Gilles Deleuze: An Encounter

On this day in 1995 the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his Paris apartment. He was 70.

Today I wanted to mark his passing by posting a letter. At least, if I give it a virtual existence, it will always be around, in the public domain, even if one day my garden office burns down. But first, some context is required.

Looking back over my old journals – always an uncomfortable experience, meeting a younger self – I can just about piece together the chain of events.

In autumn 1994 I had completed a year of working towards a PhD on Deleuze and literature. However, all that was about to end.

‘The British Academy turned me down – again!’ I wrote in September 1994. ‘That’s the second time and it’s becoming a regular event. People will queue up to see the disappointment of Pindar. What I don’t understand is, having shown a willingness to fund myself for a year, why was I not even on the waiting list as I was last year? My ideas are so much more certain, my – oh! this country! this shitdish of a country! Christ what a planet!’

Around this time I must have reviewed Paul Patton’s English translation of Deleuze’s Différence et Répétition in the Times Literary Supplement.

My PhD supervisor had written to Deleuze a couple of times, never receiving a reply, and I thought I’d have a go. I sent a photocopy of my review, accompanied by a letter in which I pointed out that someone I knew had been driven almost suicidal by reading Différence et Répétition.

I also explained that although I admired Deleuze a great deal, the word ‘fan’ implied fawning gratitude, so I was content to be an ‘anti-fan’, an idea that set up a little resistance between us, I thought. Then, as an afterthought, I rather blew my cover by asking for a signed photograph.

‘Feel incredibly tired this morning,’ I wrote in my journal on 7 December 1994. ‘Yesterday evening I felt an overwhelming sense of not being wanted or needed by anyone.’ And then the postman passed by and an envelope dropped through the letterbox (this is no longer my address, so no mail please).

In my journal I called it ‘probably the most exciting letter in my short life: from a M. Gilles Deleuze.’ Here it is:

The handwriting is in places almost illegible, but I didn't know then that Deleuze was seriously ill, having undergone a tracheotomy. He had lost the power of speech and considered himself to be ‘chained like a dog’ to an oxygen machine. ‘By the last years of his life,’ says his Wikipedia entry, ‘simple tasks such as handwriting required laborious effort.’

The full text of the letter reads:

Dear Sir,
The worst thing that can befall a book is for it to induce in some way a state of death. Your letter gave me a lot of joy, and I will need readers like you. Thank you for your review of Différence et Répétition, which is nice. What a pleasure to have an anti-fan. But would a photo matter to an anti-fan? Happily, I don’t have one, and I don’t keep any with me. Don’t hold it against me, and believe me sincerely yours,
G. Deleuze

I think it shows that Deleuze had a great sense of humour, even when seriously ill, and that thoughts of suicide could not have been further from his mind at the time of writing.

For me, at that miserable time in my life, it was an early Christmas present.

'The whole letter calms me in a way I can't explain,' I wrote in my journal. 'Astounding. A happy day.'

Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan Hill

Searching for Howards End one day in her seemingly infinite Gloucestershire farmhouse, the novelist Susan Hill encounters a mountain of unread Booker prize winners and Richard and Judy recommendations. She resolves thenceforth to stop buying books for a year and to explore her own voluminous bookshelves instead.

It's a purely personal exercise. After a year, Hill has drawn up a list of 40 titles that "I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life". This is not a list of the 40 best books ever written. It has essentially the same quality as an inventory of favourite puddings, and is similarly comforting. Trollope and Wodehouse have two titles each on the list, which tells us something about Hill's tastes, as does the absence of any European authors. What we are left with is a mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books.

That this is not a list of the best new writing is apparent from her conservative poetry choices: late TS Eliot, WH Auden (whom she studied at A-level) and the Heaney-Hughes anthology The Rattle Bag. "I do not read much poetry now, and rarely anything new," she admits. "I know I should. Should. Ought. But I don't and that's that. Perhaps I don't need to. I can recite the whole of 'The Lady of Shalott', after all."

Eliot and Virginia Woolf are, in fact, subversive Modernists who have somehow made it under the radar of Hill's traditional tastes. She doesn't like it when "linguistic or stylistic obscurity is a hindrance to understanding". She opts for To the Lighthouse rather than The Waves, because the latter "always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3".

Hill's old farmhouse is a major character in the book, with its aged wood beams and elm-wood stairs, "the Aga in the kitchen, the wood burner in the sitting room". It's a snug, warm, relaxing place where one might open a random volume and find a Christmas card from Penelope Fitzgerald. She excels at creating an autumnal, "throw another log on the fire" atmosphere; a cosy world of "doing crosswords and answering quizzes at Christmas". Meanwhile, lurking about the house is the shadowy presence of the "Shakespeare Professor", her husband Stanley Wells, whose bookshelves include long-forgotten Elizabethan plays with intriguing titles such as An Interlude called Lusty Juventus. Hill gives these a wide berth.

The autobiographical elements in the book are often delightful — Hill devoured detective stories as light relief from Beowulf while reading English at King's College London — and it is hard not to agree with her when she waxes lyrical about the Oxford World's Classics series ("printed on fine paper and published in demy octavo") or the Observer books of Moths, Birds' Eggs, Churches; or the beauty of some typefaces (Hill is a publisher too, and appreciates such things). There are also touching reminiscences of Charles Causley, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and the dying Bruce Chatwin. Hill's novelist's eye perfectly captures EM Forster in the London Library ("He seemed slightly stooping and wholly unmemorable").

This might have been a smug and indulgent book, but Hill manages to keep it charming, aided by the quality of her writing. Her legion of fans will love it; the rest of us might also enjoy its gently whimsical, self-effacing tone, even if, lurking beneath, are the steely prejudices of Middle England.

Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin

James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) is a masterpiece, but the real Samuel Johnson has long been overshadowed by Boswell’s brilliant construct. Far from being an irascible arch-Tory roaring bon mots at his quailing opponents, Johnson was “a man wracked with self-doubt, guilt, fear and depression”, says Peter Martin in this sympathetic biography. What Boswell doesn’t tell us is that Johnson was “one of the most advanced liberals of his time”, who opposed slavery and “freed” and educated his black servant, then left him his estate. Johnson also “treated women as intellectual equals and promoted their literary careers”. Johnson’s “mental distress” at Oxford is nicely handled, as is the lasting effect on him of his young wife’s death. Recent scholarship continues to chip away at the authority of Boswell’s Life, and what with the recent arrival of David Nokes’s Samuel Johnson there are now multiple lenses through which to view the Great Cham. Although, as Martin readily admits, “The best way to get the measure of Johnson is to read him.”

False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, by John Gray

First published in 1998, False Dawn pretty much predicted the current economic crisis, and Nassim (Black Swan) Taleb has even declared it “a prophetic book”. We can now read sentences such as “How would America’s fractured society cope with a collapse in the stock market such as occurred in Japan in the early 1990s?” with a sense of proleptic irony. In a new Foreword John Gray reminds us that “America’s position is much worse than that of Japan in the 1990s” and insists that globalisation has undergone “an irreversible collapse”. Given his prescience in the past, his predictions are well worth reading: with the US in permanent decline, a period of “disorderly globalisation” has begun, complete with “resource wars” (oil, water, land) and accompanied by the rise of the far right everywhere. And then, with a nod to James Lovelock, he concludes that all this will eventually be “derailed by a backlash from the planet”. All humankind can do now, says Gray, is prepare for a “sustainable retreat”.

The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, by Tariq Ali

Pakistan offers rich pickings for conspiracy theorists. Who killed General Zia in 1988? The Soviets? The CIA? Mossad? Who was behind the group that kidnapped and killed the journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002? Was Benazir Bhutto shot in 2007 or did she fracture her skull on the sunroof of her car, as claimed by Scotland Yard? Did Washington tell Musharraf “we’ll bomb you into the Stone Age” or did he exaggerate to promote his memoirs? Pakistan is not a failed state, says Tariq Ali in this lively account of the nation’s history, but it is a dysfunctional one, largely because of US interference, which has shaped Pakistani policy for decades. Afghanistan – occupied by the Soviets, then by the Americans – plays a major role in Pakistan’s future. Pakistanis need stability there before they can address their own history of brutal military dictatorship and political corruption. An unhealthy reliance on dynastic politics has also resulted in the current “medieval charade”, says Ali, whereby the “venal and discredited” Asif Zardari became president, with the full support of the US.

Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, by Brian Dillon

Charles Darwin suffered from terrible flatulence, varying from "slight" to "considerable", "baddish", "sharp" and, on bad days, "excessive". We know this because he kept meticulous records of his bodily state. The pianist Glenn Gould (another flatulence sufferer) also generated "voluminous archives of his symptoms", from blood-pressure statistics to pulse rates.
Hypochondriasis, Brian Dillon tells us in this ingenious and intriguing book, is characterised by an intense scrutiny of the body. We should all listen to our bodies, of course, but the nine people examined here were hypersensitive, possessing a heightened awareness of having a body and of being embodied in the world.

Dillon accepts that hypochondria is to some extent a chimerical illness, but there are enough similarities and convergences to just about string these disparate lives together, although clearly Daniel Paul Schreber – who experienced "divine miracles" and was convinced that he was turning into a woman – was insane. As Dillon observes, there is something rather impressive about Schreber's delusions and "the prodigious unreality of the mental world he inhabited", although in his classic 1911 case study, Sigmund Freud saw only a paranoiac who could not admit his homosexuality.

In Tormented Hope Dillon looks beyond the comic stereotype of the hypochondriac to the tragicomic reality. He also makes a strong case for there being a link between "health anxiety" and creativity, following the philosopher Gilles Deleuze's observation that many great artists have frail health, the idea of the writer or artist being simultaneously the médecin and the malade of a civilisation. Charlotte Brontë's hypochondria, he shows, was displaced on to Lucy Snowe or Jane Eyre, and Proust's was an essential aspect of his art. Dillon is a self-confessed hypochondriac and his conclusion that "the power of imagination . . . is in itself a kind of pathology" has profound implications for literature.

A major theme here is seclusion or, more accurately, reclusion. Darwin was a semi-invalid for much of his adult life, although the nature of his malady remains a mystery. His debility had its advantages: "It meant that he could retreat from the world," says Dillon, "the better to pursue his scientific inquiries." Florence Nightingale's illness was similarly undiagnosed, but like many Victorian women she probably welcomed a stay in the sickroom: "The invalid fled into an interior world, a kind of secret garden from which she had so far been barred by convention."
In her essay "On Being Ill" Virginia Woolf wondered why the sickbed has not been among "the prime themes of literature", and indeed, as Dillon shows us, Marcel Proust's bed was "a well-provisioned craft in which he set sail on a darkened ocean" (a far cry from Heinrich Heine's Matratzengruft or "mattress-grave").

A morbid fear of illness often conceals a fear of death. "A Hypochondriack fancies himself at different times suffering death in all the various ways in which it has been observed," wrote James Boswell, "and thus he dies many times before his death." An exception to this is Alice James (Henry James's sister), who was perversely happy at being told she had breast cancer because her "career as an invalid" had reached its apotheosis.

Dillon quotes from a 17th-century thesis which observes that hypochondriacs can suffer spasms as a result of "sudden Outcry, or the very opening of a Door". When Andy Warhol's silver wig was snatched from his head at a book signing, he complained that "It hurt. Physically." A more extreme example is Gould's response to being patted on the shoulder by a Steinway employee in 1959. He recoiled, muttering: "Don't do that; I don't like to be touched," and later claimed that this incident had resulted in a problem with his left hand. It was the excuse he needed to withdraw from public performances, and his recording studio, like Proust's bedroom, became a refuge, "a technological cocoon that finally satisfied his urge to separate himself physically from his public".

Warhol's obsession with his red nose is reminiscent of another of Freud's famous patients, the so-called Wolf Man, who became convinced that his nose had been disfigured by electrolysis. The problem that hypochondriacs wrestle with on a daily basis, according to Dillon, is the imperfectability of the body. They unreasonably expect their bodies to be perfect (and in Warhol's case, unattainably beautiful) and are disturbed when they don't match this ideal. "The hypochondriac's historical mistake is to imagine a condition of bodily being that is physically and psychically null or neutral, a state of simultaneous (therefore impossible) vigour and inertia." They seek the achieved body, but our bodies are dynamic systems susceptible to decay.

Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945, by William I Hitchcock

“It was rather a shock to find that we were not welcomed ecstatically as ‘Liberators’ by the people,” wrote a British corporal in his wartime diary. “They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain.” Other soldiers also found the French peasants “sullen and silent”, and in this important but provocative book William I Hitchcock has given himself the difficult task of looking at the last year of the war in Europe from the point of view of the civilians whose cities were bombed or loved ones were killed in the name of liberation. Nazi brutality cannot be denied, he says, but the “harvest of innocent life by the liberators” also needs to be addressed, along with “the indeterminate nature of liberation, its paradoxical joys and miseries”. Liberation is a useful antidote to the usual triumphalist narrative of grateful citizens cheering on our boys. Similarly, Hitchcock shows how Allied soldiers were disgusted and repulsed by the “ape-like gibbering skeletons” they liberated from the death camps, and could not relate to them as fellow human beings.