Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen

  GIRL, INTERRUPTED - SUSANNA KAYSEN

It's not until the end of Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen that we learn the title is taken from the painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer called Girl Interrupted At Her Music. Kaysen first saw the painting just prior to her being put into a psychiatric hospital and it was the eyes of the girl in the painting that she was drawn to.

'I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something - she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn breath in order to say to me, "Don't!" I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. "Wait," she was saying "Wait! Don't go!"'

It was the eyes of the girl in the painting that were talking to her. Warning her. The girl's eyes were a forewarning, just as they were in the closing scene of the Roman Polanski film 'Repulsion' when the camera slowly zooms in on a photograph and the eyes of Catherine Deneuve as a child.

There are a slew of difference between Repulsion and Girl, Interrupted, of course, the main one being that whilst Repulsion is fiction and fantasy, Girl, Interrupted is non-fiction and actually based on real life events. The obvious comparison to make is with Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' and in fact both stories take place in the same hospital although by the time Kaysen gets there, Plath has been and gone.

The other obvious comparison to make is with Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' that apart from also being set in a psychiatric hospital, both portray a number of different characters at their respective hospitals - or rather, should that be 'patients'?

In regard to Girl, Interrupted, the subject of being a 'patient' at the psychiatric hospital is one of its main planks. Was Susanna Kaysen a 'patient' as such or a prisoner? It's a question that is wrestled with though come the end there's no clear answer. Apparently, Kaysen was advised to submit herself into the hospital by her doctor after just a twenty-minute consultation. You could do with a rest, he told her, just for a couple of weeks. So she waited in her doctor's office for a taxi that promptly came and took her away. Kaysen, essentially, went of her own volition. She was eighteen years-old and she stayed - or was held - at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts for almost two years.

The overarching question, however, is who is and what exactly is 'crazy'? For sure, some of the girls who Kaysen writes about have problems and Kaysen herself is open about her own issues too but when they're all sat together watching television and they see on the screen the horror of the Vietnam War, students beaten to a pulp by police on University campus sites, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale bound and gagged in a courtroom, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, and poor people, black people and young people everywhere being killed... it puts 'crazy' into perspective.

Was sanity simply a question of following the rules and being like everybody else? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? Was having trouble with the rules a mark of madness? Having thoughts is fine but is thinking about thoughts like throwing a stone into a pool and watching how far the ripples go? Do the ripples ever even stop? And where does the stone go? If the pool isn't clear, then how do we know when or even if it will reach the bottom?

Whilst not quite as brilliant as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is really good, particularly when it comes to the dialogue. And in particular, the dialogue of one of the girls in the hospital called Daisy, who ends up as a suicide. Susanna Kaysen, of course, eventually left the hospital and became a writer - and a very good one at that as evidenced here.

John Serpico

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile - Adelle Stripe

BLACK TEETH AND A BRILLIANT SMILE -

ADELLE STRIPE

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, we're told, but I say be even more wary of middle class people talking and writing about the working class because invariably they're going to misrepresent everything and all for their own ends. A middle class interpretation of working class life is never going to be genuine, and vice versa. It will only ever be an approximation at best. Jarvis Cocker in his lyrics to Common People came close to explaining this when he told the girl from Greece who had a thirst for knowledge how she will never understand. And that's the nub of it. To understand common people you have to be of and in among them. The voice of the working class can only be and come from the working class itself.

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile, by Adelle Stripe, is the story of playwright Andrea Dunbar, most widely known as the writer behind the film Rita, Sue And Bob Too. It's a novelized biography, written through a combination of fact and fiction or as it's put in the introduction: 'This is an alternative version of historic events. It has been manipulated, re-structured and embellished. It is not the truth and exists purely within the realm of speculation.'

In itself, this is an important declaration to have at the start of the book that makes absolute sense come the end of the book. The insertion of it reflects well upon Adelle Stripe and shows she has an understanding of her subject matter.  Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is excellent. It's quite brilliant, in fact, in that it allows the true voice of Andrea Dunbar to come through between the lines without any judgement or manipulation of it.

To understand who Andrea was (she died in 1990 at the age of 29 from a brain haemorrhage) you need to have watched Rita, Sue And Bob Too, and to have an even better understanding you need to know that Andrea wasn't actually happy with the film. You need to know she wasn't happy with the London-centric metropolitan life it brought her into contact with. You need to know that she hated all the well-healed, middle class people her writing attracted; who pushed their business cards into her palm, who bought her drinks and told her how delightful she was. You need to know she thought all these people were cunts. You need to know what she meant by her use of the word 'cunt'. You need to know where she was coming from.

'Careers advice said I could be a shop assistant, mill worker, nanny or hairdresser. All of those sounded shit. I asked them can I be a writer and they laughed at me. What someone from here, a writer? You're living in cloud-cuckoo-land they said. Only the brightest get to do jobs like that. And there's no jobs for writers in Bradford. Don't get your hopes up lass. But I like writing I said. It's the only thing I'm good at. If you study hard you might become a primary school teacher or work in the bank. But that means no messing about they said. You have to be realistic. 

At least I knew where I stood.'

Career opportunities the ones that never knock, as The Clash once sang, every job they offer is to keep you out the dock. So Andrea went to work at the local cotton mill before moving in and having a baby with a local Pakistani taxi driver whose abuse of her extended to him tying her to a kitchen chair to stop her going out. On escaping and ending up in a women's refuge house, it was there that Andrea met a social worker who happened to also work as part of a local theatre group.

'I write plays.' Andrea told her.

'Really?' the social worker replied. 'You might be the first person I've met in a refuge who has ever said that.'

The play that Andrea showed the social worker was called The Arbor and it ended up being staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London. 'She's like Alfred Wallis,' director Max Stafford-Clark declared. 'Primitive energy. This play is the dramatic equivalent of Wallis' paintings nailed to the wall of a fisherman's cottage. Her words are the leftover yacht paint. A world that many try to imitate, but few can convincingly portray...'

And so they were. Andrea's words captured the essence of working class life on an impoverished estate outside Bradford during the 1970s and 80s. A life battered by Thatcherite economics. A life out of view and out of mind. A life that amazed many in the middle class for not only existing but for burning so bright.

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is anger-inducing, it's laughter-inducing, and it's tear-inducing. It's not a depiction of 'Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down' as the strapline for Rita, Sue And Bob Too put it, but rather it's more like lifting the skirts of Thatcher's Britain and finding she's not actually wearing any knickers in the first place. 

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is brilliant.

John Serpico