Scratches

A rediscovery this morning. The last two days I have been sane – so sane – and so functional – and by that I mean I have been steadily working. Almost like a normal person. I wake up, I have tea and oatmeal with John (he still makes it, he still “wifes” me – to wife, a verb), and then I go up to my white windowless box of a room and attempt to commune with my unruly notebooks. Of course I always go off track – but at least it is productive-  functional – highly sane. Yesterday I got through one Vivien Eliot notebook and read through a large large Jean Rhys biography on my lap, while pretending I wasn’t really reading it (I was on the wrong mad wife). I also read through Smile Please, the autobiographical sketches she wrote in her eighties, that were unfinished (everything to Rhys was unfinished, she was upset at her editor Diana Athill that she let two words remain in Wide Sargasso Sea, I believe one was “very” and the other was some other to her unnecessary straggler-adjective). And rediscovered a Rhys text that I had forgotten but was very inspirational to me, that someone gave me when I was at the London bookshop and discovering Rhys, and then I had forgotten it but it lingered on. The text is called “The Trial of Jean Rhys” and it is a memoir fragment in the notebook she called The Ropemaker Notebook, a plain brown songbird of a notebook that she kept while she stayed at The Ropemaker’s Arms while her third husband Max was in prison for something amounting to fraud, both of them old, sick, fragile, desperately poor. Rhys gave her notebooks names, and they were integral to her process, before The Ropemaker there was the Orange notebook, even when she wasn’t publishing, in the time she was believed to be dead, that great chasm of decades between the publication of her modern between-the-war novels and Wide Sargasso Sea in 66, indeed she has said she wouldn’t have been able to write WSS without The Ropemaker. In this particular text she examines herself ruthlessly, she is persecuted and persecutor, and it really struck me while reading through this unpublished period how similar Rhys’ way of writing WWII and the alienation and fragmentation of society at the time is to Kavan’s Asylum Piece and I Am Lazarus collection.

In “The Trial of Jean Rhys” there is an interrogating voice, which reminds me actually of Nathalie Sarraute’s memoir Childhood, Rhys would have been used to the language of trials as she was perennially hauled into court at this time for physical altercations with her neighbors. But here, such searing exorcism and honesty.

DEFENCE. It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn?

It is not true.

DEFENCE.Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, so on?

Yes. Not friendships very much.

Did you succeed?

Sometimes. For a time.

It didn’t last?

No.

Whose fault was that?

Mine I suppose.

You suppose?

Silence.

Better answer.

I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me.

The phrase is not ‘I do not know’ but ‘I have nothing to say.’

The trouble is I have plenty to say. Not only that but I am bound to say it.

Bound?

I msut.

Why? Why? Why?

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other peole. But it will be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.

I love that. Even when she is not publishing, when everything thinks she is dead, the compulsion to write, to uncover. To EXIST. To write. Above all to write. To channel her memories and her emotions and to distill and communicate her existence.

  notes on front cover of notebook (my list of what it contains): hatchet job bio of Djuna; brief notes on Assia; Sleepless Nights; the Baroness; notes on TSE criticism and Foucault on author-function, articles on Viv, Zelda & Lucia

This morning when I was supposed to be transcribing now the last (fourth?) Vivien Eliot notebook, my lined Orange Rhodias No. 18, I am too fetishistic about my notebooks, if I know I want to save them for my archive, I am fanatical about archiving, acid-free, I guess as befits one whose husband is in the profession and who is obsessed with women whose archives have been erased, I instead read through the journals that I kept when I moved back to Chicago from London. Now so long ago (6 years ago?). The early years of my marriage. Realizing even in Chicago, which I love now, with distance, and hated then, too close to my family and memories, I was isolated, alienated, always struggling with feelings of entrapment. I was working on Green Girl, which I had started in London on scraps of things, I didn’t have a notebooking system then and before that actually stuck, and I was dealing for the first time with all the space of my day through adjuncting, feeling leftover, a vestigial person, wondering what was the difference between a housewife and a woman writer who is married who stays home all day and doesn’t get any writing done  (difference: the latter doesn’t actually do any housekeeping), but throughout keeping fastidious, constant notebooks. In what has become my tradition, the black Moleskine journal.

And before the black Moleskine system there were three large grid black Moleskines, the size that I now use to write out drafts and notes for creative projects, that I have self-mythologized and refer to as the “Scratches” notebooks (#1-#3) that on each one is written in silver glittery pen:

            Scratch your eye out

Scratch your I out

Scratching the surface

Scratching my ass

(Why do we write? To mark an existence? to pass time? Ecrit –to scratch. A text – textile. To weave the tapestry.  Out of an idea of who we’d like ourselves to be? Out of hope? Out of desperation? Out of fury?)

I haven’t read these Scratches notebooks in quite some time, although they form the basis in many ways of Green Girl and Book of Mutter and now, Heroines (oh and various texts that remain unwritten or failed experiments).  I remember this as the period I was coming to writing, I always refer to it as such in my head, I remember sticky hot August days  tagging along with John to the Newberry library, in new heeled sandals, washing my sweaty and bleeding feet in the public sink, sitting in frigid air-conditioning in the regal rooms, taking notes, filling up these notebooks. I guess I had always thought the content of these Scratches notebooks were full of this project I remember I was undertaking at this time of attempting to write down everything that was happening to me in the present, in an attempt not to censor myself, what Virginia Woolf calls “life-writing” (to understand myself, to really, try to understand myself). (At the beginning of The Ropemaker Notebook: “This time I must not blot a line. No revision, no second thoughts. Down it shall go. Already I am terrified. I have none of the tools of m trade. No row of pencils, no pencil sharpener, no drink. The standing jump.”) Pondering life versus fiction – What to keep out, what to put in – pondering the move towards censorship. How to channel my experiences and memories into fiction – and was that the goal, fiction? In these early notebooks I was so unsure (I am still). And I forgot how much I was writing out Green Girl in these notebooks, and how many passages and lines from my quotidian at that time make it into the now finished novel, my alienation as an adjunct teaching women’s studies just returning to the States now projected onto the alienation of a young blond American working at a fragrance counter in London (still: trauma, perpetual foreignness), and somehow the ambivalence of this splitting so that there is the older female narrator watching the young girl throughout the book.

But what I forgot is how enthralled I was, even then, to these mad wives, how many pages of the Scratches are simply transcribed notes from reading the biographies of Vivien and Zelda, and I realize how the lives of these wives – which I took on both as mythology and as cautionary tale – formed the basis for everything I wrote, have ever written (even O Fallen Angel, the Maggie sections are based partially on diaries from my breakdown period during my college and post-college years and my later attempts to both understand and exorcise, and yes, grotesquely mimic, who I was at that time). During these early Scratches I poured out memories, trying to filter my memories into book projects – kind of mimicking and mirroring Jean Rhys when she first began to write, after her first big love affair ended, when she bought up exercise books from the stationary shop, where for days she would stay up all day and night writing in them,—“What happened to me.” “What it felt like.”  And how Rhys carried these three exercise notebooks around with her for years, in all of her many moves, as I did with my three Scratches notebooks, not reading them, and then how hers formed the basis for her novel with her youngest heroine, Voyage in the Dark. And now I’m realizing how these Scratches form the basis for Heroines – all throughout the notebooks I am frantic with what I am to do with this found material, consciousness. For so long these women haunted me – was it a novel? A fictionalized notebook? (thinking of Anais wondering whether to turn her diaries into a fictionalized diaries). A series of essays?

And a feeling of triumph today. Some wonderful feeling of discovery. To be at the end and retrace back to the beginning. And realizing it’s all been one path I’ve been on, the entire time.

by request of Roxanne Carter: an image of some finished diaries/notebooks since 2006: the three big ones are my Scratches notebooks, the red one is a gorgeous Bindewerk I bought in Berlin they dont' make anymore - the small ones serve as scratch pads/dumping grounds/larger laboratories/dated diaries