"I've Got One Hand in My Pocket"
And the other one is holding a biography of Keats.
Yesterday, while driving with my mom and dog, Alanis Morissette’s “Hand in My Pocket” was on the radio. It had been years since I last heard this song (or at least registered hearing it). I sang it in its entirety—matching the lyrics perfectly with the intonations in Alanis’s voice. “I had forgotten the year you listened to nothing but that album,” my mom mused, during Morissette’s harmonica solo.
I had forgotten it, too. I don’t think my mom was a fan of grunge or post-grunge, and remembering this made me appreciate my parents for never asking us to turn down our music, whatever it might have been at the time. Their taste in music has always been a point of pride. The soundtrack to my childhood was a lovely combination of soul and outlaw country. My dad worked in his office listening to his old Sam Cooke records and my mom ran errands listening to Johnny Cash cassettes in her car. Added to the mix was everything my sister (who is ten years older than me) passed down as an education of sorts: New Order, Duran Duran, The Smiths, The Cure, Public Enemy, and Run-D.M.C.
For a brief period Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” (1995) was mine—my contribution to the backdrop of our lives, at least until I moved on to Fiona Apple before returning to the 80s bands of my sister’s teenage years. No one in my family liked “Jagged Little Pill” but they endured repeated replays of it with acceptance and grace.
Singing “Hand in My Pocket,” yesterday was certainly nostalgic but, reflecting on it, I am surprised by how much of it still rings true. At my age, this is somewhat disconcerting. I always imagined that by the time I reached this age, I would be living in an apartment with charming historic features and built-in bookshelves in a city I loved. Just a one-bedroom, perhaps two. Or, depending on the city, perhaps an old WWII bungalow with its original features intact and original walls in place (open concept, be damned). All of this would be the result, no doubt, of an income that made it possible.
While I have lived on my own and in some charming places, I am currently living with my mom, my books stacked in piles on the floor or packed away in storage along with my collection of Edwardian blue and white china. I would like a little cupboard in my own kitchen (however small) where the latter is more accessible.
In some ways, I feel more like my lost, 22-year-old self (22 being closer to the 13-year-old self who listened to Alanis Morissette) than a self-sufficient adult. I am “poor, but...kind,” “here,...but...really gone,” “brave,...but chicken shit,” “broke, but [not necessarily] happy.”1 One hand is no longer “flicking a cigarette,” as it did, much to my shame, when I was an undergraduate. So perhaps that is an improvement, even if it feels as though everything else has regressed.
Capitalism is to blame for these feelings, I know. I must not forget that experiences over the last two decades have made me wiser, and have made my life richer. But it is still tough sometimes. And I feel guilty for wanting these things when I have so much. Though it is possible that “Hand in My Pocket” is less about being young and broke and more about the fact that we are all of us a bundle of contrasts, no matter our age.
Speaking of contrasts, and those who use them as a form of self-expression, I have finally had time to read Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats. As a result, I see Keats everywhere. I am currently writing some college recommendation letters for former students, some of whom embody an idea of Keats: the ones who write poetry and/or don’t think they have enough time to express all that their “teeming” brains have in store. And I see Keats in myself, in periods of ardent melancholy or longing.
This takes me back to Mrs. Wilkins’s faux pas in asking, when she meets Mrs. Fisher in “The Enchanted April” (1922), if the latter, elderly and reminiscing about all the eminent figures she once knew, had met Keats.
"Did you know Keats?" eagerly interrupted Mrs. Wilkins.
Mrs. Fisher, after a pause, said with sub-acid reserve that she had been unacquainted with both Keats and Shakespeare.
"Oh of course–how ridiculous of me!" cried Mrs. Wilkins, flushing scarlet. "It's because"–she floundered–"it's because the immortals somehow still seem alive, don't they–as if they were here, going to walk into the room in another minute–and one forgets they are dead. In fact one knows perfectly well they're not dead–not nearly so dead as you and I even now," she assured Mrs. Fisher, who observed her over the top of her glasses.
"I thought I saw Keats the other day," Mrs. Wilkins incoherently proceeded, driven on by Mrs. Fisher's look over the top of her glasses. "In Hampstead–crossing the road in front of that house–you know–the house where he lived–"2
Mrs. Wilkins’s ramblings here are an effort to cover up her error (had she met Keats, Mrs. Fisher would have been ancient by the time of the novel’s events). But Mrs. Wilkins is not the first to imagine Keats’s ghost. Hardy wrote about Keats’s ghost in “At a House in Hampstead sometime the Dwelling of John Keats” (1920).3
I agree with Hardy, as I do in most things, that the memory of Keats lingers more in a much-altered Hampstead than it does in Rome. Given that it is Halloween, I must admit that I wouldn’t mind seeing Keats crossing the road, though I highly doubt he would visit the treeless, concrete monstrosity where I currently reside.
“But” just for today, in the words of Alanis, “I’m hopeful, baby.”
Morissette, A. (1995). Hand in My Pocket [song]. On Jagged Little Pill. Maverick.
Von Arnim, E. (1928). The Enchanted April (2nd ed.) Macmillan. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/arnim/april/april.html
The film Enchanted April (1992) is delightful. For more about the novel see Ann Kennedy Smith’s Substack.
Hardy, T. (1920). At a House in Hampstead sometime the Dwelling of John Keats. https://www.simple-poetry.com/poems/at-a-house-in-hampstead-sometime-the-dwelling-of-john-keats-60294365115