As she’s experimenting with art, Smith also experiments with different selves. And yet, this is not at all like the myth of Sylvia Plath painfully shedding her false selves until she reached an impasse that could only end in suicide. Smith (who is, anyway, making her own myth) is trying on different selves, putting them on and taking them off, seeing how they suit her. It is life as costume drama. She says Mapplethorpe ‘approached dressing like living art’. And she is forever donning a striped boatneck shirt and red throat scarf in the manner of Yves Montand in Wages of Fear, or channelling Audrey Hepburn’s Funny Face beatnik bookseller. When someone says she looks like a folk singer, she decides to change her image. She studies pictures of Keith Richards and cuts her hair to look like his. It’s transformational; ‘I miraculously turned androgynous overnight’. For a fancy dress ball she wears an all-black outfit of pegged trousers, silk shirt, tie and jacket, with pristine white Keds. She leans against a wall like Buster Keaton and when people ask, she says she’s come as a ‘tennis player in mourning’.
This justifies my many hours poring over Vogue – style is serious! – but, when she’s dressing as Montand or Hepburn or Richards or Keaton, Smith is also saying something profound about hero(ine) worship. When she dresses like Keaton and gives her look a funny name, and looks beautiful and singular as she’s doing it, she isn’t mindlessly stealing, she’s honouring her heroes and heroines, remixing them, pastiching them and making something new.
Maybe we all find our style through homage – just as I learned to put on make-up from watching my mother at her dressing room table all those years ago. And some of my best-loved heroines are mash-ups. The Fossil girls in Ballet Shoes are rewrites of The Whicharts. Emily Byrd Starr is Anne Shirley rebooted. Mary Yellan is Cathy Earnshaw, but with better choices. And maybe this means I don’t have to feel so guilty about the heroines I’ve misread. Lucy Honeychurch has been on my conscience. But Smith makes me think that perhaps I didn’t misread so much as exuberantly appropriate her. And maybe it’s by appropriating our heroines that we become heroines ourselves. That’s how it happens for Smith. After many turbulent times – she and Mapplethorpe weather illness, disappointment, poverty and the shift in their relationship as he discovers he is gay – she finds out she wants to be a rock and roll poet, and he takes the picture of her for Horses, and ever since she’s been one of the heroines other women want to dress like and learn from.
After Just Kids I feel hugely relieved. I don’t need to give up my heroines after all. I won’t go cold turkey, read only books about men. I won’t edit my bookshelf. Even What Katy Did is still up there. After all, I loved Katy once.
Inspired by Smith’s commitment to hero worship, I decide to visit the grave of Aphra Behn. Smith is always visiting graves in Just Kids. She crosses the Atlantic to visit Rimbaud’s grave. I thought the least I could do was go four stops on the tube to Westminster Abbey. Virginia Woolf, no less, said all women writers should let flowers fall on Behn’s grave. And I am helping to found a women’s theatre company which we’ve called Agent 160 – Behn’s code name when she was moonlighting as a spy. She was the pathbreaker: the barber’s daughter from Kent who was supposed to enter a convent, but instead became a spy, a dedicated libertine, a pioneer playwright and the woman who introduced milk punch to England. The Abbey staff have no idea where, or even who, she is. But I find her. Not among the dead white male poets but in the cloister, by herself. As I put down the flowers, I remember how in Behn’s preface to her 1686 play, The Lucky Chance, she rants at the critics who said her work was unwomanly: ‘I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero,’ she says. She wasn’t born a hero, or a heroine. But she asserts her right to become one.
At home, I make Behn’s milk punch. In green tea I steep cinnamon, cloves, coriander, lemon juice, sugar, brandy, rum and (oddly) pineapple, then mix it with hot milk, letting it curdle, and straining it. The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It’s less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother’s masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off but Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn’t mind a bit. Melanie is talking books with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A grand piano. Well, why not?). Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They’ve come straight from the shows they’re in, still in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly’s cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing ‘More leopard print, more leopard print!’
Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she’s either going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her, but now I’m glad it isn’t him. It’s a better surprise. It’s Emily’s hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane’s found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles.
And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents’ carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.
Why didn’t I come to Scheherazade sooner? She’s perfect: Middle Eastern, a storyteller, a feminist. And she’s not born to be a heroine but she definitely becomes one. At the start of The Thousand and One Nights, she’s defined only by whose daughter she is, by having a vizier for a father. She is sheltered to quite an extraordinary degree. It’s been three years since the king, Shahriyar, caught his queen being unfaithful and murdered her. Every night since, he has married a virgin, deflowered her, and murdered her in the morning. That’s over a thousand dead women, and Scheherazade’s father has been procuring them. But does Scheherazade notice? Does she say something? Does she take her sister Dunyazad and run for the hills? No. It’s only when her father comes home despairing that there are no virgins left (they’ve either fled, or are dead) that she thinks to ask what’s been going on. But she does make up for her myopia after that. Quickly she formulates a plan. She’s going to be the king’s next virgin bride. Her father isn’t keen. You can see why. But Scheherazade is so persuasive that he agrees to let her marry the royal serial killer, and take her sister along for the r
ide.
Poor Dunyazad never really gets any heroine points but she absolutely should. For Scheherazade’s plan to work, Dunyazad has to be in the room for the deflowering and has to stay unruffled enough to remember to ask for a story at the end. And she does. And so it begins.
Scheherazade tells stories so marvellous that the king doesn’t want her to stop, and keeps deferring her death sentence, so she can keep going. Every story has a cliff-hanger. And, for all their tricksiness, a moral too. The very first story is about a merchant who eats a date and throws away the pit, only to find a terrifying jinn threatening to kill him because he claims that the date pit struck his (invisible) son a fatal blow in the chest. The merchant begs for his life but the jinn won’t relent – until three old men appear and make a deal with him. They will tell stories, and if the jinn thinks them marvellous enough, he will let the merchant live. He agrees – just as Scheherazade hopes the king will spare her life in return for her stories.
Most translations leave out the frame narrative between the stories, because it gets repetitive, but when I find a translation that leaves it in I’m struck by the fact that Scheherazade’s father, the vizier, arrives every morning, a thousand and one times, with a shroud folded under his arm, in case today will be the day the king kills his daughter. Scheherazade is telling stories with a gun to her head. She’s like a souped-up Esther. No fainting and fasting for her; Scheherazade becomes a heroine by fictioneering. And while Esther saves the Jews, Scheherazade saves her people too; her people are the women. She says she’s doing it to save herself and her sisters. And she doesn’t just mean her actual sister Dunyazad. She uses the plural: she means all the women who would otherwise be forced into marriage and then murdered. And she manages it. She saves them, she saves herself and she becomes the queen.
As a child, I was told stories from the Nights but I found them too fantastical. They made me anxious. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with stories that too flagrantly defy logic; I’ve tended to prefer mimesis to fancy, closure to open-endedness. I’ve worried about heroines who can do magic or stop time or transcend realism, because how can I learn from them when I so blatantly can’t do any of these things? But while Scheherazade has her head in the clouds, her feet are planted firmly on the ground. And so it’s through her that I fall under the spell of Nights.
The stories are fantastical, it’s true. Carpets fly, women turn into gazelles, men into dogs, jinn into clouds of smoke, a severed head speaks, a book poisons its reader, fish raise their heads from a frying pan and speak, the caliph wanders the city disguised as a merchant. A man is turned into an ape. He is rescued by a princess who fights a demon to free him. The fight is, of course, a shape-shifting fight.
First the demon turns into a scorpion, so the princess turns into a snake. He turns into an eagle, so she turns into a vulture. He turns into a cat, so she turns into a brindled wolf. He is losing so he turns himself into a pomegranate and bursts, scattering bright red seeds. She turns into a cock and eats all the seeds, missing just one, which turns into a fish and dives into a fountain. She turns herself into a bigger fish and dives in after him. He emerges from the fountain as a firebrand, and she emerges as a huge burning coal. As they go on fighting, flames and smoke engulf the palace. A spark catches the ape in the eye. And then the princess wins. The demon is dead, and she magics the ape back to human form – except he has lost the eye that was burned by the spark. And the princess is so depleted by the fighting and the spell-making that she only has time to say goodbye to her father before collapsing into a pile of ashes. It’s dazzling. That’s the kind of princess I think I could cope with becoming even now: a shape-shifting, magic-wielding warrior and saviour of men.
The thing that used to worry me most about fantastical heroines – the fact that I couldn’t learn from them because I couldn’t be like them – was also what made me dissatisfied when I thought my heroines were being too obviously written, or manipulated, pushed around – as when L.M. Montgomery doused Anne Shirley’s spark, or (even though it was a happier example) Jane Austen arranged Lizzy’s wedding. I felt let down when I could see the writer too much at work on a character because it reminded me forcefully that of course I don’t have a writer working on my story, guiding me to safety, bending the laws of reality for me, bringing in a hero to rescue me or transporting me to a happier life by the stroke of her pen. No writer is writing me a better journey. No writer is guiding me through my misunderstandings and muddles and wrong turns to reach my happy ending.
And then I realise I am the writer.
I don’t mean because I write. I mean because we all write our own lives. Scheherazade’s greatest piece of storytelling is not the stories she tells, but the story she lives. The best transformation in the Nights is Scheherazade transforming herself from vizier’s cosseted daughter to queen, mother, storyteller and saviour.
And all right, Scheherazade is herself a story. We don’t know who really wrote the Nights. It could be a phalanx of men. But whoever came up with the frame narrative must have needed a heroine like Scheherazade. And she needs heroines too; she writes heroines who will help her cure the king. Like a detective analysing a criminal mind, she works out what heroines will change him. First, she flatters him with stories about fickle heroines, that confirm his view that all women are as faithless as his first wife. Once he’s hooked, she wheels out good, kind, loving heroines. Finally, she invokes heroines who are unashamed of their sexual desires. By the end, the king repents having killed all those women, and may even understand why his first wife strayed. Scheherazade has given him precisely the heroines he needed to learn from.
She’s also understood her own life. In her version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, she spins her own story into a mischievous, playful, magical tale, with an ending that is part-punchline, part-moral. She isn’t just telling a story about the events that have shaped her life; it’s more active than that. She’s shaping the inchoate events of her life into a story. And it’s about a woman who educates a prince.
Sittukhan is not a princess, though she is very beautiful. When she wakes from her flax-induced coma to find a prince kissing her (and not just kissing), she freely takes her own pleasure. But after forty days and nights, he leaves. Because he’s a prince, and a snob, and she’s just a very pretty girl with a flax allergy.
But Sittukhan isn’t going to just let him go. (Scheherazade wastes hardly any words on her time asleep; this beauty is more interesting when she’s awake.) She enlists a demon to enhance her beauty and build her a palace. Soon the queen comes begging Sittukhan to marry her son. Sittukhan says no. She plays these status-obsessed royals at their own game. The queen brings gorgeous brocades and Sittukhan has them cut up into floor cloths. The queen brings emeralds, and Sittukhan feeds them to her pigeons. She says she’ll only marry the prince if he feigns death, and they wrap him in seven winding sheets, carry him in sad procession through the city and bury him in her garden. The lovesick prince agrees.
Once everyone has gone, Sittukhan digs him up, unwraps him and laughs at him for being so keen on women that he’ll go so far as to be buried alive. He realises she is the same woman he spent forty days and nights with, and now she very much has the upper hand. Then they live happily ever after. Maybe Scheherazade does too.
And yet, I worry about Scheherazade’s ending.
Not that I’ve read every story in the Nights. Legend has it that if you get to the end of the Nights, you die. There are an awful lot of them; my edition runs to three hefty volumes. I skipped to the thousand and first night to find out what happens to Scheherazade. I knew she survived, but there’s more: she also presents the king with three sons. During the thousand and one nights, she has not only been telling stories but has gone through three pregnancies, without the king having noticed. At no point does he comment on her changing shape. She never has to break off the stories to go into labour. And she doesn’t think, say, after the first baby, or even after the second, of telling the king it�
�s surely time this farce of a marriage becomes real. When she does tell him, she asks him to commute her death sentence purely on the grounds that he won’t find a better mother for their children. She’s arguing for him to value her as a mother, not as a storyteller; not even as a wife. It’s very peculiar.
When she suddenly produces her three sons for the king, she just as suddenly produces, for her readers, the idea that she has had a shadow life all along, that while we’ve been relating to her as a storyteller, she’s secretly gone off and changed roles, becoming a mother. I don’t know what to think about it. Is she having it all, stories and sons? Or is she going to stop telling stories now? Is this like Anne Shirley giving up writing all over again? Or, even worse, does this story, so far-fetched, even compared to the most absurd and sensational stories in the Nights, suggest she’s not believable herself, that she’s just a framing device, a cipher?
And then I turn the page. Scheherazade’s stories don’t end on the thousand and first night. Some of the most famous stories – like ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Ali Baba’ – come after. The story of Sittukhan comes after. Her stories burst the bounds of the frame. She doesn’t stop telling them.
I don’t find Scheherazade’s stories too fantastical any more. I find them liberating. These wondrous, curious heroines, with their magic and their dreams and their twists and turns of fate, make me feel that anything is possible. I write a short play for the opening show of Agent 160, about a heroine who feels miserable and blocked in her life, tied to her past, homesick for Baghdad, where she’s never been and can never go. (I call her Noura, but the play hugs the shore of my life.) She learns to belly-dance, and as she makes her arms move like a snake and like a swan, she starts to feel she can be anything she wants.
How To Be A Heroine Page 21
