My Animal Life (26 page)

Critics like their towers, their increments, their sense that they are watching a success story, that their own praise can add to it. It becomes taken for granted that certain names are landmarks, and the more they are repeated, the more it seems true, for they start to come
easily to everybody's lips. Once again, the power of repetition; the relief of simplifying a landscape. But it doesn't prove they're good. They are merely successful.

I saw it as a jungle, from that time on, where there were few disinterested observers. That's what we need, since there are no literary angels; we want teams of skilled taxonomists, Nabokovian naturalists, protected like jurors from prevailing opinions, ideal readers who sift slowly and carefully and add to knowledge with what they tell us. That's not what we get. We get reviewers, rushing too fast to earn their pittance, trying to be funny or shocking or rude or do anything that will get them noticed. They write for themselves, not to describe the books. Often they are writing
about
themselves. They don't see what they do as a service to literature; it's journalism; the books are fodder. It was a sinister, irrevocable step when the names of reviewers first became larger than the names of the authors they were writing about. (But reviewers also have to make their names. They are struggling too. Why should I expect them to be different? We are all out for our evolutionary advantage.) And the critics' own position is no longer secure, for the arts pages in the newspapers are shrinking, the literary editors are being sacked, the newspapers themselves are fleeing to the net because the young no longer buy the physical papers.

So what are writers, in this jungle? I wondered. (I meant, when we were not at home writing, that private, low-key act, the core of it all, which I was forgetting in my cynical inventory. The writing, which can't be faked, or stage-managed, unless you're a celeb and pay someone else to do it. The work, the work, I had to cling on to that, for the world I was seeing was very bleak.)

In the jungle, writers are opportunists. We are showoffs, trying to display our coats. We need to be the most beautiful and youthful, we need to have novelty, we need to have mates: a pack or a cohort to shoulder us through, to rush us on upwards through the trees. If we fall, we must be sure to get up quickly, for if we lie there, bleeding, we will die down there. And we, too, are here for our own advantage, struggling for the light of fame or money, for we, too, have to pay the bills, we, too, have young to bring up, and set on their own path to evolutionary advantage.

(Yet there was something else: it was about the work.
All about the work
. I would return to that.)

Of course, some good writers do well in the jungle. Of course, reviewers sometimes get it right. But it isn't inevitable; it isn't even normal. If you want to know where the best writers are, you can't tell by reading the literary pages, or going to big bookshops, or looking at prize lists. You must read for yourself, and think for yourself, or listen to voices you know and trust: private readers: truth-tellers.

I still think most of that analysis is true. And yet it left out a lot of ‘human nature', it left out the joy and pleasure people get when they find something they genuinely like, and publishers, booksellers, critics are people; it left out the fact that, alongside the conformism that biologists tell us serves most people well (which direction do you run in when a flood is coming? No time to think, just follow the others), there are always people who like to be different, who are sceptical and original. Independent publishers like Saqi and Telegram, Profile and Tindal Street Press, Salt and Comma; independent booksellers
like Foyles or John Sandoe's or my locals, Willesden Books, Kilburn Books, the Queen's Park Bookshop.

And then there is the work. Come back to that. Get up on the wire, walk the line in the sunlight. Breathe, concentrate, find the nerve. What is it about? Something says
‘my soul'
, and I am uneasy, and turn away, embarrassed. My being-in-the-world expressed as performance. The rhythm of my body imprinting on the page, what my eyes have seen, what my heart has lived. And the movement of my hand lets me share it with others. I am here, now. I am writing the truth of it. For most writers, work is not just a product.

My book had fallen foul of the market, but rereading it, I believed in it. The question was, where could I go? How could I get my portrait of Britain out to the British?

Once again, friends of mine stepped in, Moris Farhi, the Turkish writer, campaigner and intellectual, and his wife (and editor) Nina Farhi. Nina: it is still hard to write about her, those intelligent brown eyes and bird-like profile under a Greek girl's thicket of curls: with whom I would talk passionately about novels while Moris (‘Musa') cooked succulent chicken, his deep voice interjecting knowledge from the stove. Nina: who played football with us in the garden, lithe and laughing but a deadly opponent. We discussed Fay Weldon and Anita Brookner and our beloved only daughters, and our central theme was often writing, though Nina was a well-known psychoanalyst (she died, alas, most fierce and beautiful and missed, her mind still the mind of an eagle, a claw-hold on life as the sky went dark, while I was finishing this book. How can such presence become an absence?)

Nina and Moris both loved
The White Family
and discussed gravely what to do about it. Moris showed the book to his friend and publisher, the Lebanese sculptor and writer Mai Ghoussoub, co-founder with André Gaspard of Saqi, which had been in existence for over twenty years. I am sure Moris encouraged her in certain expectations; probably he told her it was wonderful; in other words, the ‘frame' was right.

She read it expecting it to be good because she loved and trusted Moris. I knew she had the manuscript. I dared not hope.

Only my diary can truly tell the story of those unforgettable three days in late April.

Tuesday April 17 2001 was just an ‘ordinary' day. My daughter was ‘grumpy', I went on trying to write ‘a new book' (it was the start of
The Flood
, in fact), but the diary says ‘a mere 650 words so far'. Then the page breaks into big, bold, type:

Oh happiness, oh unimaginable happiness that may yet turn into absolute bliss, for this afternoon … the phone rang, and it was a melodious woman's voice, foreign. I stood in the grubby hall and took it in. ‘Mai … Mai Ghoussoub … We have a friend in common, Moris Farhi … I have phoned to tell you I have finished reading your book, and I have enjoyed it very much … It was such a pleasure. It is literature. Literature does not judge … All your characters are human. And the end. I liked it very much, the end. Because it moves it outside of London and makes it universal … Very touching. I think I enjoyed it more than any manuscript I have read in a long time …'

Then there was apparently a note of caution, for she said the book would be discussed at a meeting they would have over the next day or so, and her last words were disquieting: ‘I hope we meet, at any rate.'

Once I had put the phone down, though, I was ‘suffused and energised with hope … someone likes my White Elephant!'

Wednesday April 18

Still fizzing. I wrote a little more on the new novel, diary, fun with Rosa—but the weather is cold—‘It's winter again,' said Nick. No phone call from Saqi yet at 5 pm.

Thursday April 19

What a day. Fear started to replace joy some time around the end of the morning, Nothing could protect me from gloom … as the afternoon went on in the empty house. Had Mai's meeting been on Wednesday? Had it been this morning? No call meant bad news. I hate the feeling that I can do nothing, nothing to help myself—not my busybodying nature to do nothing and accept what comes.

I tried to read and got—next to nowhere. Nick rang [from the BBC] around four—any news? No. He was full of love. ‘Go and read outside,' he said—then, ‘Maybe not, it's raining.'

Actually I did go outside and read, in the garden, on the step, though it was splashing with April rain which dimpled my pages, and there was April sun, too. Wild violets where the grass had given up. Magnolias in the next-door garden. I thought, ‘I mind terribly about this, I've just been kidding myself that I would understand if Saqi turn me down.' In the end the rain drove me in and I sat in my armchair testing the phone at intervals to see if it was working. Picking it up, putting it down. Random absurd compacts with fate—‘If when I look at my watch it is past 5 o'clock, there's no hope.' And yet in part of me hope was very strong. Another voice inside me said loud and clear, ‘This will work. They will take it. It will come right.' But time slipped on, past
5.15, past 5.30 … Too late, I thought. They have gone home.

But sometimes hope is stronger than the dead fall of failure, the weight in the heart, the bitter taste rising. Because at 5.40 the phone rang again, and there was Mai's singsong voice: ‘We have had our meeting, and I am ringing to say Yes, we would like very much to publish your novel, if we can come to an agreement …' We finished off with compliments—looking forward.

In fact, I was ‘struck down, pole-axed. Floored by emotion, almost exhaustion, almost blankness, something I could hardly give a name to, but which possessed me, beyond words. I didn't know what to do with myself.' (I see now it was like the aftermath of the endoscopy which began this book: my body was left behind by my mind; it had to find itself again.)

I felt I had to move, to go out, to walk, to find people, to shout, to dance, to sing. I ended up walking down the road under an extraordinary thunderstruck black-and-sun sky, in the teeth of an icy wind, headed for my friend Hanna's, bits of whose life and wisdom are in that book—rang at her door, the doorbell was run down they—were out. Maybe in a way that was better, because I was in such a strange stunned state …

Then I walked through hard cold rain to Willesden, foraging for my fair folk—I had a ten-pound note and some change in my pocket; bought a bottle of cheap fizz, a pizza for Rosa, mushrooms, good bread—thinking ‘feast-time, feast-time, happiness'.

Walking back home from the bus down Liddell Gardens there was a blaze of late warm-toned sun and suddenly the Victorian school for the disabled was lit with red beauty—warm, warm, reaching up to the rain-cleared sky. I just stood and gazed; the sun, which had already set at my eye-level, shone above me in a high red band; it caught and lit the top of a tree of blossom; as I looked at the heights of the burning school, a small dark bird swooped up and over, made for the tower on the roof with a weather vane, and before my eyes landed on the very top in the sun—Hurrah, bird of my heart, well aimed.

And then down the long straight street of gardens towards my home, and everything was all at once illuminated with the joy I was too overcome to feel at first. The sky—such a sky. Pearly complicated clouds with a patch of warm sandy-gold and high fans of whitish silver, too bright to look at long, and behind them the pure thin blue—cherry trees that looked black against the sky until you got close and looked up and there as your blindness peeled away they were, deep maroon leaves and keen pink blossoms, nothing was black,
everything swam with colour—and the sharp fresh smell of the altar of redcurrant flowers pulled me across the wet road to bury my face in them—I wanted to live for ever.

Yes: the joy. I can still feel it. It was not about money. It was the work. The work, in which I'd put my soul and my heart, the bird on its arc across the thin blue sky.

(But what if I had not had a friend? What if Moris Farhi had not known Mai?)

Nearly a year later, I was in Australia with Rosa, a month or so before
The White Family
was published. We were happy, on bikes, a late balmy afternoon, tied them up and went into an internet café. I opened Hotmail and saw a puzzling blizzard of emails. Most of them were headed ‘Congratulations …' The book had been long-listed, pre-publication, for the Orange Prize, the global prize for women writing in English. It came out on that ready-made wave of approval, and gained excellent reviews. Then, to the excitement of my publisher and my triumphant, unreasonable joy, it was shortlisted. And then, again, it was shortlisted for the International Dublin Impac Award of 100,000 Euros, the largest award for a single book, and ran into many editions and translations. I suppose you could say I was vindicated.

The ‘Disaster' years came more or less exactly in the middle of my career to date, with my sixth, out of twelve, books (this is my thirteenth). It turned out to
be the middle, but it could have been the end. Ever after, my memory of that time has added a resonance, a shading, a depth of pleasure when good things happen; each time a new foreign right is sold, each time I get the chance to travel for my writing. Since the ‘Disaster' years, I have been asked, for work, to Rome, Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Beirut, Majorca, Ankara, Istanbul, Zurich, Tripoli, Geneva, Copenhagen … so many foreign cities. So little time on this beautiful planet, and writing is helping me travel around it. A new and quite unexpected African connection opened up for me in 2003 when my enterprising editor, Anna Wilson, said the right thing to Cheltenham Literary Festival, and they sent me to Kampala, Uganda, on an exchange with the Ugandan novelist Ayeta Anne Wangusa, which inspired friendships, short stories, two novels. My luck, my luck, sitting writing in Kampala with the weaver birds darting outside the open door. When, in 2004, I became Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, the first woman to hold that post, it meant more to me because, not so long before, I thought my life as a writer might be over.