Nothing to Be Frightened Of (37 page)

And there it all runs out, memory and knowledge. These are the available scraps; nothing more can be known. But since family piety is not my motivation, I am not disappointed. I give my grandfather’s service, and its secrets, and his silence, as an example. First, of being wrong: thus I discovered that “Bert Scoltock, so christened, so called, so cremated,” in fact began life, in April 1889, at the register office of Driffield in the County of York, as Bertie; and was still Bertie in the census of 1901. Secondly, as an example of how much you can find out, and where that leaves you. Because what you can’t find out, and where that leaves you, is one of the places where the novelist starts. We (by which I mean “I”) need a little, not a lot; a lot is too much. We begin with a silence, a mystery, an absence, a contradiction. If I had discovered that Grandpa had been one of the six Sleeping on Post, and that while he was slumbering the enemy had crept up and slaughtered some of his fellow Fusiliers, and that this had caused him great Remorse, a feeling he had carried to the grave (and if I were to discover all this from a hand-written affidavit—mark that remorsefully shaky signature—while clearing out an old bank-deposit box), I might have been satisfied as a grandson, but not as a novelist. The story, or the potential story, would have been spoilt. I know a writer who likes to linger on park benches, listening in to conversations; but as soon as his eavesdropping threatens to disclose more than he professionally requires, he moves on. No, the absence, the mystery, they are for us (him and me) to solve.

So in “Scenes from Highways & Byways,” my eye is drawn not to Great Uncle Percy in Blackpool or Nurse Glynn or Sgt P. Hyde Killed in Action Dec 1915 but to the lips and hair and white blouse of “Sept 1915” and the erasure beside the date. Why was this photograph defaced, and its edges ripped as if by raging fingernails? And further, why was it not either removed from the album entirely, or at least pasted over with another photograph? Here are some possible explanations: 1. It was a picture of Grandma, which Grandpa liked, but which she later took against. However, this wouldn’t explain the seeming violence of the attack, which has dug through to the album page below. Unless, 1b., it was done after senility took hold, and Grandma had simply failed to recognize herself. Who is this woman, this interloper, this temptress? And so she scratched herself out. But if so, why this picture rather than any other? And why erase the scrap of information next to the date? 2. If this was another woman, was the gouging done by Grandma? If so, roughly when? Shortly after she was stuck into the album, as a dramatic marital strike? Much later, but in Grandpa’s lifetime? Or after Grandpa’s death, as a long-delayed act of revenge? 3. Could this, just possibly, be “a very nice girl called Mabel,” after whom my mother was named? What did Grandma once tell my mother—that there would be no bad men in the world if there were no bad women. 4. Grandpa might have done the gouging and attempted ripping himself. This seems highly unlikely as a) it was his album; b) he was experienced in handicrafts, leatherwork, and bookbinding, and would certainly have made a better job of it; and c) photo-mutilation is, I suspect, a predominantly female crime. 5. But in any case, consider the dates. Bert (as he had become by 1914) and Nell were married the day war broke out; their daughter was conceived within a month, and born in June 1915. The mystery photograph is dated September 1915. My grandfather volunteered in November 1915, though conscription was to be introduced anyway within a couple of months. Is this, perhaps, the reason he knew about remorse? And my mother, of course, was an only child.

A Bertie who changed into a Bert; a late volunteer; a mute witness; a sergeant discharged as a private; a defaced photograph; a possible case of remorse. This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the seemingly known, to resolve—or make usefully vivid—the contradiction, and to make the silence eloquent.

Chapter 67

My grandfather proposes, “‘Friday. Fine day. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.’” My grandmother retorts, “Nonsense,” and insists, “‘Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden.’” He shook his head when his
Daily Express
told him of a Red Plot to Rule the World; she tut-tutted when her
Daily Worker
warned her about US Imperialist Warmongers Sabotaging People’s Democracies. We all—their grandson (me), the reader (you), even my last reader (yes, you, you bastard)—are confident that the truth lies somewhere in between. But the novelist (me again) is less interested in the exact nature of that truth, more in the nature of the believers, the manner in which they hold their beliefs, and the texture of the ground between the competing narratives.

Fiction is made by a process which combines total freedom and utter control, which balances precise observation with the free play of the imagination, which uses lies to tell the truth and truth to tell lies. It is both centripetal and centrifugal. It wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction, and irresolvability; at the same time it wants to tell the one true story, the one that smelts and refines and resolves all the other stories. The novelist is both bloody back-row cynic and lyric poet, drawing on Wittgenstein’s austere insistence—speak only of that which you can truly know—and Stendhal’s larky shamelessness.

A boy dives on to a leaky pouffe and through its broken seams squirt the torn-up love letters of his parents. But he will never be able to piece together the wonder and the mystery, or the routine and the banality, of their love (“People tell me it’s a cliché, but it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me”). Half a century on, the boy, now approaching old age, who has spent his adult life with stories, their meaning and their making, thinks of this as a metaphor of our lives: the energetic action, the torn-up clues, the unwillingness or inability to piece together a story of which we can know only fragments. What remains are blue scraps of paper, postcards with the stamps—and therefore postmarks—steamed off, and the tone of a Swiss cowbell as it ding-dongs stupidly down into a skip.

I have no memory of being that small boy who was pushed, blindfold, into a wall by his brother. Nor, without the kind of psychotherapeutic intervention of which I am suspicious, can I discover whether my non-memory comes from deliberate suppression (trauma! terror! fear of my brother! love of my brother! both!) or the unexceptionality of the event. My elder niece C. first described it to me, at the time she and I were dealing with my mother’s final decline. She said that she and her sister were told it “as a funny story” when they were little. But she did also remember concluding “that it was not a particularly good way to behave, so perhaps he [her father, my brother] intended it as a cautionary tale of sorts.” If so, what might be the moral? Treat your younger sibling better than I did? Learn that life is like being pushed blindfold into a wall?

I apply to my brother for his version. “The trike story,” he replies. “I told it, or versions of it, to C. & C. to make them laugh—which, I fear, it did. (I can’t recall ever telling them anything with a moral to it . . . ).” Now, there ’s having a philosopher for a father. “In my memory, it was a game we played in the back garden at Acton. An obstacle course was set up on the lawn—logs, tincans, bricks. The game was to tricycle round the course without serious injury. One of us steered the trike while the other one pushed. (I think the trike had lost its chain; but perhaps the pushing aspect added to the sadistic pleasures of the event.) The steerer was blindfolded. I’m pretty sure we took it in turns to steer and to push; but I suspect that I pushed you faster than you pushed me. I don’t recall any major accident (nor even anyone being pushed into a wall—which in fact would not have been at all easy, given the layout of the garden). I don’t recall your being frightened. I seem to think we thought it was fun, and rather naughty.”

My niece’s initial summary of the game—my brother blind-folding me before pushing me into a wall—might be a child’s shorthand memory, emphasizing what she herself would most have feared; or it might be a subsequent abbreviation or reimagining made in the light of her relationship with her father. What’s more surprising is that my own memory is blindfold, especially given the elaborateness of the proceedings. I wonder how my brother and I can have acquired logs and cans and bricks from our very small, neat suburban garden, let alone laid out such a course, without it being known and noted, and permitted or forbidden. But my niece rejects this: “I’m sure your parents never told me the story; in fact, I thought they never knew about it.”

I apply to her younger sister. She too remembers the obstacle course, the blindfolding, the frequency of the game. “You were then pushed at breakneck speed through the obstacles and the race ended with you being rammed into the garden wall. It was billed as a Great Bit of Fun for both of you, with an undercurrent of doing something that was certainly disapproved of by Mother; I think not so much because of the damage inflicted on you but the misuse of garden tools and the soiling of washing hanging up to dry. I don’t know why we were told this story (or why I remember it). I think it was the only story about you, in fact about the family at all, except for your grandmother vomiting on a boat into a series of yoghurt pots. I think it was supposed to prove to us that children should do whatever they please, in particular if it is silly and displeasing to adults . . . The story was told in a jokey way and we were certainly supposed to laugh and applaud the daring nature of the whole thing. I don’t think we ever questioned the truth of it all.”

You see (again) why (in part) I am a novelist? Three conflicting accounts of the same event, one by a participant, two based on memories of subsequent retellings thirty years ago (and containing detail the original teller might himself have since forgotten); the sudden insertion of new material—“misuse of garden tools,” “soiling of washing”; the emphasis, in my nieces’ versions, on a ritual climax to the game—me being pushed into a wall—that my brother denies; the forgetting of the whole episode by its second participant, despite his serfdom as a log-trundler and brick-gatherer; the absence, from my nieces’ versions, of a return match in which I got to push the trike; and most of all, the moral variation between what my brother said he had been intending when he told the story (pure amusement), and what his daughters, separately and differently, concluded he was doing. My informants’ replies might almost have been scripted to cast doubt on the reliability of oral history. And I am left with a new proposed definition of what I do: a novelist is someone who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember.

The novelist in the present instance would need to supply the following: who invented the game; how the trike lost its chain; how the pusher instructed the unseeing driver to steer; whether or not Mother Really Knew; which garden tools were used; how the washing got soiled; what sadistic and/or pre-sexual pleasures might have been involved; and why it was the main, almost the only story a philosopher told about his childhood. Also, if the novel were to be multigenerational, whether the two sisters who first heard it subsequently repeated it to their own daughters (and with what humorous or moral purpose)—whether the story dies out, or is changed again in the mouths and minds of a subsequent generation.

For the young—and especially the young writer—memory and imagination are quite distinct, and of different categories. In a typical first novel, there will be moments of unmediated memory (typically, that unforgettable sexual embarrassment), moments where the imagination has worked to transfigure a memory (perhaps that chapter in which the protagonist learns some lesson about life, whereas in the original the novelist-to-be failed to learn anything), and moments when, to the writer’s astonishment, the imagination catches a sudden upcurrent and the weightless, wonderful soaring that is the basis for fiction delightingly happens.

These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer’s life than he or she cares to admit (a common error among those who anatomize fiction) but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of the imagination than ever before. My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth. Ford Madox Ford could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence.

Chapter 68