One of the many novels I read, when young and impressionable, was Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. It’s one of his Berlin stories, immortalised in the minds of men of a certain age by the image of Liza Minnelli straddling a chair in the film derived from them, “Cabaret”. That life is a cabaret, old chum, is something I’m sure Johann Hari considered all too true last week.
I’m almost ashamed to admit that the reason I remember the book more powerfully than I do any of his other works, or even Liza Minnelli on the chair, is that its first page contains the line “I am a camera”. Twenty-five years at least passed between my reading that novel, and this — that which you see before you now — an attempt to craft a career from words. I am here, you are reading this today, because I won a prize, called the Orwell Prize (I won it for my blogging on Conservative Home). The prize is awarded to the person who has “done most to turn political writing into an art”, in the words of the people who award it. I’ll come back to that reference to “art” in a moment.
It is still not possible for me to describe myself as a “writer”. I am sure many of you will agree. I hope you take comfort that I cannot bring myself to even use that word inside my own head. I’m just a statistician, mildly obsessed with swimming, who sometimes writes things down.
I think I write because I am perplexed by most of the human beings around me (residual Only Child psychology), so I listen to what they say to one another, I listen to the words they use, and without always succeeding, I try not to theorise about why I’m hearing or seeing those things; and thus my fixation on that Christopher Isherwood novel. I want to be a camera. I am often puzzled by a dream, in the words of the beautiful song, and this bewilderment carries over to the snatches of disconnected words I hear around me every day. What are those patches of overheard conversations most like? They are dreams, the dreams of other people.
That George Orwell also inspires me is hardly a shock; he’s a hero to many Tories because he refused to back down in his opposition to totalitarianism, simply because it was sometimes prefixed with the adjective “socialist”. The real reason he interests me, though, is related to the writing-as-camera idea; that and the clear love he evinced in his writings for the English working class. It is so easy to scorn this love, to write it off as an affectation. For a homosexual man, of course, the confounding is multiplied — my unchecked admiration for the men who build our roads, our houses, is not unaffected by my aesthetic sense, and I am aware of that. But the company of such men provides the chance to hear honesty in speech. I think there is more honesty to be found in a scuzzy East End pub on a Friday evening than in any boardroom or editorial office or writer’s garret in the land. Nothing is dressed up, or hidden, for the sake of a “greater truth”. It is this reason why the left is so angry with the working-class, and in government devoted such political energy into destroying their leisure environments. Working men remain — just — immune to the imprecations to speak only acceptable, liberal “truths”.
So: I should be — I am — aghast at Johann Hari’s actions: he “interviewed” people by meeting with them, and then (after the interviews, when he was writing them up), he ascribed direct quotations (of the “And then he said….” form) into the mouths of his interviewees. Unfortunately, regrettably, many of his interviewees had not used those words when speaking with Mr Hari. He lifted them from books, articles they had written. He did so in order to illustrate “their greater truth”. Both the Tory and the empiricist in me have a massive problem with that.
But there remains, even for the person who wants only to record what is said around him, an element of art. And this is the only iota of sympathy I have for Mr Hari. I do write down what I hear, usually within seconds of hearing it. But could I take the witness stand, and swear on my life that I have written a totally verbatim transcript? Let me try it now. It is 10pm, I am in the pub closest to our flat, and I am hearing:
– No but the reason
– I did sell it
– what a lovely dog! he’s smiling!
– you work abroad in the first place
Even that patch wasn’t quite in real time — my fingers won’t go that fast. This is where the “art” (specified in the prize) might come in. The art is not in the “bigger truth”. You deconvolve the multiple inputs into single-sensed passages, and add notes of scene-setting, and your own psychological conclusion:
– “I did sell it [my car]. The reason is that there’s no point in going to work abroad if we’re going to hold onto the life we’ve got here.”
His girlfriend is bored. I feel strongly and at once that she does not want to move abroad, and that it is far from the first time they have had this conversation. Her gaze has moved from him, onto the dog that’s been lurking under their table:
– “Oh, what a beautiful dog! Look, he’s smiling!”
The man will move to Spain. His woman will remain behind.
The “art”, if there be any art here at all, lies in the little truth. The straining to breaking point of a relationship on its last legs, the desperate displacement activity (“Oh, what a beautiful dog!”) tell me, anyway, more about the life of that couple than any “greater” truth I might try to strap onto the scene, to persuade a reader that my loudly proclaimed worldview is the one worth supporting. I might “only” be describing an anonymous couple, but I think the principle would be the same in any situation.
My fundamental dogma is that words are real things, with power, in the Universe. Their power terrifies me, actually: they deserve respect. But then I’m not a writer. I just try to write things down.
Content from our partners
Related
