On the last night of the Edinburgh festival, in another small, dark, drunken venue, I waited for my brother to go on. It was about two in the morning. Only comedians were left at the festival; the audiences had all gone home. I feared for him, again-but he did his set, and he killed. He was relaxed. There was nothing riding on his performance; the pause had been fixed. Then a young Australian dude came on and spoke a lot about bottle openers, and he killed, too. Maybe everybody kills at two in the morning. Then the end of the end: one last comedian took the bar stage. This was Andy Zaltzman, a great, tall man with an electrified Einstein hairdo and a cutting, political-satirical act that got its laughs per minute. He set to work, confident, funny, and instantly got heckled, a heckle that was followed by a collective audience intake of breath, for the heckler was Daniel Kitson, a rather shy, whimsical young comedian from Yorkshire who looks like a beardy cross between a fisherman and a geography teacher. Kitson won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2002, at the age of twenty-five, and his gift is for the crafting of exquisite narratives, shows shaped like Alice Munro stories, bathetic and beautiful. A comedy-snob thrill passed through the room. It was a bit like Nick Drake turning up at a James Taylor gig. Kitson good-humoredly heckled Zaltzman, and Zaltzman heckled back. Their ideas went spiraling down nonsensical paths, collided, did battle and separated. Kitson busied himself handing out fliers for “Our joint show, tomorrow!”-a show that couldn’t exist, because the festival was over. We all took one. Zaltzman and Kitson got loose; the jokes were everywhere, with everyone, the whole room becoming comedy. There was a kind of hysteria abroad. I looked over at my brother and could see that he’d got this abdominal pain, too, and we were both doubled over, crying, and I wished Harvey were there, and at the same moment I felt something come free in me.
I have to confess to an earlier comic embellishment: my father is no longer in a Tupperware sandwich box. He was, for a year, but then I bought a pretty Italian art deco vase for him, completely see-through, so I can see through to him. The vase is posh, and not funny like the sandwich box, but I decided that what Harvey didn’t have much of in life he would get in death. In life, he found Britain hard. It was a nation divided by postcodes and accents, schools and last names. The humor of its people helped make it bearable. You don’t have to be funny to live here, but it helps. Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations.
For eighty-one years, my father was up to the same game, though his situation wasn’t so comical; at least, the living of it wasn’t. Listen, I’ll tell you a joke: his mother had been in service, his father worked on the buses; he passed the grammar-school exam, but the cost of the uniform for the secondary school was outside the family’s budget. No, wait, it gets better: at thirteen, he left school to fill the inkwells in a lawyer’s office, to set the fire in the grate. At seventeen, he went to fight in the Second World War. In the fifties, he got married, started a family and, finding that he had a good eye, tried commercial photography. His pictures were good, he set up a little studio, but then his business partner stiffed him in some dark plot of which he would never speak. His marriage ended. And here’s the kicker: in the sixties, he had to start all over again, as a salesman. In the seventies, he married for the second time. A new lot of children arrived. The high point was the late eighties, a senior salesman now at a direct-mail company-selling paper, just like David Brent. Finally, the (lower) middle rung! A maisonette, half a garden, a sweet deal with a local piano teacher who taught Ben and me together, two bums squeezed onto the piano stool. But it didn’t last, and the second marriage didn’t last, and he ended up with little more than he had started with. Listening to my first novel on tape, and hearing the rough arc of his life in the character Archie Jones, he took it well, seeing the parallels but also the difference: “He had better luck than me!” The novel was billed as comic fiction. To Harvey, it sat firmly in the laugh-or-you’ll-cry genre. And when that Fawlty Towers boxed set came back to me as my only inheritance (along with a cardigan, several atlases, and a photograph of Venice), I did a little of both.
REMEMBERING
Seventeen – BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN: THE DIFFICULT GIFTS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort thedisturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’spurpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her ownskull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable partof being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art foris an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more likea sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all sufferalone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fictioncan allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might thenalso more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art-which just means art whose primary aim is to make money-is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to thereality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas“serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is moreapt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access itspleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-productof hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially ayoung one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurableand to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction.That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’tthink. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort oflazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’sreaders both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.