All the patients at Craiglockhart are officers of the educated middle and upper classes. Among them, Billy is a social anomaly, an officer who is street-smart working-class. Possessed of an intelligence built to calculate the winning odds in any situation he confronts, Billy is cunning, sensual, and if need be criminal: sexually wild, infused with class hatred, devoted to survival at all costs. Nonetheless, the war has brought him to a level of alienation even he never imagined himself capable of. Raised in the slums of the urban north, Billy had always considered England’s mean-spirited class system the one true enemy of life. But now, after France and the trenches, he sees all of humanity as an existential horror. The question of how and whether Billy—in all his thrilling misanthropy—will make his way back into the company of the living is the beating heart of the book’s matter. Two moments in Billy’s life with Sarah, a munitions worker he picks up in a cafe in Edinburgh, indicate the scope of the problem it has set itself:
On their first date they take a walk down at the seaside. Sarah, a wonderfully vital young woman, instantly responds to the holiday-like atmosphere, and we read: “She belonged with the pleasure-seeking crowds. He both envied and despised her, and was quite coldly determined to get her. They owed him something, all of them, and she would pay.” Later on in the novel, when he falls in love with her and she has become his sole source of comfort, Billy considers telling Sarah what it was really like in the trenches and then decides against it: “Somehow if she’d known the worst parts, she couldn’t have gone on being a haven for him … He needed her ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and be known as deeply as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable.”
The crucial relationship, of course, is with Rivers. It is during their analytic sessions that the unspeakable cost of the war—the cost to the human dream of wholeness—is driven home to the reader. Here, not only do every one of Billy’s emotional contradictions come into play, the sessions themselves demonstrate brilliantly why the most ordinary of analyses might despair of approaching integrity.
Billy is the analysand from hell, the clever patient who runs rings around the doctor, as though, together, they are playing a game of winning or losing. Billy himself cannot, of course, help being determined on “winning.” His greatest joys occur when he seems to triumph over Rivers, whom he comes to love but cannot help seeing as an Establishment figure, as saturated in self-deception as any other.
Like many of the men at Craiglockhart, Billy (once he recovers his voice) is afflicted with a fearful stammer. When he discovers that Rivers also stammers, he is gleeful. Rivers, understandably, claims that his stammer is different from the stammer of the patients. Whereupon Billy observes, “Now that is lucky, isn’t it? Lucky for you, I mean. Because if your stammer was the same as theirs—you might actually have to sit down and work out what it is you’ve spent fifty years trying not to say.”
As a psychoanalyst, Rivers knows that he must make Billy remember—and live through—the attack after which he lost his voice, but session after session like the one about stammering leaves him exhausted and often crucially discouraged. For the longest time Billy keeps saying, “I’ve told you, I don’t remember.” Then, suddenly, he seems to relent. “Yes,” he says one day, “it was exactly like any other attack … You wait, you try to calm down anybody who’s obviously shitting himself or on the verge of throwing up. You hope you won’t do either of those things yourself.” As he speaks, Rivers looks askance. Suddenly, he knows that Billy is throwing him a bone. When Billy sees the light go on in his eyes, he laughs mockingly and Rivers feels the deadly truth of the moment: “He [Billy] seemed to be saying, ‘All right. You can make me dredge up the horrors, you can make me remember the deaths, but you will never make me feel.’”
It’s hard for me to describe how deeply Billy Prior entered into me. He threw me back on a sense of working-class solidarity I had not experienced in fifty years: a sense so joyfully antisocial that for a moment it scared me, but only for a moment. The pleasure I had once taken in the pugnacious certainty aroused by class struggle—you have the truth, you know the enemy, you feel the justice of the cause—it flooded me now, in Billy’s company, with a nostalgia keener than any other I could recall feeling. And then, for the first time in decades, I remembered myself watching Gypsy.
There’s a history in American theater of the anti-romantic musical. It has an ugly little thing to say, this musical, and it never loses sight of it; therein lies its strength. Gypsy—the story of a celebrated stripper and the most infamous stage mother on record—is one of the great examples of the genre. I know this because the ugly little thing that Gypsy has to say spoke directly to me.
I was in my twenties the first time I saw Gypsy, and Ethel Merman was playing Rose, the mother. Merman was one of the great belters of all time, with an acting style to match. In her performance there was no nuance, no complexity, no second thoughts. She was like a natural force, crude and overwhelming: fierce, ignorant, a killer. She wanted hers, and nothing, nothing, nothing was gonna get in her way. I loved it. I loved it with a hard pressing love that both frightened and exhilarated me. Here I was, this college girl barely out of the immigrant working-class ghetto, with a sense of the world belonging to everyone but me, yet at a moment in social history when I, and all those like me, suspected that we didn’t have to become our parents: only we’d have to fight to get ours. And there was Rose, up there on that stage doing it for me. The energy this scene induced in me came from so far down inside it seemed as though it could make its own laws. When Merman reached the balcony with “Rose’s Turn,” my head was bursting with a sense of payback that nothing could make seem unjustified. Rose was a monster? So what. She was my monster.
The next time, years later, that I was in a theater where people in the audience were screaming with joy because some monster up there on the screen was doing it for them, the theater was a movie house and all around me young black men and women were calling out, “Kill him! Kill him!” and laughing “fit to die.” For a moment I was startled, but the moment passed quickly enough. I turned in my seat and saw, in the faces all around me, the simple, irreducible clarity I myself had once felt. They had the truth, they knew the enemy, they felt the justice of their cause: no nuance, no complexity, no second thoughts. I understood. And I went on understanding for a remarkably long time.
The very first episode of the second volume of Barker’s trilogy (which, for my money, could have gone into Regeneration) has Billy out on a randy night in the city (“He needed sex, and he needed it badly”), looking high and low to get laid. When he can’t find a woman, he allows himself to be picked up in the park by a man: an upper-class officer, to be exact. As I read on and slowly grasped what was happening, I could feel on my skin the shock of surprise going through me: this was a turn of events I would never have predicted. But soon enough, I’m right there with them. And what happens? When they get back to the officer’s place, he (Billy) fucks him in the ass. (“He’d probably never felt a spurt of purer class antagonism than he felt at that moment.”) Later, the officer wonders if he does turnabout and asks, “Or don’t you do that?” Billy smiles and says, “I do anything.” And I said to myself, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Then I said to myself: “Are you crazy?”
* * *
IT WAS BILLY PRIOR who sent me back to A Month in the Country, looking to meet up again with the Tom Birkin I had not fully grasped upon my first encounter with him.
When I again read the Carr novel, I could hardly puzzle out how it was that I had managed to ignore all in the book that clearly binds Tom not to something as fancy as existential determinism but simply to the war: the war itself: the war that colors every thought, every scene, every encounter in the novel, leading finally to a portrait of human damage so richly intimate it distinguishes A Month in the Country from all other prose works of its kind. How was it, I marveled, that:
I remembered that Tom had a stammer and a twitch,
but I did not remember its vividness: “There was my face, the left side, [that] worked spasmodically. People like the Revd. J. G. Keach brought it on badly. It began at my left eyebrow and worked down to my mouth. I’d caught it at Passchendaele … The medics said it might work off given time.”
I remembered him sharing a mug of tea most mornings with Moon, but I did not remember that Moon “through pipe smoke … would look speculatively at me and I’d see him thinking, Now who are you? What befell you Over There to give you that God-awful twitch? Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?”
I remembered that one very hot day Tom lay back “letting summer soak into me—the smell of summer and summer sounds…” I did not remember that he covered his “eyes with a khaki handkerchief” before he dropped off to sleep.
Then I completely forgot that when Alice Keach launches into a bizarre story of a nightmare the first time she meets Tom, he responds, “Yes, yes, I told her, I knew exactly what she was talking about, because it was like that when a really big shell exploded; the air in a dug-out is sucked out then blown in, a quite stupefying sensation.”
And, at a later time, when she asks him if he believes in hell, there actually flashes through his head this image of Passchendaele: “Bodies split, heads blown off, groveling fear, shrieking fear, unspeakable fear! The world made mud!”
When I did “remember” all this, I saw that the very particular achievement of this jewel of a book was the indelible portrait of a man returned from the war that had most resembled hell with a spirit that is permanently stunted. Neither crippled nor unbalanced nor twisted up inside: only stunted. He can see, hear, smell, and to some extent feel desire. Only he cannot feel it strongly enough to act. He will never again feel strongly enough to act. He is spiritually stunted.
And suddenly I knew that this was how Billy Prior would have ended up, had he lived (which he didn’t), because he, like Tom, would have come out of the war also permanently stunted: “You will never make me feel.” The class hatred that fueled his raison d’être would have hardened steadily around an inner life grown smaller and smaller; sleeping with women or upper-class men for “revenge” would become routine; family life would not make a dent in him. Thrown back on a self that, increasingly, wasn’t there he would have continued to have his unchanging truth, know his lockstep enemy, never doubt the justice of his simple cause. I knew this because I had cheered on Rose in Gypsy and cried “Yes! Yes! Yes!” when Billy fucked the upper-class officer, and I knew how long and comparatively undamaged a life it took to admit of nuance, take in complexity, welcome second thoughts.
In service to class struggle (or women’s rights, for that matter) I have experienced many times those deliciously hard-edged feelings Billy had whenever he was ripping off authority, and I know while in their grip one imagines oneself bold, free, liberated. But unnuanced freedom is no freedom at all. It’s the nuance that makes us act like civilized human beings, even when we do not feel like civilized human beings. Do away with nuance and it’s all animal life; in other words, war.
I was grateful that I’d been allowed a life that had taken me from that single-minded bloodlust to the pain and confusion brought on by the gap in myself between practice and theory, the one that forced on me recognition of all the human exceptions to the ideological rule. I realized then that because my life had been sufficiently free of catastrophe I remained equipped with a renewable spirit that had often been laid low but never done in. In Billy and Tom, however, both ruined by the war, it had sickened to a perilous degree.
“It is the death of the spirit we must fear,” J. L. Carr wrote in one of his novels. It was an inner circumstance he would write of often, but never before or again with the emotional exactness he lavished on A Month in the Country.
Sometimes I shiver when I think that I might not have re-read either A Month in the Country or Regeneration, and then I shiver some more thinking of all the good books I wasn’t in the mood to take in the first time I read them, and never went back to. I don’t mind if I’ve read only once a book that has left me prizing a mediocrity—I can live with that—but the other way around: that feels oppressive.
EIGHT
Some years ago, after living alone for decades, I found myself yearning for something alive in the house besides myself and, to my own great surprise, decided on adopting a cat. My mother’s fear of anything that moved on more than two legs had infected me quite early, and for most of my life I, too, have been either frightened of or repelled by animals—dogs, cats, sheep, cows, frogs, insects: you name it, if it came near me I shuddered. But now the yearning carried the day, and out I went in search of the affectionate creature who would purr on my lap, sleep in my bed, and at all times enliven the apartment with its antic presence.
It was late summer, and everywhere in the city there were cages full of rescue cats being attended to by one animal rights person or another. Soon enough, I spotted an exceptionally beautiful pair of twelve-week-old tabbies, each streaked in a different pattern of black and grey, both possessed of exquisite little tiger faces dominated by great green eyes perfectly outlined in pencil-thin black, and I said to the woman guarding the cages, “I’ll take one of them.” No, she said, they’re females from the same litter, they can’t be separated, it’s either both or neither. Why not, I thought, and said yes, I’d take the pair.
No sooner done than anxiety of a high order set in. Suddenly, there they were: in the apartment. Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, I stared at the cats, and they stared back. What did I do now? I hadn’t a clue. What did they do now? Obviously, they hadn’t a clue either. If I made a move toward either kitten, both shrank; a second move and they scurried. Then one of them hid for three days behind the couch, during which time the other one meowed piteously, all the while keeping steady watch at the exact place where Cat One had disappeared. After that there were days when they both hid themselves so thoroughly I ran around the house like a lunatic, flinging open closets and drawers, pulling furniture away from the walls, calling out desperately. I was sure they would both die of asphyxiation and I’d be brought up on charges of animal abuse.
I tried going about my business as usual—working at my desk, keeping appointments, meeting friends for dinner—but a black cloud hung over me. If I was out, I dreaded coming home. If I was home, I wandered around the apartment feeling homeless. What had I done to myself! It was as though I had longed for a baby, then had one, only to discover that neither I nor the baby had any talent for the relationship.
The worst of it was my keen sense of disappointment: it consumed me. I walked around mentally wringing my hands. I was never going to get what I wanted from the cats! They were never going to cuddle up to me, purr in my arms, sleep in my bed. Never! Never! And indeed, for a good few years they did not.
Meanwhile—exactly as though I were a new mother—well-meaning friends began inundating me with cat trivia; books and toys and DVDs arrived daily, all offering advice, mostly of the kind the sender thinks humorous, on how to get on with the creatures. Truth to tell, this development startled me, and I experienced it as juvenile and more than a bit tiresome.
Among the detritus, however, was a book by Doris Lessing called Particularly Cats. A devotee of Lessing’s since college—for my generation of feminists-in-the-making The Golden Notebook was scripture—I thought nothing she wrote could fail to be of some interest to me. So I began reading this slim little volume of hers about cats, but the book wasn’t giving me what I needed—concrete advice!—and as I was too nervous to concentrate on anything else, I soon flung it away: “Another celebrity writer being cute about cats!” For years afterward, almost all I remembered of the book was that Lessing had had a cat she referred to as “grey cat” and another as “black cat,” and that one of them slept behind the bend in her knee, while another had been wrapped in a warm towel when it had fallen ill. In short: nothing. One thing about the book, however, did remain
indelibly imprinted on my memory: the tone of its prose. That remarkable voice of Lessing’s—cold, clear, level to a fault, richly reflective of her signature lack of sentimentality—there it was in a book on cats!
And speaking of sentimentality, it was the cats who, during this distressful period, taught me how low my own level of the stuff had sunk by revealing the ruthlessness with which my subconscious sought relief. One day while traveling in a poor country where stray cats and dogs abounded, I saw a mother cat and her kittens taking shelter from an afternoon downpour under a palm tree. As I stood there, enchanted in the rain, one of the kittens looked directly at me and in its eyes, I was certain, I saw the plea, “Take me home with you.” I remember thinking, If only one or both of my own cats would die—maybe one of them is doing so right now back in New York?—I could start all over with the little beauty in front of me, and this time around I’d get it right. Immediately after this thought came another: So, after all, you are capable of the same cold-blooded calculation with which you have so often charged others.
Then, one day, just like that, it was over. Boredom with my own disappointment set in, and suddenly I was tired to death of thinking about what I was not getting from the cats. From that moment on I looked at them as creatures apart. And then began my long steady practice of watching them become themselves in my presence, through their relation not to me but to each other.
After seven years together, they still lick, bite, chase each other daily with as much interest and purposefulness as if they have just met. Whether as allies or enemies, they are always aware of one another. Should an unusual sound occur or a movement seem to threaten, instantly, even magically, whether they were awake or asleep, they are up on their haunches, sitting side by side, making sure they’ve got at least one friend in this crisis. On the other hand, once a day like clockwork each assumes a stalking position, facing the other across the living-room rug as though they are miniature tigers and the rug the floor of a jungle. At some mysteriously agreed-upon moment, both spring and are quickly locked together—hissing, biting, clawing—as though each one means, once and for all, to vanquish this deadly foe, her sister. A few terrifying seconds of this free-for-all and they fall apart, clearly bored by the game, each walking off, head high, tail swishing, in the opposite direction. Together or apart, six times a day they make me laugh.
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