‘The Happening Trick’

Sinéad Morrissey: Room. Room, most obviously, to write to the end of the line and to the bottom of the page. I’ve wanted to write this book for thirty years and all my various poems on Communism, from ‘Among Communists’ in 1996 through to ‘Colour Photographs of Tsarist Russia’ in 2017, have felt like forays into territory too big to be covered by the single poem, or even by a book-length poem or overtly themed collection. It was difficult at first to work with the sentence rather than the line as the fundamental unit of sense, and it was hard to pull so many words out of my head. You need a sustained fluency for prose that you can’t get without a voice to power you along. Once I got the voice for this book, it became easier.

SM: I started off trying to organise the book thematically, and whilst it’s still thematic, with chapters structured around key ideas – culture, fear, school, collapse – these themes are now also pinned to a more straightforward chronological timeline. The German language and Germany play an important role, and so I borrowed the form of the Bildungsroman and simply told the story of my own growing up from birth to the age of twenty-one. If outmoded, this at least has the virtue of being very clear: I finish abruptly in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1994, weeks before my twenty-second birthday.

The first half, ‘Together’, which covers my childhood to about sixteen, depicts the lost world of Belfast Communism (to adapt a phrase of Raphael Samuel’s) as well as the lost world of my intact nuclear family. The second half, ‘Apart’, which is shorter and faster, recounts the simultaneous unravelling of both.

SM: I wrote Among Communists twice. The first draft was written much more overtly out of research and included hundreds of footnotes. It was more essayistic in style. The sentences were interminable, the paragraphs blocky and dense, and it definitely told more than it showed. I think I was using my musings on Chernobyl or the Polish Solidarity Movement to avoid talking about myself. Two of my friends, who are both prose writers, read this early draft and gave me the same advice – to just tell my own story. So I wrote the whole thing again and everything changed. The sentences became shorter, the footnotes disappeared and direct speech took over – it became chattier and more immediate. I muted a great deal of the adult commentary and tried harder to inhabit my younger self, who didn’t know what was going to happen next, so that irony, rather than analysis, became the engine of the book. But I couldn’t have written this version without the other version lurking underneath.

SM: Because my younger self is now lost to me, trying to re-occupy that different consciousness was like making up a character in a novel. I can remember thinking and believing certain things, but they’re not the things I believe or the way I think now, and so imagination plays a role in animating memory. With poems I’m trying to create linguistic events, in and of themselves – re-enacting something rather than relaying it – and I suppose occupying that younger consciousness in prose was analogous to writing something from the inside out rather than describing it. Of course, the scenes themselves link to lyric poetry, in that they are suspended moments, islanded from time and context, often with a light source (there are a lot of windows and overhead lights). Because many of the scenes are quite short, and some no more than a paragraph, there’s a connection too in the amount of material pressed into the white space between sections, like the seismic jumps that can happen between stanzas in a poem.

SM: I started keeping a diary when I was eleven. I won a prize in the Irish Schools Creative Writing Competition and attended a workshop in Dublin where John F Deane told everyone in the room to write something every day. I threw away those teenage diaries when I was a university student in Dublin – my boyfriend at the time disapproved – but started keeping one again after we split up and have kept one sporadically ever since.

SM: Good question! The first draft was more focused on politics. But I got bogged down in the endless circular arguments about Western Communism – how to support something that in practice, on the ground inside the Soviet Bloc, had perpetrated atrocity, but appeared, in the West at least, to be doing better work, determined by local context. There’s no way out of that paradox. You either fall to one side or the other. Martin Amis, for example, fell to outraged denunciation. Others end up apologists. I couldn’t disentangle my own nostalgia for the distinctive culture of Belfast Communism from the knowledge, acquired as an adult, of what had actually happened in the USSR. Just telling the story of my own growing up, from my perspective at the time, meant I didn’t have to. It also allowed other things to come in. Houses. Poetry. School. Relationships. Travel. And balancing them became almost automatic, because these were the dominant forces that shaped me into who I am.

SM: I started writing as a very young teenager, not about politics, but about my own subjective anguish (and if I wasn’t feeling particularly anguished, which most of the time I wasn’t, I made the anguish up). Plath proved a terrible model. If politics belonged to my parents, poetry was all mine. But there were multiple things about my Communist upbringing that enabled and endorsed my literary interests. The enormous emphasis on reading and self-education. The valorisation of culture (especially poetry, that most Russian of artforms!). And the belief in an otherwhere, of being connected to something bigger, and potentially more brilliant, which is at the heart of how metaphor works.

SM: My parents grew disillusioned but at different times and for different reasons. My mother’s split from the Party was more dramatic than my father’s and happened when I was a teenager. She became religious instead, adopting a much more conservative worldview, which I found bewildering – particularly in the light of her fierce commitment to the Party when I’d been younger, and especially so after her trip to the GDR [German Democratic Republic] in 1981. My father’s disillusionment with the Communist system happened later, fuelled by his visit to the USSR in 1989, when it was already on the brink of collapse. For my father that collapse remains a source of grief, though he is also haunted by the complicity of Western Communism in Soviet atrocity. So it’s complicated.

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, I remember not knowing how to react. The joy of the moment was contagious, and I certainly felt joy. But at the same time, something that I’d been told was true was clearly being exposed as a lie, so there was grief in that moment too. I felt paralysed by these contradictory emotions. Having read multiple histories of the Soviet Union since – most shatteringly, A People’s Tragedy (1996) by Orlando Figes – I think it inevitable, and correct, that my parents turned away from their earlier convictions. And yet. And yet.

One of the things my book tries to chart is the complicated emotional legacy of what Vivian Gornick terms the ‘romance’ of Communism in the West.

SM: One of the book’s central subjects is my non-engagement with the Troubles. Not engaging with the Troubles wasn’t unusual. People zoned out, or stopped noticing things, because that was the only way to survive. But my zoning out was mostly ideological – determined by living in a little bubble of the East-inside-the-West, like the spot of white in the black half of the Yin–Yang diagram. As with all of the ‘Big Safe Themes’ (to borrow a phrase from Paul Farley), the only effective way to access or manage it is to approach it via the smaller things, through the contours of the specific instance. The book is essentially a series of scenes with a set of totemic images woven through – descriptions of actual photographs or paintings – as anchors. In this sense, Among Communists is also an ekphrastic exercise, but in prose.

SM: Though my parents came together via the Party and were held together through their political activism, their relationships to Communism were different. My father had been raised in the faith by his father, who had converted to Communism in prison during the Second World War (he was interned for being in the IRA). Communism for my father was therefore both a matter of filial loyalty and part of his identity. For my mother, Communism was a choice. There was nothing in her own working-class English upbringing that predetermined it. In fact, she joined the Party partly to separate herself from the political culture of her own parents as a form of rebellion and escape. And because it had been a choice for my mother, she was able to abandon it in favour of other choices easily, and without grief, whereas my father would still say he was a Communist today, because he cannot imagine being anything else. For him, it simply goes too deep.

SM: When I was quite a young child, I used to play a game to frighten myself I called the Happening Trick. To play, I simply repeated the phrase this is happening over and over until consciousness dawned that I was really alive and therefore would also die. I don’t know if there’s a Buddhist mediation practice that’s similar to this, but I suspect there might be. It always terrified me, but in a limited way, because it would only last a few seconds at most and then it would snap off.

When I was eight, I got lost in some woods with my brother on a Communist-Party holiday, and the fear this engendered was like the Happening Trick fear, but much worse, because it lasted far longer. Then I accidentally read When the Wind Blows (1982) by Raymond Briggs – a graphic novel satirising the UK Government’s Protect and Survive public information campaign about how to survive nuclear war. Because of its picture-book format, I thought When the Wind Blows was a children’s book. I wasn’t expecting both protagonists to die horribly, but when they did, I realised I would also die, in shocking pain, and that nothing could save me. I had never known fear like the one this book engendered. I had nightmares for weeks afterwards, and I never played the Happening Trick again.

SM: I wrote a poetry collection this spring, very fast, and it was joy to write poetry again after a long hiatus. As though it had been waiting for me, all this time.

SM: In August 1989, just weeks before the fall of the Wall, a West German man told me how rubbish supermarkets in the GDR were at supplying even basic foodstuffs, and I didn’t believe him. He gave East Germany ten more years, and I didn’t believe him. I was still labouring under a belief system that clouded my vision, corrupting my understanding of reality. There’s something dangerous to democracy right there, of course, in the erosion of objective truths to which people with different beliefs can still attest.

My forthcoming collection, In All Our Clothes, carries on from where Among Communists leaves off in that it also explores familial-collapse-at-breakneck-speed (my own this time) as well as the blinding power of beliefs. It ends with an ekphrastic sequence inspired by the exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting at the National Gallery last year – a showcase of that great flowering of early Renaissance art just decades before the Black Death arrived and decimated the City State. I link these paintings to Craigavon, a New Town in Co. Armagh where I lived as a very small child, in such a way that the act of vanishing itself becomes the engine of the work.