by Rachel Cusk
His book had sold all over the world, as he had said, despite the fact that after the initial shock of appreciation people did little but complain about it, about the fact that nothing, as they saw it, ever happened in his writing, or at least nothing they recognised as fit to be written about. A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable: it always surprised him how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation. Reality, on this occasion, could serve in the place of fantasy as a means of distracting people from the facts of their own lives. In fact he quite liked Julian’s book, and not just because they had become, so to speak, fellow travellers. A lot of writers seemed to think that the higher a truth – or to be more accurate, since truth was something altogether different, a fact – was pitched from the earth, the less of a supporting structure it required: so long as something could be proved to have actually occurred it could be left to stand on its own, and if that thing happened to be so bizarre or grotesque that it caught people’s attention, the need to explain it was diminished even further. Unlike the others, what Julian appeared to realise was that for every degree of extremity a corresponding degree of responsibility was required, just as the architect of a tall building faces a more strenuous task of engineering than the builder – if Julian would excuse him – of a garden shed.
Louis’s was just the low-lying truth of his ordinary existence and though people claimed to find his accounts of eating and drinking and shitting and pissing and fucking – or more often masturbating, his difficulty in admitting his own homosexuality having limited his opportunities for congress with bodies other than his own – monotonous, disgusting or even offensive, they continued to buy his book all the same. He wondered if it was a bit like the way people always used to own a Bible: they never read it but they felt they ought to have it in the house. He wasn’t about to start comparing his book to the Bible, but he wondered whether there wasn’t something about the ability to deny the truth about oneself – perhaps, almost, the necessity of denying it – that created the need for a retributive text; which everyone, of course, then denied again by ignoring it. It was amusing, if faintly sad, to see people call disgusting the things they themselves did on a daily basis. In fact he himself wasn’t that interested in those parts of the book, which he saw as little more than groundworks, preparatory labours to clear his writing of shame as a plot might be cleared of weeds. He had often been told that one reason people never finished his book was because at over a thousand pages it was unduly long. The answer to that was simple: but what interested him was that whenever he was asked to read a passage from the book aloud, he always chose one that was unrepresentative of the way he had reproduced the mechanism of time. For all the hours spent shitting and pissing and staring out of the window, the moments when life could be observed in a meaningful arrangement were rare: his attempt to represent this fact had cost him most of the five years it took for the book to be written, yet it was always one of the other parts, the rare, choice extracts, that he selected. It had not escaped him that what this habit signified was the ease with which he could be led back into self-betrayal: like the episode of Mino and the bird, he often caught himself living in the mistaken belief that transformation was the same thing as progress. Things could look very different while remaining the same: time could seem to have altered everything, without changing the thing that needed to change.
The extract he read most often, he went on, concerned an episode from his childhood in which, at the age of five, his mother had taken him to a petting zoo a few miles away from their house. They had taken the bus together and had wandered around the small farm, looking at the animals. At a certain point he had noticed a horse, standing in a muddy enclosure looking out over the fence. He had gone ahead of his mother, who was detained by something, to see the horse, and had climbed a little way up the fence so that he could stroke its nose. At first he was slightly nervous of the animal, but it was passive and gentle and allowed him to stroke it without shying away. He sensed his mother’s approach and became aware of her looking at him: he remembered thinking she would be impressed with the way he was handling things. But when she arrived at his side she had given a little cry and had pointed out an injury to the horse’s eye. Did you do that? she had asked him, aghast. He looked at the eye, which he hadn’t actually noticed: it was red and swollen and weeping, as though it had been poked. He was too startled to rebut his mother’s accusation; but also, as the seconds passed, he became increasingly less clear as to his own innocence. Once his mother had described him poking the horse in the eye, he couldn’t be sure whether he had done so or not. They went home, and Louis spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a state of growing anxiety. In the morning he asked his mother whether he could have his pocket money so that he could go to the corner shop and buy sweets, as he was always allowed to do on a Saturday. She gave him the money and he set off. But instead of going to the corner shop he went to the bus stop that he remembered his mother taking him to the day before. The bus came and he paid the fare with his pocket money. He sat beside the window and stared out, becoming more and more frightened as the stops passed and he failed to see anything he recognised from the previous day’s journey. But then when the right stop arrived he found that he remembered it after all: there was a café just beside it with a neon sign in the shape of a fat chef wearing a checked apron. He got off the bus and made his way through the gates of the petting zoo and across the grass to where the horse still stood behind its fence. He approached it warily. Its passivity looked to him now like submission, its gentleness like resignation. His mother had said the horse might go blind from the injury. But she had also appeared to forget the incident immediately, not informing anyone at the zoo and failing even to mention it to his father when he got home. Climbing the fence, Louis had examined the horse’s eyes. He found that he couldn’t remember exactly which eye had been injured, nor what it had looked like; try as he might, he couldn’t even ascertain what he was looking for. Eventually he gave up and went to get the bus home, where he found his parents in a state of near-hysteria at his disappearance. They had dealt with him very harshly, even when he had given the explanation for his absence. Later they had told the story with pride, particularly his mother, who for ever after judged every five-year-old she happened to meet on the basis of it.
He had often been asked, Louis said, about his relationship to trauma, and perhaps the reason why he chose that story in public situations was because he believed it said something not about his own relationship to trauma but about the inherently traumatic nature of living itself. He wasn’t sure, he added, that he would ever write anything again: his relationship to the world was insufficiently dynamic. His book would have to stand alone: it would have no siblings, any more than he himself would ever have children, even if his sexual inclinations had rendered that a possibility. He had no particular interest in being able to say that he was a writer. He had succeeded in writing a book simply by virtue of the fact, as he had already said, that while writing he had believed himself to be unknown. That was no longer the case. He supposed, he said, that the time would come when the book people were now reading would seem no more personal to him than the skin a snake has discarded and left lying there. He wished only to return to that state in which, uniquely in his experience, he had been capable of absolute honesty, but by using writing as the forum for it, he had also ensured that writing was a place he would never be able to go back to. Like a dog that shits in his own bed, he said, turning and looking directly, for the first time, at me.
Water was still dripping down the back of my neck from the hair Dale had dried carefully the day before. My clothes were damp an
d my feet moved in water that had pooled in my shoes. The light on the stage had a blinding effect; beyond it I could just make out the oval shapes of the audience’s faces, weaving and nodding like things growing in a field. I said that I had brought something to read aloud, and out of the corner of my eye saw the Chair make a gesture of encouragement. I took the papers out of my bag and unfolded them. My hands shook with cold holding them. There was the sound of the audience settling into its seats. I read aloud what I had written. When I had finished I folded the papers and put them back in my bag, while the audience applauded. The Chair uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. I felt his brown eyes, opaque as two brown buttons, glancing frequently at me. People were already standing up and edging their way along the rows, anxious to be home. The rain had started to drum again on the top of the marquee. The Chair said that he was sorry there wasn’t time for questions, because of the late start. There was more, half-hearted applause and then the lights came back on.
We returned to the green room, this time along the covered walkway. Julian and Louis walked ahead. The Chair walked behind with me. I wondered what he felt about his own part in what had just occurred, but he only remarked that it was a nuisance the marquee had been so cold – they hadn’t managed to warm it up in time after the electrical failure. He imagined there would be some complaints, given the average age of the audience. Sometimes, he went on, he wondered what the audience got out of these events. He had chaired a few and seen all sorts of extraordinary things: people fast asleep in the front row, blatantly snoring; people sitting chatting while the authors were talking on stage; people knitting or doing crosswords, and on one occasion someone even reading a book. The festival offered such a large discount for multiple ticket purchases that people tended to buy the whole lot – half the time, he wasn’t sure they knew who it was they were coming to see. One author, a World War Two historian – he mentioned a familiar name – had given up on trying to talk about his book and instead had started singing old songs from the Blitz, encouraging the audience – most of whom remembered all the words – to join in. They’d had a marvellous sing-song in the tent apparently, with the rain coming down outside.
I said I wasn’t sure it mattered whether the audience knew who we were. It was good, in a way, to be reminded of the fundamental anonymity of the writing process, the fact that each reader came to your book a stranger who had to be persuaded to stay. But it always surprised me, I said, that writers didn’t feel more fear of the physical exposure such events entailed, given that writing and reading were non-physical transactions and might almost be said to represent a mutual escape from the actual body – in fact some writers, like Julian, seemed positively to enjoy it. The Chair glanced at me with his furtive eyes.
But you don’t, he said.
In the green room the flax-haired boy was waiting at the table we had sat at earlier. When he saw us approaching he pulled out the chair next to him, clearly intending me to sit on it. He introduced himself – his name was Oliver – and said that he had spent nearly the whole event watching us sitting there in our wet clothes and thinking about the issue of humiliation, the humiliation that was involved in maintaining the pretence of normality. It had astonished him that no one had objected to being asked to perform under those circumstances.
‘Even Louis,’ he said, ‘with all his so-called honesty.’
I said that Louis’s honesty, as I understood it, was of the kind that feared public scenes of precisely that nature. He had made his cowardice and deceptiveness quite clear: however cynically, his susceptibility to humiliation was a kind of open secret.
Oliver glanced meaningfully at the Chair, who was standing at the bar ordering drinks.
‘He should have done something,’ he said. ‘It was his fault.’
He had to admit, Oliver went on, that he hadn’t actually paid attention to most of what was being said: he had been to so many of these events, and Julian and Louis always said exactly the same things. Because they’re professionals, obviously, he added. Julian had been very kind to him. He was staying with him at the moment, in London, while he looked for somewhere to live.
I asked where he had been before and he said in Paris. He had lived with a man there but the relationship had ended. He had very much played the housewife in that relationship, and so when Marc had called things off he found himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
I said it was an unusual way for someone his age – which could only have been twenty-three or twenty-four – to describe himself.
Oliver smiled somewhat forlornly. It had struck him, he said, while we were talking on stage, how stupid it was that form should be viewed as the writer’s – or any artist’s – dominating characteristic. Subject was surely a more accurate basis for affinity. When I think about it like that, he said, the idea of finding a job becomes much less frightening. Julian says I just need to find something I enjoy – it doesn’t much matter what it is.
Before his three years in Paris he had spent a year backpacking around Europe. Before that, he had been at school. The backpacking trip was meant to be a prelude to university but on his way home through Paris he had met Marc instead. Increasingly, he said now, he thought about that trip, which he forgot the instant he was with Marc and never really thought about again. It was perhaps because he was now effectively homeless that it had started to come back to him, the way sometimes you only remember something when you find yourself once more in that same position, as if part of yourself had been left there. He’d started to remember the hostels he’d stayed in, the dormitories where he’d slept among boys and girls his own age from all over the world, the cheap cafés and markets they frequented, the hectic intersections of bus and train stations and even the journeys themselves, the long, slow transitions from one culture and climate to another: all of it was returning to him, in finer and finer detail.
He remembered being on the beach in Nice one night with a big group of people he’d just met: they were all drinking and talking; someone was playing a guitar. The sea shone silently in the darkness while behind them the night-time city madly buzzed with noise and light. He had felt both atomised and on the brink of discovery; both disappointed by what the world had revealed to him and in new, faltering correspondence with some of its elements. But what he had felt most of all, that night, was the incoherence of what he was doing: everywhere he had been in Europe, he had found not the intact civilisation he had imagined but instead a ragged collection of confused people adrift in an unfamiliar place. Nothing had seemed quite real, in the sense that he had come to know reality: yet he experienced the failure as his own, for he had been brought up in a stable, prosperous home where expectations – material, cultural, social – had been high. And particularly that night in Nice, this fragmented picture, of young lost people clinging to one another for safety, of the mute beautiful sea that refused to tell its secret, of the city sealed in its own frenzy, was not one that he recognised.
It was here, he went on, in Nice, that someone had lent him a copy of Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, and its brutal aestheticism had deepened his confusion even more.
‘Have you read it?’ he said, looking at me with an expression of shocked wonderment, as though he were reading it still.
At nineteen he was still a virgin: he had never disclosed his sexuality to anyone, for the reason that he didn’t know how. He didn’t know it was possible to live as a gay man; he hadn’t realised that what was inside him could become an external reality. In Nice, as elsewhere on his travels, girls had approached him with their shy bodies and tentative fingers; when they talked, their confusion and uncertainty seemed to mirror his own, to the extent that eventually they seemed to understand that what they were looking for wasn’t in him, that he was insufficiently distinct from them to be able to resolve them, that if anything he was making their problems worse. The world of Jean Genet was a repudiation of all that, a world of unrepentant self-expression and selfish desire. It was such a
violent betrayal and robbery of the feminine that he felt guilty even reading it in the company of these tentative girls, who would never, he felt certain, plunder the masculine in that way, but rather would live lives in which their unsatisfied passions tormented them, as his did him.
