Kathryn Hughes
At the age of 50, the acclaimed writer was
divorced and living in a new flat. In elliptical, allusive prose, she re-engages with the ideas of
Simone de Beauvoir
here’s a wonderful
moment in a series of wonderful moments in this second instalment of Deborah
Levy’s “living memoir”. It’s a “sad Tuesday” and she is being told off by a
neighbour in the block of flats into which she has recently moved with her
daughters following divorce from their father. This is supposed to be a fresh
start for Levy, a liberation from the contortions of a family life that has
become too difficult to sustain alongside her work as a writer. But now here
comes a new kind of cultural policing, imposed not by a man but by another
woman, who is part of what Levy calls the “societal” system.
Deborah Levy.
Photograph: Sheila Burnett
With her sharp
little teeth, rictus smile and high sweet voice, the woman is dripping gentle
venom about Levy’s habit of parking her bike in the front car park, her
resistance to ordering her shopping online like everyone else, not to mention
the fact that she appears so “busy busy busy all the time”. As the teeth get
pointier, Levy’s necklace, the one she always wears even when swimming, breaks
and the large pearls bounce across the entrance hall floor. She is unstrung,
undone in this place where she was supposed to be aiming for a “new
composition”.
A good 30 years
after someone clever and optimistic (no one is quite sure who) first announced
that we had landed safely on the shores of “post-feminism”, it’s clear that
being both a creative and reproductive woman is as tricky as it’s ever been. As
with Freud’s return of the repressed, those angers and desires, the consequence
of botched compromise and thankless sacrifice, have come bubbling up, all the
more potent for being choked for so long. Into this molten moment some of our
finest writers including Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and, indeed, Levy have
poured their blistering experiences of the psychic and emotional cost of being
a wife and mother in the 21st century.
Levy’s oblique and
elliptical prose, on magnificent show in her Booker shortlisted novels Swimming
Home and Hot Milk, does not lend itself to a route march through chronological
time and external circumstance. Instead, what Levy gives us is an account of
her internal world, a shape-shifting space where past and present coexist,
where buildings are not so much bricks and mortar as extended metaphors and
where identity is in a radical flux of unravelling and remaking.
All the same, Levy’s prose is not so slippery
that it can’t serve up the basics. At the age of 50 and after decades of what
sound like the usual patterns of north London family-making, she finds herself
cast adrift from her marriage and, crucially, without any desire to swim back.
We’re not given names or details, but that is not so much a matter of tact as
irrelevance, since the story Levy tells, she insists, does not belong to her
alone. It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her
love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone
except herself.
Levy is
not shy to elevate her drama to the realm of the immortals but is picky about
which mythologies she co-opts
Not that getting
free is exactly easy. Indeed, as Levy’s wry title suggests, choosing not to be
married to society costs a lot. Her comfortable family home has been exchanged
for a flat where the heating often doesn’t work and the lavatory often won’t
flush. The communal parts – there are 100 flats in this huge block – are a
hallucinatory tube that she dubs “the Corridors of Love”. This sounds
promising, but Levy’s most rewarding experiences turn out to be with an
electronic screwdriver that bites efficiently into spoiled old wood, and her
new electric bike, which whizzes her home along the Holloway Road with the
groceries. She pays for the screwdriver and the e-bike, not to mention the
groceries and her daughters’ trainers, by taking teaching and writing jobs
that, she hints, are not ones that she would otherwise choose.
Into this present
tense Levy inserts incidents that reveal the conditions that made her want to
break away from the family racket in the first place. She tells us about a man
she knows who can’t look at his wife, another who never remembers women’s
names, and a downstairs neighbour who invites her in for a drink but whom she
actually values for the loan of his power tools. Working further back, earlier
encounters show her dealing with random men who take up too much space, time
and air in cafes, on trains and in conversation, barging into her narrative as
if it is their natural right.
It is to counteract
this sense of diminishment that she sets about expanding her own domain. A
neighbour, the elderly widow of the poet Adrian Mitchell, offers Levy her
garden shed as a writing hut. It is a provisional kind of liberation, though,
shared with a fuming deep freeze and a gas heater that makes the place sweat.
Still, in case there is any doubt about the allegories in play, Levy describes
this particular Garden of Eden as having its own abundant apple tree (the fruit
goes splat on the shed roof) and a loving gardener-god who tends to all living
things (in fact a handsome out-of-work actor).
As the biblical allusions suggest, Levy is
never shy about elevating her personal drama to the realm of the immortals.
Still, she remains picky about which mythologies she is willing to co-opt in
the process. Penelope patiently waiting at home for Odysseus to return from his
adventures definitely will not do. Instead, Levy prefers to tell us about the
Medusa who dares to return the male gaze, transforming all those gawpers into
stone. Then there are the Maenads, the raving female followers of Bacchus who
remind her of her friend Sasha, a high-flying city woman who goes out to get
blind drunk every Friday. In an extravagant gesture of refusal Sasha always
ends up being sick over her short-skirted business suit and high heels, a
fantasy uniform of female empowerment that could only have been dreamed up by a
male boss.
Femininity for Levy, then, is a kind of shoddy
masquerade, an elaborate costuming of body and desire that she no longer has
any interest in maintaining. There’s nothing new about this idea. You see it in
early radical psychoanalytical circles before it disappeared as the 20th
century unfolded, pushed off stage by more pressing anxieties about life and
death. After the second world war, Simone de Beauvoir re-engaged with the idea
of gender as performance, only to see the thread get lost again in the 1980s
and 90s with the emergence of so-called “lipstick feminism”, a mode that
positively relished the dressing-up side of things.
Now, in The Cost of Living, Levy explicitly
recuperates De Beauvoir’s position, not only by engaging closely with The
Second Sex, but by going deeply into the philosopher’s personal struggles to
reconcile sexual love with intellectual liberty. The result is a piece of work that is not so much a memoir as an
eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls “a new way of living” in the
post-familial world.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/06/cost-living-deborah-levy-review-feminist-manifesto-divorced-simone-beauvoir