Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

‘Why did the women do it?’

‘It was the first time, I guess, that he’d seen that he could use his power, position and charisma to seduce and use. As he said, being famous, witty and good-looking made him catnip to the menopausal. He was so interested in some things that the world seemed to vibrate around him. And these women were curious. But they had husbands, children and lives, and weren’t always available when he wanted. He had the bright idea of inviting professionals to join us.’

‘How many times?’

‘Almost every night, for a few weeks. We were so overtaken by it, we blew a big hole in his income, not that he cared. Why would he? I guess a lot of it was Peggy’s and he believed she owed him.’

‘Were you drinking and using drugs? Were there other men involved?’

‘He was very keen.’

‘How do I know this is true?’

‘There are letters.’

‘If we’re to skewer him, I have to see them.’

‘You do?’

‘Otherwise he can say you’re only a mad fantasist.’

She hesitated for a moment before getting up and leading him out of the room. In the corridor, she pushed open her bedroom door.

Ahead of him, framed on the wall, was a large print of Richard Avedon’s photograph of Mamoon, which Harry had only seen previously, the size of a postage stamp, on a book jacket. In a suit and tie, and wreathed in cigarette smoke, Mamoon must have been in his mid-forties, dark-haired, black-eyed, anguished, a man with the strength to endure, with a poet’s soul, an Asian Camus. In time, Mamoon, the radical transgressor — for whom accurate language was always revolutionary — would argue and fall out with fellow writers; he would be banned from various countries for political or religious opinions, pick up a clutch of fatwas, and numerous prizes and awards, at which he would chuckle; and he would write good books.

‘You see?’ said Marion.

With her behind him, Harry continued to stare: if he had forgotten why, as a young man, he’d loved Mamoon — the tough-guy, hard-living artist who looked into the dark without flinching, and spoke what he saw, putting truth and authenticity before safety — this picture of pride, self-knowledge and glamour should remind him.

It had to be true, as Rob liked to reiterate, that the writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed — they always would be, these sometime Christs of the page.

It must have been the Faustian idea of Mamoon as hero and holy transgressor, as the one who took on God and the righteous, that Harry had fallen in love with, an image which had brought him to this room today, followed by this woman who had slept every night for years beneath the picture. It was, also, a picture of the man Harry had, at one time, wanted to become. Yet now he was only the illustrator, not the subject. In what way, he wondered, could he become more like the image? How brave or daring had he ever been?

Marion kissed her fingers and pressed them against the photograph.

Harry noticed there was nowhere else to sit except beside her on the narrow single bed. On the undusted shelf there were photographs of her children when young. He told her they were lovely kids.

‘Women must not bolt,’ she said. ‘The children punished me. When I went, one of them attempted suicide, and is still mad in an asylum. The youngest refuses to let me meet my grandchildren.’

She asked Harry to pull a shoe box from under the bed. Out of this she extracted the letters, of which there were about fifty. She opened two of them, and let him see the date and the ‘Darling Marion’ and ‘all my love, Mamoon’, in his familiar minuscule writing.

She said, ‘During this period he kept saying I bored him, and he didn’t feel alive any more. If I didn’t think of new things for us to do, he’d go mad. He was fascinated by styles of love-making, by how different women respond, move, kiss, and how he was new each time. It was almost forensic for him.

‘I suggested we could ask men to join us, and he could watch, if he wanted to. He did watch; he wanted to take part. He seemed to join forces with the other men. There were too many of them. He started to make me do things I couldn’t bear to do to please him. Scenes so depraved it makes me sick to think of them. Tiger burning. . burning. .

‘He wanted an accelerated ecstasy, as he nominated it, what Poe calls an “infinity of mental excitement. .” He claimed, oddly for him, that this extremity, this repeated transgression and sacrilege, was the closest thing to a religious experience he’d had. Here, he said, he could fruitfully lose himself entirely, and betray his father over and over again. He understood the point of the crowd, and how it could pull you away from yourself. And this from no keener follower of individualism.

‘I made love to people I wouldn’t otherwise have touched. This was dangerous at that time, but I would have done anything to keep him. Anything .’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Now, looking back, I feel abused. I was used. I was a fool to think he would love me always, that he would marry me.’ She said, ‘He was strong then. He grabbed my face and forced it into a man’s crotch and I remember thinking “You’ve hurt me for your pleasure. It matters more to you than I do.” There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?’

‘When it’s done right. Are you saying he was a pervert?’

‘Are you a serious writer, or are you working for the National Enquirer ?’

‘The Enquirer .’

‘I learned that real sex is mad, mad, mad,’ she said, ‘It can overrun everything else, particularly sense and intelligence. And you must remember, he loved me so much, even as he hated me. I had captivated him, sexually, and he was mine. Fortunately, he was travelling a lot at the same time and wrote to me with various “requests” I should fulfil when he came home.’

‘He did?’

‘In the end, Peggy, who was not well in mind or body, requested him to return. He hesitated for days. Suppose he just walked out now. What would he lose, what would he gain? What about her? Duty or love? I’d never seen him so anguished. I was foolish: I said I’d stand by him whichever way he went. He kissed me goodbye. I believed he would marry me. I didn’t think for a moment I’d never see him again.’ She went on, ‘I suspect he went back to see another woman — not Liana. It wasn’t her turn yet.’

‘Another woman? Do you know which woman?’

She shrugged. ‘Do you? Yes, obviously. You do know.’ When he said nothing she continued. ‘I learned later, from reading him, that the experiences we’d had together had traumatised him. He could only process all that raw experience by sitting in a room for months. I even think he still believed he could turn his back on his sexuality and sublimate it entirely.

‘Peggy kept going for eighteen months. She created the environment he needed, where he wrote that horrible text, one of the ugliest books I’ve read, with a sadism which I believe is quite unconscious, since he actually loves women. He was the most conscious of artists, but he knew there were some things you had to leave alone when they occurred to you, which were the essence of something true.’