I am a hyphen. While I appreciate I’m not in any immediate danger of extinction (interrogbang, anyone?), as punctuation marks go, a hyphen doesn’t immediately seem to be at the interesting end of things. If an ampersand is an on-trend coffee house, then a hyphen is the serve-over counter in a rural railway station where you buy a Purple Snack just for something to do. Social media has given the once-despised hashtag a whole glittery new life in everything from punchlines to headlines, and an asterisk has always been a flash mob-in-waiting, but a hyphen? It’s a shrug. A yeah. A whatever-you’re-having-yourself.
At Recovered Voices, one of the events in The Long Gaze Back’s One City One Book programme, Louise Kennedy discussed author Norah Hoult’s hyphenated identity. Hoult was born in Ireland to an Irish Catholic mother and English Protestant father (they had eloped when Norah’s mother was 21). Both her parents died while she was young, so she grew up in a succession of English boarding schools. One of Ireland’s most censored writers, she wrote more than twenty novels, plus several short story collections. Her many novels vary in setting, but what struck me forcibly about the few I’ve read was that those set in London – such as 1944’s There Were No Windows, as stunning and darkly witty a depiction of memory loss and isolation as you can hope to read – feel so entirely British, while the ‘Irish’ ones feel so… well, Irish. Hoult’s hyphenated identity appears to have contributed to her work becoming disregarded in both countries for decades: she ‘belonged’ to neither place, so no-one claimed her as their own. Yet can’t being both-and-neither be a positive thing for a writer? For Norah Hoult herself, was it a bridge stretching over the Irish sea she could slip across as it suited her, or a fraying high wire?
My family moved from Belfast to Cork in 1976, only to return to Belfast in 1990. I brought the north south, and at school called runners ‘plimsolls’ and used an ‘eraser’ rather than a rubber. The ‘Protestant test’ a Cork friend referred to it, confused that someone from a Catholic family could pass her exam.
Listening to Louise Kennedy, I began to consider the power of the hyphen, and realise the extent to which the characters I write are struggling with a duality of identity or circumstance. In my new book Violet Hill, the eponymous protagonist is the only female private detective in London, and also a ‘surplus woman’, that sharply unforgiving term given to the perceived excess of unmarried women at the end of the first World War.
Violet is independent – she has her own business, she has no interest in getting married – yet completely dependent on men at the same time, because her male clients hold economic power over her. Violet’s lack of interest in marriage and motherhood are her link to the solo future she desires, whereas for her secretary Chrissie, a husband is only hyphen powerful enough to connect her past and future. In 1922, a Daily Mail female commentator wrote, ‘A woman who is loved has no need for ambition. She leaves that to her sisters whom fate has cheated of their due’, and Chrissie has enthusiastically signed up to the narrative that marriage is the only route to happiness. In Singled Out, her excellent chronicle of the women left alone and vilified after the first World War, Virginia Nicholson described Charlotte Bronte’s famous ‘Reader I married him’ finale to Jane Eyre as, “the biggest sigh of relief in English literature.”
Violet Hill has two parts, running in parallel. Violet’s postwar story alternates with that of Susanna Tenant, a sergeant in the Met Police’s Super Recogniser Unit. She is fictional, but the unit is real, established in 2015. The average person can recognise maybe 20 per cent of the faces they see, whereas Super Recognisers can remember up to 95 per cent. Just as 1-2 per cent of the population are prosopagnosics – ie people with face blindness – it’s assumed that at the other end of the scale another small percentage are Super Recognisers. If you think you might be one, look online for the Cambridge Face Memory Test or University of Greenwich Super Recogniser test.
Susanna too has a foot in each of two worlds. Because her natural ability can never be switched off or dimmed, everyone she sees means something to her. She is permanently connected to the lives of strangers. The curious contradiction at the heart of the job of Super Recogniser is that being unable to stop recognising wanted criminals is the downside of being paid to find them. The hyphen connecting Violet and Susanna is a third character, a woman who used to make her living as the double of a famous movie actress. Without realising it, this character is the key to the plurality of identity they both struggle with.
Perhaps hyphenation can have a physical impact too. In an article in the Guardian last year, Caitlin Moran wrote, “the main problem with texts on writing is that they never talk about your arse. And that’s the biggest problem for writers – the constant, grumbling pain in your arse… Our posture is broken. By their mid-40s, most writers are in the shape of an ampersand.”
For centuries, the responsibility for punctuating a text was given to the reader, not the writer (though you’d see plenty of hoardings around town to suggest that including or excluding errant apostrophes is a game being played by signage writers with the public). Pity the ancient Greeks and Romans, trying to locate meaning in texts without punctuation marks, or even spaces between words. The job of punctuation is to remove ambiguity, but perhaps the hyphen is sneakily creating it instead?
A tiny sliver of anarchy lurking on every keyboard.
Violet Hill is published by Hachette. Henrietta McKervey will be speaking about her third book at the Belfast Book Festival, Sunday, June 10th, and it is launched in the Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, Dublin, on June 13th, at 6.30pm, by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.
