My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  (Here I need another brief aside on friendship, which will take me from 1979, when I arrived in London, to 1986, when Rosa was born. Because our former ‘landlady’, Grania, cannot just be called a landlady. She was a rare spirit who became a friend, her blue Georgian house full of books and paintings, an Irish intellectual who had been to Oxford and worked in a hospice because she believed in it. It was she who had said, hearing we were to get married, ‘Well there is another room free, you know. Nick could have it, if you like.’ It hadn’t occurred to us to live together. We really were babes in the wood, I think now. I had sent this information to my aunts and uncles: ‘We’re going to get married, but not live together’—but of course, the root cause was, we had nowhere to live. He was renting a cupboard-sized room in Paddington, I was Grania’s tenant in Camden Town. Then Grania stepped in, mild, amused, with her offer of a room on the floor above mine. Of course he would like it. Yes, yes! Would we have stayed together, had we not lived together?

  Looking back, my friends have been guardian angels, though of course they were normal, human, earthbound, fallible people who saw my failings. ‘You must know there are spaces after punctuation,’ said my kind friend Tony Holden, in despair, after reading the typescript of my first novel. ‘And you can’t send envelopes like that.’ (It was on its ninth or tenth tour of service, written all over, with criss-crossing PSs.) ‘Maggie, pick up your purse and your gloves,’ sighed Barbara, watching me scatter my possessions once again, myopically carefree, all over the floor. ‘Please don’t leave the light on in the kitchen,’ begged Grania. ‘And perhaps you could be careful not to slam the door.’ ‘Your letters are over the top,’ said Beverly. ‘You don’t have to thank me so much. I don’t like it.’

  One summer, Grania came down to see us, her steady step on the wooden stairs. She had been thinking about the rent. We nodded, resigned. It was very low, and yet we did not earn much money. But she said, ‘I’ve been looking at my outgoings. I thought I would put the rent down three pounds.’ Twelve pounds less per month! It was a fortune to us.

  Pure chance, if there’s really any chance in life: I had found her through an advertisement in Time Out, in summer 1980. I had survived my rackety beginnings in London, working as a live-in maid in Chelsea where I was expected to dust the carpets and the lady of the house walked behind me, inspecting; the ‘free basement flat’ she supplied in return turned out to leak rain all over my books, and the woman was demented, and I was trapped, but my friends, Jim Stredder, Tony, Phil, emerged from the trees when I sent desperate postcards—‘I am enslaved to a madwoman’—and once again helped me, joined forces to get me out of there. Then I fell on the shambling, eccentric sweetness of Maria Iwtschenko’s house in Chiswick, inhabited by elderly Russians who had been expropriated in the Revolution, and one embattled but fascinating Polish countess, where I had a green bedsit with a gas-ring and a sink, and paid the rent by doing shifts as a hotel receptionist. When Maria Iwtschenko, by now in her eighties, had to sell the house, I spotted the ad that Grania had placed.

  Large sunny room would suit quiet person. I turned up for the interview looking unfeasibly unquiet, in cream jacket and trousers with a shocking pink tie, pink belt, pink earrings, and bright pink socks which were the icing on the cake, a very pink, very creamy cake. I was shy, in fact, but I hid it well.

  Grania looked at me, and seemed to quite like me. She asked me if I was ‘very sociable’, a question perhaps aimed at all that pinkness (I was blind, I think, to the effect of my clothes, which were curiously at odds with my real habits, which were, indeed, mostly scholarly and quiet. I didn’t see people for days on end; I read voraciously; I wrote.) I was finishing a PhD, I told her. She already had one, on nineteenth-century literature. She overlooked the pink. She let me in.

  On our improvised wedding day, which nobody knew about but Grania (that is, except for Barbara, our bridesmaid, and John Waite, the best man), she left two presents in the kitchen: a large white hat—it was blazing August—and a beautiful unorthodox wedding cake, a sponge cake covered with strawberries and peaches. When we returned from Cambridge we were the house’s young marrieds, an exception to the other female poets and students. I am sure we were sometimes noisy and annoying, because two people together laugh and chatter a lot, and there are lovers’ quarrels, which is worse, and two typewriters rattled on different floors, but she knew that we loved her, and the tall blue house, and the garden she had garlanded with old-fashioned roses, pale pink, cream, white, Gertrude Jekyll style, among tall blue delphiniums and fragile harebells, and in the morning, she would stand there among them, watching things emerge, weeding, thinking, with her large blue thoughtful eyes and thick hair. ‘Every time you make love, it is a sacrament,’ she said.

  She had nothing in common with a landlady.)

  But now it was 1986, I was pregnant, and a baby wouldn’t suit the tiny shared shower room in the basement, and its crying certainly wouldn’t be quiet. Now once again they emerged from the wings, my cast of friends, and helped us to move. I had become very worried about our books. I was far too unwieldy to pack or unpack them. The new flat, now stripped of both damp and asbestos, was in many ways delightful, but had no bookshelves. Nick seemed very busy doing who knows what. I was busy growing, slow and sleepy. For the first time in my life, I was probably restful. I swam in hormones. I let things be.

  On the evening of the move, he took me over to the flat. I was eight months pregnant and expected to find chaos. Instead, I found the front room completely shelved up, with the books all installed in alphabetical order, and standing in front of them, the friends who had helped with electric drills, know-how, muscle. Musa, Campbell, Barbara. I cheered, they cheered, we drank to each other. There is a picture of me standing, curved out like a pear, by a wall of books, crying with happiness.

  But I knew that Grace, the novel I was writing, didn’t work. No one had told me, no one had read it, but I couldn’t fail to see the plot was becalmed, I fell asleep when I tried to read it; and the narrative hadn’t even managed to climb from the leisure of my notebooks into the viability of typescript; it was dull, dull, that was the truth, and the baby was coming, and I wasn’t ready, except for the physical act of birth, which I’d tried to prepare for with classes and yoga. Would there be a life beyond the birth? If so, I had no idea how to live it. I phoned Brent Childcare Services in a panic. A calm voice told me about child-minders. I only needed to know they were there. Now I could face the great adventure.

  But why did I feel, even at that point, that I would cease to exist if I couldn’t go on writing? Why have I always needed to write? In a way, it has always defined my life. It made me think I could never have children; I accepted it; I had to be a writer. I wrote poetry from infants’ school onwards. It’s as if I had signed up to some cult at six. In my last long vacation from Oxford, I wrote my first novel, in a four-week monastic burst of activity, up in the attic of a chalet in Switzerland my parents had rented with my father’s brother, the very first time we hadn’t gone camping. I wrote it, really, by arithmetic. This is the meaning of ‘Ignorance is bliss.’ I thought, ‘The average novel is 100,000 words long,’ and divided that sum by the available days (25), so wrote 4,000 words a day, because that was what was needed to get it done, though it did seem to mean an awful lot of work, and left me no time to reread what I had written.

  My father had given me a ‘can-do’ attitude. I’m grateful to him. For all my naivety, for all the weaknesses of what I poured out, something important had been achieved. I remember the happiness of the last day, when I had dotted the ‘i’s of the last sentence, and walked up with Aunty Hilda through the pines to the resort of Montana Vermala, where we bought exotic food to entertain the others. How game Hilda was, Dad’s younger brother’s wife, a trait which perhaps helped her live into her nineties, surviving all the brothers and all the other wives. Our one rule on that happy day was: ‘Buy food that none of us has eaten before.’ I remember only vine leaves stuffed
with rice, which were unknown in Britain in 1969. I was utterly happy as we climbed down the mountain with bags full of oily, alien food. I was queen of the earth. I was a novelist, now, because I’d written a novel.

  And there’s some truth to the idea that getting to the end was all that mattered. With novels, it’s the length that kills, as Robert Louis Stevenson remarked, and I’d proved I had the drive and the stamina to do it. Then, in my twenties, as I added degrees—an Oxford BLitt, the PhD—and between them, worked two years in publishing, I struggled to keep writing in the gaps. I wrote long narrative poems, tried out novellas. In a six-month interlude ‘on the dole’ between leaving publishing and moving to Wolverhampton to start a doctorate, I wrote, in an isolated cottage in Oxford, the book that would become my first published novel, an ‘experimental thriller’ called Dying in Other Words. I had a half-formed thought, from the depth of my innocence: I think this will win me the Booker Prize. But the two publishers I sent it to did not agree, though one of them asked me out to lunch, and said, in effect, he would probably publish if I would cut the last third of the book, a bizarre section of poems and prose supposedly written by my heroine, Moira.

  Cut? I was shocked. Of course I would not. I was on the high horse of my higher degrees, and practical concerns were nothing to me. Nor did I understand what was obvious: you must keep sending books out, again and again. I somehow just felt my day would come.

  And five years later, thanks (once again) to a friend (which one? I still don’t know) who told a publisher I had something worth seeing, a small publisher in Sussex, Harvester Press, wrote me a letter asking to see the manuscript, ‘with a view to finding the statue in the stone’.

  Cheek! ‘Send us your rubbish, and we’ll turn it into art.’ But I posted the manuscript, which had only been greying and wrinkling in some corner, and forgot all about it when there was no response.

  Six months later, a letter came offering a £500 advance to publish it. I learned much later that the manuscript had been read by that great man and novelist, David Hughes, author of The Little Book, who liked my strange tale, and recommended publication. Without him, who’s to say I would have continued? He didn’t reveal the role he had played until some years after we got to know each other in the mid-1990s. My first book, so odd and passionate, might have gone to a dozen other readers, but David was there at the crossroads, unseen, and gave me the secret benediction of luck. It had happened again: the universe split, and in the one I remember, I received the right letter.

  I was amazed when I opened the envelope. I read it again and again for the catch. I called up my brother, and he, his girlfriend Liz and I sat out on Chiswick Green, under a sunset sky, and celebrated in the summer evening with a bottle of wine. We were, all three, as amazed as each other. I was clearly never, ever, going to get published. Then suddenly I was. And now we were here. The impossible was all about me: a crimson glory sinking into brilliant indigo, the dark grass stretching away into the trees where every mystery might be waiting for me, the lights of passing cars winging over our faces, the stars of happiness steadying above, becoming clearer and more confident.

  I came out in July, when few books were published, and got ‘rave reviews’, the kind that welcome a new arrival. Thanks to my friend Tony Holden, who was deputy editor, The Times ran a full page extract. A team of judges who included Brian Aldiss and Hermione Lee put me in the top twelve of the Booker submissions, on what would now be called the Booker longlist. My luck seemed to grow exponentially, as if it had seeded in the dark of delay through the seven years the book was confined in its drawer, and had burst out, shining and fat, a pale puffball. I got a letter from Robert McCrum at Faber, declaring himself a huge fan of the novel and saying how delighted he would be to read anything I liked to send him. (What did I do with it? Did I write back? No, I was paralysed as well as delighted. My heart beat too fast. I put it in a frame.) I was included in the list of twenty ‘Best of Young British Writers’, the original one with Martin Amis, Pat Barker, William Boyd, Buchi Emecheta, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Mars Jones, Ian McEwan, Philip Norman, Clive Sinclair, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, AN Wilson and other famous names. I was blonde, young for that group, photogenic, though in fact photo sessions were agony. In ninety per cent of the shots I would look taut and nervous, but a lucky few caught me beginning to smile at the absurd novelty of being half-famous. The Times sent a photographer to take my portrait, and spread it, huge, beside their two-page feature on our group. (It must have been annoying. I had only published one novel. But I revelled in that fifteen minutes in the sun.) Then I was awarded the prestigious University of East Anglia Writing Fellowship, against stiff competition that included Andrew Motion. I was suddenly shooting down the rapids, though I didn’t have a clue how to steer the canoe. I got an agent, Mark Hamilton, who took charge. My next novel, The Burning Book, was bought by Faber for the sum of £4,500; the third, Light Years, for £10,000.

  But by then, I was starting to break the rules. I was living with a man. I was happy with him. I wasn’t always alone, reading and writing. I ate meals with Nick, instead of a book. I got married, and my agent worried, and my publisher sent Nick around the world to write his book about Robert Louis Stevenson.

  In a way, things were going swimmingly. Suddenly I had love, work and money, only a couple of years after a thirtieth birthday made bleak by my sense that I had none of them. But in another breath, there were problems ahead, and I hadn’t the experience to see them, or avoid them. Four years in, then five years in, my magnificent puffball of luck seemed to expire in a slow soft sigh of missing increments. I wasn’t winning prizes, while the peers who joined Faber not long before me—Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro—had won, or been shortlisted for, the Booker. Faber made less effort with the paperback of Light Years than they had promised in a florid memo which mentioned dump-bins and national tours. (So what? I would think now, but I was young and headstrong, and believed the enormous praise I had received, and took it for granted that, if I was good, I would automatically get sales and prizes.) How young I was. How very foolish. And the family trait of anger let me down. Anger and rashness, which you could call passion, but self-righteousness also, which makes us all blind. I quarrelled with Robert, and left my agent, swayed by what I now think was largely empty praise from a youngish female agent who approached me at some ‘Best of Young British’ jamboree and said she thought I was ‘the bees’ knees’. (Meaning what? Perhaps nothing. But I thought she would dust me with the pollen of money.)

  These days I get on with publishers. I haven’t argued with them for a decade, except for the odd callisthenic textual wrangle that invigorates the editor-writer relationship. But in those days I argued, and Robert wrote a letter saying goodbye when Rosa was not many months old, and Grace was still languishing in notebooks. The timing was dreadful, just after childbirth. Everything was suddenly uncertain. I didn’t like the novel I had written while pregnant, and yet I had no time to rewrite it. I had a new agent, but no publisher. I was thirty-eight, potentially a dangerous age, although I believed I would be young for ever, though I still looked young, and slimmer than before as I ran around Rosa, and (quite soon) after her.

  And here I am still, running around the subject, avoiding the nub of the question I asked—writing and Rosa: Rosa and writing. Before Rosa, writing. Why write? Why Rosa? How in heaven’s name could I have both? I have been kicking up dust for several pages, unable to touch the heart of things.

  I have to write because I have to speak. Most genuine art is a break for freedom, a run into the light, evading the warders. Then craft comes in, refining, restraining, but the initial impulse is usually rebellion, the will to bring something new into the world. In the home I grew up in, too much was not spoken, or was dangerous to speak, suppressed and diverted. This is normal, of course. There are taboos and customs.

  The custom in our house was, defer to the male. My father always had the last word. My brother John, being four years older, and very br
illiant, knew more than me, and must have had more say, though that’s simplifying—he also represented more of a challenge to my father, which sometimes made his position precarious. My younger brother arrived when I was nine, so he wasn’t really part of the original family that established my sense of the universe I lived in, and my place in it as the youngest and most fearful. For the taboos in our house were backed up by fear, and once the fear was removed, once I had fled the coop and the old cock could no longer harry his flock, I wrote irrepressibly and joyously. And in social life, I couldn’t bear to be talked down; still can’t, to the cost of many talkative men who assume women only want to sit and listen. I like to listen, very much, I like to ask questions and learn from the answers, but I sometimes like to speak, as well, and sometimes I’m not ready to stop speaking. ‘Leave it,’ was my father’s way of closing subjects where we disagreed with him, or upset him. But he couldn’t tell me to leave my writing. He didn’t know I was doing it. And when he read things I had written, poems or stories, he praised them and encouraged me, not seeing that one day this precocious skill would enable me to write about the family, not seeing that I was acquiring the tools I needed to tunnel my way out into the open.

  Though the nature of writing is always two-edged: it frees you, but it makes you work to excess. The novel is far too long, as a form, but still too short and too unyielding to relive your own life and make it right. The book suddenly takes off somewhere else, on its own. It makes a dash for the future as well as the past. It grows bored with the self, and seeks otherness. So I never quite found the infinite terrain where I could reinvent and absolve myself. But I think that’s the impulse, I think that’s why I do it. And yet the ground always falls away, the truth is not quite there, the door’s only half-open.