Stranger on a Train

by Jenny Diski

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Circles and Straight Lines

  Journey One

  Magic Monotony

  Only the Lonely

  When You’re Strange

  Too Much to Ask

  By the Time I Got to Phoenix

  Journey Two

  Live Tracks

  Expending Nerve Force

  Just Like Misery

  What State I’m In

  Also by Jenny Diski

  Copyright

  FOR IAN

  Acknowledgements

  Parts of this text have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar (US), The Guardian and the London Review of Books.

  My thanks to Marjorie and Merle Turner for time off and good company in Oregon, and for straightening me out on the rivers of the Northwest. Thanks, also, to John and Maria Phipps for oasis time. And thanks to my New Mexican hosts. I am grateful to an anonymous, virtual, but, I am assured, human librarian at the Newark Public Library for his or her helpfulness and kindness in finding and sending me the Frank Leslie quote. Frederic Tuten and Karen Marta made New York an even more vivid and invigorating place to begin and end my journey. And many thanks for everything to Ian Patterson, who changed my horizon entirely.

  Circles and Straight Lines

  Many writers have imagined that history is cyclic, that the present state of the world, exactly as it is now, will sooner or later recur. How shall we state this hypothesis in our view? We shall have to say that the later state is numerically identical with the earlier state; and we cannot say that this state occurs twice, since that would imply a system of dating which the hypothesis makes impossible. The situation would be analogous to that of a man who travels round the world: he does not say that his starting-point and his point of arrival are two different but precisely similar places, he says they are the same place. The hypothesis that history is cyclic can be expressed as follows: form the group of all qualities contemporaneous with a given quality: in certain cases the whole of this group precedes itself.

  An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1940

  One month after I had started my journey around the circumference of America, I was back again where I began, on the frantic concourse at Penn Station, in Madison Square Garden, New York—

  I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling on the echo of a closing speech, living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false, because there you still are, the reader, the observer, the listener, with a gaping chasm in front of you, left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it. Then it’s done and gone, abandoning you to continuation, a con trick played out and you were the mark. An ending always leaves you standing in the whistling vacancy of a storyless landscape. Any ending exposes the impossible paradox – the desire for completion, the fear of termination – which like an open wound is too tender to uncover. But neat endings are the worst; the rounded closure that rings so true and so false, the harmonious conclusion that makes sense of the beginning and of all that happened in-between, and makes a lie of what you know about the conduct of your life, a lie of you.

  There are two kinds of neat endings: the satisfying circle that ends where it began, and the straight line that ends in a point. Our life, we are inclined to think, is like the latter; the world is like the former. Artifice – art, if you must – very often inscribes the circle, taking the straight line to its desired conclusion: the point becomes a metonymy for the completed circle. Artifice makes the circle the secret pattern beneath the straight line. Very gratifying, that. It is as if our brains are tuned to that wavelength, we look for completion like we look for the definitive note at the end of a symphony. And, should they wish to challenge it, all that life and artifice can do against the tendency is subvert it: to deny us what we expect, what we are disposed to want, so that what we feel is lack. But finally that only reminds us again of what we crave. We don’t escape by exposing ourselves to subversion, we only experience our uneasiness at being deprived of what we want. We should be wary of this, aware at least that there’s a covert affirmation of the status quo in volunteering ourselves for discomfort.

  When I was thirteen, at weekends and during the holidays, I spent a large part of my days underground. I hated my home at that time. Having run away from my distressed and distressing mother and without anywhere else I could be, living with my father was a last resort. He had disappeared without trace over a year before and only recently been found again, living in the house of a woman called Pam. I hadn’t chosen to be there, nor had they chosen to have me. Pam, it turned out later, had made a secret deal with my mother after I arrived at her house. She would do what she could to make me feel unwelcome so that I would want to leave and return to my mother. Nothing would have made me do that. The result was an epic sulk on my part. I lived inside a kind of microclimate, a dark cloud of misery and punishment. We all suffered. I spoke to no one, ate meals in silence and retreated to my room at the top of the house. Every morning when I was not at school I walked to the local library and took out three books, novels, whatever took my fancy, based on nothing but titles and covers (I read Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allan Poe, Nevil Shute and Margaret Mitchell with equal enthusiasm and literary innocence), and I took these to the nearest underground station, Notting Hill Gate. Notting Hill, to my great good fortune, was on the Circle Line, a London phenomenon that has been the saving of many a tramp, drunk, overcrowded writer and sulking teenager down the years. It is the only tube line that travels in a continuous complete circle, although looked at on the modern tube map it is shaped more like a bottle lying on its side. All the other lines go north–south or east–west, beginning and ending at opposite ends of the outskirts of the city. The Circle Line, depicted in bright yellow, sits in the centre of the underground web, enclosing within its boundaries the heart of London. It is central London’s perimeter and a route that includes most of the major main-line stations. The point about it was that instead of having to get off at a particular station and take another train back, you could sit in the same plush if tatty seat and circle endlessly all day long for just the cost of the minimum fare to the next stop. It was the cheapest day out in London, and the best way to keep dry if it was raining and warm if it was cold. Anyone with time on their hands, who didn’t want to be at home, or didn’t have a home to be at, could, for just pennies, use the Circle Line as their office (it is said that Naomi Mitchison used it to write novels) or their escape, or even, given the ever-changing cast of characters, their entertainment. If, like me, you were travelling without a destination, or planned eventually to return to your starting point, you could choose, when you first got on, whether to travel clockwise or anti-clockwise; it didn’t matter. In those days I could recite the stops in order in both directions, now I have to remind myself by looking on the map. Notting Hill Gate, Bayswater, Paddington (for points west), Edgware Road, Baker Street (where I went to Madame Tussaud’s in the old days with my father), Great Portland Street, Euston Square (almost at the block of flats I grew up in until we were evicted after my father moved out), King’s Cross St Pancras (to head up north), Farringdon, Barbican (not there in my travelling days), Moorgate, Live
rpool Street (for eastern areas), Aldgate, Tower Hill (again, trips with my father in the old days), Monument, Cannon Street, Mansion House, Blackfriars, Temple, Embankment, Westminster (coming out of the City now), St James’s Park (feeding the ducks, being stopped by old Queen Mary when I was three and chucked under the chin by her close-laced hand emerging from her car window), Victoria (to the south), Sloane Square (into unknown chic territory for me), South Kensington (the museums on a Sunday with my father), Gloucester Road, High Street Kensington and Notting Hill Gate (home, though I never thought of it as that).

  People got on, people got off. Every now and then someone else didn’t get off, though you couldn’t be sure they were doing the same as you until you had been a full circle, since they might just have gone round in the wrong direction. There would be a couple of flashers a day, who sat opposite you and exposed a pale worm from a slit in their trousers when the carriage was empty enough. A friend, who I met too late for my journeys, used to look at them hard and say very loud, ‘Well, it looks like one, only smaller.’ At thirteen, I was too embarrassed to say anything. Not distressed, but embarrassed for these pathetic adults. Also annoyed that I would have to get up and change carriages. Flashing was ubiquitous, and nothing more than a nuisance in those days. I didn’t speak to anyone, nor they to me. That was inner-city travel. People wrapped up in their own thoughts, brooding about their lives, or others, about work or love or whatever people think about on the way from here to there and yet in neither place. I smoked if I had any cigarettes – we lived above Pam’s newsagent and tobacconist shop, and sometimes I would sneak down in the middle of the night and steal a packet of twenty. I read voraciously. There was no need to look up to check which station we had arrived at, it made no difference to me. So I could keep my head buried (as Pam would say contemptuously) in a book. I got through my three books by the following morning unless I had chosen something I found unreadable. That was very rare. The fact that something could be read made it readable to me in those days. Books were where I lived, not because I was bookish, but because everyone has to have a place to go, and between the covers of books was mine. If I was hungry and I had any money, I could get off at a station and buy chocolate or nuts from a machine, and I bought a drink on the way to the station. The round trip, these days, is reckoned to be about forty-eight minutes. And I would go round and round all day long. I didn’t count but if I rode the Circle Line from ten in the morning until five, when it was time for me to go home to eat supper and return to my room to finish my third book, while sitting smoking through the open window, I would have done the circuit nine times. The Circle Line was a salvation until I figured out a way of getting the local council to send me back to the boarding school I had been asked to leave because my mother kept turning up and screaming at everyone.

  * * *

  —In fact there were two American journeys, not a single, neatly planned, satisfyingly structured circular trip. The second excursion around the edge of the States was an afterthought, conceived of as the plan for a book inscribed on the geography of North America, and circumscribed by the schedule of the Amtrak rail system. The first trip was impromptu. I was going to smooth the two journeys into one, for the sake of neatness, for the sake of describing a gratifying circle. But I don’t think I will, after all. On the first, accidental journey I travelled, delightfully, as a stranger; with the second, planned trip my deliberate strangerness became both stranger and more familiar than I had intended. When the unexpected becomes entirely expected and known, and when the known becomes bizarre and spirit-draining, it’s time to go home and wonder what you thought you were doing.

  Another thing. The plan for a book. I am predominantly a writer of fiction. Research, which might include travelling, only comes about because of a need for detail required for the novel which essentially comes out of my head. I was once at a party where a novelist asked a journalist if he knew about the World Bank located in New York. The journalist replied that he did, and began to discuss the workings of the bank, its international role and effect. The novelist stopped him in mid-sentence.

  ‘No, I just want to know what colour the front door is.’

  That is exactly what researching a novel is like. Some things you make up, others you can read about, but there are small crucial details that have to be accurate.

  A travel book is something else, if it is non-fiction. Though I’m not at all clear what. I imagine a travel writer plans a trip in order to write about it. Why, I’m not exactly sure. A film would give the curious a much better idea of the terrain, so it must be something about the act of travelling itself, adventures, encounters along the way. Travel writers must assume that adventures and encounters will occur. They must put their faith in the inevitability of incident.

  I’m not much of a traveller at all. I travel in order to keep still. I want to be in or move through empty spaces in circumstances where nothing much will happen. When I go on holiday, I want a vacant beach and an uncluttered horizon. The last time I was on such a beach, I was sitting in a taverna when the Poet, my companion, put his glass of beer down on the table in front of us.

  ‘Excuse me, that’s my horizon,’ I complained.

  That is the trouble with travelling in company.

  So going on a journey and writing a book about it is an odd thing for me to contemplate. The journey is in concept entirely uneventful, and so, therefore, is the prospective book.

  ‘Well,’ I explain to my editor, ‘it will be a book about nothing happening.’

  This book about nothing happening is the perfect book that I have in my head. The one I write towards but fail to reach whether what I’m writing is called fiction or non-fiction. My editor nods benevolently, going along with the notion, at least for my benefit. I would be perfectly happy to take these trips for their own sake, but I have to earn a living. I mean to say, that I am not a travel writer in any reasonable sense of the word. I do not feel compelled to bring the world to people, or meet interesting characters, or enlarge my circle of acquaintance. I just want to drift in the actual landscapes of my daydreams, and drifting, other than in the imagination, is expensive. So I concoct the idea of a book about my uneventful drifting. Eventfulness is not the mode of the fiction writer, or at any rate of my fiction writing – events just get in the way. So what a proper travel writer hopes for, I dread: incident. My ideal method of writing a travel book, I realise, would be to stay at home with the phone off the hook, the doorbell disconnected and the blinds drawn. I confess that I remain baffled that I should have put myself at such risk of incident. Baffled and very glad to be home with the blinds drawn.

  As for America being the place I chose to trace my circle, well, it wasn’t entirely fortuitous. As a child in fifties London, America was as distant a reality to me as ancient Egypt, yet present in my life in a way that those who had carved the remnants of mighty statuary I knew from my visits to the British Museum could never be. Distant is not quite the word. America was like the moon: its remoteness was irrelevant, what mattered was the light it bathed me in, its universal but private reach. The moon was the moon, and mine; familiar and personal, shining over me wherever I was, whenever I looked at it. America, too, was light. It beamed above my head from the cinema projection booth, particles dancing in its rays, ungraspable as a ghost, but resolving finally on the screen into gigantic images of a world I longed for, yet only half believed in. If I walked directly in front of the screen and got caught in its light, my very own shadow was projected up there with the bold and the beautiful, the lovers, the adventurers, the underworld, the mean streets, the main streets, the promising and punishing streets, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-laughing and crying world of what we then called the flicks. People in the audience shouted at me to duck down and get out of the way as if I hadn’t realised what had happened, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted to be in the way of all that.

  JOURNEY ONE

  Magic Monotony

  One thing f
ollows another. I had just spent three weeks crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship carrying 25 tonnes of potash from Hamburg to offload in Tampa, Florida, and then doubling back round the tip of Florida to take on kaolin miles up a wriggly inlet at Port Royal, near Savannah, Georgia. I watched or felt every yard of the 6000 or so miles we travelled at a stately average of fifteen miles an hour. My capacity for staring had developed beyond even my expectations. Conrad writes of ‘the magic monotony of existence between sky and water. Nothing is more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.’ I sat on a small deck, like a veranda, at the back of the ship, the MV Christiane, and watched the ocean like a vigilante as we passed over it, loath to miss a single wave or trick of the light retexturing the water, so that I had to drag my eyes down to the book on my lap, or force myself to go back to my cabin to work or sleep. Even at night, the rabble of stars demanded to be watched, and how could I ignore the effect of the fiercely shining moon, lighting up a brilliant pathway in the encircling blackness of the surrounding sea? Night-time on deck was special, like being awake in the early hours in a darkened hospital ward and seeing the night nurses sitting at dimly lit desks, or gliding silently about to check on sleeping patients. While I walked on deck, and the majority of the Croatian crew got their rest, one of the officers kept watch on the bridge, and an engineer attended to the gauges in the thudding depths of the ship’s engine room. That someone is awake and keeping watch in a pool of light when night is at its blackest is very comforting.

  After a very short time, when you are travelling so far at such a snail’s pace, and with no urgent need (or in my case, any need at all) to get to where you are going, you become an aficionado of detail. I took on the task of witnessing the sea, as if someone, somewhere had to be constantly alert to its shifts and nuances, and here and now the job was mine. I kept an eye on the window when I brushed my teeth for fear of missing something. It was not a fear of missing dolphins leaping, or whales breaching, or a tornado five miles off withdrawing back into its cloud: though I did chance to see those events as I kept watch. It was a fear of missing all the nothing that was happening. The more ocean I watched, the more watching I needed to do, to make sure, perhaps, that it went on and on and that the horizon never got any closer. But simple witnessing is not easy, and I began to notice, with increasing irritation, my need to describe and define what I observed, when all I really wanted was for the sea simply to be the sea. I found myself constantly thinking of it in terms of something else, as if I were reading it for meaning, which was not what I thought I wanted to do at all. The sea was like shimmering mud, I heard myself think, glossy as lacquer, slate-grey, syrupy, heavy silk billowing in the breeze … it was like this, and then that. It’s true that it did change all the time, but the most remarkable thing about it was that it was always and only like itself, though I couldn’t manage to keep that thought firmly in my mind, which, being a human mind, was also like itself and probably couldn’t help it.