MEMOIR
Cal Flyn
On Agoraphobia
by Graham Caveney
Picador £12.99 pp208Graham Caveney has suffered
from a pathological fear of
open spaces for more than 30
years. This peculiar fixation,
which has haunted him ever
since he suffered a panic
attack on a coach aged 19, has
come to define his life.
Through some indelible
Pavlovian association, empty
roads now seem to him
freighted with danger. This
fear often expands to include
parks, streets and all manner
of outdoor settings, no matter
how green or pleasant. All
suggest to him the possibility
of panic, a loss of control.
“Agoraphobia is a meta-
fear,” he explains, “a pre-
emptive strike against the fear
yet to come. It is so frightened
of fear that it insists you
remain permanently afraid.”
Several times he was forced
to move back in with his
parents, who regarded his
periodic hermitry with a
mix of bafflement and
suspicion. And who could
blame them? Their
intellectual son had
dropped out of
university to live
squalidly in his
childhood
bedroom, barely
emerging to eat.
There was
more to it than
they knew.
Caveney’s 2017
memoir, The Boy
with the Perpetual
Nervousness,
revealed his sexual
abuse at the hands of
his headmaster, a
Catholic priest. This
new book is a record
of the continuing, insidious
fallout. Still, it is no misery
memoir; it is a strange and
many-headed work thatmelds personal experience
with cultural criticism.
Agoraphobia, for Caveney,
has been an intensely lonely
experience. But, throughout,
he has found fellowship in
books. He offers a whistle-
stop tour of agoraphobes in
literature, from Dickens’s Miss
Havisham to Wilkie Collins’s
Mr Fairlie. He finds parallels
in the lives of writers too:
Emily Dickinson; Ford Madox
Ford; Shirley Jackson, who in
her later years became so
terrified of the outside world
that even a phone call might
trigger a panic attack.
He quotes an 18th-century
physician who pinpoints
artificial lighting and the
colonial project as among the
sources of anxiety. Others felt
it to be a problem of the liver
or the ear. By the close of the
19th century, agoraphobia
was so common as to be
dismissed as fashionable.
Caveney turns the essential
tragedy of his condition, its
incommunicable nature,
into something akin to a
philosophical paradox: “My
phobia — my most sacred fear
— is something that cannot
be got,” he warns us.
“Attempting to fill in the
blanks tells me nothing
about them other than
they are impossible
to fill.”
There is
comedy too — a
black humour in
his agoraphobes’
support group’s
collective relief in
response to the
government’s
pandemic edict to
“stay at home”.
This is one
demographic who
do not tire of Zoom.
But perhaps those
frightening,
housebound months
have offered us all a
glimpse of Caveney’s
experience. I may never
understand his phobia,
but that tiny flicker, fanned
by the insight offered in
this thoughtful, humane
and unjustly enjoyable
book, feels like a start. cpurposes of welfare fraud;
once, a PTSD-ridden Vietnam
vet killed a cat in the family’s
garden, smeared his face with
blood, then “hunted” her
terrified older sister Anita
through town. Davis also
describes a culture of sexual
abuse that went chaotically
unchecked: the predatory
relative, the man who grabbed
the eight-year-old Davis at a
party, the serial molester who
assaulted her sister in a shop.
Yet somehow Davis saw
around the odds so heavily
stacked against her. Her sister
Dianne once warned her that
she must work hard to
become somebody; drama
became the plan when she
caught the actor Cicely Tyson
on TV. Davis made it to
college, then to Juilliard,
where she bridled against
training aimed at creating
“a perfect white actor”, the
costume department’s
“huge European wigs”
symbolically failing to fit
over her braids. Out in the
working world she was
largely offered roles as
“drug-addicted mothers”.His whole life
in lockdown
The terrors — and black humour — of
living with the loneliness of agoraphobia
Her breakthrough came in
1996 with her Tony-nominated
Broadway appearance in
August Wilson’s Seven Guitars;
Barbra Streisand, Halle Berry
and Denzel Washington
among the backstage visitors.
Roles in Steven Soderbergh’s
Out of Sight and the TV show
City of Angels nudged her even
further away from catching
the bus to rep jobs and living
off dried herring. As her
profile rose, she was soon in
the position where her Solaris
co-star George Clooney let her
stay at his Italian villa as a
wedding present (“I felt like
I was in The Great Gatsby”).
Even so, there could be
moments of awkwardness — at
her first meeting with Meryl
Streep on the set of 2008’s
Doubt, Davis followed her to
the bathroom for reasons she
still doesn’t quite understand.
This trajectory is testament to
her talent, tenacity and, as
she emphasises, sheer luck
— and if anyone has earned
the right to dispense career
wisdom, it’s Davis. At one
glorious point she slips into
hard-boiled advice mode,
scathing about “privileged”
young actors who blithely
witter about “waiting for the
right roles” — “You have no
leverage if you do not work.”
For all its pain, there is joy
in Finding Me — the adoption
of her daughter, Genesis,
marriage to the actor Julius
Tennon — and Davis writes
about her parents with
clear-eyed compassion. Her
father changed his ways as he
grew older, becoming a
devoted grandfather and
husband: Davis grants him a
forgiveness that is touching, if
hard to read. Yet her desire to
write more than a standard
showbiz memoir is possibly
clearest in the sheer
physicality of this book.
Davis describes the abortion
she had when she discovered
she was pregnant two weeks
before her Juilliard graduation;
she discusses her alopecia,
her fibroids, her bleeding, her
infertility. Not many
Hollywood stars talk about
bunions, but Davis is there,
encouraging the reader to
walk in her shoes. If there’s an
occasional tinge of Hollywood
therapy-speak to Finding Me,
it’s an understandable part of
Davis’s mission to show the
whole woman, to reveal what
being “exceptional” really
takes — and who it leaves
behind. “How I did claw my
way out of poverty?” Davis
writes in answer to a friend’s
question, before delivering the
hard truth: “There is no out.” cOpen about his phobia
Graham CaveneyEMMA ROBERTSONALAMY1 May 2022 21