One Little Room: Peter McDonald
This week's blog 'Thinking Inside the Box' is by Peter McDonald, author of One Little Room, which is published this month! Use the code NOVBOOKS for 20% off and free UK P&P.
A little over a year ago, I needed to pack up.
I was quitting my job and, since I had been a full-time academic for more than thirty-five years, and suffered (like most of my kind) from a chronic inability to throw things away, I had accumulated a lot of material – papers in files, papers not in files, journals, handouts and academic bric-a-brac, photos, keys and cables of all sorts and conditions and – most of all – books. Since this office was to be my last, there was no option of simply shifting the lot to a new venue: what I might want to keep had to be fitted into what my home could contain, and my home certainly couldn’t contain that much. Not that I had exactly planned this, and the day would have come in any case sooner or later; still, it was time now for me to get rid of all in my professional life that could be junked.
Providentially, works on the staircase meant that there was a reasonably capacious skip parked just outside on the quad. So, away went decades of rubbish: committee papers, notes, letters, decades worth of promotional material for poetry’s (hilariously unending) golden ages, print-ups of this, that and the other, messages of thanks, all the paid invoices, pleas to be noticed from a multitude of poets, poison-pen communications from others, job details, job references, copies of booklists, copies of essays, copies of everything. All gone, easily and (I soon felt) cathartically. It’s great to get rid of so much of a life. And to realise how little all that side of it ever really meant.
But the books. The books were a different kind of problem. Never mind that I hadn’t read all of them – who ever does? They were nevertheless somehow integral to what I had made of myself, or made myself into, over all those years. And I suppose I had meant to read them all, some way or other, some time. Then there were those I really had read, often several times. The books I had loved intensely, the books I still loved, and those with whom I’d had lover’s quarrels. The books, too, I had loved and yet managed to fall out with for good, and couldn’t bring myself to read again. My fault, that; and with books, as with life, we are made out of our faults as well as our successes. Anyhow, a lot of them would have to go.
I had the boxes ready and waiting. Pretty quickly, these filled with the volumes that were essential – were always, I knew, going to remain essential to me. Size, like weight, was an issue: the boxes were one kind of volume, the books another. As for the rest – the College library to have first dibs, then the charity shops. Gargantuan helpings of literary criticism (how little I needed it, how expensive it all was, and how quick to go out of date) simply fell away. A whole landfill of once-contemporary poetry left my care to fend for itself. What was left was what I needed, just for me.
As I toiled away on this one afternoon, a quatrain came to me on the spot (the kind of thing that doesn’t happen to me usually):
Thirty-four cartons that I’ve filled, and half
as many again for the skip, unplaced
for good, with emptiness on every shelf
and nobody inside that room: all waste.
Of making many books, as we know, there is no end; and the lines are now the middle stanza in a poem in my own new book. ‘Departures’ is dedicated to the memory of a dear colleague, whom I was missing. His death had removed one of the few representatives of human decency from the finally intolerable toxicity of my place of work. He was also someone who kept at least ten times the number of books that I contrived to hang on to, in rooms of glorious, unfettered chaos. The short lyric ends with me putting myself in storage, though this container is also, as it turns out, a poem:
A big box plastered with stickers and straps,
its origin and destination not the same,
or probably not: words peel away in strips
on the poem where I’m posting myself home.
It strikes me now that I had been watching a documentary about some nefarious business-cheat who gave the authorities the slip by posting himself overseas in a trunk. A good move. Poets, I suppose, ought in some sense to be a bit unacceptable to whatever environment they inhabit. At least, the determination to fit in to things – to a profession, a culture, an identity, a nationality or a tradition – seems to me to be at odds with what a poet ought to be doing. Life – especially the large part of it that is professional life – closes a box on you. It’s a box you’ve chosen to open, and to climb into, but it closes on you all the same. What we call the imagination, though, keeps thinking live and active inside, and in fact works its way out of there in the end – with the self (or the spirit, or whatever) damaged perhaps, but also newly shaped and empowered.
The particular kind of box a poet puts himself into is, in the first place, a matter of constraint. One of the many things poetic form does is that it confines. If you object to confinement on principle, then OK: but you will need to leave poetic form behind (something not so easily done as many writers of poetry appear to believe).
A poem can look like a small thing, even a tiny one. While I was writing One Little Room (roughly, from 2020 onwards – including a period, of course, when we were all pretty much cooped up) I found myself gravitating towards single rhymed or semi-rhymed quatrains. Making four lines into a poem is fantastically hard, and naturally I have no idea whether (or how often) I have succeeded in that. But the very effort was part of a thematic discovery: poems – like imaginative engagements that get more surprising as they become deeper – can be much bigger on the inside than the outside. Like the Tardis, I know, I know.
At the same time, a poet is also a kind of escapologist: somehow, they get out of the tight spots they have made for themselves. At least, the meaning of their material does that; or, if you like, it’s done by the ‘self’ they are, or have made, or have discovered in there. I’m afraid I might have identified with Harry Houdini in one poem, which is called ‘Escape’, and that’s probably something of a hostage to fortune. But I felt reckless. And the new book is reckless in a number of ways, I think. My life is in plenty of the poems, making a show of itself; in others it’s there too, but deeper in hiding perhaps. Young writers can get away with imagining more about themselves, and they can quite rightly see themselves and their society of choice in their own brilliant futures, just waiting to arrive. Older writers can’t really do that without bluffing or self-delusion, for much of life is something behind them, which they need to sort out, reduce to essentials, and pack safely away. I am, I ought probably to say, sixty-two years old now – an age that may be many things, of course; but one thing it isn’t is young.
None of that sounds exactly reckless, I suppose. And yet I think there’s a certain freedom in this whole packing-up process, which carries its own sense of discovery and elation. I don’t write in order to please anyone (including myself), or to obey the rules of any club. I represent nothing, and I don’t much mind what I’m called. And the little room I find myself in, with its contents of the past and present, and not a great deal of spare space for the future, is indeed, in ways I can’t understand or predict, ‘an everywhere’ (as John Donne has it). At times, even, I can feel the full liberated and liberating force of that wonderful line of Wordsworth’s – ‘Now I am free, enfranchised, and at large’.
Mind you, he was still a young man when he wrote that.
Please join us online at 7pm on Wednesday 4th December to celebrate the launch of One Little Room! The reading will be hosted by Tim Kendall. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along. Book your place here.