Essential Nosiness by Sandra Horn

          I’m a Psychologist by trade. Someone once said that Psychologists are all peculiar (that old taunt) because they just can’t fathom other people and they think studying Psychology will help them. Hmph. I’m inclined to think I chose it as a career from simple nosiness – or a fascination with why people do as they do, to put it more kindly.
          We’re all at that, of course – we have to be, and some of us are demonstrably better at working it out than others. I wouldn’t claim that my training or work experience gave me some sort of extra insight or powers of prediction into other peoples’ lives, although it did provide some useful frameworks for clinical interventions. In everyday life, though, the same old questions continue to haunt: ‘Why would somebody do that?’ ‘How could somebody think that?’ ‘I can’t understand why anyone would…’ etc. etc.
          Try as we might, we can never get right inside the heads of others; we either get it right enough to manage relationships or we get it wrong enough to come to grief – in the course of a lifetime, a mixture of both, I guess.  As writers, we don’t always crack it with our own creations, either – it’s amazing how often writers are surprised by their own invented characters as they develop through a story. Or perhaps it isn’t amazing at all, given our part and partial understanding of our own minds.

          Do autobiographies of notable people help us to understand them?  Not in my experience. They are often just sanitized strings of anecdotes; self-conscious attempts to portray a particular facet of the writer. There are exceptions, of course - Rebecca West’s ‘Family Memories’ is a great read, but very much a safe, ‘novelised’ account. She’s in there somewhere, but hiding behind her writer’s persona. Her ‘fictional’ characters, notably Rose, in The Fountain Overflows, are probably the closest we get to a real glimpse into her life. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s  ‘Slipstream’ comes closest, of all those I’ve read, to real candidness, often painfully so. 

 

          Biographies? Again, usually partial, sometimes even destructive of the vision we have of someone we admire through their work – there’s dreadful one of Hans Christian Andersen which focuses on his sexual immaturity. Why? It tells us nothing about his creative genius.
          I’ve just been reading H is for Hawk, which gives a detailed account of T H White’s sad, strange life, so there goes my comfortable vision of a tweedy, bookish, don contentedly conjuring up his delightful version of the legend of King Arthur.
          There are, of course, many notable exceptions, such as that of Norman Nicholson by Kathleen Jones,  which shed light for me on a much-loved poet. I learned, among much else, that he was treated for TB in the New Forest, just down the road from here, which gave me one of those enjoyably spurious connections with him, and knowing more about his health and the impact of it on his life gave me a new understanding of some of the poems.  Thank you, Kathy.

          Letters? Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters is a powerful and also sometimes painful read, but it is careful. About what you’d expect from someone in the public eye but essentially private; his poetry has the keen observations of a naturalist running through it, not a baring of his soul. Do people keep letters in the expectation of publication later? If they do, they are likely to be guarded and partial.

          This all brings me to diaries. Or one diary in particular. It’s a by-my-bed for re-reading book: A Lewes Diary 1916-1944 by Mrs Henry Dudeney. In my diary, there are dates. That’s it.
          I kept another kind, years ago, mainly to record events around my children’s development, but I’ve never tried to record my thoughts and feelings day after day.  No-one reading any of my jottings would have much of a clue about me beyond ‘doting mother’. Mrs D , on the other hand, doesn’t hold back about anything, from fulminating about her ‘brute’ husband (or ‘dear soul’ on other occasions), servants (‘if only we could do without them!’), her impossible sister, her ex-lover, about whom she blows hot and cold as the wind changes, her beloved Dalmatian dogs, the pacifist parson (despised), neighbours, tradesmen, publishers, Sir Philip Sassoon, with whom she had a close friendship (he sent her presents, including a taffeta coat lined with ermine; sometimes when she stayed at his country place there were Jewish guests, some of whom were ‘touched with the tarbrush’ (!!).  She was unashamedly prejudiced, irascible, snobbish, self-indulgent, acquisitive, histrionic, and altogether fascinating.  I’m astonished  at her unguardedness – although she did destroy the diaries of the years in which she left her husband and went to live with her married lover (she subsequently went back to her husband) and she left instructions about the publication of the rest, so she clearly expected them to be put in the public domain at some time. What a woman. I think I know her…