Some Answers Without Questions

by Lavinia Greenlaw

The place I went to when I could not speak was also where my voice came from.Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Lavinia Greenlaw sets out to explore the impulse to say something, to write or sing, and finds herself confronting matters of presence and absence, anger and speechlessness, authority and permission. The result is important and timely, a spirited and vital exploration of what enables anyone - but a woman and an artist in particular - to create and respond even when not invited to do so. Some Answers Without Questions is the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter - and not being asked the ones that do.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Helen McClory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have underlined so many things as to render my copy nearly useless. I will be passing it on to a friend who will also get lots of out of this one.

Full of subtle flame and direct, quiet critical insights

[Stephen Dilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lavinia Greenlaw's 'Some Answers Without Questions' is a brilliant book: a series of short personal essays on topics including writing, gender, singing, dancing, anger and place, but perhaps linked by the idea of voice, and Greenlaw's development of her own voice. Male readers come in for a fair bit of (entirely justified!) criticism throughout this book, so I approach this review with some trepidation and tremendous respect for Greenlaw's work.

"Some Answers Without Questions" is the title of one chapter consisting of a list of Greenlaw's responses to questions she has been asked over her career, but it seems to encapsulate the concerns of the book as a whole, which feels like a series of responses to the questions she would prefer to answer, rather than the inane and reductive questions often put to her (by male interviewers in particular). Greenlaw also challenges many of the labels assigned to her work - again often by men - including "lyrical" and "domestic", and also the three adjectives "cool, intelligent, precise", which she scathingly dismantles: "All poetry should be intelligent and precise but what of this so-called coolness? Is there something about how I comport myself that is not sufficiently friendly? Am I not doing enough to make you comfortable?"

At the heart of the book are the years Greenlaw spent singing in a band and making a record - and her subsequent decision to omit this experience from a previous memoir about music, a silence which she attributes to wanting to "withhold myself rather than risk presence". This silence allows Greenlaw to explore the forces at work that have made it difficult for her and other female writers to speak and be heard, to which she responds passionately and eloquently.

Greenlaw writes in crystalline prose: compact without being dense, epigrammatic without being obscure, startlingly perceptive but also entirely clear. Her own life and experiences provide the through-line for a book which might otherwise risk feeling disjointed, but she also offers illuminating discussion of other writers' lives, including Dickinson, Plath, Gosse and Rilke.

"Some Answers Without Questions" is an incredibly powerful and profound book which deserves to be recognised as a classic of literary criticism and memoir - in many ways the 21st Century's answer to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

Many thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for sending me an ARC to review.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am slightly conflicted in my reaction to this book. There are passages of sheer brilliance, full of wisdom and insight, but somewhere, throughout the course of the whole, things don’t quite hang together as well as they should.
I would still give it four stars for the passages of brilliance.

I was sold on the blurb: “Part memoir, part manifesto…a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation.” Was it the manifesto that was the problem? I have still managed to mark eleven places in the text to come back to and read again.

Some Answers without Questions is a short book with a long timeframe. It follows Greenlaw throughout her life, and so gives us great insights into her development. There are three parts and thirty chapters spanning 175 pages. Everything is bite-sized, perfect for this day and age. In ‘Being Good with Words’ we see the emergence of the young reader. As a ten-year-old she preferred to sit in the library reading The Odyssey, but then went on to describe the author’s prose style as idiosyncratic, she observes:

But when she brandished words that had been placed out of reach and appeared to know what they mean, it was as if she had picked up a sword. She was not to be trusted with such things. Not yet.

She goes on to say;

I couldn’t get over the discovery that while words were just air, what I built out of them seemed as real as anything else, if not more so. The surging worlds in my head could be given form as stories and poems. I could walk among them. I was the child who found such joy in articulation that when a teacher asked the class a question, they would sometimes pretend not to see my raised hand. I wasn’t trying to show off. That would have required more social awareness than I had at the time.

All these things are fascinating developments in the life of a writer. We also hear about some of the tools of the trade, such as here about notebooks:

It was an artist’s sketchbook with. A plain black cover and blank pages, about the size of a paperback. I’ve varied the format over the years but always come back to it. I don’t write, or think, in sequence, and I use the page as open space, drawing diagrams and sketches. Ruled lines would impose organisation before my thoughts are ready for that. I’ve worked in notebooks that I didn’t like because they were cheap or a gift or the only thing available. I was also making a point to myself about not over investing in the words I produced.

At the end of a three-page chapter all about how teenage girls can disguise themselves and disappear into a group who looked and spoke the same, comes this wonderful last paragraph on a quite different topic, of where the author went to when she could not speak.

When people ask where poems come from, I can only say that I know when something might become one. I have a feeling of prickling alertness, somewhere between pleasure and a sense of threat. There is a presence I can’t yet explain or make safe but which is recognised by my body at an animal level. I’m in the dark, as is the thing I’ve encountered, but there is a path and the lights are going on.

The book reveals a gradual shift from the girl who used to sing along to all the songs, to one who is confident enough to sing alone. Greenlaw reveals how she could sing every verse, chorus, whoop and sha-la-la of dozens of songs but needed to re-enact the listening by which she first learnt them to bring them to mind. The transitions were so gradual that they were hard to see – from singing at the back to being the singer at the front. From imitating the writing of other people’s song to one day writing your own. So much so that ‘You don’t notice the day that your voice becomes your own.’

As a sender of poems and prose to editors and competitions this passage spoke loud and clear to me:

I had to get used to sending my poems out into the world, and to accept that they would be met with No or Not quite more often than Yes. I had thought of the literary world as a place of older men and fountain pens, and so it proved to be. The replies I received from poetry magazines were written on compliments slips by The Editor, an avuncular but testy figure who might send a few encouraging words written in a discouraging hand.
My poems were always clearer to me when they came back, sometimes painfully so. It was as if their leaving the house had undomesticated them and they no longer had an automatic place among my work. There were a few I grew to trust and when those ones came back to me, I didn’t hesitate to send them out again.

And another writing insight which resonated with me was:

For me, writing is a cycle of building safe ground and then leaving it and finding myself alone and eventually becoming permeated by the adventure to the extent that new ground emerges.

At chapter 25 of the 30 in the book we hit a hint about the title of the book. The chapter is called What, when, where, why, (who) but has a subtitle of (Answers without questions taken from past interviews). There are lots of short paragraphs, enabling you to cherry-pick favourites. I liked this:

I’ve been writing since I could write. I can’t imagine not writing. I believe if I had never been published I would still be writing. It’s my way of translating the world or experience, or a desire to
…I don’t know what it is.

My first novel grew out of a poem that accidentally became a story. It took me years to find out how to write it. A poem is something you can turn over in your head whereas a novel is a world you have to travel. I’d say I’m a poet who has written some fiction and may write some more.

And right at the end of the book I discovered this wonderful paragraph:

Solitude can be achieved among people if you can pass unnoticed among them. The city where I was born, that I defend and love, where I cannot sleep and find it difficult to breathe, where I have to concentrate on keys and locks and shadows, has given me much solitude. Before the year of lockdowns, I hadn’t realised how much I depended on the city’s sheer flow while moving through it, gathering static from its dense, intricate, inefficient continuous activity. I need solitude but I know that I form it out of its opposite: crowds and noise and the intrusion of strangers; interruption, diversion, abrasion, life.

This has a poetry about it and an awareness which is sometimes hard to find in ourselves. Because this is the first time I encountered Lavinia Greenlaw, I had no sense of who she was or what she had written. There is much talk about song at the start of this book, a feature of her life that does not warrant a mention in her entry into Wikipedia. Hopefully parts of this book will help to set the record straight.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I’m in the dark, as is the thing I’ve encountered, but there is a path and the lights are going on.” Lavinia Greenlaw’s original and intuitive blending of memoir and craft writing in Some Answers Without Questions makes for a compelling and varied reading experience; as a poet, Greenlaw brings a certain freedom to her prose, aware of the rhythms but also the shapes the words take on, not just immediately but throughout, as they accrue, building, ricocheting. This is one of the many books I have read this year that has made me excited to be both reader and writer, alive to the possibility of each. Greenlaw’s personal narrative makes it all the more powerful, as she frames her writing — and her writing about her writing — as being in perpetual tension with her need to speak, recover from silence. “My voice arose out of the desire to connect and was shaped in reaction and resistance. It became my own when I started to use words in a way for which I had no example.” I also really enjoyed the reflections on anger at the start of the book: “Anger can be withheld to the point where it becomes constituent: no longer an emotion but a texture deep in the tissue.” Towards the end of the book, Greenlaw excavates from her own past interviews, presenting a variety of answers detached from their questions (as promised in the title), creating a sort of tapestry of personal meaning and motive and memorialising. “I never imagined being a writer because although I read avidly I never thought I could meet a writer, let alone be a writer. I didn't connect writing with being a writer and I still don't.” Such a beautifully real contemplation of creativity and the self.

[Charlie Beaumont · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated the opportunity to read this very interesting book. It provided me with great insights into the developing personality of Lavinia Greenlaw, and the key influences on her development. I was also fascinated by her discussions of her writing (novels, non fiction and most importantly, I believe, poetry) and her ambitions for it.

It appears that her inner life has been difficult at times but her search for integrity in her writing is a model for us all.

The book encouraged me to reflect on my own personality and on how I present myself to the world, far more so than most books do.

This is a very rewarding read although not necessarily and easy one.

[Emma Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greenlaw expresses many of the thoughts and feelings I have experienced during the creative process. If we read to know that we are not alone, this book delivers in spades.

[Esmé Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best thing I've read since Sarah Kane, made me cry about as much. I think I'll need to read it another few times yet.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Concentrated and requiring concentration, SAWQ contains many beautifully detailed - I had to stop and copy them down! - observations of the purpose of writing, alongside some horrific examples of male ‘privilege’ wrapped tightly within dreamy moments of autobiographical retrospection. Exquisite writing, though not an easy read in both senses of the word.