Transposed maps of different regions would be a variant explanation. The Vancouver hotel room I occupied that morning seemed in my state of half-wakefulness to contain all the hotel rooms and temporary rooms I had ever stayed in, not in a simultaneous continuum, nor in chronological sequence, but in flickering, overlapping, and partial surges, much in the way that a dream will dissolve into a new dream yet retain some colour or fragment of the previous dream, which across the pulsing transition both remains the same and plays a new role in an altered story, like a psychic rhyme, or a printed fabric whose complex pattern is built up across successive layers of impression, each autonomously perceptible but also leading the perceiver to cognitively connect the component parts in an inner act of fictive embellishment, so strong is the desire to recognize a narrative among scattered fragments of perception. My own youth seems to move in my present life in such a way – present and absent, at times incoherent, sometimes frightening, scarcely recognizable, rhyming and drifting.
I’m writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task is to re-enter, by means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. The desire to make a representative document began only with the involuntary incident in the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I’ll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I’m at the round table under the linden tree, in a sweet green helmet of buzzing. Each of its pendulous flowers seems to be inhabited by a bee. They don’t mind me – they’re rapturously sucking nectar. I’m at the core of a breezy chandelier of honey. I’m sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbour, I was seized by a kinship; how very slowly, in a weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it’s a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I’ll work with that. I’ll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.
I’m writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.
In the cold autumn of 1984, when I was twenty-three years old, I decided to change my life. I flew from Vancouver to London with the plan to seek a new citizenship, continue to Paris, settle, and look for work. I carried one overpacked rip-stop nylon duffle bag, a sheaf of documents, and my typewriter. I found a hotel room near Victoria Station in what purported to be a Polish veterans’ hostel, or that is what the sign said, where the cheapest of the remaining rooms, at eight pounds a night, was in the basement, with the word Storage written over the door. Perhaps the proprietor referred to it as the garden level. I did not mind because beside it was the bathroom, which had a very deep and long bathtub and a good supply of hot water, making it the warmest place in London that cold month. This bath was the antidote to the chilly museums where I passed my days sketching and writing in my diary, and my vain meanderings in Bloomsbury in search of the tea room where H.D. transformed herself to an Imagist in 1912. The second and important richness of the room, beyond its proximity to the bath, was the breakfast brought singingly to my door each morning by the Polish hotelman. Incredulous, I listed the contents of that tray in my diary: a tall glass of orange juice, a mug of very hot coffee, a demitasse of milk, a bowl of sugar, two eggs perfectly boiled, two slices of ham, a glass of marmalade, a plate with four slices of buttered brown bread and half a baguette, a tinfoil-wrapped candy, four chocolate lady’s fingers, and a piece of cream-filled cake. So I would put three pieces of brown bread and all the sweets aside for my supper, returning from my day’s wanderings with some cheese and lettuce to make sandwiches. He would place the tray each morning on a small table covered with a yellow plasticized cabbage-rose-patterned cloth, which oddly matched the room’s small hooked carpet, yellow also, dingy, and incongruously ornamented with a brown cartoon bear. The wooden stand beside the narrow blue metal bed held a crucifix, a King James Bible, a spool of blue thread with a needle ready in it, and a 22p stamp. There also I kept the few books I travelled with – used paperback copies of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees, and a beautifully bound volume of Beat translations of classical Chinese poetry called Old Friend from Far Away. Why these books? Chance, I suppose. I was ardent and inexperienced in my reading, earnestly drawing up lists of necessary future studies at the back of my diary, and as I read I seemed to float above the difficult and clever pages, in a haze of worshipful incomprehension. I imagined that simple persistence would slowly transform this vagueness to the hoped-for intelligent acuity, and in a way I was not wrong, although it was not true acuity that I later entered into, but the gradual ability, similar to the learning of a new handcraft, to perceive the threads linking book to book, and so to enter, through reading, a network of relationship. I might call this my education; save my gambits in parks and museums, I had had no other. Later this network would become an irritant, like a too-tight jacket, a binding collar. To counter this sad diminishment in my credulity, and to enter again the pleasurable drift, the sensual plenum of my youth, where even incomprehension was mildly erotic, in my middle age here in the cottage I have started to read French. I began with high-brow pornography, developing a taste for Pauline Réage, and eventually I moved from pornography to linguistics, and thence to poetry, led by Émile Benveniste and his theories of rhythm and semantics, to the works of Baudelaire. I was stunned by the sheer elegance of Benveniste’s thought and puzzled by his absence from the North American canons. He led me to a fresh thinking of the movement of meaning in poetry; I abandoned the cult of the sign. I have had absolutely no irritating institutional knowledge to trouble my French reading, which is necessarily very partial and flawed. But I have with time lost the immature sense of self-incapacity, so useful in my earlier studies as a disciplining constraint. Always there would be something else that needed to be consulted before I could understand the book in hand. Always my path to that other text was slow, dependent on chance, libraries, and time-consuming love affairs. By the time I had laboriously located the errant reference, my own position had shifted. So my self-education took on an unintentional rigour. Now, with gusto, in the other language, I enter the cavalier abandonment of effortfulness.
I slept in that dark room in London for several weeks as I waited to procure a British passport. I had learned that I was eligible for this identity thanks to the accident of my father’s birth in London. I am aware of how implausible this seems from the perspective of contemporary politics, but in 1984, with the appropriate paperwork in hand, a Canadian daughter of a British-born father could expect to receive British citizenship in under three weeks. Just before the Second World War, my paternal grandfather, a young radio genius fresh from the Saskatchewan farm, had travelled to England from Canada with his new wife to take a job in early radar technology. My grandmother had told me that she arrived in England already pregnant, continuously seasick during the Atlantic crossing on the empty coal freighter in which she and her economical husband had narrow wooden berths. Could that be so? I recall her telling me that when the empty ship docked in Liverpool, they had had to disembark by way of a flexible ladder thrown down the side of the steel hull from the high-riding deck, and when she arrived on the dock, the front of her new pastel-coloured travelling suit was deeply soiled. My grandmother