The Library: Jeff Young - Wild Twin. Dream Maps of a Lost Soul and Drifter

By Marcel Krueger

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (translated by Howard Eiland)

I struggle with getting older. Not in an expensive-motorbike-and-young-mistress-type midlife crisis, but with the strange effects of time and nostalgia that only seem to amplify the older I get. I’m 47 when I’m only 33; my parents are both over 70 now and my grandfather died in 2002 and was born in 1913, but for me he is still 60 and my parents forever 30. The older I get, the more I also become fascinated with memory. There is the physical manifestation of it, in photographs or objects that I keep, in a sense finding a way to outsource memories, moving them from the chaotic and crowded warehouse of my mind to the shelves and drawers in my study. And then there is the landscape of memory itself, the capability of conjuring up the sights and smells of places that have long become ruins, or to summon people I haven’t seen in decades or who have become dust and bones. But there is also the fickleness of it all, the uncertainty if what remembered is not embellished or fully invented by thousands of hours of music I’ve listened to, the endless hours looking at visual art and watching films, and the thousands of books I’ve read.

One of my earliest memories is one of taking a piss. I must be two or three years old, it is a hot summer’s day and I’m in the public pool with my family. I’m naked (this is Germany), and I feel the urge to pee. I must have mentioned it, as one of my mother’s cousins, in her early teens back then, is leading me to the toilet by the hand. But the urge is too strong, and at some point on the way I just relieve myself. I remembered that feeling of relief, of the rough stone slabs of the walkway or wall that I was walking on under my bare feet, and the feeling of being safe and warm in the sun. But there is also a series of images that capture that exact moment - my mum or my dad or someone else must have a had a camera ready and captured it all, nothing self-evident in 1970s Germany. There’s me looking down on my peeing penis, my mum’s cousin, still holding my hand, laughing out loud. And here’s the thing: the photos were lost to me for a good while, stuck in a family album that ended up god knows where after my parents divorced 30 years ago; but I still could not say if my memory is the emotional image of my feelings at that very moment, or something I constructed myself as an older child when I was looking at the pictures. I only had confirmation of it recently, when the family album resurfaced for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. To my relief my memory is not like what can be seen in the images, the stones under my feet much smaller than I remember, and my mum’s cousin also not the tall teenager I remember but a smaller, lankish girl of 10 perhaps. So my memories are correct in their warpedness - after all, they are the imprints of a person in a small, three-year old body.

But we know that memory is anything but reliable. It selects at random what it wishes to store, discards what is not to its liking, underscores the emotional, sublimates and distorts. Thus I contributed both intentionally and unintentionally to the growing loss of reality for my place of origin, adding the odium of implausibility to its - and thereby also my own - already legendary reputation for shifty unreliability.

Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear (translated by H. F. Broch de Rothermann)

Jeff Young’s latest book “Wild Twin” is also about this warpedness, and the fickleness of time and place. Caring for his father who is suffering from dementia and being faced with the disappearance of memory, Jeff conjures up the titular wild twin, his younger self travelling from Liverpool to Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s. This is a young artist disillusioned with his mundane job and setting out to see and experience the places that he read about in the works of Henry Miller or Allen Ginsberg and watched in François Truffaut movies. There is, upon first glance, some similarity to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts”, which is recounting the author’s journey from the Hook of Holland to the Danube as part of a longer journey to Constantinople in the early 1930s when he was 18 and written and published 44 years later. There is a similar age difference between Jeff Young the narrator and his wild twin, and the narrative has the same joyful wonder of youth but at the same time the wisdom, perspective and vocabulary of later age. That is however where the similarities end. Through chance and contacts, Leigh Fermor was staying with one aristocratic family after another and visits crumbling castles all along the Rhine and Danube; Jeff Young journeys in another strata of society altogether. Hitchhiking from Ostende via Brussels and Amsterdam to Paris, he ends up in dingy, bed-bug-infested hotels, squats filled with a wonderful but damaged ensemble of outcasts or sometimes sleeps rough with other bums in the entrance of cathedrals.

The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in the fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.

Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter

“Wild Twin” is no straight counter-cultural beat travelogue however; but instead a book about how the wild twin of our past selves continues to exist in ourselves and the present. The narrative constantly switches between multiple levels of time and location, and besides Paris and Amsterdam there all the different incarnations of Liverpool that Jeff experienced growing up as well as the present city of the family home where Jeff’s father lies dying. As Jeff writes, “Nostalgia is an illness, perhaps. And yet, it is beautiful. I live in memory. I live in the present moment but the past is here too, sometimes shimmering, sometimes dimming in the same space as the now. [...] In Ostend, in the hotel bed, nearly fifty years ago, there were tears rolling down my face. I can feel them now. Nostalgia is a fever. It feels like a surrender, a defeat, a negative. I try and resist. I succumb. So be it...”

For me, ageing and sometimes despairing, reading about Jeff Young’s wild twin helped me to welcome my own ones, and to look forward to accumulate more memory and immersing myself in it, despite the dangers. “Wild Twin” is, on the one hand, a weird and wonderful and fucked-up “Time of Gifts” full of mouth ulcers, legions of mice and the necessity of stealing chocolate croissants. On the other it is a bittersweet and honest meditation on memory and the loss of it, and how we can get unmoored by both. Read it.

Marcel Krueger is one of the editors of Elsewhere. He works as a writer and translator, and through the prism of family history explores the European past and present and writes about memory, nostalgia and identity, especially focusing on Ireland, Germany and Poland.

Wild Twin by Jeff Young is published by Little Toller Books, 2024.