Collected Essays

Something Given: Reflections on Writing

‘Now, whether it were by peculiar grace.

A leading from above, a something given …’

Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’

My father wanted to be a writer. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t want this. There were few mornings when he didn’t go to his desk — early, at about six o’clock — in one of his many suits and coloured shirts, the cuffs pinned by bejewelled links, before he left for work carrying his briefcase, alongside the other commuters. Writing was, I suppose, an obsession, and as with most obsessions, fulfilment remained out of reach. The obsession kept him incomplete but it kept him going. He had a dull, enervating civil service job, and writing provided him with something to look forward to. It gave him meaning and ‘direction’, as he liked to put it. It gave him direction home too, since he wrote often about India, the country he left in his early twenties and to which he never returned.

Many of my dad’s friends considered his writing to be a risible pretension, though he had published two books for young people, on the history and geography of Pakistan. But even for my father, who loved seeing his name in print — I remember him labouring over the figures for average rainfalls, and on the textile industry — this was not authentic writing. He wanted to be a novelist.

He did write novels, one after another, on the desk he had had a neighbour build for him in the corner of the bedroom he shared with my mother. He wrote them, and he rewrote them, and he rewrote them. Then he typed them out, making copies with several sheets of carbon paper. Sometimes, when his back hurt, he sat on the floor and wrote, with his spine pressed against the wardrobe. But whatever his posture, every workday morning I would hear his alarm, and soon after he would be hammering at his big typewriter. The sound pounded into us like artillery fire, rocking the house. He wrote at the weekends too, on Sunday afternoons. He would have liked to write in the evenings but by nine o’clock he’d be asleep on the sofa. My mother would wake him, and he’d shuffle off to bed.

In one sense his persistence paid off. By the time he was sixty he must have completed five or six novels, several short stories and a few radio plays. For many writers this would be considered a lifetime’s work. Often he became dejected — when he couldn’t make a story live; or when he could, but had to break off and leave for the office; or when he was too tired to write; and in particular when his books were turned down by publishers, as all of them were, not one of them ever reaching the public. His despair was awful; we all despaired along with him. But any encouragement from a publisher — even a standard letter expressing interest — renewed his vigour. Whether this was folly or dedication depends on your point of view. In the end all he wanted was for someone to say: ‘This is brilliant, it moved me. You are a wonderful writer.’ He wanted to be respected as he respected certain writers.

Once, in Paris, where I was staying, I went to a restaurant with one of my father’s elder brothers. He was one of my favourite uncles, famous for his carousing but also for his violent temper. After a few drinks I admitted to him that I’d come to Paris to write, to learn to be a writer. He subjected me to a tirade of abuse. Who do you think you are, he said, Balzac? You’re a fool, he went on, and your father’s a fool too, to encourage you in this. It is pretentious, idiotic. Fortunately, I was too young to be discouraged; I knew how to keep my illusions going. But I was shocked by what my father had had to endure from his family. You couldn’t get above your station; you couldn’t dream too wildly.

Perhaps my uncles and father’s acquaintances found his passion eccentric because Asian people in Britain hadn’t uprooted themselves to pursue the notoriously badly paid and indulgent profession of ‘artist’. They had come to Britain to make lives for themselves that were impossible at home. At that time, in the mid-1960s, the images of India that we saw on television were of poverty, starvation and illness. In contrast, in the south of Britain people who had survived the war and the miserable 1950s, were busily acquiring fridges, cars, televisions, washing-machines.

For immigrants and their families, disorder and strangeness is the condition of their existence. They want a new life and the material advancement that goes with it. But having been ripped from one world and flung into another, what they also require, to keep everything together, is tradition, habitual ideas, stasis. Life in the country you have left may move on, but life in the diaspora is often held in a strange suspension, as if the act of moving has provided too much disturbance as it is.

Culture and art was for other people, usually wealthy, self-sufficient people who were safe and established. It was naive to think you could be a writer; or it was a kind of showing-off. Few of father’s friends read; not all of them were literate. Many of them were recent arrivals, and they worked with him in the Pakistan Embassy. In the evening they worked in shops, or as waiters, or in petrol stations. They were sending money to their families. Father would tell me stories of omnivorous aunts and brothers and parents who thought their fortunate benefactor was living in plenty. They knew nothing of the cold and rain and abuse and homesickness. Sometimes they had clubbed together to send their relative to England who would then be obliged to remit money. One day the family would come over to join him. Until this happened the immigrant would try to buy a house; then another. Or a shop, or a factory.

For others, whose families were in Britain, the education of their children was crucial. And this, along with money, was the indicator par excellence of their progress in the new country. And so, bafflingly to me, they would interminably discuss their cars.

Even we had to get a car. Most of the time it sat rusting outside the house, and my sister and I would play in it, since it took Father six attempts to get through the Driving Test. He became convinced that he was failed because of racial prejudice. Eventually he complained to the Race Relations Board, and next time he passed. Not long after he crashed the car with all of us in it.

Writing was the only thing Father wanted to be interested in, or good at, though he could do other things: cook, be an attentive and entertaining friend, play sports. He liked being a father. His own father, a doctor, had had twelve children, of which ten were sons. My father had never received the attention he required. He felt his life had lost ‘direction’ due to lack of guidance. He knew, therefore, what a father should be. It wasn’t a question for him. He and I would play cricket for hours in the garden and park; we went to the cinema — mostly to watch war films like Where Eagles Dare; we watched sport on television, and we talked.

Father went to the library every Saturday morning, usually with me in tow. He planted notebooks around the house — in the toilet, beside his bed, in the front room beside his television chair — in order to write wherever he was. These notebooks he made himself from a square of cardboard and a bulldog clip, attaching to them various odd-shaped sheets of paper — the backs of flyers which came through the letterbox, letters from the bank, paper he took from work, envelopes. He made little notes exhorting himself onwards: ‘the whole secret of success is; the way to go is; one must begin by …; this is how to live, to think, to write …’ He would clench his fist and slam it into the palm of his other hand, saying, ‘one must fight’.

Father was seriously ill during much of my youth, with a number of painful and depressing ailments. But even in hospital he would have a notebook at hand. When dying he talked of his latest book with his usual, touching but often infuriating grandiosity. ‘In my latest novel I am showing how a man feels when …’

My mother, quite sensibly, wondered whether he might not be better off doing something less frustrating than shutting himself away for most of his spare time. Life was slipping away; he wasn’t getting anywhere. Did he have to prefer failure as a writer to success at anything else? Perhaps she and he could do things together. Nothing changed, that was the problem. The continuous disappointment that accompanied this private work was hard for everyone to bear, and it was the atmosphere in which we lived. Sometimes Mother suggested the illnesses were precipitated by his hopeless desire for the unattainable. But this was not something Father liked to hear.

He was convinced that she didn’t understand what such a passion entailed. The fact was, she did. Yet he wanted to get to people. He had something to say and wanted response. He required attention. The publishers who rejected his work were standing between him and the audience he was convinced was waiting.

*

Father was good company — funny, talkative, curious, nosy and gossipy. He was always on the look-out for stories. We would work out the plots together. Recently I found one of his stories, which concerns the Indian servant of an English couple living in Madras before the Second World War. The story soon makes it clear that the servant is having an affair with his Mistress. Towards the end we learn that he is also having an affair with the Master. If I was surprised by this fertile story of bisexuality, I always knew he had an instinct for ironies, links, parallels, twists.

He liked other people and would talk with the neighbours as they dug their gardens and washed their cars, and while they stood together on the station in the morning. He would give them nicknames and speculate about their lives until I couldn’t tell the difference between what he’d heard and what he’d imagined he’d heard. ‘Suppose, one day,’ he’d say, ‘that man over there decided to …’ And off he would go. As Maupassant wrote, ‘You can never feel comfortable with a novelist, never be sure that he will not put you into bed one day, quite naked, between the pages of a book.’

It amused Father, and amazed me — it seemed like a kind of magic — to see how experience could be converted into stories, and how the monotony and dullness of an ordinary day could contain meaning, symbolism and even beauty. The invention and telling of stories — that most indispensable human transaction — brought us together. There was amusement, contact, entertainment. Whether this act of conversion engaged Father more closely with life, or whether it provided a necessary distance, or both, I don’t know. Nevertheless, Father understood that in the suburbs, where concealment is often the only art, but where there is so much aspiration, dreaming and disappointment — as John Cheever illustrated — there is a lot for a writer.

Perhaps after a certain age father couldn’t progress. Yet he remained faithful to this idea of writing. It was his religion, his reason for living, the God he couldn’t betray and the God who wouldn’t let him down. Father’s art involved a long fidelity and a great commitment. Like many lives in the suburbs, it was also a long deferral. One day in the future — when his work was published and he was recognized as a writer — good things would happen to him and everything would change. But for the time being everything remained the same. He was fixed, and, from a certain point of view, stuck.

Writers are often asked — and they certainly ask themselves — what they would do if they were not published. I suspect that most writers would like to think that they would continue as they do already, writing to the best of their ability without thought of an audience. Yet even if this is true — that most of the satisfactions are private — you might still need to feel that someone is responding, even if you have no idea who they are. Until you are published it might be difficult to move on; you could easily feel that nothing had been achieved, and that by failing to reach another person — the reader — the circle had not been completed, the letter posted but not received. Perhaps without such completion a writer is destined to repeat himself, as people do when having conversations with themselves, conversations never heard by anyone.

Yet Father would not stop writing. It was crucial to him that these stories be told. Like Scheherazade, he was writing for his life.

*

Where do stories come from? What is there to write about? Where do you get material? How do you start? And: why are writers asked these questions so often?

It isn’t as if you can go shopping for experience. Or is it? Such an idea suggests that experience is somehow outside yourself, and must be gathered. But in fact, it is a question of seeing what is there. Experience is what has already happened. Experience, like love and hate, starts at home: in the bedroom, in the kitchen. It happens the moment people are together, or apart, when they want one another and when they realise they don’t like their lover’s ears.

Stories are everywhere, and they can be made from the simplest things. Preferably from the simplest things, as Father would have said, if they are the right, the precise, the correct things, and if the chosen material is profitable, useful and sufficiently malleable. I say chosen, but if the writer is attentive the stories she needs to shape her urgent concerns will occur unbidden. There are certain ideas, like certain people, that the writer will be drawn to. She only has to wait and look. She cannot expect to know why this idea has been preferred to that until the story has been written, if then.

There is a sense — there has to be a sense — in which most writers do not entirely understand what they are doing. You suspect there might be something you can use. But you don’t know what it is. You have to find out by beginning. And what you discover probably will not be what you originally imagined or hoped for. Some surprises can be discomfiting. But this useful ignorance, or tension with the unknown, can be fruitful, if not a little unreliable at times.

*

The master Chekhov taught that it is in the ordinary, the everyday, the unremarkable — and in the usually unremarked — that the deepest, most extraordinary and affecting events occur. These observations of the ordinary are bound up with everyone else’s experience — the universal — and with what it is to be a child, parent, husband, lover. Most of the significant moments of one’s life are ‘insignificant’ to other people. It is showing how and why they are significant and also why they may seem absurd, that is art.

The aged Tolstoy thought he had to solve all the problems of life. Chekhov saw that these problems could only be put, not answered, at least by the part of yourself that was an artist. Perhaps as a man you could be effective in the world; and Chekhov was. As a writer, though, scepticism was preferable to a didacticism or advocacy that seemed to settle everything but which, in reality, closed everything off. Political or spiritual solutions rendered the world less interesting. Rather than reminding you of its baffling strangeness, they flattened it out.

In the end there is only one subject for an artist. What is the nature of human experience? What is it to be alive, suffer and feel? What is it to love or need another person? To what extent can we know anyone else? Or ourselves? In other words, what it is to be a human being. These are questions that can never be answered satisfactorily but they have to be put again and again by each generation and by each person. The writer trades in dissatisfaction.

*

How, then, can the novel, the subtlest and most flexible form of human expression, die? Literature is concerned with the self-conscious exploration of the lives of men, women and children in society. Even when it is comic, it sees life as something worth talking about. This is why airport fiction, or ‘blockbusters’, books which are all plot, can never be considered literature, and why, in the end, they are of little value. It is not only that the language in which they are written lacks bounce and poignancy, but that they don’t return the reader to the multifariousness and complication of existence. This, too, is why journalism and literature are opposed to one another, rather than being allies. Most journalism is about erasing personality in favour of the facts, or the ‘story’. The personality of the journalist is unimportant. In literature personality is all, and the exploration of character — or portraiture, the human subject — is central to it.

*

Writers are often asked if their work is autobiographical. If it seems to me to be an odd, somewhat redundant question — where else could the work come from, except from the self? — I wonder whether it is because there remains something mysterious about the conversion of experience into representation. Yet this is something we do all the time. We work over our lives continuously; our minds generate and invent in night-dreaming, day-dreaming and in fantasy. In these modes we can see that the most fantastic and absurd ideas can contain human truth. Or perhaps we can see how it is that important truths require a strange shape in order to be made acceptable. Or perhaps it is simply true that the facts of life are just very strange.

Still, it is odd, the public’s desire to see fiction as disguised, or treated, or embellished, autobiography. It is as if one requires a clear line between what has happened and what has been imagined later in the construction of a story. Perhaps there is something childish about the make-believe of fiction which is disconcerting, rather like taking dreams seriously. It is as if we live in too many disparate worlds at once — in the solid everyday world, and in the insubstantial, fantastic one at the same time. It is difficult to put them all together. But the imagination and one’s wishes are real too. They are part of daily life, and the distinction between the softness of dreams and hard reality can never be made clear. You might as easily say, ‘we live in dreams’.

Sometimes I wonder whether the question about autobiography is really a question about why some people can do certain things and not others. If everyone has experience then everyone could write it down and make a book of it. Perhaps writers are, in the end, only the people who bother. It may be that everyone is creative — after all, children start that way, imagining what is not there. They are always ‘telling stories’ and ‘showing off ’. But not everyone is talented. It is significant that none of the many biographies of Chekhov — some have more of the ‘facts’ than others — can supply us with an answer to the question ‘why him?’ That a man of his temperament, background and interests should have become one of the supreme writers, not only of his time but of all time, is inexplicable. How is it that he lived the life he did and wrote the stories and plays he did? Any answer to this can only be sought in the work, and it can only ever remain a mystery. After all, everyone has some kind of life, but how that might be made of interest to others, or significant or entertaining, is another matter. A mountain of facts don’t make a molehill of art.

Writing seems to be a problem of some kind. It isn’t as if most people can just sit down and start to write brilliantly, get up from the desk, do something else all day, and then, next morning start again without any conflict or anxiety. To begin to write — to attempt anything creative, for that matter — is to ask many other questions, not only about the craft itself, but of oneself, and of life. The blank empty page is a representation of this helplessness. Who am I? it asks. How should I live? Who do I want to be?

*

For a long time I went to my desk as if my life depended on it. And it did; I had made it so, as my father did. Therefore any dereliction seemed catastrophic. Of course, with any writer the desire to write will come and go. At times you will absolutely rebel against going to your desk. And if you are sensible, you will not go. There are more pressing needs.

There are many paradoxes here. Your work has to mean everything. But if it means too much, if it is not sufficiently careless, the imagination doesn’t run. Young writers in particular will sometimes labour over the same piece of work for too long — they can’t let it go, move on or start anything new. The particular piece of work carries too heavy a freight of hope, expectation and fear.

You fear finishing a piece of work because then, if you hand it over, judgement starts. There will be criticism and denigration. It will be like being young again, when you were subject to the criticism of others, and seemed unable to defend yourself, though most of the denigration people have to face has been internalised, and comes from within. Sometimes you feel like saying: Nobody dislikes my work quite as much as I do. Recently I was talking to a friend, a professional writer, who is conscious of not having done as well as she should have, and hasn’t written anything for a while. She was complaining about her own work. ‘It isn’t any good, that’s the problem,’ she kept saying. But as good as what? As good as Shakespeare?

You don’t want to make mistakes because you don’t want a failure that will undermine you even more. But if you don’t make mistakes nothing is achieved. Sometimes you have to feel free to write badly, but it takes confidence to see that somehow the bad writing can sponsor the good writing, that volume can lead to quality. Sometimes, too, even at the end of a piece of writing, you have to leave the flaws in; they are part of it. Or they can’t be eliminated without something important being lost, some flavour or necessary energy. You can’t make everything perfect but you have to try to.

At one time I imagined that if I wrote like other people, if I imitated writers I liked, I would only have to expose myself through a disguise. I did this for a time, but my own self kept coming through. It took me a while to see that it isn’t a question of discovering your voice but of seeing that you have a voice already just as you have a personality, and that if you continue to write you have no choice but to speak, write, and live in it. What you have to do, in a sense, is take possession of yourself. The human being and the writer are the same.

Not long ago I was working with a director on a film. After I’d completed several drafts he came to me with pages of notes. I went through them and some of his ideas and questions seemed legitimate. But still I balked, and wondered why. Was this only vanity? Surely it wasn’t that I didn’t want to improve my film? After thinking about it, I saw that the way I had originally written it was an expression of my voice, of my view of the world. If that was removed, not much remained apart from the obligatory but uninspiring technical accomplishment.

*

One of the problems of writing, and of using the self as material, is that this will recall powerful memories. To sit at a desk with a pen is to recall familiar fears and disappointments — and in particular, conflicts — which are the essence of drama. This is partly the difficulty of coming to terms with the attitude to learning that you have already picked up from your parents and teachers, from the experience of being at home and at school; and from the expectations of all of these. There is the inability to concentrate and the knowledge that you must do so for fear of punishment. There is boredom, and the anxiety that more exciting things are going on elsewhere.

How soon memories of this kind of learning bring back other discouraging ideas. The limitless power of parents and teachers — that they know everything and you know nothing, for instance; and that if you resist them you are either stupid or obstinate. You recall, too, somehow being taught that work is boring but that you must endure it; and that endurance — putting up with uninteresting things — is a necessary quality in the everyday world. You must be unquestioningly prepared for a good deal of tedium otherwise you are indolent or useless.

How soon, too, when you start to write, do several other things become clear. How much you want to succeed, for instance. Or how much you require the reassurance of some kind of success, or of some kind of enviable status that you believe that writing will bring. To begin to write is to recognise both how much you require such reassurance, and how far away it really is.

But you might also recall the concentration of childhood play — long periods of absorption and reverie as the unforced imagination runs. You concentrate then out of pleasure; there is no conflict. Often, the self seems to disappear. There is, however, a puzzle here. How is playing — playing with the language, playing with ideas — going to produce the necessary result? After all, children just play. They don’t make complete objects. They don’t revise; their games aren’t for anyone else.

Perhaps writing requires the regularity of work and the inspiration and pleasure of play. But this inspiration and pleasure cannot just be conjured up on demand. Or can it? Children never think of such things. If a toy or game doesn’t give them pleasure they throw it aside and seek something that does. But if you did that as a writer, just went off when you felt like it, nothing would get done. Or would it? A good deal of writing is finding a method that will make the writing happen. And how the writing happens depends on the ideas we already have about ourselves. We shouldn’t forget that we create our creativity, and imagine our imagination.

You have to tackle all this while knowing that these are, really, questions about who you are, and who you will become.

*

I started to write seriously around the age of fourteen or fifteen. At school I felt that what I was expected to learn was irrelevant and tedious. The teachers didn’t conceal their boredom. Like us, they couldn’t wait to get out. I felt I was being stuffed with the unwanted by fools. I couldn’t make the information part of myself; it had to be held at a distance, like unpleasant food. The alternative was compliance. Or there was rebellion.

Then there was writing, which was an active way of taking possession of the world. I could be omnipotent, rather than a victim. Writing became a way of processing, ordering, what seemed like chaos. If I wrote because my father did, I soon learned that writing was the one place where I had dominion, where I was in charge. At a desk in my study, enwombed, warm, concentrated, self-contained, with everything I needed to hand — music, pens, paper, typewriter — I could make a world in which disharmonies could be contained, and perhaps drained of their poison. I wrote to make myself feel better, because often I didn’t feel too good. I wrote to become a writer and get away from the suburbs. But while I was there my father’s storytelling enlivened the half-dead world for me. Stories were an excuse, a reason, a way of being interested in things. Looking for stories was a way of trying to see what was going on within and without. People write because it is crucial to them to put their side of the story without interruption. This is how they see it; this is how it was for them — their version. They need to get things clear in their own minds, and in everyone else’s. To write is to be puzzled a second time by one’s experience; it is also to savour it. In such reflection there is time to taste and engage with your own life in its complexity.

*

Experience keeps coming. If the self is partly formed from the blows, wounds and marks made by the world, then writing is a kind of self-healing. But creativity initiates disturbance too. It is a kind of scepticism which attacks that which is petrified. Perhaps this is a source of the dispute between Rushdie and the mullahs. Art represents freedom of thought — not merely in a political or moral sense — but the freedom of the mind to go where it wishes; to express dangerous wishes. This freedom, of course, is a kind of instability. Wishes conflict with the forbidden, the concealed, with that which cannot or should not be thought, and certainly not said. The creative imagination is usefully aggressive; it undermines authority; it can seem uncontrollable; it is erotic and breaks up that which has become solid. I remember some of my father’s friends complaining to him about my work, particularly My Beautiful Laundrette. For Asians in the West, or for anyone in exile, intellectual and emotional disarray can seem unbearable. The artist may be a conduit for the forbidden, for that which is too dangerous to say, but he isn’t always going to be thanked for his trouble.

*

I wrote, too, because it was absorbing. I was fascinated by how one thing led to another. Once I’d started banging on my typewriter, in my bedroom above Father’s, I wanted to see what might be done, where such creative curiosity might lead me. You’d be in the middle of a story, in some unfamiliar imaginative place, but you’d only got there because you’d been brave enough to start off. I was impatient, which hindered me. As soon as I began something I wanted to get to the end of it. I want to succeed rather than search. I wanted to be the sort of person who had written books, rather than a person who was merely writing them. Probably I inherited Father’s desperation as a kind of impatience. I am still impatient; it isn’t much fun sitting at a desk with nothing happening. But at least I can see the necessity for impatience in writing — the desire to have something done, which must push against the necessity to wait, for the rumination that allows you to see how a piece of writing might develop or need to find its own way over time, without being hurried to a conclusion.

*

When, after my teenage interest in literature, I decided on graduating to do nothing but write, my enthusiasm and indeed my spirit fell away. I found that it is one thing to write for yourself in your bedroom after school, but that it is another to do it eight hours a day for a living. It was tough; the only response I met was silence and indifference. I starved myself of other people’s attention and it is difficult to write in a vacuum, though this is what I did. From the window of my flat I would watch the people going to work in the morning, envying their hurry and purpose. They knew what they were doing; they weren’t floundering.

I made myself sit for hours at the desk feeling nothing but a strong desire to be elsewhere. Eventually I would go elsewhere but would feel nothing but the desire to return to my desk. I’d stare at the paper, wanting it to come, wanting to force it, knowing it cannot be forced. But if you don’t push a little, you feel helpless, as if nothing is being done. Learning to wait is a trial if you don’t know what you’re waiting for. Soon I found it difficult to go out; it was almost impossible for me to communicate; I couldn’t see any reason to continue. Hatred of others and of myself was all I felt; and then despair. I made myself depressed.

I couldn’t see the extent to which pleasure had to be part of the work. Perhaps I had picked this up from my father: writing is unrewarding in the long run. There is much rejection to bear. Mostly it is failure and defeat; a sort of prolonged martyrship. In fact, this wasn’t my experience. As soon as I started to write plays they were produced. But I lived as if it were.

I knew I was a writer but no one else was aware of this important fact. I knew I was a writer but I hadn’t written anything I was pleased with, anything that was any good or any use to anyone. In fact I didn’t know what to write; I didn’t know what my characters should say to one another. I’d write a line, scratch it out, write another, scratch it out, and despise myself for my failure. Writing was an excuse to attack myself. Father had both encouraged and discouraged my efforts. He could be caustic, dismissive, curt. His contempt for himself and his own failed efforts were visited on me.

I was afraid to write because I was ashamed of my feelings and beliefs. The practice of any art can be a good excuse for self-loathing. You require a certain shamelessness to be any kind of artist. But to be shameless you need not to mind who you are.

Sometimes writers like to imagine that the difficulty of becoming a writer resides in convincing others that that is what you are. But really the problem is in convincing yourself. You can become trapped within an odd, Beckettian paradox. There is the internal pressure of what must be said. At the same time you are possessed by the futility of all speaking. The image I have is of an open mouth, saying nothing. It is as if you have translated your words into the language of zero at the moment of their delivery, for fear of how powerful they might be.

If there isn’t a commitment, if you keep yourself semi-serious and don’t quite believe in the writing project yourself, you can back out without feeling that you have failed. You recruit others, then, to convince you of something you don’t believe yourself. But they will sense your scepticism and return it to you. It is only when you give yourself to your work that you will get anywhere. But how to get to that point?

The people outside on the street walking to work had ‘discipline’. Surely, if I were to get anywhere, I had to sit still for long periods. Discipline, then, is a kind of violence and involves the suppression of other wishes. It becomes necessary when really you’d much rather do something else. Sometimes it is important to believe that behind everything worthwhile there is difficulty. It is imagined that difficulty and moral strength — or virtue — go together. It is as if the harder something has been to write, the more painful the conception, the better it will be.

*

If artists suffer it is not only because their work involves sacrifice and dedication. It is because they are required to have close contact with the unconscious. And the unconscious — bursting with desire as it is — is unruly. That is often how creativity is represented, as being an unruly force, a kind of colonial mob or animal instinct that must be suppressed. Artists become representative of the unruly forces within everyone. They have to live these out, and live with them, all the time. It is the price they pay for ‘talent’. If most people in the bourgeois world have to live constrained lives, artists do a certain kind of crazy living for those who can’t.

*

One of the conditions of being a writer is the ability to bear and enjoy solitude. Sometimes you get up from your desk under the impression that your inner world has more meaning than the real one. Yet solitude — the condition of all important creative and intellectual work — isn’t something we’re taught, nor is it much attended to as a necessary human practice. People often avoid the solitude they need because they will feel guilty at leaving other people out. But communing with yourself, the putting aside of time for the calm exploration of inner states where experience can be processed, where dim intuitions, the unclear and inchoate can be examined, and where the undistracted mind drifts and considers what it requires, is essential. In this solitude there may be helplessness. You may be aware of too much experience, and an inability to see, for some time, what the creative possibilities are.

The solitude of writing is not the same as loneliness or isolation. When the words are flowing the self disappears and your anxieties, doubts and reservations are suspended. There isn’t a self to be lonely. But such solitude can become mixed up with loneliness. You can delude yourself that everything you need can be obtained within, in the imagination; that the people you create and move around as characters can supply everything that real people can. In a sense you are asking too much of your art. You have to learn to separate these things out. In that sense writing, or becoming a writer, is, like sexuality, a paradigm for all one’s learning, and for all one’s relationships.

*

I conceived the idea of what became The Buddha of Suburbia on the balcony of a hotel room in Madras, my father’s birthplace. Until then, as a professional writer, I had written plays and films, though I’d already published the first chapter of The Buddha of Suburbia as a short story. Ever since it had appeared in print the characters and situation remained with me. Normally you finish something with a sense of relief. It is over because you are bored with it and, for now — until the next time — you have said as much as you can. But I had hardly begun. I knew — my excitement told me — that I had material for a whole book: south London in the 1970s, growing up as a ‘semi-Asian’ kid; pop, fashion, drugs, sexuality. My task was to find a way to organise it.

Often, to begin writing all you need is an idea, a germ, a picture, a hint, a moment’s recognition — an excuse for everything else you’ve been thinking to gather or organise around, so that everything falls into place. In the search for stories you look for something likely and malleable, which connects with the other things you are thinking at the time. I have to say that with The Buddha of Suburbia I was also excited by the idea of being occupied for two years, of having what was, for me, a big project.

*

Looking at the journal I kept at the time, I can see how much I knew of what I was doing; and, concurrently, how little. It had to be a discovery — of that which was already there. I am reminded of a phrase by Alfred de Musset: ‘It is not work. It is merely listening. It is as if some unknown person were speaking in your ear.’

I spent ages trying to unblock myself, removing obstacles, and trying to create a clear channel between the past and my pen. Then, as now, I wrote pages and pages of rough notes; words, sentences, paragraphs, character biographies, all, at the time, disconnected. There was a lot of material but it was pretty chaotic. It needed order but too much order too soon was more dangerous than chaos. I didn’t want to stifle my imagination just as it was exploding, even if it did make me feel unstable. An iron control stops anything interesting happening. Somehow you have to assemble all the pieces of your puzzle without knowing whether they will fit together. The pattern or total picture is something you have to discover later. You need to believe even when the only basis for belief is the vague intuition that a complete story will emerge.

The atmosphere I had already. But the characters and the detail — the world of the book — I had to create from scratch. Establishing the tone, the voice, the attitude, the way I wanted to see the material, and the way I wanted the central character, Karim, to express himself, was crucial. Once I found the tone, the work developed independent life; I could see what should be in or out. I could hear the wrong notes.

*

The Buddha of Suburbia was written close to myself, which can make the writing more difficult in some ways, if not easier in others. I knew the preparation — living — had already been done. But in writing so directly from the self there are more opportunities for shame and embarrassment. Also, these characters are so much part of oneself, that you can almost forget to transfer them to the page, imagining that somehow they are already there.

There are other dangers. You might want the control that writing provides, but it can be a heady and disturbing sort of omnipotence. In the imaginative world you can keep certain people alive and destroy or reduce others. People can be transformed into tragic, comic, or inconsequential figures. They are at the centre of their own lives, but you can make them extras. You can also make yourself a hero or fool, or both. Art can be revenge as well as reparation. This can be an immense source of energy. However, the desires and wishes conjured by the free imagination can make the writer both fearful and guilty. There are certain things you would rather not know that you think. At the same time you recognise that these thoughts are important, and that you can’t move forward without having expressed them. Writing might, therefore, have the aspect of an infidelity or betrayal, as the pen reveals secrets it is dangerous to give away. The problem, then, with explorations, or experiments, is not that you will find nothing, but that you will find too much, and too much will change. In these circumstances it might be easier to write nothing, or to block yourself. If we are creatures that need and love to imagine, then the question to ask has to be how, why and when does this stop happening? Why is the imagination so terrifying that we have to censor it? What can we think that is, so to speak, unimaginable?

A block holds everything together; it keeps important things down, for a reason. A block might then work like depression, as a way of keeping the unacceptable at a distance, even as it continuously reminds you that it is there.

*

Once I’d embarked on The Buddha of Suburbia I found characters and situations I couldn’t have planned for. Changez, in particular, was a character who sprang from an unknown source. I knew Jamila had to have a husband who’d never been to England before. In my journal of January 1988 I wrote ‘Part of me wants him to read Conan Doyle. Another part wants him to be illiterate, from a village. Try both.’ Originally I had imagined a cruel, tyrannical figure, who would clash violently with Jamila. But that kind of cruelty didn’t fit with the tone of the novel. I found, as I experimented, that the naiveté I gave Changez soon presented me with opportunities for irony. If arranged marriages are an affront to the romantic idea that love isn’t something that can be arranged, what would happen if Changez did fall in love with his wife? What if she became a lesbian?

Many of the ideas I tried in the book seemed eccentric even as I conceived them. I taught myself not to be too dismissive of the strange. There was often something in peculiar ideas that might surprise and startle the reader just as I had been jolted myself.

*

When my films were made and books published Father was delighted, if not a little surprised. It was what he wanted, except that it happened to me rather than to him. Towards the end of his life, which coincided with my becoming a professional writer, he became more frantic. He left his job, wrote more, and sent his books around the publishing houses with increasing desperation. At times he blamed me for his failure to get published. Surely I could help him as he had helped me? Even as he took pride in what I was doing, my success was mocking him. For the first time he seemed to have become bitter. If I could do it, why couldn’t he? Why can some people tell jokes, do imitations, juggle with knives and balance plates on their nose, while others can only make soufflés? How is it that people might persist in wanting to do something they will never excel at? Is writing difficult? Only if you can’t do it.

*

I like to work every day, in the morning, like my father. That way I am faithful to him and to myself. I miss it badly if I don’t do it. It has become a habit but it is not only that. It gives the day a necessary weight. I’m never bored by what I do. I go to it now with more rather than less enthusiasm. There is less time, of course, while there is more to say about the process of time itself. There are more characters, more experience and numerous ways of approaching it. If writing were not difficult it wouldn’t be enjoyable. If it is too easy you can feel you haven’t quite grasped the story, that you have omitted something essential. But the difficulty is more likely to be internal to the work itself — where it should be — rather than in some personal crisis. I’m not sure you become more fluent as you get older, but you become less fearful of imagined consequences. There has been a lot to clear away; then the work starts.

Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on teaching and the writing life

Twenty young people drift into a room beside a theatre for the start of a new writing workshop. Nervous or uncertain, most have never met before and won’t know what will be asked of them or what a writing workshop involves. All sorts of alliances, liaisons and friendships will develop over the months, but now I am as anxious as anyone: whether the fear is of what will happen, or of what might not happen, I don’t know. But I am the teacher; like it or not, I have the authority. I am not entirely certain of what I will say or do — and I don’t want to be — yet it’s up to me to make these meetings worthwhile.

In the hope of dissipating some of the self-consciousness, I play a few standing-up ‘name’ games, where people introduce themselves. Then we run about a bit, before sitting down to play some word games. Whatever you do at the beginning, it will always take a few weeks for people to begin to feel at ease, for them to be able to speak to each other about their writing or read it aloud. All workshops generate some kind of work, but the most inspiring ones are often those which are concentrated over a weekend or week away; or, like this one, they will continue for months until the participants begin to see how they can use them — and the other people there — to benefit their writing. They might even get an idea of what ‘their writing’ is.

At last we sit in a circle where everyone can see everyone else. But the ‘democratic’ circle is too big and the chairs are crammed together. Around half of this size, about twelve or less, is the best number. Over the weeks, of course, some people will leave.

As far as I can tell, it seems to be a disparate group in terms of race and background. I would prefer more diversity of age and experience — most young people only have friends of the same age — but at the Royal Court the age limit is twenty-five.

One of the students is a journalist; another guy teaches English as a Foreign Language in the morning, and works as a cashier in a betting shop in the afternoon. Several are at university, or have just left, and almost all the others work in television or film, often as researchers, runners or receptionists. Few have children. As usual there are a couple of writers who seem to have trudged around most of the workshops in town, who have existed on the fringes of the writing world, about to ‘make it’, for years. A number will be dithering about whether to give up their jobs in order to concentrate on writing. Everyone seems serious about what they do; I guess they’re aware that their decisions about jobs or professions will affect the rest of their lives. They’re young but they know the possibilities are already closing down.

There will always be those who talk too much and tend to dominate, and there will be others who are shy. It is difficult to hide in the ‘democratic’ circle, but I did teach a hijab-wearing girl who said not one word to me or to anyone else. I wondered for ages whether I should prompt her, but decided that as the workshop was neither a school nor therapy, if she didn’t want to speak, it was up to her. In the end she sent me her work with a letter saying she was grateful that, unlike other teachers, I hadn’t pressed her to contribute. Each week, she posted me a chapter of the novel she was writing at night when her children were asleep, after having ‘written it in her mind’ during the day, holding the words inside her. In a few months she had completed a first draft.

*

Since the early 1980s, when I first became involved with the Royal Court Young People’s Theatre, I have usually been running some kind of writing group somewhere. Why do I do it? When I think about this, which is often, I’m reminded of a remark Stephen Frears made when asked why he taught at Film School. ‘Because no one else ever asks me the questions my students do,’ he replied.

As working writers get older it is easy for them to become cynical or lost in their own minds and projects, refusing contact with anyone unlike them, not wanting to be changed. A workshop is a good place to have conversations about writing, and to hear stories of various kinds. There is also the opportunity to discuss, by way of writing, whatever else the participants might be thinking about: politics, race, parents, love, childhood, creativity, failure, criticism, happiness. These can be serious talks, more concentrated than chats with friends, and less competitive and formal — more usefully rambling — than university seminars. There is also the pedagogical and parental pleasure of seeing someone develop, of watching them find something unexpected and witnessing their surprise or joy, and feeling that somehow you were present when this happened.

After a certain amount of talk about what we might do, I set a writing exercise and send people off on their own. This surprises and terrifies some students, who expected only to listen. There’s a rush of anxiety in the room. Some people haven’t brought pens or paper; one person leaves for good.

Soon there is silence; everyone is working. I try always to have the students write something, however rough, in the workshop. Plenty can be done in twenty minutes’ concentrated writing. But sometimes the warm-up ‘discussions’ — of the relation between craft and talent, of movies, or of what it is like to be male or female — can go on for an hour or more. It is difficult to plan the work these groups will do as you never know what will stimulate people. Recently, we began talking about men as fathers and ended up talking about parents and children, particularly a parent’s failure to see or understand the ‘real’ nature of the kid. After a while this seemed to reconnect with writing, with the urge, later in life, to put your side of the story; to speak in order to have others know you when once you were encouraged to remain silent. Schools, too, in my day, and for many of the people in the workshop, were basically authoritarian. You remained — mostly — silent, and information was put into you, which you retained until the exams. The pupil was of no interest in herself, except as a receptacle.

Some people turn to writing in order to locate an identity; they even feel that if they don’t do something like this, they will disintegrate.

*

Can writing be taught? There is usually strong feeling about this question, with some derision on both sides, even as more writing courses are being developed. I guess people want to know where this particular talent, or any talent for that matter, originates; how it got to be a talent in the first place, who put it there or what can be done with it. I like to reply: ‘I don’t know, but we’ll meet once a week anyway.’

Certainly there are discussions about writing, and about trying to make anything new, which are worth having, which can be constructive and even improving. This, it seems to me, is plenty. The problem with the writing schools, or with over-academic writing courses, is that they have too narrow a notion of competence and tend only to choose the best students. What would happen if such an idea was abandoned altogether? I wouldn’t even say that talent is important. The less accomplished writers and the novices are no less interesting than the brilliant ones. It is moving to see someone speak when they hardly dared before. Who can say what anyone will produce in the future? Who doesn’t have something to say? Why fetishise talent or approve most of those who please their teacher?

The idea, really, is to be inspiring; to make others see, through one’s enthusiasm, that this is worth doing. Of course people have to understand this themselves; if they don’t, there’s nothing there and the teacher only demonstrates his intelligence while the learning is superficial. Can the teacher do anything? Is she necessary? Why not have a ‘leaderless’ group?

Most of the time it is not that the writer can’t write, it’s that she can’t find out whether she can write or not. She can’t get that far because she is held up by herself and her history, by the external and internal fears which crowd her as she puts pen to paper, standing in the way of real development. The teacher is an alternative or auxiliary voice, which helps the student make an arrangement with herself to continue despite her doubts, an arrangement which will let the student’s natural abilities evolve without crippling inhibition.

*

Early on there was an exercise that appealed to the class. It wasn’t something I’d prepared, but developed out of talking about writers who use alternative names, for instance Stephen King / Richard Bachman, Ruth Rendell / Barbara Vine. In the exercise you write under a pseudonym, as if you were someone else, or as if you were an actor ‘freed-up’ in a mask. Who would you write like if you were liberated from the necessity of being yourself, if you could inhabit your strangest parts without believing you will turn into that person? In the spirit of Miles Davis’s remark, ‘There are no wrong notes in jazz,’ it seemed important to encourage people to bring their worst selves to the page. Of course the idea of a ‘second’ or ‘shadow’ self is one which has been explored by writers as diverse as Poe, Dostoevsky, Stevenson and Maupassant.

‘Remember, you are many,’ was the note I gave them. Initially, people thought just ‘the bad stuff ’ would come out, that their concealed desire would be abhorrent and they would discover only nightmares. One man began the exercise and immediately found his thoughts repellent, as he ‘turned’ into a rapist. His own ‘darkness’ was so agitating and his belief that once in it he’d never return so strong, he refused to continue the exercise and had to walk around the building until he calmed down. ‘Saints can’t write novels,’ I said, unhelpfully.

For others, this disguised speaking of hatred, fury and longing had a surprising and considerable energy in it. Whatever their fears, most people seemed to feel that they had at least discovered something they could use — a new position to write from, for instance; something they would return to, and couldn’t find any other way.

Ted Hughes: ‘Writers have invented all kinds of “games” to get past their own censorship … One thing such games have in common is a willingness to relax expectation, and to experiment, to let flow — a willingness to put on masks and to play.’

The writer here isn’t attempting to find his voice, as if there were one such thing to find, but is discovering multiple inflections and the numerous attitudes it is possible to write from without wholly identifying with any of them.

*

When I set an exercise, I encourage the writers to read out the results. This can feel embarrassing and students are not compelled to do it. For some people, being heard can be harder than being ignored. However, it can be illuminating to hear yourself read in front of a small audience. The story will change as it reaches the light. If you are able to listen to yourself, you will hear the false notes and will, probably, stumble over them. The bad bits will leap out. As you go you will revise in your head.

The other day I read one of my own stories to the class, a story I thought, or hoped, was finished. To my surprise I received a good deal of criticism, most of which was helpful. Misunderstandings and the need for more detail were pointed out. Nothing holds up a story more than lack of clarity and this is not something you would always be able to notice yourself. I went home chastened.

There is a letter by Robert Lowell in which he says, ‘I’d been doing a lot of reading aloud. I went on a trip to the West Coast and read at least once a day and sometimes twice for fourteen days, and more and more I found that I was simplifying my poems. I’d make little changes just impromptu as I read.’

The disadvantage of reading aloud is that it can encourage unnecessary irony and whimsy. The reader likes an instant response; he wants only to entertain and is afraid of a more subtle engagement with an audience. Reading aloud can also force writers to make too much sense of their ideas too early, foreshortening a productive mad rambling — an over-spilling of ideas, memories, day-dreams, night-dreams, images, fantasies, random thoughts and feelings — which might be more generative if continued.

A few weeks into the workshop I am aware of my own impatience. I’m beginning to wonder whether the work of this group is as good as that of other groups I’ve run and whether — and this must be any teacher’s or writer’s worry — other people really want that which is being offered. Of course, only parts, perhaps only a fragment of what you say will be important, just as certain parts of any work of art, or poem — perhaps only a section, paragraph or image — will resonate for a reader. But already I want them to be better writers. Why bother with a workshop otherwise? Or is it only certain sorts of writing that I like or want? Has my taste become too particular? Anyhow, I feel dyspeptic, sour and old. I remember seeing this in some teachers at school: for them, as a pupil, you were a failure already; just being a kid at all was a kind of weakness for them. I have to remind myself to be demanding without becoming destructive of hope. I don’t want to be as hard on them as I can be on myself. But how can the teacher not reproduce with his students the relationship he has with himself?

There are lots of things I know and might pass on. But to have a chance they have to be said at the right time, when people are ready. This is something I can only intuit.

*

After a few weeks, something good is happening. All the students seem to be writing, both in the workshop and outside. At the end of each weekly meeting, they hand me more and more scripts and stories. Having read them I will sit with the writer, trying to say something which will make him want to continue, or which makes him see that he’s found an idea or image that could be pursued further, which is a key to the way he sees the world. What interests or confuses me is the unevenness of their work — how they can write something shockingly compelling and original one day and hopeless and clichéd the next. I guess you couldn’t have one without the other; perhaps one makes the other. It’s odd, too, how sometimes they cannot tell the difference between the good work and the not-so-good.

Anyway, there are never going to be immediate results. Why should there be? A good deal of writing work is waiting, or gestation. The teacher and the writer both have to learn to wait, even when you’re not certain that anything at all will turn up. Of course, in writing it’s only yourself you’re waiting for. That is the fantasy, or attraction of writing for some people, I believe; the fact there is no dependence on others.

Some people from my groups have become better writers; a few, ten years after they came to the group, have begun to make a living at it, having written successful first novels or plays. The point for me isn’t to turn out writers in the way a technical college turns out bricklayers, but to use writing, as one might use anything else — drawing, say — to remake the world and think about the way one lives in it. Anyone can do this.

*

Usually, at the beginning of a workshop, I go around the circle and ask why people have come. I want to know why and how writing might be difficult — or how difficult they want it to be, and where that sense of difficulty originates — and whether there’s a particular aspect of writing which bothers the students.

In this workshop the replies were intriguingly puzzling. Usually they’re along the lines of, ‘how should you write dialogue?’, ‘how do you get ideas?’ and even ‘how do you get out of bed and to your desk every day?’ On this occasion, however, four people, in different ways, said ‘structure’. A young man asked how he should ‘connect’ the various bits of his writing, saying he wrote different parts of a piece and then couldn’t put them together.

These questions perplexed me because the ‘structure’ of a piece is often something that occurs quite late. Normally you can only decide what to do with what you’ve got when you can see what it is that’s there. I assume that if the writer keeps looking at it, some sort of solution will occur, a solution that will be, that could only be, in the writer’s own voice. However many books you’ve read or films seen, the piece you’re working on will have its own peculiar problems to which you can only find a resolution according to the sort of person you are. The decisions you make can only come from you; they should only come from you and the characteristic way you think, otherwise the piece’s form will only be conventional and something fresh might have been lost. First drafts are usually more original than finished work.

People’s concerns about writing are also another way for them to talk about their lives. Daily writing, or the project of becoming a writer, can give ‘structure’ to a life, to people who feel their lives are unorganised. For young people in particular — and those who have recently left home — there can be too much experience and not enough understanding. While writing is a way of integrating unacceptable material into a life, the daily practice itself, the contract you have made with yourself to continue, along with the regularity of the workshops, will provide the form, framework and inevitability which parents and school once gave. Attending a weekly workshop can provide an important shape. You can only orient yourself in terms of other people. Nevertheless, it is the writing in between, that which people do outside the workshop, which matters most.

Of course, as every school kid and teacher knows, all classrooms are sexual sites. A writing workshop is always going to be more erotic than sitting alone at a desk, which can, for some people, be a way of avoiding bodies. Sometimes the students want to learn but sometimes they just want the teacher. Or they need someone in authority to make a demand on them. They need confirmation that what they want to do is worth the effort, and that they are not writing into a vacuum.

Their fear is of speaking with no one listening. Even worse is the common fear that others might listen but be bored, or turned off by what is being said. Of course, we know what this is like. Not only are we bored by others occasionally, but we are bored by having the same thoughts, fears and words in our minds for years. If we are to hear new stories, the old ones have to come into contact with reality. The question then becomes: can we do something with the past rather than have it merely haunt or oppress us? This need to create narrative and meaning — or new meaning — is not an indulgence or luxury, but an imperative for some people in certain circumstances, an alternative to various kinds of repetition or even breakdown.

*

One young man wants to talk to the group about his fear of being pretentious. He says his brother is an electrician whose existence seems to mock the young man’s stated but shaky intention to write. Being an electrician is its own justification. You can’t have enough electricians. A writer isn’t like a scientist either, who has studied and passed his exams. Any old scientist has the right to call himself a scientist, but when do you earn the right to call yourself a writer? In my view, this doesn’t seem to matter. It is the activity rather than the label which counts. I want to move on. But the group insists we discuss this for a while. It’s important to them to worry about the circumstances in which you can legitimately call yourself, or ‘come out’, as a ‘writer’. If others can recognise what you are, you’re more likely to accept it yourself.

Behind this, I realise, is a certain amount of shame. It reminds me of the shame some actors feel at their profession and the feeling that what they do is really rather childish, not grown-up enough, and that people should grow out of their day-dreams as, they believe, all adults do.

Any kind of writing is an act of faith. At first it is a ‘relation’ but not yet a relationship. The writer has to believe, somehow, that not only does he have something to say, but that he is of interest to others; that he can engage rather than bore them, that he can stimulate desire and curiosity in other people. He has to believe in the future, believe that writing this page today will, in the years to come, be sufficiently alive for others so that they might even pay to read it.

Any writer is more likely to believe this if she has had this experience before, if she has had a parent, teacher or carer who was convinced of the child’s usefulness, who found the child’s concerns appealing. If she lacks this, she will have to install or create this belief for herself, using others at workshops, for instance, as stand-ins for absent figures.

On the other hand, any sort of writer has to be able to bear the fact that other people will not be interested. They might be appalled, disgusted, indifferent. Then, like anyone facing criticism, the writer has to decide whether to continue in the same way, or modify what he does in order to suit the other.

To write seriously, then, a lot of things have to be in place and a lot will change as you go.

*

The question of who you write for can often be answered in this way. (In fact, you might as easily ask: who are you living for?) First of all you write for another part of yourself. And this other part of the self, this internal reader as it were, might be over-discriminating or have too confined a taste. There might be all kinds of possible work you could do (or possible lives you could lead) which are prohibited by the zealous internal reader. This scrutineer, who could become a tyrant or saboteur rather than an ally, might require an education — from others — in fruitful vulgarity. Workshop colleagues or a teacher might help you to be bolder.

*

Usually, at the beginning of each weekly workshop I ask what people have been reading or have seen. All the students watch films — commercial, American films mostly. Some of them go occasionally to the theatre. What shocks me is how little they read. While they mention some contemporary or fashionable novels, there are few ‘classics’ or philosophy, and little poetry.

I have always assumed that reading and imaginative writing go together. A writer’s originality can consist of how he distorts or uses someone else’s work. Even a failed plagiarist is an artist. What I’m trying to do, I guess, is get the students to read and look as writers, seeing how the author achieved an effect, being aware of what they can use or transform for themselves. If writing is the translation of feeling into language, I want to encourage a closer acquaintance with the language in order to increase the quantity and quality of expressed feeling. This is not reading for fun, and it is not literary criticism.

What I noticed as a young man at school — and it wasn’t difficult to see, it was drummed into us — was that the well-behaved, the conformists and the compliant were, and would be in life, the most rewarded. What was disturbing was not only that the less bright would go down, but that the dissenters, the ‘difficult’ pupils, often the funniest or liveliest, would not only fail, but be excluded from approval. I suppose I saw myself like that. Luckily there were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Where I did belong, I discovered, was in ‘pop’, then a haven for non-conformists and the creatively odd. Around this time my friends and I began to use marijuana and take LSD regularly. Until then I’d been, I think, not unlike a lot of boys, educationally anorexic. Nothing would go in; I wouldn’t let it in. One day someone gave me De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I went from this to Hunter S. Thompson and after that never stopped reading. The dissipated writers, Bukowski, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and then Roth, Salinger, Kerouac — artists who combined pleasure with art — seemed as self-destructive as pop stars. They were writers who eulogised wild, suffering young men in despair. This was both a picture of how I felt and a picture of who I wanted to be in certain parts of myself. I began to learn that literature was not respectable and didn’t only belong to the teachers or upholders of culture.

Between the ages of fourteen and thirty I read novels, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers. I went to the theatre or concerts at least once a week. I listened to pop, classical and jazz music constantly, tapes, the radio, anything that was around or had been recommended. Later, I lay on the sofa reading The Remembrance of Things Past in the afternoons, from three or six every day, until I finished it, making notes as I went. I read history, politics and philosophy too, in order to think about race, class and gender, notions which were being generally investigated at the time. There was a hunger or longing in me, during that confusing, semi-independent period after childhood and adolescence, for knowledge and comfort, for what I thought was wisdom, and for close contact with stories and writers. I was beginning to try to make sense of my childhood and parents; I required tools for understanding. At the same time I wanted the world but not too much of it. It was easier to bear mediated through books. Reader and writer meet but their bodies do not touch.

Later on I read to see what other writers were doing. This is still of interest to me, but less significant. I have my own voice and concerns as a writer. I’m less likely to learn from anyone else. I would like to read seriously and for long periods again, but there always seems to be something more important to do than remaining in close contact with the mind and feelings of a stranger.

*

My doubts about what I can offer as a teacher don’t diminish. Although I’ve received much incisive and necessarily ruthless assistance over the years from directors, literary managers, editors and friends, I’ve noticed in other writers who teach an inability to see why their students might find it painful. If a writer can write it does not follow that he can understand what the problems of writing might be, or why someone else might find it hard or almost impossible to do. A writer might not want to look at how he had made himself. There could be mutual incomprehension.

Nonetheless I decide to continue with the workshop as long as people come. Sometimes the pleasure of the group seems to be its sole justification. After all, why a group at all when writing is so personal, so private, and may be a way of protecting yourself from various kinds of community coercion? You’d think it was the last thing people would want to do communally.

I was thinking this the other night, after setting an exercise for the group. If I ever wondered what the point of all this might be — my pathological scepticism, you might call it — the students’ demands reminded me. They had come to the workshop in the cold winter rain believing there was something there for them. One man came from Exeter; another commuted weekly from Liverpool, and now fifteen people were working in a room next to the tube line. As I wrote, too, making these notes, I was aware of the quality of silence in the room, an extended, concentrated silence. The members of the group were lying on sofas, sitting on hard chairs, they were hunched in corners on the floor, but everyone was writing, separately but somehow together. I’d set a time limit for the exercise — so there would be time for a break, and then for participants to read work aloud — but it took me several attempts to interrupt them. Later we went to the bar for more talk about plays and writing, and some of the group exchanged email addresses in order to look at one another’s work.

This was, it seemed to me, a productive way to spend an evening.

*

‘Workshops’ were used for group therapy by the psychotherapist Carl Rogers in, of course, California. This ‘planned, intensive group experience’ was, in his judgement, ‘the most rapidly expanding social invention of the century’. Workshops were, in the jargon of the time, ‘training groups in human relations skills’. The idea was that individuals would be taught to observe their interactions with others.

Rogers and others with Freudian backgrounds, like Fritz Perls (a German exile and Gestaltist, who began the Esalen Institute in Big Sur), knew already of the powerful feelings stirred in the traditional psychoanalytic couple — patient and analyst. They were curious to see what would happen if more people were introduced into the room, if you could, according to the democratic impulses of the time, attempt some kind of therapy with a group. If the usual social defences of 1950s America, which had begun to seem unnecessarily constraining — politeness, good manners, small talk and alcohol — were removed, the current of feeling between people ran with extraordinary strength. The intimacy, the quality of honesty, and of ‘realisation’ possible, was more illuminating and pleasurable — and painful — than a thousand conventional conversations. New, temporary communities could be formed when the old ones didn’t work. These ‘encounter’ groups spread rapidly.

Workshops were taken up by dance, mime and theatre groups in New York in the 1960s and were used at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1960s and 1970s when actors, directors and writers would meet to talk, to experiment, and to improvise. These were not rehearsals of already written scripts, but loosely organised, intense meetings where nothing precise had to happen. This, I guess, was almost the opposite of education. There was no information to be conveyed, nothing which had to be put into the participants, only ‘ideas’ which might be discovered in a collective experiment.

‘Workshops’ — groups of people who meet in the hope of discovering something which might be of use — can be a powerful tool for emotional contact and learning, and can be adapted in many ways. Writing is a particularly good use for workshop time because despite their individuality writers have a lot in common and, in the end, all writers write to be heard by others.

You get to be a better writer not only by making more beautiful sentences, but by going deeper into your experience and finding a unique form for it. It is there, at the most fundamental level, that all human experience is similar and where you link up with others.

*

In writing at the moment, there seems to be a demand for instruction. Recently, in New York, where I hadn’t been for five years, I visited the bookshops and headed for the ‘writing’ section. Up to ten years ago there would only have been a handful of writing guides, confined to the reference section, not far from the etiquette books. Now there was an entire shelf of them. There was writing from the body, heart, soul, unconscious, and, it seemed, from all the other parts of the anatomy, suitable or not.

In the 1970s my father would study the writing guides that were available — he was a keen self-improver, and loved ‘wisdom’ and ‘guidance’. He came from a big family and, I assume, had to compete for attention. I read these guides too, though mostly the writers I’d look to for tips would be Somerset Maugham (A Writer’s Notebook) and Henry Miller (‘Reflections on Writing’ from The Wisdom of the Heart). There was also a little book of thirty-five pages by Ray Bradbury, published by Capra Press in 1974 (though I believe it was written in the mid-1950s), called Zen and the Art of Writing, which I still keep on my desk, with my father’s signature inside, and the date, 19 August 1974.

The other book my father and I enjoyed was Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery, mostly because we were interested in sport and how its psychology might be applied to creativity. I remember my mother’s puzzlement over our fascination with a book about archery. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she’d say. ‘A couple of Robin Hoods?’

Collecting and reading these books is, for me, a way of finding inspiration and of wasting time when I could be writing, or of being close to my father, depending on how I’m feeling.

Most of them say similar things. They recommend free writing — free association by hand, you could call it — as a way of outwitting internalised censorship. This is an echo of Freud’s most important request to his patients, which was that they say whatever came into their mind, however trivial, abhorrent or stupid. His only demand was that they speak as fully as possible, particularly if they found a thought trivial, abhorrent or stupid. This abandonment of consecutive or linear thought, the privileging of incoherence and verbal breakdown, in order to mine the realm of dreams and desire, became, for the surrealists, a style, and was the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. It is still the basis of most therapies and ‘talking’ cures. From a Freudian point of view articulacy is not a virtue; one should be suspicious of those who claim to know what they mean. It’s not that people aren’t intelligent, it’s that they deliberately, and with intelligence, hide the truth from themselves, and what is hidden dominates their lives. The hidden, which is raw, is of more use than the cooked.

Freud’s first biographer, Ernest Jones, makes an intriguing claim for the origin of the idea of free association. He says that Freud may have been inspired by an essay written in 1823 by Ludwig Borne — one of Freud’s favourite authors when young — with the excellent title of ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’.

Borne states: ‘Here follows the practical prescription I promised! Take a few sheets of paper and for three days in succession write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head … and when the three days are over you will be amazed at what novel and startling thoughts have welled up in you. That is the art of becoming an original writer in three days.’

Such prescriptions reveal the proximity of writing to therapy, which is one of the things it can be used for. Certainly, at the moment, therapy seems to be the only progress myth there is to believe in. Therapy can help us endure and enjoy more; many teachers, healthcare workers and GPs are using writing in schools, prisons and hospitals in the way painting, drama, dance and music have been utilised in the past.

For me, writing is nourishing and a necessity, a place to commune with myself, to meditate and to be solitary without being lonely: ‘a third space’, as Winnicott calls it, between oneself and the world. For Winnicott, children’s fantasy often involves aggression; playing is an expression of, and mastering of, the anxiety involved in this. The child requires it as a kind of self-restoration. I recall one of my sons saying, after a day out, ‘but I haven’t played today!’ and he settled down, alone, with his cars, and played and talked to himself, until he was ready to be with others. Writers, too, can get irascible if they haven’t put in a few hours with themselves at their desk.

Most human enterprises are more or less therapeutic — ultimately good for us in intended ways. It’s hard to think of anything that couldn’t be counted as therapy, if therapy is seen as the attempt to replace one state of mind with another, preferred state. For adults, to play is to ‘do’ something with one’s anxieties, integrating them into the self, as opposed to leaving them frozen where they remain a dead area within the mind. In that sense writing is a release, which means not to think of those anxieties so much. No wonder writing is in demand as a vocation.

However, despite Freud’s liking for Borne, there are vital differences between therapy and literature. Writing cannot replace what is unique in therapy; in fact it may enforce a dangerous solitude or narcissism. The desire to write can be a problem if it fosters a fantasy of self-sufficiency, omnipotence and withdrawal. At least in a workshop there’s contact with others.

The Freudian patient’s monologue takes place in the presence of another, a trained witness, an ideal listener who never speaks of herself, and whom one is paying. This is not self-analysis but an alliance which helps the patient through the locked doors of the mind that otherwise would remain unopened. In the absence of this, writing as therapy might become merely circular or obsessional; there’s no other way out of the maze of ourselves. The therapist talks back to you in ways you can’t talk to yourself.

One aim of therapy is liberating self-knowledge through contact with unconscious desire. You speak in order to hear yourself, to know who you are. The therapist helps you see what you are doing unconsciously. In writing, however, it often feels better to work in the dark. It is only later, in reflection after the act, that you will see what you have done, or begin to understand what you were really trying to say. But why, even then, would you want such knowledge?

Adrienne Rich: ‘Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simpler way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experience I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it.’

For me the workshop aims neither to produce significant work nor to ‘cure’ anyone of anything. (There’s nothing wrong with them.) There’s no anxiety of success, only the desire to work around the subject of writing. There is probably some benefit in this but I wouldn’t want to know what it is in advance.

*

Sometimes it feels wrong to try to work out what a dream is ‘about’. It seems like a reduction rather than an illumination. What you need to do is wander through its atmospheres, feeling what’s there. Occasionally, in the class, when I’m listening to someone read, rather than considering the work as a literary construction, I let myself absorb it like a dream, encouraging my mind to move amongst the images and words, in order to see what they conjure up, returning some of this to the writer in the hope they can make something of it. Occasionally, rather than offering criticism or encouragement, I invite the group to free associate around a piece of writing, offering lists of words, other dreams or any thoughts inspired in them, as if the writing, and the response, is one continuous piece.

I knew I liked Wallace Stevens’s poetry but for a long time found him impossible to read, particularly as I’ve never read much poetry. He always made me think: how should I read this? I couldn’t understand him. When I realised that ‘understanding’ him, as opposed to liking bits of what he did, or scanning through it until I found something which held my attention for reasons I could only discover, was not the best thing I could do with him, I found another way into his work.

In the end, it’s the artist who is necessary. When you want sustenance, or pleasure, you’re more likely to go to a poem by Eliot or Lawrence than you are to a piece of criticism by Leavis. Criticism erases the pleasure of reading, replacing it by understanding, which is a different sort of thing.

Occasionally I will ask the student to tell me what they were trying to say in their writing, in order to force clarity or focus. Mostly, thought, it hardly matters what you say about someone’s writing. It is the act of sitting there, of being present at all, which is of value. After having spoken and been heard, people’s minds move on of their own accord.

*

Certainly writing is of benefit in the wider, political sense, particularly where there is a tendency for only the most acceptable or publicised voices to be attended to. The most impressive and influential writers of my youth were dissenters like Baldwin, Genet, Salinger, Fanon and De Beauvoir. It is the voices of argument, of dispute and disagreement, which can teach us the most about the position of excluded individuals and groups. Of course the young always feel like outsiders and this would appeal to them. The political effort of my era has been that of formerly suppressed voices, those of women, blacks, gays, the bullied and abused, the mentally ill and the addicted, to speak their history and to have it recognised. This is the struggle to uncover what was formerly hidden. There is also the struggle within each individual writer to believe that their voice is worth attending to. Confession, rather than irony, has become the modern mode. If party politics is banal, formulaic and uninteresting, and most of the media the same, it might be to something as old-fashioned as writing that we will turn to express and share our deepest concerns.

Since the arguments for equality of the 1960s and 1970s, these days the voices most neglected — probably because they are the most unsettling — are those of children. If the latest position for children is their use to adults as consumers — the exploitation of children’s desire — writing freely can be an important implement for them, both in and out of school, enabling them to repossess their own thoughts. This can be particularly valuable for children in authoritarian systems, and most children live, to a certain extent, in authoritarian systems, called families.

There is also the sense in which writing, or anything creative, is ‘counter-consumerist’ in itself. When making something original from one’s own life and feeling, we are not merely objects with wallets, but active and free subjects, the authors or artists of our own lives. Most of us know that when we are creative an authentic connection, or something particularly satisfying and original, has been achieved.

*

As a young man I didn’t attend writing workshops. I didn’t know of any, and would probably have been sceptical of them. I’d have wanted to impress everyone so much I wouldn’t be able to get through the door. I’d have been standing outside, leaning against a wall with the collar of my jacket turned up, sneering, confused. I hated to learn from others. I think I was looking for something I could do on my own, or only with my father. I’m probably a better teacher than I am pupil.

As a child, and before I thought of becoming a writer, I envied talented children at school; I admired their ability and composure, envied the praise they received and, I guess, envied the envy I had of them. My mother had been to art school. Her portraits and abstracts were around the house. Sometimes she sketched. Mostly she didn’t, though we liked her to. She preferred to demonstrate how much life you had to give up in favour of your children. At the same time my father was a published, part-time journalist.

Around the age of twelve I wanted to draw. Some of my friends at school were good at drawing, too, and would, eventually, go to work at one of the many advertising agencies which were opening in the 1960s. But the act of drawing itself wasn’t enough for me. I was searching for a project, for some direction or meaning. I decided to become a painter, an artist. I did paint for a while, but without knowing why I soon became frustrated and gave up. After discovering the Beatles I began to play the guitar, but the same thing happened. There was a point beyond which I couldn’t go. I didn’t improve. I played the same thing over and over. I wasn’t patient enough to see whether I could get beyond that point. At school there were a number of talented guitar players. Kids would bring their guitars to school and play at lunchtime.

I can see now that I wanted results — attention, the engagement of others, someone sitting beside me, interested enough in what I was doing to show me where else I might go. I concluded that playing guitar wasn’t my thing. I remember the pangs of envy and self-hatred, almost erotic in their intensity, which accompanied my failure. That might have been enough for me, but I wanted a ‘thing’. What was my thing?

No one I knew was writing. As a competitive kid, this suited me. I’d have hated to be up against any other kid. I’d have hated not to be the best: I could have given up, gone into a sulk, which finished me off. Writing, for me, was a private, if not secret occupation. Nevertheless, its point, in the long run, was to reach others.

My father was a good teacher; he lived with the dilemmas of writing and talked about them all the time. If I joined in his dream, he gave me a lot of attention. What I did do, under his aegis, as he sat in his armchair in the evening underlining phrases by Tolstoy, was write. I learned some discipline, developed a vocabulary, became used to arranging words into sentences in an order that seemed right, and then sentences into paragraphs. I always had a dictionary and thesaurus open on my desk.

I learned how slow and frustrating writing could be and, I guess, learned to get past this to other pleasures. I learned to use my experience of school, family life, friends, in my writing, and I learned how to remake that experience, in my imagination, into stories. I learned to see, from reading my own work, when it worked and when it didn’t; when it sounded right or like me. I learned to think of writing when I wasn’t at my desk, going over stories in my mind, testing them for potential.

I learned the habit of thinking as a writer and became acquainted with the usual doubts and fears, the isolation, self-belief and bloody-mindedness required. And from the rejections I received for my articles, stories and novels I began to learn something about the practical aspects and difficulties of making a living out of what I wanted to do.

*

In my mind or on paper, in various states of preparation — they might be notes, lists of words, character sketches, or scenes or paragraphs — I have numerous ideas which I poke now and again, for signs of life, to see whether I might get round to writing them, whether there’s any urgency or necessity there. That is why, I guess, if I have an idea, I like to start on it immediately, whatever else I’m doing, when the ideas might ‘run’, and before I can persuade myself it’s really no good. As time passes and I move away from the original impulse or inspiration, I’m less likely to write the idea. It no longer seems important. This way I can work a lot, which I like. But I often work too quickly and the piece might seem rough or unfulfilled, an effect which can have its virtues.

*

Of course, during the day, you write in different moods: sometimes intensively, unstoppably; at other times with self-hatred, or with bad concentration, indifference or boredom; sometimes an idea catches fire and there is an easy pleasure, and so on. These moods might follow in rapid succession. All you can do is sit through it all, knowing that different things are possible at different times, aware that the one thing you cannot do is find reasons to stop prematurely.

As with anything creative, so much of writing seems dilatory. What are you doing all day but dreaming, or dozing on the edge of boredom? Sometimes you follow whimsical or downright stupid ideas to see where they might go. You let pieces of work drift or hang about the house for months before abandoning them, or using them elsewhere; you worry, walk about your study, picking up books at random, leafing through art catalogues, hoping for something to occur. You think: if this was being filmed what would there be to see but a bored bloke doing nothing much? If you try to hurry up you slow down.

Sometimes all writing seems tiresome. You add something to a piece and the whole thing changes. Everything else has to be altered. It takes off in another direction, just when you were starting to get satisfied. Taking something out can have a similar effect.

A good deal of writing, most of it in fact, is craft: cutting and ordering and replacing material, trying it in different places, looking at it again, and going through this process repeatedly, alone and with others, until you think you’re going mad. Most writing is mostly about giving the reader the right information at the right time. The reader’s attention, like all attention, is sustained by withholding. This is partly an editor’s skill and can be learned. What you’re trying to do is to look at what you’ve done as objectively and coolly as you can, which is almost, but not quite, impossible.

Yet, somehow, eventually, things get done. People, fools usually, even say, ‘But you’ve written a lot. You must be very disciplined.’ I am still surprised that anything is finished at all.

It’s as if I imagine there’s another, ideal way to work, if only I could find out what it is. But this might be the best way to do it — haphazardly, in a sort of chaos hedged by hope, while waiting by the window to see my children’s faces when they come home from school.

I wouldn’t measure the quality of a day’s work by the number of words written. The writing might be slow or slower but I’m more likely to see a good day in terms of fruitful ideas which take the piece forward. It is the idea which is significant. The writing itself becomes luxurious; I can enjoy messing around with words and seeing whether they lead to other words.

I have been a man who is always about to go into a room and write. That’s where I’d rather be, most of the time. Sometimes I think everything else — and everyone else — is just getting in the way. I have, at least, learned to write anywhere and at any time: in cafés, on the train, in a car when travelling. Before, I could only write at my desk, with my ‘ritualistic’ objects around me.

My study is full of notebooks. My bag is full of notebooks. My coat pockets carry little notebooks. There are notebooks beside my bed. There are pens everywhere. Most of the notebooks are half-empty; in many I have only written on the first page. If I succeed in filling one I am delighted. Every time I buy a new one I want to write in it immediately. Clean white paper offends me; I want to scribble on it. My job is to turn white paper into half-dark paper.

Soon the notebooks are battered. I stick my wet umbrella on top of them. I write on trains or lying across the back seats of cars. I guess I like being a writer more than I like any of the other roles I have. If I take the notebooks with me, I can be a writer all the time; the further from writing I get, the flatter and more without purpose I feel, as if I don’t know who I am.

*

Writing, or any imaginative act, feels sensual; it feels — perhaps it should feel like — a bodily act, rather than an intellectual one. The movement of the writing hand on the page reminds me of someone drawing a model, looking up, moving between inner and outer worlds. How you turn the page round as you go, how you add; the page with its arrows, additions, notes down the side, underlinings, circles and coffee rings, can look like a drawing. Ink on your fingers and jeans. Your materials matter; the whole thing matters. Fountain pens become a part of you, as the nib changes over the years. Love letters should only be written by hand. Children don’t learn to write on typewriters or computers; you can’t scribble with them. You can’t write at an angle or turn the page upside down; everything turns out looking the same. They are for journalists.

*

Ray Bradbury says in Zen and the Art of Writing, ‘The artist must not think of the critical rewards or money he will get for painting pictures.’ It would be difficult to disagree with Bradbury here; you can never know in advance what people might want. The integrity of the writing itself has to be the important thing. But it cannot be the whole story. Even if it is unconscious, there is the desire to speak and, in any writer, that which he believes speaking will bring him, in the world, with others. What are you using these sentences to do? How do you expect them to reward you, both in the world and in your mind? Any working artist will have to have — at least — sufficient drive, motivation, energy or ambition which will make her want success more than almost anything else.

Freud, with characteristic good sense and a certain amount of condescension, writes of the artist’s belief that his creativity will bring him ‘honour, power, wealth, fame and women’s love; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interests, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis.’

This, then, is writing as a way of wishing, but of course it is not only that. (In other places Freud admitted his inability to understand the creative artist.) If the writing act remained at the level of internal chatter it would, indeed, be a ‘neurosis’ or even madness. But the ‘phantasy’ is turned into words for others, or into an extension of literary tradition — this is the difference between the phantasies of Flaubert and those of Madame Bovary — and is used to make an alteration to the world. The ‘phantasy’ goes on.

I’ve always liked to write every day, otherwise I get anxious. Though I rarely think of it consciously, what I’m doing is always with me and I want to take it further when I can. As a young man I took it for granted that becoming a full-time writer was my goal. I’m less certain now that this is the most fertile way for a writer to spend his life; anyone with a historical perspective will see that any number of writers have pursued other professions, which have informed and broadened their work.

The writer as ‘artist’, as opposed to professional craftsman, particularly during the period known as ‘modernism’, might have rendered fiction more solipsistic and less open to the pressures of the everyday world. In the end it is life rather than language which is interesting.

*

If writing is a profession as well as an art, sometimes I like to think of myself as a ‘professional writer’. It’s a craft, a job; just hard work. I do it to support myself and my family, and if I weren’t paid would do something else. It feels better to be modest about such things: do what you can and shut up. At other times I want to be pretentious and consider myself an artist, a dreamer, someone with a unique vision. I can’t make up my mind; I don’t see why I should. I can be a different kind of writer on different days.

A few weeks ago I looked around at the young faces in my group and asked whether they wanted to be writers, working writers, as opposed to people who might write for pleasure, or as ‘personal expression’. All of them put their hands up.

I thought: none of you have any idea what it’s like to support three kids and run a house by writing. But then, nor did I, for a long time. When I began to write for the theatre I lived cheaply and thought little of how I might get by in the long term. The politics of the 1970s affected me; making money or a living wasn’t the point: free expression was.

Turning a penchant for storytelling into a profession, into food you can buy in the supermarket, and how you might do this for a whole working life, is different for each generation. Not long after I started out as a writer, I did begin to write films, which a number of writers of my generation were doing. I knew this would be useful, and it subsidised my novels.

Not long ago I had dinner with a charming French novelist from Martinique, who writes in Creole. Mostly he works as a teacher, writing at weekends and during the holidays. He was surprised that I don’t have to lecture or do journalism to make a living. He seemed to think there were not many French novelists who could do this. I said in Britain there were quite a few writers I knew who made a considerable living from writing, but that many of them also did other things, like writing for film, television and radio, partly out of choice, but also out of necessity.

*

Few of the writers I know teach much and the teaching I do myself is financially nugatory. These days writers are more likely to work in other areas of the media. As literature and academia have moved further apart, the profession of writing seems closer to the rest of the media: print, television and film. Most writers, these days, fancy writing and directing their own films, or at least having their work made into films, which is a good way of extending one’s income and reaching a larger audience. Films can be lucrative and pleasurable, but they take a lot of setting up and can be a waste of time and hope, as so few of them are actually made. With a film there are usually two significant creators, the writer and the director. Occasionally, as with Bergman, say, this can be the same person. Usually it is not, as writing and directing are different types of talent. The writer does his work first, after which it is used in various ways by the director. The writer almost always receives less recognition than the director and often less than the actors. This can be a mercy, depending on the temperament of the writer and the quality of the film. He will be paid far less, too.

*

Around the time of My Beautiful Laundrette my life changed. There were trips to America, prizes, nominations, opportunities, praise, attention, and new girlfriends. I had to try to understand the way long-standing friendships shifted; there was envy and incomprehension. It was an ‘accelerated’ period, which made me fear who I was turning into, and made me want to cling on to a previous idea of myself. I couldn’t integrate so many alterations; my identity seemed in flux. I didn’t know how much I could change in order to enjoy what was happening, without turning into someone I didn’t recognise.

My Beautiful Laundrette was a successful film, which took a lot of money at the box-office in relation to what it cost. I wasn’t fairly rewarded and was told not to complain, since the movie had established my reputation and enabled me to get my next projects made. Yet others, who lacked my ability, made plenty of money out of it. I was keen for this not to happen again.

There are few more bourgeois professions than that of writer. The fiction artist is rarely a heaving volcano of dissent. It’s the poets who are mad; they drink too much, bitch at one another, get into fights at parties and copulate with strangers. The novelists always leave early to relieve the baby-sitter. They want to be around for a long time; they think they’ll get better and better. The novelist is someone with a solid, middle-class job, who can never be sure she will be making a living in five years’ time. It’s like having qualified as a doctor but being uncertain whether there will always be work available. Each piece of writing should be a risk; it would be worthless otherwise. But to what extent can you jeopardise your livelihood? What happens if you run out of ideas just as your house needs a new roof? How long will you have between your ‘peak’ and the beginning of your decline? Most writers, I’d guess, imagine at the beginning of their careers that their income will increase. But it’s more likely to tail off, and there’s not much they can do about it. A bad divorce and you could be down to nothing, doing rewrites on other people’s films.

*

The other day I ran into a friend: we’d been young playwrights together; we’d shared awards and I’d stayed with him, discussing our work, directors and the theatre. He told me that last year he made only £1,000 from writing. Now he wrote proposals for television dramas or films, which were inevitably turned down by executives who’d never heard of him. He was, in fact, on his way home from a party where he’d met other contemporaries of ours who were complaining that their old work was no longer produced and they couldn’t put their new work on. They were all less than fifty years old, already out of fashion and still with plenty to say as writers.

This mixture of security and uncertainty can be enlivening. It can also be depressing and discouraging, if you have a family. But unlike with other bourgeois professions, you have to endure regular criticism and advertise yourself as well as your books. It isn’t imperative for doctors to appear in glossy magazines.

By the end of the 1980s, particularly after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia, the commercial aspect of writing began to take up more of my time. If I wanted to have some idea of the financial possibilities of my profession, I had to learn fast about the nature of the business I was involved in. If I wanted to be an ‘artist’ I had to be practical.

Now, at least a third of my writing life is taken up with phone calls, letters, faxes, emails, business arrangements, interviews, readings, signings, travelling, seeing agents, accountants, students. In other words, it’s like running a small business. All the working writers I know constantly have to make decisions about the proportion of actual writing to publicity they will do. The creative part soon becomes as hard to protect as it would be for someone trying to write while doing another job.

The modernist writers I admired when growing up — Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, Burroughs, Genet — didn’t expect to trade in the marketplace. They didn’t work on TV series or do adaptations on the side; they didn’t consider writing for Hollywood. They were artists and individualists, to say the least; they had integrity. Commerce was corruption. The second-rate writers made a living at it; the artists didn’t care. Graham Greene seemed an exception: he wrote good movies and novels that sold. Otherwise, the world of the nineteenth-century novel — writer and large public in contact; writer to the side of, but part of the ruling class — didn’t exist for serious writers. Storytelling in its crudest sense, as entertainment, as escape, had been taken over by the cinema, and then by television.

Yet Burroughs, Beckett and Genet did begin to sell, in the 1960s and 1970s, as did Sartre, Camus and Grass; when I was at university writers like Borges and Márquez were in most serious students’ pockets. Publishers like Picador made hip books fashionable and sold them to the same people who would buy the Doors and Dylan. The expected ‘break’ between artist and mass audience never occurred. Just as in the cinema there are usually a couple of ‘arthouse’ hits a year, so it is with literary novelists, some of whom ‘cross over’.

The sort of writer you can be is partly determined by the market and whether you want to sell books or not. If you want to make a living by writing, the kind of work you will produce might be different to that which you’d do if you had another job. Your relation to your audience will be different. By the end of the 1980s the nature of the profession and the opportunities available within it had changed considerably. Book publishing, with the rise of massive media conglomerates, became more dynamic. There was more media, more places to promote books and more ‘profiles’ of writers.

The intensification of publishing coincided with the rise of better bookshops — mostly Waterstone’s, then, a bit later, Books etc. and Borders. Soon vast palaces of books were opening in London and other cities, where you could buy coffee and croissants, as well as CDs and magazines. These shops started to organise readings, where writers and their public could, at least, see one another. Each seemed curious about the other. The small independent bookshop — much idealised and often useful — could, at times, drive you mad. These shops were usually small and the selection narrow. In places like Waterstone’s — if the past sometimes seems to have been expunged and you can only get the latest books — you can instantly get a good idea of what is in print.

*

I became aware of these imminent changes when a well-known American agent came to the apartment in which I was staying in New York. It must have been in the late 1980s, before I’d published The Buddha of Suburbia, and when, I imagine, I was still attending film festivals and conferences on the back of My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which I did for months, travelling the world for the first time.

This thin, intense, black-suited man brought with him a calculator with a paper roll in it, which I doubt he still has. He sat down, set the machine up, and asked me what I intended to write in the next few years. As I reeled off the list of essays, stories, novels and travel pieces I’d been mulling over for years — adding a few extra, just for luck — he punched in figures. Finally, he came up with a figure so astronomical, with so many noughts on the end, that I couldn’t believe my efforts could be worth so much.

Probably, going with him, I’d have made more money than I did eventually make. But it was a high-risk game. I might have moved publishers several times in the process, chasing the dollar, and been less well published as a result. I wouldn’t have had such a productively quiet life. It might have been different if he hadn’t reminded me so much of the bullying, loud-mouthed, suburban wide-boys I’d grown up with, selling socks and watches from suitcases on a pub floor.

*

Every celebrity these days, in whatever field, aspires to the condition of rock stars. Being ‘good’ at publicity might be as important for a writer as it is for a performer. But if writers are marketed in this way, their careers are going to rise and fall rapidly, too, and the pressure on them will increase. Recently a bookshop manager told me that the writers of the generation preceding mine, the writers I once wanted to be like, hardly sold now even as their reputations and advances increased. They had written neither literary classics nor popular novels. There were younger, more attractive, enviable and relevant writers out there.

There might be more opportunities to sell books, but you will have to work harder to get your work before the public, which includes giving interviews. As a kid I’d have read any interview with almost any writer to get an idea of how it’s done, to find inspiration, and to increase my hunger and confidence. For me, writers have always had status as semi-sages. Where else do you go for insight, if not wisdom? Certainly not to politicians; and priests will give you only religious propaganda or morality. Perhaps you’d go to a therapist but there you’re really only going to find out what you think. Writers at least think seriously about the world in all its aspects — emotional and political — and don’t usually have a programme. They think for a living about the lives of men and women in all their aspects.

The writer who disappears behind his work or seems to dissolve into it, is almost impossible in the modern marketplace. The artist might want to discuss his work, but the journalist wants to know about the artist’s life. The artist has attempted to capture some kind of complexity while the media caricatures and empties people out. The writer is stripped bare; no mystery can remain, unless he turns himself into a grotesque enigma like Pynchon or Salinger and will, therefore, be pursued and caricatured even more.

What can an interview do? There’s usually a photograph and the name of the book or film you’re promoting. This might be sufficient to get the work to an audience, to let them know it’s there. You might also be invited to explain how you came to make the piece. Although some writers hate this — they’re superstitious about how they operate; or, like conjurors, don’t want others to see the banal workings of created wonders — it isn’t uninteresting to talk about your work, particularly if you’ve just finished something. That is when you do want, maybe in exchange with a journalist, to get some idea of what has been achieved. You don’t really know what sort of book it is you’ve written until someone else has read it. If you cook a meal you want people to eat it and tell you they liked it. Yet talking about a book after you’ve written it, when it’s published, bears little relation to what you thought you were doing when you were writing it. The story of the book told in interviews becomes another made-up story.

Of course, as you promote a book or film in many countries, the questions are always similar and it is tempting to give the same replies. (This is odd and frustrating for an artist: how their work only stimulates certain kinds of questions.) It’s exhausting, too, to talk to someone who cannot talk about themselves. You begin to hear your own voice droning on. It can be helpful to think of the questions as Zen paradoxes. Each time, if you empty your mind, you might hear yourself say something different, particularly if you try to think about what is really being asked.

*

Not everyone came to the workshop every week, but by the end there was a core of about fifteen. I withdrew after eight months, without quite knowing why. I wasn’t convinced there was anything else I could give them, though why I felt I had to do more than listen and wait for something to occur, I don’t know. Teaching can be draining. You have to put other thoughts and preoccupations aside, which is not something I’m used to. I wouldn’t be able to do too much of it and continue to write.

As with some of my other groups, the workshop members continued to meet, at first in the theatre and later at someone’s house, to read and discuss one another’s work. Some students wrote together; one applied for writing jobs on soap-operas, and another found work writing erotic horoscopes. Two others gave up their jobs or went part-time in order to make time to write. Some joined or started other writing groups.

They were hard-working and committed. They knew that, despite its drawbacks, being a writer is a relatively free and rewarding life. Most of the group, by the end, were writing seriously and had embarked on substantial projects, whole plays, novels or films. Some were making films with digital cameras, using friends and out-of-work actors. Many of the friendships would continue; the students would send me work and invite me to readings and productions of films and plays.

Certainly many people attend evening classes and courses for some sort of community, contact and sustenance. Being an enthusiastic amateur is one of the most liberating ways there is of being an artist. Whether writing workshops are therapeutic, creative, good for making friends or useful in any other way, you can only ask the participants. There cannot and should not be any guaranteed outcomes. People meet to discover what they might do together, striving to get close to something that needs to be said, and to speak of difficult things in voices that have been muffled, ignored or silenced. There is always the need to speak and the need to be heard.

The Writer and the Teacher

If it is true, as I have read somewhere, that at any one time at least 2 per cent of the population are writing novels, then many questions about ‘creative writing’ courses, and their recent rapid proliferation are really about what you need other people for.

Is writing something you do alone, or do you need others to help? You can have both useful and repetitive conversations with yourself, and you can have sex with yourself, though it might cause alarm if you claimed to be making love to yourself. Conversation and sex are generally thought to be more productive and unpredictable with others. Several of the most significant art forms of the twentieth century — jazz, pop, cinema — have been collaborative. Is writing like this or is it something else altogether?

Some people become writers because they want to be independent; they want neither to be competitive nor to rely on others. For them writing is an entirely personal self-exploration, a way of being alone, of thinking through their life, and perhaps of hiding, while speaking to someone in their head. And certainly, without a passion for solitude no writer is going to be able to bear the tedious obsessionality of his profession.

Yet that’s not where the story ends, in solitude. Particularly when they are first beginning to write, some students like to show their work to their friends, and, sometimes, to their family, both as a way of informing them of certain truths, but also in the hope of a helpful reaction. Yet, however much the well-meaning reader might like the work, it doesn’t follow that he will have the vocabulary to be able to speak usefully about it, saying something which might help the writer move forwards. Kindness may be comforting, but it isn’t always inspiring.

Men and women have always searched for ways to enhance, modify or transform their states of mind, using herbs, nicotine, alcohol and drugs, as well as bolts of electricity through the skull, opium, baths, tonics, books and conversation. [Even ‘pearl cordial’ — powdered pearl — was popular in the eighteenth century, as a purported cure for depression.] There’s no reason why the practice of writing can’t help people see what’s inside them, as well as helping them organise and deepen their ideas of who they are. Reading does this too, providing a vocabulary of ideas which you might utilise to view your life in a new way. But a writing teacher is not a therapist, listening patiently for the unconscious in a free association or dream telling, and the student would be surprised to learn the teacher saw himself as a healer rather than as an instructor.

When necessary, and it is usually necessary, the teacher has to teach, to pass over information about structure, voice, point of view, contrast, character, or the discipline of writing. But, particularly on those occasions when faced with a mass of work she can’t understand, and doesn’t know how to begin addressing — particularly horrifying for a teacher who might be under the misapprehension that she must understand, and quickly too — she might use something like a Socratic method. By asking numerous questions, the teacher will give the student her work back in a different form, making it seem both clearer and more puzzling.

Students are often at a loss when you ask them what a particular image or piece of dialogue means, and whether it is doing what they believe it is doing. While it might be productive to write from the unconscious where the world is weirder and less constrained, the work has also to be assessed rationally. Discussing it is part of this.

In a short film he’d made, a film student had stationed two young men on a park bench where he filmed them from behind — the backs of their heads — for some time. When I asked him why the shot was so sustained, he replied that the moment — to me a considerable moment — represented ‘death’. He said he wanted the viewer, at this point in the film, to consider their own death. Always up for that, but trying to remain calm, and reminding myself of the nobility of teaching, I said it defeated me how he thought an audience would leap from the picture he presented to this thought. He seemed to see he needed more vivid and accurate images to convey what he wanted to say. It was also helpful for him to be told that he needed to develop a sense of story, rather than slamming scenes together in the hope the audience might notice some connection. If nothing else quite succeeds in a piece of work — humour, for instance, or the fascination of the characters — the story alone might still hold the reader’s interest, as it does with soap-operas.

This student might have also benefited from better authorities, from closer contact with other artists and dead poets, from whom he might learn more imaginative solutions as he strove to carry his internal world into the outside one. It is amazing that students are so rarely taught to see the connection between studying others and their own work. Borrowing a voice, or trying out new ones, isn’t the same as acquiring your own, but it’s a step in that direction. What you steal becomes yours when it is creatively modified. Since almost anything can usefully feed an artist, a broad humanistic education, a sort of foundation course involving religion, psychology and literature, would be a positive accompaniment to any writing course.

Conversations with a teacher should enable the student to get an idea of what an ordinary reader might make of her work, and how she must bear in mind that, in the end, she is writing for others. Writers are entertainers rather than exhibitionists. These exchanges should also give the student an idea of what she is striving to say.

The clarity a student might gain, along with new ideas, can also be obtained from writers working in groups. While concentrated individual teaching is usually preferable — most advice about writing is too general and is along the lines of ‘write about what you know’ — the advantage of the group is that each student has the opportunity to hear a range of criticism and suggestion, some of it mad, some invaluable. The students learn from one another.

Another version of this is for the students to work in pairs, reading their work to one another, though this is not easy with longer pieces, and difficult to keep going over the considerable period it might take to complete a sizeable work. What must be recognised is that the reader orients the writer, and the writer should understand he exists only in relation to the one whose attention is being solicited. The reader or spectator must be convinced by the competence of the writer, acknowledging that his work is credible, and that it’s safe to believe it. What the writer wants is for the reader to feel as he felt.

When attempting to write there are some mistakes you have to make, mistakes which will yield good ideas, opening up a space for more thoughts. And there are other mistakes it might be worth avoiding, though sometimes it is difficult to tell the two apart. What might make it clear is when the writer gets blocked or stuck. A student of mine wanted to tell a story in the voice of a seven-year-old. As you can imagine, she was finding this inordinately difficult, and it was holding up her progress. (That which you most urgently want to say might not make the best writing.) By trying to inhabit a point of view it was almost impossible for her to see from, she was getting little work done and becoming discouraged. Good advice would have been for her either to see if she could get hold of the story from another position, or work on something else for a time, before returning to the idea.

She might then have to learn how to wait for the occurrence of a better idea. And this question of waiting, for a writer, is an important one. A good idea might suggest itself suddenly, but its working out or testing will take the time it needs. It might appear to acquaintances of the author that he’s doing little but lying on the sofa staring into the distance, or going on long walks. (Clearly, Charles Dickens was writing when he was walking.) This might be when good ideas turn up — a book is a thousand inspirations rather than one big one — and the guilt of fertile indolence has to be borne.

Writing and life are not separate, though they can be separated, and, on the whole, it is the teacher’s job to consider the writing as an independent entity. Often though, a student will use writing to think about his life, so that what the student is showing the teacher is a problem.

A woman decides to write about her mother but finds herself overwhelmed with grief and heartache. She pushes on, but stops, terrified of what she might want to say. Eventually she must decide whether or not to drop this painful but essential subject. Perhaps she’d prefer to write something else. Or she might need to discover whether she can endure the difficulty of confronting the matter. And it might also occur to her: is writing a way of calming terror, or of creating it? We can see here that the writer is the material; the poem is the person. They are the same thing.

Following on from this, an anxiety in the writer will be a fear of what his words will do to others, and what others might do to him in return if he says what he thinks, even in fictional form. As there are certain ideas which are discouraged or forbidden in families, and indeed in all institutions, most adults — even if only unconsciously — are afraid of expressing their own ideas about what is going on. They fear they will be accused of betrayal and then punished — both of which are possible. They will have to wonder whether they are prepared to put up with this. A certain personal truth might, however, be what the writer most wants to reveal, thus creating an intolerable conflict which might lead to a block.

If a student can only write miserable monologues at the end of which the speaker kills himself, you might wonder, not only about the student’s state of mind, but also about why there aren’t any other characters in the piece, about the voices which aren’t being heard. Obviously this student — who had been through the psychiatric system where he wasn’t much listened to — was showing me something I had to take seriously and think hard about. It was worrying, and not easy for me to see how to proceed here.

Eventually I persuaded the student to bring in other characters to make more of a conversation of it. To his credit, after a few weeks, he was able to do this, though the suicides continued. I learned that when the unsayable was about to be broached at last, suicide was seen as the convenient way out. It was like a version of writer’s block. But once his characters began to have exchanges — and the student saw the point of debating with himself, of opening up his own head — his work developed. The scenes got longer and the people spoke. His work became more available to others.

For a while at least, a measure of madness appeared to have been transferred from the writer to his characters. They were iller than he was. Certainly it’s not the most healthy who are the most creative. As Proust reminded us, ‘Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. We enjoy a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.’

It was my student’s excitement and determination in his work which reassured me. Our meetings were a helpful structure. I think without a teacher to accompany him through this, he could have twisted in painful circles and become more isolated. As it was, his work was among the most imaginative and strange I’ve read, far removed from the dull realism and conventionality which most students think passes for imaginative work.

Some students have considerable phantasies about becoming a writer, of what they think being a writer will do for them. This quickens their desire, and helps them to get started. But when the student begins to get an idea of how difficult it is to complete a considerable piece of work — to write fifteen thousand good words, while becoming aware of the more or less impossibility of making significant money from writing — she will experience a dip, or ‘crash’ and become discouraged and feel helpless. The loss of a phantasy can be painful, but if the student can get through it — if the teacher can show the student that there’s something good in her work and help her endure the frustration of learning to do something difficult — the student will make better progress.

In the end, the writer mostly teaches himself and will always want to develop, finding new forms for his interests. If he’s lucky, along with learning to allow his imagination free rein, he’ll mostly edit and evaluate his own work himself. Of course it doesn’t follow that he’ll never need anyone else. He might prefer to ignore others, but he will need to listen to them first, as he continues to speak.

The Rising Line

A student came to me last week with a short film she’d made and we watched it several times on DVD, in my front room. I made suggestions and she said she’d go away and re-cut it. What I wanted her to do was get to the story quicker, to what I called the ‘good bits’ and she was rather bewildered by this, particularly when I said things like ‘can’t you put all the good bits together and hand it in?’ She liked the other, slower, parts because she felt that to put the good bits in a sequence would make everything, as she put it, ‘too sudden’. I knew what she meant and couldn’t help but agree that the ‘proportions’ had to be right.

Under my sofa there are two novels written by former students, which I feel compelled to read. The first is about a girl whose father dies and her mother joins the Orange people, taking along the teenage daughter. There are, as you can imagine, some excellent sex scenes, full of hairy New Agers and embarrassment and sadness. The other novel is about a young man who joins a writers group, not unlike the one I ran at the Royal Court at the end of the 80s, and that book is full of anxiety and competitiveness. If the writer does what I say it could turn out to be a decent comedy.

I wonder what I am supposed to give to these students, whether I can be any use. I could be a good parent, encouraging them to try new things, and I could be their first audience, telling them what I feel as I experience their work. I take this ‘teaching’ seriously, because they listen to me seriously and I’d feel guilty if I couldn’t give them anything useful. Do they have anything in common, these three? It could be that the story they are telling isn’t in focus, that there aren’t enough ‘good bits’ in the right place.

Who am I to talk? I’ve just written a film which I’ve shown to friends. They think it’s eccentric, weird and probably unfilmable. Also, I have hundreds of pages of a novel, (what Spalding Gray called ‘The Monster In The Box’, before he threw himself into the Hudson), which I am sure I will never be able to organise into a coherent whole.

On the floor of my study I keep finding words written on squares of paper. I bend over, pick up a bit of paper and it says ‘horse’ or ‘scorch’ or ‘make’ on it. My six-year-old and I have been making a ‘wordbag’. If we find a likely-sounding word in the newspaper, in a book, or even said in the street, we write it down, cut it out, and stick it in a Christmas stocking. When we want to make a poem we haul out words at random and put them together, to see what happens.

I seem to remember William Burroughs doing something like this, which may be why his novels are memorable but unreadable. Others took this up in the 60s. When David Bowie was working on the music for the TV version of my novel The Buddha of Suburbia, and we needed a song, he asked me to bring in fifty words from the first half of the book. ‘On one page,’ he said. So I wrote down a load of words and was amazed when he made them into a good song which was played on Top of the Pops.

Faber have just published On Film-making, the writings of Alexander Mackendrick, who directed The Man in the White Suit. When he could no longer get his films made, Mackendrick became a film teacher in California and these notes are the book. One chapter is headed ‘Exercises for the Student of Dramatic Construction’ which I will read one day, because I know it will help me. There are ideas about how to make plots and create what he calls ‘the rising line’. Mackendrick keeps the process alive by suggesting new, lateral, ways to proceed, as though he knows that at the slightest discouragement the artist will collapse and retreat to the pub.

Of course there are few things more temporarily satisfying than finding a rule or formula which one could follow forever, without the struggle or conflicts which characterise the creative enterprise. When I was researching The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic among young Muslims I envied the fact that, for them, there were no unanswerable questions. What could they have to worry about?

Of course it is common to suggest that writing cannot be taught. Despite this, there are now more books about writing than there are about learning to play the piano; some bookshops have whole sections devoted to ‘creative writing’. Mackendrick’s collection, full of excellent notions and exercises, is far better than most of the ‘How to Write’ books on the market these days. I’ve read a lot of them, which passes the time when one is supposed to be writing.

It’s easy to sneer. You can’t, however, forget that the foundation of Freudian therapy — the basic rule: free association, saying whatever nonsense comes into your head — was adapted by Freud from a self-help manual he read as a teenager, Ludwig Borne’s ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’. Borne suggested free association — on paper — as a method of evading internal censorship or what Freud would later call the ‘superego’. It worked for Freud: he did become an ‘original’ writer by lifting this method, which is used in therapy everywhere today. Mackendrick’s book is a variant of this.

So-called free assocation goes on all the time, but there are more unusual ways of doing it. Now I have an image: my three sons, all conventionally resistant to the written word, are on their knees on the floor, sticking their filthy fists into a bag, pulling words out, and making them into poems. At one point a fight breaks out: they all want the same word, which is ripped to shreds. Eventually something almost literary gets done. Here’s one result:

Poem Five by Kier [aged 6]

Tomatoes gazed on

women flowers

books sound madly knowing

but tonight apples are

going

to

children.

Loose Tongues

That exemplary dissident Oscar Wilde, whose punishment failed to erase his words but taught us something about where a loose tongue might get you, wrote, at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.’

This essay concerns something we are and take for granted: the fact we are speaking animals, full of words which have a profound effect on others, words that are sometimes welcomed, and sometimes not. I want to say something about words which seem possible and others that seem impossible.

It is no coincidence that the political and social systems which have dominated our era — communism, global capitalism, fascism, imperialism, the nuclear family, different varieties of fundamentalist religion, to name but a few — are marked by a notable factor. There are circumstances in which they don’t want people talking about their lives. Tyrants are involved with silence as a form of control. Who says what to whom, and about what, is of compelling interest to authorities, to dictators, fathers, teachers, and officials of whichever type.

As Milan Kundera pointed out in his great novel The Joke, there are times when the need to be funny is so subversive that it can land you in jail. Issac Babel, who was murdered in prison, and called a book ‘the world seen through an individual’, was himself not unaware of the ironies here, and said, ‘Whenever an educated person is arrested in the Soviet Union and finds himself in a prison cell, he is given a pencil and paper and told “write!”’

What his interrogators wanted were words. But of course the meaning of ‘corrupt’ is to falsify, adulterate, or debase, in this case the language — that which links us to others.

In his short fiction ‘In The Penal Colony’, Kafka describes an ingenious machine for torturing to death a man condemned for disobedience. The device is equipped with ink-jets which inscribe the name of the crime on the victim’s body, even as he bleeds to death. ‘“This condemned man, for instance,” — the officer indicated the man — “will have written on his body: Honour thy superiors.”’

The whole process of writing as killing takes twelve hours. This calligraphy of colonialism might be called ‘being killed by description’, as the body is ripped to shreds by those who hold the pen. There is no question here of the victim having his own pen; he doesn’t speak. His version of events, his story, will not be considered. Even his own body carries the inscription of the other.

Collective or shared stories, linked by implicit agreement about how the future should be, or about the sort of people who are preferred — heroes, leaders and the morally good on one side, devils, villains, the ignored and the bad on the other — can also be called ideologies, traditions, beliefs, ways of life or forms of power. After they’ve been told for a while, stories can turn into politics, into our institutions, and it is important that they seem to be just the way things are, and the way they have to go on being. It is always illuminating to think of those groups and individuals who are denied the privilege of speaking and of being listened to, whether they be immigrants, asylum seekers, women, the mad, children, the elderly, or workers in the Third World.

It is where the words end, or can’t go, that abuse takes place, whether it’s racial harassment, bullying, neglect, or sexual violence. Silence, then, like darkness, carries something important about who the authorities want others to be, something important about the nature of authority itself, and the way it wants to dehumanise others in the silence.

Of course different systems use different methods to ensure silence. From the cutting off of tongues to the burning of books, or the use of sexual morality as well as covert prohibition — like ignoring people, for instance — all are different ways of ensuring a dictatorship of voices, or of maintaining the single voice. If one person tells another who they really are, while denying them the right to self-description, certain kinds of self-doubt or inner disintegration will follow. People can be formed and also deranged by the stories others tell about them. When Jean Genet was told he was a thief, it was an idea it took him most of his life to escape.

The necessity of a certain interpretation of reality and the imperative that this idea be maintained, couldn’t be clearer than in families. Children are soon made aware of the force of a particular description, and of its authority. While most parents are aware that children develop when they are listened to, they don’t always want to hear them.

On their side, of course, children are fascinated by language, especially when they discover that there are words which make the adults crazy or frightened, which make the adults want to slap them, or shut them up. Children can become compelled by any discourse which provokes terror in adults. Therefore children learn about the language community by discovering what cannot or should not be said. They learn about prohibition and limits, about punishment, about hiding and secrets, and about privacy. When they discover what cannot be said, they have to learn to lie or conceal their words, often from themselves. If they are lucky they become creative and use metaphor. If they are unlucky they go mad.

Depression, for instance, might be called a kind of slowness. It could be seen as a subversive refusal to move at the speed of the others, as the rejection of a banal, alienating consumerist world in favour of an authentic inner puzzlement. But, more commonly, without such an idealisation, it is a slowness which usually takes place in silence, beyond or outside language and symbolisation. The depressed, therefore, do not believe in language as the carrier of meaning. The dead cannot make friends. The depressed person, self-silenced you might say, feels far removed from the source of her words, which may well multiply on their own, and can seem to circulate wildly and without meaning, like birds trapped in an empty room.

The deliberately silent are at least making a point — to themselves — when they suppress or break up their own stories. The involuntarily silent, on the other hand, might feel as though they’ve had their words fruitlessly stolen from them. But this enforced silence on behalf of the powerful is not for nothing. The mythologising of those not heard is the opportunity for difficult and busy work. The silent other has to be called, for instance, a stranger, foreigner, immigrant or asylum seeker. She might be an exile, an interloper, the one who does not fit or belong, the one who is not at home, the one whose words do not count.

This range of denotions at least makes it clear that we can never stop wondering about our own alien, awkward or foreign parts, the elements which cannot speak except through the use of others. Racism might at least teach us that we are always strange — or other, or unwelcome — to ourselves, particularly when it comes to our need. We might even be aware that there is an odd but intriguing silent reversal here. The sort of capitalism we have has always depended on colonialism, and has always required both labour in the Third World and labour from the Third World — the immigrant, in other words. And yet our own need has only ever been represented in terms of their need, as their dependence on us. This is frequently manifested as an image of desperate people climbing over barbed-wire fences, eager to come over here and strip us of all we have.

The subject chosen to be strange has an important place. He or she has to be kept constantly in mind; worked over and worked on. It is a passion, this attitude to the threatening foreigner, the outsider, the one who doesn’t know our language. Someone has to be kept in their place in order that the other can exist in a particular relation to them, so that hatred can flourish. I call this a passion rather than an opinion because these fictions have to be constantly reiterated. They cannot be stated once and for all, since the victim seems always about to escape his description. Unless he’s constantly buried and re-buried beneath a deluge of words, and, of course, the actions which words entail, he might turn into someone like us.

If a plausible version of the twentieth century can be told in terms of silence and its uses, there is reason for optimism too. That period was also about people insisting on their own words and histories, speaking for themselves. The 1970s, as I recall, were about the formally colonised, gays, women, the mad, children, putting their side of the story, telling it in their own words and being heard. As a result, in some places, there were significant social advances. It has been said that when Pinochet was arrested in Britain, things changed in Chile. The dictator wasn’t sacrosanct; people began to speak, his mystique was penetrated at last.

Clearly, though, this description is simplified; there is an absence here. I have implied that on one side the words are there, ready and waiting to go, while on the other they are unwelcome or prohibited, that the only problem with the words is that the authorities don’t want to hear them.

However, at the centre of this is something else: the person who doesn’t want to hear their own words. This is the person who owns them, who has made them inside his own body, but who both does, and does not, have access to them, who is prisoner, prison and the law. Real dictators in the world are a picture, too, of dictators within individuals, of certain kinds of minds.

If we wanted to create an authoritarian system which was complete, in which there were no loose tongues — or, within an individual, no significant inner life — it would have to be one in which dreams were controlled. Even in prison, under the strictest supervision and observation, a human being can at least dream. Here he might, at least, represent, or symbolise that which cannot, or must not, be said. But how would these dreams be understood? Who would be there to receive the scrambled communications which might be his only hope?

In 1906 an English surgeon, talking to Ernest Jones, mentioned, with some astonishment, a strange doctor in Vienna ‘who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him’.

What Freud realised was that because there are forms of speaking which are radically dangerous and unsettling, which change lives and societies, people don’t want to know what those words are. But, he adds, in another sense they do really want to know, because they are made to be aware, by suffering, of a lack; they at least know that they will not be complete without certain forms of self-knowledge, and that this will be liberating, even though the consequences of any liberation could also be catastrophic.

Human beings leak the truth of their desire whether they like it or not: in their dreams, fantasies and drunkenness, in their jokes and mistakes, as well as in delirium, religious ecstasy, in babble and in saying the opposite of what they mean. It takes a rationalist then, to see that rationalism can only fail, that what we need is more, not less, madness in our speaking. Otherwise our bodies take up the cause on our behalf, and bodies can speak in weird ways, through hysteria, for instance in Freud’s day, the modern equivalent of which might be addiction, anorexia, racism or various phobias.

Freud invented a new method of speaking, which involved two people going into a room together. One person would speak and the other would listen, trying to see, in the gaps, resistances and repetitions, what else, in the guise of the obvious, was being said. He would then give these words, translated into other words, back to the speaker.

Great individualists though they might be, both Wilde and Socrates, like Freud, used dialogue as their preferred form. Indeed, in another essay, Wilde replaces the Socratic imperative ‘know yourself ’ with ‘be yourself ’, which might become, in this version of ‘being’ — that of the language community — ‘speak yourself ’. The therapeutic couple is one method of seeing who you are by speaking, and it is an original and great invention. But there would be something odd, to say the least, about a society in which everyone was in therapy. Not that there isn’t something already odd in the idea that only the wealthy can buy mental health.

Fortunately there has always been another place where the speaking of the darkest and most dangerous things has always gone on, which we might call a form of lay therapy. We know that this mode of speaking is useful because of the amount of prohibition it has incurred. It is sometimes called conversation, or the theatre, or poetry, or dance, the novel, or pop.

What is called creativity or culture might remind us of Freud’s method because many artists have talked about the way in which words have the knack of speaking themselves. The writer is only there to catch them, organise them, write them down. Even the prophet Mohammed, around whose name silence is often required, was visited by an angel who gave him the law. Mohammed didn’t make up these rules himself; they were spoken through him but came from elsewhere. Another instance of the death of the author, or the author at one side to himself, as secretary or midwife to himself, you might say, making a divine Law that no human can modify or speak back to.

A culture is a midwife to images and symbolisations, a place where people speak to one another, where words matter and, because they are in the public domain, can be understood or used in a number of ways. It is also where one is forbidden to speak about certain things. It has, therefore, to be a place where the question of speaking and punishment is spoken about. The collective can have a conversation because artists like to loiter near the heat of the law, where the action is. If artists are considered to be on the edge, they are on the edge of the rules, close to punishment, and, like Beckett, not far from silence, where speaking has to be almost impossible if it is to be of value.

What Freud added, and the surrealists knew, along with the other artists who have formed our consciousness, Buñuel, Bergman, Joyce, Picasso, Woolf, Stravinsky, Pinter, was that if the unconscious was to be represented, there had to be new forms for it.

These artists knew that conventional talk and the conventional art which accompanied it, had been turned into chatter. They knew that this worked as a block or filter to forms of knowledge which were essential if we were not to be silent, or if we were not to racially persecute, and kill one another, for reasons we couldn’t understand. Therefore, if modern art and much of what has followed it, has been the attempt to say the unsayable, some of these forms can only be ugly and disturbing. These forms have to be banned, dismissed and discouraged, partly because, like most forms of fantasy, they are subject to shame, itself a form of censorship.

To speak at all is to be aware of censorship. The first thing tyro writers come up against, when they uncap their pen, is a block — in the form of a prohibition. They may well find their mother’s face floating into view, along with several good reasons why not continuing is a good idea. Freud, a prodigious writer himself, put it like this, ‘As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, it will be stopped.’

This, you might say, is the imprimatur of good speaking — that there is a resistance which guarantees the quality of the utterance. There are, then, at least, two voices called up here, the voice which needs to speak and the voice, or several voices, which refuse, which say these words are so exciting and forbidden that they are worthless. This is what makes any attempt at creativity a useful struggle. What makes it worthwhile is the difficulty, the possibility of a block.

Twentieth-century art has been fascinated by dreams and nightmares, by violence and sexuality, so much so that it might be termed an art of terrible fantasy. One begins to see splits, deep conflicts, terrors, hatreds and a lot of death in these art nightmares. These elements can be put together — somehow fused in a work of art — but they are not always reconcilable. However, irreconcilable parts may find a voice in some form of personal expression, which, partly, is why modern art has been so painful and difficult to look at, even now, and why any new art, to be of value, has to shock us. This is because it breaks a silence we didn’t even know we were observing.

At least art brings us beauty as compensation for its message. But it is not, in the end, the favour it might be, because it can be an awful beauty, just as to tell the truth about sexuality might not be to talk about how good or hygienic it is for us, but to speak about how bad or painful it is for us.

Speaking, listening, being known and knowing others. We might say that at least, if everyone doesn’t get much of a turn, we live in a representative democracy. This, at least, separates us from various fundamentalisms. We can vote; we believe we have politicians who can speak for us. Yet one of the reasons we despise politicians is that we suspect they are speaking on their own behalf while purporting to speak on ours. Our words, being handed on by our representatives, are not getting through and they never will. Our speaking makes not a jot of difference. One way of looking at globalisation, for instance, is to say that it is a version of certain Orwellian authorities saying the same thing, over and over, the attempt being to keep new words, or any human doubt, need or creativity, out of the system.

Surely, then, if politicians cannot possibly do the trick, artists might do it. Speaking from themselves and sensibly refusing to do advertising, they do nonetheless speak for some of us, and they take the punishment on our behalf too. In the absence of other convincing figures, like priests or leaders, it is tempting to idealise artists and the culture they make.

Nevertheless, in the end, there is no substitute for the value of one’s own words, of one’s story, and the form one has found for it. Sartre, in his autiobiography Words, says, ‘When I began writing, I began my birth over again.’ There is something about one’s sentences being one’s own, however impoverished and inadequate they might feel, which is significant, which makes them redemptive. If you wanted to tell someone you loved them you usually wouldn’t get someone else to do it for you.

If there are to be a profusion, or multiculturalism, of voices, particularly from the margins of expression, then the possibility of dispute and disagreement is increased. The virtue and risk of real multiculturalism is that we could find that our values are, ultimately, irreconcilable with those of others. From that point of view everything gets worse. There is more internal and social noise and confusion, and more questions about how things get decided, and by whom. If the idea of truth itself is questioned, the nature of the law itself is altered. It can seem conditional, for instance, pragmatic rather than divine, or at least subject to human modification or intervention, if not control.

There are always good reasons not to speak, to bite our own tongues, as many dissidents, artists and children will testify. It will offend, it is dangerous, hurtful, frightening, morally bad, others will suffer or they will not hear.

But the good thing about words, sentences and stories is that their final effect is incalculable. Unlike violence, for instance, which is an unmistakable message, talking is a free form, a kind of experiment. It is not a description of an inner state, but an act, a kind of performance. It is an actor improvising — which is dangerous and unpredictable — rather than one saying lines which have already been scripted. ‘The thought is in the mouth,’ as Tristan Tzara put it. It is not that we require better answers but that we need better questions. All speaking is a demand, at first for a reply, proving the existence of communication, but, ultimately, for an answer, for more words, for love, in other words.

You can never know what your words might turn out to mean for yourself or for someone else; or what the world they make will be like. Anything could happen. The problem with silence is that we know exactly what it will be like.

Telling Stories

From a certain point of view it’s almost irrelevant who the protagonist of a novel is. What one wants as a writer when planning a piece of fiction is to find a position from which one can see. So what a novel does, for the writer, is to bring together the numerous notions that have been cooking in his unconscious for the previous weeks, months or even years. A book then will be a kind of imaginative diary, an account of what the writer wasn’t quite aware of but would come to know as he proceeds.

When I wrote Something to Tell You, I chose to make the protagonist a psychoanalyst because writers and Freudians, though they may have presented themselves as rivals, were, during the twentieth century at least, interested in the same thing.

Modernism in literature and the discoverers of psychoanalysis were looking in similar places. So the three most significant works of the early twentieth century — which are Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, and Joyce’s Ulysses — are all concerned with sleep, dreams, childhood, sexuality and jokes. They are, in other words, fascinated by all of that which cannot be apprehended and examined by consciousness. The mystery of the human subject, and its elusiveness, are common to both psychoanalysis and literature.

You might also say that the difference between psychoanalysis and literature is of course that psychoanalysis is therapy, that there is some notion of human good and the undoing of certain fixed ways of seeing the world behind the careful listening. But at the same time Freud would have considered it to be a very strange thing indeed if most of the population had decided to take to the Freudian couch. The place where another, more extensive form of therapy takes place is in the culture. This is embedded in drama (Freud was of course fascinated by Sophocles, Shakespeare and Ibsen), in prose literature, and of course in conversation.

One of the reasons I may have selected an analyst as a protagonist is because for me analysis is an enviable profession. As I get older writing seems to me to be perhaps too solitary, and I require more the presence of others. So how can I not envy those who have the opportunity to listen to others all day? I think it is that curiosity that writers and analysts have in common. And of course Freud and writing always proceeded side by side. Freud of course did win the Goethe prize for literature.

In the post-war period there has been a separation of psychology from psychiatry. The psychiatrist medicalises and therefore objectifies the human body, which no longer speaks as it did from the Freudian point of view in hysteria and in psychosis, but has become in the psychiatric idiom something like a malfunctioning machine.

To remain interested in psychoanalysis is an attempt to try and remember that primarily we are speaking beings and it’s not only in our words that we speak. There’s the great danger that much of the huge research done in psychoanalysis in the twentieth century may be forgotten or even buried, and the fact that writers today are taking analysts or their patients as subjects for fiction is a tribute to the desire to keep the human mind in the forefront of humanistic investigation, particularly when practices such as CBT, the spread of psychopharmacology and talk of brains and chemistry, may lead us away from the human being.

It is been said that Freud, his followers and their work are old-fashioned and have been superseded by other more successful and effective and more rapid practices. But there is something still startling in Freud’s invention. The idea of two people sitting in a room with one another day after day, week after week, for as long as it takes for some clarity and understanding to emerge is an extraordinary innovation in psychology, because it places human discourse at the centre of understanding the human crisis. It is therefore not a matter of seeing what is ill or even wrong with the subject, but seeing what the person has made of his or her own history, or what they have turned it into as a matter of psychic necessity. It is a deeply humanistic insight that this necessity may be modified by conversation. And it is conversation, in the subject, in the culture and in colloquia like this, which is deeply important.

Introduction to The Collected Stories of John Cheever

If you read John Cheever’s The Journals alongside these stories, getting a sense of the man and what he made at the same time, you will be presented with a dark unease. The Journals themselves are one of the great confessional works, and I would rate them with Rousseau and Pepys as exemplifying the inner combat of a complex man never content with himself or others. As Cheever puts it, ‘I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never seen, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.’

The Cheever of The Journals appears to be a thin-skinned loner who loved both men and women. This confused him and at times made him crazy to be with, since it was conventional, when he was a young man, to make a choice. But for a writer such a broad range of sympathy could only be an advantage.

Cheever wrote about the most important things. You might think, turning to the stories, that you would be hard pressed to learn much about a wider America, of black and Hispanic lives, of post-slavery trauma, inequality, political struggle, or poverty. But you do learn about the shabby hard lives of elevator operators, of janitors and the respectable poor.

In The Journals Cheever called his work ‘confined’ and worried about his limitations. And yet, far from being an elitist WASP with little knowledge of life outside of the evergreen and affluent suburbs, a wasteland of Saturday night parties and post-martini despair, where all the men are commuters and the women feel they have wasted their lives — not unlike the swimming-pool world satirised later by Charles Webb in The Graduate — Cheever’s writing is right at the centre of things. His subjects are not freaks, losers or marginals, but children, work and the central idea of Western literature, what Cheever calls ‘the bitter mystery of marriage’, and the way marriage can make passion seem improbable, if not impossible. And while he is fascinated by what he sometimes describes as ‘carnal anarchy’, he is wise enough to know that it is status, self-respect and work, rather than sexual passion, which drives us: we live money, while dreaming of a complete love.

I guess you might want to characterise these stories as Chekhovian, if only because of Cheever’s facility for capturing significant moments in ordinary lives with humorous compassion and without condescension, and because of Cheever’s ability to write a breath-taking last elegiac paragraph which both encompasses and transcends the story, as though the whole thing at last is thrown in the air in a kind of bacchanalic celebration. You might also want to say that Cheever is less bleak than Carver, and more capacious, ironic and jaunty than Hemingway. But in the end he is always entirely himself, with every sentence weighed and balanced until it says the right thing and often more, rising until it unites the daily train with the wider political railway.

Cheever speaks of a society in which people are ‘united in their tacit claims that there had been no past, no war — that there was no danger or trouble in the world’. How vast and important America was at that time, with his characters sharing a general American post-war hope for prosperity and peace while all the time undermined by the fear that it is all too new, and can be taken back. And with regard to the political scene, it is almost impossible to read these stories without some knowledge of what was to follow, that these shallow, narrow lives would be shattered by ‘the 60s’ — that uprush of excitement, cussedness and rebellion which changed everything. He makes us see it coming: his innerly divided people wish for ease and security, but they want love and unrepression too; they are engaged by desire of a very pressing kind, which breaks up most attempts at contentment and leads often to disaster.

You would, therefore, expect to find only ordinariness and the cleanest dull rectitude in the suburbs; that, presumably, is why people choose to live there. But on closer examination there are extraordinary human passions and weaknesses, an awful restlessness. At its most moderate this is sensible. ‘In order to see anything — a leaf or a blade of grass — you had, in think, to know the keenness of love.’

But when was loving anyone simple? There are, as Bascomb the wise poet in ‘The World of Apples’ confirms, occasions when ‘obscenity — gross obscenity — seemed to be the only factor in life that possessed colour and cheer.’

Further along then, desire becomes a destructive passion, a perversion even, which cannot be satiated. This is shown in ‘The Country Husband’, one of Cheever’s best stories, and one of the finest ever written, where a man who narrowly escapes disaster in a plunging aeroplane returns home to find his wife and children not only indifferent to his narrow escape but perhaps to his entire being. Madly, he seeks solace with his young baby-sitter. As a result he goes to a psychiatrist, which was what many Americans did in the 1950s, where, after memorably saying to the doctor, ‘I’m in love, Dr Herzog,’ he finds more disappointment and a recommendation to take up woodwork. Where then, might a suffering person turn, if not to the bottle?

The complexity of Cheever’s own character — and what today would be described as a ‘struggle with alcohol and sexuality’ — enabled him to see that a good deal of his characters’ misfortunes are due to their weakness and their history rather than to social forces or the malevolence of others. The eternal puzzle of why people do that which is not in their interest, and have a desire to lose what is most precious to them, makes Cheever fascinated by the deepest destructions.

Sometimes this is comic, with a gay man putting his head in an oven three times, only to be rescued by an annoyed homophobic janitor. But ‘Reunion’, a fine story only a couple of pages long, concerns a father who can only repeatedly sabotage a meeting with his estranged son, leaving both lacking the thing they most want, some connection and authentic exchange.

John Cheever was born in 1912 in Massachusetts. After serving in the army, he became a full-time writer in the early 1950s. In 1948 he wrote, ‘We are as poor as we ever have been. I can write a story a week, perhaps more.’ He succeeded, writing novels and stories until his death in 1982. He lived in Rome and wrote many brilliant stories set in Italy. Working in the commercial world, mostly for the New Yorker, Cheever managed to support his family with his writing. As half-artist, half-entertainer, his work is not only in the top range with that of Maupassant and Flannery O’Connor and the other great Americans, it is not conventional but experimental in the most interesting sense. In The Journals there is very little about his actual process of writing. Cheever is reluctant to talk to himself about what he is doing when he isn’t doing it. Nor is he compelled to: this was before authors went on lengthy book tours, gave huge numbers of readings followed by signings, and were interviewed until their own voice horrified them. But he does give us something significant, once more in the Paris Review, ‘Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way.’

The chief problem for the story writer however, particularly when it comes to a collection, is of variety, especially if the reader wants to consume the stories in one go; it could be like gobbling too many oysters, rather than taking them one by one at intervals, the ideal way. But there is immense range and variety here: this is a life’s work, and it was a life of curiosity and renewal.

Oddly, Cheever never created a character as talented, intelligent or cultured as himself; these are all smaller people than he seemed to be, but they are scraps of him. The creation of character, the novelist’s main work, wasn’t his primary concern, but the putting together of it all at once. As he said, ‘I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts. Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap.’

His ability to see and describe is startling: an ‘unclothed woman of exceptional beauty, combing her golden hair’ in the sleeping car of a passing train; a neighbour playing the ‘Moonlight Sonata’: ‘He threw the tempo out of the window and played rubato from beginning to end, like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity — of everything it was Beethoven’s greatness not to know.’

To have written many stories that others can read with pleasure fifty years later, sentences which are intelligent and resonant, poetic and ineffable, is no waste of a life, and to read them, over and over, is to live better, and to allow the respect and admiration Cheever deserves.

Introduction to The Graduate by Charles Webb

If the straightest places are where the weirdest things happen, then the American suburbs in the post-war period have good reason to fascinate American artists. From Cheever, Updike, Roth and Yates, to David Lynch and Mendes’ American Beauty, the American ideal has also embodied the American nightmare. As John Cheever put it, ‘Why, in this most prosperous, equitable and accomplished world, should everyone seem so disappointed?’

There are few characters in post-war fiction as disappointed as Benjamin. A brilliant and successful student with ‘everything’ as they say, ahead of him, one day in the early 1960s he returns home from college to find that nothing has meaning for him; he no longer wants what he is supposed to want. Who, in those changing times, should he become when his only desire is to flounder in his father’s swimming pool on a rubber ring? But Benjamin is not entirely good for nothing. It is his good luck that someone does sense his dissatisfaction, and does want him. This is the wife of his father’s business partner, the fabulous Mrs Robinson, who has been observing him closely.

The son of a doctor, Charles Webb was born in San Francisco in 1939 and was brought up in affluent Pasadena. At the age of twenty-four he wrote and published The Graduate, which received mostly indifferent reviews. It was picked by up Mike Nicholls in 1967 and made into a film which took £100 million at the box-office, though Webb had sold the rights for £20,000. Since then he has published seven more novels, some featuring characters from The Graduate.

There were many young disillusioned heroes being studied in the early 60s, Meursault in Camus’ The Outsider, McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Like them, Benjamin is not a revolutionary; he doesn’t want to make a new, more free or equitable society. That was to come: in the mid-1960s the American scene would brighten wonderfully before it darkened again. No, Benjamin merely wants to inform those around him that he hates the world they have made; it bores him, is stupid, and he cannot find a place in it. Like Melville’s Bartleby, he would just ‘prefer not to’.

This semi-teenage rite of passage baffles Benjamin as much as it baffles his parents. We see and hear this incomprehension in his very language, which is dull and inexpressive, as if he doesn’t really inhabit the words he uses; like everything else around him, language appears to not quite belong to him and there isn’t much he can make of it. Most of his speech consists of questions, few of which are answered, or even answerable.

But the triumph of the book, as of the film, is Mrs Robinson. If one essential quality of a good writer is the ability to make memorable characters which appear to transcend the work they appear in, then Mrs Robinson is one of the great monstrous creations of our time. Well-off, middle-aged, alcoholic, bitter, disillusioned, perverse, self-composed and yet to be rescued by feminism, Mrs Robinson’s position is far worse than Benjamin’s.

Nonetheless, she is the book’s only potent character, a smooth, confident seductress, using Benjamin for sex while he is her more or less passive object. That, presumably, is how she likes them. Mrs Robinson, we know, will never consider her lover to be her equal. For her Benjamin is only of use if he is ‘just a kid’, and she always addresses him — with enraging superiority — in the firm terms of a mother to a child. ‘That’s enough,’ she says to him relevantly and often, suppressing his curiosity with her constant scolding.

The couple may be able to make love, but as Benjamin points out, they cannot speak to one another. Their attempts at conversation are comically awkward and stilted, as if they are virgins at dialogue. Yet there is some progress even here, as he continues to question her. Having inducted him into the secrets of sex, she does eventually let him into a more complex and painful secret, the truth about marriage as habit, safety, and passionless comfort. She neither hates nor loves her husband, and that seems to be all there is to it. Once more numbness is preferable to unhappiness, frustration or worse, the madness of fury. This sentimental education by an older, experienced woman is, in the end, a pedagogy of disillusionment and failure.

When Benjamin decides he wants to break away from Mrs Robinson to begin the relationship with her daughter Elaine which the two families want so much — it is almost an arranged marriage — things turn nasty. The mother may not have much use for Benjamin herself, but she cannot let her daughter have him. Cleverly, she never lets him know why, thus banishing Benjamin into a whirlpool of self-doubt and bewilderment. Mrs Robinson would be happy to destroy Benjamin, and soon becomes a vengeful maternal succubus, the cold strict prohibitive mother who punishes for no reason apart from her own pleasure. Later she accuses Benjamin of raping her when it was, in a sense, the other way round. If the American male is on the road, it may be the mother he is escaping.

Benjamin’s father finally intervenes, as he has to, and his solution is to threaten to pass Benjamin on to someone else: a psychiatrist. In the absence of other authorities, it is the white-coated contemporary expert, the psychiatrist, who is appealed to. Already invested with considerable power, the mind doctor might be ‘the one who knows’. Certainly the father doesn’t know what to do; the mother doesn’t; Mrs Robinson doesn’t, and the boy admits that he is lost.

A visit to the psychiatric is the fate of other young dissidents of that period, of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, who tells his story to a therapist, likewise poor Portnoy with Dr Spielvogel, who famously says at the end of the book, ‘Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?’ Presumably the doctor will be able to straighten these boys out, rendering them normal by removing unnecessary eccentricities and individuality, an ideal of psychiatry which terrified Freud and is exemplified by A Clockwork Orange.

In the end Benjamin does act, doing both a conventional and rebellious thing by running away with Elaine, the one person forbidden him by Mrs Robinson. He has decided to become a teacher, thus fulfilling his family’s wishes, though he takes the long way round, making into a choice that which was originally the will of others.

Charles Webb’s The Graduate has long been eclipsed by the film, but in its deadpan quiet stylishness it is easily its equal, being that most rare and valuable thing, a serious comic novel which both exemplifies its time and continues to speak to us.