If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
The title of my ‘Life’, as I prefer to call my auto fictional biography, would start with my childhood of course, something I addressed in a blog on the year of my birth, 1954 (see the blog at this link). The rather sentimental print that I photographed above, after digging it out from a deep wardrobe, was once owned by my parents and I was always embarrassed by its kitsch-ness, though I suppose I ought to be moved (as I am now) by the intentions that drove its purpose. It hung in the front room of the council house I lived in (there were on;y two rooms and this was was rarely heated or sat in). That lad ‘always has his nose in a book’ my Dad said. And I remember that was so. I would walk around the village I lived in (Honley) reading – originally in books from the small library, but eventually in a growing but small library held in a bookcase my Dad made and painted which still stands in our guest bedroom, in a house now stuffed with books. It was painted in hard gloss Dulux paint, my Dad was a Painter and Decorator, and it is still is, never having been repainted in 54 years.
I would walk out of the house with my nose in a book, round the corner shown in the web photograph of the estate Roundway in Honly below, even every long step of the long walk to the opposite valley side where my grammar school stood, for we didn’t move to Honley until I was in secondary education.
And summarisation as ‘nose in a book’ I stayed, not just in fictional books but in anything that illuminated my life, books of sociology mainly, rather than psychology which only later became my subject of fascination. It always seemed obvious to others, if not to me, that this was an act of hiding behind a book or disguising myself from the thought of being seen and judged. It never struck me as so except when I first heard Simon and Garfunkel sing of a man who preferred his own company in their I Am A Rock (full lyrics at the link) with their:
I have my books And my poetry to protect me I am shielded in my armor Hiding in my room Safe within my womb I touch no one and no one touches me.
But such views ignore that fact that though one may hide what one would prefer not to be seen as (a pretty hopeless psychosocial task) but to find inside the book alternative identities open to shaping by the imagination. As I look back now, I can’t remember any selective preference amongst those identities, as the wonderful lesbian writer, Bryher, identified with the heroes and fake masculinity of Henty’s fabulous boyish adventure stories, and which she sometimes reproduced with queer difference in her art (see my blog on her at this link).
So my first chapter would be on the possibility that books are a disguise, a hugely inflated form of externalised symbol of impostor syndrome, a desire to look for an appearance in oneself to suit that you do not, in your heart of hearts match nearly enough. No wonder in the 6th form I was an avid reader of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, but especially Uncle Vanya (see my blog at this link) ad not the preachy, and more socialist inclined – (for George Bernard Shaw told us so) Ibsen preferred by my my beloved English Literature teacher, Geoff Mountfield.
But even later when my politics hardened, it came through finding the hidden personal in apparently impersonal analyses of the psychosocial worls. I have made a resumé of my political life in an earlier blog (at this link) but perhaps I neglect there to say how it was led by immense absorption in books and the lives they half-hinted towards (like Ruskin, Marx, Engels but particularly Antonio Gramsci, in the wonderful translations by the beloved Hamish Henderson).
It seems strange to look for Marx the man in the Grundrisse, but I did and he is there, and fuelled many trips to the unconsecrated ground ti see that appalling monstrosity that was the tomb to Marx, which one tried to find him, in some nook of prose passage you took to read with your back pressed against the grey-grained sepulchre of stone.
So here are the Chapters of my ‘Life’ as I wish it to be written, and perhaps ought to write it:
Chapter 1: Shielded by an Armour of Poetry and Books
This will look at the material above and debate whether we hide BEHIND book or reconstruct ourselves within their contents and their readerly aura. It will start with childhood, but in the child too that lived on in the man, and now in the ‘older (much older) man.
Chapter 2: Revelation in Concealment in auto-fiction.
This will look at how as a student of literatures (in English and translation – and where I could for the latter in parallel texts of the original and its English translation), I began to identify why, and how people wrote books in disguise – none greater, of course, than Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, but true of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Thackeray’s Pendennis, Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham, James Joyce in The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses, and right up to the queer auto-fiction (or near auto-fiction for in post-modern novels self is presented as multiple, diverse, shape-shifting, and crossing normative boundaries (read my blogs on Jon Ransom and Andrew McMillan at the links). This chapter will chart how I got to that position from being an alienated queer-badge laden student at UCL in love with A.S. Byatt to my current semi-autobiographical (for my own purposes) blogging
Chapter 3: A Life Inside Bookish Politics
This will look at how books mediated my politics from the unrecognised right-wing elitism of F.R. Leavis at school to socialism, but oft mediated through boos. See a little of that speculation above.
Chapter 4: Writing An End
This will look at my life-long obsession with endings, leavings, renewal / change and mortality (something like the theme of Édouard Louis‘s new novel (2024) Change (blog to follow shortly). There is a tendency to interpret such phenomena in opposition to binaries: beginnings or continuations, staying, stasis and immortality. It will look at my engagements with people i love or have loved and resolve through the episodes it picks out how the binary interpretations of life alone allow us to expect change to be renewal rather than a diversely configured experience of survival where somethings end, other continue (for a time but never forever), the imagined and the real in time and space and for most things continual change (variously in ontological nature, form, name or sensory style/appearance). This won;’t be philosophical really for it speaks of persons and their interactions as being mutations of all we have available to us – the action of somatic sensation, cognition, emotional affects and agency to change (or stay the same or a mixture of both) through action.
I don’t think it will be a best seller! Do you? LOL.
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