16. As for me, after surrendering myself to the Travelling Companion...
The sixteenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls heady days at the Glastonbury Festival and his dreams of a literary life.
As for me, after surrendering myself to the Travelling Companion, the following months were ones of relative happiness, spent in a perfectly splendid haze of lager, literature and lovemaking. At least that’s how I remember it…
That first summer – after her graduation, and my first year – we packed our bags and travelled to the Glastonbury Festival for a weekend of unalloyed magic and amatory bliss. Two lovers, like a pair of impish fireflies, cavorting around mystic fields, full of each other and the hallowed world. Magnetic nourishing nights. Abelard and Heloise on the hunt for cheap thrills and even cheaper drugs. Or something like that.
Whatever happened, it seemed to complete a circle for me, because this was a place that had played a big part in my life as a child, which is doubtless why I’ve always been apt to romanticise it. Although I never fully understood his reasoning at the time, this was where, each year, my father and a few like-minded friends went to escape the parochial concerns of our little town, which, unbeknown to me, were quietly driving him mad. He brought me along, I think, in the hope that I’d see there was a life outside the one I knew at home, where convention and conformity were common currency, and people like him were tarnished simply because they dared to entertain alternative ideas about the world.
The name ‘Glastonbury’ carries with it such baggage these days, that it’s difficult to describe what it was like back then. The festival I knew existed in an entirely different social and political context; a world of mass unemployment, union busting and the bomb. As a kid, I remember feeling a genuine sense of anarchy, of being let loose in a space in which the shibboleths of Thatcher’s Britain no longer applied, beyond the influence of police, teachers and agents of authority. I realised that going there marked us out as somehow different from most of the people back home, even though I never really understood what that difference meant. I remember instead, the freedom, joy and madcap energy of the place, of learning to stilt-walk and juggle in the Circus Field, of having my face painted by beautiful young women who smelt of wood-smoke and lavender, of a thousand fires spread across the dark fields, the atavistic pulse of the land, the low thrum of music late into the night.
In fact, it was while playing in the Circus Field one day, amid the melee of fairy children and hoary hippies, that I first encountered a toy called a ‘diabolo’, an hourglass-shaped piece of plastic that is spun on a piece of string suspended between two sticks. I can’t remember why I was so fascinated with it, but I do recall practicing for hours in a rather fruitless attempt to master the technique. I think it spoke to a certain stubbornness within me; something I’ve always possessed, which has, on reflection, perhaps made tackling a book like the Search, which many people take years to read, possible in a far shorter time. Whatever it was, I was determined not to let this strange, inanimate thing win and fall to the floor. Instead, I’d diligently keep it spinning, in motion, at all costs, at least until fatigue or boredom got the better of me.
The memory of this random and rather fleeting obsession came back to me while I was reading on my way to work one day. As I was stuck beneath the ground in London, the Narrator was holidaying at the seaside resort of Balbec (based on Cabourg in northern France). There he stumbles into a brash ‘little band’ of girls around his own age, who shoot along the promenade like a ‘luminous comet’, running about, raising hell, even jumping over procumbent beachgoers, because ‘they had decided that the surrounding crowd was composed of creatures of another race whose sufferings could not awake in them any sense of fellowship…’
Out of this strange crew emerges the beguiling Albertine, who we later find playing on the beach with the very toy which had so fascinated me all those years before in Glastonbury. What was this all about? Always the aesthete, the Narrator compares Albertine and her toy to Giotto’s fresco Infidelity, which depicts a male figure holding in his hand a small female idol who has him lassoed around the neck. The etymology of the word ‘diabolo’ reveals yet another layer of playful inference. From the Greek dia bolo, meaning ‘across throw’, its meaning is doubled, for it can also be read as ‘liar’, ‘one that commits perjury’, or perhaps most tellingly, ‘to make someone fail’. It seems the master of the diabolo is not to be trusted in affairs of the heart – something the young Narrator could never know, but that his creator no doubt takes delight in suggesting, for one of Proust’s great themes is this the perverse waltz of lover and beloved:
‘… one would like to remain, for her whom one loves, the unknown whom she may love in turn, but one has need of her, one requires contact not so much with her body as with her attention, her heart… and love, following an unvarying procedure, sets going an alternating movement the machinery in which one can no longer either refrain from loving or be loved.’
This is the ‘across throw’ at the root of human love relations, a dynamic ambivalence that plays out between two lovers, a process that is subject to persistent diabolic interruptions, and to which the Narrator, in his pursuit of Albertine, will find himself once again unwillingly subjected.
A year or two passed for me too. After those idyllic few days in Glastonbury, which felt like stepping out of the world altogether, and during which my love for the Travelling Companion was consolidated, much of my time was taken up with study (I became a diligent student mostly because I wanted to impress her) and hers with teaching English to foreign students at one of the language schools in Norwich. We lived in the kind of blissful ignorance that many couples in their early twenties do, by which I mean we played at being married.
This involved making house, making out, and making believe that everything was as it should be. I was still a student but, with a certain smugness, felt like I’d progressed further, and in less time, than my peers – because there I was, living with my older girlfriend, having sophisticated dinner parties with her sophisticated friends, talking philosophy, art and politics, and not sat around in the student bar drinking pints, playing pool and procrastinating about revision. I was now taking this seriously; and with her help, beginning to see literature as a way of extracting certain truths from the world, while fantasising, with her encouragement, that I might even have it in me to write something great myself one day.
Seeing this upturn in my attitude and attainment, the faculty encouraged my efforts. I always remember being told how far I’d come, ‘from subtopia to seminar room’, as one of my professors once put it. On several occasions, I was even made to read out extracts from my work in class, so that my fellow students could get a sense of what was required of them. At the time, UEA had what was generally regarded as the best postgraduate creative writing course in the country. It soon became my ambition to secure a place; the perfect kick-start to my stellar literary career. ‘I’m sure you’ll be a shoo-in for Andrew’s course,’ another tutor assured me. I thought so too. These were the years in which I began to think I was something rather special. I never considered the possibility that he’d simply been stroking his own ego; impressing upon me just how great his teaching was to make himself feel good.
Of all my teachers back then, the one I most admired was called Howard Summers. He looked like someone I wanted to become, the kind of self-assured, middle-aged man who still made fresh-faced undergraduates quiver at the knees. In his early forties, grizzled, rugged, but still boyish, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and rakishly handsome features, I always thought he resembled Ted Hughes and had something of the oak tree about him. He wore jeans, open shirts, a black leather jacket, and was usually to be found drinking real ale in the student bar, surrounded by a gaggle of eager acolytes, ears pinned back to catch every word from the great man’s mouth. I seem to remember him having a dog, but may have invented that part.
What I can most clearly recall was the thrilling introductory lecture he gave on The Great Gatsby, which left the room breathless, and I’m certain changed the course of my life. I’d never had a work of art explained to me so perfectly. In all my years of reading, perhaps blinded by youthful hopefulness, it had never occurred to me that what we most desired in life, even at such a young age, might already be behind us, like the love Gatsby and Daisy had once shared. Summers wielded concepts like this with a blithe disregard for the tiny teenage minds in his midst. He often joked, that as students of literature, we were, in fact, being trained to be incapable. The insights and knowledge we were acquiring, he said, would enrich our lives no end, but render us utterly ineffectual when it came to the practical world of work, earning a living, and all the rest of it. I laughed at the time, but later realised there was a truth to what he said; it explains a lot when I reflect on everything that’s happened since. As I got older, many of the ideas I marvelled at back then have become obscured, lost in the general tide of habit that washes over all of us as life winds on. That, or they got mixed up with the tsunami of content the world perpetually dumps on people these days. Either way, things didn’t turn out how I once imagined they might.
For a while, I pictured myself as a successful scholar like him, living a busy, happy, intellectually fulfilled life with the Travelling Companion, possibly on the outskirts of Cambridge, in a characterful cottage near the river, with a neat garden of carefully tended annuals: zinnias, marigolds, morning glories. I’d spend much of my time writing well-regarded books with orange spines, so well-crafted, insightful and accessible that they’d reach beyond the usual academic audience to occasionally bother the bestseller lists. There would be regular book reviews in The Guardian and appearances on In Our Time, perhaps even the odd documentary on BBC Four, plus an annual pilgrimage to Hay to flog my latest effort and flaunt my easy intelligence to an appreciative crowd.
Back at home, our feet would be warmed every evening by a real fire, our souls succoured by the obligatory chocolate Labrador, and our bellies warmed by sixteen-year-old Lagavulin. Outside in the drive, the still-warm engine of our trusty old Land Rover would make reassuring noises as it cooled; while in the kitchen, the Travelling Companion would rustle up supper on the Aga, as I lay on the couch, idly turning the pages of the Paradiso. The ageing Professor Summers might even stop by to share a tipple with his favourite former student, and we’d sit and drink our whisky while earnestly wearing waistcoats and talking about Walter Benjamin. I’d be able to look back on my life with great satisfaction and imagine social mobility in Britain to be alive and well.
But what really happened next was what happens to most people. By which I mean: nothing much. Three or four years went by. We didn’t die. We weren’t particularly happy, we weren’t particularly sad. Instead, we were very much a ‘couple’, locked into each other’s patterns of behaviour, reflexive in our love for one another, habitually attentive, occasionally spiky, and thinking this was how it would be forever. Our curiosity, ambition and rage were tempered by comfort. I passed my degree with a narrow first, but Summers marked me down on my final dissertation and I didn’t get accepted onto the creative writing MA. The Travelling Companion still worked at the language school, but in a more senior post, and I ended up getting a job in the housing office at Norfolk County Council, adding names to a waiting list that only ever grew. At the weekends, we got supremely drunk.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.