Trying to Keep Still by Jenny Diski

I had just started my latest attempt at book writing, limiting my reading and blogging to one book a week, when I picked up this book by Jenny Diski on an impulse from the local Oxfam shop. It was only £2.99, which was part of the reason (though Oxfam books are rarely more expensive than that), and another blogger had mentioned Diski positively quite recently which was another piece of the strange puzzle that is my book buying disease. I had also, some time ago, encountered Diski’s name when researching books about the Arctic and had flagged one of her books for future reading (Skating to Antarctica, specifically. Yes, I do know that is quite the other side of the planet). I had no real idea what this book was about, yet when I was mooching about the house feeling a little sorry for myself I picked it up thinking I’d read a few pages to get a feel for it and then next thing you know I’d put all my other books to one side and made this my one book of the week. Or the quarter, at least.

Diski is a travel writer, and this book explores three journeys she undertook: one to New Zealand, one in Somerset and one to Lapland. Yet whilst the structure of the book is created around these journeys, this is very much an exploration of Diski’s desire to keep still.  This seems a crazy premise for someone who is a travel writer, though it also seems that becoming a travel writer is something that mystifies Diski and results, largely, from her more pressing inability to say no. What follows is a strange kind of meditation on the idea of stillness, the guilt at not wanting to leave the house (or even her bed necessarily), the social pressure to enjoy activities such as walking or going out in general, the internal and, sometimes, external conflicts that arise and the difficulty in being honest. It is also very amusing, very truth-filled and wry. What Diski does or doesn’t explain about travel is neither here nor there, but her musings are absorbing, like here:

“What people always say about being alone for long periods is some variation on the theme of the immense and unimagined difficulties of having to confront oneself, a concealed self which lurks unnoticed below the requirements of everyday sociability. Coming face to face with yourself, is how they describe it. ‘You really find out who you are’, they say with a look of agonisingly acquired wisdom, implying an inevitable dark night of the soul. What I have discovered during these periods of being alone for as long as possible, is that I am extremely good at passing the time, and taking pleasure in passing the time, reading, idling and pottering, rarely bored, hardly ever restless, sometimes miserable, often dissatisfied with myself and the world, without finding out an iota more than that about who I am, because that is pretty much what I’m like in company too. The agony of solitude passes me by, until, because social guilt and self-analysis are never far away, the lack of agony at being with myself become an agony of lack of self.”

It is a book very heavily seated in introspection, the journeys being as much about Diski’s own response to her environment as the environment itself. Not such much travel writing as a woman writing about herself travelling. And it works. It is insightful and amusing, it is wise, it is challenging in the way watching anyone doing mental gymnastics whilst being rigidly honest can only be. There were times when reading this book that I felt like I was reading my own thoughts expressed more articulately and with greater insight and humility. It had such a familiarity about it, like listening to the rambling of your own thoughts in a dead moment, which was exactly the space I happened to be in at the time of reading it.

For the purists who like a travel writer to write about travel, there is still plenty of travel in this book. But what makes it so interesting is the intensity of reluctance Diski brings to the whole experience “nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller” Diski says, and there is so much truth in that little statement, the reminder that everything we experience is happening exactly where we are right now and we don’t really need to go anywhere to find it, or prove ourselves to anyone. And if this book tells us anything it’s that we can be exactly who we are, without the need to take part or live up to a certain standard. Exactly what I needed to read.

What I didn’t need, however, was the extraordinary list of books she took away with her to Somerset, listed on pages 77 and 78 and from which I have lifted a shortlist of about 5 or 6 I want to read for myself. Including Montaigne, who I think has heavily influenced this book but whom I know too little about to truly appreciate the connection. And I don’t have to either. In fact it is perfectly fine if I never read Montaigne, though I think I will in the end.

I can’t express here how much I enjoyed this book. It was a breath of stale bedroom air, beckoning me to sleep in. It won’t quash my love of travelling, unlike Diski I love walking and experiencing new places. But in many respects she articulated, with great clarity, the way my mind has been turning. It may have been a stroke of serendipity, but I don’t care. I loved it. 

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (translator: Michael Hulse)

There are many kinds of books you can encounter in a lifetime. There are books which are soulful and full of grace. Books that are like a slap in the face. Books that nurture and console you. Books that make you laugh. Books that are like a lifelong journey. Books that are like a puzzle you don’t have the brainpower to solve. Books that never seem to end.

Then there are books that are like walking along the riverside in the company of an erudite and well informed man, someone with whom you have only a tenuous relationship, perhaps through work or a shared acquaintance, but whose company is always interesting. You are walking along the riverside on a pleasant summer day, heading towards a pub you visited together a number of years ago. The sun is blinking through the trees, there is a gentle breeze and soft summer clouds floating fatly in the blue air. Your companion is telling you a story about a man he once encountered as a child, a lord of something or other who had a peculiar penchant swans – your friend mentions this pointing towards a pair of swans paddling along the river. The lord had such a love of swans that he had created a sanctuary somewhere hereabouts. The swan sanctuary turned out to be short lived and the ruin of the man.

As your companion talks you see the pub come into view. It is on the top of a small hill to your left, its grounds rolling down towards the riverbank clustered with picnic benches and you remember when you came here the last time. Then you were much younger, you were newly arrived in the area and this man, through your shared acquaintance or work, had offered to show you around. The day, one similar to today, was bright and warm, there were bees buzzing in the grass and ducks on the water and your anxiety about having moved from your home to a new, strange place had been assuaged for the duration of the afternoon. Something about your companion and his excellent conversation.

When you arrive at the pub the man goes off to the bar to buy beer, and you sit down at one of the tables close to the waterside. It is then that you discover that things are not exactly the way you remember them. The pub, its grounds so well situated on such a lovely day, is largely deserted. The wood of the picnic table splinters under your nails, there are cracks in its surface and great gouges torn out of the wood. The swans are gone from the river and the ducks from your memory are absent. Your friend returns and sits down, passing you your beer glass from which you take a great gulp. The beer doesn’t taste as good as you remember. ’It was here,’ your friend explains. ‘This was the place of lord such-and-such’s swan sanctuary.’ The Swan, is the name of the pub. As the bitter taste of beer melts from your tongue, you realise with surprise that you are now the same age as your companion was the last time that you were here together.

The air turns chill, a dark cloud rumbles overhead blocking out the sun. A melancholy mist rises from the river, drawing with it the brackish tang of decay. It reminds you, somehow, of a dream you had recently in which you had been walking along the self-same riverbank heading towards the pub at which you were now drinking. In the dream it had been a day much the same as today, but you had walked alone. The air seemed thick and dense, and as you walked a great, ancient forest appeared. With each step more trees grew, until the forest grew so thick you became lost within it. The familiar houses and landmarks had decayed to tumbledown ruins, and if there were any other people in the forest there was no sign of them. You walked until you were ready to lie down with exhaustion, and only then did the forest open into a clearing and the way out became obvious. You turned to find that the light was failing, that the path you had walked along had disappeared. It was a peculiarly vivid dream, and though you had felt lost you woke from it feeling only that you had experienced something like truth.

That is The Rings of Saturn.   

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who openly plumbs her own history in her work, famously so in her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which chronicles her childhood as an adoptive daughter, living in the house of a woman obsessed with the apocalypse and highly homophobic, which is unfortunate for Winterson who is a lesbian. I haven’t read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, though it is a book which has been sitting on my shelf for some time, and having read Why Be Happy… I think it’s about time I got around to it.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal is a memoir, a non-fictionalised account of the same events but also spanning a greater period of Winterson’s life. The memoir focuses on three significant events: her adoptive childhood and her relationship with Mrs Winterson, her emotional breakdown following the death of her mother and the end of a long-term relationship, and the search for her birth mother. Interspersed amongst these events are many fascinating observations about education, about reading, about feminism, about her love of women and women she has loved, about love, sharings of wisdom and history to name but a few. It is a difficult book to explain because of this, so perhaps I can explain by saying that whenever I read a book I mark pages of interest with a little torn strip of paper, so I can return to it and write about it or reflect on it. My copy of Why Be Happy is bursting at the seams with these little strips of paper. There is much wisdom in this book, much honestly and reflection.

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who is honest and open, she writes with passion and risk, she is funny, bright and insightful. It is, whether you know her story or not, an insightful and informative read. And it’s fun to read too. There were many points in the reading that I laughed openly, other times when I felt close to tears. Winterson is a writer who pulls emotion close to the surface, but she’s not sentimental or crass. She writes an incredible amount about love; I have seen this in her fiction, most especially in The Powerbook which is, perhaps, one of the most passionate books I have ever read. It is therefore surprising that Winterson spends much of the book convincing the reader that she doesn’t know how to love, that she learned to do it wrong. As she explains here:

“No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.

And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and stead way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to love.

But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?

Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.

Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.

We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.

In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.”

Jeanette Winterson is an intelligent and vibrant woman, she is a fighter and she fights through her fiction, she reaches and explores searching out what she wants and needs to survive, but more than to survive: to live. Coming from a working class background in the North of England (not hugely different to my own, though my mother was mine and more stable) she scrabbled and fought her way out of an appalling family situation into a degree course at Oxford (no mean feat) into a published, award winning novelist by the age of 25. She touches on all of this throughout Why Be Happy, and she does this not by being modest or with hubris but with that luminous clarity she describes about her connection with language. Whilst love may have failed her, language hasn’t and her relationship with reading, how she explored and learned from it, its intrinsic value, is inspiring. Another aspect of the book I particularly loved was the way it dipped and dove around in time. This is a feature of Winterson’s books (it has certainly appeared in all the others I’ve read) and it is one that could be frustrating but which I find very personable. Particularly in the memoir form, you get the sense that you’re following the train of Winterson’s mind where she leads you, that one thought leads to another and then to another. It places Winterson very present in the book, it is like she is talking to you. A conversation I think I would find terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

I came away from Why Be Happy with a huge respect for Winterson as a writer. It is an honest, heartfelt and intelligent book. There are so many fonts of wisdom it is impossible to write about them all here. I was a fan before, and I’m more of a fan now. She is a writer not afraid of taking a risk, she is herself and unashamed of it. She has suffered, she has lost, she has used her life and her loss and her pain and her endless search for love as a mine for her fiction and it is remarkable for it. This non-fictional account is no different. What a great book, and a great woman.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal receives a respectful 10 out of 10 Biis. 

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

“There’s a gazillion reservations against this book,” the nice man from the library told me as he handed the most beautiful hardback into my slightly sweaty-with-excitement waiting hands. I could believe it. I had waited two months to read this book; two months of fingering it longingly in Waterstones. Two months of putting it back on the shelf with near superhuman resolve. I had heard so many good thing about this book, found myself entranced by the stern, yellow eyes of the hawk illustration on the cover. It fit everything I loved into one neat little package: nature, birds, stunning writing, a personal journey, challenge, life. There was danger in this, I knew. I could be expecting so much that the book could never live up to those expectations, it could only disappoint.

Did it? No, I’m glad to say that didn’t happen at all. In fact this is a book which lived up to all of my expectations, which makes it quite unique.

H is for Hawk is a memoir, written by Helen Macdonald in the wake of her father’s unexpected death. It’s also an account of her decision to train a goshawk (Mabel) and how this interlinks with her grief following her father’s death and the writer, T.H. White, and his own attempts to train a goshawk (Gos) and his written account of those events. It’s a complex piece of interlinking which a poorer writer would struggle with but Macdonald manages to maintain in delicate balance.

It’s a stunningly written book. There are times when the landscape leaps off the page, and you can feel the fear and tension as Macdonald struggles (and doesn’t) with her decision to train a goshawk. An experienced falconer, Macdonald had been put off training goshawks as they’re notoriously difficult, yet something happened after her father’s death that precipitated her on this journey. That she loves the birds is quite apparent, as can be seen from the description here:

“In real life goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail. You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision. Perhaps you’ll find a half-eaten pigeon sprawled in a burst of white feathers on the forest floor. Or you might be lucky: walking in a foggy ride at dawn you’ll turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target. A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more. Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often and you don’t get to say when or how.”

Yet despite this love, at times she regretted following the path of the goshawk. This becomes particularly apparent as she sinks into depression, using the hawk as a way of hiding from her life and her responsibilities. She desires to disappear, to become the hawk in all its bloodied majesty, wild and untouchable by human society. She describes her descent into hawk-fuelled madness here:

“Nothing was wrong with the hawk. She wasn’t sick. She was a baby. She fell asleep because that’s what babies do. I wasn’t sick either. But I was orphaned and desperately suggestible, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. For years I’d scoffed at White’s notion of hawk-training as a rite of passage. Overblown, I’d thought. Loopy. Because it wasn’t like that. I knew it wasn’t. I’d flown scores of hawks, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But whilst the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”

As Macdonald chronicles her own passage through Mabel’s training, so she also critiques White’s journey, commenting on his failures and extrapolating from his stories the truth that underpinned his life. At her trade Macdonald is an historian and she shows her skill here in unpicking T.H. White the man from his stories and, perhaps most importantly, from the bones of his memoir The Goshawk in which he describes the terrible efforts, misguided and in some ways quite cruel, to train his own goshawk. What motivated the man, Macdonald seeks to uncover. As she describes here:

“Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wanted to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he’d pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk.”

It’s a convincing story, perhaps more so because it is wrapped up in Macdonald’s examination of her own behaviour, the way she projected her desires through her hawk, through the training of the hawk, how she used it to disguise the terrible state she was in, that she wasn’t coping in the wake of her father’s death. Her love of her father really bleeds through the pages, you can feel her sadness, her loneliness, the loss of identity that spawns from the sudden exit of someone so pivotal in her life. It will be a familiar story to many, but the way she deals with it is not. It is a story of love and loss, one which plays out in the training of the hawk, Mabel, who it must be mentioned is such a pivotal part of the story, and for whom Macdonald feels such love that she leaps from the page in stunning technicolour:

“The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers. And the more I sit with her, the more I marvel at how reptilian she is. The lucency of her pale, round eyes. The waxy yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak, The way she snakes her small head from side to side to focus on distant objects. Half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a think hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that turn her into something loveable and close.”

It is a stunning book. At first I thought it was so-so and then I realised that I’d swallowed 150 pages and barely noticed and I didn’t want to put the book down at all. H is for Hawk is everything that Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is not. It is honest and outwardly focused. It is a journey in which you see the protagonist, Macdonald, suffer trials and grow. It is not mawkish or self-pitying; there is anger but it is directed, diverted, channelled, so that it becomes something wonderful. It is a story as much about the hawk, Mabel, as much about Macdonald’s father who was a great photographer, as much about T.H. White and his flaws and trials. It is about England and the spectre of war, the terrible abuses heaped upon a child (White) and the terrible ways in which he tried to find comfort and love where none could be found. It is stunningly written, heart-stirring and wonderful. A deserving prize-winner and a book I would be honoured to have sitting on my shelves, a book to return to over again.

H is for Hawk receives a wild 10 out of 10 Biis. 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

“At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realisation of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.”

That’s how I felt by page 50 of Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

Could I continue? Was there any point? Couldn’t I be humping a sexy man, any man, instead? Because I was young, I was hot, my mother had died four years ago and I still hadn’t gotten over it. I was a girl of extremes, who leaps into things without thinking. And guess what? I’m hiking the PCT (that’s the Pacific Crest Trail) and I’m young and I’m hot and all the men want me and I love the way that makes me feel and I’m hiking the PCT. I’m hiking the PCT, you know? I’m hiking the PCT and my Mum died. In case you forgot, I’m hiking the PCT. Just thought I’d mention it.

Now you don’t need to read Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

By page 50 I had an idea that I was going to dislike this book quite intensely, and if I hadn’t been on holiday and I hadn’t been in a perverse frame of mind I’d have probably chucked it onto the ‘to give away’ heap and left it there. But I was on holiday and I was in a perverse frame of mind so I continued. This was not a book for me. I love nature books, I love books about travel, but despite the description this book was neither of those things. The PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail a 2,663m trail running along the West coast of the USA, is merely a backdrop for the story of Cheryl Strayed, a pinion around which she spins out this tale of intense self-absorption. The story follows 26 year old Cheryl who, four years after the death of her mother and disintegration of her family, decides to hike the PCT. It’s not clear why she decides to hike it, but it is clear she has no idea what she’s doing. Consequently she bumbles along the trail, slapstick-style, tripping from disaster to disaster – the loss of her boot, close encounters with dodgy men and bears, the loss of toenails, layers of skin, endless hunger and poverty. It has everything which should add up to an inspiring, life affirming story. Yet somehow it just seems to fall short.

I think the problem is that whilst what she attempted (and achieved, I should add) was extremely admirable, and the place she had come from and the person she became at the end of the story was seemingly a positive arc, very little of this actually came across in the writing. Instead we encounter a young, highly self-absorbed woman who is attracted to extremes: the destruction of her marriage through infidelity, encounters with heroin, meaningless and endless (it seems) sex with men she barely knew, directionless and obsessed with the death of her mother. The trip from the person she ‘was’ to the person she ‘became’ on the PCT isn’t really that much different. Again the decision was rash and unplanned, the goal extreme and dangerous. Perhaps the story should be titled ‘Lucky’ rather than ‘Wild’ (though I think Wild may be an accurate title) as it was luck more so than judgement which allowed Strayed to successfully complete her goal. Luck, and a lot of help from people around her which she does (in part at least) acknowledge. In the course of her journey we learn little about the PCT, little about the towns she visits or the people she encounters, except how they relate to her. This is, perhaps, honest, but in a nature/travel diary it becomes tedious very quickly. There are only so many times you can hear about the state of her feet before it becomes a line (or a paragraph) to skip over.

Perhaps that is my greatest criticism of this book: that whilst the potential and scope of the subject matter is great, it becomes, very quickly, highly repetitive and tedious. That Strayed discovered she could endure, that she could persevere despite difficulties, is a highly admirable thing. That I had to feel the retelling of the story an endurance, not so much. Certain themes repeat themselves endlessly: her mother’s illness and death (and her reaction to it), her dabbling with drugs, her self-destructive cycle (which didn’t seem to have ended on the PCT), that she was hiking the PCT, her injuries, how tiring it was, Snapple lemonade, hunger, sex, men and how she looked. Against a backdrop of the intensely beautiful and soulful California wilderness, I had an expectation that we would encounter more than that. What a shame that considering the journey she had taken, she failed to exit the orbit of herself.

The writing itself also became repetitive and irritating. For example, Strayed has a practice of drawing out points by putting them in a sentence by themselves.

Kind of like this.

Especially at the end of chapters, or where a point of special significance is made. However, after 300 pages of

Highly important points

It’s a bit wearing. Especially as the points were not particularly noteworthy. I also nearly threw the book at the back of the head of the person sitting in front of me on the plane home as she railed against her mother’s death, blaming her mother and stacking up the points in which her mother failed her including (I jest not) saying it was okay to call her by her actual name. If this is the extent to which her mother had failed, I’d say she’d done a pretty fantastic job. Again, it is the self-centredness that really grates my nerves. Perhaps it is a cultural thing, but the good old British stiff-upper-lip would never permit that kind of pathetic self-pity. Snooty condescension, however, is quite permissible.   

Perhaps this is the crux of the problem; perhaps the book was simply culturally wrong for me. I found myself irritated in the extreme with her complaints, her irresponsibility, her failure to observe what was outside of herself, her endless references to her looks and her terrible upbringing (no worse than most experience), the disintegration of her family, her excuses for her behaviour. I didn’t see how the woman at the end of the book was any different to the one at the beginning; it didn’t seem to me that she’d learned anything or changed or developed in any way. Perhaps that is an unfair assessment, but it was my reaction all the same. Given the potential of the story, what she’d achieved, the telling of it fell completely short for me.

It is not a book completely without merit. If you are interested in journeys of self discovery then you may find something worthy in this story. Strayed may have been irritating to me, but she was honest and I think there is a bravery in telling her story the way she did. I suspect that she got more from the PCT than is conveyed in the story, and perhaps that is the real failure of this book.

Wild receives an irritated 4 out of 10 Biis.