When Paul Morley’s memoir about his father’s suicide, Nothing, came out in 2000, I bought it immediately, but couldn’t bring myself to read it, despite having been an avid fan of Paul’s writing since my teens. (I’ll call him Paul rather than Morley; the latter brings back memories for him of his disciplinarian grammar school.) The reasons that I couldn’t face reading the book were complex, combining a reluctance to face up to the act of suicide since my own sister had killed herself when she was 22 and I was 21 in circumstances that combined horror with soap opera implausibility; a subsequent general hiding from anything that would conjure analysis of my family past ( a mindset that also stopped me following the area of medicine which fascinated me most, psychiatry, instead choosing the less introspective specialties of general medicine and then anaesthetics); and, to a lesser extent, an unwillingness to evoke the inevitable painful nostalgia for the days when I worked with Paul at the NME: I loved the thrill and fulfilment of being a receiving physician, sorting the emergencies of acutely ill patients, and enjoyed the camaraderie of anaesthetics, but a part of me has never found a job I loved as much as freelancing for the NME, which I did mainly between 1981 and 1983. However exciting and satisfying medicine could be, working an obligatory 90 - 130 hours a week and, for much of that time, being paid at half rates for all hours above 40 so that most of your week was spent earning a lower hourly rate than the cleaners inevitably took the shine off. (Trainee doctors are paid decently for their overtime now, deservedly.)
So I forgot about Nothing for nine years, although ’forgot’ is probably the wrong term. I watched it warily on my shelf and it watched me back, ruefully, silently accusing me of neglect. Whenever Paul popped up on the TV or in print, I’d remember how much I’d liked him (he was a bit of a mentor to me) and his writing, but I thought it would bring back too many awful memories of my own to read about his coming to terms with his father’s suicide.
Then Kevin Cummins’s book Manchester Looking for the Light Through the Pouring Rain came out a couple of months ago. My review of it is elsewhere in this blog. It was fabulous to see those beautiful, iconic images of timelessly wonderful Manchester bands collected together, and the essays were all superb too. Paul’s contribution touched on the suicide of his father and his own embarrassment at embarrassing people by having to mention it. This tallied with my own experience – not wanting to mention it to people for fear of putting a blight on their day and therefore either keeping it secret (very few of my medical colleagues ever knew about my strange family), or disclosing the information in an airy, matter-of-fact way as if it meant nothing to me . And reading of Paul’s father’s death just made me wish I’d known about it when I worked with Paul.
Then I went to see Cummins and Morley talk about the book in London. It was the first time I’d seen Paul since around 1982, and spurred me to read Nothing.
I couldn’t put it down. I fear that the first chapter may have put some readers off, plunging as it does into the unsettling terrain of Paul viewing a dead body for the first and only time in his life. The reader, knowing the subject of the book, assumes that the body belongs to Paul’s father, but it transpires it’s actually Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who killed himself on the eve of the band’s US tour in May 1980. Tony Wilson wanted Paul to see the body because Wilson, with either shameless opportunism or ultimate, obsessional loyalty, or possibly both, wanted the band to live on in people’s memories and figured asking their most enthusiastic supporter in the music press to see Curtis’s broken body would help propel the band to the superstardom they never enjoyed in life.
This opener is disturbing and frank, and, in typical fashion, Paul embarks on a stream-of-consciousness monologue on death and the number of dead bodies he’s seen on TV, and the methods used to embalm the dead, and so on. I can say from experience that this ability to think factually is one of the more jarring aspects of sudden, shocking bereavement. Of course Curtis is not related to Paul, but in a way he lets himself think the thoughts that he held back when his father died a few years previously when Paul was twenty.
From here, the book sweeps back over Paul’s early life, growing up as the oldest child with his parents and two sisters, first in the Isle of Wight and later in various homes in Stockport just outside Manchester. Anyone fearing this may be a morbid read should assuage those worries now, Nothing is charming, thoughtful, interesting, intelligent and often hilarious. It is also painful in parts but painful in a good way if that’s not a paradox; insightful, sensitive, searching for answers and making do with fragments. My first reaction on reading it was to want to give Paul a hug. My second reaction was amazement at how insightfully he captures the sequelae of a suicide in the family. I had assumed the memory gaps for much of the year of my own family trauma were an idiosyncratic thing (people recall meeting me that year, I have only blanks), but Paul suffered them too. The same with those dreams where the dead person is alive again, having been dead or perhaps just in a coma and now brought back to life. The grasping at the shards of memory on waking and their dissolving into nothing while realisation dawns is also skillfully portrayed. And Nothing is also scouringly perceptive about the unreliability of memory – like Coetzee’s recent novel Summertime, Nothing shows how convinced people can be that their version of memory is the correct one.
There are many delightful sections in this memoir. Paul’s coming of age, his growing passion about music, his burgeoning interest in girls coupled with his shyness, his first kiss, his tactics to avoid washing his hair (!), his humiliations at his loathed grammar school, are all documented with acute self deprecating wit. I laughed out loud at so much of it that far from being the sombre read I feared, it was actually soaring and uplifting in many parts. Paul manages to bring surreal humour to the most unlikely items and events – the monstrous settee in their living room, an unwanted present from his father’s frightening mother; his hellish first day at Stockport Grammar where he gets on the wrong bus (embarrassment seems to be an occupational hazerd for day dreamers – I missed my own first day of secondary school as my mother ‘forgot’, so had to turn up on day two wearing an ill-fitting sack as the school uniform provider had run out of non tent-like sizes. Twenty years later, despite waking up neurotically early, I turned up late for a new registrar job in Falkirk because I was so busy reciting ‘get off at Falkirk’ on the train that I forgot to get off at Falkirk.)
Many sections combine humour with an almost unbearable poignancy. The pages dealing with the settee, for example, made me laugh uproariously at one point and then almost cry the next:
‘He sat on a second-hand settee and he had the look of a man who had outlived certain desires. The settee wasn’t entirely responsible for this, but it didn’t help. It smelt old, as if it spent a large amount of the day belching out stale wind. It was bloated enough for you to feel that it had a problem with gas, not necessarily the kind of gas you find swirling enigmatically through the fibres of the universe, but the gas you get from eating too many baked beans. The settee had experienced years and years of intimate human touching, it had been crushed by selfish arse after wriggling arse, undermined by an eternity of fatigue and laziness. It was silent but if it had been able to make a noise it would have been a very tired noise, a sad, sighing noise, a noise that never ended.’
There are many such moments of delicious humour. Another noteable one is when Paul persuades his mother to buy him a pair of enormously flared trousers, waving aside the fact that their adherence to the school uniform code is besmirched by ostentatious white stitching. The geography master accosts him (‘He boomed with devil-winged scorn: Are those trousers that you are wearing?’) and he is sent home in disgrace under orders to cut his hair and obtain regulation trousers. But money is very tight, Paul doesn’t dare admit this setback to his parents, and the Long Night of the Trousers ensues, in which he seriously contemplates whether death would be a preferable option to life as it stands.
The sad picture of Paul’s father that emerges is of a man who married and had children too early, possibly as a means of escaping his ferocious mother whose love for her son was always tinged by distrust of men, her own husband having run off with another woman. Paul’s father never knew his own father and was led by his mother to believe for many years that his father had died. His mother (with what one imagines to be fairly brutal frankness) finally tells him that his father was living for all these years but has now died. The opportunity lost plunges Paul’s father into fresh despair.
Nothing is excellent at conveying how the warped, abnormal dysfunction of a family is seen as normal by the children. Throughout Paul’s childhood, his father would disappear for days at a time, once with another woman but more usually on his own. He would return deflated and desperate. On one occasion he is kept in a psychiatric hospital and given ECT because he is in such a catatonic stupor that he can’t even say who he is. Paul’s mother is convinced that some of the spark leaves her husband after the ECT which is perfectly plausible – who can say if this literally shocking treatment blunts emotions and dulls memories of good times as well as helping a proportion of those who receive it. What is most heartbreaking is that treatment for depression in those days was so lamentably poor. The GP tells Paul’s father sharply to ‘snap out of it’. Anti-depressants of that era were laden with unpleasant side effects. Nowadays the talking therapies and drugs are far superior, and of course, long overdue, it’s now not shameful or stigmatising to admit to depression. It makes me shiver to think that not long ago it was so different.
And of course, Paul’s father’s death is not the only one haunting this book. Paul has never made a secret of the fact that Joy Division is his favourite band of all time. The tragedy of Ian Curtis’s life and death lurks in the background as Paul searches for answers to his own father’s suicide, another waste of a young life only partly lived, another question seeking resolution which it will never find.
Overall, the picture of Paul that emerges from this book is a far more complete one than that which his other writing paints. His journalism and appearances on TV have always attested to his enthusiasm and passion about music and popular culture as well as his intelligence and eloquence, but Nothing shows a human side, a side that is warm and that loves his family, a side that is heartbreakingly sensitive but not (like his father) in a self destructive way.
In the end, Paul and his family finally talk about the suicide. This helps, although no amount of talking will answer all the questions or resolve the kernel of raw pain buried in them all.
Did Nothing help me face up to my own sister’s suicide? I’m not sure yet. The circumstances were very different. My parents fought day and night, often physically; my sister went off the rails pretty early, taking all sorts of drugs and triggering a schizophreniform psychosis. Even before she developed delusions she had alienated some of those she knew by spinning bizarre, attention-seeking untruths. The family reaction was very dysfunctional. My father judged his children on their academic ability so he never praised my sister’s brilliant art or talent in piano (I was crap but she effortlessly obtained grade 9 and played Chopin gorgeously), or her passionate writing (she wrote for Sounds while I wrote for NME). My mother defended my sister dysfunctionally, reacting against my father by having screaming fights with him and allowing her to stay out all night in her early teens. My mother seemed to hate me for being the quiet shy academic one; she sneered when I got good O and A levels, went ballistic when I started writing for the NME (she saw it as my sister’s territory) and, when my by then psychotic sister sent me a death threat at uni for having a ‘telepathic affair’ with some boy she liked and I’d never met, my mother screamed at me. My sister jumped in front of a tube train in July ’85 when I was 21 after years of taking heroin in a squat . Despite not having talked for years, when he heard the news my father had a heart attack and stroke. They lay comatose in different wards in the Royal Free and both died within six months. I took a year off uni and spent the year in a depersonalised daze in a room in London on the dole while my mother paid for my brother (on a pre-uni year off) to spend most of it living life up abroad. After that kind of family life, anything else is easy to cope with, which is why I’ve been very happy as an adult, despite an auto-immune illness. Friends become the family you can choose, nothing – physical pain, illness, etc – is ever going to be as bad as that again, especially because nothing needs to be as secret and shrouded in shame. In a way the death of my sister and father was the first time I could express the abnormality of that family life – simply bleating ‘my mother doesn’t like me’ never quite conveyed it.
I hope Paul has found peace. From the book, it appears that he still gets low sometimes when he remembers (how can you forget?), but his keys to recovery are the love of his wife, daughter and remaining family as well as adequate sleep. (Sleep deprivation worsens depression as well as predisposing to overeating of sugary food) For all its pondering of heavy philosophical subjects like life and death, Nothing is strangely uplifting, and the most emotionally honest book I’ve read for years.
*****
19 Responses to Paul Morley – Nothing
I have only read extracts from the book in Paul’s ‘Piece By Piece’ but I am desperate to read the whole thing.I am a freelance writer myself and I ‘m sure I’m not alone in thinking somebody should re-publish this book! While you’re at it, how about ‘Ask’ and ’1977′ as well?
I also attended the Cummins evening, fantastic talk, very informative. Morley’s essay in the ‘Looking For The Light’ book is also worth a look. Very inspiring.
Thanks Mark. I agree, Morley’s essay in the Cummins book is excellent. I think he injected the right amount of personal details to make it really compelling.
The degree of emotional honesty in Nothing really took me by surprise. I think in the early ’80s many people had Morley down as someone quite inscrutable; his writing was so playful that it gave nothing away about him as a person other than his love for great music. I didn’t even know he was an old school Labour supporter until I read Nothing – the early ’80s NME stuff suggested a disengagement from politics, though it’s easy to see now that it was simply a distancing from the more simplistic sloganeering of knee-jerk politics than true political apathy.
Nothing really is a shockingly incisive, powerful and personally honest book. I hope it’s still in print.
Leyla – Timely reminder of this man\’s writing abilities. I haven’t read Nothing – seemed the bleakest of territory – but your recommendation is noted. Ask would be a volume with an audience, as Mark says, if it reappeared in the lists. I have a feeling though that 1977 is a book that Morley was slated to write and then it didn’t happen for some reason. I asked him about it once – it’s there on Amazon, yes – but I’m pretty sure that PM sd it was an idea that never saw the light of day.
Simon
Thanks Leyla, If you have\’nt already, have a read of Morley\’s sleevenotes for the last four Siouxsie And The Banshees re-issues. Makes me want to put pen to paper every time. The man is a literary genius.
I really enjoyed your blog. You still writing about music today? Let me know where I can check out more of your stuff.
Thanks for your comments, Simon. I remember Paul writing about Joy Division in the NME but I never sought out the Joy Division book because although I love their music, listening to them gives me goosepimples and makes me sad – they were my sister’s fave band and I’m transported back to those less than happy days. I remember in a gig review of the fabulous Associates Paul said they were the best band he’d seen since Joy Division, who were the best band he’d seen since he was born. The Associates were my fave band live, having only seen JD once, and I remember when Billy Mackenzie killed himself thinking, illogically, ‘Oh no, Paul Morley’s going to be so upset.’
It’s interesting that you avoided Nothing because of fears that it would be bleak – that’s the reason I didn’t read it for so long and yet the book is hilarious and warm and endearing as often as it’s sad, and even the sad parts aren’t maudlin or sentimental but philosophical.
Mark, thanks for your compliment. I don’t write about music anymore as I’m pretty out of touch with current bands, but I do write book reviews. You can see some of them at this url:
http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/?author=20
I’ve also written some medico-political stuff; lots of it isn’t on the net but some of it might come up if you google my name. Thanks again for your interest.
PS I forgot to say, Simon, that I’m pretty sure I saw the Joy Division book in Zizzi almost two years ago, so I think it did eventually come out. Amazon says it was published in Dec ’07, which would tie in with when I saw it. There’s one of those iconic photos of the band on the front that you know you’ve seen before, possibly from the NME. It must be either a Cummins or a Corbijn one.
Leyla, I appreciate your candour in describing your own family background as a way of explicating Paul Morley’s book Nothing. When we were discussing Flannery O’Connor in emails a few months ago, you mentioned having had conflict with your mother (as O’Connor had), but I didn’t realize the extent of the tragedies you’d experienced with your sister and father too. In view of your strength in facing all that, as well as your own more recent health problems, your level of existentialism is a model for the rest of us. My parents were quiet nonconformists (Democrats in a Republican small town, etc.), but we never experienced any real turmoil or tragedy, certainly not like yours.
I’ll keep Morley’s book in mind, might even be able to find a copy via the magic of Amazon, as you and Simon and others have noted below.
It’s late at night, I’ve just got in from a friend’s wedding, and have had enough vodka and tequila to kill a battalion of teetotalers, so all I want to say, Leyla, is thank you for this beautifully written (as ever) piece. I share your feelings about Paul Morley’s writing, and know too just how difficult it is to deal with premature death in the family.
When I was five, I lost my one-year-old sister to a mystifying cot death. I would never dream of giving that any kind of equivalence to what you went through but, while my parents were out, I effectively listened to her dying (and did nothing) while a teenaged babysitter ignored her cries. The next day my parents showed us her lifeless body on the bed and explained what had happened – there was thankfully no attempt to bullshit us that she had gone to some wonderful place – but, because nobody thought that I could possibly really understand what was going on at five years old, I was given no chance to deal properly with the trauma and so, after the inexpressibly cruel sight of her tiny coffin at the funeral, I protected myself by burying her memory so deep that I had no conscious trace of her existence for over 13 years.
When a chance remark finally reminded me of her, the memory erupted through the crust of my subconscious like a volcano. It has remained that way ever since. Over forty years since her death, and after ten years of doing everything I can think of to deal with it, I still find it impossible to think of my sister without bursting into tears. I’ve often assumed that time really does heal all wounds, but I carry her memory with me like a raw wound from which only forgetting gives me any relief – so I’ve become good at forgetting.
Why am I saying this? I don’t know. Maybe just to urge anyone who has lost a loved one prematurely, however it happened, to confront and deal with it as a matter of urgency, whether you’re feeling traumatised, ashamed, numb, furious or whatever. The alternative, as I can testify – and I’d give anything to go back in time and change it – is far worse.
Oh Simon, what a horrific tragedy. Cot deaths must be unbearable for all concerned but to actually have been there at the time at a helplessly young age must haunt you terribly. It would be a dreadful enough event without you being able to recall vague memories of her cries. As adults we look on five year-olds as being so tiny and vulnerable, and to think that as a child you experienced that level of trauma at that age is awful. Thank you so much for sharing that.The thing with bereavement is, although condolence letters stop coming after a few weeks, it’s something that stays with you forever. The pain may fade but it never really vanishes.
Dealing with psychological trauma is such a complex issue, isn’t it? I absolutely agree that acknowledging what has happened and not hiding from it is vital. On the other hand, I know from personal experience that picking at old emotional scabs too much is something I can’t cope with – it plunges me into misery whereas I’m actually very upbeat naturally – so with my own past I need to tread a tricky balancing act of not being afraid to face up to it when necessary but also being careful to avoid thinking about it excessively.
I hope that one day you can think back to your baby sister without becoming overcome with sadness. I hope this doesn’t sound intrusive but I wonder if having a child/neice/nephew of your own would help? I know a child can never take the place of a lost loved one but I believe that some parents who have experienced cot death are encouraged to have another child.
Richard, thank you for your kind words. It was a pretty crap time but then I’ve also had my share of good luck in life – the chance to write for the NME, the ability to move to a new life in Scotland,lovely friends and a loving boyfriend, etc.I guess we all have our challenges in life and in a way when you have them young nothing else seems insurmountable.
Many thanks for the kind words, Leyla. I was particularly pleased to hear that you\’re naturally upbeat as, despite last night\’s rather heavy posting, so am I. I generally wake up every day excited about life and grateful for my own good fortune, and I know people who have a hundred times my material success without enjoying that blessing of natural demeanour. As you say though, sometimes it helps not to think about incurable past sorrows too much.
Much as I wish my parents had understood how much I knew at five, I can\’t blame them for not doing so. I have another sister who is 18 months younger than me, and she has no memory at all of the whole thing, so it\’s a close call. As for healing the trauma with more children, I have a brother who is six years younger than me, whose existence I have always believed we owed to my sister\’s death, and far from resenting him for that fact – about which I\’ve recently been told I\’m quite wrong – I love him with a passion. I haven\’t done the child thing myself, but I have seven nieces and nephews and five beautiful godchildren, some of whom give me a perfect insight into the beauty of the experience.
I can\’t imagine thinking of my lost sister without sadness, but I don\’t think her memory, or more commonly absence thereof, is holding me back in life. I just wanted to share it in the wee small hours of this morning, because I was moved by what you had written.
Thanks, Simon. I’m smiling at the thought of so many small nieces/nephews and godchildren, I bet you’re a doting uncle/godpa.
I don’t think anyone would think the tragedy you went through had held you back, you are obviously a very together person, you always come across as interesting and upbeat and are an accompished and talented writer. I really valued your post because I was at that ‘eek’ stage of thinking ‘have I overemoted in public?’ and it was very touching to read that you had had a similar experience and that your responses to it have been so similar to mine.
I do think it’s great that there is this healthy middle ground between Oprah/Trisha style chest beating on TV and the traditional repressed stiff upper lip. I don’t know about you, Simon, but discussions with friends about their own family experiences (such as yours above) have been incredibly important to me.
Thanks again.
How funny to hear about your “eek moment”. I experienced much the same feeling when I woke up this morning. Glad we could be of service to each other. Thanks too for the kind, quite unexpected words of appreciation. I remember your NME work very well and – though we doubtless have many musical differences – was immediately reminded, when you started blogging here, of the fierce intelligence that shines through all of your writing.
I was thinking about musical differences last night, while reading your tribute to Paul Morley’s talent. Before I began writing for the NME, when I was still at school devouring each issue from cover to cover, I used to love Paul Morley’s writing above all else, and yet he wasn’t remotely as influential on my record buying habits as Barney Hoskyns was. In fact, while I can trace my first encounter with various artists (from Black Flag, Flipper and Husker Du to High Fashion, ZZ Hill and Bobby Womack) to Barney’s writing, I’m not sure I could name a single artist I discovered because of Paul. I used to love the fact that Paul’s pieces were often more about himself than the artist in question – that he had the talent, wit and chutzpah to get away with that – but maybe that’s why I now couldn’t tell you whether or not it was him that got me into Joy Division (it probably was, in all fairness). It’s a funny old world, but I digress.
Much love and festive cheer to you and yours.
Very perceptive, Simon, Paul’s pieces often conveyed the mood and emotions evoked by the music rather than any detailed dissection of it. Yet while many of his NME pieces divulged snippets of information about him, the reason Nothing had such an impact on me is that it’s the first piece of his writing that to me exposes his vulnerabilities and is unflinchingly honest about his emotions. It’s also the funniest thing he’s written, full of wonderful self deprecation and hilarious anecdotes about his gauche youth.(For example, after his first kiss, his comment to the girl was to ask if she wanted to lie on the ground.)
Thank you for your sweet comments about my own NME writing, to be honest I cringe at some of my early pieces but then I suppose most writers do that.
Happy Christmas.X
Compelling writing Leyla. I didn’t know about your sister. (Did you tell me? – I think I would’ve remembered.) Makes me appreciate my (Relatively) happy upbringing. Keep on writing. Your work deserves to be in print – are you interested in that or is blogging enough for you?
Thanks for the compliment, Stephen. I won’t have told you about my sister, it’s a bit heavy duty for someone you don’t know that well. Writing about it is different, you can write without thinking too much about who’s going to read it. I wrote about my family in an article in Elle back in the ’90s under a pseudonym, there were photos of us as kids but little chance of anyone I knew as an adult recognising them.
I would love to be in print more, both for the increase in audience and for the pay. Unfortunately the broadsheets all have their regular book reviewers and aren’t hiring any new ones – many established journalists have already lost their jobs in this recession. Also the medical background is a bit of a hindrance; I wrote medical and medico-political columns in several publications including broadsheets for years but as soon as I venture out of that zone and ask to review fiction, editors tend to think of all the people with English degrees who could be doing it. I still do a medical column in the Scottish Medical Journal but it’s a bit of a yawwwwn compared to reviewing fiction.
Hi Leyla and a happy new year,
I just wanted to tell you that you’re a good woman. That’s a good way to start the year, I think. I think I’ll tell more people that in 2010, unless they’re men, of course, in which case I’ll have to think of some way to adapt the concept. Or unless it’s not, in my opinion, true.
Your Morley review, of course, inspired me to write partly because it reveals aspects of your life that I had hitherto known nothing about. It’s become a weird world, hasn’t it, where we feel kinship and share deeply personal experiences with relative strangers in virtual public space?
What came back to me very powerfully as I was reading it is that I’ve been very lucky in my life and never suffered the kind of intense personal tragedies that you and Paul and Simon Witter and others have.
I come from a working class background in a family which, although very loving, was blighted by drink and gambling and a general lack of money – probably caused by the drink and the gambling. My parents fought a lot, often split up but always got back together again. I think they genuinely loved each other but didn’t know how to deal with their personality differences.
I know they loved me but when I try to think of what I learned from them, there’s very little in terms of specifics. I don’t recall ever being given any advice about how to cope with life, for example.
What I did get from them, and I’m constantly aware of it, is a sense of humour, resilience, optimism, a love of music and movies and the enjoyment of working.
My parents managed to live decently long lives, I was closely in touch with both at their deaths, and neither death was traumatic for me.
Sometimes, people like me imagine that we envy people who have had harder lives. I think we imagine that tragedy would have made us greater writers, or able to feel more deeply.
Truth to tell, I feel things pretty deeply anyway and the deepest of those feelings are about the safety of my children and the love of my wife – but those must be pretty bog-standard concerns for anybody who’s still functioning reasonably well.
I like to think maybe I’m more like Mendelssohn
than Beethoven. Mendelssohn, I’m told, lived a happy life and knocked off his compositions with relative ease, while Beethoven was miserable most of the time and struggled with every note.
Despite which, I love Mendelssohn as much as – possibly more than – Beethoven. Maybe I’m just intrinsically shallow, congenitally pre-disposed to relative contentment. Then again, I find adverts for Werther’s Originals puke-inducing.
As time goes by I come more and more round to the idea I first encountered in Vonnegut that it’s all about chemicals and I got lucky with my chemical composition.
I have my moments of sadness, self-doubt, rage, despair … but they don’t last. It’s a bit like living in a show from the Hallmark Channel. A smile, a snatch of melody, a cute-looking mouse – any of these can restore me. Maybe I naturally manufacture valium.
I know people whose lives tear them apart. I don’t mean people who are coping with tragedies. I mean people for whom it’s a serious issue if they run out of hair gel and the shop is shut.
I know other people who have been to hell (or just got born in hell and never got out) and back and yet seem to cope with it magnificently.
I read a quote from somebody recently that said happiness is good health and a poor memory. I think I fit nicely into that category.
So, no special deep thought here, just gratitude that my life hasn’t been bad and thanks for making me think about that via your review of Paul’s book – which I haven’t read. Ah, me.
Johnny, what a lovely and wise post. Thank you. I missed it yesterday when you must have posted it and it’s been a really touching surprise today.
Your own childhood sounds as if it had its own trials but it seems as if your parents’ love for each other and for you superceded the other problems. I do think (at the risk of sounding really soppy) that love is the most important thing to have in life. I may have had a very dysfunctional family but I was always lucky enough to have very good, close friends, and although I never felt my mother liked or loved me, I always knew my dad loved all three of his kids equally.And I now have the kind of peace with my mother that we can meet up for a civil cup of coffee if I’m in London where she lives. Much of her behaviour towards me when I was young must have been due to her own unhappiness and frustration.
The warmth and humour in your childhood sounds a lot like my boyfriend’s background – he comes from a working class family and they’ve imbued in him a sense of kindness, loyalty to family and an ability to show love, for which I’m very grateful. Then again, he had to provide his own motivation for getting on in life – no one in his family had been to university before, or been into reading or classical music or learning. That’s something I didn’t have to work for – although I went to a non fee-paying school, there were always books at home and there was always encouragement from my dad to learn. Plus I always knew my dad loved me, even if we kids didn’t have much contact with him for fear of provoking more fights between him and my mother. And I had my own room and there was always enough money to go round. So I guess I had certain advantages that you or my boyfriend may not have had.
I love the comment about those two great composers. The depth and suffering of Beethoven’s life probably contributed to his incredible talent, but life can’t all be Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, there’s room too for a lighter form of creativity. Beethoven is my favourite classical composer and I deeply admire Joy Division, but most days I’m happier listening to less tortured souls.
Happy New Year to one and all.
What a wise, beautifully-written post, Johnny. The leap from Mendelssohn and Beethoven to Werther’s Originals made me laugh out loud.
The idea that great art must be born of suffering is deeply ingrained in our psyche. I know that I’ve often found the idea very tempting, but deep down I don’t buy it. Those beset by tragedy do not, for the most part, end up being Van Gogh/Kafka/Martin Armies/whatever. And, as you rightly point out, people in incredibly different circumstances react in often unexpected ways to their predicament. That’s surely the most important thing – how we deal with our lot.
We tend to view happiness as frivolous, but there is nothing superficial about happiness. I experience all hues of emotion at different times, but happiness is the predominant one and, having tasted some of the others, I will never stop being grateful for that.
Speaking of which, happy new year to all!
Your last paragraph about the range of emotions most people experience is particularly eloquent, Simon. One of the characters in the book I’ve just finished (Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies)expresses a similar thought: ‘All men contain several men inside them and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.’I wonder if experiencing the occasional low makes the contrasting highs more glorious in the way that getting drunk on champagne at brilliant parties is more fun when you don’t do it every day. Thanks to everyone for all the thoughtful and sensitive contributions to this thread.x