Hopdance

Note on the Text

At age nineteen, during his second year as a student at Queen's University Belfast, Stewart Parker learned that he had Ewing's Tumour, a rare form of bone cancer. The only effective treatment for it then entailed removal of the diseased limb before the cancer could spread, and so, on 17 May 1961, surgeons at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast amputated his left leg above the knee. Parker remained in hospital for three months, then spent the rest of the summer convalescing at home before returning to university that fall. Desiring fervently at the time to appear merely inconvenienced by his loss, he threw himself back into his old activities with an intensity that left him little opportunity to reflect on it.1 For nearly a decade following his ordeal, however, Parker lived with the uncomfortable knowledge that the cancer could recur. Only when this apprehension had begun to fade could he admit to himself what a heavy burden he had been carrying since his diagnosis, and he decided to attempt to capture in writing the period before, during, and immediately after his hospitalization. As he confided to an interviewer in 1977, he sought to exorcise the trauma by getting it out of his head and onto the page.2 (His protagonist, Tosh, defines the 'artistic impulse' as 'the obsessive need to rehearse your memory of hell': 'If you don't enact it from time to time, it'll rend out your heart.') Conversely, he may have wanted to preserve his memories of that phase of his life before they lost their sharp edges. Most of all, though, recording the experience allowed him to structure it for himself in such a way as to endow it with meaning.

In early 1970, Parker began planning a screenplay about his amputation, and he eventually started writing it in January 1971. Likely stymied by the intractably psychological nature of what he wished to convey, however, he never completed more than a few scenes of this. By January 1972, when he returned to the subject, he had probably decided to write his story as a novel instead, although he kept the same title for it: Caution In the Traffic, Prudence In the Rain. (He would not rename it Hopdance until 1974.) Parker finally achieved some momentum on the work early in 1972 after assigning himself a daily quota of 300 words, a tactic intended to help him make headway on his most artistically ambitious projects even amid the pressures of paid work with urgent deadlines. This method of composition, together with the text's genesis as a screenplay, likely influenced its structure of short, vivid vignettes. He worked on the novel through 1972 and 1973, completing a draft of it in September 1973. Within a week, though, he began tinkering with the order of the sections. From the beginning, he had conceived of the work's structure as non-chronological - inserting, for example, scenes from before Tosh's cancer diagnosis between scenes taking place after it - but now he exchanged one non-chronological arrangement for another one, in some cases cutting handwritten scenes apart with scissors and taping them back together in a different order.

Parker began typing what he then regarded as the 'final draft' of the novel in October 1973, but managed only a few sections before losing the impetus to continue. In January 1975, having already reached the decision to focus in future on drama, he returned to Hopdance once again and started typing it from the beginning. 'Can't make up my mind', he remarked in his journal:

I've spent too long considering it, I don't know what it's trying to be anymore. Only thing that's certain is, it's too short for publishers. Am apathetic about it for over a year now. Oh, well. Finish and be damned. There are certainly good phrases in it, here and there. Treat it as a daily chore, be done in a couple of months. Thereafter concentrate on plays, I think now my major energy shd. be applied there.

This time, the effort to produce a typescript foundered before the bottom of the ninth page.

Had Parker considered Hopdance to be a commercial proposition, which he clearly did not, he might have managed to finish it at this juncture. In the absence of any financial incentive, though, he felt more enthusiasm about his first full-length stage play, Spokesong, in development at the time. In truth, as he remarked later, the novel's writing had been propelled by an overwhelming psychological need. Once he had drafted the scenes, however, the sense of urgency deserted him. He put away the manuscript, satisfied that it had served a 'therapeutic purpose' for him.3

Although his work life now revolved around play-writing, Parker never forgot about his autobiographical novel, and, at times both of unusual stress and of unaccustomed time for contemplation, his thoughts reverted to it. In late February 1982 ('On an impulse,' as he noted in his journal), he 're-read passages of Hopdance, & made notes towards completing it. Must do. Somehow. This year.' Sporadically, over the ensuing months, Parker worked on the novel, making minute changes to the existing manuscript and playing yet again with the order of the scenes. This was the year in which Parker's marriage, troubled for some time, broke down entirely - partly as a result of his falling in love with someone other than his wife. He was, simultaneously, undergoing a crisis of confidence in himself and his work. He had both the urge and the opportunity to revisit Hopdance, but he lacked the tranquillity necessary to focus on it. By the time he regained his emotional equilibrium the following year, he had entered a particularly frenetic phase of his career as a dramatist that did not abate until the last months of 1987.

In the summer of 1988, Parker returned at last to his novel. He had decided to add several new scenes to it, and he drafted three of these between July and October: Tosh's conversation with his tutor, Larmour, about Thomas Rhymer; a debate between Tosh and another student about the relative value of literature and political action; and a scene in which Tosh gives a presentation to a group of schoolboys. He also wrote out yet another plan for Hopdance and seemed determined to rework the book from beginning to end. The most recent additions to the manuscript consist of ten word-processed pages representing the first six scenes of the projected final version. In a sadly ironic twist, however, a diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer in September derailed Parker's progress. Initially told that, with treatment, he might live for another year, he tried frantically to keep working on Hopdance, but, in the event, he died on 2 November 1988, leaving the novel unfinished.

Hopdance has fascinated me since June 1994, when Parker's executor, Lesley Bruce, allowed me to examine it. I knew the novel had never achieved the apotheosis Parker had envisaged for it, but to my mind it possessed a raw power even in its patchwork state. Although incomplete in Parker's terms, its form meant that there were no obvious holes or gaps in it. Fragmentary by nature, it readily accommodated new fragments - and could just as easily do without them. It therefore seemed possible to me to produce an edited version of Hopdance that, while not fulfilling Parker's ultimate vision for it, at least would not do violence to it.

As a writer of experimental prose, Parker wished to challenge novelistic conventions regarding linear structure and character development by illustrating, as he had explained in notes towards an earlier unpublished novel, The Jest-Book of ST Toile, 'simultaneity of event and stasis of character. pitted against an alarmingly unpredictable universe.' Since, he had argued then, 'life is largely lived, not in the present tense, but in the continuous past tense,' he rejected the idea of 'a step-by-step narrative' in favour of 'a sequence of narrative images which will enact themselves simultaneously in the reader's mind when he has finished reading them by the intricate way in which they are connected.' As Parker's alter ego, Tosh, explains to his friend Harrison in Hopdance, 'You take the fragments of your past. You fit them into whatever mosaic seems to work. It has nothing to do with time or space' - except that, in his own case, 'figments' might be a more appropriate description of them: 'I remember single incidents with surrealistic intensity, they never happened the way they replay themselves in my head. Most of them were insignificant at the time. I've forgotten all the big production numbers. But these small moments obsess me.'

The non-chronological aspect of the novel apparently became less important to Parker over the course of composition; in successive revisions he often took pains to clarify the time frame of the scenes that depart from chronology through the addition of signposting words such as 'had'. Nevertheless, the episodes retain the sense of being suspended in time rather than definitively linked in it. Each section of Hopdance has a coherence of its own, but each also gains from association with the others both before and after it, so that individual incidents gain resonance on repeated readings of the book.

The sections of Hopdance that Parker drafted last - as well as those he wanted, but was not able, to write at the end of his life - were designed to make more overt a theme implicit in the version of the novel he completed in 1973. Tosh is adrift before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin...