I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this. Gillian Rose, professor of social and political thought at Warwick University, and dying of cancer at the age of 48, managed to complete and publish this before her time was up. If her mind could be characterised it would be by a phrase something along the lines of: a fierce vigilance of thought. She was not going to be fooled by anything, and aspired to the persona of Miss Marple. In her professional life she was an implacable and feared opponent of modish reason-denying relativism; and some part of that intellectual struggle continues in these pages. "To destroy philosophy, to abolish or supersede critical, self-conscious reason, would leave us resourceless to know the difference between actuality and fantasy, to discern the distortion between ideas and their realisation." (Rather in the way, she says, that it is actually horribly irresponsible to stop small children playing with guns: it's a manifest "loss of trust" in play as a means of discerning truth from fiction.) It comes as little surprise that, after having found conventional medicine no help in containing or curing her disease ("medicine and I have dismissed each other"), she has even less time for alternative therapies: "From the iatrogenic materiality of medicine to the screwtape spirituality of alternative healing, I am prescribed these equally sickly remedies in a combined dosage which characterises the postmodern condition itself." As you can see, this is far more than just invective, although I wouldn't have been surprised if those around her found her spiky, restless intelligence a little exhausting at times.
But this is only a small part of Love's Work. It is, in part, conventional memoir: of her Jewish family, her hugely strained relationship with her father, her much more pleasant relationship with her stepfather, whose surname she adopted; and various love affairs, none of which seem to have ended happily. But that is not the point, to have a happy love affair. "Love" and "life" are for Rose almost interchangeable words; we read the phrase "life affair" more than once. And for those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read. Here there are no soupy platitudes which deal with that near-miraculous unlikelihood, the happy and eternal love affair: Rose is the enemy of fatuity, which you had better be, if you are going to give any honest, meaningful answer to the question of whether the agonies of love are worth its joys (or vice versa). "In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change . . . There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy."
It might seem that, from the extensive quotation (and I'm not the only critic who has cited so much of her book in review, or admitted to doing so), this is, in more than one sense, a "difficult" book. Well, yes and no. (Who can say where difficulty resides? I couldn't even finish the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code.) Certainly, there is a lot going on in here. The thought is clotted, but I use the word not as it is commonly used, as in harmfully or opaquely congested, but as applied to cream: rich, satisfying, desirable, and to be approached and ingested with respect. It is a short book – 150 pages, along with a coda constituting Geoffrey Hill's poem "In Memoriam: Gillian Rose", which is as typically moving and thought-provoking as you could hope for (and I salute the editor at NYRB whose idea it was to include it) – but it bears much rereading. It is the essence of her philosophical work – I thank her for quoting Hegel on comedy, the only lines of his I can claim to have understood – as well as a meditation on the physical, and not without its moments of stern humour ("nowhere in the endless romance of world literature . . . have I come across an account of living with a colostomy"). It makes profound sense of her chosen epigraph: "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not."
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