"I don't write fiction for people to identify with and I don't write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people. What excites me is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable.” Will Self *1
An English novelist coasts into his sixties with an impressive list of books written, not only fiction but far ranging commentary, all shot through with brilliance and originality. Born in London in 1961, he missed the bon enfant beginning of the social changes of the 1960s and was shaped by the rancid aftermath. His American mother had fled her home country that she deemed illiberal and a marriage in which she never found her place. Expatriation to London and another marriage, this time to an Englishman, didn’t lessen her disarray. She was strong-minded but extremely vulnerable. She gave birth to the novelist who remembers his father as being a bore stuck in the Edwardian age and his mother as shipwrecked by her encounter with social change.
The writer is Will Self, author of ‘Elaine’**2, 2024. The novel is all about his mother under another name. Her son adds to her confusion by his writer’s nonchalance in mixing fact and fiction. What he calls a novel, he says, is based on her unpublished diaries found after her death. Looking for some clarity, we can read his ‘Will’***3, a memoir published in 2019. It is more than an account of his drug addiction and tells how a knowing, too bright boy grew up in London in the 1970s. He is bold to the point of recklessness and tense with teenage insecurity. He rides the besoiled tail of the 1960s’ shift in mores in a comfortable Hampstead Garden Suburb home. The boy, Will, just as his mother did in upstate New York, hatches a hatred of the place and way of life. His local MP is Margaret Thatcher. But 1970s London is not 1950s America. His mother’s rebellion never got beyond scribbling bitter notes to herself and despising her husband among sundry others. Will had the dark side of Swinging London to work through. In adolescence, he chose drugs and anarchy as a life path.
As a teen, Will spiced his expensive education with hippie ways. When he attended the Punk show at Camden Town’s fabled train shed, the Roundhouse, in the mid-1970s, his long hair fell over his roomy army surplus camouflage. But the Sex Pistols, the Frogs and the whole Punk mindset made him ashamed of the hippie shtick. It was out of it, passé. He would be a Punk from then on. He saw that:
“The young punks had arrived hot foot from the future—that much was clear-and their mission was to retrospectively alter history’s very course, by making everything that had hitherto been positive…negative. And vice versa”.
The November evening set Will’s direction in life. It can also be seen as a pivot in counter-culture. The easy-going 1960s’ new bohemianism morphed into the 1970s’ hard-edged anti-social nasty. Will recognised himself in the Punk gospel. In desperate moments hadn’t he tried masochism, cutting himself with razor blades and burning his own flesh? Like his mother, he had felt the absolute need to get away, to flee, and the disinclination actually to do so. Punk total negation was a way of escaping himself and his situation into a drugged other place. It spit a fierce no, never, at Hampstead Garden Suburb and what be called the bourgeoisie.
Punk naysaying would leave a permanent mark on Will Self’s style as a writer. Even in maturity he evades geniality. In his memoir he doesn’t hide the contempt he felt as a boy for his parents. He paints them over with biting satire. His father was a simply too-ordinary and conventional a scholar and professor, notable only for his absence from the household. Later Will would admit that like all sons he had parricide in mind. His mother, whose battle cry was “I’m a woman, and I’m hysterical,” he saw as an erratic eccentric who stifled him with intimacy when not stepping away in total detachment. But the duo Will formed with her had a profound effect. The thought of her keeps popping up in the memoir. Will says that he:
“finds it impossible to think of her as an ordinary mortal: she’s immense, a vast and ever-mutating presence, with Olympian—let alone built in orphan-powers”.
“Orphan-powers” in their intimate talk meant an attractiveness that couldn’t be resisted. Mother and son saw it in each other. Will knew as a boy:
“There’ll be no escape from the Mother planet-Will realises this intuitively: even if he does blast off for new worlds, he’ll touch down to find her footprints already in the dust. There’ll be no giant leaps for this specimen of mankind, only baby steps”.
But “there’s a paradox: her omniscience is combined with self-confessed impotence…” which proceeds “to sully her divinity—turning her into some…demiurge, […]”.
Now this omniscience undercut by impotence is the theme of his mother’s unpublished diaries or, at any rate, of the novel Will Self says he has made of them. It is an astonishing exercise in mimicry by the author son of his disgruntled mother diarist. She, as Elaine, delivers a breakneck, fragmented account of her malaise for 290 pages. The author is identified with Elaine so closely that we come to see Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” in less abstract and more fleshy terms. Will could be reporting from inside his mother’s womb.
We should remember that Will Self has declared himself a novelist of the body, of “embodiment”:
“I just don’t understand why other people aren’t preoccupied by the body. I just don’t understand it. You can read novels—and I don’t read a great deal of novels—that never consider the body. I just don’t understand it. In a way, it’s just as simple as nobody ever having a shit in a book whereas it seems to me that the condition of somebody’s digestive system is of almost paramount importance to their mental state. So much fiction seems disembodied to me, and so connected with a kind of cultural and political establishment, in whose interest it is that we be disembodied—particularly in Anglo-Saxon culture which is so antipathetic to sexuality, sensuality and bodily experience.”****4
In this spirit, Will Self’s seventh collection of stories, 2008, was entitled ‘Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes’. Each story features someone with a damaged liver. The review ‘Time Out’ said: ”Self has all the fun you’d expect with this, and the result is satire so vicious it makes Charlie Brooker look restrained.”*****5
His novel ‘Elaine’ is all about his mother’s body and its psychosomatic raiment. Self’s fiction often unfolds like a session with an analyst. Psychiatrists make regular appearances. His impressive trilogy, 2012 to 2017—‘Umbrella’, ‘Shark’ and ‘Phone’— has a psychopathologist as the leading figure.
One of Elaine’s many hates is her psychoanalyst, to her mind, a devious and double-dealing shrink. But we can sympathise with him when he dumps a disputatious patient who often phones him in the middle of the night. He too has a stress limit. Will Self, an Englishman, is reconstructing American life in the 1950s. Since Elaine’s husband is a prof at Cornell University, we are in the intellectual rough weather that then raged. Elaine is Jewish and anti-semitism was pervasive at the time. Jews were unacceptable everywhere from country clubs to university faculties. Elaine as a child was troubled by a mother who sidestepped the stereotype of the warm Jewish mom by her coldness. But her father fit all too well the view that anti-semites had of the vulgar, money-grubbing Jew.
There was a tendency of the aspiring, shared by Elaine, to blank out their immigrant background. To shed his German aura as an American soldier in WWII, her husband, Johann Schitz, in law became John Hancock. In view of the Red Scare that peaked in the early 1950s, he had also to hide his former infatuation with Marxism and bury himself in literary studies. He chose John Milton as his subject in the hope that 17th Century Puritanism would be beyond the ken of Commie-chaser Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Other 1950s’ forces also weighed on the Elaine and Johann-John’s couple. Sigmund Freud’s thought had reached American and been boiled down to how-to-be-happy formulas. Even the Protestant cleric and TV preacher Norman Vincent Peale warned his flock to beware of sexual repression. Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose book on child care was outsold only by the Bible, told parents not to worry if their children masturbated. Alfred Kinsey’s sexual surveys of men in 1948 and of women in 1953 sold three quarters of a million copies and questioned long-standing taboos. Americans engaged in sex more frequently and with more variety than had always been thought. Homosexuality was natural for some. No surprise that a congressional committee accused Kinsey of weakening American moral fibre and aiding communism. Undeterred, the review ‘Playboy’ was launched in 1953 displaying a new graphic permissiveness to the main stream.
How did ex-Johann and his bleached-Jewish wife weather these forces? They fit themselves into a circle of Cornell academics and their mainly stay-at-home wives. Pill-popping was routine, Nembutals for sleep, benzedrine concoctions to wake up and Miltowns for calm when awake. There was no fear of what the longterm effect of uppers and downers might have. Alcohol consumption in social settings was enormous, a necessary fuel in the competitive game and a consolation when it was lost. Since competition extended to wives and their housekeeping— whether they were “slatterns” or not—pre and post party drinking on their part was indulged in for an energy boost before vacuuming or emptying ashtrays. Yes, everyone smoked.
Elaine held her own socially. She was a witty and lively guest. It was at home in her secret diary that she poured out her vituperation, frustration and tireless fantasy. She had come to hate her husband and entertain half-imaginary affairs with his colleagues. Since social gatherings usually ended in drunken exchanges of partners for sessions of “necking”, Elaine had much material for romancing. But her mornings after were bitter. The self-loathing that filled her she could only counter in private by loud affirmations that no one could hear and that even she on rereading disowned. While capable of irony like calling labor at the ironing board just that, Elaine would be the victim of the cruelest irony of all. Plunged in her a good-part fantasy romance with her husband’s colleague, said husband has a genuine affair with the colleague’s wife. This plot twist might be a poisoned gift of her novelist son.
The moment in history and Elaine’s psyche make her contradictory. She gripes about women’s restricted role but at times embraces dishwashing and mothering as a kind of salvation. Her dissatisfaction and contempt for her husband is unlimited. She feels she must get away but can’t manage an actual move. In thought she’s ready for the wildest gestures, but day to day she’s careful to stay within the bounds of her social group.
No wonder that the blockage combines with agonising menstruations and crippling migraine to produce episodes that are breakdowns of sorts. Will Self with his body consciousness renders these with the shared pain of a witness:
“Each month, she speculates, my mechanism adjusts such that cogs, wheels, and levers soaked in blood and bile ratchet everything forward—the whole world, forward”.
The account of an exchange of blows between the couple is unforgettable. Elaine provokes her husband:
“”Yes…she’d rather have his blows—even expert ones—than inept caresses! […] her head is clamorous with this revelation: He isn’t going to stop…along as I carry on, he isn’t going to stop…”.
In breaking down:
“…she hammered her head on the wall, or merely shouted and hurled whatever was handy at him, before collapsing into sobs and taking to her bed for an hour or a day, where she’d lie in a miasma of nerves and ennui, her bruised knuckles clamped between her iron thighs…”.
At such times, Elaine revisits the trying moments of her past:
“…she grinds her face in the blue-and-white ticking, and sees plotted on its lines all the ups and downs of her social life”.
The repeated use of ellipsis,“leader dots”, those three points,…, calls attention to what Will Self terms his “broken down parenthetic style”, which he admits taking from the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.****4 But the juggling of chronology is all his own. The six parts of ‘Elaine’ go from 1.November 1955 /2. November 1954 /3. The following day/ 4. December 1954 /5. March to July 1955/ 6. December 1955. This apparent disorder comes from another stylistic trait. He writes, and his characters proceed by association. Memories keep popping up in their minds that destroy linear chronology.
However, it’s something else that leaves us not quite satisfied with Will Self’s ‘Elaine’. The reader hasn’t been told how exactly the novel mirrors the diary. In fact, the diary is never truly quoted. Scattered phrases decorating Will Self’s prose would seem to come from it, but we can’t be sure. It would not be out of character for him to be hoaxing us and that the unpublished diaries are a fiction in the fiction. In a way, it doesn’t matter since we do have the novel, but, in another way, it does matter, if we wish to get to the bottom of the connection between Mrs Self and her offspring.
Moreover, feminists might say that son and intimate though he may be, the author was still only a man describing not only a woman’s inner feelings but her very innards.
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Notes
*1 M.Hunter Hayes in ‘Understanding Wii Self’ and Brian Finney in ‘Will Self’s Transgressive Fictions’.
**2 Elaine’ 2024, Grove Press UK, pp.290, ISBN 978 1 80471 046 3.
*** 3 ’Will’ 2019, Viking, pp.388, ISBN 978 0 670 91861 4.
****4 Interview with Jacques Testard in the ‘White Review’, July 2013.
*****5 ‘Time Out’, Sept. 8, 2008.
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