When her memoir begins, Harriet Shawcross, a film-maker and journalist, is shortly to be married. Looking for something to read at her wedding that doesn’t come either from Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit, she picks up a book she once carefully annotated in pencil: a collection of verse by the objectivist poet George Oppen, whose work she discovered as a student on the west coast of America. Here they are at last, she thinks, turning its pages: the words I will say out loud to the woman with whom I hope to spend the rest of my life. The poem in question, The Hills, which is about Oppen’s relationship with his wife, Mary, shimmers with optimism; it pleases her greatly that its sense of love has to do with aspiration rather than ownership.
Oppen was something of a minimalist, his poems sitting “like little insects on the pages” – a sparseness that is the polar opposite of certain things that make her nervous about weddings. Looking at his work now, though, she wonders if she can’t also deploy him in another way. Before she is married, Shawcross wants to “go back into the silence”: to try to understand why, as a teenager, she gave up speaking for several months, and what effect, in adulthood, this had on her capacity for intimacy. It isn’t only that as “the poet of the gaps and caesuras of gaping white space”, Oppen will make for a good companion during such an excavation. There was a time when he, too, fell into silence. Following his first collection in 1934, with its acclamatory preface by Ezra Pound, he did not publish again until 1962.
This sounds like a good premise for a book, two seeming mysteries to be solved. But what follows hardly lives up to the early billing. Oppen, it turns out, wasn’t so much silent as preoccupied with other things during his own quietness, poetry seeming to be somewhat superfluous in Depression-era America (as a member of the Communist party, moreover, he feared his work being co-opted as propaganda). Shawcross’s wordlessness, meanwhile, was not half so dramatic as it at first sounds, being only partial. Though she declined to join in conversations outside the home, she was always able to answer direct questions, and she spoke to her family quite normally; her old school friends, she reveals, do not remember that she was quiet. Hers sounds like a fairly ordinary sort of reticence, and she works out within the first 40 pages of her book that it was largely the result both of not quite fitting in at her independent school, and of her sense that there were some things she should not talk about in public (her father had been made redundant, causing a “unimaginable” loss of income given that he had “a house in the home counties and four sets of school fees to meet”).
Having reached so soon what feels to the reader like a dead end, where she should go? Shawcross initially sets out to investigate the experiences of children who are suffering from the condition known as selective mutism. She talks to a therapist who believes that for some speech is a phobia like any other, and visits a camp in the US that encourages children to overcome their anxieties in this area in a somewhat brutal manner. After this, however, things grow more unfocused. She interviews Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, who empowered women to speak of things they were perhaps previously conditioned to keep quiet about. She looks at the rise of the Samaritans, whose job it is to listen. In Nepal, where she meets victims of the 2015 earthquake, she comes to understand that there are times and places where talking cures may be of no use at all. She goes on not one, but two, Buddhist retreats, and attends a Quaker meeting. She has a cup of tea with a nun who belongs to a silent order.
What does she learn in the course of these encounters? Not quite enough, perhaps (one particular strangeness of her book is what a haphazard journalist she seems to be, worrying about her taxi meter when she should be concentrating on the story). Sometimes, it seems, silence is empowering; at others, it can be a sign of distress. It often provokes anger and frustration. I kept waiting for everything to come together: a moment of epiphany or even of some clarity. But this never happened. I don’t want to discount what Shawcross has been through emotionally in her life. Nevertheless, it is uncomfortable to see her moving rather seamlessly on the page from writing about those who have lost everything in an earthquake to the trouble she had coming out, or the death of her grandmother from old age, as if these things are similar. They are not, and I wonder that no editor was moved to point this out. Shawcross can certainly write – there are some lovely images in Unspeakable – and she is obviously in possession of a curious and interesting mind. But there is simply not enough for a book here – or not for this book, in this form.
• Unspeakable: The Things We Cannot Say by Harriet Shawcross is published by Canongate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
