In the last few years I’ve found myself reading biographies and memoirs, filling in lives of philosophers, activists, historians, theoreticians and literary scholars whose work I read early in my career. Part of this interest results from a certain weariness of complexity for complexity’s sake in academic writing — as my powers of concentration seem to decline, I’ve become much more interested in historical rather than theoretical work, and I find theory harder to read. Mostly, though, I’m impelled curiosity about interlinked histories and how ideas emerge from social contexts. Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin both fled Germany to Paris and then headed south to Spain after France capitulated in the Second World War. The internment camp in Gers, which Arendt passed through, also played host to Arthur Koestler. And as they left occupied Europe, another, more privileged traveller, Somerset Maugham, struggled to find a ship to England after leaving his villa in Cap Ferrat. Sigmund and Anna Freud fled to London, and Anna Freud worked with displaced children in Hampstead, only a few doors from where S. Rajaratnam lived. Lives I’ve researched separately often serendipitously cross paths, and spill over into each other in curious, unanticipated ways.
It’s in this spirit that I began reading Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, a series of vignettes written in the 1930s, when Benjamin knew he would not return to the German capital, looking back to a childhood at the turn of the century. The fragmentary pieces of narrative are lapidary and almost at times overly dense, although I’m unsure whether this thickening of language and is an effect of translation, or whether the translation mirrors the original. Benjamin’s reaching back to his childhood over thirty years made me also reflect on my own relationship to my childhood, over half a century ago, sixty years after the events that Berlin Childhood describes. Again, there are some strange crossings, where our experiences meet. One vignette, “The Sewing Box,” describes Benjamin as a young child watching his mother sew, and putting his hand into her sewing box to explore. My experience was a little different from his – my mother actually taught me how to darn and sew, although, until this day my natural impatience means that I make do in darning and sewing, never taking the time to do fine work. Yet there’s almost an exact parallel in Benjamin’s experience of the “shabby allure” of the spools of thread in the box:
“What attracted me about those spools was their hollow core; originally, this was intended for an axle which, on being rotated, would wind up the thread on the spool. Now, however, this cavity was covered on both sides by a black label which bore, embossed in gold, the name and number of the firm. Too great was the temptation to press my fingertips against the center of the tag; too intimate, the satisfaction when it tore and I dipped into the hole beneath” (113)
By my own childhood, the new spools were mostly plastic, although wooden ones from years ago still lurked in the box. In addition to the hole for the spindle on the sewing machine, these pale taupe plastic spools, with an unsightly cut in the rim to lodge the end of thread in, also had a series of cavities around the centre, so that in cross-section they resembled a spoked wheel. There were thus many more opportunities with each of them to press on the labels that covered each end, and to break through the paper tag: the pleasure of the action, which I remember distinctly, was a little like the pleasure that comes from popping the bubbles on bubble wrap.
In the last few months, as I prepare the manuscript of Heaven Has Eyes for publication, I’ve been thinking about these small, tactile moments, and how they are the foundation for building historical fiction. You read and research the archives for historical artefacts and for details. And yet your body is also an archive, an accumulated site of embodied memories. Writing yourself into the past seems to proceed from this kind of remembered gesture, or space, or sensation, and then building outwards, entering the world of a character at a particular place and time.
In preparation for a workshop at Singapore Writers Festival, I’ve been thinking further about how I write myself into these interlocking histories, and how I inhabit historical characters. I often begin from an object that would have been present at the time, an object that I can come to know almost physically. Sometimes there are analogues in my own experience, gestures or ways of working that I’ve internalised and now forgotten, like that pleasure in popping the paper on the end of the bobbin. For the first seventeen years of my life, for instance, I attended church regularly, and some of the gestures associated with this attendance are still hard-wired into my body. I can make the sign of the cross effortlessly, crossing myself with holy water when I enter a Catholic church. In Singapore, when I see foreign workers playing cricket on a bare patch of land, I can feel the rhythm of bowling a delivery, or executing a forward defensive stroke, in my body. Sometimes this memory will stay with me, and I’ll rehearse the gesture when I’ve returned to my flat, marvelling at how the body still knows what I’ve consciously forgotten.
These gestures embedded in the archive of the body, however, need to be translated into gestures that the characters make which are analogous to them, but not the same. Ways into this include rituals that all bodies share: the process of eating, for example, in which observation slows down what has become automatic, so that tastes and actions are noted, and then reassembled again. Here I think I’m helped by the embedded memory of a life before screens existed outside of the television and the cinema, in which writing and reading were tactile activities.
I’m curious about the workshop, and whether I can find a way of working that is useful to others, as well as myself. In the meantime, we’ve transitioned from summer to winter in Vancouver in a month. Rain falls; umbrellas go up. Small children pass the fire hall on our street, and stop in wonder at the fire trucks with their chrome and red paint and flashing lights in the day’s darkness. I Iook at photographs of my childhood, and think about those sensations of wonder that marked themselves on the body, even though I have no memory of them.