Feel Free: Essays

by Zadie Smith

  When you write a novel in the first person you take on an impossible identity, someone you can’t be, because you are already you—and not this “I” in the book—and you have lived your life, had your adventures, experienced your own highs and lows. My pretend life story in Swing Time ends with “my” mother dying. When I gave it to my very much alive mother I wondered what she would make of it. I knew the reality effect in it was oddly strong: an acquaintance who had read it sent me an e-mail expressing her sadness on my mother’s passing. But my mother read it with equanimity. I suppose she has at this point seen so many false and fictitious mothers from her daughter that she has become very used to the I-who-is-not-me and does not bother too much over it anymore, though I know it must not be much fun to be mistaken, by others, for Clara in White Teeth or Kiki in On Beauty, or to have any fictional self precede you into a room—or indeed to be presumed dead. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once famously warned: “When a writer is born into a family that family is finished.” But so far my family seems to be holding up, and this despite the fact that I have also one comedian brother and one rapper brother—so that’s three kids picking over the narrative bones of one clan. But the Smiths still stand. I have no idea how it was for the Roths but I’m guessing it can’t always have been easy. The freedom I have been suggesting novels can offer their readers does not easily extend to those real people mistakenly thought to be depicted within their pages. For them, I fear, these fictions are instead a kind of prison. For this and many other reasons I am forever unsure whether novel-writing is worth it. The balance is hard to measure. I think of all the pain writers like Richard Yates and John Cheever caused their families, and then I place it against all the joy these men provoked in me. Writers create their secondary selves, they use them to slip from every bind and definition, but they can also prove callous with the lives of others and in their dash for freedom knock their loved ones out of the way. Half of Karl Ove’s family, or so the newspapers tell us, are presently suing him. And yet the freedom that this writer has conveyed, worldwide, is huge and not easily dismissed. I used to think, as a young writer, that it all boiled down to that crusty old Yeatsian warning: “The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work . . .” But now that seems to me another impossibly taut identity in need of loosening up. Why must either life or work be perfect? Writers, like everybody else, are stumbling through this world, constantly re-examining the checks and balances of their choices, knowing they are helping here but hurting there. In my life, at least, the flesh-and-blood “I” and the I-who-is-not-me stumble equally, neither ever coming close to perfection. But I feel extremely fortunate to be engaged in this lifelong project concerning their inter-relation, communication, mutual rejection and argument. If I can keep saying “I” both ways for even half as long as Mr. Roth managed it, I will count myself a very fortunate woman indeed.

  FEEL FREE

  LIFE-WRITING

  For a long time I’ve wanted to keep a diary. I tried throughout adolescence but always gave it up. I dreamed of being very frank, like Joe Orton, whose diaries I admired; I found them in the library when I was about fourteen. I read them half as literary interest and half as pornography, thrilled to follow Joe around the many corners of the city in which I had only walked but he had managed to have illicit sex. I thought: If you’re going to write a diary, it should be like this, it should be utterly free, honest. But I found I couldn’t write about sexual desires (too shy, too dishonest), nor could I describe any sexual activity—I wasn’t getting any—and so the diary devolved into a banal account of fake crushes and imagined romance and I was soon disgusted with it and put it aside. A bit later I tried again, this time concentrating only on school, like a Judy Blume character, detailing playground incidents and friendship drama, but I was never able to block from my mind a possible audience, and this ruined it for me: it felt like homework. I was always trying to frame things to my advantage in case so-and-so at school picked it up and showed it to everybody. The dishonesty of diary-writing—this voice you put on for supposedly no one but yourself—I found that idea so depressing. I feel that life has too much artifice in it anyway without making a pretty pattern of your own most intimate thoughts. Or maybe it’s the other way round: some people are able to write frankly, simply, of how they feel, whereas I can’t stop myself turning it into a pretty pattern.

  As a young adult I read a lot of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and again thought that I really should keep a diary. I knew enough about myself by then to know that the retelling of personal feelings in a diary was completely intolerable to me, I was too self-conscious, and too lazy for the daily workload. So I tried to copy the form and style of Woolf’s single-volume Writer’s Diary and make entries only on days when something literary had happened to me, either something I wrote or something I read, or encounters with other writers. That diary lasted exactly one day. It covered an afternoon spent with Jeff Eugenides and took up twelve pages and half the night. Forget it! At that rate the writing of the life will take longer than the living of it. I think part of the problem was the necessity to write in the first person, a form I have, until recently, found laborious and stressful. I was not able to use it with any confidence except in short, essayistic bursts. When I was younger even the appearance of “I” on the page made me feel a bit ill—that self-consciousness again—and I would always try to obscure it with “we.” I notice that once I got to America this began to change, and then snowball; looking up the page right now I see more cases of “I” than a stretch of Walt Whitman. But still I have some mental block when it comes to diaries and journals. The same childish questions get to me. Who is it for? What is this voice? Who am I trying to kid—myself?

  I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened—and I like it that way. I feel when I am very old and my brain “goes” it won’t feel so very different from the life I live now, in this miasma of non-memory, which, though it infuriates my nearest and dearest, must suit me somehow, as I can’t seem, even by acts of will, to change it. I wonder if it isn’t obliquely connected to the way I write my fiction, in which, say, a doormat in an apartment I lived in years ago will reappear, just as it once was, that exact doormat, same warp and weft, and yet I can’t say when exactly I lived there, who I was dating or even if my father was alive or dead at the time. Perhaps the first kind of non-memory system—the one that can’t retain dates or significant events—allows the other kind of memory system to operate, the absence of the first making space for the second, clearing a path for that whatever-it-is which seems to dart through my mind like a shy nocturnal animal, dragging back strange items like doormats, a single wilted peony, or a beloved strawberry sticker, not seen since 1986, but still shaped like a strawberry and scented like one, too.

  When it comes to life-writing, the real, honest, diaristic, warts-and-all kind, the only thing I have to show for myself—before St. Peter and whomever else—is my Yahoo! e-mail account, opened circa 1996 and still going. In there (though I would rather die than read it all over) is probably the closest thing to an honest account of my life, at least in writing. That’s me, for good and for bad, with all the kind deeds and dirty lies and domestic squabbles and bookish friendships and online fashion purchases. Like most people (I should think), a personal nightmare of mine is the idea of anybody wandering around inside that account, reading whatever they please, passing judgment. At the same time, when I am dead, if my children want to know what I was like in the daily sense, not as a writer, not as a more-or-less presentable person, but simply the foolish human being behind it all, they’d be wise to look there.

  THE BATHROOM

  When I was eight years old my family moved out of a c
ouncil estate and into what seemed to me a mansion. From the front it looked like a whole house; inside it felt like one, too. We had the front door to ourselves, and if you looked out of the back windows you saw a big, square, overgrown garden, which also appeared to be entirely ours. Most visitors never noticed it was a maisonette, or that the bottom half of the building was council accommodation, accessible through a side entrance and occupied by an Indian family whose first act of greeting was to show me how to fold a triangle of pastry into a samosa. Not long after we’d moved in, my father set about splitting the shared garden in half, by way of a slightly warped wooden fence. I don’t think the division was contentious: it was just a practical matter, relating to differing concepts of what constitutes a garden (coriander, potatoes; flowers, paddling pool). With the fence completed everyone was satisfied. We each had our little fiefdom. And from the back windows you still had this sense of grandeur, of space.

  Inside we had four bedrooms. One each for me and my brother (although out of habit I usually snuck out of mine in the middle of the night and joined him in his), one for my father and mother—who was pregnant—and a “spare” room, on a lower level, into which we periodically lured European teenagers. These teenagers were very glamorous to me, very exotic. They wore Swatches and pristine Dunlops and primary-colored Naf Naf sweaters; they watched—and seemed to genuinely enjoy—the Tour de France. They were forever wanting to be taken to Abbey Road and photographed walking on the zebra crossing. And of course they paid good rent. Later, when my youngest brother was born, the spare room became a place for a series of Spanish “au pairs” who looked after the three of us, in lieu of rent, while my parents worked, my father in a small paper company, my mother as a recently qualified social worker. Clearly we had risen in the world. We had, for the first time, these non-essential spaces. Besides the spare room, we had the bathroom, which had its own toilet and was right next to another little room that also had a toilet. These two toilet-containing rooms were my mother’s delight,* decorated with care, always scrupulously clean. Both the European teenagers and the later au pairs were expected—required, really—to express their regular admiration for them if they had any hope of living happily among us.

  The spare room, the extra toilet—these represented, for my parents, a very British form of achievement. Raised in poverty, they were now officially what the census-takers call “lower middle class.” I recognize that for people outside the UK these gradations of class are often bemusing, inherently absurd, and difficult to parse in their delicate separations, but let me try. When you were lower middle class, in the eighties, you went to Europe occasionally—though only on flights that left at 3 a.m., and on planes in which you freely chose the smoking section—and you drove a Mini Metro, and you bought fresh orange juice. You went to state school of course and had never seen a ski lift but you took the Guardian* and, if there was a good front-page sex scandal, the Mirror, and you had those nice stripy Habitat blinds in the kitchen and china plates hanging on the walls and you absolutely understood that doormats with jokes on them were in bad taste. You told people you “never watched ITV,” although this was actually a lie: you watched ITV all the time. And each summer you packed the car and motored down the M4 to Devon or Cornwall, stopping along the route to take tea—thanks to the National Trust—in the various country mansions of penniless aristocrats. At least, that’s how it was for us. Thinking back on it, I remember a lot of happiness. I’m sure every category in the census will stake its own claim—the noble working poor, the striving bourgeoisie, the elegant rich, the serenely high born, the haute bourgeoisie intellectual or artist—but the unlovable lower middle class also have their points of pride, although most of their satisfactions are, in my experience, the consequence of a series of counterfactuals. It’s not what happens to the lower middle class, exactly, that makes them relatively content, but rather what doesn’t happen. When each bill hitting the mat no longer represents an existential threat you are freed from an inhibiting and oppressive form of daily fear. Nor are you touched by the self-contempt that tends to stalk the solidly middle and upper middle class, and you are perfectly ignorant of that sense of enervation too often found in the highest born. The lower-middle-class child has, as the football managers like to say, everything to play for. It’s not that you don’t hope to redeem your parents’ own thwarted ambitions—particularly in the arena of education—you do, but you also understand that if you happen to fail it’s no longer the end of the(ir) world. And, as you motor onwards through your life, whenever you pause to check behind you in the rear-view mirror you see a vista quite unlike that of the child of the long-term unemployed or the working poor or the recently migrated. You see that your parents have established a small but relatively stable space for themselves in this world, one that does not—vitally—depend completely on you. And so there is a little space for your own dreams, too. You don’t have to become a doctor. In fact as long as you don’t expect your dreams to be financed in any way whatsoever you are pretty much free to dream your little head off. My parents’ reaction to the news that they had, among their children, one aspiring writer and two aspiring rappers was, basically: knock yourself out.

  I see now how liberating that was. Nothing was guaranteed and nothing could be promised, but this also meant nothing was finally decided or completely shut off. It gave me a great sense of freedom. And I’m aware, as I raise my own children, that in a peculiar sense they inherit from me less freedom than I took from my parents. Their material circumstances are far better, and their parents aren’t permanently at war (four years after they moved into their “mansion” my parents bitterly separated). But I cannot present to my children the utterly blank slate—equal parts exhilarating and frightening—which my parents placed in front of me. In their case risk has been largely eliminated, for to be born solidly middle class in England is still one of the safest bets in the world—though of course not quite as safe as it once was. (To truly fall out of the British middle class, when I was a child, you really had to do something pretty spectacular, like become a heroin addict or join the Hare Krishnas.) But even with rising house prices and disappearing pensions, a lot of the important chapters of a middle-class child’s life story are already written; they are composed at birth. My children are very likely to go to university. They are very unlikely to become teenage parents. And then of course my children are the children of writers. I’ve met the adult children of writers, their lives continually overlaid and undercut by another person’s words. I think I have a sense of what a suffocating space that can be. Honestly, if I were a child of mine, I imagine I’d have a great urge to flunk out of school and become a teenage parent, if only as a way of asserting my own freedom.

  • • •

  One of the strange, not especially pleasant, things about child-rearing is what I want to call the retrospective swirl. A woozy movement, hovering between present and past, so intense, nausea-inducing, and yet, in its painful way, instructive. An example: I invite my oldest mate, Sarah, round my house, and our kids are running about, basically entertaining themselves, while we surreptitiously smoke fags and drink a bottle of white wine and start cussing all our friends and laughing big hawking laughs, and then the kids wander back in and I force them to call this best friend of mine “Auntie Sarah” and they are profoundly dubious and I ignore their objections—and also all requests to cook dinner—and carry on talking very loudly and laughing a lot and then in the middle of all this I will think: Oh, right, I get it now! This is what Mum and “Auntie” Ruth were like; and this is why, after about 6 p.m., they stopped telling us what to do, and we got to stay up an hour or two hours later, until finally somebody thought to cook a frozen pizza—oh, I get it now. They were best friends, Mum and Ruth, from before we were born, and they both worked hard and had little time, so it was a big deal when they got together. They loved talking to each other. They were human women with many other concerns besides their children. And they were
a bit pissed on cheap white wine. Oh, right. Parental behavior that seemed completely mysterious to me thirty years ago now freshly clarifies itself. Recently this has been happening to me more and more. It’ll be about 4 p.m. on a Sunday, after forty-eight hours of uninterrupted childcare, and I’ll fall into a black hole, an almost suicidal trough, and my children will be confused; in answer to questions they’ll get blank stares or monosyllables, and then, out of nowhere, I will suddenly rise to my feet and start screaming at them about some tiny, insignificant matter—and in the middle of the yelling a part of me is sent back, into that retrospective swirl, and I think: Oh, right—this is what she felt, thirty years ago. This is why she’d suddenly go silent and stare at a wall. She just couldn’t take one more second of it. Not one more second of children shouting about who took what and what’s fair and not fair, and the continual demands and unnecessary meltdowns, and the sense that you do not have even a second to yourself, and meanwhile the TV plays the same show it plays every day with that same fucking theme tune . . . Oh, right. Now it all falls into place. And my mother had three. Plus a very unhappy marriage, and few of the outlets and freedoms I take for granted. And she was twenty-nine. The retrospective swirl leads to retrospective lucidity.