She would ask me what I did.
‘Erm . . . I’ve just finished a course in careers guidance.’
So I was a careers officer now?
‘No . . . I – I did an MA in psychoanalytic studies before . . . and I realized this year that I really didn’t want to practise, that . . . actually . . . the theory interested me more. The model of decision-making we were supposed to follow, I thought it was – from the perspective of my background – that it privileged the rational too much, and I wanted to see if I could combine the two – the psychoanalytic stuff and the careers theory – and come up with something that incorporated the role of the unconscious . . . so I’m going to do a PhD.’
And where would that be?
‘Oh, I haven’t got a place yet . . .’
Oh.
‘. . . But I do other things, I write as well.’
Was I published?
‘Yes – in magazines – poetry magazines.’
Oh.
Then we would move on to where we lived, and I would feel compelled to tell her the whole truth, that I was living back with my mother. She would say that must be awkward, mustn’t it, bringing my boyfriend home? I would have to tell her that I didn’t have a boyfriend.
But I could save some face, at least. I had a rationale for avoiding a career in careers guidance. I was going to do a PhD. People would ask me what I was doing, and I would be able to tell them that what I was doing was a PhD. People at parties understand that whatever obscure nonsense a PhD might be about, it is, at least, a qualification – career-progression, of a kind. If all you can tell them is that you are living off a small inheritance while you write poetry – poetry! – they’ll only think you’re a complete sadloserwaster, as opposed to just a partial one.
Most people are, at best, indifferent to contemporary poetry. Some commentators think that this is the fault of most people, while others blame the poetry. Some people, in what, for the sake of a coherent paragraph, I’ll call ‘the poetry world’, try to elbow poetry into mainstream culture, through National Poetry Days, and work in schools, and accessible events, and placements of poets in unpoetic places. Others make a virtue of its marginal status, seeing the writing and non-commercial distribution of a poem as an act of resistance against the commercialization and commodification of just about everything else. Meanwhile, most people remain indifferent, with the consequence that the market for poetry is negligible. If you manage to get a collection published, you are a success. If you sell more than a handful of copies, you are a great success. If you manage to sell in the thousands, and do a few radio broadcasts, get your work taught in schools, then you are, in poetry terms, a superstar. But most people still won’t have heard of you, and unless you get some steady job, a chair in creative writing, say, or a regular radio slot of some kind, you will still struggle to make a living.
If you rank among the merely successful, your relative poverty will bewilder and embarrass people – if you’re as talented and hard-working, so widely published and well respected, as you seem, indirectly, to be claiming to be, then how come you earn so little money? If you’re not bullshitting them, then you must be deluding yourself. When your mother tells the people she meets at parties that you’ve got a poetry book out, they ask her, in all sincerity, how much you had to pay to get it published.
Poetry rewards in other ways. I’d had a difficult few months with it, as with everything else, but once I arrived back in London, I found a new momentum. In 1998 I completed twenty-one poems, thirteen of which would make it into my first collection. I wrote of course about my family, my father and grandparents, their deaths, the grief we all felt, and always in the process of writing, the technical and emotional difficulties would get all tangled up together – as they must do – and I would think that whichever piece I was writing was never going to work. But then, more often than not, suddenly, it would. And every time I began work on another poem, it was a whole new start, always with the distant but irresistible possibility that this time – this time – I might manage to do something, well, perfect? Please?
Travelling Light
Never underestimate
the ecstasy of chucking out:
the clean desktop, the orderly wardrobe,
the black bags stacked by the shut front door,
the softness of a shaven calf,
the bracing soreness of the friction glove –
a text that could edit itself would know it,
linen being boiled must know it,
the godly joy of cleanliness,
the pleasure of being stripped bare
and blameless, a born-again,
with just one suitcase, on the right road.
In March, I got some excellent news: the previous autumn, I had made my second submission to the panel of the Eric Gregory Awards for the encouragement of young poets, a self-explanatory fund administered by the Society of Authors. Now I learned that I had been shortlisted and was to attend an interview, at the society’s offices in Kensington. When the day came, I wore a black, sack-like dress, with a grey knitted jacket over it, and I’m sure I looked every bit as eccentric and badly dressed as people expect poets to look. I may have had some idea that my financial situation might be taken into account, so I didn’t want to look too well finished.
I arrived early, and was shown into a waiting area where I could relax for a bit, or, alternatively, finish working myself up. So I worked myself up for ten minutes or so, and then someone ushered me into a committee room. Sitting round the table were lots of poets I’d heard of. And they were very nice to me, asking lots of encouraging, not-too-difficult questions about my work, mostly presaged by ‘What I particularly liked . . .’ I wondered, because of the whole tone of it, if the interview might be a formality, but didn’t dare to hope. A few weeks later, an envelope stuck in the letterbox told me that I was one of that year’s six winners, and would be presented with a cheque at the society’s award ceremony in the summer. It was the first really nice thing to happen to anyone in my family for a good while, so it’s a shame, really, that I so quickly got into the habit of forgetting about it. I find it so much easier to recall the things I didn’t win.
Back in what many people like to call the Real World, I was still struggling to escape a life sentence of sadloserwasterdom. I sent a rough draft of a research proposal to a concrete-built campus university within commuting distance of London, and got a reply from one of the professors of psychoanalytic studies there, who was interested in my project. He helped me come up with a finished research proposal, and I was formally accepted as a full-time, self-funding student, to begin the following autumn.
In the meantime, I found a decent poetry workshop to attend, and a new therapist to visit. I asked Linda to ask her Jungian analyst if she knew of any good and affordable Jungians in the north-west London area. I was shy of Freudians now, but the poet in me remained drawn to the Jungian approach, with its narratives and its pictures. She came back with the name of a woman in Finchley, a therapist who was training to be an analyst, and who could see me at the lower trainee rates. I liked her: she was thoughtful and funny. She was Jewish, so nothing about my background needed to be explained. And she took me seriously as a poet – it wasn’t a symptom to her. On the debit side, she lived on the wrong branch of the Northern Line, but if I was having a bad avoidance day, I could always take a taxi.
Summer 1998 arrived, and now I had the poetry award, the PhD place and the therapist. Money was coming in in fits and starts from my great-uncle’s estate. ‘But,’ said my party-girl superego, ‘you’re still in your old back bedroom, aren’t you? And an adult should really have a job. That money’s going to run out, especially if you spend it all on’ – she smirked – ‘therapy. What if you want to get a mortgage? You need a back-up.’
So we compromised: I got a very part-time job as secretary to a helpline adviser at the National Autistic Society, a particularly nice post for me as it enabled me to spend my bre
aks in the library, trying to discover if there were any grounds for my long-held suspicion that I had Asperger’s Syndrome. The pay was minimal, but if I added it to my dead relative income stream and my poetry award cheque, it would be more than enough to pay the rent on a room somewhere. I had no financial excuse for living at home any more, and I wanted to live closer to my London friends. I bought a copy of Exchange and Mart and circled some ads.
One of my circled ads had been placed by a rental agency in Camden. When I phoned up, they offered to pair me up with another young woman who was looking for a flat, so that they could show us some two-bedroom places together. I met Sally at their offices the next day. She was friendly and seemed easy enough to get on with. So did I. We took the agency up on their offer. Then they showed us a couple of places which turned our stomachs, so we decided to look together on our own behalf. I suggested we look further out – East Finchley maybe? – but that was further than Sally wanted to go, so we kept looking in Hampstead, Camden, Kentish Town, where the prices were high and pickings thin. We took ourselves to another Camden rental agency, a bigger one with shinier offices, and they showed us round a flat in a newly refurbished concrete block in Chalk Farm. The surroundings were rather squalid, and the block itself looked like a Brutalist lift shaft in a multi-storey car park, but the flat itself seemed pleasant enough, and the block well-secured, so we took it.
Sally moved in first, and within hours I had the first phone call: ‘Well, it’s just turning into a nightmare . . .’ Plumbing was blocked, circuits had fused, the man at the rental place was shirty with her when she tried to complain . . . Worst of all, the paved-over flat roof outside our living room backed straight onto another roof, which was easily accessible from another flat, which was occupied by a riotous group of Italian squatters. There had been squatters in our new flat before the property managers had thrown them out, and whether these were the same people, or their friends, they apparently hated us already. Sally was convinced that when they played their games of roof football, they were kicking the ball against our French windows on purpose.
It did sound like a nightmare; in fact it sounded like one of my adolescent nightmares, where I was living unprotected in a house with dodgy wiring and even dodgier men banging on the windows, but I’d already paid my deposit in cleared funds, I was committed, and I couldn’t leave Sally by herself, so I moved in. I had the smaller of the two bedrooms: Sally had told me that as she was a ‘clothes and shoes person’, she would take the bigger bedroom, if that was OK. I said OK. As long as I could keep some of my books in the living room.
‘You do have a lot of books,’ she said, dismayed, as I lined up crate after crate against the wall. The Nigerian student who guarded the front door at night, always with one of his business textbooks or the Koran in his hand, was more approving: ‘You are a clever girl!’ he cried.
I did try to stick it out. For all of two weeks, I tried. I walked to Camden station on workday mornings, slapping the pavements with my thin shoes (at that time I was wearing boys’ slip-on plimsolls, size 5 from Woolworth’s, the cheapest summer shoes you could get); I had a couple of friends back to the flat, and they admired its good proportions; Sally, who had been a hairdresser before she moved into tourism, gave me the best haircut I’d ever had, plus some excellent advice about hair-care, which I’ve followed ever since; I wrote some decent poems on my Powerbook, sitting at the dining table with one nervous eye on the windows; when I wasn’t writing, I spent most of my time pacing my tiny bedroom, listening to Hello Nasty by the Beastie Boys over and over again on my Walkman.
The nights were harder than the days. It was a hot summer, and I slept uneasily, while noises from the streets outside seeped through the open window and into my dreams. At least there were no more football games after dark. Sometimes we would venture outside ourselves, and if the boys from the squat saw us on the patio or through the windows, they’d shout, ‘Eh, brutana!’ Sally had lived in Italy and told me ‘brutana’ meant ‘bitches’ or ‘dogs’ – I’m not sure which is worse.
‘Italian men never grow up,’ she said. ‘If their mums were here, they wouldn’t dare.’
Not long after I arrived, I developed a painful sore throat that wouldn’t shift, so I took a couple of days off work, and registered as a temporary patient at a surgery in Kentish Town. It was huge, with a waiting room like a bus station, filled to bursting with the slumping dispossessed. I was told to wait, and slumped in my turn along with all the others. We avoided one another’s eyes, and kept them on the long electronic strip sign that showed us who was to go and see whom next and in which room they were to see them. Years later, when I was watching Ian Puleston-Davies’ drama about OCD, Dirty Filthy Love, I’m pretty sure I recognized the waiting room in one of the scenes: it suited the bleak tone perfectly. After a short wait, I was summoned by the strip. An unfriendly young doctor took a quick look at my throat and said she would write me a prescription for antibiotics. She obviously begrudged me them.
While I was off work, I opened the Guardian one day and saw that Miroslav Holub had died. Since the poetry course, I’d sent him a postcard and he’d sent one back. I cried because he wouldn’t now send any more to me, or to anybody. No more essays, no more poems, no more anecdotes about laboratory mice or domestic cats. It was too sad.
My previous experience with GPs had taught me that they would rather trust their own observations than take the patient’s word for it, so instead of waiting till the crying fit had subsided, I phoned the surgery during the crying fit.
‘I can’t stop crying,’ I sobbed, when the receptionist asked how she could help me.
‘Do you think you might be depressed?’ she asked.
I said that seemed probable.
She got me an appointment straight away. I saw one of the Unfriendly Doctor’s kindlier colleagues. I told her that I was depressed, my father had been depressed and that I was scared that I was going to fail and succumb and die young just like he had. She said there was no need for that to happen: there was a new treatment out there called cognitive behavioural therapy, and this, she said, could help me get out of my depressive thinking patterns. In the meantime, of course I could have some more Prozac. I clutched the prescription gratefully. I was someone’s pill-popping patient again, and the role felt familiar and comforting.
Back at the flat, I lay on the sofa reading Prozac Nation. Elizabeth Wurtzel made bad mental health seem like a romantic destiny, a vocation. At the same time, she gave a wincingly accurate account of what a self-absorbed pain in the arse a depressed young woman can be.
When I told Sally that I couldn’t hack it any more, that I was heading back to my mother’s, she was very sweet about it. She even said that, London rental prices being what they were, she would commute from her parents’ herself, if she could. I promised that I would pay my half of the rent until she found another flatmate, and she found someone else almost straight away, but there was no denying that I’d done her a shabby turn, leaving her alone in that concrete block to deal with the football-playing squatter pests.
‘Can you accept that you let her down?’ my therapist asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying my best not to choke on it.
The move meant changing doctors, again. I had got it into my head that the next doctor might disbelieve me and take my lovely Prozac away, so I asked the kindly Kentish Town doctor to write a letter that I could take in with me, to explain the need for the prescription. There was no way that I was going back to my old GP to be patronized, so that left me with the big medical centre round the corner, down the hill, round the roundabout, up another hill and next to the car park by the disused railway line. Its waiting room reminded me of Kentish Town, only with much less slumping room. The receptionists spoke sharply. When I showed the letter to the doctor, it was obvious that I had done the wrong thing by bringing it.
‘What are you giving me this for?’ she snapped. Never mind: she renewed my prescription. Then she said I’d
be better off seeing one of her colleagues next time, as he had been a psychiatrist, so he knew much more about mental illness. I got out as quickly as I could, which was what we both wanted.
When my next renewal came around, I saw the mental illness expert. He smiled broadly at me, and delivered a little lecture about how negative thinking activated the ‘depression centres’ – not a concept I’ve come across anywhere else – and what I needed to do was to stop dwelling on these depressing ideas and focus on the positive side. ‘We can’t always get what we want,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear.
‘I certainly can’t get my father back,’ I might have replied.
On the positive side, he renewed my prescription.
Leaving the flat had been a retrograde step but, again on the positive side, it had been twelve years since my humiliation by ten-year-old boys, and I’d managed to claim my local territory back from avoidance. These days, I was able to travel home late on the underground, and not always in the guard’s carriage (not that I’d used them much anyway since a guard had hit on me a few years earlier, an incident which seemed to me to negate the whole point of his carriage, and of him). And when I got into Canons Park station on the late train, I would walk home. In the dark. All by myself.
I wanted to be able to go out at night and I didn’t want to avoid meeting men. Observing the mourning rituals for my father had given me a new set of unexpected warm feelings towards my Jewish background, and, as I said to my mother, I was starting to think that settling down with a nice Jewish boy might not be such a bad thing after all. I had a look at the personal ads in the Jewish Chronicle, and left a message in a promising-sounding box. The man called me back, we had a pleasant enough chat, even laughed a few times, and arranged to meet in a bar in Covent Garden.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 19