Tracey Emin
STRANGELAND
224pp. Sceptre. £14.99.
0 340 769440
Tracey Emin’s art is confessional and raw. Her works document her promiscuity and her experiences of rape and of violent abuse. She archives her existence assiduously: the details of her daily life – be they tragic or mundane – are the lineaments of her artistic achievement. Since her work is so unabashedly autobiographical, a written memoir is a logical extension of her oeuvre, albeit perhaps a superfluous one. Strangeland is not her first book, but it is her first aimed at a mass audience. It comprises three sections, which are entitled “Motherland”, “Fatherland”, and “Traceyland”. In the first there are recollections of her rackety childhood – running wild in Margate with her twin brother Paul. In the second she sketches her loving yet confused relationship with her Turkish Cypriot father, and she explores her Turkish heritage. Finally, she journeys inward, laying bare her neuroses, her fantasies and her most pungent traumas.
The material which Emin has at her disposal is richer than that of many a successful memoir: she has led a remarkable life. But she rarely tells it straight. The titles of her artworks suggest a flair for noisy hyperbole: “Every Part of Me’s Bleeding”, “I Need Art Like I Need God”, “My Cunt Is Wet With Fear”. On the page, the volume is set just as high. From the opening sentence (“When I was born, they thought I was dead”) to the last (“DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE THE PAST HEAD ON”), the writing is strident. It is characterized, as well, by an unresisted urge to trumpet metaphysical profundities.
Emin is interesting when she deals in concrete particulars. She memorably records that her mother worked at a club in Ramsgate called Gay Nights, and that at one time her diet consisted only of fish fingers and Nesquik (“preferably strawberry”). When an addled drug dealer tries and fails to hump her in a cheap hotel, she rifles his pockets; the resulting booty consists of £16, a gold lighter and a packet of Benson and Hedges. She even reveals, alarmingly, that she has already made her own coffin – sky blue, with a purple mattress – and that she always takes her watch off during sex, “even . . . outside in winter”.
But then there is the gimcrack philosophy: the platitudinous guff of assertions such as “Love. It’s a hard thing” or the vodka-and-Red Bull swagger of “You don’t have to be born with balls to have balls”. A particular and worrisome preoccupation is the condition of her soul. Emin’s first book, which chronicled her sexual history, was called Exploration of the Soul, and in 2001 an exhibition of her work at London’s White Cube gallery was entitled You Forgot To Kiss My Soul, so perhaps we should expect a certain amount of unctuous self-communion. All the same, it is wearing. When she learns that her uncle is dead, she doesn’t cry, “because deep in my soul I know the soul can endure”. “Flying is tough”, she opines on another occasion, cherishing the thought that “When you land, you have to wait for your soul to catch up”. In one of her many fantasies, she writes a novel, which is banned from all bookshops in Britain; its title is Fucked-up Crazy Soul.
At times Emin writes with fierce clarity. Her description of an abortion is arrestingly visceral: in the back of a minicab “I cradled the foetus . . . between my thigh and the palm of my hand”. Often, however, self-consciousness and theatrical posing intrude. Reflecting on the vagaries of her sex life, she apes Hamlet (“To masturbate or not?”), and after her famously inebriated ramblings on a Channel 4 arts programme she wonders, “Am I now the George Best of the art world?”. Restraint is not a part of her creative vocabulary. Typically, she recalls a tomboy classmate called Suzy (“When we all got tits, her voice broke”), and describes being attacked by her: “Her fist came flying into my face. It felt like a fucking hammer”. The recollection has some snap, but what does the adjective add? A touch of Emin’s tobacco-stained voice, perhaps? In truth, her numerous expletives tend to convey not the intensity of the moment, but the instinctive vehemence of her anger and self-pity. One of her beliefs – unarticulated, but frequently implied – is that incoherence is an integral part of truth-telling: the inexact and the unmeasured are poetic. On the page, this is not a congenial strategy. Some of her similes are at least vividly odd, and occasionally a metaphor warrants a second reading. For instance, the middle-aged fisherman she takes as her lover in Turkey has a face “like a burnt old wooden spoon”; the women at an abortion clinic wait “as though they were at the hairdresser’s”; and a case of gonorrhoea lies “nestled inside me”. But often her language is opaque.
On holiday in Egypt, Emin disparages the patronizing ways of tour guides: the Valley of the Kings, she complains, is “not a noddy-dog situation”. When she writes of an old woman who “looked Freudian”, does she mean that the woman looks like Freud or that her features suggest she is opulent with the sort of neuroses Freud would have liked to unravel? We can only guess. Elsewhere, reflecting on some of the more brutish sexual indignities that have been inflicted on her, she observes that you never “see the anal police sniffing and banging at anyone’s door”. The word “anal”, included for both kinds of explicitness, merely throws us off the scent. On another occasion, she recalls the experience of picking olives with her father: “There were a lot of jokes going around – general olive-talk”. What sort of jokes? Jokes like “Where do you live? Olive over there”? And what is “olive-talk”? It would be good to know.
In its final hallucinatory stages, Strangeland becomes Dalíesque. Emin is apparently propositioned by a dog, thrown into the boot of a car and violated. The details are eye-watering. Yet here, as ever, the author’s enthusiasm for lavish disclosure doesn’t stop her leaving a lot out. Part of the reason is that she is easily bored. She never finishes books: “Sometimes I think: I wonder what happened to Riddley Walker? Or, How did Byron die?”. At moments such as this, self-portraiture slides into self-disgust. It hardly comes as a surprise when among her concluding remarks she reveals that her favourite painting is Munch’s “The Scream”. It is the inevitable choice, conveyed in now familiar terms: “But paying homage wasn’t enough, I wanted to jump inside the picture and cradle the Scream in my arms. Another lost soul”.
