My thirteen-year-old son wandered out into the street and said he’d like to have a go with the rope, if I didn’t mind. I handed it over and he began to fling himself in all directions at once, criss-crossing his arms, hopping and tripping from foot to foot while doing a Cossack impression; then he did the whole thing backwards, singing a Beatles song. It was moving and educational to be so instructed by one’s son. I hoped an opportunity for retribution would soon present itself.
His easy display in comparison to my inefficiency stimulated in me childhood memories of being humiliated by my father at home in the London suburbs. In India Dad had, apparently, been brilliant at cricket, squash and boxing. As a young man I could never reach his level; nor did we have the facilities or sunshine to help provide the opportunity. Or perhaps Dad made sure I could not keep up with him. Whichever it was, my father, tragically, mostly wanted to be a writer and, it turned out, he wasn’t great at that. He didn’t give up, but he was never as good as he wanted to be, and his writing efforts yielded him little satisfaction or self-esteem, particularly as I began to succeed.
My son who can skip and sing found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished for his inability. After experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labelled dyslexic and dyspraxic.
There is, at least, some relief in diagnosis. One is not alone, but joins a community of others who appear to have a similar condition. But can the inability to do a particular thing be described as a ‘condition’ at all? Would the fact I can’t do the tango, read music or speak Russian be considered a ‘condition’? Is it a failure of my development? Am I ill?
I wasn’t much impressed by the imagination and curiosity of the experts: they used an awkward, objectifying language that sounded borrowed rather than earned, and none made the elementary connection between my competence at reading and writing, and the boy’s inability, or refusal. And it usually isn’t long, with an expert, before they begin to talk, fashionably, about brains and chemicals. Biological determinism is one of psychology’s ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue.
An appeal to the certainties of science might seem finally to settle any question. But this is an ethical issue rather than a scientific one. It is values, not facts, which are at stake here. It is in the irritating human realm where the interesting difficulties are, and where one might have to really think about, and deal with, an individual’s history, circumstances and reactions. It is the attempted standardisation of a human being and a limited notion of achievement which is limiting, prescriptive and bullying.
An eighteen-year-old acquaintance of one of my older boys mentioned that he’d been given Ritalin by a doctor, under his parents’ instruction. He couldn’t concentrate at school; his mind, he said, kept scattering off in numerous directions. He couldn’t get anything done, and he was anxious that he was falling behind in life, and this was depressing him. I said that perhaps the teachers were dull, or that he had other, more pressing things on his mind. But he insisted that the drug focused him. He asked me whether, given the choice, I wouldn’t prefer to focus at will.
This is a good question and I thought about the virtues of being focused, and what could be achieved with the full beam of concentration, within an intense charmed circle of attention, when the mind, feeling and will are linked. As a teenager, in particular, I wanted to be good at things, to shine, but, like the Ritalin boy, I fell badly behind at school, finding myself not only unable to learn but at the bottom of my class. I walked out of secondary school, and a semi-skinhead violent street culture, with three O levels, feeling as if I’d been badly beaten for five years. Fortunately I could tell myself it was still the late 60s, I was a rebel and didn’t fit in – no one with any imagination could.
When I consider that wretched period now, I can see I wasn’t enjoying a creative distraction, a vacation from the drudgery of a bad education, but was enduring a tantrum. Having shut myself off, I was suffering from a form of intellectual anorexia – the refusal to be given anything, to take anything in. As a result of that self-stymieing I lost hope and believed I’d never catch up or achieve anything. It was a short period in my life, but I haven’t forgotten that early deficit. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still compensating for it. It was a relief for me eventually to discover some competence as a writer, though this was later, and it took me a long time to see its value, to understand that I had a gift and some intelligence, and that I might develop these, or even build my life around them.
When I was failing – and it was very isolating – I envied the love and accolades which the competent and the clever received. I thought that anyone would want such attention and admiration, and that it would lift their spirits. Competence, for me, was even preferable to beauty since any consideration received was earned and deserved.
For me, now, things do get done; books are finished, and other projects are started which are also finished. They take the time they take, and the breaks are as important as the continuities. Only a fool or an educationalist would think that someone should be able to bear boredom and frustration for long hours at a time and that this would be an achievement. Of course, without the ability to bear unpleasant affect, nothing is completed, but concentration follows interest and excitement, and the adults have a duty to give the kids good things, while the kids have to find a way to accept them.
What I might have said to my son’s friend is that it is incontrovertible that sometimes things get done better when you’re doing something else. If you’re writing and you get stuck, and you then make tea, while waiting for the kettle to boil the chances are good ideas will spontaneously occur to you. Seeing that a sentence has to have a particular shape can’t be forced; you have to wait for your own judgement to inform you, and it usually does, in time. Some interruptions are worth having if they create a space for something to work in the fertile unconscious. Indeed, some distractions are more than useful; they might be more like realisations, and can be as informative and multi-layered as dreams. They might be where the excitement is.
You could say that attention might have to be paid to intuition; that one can learn to attend to the hidden self, and there might be something there worth listening to. If the Ritalin boy prefers obedience to creativity – and who can blame him for wanting to cheer up the authorities? – he might be sacrificing his best interests in a way that might infuriate him later. A flighty mind could be going somewhere.
I might have been depressed as a teenager, but I wasn’t beyond enjoying some beautiful distractions. Since my father had parked a large part of his library in my bedroom, when I was bored with studying I would pick up this or that volume and flip through it until I came upon something which interested me. I ended up finding, more or less randomly, fascinating things while supposedly doing something else. Similar things happened while listening to the radio, when I became aware of artists and musicians I’d never otherwise have heard of. I had at least learned that if I couldn’t accept education from anyone else, I might just have to feed myself.
From this point of view – that of drift and dream; of looking out for interest, of following this or that because it seems alive – Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed so they wouldn’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good. There is more to this than keeping out the interesting: there is the fantasy and terror that someone here will become pleasure’s victim, disappearing into a spiral of enjoyment from which they will not return.
It is true, however, that many people, often called obsessives, have spent their lives being distracted, keeping away, often unknowingly, from that which they most want, thus brewing in themselves a poison of disappointment, bitterness and despair. But there are still, as the Ritalin boy seemed to know, forms of dist
raction which can be far more harmful. We can attack ourselves unknowingly: we might call this corrupted desire, as if we are possessed by a demon whose whispers are cruel diminutions of the self, destroying creativity and valuable connections, until enervation and self-hatred make a living death.
It is said that distractions are too easy to come by now that most writers use computers, though it’s just as convenient to flee through the mind’s window into fantasy. In the end, a person requires a method. I mean that he or she must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can only work if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself – if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.
As we become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realised we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to. This may be why most art is either collaborative – the cinema, pop, theatre, opera – or is made by individual artists supporting one another in various forms of loose arrangement, where people might find the solidarity and backing they need.
Weekends and Forevers
Marriage as a problem, and as a solution, has always been the central subject for drama, the novel and the cinema. Most of us come from a marriage, and, probably, a divorce, of some sort, and both bring together the most serious things: sex, love, children, betrayal, boredom, frustration, and property. The kind of questions which surround lengthy relationships – What is it like to live with another person for a long time? What do we expect? What do we need? What do we want? What is the relation between safety and excitement, for each of us? – are the most important we can ask.
Set in contemporary Paris, Le Week-End is a film I developed with the director Roger Michell, with whom I’ve worked on a TV series, The Buddha of Suburbia, and two films, The Mother and Venus. The films were mostly concerned with a subject we believed was neglected in the cinema: the lives and passions of older people, whose anxieties and desires, we found, were as intense, if not more significant, than those of the young.
Le Week-End concerns a late-middle-aged couple, Nick and Meg, who are both teachers, one in a school, the other in a university, and who go away to Paris to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. While there they discuss the meaning and direction of their marriage now their children have left home. Time and health are running out for them, as they consider their impending old age, and wonder what sort of future they might want, either together or apart. They think about how they might die, but this couple also need to talk about how they have lived: the way in which they have brought up their children, and how the family has worked, where it failed, and where there is regret, bitterness and even fury.
The film shows the depredations of time, but also the lability of the past, its different meaning and value for each of the couple, and how, now they are talking, it can seem as unstable as the future. They are looking in the same direction, but cannot see the same thing. There is no narrative they can agree on.
Their short sojourn, whatever else it is, will be a time of difficult conversations. What if it occurs to one or other of them that their relationship was a mistake, that it didn’t resemble their original hopes at all, and they could have had a far better life elsewhere? Meanwhile, what have they done to one another? Was there harm? What did they use one another for?
The couple are from a suburb of Birmingham, where they have taught for decades. But ‘Paris was where the twentieth century was,’ says Gertrude Stein in Paris France. And Paris, in their provincial English imaginations, represents several desirable things: the fresh ideas and radicalism of the sixties and the barricades of 1968, along with the intellectual revolutions of their youth as exemplified by Derrida, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault. There are also personal revolutions: the idea of the equal, committed, but ‘open relationship’, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, for whom ‘the game of love’ – the rondo of seduction, rejection and change – never had to end. As Stendhal writes in Love, ‘The pleasures of private life ought to be augmented to an infinite degree by recurrent exposure to danger.’ But was it true that love could easily be turned into a form of sport or frivolous distraction? Surely love was no closer to sport than sex was to exercise?
As well as these essential questions, Paris, for our couple, represents continuity, and an ideal of civilisation. It means a certain quality of living when it comes to clothes, sex, transgression, tolerance, conversation, bohemianism. This pair like to eat well; it is in French restaurants that they find sensuous enjoyment together, perhaps the one place now where there is real collaboration and exchange between them.
In the London suburbs of the 50s and 60s, where I grew up in relative safety after the turbulence of the war, all, apparently, was set forever. Conventional marriage was the paradigm. My father, an exile from colonial India’s religious strife and partition, was a commuter, and my mother was happy to call herself a housewife. The relation between work, marriage and play was perfectly arranged. Nothing was missing; it was all there already. All you had to do was fit in. That, at least, was the idea.
As Nick and Meg are aware, marriage frees a certain sort of companionate love, if you’re lucky. But it domesticates sex. The couple are over-intimate. They know too much about one another. Without obstacles, there can be no fascination. How can you desire what you already have? That’s not all: the arrangements which marriage requires to survive – security, duration, reliability, repetition – can seem liberating in their continuity, or stifling, according to your nature. The suburbs suited my father, since he’d come from a more dangerous place, and wanted contentment. But there was something about living there that could make you want to scream. For some, it would never be sufficient. You might learn, as Nick does in Paris with his wife – whom he still wants and needs – that the problem with desire is not that you cannot get rid of it, but that there is too much of it. It is ever-present, and ever-pressing, however much you want to discount it. You cannot wish it away, and it cannot be replaced by a substitute.
Either cannily or madly, John Cheever took up residence at the heart of the American Dream in a New York suburb, more affluent than the one I came from. He was a homosexual alcoholic artist attempting to be a straight married man. The mask and myth required to enact the gestures of servitude and constraint needed to live this kind of life proved disabling and humiliating. Cheever gave it a long try, and it enabled him to become an artist. But it never worked out; it was never going to. Chaos returned, and any fool could have predicted it would, even Cheever himself in certain moods. Perhaps there is only so much about yourself you can bear to understand.
A lot of this turns up in American writing at the time. And the question is always the same: was the repression worth it? Had too much that was essential been sacrificed for the ideal? How much of yourself could you give up and remain an ‘authentic’ person? Couldn’t there be less painful or difficult, more satisfying ways to live, more in line with ‘human nature’, as the romantics might have put it?
An interesting version of someone wondering about this was Wilhelm Reich, the subject of a biography by Christopher Turner. A psychoanalyst trained by Freud in Vienna, and living in the US in the 50s, he and other ‘liberationists’ of the times, such as Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and R. D. Laing, were thinking about how desire could free people from oppressive and frustrating ways of living. According to Reich, the wrong life could make your body rigid, inflexible and awkward. He says, in The Function of the Orgasm, ‘that the average human being of today has lost contact with his real nature’, and he writes of ‘the incrustations and rig
idities in human emotional life’.
Reich considered Freud conventional and pessimistic, and thought he didn’t go far enough when it came to acknowledging the central place of sexuality in human life. For Freud, renunciation made some happiness possible, whereas Reich wanted to know why there had to be renunciation at all. Weren’t human beings attacking that which in themselves was most alive: their capacity for love? Weren’t fascist, authoritarian structures also inside the individual? Of course they were, argued Freud. But people loved their illness; they wanted to be unhappy; pleasure was the last thing they desired. A ‘complete Eros’, or ultimate cure, was impossible.
It wasn’t long before Reich gave up on the most dangerous thing – speech – and the idea of the ‘talking cure’. Speaking took too long; it was indirect and inconclusive. He began to touch his patients, believing that more and stronger orgasms were the solution. A full blast of pleasure, of orgiastic potency, would enable you to see you’d been living badly, or not according to your nature. This Salvationist view, from our less credulous and more cynical time, might seem like the least of it. But Reich was onto something here. If pleasure isn’t your guide, what will be? Reich had some grasp of the creativity of sexual desire, and the cost of constraining it. And numerous people have been awoken from relative slumber by the unexpectedness of love or sex, and by the sense of opening out to more life and possibility.
Love + Hate: Stories and Essays Page 7