A woodpecker just when I needed one

I rest a lot in my bedroom. I read there too and also watch garden birds, I have a chair at the window. It is my meditation, my way of being peaceful, my way of 'working out'. It's restorative, I lose myself, nothing else matters. I have had a dreadful few weeks with one thing and another. Last night, I woke up around three with a brutal sinus headache, I am very prone to them and can no longer use steroidal sprays because of ocular hypertension (discovered in 2009 when using steroid drops for uveitis), so I swallowed a handful of Sudafed and Ibuprofen. It's the kind of pain that can make you cry. I had a scan many years ago and have chronic inflammation, possibly from an over-zealous use of mothballs. I declined surgery. Today, I woke early with the pain still on the fringes but bearable. A few hours later, I saw a woodpecker - an adult male great spotted - I've never seen one before. I had on my old glasses and saw a flash of red at feeder, wondered why goldfinches were eating peanuts and when I held up my camera - always in my bedside drawer -  I realised it was a woodpecker. I managed to nab it before it flitted off. It felt auspicious. Today is also the anniversary of my father's death, he died in 1972, and although for many years it was not a date I ever thought about,  since I've  been writing about him, the date has much more resonance. A friend sent me this, the symbolism of a woodpecker. 

Autobiographical novel: 'a prosthetic voice' (Alexander Chee). And (films of) Guru Dutt

I recently dipped into Alexander Chee's collection of essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I find reading about writing to be reassuring: you learn things that you already knew but didn't know you knew. It's the kind of book where you want to write down fragments and keep them close to your heart. Chee describes his first (autobiographical) novel as a 'prosthetic voice', which gives voice to those things too difficult to speak about, in his case, sexual abuse. His image of prosthesis is, I think,  quite brilliant.

And so while I wrote this novel, it didn't feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel. The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

The State of Me - hard to believe it was published ten years ago, its message as relevant today - wasn't for me a fictionalisation  about something too difficult to talk about, but rather a representation of the anger and injustice that people with ME have felt for decades due to a wilful reframing/misrepresentation of the illness by a core of the medical/political establishment. The novel had to be written, but the difficulties in writing it were much more the physical/cognitive challenges of ME than an inability to voice the subject. (I also, of course, faced the structural challenges of writing a novel that face all writers, ill or not.)

Chee's concept of  'prosthetic voice' does, though, resonate for me when I go to the project/novella which is partly about my late Pakistani father, the project that often has me thinking of Bernard MacLaverty's description of writing as 'a way of trying out different fathers'. This is exactly what I am doing - when I can - and something in me is a little broken the whole time. The theme of my novella is 'not knowing'.

It's fascinating to learn about writers/artists who would have been contemporaries of my father. I've just discovered Guru Dutt, an Indian director and actor, famous for Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) and Chaudhvin Ka Chand. Dutt died aged only thirty-nine in 1964 from probable suicide, he had mixed sleeping pills and alcohol.  He had attempted suicide before. Knowing Dutt's life story made it even more emotional watching Pyaasa, the story of a shunned poet, who only finds success when he is (wrongly) presumed dead. And Kaagaz Ke Phool, a melodramatic tale of a director's flop (prescient as Kaagaz Ke Phool also flopped) - had me in tears at the end. Real tears rolling down my cheeks.  When we respond to films we are, of course, not responding to just the fictional narrative but to the narratives in our own lives. I especially love the framing of the film - the opening and closing scenes - with Suresh Sinha as an old man looking back on his life.

I thought of Saddat Hasan Manto and wondered if he had ever met Dutt in Bombay (Manto left his beloved Bombay for Lahore shortly after partition). When googling Manto and Dutt, I came across this review, which likens Guru Dutt's Pyaasa to Nandita Das's recent biopic Manto. Manto and Dutt certainly shared sensibilities, a concern for those in the margins, those disenfranchised, in Manto's case specifically those harmed by Partition (on both sides).

Manto was seven years older than my father. Dutt was six years younger than my father. All were in Bombay in 1947. My father was not working in film, or as a writer, he was a medical student, who had interrupted his studies to join the Indian Air Force during the Second World War. What these three  men would come to have in common was an addiction to alcohol, an addiction tragically implicated in all of their deaths. They were not old men when they died, Manto was forty-two, my father was fifty-three (I was eight). I fancifully allow myself to imagine the three of them meeting up in Bombay before Partition, wondering what they would have spoken about.

I've discovered that Nasreen Munni Kabir made a Channel 4 documentary  in 1989 called In Search of Guru Dutt. I have ordered her book on Dutt. The beautiful and luminous Waheeda Rehman appears in all three films mentioned above. I understand that she and Dutt had an  affair, which ended his marriage to Geeta Dutt.  Geeta Dutt was also the hugely talented playback singer for Rehman's songs. Geeta, I have read, had a breakdown and became alcoholic after Dutt's death. She died in 1972, leaving behind their three children, two sons and a daughter, Nina (Nina was just a baby when her father died). It is heartbreaking that Tarun Gutt, their eldest son also took his own life and Arun Dutt - who was involved in preserving his father's legacy - died of alcohol-related illness in 2014.

Having now also seen Chaudhvin Ka Chand I am left with a huge nostalgia for a period in Indian film-making in 1950s I did not even live through. I think the melodrama, the heightened reality, the muted gorgeousness of monochrome all tap into a process in my head and heart (the not knowing). The wonderful singer for Guru Dutt, in these three films, is Mohammed Rafi, who died aged fifty-five (though it is Hemant Kumar who sings 'Jane Woh Kaise Log' in Pyaasa). I also loved the actor 'Johnny Walker', who brought humanity and slapstick (much needed, to balance the sadness) in his role as the masseur in Pyaasa. I have read Johhny Walker and Guru Dutt were great friends in real life.

Reading Chee's essays and watching Dutt's films, something collided gently in me - it reinforced how important art and film and fiction are in understanding our lives, both for those who create the art and those who consume. Making the hard stuff bearable.

'Trying out different fathers' - my thoughts on Omar Sharif

Had tears today, hearing that Omar Sharif has died. Sad for his family, but happy for him that he no longer suffers the ravages of dementia. To me, he is more than the handsome Egyptian actor who glittered in Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.

I grew up hearing that my father looked like Omar Sharif. My father was my mother's first husband, she met him in the sixties when he was a doctor and she was a nurse, a Mills & Boon romance without the happy ending. My father died in tragic circumstances when I was eight. My memories of him are hazy. He looks handsome in photos, and I can definitely see the resemblance (though I think Omar had the edge). When I first saw Dr Zhivago - aged thirteen? - I couldn't watch Omar Sharif without thinking of  my father. The tram scene had me weeping, and not just because Yuri  doesn't get to see Julie Christie again. I've since seen Dr Zhivago many times over the years, and the tram scene is me watching my father dying, which sounds fanciful, but that is the truth. My memory also tells me that I first saw Dr Zhivago in Karachi, when we visited in 1974 (after my father had passed away), but that is not true, I watched it a few years later at the cinema in Glasgow.

And I still can't even listen to Lara's Theme without welling up.

In May, when the media revealed that Omar Sharif had dementia I had a lump in my throat, having recently lost my beloved stepfather to dementia. To know that this brilliant actor now had dementia  touched me. And when my stepfather passed away, five months ago, I was unable to contemplate even a sentence of the novella I've been slowly, slowly writing, based on my father. My head was full of Greenland, there was no room for Karachi (my father was my father for eight years, my stepfather was my father for thirty-eight years).

The character based on my father is called Omar, I'd juggled many names but Omar fits best. Recently, I've ventured back to the novella when I have 'spare' energy - creative writing is much more physically and mentally demanding that you would think - but I'm a different person writing as I no longer have a stepfather, there is a huge gap where he should be. Moreover, fictionalising my father has its own griefs and complexities: I  think of Bernard MacLaverty who has spoken of 'writing as a way of trying out different fathers'.

I say to my mother sometimes, Did he really look like Omar Sharif? Yes, she says, he did.

RIP, Omar Sharif.  In the meantime, I will try out different fathers.

*I watched Monsieur Ibrahim last year, I recommend it. ** The character is no longer Omar, but I am not saying who he is now, don't want to jinx.

Discovering Anita Desai and Malcolm Lowry

I hadn't read anything by Anita Desai before, but just loved her gorgeous, short novel Clear Light of Day, a collection of disappointments and sadnesses, sprinkled with joy as two sisters Bim and Tara look back on their childhood in India in 1940s and their lives post-Partition. Here's a short clip of Desai  talking about Indian writers writing in English. And a longer interview here. Also, I recently discovered the writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), this Oscar-nominated documentary from 1976, 'Volcano, An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry' is on YouTube. It's a compelling and disturbing portrayal of the debauchery and devastation of alcoholism and the cycle of perseverance and rejection and success in the writing life. I couldn't watch this film in one go, it's a disquieting experience, I watched it over a few nights,  the soundtrack is jangling and alienating. One of Lowry's friends interviewed, years after his death, wipes away a tear saying: 'The idea of such a talented man going so wrong... He could cope as long as he was drunk...' This resonates,  thinking of my own father.

Fabrication (in fiction and medicine)

It's something of a relief to be finished Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Man in Love (I finished a week ago) though I would still recommend it. There are four volumes of the series (of six) still to be translated. I skipped the first one as I don't much want to read about alcoholic fathers, especially when I am trying to write about it (have been sporadically for the last year, a kind of novella-memoir). I feel the same way, these days, about alcoholic father narratives as I do about illness narratives, jaded, but I recognise we still have a desire and need to read - and write - such narratives. My favourite quote from trawling through 520 pages of A Man in Love - and it is a trawl but worth it for the gems - is when he is talking about potential research for a novel:

"… just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous, I reacted in a physical way."

And at the end of this memoir/novel, he tells us:

"The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet."

Knausgaard is wholly self-obsessed - and not as interesting or original in his 'profound' thoughts as he thinks he is - and neither is he afraid to use dreadful clichés - but his narrative/voice is oddly compelling - and comforting. He has certainly pulled something off, although I am still unsure of what exactly it is. And I love this comment: You write novels because something is broken. 

*

A great article from Dr Nigel Speight in the Saudi Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences, making some excellent points about the politics and history of ME. He notes that in severe cases:  Multiple symptoms are the norm, and severely affected cases may have more than 20 symptoms. I remember when I first got ill in 1982 I seemed to have a new symptom every day, I would write them down to keep track (this was, of course, the beginning of the writing process but I could not have known at the time):

"Her symptoms have signed a lease behind her back and moved in permanently. They like living in her muscle tissue. It’s nice and warm there." (The State of Me) 

Dr Speight also refers to the scoundrels McEvedy and Beard, the psychiatrists who famously claimed that the Royal Free outbreak in 1955 had been hysteria without even examining the patients (1970), and incomprehensibly influenced others. Dr Byron Hyde, in his very interesting book, describes how when he met McEvedy years later he had justified the hysteria claim by saying it made for 'an easy PhD'. You couldn't make it up. (A shorter version of Dr Speight's article is here via ME Association.)

Manto & translation, & Pakistani fathers

This is Saadat Hasan Manto's Mottled Dawn, Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, published by Penguin India. The cover is exquisite, it came the other day. The painting is 'Melting Wit' (2005, acrylic on canvas) by N. S. Harsha. I'm not sure if the clowns are bleeding or melting. Harsha says: 'I fill my work with gaps and loose ends; I want to lead and mislead the viewer. Ambiguity makes a picture very exciting'.

I've already read 'Toba Tek Singh' online - the first story in this anthology -  and have also read the introduction by Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose own short story 'A Spoiled Man' from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is one of the saddest stories I've ever read. I look forward to the rest of Manto's  deceptively simple yet brutal and sometimes funny stories about Partition. It struck me that Manto was only seven years older than my Indian-born Pakistani father, who migrated to Karachi briefly in the late forties before coming to the west to work as a doctor. Manto migrated to Lahore from Bombay, but he was never happy there. Both of them died as not old men through alcohol excess.

These stories have been translated by Khalid Hasan and I was interested to read that Aatish Taseer - the estranged son of  the assassinated Pakistani politician (himself the nephew of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz ) - does not approve of Hasan's translations, suggesting he lacks 'the simplicity, speed and vitality' of the original prose. He has translated Manto himself in an anthology of Selected Stories (Random House). I downloaded these last month and have read a couple. This reviewer is critical of Taseer's criticism of Hasan as a translator. As I only know a few words in Urdu - banana, water and thank you - I have to trust that whoever has translated has done a fine job.

And, on translation, here is a list of the best books of 2012.

Books & truth & blood

I was truly sad to read about Candia McWilliam's struggle with a rare eye condition. I met her in the mid-nineties, she was funny and beautiful and kind. I can't recall now what writing I showed her. I've ordered her memoir from the library, though I see the memoir/fiction debate has been sparked again. It seems to me that AS Byatt wants to have her cake and eat it (though she admits she is 'tarnished' in this). Memoir is about truth or there is no point, but I suppose it can never be entirely straight as it is based on memory. Fictionalised memoir is a different matter.

Am so happy to see that blood donation from people with ME has been permanently banned from November 1. For me, this is not about the possibility of XMRV involvement, this is about the illness being accorded its rightful neuroimmune status by the blood bank. My energy is horrible just now, I'm like a calculator, ruthlessly measuring out tasks (I'm aways like a calculator, but at the moment I'm counting out in fractions of fractions). I'm definitely experiencing a sliding back this past couple of months.

A convenient myth?

In an article on her alcoholic father, and the horrors that children of alcoholic parent(s) face behind closed doors, writer Isabel Ashdown says: It's convenient to think of these families as hailing from the "Asbo classes", but that's just a convenient myth. So often, these families look just like us. Hmm. I have an acute understanding of the alcoholic, charming in public, a monster in private, but I find it hard to believe that anyone buys into such a myth or believes such a myth still exists.