Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005)

Colette lent me Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters after a conversation about homelessness. She knew that I had worked in a direct access hostel in Cambridge for a few months between college and uni.

I learnt a lot in that short space. The fate of Ruth Wyner and John Brock could easily have been mine. Working, living and socialising with homeless people for a year certainly made uni seem like an astonishing privilege.

Homelessness has nothing to do with having a roof over your head. It is to do with banging your head against a brick wall called society. The term ‘chaotic homeless’ – for those who can’t simply be doled out help and services to make everything better – was new to me, but I recognised the existence.

Like Stuart, Jesse Warren was a witty, intelligent, thoughtful and determined person. The chaos wasn’t of his making, though he certainly did some daft things from time to time (as we all do). There was a demon sitting on his shoulders and its claws never let go. Just making breakfast could be a massive challenge. People would yell at him in sandwich shops, claiming he was trying to rob them, just because he had a Big Isssue vendor’s badge. He called it ‘The Big Tissue’.

I learned that sometimes, you just can’t make a difference for the person you love. It must have been ten times harder for his mum.

Masters makes no claims to have solved anything, his book has no ‘message’. The honesty in reporting his feelings of anger, frustration and anxiety, as well as fascination and compassion for Stuart, builds a rapport with the reader. As does the performance of his bookish middle-class persona confronted with a man who cannot spell his biographer’s name, and tells him the story he’s writing is shit.

Stuart’s insistence that there can be no ‘explanation’ for his life, no reduction to the abuse by carers, violence or drugs, gives the narrative a provisional feel and is perhaps the most humane thing about it, giivng it a resonance beyond homelessness to other encounters between those who inhabit edges and those who are more firmly cemented into the wall.

Saying goodbye

We got the bus from Anglia to St. Paul’s Walden today. Sunshine through bluebell woods.

A sad occasion but also a fitting celebration. Very good to get a sense of the other sides to Justin apart from Uni and to all be there together.

At the wake all the classic motorcycle riders revved their engines together. It was the most glorious sound.

Justin Wand

A meeting up after classes today to be with other staff and students who knew Justin. I thought that when I saw his friends and tutors it would seem more real, but it still just feels a bit strange, like we’ve slipped into a parallel world.

Everyone waiting for it to sink in.

Glad that his sense of humour was in the room with us today.

The funeral is on Friday in Hitchin, and there’ll be tributes to him on April 30th at the Literary Society shindig.

Personal literary history

This week’s set task for the new Creative Writing MA students is to write a one-page, informal personal literary history. I don’t like setting tasks I haven’t done myself, and it’s a nice excuse to reflect on books much loved (and a little hated).

For many years I thought I was going to grow up to become Bertie Wooster. It gradually dawned on me that this was not the case during a year of working as a waitress and home help after finishing my BA. I needed a break from study, to be sure that an MA was the right thing and not an automatic next step. Instead of throwing bridge rolls at game pies down at The Drones, or extricating myself from being engaged to improving young ladies, I was working casual bar shifts until 3am and living in Longsight in a house with no heating and a broken bathroom window. At secondary school I would religiously skive PE and sit in the library reading P.G. Wodehouse, and have been unable to entirely relinquish his effect on forming my expectations of the world.

The earliest stories I remember are Tiger Voyage and The Butterfly Ball. My Dad would read the first of these to me and my brother on a regular basis. There’s a close escape from a volcano explosion at which point the duvet would inevitably erupt to resounding shrieks. It’s a story about the amazing adventures of a Tiger gentleman and his son, beneath whose sedate and ordinary appearance there lie brushes with death and various exotic encounters. Picking the book up again recently I noticed that it was riddled with assumptions about class and race and was torn between wanting to deconstruct the tale and wishing away my years of politically correct education.

The Butterfly Ball is a series of songs or poems that I used to listen to over and over again, on a cassette tape with Michael Horden and Judi Dench doing many of the voices. The Ball itself hardly features – we meet various characters who for one reason or another haven’t been invited or miss the occasion due to distractions or mishaps. The music is exquisitely cheesy in that way that only children’s entertainment from the 1970s can be.

Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room made a huge impression on me. Even though the character Myra was living in quite a different situation – suburban America as compared to an East Anglian village – there was something hugely compelling about her situation against the world. Perhaps it was because she had no original sense of shame. Years later I met Christy Ann Conlin and read her novel Heave, which in terms of a female character’s struggle against society’s expectations is an equivalent of The Women’s Room for a later generation, confronting addiction and mental illness. Heave gave me churning knots in my stomach. It is one of the best and bravest books I have ever read.

I spent a year reading Camus and Sartre on my own instead of French lessons, at the age of 15-16, and nearly went mad. There was something irresistible about the thought processes of Antoine Roquentin in particular, and the sense of the physical world on the verge of erupting into seething chaos and hostility was too infectious.

At sixth form, in the first year of A-level English, we were set Ulysses and I still have my first copy with BOLLOCKS scrawled over the opening page of episode three, tearing though the paper. It was unbearably frustrating being asked to read something that I couldn’t begin to make sense of. But the idea that the ordinary everyday world is waiting for us to recognise it as art, as orchestrated accident, has haunted me ever since. That moment when pieces of paper scuttle around like leaves and the advertising letter men walk past often comes to mind in the middle of a city, with a feeling of excitement in the knowledge that art can be found as much as made.

Perhaps the true inheritors of modernism are today’s graphic novels. The Filth by Grant Morrison and Gary Erskine is marvellous, grotesque, hilarious and disturbing. Don’t read it!

Back to reality

In three months my luxurious sabbatical year will come to an end and I’ll be returning to my post at Anglia Ruskin University, teaching English Literature and Creative Writing.

This blog is a way for me to communicate with students and colleagues in an informal way about my interests in poetry, science and imagination. It’s also a collecting box for ideas, contacts and resources that I’d like to pursue.