I hadn’t given my coffin much thought until last Saturday, when I attended the South Bank Centre’s ‘Festival for the Living’. The main exhibit was a selection of coffins from Ghana. They were bizarre: a skip, a mini Mercedes and a giant cream cake. It was an absurd sight. I found myself playing Loyd Grossman in a macabre version of David Frost’s Through the Keyhole: ‘Who’s buried in a coffin like this? David, it’s over to you.’
The coffins were a wonderful distraction, but the show wasn’t about death — not as such. The ‘Festival for the Living’ concerned those who are left to grieve; and there were two literary events that confronted grief directly. Meghan O’Rourke spoke of The Long Goodbye, her memoir of mother’s death from cancer aged 55; and Christopher Reid read from and discussed his poetry collection A Scattering, written after his wife’s premature death.
O’Rourke’s book sounds not wholly dissimilar to Joan Didion’s more famous, The Year of Magical Thinking. O’Rourke described both the crushing loneliness of loss, and the comfort of intense memories. Shorn of sentimentality and self-pity, she was deeply empathetic.
Reid’s volume is a different proposition. It is sentimental, almost saccharine at points; but in no way is it false. ‘The content and structure [of the book] reflect the grieving process exactly. Everything was as it’s described,’ Reid said. He wrote faithfully out of respect to his wife. ‘Part of what informs this book is her idea of appropriate writing. She could spot insincerity or timidity, and didn’t suffer them.’
Listening to Reid, I got the impression that his wife’s departed voice had sounded in his ear, cajoling him to write. He confesses that he composed A Scattering largely without notes, which is very unusual for him. This lends some of the poems an unrefined emotional edge, of which Reid is unashamed. In fact, he says that he could have gone further. ‘There were moments of unspeakable grief, particularly early on, and perhaps it’s a failing of mine not to have written of them.’
Reid concedes that these emotive poems are not to everyone’s taste. He published Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters while poetry editor at Faber, and knew Hughes well. He said, ‘Ted would have found these poems too autobiographical, too explicit. We had different views on what poetry is.’
Generally, though, A Scattering has been very highly regarded since it won the 2009 Costa Prize, and the praise is merited. Reid’s honesty is compelling, his language gripping. The opening lines of ‘The Unfinished’ (‘Sparse breaths then none — and it was done’) catch the instant of death perfectly — its mixture of sorrow and relief. A test of the literature of grief is whether you remember it when grieving. I feel certain that those two lines will return to mind.
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