by Zadie Smith
I prefer Fox the fiction writer, who has such an ear she once wrote several “black” stories (two are included here) and submitted them to The Negro Digest, where they were accepted. The editor at the time, Hoyt Fuller, “wrote to find out if I was black. He did it very subtly, but I could see that was the question behind the letter.” Not only can Fox see, she can hear, she can feel—and in these vital areas there has been no weakening in her powers. One story, “Grace,” dated 2003, absolutely floored me. It is about a bachelor with a sick dog. Against his will he has to leave it at the vet for an operation. At a loss, he wanders into a bar to eat, and drink:
The steak, when it came, was leathery, and it reminded him of the gloves he wore when he played with Grace. At this very moment she was in a cage in the dark, bewildered but stoical. Long-suffering was more like it, poor thing, carried along on the current of existence. No wonder she suddenly got up and went to another room to lie down. It wasn’t thought that roused her, only a need for a small movement of freedom inside of fate. Why, after all, had he stopped in this awful, shadowy bar?
Now that is empathy. When the dog dies, the man feels the need to phone an ex-girlfriend:
“And what do you want?” She was breathing rapidly.
“I’d like to see you.”
“What for?”
“Jean. I know how bad it was, the way I spoke to you.”
“You were so—contemptuous!”
“I know. I had no right —”
She broke in. “No one has.”
Not blacks, not whites, not the rich, not the poor, not parents, not children. No one.
• • •
“Would it be immodest,” asks Geoff Dyer, in the introduction to Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, “to claim that this book gives a glimpse of a not unrepresentative way of being a late-twentieth-early-twenty-first-century man of letters?” Yes, Geoff, it would. Then again, it wouldn’t be inaccurate. And if it didn’t happen to be you saying it, you could go ahead and replace “not unrepresentative” with “exemplary.” Many reviewers who are not Geoff Dyer have noted the extraordinary variety of this book, moving as it does from photography, to literature, to music, to travel, to sport, to war to peace, to love to sex to family—to sex with your family, of which more later. But the eclecticism is less important to me than the unity of approach. Considering a 1943 Robert Capa photograph in which an Italian soldier and his girl walk along a country lane, Dyer writes: “Works of art urge us to respond in kind and so, looking at this photograph, my reaction expresses itself as a vow: I will never love another photograph more.” Every essay here is an attempt to respond in kind, to be equal to the art work, in some way to meld with it, like a love object. The act of critical appreciation is, for Dyer, very close to longing (“I want to be that soldier”). Discussing a snapshot (by Jacques Henri Lartigue) of an attractive woman on a sunlounger, it is Dyer himself who leans over her and murmurs, “Excusez-moi, mademoiselle. J’espère que je ne vous dérange . . .” He wants to be in these photographs, but he also wants to be these photographers. His critical apparatus is essentially novelistic: voyeurism. What if I weren’t me? What if I could be someone else, do something else? What is it like, being a photographer? Or a musician? Or a sculptor? The title of an essay on Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Achievement of Others,” in fact applies throughout. While quoting the photographer (and obsessive quote-transcriber) William Gedney, Dyer finds a line that illuminates his own interest in role reversal: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience,” wrote Joyce. Gedney marked that with an asterisk and inverted the terms—“the experience of reality”—to distinguish the photographer’s quest from the novelist’s.
Dyer seems always to be questing to comprehend somebody else’s quest. A “literary and scholarly gate-crasher,” who turns up “uninvited at an area of expertise,” he quotes approvingly Sontag’s exacting dictum (“My idea of a writer: someone interested in ‘everything’”) but his own way of being a writer is a little less pompous than Sontag’s, and a lot more comic—I’m tempted to say, more British. For Dyer the line between being not at all interested in something and being very interested in it is remarkably thin: concentration, even obsession, is born of distraction and boredom. His experience with photography is typical. Quite suddenly he went from not being interested in photography, to being very interested in it, to—and this is the step 99 percent of normal people don’t take—getting so interested in it he wrote a whole book about it. Yet in all that time, as he explains, he never bought a camera. When asked by a librarian at the Institute of Jazz Studies what his credentials were for writing a book about jazz, he replies, “I like listening to it.” And once he’s successfully established himself in a subject, “making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two,” he then abruptly abandons it, “moving on elsewhere.”
There’s a restless current to these essays, as if a net were being thrown ever wider in search of fresh versions of that original burst of aesthetic delight, literature, which managed to turn a working-class grammar-school boy from Cheltenham into an international “man of letters.” It will not surprise longtime Dyer readers to learn that D. H. Lawrence was central to that transformation. Coincidentally, Lawrence was essential to Paula Fox, too; both writers read the same book, Sons and Lovers, at the same age, fifteen. For Fox the book was an “awakening”; for Dyer “it dramatized a process of which reading this novel was an exemplary part,” the process being that peculiarly English problem of “growing up in—and moving away from—the working class.” But Lawrence is much more to Dyer than a class role model (forgive me, Paula). Lawrence means frank discussion of sex, he means escape from the academy, he means “not belong[ing] to any class” and instead feeling “everywhere . . . at home,” he means childlessness and adventure, he means “never let[ting] the fact that [you are] technically ill qualified to write about something deter [you] from doing so.” In the claustrophobic world of British letters, Lawrence means freedom. It is a spiritual connection that exists between the two writers: stylistically they have almost nothing in common. What Dyer admires in Lawrence is his fundamental openness to the world, “his bond with everything in creation,” as Frieda had it. But the purple prose for which Lawrence is, in my opinion, rightly notorious is nowhere in Dyer.
At a certain point in that Gedney essay, Dyer transcribes a line of the photographer’s that feels self-reflexive: “It is not easy to be unpretentious, simple, direct, honest and yet intelligent.” For British writers it can feel almost impossible, for reasons that are profoundly bound to class, as Dyer, in a very brilliant essay on Richard Ford, recognizes:
Lucky American writers for whom the dominant narrative voice of literature is so close to the lives of the people within the narrative! . . . Think of the hoops James Kelman has to wedge himself through to close the gap between narrative and dialogue; then think of Ford and that all-accommodating, middle-of-the-road voice that is equally at home on either side of quotation marks.
And this is what I find most remarkable about Dyer: his tone. Its simplicity, its classlessness, its accessibility and yet its erudition—the combination is a trick few British writers ever pull off. It allows him to say things like this: “Not only is ours a time when anyone—from presidents of the United States to nameless peasants—might die on film; this has been the time when, to a degree, people die only on film. I have seen hundreds of bodies on film and never one in real life.” As a mode you might call it “the conversational sublime.” It’s very close to the tone of John Berger—another of Dyer’s heroes—but Dyer isn’t tied to Berger’s political stringencies, and so can indulge the personal in ways Berger cannot. It’s very difficult to imagine Berger writing about anal sex, or sex in hotels, or explaining that one of the pleasures of fiction writing is the way you get to invent people, precisely, a sister, more precisely “the perfect sister—
one you were sexually attracted to.”
Dyer knows, like Martin Amis—from whom a lot of the Dyer humor comes—that writers’ lives are “mostly anxiety and ambition.” In the literary essays this gives him an acute psychological edge. Discussing the romance between American writing and boxing, he begins with Hemingway’s brag (“I started off very quietly and I had Mr. Turgenev . . . I fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one”) before wittily tracking a masculine contest, among Papa’s descendants, to produce the most muscular, brutal, “broken” sentences, at the end of which zero-sum game lies “the quandary of a contemporary American literary ideal: if only it were possible to not be able to write at all—and still be able to write.”
Which is all to say Geoff Dyer has a very refined shit detector indeed. But every shit detector has a flaw. Dyer’s may be unnecessary self-defense. “To what extent,” he asks of Sontag, “is it possible to be a great prose writer without being a great writer of fiction?” The answer is comically obvious (“As for In America, I respected myself so much for finishing it that I felt I deserved a prize myself”), but he doesn’t seem to believe we believe it. On Rebecca West: “If she is not regarded as a writer quite of the first rank, that is largely because so much of the work on which her reputation should rest is tacitly considered secondary to the forms in which greatness is expected to manifest itself, namely, the novel.” On Ryszard Kapuściński: “he is the victim of a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction.” Maybe fifty years ago. It is the only subject in four hundred pages on which Dyer is (slightly) dull. In the end he is rescued from the accusation of self-seriousness by his humor. It’s what separates him from Berger and Lawrence and Sontag: it’s what makes these essays not just an education but a joy. His piece on the blue-chip gallery photographer Edward Burtynsky opens like this:
Whether these are seen on the walls of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington or in the accompanying book published by Steidl, the photographs in Oil bring the viewer face to face with huge and troubling questions. How can we go on producing on this scale? How can we go on consuming like this? Aren’t we at the point where we say, okay, enough is enough? Is it sustainable, the level of luxury and lavishness to which we have become accustomed? In short, how many more of these high-concept, high-value Edward Burtynsky productions can we take? I am being only slightly facetious.
Facetious inversions are a specialty. One of the funniest things on the Internet is Dyer pulling the same trick while introducing an unsmiling J. M. Coetzee at a literary festival.
In the memoir section, the familiar archness gives way to something softer. Here the tantalizingly cool life of the independent writer is rooted in the longueurs of life as an only child, and an excess of empty time was not, is not, always the paradise it may seem to those looking on: “whereas many people my age are starting to feel worn down by the burden of obligations, responsibilities, and commitments, it’s the freedom that’s getting to me.” Dyer is an excellent chronicler of his own ennui, and is perhaps most moving when he reveals that the young man who created himself from books now finds it hard to even finish reading one: “But how could it have happened? How did I go from being interested in everything to not being that bothered about anything?”
I once compared Dyer with Kingsley Amis, a comparison I suspect he wouldn’t thank me for, given that Amis’s interests were, in the end, so narrowly parochial and British, and Dyer’s are so stunningly wide. But it’s a connection I’ve always felt without being able to give a very rational reason for it. I was glad, then, to find in his essay on Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon a funny moment where the two men seem to coalesce. Dyer is discussing West’s “affirmation of the agreeable” over the disagreeable. This is Dyer’s preference, too, and in his resourceful way, he finds an Auden quote (from “In Time of War”) to echo the sentiment: “It’s better to be sane than mad, or liked than dreaded;/It’s better to sit down to nice meals than to nasty;/It’s better to sleep two than single; it’s better to be happy.” And it’s this poem that Kingsley bastardized to come up with his much-repeated credo: Nice things are nicer than nasty ones. That’s where Kingsley and Dyer meet: in a commitment to the moral integrity of pleasure. It also explains why, in all these many pages of Dyer, there is not one conventionally “bad” review. A man who can’t be bothered to do yoga is unlikely to rouse himself to write a thousand words about something he hates. What gives Dyer the edge over Amis Sr.—and over so much of what he calls “the tucked-up, hospital corners school of British fiction”—is his ability to hold both the beauty and horror of existence in his mind simultaneously, as he demonstrates in Algeria, while shadowing another of his literary idols, Camus: “I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.”
Two Legs Bad, Six Legs Good—Sontag Worse!
Am I a redundant human being? A question asked by many a novel—many a novelist—but rarely so explicitly, and not usually on the front cover. But that’s the title of Mela Hartwig’s novella, written in 1931 and now reissued by Dalkey Press, and it works like a life buoy, alerting us to a writer drowning in obscurity. Born in Vienna in 1893, Hartwig was an actress before becoming a writer; she married Dr. Robert Spira, an art historian and critic, and when the Anschluss came, the couple escaped to London, where they befriended Virginia Woolf. That much the publisher tells you; it’s difficult to find more. There was another early novel with an equally provocative title, Das Weib ist ein Nichts (The Woman Is a Nothing), which became a scandal (and almost a Greta Garbo movie). And I was pleased to unearth an issue of the Association of Jewish Refugees newsletter reporting Mela’s seventieth birthday, a short paragraph sprinkled with poignant information (“When she came to this country in 1938 she encountered insurmountable difficulties in carrying on her activities as a writer. This frustration caused her to find another outlet for her artistic inclinations, which was independent of her German mother tongue: painting”). The next reference in the same organ is her 1967 obituary. In the English-speaking universe she seems to exist mainly in the blinding contrails of Woolf, who used her influence to help release Dr. Spira from a brief internment on the Isle of Man, and came again to the couple’s aid when some paintings Robert had brought from Vienna were judged to be fakes (Woolf promised to get Sir Kenneth Clark, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, to take a look at them). We have a footnote: a cache of letters between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West was recently discovered in a hidden drawer in Sissinghurst, one of which was found to mention Mela in passing, a stray ball lobbed between two pros, long lost in the high grass. Was Mela grateful to be the object of Virginia’s well-connected generosity? Or did she feel patronized, pained by the status gap between them? Friend or frenemy? You’d expect a little volatility from the woman who opened a novel this way:
I’m a secretary. I have nearly twelve years of experience. My shorthand is first rate and I’m an excellent typist. I don’t mention it to brag. I just want to show that I amount to something . . . This is the story that I want to write. Though, it’s so laughably mundane, so incontestably banal, that it’s really no story at all.
The story, such as it is, is an oppressive, monologic rant, not dissimilar to those of Hartwig’s compatriot Thomas Bernhard: the sort of writing that seems dictated from a Viennese chaise longue, though without any hope of therapeutic closure. Never mind Anna O.; meet Aloisia Schmidt: self-hater, compulsive masturbator, narcissistic manic-depressive, all-round good-time gal:
I’m neither pretty nor ugly. My face is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither attractive nor unattractive. It’s a face you simply don’t see. It goes without saying that I wish I were beautiful. That’s hardly a confession worth making. However, I swear that sometimes I want to
be ugly too—revoltingly ugly. Of course, I can’t explain why I want to be revoltingly ugly. Perhaps it’s because people would at least notice me then.
At first the comparison with Bernhard is depressing: why do male writers channel rage into sadism while their female counterparts collapse into masochism? After hearing of Aloisia’s unhappy and furious childhood (“I don’t mean to make myself sound any more neurotic than I already have—who am I to have neuroses anyway?—but I have to admit that even as a child I suffered when someone didn’t pay attention to me”), the reader peeks fearfully through her fingers as Aloisia reaches adulthood and men enter the scene:
I think, in fact, that this was what impressed me most about Emil K.: the fact that I only understood half of what he was saying, most of the time . . . I couldn’t understand why an intelligent person like him would stoop to associate with someone like me. It wouldn’t always be enough for him that I had a pretty face. If he was sticking around, it could only be because he still hadn’t found me out.
Aloisia is an accomplished self-saboteur (“I think I have a special talent for seeing the failure I deserve behind every success I might have stumbled into: I had every reason to be content, but wasn’t”) who even in her retelling of events doubts her ability to do precisely that. The sentence “I don’t know if I’m making myself clear”—usually following a paragraph of perfect clarity—keeps coming back, like a stutter.
In an online review, someone called Kate calls Hartwig a “Viennese Carrie Bradshaw from Hell.” It’s a smart comparison, although I think Kate means to condemn her and I’m more inclined to praise. While struggling along with Aloisia—by turns delighted and infuriated, as I once felt watching Carrie—it occurred to me that people consistently misunderstand the logic of these feminine narratives, wherein what looks like self-abasement is very often an inverse form of self-display and self-assertion. That it should be so often mistaken is not surprising: every effort is made to make the self-abasement as persuasive as possible. Think of medieval mystics offering to rip holes in their chests so that Jesus might enter, or present-day comediennes and columnists tearing strips off themselves—death by a thousand self-deprecations. And yet don’t they all, as Orwell put it—describing the “sheer egoism” of writers—“live their own lives to the end”? Doesn’t Carrie always do, in the end, exactly what she pleases?