The tube station is the soul of the place made visible. Around and about it Earls Court anchors itself. Out of it is disgorged and into it is ingested a steady stream of humanity. A multi-hued, multi-lingual crowd is always gathered near its entrance. Earls Court is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Long-haired students from the Continent weighted under rucksacks studded with the flags of their countries pore over street maps. Bearded Australians study the poster that invites them to join the Zambesi Club – Rhodesians, South Africans, New Zealanders and Canadians also welcome. West Indians – lithe black bucks dressed in the height of fashion – parade aimlessly. A shrunken veteran of the First World War, a hat upturned at his feet, scrapes at a violin. Another ferrety old man, half-asleep on a box, clutches in his lap a stack of weeklies from the ‘underground’ press. Waking with a start, he holds aloft The Red Mole; and then, just as abruptly, his hand falls and he relapses back into slumber. The flower sellers (who would buy flowers in Earls Court?) sprinkle water on their wilting exhibits. From the hamburger joint not many yards away throbs a delirium of pop music. Hippie-clad young men and women swagger in and out. Those of the tribe who congregate in Earls Court have a tough vacancy of expression: they represent the fag end of that particular dream of gentleness.
The elemental necessities are available in abundance. The Accommodation Agencies and the proliferating cheap hotels will always be able to provide you with a roof above your head; the gaudy constellation of cheap eating places will always provide you with food to fill your stomach; and, satisfying another need, the army of prostitutes – male as well as female – will always provide you with the cheap solace of their bodies. Watch the group of men, not all of whom are old and mackintoshed, assembled round the window of the newsagent and intently perusing the quaintly worded cards which are mixed in with blandishments to join overland trips to Australia and South Africa. ‘Grounded Air Hostess Seeks New Position.’ ‘Chocolate Baby Teaches French. Very Strict.’ ‘Handsome Young Man Willing to Walk Dog.’ Numbers are hastily jotted down on scraps of paper and the prospective client slips discreetly away in search of a telephone booth. With a quiet shuffle those at the rear shoulder forward. These havens of sexual delight are usually on the Warwick Road. I have often wandered along that bleak strip where, behind the drawn curtains of dank basements, passion is so easily bought and expended.
At dusk, on certain evenings, a fresh performer joins the circus. The hoarse orator of the World Socialist Party exhorts his handful of listeners to overthrow the exploiters and establish the universal brotherhood of man. In Earls Court his message falls on stony ground. In that chaos there are no allegiances. A man leans against a lamppost being sick. No one pays him any attention. Two women stagger along the pavement in the middle of the afternoon. One of them lies on the pavement and, lifting up her skirt, kicks her legs up in the air. Her companion, laughing uproariously, picks her up. They drift on and repeat the exhibition further down the road. No one pays them any attention. Late one evening I see a drunk approach the display window of the shop downstairs. He is carrying a brick in each hand. Calmly, deliberately, he takes aim. There is an explosion of shattering glass. The passers-by, their faces averted, hurry on. Like the appeal to universal brotherhood, the act of violence falls on stony ground.
Earls Court offers to its denizens the life of the city at its rawest and purest. It is uncompromisingly urban; a conglomeration of solitary individuals. Relinquishing responsibility, it offers frenzy. Therein lies its attraction. Nothing is permanent in Earls Court. The restaurants come and go with bewildering rapidity; the bedsitter population is notoriously ephemeral. Yet, the transience is superficial: it is the transience of a purgatorial clearing-house. The actors change but the play, revolving on its febrile treadmill, remains much the same.
One lunch time I went to the pub where six years before I used to sit and look at the charladies sipping their bottled Guinness. It had undergone a metamorphosis. Carpeted steps led to an upper bar where girls in hot-pants doled out the drinks. Sliding glass panels opened on to a terrace set out with tables shaded by colourful umbrellas. The charladies had disappeared tracelessly. I descended to the gloomy cavern of the lower bar. Strobe lights coruscated like demented fireflies in the interior recesses of the gloom. There was the heavy pound of rhythm and blues from scattered speakers. Groups of men, their faces indistinct, lowered their heads over glasses of beer. The garish designs of a watered-down pop art decorated the walls. I bought my drink and settled in a corner. It was a weird, timeless world. The music stopped and the strobe lights were extinguished. Out of the hush drooled the West Indian voice of a disc jockey.
‘And now specially for you cool cats out there something real hip. The beautiful Cheryl is gonna dance just for you.’
The groups of men surged forward into a solid phalanx and fenced in the wooden-floored circle where the beautiful Cheryl would perform. A spotlight was switched on. Then Cheryl herself appeared, a slight, pretty girl with protruding collar-bones. She was dressed in a shimmering bikini hung with silvery tassels and a pair of white boots that reached up above her knees. Moving awkwardly in her boots she came and stood limply, head bowed, in the middle of the circle: a drowned mermaid in the glare of the spotlight.
The voice of the disc jockey drooled again. ‘Ready, Cheryl baby? Then let’s swing it. Shake it up! Hey! Hey!’
An ear-splitting volley of music crashed forth and Cheryl, roused from her hibernatory stillness, pitched into her gyrations. She bobbed and weaved; she brandished her pale arms; she rotated her hips. The strobe lights flashed. A shine of sweat overspread her cheeks. She quivered orgasmically as the music climbed to a crescendo and, when it had passed, she rippled with the tremors of post-coital exhaustion and sank, eyes closed, on to the wooden boards of the arena. It had been a fine performance but she was not applauded. She rose to her feet and was once again a drowned mermaid in the glare of the spotlight. Ploughing a passage through her impassive masculine audience, she disappeared behind a door marked ‘Staff Only’.
‘That was way out, Cheryl baby. Thank you. And now we’re gonna groove some more with the dynamic Shirley. She’s gonna get you cats out there real hot under the collar. Hey! Hey!’
I did not wait to see the dynamic Shirley. Outside a fine rain was falling. The big lorries roared, tyres squelching on the wet roadway. I breathed in the soupy air blowing in chill gusts. In its metamorphosis that pub had conformed to the underlying spirit of Earls Court. A further revolution of the febrile treadmill: it was no more than that. Beautiful Cheryl and dynamic Shirley were part of the quick, passionate flux; souls resting a while in the clearing-house. Eventually, they too would be swept away as the charladies had been swept away, leaving no trace. That was the iron law of Earls Court.
The usual crowd was gathered outside the tube station. His unfilled hat dampening in the rain, the veteran of the First World War scraped undaunted at his violin. Behind him, the collar of his donkey-jacket raised protectively, the agent of the underground press slept fitfully on his box.
Some months later I too was swept away. I could not work in Earls Court. Already I had fled once to a cottage in Suffolk where I stayed for six months. There I finished my second novel. On my return I found Earls Court even more intolerable. There being little to keep me, my urge to vagrancy reasserted itself. I obeyed the iron law and left. I write this in an Indian hill station. From the balcony of the hotel I can see the snow peaks of the Himalayas on clear days. Then the mists descend and they vanish completely. It is as if they had never been there; as if I were the victim of an illusion. At this distance, Earls Court too seems illusory. It is as if I had never been there; as if it had never existed. Alas, I know that that is not so.
Salman Rushdie
[1947-]
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, the oldest child and only son in an affluent Muslim family. At the age of fourteen, he left India to study at Rugby in England. Rushdie eventually took a history degree at King’s College, Cambridge. Meanwhile, in 1967 his parents moved to Pakistan.
Surrounded by books and story-tellers in his youth, Rushdie knew that he wanted to become a writer from an early age. After graduating from King’s College, he stayed in England, where he worked in the theatre and as a copywriter in an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus (1979), was met with negative reviews. Undaunted by the setback, he wrote Midnight’s Children (1981), an innovative blend of fantasy and reality. Ambitiously conceived and widely praised, this novel was born of Rushdie’s desire to write an ‘epic’ about India, and was begun when he revisited Bombay after a ten-year absence. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, ushering Rushdie into the literary spotlight and enabling him to begin writing full-time.
The next novel, Shame (1983), is set in Pakistan, where it was banned upon publication. In 1986 Rushdie travelled to Nicaragua as a guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. The result of his visit was The jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). In 1989 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses. Set in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the novel contains what Rushdie calls the ‘most spectacular act of immigration’ that he could imagine, when his two Indian protagonists fall out of the sky and into the English Channel. Both an attempt to ‘give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture’ and an exploration of religious faith, The Satanic Verses was banned in India a week after its British publication. Several countries with large Muslim populations soon followed suit.
In 1991 Rushdie published Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. In 1994 he published a collection of short stories, East, West, and in 1995 his first major novel in six years, The Moor’s Last Sigh, appeared. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize for best novel of the year.
Rushdie’s ‘post-colonial’ essay ‘A General Election’ (1983) tackles British society with the kind of unsheathed vigour that a ‘colonial’ writer might well have shied away from. Here is the fully developed voice of the British writer who was not born in Britain but who fearlessly dares to criticize. This is no Equiano, learning the language and the customs, nor a C. L. R. James, anxious to impress. The ramparts have been breached, neither by stealth nor by bluster. The force of confident and elegant argument challenges the reader’s understanding of what constitutes a ‘British’ writer.
A General Election
I returned to England only recently, after spending two months in India, and was feeling pretty disorientated even before the general election was called. Now, as successive opinion polls inform us of the near-inevitability of a more or less enormous Tory victory, my sense of alienation has blossomed into something close to full-scale culture shock. ’‘Tis a mad world you have here, my masters.’
Have they been putting something in the drinking water while I’ve been away? I had always thought that the British prided themselves on their common sense, on good old-fashioned down-to-earth realism. But the election of 1983 is beginning to look more and more like a dark fantasy, a fiction so outrageously improbable that any novelist would be ridiculed if he dreamed it up.
Consider this fiction. A Tory Prime Minister, Maggie May, gets elected on the basis of her promises to cut direct taxation and to get the country back to work (‘Labour isn’t working’). During the next four years she increases direct taxation and contrives to add almost two million people to the dole queues. And she throws in all sorts of extra goodies: a fifth of the country’s manufacturing industry lies in ruins, and (although she claims repeatedly to have vanquished the monster Inflation) she presides over the largest increase in prices of any British Prime Minister. The country’s housing programme grinds to a halt; schools and hospitals are closed; the Nationality Act robs Britons of their 900-year-old right to citizenship by virtue of birth; and the great windfall of North Sea oil money is squandered on financing unemployment. Money is poured into the police force, and as a result notifiable crimes rise by twenty-eight per cent.
She constantly tells the nation that cash limits are tight, but finds untold billions to spend on a crazy war whose legacy includes the export of drinking water to the South Atlantic at a cost to the British taxpayer of five pence a pint; and, speaking of peace, she earmarks further untold billions for the purchase of the latest weapons of death, although common sense, not to mention history, clearly indicates that the more such weapons exist, the more likely they are to be used.
So far, the story of Prime Minister May is almost credible. The fictional character does come across as unusually cruel, incompetent, unscrupulous and violent, but there have just occasionally been Tory politicians of whom such a description would not be wholly inaccurate. No, the story only falls apart when it gets to the end: Maggie May decides to go to the country, and instead of being hounded into the outer darkness, or at least Tasmania, like her namesake, it seems that she is to receive a vote of confidence; that five more years of cruelty, incompetence, etc., is what the electorate wants.
The hapless novelist submits his story, and is immediately submerged in a flood of rejection slips. Desperately, he tries to make his narrative more convincing. Maggie May’s political opponents are presented as hopelessly divided. The presence of alleged ‘full-time socialists’ amongst her foes alarms the people. The leader of the Labour Party wears a crumpled donkey-jacket at the Cenotaph and keeps falling over his dog. But still (the rejection slips point out) the fact remains that for Mrs May to hold anything like the lead that the polls say she holds, the unemployed – or some of them, anyway – must be planning to vote for her; and so must some of the homeless, some of the businessmen whose businesses she has destroyed, some of the women who will be worse off when (for instance) her proposal to means-test child benefits becomes law, and many of the trade unionists whose rights she proposes so severely to erode.
At this point, our imaginary novelist (compromising the integrity of his vision for the sake of publication) would, in all probability, agree to rewrite his ending. The trumpets sound, the sleeping citizenry awakes, le jour de gloire arrives, and Maggie May gets, in 1983, the same sort of bum’s rush given to her hero Winston Churchill in 1945.
Is it not passing strange that this, the plausible and happy ending, is the one that looks, in the cold light of real-life Britain, like the one in which it’s almost impossible to believe?
I find myself entertaining Spenglerian thoughts about how there can be times when all that is worst in a people rises to the surface and expresses itself in its government. There are, of course, many Britains, and many of them – the sceptical, questioning, radical, reformist, libertarian, non-conformist Britains – I have always admired greatly. But these Britains are presently in retreat, even in disarray; while nanny-Britain, strait-laced Victoria-reborn Britain, class-ridden know-your-place Britain, thin-lipped, jingoist Britain, is in charge. Dark goddesses rule; brightness falls from the air. ‘The Ancient Britons,’ says the best of history books, 1066 and All That, ‘painted themselves true blue, or woad, and fought heroically under their dashing queen, Woadicea.’ The Britons are even more Ancient now, but they have been fighting once again, and that blue dye takes a long time to wear off. Woadicea rides again.
What an achievement is hers! She has persuaded the nation that everything that goes wrong, from unemployment to the crime rate, is an Act of God or someone else’s fault, that the forces of organized labour are actually the enemies of organized labour; that we can only defend ourselves by giving the United States the power of life and death over us; that to be an ‘activist’ is somehow far worse than being an inactivist, and that the left must once more be thought of in Latin, as sinister. She propounds what is in fact an ideology of impotence masquerading as resolution, a con-trick, and it looks as though it’s going to work: Maggie’s sting.
And it was as recently as 1945 that the British people, politicized by their wartime experiences, threw off the yoke of the true-blue ruling class … How quickly the wheel has turned, how quickly faith has been lost in the party they forged as their weapon, how depressingly willing the nation seems to be to start touching forelocks once again. The worst thing about this election is that nobody seems really angry about what has happened, is happening, and is sure to go on happening if Mrs Thatcher is standing on the steps of No. 10 on the morning of 10 June. (What will she quote from this time? St Francis of Assisi again? St Joan? The Hitler Diaries?)
I believe the absence of widespread anger matters enormously, for this reason: that democracy can only thrive in a turbulent climate. Where there is acquiescence, cynicism, passivity, resignation, ‘inactivism’, the road is clear for those who would rob us of our rights.
So, finally, and in spite of all the predictions and probabilities, I refuse to accept that the cause is lost. Despair brings comfort to one’s enemies. And elections are not, at bottom, about reasoned arguments; they are about passions. It is just conceivable that even now, in this eleventh hour, a rage can be kindled in the people, rage against the dying of the light that Thatcherism represents. The electorate, we are told, has never been so volatile; so maybe the miracle can still be worked. Maybe, on the day, real life will turn out to obey the same laws of probability as fiction, and sanity will return.
If not, we can look forward to five more years of going to the dogs. Guardian readers will no doubt remember these unappealing canines; a few years ago, they used to be known as the running dogs of capitalism.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
[1948-]
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania. He left Africa in 1967, at the age of eighteen. The young African boy Hassan in his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), also leaves home at an early age. In a letter to his loved one, nineteen-year-old Hassan explains the reason for his emigration: ‘Perhaps because I saw nothing but the misery and defeat of my people. I saw nothing but a clinging to old habits.’ Trying to come to terms with his identity, Hassan refers to himself as an ‘exile’: ‘It makes it easier to bear this feeling because I can give it a name that does not shame me.’ Praised by critics as a poetic and compassionate debut, Memory of Departure prompted comparisons with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was followed in 1988 by Pilgrim’s Way, a novel in which the main character, Daud, is a self-described ‘alienated creature’ – an African in England whose life becomes increasingly complicated when he falls in love with a white woman. In 1990 Gurnah published Dottie, which touches upon similar themes of displacement and interracial relations.
In 1993 Gurnah edited Essays on African Writing: A Re-evaluation. In his introduction, he reiterates the ambivalent feelings of post-colonial African writers towards European intervention in their country of birth. Gurnah currently lives in Canterbury, England, where he teaches literature at the University of Kent. He is also associate editor of the journal Wasafiri. In 1994 Gurnah published a fourth novel, Paradise, which was short-listed for that year’s Booker Prize. Paradise is set in German East Africa during the First World War and explores the reactions of the locals as their homeland is torn by conflict and colonial rule. His latest novel, Admiring Silence, was published in the autumn of 1996.
The central character in Gurnah’s novel Pilgrim’s Way is sadly aware that the English perceive him to be little more than the flotsam of empire. He is trying to understand why England is not the place that he expected it to be. This England of cathedrals and spires, to his eyes, is far from ‘civilized’.
