Then there is the case of the American poet Robert Lowell, whose sonnet collection For Lizzie and Harriet described the breakdown of his marriage, while The Dolphin (1973) incorporated, verbatim, lines from letters written to him by his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, during their separation and divorce. ‘Art just isn’t worth that much,’ said Lowell’s friend, Elizabeth Bishop, when she saw what he was doing. Adrienne Rich, describing The Dolphin as ‘a cruel and shallow book’, asked – in genuine perplexity – what could be said ‘about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife’. Lowell had stretched the confessional form to snapping point, and The Dolphin, like Don Juan, was soon recognised as a masterpiece.
Intimacy did not, as Kureishi believes, create and infuriate its readers because ‘the subject is infuriating’. There are two reasons for Intimacy’s unpopularity. Initially, its narrative form: it is told in the first person with an uncomfortable mixture of serene critical detachment and more intimacy – in the sense of more information – than the reader can bear. The sentences smart like slaps in the face: ‘There are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea.’ Secondly, the plot repeats intimate events in Kureishi’s own recent history: he, like Jay, left the house he shared with his partner and two young sons because, he said, ‘it was more interesting to go’. In Kureishi’s writing it tends to be the fathers who work to preserve the culture of the home, and the sons who leave. For his fathers, having a home means adopting an identity, a home is something to which they aspire; for his sons, the opposite is the case. In Intimacy, home represents the erosion of paternal identity and Jay, the father, is given a Dante-esque meditation on being lost in the midst of life, or as he puts it ‘lost in the middle of life and no way home’. ‘Father, six years dead, would have been horrified by my skulking off,’ he considers. ‘He didn’t approve of leaving.’ It is fathers and not sons who now leave: the problem with Intimacy is that it is too close to home.
Certain stories offend our understandings of what it is acceptable to say, or even feel. Intimacy not only transgressed, as Kureishi put it in an interview in Time Out, ‘the Koran of the middle classes’, it also crossed the line of discretion and good taste, of what can and cannot be written down, and of the genre in which you are entitled, or not, to write it. ‘Anyone even with a scrap of rectitude could not fail to find Intimacy a repugnant little book, not least in view of the open secret that Kureishi’s own life is known to mirror the events he describes,’ wrote Cressida Connolly in the Observer. The critical assumption is that Kureishi, being the same person as Jay, has produced not a novel but a barely disguised piece of autobiography. ‘Let’s believe this book is a work of fiction,’ wrote Laura Cumming in the Guardian. ‘Immediately we won’t have to worry about the effect the rancorous tale of a writer who leaves his partner and two small children might have on the family he has recently left …’ ‘Kureishi left his family before writing this beastly little book,’ Kate Kellaway wrote in the Literary Review. ‘I hope that it is only a novel and that an autobiography would read differently.’ (In many descriptions of Intimacy, its awfulness is yoked to its brevity, reminding one of that old joke, ‘the food was dreadful, and so little of it’.) Tracey Scoffield, the mother of Kureishi’s two small children and the long-term partner he left, joined in the debate. ‘There are sections and sequences in that book which are intended for me only and only I can understand them,’ she said. Of Faber, Intimacy’s publisher (who happened to be her former employer), she declared, ‘They think it’s called a novel, therefore it’s fiction, therefore they are not responsible.’ Of Kureishi, she went further: ‘He says it’s a novel, but that’s an absolute abdication of responsibility … Nobody believes it’s just pure fiction. You may as well call it a fish.’
There has always been something fishy about the value of autobiographical fiction. But at what point does a writer’s fictional depiction of his own experience become an abdication of responsibility? ‘I think it is the writer’s job to be irresponsible,’ Kureishi shrugged, and we used to like him for it. In the fin de siècle ennui of Intimacy, he does not tell us what we want to hear about either break-ups or grown-ups. He did not write the book we wanted him to write. Along with Midnight All Day and Love in a Blue Time, Intimacy represents for Sandhu ‘the ongoing decline of a once vital writer … In his earlier writing he captured and defined a precise historical juncture. He changed the lives of many young Asians.’ ‘I want to be free to not only be an Asian writer,’ Kureishi insists, but none of his readers, neither Asian nor White, want to grant him this freedom. Kureishi should continue to write about race rather than giving us grim tales of middle-age and falling out of love; or at least he should tell us how difficult it is to leave your family and how guilty the guilty party feels: ‘People speak of the violence of separation,’ Kureishi writes in Midnight All Day, ‘but what of the delight?’ ‘I have been trying to convince myself,’ says Jay, ‘that leaving someone is not the worst thing you can do to them. Sombre it may be, but it doesn’t have to be a tragedy. If you never left anything or anyone, there would be no room for the new.’ We like his autobiographical fiction only when Kureishi is writing about being young, hip and Asian; when he stops telling us illuminating things about that and instead says something illuminating about the choices made by men as they grow older, we stop listening.
The vocabulary used by the Intimacy’s reviewers was peculiarly intimate: ‘deeply irritating’, ‘odious’, ‘beastly’, ‘repugnant’, ‘verging on the psychotic’. Kureishi’s ‘right to write the book’ at all was raised by Susie MacKenzie in the Guardian, while Randeep Ramesh in an Independent on Sunday profile described ‘loathing’ not the book but Kureishi himself, ‘for his apparently confessional, mean-spirited, and at times hateful outbursts’. But Intimacy is also described, by those same reviewers, as being too honest: it is ‘relentlessly honest’, ‘chillingly honest’. No wonder Maggie Gee asked, in her own review, ‘what are we to make of this?’ One of our most cherished assumptions about fiction – the assumption on which the whole edifice of literary criticism has been built – is that it reflects experience, that the source of a story can be located in the life of its writer. Universities churn out English Literature graduates by the thousand who have been taught to read Sons and Lovers as an account of D. H. Lawrence’s childhood and Villette as a fictionalisation of Charlotte Bronte’s unhappy love affair. And yet, when a story so blatantly reflects experience, so unapologetically describes the life of its writer, it loses its value. There is no room in a novel for honesty on this scale. Honesty of the ‘irresponsible’ sort is the preserve of autobiography.
So what are we then to make of the statements which appeared in the press by Kureishi’s mother and sister at the time that Intimacy was being reviewed, denouncing as far from honest the picture he drew in the book of his run-down, impoverished and emotionally deprived childhood? Rather than revealing home truths, Kureishi gave an entirely ‘false impression of family life’, which his mother and sister regard as every bit as unacceptable in the novel form as the ‘chilling’ and ‘relentless honesty’ to which Tracey Scoffield objected. ‘Does being famous mean you can devalue all those around you and rewrite history for even more personal gain?’ asked Kureishi’s sister; ‘He has sold his family down the line.’ ‘Hanif has made us sound like the dregs just because it suits his image and career,’ said his mother, who had been told by her daughter not to read the book. ‘I suppose it is trendy and fashionable for an author to pretend they had a working-class background [Kureishi uses, in fact, the term ‘lower-middle class’], but Hanif had everything he wanted as a child …’ Kureishi responded to these comments with his usual sigh: it is inevitable to find different members of the same family interpreting facts and event
s – even their own social class – in differing ways.
For one half of his family, the problem with Intimacy is that Kureishi made up too little, for the other half it is that he made up too much. What is curious is the way in which his family squabbles, the comments of his ex-partner and sister, have been treated in the press as literary criticism, so that Intimacy has been evaluated not on the grounds of aesthetic merit (the way in which he deploys language, form, style, structure, tradition, and so forth), but entirely on grounds of honesty and responsibility, as though these moral categories constituted valid and useful critical terms.
Break-ups, like the children’s stories that Jay reads to his sons at bedtime, tend to be cruel. Their peculiar unhappiness makes each break-up feel unique but part of their cruelty is the uniformity of the hurt, the predictability of the narrative, the fact that in the end every break-up amounts, like every birth and death, to more or less the same story. For Tracey Scoffield, what stung ‘to the power of ten’ in Intimacy were those aspects of Jay’s and Susan’s relationship that only she could understand, which were meant as a message from Kureishi to her. But the sting in the tale is actually that, in Kureishi’s hands, there is nothing peculiar or specific to this particular break-up, there are no hidden codes or secret meanings. Jay’s and Susan’s separation involves nothing more than the boiling down of a shared language to a few tired lines. ‘I am leaving because I cannot make her a cup of tea,’ Jay realises.
The problem with Intimacy is not that Kureishi has moulded personal experience into novel form, the true worth of which can only be appreciated by Tracey Scoffield, but that he tells a general enough tale to describe the experience of more or less anyone who has ever broken up. This is where the vertiginous thrill of the novel lies and why it is so appallingly readable. By stopping the clock, by giving us nothing but Jay’s consciousness over one night, Kureishi gives us the triumph of selfhood in all its egocentric monstrosity at the same time as revealing Jay’s story to be everyone’s story, and his revelations to be commonplace. Separating couples are trapped in an airtight lexicon. The complexities of the relationship can be reduced to one or two sentences, gone over again and again like a Mobius knot. ‘What puzzles me more than anything?’ Jay ponders. ‘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.’
The novel’s skill lies in what Sukhdev Sandhu criticised as its ‘prim, medium-lengthed, stiffbacked, shorn of excess’ prose. The flat, insolent drive of Kureishi’s seemingly effortless sentences, his ironic refusal of sentiment, depth, and emotional grandeur, mimic the vertical plunges of self-reflection: ‘I know love is dark work, you have to get your hands dirty’, ‘We begin in love and go to some trouble to remain in that condition for the rest of our lives’, ‘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’, ‘Naturally, to move on is an infidelity – to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself’, ‘Surely the ultimate freedom is to choose’, ‘After a certain age sex can never be casual’, ‘After a certain age there are only certain people, in certain circumstances, whom we allow to love one another.’ This is the language of intimacy, and Kureishi tosses out his profundities like bones to a dog.
Breaking up is a form of editing, which is perhaps why writers do it so well. Experience is revised, the past is reduced, what was seen as a good holiday is rewritten as a bad one, those feelings we believed to have been real are discovered to have been false, the things we thought we meant, we realise now we didn’t mean at all. ‘There was never great passion,’ Jay muses, considering his many years with Susan and the birth of two sons. ‘I should have gone out with her for six months. Or maybe a one-night stand would have been sufficient.’ Too honest to be fiction, too dishonest to be fact, too unpleasant to be art, too artistic to be true, Hanif Kureishi has produced not a novel but a slippery, elusive, lingeringly pungent and fishlike thing. Which is why we are so afraid of Intimacy.
9 Paul Auster, Leviathan
KEVIN JACKSON
‘I write for those on whom the black ox hath trod’ – Fulke Greville
Paul Auster has often spoken of how Fulke Greville’s simple, monosyllable-heavy declaration has haunted him over the years, and come to serve as a tersely eloquent mission statement for his own work as a writer. Greville adapted his phrase from a common folk saying of his day: to be ‘trodden on by the black ox’ was to suffer ill-fortune: disease, poverty, dispossession, betrayal, defeat, imprisonment. So: to write ‘for’ the afflicted is to bear constantly in mind several kinds of possible relationship between the wounded and the would-be healer. It might, for instance, commit the writer to seek his audience mainly among those who are temperamentally given to sorrow: melancholics, misfits, recluses, self-haters. Or – a harsher, more demanding interpretation – it might mean trying to write on behalf of those who cannot themselves write, or even read: the prisoners, the murdered, and all of Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’.
Since it is in large part a novel about the pitiless demands of a radical social conscience, and the explosive violence that might come of those demands, Leviathan (1992) is much possessed by the latter implication of Fulke Greville’s words. It ruminates uneasily on how fiction might perhaps, or might never, be able to serve the cause of elementary human justice, and on why a sufficiently anguished novelist might come to feel that all writing, however well-intentioned, is a poor or contemptible substitute for acts of force. And yet for all the darkness of its matter, the book remains, as all worthwhile novels must remain, a form of agreeable entertainment, too – a pleasure in easy times, a palliative for which we may one day, soon, be grateful in the endless insomniac nights of bereavement, illness or broken love.
Not all novelists have felt this tug-of-war between imperatives – some, plainly, have made careers out of mocking the afflicted – but there is a vital tradition in the European and American novel of balancing diversion with ethical and political concern (a tradition that updates classical injunctions to the effect that works of art must instruct as well as delight). The most accomplished writers in that vein, from Dickens to Henry James and beyond, have achieved ethical gravity as well as writerly grace. Leviathan is a valuable recent recruit to that tradition – a point insufficiently stressed by all those critics who have treated Auster’s books mainly as dry metaphysical puzzles, or as cryptic utterances that stand in urgent need of decoding. Not very interesting in their own right, they seem to me to have slighted and impoverished a body of work that is often intensely pleasurable as well as sometimes disconcerting.
Literary criticism of this tiresome kind usually involves the deployment of (metaphorical) scalpel and forceps. At the end of the exercise, we have no doubt learned something about how a frog works, but there is a horrible mess on the table, seeping with vile juices and jellies, and the poor thing will never sit on a lily pad again. (Wordsworth: ‘We murder to dissect.’) There are better ways of doing the job. One of them requires, as it were, a bright lamp and a magnifying glass. At the end of the session, the gem remains glittering and intact and, if it has proved its carats, the jeweler makes a sale. Leviathan is a book with many wonderfully cut facets. I will try to hold ten of them up to the light, and hope not to do too much damage with clumsy handling.
1 Friendship
‘When I came home from work on Wednesday afternoon, I immediately sat down and wrote him a letter. I told him that he had written a great novel. Any time he wanted to share another bottle of bourbon with me, I would be honored to match him glass for glass.’
One of the world’s oldest stories is the story of male friendship: Achilles and Patroclus, Hamlet and Horatio, Falstaff and Hal, Don Quixote and Sancho Panz
a, Estragon and Vladimir. In this respect, Leviathan takes a very old story and makes it new. It tells of a fifteen-year friendship between two intelligent, decent, white American men, both of them writers – a friendship at first warm and mutually sustaining, then increasingly splintered and vexed, and finally blighted by chance and ideology. The narrator, Peter Aaron, looks back from early middle age on the time when he was a youngish man, freshly back in New York after a stint in Paris, gradually passing from spirit-crushing years of anxiety, genteel poverty and marital break-up to the nursery slopes of recognition and success, and to private happiness. He recalls how he came to meet an older writer, Benjamin Sachs, the author of a single large and ambitious novel, The New Colossus. Sachs is remarkable, charming, troubled, hard to fathom.
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