I had, at least, found a good GP. The first time I saw her, I was in for nearly an hour. She asked me if I felt like Job. GPs don’t usually ask you if you feel like Job. I told her that I did. If I hadn’t yet had the plagues and the locusts, I had certainly had the boils. The GP referred me to a psychotherapist. At first I found therapy weird and embarrassing, but after a few months the twisting pains in my knees started to feel less sharp. I knew I would have to find a way to earn a living, even if I was still in pain. I saw an ad for a proofreader for Loot, a magazine selling second-hand cars. I also saw an ad asking for someone to work at the Southbank Centre, doing ‘literary PR’. Luckily, I had the interview at the Southbank Centre first.
Maura started the literature programme at the Southbank Centre, and revived the Poetry International festival started there in 1963 by the theatre director Patrick Garland and Ted Hughes. Maura is a poet and she looks like a poet. I don’t mean she looks like Byron or Keats, but she has wild curls and big brown eyes, and when I saw her at the interview I couldn’t help thinking: this is what a poet should look like. Maura has read more poetry than anyone I’ve met. She’s brilliant and she’s erudite, but she’s also warm and funny. When she phoned me to let me know that I’d got the job, I felt like someone who had been trying to stay afloat in an icy sea but had been spotted by a passing boat and lifted to dry land.
The job was a part-time freelance role for two days a week. I could drive to work, in the seventeen-year-old Ford Fiesta my mother had lent me, park in the underground car park and get the lift right up to the office. At first it was difficult to get around, but as the months passed, I was able to move more. When Maura’s deputy left, I applied for her job and got it. Now I was actually organizing and presenting literary events and not just promoting them. Through Maura, in fact, I got one of the things Freud thought was necessary for a successful, happy life: work you believe in and love. I had the opportunity to meet some of the greatest writers and poets of the twentieth century. I met almost every living writer I had heard of. I had dinner with Martin Amis, and Doris Lessing, and Salman Rushdie and Derek Walcott and Octavio Paz. I got to read poetry and literature I would never have read before. And when Maura left, and was no longer my boss, I gained a friendship that has so far lasted for quarter of a century.
Maura’s poems are like her. They are subtle and tender and intelligent and complex, but they are also often witty and surprisingly down to earth. In her poems, you get a glimpse of a life in a handbag, a handkerchief or a snow storm. In her poem ‘Up on the Roof’, for example, she writes about a conversation on a roof while gazing at the stars.
I cannot name the dust of starlight, the pinheaded planets,
but I can join the dots to make a farming tool,
the belt of a god: all any of us needs is work,
mystery, a little time alone up on the roof.
I couldn’t put it better. I couldn’t, in fact, put it a fraction as well. We all need work. We all need a sense of what we don’t know and we all need time to gaze at the stars. For a poet, a writer, or an artist, ‘work’ is what you produce. It may or may not be how you earn your living – very few poets actually earn a living from writing poems – but it is certainly the fruit of your labour. And it is labour. As Siri Hustvedt made clear in The Blazing World, creating anything you could call art takes massive effort. Picasso’s scrawled lines on a napkin may have looked easy, but that’s because no one had seen the decades of practice that brought those lines alive.
‘I can’t remember not writing,’ Maura told me. ‘I loved rhyme as a child. I think most children do. It was pleasure more than refuge. I wasn’t an angst-ridden teenager in my room.’ We were in the sitting room of the house in South London where I have spent so many happy evenings with her, her partner David and their two very lovely daughters. It’s common to talk about a ‘book-lined room’, but theirs is a book-lined house. I have never seen so many books in one home – and I’ve got a fair few in mine.
Maura won a poetry competition when she was ten and first started getting her poems published as a teenager. Since then, she has edited several poetry anthologies and published six poetry collections, two of them shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, poetry’s version of the Booker. In all our years of friendship, I have never actually talked to Maura in detail about her work, and decided the time had come. So was there, I asked, a moment when she thought ‘I am a poet’?
Maura glanced down at the pulsating red bar on my phone and laughed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve never thought that. I remember some years back, my mother bought me a set of perfume and a mirror called “Poet” and she was so thrilled to find it. In the US, I’ve noticed there’s a beer called “Poet”. There’s also a paint shade called “Poet”. It’s a sort of wafty notion, a Farrow & Ball shade.’
I’m a fan of Farrow & Ball. A few years ago I got my kitchen cupboards painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Lamp Room Grey’. But poetry is not Farrow & Ball. I’ve interviewed some of the world’s leading poets and very few of them talk about being poets. They talk about writing poems. Art is about making something, not being something. If you want to make something well, you have to practise it a lot. Like all good writers and artists, Maura spent years learning her craft. And writing a poem is, for her and pretty much all the other poets I’ve interviewed, still hard work.
It often starts, she explained, ‘with a bit of an idea, or a sensation going on up here,’ and she patted her head, ‘in your brain. In my case, on the right-hand side of it. Something begins to fizz a bit, and then you start to write things down. That,’ she said with a rueful smile, ‘is the easy bit. Then all the drafting begins, the endless drafting. There’s the getting of it down and once you’ve done that there’s quite a long process, endless agonizing over commas and line breaks and full stops and whether or not you’re saying the same thing twice. I’m not saying it’s like doing a crossword puzzle, but it’s the same kind of concentrated looking to find what will work and fit.’
Some poems, she said, take years to finish. Most take several months. Many people who read a poem have no idea how long it might have taken to write. ‘The thing about poetry,’ she said, ‘because it’s short, if you do pick up an anthology, you’re buffeted with all these emotions and perceptions that writers over centuries have found. It is absolutely extraordinary that in a sonnet – fourteen lines – you can experience such a different outlook on the world. You can experience so many shoes in which to stand.’
So how, I asked her, does the task of writing poetry relate to her life? Maura took a sip of her tea as she thought. ‘Well, it’s not passing the time! To be a writer is supposed to be a vocation – and rather like saying “yes, I am a poet”, there’s something slightly absurd, it seems to me, in claiming that it is my vocation. But I do think that writing poetry is part of my purpose in life. It’s what I want to be doing.’
And what about this question of being ‘difficult’? Quite a few people seem to think contemporary poetry is hard to understand, just because it doesn’t always rhyme or scan. ‘Poetry,’ said Maura, ‘more than any other art form, suffers from being accused of being difficult. Part of that difficulty lies in the fact that, in order to unlock some poems, you need, as a reader, to come to them and work at it a bit. I want my work to be readily understood at a reading, but to then reward the reader with much more subsequently. That’s why they take so long to write because there’s the endless weaving in of what you hope will be a sustaining kind of grace.’
I first met Paul Brandford at Shandy Hall, the place where Laurence Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy. He’s a friend of Patrick Wildgust, the visionary curator of Shandy Hall and the man who organized that world premiere of Cock and Bull in the village hall. Paul told me that he was an artist, and that his work was ‘very good’. I attacked him for his arrogance. We have been friends ever since. Every few months, we meet to go round an exhibition and then, of course, have a drink. Paul teaches workshops and gives to
urs at the Royal Academy. He has given me private tours of David Hockney, and the Summer Exhibition and Anish Kapoor. He always makes me look at an artist’s work with fresh eyes.
Paul grew up in Welwyn Garden City. His father worked for the company that made Polyfilla and his mother worked in a factory packaging drugs. His parents weren’t keen on books and art, he told me as we sipped red wine in paper cups in his Hackney studio. He decided to do an arts foundation course because he ‘didn’t want to do the academic stuff’ and was sent a list of galleries to visit before he started. It was a trip to the National Gallery that changed his life. ‘Manet, Corot, Degas, that nineteenth-century stuff,’ he said, ‘where the language of paint was breaking away from the illusionism. Just walking around there for the very first time, I thought “fucking hell, this is what can be done”. In a way, that’s all I’ve been doing since, just finding out what can be done.’
His parents weren’t thrilled with his career choice. ‘I think,’ he said with the cheeky grin that always cheers me up, ‘my dad probably wanted me to be some sort of sportsman. Being an artist was probably the reverse of that. Not manly enough. I do love sport. As you know, I’m an Arsenal fan.’ I nodded wearily. Show me a man who isn’t. ‘But art,’ he said, ‘is a tough business. You take many rejections. Most people aren’t interested. You have to have some sort of belief that drags you through the hard times. It’s not an easy choice.’
That’s one of the reasons I have come to admire Paul so much. In art, it’s nearly all rejection. You do it because you have to do it, not because you’re expecting rounds of applause. Mind you, Paul has won prizes. He’s had pictures in the Summer Exhibition and major exhibitions of his work. By the time he asked me to write a piece for his website, I agreed with his assessment of his work. He is a ‘very good’ artist. He paints fierce, subtle, haunting portraits of politicians, dictators and people in authority, paintings full of energy and rage. In the face of Tony Blair, for example, you can just about see the eyes, but what you really see is paint and shadow and a terrible blankness. In Dying for a Piss, you see soldiers urinating on Afghan corpses. These are paintings about politics and power and they bring to mind what the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt said about the ‘banality of evil’.
Like all good artists, he draws nourishment from the greats. ‘The Rembrandt thing at the National Gallery,’ he said, ‘I went about twelve times. Trying to get to grips with how they’re made, or maybe just how they affect you. You can never put your finger on the thing, which means it’s still alive. Somehow, it’s weirdly compulsive, because you don’t get to the bottom of it. You’ll never get to the bottom of it. It’s like an addiction. Is it a career? It’s probably more of an addiction than a career.’
It takes, he thinks, ‘a couple of decades to get some degree of quality in your work’. A couple of decades of toiling, and trying, and failing, and toiling, and trying and failing again. ‘If I’m starting a large painting,’ he said, ‘what I’d like to do is give it four or five days in a row. If it’s going badly, you try not to leave the room until you’ve rescued it to some extent. You might create something, you think it’s great. You turn up the next day, it’s bloody awful. The important thing isn’t what it is, the important thing is what it could become.’
I first met Clare Higgins when I interviewed her for The Independent. She was starring in a play called Mrs Klein about the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. She has been in Doctor Who, The Golden Compass and Downton Abbey, but her best work is on the stage. She has won the Olivier Best Actress award twice and has been described as ‘the greatest British actress we have when it comes to communicating overwhelming tragic emotions on stage’. She is a great actor and one of the most interesting people I have met. So I was very pleased when, at the end of our interview, she offered to meet me for a drink after the play.
I saw Mrs Klein on the day I found out that my cancer had come back. I thought I was going to die. We are all going to die, of course, but I thought I was probably going to die quite soon. I had spent the morning at the hospital and the afternoon working out how to tell my mother the news. I didn’t get round to cancelling the drink and then thought I might as well go along anyway. The play was very good indeed. Clare Higgins was brilliant, and we had a nice drink afterwards, but I’d be lying if I said that I managed to forget the shadows on that scan.
The third time I met her was after I lost my job, at a play down the road from me at the Arcola Theatre. It was a play called Clarion, about a tabloid paper that runs headlines like ‘Fury Over Sharia Law for Toddlers!’ and has upped its sales by having front-page stories about immigration every day for a year. ‘Ambiguity’s for cunts!’ screams the editor at his terrified staff. One of them is Fleet Street veteran Verity, a former foreign correspondent who’s now a columnist and one of the few people who dares to stand up to the editor. The play is funny and sad and, for any journalist, bitter-sweet. ‘I never thought I’d watch our whole world disappear,’ says Verity at one point. Nor, I felt like yelling out, did I.
Clare Higgins was magnificent as Verity. In the bar afterwards I told her. She gave me a hug and we agreed to meet for lunch.
‘Your column was the first thing I used to turn to,’ she told me as I joined her at her usual table at Joe Allen’s. I felt a bit embarrassed. If I was a different kind of person, I might have shrugged and said it was water under the bridge. I might even have said that losing it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Unfortunately, I am not that kind of person. I told her that losing my job as a columnist had felt worse to me than heartbreak, worse than illness, worse almost than cancer, because at least cancer wasn’t anyone else’s fault. When I heard the words spoken aloud, they sounded ridiculous. ‘Do you think,’ said Clare, ‘that that’s because if you are allowed to talk about the things on your heart, you can cope with all those other betrayals, massive though they may be? But if that voice is taken away from you, you are truly in the wilderness, screaming?’
Gosh. I didn’t expect anyone else to put it in such dramatic terms, but yes, I told her, that was exactly how I felt. That’s the thing with actors, or at least with great actors. Like all great artists, they understand the human heart.
For her, it all started with a nosebleed. She was fourteen, and she was watching Judi Dench play both Perdita and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. ‘For me,’ she said, ‘it was the beginning of a rip in the fabric of my universe. I thought: my God, there is someone else out there. I also remember thinking I wish I’d never come, because now I’ve got to try and do that. Nothing could stop me,’ she said. ‘It was willpower. Sheer, dogged, damn fucking determination. And anyone who got in the way . . . I will kill you first. I remember thinking that if I get through my three years at LAMDA, if I ever am an actress, if anyone ever pays me to do this job, how lucky would it be for me to be paid to express the love of the poets who kept me standing.’
Lucky for her? Lucky for us, I think. ‘When I started to work,’ she said, ‘when I started to realize that I’m safe on stage in front of a thousand people, that I actually had been given the gift to say: through this text I can now give – and it’s nothing to do with me. This is the thing that has blessed my life. When I got my first standing ovation, I was looking behind me going “what’s going on?” It became a regular thing.’
When I first interviewed Clare, I remembered her talking about a production she had been in of Death of a Salesman. ‘At a certain point in the show,’ she said, ‘there’d be this strange noise that I’ve never really heard in the theatre before, and it was men crying. To me,’ she said, ‘theatre is what church ought to be, a dark place where you’re allowed to have these extreme feelings together. That beautiful silence where we can all collectively mourn.’
I remember that production of Death of a Salesman. I remember the crying, because I was crying, too. I was crying for Willy Loman, and his lost job and his shattered hopes and I was crying because Arthur Miller had done what all grea
t artists do. Out of pain and failure and struggle, he had made something beautiful.
Part III
Fighting Back
‘The heart is a very resilient little muscle’
Woody Allen
Sex and Borgen and ice cream
At a party, I met a man. He had a reputation as a serial seducer, and all through the party I kept swatting him away like a fly. When he told me that I was ‘the best woman there’, I gave in to flattery and agreed to go and have ‘a bite’. As he slouched over his risotto, I thought he looked extremely unattractive, but our farewell peck outside Green Park Tube ended up so passionate that we almost knocked the recycling bin down.
You’d have thought, by the age of fifty, that I’d have learnt. You’d have thought, for example, that when you meet someone who’s famous as a womanizer, and they tell you that you’re exceptionally beautiful, and sexy, and smart, you’d realize that the reason they sound so sincere is that they say these things all the time.
It is, of course, nice to have a few nights of flattery and enthusiastic sex. We watched Borgen and ate ice cream in bed. We talked about books. We talked about art. I was reading a novel called Barracuda. He was re-reading Proust. What wasn’t quite such fun was our walk on Hampstead Heath. Afterwards, he told me that he should probably mention that he had dates lined up with other women. When he left, he said that I hadn’t ‘heard the last’ of him. I told him that he had certainly ‘heard the last’ of me.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 16
