Marion Coutts, the author of one of the fiercest, most beautiful, most honest memoirs to be published in 2014, The Iceberg, an account of what it is to be impaled by a catastrophic event, in this case the dying, and death, of the author’s husband, art historian and critic for the (London) Independent, Tom Lubbock, is coming to Ireland this week, specifically to the West Cork Literary Festival. Huzzah!
Since its publication, The Iceberg has been deservedly garnering gongs – the latest being from the Wellcome Book Prize; it has also garnered thousands of readers, flocking to experience Coutts’s unflinching gaze at the terror – and the wonder – of “the period of dying that was also living”.
Coutts begins her narrative from the moment the terrible news of a malignant brain tumour is delivered as she is bringing their son to his first day at the babyminder. The news, “falling between one moment and the next, no time for anything to be saved. There is no time for anything to sink in. The word is deed. The deed is done before the knowledge can release its meaning. It is the quickest poison.”
We think, says Coutts, that we know we are mortal. In truth we have no idea.
Extraordinarily, the Via Dolorosa leading to the first operation, the first round of chemo, the second operation, more chemo, steroids, radiation, more steroids, more drugs, and finally death, is not all sadness and despair. Family life is still to be lived – 18-month-old Ev to be reared or, as Coutts writes, “We are in mortal danger but we fall about laughing at what Ev comes up with”.
Cancer, being the bastard it is, attacked the “brain centre for speech and language” of Lubbock’s brain, ie where his work lay – formidable complexities around art and culture and their elucidation.
Soon after the diagnosis and their catapulting into the land of the sick, Coutts, an established sculptor and art teacher, mothballs her own studio. “We are too volatile. The economy of our household as it stands could not support it.”
“So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.”
Amazingly, with Coutts and their friends’ unflagging help, Lubbock works on, writing his two columns a week for the Independent, and a highly-acclaimed memoir of his own, published by Granta, Until Further Notice, I am Alive, and yes, black humor was one of the weapons they both used to beat off the despair, sanity maintained not by avoidance of the catastrophe but by un-self pitying living of it; by Coutts’s determination to keep their consciousness of themselves as selves, not victims, alive; to keep their tiny family intact as modern medicine rolls out its panoply of procedures. The afflicted brain is carved open, leaving a 12cm scar from jaw to skull held together with 22 thick, large metal staples. There is chemo, followed by more chemo, with steroids thrown in, followed by the news: “it’s growing again”, a second operation, even more expensive chemo, more hell.
As the destruction of her husband continues, the author looks out of her window as spring unfurls: “I am against lyricism, against the spring, against all growth, against all fantasies, against all nature.” It’s one of very few moments of utter bleakness.
“Illness, insatiable in its demands” digs in. The author is “scissored” between the utterly delightful Ev (“the deep thinker in the family”) and looking after her husband, whose words are now disappearing in a daily blizzard. There is the sheer labour of caring to contend with; the trips to hospital, the giving of medicines, the helping her husband find words, the broken nights, broken days. The watching while someone you love and adore is being destroyed.
Thankfully, Coutts, with her Joan of Arc haircut and blazing stare, is no saint. “You should know that I am a slob and I love to loll. I do not wish to have the roles I have – cook, facilitator, interpreter, editor, carer, watcher, driver, calendar keeper, drug administrator, planner, gatekeeper, worrier, conduit, walker, helper, organiser, nag, mother.”
Sometimes it gets too much. Shepherding Ev through busy London streets she snaps as he charges off. “My anger is not commensurate. It is molten and held down in place ever so lightly, like a lid closed with a homemade peg on a billycan set on a campfire. (-) I grab him, roar and shout. I am so furious I can hardly see.”
What almost undoes our Joan of Arc is, ironically, the carers sent out, to do half-hour slots towards the end. Indifferent, poorly-trained and poorly-paid strangers, whose advice sheet urges: “Settle the client in front of the TV”. Coming down one morning to find their front door left open by a departing carer the night before, Coutts feels their precious empire has been brutally breached: “There is nothing between us and nothing”.
Friends bring food – “lasagne, chicken with couscous, lemon cheesecake, a pork and bacon pie, lentil soup, a three-tier blueberry cake, ready-made meals for kids, pasta sauce, half a chicken, beetroot and apple salad, rhubarb fool, sausage rolls, ham, macaroni cheese, clafoutis, fish pie, bread pudding, figs, shepherd’s pie, lamb casserole, a whole chicken, roast chicory, spinach and chickpea tart, bolognaise sauce, rice salad, chestnut and celeriac soup, hummus, spicy chicken wings, croissants, beef stew, bread, vitello tonnato, caramelised onion tart, duck, peaches, a great deal of cheese, a basket of little cakes anointed”.
A catalogue of love and caring. Not that Coutts is hungry. “I was a gargoyle carved in stone. Blasé. Flippant. Desolate.”
The end comes in a hospice on Clapham Common, a place fought for with savagery as “the system” tries to shove Tom into a nursing home, ironically named since there are no medical staff there; in the hospice there are “beautiful” nurses, things from home, a wall of pictures put up by Coutts, an eiderdown on which she has appliqued, “Tom, Marion, Ev”, an oasis “where he can die well with us around him. Suddenly, overnight, we are home.”
As her husband dies, she on the bed beside him, friends and the adorable Ev dismissed, Coutts writes, “We are way outside, out of culture, place, gender. I do not know where we are but I feel very sure of myself here. Time is refreshing itself, that’s all. It is simple. Duration is the rope that drags and keeps us. Time is the fundament we have never left, so powerful is its agency and pull, so direct and strange.”
The following night she has a dream. Multiple texts from her beloved, saying simply, ME!
A beautiful, heart-scalding, heart-warming book, forensic documentation of a trip through hell. With heaven on the other side.
West Cork Literary Festival 2016, here I come!
