On Rosalind Belben’s Dreaming of Dead People

“How . . . how can I speak from my core; there is nil. I have turned thirty-six and shall never have children. I am a shrivelled person, I have sucked myself dry; I am a figure of fun; an object for curiosity; an old maid; or I shall be, old; don’t suppose I don’t mind. I do mind.”

To read Rosalind Belben’s Dreaming of Dead People is to enter a mode of thinking that hovers on the edge of psychic exhaustion. Published in 1979, the novel positions itself with unsettling clarity inside the tension between aloneness and loneliness, between acceptance and a more resistant despair. Its relation to the so-called spinster novels of the early twentieth century is oblique, unflinching, and profoundly interior: the sexual unease is not disguised or displaced, but lived, made audible in the prose.

Virginia Woolf once recorded in her diary: “I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel.” That bottom, feared, shunned, known, is precisely where Belben’s novel remains, not merely peering into the depths but writing from within them. In a year so saturated with isolation, the novel’s dry stillness feels perilously near. Not prescient, not therapeutic, but recognisable in its blank, clean sadness.

Ilse Aichinger speaks of the “undergrowth of banality” through which thought must travel. Writing about Belben’s novel risks just that: overstatement, summary, the flattening gestures of praise. Better, perhaps, to let its unyielding tone emerge through its own sentences:

“I would laugh because I had come near enough to grasp that when all’s said and done – it isn’t said and done – you are beyond the point of caring about your books, or seeing the world first, or spending the rest of your money, or altering your will, or making a list of your treasures, or finding a beautiful landscape to die in, or fussing over your body and the redemption of your soul: you are flopped full length on your sofa, in your own room, gazing your last on the blur of your bookshelves – for the innocent reason that it happens to be the way you are facing; you are gone beyond the physical life; you are too near the fathomless bottom, dear nothing and nothing dear; you are not murmuring, even, howl, howl, howl, howl, howl, though you may be conscious of what is dead and what is alive. You may just write a letter to someone, sounding cheerful. No, that’s not true. Nothingness. And numbness. And blank, without either desolation or will.”