The prolific British novelist Michele Roberts (once nominated for the Booker Prize for her novel, Daughters
of the House), also the receiver of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des et Lettres awarded by the French
government, declares that she is a woman damaged by Catholicism. For most of
her life, judging by her warts and all memoirs, Paper Houses, Roberts has
tried to reject her Catholic upbringing, and, with it, the middle class Tory
values of her parents. Roberts’s father had a working class background;
however, the family had become middle class when Roberts and her siblings grew
up.
When Roberts returned to London after
finishing her degree course in Oxford, at the start of the 1970s, her aim, to
begin with, was to train as a librarian. However, much to her parents’ dismay,
she gave up on the idea and announced that she was going to earn her living by
writing (the young Roberts believed that she had a flair for poetry). She also
hurled herself into the Bohemian lifestyle embraced by many young men and women
from middleclass backgrounds. This involved, based on the evidence supplied by
Roberts, living in squats, holding ultra-leftist feminist views, joining
marches and demonstrations against the Capitalists, contributing to radical
magazines, participating in Street theatres, smoking dope and (occasionally)
snorting cocaine, letting one’s hair down in wild parties, and sexual
promiscuity aplenty. There is rather a
lot of sex in the book, as Roberts informs the readers about her various sexual
exploits. By her own admission, Roberts did not learn to come for a long time
and worried that she might be frigid. However, once she learned how to, she
laid down her carpet, so to speak, for the inspection of a cavalcade of men and
women. It was all, one supposes, part of experimenting with freedom and a
desire to push the envelope, engendered by the liberal values prevailing at the
time. Roberts, to her credit, has avoided falling into the trap of overdoing
it. Thus, when she narrates an incident, where a fellow commune member and
husband of one of her friends, in a sexual experiment, makes Roberts and
another woman lie on his either side and fingers their clitorises, if the intention was to titillate, it is
expertly camouflaged by the matter of fact tone. Curiously, for a writer
avowedly big on workings of the mind—there are countless references to Roberts
‘diving’ into her unconscious to procure material for her fiction—her responses
to the sexual encounters are banal and clichéd.
This is not to suggest that Roberts is dissimulating when she says she
enjoyed sex, nor that she should have invested the encounters with feelings she
did not experience; it is just that Roberts, who analyses everything—to death,
you might be excused for thinking at times—is content to luxuriate in
superficialities (‘I thoroughly enjoyed it’) while describing her responses to sexual
acts which pop up on every other page in the first half of her book. In the
memoir Roberts recounts her own struggles with breaking the taboos and talks,
deftly blending Freudian psychology with her Catholic upbringing (which she
found repressive) about the disapproving ‘Mother Superior of her mind’,
repeatedly chastising her and stifling her creativity for a long time by
telling her that she was wicked and no good. Perhaps the punitive superego is
still at work. Towards the end Roberts turns overtly analytical and—probably
from the knowledge indirectly gleaned through her own therapy—analyses her
relationship with her father, and arrives at the (not altogether surprising)
conclusion that what she must have really wanted to do was to have a physical
relationship with him.
In a literary event, promoting the memoir,
Roberts described herself as a flaneur.
There is certainly a lot of flaneuring
in the memoir. The bits where Roberts describes her explorations of the city
are the most enjoyable, not least because Roberts’s love for London, her home
for well over three decades, which shines through these reminiscences. The
quaint pubs and cafes, her stays in cheap rooms in parts of London which were
far-flung in those days (and where local men had a strong tendency to regard
young women walking alone as either lesbians or on the game; Roberts, it would
appear, could not walk more than a few steps without being subjected to
lecherous comments, just because she neglected to wear a brassiere) are brought
to life brightly and distinctly. The reader marvels at the intensity and acuity
of these recollections as Roberts describes with great vividness minutiae. (While
describing an impromptu beach picnic she once had with one of her innumerable
friends Roberts remembers that her breasts popped out of her skimpy top every
time she rowed).
Paper Houses is a
candid memoir of an intelligent, idealistic, creative, emotional person who
lived through the heady days of left-wing politics in the seventies. The young
Roberts, working for outré magazines of the counterculture like Spare Rib and Oz, was convinced that she was part of a revolution that would
change the world. Written in the first person singular and in past tense, the
emotions and thinking process are those of a young Roberts, raw and unanalyzed.
It is to the credit of the older, mature, Roberts that she has not allowed
hindsight to cast its retrospective influence and distort the naive idealism of
her younger self which attempted to be a revolutionary feminist, novelist,
poet, street theatre actor, and a bibliophile, all at the same time. Roberts
was trying her best to break out of the comfortable, middle-class background,
yet all her endeavours, as she is frank and honest enough to admit, were cas typique bourgeois. When she worked in Clerkenwell, her fellow workers, all working class women from
Essex, viewed Roberts’s endeavours with a mixture of amusement and contempt:
they thought feminism was “something for
middle-class chicks wanting to get into the middle-class men's world”. For her fellow members in the various radical
households she lived in, Roberts was not radical enough: they considered her “too
wide-eyed and emotional” and pooh-poohed her writing aspirations as bourgeois
individualism.
Roberts strives hard—too hard, you
suspect—to give the impression of a person full of joi de verve. The sheer number of friends and acquaintances who
appear in the memoirs is bewildering—there are so many of them, and they pop up
every so often, that it is a bit difficult to keep a track. Thus, when on page
250, say, a character, say, Joe, appears, you suspect, given the familiarity
with which Roberts speaks of him, that he has appeared somewhere earlier in the
memoirs; but when and where? In a way it does not matter. Such is the pace and
momentum of Roberts’s narrative that the reader is tempted to just go with the
flow. The writing is highly impressionistic and the reader does not get
insights into the workings of the minds of the procession of characters that
appear; they remain, all the time, supporting characters in the big, exciting drama
of Roberts’s life. You wonder whether the people were more complex and
multilayered than Roberts’s breezy, passing impressions suggest. Even, the two
ex-husbands—who feature prominently in Roberts’s account of her two failed
marriages—remain sfumato.
Paper Houses is a
quaint, nostalgic reflection on the milieu which contributed to the development
of one of the important novelists of our generation. Roberts emerges from this
narration as a thoughtful, perceptive and generous human being, although you
wonder whether underneath all the chutzpah, (deceptively) breezy prose and
wassailary tone lurk stygian emotions.
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