Episode 1: Ireneson Okojie and Helen Lewis
A conversation about beginnings with Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch and winner of the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for her short story Grace Jones, and Helen Lewis, columnist, broadcaster and author of Difficult Women.
Twitter: @tds153 @IrenosenOkojie @helenlewis
Line by Line is produced by Ben Tulloh with readings by Deli Segal. Music by Dee Yan-Key
Passage 1
‘Get away from here, you dirty swine,’ she said.
‘There’s a dirty swine in every man,’ he said.
‘Showing your face round here again,’ she said.
‘Now, Mavis, now, Mavis,’ he said.
She was seen to slam the door in his face, and he to press the bell, and she to open the door again.
‘I want a word with Dixie,’ he said. ‘Now, Mavis, be reasonable.’
‘My daughter,’ Mavis said, ‘is not in.” She slammed the door in his face.
All the same, he appeared to consider the encounter so far satisfactory. He got back into the little Fiat and drove away along the Grove and up to the Common where he parked outside the Rye Hotel. Here he lit a cigarette, got out, and entered the saloon bar. Three men of retired age at the far end turned from the television and regarded him. One of them nudged his friend. A woman put her hand to her chin and turned to her companion with a look. His name was Humphrey Place. He was that fellow that ‘walked out on his wedding a few weeks ago. He walked across to the White Horse and drank one bitter. Next he visited the Morning Star and the Heaton Arms. He finished up at the Harbinger. The pub door opened and Trevor Lomas walked in.Trevor was seen to approach Humphrey and hit him on the mouth. The barmaid said, ‘Outside, both of you.’
‘It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here,’ a woman remarked.
Passage 2
In the mid-seventies, a young man named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson began to appear at psychoanalytic congresses and to draw a certain perplexed attention to himself. He was an analyst-in-training at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, but he wasn’t like the other analytical candidates one sees at congresses—quiet and serious and somewhat cowed-looking young psychiatrists who stand about together like shy, plain girls at dances, talking to one another with exaggerated animation. Masson (to continue the metaphor) not only assiduously steered clear of the wallflowers but was dancing with some of the most attractive and desirable partners at the ball: with well-known senior analysts, such as Samuel Lipton, of Chicago; Brian Bird, of Cleveland; Edward Weinshel and the late Victor Calef, of San Francisco; and—the greatest catch of all—K. R. Eissler, of New York.
Masson was lively, inquisitive, brash, very talkative, anything but cowed. He was not a psychiatrist but a Sanskritist. He had become a tenured associate professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto at the age of thirty (by thirty-five he was a full professor), and he gave of a sheen of the intellectual big time that even those who disliked him from the start were grudgingly impressed by. He was good-looking in a boyish, dark, mildly Near Eastern way (The photographs of Masson that were presently to appear in the Times, Newsweek, and Time make him look more exotic than he does in life, and a bit plump and spoiled.) At the congresses, Masson would sometimes be accompanied by his wonderfully intelligent, thin, elegant, mockingly witty wife, Terri; she stood out from the wives of analysts as Masson stood out from his fellow-candidates. Victor Calef, in recalling his first meeting with the dazzling Massons, at a congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Paris in 1973, spoke of them as if speaking of the young Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. “They were so beautiful, so brilliant, so delicious,” Calef recalled. (And felt compelled to add, “She was smart as a whip.”) At the Paris congress, Masson read a paper criticizing Erik Erikson’s book on Gandhi—a paper that was much admired and was subsequently published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. (While other candidates were still copying out exercises with inky fingers, Masson, with irritating precocity, was already delivering and publishing papers.) The following year, at the spring meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, in Denver, he read a paper entitled “Schreber and Freud,” which caused a New York analyst in the audience named Leonard Shengold to rise and say, “I’ve never heard of this man, but he’s a find. Canada has sent us a national treasure.”
Passage 3
One day in August, in a quiet little suburb hot with cars and zoned for parks, I, Charles C. Charley, met a girl named Cindy. There were lots of Cindys strolling in the woods that afternoon, but mine was a real citizen with yellow hair that never curled (it hung). When I came across her, she had left the woods to lie around her father’s attic. She rested on an army cot, her head on no pillow, smoking a cigarette that stood straight up, a dreamy funnel. Ashes fell gently to her chest, which was relatively new, covered by Dacron and Egyptian cotton, and waiting to be popular. I had just installed an air conditioner, 20 percent off and late in the season. That’s how I make a living. I bring ease to noxious kitchens and fuming bedrooms. People who have tried to live by cross-ventilation alone have thanked me. On the first floor, the system was in working order, absolutely perfect and guaranteed. Upstairs, under a low unfinished ceiling, that Cindy lay in the deadest centre of an August day. Her forehead was damp, mouth slightly open between drags, a furious and sweaty face, hardly made up except around the eyes, but certainly cared for, cheeks scrubbed and eyebrows brushed, a lifetime’s deposit of vitamins, the shiny daughter of cash in the bank.
‘Aren’t you hot?’ I inquired.
‘Boiling,’ she said.
‘Ah, come on, little one,’ I said, ‘don’t be grouchy.’
‘What’s it to you?’ she asked.
I took her cigarette and killed it between forefinger and thumb. Then she looked at me and saw me for what I was, not an ordinary union brother but a perfectly comfortable way to spend five minutes.