MEMOIR

The Following Game, Jonathan Smith, Peridot Press, 232pp, £14.99 (hardback) With the Kisses of his Mouth, Monique Roffey, Simon & Schuster, 480pp, £14.99 (hardback)

Debts owed to those mysterious forces that make up the ‘best portion of a good man’s life’ are reckoned in Jonathan Smith’s fine new book. The remembrance and naming of those ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and love’, are significant shaping spirits as well as a common thread to the work. Smith is a Wordsworthian: he takes strength from what remains; he is a teacher who seeks to comprehend the ‘impulse’ of teaching and the impact of being taught, both consciously and in ways beyond ‘rational’ control; he understands the creative links between walking and writing; he is open to and opens up ‘the hiding places’ of his power, in the process making vivid and palpable his own history and that of those closest to him. And in this case, in an odd way, the ‘child is father to the man’ given the teasing out of the indebtedness Smith feels in his ‘following’ of his own son, Ed. This makes the writing sound rather portentous – it is not. Smith is also a satirist, an astute and witty observer and recorder of human behaviour, foibles, habits, superstitions. As Smith says of a poem by Elizabeth Jennings: ‘I found myself nodding at … every word and perception’. That’s true too, was my common response.

This is a beautifully understated book, one that defies categorisation (despite being long-listed for the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year). It is as well-stitched as a Readers ‘Assassin’. At its centre is an enquiry into notions of ‘family’. It consists of short chapters or episodes, or lessons; these have a chronology with a pivotal source in January 2006. Smith puts aside another project, a novel, to ‘capture what it has beenlike to be a follower and a fan, but also to capture what it has been like to be a follower and a fan who happens to be the father of a professional sportsman who also happens to be a writer himself’. Smith’s son, Ed, was a professional cricketer with Kent, as captain, with Middlesex, and for England. They are on their way to India, a once-in-a-lifetime trip. And there is a subtext, an urgency: ‘I was told last week that I have cancer’. Smith’s style is to qualify, to underplay, to nudge this notion down to third man for a single: ‘It’s all right, don’t worry, this is not going to be a book about cancer. There are plenty of those already.’ Such a mode of address (with its lightness of touch, its self-deprecation, its ‘don’t worry’ concern for the reader, its subtle evasiveness) informs the entire venture. The book is going to be written because the thought of doing so ‘feels fun’, it is ‘something a bit personal’: ‘a bit of looking out and looking in’. Again, the conversational rhythms and the matter-of-fact tone play down the seriousness. The book that follows, in fifty-two sections, if we allow the closing poem by Vikram Seth its own number, is various in mood, deep yet playful in its learning, informed by what Leavis called ‘felt life’. This is the song of a man who has come through, and it pays homage, in elegiac mood, to others who have moved and prompted him, to whom he owes debts; it is, in short, celebratory and urgent.

For example, the account of what it was like to see Ed bat for England at Trent Bridge is a detachable masterpiece, by turns hysterically funny (‘Apparently, I was on television in my pink shirt and looking pre-occupied and serious. Well, bugger me, there’s a surprise, looking pre-occupied and serious was I, when I could have been dressed as an Elvis look-a-like or done up as a nun with a big tray of lagers…’) and wrenchingly choked, as in reactions to his son’s second innings golden duck (‘My heart stands still. There is a small explosion in my stomach. The umpire’s finger goes up. In my gut a small emptiness flares and burns.’) What is obvious here is variety in pace and sentence length and register and tone – demotic, lyrical, Beckettian; a voice at work. Smith’s book is therefore great to dip back into, both for vignettes and for the advent calendar style ‘bigger picture’. He deploys an expansive range of literature to illustrate his case. A restrained lyricism underpins the whole venture, such as this beautiful moment of covert revelation: ‘Before I go to sleep each night, when things are still and the only sounds I can hear are my own shallow breathing and the water lapping, I talk to myself about my mother and my father. I try – and sometimes it takes me a while – to bring back their faces in front of me, to summon them back.’ Smith’s subsequent recreation of mother and father is as moving and memorable as anything I have read for a time. It is accomplished and yet at the same time raw; the art is everywhere felt but nowhere seen. Smith uses cricket as part of an extended analogy to deliberate upon the art of writing. A key moment is this: ‘Readers do not want to be taken for granted. They like a little decorum’. Such respect for the powers of the reader informs every page.

The title of Monique Roffey’s ‘memoir’ bears a heavy load. It is taken from The Song of Songs, the ‘erotic Hebrew love poem of the Old Testament’; in turn this poem is revealed to have been a gift to the author by her ‘ex’. He gave her a ‘slim black hardback’, an emotionally-charged object. Roffey’s puzzling over the hidden meaning of the gift, her obsessive returns to the text itself (‘enigmatic and endlessly fascinating’), its potential for varying interpretations (the intertwining of divine and secular love, the scope for both allegorical and ‘literal’ interpretations) and the nature of the poem (‘not one long poem but a number of small poems strung together, where two voices, one male and one female, call to each other and speak of human love’) can be traced as both structural and thematic devices for the whole endeavour. For ‘poems’ read ‘episodes’ within a time frame, given the use of the journal format (looking back to the start of the love affair via the pivotal moment of revelation, as with Smith’s book, January 2006, and forward to the ‘present’ of the writing act itself, July 2010).

It is perhaps limiting and potentially misleading for the subtitle of the book to be termed ‘A Memoir’. Roffey’s exploration of ‘love’ is a many-layered thing: the poignancy of her autobiographical account of a ‘sexual odyssey’ – every bit as ‘candid’ as the blurb announces – lies in the nature of the loss as evoked in often graphic detail. (There are vividly-rendered backdrops that are fused to events: the crammed pubs and the glorious squalor of London squats, but most memorably the Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton in Devon, itself a point of departure and returning for this writing.) There are some moments akin to ‘look away now if you don’t want to know the score, as Match of the Day follows the news’, so it’s your choice, reader – the book crosses and reconfigures boundaries. There is no doubting the power in the telling of Roffey’s quest for self-understanding (post- traumatic re-construction), the openness and vulnerability of the narrative voice, ruthless in ‘burning down the house’ of ego, willing to expose herself to dangers and threats at every turn in the quest for ‘meaning’. The whole business is risky and thereby itself runs the risk of inviting the reader to assume the role of voyeur, with overt encouragement from Roffey for us to enter the new worlds encountered.

What redeems the whole enterprise (it is billed as ‘redemptive’) is the author’s unflinching humour, her scope for self-deprecation and at times self-denigration; the self that loved, as it could, is surveyed without self- pity or sentimentality. It invites the reader to be shocked, and just as Roffey starts off an outsider, an innocent, so the reader is exhorted to ‘boldly go’, to proceed, along these lines: ‘if internet dating is like shopping for a mate, then the Casual Encounters section of Craig’s List is like the bargain basement of all internet dating sites, a wretched place. Yes, please, go there right now.//Shocked? At first glance, it’s a harsh world.’ She is here, and elsewhere; in some senses then, our Virgil.

Roffey’s hard drive of being a writer is never jettisoned. She finds a source in Frank O’Connor, the Irish short story writer, with his belief that stories come from ‘submerged worlds’, that they are ‘about outlaw figures trying to escape from … small, socially claustrophobic societies’. And, as such, Roffey’s voyage is a social document in itself, daring, risqué, a lone voyager – trying to escape from what? Grief; a past; previous selves. A lyric from Bob Marley kept floating into my mind – you’re running and running and you’re running away, but you can’t run away from yourself.

So, it is a book about ‘recovery’. The ‘ex’ (‘a fat, ugly, hilariously funny author’ is one of the more complimentary billings that he gets) was, we gather, the love of her life. There is a shattering of this in the revelation of his affair. Thereafter attempts to make sense of the new state become dominated by a perceived conundrum: a love that lacked sexual desire. The love story is thus very much one of ‘two voices’, one male and one female, the man much missed calling to the woman in a bizarre take on Hardy’s ‘The Voice’. Consequently, the effigy of the ‘ex’ has to be constructed for the reader and then destroyed again and again: this is the most painful part of the enterprise. The most moving moments for this reader are not those connected with any flaunted confessionalism but with a profound exploration of grief, mourning and melancholia. One of the most moving and revelatory chapters is entitled ‘ancestral widowhood’; Greek notions of tragic familial inheritance are seen to infuse the following two years of sorrow: ‘My mother has been a widow for seventeen years and counting. She still mourns my father; she’s still lonely without him./I know how she feels. It is in my particular DNA to grieve romantic loss. It’s in my inheritance, my family map. I wasn’t aware of this till it was my turn.’

Much of the writing is intimate – for this reader, ‘look away now’ stuff. It is often too painful for words. Tied to Eros is Thanos, as acknowledged and outlined in the source for the title: ‘Throughout the poem the woman is ardent; she often takes the initiative herself. It is a poem which celebrates and also warns of the potency of erotic love: for love is as strong as death’. Ancient and modern; ‘modern’ in the matter of technology itself – the ease and potential perils of social media, in this case, ‘internet dating’: ‘and right here in front of me, on the screen, was such a world’. There are many moments where a Miranda-like ‘Oh brave new world that hath such creatures in it’ rubs against a Prospero-style ‘tis new to thee’.

The key development in the trajectory of the book is the move from the ‘harsh world’ of sexual experimentation and the overturning of sexual taboos towards an exploration of the spirit and emotional needs. This is reached via ‘tantra’, the teachings and meditations handed down and largely sourced in translations by Osho, the late Baghwan Sri Rajneesh, in The Book of Secrets. Roffey works away and against her own preconceptions in the spirit of the word: ‘I found out that tantra is a Sanskrit word meaning “web” or “weave”. It comes from the verbal root tan, meaning “to expand”.’ This makes the second part of the book more radical and happily no less funny or spiky. The news of the ex’s marriage in April 2010 can thus ultimately be met with ‘not a flutter of pain, not a twinge, not a murmur in my heart’. It is a book of weaving and expansion; there is a promised future that is captured in the beautiful Derek Walcott poem, ‘Love after Love’, that acts as a postscript. It has at its heart this line: ‘You will love again the stranger who was yourself’.

Roffey’s book seems to have been generated by something akin to what Eliot termed in Blake, a ‘peculiar honesty’. It is an astonishing book, but my hope and concern is that life, or afterlife, survives the moment and delineation of such pain in writing, that those central players named therein are able to ‘carry on’, to resume their lives. Smith’s book ‘feels fun’; it is a means of coping with ‘the only end of age’, in paying homage, revealing indebtedness. Its very reserve is an act of ‘decorum’ and attempted preservation.