Public faces in private places
THE poet Rilke used t h e w o n d e r f u l expression ‘ veins glutted with existence’ to describe those amazing moments in life — which may be few — when a person really exists. Totally.
Certainly in Eve Claxton’s massive compendium of autobiographical writing — which spans the centuries and represents 126 writers — the reader is very aware of the marvellous, pulsing veined and passionate, unique-to- everyindividual life force.
Claxton has arranged the collection in four parts — Beginnings, Youth, The Middle, Towards The End — and you dip into the pages to find treasure upon treasure.
Here, for example, is Peter O’Toole discovering that there is no Father Christmas. He is in his pyjamas, at the bottom of the stairs, awaiting the arrival of our ‘ Munificent, white-whiskered visitor from the North Pole’.
Peering into the living room, he sees his drunk, parcel-toting dad collapsed on the floor and his mother in happy, hooting hysterics.
Dad lurches out, clutching a paper bag, there’s a loud bang and he returns to tell the tiny O’Toole ‘ Father Christmas just shot himself’.
There’s Roy Hattersley attending his first football match, an event ‘ as grown- up and daring as smoking or wearing long trousers’, the match marking for him the onset of age, wisdom and maturity and ‘ the discovery of one of the wonders of the world’.
Less ebullient, and a piece that never fails to make you cry, is Dickens’ description of slaving in the dreadful, rat-infested blacking factory.
‘No words can express the secret agony of my soul,’ he writes, recalling the long, hungry days of his boyhood spent eking out his pitiful pennies to buy small loaves and drops of milk.
‘I felt my early hopes of growing to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast.’
Here, too, is Isadora Duncan, informed from early childhood that her absentee father was ‘a demon who ruined your mother’s life’ and, then, suddenly he turns up when she’s seven years old and stuffs her with ice cream and cakes.
She returns home to her furious mother in wild excitement declar- ing that he is not a demon but ‘a perfectly charming man’. Roald Dahl juxtaposes memories of fizzy sherbert fountains with the bombing of Bristol. As the bombs blasted, eight-year- old Dahl began to ponder the possibility of death and Eternal Punishment.
Confiding his fears to his father, whose head was cocked towards the sound of nearby explosions, his father retorted ‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ which, Dahl explained, ‘rather cheered me up’.
Lorna Sage recalls the hairpulling, pinching, kicking, wristtwisting purgatory of the school playground: ‘ I can still hear the noise of a thick, wet skipping rope slapping the ground.’
And Sara Coleridge recalls being taken by her father, Samuel Taylor, to stay with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, missing her mother and being horribly jealous of the lively little Wordsworths whom her father obviously preferred to her.
George Orwell writes most harrowingly of the agonies he endured at boarding school, the shame of wetting his bed, of being beaten so hard with a riding crop by a master that it broke and the handle flew across the room, and crying not so much because of the pain but ‘ because of a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness’.
Dirk Bogarde discovers that reaching his dread 50th isn’t so bad, that the face reflected in the mirror, though unquestionably that of a middle-aged man, belies the fact that his innermost heart is ‘ still unnervingly that of a mildly retarded 16-year- old’.
Tolstoy is hit harder at 50, sinking into depression: life no longer has any meaning as if ‘ an irresistible force was dragging me down into the grave’.
With so many glimpses of private moments and contemplations, it is difficult to make a selection. But I must mention Gandhi experimenting with smoking, De Quincy kidding himself he’s kicked the opium habit, Katharine Hepburn’s first film job, Charlie Chaplin togged up in his best to stroll through Victorian London, and George Sand in rapture over the birth of her first baby.
But, fascinating as the entries are, I do have reservations. Why include the self- conscious silly scribble by John Lennon? And some dreary reminiscences by Marlon Brando? And why is there so little humour? Apart from the great P. G. Wodehouse and an hilarious item by Noel Coward in hospital following a haemorrhoid operation, the prevailing tone is solemn and sober.
Why has Claxton not included, for instance, Martin Amis’ brilliant and achingly funny description of his dental disasters? Or Fay Weldon’s hilarious memories of her early married life?
But despite the lack of humour, we can enjoy an abundance of heart- felt outpourings. Mrs Thatcher, agonising about leaving Downing Street and replying to her many letters of commiseration, admits: ‘ Some of my correspondents were in despair. I, myself, was merely depressed.’
NELSON MANDELA recalls his release from Robben Island after 27 years in prison, walking as in a dream towards a vast, cheering crowd of wellwishers and newshounds, all making a noise like ‘ some great herd of metallic beasts’.
He recoils as a long, dark, furry object is thrust in his face (a microphone) wondering if it’s ‘some newfangled weapon’ developed while he’s been in prison.
To almighty roars of approval, he raises his right fist for the first time in almost three decades. My favourite entry is Stephen Fry’s description of falling in love for the first time. Nothing was ever the same again. ‘The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape, the air never smelt the same, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind . . .’
We’ve all been there. It’s such a regular, commonplace occurrence and yet it’s an everyday miracle and, like the vast spectrum of human experience collected in this book, it excites us and affords us a little shock of recognition.