★★★★☆
The Green Bell: A Memoir of Love, Madness & Poetry
The Green Bell: A Memoir of Love, Madness & Poetry
By Paula Keogh
Published: 2017
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Affirm Press
ISBN: 9781925475524
Edition: 1st Edition
Format: Paperback (275 pages)
Source: Public Council Library
Content Warning
This book includes references to: mental illness, suicidal ideation, schizophrenia, psychosis, electroconvulsive therapy, drug use, addiction, and death. War and state-sanctioned violence are also mentioned (but not described)
Our contradictions are woven through the stories we tell each other of our lives… They weave our lives together in the face of a madness that threatens to tear everything apart.
page 88
Synopsis
The memoir of Australian writer Paula Keogh, striving to find herself as a young woman in the 1970s. During a time when mental illness is misunderstood and mistreated, she struggles under the weight of a schizophrenic madness that escalates after the death of her best friend. While in a psychiatric hospital she meets and falls in love with poet Micheal Dransfield who wrote over 1,000 poems and was prominent in the Australian literary scene during this era. Central to Keogh’s portrayal of her life is the understanding of a poetical—and oftentimes traumatised—self vis-à-vis social constructs of romance, gender, and religion during the tumultuous countercultural changes of the time.
It is also fascinating to read Paula Keogh’s own synopsis of the book which has been reproduced here.
Most Compelling Aspect
The Rendering of Madness:
Refusing to be silent or be silenced, Keogh’s memoir reclaims the concept of madness from the stereotypes that have long been associated with the “insane”. Lucid and empowered, it speaks back to the dark loneliness that is suffered at the hands of one’s own mind when plagued by psychological distress. By viewing mental illness through the prism of language, she refuses to allow prescriptive terms—such as insane, abnormal, crazy, unstable, or hysterical—define her experience of schizophrenia and depression. Instead, madness becomes a self-attributed descriptor that is closer to a meaning she can identify with, and that encompasses the impact of illness upon her. It subverts the clinically sanitised rhetoric used to classify those deemed “crazy” by supplanting medical and diagnostic terms with a more human one—madness. The very meaning of mental illness is reconstituted by Keogh’s poignant and insightful rendering of such a madness. Defiant, mosaic, and expansive, it does not allow others to define that which they have never experienced nor are able to fully understand.
For an in-depth look at madness and language, please continue reading here:
‘Memoir and Mental Illness: Madness in 'The Green Bell’
The Good
Embracing the ambiguous:
Often sitting in oppositional truths and multiplicitous meanings, the narrative does not flinch away from its own paradoxy. Without bravado or ego Keogh doesn’t let fear of inconsistency or hypocrisy inhibit her expression of the all too real double standards of mental illness, gender, and religion. A fractured self mediates a fractured society, confronting the amorphous concepts of war, love, friendship, death, and poetry. There is a power in this fragmentary and poetic prose that doesn’t shy from the ambiguity of the human condition and the reality it is situated within.
Philosophy and social analysis:
There is a relentless search for definitions, answers, and reasons by Keogh. Intellectualising the space between one’s self and the world, it creates a whirlpool of philosophical threads that ask a litany of questions about meaning and existence. What is faith? Does society need poetry? Is truth even possible? Is love self-effacing or self-affirming? How do we change a world so at odds with ourselves? Or does the change begin with ourselves? Intensely philosophical, the greater search for meaning through language is underpinned by critical theories of social and cultural analysis that gives the individual memoir a collective significance.
The personal as political:
Keogh shows that if mental illness is exceptionally personal it is therefore also inherently political. The portrayal of a countercultural milieu—radicalised and hungry to disrupt the conservative status quo—isn’t just the backdrop of her story, but impacts on the construction of the mentally ill self. Far from being immune or desensitised to history, madness often embodies it and reminds us that art and life do not exist in mutually exclusive boxes. The struggle of the individual to mediate the cultural politics of their time, which is especially complex and essential when ill, is palpable in The Green Bell.
Vulnerability as strength:
With trauma, vulnerability is sometimes not a choice and sensitivity is derided as weakness. Yet Keogh manages to capture the vulnerability inherent to psychological illnesses but uses it to inform her social analysis and commentary. This gives cogency to a story that is rife with uncertainty and instability. It’s the kind of power from vulnerability that leads to a strength in writing whatever the genre, and is one that, more generally in life, I am absolutely here for. Long may narratives by women find strength in vulnerability and be empowered by softness.
In the word 'madness', there's the recognition of the human dimension…To be mad is to have a disordered mind, it's also to have an excess of anger, it's also to have an excess of enthusiasm ... I think madness is a real mystery and I don't think that psychiatry has come close to recognising how multi-dimensional the causing factors are.
– Paula Keogh
(via gabriella coslovich)
The Bad
The ending:
The ending of the memoir, which shifts from the two years surrounding Paula and Michael’s meeting to the rest of Keogh’s life into the present day, feels somewhat sweeping and disjointed. While brazen fragmentariness gives much of the memoir its power, an attempt to ‘wrap up’ or give the book a kind of unity perhaps betrays or diminishes this rhetorical achievement. It sweeps, cursorily, over the momentous occasions since Michael’s death such as the birth of her daughter. I wonder if it would have been better to be left feeling a sense of incompleteness instead. I mention this not to diminish the importance, or even relevance, of these other moments of the life that this memoir focuses on, but because they feel like an addendum to the rest of the book.
Temporality and perspective:
In interviews since its publication, Keogh has discussed the origins of the book (as originally a PHD on Michael Dransfield’s poetry, see here) and the narrative point of view (written in the first-person, present tense, see here). And while this information is useful in understanding its origins and explaining some of the way it reads, I think the book still struggles with its own temporality and perspective, especially when it moves beyond the few years that are focused on (for at least 80 percent of the book). While these origins are worth considering, they don’t belie the sense that in its quest to go from zooming intensely in on a few years and out again to an entire lifetime, the mechanism jar. Almost sputtering, the present tense account of forty years past cannot keep pace and at times the book is not able to hold the prose with grace. (However, this may also have much to do with the form of the memoir and the antagonism of verse and prose, see below).
The Not Sure
The antagonism of memoir and poetry:
Incorporating both memoir and poetry, The Green Bell shifts between two forms of writing that are in tension with one another. The arbitrary but nevertheless extant binaries of prose and verse play out: the explicit and implicit, the specific and symbolic, as well as content versus form. Memoir and poetry depend on subjectivism deployed in different ways and when both are present in the prose there is a clash stylistically—rhetorically it is parsing disputed territory. At times, the writing perfectly captures my own feeling or experience and beautifully captures moments that seemed previously inarticulable. At other times, it was this gap between specificity and inference that sometimes makes the language feel inadequate, even if it is aware of its own inadequacy. While intensely personal prose may perfectly represent a specific moment, this same specificity is walking a fine line between accessibility and alienation that is in danger of disavowing the reader of the opportunity to feel themselves between the sentences. While I adored some lines, others felt misplaced or ill-fitting—a description of the feeling rather than the feeling of it. And while this is more of a philosophical question of the author-reader relationship in the genre of memoir, this tension plays out in a myriad of ways throughout the book that are important because they are the exact kind of theoretical questions Keogh asks throughout it. However, this is a broad thought and far from being fully fleshed out!
The ‘of its time’ fallacy:
Because Keogh roots her individual story within the wider scope of Australian history, there are times when cultural values and assumptions are perpetuated—or implicitly sanctioned—within the wider brushstroke of ‘this is how it was back then’ and it is a product of its time. But, given the consciousness and oftentimes radical thinking that underpins it, there are times when these are jarring. One such instance is in the description of suburban Canberra that invokes presumed white middle-class privilege and in doing so denies and erases Indigenous history. As a memoir, this book can only do so much, but these occasions peppered my reading and made me recoil from the use of the political climate in the 1970s as intrinsic justification for the acceptance of other outdated social values.
Postscript 1: The Title
What is the green bell?
The green bell is a reference to a weeping willow tree with drooping branches that make a bell shape as they casacade down from the tree’s trunk and branches to the ground. Inside this umbrella of foliage Paula and Michael find reprieve from the world and escape the reality of the psychiatric ward from which they have come.
Michael pulls aside the branches, and we walk into a room of filtered light, a round space enclosed by cascading greenery. For a moment we stand there, quiet, our eyes adjusting to the shade. Then Michael says, ‘It’s a green bell,’ and repeats the willow’s Latin name, ‘Salix babylonica,’ as if it were a prayer, an invocation. I think of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, remembering from childhood a picture of their arching vaults and climbing terraces. The drapery of leaves, the play of light… Sunlight filters through the soft down of new growth, and long tendrils of leaves hang around us like sheer curtains, protecting us in our secret green idyll.
page 36
Green and Glass Bells: A Comparison with Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar
The green bell is poignantly reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s bell jar which invokes a glass version of the shape as a symbol of encasement, enclosure, and a metaphor for psychological struggle. But it is also a paradoxical image, as comparisons of Keogh and Plath’s bells show. The latter is entrapped within the bell while the former seeks refuge in it. But deeply relevant to both is a discord between the self and the world because of mental torment, a division embodied in the screen of the bell. This divider implicitly asks what or who is making the individual sick, and what role society plays in perpetuating (or worsening) that which makes them mentally unwell.
Sylvia Plath’s protagonist from her only novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, is suffocated by the cacophony of noise inside the bubble of depression that encases her. Whereas Keogh’s shroud of foliage is a protection, or reprieve, from the barrage of sound. Beaten down by circumstance, Plath’s bell is one where the person within is “blank and stopped as a dead baby, [where] the world itself is the bad dream” (The Bell Jar, chapter 20). Of the symbol, Plath apparently said that “I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown….I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.”* Clarity—or the ability to articulate and begin to understand the factors of her depression—comes only when the bell jar is removed. It is an image of entrapment.
However, a bell jar is also resonant of a protective or nurturing space, such as the green bell. Think of a terrarium lush and thriving or preserved historical specimens encased safely inside a glass cloche. Which side of the bell signals safety when we compare Sylvia’s glass bell to Keogh’s green one? Initially the paradox appears to be irreconcilable. However, when contextualised within the broader aspect of each book, it seems to point toward the question of nature versus nurture in mental illness. Genetics may be the origin of some aspect of mental disorders but environment also contributes significantly. It is as if both Keogh and Plath are struggling with this ambiguity by situating their bells in a liminal space between themselves and society. Origins and meanings are tried and tested through writing about them, through language. Bells, for both authors, are lenses through which they seek to articulate themselves and their experience of madness. They are attempting to reclaim their lives and themselves from the hostile clutches of a world that wishes to malign or confine them.
I do not think it is coincidental, for instance, that Keogh’s green bell invokes Babylonian associations. The ancient city in Mesopotamia, both lavish and beautiful—venerating the coexistence of humankind and nature in its featured hanging gardens (which are considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world)—has strong symbolic ties to the human development of language. The intrinsicness of language is paralleled by the intrinsicness of nature for the survival and wellbeing of humans. Words are symbolised in the gardens of earth and its retributive power when we err. Culture, in its human tendency to excesses of consumerism and profit, is kept in check by its other innately human need—nature. It is a protective factor from ourselves when we overreach for absolute control or knowledge (the antithesis of being human and reaching for the sacred). A biblical account of Babylon includes the story of the Tower of Babel. In what is described as the wicked city to which the ‘evil’ were exiled, there is an attempt to build a tower to heaven to reach god. But when god saw this he struck it down and scattered the people across the world by making them all speak a multitude of different languages. No longer, as the Old Testament story goes, could people understand or communicate with one another. It is, in essence, like Keogh’s story of madness and the loss of self-articulation. But the gardens, or the green bell, are a film that dilutes the torment of incommunicability.
The stunning metaphor in The Bell Jar of the fig tree signals a similar struggle. Esther Greenwood envisions herself sitting below the tree, watching fruit fall to the ground through the passage of time. But instead of taking a piece of fruit while it is ripe, she is unable to choose from the abundance of figs; paralysed by indecision she watches as they all fall, dead and lost opportunities. These are potentially restorative or generative chances of creating something, of melding the madness into speech, that are lost. She is unable to ‘read’ them, entrapped by the bell jar that encases her she is cannot grasp them with any firmness. Bells, whether glass or botanical, form a prism that, depending on positionality, alters the refraction of light. Somewhere between their biological fate and their time in an environment that condemns an individual for illness, sits—or is imprisoned—the mad ones, trying to escape whichever restrictive side of the bell they must compromise themselves to exist upon. Madness, once again, holds opposites together at the same time: the bells are both hope and despair.
*This was written in a letter penned by Plath’s mother Aurelia from 1970 in which she quotes Sylvia saying this to her.
How did I know that someday…somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
sylvia plath, 'the bell jar'
chapter 20 (1963)
Postscript 2: Behind Every Man
It is disheartening to see so many (mostly older white males) reading and reviewing this book for breadcrumbs about Michael Dransfield (see here, here, and here). This does an immense disservice to Paula Keogh and the strength of her book. She loved a man but this is her memoir and to pick out the biographical elements of Dransfield as more valuable (however unintentional) betrays them both. Keogh’s memoir has strong feminist tones and, while it is not the focus of the book, Keogh’s struggle to tell her story is heavily gendered and belongs on any shelf analysing the intersection of gender and mental illness, as well as ageism. As Gabrielle Coslovish’s review aptly notes, “Keogh's psychosis occurs amid a feverish backdrop, a time of profound societal changes – sexual liberation, the women's movement – and the horrors of the Vietnam War”. In this case, it is behind the great woman that a man lies, not the other way around. And, perhaps even more significantly, what lies behind this great woman is in fact another apparently phenomenal woman—the monumental friendship with Julianne that was lost. As Coslovish again notes, both women “are young, intelligent, acutely sensitive and questioning of societal norms, particularly those pertaining to women” and are navigating “the impact of external turmoil on a young mind searching for identity and meaning.”
Postscript 3: The Fallacy of Recovery
That mental illness is not always a temporary experience or linear process is not recognised by many discussions of the book. As Paula Keogh herself has drawn attention to in later interviews, whatever success she has had in describing mental illness was only possible with time and distance. And even then it was a fraught endeavour. She says: “Until not that long ago, I was still close to the edge. So it was like, I have to keep that at bay, I can't go there. That's too much” (quoted in Gabriella Coslovich). Even when she could approach it, she says that sometimes: “I had to get up from the table and walk quickly around…because the surge of imagery and the memories that came back, that feeling of fragmentation, was really a bit of a shock to me” (quoted in Fiona Wright). In short, many mental illness sufferers do not or will not “recover” from their affliction. This is integral to Keogh’s illustration of a mad-person’s isolation from society and it is important to recognise. Yes, she has triumphed in articulating her experience all these years later, both beautifully and insightfully. But we must not diminish that these interim years were full of uncertainty and pain that are not necessarily eradicated by time. They may never be fully gone. And many, like Michael Dransfield himself, never get the chance to look back in retrospect.
Postscript 4: Paula Keogh's Own Words
Synopsis
“When I was eighteen, my best friend, Julianne, died. My story is about her death, my subsequent breakdowns and my meeting with the poet, Michael Dransfield in the psychiatric ward of the Canberra Hospital.
There are times in your life when something happens to you and it changes you, and changes the trajectory of your life. My life was transformed dramatically by Julianne’s death. I was plunged into confusion and grief. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Later, I fell in love with Michael and was introduced to his ideas about the imagination, poetry, and music.
The Green Bell is a love story and a story about my struggle to live a life in spite of madness. It’s my attempt to say the unsayable: to speak of things that can’t be said: death, ecstasy, love, loss, grief, madness.” – Paula Keogh (quoted in Anastasia Hadjidemetri)
The Green Bell as PHD
'The Green Bell had its genesis in a Master's thesis Keogh began writing on Dransfield's poetry 10 years ago. When her supervisor learnt that Keogh had been in a relationship with Dransfield, she suggested that a memoir might be more appropriate than literary criticism. Keogh wasn't entirely sure about that, but decided to give memoir a shot. "I got about 10,000 to 20,000 words into it and the story just gripped me," she says. "At this point my supervisor said 'you should be doing a PhD', and I thought what I'm writing is probably not a PhD, it's not anything."' (via Gabriella Coslovich)
The Green Bell’s narrative voice:
'Her book had been a tussle between the voice of the older Keogh and her younger self. Kate Goldsworthy, a then editor for Affirm, advised Keogh to recast the story in the present tense and tell it entirely from the perspective of the 22-year-old. "It was a real breakthrough," Keogh says.' (via Gabriella Coslovich)
On Belief:
“I can say that my understanding of what belief is, has changed. I think of it being about the things I love and care about, rather than an intellectual conviction. I now believe in music, in trees, in the warmth of sunshine. I believe in poetry and kindness.” – Paula Keogh (quoted in Anastasia Hadjidemetri)
On Language:
“Reading it I realised that language works magic. It can conjure up a whole world, it can inspire deep feeling. Words have the power to enchant and to transform my state of being, how I think and feel.” – Paula Keogh (quoted in Anastasia Hadjidemetri)
On Psychiatry:
“I think there's a profound psycho-cultural dimension to madness, a very deep connection, in fact… I think the whole focus on biology is really misdirected, and there needs to be a lot of questions about that. Psychiatry is not working. It's a real problem.” – Paula Keogh (quoted in Gabriella Coslovich)
Sources
Gabriella Coslovich, ‘Paula Keogh: the mystery of madness’ (March 1, 2017). The Sydney Morning Herald - accessed June 2020
Kevin Brophy, 'Book review: Love, loss and madness in The Green Bell' (March 17, 2017). The Conversation - accessed June 2020
Anastasia Hadjidemetri, ‘Paula Keogh: I want the struggle and the elation of writing to be part of my life’ (March 3, 2017). Booktopia - accessed June 2020
Fiona Wright, 'Poetry, love and psychosis: can writing help us come to terms with mental illness?' (February 27, 2017). The Guardian - accessed June 2020
This review was added to the Australian Women Writer's Challenge 2020, as part of their initiative to redress the disparity in literary reviews that disproportionately favour male Australian authors compared to their female counterparts, despite publishing numbers not reflecting this. You can learn more about the AWW here.
What a thorough discussion of this book! I remember when it came out, and thinking I’d like to read it, but like many books I think I’d like to read it slipped through the net. This is not an area of specific interest to me, but I do remember Michael Dransfield, and I do like to think about the memoir form. For that reason I was particularly interested in your discussion about the ending.
Me also! Which is why I’ve reviewed it so much later than it was released. I wonder if this is a good way to go though really – gives the title a chance to settle and I suppose if you find your way back to it then you probably really did want to read it all along