Book review: Negative Capability, by Michèle Roberts

It is certainly audacious to begin a book – subtitled A Diary Of Surviving – with a confession that the reason the work came about at all was that the ominously named “Publisher” and the patronised “Lily-the-Agent” had both expressed doubts about your newly-delivered manuscript. It is a high-risk strategy to foreground a work with degree of neediness and intemperate anger.

Michèle Roberts PIC: Catarina Heeckt

That said, this account of 12 days over a year has parts that are intriguing and parts that are lyrical and melancholy. As I pondered it afterwards, I wondered whether or not it would have been better to leave it in a drawer for a century or so, as it might then be read as a fascinating social document about the life of a writer in the early years of the 21st century. Indeed, Roberts seems to pre-empt this by saying “you wait and see, I’ll be rediscovered when I’m 90, you’ll call it a comeback but I’ll have been writing away all along, I refuse to give up so just f*** off and leave me alone!”

The opening parts talk about a “new life of thrift”, although she does admit that she has a second home in France, and later chapters will see her on working trips and holidays to Avignon, Dublin, Paris, La Ciotat and so forth. I personally would not consider Morrisons to be “basic, cheap and cheerful” compared with Aldi, Asda or Lidl (which Roberts loathes), and I winced that Waitrose was described as a place where you can buy “artisan breads hand-woven by Sicilian peasant grandmothers”. A problem with contemporary diaries is an awkward sense of voyeurism. Reading about the daily habits of Pepys, Burney or Woolf is one thing, but it is more difficult when one is in the world one is reading about.

Roberts is a novelist whose work I have admired, especially Impossible Saints and Daughters Of The House. She is, in the best sense, bolshie. She is also acute on how there might be grammatical differences between the genders at the level of the sentence. Indeed, in one passage she produces a kind of homage to the idea of a less rationalistic approach: “Swimming back and forth, not thinking about anything, just letting go into the rhythms of movement, after a while I drifted out of consciousness into somewhere vast and nebulous, I became porous, flooded with memories of dreams, memories of thoughts, of scraps of speech, couldn’t distinguish one from the other, began to realise I’d lost myself, dissolved into a timeless space, back into the unconscious, swimming in it, I’d come loose, no edges or boundaries, I was composed of sparkles of light sparkles of seawater blue-green-silvery leaping points I was a fish with silvery scales I was nowhere just lolloping along in a sea of language a sea of dreams”. Well, it sounds perfectly pleasant.

But this jars with a tone that reminds the reader that they are just not quite as clever as she is. Some words in French – Roberts is half-French – are glossed in parentheses, others left to stand stranded. I can sympathise with the hectoring of the “inner critic” – Roberts writes that her inner sneer tells her that she is “too literary, too difficult, too experimental, too serious, too poetic, too unironic, too female, too ex-Catholic, too uncool, too everything, why can’t you write a bestseller… why are you so ambitious, why can’t you just write nice middlebrow feminine stuff in a nice plain style.”

Almost every author I know or have reviewed or have interviewed has admitted to doubts. At the same time, the idea that the awful Publisher just wants the Next Big Thing is not something I have experienced. When there are writers such as Joanna Kavenna, Ali Smith, AL Kennedy, Nicola Barker, Scarlett Thomas, Lucy Ellmann, AS Byatt, Zadie Smith, NoViolet Bulawayo… the list could go on.

There is no male monopoly on egotism. Although I did enjoy the passages on DR Richardson, it’s curious that the novelist most frequently mentioned by Roberts is herself. Self-praise, as my Mum says, is no praise. The title refers to Keats’ idea of ambiguity – his later letters refer to hating “poetry that has a palpable design upon us” and in an even more remarkable piece describes the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought” (what a phrase for a critic to unpick) out of which “many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages… We are in a Mist”.

One of my Mum’s other great sayings is “let not the sun go down on your wrath”, which she pilfered from the Bible. It may have been cathartic for Roberts to write this, and it may have got her through her year of surviving, but it leaves a bitter aftertaste. The off-hand dismissals, the throwaway snipes, the fact that future potential agents are reduced to being Lily-2, Lily-3, Lily-4 (I am sure they all had names and beliefs and longings of their own; most humans have) all contribute to a book which seems to miss its very title. The point of negative capability is empathy. We do not judge, we allow the other to be other, we gift them the mystery of themselves.

Negative Capability, by Michèle Roberts, Sandstone, £14.99

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