Ungovernable, Capricious Life

Hanif Kureishi, the English playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, posted these words on his Substack in January 2023:

On Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.

I had been following Kureishi’s Substack for a while out of admiration, curiosity, and loyalty—though I’d met him only once, briefly. (His partner, Isabella D’Amico, and her family are old friends.) His dispatches were warm and entertaining, often about the writer’s life. But this one was shocking:

I cannot move my arms and legs. I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself. As you can imagine, this is both humiliating, degrading and a burden for others.

According to his hospital report, his fall resulted in neck hyperextension and immediate tetraplegia. An MRI scan showed a severe stenosis of the vertebral canal with signs of spinal cord injury from C3 to C5. It was unclear, he said, whether he would be able to walk again “or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen.” He was speaking these words through Isabella, who was slowly typing them into her iPad.

Kureishi’s new book, Shattered, is a collection of dictations from his hospital bed (beds, in fact; he would stay in five different hospitals before he was able to go home), first to Isabella and then to his son Carlo, in the year following his fall. The entries are astute, nostalgic, gentle, angry, grateful, even angrier, even more grateful, scatological, always emotional, always biting. “The only good thing to be said for paralysis,” we read, “is that you don’t have to move to shit and piss.”

Although the book is identified on its cover as “a memoir,” it was not written looking back, meditating on the shock and terror of a year in the past. Shattered was written a day at a time, at the time, and the burning immediacy of each entry is unmistakable. The future is something Kureishi’s family and doctors may talk about, the past is a part of him, but this new present does not change. The location may shift, and the characters may come and go, but the reality stays nightmarishly the same.

There is no publishing category of after-the-medical-tragedy that I am aware of. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), which Bauby composed by blinking one eyelid, the only movement available to him after a stroke; Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet (2010), dictated as he lay dying from ALS^*; Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (1994), written after she was disfigured by cancer as a child—these are all books about medical catastrophes, but unlike articles in medical journals, each is the creation of a writer with a style and an imagination and a sense of humor and tragedy all their own.

Shattered is in the tradition of these memoirs. But even more, it is in the tradition of its author. Kureishi’s style, his obsessions, his language—they’re all here in this extraordinary work. One of its powers is the inevitable, undeniable forward movement of time—marked in the Substack series by the regular arrival of an e-mail titled “Dispatches from my hospital bed,” and marked in the book by the date at the end of each installment. The truth of immobility is checked off on the calendar. The days, weeks, months progress. But the rhythm of Kureishi’s body is not defined by the days or weeks or even hours. This narrative, though it has a beginning, has no end.

Reading the bulletins as they appeared in my inbox was a singularly unfamiliar experience. There were certainly elements that one would expect in a memoir or essay: a narrator, characters, descriptions of events and places, opinions. There were memories of childhood, anecdotes of early fame and the famous, reflections on Jung and Freud and psychoanalysis, on food, on sex, on London, on his father, his children, his girlfriends, and his friends, on rock and roll and cricket and literature and film.

At the same time each one brought with it an almost frantic suspense that had nothing to do with a literary plot: readers did not know what would come next because the writer did not know; the writer did not know because the doctors did not know. This story did not follow the course of a story; it followed the course of unpredictable, ungovernable, incomprehensible, utterly capricious life. Celebrating narrative suspense in a discussion of Kureishi’s tetraplegic confusion, pain, and dread seems almost indecent. But the book cannot help making you ask: What will happen next?

Well, you can choke on a piece of fish and almost die. Or, when you feel there is nothing left for you, you can make a new friend:

I’ve had enough of this shit. I feel I lack the strength to take this on. I really don’t want to live like this. It’s shit and I’m tired of asking Isabella to do so much for me. Then, a wheelchair-bound woman in her late thirties, with long dyed bright-blue hair, rolls herself into the room and we introduce ourselves. I’ll call her Miss S.

I ask if we can be friends. I plead with her to not let me go. She tells me she won’t. She says, “After the accident, when I first came here, I could only use one eye.”

Friendships run through the book: the kindness and awkwardness of old friends, the unique closeness of new hospital friends like Miss S., the odd oppression of a hospital room full of friends he is sometimes too depressed to talk to but appreciates nevertheless.

There was a fall. But the fall is not over, and the ground is nowhere to be seen. This is where Kureishi writes. This and the physical space of the different hospitals he was in. If you’ve ever been in the hospital for even a short stay, and certainly for a prolonged visit, you will recognize the obstinate nurse who insists on closing Kureishi’s door in spite of his claustrophobic terror. If you’ve ever been stuck in a bed for months or pushed about in a wheelchair, you will recognize the inevitable condescension of those towering above you. The kind physical therapists, the clueless doctors, the joy of a new mattress that provides a bit of comfort, the lights that never go out, the noisy bustle and the deathly silence—all of this Kureishi portrays with offhand precision and humor.

What is never offhand in Shattered is Kureishi’s devotion to writing. From the first dispatch he says, “I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.” The book is a record not just of a writer practicing his art but of a man with a broken neck wondering whether he will ever again be able to walk through his own front door. The point, if there can be a point to such a meaningless accident, is that the two—the writer and the tetraplegic—are one. And Kureishi is determined that they must continue as one:

One day, looking out of the window at school, I called myself a writer…. I was keen for others to apply the word to me even though I hadn’t yet written anything. After all, at school many words had already been applied to me, words like “Brownie,” or “Paki,” or “Shit-face,” so I found my own word, I stuck to it, and never let it go…. Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.

But after ten months in various hospitals, he begins to feel even that totemic word slipping away: “I have become more of a patient than a writer. I am a patient all day, a more or less anonymous body to the nurses who take care of me.” He adds:

This writing I have done in hospital, dictated to Carlo and my family, has sustained me. I want to keep going. I often despair, but… I have no wish to die. Out of horror, something new must arise.

A hospital is the place from which modesty and dignity disappear, desert you, seemingly forever, as soon as you cross the threshold. Kureishi, a reliably sexy, unrestricted writer, presents the physical deterioration and indignities he undergoes with his usual wit. The sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it is also one of the characteristics Kureishi reveals about himself that makes him so likable here, and the writing so intimate. The tone is remarkable: even the self-pity has no self-pity. One way he achieves this is by sprinkling punch lines throughout:

I woke up and started to cry. When you cry you must wipe away your tears, which is something I’m unable to do. So my eyes filled with bitter salty water and I got into a panic and thought I might lose my eyesight along with everything else. Finally, a kind nurse came into my room and downed me with a good dose of Lorazepam, then she touched me on my cheek and said, “It’s not so bad, at least you’re not in a coma.”

Beyond the tone, though, is something I found astonishing when I first read the book as a whole, rather than in pieces: structure. How, rambling on to someone at the end of the bed who is stabbing at an iPad about a situation that you did not plan and that will not reveal its plans to you—how do you manage to shape even a paragraph?

The structure of Shattered appears at first, like its title and subject, to be splintered, broken into incomprehensible shards. There is no obvious framework, but it is there, rather miraculously—like, say, the lymphatic system, crucial but invisible. Kureishi’s observations veer this way and that, seemingly random, and by the end of an entry we arrive at a destination we never saw coming. The wandering thoughts, however, seem to have been headed there all along. Kureishi and Carlo did some revising and expanding of the original entries for the book. But this coherence was there from the beginning of the live entries themselves.

In his memoir My Ear at His Heart (2004), Kureishi describes listening as a child to conversations, “lively and loud,” between his father and his uncles. Their talk “was so full of jokes, witticisms, filthy stories and political comment…and gossip about sport—an extemporary surreal flow…. You had to learn to be good at it.” For Kureishi, being funny in conversation “is a form of creativity, as is all conversation.” His uncles and father were funny all the time, he says in Shattered. “Humour rippled through them.” Watching them “trying to amuse and outwit one another, I knew I wanted to be like that when I grew up.”

Born in 1954 in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother, Kureishi grew up in the suburbs he writes about in his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Exuberantly comic and unexpectedly sweet, it is about British youth culture, race, fathers and mothers, theater, and sex. It won the Whitbread Award for best first novel. Five years earlier Kureishi’s screenplay for Stephen Frears’s 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette, starring a twenty-eight-year-old Daniel Day Lewis, had been nominated for an Oscar. Kureishi, young and handsome with deliciously wild long hair, was soon being called “an angry young man of letters who picks up where Joe Orton and Colin McInnes left off.”

Earlier, Kureishi had gotten the chance to observe London’s theater world, starting at the age of twenty-one, when he walked into the Royal Court Theatre and saw Samuel Beckett in the midst of directing Billie Whitelaw in a production of Footfalls—a lesson in collaboration. Kureishi also brings up the example of the Beatles:

Those four boys…were able to do things together that they couldn’t do apart. This is both a miracle and a terrible dependency. In my experience, all artists are collaborationists.

If you are not collaborating with a particular individual, you are collaborating with the history of the medium, and you’re also collaborating with the time, politics and culture within which you exist. There are no individuals.

The idea of collaboration as a goal rather than an intrusion on writerly solitude is translated to his life in the hospital. In the gym where he is taken for rehab, he observes

all the patients with their broken or malformed bodies being manipulated and caressed by the physiotherapists…. When you see the mutual work done in the gym, it is a place of beauty, collaboration and respect.

The arts of conversation and collaboration help shape this powerful little book as much as the constrictions of time. It is a work always in progress, but it progresses through unexpectedly formal means. At one point, for example, Kureishi says he feels like “a patchwork of random pieces thrown together as if by Mary Shelley’s imagination.” But then the physiotherapists arrive: a handsome man who “caressed my fingers and my feet” and three beautiful Italians who hoist him into a wheelchair:

For the first time I was able to see the other side of my room. I saw the Italian sky through the window, some trees and a cloud and a few birds. I believed that things might begin to improve.

My heart is like a singing bird.

From the euphoria of this moment he proceeds to the ominous politics of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, Brexit, and the absence of people of color in the Italian hospital. “Are they kept in a special place to avoid contaminating the others?” he asks. This provokes his Italian partner to point out that, as he has never bothered to learn Italian, his take on Italian social ills is perhaps unreliable. To which he responds that it would be easier for every Italian to learn English than for him to learn Italian. And so we follow Kureishi’s thoughts casually, as if we were having them ourselves, accompanying him next to the subject of literature, that “dirty-bastard form”:

From the most vulgar and scurrilous, to the most sublime and poetic—you can put anything in a book, twist it about and turn it into something unforgettable. An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster. Out of these mixings will come impressive horrors and amazements.

Lest any singing-bird euphoria or bedridden philosophizing lure the reader toward the sentimental view of Kureishi as heroic optimist, he firmly yanks us back. Having gathered up Mary Shelley, Giorgia Meloni, beautiful Italian men and women, and a partner we have begun to realize is always at his side, the accident, too, has its say: “Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body to give form to this chaos I have fallen into, to stop myself from dying inside.”

The night after provides some comic fodder for Kureishi but is particularly dismal for his broken body. “Another shitty night,” he writes. “One of the worst…. My head became jammed down the side of the bed. I can’t move my arms or legs and no one could hear me.” A few engaging anecdotes of the young writer’s adventures in publishing back in the day come next. He meets Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter. And then the essential moment when he realized he was a comic writer—“a writer who could integrate the wildest and the most interesting elements on the same page.” Which, of course, he has just done. He ends that dispatch like this:

The nurse has arrived. She has managed to prise my head from the breech position…. There is a beautiful opening line in “Viewfinder,” from Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which reads: “A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.”

This image struck me tonight, since I am the man with no hands.

It is noteworthy that Kureishi writes about his uncooperative hands far more than his ineffective legs:

I envy those who can scratch their own heads. I envy those who can tie their own shoelaces. I envy those who can pick up a cup of coffee. When I saw a man waving to his own wife, I couldn’t believe that he didn’t see what a profoundly complicated act this was. I envy anyone who can use their own hands.

Sometimes, hauntingly, Kureishi recalls the luxury of using his hands to write. His descriptions of holding a pen, his hand sliding across the paper, are physical, sensuous. But the beauty of this process has been taken from him:

My hands continue to feel like alien objects. They’re swollen, I cannot open or close them, and when they are under the sheets, I could not tell you where they are precisely. They may in fact be in another building altogether, having a drink with friends.

In an interview with Kureishi in The Guardian in 2014, the writer and editor Robert McCrum remarked:

From a career of thinking and talking about himself, the public Kureishi has morphed into someone he can happily discuss as a kind of alter ego. In the past, he has said that he gives “at least one interview a week. Over a period of time you work up an account of yourself and one day you find you even believe it. Finally, it has become the story of your life.”

“Paki, writer, cripple: who am I now?” Kureishi writes of his post-accident identity. Nurses describe him as “the man who never smiles.” But he cannot escape his own humor:

Sometimes I’m asked why I put humour in my books, but to me that is like asking why you write a book with a story. The humour is integral to the idea and the language, just as it might be integral to a person, the way they speak and view the world….

Freud…recognized that humour, like sexuality, is where we can be taken by surprise, and where the unconscious exposes itself.

In June 2023 Kureishi is taken by surprise again when he is finally moved from an Italian rehab facility to a London hospital. Because of a lack of beds, he is quartered, as if a character in a crudely satirical play, on the dementia ward. It is 2:00 AM and

a patient is wailing, another is banging on his table with a spoon…. I can see a disabled, half-naked man dragging himself across the floor pulling a leaking piss bag behind him. Then, a zombie-like patient who regularly approaches my door, now comes in, stands beside my bed and stares at me vacantly, before shuffling off.

In many ways, Shattered is a book about perspective—both that of a writer and that of the disabled. Kureishi cannot move, but he is flexible and quick in the movements of paragraphs, in the movements between ideas. In one early dispatch, he begins with an account of a hospital pedicure, the first he’s ever gotten. The man performing this task wears a bright flashlight on his forehead attached by “a sort of miner’s harness.” Kureishi looks grimly on. “From where I am lying, with his whirring machine and his glasses covered in foot-dust, he resembles someone cleaning the inside of a nuclear dump.”

“Glasses covered in foot-dust.” That is an image, a punctiliously farcical image, I will not soon forget. But from nuclear foot shavings we move right into a wonderful paragraph describing another kind of absurdity, with a completely different texture and tone, full of humor but also driven by a distinctive sympathy and a very precise and intricate propriety:

In the gym today a man tried to sell me a horse. He showed me a picture of the horse. I can confirm the horse is very pretty. I had to explain to him my garden in London is not big enough for a horse. Like you, I was wondering whether this patient became paralysed after being kicked in the back by said horse. But there is an etiquette when it comes to other patients’ injuries. You have to know them reasonably well before asking about their accidents.

The pivot from the impersonal invasion of his own body by the pedicurist to the kindly, deadpan description of one paralyzed stranger offering to sell another paralyzed man a horse, and the delicacy of manners Kureishi recognizes and adheres to—not to mention the mystery of the horseman’s injury, which Kureishi drops in for good measure—are all done with such seeming ease that the reader may notice only an amusing and satisfying anecdote. But this anecdote, like the book itself, is satisfying because it is informed by a lifetime of writerly skill and observation and thoughtfulness, by private emotion and keen worldliness, all of which must now contend, leaning at a new angle, with a new world and a new life story. We are fortunate that Kureishi has chosen to include us, his readers, in the group of people he knows “reasonably well,” well enough to tell us so much.