The storyteller and her life

While accepting the 2014 Moth Award, novelist Zadie Smith described the process of storytelling, in particular, her process of storytelling. As a child, she wrote a story that she then read out to her class. Everyone appreciated it except this one girl, who wouldn't "buy" it. Smith narrates:

"And one day, apropos of nothing at all - she turned to me in the playing fields and said: 'That story isn't true. It's a lie. And I'm going to tell everyone.' And she started to run towards our classrooms. Watching her go, I experienced the ten-year-old version of acute despair. Everything I'd built, all my new friends, indeed, my sense of my own value - all of it seemed dependent on this ridiculous story, and she was threatening to reveal it for what it was: a lie. I had to stop her from reaching that classroom. I ran after her. She was fast - it wasn't easy. But just by the sandpit, I put my leg in front of hers like an Italian footballer and dragged her violently to the ground, where her knee promptly split open and bled all over the concrete. Crying, filthy, she lay defeated on the floor, and the look she gave me I have never forgotten. It was a horrified question: What kind of a person is this?"

The girl did not, finally, "rat on" Smith. Smith goes on: "Part of my anxiety about storytelling is an awareness of that monomaniacal part of me that is willing to wrestle a little girl to the ground in order to preserve the integrity of a story. I know that part of me exists, but I really try to suppress it, because I want to find an accommodation between telling stories about life and living it well."

It's a brilliant essay and astutely discusses the incentives and pulls of storytelling. I have, like most of us, often found myself having this conversation: "I feel this. Should I be feeling this?" Between the two statements lies a gap that every storyteller tries to close. How should I live in order to be true to my craft? What morality should my life, and my writing, follow? How does my experience help my craft? How can I use it to make my writing better? More perniciously, should I choose a particular course of action to see how it improves my writing?

In Iris, the 2001 film about Iris Murdoch, the British writer who died in 1999 of complications brought on by Alzheimer's, there is a tender scene in which John, her husband, frustrated by her unresponsiveness, launches into a tirade. John has cared for Iris with devotion but at this moment, something in him snaps. Iris, as is well-documented, had a series of affairs before and during her marriage to John. This is what John says: "I hate you, Iris, you stupid cow! I bloody loathe you, every bloody inch of you. All your friends are finished with you. I've got you now. Nobody else has you anymore, except your f*****g best friend, Dr. F*****g Alzheimer, with all his f*****g gifts. I've got you now, and I don't want you. I've never known anything about you at all, and now I don't care."

This might seem cruel but in fact it isn't. In the movie thus far, Iris has been shown to be a free spirit who, while professing love to John, has also been remarkably open-minded about her love for other people. Now that she has lost the capacity to understand, John's lament becomes a remarkably diluted complaint but one enough to calm him.

Which brings us back to the relationship between art and life. Murdoch's books are about the conflict between reason and passion. Her protagonists are solitary men, such as Bradley in The Black Prince and Charles in The Sea, The Sea, who spend their lives searching for an adolescent arcadia forever lost. Murdoch does things to them - intimate, intrusive things - that no human should do to another. She makes them scheme and plot; fall in love serially; and wreck themselves and others they come into contact with. All this while, she prevents the reader from shaking off his empathy because her men are, at the end of the day, only fools looking for love.

In the backdrop of her writing, it becomes pertinent to ask if Iris, the author, was trying to tell Iris, the person, how to lead a good life. 

In her speech, Smith mentioned she wants to find an accommodation between storytelling and life. She concludes her speech with this: "In this accommodation, no one and no story can compare with Nick, who is every bit as ruthlessly dedicated to writing as I am, but who has besides a capacity for love and kindness that I know I will spend my lifetime trying to equal. Without you, I would not be telling stories all - I'd just be kicking little girls in the face. The luckiest thing that happened to me - besides becoming a professional storyteller - is marrying one, and as I don't often get a chance to say thank you publicly, I wanted to do so now. Thank you."