Books & Poetry

Was it ‘Emptiness’? ‘Stillness’? ‘Trying To Be Empty’? I’d spent a week living with Jenny Diski’s latest autobiography, but halfway through the interview I couldn’t for the life of me recall its exact title. Perhaps more tellingly, nor could Diski. She cupped her hands under her chin. ‘Hmm. When it was contracted, it was called “On The Sofa”. It was going to be a book about me sitting on a sofa doing nothing.’ But then fate stepped in and Diski held the door wide open: an invite to a New Zealand book fest, a solitary retreat to Somerset, and an out-of-the-blue commission to Lapland weld together into the travel memoir ‘On Trying To Keep Still’.

It’s an ironic title for a third travel book. With her slight physique and page-boy crop, Diski doesn’t look like the most obvious candidate for travel biography. She admits to frequently mixing up left and right, and would evacuate the premises at the mere mention of compass points. ‘My travel books are all about me not very much liking being in the world. Feature continues

I hate travelling. It just happens.’ Her first two novels, ‘Nothing Natural’ and ‘Rainforest’ – the former an acerbic tale of sexual violence in Hampstead, the latter a smouldering story of obsession in the jungle – started her reputation as a literary minx. Twenty years, 15 books and three awards later, her characteristic vulnerability and honest bluntness remain, while her treatment of her subject matter has shifted somewhat.

In the Somerset-based chapter, ‘On Being Shallow’, Diski writes: ‘I am completely cosy and content, but there’s still a lurking fearfulness of not getting up, as if it might be the first stage of a decline into the chasm.’ Darkness threatening to engulf stillness, and the tension between solitude and company are recurring themes. Diski’s darker side has been well documented, both in her own work and in reviews. While her stays at a psychiatric unit in her twenties are retraced here, it is the first time she has mentioned her rape aged 14 in her non-fiction. Is there anything she would shy away from writing about herself? ‘No, because people don’t know me – they just know my books. The thoughts that people are having are about what I’ve written. If you’re an artist, mapping out emotions is simply what you have to do. You don’t do it in an arbitrary way – I don’t write about being raped all the time – but it wasrelevant there.’

The book’s fragmented structure mirrors Diski’s emotional geography: ‘I have no real sense of myself being anything other than a series of fragments of self. Which is fine for writing, because that’s what allows fiction. Both fiction and non-fiction are a series of fragments.’ She folds her tapered fingers carefully in front of her. ‘Whereas the notion of a complete personality from which one writes – that’s not my experience of myself and it’s not really the way the world is. It’s the way the mind wants the world to be. It’s the desire we have for narrative to make complete pictures, stories and personalities; but I don’t think that’s real.’

The more Diski tried to keep still, the less it became possible, and the further writing was pushed from the agenda. ‘Doing nothing turned into this whole fretful thing. You always have this sense that you’ll sit there sublimely centered when you’re alone. What is most interesting is the inability of our brains to conceive of not being. I think I’ve got some kind of deep attraction to emptiness and oblivion.’ Diski fixes me with a long gaze. ‘I have an enormous respect for silence. To produce something is almost a negation of that; not doing what I most want to do, which is to remain silent. There’s almost always something driven about writing, but ideally, one wouldn’t be driven. It would be possible to be completely still and silent, which is ludicrous – because one can’t. One can’t not breathe. You can’t not think! So in the end, we’ll just have to do what our minds want us to do, which is carry on with the idea of being.’

To a non-fiction-writing fiction writer, separating reality from imagination not only blurs but eventually becomes unnecessary. ‘One of the key things in this book was when I had planned to see the glow worms in New Zealand, but couldn’t because I was ill. The description of the imagined trip turned out better than if I’d actually gone to see them. The question then is, what’s the whole point of going?’ I wouldn’t trust that Diski is stopping at imagination’s doorstep, however – she has teamed up with Earthwatch to study African elephants for a future work on anthropomorphism. ‘I’ll always be an evil spy, an anthropologist from Mars,’ she chuckles.

‘On Trying To Keep Still’ is published by Little, Brown at £15.99.