Self Elaine

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ISBN: 978-1-80471-048-7
Verlag: Grove Press UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

'Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity' Guardian Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Self, Will

Leseproben

.2.

November 1954

The last words of John’s introduction to his study of the blind poet—ones Elaine had typed before her departure for New York, stayed with her the whole time. Perhaps not verbatim—but anyhow, as the cab turns into Hemlock Street they repeat once more, as food rejected by the stomach does, all chewed up into acidic little bits:

Ridiculous! The truth is he shares with his chosen subject a great pleasure in being peevish, ungrateful, and most especially ungenerous. Moreover, Elaine doesn’t think much choice was ever involved—there’s an elective affinity between the two Johns.

Now, looking up at the small and isolated suburban house from where she stands in the roadway, paying off the cabbie who’s driven her from the station, Elaine wonders: Who am I coming home to—and why? Why not simply keep going somewhere—anywhere!—else? The thought of some mad meter reading for a two-hundred-mile ride up to the Canadian border , makes her smile internally, .

The two-buck fare from the station—including tip!—will be noted and filed in the hushed repository of her husband’s highly efficient memory—and eventually it’ll be . Because he’s a parsimonious soul, is John—No! Not so—a grave misnomer: he’s a goddamn miser, a puritan to his core, who, far from suffering their straitened circumstances as his wife does, positively .

His judgmental presence has, she feels sure, swelled in her absence to fill the entire house. The front room is all his head—his lips are Dalí cushions. His rear end squidges against the back wall of the kitchen. Fuseli’s artist is moved by the grandeur of similarly enlarged and fragmentary limbs . And even if she didn’t know her husband as well as she does, Elaine suspects she’d feel the same were she to come upon his giant arms and legs lying athwart the dinky hallway and the tiny first-story landing.

Yet despite John’s overbearing grossness, it’s he who has the nerve ! Worse yet, he now feels free to express his scorn in company quite as much as when they’re alone: the same sour look, as if he’d just this second bitten into the realization that . Not that it’s any better at home—for he does it in front of their child .

As Elaine mounts the stairs, then, opening the screen door, enters the glassed-in porch at the side of the house, she’s compelled to this pained acknowledgement: Billy is unusually close to his father, while John—unlike so many other men—is perfectly competent when it comes to his own and Billy’s daily needs—so, really, there’s As for love, the angles of their triangle are always altering, as each parent is revulsed by the spectacle of the other enfolding their child in a sweetly endearing embrace.

Opening the kitchen door Elaine smells the reheated meatloaf they must’ve had for their supper—a dish she prepared and refrigerated before she left—and again she’s overwhelmed by a desire to be alone and . On Saturday evening—if they do, after all, attend the Lemesuriers’ annual cocktail party—John will do it again: pick-picking away at some mispronunciation or grammatical error of his wife’s as if .

He cannot help himself—and doesn’t seem to realize this behavior makes neither of them look smart. On the contrary, when he does this Elaine’s certain the others can see what she and John know to be always there . . . clinging to their shaggy, unkempt coats—the wretched testaments of our introversion .

They’re not expecting her back until the following morning—so Elaine hesitates on her own threshold between inside and out, claustrophobia and agoraphobia, atomic Armageddon and the world peace earnestly hoped for in the greasy disarticulation of the wishbones, little fingers crooked, she pulls with her seven-year-old son, so that even if everyone else’s world is destroyed, hers will be miraculously .

She remembers getting back early from a shopping expedition with Bobbie at the beginning of the summer—before the Hancocks went to the cottage in Vermont for their vacation. That was an awful episode—will this be one, too?

Elaine had still been seeing Doctor Freudenberg every Wednesday afternoon—either driving there alone or, on the days when she couldn’t face the bumpy boring through the small wooden townships, and the sinister whirring of the tires as the Buick bucketed across the open-form bridges, John would have to accompany her, having begged a colleague for yet another favor.

No surprise, then, that he’s unpopular in the department—and thrashing about trying to get a promotion, or a Fulbright, or both. Elaine, bitter to a fault, conjoins her husband’s lack of sexual vigor with his obnoxiousness, socially, and his failure to advance professionally—then cries out in the cramped confines of her own head: That was then—this is now, when she’s better—much better, so much so she’s free to consider exactly how reliant he might’ve been on her illness . . . it suited him—saved him from having to face up to his own inadequacies.

There are Billy’s outgrown clothes in upstairs drawers, together with old correspondence and saved string. There, upright in the dish dryer beside the sink are washed dishes, but they’ll be dirty again soon enough. And there, on the mat beside the door, polished , are his school shoes.

All domestic objects have, for Elaine, this dread quality: they’re hooks that, any time she sees or thinks of them, pierce her cursed flesh and drag her back, through months and years full of awful days and excruciating, inertial hours—times when she felt so bad, so worthless, and yet so very angry, she couldn’t lay a hand on a plate without wanting to fling it at John’s head.

While as for Billy’s lace-up shoes: hunched over and shaking as she fumbled together their bows, Elaine was gripped by maniacal urges—wondering whether her best course, given the rotten state of the world, would be to pick her small son up by his heels and . After which she’d slump down on the floor, sobbing, and John would have to get their kid ready for kindergarten, then take him there.

Well, nowadays it may not exactly be ! but for the most part that terrible, tense atmosphere has hissed out of the house—and this was coincident with Elaine stopping seeing Doctor Freudenberg. He’d doubtless say it was because of the work they’d done together, rather than its termination—Elaine isn’t so sure, as she’d come to distrust his motivations, which at worst seem adventitious—she knew he’d wanted to get rid of her quite a while beforehand but had had no one to take up her hour until July . . .

. . . Well, is it any surprise she’d come to feel a sulky mistrust, not just with respect to this one egghead, coddled in his consulting room—but the entire apparatus of psychoanalysis, which she’d begun to see as just another American fad, one she’s observed in the past five years heading West, as if its practitioners were gripped not just by the money-making zeal of carney men, hucksters, and four-flushers , but by a weird version of Manifest Destiny, compelling them to subdue the Indians of the id, and take possession of their unconscious hinterlands.

During the same period, she’s noted the language of psychoanalysis creeping into ordinary speech and commonplace prose. It’s no longer only the faculty crowd—among whom are plenty of quondam communists and renegade Jews—that speaks of attachments, complexes, and inhibitions . Soon enough, Elaine thinks, I’ll go into Pete’s to pick up some groceries, and he’ll be behind the counter, sitting on the old barstool with the foam escaping from its crimson cushion, massaging his temples with one hand while he makes tragic gestures with the other, and he’ll explain he can’t go to the storeroom and get what I want because of his

Now that she’s stopped seeing Freudenberg, Elaine finds it weird that she was captivated for so long by this odd little man—whatever he did or didn’t do for her, one thing’s sure: he isn’t one of those screwy, clever guys she can’t help herself falling for. That was the nub of the problem—and when she tried to get him to say anything about his feelings for her, he’d retreat behind his wall of jargon, then begin chucking hand grenades: Elaine hadn’t merely been what he termed a child seductress—but a castratory one as well, who, sidelined by that golden boy, her brother, resolved to cut his penis off and have it for her ownsome.

What could possibly be the connection between this mishigas and treating...