I share Sylvie Guillem’s pain

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/06/sylvie-guillem-dazzling-pain-sublime

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At the advanced age – for a ballerina anyway – of 50, the dazzling Sylvie Guillem has announced she’s to retire. “It would be nice to wake up and be able to walk to the bathroom,” she said in a 2008 interview, referring to her extreme muscle stiffness each morning. She was 42 at the time and I, only a few years older and a long-time scoliosis sufferer, felt an instant – even glamorous – solidarity.

Sadly, the similarity ends there. But it could have been so different because, long ago, before I grew too tall (the already enormous feet were a clue) and discovered I had no talent whatsoever, all I wanted to do was dance. There’s something about ballet – the clean curve of those lines, the arched elegance of a foot en pointe – that is as close to sublime as any human ever achieves. It’s the same as the tennis ball that drives weightlessly off the very centre of your racquet, the dive that barely ruffles the water. Or the line on the page, shaped and turned and ached over for hours, that manages somehow to convey both daring and truth by the most alive and direct route. I’d like to think that Guillem will now be able to jump out of bed and bound into the bathroom, but the price that ballet exacts is a bloody one, and somehow I doubt it.

Prose that ruffles feathers

Speaking of perfection, I finished Helen MacDonald’s astounding memoir, H is for Hawk, on the day it won the Samuel Johnson prize. There’s no arguing with the power of MacDonald’s writing; I’m not sure I’ve ever read prose which gathers itself up and leaps into your face in such a concrete, almost sculptural way. If you want to know, precisely and viscerally, how it feels to train a goshawk, then this is your book. There is breath, fire and blood here along with the feathers. So why has it bothered me so much? Why did I hear myself even criticising its monolithic solipsism? Sure, it is a throbbingly depressive piece of writing, but then MacDonald knows that: it is, after all, an account of a grief-triggered breakdown. And unless we can share these things, what hope is there of any honest conversation?

Later, I found myself trawling the internet for pictures of MacDonald and, especially, her hawk. I don’t know why I needed to see it, but I did, close up, feathers and all. Somehow the book had rattled me so much that, even after finishing it, I couldn’t let it go. But then isn’t that what we all most want from reading, to be dragged so far out of our comfort zone that we’re not even sure what we think any more?

Read before you speak

Having been mobbed viciously by the rightwing US press and having initially dismissed them in the way they deserved, Lena Dunham is now forced to apologise for sentences in her memoir which may (or may not) be construed as describing instances of child abuse. I feel a huge shiver of empathy. I wouldn’t dream of commenting on the details, because I haven’t seen, let alone read, her book (though yes, I do realise I risk fanning the flames by even referring to it here). Yet plenty of others no doubt will comment in detail and at length without even bothering to read it to discover the context in which Dunham is writing. When the British press decided to do a number on my 2009 memoir The Lost Child, the worst of it came from columnists, slipstreaming off articles by other columnists. Not one had read a word of the actual memoir. How can I be so sure? Because publication was still months away and not a single proof copy had been sent out. I’ve never met a writer who isn’t prepared to be judged by the totality of what they’ve written. But to be hounded for something someone else says you’ve written? I can tell you that’s a unique circle of hell.