Who needs a handkerchief when you’ve got a book, a duffel coat and The Vivisector?

When he was dying, my dad brought himself to the threshold of an apology. You were different, he said, I treated you the same as the others (my sister and brother) but you were different. 

My ill-fitting shape was formed early and I lugged it around the family home weeping into my duffel coat. I was a mummy’s boy but mummy, or mum as we called them, had disappeared behind the veil of valium. I had to find other entertainments or at least some sense of belonging. It took a while. I cried my way through infancy, primary school and seven different shades of duffel coats. I wiped my nose on my grammar school blazer sleeve whilst my peers pulled out their silks and petted their noses. Safe to say, I didn’t belong at home where laughter bordered on ridicule, or at school, where the teacher’s ridicule bordered on a cruel cackling intended to make boys like me shrink back to the council estate where they imagined I belonged.

Childhood is the foundry of the soul. Growing up is learning how to hold, carry, comfort,  protect that soul.

 
When I was eighteen I allowed myself to fall in love and, in that love, find some sense of belonging. There had been overtures before but, because of my background, I believed that it wasn’t for me. Headsunk into my shoulders, I was idling along Long Acre in Convent Garden, aching with expectation and fear. I had failed at school and I was making a good stab at failing at life.

​Something drew me from the street and I stumbled into Hatchards - once one of the oldest booksellers in England, now owned by Waterstones which is owned by Elliot Investment hedge funders - and picked up a book. I had never heard of the author, nor the title - though I think that was the draw : The Vivisector. I didn’t even know what it meant but I felt a strange thrill. I bought the book, went home and started reading. And that was it. Keats had tickled this passion at thirteen but I locked it up, feeling I wasn’t worthy. I was a dullard and literature was for those I’d been to school with, not those that I lived with.

I was taken. I remain took.
​
This week I returned to Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970), a re-reading of a book that brought me to my own threshold of belonging. Forty odd years later, along with an unexpected memory of episodes unfolding when a character’s name is introduced, traces of the thrill remain. Back then, I read everything White wrote, revelling in the worlds built with words and in the brutal longing of his misfit protagonists. The Vivisector is a barbarous and brilliant book.

                                                                                                                                               Les Maisons (1921 ) Chaim Soutine

I came back to Hurtle Duffield, White’s artist protagonist, after finishing another story of an artist battling against the conservative mores of religion and society. Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (1972) is a much more sedate, less raw telling of that tension. The fronts on which this war is waged are the family and the traditions of Judaism: a father’s dismay that his son should devote himself to such foolishness as art and how the artist's image making is unacceptable within a Hassidic household. Potok creates poignant family scenes - a father's familail love poured into the Z'miros (Shabbat Table Songs), a child watching his mother's collapse and depressed retreat from the world - which make the inevitable implosion much more disquieting. It is a tender rendition of the torment.

​Torment and how we treat it are at the heart of Kay Redfield Jamison's latest book, Fires in the Dark (2023).  Exquisitely written, sensitive to the shredding of the mind and full of hope, it is an exploration of how we heal and what lives in the hands of those that heal us. Jamison is a compassionate companion who writes about the history of suffering: her own, soldiers, artists and poets and how it has been tended from Imhotep in Ancient Egypt to the analyst's room today.
​

The sea encourages my melancholy
And then helps me forget it
                                                                                                                        Wishful Thinking, Douglas Dunn

Much of the hope comes in the tending. As wars grind on around us, the book is also a stark reminder of the senseless devastation human's inflict on one another. There are descriptions from nurses at the front of the first world war who sit with young men, holding their hands and softening their fear as they die. There are graphic descriptions of injury before death. There are stories of unbearable agony. 

And then there are the healers, the nurses, the doctors, the psychotherapists. There is a celebration of the relationships formed in that healing process. There is a fascinating and inspiring portrait of the relationship between the suffering poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and the doctor, W.H.R. Rivers, who tended him:

Rivers believed, one must encourage patients to engage memory. First, to remember what they had pressed out of consciousness. Then, to recollect the unbearble in a more circumspect way; to grapple with the dark forces to obtain mastery over them. To be a healer was to make a patient's "intolerable memories tolerable". It was the doctor's charge, Rivers said, to "use the controlled reflection of horror to understand what the patient has been through, to allow him to meet the horror in his own strength." In the grip of suffering the patient needed to be helped  to understand the situation in all its complexity. The doctor should accompany and be as convoy in dangerous waters.
                                                                                                                           Kay Redfield Jamison, Fires in the Dark

What else heals? Art?  Nature? Love? Reading?