'She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life . . . with a keen interest in gimp.' : A Writing Manifesto inspired by ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’
‘She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.’ (Middlemarch, George Eliot)
George Eliot is funny and surprising. She is both a serious and a comic writer. At the heart of comedy is an element of surprise, an unexpected factor which can never be predicted by following a certain line of thought or a particular combination of character traits. Dorothea Brooke, we are told in one of Eliot’s pithy character summaries, is a surprising admixture of parts; she seeks for herself a spiritual life, one unattached to worldly things, but she also enjoys the small delights of haberdashery: playing with fabric and pretty forms of self-fashioning. (Gimp is twisted silk or cotton with wire running through it traditionally used to ornament dresses or furniture). ‘Keen interest’ tells us Dorothea is quite committed to the pleasures of interior décor, the design of clothes. Dorothea Brooke likes running her hands along pretty lines and textures, and what is wrong with that?
Young Dorothea cannot quite be read by herself, so Eliot must help us. And she does. Her syntactical timing is perfect; she cuts the idea of Dorothea in two with the arrival of that second prepositional -- ‘with a keen interest….' -- as does, so I imagine, the corset she is forced to wear underneath her dress to lend it its peculiar shape. A physical outline. It is hard not to think of forms of draughtsmanship when reading Eliot because she draws our attention so often to the effect of shape and texture and line: her devotion to the effects of ‘gimp’ by visual imagery. Eliot is a fine draughtswoman and a keen portrait painter, and this splitting of Dorothea’s character is essential for us to remain objective in our regard for Eliot’s heroine. Dorothea must be parsed if we are to believe in her. She must be a little deconstructed, undone, interrupted. She must surprise us.
Surprise, as it turns out, is essential to remaining both sympathetic and objective. It is crucial for the arousal and survival of our critical mind, which will, with new information, turn this way and that as it tries to understand, as her creator must have, how a young woman who professes to a life of spiritual discipline can also be waylaid by beautiful things. The surprising facets of real human nature, Eliot suggests, never quite fit a cohesive form: at some point we must depart in a mode of volte-face to look the other way at what else might be coming in the other direction of travel.
In my own writing I do something much less elegant. I interrupt my form because the danger is, I know, — for a writer who enjoys style so much — that I might become too delighted by my own word play. After all, a writer has a responsibility to examine something; to turn her subject around and around and see it in several lights. This swivelling examination is the practise of instilling faith in your own creation. It is a way of coming into more varied knowledge.
Cardinal Newman writes of the multi-faceted nature of spiritual faith in his difficult and often elusive spiritual treatise, Grammar of Assent (1870), where the image of a kaleidoscope, whose brilliant and ever-changing shapes and colours, stands as a metaphor for the nature of faith itself. The human retina works hard to absorb the shifting forms generated by the turning kaleidoscope. As a child the first thing I bought with money I had somewhere acquired — ten pence I recall — was a kaleidoscope. I was delighted with it. I loved the alchemical effects of lines melting and remoulding and reframing my sight lines. What was a sure pattern for one moment altered in another by the twist of my flimsy wrist. I could, I believed, alter the world in one tiny spin. I could play at being God or a disruptive creator of some sort.
In fact, I was rehearsing ways of maintaining an objective view of the world. Somewhere deep within I had already learned from the personalities I lived with that human nature and human character is rarely stable. Under the pressure of circumstantial change, social and economic fluctuations, we all split off into other versions of ourselves. In the case of my familial personalities, these small fluctuations arose from the sums in my grandmother’s pension book which held our household together. Money in the purse set the tone for the week; set the pitch of household temperament – my aunt flying off the handle or not flying off depending upon the number of pints of milk my grandmother – our indentured maid -- dragged up the stairs that morning. Moods, that is angry words, I learned, are determined by the money in the purse. Nobody was ever quite consistent except perhaps my grandmother whose purse it was, whose pension we claimed, whose ability to negotiate extra pints of milk from the grocer kept us going. But all around there were dangerous splinters flying of an exorbitant mood which somehow I had to put back together, to make sense of, to refashion into a clumsy cohesion of parts. You might call this family and the family personality. We all have one, even if ours is missing, and it is the nature of personality to wax and wane along several temperamental lines. Speaking as a writer, I transfer this set of accepted fluctuations to the more morally loaded literary notion of ‘character.’ My characters, I wonder -- which in the past have included fictionalised forms of my biological family --- who are they and how well do I know them? What might really make them known to me and to my reader? What sort of signs might I send ahead?
Certainly these are questions I ask when considering a writer such as George Eliot whose business is applied moral philosophy and whose characters come with several warning signs. Beware those with a flashy outward style; or those who let themselves run to fat. See the thirty-five-year-old prodigal son, Harold Transome, in another of Eliot’s novels, Felix Holt. See the plump nature of his hands: and I do, early on in the novel. Why, I wonder, am I being asked to see his fleshy hands? Even Harold himself draws attention to his plump hands, in his first exchange with his mother, and then several times over — even to his potential wife, the temporary heiress, Esther Lyon --- as he woos her. What is Eliot doing with those hands, and why do they linger in my imagination, pressing themselves up against my mind’s eye, faintly disturbing me, certainly distracting me? Because Eliot is wishing to remind me of Harold’s lack of form, his self-neglect or his self-indulgence, his wantonness, his indulgence in too much style, if by style we also mean a certain tendency towards decadence. Fine food and too much lounging. Harold’s fat hands alert us to something about his character we ought to watch out for: some form of moral weakness, some aspect of himself he has not yet assimilated into his character. Something loose and dangling, something chubby and immature, something hanging low and callow. “How is it I have the trick of getting fat?” he asks his mother. Fifteen years have passed by since mother and son last met. It is an odd thing for us to consider at this most poignant moment, a plump hand, but perhaps it is the clue to Harold’s past and present self, and to his future. More and more fatness, more and more soft chairs makes for a Harold with no clear purpose.
Dress and manner seal off the person. They can be warning signs, but they can also reflect taste and character. Dorothea Brooke wants us to take her seriously; she wants to take herself seriously, so she dons ‘plain dress,’ an unshowy sartorial style. She poses as a beautiful sort of saint: as saint Teresa. Meanwhile, her sister Celia ‘has a shade of coquetry in her arrangements.’ But a coquette is a flirt, and a flirtation is a process of play if the flirt is a good flirt. And flirtation is also a matter of trial and error, a test of the substance of an interaction, that is, the perceived reaction of the character on the receiving end. Who or what are you flirting with I ask myself, and are they worth it? I suppose as a writer I should admit to some degree of flirtation with style, with my ever moving subject, for she is the first to receive my attentions before I hand my work to any reader. Style, you might say, is an exercise in remaining surprising to myself and my subject. And it is the keen work of objectivity.
One of my most common devices as a literary flit is to interrupt my prose and turn it into something closer to the lyric: to a song or rhyme or form of dance; to a body breathing. To a pattern of words that lives and breathes by rhythmic movement; by repetition and echo; an iteration of sound-parts. I hear this interruption as a foot tapping restlessly on a dance floor ready to go. She knows the steps and she can follow them. I want to make sure I am fully alive and alert to the more surprising elements of my subject. To let loose aspects of my subject I may not yet fully know. I want to watch her dance.
In my next book, The Green Lady -- an imagined biography inspired, in part, by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando -- I try to capture the sense of my mother’s lost history, a history I have no access to and cannot possibly recall. I go about this capturing of an unseen past by sketching out a series of word-doodles. I write up a set of loose rhymes that evoke the sort of draughtsmanship – lines on the page --- I understood my mother absorbed in the nursery rhyme books she enjoyed as a child; the ones I heard her evoke at least in my own childhood; the ones I could still find among the shelves of my local library. My verbal doodles set free a loose set of imagined associations that create – for me, and hopefully for my reader – a approximation of the village life my mother partly lived and partly imagined; that I almost wholly imagined from the books I read. These were Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories merging in my visual imagination with the chocolate box villages found on the covers of the Miss Read books; and then the Kate Greenaway illustrations my mother adored as have many other women. Illustrations that permitted them to dream back to a childhood they never had, that that never existed: a dream of the perfect childhood idyll they found in Miss Greenaway’s books. (The fact the children in her books often look cross and out of sorts is another matter. Think of Mary Mary Quite Contrary. A most unconvincing subject for a pastoral idyll). Sally here is my mother’s legendary lost friend, Sally Green, the George Eliot of her peer group who made it to Oxford to study Latin from a small downland village in Sussex.
Doodles
Cowslips tall her pensioners be,
and cowslips grow on the Downs
above Cokeham village
where Sally lives.
Sally has a garden at the front
of
the pretty cottage where she lives
with her parents.
Her father is a minister
and his church is Saint Mary’s
of
the Blessed Virgin
and she stands on the edge
of
Sompting Village where
the rooks crow loudly
through the beech trees
where some nights the thrush beats
through the gloaming,
as the minister says his prayers
as her pencil begins to soften
as the candle begins to burn
as the smoke rises from
the chimney
as she realises
a cottage is ideal for visitors,
and home birds
who prefer to nest,
underneath the eaves.
We shall be homebirds,
We shall be cooing doves,
she sings.
This is not good poetry: it's not meant to be. It is a young woman’s daydream of sorts, and daydream is another kind of self-interruption; a shrugging off of immediate contexts; a departure for an elsewhere or a wonderland. It is reality interrupted. As a writer I enjoyed my word doodles because they interrupted the unmarked topography of the page. They brought about a new way of seeing — more white space —- a more fluid relationship to lines set out across that void such as occur in song and rhymes or the body as it dances, weaving patterns through empty space looking for a place to rest. I doodle and I see words moving radically into the white space of the margin; or keeping out of it. In such a way the page becomes more of a territory I mark or unmark with my presence, with my set of swirling and circulating images, with my daisy chain of words. All of this asks for a shift in attention – my attention and the attention of my reader – and a belief in the imaginative rewards of surprise which has allowed me to see that what I write lies beyond the dull designations of literary taxonomies: taxonomies that exist for the sake of marketing which is always imaginatively lazy. By interrupting my own form I ask for what I create to be seen as several things at once: a ‘novel’ but also an imagined ‘biography’; and also a poetic drama; and also a set of miniature lyrical essays; and also a sketchbook with faint and then more complete outlines.
I have just completed the copy for The Green Lady. It is an attempt to describe a book that is part novel, part memoir: a work of memory deliberately altered or invented to maintain a sense of not-knowing; of imaginative work emerging from that great cloud of partial knowledge you might call cultural history. Surprise is crucial to my writerly aesthetic, to my game-plan, to my wordplay -- because without it the whole mission of trying to convince the reader and myself that the facts are still elusive; still swirling around in the depths of my memory and collective memory, which includes memories not had, but also potential memories —- will have failed. And so there must be some element of fiction, some quite significant element; and there must also be an element of surprise, which in the case of my book, means resorting to other media: to painting in words, to drawing in words, to taking photographs. It means imitating the art and craft of a visual artist without actually being one.
My medium is verbal, but I evoke other forms of art as a means of reminding myself that my words are fallible and that I rely upon the processing of faint or incomplete images as a photographer might or a draughtsman or a painter. As J.M.W. Turner did from a few faint lines in his sketch book. What he carried with him was the element of surprise: those invisible lines rendered by his imagination which often included white space filled with the idea of light and clouds. Numinous forms, ideal forms, forms often suggesting meteorological surprise: sun and wind and rain all emerging from a chemical kaleidoscope turning this way and that. Elements of surprise.
It is a useful metaphor, this object turning in my hand, for my need as a writer to retain a sense of objectivity which I associate with a keen kindness: to regard another as separate but related to you through the lens of sympathy which is Eliot’s great contribution – via David Hume and Adam Smith – to the novel of moral philosophy. Eliot’s novels ask us to read with sympathy; to train ourselves into a compassionate and reasonable and therefore more supple judgement.
In the world we live in now new information arrives daily, and as a writer, I must constantly grapple with new ways of seeing my subject. Sometimes this means inventing an addition to her wardrobe: an unexpected accessory by which she might be seen. I think of those jewels Dorothea Brooke lays claim to from her late mother’s endowment: despite her admonishments to her sister for admiring such trinkets, Dorothea selects a sparkling emerald ring and bracelet whose gleaming beauty entices and surprises her with ‘a new current of feeling.’ Here is an unforeseen object provoking a rush of aesthetic emotion she cannot ward off; for the effect of this beautiful object is ‘as sudden as the gleam’, and Dorothea can only concur with her sister that indeed ‘they are lovely.’ She is entranced and so renders meaningless, or perhaps less meaningful, those sharp reprimands she directed at her sister for enjoying such pretty things.
But Dorothea’s entrancement brings us pleasure too, and some relief from the sterner elements of her character which surely cannot be sustained; after all, she is only twenty, and it would be surprising in an unsustainable way; it would be implausible, if she were not to join her sister in stroking and petting her mother’s jewels. It would be an unnecessary relinquishing of her youth which, in any case, is yet to come to her sister Celia a least in the most surprising way; and yet, within the context of the novel, it is the most unsurprising of dreadful marriages built as it is on callow spiritual pride. And so I say to those of you surprised, and to myself even after all these years of reading and rereading Eliot’s great novel: Dorothea Brooke is only twenty. She can survive her terrible surprise. She can turn herself around and around and reform the way she sees herself in the world; cast herself in a new light. By sympathetic reasoning, she can revise the girl she was and grow towards the mature being she sees in her painful about-turn. That slightly more coherent self facing another way. By means of her wiser more adroit hand, her kaleidoscope can shift and turn, alter and remake her, as a false judgement can become a kinder object if only we let it.
**
But I have forgotten Dorothea’s spiritual anxiety; I have neglected her desire for an eternal consequence. I have left behind my own writerly prompt. I must draw myself back to the wire underpinning the silky gimp with which I began: what you might call the softer furnishings of life. How one lives or doesn’t live; how one survives. One cannot live by spiritual anxiety alone, and all writers, like all living beings, must follow some sort of plot. Dorothea Brooke wishes for a plot: she is enthralled to the idea of unity and partnership; to the spiritual ideals of marriage. In marrying first Casaubon, then Will Ladislaw, she elects for a legitimate social consequence. This is not surprising. After all, Eliot must have some sort of reckoning with the circumstances of a woman’s lot; and how else will Dorothea have her gimp? I might ask, and I have asked over and over, can any female writer live without security?
Virginia Woolf thought not, not entirely; there must be some through-line or through room leading somewhere; a room of one’s own where the writer can set down her burdens and sort out her own internal contradictions: all the parts of herself that overlap but don’t quite cohere. All her aborted or half-tried-and-tested plots many of which are just ungrounded images. Fireworks going off in her mind. A private vault of feelings. Too many hopes and dreams. All her young and older ambitions crashing into one another. Frankly, they are embarrassing, and to mark this, note, I have begun to write in staccato. Because not everything is pleasing, and my style is closely related to my thoughts. Of course they are. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’ I always return to that line. And I see a green stalk pushing up through the soil without a flower. An aborted flower. Why? Someone has pulled it off, because this is Wonderland, and I am Alice. I have always been Alice. It was my mother’s preferred name, but my father got his ‘Sally’. Therein lies the split which is one of class. Sally is the girl who lives off the alley – and indeed I did – and Alice is the girl in Wonderland who wears a headband and a pinafore – and indeed I did.
Life includes at least two plots, and as a ‘life-writer’ (what a terribly unimaginative designation; it is marketing speak; it is academic nonsense) I know that life always holds at least two marriages, and many are not to other mortals. As a writer, I must live by surprise and a perpetual tussle with myself. Split plots, fraught selves, a sense of turning this way and that swivelling my head as Alice does at one point when she resembles --- a flamingo – is that it? Alice is always wandering in and out of plots defined by strange spaces anticipating strange creatures: the railway carriage, the woods, the croquet lawn, the Duchess’s house, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the pool of tears, the Caucasus races. These shifting scenarios, these ludicrous cameos, drive her to distraction. And they do; they drive me to distraction too. My scenario is never stable, my ideal self, the place I’d like to put myself next. Writers are restless. We are always looking for somewhere else to go; we are constantly swivelling our necks because we don’t wish to be captured. Not even by our readers; especially not by our readers.
I think of it like this: I mostly exist – or hover -- in an antechamber. I must pass though that anteroom again and again; that space before the space I never quite reach where I turn over in my mind the idea of where it is I might be going. I am like Alice on the train sitting opposite the White Queen who by now has donned the guise of a sheep and is bleating at me. What is more, Alice is not going forward but backwards because that is how things are done here. Poor Alice: she cannot cope with this sort of surprise because it is not logical, and it is unreasonable; it is too surprising. Alice is a girl who likes to have a plan. But there is no plan, there is no plot, only more and more tests of her patience, only more interruption of her logic.
Dorothea Brooke would not do well in Wonderland. Her do-gooding plan to improve the lot of the local cottagers in the province of Tipton (somewhere near Middlemarch) would never come to fruition; they could not even be contemplated. Dorothea’s keen desire to do some social good would be mocked in Wonderland. ‘Forget it, dear, just forget it,’ the White Rabbit might say. ‘It is far too late for that, and in any case, we don’t do that sort of thing around here. I do whatever Her Royal Highness commands.’ Wonderland is built upon tyranny and with tyranny comes the most absurd surprises.
As I child I found the eruptions of strangeness --- the expression of unconscious desire -- unsettling and oppressive, despite the atmosphere of summertime croquet parties and teatime en plein air. You never knew what anyone was going to say or do next; you had no idea how anyone was going to behave. Thank goodness we, by which I mean the characters themselves, which always included me, are decked out in our quaint Victorian apparel. Our costumes are set even if our selves are not. Clothes say something about us and these days I find myself reverting more and more to the dress code of my childhood: velvet dresses, long and loose except around the bosom (because the Victorians do not say ‘breast.’) It feels almost instinctive; and it feels very Alice.
My mother made my clothes and Alice was her role-model or someone like Alice. Or perhaps the children in the Kate Greenaway illustrated nursery rhymes. God help me. My legs and arms were often itching and there was always a sense of constriction. Too much gimp running around my shoulder blades or across my chest. Too much tightness where I desired release. Too tight at the top and too loose at the bottom. I think of this now as a metaphor for my own writing process: I start out tightly and then something begins to sag; or perhaps I just let go. Because I want to see what will happen with all that control: the loss of form or the remaking of it. The grabbing of it by the wider part, the skirts; the dropping of the hem or the undoing of the hem. With a wide skirt you can run. I still prefer dresses and skirts to trousers. There is something faintly ridiculous about constrictions around the legs. See Tweedledum and Tweedledee and their exaggerated trousers. You might say tights. I often imagine writing is a clutching at material at the widest part. A gathering and bunching up, a loose sort of stitching to begin with as you try to shape and loop and loop and shape. An iteration of parts is crucial to anything hanging together. I must return to the same image over and over to alter and rearrange it. Revise it, move it along, egg it on.
My mother was a seamstress and so am I; I am just far less exacting in my method than my mother’s exquisite craft. But I don’t want to lose sight of surprise, and surprise can never arrive until you have decided to let go of tightness. Cut loose the wire. Let something fall out even if it is yourself. Perhaps especially if it is yourself. You are not the subject. It your estranged, faraway self that is. This might be why I object so much to being told I write memoir. If I do, it is a wildly non-factual form. There is only the barest aroma of facts. Certainly, the big emotional events I iterate happened, but they are just that -- emotional events, they lie within --- and those sorts of events can be told a hundred different ways. When I perform improvised readings in public, I always add or subtract words; I alter the printed text; I rewrite the script. I viscerally re-enact the story in several different ways. I cough up whatever comes along. Usually it is my hands and feet that move me: the worded gesture, the pointing finger, the foot turned left or right setting forth across the stage into darkness. The imagination is often dark and the lights are not always on; so I have to point my away through that dim space. I know I must exaggerate the direction of this, my turn, which is lonely and unaccompanied.
Because, as with the Alice books, mine are exponential stories. You can increase or decrease emotion. The Red Queen and the White are over inflated forms of emotion, an over exaggerated will, the tyrannical will of the child who has never been told no and never gone without. Has never been cut out of any story. Those frightening Queens are the flamboyant and extravagant stuff of our unredacted childhood fantasies and dreams: silly and preposterous and full of overblown, nasty surprises. They are very far from being objective; in fact they are over inflated subjectivity and as such they cannot possibly tell the truth, but they do not wish to. Those Queens exist in our imaginations as absurd distortions of feelings and facts. I would never trust either of them to recount any form of reliable history. Now I think of it, they might be a parody of the Victorian form of ‘life writing’, the Victorian autobiography ------ the sort written by John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Bronte, Cardinal Newman -- to name a few. Religious or scientific or both, they were all devoted to spiritual and educational forms of bildungsroman. To coming of age stories by some form of epistemological devotion to knowing more about themselves.
Alice knows that everyone she meets wants to tell them something about themselves and their peculiar form of stasis, their stuck and maddening state, their aggravating loop of self-perpetuating nonsense. Their particular mode of chasing their own tail (there are a lot of tails in the Alice books). But where are these tall tales headed? Where is that train going? Alice also spends an infuriating amount of time getting stuck: she is either too large or too small to get in or out of the door or window. On most occasions she doesn’t seem to have asked the right question and she is certainly never given the right answer. So she has to fall back upon herself: her innate sense of curiosity; her willed desire to move on; her restlessness, her anxiety, her desire for a consequence. It is the only way she can find anything that matters.
The consequence is Alice is stirred from her dreams by too much temper: the temper of the Red Queen in the court scene with her ludicrous pronouncements, which is the mirror reflection of her own will and desire to reach some conclusion, some real consequence, to return to reality. In fact it is the Queen of Hearts who presides over this scene. In my mind’s eye I can see her face, but renaming has always been a mode of creation for me; and I know that how we name people matters and I know --- yes, I know yells Alice! -- that it is the Queen of Hearts who confronts her in the court scene; but it is the atmosphere and attitude of the Red Queen I recall. So, as in a creative game of chess, I have moved her piece to the court scene, because the Red Queen is more terrifying; she is more infuriating. She is closer to the child’s sense of internal frustration as she is told ‘no’ by some adult imposing an arbitrary rule. As the writer tells herself ‘no’, she cannot proceed. She is creatively stuck. She must now move on.
In the end, Alice wants to leave that space of tyranny, of disproportionate moodiness; to abandon the absurd assertion of her superego towering above her from the judge’s stand. For by the end of the story Alice is the Queen, and it is not a comfortable mode of being to see one’s own will inflected as a form of absolute judgement, of absolute rule and tyranny. Nobody and nothing but yourself in charge. Only your keen unmoderated desire.
The writer knows this too, and so at some point she must leave behind the assertion of her own will, her own voice even, especially if it is strong (and I suspect mine is), so that others can break in; can share that antechamber of fulminating ideas and imaginative expression. So she can conjure other folk, other idioms, other ways of seeing and hearing, new and surprising forms. Dorothea Brooke knows that it is an unsatisfactory life that does not hold some degree of conflict or tension. For it is the very search for resolution, that difficult and almost impossible passageway towards a coherent project that is the call of every writer. She knows it requires a move away from the tyranny of solipsism; a trying out of new and surprising parts; a shift from subject to object and back again; a long look through that glass lens – my kaleidoscope again – allowing it to turn back and forth seeing whatever may come. Queens, white Rabbits, caterpillars, dusty old men locked up in libraries looking for the key to their own mythos. She must try to see them all clearly, and when her lens gets dusty, wipe it down. Create a space where she might at least watch others doing whatever odd antics and rituals they carry out in order to know themselves. Those strange and peculiar consequences of being human.