The secret books, p.1
The Secret Books, page 1
MARCEL THEROUX
The
SECRET BOOKS
This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.
WALT WHITMAN, ‘Song of Myself’,
from Leaves of Grass
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
1: LOST BOY
2: THE SAVIOUR ON BLOOD
3: THE SECRET BOOKS
4: CONVOY SIXTY-EIGHT
Afterword
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
1: LOST BOY
WEARYING OF THE TRICKERY of arresting opening sentences – their flavours of honey and brimstone, their glimpses of drama to come, their syntax weighted to draw you to the full stop and beyond – all I can honestly say is: reader, come with me.
I’ve never been a fan of epigraphs in books; there’s something arch and writerly about them, like a cupped chin or an ostentatious scarf in an author photo. They’re a cut-price way of giving both of us a literary feeling – instead of flowers, a burst of ersatz laurel from a can of air freshener. Psssht. Mmm, is that … Whitman? But I chose that fragment of Leaves of Grass as a kind of promissory note, as a token of good faith between us. It says: let us be equal partners, let us be the sort of friends who share secrets. Is there flattery here? Perhaps a little; friends must be inclined to think well of each other.
My friend – and I’m aware of sounding overfamiliar in my eagerness to assure you of my good intentions – in order to save you time and money, I’m going to put the argument of this book on its opening page: the world we inhabit is only a story we tell, and neither the truest nor the best.
The wisdom of the conventional metaphors says that stories resemble bridges, gifts and medicine; they join, they are bestowed, they heal. But stories are less pure and less benign than these images suggest. Human beings are compulsive makers and believers of stories. And stories can be many things – banners round which a mob will rally; masks to signify enemies; blades even, to cut, and sever, and kill. If novels are good for anything, which I occasionally doubt, perhaps it’s for revealing how stories arise, where they end, and when to stop believing.
Still listening, camerado?
Towards the end of the year before last, I began swimming every day at Tooting Bec Lido. Looking back, I don’t recall a particular day when the resolution to swim throughout the winter seemed finally to crystallise. It’s not easy to explain – even to yourself – why you would undertake such an unpleasant daily commitment. The pool is a hundred yards long and unheated. From October to April, the water is varying degrees of icy, sometimes frozen. The first immersion is bewilderingly painful. No amount of repetition makes it easy. Sometimes I would spend the whole morning before my swim haunted by a vague sense of dread. Worst of all were the days when the walk from the changing cubicles exposed shrinking flesh to wind and rain, or sleet.
Shuffling across the poolside in my flip-flops, I would pause by the water’s edge. For a long time, I was in the habit of easing myself in slowly and waiting at the shallow end for my legs to go numb before I submerged my whole body. It took me a while to realise that this was a method used by none of the small number of people who continued to swim through the winter months and who all regarded the use of a wetsuit as beneath their dignity. They would plunge in without hesitation, committing themselves to the scalding immersion that left them gasping for breath.
By January and February, most swimmers are doing a width or two at most, though some physiologically gifted people are capable of swimming eighteen lengths, a mile, when the temperature of the water is close to freezing. I discovered that my natural distance was two lengths, not for reasons of machismo, but because any fewer and the experience was abbreviated to something approaching pure pain.
For me, the first fifty yards were like being in a fight, or having a tooth pulled without anaesthetic, or any experience where your consciousness contracts to the immediate struggle to keep breathing. Your skin feels as if it’s being stripped off you with wires and your head aches. There is no space to think of anything. Abandoned by your higher mental function, you regress to the state of a floundering reptile. The first few times you do this, it seems like pure insanity. Gradually, experience shows you that this moment will pass. As you relax, you begin to notice that there is no pain in the place where the breath enters your body. If you can abide there long enough, by the time you reach the midway point of the pool the pain has not only diminished but been succeeded by a sensation of well-being that verges on euphoria. On the return length, you are no longer cold. There is no feeling whatsoever in your lower body. Hauling yourself out of the water, you experience the air as warm. You can then walk the fifty or so yards to the sauna – a gift from the Finns on the occasion of the lido hosting the World Winter Swimming Championships in 2008.
At this point, you know that nothing you have to face that day will be more difficult than what you have just done, and whatever anxiety or stress you’ve been carrying has been purged from your system.
The sauna comfortably seats eight. At the times of day when I swam, there were usually no more than three or four other people in it. Many of the long-time winter swimmers regarded it as an unwelcome novelty and talked fondly of the old days when the amenities of the club offered nothing more than a cold shower and a cup of tea.
I should point out that there is no evidence that swimming in icy water is good for you. Only cod science and the attractive but unproven intuition of hormesis – the notion that something bad for you in large doses is good for you in small ones – suggest otherwise. In my first winter, I contracted a stubborn case of bronchitis for which the doctor prescribed steroids and antibiotics. I felt sure the swimming was to blame. And yet, all the other swimmers seemed in rude good health. I, in my forties, was one of the youngest. Some looked decades younger than their calendar ages. These people seemed to have found in the freezing water the elixir of eternal youth.
The conversations in the sauna circled constantly around three unchanging topics: the temperature of the water, the inaccuracy of the lifeguards’ thermometers and the prospects for the weather. If you stayed in there long enough, your opinion would be canvassed on all three. The discussions we had often resembled the dialogue of an absurdist drama, full of repetitions, non sequiturs and strange bathos. One elderly woman vocalised every thought that came into her head, from what she was intending to have for lunch to the brand of ointment she used for her piles; clad in a drooping towel and citing weak hands, she would ask the nearest male to wring out her swimming costume. There seemed no appropriate way to decline.
Still, for someone like me who works in solitude, it’s important and restorative to connect with other people. Something we shared was our baffled curiosity at the motives that drove us to participate in such a painful activity. Our general inability to explain it fitted with my growing disillusionment about stories. It seemed to me that the true source of all our desires was mysterious and inaccessible and never disclosed by our belated explanations. First we do things, then we make up stories to explain why. Of course, being a writer, I could invent plenty of reasons. One was that it was something to do with death. It made me think of the Japanese delicacy fugu, the deadly pufferfish; its real aficionados like to enjoy it with just enough of the highly toxic liver to induce euphoria, but not so much as will kill them. When you saw the blotchy ice-milers mumbling incoherently in the hottest corner, as their core temperature rose slowly back to normal, it seemed that they were drawn to some threshold experience, to peering over the lip of the crater at the spectacle of their own dissolution.
But the experience of swimming in the cold also offered less grim rewards. It was often beautiful: the ice sang with the vibration of the water; the pool in sunshine glowed an extraordinary submarine blue, all the more wondrous when you were in it; a pair of Egyptian geese honked by the changing cubicles, like guardian spirits. One sunny midwinter morning a septuagenarian swimmer towelled off his brick-red body and declared to me: ‘If paradise is one tenth as good as this, I’ll settle for it.’
In the water, when the pain eased, I would turn over ideas for stories in my head, wondering at my presumption in telling untruths for a living. I seemed to have lost the gusto for inventing facts that is at the root of what a writer does – but in the bracing grip of the water, I couldn’t feel sorry about it. I assumed that either something would turn up or it wouldn’t. And it didn’t really matter which.
Now and again, I would hear the story I wanted to tell like a shortwave broadcast from a distant country, the swooping signal fading in and out, carrying unintelligible fragments. But at the moment I turned my full attention towards it, it would vanish.
My long apprenticeship, almost twenty years of it, had at least taught me patience.
At my desk, I made a list of the books I wanted to write: a counterfactual thriller in which Britain had been colonised by India; something about a Viking; something about a psychoanalyst on a spaceship. But each time I started writing, my nerve failed me after three or four pages. Whenever I considered committing to one of the ideas – and I think I knew by now that I could force my way to the end by an act of will – I felt a great weariness.
The problem I kept encountering was that fiction, which I had used for consolation all my life, had somehow lost its charm. Whenever I read a novel, I found myself resisting the necessary conspiracy between writer and reader. I
There seemed to be nothing special any more about the enchantments of fiction. On the contrary, in every area of human life, someone was trying to tell a story. Sports commentators, politicians, revolutionaries, religious leaders, business people, accountants, advertisers, actors – all were peddling selective and self-serving interpretations of the world. I told my wife I no longer believed anything I read in a newspaper, and she said I was driving her nuts.
Everyone was suddenly talking about narratives. These bogus narratives could justify invasions, absurd inequalities of income, murder, torture, and every kind of cruelty and selfishness. It seemed that people thought that by shouting loudly and insistently enough they could talk any version of the world into existence. I began to understand the peasant distrust of what educated people do with words, of the smooth and lawyerly language that talks you out of everything you own. More and more, I felt that true goodness must be mute.
Assailed by empty words, I longed for something preverbal, an unmediated experience of the world, and the cold water provided it. It told no story.
Back at my desk, I began another book, about a haruspex, one of the Roman diviners who scrutinised the entrails of animals and who are memorialised as emblems of charlatanism. But my haruspex was entirely sincere, someone in thrall to his own baseless claims of expertise, little different from the people I heard on the radio every morning: pundits pretending to make sense of the aggregated chaos that no one could really understand; reporters being invited to speculate on a country’s ‘mood’. I half expected someone to describe the speckled appearance of a sheep’s liver and pronounce the economic recovery therefore in full swing.
I wondered if was possible to write a story that bore witness to the unrepeatable crisis of its own creation. But I was constitutionally hostile to experimental fiction, and when it crossed my mind that I might be inadvertently writing some kind of deconstructed novel, I felt like punching myself in the face.
One afternoon, after my swim, I went for a fruitless meeting with a film producer who told me in passing that the secret to producing a masterpiece was to organise a story around a single word. His explanation worked something like this:
Play: Macbeth; theme: ambition; result: masterpiece.
Play: Hamlet; theme: not sure; result: qualified failure.
He was rich and successful and the idea had an attractive simplicity. But afterwards, it struck me that one of the many ways of understanding Hamlet is that its central character is someone who has lost the capacity to believe in stories. Once a conscientious person has shared Hamlet’s glimpse of the way the stories we tell mask instinctual motivations for power, and sex, and status, it’s hard to believe in anything ever again. A series of strange and problematic plays clusters round Hamlet in the Shakespearean canon: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello and All’s Well That Ends Well – the work of someone rattled by the insight that justice, love, honour, history and progress are all just stories.
At the end of August that year, I flew to China to write an article about its surplus bachelors – a result of the country’s one-child policy. It was part of a larger demographic anomaly: the world’s missing women. In many countries – South Korea, India, China – men greatly outnumbered women. Abortion, cheap ultrasounds and a preference for boy babies meant that girl foetuses were terminated for being girls, and boys were growing up in a world shaped by their absence, a world of fewer daughters, fewer sisters, and fewer wives.
In a tiny hamlet outside the city of Huayin, I sat on the floor of a dusty brick shack. It belonged to a family of farmers who seemed to have been vaulted from the distant past into the twenty-first century. The soil still yielded ancient stones from buildings that had stood there millennia before, part of the great riparian civilisation that had grown up beside the Yellow River. An old woman called Qin Yu Lan, who was bird-thin and bowed from a lifetime of hard graft, cooked a meatless dinner over handfuls of blazing firewood and wept about her son’s failure to find a wife. He was forty, and she was lamenting the lonely old age that faced him. She might well have been shedding tears for her own predicament. She had lived her life like an ox in harness, dragging unimaginable burdens, and there was no possibility of respite in old age, no daughter-in-law to share her labour, to care for her or her decrepit husband. Now and again a train rumbled along the track behind the house. The old terraces above us were overgrown with thornbushes and wild date trees. Forty years earlier, there had been wolves roaming in the woods. Now this was the last bit of village left as the urban sprawl encroached.
Mrs Qin’s plight touched a chord with my belated understanding that I had arrived in a world wholly shaped by the decisions of previous generations. She and I were part of a species that was living through the reverberations of a slow-motion car crash that had begun in the long nineteenth century. The filthy air we breathed, the fictional division of the globe into nations, planes, penicillin, dentistry, the plastic detritus in the grass by the outside toilet: all were products of this sudden period of change; something that, for want of a better word, we must be tempted to call modernity.
The axiom of storytelling is that a person defines their life through their choices. From ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to Hamlet, a protagonist desires, and then acts, and then lives through the consequences of their decisions. We parse the events of our lives in this way, turning them into stories – of triumph and failure, of odds overcome, moments of insight and redemption, and lessons learned. But for millions of people, ourselves included, the truth of a life lies in shadows and absences, roads not taken, unborn daughters-in-law. The Qin Yu Lan I met was only one possible version of her. And who’s to say whether it was the most accurate, fairest or best? Even starting with such difficult ingredients – being born poor and female in Shaanxi province in 1942 – we can still conjure numberless variations of the life she might have led. Her husband, who had arrived to work on the railway in the 1960s, might easily have been dispatched to another village. She could have caught the eye of a well-connected Party member; or perished in a famine; or learned English; or become a Red Guard; or moved to the city. But now we are entering the territory of the haruspex, engaging in activity that is futile and tempts absurdity. And yet there is a stab of compassion in remembering this: glimpsed in her crib, or at her mother’s breast, with her hopeful bright eyes and tufts of ebony hair, tiny Yu Lan was already someone; she surely had an inner essence, which would struggle to find expression in the world; which would be shaped and thwarted by circumstances over which she had no control.
It seemed to me then that the people we didn’t become, the lives we couldn’t lead, and the worlds that never were, were like so many secret books, whose pages supported with certainty one single knowable assertion: things might all have been so different. And any other conclusion or story was a shameful collaboration with the tyranny of this accidental world.
Nabokov writes, on the final page of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, that ‘any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations’. Back in London, hauling myself through the icy water, I felt an ambition stirring: to gather one soul, just one in its entirety, from the oblivion of the secret books.
*
FICTION SHOULD HAVE PREPARED me for this inevitable reversal: the soul I went looking for was not the one I ended up with. In the beginning, I was searching for one of my distant relatives. I wanted to write about a lost boy.
In August 1914, my great-uncle, Leonard Castle, joined the Royal Norfolk Regiment to go and fight in World War I. At that time, he lived above his father’s shop on Moyser Road, in Streatham, south London. The building stands about one hundred yards – a pool’s length – from where I’m sitting now. If I open my window and stick my head out, I can just see its chimney pots.
