Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)
Memory, narrative and identity.
Are your memories like the panel of a cartoon, that’s been torn from the rest of the strip? A scene from a film where the credits have gone missing? Vague images glimpsed from the wrong angle, a collection of shade and colour and movement? What happens to them when you try to put them into words and tell them to someone who wasn’t involved?
Beyond the obvious idea that writing memory is always a work of reconstruction, there is the lurking problem that although the event can be described in words, the writer is on the outside looking in. Whatever emotion that incident evoked at the time, or no matter how important it seems in retrospect, it slips away or is distorted in the attempt to write it.
Freud claimed that some of his patients could not ‘narrate themselves into coherence’. And what is a memoire, if not a retrospective rearrangement of events to produce a coherent character who shares a name with the narrator?
But the key term is ‘narrate’. We all have memories. But putting them into words, even for the most eloquent, is never straight forward.
The English poet and critic, Jeremy Hooker suffered a stroke in July 1999, and kept a journal of his experience, first in hospital then when recuperating, until his return to work in January 2001.
As the book progresses the entries integrate record, observation and memory and gently develop into a memoire of his early years. The awareness of the problems of writing memory make this book far more interesting than a well-written memoire would be on its own.
The book begins with short entries which record the world of the hospital, his return home, and his adjustments to a body that was no longer to be taken for granted. The entries record encounters with friends, old and new which provoke reflection, and Hooker, refusing to sentimentalise, is candid about himself and his life. However the book turns on his unexpected desire to write about his past.
‘Since lying in hospital I have thought that I would like to write something-call it a memoire or autobiographical sketch-about my childhood…. I doubt I could do it formally since it would confront me with problems of public persona & literary occasion-problems in my own mind about my ‘rights’ as an author.
What I might do , though, is give way to the impulse when it occurs and use this journal space , in which I feel most free as a writer, to sketch a memory or an impression. (P.93. November 10.)
For a writer who had refused the ‘confessional’ and ‘autobiographical’ in his own poetry the desire was not straight forward. How to avoid what he had called ‘the sludge of nostalgia?’ More significantly, if a memory is a first person narrative, the writing of it becomes tangled in problems of subjectivity. In a previous essay, Hooker had reflected on ‘the lyric I’ and written ‘quite simply, I might look at a tree or any living thing and know its reality would always be beyond my words’. The past may be factual. But in narrating it, it becomes a thing, to be described, ‘to be always beyond words.’
In the same essay he wrote:
…’One problem with Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as originating in emotion recollected in tranquillity is it’s tacit assumption of a stable ego in the act of recollection’. Against this he juxtaposes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘ If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!-then, I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me.’
Comparing such disparate figures as Keats, and David Jones, he wrote: ‘Each involves self or soul as more process than fixed identity, as something one works with and realises in the making’.
A memoir is not just a straight forward account of past events. It is the construction of one possible version of a life, a fixing of identity in retrospect. In Hooker’s case, an activity qualified by a critical awareness:
‘It seems to me that a lot of ‘inner experience’, offered as the subject of poetry, isn’t interesting. For a start it tends to be conventional, with more sameness (but less common depth) than its advocates are prepared to allow. The individual is a bourgeois concept , a commercial asset in a society given to buying and selling ‘lifestyle’ products. The person by contrast turns away from convention and instead of idolizing the psychological, as though it were a precious private property, is sensitive to the unique and relational aspects of human being.’ (p. 81. October 24)
He is therefore, wary. If our past is something we narrate into coherence, then what is a genuine memory? How much of our idea of our past is constructed around stories other people have told us, or photographs we have seen. How do we know our memory isn’t a story we have told ourself so often we now accept it as something that ‘really did happen’. In retrospect do we freight incidents and people with a significance they didn’t have at the time?
One of his memories is off sitting in a car, waiting for his father, and sketching what he could see outside the window. The image becomes a symbol of what he’s not trying to achieve.
Often the memoire seems to the writer, looking out at a world that is ‘over there’, as if the world was a painting without people. Or that what mattered was his or her reflection in the glass. ‘But what I want to see is the life out there, not my face reflected in the glass, or an empty landscape, but the quickness and the plenitude in this common place.’
As with Hooker’s other Journals, his reading and reflection are contained in the diary. During the period covered in Diary of a Stroke, he was also working on Imagining Wales and these two books complement each other. Imagining Wales is the publicly endorsed critical approach, Diary of A Stroke contains a personal response to these writers that is no less interesting. For readers of his critical work, the journal references provide a perspective on these authors: these writers give him a way of orientating himself, or navigating his way through the experience. It is a model of literate critical reading in the best sense, of taking what can be learnt from books and folding them into his life.
Hooker’s long engagement with the work of John Cowper Powys, David Jones and Richard Jeffreys, provide threads through the journal. Two of those writers provide unusual models for anyone writing about his or her past. In his Autobiography Powys carefully manufactured a version of himself. It’s an astonishing performance but he left his biographers the task of untangling the fact from fiction. Jefferies’s Story of my Heart is an autobiography mostly lacking in the kind of dated events one might expect. Hooker’s approach is less programmatic, more conventional but no less interesting
If you take into account class, geography and time, most childhoods, barring traumatic events, are similar. Like it or not, we are cliches. What makes Diary of a Stroke more than just an eloquent record of memory and recovery is Hooker’s reluctance to simply record his past. There’s an honest tension between the desire to write about memory; the critical sense that self-revelation is usually not that interesting to a third party, and an awareness of the technical difficulties of writing about the past that elevates the book above the merely self-referential and provides a stranger with much to think about.
