HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME — the barking refrain from “The Waste Land.”
The Eliots lived across from a pub at their first flat on Crawford Street. Tom complained about the actresses playing the phonograph. They entertained each other with cruel cariatures of their beastly neighbors. Vivien(ne) would mimic their Cockney accents. “Well you see, Sir, it’s the artistic temperament. We ordinary folks must learn to make allowances for artists. They’re not the same as us.” Said their landlord, unironically.
The noise on Brick Lane was fragmenting, obscene. We had to leave.
Their move to a more spacious abode at 9 Clarence Gate Gardens, a large Victorian building close to Regents Park. It was where they stayed unhappily the rest of their marriage, editing The Criterion, where she later lived alone, his photographs on the wall. Our Room #3 was also close to Regent’s Park, had the same “dark carpeted staircases” and “jangling lifts” of the Eliots’ earlier “Mansions,” as Viv derisively put it in a story. Another institutional tomb. A card table for a dining table. The bed actually two mattresses piled on top of each other.
They’re going to knock the whole building down, you know. An elderly woman wanders into our apartment as we’re moving in. She is Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby. I am spooked Mia. John is at the British Library finishing his thesis.
In 1918, Viv writes in a letter that “life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time, and one is always waiting, waiting for something. Generally waiting for some particular strain to be over. One thinks, when this is over, I will write.”
Vivien(ne) always frantically looking for a place outside of London, a nice cottage perhaps, looking to escape the trauma of the Blitz (never being able to escape the trauma of life itself, of her marriage, a melodrama played out on her body).
Then, the terrorist attacks of 7/7, the evacuation of our local tube station where a bomb was supposed to go off, we watch the hysteria on the TV at the nearby dormitory for international students. A framed photograph of the Captain, as Eliot liked to be called, when he moved to his secret lodgings on Charing Cross Road, hangs near the snack station. The bloated, later Eliot, soon on to Wife #2, daughter-figure, secretary. (Viv also was his secretary, there she is in their Paddington flat, with her Corona typewriter, she is posed in profile, hands on hips.)
We lay on our lumpy bed and hold each other, feeling panicked against the stoic Englishness around us, a badge of pride since the Blitz and the IRA, a sort of emotional imperialism that Viv also experienced. Only the foreigners seem completely freaked out.
2009
My morning has already been torn to shreds, my sanity thin, I am fearful I will not be able to collect the fragments of the afternoon, to quote Eliot, in his poem “Hysteria,” his short prose poem depicting the grotesque figure of a woman, modeled on Vivien(ne). The speaker of the poem trying to escape from the horrors of the woman’s body/presence/most importantly voice, a grande guignol of femininity personified by her terrifying laughter, the caverns of her throat. A poem written just before their marriage.
Noise has always had the ability to destroy my day, the possibility of my writing. I share this with hysterics and paranoid schizophrenics. I share this with Schreber. The voices, the voices, they still worm through.
Akron refers to itself as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” for its now atrophied tire and rubber industries. The Goodyear blimp often circling slowly above. There is no insulation between walls in this building. Downstairs, destruction workers are drilling, laughing cavalierly. They have the radio on. My next-door neighbors have also decided to get a monster puppy, a mammoth puppy, who bounds up and down the wooden floors and emits constant shrill, nervous yelps.
Eliot was exquisitively sensitive to noise.
She was exquisitively sensitive.
I am inheriting the puppy’s hysteria. I wear the noise on my shattered body. I hold in my palms my waxen medicine-blue earplugs. I show them to my neighbor. She teaches undergraduate art history part-time at Kent State University. Her boyfriend has scruffy facial hair. They grew up around here, they go to their parents, I imagine, when they disappear with the dog on Sundays. Once, she squealed with excitement when she got her copy of Martha Stewart Living: “Martha is here!”
Our neighbors have heard us fight loudly through the walls, often during the process of editing something I’ve written, usually the catalyst for most of our fights, that and moving. Sometimes high melodrama, my operatic roars, the sounds of books being thrown (nothing riles him more than me throwing library books). They have heard us fuck loudly through the walls, sometimes right after one of our apocalyptic fights.
She is worked up too, stressed. I am still shaking from the experience. I want to say: I will never fuck again, never operate the blender, never set an alarm — just shut the fuck up. Please. I am begging you. But I don’t.
It’s just a puppy. She says to me, exasperated. It’s an energetic puppy.
And I am fetal. I do not resist. My home is under siege. My body is under siege. The terror of the birds outside in the trees. I am Tippi Hedren.
I think of one of my favorite opening passages, from Anna Kavan’s Who are You?, a paean to madness brought on by noise, the ability of sound to destroy the self. The title comes from the monotonous cries of the “brain-fever birds,” which Kavan characterizes as an assault on identity, forming an ominous chorus for the main character’s breakdown:
All day long, in the tamarinds behind the house, a tropical bird keeps repeating its monotonous cry, which consists of the same three inquiring notes. Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Loud, flat, harsh and piercing, the repetitive cry bores its way through the ear-drums with the exasperating persistence of a machine that can’t be switched off.
Birds that often occupy Kavan’s nightmare landscapes of hallucinations and delirium — nature in general has a way of turning sinister in her narratives, like her apocalyptic grass in A Bright Green Field or ice in her dystopic masterpiece Ice.
I attempt to drown it all out with Arvo Pärt. (Choral, chloral.) Yet I am drowning.
And now the queer symphony of the barking squirrels.
I begin to escape to a study room in the university library to get away from the destruction workers. Room 376A. The same room every time. A battered desk. A menagerie of those institutional sickly sort of fabric chairs. But I can think now, I can channel my voices. I begin to return to a fictional notebook I call Mad Wife that I started trying to write when I first began reading the biographies. A woman trapped inside her home haunted by the mad wives of modernism. Anaïs Nin who told her husband Hugo that her journals were the fictional diary of a possessed woman.
Of course I can never figure out the form. I can never manage to finish it, but still it obsesses me. I who devour these lives. I who Bovarize. Emma who too felt an “ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women.”
When Victorian readers first read “The Yellow Wallpaper” they placed it within the whole Gothic, haunted house tradition. Simply a tale of a creepy madwoman unraveling. But it is in fact another sort of ghost story.
I too am interested in ghost stories. A collective history of ghosts.
I begin to cannibalize these women, literally incorporating them, their traumas, an uncanny feeling of repeating, of reliving.
I am in bed downed by something like a sinus infection. Channeling, channeling, always, I am Simone Weil, although Simone Weil pushed bravely past her sinus headaches, working in the fields and organizing worker protests, and writing her crystalline philosophical texts in her notebooks, while at the slightest hint of sinus troubles I dive under the covers. I am the exact opposite of Simone Weil. More Sylvia or Vivien(ne), also with their chronic sinusitis.