Thinks...
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MONDAY 3RD MARCH. Spent all yesterday and most of today reading the students’ work-in-progress, their major projects for the year, novels (or in two cases collections of short stories) which they started last semester under Russell Marsden’s supervision, or brought up to the University with them, already under way. I feel rather jaded by the experience. It’s not that they’re badly written – on the contrary, the general level of ability is high – it’s just that there are too many of them, too many to take in all at once. Every time I open another folder there’s another imagined world to be inhabited, a whole new set of characters with names to be memorized and relationships of consanguinity and affinity to be sorted out, times and seasons to be noted, physical appearances to be pictured, connections of cause and effect to be inferred . . .
There’s Rachel McNulty’s glum chronicle of going through the menarche on a dairy farm in County Armagh; Simon Bellamy’s deft satirical comedy about a group of young people starting up a style magazine in Soho; Robert Drayton’s memory monologue of a condemned prisoner on the eve of execution in some imaginary African state ruled by a mad dictator; Frieda Sinclair’s unflinching tales of young women dancing, drinking, shagging and puking in clubs from Inverness to Ibiza; Gilbert Baverstock’s novel about a pathologically shy insurance clerk who falls in love with a girl in his office and communicates with her by Email, pretending to be a hip screenwriter in Los Angeles; Thomas Vaughan’s gritty historical novel about a strike in the Rhondda Valley coalmines in the nineteenth century; Chuck Romero’s Bildungsroman about a young man losing his virginity and finding his vocation in Providence, Rhode Island (where Chuck comes from); Farat Khan’s interlinked short stories about cultural and generational conflict in the Asian community of Leicester (where she comes from); Saul Goldman’s Oedipal ding-dong between self-made Jewish businessman and gay artistic son; Franny Smith’s funny and appalling multi-viewpoint portrait of a Liverpool sink school; and Aurora da Silva’s kinky fabulation about a New Age Institute on a Greek island that runs courses on sadomasochism, body-piercing, tantric sex, and recreational drug-taking. That’s eleven self-contained fictional worlds. There should be twelve, but Sandra Pickering hasn’t submitted her folder yet. Eleven is quite enough to go on with, however. Already they’re becoming confused in my mind, and I’m afraid that I’ll make some frightful blunders when I see the students individually, getting the names of characters wrong and the story lines muddled up.
It’s a very unnatural way to read, of course, jumping from one unfinished story to another, but it made me think about the prolific production of fiction in our culture. Is it over-production? Are we in danger of accumulating a fiction-mountain – an immense quantity of surplus novels, like the butter mountains and milk lakes of the EEC? I remember Ralph Messenger’s dry remark, ‘Whether the world needs more novelists is a matter of opinion.’ His own opinion was pretty obvious.
Of course one can argue that there’s a basic human need for narrative: it’s one of our fundamental tools for making sense of experience – has been, back as far as you can go in history. But does this, I ask myself, necessarily entail the endless multiplication of new stories? Before the rise of the novel there wasn’t the same obligation on the storyteller – you could relate the old familiar tales over and over, the matter of Troy, the matter of Rome, the matter of Britain . . . giving them a new spin as times and manners changed. But for the last three centuries writers have been required to make up a new story every time. Not absolutely new, of course – it’s been pointed out often enough that at a certain level there are only a finite number of plots – but the plot must be fleshed out each time with a new set of characters, and worked out in a new set of circumstances. When you think of the billions of real people who have lived on this earth, each with their unique personal histories, that we shall never have time to know, it seems extraordinary, even perverse, that we should bother to invent all these additional pretend-lives. And it is a bother. So much that in reality is simply ‘given’ has to be decided when you’re writing fiction. Facts have to be represented by pseudo-facts, laboriously invented and painstakingly described. The reader must register and memorize these facts in order to follow your story, but they are flushed away almost as soon as the book is finished, to make room for another story. Before long nothing remains in the reader’s memory but a name or two, a few vague impressions of people, an indistinct recollection of the plot, and a general sense of having been entertained, or not, as the case may be. It’s frightening to think of how many novels I must have read in my lifetime, and how little I retain of the substance of most of them. Should I really be encouraging these bright young people to add their quotient to the dust-heap of forgotten pseudo-lives? Would they perhaps be more profitably occupied designing computer models of the mind in Ralph Messenger’s Centre for Cognitive Science?
TUESDAY 4TH MARCH. No mail today. I haven’t had a letter from Lucy since I got here, although I wrote to tell her the address. Maybe she didn’t get it in time – she said she was going off with some friends on a trip to the Barrier Reef. I did arrange with the Post Office to have my mail redirected, but perhaps one slipped through the net. Probably there’s a letter from her lying on the doormat in the hall at 58 Bloomfield Crescent under a heap of junk mail addressed to the Occupier, fliers for local shops and free samples of shampoo. My tenants haven’t arrived yet – departure delayed by illness – so I can’t ask them to check. Paul hasn’t written for ages either, but then he always was a hopeless correspondent. And anyway he’s a man. I worry about Lucy so far away from home, and reading all these novels about young people hasn’t helped. There’s so much about drugs, casual sex, getting drunk. Of course I made sure she knew all about the facts of life, contraception etc. at an early age, but I don’t actually know whether she’s still a virgin or not. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Carrie confided on Saturday that Emily is sleeping with her boyfriend and tells her all about it, which I suppose shows an admirable degree of mutual trust, but something in me recoils from such intimacy between parent and child.
WEDNESDAY 5TH MARCH. Answer to Monday’s concluding question: a resounding ‘No.’
I ran into Ralph Messenger in the campus bookshop today, and mentioned that I was a little worried about Lucy. ‘Don’t you have Email?’ he asked, and I had to admit that I didn’t, and anyway Lucy doesn’t have a computer. ‘I bet she has access to one,’ he said, and he’s probably right, since she’s working in an office. ‘You should get yourself wired,’ he said. I think I shall.
Talking about Lucy reminded me of his German postgraduate student’s project on mother-love, and he invited me back to the Centre to see it. It was a great anticlimax: nothing but a glorified computer game, really. There was this woman-shaped icon on the screen representing a mother, and three smaller icons representing her children, all demanding to be fed and clothed and looked after, and encountering various hazards like falling in the fishpond, or getting scalded by a cooking pot, or running out of the house and into the road, and the mother was having to make decisions all the time about directing her attention to where it was most urgently needed – putting hungry child A on hold while she pulled child B from under the wheels of an advancing bus etc., etc. The poor woman was in constant skittering motion, coping with one emergency after another. I was reminded of the video games in the arcade in the Students’ Union. Anything further removed from the emotional experience of motherhood would be difficult to imagine. I’m afraid I laughed out loud. Carl looked downcast, and Ralph a little irked. He said it was only an experimental model, and at an early stage of development.
As I was leaving, he gave me directions to their cottage near Stow-on-the-Wold, and said, ‘Bring a swimming costume. We have a hot tub.’ I presume it’s one of those big jacuzzi things they have in the open air in California. Must be a bit chilly in Gloucestershire in early March, surely?
My faith in the Creative Writing course, or at least in my own ab
ility to teach it, has been strengthened considerably by a very good response to the ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ exercise. I’ve just looked at the work handed in yesterday, and there are some excellent, if rather ribald, parodies or pastiches. The best ones are by Simon Bellamy, Frieda Sinclair, Aurora da Silva and Gilbert Baverstock. I’m going to photocopy them and send them to Ralph Messenger.
THURSDAY 6TH MARCH. My tenants have arrived at Bloomfield Crescent and have been phoning me on and off all day with questions about the house. Where is the timer clock for the central heating? What do they do with ‘trash’? Where is the instruction manual for the washing machine? (answer: lost) How do you light the gas fire in the lounge? (answer: with a spill, the automatic spark is broken) Is there another ‘icebox’ apart from the very small one in the kitchen? (answer: I’m afraid not) And so on. I suppose I should have written out more exhaustive instructions for them. They sound quite nice, Professor Otto Weismuller and his wife Hazel, if a little tone-deaf to English humour. When I told Professor Weismuller that ‘You just have to be firm’ with the flush handle in the downstairs loo, and ‘Don’t take no for an answer,’ he thought I was telling him to call a plumber.
However, one bit of good news: there are two airmail letters from Australia which they are going to forward to me soonest.
FRIDAY 7TH MARCH. Long article in the paper today about Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French writer, journalist, editor of Elle magazine, aged forty-three, who had a kind of stroke that left him in a condition called ‘locked-in syndrome’, conscious but unable to move a muscle – except for one, his left eyelid, which he used to communicate and – astonishingly – to dictate a book about his experience. He worked out with a friend a system of blinking this one eye to semaphore letters of the alphabet, to make up words and sentences. Incredibly laborious and time-consuming, but it worked. The book has just been published to critical acclaim, and apparently there was a TV documentary about him that had a huge impact. No wonder. It’s an extraordinary story, even in the newspaper report, both tragic and inspiring.
In a way it seems the worst thing that could happen to a human being – to be locked inside your body, completely helpless, unable to speak or gesture, unable to even nod or shake your head. Apparently he was in a coma for four weeks, and it was some time before the staff at the hospital realized that he had regained consciousness. They had written him off as being in a vegetative state. It must have been like being buried alive, hearing people walking about above your grave and not being able to attract their attention. Jean-Dominique Bauby himself compares it to being in a diving bell. His book is called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the butterfly being his thoughts that flutter about inside the diving bell, unable to get out – until he invented the eyelid code. That’s the inspiring side of the story: that he did in the end find a way to communicate his plight. It’s tremendous testimony to the strength and resilience of the human spirit, its refusal to be silenced.
Of course I can’t help thinking of poor Martin, whose aneurysm was by the sound of it rather similar to the Frenchman’s stroke, and might have had the same effect, perhaps. In fact . . . the horrible thought occurred to me that perhaps Martin wasn’t dead when they let me in to see him at the hospital but suffering from locked-in syndrome, but of course that’s nonsense, he was dead, his heart had stopped and he wasn’t breathing. I can’t wish it had been otherwise, I don’t think I could have coped with looking after someone in Bauby’s condition. Selfish of me, but that’s the truth.
SATURDAY 8TH MARCH. I brought a swimming costume with me from London, thinking that I might take some exercise at the Sports Centre pool here (a good resolution so far not acted upon), but when I got it out and looked at it this morning it seemed a shabby, faded thing, so I went into Gloucester to buy a new one. Gloucester rather than Cheltenham because I had a silly fear of running into Carrie in the shop by some bizarre coincidence and having to reveal that I was buying a new swimming costume specifically to cut a good figure in her hot tub.
A somewhat anxious business always, for a woman, buying a swimming costume, especially as one gets older. No garment exposes so cruelly the increasing imperfections of the body. Looking at myself in the angled mirrors of the changing cubicle, I was dismayed to see a network of indigo veins, like hairline crazing in old china, or the lines in Danish Blue cheese, spreading from behind both knees.
After much searching I found a plain black one-piece with a halter neck that I thought looked quite becoming, but I tried it on over my knickers, as very reasonably requested by the store for reasons of hygiene, and when I put it on again at home, sans underwear, behold: tendrils of pubic hair sprouting luxuriantly from under the cutaway crotch. So now I must shave myself. What a bore. I feel punished for my vanity.