* * *
When Len went home and told Sushila that he had gone to Marcie’s place, she was angry with him. He wasn’t her representative. Why hadn’t he discussed the plan with her first? She was the one it had happened to. It wasn’t even his story. What did he think he was doing?
Len said that there had been nothing light or flirty about Mateo’s approach, as far as he understood it. Mateo had insulted him as a human being too; he was entitled to take offence and seek an explanation, if not revenge. It wasn’t often, he said, that you experienced deliberately inflicted cruelty. And from a friend! His view of Mateo – one of his oldest friends and someone whose advice he had always trusted – had changed for good. The insult was now general. It didn’t belong to anyone and it could happen again. Women were at risk. Len would hate himself if he didn’t speak out.
Sushila told Len that he was becoming fixated. It had been a lapse. Women had to put up with this kind of thing all the time. Not that she wasn’t touched or impressed by Len’s concern. But she didn’t think Mateo would do it again; he was mortified by what had been said; his regret was genuine and his behaviour had obviously been self-destructive. Len said that self-destructive things were what people most enjoyed doing. Sushila agreed, adding that Mateo resembled a gambler who repeatedly risked his own security. She herself liked rock climbing, which at times put her life in danger. But Marcie would have a word with Mateo. Marcie was the only one who could get through to him. In future Mateo would hesitate, if only for Marcie’s sake.
Len doubted that. Nor did he understand how Marcie could just sit there, putting up with the embarrassment. But Sushila said, please, he knew Marcie was ill. It might be a good idea for him to apologise to Marcie for intruding like that. Was he prepared to do that?
Before he could begin to consider this, Sushila went further. She wanted to speak frankly now. Len could be a little conventional, if not earnest at times, in his ideas about love. He could? he enquired. How was that? Well, Marcie was celibate and Mateo, they were coming to understand, might be a serial abuser. Otherwise they could be the model contemporary couple. Despite everything, they were genuine companions with an unbreakable link that he, Len, couldn’t grasp. No one had loved Marcie as Mateo had, and Marcie was devoted to Mateo. Even if he did something crazy now and then, which we all did at times, she stood by him. You had to respect that.
Len mocked the idea of a passionless passion. It didn’t make sense and was probably why Mateo was frustrated. Assaulting women made him feel potent.
Sushila said she didn’t think that was it. But, with regard to Marcie, she wanted to add that often we love others because of their weakness. And if we were able to keep all the crazy people from being crazy, well, who would want to live in that dull bureaucratic world?
* * *
They had grown tired of discussing it, there was nothing to add, and the topic seemed to have been dropped from their lives, when, a week later, an invitation arrived. Mateo’s birthday was the following week and they were invited to the celebration. Sushila went into town and spent an afternoon looking for a present. She asked Len to promise not to say anything. A party wasn’t the time or place. Len vowed to keep his mouth shut, adding that he would sulk a little and maintain his distance, so that friends knew the incident had registered but wasn’t killing him any more.
However, once they got to the party Mateo, or at least a man who resembled him, approached Len immediately. Mateo had shaved off his beard, cropped his hair and seemed to have coloured it. Before Len could discover if this was a disguise, Mateo put his arm around Len’s shoulder and pressed his mouth to his ear. He wanted to have a word with him, over there, in a corner of the room. Would Len follow him, please?
Len had told the story to many people, Mateo said. Someone in Mateo’s office had even mentioned it. Now exaggerated rumours were spreading. Yet hadn’t Len accepted his apology and agreed to end the matter? Do you want to stab me in the heart and make my wife weep all night? Mateo said. She did that, okay? She cried after you walked right into her home and bullied her. And my assistant, standing over there, saw what happened in the park. He admits it was messy, but no more than that.
Len pushed him away. Don’t fucking stand so close to me, he said. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re actually a savage. What about Susan, Zora and all the other women?
Mateo replied that everyone knew seduction was difficult these days. In these impossible times, courtship rituals were being corrected. In the chaos, those seeking love would make missteps; there would be misunderstandings, dark before light. Anger was an ever-present possibility. But it was essential that people try to connect, if only for a few hours, that they never give up on their need for contact. Otherwise, we would become a society of strangers. No one would meet or touch. Nothing would happen. And who would want that? Of course, Len was known in their circle to have issues with inhibition. If there was an opportunity to be missed, he’d miss it for sure. Didn’t he dream repeatedly that he’d gone to the airport and all the planes had left? At least that was what he had memorably told everyone at supper one night. He was a born misser.
Len told Sushila he had to go out for some air, but once he was outside he didn’t want to go back. He felt as if he didn’t quite recognise anything any more. The world was stupid, and there was no way around that. He started to walk quickly away but knew that however far he went, he’d have to come back to this, if he could find it.
We Are the Pollutants
The recent furore over Penguin’s wise and brave decision to ‘reflect the diversity of British society’ in its hiring policy and publishing output seems to have awoken the usual knuckle-dragging, semi-blind suspects, with their endlessly repeated terrors and fears. They appear to believe that what is called ‘diversity’ or ‘positive discrimination’ will lead to a dilution of their culture. Their stupidity and the sound of their pathetic whining would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for Britain. You might even want to call it a form of self-loathing; it is certainly unpatriotic and lacking in generosity.
The industries I’ve worked in for most of my life – film, TV, theatre, publishing – have all been more or less entirely dominated by white Oxbridge men, and they still mostly are. These men and their lackeys have been the beneficiaries of positive discrimination, to say the least, for centuries. The world has always been theirs, and they now believe they own it.
Some of us have been fortunate enough to force a way through the maze and make a living as artists. It was a difficult and often humiliating trip, I can tell you. There was much patronisation and many insults on the way, and they are still going on.
We are still expected to be grateful, though those in charge – never having had to fight for anything – have always been the lucky ones. And these lucky ones, with their implicit privilege, wealth and power – indeed, so much of it they don’t even see it – are beginning to intuit that their day is done. Before, with their sense of superiority and lofty arrogance, they could intimidate everyone around them. No more.
It was never not a struggle to become an artist, with racism, prejudice and assumption all around, visible and invisible. I remember standing in a room with Salman Rushdie in the early nineties just after The Buddha of Suburbia was published, discussing how it could be that we were the only people of colour there; indeed, the only people of colour in most of the rooms when it came to books. And that was the case with all of the culture industries. The first TV producer I ever met asked me why my characters had to be Asian. ‘If they were white, we’d make this,’ he said to me.
It is not coincidental that at this Brexit moment, with its xenophobic, oafish and narrow perspective, the ruling class and its gate-keepers fear a multitude of democratic voices from elsewhere and wish to keep us silent. They can’t wait to tell us how undeserving of being heard we really are.
But they should remember this: they might have tried to shut the door on Europe, refugees and people of colour, but
it will be impossible for them to shut the door on British innovation. We are very insistent, noisy and talented.
When I was invited to join Faber in 1984, the fiction editor was Robert McCrum. He was excitable then, and so was I. I couldn’t wait to be on his list of writers since he was publishing Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, Peter Carey, Mario Vargas Llosa, Caryl Phillips, Paul Auster, Lorrie Moore, Danilo KiŠ, Marilynne Robinson and Vikram Seth. Not long before Salman Rushdie had won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children, and that masterpiece, with its echoes of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez, suddenly seemed like a great opportunity. The world was coming in; what had been a narrow and sterile place was opening up. These books were successful, and readers discovered that they wanted them.
This is not a gesture that can be made only once. It has to be repeated over and over again. British culture – which is the single reason for wanting to live in this country – has always thrived on rebellion, cussedness and non-conformity. From pop to punk, from Vivienne Westwood, Damien Hirst, Zadie Smith and Kate Tempest; from Alexander McQueen to Oscar-winning Steve McQueen, it has been the voices of the young and excluded that have made British culture alive and admired. It is widely acknowledged that there is no other country in Europe with a cultural capital to match that of Britain, and no more exciting place for artists to live. This is where art and commerce meet. These artists’ work sells all over the world.
The British creativity I grew up with – in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel – has almost always come from outside the mainstream, from clubs, gay subcultures, the working class and from the street. Many of the instigators might have been white, but they were not from the middle class, a group that lacks, in my experience, the imagination, fearlessness and talent to be truly subversive.
The truth is, the conservative fear of other voices is not due to the anxiety that artists from outside the mainstream will be untalented, filling up galleries and bookshops with sludge, but that they will be outstanding and brilliant. The conservatives will have to swallow the fact that despite the success of British artists, real talent has been neglected and discouraged by those who dominate the culture, deliberately keeping schools, the media, universities and the cultural world closed to interesting people.
It is good news that the master race is becoming anxious about who they might have to hear from. At this terrible Brexit moment, with its retreat into panic and nationalism, and with the same thing happening across Europe, it is time for all artists to speak up, and particularly those whose voices have been neglected.
No one knows what a more democratic and inclusive culture would be like. It is fatuous to assume it would be worse than what we already have. The attempt of reactionaries to shut people down shows both fear and stupidity. But it’s too late. You will be hearing from us.
It Was So Much Fun
Artists require solitude to get anything done, but that is not all they need. As they work, they might like to believe that they are outside the market, in a private dreaming space. But artists need to engage the public. They have to keep going, and to make a living. They need contemporaries, supporters and collaborators, people who grasp what they’re up to, and institutions and networks that carry their work to the world – theatres, producers, editors and publishers.
Matthew Evans, former Managing Director and Chairman of Faber & Faber, knew a lot about this: his father was a writer. And at Faber he provided his authors with stability and support. But he was personally rebellious and anarchic, and that cheered his writers up because his mischievousness and terror of boredom, habit and respectability reminded us what we were supposed to be doing, particularly in the eighties and early nineties, during that period of greatest Thatcherite ignorance, destructiveness and philistinism. Once, later, I said to him, ‘I’ve just been talking to someone who says libraries are irrelevant in the new digital age,’ and he replied, ‘Did you punch him?’
I recall Janet Frame, played by the exquisite Kerry Fox, saying in Jane Campion’s movie Angel at My Table that all she wanted, living in New Zealand, was to be published by Faber & Faber. By 2004, during celebrations for the 75th anniversary of Faber, Seamus Heaney told Andrew O’Hagan that being published by Faber was like ‘getting a call from God’.
Since the 1930s, Faber & Faber, which Matthew joined in 1964, had been the jewel in the crown of British publishing, a bit like Manchester United and Jaguar. But by the 1970s, though Faber published Beckett, Pound, Auden and Eliot, things were getting a little staid.
Just as the backbone of the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s and 60s was the talent of the writers who provided meaning and purpose to it, Matthew understood that Faber & Faber was not about finance, marketing or even profit. The publishing house had to be built on the talent of those it published. For him its poets, dramatists and novelists were at the centre of our national life, and were more important than actors, politicians or accountants. The geniuses Heaney, Pinter, Hughes, Plath, Larkin, Kundera, P. D. James, Derek Walcott, Golding, Peter Carey, Škvorecký, Vargas Llosa – and many others – should be well treated in a non-intimidating atmosphere that had to be, ultimately, organised around them.
Matthew was a charismatic man who could lead without being bossy and was ruthless without cruelty. He had glamour, charm and class. Careless and virtuous, he knew how to behave with everyone. He loved restaurants, booze, gossip, fast cars, good talk, politics and filth. He was louche, moody, good-looking, wore fine shoes and suits, and with a fetching naivety was always keen to open his jacket and show you the label. He played cricket and was sexy like a movie star, with a shy side and a great body, which is something you won’t hear said about many publishers. People in the office and all over London were in love with him, and wanted to sleep with him, though some of them were disappointed.
More than anything, he hated to be bored, which was when he might start to make trouble. And he hated to read, though if you dropped into his office, particularly after an exhausting lunch in the Ivy or Worsley, where he did a lot of his business, you might find him with his feet on the desk looking through the pictures in Hello! magazine and drinking whisky. One time when I asked him why, since he was my publisher, he didn’t trouble himself with the admittedly arduous work of reading one of my books, he replied with unarguable logic, ‘For a start, that’s what that lazy bastard McCrum [editor-in-chief] is paid to do when he isn’t watching the cricket on television. And, secondly, if I read yours I’d have to read everyone’s bloody books, and then where we would be?’
The dinners and parties at Faber in the eighties and early nineties were wild; everyone beautiful and brilliant was invited, and you could believe yourself to be in a Scott Fitzgerald story. The poets, in particular, copulated randomly and vomited where they stood; people slapped one another and fell over; and Melvyn had his head shoved into a toilet by someone or other who hadn’t liked a show. Later, everyone would go to the Groucho, of which Matthew was a founding member.
Matthew was loved by the best men, like Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and by the loveliest women, like Caroline Michel, and if he loved you, he’d be loyal for ever, never let you down and sit with you for hours, though he wouldn’t necessarily share intimacies or even say a word.
He was too intelligent to take anything over-seriously, but he picked his enemies and only insulted people worth insulting. When he was chairman of the Royal Court, and I was on the board, he clashed with the equally macho and uncompromising artistic director Max Stafford-Clark, asking right out why the plays were neither informative, entertaining or short. John Osborne wrote Matthew the most offensive postcards he’d ever received, often beginning ‘Dear Cunt’, and Matthew once asked me, ‘Is that fucking boring Harold Pinter actually a good writer?’ ‘I’m afraid he is, Matthew,’ I had to reply.
When he was dying, and it was said he was demented, I liked to whisper the names of his most hated foes into his ear and inform him they would soon ar
rive to read to him from their latest works. His wicked eyes, even then, would fill with horror as he thrashed in his bed.
You understand, as you get older, that defiant, magnificent people are few and far between. The world was more fun with him in it.
Two years ago, strolling along Copacabana beach with my youngest son, we ran into him, and he had a plastic bag around his arm. When I asked him what had happened, he said he’d got a tattoo. ‘It’s never too late to be a teenager,’ he said.
Starman Jones
One of the first and most important pieces of advice David Bowie ever gave me – and this was in the early 1990s – was to make sure I noted down the names of secretaries and assistants I came into contact with. This would help me later, he explained, when I needed to get through to the important people.
Charm, as Albert Camus put it in The Fall, is a way of getting people to say yes before you’ve told them what you want. And Major Tom, or Captain Tom, as Frank Zappa insisted on calling him when Bowie tried to poach his guitarist, had already used his ample portion of it to get through to the important people. And to the assistants, secretaries and thousands of other women he slept with, sometimes in threesomes and at orgies in Oakley Street in Chelsea, where he lived with Angie Barnett in what was then cutely called ‘an open relationship’.
Bowie’s father, who knew a lot about music and was an early encourager – perhaps Bowie’s first fan – was head of PR for Dr Barnardo’s children’s homes. In a sense, Bowie himself always worked in PR, realising early that the image was everything. Even as a teenager Bowie had learned to make both men and women adore him. By his early twenties, he had turned to men for sex, sleeping with mime artist Lindsay Kemp and composer of musicals Lionel Bart, among others. A vivacious Kemp, interviewed by GQ editor Dylan Jones in David Bowie: A Life, says that Bowie ‘went out with most people’, including Kemp’s costume designer, much to Kemp’s chagrin, causing poor Kemp to attempt suicide by bicycling into the sea at Whitehaven in an effort to re-create scenes from both The 400 Blows and Bicycle Thieves simultaneously.
What Happened? Page 6
