Depersonalization and Creative Writing

Unreal City

Matthew Francis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000603156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process.

Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psychological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus's The Outsider and Sartre's Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing.

Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher's maxim show, don't tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a practical instruction for taking students' writing to a new level of sophistication and wisdom.

Part I Autobiographical

1 Land without Feelings A Depersonalization Memoir

DOI: 10.4324/9781003080336-2

The Squirrels Hotel was never intended as a hall of residence. The university had more students than usual that year, and couldn’t even provide all its first-year undergraduates with accommodation; thirteen of them had been sent out to Rottingdean, five miles from Brighton and almost ten from the university itself, and there were posters up all over campus saying FREE THE ROTTINGDEAN 13! As a new postgraduate, however, I was left to arrange my own accommodation, and found a room in the Squirrels at out-of-season rates. The landlord, a gruff little man named Bill, told me I was welcome to use the bar any time – just ring for service. Every time I entered the hotel I would pass the open door of that empty bar, the smallest I had ever seen, and imagine myself walking in, switching on the light and ringing the bell to order a large whisky, as a character in a novel might. Instead I would climb to the dark landing with its electric double hotplate and miniature fridge and enter my palace of glitter. There were my books arranged on the carpet in one corner, the chair at the dressing-table where I had to work, the scattered notepads and folders doubled by the mirror, the ironic double bed with its chilly golden counterpane, my own newly bearded self staring back at me from the second mirror on the wardrobe door.

I think it all started with those mirrors, the fact that there were two of them placed at an angle to each other, so that everywhere I looked I was confronted with multiple different images of myself and my shiny surroundings. For a long time I had been in the habit of looking away whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in one. I disliked being ambushed by that stooping figure with the untidy ginger hair, its narrow outline mostly submerged these days in one of the vast polo-neck sweaters I had inherited from a recently deceased uncle. I also had superstitious fantasies that one day I would look into a mirror and see a room different from the one I was standing in, or a person who wasn’t me staring back, or no one there at all. In my undergraduate years I had written a poem that included some lines about mirrors:

I saw myself in a strange land

of walls and shadows, seated and walking

figures. I was red without heat.

I scratched without itching.

I moved among the figures.

A mirror is a land

without feelings.

Most days I went to campus, though, on the many occasions when none of my friends were about and I had nothing in particular to do, I didn’t so much work in the place as haunt it. It was very different from Magdalene College, Cambridge, where I had been an undergraduate. The University of Sussex was in the grip of what seemed to be a slow-burning revolution: alongside the poster about the Rottingdean 13 were others advertising protests against the new Thatcher government (illustrated with a photocopied black-and-white photograph of a dreadlocked youth shaking his fist at a policeman), a Das Kapital Reading Group, and a Men’s Gender Awareness group (defaced by angry comments from women who didn’t think men needed one). For the whole of my time there at least one building was being occupied by student protesters, and it was a popular recreation after an evening in one of the campus bars to go and visit the Occupation. In the Common Room of the School of English and American Studies (ENGAM) I would eat hot dogs and apple doughnuts, uncomfortably conscious for the first time in my life that these were not considered ethical food choices by my brown-rice-eating friends, and discuss confessional poetry. Sometimes I went to parties and stayed the night on someone’s floor; sometimes I smoked a joint, and examined the inside of my mind carefully for the next few hours to see if it made me feel any different. Most of my fellow students lived on campus; some had houseshares in Brighton or the Regency part of Hove; no one else lived in a hotel room.

At the Squirrels I kept my food stores and the pans I had also inherited from my dead uncle in cardboard boxes under the bed. I cooked for myself at the hotplate on the landing, corned beef hash or vegetable curry, and ate at the dressing-table with my chewing reflection looking back at me. I was occasionally invited to dinner, in crowded communal households where people would argue about the dictatorship of the proletariat, but I never reciprocated, not having anything that would do for a table. At night I would lie in bed listening to the drunks in the street and the sound of the sea, only about fifty yards away.

It was possible to spend a whole day in Brighton drifting from one second-hand bookshop to another on the pretext of buying books I might need for my course, or for the doctorate I was planning to do when the course was over. The town was hilly and full of unexpected vistas. I would turn a corner and see a fold of it lying beneath me, roofs, chimneys and the backs of flying gulls, with the sea beyond. It started to feel like Christmas early that year, with bright clear days and sudden onsets of dark. The lights were not Christmas ones yet, but I was not used to seeing them in such profusion or such contoured sweeps, nor to the way they came to an abrupt halt at the promenade with the shifting mass of water behind. Starlings rustled and twittered in the branches of the trees by the Pavilion, and gulls bedded down on the waves beside the ruined West Pier.

After the Monday seminars on American history, which were attended by all the students on the course, a group of us would catch the train from Falmer and go to the Shakespeare’s Head for an evening of drinking. These sessions were dominated by Rob, a heavy, bearded man in his late twenties who had a wife and baby son in a town further along the south coast. He was also planning to do a doctorate, on the Black Mountain poets. He knew a lot about literary theory and had a way of talking about Lacan and Derrida as if they were friends that he had recently fallen out with. There was something very impressive about his jadedness; he had already got tired of theorists I had barely heard of and whose ideas still intimidated me. He spoke in a wheezing Estuary voice: ‘Oh, Todorov! Well, if you believe him…’ (as if it was inconceivable that anyone still could). Drinking all evening was exhausting, and I would tune into and out of the conversation, surprised, on rejoining it, to discover that we were no longer talking about Todorov but about the political symbolism of the Western, or Rob’s theories about the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Pentel rollerball pen, the dry-roasted peanut and Space Invaders. The world was going to end in 1980, and the sudden irruption of new technologies was his evidence ‘Things go along more or less the same as ever,’ he said, ‘and then suddenly it all changes at once, and you’re fucked, basically.’ Apart from the dry-roasted peanuts, now spread out on the table on top of their ripped-open packet, there was nothing to eat in the Shakespeare’s Head. When I nervously suggested we should go to a restaurant, he looked at me as if I were an amateur. ‘If you’re hungry, go and get a cheeseburger.’ So I did, and ate it hurriedly in the street before rejoining the group in the pub, who were still listening to Rob.

One evening no one else could make it, for some reason, and Rob and I ended up taking the train to Brighton alone. We sat at our usual table, the eviscerated packet of dry-roasted peanuts between us, while the ten or so seats that were normally occupied by the rest of our cohort filled up with other customers. At first our talk was of Olson and Lowell, as usual, but by the third pint Rob was leaning forward confidentially and asking me how many women I had slept with. I knew the answer to that one: it was three. People had been asking me since the sixth form. The questioner was always male, and the conversation usually took place late at night, after a party or a night at the pub, though in the sixth form we would have been sitting on top of the desks in the form room after teaching hours. The tone was usually hushed and earnest in the early days, but later it became slightly mocking, even challenging: ‘OK, so how many…?’ And the answer was three.

It had not always been three, of course. In the early days it was an embarrassed smile, a shake of the head and a sort of gasp that was trying, not very successfully, to disguise itself as a laugh, while the mind worked frantically to try and deduce what answer was expected. Should I have slept with any girls by now, and if so how many? At that point, as a pupil in a boys’ school, I didn’t even know any, or at least none that I wasn’t related to. But I got better at answering. I met girls at Cambridge (most of them nurses from Addenbrooke’s Hospital since female undergraduates comprised less than 20 per cent of the student population in those days). I went out with a couple of them, took one to a May Ball. I had my first kiss at a party, upside-down, leaning over the back of a chair to attach myself to the lips of a girl who had kissed every other boy in the room that evening, in my eagerness to make sure I didn’t miss my chance. But that was as far as it went. I had pined after some of the nurses, and been humiliated a couple of times. A girl came to stay with me once and spent the weekend in bed with one of my housemates. By the time I arrived in Brighton I had decided it was less painful not to try; meanwhile I had quietly changed the answer from a shrugging none to a shrugging three, because I had reached the age when three seemed a modest, sensible, unshocking number.

Rob was as jaded about love as he was about literary theorists. He told me about some of his adventures, sighing for things that were in the past. I didn’t know how lucky I was to be single; at my age, I should be having it off with half the women in the seminar group. Why only three, he wanted to know. I was choosy, I told him. He showed me a photograph of his wife and son; she was tall and handsome with high cheekbones and looked very grown-up. Even the baby looked grown-up somehow. Rob started to make a roll-up and offered to buy me another pint.

‘No, really. I’ve got to eat. I can’t drink all that beer on an empty stomach.’

‘Food is overrated,’ Rob said. ‘We’ll get some more peanuts. No? All right then, go and get your cheeseburger and come back. I’ll get one in for you.’

When I got back, the pint was waiting on the table for me, but Rob was sitting with his back to it, and to me, talking to someone. I glimpsed her long brown hair, a bit of her upper body. I took my seat and drank some of the beer, while Rob turned enough to acknowledge my return and introduce me to his new friend, whose name was Monica. She gave me a compressed smile and they went on talking. She was short, broad, and had a doughy look, not as elegant as his wife. Their conversation was more or less the same as the one Rob and I had been having before he got on to more intimate subjects: poetry, theory, nothing exciting, but they were deeply involved in it, and I had a whole pint to get through before I could gracefully leave. In the end, they left before I did, Rob putting one hand briefly on my shoulder as he went out as if to say sorry, you know how it is.

That was the last I saw of him. He was not in our seminar the next week. The week after that, one of the other students asked me if I had heard what had happened. He had died in a car crash in France, where he had had no business to be – no one, not even his wife, had known he was there. A couple of days after that, I met Monica on the train to campus, and found that the news had reached her, too. ‘I was really sorry to hear that,’ she said, ‘I liked him a lot.’ We didn’t speak again before the train got into Falmer.

When the Russians invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979, I was at home in Gosport for the holiday; I remember the television being on one evening in the dead period between Christmas and New Year while people in the room were drinking and talking, and someone asked what the reporter had just said. I replied, to my own astonishment, ‘I think he said the Third World War is just about to start.’ The crisis built up from day to day, as the outgoing president, Jimmy Carter, kept coming up with more alarmist statements about it: the gravest crisis since Vietnam, since Cuba, since the Second World War. I began to realize how news worked – nothing new was known about the situation but there had to be something to report every day about the topic that was on everyone’s mind, and that meant that Carter had to keep escalating his comments. I spent many evenings alone in my room working on a term paper about Marianne Moore. When thinking what to write next, I would get up and go to the window and look out into the dark street with its frosty pavements. On the night of the full moon, I kept the curtains open, fascinated by its power. It seemed to generate cold, to be the source of the night’s frost and of the condensation on the windows that half-obscured it sometimes when I moved my head, then released it again, as if it were dissolving and then reconstituting itself. I had heard from one of the Addenbrooke’s nurses that patients in mental wards had to be supervised carefully on nights of the full moon because suicides were most common then, and I began to understand why. It was impossible not to think it was staring at me with a one-eyed unblinking gaze.

When I got back to Brighton, I would walk in the cold sunny weather between the Regency terraces and the sea, and feel a pressure on the top of my skull, as heavy and menacing as the stare of that full moon: the imminence of the Soviet missiles. At any moment all this elegance could be destroyed. I could hardly breathe. One evening I went to the nearest pub, unfrequented by students, and drank my pint of bitter at a table in the corner. The only other customers were a group of old men singing ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’. When they stopped, one of them said, ‘Yes, and we’ll all be singing that soon.’ There was a smugness in his voice that infuriated me; it was people like him that were bringing destruction on the rest of us, not realizing or caring that there would be no trenches, armies and uniforms this time. The student activists on campus apparently shared the same delusion: a lot of flyers had appeared explaining what to do if you were called up into the armed forces. There were nervous conversations among my seminar group. ‘The world will end with a bang, not a whimper,’ I said to one of my friends.

‘It’ll be a bang first,’ she said, ‘and a bloody great whimper afterwards.’

At the beginning of the next academic year I was still alive, and starting work on my PhD on American academic poetry. I had become intrigued by the fact that the poets I was interested in had all had university jobs teaching creative writing. It seemed to me that the career of poet, so impossible in this country, not just because there was no money associated with it, but because there was no status, no identity, was still meaningful in America. I wanted to prove that American poets like Lowell and Berryman had used their academic careers to construct a poetic identity, and that Plath, who left both the US and academia, had done the opposite, taking her poetic self apart. Lowell’s poems built a literary persona piece by piece, the eccentric lives of his aristocratic New England family, the magnolia in his garden, his daughter in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear, while Plath invited one to ‘the big strip tease’ as she removed her hands, knees, skin and bones (Lowell, 2003, pp. 185, 187; Plath, 1981, p. 245). It was a theory, and a theory was what I needed to do a PhD. I didn’t know why I was doing one – there were no jobs available in university English departments in those days, so I was only qualifying myself for unemployment. Also I had no idea how to study systematically, how to file and keep track of information (a real organizational challenge in the days before personal computers) or how I could possibly write 80,000 words about anything. As I spent days in the library reading the biographies of the poets, it gradually became clear to me that, for all their enviable creative writing careers, their lives were chaotic: Lowell and Roethke were in and out of hospital with what was then called manic depression; Berryman was an alcoholic and jumped from a bridge to his death; Plath put her head in the oven. I was not sure where that left my theory.

The outsize sweaters had gone. On my first day in my new accommodation, a room in a house in Southdown Avenue, in the north of Brighton, I had put them in an airing cupboard and they were now covered in rust from the corroded pipes there. I had read somewhere that you could remove rust from clothes by boiling them with rhubarb leaves, but rhubarb was out of season, and in any case it didn’t seem the sort of thing you could do in a house belonging to someone else. The owner was a lorry driver named Josh, a rangy, self-confident man in his forties with a disconcertingly posh accent for someone in his line of work. Lorry-driving, I gathered, had been his way of dropping out and leading an adventurous life, though he told me he had to adopt a cockney accent sometimes for professional purposes: when the dockers wouldn’t unload your lorry, the only way to get them to do it was to threaten to beat them up, a threat they wouldn’t take seriously unless you dropped your aitches at the same time. He enacted the whole scene, doing the dockers’ Glasgow voices as well as his own fake cockney. Josh had a Swedish ex-wife who visited occasionally, and two small sons with curly blond hair, Sam and Toby, whom I sometimes looked after, making model animals for them out of Blu-Tak. ‘Do a warrm,’ Sam told me, and, when I looked puzzled, continued, ‘do a warrm an a nake’. (It was one of my easier commissions.) There was another lodger called Neil who hated me because he saw Josh as a father figure and was jealous of me taking any of his attention. Neil was suffering from depression, and disappeared for a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Autobiographical
• Part II Psychological
• Part III Practical
• Bibliography
• Index