There is a feeling of utter randomness to The Position of Spoons: and Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy’s new collection of nonfiction writing. In a world of pithy blurbs—and the publishing industry’s insistence that even disparate pieces of writing can be made to speak to one single, overarching theme—it’s quite wonderful.
Levy doesn’t bother with an introduction, a foreword or an afterword (in which lesser authors would try to force an unnecessary connection between their various works, or find another to do so on their behalf). These 34 pieces, of which 29 have been published previously, speak for themselves. The book begins with the first essay, “Bathed in an Arc of French Light”, on Colette. It’s illustrated with a marvellous photograph of the French author sitting at her typewriter, her cat on the desk—and then, on the following left-hand page, Levy’s writing begins. “Preamble, be gone!” the form seems to say. It’s a sentiment that occurs throughout this always wise, always surprising author’s oeuvre.
Levy was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1959. Her father, Norman, was a member of the anti-apartheid African National Congress party, and in 1968 the family fled to London, where Levy grew up. She began her literary career writing plays and poetry, and released several novels with major publishers in the decade from 1987. Later, she struggled to find an outlet for her novel Swimming Home, which she has said was rejected by numerous editors before it landed with the small press And Other Stories, who published it in 2011.
Swimming Home is a hallucinatory, modernist work, which might explain those rejections. “Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely,” the author writes of its philosophy in The Position of Spoons. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and began a mid-life renaissance for Levy. Her 2016 novel Hot Milk (“about how love can scald us, and how sometimes we are the arsonists”) was also shortlisted for the Booker, while The Man Who Saw Everything (2019) was longlisted for that award and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. In between, she began a “living autobiography”, beginning with Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), a feminist response to George Orwell’s famous essay “Why I Write”. The political yet playful trilogy—completed with The Cost of Living in 2018 and Real Estate in 2021—cemented Levy’s reputation as one of the most original writers of our time.
There is much to delight in The Position of Spoons, which is primarily formed of short pieces of art and literary criticism, with some memoir and other miscellaneous portraits. What hits me first is the sheer joy of Levy’s lyricism: “I have measured out my life with anchovies on buttered bread,” she writes in “Watery Things”, after TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. “It’s all ha-ha eating anchovies in Hackney, oh yes, like a wind blowing in from Capri.” What a divine couple of lines.
Levy’s switch from cerebral critic who exists only on the page to living, walking presence in the outside world is instant and exhilarating
Amusingly, the book provides a number of lessons for life. (To labour the point: a lesser publisher might have remade the book around this theme.) In “A to Z of the Death Drive”, written for a 2009 Dean Rogers photographic exhibition, Levy notes that “yawning is caused by lack of oxygen. Therefore, yawning in an automobile suggests the windows should be hastily opened. Yawning is also contagious. A passenger must never yawn too near the driver.” Levy’s droll practical-mindedness is charming. Elsewhere, in response to a blurry, quietly balletic photograph by and of Francesca Woodman, Levy draws our attention to Woodman’s heeled boots, which are less blurred than the rest of her. “It is so important to have a grip when we walk out of the frame of femininity into something vaguer, something more blurred,” she insists—and then proves she lives by her own advice. “Actually, I am wearing boots that are quite similar as I write this. In about five minutes from now, I’m going to switch off my computer, lock the door of my writing shed and walk to the Tube station.” Levy’s switch from cerebral critic who exists only on the page to living, walking presence in the outside world is instant and exhilarating.
The book also contains lessons on writing. In an essay on Violette Leduc’s autobiography La Bâtarde, Levy holds up a mirror to her own practice: “Is that why people write autobiographies? Are they attempting to remake their lives?” she asks—quite perfect, given that The Cost of Living chronicles the breaking apart of hers. She goes on to describe Leduc, a 20th-century French feminist writer, as “uniquely placed to write an autobiography because she was a novelist who knew how to make the past and present seamlessly collide in one paragraph”—and much the same could be said of Levy, a writer who, most notably in The Man Who Saw Everything, has time haunt and twist her characters’ lives. That Levy chose to approach her memoir as a “living autobiography” —written near-contemporaneously—also dispenses with the typical notion of an autobiography as looking back on a life. Her formal play with temporality in her fiction set her up well for that. Meanwhile, her memoir’s subject matter is domestic, day-to-day. “Leduc’s cunning decision,” she adds, “was to tell the reader that she is not unique, which is a relief—most people write autobiographies to persuade us that they are.”
Occasionally Levy’s lightness feels too light. “I’m not convinced a book as incandescent as The Lover, more existential than feminist, would be published today. Not in Britain, anyway,” she writes of Marguerite Duras’s 1984 work. I found myself wanting to get out my editor’s red pen: “Expand!” I’d write in the margin, “Why do you think that? And what does that say about the importance of it having been published at all?” About the photographer Lee Miller, Levy writes: “She was publicly very modest about her own work, but perhaps she didn’t feel that way inside.” Perhaps? What has drawn Levy to that conclusion, and could we please see the workings? The author’s erring on the side of whimsy sometimes comes across as thinness.
In Levy’s fiction, it’s a very different story. Delivering the Goldsmiths Prize lecture at London’s Southbank Centre in October, Levy described the novel as doing “something more intuitively mysterious than nonfiction”. In her fiction, she leans into that mystery, writing tales that are as much about what we do not know as what we do. It’s in that in-between space that so much of the wonder happens.
In Levy’s most recent novel, August Blue, published in 2023, this uncanniness concerns a doppelganger. Our protagonist is Elsa M Anderson, a 34-year-old piano virtuoso who has just blown up her career by walking off stage in Vienna during her performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2. Elsa has a complicated backstory—fostered as a baby, she became a child prodigy who left her parents to be taken under the wing of Arthur Goldstein, the teacher who nurtured her musical talents. Arthur is now on his deathbed, and Elsa is travelling around Europe, teaching private piano lessons, working out where to go from here.
At a flea market in Athens, Elsa watches a woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. She sees the woman is about the same age as her, and “wearing a tightly belted green raincoat” that is almost identical to hers. “We obviously wanted the same things,” Elsa realises, almost instantly. “My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was.” After the woman has left the market stall, Elsa sees she has dropped the black felt trilby hat she was wearing. She puts on the hat.
“She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was.”
This familiar-looking woman seems to be following Elsa—or is Elsa following her? In a Turkish bakery on Green Lanes in London, Elsa spots her—though she notes, comically, “she was not wearing the trilby because I had her hat”. Then, in Paris, she sees the woman walking down the street, smoking a cigar. “Glowing at the end. It was a poke at life. A provocation.” This woman has a boldness that Elsa currently lacks—and desires. Meanwhile, Elsa experiences other doublings. Sitting in a bath in London, she sees ants running across the tub’s rim. It happens again in Paris, where Levy describes the insects as having “found a portal to all my worlds”. Even more deeply felt are Elsa’s memories of the horses that pulled a trailer containing a grand piano across a Suffolk field, long ago in her childhood. What does the resurfacing of that memory mean, she thinks, and do the mechanical horses from the market have anything to do with it?
August Blue is a wonderfully slippery novel. Levy’s place-jumping—from Athens to London, to Paris, back to London, then on to Sardinia—means her characters are never physically in one place for very long. At the same time, Elsa’s mental state is shifting. Before her performance in Vienna, she dyed her hair blue, so as to build “a separation from my DNA”. When Elsa meets her friend Marie in Paris, Marie looks at her blue hair and says “You had to create yourself”, which begs the question: what or who was Elsa before this creation? As she walks alone on the bank of the Seine one evening, she thinks: “I let the stars enter my body and realised I had become porous. Everything that I was had started to unravel. I was living precariously in my own body; that is to say, I had not fallen into who I was, or who I was becoming. What I wanted for myself was a new composition. I had let the omen who bought the horses enter me, too.”
The novel raises far more questions than it answers. In her lecture at the Southbank Centre, Levy spoke of her desire to “negotiate reality” via fiction, but not necessarily to explain it. After all, she added, “Sometimes we prefer obscurity because it’s less painful than clarity.” In her essay “The Psychopathology of a Writing Life”, collected in The Position of Spoons, she writes that “it is important and exciting to say and think things we do not yet understand. If we are reaching for something that is there anyway, in ourselves, in the world, the struggle in the writing is to connect our thoughts and make visible something that is seemingly impossible to convey.” Levy’s great gift is to write through the holes of our known world, reaching for—but never quite grasping—the abyss that lies beyond.
