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Literary Review
MEMOIR
The language of grace
TISHANI DOSHI
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A searing account of the turbulent relationship between the author and his father.
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A Lie about my Father and Selected Poems by John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, £12.99
SOMETIMES you come across a writer who obsesses you so completely; you cannot read anyone else for months. It's happened to me in the past with Dostoevsky, Rilke, Neruda, Kapuscinski, Coetze. My latest acquisition is the Scottish poet-novelist, John Burnside. I discovered him in April this year, and I'm still clutching on to his Selected Poems as though it was a long-lost Siamese twin.
At Hay-on-Wye this summer, I tracked him down, because it was suddenly important to see if the way he looked, spoke and recited, matched anything of my imagination. It did not. Burnside is an anomaly in every sense of the way. He is a large, tall, bespectacled man, with floppy hair and a teddy-bear-like countenance that belies the drug-filled, violent years of his youth. He speaks with a thick, but not undecipherable Scottish accent; slow and measured in some instances, racing like a greyhound in others. He laughs a lot. The more I discover about John Burnside, the more surprised I am.
Story about madness
A Lie About my Father, Burnside's sixth prose publication, is a story about madness. It's set in industrial Scottish towns Cowdenbeath and Corby, where families live in prefabs and men are measured by the amount they can drink. The turbulent relationship between Burnside and his father, who was an alcoholic and compulsive liar, forms the central narrative of the book, but what it really asks is, what does it mean to be a man? Burnside, in the writing of this memoir, attempts to reconcile the past, but also, to pass down to his own son, something, "however flimsy, to imagine himself as a man, with his own history, his own images, his own, very particular spirits."
He describes those years as being lost, crazy; living in a lunatic asylum. A time when he was reaching out like Alice in her slow fall into Wonderland. For Burnside, who was raised Catholic, the idea of the Fall is a very seductive idea. He says, the insanity, the willingness to fall until you get hit, till you've lost everything, helps to remove the social crust, reveal the raw authentic self that gives you back your mantle. The Fall is what allows you to reconnect with the world. For Burnside, the Fall is the language of Grace.
"We are, all of us, walking libraries of the unspeakable, whited sepulchres where the real life we imagine is concealed behind talk of the weather, sensible shoes and a received morality that we more or less obey and more or less despise."
The adolescent Burnside listened to The Doors, Neil Young, David Bowie. He experimented with drugs. For him, the communion of the pink microdot of Acid was more cathartic than the communion with the body of Christ. He feared Halloween, phantoms, ghosts, the dead. The memories of his youth inhabit such a dark, dangerous place which he depicts with such brutal honesty, it's a miracle his prose isn't the LSD-induced howl of the Beats. It's not even a Rimbauldian derangement of the senses. Burnside is entirely too lucid for all this. He is measured, metered, magical. Surprising again, when you recall the roots of Cowdenbeath and Corby; places, we're led to believe, that don't encourage poetry, certainly not by its men.
Resistance to being a poet
For many years, Burnside resisted being a poet. He moved away from Scotland and worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener, and a computer systems designer. Poetry was a hobby, penned in his head, never written down. Burnside believes poems must be composed on the lips, and written for the eye to help the ear. As a poet, he says, you must "earn the moment" — allow a series of details to build up, things that may or may not be worthy, but are only recorded when they persist. Eventually, he would return to live in Scotland with his own family because there was a desire, he says, "to see that the world is still there, where you left it."
In A Lie About My Father, Burnside writes that what he aspires to find is what the ancients call anachoresis — a neutral place where one remains untouched by the sins of the world. "If there is an afterlife, for me it will be limbo, the only true great Catholic invention: a no man's land of mystery and haunting music, with nobody good or holy around to be compared to... "
Burnside, in his prose and poetry, has managed to create an elegant limbo of his own; a space between light and dark, innocence and knowledge. But even this space, he doesn't fully inhabit. He hovers on the edge: watching, observing, falling.
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