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Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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What also earths Levy’s work is her wit. “She is so amused, diverted and delighted by life,” said the actor Tilda Swinton, who is a fan. Her jokes, often wryly commenting on her own failings, make for a kind of intimacy, even complicity – “the kind of complicity that many of us can only relate to the dry land of childhood companionship”, said Swinton. Levy’s women, especially the “I” of the living autobiographies, fail as well as succeed; they have good days and bad. They are neither “feisty” and “gutsy” – those tiresome cliches – nor are they self-saboteurs, who put themselves down to ingratiate themselves with the reader. They are both real and offer an example of how to live well. When Levy was finding a way to write her living autobiographies, she searched for a voice that “was immensely powerful, immensely vulnerable; immensely eloquent and totally inarticulate. Because that’s all of us.”

To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else. He was probably the wrong reader for her story, but I thought on balance that she might be the right reader for mine. It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals. She could have stopped the story by describing the wonder of all she had seen in the deep calm sea before the storm. That would have been a happy ending, but she did not stop there. She was asking him (and herself) a question: do you think I was abandoned by that person on the boat? Deborah was born in South Africa in 1959, the eldest child of anti-apartheid activists Norman and Philippa Levy. Her father was arrested when she was five and was imprisoned for four years. During this time, Deborah became an almost silent child, but was encouraged by a teacher to write down her thoughts, sparking her love of creative writing. After her father’s release, the family relocated to the UK and first lived above a menswear shop in London. As a teenager Deborah worked as a cinema usher, and a chance encounter with the film-maker Derek Jarman inspired her to change her plans to take a degree in literature, and instead she headed to Dartington College of Arts, where she studied writing for the stage and performance. Hot Milk frequently pans from the personal to the political. The waters of Almería’s beaches are infested with jellyfish, portentous refugees from a damaged ecosystem; Sophie ruminates on the conditions endured by local agricultural workers and the developing-world origins of various consumer goods; the privations of austerity economics are everywhere apparent. Indeed, the book’s preoccupation with kinship feels acutely relevant. In years to come, the profound societal impact of an ageing population will prompt more of us to reflect, like Sophie, on how a ‘wife can be a mother to her husband and a son can be a husband or a mother to his mother and a daughter can be a sister or a mother to her mother who can be a father and a mother to her daughter’.The following year, she published Things I Don’t Want to Know, the first in a trilogy of what she calls “living autobiographies”, to convey their selective, fictive nature. Over the next few years, she alternated two more novels, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, with two more volumes of living autobiography, which spoke of how, after her marriage ended, she recomposed a life for herself and her daughters in her 50s, outside the old patriarchal structures. All of these books, she told me, flew out of her “like a cork coming out of a bottle”. Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen) I am not sure I have often witnessed love that achieves all of these things, so perhaps this ideal is fated to be a phantom. What sort of questions does this phantom ask of me? It asks political questions for sure, but it is not a politician. Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the author of Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything De Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realised. She remained committed to Sartre being the essential love of her life for 51 years, despite their other attachments. She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more lovable to him. She was appalled by middle age, in ways I did not completely understand. All the same, as she had written to the writer Nelson Algren, in the flush of their new love: “I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself ... ”

Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless. A Deborah Levy— Well, her writerly attention is always in an interesting place. She had an impoverished childhood in Vietnam and this was explored in her novel The LoveR. It is here in her masterpiece, published when she was 70, that you will find one of the most devastating seductions ever written. A teenage white girl has an affair with a Chinese financier, and it’s not just an erotic forbidden sexual encounter, it’s an essay on how colonialism messes everyone up. Duras is a totally unsentimental, mind-blowing writer, and the formal design of her fiction is often beautifully cinematic because she wrote and directed for film too. Deborah Levy is a writer whose novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Last year she published the final instalment of her ‘living autobiography’ trilogy of memoirs, and her earlier work includes plays for the RSC as well as short story collections and poetry. It was futile to try to fit an old life into a new life. The old fridge was too big for the new kitchen, the sofa too big for the lounge, the beds the wrong shape to fit the bedrooms. Most of my books were in boxes in the garage with the rest of the family house. More urgently, I no longer had a study at the most professionally busy time in my life. I wrote wherever I could and concentrated on making a home for my daughters. I could say that it was these years that were the most self-sacrificing, and not the years in our nuclear family unit. Yet, to be making this kind of home, a space for a mother and her daughters, was so hard and humbling, profound and interesting, that to my surprise I found I could work very well in the chaos of this time. A Deborah Levy— I just have no idea why anyone wouldn’t be attracted to modernism. It’s incomprehensible to me. There wasn’t really much writing like BeAuTifuL muTAnTs when it was first published in the UK and I wrote it because I had to find out what I could do with language, I had to find out everything. I didn’t set out to write like a modernist or a surrealist, but I didn’t set out to write a realist novel either. I wasn’t really writing in protest against other kinds of writing either. I obviously had my aesthetic enthusiasms, but language was the great adventure of my life. BeAuTifuL muTAnTs represents the sum of those early technical experiments.Levy’s writing has a very particular quality: it seems to infiltrate the mind. You absorb her way of seeing and start to perceive the world in Levy-ish ways. In her stories, seemingly trivial moments take on political force: an encounter with a hairdresser in The Cost of Living becomes a story about the camaraderie of women and what they reveal to each other; a scene about sharing a table on the Eurostar becomes about how men, literally and figuratively, fail to make space for younger women. In the new novel, August Blue, the narrator, having been insulted by a young man in a cafe, tells us, “I think he was expecting me to respond, to reply in some way, but I didn’t care about him or his problems.” I’ve used that in my own life more than once, since first reading it. The books become “almost a guide to life”, said Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Foundation. “She trains you to become your best self.” As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story. One January night I was eating coconut rice and fish in a bar on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. A tanned, tattooed American man sat at the table next to me. He was in his late 40s, big muscled arms, his silver hair pinned into a bun. He was talking to a young English woman, perhaps 19 years old, who had been sitting on her own reading a book, but after some ambivalence had taken up his invitation to join him. At first he did all the talking. After a while she interrupted him.

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