Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

The Dead

  They cry to us, never finding the words

  To tell us what we already know,

  That our own lost voices will one day

  Be as theirs, the mouths of our souls

  Gaping like graves, gaping for reunion

  With those we have preceded.

  On the Bridge

  Three girls on a bridge

  (A subject for a painting—Gauguin or Munch).

  Three girls on the old, quiet, stone bridge

  At the edge of the little town

  Where he, an English academic driving south

  (Some summer thing in Nîmes),

  Decided to put up for the night

  And after a meal and a pichet of rouge

  To take a stroll in the late, soft light.

  Swallows skimmed the little river,

  Then on the bridge (the obvious place,

  After crossing, to turn back),

  Those three girls in a huddle at the centre,

  Leaning on the parapet.

  That moment of polite hiatus when

  Two worlds meet and agree upon

  The brief suspension of each.

  A bridge. ‘Bonsoir.’ ‘Bonsoir monsieur!’

  He felt an intruder, of course.

  Should he have crossed at all?

  Their bridge, not his. But then

  He was hardly Actaeon

  Crashing on the forest pool.

  And which, in any case, was Diana,

  Which the attendant nymphs?

  The fact is they were, all three, beauties—

  And perhaps, somehow, he should have said.

  Not intrusion but privilege.

  Not Actaeon but Paris, come to judge.

  (What was in that pichet of red?)

  ‘Bonsoir monsieur!’

  He crossed, walked on,

  Turning along the farther bank,

  Daring only once to twist his head

  And see their faces still perched there,

  Looking back at him, neither playful nor stern,

  Just something in between.

  Schoolgirls-no-more, he guessed:

  The summer after the very last term,

  And now they hung somewhere

  Between girlhood and what comes next,

  Looking for their futures perhaps

  In the slow slide of the river.

  The soft splash of a fish.

  Their soft, indecipherable voices

  Reached him over the water, and yes

  (Somehow he knew it for them):

  All their lives, they’d never forget.

  These in-between places

  Where all seems yet to come,

  Which yet turn out to be the thing itself.

  Do you remember, when we met?

  Those evenings, that summer,

  On the bridge.

  Allotments

  I used to tease out the word

  Before I knew what it meant.

  How could it be a lot when it looked so little?

  A strip of soil for beans or cabbages,

  A cold frame, a compost heap.

  Hardly the Earth.

  But look at the love that has gone into each.

  The careful rows of canes,

  The sheds magicked up from old offcuts,

  Each one architecturally unique.

  Look at them here on Sunday afternoons

  Lost in their little worlds.

  I never knew what a lot meant, or a little.

  Then I was let in on the meaning.

  ‘Allotment’: it’s what you get,

  It’s what you’re given to get on with.

  Didn’t you understand?

  Your little patch, your little place,

  Among all the others.

  Perspective

  The desire to be in and out of your skin,

  That soft fatal voice, yours and not yours,

  That says even as you walk down the street:

  ‘He walked down the street.’

  This damp paving, these walls,

  These rooftops, drying against a brightening sky,

  Aren’t of now, and only ever will be

  Of some time that was.

  Understand your position.

  Understand the anguish of the painter

  Who long ago in some Flemish town

  Looked from his window and painted what he saw

  So it would remain, in its frame,

  Like another window on another world.

  Relapse

  These things that were still there,

  Like scorched flowers under winterloads of ice,

  These things that, surely, you could never relive.

  But most of his life had fallen away

  Like meaningless waste,

  Memory caving in, an avalanche of the brain,

  And he was back there again

  Among that mountainous furniture,

  Among those towering creatures,

  Like some small, pecking bird

  Hopping among buffalo, elephants.

  Adults. What great, alien beasts they were.

  And he’d been one once!

  Their huge, crashing weight

  And their thick, leathery stink of time.

  Another

  To see ourselves as others see us:

  That’s one thing.

  But to see others when they don’t see us,

  When they aren’t just part of our own grey penumbra,

  In their own sweet, bright, unshadowed space:

  That’s another.

  This Is the Life

  ‘This is the life, eh?’ some cheery oaf said,

  In cravat and blazer and seaside flannels.

  And of course we thought he was a fool.

  But is this the life then, this life we’ve settled for?

  No (we half know it), this isn’t the life either.

  And there he stands, that oaf, on the jetty,

  Getting smaller.

  He hasn’t realized yet: we’re leaving, not arriving.

  There he stands, still grinning and waving

  And rubbing his hands in readiness,

  Trousers flapping in the wind.

  Bookmark.

  SANTA AGAIN

  CHRISTMAS WITH MR BROWN, 1989–99

  We don’t see each other now, but for ten years or so we were in pretty close contact, at a time when it was very difficult to have any contact with him at all. It’s one of the ironies of my memories of Salman Rushdie that I knew him most when the world was least able to know him. Of course, that statement can be turned on its head. The world knew him very well. Though he was in deepest hiding, he couldn’t have been more conspicuously, glaringly in the news, and though he’d become invisible he was far from silent or uncommunicative. By temperament, Salman is a man who wants the world to know him. Setting aside the absolute seriousness of his predicament, there was a bleak joke in such a person being driven into seclusion. Still, during that dreadful time, I don’t think the world knew Salman himself; it knew the figure, not the man. For his enemies, clamouring for his murder, it was important to do just that—to turn him into a monstrous figure beyond human delineation. But even those of his defenders and supporters who saw only the projection of events through the media often lost sight of the human scale.

  It’s hard not to get solemn in recalling that time, and solemnity is the last feature of his writing. But his situation then gave no quarter to the novel’s customary playfulness with human gravity. It demanded deadly earnestness. It demanded, under pain of death, that a novelist shouldn’t be a novelist. Salman, to his credit, was having none of it and, to his credit, he never turned solemn himself.

  I hardly knew him before the fatwa was issued. I’d met him a few times, once at a Booker Prize dinner, not an ideal occasion for meeting anyone. I know I’m far from alone in having befriended him subsequently and having found that the friendship blossomed; and I know I’m n
ot alone in having frequently made him, during the years in hiding, a guest in my house, along with his retinue of protection officers and their (usually) concealed weaponry. But quite early during that bizarre time a tradition grew up that he and his wife would spend Christmas Day with me and my wife, sometimes with other guests, either at my place or at a place that old habit, even now, makes me not want to specify. There was a general cloak-and-dagger avoidance of careless talk. I still think of Salman as ‘Anton’. Caz Phillips and I sometimes arranged to meet him covertly, and it was Caz’s idea that for this purpose, though for reasons not entirely to do with security, the three of us should be known as Mr Black, Mr White and Mr Brown. So Salman also became Mr Brown.

  I shan’t forget those Christmases with Special Branch upstairs (turkey and pudding for them too). It sounds odd, but they rather restored Christmas for me. I mean the feeling for Christmas that really goes with childhood and that we grow out of, even though we continue to celebrate the day: a feeling for Christmas that in my case has nothing to do with religion—and perhaps that was just as well. I’d frankly hate to think that on those days when I most intimately enjoyed being with him some religious point was being made. They were very merry occasions. The merrymaking may have had a touch of special, conscious defiance (how could it not, with armed police officers sitting in?), but it usually passed into a happy forgetfulness of the strange conditions under which it was occurring. And, for me at least, beneath it all, there’d be this feeling of Christmas that I’d last had decades before—a pagan feeling, really, of hearthside warmth and magic, of a glow in the dark days. Well, they were dark enough for him.

  He was good, affectionate company. He may have been dominant company—he may always want to be dominant company—but in those days you could certainly forgive him that. You would have forgiven him, after all, if he’d arrived an exhausted, drained and haunted figure, but he was the life and soul. And that phrase, ‘life and soul’, wasn’t just in those days a token epithet. Not the least of his achievements during that time was the preservation of his sense of humour. He must have had some blackest of black private moments, but he scarcely spoke of them. It was at one of those Christmases, I think, that he gave me his brief word—his rubric—on fear. He said that the thing was that you had to quell it, crush it at once, as soon as it arose, give it no further space, otherwise you were lost. Easily said. I’ve never experienced fear of the kind he must have felt, but it’s the best and most convincing advice I’ve had on the subject.

  Another irony, or simple fact, persists from those times. A great deal has been written or said about Salman by those who never knew him or who knew him only slightly. Empty or scabrous comment is one of the risks of seeking the limelight (fatwas apart). But the truth was that the smaller the audience, or the company, the better he was to know and the more good-heartedly, funnily and intelligently human he became. Some of the best conversations I’ve had about writing—writing from the inside, its personal demands and challenges—have been brief one-to-one exchanges with Salman.

  Here was a man who would gladly, in ordinary circumstances, have faced the Albert Hall, for whom the term stage fright meant nothing, but now he had a price on his head and other things to fear. And here he was sitting at a small if groaning table in an entirely domestic setting (some cops with guns upstairs), and he and all of us were having a high old time. Salman, too, at Christmas, was thoroughly capable of feeling like and being a kid again.

  As a writer, he’s always been an overt enjoyer, a master of revels, only following a tradition that goes back to the novel’s origins in Rabelais and Cervantes, of the novelist as a lord of misrule. But that rich literary pedigree could barely be mentioned at that time with impunity. He was a maker of fun, and righteousness lacks a comic register. The defence, the plea of fun, is to righteousness like a self-damnation.

  Fun was certainly had at those Christmases. Once you’ve played charades with the author of The Satanic Verses or heard his imitation (not quite as good, in my opinion, as Kazuo Ishiguro’s) of Bob Dylan, your view of things is fundamentally improved. Many writers—maybe most writers—are an assemblage of opposing forces. Outspoken or extravagant on the page, they may be reticent and shy in private. Or, spare and chaste when they write, they will let their hair down in company. Salman Rushdie, who contains his own incongruities, is nonetheless the most consistent writer-personality I’ve known. Never anything but a force, never anything but an intense bundle of energy and combustion, sometimes crackling, sometimes flaring, sometimes just emitting warmth.

  I was a supporter anyway. The monstrosity of his plight was infinitely worse than any of the monstrosities of character alleged by his enemies and sometimes even by an otherwise rallying press. I went to meetings of a quickly formed group of defenders, though if the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini had known that the International Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie consisted of a few people sitting round a table in a cramped office near London Bridge their gleeful scorn might have known no bounds.

  I supported him, but it would be equally true to say he supported me. There was more than usual human sustenance, as there was more than usual festivity and entertainment, round those Christmas tables. We would wait for his clandestine and carefully monitored arrival, conscious of the theoretical gist of the situation: that we were giving shelter to a fugitive. But an opposite interpretation was at work. It was an absurd notion and in the light of what was going on and with its cartoonish element, it was only foisting on him another monstrosity he could do without—but he was just a bit like Father Christmas. You could imagine him donning the red costume, the cotton-wool beard, and doing it rather well. And he’d already, out of necessity, had to don an actual, partial disguise.

  Once upon a time, I’d believed in (or at least happily absorbed the make-believe of) Father Christmas, as superstitious in that respect as any other five- or six-year-old. Scepticism set in for me around the time I received my polio jab, but in any case there had never been in my family one of those jovial, extrovert adults who was actually prepared to play the part. A good thing too, I think. Some parts play best in the mind. And anyway you grow up, you grow out of all that stuff.

  Yet we would wait on Christmas morning for Salman Rushdie to appear, for the man under threat of death and under special police guard, and what I couldn’t help feeling, if I never quite dared tell him at the time, was: it’s Christmas morning and we’re waiting for Father Christmas to arrive.

  READING ALOUD

  CHELTENHAM AND EVERYWHERE, 1991

  Before I visited the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1991, the Daily Telegraph asked me to write the short piece that follows, expressing my thoughts on reading aloud.

  When I first began writing, writers very rarely read in public. Generally speaking, they were neither seen nor heard. The now-proliferating business of putting writers before audiences has various virtues and vices, though the common claim is that it allows writers and readers to meet. True up to a point, but incomparably the best time for this is when a reader quietly sits down to read a book. Most of the time, I hope, I meet my readers without ever being aware of it. I believe in this unseen contact.

  My readers are certainly the most important people in the world to me. I need them and I trust them. Yet, strangely, while I’m writing I hardly think of them at all, it seems a folly and a presumption even to imagine who they are. And of course the one thing no writer will ever know is exactly what it’s like to read their own book. Readers are essentially invisible too—or, rather, the actual experience of reading, what goes on in an individual reader’s head, is for no one to be privy to, unless invited, but that reader. Very few book readers (I imagine) ever try reading aloud, and only a small portion, perhaps, of their silent reading is done in public. I’ve only occasionally observed someone reading one of my books, and then I’ve felt vaguely like an intruder. Conversely, when I’ve chanced upon someone reading a book by a writer-friend of mine, I’ve so
metimes had the bizarre urge to phone them up and say, ‘I’ve seen it, it actually happens.’

  When I finish a book I seldom revisit it, except for practical purposes. By this time I’ll probably have read it, in effect, a hundred times or more (though not in ways, I hope, that a general reader would read it) and the idea of my sitting down comfortably to read one of my own novels would just be ridiculous. It’s the one experience a writer can’t have. But public readings can give you a meaningful pretext for slyly revisiting your own book, or parts of it; and with the aid of a favourable audience of readers, or potential readers, and if the atmosphere is right (it so often isn’t), you can even trick yourself into the feeling of being a reader of your work in both senses, of having sneaked up on it like a third party, as if you’d never actually written it yourself.

  Reading Aloud

  The programme for this year’s Cheltenham Festival of Literature states that ‘Graham Swift much enjoys reading aloud.’ No doubt some bluster of mine on the phone to Cheltenham led to this blithe hyperbole, but I hasten to correct any impression that I am a Liberace of the lectern.

  I can certainly claim experience as a public reader. This doesn’t mean I have ever got used to it—I seldom give a nerveless reading—but I’ve done it enough times and under diverse conditions. I’ve read in a giant plastic tent in Adelaide, Australia, when the temperature outside was 43°C. I’ve read in another tent in Edinburgh when a howling gale threatened to tear the whole, flapping edifice from its moorings, leaving audience and author in astonished in flagrante. I’ve read in bookshops, libraries, theatres, pubs, town halls, colleges and disused churches. From Aberdeen to Adelaide, from Winnipeg to Wagga Wagga.

  The author as one-man circus? Hardly. Ninety per cent of my professional time is spent at a desk, but over the years the ‘author reading’ has become the expected thing. It’s not a perfect way of bringing writers and public together, but not a bad one. Authors are not necessarily the best readers of their own work, nor does all writing lend itself to reading aloud. Novelists are disadvantaged since they have to find passages of appropriate length which will work well out of context—not always easy. But in any case, I don’t write to be read aloud. I write for the inner ear of a silent reader. When I give readings I nearly always have to adapt the text.