A letter to my friend Hanif Kureshi

DEar Hanif,

You and I have been friends and sparring partners on the well-trodden path of the London book, theater and media world for about half a life – more than 40 years. At Faber’s I published much of your early work in the 1980s (particularly The rainbow sign, My beautiful laundromat, The Buddha of Suburbia And The Black Album).

When I heard just after Christmas two years ago that you had a bad fall in Rome and were taken to intensive care with a broken neck and severe paralysis and almost died (there were a lot of rumors, none of the stories about you). were exactly the same), I was stunned and desperate.

When I was finally able to visit you at Stanmore Rehabilitation Center on your return to the UK, you were already a veteran of many months of neurophysiotherapy and had adjusted to the strange new world of disability.

Perhaps I was more concerned on your behalf than around you. As a long-term stroke survivor (1995), I know all about the brain injuries that cause paralysis and the internal and external struggles of recovering. In my own way, I also understood the terrible gravity of your plight as a quadriplegic – in your words, “like a Beckett figure.” At any age, the reminder that we live in our bodies can be a personal apocalypse and a shock that many cannot get over.

But then something amazing happened, something very unique: In extreme cases, I saw and marveled at how, with constant determination, you became even more yourself. You have always been committed to your life and work as a writer, drawing on yourself as an essential source. Now you were writing with greater urgency than ever before, reporting from no man’s land with a kind of perverse joie de vivre.

“I can’t scratch my nose or feed myself… I can only talk, but I can also listen.” From this you concluded that “being paralyzed… is a great way to meet new people. Ironically, you insist that paralysis is “good for creativity” and shows you “how boring my old life was.”

You began by “writing through dictation,” aided by your boys Sachin, Carlo and Kier, initially in a series of essays, a masterpiece of British Stoicism, published on Substack over the last 18 months. You have now edited this extraordinary first draft of your life-changing crisis Smashedan extraordinary volume (as original in its way as another treatise on acute neuroparalysis, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s stroke classic The diving bell and the butterfly).

For me, this unique and undeniable memoir is as profound and moving as Salman Rushdie’s Knife. It is amazing how you and he, who both share so many common experiences of literary London, have found yourself, out of necessity, reconciling your respective fates.

Based on this Substack raw material, Smashed offers the simple clarity that your writing has always had: “On Boxing Day in Rome, after taking a leisurely stroll to the Piazza del Popolo…I fell.” Actually, you had just taken a sip of beer while listening to Mo Salah watching the goal against Aston Villa when you felt “dizzy”.

“Fall” is an Anglo-Saxon word as old as the mountains, deeply rooted in our past and steeped in fear. Just a fall for a child or a fall for a clown, but experience has taught me that the failure of the human body in a fall can be a profound humiliation to a person’s self-confidence.

In these moments, which take place in a kind of slow motion, we are faced with a private drama, from the outside in. You describe feeling “separated from myself” at that moment when you thought you were dying. Paradoxically, your literary voice—ever so irreverent, open, and unfettered—becomes more dominant.

Their innate carefree attitude belies a lot of suffering. In the agonizing first weeks after that disaster, you say you fell victim to a “racing mind” and the agony of hospital pain, suffering a Heimlich maneuver, “anesthesia in the penis” and tubes down your nose and throat.

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For you as a reader, everything has always been a copy – not to mention the cost intimacy (an account of your separation from the mother of your children) will be remembered. In Rome two years ago, after that astonishing catastrophe, you seemed invigorated by the challenge of reporting something new: “People say that when you are about to die, life passes before your eyes, but with me “It wasn’t the past, it was the future that I was thinking about – everything that was stolen from me, all the things that I wanted to do.”

This fall sparked a rare and inspiring resistance. As an artist, you have always been extremely self-confident: unsentimental, argumentative and contrarian, with a keen eye for human comedy. Like Montaigne – a comparison that will make you snort in disbelief – you always knew that “we laugh and cry for the same thing.”

Today you contrast laughter and tears to the extreme. Your critical care and near-death experiences have brought wonderful new examples, like room service, to your hospital bedside. If this were to be your future, you might embrace it with a shout of recognition. Hanif had suffered a severe insult to his sentient self, but “Hanif Kureishi” was in high spirits, in the triumph of spirit over matter.

Maybe this is part of the human condition. In his essay Darwin’s wormsAuthor and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips describes our ability to survive as “a banal and remarkable fact” of life. He concludes: “The sheer stubbornness of the so-called will to live is often cause for celebration.”

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I think you have a version of this instinct: the born artist’s special gift of being at home in the midst of catharsis. Your writing, which now involves the whole family, including your beloved Isabella d’Amico, whom I met and admired during my visits to your newly converted home in Shepherd’s Bush. “A few days ago,” you wrote, “a bomb exploded in my life, but that bomb also destroyed the lives of the people around me. My partner, my children, my friends.”

I have watched your brave and determined new wife play a role in your approach as a helpless patient, tactfully supporting your caregivers while contributing from the sidelines. I think when you write that “all artists are collaborators” you acknowledge the way in which that happens Smashedwith its unique authorship, has become a lifesaver. For the reader, this increases the intensity of the testimony.

Yet, like an anatomist of intimate relationships, you also note that your misfortune “has made everyone a little crazy… There is guilt and anger, and people resent their dependence on one another… My accident was a physical tragedy, but The emotional impact on all of us will be significant.”

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This, in turn, becomes an unsentimental introduction to a fundamental truth: It’s all about you. “I would like to add,” you tell us, “that I really enjoy writing these dispatches from my bed.” At least I had not lost the only thing that was valuable to me – my ability to express myself.”

Luckily, that blessing is never self-pity. Far from it. The “Hanif” revealed in these pages is now the subject of some outrageously self-deprecating jokes. Like an irrepressible Monty Python character, you cheerfully meet your adversities halfway and joyfully report on what it means to be more than half a vegetable. You cheerfully report: “The only good thing you can say about paralysis is that you don’t have to move to fuck and piss.”

From what I know of you from those distant Faber days, behind your witty and exuberant appearance you are a rather shy and in some ways vulnerable man. You have always been fundamentally confident; what you ironically describe as “something like a realist.” For you, this realization was the first decisive step on the way to the comic author’s redux: in the future, nothing would be too trivial as a potential joke.

So when a nurse gives you an enema, you spontaneously report that it’s been a few years since “a medical finger” entered your bottom. You carry on, in a tone consistent with the classic Kureishi I’ve known since the heady days of My beautiful laundromat (1984): “When the nurse turned me around she asked, ‘How long did it take you to write?’ Midnight Children?’ I replied, ‘If I had actually written that, don’t you think I would have gone private?'”

Kind regards, with every prayer for more medical miracles,

Robert

Shattered by Hanif Kureishi is published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton on October 31st