Authors: Hanif Kureishi
I have come to adore my pens and can often be found fondling them, particularly my old classic Mont Blanc. But I have fallen for a new black Montegrappa, with its shiny case, heaviness and bendy nib. A favourite occupation of mine is to study the Montegrappa catalogue, turning the glossy pages slowly, convincing myself I need the turquoise one, and cannot survive another minute without the limited edition St Moritz. Not that expensive pens are always better than cheap ones. I use Lamy fountain pens every day, as well as their roller balls, in a variety of colours. Muji is excellent for light gel pens. But sometimes only a soft pencil will do … And still, a lot depends on the kind of paper you use and which nib runs best on what surface …
A writer could come to love the eventful paraphernalia of writing equipment and inks, of which colour where, as guitarists love guitars, photographers their cameras, and fetishists their thing. I like to see the page I’m on decorated. I want my art or craft – writing – to resemble a physical activity like drawing. This is not only passing time until one has to actually commit to the agony of
beginning. In terms of sentences and paragraphs, I like the page to be prettily laid out; it is part of the pleasure of what I do, just as I like to look at art while I’m writing, rather than reading other people’s words.
This pleasure, of course, is only a minor hedonism, for how could I forget that I grew up in the 1960s, when pleasure was still hidden, subversive and irreligious, when sucking on a cigarette could seem decadent? Recently, in my spare time, I’ve taken to lying on my sofa thinking of hedonists I admire – or admired. I think, in particular, of a good friend who died recently, a former roadie, private detective and storyteller – a man who could make the world seem worth getting up for – who explained last year to my youngest son and me, as we sat in Rio’s Sugarloaf cafe, that he once fucked six women in a day. How hip it was in the 1960s, and particularly in the seventies, not to take care of yourself or anyone else, stepping as close as you could to peril and death, where things got raw and seemed to matter more than anything else: how important it was to be a threat to oneself, if not to others. The Velvet Underground, with their black polo-necks and near-death look, were an impressive influence. With dyed blond hair, Charlie Hero, in the television version of
The Buddha of Suburbia
, stalks the school playground with authority because he has the Velvet Underground and Nico album under his arm …
But as for committed hedonism, there’s always the danger of there being too much of it. If, in certain circumstances, drugs can be bad for you, work can be worse. The ever-reliable Nietzsche, when it comes to truth, denotes work ‘the best policeman’ and pits work – mind-numbing labour – against more important matters like ‘brooding, dreaming, worrying, loving, hating’, suggesting that pure labour organises us too easily and excludes too much. We use work as a discipline to kill off our most interesting and passionate impulses.
If the most significant post-war literary text,
Waiting for Godot,
was about the unbearable heaviness of deferment, about how mad you can go when nothing important is happening, we grew up – in the mode of capitalism then fashionable – in a period of instant gratification. Waiting, and frustration, were no longer allowed. We wanted it all now, and we wanted it at once.
So beware: if there’s only pleasure, it will call up destructiveness and death. Sacrifice is always a temptation. The pleasure-seekers explode, go crazy, or otherwise ruin themselves, as if that were the most perverse privilege of all. The natural end to pleasure would be addiction, a fatal narrowing, where one would find, at last, a boundary or a limit.
The important question has to be: how can we defend ourselves against our own destructiveness, those tantrums of the self-damned? How can we even see that we
are being destructive? Where might we find better pictures of good lives?
The making of art represents the crossroads where the good things collide, where duty, magic and creativity fruitfully run into one another. Being an artist is a way of being interested in other people without having to sleep with them. There’s an apt sentence by the British analyst Ella Sharpe: ‘Sublimation is in its very externalisation an acknowledgement of powers within us to both love and hate.’
Not everything can be sublimated; one thing cannot be turned into another indefinitely. Nor can the excluded element be forgotten or renounced; it must find danger and an object or you will fall ill of unfulfilment, becoming unbearable to yourself. The hedonist, joy-rider and addict are safe from this; nothing new will happen since they have cancelled the future. They have ensured that the bad thing has already happened.
Making a swift survey, I see that friends who have endured with most contentment, if not happiness, are the artists or craftsmen, the ones who continue to work however futile it might feel. They go on: the work might be eccentric, far-out or delinquent, but the artist has to form and control her somersaults of the imagination to make something for others, enduring the frustration of turning day-dreaming into meaning. All work is productive, a greeting, a wave across an abyss, as the audience
overhears what the artist is going through.
The artist must live on the edge of failure. There can be no omniscience; any work could be a triumph, disaster or a bit of both. The difficulty here must be proportionate, and the work not impossible. The pen is a more than useful instrument; it is a wand which conjures that which you don’t yet know into being.
The other day it occurred to me that I needed more exercise and should take up skipping. I obtained a smart leather rope with weights in the handles, and, waiting until it was almost dark, went out into the street. Making sure that no one was coming, I started bouncing on the pavement. I must have skipped a bit as a child, I guess, because I could remember how to do it. Being a determined if not bloody-minded fellow, I improved after a few days; I could go on longer. But that was that: I didn’t do more skips; my knees couldn’t take it, and I soon ran out of breath. Nor could I do the leaps, twirls, step-overs and girly hops I’d seen on the internet. I repeated the same little leaden jumps over and over. Soon I had to conclude that I’d reached my level. The only way was down.
My thirteen-year-old son wandered out into the street and said he’d like to have a go with the rope, if I didn’t mind. I handed it over and he began to fling himself in all directions at once, criss-crossing his arms, hopping and tripping from foot to foot while doing a Cossack impression; then he did the whole thing backwards, singing a Beatles song. It was moving and educational to be so
instructed by one’s son. I hoped an opportunity for retribution would soon present itself.
His easy display in comparison to my inefficiency stimulated in me childhood memories of being humiliated by my father at home in the London suburbs. In India Dad had, apparently, been brilliant at cricket, squash and boxing. As a young man I could never reach his level; nor did we have the facilities or sunshine to help provide the opportunity. Or perhaps Dad made sure I could not keep up with him. Whichever it was, my father, tragically, mostly wanted to be a writer and, it turned out, he wasn’t great at that. He didn’t give up, but he was never as good as he wanted to be, and his writing efforts yielded him little satisfaction or self-esteem, particularly as I began to succeed.
My son who can skip and sing found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished for his inability. After experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labelled dyslexic and dyspraxic.
There is, at least, some relief in diagnosis. One is not alone, but joins a community of others who appear to have a similar condition. But can the inability to do a particular thing be described as a ‘condition’ at all? Would the fact I can’t do the tango, read music or speak Russian be considered a ‘condition’? Is it a failure of my development? Am I ill?
I wasn’t much impressed by the imagination and curiosity of the experts: they used an awkward, objectifying language that sounded borrowed rather than earned, and none made the elementary connection between my competence at reading and writing, and the boy’s inability, or refusal. And it usually isn’t long, with an expert, before they begin to talk, fashionably, about brains and chemicals. Biological determinism is one of psychology’s ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue.
An appeal to the certainties of science might seem finally to settle any question. But this is an ethical issue rather than a scientific one. It is values, not facts, which are at stake here. It is in the irritating human realm where the interesting difficulties are, and where one might have to really think about, and deal with, an individual’s history, circumstances and reactions. It is the attempted standardisation of a human being and a limited notion of achievement which is limiting, prescriptive and bullying.
An eighteen-year-old acquaintance of one of my older boys mentioned that he’d been given Ritalin by a doctor, under his parents’ instruction. He couldn’t concentrate at school; his mind, he said, kept scattering off in numerous directions. He couldn’t get anything done, and he was anxious that he was falling behind in life, and this was depressing him. I said that perhaps the teachers were dull, or that he had other, more pressing things on his mind. But he insisted that the drug focused him. He
asked me whether, given the choice, I wouldn’t prefer to focus at will.
This is a good question and I thought about the virtues of being focused, and what could be achieved with the full beam of concentration, within an intense charmed circle of attention, when the mind, feeling and will are linked. As a teenager, in particular, I wanted to be good at things, to shine, but, like the Ritalin boy, I fell badly behind at school, finding myself not only unable to learn but at the bottom of my class. I walked out of secondary school, and a semi-skinhead violent street culture, with three O levels, feeling as if I’d been badly beaten for five years. Fortunately I could tell myself it was still the late 60s, I was a rebel and didn’t fit in – no one with any imagination could.
When I consider that wretched period now, I can see I wasn’t enjoying a creative distraction, a vacation from the drudgery of a bad education, but was enduring a tantrum. Having shut myself off, I was suffering from a form of intellectual anorexia – the refusal to be given anything, to take anything in. As a result of that self-stymieing I lost hope and believed I’d never catch up or achieve anything. It was a short period in my life, but I haven’t forgotten that early deficit. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still compensating for it. It was a relief for me eventually to discover some competence as a writer, though this was later, and it took me a long time to see its value, to understand
that I had a gift and some intelligence, and that I might develop these, or even build my life around them.
When I was failing – and it was very isolating – I envied the love and accolades which the competent and the clever received. I thought that anyone would want such attention and admiration, and that it would lift their spirits. Competence, for me, was even preferable to beauty since any consideration received was earned and deserved.
For me, now, things do get done; books are finished, and other projects are started which are also finished. They take the time they take, and the breaks are as important as the continuities. Only a fool or an educationalist would think that someone should be able to bear boredom and frustration for long hours at a time and that this would be an achievement. Of course, without the ability to bear unpleasant affect, nothing is completed, but concentration follows interest and excitement, and the adults have a duty to give the kids good things, while the kids have to find a way to accept them.
What I might have said to my son’s friend is that it is incontrovertible that sometimes things get done better when you’re doing something else. If you’re writing and you get stuck, and you then make tea, while waiting for the kettle to boil the chances are good ideas will spontaneously occur to you. Seeing that a sentence has to have a particular shape can’t be forced; you have to
wait for your own judgement to inform you, and it usually does, in time. Some interruptions are worth having if they create a space for something to work in the fertile unconscious. Indeed, some distractions are more than useful; they might be more like realisations, and can be as informative and multi-layered as dreams. They might be where the excitement is.
You could say that attention might have to be paid to intuition; that one can learn to attend to the hidden self, and there might be something there worth listening to. If the Ritalin boy prefers obedience to creativity – and who can blame him for wanting to cheer up the authorities? – he might be sacrificing his best interests in a way that might infuriate him later. A flighty mind could be going somewhere.
I might have been depressed as a teenager, but I wasn’t beyond enjoying some beautiful distractions. Since my father had parked a large part of his library in my bedroom, when I was bored with studying I would pick up this or that volume and flip through it until I came upon something which interested me. I ended up finding, more or less randomly, fascinating things while supposedly doing something else. Similar things happened while listening to the radio, when I became aware of artists and musicians I’d never otherwise have heard of. I had at least learned that if I couldn’t accept education from anyone else, I might just have to feed myself.
From this point of view – that of drift and dream; of looking out for interest, of following this or that because it seems alive – Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed so they wouldn’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good. There is more to this than keeping out the interesting: there is the fantasy and terror that someone here will become pleasure’s victim, disappearing into a spiral of enjoyment from which they will not return.
It is true, however, that many people, often called obsessives, have spent their lives being distracted, keeping away, often unknowingly, from that which they most want, thus brewing in themselves a poison of disappointment, bitterness and despair. But there are still, as the Ritalin boy seemed to know, forms of distraction which can be far more harmful. We can attack ourselves unknowingly: we might call this corrupted desire, as if we are possessed by a demon whose whispers are cruel diminutions of the self, destroying creativity and valuable connections, until enervation and self-hatred make a living death.
It is said that distractions are too easy to come by now that most writers use computers, though it’s just as convenient to flee through the mind’s window into fantasy. In the end, a person requires a method. I mean that he or she
must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can only work if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself – if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.
As we become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realised we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to. This may be why most art is either collaborative – the cinema, pop, theatre, opera – or is made by individual artists supporting one another in various forms of loose arrangement, where people might find the solidarity and backing they need.