Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (10 page)

When my granddaughter Izzy was not much older than I had been then, I took her to a production of
The Importance of Being Earnest
. She knew little of Oscar Wilde, so on the way to the theatre I filled in with some facts – the life, the scandal, the trial, the imprisonment. When I was done she exploded: “I don’t believe you! He was sent to prison because he was
gay
!”

A fifty-year gap, or thereabouts. One adolescent who had never heard of homosexuality; another who didn’t realize that it had once been illegal. A chasm of understanding and assumption.

So by the time I was grown-up I was well aware of homosexuality. There was the occasional scandal – some high-profile figure arrested, some peer or actor whose misfortune was relished and prolonged by the newspapers. But it seems to me that my student generation was still wonderfully naïve. Looking back, I can identify contemporaries both male and female who were undoubtedly gay, but this was never spoken of, or at least not in the circles in which I moved, and in some cases I wonder if they themselves recognized their own nature. And this was the early 1950s; legalization “between consenting adults” was only just over ten years off.

Within half a century the most abiding sexual taboo has vanished. Yes, there are still pockets of homophobia, but by and large same-sex relationships are accepted as a norm. The 2011 census asked if you were in a same-sex civil partnership or, indeed, a registered same-sex civil partnership (along with your ethnic group, if mixed/multiple: White and Black Caribbean, White and Black African, White and Asian . . . one imagined households up and down the land puzzling over their correct definition). The census is the status quo made manifest, or rather, the bureaucratic drive to identify the status quo. In 1951 they were exercised about the fertility and duration of marriage, the dates of cessation of full-time education, and how many outside loos the nation still had; a question compiler of back then, fast-forwarded to 2011 and confronted with registered same-sex civil partnerships, would have gasped in disbelief.

But the census tells it as it is, an unblinking social snapshot, and this is the way we live now, by grace of the extraordinary tidal wave of change unleashed by the legislation of 1967. Change not just in what people may do now, but in how others view them, which seems to me the most remarkable aspect – the overturning of an entire history of prejudice and denial. An upheaval neatly slotted into my lifetime, so that I grew up to the backdrop of one set of assumptions and sign off in a very different society.

A couple of years ago, Izzy yearned for an old-fashioned manual typewriter: “Vintage!” A Smith Corona was found off eBay, and she rejoiced in it until a new ribbon became necessary, and then no one could work out how to change the ribbon. I was summoned: “I can’t believe we’re going to Granny for technical support.” I sat at the machine, looked, did not know how it was done, but lo! my fingers did. They remembered. You lifted out the old reel, put the new one on, thus, you slotted the ribbon through there, and there, pushed that lever, wound the end of the ribbon round the empty reel and caught it on that prong. There! My brain hadn’t remembered, but my fingers had – veterans of manual typewriters. That was how it felt, anyway.

This is an instance of what is called procedural memory, that aspect of memory whereby we remember how to do something. How to ride a bicycle is the example frequently cited, but I prefer my typewriter experience, or Vladimir Nabokov’s of pushing a pram, he being that most refined authority on memory: “You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher’s knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb.” Yes, yes – and a sensation alien to those who have known only the abrupt tilt required for the strollers of today. My first pram, as a very young mother, was one of those sleek majestic cruisers, and my wrists too respond.

There is procedural memory, and then there is semantic memory, which enables us to know that this thing with two wheels is a bike, and that object is a typewriter – the memory facility that retains facts, language, all forms of knowledge without reference to context. And finally, and crucially, there is episodic or autobiographical memory, which gives the context, reminds me that my student bike was dark blue with my initials painted in white, that the baby in the sleek pram once grabbed the shopping, and squeezed ripe tomatoes all over everything. Autobiographical memory is random, nonsequential, capricious, and without it we are undone.

Much of what goes on in the mind is recollection, memory. This is not thought – it is an involuntary procession of images, ranging from yesterday to long ago, interspersed with more immediate signals like: must remember to phone so-and-so, or, what shall I have for lunch? Pure thought is something else – it requires conscious effort and is hard to achieve. The Borges story about the boy cursed – not blessed, cursed – with total recall, with a memory of everything, demonstrates how punishing that would be, how he remembers “not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.” And, crucially, he did not think: “To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract.” It is the mind’s holy grail, thought, and the process hardest to control – erratic, and prone to every kind of hijack. What bubbles up most of the time is memory, no more and no less.

Memory and anticipation. What has happened, and what might happen. The mind needs its tether in time, it must know where it is – in the perpetual slide of the present, with the ballast of what has been and the hazard of what is to come. Without that, you are adrift in the wretched state of Alzheimer’s, or you are an amnesiac.

Amnesia disrupts autobiographical memory. In retrograde amnesia, everything is forgotten that happened before amnesia struck; in anterograde amnesia, memories can no longer be stored, the past is kept, but the future – passing time – cannot become a part of it. In dementia, life takes place in a segment of time without past or future. For mental stability we need the three kinds of memory to be fighting fit – procedural, semantic, autobiographical. And never mind that autobiographical memory is full of holes – it is meant to be like that. There is what we remember, and there is the great dark cavern of what we have forgotten, and why some stuff goes there and something else does not is the territory of the analysts, where I cannot venture. We forget – we forget majestically – and that seems to be an essential part of memory’s function, whether it is the significant forgetting of sublimation, or denial, or whatever, or the mundane daily forgetting of where the car keys have got to, or those elusive names that so challenge us. William James is elegant on that particular problem: “Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap there, but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of a wraith of a name is in it, beckoning in a given direction.” I love the concept of the active gap, the wraith, and know them well: that evasive name of mine has a T somewhere about it, or possibly a P . . . And it is good to feel companionate with a brilliant thinker of a hundred years ago, irritably flogging his mind because he can’t remember what that man he met last week is called. But he doesn’t put forward any theory as to why it is names that are most vulnerable. I am still waiting.

The memory that we live with – the form of memory that most interests me – is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.

That, presumably, is why we spend so much time foraging around in it, in that unconsidered, involuntary way – we are checking it out, touching base, letting it demonstrate that it is still in good working order. This morning, while going about ordinary morning business – shower, eat breakfast, read newspaper – I have visited Seattle, where once years ago I was taken to the fish market, this memory prompted by an item on the radio about fish stocks – I saw those huge Alaskan salmon again, laid out on the slab; I have seen my aunt Rachel, and heard her voice, conjured up by a painting of hers that I pass on the way down to the kitchen; the orange in the fruit bowl there became the one through which I once stuck a skewer, trying to reproduce for four-year-old granddaughter Rachel the turning of the world, she having asked – inconveniently, while I was making the gravy for the Christmas turkey – why it gets dark at night. None of this is sought, hunted down – it just pops up, arbitrary, part of the stockpile. And each memory brings some tangential thought, or at least until that is clipped short by the ongoing morning and its demands. The whole network lurks, all the time, waiting for a thread to be picked up, followed, allowed to vibrate. My story; your story.

Except that it is an entirely unsatisfactory story. The novelist in me – the reader, too – wants shape and structure, development, a theme, insights. Instead of which there is this assortment of slides, some of them welcome, others not at all, defying chronology, refusing structure. The Seattle salmon, my aunt, that Christmas orange are simply shuffled together – make what you like of it.

We do just that, endlessly – it is the abiding challenge and mystery, memory. I have to invoke Sir Thomas Browne again: “Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us . . . To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.” Exquisitely put, but I’d take issue with some of that, which seems to be letting memory off rather lightly – the cutting remembrances are around all right, I’d say, and the stroaks of affliction. It is the view of memory as we’d like it to be, rather than as it is. Or is there a premature glimmer of psychological theories far in the future – ideas about suppressed memories? “Forgetful of evils past . . .” – denial? Suffice it that he is thinking about the operation of memory, and with such style that you can’t but mull over the words, the phrases.

Joseph Brodsky thought memory “a substitute for the tail that we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our movements, including migration. Apart from that, there is something clearly atavistic in the very process of recollection, if only because such a process is never linear.” His own migration from youth as an active opponent of the regime in Soviet Russia, with accompanying punishments, to exile in America as a celebrated poet and commentator, gave him a striking memory trail, though he says, oddly, “I remember rather little of my own life and what I do remember is of small consequence.” But he had considered memory: “What memory has in common with art is the knack for selection, the taste for detail . . . Memory contains precisely details, not the whole picture; highlights, if you will, not the entire show.”

All the best commentary on the working of memory seems to me to share this emphasis on “the knack for selection, the taste for detail.” Nabokov’s “series of spaced flashes” – and I want to get on to them later. Just as the most effective method of memoir writing seems to be to focus on that, to try to reflect the processes of memory itself rather than the artificial plod through time of routine autobiography. When I did that myself, nearly twenty years ago, in a memoir of childhood, it was because I realized that that childhood was there in my mind still, but in the form of these finite glimpses of that time, not sequential but coexisting, each of them succinct, clear, usually wordless, and conjuring up still those frozen moments of a time and a place. Most people remember childhood in that way, I think, and in old age these assorted shards in the head seem to become sharper still; they assert themselves when a conversation you had last week has been wiped, along with a friend’s name and the whereabouts of your transit pass. Childhood memories have a high visual content – I certainly found that, as Egypt surged up in bits and pieces – the buff and brown bark of a eucalyptus tree, the brilliant green of a praying mantis, the white of roosting egrets on a tree by the Cairo Nile. Coleridge noted this feature, thinking about the nature of memory, and wondered if the visual quality was enhanced because of the lack of a spoken element: “I hold that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling
states of feeling
than in trains of ideas; that the recollection of early childhood in latest old age depends on and is explicable by this.” And also, surely, because of the novelty, the fresh vision of the physical world – Wordsworth’s “Splendour in the Grass” – when things are seen for the first time, the imprint that remains.

This would seem to account also for the capricious nature of time. It accelerates, it has broken into a gallop by the time you are old – a day then has nothing of the remembered pace of childhood days, which inched ahead, stood still at points, ambled from lunchtime to teatime. And laid down, every now and then, one of those indestructible moments of seeing. William James described this effect: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, the retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

The collapsing years of old age are indeed a source of dismay. They disconcert. What has happened to time, that it whisks away like this? And such answers as the psychologists have come up with seem to home in on the idea that the experience of time is linked to what is going on in our consciousness. Intensity of experience is a factor: traumatic events appear to be more recent than they in fact are. Intense expectation can make time pass more slowly; I can still remember the agonizing crawl of a week when I was waiting to go to Oxford station to meet a young man I was in love with – four more days . . . three . . . days that were each a week long. Nearly sixty years ago.

When you are busy, time scampers – a truism, but one that we all recognize. “A week is a long time in politics” – a cliché, but one that nicely suggests the flexible quality of time, its ability to expand, as it were, on demand. A political week can stretch to accommodate gathering events: more and more can happen, in obligingly baggy days, until on Sunday the prime minister resigns.

That is expansion of time. The old-age experience is the opposite – the sense of having entered some new dimension in which the cantering days and weeks are quite out of control. In some ways this puzzles me. Intensity of experience is not lost – there are still the bad times and the points of great pleasure, but they seem to have lost their capacity to arrest time, to make it pause, hover. On the other hand, memory has acquired some merciful ability to close up, to diminish the worst passages of more recent life. For me, the awful summer and autumn of Jack’s illness – the hospital months, the last weeks at home – are now not time but a series of images I cannot lose. My own three and a half months of pain, four years ago, are also not months at all, but just the memory of a state of being, of how it was.

In childhood, a year is a large proportion of your life. Not so when you are eighty. That must have a lot to do with it. We old are cavalier about years; they have lost the capacity to impress. When you are eight, to be nine is a distant and almost unimaginable summit; Christmas is always far away, it will never come. For the old, it is a question of time’s dismaying acceleration; we would prefer it to slow down now, to give us a chance to savor this glorious spring – we may not see so many more – while anticipation is now welcome and there’s no rush for that next birthday, thank you. And maybe it is precisely because we find ourselves on this unstoppable conveyor belt that we are so much concerned with recollection, with reviewing all those memory shards in the head, brushing up time past, checking it out.

Much of my own childhood was spent in a garden, and I find that – miraculously, it seems – I can, today, seventy plus years later, draw a precise map of that garden, more or less to scale. Not only can I see it – the eucalyptus and casuarina trees, the rose arbor round the basin with the statue of Mercury, the water garden with the arum lilies and bamboo – but I know exactly how it was laid out. This was a very English garden, created by my mother, but in Egypt, a few miles outside Cairo. And I spent so much time in it because I was a solitary only child, and did not go to school. But what surprises me now is not that I have all these images of it in my head, but that I have also a map of it, which I can reproduce on paper (I know – I’ve done it). I can make a plan of this large garden – the drive leading up to the house, flanked by the lawn and the pond with the weeping willow, the rose garden, the kitchen garden, my secret hiding place in the hedge, the wild bit at the end where there are persimmon bushes that the mongooses raid – no uncertainties, no section uncharted.