Hanif Kureishi: A Theft: My Con Man

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Thieves of time, thieves of friendship, affection and sexuality, thieves of your soul, stealers of dreams: bad loves, and even worse loves. The obscene, perverse, sadomasochistic death dance, both partners locked together in limbo. You could call these anti-loves. People love their suffering, and most thefts are even welcomed, as you can barely wait to give away that which is most valuable; and there are many thefts you don’t notice because you are paying attention to the wrong things. When you do see at last, it can be a shock. Twilight: time is running down; there has to be an attempt at reparation — a release, if not a rebirth, converting action into thought and renewed creativity, into a better madness. Ruthlessness, particularly with oneself, is an art.

I know I’m ready for something fresh when I want to buy new notebooks. With scores of new pages to fill and flip through in anticipation, I can begin to believe I’m a writer again, the void of the empty page being an invitation and a limit to the disorder of my ideas.

My talent, such as it is, had not yet deserted me. Whether I was distracted or not, I could write; I liked to write and worked longer hours than before. I like to wake up in the morning with the whole day ahead of me, in which I can write uninterruptedly. My writing was developing and changing, even if other things were getting worse by staying the same. I began to scribble these notes, and wonder about what sort of thief an artist is. Things had got too predictable in my life, and unpredictability — at least in the head — is the engine of creativity. I knew that I needed more imagination here. To be liberated from someone is to no longer have the enervating burden of thinking of them: that is one lesson that love can teach. How long had it been since I’d gone a day without this fool flailing in my mind? He had made me into someone I didn’t like, and for a time I hated to wake up to myself. Jeff had taken my money, but what else had he taken? He had come far, according to the policeman, but I had come further, and would go much further. To be happy, I had to forget, and that is difficult.

I thought: I should steal from him. If I stole something back from this devil and homunculus, I could transform and remake him, pinning him to the page. If my despair had made me wonder what art might be for, I could at least now see that art is a glorious binding Eros, making new unities. Art might seem mad at times, but it has boundaries and structure; it has to. Where there was nothing there would be something new, a moment of light, an upsurge, invention. As an artist you have to force yourself to turn and look at the world, and the world is always worse, and more interesting, than you can imagine or render.

Hanif Kureishi grew up in Kent and studied philosophy at King’s College London. His novels include The Buddha of Suburbia , which won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, The Black Album, Intimacy and The Last Word . His screenplays include My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Le Week-End . He has also published several collections of short stories. He has been awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the PEN/Pinter Prize and is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. His work has been translated into thirty-six languages. He is professor of Creative Writing at Kingston University.