Feel Free

by Zadie Smith

  • • •

  As the picture of the past refines I see one room in particular in a new, semi-tragic light: the bathroom in my parents’ maisonette. It wasn’t big—about twelve feet by ten—but now I understand how much it had to hold. On the one hand, it was a just a little bathroom, done up in a vaguely “seaside” theme—a shell here, a piece of coral there—the kind of thing British people like in their bathrooms. But it was also a sort of dream space of my parents, mixing memory and desire, precisely in Eliot’s sense. My mum’s contribution was plants. They were green and tropical-looking and hugely overgrown: tubers poked out of the soil and sometimes stretched to the next pot along where they grew some more, and every time you had a bath you had to contend with these tendrils, and the insects that were attracted to them, especially in summer. I’m not good with the names but there were definitely many spider plants, a few ferns, and something huge with broad, glossy leaves that blocked the light from the single window and made the whole thing feel like a tropical sweat-box.* The usual comment of visitors was: “Christ, it’s like a bloody jungle in there.” Green grew on green grew on green with lush abandon. Cutting it back only speeded up the process. Thirty years later, while attending a literary festival in Jamaica, I stood amid a lot of green growing on green growing on green and was thrown back, in memory, to a corner of a foreign bathroom that was forever . . . Jamaica. Yet it never occurred to me, as a child, that my mother might be homesick. Children are so narcissistic: nothing about other people ever really occurs to them, least of all about their parents. It further didn’t occur to me that there was anything interesting about my father’s use of this same small space as a dark room. I wasn’t at all curious about it. The first time I even noticed what he was doing was when I accidentally disturbed him; I’d walked into the bathroom, intending to go to one of our several loos, and found the room pitch black, except for a strange red glow. My father shouted at me: “Close that bloody door!” I did, but with me inside. Weird tableau: my father with his sleeves rolled up, and the bath full of liquid, and this red light, turning the clean Habitat lines of our modern home into something subterranean and, to me, unnerving. What was this secret room doing in our house? I looked up and saw he’d strung a clothes-line past the plants, stretching between the walls. On this were pegged large contact sheets from which images were slowly emerging. I’d never seen this process before and stared, wondering what was to come. All my childhood I’d hoped to discover my father had some hidden artistic genius—was this it?

  But as the images rose to the fore it turned out that all the pictures were of us. Of me, my brother Ben and my brother Luke, over and over. Scattered around the base of the toilet were many little canisters of Ilford film, black and white, twenty-four shots on a roll. And these, too, turned out to be all of us. I was disappointed. I knew, vaguely, that my father had once had dreams of a career in photography; much later I learned that these dreams had, briefly, some reality, although many years before we were born. By the time we moved to the maisonette he was no more a photographer than the dad who plays five-a-side is a professional footballer. All ambition in that direction had been abandoned. Everything was now about us, everything had been submitted to, and re-formed around, family life. Which, as a child, I had nothing but contempt for, even as I benefited from it. That my father was a boring, reliable and sane man, able to infinitely defer his own pleasures and ambitions, is, I think now, at the root of whatever emotional stability I’ve been able to maintain in my life. But at the time his inability—or unwillingness—to live for himself filled me with horror. For the sake of the children was a phrase I especially detested; it seemed a thing people said to get out of the responsibility of actually living out their own desires and ideas or pursuing their God-given abilities. To stay married to someone you basically couldn’t stand—for twelve years!—for the sake of the children! What kind of insanity was that? Yet now, in the retrospective swirl, I look back at my parents’ dedication to this principle with fresh appreciation. I still couldn’t do it, but I understand now why they did. They had each grown up without fathers—devastating, in both cases. To employ another classically lower-middle-class cliché, they wanted something better for me.

  There are of course degrees of these things but I do think every family home is an emotionally violent place, full of suppressed rage, struck through with profound individual disappointments. It’s in the nature of the beast that no one gets out of a family unit whole or with everything they want. I think of that wonderful Jerry Seinfeld line: “There’s no such thing as fun for all the family.” Somebody’s going to have to give up something: it’s only a question of how much and to whom. In moments of retrospective swirl I see clearly that my parents gave me much more than I consider it reasonable to give anybody, and far more than I am able to give my own children. For though, superficially, I seem to give my children more of everything: more money, more “opportunity,” certainly more holidays, certainly more space, my parents gave me their lives. Children and domestic life supplanted art-making, for my father. And, for my mother, a new country supplanted the old, whether she wanted it to or not, that’s what happened. I haven’t had to make anything like these sorts of stark choices. My parents were fully immersed in the contested space in which adults live with children, each trying to realize their own ambitions, each trying to “live their lives” and “have time”—tropical plants here, contact sheets there—and no one ever getting all of what they want. I also live in a contested space with children, but the battles this time round are nowhere near as brutal.

  When I think of my parents it’s often with some guilt: that I did the things they never got to do, and I did them on their watch, using their time, as if they were themselves just that—time-keepers—and not separate people living out the ever-shortening time of their own existence. This is especially true of my father, if only because the time for his own life ran out. My mother got her education as an adult and now, still pretty young, gets to pursue her own whims and interests, relatively secure as she approaches the state pension she worked thirty years to earn. She travels, she lives—she even writes. But my father waited his whole life to see a certain image of himself rise from the contact sheet and it never did. My image rose instead, and my brother Ben’s, and my brother Luke’s. If my father was some kind of an artist—and my sense is that he was—his art stayed in that bathroom, and then died with him.* Meanwhile my mother is writing a novel about Jamaica even as I type this. And my own children, well, they have to live around and about and within the art-making of their parents; they have to listen to us talk about the books we’re writing or reading, of films we’ve seen or films we want to write, and they have always known, from the start, that they are not the only things being created, cared for and raised up in this many-roomed house. Whether it’s good or bad for them—or us—I don’t know. But it’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is “the family” is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.

  • • •

  Postscript: Two years after I finished writing this my brother Ben—a rapper, among many other things—sent me his new album. Though he had not read this essay, I found he had chosen, for the cover art for his album—and among the many pictures my father left behind—the exact same picture I have placed here.

  The Family Is a Violent Event, Harvey Smith, date unknown

  MAN VERSUS CORPSE

  1.

  One September night, running home from dinner to meet a babysitter, I took off my heels and hopped barefoot—it was raining—up Crosby Street, and so home. Hepatitis, I thought. Hep-a-ti-tis. I reached my building bedraggled, looking like death. The doorman—who’d complimented me on my way out—blushed and looked down at his smartphone. In the lobby, on a side table
, sat a forlorn little hardbacked book. The World’s Masterpieces: Italian Painting. Published in 1939, not quite thirty pages long, with cheap marbled endpapers and a fond inscription in German: Meinem lieben Schuler . . . Someone gave this book to someone else in Mount Carmel (the Israeli mountains? the school in the Bronx?) on 2 March 1946.

  The handwriting suggested old age. Whoever wrote this inscription was dead now; whoever received the book no longer wanted it. I took the unloved thing to the fifteenth floor, in the hope of learning something of Italian masterpieces. Truthfully I would much rather have been on my iPhone, scrolling through e-mail. That’s what I’d been doing most nights since I bought the phone, six months earlier. But now here was this book, like an accusation. E-mail or Italian masterpieces?

  As I squinted through a scrim of vodka, a stately historical process passed me by: Cimabue, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo, Raphael, Michelangelo. Dates of birth and death, poorly reprinted images, dull unimpeachable facts. (“The fifteenth century brought many changes to Italy, and these changes were reflected in the work of her artists.”) Each man more “accurate” with his brush than the last, more inclined to let in “reality” (ugly peasants, simple landscapes). Madonnas held their nipples out for ravenous babies and Venice was examined from many different angles. Jesus kissed Judas. Spring was allegorized. The conclusion: “Many changes had taken place in Italian art since the days of the great primitive, Cimabue. The Renaissance had opened the way for realism and, at last, for truth as we find it in nature.”

  To any reader of 2013 the works of 1939 may seem innocent. Though how jaded, how “knowing” we can think ourselves, without knowing much of anything at all. I’ve worked my way through surveys like this before, and am still no closer to remembering who came first, Fra Angelico or Fra Filippo. My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions. But golden yellows and eggshell blues, silken folds of red and green, bell towers and lines of spruce, the penises and vaginas of infants (which, for the first time in my relationship with Italian masterpieces, I am able to judge on their veracity), the looks that pass between the Madonna and her son—these are the sort of things my mind accepts. And I was making my way through these details pleasantly enough when I was stopped short—snagged—by a drawing in charcoal. The whole stately historical procession dispersed. There was only this: Nude Man from the Back Carrying a Corpse on His Shoulders by Luca Signorelli (c.1450–1523).

  Man is naked, with a hand on his left hip, and an ideal back in which every muscle is delineated. His buttocks are vigorous, monumental, like Michelangelo’s David. (“Undoubtedly indebted to the works of Luca Signorelli.”) He walks forcefully, leading with his left foot, and over his shoulders hangs a corpse—male or female, it’s not clear. To secure it Man has hooked one of his own rippling arms around the corpse’s stringy leg. He is carrying this corpse off somewhere, away from the viewer; they are about to march clean out of the frame. I stared at this drawing, attempting a thought experiment, failing. Then I picked up a pen and wrote, in the margins of the page, most of what you have read up to this point. A simple experiment—more of a challenge, really. I tried to identify with the corpse.

  Imagine being a corpse. Not the experience of being a corpse—clearly being a corpse is the end of all experience. I mean: imagine this drawing represents an absolute certainty about you, namely, that you will one day be a corpse. Perhaps this is very easy. You are a brutal rationalist, harboring no illusions about the nature of existence. I am, a friend once explained, a “sentimental humanist.” Not only does my imagination quail at the prospect of imagining myself a corpse, even my eyes cannot be faithful to the corpse for long, drawn back instead to the monumental vigor. To the back and buttocks, the calves, the arms. Across the chasms of gender, color, history and muscle definition, I am the man and the man is me. Oh, I can very easily imagine carrying a corpse! See myself hulking it some distance, down a highway or through a wasteland, before unloading it, surprised at its ever-increasing stiffness, at the way it remains frozen in an L-shape, as if sitting up to attention. And it’s child’s play to hear a neck bone crack as I lay the corpse—a little too forcefully—upon the ground.

  Imagining that reality—in which everybody (except me) becomes a corpse—presents no difficulties whatsoever. Like most people in New York City, I daily expect to find myself walking the West Side Highway with nothing but a shopping cart stacked with bottled water, a flashlight and a dead loved one on my back, seeking a suitable site for burial. The post-apocalyptic scenario—the future in which everyone’s a corpse (except you)—must be, at this point, one of the most thoroughly imagined fictions of the age.

  Walking corpses—zombies—follow us everywhere, through novels, television, cinema. Back in the real world, ordinary citizens turn survivalist, ready to scale a mountain of corpses if it means enduring. Either way, death is what happens to everyone else. By contrast, the future in which I am dead is not a future at all. It has no reality. If it did—if I truly believed that being a corpse was not only a possible future but my only guaranteed future—I’d do all kinds of things differently. I’d get rid of my iPhone, for starters. Lead a different sort of life.

  What is a corpse? It’s what they piled up by the hundreds when the Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh this April. It’s what lands on the ground each time a human being jumps off the Foxconn building in China’s high-tech iPhone-manufacturing complex. (Twenty-one have died since 2010.) They spring flower-like in budded clusters whenever a bomb goes off in the marketplaces of Iraq and Afghanistan. A corpse is what individual angry, armed Americans sometimes make of each other for strangely underwhelming reasons: because they got fired, or a girl didn’t love them back, or nobody at their school understands them. Sometimes—horrifyingly—it’s what happens to one of “our own,” and usually cancer has done it, or a car, at which moment we rightly commit ourselves to shunning the very concept of the “corpse,” choosing instead to celebrate and insist upon the reality of a once-living person who, though “dearly departed,” is never reduced to matter alone.

  It’s argued that the gap between this local care and distant indifference is a natural instinct. Natural or not, the indifference grows, until we approach a point at which the conceptual gap between the local and the distant corpse is almost as large as the one that exists between the living and the dead. Raising children alerts you to this most fundamental of “first principles.” Up/down. Black/white. Rich/poor. Alive/dead. When an Anglo-American child looks at the world she sees many strange divisions. Oddest of all is the unequal distribution of corpses. We seem to come from a land where people, generally speaking, live. But those other people (often brown, often poor) come from a death-dealing place. What a misfortune to have been born in such a place! Why did they choose it? Not an unusual thought for a child. What’s bizarre is how many of us harbor something similar, deep inside our naked selves.

  A persistent problem for artists: How can I insist upon the reality of death, for others, and for myself? This is not mere existentialist noodling (though it can surely be that, too). It’s a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I’m a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.) Elsewhere, death is rarely seriously imagined or even discussed—unless some young man in Silicon Valley is working on permanently eradicating it. Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses—a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame—will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.

  Historically, the drift from representation toward abstraction has been expressed—by those artists willing to verbalize intent—as the rejection of illusion. From a 1943 mini-manifesto sent by Mark Rothko to The New York Times: “We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” But what is “truth”?

  There is no suc
h thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject matter is crucial and that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

  Death, for Rothko, was the truth—the tragic and timeless thing—and it’s hard not to read his career as an inexorable journey toward it. His 1942 Omen of the Eagle (inspired by the Oresteia—itself an agonized consideration of three corpses: Agamemnon’s, Cassandra’s and Clytemnestra’s) is the painting that apparently led to the mini-manifesto, and it’s clearly transitional, still depicting, within Rothko’s famous strata, some recognizable forms: Greek tragic masks, bird heads, many surrealist feet.