WRITING THE EYRIE: LIVING IN THE HOUSE OF MEMORY
Stevie Davies
an essay dedicated to the memory of Frank Regan
We are all condemned to live in the house of
memory, and, until the last light fades, we are at once memory’s
creatures and memory’s forgers. Narratives of memory link
our significant actions and their endless reproductive creativity
binds the self in forms we can bear to live in. Yet memory itself
is suspect. We hide knowledge from ourselves or try to extinguish
it. The repressed returns, as Freud taught us. It meets us round
every corner. It is hanging from the ceiling like a spider on
a web.
I write this in the shadow of a bereavement:
the death of the man who was a partial and unconscious model for
my character ‘Red Dora’ Urquhart, the ninety-two year
old hero of The Eyrie.1 The similarity had
little to do with character: as a woman, Dora is an eagle; as
a man, Frank was a lamb. The likeness resides in absolute political
allegiance to the Marxist-socialist tenet: From each according
to his ability; to each according to his need. The Eyrie
is the child of a specific historical moment: that bitter day
in March 2003 when we woke to find we’d invaded Iraq - again.
I’d been on the Million March and realised that the antiwar
movement would be ignored; that we’d entered with the millennium
into an age of cynicism. In his proof copy of The Eyrie,
Frank had underlined only one passage, quite near to the end of
the novel. The underlined words were:
Such a fighter she was. And as far as Dora
was concerned, all the battles she
cared about had been lost. There was nothing left for Red Dora
to do. Just
being an old person with failing health was not enough.
(p.237)
This sounds like despair. But it is a mere statement of fact.
Dora, still resisting but in a new, final and sublimely nihilistic
way, turns away into the dark.
As a student, snoozing away at the back of an
Anglo-Saxon class, I was electrified into alertness by phrases
being read from The Battle of Maldon, the 10th century
Old English poem that commemorates the tragic - and heroic - failure
of Byrhtnoth and the men of Essex to hold their land against Viking
invasion. The words were those of the ‘old comrade’,
Byrhtwold, speaking after the death of their leader and their
hope:
Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe
cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.
(lines 313-4)2
A rough translation might read,‘Mind must
be the harder, heart the keener,/ Spirit shall be more - as our
might lessens.’ I’ve carried that with me throughout
my journey. Like so many epics, The Battle of Maldon
commemorates failure, rendering stoical failure itself heroic.
The mind’s victory, inner power, is won from the ruin of
the old community.
All the battles she cared about had been lost:
never-say-die Dora, socialist veteran of the Spanish Civil War
and Paris barricades, still raging in her twilight, is forced
by and by to lay down her arms. She has, to all intents and purposes,
retired to that unheroic margin where we go to live out our decline,
in this case the cosy and comfortable world of a block of flats
in Oystermouth, where elderly folk, chiefly female, retire. For
Dora this haven is ‘this subdued, murmurous antechamber
to a final quiet.’ (p. 12) Dora, cussed and tender, funny
and sharp-tongued, does not find this particularly easy. The year
is 2003 rather than 991. She has learned to distrust the certainties
that drove the young Scot-and-Trot (‘Fiery Particle’
to her Clydeside docker family) to the Party in the 1930s. Feminism,
the peace movement and the civil rights movements of the 1960s
shifted her perceptions. Yet when the Berlin Wall came down in
1989, she felt that (in the novel’s opening words) ‘She
had fallen, with the Wall, into obsolescence’. The Eyrie
is a millennial novel, set in the wake of twentieth century ideologies.
It asks, ‘What is left to us on the Left when ideologies
die?’
I had no conscious thought of The Battle
of Maldon when I set about writing The Eyrie. Poetry
bubbles around in my head ceaselessly. I’d have been more
likely to quote Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animals’
Desertion’:
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’.3
Or George Herbert’s ‘And now in age
I bud again,/ After so many deaths I live and write;/ I once more
smell the dew and rain ...’4 For it’s never
over till it’s over. In my fiction and in my life there
is a rooted faith in the stirrings of second chances, tentative
new beginnings. There are late meetings that lead us into new
insight; that hand us the key to the store where our most tender
(and tender is painful) trove of memories is kept locked. That
such reawakenings may prove fragile and ephemeral only adds to
their rare beauty.
It is in Dora’s meeting with two other
women that she finds a new sense of community and possibilities
of comradeship. That doesn’t mean she ceases to rage against
an unnamed Prime Minister, ‘the Butcher of Baghdad’,
or to devote her declining energy to learning to hack into US
military web sites. Dora can’t give up trying and failing.
Middle-aged Eirlys, the comforter, the childless mother-hen of
The Eyrie, also carries within her an ideologically passionate
past. Veteran of Welsh language militancy, an activist in Cymdeithas
Yr Iaith, the Welsh Language Movement, Eirlys (along with
her poet-cousin, Waldo) experienced the thrilling drama of the
‘60s and ‘70’s language protests, climbed television
masts, engaged in sit-ins, uprooted English language signposts
and saw the inside of Pucklechurch Women’s Prison, a university
education of itself for the privileged daughters of the middle
class. In creating a history for Eirlys, I was helped by the generosity
of distinguished Welsh poet and activist, Menna Elfyn, who told
me something of what it was like to be fighting for the survival
of your language.
But Eirlys, like my other characters, is embroiled in contradiction.
She too has outlived the heroic era of her life: marriage never
happened, her university education gave way to social work and
a carer’s unpaid ministry. Consumed by the demands of family,
she has fled the nest for The Eyrie. All The Eyrie’s residents
are in some sense refugees. Eirlys looks back on her personal
history with mingled gratitude and bewilderment:
Parents growing elderly and becoming gentle
living wraiths, to whom she had been able to offer the care
of the unattached daughter. Their gratitude. The knowledge upon
which she rested after they joined one another in the earth:
that she had done her best by those who had done well by her.
Eirlys would not say that she had had an unfulfilling life,
no. The marvellous chatty weave of family. She practised an
ethic of feeding, or so Dora said. Feed my sheep, said the Bible.
Christ had cooked up something wonderful out of five loaves
and two small fishes. In that case, though, you’ll have
to explain, Eirlys pointed out to herself, why you left your
vocation in social work and dodged up here where no one speaks
the language you would have died for! Your nearest and dearest
have to make an excursion to find you, rather than popping in,
yet here she was, stuffing strangers with goodies. It must be
pathological. Never mind. (p. 29)
The novel’s action begins when Hannah Francis,
twenty-something survivor of a commune upbringing and a stale
marriage, joins Dora and Eirlys at The Eyrie. Dora, looking down
from her window at the young woman, as she bundles her bags out
of the taxi, is struck by a likeness to her own daughter, Rosa.
Dora is pitched into domain of the heart: that
foul rag and bone shop, where all the ladders start. Who knows
what sordid leavings may disgrace us when the heart is exposed
and its accounts searched? And yet Jacob’s visionary angels
may ascend and descend from that base. In the little world of
party walls, a honeycomb of solidarities is built by the women’s
clement or formidable hands. Hannah’s speaking likeness
to Dora’s daughter, Rosa, named after Rosa Luxemburg, unearths
memories of quarrel, heartbreak, possessiveness and rancour. But
it also enables the surfacing of love. This is one of many occasions
in my writing career where I am aware of claiming irony for optimism:
benign action may be triggered by illusion. Hannah is really nothing
like the fanatic Rosa. Dora’s optical error will have to
be corrected. But in the meantime she is able to pass on fruits
of her experience to Hannah and to her great granddaughter, Angelica,
who, like many of the younger generation of my novel, are empty
vessels innocent of cultural and political history.
I am profoundly interested in flaws, inconsistencies
and fissures in characters: the vein of cruelty in a soft-hearted
woman; an explosion of wrath in the mild and genteel Mrs Dark;
the gentle Alzheimer’s sufferer who’d worked as a
tax inspector and ‘had doubtless terrified many a taxpayer
in her time’; the great public figure who’s been a
lousy mother. Yet love is always and everywhere love, warts and
all. The Eyrie leads to unearthing of buried memories and the
grave of Rosa.
This is an historical novel but not directly
set in an heroic or climactic era. Whereas in my earlier novel,
The Element of Water (2001), I took the reader imaginatively
back to Germany in the Nazizeit and its defeat, dramatising
German experience from 1933-59, The Eyrie looks back
but its communion with the reader is always from the perspective
of the unheroic here-and-now, the haunted quotidian moment. Major
key gives way to minor. The present is saturated in the past,
which in turn saturates the present. My inspiration for the character
of Dora and her participation in the Spanish Civil War came from
Republican women like Nan Green, Margarita Nelken and Patience
Darton. The high point of Dora’s life was as an administrator
at the emergency hospital rigged up in the caves at La Bisbal
de Falset in the summer of 1938, to treat the casualties from
the Republicans’ last major offensive against Franco, the
battle of the Ebro. It was in the carnage of this last battle
that Dora lost her young husband, Lachlan, the passionate volunteer
in the International Brigade. At the Ebro there remained to the
young Spaniards and the idealistic international warriors only
the kind of hope that animated the defeated heroes at Maldon a
thousand years before: ‘Hige sceal þe heardra,
heorte þe cenre,/ mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
mægen lytlað.’
But I show these events only through the brief rushes of recollection
Dora can make under the influence of Hannah’s proximity.
What do we know of Lachlan? How much does Dora know?
A hopeless fighter, Lachlan had been anyway.
One arm of his specs had been taped on. Poor co-ordination between
left and right hands. He had thrown his life away. The Republican
generals had squandered the lives of thousands of boys in that
desperate last push. Dora, questing back to where Lachlan lay
stranded, with the Second World War, the Cold War, the Korean
War, the Vietnam War and now two Middle Eastern Wars standing
between them like mountain ranges, felt she could make little
out. What had he been like then, really, this grave, tender
young idealist? Or rather, how would Lachlan have turned out?
For he had been in bud; still, in his mid-twenties, an open
question...
If he could be here now, in the same time-zone,
an ancient bag of bones on Rotherslade Bay, sucking at an ice
cream, deaf as a post, how would that have been? Dora, in that
case, would scarcely have been the Dora she was, a person who
had evolved in the wake of his death, wife to no man; her own
master. But she had brought with her some vital gifts that came
from him. These kernels of goodness amongst the mind’s
trash-can of vanities. (p. 100)
One could hardly say that The Eyrie
is set in Spain; rather, the Spanish Civil War lies under varying
lights and shades in the novel’s shifting hinterland. The
past is mind-stuff, filtered through the dubiety of the moodily
reflective present moment. For this reason, the novel makes constant
use of the subtle third person technique known as ‘free
indirect speech’: in the Latin, the term oratio obliqua
brings out its obliquity; in the German, where it is signalled
by the subjunctive, erlebte Rede (experienced or lived
speech) foregrounds its lived quality. What the technique allows
to the writer is an ambivalent suffusion of interior thought (a
reported thought or speech without the tags) with objective telling.
The technique conduces to irony and openness; distancing the reader
whilst revealing. Shadowing the focalised character every step
of the way, the writer can achieve intimacy, distance and openness.
Moving between Dora, Eirlys and Hannah, the quest of the narrative
voice of The Eyrie is to indicate disparate perspectives
on a shared present moment.
And, in any case, how is it more heroic for a
young man to die in battle than for an old person to face the
often solitary indignities of old age? In Middlemarch
(a novel that was formative for me) George Eliot draws our attention
to the tragedy that lies mutely at the core of ordinary experience:
‘the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance’.
We could not bear, she says, to empathise with all suffering,
which would be like ‘hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s
heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other
side of silence.’5 In the minor characters of
The Eyrie, and in the minor key, treating them with tender
humour, I touch on the quick of commonplace endurance, ordinary
tragedies. Megan is a centre of the novel’s meaning: she
suffers from Alzheimer’s and the moment comes (like a memento
mori for Dora, such a coward in personal matters), when Megan
is removed from The Eyrie and put in a nursing home by
her daughter and son-in-law. Failure of memory ushers in failure
of control and autonomy. Megan moves further and further out from
shore: from one home in Swansea she is removed to a cheaper one
in Carmarthen. When Dora finally brings herself to visit, she
sees too clearly her own possible destiny. Where would her next
of kin move Megan next? Pembroke? ‘Next stop, the sea!’
It is given to few of us to conclude our lives with the heroic
gesture. Megan encapsulates an ordinary and commonly uncongratulated
endurance - not without the spirit of Maldon - as her powers lessen.
*
The writer of course is omniscient, creating
for herself a bird’s-eye-view:
Venturing inland from the silver oval of Swansea
Bay, the oystercatcher’s eye hovers above the ruins of
a Norman castle on the hill’s green breast before flying
across a valley to a lushly wooded limestone scarp. Go back
180 years and the creature’s ancestor would have circled
above a quarry and a lime kiln raising choking clouds of smoke
and dust and a furore of industrial noise, where ant-like workers,
glad of a pittance, toiled and died for their masters.
But, veering east along the ridge, it would
have come upon leafy woodlands, a choice spot for a coppermaster
to build a sanctuary, round the coast from the poisonous fumes
of his arsenic and copper works at Llangyfelach and Clyne ...
erecting his retreat, Nyth Eryr ...
I am the oystercatcher. It is given to the novelist
to spy out the whole picture from her lonely vantage point above
the land. I am also the archaeologist chipping out fragments from
the caves of memory. And I’m Hannah on Trewyddfa Hill surveying
the miles of slate roofs through her binoculars, going by an aerial
view she’s first obtained on the Internet - the Google Earth
programme, whereby you are supposed to be able to spy out every
house in the world. As novelist, I am also a cruising eye that
can move through walls and ceilings: from the privacy of Dora’s
world up to Mrs Dark’s obscure cell. I can be with Eirlys,
admire her pot plants and smell her baking. I can look over Hannah’s
shoulder as she drinks wisdom from Dora’s books. More profoundly
I am down on the ground with my characters - after all, they are
all my children, their need forged out of mine, their histories
refractions of my history.
But a personal history always belongs to a community’s
history. Hannah comes to Swansea to understand her roots. The
previous year I had been researching my family history to the
path trodden by my father’s family. Pauperised agricultural
labourers in starving early nineteenth century Carmarthen, they
migrated with thousands of others to the iron mines of Merthyr
Tydfil in the late 1830s. Thirty years later they joined another
great migration to the steel mills of Morriston, where they became
greasers, puddlers and furnacemen. The narrative of the Francis
and Davies families from land to mining and heavy industry is
also a generic narrative of the nineteenth century Industrial
Revolution. At the end of that period one Francis has risen from
manual labour to become a clerical worker; the Davieses have owned
a shop. In the twentieth century they struggle their way ‘up
the hill’ to join the middle classes who could afford to
live in Newton, Mumbles and Sketty. I shared something of this
history with Hannah. When she looks down on Trewyddfa Hill she
looks back into the industrial world that bred the author of The
Eyrie.
The novel is saturated in history’s ironies.
The Eyrie was originally a coppermaster’s mansion, situated
round the coast from the poisonous fumes in the Valley that polluted
the air breathed by Hannah’s and Eirlys’s ancestors.
The mansion decays: copper dies; steel dies; dissolute heirs clear
off to the New World to invest or squander their inheritance.
An unseen drama of recrudescence undermines man’s creations,
nudging them back into the earth from which they were forged.
How ironic that the coppermaster’s folly should be inherited
by Red Dora; even more ironic that the revolutionary Trotskyist
allows herself to inhabit an ‘executive flat’ in a
thickly wooded haven of tranquillity, where limestone quarreymen
once toiled.
And behind the English house-name, ‘The
Eyrie’, lies a suppressed earlier name, the Welsh Nyth
Eryr. Everywhere in Wales we see and hear traces of yr
hen iaith, the old language. When my ancestors lived in Merthyr,
they spoke no English at all. When they came to Morriston, my
great grandparents spoke both languages. But Welsh was suppressed
in day schools, which punished children caught speaking Welsh
by hanging round their necks pieces of wood bearing the words
‘Welsh Not’. The Welsh Education Act of 1889 struck
further at the heartwood of the Welsh language. Despite this,
my steelman grandfather and his contemporaries (the men who went
to the Trenches in the Great War) held on to their Welsh and spoke
it amongst themselves; but one generation later, my father had
little or no Welsh, which was stigmatised as the language of the
underclass. In The Eyrie Eirlys has been part of the
heroic - and to an immense degree successful - work of recuperation.
Wherever we look, history surprises us by its
subversive, mnemonic persistence. Old letters, forgotten or even
unopened, are thrust into books and stored like an external memory.
We keep secrets even from ourselves. The Eyrie explores
ways of restoring gaps in memory, through, for example, the world
of the computer chip - and thence the suddenly available censuses
and certificates on the Internet. How wantonly providential of
the British Government to have compiled a memoir for Dora, in
the form of her 1950s MI5 record. I took wicked satisfaction in
pastiching the newly released secret documents on Orwell and the
Lefties of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Spies’ humourless
reports make for hilarious reading. But within the interstices
of the public record, movingly private and long-forgotten moments
may have been inadvertently stored. The intimate private world
violated by surveillance can take revenge fifty years after the
event.
Even within the ordinary domestic interior there
are so many possibilities of recapitulation. You don’t have
to climb up to a cobwebby attic to find memorabilia. Dora and
Hannah take apart a pouffe, stuffed with old newspapers.
Why not open up the pouffe and read those
papers, [Dora had] suggested. Time-travel back to the pre-Thatcher
Seventies? A glitter in the girl’s face had answered her,
and they’d found themselves disembowelling the pouffe,
tearing the past from its innards in handfuls, laughing like
maenads. After a good read, they’d stuffed the papers
back in. (p. 73)
How to restore our amnesiac age’s memory
is a larger question. The nineteenth century historian, Walter
Bagehot, put the problem rather crisply when he observed, ‘Every
generation is unjust to the preceding generation: it respects
its distant ancestors but thinks its fathers were “quite
wrong”. ’6 While Dora’s daughter
turns to a terrorism Dora cannot condone, her grandchildren -
more shockingly - are young conservatives from the pram. Christened
Keir (after Keir Hardie) and Karl (after Karl Marx), what can
Dora’s grandchildren do but revolt? While Dora’s great
granddaughter, Angelica, chip off the old block, seems more promising
material, she has been denied knowledge of history: What’s
the Spanish Civil War anyway, Nannan?
Dora ponders the conundrum: ‘If she should succeed in restoring
the amnesiac memory of the Age as manifested in Angelica, how
could that leaky vessel be encouraged to retain the information?’
*
‘You are a fine cartwheeler,’ Dora
tells Hannah admiringly, on Rotherslade Beach. One should never
underestimate the importance of cartwheeling. Criticism (even
or especially the writer’s critical account of her own work)
falsifies. For art is child’s play. I grew up in a family
where Cordelia’s ‘sunshine and rain at once’
were very present - and it has always seemed to me that tragicomedy
is the fullest possible response to life in its plenitude. Comedy
is notoriously difficult to talk about. It is present in the characters’
joie de vivre; in the breathing inventiveness of language.
Light implies and succeeds to dark in perpetual revolution. When
Hannah follows Dora’s tragic path on the final page, she
returns, paradoxically, ‘exultant’. Loss is not the
last word:
With that, the child who’d been strolling
with, presumably, her nan on the beach, slipped her mittened
hand free, gave a little skip, and pelted down towards the sea.
(p. 238)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 All references to The Eyrie are to Stevie Davies,
The Eyrie (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
2 Ed. D.G. Scragg, The Battle of Maldon (Manchester
University Press, 1981).
3 W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (Macmillan,
1958), lines 38-40.
4 George Herbert, ‘The Flower’ (The
Temple, 1633), lines 36-8.
5 George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-2, ed. Rosemary
Ashton (Penguin Classics, 1994), pp. 788, 194.
6 Walter Bagehot, ‘Matthew Arnold on the
London University’, in Collected Works, ed. Norman St John-Stevas
Economist, 1974), p. 388.
