Marion Coutts: "We're terrible at dealing with death"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Wednesday evening, the artist and writer Marion Coutts won the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize worth £30,000 for her memoir The Iceberg. In The Iceberg, Coutts describes what happened to her and her family when her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008, and died in 2011. The chair of the judges Bill Bryson described her book as “Painful to read, but beautifully expressed. She recalls things with such vivid detail that you almost feel you’re reliving this experience with her in real time.” Prospect’s Arts and Books Editor Sameer Rahim spoke to Coutts about the surprising moments of joy during a terrible time, and why our attitude towards death needs to change.

Sameer Rahim: Given the subject of the book, this must be a bittersweet victory?

Marion Coutts: It’s just a delight. Tom would have been delighted… He would have been right there celebrating. It is just amazing.

SR: There’s a moment early on in the book when you write about cooking meals for Tom. “In impotence, here is something I can actually do. It is a form of control.” Did writing the book give you a sense of control?

MC: When I started writing this stuff at the beginning, I wasn’t in any sense writing a book. I wasn’t doing anything coherent really. I put things down in short sentences. They were separate Word documents—loads and loads of different Word documents—sometimes with just a sentence in them or sometimes the sentence was the subject heading and the document was empty. It all came upon us very suddenly. We were immediately immersed in it with no build up: we were right in there. [Writing things down] gave me a sense of being able to look at some of the things that were given to us to see and to experience. This business about control only came much, much later… It was only after he [Tom] died that I realised I was making a work. And at that point, I understood that actually in a book you can do what you like, and that is of course a huge arena of control, a big zone of power.

One of the things about the book was that it was written out of chronology. At first I thought I would publish it as an anti-chronological book… It was a way of being against this linear thing that was unfolding. At a certain point, I decided that would be gimmicky and I didn’t want to do that, and so it took me the longest time to put it back in order. Some sections deal with a situation that lasted three minutes, some deal with a situation that lasted six months. Even within that I could organise the time, I could deal with it in a specific way. But I hadn’t thought of that beforehand in any way: I hadn’t written a book before; I didn’t know about that.

The book was pulled together after Tom’s death, and it was a way of me thinking about the time of his living and dying for those three years, which was both a really awful time and an amazing time. It was a way of being connected to that noise, that stuff, that excitement that was going on.

SR: In one of the emails you sent to your friends included in the book you describe a “precarious, difficult but also strangely wonderful time.”

MC: We did find that. We just did. Obviously I took my cue from him [Tom]: his personality powers the book in a sense. But there was also the thing that we were very much in it together…There were certain things that you didn’t discuss because you were together with this person. Whatever happened you would do it together. But the ways of doing stuff and the sort of imaginative leaps that he took and our friends took—it was a huge improvisatory leap. There are no models: it’s not like someone says, this is how you die. So you can do it how you like.

There is a line in Tom’s book, Until Further Notice, I Am Alive, where he says: “Of course I’m helpless. So what do I do with helplessness.” I think that’s a very potent thought about how even in extremis one can continue… We’re very lucky in slightly mad ways: the tumour took his language and ultimately killed him but it didn’t take his intellect or his personality: it was still there. And that is hugely important. The fact that he was there, the fact that he was the motor for all this stuff. One couldn’t stop.

SR: Has the experience changed the way you look at death and the way we deal with it in our society?

MC: We’re terrible with it actually—we’re really, really, poor. I think we fudge the language of our endings and we kind of look away, and one of the big drivers of the book is being attentive and not glossing the ending. Then there’s the whole business of death and young children, and our decision to have our child with us. Nothing was hidden from him. Obviously you have to navigate that incredibly carefully but why would he not be with us? What could be more frightening than not being told things? The truth was already bad so you didn’t want to make anything worse.

One of the other things I think about the experience is how important it was to have the hospice. I’d really speak to the expansion of hospice as a system—both hospice at home and hospice as a dedicated unit. When things had reached a certain point, our main aim was to be together. People shouldn’t die in hospitals, they shouldn’t be removed from their habitat.

Most deaths are not medical emergencies… we got to the hospice by the skin of our teeth. It’s a really important fact that very much informs how I am now, the fact that I can talk to you, and the fact that I wrote the book, because I had the space from which to look back. We all had that time together. And that’s a really big deal.

SR: The presence of your friends who came to help is striking. You had a community of people to support you.

MC: It was very important. Tom was very much being fuelled by the social. It was what kept him going: he really enjoyed it, and even when his language was almost gone, and he was pretty incapacitated, his capacity to enjoy was huge. So we couldn’t drop that for one minute; it was completely exhausting for everybody but it was really vital.

SR: You’re an artist as well as a writer, and I was wondering whether you’d created any artworks in response to Tom’s death?

MC: I packed up my studio pretty quickly on hearing what was happening. I was just emerging from a space of having a child, thinking about my career and then this happened. There just wasn’t anything I wanted to make. Tom was a writer and the pressure was on words and word-finding and he continued to work and we helped him work on his projects. He had his book, he had his collected essays; language and words and being particular and accurate in finding the words was a kind of mantra. We did it day and night. Out of that it made sense that the thing I was making was a work of words. And I do think of it rather like that. This is a work of language. The pieces I made beforehand—videos, films, sculptural objects—were much much concerned with the physicality of the experience, and that’s what I was trying to do with language.

SR: In the book you write: “I am an over-achiever. I will do anything and everything and all. Why am I so competitive? Must I do even this thing well?” Did you allow yourself to feel unsettled by your composure?

MC: I think that unsettlement runs all the way through… In earlier drafts there were more actual rants and then I thought that the violence was in the language, in the structure of the sentences, and the way things are articulated in each sentence. That’s where I think that unsettlement goes.

The point I realised that it was a book I drafted and drafted, I counted 13 drafts because I’m sure there were more…I wanted to take people very close to the texture of what it was like. It has an intimacy I hope. If you think about it theoretically, it wasn’t like I sat down to write a memoir about my husband’s illness and death… I wanted to write that book in that way, in those words, in that format.

SR: I wonder if you’ve read another of the shortlisted books, Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, which gives the surgeon’s view of brain tumours?

MC: I haven’t read Marsh’s book… but I had a chat to him and he said it [The Iceberg] was interesting because we don’t often get the patient’s perspective. The NHS was amazing in many regards, and in some regards a complete fail. It’s very volatile and chancy what kind of experience you have. One of the things that struck home was that I’m a person who is very articulate: I can fight for what I want, I can talk, I can make huge efforts to find out what I need to know. And a lot of people absolutely cannot do that, and I really felt the lack of advocacy. If you aren't someone who can talk and fight for your rights, it can be really difficult. Particularly around dying and where people should die. I saw around us people who should not have died in hospital, who did not want to die in hospital, their families didn’t want then to die in hospital but that didn’t happen for them. That voice really needs to be listened to because it matters so much—it matters to the person who is dying, it matters hugely to their family and to how they handle their grief afterwards.

SR: Do you think this book will help with that?

MC: I can only hope so. Before I wrote the book it didn’t occur to me that anyone who I didn’t know would get in touch with me about it, but of course they have in all sorts of ways and that’s been incredibly moving and incredibly thought-provoking and I’m just really happy if something I’ve done can be of assistance, in a very extreme situation, on whatever level.

"The Iceberg"by Marion Coutts is published by Atlantic (£14.99)