Hanif Kureishi - Collected Essays

A student came to me last week with a short film she’d made and we watched it several times on DVD, in my front room. I made suggestions and she said she’d go away and re-cut it. What I wanted her to do was get to the story quicker, to what I called the ‘good bits’ and she was rather bewildered by this, particularly when I said things like ‘can’t you put all the good bits together and hand it in?’ She liked the other, slower, parts because she felt that to put the good bits in a sequence would make everything, as she put it, ‘too sudden’. I knew what she meant and couldn’t help but agree that the ‘proportions’ had to be right.

Under my sofa there are two novels written by former students, which I feel compelled to read. The first is about a girl whose father dies and her mother joins the Orange people, taking along the teenage daughter. There are, as you can imagine, some excellent sex scenes, full of hairy New Agers and embarrassment and sadness. The other novel is about a young man who joins a writers group, not unlike the one I ran at the Royal Court at the end of the 80s, and that book is full of anxiety and competitiveness. If the writer does what I say it could turn out to be a decent comedy.

I wonder what I am supposed to give to these students, whether I can be any use. I could be a good parent, encouraging them to try new things, and I could be their first audience, telling them what I feel as I experience their work. I take this ‘teaching’ seriously, because they listen to me seriously and I’d feel guilty if I couldn’t give them anything useful. Do they have anything in common, these three? It could be that the story they are telling isn’t in focus, that there aren’t enough ‘good bits’ in the right place.

Who am I to talk? I’ve just written a film which I’ve shown to friends. They think it’s eccentric, weird and probably unfilmable. Also, I have hundreds of pages of a novel, (what Spalding Gray called ‘The Monster In The Box’, before he threw himself into the Hudson), which I am sure I will never be able to organise into a coherent whole.

On the floor of my study I keep finding words written on squares of paper. I bend over, pick up a bit of paper and it says ‘horse’ or ‘scorch’ or ‘make’ on it. My six-year-old and I have been making a ‘wordbag’. If we find a likely-sounding word in the newspaper, in a book, or even said in the street, we write it down, cut it out, and stick it in a Christmas stocking. When we want to make a poem we haul out words at random and put them together, to see what happens.

I seem to remember William Burroughs doing something like this, which may be why his novels are memorable but unreadable. Others took this up in the 60s. When David Bowie was working on the music for the TV version of my novel The Buddha of Suburbia , and we needed a song, he asked me to bring in fifty words from the first half of the book. ‘On one page,’ he said. So I wrote down a load of words and was amazed when he made them into a good song which was played on Top of the Pops .

Faber have just published On Film-making , the writings of Alexander Mackendrick, who directed The Man in the White Suit . When he could no longer get his films made, Mackendrick became a film teacher in California and these notes are the book. One chapter is headed ‘Exercises for the Student of Dramatic Construction’ which I will read one day, because I know it will help me. There are ideas about how to make plots and create what he calls ‘the rising line’. Mackendrick keeps the process alive by suggesting new, lateral, ways to proceed, as though he knows that at the slightest discouragement the artist will collapse and retreat to the pub.

Of course there are few things more temporarily satisfying than finding a rule or formula which one could follow forever, without the struggle or conflicts which characterise the creative enterprise. When I was researching The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic among young Muslims I envied the fact that, for them, there were no unanswerable questions. What could they have to worry about?

Of course it is common to suggest that writing cannot be taught. Despite this, there are now more books about writing than there are about learning to play the piano; some bookshops have whole sections devoted to ‘creative writing’. Mackendrick’s collection, full of excellent notions and exercises, is far better than most of the ‘How to Write’ books on the market these days. I’ve read a lot of them, which passes the time when one is supposed to be writing.

It’s easy to sneer. You can’t, however, forget that the foundation of Freudian therapy — the basic rule: free association, saying whatever nonsense comes into your head — was adapted by Freud from a self-help manual he read as a teenager, Ludwig Borne’s ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’. Borne suggested free association — on paper — as a method of evading internal censorship or what Freud would later call the ‘superego’. It worked for Freud: he did become an ‘original’ writer by lifting this method, which is used in therapy everywhere today. Mackendrick’s book is a variant of this.

So-called free assocation goes on all the time, but there are more unusual ways of doing it. Now I have an image: my three sons, all conventionally resistant to the written word, are on their knees on the floor, sticking their filthy fists into a bag, pulling words out, and making them into poems. At one point a fight breaks out: they all want the same word, which is ripped to shreds. Eventually something almost literary gets done. Here’s one result:

Poem Five by Kier [aged 6]

Tomatoes gazed on

women flowers

books sound madly knowing

but tonight apples are

going

to

children.

That exemplary dissident Oscar Wilde, whose punishment failed to erase his words but taught us something about where a loose tongue might get you, wrote, at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.’

This essay concerns something we are and take for granted: the fact we are speaking animals, full of words which have a profound effect on others, words that are sometimes welcomed, and sometimes not. I want to say something about words which seem possible and others that seem impossible.

It is no coincidence that the political and social systems which have dominated our era — communism, global capitalism, fascism, imperialism, the nuclear family, different varieties of fundamentalist religion, to name but a few — are marked by a notable factor. There are circumstances in which they don’t want people talking about their lives. Tyrants are involved with silence as a form of control. Who says what to whom, and about what, is of compelling interest to authorities, to dictators, fathers, teachers, and officials of whichever type.

As Milan Kundera pointed out in his great novel The Joke , there are times when the need to be funny is so subversive that it can land you in jail. Issac Babel, who was murdered in prison, and called a book ‘the world seen through an individual’, was himself not unaware of the ironies here, and said, ‘Whenever an educated person is arrested in the Soviet Union and finds himself in a prison cell, he is given a pencil and paper and told “write!”’

What his interrogators wanted were words. But of course the meaning of ‘corrupt’ is to falsify, adulterate, or debase, in this case the language — that which links us to others.