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The lightness of being Zadie
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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It's not often that writers are brutally tentative about their own work…
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Refreshing Honesty : Zadie Smith
I read literary non fiction the way some people read fiction: in one sitting. A good essay for me is unputdownable. When I heard Zadie Smith had a new (and first) collection of essays out, I couldn't wait to zip through them. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays shows Ms.Smith to be a really cool literary essayist; she's deeply intellectual, full of honest feeling, consummately stylish and witty. Whatever she happens to be writing on, you want to read her. I don't particularly care for Katherine Hepburn or The Philadelphia Story but Zadie's radiant passion for both lights up your own enthusiasm for the things you care for in that special and vulnerable way.
As one of the epigraphs for her book she chooses a Hepburn line from The Philadelphia Story, Tracy Lord exclaiming: “The time to make up your mind about people is never!” Smith speaks of a time when Hepburn was ill and dying and in a hospital and she serendipitously found herself at a free public screening of The Philadelphia Story in New York. The screening was full; standing room only. With a friend, disconsolately looking for two seats, she couldn't believe it “when suddenly two unholy fools, two morons, changed their minds and gave up their second row seats. Hard to describe how happy we were.”
Hooked
It wasn't long after that Katherine Hepburn died, and Zadie remarks: “Few artists in any medium have given me as much pleasure as Hepburn. In fact, the marvellous weight of the pleasure ennobles all clichés, and I hope to see the obituaries full of “the last of her kind”, “the greatest star in the firmament” and the rest of that sort of gruff because, for once, it is all true.” The first piece in Changing My Mindhooks you: an adolescent Zadie's discovery of a personal favourite book: Their Eyes Were Watching God. This is before Zora Neale Hurston went from being a well kept secret to becoming a cottage industry of thesis-making.
She's stubborn about not reading it when her mother urges the book on her, but when she opens to read the first page, she is riveted by this: “Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
She distrusted aphorisms and this was one, but it felt true. She wept after reading the book and when her mother asked her: So? She said it was basically sound. There's a great piece here on two different ways of reading and being a reader, one as deconstructed by Barthes, the other as described by Nabokov. In the first there is only you the reader, no author, and in the second, there is only the author (and the admiring reader in thrall). Zadie Smith, both reader and author, finds it hard to be one or the other. As a reader she feels liberated by what Barthes says, but as a writer, she needs to feel as Nabokov feels: be in charge.
She quotes N's definition of the ideal reader: “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader.” Whatever else she feels about reading, Zadie is sure about one thing: “Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.” In ‘That Crafty Feeling', a lecture to students on writing, she's devastatingly honest and funny about how she's unable to read her own books. “I've never read White Teeth. Five years ago I tried; I got about ten sentences before I was overwhelmed by nausea.” Once on a whim she bought The Autograph Man at an airport bookstore and upon reading about two-thirds found it wasn't, to her surprise, a bad experience.
Sense of strangeness
She laughed, even felt surprise because “the book was genuinely strange to me; there were whole pages I didn't recognize, didn't remember writing.” Finally, she dared to peek into her last book, On Beauty, and felt the nausea returning, “the feeling of fraudulence; and the too late desire to wield the red pen all over the place –but something else, too, something new. Here-and there- in isolated pockets- I had the sense that this line, that paragraph, these were exactly what I meant to write, and the fact was I had written them, and I felt okay about it, felt good, even. It's a feeling I recommend to all of you. The feeling feels okay.”
There are other sparkling essays here on Kafka, E.M. Forster, Middlemarch, multiplex movies, David Foster Wallace and personal essays on her family, especially memories of her dead father. There are many brilliant, illuminating asides here, and one of them is a line on Brief Encounter: “And if there is a moral lesson, it is not about the sin of sexual infidelity but the secular sin of being unfaithful to oneself.” And marvelous lines she picks up to quote from others, like the one by the legendary European star, Anna Magnani: “Please don't retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.” These are more than occasional essays; these are essays to savour deliberately. Zadie Smith at just 34 is writing critical prose like an old pro.
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