Coventry

by Rachel Cusk

  So I was both man and woman, but over time the woman sickened, for her gratifications were fewer. I had to keep out of the way, keep out of the kitchen, keep a certain distance from my children, not only to define my husband’s femininity but also to appease my own male values. The oldest trick in the sexist book is the female need for control of children. I perceived in the sentimentality and narcissism of motherhood a threat to the objectivity that as a writer I valued so highly. But it wasn’t control of the children I was necessarily sickening for. It was something subtler – prestige, the prestige that is the mother’s reward for the work of bearing her offspring. And that prestige was my husband’s. I had given it to him or he had taken it – either way, it was what he got out of our arrangement. And the domestic work I did was in a sense at the service of that prestige, for it encompassed the menial, the trivial, the frankly boring, as though I were busily working behind the scenes to ensure the smooth running of the spectacle onstage. I wasn’t male after all – men didn’t do drudgery. And I wasn’t female either: I felt ugly, for the things that were mine – dirty laundry, VAT returns – were not pretty at all. In fact, there was nothing pretty that gave me back a reflection of myself. I went to Paris for two days with my husband, determined while I was there to have my hair cut in a French salon. Wasn’t this what women did? Well, I wanted to be womanised; I wanted someone to restore to me my lost femininity. A male hairdresser cut off all my hair, giggling as he did it, amusing himself during a dull afternoon at the salon by giving a tired blank-faced mother of two something punky and nouvelle vague. Afterwards, I wandered in the Paris streets, anxiously catching my reflection in shop windows. Had a transformation occurred, or a defacement? I wasn’t sure. My husband wasn’t sure either. It seemed terrible that between us we couldn’t establish the truth. It seemed terrible, in broad daylight, in those public anonymous streets, not to know.

  Sometimes, in the bath, the children cry. Their nakedness, or the warm water, or the comfort of the old routine, something, anyway, dislodges their sticking-plaster emotions and shows the wound beneath. It is my belief that I gave them that wound, so now I must take all the blame. Another version of the heroic, where the hero and the villain are hard to tell apart.

  I wounded them and in this way I learned truly to love them. Or rather, I admitted it, admitted this love, admitted how much of it there was. I externalised it; internalised, it had been an instrument of self-torture. But now it was out in the world, visible, practical. What is a loving mother? It is someone whose self-interest has been displaced into her actual children. Her children’s suffering causes her more pain than her own: it is Mary at the foot of the cross. In church, at the Easter service, I used to be struck by the description of Mary’s emotional state, for amid that drama of physical torment, it was said that she felt as though a sword had been run through her heart. It interested me that such an image was applied to her feelings, an image that came to her from the cold hard outer world, from the physical plane of men. Somehow, in the transition from other to mother, the active becomes passive, the actual theoretical, the physical emotional, the objective subjective. The blow is softened: when my children cry a sword is run through my heart. Yet it is I who am also the cause of their crying. And for a while I am undone by this contradiction, by the difficulty of connecting the person who acted out of self-interest with the heartbroken mother who has succeeded her. It seems to be the fatal and final evolution of the compartmentalised woman, a kind of personality disorder, like schizophrenia.

  *

  Winter comes: the days are brief and pale, the sea retracted as though into unconsciousness. The coldly silvered water turns quietly on the shingle. There are long nights of stars and frost, and in the morning frozen puddles lie like little smashed mirrors in the road. We sleep many hours, like people recovering from an operation. Pain is so vivid, yet the stupor of recovery is such that pain’s departure often goes unnoticed. You simply realise, one day, that it has gone, leaving a curious blank in the memory, a feeling of transitive mystery, as though the person who suffered is not – not quite – the same as the person who now walks around well. Another compartment has been created, this one for keeping odds and ends in, stray parts of experience, questions for which the answers were never found.

  We rearrange the furniture to cover up the gaps. We economise, take in a lodger, get a fish tank. The fish twirl and pirouette eternally amid the fronds, regardless of what day it is. The children go to their father’s and come back again. They no longer cry: they complain heartily about the inconvenience of the new arrangements. They have colour in their faces. A friend comes to stay and remarks on the sound of laughter in the house, like bird-song after the silence of winter. But it is winter still: we go to a Christmas carol service and I watch the other families. I watch mother and father and children. And I see it so clearly, as though I were looking in at them through a brightly lit window from the darkness outside; see the story in which they play their roles, their parts, with the whole world as a backdrop. We’re not part of that story any more, my children and I. We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom. The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.

  We sing the carols, a band of three. I have sung these songs since my earliest recollection, sung them year after year: first as a tradition-loving child in the sixstrong conventional family pew; later as a young woman who most ardently called herself a feminist; later still as a wife and mother in whose life these irreconcilable principles – the traditional and the radical, the story and the truth – had out of their hostility hatched a kind of cancer. Looking at the other families I feel our stigma, our loss of prestige: we are like a Gypsy caravan parked up among the houses, itinerant, temporary. I see that we have lost a degree of protection, of certainty. I see that I have exchanged one kind of prestige for another, one set of values for another, one scale for another. I see too that we are more open, more capable of receiving than we were; that should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders.

  I begin to notice, looking in through those imaginary brightly lit windows, that the people inside are looking out. I see the women, these wives and mothers, looking out. They seem happy enough, contented enough, capable enough: they are well dressed, attractive, standing with their men and their children. Yet they look around, their mouths moving. It is as though they are missing something or wondering about something. I remember it so well, what it was to be one of them. Sometimes one of these glances will pass over me and our eyes will briefly meet. And I realise she can’t see me, this woman whose eyes have locked with mine. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to, or is trying not to. It’s just that inside it’s so bright and outside it’s so dark, and so she can’t see out, can’t see anything at all.

  II: A TRAGIC PASTIME

  Louise Bourgeois

  Suites on Fabric

  The artist is a person in whom there has been no caesura with the creativity of childhood: how, then, will she herself become a mother? For the artist is a perceiver, and the mother the first and fundamental object of perception, the first image, the Madonna of earliest Christian iconography. What will the outcome be when these two identities – perceiver and perceived – become one? The artist-mother has to maintain her own links to childhood and to the sense of freedom and irresponsibility that is the condition of her creativity. And her actual child – will it be, in its own freedom, her rival; in its status as her creation the rival of her art?

  These are the questions an artist may ask of herself, but to ask them of her art is to seek new, public kinds of legitimacy for the female modes of private enquiry. In these suites of images Louise Bourgeois explores the interface of public and private in female experience. Working on fabric – utilitarian, personal, domestic – she represents that interface as both
reimagined and real. Cloth expresses the new legitimacy, soft and unprestigious, mediating between body and world, a record of female process. And it is through the concept of process that the legitimacy is to be sought, for in the organic, the evolutionary, lie the sources of woman’s authority. Woman has special knowledge of process as the unifying characteristic of all that can be made: she understands it because she is subject to it, has experienced it as both curative and destructive, as health and disease, knows that its transformations are sometimes indistinguishable from deformities. Nature Study enquires into this organic basis of form and finds at once menace and possibility in the vegetable mechanics of growth, which beget both flowers and monsters. Who or what governs this process? What is being expressed through the mutability of nature, and from where does the expression come? In art, surely, form is immutable, so how will the artist surrender to the principle of growth that is the basis of her fleshy being? But she too can create: it need not be surrender but alliance. She can look into nature as into a mirror. The woman is shown emanating the power of form, finding its source to be her own body. Yet alliance is tense, nerve-wracking, always in danger of collapse. Sometimes she sees growth as mere profusion or extrusion, unstoppable, verging on the loss of its own meaning.

  In Self Portrait the idea of the human form under the rule of nature causes alarm: woman has not yet asserted her alliance with the process of growth; instead, the whole concept of the self is under threat. The self begins as simple, virginal, childlike. Coupling, too, is innocent and childlike, the mutual narcissism of two distinct forms. It is creation that is ambiguous. The creative process that confirmed and organised the artist’s self disrupts the mother’s. Pregnant, she cannot see her creation; it is inside her; it threatens to displace her identity, her importance. Fine, then let it be ejected, expelled. Now she can see it, but her body has been left with the knowledge of pain and of its own mutability. In creating this new form her own form has been broken. There they stand, her works, intact, the image not of herself but of their father. And she herself is not unfixed, continually transmogrifying: she is a serpent, a spider, a sow-like field of breasts, an amputee; sometimes she fuses with man or exchanges characteristics with him; sometimes she is merely one enlarged aspect of herself. But this too is a process; she emerges from it in glimpses, strong, fiercer, Medusa-haired, a kind of rayed goddess. She is less unified, more cerebral, more beautiful: an artist, after all, in the act of recording herself.

  The Fragile offers a different, poignant vision of these same events. It is a commentary on love, delicate and evanescent compared with the drama of the woman artist’s struggles with nature. Here the child speaks, tracing the maternal form again and again – drawing Mummy, the dextrous spider who spins and weaves. These are a child’s perceptions of the primary image of its parent, yet their knowledge is the mother’s knowledge too, her knowledge of her own body as an unstable form. Resolution is sought in these fused perceptions: perhaps the artist herself can, through her child, return to the childlike state of freedom and creativity. And she remains, after all, a daughter: the spider, Mummy, belongs to her too. This arachnoid maternal shape is of more than biographical interest. It bespeaks Bourgeois’s familial links with the arts of weaving, but its power as a representation of maternal ambivalence is also striking. Mother is both static and busy, many-limbed but imprisoned; she is ugly and useful, frightening and familiar, so competent that a kind of helplessness adheres to her emotional and spiritual being, atop the clever busy legs. The spider is benevolent and productive, a worker, a provider, but she is fundamentally unfree. She traps things in her web; she embroiders her tiny corner of the universe.

  The artistic notion of process, of growth and reproduction as vegetable forms on which the artist seeks to impose morality and meaning, is interwoven in these works with the countercurrent of memory. The process of recollection is asserted here as the foundation stone of individual identity: it is, finally, immutability, that which can’t be transformed by nature. The meditative horizons of Ode à la Bièvre, the river beside which Bourgeois had her childhood home, are distinct in their geometric calmness and abstraction from the sometimes tormented feminine forms of Self Portrait and The Fragile, or the anarchic self-absorption of The Cross-Eyed Woman. Through the process of memory the artist recovers balance. She is released from her tortured body, becomes unbodied, returns to objectivity. In the concentric circles of the final image, as though a pebble had been tossed into the river’s waters, the human presence is readmitted, the relationship of self to natural form iterated once more; but quietly, peacefully, soundless and transient as the ripples that will grow fainter and eventually disappear, so that soon the surface will restore itself as though they had never been there at all.

  I Am Nothing, I Am Everything

  Assisi lies an hour away to the south-east. The day is overcast: clouds sag over the plain. Now and again there is a motiveless gust of wind like an outburst of temper across the flat fields that subsides as suddenly as it came. It is Sunday. The great grey drifting sky, so deep overhead and unalleviated, recalls the Sundays of my childhood with their strange double nature of privation and feasting, a character impassable and final in its duality. The week was dead: it passed away somewhere between Mass and Sunday lunch, which between them finished it off, knocked the living daylights out of it with the sacerdotal rod and the Sunday roast. There was no hope given out for Monday, or for Tuesday either. Week after week they led back to the same impasse, the same nullifying conclusion. I still have a Sunday feeling, even now; a feeling that is like a bruise or mark on the skin, that is tender when it is touched.

  From far away, the Basilica di San Francesco can be seen, standing on its hill in a tent of cloud. At the front there is a buttress wall, blank and pagan-looking, frightening in its enormity. The building’s long, forbidding colonnaded walkway extends from its side, like the huge dark wing of a bird of prey. I am familiar with the giantism of Catholic architecture. At the pilgrim centre of Lourdes in France the main square and basilica are so large that they harmonise unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism, with the airport terminal and the runway and the shopping mall. And indeed both are determinedly global in their perspective: visitors surrender their separateness at the sheer scale of the enterprise, without protest. It must be imagined that people are pleased to be relieved of their individuality, though that doesn’t seem to be the case when disaster strikes. Then it is the impersonal they fear more than anything else.

  As we draw near, the Sunday feeling grows stronger, the atmosphere of Catholicism more unmistakable. There are coach parks, scores of them, for it is in the spectacle of mass transportation that these large-scale beliefs like to show their might. We are controlled and directed by traffic police, by zoning, by different-coloured signs with numbered boxes. The traffic police wear white gloves. They point and prohibit and occasionally permit. We wait a long time. At last we are given a zone and a number and allowed through. These precautions have not been put in place to marshal admirers of the early frescoes of Giotto, beautiful though they are reputed to be. It is St Francis who is causing the crush. All that remains of him are the bones that lie in the basilica’s cold heart, but it is the bones the coach parties have come for. The mania for the tangible is the predictable consequence of the intangibility of religious belief, though it has always bewildered me that it should be among the relics of the actual that the missing link between faith and reality is sought. At the Catholic convent school I attended, the nuns were forever debating the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, or the scrolls of Fatima, or the splinters of the true cross that were in ever-increasing circulation around the Catholic world and that put together could have made a hundred crosses. Such things roused their interest as individuals and, I suppose, alleviated the dreary impersonality of their beliefs. They were a form of attention, of love, for these women had given their lives to Jesus and had nothing whatever to show for it. Their love had no object,
and in the end any bone or bit of cloth would do, just as a baby needs a blanket or a teddy bear to soothe him in his mother’s absences. Once, our class was taken to see the hand of Margaret Clitherow, which the Order kept preserved in fluid at their convent in York, and those girls who screamed were immediately given detention.

  *

  I have been reading about St Francis. He was not always the poor anti-materialist who befriended the birds: he came from a family of rich Assisi cloth merchants. He was born in 1182, to doting parents who freighted him with their care and their ambition. His mother named him Giovanni, after John the Baptist, for she desired him to be a religious leader; but his father, who was away on business at the time of the birth, changed the name when he returned, furiously asserting that he did not want the child to be signed over to God. He intended him to work in the family business and drove him hard at his studies of Latin and mathematics, but no doubt he approved of his son’s popularity and vigorous social appetites too, for these were suitably ungodly pastimes, and besides, ambition is gratified wherever its object finds approval in the world. Francis danced and feasted and passed his nights in riotous style with his aristocratic friends, while by day he studied and worked in his father’s shop. One day a beggar came in to ask for money and Francis threw him out, but a feeling of compunction made him go after the man with a bag of coins and beg his forgiveness. Francis’s father disapproved of such spiritual melodrama, and his friends ridiculed it.

  Some time later Assisi declared war against neighbouring Perugia and Francis immediately enlisted. He was ambitious for knightly glory and prestige: and for escape, too, it would seem, from his parents and their conflicting desires for him. Later this need would take desperate forms, but as yet Francis perhaps believed that he could free himself by a worldly route. Almost as soon as he set off he was captured, and was imprisoned for a year. When he returned to Assisi he was ill and took to his bed. There a change took place. It expressed itself in a need to give away his own possessions, a form of behaviour that was also the deepest challenge he could offer to his father’s authority.