Feel Free: Nick Laird & Zadie Smith

good evening everybody welcome to Shakespeare and company I imagine you can all hear me but just really those of you right the back just give me a little wave if you can hear me okay okay thumbs up thank you Wow Sean's alizée eat your heart out we're delighted to welcome Nick Laird and Zadie Smith to Shakespeare and company tonight in the third and final of our collaborations for this season at least with the New York University Creative Writing Program Nicola its fourth book of poems feel free is an extraordinarily rich work that straddles the Atlantic and subject matter and influences resonating with the cadences of his literary forebears Heaney and Whitman yet still feeling resolutely contemporary deeply personal and socially engaged in feel free Nicoletta subtly at ease with poetic conventions and so takes great delight in subverting them well the English language bends with almost embarrassing eagerness to his world I can't recall for example the driver cavalry of Technology and bureaucracy ever being employed to such poetic or effecting ends as Nick lair does in extra life and certainly not between the same covers as the tenderness and quiet devastation one finds in poems like silk cut feel free is a collection whose rhythms and images resonate in the mind long after it's been put down in addition to feel free neck lad is the author of the collections go Giants to a fault which one the older burr poetry prize an on purpose which earned in the Somerset Maugham award and the Jeffrey Faber Memorial Prize he's also the author of the novel's modern gods AG lovers mistake an ugly monkey and the editor alongside Don Patterson of the zoo of the new safety Smith is the author of the novel swing time and W on beauty the autograph man and white teeth as well as the 2010s a collection changing my mind she's a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and was listed as one of granters 20 best young British novelist in 2003 and 2013 white teeth want multiple literary awards including James Tait black Memorial Prize the Whitbread first novel award and the Guardian first book award on beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize him on the orange price of fiction 2006 and W was shortlisted for the Bailey's price of fiction 2013 and swing time was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 this year saw the release of Zadie Smith second collection of essays when choosing her topic she can send that widely covering technology comedy literature libraries and art as well as the three B's brexit bathrooms and Justin Bieber just as in her fiction Zadie Smith writes essays with an irresistible contagious empathy and with a lightness of touch that still somehow almost miraculously leaves an indelible mark upon the readers consciousness spanning the years 2010 to 2017 the book also acts perhaps inadvertently as a valuable record of the ships and looming upheavals in American British and European culture during that time and through the freshness of Zadie Smith reflections in the originality of an insight provides an alternative and augmentative perspective for a civilization apparently determined to eat its own tale one of the pieces also happens to contain perhaps my favorite opening line of any modern essay I met JG Ballard once it was a car crash the title of Zadie Smith's new collection feel free please join me in welcoming nicola and Zadie Smith to Shakespeare in company so this evening we're gonna meander a little bit between the two books between the two collections both Nick and Sadie are going to read for us at different moments during the evening and we're going to perhaps get to the root of how two people come to release two books with the same title Sadie I'd like to begin with you you wrote recently after the passing of Philip Roth about his his dedication to fiction his commitment to fiction it is true that Roth didn't particularly write many essays and he would write occasional introductions was very limited one thing that I think astonishes people with your work is your aptitude for for both forms you seem to turn your hand quite with equally comfortably to writing fiction and to writing essay so I guess first of all I want to know if that is the way it feels to you and also when you are writing essays do you feel that you're writing from the same place as when you're writing fiction from the Tangut same internal space oh yeah it's on high I mean are you're English I'm English we you're trained to write essays I mean I think that that's that's the difference maybe between English writers and American writers I spent three years in college doing nothing but writing long-form tedious literary essays that that was my job and I I did think when I came to New York like for instance a critic like James would in English critic he's a wonderful critic but part of the surprise for an American reader was he come basically straight from college take from graduate work and he was just a professional at making these kind of essays but I think most English students are so for me my essays are just like homework you know I never really got out of that mental state someone sets me an assignment I do it it's homework and it feels good because it's a contained thing it's productive it gets finished none of these things can be said for novels you know they take forever it's not a contained space you can't get marks for them really they're just these weird ambivalent messes so so um NSA it's just a way of feeling like I have a job and in but but in writing an essay cuz I understand what you mean about being sort of been trained in that in Britain but I think one thing that we we're also trying to do is to give the impression that we know what we're talking about right and one thing that I had to unlearn that was striking about reading the essays and feel free because I'd read a lot of them over the years but reading them all all together like that was actually sort of how frequently you insist upon not being an expert in anything not perhaps knowing a great deal and beyond sort of novel writing which in which you feel at home and feeling quite sort of lost we're though with other subjects and I was just wondering that's there's a certain I guess it must be a certain vulnerability to to making your to declaring yourself not to be an expert in that way I mean I the one thing I remember about college we were at the college at the same time there's the whole way to get through those exams was to pretend to do absolute knowledge right that would that the tone you needed in an English degree was the tone from the mount and that's what I got very good at doing but then and never saying I you wrote all essays from this distant objective voice and then when I got to America and realize that everybody was saying I all the time it was a kind of a novelty I thought oh you can say I and it's not illegal it's allowed so you can express this more kind of ambivalent self but I mean Nick knows the the the declaration of ignorance is not a humble brag I literally don't know anything about most things that are fair to say you can ignore me like if the kids ask me does the Sun go around the middle does the earth go like there are there's a huge lacuna of absolute ignorance in every area of my life so one of the things about assignments is that it's a chance to learn something about something for a period and then bore you with it and Nick do you find with let's just clarify the earth goes round the Sun Z there you go good good to know but do you fight do you find as a poet I mean I guess poetry in a way as a form is one of the sort of the best we have perhaps the best literary form we have the kind of writing about that which cannot be written about about so there's somehow sort of capturing capturing the ineffable in in text and eyes what did you do you feel that you write from a sort of a similar position of ignorance let's call it non knowing yeah I think so I don't think you go into a poem knowing where the poem will go and if you do it's probably not going to work you want to be surprised you want the poem to take you somewhere so you know that is a sort of shocking to you in some way I'm not interested in the kind of poetry that sort of affirms what you already know or sort of prejudices or suspicions that you have I'm interested in poetry that does something else so I think the position of not knowing is a strong one I I don't know what your father was like but I never in my life heard my father say I don't know even though there was a lot he didn't know but my mother's like that - yeah yeah we come from those people and so in response it's like it feels incredibly freeing to say I don't know the answer to that I don't know how that works you know so we sort of tried to take a different tack on it yeah mm-hmm I mean it says of you made me think just then if that sort of that famous the consist in Ian's line I've got of that which cannot be spoken about must be passed over in silence yeah I never got that that was right actually um Vik and Stein loved the aphorism but often that sort of the cost of sense and I think the opposite is the tree like in poetry in particular what the entire game is about trying to to get at that which cannot be said so fortunately we have other ways of getting it apart from language we have forms and or ISM and repetitions and and things that conscious sonic webs or a kind of gauzy you know cause of sign so we can induce things like a kind of trance-like state there are different ways that language works with John just to do with the meanings of words I'd like to return to that I directly of the the I the presence masters of writing oneself into one's work I mean actually in your collections ad you write about how in one of the essays you talk about house swing time which you were working all the time is the first time that you have written a novel or perhaps any fiction I think in the in the first person and obviously the the essay form I guess particularly when one is writing as I sort of declared non-expert it will require a lot more of the the I more of the presence but I was just curious as a sort of a as a fiction writer is there a do you find there's a sort of a Zadie Smith persona of Zadie Smith the essayist I mean in reading it as well you write about example your brothers one of whom is a comedian one of whom is a rapper both of those professions almost required the assumption of a personality right everyone in my family both has a persona and a fake name yeah I mean but to me I mean that that may be where I differ with a younger generation that I don't to me it's all rhetoric I don't I consider it a intimate or personal expression you know I don't think of it that way to write an eye is just another kind of rhetorical process then the kind of third person I'm used to using but it doesn't feel closer to me I don't really know what people mean by that to me intimacy is something which happens between people in real life mm-hmm it's not something that happens between writers and readers it really I put a voice there and it stays there but I'm not present you'll never present in language language is its own thing operates independently from you it has its own life that's what it's there for and the idea that I sometimes fight it with my students if you just say I strongly enough for you just say I really really hate it I really really like it that you will be present at the moment of reading you never are all this left is language you don't all you can do is control languages as effectively as you want to create certain effects but you aren't there ever and I'm never there either I'm only there in my life with Nick with my children with my friends that's where I am the page is something else entirely which is similar to so when you're talking about at a moment you're in the book about the sort of the memoirist and the sort of the for what strikes you is sort of a false distinction between between writing memoir or in writing and writing fiction for you sort of seems to come come I just don't understand the distinction I remember doing an event and in New Mexico with canal cigar the Norwegian and and we were talking on stage and as we were talking I realized that people in the audience really believed that this man in his mid-40s remembered putting a beer in the fridge when he was 8 and having a conversation detail conversation with his father about where the beer Waylon and that kind of fascinated me that that was possible to believe something and that's not what writing is about you know it doesn't mean that what he's writing is untrue but it's those kind of memories on aren't really accessible I don't remember what I said to Nick yesterday in any detail and certainly not you know 20 years ago but maybe that's a difference between readers and writers the conception of what's true or not in that sense I know I was wondering Nick does that do you sort of ascribe to the same conception of language that's that same sort of distance I mean I'm some never attempted to write poetry in my life like I don't gets in myself to have a particularly poetic sensibility but I kind of always hold poetry up as something which I don't know which seems to have perhaps and an honesty or a proximity to the writer that perhaps fiction I don't know people who don't read or write poetry always hold it in a very high regard you know people have a kind of schizophrenic attachment to poetry when they die or when they get married or you know they want to turn to it but they're not really there every day yeah where are you my friend and they say you know it's a sort of pinnacle of literature but let's say financially that's not that's not really reflected its I know you're uncorrupted by well I think actually in some way that is interest and we don't we don't have to respond to the market so it does leave you kind of free in that you can literally write what you want so you can write what is interesting to you so I think in that regard there's no responsiveness so in terms of late capitalism poetry is free because there is no market for poetry so that does make it in a way hideous ink rhotic interesting but I don't I don't you know I I think it's amazing poetry and I think it is the pinnacle of literature but that's because I write it I'm not sure that well I'm not sure novelists think that by the way I remember what you said to me yesterday how you do I mean normally say envious of poets that's for sure of a kind of purity of expression but it's so different like I if we're in a bad mood with each other I would say poetry is like the song of the self and prose writing is is social by definition you know it's about other people but all those other people yeah okay and concerning I made like in the introduction when I was speaking about sort of potential for bats like people see sort of poets writing writing in a tradition in a way I wonder if sort of with essayists perhaps it's sort of less so there but there were two names that came to me while reading the collection work - - that you actually mentioned but one particular thought of even before I came to that were john bersia and Seneca and yeah Wow thanks but it struck me the sort of like these - these were two writers who were kind of writing from quite different perspectives I mean Seneca there's very much this sense of giving a lesson right of sort of instruction whereas with john bersia which i say was the sort of the tradition perhaps which you cleave closest to is this sense more to do with sort of opening out and sorry demystification blows just wondering do you have sort of do you consider you have sort of an essay writing for bears sort of people who've influenced what you do I love both those writers but they came late to me I only came to Berger through Jeff Dyer and and the connection there is about close because Jeff is always interested in English writing which isn't middle or upper class which is very very rare in England so birdurer is consistently interesting for that reason because he's open to the idea of a kind of public spirit and a public voice I love birch and I love Seneca but when I was growing up I read hayslett mmm-hmm Wolfe and I can still when I'm writing I'm what I'm often trying to do is delete the wolf from my habits but it's very hard because I read are very young and I can't help it and actually Alice Walker and there's a book of essays by her that my mother had which had this kind of the first time I'd heard that American conversational voice was kind of open and partly confessional and incredibly engaging to me because I guess as a child she was in a mixed race relationship here a mixed-race daughter and I didn't have many examples of that and so on my mother's shelf I took it out and it was a kind of surreptitious way of reading about my mother or so those are the kind of voices I thought about but wolf above all just because I don't know if you're a girl right - in England I was growing up there wasn't there was a kind of 1817 1890 century heroes but Wolfe was the closest this sounds ridiculous but even in the 70 she was the closest I could think of now I'd like to talk a little bit in a what in a moment about the kind of the period of time that these essays and these poems were written but I think it would be good first to hear Nick read a little bit because poetry is a very hard thing to talk about without having a sense of how it goes so if Nick of you if you'd like to go to the lectern or stay yeah it's great thank you so that wasn't me to read you said that I was like cheese okay okay autumn was gonna tell hello I'm embarrassed to read these because every time I come to I asked them not to do that for me it's a lot it's anyway it's nice of them but so I start off with the first poem in the book it's called glitch so I fell over one day and I got up out of bed and I fainted and I had to get stitches in my forehead and whenever I was unconscious I was in this place where everything seemed to be amazing and then I came back to real life and you know it was fine but it wasn't as good a place I've been before so this poem is just about that um yeah I haven't got time you gotta watch for it time listen I read like three years on okay blitz more than ample a deadfall of 1 meter ear D to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet and crash the OS tripping an automated shutdown in this specific case and halting all external workings of the heated moist robot I currently inhabit i am i cold for some time and when my eyes roll in you're there to help me over to our bed as i explained at length I take and I am with the place I'd been had been compelled to leave airlifted I made gesture mid-sentence risen of a sudden like a bubble to the surface a victim snatched and bundled out helplessly from sunlight the usual day and all particulars of my other life flared except the sense that lasts for hours of being wanted somewhere else because you know if you do that for one poem and then you don't do it for all the poems you know I'm gonna feel upset so don't do it at all Adam just give me a list a weird list of some poems here I'm not gonna read these yeah should I read that okay I don't know why it's become a communal decision but I read it's like everyone's opinion was did you write the poems okay all right I read it i reaiiy read the title poem feel free I've read there's so many times in Paris I'm sorry to all the other writers I teach at the NYU you're gonna have to hear it again so you might ask why we both have big site by the same title this year it's a question that I ask a lot so I wrote a poem called feel free that was in The New Yorker about four years ago and city was trying to get a title for her essay collection and then she said I know I've got the perfect title it's feel free and I was like yeah there's a problem with that and then she went on and on about it and for some peace in the house I said all right give me a week and I'll try and get a different title and I went to speak to my editor at Faber and he said don't be ridiculous your book has been called feel free for four years it has to be called feel free all the poems are about forms of freedom and so I went back to City after a week and said I've tried other titles I think I have to you know stick with feel free and either you can't have it and she said oh it's too late it's already gone to the publishers so that was fine [Music] and then she said it's alright we can both we can both have feel free as a title that's like well it's a bit weird yes comes out first and okay I run with it but I'm not massively happy and then and then she published her is in January and the day after she comes to me and says yeah I think you should change the title of your book anyway [Music] feel free I mentioned a Harvey that's my son and Catherine is my daughter in this poem one it's in three parts to deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface with earth I like to do this in a number of ways it's like a challenge it's too much okay to deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface with earth I like to do this in a number of ways I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed the width of my person refigured and I like to hang above the ground thus snorkeling hammocks alcohol hi I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy and to that end I set aside a day a week Shabbat to not act having ceded independence to the sunset I will not be shaving illuminating rooms or raising the temperature of food if occasionally I like to feel the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural tension I walk off as sundy through the high fields of blanket Borg saxifrage a few thin belted Galloway's Rondon Locke Mullin to stand by the form of beauty upheld in a scrubby acre at Craig and EV ski well I do duck and enter under a capstone mapped by rival empires of yellow feather moss and powdery white lichen I like then to stop Christ and press my back on a hoisin of actual rock coldness which lives for a while on the skin and I like when I give you the night feed Harvey how you're concentrating on it fists clenched eyes shut like this is bliss - I like a steady disruption I like it when the solid mantle turns to shingle and water rushes up it over and over in love my white noise machine from Argos is set to crushing weave but I'm not averse to the presence of numerous and minut quanta moving very fast and unison occasions when a light wind undulates the ears of wheat or a hessian sack of pearl barley seed is sliced with a pocketknife and pause I like the way it sounds pattering on stone I like how the starlings over Monte cohere and separate their bodies into one cyclonic Symphony and I like that the hawk of mine catches up their puss pulse call arc I like the excitation passing as a shadow rippled back and how the bag is snatched rolled slack Street falciform mouthing bulb in a pumping heart I like to interface with millions of colored pixels depicting attractive people procreate in on a screen itself dependent on rare metals mined by mud great children who trudged ups bamboo scaffolding above a greyish red lake of belching mud I like how the furnace burning earth and stills and me reflexive gestures of timidity self-pity and deference as I walk across the kind of surfaces grass say or sand unable ever to meet with my eyes the gears of the Sun three I can imagine that my first and fifth marriages will be to the same human a woman the first marriage working well enough that we decide to try again as soon as it's you know mutually convenient I can see that I like the fact were supercooled star matter even if I can't envisage is anything other than warm and bleeding the thing is I can be persuaded fairly easily to initiate immune responses by the safety signals of national anthems cleavage family photographs country lanes large-eyed mammals fireworks the King James Bible Nina Simone singing the twelfth of never cave paintings coffins dolphins dolmens but I like it also when the fat impostor of the canvas gets slashed by a tourist with the claw hammer and a glimpses caught of what you couldn't say entanglement I like spooky action at a distance analogizing some little thing including this long glance across the escalators or how you know this song before you switch the station on when a photon of light meets a half-silvered mirror and splits one meets the superposition of two being twinned and this repeats tickling your back Catherine to get you to sleep I like to lie here with my eyes closed and think about my school friend sizes before choosing one to walk through slowly room by sunlit room all right I know that seem to last forever no no if they seem to last forever for you imagine what it was like for me I'm gonna read two short poems once called father's so the big feel free is sort of a bite restrictions I'm 42 I says Edie and you get to that bit where your children I literally killing you every day and and your parents are dying so you feel very kind of boxed in and and the book is kind of about ways of feeling free to even despite that so in restrictions this poem is called father's and then I'll read one short poem called sucka fathers we set a Saucerful of water on the kitchen sill and check it before breakfast for three days straight until it's all evaporated I think it's more like that but don't you understand that Jesus lives in the sky I think the moon is blow light and the trees plucked off the birthday cake and put back with the batteries and all the country of you divided up into the tiniest of slices but what I've got is microwave popcorn and this ability to whistle every number one single from 1987 onwards there's no use getting all het up I give you a bed for your tiredness I give you some bread I have toasted and buttered I give you a stretch of the earth baked hard where we follow the shiny beetle hole in the shield of himself into noon I can tuck a Clyde under your chin if it's an advert the product is love if it's an element water if it's not consistent that's part of its charm if it's a bomb it's a beautiful dud and I love you she says this much I read one short poem and then I'm gonna happily not stop reading so this is called silk it's about there it's the brand of cigarette that my father smoked for a many is my mother died last year she was only young she was 67 and this is about my father and I kind of in the aftermath I was five and stood beside my dad at a junction somewhere in Dublin when I slipped my hand in his and met the red end of a cigarette but now our hearts are broken we walked on to the brace ID where we can get a proper pint and his voice tears up a bit like the emptiness in the house and we are going home waiting at the turn for the traffic when I find I have to stop my hand from taking his so I said I was gonna finish what I'm gonna read a poem by a good poet frank O'Hara from this wonderful anthology which I'm not in but I did edit so let's finish on a higher note than that one this is called animals my frank O'Hara it's one of my favourite love poems animals have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first-rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth it's no use worrying about time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turn some sharp corners the whole pasture looked like our meal we didn't need speedometers we could manage cocktails out of ice and water I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than know if you were with me oh you were the best of all my days thanks a lot thank you so much I'm very conscious there will be questions from the audience so I won't dominate your time too much longer but one thing I'd like to talk with both of you about is I guess the sort of the period over which these these essays and these poems were written and the sort of the process of then compiling them into a book and I wonder perhaps is a tea for you it was I don't know if it's a different process but I just wonder in the so these essays the I think the earliest is 2010 the latest is certainly the introduction was 2017 I think he wrote it and of course that's something which in Britain and in the United States particularly we think of a period of quite great change a period sort of of great turmoil and I just wonder in the compilation of these essays in reading back over them and deciding which ones to include and perhaps deciding which ones in what order to place them in the book did it did you get a sense that you were putting together almost sort of a time capsule of a particular time in culture but also in your own life I think the thing we felt in our home generally in 2017 was the comical pointlessness of our lives typically of our writing so when I was picking that's what I thought anyway when I was putting the essays together I mean the timing was in some ways random my editor emailed me and said do you know there's enough essays you could have a collection it's not something I usually think about very consciously but then the election happened and you know it's really hard to write read essays about I don't know film about 24 hour clock or they say about Justin Bieber and feel that there's any reason for them you know so I guess I decided to just double down on their pointlessness and and feel that they were record of a different time because it that's immediately what it felt like you know a more naive time on my part and I'm always pretty politically naive but I think I really outdid myself this time around in in not expecting anything that happened and being constantly amazed so in that way it became a little Museum of things I had felt I had time to be interested in like a record of having your eye off boy your eye in various essential places but but but I did mean it when I write in the instruction that you know in an ideal time there is time to consider what Justin Bieber might have in common with Boober and and what a 24-hour film but about a clock might be about that that is still my ideal a life in which those things are possible and those thoughts are possible but I was very aware of compiling a book in a time of emergency and activism when these things could only be held as well maybe one day we'll get back to thinking such non-essential things but yeah that's how I put it together but is there any sense of those wealth of those kind of these so-called non-essential things are in fact the essential things like in some way in in in keeping this kind of variety this this perspective this kind of keeping that in our lives in some way perhaps gonna be the the anecdote I'd like to think that but in my view it's like a Maslow pyramid and and the kind of thing I do is not even on the goddamn pyramid like it's just genuinely unnecessary but it but but it's been meaningful to me I guess I think of myself as a person made out of these kind of experiences I imagine I'm not the only one so I'm talking to those people who've also had the good fortune to be made out of these kind of experiences but yeah it was a strange it's a strange thing to put together um yeah and similarly Nick you you said for example feel free was was published in The New Yorker four years ago there's what there's a poem entitled grenfell in the in the collection which I confess as a reader I I think I was expecting something very different to what I got after after reading the title because it's sort of its its engagement with I mean the the the word Granville has become so so sharply defined in the last you know because of the tragedy of a year or two ago I noticed what do you see it from whether from a personal perspective or as a sort of a political perspective as a sort of a record of a particular time or a sort of transition through a particular time yeah I think when I think old book so that I mean it sort of you can't you can't help it but be that yes oh Grenville is the tour in London that went on fire now more one of the poems in the book is an elegy for it but it kind of it refuses to break into sort of sentimentality it's all written in the bureaucratic language in some way yeah you know the this question about art politics what the worth of it you know it's the old question and I sort of think in the end like all art is a political intervention simply by being it is it's a form of hierarchy you choose what to write about you you you know it that sort of question I feel has been answered in some ways and even providing the kind of complication of the received narrative is itself political I think of that levin asseline about once you actually look someone in the fierce killing is forbidden I think about that again and again in terms of Northern Irish writing like that the whole point is to kind of complicate the narrative so I'm not I don't I don't think of it as ad doesn't lose get bold terms about the pointlessness or but it seems to me incredibly pointed like it seems to me what are we fighting for if not the right to make art like it so right but that grand full poem is a good example like there's an argument for a kind of political art that the point is just to repeat the fact of the monstrosity it was a monstrosity this is a monstrosity but the effect of that is limited it's the same voice you hear in the news as the same voice of journalism which I don't think though that what for example in that Grenville poem and that it's not repeating the monstrosity saying what interests me about it is that it was about the monstrosity itself which is a kind of bureaucratic bureaucratic mindset which allows writer does my language for a convenience and so that houses some distance away the cladding on that building was aesthetically pleasing for the rich people who live around the corner in Notting Hill so the poem is about that kind of Bureau attic - bureaucratic mentality which to me is so much more powerful than the poem which said did you know all these people died wasn't it terrible that that does nothing to me the repetition of a horror it was painful wasn't it painful I'm interested in the structural reasons that happen me that poem is about that right the power is from that I think the only point of going into a poem is when the poem is surprising and just repeating that it's terrible that people die that's not an interesting poem and it makes no change it's just a sentimental ritualization of a complete horror we live in that neighborhood you can get on the train and see this coffin it's absolutely extraordinary and to try and find language that's equal to it I remember when it happened I'm sure like many London riders or horse / and I couldn't I actually sorry couldn't anyway you mentioned a mindset and I I think maybe we'll just leave this more of it as a teaser to the audience before you read to us before we go for questions but you had a story published in The New Yorker just today yeah now more than ever which I think is it's fascinating such an extraordinary story and so pertinent to what we've been talking about tonight because it seems to to bridge the divide almost between essay and fiction I mean there's a certain tone to it particularly when you're talking about a movie and it which feels very essayist tick it's written in in the first person again and yet it's it is a piece of fiction and I say without perhaps giving too much away or dwelling on it because I suspect it's probably more important for people to read it before hearing us talk about it but I was just wondering is that something having now written for example a novel in the first person and having written sort of a great deal of essays and kept up your essay practice for a while do you feel that's there's a direction your your fiction is taking or do you think that was very specific to this particular story it's a it was a lot to do with what I was reading I was reading a lot of baths on me and in fact Joe O'Neill's recent stories in New Yorker in thinking about a voice that was kind of loose and fast enough to talk about an atmosphere it's quite hard to talk about an atmosphere like my brother's a comedian in his job a comedians job is to try and say what people feel but don't articulate right and because he's trying to get lost it's usually done in a fairly broad way so when you go and see a comet your main instigators oh that's what I've always felt but I never had the words and my brother finds words for you and you laugh and it's cathartic it's funny cuz it's true when I'm writing fiction I love comedy but I'm but I'm always aware of not not entirely wanting to give that catharsis like part of comedy is like a lot of thing often feeling comfortable in it and I kind of went to write a story that didn't allow for that but but captured in that atmosphere and I guess when I was reading those 60 stories by both of me which I haven't read since I was 20 I was just struck by how radical that book is right it's just so wild and I tried to think of any of those stories being published in The New Yorker today no offense to New Yorker or you know many Jones like I couldn't see it you know they are so just out there off-base really crazed and incredibly political at the same time and the tone of them it's fundamentally insincere and irresponsible even though he is writing about politics in the fiercest way and that interest of me that there was a way to write politically which didn't take on the the for me fake sincerity of the political voice that was still free and still wild and still funny and I thought how is it possible that he could do this him you know late sixties early seventies and now I feel so constrained so that was really what it was about just thinking how is it possible to get a bit of this freedom back that they that so many rights has had in the late 70s this real wildness but at the same time dealing with easily as serious a political situation in America but still with this freedom I I was really kind of thrilled to reread him so it came out of that as I said quite an extraordinary story and I do recommend you all now once the event is over get it on your phones or by the magazine just really yeah yeah really really quite something but it's a DS this one right here the title is now gonna hurt so before we come to you for your questions which are going to hear as ad read a short extract from from one of her essays in feel free I'm a little shorter than him yeah there you go a lot shorter I'm just going to read a few lines of last escena but called joy I guess this is like as close to my the kind of stuff my brother does that I do it's really just about trying to describe an emotion and so that's what this is joy it might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy but maybe everybody does it's very easily all the time and only I am confused a lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure arrived at by the same Road you simply have to go a little further down the track that has not been my experience and if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life I wouldn't be at all sure I did exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage it's not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day I wonder if this is more than the usual amount it was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable I don't think this is because so many wonderful things happened to me but rather that the small things go a long way I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food for example any old food an egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has a genuine power to turn my day around whatever is put in front of me food wise will usually get a five-star review you'd think that people would like to cook for or eat with me but in fact I'm told it's boring where there's no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort don't say that was delicious my husband warns you say everything's delicious but it was delicious it drives him crazy all day long I can look forward to a pop cool the persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calm for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth and though it's true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that's so readily available especially here in America the pineapple popsicle even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle my other source of daily pleasure is but I wish I had a better way of putting it other people's faces a redheaded girl for the marvelous large nose she probably hates and green eyes and that sunshine complexion composed more freckles than skin or a heavyset grown man smoking a cigarette in the rain with a soggy moustache combined with the surprise the keen eyes snub nose and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self upon leaving the library at the end of the day I will walk a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular cat-eyed teenager in skinny jeans and stack heeled boots a perfectly ordinary gray sweatshirt last night's makeup and its silky Pocahontas wig slightly askew over his afro he was such a down the street Platts flying using the whole of Broadway as his personal catwalk miss thang but off duty I add this for clarity but Nick nods a little impatiently there was no need for the addition my husband is also a professional Gawker the advice one finds in ladies magazines is usually to be fair but there is something in that old chestnut shared interests it does help I like to hear about the Chinese girl he saw in the hall carrying a large medical textbook so beautiful she looked like an illustration for the tall Kenyan in the elevator whose elongated physical elegance reduced every other nearby body to the shrunken gnarly status of a troll usually I will not have seen these people my husband works on the 8th floor of the library I work on the fifth but simply hearing them describe can be almost as much a pleasure as encountering them myself more pleasurable still is when we recreate the walks or gestures of voices or voices of these strangers or whole conversations between two people in the queue for the ATM or two students on a bench near the fountain and then they're all the many things that the dog does and says entirely anthropomorphize and usually offensive which express the universe of things we ourselves cannot do or say to each other or to other people your being the dog our child said recently surprising us she's almost three and all our private languages are losing their privacy and becoming known to her of course we knew she would eventually become fully conscious and that before this happened we would have to give up arguing smoking eating meat using the internet talking about other people's faces and voicing the dog but now the time has come she's fully aware and we find ourselves unable to change stop being the dog she said it's very silly and for the first time in eight years we looked at the dog and were ashamed occasionally the child too is a pleasure though mostly she's a joy which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all but rather that strange admixture of terror pain and delight that I have come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with daily this is a new problem until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life perhaps six and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened out of the fear that the memory of it would demint and destroy everything else thank you thank you so much okay it's over to you if you have a question for for Nik vis-a-vis ad for both of them just raise your hand do try and keep your questions as brief as possible so we can get through as many as possible who would like to kick us off we'll begin with this lady over here we'll just get the microphone teeth-like advice do either of you have for an artist or writer that is trying to express themselves using their own voice microphone yes first use microphone for me the question is always what's your own voice I guess I'm the wrong writer to us that of because I don't I just I just don't feel that way about it you know I couldn't even tell you now what my voice sounds like I'm very aware as a teacher when I have students that they can be heavily influenced by a certain voice I'm sure you have it poetry teaching right so in my case someone like George Saunders is incredibly distinctive voice and I can have years where all my students sound exactly like George but I don't think I've ever had a student who sounded like me I don't feel I have any sound you know maybe we're invisible to ourselves that way but for me my voice it's different for different writers my voice is genuinely just the amalgamation of other books but that's the truth of it other people's books that I've read for a long time added to my sensibility but I would say my sensibilities a tiny proportion of the difference the me is like maybe 2% the rest is books books films for just influence so so my advice is always to be as open as influenced as possible yeah yeah read I'm so boring to say it but read widely and then when you find something you love read deeply and into that person read everything they they wrote and then hope that write enough until you sound like no one but yourself but expect to sound like almost anyone else at the start for many years that's just the nature of the beast I'm afraid right good evening is that you Smith and declared I thought I would never see that sentence but here we are I just wanted to ask your question about the fact that your two books have the same title I just wanted to ask you how important is a title anyway for a book willing to give it up yeah I mean you didn't have to give it up that's fair hi for me it's everything it's unfortunate that Nick is always coming up with titles that I like that's half of the few types on Beatty is named after a poem of his as well so I have previous here well the previous goes way back we were at college together and I remember we haven't talked about this but think about this the other day and like 21 years ago my I got a knock on the door and there he goes oh it's our history of the English language final in like a week and I haven't been to any of the lectures or the classes I need all your notes and essays now I was like oh okay here are all my notes and essays I was thinking about it it's the precedent was set a long time ago and I was just like yeah all right there you go sorry yeah sorry yeah so a title a title is important I think yeah partly because you know I like I like titles that have sort of assonance like um the rattle bag that little o or feel free or seen things a little chime in the title I like a lot I like it it gives something memorable and I like a kind of what's the word epistemological time a kind of little undercutting of sense a revitalization a cliche like you get in feel free or to a fault or whatever the thing is something weird about it I think is sort of important but you know there's a lot of great titles out there that don't do that but but but I thought yours yeah yeah I could have no no but you can make your own thank you not to thing that could happen I would just like to say about this title feel free but which makes me think fancy free and it's very easy but actually if you think of both words feel is absolutely enormous just ask anyone who's been through therapy and free is enormous - so you have two words which have unbelievable meaning I mean in terms of philosophy it cetera huge huge baggage with feel and with free but in fact putting them together one thing's Oh feel free right it's a really good title I know I know dude tell me about it anyone have a question not about the title I think that's key now hi thanks so much for being here and talking with us my name is Menaul Hill I'm a student in the US I was ztu brought up the idea of feeling constricted and I was wondering aside from like doubling down on pointlessness like you did with this latest collection actually cool do the doubling down pointlessness called the collection title um I was wondering I guess in your other works how you kind of confront that constriction and how you get out of that especially with I know you said for you it doesn't feel like it an intimacy for me like I'm a Muslim immigrant and I again that sense of constriction is really challenging and I'm wondering how you navigate that sorry I think if you're right it's the least you can do I grew up on on great myths of writers who really were free who were sexually free who were socially free who had new arrangements canoes who have radical political activists who got on bloody bikes and traveled across America I'm not doing any of that I am living a perfectly normal bourgeois life so given them that's true if you can't be free mentally what the are you doing I don't really see the purpose of being a writer if you can't have some area in which you're free so I always felt like growing up many of a dream of the writing life you're gonna have some of these dreams incredibly romantic and extensive and but I think there is also I mean the one whose most inspiring to me is Ballard Ballard's is you probably know brought up three children after he was widowed in the most boring English suburb it's possible to imagine and wrote these extraordinary books like a man who's entirely free here and I just cling on to that model that it is possible to to live a life which is perhaps it's not fascinating from the outside but in which you're mentally free but the idea that you can't even be that that someone's going to be inside your brain saying don't say that don't think that that's not allowed I can't I can't bear that because that's the freedom that I have so that's that's the freedom you have to take oh yeah hi I'd like to bring the conversation back to voice earlier Zeitung you said that you wanted to forget wolf in terms of essay writing and I was really curious as to why you wanted to do that and also if you have any voices that you really admire author wise well I love wolf but it's the fact remains it's a very English very stylized very upper-class racist yes racist boy I often when I was a kid reading war fight you know as a kid you always thing I love this writer I'm could I have tea with them and if you're a black woman writer the answer is almost always no they don't want to have tea with you at certain points of history they would have lynched you a lot of times they just wouldn't have recognized as a human there's all these kind of knows everywhere and with Woolf that's very evidently the case you know I'm part of my affection for Forster when I was young is I felt in him a kind of openness you know it's sentimental and he's very sentimental about Indian law recipe but he was open and interested in non-white English people where wolf wasn't at all and you can find all over her diaries bits which make me really painful to me but the the genius and the the mixture of emotion and logic that's what I think is so attractive to me in wolf and what I was so such a sucker for but but being in America reading people whose voices are freer or on the other hand someone like Didion much more controlled or like Kathy Acker really wild you see all these other possibilities outside of this kind of drawing room prose so sometimes I just like to get out from under it that is I'm afraid all we've got time for tonight I wouldn't be doing my booksellers duty if I didn't recommend you taking the to fill freeze as a set I would say don't don't believe the the explanation that it was just next title and Zadie stole it from him I think I think they do work very well as companion pieces I certainly perhaps felt encouraged to read them in that way by the title and I think they do they do dialogue with each other and in quite in quite an interesting way you'll be to hear that we have stacks of copies of Nick's feel free and zaydis feel free as well as both of their back lists available here Nick and Sadie will be signing right here please do just bear with us because there is there are a lot of you here so we're going to try and clear the chairs away get the sign in queue organize so please don't all rush the stage at once otherwise stick around have a glass of wine with us and please just join me one more time in saying thank you - Sadie Smith Anton Eclair [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Shakespeare and Company Bookshop

Views: 30,484

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Id: 1dQ3fxFAdDg

Length: 59min 25sec (3565 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018