Vignette: Moving onwards

Summary

The knowledge that soon she would cross the border to a country, his country America, where once more she would feel a stranger.

And England?

How distant it seemed now. Yet in moments a longing.

But for what?

She had no sense of belonging there either. A vague feeling of ‘roots’. A certain kind of identity. The freedom of knowing her way around. But the greyness. Oh that grey, grey thing creeping from the sky, smoke, buildings, into the pores of skin. Grey faces. No she could not go back to that.

Quin, ‘Eyes that Watch Behind the Wind’, p. 111

Quin spent much of her short writing life restless, leaving England for Europe and America whenever finances allowed, crossing borders and moving onwards in search of new experiences while also seeking the space she needed to be able to write. During the early 1960s, she had travelled to Bantry in Ireland, to Italy, Paris, Amsterdam and Scotland. In the summer of 1964, Quin journeyed across Italy and the Ionian Sea, initially to Parga, and then on to Athens, Corfu, Ithaca and Kolymos, hoping to make it to Istanbul but being prevented by riots. A postcard to John Calder from this time has a photograph of statues of ‘Olympia. Centaur seizing a Lapithan girl’ on the front, and on the back, scribbled in black felt-tip, ‘S.O.S. £.s.d. needed – desperate. Istanbul riots. Please forward to: c/o L. Matheovdaki, 4, Seremeti, Corfu, Greece’. The postcard depicting classical Greece and Quin's words describing tumultuous political circumstances and pressing financial need are striking for how they connect with and communicate her fluctuating movements caught between the desire for excitement, for life to be ‘EXPERIENCE in caps period’, and the desire for flight. ‘I have very much two extremes’, she said to Nell Dunn, to sometimes be the life and soul of the party but then a desperate need for stability and seclusion, for the ‘peace and stillness’ to write, as well as an ongoing emotional and here again material precariousness.

In late spring 1965 she sailed to New York to take up her Harkness Fellowship. Quin did not enjoy this first trip to America. She felt increasingly frenetic and conflicted, and hated what she called this ‘whale's mouth of a city, where people paddle—swim up sidewalks that are fallen ladders’.