Read Online Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun - Free Book Online
Authors: James Lasdun
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or skills of seduction (no need, in fact, for any preliminaries at all) is, I imagine, a fairly standard component of male fantasy. It certainly is in mine. A voice calls to you from on high, from out of the blue, like some supernatural being who has read your mind, heard your prayer, the mumble of your everlasting need, which may be narrowly sexual or may have more to do with jolting yourself out of the settled patterns of your life, however pleasant that life might be, and all you have to do is acquiesce, surrender, and there you are, face-to-face with her, beside her bed …
It seems to me possible that I was motivated to write this story at least partly by the idea of imagining such a being, and that I was able to do this, finally, by combining my memory of the original woman with certain resonances from my first impressions of Nasreen, Nasreen’s first emails having come at me out of the blue (or at least out of a two-year silence) like the voice of the woman in the window, calling for help like her, and curiously similar to her in their amusedly courteous tone and language: Sir, sir, excuse me, sir …
The fact that the young Englishman in my story is resistant to her charms, gallantly rescuing her from her ostensible plight while failing to acknowledge the underlying emotional plea, if anything further cements the connection, offering, as it does, an accurate representation both of my own irreproachably “correct” behavior with Nasreen and of the extent to which this depended on ignoring more complicated elements in the picture. He remains unaware of her designs on him, as he does of any desires of his own that might have led him up to her apartment in the first place. But both are known, of course, to his author, fabricator of this impeccably English mask, and of the fantastical femme fatale herself, who sends her curses after him as he vanishes out of her life: “Goddam Englishman…,” just as Nasreen was to do when I vanished out of her life a few months later.
So I stand guilty of appropriating some kind of echo or semblance of Nasreen’s “essence,” for literary purposes. Not a crime, perhaps, in the eyes of the ordinary world, but by my own standards definitely troubling, if only for its very strange consequence: that the hybridization seems to have doubled back from the purely fictional realm into the realm of reality, with Nasreen exhibiting symptoms of a disturbance as deep as that of the woman in my story, and doing so more vividly the more closely she identified with her. As she herself was to write a few months later: “i’m living your short story out and I’m scared.” This troubles and perplexes me quite a bit. It is as if in writing a character to some extent modeled on her, I am also guilty of modeling her , in turn, on the character: of causing her to develop her own version of the “psychotic” behavior of the woman at the window.
We are in the realm of the Gothic here: mind control, telepathic metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. I don’t believe in such things; I’m embarrassed even to mention them, and I wouldn’t, were it not for the fact that this peculiar mechanism of reciprocity was to become a steadily more pronounced feature of the story as things got worse, and that, moreover, it began to work as much on me, after a while, as on Nasreen. So much so that, by a certain point, we were both, in effect, creating or re-creating each other in the image of our crassest fear, our most cravenly stereotyping fantasy: the Demon Woman, shall we say, and the Eternal Jew.
Good Morning
You pose as an intellectual but you’re a corrupt thief.
Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James? Oh, I see all the white male writers are doing it too …
I want your apartment because you owe it to me because you were miserable and you sucked my nectar and didn’t help me when you should have …
what is wrong with your people?
do any of you have any ideas of your own? after
It seems to me possible that I was motivated to write this story at least partly by the idea of imagining such a being, and that I was able to do this, finally, by combining my memory of the original woman with certain resonances from my first impressions of Nasreen, Nasreen’s first emails having come at me out of the blue (or at least out of a two-year silence) like the voice of the woman in the window, calling for help like her, and curiously similar to her in their amusedly courteous tone and language: Sir, sir, excuse me, sir …
The fact that the young Englishman in my story is resistant to her charms, gallantly rescuing her from her ostensible plight while failing to acknowledge the underlying emotional plea, if anything further cements the connection, offering, as it does, an accurate representation both of my own irreproachably “correct” behavior with Nasreen and of the extent to which this depended on ignoring more complicated elements in the picture. He remains unaware of her designs on him, as he does of any desires of his own that might have led him up to her apartment in the first place. But both are known, of course, to his author, fabricator of this impeccably English mask, and of the fantastical femme fatale herself, who sends her curses after him as he vanishes out of her life: “Goddam Englishman…,” just as Nasreen was to do when I vanished out of her life a few months later.
So I stand guilty of appropriating some kind of echo or semblance of Nasreen’s “essence,” for literary purposes. Not a crime, perhaps, in the eyes of the ordinary world, but by my own standards definitely troubling, if only for its very strange consequence: that the hybridization seems to have doubled back from the purely fictional realm into the realm of reality, with Nasreen exhibiting symptoms of a disturbance as deep as that of the woman in my story, and doing so more vividly the more closely she identified with her. As she herself was to write a few months later: “i’m living your short story out and I’m scared.” This troubles and perplexes me quite a bit. It is as if in writing a character to some extent modeled on her, I am also guilty of modeling her , in turn, on the character: of causing her to develop her own version of the “psychotic” behavior of the woman at the window.
We are in the realm of the Gothic here: mind control, telepathic metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. I don’t believe in such things; I’m embarrassed even to mention them, and I wouldn’t, were it not for the fact that this peculiar mechanism of reciprocity was to become a steadily more pronounced feature of the story as things got worse, and that, moreover, it began to work as much on me, after a while, as on Nasreen. So much so that, by a certain point, we were both, in effect, creating or re-creating each other in the image of our crassest fear, our most cravenly stereotyping fantasy: the Demon Woman, shall we say, and the Eternal Jew.
Good Morning
You pose as an intellectual but you’re a corrupt thief.
Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James? Oh, I see all the white male writers are doing it too …
I want your apartment because you owe it to me because you were miserable and you sucked my nectar and didn’t help me when you should have …
what is wrong with your people?
do any of you have any ideas of your own? after
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