How I nearly Died and What I Did While I Was Doing That

Like most people, I expect, I associate the British farce tradition with sudden brutal reminders of mortality and death. Unlike most people I have some biographical cause for this association. The other year, the morning after watching a pretty good performance of Noises Off by Michael Frayn, I fell to my bathroom floor after suffering a sudden massive brain haemorrhage. I did quite a lot of vomiting, as you can imagine. Screaming was also involved and there was a longish period where I thought I might be a Chinese peasant (I am not). For about a fortnight I was in the tenuous middle ground between being alive and life's opposite. When I finally got a correct diagnosis I was told that I had a blood clot the size of a golf ball in my head. 

This sort of news makes you quickly re-evaluate any opinions you might have had about the relative smallness of golf balls.  I had always previously looked on them as being on the fiddly side. From now on I would view them with a proper respect. I was also informed, in a frank way, that my brain was gearing up for having another go at the whole haemorrhage project, with the intention of correcting the first one’s failure to finish me off. Did I mention I couldn’t see? I couldn’t see, or not much. The haemorrhage had squashed a good part of my visual cortex. Again, when faced with this kind of news one quickly re-evaluates things. You remember the game about what sort of hypothetical impairment would hinder you the least? Few people opt for loss of vision but when made aware that a haemorrhage occurring a few inches to the right or left might have wiped out your ability to walk, say, or your memory, then losing, as I did, most of my peripheral vision strikes me as relatively fortunate. In one of his (silly but anecdotally abundant) books Oliver Sacks tells of someone who had a brain haemorrhage which, like mine, affected the visual cortex, only with far greater impact. Not only could they not see at all, the haemorrhage had erased any memory of having had seen. Like I said, relatively fortunate.

The immediate effect of all this, once the (exemplary and wonderful) NHS staff had saved my life and sent me home, was a worrying one. I became a nicer person. I like to think, in retrospect, it was some looming knowledge that my brain had designs on me, but in the months leading up to the incident I was something of a horror. Grumpy, morose, prone to small-scale tantrums and with a premature fear of getting old, I was rarely mistaken for a joy to be around. And that went, at least for a while. Nothing rids you of the fear of getting old like almost dying young. After this, middle age, responsibility, senility itself, seem like eagerly anticipated treats. I became benign, avuncular, appreciative of the smaller pleasures (a decent book, a good cup of tea, the company of loved ones… that sort of thing). I developed a childlike glee at the company of mammals, in zoos and in the home. (My cat, it should be said, while ill-tempered enough, was stalwart throughout this period). I treated my girlfriend, now my wife, with the loving-kindness that was surely her due. Bedridden and blessed with a new found aptitude for life, I chose for myself a task that would suck away at all this fresh wisdom like a zombie with a straw. A task that would render me, by the end of the year, an anxious self-torturing pain in the arse. I chose to write a novel.

Before you dash in panic from the screen, I should stress that this wasn’t a completely absurd choice. I had attempted twice before to get one started, but abandoned them both due to laziness and the vague belief that no one has anything useful to say until out of their twenties (I recognise that this belief puts me at odds with the wider culture which tends to assert the opposite). I had written scraps of stories and I had read a great deal of literature which I was naive enough to think would help. Proust, I reminded myself, had written much of his best stuff while prone. Homer, Joyce, Huxley and Milton would all have needed help crossing the road but were none of them slouches with a quill. (It was around this time I was awarded a white-stick by the council. It was unnaturally short and made me look like a drunken Sooty). Lying on my back, I set to work.

I was determined not to address the issue of my illness in this work. (What’s that, you say? I should? Well one day, perhaps). Instead I had chosen for a theme the romantic lives of the conspiracy theorists. In my day job I’d had various dealings with the differing movements and sects that make up the UK conspiracy movement, such as it is, and found their differences and similarities intriguing. I thought, that, allowing for some exaggeration, their shifting worldviews could tell us something about life and about fiction, and the perils of confusing the two. Characters and plots sprung up and reported for duty. I was enjoying this. Free from the demands of readership, I could pretty much do as I liked. The problems came later.

Flaubertian perfectionism is maybe a little unfashionable nowadays, when the preferred literary model is the confessional blog or opinion column, but I found I just couldn’t give up on an urge to get the words right. Never mind my girlfriend’s argument that this was what editors were for (there are still editors right? Like, four or five, of them, somewhere). I was confident, if that is the right word, that for my book to be even considered by a publisher there could not be a word out of place. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had a brain haemorrhage,-maybe you did and it worked wonders- but one thing it failed to do in my case was give my vocabulary a boost. Instead one thinks through a gauze of befuddlement, a hangover made permanent. On more than one occasion my girlfriend returned home to see me weeping over an adjective. My unedited prose had the power to make me physically sick, like hearing your voice played back and hearing a nasal shriek. And when, I was done torturing myself over word-orderings then the extra-textual anxieties would kick in. Was my novel too anti-realist or was it too wedded to realism? It was set in the North of England and this would surely repel publishers? What publishers, anyway? The book game was surely over, was slowly being replaced by downloadable vampire porn written by and for horny Baptists. I didn’t go to Oxbridge –none of my characters went to Oxbridge- did this make me an autodidact? Was I any good and would it make any difference if I was?

Reader, you will be relieved to hear I passed through this phase. The book sits, strange, on my computer, taunting me with the suspicion that it might be good. It deals with a lot of things –conspiracies and fiction, love and the loss of love. It has sentient cats, Men’s Right activists, astrologers, rationalists and quite a lot about motorway service stations. While I can’t say every word is perfect and in place, I can say with confidence that some of them are lovely enough. I am perversely proud, in a sub-Oulippian way, that the word “conspiracy” does not appear anywhere in the text. I think it’s rather funny, in parts. On the whole I think you’ll like it. If you’re a publisher or an agent you might want to get in touch (there are still four or five of you out there, right?)

Despite vowing not to address my illness in the work, I find upon re-reading that the haemorrhage has snuck its way onto the page. Two major plot points factor on characters being hit painfully on the head. Characters experience the loss of beliefs or relationships as small deaths, blurring their fixed and static selves, opening themselves to the point where they become different, transformed beings. The image of the mind as a struck, reverberating gong appears and reappears. More to the point I realised, during the writing, that trauma, physical or emotional, makes conspiracy theorists of us all. We force our minds down narrow and circling tracks, too scared to leap towards the bumpy grasslands to the side. We repeat, we fixate, we go over until we perfect. Eventually if you are lucky you jump. My novel is about those who find they can’t. It is called The Movement and I hope one day it will be read. My next one will be started in full health, although I cannot promise how I’ll be by the time it’s finished.