Intimacy

by Hanif Kureishi

  I was keen on history too: E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Hill. I had an uncle who, when middle-aged, made himself ‘master’ Roman history, and spent years memorizing ‘the classics’. Yet, at the end of his life, as well as being unable to remember a tenth of it, he couldn’t even recall why he’d sought such learning or who it was for.

  You might say that without a general culture nothing can be understood. But the general culture isn’t getting me anywhere tonight. I can’t keep my loneliness and longing away.

  I must do something. But what?

  And, more importantly, why?

  At university I shared a flat with a friend, a handsome, intelligent man, who would sit at a table for days with only a pack of cigarettes as distraction. People might come in and out of the flat; they might be troubled or unhappy, or might want excitement, sex. Yet still he would sit there. I don’t know if he was depressed, indifferent or stoical. But I envied him. Pursuing nothing, he waited. He and I discussed the possibility of living on cereal, eating it twice a day, with an orange for lunch. We discovered that one could survive on this regime for weeks without injury to one’s health, if not to one’s outlook. I expect to hear one day that he has killed himself.

  But to be able to bear one’s own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding – that is an enviable state of mind.

  What puzzles me more than anything? The fact that I have struggled with the same questions and obsessions, and with the same dull and useless responses, for so long, for the past ten years, without experiencing any increase in knowledge, or any release from the need to know, like a rat on a wheel. How can I move beyond this? I am moving out. A breakdown is a breakthrough is a breakout. That is something.

  *

  One makes mistakes, gets led astray, digresses. If one could see one’s crooked progress as a kind of experiment, without wishing for an impossible security – nothing interesting happens without daring – some kind of stillness might be attained.

  You can, of course, experiment with your own life. Maybe you shouldn’t do it with other people’s.

  I like walking to school at lunch-time with my long-haired sons, pulling them along and joking with them. But as soon as we enter the Victorian playground, the smell and the teacher’s dogged look – her voice carries to the street – remind me of futility. If the teacher spoke to me as she does to my elder boy, I would smack her face. A braver man would take the boys home. But I drop them off and slip round to a quiet pub for a pint of Guinness, a read of the paper and a cigarette, glad it’s them and not me.

  I paid no attention to my schoolteachers. They had bored and scared me, unless their legs provided some compensation. But my first weeks at university shocked me into attention. I had to get home to read Teach Yourself books, and The Children’s Guide to … When there was no compulsion and my mind began to run, I got through Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Freud, Sartre.

  Philosophy was formal, abstract, cool. I chose it because I loved literature, and didn’t want stories that had been poisoned by theorizing. For me that was like food that had been chewed by other people. I am ready to study seriously again – music, poetry, history. At this age, coming to my senses as a human being at last, I am not done with learning. I know I am no longer ashamed of my ignorance, nor afraid of liking things.

  At university we went to the theatre several times a week, since my group of friends worked as dressers and ushers at the Royal Court, at the newly opened National, and at the RSC in the Aldwych. At the interval I would pick up girls in the audience. During the more boring plays they would slip out and talk to me. I have never found that the man being in a subordinate position has put women off. In fact, for some people, the more subordinate you are, the more ‘genuine’ they imagine you to be. People are afraid of too much power in others. But when I had these women I never quite knew what to do with them.

  *

  I am still standing upright, but something is moving and I would rather it didn’t. Yes, it is me. I seem to be swaying.

  I sit still a few minutes, head in hands, taking deep breaths, hoping for some deep calm. During one of our turbulent periods, Susan and I attended yoga classes in a hall at the end of the street. There were, in this class, many attractive women, most in bright leotards and all taking up adventurous positions reflected in the polished mirrors. In such circumstances I found infinite desirelessness a strain to bring on. As our souls lifted into nirvana on a collective ‘oommm’ my penis would press against my shorts as if to say, ‘Don’t forget that always I am here too!’ Sexual release is the most mysticism most people can manage.

  Fuck it, I will leave everything here. My sons, wandering in this forsaken room, will discover, perhaps by mistake, the treasures they need.

  After school or college, in my bedroom, I would pile up Father’s classical records on the spindle of my record player, and the symphonies would clatter down, one by one, until supper. It was rebellious in those days to like music that didn’t sound better the louder it was played.

  Then, restless at my desk, with my father’s bookshelves around me, I would reach up and pull down a few volumes. Father, like the other neighbourhood men, spent most of his days’ energy in unsatisfying work. Time was precious and he had me fear its waste. But browsing and ruminating at my desk, I figured that doing nothing was often the best way of doing something.

  I will regret forfeiting this room. For though I have never been taught the art of solitude, but had to learn it, it has become as necessary to me as the Beatles, kisses on the back of my neck and kindness. Here I can follow the momentum of my thoughts as I read, write, sing, dance, think of the past and waste time. Here I have examined dimly felt intuitions, and captured unclear but pressing ideas. I am speaking of the pleasures of not speaking, doing or wanting, but of losing oneself.

  But it was in this room, late at night, when she and the children were asleep and I sat here listening to the street, that I saw how I yearned for contact and nourishment. I never found a way to be pleasurably idle with Susan. She has a busy mind. One might want to admire anyone who lives with vigour and spirit. But there is desperation in her activity, as if her work is holding her together. In some ways, it is less of everything that I want.

  I know how necessary fathers are for boys. I would hang on to Dad’s hand as he toured the bookshops, climbing ladders and standing on steps to pull down rotting tomes. ‘Let’s go, let’s go …’ I’d say.

  How utterly the past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once. The writers Dad preferred are still my favourites, mostly nineteenth-century Europeans, the Russians in particular. The characters, Goriot, Vronsky, Madame Ranevskaya, Nana, Julien Sorel, feel part of me. It is Father’s copies I will give to the boys. Father took me to see war films and cricket. Whenever I appeared in his room his face would brighten. He loved kissing me. We kept one another company for years. He, more than anyone, was the person I wanted to marry. I wanted to walk, talk, laugh and dress like him. My sons are the same with me, repeating my phrases in their tiny voices, staring admiringly at me and fighting to sit beside me. But I am leaving them. What would Father think of that?

  What embarrassed Nina about me embarrassed me about him. I don’t yet read the newspapers wearing gloves, as Father did to prevent his fingers getting soiled. But I know many local shopkeepers, and I do bang on their windows as I pass, and will stop and ask them personal questions about the minutiae of their lives. Father would invite in any passing religious freak with a shopping bag full of pamphlets and engage in a ferocious debate.

  But I lack his kindness. Of all the virtues it is the sweetest, particularly since it isn’t considered a moral attribute, but as a gift. Nina always said that I am kind; she said I was the perfect man for her, and that I had everything she could want. Would she still say that?

  My younger son, his nose in my wrist as we walked in the street last week, said,
‘Daddy, you smell of you.’

  Cheerio, I must be going.

  Father, six years dead, would have been horrified by my skulking off. Such an abandonment would have seemed undignified at the very least. Susan used to go to him when we were fighting and he would take her side, phoning me and saying, ‘Don’t be cruel, boy.’ He said she was ‘all in one’. She had everything I could want. Dad left his own mother at twenty-one and never saw her again. He didn’t approve of leaving, and he liked to be chivalrous. He didn’t see that the women could take care of themselves. The man had the power and had to be protective.

  Father believed, too, in loyalty. For him to be accused of disloyalty would have been like being called a thief. But what would he have been loyal to? After all, when required, one can always find something to attach one’s stubborn faith to. Probably he would have been loyal to the idea of loyalty itself, for fear that without it the world would have been robbed of compassion, and oneself exposed.

  Father was a civil servant who later worked as a clerk at Scotland Yard, for the police. In the mornings, and at weekends, he wrote novels. He must have completed five or six. A couple of them were admired by publishers, but none of them got into print. They weren’t very bad and they weren’t very good. He never gave up; it was all he ever wanted to do. The book on his bedside table had, on the cover, a picture of a middle-aged writer sitting on a pile of books, a portable typewriter on his knee. It was Call It Experience by Erskine Caldwell. Under the author’s name it said, ‘Reveals the secrets of a great writer’s private life and literary success.’ The writer did look experienced; he had been around, but he was ready to go on. He was tough. That’s what a writer was.

  Failure strengthened Father’s resolve. He was both brave and foolish, I’d say. He wanted me to be a doctor, and I did consider it, but probably only because I was an admirer of Chekhov and Father liked Somerset Maugham. In the end Dad told me it was hopeless to take up something that wasn’t going to provide me with pleasure for the rest of my life. He was wise in that way. I was adept and successful a couple of years after I left university. I could do it; I just could. Whether it was a knack or trick or talent, I didn’t know. It puzzled both of us. Art is easy for those who can do it, and impossible for those who can’t.

  What did Father’s life show me? That life is a struggle, and that struggle gets you nowhere and is neither recognized nor rewarded. There is little pleasure in marriage; it involves considerable endurance, like doing a job one hates. You can’t leave and you can’t enjoy it. Both he and Mother were frustrated, neither being able to find a way to get what they wanted, whatever that was. Nevertheless they were loyal and faithful to one another. Disloyal and unfaithful to themselves. Or do I misunderstand?

  I run my hand down the CDs piled on every available surface. Classical, of all periods, with dark Beethoven my God; jazz, mostly of the fifties; blues, rock-‘n’-roll and pop, with the emphasis on the mid-sixties and early seventies. A lot of punk. It was the hatred, I think, that appealed. It is great music but you wouldn’t want to listen to it.

  Victor doesn’t have much music over there, and few books. He only had the Bible in his house, and no one read it, not even the Song of Solomon. Now I accompany him to record shops and he flips through the CDs. ‘Who’s this? What’s this?’ he goes.

  He has a lovely helplessness, and has caught my enthusiasm. I took him to see my friend who has a shop. He bought a sky-blue suit which certainly shocks but does not outrage, except in certain low dives. He has tinted his hair. He might resemble a badger, and I did balk at the earring. But I keep my mirth down, and would say: any advance in wisdom requires a good dose of shamelessness.

  Separation wouldn’t have occurred to a lower-middle-class couple in the fifties. My parents remained in the same house all their lives. Mother was only partially there. Most of the day she sat, inert and obese, in her chair. She hardly spoke – except to dispute; she never touched anyone, and often wept, hating herself and all of us: a lump of living death. She wouldn’t wash; there were cobwebs in all the rooms; the plates and cutlery were greasy. We hardly changed our clothes. All effort was a trouble and she lived on the edge of panic, as if everything was about to break down. Occasionally there were reminders of life, a smile or joke, even a conversation. But these were rare, and she was gone. For a long time I had the strange feeling that she reminded me of someone I used to know.

  She was aware of it, in some way.

  ‘Selfish,’ she called herself, because her mind hurt so much she could only think of herself. She didn’t know how to enjoy other people, the world, or her own body. I was afraid to approach her, since with such a mother you never knew whether she would send you away or put out her arms for a kiss. My existence was a disturbance. Being a burden, or interruption, I couldn’t ask her for anything. But if she didn’t like me, I did cause her to worry. And I worried about her worrying. Anxiety handcuffed us to one another. At least we had something in common.

  When I was nominated for the Oscar and I rang to tell her, she said, ‘Will you have to go all that way to America? It’s a long way.’

  ‘Thanks for the concern,’ I said.

  When we were older money was short. Father refused to look for another job and he wouldn’t move to a different part of the country. Nothing was allowed to happen until he ‘made it’. Mother was forced to find employment. She was a school dinner lady; she worked in factories and offices; she worked in a shop. I think the compulsion and other people were better for her than sitting at home.

  The day I started to live with my sad girlfriend in London, I went home to pick up my things. I imagined it would be the first and last time I would leave home. I didn’t know I’d be making a habit of it. My parents sat in separate armchairs, watching me carry out my records. What was there left for them to do? Hadn’t I rendered them irrelevant?

  But when my brother and I left, our parents started going to art galleries, to the cinema, for walks and on long holidays. They took a new interest in one another, and couldn’t get enough of life. Victor says that once the lights on a love have dimmed, you can never illuminate them again, any more than you can reheat a soufflé. But my parents went through the darkness and discovered a new intimacy.

  Can’t you, then, apply yourself? Susan often accuses me of lack of application. It was what my teachers said, that I didn’t concentrate. But I was concentrating. I believe the mind is always concentrated – on something that interests it. Skirts and jokes and cricket and pop, in my case. Despite ourselves, we know what we like, and our errors and distracted excursions are illuminations. Perhaps only the unsought is worthwhile – like Nina’s face and the caresses of her long fingers.

  Not loving Susan I insist on seeing as a weakness, as my failure and my responsibility. But what is the point of leaving if this failure reproduces itself with every woman? Suppose it is like an illness that you give to everyone you meet? Wouldn’t I have to keep a bag permanently packed by any door I had taken refuge behind?

  I don’t want to think of that.

  My bag sits on the floor.

  I will be needing pens and paper on my journey. I won’t want to forfeit any important emotion. I will pursue my feelings like a detective, looking for clues to the crime, writing as I read myself within. I want an absolute honesty that doesn’t merely involve saying how awful one is. How do I like to write? With a soft pencil and a hard dick – not the other way round.

  I like paper of all kinds: creamy, white, yellow; thick, thin, lined, plain. In my cupboard I have at least fifty notebooks, each of which, at the time of purchase, filled me with the excitement of what might be said, of new thoughts discovered. Each has a sheet of white blotting paper between the leaves, and all are blank apart from the first page, on which I have usually written something like, ‘In this notebook I will write whatever comes into my mind, and after a time I will see a picture of myself emerge, made up of significant fragments …’ And then – nothing. I freeze, as on
e does when things are getting illegitimately interesting.

  I have tried devoting each notebook to a different subject: books I’m reading, thoughts on politics, problems I have with Mother, Susan, present lovers, etc. But as I begin, I become busy washing my weeping fountain pens, refilling them, testing the nibs and wondering why the flow isn’t regular. There are few more exquisite instruments than a fountain pen as it glides over good paper, like a finger over young skin.

  But somehow I am made for ferocious, uncontrolled scribbling on scrap paper with old Biros and stubby soft pencils.

  For our homework, as kids, we would sometimes be asked to write, ‘What I did today.’ Now I feel like compiling a list: the things I didn’t do today. The things I haven’t done in life.

  I think of the people I know (later I might write their names in a suitable notebook) and wonder which of them knows how to live well. If living is an art it is a strange one, an art of everything, and particularly of spirited pleasure. Its developed form would involve a number of qualities sewn together: intelligence, charm, good fortune, unforced virtue, along with wisdom, taste, knowledge, understanding, and the recognition of anguish and conflict as part of life. Wealth wouldn’t be essential, but the intelligence to accumulate it where necessary might be. The people I can think of who live with talent are the ones who have free lives, conceiving of great schemes and seeing them fulfilled. They are, too, the best company.

  Victor and I were in our favourite bar the other day, watching football on television. He said, ‘When I think of how my wife and I stayed together all those barren and arduous nights and years, I cannot understand it at all. Perhaps it was a kind of mad idealism. I had made a promise that I had to fulfil at all costs. But why? The world couldn’t possibly recover from the end of my marriage. My faith in everything would be shattered. I believed in it without knowing how much I believed in it. It was blind, foolish obedience and submission. Probably it was the only kind of religious faith I’ve had. I used to think I had some radicalism in me, but I couldn’t smash the thing that bound me the most. Smash it? I couldn’t even see it!’