But Why Must We Always Rise To One Another? In Praise Of Flat Places

 

At the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, children zigzagged between the duckponds like bees performing a cryptic private dance. The sound of children screaming makes my hands judder, in half-remembered horror. But today I could bear it, because there were geese to feed; they ran after me, pistoning seed out of my hand and leaving crescents of mud behind. As we left the feeding area, birdwatching hides rose up from the path: dark and shady, with silence inside and long windows giving out on to the marshy flatlands around the Severn Estuary. This was more like it.

Very quietly, we unhooked the wooden window clasps and let the pane down. My friend settled in with his binoculars, while I, chin-on-arms, watched the flat landscape – the low, ironed green, sprinkled with buttercups; the patches of water like gleaming fallen coins. We’d come in summer: a bad time for wetland wildfowl, my friend told me. In wintertime, godwits and dunlin and grey plovers come in from northern Europe and Russia to nibble on Britain’s mudflats. But when the weather gets warmer, many of these nice solid wading birds go back to the Arctic Circle, and leave Britain’s flat landscapes to themselves. That was OK with me. I was really here for the bare, stretched horizons of the wetlands. The flat places with nothing much to look at.

So I looked. And gradually the noise in my head got quieter. It always does, when I’m in a flat place. Something in me stills and lines up with the horizon.

Flat places are the ground that my mind is built upon. Wetlands, fenlands, stretches of shingle: I never get tired of their clear, straight horizons. Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless. Without mountains or hills, there’s nothing to catch on my vision, or distract me. I’m freed from hindrance. I could rise up, I think, into the air and float.

This isn’t a popular view, I know. I’m aware that people often find flat landscapes alienating. They can seem bleak, boring, even terrifying, because there’s nowhere to hide, and everyone can see you for miles. There’s no landmark to fix your gaze upon, and this makes it difficult to orientate yourself. That’s why people tend to prefer breathtaking mountains or lush forests or plunging valleys. Scenes with texture, that steer your vision comfortingly as you move from detailed foreground to rising background. People know where they are in varied, hilly landscapes. And they know who they are.

The experience of elation or awe in the face of a mountain is as old as literature. Gods lived on Mount Olympus, in ancient Greece. The Romantic poets climbed Mont Blanc to enthuse and gush. Loving a mountain means that you join a whole long line of mountain-loving humans, well-documented in novels and poetry and drama. Loving a mountain joins you to something bigger than yourself. I understand those preferences. But I am different. It is flat spaces that make me come alive. The lack of landmarks makes me feel I could do anything, or go anywhere I wanted. Uncontrolled and uncoerced: unsteered by other people’s beliefs or priorities. In a flat space, there are no focal points to fixate on, to force me to see some things and miss out on others. Looking out at the flat wetlands of Slimbridge, that summer’s day, my mind spilled out across the space like water over a floor: expanding, becoming sensitive and alive again, where life and work and other people had shut it up close.
 
My life has made me strange. I don’t mind admitting that. I was born and raised in an odd house in Pakistan, dominated by an arrogant and grandiose father. He was a celebrated doctor, and he had big ideas: so big that they absorbed us all and left no room for anything else. He was a genius, he told us. Other people were stupid: we should stay away from them. Especially other Pakistanis. He saw them as benighted by religion. My father was a Pakistani in love with the West, with the very surface layer of its cultural touchstones: Mozart, Vincent van Gogh, Gilbert and Sullivan. He painted a copy of The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Peletier (1872) by Edgar Degas, five foot by three, which he hung in the living room: the arms of the ballerinas bare and provocative and just a bit wrong in the elbows, where he’d misjudged the angles. Yet my father didn’t like British people any more than he liked Pakistanis; they didn’t defer to him in the way he thought he deserved. So he kept us away from everyone. We weren’t to speak to the neighbours, or visit friends from school. Our whole world was inside that house, our eyes trained upon him, braced for anything to happen. He might bring home chocolate. Or live turkeys. Or come in roaring and grabbing and throwing things. Anything could happen. And anything happened all the time.

Or maybe it was nothing. It felt like nothing: those long days cooped up in the hot dazed rooms. My father went out, and we didn’t. We were driven to school and driven back, and that was all. In the summers, when school was out, we went nowhere. There was nothing to do or look at or think about, except the floor, and the books we’d read and reread over and over, with the sound of the traffic shouting outside, and my uncles and aunts and grandparents shouting downstairs. Life was a bare landscape with nowhere to hide. I knew the other children at school didn’t live like this, but I couldn’t explain what this was. I lived my life in a daze. I wished there was more space.

‘You’re lucky,’ my mother said. White and British, she had moved to Pakistan to be with my father. All day she mopped and cooked and scraped up vomit. She roamed through the house, back and forth and back again, even more trapped than we were. ‘You’ve got enough to eat. You go to school. Do you know how many girls don’t go to school in this country? Should we take you out of school and just marry you off, so you can scrub floors for your in-laws all your life?’

I was lucky. And I went on getting luckier. I was lucky when my father disowned me, two weeks before my 16th birthday, and I fled with my mother and sisters to Britain. I was lucky when I got to go to school again, near my grandmother’s house in Scotland, and chose what I wanted to study, and could walk in the street by myself for the first time, and look at the sea and the grass. I was lucky when I got into Oxford to study English, floated by government grants and equal opportunity bursaries. But for some reason, throughout my 20s, my body didn’t seem to know I was lucky. It cried, and hurt, and clouded over, and numbed out. It was terrified of other people. It wouldn’t come close to them, wouldn’t be drawn to them, wouldn’t be caught up by passion. I kept falling asleep. I couldn’t want anything. And I couldn’t explain why. When I tried to share my feelings with other people, they couldn’t see what I saw. They couldn’t see the nothing of my life, which burned a thick stark line across my mind.

My life in Pakistan, full of painful nothing, had left a flat landscape inside my head. Not a bleak, dead one. That would almost have been easier. This flat landscape seared with painful livingness. It wouldn’t let me look away: kept me mesmerised by its agonised, intense emptiness. And it seemed more real than any of the strange world around me. Even in safe cosy Britain, where there were consequences for hurting your children and education was free, I sensed something sinister under the gleaming surface. Something stark and painful, and utterly relentless that refused to know how much its wealth and serenity was built on the pain of others, stripped for parts by white colonisers and taught to hate themselves.

It made it hard to be around people, in their happy ignorance. It made it hard to feel safe with them. So I lived in my own world, alone with what was real to me alone. I had no words to describe any of this. I loved my friends, but I couldn’t bring them in there with me. I knew the flat place was trying to tell me something important: something that Britain didn’t want to know. I just couldn’t work out what. And it hurt that no one else could see it.

When the wading birds go home for the summer, warblers from Europe and Africa take their place, eating, breeding and shouting seductively at each other. Little brown birds, mostly: flighty, quick, difficult to glimpse and to distinguish. Cetti’s warbler, Dartford warbler, grasshopper warbler. Garden warbler, marsh warbler, reed warbler, willow warbler, wood warbler, sedge warbler. So many and so alike, and in the summer the trees grow thick leaves to hide them from view. At Slimbridge, my friend peered at the reedy edge of a pond, binoculars to his eyes, muttering about a warbler, half to himself. I had no idea what kind of warbler it might be. Between the shivers of leaves, and the everyday swell and tremble of my vision, I could barely see the bird at all.

How do we see things? Usually we see what we know: what we expect to see. If there’s a mountain in the middle of a plain, we stop seeing the plain. The mountain ‘matters’; the plain doesn’t. Our cultures tell us what’s worth seeing and what isn’t. What counts as real and what doesn’t. In a flat place, we’re told there’s nothing to see. But the life I’ve lived has made me struggle to see what I’m supposed to: to focus on the right things, and ignore the wrong ones. What I can see instead, all the time, is the flat place.

As we went on along the path, the birdwatching hides fell away. Suddenly there was a high, raised bank on the left, a little furred comb of grass along the top, joining earth to sky. I knew what that bank held back from us: the flat stretch of the Severn Estuary, too muddy to step upon. The Bristol Channel brings up armfuls of brown mud, day and night: its funnel shape and sandy base turn the water heavy with silt. But in that mud lives delicious food for wading birds. Redshank, curlews, wigeon, shelduck, dunlin all gather to feast on ragworms and clams. If you cut a square metre out of the Severn mud, just 2.5 centimetres deep – like a big thick square of turf – it would contain the same number of calories as 13 Mars bars, all in snails and worms. There’s a richness in flat places, and the birds know it.

My friend was getting excited. Wading birds are his favourite, and they’d be out on the estuary. Birdwatching is a good hobby if, like my friend, you enjoy seeking focal points, ways of ordering your experience of nature. Giving things names. Yet there’s another kind of life, which is about living alongside things that have no names: memories that can’t be explained. The day something might have been put into my shoes, to smuggle it across a border. The day something was injected into me, at home, for reasons unknown. My grandfather, roaming the corridors with wide eyes, screaming and shouting for help. The men who came to the house and had conversations in whispers. And throughout, my father: mouth stretched with rage, throwing a metal box at me – its wires dangling and snapping – with a hatred even he couldn’t name.
 
Such a nameless life means that, normally, the longer I spend around people, the more I feel like I’ve been set on fire. But my friend is good at letting me be. He carries around my world respectfully, without prying, like a very polite bellhop with a lady’s handbag.

On our right were the inland flats: a river winding through, trees assembled at the back like an audience of mixed height, watching the bare stage of the level landscape, as I was: the prickling nothing that was happening all over it. Yellow flowers waved stiffly, out of sync, like buzzing made visible.
We passed through a tunnel of trees stretching over the path, almost touching overhead, and then – suddenly – the bank, which had been blocking our view, gave out, and there was clear flat land uninterrupted between us and the Bristol Channel. Salty grassland stretched out wide and, beyond, a little strip of sea. What was the land beyond, my friend wondered? Was it Wales? Already my mind was settling into straight quiet lines. The white shine on the green land and the smooth grass felt like hands running reassuringly over my head and down my neck. My friend walked ahead, towards the sea, and I took a photo of him, tiny on the path, in his pink shirt, with the blue sky arching over.

Four years ago, none of this – light, comfort, awe – would have seemed possible. I was 29. I’d just finished my doctorate, and got an academic job that would last a whole three years. This changed my life because it paid enough for me to start weekly therapy. I went into my therapist’s office – bony, exhausted and struggling to want to stay alive – and explained that nothing had happened to me, and could she maybe help, please?

My therapist was delicate and wise. She knew when to be offhand. Almost in passing, she mentioned complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). I snatched up the term and went straight to books, to the internet, to strip it for meaning. Complex PTSD, I learned from the psychiatrist Judith Herman and the psychotherapist Pete Walker, is different from the sort of PTSD we associate with war trauma, or attack. It doesn’t turn on a single, traumatic memory, which marks the point when, for the survivor, the world turned from OK to not OK. In complex PTSD, the world may never have been OK in the first place. Complex PTSD is caused by ongoing events – often, where it feels like they’ll never end, or there’s no hope of escape. It’s worse when the traumas were caused by someone who was meant to take care of you. It’s worse if they start when you’re very young: too little to know what counts as an ‘event’. Or what counts as something being ‘not OK’.

This explained why the flat place in my mind had no landmarks I could pick out. No single terrible thing had happened to me, yet my whole life had been filled with a nameless terror and fear since I was born. I’d learned to dissociate to protect myself – to vanish from terrifying situations that I couldn’t fight or fly from. And that had been a wise response, said my therapist, to the situation I’d been in. Now, in Britain, a new way of handling life and its terrors might be more helpful. With my therapist, I started lining up what I could see, in my mind, with what I felt: sliding them up along the same straight horizon.

And I started going for walks in flat places. Morecambe Bay, in the northwest. The Cambridgeshire fens. Suffolk. Orkney. I dug my toes into mud, traced shapes in shingle, and stared at long gorgeous horizons in places that held themselves unapologetically in their strange refusal to be conventionally attractive to viewers, seducing them with hidden turnings or mystical peaks. In such places, I could be strange too: inscrutable, solitary, refusing to fit into an easy story that rose to a climax and fell to a satisfying ending. What was inside me found its counterpoint in the fens and mudflats. I was no longer alone.

From those flat places, drained and bare and empty, and which hid nothing – which, like me, couldn’t stop showing their damage – there rose up stories of more migrants from Asia and Africa. Not birds, this time, but cockle-pickers, farm-workers, a human zoo, a labour battalion. Migrants whom Britain does not know how to see; whom it prefers not to see. I wrote about these walks in my book, A Flat Place (2023). I put the flat place inside me on to paper, made it into a solid flat rectangle bound between boards, so that it didn’t need to surge up under my eyes any longer. I could show it to friends who loved me.

There were little birds out on the mud. I could see them but I didn’t know what they were. My friend had his binoculars out, and was muttering.

‘What do you think that is?’

As we relaxed into the space between us, birds started slowly to come into focus for me. I leaned in, peered through his binoculars.

‘I can see grey,’ I said. ‘And a bit of black. And maybe brown? Near the head?’

There was a pause.

‘Oh,’ said my friend. ‘It’s a wigeon.’

The plural of wigeon is either wigeons or wigeon. The males have brown-russet heads, peach chests, grey bodies.

We’d seen almost no one since we left the main centre, but now we stopped near a man who’d set up his camera on a tripod. His friend was sitting on the ground, nearby. They were both talking, neither of them listening to the other.

‘I was hoping we could have the soup at the centre,’ said the friend. ‘But I saw on the board, it’s tomato. I can’t stand tomato.’

‘Either a curlew or a whimbrel,’ said the cameraman, curving the lens round. ‘Earlier, the way it was moving made me think curlew. But now I’m not so sure.’

‘So I suppose we’ll just do sandwiches,’ said the friend. ‘I don’t know what they’ll have in the way of vegetarian though. If it’s just egg…’

‘This would be the right time of year for whimbrel,’ said the cameraman.

How can we ever know each other? How can we even know what we are seeing?

My vision ran over the clear brown land, mirrored with blue and white where the water had come in. It ran and ran as fast and as far as it wanted. It ran over the tiny birds, unseeing, over the wigeon and the curlews or whimbrels. It was the flatness I could see, bigger and better than anything else in that landscape, full of brightness and clarity. It didn’t have an existence for anyone but me, that day. But I could see it and felt I knew what it was.
 
Right at the end of the big map, printed on boards throughout Slimbridge, was a kingfisher hide, facing a river. When we got there, the hut was full, so we hovered waiting for a seat to become free. Who wouldn’t want to see a kingfisher? They are so beautiful and elusive: a rare, jewelled handful of blue and orange in among Britain’s collection of little brown birds. I’d seen a flash of blue down at a river, once, the year I was bones, but that was the closest I’d come. Once we were seated, my friend leaned next to me. This was allowed, because we were friends.

Intimacy is very, very hard for me. This is one of the most powerful and painful parts of cPTSD. At its root, complex trauma is relational trauma. It comes from being totally dependent on someone, for a long time, and being catastrophically betrayed by them – so catastrophically that they distort your sense of other people, and what they will do to you. Complex PTSD can mean feeling that other people aren’t real, or safe. That you are fundamentally different from them and can never share a world. Or, worse, that you are essentially defective and repulsive, and wise people should stay away from you.

Yet the only way out of cPTSD is relationship. It’s a cruel irony. The only way to start feeling better is to get close to people, and trust them: to have the experience of them not betraying you. It’s difficult, because everyone is busy and human and distracted, and makes mistakes. A little slip on their part will prove, beyond doubt, that you were right to be suspicious in the first place.

My experience of cPTSD made it hard for me to imagine that anyone would want to be near me, ever. I always marvelled when my friends leaned in close or hugged me. But when I’m sure it’s safe and allowed – that I won’t harm them, or disgust them – I can’t take my hands off them. I drape myself over them, poke my chin into their clavicles, touch their heads. I’m sold. I’m theirs. I touch them again and again, to check they’re still real.

My friend put his binoculars over my head, and the lady sitting next to me told me where to look. The kingfishers were coming in and out of that little hole in the bank, she said. I tried to find it through the lenses. Twice everyone in the hide gasped and started clicking cameras, while I waved the binoculars frantically, unable to see what they were seeing. The third time – at last – I saw it. The kingfisher came out of the hole; it sat on the twig. I saw its orange tummy. I saw its little head turning, taking everything in, at peace.

I looked and looked until I felt guilty, and held the binoculars up to my friend. But he shook his head. ‘This is your first proper kingfisher,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them before, lots of times. You enjoy it.’

I turned back to the bank, and went on seeing what everyone else could see, till the kingfisher went back into its hole and the moment was broken.

What I call the flat place inside me, now, is the feeling of intensity, of angry stubbornness: of knowing that I am real, and that what I know is real, even if the world can’t see it. I know what people can do to each other. What parents can do to their own children. Although the good moments get more and more frequent – when my friends and I find, even briefly, that we’re seeing the same thing at the same time – in the end, I wouldn’t trade the flat place for anything. Even if it means living mostly in my own world, alone with the memories without names that draw my eye endlessly but never rise into focal points in the flat place inside me. Shoes. A metal box. The scratch of a needle. The things I alone can see.

Flat places. By Noreen Masud.  Aeon, September  28, 2023.

Who and what do we love? And why?

In the 2007 video "In My Language," the writer and controversial activist Mel Baggs performs the repetitive actions associated with their autism. (Baggs died in April 2020.) Society often views these repetitive stims as evidence that the autistic person is cut off from the world. On the contrary, Baggs explains in subtitles, these actions spring from a profound responsiveness to their environment. They cannot, and will not, differentiate between the trivial, the inanimate, and the socially acceptable. Baggs responds with tender fascination to a stream of water in the same way as a neurotypical person might to a human face or speech. They bat at a string, rattle a door handle, run their finger over a corrugated chair seat, rub their face and head between the pages of a book. All the time they sing, in a beautiful drone which reminds me both of a bagpipe sound and of Pakistani classical music.

“…the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as "being in a world of my own". Whereas if I … only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am "opening up to true interaction with the world". They judge my existence, awareness and personhood on which of a tiny and limited part of the world I appear to be reacting to.

 […] I smell things. I listen to things. I feel things. I taste things. I look at things. It is not enough to look and listen and taste and smell and feel, I have to do those to the right things, such as look at books and fail to do them to the wrong things or else people doubt that I am a thinking being…”

I read about Baggs's work in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus lockdown was firmly in place, and I'd been alone and happy in my flat for a long time. I stopped reading, looked up the video and watched it through. After, I lay on my back on my red rug in the middle of the living room with my hands pressed into my eyes. The revelation vibrated through me; I could feel it in my teeth. Not because the idea of a relationship with inanimate things was new to me. But because, in fact, it had never occurred to me that one might not engage deeply and absorbedly with unalive things. A strand of me seemed to shake itself loose and offer itself as distinct, as graspable.

I'd long experienced something of what Baggs described. Complex trauma, sustained throughout an isolated and cultish childhood in Pakistan, meant that I'd struggled to feel attuned to human faces (whether my mother, my friends or strangers), preferred to be alone, and avoided strong stimuli, like crowded places or loud voices. Instead, I'd always cleaved to objects – stones, red tripods in pizza boxes, the cut sides of a raw potato – with a rapt affection that I struggled to explain to those around me.

My book "A Flat Place" is about the flat landscapes of Britain and Pakistan, and my intense, fascinated love for them. Flat landscapes aren't a popular thing to love. The bare expanses of prairies, fenlands, wheatfields and marshes can seem boring, bleak, even frightening. Their horizons have no landmarks to hang on to: nothing to orientate yourself toward. That's why we hate them or fear them, mostly, in Western culture. It's hard to find the point of them, in a very literal sense.

 But I love them in the same way that I love stones and bones. They are hard, inert, inscrutable. Busy being themselves, in a way I can't stop watching. Because they have no landmarks, I can't grab onto them — can't orientate successfully toward them — and so I could look at them forever.

I think about my sexuality in the same way. It is unfocused, self-enclosed, directed toward strange things. The critic Sara Ahmed turned on a light for me in her book "Queer Phenomenology." She picks up on the "orientation" in "sexual orientation." To be orientated in space is to be directed, or find yourself directed, to someone or something. Thinking in these spatial terms was revelatory to me. My queerness comes from not being orientated to anyone I've met, so far, in a way that's consistent, mutual and survivable: in a way that I can disentangle from my trauma.

How do I explain this? Because of course, you do have to explain yourself in this world. We live alongside other people, and language is all that we have. I don't mind. I say that I am gay; when I am being most accurate, I say I am queer. Not because, as some people think, "queer" affords mobility between socially normative and non-normative gender and sexual presentations. For me, "queer" allows me to move between desiring women, and not desiring anyone at all. Mostly I want to be alone, or with cats: swimming in cold water, until my eyes go blurry. I want to hold clean bones and fossils; I want to look at a plant until I feel like I'm becoming part of it. I want my friends to hug me and help me hold my body together. And I'd like a girlfriend, please, if it's convenient. But don't touch me there. Or there. Ever.

There are other words I could use for myself, apart from "queer" and "gay," but I find I'm not interested in them either. It's not that I don't like labels. Labels are very useful. It's more that I am happy for my murkiness to constitute my sexuality: happy to be one big mess of loves and fascinations which don't separate out neatly. The writer Callum Angus has a short story, "The Swarm," which I double-dog-eared when I read it. A woman gives birth to a swarm of insects. "As it grew," Angus writes, "the swarm's head filled with a constant buzzing sound, its skin was always crawling, and it devoured entire fields of corn in a single afternoon" (105). I am happy to be a swarm.

My book "A Flat Place" makes a case for description rather than summary and conclusions. There's so much we can't know. There are so many ways in which our possibilities of knowing are trapped by the cultural channels available to us. Our conclusions, in general, are not much good. At this point I find it most helpful to describe rather than sum up: to stay on the surface of the flat landscape, and look at what is right there, rather than digging for absolute answers.

And like a flat landscape, I am content, sometimes, to be without feeling. To want nothing. Capitalism tells us that we must always be wanting: that when desire ends, we somehow lose our humanity or distinctiveness. And one of the ways we understand our desires is through landscape. People often use landscape as a way of noticing, describing and validating their feelings. Mountain ranges, or textured rivers — landscapes full of variation — seem appealing because they elicit and reflect the heightened feelings of ecstasy and despair that we're most entranced by: that we think of as representative of "real" human experience. In contrast, we continue to resist the idea that we might love things and spaces which signal their passive inanimateness: a blank stone, a chair seat, or a flat landscape. To feel flat, or to love in a flattened way, or to love flat things, is one step, we're taught to think, from deathliness.

 But there are all kinds of reasons why one might not distinguish, in one's loving relationships, between alive and unalive things. For me, it comes from a sense that a living creature might not have much to offer me. Or rather, they offer me something I can't rise to meet.

But why must we always rise to one another?

How much better, I think sometimes, to know that one can never understand another. To sit alongside them, or it, in unbridgeable difference.

In praise of flat places: On queerness, landscapes and understanding our desires. By Noreen Masud.  Salon, June 24, 2023. 

From Pakistan, two flat landscapes stay with me. One outside our house, one inside it.

Outside: The green misted fields glimpsed from the car window, stretching out wide and far away, on my way to school.

And inside: the flat stone floors of the house. I can still feel them against my cheek, under my hands. Caramel-coloured marble blocks, each just under a metre square. They were embedded with grey and white and pale blue pebbles, and sheared perfectly smooth: joined together with dark grey frosted glass. In the heat of the day, every day, I lay on that cold floor, moving my hands over it slowly, in small circles and in large ones.

When I stare at any flat landscape now, I get the same feeling of coolness: in my throat, in my hands, and at the back of my neck. My gaze loops over and over the stark surface. It feels like rubbing my hands over a smooth table, or a cold sheet of ice. But very few things in nature are truly, perfectly flat. As my eye roves, I know I’m seeking something. Will there be a flaw, a knot, a gnarl, to break the surface? Half of me hopes I’ll never find one. Half of me goes on searching, uneasily.

Something went wrong in my life, years ago. A knot or a gnarl, embedded somewhere, which must have sent everything strange. But I can’t seem to find it.

The memory theorist Douwe Draaisma argues that we only remember things that are aberrations from the normal. I can’t remember what happened to me because it was the substance of my normal. But one of my clearest memories is of lying on that stone floor. Ants crawled across it, just as lizards crawled up the walls and cockroaches roamed the bathroom, and frogs sheltered in the kitchen cupboards. I put my hands flat on the ground, index fingers and thumbs forming the shape of an ace of spades, trapping an ant. It blundered around this new wall, trying to find a way out until eventually it gave up and climbed up onto my hand. I lifted my hand and watched the ant crawling down my arm, round and round. My hair prickles at the memory of it biting, again and again.

It’s important to say that my life in Pakistan was unusual. It was an odd life compared to British lives, but for Pakistan, too, it was an unusual life. My father put his two big hands on the ground around us, and we crawled around inside. If I remember the floor more clearly than anything, it’s because for thirteen years that was my world. The cold marble; the fluorescent lights; the dusty smell of the chicken wire over the windows. In the summers, when there was no school, months could go past without us leaving the two rooms on the upper floor of our house. My mother, my three sisters, and me: Rabbit, Spot, and Forget-Me-Not. Those aren’t their real names, but I think you could have guessed that.

 No one else I knew lived like this. Many, many Muslim and Pakistani women have rich, juicy, vital lives, integrated with other people, fulfilling their ambitions. But also, many don’t, because Pakistani society lets things go both ways. In particular, it turns a blind eye to anything that happens between fathers and daughters.

My father was a doctor, and the eldest son in his family: in charge at work and at home. He specialized in diabetes, which afflicts nearly a fifth of the Pakistani population. By all accounts, he did it very, very well. ‘Oh, you’re Dr. Anwar’s daughter!’ my teachers would exclaim. I squirmed. His intelligence was impatient, fitful, and indifferent to rules; he skirted and tore through the tedious twists of bureaucracy which colonization had left hanging around our country like cobwebs. He became known as a genius, a maverick, doing what he thought best and never asking for permission, in the way that men are allowed to do all over the world. Anyone who disagreed with him, he thought, was stupid and ignorant. And he had a specific disdain for Pakistan: what he saw as its inefficiency, slowness, and superstition.

‘I don’t worship Allah,’ he used to say, smiling. ‘I worship my god, Apollo.’

My father was an Anglophile who despised most other Pakistanis. It became part of his mythology. ‘Dr. Anwar is so rude,’ his patients would say lovingly, ‘but such a great man.’ He wore very fine Western suits, and leather shoes which he would have me fetch and polish and slide onto his feet. He shaved his beard and trimmed his mustache; he took the top off a water cooler and used it to brew illegal cider in our bathtub. He made us taste the results. The alcohol ran warm down my throat and pooled in my stomach.

The great man was a megalomaniac and a fantasist. He’d done work for the president, he told us. For the army. When you’re as good as I am, he said, you can do whatever you want. And ironically, despite my father’s Westernization, only Pakistan would handle him deferentially enough for his tastes. Only its glitching, dropping rhythms—lurching from crisis to crisis—would let him dodge through the system without answering to anybody.

Other people don’t understand, my father told us. Stay away from them. He loathed the weddings, the visits, and the community relationships that formed the glue of Pakistani society. If we spoke to the neighbours, or went to our friends’ houses, they’d only start asking for favours and taking up his time. So that wasn’t allowed.

To his credit, he never complained about having four girls and no boys. ‘My girls are my boys,’ he used to tell people who hinted delicately at our family’s tragedy. We would be every bit as good, he decided. We’d be doctors and engineers and mathematicians. Our hair was cut short, straight across our heads, and we were kept away from other children. Instead, shut inside, we were tested. Maths. Physics. Lateral thinking. And more abstract things: Can you identify your sisters by the scent of their pillows? Can you solve this riddle? If I put you up high, so high that you freeze with fear, can you work out how to climb down?

I always failed.

The Flat Places of Pakistan: Solving the Riddle of Childhood. By  Noreen Masud. Psychology Today, June 6, 2023. 

 In 2019, I went to a therapist because I was very thin and very sad and really not wanting to be alive, but too tired to do anything about it. There was something inside me that was screaming, but I couldn’t explain it to anyone.

I’m better at explaining it now, or not explaining it. I write about it in my new memoir, A Flat Place. Here are some bones: I’d been born and raised in a strange family in Pakistan, headed by a father convinced that he was the answer to all the country’s problems, and probably all of God’s problems too. He’d kept us inside, banned us from talking to the neighbours, and put us through physical and psychological tests. A month before I turned sixteen, he’d disowned my sisters and me, and my (white) mother took us all to live with her mother in Scotland.

Now, fifteen or so years later, I was a postdoctoral fellow at a top university in the North of England, trying to write a monograph on flat landscapes in literature. I’d done well in my career but I felt terrible. I only wanted to be alone, but even that wasn’t enough. Most days I spent lying flat, with my cheek on the floor.

I couldn’t solve the problem of loving and being loved, of holding and being held. And I didn’t know how to live in the world either with or without love.

My therapist let me sit with my face on my knees, or stare out of the window, for weeks. She was too sensible to argue with me. I was really bad, I’d warned her, at being told what to do; it made me want to run away. So we talked about my mother and my father, and my work, and the bare, scalded landscapes inside my head. I told her: the world felt like I was walking through a flat, burned-out wasteland, and no one could see the horrors all around us except me. Flat landscapes had always given shape and meaning to my thoughts, and I described them to her in detail.

The therapist listened to the images of flat places I described, and let them become the main language between us. And it was only in passing, casually, that she mentioned complex post-traumatic stress disorder or cPTSD. It gave me a jolt. In my head I imagined war veterans: like my father, who’d seen his best friend blown up next to him in the Pakistan-Bangladesh war of 1971, when he was just seventeen. Post-traumatic stress disorder seemed a ludicrous thing to associate with that cramped, febrile house back in Lahore.

I stewed over the term ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’ for a while. I Googled it when I got home. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I learned, didn’t turn on a single shocking event, like regular PTSD. It described the results of trauma that occurred over a long period of time, usually perpetrated by people who should have looked after you, in a situation where you felt no hope of escape. Symptoms included: physical pains (like the aches which crawled through my stomach and legs and hips and chest, every day, and choked me), dissociative symptoms (like the way I went numb and let the world become unreal around me), suicidal feelings, a sense of worthlessness and permanent damage, finding friendships and relationships very difficult. Yes.

I went back to my therapist and brought it up again, half-belligerently. The therapist said: yes, this was one of the words which might make sense in the context. Another might be ‘developmental trauma’. We could use either of those names if we wanted, but we didn’t have to use any names at all. I relaxed. This left me free to move whichever way I wanted, like a queen on a chessboard.

And gradually, after sitting next to it for a long time, I decided that I was okay with the term ‘complex PTSD’. Sometimes it helps to have a word. It didn’t have to fit me seamlessly; there were things about the term which still itched, or felt strange. But words are for communication, and this helped me communicate.

And having a word was a way, strangely, of realising: I wasn’t alone. Lots of people had had similar experiences with similar results. Part of my horror and loneliness was the feeling that no one could ever understand what had happened to me, and what it had done to me. But actually, I was just a normal human being like other normal human beings, being shaped by my life in the way that everybody was, and finding my way through.

I started to use the term ‘cPTSD’ when it felt right. And now, sometimes I use it and sometimes I don’t. And I started to write my book A Flat Place, about the way that my life felt like a flat landscape with no landmarks: nothing to point to as a single, searing explanation of ‘what happened to me’. And I wrote about how that hurt but could also be beautiful: could be a way of seeing things with a brightness and intensity which was all my own.

The term ‘cPTSD’ gave me a little ledge to stand on, a place to begin, with the project of putting my world into language. I don’t think it’s part of my identity, exactly. It’s a tool, like any other, to help make myself clear to other people. No one can ever be perfectly understood: that’s part of the dilemma and the despair of being human. But using the term is a way of having faith that sometimes the act of connection is more important than the detail. That an imperfect, smudged seeing of each other might still be worthwhile.

The term ‘cPTSD’ may not always be useful to me. But for now, it is. I wrote A Flat Place to become more okay with trusting other people and trusting language to hold me.

In the stairwell outside my therapist’s office, thick red letters were propped up on a windowsill next to a diffuser, spelling LOVE and HOME. I couldn’t bear it at first: I swapped around the letters so that they read VOLE EMOH. But they were put back in their right place, every time, when I returned. LOVE. HOME. And gradually, I started leaving them alone. Words can be absurd and embarrassing, but so are we.

 

I Was Sad and Did Not Want to Live. By Noreen Masud. Psychology Today, June 7, 2023. 

A Flat Place is a surprising and lyrical journey—part memoir, part nature book—meditating on the meaning of "flatness" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature’s most undervalued wonders. Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place — bodily and psychologically — and the healing properties of literature and landscape.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions. She work mostly on twentieth-century literature, but makes forays into Victorian and Romantic literature too. Carissa Potter talks with Masud.

Noreen Masud on finding comfort in flat places. Bad at Keeping Secrets, June 8, 2023. 

 

Website Noreen Masud

Memoirs have sometimes been considered a form of fiction, not as false accounts but by being enriched with the layering of symbols, place, and affable narration. Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma picks up these tools and employs them to full effect, as she takes the reader further and further into these vast, empty-but-not places to share her experiences.

“The world was a flat plain with nowhere to hide…Nothing was all right…Flat landscapes have always given me a way to love myself,” are just a few of the achingly honest and intriguing lines Masud shares in her introduction. It helps frame and give shape to this work, in understanding the three main focuses therein: her perspective as a Pakistani immigrant in the U.K., her diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD), and her fascination and feelings of safety in flat places. This is all woven together throughout the memoir, giving a textured and intimate portrayal of a woman who has come into her own, but is unwilling to let any of the past go without giving it a name or story—“We tell stories to make them visible. Or we tell stories so that we don’t have to look at them any longer.”

The complexities of Masud’s highly controlled and abusive childhood are brought into focus from the start but skews dwelling on it, choosing instead to highlight what came after. Her sharp words and mind cut through the chaff of what commonly bloats memoirs. She describes playing with ants as a child and makes the comparison to upbringing, “My father put his two big hands on the ground around us, and we crawled around inside.” The we here speak of herself and her sisters. The relatively simple line, set up by the preceding paragraph, encapsulates the claustrophobic nature of her rearing. One line succinctly summarizes a whole breath of feelings and experiences without her belaboring the point. There are passing mentions in later chapters but the foundation has been laid.

The structure of A Flat Place is striking, diverging from a conventional methodology. Masud chooses locations she visits in order to frame each progression as she dives deeper into her struggles and identity. From Orford Ness to Morecambe Bay to Newcastle Moor, the reader follows as each place unfolds in an indeterminate direction, melding with the horizon. Yet, despite these locations being places of sanctuary, Masud is not naive and refuses to romanticize the past. She is self-aware, “We think of places like the fens as rural, and yet that flatness derives from intensive human intervention.” With the brief and informative sense of a crack journalist, Masud highlights the complicated history of how the English changed the very landscape she now appreciates. What was once a marsh is now rich farmland, known as Cambridgeshire, thanks to the colossal public project of draining the region. The lite-terraforming is something she traces with bittersweetness because the flatness that exists reveals a sanctuary. She also cannot avoid the coy reference that these places may soon be reclaimed by the same waters that were banished due to climate change.

The style of Masud’s writing is like that of the eels she mentions in the Fens. Her words twist and wrap around various concepts, at times in the same paragraph, challenging the reader to take her work as a whole, rather than pin it down for dissection. The concerns of her work, while innately personal and self-refectory, retain a global scope as she considers her homeland of Pakistan and her new home in England. She remains an outsider, mostly because her cPTSD forces her to be, but she cannot excuse herself from her ancestry or the empathy she feels towards those similar to her. Upon her visit to Orford Ness, an old WWII base turned historical tourist attraction, she considers the experiments and foul things created there in hopes of turning the tide on the Germans. “I’m always interested in which parts of history British people want to know more about, and which parts they’re happy to draw a veil over.”

Buried in these flat places are not only the ruins of history but the spiritual wreckage of a life repressed. Masud writes openly about the grief of her family fracturing and the inability of being able to put it back together. The hauntology that pervades these insights and the book as a whole is heavy but does not overwhelm. These feelings and circumstances continually drive her back into the wilderness, the flat plains, in order to work through them. It is only in all of these spaces she can process and connect to that which is the most broken. This combines as a challenge to the reader, although Masud is not intentionally issuing one. We, as the reader, are asked to reflect and make peace with the circumstances that we cannot change. The relationships that may never reappear or heal. The kind of open consideration that should be felt for individuals who struggle socially, mentally, physically, or economically.

It is commendable that the work does not fall into a spiral of attempting to define terms or hand-wringing around what might be more politically correct to say. Masud is careful to mention and draw the line of how various things such as the COVID-19 pandemic were beneficial to her because she was able to enjoy the time alone and inside without dealing with peer pressure to go out. One might think her authenticity and brutal honesty may leave her vulnerable to critique, but it may in some ways shield her because all of her cards are on the table. This kind of prose does not come along often and should be treasured as a rarity.

While it would be too soon to expect another work from Masud, it will be and should be demanded in the future. Too few writers are able to combine personal essays, memoir temperaments, and piercing social critique, all in the vein of unpacking and reflecting on trauma. Readers of all preferences, history, narrative, and social sensibilities will be able to take something away from the work and maybe learn something as well about themselves or others, as an excellent work of literature like A Flat Place does.

 

Horizontal Profundity: Mapping the Interior by Proceeding through the Exterior in “A Flat Place”. By Alexander Pyles. The Chicago Review of Books, June 12, 2023. 

Flatlands can be places of unnerving paradox. There, you can’t be taken by surprise, but nor can you hide; any feeling of liberation tends to be constrained by a barb of danger; and while you may be granted a glimpse of the infinite, you’re also made to feel hyper-aware of your own body. For Noreen Masud, a lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Bristol, “it’s as though the landscape is sending us a message that we’re unable to decipher.” In “A Flat Place,” she travels to five landscapes in England and Scotland in an effort to interpret them: the Cambridgeshire fens, the shingle promontory of Orford Ness, the tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, the Town Moor in Newcastle and the islands of Orkney. She also seeks to interpret their appeal, for while this is a kind of quest narrative, that quest’s true objective might be to answer the question: What am I looking for? And though the journeys together have something of the quality of a pilgrimage to a healing spring, Masud is too skeptical to anticipate any sort of nature cure.

“What does it feel like?” she asks her therapist. “To feel connected to another person?” The wellspring of Masud’s sense of disconnection (diagnosed as complex post-traumatic stress disorder, though she uses the term warily) is a childhood spent in near-total separation from society, enforced by a father who finally disowned her when she was 13. With her sisters and mother, she fled her birthplace, Pakistan, for her mother’s birthplace, Scotland. The abiding image of her childhood, and of “A Flat Place,” is the plains of Lahore, seen glancingly through a car window. “The fields were perfectly, shimmeringly flat. No people crossed them.” Borrowing from Virginia Woolf, Masud comes to consider that impression of a deserted, featureless land the “base that life stands upon.”

In other words, “flat landscapes … had always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me.” The British Isles, however, whose very substrate she knows to be cemented with the blood of racial injustice, are too haunted to grant her easy verities or much consolation. Surveying the old military test zone of Orford Ness, she discovers a sea wall built during the First World War by a Chinese labor force largely written out of history. As recently as 1929, Town Moor hosted an exhibition that included an “‘African village’ — a human zoo inhabited by a hundred Senegalese people.” In 2004, Morecambe Bay was the site where at least 21 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned, victims of human trafficking and of gang masters who did not understand, or disregarded, the bay’s notorious tides.

It is not Pakistan, then, that is “the place of trauma, of lack, of pain.” And yet the unhappiness of Masud’s childhood makes nostalgia impossible. “The flat place,” she writes, “is what happens when one’s reality is at odds with that of everyone else.” It is also a realm familiar to every exile: neither home nor away, but a “nowhere” in between. By the end of this sorrowful, tender, sometimes beautiful book, it becomes apparent that it is not those mythic Lahore fields that Masud has been trying to find, but rather a terrestrial analogue for her own sense of desolation. Quests of this sort, as she understands, are bound to be fruitless, but in an unexpected coda we are allowed to hope that the “flat place” is not, after all, limitless.

William Atkins is the author of “The Moor: A Journey Into the English Wilderness,” “The Immeasurable World: A Desert Journey” and, most recently, “Exiles: Three Island Journeys.”

A Flat Place:  Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma | By Noreen Masud | 227 pp. | Melville House | Paperback, $19.99

From Lahore to Orford Ness, Searching for the Roots of Trauma / By William Atkins. The New York Times, June 6, 2023.

On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.

Masud is, amongst other things, a theorist of the aphorism, and it is thus striking that the horizons on which she sets her sights throughout the chapters of this book are etymologically linked to this short-form wisdom: the Greek “apo”, which means “away from”, combines with “horizein”, meaning “to bound”.

 Though Masud never explicitly draws on this connection of wisdom-literature to the figure of the horizon, it represents a good way of thinking about the readings she gathers from the landscapes through which she walks. An aphorism might be defined as the shortest line to revelation. For Masud, such truths might similarly be read in the “one stark lovely line” of the horizon, and the landscapes that they delimit. Like the small form of the aphorism, which can nevertheless accommodate large truths, the horizon is both limiting and expansive. It is also a myth we tell ourselves in order to keep going.

As Masud travels through each of her six flat places – the green fields from a childhood spent in Lahore, for instance, or the eerily post-apocalyptic Orford Ness, with its hulking military buildings in rusting disuse – she dwells upon the stories that we tell ourselves of our past, and what happens when those stories deteriorate into a derealizing blankness. Masud has complex post-traumatic stress disorder, meaning the story of her early life refuses to comply with any of the narrative linearity retelling might afford. Some of the most moving points of the memoir emerge from the author’s search for a story that, like a flat landscape, refutes or refuses structure. Something of this is evident from the first walk she describes, in which she traces the landscape of the fens from Ely to Wenley. This flat land, “drained, inscrutable, rigid, balanced between the real and the mythical”, sustains “miles and miles of horizon” which tells her “with every step, that it was all right to be damaged, hurting, solitary.”

A Flat PlaceMasud uses the reflective landscape to map her own feelings of flatness. Her journeys are less ones of self-discovery and more exercises in self-placement. The concern – a search for space that can accommodate the self – extends from a feeling of being pressed up against bodies not her own and the claustrophobia of a childhood in which she had to search continually for breathing-room.

Masud and her three sisters were born to a Pakistani father and a British mother, with whom they lived in Pakistan, isolated behind chicken wire. This persisted until she and two of her three sisters were disowned by her father. Masud was 15 when, in consequence, she moved to her maternal grandmother’s house in Scotland. The cause of their father’s anger towards his daughters is met with a deliberate, powerful opacity. Masud writes that ‘[s]ome stories make less sense the more you remember’, but she is also firm about the fact that this story does not belong to her or to the book that she’s writing. It features more as an absence in the story, a “hole which is not the point but which looks like the point”:“a focal point that organizes you nowhere, towards nothing”. This story, then, has a flatness all of its own.

When she asks her youngest sister, referred to pseudonymously as Forget-Me-Not, what her epileptic seizures feel like, the latter describes them as “[l]ike the world is a circle without a centre”. The circle around the absent story is a narrative seizure, but one that brings Masud back to a world of her own. “What would it look like, to bring people into your world?” she’s asked by her therapist. She answers this by writing about a flatness that, if really looked at, can tremble with “a thousand tiny vibrations”, or where the “smooth ribbons” of low-lying rivers appear “‘as though a huge animal had stooped its head and licked a long stripe over the bay”’. The language of the memoir is a landscape: like a flat place, it creates its own beauty that refuses to be overlooked.

 In all this, Masud’s voice is decidedly aphoristic at points. She learns that “[r]eality meant living continuously up against a basic truth: the world would hide nothing from you, even if you were eight years old […] The world was a flat plain with nowhere to hide”. Such sayings initiate a radical sense of exposure. There is an idea that Masud is travelling to places where you cannot look away from the expanse, which simultaneously instigates a laying bare of the self. This refusal to look away is a pervasive theme. Her eyes fix on the horizon or fixate on the bones of a dead thing in search of perspective.

This is partially a story of Masud’s formative childhood, in which her resistance to (or even need for) memory might be lost in the expanse of a flat place. It is also, however, a story about refusing to turn one’s back on something. The writing offers us an unflinching gaze which is frequently fixed in horror on racism in Britain and its horrendous repercussions, including those for the country of Masud’s birth. The memoir is a story of herself, but it also memorialises the lost narratives that she finds embedded in the landscapes she explores. These “contain the stretched pain of people of colour”, such as the twenty-one trafficked people from China who drowned in Morecambe Bay whilst picking cockles; or the “human zoo’” that once existed on Newcastle Moor. Britain lives in a state of “terrible denial”, she shows, participating in a form of narrative erasure when it comes to the stories of people of colour as a way of protecting itself from the truth of its ongoing and dangerous oppressiveness. Masud’s anger at this courses through the book and electrifies it. The stories that we tell ourselves can either be dangerous myths or make vital ethical demands.

There are things that are withheld, still, at the end of the memoir, creating something like a longing for narrative closure – but this is precisely Masud’s point. It is a story of the feeling you get when the stories we tell ourselves refuse to disclose an essential or epiphanic message. It’s a brave style of refusal that somehow still manages to convey a ringing affirmation.

Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes. By Issy Brooks-Ward.  The Arts Desk, May 9, 2023.

Utterly Unknown Nick Drake

 

On the cover of his 1969 debut album, the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake gazes out of an upstairs window in a derelict house, a faintly quizzical smile on his lips. Five Leaves Left was the first of three low-selling LPs he made before he took his own life in 1974, convinced he was a failure. Had he lived to witness the reverence his music has gone on to inspire across the world, his smile would surely be of outright incredulity.

There are several possible reasons for his ever-growing reputation. Most superficially, his early death has fixed him in the “poète maudit” tradition of John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, Rupert Brooke and even Jim Morrison (all of whom he admired). Tall, dark and handsome, with a gently enigmatic aura, he projects a powerful charisma in photographs. “He looked striking, like a Romantic poet,” says his friend Chris Jones. “He tended to dress in dark, sombre colours – nothing bright. He often wore a rollneck, and in winter what used to be called a greatcoat. He cut quite a famous figure in that – part of his mystique was the sight of him coming down the street in it.”

Drake’s background did not point towards the classic narrative of a doomed artist. He came from a loving and supportive family and grew up in comfort in a large house in the English countryside. Although he was gentle and self-contained, he had a wry sense of humour and was popular at boarding school, where he excelled at athletics. Music was increasingly his focus, though, and his talent was encouraged both at school and at home: his mother, Molly, was an accomplished songwriter and poet.

By the age of 18 his guitar playing was good enough to impress the Rolling Stones, with whom he had a private audience in 1967 in Marrakesh, where he was travelling before starting at Cambridge. University didn’t suit him, but his blossoming talent stunned his contemporaries, most notably Robert Kirby, a music scholar who began to arrange the material he was writing. “I was astounded by the sheer inventiveness and absolute quality of his songs,” he says of their first encounter. At the end of Drake’s first term, just before Christmas 1967, he played his first public concert, a short set at a London “happening”. In keeping with his seemingly effortless rise, he was talent-spotted and signed up by the producer Joe Boyd.

Boyd was also stunned when Drake played him his songs, in January 1968. As he instantly recognised, they were sui generis. “The music stayed within itself, not trying to attract the listener’s attention, just making itself available,” says Boyd. “His guitar technique was so clean it took a while to realise how complex it was. Influences were detectable here and there, but the heart of the music was mysteriously original.” Indeed Drake’s songs, which teem with unusual tunings, melodies and countermelodies, are the most important factor in his ongoing appeal. His work is lyrically striking, too, rich with imagery yet cryptic enough for each listener to devise their own private relationship with it.

His guitar playing also inspires – and flummoxes – many of his admirers. “Nick was an absolutely phenomenal guitarist,” Kirby said shortly after Drake’s death. “He was very adept at highly complex double-picked rhythms, with the thumb on the bass string and the other fingers working on as many as four tunes at a time. He was a master of counterpoint.” For Drake’s friend Ben Laycock – himself a good guitarist – his playing was a revelation: “I’d never met anybody of my age who could do anything that well – just magically get those sounds out, strong fingers flying across the fretboard ...”

Drake’s first two albums were made with Boyd and the engineer John Wood, who went to great lengths to create the best possible recordings. They were committed to bringing out the best in the material, however long it took. “The way I worked with Nick was very different from the way I worked with other artists,” says Boyd, referring to the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Vashti Bunyan, John and Beverley Martyn and others. “With them we tended to go in and do a record in a concentrated period of time, but with Nick we worked slowly. We went in, did a couple of tracks, listened to them, thought about what we wanted to do with them, worked on them a bit more, put down a few more tracks, waited a month, waited six weeks, thought about it some more.”

This was a luxurious position for an unknown artist to be in, and allowed Drake to keep his head above water at Cambridge while working on his music. After the release of Five Leaves Left he chose to drop out of college in order to focus fully on its follow-up, Bryter Layter. Sequestered in a shabby north London flat over the winter of 1969, he perfected another remarkable set of songs, continuing to collaborate with Kirby. Again, Boyd and Wood hired the best possible backing musicians and strove to deliver a masterpiece that also had commercial potential. “It’s the only album I’ve ever recorded where I wouldn’t want to change a thing,” says Wood. By all contemporaneous accounts, Drake was delighted with it.

Its release kept being pushed back, however, and he found it hard to make an impression at gigs. He had always been reticent, but over the course of 1970 he became antisocial and almost impossible to communicate with. Dope smoking didn’t help, but it was hardly the sole cause of the radical change in him. “It wasn’t the old Nick; it was a different Nick,” says his friend Ben Laycock, who visited him in his flat, which he rarely left. “I can’t explain it. I’ve never been able to. I would ask him why he was so down – things seemed to be going well – and he wouldn’t say, or couldn’t say.”

The failure of Bryter Layter to find an audience was crushing, and after Drake had completed his third and final album, Pink Moon – which featured none of the lush orchestral trappings of its predecessors – he returned to live at home, where his decline relentlessly continued. Whether he was suffering from a specific disorder such as clinical depression or schizophrenia is moot, but he was consistently reluctant to engage with treatment, and for much of the time his family and friends could only look on helplessly as his illness ravaged his creativity.

Although his family saw no shame in his condition, and focused on doing whatever they could to understand and ameliorate it, Drake was inevitably sensitive to the stigma surrounding mental health in the early 1970s. He spent periods in a psychiatric hospital in Warwickshire, where his friend Brian Wells visited him. “His main preoccupation was with emphasising that it wasn’t a ‘nuthouse’ or a ‘loony bin’ and that he wasn’t a ‘nutcase’,” says Wells. With far greater awareness today of how mental illness blights young lives, he stands as a beacon of sorts for many with struggles of their own, while others feel a powerful sense of pity and affection for him in his suffering.

Although his low record sales agonised Drake, he wasn’t hungry for fame and fortune as much as communication. “He had always longed to get through to young people, particularly young people who had difficulties in life like he did, and he just thought he hadn’t,” according to his mother. The extent to which his suicide has played a part in boosting his appeal is impossible to gauge, but momentum swiftly gathered after his death.

 Five Leaves Left was finally released in the United States in March 1976, with ardent sleevenotes that praised his “masterful musicianship”, described him as a visionary and declared: “Life speaks for itself through Nick Drake.” They were written barely a year after his death and indicate how his reputation was growing. In April 1979, Island Records repackaged all three of his albums (and four demos he made shortly before his death) as Fruit Tree, one of the first retrospective boxed sets accorded an artist of his generation, and a striking indication of his increasing renown. It was followed in May 1985 by a compilation, Heaven In a Wildflower, while in 1986 Joe Boyd oversaw a collection of previously unreleased material, Time of No Reply.

Drake’s renown has never slowed since, his popularity growing with each reissue or use in film and on television. In despair, he had told his father in July 1972 that “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime. One day people would realise.” The fulfilment of those words helped his parents and sister reconcile themselves to his absence, and Boyd has come to understand that his short-term obscurity has yielded a long-term benefit. “The fact that Nick’s music failed to find an audience during his lifetime means it’s not identified with a particular time and place, which allows each generation to create its own connection to it ... I listen to the music now and it sounds the same as when I first heard that first demo. I thought his songs were genius and I still do. He was a unique and brilliant talent, and it’s heartbreaking for me that I didn’t think of a way to make him happy and famous.”

Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack, is published by John Murray.

 ‘It’s heartbreaking that I didn’t think of a way to make him happy’: Nick Drake’s producer on the doomed songwriter.  The singer-songwriter died by suicide aged 26, convinced he was a failure. The three albums he left behind tell a different story. By Richard Morton Jack.  The Irish Times, June 17, 2023.

From a youthful hook-up with the Rolling Stones to crafting his bleakly brilliant final album, three extracts from an exhaustive new biography offer the most nuanced portrait to date of the 70s singer-songwriter.

For a singer-songwriter who only made three albums, Nick Drake continues to cast a long shadow. A mixture of extreme shyness and difficulties with mental health meant that his beautiful, meditative and deeply melancholic take on mystical English folk slipped through the commercial cracks during his lifetime. There is no known footage of him performing live and very few interviews exist. Drake died from an overdose of antidepressants in 1974, aged just 26, but since his death, his music has found new audiences as successive generations have discovered an enigmatic but immaculate body of work.
 
Now a new biography of Drake, by the writer Richard Morton Jack, offers a definitive version of a life story previously shrouded in mystery and, eventually, clouded by tragedy. Containing unseen photos, previously unreleased correspondence and the insights of the people who knew Drake best, it provides a rounded portrait of an artist whose recorded works continue to beguile and resonate. In these exclusive extracts, we see the light and shade of Drake: his problems are laid bare, but so is his exquisite artistry. Phil Harrison

While Drake’s career as a musician was characterised by diffidence, his youth wasn’t entirely devoid of high jinks. A road trip with some friends to north Africa, for example, saw a memorable encounter with some of his musical heroes

Rumours were swirling around Tangier that the Rolling Stones were in town. [His friend] Julian [Raby] confirmed their presence on the penultimate night: “I was looking out of a tiny window over a narrow alley when I saw the Stones’ party passing, in sheepskins and bell-bottoms, like a medieval apparition.” Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were there, as well as a court including Anita Pallenberg, Cecil Beaton, Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs and Michael Cooper. Urged by his companions, Nick took his guitar when they sallied forth the next evening. “Hoping to make contact with them, we went down to their hotel, the celebrated El Minzah,” he wrote home.

“Having seen them going in, looking quite extraordinary even by their own standards, we marched in and I made a request to play in the bar. After I had been turned down very politely, Bob [Drake’s friend Rick Charkin, so nicknamed because he was thought to resemble Bob Dylan], whose nerves seem to stop at nothing, proceeded to ring up the Stones’ suite and ask if they might be wanting a little musical entertainment! This was unfortunately refused in a similar fashion, and it was decided that my fortune should be made elsewhere. So we made a quick tour of the nightclubs, asking if I could play.

“Fortunately, one of those which accepted the offer was the Koutoubia Palace, Tangier’s most exclusive nightspot, which is done up in the style of a Moorish palace. I couldn’t help feeling a little out of place, but all the same I played for about quarter of an hour. The reception was extraordinarily good and we all got stood rounds of drinks, which was rather pleasant.”

It’s notable that – albeit egged on by his friends – Nick had the confidence to perform spontaneously. The following morning Mike [Hill, usually the driver on the trip] whisked them the 370 miles to Marrakech. He was overwhelmed by its souk, calling it “a huge, crowded gathering place where one finds musicians, magicians, soothsayers, acrobats, snake-charmers, dancers, and various other oddities which I am unable to find a name for. Best of all was a set of African drummers and dancers, who produced about the most infectious rhythms I have ever been infected by.”

By coincidence the Stones were also in the crowd, making a field recording. The friends revived the idea of getting Nick to play for them. Having established that they were staying in an old French colonial hotel, La Mamounia, they went there that evening. Upon discovering that they were in its grand dining room, says Julian, “Rick went in with Nick and told them how great Nick was at the guitar. Nick then played for them.” It’s striking that Nick was willing to perform alone and at close quarters in front of such an intimidating audience. Rick does not recall what he played, but when he stopped, continues Julian:

   “We all sat down. It was a large room with a long table immediately on the left, deserted but for the Stones and their entourage. Mick Jagger was at the head, and in my memory Nick sat at the opposite end. It was like a scene from The Decameron, with food everywhere, which they invited us to help ourselves to. We were very grateful, because we were starving. They were bombed out of their minds yet clearly impressed by Nick. At the end of the encounter Mick said to him: ‘You must come and see us when you’re back in London,’ which I doubt he said to everyone.”

Young musicians all over the world would have envied Nick, yet by Julian’s account, “He was so congenitally mellow that it seemed normal for him. He seemed to internalise it all.” His own vague account to his parents ran: “I went in and did them a few numbers. We in fact got quite chatty with them, and it was quite interesting learning all the inside stories.”

An exchange of letters between Drake and his father, Rodney, during Nick’s university years hints at his growing turmoil and confusion. His father’s reply is patient and kind but provides a sadly prophetic foreshadowing of the problems that were to undermine Drake’s musical career and overtake his life

Nick wrote to his parents on Thursday 23 January 1969.

“Cambridge has been quite pleasant this term, but here I am, becoming increasingly sure that I want to leave soon. I’m sure that our various conversations have made clear my general feelings … As far as performing is concerned, I am certainly no more than amateur. However, with regard to my songwriting, I can only progress from the stage that I have reached so far by developing a purely professional approach … I know for a certainty that I must make this progression with my music in order to achieve any sense of fulfilment.

“I hope you can perhaps appreciate that the idea of having my music as a ‘vacation hobby’ for another year-and-a-half is not a particularly happy one. It seems that Cambridge can really only delay me from doing what at the moment I most need to do.”

Having discussed the matter at length with [his wife] Molly, Rodney sent him a considered reply the following week. “Obviously it is a step which we have to consider carefully, because it is an irrevocable one,” he began, going on to pose two vital questions: “Are you more or less likely to succeed at your chosen career if you leave now? Secondly, what advantage unconnected with your career may you be throwing away if you leave now.”

He continued candidly: “We are slow developers in our family and you, I believe, are no exception. I would go so far as to say that you will surprise yourself in the next two years by the changes and development that will occur in your personality, your understanding and your outlook. In addition to this, any career involving self-employment demands a high degree of self-discipline and a will to overcome one’s weaknesses, and making the effort required to tackle problems which do not come easily. I think you have a long way to go here.

 
“You believe that the problem of turning yourself from an amateur into a professional can be solved merely by transferring yourself from Cambridge to somewhere where you are surrounded by, and under the influence of, professionals in your chosen field. From what you say I take it that you must believe that it was the prospect of returning to Cambridge for eight-week periods during the year that prevented you, in the long summer vac, from getting into the swim, so to speak, and of starting to acquire the professionalism which you are rightly seeking.

“But I doubt this very much and I would regard as far more likely reasons your reticence (which you must overcome), your difficulty in communicating (which you must overcome), and your reluctance to plunge in and have a go (which you conceal from yourself by self-persuasion that more solo practising and solo listening are required before the move is made) … If I am right in what I say, and the real trouble is that you have not yet overcome your weaknesses (and God knows we all have them), then you may well find that you have thrown over Cambridge simply to continue indefinitely on the outskirts of what you are looking for.

“At Cambridge you have a chance to fight your weaknesses and overcome them (and fight like hell you MUST), to discipline yourself from inside, and take a more active interest in your fellows (another weakness of yours – I am being very blunt, aren’t I?) and generally to prepare and develop yourself to make a real success of what you want to do. And, in the meantime, your creative powers will be developing, not stagnating, do please believe me. On the second aspect – what advantages unconnected with your career may you be throwing away – there is not a great deal to say except that it is a rounded personality which is most likely to lead its owner on a happy and full road though life. To specialise too early and to have interest in only one activity makes Jack a very dull boy. One-and-a-half years may seem a long time to you. Allow me to assure you it is not – but it is a terribly important time in the development of you as a person into something that you are going to start to be at about the age of 23.

“The winning of a degree may seem to bear little significance to you, and the argument that it is a safety net if you come a cropper with your music will doubtless evoke the response that a safety net is just what you don’t want. I would say to you, however, that the self-discipline which it involves, apart from anything else at all, is a priceless asset in whatever you want to tackle during the rest of your life. So there we are, Nick – there’s my view. I urge you to resolve to see Cambridge through.”

It was indeed a blunt statement, but Nick knew it was written out of love, recognised the truth in it and did not take it amiss. Rodney had written nothing that any concerned parent wouldn’t have thought under the circumstances, but he and Molly perhaps didn’t grasp the intensity of their son’s commitment to his music or – as they later conceded – his brilliance.

Drake’s third and final album Pink Moon is a bleak, minimal affair, seemingly wrenched from the depths of mental illness. As shown by the reactions of his family and contemporaries, it’s a reflection of his brilliance and the uncomfortably intimate nature of the material

Nick’s relationship to the finished album is unknown, and it’s likely his family and friends were unaware of it until it was released. [His friend] Brian Wells is convinced Molly and Rodney didn’t listen to it closely, and Gabrielle [Drake, Nick’s sister] doesn’t recall doing so, either; by the time it appeared they were more focused on his day-to-day condition than on his musical output. Rodney later wrote that it was made “when Nick was getting pretty bad, and it’s rather ‘way out’, as they say”. In another letter he admitted: “The material on Pink Moon has always bewildered us a little (except From the Morning, which we love).”

Joe Boyd [who produced Drake’s first two albums] had nothing whatsoever to do with Pink Moon. The first he knew of it was when Island sent a copy to him in Los Angeles. “When I saw the cover I was horrified, and when I played it I was even more horrified. I interpreted its starkness as a rebuke to me. I thought it was self-destructive, a capitulation, as if he were saying: ‘Fuck it, I don’t care whether people listen to it or not.’ I listened to it once.”

Nick’s close friends were upset by it, too. Wells says: “I wasn’t around when he was making Pink Moon, and when I heard it I found it bleak. I remember a friend from Cambridge describing it as ‘music to commit suicide to’.” Alex Henderson and Ben Laycock were taken aback by it after Bryter Layter. “We found its atmosphere dark and depressing, knowing how Nick had become,” says Alex. “We had no idea what musical direction he would or could take after that.”

“I was appalled by Pink Moon,” remembers Drake’s university friend Paul Wheeler. “I found it incredibly upsetting. I thought the songs were frightening. To this day I cannot ever imagine listening to it for pleasure. It’s like opening some terrible Pandora’s box.”

Folk singer Beverley Martyn had similar concerns. “I thought: ‘This boy’s gone, we’ve lost him. We can’t reach him any more, and he can’t reach us.’ I wondered why he’d bothered to record some of the tracks, and who had thought it was a good idea to let him go into the studio and do so. They were so dark and sad, and telling about the state of his mind: doom, gloom and despair, with apocalyptic elements. People listen to it and say: ‘That’s a great line!’, and talk about the songs and the surreal cover like they’re a puzzle they can solve, but Pink Moon is like the Book of Revelation. It doesn’t make sense and it’s a manifestation of illness, of madness. When people are really ill they don’t know what they’re saying, they don’t hear what’s coming out of their own mouth. I thought those songs, those words were the product of a sick person.”

Musician Richard Thompson, who had collaborated with Drake, heard Pink Moon when [producer] John Wood played it to him in Sound Techniques: “I was disturbed. Part of what had made Nick’s earlier music so appealing was a balance between dark and light. The sadness inherent in the music had been veiled behind beautiful arrangements and an intriguing voice that drew you in. However, his third album seemed a stark cry for help, the voice of a man teetering on the edge of sanity.”

Not everyone felt that way. “I find it’s got some of the most optimistic songs of his,” said [arranger] Robert Kirby. “I think Pink Moon is in fact my favourite, as far as the songs are concerned.” Despite his disappointment at not having worked on it, he supported Nick’s prerogative in eschewing arrangements and later stated: “I think it’s his greatest work, by far.”

These are edited extracts from Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack, published on 8 June.
 
  
‘I thought: This boy’s gone, we can’t reach him any more’ – the tragedy and beauty of Nick Drake, by those closest to him. By Richard Morton Jack. The Guardian, May 27, 2023. 

 

Nick Drake is on the cover of the current issue of UNCUT. In this extract, we look at how a new biography of the beloved singer-songwriter illuminates his brief but indelible life and music…

 In a small turreted room in Wenlock Priory sits a trunk of clothes that belonged to Nick Drake. Gabrielle Drake has owned the prior’s 16th-century private apartments since the 1980s, where she has meticulously and painstakingly restored one room after another. One room, however, has been turned over to her late brother, Nick. Aside from the trunk of his clothes, the plain details of a life are laid bare: boxes with letters, school reports, university essays, bank statements, tax returns, his recording contracts, photo albums and old passports along with posthumous publishing and royalty statements.

Among other sources, including his own new interviews with Drake’s friends and fellow musicians, this material has been of critical importance to author Richard Morton Jack, who has spent five years working on his new biography, Nick Drake – The Life. There, in the turreted room, sifting through the boxes, Morton Jack set out on a detailed archeological survey of Drake’s short life and slender musical career – three albums released between 1969 and 1972 prior to his death in November 1974 aged 26. Sometimes, he discovered, the slightest details could yield unexpected results. “There were small but satisfying bits of puzzle,” Morton Jack tells Uncut. “I’d find a letter from Nick’s grandmother saying, ‘Happy birthday, here’s a cheque for something.’ So I’d think, ‘Ah,that’s how he afforded his new guitar!’ I was able to be absolutely forensic about almost every aspect of his life.”

Morton Jack had previously helped with research for Gabrielle and Cally Calloman, who manages Drake’s musical estate, on 2014’s coffee-table volume, Remembered For A While. Along with essays, tributes and analysis, the book also included previously unseen photographs, family letters and Drake’s father Rodney’s diaries. “It was a really useful accompaniment to a serious fans’ appreciation of Nick’s work and a good way of scratching itches as far as curiosity about his life went,” says Morton Jack. “But I felt that it was a bit of a shame that there wasn’t a proper narrative. I think Cally was a bit resistant to the idea of ‘authorising’ a biography, because that word would carry with it connotations of control and of most importantly of saying this is the one holy scripture on Nick. Gabrielle was resistant to that, too, because she knows better than anyone how baffling and private and inscrutable her brother was.”

Critically, Morton Jack also intended to dispel many of the myths and inaccuracies that have accumulated around Drake – a strategy that clearly gained approval from Gabrielle. Writing in her introduction to The Life, Gabrielle says, “This not an Authorised Biography… But it is true that this is the only biography of my brother that has been written with my blessing.”

Gabrielle’s blessing also unlocked a number of doors that may otherwise have remained firmly shut. “Nick’s London friends have been least communicated with because they’re private individuals who have no desire for self-publicity and who aren’t normally the sort of people that give interviews,” says Morton Jack. “They were happy to invite me to their homes and show me their photo albums – especially Sophia Ryde, who died very sadly during the course of writing the book, but not before she and I had spent a pretty long time together, going over all her memories. That wouldn’t have been possible without Gabrielle’s involvement.”

Morton Jack confirms that there are no great revelations in the book – “‘Oh, my god, he was gay!’ Or, ‘Oh my god, he was on heroin!’ There was nothing like that.” Instead, one of the book’s great achievements is how a strong consensus of opinion builds around Nick’s character. “His friends remember him vividly,” explains Morton Jack. “I tried to include stories, especially ones which involve any sort of physicality with him. Like a box of matches exploding and Nick jumping up into the air. Someone told a story about cutting her arm and Nick being very helpful with finding bandages. Someone else told a story about Nick falling into a roof space and crashing through the ceiling. I felt those stories were worth including. They tethered him to us mere mortals. There’s a tendency to think of Nick as some celestial apparition. He was a normal bloke and most of his friends remember him quite well.

“One of the myths that’s built up around Nick was that he was crippled by stage fright. Literally no-one said that to me in the course of putting the book together. It was more that he thought he was wasting his time performing on stages in front of strangers who were clinking glasses. But he made lists of producers and made a tape, went round and he hustled – not to a huge extent, because he was lucky enough to be picked up quite quickly – but he was willing to do that. I think that says a lot about the kind of person he was.”

 “There’s a tendency to think of Nick as some celestial apparition…” A new biography offers the deepest dive yet into Nick Drake’s brief life. By Michael  Bonner. Uncut, June 1, 2023.

 

A few years ago, obsessive fans started chipping away at the grave of Nick Drake in Warwickshire and taking bits of it home. It might have gone the way of Jim Morrison’s in Paris had Drake’s sister Gabrielle, a rather fabulous character who acted in Crossroads in the Eighties, not had it removed and renovated. Around the same time, she produced a book, Nick Drake: Remembered For a While, compiling dozens of letters and diaries from the family – a family that began in British India, where both children were born, in the last days of the Raj – in an attempt to dispel some of the myths that had grown up around her brother, who died aged 26 in 1974 after releasing three albums. Now, Gabrielle assists the music writer Richard Morton Jack by giving over those documents, her own memories and dozens of childhood contacts for a more conventional biography. It is not, she says, an “authorised” one, as that would indicate a “straitjacketed affair” tailored by the estate to fit a certain image of its subject. I thought her choice of words was unusual.

When someone dies by suicide, you ask why. But Nick Drake is unique among famous musicians who died young: aside from his songs he has no voice at all. There are only two interviews, as he shirked most press commitments, and there is no moving footage of him, as he played only 40 (mostly small) gigs; there is nothing besides his music from which to piece together his psychology. Though he stokes new imaginations and gains new fans year on year, he is also strangely static: a country headstone playing incandescent music, with a velvet voice, waterwheel finger-work and lines such as “Fame is but a fruit tree/so very unsound/It can never flourish/Till its stock is in the ground.”

 Morton Jack’s book – accidentally, I believe – is a long, sharp shock for anyone who romanticises the figure of the tortured songwriter. It does not illuminate the creative methods of an enigmatic artist but brings into lurid relief the reality of Drake’s mental illness: his depression was not a feature of his genius but the very thing that stood in the way of it. Creativity receded into darkness very quickly as commercial success failed to follow from the hopes placed on him when he was a student at Cambridge.

No one from the music world got to attend his funeral – not his mentor, Joe Boyd, nor the elite musicians on the Island label with whom he recorded. In the genteel service the vicar talked about how he was good at running at school. The author thinks the funeral reflects how Drake compartmentalised his life and friends – but it wasn’t as though he was in charge of the guest list. To me, it says more about the shock and shame of suicide, and the grief of the family with whom he had lived in his final months. “Sad little ceremony this morning at the churchyard,” wrote his father, Ronald, a playful retired engineer, after the private interment of his ashes in mid January 1975.

Publishers love authorised biographies but an author is always at risk when writing a book with the family. They are doubly at risk when the subject died without speaking for himself, and the family are recalling a boy who lived 70 years ago. “He was the handsome, delightful child that every parent would want their own to be,” recalled the Drakes’ old friend Andrew Hicks, who knew him when they were both about six. This is the tone for the first part of the book – a strange sense of turning over stones: this was such a happy family, nothing to see here.

 His sister, quoted by Morton Jack, has a very powerful voice – a voice from another time, both vivid and concealing. “Mother was very glamorous, and father was the most wonderful sort of strong person,” she effuses. Gabrielle – and, through letters, her mother and father too – shape Morton Jack’s writing an odd way. “It did not reflect emotional coldness on his parents’ part,” he writes, that they sent Nick to the famously harsh Eagle House school in Sandhurst, where one boy was known to have been forced to eat a rotten egg; it was simply convention. “Uprooting Nick from his happy home for months at a time was collateral damage that had to be borne… to maximise his chance of fulfilling his potential.” This is not the voice of a rock critic, but lofty and strange and entrenched in family lore.

Although Rodney and Molly Drake adored their son – and his music, in a strikingly modern, generation-gap-traversing way – and although  they did everything they could to save him, something about the family dynamic feels stifling. When he was sectioned at a psychiatric institution not far from his home, his duty officer found him to be “muddled” as to his relationship with his parents, with “some guilt complex about leaving Cambridge” – which he had done, against his father’s wishes, upon the release of his first album, Five Leaves Left, in 1969 – and Molly and Rodney were advised not to visit so often.

Drake became morbidly obsessed with the story of the artist Richard Dadd, who had murdered his father after the latter’s intervention in his mental health treatment, and he worried that he, like Dadd, would live out his creative life in an institution. But Morton Jack does not investigate these relationships. He shuts things down. Drake’s key musical influence was his mother, herself a songwriter, who had also had a nervous breakdown straight after her marriage to Rodney and had to move back in with her parents. This compelling revelation is covered in just one line. “She had no more such episodes,” Morton Jack writes. One envisions Gabrielle taking a neat sip of tea.

Dozens of first-hand accounts of Drake’s young life stack up to say pretty much the same thing: as a teenager he was “detached” from all things apart from music; passive, uninterested, unengaged. “There is evidence of an all-round lack of drive, almost sleepiness,” said his teacher at Marlborough College. One family friend remembered him aged 14 on a bad day: “It was as though one were sitting next to a black hole.” As he comes of age, there is a sense of a mysterious mental makeup hardening. There was some concern over his heavy marijuana use, which began at Cambridge, though it appears to have stopped when he returned home. A doctor gave his parents a diagnosis of “simple schizophrenia”, an archaic term for a subtype of the condition characterised by blunted emotional effect and low motivation: it often presents in early adulthood, and generally gets worse.

Drake’s Island labelmate John Martyn once said that Drake’s lack of commercial success floored him because until then he had always excelled at everything. Martyn, more of a frenemy than a friend, exerted a powerful influence over Drake and had little tolerance for his mental health struggles. Martyn wrote the song “Solid Air” about Drake: “You’ve been taking your time/and you’ve been living on solid air.” Though Drake had been signed to Island at the age of 20, and early reviews were enthusiastic, his albums only sold around 3,000 copies each. Reluctant to promote his second record, Bryter Layter, in 1971, he started to isolate himself.

Here Drake takes shape as someone who had it all at his feet but was never confident enough to act: who expected success – felt he deserved it – but hovered on the edge and ran, then spent the rest of his extremely short life beating himself up. No one rated his final album Pink Moon at the time (these days, it is seen as a masterpiece). Yet still, when he handed it in at the reception of Island Records, so unwell by then that he could barely speak, they wrote him his £500 advance cheque on the spot without listening to it. Island wanted anything he had to give.

The label didn’t care if he didn’t tour, and on the album’s release in 1972 they issued a satirical press release saying that his records “haven’t sold a shit” but they believed in him, even if no one else did. Like so many of the most difficult people Drake also believed in himself – the problem was, he hated himself too. He told his father at 24 that he had finished his life’s work – and that people would understand it one day.

In December 1974, in a rambling obituary, the journalist Nick Kent said that Drake’s death, from an overdose of his antidepressants, could not possibly have been suicide, as he was working on new songs – Boyd was keen to record with him again (in reality, when Boyd drove Drake to Island for a meeting, Drake could not face getting out of the car).

For me, the most awful aspect of Drake’s decline in this book is the sense of just how hard he was trying to write songs in the weeks before he died. Forget the artist wandering in the woods, waiting for the muse: he’d lock himself in the music room – orange armchair, reel to reel tape recorder, set of Encyclopaedia Britannica – and force himself for days on ends. Once, his parents returned to find his equipment smashed. Another time he sat for many hours unmoving with his head in his hands. He never stopped trying, writing a track list for an imaginary fourth album, only part of which he ever completed, reproduced here in his curly hand. In an unusual moment of confession three months before his death, he told his friend David Ward of his frustrations with two people: Boyd, “because [Drake] hadn’t been more successful, and his father, from whom he felt an undercurrent of pressure to do something else with his life, commit to a course.”

One day around this time, after another trip to London on one of his sporadic better days, Drake was found by police at a zebra crossing in Swiss Cottage unable to “muster the wherewithal to cross the road”. The image of the suffering creative will always appeal, and Drake will always hold some of our most powerful projections, because he was enigmatic, beautiful, nomadic and utterly unknown. To know him better, through this book, is to reimagine that figure as a very sick man unable to walk across a road. Though clearly written as an act of love, it is hard to read. 

Nick Drake’s dark places. By Kate Mossman. The New Statesman, June 11, 2023. 

 “Do you curse where you come from?” Nick Drake asks an imagined lover in his 1971 song Hazey Jane I. This first comprehensive account of the revered singer-songwriter’s short life makes it clear that he did. It uses previously unseen family papers to illuminate Drake’s final years, in which, despairing at his apparent failure as a musician, he withdrew to his detested childhood home in Tanworth-in-Arden.

 Towards the end of his life, Drake was pulled between two places he felt damaged him in contrasting ways. London, the hub of his musical career, was overwhelming; his family’s comfortable home in rural Warwickshire was safe but stultifying. “There’s no outlet to say what I think about this bloody place!” he told his mother and bemoaned that in Britain, unlike the US, people could never “break away from their background”. This meticulous and ultimately heartbreaking biography is the story of a man who believed he’d “failed in every single thing I’ve ever tried to do”. It’s true that a quarter of a century after his death he would become famous for his music; but also as an archetype of the doomed artist whose only acclaim is posthumous.

This painfully taciturn man lived for 26 years, the first three quarters in smooth upper-middle-class transit from early childhood in newly independent Burma through the English private school system to Cambridge, despite academic mediocrity. He was enigmatic and inscrutable, leading an uneventful life until his final five years. It was then that he released three exquisite albums – the romantic pastoral Five Leaves Left; Bryter Layter with its focus on the city; the chillingly introspective Pink Moon – but refused to promote them, causing their commercial failure and contributing to his psychological collapse.

Richard Morton Jack’s diligence, sensitivity and musical knowledge have enabled him to extract a readable and informative biography from sometimes unpromising material. He has tracked down schoolfriends with whom Drake travelled to Aix-en-Provence and Morocco; fans who attended his few concerts; musical collaborators (producer Joe Boyd and studio engineer John Wood make vivid contributions); a family friend who tried to help before Drake’s death in 1974. He acknowledges the generous help of Patrick Humphries, whose 1997 biography was hamstrung by a lack of cooperation from key figures. Morton Jack’s has been written with the blessing of Nick’s sister, Gabrielle Drake, which is both a strength and a weakness.

In her foreword, Gabrielle pays tribute to their parents, the “outstanding”, “exceptional” Molly and Rodney. The book closes with a psychiatrist’s letter reassuring them they could have done no more to prevent his death. But by then it’s clear that, however good their intentions, Drake’s relationship with them was fundamental to his distress. He was consumed by rage at feeling misunderstood, monitored and controlled, especially by Rodney, who tried to steer him towards a “proper” career. After moving back to the family home in 1971 he would ignore his parents for days, breaking his silence only to swear at them. I wanted exploration and analysis of this, his most important relationship – for instance through Nick’s friends’ recollections of exactly why he so resented his parents, which need not have implied culpability for his death. But perhaps doing so would have turned up material contradicting Gabrielle’s line that they were beyond reproach.

Even so, the book’s greatest asset is the access Gabrielle granted to revelatory documents from the family archive. Candid letters from Rodney scold Nick for his indolence, introversion and cannabis-smoking. “The man who resorts to pot as the solution to his problems becomes bemused, befuddled and vegetable-like,” lectured Drake senior, the self-assured old Burma hand and managing director of an engineering company. “How do I know this, you say? Because I saw it again and again in the East.” A letter Nick wrote to the radical psychiatrist Leon Redler gives a rare insight into his own thoughts about his breakdown. “There was a lot of pressure around and I suppose I sort of cracked up,” Drake explained. He said that although he’d been treated for depression, “I never really understood the word and felt that ‘confusion’ was more apt.” Psychiatrists were mystified by his decline into a state of mute catatonia, interrupted only by explosions of fury and destructive violence (he smashed guitars, a chair, a radio, his car window). They tentatively diagnosed “simple schizophrenia” but conceded that this catch-all term had little meaning.

As I finish writing this review in a cafe, Pink Moon has started to play. The waitress tells me she’s a Nick Drake fan. So many people are now. Drake knew he lived at the wrong time, as well as feeling he was from the wrong place. He took an overdose of antidepressants in November 1974. Two years earlier, Rodney noted in his diary that his “despondent” son said “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime. One day,” Nick Drake insisted, “people would realise.”

 Nick Drake by Richard Morton Jack review – genius remembered. By Kieron Pim. The Guardian, June 7, 2023. 

Richard Morton Jack’s Nick Drake: The Life begins at the end. It is Monday, 25 November, 1974 and, as the author explains in his exhaustive new biography, “the magically gifted, frustratingly unfathomable” singer-songwriter has decided to swap the family home of Far Leys in Tanworth-in-Arden for “oblivion”.

Drake was just 26 when he died following an overdose – ruled suicide at the inquest – of the Trypitzol pills designed to treat the depression that had entrenched his musical career and personal life. Morton Jack’s book is the first of its kind to be written in tandem with Drake’s family and seeks to bring an equal measure of light and shade to an English musical figurehead who has become uniquely mythologised.

Nick Drake released three albums of bucolic folk for Island Records between 1969 and 1972. Richly melancholic but universally ignored, his songs and character became increasingly foreboding and isolated. But in the years since, posthumous releases like 1979’s Fruit Tree box set and 1994’s Way to Blue compilation, alongside veneration from the likes of Kate Bush, The Cure and Paul Weller, helped deliver tangible momentum. A further sign of his reappraisal will come later this summer, with The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs of Nick Drake, featuring multiple contemporary acts, including Fontaines DC, John Grant and Feist.

Morton Jack’s intention in opening with Drake’s suicide was to immediately take readers beyond the desperate end of his life, which “looms so large in people’s perception of him”, he tells me. In fact, the book – timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Drake’s birth – is a forensic tome that not only celebrates and humanises its subject but also straightens out the unreliable biography that has propelled his mystery across half a century.

 “I think Nick’s sister Gabrielle gave permission and was willing to collaborate with me because a lot of the people who knew Nick are inevitably now in their 70s or older, and with them would die a lot of interesting and valid history,” he explains.

“There is also so much misconception and error surrounding Nick, there was a realisation that unless something was approved and assisted by her and his estate, it would pass into fact.”

Morton Jack, who cites the 200 factual errors on Drake’s Wikipedia, carried out a similar number of interviews for Nick Drake: The Life. “Fundamentally, the image he’s always had is accurate. He was this mysterious, enigmatic, charismatic, talented, doomed youth. None of that is challenged but the cumulative impression I built of him was not as cut and dried as the one a lot of people have.”

One thing that has been overstated, he says, is “the extent to which Nick’s background was privileged”. Drake was not a “Cambridge scholar”. He dropped out of the city’s Fitzwilliam College in 1969 after the release of debut album Five Leaves Left. He also did not “retreat to the country estate” when the 1971 follow-up, Bryter Layter, also failed to deliver the commercial success or critical acclaim he craved. “Nick’s upbringing was comfortable but his parents weren’t millionaires.”

However, Morton Jack does believe being raised “in the bottom of the one per cent” could explain Drake’s fabled indifference – frequently depicted as paralysis – to self-promotion. Despite recording alongside pre-eminent producer Joe Boyd and rubbing shoulders with Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band and John Martyn, he played only around 40 concerts and gave just two interviews. “He found the idea of being interviewed and saying ‘I’m brilliant, look at me’ instinctively problematic.”

No footage – and one photograph – of Nick Drake performing live exists, although Morton Jack points out he was happy to play various “cavernous auditoriums”, including London’s Royal Festival Hall, to kickstart his career. “He had this slightly unrealistic expectation of it being like people watching a string quartet, and he would be listened to and applauded at the end of each song. The fact that’s not how it worked is where there was the most obvious clash between his background and art.”

Morton Jack’s book is founded on “minutiae”, bringing its subject into unparalleled focus. The author’s diligent research provides insight into his movements during the “Summer of Love” era. He watched The Doors play London’s Roundhouse in September 1968 and Bob Dylan a year later at the Isle of Wight Festival.

“Nick came home elated and declared that now, finally, the world would change and peace would prevail. It was one of the few political statements he ever made,” Gabrielle tells the author.

The biggest revelation about his interest in the emergent rock’n’roll scene comes in the pre-Cambridge description of an unlikely audience with The Rolling Stones on a March 1967 trip to Marrakesh. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – fleeing the infamous Redlands drug bust – were staying in a French colonial hotel. Despite being “bombed out of their minds”, the group agreed to a friend’s request for Nick to play for them.

“What’s interesting is that Nick’s willingness to perform was right there. He knew he was good and wanted to hustle.” Still just a teenager, Drake was already an effortlessly skilled guitarist.

“Playing in front of The Stones gives us an early glimpse into the fact he wasn’t always crippled by self-doubt and embarrassment,” says Morton Jack.

Elsewhere, the book details the more improbable events that accompanied Drake’s drift into reclusion following the 1972 release of the stark and spectral final album Pink Moon. By now receiving treatment for depression and back living at home in rural Warwickshire with his parents Rodney – who kept a diary of his son’s final years – and Molly, Drake could be found chuckling away to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, The Two Ronnies and Monty Python. Despite Pink Moon’s limited impact, Drake told his father “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime. One day people would realise.”

It’s a comment that tallies with the luminous, soothsaying aura that runs through songs like “Time Has Told Me”. But it also frames a deeply troubled and painfully withdrawn individual unable to banish the demons devouring his mental health. Indecision and contradiction dominated this phase. There was talk of enlisting in the army or working in a bank. He even accepted the offer of a six-month traineeship as a computer programmer in Droitwich. This, inevitably, fell through.

There was also a failed first suicide bid involving Valium, as well as one session of ECT, and countless medical appointments and in-patient spells in various institutions. Of his “depression”, Drake writes in a letter included in this biography: “I never really understood the word and felt that ‘confusion’ was more apt.” Morton Jack’s caveated view is he “probably had some form of schizophrenia”. Rodney was a member of the Schizophrenia Society and Nick read books about the condition.

Morton Jack describes a man whose decline would occasionally manifest itself in destructive – numerous guitars were destroyed – rather than creative bursts of energy. When he did leave the house, it was to drive aimlessly – often to London and straight back again – clocking up an incredible 10,000 miles in two months during 1973 in his Austin 1100.

In March 1974, six months before he died, Drake’s erratic behaviour peaked in an entirely unexpected marriage proposal to a close – but platonic – female friend: Sophia Ryde. “She told me it came completely out of the blue and was not remotely supported by their relationship to that date,” says Morton Jack. “It was unfortunately just another figment of his illness and desperately trying to find a solution.”

Since his death, Nick Drake’s legacy has been thoughtfully shepherded, with selected reissues, an incongruous but beguiling Volkswagen TV advert and 2014’s handsome coffee table book, Remembered For A While. As Morton Jack attests, he is now in exulted, once unthinkable territory alongside the likes of The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Nick Drake: The Life underscores his family’s decades of grief and enduring belief in his music. It also amplifies the words inscribed on his headstone in the St Mary Magdalene Church, Tanworth-in-Arden: “Now we rise and we are everywhere.”

The truth about Nick Drake, the most mythologised man in music. By Ben Gilbert. iNews, June 6, 2023. 

When the cult singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s third album, Pink Moon, was released in 1972 many of his friends were horrified. Now held to be a stone-cold classic, it is a spare, beautiful sequence of songs, many of which lay bare its 24-year-old author’s inner tumult. Drake’s two previous albums, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly. Although he was an English singer-guitarist whose unconventional tunings and numinous lyrics set him apart, even in a crowded folk revival field, a chasm had opened up between the promise of his talent and his meagre public profile.

 Now, Drake is revered as a depressed romantic too fragile for the world. The Cure took their name from one of his songs. In the 80s, artists as diverse as Kate Bush and the Dream Academy cited him as an influence. Volkswagen used Pink Moon’s title track in an ad in 1999, prompting a fresh upsurge of interest in his oblique pastorals.

Pink Moon was the product of a period of intense, secretive songwriting, during which the singer’s behaviour became more erratic and his mental health deteriorated, much to the anguish of family and friends. It was a mark of the regard in which he was held by associates that the album was recorded with little warning, late at night, exactly as Drake prescribed by engineer/producer John Wood with no external input (the previous two LPs featured arrangements).

Drake handed over a recording of Pink Moon to Island Records’ bewildered boss Chris Blackwell, who had not been expecting it, before going dark again. Blackwell ploughed ahead with his most mysterious charge’s release, even though Drake had no interest in artwork or press. There was little hope of the erratic, retiring musician touring. Pink Moon didn’t sell much either.

Drake is now ensconced in myth as a doomed poet whose life ended at 26 through an overdose of antidepressants. Previous biographies and documentaries have given thorough accounts of his life and work, including one in 2014 by his sister, Gabrielle Drake, the actor. The work of their mother, Molly Drake, has been folded into the story. Her son had grown up to the sound of Molly composing songs at the piano; there are resonances in their bodies of work.

Richard Morton Jack’s authoritative doorstop is, though, the definitive word on Drake, insofar as the story of a deeply inward-facing man can be told by others. It builds on everything that has gone before and adds so much detail it can seem, at times, overwhelming. Although a foreword by Gabrielle Drake maintains that this is not an authorised work, she provided Drake’s own papers, her father’s diary and gave her blessing for everyone around Drake to contribute. Patrick Humphries, who published a biography of Drake in 1997, even handed over his own archive. There is something of Mark Lewisohn’s approach to the Beatles here: no childhood friend or university contemporary is left un-interviewed. There are a great many school reports. Drake’s guitars are reverently documented.

The outcome of this forensic but always eloquent account is two-fold. The first half of the book sets out to establish just how normal and, indeed, biddable and cheerful Drake was as a child. Born in Rangoon, he lived a life of genteel privilege in Warwickshire from the age of two where his parents, “old Burma hands” in the colonial parlance, doted on him and his sister. Their Karen nanny, Naw Rosie Paw Tun, acted as third parent (the Karen people originate along the Thailand-Myanmar border and remain in conflict with the Burman majority in Myanmar). Although Drake disdained sports, he was athletic and could be persuaded to join in; he got up to high jinks at Marlborough College and, later, Cambridge, where he gravitated towards other “heads” into the burgeoning 60s music scene. Most agree that he could be detached or preoccupied with his own interests. But there was little in his early years that predestined a life of artistic torment.

  Among the many interviewees, a couple of material witness accounts are absent. The family’s housekeeper, Naw Ma Naw, died in 1988 and so could not have been consulted by Morton Jack. Her aunt, Naw Rosie Paw Tun, the Drakes’ long-serving nanny, is also presumably long gone.

Even so, it is a small shortcoming in this assiduously researched work that Morton Jack follows the lead of this largely upper-middle-class cast in reporting that Tun and Naw were part of the family, rather than servants, and yet their thoughts on Drake and his end have not been recorded or conjectured. The book is full of public schoolboys weighing in on whether the singer was odd. Naw was the one to discover Drake’s body on a November morning in 1974. She was reportedly the last to hear him alive, moving about around 5.30am. Her thoughts and feelings can be imagined, but are not known.

In an interview with Uncut magazine, Morton Jack makes plain there are no shocking revelations in his work. Drake’s lack of interest in the opposite sex has led some to speculate whether he was gay; Morton Jack finds no evidence, and records his proposal of marriage to a friend, Sophia Ryde. Drugs might have explained Drake’s decline. But although much dope was smoked – and it remains plausible that the singer’s cannabis consumption might have precipitated a form of psychosis – Morton Jack concludes that he almost certainly wasn’t using anything harder.

The last third of the book is difficult to read – through no fault of the author’s, but because Drake’s final months are chronicled almost day by painful day. There is no ending other than that foretold.

Drawing on the diary Rodney Drake kept when his son moved back to the family home at Far Leys in Warwickshire, Morton Jack bears witness to Drake’s alarming unravelling: all the psychiatric interventions, all the missed pills, all the false dawns. Drake smashed things up, he would disappear for days, go to Paris ostensibly to write an album for Françoise Hardy, come straight back. He would take long drives, then abandon his car when it ran out of petrol. Often he was unable to speak. Astoundingly, he considered joining the army and accepted a job in IT, but never took it up.

Everyone around him tried to help; from time to time, some did, leading to more heartbreak when Drake relapsed. The diagnosis was “simple” schizophrenia. But in a moving letter to Rodney, one of the doctors who saw Drake implored his devoted parents not to blame themselves. “People who have studied this illness all their lives have no better understanding of patients than you had of Nick,” he wrote. This book is illuminating, but Drake himself remains painfully unknowable.

Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack review – folk’s fragile man of mystery. By  Kitty Empire. The Guardian, June 4, 2023.