Culling
I’m doing an annual cull. Chucking possessions. Culling comes easily to me - too easily perhaps. My adage is: If in doubt, Out. Letters, photos, manuscripts, clothes, things, people – I shred, recycle or bag them up and take them down the charity shops for someone else’s use. There’s an oppression about possession and I like to travel light. Natalie Barney said the trouble with possessions, is that they possess you. A psychiatrist once told me they were my rivals, which is the sort of thing psychiatrists tell you.
Books are a bit of a problem but this time they’re out too. My flat’s being painted Stark White and I want it to stay as empty-looking as my diary and my mind, so all those paperbacks with brittle spines and yellow leaves and scruffy covers – out, out.
It hurts a bit when out go the true friends of my youth: Carson McCullers, Jean Rhys, Anais Nin, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov…. but they look so worn, old and neglected, and I won’t read them again, and I only hazily recollect their content, and though I’ll not read future books with quite such caring as I felt then, Out. Out they go.
I think old people cull more as their time runs out. Bit by bit we relinquish.
Last week I heard Joan Didion talking about her Year of Magical Thinking. She wrote it after her husband and daughter died within eighteen months of each other. She seemed fragile, emaciated, wraith-like, unconsoled, tough. She said she couldn’t chuck away her husband’s shoes because if she did she knew he wouldn’t come back. And I thought how, with all my ease of culling, I haven’t deleted my mother’s phone numbers – not for her house, long emptied and sold, or for the hated old people’s home where she died alone a year and nine months ago. Because if I do cull those, then I know I won’t be able to phone her up.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Cull the crumbling ones by all means – I had to get a new copy of Under the Volcano because the one I had laid down in 1960 fluttered away, unread page by unread page when I at last turned to it. But if you have Dorothy Richardson, Virago, vols 2 and 3, which I need, you know where to find me.