Bookkake

Last night I was in Soho for the gay lit salon Polari, to hear readings from Stella Duffy and Maureen Duffy (no relation, I’m fairly certain, although some in the audience were a little confused).

Maureen Duffy read from her most recent novel, Alchemy, a wonderful love story with two strands in history, the 17th Century and the present day. Duffy’s writing always encompasses a vast range of references, and Alchemy muses on Shakespearean cross-dressing and compares cyberporn with the more tactile pleasures of tart cards.

Stella Duffy is always a joy to hear, and she was in fine form reading from her new novel The Room of Lost Things as well as 2006’s Singling Out the Couples, which involved some extraordinary yogic leg-raises, and a vicious but brilliant single-person’s attack on smug couples, although she was at pains to point out that life does not always mirror art, or vice versa, and she and her girlfriend of 14 years were very happy, thank you very much.

Maureen Duffy also spoke of the lack of support for gay publishing in the UK, singling out her novel The Microcosm of 1966, a groundbreaking lesbian work set in the legendary Gateways club and now out of print. But there was obvious pleasure - tinged with sorrow - in reading from her recent poetry collection, Family Values, one of whose bittersweet verses I’ll include here - without permission, but I hope she won’t mind.

Knickers
by Maureen Duffy

My granny got up at six to go out cleaning
that’s why I suppose she used to say:
‘Best place in the world is bed,’
not thinking the last place in the world is bed too.
Her children mocked her, hooked on dancing
as they were on silk knickers and vests.
They tried to prise her out of her itchy
knee-length woollen drawers. Later my mother
would say it killed her but cancer is no considerer
of knickers. It got her finally six months
before I was born, another of those I never knew
but have her snapshot laughing with two
of her daughters, my aunts, Dodger who died
in her twenties out of the shed put up
in the East End garden for the family
consumptives so they could breathe their full
ration of soot (was she ‘my little dark daughter’
my granny fretted over as the anaesthetic
took her down for the operation she
never came through? Or was it my mother
unmarried, pregnant with me in lodgings
in a distant seaside town?) and Ada
(Minge was her family name) the cleverest
of them all, smart as a grammar school girl
and out of the san for the first time in years
killed by an axis bomb, the first casualty
in theat little coastal town. Grace, my mother
never forgave Hitler. She liked her bed too.
Not that she ever got much of it except
when packed off to the sanatorium
in her turn. Otherwise she was always early
up and about. So now when I want to linger
in the companionable warmth of bed
all of them get me up and going
crying out of the past: ‘We’re all a long time
dead’ with a ritual of baths and briefs on.
(’You’ll catch your death in those, they
would have said.) And breakfast, putting off
that moment when I shall lie down with them.