Sometime in the early sixties Jack, who taught PPE – politics, philosophy, and economics – was interviewing a candidate for a place at his Oxford college, a bluntly spoken northern lad. He asked the boy which aspect of contemporary society he saw as most in need of reform. The answer bounced back without a moment’s hesitation: “Reform of the abortion laws and legalization of homosexuality.” The boy got a place, needless to say.
We all knew that you could get an abortion. We had all heard of someone who had. We knew that it involved furtive inquiries, a clandestine visit to a closely guarded address, the handing over of an envelope of bank notes – a couple of hundred quid, a fortune in those days, if the address was not in some back street but somewhere you stood a better chance of a medically qualified practitioner and, indeed, of survival. We all knew the myths about self-induced abortion: the glass of gin and a hot bath, the trampolining on the bed. And that they did not work, by and large. The shadow of that fate hung over any burgeoning love affair – just, frankly, as it always had done. We were in exactly the same position as the Victorian domestic servant, or the medieval village girl.
So what a catalyst for change – the pill. And how quickly we have forgotten just what a revolution it heralded. Not just in giving women the power of choice, but in reshaping attitudes toward sex and sexuality. For the first time in human history a young woman – any woman – can enter into a sexual relationship without fretting constantly that she will be landed with an untimely baby. And it is openly acknowledged that sexual activity takes place, everywhere and all the time, which may sound an absurd statement, but set it against the paranoid reticence of much of early twentieth-century society, when someone like my grandmother – far from untypical – went through life avoiding all mention or recognition of that most basic human concern. And she had three children.
She and her like represented, I suppose, the last gasp of Victorian middle-class sublimation, soldiering on into the twentieth century and surrounded by an insidious tide of provocative new behavior. Elsewhere, things were already different. Take that emblematic Bloomsbury drawing-room gathering when Lytton Strachey pointed a finger at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress and announced: “Semen?” Sometime in the 1920s. In most drawing rooms the word would have been unfamiliar to many and unmentionable for all. Bloomsbury was ahead of the game, and even today Strachey might seem a touch candid. But the point is that the shift had already begun, the unstoppable slide toward entire permissiveness, to a climate in which nothing is unmentionable and most of it is mentioned all the time. And this has happened over sixty years or so – not unlike the reverse journey from the cheerful profanity of the eighteenth century to the constraint of the Victorian age. Maybe it will switch once more and my descendants will find themselves with pursed lips and averted eyes.
Feminism; the pill; sexual candor. But there is one aspect of change in assumptions and attitudes over my lifetime that seems to me seismic – so rapid, so absolute.
When I was nine, one summer in Alexandria, I fell in love with a young man. He was twenty-eight, and a sort of relative – his sister was married to my uncle, Oliver Low. Hugh Gibb was serving with the Eighth Army in the Libyan campaign, and on his leaves from the desert, he would visit us, often joining my mother at Sidi Bishr, Alexandria’s prime beach, where she held lunch parties from a rented cabin. Hugh was popular, charming, and I was besotted. We surfed together; I was pretty good with a surfboard, and those moments are with me still – the careful choice of wave, and then the glorious slide down its flank, with Hugh a few feet away, head turned sideways, beaming encouragement as the wave broke and we rushed toward the shore.
A few years later, in London now, Hugh turned up for a family lunch at my grandmother’s house in Harley Street. Uncle Oliver was there – various others. And Hugh – still charming, still everyone’s favorite person, still being nice to me (who was by then perhaps fourteen). After he had gone, I remarked to Oliver, complacently, that Hugh was not married (could he be waiting till I was old enough . . .).
Oliver laughed: “My dear girl, Hugh’s queer.”
Queer? Queer? In what way?
Did I ask for an explanation? Was one given? I don’t know – and actually Oliver was being quite risqué, talking like that to a fourteen-year-old, but he was the bohemian end of my father’s family, my favorite uncle, and he liked me, as a seemingly bookish sort of girl with whom he enjoyed a chat. Suffice it that, somehow, I knew from then on that there were men who weren’t interested in women, and if Hugh was one of them then that was that. I fell out of love at once, sensibly enough, though I continued to like Hugh and to bask if he noticed me.
When my granddaughter Izzy was not much older than I had been then, I took her to a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. She knew little of Oscar Wilde, so on the way to the theatre I filled in with some facts – the life, the scandal, the trial, the imprisonment. When I was done she exploded: “I don’t believe you! He was sent to prison because he was gay!”
A fifty-year gap, or thereabouts. One adolescent who had never heard of homosexuality; another who didn’t realize that it had once been illegal. A chasm of understanding and assumption.
So by the time I was grown-up I was well aware of homosexuality. There was the occasional scandal – some high-profile figure arrested, some peer or actor whose misfortune was relished and prolonged by the newspapers. But it seems to me that my student generation was still wonderfully naïve. Looking back, I can identify contemporaries both male and female who were undoubtedly gay, but this was never spoken of, or at least not in the circles in which I moved, and in some cases I wonder if they themselves recognized their own nature. And this was the early 1950s; legalization “between consenting adults” was only just over ten years off.
Within half a century the most abiding sexual taboo has vanished. Yes, there are still pockets of homophobia, but by and large same-sex relationships are accepted as a norm. The 2011 census asked if you were in a same-sex civil partnership or, indeed, a registered same-sex civil partnership (along with your ethnic group, if mixed/multiple: White and Black Caribbean, White and Black African, White and Asian . . . one imagined households up and down the land puzzling over their correct definition). The census is the status quo made manifest, or rather, the bureaucratic drive to identify the status quo. In 1951 they were exercised about the fertility and duration of marriage, the dates of cessation of full-time education, and how many outside loos the nation still had; a question compiler of back then, fast-forwarded to 2011 and confronted with registered same-sex civil partnerships, would have gasped in disbelief.
But the census tells it as it is, an unblinking social snapshot, and this is the way we live now, by grace of the extraordinary tidal wave of change unleashed by the legislation of 1967. Change not just in what people may do now, but in how others view them, which seems to me the most remarkable aspect – the overturning of an entire history of prejudice and denial. An upheaval neatly slotted into my lifetime, so that I grew up to the backdrop of one set of assumptions and sign off in a very different society.
Memory
A couple of years ago, Izzy yearned for an old-fashioned manual typewriter: “Vintage!” A Smith Corona was found off eBay, and she rejoiced in it until a new ribbon became necessary, and then no one could work out how to change the ribbon. I was summoned: “I can’t believe we’re going to Granny for technical support.” I sat at the machine, looked, did not know how it was done, but lo! my fingers did. They remembered. You lifted out the old reel, put the new one on, thus, you slotted the ribbon through there, and there, pushed that lever, wound the end of the ribbon round the empty reel and caught it on that prong. There! My brain hadn’t remembered, but my fingers had – veterans of manual typewriters. That was how it felt, anyway.
This is an instance of what is called procedural memory, that aspect of memory whereby we remember how to do something. How to ride a bicycle
is the example frequently cited, but I prefer my typewriter experience, or Vladimir Nabokov’s of pushing a pram, he being that most refined authority on memory: “You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher’s knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb.” Yes, yes – and a sensation alien to those who have known only the abrupt tilt required for the strollers of today. My first pram, as a very young mother, was one of those sleek majestic cruisers, and my wrists too respond.
There is procedural memory, and then there is semantic memory, which enables us to know that this thing with two wheels is a bike, and that object is a typewriter – the memory facility that retains facts, language, all forms of knowledge without reference to context. And finally, and crucially, there is episodic or autobiographical memory, which gives the context, reminds me that my student bike was dark blue with my initials painted in white, that the baby in the sleek pram once grabbed the shopping, and squeezed ripe tomatoes all over everything. Autobiographical memory is random, nonsequential, capricious, and without it we are undone.
Much of what goes on in the mind is recollection, memory. This is not thought – it is an involuntary procession of images, ranging from yesterday to long ago, interspersed with more immediate signals like: must remember to phone so-and-so, or, what shall I have for lunch? Pure thought is something else – it requires conscious effort and is hard to achieve. The Borges story about the boy cursed – not blessed, cursed – with total recall, with a memory of everything, demonstrates how punishing that would be, how he remembers “not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.” And, crucially, he did not think: “To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract.” It is the mind’s holy grail, thought, and the process hardest to control – erratic, and prone to every kind of hijack. What bubbles up most of the time is memory, no more and no less.
Memory and anticipation. What has happened, and what might happen. The mind needs its tether in time, it must know where it is – in the perpetual slide of the present, with the ballast of what has been and the hazard of what is to come. Without that, you are adrift in the wretched state of Alzheimer’s, or you are an amnesiac.
Amnesia disrupts autobiographical memory. In retrograde amnesia, everything is forgotten that happened before amnesia struck; in anterograde amnesia, memories can no longer be stored, the past is kept, but the future – passing time – cannot become a part of it. In dementia, life takes place in a segment of time without past or future. For mental stability we need the three kinds of memory to be fighting fit – procedural, semantic, autobiographical. And never mind that autobiographical memory is full of holes – it is meant to be like that. There is what we remember, and there is the great dark cavern of what we have forgotten, and why some stuff goes there and something else does not is the territory of the analysts, where I cannot venture. We forget – we forget majestically – and that seems to be an essential part of memory’s function, whether it is the significant forgetting of sublimation, or denial, or whatever, or the mundane daily forgetting of where the car keys have got to, or those elusive names that so challenge us. William James is elegant on that particular problem: “Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap there, but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of a wraith of a name is in it, beckoning in a given direction.” I love the concept of the active gap, the wraith, and know them well: that evasive name of mine has a T somewhere about it, or possibly a P . . . And it is good to feel companionate with a brilliant thinker of a hundred years ago, irritably flogging his mind because he can’t remember what that man he met last week is called. But he doesn’t put forward any theory as to why it is names that are most vulnerable. I am still waiting.
The memory that we live with – the form of memory that most interests me – is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.
That, presumably, is why we spend so much time foraging around in it, in that unconsidered, involuntary way – we are checking it out, touching base, letting it demonstrate that it is still in good working order. This morning, while going about ordinary morning business – shower, eat breakfast, read newspaper – I have visited Seattle, where once years ago I was taken to the fish market, this memory prompted by an item on the radio about fish stocks – I saw those huge Alaskan salmon again, laid out on the slab; I have seen my aunt Rachel, and heard her voice, conjured up by a painting of hers that I pass on the way down to the kitchen; the orange in the fruit bowl there became the one through which I once stuck a skewer, trying to reproduce for four-year-old granddaughter Rachel the turning of the world, she having asked – inconveniently, while I was making the gravy for the Christmas turkey – why it gets dark at night. None of this is sought, hunted down – it just pops up, arbitrary, part of the stockpile. And each memory brings some tangential thought, or at least until that is clipped short by the ongoing morning and its demands. The whole network lurks, all the time, waiting for a thread to be picked up, followed, allowed to vibrate. My story; your story.
Except that it is an entirely unsatisfactory story. The novelist in me – the reader, too – wants shape and structure, development, a theme, insights. Instead of which there is this assortment of slides, some of them welcome, others not at all, defying chronology, refusing structure. The Seattle salmon, my aunt, that Christmas orange are simply shuffled together – make what you like of it.
We do just that, endlessly – it is the abiding challenge and mystery, memory. I have to invoke Sir Thomas Browne again: “Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us . . . To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.” Exquisitely put, but I’d take issue with some of that, which seems to be letting memory off rather lightly – the cutting remembrances are around all right, I’d say, and the stroaks of affliction. It is the view of memory as we’d like it to be, rather than as it is. Or is there a premature glimmer of psychological theories far in the future – ideas about suppressed memories? “Forgetful of evils past . . .” – denial? Suffice it that he is thinking about the operation of memory, and with such style that you can’t but mull over the words, the phrases.
Joseph Brodsky thought memory “a substitute for the tail that we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our movements, including migration. Apart from that, there is something clearly atavistic in the very process of recollection, if only because such a process is never linear.” His own migration from youth as an active opponent of the regime in Soviet Russia, with accompanying punishments, to exile in America as a celebrated poet and commentator, gave him a striking memory trail, though he says, oddly, “I remember rather little of my own life and what I do remember is of small consequence.” But he had considered memory: “What memory has in common with art is the knack for selection, the taste for detail . . . Memory contains precisely details, not the whole picture; highlights, if you will, not the entire show.”
All the best commentary on the working of memory seems to me to share this emphasis on “the knack for selection, the taste for detail.” Nabokov’s “series of spaced flashes” – and I want to get on to them later. Just as the most effective method of memoir writing seems to be to focus on that, to try to reflect the processes of memory itself rather than the artificial plod through time of routine autobiography. When I did that myself, nearly t
wenty years ago, in a memoir of childhood, it was because I realized that that childhood was there in my mind still, but in the form of these finite glimpses of that time, not sequential but coexisting, each of them succinct, clear, usually wordless, and conjuring up still those frozen moments of a time and a place. Most people remember childhood in that way, I think, and in old age these assorted shards in the head seem to become sharper still; they assert themselves when a conversation you had last week has been wiped, along with a friend’s name and the whereabouts of your transit pass. Childhood memories have a high visual content – I certainly found that, as Egypt surged up in bits and pieces – the buff and brown bark of a eucalyptus tree, the brilliant green of a praying mantis, the white of roosting egrets on a tree by the Cairo Nile. Coleridge noted this feature, thinking about the nature of memory, and wondered if the visual quality was enhanced because of the lack of a spoken element: “I hold that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than in trains of ideas; that the recollection of early childhood in latest old age depends on and is explicable by this.” And also, surely, because of the novelty, the fresh vision of the physical world – Wordsworth’s “Splendour in the Grass” – when things are seen for the first time, the imprint that remains.