If part of writing consists in smuggling the efforts of the imagination past an internal policeman or customs officer, one function of that official is as a monitor of taste. The precepts of taste are determined by the past and its precedents: the laws of taste are case law; they are a guide to what has been done and so can be done again with safety. And for some writers the constraints are no handicap at all; fences only become barriers if you choose to leap them.
But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. It stunts. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar; Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity; but it’s better than a timorous toeing of the line.
Taste abuts on self-preservation. I have too much taste, find it hard to let go. And it is the audience that polices taste. Only if you can forget your audience can you escape. It was in an effort to evade this internal policeman that when I began to write sketches at Oxford I would often get drunk first, though since it’s never taken much to make me tipsy a quarter bottle of whatever was enough to see me through the evening. To begin with it was gin, then I sickened of that, tried whisky, finally graduating to vodka, really because it has almost no taste at all. I never had any hesitation in telling my friends (who drank much more than I did) what I was occasionally up to and was surprised by how shocked they were, solitary drinking thought by them to be the first step to perdition. It seemed perfectly natural to me, a way of loosening up the mind and eluding the censor that narrowed one’s scope, a thin vinegary voice which said, ‘You can’t write that. Other people can but not you. Not unless you want to make a fool of yourself.’
Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a kind of divestment, a striptease even, so that if I start off undressed I have nowhere to go.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought unique and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.*
To achieve this in writing must be satisfying, too, though short of being told so by readers (not easy if you’re Montaigne, say) the writer may never know he has hit the spot.
Emerson writes:
In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more
affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impressions [Emerson’s italics] with good-humoured inflexibility most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.*
The same note is struck by Seamus Heaney, who, when he is analysing the need the poet has to write, describes first how he appeases that need by learning to find his own unique and distinctive voice but
… then begins a bothersome and exhilarating second need, to go beyond himself and take on the otherness of the world in works that remain his own yet offer rights of way to everybody else… What poets do is to encourage our inclination to credit the prompting of our intuitive being. They help us to say in the recesses of ourselves… ‘Yes, I know something like that, too. Yes, that’s right. Thank you for putting words on it and making it more or less official.†
Never exactly a pushover, these notes of common humanity are harder to strike nowadays on account of competition from an unexpected quarter. Locating in one’s own life or imagination those thoughts, impulses or experiences that may be part of the common stock is not without risk and can be shaming. Though a sympathetic reader may nod and say, ‘I’ve thought that,’ the less sympathetic may be outraged and think the writer a brute for even daring to set it down.
Most aware of this nowadays because of their more immediate access to an audience and its responses are not novelists or writers of autobiography. Today the keenest searchers after a currency that they hope is common are the stand-up comedians. Their coin is laughter bred out of recognition, their stock in trade riffs that begin ‘Have you noticed that…’ – there following some observation (less hard won, the poor novelist may feel, than his or hers) and the more shocking and intimate the better, the nearer the bone they come the more likely they feel that they will tap into thoughts so shaming or unspeakable we had thought them peculiar to ourselves (and wanted to keep them that way).
No longer. There is nothing nowadays that comedians cannot say. Jaded though one may feel their observations may be, their aperçus contrived and seldom so spontaneous or joyously incidental or indeed thrown off as they would have us think, nevertheless the comedians are at the same game as the rest of us. Playwrights, novelists, autobiographers, poets or comedians, it makes no difference; Proust is on a continuum that stretches past Billy Connolly to Eddie Izzard, Bernard Manning and beyond. And should you doubt that look up Proust’s description of Charlus’s behaviour when he first sees the young violinist Morel on the railway station; transposed, it is a routine by Jerry Seinfeld.
If there is a beneficiary of all this intrepid soul-searching and delving into our most intimate secrets by the nation’s comedians seeking after common ground then I hope it will be a boy such as I was at fourteen, awkward, self-conscious and ridden by fears that seemed shameful and incommunicable. At the same time prudish and prurient, he feels himself set apart from his fellows and convinced of his own wickedness and hypocrisy. I hope there aren’t as many such boys or girls as once there were and that the efforts of the writers and the routines of the stand-ups will set them free. But there will always be some, there being no enlightenment that can prevail against the ineluctable capacity of the human spirit to imprison itself.
If writing is a form of striptease it’s easier when the author invents a satisfactory long-running eidolon such as Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, for instance, or John Updike’s Rabbit. I could have wished many (not that there are many) of my life’s stories onto such a figure while at the same time maintaining my reserve. But I have not written enough fiction for that and plays seldom allow of sufficient continuity to feature a recurrent character.
Much of my work I have stayed outside. I do not find myself in Forty Years On, for instance, though much of my reading is there. I am in some of my other plays but can’t find myself in others – The Madness of George III, for instance, or A Question of Attribution – and on the whole I prefer those plays from which I am absent to those in which I too clearly hear the sound of my own voice.
This absence from one’s own work is abolished by death, or will be in my case, I imagine, because of having kept a diary. In life a journal is a separate thing, a commentary running alongside one’s life even when (as in my case) extracts are occasionally published.
Death, though, coalesces all one’s writings and wipes out the difference. Virginia Woolf is remembered as much for her diaries as for what she would have thought of as her proper work, but all now is just the work of Virginia Woolf.
Though there are diaries and diaries. Virginia Woolf’s diary was livelier than her novels, as Philip Larkin’s diary was probably livelier than his poems, though in a different way. Her diary enhanced her reputation; his (he felt anyway) wouldn’t have, so his dutiful executrix put it into the shredder. Feeling as he did about death, the surprise to me still is that he cared.
When I do crop up in my own work I’m not a prepossessing figure. If I do write about (or at least around) myself the eidolon, the lay figure I advance into the picture and shelter behind, is generally downtrodden and middle-aged and often involved in some sort of pedagogic activity – a lecturer at a polytechnic, for instance (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf), a teacher
at the local comprehensive (Intensive Care). Even when I (if I can use the word) have a proper job, like the harassed provincial insurance man in Kafka’s Dick, the job gets elbowed out of the way because of academic pursuits. Since teaching undergraduates is the closest I have ever come to having a normal job I suppose this is why, suitably disguised, it regularly smuggles itself into my written work.
That said, though, also evident is a deep uneasiness about learning and in particular books. It wasn’t something I had been especially aware of when writing but I found quite late in the day that I had been writing and rewriting the same scene for half my life. In this set-up someone stands looking at a bookcase, baffled and dismayed by what one is expected to assimilate and despairing of ever doing so. It occurs in Getting On; in The Old Country; in the film of Prick Up Your Ears; and in Kafka’s Dick. And the thought is always the same: ‘How will I ever catch up?’
Though the character doing the looking and the despairing is often myself, the scene crops up even when I am nowhere to be found. I do not see myself in any form in An Englishman Abroad but sure enough here it is again, this time with Coral Browne looking at the books belonging to Guy Burgess. One couldn’t get much further from an English provincial schoolboy than the Australian grande dame Coral Browne, but when she’s looking at the bookcase in Burgess’s Moscow flat that’s what she is: me, as a boy or an undergraduate, baffled by the world of words.
Of course one isn’t always able to make a certain identification. Am I – though it’s no dream of mine – also the provincial boy in The Old Country, picked up by an establishment figure to spend an idyllic evening in his underpants looking at back numbers of Country Life? I hope not, but who am I to say?
I note another recurrence, or a preoccupation, something at any rate that seems regularly to crop up. I seem to have a fondness for, an affinity with, the maimed and the stigmatised. It is not charitable, still less Christian, and they don’t get much sympathy or understanding. Indeed it occurs first just as a joke, part of the opening speech of my first play, Forty Years On. The headmaster addresses the school (which is also England) at his farewell speech day.
Some of the older ones among you will remember Bombardier Tiffin, our Corps Commandant and Gym Instructor, lately retired. The more observant ones among you will have noticed that one of Bombardier Tiffin’s legs was not his own. The other one, God bless him, was lost in the Great War. Some people lost other things, less tangible perhaps than legs but no less worthwhile … they lost illusions, they lost hope, they lost faith. That is why … chewing, Charteris. That is why the twenties and thirties were such a muddled and grubby time for lack of all the hopes and ideals that perished on the fields of France. And don’t put it in your handkerchief …
Bombardier Tiffin was just the first of a series of less comic and variously maimed or stigmatised characters who turn up in plays over the years. There was Cross, a boy with a club foot who goes with an Edwardian cycling club on its outing to Fountains Abbey in A Day Out (1972).
In The Old Country (1977) there is a brief encounter with a child murderer; in Marks (1982) a boy stigmatises himself by getting tattooed; in The Insurance Man (1986) a young man is disfigured by a creeping eczema that gradually covers his whole body, and there are dozens of maimed characters besides as this is a play about Kafka and his job as accident and compensation assessor for a Prague insurance company. I suppose, too, though I had not thought of it, that George III was maimed mentally and physically by the attack of porphyria which is the subject of The Madness of George III (1991).
The prevalence of the damaged and disabled says something about me. It’s not, as I might like to pretend, a plea for sympathy and understanding for the handicapped; this doesn’t really come into it. However irritating and unfair it may seem to the actually disabled, these characters turn up out of a sense of identification because I do not think it is fanciful to suppose writing itself a form of disablement; it’s certainly a handicap when it comes to getting on with things, writing in some sense a substitute for doing.
Roaring, which you occasionally do in the ordinary world with laughter, in Leeds means also to cry, ‘Don’t start roaring’ a warning to a child to fetch it back from the brink of tears. I roared a lot when I was a child – out of shame, rage or simply because I couldn’t see any other way out. Now, I suppose, the writing has replaced the roaring but the reasons are much the same.
When the young Stephen Spender told T. S. Eliot he ‘wanted to be a poet’ Eliot rather tartly responded, ‘I can understand your wanting to write poems but I don’t quite know what you mean by being a poet.’* Being a writer is not quite the same as writing. The evidence of a lifetime’s work, his or her books ranged on the shelf (or shelves), ought to reassure someone who writes that he or she is indeed a writer. But nothing, not the books in the shop window or the play on the stage or shoals of letters from delighted readers, furnishes such assurance but only the act of writing itself, the fingers flying over the keys or, in my case, pushing the pen across the paper.
Still, it is always easier to be it than to do it, easier for the public, too, who prefer what they have had from a writer to what they might be given. Being it is comfortable, so far as the public is concerned: this is the writer they have got used to. Doing it is less comfortable: the writer might be wanting to try something new.
The real mark of recognition for a writer or any artist, perhaps, comes when the public begins to want him or her to die, so that they can close the book on that particular talent, stop having to make the effort to follow the writer any further, put a cork in the bottle.
Between being and doing, though, the writer sometimes has no choice. Larkin was someone who, on his own admission, ceased to be able to do it and just had to be it for the last ten years of his life, in the process becoming far more famous not doing it than he had ever been doing it. To E. M. Forster, too, this happened.
But any writer would say that, though the sales and plaudits come not with doing it but having done it, the useful medal to have would be one bestowed, as it were, on the field of battle, hung round your neck in recognition of yet another fruitless morning spent at the typewriter or after a week or even months spent staring out of the window.
* Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies: Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley, 1991.
† This was in 2001, since when I’ve slightly unexpectedly written The History Boys (2004), which is set in a northern grammar school.
* Words later put into the mouth of Hector, the old-fashioned schoolmaster in The History Boys.
* Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841.
† Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, Faber, 1988.
* Ian Hamilton, Against Oblivion, Viking, 2002.
Ups and Downs
A Common Assault
‘Che cos’è la sua data di nascita?’
I turn my head sideways on the blood-soaked pillow. ‘9–5–34.’
Expressionless, the doctor in the Pronto Soccorso writes it down as a thought occurs to me, and I raise my head. ‘Domani il mio giorno natale.’
Hardly a joke, in the circumstances it merits a smile, but from this mirthless young man nothing is forthcoming. I lay my head down again. At least I seem to have stopped bleeding.
Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on May 9 and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I am. The coincidence is always good for a laugh, particularly when it dawns that we must both have been conceived during the old August Bank Holiday, sex confined to the holidays perhaps, or unconfined by them. But that I should have had my beginnings in the cheerless surroundings of a boarding-house bedroom has always seemed to me a melancholy circumstance. Morecambe it would have been, or Filey, linoleum on the floor, jug and basin on the wash-hand stand, and the room smelling faintly of the methylated spirits my mother always brought for the pad on which she heated her curling tongs; meths for me, a lifetime later, still the smell of the seasid
e.
The kind of establishment we stayed in turned out its boarders, rain or shine, at ten in the morning and there was no coming back between meals, so it would have been done at night, the act itself stealthily undertaken, mindful of the strange bed and my two-year-old brother sleeping beside it and conscious, too, of the thin walls and the adjacence of other boarders, not sleeping perhaps, whose glances would have to be negotiated over the next morning’s sparse breakfast. Other people were always very much a consideration in my parents’ lives; mine, too, I suppose, so much of my timorous and undashing life prefigured in that original circumspect conjunction.
We were both born at home, my brother’s an awkward birth requiring forceps, with my mother’s screams said to have been heard down the street. I still have the bed, the polish at the foot of it scraped and scratched by my mother’s feet during the initial stages of that reluctant arrival. Had mine been a difficult birth, the persistence with which untoward events occur on and around my birthday would, though I am no believer in astrology, make a kind of sense. But I seem to have come into the world with no fuss at all, my mother recalling only the bedspread, embroidered with flowers and butterflies, and how the midwife, making the bed after an examination, would always exclaim: ‘Butterflies to the bottom!’
Neither my brother nor I ever had a party, the fact that our birthdays coincided not doubling the festivities but serving to cancel them out. By the time I was of an age to care about this the war was on, and parties and presents, like oranges and bananas, something that had been discontinued ‘for the duration’. In later years things were to improve slightly, but unless we made a point of getting our own presents we’d build up a backlog of gifts ungiven that stretched back years. We were not particularly poor so there was no sense of deprivation about it. Whatever deprivation my brother and I felt was ceremonial: it was not so much the actual presents we missed as the want of occasion. Other people made more of their lives than we did. Wanting birthdays, parties and presents was just another instance of the way our family never managed to be like other families. Even where birthdays were concerned we could not achieve ordinariness.