What Happened?

by Hanif Kureishi

  According to Mary Finnigan, his former Beckenham landlady, and herself another forever disappointed suitor – Finnigan wrote Psychedelic Suburbia, a delightful account of her relationship with Bowie in Beckenham, just after he’d left home and had broken up with the splendidly named Hermione Farthingale – Bart swung down to the south London suburbs in his Roller and disappeared with Bowie onto the back seat for the afternoon.

  Bowie was an admirer of Joe Orton’s cheeky subversion. They both had something of the Artful Dodger about them; Bowie certainly wasn’t averse to putting it about when it came to getting ahead. He had much to put about. Feminine and extraordinary looking, with different coloured eyes, a swan neck, porcelain skin, good hips and a delicious penis, he had it all. I believe his penis was initially detailed in print by his first manager Ken Pitt, in Bowie: The Pitt Report. Bowie deserted Pitt after ‘Space Oddity’ became a hit, but Pitt poetically describes Bowie’s ‘big penis hanging from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock’. Enthusiasts will be pleased that Bowie’s member is often commented on by fans and biographers, and might want to think of Bowie as something from a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, a thin man with a transcendental phallus.

  Bowie attended the same school as me, Bromley Technical High School in Keston, Kent, but ten years earlier. It is important to note what a shithole it was: bullying, violent, with incompetent if not sick teachers. Education, in those days, for working-class and lower-middle-class children, was hardly considered essential or even necessary. We were being trained to be clerks for the civil service, like the dour, eponymous hero of H. G. Wells’s Kipps, a rags-to-riches tale of self-improvement which we studied at school, since Wells was the only famous local artist apart from Richmal Crompton, author of the Just William books. The more imaginative boys, or the ones who could draw, went into advertising, which Bowie did after school, working on a campaign for a slimming biscuit called Ayds. The only decent adult at Bromley Tech was guitarist Peter Frampton’s dad, Owen, who let us use the art room at lunchtime to mess around in with guitars, while complaining how much he hated Steve Marriott’s voice. His son had just joined Humble Pie.

  It is instructive to recall how little was expected of us kids and how we were patronised. I remember a nouveau riche friend from ‘up London’ walking into our house in Bromley and saying, to Mum’s horror, ‘What a lovely little house you have!’ British pop has always been lower-middle-class and came out of the art schools rather than universities, which was where, until recently, all the rest of British culture – theatre, movies, the novel – came from. Pop was always more lively: the musicmad kids were rebellious, angry and ornery. They always had a chip on their shoulders when it came to class and education. Social disadvantage has always been essential to pop: the hilarious incongruity of kids brought up in small houses without central heating and eating Spam for tea suddenly finding themselves living in mansions after writing a hit song.

  Despite Lindsey Kemp’s efforts, Bowie was a terrible mime. But he was a great mimic and loved to do the voices of his contemporaries – Jagger, Bryan Ferry – while pissing himself laughing. This matter of the voice is interesting: as with a lot of us, Bowie’s accent wobbled and never really settled. The accent known sneeringly as ‘mockney’, used by south Londoners like Bowie and Jagger before they went American, would have been necessary as well as natural at the time for boys brought up among cockneys who’d moved to the suburbs after the East End had been bombed during the war. That accent, which I still do when I’m bad-tempered, would have helped you fit in, saving you from being beaten up at school or on the street, since the locals weren’t keen on anyone who didn’t speak like them, or, God forbid, showed an interest in anything artistic. The commmunity was always aspirational, but determinedly downwardly mobile when it came to culture. You wouldn’t have wanted the lads to see you in a dress.

  Fortunately, Bowie’s schooling didn’t interfere with his education. Almost everyone remarks on Bowie’s everlasting curiosity, ‘self-improvement’ and wide-ranging intelligence. After reading Robert A. Heinlein’s 1953 sci-fi epic Starman Jones, as well as collecting from movies, poetry and the numerous artists he admired, he constructed himself and his numerous aliases from a range of sources. As his obvious precursor Oscar Wilde writes in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘Man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature …’

  Bowie was more Don Juan than Dorian Gray, a woman’s fantasy rather than a narcissist. It is well known that he made himself up, but much in him remained constant. Unlike Iggy Pop or Lou Reed, or Bowie’s schizophrenic older brother Terry, he was born cheerful and was never truly nihilistic or even depressed. Like most of us, he worried he might go mad, but he clearly never did, despite his best efforts. He was unembarrassable and could be blokey and laddish in the English manner, adoring jokes, TV shows: Larry Grayson, Peter Sellers, Pete and Dud and The Office.

  Bowie wasn’t one to waste anything. Even his period of self-destructiveness yielded some of his finest work, which, like the Beatles’, was that incredibly difficult thing – both experimental and popular. He told me that cocaine almost killed him several times, his friends putting him in a warm bath just to keep his circulation moving. However, he was always concentrated and was never not serious about his career. Both otherworldly and extremely practical, when he had a new album, he’d make the terrifying move of playing it to you, sitting opposite you in a kimono with a pad and paper, ready to make notes, seeming to believe he could learn from you.

  I met Bowie through a mutual friend and asked if we could use his songs on the soundtrack of the BBC adaptation of my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. He agreed, and said he also had ideas for some original music. When he was composing this, and I expressed fear that parts of the music was either too fast or slow, I can’t remember which, he hurried back to his pad near Montreux in Switzerland, spending the night re-doing everything. He’d never composed for film before: he had wanted to make the score for The Man Who Fell to Earth but was too knackered after filming to get down to it.

  In his Bowie: A Life, Dylan Jones uses a collage or dialogical method, collecting the voices of those who knew or worked with Bowie and running them together chronologically. It is a pleasure to hear from everyone: lovers, managers, musicians, journalists, Croydon girl Kate Moss, musical figures such Carlos Alomar, Earl Slick, Mike Garson and Tony Visconti. And we hear all the Spinal Tappish gossip. The time Jimmy Page spilled beer on Bowie’s silk cushion and blamed Ava Cherry; and when a clearly envious Paul McCartney invited him over and then couldn’t bear to talk to him, but got Linda to instead. The time Bowie and John Lennon went on holiday to Hong Kong and were determined to try monkey brains. And how, when Bowie’s shows had intervals, he’d sit in the dressing room watching Coronation Street on VHS.

  More importantly, as a more-or-less single parent, Bowie brought up his son, the film-maker Duncan Jones, impeccably, and it is amusing to think of him and Lennon talking together about being good fathers. Bowie always said that Keith Richards was less out of it than he liked others to believe, being an ace at Trivial Pursuit, for instance, but the same was true of Bowie himself.

  Many Bowie stories are as familiar as tales from the life of Jesus, but most impressive about the useful biographical method which Jones uses are the accounts by then youngsters like Nick Rhodes, Neil Tennant, Siouxsie Sioux and Dave Stewart of seeing Bowie as Ziggy on Top of the Pops and suddenly understanding something about their lives and what they would go on to do in music. Bowie appealed to those who wanted to get out of Bromley or anywhere that resembled it – most of Britain in the 1970s. His kids’ song ‘Kooks’ really is wonderful; he was liberating and did want to ‘let the children boogie’.

  Bowie and Iman came to visit Sachin and Carlo, our twin sons, when they were born, bringing gifts. That night Paul McKenna, who was a pal, tried to hypnotise Bowie into quitting smoking, but he clearly didn’t want to be hypnotised and didn’t
want to quit, but he pretended for Paul. After, I remember him standing on the steps of my house, begging me to get him some fags. ‘Can’t we go together?’ I suggested. ‘But I can’t go anywhere,’ he said, gesturing at Shepherd’s Bush.

  Being flattered and fawned over your whole life isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be, and, in his last years in New York, he gave up pleasure for happiness. It seemed he returned to the blessedly ordinary satisfactions of being a good parent and husband. Not that someone like him could give up being an artist; unlike most pop stars, his last albums were a development. If, inevitably, this story is sad at the end – Bowie never seemed the sort of person to die on you – it is inspiring to hear what he meant to so many people.

  He always sent a birthday card, which, characteristically, he made himself. He was our starman, and he knew it. He did it for us, always prepared to be the hero we wanted, a real star, not a musician in jeans and a T-shirt with dirty hair, but a glorious glowing beauty like Jean Harlow, Marlon Brando or Joan Crawford, someone who lived it all the time, and who was never bored or ordinary for one moment. Anyone, anywhere, who has ever listened to pop and danced in their bedroom will have listened to him, and always will.

  His Father’s Watch

  In Georges Simenon’s When I Was Old, his wonderful journal of the years 1960–1962, which apparently he wrote for his children, and where he is mercilessly honest and shows what an acute self-observer he is, the writer tells us that when his father was dying, he, Georges, felt the absolute necessity of going with a ‘Negress’. This was clearly a pleasure of his, since later he would have an affair with Josephine Baker. But on this occasion the notable thing is that he paid for sex with his father’s watch, about which, as he tells us, he felt suitably guilty, though not so guilty as not to do it.

  Simenon was a great writer who used a cheap or popular form – crime fiction, mostly – to write about important things: theft, blackmail, murder, prostitution, deceit and cruelty. Betrayal – and its necessity, in particular – is a theme of his, because, as he makes clear, none of us are ever far from either being a perpetrator or victim. Security in this world is not an option. All of us are always on the verge of being let down or losing our place.

  The other thing about which Simenon remained constant was the market, for which he laboured incessantly and cheerfully, writing book after book. There were, of course, numerous movie adaptations of his work, as well as TV series and translations. Simenon was no unworldly artist. Stendhal had noted that success required shamelessness, and Simenon understood the market, he was good at PR and he knew how capitalism worked. In 1927, for 100,000 francs, he arranged to write a novel while suspended in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge for seventy-two hours. The characters in the novel would be decided by the public. It didn’t take place, but it could have; Simenon was aware that the legend was sufficient. But he also knew that one could become trapped inside the legend, and he didn’t like to be trapped.

  Simenon had an animus against categorisation and was in favour of complexity, particularly when it came to himself. With regard to literary values, he wanted to challenge the snobbishness of the time. Every year, when the Nobel Prize came up, he hoped or sometimes expected to be chosen. Yet he didn’t want to write for scholars, critics or students. He wrote brilliantly organised throwaway books for the public, while wanting to be known as a great artist. Somehow he succeeded in doing both. He eradicated traditional ideas of the artist by making pulp fiction into an art form; he wrote fast-moving novels about trashy people, which could be read by ordinary folks, usually in one sitting, perhaps in a waiting room. Or on a train journey.

  Like Hemingway and Steinbeck, whom he admired, Simenon went back to the people, writing for them and about them. In his stories he says little about his characters’ internal life. They are just people who do ordinary things for a long time, and then, suddenly, something significant occurs which changes them. Simenon read and admired Freud, but he never wanted to be a psychologist in the manner of Stendhal, Flaubert or Proust. After Joyce there weren’t many avenues for literary writers to pursue, but Simenon returned good writing to the story, which is where it will always belong. Colette, for whom he briefly worked as a journalist, supposedly encouraged him to remove all traces of beauty or literature from his work. He said, when interviewed by the Paris Review, ‘I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice.’

  He learned to ‘kill his darlings’, as William Faulkner – a writer Simenon also liked – advised. This was a brilliant suggestion. Simenon became a minimalist; he learned to show everything quickly, and, as a result, his work has a relentless energy and straightforwardness: austerity plus speed.

  There are perfect sentences, such as, ‘It was cold. It was raining. It was slushy.’ Simenon, like P. G. Wodehouse, is admired by all generations of writers as a master, for few writers are as competent with the difficult balancing act of structure and plot, as well as of atmosphere and character. And his romans noirs, written in a direct and filmic style, with their nocturnal feel and their crooks, deceivers and marginalised bums, were perfect for the war-torn periods through which Simenon lived. And they have become perfect for us.

  Simenon was born in Liège in 1903, and the German occupation of Belgium was probably the defining event of Simenon’s early life, when he learned that any ordinary individual might have to cheat, lie, betray or even kill in order to survive. During this time he worked as a journalist and wrote anti-Semitic material for a collaborationist paper. But he didn’t want to be a journalist. His head was full of people, and they never went away or left him alone.

  At the same time as he was working on When I Was Old, Simenon wrote The Train – which is also concerned with occupation, and is exquisite in its beauty and simplicity. Set in the early 1940s, it is the story of Marcel, a quiet, ordinary, tender man who mends radios for a living, and who is forced to flee his town with his wife and child when the Nazis invade France. Ordinary people, caught in the wheels of history, can wake up one morning and find they are refugees.

  Marcel and his pregnant wife and child are separated. During this time he begins a relationship with a woman who sits with him on a packed train taking refugees across the war-torn country. This is not a story of sexual desire; it is of a passionate, mind-changing – if not life-changing – love. The point is not that just anyone could have beautiful sex with a stranger, it is that there are worse dangers: one could fall in love with them. Then they could accompany you to disaster. Even worse, you cannot know until it is almost too late if you have unconsciously chosen a partner who will ruin you. This would be one of the darkest temptations, as well as one of the most difficult to resist.

  The Train suggests that under certain circumstances war can at least free people from their allotted roles, and Marcel informs us that he has never felt as liberated and vital as when he is fleeing. Out of time, as it were, and freed from habit, the world recovers its savour and a person can feel very pleased to be alive. Simenon sketches the woman lightly, and she is more or less anonymous to Marcel, as he is to her. This not knowing is important; it makes the relationship work. Knowledge would be counter-erotic; there would be responsibilities, debt and inhibition.

  There is no doubt that, when he finds his wife, child and new baby, he will reunite with them. Eventually, the family return home, where everything in their small house is untouched, and comfortable habit envelops them once more. The new element in his life is the fact that Marcel secretly begins to write an account of his adventure ‘off the rails’. This is intended for the youngest child, for whom Marcel wants to offer a rounded picture of himself. Therefore the novella itself becomes a kind of memoir, not unlike the thoughts about marriage and domestic life Simenon was writing contemporaneously in his note
books. Since the truth cannot be spoken or integrated yet, it must be preserved and written down. Someone, sometime, will hear and understand it. But not now.

  The Train illustrates Simenon’s life-long ambivalence about bohemia and the bourgeois life. The theme of someone leaving one life and descending into another is common in Simenon’s work, and often his characters exit their lives to become murderers or serial killers. Simenon calls it ‘the moment of downfall’. Yet if we break through the veneer of civilisation, where sadism is disguised as morality, we will find, underneath, another Hobbesian world of competition and cruelty.

  But criminals, you could say, are enviably free. For a time the rules don’t matter to them; temporarily, they are beyond good and evil. In this uncontrolled zone we know they will perish in the end. But, on the other hand, civilisation is too constraining, and aggression will be turned inwards. Simenon’s characters veer between the desire to survive in a mortified but civilised world, and the temptations of life outside of it. They desire both. They can never settle.

  In truth, it is civilisation which is truly dangerous, and Simenon, although he was wealthy, successful and hard-working for most of his life – and lived in large houses served by many staff – was aware of this. He thought of becoming a doctor, but he also believed he could have become a ‘criminal’, and he confesses in his diary that ‘I have made love in the street, in passageways, when the unexpected arrival of a policeman could have changed my fate.’ Criminal or doctor: whichever it was, he wanted to study what he called ‘man’, whom, like Freud, he could only understand through his aberrations.