Levy Deborah - Things I Don't Want to Know

The mute piano and the window opening like an orange and the Polish notebook I had brought to Majorca with me were connected to my unpublished novel, Swimming Home . I realised that the question I had asked myself while writing this book was (as surgeons say) very close to the bone: ‘What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?’

I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world. I did not know how to open the window like an orange. If anything, the window had closed like an axe on my tongue. If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it.

As I watched the snow gather on the fronds of the palm tree in Maria’s garden, I asked myself another question. Should I accept my lot? If I was to buy a ticket and travel all the way to acceptance, if I was to greet it and shake its hand, if I was to entwine my fingers with acceptance and walk hand in hand with acceptance every day, what would that feel like? After a while I realised I could not accept my question. A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.

She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.

— A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf (1929)

I had told the Chinese shop keeper that to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all. My conversation with him had taken me to places I did not want to revisit. I had not expected to return to Africa while sheltering from a snowstorm in Majorca. Yet, as he had pointed out, Africa had already returned to me when I found myself sobbing on escalators in London. If I thought I was not thinking about the past, the past was thinking about me. I reckoned this was true because the Chinese shopkeeper, whose father was a steel worker, had told me that escalators, or the ‘revolving staircase’ patented in 1859 by Nathan Ames of Massachusetts and then re-designed by the engineer Jesse Reno, were first described to the modern world as an ‘endless conveyor’.

I rearranged the chair and sat at the desk. And then I looked at the walls to check out the power points so I could plug in my laptop. The hole in the wall nearest to the desk was placed above the basin, a precarious socket for a gentleman’s electric razor. That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket. Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa.

Deborah Levy’s note: The line: ‘I simply couldn’t see where there was to get to’ references Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’.

Deborah Levywrites fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and widely broadcast on the BBC, including her dramatizations of two of Freud’s most iconic case histories, Dora and The Wolfman . The author of highly praised novels including the Man Booker Prize — shortlisted Swimming Home, Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography , and Billy and Girl , she lives in London.