in what I'm doing and in the world.

Having known Jessica Bell for several years and having read most of her books the one thing I can say about her is that’s she’s serious about her writing and (mostly) her writing is serious (without being sombre) so I don’t buy for a minute that this memoir is something others badgered her into writing or she’s dashed off to make a quick euro; this was something she needed to do and now she’s done with it maybe others will be able to get something from it. As she said in this interview:

I definitely write for myself, and THEN try to figure out how to market it to readers. I’m a strong believer in the notion that if you do not write for yourself, your work will not be your best. Any creative endeavour has to come from an honest place in order for people to be able to relate to it. That’s my opinion anyway.

The writing was for her; the finished book is for us. It’s clearly a project she’s been struggling with for years. As she told Zoe Courtman in 2010, “I’m having difficulty with my memoir at the moment … I just don’t want to be in it.”

 

All intentions selfish or unselfish aside there’s a problem with autobiography, several problems really. Can a writer be honest when he writes? Dostoyevsky thought not. In Notes from Underground he maintains that “a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself.” Even if an author doesn’t deliberately set out to misrepresent the facts does not the written text nevertheless become an interpretation of the past as opposed to faithful recollection? The person writing about their experiences is not the person who went through them. But even let’s say an author can be honest, ought he to be honest (and, if so, how honest) and does he even want to be honest? (Despite what we were taught as children honesty is not always the best policy.) Autobiography is never merely a recording of what we did and where; it invariably involves commenting on, explaining, justifying or trying to excuse our life choices. Confession is more than mere disclosure. It seeks absolution or at very least understanding.

 

I was looking at a WikiHow site a while back; a post entitled How to Write an Autobiography, where I was rather surprised to find this subheading under ‘Crafting a Narrative’: “Create an overarching plot.” Novels have plots. Lives have chronologies. Both leave a lot to be desired. In Jessica’s case she boils thirty-five years down to less than 300 pages. In condensing a breadth of experience confabulation must arise. But is that necessarily a bad thing? She concentrates on telling a specific story and leaves out what she thinks isn’t pertinent. She hasn’t gone as far as novelising her life but in her opening ‘Note from the Author’ she nevertheless admits:

While all the events in this book are true, on some occasions I have been creative with the way they play out due to my inability to recall specific details. I have instead filled these gaps in memory with what I assume would be the most logical and fitting details in relation to the era and circumstances. […] In some cases I have compressed or merged events; in others I have made two or three people into one.

This reminded me immediately of another Australian writer. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James would’ve been the first book by an Australian I read and probably the first memoir I ever read, too. He, likewise, admitted up front that his book played lip service to the truth:

Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel. On the periphery, names and attributes of real people have been changed and shuffled so as to render identification impossible. Nearer the centre, important characters have been run through the scrambler or else left out completely. So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like truth. All you can be sure of is one thing: careful as I have been to spare other people’s feelings, I have been even more careful not to spare my own. Up, that is, of course, to a point. […] I am also well aware that all attempts to put oneself in a bad light are doomed to be frustrated. The ego arranges the bad light to its own satisfaction. But on that point it is only necessary to remember Santayana’s devastating comment on Rousseau’s Confessions [regarded by some as the starting point of modern autobiography], which he said demonstrated, in equal measure, candour and ignorance of self.

All I can say from a personal point of view is that I’ve never written a book I’ve intended to and I’m pretty sure that’ll be the case with most authors; we’re never as in control as we like to think we are. The real issue with life writing is truthfulness. Not truthiness. Can you be truthful without telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Well, of course you can. In her 1979 article ‘Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?’ Ursula Le Guin wrote, “[F]antasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true.” Imagination and truth are not so incompatible. Far from it. In her memoir Jessica imagines (literally fantasises, from the Greek phantazesthai which means "picture to oneself") how things might’ve happened and she admits she may have got more than a few details wrong but her intent clearly was to head in the right direction; to be truthful. As Janina Bauman puts it in her essay ‘Memory and Imagination: Truth in Autobiography’: “[I]magination helped by a sense of probability: it could have been so.”

 

According to Denis Ledoux, who runs a website called The Memoir Network, “People read memoirs to learn to be better or happier or more contributory people.” It’s a thought. I’m not sure it’s as simple as that or maybe it’s simpler still; maybe it’s plain nosiness. What I do have to agree with is what Jennifer S. Wilkov had to say in her article for The Huffington Post, ‘No One Wants to Read Your Diary’:

        While your personal life story may be an unbelievable one, how you craft it, how you tell it, and how you share the development of the main character—meaning you—is of utmost importance.

         The reason why many memoirs don’t get picked up by major publishers is because they fall short of this important distinction: no one wants to read your diary; they want to read your story.

At first I wondered if this was the hurdle where Jessica’s book might fail because from the off she uses the classic ‘Dear Diary’ format. Okay she doesn’t say, “Dear Diary,” she goes with, “Dear Reflection,” and it’s hard to draw any distinction at first but there is one, a significant one because her reflection talks back. It’s a contrivance, a literary device; it never happened. It works though. Her reflection is often scathing, accusatory, rude, challenging and insulting but on occasion she provides the voice of reason.

 

Here’s another problem though. Readers, not authors, are the ones who supply meanings. I’ve lived a very different life to Jessica and her family and so the problem she faced—indeed the problem every author faces—was how to minimise the… let’s just go with ‘damage’… the damage a reader could do whilst struggling to relate to the characters and events on the page. In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, psychologists Michael White and David Epston maintain, “Since we cannot know objective reality, all knowing requires an act of interpretation.” What right do I have to validate a text when the experience was never mine to begin with? All I can possibly be left with is an idea of what Jessica went through. Let me give you an example. Both Jessica and I are depressives. In her book she mentions depression a few times assuming that’s all we need to understand. But if you’ve never been depressed-with-a-capital-d you really have no idea and her experiences of depression are markedly different to mine; for one I’ve never felt suicidal. In the mid-nineties she says she was plagued with “constant thoughts of suicide”—“[t]he only thing that prevented me from taking suicide one hundred per cent seriously was music,” she writes—although in this article from 2014, ‘But That’s Not “Real” Depression’, she opens with, “Sometimes I get told that I’m not ‘really’ depressed because I am not suicidal…” so one can only assume that her symptoms have changed over the years as did mine; people think about autism as a spectrum so why not depression? Either that or she remembers adolescence as being worse than it was. I suspect it’s the former because when describing a bout of separation anxiety in the 2000s she realises:

        It wasn’t my usual depression in which I felt worthless, and it definitely didn’t make me want to commit suicide.

        This sadness was manic.

        Like I was going through this torturous thing, can’t you see, can’t you see, and why isn’t anyone trying to help me find a solution? Why isn’t anyone trying to help me get back to him?

        Imagine giving a homeless person a house, a night to sleep in a warm bed, and shower, and then saying, “Sorry, man, just kidding, you’re stuck in the cold for life.” The world had betrayed me. It teased me into submission and then pulled the ground from under my feet. [bold mine]

In his essay ‘Graves Without Bodies: The Mnemonic Importance of Equiano's Autobiography’ the Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang notes, “The successful autobiography is one that shows a mind reflecting upon, sifting and relating to events; it must display a person changing and being changed by life's experiences, and sometimes even by the very process of writing the autobiography.” [Italics mine.] This is something Jessica does. From time to time she’ll jump to the present—if you like out of the memoir—and sets herself side by side with the reader, asking herself to pass comment (and ultimately judgement) on her younger self. One reviewer compared Jessica’s memoir to the work of Maya Angelou. If that’s not setting a writer up for a fall I’m not sure what is but there is a case to be answered. What distinguishes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from what went before it is that Angelou records experience not as history, but as experience she recognizes as changing in time. In what way does Jessica do that? In that we’re presented with a portrait of someone called ‘Jessica Bell’ which is then worked on throughout the book. At the start it’s only a pencil sketch. The child we meet in the beginning is little more than an outline which gradually gets coloured it. At times the picture gets messy and needs painting over. At university she experimented with her look (and, she says, inadvertently her personality) so much so that sometimes other students failed to recognize her; later drink, bad relationship choices, mental health issues and loss distort the picture. A chapter ends; we get a breather and begin again. Eventually the Jessica we’ve come to know over the years—as much as any of us knows anyone we’ve only met online—starts to appear.

 

In the Smithsonian magazine I read that “Dickens began his autobiography in 1847, when he was [also] 35, but abandoned it and, overcome with memories of his deprivations, a few years later was inspired to write the autobiographical David Copperfield, fictionalizing his early miseries…” Jessica has already done this, ransacked her past to create her fictions. In her novella The Book, for example, she describes an incident where a five-year-old girl who’s soiled herself fears being trapped in the school toilets overnight. Reading that again and knowing that little girl was Jessica and not someone she dreamt up changes everything. And yet, to my mind, the novella’s version is more powerful because it’s written in the voice of a child and it’s not an adult remembering something that happened thirty years earlier. See what you think.

 

From the memoir:        

        Why did you run away? Why didn’t you just tell Mrs Wallace in the playground?
        Because I didn’t want the other kids to see!
        But now you’re stuck in here. That was stupid. What are you going to do?
        I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do!
        You’re an idiot. You’re stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
        I wailed and wailed, holding my yellow-and-white striped Miki House Club dress away from my legs—my saturated knickers still hooked around my ankles. I was so afraid of stepping out of the cubicle in case another kid came in. I had to get cleaned up. But how? I couldn’t possibly go outside without a pair of knickers on. Everyone would see my chishy as my dress was short.
        Call for help.
        I don’t want to.
        There’s no other way.
        But they’ll see me, and they’ll laugh at me.
        Do you want to be locked in here all night?
        No.
        Then stop being such a wuss and call for help!
“Help!” I cried at the top of my lungs. Only once. But no-one came for what seemed like hours.

The italicised sections are her reflection and her squabbling. Now here’s how it plays out in the novella:

        I lift my Mickey Mouse skirt and pull down on the flicky-thread of my undies. But it squishes between my legs when I sit on the torlet seat.

        It smells like a baby accident and a hospital in here and my heart goes all bumpy in my chest. I can smell that stinky liquid stuff that my mummy uses to make clothes white, and it always makes her rub her head after, and I have to bring her some Tic Tacs.

        I can’t tell any bodies I did this. I can’t! They will all laugh at me and I don’t like it when bodies laugh at me. When bodies laugh my belly goes all feeling not nice and tears come out of my eyes. Mrs Haydon will come a-looking for me any minute, wondering why I’m not back to get my school bag off my hook. The home-time bell just runged. I’m going to be in so much trouble.

Both are honest accounts (honest enough) but which is the more truthful? I checked with Jessica assuming “Miki House Club” was a typo. Apparently not. That's what the real shirt said. So why change it in the novella? And does it matter if it was a dress or a skirt? We get the idea.

 

According to Blake Morrison, writing in The Guardian, “The confessional memoir is disreputable. Critics tend to dismiss it as the equivalent of a selfie, a look-at-me snapshot, a glorified ego trip. Narcissism, they say, is inscribed in the very word ‘memoir’: me-moi.” In the article he proposes seven reasons why people confess on paper: spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, confession as an apology or self-justification, confession as a desire to shock, confession as the desire to redefine what’s shocking, confession as performance and showmanship, an effort to set the record straight or, finally, as catharsis, cleansing, or purgation. That last one comes closest to what I think Jessica intended here but if the book truly is, as she says, for everyone except herself is it meant to be a teaching aid? Learn from me. Don’t make the same mistakes as me. If you have made mistakes or are in the process of making mistakes that doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

 

Life is all about choices. So they say. It’s not entirely true. Maya Angelou didn’t choose to be black. Anne Frank didn’t choose to be Jewish. Jessica Bell didn’t choose to be raised by rock musicians. They could’ve been fundamentalist Christians like my parents. Or wolves. Normal is what you’re used to. It doesn’t really exist except as a good idea. As the cliché goes: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But what if life hands you shit? Shit has its uses too If only for throwing at fans or decorating your cell with.

 

Jessica did not always make the wisest of choices. She turned to drink, was promiscuous and experimented sexually; she refused to learn from past mistakes. She wasn’t born black in the Deep South in the 1920s or Jewish in Nazi Germany but then most of us weren’t. There are some things in life we can’t control and there’re others we lose control of. Depression is not a life choice, alcoholism is an illness and bullying might not quite be up there with racism but when you realise half our kids get bullied at some time and one in five gets bullied every day you start to appreciate how serious it is.

 

Does Jessica provide any answers? Not really. The closest she gets to a Rosa Parks moment is snogging another girl in the middle of the dancefloor during the End of Year 10 Formal and all that does is solidify the negative impression most people had of her. The girls did not get nominated for homecoming queens. This was the Australia in the 1990s, not the set of Faking It. I was interested to read this in a 2011 interview:

Not every woman in this world lives without regret, knows exactly what they want, and has the courage to put every essence of their being into achieving their dreams. Not every woman is inspirational to others. Not every woman can leave their comfort zone to better their future. But, so what? Does that mean a less strong-minded woman doesn't have an interesting story to tell? Definitely not.

What Jessica does do is survive. She could just as easily have died under anaesthetic in 2001 or stepped off a cliff in 2002. She has her scars (and her battle scars) but she’s still here to tell her tale to the best of her ability. Not without some luck. But here’s the thing about luck: you need to make the most of it, the good kind anyway, and it rarely waves a flag yelling, “This way! This way! Here’s where you go right and not left.” Jessica had to hang on until 2005 for her moment and, oddly, this is where the book starts to peter out and she doesn’t go on to explain how successful (it’s a relative term, I know) she’s become but then most of the people who’ll be attracted to this book will have some knowledge of her and we know for all her failings the one thing Jessica has never been afraid of is hard work. I asked her about why the ending doesn't focus on her writing career and this is what she came back with:

It's an entirely different story, unrelated to my childhood and teenhood and love life and music, and would be the length of an entirely new book. I intend to write about it. I have two other memoir project ideas at the moment: 

1. The building of my career as a writer and entrepreneur beginning 2005.
2. The (rather humorous and quite devastating) story of running the café-bar in Ithaca.

I did start to go into more detail about these things as I was writing Dear Reflection, but I soon realized that, not only would it completely destroy the thematic thread and focus of the book, but the texts focussing on these areas would have ended up longer than the current book. These stories didn't belong in Dear Reflection. They are not related to my psychological struggle. They are related to the side of my personality that is highly confident, ambitious, and has an overactive drive to succeed. And because that side of me is completely different to the side I write about in Dear Reflection, it needs its own book.

Think of it this way: Why do horoscopes separate career and love predictions? Because there is no way to predict the future of one path in tandem with the other. They are separate elements of one's life, and though they can co-exist, and influence each other, the narrative and outcome of each element is always going to differ, and therefore trigger different human responses.

She makes a good point and to that end it might’ve been better had she ended this memoir in 2005 with her standing at the door to a new life. Just a thought. I suppose one could think of the last section as a teaser trailer.

If you want to know what Jessica’s achieved in recent year check out her bio here. If you want to know why you might want to read her memoir you should look at this blog post, again from 2010.

 

I’ll leave you with the book trailer.