I recently reviewed this book for Trip Fiction. The review begins: “Fiction can provide us with the chance to travel in time as well as in space, on a double trip as it were, and Hannah Kent’s first novel, Burial Rites, the story of a serving woman condemned to death following a double murder, is a good example of this. It’s set in 19th century Iceland, on an isolated farm in rural Kornsa…”
I was less impressed than most people seem to have been. You can see what I thought about the book here.
Charlie Hill’s Books – at least in part – is set among the shabby shelves of the kind of independent bookshop all too rarely found these days in provincial England: in this case, Birmingham. Its hero, Richard Anger – Hill’s explicit use of names is unashamedly Bunyanesque – is a bookseller, borderline alcoholic, experimental writer – come on, you know the type – whose path, on holiday in Corfu, crosses with that of an academic, Lauren Furrows (as in plough, or possibly rut…) when they both see someone die of a mysterious illness, an illness that will bring the two of them together to form as unlikely an investigative term as you’re likely to have come across since Hawthorn and Child. There seems to be a link between this death, and other deaths, and the work of a popular novelist, Gary Sayles – think, ungenerously, Tony Parsons, although the character morphs into a sort of David Icke figure as the novel progresses. But that’s enough summary, because one of the many pleasure the book offers is provided by the plot as it twists and turns, bringing into its orbit a couple of post-post-modernist artists, Pippa and Zeke, without whom, these days, no show would be complete. The novel is a delight as it sets up its target – the mediocrity of commercialised popular culture – and then throws every ball in the shy to knock it down. It’s sharp, caustic, intelligent, often hilarious and, yes, ultimately serious, as decent satire should be, as well as providing a handy check-list for movements in modern art and literature, and a hard look at the way these are commodified. What’s interesting is that both Anger and Sayles – in their different, indeed diametrically opposed, ways – are convinced that art and language can change lives. By the end of the novel, although there’s certainly no sympathy for the bombastic, vainglorious purveyor of banality, Sayles, the only people who seem to deny the centrality of art as a bearer of value are the artists, Pippa and Zeke. Which should put them in pole position for the next Turner Prize.
Much of Victor Olliver’s Curtains takes place in Raven’s Towers, the corporate headquarters of a lifestyle-cum-fashion Conde Nast-type glossy in the heart of the capital, although, here too, a significant part of the action ventures out into the dim provincial greyness surrounding London, in this case, a seaside town called Brightworth, famous for its pier and not much else, although fame, as the novel teasingly points out, is as up for manipulation as anything else. Following an explosion on said pier, Vicki Cochrane, editor of a high-end life style magazine, finds herself trapped between life and death in an astral waiting room, with the chance to virtually relive her last few hours and see what sense might be made of them. Olliver has enormous fun with the eavesdropping possibilities this offers, as Vicki enters and exits (in spirit form, naturally) not only herself, but some of the other appalling creatures that populate the world of fashion journalism. Think Ugly Betty with every opportunity for sentimentality surgically extracted and you’ll have some idea of the ambiance, and bitchiness quotient. At the heart of this wickedly perverse morality tale stalks Vicki the evil queen, a literary Wilhelmina (UB fans will know what I mean), but without the kittenish side. The setting, late 80s, adds to the fun and general campiness, as Vicki slots cassettes into her astral VCR, but the satire, relentless wit and narrative poise, are bang on today’s money. And like Charlie Hill’s novel, what sets out to make a point, as any good satire should, turns out to have not just claws but also, in the unlikeliest of breasts, a heart.
The View from the Tower is now available for pre-order on Amazon UK and US, and should soon be arriving, I hope, at a bookseller’s near you. (If it isn’t, make a fuss!) It’s always odd, and exciting, to see a book up for sale, with cover and blurb in place, after the usual months of post-contractual waiting (and the years of writing, rewriting, tinkering …). In its very different way, I imagine it must be like seeing the first scan of a child-to-be, and having to decide whether or not one wants to know what sex it is. Although, clearly, that’s not the case with a novel, not even metaphorically; by the time the scan arrives, for better or worse, the decisions have all been made.
Anyway, enough of this. The first review of the novel has just been posted, and it’s a good one. Among other things, it calls the book ‘a literary and psychologically charged murder mystery that slowly cuts deep to the bone’, which seems to me get the feel of it, as I intended it, down to a tee. If anyone else would like to review the book, get in touch with NetGalley. And for those of you who don’t already know, The View from the Tower, is a prequel to my last novel, Any Human Face (also available, etc., etc…), so if you’d like to catch up with some old acquaintances, this is your chance.
The woods around Prague are in full autumn splendour right now, the whole range of colours from rose madder to white-gold. The taxi whips us past them; when the tree-cover breaks, we catch glimpses of the city in the distance, coming in from the castle side of the river. Prague is a place I’ve never seen, although I must have been shown it a hundred times in films, where it’s played both itself and a dozen other eastern (and non-Eastern) European cities. I was convinced until a few moments ago that Woody Allen had filmed Shadows and Fog there, but apparently not, although he did intend the film as a homage to, among others, Franz Kafka, the city’s most famous son (for me, anyway). According to Wikipedia, it was made on the largest film set ever built in New York (26,000 sq ft). Still, that’s what I had in mind when I thought of Prague. Angles, shadow, alleys; something dark and jagged and elusive. Oh yes, and beer.
Cities are what they are and what we bring to them, of course, and the shorter the visit, the less chance the place has of wriggling out from under the weight of one’s expectations. Given that my expectations were coloured by NY faux expressionism and perhaps the 20th century’s most disturbing writer (and beer), it may not have been a brilliant idea to book into a hotel that had once been a convent occupied by (and built for) the Grey Sisters of St Francis. I’d imagined something medieval, characteristic. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the convent might have been built in the 1930s in a style known as (and I quote from the brochure) Prague’s constructivism. Its first use was as a hostel for homeless girls, who were rescued from the streets and set to work as rosary-makers for Latin America, or co-opted into the Order. In 1950, the building was taken over by the Communist police and, following the Velvet Revolution, by the regular police department of central Prague. The mood of the place, which must have seen more than its fair share of human misery and interrogation, both spiritual and otherwise, in the past 80 years, has been lightened a little by a beige and maroon colour scheme, and some rather modest pastels on the stairs. It’s now an entirely adequate three star hotel, but its greatest asset is its position, roughly equidistant from Charles Bridge, Wenceslas Square and Old Town Square (and no more than ten minutes’ brisk walk from the Prague Beer Museum). It’s also a spit away from the Bethlehem Chapel, where a woman who might have been trained in one of the earlier manifestations of the hotel spots us hovering outside the building, orders us to buy tickets and marches us into the chapel itself. Jan Hus used to preach here, we’re told in two languages, and we’re directed towards a fresco that illustrates his fiery end, but is otherwise undistinguished. Severe middle-aged female custodians, it turns out, are a feature of Prague’s cultural venues.
Our first evening we eat in a place called Lokal, a long narrowish dining hall, cadenced by arches, with wooden tables along each side. It has a slightly industrial air to it, enhanced by enormous metal beer casks lying supine beneath a glass-walled bar counter. It’s packed and we’re lucky to get a table. Beer arrives, and then arrives again, carried by a hawk-eyed waiter bearing an ever-replenished tray of half-litre glasses, who scouts the hall with a kind of frenzied zeal. We eat sausages of various kinds, Prague ham, goulash, pork neck, sauerkraut, all of it excellent; Giuseppe discovers that sufficient quantities of horseradish have a similar effect on him to a certain type of chilli pepper and very good grass: unpredictable hilarity. I realise after a while that part of the atmosphere of the place is due to the presence of cigarette smoke, and then, to my surprise, that it’s an element I’ve come to miss. Beer halls just aren’t the same without it. It also makes a nice change to be able to eat inside; one of the penalties of travelling with a smoker is that any temperature above zero is tolerable if it comes with an ashtray. Although I notice that here, as in Berlin, blankets are thoughtfully draped over the back of most alfresco chairs. Walking past Lokal a couple of nights later, we see a light show and some ghostly illuminated figures strung up high above the street. As usual, when surprised, I wish I lived in a city where this kind of thing happened on a regular basis, without the intervention of some local saint.
Music is everywhere in Prague, and a startling amount of it is good. Charles Bridge is full of musicians, a reminder of just how European a music jazz has become. Bars employ singers with guitars and a thorough knowledge of the Bob Dylan songbook, which can be rather karaoke, although here too there are surprises, such as the talented singer/guitarist at Motto Bar in Franz Kafka Square. But the star has to be the man in the photograph. His name is Jiří Wehle and he’s been performing for many years now, alone or in a series of bands. He used to play on Charles Bridge, but appears to have had problems with the people who run it, who banished him some years ago. He’s now in Old Town Square, or was this week. The instrument he’s holding is a hurdy gurdy and the music it makes feels almost as old as the human voice, and as heart-wrenching. You can buy his CD, as I did. His repertoire ranges from Goethe to Tolkien to traditional folk music from all over Europe. He sings in Czech, and he’s special. (If you visit his site, and you really should, stay with the Czech version; the English one, for some reason, doesn’t have audio or video links.)
The best bits of a holiday are the places you stumble on, restaurants that aren’t in the guidebooks, street markets with cackling festive witches on strings, gardens that, inexplicably, not even Lonely Planet sees fit to mention. The photograph to the left is a view from inside the Vrtba Garden (this is the Anglicized version of the name, by the way; you don’t even want to see the Czech word), an extraordinary Baroque garden in Mala Strana. We found it because I can’t walk past a door opening onto a courtyard without walking through it. It’s a UNESCO site, but the only people there, apart from us, were two or three other gay couples. In passing, I should say that this was the only moment I felt that Prague was, well, gay-friendly; the rest of the city was indifferent, which is fine but somehow needs testing; we were offered free entry to a number of strip clubs, which suggests a certain, possibly wilful, cultural blindness. But back to the garden. It’s a lavishly tiered affair, with all the topiary a boy could want, and this must be the best time of year to see it, as Virginia creeper dyes the surrounding walls a shocking deep red. From the top layer, you can look down into the heart of the garden or out across the city, from St Vitus and the dome of St Nicholas to the impressively ugly Žižkov Television Tower. It’s a skyline and a half, with Gothic, Baroque and Russian onion domes jostling for space. And Gothic doesn’t even begin to describe the sheer Disney-like spiky weirdness of some spires, notably those of Our Lady in front of Týn, as though someone had asked Tim Burton to design a church and then actually allowed it to be built. It’s hard not to breathe a sigh of relief, though, when you pass through the Baroque façade of St George’s basilica inside the Castle and find yourself in a stripped-bare Romanesque nave, without a single gilded cherub in sight.
Kafka. It’s hard to avoid him in Prague (or maybe not; a gang of teenage kilted revellers didn’t seem particularly aware of the writer’s presence, although I was certainly aware of theirs). So let’s start with a place called Café Franz Kafka, possibly the worst bar in Prague, and beyond. You can read what I thought about it here. The building that houses it was Kafka’s birthplace, although his family later moved to the second floor of the extraordinary House at the Minute, a hundred yards away on the other side of Old Town Square. Kafka pilgrimages are easy because they coincide with the places you would probably visit in any case. He lived much of his life within a mile of his birthplace; this included a spell in Golden Lane, in a tiny blue-painted house that belonged to his sister and that can be described as both cute and oppressive, according to one’s mood. Golden Lane is now mostly shops, from one of which I bought a small jointed metal Golem, another of Prague’s famous sons. The woman I bought it from said, ‘Always men buy Golem, never women buy Golem,’ which was interesting. Maybe women know how unreliable home-helps can be. Kafka would have used, although not assiduously, the Old-New Synagogue, where the Golem is reputedly still stored in the attic, a building the Nazis had planned, with their usual thoroughness, to transform as part of a museum in commemoration of an extinct race.
Our last morning, we visit the old Jewish cemetery. I’d thought Kafka’s grave might be here, but he was buried in the new Jewish cemetery, outside Josefov. To reach the cemetery we pass through the Pinkas Synagogue, the walls of which bear the names, along with their dates of birth and death, of those people from Prague who died in concentration camps. It’s an epitaph that occupies rooms spread over two floors, and it’s a work of harrowing dedication, both intimate – because how can one not begin to calculate the age of this person or that person, and to say their names to oneself, and to wonder how that life might have been? – and enveloping, annihilating. In some ways it does the work an ordinary cemetery might, except that an ordinary cemetery commemorates the awful, but entirely natural, work of death, while these rooms, light-filled, shocked into silence, are a monument to the human will-to-power at its worst. The actual cemetery offers, in an odd and unexpected way, a sort of relief from the evil the synagogue is witness to; it’s a jumble of stones, lop-sided, sloping, stacked against one another that brings to my mind at least, if this isn’t too belittling a comparison, Anthony Gormley’s Fields. There’s a sense of crush, of proximity, of promiscuity even, but also of variety, and improvisation, and making do. The work here is also human, but it’s a work of acceptance, a work that takes annihilation to its heart and finds that there is more, after all, than that; that the deaths remembered here occurred, for the most part, as most of our deaths do if we’re lucky, in their own good time. It’s an antidote, in its way, to the rooms filled with names and dates, and I leave it with a sense of completeness I hadn’t expected, glad that I’d been to both. As Kafka once said: “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”
Among my more vivid memories of television as a child was the story of a young man who meets an attractive older woman in Venice and is lured back to her room. They’re already in bed when he realises the light is still on. He’s about to get up, but the woman stops him. Don’t worry, she says, I’ll turn it off. And the young man watches, in horrified fascination, as the woman’s arm slowly extends, insinuating as a snake, until it reaches the light switch on the other side of the room… I can still see the hand of the woman, who might have been Nyree Dawn Porter, as it weaves its way towards the switch, and the horror on the face of the man, who might have been Ian Ogilvy, as the light is about to be extinguished. I can still hear the music, that jangling crescendo so beloved to the makers of classic TV horror on both sides of the Atlantic. But this story, I’m sure, was British. Was it an episode of Mystery and Imagination? Can anyone out there help me identify it? They don’t make them like that any more, whatever it was. And don’t get me started on the frosted glass in Lost Hearts. I’m still chilled.
It’s good to know, though, that the spirit of those days is still alive in the form of Nightjar Press chapbooks. I’ve recently read two of them, Black Country, by Joel Lane, and Marionettes, by Claire Massey, and very fine reads they are, intelligent, assured and, yes, oh yes, creepy. Like my never-to-be-forgotten episode from the 1960s, Marionettes takes its readers out of their comfort zone into somewhere else. Somewhere else is unpredictable on the surface because those who venture there don’t know the rules; half the time, they don’t even know they’re there. And the only way to learn the rules is to play the game. Because every game has its own predictability, and its own pitfalls, and there is no acceptable way out except to go farther in. Venice lends itself to somewhere-elseness, and Daphne Du Maurier wasn’t the first to recognise this, but the world offers other contenders and perhaps nowhere in Old Europe is more elsewhere than Prague, the setting for Massey’s story. The story starts with the classic creepy tales trope of recognising, and not recognising, a place, a trope exploited at length, and to great effect, by Andrés Neuman in Traveller of the Century (see my review here). In Marionettes, a couple of English tourists – Karl and his (unnamed) partner – return to the city after seven years. They’ve been together for at least that time, they have children old enough to be left at home, their relationship appears to have hit a rough patch, any fascination Karl may once have exerted on his partner has receded with his hairline. Waking up their first morning, she leaves Karl in bed with a hangover, thrilled by ‘the thought of wandering the city alone’. She finds herself for the second time since their arrival outside a shop selling marionettes, a shop she remembers – and Karl doesn’t – from their previous visit. She sees two figures, with ‘pale faces and dispirited eyes’, dangling in the window, and recognises them immediately. It’s no surprise that ‘his marionette had hold of the strings just above her marionette’s head.’ Only eight pages long, Marionettes is a powerful story about identity and the loss of it, about need and the gradual, almost unnoticed attrition of love. The ending is chilling and inevitable, as endings must be in stories like this.
Joel Lane’s story travels as well, this time into the different country of the past. It’s particularly poignant for me because, as the title – Black Country – suggests, it’s set in the post-industrial Midlands, where I spent a significant part of my childhood, as well as periods in later life. The landscape of the story is a landscape I recognise, of derelict swimming pools and tower blocks, of chain-link fences and industrial estates. Now living in Walsall, the (once again unnamed) narrator has been called in to investigate what appears to be a series of acts of violence involving children in a part of Dudley once known as Clayheath, where he grew up. These acts, trivial in themselves, are followed by pilfering from local shops, apparently random acts of vandalism, a dead cat with Monopoly tokens found in its throat: ‘a car, a boot, an iron and a dog.’ The pervasive sense of tension – even the local DS is ‘vaguely ill at ease’ – is mirrored in the narrator’s own memories, as the hotel room in which he’s staying segues into the room with the ‘narrow bed’ he slept in as a child while his parents’ marriage fell apart. There’s an undercurrent of violence, both actual and potential, and a feeling that its source is nowhere and everywhere, specific and legion. One of the girls attacked, when asked to draw her attacker, ‘had gone on drawing one face over another until the image was impossible to make out.’ All of them in one. Later, a school caretaker claims to have seen ‘a “scraggy looking” child of nine or so, moving so fast his face was a blur.’ The idea of child as victim and perpetrator is central to the story; the highlight of the blues night in which the narrator takes part is, appropriately enough, ‘when a young woman with red hair sang “God Bless the Child”.’ By this point, the police investigation has been subsumed into something more personal, a private world in which the adjective of the title is more than a merely geographical reference. Lane’s story, when compared with Massey’s, is more mundane in its setting, and – maybe – more elemental in its final image. Both stories, though, in their different ways draw on deep fears: of loss of self, and of how that self is made, and unmade, by the world around it.
Sometimes a holiday is more than just a getting away; it can also be a getting back, in every sense. Last year, in South Africa, above and around the uncomplicated joy of visiting a new place and loving the stimulus and excitement it offered, I had my own baggage to deal with, commitment-related baggage from years before. I felt that I was up against an historic anger and sense of injustice, something I hadn’t felt, viscerally, for decades, and that I was going to be forced to reconsider, an anger I’d somehow, shamefully, side-lined so much I had no idea even when apartheid rule had ended. I went, white liberal cap in hand, uneasily prepared to be despised, reviled, misunderstood. I must have been mad. Unsurprisingly, South Africa turned out not to be all about me. I realised within hours of my arrival that I wasn’t in the least important, which I’d already known but needed to be reminded of, and, during the subsequent two weeks, that radical change could be made without radical annihilation, which is something that’s worth being reminded of, now and always.
This year, though, in Portugal, I had a sense of being taken back to a more personal version of myself, that meant nothing to anyone else, and perhaps – as events seemed to show – not even to me. Those of you who’ve read The Slave House or, for that matter, this blog in the past few months will know that I spent six months in Setubal, an hour south of Lisbon, in the late seventies, not long after the Carnation revolution. You’ll also know, or have rightly assumed, that I had an unhappy time there, for reasons made clear in the novella that I won’t repeat here. And you may wonder what possessed me to go back to the country this summer. I wondered myself.
A friend of mine, commenting on The Slave House, remarked that the main character’s failure to change as a result of his experience had surprised her. It’s a tenet of creative writing orthodoxy that protagonists move from one emotional place to another, although not one I’ve felt the need to respect, but it’s certainly true that Simon, my hero and alter ego, doesn’t cover much ground in the course of the story. His learning curve is, bluntly, flat. He doesn’t grow; he’s as aimless and self-deceiving (or self-serving) at the end of the novella as he is at the beginning, his unexamined ego remaining unexamined, despite the contribution of Tarot cards and the I Ching, his id as impellent and mysterious to him as ever. He doesn’t know what he’s doing there, and neither did I. So when friends suggested that what drew me back was nostalgia, I was quick to deny it. Nostalgia assumes a fondness for the other place I knew I didn’t feel. Whatever I did feel for Portugal, and I wasn’t sure what that was, I was pretty sure it wasn’t fondness. I told myself, and others, that it just seemed like a good time to visit a city, Lisbon, of which I had almost no memory, after a more than thirty year absence.
Well, Lisbon is wonderful. It’s vibrant, varied, welcoming, well-organised (something I particularly appreciate after years of living in its richer and theoretically more advanced southern European big sister). It’s relaxed about eating times, and has excellent coffee. It has colour, and the substantial presence of water, and a castle on a hill, and sufficient oddness to keep one’s curiosity alive. It has the most delicious cakes I’ve ever eaten (pasteis de nata) and one of the most splendidly bizarre architectural styles (Manueline) I’ve ever seen, the two of them within a few hundred yards of each other (although the best pasteis I found were actually in a dedicated shop in Rua da Prata). It has both seediness and charm in abundance. As far as the former goes, one memorable lunch stands out. At the foot of the Alfama, fifty yards away from a gigantic poster of Saramago; an overcooked bitoque with the customary rice and chips and scrap of lettuce. As added garnish, an insistent octogenarian dealer with a bag of what looked like excellent grass, a pair of copulating pigeons and a young man hawking something terminal from his lungs. And flies. And more flies. A tsunami of flies.
But this was more than outweighed by the perfect Dover sole (twice, at La Floresta de Belem) and the ginjinha in its little paper cup and the almost empty Museum of Tiles in the old Madre de Deus convent. And tee-shirts in every gift shop with two lines from Pessoa on them: Tudo vale a pena/Se a alma não é pequena (“Everything is worthwhile/if the soul is not small”.) And the piri piri chicken, cheap and hot and juicy. And the lights of Lisbon from the other side of the river. And the sunset behind the bridge that once bore the name of Salazar and now bears the date of the revolution, which is also the anniversary of the day Giuseppe and I met. And so the personal intrudes.
Because we didn’t just stay in Lisbon. We went back to Setubal, leaving the capital from the same bare, unimposing square I must first have caught the bus from when I arrived in 1978, with the Gulbenkian Foundation on the far side of the square, less a square than an empty place criss-crossed by curving dual carriageways and surrounded, now, by multi-storey banks and hotels, standing back from the square in a wary sort of way, as though the shabbiness of the small rough market along one side of it might be contagious. Was the market there, I wonder, when I was? I can’t be sure. And that’s the theme of the day we spent in Setubal. I can’t be sure.
Some people remember everything, others almost nothing. On a cline from everything to nothing, I’m near perfect. The copy editor of my first novel remarked on how obsessively I repeat the verb ‘look’. I can recall every detail of a day I spent in, say, Cuneo, during the winter of 1976-77, the walk from the station through the centre, the snow, the restaurant in a sort of cellar, the brasato, the grappa. I can remember where I shopped in Milan a year earlier, and what I bought, and where I shoplifted in Dublin in 1975, and what I stole. (And what Charlie stole.) I can remember the pubs I drank in with a series of Irish publishers, none of whom had a job for me, all of whom paid for my drinks and were charming. I have a memory for places I’ve been to, and drunk in, and lived in. Details, visual details.
But not Setubal. After the bus station, the familiarity of which gave me a sense of false hope that I might be returning to a place I would know, there was nothing. We arrived in time for lunch and walked down to the estuary, and all the time I was walking there was this constant interrogation, Do you recognise this place? This shop? This bar? This face? Have you been here before? And the deep, intuitive answer was always the same. No. This is new to me. We walked through the main square of the town, and smaller squares, each beautiful in its way, which I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t expected beauty. We walked along the river front, and I was wide open to what I knew, was convinced, would come sooner or later, that epiphany of recognition. Except that it didn’t. I looked at the cathedral façade, two lovely solid towers, a central portico. Nothing. It was built in the 16th century, for fuck’s sake, it must have been here when I was here. So why don’t I remember it? Where was I? More to the point, who was I?
It took me half a day to accept that the place I had lived in for half a year was strange to me. Not entirely; I remembered the building I’d lived in and, to my surprised amusement, the place I’d transgressed in with Sabrina (see The Slave House for details). I managed to persuade myself that I half-remembered the park near the school, and the bar I’d drunk in, that I half-remembered the supermarket where people had queued for milk while I stayed in my classroom, that I half-remembered a bridge, a turning that led to my girlfriend’s flat…
I think what I must have done when I was there is batten down all my hatches in the most literal (i.e. metaphorical) way. I needed a certain amount of sensory input to live, some basic minimum, and everything beyond that was filtered out. It must have been a ruthless process, like dumping one’s friends from the basket of the balloon to lighten the load. I can’t imagine how it happened. I can’t imagine how I must have walked around these streets and simultaneously closed them off, because to let them into me, to let them become a part of me, would bind me to them. I’ve never believed in the notion that someone could wilfully (if that’s the word) remove a bad experience from one’s memory. No one, I always thought, could forget they’d been held in an isolation cell, or locked into a space between the stairs for days on end. Victims of torture don’t forget. But I, in my smaller way, seem to have done just that. And then I find a line from Pessoa, appropriately enough from the Book of Disquiet, that goes like this:
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
I’m delighted to say that I’ve just been asked to contribute to a collection of responses to Kafka, to be published next year by Italy’s Institute of Germanic Studies. Right now, as women and children are abducted by supine, mendacious or incompetent governments and teenagers are gunned down by self-appointed vigilantes, Kafka seems more than usually apposite.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
As I said in an earlier post, my novella The Slave House is loosely based on some time I spent in Portugal in the late 1970s. It was a difficult time, for Portugal as a whole and for me in particular, as those of you who’ve read the novella will know. But it wasn’t all bad. I saw dolphins and churches, and castles, and Cascais. Talking to a friend this morning, I remembered an episode that, for reasons that should become apparent, I decided not to include in my dark and bitter story of unwitting betrayal.
My memory of the event is bathed in autumn light so it must have taken place during my first few months in Setúbal, a coastal town with a working port where I worked in a private language school. The number of British residents in the town was small, extremely small, or my colleagues and I would never have received an invitation to attend a cocktail party, presumably via the British Embassy. The cocktail party was being held on a nuclear submarine, moored in Setúbal harbour, presumably on government business. It’s an odd thought that someone decided to use the brief pause from military duty as a PR exercise – perhaps the idea was merely to give the crew a 48-hour respite from submarine life. I remember being initially reluctant to go, imagining that my refusal would be seen as a cogent anti-militaristic stand, one drop in the coming tsunami that would sweep all armies away. I actually thought like that in those days, or think I did now. But I was persuaded to change my mind, by the promise of alcohol, or the chance of sabotage, or the thought of sailors, un-cooped up and keen for a little light relief.
There were three or four English teachers at the school, and a German woman, named Sabrina in the novella, so Sabrina she is. I don’t recall how we managed to get hold of an invitation for her, though I do remember another colleague, called Elaine in the story, wanting her included out, as Sam Goldwyn once said. We arrived together, embassy invitations and passports at the ready, and were taken down, one by one, into the belly of the submarine. Sabrina had on her trademark stilettos, and managed to skewer the air between two rungs of the narrow ladder with one of them, swinging perilously until a sailor reached up to support her bottom. She was wearing a pencil skirt – I may have learnt this term from her – and a tight-fitting white blouse. I’d asked her as we walked across the port how she managed to avoid visible panty line – that’s the sort of friendship we had – and she stroked my cheek with maternal affection and told me, and I should have known this already, that the best way was to wear no panties. She was – and I’m putting myself in the uniform of a sailor here – a sight for sore eyes. Blonde Louise Brooks haircut, bright red lips, wide-eyed. On a bright and busy street she turned heads. You can imagine the impression she made within the gun-grey men-only innards of a nuclear submarine.
The submarine, as far as I remember, had all its workings visible, pipes and cables running along claustrophobic corridors, more like natural tunnels with their curves and obloids and improbable lateral openings than anything man-made. I have a mortal fear of pot-holes and anything resembling them, and the submarine, horribly, did. I found it hard to breathe. Although no more than feet below the surface of the estuary, I felt the full weight of an imagined ocean on my skin and bones. I focused on the neck and shoulders of the sailor in front of me as we were led into what must have been the galley, the largest space on the vessel, little more than the width of an English double bed, and offered rum. The cocktail party was actually a rum party. It was excellent rum. Navy rum. The sailor I’d followed explained that no matter how much real Navy rum you drank you would never have a hangover, and I was foolish enough to believe this, and to believe that the man who was telling me might have a reason for getting me drunk. I was wrong on both counts.
We were taken on a tour of the submarine at one point, Indian file. I saw the bunks and imagined not some torrid tar-on-tar action but the sheer horror of lying in a space the size of a meagre bookshelf, with the metallic curve of the vessel’s skin only inches from my face and, beyond that, water, an immeasurably high, unscalable wall of water, extending in all directions. A world of water. I imagined the submarine buckling and myself being crushed between crumpling plates of steel. Beyond the bunks, at the business end I suppose of the submarine, were the torpedoes that carried the nuclear warheads. They were smaller than I’d expected. I may have sneered inwardly and thought toys for boys, as one did in those days. With a little more headroom, you could have mounted one and ridden it bronco-style, or pretended to. Someone cracked a joke about not lighting a match, but no one laughed. I was still sick with claustrophobia.
Back in the galley, more rum in my hand, I calmed down. It wasn’t until Elaine asked if I knew where Sabrina was that I noticed her absence. I’ve no idea, I said. You’d better tell someone, she said. You don’t want that German tart messing about with the war effort. But what I didn’t want was to get Sabrina into trouble. I set off down the nearest corridor. I can’t have gone far when I heard an odd sound, as if someone were struggling for breath, and then a thump, of something soft hitting metal. Against my will, I speeded up. Someone was calling behind me; for a moment, I imagined I’d breached some protocol and might never be seen again, be washed up at Scapa Flow with mysterious scars on my underarms. I hurried on towards the noise. Rounding a final corner, I saw Sabrina: her arms waving in ecstasy, her bare legs wrapped around the waist of a sailor, stilettos digging into his milk-white arse, a nuclear warhead rolling and shifting beneath their weight.
The first time I saw Antony Hegarty, at the Meltdown curated by Patti Smith some years ago, I barely knew who he was. My sister had won tickets to any event she chose and it’s one of my small regrets that, alongside seats for Patti herself, John Cale, Yoko Ono, we didn’t book the Antony night. He was playing the small hall – I don’t remember the name – while we sat in the main one, watching a disappointing evening of people I’d loved and valued – Robin Williamson, Roy Harper – and found I no longer did. But we also had tickets for Stand Bravely Brothers, an evening devoted to Brecht songs. Among the many wonders of that night – Marc Almond appearing for the first time after the accident that nearly killed him, Tiger Lillies, the Finn brothers marching to a new translation of the Cannon Song – was Antony. He shuffled up to the centre of the stage in the sort of loose smock-like garment he’s now refined into something Juliette Greco might have worn. He was clearly mortified to be there, or seemed to be, and then he began to sing. It was Surabaya Johnny, a song that will reduce me to tears in the least capable of hands, so you can imagine.
The second time was in Rome, not long afterwards. By that time he’d become a household name, in my household at least. I’d bought the first CD at the airport on my way home and my partner had fallen in love with him, as had a close friend of ours, Paola. The two of them spent hours on the phone quoting lines from You Are My Sister, damp-eyed, to each other. I was less enamoured, but not by much. That evening, Antony played in one of the covered spaces of Renzo Piano’s new Auditorium, a place – like the Nazca lines – of intriguing beauty when seen from above, gigantic brown-backed scarabs about to mate, or fight, with reasonable acoustics (after some adjustment), and with seating, alas, designed for rubber-legged dwarves with robust backs. Cramped, at the back of the hall, far away and high above the stage, we saw Antony, we really did, but only just. He was hidden away at one side of the stage, seated at the piano, penumbral, his face concealed by his hair, his hands occasional flashes of white, like moths.
He was back at the Auditorium on Monday evening, this time in the Cavea, the central amphitheatre where the three bugs meet head-on. This time, though, he took the centre of the stage and, except for a couple of songs at the piano, stayed there, his black robes – half Merlin, half Sophie Tucker – oddly static.The playlist was almost entirely composed of covers, and it was mostly good to hear him take a song you thought you knew and turn it inside out. Any good interpreter will make a song hers, or his, but rarely as radically as Antony did, his voice resonating within, and distorting, the melody as though it were being channelled through some dark personal cave of his own making. There was a lot of channelling going on during the concert, most of it – surprisingly to me – from the world of black music. Billie Holiday, gospel, jazz, even jazz hands at times, but held low down as though admonished, torch song, blues, the music magisterially keeping up with, and framing, the ever more remarkable instrument of Antony’s voice. There were times he raised his hands to the sky like a parody of some mad preacher, or witch(-doctor), invoking who knows what force. At one point, towards the end of a traditional ballad I didn’t recognise, with the chorus of the Johnsons singing the refrain and Antony, banshee-like, wailing out the verse, a flock of seagulls appeared from nowhere to circle above our heads, their cries just audible, so integral to the song of death and unrequited love below it was hard to believe their presence hadn’t been meant. They hung around for the next song too, a reading of I Will Survive that broke me up (disco bunny that I was), before sweeping away. At one point, someone cried out from the audience, I love you, Antony, and I wondered how he’d deal with it, his new-found stage presence as much a self-protecting wall as his earlier timidity. Thank you, dear, he said, for all the world like Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirits.
The choice of music was, without exception, canny and deliberated, a network of ideal alliances across genre and time, from the Marvelettes (Someday, Someway) to Leonard Cohen, from As Tears Go By to Motherless Child, dedicated to gay children in Nigeria, Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the almost endless list of places in which is to be gay is to be condemned, culminating in a wry – and much appreciated – ‘and maybe some children in Italy’. Apart from this dedication, and the moment when he called us his ‘bambinos’, making up in affection what it lacked in grammatical accuracy, he spoke only once, a sermon about the female principle that centred on the phrase, God’s vagina. Not everyone understood everything, but the whole cavea understood God’s vagina, and applauded, as though the malevolent background hum of the Vatican had been magically silenced, for a moment at least.
The encore was Candy Says, from Lou Reed’s Transformer, one of my favourite albums and perhaps the first time art music and coloured girls were united into something entirely new. I’ve come to hate my body, Antony sang, and this is probably still true for him, as it was for Candy. It’s easy to become a parody of oneself, particularly when one’s self is a sort of mask or truth turned inside-out, but Antony seems to have avoided this fate so far. Long may it continue. I only wish he’d done Surabaya Johnny.
As I left the auditorium I remembered a few lines by Frank O’Hara:
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Ever heard of The Tomorrow Project? This is what it says about itself.
What kind of future do you want to live in? What future do you want to avoid? The Tomorrow Project explores our possible futures through fact-based, science-based fiction and video conversations with scientists and science fiction authors, legends and world renowned experts, passionate advocates and everyday people. Science fiction gives all of us a language so that we can have a conversation about the future and these conversations make dramatic changes.
In collaboration with ARC, a digital quarterly from the makers of New Scientist, The Tomorrow Project organises short story competitions. A story of mine was one of the winners of their most recent competition, with the theme “Is the future friendly?” The story is called Mirrors.
CHARLES LAMBERT 