The Position of Spoons, page 10
* * *
And something else. Masha quotes from Pushkin at the start of the play: ‘A green oak by the curving shore, and on that oak a chain of gold.’ I sort of understood those lines, aged nineteen, but I did not feel them. Later, maybe thirty years later, when my marriage was on the rocks (as was Masha’s in Three Sisters), I read Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Couriers’: ‘A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.’ Oh, I thought, so that’s what Masha was trying to convey.
As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard told us, ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’
* * *
That ring of gold came back again, in a different form, when I joined a queue outside a London grocery store, all of us wearing surgical masks as if they were the most normal accessory in the world. Someone in the queue asked me if I had the time. It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but the pandemic had somehow managed to congeal time, and anyway, these days everyone has the time on their phones. I found myself looking at my wrist, as if I had a watch strapped to it, which I did not. This gesture, glancing at a watch that was not there, brought back to me the memory of the little gold watch my paternal grandmother, who was born in Lithuania, bequeathed to me. I was seven when she died and it fitted my wrist perfectly.
Her name was Miriam Leah. When she arrived in Cape Town, aged twelve, in 1908, it was changed to Mary. Her future husband’s name was Abraham Moses, and he had changed it to Mark. Mary and Mark. I still think of my grandmother as Miriam Leah, though I understand that Mary was her avatar to survive anti-Semitism. She was Mary like Mary Poppins, except she spoke English with a Yiddish accent. I’m not sure what happened to that watch, alas, but that afternoon, queueing to buy apricots, I realized that what I had inherited was not a ‘grown-up’ watch, as I had thought at seven, but a child’s watch. It would not have fitted even the dainty wrists of Mary/Miriam when she was an adult woman.
* * *
Did Miriam Leah travel with that watch on the long journey from Lithuania to Cape Town? Why did I never ask her about that journey? Or, to put it another way, why was I not pointed by my family to ask her about the epic journey she had made with Rosa, her older sister? The train, the ship, the suitcases carried by a cart pulled by horses. Their mother had died of cancer and so the two sisters were obliged to join their estranged father in South Africa.
* * *
I would guess that Rosa and Miriam felt a bit tender on the anniversary of their mother’s death. They would know how to speak the line ‘It’s exactly a year ago today that Mother died.’ What happened to Miriam/Mary’s relatives and the family friends who remained in Lithuania? Apparently, my grandmother told my father stories about the pogroms she had witnessed in her village, yet as an adult, he says, she never spoke of the holocaust. That silence was transmitted to me, too. I know nothing about my extended family in Lithuania. It is a silence I explore in my novel Swimming Home: ‘If cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.’
* * *
All the same, why is that gold watch important to me? What do I really want to know about it and what is it there to do?
* * *
This is one of the many questions that Maria Stepanova, Russian poet and writer of exquisite long-form prose, asks herself in her recent book, In Memory of Memory, a 500-page deep dive into historical, cultural and personal memory. In a sense she answers it in one punchy line: ‘There comes a day when the scattered pieces of knowledge need to be fixed in a transmission line.’
Stepanova begins this discursive, epic meditation on and around the ways in which her ‘ordinary’ Jewish family managed to survive the persecutions of the twentieth century with the death of her father’s estranged sister. The narrator finds herself in Aunt Galya’s apartment, sorting through postcards, ivory brooches, photographs, letters, diaries, souvenirs. She realizes that this hoard is a valuable archive from the twentieth century.
‘Objects from the long distant past,’ Stepanova writes, ‘look as if they have been caught in the headlights, they’re awkward, embarrassingly naked. It’s as if they have nothing left to do.’
Stepanova is at her most searing when she writes about the ‘non-human face’ of objects. Her description of missing parts of crockery as ‘orphaned’, or faded photographs as ‘foundlings’, opens the mind and lets in our own personal and historical associations. She is also astute on family photographs, noting there is always one which features ‘a middle-aged, stylish woman, suffering from chronic, mild depression’.
* * *
Many writers are called upon by Stepanova to accompany her on what is as much a thought experiment ‘on the way memory works, and what memory wants from me’, as an attempt to piece together shattered fragments of family history. These include Sebald, Proust, Barthes, Nabokov, Sontag and, perhaps most piercingly, Osip Mandelstam, under the heading ‘The Jewboy Hides from View’.
A few visual artists are enlisted too, but less successfully. Stepanova includes a short, rather basic treatise on the photography of Francesca Woodman, who experimented with ways of making herself blur and disappear in her self-portraits; also, the vibrant, turbulent, ironic paintings of Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered in Auschwitz. All the same, to twin these astonishing female artists who disappeared in different ways (Woodman suicided, aged twenty-two) is a brave idea. As Stepanova writes so evocatively in a chapter titled ‘Selfies and Their Consequences’, ‘All that disappears is what made you yourself.’ That is certainly true for the narrator in W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel, Austerlitz. He gradually manages to discover the fate of his mother, who was deported to the death camps. There is a great deal at stake for Jacques Austerlitz. This is because he carries within himself knowledge that is too painful to access. His assignment with the past is to recover this knowledge.
Stepanova’s narrator speaks and thinks in a detached, elegant, serene tone. Perhaps there is no other tone that can better handle the panorama of ideas she puts to work in this philosophical investigation into remembering and forgetting. If I am not sure what is at stake or what her narrator wants to know, or indeed what it is she wishes to unknow, perhaps that’s her point. ‘There is too much past, and everyone knows it,’ she tells us. As her title suggests, memory itself is an artefact.
In contemporary Europe with its barely healed wounds, black holes, and traces of displacement, a well-preserved family archive is a rarity. A set of furniture and china that has come together over decades, inherited from aunts and grandmothers and once thought of as an ancient burden, now deserves its own special memorial. Those who were forced to flee (it hardly matters from whom they fled) burnt documents, shredded photographs, cut off everything below the chin – officer epaulettes, army greatcoats, civil service uniforms – and left their papers with other people. By the end of the journey very little is left for the memory to cling to, and to set sail on.
It is sometimes a relief in this dense, intense, meandering stretch of writing, to come across an anchoring line, such as: ‘My grandfather was from the southern port city of Odessa.’ And a pleasure to learn that the cab drivers in Odessa ‘sang opera arias as if they were gondoliers’. At the same time, the narrator tells us, ‘News of pogroms spread like wildfire around Southern Ukraine. It travelled on trains with the railway men, down the Dniepr with the ferrymen, jostled at hiring fairs, and served as a model for new outbursts of pointless cruelty: “Let’s do it the Kievan way!”’
* * *
Towards the end of the massive achievement that is In Memory of Memory, Stepanova writes, ‘Sometimes it seems like it is only possible to love the past if you know it is definitely never going to return.’ I know what she means. Chekhov understood this, too. The Three Sisters do not return to Moscow. Miriam Leah did not return to Lithuania. Yet, as Freud told us, the past does return, and though we might wish to see it off, the repressed will jump into the queue at the grocery store and present itself in the form of a child’s gold watch. Memory was Freud’s major subject, of course, a life’s work. His archaeological metaphor suggests that to recover the past, with all its shards and fragments, we have to dig down and bring to the surface those memories that have been pushed out of consciousness. And so, for this reader anyway, the unconscious of In Memory of Memory is the way it obsessively digs up the perilous twentieth century and searches amongst its tram routes, crockery and stockings for the trauma wound.
The past is not exactly a stranger at our table, but it is uncanny all the same. Neither dead nor alive, it does not return my stare or smile or tears, but in my own mind it does listen to my thoughts. Somehow, I believe we are both of us, the present and past, slightly altered from this exchange of knowledge and feeling.
BLUE RAIN
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad.
—MARCEL PROUST, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME (1913–27)
Dear Peter,
I bought a wisteria plant today (about two feet tall in its pot) and carried it in the April weather (sunshine and snow) to the tiny balcony of my apartment. Then I read the instructions, which told me that Wisteria sinensis is sometimes called Blue Rain. That made me think of you because you were crazy for Purple Rain and Prince died on this day, 21 April. So, Peter, here I am in London thinking of you and Prince today, while I settle in the wisteria.
I wish so very much that I had seen you before you died in Frankfurt. Amongst many other subjects (politics, art, sex, new beers from Belgium, power, lack of power, madness – you were reading Michel Foucault – the horror of Scotch eggs, money and how we did not have enough of it, the way people smile and if they mean it), we often discussed our respective mothers – which, we decided, was a conversation without end. All of the world is in Mother, every emotion, too. Love, rage, regret, fear, guilt, pity, admiration, the need to fly from her nest, her breast, her vintage problems (mine born in 1939), the sorrow in her eyes, the viper in her heart, the pains in her legs, oh God, didn’t we have enough problems of our own? Do you remember how we continued this conversation in the rowing boat on the lake in Regent’s Park?
I was in charge of the oars on that day, pulling our boat across the brackish water, steering it to change direction so we could sit under the trailing branches of a willow tree and begin our picnic of radishes and potato salad. Years later, after we lost touch with each other, I wrote a novel about a mother and daughter, titled Hot Milk. It’s about how love can scald us, and how sometimes we are the arsonists. You never got to read it, or to discuss the low flame that burns underneath it, yet in a way I began to write it that afternoon with you in the rowing boat.
* * *
Meanwhile, back here in London, according to the instructions that come with the wisteria plant, I have to feed it with ‘fish, blood and bone’ to help it bud and make blue rain. Peter, I can see you gazing at me now. Your blue eyes are the rain. Did you and I mean the things we said all those years ago? I think we did.
We thought deeply and freely together, no shaming, no judgement, no righteous pointing fingers, so many hopeful words thrown at the wind. This is to say hello, again, my old friend.
Some of this writing was previously published in the following journals and assorted media:
‘Bathed in an Arc of French Light’: Cent Magazine (2004).
‘Marguerite Duras’: ‘Book of a Lifetime: The Lover by Marguerite Duras’, Independent, 29 September 2011.
‘My Beautiful Brothel Creepers’: ‘Real Living: Love and Brothel Creepers’, Independent on Sunday, 8 November 1998; A Second Skin: Women Write About Clothes, ed. Kirsty Dunseath (The Women’s Press, 2000).
‘Walking Out of the Frame’: ‘Francesca Woodman: Vanishing Act’, Tate Etc., 43 (Summer 2018).
‘Believe It’: ‘My Hero: Lee Miller’, Guardian, 21 September 2012.
‘Kingdom Come’: introduction to Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard (Fourth Estate, 2014).
‘Telegram to a Pylon Transmitting Electricity over Distances’: Artesian Journal, ed. Gareth Evans (2008).
‘A Mouthful of Grey’: ‘Touring London’ (2000), InIVA.org.
‘Them and Us’: foreword to Hysteria, a graphic novel written by Richard Appignanesi, drawings by Oscar Zarate (SelfMadeHero, 2015).
‘Ann Quin’: Music & Literature, no. 7 (2016).
‘A to Z of the Death Drive’: commissioned by Jules Wright for Wapping Hydraulic Power Station for an exhibition by Dean Rogers, 2009; published in Five Dials, 30 (August 2015).
‘Migrations to Elsewhere and Other Pains’: New Statesman (April 2013).
‘A Roaming Alphabet for the Inner Voice’: Revolver (2006).
‘Reading Violette Leduc’s Autobiography, La Bâtarde’: introduction to La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).
‘The Lady and the Little Fox Fur’: introduction to The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc (Penguin, 2018); extracted in the Guardian, 25 August 2018.
‘Charisma’: written for Forced Entertainment’s lecture performance Marathon Lexicon (2006).
‘Mona Lisa’: written for 1001 Nights, a durational performance by Barbara Campbell (2008).
‘The Position of Spoons’: ‘The Position of Teaspoons’, The Happy Reader (June 2018).
‘The Mortality Project 2050’: Southword 35, ed. Patrick Cotter (2018).
‘Watery Things’: Whitstable Biennale 2018.
‘Letter to a Stranger’: Dear Stranger: Letters on the Subject of Happiness (Penguin, 2015).
‘X = Freedom’: a poem for Meret Oppenheim, commissioned and performed at the Swiss Institute, Rome, 2023.
‘Seduction and Betrayal’: introduction to Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick (Faber & Faber, 2019).
‘Lemons at My Table’: The Food Almanac by Miranda York (Pavilion Books, 2020).
‘Hope Mirrlees’: foreword to Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirlees (Faber & Faber, 2020).
‘The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir’: introduction to the translation by Lauren Elkin (Vintage Classics, 2021).
‘Paula Rego’: extract from the essay ‘She Doesn’t Want It’, Paula Rego: The Forgotten (Victoria Miro, 2021).
‘The Psychopathology of a Writing Life’: commissioned by Word Factory, 2016.
‘Too Much Past’: Jewish Quarterly (August 2021).
ALSO BY DEBORAH LEVY
FICTION
August Blue
The Man Who Saw Everything
Hot Milk
Black Vodka
Swimming Home
Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places
Billy and Girl
The Unloved
Swallowing Geography
Beautiful Mutants
Ophelia and the Great Idea
NONFICTION
Real Estate
The Cost of Living
Things I Don’t Want to Know
A Note About the Author
Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and translated widely. She is the author of several highly praised novels, including August Blue, The Man Who Saw Everything (long-listed for the Booker Prize), Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka; and a three-part autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate. She lives in London and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Bathed in An Arc of French Light
Marguerite Duras
My Beautiful Brothel Creepers
Walking Out of the Frame
Believe It
Values and Standards
Kingdom Come
Telegram To a Pylon Transmitting Electricity Over Distances
A Mouthful of Grey
The Psychopathology of Everyday Café Life in Freud’s Vienna
Them and Us
Ann Quin
A To Z of the Death Drive
Migrations To Elsewhere and Other Pains
A Roaming Alphabet for the Inner Voice
Reading Violette Leduc’s Autobiography, La Bâtarde
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur
The Thinker
Charisma
Mona Lisa
Enslaved To the Evil Flower of Fame As Told By a Dog
The Position of Spoons
The Mortality Project 2050
Watery Things
Letter To a Stranger
X = Freedom
