I keep an archive on this site of blog posts about a gardening project I embarked upon during the pandemic. Enough time has passed now for the garden in question to have been engulfed again by brambles and bindweed - I can’t imagine anyone continued what I started there. My work was only a brief interlude in the garden’s history, a rare and bold intervention of my own that has surely disappeared by now.
It’s emblematic, I suppose, of the life I led in that house, a building owned by an institution with which I had no affiliation. Covid made me braver - brave in the way that I often find I am in the face of any disaster I can be sure I didn’t personally cause. With my inclination towards self-chastisement thus pacified, I found my imagination emboldened by the demonstrable failure of the existing systems that usually bind us, by the opportunity to create without fighting, first, to secure the space in which to do so.
If I sound evasive here, it’s deliberate, because I haven’t worked out exactly how much my public writing should connect with my personal history. Those who know me, and who know the opening of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, may be able to imagine what I am getting at here. Woolf’s essay is from 1929, but nearly a hundred years later I can affirm that women’s thoughts continue to be sent into hiding by those persistently enforced hierarchies of certain venerable institutions. I recall once being escorted over the grass of Trinity’s Great Court by a Fellow there, as if in the wake of his superior intellect my own footsteps were sufficiently lightened to protect that perfect turf from plebeian tread. Unaccompanied, I, like Woolf under the chastisement of a Beadle, would have been relegated to the gravel.
In that garden, though, I did a great deal more than just to walk on the grass. Digging up those root crowns and broken tiles, marking out vegetable beds under the watchful eyes of birds awaiting the spoils of overturned earth, I claimed an intimacy with the land. I sweated and even bled into it, the brambles demanding their price for being insistently, violently curtailed. This was a rebellion. Indoors, under lockdown, I was permitted no personal space - no right to any room, to any closed door, able only to stake out a corner of the kitchen, into which I crammed an armchair and a few books and my own constrained self. Outside, protected by the willingness to labour, I marked out my borders in blood, and was blissfully untroubled, alone.
When I read John Locke as an undergraduate, and dutifully memorised the labour theory of property, I didn’t realise it would feel like this to mix labour with land. Under the conditions of pandemic, the garden felt protected from arbitrary laws of country and college. In one sense it was a rational protection, a reversion to natural law, in which the machinery of logic creaked into function and ceded the territory to me. But in another sense, it felt like witchcraft, something far removed from such absurd vanities as ownership, and much more powerful. We might just as well say that the garden was the chief intervener, making inroads into my mind and body; that the garden, actually, owned me.
I finished reading Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep over the weekend. I love it. And I love it in a way that makes it difficult to write a review, to get the necessary distance. I resisted the book at first because it’s not funny, and almost everything else I’ve read lately has had a strong comedic element. Lately, I’ve needed it. However, the very fact of this need has made me consider that comedy often serves to set up emotional distance. When I first started writing Amourette I was excited by the capacity of comedy by women creators to eradicate the taboos that distance us from each other. But now I see that it can be a method of evasion.
In part my love of The Safekeep has to do with a natural protectiveness I feel over queer stories, especially when I see them critiqued by predominantly straight audiences. Some reviews of The Safekeep insist that its sex scenes are excessive, to which I am inclined to respond with a fervent plea to deconstruct the subconscious homophobia that might be lurking in that opinion. I think about this interview with Ocean Vuong a lot, in which he makes the point that the “show, don’t tell” imperative of the creative writing classroom doesn’t work for marginalised perspectives. I think that a lot of writing “rules” are made from a position of privilege.
But that’s not the reason I find the sex scenes in The Safekeep to be indispensable. This is a novel, too, about personal spaces, about the houses we live in and own or don’t own, borrow, perhaps, or rent, or unlawfully occupy. The legal status of the property Isabel lives in is eventually revealed in The Safekeep, and I didn’t know enough of the postwar history of the Netherlands to guess what would happen in advance. But all the clues were there, and the revelation was dazzling, and utterly satisfying. And I think the ending of the book wouldn’t have been so effective without the explicit sex scenes. The energy of them, the physical effort, the awareness of bodily fluids against the backdrop of the house - all this generates an eventual sense of a three-way right of ownership between Isabel, Eva, and the building itself. Set in a heteropatriarchal, racist, and antisemitic society, The Safekeep shows the way to the possibilities of a queer utopia.
In my recent posts on The Scholomance Trilogy, I talked a lot about the quality of Novik’s ideas. One of the ones I especially liked was the idea of borrowed space. Wizard enclaves, it turns out, often own empty buildings in the mundane world and transfer the space into their void-bordered magical worlds. Once inside the enclave, the apparent location of the borrowed space is determined by real-time perception of it. Gardens with winding paths are much less costly to maintain in an enclave than vast open spaces, because they can be constantly rearranged according to how much space actually needs to be perceived at once. I love the way this is true in mundane reality, as well - a winding path creates an experience of spaciousness, even when confined. That’s the thrill of the labyrinth, its spiritual resonance; the excitement and joy of the walled garden; the folded impossibilities tucked in amongst the real.
All this takes me back to Woolf’s essay, and to my remarks on Herbert’s poem ‘Redemption’, and how it feels to struggle to find a home of my own when institutions of great wealth hoard up my city’s living space. Things started to change for me, at least in terms of wellbeing and wakefulness, when I decided to engage intellectually with this issue as a philosophical problem, rather than to be utterly at the mercy of the anxiety it induces, utterly weakened by it. “[A] woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” goes the most famous line of Woolf’s essay, and I have my own grappling still to do with this sentiment. Until then, what can I do but let the fear in, and write the fiction anyway?
