Let’s begin at my beginning. Perhaps some of you will identify. I had an interest in theatre – it had lit me, had sustained me through a small-town childhood and adolescence. I remember watching a TV production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, knowing nothing of the man or his life, but understanding when the characters said ‘To Moscow, to Moscow’ that I knew exactly how they felt. Chekhov articulated the horror of being trapped in a dead end and out of context, of being a permanent stranger. He had therefore spoken on my behalf. He had also let me know that I wasn’t alone, other people felt like that – like Chekhov, whose brother remembered him saying, ‘In my childhood I had no childhood.’ Chekhov grew up in the Crimean backwater of Taganrog, not Moscow – it took him a while to reach Moscow, to reach himself. On the 7th January 1889, when he was just shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, he wrote to his friend Suvorin:
Write a story about a young man, the son of a serf, a former shop-minder, chorister, schoolboy and student who was brought up to fawn upon rank, to kiss priests’ hands and to worship others’ thoughts . . . write how this man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and then wakes up one fine morning to discover that in his veins flows not the blood of a slave, but of a real human being . . .
As I say, when I saw Three Sisters I didn’t know about Chekhov’s life, I didn’t know he had a bumpy childhood like mine, I didn’t know he worked with prisoners and the poor, I didn’t know anything other than what he made, the product of simple, joyful, human creativity – his writing. But it started to squeeze the slave out of my blood, drop by drop.
And I read – all I could get – and then I went to university, because a grant made that financially possible for me. It wouldn’t have mattered how many exams I passed, I wouldn’t have got there without a grant. Beyond university, I started to work with community groups and special-needs groups, partly because I couldn’t do anything else, partly because I was looking for something and I didn’t know what, but it somehow seemed the proper course for me to write and to search in the company of other people. On the one hand, I was completely busking it. I was working with groups of radically mixed ability, in unsuitable spaces, inventing everything from scratch. Very few people were working with non-literate people to produce writing – I had to make up how we did that, relying on the fact that written words are simply a high-status record of what someone would say in their absence. I hoped that if we worked out how to catch what people wanted to say and how to finish it in a way that was pleasing to them, we could proceed happily. And so we did. I was making a tiny amount of money out of long hours. Simply earning a living until I found out my proper direction was pretty much all I had as a plan, but then I saw – I saw face after face changing after one session, ten sessions, twenty sessions – I saw the slave leaving the blood. I laughed more than I ever had. And I cried. We all laughed and cried. I found out about people. I was no longer alone. I found out what happens when, for example, I watch Three Sisters, when I touch art and art touches me. That’s when I get something beautiful and new in my life. I feel no longer alone, I have more strength to be myself and I see there may be other possibilities beyond the here and now. I receive a gift within which is a kind of hope about human nature – it’s not naïve, but it’s not the unreality of reality TV, not a cheap and nasty opportunity to feel good about ourselves because other people are manifestly more dysfunctional than we are, more stupid, more greedy, more sex-obsessed, more shoddy. Fully functional art doesn’t show us that – a toxic stasis, a warning to not leave the house – it shows us what we truly are and could be, good or bad. Art is about motion, strategies, rehearsals of new futures. It’s a power. And think – of course you’ve thought – if you’re not just receiving the end product, accepting the gift from the artist, joining in humanity with someone who may be in many ways alien to you – from another culture, another country, another time, who may be dead – what if you make that art? What if others suddenly can know a part of you, a deep and intimate part of you, the dreams you make? What if you light them and are useful, bring them in to what might previously have been an alien experience? What if you change their lives? How could that possibly not be a joy in your life and change you? How could that possibly not improve, for example, your health and well-being?
I began with mercenary and confused motives, running drama workshops, leading writing workshops, improvising from nothing – and I found a wonder, a purity: people making things for other people, being useful and getting well – not markets, not an industry, not egos, not much – just beauties, at very little expense, over and over and over.
Which means, incidentally, that I have very little patience for the kind of writer who sits in cafés wearing black pullovers while not writing and finding everything really difficult. Writing can be tricky and lonely, yes, but good Lord, it isn’t really difficult. It’s nothing but jam and gravy and good luck to be able to do this, to be able to be, in my case, a professional writer. It’s a high-quality job.
And it’s important. Being with people in art, helping it happen – that’s important. I know we’re not supposed to say so, but I am. It matters. When the chiropodist interrupts your reminiscence group – apparently just on principle – or someone hasn’t taken their medication in the mental-health group and you remember your public-liability insurance might not be up to date, or someone has a fit and you’re by yourself to cope and no one told you anybody might have fits. Or someone is dying, dying before your eyes. Or someone is beautiful inside and has shown you this repeatedly and wonderfully, but they live in hell. Or when someone quits a project, or when the funding is cut, or when a group doesn’t come together. Or when it all goes well and you make the movie, or you put on the musical, or the exhibition, or unveil the mosaic, or you print off the magazine, or the anthology, or the comic book and maybe you think, ‘Is this just self-indulgent, is this just having a laugh, just playing?’ When you forget how everyone has grown and changed – yourself included . . . On all those occasions, it is probably wise to step back for a moment and remember: the arts are important. Practically and politically and personally and in general they are important.
When we make art, art to which we commit ourselves, art which isn’t simply a commercial artefact, a pose, a gesture towards a concept, when we go all out and really create, we do a number of remarkable things. We take on a little of what we usually set aside for the divine – the troubles and delights which spring from overturning entropy and bringing something out of nothing. We excel. We offer something of ourselves, or from ourselves, to others. We allow and encourage a miracle – one human being can enter the thoughts and the life of another. We can be the other: the king, the foreigner, the wino, the superstar, the debutante, the murderer, we can experience a little of the large, strange, wonderful, horrible thing which is human experience.
What we make can reveal us to ourselves as greater than we were and help us practise addressing the world with courage and – because it is practical to involve such a thing – with love. As the listener, the viewer, the reader, the recipient of art, once again we are, of course, encouraged to be greater.
The proverb tells us we should walk a mile in a person’s shoes before we judge them. And if we’ve spent a whole novel in their thoughts, if we’ve heard their heart in music, if we’ve seen as they do how light falls, if we’ve breathed with them as they speak, felt the way they dance under our skins? Then I believe it is very difficult not to grant others at least dignity, at least that. In the arts, I feel we are in the dignity business.
And now let me mention a man who was a lawyer – which doesn’t sound especially artistic. He was also an incredible writer. Lawyers can be artists with words – they believe in the power of their medium, as artists do. This man changed the world by inventing a word. He was called Raphael Lemkin and he invented the word genocide. He put it in Webster’s dictionary, defined it, so it couldn’t be ignored and it could be made illegal. The failures of multiple governments to
live up to his hopes and his passion and his law – he isn’t responsible for them. Lemkin worked himself to death, to try and save lives – with a word. And he thought a great deal about genocide: how it starts, for example. He realised that murder isn’t the first step. Cultural annihilation comes first – what he called ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’. Barbarity was ‘the premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities’. Vandalism was ‘destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of these collectivities’. To put it another way: before I can oppress you, hurt you, kill you, I have to silence you. I have to silence your dreams, I have to destroy them, in order to weaken and demoralise you, make you deaf and invisible to yourself, and to let myself forget your humanity, to rehearse the silence into which you’ll disappear.
In the world now we have many silences, many rehearsals, more or less catastrophic. If you work in art, automatically you’re working against that. When you sit in that draughty library, that weird-smelling community hall, when you wait for the latecomers to turn up again, work round that guy who’s always drunk, again, wish that the Zumba class would keep a lid on it next door again – you are part of something literally life-saving.
Although things are a little more complicated than that. Art can be weakened, altered for the worse, often by people with good intentions. Here’s the late Ray Bradbury writing in the New York Post on censorship. I’ll begin where he mentions a school’s anthology.
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ’em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito – out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch – gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer – lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like – in the finale – Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention – shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to pour the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blancmange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Or there’s the school’s version – I’m not kidding about this – of a Philip Larkin line, which goes, ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Which is sort of sweet. But I found the original version more helpful.
And art can be completely stripped of its humanity. By that point, I wouldn’t really call it art, but it has some of the characteristics of art – it still has power and can be influential and toxic. As Vonnegut mentioned, Nazi Germany trained a population to be blind to the dignity and humanity of some others. A diet of soft porn, cheap sentimentality and hate proved effective. Radio Mille Collines pedalled fear, poisonous pop music and a sense of unhinged communal power – it helped to push Rwanda into the abyss. All over the world, cultures have sickened and grown sickening and rehearsed dark times so effectively they have been able to come to pass. Lemkin predicted the pattern – those who wish to be powerful deny those they seek to victimise a voice. The victims’ art is suppressed, no one is to see or hear from them, to feel with them, to find their dignity, be touched by their humanity. They are unpeople. And into the space their signs of life once filled – fakery, lies, expressions of loathing and fear and nothing else above a whisper.
In our own country we currently have mostly mild rehearsals, little injuries. We might say that it’s easier to take away disability benefits when we don’t really see that many disabled actors, when we apparently don’t have famous disabled poets, when housebound people stay that way. We might find it’s easier to steal a generation’s education when our young people only come to notice if they’re rioting, or being arrested. There’s a mass of experimental evidence – try reading Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo for a start – that shows human beings do care about each other generally, but the further away we are, the less well our caring functions. We have to use our imaginations to enter into the suffering of strangers and we need practice to do that. A diet of constructed reality, gossip and porn won’t really cut it. When I bang on – and I often do – about wanting more and better from my media and my so-called arts, I am being elitist. I don’t see why elitism is only acceptable if we’re talking about sport, or fashion. I am being elitist, I think, with good reason. Trying our absolute best as artists helps us grow better and stronger in what we do, it improves our craft. Doing our best with others – not thinking, it’s just a community group, it’s just kids, it’s just nutters, it’s just a bunch of window-lickers – doing our best, committing to make what they want possible so that maybe for the first time ever they can say what they want and get what they want – I think that’s artistically and morally and practically the only way to go. Making a decision to do that means everyone grows and the end product is powerful and the slave leaves everybody’s blood. And producing art in which humans are shown to be human keeps us all safe. It steers a panicky, self-obsessed, easily led, fearful and fragile species towards the light.
At this point when I delivered this piece as a lecture, I read a young person’s poem, a young writer’s poem. It had perhaps some imperfections, but also had a good heart. It spoke of impossible journeys, of flying and soaring, of travelling the world in absolute freedom, bathing in experience and opening oneself into a full life. In this it shared characteristics with a significant proportion of writing by authors who are in some way threatened or confined. They remade the world as a better place.
The poet was an amateur, a child called Avraham Koplowicz and his poem, through the imperfect medium of translation, was his voice. It still is his voice. It is the shape of his breath in his lungs, the music his mind arranged for his own delight and for that of others, for the invisible, unencountered other that artists can’t help but anticipate in a kind of permanent hope. Artists always do seem to wish and reach out towards a future time and place. Even when the promise of those things is frail beyond measuring, they produce art, they make the beginnings of better worlds.
I don’t know if Avraham would ever have become a fully fledged poet, I only know that he wrote himself a dream of escape from inside the Jewish ghetto at Lodz. The ghetto was sealed by the Nazis on April 30th, 1940. On the 4th of September 1942 the last consignment of its living children was transported to Chelmno Extermination Camp where, like all of the previous consignments of human beings – men, women and children – they were gassed to death using carbon monoxide fed into specially converted Renault trucks. I came across his poem in Yad Vashem. I read that he hoped to reach twenty and to set out upon adventures.
Now, as it happens, the ghetto at Lodz was very well documented, both by the Nazis and its own Jewish authority: we know the names and addresses of almost all those imprisoned there and their countries of origin and dates of death. Avraham, for example, was born in Lodz in 1930. We know that in a little over 1 and a half square miles the ghetto was forced to contain up to 250,000 Jews and 5,000 Roma; we know about the soup kitchens, the ghetto newspaper, the morale-boosting activities; the typhus outbreaks, the forced deportations, the break up of families onto transports.
We know that around 43,500 people died in the ghetto of starvation and despair and that around 800 Jews were left alive there when it was liberated by the Soviets. We can subtract, if we’d like, the number 800 from the larger number 255,000. We can consider how many thousands suffered and passed through to further suffering and death.
Good journalism, good non-fiction writing, the proper and fastidious presentation of fact can help us to understand what is incomprehensible: 100 dead, 1,000 dead, 100,000 dead, 200,000. I believe that to understand many deaths we have to understand one, the absence of one life. When we read lost authors we breathe on behalf of someone who no longer does, we navigate the frailties and strengths of their minds and hearts. In a minute way, we bring them back. We can begin to understand a little of what was lost with them. We do not need to have known the dead to mourn them, to mourn a life turned to silence, a loss of our shared delights.
I mention these things although I cannot reproduce the poem here. Commercial considerations and the current owners of the rights to reproduce Avraham’s work have combined to produce a new kind of silence. I would encourage you to seek out Avraham Koplowicz’s work if you can, but you can’t find it here.
On Writing Page 23