Both Sides, Now

Liam Hoare | April 2023

Liam Hoare, Deborah Levy

 

In his second-most quoted essay on the art of writing, “Why I Write”—the first being “Politics and the English Language” with all its rules and stipulations about eschewing dead metaphors, long words, and for­eign jargon—George Orwell supposes that the first great motive for writing is “sheer egoism,” defined as the “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood,” and so on.

Writers, Orwell posits, are unlike the “great mass of human beings” in that they are inherently selfish, “vain and self-centered.” They do not live life for others, but rather are part of a “minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end.” 1 The writer lives for themselves and is, as Martin Amis once commented, “most fully alive when alone.” 2 (“How to say ‘writing is a lone­ly business’ without saying ‘writing is a lonely business’?” Gore Vidal once asked in an interview. 3) All writers, Amis has also said—another oft-cited writer on the art of writing—“if they mean business, if they’re ambitious, have got to think they’re the best. You haven’t got a chance of being the best unless you think you’re best.” 4

Amis’s literary obsessions include envy between writers and male rivalry, male violence, male depravity, and male criminality, male friendship, and man’s sexual conquest of women. In short, he is a male writer, and when Amis speaks of writers, their ego and their ambition, he speaks perhaps of other male writers. The same may have been true of Orwell too, whose female characters like Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four were not always fully realized. “Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not think­ing about the sheer egoism of a female writer,” Deborah Levy wrote in 2013’s Things I Don’t Want to Know. “Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.” 5

Things I Don’t Want to Know, original­ly written as a standalone response to Orwell, is considered to be the first part of Levy’s so-called living autobiogra­phy or living memoir, which is to say, a memoir written about near-contempo­rary events, a memoir written about and in the present, but also a memoir about a work-in-progress—a memoir about that which we now call rather faddishly “becoming.” The second installment, The Cost of Living, was published in 2018. The third, Real Estate, billed as an “intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it,” was published in 2021.

“When a female writer walks a female character in to the center of her literary enquiry (or a forest),” Levy writes in Things I Don’t Want to Know, “and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact, it would be best if she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject, it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.” 6

“As far as I’m concerned, the writing life is mostly about stamina and the desire to give my complete attention to language,” Levy wrote in the Guardian in 2016 (in a charming piece about the shed at the bottom of a friend’s garden in which she writes: “I have rented it from her ever since. It’s freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, but I have grown to love my writing shed in every season” 7). Of course, the writing of a memoir is about more than that: becoming the center of one’s own lit­erary enquiry. Levy’s living memoir is an attempt to find a language that turns the author, a female writer, into a subject and grapples with the soci­etal system and the conditions that have shaped her. In her living memoir, Levy—the novelist and playwright, in other words the woman behind the words—is learning how to become a subject.

“To become a writer,” Levy writes at the end of Things I Don’t Want to Know, “I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.” 8 This first part of her living memoir is in part about Levy finding her own voice: about her childhood growing up in apartheid South Africa (her father, Norman Levy, was among other things a member of the then-proscribed African National Congress, for which he was at a certain point in his life thrown in prison) and then her emigration to England at the age of nine in 1968. She recalls being five years old, looking out the window that faced onto the back garden of the family home and watching the snow fall upon the palm trees in the company of her nanny, Maria:

I asked myself another question: Should I accept my lot? If I was to buy a ticket and travel all the way to acceptance, if I was to greet it and shake its hand, if I was to entwine my fingers with acceptance and walk hand in hand with acceptance every day, what would that feel like? After a while I realized I could not accept my question. A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly. 9

When she was fifteen, her parents sep­arated. Now living in England, in what she describes as a kind of exile, know­ing that she wasn’t entirely English in the way that that used to be defined, which is to say by birth and lineage, she describes sitting in a greasy spoon—the kind of café that sells a full English breakfast with builder’s tea served in a chipped mug—and making doodles on the napkins. Beside or around them, Levy would write sentences, often at great pace. “Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad. That was what I thought writers should be. I was sad anyway, much sadder than the sentences I wrote. I was a sad girl imper­sonating a sad girl.” 10

The challenge for Levy, the challenge of being a female writer, was not only one of voice, of ego. “I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world, but I was overwhelmed by everything and didn’t know where to start.” 11 There is also the problem of finding a way of getting one’s work out into the world, a challenge she describes rather wonderfully as like opening a window “like an orange.” 12 The reality was that she was a writer, she knew it, but did not know what to do with this knowledge and how to go about making it a reality.

Part of the problem—another subject of her living memoir—was finding a way to write in a world shaped by mas­culine consciousness, a world where women, as she writes in Things I Don’t Want to Know, are placed into roles of attending to other people’s desires while cancelling their own: within a marriage or within a family; wife, daughter, mother. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Levy retreated to the garden shed in order to write: not only to divorce oneself from the world but to disentangle oneself from those roles and relationships, to find that aliveness in being alone of which male writers like Amis speak.

The writer’s liberation from those structures—and, once more, the rela­tionship between writing and wom­anhood—is the subject of the second volume of Levy’s living autobiography, The Cost of Living, encompassing the dissolution of her marriage, the move to living independently once more, and the death of her mother:

When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels. 13

It is in light of this particularly literary project as well as novels like Hot Milk (2016) that Levy is often considered pri­marily or exclusively as a female writer or a writer on femininity, on women. As Dwight Garner rightly observed of Hot Milk and Swimming Home, writing in the New York Times: “They’re yearning, jaggedly smart and drolly comic devices that are in large part about women who long for freedom and foreign experi­ence; they’re about women who have come to sense they’re not locked into their lives and stories, characters who have a heliotropic urge to turn to face the cleansing sunlight.” 14

But to read her work another way is to see a different side of the author often left unexamined. She is a female writer, indeed, but she should also be consid­ered as a Jewish one. In a 2013 inter­view, Levy described her father’s parents as Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to South Africa, where they opened a fish­monger. Her grandfather wrote poetry in Yiddish. Her grandmother, she told the Jewish Chronicle, taught her one line of the language: A choleryeh ahf dir! May you catch cholera. In Things I Don’t Want to Know, she describes a particular­ly troubling incident from her school­girl days in Johannesburg that took place when she was seven years old:

I was thinking about the phrase “out of the blue.” It was so thrilling to think about the blue that things came out of the blue. There was a blue, it was big and mysterious, it was like mist or gas and it was like a planet but it was also a human head which is shaped like a planet. Out of the blue my teacher asked me how I spelt my surname?

L-E-V-Y

It was obvious to me she knew my father was a political prisoner, but then she said in an excited voice, “Ja, you are Jewish,” as if she had just discovered something incredible, like a Roman coin stuck in the paw of a kitten or a dragonfly concealed in a loaf of bread. And then she blinked her liver-colored eyes and said, “I’ve had enough of your nonsense.”

Her comment did not come out the blue. Not at all. 15

Names matter to Levy and the names of her protagonists in novels like the Booker Prize–nominated Swimming Home (2011) and 2019’s The Man Who Saw Everything are not incidental. They carry weight. They do a lot of heavy lifting. Joe Jacobs in Swimming Home and Saul Adler in The Man Who Saw Everything are named as such for good reason. These characters are Jewish because of the themes Levy explores in these novels: history, identity, and the burdens of past and present that people carry around with them. They are Jewish because of the questions by which Levy is consumed. “I realized that the question I had asked myself while writing [Swimming Home] was (as surgeons say) very close to the bone,” she writes in Things I Don’t Want to Know. “‘What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?’” 16

Joe Jacobs, a poet, has taken his family, as is their annual routine, to a large, tumbledown villa in the south of France. His wife Isabel refers to him as “Jozef.” In the novel’s opening pages an interloper swims into their lives: Kitty Finch, the woman who will unwind their lives. Seated beside one another in the car, Kitty says to Joe in lines that form the novel’s Leitmotiv, “Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safe­ly. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all. That is why I am here, Jozef. I have come to France to save you from your thoughts.” 17

Those thoughts concern Joe’s family history, events that shaped and defined his life and from which he is unable to escape. Born Jozef Nowogrodzki in western Poland in 1937, he arrived in Whitechapel, east London, at the age of five:

His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same. 18

His parents, who died in the Holocaust, exist as memories that visit Joe in his dreams, people he had long cried for until he learnt that doing so would not bring them back. Levy describes Joe’s childhood as a “one-sea­son pharmaceutical mist. Or as he had suggested in his most famous poem, now translated into twenty-three lan­guages: a bad fairy made a deal with me, ‘give me your history and I will give you something to take it away.’” 19

Kitty, like Joe, is a depressive. “Life is something she has to do but she doesn’t want to do it,” it is said of her. 20 She is obsessed with Joe’s poetry to the extent that she believes it is being written just for her, and wishes Joe would read her stuff, too, which eventually he does. “He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc [sic] concealed something that could not be said.” 21 The tightening of their bond leads to the novel’s denoue­ment, the revelation that the mission to save Joe from his thoughts means to lead him to an end about which he had been thinking nearly all his life.

Joe Jacobs and Saul Adler are haunted men. One of the most frequently used words in The Man Who Saw Everything is “specter,” and indeed, phantoms and spirits populate the novel. The year is 1988 and Saul Adler is about to head to East Berlin to continue his research into communism and contemporary life there when he is hit by a car crossing the Abbey Road. Similar to the function Kitty Finch plays in Swimming Home, this brush with death unhinges both Saul and the novel, one that becomes increasingly unmoored from a linear time structure as, twenty years later, Saul is involved in another car accident that brings him close to death.

Laying in his hospital bed, Saul is visited by the ghosts of his past. His mother, born in Heidelberg, who came to Britain when she was eight and died when he was a young boy. His father, a committed communist who was always uncomfortable with Saul’s sissy demeanor. While in East Berlin, Saul symbolically buries him in a matchbox and has dreams in which he knocks his father to the ground, sits astride his chest, and wraps his hands around his throat, as if he is wrestling with history itself. Walter Müller, his translator in East Berlin whom Saul fears he betrayed to a Stasi informant. Walter’s sister, Luna, whom he believes he abandoned in the East by failing to help her get out and whose child he may have fathered.

The Man Who Saw Everything builds on the historical themes set down in Swimming Home as to associate them with memory and identity. The East German setting, with its spooks, spies, and partly concealed lives, and the way in which Levy plays with time and con­sciousness raise questions about who people really are. She describes the fol­lowing conversation between Saul and Walter, who at this point are working their way into an affair:

Walter, I have to ask you something. … If we had been friends earlier, say 1941, I would have to ask you to hide me. … Would you have helped me?

Yes.

… And what if we had been at school together and you discovered I was forbidden from swimming with you at the public pools. Would you still have been my friend?

More than that, Saul. I would have done everything I could to save you.

“I believed Walter Müller’s words,” Saul says. “At the same time, I knew he was following me when I visited the British embassy to have a cup of British tea and read the newspapers. … I knew his heart was not in it, but he had to save himself.” 22 In the GDR, to exist was to partly conceal oneself, to delineate the public from the private, to live more than one life. “I was learning to not be myself in the GDR,” 23 Saul says, while Walter tells Saul, while discussing his work, “The personality of the translator has to hide.” 24 When Saul overhears Walter talking about him with his su­perior and discovers that he has a wife and children about whom he knew nothing, Saul suspects that Walter is, indeed, keeping something back.

In the end, Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything—superb, mesmerizing novels both—are bound by a single idea. “Stalin had eradicated the past by deleting from the historical record whatever he found inconve­nient,” Saul narrates in the latter. 25 What Levy maintains is that ordinary men cannot. We cannot conquer space and time. It is our master. We are defined by our past. We are our past. “I don’t want to talk about it now,” Saul tells Luna when she asks about his mother. “But you must,” she replies. “You are history.” 26

The publication of Swimming Home heralded Levy’s second coming as a writer. What followed was a prolific period that included two further novels, three memoirs, and a collection of short stories all in the span of nine years. Of them all, Swimming Home stands out. Slender, captivating, it remains upon re-reading a taut and incredibly lucid novel: the finest thing she has ever writ­ten. She is not a mystery writer but cer­tainly she understands its power—what can be achieved in fiction by holding something back. That which the reader needs to know is only slowly revealed as events gradually unravel. Her lan­guage, her use of motif, allusion, and suggestion, shimmers and twinkles. Her stories are not a puzzle to be proactively solved. Better simply that one sits and waits for answers.

Liam Hoare is Europe Editor for Moment Magazine, the author of the Vienna Briefing, and a freelance writer on politics, culture, and Jewish life in Austria and the wider region based in Vienna.

Notes

1. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 4.

2. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151,” interview by Francesca Riviere, The Paris Review, 1998, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1156/the-art-of-fiction-no-151-martin-amis.

3. Gore Vidal, “Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal Part Two,” BBC, 1995, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EzOGm2VmTk.

4. Amis, interview.

5. Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know (London: Notting Hill Editions Ltd., 2013), 17.

6. Ibid, 26.

7. Deborah Levy, “Deborah Levy: ‘I have grown to love my writing shed in every season,’” Guardian, October 1, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/01/deborah-levy-my-writing-day.

8. Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know, 107.

9. Ibid, 106.

10. Ibid, 86.

11. Ibid, 99.

12. Ibid, 106.

13. Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2018), 186-7.

14. Dwight Garner, “Stepping Out of Character and Starting a New Story,” New York Times, June 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/books/review-cost-of-living-deborah-levy.html.

15. Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know, 33-4.

16. Ibid, 106.

17. Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (High Wycombe: And Other Stories, 2011), 26.

18. Ibid, 143.

19. Ibid, 22.

20. Ibid, 134.

21. Ibid, 83.

22. Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 59.

23. Ibid, 65.

24. Ibid, 75.

25. Ibid, 45.

26. Ibid, 89.