'And I
know, too, how destructive ambition is, and how it deforms what one
might create. And yet, and yet, I want to be acknowledged.' - Willa
Muir, Journal, 20th of August 1953
***
When
I was six, I had the good fortune to be at a school where the
academic priority seemed to be to get us to write. Write whatever, as
long as we were writing. Most of us couldn't even read yet but that
was apparently unimportant as long as we were cooking up our own
works of literary genius. I remember that I understood how to use
metaphors, for instance, but not full stops.
It
was an interesting time during my personal artistic development.
Amongst
other things, we would have to write descriptions of what we did at
the weekend every Monday morning. At some point, presumably around
Guy Fawkes night, I wrote about going to see fireworks, and received
a special gold star sticker and the mysterious commendation from my
teacher that I 'could be a writer' when I grew up. I had no idea what
that meant, but if it came with more of these gold stars, I was game.
Thus
was an ambitious young writer born.
***
In my third
year at university I fell in love with a little known Scottish
novelist named Willa Muir – which is a pity because by that point
she'd been dead for forty years.
She's much
less famous than her poet husband, Edwin Muir, although current
research suggests that it was she, not Edwin, who was mostly
responsible for the Kafka translations that made his name in the
western literary scene of the early-mid 20th century.
And therein
lies something of what drew me to her work and which pulls me back to
it every now and again.
In her
lifetime, Willa wrote only two novels: Mrs Ritchie and
Imagined Corners, both witty examinations of family, class and
gender in small town Scotland in the 1920s-40s, both of which I
loved. They're vibrant, funny books full of bristling politics and
human characters, keenly drawn with a sharp voice that feels about a
generation ahead of its time.
But she
never wrote anything else and eventually died in relative obscurity.
This woman lived into the 1970s and was, as a result, witness to some
of the greatest social upheavals of our time: the fact that her work
reflects only a fraction of that is a horrible shame. What Willa
didn't write about is, frankly, as telling as what she did.
It's clear
from Willa's personal writings, journals and letters, that though she
wasn't without ambition, she sacrificed her aspirations to help with
her husbands' – that instead of pursuing her own career, she
supported his, to the point of doing most of the work he was famous
for, for him.
What is
also clear is that she regretted it. In her personal letters and
diaries she voices a concise knowledge of what it cost her and how
that pains her:
'I am a
better translator than [Edwin] is. The whole current of patriarchal
society is set against this fact, however and sweeps it into
oblivion, simply because I did not insist on shouting aloud: “Most
of this translation, especially Kafka, has been done by me. Edwin
only helped.” … So that now … I am left without a shred of
literary reputation.' (Journal, 20th of August, 1953).
Willa was a
woman with ability and ambition who felt that her lack of courage
(she called it her 'dicky backbone') had held her back from the work
she should have spent her life creating, which in turn denied her the
reputation that she deserved.
I'd argue
that she may have been overly harsh with herself: it's easy for me,
living three generations later, to look back and see the myriad of
societal forces stacked up against female writers trying to find
their voices during this period. In many cases, it feels more like
luck and class privilege that allowed those few women who broke into
the mainstream to be heard, not courage. (I'm aware that that is
often still true today). But, facing far fewer of those obstacles
myself, do I have any excuse to give into my own fears the way Willa
felt she did hers?
Willa
reminds me, forcefully, never to fear reaching for my ambitions.
***
There are
days when I wake up so restless I feel like I have ants under my
skin.
I once
wrote a story about my grandmother's death – the closest person I
had to a grandmother, anyway. I said that when she died her body
blossomed. I turned the swelling caused by all the steroids she was
on into a garden, I said her body was only brewing life, her death
was transformation.
I'm not
sure that that's true. I miss her, and she hasn't turned into a
garden.
I feel like
I might, though. I feel like I could grow flowers, in her place. Just as I can't
fathom her going to nothing (I don't believe she went to nothing; I
know that nothing in this world ever truly disappears, that water is
recycled, that Helen of Troy cried tears that are still out there,
somewhere), I know I can't allow myself to go to nothing. I want to cough up
seedlings, I want to grow bluebells in my belly; I have an oaktree in
my head.
I choke on
words – I have to practice not swallowing them.
***
I'm
Scottish. I was born in Edinburgh, I've spent most of the first
twenty five years of my life there. I moved south only last year. I
miss it.
I left
because I had to. Like Willa Muir, like Muriel Spark, like Jackie Kay
– there are a wealth of Scottish writers across three generations
now who had to get the fuck out of the country before they could
write about it or about anything else. Scotland is precious and
beautiful and strange and brilliant but also small, and it lacks the
resources necessary for an ambitious young screenwriter like me to
launch the kind of the career she really wants.
If I'm
honest with myself I want more than I ever publicly state. I was
reluctant to come to terms with that some years ago when it first
dawned on me that I would have to move to London (I thought, I'll
stay in Edinburgh, become a teacher and write novels – that's
enough, isn't it? But I knew it
wasn't); I am reluctant to come to terms with it now that it
dawns on me that I may have to move even further afield.
I say I
want to work in British TV and I do. But the more familiar I become
with that world the smaller the reality seems (soaps. Soaps are were
the steady money is. Christ. Soaps? Soaps. And if you wanna write soaps that's great but... do I? Really?), and I remember that a
woman who graduated only two years ahead of me from my filmschool
just sold a script to an American production company for three
hundred thousand dollars and I think Jesus I should dream a little
bigger.
Why
shouldn't I dream a little bigger? What, like the soaps are going
somewhere? I have precisely nothing to lose, and yet I'm afraid to
even breath the possibility of more than feels safe. I don't feel
entitled to that.
Ambition is
a tricky thing because women are told not to be ambitious. Or, well,
we can be ambitious (lean in, ladies!) but we can't be bitches about
it – which boils down to us being told that we can want whatever we
want but we must never ask for it. Which boils down to sitting on our
hands and hoping our dreams will land in our laps and I can't accept
that.
Willa Muir
didn't die in obscurity for me to accept that.
And I don't
believe that the problem is with the attitude of the oppressed, I
believe, as Hellen Keller once said, that the inferiority of women
is man-made. We live in a
patriarchy: individual women taking the initiative will not change
that. It's often not possible for many individuals, especially those
in poverty, to take any kind of initiative at all (doubly or more so
for those of us whose sexualities or gender identities or
disabilities or skin colours increase our risk factors for poverty,
for suffering violence and and non-violent oppression during our life
times). That's why the patriarchy is considered an oppressive system.
But
I'm increasingly convinced that being ambitious may be the only way
for me, personally, to survive it.
My
vulnerabilities, my social anxieties, the level to which I care –
deeply, unfathomably – about how others perceive me, all habits
picked up via a lifetime of homophobia, of misogyny, of myriad
societal systems chip-chip-chipping at my self-esteem, all play
into blinkering me even from dreaming
bigger than myself, let alone reaching. And that is not okay. I will not take that, the robbery of my dreams, without a fight.
I
don't want to be obnoxious – I'm at a filmschool, I see plenty of
obnoxious people and good god save me from getting lost up
my own arse – but I've
decided, lately, that I won't be weak. (And if that means having to
be obnoxious sometimes? Fine.) I turn twenty five in a couple of
months and I am tired of acting like a little girl, of swallowing my
ambitions, of staying meek and helpless to make others comfortable –
because god forbid I be thought of as anything other than that
horrible word 'nice'. I am a grown up, I have a fucking career to
worry about.
I
am full of potential – there are bluebells in my belly – and I
can't look back in thirty years and know I wasted it, especially not
because I was afraid.
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