The Body in the Library

by Graham Caveney

Cancer, tumour, cancer. The words fizzle and dissolve into nothing like aspirin in water. I exist in the third person. The room is blue. When Graham Caveney was a child the word 'cancer' was unspeakable, only uttered in jokes told by people too frightened to say the word in any other context. Now the boy with perpetual nervousness is a fifty-something man, and the oncologist in front of him is saying words evacuated of all Inoperable. Incurable. In this startling and deeply moving memoir from one of the great chroniclers of British working-class life, Graham Caveney charts a year of disease from diagnosis to past 'original sell-by-date'. Shot through with Northerness, tenderness, and Caveney's trademark humour, The Body in the Library reflects on an unfinished lifetime filled with books and with love. What's it like to realise that the books on your shelf will remain unread? That the book you are writing will be your last - that you have become your own deadline?

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

141 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 30, 2024

Reviews

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it is true that for every reader there’s one book that becomes a part of their soul, then this is my book. This memoir is spectacular in its honesty, literary reflections, poetic prose, and its irony. It’s written with the heart.

“Remission, like the prose poem, seeks to do two contradictory things simultaneously: to pause time and demand that time continue, to savour the sentence while turning the page. Stop, start. Freeze, carry on. Stay still but tell me: what happens next?”

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.” (Taylor Swift) Well screw that. Today I am so happy that I’m a reader 😊 What a blessing. In The Body in the Library: Memoir of a Diagnosis Graham captures things I wouldn’t even know how to begin putting into words. Life, living, dying - it’s a complicated business. More than one thing can be true. It isn’t fair. It doesn’t make sense. Meaning is found and lost and made up.

But despite all of that, this book and these words spoke to me. In the introduction Jonathan Coe calls it a “masterpiece. A book that will take hold of your heart and never let go” and I can’t say it better than that. I adore Caveney’s writing, he has such a way with words. Lyrical, flowing, funny, smart, sad. I’ve previously read On Agoraphobia and really liked that one too.

There is a part (page 60) about almost expecting a phone call where the doctor says sorry you don’t have cancer after all there’s been a mistake and Graham thinks, I would forgive them. The specificity of that experience and yet I'm sure countless people can relate. Talk about capturing a feeling and good writing. He quotes Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals which was neat to me because I bought this book and that one in the same bookshop on the same day. He also references many other words including John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed which is one of my favourites.

On page 129 beginning “She says, How are you? And my fury boils over” that whole page captivated me. I wanted to quote it in my review but it would be too long. Realising his (apparently fit and healthy, not terminally ill) wife could still die before him. Anger. Fear. Jealousy. Exhaustion. Nihilism. Longing. The contradictory feelings which co-exist. The completely overwhelming experience of being. Hang it in the Louvre. Wow.

Some of my favourite lines 🤍 :
Illness seeks out its rightful genre, moving between the melodrama and the detective story, the sensation novel and farce. It abandons such tropes even as it invites them, wrong-footing our readings, disrupting our conjectures. - page 25

Hospitals remind us that our heroism is entangled with our helplessness, a dialectic of snark necessity. They move between triumphant modernity and abject humanity, congratulating us on how far we have come, reminding us of how far there is to go. - 32

I was convinced that a diagnosis would surely rekindle my addiction, re-awaken the monster that has laid dormant in me for well over a decade. From terminal disease to alcoholic dis-ease, my farewell fuck-it, bucket list of booze and pills and powder. Yet that is not what I want to happen. What I want is to stay alive. Self-destruction is a fantasy of the well, a consolation of the healthy. There is only enough room for one catastrophe. - 45

I think of the death fixations of my youth, all that Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis, Kierkegaard and so-bleak-it’s-funny Schopenhaeur. All that black eyeliner. I had bought into it all, Thanatos as Eros, the vainglorious posturing of romantic oblivion. Suicide had once seemed the coolest of career moves: die young, stay pretty. [...] It turns out I don’t want to die before I get old. It is better to rust. - 47

The post-diagnosis early days are a series of encounters with my own never-will-bes, probably-last-times and never-agains. Like those funeral goths in Leeds, I am in mourning for myself. - 60

Reader, I fucking married her. - 71

Just one more summer. Another round of cricket (The Ashes!), WImbledon, tea in the garden, the new Lydia Davis. One more summer and then I’ll be ready. Except I know that I won’t. - 93

I have been given a disabled travel pass, valid until May 2025, three years after diagnosis. Thank you, Nottingham City Council. I appreciate the optimism. - 93

I say to her, I’m sorry I have to leave you. I don’t want to leave you. Don’t let me leave you. - 102

To dismiss AA and its various offshoots as cults is to miss the point: what is not a cult? Show me an enthusiast and I will show you an advocate. Is a conversation not always, to some extent, an attempt at conversion? - 107

He says, We’ll know for sure by then how the cancer is progressing. Progressing? Such a hopeful, Good Thing word, like ‘growth’ or ‘develop’ or ‘advance’. These are all my enemies now. I have ears out for a less robust lexicon: ‘shrink’, ‘delay’, ‘halt’. I think again of playing Scrabble with the nurses while my mother was ill, recall the intensity with which we played. As though our lives depended on it. - 118

A whole nineteen pounds an hour for a junior doctor? You’ve got to be kidding. I could go on but I won’t. I am tired and it is tiring. The story is so familiar we are unable to comprehend its enormity, an incremental erosion, just another item on our collective list of dread. - pg 132

My circumstances are no different to anyone else’s: they simply exist in sharper focus. None of us know when or how or where. I say this to Emma but it rings hollow. That ‘simply’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. - pg 146

[Wilko] Johnson’s story is both hopeful and defiant, yet it is still a story that ends with death by cancer. Finding faces in clouds does not stop them being clouds. - pg 146

[Rebekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully literary memoir that touched on so many pertinent subjects for me currently - mental illness, cancer diagnoses, facing and preparing for death, alcoholism and eating disorders (i have never heard anyone make this link before but it is something i have long experienced), finding solace and comfort in books and music and subcultures esp goth, in intellectualism, finding a life partner unexpectedly, the beauty of the quotidian, wonderful explorations of Anita brookner, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor...I sat down and read it all in one afternoon and felt deeply moved.

' I got clean in 2009, was hospitalised, rehabilitated, twelve stepped. Sobriety meant starting again. After thirty-five years of pouring liquor onto an empty stomach I discovered that there is a thing called breakfast. Not valium washed down with vodka and orange, but porridge, muesli and granola....croissants. Solid breakfast...`why didn't someone tell me how hungry I had been. The relationship between eating disorders and alcoholism never gets anough airtime. People tend not to associate them, they seem opposite ends of a narcissistic spectrum. The bloated versus the ascetic. Morbid self-denail on the one hand, reckless self-indulgence on the other. It is a false opposition. The two coalesnse around the same question, compulsively asked: what do I need? Like Kafka's Hunger Artist, we are unable to find food to our taste.'

'The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself.' Anita Brookner, Look at Me.

'As an adolescent in the late 1970s, illness seemed a thing to which one should aspire, an oppositional space, a challenge to society's grotesque health. 'Sick' was an epigram we wore with pride, safe in the knowledge that those who applied it to us had a much deeper sickness of the psyche - the terminal corrosive drip-drip-drip of conformity. Our sickness was proof that we were alive: socially and politically aware. You're not feeling sick? Then you've not been paying attention. Our heroes were emaciated, bedsit pale. Iggy Pop, Siouxsie Sioux, Mark E Smith.'

'The process of getting used to the world seems to be too much for us.' Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders and Betters

'There are certain eras, wrote Susan Sontag in her essay on Simone Weil, 'which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction.'

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhat in the style of Ruth Picardie's "Before I Say Goodbye" (1998), Caveney offers us one of the greatest gifts: an uncensored, unsoftened, self-critical and brutally honest account of the step-by-step calvary travelled by his emotions from the moment he is diagnosed with (apparently incurable) cancer to - I am glad to read - his remission.

Such diagnosis has the effect of intensifying each moment in time, slowing down our perception of the present while accelerating our ex post measure of the moments just past. It strips away all patience for pretence, or for anything other than the candid truth. It accentuates the solace derived from daily routines that remind us we have been given another day (in Caveney's case, the walk with his partner by a nearby lake watching the swans).

In Caveney's critical assessment of his life he comes to two conclusions that, inter alia, both seem to point to how he might have lied to himself (and that the reader may recognise as constituting broader warnings). Having spent seven years not getting a PhD, he joins Aldous Huxley in railing against "those so scared and scarred by the prospect of life that they build tombs for themselves in universities ..... death without tears." And when he checks into a monastery he realises that he had "mistaken my desperation for sincerity. ..... I'd had a Christ-like revelation, an epiphany of common sense."