Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  What I did all day as a graduate student, in practice, was to spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying not to do any work. I would get up late – eleven or so – have coffee, and take the bus into town. I would stumble into the Bodleian Library around noon, and perhaps go to the catalogues to order up a book or two for the afternoon. I would hand in the book request slip and – because by now I would invariably have bumped into a couple of people I knew – would then head off for lunch at a café or college. After a good long chat and maybe a wander around Blackwell’s to see if there was anything new, I might briefly return to the library to check whether my books had come back and perhaps flick through one or two of the things I’d ordered up – only to spot another friend and go for a coffee instead. Then a wander back to college to check my pigeonhole for mail, and then – oops! – it would be time to head back to a pub or bar for a drink before taking the bus home. I’d have supper with my friends and stay up reading until two or three in the morning.

  A rich, full life it wasn’t. You can live like this only if you are pretty seriously unhappy, and I was. Of course, there was no way I was going to get away with it. I began to suffer from panic attacks.

  There is a mechanical account of panic. It can be seen simply in terms of physiology. What happens is this: it starts with the trigger, your personal trigger – spiders or snakes or open spaces or closed ones or the fear of fear or no reason that you can detect. You begin by noticing the signs of anxiety in yourself – increased temperature and heart rate, butterflies, a sense that the veil of reality is too thin, that you can tear it with your own thoughts. Most of all you become aware of your own rapid, shallow breathing. You begin to over-breathe. Your body is taking in too much oxygen and not retaining enough carbon dioxide; you have begun to hyper-ventilate. But breathing too much oxygen paradoxically feels like not breathing enough. You feel as if you can’t draw a proper breath. (The trick of breathing into a paper bag works because it increases the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, which makes the respiratory system slow down.) You realise what is happening and that there is no way out. The cycle speeds up; the anxiety and the symptoms of CO2 shortage both soar; and then you are lost to panic. Once you have taught yourself to do this, it is all too easy to do it again and again and again, and then to learn to fear it, and to fear situations where you may feel it, and then you have a new acquaintance in your life, called panic, who isn’t going to leave you any time soon.

  That’s the mechanical account, that’s how the physiology of panic works. But it’s not the whole story. A big part of panic has to do with being ambushed by feelings you have not acknowledged. You ignore something in the hope that it will go away – and let’s face it, this would be a perfect strategy if it worked.

  The trouble is that it doesn’t work. If the feelings are sufficiently important, then they – the bastards! – won’t let you ignore them. Ambush is a good metaphor for what they do. They hide out of plain sight, giving their presence away only by the equivalent of a stifled cough or rustling bush: the night sweat, the forgotten appointment or unexplained surge of anger, the compulsion to open the second and then the third bottle, the inability to sit still. And then the sky falls on your head. Your unconscious, the thing you are trying not to think about, whose existence you are working not to acknowledge, suddenly turns into a nine-hundred-pound gorilla and says, ‘Oi! Try and ignore this!’ The resulting panic blanks out everything else – blocks out all other thoughts and feelings, erases all consciousness of everything but itself. You become your own panic room. You enter a compartment of the mind that consists of pure fear, and nothing else.

  When you get out of that room – and it is part of the horror of panic that, at the time, you don’t feel you ever will – you know that something isn’t right with your psyche. You know that in the deepest fibre of your being, because your mind has just attacked itself. (‘Mind attack’, formed on analogy with ‘heart attack’, might be a better term than ‘panic attack’.) But you don’t necessarily know what the problem, or set of problems, is – you just know that they are there. In that sense the alert-raising powers of a panic attack are all too effective. It’s like a powerful alarm, but one you set off not only when there is a fire, or a burglar, but also when there is a gust of wind, or a TV set left plugged in, or a fly in the hallway, or a curtain not pulled back, or a leaking tap, or anything. In other words, a panic attack tells you that something is wrong but doesn’t tell you what it is.

  My first real encounter with panic happened one day when I was walking to the upper reading room and found myself suddenly short of breath. My heart was racing, my hands were sweating; there wasn’t enough air. I had to get to somewhere safe – somewhere out of the building – which felt miles, hundreds of miles, away. Away, away! And down the stairs I ran; and as I did so, the panic eased. That was a crucial, fatal lesson. If you run away, it helps. For the moment, anyway. The trouble is that if you run away you are more or less guaranteeing a recurrence of the phobia, which thrives more than anything on avoidance. Avoidance is a phobia’s favourite thing: every time you avoid something that gives you even the initial flicker of fear – let alone any of its more flagrant manifestations – you are making it absolutely certain that the fear will (a) come back, and (b) be worse. So why avoid things, if it’s so damaging? That’s easy to answer. You avoid things because you’re so frightened you feel as if you have no choice, even when you know you’re just making things worse. Thanks to the diagrammatic, irresistible logic of avoidance, I never again walked up those stairs without fear.

  In hindsight, I can see that that panic was linked with another thought I had had in the reading room. I was looking around it one day – I vividly remember that I was reading a run of back issues of Ian Hamilton’s poetry magazine The Review. This was part of a growing realisation on my part that I wanted to make my living in the world of literary journalism rather than as an academic, on the basis that its evaluative judgements, general racketiness, and closeness to the actual process of creative writing were much more appealing than being on an academic treadmill. Anyway, I was reading The Review, and I looked up to see the Merton Professor of English Literature, John Carey. He was a critic I greatly admired (and I admired him too because he was Chairman of Examiners when I got my congratulatory first, so I regarded him as a scary judge of talent), and that feeling gave all the greater force to a thought that suddenly hit me: if I stay in academia, and have a brilliant idea for a thesis, and write it up and get a Junior Research Fellowship, and then turn it into a book and get a Fellowship, and then a Readership, and then if I’m really lucky and work hard, a Chair, perhaps even the Merton Chair itself – if all these amazing things happen, and I have the best possible career anyone can imagine, I get to spend the rest of my working life in this room.

  I say we don’t often decide things, but that was one of the few times when I did. I realised that I wasn’t going to be an academic, and that I needed to find something else to do. I started to spend more and more time doing bits and pieces of journalism for student and local magazines, and touting for work from the London literary press, beginning with Poetry Review and Literary Review. This was the beginning of a bid for freedom.

  And there is another irony here – again defining irony as Jonathan Coe does, as a form of pain. Because I don’t know if I would have become a writer while my father was still alive. I think I would have found the level of risk difficult – financial risk, which is what would have bothered him, and me in telling him; and psychological risk, too. So terrible though this is to say, my father’s death gave me a degree of freedom. Anthony Powell says somewhere that there’s nothing quite like having a father go bankrupt to force a man to think for himself. My father’s early death was a version of that. His life was not inherently tragic: he wasn’t inherently a sad man. If he had lived to be alive today, pushing eighty – even if he had lived to be seventy, not an unreasonable wish – he would have had decades of comfort
able retirement to balance the years spent doing his boring job. He would, perhaps, have found things he wanted to do – the move into Norwich was a good start. He might have made a new life for himself, or even have just resigned himself to the fact that he was going to potter about enjoying his hobbies. But none of that happened. He didn’t have that long balanced life, with years of drudgery evened out by years of suiting himself; he had a truncated life, with years of drudgery followed by an untimely death. That made me determined to not do what he did. Whatever else I did with my life I wasn’t going to spend it doing something I hated: because, as I learnt from his death, life is short. If you have any degree of choice – which, as I’ve already said, most of the people who have ever lived haven’t – you should, especially when you are young and unencumbered, set out to try and do whatever it is you most want to do. My father, who almost never gave direct advice – he was a wise man in that respect – was explicit about this. ‘When you are young,’ he told me, ‘you must try and do what you want to do. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go and make some money when you get older – but you never get back that chance just to try things out.’ It was good advice and I tried to take it. Indeed, broadly speaking, I think that I did take it. First, though, there was a nervous breakdown to have.

  The panic I had experienced that day at the Bodleian turned out to be the beginning of a series of attacks. Any situation I could not get out of at will began to be a problem. This, I now know, is classic agoraphobia – which, contrary to what the term is sometimes taken to suggest, has to do not solely with wide-open spaces but with the agora or public sphere. You are not frightened of the space per se, you are frightened of panicking when in the space; you are frightened of fear. It’s the most complicated of phobias, and one of the hardest to treat, and it was my new constant companion. In a weird way, it was like having a new best friend. Fear of the fear became a structuring principle of my days. I wasn’t frightened all the time; but at all times I was aware of the possibility of feeling fear. It was there in the corner of my eye if I chose to look. I always knew where I was in relation to it; it was like a private compass point, visible at all times, but only to me.

  I started feeling anxiety, which had a way of spiralling into panic, every time I was in a situation that I couldn’t get out of. It would happen even just sitting in the pub. In that instance, something about the experience of behaving normally, having a normal conversation, would somehow mean that my freedom was impaired (my freedom to get up and run away without looking like a complete idiot), so I would have to get up and run away like a complete idiot. That sensation was with me, not quite all the time, but at least once a day. My world began to shrink, and to consist entirely of places and situations where I felt safe. In practice, that meant my room, and the journey home. The mere act of turning for home, of giving up whatever I was trying to do outside, brought relief.

  It couldn’t go on. That’s easy to say, of course: lots of things that we feel can’t go on do just that. But a fairly big panic attack while I was walking down Cornmarket Street – a longish high-street shopping hell which for some reason was always a particular nexus for my phobic feelings – made me realise I had to do something, even though I had no idea quite what that something was. So I went to see a GP. The first great relief was that he took me seriously. I was wired up to an ECG machine and he tested my heart – uselessly, I now know, since a resting ECG may not tell you much, but never mind. He then said that the best thing to do would be to go and talk to a specialist, but that the referral would take some time. He wrote me a prescription for Valium for the interim and explained that it worked best if it was used to get over specific crises, rather than taken as a general panacea. And that was more or less that.

  It would be untrue to say that I felt better immediately, but I found some relief in the thought that I had at least taken some action and that somewhere in the distance, if I listened very hard, I would be able to hear the hoof beats of mental health professionals riding to the rescue. There was, though, a longish wait. I think it was a couple of weeks before I had a letter from the Warneford, the local bin, as it was usually referred to – i.e. the local mental health hospital. I was given an appointment for an assessment in three months. The time did not fly past, not at all. I mainly spent it reading back issues of literary magazines and mulling over an idea I had had for a novel, a cookbook that turned into a murder story – which was eventually my first book, The Debt to Pleasure. But mainly what I was doing was not working and not feeling, which, in its way is a specialised, highly demanding, indeed exhausting, form of mental labour.

  When the time for my appointment came, I took a bus to the Warneford and made my way to a Nissen hut, where I was given an assessment by a psychiatrist and the therapist with whom I was to work. She was a trainee, an Israeli in her early thirties with whom I had nothing in common but with whom I found I got on – I didn’t know then how rare and how essential that was in a therapeutic context. We had one session a fortnight over a period of a few months, and though I can’t really remember what we talked about, it helped. In fact, it didn’t just help – the phobia swiftly, and apparently definitively, just went away. Spontaneous remission, you might call it; ‘flight into health’, if you were a Freudian; good therapy, if you were my Israeli; or some combination of all the above. The turning point, or what felt like the turning point, was a session when I came in with something she had asked for, a time sheet giving a breakdown of a typical day. It was divided into fifteen-minute sections. I told the truth and gave an account of a day much like the one I described earlier. My therapist freaked. ‘You don’t do any work at all!’ she said. ‘Nothing!’ Her outrage was useful: I realised that my general sense of something lurking in the bushes, waiting to jump out and get me, might be usefully addressed if I gave some attention to the thing actually lurking in the bushes of my daily life, i.e. my unwritten – untouched, unbegun – thesis. I decided that I had to get out of the life I was leading – well, I say decided, but what happened was that I realised I couldn’t go on, and needed to act on the consequences of that resolution.

  I don’t think my exhausting, strenuous efforts at not working were what was really wrong with me; but they were a vivid symptom. By turning to face the symptom, I began to feel that I was no longer running away – which is what I was really engaged in doing, all day and every day, and was one reason why running away played such a big role in the phobia. So I made a plan, and the first part of it was not to apply for money for the third year of my PhD. At the moment I was enrolled to do an MLitt – that fifty-thousand-word thesis on a critical subject. If I took money for the extra year, I would have to do a DPhil, which would be ninety thousand words long, and would also have to be, by strict rubric of the degree, a ‘substantial, original contribution to knowledge’. All three of those words were like grenades. Substantial meant long, and with lots of footnotes. Original meant it couldn’t be a review or overview of things that had already been discussed. But the real killer was ‘knowledge’: it wasn’t to be a collection of thoughts or opinions or ideas or insights, however interesting: I had to find out something new. In those days, as a direct result of this grim rubric and the lack of support for graduate students trying to grapple with it, the average completion time for a DPhil – which was funded for three years – was between six and seven years, and the dropout rate (or ‘non-completion’ rate as it was called in Oxfordese) was over 90 per cent. It might have been easier to take the money for the third year and to spend another twelve months in subsidised misery, but I realised that that way lay, perhaps literally, madness. So I decided to go home to Norwich when the grant ran out, in late summer 1986, knock off my fifty-thousand-word thesis in one big go, do as much journalism as I could, and try to find a job.

  As I write, it occurs to me that what may have helped more than anything else to relieve the phobia was the fact that, by giving up on graduate work, I was giving up on an ambition I had inherited from
my father. I was beginning to live my own life, and therefore beginning, implicitly, to acknowledge that he was dead. That’s sad to admit. But it was true that his death gave me one fewer person to disappoint – and to become a writer, as Cyril Connolly once said, you have to do a certain amount of living down your promise. This usually takes a few years, and it would have been hard to do with my dad’s unspoken worries and disappointments looming over me. Leaving Oxford was an implicit admission that I no longer had to worry about pleasing him. It wasn’t that I simply woke up one morning to find that the phobia had gone away. It wasn’t even a question of realising that it had gone away. It was rather that the fear gradually faded, first in the number of times it came; for a while, the London Underground was a particular nexus, not when the train was stuck in tunnels (which is what gives me the willies now, to such an extent that I can’t take the Tube any more), but when it was rattling along between stations. The fear faded in frequency, then in severity, becoming less acute and unignorable and more like a few moments of anxious discomfort which, I learned, would soon fade. Then, as the specific occurrences went away, its steady presence in the corner of my mind went away too – it was no longer the compass point, the monster in the cupboard. Sometimes you don’t so much get over something as forget about it; and that was what happened here.