My thirteenth novel was published on Thursday. Throw in non-fiction and that’s eighteen publication days. You’d think I’d be relaxed about the whole business by now. Ho-hum, another bloody book … what’s for lunch? But it doesn’t seem to work like that for me. I still go on thinking the world will look physically different on publication day – splendour in the grass, glory in the flower, an overarching rainbow of jubilation. And even more unreasonably, I still go on thinking I will look different too. A new spring in my step, a new insouciance. But the world wakes, as it has for eighteen books, with its usual cruel indifference, and I remain the fretful novelist of old.
So why, exactly, the fretting? I think it’s the necessary condition of making something that requires approval. If one wrote for oneself, happy in the act of creation alone, there’d be none of this. To lose oneself in making art – all questions of quality apart – is an incomparable way of living life. Never mind self-expression. The truly wonderful thing about being a painter, a writer or a musician is escaping self. You light the touchpaper, step back, and watch the pages or the canvas explode.
People ask writers where they get their ideas. The answer is – from the work. Start with an idea and you’re dead in the water. Inspiration doesn’t precede the work, it finds itself in it. Down you go into the deep dark tunnel which is writing, wondering when, if ever, you will find the light, and so long as you are down there, unsure, perplexed, not someone you recognise, not anyone at all, just a thing that burrows, you are happy. But then, alas, the light, at which moment you see what you have done, declare it good, like God on the morning of the sixth day, and from then on start wondering if others will see what you have done as well. Call this the corruption of art, when the letting it make you is over, when noise and self obtrude on silence and mystery, and the mechanical side – vanity, reward, applause – takes control.
The best writerly advice I’ve ever heard was Kingsley Amis’s. As soon as you’ve finished one book, start another. That way you get the better of disappointment. Fall out of love with the book that’s done (and probably won’t succeed) and fall in love immediately with another. For infidelity mends a broken heart. The other justification for this is that it keeps you in the domain of art, still tunnelling in the dark, far from the treacherous blandishments of public notice. Do this and publication days will come and go as chaff before the wind. That’s the theory. But the flesh is weak and up we come, in spite of art, to collect our wage among the living.
The other thing I have against publication day is the morbidity it engenders. Another book, another two years gone, another three hundred pages closer to the grave. In order to dispel such thoughts I cast my mind back to the moment when my first novel was accepted. Time has passed but at least I’m a little less green now than I was then. There, as I choose to remember it, I stand, looking in perplexity from the poet Dennis Enright to the biographer Jeremy Lewis, guardians in those days of the fiction portals of Chatto & Windus, wondering why they were looking in perplexity at each other, all three of us lost for words, because they hadn’t quite said yes, so I couldn’t quite say thank you. In the end, they told me that what was needed was an outside arbiter of taste, someone who could confirm or otherwise what they did or didn’t think of what I’d written – in other words, an agent – and when I asked where one went for one of those, they pointed with their thumbs and said, ‘Upstairs.’
Up the single flight I therefore went, knocked on the door of Mark Hamilton of A. M. Heath, mentioned who’d sent me (though I think he guessed), left my manuscript, and returned seven days later as he told me to. Enright and Lewis were waiting for me. Perhaps they’d been there all week. They watched me mount the stairs and watched me come back down again. ‘Well?’ Enright asked. ‘He seems to like it,’ I said. ‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed Lewis, pumping my hand. And that was that. Publishing as it used to be. One building, one flight of steps, few words, small advance.
So yes, I’m less green but not less all the other things. Indeed, the shock of coming up from the tunnel is even greater this time than before. I’m not sure whether that’s because I was down a little longer, or was led a little deeper, or because the beckoning spirits were not ones with whom I was familiar. They joked with me and jossed me less for one thing. And there were more women among them than men.
Prufrock heard the mermaids singing each to each but didn’t think they would sing to him. That’s faintness of heart speaking. The mermaids will sing to anyone who’ll listen. But what determines which voices a writer will listen to and why he will suddenly listen to new ones? I have no answer to that. Maybe he just gets tired of those who normally keep him company. I heard women’s voices, anyway, as I wrote , and let them take me wherever they wanted to go. And when they told me to shut up for a change, I did their bidding.
Among the reasons that the title of this novel is , with two strokes across it, like a musical notation, or as though the letter is being smoked the way a tramp smokes a fag end he’s found in a rubbish bin, is that it’s a hushed story about hushed events. Unowned memories hang in the narrative like photographs taken by one doesn’t know whom. Never trust the teller, D. H. Lawrence said, trust the tale. So don’t look to me to tell you what I’ve done. I’m still rubbing my eyes against the light.
Cropper
I fear it must attest to the essential morbidity of this column that almost the only time I refer to Coronation Street is when someone dies on it. Last time it was the fragile Alma, who departed in a becomingly confused state listening to Perry Como. We should all shuffle off as peacefully, though I’ve chosen Richard Tauber singing ‘Goodnight Vienna’. If I make it through that I want the same singer singing ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’ to Marlene Dietrich, and if I’m still alive then, it’s obviously going to be a long night and I’ll need the St Matthew Passion. In this instance, the death on the Street hasn’t happened yet but, barring divine intervention, will have before you are able, reader, to send flowers.
This isn’t a spoiler. Not only has Hayley Cropper’s death been dramatically imminent for some time, it has become second-page news in the popular press because the actress playing Hayley believes as fervently in assisted suicide as her character. The furore is of the usual uneducated sort. How dare they show children the way to suicide before the watershed! I would worry more, myself, that we show children the way to intellectual suicide whenever we let them watch Simon Cowell, but anti-euthanasia campaigners have a narrow understanding of what a life is.
Those who express pious concern about sex and swearing on the box the same: we violate the minds of the young with every manner of crassness and triviality, and then worry lest a profanity offend their hearing. Suffer the little children to gibber, so long as they grow up unsullied of ear and chaste of body – which they won’t anyway.
Hayley, notwithstanding, is off. And if she does go the way she promises to, in charge of her own final hours, a whole person in the arms of the strange man she loves, we should salute her. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch. Too painful.
That this has a lot to do with Julie Hesmondhalgh’s acting – that I am going to miss her shadow puppetry as much as I’m going to miss her shadow puppet – I don’t doubt. She has been the best thing in Coronation Street, along with David Neilson who plays her husband Roy, for years. And to be the best thing in Coronation Street is to be the best thing in any British soap opera – a verdict I reach, admittedly, without having seen all the others, but I have my finger on the pulse and what I know I know.
The premise of their relationship is somewhat convoluted – Hayley, a pre-operative transgender male to female, and sometime friend, incidentally, to the Alma who died listening to Perry Como (an early intimation of mortality), meets Roy who isn’t a pre-operative anything but carries a shopping bag and could be said to be in need of a boost to his self-image of some sort, though it’s Hayley who goes to Amsterdam (an early intimation of her free-thinking ways) for what I used to think was
called realignment but is actually called reassignment surgery.
Roy’s coming to terms with this, to say nothing of Hayley’s coming to terms with Roy (a humourlessly honourable pedant with a thing for model railways), has kept the writers of Coronation Street busy for the past fifteen years, masterfully steering the story out of the shallows of macabre curiosity into the deeper waters of an abiding and now tragic affection between two gauche and unglamorous people.
Detective dramas have come and gone on television recently, most of them overpraised. Too many lakes, too many dead children, too many wrongly accused paedophiles, and of course too many detectives. For my money, the tale of Hayley and Roy Cropper has knocked them all for six. And if you think Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch could have done it better, think again.
(Just an aside, but given our national obsession with the Old Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch, to say nothing of such Old Etonians as Dominic West, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne, Henry Faber and God knows how many more, isn’t it time we English stopped complaining about the Etonian complexion of the Cabinet and admitted that the minute a public schoolboy opens his mouth or shows us his dimple we go weak at the knees? Britons never never never shall be slaves? Pull the other one.)
But acting alone doesn’t account for my reluctance to watch Hayley die. No matter how well Julie Hesmondhalgh goes on to perform as Medea or Lady Macbeth, I doubt I will feel about them as I feel for Hayley. This is the point in a conversation about soap operas where the subject of catharsis invariably crops up, the classical view that art should purge us of immediate emotion and return us to life, restored to calm.
The justification for art lies in its being at once real and unreal: us but not us, us with the space to reflect on what we are, us as our own study and not the helpless victims of being – a familiarity tempered by remoteness that is beyond the reach of soap operas, partly because of the illusion of intimacy they create night after night, sometimes for years on end, and partly because they refuse both the artificiality of theatre and the fictionality of novels – even novels read out of the misbegotten impulse to ‘identify’.
I don’t mean this to be a qualitative distinction. Coronation Street is better written than many a play and film I’ve seen recently. But it isn’t in its nature to free us from the raw immediacy of experience, to position us simultaneously within suffering and outside it.
So Hayley will have to die without me because I can’t bear the naked, unmediated sadness of it.
Tenho saudades tuas
Let’s get the envy question out of the way. Yes, I would like it to have been me the 15,000 Madrileños, or better still Madrileñas, turned up at the Bernabéu Stadium to welcome to their club. Ever since I attended a bullfight on a school trip to Barcelona I have smelt blood in the sand, tasted churros from a sugared paper bag, and heard the crowd chanting my name. ’Oward! ’Oward! Never mind that I am not fleet of foot or brave of heart – am I not a matador, a galactico, in my soul?
And yes, all right yes, I would rather that the £300,000 (or is it merely euros?) Gareth Bale will be earning at Real Madrid every week – come rain or shine, regardless of whether he plays or sits on the bench, regardless of whether he scores or falls over in front of goal, regardless, in fact, of all contingencies including the collapse of the Spanish economy and the impoverishment of his Spanish fans – went to me.
I don’t say I am more or equally deserving; I don’t say I am deserving at all; I would simply relish being loved – and let’s not pretend that money is not now the prime signifier of popular affection – to the tune of four nicely presented semi-detached houses in Prestwich, north Manchester, per month.
Think of that – forty-eight a year, a round five hundred if Gareth Bale goes on to play at Real Madrid for a decade. I don’t actually want five hundred houses in Prestwich (though I can think of a few people I’d like to give an avenue or crescent of them to), but then neither, I suppose, does Gareth Bale. It’s just nice to know that you can buy up a suburb if you are of a mind to.
But neither money nor acclaim is what this is about. It’s Gareth Bale’s linguistic virtuosity I envy. ‘Hello, it’s a dream for me to play for Real Madrid,’ he said, smiling that still-wet-behind-the-ears, Welsh, mother’s-boy smile of his. ‘Thank you for the great welcome. Go Madrid!’ Only he said it in Spanish. Reader, two whole sentences of Spanish! ‘Es un sueño para mí jugar en el Real Madrid, gracias. Gracias por esta gran acogida. Hola Madrid!’ What wouldn’t a British prime minister give to be able to speak two whole sentences of Spanish? What wouldn’t I give to be able to say ‘Hola Madrid!’ and receive a gran acogida for it?
I don’t know where Bale was educated but my school was hot on languages. I studied French to A level, Spanish to O level, German for a year, Latin for the whole time I was there, and had to do an Italian paper at university. And to show for this polyglottery, what do I have? A deep, disturbing resentment of Gareth Bale. ‘Hala Madrid!’ he said, the little shit, and I am green with envy. In fact, thanks to my Spanish teacher, I pronounce it far better than Gareth Bale does. I know to slide my tongue between my lips, roll a bit of spit around and fill my mouth with ths. Mathrith. Mathrith, is how you say it, Garethth. But the difference is that he stood up there and delivered it and I am not able to. Too self-conscious.
To my ear, and no doubt to everybody else’s, I sounded a prat speaking a foreign language as a teenager and as a consequence everything I learned was turned by the corrosive power of embarrassment into forgetfulness. I shamed myself into lingual oblivion. Now, I can read a line or two of Dante but can’t order a cappuccino in Italy without making the shape of a cup with my hands, imitating the sound of a Gaggia machine, and then deciding I’m not thirsty after all.
And yet I am not a xenoglossophobe. From the earliest age I somehow needed, and knew, foreign words and expressions and peppered my conversation with them. Plus ça change, I apparently told my mother at around about the time she was trying to wean me on to the bottle. ‘Tenho saudades tuas,’ I used to write to my grandmother when I was away on holiday, knowing that ‘Miss you, Nanna’ inadequately rendered my desolation. And I have rarely been able to go a day since without having recourse to Schadenfreude. How else to universalise the daily satisfactions one takes in the misfortunes of others?
Nothing to inspire Schadenfreude in Gareth Bale’s progress, however. Which might be why questions of the morality of his transfer fee and salary are asked. Money and morality are uncomfortable bedfellows. That money is the root of all evil we know until we make a bit. But cynicism shouldn’t stop us asking how good a thing it is, in tough times, for huge amounts to go to a few people, allowing that one way or another it’s always the poor who finance them.
Real Madrid will recoup its investment many times over, we are told, by marketing the kitsch that goes with sporting celebrity, which means parents who can ill afford it having to buy their offspring shirts with Gareth’s name and number on it. And grown men, who can’t afford it either, will do the same – though they have only their own inanity to blame. If a tattoo is the last resort of the desperate, how lost to self-respect must you be to wear a shirt with someone else’s name on it?
My imagination falters at the moment of wanting, let alone buying, let alone wearing such a thing. I had my idols as a boy, but I still wouldn’t have been seen dead with the words Mrs Gaskell or F. R. Leavis on my back. And if I saw someone else wearing a shirt emblazoned with the name ’Oward, how would I feel? Reader, that’s eine rhetorische Frage.
Preacher man
You’ve got to hand it to Jesus. He didn’t settle for the easy part of being a rabbi, turning up to charity fundraisers or telling folksy parables about the wise man of Minsk to bored bar mitzvah boys. He went out, in Matthew’s words, ‘to cities’, or wandered by the seashore where ‘great multitudes were gathered unto him’. I have started to do the same. ‘Lecturing’, I call it. Addressing people in the streets on matters of practica
l morality, dress sense, litter – that sort of thing.
‘That’s not lecturing,’ my wife tells me. ‘That’s preaching.’
‘Preaching! Why is it preaching when all I am trying to do is warn young women that if they go on wearing six-inch heels they’ll be lame by the time they’re forty, that’s if they haven’t already walked underneath a truck while tweeting about Robbie Williams, an interest in whom is not compatible with live brain activity?’
‘There you go again,’ my wife says.
I recently saw a woman drop a scarf in Trafalgar Square. It was bright red and lay like a splash of blood coughed up by one of the lions. I bent to pick it up but I’m a slow bender and by the time I was upright she was halfway across the square. I took off after her, shouting ‘Madame!’ – a word she’d probably never heard before – then tried ‘Miss!’, ‘Lady!’, ‘Mrs Woman!’ (an expression from my father’s market days), and finally ‘Izvineetye, your babushka!’ on the reasonable assumption she was of the same nationality as everyone else currently traipsing around London.
No response. If anything, her pace quickened. My bad luck that she was the only woman in Trafalgar Square not wearing six-inch heels. I had to run to catch her in the end. I tapped her on the shoulder. When she turned I saw that she was wearing headphones. Now I have been careful about inveighing against the wearing of headphones in public places ever since a person apparently wired up to the usual musical inanities walked blindly into me, stopped in amazement and, before I could dress him down, told me that by wonderful coincidence he was listening to my latest novel on audiobook. I let him off with a caution.
But on this occasion I could think of nothing but the madness of making yourself so deaf to the world that if someone tells you are on fire, you can’t hear. Not waiting for her to remove the cans, I took her arm and told of the risks she faced.
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