And they’re playing my song.
May 2001
An Alternative Career
[Michael Ondaatje asked me to contribute a piece to an issue of the Canadian literary magazine Brick about alternative careers. This was, obviously, many years before my appearance in the film of Bridget Jones’s Diary . . .]
I always wanted to be an actor, in spite of early reverses.
I started out at the age of seven as a pixie in a school play in Bombay. My costume was made of orange crepe paper, and halfway through the little pixie dance I had to do with several other pixies, it fell off.
When I was twelve, I played the Promoter (that is, prosecutor) in Shaw’s Saint Joan. I had to sit at a table in a grubby white cassock and make copious notes with a quill pen. The only quill pen that could be found in Bombay was actually a ballpoint with a large red feather attached. I scribbled away merrily. After the play someone congratulated me on my performance and said that he had been especially impressed by the fact that I had been able to write for so long without ever needing to dip my quill pen into the ink.
At school in England the difficulties continued. In one production I played a swarthy Latin hound who got poisoned at the end of Act One. I was permitted a wonderfully melodramatic death scene, full of staggers and clutches at the throat, before crashing down behind a sofa. In Act Two, however, I had to lie behind the sofa for an hour with my legs sticking out. Stagehands climbed up above the stage and dropped peanut shells onto my face, trying to make my legs twitch. They succeeded.
Next I was cast as one of the lunatics in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, but then illness struck down the boy actor playing the megalomaniac hunchback woman doctor in charge of the lunatic asylum in which the play is set, and I was told to take over. (It was a single-sex school, so we were obliged to follow the boys-only casting philosophy of the Elizabethan theater.) I wore thick tartan leggings, a tweed skirt, and a Mad Cherman Akzent. The play was not a success.
At Cambridge I built myself a putty nose extension for a part in an Ionesco play, but on the first night, bending over a lady’s hand, I squished my fake hooter sideways and looked more like the Elephant Man than I would have liked.
In a badly under-rehearsed production of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, playing to a first-night front row full of English literature professors, I suddenly understood that the line I was speaking was the answer to the question I was about to be asked. The whole cast immediately panicked and began improvising in something like Jonsonian meter, trying to find our way to a bit—any bit—we knew. It took what seemed like hours, but we managed it. Not one of the assembled luminaries of the Cambridge literature faculty noticed a thing.
After graduating I spent a while involved in London fringe productions. In a production of Megan Terry’s Viet Rock I was required to insult an audience full of people in wheelchairs, attacking them for their apathy about the war. Why were they not marching in protest, why had they not been at the Grosvenor Square demonstration confronting the mounted police, I demanded righteously. The wheelchair people hung their heads, abashed.
In another production I went back into drag, wearing a long black evening gown and a long blond wig to play a sort of Miss Lonelyhearts figure in a play written by a friend who has since become a successful writer. To make the Nathanael West-ish point that such figures are often men, I also sported a prominent black Zapata mustache. My friend the now-successful writer still threatens from time to time to publish photographs of this performance.
After playing the blonde, I understood that I had a limited future in this line of work and ceased to tread the boards. The itch remains, however. A few years ago another frustrated actor, the writer, editor, and publisher Bill Buford, suggested that we should sign up one summer in the most out-of-the-way American summer-stock company we could find and spend a few happy months playing pixies, swarthy Latins, cassocked prosecutors, mad doctors, et cetera. It never happened, but I wish it had.
Maybe next year.
October 1994
On Leavened Bread
There was leavened bread in Bombay, but it was sorry fare: dry, crumbling, tasteless, unleavened bread’s paler, unluckier relation. It wasn’t “real.” “Real” bread was the chapati, or phulka, served piping hot; the tandoori nan, and its sweeter Frontier variant, the Peshawari nan; and for luxury, the reshmi roti, the shirmal, the paratha. Compared to these aristocrats, the leavened white loaves of my childhood seemed to merit the description that Shaw’s immortal dustman, Alfred Doolittle, dreamed up for people like himself: they were, in truth, “the undeserving poor.”
My first inkling that there might be more to leavened bread than I knew came on a visit to Karachi, Pakistan, where I learned that a hidden order of nuns, in a place known as the Monastery of the Angels, baked a mean loaf. To buy it you had to get up at dawn—that is, a servant had to get up at dawn—and stand in line outside a small hatch in the monastery’s wall. The nuns’ baking facilities were limited, the daily “run” was small, and this secret bakery’s reputation was high. Only the early bird caught the loaf. The hatch would open, and a nun would hand the bread out to the waiting populace. Loaves were strictly rationed. No bulk buying was permitted. And the price, of course, was high. (All this I knew only by hearsay, for I never got up at such an unearthly hour to see for myself.)
The nuns’ bread—white, crusty, full of flavor—was a small revelation but also, on account of its unusual provenance, eccentric. It came from beyond the frontiers of the everyday, a mystery trailing an anecdote behind it. It was almost, well, fictional. (Later, it became fictional, when I put the monastery and its secret sisters into Midnight’s Children.) Now, in the matter of bread, such extraordinariness is not good. You want bread to be a part of daily life. You want it to be ordinary. You want it to be there. You don’t want to get up in the middle of the night and wait by a hatch in a wall. So while the Angels’ bread was tasty, it felt like an aberration, a break in the natural order. It didn’t really change my mind.
Then, aged thirteen and a half, I flew to England. And suddenly there it was, in every shop window. The White Crusty, the Sliced and the Unsliced. The Small Tin, the Large Tin, the Danish Bloomer. The abandoned, plentiful promiscuity of it. The soft pillowy mattressiness of it. The well-sprung bounciness of it between your teeth. Hard crust and soft center: the sensuality of that perfect textural contrast. I was done for. In the whorehouses of the bakeries, I was serially, gluttonously, irredeemably unfaithful to all those chapatis-next-door waiting for me back home. East was East, but yeast was West. *10
This, remember, was long before British bread counters were enlivened by the European invasion, long before olive bread and tomato bread, ciabatta and brioche; this was 1961. But the love affair that began then has never lost its intensity; the new exotic breads have served only to renew the excitement.
I should add that there was a second discovery, almost as thrilling: that is, water. Water back home was dangerous, had to be thoroughly boiled. To be able to drink water from the tap was a privilege indeed. In this respect, life in the West has somewhat declined in quality . . . but I have never forgotten that when I first arrived in these immeasurably wealthy and powerful lands, I found the first proofs of my good fortune in loaf and glass. A regime of bread and water has never, since that time, sounded like a hardship to me.
November 1999
On Being Photographed
Outside a photographic studio in South London, the famous Avedon backdrop of bright white paper awaits, looking oddly like an absence: a blank space in the world. In Avedon’s portrait gallery, his subjects are asked to occupy, and define, a void. Somebody once told me that a frog on a lily pad keeps its eyes (which see by relative motion) so still that they see nothing at all, until an insect flies across their field of vision and becomes literally the only thing there, captured without escape on the white canvas of the frog’s artificial, temporary blindness. Then snap, and it’s gone.
&nb
sp; There is something predatory about all photography. The portrait is the portraitist’s food. In a real-life incident I fictionalized in Midnight’s Children, my grandmother once brained an acquaintance with his own camera for daring to point it at her, because she believed that if he could capture some part of her essence in his box, then she would necessarily be deprived of it. What the photographer gained, the subject lost; cameras, like fear, ate the soul.
If you believe the language—and the language itself never lies, though liars often have the sweetest tongues—then the camera is a weapon: a photograph is a shot, and a session is a shoot, and a portrait may therefore be the trophy the hunter brings home from his shikar. A stuffed head for his wall.
It may be gathered from the above that I do not much enjoy having my picture taken, do not enjoy becoming, rather than exploring, a subject. These days writers are endlessly photographed, but for the most part these aren’t true portraits—they are publicity pix, and every newspaper, every magazine, must have its own. Mostly the photographers who work with writers are kind. They make us look our best, which isn’t always easy. They compliment us on being interesting. They ask our opinions. They may even read our books.
Richard Avedon is the author of some of the most striking portrait photographs of our day, but he is not, in the sense I have used the term, kind. He looks like an American eagle, and he sees his subjects, against white, with a bleak unblinking eye, whether they are writers or the mighty of the earth or anonymous folks or his own dying father. Perhaps, for Avedon, the stripped-down, head-on technique of his portraiture is a necessary alternative to the high-gloss fantasy world of his other life as a fashion photographer. In these portraits he is not selling but telling. And perhaps he is excited, too, by the fact that the people he is looking at are not members of that new tribe created by the camera: the tribe of professional subjects.
If the camera is a stealer of souls, is there not something Faustian about the contract between photographer and model, between the Mephistophilis of the camera and the beautiful young men and women who come to life, hoping for eternity (or at least celebrity), before its one-eyed stare? Models know how to look, the good ones know what the camera sees. They are performers of the surface, manipulators and presenters of their own extraordinary outsides. But finally the model’s look is an artificiality, it is a look about how to look. Off-duty models photograph one another ceaselessly, defining each passing moment of their lives—a lunch, a stroll, a meeting—by committing it to film. Garry Winogrand, quoted in Susan Sontag’s On Photography, says that he takes photographs “to find out what something will look like photographed,” and these professional subjects are similarly trapped—they can never step outside the frame. They become quotations of themselves. Until the camera loses interest, and they fade away. The story of Faust does not have a happy ending.
Avedon’s glamour photography has often touched on the theme of beauty and its passing. In a recent sequence the supermodel Nadja Auermann is seen in a series of surreal high-fashion clinches with an animated skeleton who is, of course, a photographer. Death and the maiden, a spectacular, with costumes by the great designers of the
world. Perhaps Avedon is making a joke at his own expense, the skeleton as grand old man; perhaps he is hinting at the passing of the supermodel phenomenon. Equally relevant, however, is his wholehearted willingness to enter into the high-budget, high-gloss elaboration of this type of mega-commercial rag trade extravaganza. This is no ivory tower artist.
The contrast with his portraiture could not be greater. The portrait photograph is Avedon’s naked stage, his blasted heath. Is it, I wonder, that one has to do something to exceptional beauties—cover their faces in icicles, make them dance with skeletons—to make them interesting to photograph; whereas unbeauties, the faces of real life, are rewarding even (only) when unadorned?
A great portrait photograph is about insides. Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt catch their people on the wing, as it were: often, their work is revealing because the subjects have been caught off guard. Avedon is more formal: the white sheet, the majestic old plate camera on its tripod. In this setup it is the insect that must be perfectly still, not the frog.
I have seen a lot of photographers work. I remember Barry Lategan in a natty beret snapping away during an interview, nodding every time I said something he liked. I began to watch him carefully, becoming dependent on his nods, growing addicted to his approval: performing for him. I remember Sally Soames persuading me to stretch out on a sofa and more or less lying on top of me to get the shot she wanted, a shot in which, unsurprisingly, I have a rather dreamy expression in my eyes. I remember Lord Snowdon rearranging all the furniture in my house, gathering bits of “Indianness” around me: a picture, a hookah. The resulting picture is one I have never cared for: the writer as exotic. Sometimes photographers come to you with a picture already in their heads, and then you’re done for.
I have seen a lot of photographers work, but I never saw anyone take as few pictures in a session as Avedon does with his big plate camera. Is it that he knows exactly what he wants, or that he is content to take what he gets, I wondered: for Mr. Avedon is a man on a tight schedule. Some people will give him more than others—so does the onus of becoming a good photograph rest with us, his non-professional subjects, who know rather more about our insides than our outsides? Must we reveal ourselves, or will his sorcery unveil us anyhow?
He positions me just as he wants me. I am not to sway, even by a millimeter, as I may go out of focus: it’s that critical. I must hold my expression for what seems an eternity. I find myself thinking: this is how I look when I am being made to look like this. This will be a photograph of a man doing something awkward to which he is not accustomed. Then, shrugging inwardly, I surrender to the great man. This is Richard Avedon, I tell myself. Just let him take the damn picture and don’t argue.
Photograph copyright © Richard Avedon. Photograph courtesy of EgoÏste magazine.
Two setups, one indoors in a long black raincoat and one indoors, very close up, in a pin-striped black shirt. I saw the results of the close-up first, and to tell the truth it shocked and depressed me. It looked, well, satanic. A part of me blamed the photographer; another, larger part blamed my face. The next time I met Avedon, his opening words were “So, did you hate it?” I was unable to grin and say, it’s great. “It’s very dark,” I said. “Oh, but the other picture’s much friendlier,” he comforted me. The other picture is the one accompanying this piece. Fortunately, I really like it. I’m not sure if “friendly” is the word for it (actually, I am sure, and “friendly” is not the word for it; I have a cheery, even chirpy way of looking at times, and this is definitely not one of those times), but I am, as they say, “comfortable” with the way it makes me look. The head is a good shape—my head is not always a good shape in photographs—and the beard is tidy and the face has a certain lived-in melancholy that I can’t deny I recognize from my mirror. The black Japanese raincoat looks great.
The way the subject of a photograph looks at the photograph is unlike the way anyone else will ever see it. You hope your worst bits haven’t been emphasized too much. You hope not to look like a bag person. You hope not to scare people who come across the picture by chance.
Let me try to see this picture as if I were not its subject. Richard Avedon was not interested in making a picture of a cheery novelist without a care in the world. I think he wanted to make a portrait of a writer to whom a number of bad things had happened. I think the picture shows some of that pain, but also, I hope, it shows something of resistance and endurance. It is a strong picture, and I am grateful to Avedon, for his solidarity, for his picture’s clarity, and for its strength.
November 1995
Crash
THE DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA
It has all been so disturbingly novelistic, and the novel I’m thinking of isn’t a fairy tale, although Diana’s story did begin like a fairy tale, nor is it a soap opera, a
lthough goodness knows the long saga of the battling Windsors has been sudsy enough. I’m thinking of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, whose recent film adaptation by David Cronenberg caused howls from the censorship lobby, particularly in Britain. It is one of the darker ironies of a dark event that the themes and ideas explored by Ballard and Cronenberg, themes and ideas which many in Britain have called pornographic, should have been so lethally acted out in the car accident that killed Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed, and their drunken driver.
We live in a culture that routinely eroticizes and glamorizes its consumer technology, notably the motorcar. We also live in the Age of Fame, in which the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities, too, a transformation that has often proved powerful enough to destroy them. Ballard’s novel, by bringing together these two powerful erotic fetishes—the Automobile and the Star—in an act of sexual violence (a car crash), created an effect so shocking as to be thought obscene.
The death of Princess Diana is just such an obscenity. One of the reasons why it is so very sad is that it seems so senseless. To die because you don’t want to have your picture taken! What could be more meaningless, more absurd? But in fact this frightful accident is freighted with meanings. It tells us uncomfortable truths about what we have become.
In our erotic imaginations, perhaps only the camera can rival the automobile. The camera, as a reporter, captures the news and delivers it to our door and, in more adoring mode, often looks upon beautiful women and offers them up for our delight. In Princess Diana’s fatal crash, the Camera (as both Reporter and Lover) is joined to the Automobile and the Star, and the cocktail of death and desire becomes even more powerful than the one in Ballard’s book.
Think of it this way. The object of desire, the Beauty (Princess Diana), is repeatedly subjected to the unwelcome attentions of a persistent suitor (the Camera) until a dashing, glamorous knight (riding his Automobile) sweeps her away. The Camera, with its unavoidably phallic long-lensed snout, gives pursuit. And the story reaches its tragic climax, for the Automobile is driven not by a hero but by a clumsy drunk. Put not your trust in fairy tales, or chivalrous knights. The object of desire, in the moment of her death, sees the phallic lenses advancing upon her, snapping, snapping. Think of it this way and the pornography of Diana Spencer’s death becomes apparent. She died in a sublimated sexual assault.