In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand.
Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of the child, the poet, the scientist and the psychologist. Lewis is adept at all these stratagems. ‘You were always so bright,’ her mother Eryl tells her accusingly, as though to lay with the child the fault of their mother-daughter problems.
Lewis’s family history is absorbingly described; but it’s in the matriarchal line that the poison lies. Her invalid grandmother Sara Ann passed the poison to Eryl. Eryl had two daughters, and couldn’t help reinstating the same dynamic she suffered with her older sister Megan, who was the favoured child. Eryl replayed, as rageful persecutor, her own childhood neglect.
Both before and after the second world war the family expressed their trauma through hoarding. Lewis’s grandfather, Dacu, was, on the face of it, a solid citizen – a successful headmaster, a stalwart on various Tregaron committees, who somehow found time to keep a meticulous weather log, auditing his entries as though they were scrupulous accounts. The image is resonant: children become a sort of register, adapting their personalities to the family’s weather system.
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