Laughing Stock - A Depression Memoir

Synopsis:

Live to the point of tears - Camus.

Memory. Nostalgia. Failure. In this mordant autofictional memoir, Alexander Williamson explores his life through a prism of projected otherness.

From the traumas of childhood to the sorrows of adolescence, his mother’s debilitating illness and a failed career in London, the narrator picks over the blunders and humiliations of his past in a series of fragmentary reminiscences.

Tackling depression, fatherhood and toxic masculinity, the book moves seamlessly between from the the novelistic tropes of the Bildungsroman and the discursive principles of the essay to examine living with long-term depression, and the cathartic quality of art.

Bleakly humorous and deeply affecting, Laughing Stock - A Depression Memoir is a deeply affecting exploration of what it means to be human in the Twenty-First Century.

EXTRACT - published in Hinterland Issue 6 - Autumn 2020.

On the beach he found a golf ball among a crop of stones. The plastic coating had partly weathered away, disclosing the yellow core underneath. It resembled a perfectly poached egg, the flaccid white encasing a silky yolk, or the cross-sectional diagram of a planet from a child’s science book. He held it and considered it for a while, then dropped it onto his foot and kicked it out over the sand.

Many years before he had played golf on a beach like this, in the company of his uncle and younger cousin, at Abersoch in north Wales. He would have been ten, or eleven years old. Hitting balls up and down the empty beach, while the wind played havoc with their shots. Running up the beach to find the balls, and hit them again. Golf loomed large in his life back then. Less so now.

His uncle once had a dog that liked to chew golf balls. A soft-brained golden Labrador named Tizer. So called in homage, or so he believed, to the fizzy drink from Cumbernauld, a drink the colour of dehydrated piss. Tizer wasn’t remotely Tizer-coloured, but his coat bore just enough of a resemblance for the name to have taken root in his uncle’s mind. Or perhaps it was just that his uncle really liked the drink. In his grandparents’ chalet at Abersoch he saw Tizer destroy an old golf ball in a matter of seconds, peeling back the dimpled plastic and crushing the compressed bundle of rubber string that made up its inner core, the part which gave the ball weight and flight. After which Tizer slumped his head down onto his outstretched paws, his muzzle mussed with slobber and white plastic shards, and emitted a long, guttural groan of satisfaction. He couldn’t remember Tizer being on the beach while they hit golf balls that damp day in July, but he was bound to have been out there somewhere, sniffing the salt air and scampering among the dunes, tail whipping the air like a propeller.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche declared: I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog’: it is just as faithful, just as importunate and shameless, just as entertaining, just as wise, as any other dog, and I can domineer over it, and vent my bad humour over it.

Nietzsche, famously, suffered with ill health all his life. Headaches in childhood, an accident while vaulting a horse during his military training, constant trouble with his bowels and stomach, bouts of vomiting, encroaching blindness and eventual dementia, the latter caused not, as was once assumed, by syphilis during a youthful visit to a brothel, but by a slowly developing brain tumour, a similar condition to that which brought about his father Carl Ludwig’s untimely death at the age of thirty-five. The diagnosis: softening of the brain.

Nietzsche’s perpetual ill health made his own list of injuries look like nothing more than the bumps and scrapes of childhood. Which, of course, they were. And yet, when Nietzsche wrote of his pain, he felt that the philosopher wasn’t simply referring to this litany of physical ailments, but the pain of self-overcoming [Selbstüberwindung] and the pain of his Godlessness, both of which became the basis of his faith in himself, his philosophy and his writing, an antithetical process no less fraught with discomfort. In later life, Nietzsche’s bad faith became a war on two fronts, bringing him into conflict with those he loved and held dear, such as the composer Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, and driving him into hallucinatory derangement and near-penury, until he became reliant on the financial support of his mother, Franziska, and the less-than-benevolent advances of his sociopathic younger sister, Elisabeth.

When he was young, all was hope and dream and possibility, the possibility that one day something truly wonderful would happen to him. Something craved and yearned and hoped for. Something deserved. The aphorisms and proverbs of the Bible and prescriptions of Erasmus’ Adagia, which he first became aware of in childhood, taught him that through diligence, endeavour and good faith, he would realise his dreams.

If at first you don’t succeed. Get up and dust yourself down. Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow. Don’t count all your chickens. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Good things come to those who wait. That which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.

He strove. He waited. Nothing happened.

He read the Delphic maxims, ancient Grecian codes for a certain mode of morality which ranged from the gnomic to the instructive.

Follow God. Respect the law. Respect your parents. Be overcome by justice. Know what you have learned. Perceive what you have heard. Think as a mortal. Control yourself. Love friends. Honor the house.

Over time, the simplicity of those proverbs and prescriptions became complicated or tempered by other, more ambivalent mantras, which now occupied the forefront of his consciousness.

Children should be seen and not heard. Do not speak unless spoken to. Failure is not an option. Ignorance is bliss. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Nothing will come of nothing. The way up and the way down are the same. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Don’t try.

Nietzsche again. Become what you are.

Much later, too late to prosper from it, he encountered the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia and ēthikē aretē, the pursuit of happiness and self-becoming through the wellness of spirit and virtuousness, and its alternate others, anhedonia, the reluctance and inability to experience pleasure, and hednophobia, the persistent fear of pleasure.

He thought of his mother, her unhappiness before and after her illness. How he felt as though he had failed her.

Because you are always miserable.

He found it interesting that Nietzsche associated self-knowledge with pain. For he often felt the keenness of the observation. Becoming what he was had been painful. Knowing himself more so. Walking, too, was uncomfortable, but not the pain of walking — sore feet, blisters, aching limbs and the like — but the notion that he was always walking away from something rather than towards it. As though his life were something he could escape, and that one day he would. Even though, according to Nietzsche, that would mean living his life all over again.

Nietzsche: This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same success and sequence… The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over again, and you with it, speck of dust!

A speck of dirt. A mote of dust. The grain of sand through which you encounter the world. Like Narcissus contemplating his reflection. Like writing a memoir at the age of forty.

Forty. A laughable milestone. Joyce’s age when he published Ulysses. Beckett’s when he penned First Love. Kierkegaard when he published Fear and Trembling. Orwell when he began Animal Farm. Henry Miller — Tropic of Cancer. Hemingway when he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bukowski when his first book of poems came out. Herzog when he made Fitzcarraldo. Lennon when Chapman shot him dead. BS Johnson when he slit his wrists.

His father’s childhood friend, who dropped dead in the shower from a heart attack following his morning swim at Abersoch.

Forty. The old age of youth, according to Victor Hugo. The moment when time accelerates, just as one’s ability to comprehend it slows. The hinge-point. The turning. The end of the beginning. The beginning of the end.

At sixteen, he could not picture his fortieth birthday. It seemed too distant, too remote, like an ancient city. A far-flung foreign place. By his thirties, his arrival there was imminent. He had vaguely hoped he would approach this milestone at the centre of some Dionysian carnival in the Balearics or the Cyclades, surrounded by the huge circle of friends he had amassed over the years, some of whom had flown in especially to surprise him. There would be much succulence and finery, trays of drink and copious amounts of drugs.

A far cry from the prosaic reality of the day when it finally arrived.

Impossible to imagine how he would rise in the morning, perhaps after making love to his wife, sleepily embrace his small, still sweet smelling children, before descending into the kitchen, sitting down to open the cards and gifts from a handful of friends and family, and feeling wounded by their generosity, their kindness, despite the great distances between them. Then, as was customary, his wife would go to work, and he would take his children to school in a muggy veil of drizzle, returning home to shower and shave, and to contemplate his face in the mirror; the unremarkable face written in his hybrid genes, his mother’s eyes and his father’s jawline, the face he deserved, ten years in advance of Orwell’s deadline, which did not please him, which whenever he caught sight of it he had to turn away.

The self his body presented to the world. His face, like his mother’s, was crinkled with crow’s feet, and his forehead lined and creased. His hairline, slowly receding since his late teens, was now on the point of disappearing altogether, much like that of his father. Their resemblance, frequently remarked upon by friends and family, had by now become inevitable. His body was carrying him into old age, where it would leave him, and he would leave it. The imprint of the years upon it and the hint of those to come. He could feel it approaching, like a train slowing as it enters a station.

I have given a name to my pain and call it Memory.

He read about an experiment conducted by an American psychologist in the late 1960s. Three groups of dogs were placed in yoked harnesses. The first group of dogs were harnessed for a short while before being released. The second group of dogs were given a series of electric shocks at random, which they could stop by pressing a lever. The third pair of dogs were shocked repeatedly, but unlike the second pair of dogs, they were not given a lever to stop the shocks. After being shocked repeatedly without respite, the third group of dogs came to understand that their suffering was inescapable, and in subsequent experiments, simply submitted to it. The scientist labelled the condition learned helplessness.

Strindberg: I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.

He knew his frequent perambulations on the World Wide Web that the apparent social intelligence of dogs had prompted a number of scientific investigations into the canine psyche. This in turn had produced a raft of popular science books with titles such as A Dog’s Purpose, The Genius of Dogs, How Dogs Love Us, At the Other End of the Leash.

After his own golden Labrador died, John Grogan, then a journalist, memorialised his beloved pet in a bestselling autobiography, Marley and Me, which was later made into a Hollywood movie, a tearjerker starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, the success of which spawned a series of children’s books further essaying Marley’s hapless antics, following in the footprints of Spot, Shiloh, Old Yeller, What-a-mess, Kipper, Hairy Maclary and countless others. He couldn’t begrudge Grogan’s opportunism. Sometimes it paid to keep it simple. Perhaps he should write about dogs. Take photographs of dogs. Or paint them.

Aesthetic representations of dogs were traceable to prehistoric times. Grogan’s cave dwelling ancestors first sketched dog-like figures onto the walls of dank caves, while Grecian and Roman potters studded their ceramics with canine imagery, and Cerberus stalked through the Underworld. As a dog’s purpose changed from hunter’s retriever to companionable pet, so their presence in paintings, particularly portraits, proliferated. The Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt’s street-snapped portraits of dogs and their owners catalogued the evolution of canine companionship in the contemporary mode, while William Wegman’s colour portraits of Weimaraners were to Flemish Primitivism what the book Marley and Me and its cinematic adaptation were to High Modernism and the Golden Age of Hollywood. C.M. Coolidge’s anthropomorphised dogs playing cards, which borrowed scenes from Caravaggio and Paul Cezanne, played with aesthetic tradition in a more sophisticated way than Wegman’s hang-dog subjects.

Books about dogs and films about dogs and paintings of dogs and photographs of dogs and sculptures of dogs and, less frequently, TV programmes about dogs. The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. Lassie. Benji. Scooby-Doo. Droopy. Huckleberry Hound. Woof! Paw Patrol — a favourite of his children. Not to mention the shows where dogs were a key part of the ensemble. Sweep in Sooty and Co. Johnny Briggs and his dog Razzle. Watching episodes of The Littlest Hobo as a child had taught him about solitude and sorrow; the little dog who solves a problem, and then moves on to the next town. Never settles, never stays. Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on. Even today, the first bars of the theme tune triggered within him a sorrow that he could not endure.

A dog’s purpose. What was it about dogs that so preoccupied him? Their obedience? Their servility? Their desire to be loved by people who anthropomorphized them, treated them like children or beat them without mercy? There was something about the human-canine relationship that made his flesh crawl. How his mother had spoken to their dog when it was having a phantom pregnancy, fussing over its toys in its basket.

Yet for all their apparent domestication, dogs were scavengers who, given half the chance, would ransack a kitchen, annihilate prized possessions, and drop a crap on a pedestrian-heavy road. Then there were those deviant breeds who were sired for the specific purpose of mauling to death vulnerable family members left in their watchful care.

As an infant he was bitten by his parent’s dog, a large, bad-tempered, male black Labrador who couldn’t tolerate his ears being pulled, particularly not by small, usurping children. He was lucky. A different breed and he may not have lived to tell the tale. And yet he understood the nature of the relationship, the purpose of canine companionship, how it could lift a person from the deepest depression, brighten the bleakest day.

And there was the rub, the departure of a beloved four-legged friend from an emotionally dependent owner was almost always traumatic, presaged either by the solemnity of drawn-out disintegration or the indignity of finding itself unable to lift itself from a puddle of its own shit. Dogs and humans shared an inescapable fate.

Walking on the beach he thought of another dog, the enigmatic canine in the foreground on the cover of the Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young’s second album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. He was unsure of the breed of the dog, but by process of elimination narrowed it down to an American white shepherd. Young had apparently named the animal Winnipeg after the town in Manitoba where he and his mother relocated after his parents separated. The dog featured in several photographs of Young from the late 60s and early 70s, mostly taken by Henry Diltz at Young’s Broken Arrow ranch in California.

The grain of the film used for the portrait of Young gives the album cover the appearance of a pointillist painting; raw and unpolished like the music inside. A man without possessions, other than his dog. Ironically, it recalls Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of Colonel John Bullock and An Officer of the 4th Regiment of Foot. Young leaning against a tree, his faithful retriever at his side, the peaks and valleys of Topanga Canyon, then home for Young, in the background.

Searching the internet, he came across other photographs of Young with dogs which served to underscore his lonesome hippy-boy persona. Here were career-spanning photographs of Young hugger mugger with some hound or other. This even extended to the stuffed dog in the foreground of a band portrait of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which appeared on the cover of their 1970 album Déjà-Vu. Like that of his earlier solo album, this portrait reflects Young’s enduring fascination with Americana and frontier mythology, which his next solo album, After the Gold Rush, would develop further.

The most recent photo he had seen was taken from the rear of Young’s Hitchhiker album[1] . The photo is dated 1976 and shows Young walking up a beach, sun just about to dip under the horizon, his narrow frame slim as his shadow. A few strides ahead of him, yet another nameless dog lopes in the surf.

He came across Young’s rangy, scrawny music by accident, when flicking through his parents’ CD collection, a selection as uninspired as it was sparse. Among the Paul Simon, Tears for Fears and Steely Dan albums there was Young’s Harvest of 1972 — his best-selling, most enduring and, some might say, most endearing album. The Neil Young album most people had heard of. Later he learned that his father was a fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, though without any actual commitment to having acquired the ensemble’s records. Tellingly, his parents also owned a copy of America’s Greatest Hits, the band whose sound was so indebted to Harvest-era Young that they sounded like a tribute act; and who knocked Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’ off the top of the singles chart with their derivative imitation, ‘Horse With No Name’.

For a time, he had become fixated with Neil Young. His music, his looks, his life. His refusal to compromise. As a young man, he had seen in Young’s process of self-overcoming a route-map to guide his own, a snaking path from the mundane present into an unknown future. A self-professed loner, Young possessed a determination, a will-to-power, that was positively Nietzschean, but it was a will-to-power entirely lacking in himself. When the time came for him to make his move, he froze. Talked himself out of it. Buried himself in the sand.

On the Beach drew from the deep well of emotional privations and psychic turmoil that coloured the early Seventies; a decadent, self-centred decade when the collective aspirations of the flower children had been swept away by a landslide of political disturbance which bordered on the anarchic. The messy end to the Vietnam War. Watergate rumbling on. Los Angeles spooked by murders committed under the orders of self-styled guru and commune leader Charles Manson, whom Young had known from his Topanga Canyon days, later reflecting with typical understatement that the songwriter-turned-cult leader didn’t handle rejection well. Young’s relationship with the actress Carrie Snodgress was by now in terminal decline. Their son, Zeke, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy shortly after his birth. Then there was the loss of Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse’s guitarist and Young’s soul brother, who had overdosed on the eve of the Harvest tour after Young fired him from the band.

Save for its opener, ‘Walk On’, the songs of On the Beach are weighed down by sorrow and loss. Young’s lyrics, frequently spare, are simplistic to the point of banality, yet unflinchingly spare and direct. Specific events and interpersonal issues are unpicked and rewoven: the disastrous Harvest tour, the implosion of CSNY, the Manson murders, his relationship with Carrie, Nixon’s duplicitousness. Ecological disaster. Violent revolution. A coming apocalypse.

There was something more abject in the grizzled persona of this Young than that at the decade’s inception: the lonely boy out on the weekend. Young’s music, which up to that point had been elegiac in its marriage of American mythology with the counter-cultural considerations, was now more circumspect, more entropic. On the Beach had a retrospective quality, a critically self-assessing eye, a composite portrait of the creative individual’s place in the world.

Young was twenty-eight years old when he made On the Beach, a culmination of three records of such bleakness many critics at the time worried about his state of mind. Now it was widely considered to be the high-water mark of his career. Success for Young came early, fast and hard. He’d first tasted it with Buffalo Springfield when he was barely twenty-one. Small wonder that he felt washed up. But Young was lucky. He’d come out the other side, largely unscathed. Others from that time weren’t so fortunate.

Despite the album’s prevailing mood of subdued bleakness, at certain moments On the Beach hymned a quietly restorative beauty, most evident in the consoling strains of the interweaving harmonica and fiddle on ‘Ambulance Blues’. The song, much like ‘Don’t Be Denied’, offered another journey through the past, one spiritually redeeming and restorative for the musician.

On the album cover, the de-saturated, honeyed yellows of the surrealistic totems assembled on a beach — a parasol, two folding chairs, Young clad in jacket and slacks, the fin of a buried Cadillac — were counter-posed with the bleached out sand and sky, the grey sliver of water. His back to the camera, Young faced the ocean, the worries of the world and the vicissitudes of success behind him. He was watching the water, looking out on a vast emptiness, with one eye turned inward, connecting nothing with nothing, and recording everything.

I was pretty down I guess at the time, but I just did what I wanted to do, at that time. I think if everybody looks back at their own lives they'll realise that they went through something like that. There’s periods of depression, periods of elation, optimism and scepticism, the whole thing is… it just keeps coming in waves.

You go down to the beach and watch the same thing, just imagine every wave is a different set of emotions coming in. Just keep coming. As long as you don't ignore it, it'll still be there. If you start shutting yourself off and not letting yourself live through the things that are coming through you, I think that's when people start getting old really fast, that's when they really age. 'Cause they decide that, they're happy to be what they were at a certain time in their lives when they were the happiest, and they say 'that's where I'm gonna be for the rest of my life'. From that minute on they're dead, y'know, just walking around.

Where are you going with this?

Some years after the death of their first black Labrador, his parents acquired another. Home from university, he had gone with his mother to collect the puppy from a farm a short distance away. When they arrived, the breeder led them to a small shed in the yard. A welter of small cries emanated from inside, and when she opened the shed it was full of Labrador puppies tumbling over one another. The breeder handed one to his mother, and she passed it to him. As he cradled the puppy in his arms he thought, This must be how it feels to become a father.

They named the dog Peg. Like the Steely Dan song.

After university, when he was back living with his parents, directionless, rootless and restless, Peg became his closest companion. In the morning he would wake to the sound of her paws scratching the floorboards on the landing, followed by sniffing and whining at the gap under the door. In those days of doing nothing while figuring out what his something should be, they took long walks through the Cheshire fields, him stoned or ruminating anxiously, Peg springing along the path up ahead. Come the evening, she would sit with him as he read or listened to music in his room. After he left home, his mother reported how the dog would disappear in the evening, how she often found the dog lying on his bed.

Peg became a different kind of dog after he left, mollycoddled and neurotic, spoilt with scraps from the table, welcomed on the furniture. His mother, frequently depressive and antisocial, used the dog as a reason to avoid human contact, addressing her as one would an infant in the presence of their friends. After his mother’s illness, the dog’s health also began to suffer. She became increasingly prone to tremors and fits. His parents, fearful of the passing of their beloved pet, allowed her condition to worsen. He visited frequently that year and often felt that her decline mirrored that of his mother. His mother was now short tempered with the dog, as irritable as she was with everyone else. The nadir came when, one evening over dinner, the aged dog began to defecate in the kitchen and his mother walked behind her with a sheet of kitchen roll pressed against her anus. Not long after that the dog refused to leave her bed and his parents took her on that final, long-dreaded but inevitable visit to the vet.

Sometime after university he had taken Peg to the beach once. They had talked of going to Abersoch but didn’t make it that far, pulled up on another wide expanse of sand just outside Rhyl. He remembers little of their conversation. Possibly they talked about his aspirations, his plans for the future. Perhaps they didn’t speak at all. He remembered that the dog, off her lead, ran to a family eating their lunch and scared the little girl. Keep her on the lead, mate, the father said. Sorry, said his own, sheepishly clipping her back on. That day on the beach he had taken some photographs with the old Canon camera his father gave him. Photography had interested his father, briefly, before work and golf took over. Some weeks prior he had discovered a folder containing black and white prints his father had developed. Twenty year old pictures of his parents and their friends from before he was born. Several of him as a new-born. And a jumble of black Labs - pups - staring balefully at the camera.

I have given a name to my dog and call it Learned Helplessness.

An early memory. Aged four or five. Playing with the boy from next door in his parents’ back garden. Jimmy. Jimmy is almost a year older than him, with straw-coloured hair, a stocky physique and piggy eyes. An elder sibling, with a younger sister. Usually they talk to each other through the privet hedge at the bottom of the garden, but today Jimmy has been allowed to come over to play. Left to their own devices he and the boy from next door have discovered a new and dangerous game. Out of sight of the kitchen window, where his mother is feeding his younger brother, they take it in turns to call his parents’ black Labrador to them, distracting the dog so the other can hit it across the hind legs with a stick. Emitting a low growl, the dog turns in uncertain circles, before chasing them across the garden, where they take refuge in the low branches of the small apple tree. Being older, Jimmy is faster, stronger, and more adept at climbing the tree. Jimmy’s family do not own a dog, nor any other pets. He does not have many other friends. Hitting the dog was his idea.