Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

When he returned to the house, he found Mamoon, sitting in the living room, and said, ‘Could I ask you, sir, if I’d be completely wrong to think that your experiences with Marion, your amour fou , informed the character of Ali in your sixth novel?’

There was a silence, before Mamoon said, ‘Harry, you do already know, don’t you, that I like to aid your intellectual development by refusing to allow any banal and simplistic correlations between art and experience.’

‘I know, sir. About that I follow you as a master. Art is a symbolic dream of life which transcends that from which it derives, and, indeed, everything which is said about it. However, there was an unmistakable outburst of desire and love, even of happiness in your work at that time. Before, your male characters were isolated, naïve even, perhaps book-bound. Then, brilliantly, you made another step.’

‘I did?’

‘You said, early on, that if every age has its central philosophical issue, ours will be the revival of religion as politics. And so you began to link radical Islam and its weird sexuality with hatred of the body, the body burned in the sacrificial auto-death. This is a gesture of the profoundest obedience. We know that the West attempted, in the sixties, to remove the father, authoritarian or not. That was how we ended up, as you have often helpfully pointed out, with a culture of single mothers. Take Ruth, for instance.

‘The father — as fathers do — returned, in the form either of a gangster, as in The Godfather or your favourite, The Sopranos , or of religious authority. There is also the father’s attempt to exclude, if not stamp out, sexuality. At least in others. Perhaps the father, according to this myth, wants all the women for himself. The sexuality returns, as it must, as perversion, as a kind of sadism. The fear, if not hatred, of women, of course, is at the centre of many religions.’

Mamoon yawned. ‘I said this, did I? And if I did, so fucking what?’

‘You let a woman in, sir. People say that sexuality is at the centre of the human secret, and that the erotic leads us into new experience, both sacred and profane. What is the connection, in your mind, if any, between the women you’ve been with and the work you’ve done?’

‘I haven’t a clue as to what you could mean.’

‘Think, sir, please: I’m trying to make you look interesting here. I can make you look good in bed, and out of it! Marion has suggested your mind opened to fresh ideas when her legs did, when the two of you embarked on your adventures in America.’

Unlike most people, Mamoon had more or less complete control over his speech; he didn’t like his words to run away from him. But for a moment he looked like someone who had swallowed a large marble.

At last he said, ‘Ecstatic as I am to hear Marion’s views from over the pond, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wish you weren’t trying to peel me as you would an onion. You know, like the general public, I have a passion for ignorance. I want to work in the dark — the best place for me, for any artist. It just comes out, compacted as in a dream.’ He was silent, before saying, ‘There’s no denying she sparked me into a new creativity. The intellect and the libido have to be linked, otherwise there’s no life in the work. Any artist has to work with their prick or cunt. Any person has to work with their desire, to defeat boredom, to keep everything alive. Anything good has to be a little pornographic, if not perverse.’

Harry said, ‘However, the biographer sees the inevitabilities, the same paradigmatic sexual scenarios enacted repeatedly. When it comes to love and sex, the past writes the future. That would be the story of everyone’s life. Cannibals don’t become foot fetishists.’

‘Harry, you know more about my many selves than I do. You’re in the remembering business while I’m in the forgetting game, and forgetting is the loveliest of the psychic luxuries, a warm scented bath for the soul. I follow Chuang Tzu, the patron saint of dementia, who advised, “Sit down and forget.”’

‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Perhaps my wife has hired you to do the little remembering I do require. I have to say, I particularly like it when you remember things which never happened. You are now making an imaginary life.’

‘How?’

‘My life, as I lived it, has been a Marx Brothers film, a series of detours, mistakes, misunderstandings, missed opportunities, delays, errors and fuck-ups. I am a man who never found his umbrella. Your life, I expect, is similar. Your ascription of a teleological arrow gives too much meaning and intention. Still, the idea of becoming a fiction does appeal. To my surprise, you might have the makings of an artist.’

Harry said, ‘I doubt I will ever reach your level, sir. I am impressed that you survived extremity and guilt with Marion, and that you came home to see Peggy through her vile death, sitting with her night after night. Then you carried on. You even had something of a family, for a time. Having repudiated the role previously, you seemed to like being a sort of father. What was that like?’

Mamoon nodded. ‘You know one is subject to many distractions and foolishnesses. It has always been my good fortune to have work which has saved me, and to have been able to look at the world through the lens of my ideas. I hope to God that you, one day, achieve that essential stability.’

‘In what way has work saved you?’

‘You strive to make me look lewd, when the truth is, even Philip Larkin had more sex, and I have been committed to the word throughout. I have always wanted to return to my desk to make something which hasn’t existed before. That is my only — meagre — contribution to improving things here on earth.’

Having said this, Mamoon closed his eyes and began to snore gently. He had the ability to nap at will but was most likely to fall asleep when Harry was making an enquiry.

Harry went into the garden in shorts and trainers to do some stretching and weights. He hung a long bag from a tree and kicked and punched it. This was his routine and his release after things got sticky with Mamoon, when he knew he’d have to return to him with more impossible queries.

He wondered how long he’d have.

A few minutes later Liana, in fishnets and wellingtons, came out of the kitchen and settled herself on the bench outside the door with a popular biography of a grand lady, a cup of tea and her reading glasses. ‘Bravo!’ she called. Feeling more like a member of the Chippendales than a literary biographer, Harry took a breather and Liana poured him some tea.

‘Poor man, you must be exhausted. I know I am. Here, I bought you this energising moisturiser,’ she said, handing him a little pot. ‘You’ll like it, you’ll see.’

‘How kind, Liana. Why did you do that?’

‘I heard you complaining about your uneven skin tone. Mamoon said that for you it’s more serious than the collapse of the economy.’

‘Much more. It’s the result of childhood eczema. For years I scratched myself almost to death. I’m worried the anxiety here will make it return.’

‘What anxiety? That cream has amazing healing qualities, and you seem agitated.’

‘I am.’

‘I think you know more about my husband than I do now.’

‘That’s the problem.’

‘Was Marion kind about my darling Himself? Or was she bitter like the other one?’

‘There was some bitterness, not entirely unwarranted. She turned out to be rather splendid.’

‘Are you sure? You must have flirted all over the place.’

He rubbed the moisturiser onto his arms. ‘She had plenty to say about many things. I haven’t written it up yet, but I can feel that the book has really progressed.’