Hanif Kureishi: Love + Hate: Stories and Essays

D. W. Winnicott writes in Playing and Reality about a ‘string boy’, who ties everything together because of his terror of separation from his mother. I recall that one of my older sons went everywhere with a lasso for a long time. My youngest was once obsessed by string, until the house resembled a cat’s cradle, with everything kept both together and apart, joined and not joined — just so, or carefully mediated, in terms of distance. Even now Bob the Builder still swings in a rope noose from the banisters. Eventually the kid gave up the string, and, as we scamper along, I wonder if this important transition to individuality is managed by an umbilicus of invisible elastic. He is slowly increasing his distance from me. My fading, and his rising, make life possible.

*

For a bit I am left behind. I stop to tie my shoelaces and regain my breath. At my youngest son’s age I was a scrawny mongrel kid struggling in a rough neighbourhood. Nervous, inhibited, insecure, moody, I could barely live with myself. But there was pop music, and books in the local library: the efficacy of words in joining things up — but only if they were written down. I could barely speak to anyone around me. I felt fortunate that near-silence was fashionable, and everyone was so stoned they could barely speak. I was beginning to write, and I had found a good teacher, an editor at a London publishing outfit who came to my house on Sundays to work with me on the novel I had begun writing. I got on with things, and was serious for my age; somehow I knew I had to be if I were to go out and find more life.

I recognise that writing is an altogether different sort of thing from speaking. I wonder if it’s a protection against having to speak. If writing creates an intimate relation with a future reader, it changes little around you. But speaking — the ability to ask for what you want, and directly to modify others — has to be a necessary form of power. There’s no use in keeping your words to yourself. For me, however, parting with words was almost an impossibility. When I tried to open my mouth authentically I fell into a kind of anguished panic. Speaking would be a disaster, turning me into someone I no longer recognised, as if I didn’t want inevitable change, or to become the new person that saying real words can make you into. And if I couldn’t speak, I felt blocked and distant and angry. In silence you rot.

I needed, as the young do, to escape, and I went to work in the theatre. Silent and anguished or not, I would be a writer. Fuck everything else: it was art or nothing. Artists did whatever they wanted. I thought then, and probably still believe, that to be an artist was the finest thing anyone could be. I had pretty much failed at school. I blamed myself for the fact the teachers there couldn’t entertain me. They hated the pupils, and the pointless system ran on threat, fear and punishment. We were being trained in obedience, and to be clerks. After, I worked in offices, and didn’t fit in there either. What sort of future would I have? If I couldn’t imagine having a conventional job, I would make things much more difficult for myself: my future, everything, would depend on one throw of the dice. Looking back in puzzlement, it seems like blindness, stupidity, arrogance and very good sense. It takes a sort of mad courage to want something truly absurd.

Not that there hadn’t been examples. At home I’d study photographs in magazines: Jagger and Richards swaggering and smoking outside some court or other; McCartney and Lennon in Hamburg and just after; Dylan around the Blonde on Blonde period. Defiant, original young men convinced of their own potency, desirability and immortality. Not only do these boys look as if they have just joyfully killed the old and now have the world to themselves, but to be a young man in the 1960s was to glimpse the view from a briefly opened window, to grasp an opportunity between two dependencies and enjoy a burst of libidinous freedom, of self-wonder and self-display.

These kids look free. But of what? Of the fetish of renunciation; of the dull norms and values of the day — whatever they were. Hadn’t there been two relatively recent world wars through which our parents and grandparents had suffered, and for which generations of young men had had their natural aggression taken advantage of, and for which they had been sacrificed? You cannot forget, too, the sheer amount of daily fear, if not trauma, the child — any child — has to endure. You could also say that the teenager’s life so far has been a cyclone of outrageous demands: to eat, shit, shut up and go to school; to behave well, to be obedient and polite while achieving this, that or the other; to go to sleep, wake up, take an exam, learn an instrument, listen to one parent, ignore the other, get along with one’s siblings and aunts, and so on. And these compulsions and demands: one succeeds in obeying them, succeeds in failing them, or evades them altogether. But each of them will generate anxiety since they are all combined with punishment, fear and guilt. Stress will be the common condition of adulthood if the demand has been the constant of childhood.

Of course, the demand is the currency of all intercourse, and not all demands are impossible, pointless or demeaning. One wouldn’t be a person unless one received or made them. These demands never end, either. At least in the West since the 1960s there might be fewer moral prohibitions than before. But there are more impossible demands. What isn’t forbidden is almost obligatory: the prescription that one should be wealthy, or always active, or successful, or have frequent high-quality sex for all of one’s life with someone beautiful is as likely to cause anxiety as any prohibition.

*

Anyone will notice that adults can lose their modesty when describing the achievements of their kids. Since the child is them but also not-them, the parent is free to brag. What sort of strange love is this, the parent’s for the child, or what sort of possession is the child for the parent? Who or what does the parent want the child to be? What sort of ideal image do they have, and how can the child escape being devoured by the parent, or respond to them creatively?

Both my parents had fantasies of being artists of some kind, in writing, theatre, dance. But they were vulnerable emotionally and financially, had few opportunities, and seemed to stew in frustration, particularly as they got older. It was all talk, the dream of a life. They couldn’t take any risks, and since they could afford to give nothing up, nothing was ever accomplished. Confined and restless, I saw I had to take their dreams for reality — and quickly, before I was done for. I liked to read and work; I wasn’t afraid to be alone and I wanted to go far into England, to see what kind of country my father had come to and what we new arrivals would make it into. It was as an artist that I felt most individual, competitive, alive and envious of others’ successes. If we are forged and made in difficulty, writing was a problem I wanted to take on. I barely thought about money or survival or security. We were hippies, and ‘bread’, at first, was never the aim of my very politicised generation, even after the deprivation of the post-war period. However, during the latter part of my lifetime it seems to have been decided that economic productivity and materialism are the ethics of choice, as the virtuous end of life. Now the teenager might be free sexually, but the neo-liberal project of open-ended economic success makes for scarcity, and for a severe form of insecurity and servitude.

*

I had my mirror years, and even fancied myself. For a time I was in love with what I saw. These were the days when everyone had more or less the same body shape. We all ate the same food, did the same amount of exercise at school, and how you looked was either good or bad luck, though as any Teddy boy could tell you, there was sticky stuff you could put in your hair to make you stand out.