Book Review: 'Nightshade Mother - A Disentangling'
Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis weaves a tapestry of dark emotion in her new memoir
“The last thing my mother said to me before she died was: ‘Shut up!’”
The overarching theme for Gwyneth Lewis’ Nightshade Mother – A Disentangling is forgiveness and the consequences of seeking out such an unrepentant human need when a parent is on their deathbed. Few instances in life can bring about the rage, fury, and confusion of a child caught in the vortex of two cultures, two hemispheres smothered in denial and silence.
Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales in 2005, lays down a compelling narrative as she recounts with unflinching honesty the demons that haunt her. Like some long-forgotten past wrapped in a nightmare, she tracks the gnawing torture of the migraines that begin after she and her husband Leighton move into her parents’ house.
Winding back the rusty cogs of her childhood, she charts how her mother’s parents, Sarah Ann and Ben James, influenced how she saw her own mother Eryl’s difficulties. When Sarah Ann’s health began the long dark retreat into sickness and hostility, there would be no turning back.
The electrifying moment when Lewis, aged five, burst into Sarah Ann’s bedroom to break the news of Ben’s death is utterly horrifying, like a scene from a twisted fairy tale. As Lewis so aptly describes, the cadence of verbal abuse is passed down by the generation before. Not so much the words, but the “pitch and sol-ffa of blame and rage.”
Ben James, Gwyneth and Sarah Ann James, 22 August 1960. Courtesy of the author.
Lewis delves into intricate and meticulous detail about her father Gwilym and his exploits before his marriage to Eryl. One can only imagine how life as a navy man infected his personality, with his often humorous escapades put to pen and paper in journals and letters to his family. The author remarks that her father was a “hoarder of text,” and notes with a tinge of sadness that after his marriage, “the paper trail becomes more impersonal’ as Eryl takes over the record-keeping.
“Her unconscious identification of me with her own sister means that I have been set up for condemnation.”
Lewis offers the comparisons to Eryl’s sister, Megan, the good girl, the older one, the one who parenthetically did no wrong as crushing blows to a younger sibling. What then and how could Lewis expect to foresee these thorns in the bramble that would catch her again and again. The moments of normalcy when she would laugh or have Eryl fall into the telling of children’s stories were a distant comfort, just out of reach.
Lewis and her younger sister Megan are the only Welsh-speaking children in the community, and as Lewis begins her mix of English and the phonetically spelled words of Welsh, she wonders if she’s covering her true self. Is she fronting the more acceptable version of ‘Gwyneth?’ As a teacher, did Eryl’s penchant for correctness burrow into the divide between the two halves of Lewis?
Poetry begins to flow from a trip to the seashore at age seven mutating into a collaborative but tenuous relationship with Eryl, as Lewis seeks acceptance but is granted corrections instead. The unmasking of a trunk full of childhood mementos flows forth with happiness, circled with anxiety and frustration, seeking truths in the middle of guilt, wrapped in the exactitude of her mother’s sewing, life patterns and indefinable perfection.
“And where was your father in all this? Preoccupied.”
Gwilym. A health inspector, a perplexed finder of ‘The Hum,’ a pipe smoker. He was “blotting us out.” He did the best he could. Look after Number One. Himself.
Higher education is Lewis’ formative, yet rebellious period. Excelling in games of lying, she plows through the migraines, the over-fulfilling of homework, and Eryl’s continued push to excel and triumph over and above. Lewis writes in her diaries of the abundant love and admiration for her mother. She wins a trophy for her work. She feels wretched and exhausted at 13 years old.
Gwyneth with eisteddfod trophy, 1972. Courtesy of the author.
The intensity of Lewis’ recollections are not for the faint of heart and yet the voice in her head knows not how this treatment, this hammering of her being will end. There is no tough shell, no fighting back except in words, penned in diaries. A summer spent in America with her aunt and uncle brings unto it a disastrous homecoming, even after Lewis’ acceptance to college in Cambridge.
Has she turned her back on the Welsh, as her mother accuses her of, with knives at the ready? Triumphs are not in her mind. Not in the least and as she summarizes further in. Lewis acknowledges in the bluntness of her words, the despair, the harsh reality and the will of her own being to take care of Eryl in her final years.
There is no forgiveness at the end, but would that change anything? Instead, she has addressed her younger self, running commentaries of blame and guilt, and has managed through adversity beyond comprehension – shared and unshared – that she can pull out “other Gwyneths from the shouting and the rage.”
“I consider this book to be my careful taxonomy and description of the nature, signs, symptoms and uses for my Nightshade mother, in whose dark light I have lived, and still do. She is potent, glamorous, hugely beneficial in small quantities, and fatal in overdose.”
Nightshade Mother – A Disentangling by Gwyneth Lewis is published by Calon and is available at Amazon UK and for pre-order in the US at Amazon, Bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble.
