68 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
CULTURE BOOKS NONFICTIONNONFICTION
A motorway triggers
Caveney’s anxietyGETTYT
he term is treacherous and
sometimes unkind; Graham
Caveney imagines taking
revenge on it by writing “agoraphobia”
in the middle of a page, surrounded
by scary white space. In Greek, agora
means marketplace and phobos means
fear. But the condition is thought of
as modern, or as a terror of modern
amplitude. Those who experience it
are caricatured as horrifi ed by the
spaciousness beyond the window. In
fact “agoraphobia”, Caveney tells us,
“is not so much a fear of going out as a
fear of something dreadful happening
whilst being out”.
He writes with inside knowledge,
as an agoraphobe not a doctor. At 19,
travelling home from university for
Christmas by coach, he had a panic
attack on the M6, his world dismantled
by the “horrifying symmetry” of the
motorway. An only child, brought
up in working-class Accrington, he
had always been a little dyspraxic ,
or “cack-handed” as it was called.
But this was new: primal fear – heart
hammering, blood pounding, body
in revolt. He survived the next three
years by staying on campus and living
within a 50-yard radius. But to the
dismay of his parents, with whom he
moved back in after graduating, the
condition persisted (“at my most
agoraphobic, everywhere outside my
front door can feel like that original
motorway ”). Now in his 50s , he seeks
to understand its origins.
Being sexually abused by his head
teacher as a teenager – as described
in his 2017 memoir, The Boy With the
Perpetual Nervousness – undoubtedly
played a part: after his body was
invaded, he distrusted boundaries.
Growing up in a tight-knit Lancashire
community, so his partner Emma
jokes, was a factor too: his phobia
was small-mindedness writ large.
Later, for two decades, came booze:
where psychiatry failed, alcohol came
to the rescue, a coping strategy that
“can work right up until the moment
it kills you”. These days Caveney is
sober, does yoga, is part of a support
group, and makes a point of going
out even on days he doesn’t feel
like it. But dual carriageways
still horrify him. His book isn’t a
bland tale of how-I-got-cured ; it’s
intellectually curious, emotionally
I
n 1611, John Donne composed
a funeral elegy for 14-year-old
Elizabeth Drury. It contained one
of his most brilliant, unsettling lines:
“One might almost say, her body
thought.” Donne portrayed body
and soul as radically, delightfully
commingled.
This is a poem that has long excited
Donne commentators. John Carey, in
his landmark 1981 Life, Mind and Art,
was fascinated by Donne’s conviction
that, as he wrote in a sermon, “all that
the soul does, it does in, and with, and
by the body”. Now the academic and
children’s writer Katherine Rundell
puts the poem centre stage in a book
she describes as “ both a biography
of Donne and an act of evangelism”.
Rundell is right that Donne – “thePrimal fear
Narrowed horizons,
expanded by literature
Blake Morrison
MEMOIR
On Agoraphobia
Graham Caveney
PICADOR, £12.99
In praise of Donne
An evangelical
portrait of the poet
Lara Feigel
BIOGRAPHY
Super-Infi nite
The Transformations
of John Donne
Katherine Rundell
FABER, £16.99bracing and immensely erudite.
Shrinks may not have helped
(“At the last count I have seen:
ten psychiatrists, a score of
counsellors, two dozen therapists”)
but imaginative literature amplifi es
his insights: Proust, Kafk a, Ford
Madox Ford , Anne Tyler, Sue
Townsend, Helen Dunmore and
many more. Two American writers
are of particular interest to him: Emily
Dickinson (the words “house” and
“home” appear in 210 of her poems)
and the novelist Shirley Jackson.
There’s a chapter on Sigmund Freud
and honourable mention of Carl
Friedrich Otto Westphal , a pioneering
specialist in the fi eld.
It is only recently that agoraphobia
has been recognised as a predominantly
female complaint. Two thirds of
Caveney’s support group are women.
With props to stabilise their instability- walking sticks, headphones, gloves,
sunglasses, bags, dogs and wheelchairs - they come over sympathetically. Their
presentations are diverse, as Caveney’s
have been, variously misdiagnosed
as epilepsy, labyrinthitis, vertigo,
motion sickness, migraine and
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Wary of remedies he has tried –
including meds that “instil a perplexed
nonchalance, an unenlightened Zen” - he’s also dismissive of one he
refused, “fl ooding”, through which
agoraphobes are forced to confront
their phobia full-on, “the most counter
of counter-intuitive treatments”.
Given the pain he has been through,
he’d be entitled to a measure of anger.
But his book is bright and funny, and
full of telling quotes, whether culled
from others ( Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette : “All within me became
narrowed to my lot”) or drawn from
his own experience: “Agoraphobes
are the ultimate squares, arch
greatest writer of desire in the English
language” – must never be forgotten,
and she is the ideal person to evangelise
him for our age. She shares his
linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in
what T S Eliot called “felt thought”,
his ability to bestow physicality on
t h e a b s t r a c t.
The facts of Donne’s life are well
known. In addition to Carey’s study,
there’s a recent comprehensive
biography by John Stubbs. Donne was
born into a Catholic family at a time
of persecution; family members were
imprisoned and tortured. Donne
moved between success and penury,
with a stint in law, an unsuccessful
foray as an adventurer in Spain, and
a period at court that ended when he
secretly married Anne More and was
thrown in prison by her father. Then
there were years as the impoverished,
frustrated father of 12 children ( six
died ), a period of grief after his wife’s
early death and his fi nal effl orescence,
at once unexpected and inevitable, as
a clergyman who was swiftly
promoted to dean of St Paul’s.
It’s a biography fi lled with gaps and
Rundell brings a zest for imaginative
speculation to these. We know so little
about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings
her alive as never before, dwelling on
the daring of Anne’s acceptance of
this man at a time when upper-class
young women obeyed their fathers
and, crucially, demonstrated their
virtue by being unwooable. This is a
love story, yet few of Donne’s love
poems were written for Anne, and
Rundell is good, too, on Donne as the
swaggering womaniser who in reality
had very little sex. She is convincing
in her suggestion that Donne wrote
his most satisfying erotic poems not
for his lovers but for an audience of
male friends.
T h i s d o e s n ’ t n e g a t e t h e e x p a n s i v e
equality of his best erotic poetry – his
belief, as Rundell puts it, that you can
fi nd “eternity through the human
body of one other person”.
Eternity, in its particular
manifestation as infi nity, is Rundell’s
central theme. This is a determinedly
deft book, and I would have liked it to
billow a little more, making room for
more extensive readings of the poems
and larger arguments about the
Renaissance. But if there is an
over arching argument, then it’s about
Donne as an “infi nity merchant”. In
embracing infi nity, he turned eternity
into a mathematical concept, and
there is pulsing excitement to his
quest for this quality, which runs
through his writing about sex, death
and God – his three great subjects. To
read Donne is to grapple with a vision
of the eternal that is startlingly
reinvented in the here and now, and
Rundell captures this vision in its
power, eloquence and strangeness.
To buy a copy for £14.78
go to guardian bookshop.comconformists ” ; “Safe space: a concept
which, for the agoraphobe, verges on
the oxymoronic”. Where his earlier
memoir was more conventional in
form, this book proceeds through
short, epigrammatic paragraphs,
weighing evidence and testing ideas.
It will hearten people who have
agoraphobia, enlighten medics
and teach outsiders all the lessons
Caveney has learned.
To buy a copy for £11.30
g o t o g u a r d i a n b o o k s h o p. c o m