Hanif, the Magnificent, I was in a loveless marriage in my 20s, to an insensitive and selfish man. Then, I watched My Beautiful Laundrette at my small-town art film house. Swept up by the love scene before Johnny and Omar open the laundrette, I walked home alone that night, dismissing it--telling myself it wasn't real--that no one feels that way about another. Days passed, and I couldn't shake the dissonance between my own miserable life and that scene. I went back and back to the theater, obsessed. And eventually, I began to believe. You made me believe in love. I left my husband in 1987, and actually began my own life. I'm now happily married to an amazing woman. We've been together for 18 years. I can trace my current happiness and contentment back to you in all your brilliance. I wish you every possible happiness and insight, even in this despicable confinement you find yourself in. Most of all, I wish you love.
Dear Hanif, I had just started reading on Substack when I encountered your post about your accident two years ago, and you have been in my thoughts ever since. I so appreciate your directness and honesty. I am a few years older than you and started writing on Substack myself last June. Your writing has inspired me to write from the heart and tell it like it is. I am also inspired by your bravery in the face of so much uncertainty and so many indignities. Even though I'm sure it was a logistical nightmare, it warms my heart to know that you were able to go back to the National Portrait Gallery. With warm greetings from western Massachusetts and best wishes for the coming year that your physical condition will improve and that your spirit will stay strong.
Hanif, you write...."my writing might lead people to feel that they know me or even that I am speaking directly to them—which I am." Thank you. I read avidly. I guess because I have a friend who is in almost the same position as you: his accident was almost exactly a year earlier than yours. I want to know more of how he feels and how he sees the world: as you say from normal waist height. He finds it very difficult to talk about and express his feelings. You have provided some potential and powerful insights. Thank you for that. I know my friend is at his best when we include him in conversation that is normal and fun. Keep looking for the fun.
I ardently wish for you to go to Paris, to London, Italy, Montréal, and out of the Francis Bacon paintings and into your new life. If we can collectively wish it for you, enough to make it happen, then we will weep in joy. If not, then I hope for better days for you.
Every one of these posts is essential, including the retractions. I look to the Kureishi Chronicles for guidance on not just writing but on behavior, thought, and expression under conditions similar to ones I assume are waiting for me, in one form or another. Call it the lifespan version of William Gibson's line about the future being already here just not evenly distributed.
Years ago, I interviewed the actor Javier Bardem for an article pegged to his performance as Ramón Sampedro, in "The Sea Inside," about the Spanish naval seaman who was paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident at 25 and spent the next 29 years writing essays and poems, entertaining guests, and campaigning for the right to assisted suicide (which a close friend helped him achieve, illegally, in 1998). Bardem portrayed a kind, noble, irascible tough-guy autodidact who indulges his admirer's arguments about the sanctity of human life and their testimonials of their love for him, but remains unwavering in his desire for oblivion. It's an infuriating story and the title of Sampedro's book of essays and poems is rather more uncompromising than the film's "Mar adentro," or "out to sea." It's "Cartas desde el infierno," which suggests an author who did indeed feel he was living inside a Francis Bacon paining and took pains to convince others of this.
Did he too prompt admirers to start crying when they met him? I doubt it. But I don't get that response either. These entries don't flood me with empathy or compassion. They amuse me, inspire me, prompt reflections on the culture and my personal life, and make me envious. Not just for the career, fame, success, and punk-era exploits but in what HK manages to get down on the page, week after week. I'm nobody as a writer, but I have good taste, read constantly in this forum and elsewhere, and have a decent sense of what others manage to produce here from week to week, presumably with working hands and arms, and the ability to go about the world autonomously. And for the most part it's not even close.
I hope this kind of thing matters to you. I remember the mental spiral I fell into when I was quitting drinking, when every pleasure and professional achievement seemed to flow through that buzz, the social lubricant that moved me into the word, that gave me courage to strike up conversations with social betters, that fortified me when my faith or interest lagged, that rewarded me after a day's effort. I assumed that long-term sobriety would be more or less what I saw in my bouts of clinical depression: days drained of color, surrounded by people mouthing cliches, with no ability to turn anything off, stuck in one humiliating way station after another. I don't pretend this is materially comparable, but I wonder if the mental processes are at all similar.
At the time, in 2009, I went to the Francis Bacon show at the Met here in NYC with a friend who was then confronting his own alcoholism, and who had a greater distribution of that future than me. We both loved the show, of course, but I remember he really resented the fact, which became the salient one to him, that Bacon was able to sustain decades of productivity as a severe but functioning alcoholic -- never having to sink down into what we both understood as the misery of sober life. My friend died of alcoholism within the decade, inside his own Francis Bacon painting until the end. I'm here, cackling at Hanif Kureishi's hot takes and cool appraisals and enduring humanity.
Are you still sober? Days still drained of color? Or can you laugh and appreciate again inspired by the comedy of life? Your letter to Hanif is simply said poignant. As the Brits say, crack on!
Writing is a wonderful form of expression. I am glad you have Carlo as your writing partner. We all do suffer. I have cancer, but look healthy. No one weeps when they see me and thats fine. Like you, I live each day and hope to travel again.
I find healing in nature and by writing. Thank you for your substack postings!!
I remember being starstruck when I saw you read from The Black Album at a bookstore in NYC in 1995 and you signed a copy for me. I could see myself being tearful if I saw you again. Not out of pity, but more due to the passing of time (30 years!) and the ceaseless wonder I feel whenever I come in contact with an artist who has moved me. However I’d like to think if that happened now, if you came back to NYC, I would be too overcome with joy to cry. I hope you will be able to travel. For now I’m simply grateful that you can write and I can tell you what your writing has meant to me. Happy new year to you and all your loved ones.
Perhaps your recent life reminds people of tragedy and suffering. I'm sure it's that for me in part. I would no doubt cry too. But the larger part is your recent life and writing reminds me of honesty, of plain writing, of looking deeper to see what's there under the surface of suffering. Because of course everyone suffers (though I will grant yours is big). Life is suffering. You just wear it on your sleeve for all to see, while the rest of us keep trying to tamp it down under a cheery or brave surface.
Come to Miami Book Fair in 2025 this November. We can create a panel around your work. Maybe Salman or other friends will come with you. I’m serious. I am the director of programming for Books & Books. This is an open invite to visit anytime!
Sometimes after reading one of your pieces, I have to step back into reality- my own reality- and realize that I don't know you, that I can't walk over and bring you something good to eat, or get you that purple velvet couch you mentioned early on, that I can't come have a chat and compare our realities as I would with a friend. Most of my friends are far less articulate about their suffering than you are- except some who have the ability to convey their own mental suffering to others and are not reluctant to do it. Some people don't realize that what they are experiencing is suffering- the hope they have for a better tomorrow, the fear of what lies ahead, the enjoyments we all favor over getting an injection, or an enema, or vomiting, the striving to be their best selves, the misery of self-improvement goals, and the ache of self-contempt. We wait for our bodies to give out on us, knowing they will, and in the meantime do all this stuff hoping against hope that there is a way out in the end or one will be discovered before it's our turn to be dumped off the top of the escalator.
I weep mostly these days when moved by someone or something in a deep way- a recognition of beauty or perceiving something previously dreamt or undreamt of. It is moving to meet others. One day in the supermarket, I saw my fellow shoppers and thought, "Here you are, here I am - right now! " There were tears of recognition in my eyes. A friend wrote about her childhood with parents who first suffered because they were communists, then suffered being shunned when they decided to not be communists any more. What's not to weep about?
I like it that you find Francis Bacon's vision limited in some way, while still appreciating his work and what he conveys through it. Someone sent a photo of their dying mother to a list so that people could say prayers for her- her mouth was open in that way. I think they would have done better to send a photo of her smiling- that way, knowing that she is dying, we could allow ourselves to see ourselves more clearly in what she is going through- it begins with a smile. https://youtu.be/rsM-Um5yJbc?si=oneNJTy4-Lv7ZHCj
It's very annoying that I cannot subscribe to your chronicles on Substack. Why? Because the OS on my phone won't upgrade to the point where I can. And, my phone still works so I don't want to buy a new one until it doesn't. The dumbness of modern life. I've been reading your books forever and send you ... what? ... great appreciation – I have embraced your writing over so many fucking years. I'll get there with the stupid phone upgrade. Cannot imagine the inconvenience (perhaps not the right word) of your current circumstances ... but I love what you have to say about it! You don't shrink from it. Thank you, gorgeous!
People weep because they feel a visceral connexion to you through your writing , which, to repeat myself,grabs the reader by the throat.....the genius of it is that we recognise a kindred spirit, we see some of ourselves , a none judgemental observation . A liberation......tears of relief and identification......xxx Jane
Hanif I have friends artists, in the Bush - this is why I follow you on Substack. My life is a little small at the moment. When I read your posts you make me want to be more - your life albeit curtailed somewhat by your accident is full and interesting - you make me what to be more. Thank you - PS I also love BOS and MBL.
In mid-September of last year I wrote a short story. Practically every day, after it was finished, I would re-read it and make changes to it. Sometimes these would be very minor. Occasionally I would gut entire paragraphs and it would be days before the story would resettle into its amended form. Through all of this I kept it under a manageable 8000 words. If something new was added then something else had to be jettisoned. This went on for almost three months. Towards the end of December, it began to occur to me that the story was conceptually flawed and couldn't be saved, except possibly by placing it in the broader context of a novel. I imagine that doing so would have only served to significantly deepen the hole I had been frenziedly digging.
This is the peril of writing that is wilfully divorced from biography and founded almost entirely in the imagination. I am presently reading – out loud – an example of how this kind of writing might be done properly: A book by William Hope Hodgson titled 'The House on the Borderland'. It was published in 1908 and is regarded as a foundation stone of so-called 'weird fiction'. Hodgson tells the baffling tale of a man who lives in a very peculiar house in rural Ireland. Early in the narrative he is forced to fight for his life after his home comes under sustained attack by anthropomorphic pig-like creatures, who exhibit a feral cunning in their assaults. The latter chapters of the novel describe a metaphysical voyage through time and space to the farthest reaches of the universe. Despite the bizarre chain of events that unfold, Hodgson is able to convey a strong sense of logic, and cause and effect. There is an extraordinary chapter where he describes the gradual acceleration of time and how this alters the appearance of surrounding objects, both in the narrator's crumbling study and in the wider world beyond the window – the moon, the sun and the distant stars. This passage was put to paper just prior to the mass production and distribution of moving pictures that might have provided a frame of reference, marking it as a greatly-unappreciated feat of technical writing, that displays a deep understanding of the world and the movements of interstellar bodies. Upon this Hodgson layers a veneer of beauty and strangeness. What he wrote manages to be both deeply weird while also retaining a deep connection to reality that confers a sense of authenticity. Without it, I don't believe that the book would be anywhere near as compelling.
I am also reading – again out loud – two poems a day from the Ted Hughes collection 'Birthday Letters'. I read each poem four times in total, twice over two consecutive days. It is strange how, during that overnight gap, my comprehension of a poem will broaden and deepens. The book is a kind of scattered biography where the focus is the romance and eventual marriage between Hughes and the poet, Sylvia Plath. I purchased it many years ago, then avoided reading it because I was an admirer of Hughes' poems about the natural world and was sceptical that he could rise to the same levels of insight in describing a personal relationship.
My lack of faith was utterly without merit; the collection is superb. I am about halfway through and I already know that, when I finish, I will begin reading it again from the beginning. Part of Hughes' strength as a poet (in my opinion) are his unusual angles of approach. I wouldn't have wanted to play chess with him; he would have somehow conspired to move his pawns in elegant circles around me. The broad impression that is left of the author, by his own pen, is that of an insular and reflective man who is unable to fathom certain elements of his wife's personality. In stark contrast, Plath is portrayed as a driven individual who exists pressed right up against life and who is emotionally engaged with it to an extent that I think most people would find unbearable. This is perhaps what gives her poems their lingering potency and urgency.
I cannot say with honesty that I now know these two individuals as a result of a partly-read book. That would be absurd. It is one man's account of his own life and the life of another. Furthermore, it is a stylised account that attempts to balance beauty and tragedy. And yet there is a foundational biographical element that conveys some truth. It's what you hook into as a reader. Perhaps these poems are true in the same way as Bacon's paintings. We, or most of us, do not live in a constant state of torment, where we are either outwardly or inwardly screaming, though such a thing is undeniably a factor of the human experience. I am coming to realise that my failure as a writer is an aversion to biography. It's an inauthentic Borgesian attempt to overwrite the world in a way that holds reality at bay. That element of biography is what makes writing compelling. The problem is that you can't write bibliographical truth without ruffling a few feathers and that includes your own.
I go out walking along Southend Seafront at night, around the time that the pubs close, or even after that when everything has shut down. It is seldom a pleasant walk. There are gangs and sketchy individuals who hide their faces well. An air of threat pervades and sometimes escalates. The local businesses pay private security to patrol the pavements. The police, who seem to have made their top priority the Kafkaesque bullying of strident women on Twitter, seldom show their faces.
There is a pub along the Golden Mile called The Falcon (a few years ago the sign lost some of its big gold letters and it was briefly called 'The alco'). A few nights ago, as I was passing on the opposite side of the road, a broken and imperfect voice sang the opening lines of 'She' – originally by Charles Aznavour, though Elvis Costello's version is probably better known. The karaoke backing was swallowed by the distance, so I heard it a capella. I have never liked the song; I would go so far as to say that I dislike it. However, the man who was performing it put so much of himself into it. I admired his rendition and the evident truth and personal experience that he set behind it.
Hanif, the Magnificent, I was in a loveless marriage in my 20s, to an insensitive and selfish man. Then, I watched My Beautiful Laundrette at my small-town art film house. Swept up by the love scene before Johnny and Omar open the laundrette, I walked home alone that night, dismissing it--telling myself it wasn't real--that no one feels that way about another. Days passed, and I couldn't shake the dissonance between my own miserable life and that scene. I went back and back to the theater, obsessed. And eventually, I began to believe. You made me believe in love. I left my husband in 1987, and actually began my own life. I'm now happily married to an amazing woman. We've been together for 18 years. I can trace my current happiness and contentment back to you in all your brilliance. I wish you every possible happiness and insight, even in this despicable confinement you find yourself in. Most of all, I wish you love.
Dear Hanif, I had just started reading on Substack when I encountered your post about your accident two years ago, and you have been in my thoughts ever since. I so appreciate your directness and honesty. I am a few years older than you and started writing on Substack myself last June. Your writing has inspired me to write from the heart and tell it like it is. I am also inspired by your bravery in the face of so much uncertainty and so many indignities. Even though I'm sure it was a logistical nightmare, it warms my heart to know that you were able to go back to the National Portrait Gallery. With warm greetings from western Massachusetts and best wishes for the coming year that your physical condition will improve and that your spirit will stay strong.
Oh Hanif you could never be in a Francis Bacon. Far too pretty love Nige
Hanif, you write...."my writing might lead people to feel that they know me or even that I am speaking directly to them—which I am." Thank you. I read avidly. I guess because I have a friend who is in almost the same position as you: his accident was almost exactly a year earlier than yours. I want to know more of how he feels and how he sees the world: as you say from normal waist height. He finds it very difficult to talk about and express his feelings. You have provided some potential and powerful insights. Thank you for that. I know my friend is at his best when we include him in conversation that is normal and fun. Keep looking for the fun.
I ardently wish for you to go to Paris, to London, Italy, Montréal, and out of the Francis Bacon paintings and into your new life. If we can collectively wish it for you, enough to make it happen, then we will weep in joy. If not, then I hope for better days for you.
I’ll admit if our paths ever crossed - starstruck tears might appear. I get it. You loom larger than I think you realize.
Every one of these posts is essential, including the retractions. I look to the Kureishi Chronicles for guidance on not just writing but on behavior, thought, and expression under conditions similar to ones I assume are waiting for me, in one form or another. Call it the lifespan version of William Gibson's line about the future being already here just not evenly distributed.
Years ago, I interviewed the actor Javier Bardem for an article pegged to his performance as Ramón Sampedro, in "The Sea Inside," about the Spanish naval seaman who was paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident at 25 and spent the next 29 years writing essays and poems, entertaining guests, and campaigning for the right to assisted suicide (which a close friend helped him achieve, illegally, in 1998). Bardem portrayed a kind, noble, irascible tough-guy autodidact who indulges his admirer's arguments about the sanctity of human life and their testimonials of their love for him, but remains unwavering in his desire for oblivion. It's an infuriating story and the title of Sampedro's book of essays and poems is rather more uncompromising than the film's "Mar adentro," or "out to sea." It's "Cartas desde el infierno," which suggests an author who did indeed feel he was living inside a Francis Bacon paining and took pains to convince others of this.
Did he too prompt admirers to start crying when they met him? I doubt it. But I don't get that response either. These entries don't flood me with empathy or compassion. They amuse me, inspire me, prompt reflections on the culture and my personal life, and make me envious. Not just for the career, fame, success, and punk-era exploits but in what HK manages to get down on the page, week after week. I'm nobody as a writer, but I have good taste, read constantly in this forum and elsewhere, and have a decent sense of what others manage to produce here from week to week, presumably with working hands and arms, and the ability to go about the world autonomously. And for the most part it's not even close.
I hope this kind of thing matters to you. I remember the mental spiral I fell into when I was quitting drinking, when every pleasure and professional achievement seemed to flow through that buzz, the social lubricant that moved me into the word, that gave me courage to strike up conversations with social betters, that fortified me when my faith or interest lagged, that rewarded me after a day's effort. I assumed that long-term sobriety would be more or less what I saw in my bouts of clinical depression: days drained of color, surrounded by people mouthing cliches, with no ability to turn anything off, stuck in one humiliating way station after another. I don't pretend this is materially comparable, but I wonder if the mental processes are at all similar.
At the time, in 2009, I went to the Francis Bacon show at the Met here in NYC with a friend who was then confronting his own alcoholism, and who had a greater distribution of that future than me. We both loved the show, of course, but I remember he really resented the fact, which became the salient one to him, that Bacon was able to sustain decades of productivity as a severe but functioning alcoholic -- never having to sink down into what we both understood as the misery of sober life. My friend died of alcoholism within the decade, inside his own Francis Bacon painting until the end. I'm here, cackling at Hanif Kureishi's hot takes and cool appraisals and enduring humanity.
Are you still sober? Days still drained of color? Or can you laugh and appreciate again inspired by the comedy of life? Your letter to Hanif is simply said poignant. As the Brits say, crack on!
Hanif,
Writing is a wonderful form of expression. I am glad you have Carlo as your writing partner. We all do suffer. I have cancer, but look healthy. No one weeps when they see me and thats fine. Like you, I live each day and hope to travel again.
I find healing in nature and by writing. Thank you for your substack postings!!
I remember being starstruck when I saw you read from The Black Album at a bookstore in NYC in 1995 and you signed a copy for me. I could see myself being tearful if I saw you again. Not out of pity, but more due to the passing of time (30 years!) and the ceaseless wonder I feel whenever I come in contact with an artist who has moved me. However I’d like to think if that happened now, if you came back to NYC, I would be too overcome with joy to cry. I hope you will be able to travel. For now I’m simply grateful that you can write and I can tell you what your writing has meant to me. Happy new year to you and all your loved ones.
Perhaps your recent life reminds people of tragedy and suffering. I'm sure it's that for me in part. I would no doubt cry too. But the larger part is your recent life and writing reminds me of honesty, of plain writing, of looking deeper to see what's there under the surface of suffering. Because of course everyone suffers (though I will grant yours is big). Life is suffering. You just wear it on your sleeve for all to see, while the rest of us keep trying to tamp it down under a cheery or brave surface.
Come to Miami Book Fair in 2025 this November. We can create a panel around your work. Maybe Salman or other friends will come with you. I’m serious. I am the director of programming for Books & Books. This is an open invite to visit anytime!
Sometimes after reading one of your pieces, I have to step back into reality- my own reality- and realize that I don't know you, that I can't walk over and bring you something good to eat, or get you that purple velvet couch you mentioned early on, that I can't come have a chat and compare our realities as I would with a friend. Most of my friends are far less articulate about their suffering than you are- except some who have the ability to convey their own mental suffering to others and are not reluctant to do it. Some people don't realize that what they are experiencing is suffering- the hope they have for a better tomorrow, the fear of what lies ahead, the enjoyments we all favor over getting an injection, or an enema, or vomiting, the striving to be their best selves, the misery of self-improvement goals, and the ache of self-contempt. We wait for our bodies to give out on us, knowing they will, and in the meantime do all this stuff hoping against hope that there is a way out in the end or one will be discovered before it's our turn to be dumped off the top of the escalator.
I weep mostly these days when moved by someone or something in a deep way- a recognition of beauty or perceiving something previously dreamt or undreamt of. It is moving to meet others. One day in the supermarket, I saw my fellow shoppers and thought, "Here you are, here I am - right now! " There were tears of recognition in my eyes. A friend wrote about her childhood with parents who first suffered because they were communists, then suffered being shunned when they decided to not be communists any more. What's not to weep about?
I like it that you find Francis Bacon's vision limited in some way, while still appreciating his work and what he conveys through it. Someone sent a photo of their dying mother to a list so that people could say prayers for her- her mouth was open in that way. I think they would have done better to send a photo of her smiling- that way, knowing that she is dying, we could allow ourselves to see ourselves more clearly in what she is going through- it begins with a smile. https://youtu.be/rsM-Um5yJbc?si=oneNJTy4-Lv7ZHCj
It's very annoying that I cannot subscribe to your chronicles on Substack. Why? Because the OS on my phone won't upgrade to the point where I can. And, my phone still works so I don't want to buy a new one until it doesn't. The dumbness of modern life. I've been reading your books forever and send you ... what? ... great appreciation – I have embraced your writing over so many fucking years. I'll get there with the stupid phone upgrade. Cannot imagine the inconvenience (perhaps not the right word) of your current circumstances ... but I love what you have to say about it! You don't shrink from it. Thank you, gorgeous!
You could subscribe and read the chroncles on your pc if you have one (I for one do not use my smartphone for Substack though I'm subscribed)
Treat yourself to a new phone. Having two on the go is great!
People weep because they feel a visceral connexion to you through your writing , which, to repeat myself,grabs the reader by the throat.....the genius of it is that we recognise a kindred spirit, we see some of ourselves , a none judgemental observation . A liberation......tears of relief and identification......xxx Jane
Hanif I have friends artists, in the Bush - this is why I follow you on Substack. My life is a little small at the moment. When I read your posts you make me want to be more - your life albeit curtailed somewhat by your accident is full and interesting - you make me what to be more. Thank you - PS I also love BOS and MBL.
In mid-September of last year I wrote a short story. Practically every day, after it was finished, I would re-read it and make changes to it. Sometimes these would be very minor. Occasionally I would gut entire paragraphs and it would be days before the story would resettle into its amended form. Through all of this I kept it under a manageable 8000 words. If something new was added then something else had to be jettisoned. This went on for almost three months. Towards the end of December, it began to occur to me that the story was conceptually flawed and couldn't be saved, except possibly by placing it in the broader context of a novel. I imagine that doing so would have only served to significantly deepen the hole I had been frenziedly digging.
This is the peril of writing that is wilfully divorced from biography and founded almost entirely in the imagination. I am presently reading – out loud – an example of how this kind of writing might be done properly: A book by William Hope Hodgson titled 'The House on the Borderland'. It was published in 1908 and is regarded as a foundation stone of so-called 'weird fiction'. Hodgson tells the baffling tale of a man who lives in a very peculiar house in rural Ireland. Early in the narrative he is forced to fight for his life after his home comes under sustained attack by anthropomorphic pig-like creatures, who exhibit a feral cunning in their assaults. The latter chapters of the novel describe a metaphysical voyage through time and space to the farthest reaches of the universe. Despite the bizarre chain of events that unfold, Hodgson is able to convey a strong sense of logic, and cause and effect. There is an extraordinary chapter where he describes the gradual acceleration of time and how this alters the appearance of surrounding objects, both in the narrator's crumbling study and in the wider world beyond the window – the moon, the sun and the distant stars. This passage was put to paper just prior to the mass production and distribution of moving pictures that might have provided a frame of reference, marking it as a greatly-unappreciated feat of technical writing, that displays a deep understanding of the world and the movements of interstellar bodies. Upon this Hodgson layers a veneer of beauty and strangeness. What he wrote manages to be both deeply weird while also retaining a deep connection to reality that confers a sense of authenticity. Without it, I don't believe that the book would be anywhere near as compelling.
I am also reading – again out loud – two poems a day from the Ted Hughes collection 'Birthday Letters'. I read each poem four times in total, twice over two consecutive days. It is strange how, during that overnight gap, my comprehension of a poem will broaden and deepens. The book is a kind of scattered biography where the focus is the romance and eventual marriage between Hughes and the poet, Sylvia Plath. I purchased it many years ago, then avoided reading it because I was an admirer of Hughes' poems about the natural world and was sceptical that he could rise to the same levels of insight in describing a personal relationship.
My lack of faith was utterly without merit; the collection is superb. I am about halfway through and I already know that, when I finish, I will begin reading it again from the beginning. Part of Hughes' strength as a poet (in my opinion) are his unusual angles of approach. I wouldn't have wanted to play chess with him; he would have somehow conspired to move his pawns in elegant circles around me. The broad impression that is left of the author, by his own pen, is that of an insular and reflective man who is unable to fathom certain elements of his wife's personality. In stark contrast, Plath is portrayed as a driven individual who exists pressed right up against life and who is emotionally engaged with it to an extent that I think most people would find unbearable. This is perhaps what gives her poems their lingering potency and urgency.
I cannot say with honesty that I now know these two individuals as a result of a partly-read book. That would be absurd. It is one man's account of his own life and the life of another. Furthermore, it is a stylised account that attempts to balance beauty and tragedy. And yet there is a foundational biographical element that conveys some truth. It's what you hook into as a reader. Perhaps these poems are true in the same way as Bacon's paintings. We, or most of us, do not live in a constant state of torment, where we are either outwardly or inwardly screaming, though such a thing is undeniably a factor of the human experience. I am coming to realise that my failure as a writer is an aversion to biography. It's an inauthentic Borgesian attempt to overwrite the world in a way that holds reality at bay. That element of biography is what makes writing compelling. The problem is that you can't write bibliographical truth without ruffling a few feathers and that includes your own.
I go out walking along Southend Seafront at night, around the time that the pubs close, or even after that when everything has shut down. It is seldom a pleasant walk. There are gangs and sketchy individuals who hide their faces well. An air of threat pervades and sometimes escalates. The local businesses pay private security to patrol the pavements. The police, who seem to have made their top priority the Kafkaesque bullying of strident women on Twitter, seldom show their faces.
There is a pub along the Golden Mile called The Falcon (a few years ago the sign lost some of its big gold letters and it was briefly called 'The alco'). A few nights ago, as I was passing on the opposite side of the road, a broken and imperfect voice sang the opening lines of 'She' – originally by Charles Aznavour, though Elvis Costello's version is probably better known. The karaoke backing was swallowed by the distance, so I heard it a capella. I have never liked the song; I would go so far as to say that I dislike it. However, the man who was performing it put so much of himself into it. I admired his rendition and the evident truth and personal experience that he set behind it.