Hanif Kureishi’s grace under fire

Hanif Kureishi had an accident in Rome late last year when he fainted and fell, twisting his neck and injuring his spine badly, resulting in quadriplegia. From his hospital bed in Rome, and lately from his newer hospital bed in London, he dictates a substack blog to his son. I recommend you read it, as it is full of wit and hope and misery and erudition and it will make the core of the next book from him. It’s at hanifkureishi.substack.com where you can subscribe for free and if you can afford to, pay for it.

In the meantime, I found this interview I did with him at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2008 on the publication of his novel Something to Tell You when we talked about writing, psychoanalysis, and relationships.

Ramona Koval: Hanif Kureishi is a very successful and multi-award winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, plays, non-fiction and essays. He was at the Cheltenham Literature Festival with his new novel Something to Tell You. In the book we meet the middle-aged Dr Jamal Kahn, a Freudian psychoanalyst who tells us about his journey through 1970s London suburbia, his first love, his family, his history of fears and longings and, as Ibsen puts it, his travels with a corpse in his cargo; that is to say, his guilt about an incident that happened in his youth.

As with most of Hanif Kureishi's work, it's about the big picture, a look at Britain in crisis, at the West in crisis, all moderated by Hanif Kureishi's sharp eye, his wit and his willingness to go anywhere in the human psyche and in human relationships to tell us what he sees. At one point our psychoanalyst Dr Kahn says, 'It's dirty work getting closely acquainted with a human,' and of course that's the work of the psychoanalyst, but, I asked Hanif Kureishi in a packed-out tent in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, isn't is also the work of the writer?

Hanif Kureishi: I have several friends who are psychoanalysts and I really envy them. A lot of my work is like theirs, lying-on-the-sofa work, but they have the privilege of listening to other people all day and I envy the weirdness that they become acquainted with hour after hour, as you can imagine. I spend most of my time alone, trying to think of stuff to say, whereas they listen to other people. I guess it's both...they try and make people better, they try and cure people.

Freud said this fascinating thing about curing, he said it would be a very weird world if everybody was in psychoanalysis, it would be like Buenos Aires where everybody indeed is in psychoanalysis. But I think there's another kind of therapy which is not only writing therapy, the therapy of writing books, but the therapy of reading books and the therapy of living in a culture, which is where we come to see one another, to know one another and to understand one another.

So psychoanalysis, I guess, is a small part of culture, of writing and of literature. Freud also thought that if you wanted to be a psychoanalyst you shouldn't only study psychoanalysis. He thought that a real education was a humanistic education, which is that you would read proper writers who he thought had anticipated everything he'd said already.

Ramona Koval: But your work as a writer is dirty work too. You get down into the human soul yourself, that's what creating a character is, isn't it?

Hanif Kureishi: That's what I do, yes. It's an odd thing, I sit in a room and I make up stories and try and make people alive, yes, it's what I do for a living, it's a peculiar thing. I try and invest these characters with parts of myself and parts of themselves and with some life, and then I try and put them in nasty situations that expose them. Then we as audiences identify with them and believe they're real. It sounds very odd now when you put it like that, but that's what the Edinburgh Book Festival is dedicated to, yes.

Ramona Koval: The psychoanalyst as a character though...they are fascinating because when you go to them they seem to be perfect people who know everything and are all-seeing, all-knowing, all-understanding. Your psychoanalyst has got this dark secret and has got a pretty messy life. I wonder, if we knew they had messy lives whether we'd continue to be cured by them.

Hanif Kureishi: As you say, the patient...presumably as you do with any other kind of doctor, you have to believe that this person knows more than you do, that they've had some training and all that stuff. But if you look at Freud's early chums, the first circle around Freud, apart from Freud himself who was a very conventional and repressed man, a good example of a successful sublimation, the rest of them were barking. Really, all of them.

Ramona Koval: Like who?

Hanif Kureishi: Jung was psychotic, Ferenczi, Adler, Tausk committed suicide, Jones was thrown out of Canada for exposing himself to schoolgirls, they're a very weird bunch. But the point of psychoanalysis isn't to make people not weird, it's not to make people straight, it's not to make them normal or ordinary, it's to make them as mad as they want to be, and that's quite a different project.

Ramona Koval: You've had psychoanalysis, haven't you?

Hanif Kureishi: Absolutely, I'm a fine example of 20 years of successful treatment.

Ramona Koval: How's the project going?

Hanif Kureishi: Well, I woke up in the middle of the night in my hotel room on my knees crying, believing that I'd turned into a dolphin, and I had a very strong desire to ring my analyst and tell him this. So I can report to you, Ramona, that I'm moving ahead slowly.

Ramona Koval: Do dolphins have knees?

Hanif Kureishi: That's a very good point actually.

Ramona Koval: So many writers are worried about doing analysis. They say I would never do that because that would dry up my unconscious and I wouldn't ever be able to write because I'd understand myself too well. What do you think about that position?

Hanif Kureishi: At the beginning of analysis in the early 20th century there was a big rivalry between analysts and artists. The analysts thought the artists, for instance, had a special access to the unconscious, which they do, and the artists thought the analysts were making scientific what they achieved poetically, as it were. There was a big resistance between the two groups. Analysis isn't going to cure you of your madness, it's going to make you see that it's valuable, that it's important, that indeed your madness is your life, if you're lucky, that that's the best bit of you, that's where you're probably freest.

I never found in analysis that I became so cured that I didn't want to write anymore. Writing is the best symptom...what you want is a good symptom, if you're lucky, and being an artist is a fantastically good symptom to have of all the symptoms that it's possible to have. Lacan says, and in the end Zizek follows him by saying that in the end what you learn in analysis is to enjoy your symptom. You know, if you're fucking mad you may as well make the most of it, that's the idea. I don't think that you're going to be cured of your creativity by having an analysis, any more than you're going to be cured of your sexuality by having an analysis, you just see what it is and realise it's part of your condition.

Ramona Koval: Have you noticed that it's made you write differently or approach writing differently or it's allowed you to reach into places that you wouldn't have reached into?

Hanif Kureishi: I found that having analysis and thinking about my own dreams gave me access to parts of myself that I wouldn't have thought were important before, yes. I opened, as it were, doors in my psyche and there was good stuff in there for me to write about, yes. But also the main thing about analysis really for me, and I guess for a lot of people, is that it will stop you doing things that are particular self-destructive or idiotic at certain times in your life. And also the other thing about it is, like creative writing too, is that it creates a space between your office, between your house, your family and so on. There's this private, quiet space. Freud invented this brilliant thing where two people would just sit once a day to talk about the deepest, most important things. You're not going to get that by taking anti-depressants.

Ramona Koval: Or getting married or anything like that. What would you do if you couldn't write?

Hanif Kureishi: What do you mean 'couldn't write'?

Ramona Koval: If you just stopped writing?

Hanif Kureishi: I wouldn't know what to do. Writing is such a passion. It's odd, it doesn't go away if you're an artist, you want to carry on doing it. It's odd to think, isn't it, that someone like Lucien Freud is, as we speak, sitting in a room painting away, there's no reason why he would have to but he wants to do it. It's a deep passion and obsession, probably you might call it, to be an artist, you really want to say these bloody things or find out what it is you might want to say by writing it down, and so on. It's a very peculiar kind of addiction.

Ramona Koval: So do you think that like Robert Johnson you've sold any part of your soul to the Devil for this gift?

Hanif Kureishi: Well, I'm selling it as fast as I can, I hope, in order to make a living actually. What I do is commercial. I'm trying to make a living and being an artist at the same time. It's quite tricky to put those two things together. I tried to sell my soul to Hollywood a couple of times actually but it was not really that successful. They didn't really want my soul and I didn't particularly want their money, it hasn't really worked. There's something about integrity that never lets you go.

Ramona Koval: The epigraph to this book is from a Robert Johnson song: 'I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees...' (talking of knees) and about a man selling his soul really for art, wasn't it, selling his soul to the Devil for art. Later on in the song: 'I went to the crossroads, Mama, I looked east and west,' so this book also is engaged with the idea of the decadent West, what's going on in the east, the clash of civilisations, if that's a phrase that you want to use. Can you tell me about this Robert Johnson song?

Hanif Kureishi: I think if you're a writer you look for somebody at a crossroads. You throw a character into a situation where they have to think hard about who they are and how they want to live. When I'm teaching so-called creative writing or looking at my own work, I will do that. So it's what we used to call in the 60s an existential moment where someone is, as it were, stripped down to their essential values where they really think about how they want to be and what they want to exist as, I suppose. My character in this book has murdered somebody, the one act that can't really be symbolised, that you can't share with your friends and have it integrated into the social system, and he has to live with this guilt.

Freud said that we're all murderers (that is, of our parents at some time) and this is the cargo that you talked about, the body which is cargo in the soul. It's really about how this man tries to come to terms with having killed somebody and having killed the father of a woman that he's in love with. Killing fathers is always a bad business, and killing fathers, as we also all know, is not a good way of getting rid of them. In fact killing people is a guaranteed way of making them come back, as the whole history of ghosts obviously informs us. So it's a book about ghosts and being haunted, and what you do with your past, how you live with your past, how the past has to be integrated and can't be integrated into the present. It's a comedy, clearly!

Ramona Koval: Well, it is funny too. As a reader you have a very interesting experience of feeling as if you're being addressed by Jamal, he's telling you his story, he's admitting to you that he's a murderer, and then he's just telling you everything about his world, his family, his sex life, his fears, his hopes, his dreams, and you actually feel like his analyst, as a reader. It's almost like I'm privy to his analysis.

Hanif Kureishi: Yes, that right. In a way we are each other's analysts too, that's one of the things we do for each other is we hear each other in a particular way too, and that's the model for what a real analysis is, which is really a particular kind of listening to other people and it's not only something that takes place in the analytic hour but you pick up things with your unconscious from their unconscious all the time.

Ramona Koval: You're very good and funny about the use of psychoanalysis. I think Jamal says, 'There are few people who when they're old wished they'd lived a more virtuous life. From what I hear in my room, most people wish they'd sinned more. They also wish they'd taken better care of their teeth.' Sometimes I thought that actually I'm not sure whether I can believe everything that Jamal tells me because I think maybe he's fantasising here as well.

Hanif Kureishi: Is that right?

Ramona Koval: Yes. Is that what I'm supposed to have surmised?

Hanif Kureishi: Yes, it's quite hard, isn't it, to tell the difference between...well, our minds are a mixture of dreams, of fantasies, of wishes, of hopes, of desires and of real experiences in the world, in this tent now today, but the meaning of being in this tent here now today is obviously surrounded by all kinds of dreams, fantasies, wishes, ideas, ideals and so on. So the whole notion of reality is so dodgy, impossible to pin down, and we do live in the strange space of dreams, fantasies and so on. So a book would be like a fantasy or a dream. You can see that in all of literature when you read Kafka or when you read Shakespeare, certainly Dostoyevsky too, you get a real sense of...the boundaries are blurred between what is commonly and rather stupidly known as reality and then the inner psychic world.

Ramona Koval: Much of Something to Tell You is set in 1970s London, and although it sounds like a monolithic thing, the 70s, obviously different people's experiences of the 70s have been different. One person's 70s might have been full of babies and nappies, and another person's 70s might be full of drugs. I asked Hanif Kureishi about the social temperature of his 70s.

Hanif Kureishi: I write about the 70s a lot because I was in my early 20s and it was during the period of punk and it was quite lively and London was decaying, exploding and falling apart. It was before the great leap forward which occurred in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher became elected. But London was a fantastic space then for young people because nothing ever worked and everything seemed to be free. You could travel on the tube, you could squat, and everybody was on the dole.

I realised the other day how lucky I had been that I was...when I look at my children...I grew up entirely on the welfare state. My parents didn't pay for my education, as you can see from...nor for my healthcare et cetera, I was a welfare state kid. And then after university I went on the dole, that's what we did, you went on the dole and you became an artist or a musician or whatever. And that did end in the 1980s, so the 70s did have a flavour of freedom, even though it was a filthy, decaying, wretched time too.

Ramona Koval: And the pursuit of pleasure?

Hanif Kureishi: Well, I was born in the 1950s when there was no pleasure, and I came to consciousness in the 60s when there was nothing else, and we end up here today wondering about the period that we've been through. In the 50s and 60s the idea was that if everybody could have sex all the time with as many people as they wanted everything would be all right in the future, and now we live in a time when everyone can have sex with whoever they want whenever they want, and we're still miserable, and it's been a very interesting ride therefore.

And so this book, compared to a book like The Buddha of Suburbia, is a much darker book and a much more disillusioned book. It's really about where our hopes and dreams went. After all, we all believed that if the generation of 1968 would come to power everything would be much better too, and then we ended up with Tony Blair.

Ramona Koval: You've got these fantastic characters. Jamal's friend, Henry, who you met just before, and his sister Miriam. They're such great characters. Henry the artist, Miriam's pretty rough, a shady dealer really, she's the one with all the metal on her face. They find each other and they have this joyous relationship.

Hanif Kureishi: Yes, there's a lot of happiness in this book, there's a lot of pleasure. None of it happens to the main character, of course, but it happens to others around him and he enjoys that, yes. There's a lot of fun in it. I had a lot of fun writing it. It's one of the things that I've most enjoyed writing. There are lots of jokes in it, and I put most of the jokes, as you'll be happy to hear for those of you who haven't read it yet, in the first 100 pages.

Ramona Koval: As a sort of inoculation...

Hanif Kureishi: No, because I know that most people won't get past the...I never get past the first...I've never read a book beyond 100 pages, so I thought if I put all the jokes in the first 100 pages then they'll get good value for money, they won't have to worry about the rest of it.

Ramona Koval: I read the whole book.

Hanif Kureishi: Did you? Lots of people say to me, 'I really enjoyed the book. The beginning was really good,' they say, and you know their hope dripped away as they turned another page.

Ramona Koval: I don't think you do yourself justice with this line of talk. They go back to Pakistan in the 80s, Miriam and Jamal are going to find their father who's left England and gone back to Pakistan. He's really interesting, he talks about when he left England and went to Pakistan, and he found a need to rescue an enlightenment library really and to establish something because he knew what was coming. In fact he had his heart in India actually. I found that really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Hanif Kureishi: My family, like many other families, moved from India to Pakistan, a bit later though, in the early 50s with the naïve and possibly stupid belief that some Muslim state could be made based on some sort of Islamic principles, and after a bit they realised that this was a very daft idea, it was a failure and would end in catastrophe. This is a terrible thing to say, but it would probably would have been a disaster there...it would be in the newspapers tomorrow...that Pakistan had been made at all, that it would never work, that you couldn't build a state on religious principles, that it would lead inevitably to dictatorship and something that indeed Voltaire said, that a state built on one religion could only ever be a dictatorship. It seems pretty obvious.

And now when I see members of my family, some of whom still live in Pakistan, they look at India and they see that there's this flourishing, wealthy democracy full of art and culture and so on. I look at Pakistan, which is an extremely dangerous, violent place with very little democracy, they can see that the idea of setting a state on religious principles has been a nightmare. It's really caught between fundamentalism and the US and there can be no worse place to be, I wouldn't have thought.

Ramona Koval: So in the bigger picture between the mess of the East and the mess of the West, you're walking a path through there.

Hanif Kureishi: Well, then we came over here, we came to England to take over your country, become newsreaders.

Ramona Koval: And commanders of the British empire.

Hanif Kureishi: That's right.

Ramona Koval: You're in the tent now though, aren't you.

Hanif Kureishi: The Queen was very pleased to meet me, Ramona. When I got my CBE you have to stand in this queue to go and meet the Queen, and I was standing next to a very nice man, and I said to him, 'What are you here for?' And he said, 'I've devoted my life to fighting world poverty,' and then he looked at me and he said, 'What have you done?' and I thought, Jesus, what have I done? You know how you do...a life devoted to indolence, fecklessness and perversion, I thought, and you feel very, very humble indeed.

Ramona Koval: And what about the family, what did they think about this?

Hanif Kureishi: They laughed their heads off, they really did. What they really wanted was to meet your fellow countrymen. They thought Kylie Minogue was going to be there, they were much more excited about meeting Kylie Minogue than they were about meeting the Queen. She wasn't there that day.

Ramona Koval: How did you really feel about meeting the Queen?

Hanif Kureishi: She was absolutely charming and she's always...she's got a bit of verbal for everybody, she talks to you. She was very charming.

Ramona Koval: And you're not supposed to report what she says, are you?

Hanif Kureishi: Well, she doesn't say very much, she's not Oscar Wilde, is she. The best thing about it is on the medal it says 'For God and empire'. No better things in the world, as you can imagine.

Ramona Koval: Where do you keep the medal?

Hanif Kureishi: I keep it in the kitchen where everyone can see it. I try and get my boys to polish it a bit but they're rather rude about it, I have to say. Sometimes they wear it actually. It's very funny to see a ten-year-old boy in boxer shorts running around your front room wearing a CBE around his neck bouncing on his bellybutton.

Ramona Koval: You've written a cutting line about...this gay character, he's envious of Jamal's work as a psychoanalyst and he said, 'Fatuous, limitless narcissism can't be what we homosexuals fought for. Can't we think about anything but our hair?' Is that going to get you into trouble?

Hanif Kureishi: If you are a writer you spend your life thinking about whether what you're doing is limitless narcissism or whether actually it's of any use or of any interest to anybody else in the world. I think if you're an artist you do think about that because the world doesn't really need your books, it can get by perfectly well without another book by Hanif Kureishi, I have to say. And so this sense of the value of what you do really does affect you. You get up in the morning, you go to your desk, and you think why am I doing this, why am I alive, maybe I should just kill myself, maybe I should write a short story, maybe I should do a film, does it have any meaning? And I think that is one of the things about being some sort of an artist is that you have to create the meaning. If you're a doctor...it must be wonderful to work off your guilt by feeling you're being a good person all the time. If you're an artist you don't feel as though you're a good person much of the time.

Ramona Koval: You don't feel as if you've contributed anything to the conversation?

Hanif Kureishi: I have to convince myself that I do, yes. The teaching is important to me insofar as I can help anybody else. It's through that, helping other people to write and to speak...

Ramona Koval: Tell me about that, tell me about being a teacher.

Hanif Kureishi: Well, I got into trouble, I nearly got fired last time I was at the Hay Festival, somebody asked me about creative writing courses which I compared to mental hospitals. And after I made this remark the newspapers of course rang up the dean at the college where I teach, and the dean got into a bit of a kafuffle about all this, particularly when I said that I gave all the students the same mark.

Ramona Koval: Is that true?

Hanif Kureishi: They all get 71%. It wasn't entirely true because I give them 72% if they're well-dressed or well-spoken. Anyway, the dean got into a huge kafuffle about this and I nearly got fired. But I would have to say that I do believe that creative writing courses do have some function and are of some use; that is, it helps people to write, to speak, to get to know themselves, and to write something for other people that has meaning. So I don't believe the students or the teachers are mad, I think the system might be a bit mad, but that's a different thing.

Ramona Koval: They would never fire Hanif Kureishi from teaching their students.

Hanif Kureishi: I said to them, after this, you'll get far more students, the whole thing will get a big boost, the college. And indeed that was the case, as you can imagine.

Ramona Koval: But you did a creative writing course at...did you not?

Hanif Kureishi: No, of course not. I'm not that desperate.

Ramona Koval: You didn't go to Malcolm Bradbury's course?

Hanif Kureishi: No, my father taught me to write. My father was a writer and my uncles were writers, so I grew up in a writing family. My father taught me to write and indeed I have many film directors, Stephen Frears and Roger Michell, who I work with who have taught me how to write. At Faber & Faber my editor Walter Donahue has helped me with my writing. You need it all the time and there are always people who you have to rely on who can show you that some of these sentences are crap.

Ramona Koval: Even now?

Hanif Kureishi: Even now, all the time, yes. You really need someone to give you a bollocking, even if you take no notice, do you know what I mean? If someone says to you, 'I think that paragraph or that idea or whatever is terrible,' then you have to think why it might not be terrible. It's important for a writer to have that first contact with a reader. When I'm teaching, what I am is...if a student writes something, they give it to me, I've their first reader, and it moves from their head out into the world and that's an important progress.

Ramona Koval: Please thank Hanif Kureishi.

Hanif Kureishi: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Hanif Kureishi speaking to me there at the 2008 Cheltenham Book Festival. His book is Something to Tell You and it's published by Faber.