Paper Cuts Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  A Note from the Author

  Paper Cuts

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘I have a small line of red dots on the back of my left hand, where the needle goes in. I have had hundreds of ketamine injections, more than anyone else, perhaps. The needle goes in, and the truth comes out. Sometimes I am a child again. Sometimes I have the innocence of a child, but I am not innocent. I know too much. I have known too much.’

  With Paper Cuts, Stephen Bernard boldly tests the bounds of what a memoir can achieve. Living through the trauma of childhood abuse and mental illness, he writes to escape and confront, to accuse and explain.

  Each morning when he wakes, Stephen Bernard must literally reconstruct his self: every night he writes himself a letter to be read the next day. The fractured, intensely personal narrative of Paper Cuts follows a single day in his life as he navigates a course through the effects of mania, medication and memories. The result is painful, unique and inspiring.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen Bernard is an English academic at the University of Oxford and formerly a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow and Junior Research Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the editor of The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons and The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Paper Cuts is his first and only experiment in autobiography.

  To Felix and Hugo

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  The names of the people in this book have been changed apart from those of myself, my family, my therapist Dr Richard Gipps, significant literary figures, and, most importantly, that of my abuser: Canon T.D. Fogarty. This is not done to confuse the reader, but to protect the identities of private individuals who have nonetheless done remarkable personal and public service, often at great cost to themselves. They should be lauded, but never sought such approbation, and it is not my intention or place now to put them in the spotlight.

  It will become clear that I have been very lucky in my family, my few friends, and doctors. Not all are so fortunate. I commend those who struggle without such support.

  I am not a writer, but an academic, with my own idiolect, for example giving patronymics when talking about people, including my family and friends. I have not sought to disguise these verbal tics and hope you will excuse me for them.

  This book was largely written over a period of six weeks during a course of trauma therapy with Dr Richard Gipps. The statement printed in this book is a redacted version of the actual statement I made to Sussex Police.

  My benchmark in writing this book was to be as honest as I could; I wrote it for myself, but share it with you now. Without honesty, we are nothing in the world, or not much. I hope that comes across. To be accountable for oneself and one’s conduct are, to me, the most important tests one can set oneself in life.

  Stephen Bernard

  STEPHEN BERNARD AT THE AGE OF TWELVE

  From: Stephen Bernard

  To: Dr Richard Gipps

  Date: 31 December 2015 at 00:45

  Subject: narrative about my childhood

  Dear Dr Gipps,

  I hope you are very well.

  I had a lovely Christmas.

  I have been thinking hard about what we need to do and have started a narrative which it may be helpful for you to see. I do not want or expect you to become my writing master and so have only included the first page. I think that you can see there is a certain calmness and detachment to it, and that it also hints at what is to come and some of the ambivalences that may come with it.

  See you next week.

  Stephen

  There will be some merit in getting my thoughts down on paper, after all this, that. It has taken some time to get this far, and some trouble too. Has it been worth taking the trouble, I wonder? Will it be worth the trouble to do this? I am just one; there have been many. The stories of each of them, of us, must be worth the telling (I think).

  I will start with my own story, of a day in January 2016, and of the trouble I went to to write an essay about a man who lived some time ago, who left his mark on the world by shepherding the present into the future. There were others, of course, but I choose him, choose one, to illustrate my point. He is the most important to me, then, now.

  Today I construct the self. Each day I construct the self. From the waste hours of sleep I wake and, stiff of limb and muddled in mind, I wonder who I am and where I am. In the darkness I reach for the iPad, my iPad (I don’t think). What is the time? I know that there is such a thing as time, although I am at that moment out of it. Five o’clock, just gone.

  I urinate in the bathroom. I remember somehow – on the sudden – upstairs somewhere and another time. And the shame. Well. I brush my teeth. It has gone five (I think).

  I go to the desk in my study and open the blinds. It is still dark out. I look at the computer. I switch it on. Click. I look at The Times online. Click. Bowie’s dead. No! Surely this means something. Surely I know what I’m doing, more than I’m letting on.

  What a lucky planet we were to have had David Bowie. So lucky. Imagine how vast all of space and time is – how endless and empty, how black and cold. Imagine a tracking shot across the universe, nothing happening nearly everywhere, nearly all the time.

  And then, as it scrolls past our galaxy, you can hear, quiet at first, but getting louder as we close in, Rebel Rebel, coming from our planet, from our country, in our time, playing on tinny transistor radios, in a million bedrooms, as a whole generation, and the next, and the next, straighten their spines, and feel their pulses rise, and say: ‘This. This is how I feel. Or at least, this is how I feel now. Now I’ve heard this.’

  I switch the kettle on in the kitchen and brew some coffee. This will wake me up, make me present and correct in the world. I switch the radio on. There’s been an accident, somewhere I’ve never heard of. Uninterested, I take my coffee to the desk.

  On my desk there’s a silver frame with the picture of a young woman in it. She is in a wedding dress, her wedding dress (I think). She looks happy. Coffee. Sip. Who is that man? Who is that man next to her? Him. In the dove-grey, white-shirted suit. He must be her husband, or her husband-to-be. On the threshold: my father. I do not remember the face, but I must have had a father (I think). Father.

  I switch on the television on the wall in my study. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ plays. Now there is both the sound of the radio from the kitchen and that of the TV curdling-electric in my flat. Outside no bird sings. I am in Jericho and far from the Meadows. Inside it’s warm, but outside there’s a chill as cold as no wonder.

  I wash and go to my room – light; light but none outside – and get dressed. Clean clothes – look sharp! – look smart to face the day.

  Medication. And a cigarette outside the pub over the road. There is a chill, after all. Hello, the house!

  *

  I feel in my pocket as I smoke. Here is a letter to someone.

  Today you construct the self. Each day you construct the self …

  It is a letter from me, to me.

  You become the self as the day develops.

  You are stiff because of the medication. You went to bed at eight, but were not asleep at midnight.

  Have you taken your medication?

  A letter from the night-time to face the day. I stub out my cigarette and re-enter my flat opposite. Someone’s got the radio and the TV on. Have you taken your medication?

  One tablet. Two tablets. Four tablets. Nine tablets. Today will be the day. Today will be the da
y when it all gets right. You can put it right. Swallow. The self. In a bottle.

  *

  You swallow the ketamine, which you have been prescribed for your condition, with the orange squash. Time passes.

  *

  Welcome. To. The. Multiverse! An infinity of meaning in an ununaspirated letter. Suddenly, on a sudden, and in a moment – now! A year passes – or was that just a minute? The child of the past breaks out from the infinity of meaning and now – before you know it – all time is there, is here, is now. This sentence is about nothing but itself. But already it is about other sentences, framing its meaning, and the multiverse reigns, as a bull in a china shop. Infinitudes like a, like a fugue in the mind.

  *

  I read the Whitehall Evening Post for 14 January 1705. Every day now for five years I have read the day’s newspapers of the day since 1 January 1701. It is my secret, which I tell you now. I read the news of the day, and then read some of the books published that day. I know what happens next, but I kid myself I do not. I totally immerse myself in the eighteenth century. Before I die, I know, Alexander Pope’s Dunciads will be published and I will probably die with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in my hand. The rise of the novel, as scholars used to call it. Except, so far, there’s not much of a novel to speak of. Nor is there any Spectator coming daily from the press and being republished in volume form yearly for the rest of the eighteenth century. Today Thomas Betterton the actor is ill. Next week, I know he will deliver one of the greatest performances of his career – of the eighteenth century – but for the moment he has a cholic and is not expected to last.

  I go to conferences, academic conferences, and people say things like ‘Godolphin was at a nervous point in his career …’ Too right! I think – he had a lot to be nervous about. Right now it’s all about the duke of Marlborough. And the funny thing is that there are almost no women. Where are all the women (I think)? In the archive. Hardly in the press, or coming from the press. Sometimes someone will appear in history, in time, who stands beyond the archive, whose story will last. Men – and women – so remarkable, or whose work is so sublime – or horrific – that they cannot be contained in the archive. Marlborough was such a man. There have been others.

  *

  I wake now with a voice which is clean and sharp and precise, unlike anything else I have written. I write without reference to the past, in the present of the past. Godolphin! You shape-shifter.

  I went to bed at eight but was not asleep at midnight and so had to take the same dose of antipsychotics and sedatives again. I have just woken up. Last night I wrote a thousand words for waking up today, to send to myself, a thousand-word letter she told me to write to myself, so I could understand myself when I woke up (because I’m sedated, I have forgotten who I am). What a brilliant idea! I am – the self-constructed self – am the brilliant idea taken from the mind of her and written out to tell you who you are and what to do and what you do. This.

  You are Stephen Bernard, of the University of Oxford.

  I am Stephen Bernard, of the University of Oxford.

  *

  The life of the mind. The mind in dialogue with itself.

  *

  one dark night. one dark. one dark night. fired with love’s urgent longings. urgent longings.

  in darkness and concealment

  *

  It is eight thirty. I need to go to the Bodleian Library. I go down Walton Street on my bike (I cycle only in my mind, in my rapidly cycling mind). Down St Giles. Across, past the Martyrs’ Memorial. Wait! I look around me.

  *

  O. O. mag. num. mys. ter. ium. It comes again, that ‘complication’, that simple complicated thought: paranoia, which at first I do not see as such. The thought that someone, somewhere, has malevolent intent. That thought. That nebulous insistent thought. Paranoia. That Wreck of the Hesperus: there is the sheer fact of it, distorted, undistorted and distorting. Afterwards the body of the captain’s daughter – the hurt and confused sureness of it – lies on the shore of the mind, a memory of the certainty of the captain. Dead, but a fact that will condition my experience of life – my life – ever after.

  *

  First I seek some quiet, some stillness in the morning before the day before me. I turn into Beaumont Street and walk with purpose past the doctors’ surgeries and the dentists’ to Worcester College at the corner of Beaumont Street and Walton Street. I cross at the crossing.

  I enter under the black iron gates and go through the porters’ lodge. They notice me, but I go unnoticed, as I have so many mornings in these the years of my life.

  Slowly, carefully, I descend the steps into the sunken garden of the college and go out through the gate of the quad into the gardens of the eighteenth century. I walk towards the waters. Such quiet! Such stillness. The air is crisp and expectant of the day that contains it, and I make my way round the lakes, past the bridge and to the cricket pavilion. No one is around in the early morning and the greenness of the playing field is generous in its bright colour.

  I light a cigarette. Five minutes pass, then ten.

  I must get on. I have a full day ahead of me. But I am thankful for this, for the gardens of Worcester College.

  *

  I see a man walking towards me. In a light-brown tweed greatcoat. I would like that tweed greatcoat to replace mine. It is cold outside today, in these the mansions of my house. I slept in St Giles, North Gate. I don’t know where I will sleep tonight, whether I’ll have the change, the money for a bed. He comes closer and nods, then turns, gives me change, but not enough. He looks kind, but troubled. It is so cold. This place is cold, Christminster.

  *

  I walk with small strides along Broad Street and under the great gates of the sixteenth-century library. I cross over the threshold. I have a great deal to do today. I have to write that article for the TLS. I am at the security gate in the Proscholium. Card.

  Now I climb the heavy black-brown Tudor stairs to Duke Humfrey’s Library. My legs are also heavy. Forty is not a great age to have reached, but age is catching up with me. I catch my breath at the turn in the stair. I must stop smoking.

  It is quiet, not very busy today in the Library. I find a desk, my desk. I look around and wonder who else is in the Library today. I wonder who else has sat here at this desk and written about the past, about literature. Edmond Malone for one, I know sat here, a great literary scholar, possibly writing the letters that are kept in the Library today. It’s chilly in the January morning air outside, but inside somehow it’s as warm. Right. I must write.

  Bernard Lintot was, in conscious rivalry with his contemporaries the Tonsons, the preeminent bookseller of the early eighteenth century, towering over the rest …

  *

  Sherborne School, with its deep yellow stones and pink, fire-damaged Abbey, lies in a wide, clear vale on the North Dorset Downs. It is an institution which was re-founded by King Edward VI, having its origins in the medieval monastery attached to the Abbey. It is styled on an Oxford college, with its large mullion-windowed quad; with the Abbey to the south and, to the north, an entrance tower; with its tower and sculpture of the young king’s coat of arms over the gate. It is a public school of some renown, for five centuries turning out the sons of the gentry, leaders of the state and the state church.

  It was here that I arrived as a fifteen-year-old boy, to start a new life. A son of the navy and of the Dock Road in Liverpool, I had by dint of academic merit won a scholarship to the school. The school and its masters were to transform me, a Scouser with a broad Scouse accent. It was to give me a new voice, the modulated soft vowels of received pronunciation, and ultimately to give me a voice which would speak the reasons why a fifteen-year-old boy would choose to leave his home and family and start again.

  *

  … when I consider how much I have seen, read and heard, I begin to blame my own Taciturnity; and since I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am
resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die. I have been often told by my Friends, that it is Pity so many useful Discoveries which I have made, should be in the Possession of a Silent Man.

  Thus Joseph Addison, thus Stephen Bernard.

  *

  Is it possible to love cancer? Is it possible to be in love with cancer? Not the condition, but the cancer itself? When I was a child I had such a cancer and I think I loved it. This is not a story about cancer, but a story about love.

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. But I still spoke as a child and that was how I learnt to speak my love.

  Loving cancer is a disgrace. It is a shameful thing to do. Loving cancer means never having to say you are sorry.

  *

  When did Praxiteles see me naked? No, wait. When did Fogarty first see me naked? 8 September 1987. I was just a boy, not yet a man. The date is clear in my mind. It happened when I returned from my first day at my new school, in a new town, in a new country. Something had happened to my father and mother. I did not know what, I do not know what. I am honest, they are honest. The father is honest, the mother is honest, the son is honest. But that does not mean that they know everything. There is a prize in not knowing. Some things are so toxic that they cannot be known, can only be felt. I felt that something had happened to my mother and father, but that it was toxic. Why else would they move from their homeland, and move to this, to what happened, to what happened to me?

  Canon Thomas ‘Dermod’ Fogarty. A doctor of divinity, a doctor of canon law. A distinguished man with a distinguished air. He was, as the books would have it, tall, dark, and handsome. Simple, useful words. Clichéd, but true. He wore black clothes and black shoes, with a simple dog collar – and in winter a black cape, a remnant from his days at the English College at Rome. But it was September and he was not in Rome or thinking of being in Rome. He was in Sussex, his parish, and had come to bless the house.