Hanif Kureishi: Collected Essays

Nevertheless, loafing is always more generative than obsessive concentration. It wouldn’t be as if I knew in advance what I thought, particularly about the important subjects — writing, teaching, liberalism, and so-called religious fundamentalism. But I know I’m interested in the area where philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis cross over — the mind in the world. And I want to take the essential strangeness of the human being — both to himself and to others — as my subject.

At school in the 1950s and 1960s, the system wanted you to shut up; they had no desire to hear from you. Creativity in the young, and their engagement with the new Pop, existed only in spite of the authorities. More or less the whole of my formal education was concerned with enforced inhibition and constraint. I had to unfetter my imagination myself and learn to let it run. It sounds awkward to say that you might train your imagination, but you might learn, at least, to hear what it has to say, and to respond. Since a period in the early 1980s when I found I couldn’t move forward with my work, I have used, in the morning, Freud’s method of free association, which he himself discovered, oddly enough, in a wonderfully titled writing manual by Ludwig Borne: The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days . I found I could create ideas and avoid anxiety by throwing words at the page at random — putting down whatever occurred to me — the same way I used dreams as a way of uncovering ideas and connections. My unconscious might know more than I did — it was quicker, funnier and more economical — but its emanations, which could be prolific, had to be organised and considered.

I was always aware that I wanted to make a living as a writer, since it implied a level of commitment and seriousness which were crucial to me. For a start, I wouldn’t have to wonder about what else I might like to do. It was the end of a certain kind of doubt. And vocational choices in the suburbs were limited, mostly to crime or clerking. I knew that the desire to make art and the desire to make money are only sometimes compatible. Oddly, the curious public is often more concerned about the writer’s routine than they are about how he actually gets food on his table, which is his major concern.

When I first began to write plays I was on the dole, and earned little money. Eight years after leaving university, I wrote a hit film and began to be surprised and a little overwhelmed at the number of cheques which turned up at my council flat. After all, I had nothing but myself to spend it on, and I wasted months wondering if I deserved it, or had truly earned it. If writing is, finally, a pleasure, and if you find that people envy you your vocation, you might wonder if you should be financially rewarded. But at last I decided to buy the most valuable commodity there is for a writer — time. I began the novel I’d always wanted to write. Being a screenwriter is always uncomfortable: the real artist in film is the director and, if you’re lucky, the actors will make the dialogue sound good. The novelist works alone. It’s all his responsibility.

However, I recall a morning, ten years after this, when my eldest sons were babies. They were playing with their au pair; an underpaid illegal immigrant was cleaning the house. Later, a no-doubt ruinously expensive man was coming to fix the central heating, and I was working on a dull short story for which I’d earn a hundred pounds, if I were lucky — and anyway I was blocked on that. I wondered if we’d ever survive. (We did, but I had to concentrate, particularly in the afternoons.)

Since then, as with most writers, there have been numerous dips and surges, and, I guess, it’ll continue that way. I’ve written at least one book, my first novel The Buddha of Suburbia , which has remained in print worldwide for twenty years and provided a steady if not spectacular income. (An author should write at least one work the title of which the general public will remember and associate with him.) However, it’s almost impossible for most writers to predict what they will earn in a year’s time, let alone in five years. Perhaps this is a common writer’s fear and wish, that he’ll run out of money and will have to do something else. I have many fears, among them that I will run out of paper, and also that I’ll never finish anything, my computer being filled with incompleted pieces.

The position of the writer has altered a lot during the period I’ve been writing. In the 1980s small, individual publishing houses were bought by conglomerates, and advances increased hugely for some writers. Where before publishers could only afford relatively modest advances, some became extravagant and, luckily for some writers, even foolish. The publisher might have justified having the writer on their list in order to add weight, or respectability, or excitement. But the problem with a large advance is how much publicity and press the writer might have to do attempting to pay it off — not that he would be compelled to. However, next time the advance could well be lower.

I must give at least one interview a week, and I don’t mind it much, unless the journalist calls me irritable, or diminutive. It does mean that the questions and the answers will always seem pre-packaged, although they may appear to be new to someone somewhere. If you are asked the same question repeatedly, you either sulkily refuse to answer it, or you are forced to find ways to make it appear interesting — mostly to yourself. Over a period of time, in interviews, you work up an account of yourself, then you develop it and one day you find you even believe it; finally it has become the story of your life.

The problem with being interviewed is that, on the whole, the two people are at cross-purposes. One wants to flog a few copies of their new book at full-price and escape without personal injury, while the other wants to find out something new, and perhaps shocking, about the subject, which they will then inform the world about under a lurid headline. Fortunately both are usually disappointed. At the end, you always ask yourself, how many people are there who can only sell their product by also selling a part of themselves?

These days you can’t put a cigarette paper between a writer and a performing flea. There is far more publicity, and more media than before. Critics and reviewers have less influence, as do individual newspapers. Every year there are new festivals, and occasions for writers, accompanied by an army of PR girls with clipboards, to display their work and their bodies, meeting readers and scratching in the front of their books. For a writer there are few sights more heartening than that of a long line at a book signing, and few experiences worse than sharing a table with a writer whose queue stretches outside the tent. Writing has almost become part of light entertainment, a form of cabaret. Some writers are good at this form of speaking, being adaptable and cheap — I have come to enjoy it. But many writers don’t. There’s no connection between being able to write and being able to explain your work in a rain-swept tent to an audience staring at you like hungry animals contemplating a suspect steak. Listening and reading are different experiences. Reading, writing for a reader, and being read, are intimate acts, and there’s something about trying to articulate what you’ve done that can flatten and reduce it, horrifyingly so. Some writers choose the written word because they find it difficult to speak directly; many writers are in love with solitude. Whichever it is, good writing should resist interpretation, summary and the need for applause.

A lot of writers, of course, work as teachers, for money, pleasure and distraction, and I write in this collection about the importance and place of teaching, how useful it is and what idiocy it can encourage. It has been said that at least 2 per cent of the population is writing a novel; apparently that number is rising. There’s been a gigantic increase in the number of writing courses available, both in universities and other institutions. Many of these students can only become teachers themselves, and I am sceptical of professional creative writing teachers. The most helpful teachers are usually ‘real’ writers who see working with students as part of their work. Scarcer is practical and realistic advice for young writers, particularly about how difficult it is to make a consistent living. Any artist has to exist in some functional relation to the real world. Of my students, the film students are the most knowing and pragmatic, since to work in film at all is to be faced continuously with questions of budgets and time.