Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Julia Blackburn’s The Three of Us perfectly epitomise the subgenre of narrative non-fiction that emerged in the 1990s and continues to flourish throughout the twenty-first century to date. Often characterised as ‘life-writing’, this category of confessional prose includes texts as diverse as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991), Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992), Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood (2001) and Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart (2004). While the writers come from a variety of backgrounds and generations, the narratives tend to share a focus on family history and parental relationships, and while they frequently testify to the strength and love of those relationships, they also tend towards demonstrating the unpalatable truth of Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’.
And When Did You Last See Your Father? is an uncomfortably raw portrait of a family on the point of a devastating change, as Morrison intersects snapshots from his childhood and adolescence with a graphic description of his father’s drawn-out death. Both Morrison’s parents were doctors, and while his decision to pursue a literary vocation is a source of some tension within the narrative, he evidently inherited their ability to gaze unflinchingly upon the human body. With brutal honesty, he records his father’s swollen stomach and shrunken penis, the ‘railway track’ scar and the bouts of faecal vomiting. These descriptions underline the physical cruelty of aging, especially when contrasted with the vivid picture that emerges through the childhood recollections of a vigorously eccentric and brazenly domineering man, dedicated to ‘money-saving, time-saving, privilege-attaining fragments of opportunism. The queue-jump, the backhander, the deal under the table’. Perhaps inevitably, an equally vivid picture emerges of the embarrassment this behaviour often caused his family, especially his son. The narrative charts Morrison’s efforts to reconcile his feelings, and to precisely locate ‘the last moment when [his father] was still unmistakeably there’ before illness and infirmity took hold. This process is further complicated by the continuing mystery surrounding the exact nature of his father’s relationship with a family friend ‘Aunty Beatty’, and the real paternity of her daughter. Morrison’s grief and confusion are palpable, but so too is the inherent humour of family life with a man who would set off on a camping trip without packing the tent-poles.
While And When Did You Last See Your Father? is a story about a family with secrets, The Three of Us is a story about a family with none, a family where every emotion and experience was on display. Daughter of the poet Thomas Blackburn and the artist Rosalie de Meric, Julia Blackburn grew up in a pressure-cooker atmosphere of sexual tension, alcoholism, infidelity and violence. Her childhood is punctuated by her father’s rages, during which her mother would utilise her as a shield: ‘she knew my father wouldn’t hurt her with me standing between them’. Despite these performances, Blackburn rarely recalls being scared of her father. His physical violence is far less threatening to her than her mother’s psychological manipulation. Blackburn reveals that after the breakdown of her parents’ marriage, her mother had relationships with a series of male lodgers. The title The Three of Us takes on a more complicated meaning, as Blackburn’s mother increasingly perceived her adolescent daughter as a rival for male attention. Years of simmering competitiveness and resentment between mother and daughter ensued, finally erupting when the eighteen-year-old Blackburn began a relationship with one of her mother’s ex-lovers. When the man in question committed suicide two years later, the relationship between mother and daughter appeared to be irreversibly destroyed: ‘She put her face close to mine and she began screaming accusations at me, about how I had destroyed her life forever’. Yet despite their history, when Rosalie was diagnosed with cancer in 1999, she spent the last month of her life living with her daughter, and Blackburn deftly threads the story of their final reconciliation at intervals through the narrative. The relationships described may be deeply dysfunctional, but they are nevertheless treated with benevolence and compassion.
Crucial to the success of both narratives is the fact that Morrison and Blackburn are first and foremost writers: the narratives are characterised by their distinctive voices and their instinctive control of language, imagery and composition. They create nuanced portraits of their characters, and handle complex time structures with ease. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. In the hands of a lesser talent, Morrison’s subject matter could be rendered banal, and Blackburn’s could descend into the worst kind of family melodrama. Indeed, when Morrison reviewed The Three of Us for The Guardian, he was quick to note that the narrative has ‘all the right ingredients’ for a misery-memoir, but that it is lifted by Blackburn’s style and skill: ‘despite the darkness of the rooms she re-enters, her book isn't gloomy in the least’. And yet, paradoxically enough, I found that the least successful elements of both narratives were to be found when the act of writing became overt. Morrison’s 2007 ‘Afterword’ includes fragments of poetry which, as he admits himself, simply serve to underline the far greater effectiveness of his narrative form: ‘Prose seemed to suit my father: his life was too cluttered, and he too larger-than-life, to be contained within verse-forms’. In the penultimate chapter of The Three of Us, Blackburn too experiments with a more self-consciously ‘literary’ style, and writes from the imagined perspective of Rosalie: ‘It was odd to be dying, but Rosalie knew it would be like entering the sea. She quite looked forward to it’. The chapter is aesthetically pleasing, but nevertheless, it sits strangely within the narrative as a whole.
Equally complex, and equally crucial when evaluating the narratives’ appeal, is the issue of privacy. There is something undeniably voyeuristic about the process of reading this type of text, resulting in a half-uncomfortable, half-thrilling sense of trespass. Both Morrison and Blackburn are honest enough to confront the ethical dilemma of writing about their families. Morrison dispassionately outlines the pros and cons of his decision to publish: ‘The risk was how the real-life characters in it would react to being (the word favoured by accusers) ‘exposed’. My father wasn't around to care. But others were’. Blackburn resists the temptation to glamorise or exonerate her younger self, and recalls her youthful transgressions, such as bedding three different men in the same day, with the same matter-of-fact tone she uses when describing her mother. Perhaps then, this is the final test of ‘life-writing’: to turn the same merciless gaze away from the subject and back towards the self. If so, it is a test both Morrison and Blackburn excel in, and it cannot be underestimated as a factor in their narrative success.
Julia Blackburn and Blake Morrison will give a literary reading at Culture Lab, Newcastle University at 7pm on 21st January 2010. Tickets are priced at £6 / £4 and are available by e-mailing Melanie.Birch@ncl.ac.uk or from the online shop.