Everyday Madness

9

AFTER I HAD FOUND that first set of photos, I would creep into John’s study regularly. Sometimes his phantom stood over me as I plundered his desk and possessions for more signs of betrayal. He hadn’t been true to his word – he had never been true. The jealous thoughts spiralled, took wing, raced through Heaven (his) and Hell (mine) and I grew smaller and smaller, a bit of rag and bone in the gleaming arcade of his life. I scoured his obtuse computer for tell-tale emails. His diaries, ranked in a desk drawer like so many tin soldiers awaiting amorous campaigns, refused to give up any more than the signs of daily institutional battles. I looked for code. When had he last seen her, or any of the others? He had always been far more attached to his lost and dead, his past, than his present. I knew that. I had neither left nor died. I found ample documents from that past, his past – photos, letters, huge hordes of them when we all went to begin to clear his Cambridge office. He kept everything.

The children thought I had just grown weak and grumpy from the dust, the monumental task of confronting his remains and the effort of removal. There was more. My mind was askew. It became clearer and clearer to me that I was the only one of whom there was no trace. I was nowhere in his life. Not in the life that he wanted to keep. To store against the forces of time. In our scores of family photos and holiday pics, there were so few of us together. There were fewer letters, not on paper. I didn’t exist either in the historical archive or in his imagination. I was just the daily help. Cleaner of excrement.

An analyst friend, underlining that this wasn’t very analytic but analysis wasn’t what I needed, advised me that as soon as I found my thoughts going off in this obsessive direction, I should think about something, anything else – groceries, the grandchildren, the garden, the tasks ahead, German verbs … A self-fashioned cognitive behaviour therapy or simply a form of diversion.

The founder of alienism, the great Philippe or Citizen Pinel, known as the liberator of the insane, leaped into my mind. He practised ‘distraction’ with patients who were perfectly lucid and reasonable except for idées fixes that had established themselves in one given area of their reasoning. Napoleon, for example, might be a trigger point. With people who suffered from oppressive passions – among which Pinel lists hatred, jealousy, remorse and, of course, grief – theatrical ruses might help, or stays away from home. Distraction, it seemed, was palliative; so were holidays.

But none of it helped quite enough. Only time would do that, and not yet, perhaps never completely. This wasn’t a bout of flu that could be got over and put behind one with minimal fuss.

Hard to admit, but my frenzy of searching, both physical and mental, had a distinct sexual charge. I no longer or only rarely saw John on his deathbed, or even as he had been through those long arduous years of treatment. He had grown younger. His hair had darkened and there was more of it. He had become the man I had first met more than three decades before.

It took a while, but I eventually realized that all my racing internal arguments with him – how could you? Why did you? Why aren’t you? Don’t you love me? Why did you bother coming back to our conjoined lives? Why? When? How? – all these howling questions, with their component of desire and jealousy, love and hate, were a vigorous attempt to bring him back. In the flesh.

If he were back, then I could scream and he could answer my questions. I could rant at his perfidy. I could unleash my resentment. I could kill him. And we could make up.

In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, after Marcel’s lover Albertine has died, he writes:

My jealous curiosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so tenacious, it was because people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

I preferred John to be travelling abroad, to remain in the realms of desire.

To be desired, my old friend John Berger writes, is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

I would have preferred to have John immortal and doubtless have a little of that immortality myself. Instead all I had was a half-empty shampoo bottle. Memory of Senses.

When I looked up the word ‘bereavement’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, it turned out to be etymologically linked to the old Germanic ‘reave’ – to plunder by force, to carry out raids in order to rob. I felt plundered. Be-Reft. My partner was gone. My lived past, which had been lived as a double act, had been ransacked, stolen. The story of my own life had to be rewritten. And I was guilty. Guilty of being a survivor. Literally. Before the late 1960s turned people like my parents – who had, against all the odds, made it through the war – into survivors, a survivor was simply someone who outlived another.

10

IN ONE OF HIS seminal insights, Freud linked the state of mourning to the condition of melancholia, which we would now call depression. The characteristics that mourning shared with depression include

a profoundly painful dejection, a cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment –

The singular difference is that in mourning ‘the lack of interest and turning away of activity’ common to depression has an exception when it comes to that connected with ‘thoughts of him’.

Both states are set in motion by loss.

In one of his understated asides, Freud notes, ‘It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude [in mourning] does not seem to us pathological.’ This is particularly the case if one considers that a clinging to the dead through the medium of a ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ can be part of mourning, too.

In his ‘Thoughts on War and Death’ written in 1915, very soon after Mourning and Melancholia, he elaborated the inevitable ambivalence that unwittingly characterizes all our loves:

These loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-relations a small portion of hostility.

This small portion of hostility can quite easily grow large in the dead partner with whom we in part identify, just as children identify with their parents, take them in, often enough later on only to spit them out. It is these very parts in the other that then turn back on us rampantly, like an avenging conscience, to persecute us into abjection once they have been lost. Have gone.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan talked about such cruel and vindictive self-persecution as the work of an ‘obscene super-ego’, the super-ego being in Freudian terms that internalized, endlessly repetitive, sadistic and rancorous conscience – initially shaped out of our parents’ prohibitions and cultural settlements on good and bad – that yaps away at us like a small-town bully, belittling us, turning us into a nether likeness of Hamlet, one without poetry. In a wonderful riff on self-criticism, the analyst Adam Phillips evokes a Hamlet whose dangerous desire for vengeful murder is converted into a form of character assassination – his own: ‘the character assassination of everyday life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character’.

The Hungarian-born Melanie Klein, so influential in understandings of psychoanalysis in Britain, thought of mourning as a reactivation of the inevitable early-childhood depression: the loss of the loved person, like the loss of internal ‘good objects’ in infancy, threatens a collapse. Mourning is thus a maddening process in which hatred, guilt and love oscillate until the ‘internal good objects’ can be reinstated and the dead person put to rest.

And all of this while we’re having a cup of coffee with a friend and talking about the weather. Stormy in these days of inner warming. Holding out hope, too, that those internal good objects come round.

Not that there’s a mother in sight anywhere.

11

THE WOMAN WHO is a simulacrum of me and not a dishevelled midnight gorgon, punished from all sides and punishing in turn, goes about her duties. She tries to be a good mother and grandmother; she deals with the bureaucracy of death and the lawyers who are its servants; she tries to concentrate on the minutiae of pensions and old share certificates more abstruse than incunabula. She writes bits – an artist’s catalogue preface, an essay for the BBC. She sits at a desk and finishes the book he hadn’t quite finished. She prepares the second for publication. She hunts for an archive for his work. She puts in train memorials and conferences. At these she manages more or less to utter a few lucid sequential sentences. Or at least she thinks she has for a moment, before going home to beat herself up.

The reality was that I could work on ‘thoughts connected to him’, as Freud called them, but not on much else for long spans consecutively. Not only had I been his first reader and editor for years, but the work allowed me to focus, more or less, on the public portions of him. The positive side effect was that I was able to concentrate on the parts of him I wasn’t so preoccupied with hating. This activity was, I imagine, an attempt to repair the destruction I had wrought on him and he on me.

Though I was still alive.

I wasn’t an altogether good enough mother, though. My daughter admonished me for being short-tempered with her and not sufficiently sensitive to her own grieving or, on one or two occasions, for erupting in negative asides about her beloved dad. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t always aware that I had. But I evidently had. All this made me think about my own mother all those years ago after my father had died. I really did need to consider the generational cascade of repetitions or hauntings that are an all but inevitable part of family life.

My mother’s own display of tears had been confined, as far as I witnessed, to the deathbed. After that she had smiled in her usual sunny way through thick and thin and stayed cool, while I tumbled as rapidly as I could into bed with a man, as if to confirm the eternal strife between death and life.

Given that I had read so many novels in which families fall asunder as soon as the patriarch dies, his departure igniting siblings and their children to war, let alone newer and older wives, I had little excuse for straying into the trap of bickering and conflict with my own brood. But my inner madness came in unpredictable waves and sometimes bubbled over and out. The smiling coolness my daughter sometimes wondered at was the mirror image of my mother’s; the harsh wartime survival stories she told, in which my father appeared diminished, were perhaps the equivalent of my negative asides.

As I had for my own mother, my daughter often thought she knew what was best for me. I, too, had known better than my mother about the ways of the contemporary world and, in my assumptions of knowing, had been even more emphatic than my wonderful daughter. But I balked when it came to me. Though I obediently trailed off to see doctors when ordered to, made sure there was food in the fridge, and invited friends over one at a time, I also sensed that, just as I had, my daughter needed me at important points to maintain my maternal authority. Then, too, I wasn’t altogether ready for a full King Lear reversal. Yet at times, for the first six months after her father’s death, I seriously considered it. Giving in and giving up seemed very seductive.

I knew my daughter was suffering at the loss of her beloved dad, who had adored her in turn. I also knew that the loss had come at a particularly difficult time for her. His advice and towering pride in her would have been important. My occasional irritability or inappropriate babble was in some instances the mask of control slipping. Early in that first year, though it might already have been summer, and after a difficult lunch, I emailed her:

I’m sorry if I haven’t been paying enough attention to the ups and downs of grieving.

I find the process utterly unpredictable, like a deep rumble inside one which sums up all the lacks there have ever been, and isn’t really assuageable. Sometimes it’s too loud to hear anything else. So I kick against it. At other times it’s just there, a dull throb, a backdrop that you don’t have to confront, and I race along in my deaf way. I will try to be more sensitive to you.

Needless to say, I don’t remember the precise situation that necessitated this apology.

I THOUGHT OF MY MOTHER a lot in those days and nights of an afterlife in which I was battling for some kind of clarity. Her husband had died in a country she barely knew. They had only recently retired and made a home here. She had few friends of her own, but she tried to make do. She flew to and from Canada, where my brother and his family lived. She was a little lost now in both countries. Her often irascible daughter (me) had recently split up with her husband, and had a small child with whom Granny had a deep bond. That, I now realize, is probably what in large part kept her coming here and led her to spend more time in London.

She took in a lodger who was a friend of mine. He happened to be black: she had no idea that neighbours’ lips would curl and malicious chatter would erupt among visiting friends from abroad. She rarely talked of my father. Perhaps she felt not unlike I have in the aftermath, but it wasn’t something she could talk about or perhaps accede to. The very thought of madness, even of the everyday kind, would for her have carried a stigma. And she was proud.

When she died, purportedly of a cold, twenty years later, after two final years of Alzheimer’s had robbed her of English, French, and all recognition of her nearest, I found a few of my father’s things still in her house. A silk robe, some cufflinks, an ancient prayer shawl, rarely worn, that might well have originated before the Second World War in Poland and made its way with them through their various migrations. She still wore her wedding band. Before that last long illness took a grip on her, when she talked of my father it was always of him as a younger man, even if that brought memories of terrible times. More often, as she grew older, her own father and brother captured her attention, earlier losses that had deeply affected her. It seems one loss reinvigorates all the prior ones. Death is most at home with other deaths.

It’s shaming to admit, but I didn’t mourn her death. Her mind had left her body behind several gruelling years back, and her ultimate passing felt like a relief to everyone. Only years later did I begin to dream about her and allow her to inhabit my life once more. She would often appear with a calm, youthful smile in the kind of rural landscape I didn’t consciously associate with her, as if some part of me wanted her to be returned to a girlish innocence.

12

WE BURIED JOHN’S ASHES on 19 February 2016. It was a bitterly cold grey day. We planted a rose bush for him that would eventually burst with dark pink buds for the length of the summer, and surrounded him with anemones and primroses. He loved flowers, he loved digging, was a keen gardener. We read – psalms, poems, Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’, which always brings tears to my eyes, even when I’m not crying. It formed part of my ongoing inner conversation with John. I had met Carver once and remembered him as a big gentle bear of a man, though I certainly knew he wasn’t only that.

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Putting John in the ground in a carefully chosen and beautiful spot at the top of a hill, not far from George Eliot, Karl Marx and Eric Hobsbawm, a friend who had also known John’s father, seemed not only crucial but an important marker. I selected the site with an eye to the fact that it was overseen by a stone angel. As importantly, we could push through brambles and stand on a ledge to see the grave from Waterlow Park, where long ago we used to take the children for walks. I thought once we had buried him on this familiar hill close to so many friends, my mind would be easier and his ghost calmer.

There was still a distance to travel, one full of potholes you could tumble into and never surface from again, without somehow acquiring a new, transformed shape.

One day, on my way home from a meeting in the Strand, I did literally tumble. It must have been April, by then. I was feeling just a little pleased with myself for having performed adequately, not fainted, managed sanity, or what passes for it, and even humour. Then, by some aberration, I decided to run for an approaching bus. I never take the bus. I hadn’t run for years. But I ran then along a crowded Aldwych, weaving between people, like some ancient rugby player toting a bright blue bag instead of a ball. The pavement wasn’t impressed. The ground under my feet rebelled. I fell flat on my face. A crowd gathered round. The pain, the shock, the humiliation were dreadful, but by some miracle, I hadn’t broken anything, not even, it turned out, my nose, though it felt distinctly out of joint. A nice young woman put me into a cab. By the time I got home my face had started to turn black and blue. The next morning, I looked like a victim of serious domestic abuse. The trouble was, I was my own domesticity.

And even then, in the midst of terrible pain, the tears didn’t come.