Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi Read Free Book Online Page B

holiday like other workers because he – and it is usually a he – isn’t someone with a job. Art is a calling. A real writer is always a writer, and he can’t help it, he just has to do it. This kind of pure artist – Shelley, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Kafka, Plath, Nina Simone or the young Dylan, say – can’t leave himself behind, or turn off his mind, since you can’t cancel your subscription to inspiration. The Muse is a sort of ‘inner tyrant’. And not only is the artist possessed, he must pay a high price for his devotion. He should sacrifice not only his time and financial security, but should also forsake the safety of being a good person. Mad and difficult, he must place his work before his wife and children, whom he would rather see ruined than compromise his will.
    This amusingly misleading but not uncommon notion of the artist a moment away from hacking off his own ear prevents us from seeing art where it mostly is: in the market, in collaborationist if not negotiated forms like popand the cinema, and in most types of craft. The written word, and the story, is still fundamental to us. Everything we see on TV or in the cinema, and every song we hear, was written down first. The idea of the romantic artist separates the use of the imagination from the rest of the public. The idealisation of the artist is a limitation which leads to impoverishment elsewhere, and can cause us to forget that the imagination extends to all areas of life.
    *
    Recently it has become common in film and television, and also in the novel, for the story idea to be based on the lives of real people. These are usually celebrities of some sort, often enduring a particularly dramatic period in their lives. It could be Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana, Tony Blair, Queen Elizabeth the First, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, or a sportsman, actor or murderer. Mad poets and mathematicians are popular, nicely illustrating the popular idea that genius and idiocy are never far apart. For a producer or a writer, this can seem like a good solution to the problem of finding a story. Most of the work has been done. The characters already exist in the public imagination; the action has taken place, and the writer will have a good idea of how these people might speak and what they might say.
    Most of this sort of writing is market-driven and is often commercial. On the other hand, the writing schoolsare full of middle-aged women who have growing kids. These eager students have turned to creative writing not to become well-off by working in television, but rather to find out – using the medicine of art – how they became who they are. They know that sanity depends on language, and writing is, as much as anything, a form of working meditation. There is, in silence with one’s thoughts, an opportunity for memory to work. At the same time, to study writing in a university makes art appear arduous and respectable. Essays are written and classes are attended, and you leave the university stamped with credits. It is as if writing is an academic discipline rather than a species of unpredictable entertainment and psychic stripping, by which an audience may or may not be impressed.
    The university gives a necessary semblance of respectability. If men are martyrs for their art, women like to be martyred for their children. They cannot suffer enough; it is a mark of love. How torn they are between the page and the kid. It is as if the parent’s essential duty is to give the child everything until there is nothing left, rather than showing her the necessity of creativity and how important it might be to write – as a form of disruption, of internal reorganisation and recreation. Not that writing is a particularly masculine activity. Men are not better writers than women, but women can be more divided here. It might take a man to be ruthless enough to find the space and time to learn to write. Children canbe a framework and a spur. If it is indulgent for any