Very Surely All About
Suffering and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
There is very little that is good and fine in the world of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Things are hard. They’re harsh and cruel. And there is little grace and charity. People are not good. They are not kind. Not many children go to bed, it seems, with their stomachs full. They hunger instead. Hunger, perhaps, for a juster world. A better place for them to live. A happier land, a land filled with fewer sufferers, fewer people without, fewer in pain.
Yet that may be but the talk of little children. And there are the sufferings of others to contend with.
Gibson’s book begins with the immense and crushing and potent story of a drowning man. The scene is very simple. A man thrown from conveyance, lying confined by injury, by debris, on the beach front, awaiting the slow coming in of the tide. He can’t move. Each minute, every moment, he hears the seawater, its swash, come in. The water arrives slightly closer. He smells its salt long before he feels it appear at the ends of his feet and begin the slow, inexorable journey up his legs, and then, possibly growing in speed, up his arms, over his chest, and — knowing now that no one will come to rescue him — past the neck to wash his mouth with rough, rotting water. And after that, the great disappearance beneath weight of water — in company of all the dead sailors that ever fell into or upon the oceans — and though the man himself be dragged out of the sea, restored to life with artificial respiration, he lies in his bed aware of the company of the drowned men whose resting place he shared; though he was but there temporarily.
He will never, he thinks, alive, be alone any moment he has left.
No book beginning like this is likely to be great larks, frivolity, fun.
Gibson’s world is not quite like our own. It is one of stark moral lessons more than people. The old young man, for instance, and the young old man — parse that however you like — having quite a different view of life. One tragical. The other a little deaf, but well-disposed. The one of them determined to instil suitable fear, sufficient awe, in the other. And the other determined to say that the trees are in flower, and it looks to be a very pretty season, if we have all the luck we deserve with the blooms.
But this is Gibson’s world and there are other things, other evils, other people to think of.
I think of the toothless old women who fight and haggle over scraps to feed themselves. Of the dead old woman who, Gibson depicts, spent her whole life — and great energies — scrubbing a set of stairs within an inch of its own life. She would scour the paint and stain and even the outer wood from those steps. Bullying it. Tormenting it. Stripping it down to the wood. Only to go and, in the final calculation, to leave the stairs unscrubbed.
Either those stairs go or I do, she may have said. Either those stairs or I go, she claimed, her joints all arthritic, her skin excoriated and red. It was a contest won by the stairs.
I remember myself hearing stories from my grandparents of the women of their parents’ generation. Women scrubbing floors with rough brushes and with soapy water. And I remember hearing, too, of women working hard to dye or to black or to colour red the front step, made somehow imperfect through the passage of many feet. The brickwork chipped and less than solid. The illusion unmaintained without much work.
And I remember someone once telling me that, if you walked up certain working class streets at particular times of day eighty years ago, you could see all the wives of the whole road working to set right their front steps — all at the same time. I remember that story, and not — at least when hearing it first — believing it to be true.
In Gibson’s world, there are still markets to grub about in Houndsditch; and the wind that’ll cut you half in two if you struggle out into the unforgiving world. It’s a world of injustice, of poverty, of precarity — for all people, for all classes. One can dream at night of being perched atop a sheet of ice placed above the fires of perdition, feeling the ice beginning to melt, before waking — all alarums sounding — in one’s bed.
That is Gibson’s world.
And Gibson is very interested in human suffering. Even his poems of pure sensation — poems on the enjoyment of fruits, their smells and their colours, at the market — are dogged by the misfortunes of others. Upon seeing a beautiful and common sight anew — and being thankful, most thankful, to have eyes that work — our narrator, Gibson writes, hears the tapping, the very tapping, of the blind man’s cane.
You never can have anything, in this world. That’s what Gibson thinks.
That’s his world. These small sufferings. And great ones. These little tragedies. That is what Gibson is interested in. That is what he thinks life is very surely all about.