What Is to Be Learned From an Unread Writer?

 Could be this is a sign of procrastination - I have job hunting and catching up on Doctor Who and starting a short story to do. Yet I had to finish reading James Ley's My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion that came to me through a Public Books newsletter. The title made me curious. Her photo also fed my curiosity. The introductory paragraphs made me wonder if I should continue.

Ann Quin was born in 1936 in Brighton, England. She died there in 1973. The circumstances of her death are inconclusive, but it is commonly accepted that she committed suicide. She stripped naked and walked into the sea.

She left behind four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). An unfinished novel and a smattering of short fiction, including an early version of Tripticks, have been collected in The Unmapped Country as part of a recent reissue of her work. The manuscripts of two other novels were lost when Quin was evicted from her London flat in the early 1970s. She was away at the time and the real-estate agent threw them in the bin.

Hm, I thought obscure writer... what good is it to read this? That she came out of the working class was interesting but might not add up to much for me. Thinking there had to be a reason for the essay, so I kept nibbling. The following made her sound more interesting:

Initially, at least, Quin did what a young woman of her station in life was supposed to do: she learned to type and got a job as a secretary. The flirtation with respectability was short-lived. Quin was drawn to the bohemian spirit of the times and its liberating possibilities. Her early ambition to pursue an acting career was scuttled by a paralyzing attack of stage fright at an audition. Writing would become her ticket out. The publication of Berg – an audacious novel that takes its thematic cues from Hamlet, Dostoevsky, and Freud, but pitches itself as a squalid seaside farce – earned her comparisons to the likes of B. S. Johnson and Nathalie Sarraute. It also opened the door to the kinds of peripatetic adventures that tend to be denied denizens of the lower orders, women in particular, and she seized the opportunity with enthusiasm...

 I have an interest in psychological states but not in what I think of any great depth, but here is where I found my interest in Quin:

...Quin’s willingness to venture into such disturbing territory is a manifestation of her wider concern with unstable and distorted psychological states. Her characters move through a world that often appears distended and grotesque, full of menacing symbols and portents that seem to reflect their anxieties and neuroses. Their conflicted desires and moments of Dionysian release are always understood to contain a latent violence that can be directed inwardly or outwardly, but not eliminated or resolved. Their motivations are often opaque, even to themselves. “How difficult it is to judge even one’s own actions,” S reflects near the end of Three. “There never appears to be only the one reason.”

Yes, that never one reason is one I know. 

By the essay's conclusion, after discussing her novels with extended quotes, I was sold by its conclusion:

The proposition that Quin failed to achieve some kind of symbolic emancipation through her writing would seem to be more a matter of unrealistic critical expectations than a reasonable assessment of her artistic accomplishment. She is a demonstration of the principle that the power of literature is not its decisiveness but its applied intelligence and insight. She is, above all, a self-aware writer, with an ironic understanding of the limits of symbolic expression, who was nevertheless prepared to test those limits. Buckeye’s assertion that Quin “never learned how writing should be written” is intended as praise for the uniqueness of her innate talent, but it does her a disservice. She knew exactly what she was doing, formally and thematically, and she knew what was at stake.

The clarity and courage with which Quin faced her situation is the ultimate source of the wit and vitality of her work. In a wry fragment published under the title “One Day in the Life of a Writer,” and clearly written near the end of her life, she describes receiving a letter from the Arts Council rejecting her grant application (“cos they read what I did with the last one”). Her reflection concludes with the melancholy observation that they must have known that she was “no longer capable of writing.” Her unfinished final novel does not bear this out. It is devastatingly lucid. Nonia Williams has traced its title to a passage in Daniel Deronda, where George Eliot writes: “There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.” The surviving pages confront us, appropriately, with a diptych. The first section finds Quin’s protagonist Sandra in a psychiatric hospital. She is clearly the smartest, sanest person there – certainly smarter than the resident quacks who can tell her nothing about herself that she does not know already. The second section describes the episode that led to her admission: a harrowing descent into paranoid delusions. Sandra reels through city streets believing herself pursued by Russian agents. Quin’s tragedy is that she was ultimately unable to resolve the contradiction. She was too perceptive not to see the absurdity and falsity of the imposed order, but knew only too well that there was no liberation in madness.

There could be something to learn from such a writer.  Madness has only one solution and that is suicide and I know full well now that is not a useful solution. Harnessing one's madness to creativity (perhaps its own form of madness) is a useful solution.

sch