by Deborah Levy
Contents
Introduction
Beautiful Mutants
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Swallowing Geography
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Also Available
Swimming Home
The Unloved
Black Vodka
Things I Don’t Want to Know
Introduction
Deborah Levy once wrote in an essay for The Times that when people ask her where she’s from, she finds herself tempted ‘to shrug nonchalantly and say: I was born in the forests of Bavaria and smuggled over the border in a hat box’.
A decade later, in her Man Booker shortlisted novel Swimming Home (2011), Levy bequeathed her Bavarian creation myth to her anti-hero Joe Jacobs, as well as the hard lesson she herself had been forced to learn. Joe was born Josef Nowogrodzki in western Poland in 1937, and his family emigrated to east London in 1942. As they fled, Joe recalls, ‘His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same.’
Occupying a tenuous place at the angle of the self and the world, Deborah Levy’s writing – from her earliest short stories and novels to Swimming Home – shows that most of us are displaced, though we’re trying not to be. To become aware of this is a gesture at self-honesty. Her first novel, Beautiful Mutants (1987), a Thatcher-era critique of Britain’s docile submission to a results-oriented plutocracy, suggests that we’re complicit in our alienation. ‘This is the age of the migrant and the missile,’ explains a character referred to only as The Poet, who works in a frozen-meat-packing factory. ‘We have displaced our selves, banished our selves.’ J.K., the main character in Levy’s second novel, Swallowing Geography (1991), is described as ‘the wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee, rambler, strolling player. Sometimes she would like to be a settler, but curiosity, grief and disaffection forbid it.’ Levy’s 1992 play, The B-File, is a choral work in six languages with one interpreter who translates the dialogue into the language where the play is being performed; at home everywhere, in every language, its main character is at home nowhere. Levy’s unique achievement across the genres of theatre, poetry, novels and short stories is to make us aware of – and even to celebrate – the unhomely quality suffusing even the places we think we know best. Her work, especially early on, is a mythopoesis of exile.
Born in South Africa under apartheid in 1959, Levy moved to Britain with her family in 1968, when she was nine years old. While it’s important not to lean too heavily on the role this reverse exile played in Levy’s formation as a writer, being transplanted from one country to another greatly sensitized Levy to the power of voice. Immediately following her family’s arrival in Britain, Levy was made aware of her South African accent at school, where no one could understand what she said, except a girl from Cork, Ireland. At home, Levy and her brother would play with different accents, imitating those they heard on television in Steptoe and Son, On the Buses, The Liver Birds and Lost in Space, delighting in the varied treatments and deformations of vowels, unable, at that age, to discern class through speech. Our voices, Levy learned, both cover up and betray who we really are. Our hesitations and our stammerings are a means of not letting through something that we don’t want to say; they are symptoms of what’s really eating us. That is part of Levy’s achievement in Swimming Home: she produced a novelistic, storytelling language out of her characters’ linguistic insufficiencies; they both fail and succeed in conveying their urgencies, their worries, their fears. An apprenticeship in the theatre crystallized this preoccupation with voice: Levy studied playwriting at Dartington College of Arts, and soon after found acclaim writing for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The polyphony of the theatre, and its marriage of voice, body and story, carries through into her early prose work.
Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography are a trial run for the strategies Levy would employ later; in particular, they show her gearing up to write The Unloved (1994), her first long narrative work. The early novels are saturated with the intensity of an old photo of the author taken during the era: half frowning, half pouting, cheekbones sharp, hair done up in a punk tulle bow, cigarette held between thumb and forefinger. We can almost see her going home to pore over Angela Carter and Kathy Acker, Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet; we can almost hear in the background Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith and Nina Hagen. Reading the novels, other portraits emerge: the young artist as sensitive instrument, registering the everyday atrocities imposed by an unfeeling ruling class; the apprentice writing into the tradition (or anti-tradition) of the literary avant-garde; the playwright straying from the theatre, revelling in what can be done on the page, instead of the stage.
Beautiful Mutants was published two years before the Berlin Wall came down; its central character is Lapinski, a young woman in exile from Moscow, who is surrounded by a cast of quasi-allegorical figures. With a detached wryness reminiscent of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Levy’s misfits narrate the novel in turns: The Poet, the Anorexic Anarchist, The Banker, who becomes so empowered by capitalism she feels invincible enough to set fire to London Zoo. (Poor giraffe, poor elephants.) Even in this scorched landscape, Levy is a startlingly funny writer, with an inbuilt sense of the absurd, a preference for surrealism over realism. This is not incompatible with the seriousness of her concerns; these more fragmented early works display a Rabelaisian belief in the subversive power of laughter. There is Lapinski’s neighbour, who calls her a ‘shameless cunt’ because she never has the same accent from one day to the next (‘it changes like the English weather’) and because she shows disdain towards his plastic love dolly. There is also a talking llama, who Lapinski’s lover turns to for advice on how to make his life meaningful. The llama counsels: ‘Go into international finance, become a dynamic sales manufacturer in a high-growth computer company, become a senior sales consultant [. . .] OH SLUTTY SON be result-motivated!’ Levy sketches a society which marches zombie-like through a world built by capitalist interests: ‘Outside, on the high street, people put bits of plastic into a brick wall and in return get money. They carry their personal number around with them, in their sleep, during meals, love play, in swimming baths and offices.’ As the people become machine-like, the machines become people-like: ‘The computer in the wall is hot, like the forehead of a person with a fever, burning into the bricks and mortar of Europe.’ ‘Tomorrow is always another day,’ reasons Lapinski’s neighbour, ‘because you can always buy something.’ Lapinski tries to jolt her neighbour out of his passive acceptance that spending equals being, but her intervention leaves him befuddled. ‘I tell [Lapinski] to write down everything she spends in a little book so she’ll know where she is,’ he explains. ‘She says she does write everything down but she still doesn’t know where she is and where do I think I am?’
In Swallowing Geography, Levy’s sense of the absurd has bec
ome more elegiac. J.K. – ‘Europe’s eerie child’ – no longer knows who she is or where she’s from. She dreams of a ‘white “Chinese” horse on her hotel wall’ who whispers at her:
We return to homelands and find they are a hallucination. We return to our mothers and fathers and find they are not the people we thought they were. We return to our street and find it has been re-named. We return to our cities and find they have been rebuilt. We return to our lovers and find they are elsewhere even when they lie in our bed [. . .] The redemptive homeland, she is a joker, she runs away bells ringing on her toes, you chase her at your peril because she will appear disguised as something else and you will be chasing her all your life.
As in Beautiful Mutants, the thematic sense of displacement and dislocation replicates at the level of the sentence, as strange juxtapositions join up like body parts at odd angles. Swallowing Geography gives us disparate characters standing close together in a frame, desiring without understanding each other. J.K. likes it that way: she feels protected by mystery. But her lovers long to minimize this distance; one wants her to take off her shoes so he can know her better, another wants to impregnate her to tie her down. For J.K., to be known is to be colonized, neutralized, immobilized. ‘To name someone,’ Levy writes, ‘is to give them a country. To give them a country is to give them an address. To give them an address is to give them a home.’ The claims we place on each other, and on the world around us, are forever multiplying, keeping pace with our instinctive need to possess, and to locate. Around J.K. and her lovers and friends, the jumble of the world is constantly in flux even against these attempts to fix its outlines. Borders are constantly redrawn – the novel registers everything from the reshaping of the former Soviet Union and the partitioning of London into two new telephone codes, ‘Central and Suburban’, to the reorganization of a front room – and the novel’s characters must unhinge themselves from fear of change and recommit to the ‘matter-of-factness’ of daily life in the ‘cities we know best’.
The fervent imagery and sweeping ambition of the two novels are the mark of a young writer who is learning to harness her energies; they have a distinct shimmer that is Levy through and through, and show her determination to employ what she learned from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985): ‘a new poetics to describe postmodern life’. Articulating this is the basis of the contract Levy discerns between reader and writer. ‘We live through the same historical events, and the same Pepsi ads,’ she wrote in the Independent in 1998. ‘Writers and readers, nervously sharing this all too fluid world, circle each other to find out what the hell is going on.’
– Lauren Elkin
Beautiful Mutants
My mother was the ice-skating champion of Moscow. She danced, glided, whirled on blades of steel, pregnant with me, warm in her womb even though I was on ice. She said I was conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, both she and my father in their Sunday best; I came into being on a pile of corpses in the bitter snows of mid-winter. Afterwards they bought themselves a cone full of ponchiki, doughnuts dripping with fat and sprinkled with powdered sugar, and ate them outside the Kursk railway station, suddenly shy of the passion that had made them search for each other so urgently under all those clothes. On my fifth birthday, my father stole a goose. He stuffed it into the pocket of his heavy overcoat and whizzed off on his motorbike, trying to stop it from flying away with his knees. We ate it that evening, and as I put the first forkful into my mouth he tickled me under the chin and said, ‘This does not exist, understand?’ I did not understand at the time, especially as my mother stuffed a pillow full of the feathers for me, and soaked the few left over in red vegetable dye to sew on to the skirt of her skating costume.
When my parents died, I was sent to the West at the age of twelve by my grandmother, survivor of many a pogrom and collector of coffee lace handkerchiefs. She said it was for the best, but I think she just wanted to enjoy her old age without the burden of yet another child to look after. I was to stay with a distant uncle in London. When I asked my grandmother why he had left Russia she whispered, ‘Because he is faithless’ and busied herself wrapping little parcels of spiced meat from Georgia for me to take on the ship. Her letters were written on torn sheets of brown paper, three lines long and usually the same three lines in a different order; short of breath as always.
In London, where women were rumoured to swim in fountains dressed in leopard-skin bikinis, I unpacked my few clothes, books, photographs, parcels of meat, and wept into the handkerchief my grandmother had pressed into my hand, embroidered in one scarlet thread with my name . . . L.A.P.I.N.S.K.I.
The Poet smells of cashew nuts and cologne. She drinks tea from a transparent cup of cheap rose-coloured glass and says, ‘This is the age of the migrant and the missile, Lapinski. In some ways you could say our time has come.’ She laughs and her gold teeth rattle. Her hands are raw from making frozen hamburgers which is her job. Every morning a coach takes The Poet and other workers to an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city, clutching bags full of shoes to change into, hand-creams and hairnets. ‘Exile is a state of mind.’ She taps her wide forehead.
Tonight I will cook for The Poet a bitter, aromatic stew my grandmother taught me to make when I was a child, a dish for hunters with guns and moustaches who like to track small animals across the snow. She watches me put cabbage, rabbit, funghi, lilac, mushrooms, prunes, honey, red wine, salt and peppercorns into a pot.
‘We on the meatbelt, Lapinski, blood under our fingernails, are not in a factory on the edge of the motorway, we are somewhere quite different. We are decorating our bedrooms, cleaning the house, making up conversations that will probably never be spoken, on a mountain, writing a book, trying out a new mascara, making plans for children, or for the future which is one day, at most one week, ahead. I myself am alone on the shores of the Black Sea coast or sitting under a fig tree in the paradise of Adam and Eve. If you were to count the thousands of miles between us as machines hum and our fingers linger on control buttons, you could cover the universe. We take ourselves through borders of every kind and carry no passport.
‘I know women who work in their sleep and wake when the bell goes, women who sing lullabies, laments and pop songs in time with the machine, women who unknown to themselves make sculptures from meat, the burgers take on the shape of their thoughts; I have seen great pyramids of thought sail across stainless steel into another life.
‘I have a good friend on the meatbelt, Lapinski, her name is Martha and she has soft white hands. In the tea-break she can hear the sea because she wears earrings made from shells and she swallows two spoonfuls of a thick expectorant for her cough every day – her lungs growl and she is often breathless. Sometimes she says she can see an image of her own face in the meatmound and who am I, Lapinski, to disagree? You will remember that when Saint Veronica met Jesus, she paused to wipe the sweat off his face and discovered that his image was for ever after imprinted on the cloth? I think of Martha as a modern saint because her visions have helped her not be defeated by her circumstances. Saint Martha paints her fingernails the colour of Portuguese oranges, defying the cardboard pallor of meatbelt life. We have displaced our selves, banished our selves. We are in exile.’
The sulphurous light of the city glows on The Poet’s fingertips. She has carried sacks of tea on her head through plantations of hazelnut and tobacco in the burning late morning sun. At five she sold gum and matches in Eastern villages. At seventeen she cut off her beautiful hair and unlike Samson found strength in the birth of her strong neck. In the slum cities of Northern Europe she lost her health. Coffee cups in greasy cafés offered her dark and difficult visions. And then she lost her mind. She lost her self in the architectural, rational, cultural, political, anatomical structures of Northern European cities and began to vibrate with confusion and pain. She turned inwards and lay in the damp crease of her pillow for twenty-eight days and nights. The sound of police sirens replaced the song of lottery callers, c
hestnut sellers, canaries and laughter. In her dreams she became a stone, eroded and reshaped by the tides, on the telephone she tried to talk to her mother but found she no longer had a language they both understood.
She held on to the bloody threads of each day, invisible with hundreds of other foreign workers, the brown underbelly of the city, some broken, some brave, but always dreaming, writing letters home, thinking of loved ones, hoping for better times. She survived on odd jobs, cleaning, sewing in sweat shops, looking after other women’s children. It was at this time that The Poet mistressed the skill of metamorphosis. She learnt she had to become many selves in order to survive. Through observation, study and meditation she taught herself to change from one self to another, from one state to another. If she had no identity she would have many identities; she learnt she was engaged in a war and saw how those who are confused and in pain, or have some secret sorrow of their own, bring out an instinct in others who refuse to acknowledge the possibility of this pain in themselves, to crush, humiliate and hurt. The Poet refused to be crushed.
She waited for the storm inside her to be over. And when it was, in the parts that were torn, she planted sunflowers. She finished her cleaning, bought bread and dates, sat on benches in city parks looking at children scuff their knees in cement.
Chewing the white unbleached flour of the bread she liked best, she decided that the word justice did not mean law and order, and the word opportunity did not mean organized human misery. And as she swallowed the bread she also swallowed the humility of being a confused human being; devoted herself obsessively to understanding her condition and thus the condition of others. ‘Lapinski,’ she croaks, eating an iced bun, for she is no exotic, ‘I have been a foolish casualty, a bitten fruit.’
Tears trickle down the veins of her brown arm.
In her eyes, whole continents seem to flicker.
