Kamran Nazeer
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Illuminations by Eva Hoffman
(Harvill Secker, £16.99)
Eva Hoffman’s memoir of migration, Lost in Translation, first published in 1989, begins aboard a ship leaving Poland 30 years earlier. “We can’t be leaving all this behind,” writes Hoffman in her dismay, “but we are.” Looking ahead, she describes “an erasure, of the imagination, as if a camera eye has snapped shut.” Her family is moving to Canada, a place of which Hoffman knows nothing more than “vague outlines, a sense of vast spaces and little habitation.”
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Andrew Brown
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the world looked to Sweden as a socialist country that worked. Affluent, egalitarian, moderate, it seemed the blueprint for a kinder, more rational future. In 1977, I moved there with my Swedish wife, Anita. I lived an apparently utopian life—raising a child, working in a small factory, living in an efficient modern home, becoming a fisherman. I found it intensely frustrating. By the 1980s, the country and my marriage were falling apart. The prime minister was shot dead on a street in Stockholm. Swedish industry was crumbling. Through the cracks in the social dream, a very different vision of Sweden emerged: a disillusioned, nervous, greedy country, suddenly unsure of its identity and place in the world. Now, 20 years later, I have returned to travel the length of Sweden—and to reflect on my experiences of a country I have loved, hated, and come to love again.
Communists and detectives
Once my Swedish was up to the task, I learned a lot about my new country from the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, about the policeman Martin Beck. Between 1963 and 1975, this man-and-wife duo produced ten police procedurals set in Stockholm, which sold all around the world. They are excitingly written, realistic about police work and full of period detail. But most of all they illuminate the orthodoxy of the Social Democratic years. The strangest thing about Sweden, to an English eye, was always its conformity. It did not matter what the orthodoxy might be: the point is that everyone knew what was acceptable and proper to believe. The Beck stories taught me most when they were most absurd, because they exaggerated what everybody then believed about progress and society. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were communists, and in the 1970s there was an assumption that communism, while imperfect, was at least a form of socialism; and socialism then seemed as completely inevitable as global capitalism does now.
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Howard Jacobson
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“The first thing you should know is that I’m a whore.”
Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (Phoenix)
“A field study in nine countries showed that between 60 and 75 per cent of women in prostitution had been raped, between 70 and 95 per cent had been physically assaulted, and 68 per cent displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the same range as combat veterans and victims of torture.”
Joan Smith, The Independent, 27th December 2007
“Another thing that distinguishes a ladylike working girl is her groomed and tidy muff. Clients know you make your money with your pussy, but a freshly waxed, beautifully maintained pussy sends a message: You spend money on your pussy.”
Tracy Quan, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl (HarperPerennial)
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John Gray
Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: an Autobiography, by JG Ballard
(4th Estate, £14.99)
Writing of a cycle ride he took with his father in Shanghai in 1941, JG Ballard describes stepping into the grounds of a derelict casino and nightclub called the De Monte: “On the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appear, it could be swept aside into the past.”
Central to all of Ballard’s writings is the disassembling of the theatre in which our lives are ordinarily enacted—a theatre that includes our habitual selves. When these props are taken away by history, or by some inner imperative of our own, we find ourselves in a world more real than the one constructed by society. With the makeshifts of conventional existence demolished, we face human life on its most basic terms—an extremely sobering, sometimes devastating, experience that can also be oddly liberating.
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Duncan Fallowell
There are plenty of things I’m happy to admit: I loathe Beethoven’s 9th symphony; that the spectacle of the disability Olympics makes me feel ill; that I wish I had a foreskin (consequently I’ve spent a lot of my adult life seeking the foreskins of others); that I am ashamed of my back—which is bowed, not flat. I should be happy to extend the list except that it would begin to involve other people (I’ve written somewhere that maturity is the growing capacity for candour, but that’s not the same as unnecessary betrayal of those close to us).
But the one thing it remains uncool to do is to have regrets. To the “do your own thing” generation, this was inconceivable. You could confess to the most appalling sins, but regret was another matter. It was a denial of selfhood; it was emotional suicide. For waverers there was propaganda: Edith Piaf’s song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” or Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: “Regrets, I’ve had a few/ But then again, too few to mention.”
For years I followed that path, but a few months ago I seemed to fly right into an asteroid belt of, well, regrets. I don’t actually wish I were another person—I simply can’t get my head round a question like “If you weren’t you, who would you want to be?” But I’m also a man for whom life and work, life and art indeed, form a seamless continuum. And that, it struck me, has been my big mistake.
It began quietly. I was lying in bed one night and thought—I wish I’d joined the Groucho Club when it asked me to become a founder member all those years ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be battling for every damned book I write. From here, it wasn’t far to an orgy of cold sweat and self-pity. Why have I never had any recognition? Why am I still a struggling author? Why have I never been shortlisted for anything or even longlisted? Then it swerved back to—why didn’t I say yes when Mark Boxer asked me to become features editor of Tatler? Why did I refuse when Emma Soames asked me to be a restaurant critic? Pitiful, isn’t it. These weren’t regrets about people—only about work, career, worldly success.
Then the regrets about people arrived—and it got worse. People as a resource. Why did I never exploit my connections? Why did I say no to Anton Dolin and Ozzie Clark when they asked me to write their biographies? Why did I reject Richard Cohen when he offered me £40,000 for a biography of Jan Morris? Most of all, why on earth did I turn down Harold Acton when he asked me to be his authorised biographer and spend time with him on the project? I would have gone everywhere and come to know everyone.
I try to justify it by thinking, oh, if I’d gone to live with Harold Acton in his palace outside Florence, it would have turned me into some piss-elegant art queen, it would have fed my poncey side, I’d never have pushed the boundaries, I should have had to dance attendance on his every whim, I’d have been suffocated in archival drudgery and lost my independence. But now I think that’s not true. It would have enlarged my field of operations enormously. Harold would have opened for me the jewelled casket of secrets which he has since taken to the grave. I could have written a small masterpiece for posthumous publication.
No—the real reason I didn’t take on these biographies, and his in particular, was vanity. I’d already written one, of a transsexual friend of mine. It was my first book and I’d done it because I’d screwed up in London and needed to escape. But I wanted in future to write books which were devoted to my glory, not the glorification of others. I wanted to be the centre of attention.
Which brings us to another big regret. In the 1970s, I worked a lot with the avant-garde German band Can. Their Japanese lead singer Damo Suzuki left in 1973 to become a Jehovah’s Witness. I was invited to replace him and— after a long dark night of the soul—turned the offer down. If I hadn’t, I might now be filling the Dome along with Kylie Minogue!
After the Can offer, I hopped over to India, for a year, whereupon my editor at the Spectator accused me of neglecting my career. I was their film critic at the time but, you see, I had never had a boss or been part of an organisation. When I returned I became involved not with the straight press but with the punk glossies Deluxe and Boulevard and was still self-employed. This led to burnout and moving to Hay-on-Wye for a bit which brings us, soon afterwards, to that golden arm of Harold’s extending out through the doors of the Villa La Pietra, the kingdom which I spurned. That is what lingers most among the regrets, the rejection of Harold Acton’s proposal. His life was fascinating and he was fantastically rich. I’d be in clover by now, instead of worrying about who will publish my next book and how I’ll survive. So many great opportunities scorned by my prattish self-regard! Why the bloody hell did I have to do it my way? Why?
Hugh Williamson
Joschka Fischer’s conference call
The event of the season in political Berlin is the publication of the memoirs of ex-foreign minister and über-Green Joschka Fischer. The Red-Green Years: German Foreign Policy from Kosovo to September 11 covers the first part of Fischer’s seven-year term, so the 430-page book is only a first instalment. Back in Berlin after teaching in Princeton for a year, Fischer had fun at October’s launch, making digs at the latest pacifist outbursts from his less-than-beloved Green party, but also promising Berlin’s political class that he was not planning a comeback.
The book itself has received broadly positive reviews, at least compared with the turgid memoirs of Gerhard Schröder and Helmut Kohl. Funny anecdotes are few, although he does recall watching football on television (with the sound off) while holding a teleconference with other foreign ministers. When Fischer suddenly cheered for his team, Madeleine Albright asked if he was okay.
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Michael Blastland
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Neil Vickers: It’s a striking fact that before the late 1950s there were very few “illness narratives,” and those that did come to public notice were produced almost entirely in the US. Until the mid-1970s, illness narrative was really just a first cousin of the self-help book; about the nuts and bolts of being ill, not about the effects on your life. What I think began to transform the genre was that by the late 1980s there were a number of celebrity illness narratives that changed the rules significantly—like William Styron’s Darkness Visible—and then there were lots from the early 1990s. It’s around that period, early to mid-1990s, that you start to get the first volumes of criticism about the form, and this criticism is very much about “how do you avoid selling out?” when you’re writing as a patient, especially if you have an illness that’s scaring the hell out of you. One influential critic is John Wiltshire, who is now working on a history of medicine solely from the patient’s point of view.
Michael Blastland: When you say “selling out,” do you mean that the concern is that people may be exploiting something deep and personal in a slightly sordid way?
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Robert Colls
My first English journey was in 1962, to Humshaugh, in Northumberland, on a Boys’ Brigade camp. We went in the back of a lorry up to Gateshead, over the Tyne bridge, through Newcastle, and out west. Passing the folks along the road, we waved and shouted. There were no seats, though someone had neatly folded coal sacks for our benefit.
This was not my first trip into the country. The brigade had camped at Alston the year before; a stormy week that saw us flooded out of our tents and driven to the shelter of a barn. Humshaugh, by contrast, was warm and sweet: my first English summer. I spent a lot of time lying in deep grass staring up at a clear blue sky. After a week I came home thinking how bricked-in South Shields felt. I was 13 years old and never gave any of it a second thought.
My second journey came the year after, a ten-minute walk from our front door to a Methodist chapel. For you had to go to evening worship if you wanted to go to Young People’s Fellowship. Under the leadership of the minister, we met in the schoolroom to debate the issues of the day—Cuban missiles, death of God, teenage sex, that sort of thing. We did other things as well. We put on plays in winter, went rambling in summer, and sang carols and rattled tins at Christmas. Nearly everything we did was deflected into good causes. Some of us got engaged. Not me, but friends who had left school at 15 to live in the real world of work and wages. Apprentice fitters and town hall secretaries grew up faster than me, and their journeying stopped early with a diamond ring, some savings and a vision of family life on a new estate.
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Lesley Chamberlain
We’re not going on holiday this summer, so I thought I’d remind myself what I’m missing. Nietzsche talks of the enchantment of short-term habits. When I think how excited I get mastering another place’s bus timetables, I know he’s right.
Some of the joy comes simply from being away from home. Because the landscape is different, your eyes wake up. Because the food tastes different, your palate is tickled into making new distinctions. Whether or not the language is familiar, your ears enjoy the challenge of a different sound world.
You can lose yourself in the music of foreign streets—car horns, scooters, trams, even horses’ hooves. It’s almost a definition of being in the Mediterranean that you don’t mind the noise. Even the birds sing a different tune, so you get interested in birdwatching. The vegetation is more luxurious, so add to that plantspotting. You wake up with foreign words in your head. You cover your face with a different kind of detective story on the beach, which has to be read with a dictionary, and it doesn’t really matter that you never get beyond page three.
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