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Clare Mulley, an aspiring biographer, working on the life of an extraordinary early twentieth century social campaigner, spiritualist and sometimes spy, in between the more everyday activities of her own life as a student and mother, pays tribute to our September speaker.

The Deconstruction of Identity: Alexander Masters’ Stuart: A Life Backwards

‘The chaotic? It isn’t a bedsit and employment that they need; it is a new brain.’ Alexander Masters [i]

In Stuart: A Life Backwards Alexander Masters paints an intimate and moving portrait of Stuart Shorter, a young alcoholic, psychotic, homeless man whose life and personality are in chaos. Written in reverse chronological order, the narrative progresses like a criminal investigation into how Stuart reached this low point, or in Stuart’s own words ‘what murdered the boy I was?’ [ii] No item from Stuart’s catalogue of misfortune; homelessness, drug and alcohol-abuse, prison terms, mental disorder, the discovery of violence, sexual abuse, disability, and the disappearance of his father, can be isolated as the overriding ‘big issue’ however. Each progressively contributed to erode Stuart’s sense of identity. ‘How much is one thing?’ Stuart asks, ‘Change me brother – does that change me getting rageous? The muscular dystrophy? That don’t change the nonces, the System, do it? It’s such a mess. Not being funny, change one and you got to change them all. Be easier just to change me.’ [iii] This is a poignant biography of Stuart Shorter, but also a challenging exploration of identity, and its deconstruction, which is given weight and purpose through both its subject and its structure.

‘Familiar time flow – out the window. Homogenous mood of reflectiveness –
up in smoke’ Alexander Masters [iv]

Masters credits Stuart with the idea of writing his life ‘backwards’, and this trick serves several purposes. André Maurois argued that it is ‘extremely difficult to interest a reader in facts which are not presented in their normal order.’ [v] Masters’ investigative structure grabs the reader’s attention, however, by offering to pin down some answers to the often seemingly unfathomable question of how people end up on the streets, and in doing so it involves them in Stuart so that ‘by the time they reach his childhood, it [will be] a matter of genuine interest how he turned into the person that he is.’ [vi]

‘Form isn’t an overcoat flung on the flesh of thought… it’s the flesh of thought itself.’
Julian Barnes [vii]

The reverse chronology is more than just a charismatic device however. On an immediate level, the disruption of normal time progression reflects Stuart’s chaotic mindset and sense of dislocation. ‘Some minutes was long, other minutes was short… sometimes which were supposed to be weeks and months – I don’t think they happened at all,’ Stuart recounts, ‘my life is so complicated it’s hard for me to actually say what happened in them days let alone in what order.’ [viii] But this is not an unstructured set of anecdotes; the reverse device lends a subversive order to Stuart’s confusing life-story. ‘Me, anything ordered was wrong. It weren’t a part of me days,’ Stuart explains, ‘You’re going to find [it] difficult to understand. You grew up with order so you’re going to want order to explain things.’ [ix]

Presenting Stuart’s life in reverse also offers some insights into his identity. Writing in defence of chronological narrative, Richard Holmes has argued that ‘by constructing a life through narrative, [biography] emphasises cause and consequence, the linked pattern of growth and change, the vivid story-line of individual responsibility and meaningful action.’ [x] But Stuart is an unusual biographical subject whose life is characterised by irresponsibility and reaction. Neither successful nor talented, he is a representative of the unfulfilled and unrecognised on the margins of modern society. [xi] His life pattern is one of narrowing opportunities and shrinking potential from childhood onwards. In this sense it is almost a life operating ‘backwards’, through which Stuart has regressed, rather than progressed. So it is not in contradiction to Holmes, or standard biographical practice linking cause and effect, that Masters reverses the order of events. In doing so he actually provides an ironic sense of progression back into sanity and opportunity, reconstructing the identity that has been fragmented and devalued by events and attitudes. Either looking forwards or backwards, as Master’s masters his portrait of Stuart, Stuart is seen to get shorter.

‘From my experience, everybody I know who’s tattooed their face up, they either end up in a nuthouse or they end up very volatile…’
Stuart Shorter [xii]

As well as being a biography then, this is a study of the deconstruction of identity. As a child Stuart experienced society’s response to his muscular dystrophy as defining and excluding. ‘Not fit to be with normal children’ he was transferred out of the mainstream education system to a special school where ‘dribbling, callipered, wheelchair-bound pupils’ were taught with books that implicitly defined childhood as healthy and active. [xiii] Bullying and abuse then colluded to further undermine his already battered sense of self, so that in Masters’ verdict ‘Stuart’s character crumbled after the age of twelve.’ [xiv] The homelessness, substance abuse and violence that colour Stuart’s adult life further assaulted his weakened sense of identity, until finally prison, overtly exchanging liberty for a uniform, ‘takes away subtleties… personality is gone’, or in Stuart’s words, ‘events replace character’, and he ‘ceases to be human’. [xv]

This theme of identity under assault is echoed throughout the book. ‘In the mid-eighties, there was a real big anti-establishment thing going and everybody had their own identities,’ Stuart meditates, ‘If you got a picture of a sixth-from college now, you’d be lucky if you found two people who didn’t look exactly the same as everyone else.’ [xvi] Masters first meets Stuart during a campaign to release two unjustly convicted homeless-charity directors, Ruth Wyner and John Brock. During a publicity-stunt for the campaign Masters also experiences some sense of personality erosion when he and Stuart camp on the streets, homeless for a few days: ‘I have a sense that I am losing control. I can imagine that if it goes on like this there will be nothing left of me by Monday. I will not be myself. I will be like the dead, a function of other people’s thoughts.’ [xvii] And while in prison Wyner also reflects that, ‘your innate sense of self actually comes from things that aren’t oneself at all: people’s reactions to the blouse you wear, the respectfulness of your family… the pictures in your living room... it is these exhibitions of yourself, as reflected in the people who you meet, which give you comfort and your identity. Take them away, be put in a tiny room and called by a number, and you begin to vanish.’ [xviii]

‘Once I get going, I go and go and go. That’s part of my badness, is I lose sight of me goodness completely and then I can’t stop.’
Stuart Shorter [xix]

Stuart is far from a passive witness to the erosion of his life however; on the contrary he seems determined to reassert himself over the defining tragedies of his past and move forward, and if there is a weakness is using reverse chronology it is perhaps that it distracts from Stuart’s positive steps, however faltering, in this direction. It is Stuart’s determination to regain some sense of self-identity and control over his life, and his powerlessness to do so, that gives the biography its emotional force. At times Stuart wants to forget his past, but his whole identity is informed by it, and he cannot avoid black moments of looking over his shoulder as if rubbernecking on a car crash. ‘It strikes me how much of Stuart’s life is based on forgetfulness,’ Masters comments, ‘is this a way to characterise the chaotic: they are people for whom forgetting has become more important than remembering?’ [xx] And yet Stuart agrees to help write his biography, and when Masters asks him to pick the seminal moment that made him the person he is, Stuart nominates a moment of his own agency, a misguided step towards some personal liberation: ‘the day I discovered violence.’ [xxi] ‘In Stuart’s eyes, the whole of his life pivots on this incident,’ Masters comments, ‘it was the unexpected moment at which he found some power, and the weakling became strong.’ [xxii] From this moment onwards Stuart’s response to any assault on his personal identity is to locate power and identity in defiance: ‘in prison being a pain in the neck is one of the few ways to make the officers react to you as an individual. Disobedience is one of the few tricks you have left to hang on to the idea that you continue to exist distinctively and are still reliably connected to the person who bore your name on the outside.’ [xxiii]

‘You fucking, wanky, middle-class cunt-fuck, Alexander, always saying, “What’s the answer?” No answers! You want to know how I become what I am? Write a book that don’t have no answers…’
Stuart Shorter [xxiv]

As the critic William Bell has spelt out, ‘the overriding purpose of biography… is to convey a sense of the identity of the subject.’ [xxv] Most biographies are focused around the construction of identity. However in Stuart’s life it is the corrosion of identity that is the connecting theme, and this is intimately reflected in the narrative’s reverse chronological structure. What gives the biography such impact is Stuart’s massive force of personality working in conflict against his resounding lack of sense of self-identity or self-worth. But it belittles both the book and Stuart Shorter to present this as the simple key to understanding his life. As Stuart reiterates throughout the book, ‘if you’re fucked up in the head there’s no explanation,’ [xxvi] and Masters himself concedes that ‘I can’t hope to justify or explain Stuart, I realise, nursing my headache: just staple him to the page.’ [xxvii]

In searching to identify what has made Stuart the person he is, Masters is also taking on the ultimate question posed by biography: what makes anyone human? Masters and Stuart represent contrasting lives, the homed and the homeless, the normal and the chaotic, but also shared humanity. ‘People like Stuart… simply don’t understand the way the big world works,’ Masters writes, ‘they are as isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them.’ [xxviii] Stuart is presented as a hero, however marginalized and unlikely, because he ‘has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation.’ [xxix] This is what lies at the heart of biography: there are no simple answers, but empathy can bring some insights, and writing Stuart’s life backwards ultimately enables greater empathy than might perhaps be achieved by a progressive story of pitiable alienation:

‘Revelation comes like a break in the hedgerow… for an instant you glimpse scenery you haven’t seen before – fields of poppy and cornflower, trees gnarled in the shape of demons. Then it is gone again. You press on, exhilarated.’
Alexander Masters [xxx]

‘Now, can we leave alone?’ Stuart Shorter [xxxi]

Endnotes

Bibliography

- Backscheider, Paula, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

- Barnes, Julian, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Picador, 1985)

- Douzinos, Costas, ‘Identity, Recognition, Rights, or What Can Hegel Teach Us About Human Rights?’ in the Journal of Law and Society, Volume 29, Number 3 (September 2002)

- Ellis, David, (ed.), Imitating Art: Essays in Biography (London: Pluto, 1993)

- Masters, Alexander, Stuart: A Life Backwards (London: Harper Perennial, 2006)

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