Christopher Priest - The Affirmation

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THE AFFIRMATION

by Christopher Priest

Extract from "Sailing to Byzantium," from W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems,

Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats; and of M. B.

Yeats, Anne Yeats, and Macmillan London Ltd.

ISBN 0-684-16957-6

without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

To M.L. and L.M.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W. B. YEATS

"Sailing to Byzantium"

THE AFFIRMATION

This much I know for sure:

My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine

years old. Already there is an uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a

variable; I am no longer twenty-nine.

I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I

could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion

write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as

the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of

deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the

imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy

into one's mind. If I am to reveal myself then I prefer to do so by my

choices, rather than by my accidents. Some might say that such accidents are

the product of the unconscious mind, and thus inherently interesting, but as I

write this I am warned by what is to follow. Much is unclear. At this outset I

need that tedious quality of pedanticism. I have to choose my words with care.

I want to be sure.

Therefore, I shall begin again. In the summer of 1976, the year Edwin

Miller lent me his cottage, I was twenty-nine years old.

I can be as certain of this as I am of my name, because they are both

from independent sources. One is the gift of parents, the other the product of

the calendar. Neither can be disputed.

In the spring of that year, while still twenty-eight, I came to a

turning-point in my life. It amounted to a run of bad luck, caused by a number

of external events over which I had little or no control. These misfortunes

were all independent of each other, yet because they all came together in the

space of a few weeks it seemed as if they were part of some terrible

conspiracy against me.

In the first place, my father died. It was an unexpected and premature

death, of an undetected cerebral aneurysm. I had a good relationship with him,

simultaneously intimate and distant; after the death of our mother some twelve

years earlier, my sister Felicity and I had been united with him at an age

when most adolescents are resisting their parents. Within two or three years,

partly because I went away to university, and partly because Felicity and I

became alienated from each other, this closeness had been broken. The three of

us had for several years lived in different parts of the country, and were

together only rarely. Even so, the memories of that short period in my teens

lent an unspoken bond between my father and me, and we both valued it.

He died solvent but not rich. He also died intestate, which meant that I

had to be involved in a number of tedious meetings with his solicitor. At the

end of it all, Felicity and I each received half of his money. It was not

large enough to make much difference to either of us, but in my case it was

sufficient to cushion me from some of what followed.

Because, in the second place, following a few days after the news of my

father's death, I heard that I was soon to be made redundant.

It was a time of recession in the country, with inflating prices,

strikes, unemployment, a shortage of capital. Smugly, with my middle-class

confidence, I had assumed my degree would insure me against any of this. I

worked as a formulation chemist for a flavour house, supplying a large

pharmaceutical company, but there was an amalgamation with another group, a

change of policy, and my firm had to close my department. Again, I assumed

that finding another job would be a mere technicality. I had qualifications

and experience, and I was prepared to be adaptable, but many other science

graduates were made redundant at the same time and few jobs were available.

Then I was served notice to quit my fiat. Government legislation, by

marginally protecting the tenant at the expense of the landlord, had disrupted

the forces of supply and demand. Rather than rent property, it was becoming

more advantageous to buy and sell. In my case, I rented an apartment on the

first floor of a large old house in Kilburn, and had lived there for several

years. The house was sold to a property company, though, and almost at once I

was told to get out. There were appeal procedures, and I embarked on them, but

with my other worries at the time I did not act promptly or effectively

enough. It was soon clear I should have to vacate. But where in London could

one move to? My own case was far from untypical, and more and more people were

hunting for flats in an ever-shrinking market. Rents were going up quickly.

People who had security of tenure stayed put, or, if they moved, transferred

the tenancy to friends. I did what I could: I registered with agencies,

answered advertisements, asked my friends to let me know if they heard of a

place coming free, but in all the time I was under notice to quit I never even

got so far as to look at any places, let alone find somewhere suitable.

It was in this context of circumstantial disaster that Gracia and I fell

out. This, alone of all my problems, was one in which I played a part, for

which I bore some responsibility.

I was in love with Gracia, and she, I believe, with me. We had known

each other a long time, and had passed through all the stages of novelty,

acceptance, deepening passion, temporary disillusionment, rediscovery, habit.

She was sexually irresistible to me. We could be good company to each other,

complement our moods, yet still retain sufficient differences from each other

to be surprising.

In this was our downfall. Gracia and I aroused non-sexual passions in

each other that neither of us had ever experienced with anyone else. I was

normally placid, yet when I was with her I was capable of degrees of anger and

love and bitterness that always shocked me, so powerful were they. Everything

was heightened with Gracia, everything assumed an immediacy or importance that

created havoc. She was mercurial, able to change her mind or her mood with

infuriating ease, and she was cluttered with neuroses and phobias which at

first I found endearing, but which the longer I knew her only obstructed

everything else. Because of them she was at once predatory and vulnerable,

capable of wounding and being wounded in equal measure, although at different

times. I never learned how to be with her.

The rows, when we had them, came suddenly and violently. I was always

taken unawares, yet once they had started I realized that the tensions had

been building up for days. Usually the rows cleared the air, and we would make

up with a renewed closeness, or with sex. Gracia's temperament allowed her to

forgive quickly or not at all. In every case but one she forgave quickly, and

the one time she did not was of course the last. It was an awful, squalid row,

on a street corner in London, with people walking past us trying not to stare

or listen, with Gracia screaming and swearing at me, and I stricken with an

impenetrable coldness, violently angry inside but iron-clad outside. After I

left her I went home and was sick. I tried to ring her, but she was never

there; I could not get to her. It happened while I was job-hunting,

flat-hunting, trying to adjust to the death of my father.

Those, then, were the facts, insofar as my choice of words can describe

them. How I reacted to all this is another matter. Nearly everyone has to

suffer the loss of a parent at some point in life, new jobs and flats can be

found in time, and the unhappiness that follows the end of a love-affair

eventually goes away, or is replaced by the excitement of meeting another

person. But for me all these came at once; I felt like a man who had been

knocked down, then trodden on before he could get up. I was demoralized,

bruised and miserable, obsessed with the accumulating unfairness of life and

the crushing mess of London. I focused much of my distemper on London: I

noticed only its bad qualities. The noise, the dirt, the crowds, the expensive

public transport, the inefficient service in shops and restaurants, the delays

and muddles: all these seemed to me symptomatic of the random factors that had

disrupted my life. I was tired of London, tired of being myself and living in

it. But there was no hope in such a response, because I was becoming

inward-looking, passive and self-destructive.

Then, a fortunate accident. Through having to sort out my father's

papers and letters, I canie in contact again with Edwin Miller.

Edwin was a family friend, but I had not seen him for years. My last

memory, in fact, was of him and his wife visiting the house while I was still

at school. I must then have been thirteen or fourteen. Impressions from

childhood are unreliable: I remembered Edwin, and other adult friends of my

parents, with an uncritical sense of liking, but this was second-hand from my

parents. I had no opinions of my own. A combination of schoolwork, adolescent

rivalries and passions, glandular discoveries, and everything else of that

age, must have been making a more immediate impression on me.

It was refreshing to meet him from the vantage of my own adulthood. He

turned out to be in his early sixties, suntanned, wiry, full of an unassumed

friendliness. We had dinner together at his hotel on the edge of Bloomsbury.

It was still early spring, and the tourist season had barely begun, but Edwin

and I were like an island of Englishness in the restaurant. I remember a group

of German businessmen at a table near ours, some Japanese, some people from

the Middle East; even the waitresses who brought us our portions of roast

topside beef were Malaysian or Filipino. All this was emphasized by Edwin's

bluff, provincial accent, reminding me irresistibly of my childhood in the

suburbs of Manchester. I had grown used to the increasingly cosmopolitan

nature of shops and restaurants in London, but it was Edwin who somehow

underlined it, made it seem unnatural. I was aware all through the meal of a

distracting nostalgia for a time when life had been simpler. It had been

narrower, too, and the vague memories were a distraction because not all of

them were pleasant. Edwin was a kind of symbol of that past, and for the first

half-hour, while we were still exchanging pleasantries, I saw him as

representing the background I had happily escaped when I first moved hack to

London.

Yet I liked him too. He was nervous of me--perhaps I also represented

some kind of symbol to him--and compensated for this by too much generosity

about how well I had been doing. He seemed to know a lot about me, at least on

a superficial level, and I presumed he had got all this from my father. In the

end his lack of guile made me own up, and I told him frankly what had happened

to my job. This led inevitably to my telling him most of the rest.

"It happened to me too, Peter," he said. "A long time ago, just after

the war. You'd have thought there were a lot of jobs around then, but the lads

were coming back from the Forces, and we had some bad winters."

"What did you do?"

"I must have been about your age then. You're never too old for a fresh

start. I was on the dole for a bit, then got a job with your dad. That's how

we met, you know."

I didn't know. Another residue of childhood: I assumed, as I had always

assumed, that parents and their friends never actually met but had somehow

always known one another.

Edwin reminded me of my father. Although physically unalike they were

about the same age, and shared some interests. The similarities were mostly my

creation, perceived from within. It was perhaps the flat northern accent, the

intonation of sentences, the manneristic pragmatism of an industrial life.

He was just as I remembered him, but this was impossible. We were both

fifteen years older, and he must have been in his late forties when I last saw

him. His hair was grey, and thin on the crown; his neck and eyes were heavily

wrinkled; there was a stiffness in his right arm, which he remarked on once or

twice. He could not possibly have looked like this before, yet sitting there

in the hotel restaurant with him I was reassured by the familiarity of his

appearance.

I thought of other people I had met again after a period of time. There

was always the first surprise, an internal jolt: he has changed, she looks

older. Then, within a few seconds, the percep tion changes and all that can be

seen are the similarities. The mind adjusts, the eye allows; the ageing

process, the differences of clothes and hair and possessions, are edited out

by the will to detect continuity. Memory is mistrusted in the recognition of

more important identifications. Body-weight might differ, but a person's

height or bone-structure do not. Soon it is as if nothing at all has altered.

The mind erases backwards, re-creating what one remembers.

I knew Edwin ran his own business. After a few years working for my

father he had set up on his own. At first he had taken on general engineering

jobs, but eventually set up a factory that specialized in mechanical valves.

These days his principal customer was the Ministry of Defence, and he supplied

hydraulic valves to the Royal Navy. He had intended to retire at sixty, but

the business was prospering and he enjoyed his work. It occupied the major

part of his life.

"I've bought a little cottage in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border.

Nothing special, but just right for Marge and me. We were going to retire down

there last year, but the place needs a lot of doing up. It's still empty."

"How much work is there to do?" I said.

"Mostly redecorating. The place hasn't been lived in for a couple of

years. It needs rewiring, but that can wait. And the plumbing's a bit

antiquated, you could say."

"Would you like me to make a start on it? I'm not sure I could take on

the plumbing, but I'd have a go at the rest."

It was an idea that was sudden and attractive. An escape from my

problems had presented itself. In my recently acquired hatred of London, the

countryside had assumed a wistful, romantic presence in my mind. Talking about

Edwin's cottage, that dream took on a concrete shape, and I became certain

that if I stayed in London I would only sink further into the helplessness of

selfpity. Everything became plausible to me, and I tried to talk Edwin into

renting me his cottage.

"I'll lend it to you free, lad," Edwin said. "You can have it as long as

you need it. Provided, of course, you do a spot of decorating, and when Marge

and me decide it's time to give it all up, then you'll have to look for

somewhere else to go."

"It'll he for just a few months. Long enough to get myself back on my

feet.""We'll see."

We discussed a few details, but the arrangement was finalized in a

matter of minutes. I could move down there as soon as I liked; Edwin would

mail me the keys. The village of Weobley was less than half a mile away, the

garden would have to be looked at, it was a long way to the nearest mainline

railway station, they wanted white paint downstairs and Marge had her own

ideas about the bedrooms, the phone was disconnected but there was a call-box

in the village, the septic tank would have to be emptied and perhaps cleaned

out. Edwin almost forced the house on me once we had convinced each other it

was a good idea. It was worrying him while it was empty, he said, and houses

were made for living in. He would fix up with a local builder to come in and

repair the plumbing, and do some rewiring, but if I wanted to feel I was

earning my stay I could do as much of the work as I wished. There was only one

proviso: Marge would want the garden done a certain way. They might come down

and visit me at weekends, to lend a hand.

In the days that followed this meeting I began to act positively for the

first time in several weeks. Edwin had given me the spur, and I moved forward

with purpose. Of course I could not move down to Herefordshire straight away,

but from the moment I left him everything I did was directly or indirectly

towards that end.

It took me a fortnight to free myself of London. I had furniture to sell

or give away, books to find a home for, bills to pay and accounts to close. I

wanted to be unencumbered after my move; from now on I would have around me

only the minimum of things I would need. Then there was the actual move; a

rented van and two return trips to the cottage.

Before finally leaving London I made several renewed efforts to locate

Gracia. She had moved, and her former flatmate almost slammed the door in my

face when I called round to the old address. Gracia wanted never to see me

again. If I wrote to her the letter would be forwarded, but I was told not to

bother her. (I wrote to her anyway, but no reply came.) I tried the office

where she had worked, but she had moved from there too. I tried mutual

friends, but either they did not know where she was or else they would not

tell me.

All this made me deeply restless and unhappy, feeling that I was

unfairly treated. It was a stark reminder of my earlier sense that events were

conspiring against me, and much of my euphoria about the cottage was

dispelled. I suppose that I had subconsciously imagined moving to the

countryside with Gracia, that away from the stresses of city life she and I

would not argue, would develop the mature love we had for each other. This

buried hope had remained as I organized the details of my move, but with her

total repudiation of me at the last minute, it was brought home to me that I

was totally alone.

For a few exciting days I had seen myself at a new beginning, but by the

time I was finally settled in the cottage all I could think was that I had

reached an end.

It was a time for contemplation, for inwardness. Nothing was what I

wanted, but all of it had been given to me.

The cottage lay in agricultural countryside, about two hundred yards

down an unmade lane leading off the road between Weobley and Hereford. It was

secluded and private, being surrounded by trees and hedges. The house itself

was on two storeys, slate-roofed, whitewashed, mullion-windowed and

stable-doored. It had about half an acre of garden, running down at the back

to a clean-flowing brook. The previous owners had cultivated fruit and

vegetables, but everything was now overgrown. There were small lawns behind

and in front of the house, and several flowerbeds. By the brook was an

orchard. The trees needed pruning, and all the plants and flowers would have

to be cut back and weeded.

I felt possessive of the cottage from the moment I arrived. It was mine

in every sense except legal ownership, and without meaning to I began to make

plans for it. I imagined weekend parties, my friends driving down from London

to enjoy good country food and rural peace, and I saw myself toughening up for

the rigours of a less civilized existence. Perhaps I would get a dog,

gum-boots, fishing equipment. I determined to learn country crafts: weaving,

woodwork, pottery. As for the house, I would soon transform it into the sort

of bucolic heaven most townsmen could only dream about.

There was much to be done. As Edwin had told me, the wiring was ancient

and inefficient; only two power-sockets worked in the whole house. The pipes

gave out a loud knocking whenever I ran the taps, and there was no hot water.

The lavatory was blocked. Some of the rooms were damp; the entire place,

inside and out, needed repainting. The floor in the downstairs rooms showed

signs of woodworm, and upstairs there was damp-rot in the roof beams.

For the first three days I worked hard at settling in. I opened all the

windows, swept the floors, wiped down shelves and cupboards. I poked a long

piece of wire down the lavatory, and afterwards peered cautiously under the

rusting metal lid of the septic tank. I attacked the garden with more energy

than expertise, pulling up by its roots anything I thought might be a weed. At

the same time, I made myself known to the general store in Weobley, and

arranged for weekly deliveries of groceries to be made. I bought all sorts of

tools and utensils I had never needed before: pliers, brushes, a putty-knife,

a saw, and for the kitchen a few pots and pans. Then the first weekend

arrived. Edwin and Marge came to visit me, and at once my energetic mood

vanished.

It was obvious that Edwin's generosity was not shared by Marge. When

they arrived I realized that Edwin had been made to regret his friendly offer

to me. He stayed apologetically in the background while Marge took control.

She made it clear from the outset that she had her own plans for the cottage,

and they did not include someone like me living there. It was nothing she

said, it was just implicit in her every glance, every comment.

I barely remembered Marge. In the old days, when they had visited us, it

was Edwin who had been dominant. Marge then had been someone who drank tea,

talked about her back trouble and helped with the washing up. Now she was a

plump and prosaic person, full of conversation and opinions. She had plenty of

advice on how to clean the place up, but did none of it herself. In the garden

she did more, pointing out what was to be saved, what to be sacrificed to the

compost heap. Later, I helped them unload the numerous pots of undercoat and

paint they had brought in the car, and Marge explained exactly which colours

were to go on which walls. I wrote it all down, and she checked it through.

There was nowhere they could stay in the house, so they had to take a

room over the pub in the village. On the Sunday morning, Edwin took me aside

and explained that because of a strike of petrol-tanker drivers there were

long queues at the motorway filling stations, and if I didn't mind they would

leave soon after lunch. It was the only thing he said to me all weekend, and I

was sorry.

When they were gone I felt dispirited and disappointed. It had been a

painful, difficult weekend. I had felt trapped by them: my gratitude to Edwin,

my awkward realization that he had got into hot water with Marge because of

it, my continual urges to justify and explain myself. I had had to please

them, and I hated the unctuousness I heard creeping into nw voice when I spoke

to Marge. They had reminded me of the temporary nature of my residence in the

house, that the cleaning up and repairs I was starting were not in the end for

myself, but a form of rent.

I was sensitive to the slightest upset. For three days I had forgotten

my troubles, but after the visit I rehearsed my recent preoccupations,

particularly my loss of Gracia. Her disappearing from my life in such a

way--anger, tears, unfinished sentiments--was profoundly upsetting, especially

after so long a time together.

I started to brood about the other things I had left behind me: friends,

hooks, records, television. I grew lonely, and acutely aware that the nearest

telephone was in the village. I waited illogically for the morning mail to

arrive, even though I had given my new address to only a few friends and

expected to hear from none of them. While in London I had been extensively

aware of the world, through reading a daily newspaper, buying several weekly

magazines, keeping in touch with friends and listening to the radio or

watching television. Now I was cut off from all that. It was through my own

designs, and yet, unreasonably, I missed it all and felt deprived. I could of

course have bought a newspaper in the village, and once or twice I did, but I

discovered my needs were not external. The emptiness was in myself.

As the days passed my gloomy preoccupations intensified. I became

careless of my surroundings. I wore the same clothes day after day, I stopped

washing or shaving and I ate only the simplest and most convenient food. I

slept late every morning, and for many of the days I was plagued by headaches

and a general stiffness in my body. I felt ill and looked ill, although I was

sure there was nothing physically wrong with me.

It was by now the beginning of May, and spring was advancing. Since I

had moved into the cottage the weather had been mostly grey, with occasional

days of light rain. Now, suddenly, the weather improved: the blossom was late

in the orchard, the flowers began to open. I saw bees, hoverflies, a wasp or

two, In the evenings, clouds of gnats hung around the doorways and under the

trees. I became aware of the sounds of birds, especially in the mornings. For

the first time in my life I was sensitive to the mysterious organisms of

nature; a lifetime in city apartments, or uncaring childhood visits to the

countryside, had ill prepared me for the commonplaces of nature.

Something stirred inside me, and I felt restless to be free of my

introspection. Yet it continued, a counterpoint to the other gladness.

In an attempt to purge both the restlessness and the depression, I made

a serious attempt to start work. I hardly knew how I should begin. In the

garden, for instance, it seemed that no sooner had I weeded one patch than

what I had done a few days before became just as overgrown and untidy. In the

house, the work of redecoration was one that had apparently endless

ramifications. It would be a long time before I could start painting, because

there were so many preliminary repairs to make.

It helped me to imagine the results. If I could summon an image of the

garden, pruned, tidied, blooming, then it gave me an incentive to start. To

visualize the rooms newly painted, made clean and tidy, was in a sense half

the work already done. This was a discovery, a step forward.

In the house, I concentrated on the downstairs room where I had been

sleeping. This was a long, large room, running the depth of the house. At one

end, a small window looked out towards the garden, hedge and lane at the

front; at the other end, a much wider window gave a view of the back garden.

I worked hard, encouraging myself with my imaginative vision of how the

room would be by the time I finished. I washed the walls and ceiling, repaired

the crumbling plaster, scrubbed down the woodwork, and then applied two coats

of the white emulsion Edwin and Marge had brought. When the woodwork was

painted, the room was transformed. From a dingy, temporary hovel it had become

a light, airy room in which one could live in style. I cleaned up the

paint-splashes thoroughly, stained the floorboards and polished the windows.

On an impulse I went into Weohley and bought a large quantity of rush matting,

which I spread across the floor.

What most excited me was the discovery that what I had imagined for the

room had come to be. The conception of it had influenced its execution.

I sometimes stood or sat in that room for hours on end, relishing the

cool tranquillity of it. With both windows opened a warm draught passed

through, and at night the honeysuckle that grew beneath the window at the

front released a fragrance that until then I had only been able to imagine

from chemical imitations.

I thought of it as my white room, and it became central to nw life in

the cottage.

With the room completed I returned to my introspective mood, but because

I had had something to do for the last few days, I now found that my thoughts

were more in focus. As I pottered about the garden, as I started the

decoration of the other rooms, I contemplated what I was doing with my life,

and what I had done with it in the past.

I perceived my past life as an unordered, uncontrolled bedlam of events.

Nothing made sense, nothing was consistent with anything else. It seemed to me

important that I should try to impose some kind of order on my memories. It

never occurred to me to question why I should do this. It was just extremely

important.

One day I looked in the bloom-spotted mirror in the kitchen and saw the

familiar face staring hack at me, but I could not identify it with anything I

knew of myself. All I knew was that this sallow, unshaven face with dull eyes

was myself, a product of nearly twenty-nine years of life, and it all seemed

pointless.

I entered a period of self-questioning: how had I reached this state,

this place, this attitude of mind? Was it just an accumulation of bad luck, as

the ready excuse seemed to be, or was it the product of a deeper inadequacy? I

began to brood.

At first, it was the actual chronology of memory that interested me.

I knew the order of my life, the sequence in which large or important

events had taken place, because I had had the universal experience of growing

up. Details, however, eluded me. Fragments of my past life--places I had

visited, friends I had known, things I had accomplished--were all there in the

chaos of my memories, but their precise place in the order of things had to be

worked at.

I aimed initially at total recall, taking, for example, my first year at

grammar school, and from that starting point trying to attach the many

surrounding details: what I had been taught that year, my teachers' names, the

names of other children in the school, where I had been living, where my

father had been working, what books I might have read or films seen,

friendships made or enmities formed.

I muttered to myself as I worked at the decorating, telling myself this

inconsequential, rambling and incoherent narrative, as muddled then as the

life itself must have been.

Then form became more important. It was not enough merely to establish

the _order_ in which my life had progressed, but the relative significance of

each event. I was the product of those events, that learning, and I had lost

touch with who I was. I needed to rediscover them, perhaps relearn what I had

lost. I had become unfocused and diffuse. I could only regain my sense of

identity through my memories.

It grew impossible to retain what I was discovering. I became confused

by having to concentrate on remembering, then retaining it. I would clarify a

particular period of my life, or so I thought, but then in moving on to

another year or another place I would find that either there were distracting

similarities, or I had made a mistake the first time.

At last I realized I should have to write it all down. The previous

Christmas Felicity had given me a small portable typewriter, and one evening I

retrieved it from my heap of possessions. I set up a table in the centre of my

white room. I started work immediately, and almost at once I was discovering

mysteries about myself.

I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,

and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I

_became_ what I wrote.

It was not something I could understand. I felt it on an instinctive or

emotional level.

It was a process that was exactly like the creation of my white room.

That had been first of all an idea, and later I made the idea real by painting

the room as I imagined it. I discovered myself in the same way, but through

the written word.

I began writing with no suspicion of the difficulties involved. I had

the enthusiasm of a child given coloured pencils for the first time. I was

undirected, uncontrolled and entirely lacking in selfconsciousness. All these

were to change later, but on that first evening I worked with innocent energy,

letting an undisciplined flow of words spread across the paper. I was deeply,

mysteriously excited by what I was doing, and frequently read back over what I

had written, scribbling corrections on the pages and noting second thoughts in

the margins. I felt a sense of vague discontent, but this I ignored: the

overwhelming sensation was one of release and satisfaction. To write myself

into existence!

I worked late, and when eventually I crawled into my sleeping-bag, I

slept badly. The next morning I returned to the work, letting the decoration

stay unfinished. Still my creative energy was undiminished, and page after

page slipped through the carriage of the typewriter as if there was nothing

that could ever obstruct the flow. As I finished with them I scattered the

sheets on the floor around the table, imposing a temporary chaos on the order

I was creating.

Inexplicably, I came to a sudden halt.

It was the fourth day, when I had upwards of sixty sheets of completed

draft around me. I knew each page intimately, so impassioned was my need to

write, so frequently had I re-read my work. What lay unwritten ahead had the

same quality, the same need to be produced. I had no doubts as to what would

follow, what would be unsaid. Yet I stopped halfway down a page, unable to

continue.

It was as if I had exhausted my way of writing. I became acutely

self-conscious and started to question what I had done, what I was going to do

next. I glanced at a page at random, and all at once it seemed naïve,

self-obsessed, trite and uninteresting. I noticed that the sentences were

largely unpunctuated, that my spelling was erratic, that I used the same words

over and over, and even the judgements and observations, on which I had so

prided myself, seemed obvious and irrelevant.

Everything about my hasty typescript was unsatisfactory, and I was

stricken by a sense of despair and inadequacy.

I temporarily abandoned my writing, and sought an outlet for my energies

in the mundane tasks of domesticity. I completed painting one of the upstairs

rooms, and moved my mattress and belongings in there. I decided that from this

day my white room would he used solely for writing. A plumber arrived, hired

by Edwin, and he started to fix the noisy pipes, and instal an immersion

heater. I took the interruption as a chance to rethink what I was doing, and

to plan more carefully.

So far, everything I had written relied entirely on memory. Ideally, I

should have talked to Felicity, to see what she remembered, perhaps to fill in

some of the minor mysteries of childhood. But Felicity and I no longer had

much in common; we had argued many times in recent years, most recently, and

most bitterly, after our father's death. She would have little sympathy for

what I was doing. Anyway, it was _my_ story; I did not want it coloured by her

interpretation of events.

Instead, I telephoned her one day and asked her to send me the family

photograph albums. She had taken in most of my father's possessions, including

these, but as far as I knew she had no use for them. Felicity was undoubtedly

puzzled by my sudden interest in this material--after the funeral she had

offered the albums to me, and I had said no--but she promised to mail them to

me. The plumber left, and I returned to the typewriter.

This time, after the pause, I approached the work with greater care and

a desire to be more organized. I was learning to question my subject matter.

Memory is a flawed medium, and the memories of childhood are frequently

distorted by influences that cannot be understood at the time. Children lack a

world perspective; their horizons are narrow. Their interests are egocentric.

Much of what they experience is interpreted for them by parents. They are

unselective in what they see.

In addition, my first attempt had been not much more than a series of

connected fragments. Now I sought to tell a story, and to tell it in such a

way that there would be an overall shape, a scheme to the telling of it.

Almost at once I discovered the essence of what I wanted to write.

My subject matter was still inevitably myself: my life, my experiences,

my hopes, my disappointments and my loves. Where I had gone wrong before, I

reasoned, was in setting out this life chronologically. I had started with my

earliest memories and attempted to grow on paper as I had grown in life. Now I

saw I had to be more devious.

To deal with myself I had to treat myself with greater objectivity, to

examine myself in the way the protagonist is examined in a novel. A described

life is not the same as a real one. Living is not an art, but to write of life

is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and

misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned.

Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.

Throughout childhood, mysteries occur in the world around you. They are

mysteries only because they are not properly explained, or because of a lack

of experience, but they remain in the memory simply because they are so

intriguing. In adulthood, explanations often present themselves, but by then

they are far too late: they lack the imaginative appeal of a mystery.

Which, though, is the more true: the memory or the fact?

In the third chapter of my second version I began to write of something

that illustrated this perfectly. It concerned Uncle William, my father's older

brother.

For most of my childhood I never saw William . . . or Billy, as my

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THEAFFIRMATIONbyChristopherPriestExtractfrom"SailingtoByzantium,"fromW.B.Yeats,CollectedPoems,reprintedwithpermissionofMacmillanPublishingCo.,Inc.,copyright1928byMacmillanPublishingCo.,Inc.,renewed1956byGeorgieYeats;andofM.B.Yeats,AnneYeats,andMacmillanLondonLtd.Copyright1981ChristopherPriestISBN0-6...

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Christopher Priest - The Affirmation

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