by Ian Wedde
I look back now at this frightened child and think it was after Chimbuk and Creature from the Black Lagoon that I lost something like my inner Mowgli – secure, invincible, with a few special powers – who allowed me to feel at home in different places, even when they were scarily different. Though I’d sometimes had bouts of the night horrors (the wardrobe in our bedroom back in Francis Street), they’d never amounted to much. Now, there was danger and difference everywhere, all the time. Our Siamese cat Sammy went feral and showed his terrible, hissing face at me when I crawled into some scrub to persuade him to come home. A green bootlace of a snake which Dave accurately ophiologises as a Whip Viper scared the living daylights out of me when I encountered it dangling under the kitchen-garden bean trellis – our neighbour Mr McKenzie, the Scottish chief engineer at the mill, rushed over with a double-barrelled shotgun and blew the bean trellis to smithereens but missed the snake, which should have been funny and cathartic but wasn’t. The gardener, whose name (Dave’s memory again) was Sultan, then clobbered the thing without fuss.
Worst of all, one hot night I went to have a shit in the bathroom, and a snake that had been coiled around inside the cool toilet bowl rose up between my legs. I ran shrieking across the concrete floor, the chill of which remained reptilian long afterwards and made me want to sprint or tiptoe across it. My father went into the bathroom and killed the snake with a golf club, but that didn’t make me feel any safer. Once, I’d gloried in my special relationship with my protector, the great python Kaa; now, at my most vulnerable, I was at the mercy of a snake in the dunny.
And it was about then that I began to write obsessively, secretly, with a conflicted sense of shame and a desire to impress. Impress whom? That wasn’t clear – my mother and father in the first instance; but, beyond them, the shadowy, impersonal constituency that had just then come into being across the gap that had opened between me and the ones who seemed fearlessly at home in what they did and where they were, in how they appeared, in how they talked to each other, in how they looked me in the face and grinned, unimpressed or unpersuaded by the fibs and stories I was making up in order to close the gap.
I was writing stories, which was hardly surprising, given the large number of them I read – a core sample would include The Wind in the Willows, The Water-Babies, Cuddlepot and Snugglepie, all the ‘Famous Five’ books, all the ‘Biggles’, abridged versions of The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask; illustrated editions of Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver’s Travels and The First Men in the Moon; Lorna Doone, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; Classic Comic versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, A Tale of Two Cities and The Hunchback of Notre Dame; a variety of books plucked from the book-club editions mailed to my father, including Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, especially a description, which I barely understood, of arcane brain surgery to make a ‘third eye’.
In the early throes of sexual curiosity, I pored over some passages in a steamy swashbuckler set in Louisiana in which a young woman overheats and takes a cooling night-time bath in a large, moonlit barrel of water, watched by a panting adventurer who soon slips in with her. In a few more years I’d be writing single words such as ‘thigh’ or ‘breast’ on single sheets of paper: they were all I needed to bring on paroxysms of lust.
But more often, and from the very beginning, I was writing poems, even though I’d come across very little poetry apart from my father’s Masefieldian rowing chant, my mother’s volume of Tennyson, and a 1907 edition of Robert Browning’s complete works with my grandfather Wedde’s signature (‘AA Wedde’) on the fly leaf (I also have an 1894 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which was his 1896 Wellington College ‘General Work’ Prize). We had Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, which I think I read more or less by accident because I was obsessed with Stevenson’s stories and novels, especially Treasure Island and Kidnapped. But I didn’t like Stevenson’s poems much. I liked Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, which I also remember Chick reading aloud with rhythmic gusto; I remember ploughing uncomprehendingly through page after page of ‘The Princess’ and poring over the shivery words in ‘Maud’:
I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirred
By a shuffled step, by a dead weight trail’d, by a whisper’d fright,
And my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard
The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night.
In my grandfather’s lushly padded and leather-bound volume of Browning, I galloped through ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, got lost in ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, but groped blindly through the tangles of ‘Sordello’ with a weird kind of pleasure.
It was not understanding everything, or not easily, that made the occasional words and sentences I did get the meaning of seem vivid and shivery, as if the outlines and fragments of the world the words were showing me weren’t things I could possibly know already and recognise. It was as though I was seeing them for the first time, or I was the first person to see them. They were from somewhere else, ‘penthouse-like’, or like the Gill-man; the stories they lit up in flashes and glimpses weren’t connected to the language I heard around me every day. In a way it was like reading the French we were by then getting quite good at, but not good enough to be at home with.
I liked how poems could tangle up the narrative, make me unsure where I was in time and place, and with whom, unsure about who was seeing or saying. I enjoyed long books like The Swiss Family Robinson (Linda had her brother’s copy, inscribed in meticulous, spidery copperplate, ‘H.K. Horne, Francis Street, Blenheim’) – I remember the illustrations, which is how I know my parents took some of their books with them from Blenheim. But I speed-read the Robinsons to get to the interesting bits, which mostly involved the sons being allowed to have guns – the story didn’t interest me much and it was years before I made the connection with Robinson Crusoe, a story I did love.
The sceptic in me scoffs at the idea of a coherent convergence of effects that got me writing as a kid. But when I came back to Bangladesh in 2005 I felt strongly a combination of disturbing memories, great happiness and familiar hollowness – a space I longed to fill, and an impulse that could do that. Back around 1957, I wrote a ballad about brave Captain Oates who, uttering the words ‘I may be some time’, left the tent he was sharing with doomed Captain Scott and went out into the blizzard to have a pee, freezing himself to death via his cock in the process. Chick gave me a perfunctory spanking for this effort, on account of my disrespect (unintended) for such a hero; secretly I suspected he was both amused and proud. It was too late to care, anyway. I couldn’t stop doing it.
What were the conditions that produced this obsession, which I called ‘writing poems’, without really knowing what I was doing? Then, I didn’t know why any more than what, and neither mattered. Now I sense it’s been a thread that keeps on unspooling through my life, and I have to follow it back through a maze of digressions if I’m to find again those homes which ‘writing poems’ made real in some way. Perhaps it progressed from the earliest ‘asparagus-patch’ dramas I expected others to act out with me, to the shit-type scenarios, to the ‘penthouse’ magic – and then, after the Black Lagoon, to a sense of emptiness that had to be filled. ‘Writing poems’ both filled that emptiness and increased it. The poems signalled the fact that I was homesick, and that was something I hoped to semaphore, somehow, in code.
Many of the reasons for my unhappiness were simple. Around the time of the Black Lagoon my eyesight began to deteriorate and I was fitted with owlish glasses by Dr Bottoms at the Chandraghona Hospital. I had my crowded teeth fitted with a wrenching apparatus of wire and rubber bands by the glamorous dentist wife of the mill’s German personnel manager (his favourite pastime was rounding up stray pi-dogs and shooting them) – I felt faint the time I looked down her front as she be
nt over me and I saw the pinkish outline of a nipple. I developed a painful kind of osteochondrosis in the heels of my feet and had to stay in an improvised wheelchair, and the resulting lack of exercise, plus surging hormones, made me fat.
The wheelchair, which consisted of bicycle wheels and a customised office chair, meant I got dog shit on my hands when I whizzed around after the other kids for whom pushing me too fast had been a short-lived novelty. What made things worse was knowing that we had a cook in the house who, if asked, would whip up another batch of toast. I remember him muttering curses under his breath. I also began to raid the pantry to gobble spoonfuls of peanut butter and drinking chocolate bought from the American stores at the Kaptai dam. A kind of morbid self-pity began to set in. I must have been bossy and obnoxious.
I look back on myself at ten years of age with mixed pity and impatience. Instead of the ‘white-haired little goat’ with the fearless Mowgli-within, I see a fat, temporarily disabled, snaggle-toothed, myopic kid who’d taken to ordering the servants around, and who spent increasing amounts of furtive time in Dave’s and my bedroom. I suspect our parents thought I was jerking off in there (often I was). But mostly I was writing stuff. I just had to keep doing it, and hiding it, at the same time flaunting my secret life that was halfway between a jeer and a boast.
Now I think I was magicking the fear embodied in Gill-man-type spooks under the bed, the ones that had begun to materialise about the time I stopped feeling at home in the world the white-haired little goats had always run around in freely and without fear. The only way to deal to the spooks seemed to be through voodoo channels opened up by Robert Lübker’s gently pedantic explanation of the alchemical word ‘like’.
The lie
In 1976 Alan Brunton and I started a small tabloid paper called Spleen – the name was at once a gesture towards the unforgiving scorn of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris prose poems, and an announcement that we intended to make trouble. Other would-be troublemakers, notably Martin Edmond, soon came on board. For all its posturing, Spleen was intended seriously, but we also had a lot of fun with it before exhausting the good will of its financial supporters a year and eight issues later.
In one issue, I reviewed a new collection by the poet Vincent O’Sullivan. These days I get on well with Vincent and like him a lot, but my review gave him good reason not to like me – and indeed he took Spleen to the Press Council, which exacted an apology from its editors. The offending review consisted of a running list of ‘like’ constructions from the poems, with a final gratuitously splenetic exclamation, ‘Ah, fuck it!’ Some weeks after the Press Council complaint, I met Vince at a literary function of some kind. My friend the poet Bill Manhire made a polite show of ‘introducing’ us to each other, and then walked off to watch what might happen from a distance, a droll smile on his face. Vince and I stood opposite each other for some minutes. I remember that we both resorted to default tics – I fiddled with my bottom lip, while he tweaked his chin. Eventually we gave up.
I now look back on this comical moment with mixed chagrin and renewed interest. Though the final line of my ‘review’ was gratuitously splenetic, the critical point being made wasn’t gratuitous; but it was excessive – why? What I’d reacted to in Vincent’s poems was what seemed at the time like a take-for-granted attitude to metaphor, a comfortable homeliness with the likening of one thing to another. These metaphors were too easy, I thought; if they weren’t going to call up something distinct, one of those disturbing third terms that hinted at another plane of existence, then what was the point?
I remembered this event – it popped back into view – just as I was going to start writing about that miserable time in my childhood in East Pakistan when I was immobilised by self-pity and fear. When I was happy, with my head in a book, or my imagination in an adventure that Dave and I made up as we ran across the bamboo rafts on the dangerous river, or threw stones at the gut-tugging vultures, it was making myself up that let me into those transforming places where I could be at home in another identity, at once myself and someone stronger and more powerful.
Before Robert Lübker, it was simple. All I had to do was play and the transformations would happen. After Robert Lübker, it got more complicated, but also more interesting, because the playing included some degree of consciousness of what ‘liking’ could do. But then the magic broke down. ‘Liking’ was no longer about play but had become worried; it was how I reached across or tried to fill the gap between where I felt separated from home and the people who seemed to have no trouble being there. They included my brother, and our mother and father, but also the kids we played with. And vague, loudly talking crowds of happy people I didn’t know, like those we saw at big celebrations where sporting events and feasts took place (I remember an immense pilau being cooked over a slow, aromatic fire in a large marquee). It was at this point that I became a compulsive liar.
It was while I was trying to remember the details of a particularly egregious lie that I remembered, instead, the review of Vincent O’Sullivan’s poems. I suppose that was because I expected so much of what I can now call metaphors. There was a time in my childhood when ‘likes’ were my magic; they transformed me. But sometimes the ‘likes’ were also the moments at which my magic broke down and I saw myself as others did: as a joke.
When I went back to Chandraghona in 2005, I walked through the garden that had once been the property of the paper mill’s general manager, a genial but tough Swiss man called Hans Meyer. The Meyers had a small swimming pool built on a promontory above the river, and at set times and for limited spells the hilltop kids were allowed to swim there. In 2005 it was dry and full of trash; lizards were stuck to its walls; the concrete floor had cracked and there were tree roots festooning the mildewed sides. But I remembered vividly the pleasure of swimming in the pool, and feeling physically liberated. Because I was having trouble walking, the pool was one place where I didn’t feel separate from the others – where, because I was a good swimmer, I even felt special.
I remember standing on the edge of the pool in blisteringly hot sunshine, feeling the water dry quickly on my skin, swelling with physical pride and pleasure, at which point one of the other kids – I think it was Billy McKenzie, but can’t be sure – reached across and jiggled my by-then substantial tits, meanwhile making a sucking sound and baring his teeth.
I wheeled this humiliation back to our house where, when Linda lost her temper and told me to stop sulking and do something or other she’d asked me to, I threw myself out of my improvised wheelchair on to the polished red plaster floor, shrieking and sobbing, and crawled towards her on my hands and knees, dragging my bandaged ankles behind me. My mother picked me up – or helped me to climb up – and sat me on her lap, where I wept loudly into her neck and gasped out my lie.
I should feel sorry for the fat kid with sore heels who, while watching his mother’s reaction closely, bellowed out his all-too-plausible account of why his life wasn’t worth living. My mother was capable of taking a sceptical view of such performances, and she’d seen a few already; but this one got to her. She may not have believed that I wanted to die; she may have seen that my performance was good enough evidence of my unhappiness. In any case, she too began to weep, and we clung to each other, sobbing, while she stroked my hair and murmured, ‘There, there …’ – the peculiar choice of words that worked for me then, even though what I wanted was to be ‘here, here’.
I still remember the shame that poisoned my happiness. I knew that what I’d done was a lie, that I’d watched myself do it, and that I’d rejoiced in the impact it had on my mother. I should feel sorry for this little imposter – but I can’t, because what I’m mostly left with is the guilt that stabbed me when, over the next few days, I saw my mother look at me with a small, sad, conspiratorial smile – and when, over the next few years, I heard myself telling the lie again in one way or another.
I’d cheated her – so that when I encounter metaphors that are easy, conf
ident performances, the miserable little liar in me flinches. He wants something paradoxical or even impossible, at once lucid and truthful to things as they are, but also truthful about the inevitable unreliability of any narrator who likens.
I think that bitter, childish homunculus seeded my young man’s preference for perverse narrators – those in the writings of Burroughs, Gaddis and Houellebecq, for example. Perhaps it explains the impact on me in my peevish twenties of Melville’s realisation that he had to write a novel that would fail (Moby Dick). It still accounts for my impatience with disingenuous narratives in which exposition masquerades as character; my awe at Conrad’s ability to construct an impeccable armature for his narrators’ points of view; Mansfield’s delicacy with style indirect libre; my admiration for the unswerving rhetorical scepticism of great thriller writers such as Elmore Leonard; my enjoyment of perverse books such as those composed by Oulipo magicians like Georges Perec.
A couple of years ago I was talking to the American essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger about an American poet, a distinguished professor within the creative writing department of a large urban university, who seemed to me to be performing in an open-shirted, bucolic, somewhat Frostian tradition – plain-spoken with pessimistic undertones. I didn’t buy it. Eliot, whose default is a kind of scathing equanimity, observed that yes, really, did we need yet another poem about changing the storm-shutters?
The lie I gasped into my mother’s neck after dragging myself towards her across the floor was my induction into bad faith. I don’t believe for a moment that Vincent O’Sullivan was guilty of that in the book I reviewed splenetically, goaded by the inner brat that had supplanted my inner Mowgli, any more than the American poet professor was necessarily guilty of bad faith when he wrote about shovelling snow or burning a pile of autumn leaves.
