2.2 mb PDF - Hamish Hamilton

Five DialsNumber 3cheryl Wagner 4 New Orleans and Flood Sleazedavid rakoff 6 On Annie Hallsimon prosser 8 The Life of R.B. KitajJonathan safran foer 9 Remembering Kitajsheila heti 11 A Very Practical Jokeluke Wright 15 StanstedBob and roberta smith 16 The Art World Needs More Traceysjean-paul sartre 22 My Darling Beaver

CONTRIBUTORSDean Allen quit smoking while designing this issue of Five Dials.Sophia Al-Maria’s work has appeared in the Cairo Times, Egypt’s Insight, Opium,The Brooklyn Rail, and she is a frequent contributor to Bidoun magazine, where a versionof her article first appeared. She lives in London.Ceri Amphlett’s artwork adorned the sleeve of the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike,by The Go! Team. More of her drawings are at ceriamphlett.co.uk.Paul Davis is the author and illustrator of Us and Them: What The British Think ofThe Americans, which has a second section entitled: Us and Them:What The Americans Think of The British.Alain de Botton is involved in a cultural enterprise called The School of Life,which offers intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life.The website is theschooloflife.com.Sheila Heti is the author of the novel Ticknor and the story collection The MiddleStories. She ran a series of blogs at the beginning of 2008, which archived the dreamspeople were having about Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton while sleeping.It was clear from the dreams that Obama would win.Simon Prosser is the publishing director of Hamish Hamilton.David Rakoff is the author of the books Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable. Hiswriting has been included in The Best American Travel Writing and The Best AmericanNon-Required Reading. As an actor, he can be seen in the films Capote (fleetingy), andStrangers With Candy (fleetingly, mutely).Jonathan Safran Foer is currently finishing a book of non-fictionwith the working title Eating Animals.Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of, among others, Being and Nothingness.leanne shapton is the author and illustrator of Was She Pretty?Bob and Roberta Smith are London-based artists represented by the Hales Gallery.Recent shows include The Fourth Plinth proposals, National Gallery and The FreedomCentre. This winter they will design the Christmas tree for Tate Britain.Cheryl Wagner is a writer and a contributor to public radio’s This American Life. Herbook Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around is due out in May. She lives in New Orleans.Luke Wright is the co-author, with Joel Stickley, of Who Writes This Crap?Five Dials is brought to you with the help of matt clacher, Debbie Hatfield, AnnaKelly, Nick Lowndes, Juliette Mitchell, James Chant, and Simon Prosser.subscribehamishhamilton.co.ukUnless otherwise noted, all illustrations by Ceri Amphlett

A Letter From The EditorOn Alibis and Public ViewsThere is a wonderful phrase on pagetwenty-one of the collected lettersof Harold Ross, the gap-toothed, chainsmokinggenius who edited the NewYorker magazine from its inception to hisdeath in 1951. In the midst of some whiplashadvice, he instructs a young editor to‘alibi furiously’. Better than any definitionI’ve come across since, these words sumup the balancing act necessary for a publication’searly stages: welcoming, tickling,grabbing with one hand and keepingthe world at bay with the other. The crygoes up: Send us work! – while the morenuanced translation reads: Send us undiscoveredbrilliance! Don’t send us . . . thatother stuff.Five Dials is not directly related to theNew Yorker – we’re more of a stunted,irregular fourth cousin with an Estuaryaccent – but like them and many otherpublications, we are now on full publicview. Subscription is free and onceyou’re on our private list, unlike thoseother magazines, your details will notbe given to anyone. Our unveiling hasbrought forth response from readers andwith response comes the option to replyor alibi with a determination unheardof since Ross’s New York. So, for issuethree, as we are well on our way, nowis as good a time as any to apologize tothose we have collectively alibied: to thepoets who glimpsed a new venue, likehyenas sniffing blood, and flooded ourinbox with verse that rhymed, in onecase, ‘fanny’ with ‘Mannie’. To the readerswho have been kind, a very heartfeltthank you, and to the readers who haveasked for directions to the Five Dials pubin Horton, Somerset, it’s halfway downGoose Lane. To the commentator in theDaily Telegraph who repeated a remarksomeone made about Five Dials being‘very Web 0.5’, I’m sorry I haven’t beenable to write personally to explain we arenot Web 0.5; rather, sir, we’re clocking inat about 0.282, if that, and if you downloadedthis PDF in the hopes of FacebookingJohn Updike or Twittering Eggers –whatever the hell that means – there maybe disappointment for you sooner ratherthan l8ter.Most of all, an apology to a readernamed Alan Twiddle, one of the moresenior staff at Alan Twiddle Sales andMarketing of Driffield, East Yorkshire,who not only took the time to printup Five Dials 1 on gorgeous paper, butsheathed it in what must be his company’sflagship product, a ‘Cover System’made from a material that, according tohis literature, ‘has passed the PAT test forphotographic archive use’. Sometimespublishing on the web feels fleeting andephemeral, but Twiddle assured us anunnamed ‘Canadian research laboratory’vouches for his material. Anythingshrouded in the plastic pockets will notnoticeably deteriorate for at least 100years. His issue will be proudly displayedat our office until 2108 but no later.Perhaps we’re fixated on the idea ofa public view because so much of issuethree concerns the pleasures, pains andtragedies of modern art. Writer SheilaHeti travelled to the sunny concrete ofthe Miami Art Fair and returned withan oblique view of swimming poolsand millionaire collectors while Boband Roberta Smith remained closer tohome, laying out a plan to revitalize artin London and finally solve the problemof Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. Thereare artists, too, who have suffered dearlyfrom this public view, perhaps nonemore than R.B. Kitaj. For those whoknow nothing of his pained and tragic life,Simon Prosser offers an introduction andJonathan Safran Foer reconsiders the finalcorrespondence he shared with Kitaj asthe artist fought the hardships of his lateryears, and tried to stay true to his dictums:measure twice, cut once. Work is neverthe same from one day to the next. Itmight be the best advice you’re going toget from any free monthly these days.– Craig Taylorleanne shapton3

Current-ish EventsThe Ballad of Black VanCheryl Wagner flees the New Orleans flood sleazeBlack Van was back with a wastedgrin. Slicked hair topped by a cheapcoal cowboy hat, he smiled red-eyed fromthe porch of a sadsack shotgun house sinkinginto the ground two blocks from minein Mid-City. It was over a year since theNew Orleans Police Department tossedhim from his last squatted house in ourneighborhood. Life was good; a group ofshady plumbers hung out on the curb ofhis latest lair. He had minions again.Carpenters, electricians, sheetrockers,citizen-sheetrockers, painters, plumbers– we had them all. Since the flood threeyears ago, my neighborhood has been aconstruction site. These weren’t like theold ponytailed plumber who, in one ofthose moments of compulsive post-Katrinasharing, cruised up to our ruined houseto tell us he grew pot on our back balconyin the eighties. The pot plumber hadpulled up his t-shirt and revealed a deeppink surgery scar. He expressed concernthat my boyfriend and basset hound andI looked in over our heads. Mired deep inthe world’s worst DIY moment, we were.These plumbers, Black Van’s plumbers,were the bad news ones. The ones whotrolled the frayed edges of our strugglingneighborhood at lunch and quitting timefor drugs. The ones who frequented theflooded-and-fixed hourly motels nearbyon Tulane Avenue. When I drove by onmy way out of town for Hurricane Gustav,Black Van remained, laughing on theporch under his tipped cowboy hat. Butthe plumbers’ eyes went slit. Their headsswiveled like periscopes or wrenchestowards me in warning. Get off this block.Typical flood sleaze. I was over it.‘Screw you, Black Van,’ I thought.‘You better not break into our house.’A guy had just written into our neighborhoodassociation email list to say hisflooded-and-just-fixed house had beenrobbed and that maybe a direct hit fromGustav might not be such a bad thing. Itwas an ugly thing to wish on the hundredsof thousands of New Orleanianswho had not pried open his side door, butI understood.I didn’t want to be cursing Black Vanon my way out of town. I wanted topretend I had mastered evacu-zenningout, leaving early and floating above thefray. My boyfriend Jake and I had justfinished battening down the hatches onour almost-finished house. The insulationguy had just blown foam into our attic.It dripped into tiny stalactites. I wantedevery penny back. We’d need it to move ifwe flooded again.‘Divorces will be made this week,’ Ipredicted as we went to fill up our gastank and get cash.‘No shit,’ Jake said.Inside my raised house, Jake and Ihoisted the bicycles we got to replaceour flood-rusted ones on top of ourdining-room table to get three extra dryfeet. They were Euro knock-off bicycles– faux-Dutch with real skirt guards. Minewas a perfect blue. I told the grey-hairedlady across the street whose house hadbeen flooded, then fixed, then burned,then fixed again that, yes, I would pray.The night before we had gone to a bluesman’seightieth birthday show. He playedthe guitar behind his head wearing twowristwatches. His stepson nagged him,‘Now do that dance.’ Finally he poppedhis thin hips like the Depression baby hehad been. He said he was glad he drove inall the way from Mississippi. He gave mea whiskery kiss.After, Jake and I went to have a drinkand a stuffed artichoke. Just in case. I heldthe goblet aloft.‘This is my last frosty mug.’Jake shook his head.‘Don’t say that.’But it felt true. After three years offixing my house while watching the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers try to fix theirs,this was the sum total of my faith. Westill had primitive levees and concretecanal walls anchored in red velvet cake.We had devoted way too much of ourlives to finishing our part, and the governmentwas way behind on theirs. Suckahs!I was starting to hear the bystandersshout. Prepare to watch your own heads roll.Black Van was another kind of realitycheck. I hated seeing him grinning fromhis slum mothership on my way out oftown. He always dragged me down tohis level. The entropy level. The JerrySpringer zone.About six months after the flood, BlackVan had appeared when almost no onewas living in our part of Mid-City excepta few haggard resettlers. Unless they hadsomehow lucked out, the resettlers wereall living either without electricity in anupstairs with just a few walls like us orin toxic trailers. There was a mentally illfamily who traded slaps and screamed‘Abuser!’ as they clutched stuffed animalsand wandered the drywall-dusted streets.On our block, a set of hard-luck kidswhose parents had left them to their owndevices jumped barefoot on mildewedmattresses between debris piles.Into this wonderland appeared a paledrug addict with greased-back hair drivinga van painted black with house-paint.It had Texas plates. Black Van set up shopon our corner. Whistling, he set out hisdisplay of stolen bicycles and tools forsale. He kept curling his finger and callingthe little hard-luck, supposed-to-be firstgrader over. It was heartbreaking.At the time, the thought of sliding anyfurther down the slumhole was unbearableto me. I didn’t like what Black Van orthe hard-luck kids portended. I wasn’t inthe habit of throwing down with hoboesin the street. But the storm and flood andwasteland and months of manual laborand crying old ladies had worked on me.I marched over to his pile.‘Whatever you’re doing, you’re notgoing to do that here,’ I said.‘Lady, I’m here rebuilding this town,’he said. ‘Lady, is that any way to treatsomeone here to help your city?’Jake was worried. He thought the floodsleaze and his house-painted van lookedlike Greyhound stations and knives. LikeFlorida panhandle trash even though hehad Texas plates. Usually mild, Jake startedyelling. He wanted me to stay away.Black Van got tossed from that firsthouse where he hung with prostituteswho were also here to rebuild this town.Someone said his con was up. He hadtold the owner he would help gut andfix that flooded house, but he just fencedstuff instead. Someone else said he hadjust gone too far – one day a guy working4

on our house with us saw him throttlinga teenage drug dealer on his porch. Thedetails, like Black Van himself, remainmurky.All I know is Black Van turned upsquatting a flooded house on the streetbehind me a few months later. He didn’tbother to lie to the owner about guttingand working on this place. He didn’t haveto. The old displaced lady who was playinghost to Black Van would never knowunless one of her neighbors told her. Butone of the lady’s few returned neighbors,a weightlifting gay gentrifier, had decidedto ignore him. He was trying his best toslap some Key West style back onto thefloodscape and was lonesome and scaredon his flooded block. Any company wasbetter than none.But when Black Van lit up his crackpipe in broad daylight on the front porchnext to him one day, the neighbor feltslapped in the face. He called NOPD toretract his hospitality. Black Van disappearedfor a while again but showed upmonths later biking around our neighborhoodwith bolt cutters.Then he was gone. People said he’dbeen arrested but no one saw it happen.Black Van had his stealth moments. Hewasn’t the Shed Thief. My neighbor theminister had held a pistol on the ShedThief over my back fence and then calledus on his cellphone to announce he waschasing him up Palmyra Street. He wasnot the Dog Thief – that rubber-glovedbandit with weird eyes who told me hewas taking my basset. I said he wasn’tand he said he was until a kind carpenterdown the street helped me run him off.Black Van was just another thief and then,mercifully, who knows why, he wasn’t.When known criminals like Black Vandisappeared for a while, hopeful neighborhoodpeople claimed they were arrestedand cooling their heels in OrleansParish Prison. But maybe Black Van wasjust on vacation or a particularly pleasingbender. He had a life too.The only reason I knew Black Vanwas back and up to his old tricks was thatLawnmower Man came sneaking out ofmy neighbor’s alley last week. LawnmowerMan was another post-flood drifterwho had decided to trawl Mid-City (orMid-Shitty as some without a formerlynice garden in the neighborhood liked tocall it). I felt bad for my neighbor. Herfather, the town’s oldest traditional jazzmusician, had recently died. Three yearsafter the flood she still did not have evena few habitable rooms in her house. Shehad asked us to keep an eye on it. She wasa nurse and looked disgusted most dayswhen she came by after her shift to workor check on her property. One day amystery chicken appeared to peck a flooddebris pile and she threw her hands intothe air. That is an infection waiting to happen!Lawnmower Man was a heavy, middleagedaddict with a blond crew cut. Thefirst day he reeled up our block, highas a kite, greeting everyone in a boomingvoice, I decided to stop weeding myreplanted garden and go inside. Acrossthe street, another neighbor, an elderlyman who spent all day hammering,peered cautiously from the shadow ofhis FEMA trailer. For months after that,Lawnmower Man carried a bucket filledwith drywalling knives that looked suspiciouslyclean. Then he disappeared. Thenhe reappeared, bent forward and dragginga rusted lawnmower. Yet I had seen himcut no lawns.There was a man who actually cutlawns, a landscaper whose parole officersometimes came by looking for him. Heand I made a pact against LawnmowerMan. The paroled landscaper had landscapingtools that weren’t fake – theywere flecked with grass clippings andwere his livelihood. He did not mean tobe ripped off.He was worried. A young Jesuit disastervolunteer living in a flooded-and-fixedapartment on our street had already hadher door kicked in. She was creeped outthat some guy had gotten her laptop andcamera with personal pictures. I told hernot to worry. They were addicts and notlikely to post her partying on Facebook.So, because I had promised the nurseand had a vow with the landscaper, I wasaggravated when I noticed LawnmowerMan emerging from their shared alleyrecently. I went and got Jake and we followedLawnmower Man off our block tosee where he was going.Tall and unshaven and burly, LawnmowerMan lugged his prop lawnmowertwo blocks straight over to Black Van’sshotgun squat. He dropped off his rustylawnmower, stepped inside, and came outcarrying a large walking stick. It started torain. Through the windshield wipers, I sawhim lurch down the street in his muscleshirt, peering into car windows with hisbig stick. Hunting. Black Van had somehowmade Lawnmower Man his zombie.For the Gustav evacuation, I did notneed Black Van and his band of junkieplumbers in my rearview mirror. Drivingthe highway, I kept picturing Black Vancruising around Mid-City on my bike withhis bolt cutters and cowboy hat. Whilewe were all biting our nails elsewhere, hewould be fattening his backpack with myneighbors’ belongings and cruising in faux-Dutch style. I even had a front-wheel propelledheadlight for when the streetlightswent down. I hope he enjoyed it.Our recovering neighborhood, thoughflooded deep after Katrina, is doing betterthan others. It is sputtering back to life. Ihave an abandoned house next door andacross the street and behind me and a fewmore down the block. But I also have reallive neighbors with fixed houses and flagpolesand spoiled dogs and only a FEMAtrailer or two.Yet still we have anything goes. Wehave flooded-and-fixed houses cut intoovercrowded apartments filled withmigrant Hispanic workers who sit shirtlesson their front steps amidst plasticflower bouquets. We have teens who mugthe Hispanics. We have Black Van andDog Thief and Lawnmower Man andoccasional shootings.A short while after the world was peeringinto the TV news levee cams duringGustav to see if someone would drownin the grey water sloshing out of theIndustrial Canal, a man a few blocks awayemailed our neighborhood email list. Hewas peering into the online crime cam inhis own rebuilt home. Some men wereprying the hurricane boards from hishouse RIGHT NOW!Some days it seems time is runningawfully short. In the fight for our neighborhood,it seems it’s not the house fixersor the flood sleaze that will win so muchas the Gulf. The Gulf is the Gulf is theGulf. It has pelicans and barnacled oil rigsand horizons gassing hot pink and closerevery week. I can tell Black Van will makea better climate refugee than me. He’salready got his house-painted, Dust Bowlwagon. He can don his black cowboy hatand rev off, mufflerless, into the sunset onthe way to his next disaster town. ◊5

A Single FilmAnnie HallAt a Woody Allen retrospective, David Rakoff encounters an old friendI’ve been trying to remember, wasit The Sorrow And The Pity they werelining up for when, sick to death of themedium-is-the-message windbaggery ofthe pseudo-intellectual – now there’s aterm to blast me back – in front of him,Alvy actually produces Marshall McLuhanfrom behind a lobby card? The associationstrikes me as a natural one, since I’mabout to gather with the other acolytes inan art house cinema. Will anyone in thequeue reference or be moved to imitatethe McLuhan moment, I wonder?And where were they? Was it at theRegency at 68th street? (Was it evencalled the Regency? It hardly matters,since it’s gone now, like the New Yorkerat 88th, the movie house at 72nd andBroadway, the Thalia {{which does showup at the very end of the movie, when heruns into Annie after they’ve stopped datingand introduces her to a young, youngSigourney Weaver, fresh out of Yale}},the Metro, the Bleecker and, of course,Theater 80. With all the rep houses havingceded their real estate to condos andtheir authority to Netflix, who is curatingthe tastes of the city’s undergraduates?How will they even know about The SorrowAnd The Pity? Mondo Cane? How canthe budding homosexual flower withoutthe occasional force-feeding of a doublefeature of Now Voyager and All About Eve?To wit – and to extend this parentheticalyet further: in senior year, at the lastmeeting of our Japanese literature seminarbefore Spring break, the professor– ageing, erudite, one of the few, perhapsonly, Western recipients of countlessJapanese cultural laurels – asked us ourplans for the coming week. I allowed ashow I would be staying in town in orderto write my thesis. ‘Well then, of courseyou’ll be going to the Bette Davis festivalevery day down at the Embassy.’ He saidit as if stating an obvious prescription,like recommending medical attention fora sucking chest wound, or ‘You’ll wantto call the fire department about thoseflames licking up the front of your house.’Only a self-destructive lunatic wouldthink he could survive the week by missingthe Bette Davis festival. I took hisadvice and went every day. Did it helpmy thesis any? Hard to say. It was a longtime ago.)The time when a Woody Allen retrospectivewould have evoked that kind offierce cinéaste devotion seems long gone,having been tempered out of us not justby the years (such performative loyaltyis really the province of the youngsterswho nightly go to Irving Plaza right nearmy apartment, passing the hours sittingon the pavement singing the songs ofthe artists they are about to see), but byWoody Allen himself. The tsunami ofmediocrities like Hollywood Ending andMelinda And Melinda effectively obliterateswhy Manhattan mattered so much. I can’thelp feeling like he’s dismantled the veryadmirable legacy of his earlier work byhis later, overly prolific efforts. It’s a morebenign version of Ralph Nader (with thekey difference that I hate Ralph Nader,whereas Woody Allen simply makes me alittle bit sad).Then again, no one worth a damndoesn’t make the occasional bit of badwork: there are episodes of The Judy GarlandShow that are absolute train wrecksof creaky squareness, made all the moreghoulish by the presence of an aphasicgin-soaked Peter Lawford, and I take aback seat to no one in my love for JudyGarland, the most talented individualwho ever lived (ladies and gentlemen, myKinsey placement); I read a lousy lateEdith Wharton novel this summer, TheChildren, that was a tone-deaf, treaclymuddle; I don’t care for Balanchine’sScherzo à la Russe and I’ve said it before,even though it is considered a cinematicallysignal moment by the Cahiers duCinema crowd (zzzzzzz), I’m no great fanof the movie Kiss Me Deadly.Perhaps taken as a whole, the twentyeightfilms will start to exert their owninternal logic and I will see and delightin how Allen mines his themes over andover again. Or perhaps it will be like theBroadway show Fosse, where a surfeit ofthe choreographer’s vocabulary made allof it suffer and the entire thing lookedlike the kind of shitty entertainment thattakes place on a raised, round, carpetedplatform at a car show. I’ll see, I guess.As one might expect for the 1:30 p.m.showing on the Friday before Christmas,there are only about a dozen of uswaiting. Our ranks swell to about thirtypeople closer to show time, but at firstit’s just me and more than a few men of acertain age (whose ranks I join with evergreaterlegitimacy each day), about whomit might be reasonably assumed that wespend an inordinate amount of time fixatingon when next we might need to pee.Thoughts of age stay at the forefront inthe first few minutes of the film, whenWoody Allen himself (who, it must besaid, in later scenes, stripped down toboxers, kind of had a rocking little bodyin his day) addresses the camera directlyand tells us that he just turned forty. I’molder than that by two years.How many times have I seen this, Iwonder? Unquantifiable. The film iscanonical and familiar and memorized,almost to the point of ritual. Perhapsthis is the spiritual solace the faithful findin the formulaic rhythms of liturgy. It’sas comforting as stepping into a warmbath. Diane Keaton is enchanting, thereis no other word for it. She comes onthe screen and you can hear the slightestcreaking in the audience as corners ofmouths turn up. There is ChristopherWalken, a peach-fuzzed stripling. Andthere, doe-eyed, with drum-tight skin:Carol Kane playing Alvy’s first wife, AllisonPortchnik.Allison Portchnik. Oy. I am generallyknown as an unfailingly appropriate fellow.I have very good manners. But whenI fuck up, I fuck up big time. Suddenly Iam reminded of how, three years ago, Iwas on a story for an adventure magazine,an environmental consciousness-raisingwhitewater-rafting expedition in ChileanPatagonia (about which the less said thebetter. It’s really scary. Others may call itexhilarating, and I suppose it is, the wayhaving a bone marrow test finally overand done with is exhilarating. And Patagonia,Chilean Patagonia at least, whilepretty, isn’t one tenth as breathtaking asBritish Columbia). On the trip with mewere Bobby Kennedy, Jr., hotelier André6

Balazs and Glenn Close, among others.Everyone was very nice, I hasten to add.After lunch one day, my friend Chris,the photographer on the story, came upto me and said, ‘I’d lay off the Kennedyassassination jokes if I were you.’I laughed, but Chris reiterated, notjoking this time. ‘No, I’d really lay off theKennedy assassination jokes. The lunchline . . .’ he reminded me.And then I remembered. I had beendreading this trip (see above about howtotally justified I was in my trepidation)for weeks beforehand, terrified by theoff-the-grid distance of this Chilean river,a full three days of travel away; terrifiedof the rapids and their aqueous meatgrinderproperties; terrified of just beingout of New York. All of this terror I tookand disguised as an affronted sense ofmoral outrage, that such trips were frivolous,given the terrible global situation. Iexplained it to Glenn Close thusly:‘I was using the war in Iraq to try andavoid coming down here,’ suddenly,unthinkingly invoking the part of AnnieHall where Alvy breaks off from kissingAllison because he’s distracted by nigglingdoubts: if the motorcade was driving pastthe Texas Book Depository, how couldOswald, a poor marksman, have made hisshot? Surely there was a conspiracy afoot.Then, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. helpinghimself to three-bean salad on thelunch line not five feet away, I switchedinto my Carol Kane as Allison Portchnikvoice and said, ‘You’re using the KennedyAssassination as an excuse to avoid havingsex with me.’ Then I followed that upwith my Woody Allen imitation and finishedout the scene. Nice. No one pointedout my gaffe or was anything other thangracious and delightful.Despite how well I know the material,the film feels so fresh. All the observationsand jokes feel like they’re beingmade for the first time, or are at least intheir infancy. By later films they will feelhackneyed (in the movie Funny Girl, theprocess of calcification is even more accelerated.You get back from intermissionand Barbra Streisand already feels like toobig a star, a drag version of herself ), buthere it’s all just terrifically entertaining.And current! Alvy tells his friend Maxthat he feels that the rest of the countryturning its back on the city – It’s themid-70s. Gerald Ford to New York: DropDead, and all that jazz – is anti-Semiticin nature. That we are seen as left-wing,Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers.And so we remain, at leastin the eyes of Washington and elsewhere,a pervy bastion of surrender monkeys.There was an Onion headline that ran aftera sufficient interval of time had passedpost-9/11, that essentially read, ‘Rest ofcountry’s temporary love affair with NewYork officially over.’Rest of the country’s perhaps, butmine was just beginning when I saw thefilm at age eleven. By the time the voiceovergets to the coda about how we throwourselves over and over again into loveaffairs despite their almost inevitabledisappointments and heartbreak because,like the joke says, ‘we need the eggs,’ (ifyou need the set-up to the punchline,what on earth are you doing readingthis?) I am weepy with love for the city.Although, truth be told, it doesn’t takemuch to get my New York waterworksgoing.Walking out, my friend Rick, thirtyplusyears resident said, ‘I had forgottenhow Jewish a film it is.’ I really hadn’tnoticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask.It’s like saying to a fish, ‘Do things aroundhere seem really wet to you?’ I wrote abook that got translated into German afew years back. There was a fascinationamong the Germans with what they perceivedas my Jewish sensibility; a livingexample of the extirpated culture. I’vesaid this before, but I felt like the walkingillustration of that old joke about thesuburbs being the place where they chopdown all the trees and then name thestreets after them. At least a dozen of thereviews referred to me as a ‘stadtneurotiker’,an urban neurotic, a designation thatpleased me, I won’t lie. Especially when Ifound out the German title for Annie Hall.Der Stadtneurotiker.◊7

ContextThe Life of R.B. KitajSimon Prosser on an artist mortally wounded by his criticsOn walking into the Main EntranceHall of London’s British Library itis impossible to ignore a huge tapestry –as big as the side of a small house – hangingto the left of the stairs, as vibrantas a patchwork quilt or a stained glasswindow.The eye registers first the fragmentedblocks of vivid colour – oranges, yellows,blues, greens, pinks and purples – and isthen drawn to the corners: to a tonsuredman in a suit, tie and glasses, wearinga hearing aid and being comforted bya naked woman, at bottom left; to theAuschwitz gatehouse at top left; to a tropicalsky with palm trees at top right; andto a bandaged soldier in rag-tag uniformat bottom right. Finally the eye beginsto fill in the central details: a wastelandof scattered figures and objects – books,a map, a lone sheep, a broken bust andplinth sinking into a toxic-looking swamp,another fallen soldier, a person drowning,a body propped up against a tree.The whole tableau seems rife withclues, references, quotations, memoriesand histories, yet so subjectively and passionatelyrendered that all of these signifierswhirl and blur.This single-loom tapestry, the largestever made in Britain, is seen every day bya legion of writers and readers on theirway to work in the Reading Rooms –which seems wholly appropriate whenone discovers it is an image created byR.B. Kitaj, one of the most writerly artistsof the twentieth century. That it isthere at all though is surprising, its commissionfollowing as it did the so-called‘Tate War’ of 1994, which pitted the artistagainst his Establishment critics in a sadtale of envy, love, death, revenge andeventual exile.Born in Cleveland, Ohio in October1932, Ronald Brooks Kitaj – the man inthe suit and tie glimpsed in self-portraitin the tapestry – spent his early youthwith his diasporic Jewish mother andstepfather in upstate New York, a periodthe artist later described as ‘Smalltownlife; constant drawing, baseball and movies. . . first book-collecting which wouldgrow into a lifelong disease’. In 1948 heleft home, hitchhiked to New York, thenembarked on a peripatetic career as a merchantseaman, reading Eliot, Joyce, Poundand Borges along the way, before beingdrafted into the US Army in 1956.After two years’ service – partly workingas an illustrator for the IntelligenceCorps – Kitaj enrolled at Oxford’s RuskinSchool of Drawing, his study fundedunder the terms of the GI Bill. He drewand painted each day at the AshmoleanMuseum, attended lectures by PicassoscholarDouglas Cooper, and began thefirst of a long series of works inspiredby T.S. Eliot. As Andrew Lambirth laterrecorded, Kitaj noted that ‘some fewearly modernist poets had arranged wordsto resemble pictures or designs, and I hadbegun to think I could do the reverse forart: to lay down pictures as if they werepoems to look at’.The following year Kitaj moved toLondon’s Royal College of Art, where hisslightly older age, his talents as a painter,his intellectual maturity and, not least, hisownership of a car helped make him amentor and inspiration for a generation offellow students – David Hockney, DerekBoshier, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jonesamongst them – who were to form thecore of the early 1960s British Pop Artscene. While never strictly a Pop artisthimself – his work was already too allusive,complex and uncategorisable for that(plus the only elements of pop culturewhich interested him were baseball andmovies) – Kitaj was nonetheless a kindof godfather to the movement. His owninterests, rather, lay elsewhere: in books;in a deep and growing interest in Jewishculture and religion; and in his passionateengagement with the Old Masters andwith Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse (laterto be joined by Mondrian and Duchamp).With his first solo show at MarlboroughFine Art in 1963, Kitaj, in the wordsof painter Tom Phillips, ‘single-handedand with one exhibition, brought theintellect back into the forum of Britishart.’ Gloriously coloured, occasionallycollaged, mysteriously rich in theme andinspiration, Kitaj’s canvases of the earlytomid-sixties remain among the finestwork created in Britain in that decadeand still have the power to compel anddelight, whether in his earliest paintingssuch as ‘Words’ (1959) and ‘Reflectionson Violence’ (1962) or in his mid-sixtiesworks ‘The Ohio Gang’ (1964) and ‘WalterLippmann’ (1966).At this time, Kitaj was developingfriendships with writers such as MichaelHamburger, Richard Wollheim, W.H.Auden and Hugh MacDiarmid and, as hewas to recall much later in an interviewwith Andrew Lambirth, ‘Andy (Warhol)came from soup cans and I came frombooks. Books and book learning are forme what trees and woods are for a landscapepainter. I said that when I wuz a kidand I say it now with one foot in the grave.’The late 1960s and early 1970s were adifficult period for Kitaj, following thesuicide of his wife Elsi in 1969, his movefrom London to America to teach atUCLA and a concentration on screenprintingrather than painting which he cameto regret. It was not until 1972 when hereturned to London, soon to be joinedby the great love of his life, the youngerAmerican artist Sandra Fisher, that heregained his momentum, with paintingssuch as ‘The Autumn of Central Paris(after Walter Benjamin)’ (1972–3), ‘Land ofLakes’ (1975–7) and ‘If Not, Not’ (1975–6),his masterpiece of the period now in theScottish National Gallery of Modern Artand the image reproduced in the BritishLibrary tapestry. Commenting on thatpicture, Kitaj outlined his debts to Eliot’s‘The Waste Land’, to Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness and to the Old Masters Giorgioneand Bassano. But most of all ‘If Not, Not’was a response to the central historical fact,for Kitaj, of the European Holocaust.Towards the end of the seventiesKitaj adopted a more traditional wayof working, drawing in pastel andcharcoal, inspired in part by Degas, andit wasn’t until 1983 and his marriageto Sandra (with Hockney as best man)that he returned to painting with gusto,driven by his deepening focus on whathe termed ‘The Jewish Question’ and theattempt ‘to do Cezanne and Degas andKafka over again, after Auschwitz’. Looser8

They can become gods.As far as I know, Kitaj didn’t believe inGod – not in any traditional sense – buthe believed in saying things to God. Hebelieved in prayer. He believed in sayingaloud and painting what he wouldhave prayed for if he believed in God. Hepainted his prayers.Kitaj was the most religious personI’ve known; his painting was his faith. Topaint, for him – to paint at the outermostbrink – was to risk participating in theongoing creation of the world. His workwas work: he strove to repair the world, tofill out the spaces with words and images,to make paintings like bandages to coverthe wounds, and paintings like wounds tomake the injuries visible.Something else is created.What else?The subject of his work was the worlditself. He wasn’t capturing it, but generatingit. He was changing it—not only inthe art-critical sense of altering the waypeople look at things, but in the Jewishsense of filling it out. Parents sometimesdisappear into their children, as pencilssometimes disappear into drawings, andteachers into their students. Kitaj disappearedinto the world, and by so doingmade more world.With Kitaj’s death, our period of knowinghim is over. There will be no moreshows of new work, no more manifestos,no photographs of him, no postcards, noafternoons at his kitchen table.What does it mean to believe in thedead?After Sandra’s sudden death, Kitajasked Isaiah Berlin if she would be therefor him on the other side of death’s door.‘My dear old friend . . . told me no. Whatdoes he know?’What, at the end, did Kitaj know?His last published words were, ‘WORKIN PROGRESS TO BE CONTINUED / (NoEnd in Sight).’ How, despite millenniaof living on the outermost brink, could aJew really believe this? And how, in thisattention/imagination/compassion starvedworld, could an artist? How could Kitaj,who knew his end was in sight, have writtenthat no end was in sight? ◊Our Scattered AuthorsA Very Practical JokeSheila Heti at the Miami Art Fairhave a painter friend. Her nameI is Margaux Williamson. Last December,her Toronto gallerist decided to takesome of her paintings to Miami, wherefor a week the city would be one giant artfair. Collectors from all over the world,the top galleries in London, Tokyo – everywhere– would gather by the beach.The fanciest art would be shown at ArtBasel, the original and largest of the fairs,and of the dozen smaller fairs whichwould circle it, one, called Scope, waswhere Margaux’s work would be.Though her dealer had already left forFlorida, Margaux continued painting. Itold her to deliver the newest paintings byhand, not ship them, and offered to takethe trip down with her. Then I watched,the morning we were to board publictransit to the airport, as she stuffed threeoil paintings packed in bubble wrap intoher large duffel bag, along with twentyt-shirts. We were only going for three days.On the plane ride down, we read anarticle in the New York Times about apainter who would be attending thatweek, a twenty-five-year-old guy whohad studied at Yale, and was representedby one of the top SoHo galleries. Baselwould be his debutante ball. From MiamiBasel to the heavens.His dealer intended him to meet everyone.No doubt he would be kept busythe whole entire time. It read as thoughhis life for the past five years had beenvery well managed, from enrolment atart school to his discovery in art school,to his move to Brooklyn and so on, sothat he was quoted saying of the contemporaryart world, ‘There’s a career track.You get your BFA and then you get yourMFA. You move to New York, you havea show, and it’s like being a lawyer orsomething else. And that doesn’t entirelysquare with the romantic ideal of beingan artist, living in isolation and being theavant-garde hero.’When we arrived in Miami, wechanged from our pants and sweaters, gettinghalf-naked in the airport washroom,our clothes spread all over the counters.‘Be careful,’ I told Margaux, since wewere both given to routine. ‘Whateveroutfit you choose for yourself now, you’llbe wearing for the next three days.’We jumped in a cab and took her paintingsto Scope – a large, makeshift tentin the centre of a muddy field, in a parkin what the cab driver told us was a verydangerous neighbourhood that the cityhad been trying to fix with art.Having delivered the work, and thendropped our bags at our cookie-cutterhotel, we decided to get dinner in LittleHavana, at the other end of town. Then,in the evening, we’d return to Scope, seethe work and also visit NADA – NorthAmerican Art Dealers Alliance – a fairthat was slightly fancier than Scope.At four in the afternoon, we steppedonto a bus, mid-way through a discussionabout what you need to know in writing,and what you need to know in art. Wecame to the same conclusion: you haveto know where the funny is, and, ‘if youknow where the funny is, you know everything.’As the bus drove on through thesun, sitting up in front, across from a seatlabelled ‘In memory of Rosa Parks,’ wetested out this theory.s. I think Manet is funny.m. Yeah, Manet is very funny.s. And Kierkegaard is really funny.m. Really?s. Yeah.m. I see him as so sweet. I see him somuch more like poetry.s. He’s funny. Do you think Nietzsche’sfunny?m. I haven’t read him much. Baudrillard?s. Haven’t read him enou– hmm.Baudrillard?m. Yes! Kafka-funny. Matthew Barney’sfunny in his seriousness.s. Richard Serra’s not funny.11

m. No.s. But he’s still great . . . but maybe that’sthe fault.m. He seems to take himself and art veryseriously. It’s nice to take it seriouslywhile also leaving your back dooropen. I mean, your pants down.s. (Laughing.) You mean slipping on abanana peel.m. You know, I didn’t realize that you –you can’t really slip on a banana peelunless it’s rotten.s. Right.m. Which is what happened to me.s. And was the buttery side down?m. It was all black. So it was hard to tell.s. Right. The Ramones are funny.m. Yeah!s. Pollock?m. Not funny.s. What about Rothko?m. He’s okay . . . I mean, all those guysare – I mean, one of them would havebeen enough for me.S. You don’t think?m. No, I think we’ve – both of us haveread this extensive article about him,like of course if you saw one pieceby Takashi Murakami, like we havesuch nuances because of articles andbecause of context and because you’veseen their past work and because, youknow. And these are so many youngartists trying to show all of that inone go.S. But the point here is not to decidewho’s the greatest artist, right?m. Not at all. Not at all. But it is a chancefor – it is a chance to let the youngerartists in. It’s a chance to let the smallergalleries in. I don’t know what it is.It’s not everything.S. No, it’s true. If you think that goingto an art fair and having your picturesin a booth will make you famous, itwon’t.m. But no one thinks that. No one’sthinking that at all.After finishing our dinner, we wentto NADA and arrived as it was closing.Because of this, we walked super-fastthrough all the booths: like it . . . hateit . . . don’t like it . . . don’t care . . . and leftafter stopping briefly to say hello to a pale,blonde Chelsea dealer we both knew andshe leaned in to kiss me, but not Margaux.‘Connecticut!’ Margaux raged as we leftthe building. ‘All the Connecticut bitcheshate me.’To calm her down, I asked her to recitewhat I knew to be her favourite Americanpoem.‘Okay. James Joyce – ’ I prompted.‘James Joyce was stupid, he didn’t knowas much as I know. I’d rather throw deadbatteries at cows than read him. Everythingwas fine until he came along. Hestarted the Civil War. He tried to get theFrench involved but they wouldn’t listen.They filled him up with pastries anddesserts. They tried to get us to use themetric system and we said, No, go away –we like our rulers. Thomas Jefferson said,You always get the rulers you deserve.’‘Do you know any other poems by heart?’‘No.’Then we found a cab and returned toScope, where the lights were down andlengths of tape had been pasted acrossmost of the booths. Calling Margaux’sdealer, we learned that the fair had closedthree hours earlier.‘Three hours!’ I exclaimed. ‘We missedthem both!’‘We had to have our dinner,’ Margauxreplied.We sat on the pavement in the verybad neighbourhood as some boys withskateboards played with a cat, and waitedforty-five minutes for another cab to takeus to the beach where the city was hostinga Peaches concert. I pulled out mytape recorder and we discussed Margaux’shopes for the fair. I couldn’t understandhow anyone could get famous in a placelike this, where there were thousands ofartists and so many galleries, and all ofthe art just laid out to speak for itself likecereal boxes on supermarket shelves, butwithout even the words. The art had allstarted blurring together for me, and Isuggested that we had as yet seen nobodytruly great.m. Well, of course there are people thatare really truly great here, but howcould you see that? Like for instance,if Takashi Murakami had one of hissculptures there, you wouldn’t knowhow good it was.S. No?m. Not at all. Not at all.S. I would be thinking that if I were anartist here.That evening we went to the concert onthe beach, and had a brief, awful fightafter I suggested that all the art that Margauxliked was ‘only almost good.’ Thenwe met up with Margaux’s dealer, andthe three of us walked in the rain to finda good place to drink around there. Onthe walk we spotted a pizza shop, andsince it had been five hours since Margauxand I had eaten, we got some slicesand sat at the counter and ate them. Aswe were eating, a boy and a girl in theirearly twenties, who were clearly part ofthe art crowd, came into the pizzeria and12

addressed Margaux directly.‘Are you Margaux Williamson?’ the girlasked, wide-eyed.‘Yes.’‘Oh, I love your paintings! I’ve seenthem on the internet,’ she said. The threeof us were startled.The boy added, ‘I met you at the artfair in L.A.. I’m a painter, too.’‘We’re from Baltimore,’ she said.As they continued to talk about herwork, my mind went to a video Margauxhad made of a friend’s performance of asong he’d written for his band, Tomboyfriend.They had put it on YouTube, andone viewer had listed himself as a fan:a man, supposedly, from Afghanistan.Planning the band’s first concert, Margauxhad carefully chosen the title: Big InAfghanistan.The next day we attended the main fair,Art Basel, which we had to pay twentydollars to get into and line up for, then,in the cavernous, cold convention centre,retrieve a full-colour map to direct ourway around. There were coffee kiosks setup, in case visitors got tired making theirway from one end of the hall to the other,and it was here we found the wealthiestart patrons.Basel was being sponsored by a bankand on their banners, which had beenhung outside the convention centre andin the corridors leading to the roomswith the panel discussions and the temporarybookshops, was this message: ‘USBwelcomes you to Art Basel Miami Beach.’Below it was a quote from Andy Warhol:‘Everybody’s sense of beauty is differentfrom everybody else’s.’Looking at it, Margaux grimaced, ‘Ohyeah. It’s saying you can be rich and stupidabout art. You’re all welcome.’After several hours, growing wearyfrom all the art, and cold – I had onlyworn a sundress – we left the fair. Outside,down at the bottom of the flight ofconcrete stairs, a woman sat staring offinto infinity, slowly winding a ball ofstring around her body and the handrails.We stopped and looked at her, thenwalked on through the streets, whereevery one of the houses was painted a different,pastel colour.Then I heard my friend say calmly, ‘Idon’t care about success. I have it in myheart now.’Earlier that morning we’d laid on thebeach for several hours, squinting intothe hot sun and reading our books, thenswam so far out to sea that a lifeguardin his motorized vehicle had to drivedown the beach and blow his whistle atus to come back to shore, while everyonestared.After that we headed over to Basel, andupon leaving the convention centre wefound a fancy hotel and went straightthrough the lobby out into the back,where we pretended to be guests andlounged by the pool, and watched as couplesplayed with their babies.I began leisurely musing on how thepiece might go, but she corrected me.‘No no, the story is: how do you do thiswhile staying in Canada? How do you dothis without going to Yale?’‘Probably not by lounging near a pool,or spending all your time on the beach, orarriving late for all the art fairs.’After another hour, we pulled ourselvesfrom the lounge chairs and went tosee our final fair of the trip, Aqua. Aquawas the smallest and friendliest of thefairs. It was a two-storey hotel with allthe rooms opening onto a courtyard inthe middle, and in each room was a gallery.The beer was free, and we saw atall, slim, handsome Asian man dragginga cabbage behind him on a leash as hemade his way into and out of the rooms,looking bored. There was a gallery ownerfrom Winnipeg we were friends with,and we spoke to a dealer from New Yorkwho was hoping to represent Margaux,who’d met her for the first time at an artfair in L.A..Now we sat down with our drinks onthe edge of an enclosed waterfall.M. We’ve talked about this so much,about professionalism and careerism.But my goal is not to be in the mostprestigious gallery. I’m so not interestedin that. It would be nice, but I havetoo many goals for that to be the mainone, you know? And I think that itcan still happen if that’s not your goal.Like, my goal is to make art and havepeople see it, and I think sometimesthat’s what a prestigious gallery does.But mainly I feel – I feel the mostimportant job is to make more art.And I always was very anxious aboutgetting a New York gallery or galleriesoutside of Canada, because I needthat to make a decent living. That’s all.S. Hmm.M. But I think it’s good for artists to seethis stuff – especially from Canada.S. To show that there’s a lot of great artout there, a lot of people doing art?M. And also to know that it’s not important.S. What’s not important?M. This.Later that night, we wound up at a partyat an extravagant hotel with our friend,the painter Clint Griffin, who was downthis time not with his own paintings, as inthe past, but with his shipping business;he had driven down canvases for someof the Toronto galleries exhibiting here.Now all the women we had seen in thestreets – with their tight skirts and highheels, their false cleavage and their tans,their make-up and their heavy, long hair –were drinking colourful cocktails with usaround a glittering, empty pool.‘Have any of your paintings sold?’ Clintasked Margaux.‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe.I haven’t asked.’I spent the next twenty minutes pretendingI was a waitress at the hotel, askingthe guests at the long banquet tables ifthey were done with their dinners, thentaking the plates over to Margaux andClint, where we ate the remainder oftheir steak and salmon.Then, after some pina coladas, we raninto a rich couple strolling along thebeach. They spoke of how they werethinking of buying a twenty-threethousanddollar Rouchet print, and hadjust come from having dinner with thegallerist who was selling it. Their collectionincluded a Gerhard Richter, andthey had so little wall space left, thatwhatever they bought in Miami wouldend up ‘in rotation.’ If they bought.Though they had flown from California,it was not necessarily for them to buy,but if they saw something they liked, thewoman said, they had the ability to buy,‘although it’s not like we have zillions ofdollars.’When I told this to my friend Mishalater, he said, ‘She has so much moneythat she has to make up an amount ofmoney that doesn’t exist to say howmuch she doesn’t have.’13

We began discussing the art and thefairs we had seen and the fairs we hadliked.M. It’s funny. It seems Basel has worse artand better art and the other fairs haveless bad art and less good art.Woman. What now? Say that again?s. She’s saying that Basel has more terribleand more wonderful art and theother fairs have more nothing.Woman. Oh, so more extremes.Man. Now, the big Basel convention onefeels more like stocks to me.Clint. Yes.Then the woman wanted to know, after Itold her I was down here to write aboutMargaux’s art experience, how she mightrecognize Margaux’s paintings.s. Well, they’re narrative, and there’scharacters in them, and it’s kind oflike, beautiful, otherworldly. It’s hardto, um, I don’t know how to explainit because you’ve seen so much art,probably – how to make it stand outfor you.Woman. But you have to work at it!You can practice with me right now,because you’re a writer and you’rewriting about it –s. The ones in this – in this – were verygreen and – uh, if you go to the gallery–Woman. You’ve got to find the words!If you can’t, then you’re in trouble,sweetie!A rage went through me – I wanted topunch her – what did she know! Besides,I had never told her that I had millions ofwords but not zillions!We left the couple and walked back tothe hotel. After another pina colada, thethree of us stripped down to our underwearand jumped in the pool. We were theonly ones swimming. Twenty minutes later,tiring of the pool, I beckoned to a man sittingon a bench near the edge of the water.‘We need towels!’ I called, and I observedhim wave down a hotel man, then collectthree fluffy towels. We swam to theshore, thanking him as we got out. Hesmiled and replied, ‘No problem.’ It wasKeanu Reeves! He was very smart andnice. But Margaux grew embarrassed aswe walked away.‘Oh God, I wish we had seen a reallymore famous, more annoying celebrity.But I like his work. I seriously have onmy MySpace page, like, Werner Herzog,Laurie Anderson, Gertrude Stein, KeanuReeves.’‘Really?’‘Yes! Ugh! I wish that all the people Iliked were either my best friends or totalstrangers . . . As they are, of course, but . . .’We returned to our hotel really drunk,and Margaux talked to me as I stood atthe sink, attempting to wash from myfavourite dress the red wine we’d spilledon it earlier that night. In three hours, wewould have to get up and go to the airportand fly back home.m. I just feel like, Oh, you had such afunny version of what this fair, youknow . . . Like the fairs are nothingabout celebrities or excitement. Theyreally are – it really is this little, selfcontainedart world, but because wewere so happy with each other and wehad so much fun, I got distracted anddidn’t arrange any activities.s. Hmm.m. But of course, every experience is fair.I have that – it’s a real flaw of mind.I really just want to show everyoneeverything I possibly can. But it’s notnecessary. You have your own art fair,you know?We got into the double bed that we weresharing and I quickly passed out, but Ihad forgotten to turn the tape recorderoff, and after a few minutes Margaux canbe heard asking me if I am up; I wasn’t,though I made a little affirmative grunt tosuggest I was.And she said softly, perhaps asleepherself:‘I feel like either it’s a dream, or it’ssome kid I know from Texas, like thisblack kid, nice kid, smart kid, and like hejust – he just wanted . . . He hated all thefootball games but he really liked the partwhen we were winning, or something.And he would just make the t-shirts fromwhen we were winning . . . and he wouldmake everything from when we werewinning.’After a twenty-second pause she spokeagain:‘He really wasn’t interested in thegame.’A thirty-second pause, and:‘And then everybody got mad at him.’Then Margaux fell asleep, and afterseveral minutes of silence, the taperecorder shut itself down. ◊14

Luke WrightStanstedMy dad used to workfor the Civil Aviation Authorityin a round building just off High Holborn.And whilst he was there he worked on the planning permissionfor the control tower at Stansted.This was the most tangible of his achievementsand for years, whenever dads were mentioned, I’d say:My dad was pretty involved with the ‘Stansted Project’I’d say: My dad was one of the top guys.And only very occasionally,when proud freckle-faced boys needed to be silenced:My dad built Stansted with his bare handsAnd yet I never really knew exactly what he did,I just needed some short phrasefor boasting rights.I didn’t know it like I knewhis mahogany trouser-press,the brass bowl for his change,the way his cheek felt coldwhen he came back from work in the rainsmelling of trainsand the morning’s aftershave.Or the skeleton clocks he spent his weekends making,meticulous time-keeping under glass domes,the way he’d rest his hands on his stomach after we’d eaten,the brown sweater with the hole in the cuff.Or how his check shirt would showat the neck of his workshop overalls,the silver popper at the top undone.The occasional Kit-Kat wrapper in his car:Dad, you’ve been eating chocolate . . . Ummm.And I’ve never asked.I just see him out on a flat fieldthat is not yet a runway,clipboard in hand,directing other men,windsock blowing in the breeze.15

FAQBob and Roberta Smith, ArtistsThe Art World Needs More TraceysWhere Does Art Sit On The SocialDivide? · Art has always been on thewrong side of the social divide. Art hasnever been for the people. Art exists nowas it did for the Medici. Art is about socialcontrol and expression of wealth. Thesituation of art is now dire. Unless artistsand the funders of art wake up and act,the period of Art and Social Engagementwhich spawned the likes of Joseph Beuys,Gustav Metzger et al, is over. As the postwar era ends, so does the belief that artcan change the world. Worthwhile artwill soon be dead.Are Blacklists Important? · I havean artist black list. I have not written thislist down but it is there in the back of mybrain. Curators are also on this list andpeople who have blanked me at openings.When I think about it most people areon my list (not my wife). Holding theselists is not a good idea. I say, delete yourlist and move on. Not because peopleare not bastards but because list-holdingdrives you bonkers.How Do You Get The Kids InvolvedWith Art? · I have said this before and Iwill say it again - The people who workin the education departments in galleriesare much more interesting than the socalled ‘curators’.If you have to put together educationprogrammes it means you have toconstantly think about the art and whatit will mean to people. Then you have togo out and find young artists who havethe time and the hunger to work withschool kids doing projects. The educationstaff know the best young artists and theyknow how to think about what art is in atotally un-biennale way. The curators justfly around from one biennale to a triennialthinking: ‘I wonder if I can persuadethat Mexican or this Brazilian to cometo Stoke or somewhere for a show inDecember’, while the ‘education lot’ haveto deal with that shit.A humiliating thing happened to merecently. I was short listed to make asculpture in Trafalgar Square, otherwiseknown as the ‘Fourth Plinth Project’.Because I have a big pedagogic gene I gotinvolved with the education programmeattached to the Fourth Plinth Project. Idid a talk to teachers at the outset of thecompetition and recently the organizersinvited me to ‘attend’ the prize givingfor the ‘Kids Fourth Plinth Project’. Thekid’s prize giving was timed to be a weekbefore the actual announcement of thewinner of the commission. I was a bitqueasy about going because I knew thatthe organizers would know who theactual winner was but I thought if I didnot go it would look bad. I resolved toslope in the back of the auditorium andobserve. However, when I got there EkowEshun, from the ICA, pulled me out andmade me join him in giving out prizes toall the children, thirty two in all. Ekowand I were photographed with each child.I thought, if I don’t win this a lot of childrenwill ask their mums and dads ‘Whois that strange man in the photograph?’ Towhich mum would reply: ‘Oh some loser.’I asked one child what it was like to winthe Fourth Plinth Prize. He just laughed.What Is A Kunstverein? · Since 1994, Ihave shown extensively in every part ofGermany, in substantial buildings in citycentres called ‘Kunstvereins’. The Kunstvereinis an extraordinary organization thatdoes not exist in this country. It is formedby guilds of artists. Artists at the end ofthe 19th Century gathered together tocreate a gallery space in which to showtheir work.The Kunstverein in Karlsruhr is agrand ‘arts and crafts’ building on threelevels. Others are more modest. Artistsin the town can become a member of theKunstverein for an annual subscription.This entitles them to inclusion in a groupexhibition once a year. These shows canbe like our Royal Academy SummerExhibition. Some interesting work butoverall a bit of a free for all. The rest oftime curators put on what they feel isinteresting work.What I like about the idea is that aservice is provided for all artists whetherthey are old and a bit washed up like theYBA’s or young and groovy or simply latebloomers. The ‘Institution’ provides afocus for artists. There is a structure inplace for inclusion but also a structurefor discussion. If we had Kunstvereins inevery town with a groovy curator and aneducation team, think of the useful jobsfor artists that would exist. Necessarywork could be achieved. Let 10,000 Kunstvereinsbloom. Let art be the evergreenlanguage that renews our great nation.What About Inclusion? · You have tolet people do what they want. Good willis created by opportunities offered anddestroyed by selection. My advice is toinclude everyone. Two of my favouriteexhibitions have been chaotic inclusionsof everyone interested in making a workabout a particular issue. The Peace Show, atBrick Lane Gallery in 2000, was based onthe idea of the Greenham Common PeaceCamp. Everyone who had a work wasincluded. It was a ground breaking eventand a very busy opening. David Beechturned up in his pyjamas and recreatedJohn and Yoko’s bed in.The next year I was asked to designthe graphics for The Climate for Changeexhibition. Climate for Change was a massiveshow on four floors of an old factoryin Southwark. The show was great andallowed everyone who wanted a chanceto make a work about climate changehave the opportunity. It is ghastly andOrwellian when organizations that are setup to promote art become the gatekeepersof Art. A few years ago, I formed TheApathy Band. We are a ‘big jam band’ anyonecan join in. Art should be like that;include everyone, even painters can beuseful, kiddie’s workshops etc.What About Famous People? · Gettingfamous artists involved with your showjust because they are well known is bad.They give you an ‘Art toenail clipping’and steal all the press.This is never a good idea. Howeverit is good to curate someone everyonehas heard of if the work relates to thesituation in a good way; or because thatartist has a dynamic which it would beinteresting for other artists to work with.Themes are good.16

Margate Rocks: Art and Ecology was good.Sometimes themes are rubbish. The curatorswho dreamt up Pensi con la Menti (orwhat ever it was) at the last Venice Biennaleshould be horsewhipped.Is Tracey Emin necessary? · Thankgod for Tracey Emin. Without Traceyanyone with even a hint of the ‘Estuary’in their voice might as well giveup. A few years ago I went to the ICAbookshop where they had cocktail stickflags on display. They had Tracey Emin’ssignature on them. Two Asian teenagegirls were looking at them in awe andamazement. They bought two of themfor quite a lot of money. I was impressed.The ‘idea of Tracey’ was what had excitedthem. She was an icon for them. I knowfrom teaching art to students in the EastEnd of London that Tracey is a powerfulrole model. Her art is good too. The artworld needs more Traceys and people likethat woman who paints pictures of Dianawith a magenta face. They are good.There are far too many upper class idiotsinvolved; artists who speak like PrinceCharles. You have to remember if youare posh but stupid you used to have tobe a priest. These days art schools are therefuge of the moneyed dyslexic. My sisterwent to a posh school. She was an onlychild for eight years and my mum anddad worked hard to send her to the LyceeFrancais. She loved it there. It is an amazingschool. The teachers used to tell thekids; ‘You are the top 1% of the population’.She did very well.By the time I came along, two kidslater, my mum and dad were broke and Iwent to an enormous comprehensive inWandsworth where there were stabbings.The teachers used to say if you workreally hard you might get a job, if you arelucky. It didn’t bother me. I have neverwanted a proper job. I think the problemwith public schools is not that they offeropportunities to the well-off but thatthey give the rich unbelievable self confidencewell beyond their ability. This iswhy we have Boris Johnson as Mayor. Hebelieves he is more than capable of runningLondon but it is clear, as he sacks oneadvisor after another, he hasn’t got a clue.Why would he? He has no idea about theaspirations of Londoners because in thenormal run of his life, up till now, he hasnever worked with them. Boris shouldhave gone to art school. He could bemaking casts of his body by now. HisEton School chums could be selling themto other Eton school chums for loads ofmoney. Other chums in the media couldbe ‘bigging’ this up in magazines and callingthe whole process ‘culture’.How Should An Artist Be Paid? ·Always, always, always pay artists in cash.The best show I was ever in was calledPimple Life. The show was in Tokyo. Wewere paid a fee before we left England andI thought that was it. I flew on an elevenhour flight over the Ob in Siberia to Japan.On the flight was Rebecca Warren whoBob and Roberta Smith’s proposal for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.was also in the show. When we arrived wewere met by our Japanese assistants whowould help us while we were there. Theygave us each £3000 in yen as spendingmoney. Rebecca, Fergal Stapleton andan American artist called Chuck (orChip or something) had the best timeever. We stayed in the hotel where theyfilmed the racist film Lost in Translation.Cocktails were expensive in the roof topbar. A round would cost £250 but it wasgood. When we got back there was afurther payment in our banks. That wasthe best show I have ever done. I can’tremember what I did but I am sure itwas good.◊17

MemoirNice Day for a Wahhabi WeddingSophia Al-MariaMy little sister Sarah got marriedwhen she was seventeen.I expressed some doubts to my mother.She defended my sister’s decision. ‘Honey,your sister is on a different path. She’salways wanted a home and family. Youwant glory and riches.’ I was hurt at thetime, but I have since decided that it wasnot a judgment, merely a statement of fact.Being half American and half Qatarimy sister and I are very lucky to have hadso many paths to choose from.If you ask my littlest sister, El-Bendari,what she wants to do when she grows up,she will tell you without hesitation: marrya boy from our tribe. El-Bendari is fiveyears old this year. Already she has decidedthat her wedding will be the high pointof her life, the funnest and best thingthere is. El-Bendari wants a wedding, nota Shetland pony or a music career.There are no astronauts or doctors inmy family.As teenagers, my Qatari cousins andI spent most of our time knee-deep indiscussions about our weddings, drawingdesigns for fantasy gowns and tossingcoins over which no-good cousin we’dend up marrying. Officially, I was understoodto be betrothed to my eldest uncle’seldest son. I discovered this the first timeI came to Qatar by myself. My uncle tookme aside for a chit-chat. ‘You know, youare going to need to get married one day,’he said, ‘and your choices are – my sonAmer Jaber.’ I was the eldest daughter ofmy father, Amer Jaber was the eldest sonof my father’s older brother; it made sense.Later I confronted my father. Was I reallybetrothed to my cousin? ‘Well, yeah, kindof,’ he said. ‘We always match up that way,as long as your blood is compatible.’My beloved presumptive, Amer JaberAl-Marri, was known to everyone in thefamily as Godzilla. I sometimes imagined(not without pleasure) a King Kong typescenario in which Godzilla clutched mein his chubby fist as I channelled Fay Rayin my black abaya. He squeezed me withhis sausage claws as he swatted buzzinghelicopters out of the Doha skyline. I hada great view, but I didn’t marry Godzilla.His father, my uncle, a powerful localimam, became impatient.Godzilla ended up with my cousinMoza.I worried about them. Godzilla wasclearly going to be a lot to handle. I hadalways liked him well enough, mostlybecause he was in possession of whatseemed to be the only (pirated, of course)English copies of The Smurfs in all ofDoha, or at least our tiny corner of it. Buthis VHS collection did not stop with TheSmurfs. One time I peeked into the salahat my uncle’s house to find Godzilla andhis brothers watching a video of womenpractising all-nude callisthenics before ahairy man in a jumpsuit. I think it wascalled Gym Nasty, though perhaps I ammaking that up. But Godzilla definitelyhad a reputation as the town perv.I danced at their wedding with extraabandon, having dodged the fastest bulletof my young, eligible life. But everyoneknew it was supposed to be me lookingelated and nervous and miserable in aspumescent white dress. Only later didit occur to me that each dramatic swerveand hair-flip generated gossip about poorterrified Moza.Sure indications that a wedding isimminent are the squeals of pain rippingthrough the cement houses of the luckybridal family. A shrill female howl of‘M-Hagg-Sanaa!’ signals that the halawalady has arrived.‘Halawa’ means sweet. The sweet is agolden glop of boiled sugar water theconsistency of thick honey. When thehalawa lady rolls in, agitated and late,neighbours in their droves descend onthe bride’s house, hoping to get a wax,too. The lucky lady comes first, though,and her waxing is extra-sweet: for herwedding she is allowed her first-ever fullbodywax. This takes place offstage, ina side room, with the door locked andthe key hidden. But the screams make itexciting for everyone. As do the probingquestions from the halawa lady, when it isyour turn: ‘So, are you getting married?’And if that answer is negative, an implied‘Then who are you doing this for?’ buffetedwith a harrumph.Nowadays some girls do a certainamount of auto-depilation with razors,but this is still controversial. When Imoved to Qatar I brought a pink Bicrazor with me from Washington andpromptly caused a scandal. My grandmothermade me take it out of the bathroomand hide it. (Who was I doing thisfor, indeed?)After the halawa, the bride has to getthe henna. Usually the henna lady is differentfrom the halawa lady. And thereare different styles: North African hennais geometrical and closely resembles fishbones; Indian henna is darker (if you mixthe henna paste with lemon, it darkens)and has feathery motifs, like peacocks;Gulfi henna is rounded and organic –there must be no hint of an image, so ittends to be floral.For her wedding the bride gets thewhole deal: head and shoulders, kneesand toes, all the way up her thighs, likestockings. Her sisters and cousins gethands and arms and sometimes, morerecently, an American-style tramp stampon the lower back. When we talk aboutour weddings, we are only barely talkingabout our marriages. The marriage ceremonyitself is a modest affair that usuallytakes place in the home of the bride, soshe doesn’t have to move. It is essentiallythe signing of a contract, witnessed byfamily members, sometimes with animam present but usually not. Tea isserved, and cookies. The last ceremony Iattended was for my stepmother’s brother.Sweetly, he had brought his bride a pairof lovebirds in a cage, but the poor littlebudgies died a week later.No, when we talk about our weddings,we are mostly talking about the parties.The duelling receptions, male and female.Usually there are two tents set up next toeach other on one of the huge swatches ofempty lot near where we live. Sometimesthey take place at a wedding hall, butthat’s quite decadent. My sisters dream ofhaving theirs at the Sheraton or the FourSeasons, the men and women in separateair-conditioned ballrooms. But we havenever been to such a weddingThe best wedding I have ever been toinvolved a whole baby lamb splayed outover a hill of rice. The lamb still had its18

eyes. Out of its back rose a tier of trayswith condiments: yoghurt, pickles, pepper,salt. The meat was buttery, and buttersoft; you tore pieces off with your hands.Usually the food at weddings is disgusting.Gahawah: yellow coffee made fromunroasted beans with lots of cardamom.Sour grape leaves. Tasteless rice in hillockyclumps. Cellophane-wrapped weddingfavours with shrivelled pistachios and sugaredalmonds in nougat, which sometimesbreed tiny worms. Plasticine fruit tarts.But El-Bendari loves wedding food,especially the tarts. She loves everythingabout weddings, lives for them, thoughshe won’t be allowed to dance until she’sa teenager. My five-year-old sister’sthoughts about weddings aren’t so verydifferent from those of the eager oldwomen who array themselves about thestage at the women’s tent. A child has thesame voyeuristic lusts as a widow, we justdon’t call them lusts yet. On weddingnights my sister stays awake long after thebride has bid the party goodnight, watchingfrom our grandmother’s lap as theolder girls display their tail feathers. Thisis the main event: nervous virgins anddivorcées take their places on a catwalkthat is at once auction house, runway,soundstage and wilderness. Black-robedmothers of marriageable sons move inclose, in anticipation.Each eligible girl clambers on to thestage and is announced by the weddingsingers, who are always Sudanese. Thesingers are called daghagat, and they playdrums and sing into battered microphones,feedback issuing from the cheap speakers.All the songs sound kind of the same andyet people have favourites. I have a favourite,but I have no idea what it says or howto ask for it, as the words are almost unintelligiblethrough all the static.The serious matchmaking happensafter dinner, after the bride has beenwhisked away by the groom and hisfamily. (When the groom comes everyonecovers themselves again and thenewly amalgamated family dances aroundtogether, the mother of the bride throwingriyals in the air, on her daughter oron herself, depending on which way thewind is blowing.) Earlier in the night iswhen the ‘practice girls’ dance, girls whoare not especially eligible, or do not wishto be taken seriously. I always dance early,to the consternation of my grandmother.The female hemisphere of the weddingparty is always well lit and bustling longafter the men say goodnight. Flesh burststhe seams of silk dresses; the party burststhe woollen tent. The goat-hair flaps canbarely shield their glittering secret fromthe lazy male gazes that peer from behindthe headlights of idling Land Cruisers. It’sa feast for the eyes, all the lacy bordersand receding hemlines.If you were to whip out a camera inthe middle of a wedding, the done-updolls of Doha and their honour-obsessedmothers would gore you quite mercilessly.Security would be called, your filmtorn out, your memory card burned witha hot incense coal. When I was little therewere no photographs at all; the bride hadto go to a photography studio, where awoman whose job it was to do so madesure that no one did anything funny withthe negatives. These days there are officialwedding photographers, usually Filipinoladies. There are no group photos. Afterthe photographer has finished with thebride, unmarried girls swarm to get theirpicture taken, something to send to theirsecret cell-phone boyfriends.Last February, before being frisked bythe stern security mama at the entranceto my cousin Jameela’s wedding, I slippedmy palm-sized digital camera into myunderpants. Over the last five years, myfamily’s wedding festivities have growngrander, more flamboyant and morerevealing, while my shrinking cameraphone has become nearly undetectable.I’d smuggled it countless times before,always to good effect. Sometimes themost perceptive girls would pull mebehind the stage and ask to be photographedin awkward glamour-shot poses(pinky finger under chin or head cockedinto plastic rosebush). After all, my photographswere free, while the Filipinophotographers charge five riyals a pop!19

But this time I felt an unfamiliar twingeof guilt as I aimed my Pentax camera lensout from under the arm of my abaya at atrio of unsuspecting second cousins.Each of them was resplendent in carefullychosen colours. Afra swayed backand forth in a beaded tunic that quit midthighand rained glass droplets down toher French pedicured toes. Abrar loungedin a golden tiger number, striped spandexstretched taut over her arms into fingerlessgloves. Abtihal, who was turning out tobe the belle of the ball, stood tall and slim,her torso and hair littered with crumpledpurple ribbon rosettes, misted with lilacscent. All three were wearing colouredcontact lenses (blue, yellow, purple) anddeep red henna all the way up their arms.I had to suppress an awe-filled sigh at theirfinery. I photographed them as they commentedsardonically on the young andunmarried unsheathing themselves for thedelectation of the shrouded older women.As she stood between her sisters, Inoticed that Abtihal had an unusual glowabout her festooned head. Just as thestrangeness registered, her violet eyesflashed an unfamiliar warning – she’dspotted the metallic gleam of my camera.We all used to laugh at the ugly girls whomade such a fuss about the stray snapshotsthat sometimes circulated around the tribe.Now, suddenly, Abtihal stood there, petrified,stock-still as her sisters gesticulatedaround her. Meanwhile, shameless in thetall grass, I poached the pristine reputationof my beautiful cousin with every snap.But every photograph I took of herwas inexplicably blurry.A few weeks later I learned that Abtihalhad got engaged to our cousin Dheeb(Arabic for ‘wolf ’) that very night. Thisnews explained both her glow and theimperceptible twitching revealed by myphotographs. Full to the brim with promises,Abtihal was too bright for me to capture.Lashed to her dignity by the braidedropes of fate, she had been petrified ofbeing photographed and risking the honourof her new family. The official photosof my cousin Jameela and her sistersfolded neatly into a pocket-sized memorybook from the Al Saad Ladies PhotographyCompany. The bride’s mother tookme aside recently to show me the album.Her daughter is unrecognizable behindlayers of white foundation and raver-girlglitter. The bride’s face is further maskedby the romantic sheen that has been airbrushedon by the professional photographers;I swear the curve of her smileis artificial. In the cover photo, Jameelasquints out of a heart-shaped cutout. Shealmost looks like she’s crying through theGaussian blur. My aunt dismisses the tearswith a wave. ‘Her eyes were wateringfrom the huge lights – we were lucky hermascara didn’t run.’As she beams down at the collection ofher daughter’s ‘memories’, she confides inme how happy she is that her daughter’snew husband loves her so much. She tellsme about how, on the wedding night,as they prepared to leave, the groomremoved Jameela’s rhinestone necklaceand kissed her powdered neck. ‘Such tendernesswas proof!’ she exclaimed. ‘Heloves her so much!’I wonder briefly about my aunt, hermarriage to my uncle. We flip throughthe rest of the photos.My aunt sighs again and mumblessomething about the Allah-given gift oflove. ‘Aagbalish,’ she whispers, giving mea matronly squeeze. ‘You’ll be next.’Maybe. But probably not. I don’t knowwhat I did to deserve it, but I no longerseem to be attracting suitors (or rather,their mothers.) I have been to scores ofweddings by now, and I know when I’mnot welcome on a dais.The first time I danced at a wedding Iwas fourteen years old and wearing a redChinese dress with a shocking slit up theleg. My hair was tied back into Chun-Listyle buns, so I couldn’t do any of the‘sexy’ figure-eight-style hair-flippingmoves I had practised at home with mycousins. Thus restrained, I resorted to amixture of Egyptian-style belly danceand Midwestern clod-hopping. Themothers-with-sons who lined the stageclapped and squawked in their hoarsegravelly voices, ‘The American dances!’At first I felt embarrassed to be introducedas ‘the dancing American’ insteadof ‘Saphya! Daughter of Mohamed’, or‘Saphya! Granddaughter of Amer!’ Butwhen my father heard about my debut,on the other side of the tent, he seemedproud. Which in turn made me feel triumphantdespite my humiliation.I realized that this was what weddingswere for: generating gossip and cultivatinginfamy.As my mother might say, my kind ofglory.◊20

HELP PAGESThe Agony UncleAlain de Botton will ease your painProblem One: I run a small company inDevon. Recently, I’ve had to take some extremely‘tough’ decisions as regards my workers. I’ve hadto fire 20% of the workforce and, at the same time,I’m having to hide from the remaining ones thatprobably another 15% of them will have to disappearnext year. I am turning into a ‘Machiavellian’person, and this deeply disturbs me – as I alwayswanted to be a nice guy AND a good boss. Butperhaps the two are not compatible? Can one begood AND effective in business? – Roger SternYour use of the word ‘Machiavellian’is fascinating – and may merit a shortdigression into history. In the autumnof 1512, in a farmhouse outside Florence,Nicollò Machiavelli wrote a book ofadvice on how to govern a state, addressedto the recently restored rulers of Florence,the Medicis. Machiavelli’s The Prince followedin a long tradition of advice booksbegun by Seneca and Cicero. Both Romanauthors had advised rulers to be clement,tolerant, generous and peaceful – a line ofadvice propounded over the centuries.But Machiavelli gave the Medicis somerather stiffer counsel. If they wanted tosurvive and lead Florence to glory, theywould have to be ready to disregard everytraditional ‘Christian’ virtue when circumstancesdictated. Cicero had argued thata ruler would turn into a beast if he usedforce, and a fox if he used fraud. Machiavelli,turning the idea on its head, arguedthat a ruler had to ‘imitate both the fox andthe lion.’ He needed to be a centaur, halfman,half-beast, to survive in a harsh world.It was no use being idealistic and highminded,if the rest of humanity wasn’t goingto be: ‘A ruler who does not do what is generallydone, but persists in doing what oughtto be done, will undermine his power ratherthan maintain it.’ Nor should a ruler worryabout being thought cruel. ‘It is much saferto be feared than loved.’ Rulers should beready to deceive, kill, plot and torture.It is common to dismiss Machiavellias a vulgar (or to some people, thrilling)immoralist, with no conception of goodand evil. But the truth is more complexand awkward. Machiavelli was very mucha moralist, he fervently believed in goodand evil, it was just that the highest goodin his eyes was the flourishing of the state,not blood-free hands. The state was thecriteria by which actions should be evaluated.Something was bad in so far as itharmed the state, and good in so far as itaided it. The awkward point is that thequalities which can make you a good rulerare not necessarily those which will makeyou a good person according to a Christianmoral system. And yet Machiavelli stressedthat the moral duty of a good ruler should,in difficult moments, be to the state, not tohis Christian conscience. Rulers could beblameless in killing people so long as theydid so for the glory of the country.Machiavelli’s writings draw attentionto an unfortunate possibility: that we maynot be able to be ‘good’ people simultaneouslyin all areas of our life. Perhaps it isimpossible to be an effective ruler and agood Christian, or a good businessmanand a humane person. It points us to aneed for choice – we may have to decidewhat we truly think of as good, and sacrificesome other virtues in its name.No wonder Machiavelli has been sohated for shattering the noble idea thatwe can in theory combine all the virtues.Problem Two: You, Mr de Botton (a verystrange name!), claim to know everything. Soexplain this to me: why does everything go rightfor some people and wrong for others? I knowsome good people who have had one disasterafter another (me) and bastards who only seemto get rewarded for their nastiness. Why?traditional way to answer theA question, associated as much with theOld Testament as with right-wing governments,is that good things happen to peoplewhen they are good (hard-working,righteous etc.), and bad things (poverty,unemployment) to people when they arebad. In the Book of Deuteronomy, theBible assures us that the godly person‘shall be like a tree planted by the rivers ofwater . . . and whatsoever he doeth shallprosper. The ungodly are not so: but arelike chaff which the wind driveth away.’Given that this is obvious nonsense, theBible does fortunately include a far more21convincing explanation for why innocentpeople suffer and fail to prosper. Writtenin the 4th century BC, the Book of Jobtells the story of a righteous, God-fearingman from the land of Uz, who seemedto have been rewarded for his goodnessbecause he was very rich and had a largeloving family. But then disasters beganto pour down on him. The Sabeans stolehis oxen and his asses, lightning killed hissheep, the Chaldeans raided his camelsand a hurricane killed his children.He was thrown into despair. Why hadGod allowed such things to occur to arighteous man? His friends knew why.Job must have been sinful, he must havedone something wrong. Job’s friend Bildadthe Shuhite told him, ‘God will notreject a blameless man.’But God stepped in with a superior,more consoling answer, in the shape of aset of questions to Job. ‘Where were youwhen I laid the earth’s foundation? . . . Haveyou journeyed to the springs of the sea, orwalked in the recesses of the deep? . . . Whogives birth to the frost from the heavens?. . . Do you give the horse his strength, orclothe his neck with a flowing mane?’ Herewere attempts to remind Job of the rangeof things which God controlled. He didnot think only of man, he was looking afterhorses, the frost and so on. Though Job hadan assured place in God’s world, all thingsdid not converge on him. It was thereforeimpudent of men to insist at all times oninterpreting their own fate egocentrically –to decide that everything which happenedto them was done with reference to somethingabout them. Not every drought whichhurts a man was designed to punish him.When a hurricane destroys a house, it is notnecessarily because its inhabitants were bad.Though God’s answer was designed toincrease Job’s faith by teaching him thathe was not the measure of the universe, itremains useful even to atheists struck bymisfortune. It suggests to us that we cannotalways explain our destiny with referenceto our moral worth. Events which appearto have singled us out, may be obeyingtheir own capricious laws. When theChaldeans raid our camels, when lightningkills our sheep or we are sacked, we do notalways have to blame ourselves. We mayhave been caught up in the path of large,impersonal forces, which know nothingabout us. It may not make our problemsgo away, but it can assuage a bitter sense ofresponsibility for failure and disaster. ◊

HOW TO WRITE A LETTERJean-Paul Sartre to Simone de BeauvoirThese few letters from Sartre to Simone deBeauvoir are taken from the collection Witnessto My Life, which was published after Sartre’sdeath, translated by Lee Fahnestock andNorman MacAfee, and edited by de Beauvoirherself. From playful declarations of affectionand detailed descriptions of everyday life, tophilosophical conjecture and in-depth discussionsof books, the letters offer a fascinatinginsight into one of the most famous relationshipsof the twentieth century and are testament toan incredible intellectual affinity which lasteda lifetime. Yet, blithely interwoven with theintimacy of shared ideas and emotions are alsoSartre’s unflinching accounts of his affairs withother women, and although complete honestyand transparency was a fundamental tenet ofthe pair’s relationship, these are still difficultto read without squirming with jealousy on deBeauvoir’s behalf.But perhaps I should reserve judgement aboutSartre – at any rate, that’s what his eerily prescientwords in the letter of 16th September seemto implore us to do. – Anna KellyJuly, 1939 · My darling Beaver,When it comes to you, my little darling,everything is idyllic. I got both yourletters at the same time. You’ve finallyread Heidegger, it’s worth your whileand we’ll talk about it. The day aftertomorrow I’ll see you, my love. I can’tsit still. I have little stirrings of hopenow (I was logy and drowsing) but I’malso more nervous. Now I can tell youthat prospects weren’t at all rosy thesepast days. When I arrived there was fearof war for the following day (there was anaborted coup in Danzig, the papers arenow calling it the July 2 coup), and I waspetrified that war would erupt while Iwas still in Saint-Sauveur. Do you realizewhat that means? And then later, onTuesday, things calmed down. But thenon Wednesday I got a letter from Taniathat annoyed me, pure delirium of passionon my part. And then I calmed down.I’m so nervous and out of sorts herethat yesterday, while reading an idioticand sentimental scene from a piece inL’Illustration, suddenly I was teary-eyed.With no thought or qualms on my partbut due, I think, to the strangely larval,overagitated state in which I find myself.But it’s over. On the other hand, I thinkI’ve done some excellent work. You’ll bethe judge of that.I love you with all my heart, my littleone. You are my haven, and I need you.I send you all my love.Late July, 1939 · My darling Beaver,I received your two delightful letters,which I read without skipping a singleone of the descriptions (which are veryspare, incidentally), and I was very movedby your small compliments. Dear God,how nice you are, my Beaver. You fill mewith regrets and longings, and yesterdayI was completely morose not to be withyou. Who wanted this? you will ask. I did,probably, but without you it’s like ParadiseLost. I love you.For now I’m relentlessly devotingmyself to my personal life (we said it better,I think: personal doggedness), butpersonal life doesn’t pay. To tell the truth,Tania is almost always charming andaffectionate, and it is very nice sleepingwith her, which happens to me morningand evening, for the moment. She seemsto get pleasure out of it, but it kills her,she lies on her bed dead to the world formore than 15 minutes after her revels.The thing is, it takes the violence of argumentsor the touching quality of reconciliationfor me to feel alive. Last night wehad a terrific argument but it was worththe effort ( . . . )Adieu my darling Beaver, she has justarrived and I am finishing right in frontof her. You know my feelings, but I don’tdare to write them, because it’s not thatdifficult to read upside down.16th September, 1939 · My darling Beaver,There’s a package for me at the postoffice. A small one. From you? Thatwould be the first sign of you I’ve hadsince Ceintry. Except that for me to getit the postal clerk has to sign a discharge,and of course the postal clerk isn’t there.Letters, none. There were 100 this morningfor the whole division but of coursenot one for the AD. That’s already someprogress. Our first sergeant hasn’t had aletter in twenty-five days. This silence isbeginning to weigh on us. I think that ourexistence would be different – perhapsmore vulnerable – if we had daily newsfrom civilian lives. I’d so like to knowwhat’s going on in your life. I get theimpression that after some few days ofgloom, Paris is beginning to come back tolife. Am I wrong? Have you gotten backto your novel? Are you giving your attentionto ‘the social life’? For me, I feel outof touch with social matters. This war isso disconcerting – still Kafkaesque, andrather like the battle in The Charterhouse ofParma. It defies thought; I struggle valiantlyto catch it, but ultimately everythingI think holds good for field manoeuvres,not for the war; the war is always screened,elusive. Actually there’s nothing new. I’mcalm, but the calm doesn’t much satisfy me,it isn’t a calm based on good reasons, and Ijustify myself in my little black notebook.Whoever reads it after my death – for youwill publish it only posthumously – willthink that I was an evil character unlessyou accompany it with benevolent andexplanatory annotations. In short, I’mmorally a bit disoriented (don’t worry,moral preoccupations don’t spoil my appetite),like the guy who, getting ready to lifta heavy barbell, suddenly realises it’s hollowand, at the same time, that deep downhe was hoping it was. Needless to say, hefinds himself flat on his ass.17 th November, 1939 · My darling Beaver,No letters from you today. I’d foreseenit for one of these days, becausethe day before yesterday I inexplicably22

eceived two at the same time. Since Ihave no anxieties and even find this gapnatural, for the reason I’ve just mentioned,it allows me to understand allthe better what I miss when a day goesby without anything from you; it is asort of Goethesque wisdom that allowsme to attend the various events of mylife without actually partaking of them.With your letters I feel Olympian at littlecost, because I regain a world we hold incommon, which is good, be it in war orpeace, like a tormented novel that endshappily. I think that it comes from theabsolute and total regard I have for you:the moment that exists, there is that absolute,the rest must clearly follow, even theworst. I imagine that is what you mustbe feeling when you call me your ‘littleabsolute.’ My darling, I love you verymuch.I got an exalted letter from Dumartinspontaneously proclaiming himself mydisciple, avowing an admiration that isnot intellectual but human, and endingby asking me to correct twenty pagesof a novel he has just written. Thereare a few pages of subtle humour in itthat I liked very much, as when he says,‘I spent two months of isolation andindividuality in England’. But I am evenmore amused by this shower of formerstudents that still associate me with theirlittle concoctions, one (Hadjibelli) askingme for a bibliography, another (Kanapa)a definition of Aristotle’s physics, thethird that I read his literary work. Alas,I’ll have to answer them all. I’ll devoteone whole day to it. I’ve finished thedifficult passage in my novel and in a waythat pleases me. But will you be satisfied,little judge?◊The Best BitSuzanne H., London, age 29, on The Sea Wolfhere were only women in my‘Tlast book club so I was interested tosee how this new one would operate. It’sfive women and five men and the bookchoice goes back and forth between thesexes. It’s weird though. When a girlannounces a book it’s often quite, I don’tknow, girly and this almighty groan goesup from the boys. And then they showup – those men who do show up – afterreading something like The Lovely Bonesand there’s something in their eyes, youknow, and they discuss the book butthey’re obviously just waiting for the ballto go back into their court. Then theypick something male and a groan goes upfrom our side of the room. It’s gettingworse, too. Last time at book club, Tanyaflipped over the bowl of Kettle Chips andsaid, “I will not read that. I just cannotread that.” She was like, “Stalingrad byAnthony Beevor? Look how many pagesthat is.” She was really upset, you know,and she looked over on the boys’ side andthey were all bunched together on theircouches and all the girls were on the othercouches. She was there in the middle ofthe room trying to clean up the KettleChips, really angry, kind of shaking andshe says, “When did Book Club becomethis?”It was a real moment, you know? Sothen one of the boys comes forward,like he’s about to make some sort ofgesture of reconciliation. It can happen,you know. Oprah picked The Road,after all. But instead he says, “I’m sorryfor Stalingrad. We’ll choose Jack Londoninstead.” Like that’s any better! MoreBoy’s Own adventure? It’s not the oneabout wolves, thankfully, even thoughthis one’s got Wolf in the title. And I’mready to hate it. I do hate it, all thatposturing and chucking bodies off theship and nautical terminology. The nextweek I get a text from Tanya saying“Have you read that part yet?” I text herback saying “What part? All that stupidsea-faring crap?” So I keep reading, Ikeep at it, still thinking, which bit? Andthen it comes. All the men have been sougly in the book. The hero is this sicklywriter and there’s a Cockney chef whosounds like the kind of guy you seedown in Dagenham on Saturdays. Thenthere’s this bit where London describesthe evil captain, Wolf Larsen. “The terriblebeauty of Wolf Larsen’s body” andall. “As he moved about or raised hisarms the great muscles leapt and movedunder the satiny skin . . . I rememberputting his hand up to feel of the woundon his head, and my watching the bicepsmoving like a living thing under itswhite sheath.”Well, ok, I have such a hard time withsome characters. They always have thingslike “tight smiles”, “innocent eyes” and Ican never quite get a picture of them. I’dsay I could see Wolf Larsen quite wellafter that. Our book club met again andit was the same as ever. The boys werelooking smug and the girls were ready toreclaim the next book. When I startedtalking I realized after about five minutesI had only mentioned that satiny skinbit and all that “bicep-moving-like-aliving-thing”business. After a while Ijust stopped speaking. The girls lookedover at me. A few of the boys were justlooking at their hands. I guess I was quiteflushed, you see. Finally someone said – Ithink it was Tanya – “Should we maybetalk about the themes of the book?”’ ◊Paul Davis23

Saturday Night (2005) · Margaux Williamson24

25Death Performance (2008) · Margaux Williamson

Ok or Self portrait as Future Buddha (2007) · Margaux Williamson