The Position of Spoons, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
BATHED IN AN ARC OF FRENCH LIGHT
COLETTE
I fell in love with her before I read any of her books.
To my teenage eyes smeared in the black kohl I believed made me look nihilistic and wasted (it was the era of punk after all and we were all in mourning for the future), Colette had a self-possessed kind of beauty that I felt she owned and hired to the photographer.
Even better as far as I was concerned, living as I did in the suburbs of London where everyone looked the same and even called their dogs the same name (there were three dogs called Spot in my street alone), Colette was a writer who looked like a movie star.
I looked nothing like her. Her dog was called Toby-Chien.
I don’t know how I chanced upon this photograph. I do know it was a freezing December in 1973 and the central heating had broken down in our family house.
The doorbell rang and my mother shouted at me to let in the man who had arrived to fix the heating. He poked around in the cupboard where the boiler was and said, ‘I officially condemn this boiler. The law says you’ve got to buy a new one.’ Then he winked at me and switched it on. The pipes in the house started to whirr and clank like an old tractor. When I at last returned to my bedroom, I had to fight my way through the black smoke coiling out of my radiator.
Despite it being a very posed image, there was something about the way Colette had contrived its artifice that connected with me. She was a working writer who had a purpose in life. I could see immediately that she was enjoying the theatre of inventing herself to portray this purpose. This was of particular interest in that phase of my own life.
I was born in South Africa and grew up in Britain. When I glimpsed this photo at thirteen years old, I had lived in Britain for four years, not quite long enough to feel that I was English. Colette was presenting herself in a way that appealed to my teenage idea of what a European female writer might be like. Glamorous, serious, intellectual, playful – with a mean, sleek cat sitting on her writing desk amongst the flowers, all of them bathed in a glowing arc of French light.
When I started to read her books, all that was transgressive and sensuous in her writing blew like a wind from Burgundy, Paris and the South of France into the damp suburban gardens of London. Her affairs with women and her three marriages (the first to a perverse and corrupt bon viveur who signed her early novels as his own) meant she had one foot in and one foot out of the bourgeois life of her era. She became arthritic in middle age and often wore mannish open sandals with her elegant dresses, much to the agony of her more conventional second husband.
I knew none of this when I first glimpsed the photograph, yet somehow I intuited she’d had an experimental life.
What is the point of having any other sort of life, I thought to myself. Outside I could hear one of the dogs called Spot barking at a cat called Snowy. Twenty years later, when I read The Vagabond, I had cause to agree with her light but slyly deep assertion, ‘I want nothing from love, in short, but love.’
Yes, what else is it we would want from love, apart from love?
Too many things, as it happens.
MARGUERITE DURAS
The purpose of language for Duras is to nail a catastrophe to the page.
She thinks as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain. It is all or nothing for Duras. She puts everything into language. The more she puts in, the fewer words she uses. Words can be nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
It is what we do not do with language that gives it value, makes it necessary. Dull and dulling language is successful. Every writer knows this, makes a choice about what to do with that knowledge.
It’s hard, sometimes even absurd, to know things, even harder to feel things – that’s what Duras is always telling us. Her films are novelistic – voice-over, interior monologue – her fiction is cinematic: she understands that an image is not a ‘setting’ and that ‘it has to hold everything the reader needs to know.’ Duras is never begging with words but she is working very hard and calmly for us. Her trick is to make it all seem effortless.
* * *
Translated European literature was once shockingly hard to find in Britain. I was twenty-nine when I first read Marguerite Duras’s 1984 masterpiece, The Lover, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. A revelation and a confrontation in equal measure, it was as if I had burst out of an oak-panelled nineteenth-century gentleman’s club into something exhilarating, sexy, melancholy, truthful, modern and female.
If its cool, spare prose and flawless narrative design were somehow representative of the nouveau roman, largely associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet, it was clear to me that its major difference was that Duras did not distrust emotion. To write The Lover she drew on her early years living in Saigon with her impoverished mother and belligerent brothers. Structured as a kind of memoir, it is about a teenage girl living a peculiar colonial existence in French Indochina in the 1930s with her genteel but ‘beggar family’.
She decides to make something happen and starts to wear a man’s fedora hat and gold lamé shoes. In so doing, she suddenly sees herself ‘as another’. It’s a magic trick to separate from her deadening mother, and it works.
An elegant, wealthy Chinese man, twelve years her senior, is watching her on the ferry bus that crosses the Mekong River. When he risks offering her a cigarette, she notices that his hand is unsteady. ‘There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling.’
She wants to make him ‘less afraid’ so that he can do to her ‘what he usually does with women’ and, perhaps in return, he might sometimes buy her brothers and mother a meal? In one of the most devastating and brutally truthful seductions ever written, the Chinese financier who, she discovers, owns all the working-class housing in the colony, drives her in his ‘funereal’ limousine to his apartment on the edge of the city.
She undresses him, notices she desires him, panics, tells him he must never love her. Then she cries – about her mother’s poverty and because she often hates her. The Lover does not just portray a forbidden sexual encounter of mind-blowing passion and intensity; it is also an essay on memory, death, desire and how colonialism messes up everyone.
I’m not convinced a book as incandescent as The Lover, more existential than feminist, would be published today. Not in Britain, anyway. Questions would arise. Are the characters likeable (not exactly), is it experimental or mainstream (neither), is it a novel or a novella? Fortunately for Duras, it didn’t matter to her readers. It sold a million copies in forty-three languages, won the Prix Goncourt and was made into a commercial film.
Marguerite Duras was a reckless thinker, an egomaniac, a bit preposterous really. I believe she had to be. When she walks her bold but ‘puny’ female subject in her gold lamé shoes into the arms of her Chinese millionaire, Duras never covertly apologizes for the moral or psychological way that she exists in the world.
MY BEAUTIFUL BROTHEL CREEPERS
When I was seventeen and bought my first pair of brothel creepers from Shellys, a high-street shoe store in London, I gazed at their two inches of thick black crêpe sole and knew I would never wear them with socks. It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers. These sockless people have a kind of abandon in their body. They walk with zip. At the same time they manage to look both nonchalant and excitable. To not wear socks is to be alert but not hearty. To not wear socks is to not pretend that love is for ever.
If it’s any consolation, people who do wear socks are probably better adjusted than their sockless brothers and sisters. They face up to things and always carry an umbrella when it rains.
The sockless are godless. So are brothel creepers, also known as ‘Teddy-boy shoes’. To walk down the street in my very first pair made me feel like I was wearing a tattoo that marked me out for a meaningful life. I have bought many versions of them since, but twenty years later that first pair still lie intact on the top shelf of my shoe rack. Like jazz musicians they have improved with age. Not quite winkle-pickers, their leopard-skin tongue (V-shaped) is still seductive, ready to pounce and growl. To slip my naked foot into these shoes was to literally walk on air. My brothel creepers were beauty and truth, genius personified, never mind they were rock and bop, that was not the point, they were the metropolis, a ticket out of suburbia.
My brothel creepers made me feel sexy, serious, frivolous, confident. I wore them with tight black clinging dresses and I wore them with jeans. I wore them with pencil skirts and pinstriped trousers and I wore them to take out the garbage.
There is something in the br
Everyone was old and if they weren’t old, they looked like they were. Except for the checkout girl in her checked overalls staring dreamily into the white strobes on the ceiling. Three minutes to go and her till roll runs out. As she stands up to get another one, I see she is wearing brothel creepers, too. Except hers are electric-blue suede and have even more attitude than my own. As I run for my train, I know she will get out of that village. Her shoes are a sign that she is making plans for a life elsewhere.
WALKING OUT OF THE FRAME
She is an art student and she has booked a studio for a number of hours. She will have studied the floor and walls and the corners of walls and where the windows are positioned and how she is going to make the light work. She has a few plans (slow shutter speed, long exposures) but she’s just going to play around. She is her own subject but she is embodying many other subjects and one of them is representation. Representation of the female form. This image is not a self-portrait of Francesca Woodman. She is using her body to figure things out.
* * *
Look at her. There she is. She is all there. She is all there but she’s always trying to make herself disappear – to become vapour, a spectre, a smudge, a blur, a subject that is erased yet recognizable. She knows we know she’s there and by constructing techniques to make herself disappear she knows she makes herself bigger. She makes herself bigger because we are searching for her. The artist, Francesca Woodman, has given us something to find. It’s a dance, a theory, perhaps a Lacanian theory (la femme n’existe pas), a fiction, a provocation, an experiment, a joke, a serious question. Francesca Woodman, like all girls and women, wants to escape the frame.
She knows that when we look at this image we will want to find ‘her’ but the her we find is the art – the whole kinetic composition. I know she is art-directing everything, working out how to do her trick. She is alert, supple, aligned, poised. She has more or less seen this image before she has made it, or she has seen it in the act of making it, and she has probably felt this image for ever. All she has to do is find techniques to make it happen. If she’s making herself present by making herself absent, it is easier to figure out that equation with maths or physics, but she’s doing it with art.
The boots are there to land this ethereal image. It is so important to have a grip when we walk out of the frame of femininity into something vaguer, something more blurred. Francesca Woodman, the artist, can move freely in those boots but they also pull her down. The image would suffer without their presence. Actually, I am wearing boots that are quite similar as I write this. In about five minutes from now, I’m going to switch off my computer, lock the door of my writing shed and walk to the Tube station.
BELIEVE IT
Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, seven years after Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. There is always something dream-like and inscrutable in photographs of her when she was young. She both hides from and gives herself to the camera. I want to keep on looking at Lee Miller because I’m not sure what I am looking at – her beauty, her poise, her hat, her melancholy gaze.
What was she going to do with all that beauty and talent? She became a fashion model to the distinguished photographers of her day in New York and then went off to study art in Europe. In Paris she worked with Man Ray, became his student, lover and model, collaborating on many extraordinary images that she probably is not credited for. She was publicly very modest about her own work, but perhaps she didn’t feel that way inside.
After she left Man Ray, she established her own studio and hung out with the girlfriends of the surrealist male artists of her generation. It is Lee’s photographs of Nusch Éluard and Ady Fidelin that rescue them from their roles as muses and mannequins. I always like coming across them when I look at the surrealist archives. And then there is the shock of some information to be found in Lee Miller’s own biography. I don’t want to believe it. There is a photograph of Lee as a child, wearing dungarees around the age of seven or eight, not long after she was raped by a ‘family friend’. She stares at the camera, looking fragile and numb.
In 1944 she became a war correspondent with the US army, following the US infantry across a traumatized Europe. She was a witness. She pointed her camera at terrible things, at human history in the present tense.
As one of the few female combat journalists at the time, it was Lee Miller who photographed the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. She climbed up on to a truck and stood amongst the bodies to photograph the emaciated, dead prisoners.
The photographs were published in American Vogue, with the heading ‘Believe It’.
VALUES AND STANDARDS
I began to wonder why a particular middle-aged woman of my acquaintance had eyes that seemed to want to disappear into her head. When her tiny peepholes tried to wriggle away from my gaze, I did not blame them for trying to hide, but it was odd talking to someone with shrinking eyes.
It became clear to me that she was in some sort of distress. I did not know her very well, but we sometimes met at the school gates when we picked up our young children. She was hyper-middle class, huge house, books on the shelves, art on the walls. It was as if she had told herself she did not suffer fools gladly (me) and that she stood for certain kinds of values and standards. She was not really very likeable. I began to think about how she had removed her eyes in the name of whatever it was she stood for.
It was possible that she did not want to look out of her eyes and see the circumstances in her life that were unpleasant to her. I had witnessed the ways in which her husband could not be separated from the pleasure he took in undermining and humiliating her. It was as if he had told himself he did not suffer fools gladly (her) and that he stood for certain kinds of values and standards. If she had performed a complicated psychic operation in which she had removed her own eyes and saw the world and herself through his eyes, I wondered if there were times she put her own eyes back in again?
I began to think about my own eyes. There were times when they definitely became smaller. When my eyes became peepholes it was usually because other things had become bigger. Perhaps overwhelming. There is the phrase to narrow the eyes. It usually refers to taking the measure of something or someone, to see things as they actually are – to express doubt, disdain, perhaps to uncover a lie. Does this mean that we narrow our eyes in order to see things clearly? In which case, the Red Riding Hood story would go something like this:
What big eyes you have.
All the better not to see you.
What does this tell us about wide-eyed realists? Are they wide-eyed because they secretly yearn to see less, not more, despite having a great deal invested in the truth of their vision?
It is possible that the woman of my acquaintance who stood for certain kinds of values and standards did not want to know that the standards and values she had bought into might just slaughter her. Her eyes, which she had plucked out like Oedipus, were staring at her anyway.
KINGDOM COME
‘Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.’
