Actually, that’s not entirely true. I couldn’t write prose. It was as if the reflective, circumlocutory nature of prose, the way of developing ideas over several pages, was quite unsuited to the momentary imperative of absolute happiness. Released from anxieties and fears, I only wanted to live in the sensual world, to still the analytical inner voices into temporary submission. And so, in these months, writing as a daily act went out of the window. But I couldn’t give it up completely, I’d find myself, rather furtively, scribbling down a few words on a café tablecloth or the back of a cigarette packet. In the gaps. I’d hesitate to call such random groupings of words ‘poems’, but they had the urgency of the poetic. The desire to capture rapidly – what poetry uniquely can achieve. I actually became quite judgemental of my former self, and the way writers prioritise words and control over the living experience. If you were happy and well adjusted, would you want to spend day after day inside, staring at a screen? Given the choice between doing your 2,000 words for the day or an afternoon of fucking, what would you choose?
During this period I spent a surprising amount of time in Shepherd’s Bush (I know it sounds strange, but please bear with me). The need to be in Shepherd’s Bush was tied up with wanting to be with somebody I’d met. Felipe was Spanish, tall, with dark, curly hair and very brown eyes with long, sensuous eyelashes, and looked disarmingly like one of El Greco’s portraits of young men, the same nobility in the face. Even the five-minute walk down the Uxbridge Road, not one of London’s loveliest streets, became a passage of beauty because it was the way to him. Each charmless off-licence became transfigured, in a kind of reverse stations of the cross, into beacons of hope that edged me nearer towards seeing that loved face again. Each vandalised bus shelter brought me closer to shared desire.
Looking back on that time now, it does seem just like the song says – ‘Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past. / I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.’ I can remember making him laugh, a shake of that head, eyes dancing delightedly as I tried to learn phrases in Spanish on that bench in Bedford Square – ‘Relahate! Tenemos todo el tiempo del mundo …’ Hmmm, not sure about that one. Or driving back from the Lake District through the night and having a violent argument about the merits, or otherwise, of Patti Smith, so much so that I almost went into the back of a lorry. Almost every part of London still has associations from those four months. The alleyway next to the Riverside Studios going down to the Thames, where we’d rush out between films to kiss – and where we saw a shooting star; the corner of the Strand and Waterloo Bridge, which I’ll never be able to look at without inwardly blushing. And that stretch of pavement outside the King’s Head on Upper Street where it all began.
There is a great paradox, however, both about being happy, and trying to live in the present moment. As soon as they become conscious states, it’s all over. And maybe this is the reason why we should stop writing – the primitive impulse that says ‘don’t kill it through consciousness’. I remember seeing Jules et Jim as a student. Yes, there were charming and funny parts to the film but overall I was pretty traumatised. It seemed to me a statement about the inability of lovers to make choices, the way love ends up torturing all who fall under its spell. But one line still haunts me, spoken by the narrator, which I remember as: ‘Happiness came and went without anybody noticing.’ That had the feel of truth. A state that can only be recognised when it’s no longer there.1
In the intensity of our growing love I also felt peculiarly connected to death. Part of it was that understandable sense of ‘God, be careful how you cross the road – it would be terrible to die now when life is so amazing …’ But there was something else at work as well. And this I did try to express at the time, in a letter to a friend in Canada:
‘Parodoxically, in the first days of a new love, we are more closely connected to death than at any other time in our lives. The exquisite pain of this state consists of the certainty that this sense of mad burning and blossoming is finite. It will end. Whether in a week, or after sixty years, whether in the death of oneself or the other, whether in the fading of the love or the lover. So, contained within the coming of love, is death. Certain as ash after fire.’
Strange to reread that and remember it was written at a time of great joy. And then, to see in a notebook, that on the same day I’d written this list:
I want to see the Bosphorus with you,
I want to explore every crevice and hair of your body,
I want to show you the Salvator Rosa in the National Gallery,
I want you to teach me Spanish,
I want you to take me to your special mountain in Asturias,
I want you to tell me why you love Victor Hugo,
I want us to go to Mangal in the early hours, ravenous for lamb, after fucking the night away,
I want to sleep out on the Heath with you under the summer stars …
Love and Death. The impossibility of anything lasting. The wilder the expectations, the more dizzying the ending.
Even today, writing this, I can hear two powerful voices pulling me in entirely opposite directions. One of these is saying, Immerse yourself in the reality of that time. Try to express – as honestly as you can – the experience. The feelings of those months. After all, it’s one of the hardest things you can ever try to communicate. The other voice, more parental, protective whispers, Are you insane? You know that re-entering this territory can be toxic. Remember how it ended. Do you want to open up all that pain again? The vast majority of the time I listen to this sensible voice; the notebooks and photographs from that time remain on a high shelf at home, pregnant with joy and pain, unlooked at from one year to the next.
But today I’m not there, I’m in the west, I’m released by the sea and the scudding clouds and the ravens on the cliffs croaking wildly. I’m roaring into the wind, feeling I exist as a body as well as a mind. Wanting to be released from these years of research into violence and horror and death. Write about the absolute opposite now. Write not him but you. Write about love. Write about tenderness, about hope. About beginnings.
*
Four moments.
The first evening. We meet outside the theatre, you’d just seen Festen. Both of us nervous but pretending not to be. The King’s Head very crowded, but we talk, your serious face, fringed with dark, wiry hair, leaning towards mine intently as we talk about family, growing up gay and Catholic, our younger sisters and how protective we still feel. London as a home for millions of escapees, some fleeing persecution, most fleeing the stultifying conformity of conservative backgrounds. The astonishing freedom that you felt as soon as you arrived here. A place where you could be yourself. For the first time. And, as you talk, an energy between us, chemical, charged. The certainty of attraction. We’re listening to each other, but also hearing another language altogether … Now you’re describing the contrast with all the hiding you had to do at home, all the repression. And I’m talking about the willed ignorance of the Suffolk young farmers I grew up with, the narrowness of the Catholic school in Ipswich. You talk about Gigon. Terrible struggles with your father. Intense homophobia at school. Then our first feelings of attraction for boys. But, in those cultures, shameful, so immediately repressed. And we share how both of us later learned of boys in our classes who’d killed themselves – unable to reconcile their sexuality with their religion.