The Lit. Soc. delighted
once again in welcoming Samantha Harvey, albeit on this occasion as a Zoom
mediated apparition, who elucidated the process which yielded her latest
book The Shapeless Unease: A Year
of Not Sleeping. She mapped the battlefield of her years-long struggle
with insomnia, explaining how this generated a tortured creative process resulting
in her latest book, which veered dramatically away from the
course set by her earlier works.
She opened with the first
of several readings from Shapeless
Unease and detailed her encounter with unsolicited, nocturnal
wakefulness and revealed how intimidating the prospect of “the yawning expanse of
a night awake” was. Linking Sleep and Death, a recurring pairing
through the talk, she confessed how in the restless throes of insomnia she was
haunted by an image of herself as the reluctant centrepiece of groups assembled
in medieval death-bed scenes. The evening started to assume the form of a case
presentation by some late Victorian medical luminary theatrically unveiling a
patient’s inner torments to an audience of medical students, junior doctors and
speculative, intelligent laymen. On this occasion the normal denoument in which
the professor, exuding Olympian detachment and an assured serenity, pulls the
rabbit of diagnosis from his top hat and
moves on to the morale boosting topic of treatment failed to materialise and
Samantha remained mentally embattled.
In
the absence of a treatable cause and a therapeutic silver bullet, Samantha’s
intractable guerrilla war with insomnia dragged on, draining but devoid of any
dramatic focus or likely resolution. It might have started with domestic
anxieties but precise recollection was proving difficult. GP consultations
resulted in a strained relationship and a refractory malaise. Discussions with
a Christian friend and scrutinising her situation through the prism of religion
only increased nervous tension and feelings of vulnerability. Driven in
desperation to the wild side, she found cold water swimming – particularly that
initial immersion of head and face – produced a transient, pleasing distraction
but no cure. Writing in her customary, conventional style proved an
unattainable objective; she could not maintain the narrative arc for a novel
but found some solace in an intimate,
self - searching approach. Her output was
fragmented; some of the shards identified with an indigenous Amazonian tribe,
others managed to embed a complete and
coherent short story in the body of her text while the rest were
elements from her autobiography. She became absorbed by the nature and
structure of this new work and the possible well springs of her new Muse – a
distillation of multiple conversations
with herself, a veiled truth- telling exercise?
Was all this mental thrashing about sucking her down into psychological
quicksand – denied dreams now; had writing become a way to process her
subconscious? Uninvited images from
these wakeful vigils were incorporated into her text. Startling conclusions ricocheted round her
cranial vault; the mind was a prison, love was the escape of the self from the
self and could proliferate. She found
she wrote easily, writing “helped”; this last book completed in 4 months as
against her previous average of 2-3 years
The memoir of this anguished internal reflection was coaxed from
her by her publisher with a view to printing it as a magazine article but the
plan was changed to marketing it as a
book. But what had she written?
Self-indulgence? Self-help? Female auto – fiction? Psycho-masochistic
trauma porn? Where were the boundaries
these days between fiction and non-fiction?
Whatever others say, Harvey is convinced the book is genuine and is
prepared to stand by it.
The
audience almost palpably ached for a happy ending – the serial long dark nights
of the soul would end and Joy would "cometh in the morning". Reality was more prosaic; Samantha remained a
martyr to insomnia but could manage it
and her expectations better. She quotes from Macbeth and reveals she knows what
she is missing
……….the innocent sleep
Sleep
that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,
The
death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm
of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief
nourisher in life’s feast.
Resignation has proven a
sturdy carapace – others’ judgement of
her work intrigues rather than enrages, she accepts she cannot control the
book’s journey post-publication,
politics is viewed with detached equanimity even if alloyed with
disappointment.
A lively Q&A session
indicated that the Winchelsea audience was fully engaged with this highly
original foray into experimental writing.
William Doherty
