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rushthatspeaksThis book is one of the main reasons I had to go on hiatus from writing these reviews for a while. You see, it hurt me very badly, and I can't tell yet whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, although probably a good thing on the whole. So it has taken a while to process.
I don't often see reviewers mention that a book has hurt them. It's personal information, I guess, of the sort that a lot of people try to keep out of a book review. It may be unprofessional to mention. It certainly does not assist in maintaining the fiction that the reviewer is in a state of godlike critical detachment and objectivity, but honestly that's not a fiction I am terribly interested in maintaining, and if you read many books, you know perfectly well that sooner or later one of them is going to leave you with scars. Sometimes it's the wrong day or the wrong time or the wrong subject matter; sometimes it's that something about the book or the author strikes you as immoral, unethical, or downright evil; sometimes it's that the book is very good and honest about things that are problems in your life, about which maybe you were not wanting to hear the unvarnished truth just at present.
Or, as with this book, sometimes it rings changes on your new and old griefs.
Derek Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986. These are his diaries from 1989 and 1990. He's moved into a cottage at Dungeness, on the coast of Kent, and devoted himself to gardening. He's just finished War Requiem when the diary starts, and had it be a miserable commercial failure despite being Laurence Olivier's last movie, and is distressed that the only press it seems to be getting is about Olivier's death and about his own impending one. He is violently bitter at the cinema. He does not think that he will work again.
He gardens. He writes about his gardening with a stunning absentminded erudition, free-ranging quotations from the entire breadth of English literature, citations in passing from fifteenth-century herbals I've never heard of. He writes with love and depth about the land, the flowers, the country round, the things that he is doing to the land (and the photos prove that his garden is as unconventionally beautiful, as unexpected, as his films). He coordinates a tour for the Petshop Boys, but there's an air of resignation about it. He paints-- political art, for exhibitions against the worst of the Thatcherian policies about AIDS. He writes knowing that he is writing in blood: he knows that getting his diaries published will be one of the greatest political acts possible to him. The rage and sadness and omnipresent fear under the loving care he gives his plants are as desperately choking and unbearable as he knows they are. His friends die, one by one by one.
Finally, he does become ill, and the dropping of the sword of Damocles is what brings him back to working in films again. He makes The Garden, a film which fuses his own fears and preoccupations with Biblical imagery; he begins to plan a film of Edward II. But he is perpetually ending up in the hospital, and makes medical history by becoming the first known human being to start losing the sight in both eyes to toxoplasmosis. At the end of the book, he's an absolute wreck.
If you know much about Jarman's life, you know that directly afterward, he started on AZT, and that it won him four more years and multiple movies, including the Edward II, which is stunning; though he never got his sight back entirely, and indeed made his last feature when almost entirely blind. But that does not make the end of this book much more bearable, because at the end of it he is in absolute despair, feeling that when he was able to work, he could not, and that his last efforts have been too late.
So the book is, I think, objectively upsetting. In good ways: he was right about the politics. These things have to be remembered. He also shows, very impressively, some of the ways that art and the artist can betray and uphold each other, at the worst of times. I do recommend this. It is brilliant and flensing, and he is a magnificent writer of landscape.
... but I do not recommend that anyone read this, as I have just done, coming off four months and ongoing of a major illness. I don't have anything life-threatening, just painful and refusing to leave; but it has still been an endurance contest, and one that has worn me to shreds. I know perfectly well, when I manage to think about it, that I will come out the other side of this with no permanent aftereffects. This book gives me the smallest hint, the tiniest fraction of a glimpse, of what it would be like to have to do this sort of thing knowing that I wouldn't come out of it, and the concept of wanting to work, of being able to work only after that sort of struggle had started-- that is one of my personal hells.
This is one thing books are for, really, is to give us this sort of glimpse so we aren't so blindsided by things if and when they happen near us. This is the sort of being hurt by a book that will probably in the long run make me a better person. But. Well. In the short term, it gave me nightmares.
In the middle distance, it is a book that leaves me very hurt; and mourning for its author, who after reading this is someone that I love.
I don't often see reviewers mention that a book has hurt them. It's personal information, I guess, of the sort that a lot of people try to keep out of a book review. It may be unprofessional to mention. It certainly does not assist in maintaining the fiction that the reviewer is in a state of godlike critical detachment and objectivity, but honestly that's not a fiction I am terribly interested in maintaining, and if you read many books, you know perfectly well that sooner or later one of them is going to leave you with scars. Sometimes it's the wrong day or the wrong time or the wrong subject matter; sometimes it's that something about the book or the author strikes you as immoral, unethical, or downright evil; sometimes it's that the book is very good and honest about things that are problems in your life, about which maybe you were not wanting to hear the unvarnished truth just at present.
Or, as with this book, sometimes it rings changes on your new and old griefs.
Derek Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986. These are his diaries from 1989 and 1990. He's moved into a cottage at Dungeness, on the coast of Kent, and devoted himself to gardening. He's just finished War Requiem when the diary starts, and had it be a miserable commercial failure despite being Laurence Olivier's last movie, and is distressed that the only press it seems to be getting is about Olivier's death and about his own impending one. He is violently bitter at the cinema. He does not think that he will work again.
He gardens. He writes about his gardening with a stunning absentminded erudition, free-ranging quotations from the entire breadth of English literature, citations in passing from fifteenth-century herbals I've never heard of. He writes with love and depth about the land, the flowers, the country round, the things that he is doing to the land (and the photos prove that his garden is as unconventionally beautiful, as unexpected, as his films). He coordinates a tour for the Petshop Boys, but there's an air of resignation about it. He paints-- political art, for exhibitions against the worst of the Thatcherian policies about AIDS. He writes knowing that he is writing in blood: he knows that getting his diaries published will be one of the greatest political acts possible to him. The rage and sadness and omnipresent fear under the loving care he gives his plants are as desperately choking and unbearable as he knows they are. His friends die, one by one by one.
Finally, he does become ill, and the dropping of the sword of Damocles is what brings him back to working in films again. He makes The Garden, a film which fuses his own fears and preoccupations with Biblical imagery; he begins to plan a film of Edward II. But he is perpetually ending up in the hospital, and makes medical history by becoming the first known human being to start losing the sight in both eyes to toxoplasmosis. At the end of the book, he's an absolute wreck.
If you know much about Jarman's life, you know that directly afterward, he started on AZT, and that it won him four more years and multiple movies, including the Edward II, which is stunning; though he never got his sight back entirely, and indeed made his last feature when almost entirely blind. But that does not make the end of this book much more bearable, because at the end of it he is in absolute despair, feeling that when he was able to work, he could not, and that his last efforts have been too late.
So the book is, I think, objectively upsetting. In good ways: he was right about the politics. These things have to be remembered. He also shows, very impressively, some of the ways that art and the artist can betray and uphold each other, at the worst of times. I do recommend this. It is brilliant and flensing, and he is a magnificent writer of landscape.
... but I do not recommend that anyone read this, as I have just done, coming off four months and ongoing of a major illness. I don't have anything life-threatening, just painful and refusing to leave; but it has still been an endurance contest, and one that has worn me to shreds. I know perfectly well, when I manage to think about it, that I will come out the other side of this with no permanent aftereffects. This book gives me the smallest hint, the tiniest fraction of a glimpse, of what it would be like to have to do this sort of thing knowing that I wouldn't come out of it, and the concept of wanting to work, of being able to work only after that sort of struggle had started-- that is one of my personal hells.
This is one thing books are for, really, is to give us this sort of glimpse so we aren't so blindsided by things if and when they happen near us. This is the sort of being hurt by a book that will probably in the long run make me a better person. But. Well. In the short term, it gave me nightmares.
In the middle distance, it is a book that leaves me very hurt; and mourning for its author, who after reading this is someone that I love.
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Date: 2011-02-03 05:59 pm (UTC)