Okay, so it’s not normal. (But how I hated that designer who suggested removing all dust jackets so that books would be a uniform beige and thence a calming silent witness to a sand-coloured life? What an attractive red splatter her blood would make against my library.)
I like things in rows. It comforts me. It’s not necessarily wrong to be comforted by order. But rows? You know what the ultimate row is? The bars of a jail cell. I have muntin bars, those internal faux grilles that make the windows easy to clean. My house is filled with racks and levels, stairs and shelves; with linage, both perpendicular and horizontal. It is choked with symmetry. And outside, garden trellis—that’s magnificent.
No, it is not normal. I rarely have anyone over unless they’re understanding types.
Also there’s a lot of softness in the house, velvet, brushed cotton, fringes, cushions. Am I just shoving this fact in to hide something Teutonic, not a passion for order and straight lines, but a mania? Why am I never on time for appointments but always ten minutes early? Since I often hear from lunatics and frequently get drunken e-mails and phone calls from my odd bosses or readers, I have to keep records. I keep a hard copy and place it in a file labelled Loonies. These crazies are filed, they’re under control, even though they’re still out there with their little brains boiling.
And it isn’t superficial. It goes to the core. I was as horrified as anyone when Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover at one of those franchised Jolly Maid Services and discovered that they tidy and make everything look sparkling, but they don’t really clean. They don’t even have Miele vacuums. The microscopic flakes of human skin that make up dust, they just disperse. To where? Imagine oiling the kitchen sink to make it gleam without having Vim-ed the thing first.
There was a time when this wouldn’t have bothered me, but the world wasn’t so chaotic then. What would Mrs. Tittlemouse have said?
We can check, thanks to Beatrix Potter.
Mrs. Tittlemouse was a woodmouse and she lived in a bank under a hedge. Cozy doesn’t begin to describe it. There she is at her tiny door (not quite tiny enough as we shall discover when Mr. Toad squeezes in) in a pink and white striped dress (stripes again) under a large white apron. She’s quite a stout fireplug of a person. I am slender, nay bony, but I think stoutness should be more prized, the way it was at the turn of the century when a certain roundness implied prosperity and a level of jollity. Such a funny little house! thinks Mrs. Tittlemouse. It’s full of nooks and crannies. Speaking as someone who despises John Pawson—the minimalist king who brought us grey rooms furnished with armless grey chairs, grey stone coffee tables with an oddly shaped grey bowl sitting on them, and little else (he doesn’t “do” bookshelves, too frolicsome)—I like the Tittlemouse look, oh I do. She has a kitchen, parlour, pantry, larder, and a bedroom with a little box bed. One day I’ll sleep in a box bed.
She is always sweeping and dusting, much like me, although she is a mouse and I am a woman who likes lying on the couch and reading and calling out for more wine. She doesn’t like insects with their dirty feet, spiders with their nasty cobwebs and bumblebees who enter without permission—as if they’d ever be given it—and set up house in piles of moss, buzzing alarmingly at their hostess.
Filthy drippy old Mr. Jackson the amphibian is allowed to stay for dinner because Mrs. Tittlemouse is polite, but there’s method in her hospitality. He eats creepy-crawlies hiding in the plate rack, scares away butterflies in the sugar bowl and positively exterminates bees.
But this is where the story gets exciting. When everyone has been eaten or has left and Mrs. Tittlemouse is alone with honey smears, muddy footprints and God knows what on the crockery. This is the life of everyone with a house. Mrs. Tittlemouse is terribly upset by the mess. She has a task and sets herself at it in a way that makes it clear that tidiness and cleanliness sit up straight within her very soul.
She spring-cleans for a fortnight. No Swiffering. She scrubs, she soaps, she dusts and rubs and polishes. And then the place gleams and a peaceful softness steals over Mrs. Tittlemouse’s heart. The sheets she tucks into her box bed are clean and fragrant. It’s the same feeling Yeats had when he arose and went to Innisfree to plant nine bean rows. It’s that pause when the poet W.H. Davies stands and stares. It’s that fine feeling a woman gets when her words are completed on the page and the publisher’s cheque is swallowed by the ATM and the dollars will flow to become fine garments and C.P. Cavafy’s sensual perfumes of every kind, flights to distant cities and swellings in the coffers of universities her daughters earnestly wish to attend so as to learn from their scholars.
But her home is gleaming and her perennial beds are well-mulched with mushroom compost and all is well in this one plot of fertile, chemical-free land in a world where the news should come with a wailing track. And it would too, but we’re too embarrassed to admit what a failure we are as a species.
So I hug my blues to myself—I knew I could count on you, blues, grim companion of my middle years—and I tend my own place and I follow the wise and wonderful Mrs. Tittlemouse and that’s all we can achieve. It’s small, it’s less than small. But it will have to do. The freakish housecleaning expert Cheryl Mendelson says a well-kept house is one that you enter and find nothing needs be done. It is waiting for you. The theorist-of-everything Alain de Botton says more nobly that we come home each workday from a world of insincerity, envy, bureaucracy, and squandered time to a place that reflects our “authentic selves.” There is gentleness, he says, in the softness of our curtains. For the first time I wonder why fabric is shunned in offices. Clackety plastic blinds are favoured, when in fact, curtains are easier to clean.
Little art there is that celebrates cleaning. Kate Bush’s 2005 CD Aerial has a song, “Mrs. Bartolozzi,” presumably about a housekeeper, on a rainy Wednesday when people traipsed mud through the house and how it had to be scrubbed out of the hall carpet. Then comes the joy of collecting all the dirty linens in the wash basket and putting them in the washing machine. “Washing machine” sings Kate. Her blouse wraps around her husband’s trousers, slishy sloshy, and it is as if she has walked into the ocean with her skirt floating around her and little fish swim between her legs.
When I need calming, I watch the front-loader throwing clothes, around, back and forth, with a slappy sound. And then the waves come in and the soap froths against the glass. It is sublime.
It hasn’t been quite as sublime since the machine attacked me. It has a little pullout drawer into which you pour detergent concentrate. Since I had opened a new jug, some blue liquid spilled onto the carpet. I grabbed a rag and started mopping up. Then I stood up suddenly, hit the edge of the pullout drawer, and crashed to the ground, listening to myself with interest for I seemed to be screaming with pain. The gash in my head bled for three hours. Painkillers and wine … should have been a country song. Then clear liquid began coming out of the wound. On the off-chance that it was brain juice and not plasma, I licked it off my fingers. It was bland.
I cannot move to Japan and join one of its cleaning communes, but I read about them and something calls out to me. Louise Rafkin, an American housecleaner who wrote a fine book called Other People’s Dirt: A Housecleaner’s Curious Adventure, taught me about a man named Tenko-san who in the late 1800s decided that work was a way of giving thanks for life. So he worked and cleaned for others as a way of offering a pure thanks. Today about 150 people remain in the group he founded.
When I heard that Japan has a national Day of Labour, in which everybody cleans, I was lovestruck. My city holds a clean-up day on April 22nd on which nobody does a damn thing. I want to see everyone out on the street with their special see-through green garbage bags, but it’s just me alone grubbing in my neighbours’ shrubs for condoms and the cellophane wrappers from cigarette packages. Even if I’m the one plucking their debris, I can only congratulate smokers for getting to their drug. Shrink wrap is the bane of my existence.
Rafkin is my kind of woman. She tells us the Japane
se words for different kinds of dirt and I go into a semi-aroused state. I am excited by dirt only in that I envision cleaning it up. Gicho-gicho means “dripping with grease” but gucho-gucho just refers to a jumble. Nuru-nuru means “slimy.” Gyogan is humble toilet-cleaning. Why call it humble? You get important psychological rewards from cleaning a toilet. Windexing a mirror hardly provides the same shot of gratification.
I once cleaned my stepdaughter’s kitchen. It wasn’t her dirt but the dirt of male roommates and there was ooze and insectry, odour and food that wouldn’t move, ketchup dried on the tip of the bottle like blackened foreskin, as Bruce Robinson wrote in Withnail and I. She howled with delight when she saw the results, and embraced me tearfully. I could not tell if it was joy at such a revelation of love from a stepmother (we are reputed to be evil; I, however, would eat gicho-gicho to earn my stepdaughters’ love) or at being related to an unofficial member of a Japanese cleaning cult.
And so I count few people as my friends. I trust almost no one wholly. I am convinced of my husband’s love and extend a hand to any stranger. But I am in a trough of melancholy, like a wet trench in the First World War. It isn’t pleasant and requires an enormous effort of will to keep going each day. But mine is the tidiest, coziest, most fetching trench on the Maginot Line, and for that I thank my alter ego Mrs. Tittlemouse.
Tell Me Where It Hurts
In which we learn and yet take some pleasure from the pain of others
This is the era of the Pain Memoir. Presumably these books will continue selling until humans stop suffering pain. Fat chance, eh?
I remember a writer being sneered at by a reviewer for unconsciously sending out the message that “novels are how-to books for living.” I was bewildered and annoyed. Because of course novels are how-to books for living. Why else would anyone write them or read them? Novels help you articulate the struggles of your own life and, at the very least, tell you what not to do. That Vronsky, he’s trouble, for instance.
But biographies, autobiographies and memoirs are best of all. Stuff happened. Memoirs are infinite in their griefs and oddities and yet by definition (she lived to write the book), the author has survived. And they’re a grab bag. Yes, you have Eisenhower trying to decide which day would have the most favourable weather for the Normandy invasion. But his wartime lover, Kay Summersby, wrote equally interestingly about their awkward efforts to have sexual intercourse without anyone suspecting. She remembers her silk underthings, intended to entrance the general. They failed. He was impotent, presumably had weather on his mind.
Great events and personal limpness, it’s all part of the memoir genre.
That is why the scandal about that American, James Frey, trying very hard to have lived a shocking life, is significant. He wrote a memoir—which I shan’t bother to read—of my favourite kind. He was miserable and drug-addicted; lots of tooth loss and some of it by his own hands (or was that from a parody after the scandal?), wet black American freeway stuff, life on the grotty edge, plenty of skanks, jolly good. I enjoy curling up in a highly stuffed sofa under a blankie and reading about the sufferings of others. It isn’t that I take joy in it. But I’ve suffered, just like every other human, in my own special, dull way, and it comforts me to read that I am not alone, despite not having spent time in Japanese prisoner of war camps. And furthermore, they lived to tell the tale so that’s all right then. No, I have never read The Diary of Anne Frank. I draw the line at the misery of children who didn’t survive to hide it from their own children.
James Frey suffered mentally and physically. Apparently, he was torn, figuratively, into a million little pieces. Except he wasn’t. He made a lot of it up. And thus his agent, editor, publisher and, sadly, every reader of his novel has now learned not to quite trust anything in the memoir genre. This isn’t good, not only because people telling the truth about their lives has improved our own flawed lives and selves so much, but because readers will turn to fiction again. And 95 percent of North American fiction is unspeakably bad (75 percent for Brits), which destroys the capacity of reading in later life to compensate for appalling schools.
Lies have increasingly snuck their way into autobiographies and memoirs (not biographies, for their accuracy is a biographer’s lifeblood. Or perhaps it’s more of a status thing.) The reason is what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness,” a satirical term referring to something known on a gut level, without evidence. The concept has little sway in the rest of the world. Frey can’t admit that he flat-out lied. He says he may not have told the facts as they were. But he felt them to be true. He didn’t tell his facts to you; he felt his facties at you. They were truthy. And that was good enough for him. I was puzzled by the number of people who defended Frey. Clearly truthiness plays a big part in their own arrangements.
So I finally read Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, years after it was published but just after the Frey debacle. And for the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to believe all of it. After some research, I now accept that his mother was a mad narcissist and that she and her possibly-autistic alcoholic husband gave Augusten up for adoption to their psychiatrist, a man who masturbated to pictures of Golda Meir and handed little Augusten over to the pedophile who lived in a barn in the backyard.
But I don’t accept that the doctor used to predict the progress of the day according to his own excrement and that one of his teenage daughters would willingly extract the mortal coil from the toilet with a spatula and leave it on a picnic table out back to be dried by the sun. It may well have happened but I remain determinedly unconvinced.
First, call me picky but as an accomplished pastry chef, I don’t think a spatula is up to the task. Perhaps one of those circular slotted spoons Chinese chefs use with their woks would be the lifter of choice. But even a fish slice wouldn’t do the trick, depending of course on the doctor’s output.
Second, teenage girls, accustomed to squalor as they are, have their limits and that would be one of them.
Third, the shrink who lived in a huge tumbledown house in a nice neighbourhood, a house that defined ramshackle, even he would drive the neighbours beyond any limit of tolerance if he built a human excrement art-installation on the picnic table in his back garden. It would be viewed, it would be smelled, it would attract flies and vermin.
Even if the spatula were the perfect kitchen tool, even if the girl, unlike U.S. Army torturers and the British diet hound and toilet inspector “Dr.” Gillian McKeith, had overcome a universal human aversion, no neighbour would tolerate a poo festival out back.
I say this as a person who watches a neighbour take a specially saved plastic bread bag and a hand spade and monthly collect hundreds of tiny beige balls extruded by her yappy little dog. She saves it for the next garbage collection. I yearn to move to another city or petition City Hall for a new fence-height limit of 16 metres. I, dear Reader, am normal that way.
Also, I don’t think anyone—and some of the people Augusten was growing up with who did this had enough remnants of sanity that they had jobs outside the home—would eat Kibbles as a snack. It’s lumps of dried dog food that look like … well, there’s a theme here and I’m not running with it.
Burroughs has rescued himself from a childhood so bad that you wish he had Asperger’s Syndrome, as his brother does, because people with Asperger’s have difficulty making emotional connections with others and are less likely to be hurt by living in a household of mental patients driven mad by a psychiatrist who is a dead ringer for Santa Claus. But there are things that don’t seem possible.
This creeping doubt about misery memoirs has damaged the work of the great American humorist David Sedaris, who writes truthfully about his eccentric childhood, decades of dealing with nutcases while working in an apple-cannery, as a mover, a housecleaner, a performance artist and devoted drug user and alcoholic. People say Burroughs resembles Sedaris. But Sedaris is a kind, highly intelligent human being who, while strange, observes the strangeness of others
with a keen awareness of his own peculiarities.
Burroughs is a book in himself, minus his upbringing, and it isn’t amusing. It is tragic. “Not laughing,” as my tiny stepdaughter used to say to me severely when I would tell a joke I thought would appeal to children, usually things that rhymed. (I was trying too hard and that never works with kids. They will not be courted.) All memoirs start to look dodgy to me in this light. When Gerald Durrell wrote My Family and Other Animals, the classic autobiography on “that rarest of things, a sunlit childhood” about his youth in Corfu, he made his brother, the late novelist Lawrence Durrell, a figure of idiocy. Indeed, he made everyone a figure of fun. What a collection of fumbling, foolish, well-meaning people.
And then we read about the suicide of Lawrence’s daughter—he is said to have raped her—and the hopelessly sad, borderline criminal life of his other brother, and his sister’s haphazard scary boardinghouse existence in post-war England, and Durrell’s own pathetic end in a care home, soiling himself and left untended for days by family and friends who admired him but did not really love him. Durrell died like the animals he had put into zoos, surrounded by well-intentioned individuals.
The great British novelist and playwright John Mortimer was once accused by a reviewer of “covering pain with jokes.” I asked him about this and he was taken aback. Covering pain with jokes is the only possible attitude, he said, and he is of course right. Not everyone manages it, but it is the stance to aim for.
Cake or Death Page 2