Personal Blogs

Deborah Levy's Hot Milk is as fine if not finer than Swimming Home. Good reading. 

She here concentrates, as today's article in Guardian suggested, on women's relationships but although I find this as oddly fractal as does he (the male writer of the Guardian article), I think it more honest and more significant and not just a reflex of material you might find in Ali Smith, a very different (if also wonderfully good) writer. 

The Guardian review addresses the treatment of sexual relationships between women too pruriently - men often do. That relationship is important but not less than the relationships with other women – especially mothers (and even a mother cat). Kleinian good and bad breasts pre-dominate – the house of the good doctor Gomez for instance.

And women are represented in dispersed snatches of classical models of aggressive female sexuality (Medusa who turns you to stone, Artemis who shoots you dead) but both emerge beautiful by the end of the novel I think. This very late quotation does not ‘spoil’ I hope because Artemis and Medusa are there (well hidden) in a very real theme:

... It's what mothers do. We watch our children. We know our gaze is powerful so we pretend not to look.'

 And names are important – Sophia – the truth – morphing into ‘fia’, ‘Zoffie’ etc and all the more pertinent because signs get dispersed through different languages and cultures – Greek, Spanish, English – and Yorkshire dialect. The true genius in the novel is Rose – whose name in anagram is ‘Eros’, an 'owd' woman off her feet in every sense.

I’m not sure the Guardian reviewer understands how important a theme in women’s writing mother-love ought to be (Eros and agape) and how fractured by cultural misrepresentations. And representations that sting women like the ‘medusas’ (the jellyfish in the novel) sting Sophie.

If we love do we ‘stay’ or ‘go’ is probably a problem for more than one gender but it resonates for women: Milton’s Adam says to Eve:

Go, for thy stay not free absents thee more

And Levy is that most literary of novelists – one who does not merely refer to the great writers that influence her bur re-writes them and in this case FOR WOMEN. For whom do I wait? It's a poignant question. Sopia has to ask it of nearly everyone.

In Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, Mary Barton, a central character – a working class woman -says: ‘It’s dree work, waiting’ and sums up a theme of Gaskell’s take on the world of women and work. I think this model lies behind Levy’s intertextual play but, more significantly, read the next passage in its light and then read again (I’ll quote it), Milton’ sonnet on his blindness (spent life, spent sight, spent hot milk) and his beautiful play on notions of service, being a ‘waiter’ and being a witness to the times and lifestyles that others find ‘invalid’ (you have to read that word in two phonetic patterns):

I have been waiting on her all my life. I was the waitress. Waiting on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. ….. (p. 216)

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide;

"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"

I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

All the best

Steve