Hanif Kureishi: Love + Hate: Stories and Essays

Most of this sort of writing is market-driven and is often commercial. On the other hand, the writing schools are full of middle-aged women who have growing kids. These eager students have turned to creative writing not to become well-off by working in television, but rather to find out — using the medicine of art — how they became who they are. They know that sanity depends on language, and writing is, as much as anything, a form of working meditation. There is, in silence with one’s thoughts, an opportunity for memory to work. At the same time, to study writing in a university makes art appear arduous and respectable. Essays are written and classes are attended, and you leave the university stamped with credits. It is as if writing is an academic discipline rather than a species of unpredictable entertainment and psychic stripping, by which an audience may or may not be impressed.

The university gives a necessary semblance of respectability. If men are martyrs for their art, women like to be martyred for their children. They cannot suffer enough; it is a mark of love. How torn they are between the page and the kid. It is as if the parent’s essential duty is to give the child everything until there is nothing left, rather than showing her the necessity of creativity and how important it might be to write — as a form of disruption, of internal reorganisation and recreation. Not that writing is a particularly masculine activity. Men are not better writers than women, but women can be more divided here. It might take a man to be ruthless enough to find the space and time to learn to write. Children can be a framework and a spur. If it is indulgent for any art to move too far from the market, and for the market to move too far from art, fatherhood makes you serious. It wasn’t until I had children that I saw I had to concentrate. I had to get on with it, making more work, supporting the children with my pen, or find, for the first time, a proper job.

*

Now and again, to nicely devalue me, as if I’ve got the wrong idea about who I am, my youngest son will suddenly start to abuse me wildly in the foulest language, saying the hardest things he can think of. Then he looks at me nervously and asks, ‘Are you still alive?’ But today he is in a mild mood, and merely says, ‘Come on, old fellow, don’t give up, you can do it — maybe …’

He will run with fitter people, I tell him. But he doesn’t like to compete with his friends, for fear of losing and being humiliated. I can only say that if you don’t compete, you have already lost, that your conflicts make you, and that, if you can, you must welcome them. Yet he will have a lifetime of competition ahead of him: for friends, lovers, sex, jobs. Substituting the lost paradise of a secure childhood for the intenser vagaries of sex and love, he will win and lose. He will be envied, hated even; he will enjoy the pleasures of brutality, and will suffer from sexual jealousy; there’s no cure for that, or for any of it.

*

At the end of the street I can see all he has been holding back. He turns it on, rushing along the pavement to the gate, ‘destroying me’, as he puts it, and laughing when I finally turn up.

At last we are home; he takes off the weights, and we both lie on our backs on the floor. We are together, and we are happy together for a while.

In the famous, reproachful ‘Letter to His Father’, which Franz Kafka wrote in 1919 but, characteristically, never delivered, the writer recalls an early memory in which the old man left the whimpering young boy on the balcony at night, ‘outside the shut door’, just because he wanted a drink of water.

‘I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm … Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.’

Far from being an absent, unimpressive father, Hermann Kafka was an overwhelming man: too noisy, too vital, too big, too present for his son, so much so that Franz was unable ever to abandon or break with him. Although Franz wrote in his diary, ‘A man without a woman is no person,’ and came close to marrying Felice Bauer and, later, Julie Wohryzek, he could not become a husband or father himself. Franz Kafka was otherwise engaged: he and his father were locked in an eternal arm-wrestle.

Kafka takes the ‘absolutely nothing’ of his ‘Letter’ very seriously. In the two stories discussed here, ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘A Hunger Artist’, written seven years apart, this ‘nothing’ becomes literalised. Out of fury and frustration, Kafka’s characters use their worthless bodies — these so-called ‘nothings’ — as a weapon, even as a suicide bomb, to destroy others and, in the end, themselves.

In ‘The Metamorphosis’, generally considered to be one of the greatest novellas ever written, and a foundation stone of early modernism, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he has become transformed from a human being — a hard-working travelling salesman, a son and a brother — into an insect, a bug, or a large dung beetle, depending on the translation. And in ‘A Hunger Artist’ the protagonist, a determined self-famisher, exhibits himself publicly in a cage, where, eventually, he starves himself to death as a form of public entertainment. Like Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis’, at the conclusion of the story he is swept away, having also become ‘nothing’, a pile of rubbish or human excrement that everyone has become tired of. The hunger artist is replaced in his cage by a panther with ‘a noble body’, a fine animal the public flock to see.

As a young man, Franz Kafka, notoriously fastidious when it came to noise and food, became a follower of a Victorian eccentric called Horace Fletcher. (Henry James was also a ‘fanatical’ follower of Fletcher.) Known as ‘The Great Masticator’, Fletcher advocated ‘Fletcherising’, which involved the chewing of each portion of food at least a hundred times per minute, as an aid to digestion. (A shallot, apparently, took seven hundred chews.) Fletcher’s disciple Franz Kafka was, on top of this, a vegetarian, in Prague, of all places. Hermann Kafka, on the other hand, was a man of appetite, who seems, from the outside, to have been hard-working, devoted to his family, loved by his wife, to whom he remained faithful, and a Czech-speaking Jew in a tough, anti-Semitic city. Certainly, Hermann had a more difficult childhood than his son, working from a young age, leaving home at fourteen, joining the army at nineteen, and eventually moving to Prague to open a fancy-goods shop. His two youngest sons died in childhood and his daughters would die in the concentration camps.

Hermann’s surviving, sickly, scribbling, neurotic first son, Franz, something of an eternal teenager, appears to be what might now be called an anorexic. Despite the fact his mother blithely considered him healthy, and refused to fall for the ‘performance’ of his numerous illnesses, there wasn’t much he could digest; it was always all too much. The boy was certainly strong in his own way; he was pig-headed and stubborn, a refusal artist of some sort, and he was not unusual in that. There are many kinds of starvation, deprivation and protest, and some of them had already become a form of circus.

A generation before, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the sprawling Salpêtrière hospital in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement, the psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot was overseeing another form of exhibitionism of the ill. It was mainly hysterical women he exhibited in his semi-circular amphitheatre on Tuesday afternoons, where ‘all of Paris’ — writers like Léon Daudet and Guy de Maupassant, along with interested doctors like Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud and George Gilles de la Tourette, as well as socialites, journalists and the merely curious — came to stare at these strippers of the psyche. Some of the women were hypnotised by Charcot’s interns; Charcot also publicly diagnosed patients he’d never met before. And while hysteria was mostly a disorder diagnosed by men and associated with women, there were a few male patients: one had been a wild man in a carnival; another worked in an iron cage at a fair, eating raw meat.