It is hard not to be introspective in Autumn, that most changeable of seasons, and most melancholic. Autumn, which forces us to confront death in life. In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Spring and Fall’, the speaker comforts a young child, Margaret, who is ‘gríeving / Over Goldengrove unleaving’.1 The speaker predicts that as she grows older, Margaret will encounter ‘such sights colder’ and though she does not yet know it, she is truly mourning herself, and the inevitable mortality of mankind. ‘It ís the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.’ My father used to read me this poem when I was sad at this time of year as a child, which along with his propensity to play Leonard Cohen and the spoken word of T.S. Eliot on tape, probably explains a lot. I think about it every autumn, as I have my breath taken away by weeks of red gold foliage, then watch it begin to fall.
What is the weight of a life? How do we hold it in our hands, when it beats like a heart or falls like a leaf in November? It’s a question that haunts the pages of the fiction I’ve been reading this season; the second instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. How we become who we are and relate to one another, how we strive to understand the human condition, the seasons of a life which are bound up with the seasons of our planet. How we defy or make peace with our own insignificance. There are no answers to these questions; there are only considerations. To quote another great poet (Lana Del Rey), we are born to die — though the inevitability doesn’t make life any less meaningful, any less beautiful. Recognising that we’re all just specks of dust at the dead end of the universe is overwhelming, terrifying even, but it can put things in perspective — the small scale as the big scale, to love and respect one another and the world as the most important fact of all.
With that out of the way, here’s what I’ve been doing, thinking, and reading this autumn - aptly my birth season, which wakes brightly to a golden dawn and fades into gloomy melancholy by the evening, and which is best swallowed with a single glass of wine and a warm meal, quietly eaten.
Reading on the Tube
There is something very sexy about reading on your commute. Or there would be, if you had the space to turn the pages, and fresh air in your face rather than a gilet-clad gentleman’s sweaty underarm. I would argue it’s worth it, though, for the extra forty minutes of reading time it affords.
To accommodate the problems of space, both in my bag and the carriage, I’ve turned to slender paperbacks, usually from the classic or rediscovered vintage shelves, as slight and powerful as a single breath. My most recent commute reads, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, could not have been better selected for my introspective autumnal mood. Both novels present a human life stripped back to its bare fundamentals to consider the conditions in which that life can survive. Each of them questions, incessantly, the position of the individual human life in relation to class, race, gender, experience, and the species as a whole.
Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, written shortly before its enigmatic author’s death, is a novella with thirteen titles. It is strange and luminous, it is unexplainable in every way. It is the tale of impoverished Macabéa, a typist in the slums of mid-twentieth century Rio, a girl whose life is abject and lived close to the bone. To the (fictional) narrator, middle-aged male Rodrigo S.M., she is inexplicable, ‘incompetent for life’, her story ‘almost nothing’ and more an ‘absence’ than a person. The bare facts of her life and death are sketched out in under a hundred pages, punctuated with narrative (explosions) as the seemingly omniscient Rodrigo attempts to make sense of the wonder and delight Macabéa experiences when she has nothing, is nothing. ‘The only thing she wanted was to live…Maybe she thought there was a little bitty glory in living.’ It is hard to say more than this about The Hour of the Star; like Macabéa herself, an enigma even to he who writes her life, its glorious strangeness has to be read to be believed.
First published in 1995, I Who Have Never Known Men opens in a subterranean cage where thirty-nine women and one child are being held prisoner by a group of faceless male guards bearing whips and guns. They do not know why they are there, nor where they are, and have few memories of the events leading to their imprisonment (just fire, screaming, and then a long drug-induced stupor). Their days are spent sitting, repeating stories about their old lives as typists, shop assistants, wives, and debating different ways to cook their meagre rations. The child is different. The child thinks, and it is this merest of acts which begins to awake the women from their haze. When an unexplained alarm leads the guards to vanish at meal time, leaving the door to the cage open, the women enter an unfamiliar, inhospitable world which is as much a prison as the cage they have escaped from.
Harpman’s language, translated from the French, is as stark as this barren landscape, her story as stripped back and bare. This is apocalyptic sci-fi, perhaps (the women wonder whether they are still on Earth), but it is defined by the absence of violence, threat, action, intrigue. Like Macabéa, the nameless child at its heart is sparsely drawn, more a absence than a person. Like The Hour of the Star, this is a novel about the human life — the female life — reduced to its bare biological essentials, about who a person becomes when they are removed from all social influences, when they are at heart alone.
The moment of finishing the novel feels like finishing a meditation, a clean cold emptiness. I scroll through reviews and Reddit threads which do not untangle the threads of my thoughts but threaten to cut them. ‘This would make a great video game’, someone says, in a forum where people guess at the meaning of Harpman’s world. Others criticise the novel for its lack of clarity, its obstinate refusal of a resolution. Where do the guards go? Why are the women locked up? Why is the child the only child? Is this even Earth? The reviewers begin to sound like the women themselves, in those early moments of manic questioning before they begin to realise it is futile to beg for answers from a world that offers you none.
Neither of these novels will provide answers. Both will leave you hollowed out, grasping for more. Neither will leave you alone for a long, long time.
But they will make you look sexy and enigmatic when you read them on the Tube.
Returning to Hilary Mantel
There are very few authors I can truly say changed my life, but Hilary Mantel is one of them. I credit her French Revolution epic A Place of Greater Safety (another gift from my father, thanks dad) with opening my eyes to the potential of history. For the first time, the past wasn’t just dry words on a dusty page but living, breathing, embodied. Perhaps I shouldn’t be admitting this as a historian-in-training, but bar a few classes here and there, A Place of Greater Safety remains the sum total of my knowledge of the French Revolution. Yet it is Mantel’s non-fiction, her essays and biographical works, which mean the most to me. One of her LRB essays was a foundational influence behind my Masters research, while her memoir Giving Up The Ghost has had profound impacts on my own identity as a writer, woman, and disabled person.2
Perhaps that makes it surprising when I confess that until the summer of ‘22, I had never ventured to explore the work for which Mantel is best known, the Wolf Hall trilogy. Even more surprising, when you consider that I’m an early modernist. I finally tumbled into Wolf Hall one week last summer, when the temperatures ran high and my fever was higher thanks to yet another positive Covid test. I raced through it, caught in its own fever, and even a year on I’ll occasionally catch glimpses of the story replayed in my mind — the infamous opening, set not far from where I grew up, the lives and deaths of the following pages. The story — or perhaps the Covid — wiped me out, and it’s taken me over a year to pick up the second volume, Bring Up The Bodies, which has only confirmed that Mantel was a master of the written word. Each sentence is crafted to be intimate yet inaccessible, just as her Cromwell is; the novel is both gripping and rich with a depth of detail rarely seen in bestselling historical fiction. You feel as if you are living the drama though the players are long buried, that the heavy atmosphere of the 1530s hangs over you like a storm. As the novel veers to its conclusion, the execution of Anne Boleyn, you anticipate a release but there is none — the tension just keeps building. Do I have the physical and emotional strength to read the final book right away? I think not, though I want to race on. The Mirror and the Light has sat unread on my parents’ bookshelf since it came out — neither of them can bear the ending they know is coming — and now I have joined them. I too cannot bear the ending, for Cromwell and for Mantel, who died last year. I have just bought her posthumously published A Memoir of My Former Self, but I want to preserve her words. There is still much I have not read, perhaps I will be rationing them out for the rest of my life.
Listening to strangers
Speaking of reading on the train. I’ve been spending a fair bit of time alone lately, travelling to and from work or researching for my PhD application — though the devastating British Library shutdown makes the latter difficult. Usually, I’ll keep my headphones firmly in, but lately I’ve found myself easily distracted by the everyday conversation which cuts through the quiet. Whether its one-sided phone calls, cryptic to the outside ear, couples arguing, or friends gossiping, I can’t stop listening to strangers. It’s annoying, it’s distracting, but it’s incredibly compelling.
As I write this section, I’m sitting on an Avanti train to Manchester, listening to a group of women chatter and gossip about their friends, husbands, children. They’re a former NCT group trailing both grown children (absent) and babies (present), and they are loud. I am trying to read Volume I of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but my focus keeps straying to the important topics of whether Year 8 Ellie should take alcohol to a party, or if Jason the lazy husband has a new job. They discuss BeReal going off with the manic desperation of people trying to understand their children, to regain some sense of youthful cool.
It is incredibly distracting (did I mention the Foucault!) but I do wonder how many times I’ve been on the other end of this interaction, how many times my own joys and sorrows and banal inanities have been fodder for some bored commuter’s train journey. Whether the man on the table next to me at the Wellcome cafe last Thursday was disturbed by my conversation about male impotence in the early modern era, whether the tired crowd on the Piccadilly Line caught my argument with my mum. Especially when you’re speaking on the phone, when you’re technically alone, performance and privacy collide. We exist with an audience; that which was once most private is now public, even when we don’t think it is. There’s something both beautiful and sinister about it, that insistent ignorance in the face of a thousand potential listeners-in, the willingness to continue narrating your life for others, no matter how boring, no matter how loud.
Thinking about faith
As anyone with one foot in the world of the internet knows, in the 2020s, religion is in vogue. One day someone is a niche Twitter micro-celebrity, the next day they’re posting about the fine detail of the Resurrection and the importance of modest dress. It’s really easy to mock these people, to criticise the repressive social strictures they embrace whilst pointing out the hollowness of their aestheticised engagement with faith (a la ‘Tradcath E-Girl Summit’), but I do think there’s a deeper and more valid reason that religion is having a moment right now. Exhausted by our hyper-individualist capitalist society, its atomising technology and increasingly policed public spaces, in the wake of a mass pandemic with which we have still not reckoned and in the face of climate catastrophe, people are desperate for connection, community, and consolation.
I’ve been meaning to go back to church for years now, but I’ve kept finding excuses. Not enough time, too busy, haven’t done my research on the right place. Living in Oxford, I was very aware of the religious history and atmosphere of the city, but also its contemporary religious struggles, namely the controversy over the Oxford Safe Churches project, which sought to provide transparency over which churches accepted and welcomed queer Christians.3 I stopped going to church as a young teenager coming to terms with my own sexuality and politics, when I felt afraid of condemnation and ostracism were I to be myself, even though I attended a liberal London church with my family, which probably would have been accepting. I couldn’t square Christianity’s public image with my sense of self, so I stopped practicing, and told myself I’d only been pretending to believe.
Yet I am a spiritual person, and I do have faith. I’m just not sure what in. My philosophy is one of connection. As I suggested earlier in this piece, I like to believe — I’ve always believed — that despite the confused briefness of our tiny human lives, we were put on Earth for a reason, and the very fact of our humanity is no small coincidence. That we all have a purpose, and are all interconnected, and though in the grand scheme of things, we have an inconsequential amount of time on Earth, that time matters. Perhaps that is why, though I still reject doctrine and dogma, I crave the community and stability of faith based practices, the bolstering certainty they may bring. And so I find myself agonising.
I’ve promised my mother I’ll attend Midnight Mass with her on Christmas Eve, but I’ve got a track record of promising and failing to show. Something about returning to the church I attended as a child, now an adult with aging parents, feels too momentous, too much like a statement about who I am and was and want to be. So maybe I’ll skip out this year too. Maybe I’ll just keep thinking about faith, and failing to practice. I’ve spent most of my life asking God if He’s out there — I can wait a little longer to go find myself an answer.
Please go and read the full poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44400/spring-and-fall
I wrote about Giving up the Ghost in March of this year
https://www.oulgbtq.org/oxford-safe-churches.html