Bleaker House

by Nell Stevens

  They are not mere suggestions. They are specific. “Have in mind between 68 and 73 percent of the ending before you begin. In narrative prose, as opposed to indented dialogue, write, on average, two-and-a-half paragraphs per page, never six or seven or ten. Avoid large abstract nouns, particularly those ending in ‘ness.’ Limit your similes to two a page. Do not write satire.”

  Leslie’s students learn, over the course of their apprenticeship, that these rules are both tongue-in-cheek and very serious. You will be castigated for using the word “happiness,” for disrespecting your own characters, for spelling “all right” as one word, for paragraphs that are too long, for ellipses…

  You also learn that one of the things Leslie loves above all is a story that breaks his rules and still somehow “works.” These are rare.

  One of Leslie’s tips, which I think about a lot on the island, is “Two, not one.” By this he means that the interest of a story lies in the interaction between two characters. A narrative that stays in the interior thoughts of a single character alone is more likely to fall flat and lose the interest of the reader. You need two—you need at least two. A more familiar way of putting this, a staple tenet of the creative writing workshop, is the assertion that narrative, or drama, requires conflict.

  I have put myself in a situation that is, on paper, one, not two. My conflicts are predominantly internal: with moods, and memories, and, worst of all, dreams. When I send Leslie an excerpt from my novel, in which Ollie arrives on the island at night, loses his way and contemplates his own death, the response that bounces back into my inbox almost at once confirms my anxieties on this point: “Well, Nell, when you go to an island with no one on it, it’s not surprising that you write a Onesey instead of a—recommended—Twosey.”

  —

  Apart from the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plan, I only have two books with me in paper form. The first is David Shields’s Reality Hunger, which I finished in one sitting on the plane from Santiago and which lies at the bottom of my case for the entirety of my Falklands stay. And the second is Bleak House. Other things I read on a temperamental, scratched Kindle—though I’m a slow reader in general, once I overcome the initial fuzziness of hunger I manage to get through a book most days here—so Bleak House is the only novel I have with me that I can actually hold: it has covers, pages, mass. In this way it assumes a presence that my other reading doesn’t. I read it in bed, wearing all my clothes, usually right after lunch, and so it becomes part of the fabric of my days, like the raisins and almonds and the nightly Ferrero Rocher. I could have brought more food with me; instead I brought this decadent, weighty book. I like its heft. I like its expansiveness. I like the familiarity of the London it describes. The novel names the city, and the city, as I remember it from afar, recalls the novel over and over, in dark streets, in rain, in contortions.

  The picture on its cover—a looming building with dark windows, black-and-white—makes me think of the bookshop on Charing Cross Road where I bought it years earlier: drizzle making the street outside look monochrome; the smell of coffee drifting down from the cafe on the top floor. The page margins are marked up with scrawls from lectures at university, when I wrote things like “Weather! Atmosphere!” and “Psych. of Realism” and “Feminine modesty / Unreliable narrator?” in blurry-edged pencil.

  Sometimes on the island, I dream about London, and in those dreams it is a strange amalgamation of the way it was as I last saw it—warm, familiar, 2013—and the way it appears in the novel—fog clogged, Victorian, full of scrap paper.

  —

  Life lived as a onesey doesn’t always feel that way. My days are filled with interactions that seem, as time passes, increasingly real: my debates with Hemingway subside as my stomach shrinks and adjusts to the diet of powdered food, but others take their place.

  My novelist friend, still on a mission to buoy me up, sends me excerpts from Dickens’s letters: “How I work, how I walk, how I shut myself up, how I roll down hills and climb up cliffs; how the new story is everywhere—heaving in the sea, flying with the clouds, blowing in the wind; how I settle to nothing, and wonder (in the old way) at my own incomprehensibility.” In my mind’s eye, Dickens rolls and climbs all over Bleaker Island; the image is so vivid it is disconcerting. The hills and cliffs and sea and clouds and weather of the letter become my hills and cliffs and sea and clouds and weather. Dickens strides up the incline towards George and Alison’s house, and sets out across the beach. He discovers parts of Bleaker that even I haven’t found—caves and peaks and new animals—seeing and not seeing, busy with his work.

  He seems to inhabit both himself and his landscape so easily; to fit so snugly into the mould labelled “Author.” When I see him setting out on his adventures across the island, the hail doesn’t sting him. When he approaches the penguin colony, they do not slither away from him on their stomachs but instead hold their ground, and allow him to join their solemn vigil. When he reaches the little hut by the airstrip, he doesn’t stare forlornly at the “Welcome to Bleaker Island” sign and ponder how on earth he ended up here, whether the story that possesses him is the right one, whether it is even worth telling. Instead, he wonders (in the old way) at his incomprehensibility. He marvels at the creative forces he finds within himself.

  By contrast, as I continue my own exploration of the island, rolling down hills and climbing up cliffs, I engage in a series of ongoing battles with frustratingly comprehensible things: the wind, primarily, which throws the toggles of my coat into my face with stinging frequency, with my own under-fuelled muscles that sometimes make a leisurely downhill stroll feel like a marathon through quicksand; and, lately, with a caracara that follows me on my walks with the persistence of a shadow.

  I worry that these are the things that possess me. These are the things that are everywhere. And if that is the case then Ollie, my lone, onesey of a character, cannot be as real to me as Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce and Lady Dedlock and Miss Flite and Guppy and Jo and Richard and Ada and Inspector Bucket and all the countless others were to Dickens.

  —

  There are several caracaras on the island: large, black birds of prey, sharp and clever-looking. When they land, they plummet clumsily into the mud, then cock their heads to one side to examine you as though assessing whether or not you are a flight risk. They are attracted to things that shine, and anything red that resembles fresh meat. The feathers around their eyes give their faces a permanent scowl. And there is one bird that seems to have made it his business to hound me off Bleaker for good.

  I am walking along the coast, south of the settlement. It is coming to the end of a bright, gold-lit day; for once there has been no rain. Beside me is the sea, dark blue. The sun is at my back and my shadow is leading the way in front of me, rippling over the stones and bones and moss. My silhouette is dark, its edges crisp, and when I glance at it I notice that inches above mine is another shadow: the perfect outline of a large bird, wings wide, talons dripping down towards my scalp. I look up and see the caracara, about six inches above my head. I shriek and duck and the bird changes course in the confusion, thudding down in front of me, stopping me short. He tilts his head to one side and scratches the ground with his feet. He looks as though he is about to charge.

  When I was in Stanley, Maura told me that caracaras sometimes eat the eyes and tongues of lambs. This detail comes back to me now, and I raise my hands to my face. I peer through my fingers at the bird, which is hopping up and down, and then I break into a sprint for the settlement. My shadow and the bird’s precede me on the ground, the space between them shrinking.

  I dive for shelter in the first of the farm outhouses and slam the door shut behind me. Seconds later, I hear the crash and scrape of the bird’s feet as it lands on the roof. Its talons scrape along the metal: scratch, scratch, scratch.

  —

  Each time I read a novel it leaves me with two stories at the end. There is the one the book deliberately tells, its plot, c
haracters and setting, and then there is the story of my reading, the time, place and atmosphere around me as I turn the pages. Wuthering Heights transports me to the summer after I turned seventeen, when I missed a record-breaking heat wave because I was inside, lying on my bed with a brain full of wilderness and rain and fog. Madame Bovary takes my mind not only to Normandy but also to the dim, damp flat in Leamington Spa that I shared with seven other students in my second year of university, where I read to the soundtrack of the smoke alarm constantly squealing, and the voices of people all around me arguing, laughing, hooking up, breaking up.

  —

  Now, a strange and unreliable relationship forms in my mind between the worlds of Bleak House and Bleaker Island. This happens in the same way that I suppose horoscopes make sense to believers in astrology. A generality, framed in the language of intimate experience, strikes you as uncanny and insightful: “As the moon completes its sojourn in your sign, you’ll be reaping the benefits of the energy you’ve put into your relationships over the past year. When an opportunity comes your way in the middle of the month, take hold of what you’ve earned.” Like a true believer, then, and with nobody to correct my magical thinking, I start to see the novel as a meaningful guide to my experience in the Falklands and to my own work of writing: I make connections, see patterns. Bleak House is full of writers. It is full of lonely people. It is full of characters desperately hoping for things that may or may not come to them. And it is full of missing scraps of paper. It is about so many things that its main concern is the many-ness of the things about which it is concerned, circular and teeming and self-involved. In this sense, I am able to acknowledge a mismatch: in Bleak House, there is a surplus of stuff; on Bleaker Island, I have the bare necessities and a surfeit of emptiness. But still, among the many preoccupations of Bleak House is this central concern: the strange ways families fracture and lose each other; the equally strange ways they come together again.

  I spend a lot of time thinking about Esther and Lady Dedlock: the mother and daughter separated, simultaneously oblivious and recognizable to each other. Ollie is Esther, on an unwitting journey to find his origins.

  And then I think about Richard, ward of the interminable Jarndyce and Jarndyce court case, who becomes obsessed with his potential inheritance and descends into a state of manic, avaricious delusion. Ollie is Richard, willing his ancestors to make sense of his life for him, to tell him who he is and what to do and make everything easy.

  Folded into the back of my copy of Bleak House is a printout of an article I found before I left, which details the plans Dickens made for the novel. His notes are haphazard and hard to follow: chapter headings and character names; the odd, scrappy line of dialogue; enigmatic directions for action.

  Skimpole and Boythorn brought together? Next time

  Miss Flite’s friends?—Her birds? Yes slightly. The birds. Not the friends.

  Old Turveydrop—Pathetic too—blesses people—My son! etc.

  “I have forgotten to mention again—at least, I have not mentioned—”

  The notes are cryptic. I think perhaps, if I can just decipher them, if I can crack the code, I’ll know how it’s done. I’ll be able to tell stories the way Dickens tells stories. So I make complicated, frenzied charts, mapping the trajectory of Bleak House against that of my own novel: Ollie’s search for his father, his voyage into the unknown, plotted alongside the failed collision course of Esther and Lady Dedlock.

  When I look at these plans the next day, I find my own scribblings almost as indecipherable as Dickens’s.

  —

  Trapped by the caracara, I wait in the dim hut. The bird is audible above me: fingernails down a blackboard, its talons across the ripples of the corrugated-iron roof. I watch my own breath and crouch in a corner, pulling my knees up inside my coat to try to preserve heat. I know this is ridiculous, that the bird will not attempt to eat my eyes, but still I can’t coax myself out into the open.

  It is dark by the time I work up the courage to open the door and sprint home.

  —

  In the fiction workshop at BU, Leslie liked to ask questions like, “What is the greatest novel in the English language?” and “Who has the biggest heart in twentieth-century letters?” and, of a story being workshopped in class, “What is the true ending to this work?” The person to offer the correct answer (Middlemarch; J. D. Salinger; that the protagonist goes back to the house and asks for a glass of water from the woman he loves) would be rewarded with a coffee candy, retrieved from Leslie’s satchel and thrown roughly in the direction of the student’s head. Around the end of our last semester, I read an interview with him in which he says, of his teaching practice, “I throw coffee candies around when they get the right answer. And there is no right answer, but I pretend there is in fiction writing.”

  A List of Everything I’m Ashamed Of

  I fall into the habit of obsessive self-monitoring. Like the weather, minute changes in my habits or thoughts seem suddenly worthy of careful study. I give up using an alarm clock, and instead keep meticulous notes of when I go to bed and when I get up. I hope this exercise might reveal something profound about myself, but at the end of it, all I have is a list of dates and times and a general sense that, when left to my own devices, and with literally nothing better to do, I fall asleep around half past ten and wake up just before seven. I do not know what to do with this information.

  In the same spirit of self-scrutiny, I keep a note of the fluctuations of my mood, patrolling for sustained deterioration, but also with the idea that I might discover some convenient pattern: that I am always more cheerful before lunch, for example, or that I get a little sad around four o’clock. Perhaps my best ideas always come to me just before I go to sleep? I think of people who know these things about themselves—the ones who wake up to do two hours’ work before breakfast because that’s when they are most productive—and wish I were more like them. I do not know when I am most productive. Despite my charts, reports and hourly checks, no trends emerge.

  —

  One morning I wake to find that eight sheep have wandered into the settlement and are grazing in front of the house. I cannot take my eyes off them. I wonder if they are supposed to be here, or whether they’ve broken through a fence; I wonder whether I should do anything about them. They disturb the geese, who squawk and fuss. They blunder along the shore, scattering loose stones into the water. When I check the time, I realize I have been watching the sheep for nearly two hours, with more attention and intensity than I would pay any TV show at home.

  In front of me, my laptop: a blank page. I cannot remember what I was writing. I do not know what I should write. When I scroll up through the document—the novel that has grown day by day—it is suddenly hard to read the words. It is as though it has been written by somebody else, in a language I do not know well.

  I blink and gently slap my cheeks. I give myself a pep talk about concentration, about getting things done, about the end being in sight and how it will feel to leave Bleaker Island with a complete novel. I force myself to read earlier chapters, to get back into it, but the writing makes me wince. I fall to scrolling through the other bits of writing I have on my computer: stories, fragments of memoir, searching for something that will pull me back into my own voice.

  —

  At ten past three on a Tuesday, after two weeks alone on the island, it occurs to me to compose a list of everything I’ve ever done that I’m ashamed of.

  The thought drifts into my head and stays there, tantalizing and horrifying. I am transfixed by the idea, struck that such an account could exist and that by merely imagining it, I have somehow already called it into being. For a long time, I sit with my pen hovering over the page. I begin to write the title, and then stumble on the grammar of the sentence. “A list of everything I’m ashamed of.” “A list of everything of which I am ashamed.” I have to choose between the dangling, inelegant, incorrect “of,” and the pompousness of grammatical pr
ecision. And then it strikes me as ridiculous that a person who has lived such a dastardly, reprehensible existence as I have is worrying about syntax, rather than the trail of ruined lives and misery I have left in my wake.

  Memories of past transgressions hatch in my mind, and as I stare through the window at Bleaker’s bottomless bleakness, I begin to feel appalled by myself. I have lived despicably. I have told lies, hurt people, disregarded the feelings of friends and lovers, disrespected my parents and behaved arrogantly towards my teachers. I left Will when he needed me. I have used people and exploited situations out of curiosity, or to have something to write about. When I was five, my brother hid my teddy bear, and in response I attacked him so violently that he still has scars on his face, over twenty years later: two parallel white lines beneath his left eye. There are countless other worse things, of course. I am a monster.

  My pen dips to the page, then rises again without making a mark. If I write this list, there will be nobody to tear it up and say it doesn’t matter. I will be alone, on a remote island, with a list of everything shameful I’ve ever done and nobody here to discredit it. Those good people—the ones I have treated so poorly my whole life, the friends and family who have supported and loved and listened to me—are not here now to offer yet more help.

  If I write this list, it will exist even more solidly than it does now in my head, in its churning, amorphous, nightmare form.

  I drop the biro, tear the page from my notebook, and fold it in half.

  “Misadventure”

  Billy Keys was shaving when he heard the crash. He froze, razor halfway between his chin and the sink. It sounded as though there had been an explosion behind him in his bedroom. He considered ignoring it, but after a couple more strokes with the blade found himself turning and walking in the direction of the noise.