Mind Picker: Swimming Home

et cetera

A Latin expression meaning “and other things” or “so forth” or “the rest of such things”. The poem, “Swimming Home”, was mostly made up of etcs; he had counted seven of them in one half of the page alone. What kind of language was this?
My mother says I'm the only jewel in her crown
But I've made her tired with all my etc,
So now she walks with sticks
To accept her language was to accept that she held him, her reader, in great esteem. He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc concealed some thing that could not be said.

It seems pertinent to note that in the same year that Deborah Levy released Swimming Home, she also adapted two of Sigmund Freud's case studies into radio plays for the BBC. This book completely reflects what was occupying Levy's mind at the time: For a novel, this book has the feeling of a play, and in ways both overt and subtle, the story constantly invokes Freud. It has so much heft for a short work, and I think that's because of all that's left unsaid but yet feels present in the mind; all that's added by the book's et ceteras. Perhaps not as remarkable as Levy's later Hot Milk, this is still an engaging and thoughtful work of fiction.

The plot is deceptively sparse: Two couples, and the teenaged daughter who belongs to one of them, are renting a villa outside Nice, and when they discover a beautiful young woman swimming naked in their pool – a young woman who explains that her reservation was mixed up and she now had nowhere to lodge – they offer to let her stay in their spare room. The woman who makes this offer may or may not be tempting her philandering husband (a world famous poet) into making the final blow to their shaky marriage, and we soon learn that the young woman is also a poet and had accidentally-on-purpose arrived at the villa in order to ask the man to read her work. The young woman, Kitty Finch (and what internal conflicts does that name suggest?), is such an unsettling presence: her unabashed and frequent nudity; attracting not just all the men, but luring the teenaged daughter's affections away from her mother as well; cutting the tails off of rabbits that had been shot by a hunter and arranging them in a vase; screaming at the old woman who rents the villa next door. We understand that Kitty has recently taken herself off her prescribed antidepressants (and because the poet had been candid about his own struggles with Depression in his work, Kitty feels an extra-strong connection with him), but her behaviour is so bizarre, and the other characters are so on edge themselves, that there's menace read into Kitty's every innocent action; literally anything feels possible.

Much of the Freudian imagery is obvious – the father continually losing his pen and only his daughter, Nina, can find it; the swimming pool as a return to the womb; Nina wondering what the tangled sheets on her parents' bed means because she was hoping that they would break up so she could finally take her mother's place – and I couldn't help but think that each of the characters represented some Freudian idea: the husbands – the glutton and the philanderer – as Id; the wives – the finance-minded businesswoman and the war correspondent – as Ego; the retired psychiatrist next door overlooking everything as Superego. In a way, Kitty and her damaged psyche seem to represent “external pressures” that will bring out the best and the worst in the other characters; no wonder the overseer next door wants to keep her in check. There's a desirable maiden, a matron, and a crone (along with a virgin on the cusp of her next psycho-sexual transition), death and desire are in constant battle, dreams come to life as centipedes and sugar mice, and it all sits heavily in the book's unacknowledged et ceteras. And there are so many details left unrevealed to the reader – What else did Nina see under her parents' bed? What was written on the yellow slip of paper? What is the text of Kitty's poem? – and these details left me rather anxious; so much unsaid, unrevealed. And yet, this book is pointed in what it does say. Here's the woman next door, Dr. Sheridan, on declining an invitation for dinner at the villa:

When couples offer shelter or a meal to strays and loners, they do not really take them in. They play with them. Perform for them. And when they are done they tell their stranded guest in all sorts of sly ways she is now required to leave. Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart. A single guest was a mere distraction from this task.

That bit reminded me of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and when depressed poet Kitty starts collecting stones (and Nina reads the phrase “the Drowning Stones” in her poem), it felt like of course we're supposed to be thinking of Ms Woolf. And here's the poet's wife, and Nina's mother, Isabel; how she feels but cannot say:

She had attempted to be someone she didn’t really understand. A powerful but fragile female character. If she knew that to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile, she did not know how to use this knowledge in her own life.

The poet, Joe, provides more foreshadowing in what he will not say:

“I've been thinking about your title, 'Swimming Home'.”

His tone was offhand, more nonchalant than he felt. He did not tell her how he had been thinking about her title. The rectangular swimming pool that had been carved from stone in the grounds of the villa reminded him of a coffin. A floating open coffin lit with the underwater lights Jurgen swore at when he fiddled with the incandescent light bulbs he'd had to change twice since they arrived. A swimming pool was just a hole in the ground. A grave filled with water.

And Nina, many years later, reflecting on this week in her youth:

I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made of bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

A stuffed animal in a rattrap, a pony on a patio, tattooing the wrist of someone who had avoided the Holocaust; the imagery can be strange and unsettling, but it all seems to resonate with the internal struggles we deal with every day; metaphorical and wise, I enjoyed this read very much. The last word is for Kitty: