The hills along the coastal road south from Beirut are blemished by ugly highrises and concrete blocks abandoned mid-construction, so as I negotiate the lawlessness of the highway, I prefer to glance at the banana plantations and the blindingly blue sea to my right. On this particular morning, the heat and humidity filled the car despite the air conditioning, and my dress was already creased. As soon as I turned off the coastal road at Damour, I began the climb into the Chouf mountains.

The heat became increasingly dry and the air cleaner as I circled green mountains and pine valleys. Most of the villages along the way are modest but others are clearly prosperous. Deir el Qamar, for example, the seat of local governors from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, is beautifully restored. It was Prince Fakhreddine II of Mount Lebanon who first moved his capital here and grew so powerful that the Ottoman sultan eventually had him killed. Although now in the heartland of the Druze community, historically it had a mixed population of Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Deir el Qamar could stand as a microcosm of the country, with its eighteen different religious sects, many of which have coexisted for centuries. The Chouf has traditionally been inhabited by Druze and Christians, who retreated into this mountainous region for self-protection long ago. The Druze are perhaps the most intriguing of the religious minorities in Lebanon, both because of their closely-guarded spiritual beliefs, which are accessible only to the initiated, and thanks to their long-standing reputation of being close-knit and fierce fighters. Walid Jumblatt, the current Druze leader and head of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), consolidated his power in the Chouf during the 1975-90 civil war and has made his main home here. One of the most politically canny and charismatic politicians in Lebanon today, he represents a fascinating form of feudalism that persists in a modern, democratic country. I was on my way to see him after his recent controversial announcement that he had withdrawn from the pro-West ‘March 14’ governmental alliance.

Rounding the head of the Chouf’s main valley, I passed Beiteddine, Lebanon’s most magnificent palace built by local Prince Bashir II, and a little further up the mountain, I came at last to Moukhtara, the home of Lebanon’s Druze leader. I couldn’t see much from the road, but the entrance to my destination was recognizable by the crowds of cars and people. After parking the car, a muscular guard holding a Kalashnikov let me by with an unexpectedly friendly greeting. Ushered through the gates and security check, I continued up the incline until I found myself at the foot of a towering nineteenth-century palace.

Climbing the old stone stairs to one of the main gates, I became increasingly aware of the palace’s architectural beauty and the stunning mountain views it offered. Parked at the bottom of an elegant double stairway leading to another entrance, probably the residential quarter, was a silver and black Harley Davidson: a sleek, modern machine gleaming brightly in this historical and mountainous haven.

In the main courtyard of the faultlessly restored chateau, locals, visitors and semi-official men stood about. Entering through the first doorway, I emerged into an informal majlis or sitting room, where, surrounded by men and visiting supplicants, I found my host. Tall and skinny, with his extraordinary trademark hairstyle, and wearing jeans and navy blazer, he looked and carried himself more like a Sorbonne professor than a warlord.

At Moukhtara, Walid Jumblatt regularly holds court, opening the doors of his palace to members of his community who come to discuss problems and ask for favours. Jumblatt has been called many things: Lebanon’s political weather vane whose manoeuvering reveals the current state of local, regional or international politics; a well-read figure whose quasi-philosophical political statements inspire flurries of media speculation; a cunning practitioner of realpolitik whose shifting allegiances ensured his survival and the protection of the minority Druze community throughout the Lebanese civil war and since. He is probably all these. But for me, his role as a modern feudal lord explains a lot about his politics.

With his sharp eye, he quickly spotted me and interrupted his consultations to greet and lead me into an anteroom before his private study. Here, pre-colonial maps of the Middle East hang on the walls, alongside a large, framed photograph of his father Kamal Jumblatt, one of the defining figures of twentieth-century Middle Eastern politics. An intellectual politician who studied extensively in Beirut and at the Sorbonne, Jumblatt Senior founded the PSP in 1949, led a major uprising in 1958, united the leftist parties with a secularist, pan-Arab ideology, and supported the Palestinian nationalist movement. In 1977 he was killed by a carbomb – assassinated like his own father before him.

Only two days after I had first spoken to Walid Jumblatt on the telephone, he had declared his withdrawal from the March 14 bloc, a sudden move that arguably spelled its demise, and had spent the previous several days fielding criticism for this move. The March 14 bloc is a Sunni, Christian and Druze alliance that arose after the assassination of the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was responsible for most of Lebanon’s reconstruction since the 1975-91 civil war. The assassination led nearly a quarter of the Lebanese population into the streets on March 14 2005, in the largest peaceful demonstration the country had ever seen. The people demanded an investigation into Hariri’s death and the departure of Syria’s military presence from Lebanon. Washington neo-cons seized on this genuinely hope-filled ‘Cedar Revolution’, and Damascus was pressured into withdrawing its troops, which had been present in Lebanon since 1976. Jumblatt was at the forefront of the movement.

Hezbollah, which represents the majority of the Shi’a population and is supported by Syria and Iran, together with its Christian allies led by Michel Aoun, became the official Opposition to the pro-West March 14 government bloc. The neo-cons, unsurprisingly, proved themselves to be treacherous allies when they gave Israel the green light to bomb Lebanon in July 2006, hoping to get rid of Hezbollah once and for all. But the near-continuous bombing that lasted 34 days led to the destruction of the country’s infrastructure (airport, roads, bridges, power station), environmental disasters and over a thousand civilian deaths. Hezbollah, meanwhile, only gained more supporters, mostly from among the Shi’a population who were most affected by the bombing.

Many admit that the March 14 government was disappointing. The Hezbollah-Israel war revealed its weakness. At the end of 2006, after a Shi’a cabinet walk-out over the Hariri tribunal, it was unable to appoint a president for eighteen months. The government’s limitations were again exposed when it tried to dismantle the Oppositions’ telecommunications network, triggering an attempted coup. Syria’s withdrawal had little impact on the everyday workings of Lebanese politics, however, which remained riddled by sectarian antagonisms, corruption and partisan allegiances to outside powers.

Despite differences of opinion on a number of issues within the March 14 bloc, Jumblatt’s announcement was nevertheless a shock. At Moukhtara, I suggested to him that he had dealt the alliance a fatal blow. His answer was succinct: ‘The demands of 14 March are accomplished. We have the mandate for the withdrawal of the Syrians and the Syrians got out. We’ve asked for a tribunal, we’ve got a tribunal. What else? Independence, liberty, freedom… And then what?’

I pressed him on the timing of his withdrawal – only two months after March 14 won the election. He cited the need for the protection by a greater Arab community, speaking of ‘good relations with Syria’ and ‘our cousins and relatives in Syria’, and emphasizing an Arab identity: ‘I feel much more secure when I stick to my Arabness. I am Druze but without Arabism there is no protection.’

This was a 180-degree turn from the man who had spoken out so daringly against Syria, and who had publically stated his fear that he might be assassinated – an understandable fear given his father’s fate and the contemporary wave of assassinations of prominent figures who had criticized Syria.

Of course, in earlier years and during much of the civil war, Jumblatt was Syria’s ally. And now, the Bush administration has gone and a thaw is taking place between Syria and the US. Jumblatt is at heart a pragmatist and seems to be responding to wider international changes as well as to local shifts. But he affirmed only that his main concern was how to solve ‘the biggest problem and injustice in the twentieth and twenty-first century, which is Palestine’. He reiterated his pro-Palestinian position and reclaimed his Arab identity, brushing off his previous stance as a mistake: ‘At one time I committed the error of going to the neo-conservatives […] Now I’m back to my origins, hamdulilah (thank God).’

It’s hard to trust the sincerity of this return to his leftist roots or, for that matter, of his earlier flirtation with the neo-cons. I put it to him that during his time as a March 14 leader, he had let down the Druze of Syria, who, as a vulnerable minority, may have been endangered by his provocative statements against Syria. He did not attempt to justify himself and, with a sigh, simply admitted that he had.

Perhaps sincerity is irrelevant for any Lebanese politician, let alone one as slippery as Jumblatt, since history so often seems to repeat itself in Lebanon: Israeli invasions, Syrian interventions, regional and international attempts to influence local actors, and a confessional political system that sees sons succeed fathers as leaders of the same, slightly updated political parties. Time curiously stands still in the midst of apparently dramatic changes, and it is perhaps Jumblatt’s philosophical bent, combined with the unflinching loyalty he receives from his community that make him a continued and potent actor on the political scene. In reality, many Druze were quietly horrified at his withdrawal from March 14, but the fact that they continued to support him ensured his lasting power and, in turn, their own protection.

Jumblatt certainly enjoys an idiosyncratically strong loyalty from his community. He is known as Walid ‘Beyk’, a title (originally military) conferred on the Jumblatts centuries ago. Among the people surrounding Jumblatt in Moukhtara during my visit, there was a woman with a baby in her arms, a foreign woman and her Lebanese husband, and several men waiting patiently to gain the leader’s ear. The supplicants come to ask for help with legal issues or land conflicts with neighbours, or to make requests on behalf of their children, who may need a scholarship or help in becoming officers in the army.

They sit or stand informally, but respectfully, in the reception room, where cushion-covered seating runs along all four walls, and in the outer courtyard, where they can lean against a traditional well or under an ancient Byzantine mosaic on the wall. The semi-official men who seemed to hang about aimlessly, talking in low tones, are modern ‘courtiers’ in charge of the various Druze educational and social institutions, so that particular requests may be followed up immediately. Most were wearing casual suits and shirts without ties, but a few had on the traditional Druze sherwal (baggy black trousers) and white skullcap.

Not all those who make the trip to Moukhtara are Druze, since there are many Christians and some Sunni and Shi’a Muslims who live among Druze communities and whose interests are also partly represented by Jumblatt. Full of nervous energy, the Beyk doesn’t sit still for very long and is given to checking his mobile phone while people whisper their requests. He makes impatient noises or raises his voice when someone comes along with a banal problem, such as a collapsed garden wall. A white hunting dog dozes by his side throughout these consultations and then follows him from room to room.

This cosy feudalism initially seems at odds with Jumblatt’s pragmatic politics, but it is even more strange when one considers his modern, cosmopolitan outlook. For instance, he founded the annual international Beiteddine music festival during the civil war, and his wife Noura is a keen patron of the arts. A wine enthusiast, he is the majority shareholder in Chateau Kefraya, Lebanon’s second largest winery, and he adores Harley Davidsons. He is also said to enjoy a party. Most significantly, as president of the Chouf Cedar Reserve committee, Jumblatt has helped save the Lebanese cedar tree and countless endangered animal and plant species, and has created the largest nature reserve in the country. His concern for the environment has spread throughout the area: on my drive up to Moukhtara, I was struck by the spotlessness of the landscape. There is no litter here as there is all along the coastal road, and the detritus of building developments that seem to be ubiquitous in the country are a distant memory.

And yet, the feudalism is not really so odd. It is a logical extension of the Lebanese confessional system that distributes political positions according to sect and therefore permits the persistence of a traditional feudalism in the modern form of political clientelism. The Prime Minister must be Sunni, the President a Maronite Christian, the Speaker of the House a Shi’a Muslim, and so on, more or less, among the eighteen official sects.

Druzism is a philosophical offshoot of Shi’a Islam (Ismailism, to be precise) and is influenced by Sufism. Its esoteric nature kept it secret from all but the initiated, partly for the protection of the community. I asked Sami Makarem, professor of Arabic Literature, Islamic Thought and Sufism at the American University of Beirut, to explain the strong feudal allegiance the Druze continue to offer their leader. For Makarem, the Druze are historically a military people: they descend from the Tanukhids, who came from the Aleppo region to Lebanon in 1017 because the Abbasid authority wanted them to defend the Lebanese coast from the Byzantines. The Tanukhids embraced Ismaili Shi’ism and then Druzism, and continued to defend the Lebanese coast and Beqaa valley for the following five centuries under the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties. Their military past explains the way in which their leader became both a military and a political figure. The importance of land accompanies this type of military loyalty, particularly as the Druze were granted feudal fiefdoms by the caliphates and local empires they defended. Interestingly, the Druze are today the only Arabs allowed to join the Israeli army, part of Israel’s ‘divide and rule’ policy over the Palestinian population. But in most of the region, the Druze have been strongly associated with anti-colonialism and nationalism.

Jumblatt’s current political about-turns may be viewed cynically, but they are effective because of his community’s support, and the return to his leftist roots is not so much ideological as simply a question of security and self-protection. ‘I feel safer as part of a bigger group’, he says. He believes that there used to be ‘a more effective left’ in the Middle East during his father’s era, but that now, in the age of globalization, there is no alternative but to be pragmatic.

So what is Jumblatt confronting now? His own explanation that March 14 achieved what it had set out to do is certainly true. The alliance did not, as was hoped, lead to a more profound unification of the nation. There remained differences in opinion among the allies, and the division between March 14 and the opposition was further cemented. This was apparent even after March 14’s election victory when it took months to form a cabinet. Jumblatt has local concerns, to be sure, including jockeying for important cabinet seats and achieving neutrality in any potential Sunni-Shi’a rift within Lebanon. But his manoeuvering is also a response to the wider regional and international situation, which he was the first to understand. With the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the stated intention to prevent further Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, the Obama administration at least appears to have a different approach towards the Middle East. It is also bringing Syria into the international fold, loosening her strategic alliance with Iran. Recent meetings between Saudi king Abdullah and Syrian president Assad signal a healing of their rift and a possible regional configuration that sees a Saudi-Syria understanding to counterbalance Iran. Jumblatt, in response, is reconfiguring his own position in order to ensure his survival in the new world order.

For Jumblatt, ‘there is no Lebanese nation’: for as long as the ‘old-fashioned, outdated’ sectarian system remains in place, he believes, people will function in a sectarian and feudal fashion. So, for the time being, he can only be pragmatic, remain at the head of his community, and attend to situations as they arise. It is a grim worldview, but one that is at least more plausible than either the overblown rhetoric of the religious parties or the wishful idea that Lebanon can rely on the West to sort things out. Intelligent, unpredictable, occasionally ruthless, Jumblatt shows that he is still very much in the game.

He also continues to maintain a balancing act. While contending to be a player in national politics, he must simultaneously represent the Druze community effectively enough to preserve his position as their leader, and also respond to the politics of external powers who are always nearby and ready to meddle in a small, weak Lebanon. Although many condemned his abandonment of March 14, many others, certain at least of his survival instinct, wondered what he knew or foresaw that they didn’t.

The conclusion of an essay by journalist and author Jeremy Seabrook, in which he pictures his nineteenth-century self that would have been; he also traces the end of the industrial era and the role he fears he played in it.

To read Part I, click here.

Part II

In the mid-nineteenth century I would have been a ranting cobbler-preacher, attracting a small crowd of devout believers to some extreme dissenting sect in a cold red-brick chapel in a slum area abandoned even by the Primitive Methodists. I would have worked at home, collecting the uppers from shop, and working at a bench in the kitchen of rented rooms. I would despise the work I was doing – bespoke dancing pumps for the daughters of a local manufacturer to waltz their way through the night in the new crystal conservatory their father had constructed as an annexe to his substantial villa on the edge of town. Unlike my fellow workers – who usually earned their week’s wage by working ceaselessly for three days and nights and then going on the booze for the rest of the week – my weekly labour finished, I would open my Bible or my copy of Bunyan, read by a farthing rushlight and lose myself in visions of the better world that was, and was not, this one.

My wife would disturb me in the early hours, wondering why I had not come to bed, and express her bitterness about the vagrancy of my mind, even though I never strayed physically far from the draughty tenement we occupied in Alliston gardens – one of the most shameful addresses in town, a sombre four-storey of rented rooms that still stood in the centre of Northampton until the 1960s. She would have reproached me for my lack of ambition, and worse, for failing to provide a half-decent life for my family. Goaded, I would, for a time at least, have abandoned my books and dedicated myself to work, so that we could afford one of the little houses being built on the eastern limit of town, called Upper Thrift Street. While I railed against the curse of riches and her perverse desire to return to the fleshpots of Egypt, she would tartly point out that she had seen nothing but the wilderness and had never known what it meant to eat bread to the full.

I would move the family into the new house, with its adjacent workshop; and in our new prosperity, I would have taken on an apprentice; a young man I had ‘rescued’ from the ‘burrows’, those courts and lanes of slum housing behind the town centre. Ostensibly to compensate for the absence of a son, the interest I took in him would have been far from fatherly, although it is unlikely that I would ever have become conscious of the nature of my attraction to him. He would have moved into the house as a lodger. I would have vested my hopes and dreams in him, and he, a not particularly skilled or conscientious boy, would have infuriated and enchanted me; I would indulge his idleness and lack of ambition, tolerate anything; until the day when I discovered, to the shame and dishonour of the family, my daughter was pregnant. Embittered and angry – and perhaps unconsciously jealous – I would have dismissed him from the house and from our lives. But that would not be the last of him. As soon as the child was born, I heard his voice in its crying and laughter; and this would accompany me to my grave. Through all this, I would have remained unaware of the ambiguity of my sexuality, buried, as it was, beneath radical proprieties of a world deaf to my thin and useless fulminations.

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This is the first part of an essay of non-fiction by author and journalist Jeremy Seabrook, the conclusion of which will be published here tomorrow. In Part I, we are transported back by one generation to visit the life the author would have lived, had he been born at a different time. Tomorrow, he takes us back into the nineteenth century, and his days as a ‘ranting cobbler-preacher’.

Part I

My mother’s cry rang in my ears from infancy. ‘No child of mine is going into a shoe factory.’ Similar heroics were heard throughout the land then, as parents declared their children ‘too good’ for the mill, the pit or the factory; such brave resolutions coincided with the closure of those sites of labour. My mother was no visionary, but she sensed that the employment from which she was preserving me was doomed. She wanted to take credit for the approaching extinction of the staple industry of our town, as though she had personally closed down the factories, solely to keep her children out of them.

A generation earlier, the main influence on my life would have been those same factories, which used to stand, squat, of blood-red brick, on almost every street corner: dusty windows, the glass of which was frosted, not to prevent passers-by from looking in, but to stop the attention of distracted employees from wandering outwards. Inside, heavy black machinery was served by the work of clickers, who cut the soles and uppers, skivers, makers, finishers, eyeletters; while fragments of discarded leather accumulated on the floor, in which insects and mice made their nests.

Life was marked by the regimented tramp of boots on the pavement in the early morning and again in the green winter dusk, the tang of leather that left its taste in the air, and even entered into food and drink. The work I would never do was tantalizing; and although I had no inclination to do it, it held a sombre seductive power, since in it I could clearly perceive the individual I was spared from becoming. If my mother conceived such a hatred for boot-factories, this was doubtless because her ten surviving siblings had been claimed by them; although this did not prevent them, for the most part, from becoming decent women and men, people who led lives of exemplary honesty and frugality.

My own early work consisted largely in recording the last gasp of their recollections of lives of labour. For years I haunted the slum houses where they had lived, watched as unfit buildings were razed; I re-animated the plain interiors, sketchy amenities and absent comforts with the obdurate, stingy and punishingly self-righteous boot and shoe workers. Surly, parochial and suspicious, they distrusted all orthodoxies. Three times they returned Charles Bradlaugh to parliament after he was expelled for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance on the New Testament; not because they were atheists, but because they thought his representation of them had nothing to do with his religious beliefs or lack of them.

The town of Northampton was a monument to their plain, conserving spirit. Some houses remained almost unaltered from the time of their construction, with little concession to ease or homeliness. Wooden chairs stood around the scrubbed table, a home-made rag-rug on the lino in front of the hearth, a chenille door-hanging danced in the draughts. A single brass faucet, discoloured by verdigris, sent a splashy cone of water into a shallow plaster sink. Coconut matting covered the red flags of the kitchen floor. In the sitting-room, a hard whipcord sofa, greasy from the pressure of arthritic hands; coal-smoke puthered into the room whenever the wind was in the wrong direction. The mantelpiece had a faintly ceremonial function: a clock, a wedding photograph, some brass candlesticks – emblems of a sacred domesticity. The bedrooms, too: austere penitential places, where the inside windowpane blossomed with frost in winter, and the ear of an enamel chamber-pot protruded from beneath beds high and hard, punitive altars for the sacrifice of human sexuality.

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Decaying grandeur has a strange allure. Those imperious structures that once represented wealth and power, crumbled out of context by man’s destruction and nature’s ruthless erosion. Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s photographs of the dystopian Ponte City in Johannesburg intrigue for exactly this reason. To look at their images is to enter a compelling tale, narrated by the reassuring voice of the local griot. They lead you with authority through an unfamiliar and intimidating environment.

Subotzky’s work in particular is profoundly sensitive for one so young. The stories are preserved with an immediacy that grips – but is in no way gratuitous. Like any good story-teller his presence is unobtrusive, allowing the viewer to absorb the atmosphere. Anyone with even a hint of claustrophobia will squirm at the very thought of the conditions we see in ‘Die Vier Hoeke’, Subotzky’s photographs of Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison in Cape Town. The Ponte City photo essay speaks in a similar voice. As with the prison series, it stresses the space that controls the movements and choices of the individual – recalling Michel Foucault’s meditations on space, power and control.

Claustrophobia is a recurring theme in Subotzky’s work, but what is arresting about this collection of images, particularly the series of window shots, is the individuality that defiantly peeks through a coarse thicket of decay. It is as though watercolour prints of a city skyline have been ‘crowdsourced’, as each canvas is individually customised. The composition of these photographs depicts each window as a collage. Layers of idiosyncratic objects are framed with ghostly silhouettes, creating images of contrast and solemn beauty.

Subotzky is unremitting in his documentation of an underexposed South Africa, but the Ponte City series also displays an intimacy that contrasts vividly with the building’s bleak exterior. See the domestic scenes in which the lively colour of a young girl’s dress illustrates warmth and a touching dynamic among a family making home in quarters designed for one. Or gaze as the bathing couple seemingly at ease with sharing such an intimate moment with the world. Irony echoes in the vacant hallways of this building, whose seductive marketing material sells an experience with the exhortation ‘LIVE YOUR LIFE’.

Although Ponte City was conceived as a monument to aspiration in a country trying to embrace universal capitalism, it ultimately represents South Africa’s failure to develop an infrastructure that could contain the inevitable fallout from apartheid and its resulting class structure. If this summer’s World Cup is even a tenth of the spectacle witnessed at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, a cloying fairytale of smiles and colour will be the prevailing image. We need artists like Subotzky and Waterhouse who choose to expose the reality beneath the sugar-coated façade.

To see the photo essay ‘Ponte City’, you can buy Granta 109 in our online shop.

Michael Salu is artistic director at Granta.

First you notice the dogs. In all other ways Freetown is a West African city like any other, of red dust and raised cries, forty-degree heat and a year neatly segmented into two – hot and dry, hot and wet.

Today water tips from the sky. Beneath the canopy of a local store three street dogs and a man holding a briefcase stand and contemplate the rain. Another dog shelters beneath the umbrella of a cigarette seller. A fifth follows a woman across the street, literally dogging her footsteps, using her as a beacon to navigate the traffic and the floodwater.

In the dry season the kings of the city are the dogs. They weave through the crowds, lie in the roadside shade watching through slitted eyes, they circle and squabble, unite in the occasional frenzied dash. For the most part the people and the dogs exist on separate planes. The dogs ignore the people, who likewise step around and over them. On the road the drivers steer around reclining animals. This city has more street dogs than any I have known.

It is eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Torrents of water sluice off the hills and rush down the cross streets. The force of the rain has swept the traffic off the road, and now threatens the battered Peugeot ahead of me. Inside his clinic Dr Jalloh has placed his plans on hold, waits for me in his tiny surgery surrounded by dogs, waits for the rain to stop.The whole city waits for the rain to stop.

It was the dry season of 2004 and I was home working on a novel when I first met Gudush Jalloh. My friend Rosa called, concerned that her dog, at that moment whelping, was in trouble. The dog in question was a snappish bitch, a street rescue by the name of Corre whom I had so far failed to befriend. I was in that selfish space of writers and the interruption was unwelcome. Could she not call a vet? She told me the vet was upcountry. Call another vet? There was no other vet. Someone who knows about dogs, then? Yes, she replied, and waited for my answer.

I know a bit about dogs. I do not pretend to know a great deal. I enjoy the company of dogs and keep them, but know nothing of whelping bitches. I consider myself something less than an expert. An interested amateur.

Eyes closed, half in, half out of this world, the puppy looked dead. I had no idea what to do so I telephoned my husband in South East London, who in turn called our vet and relayed his instructions via mobile phone and satellite to reach us six thousand miles away, at a pound a minute. Try to free the pup’s shoulders. Olive oil might help. Corre, by now docile in her distress, allowed me to try to hook my forefingers under the puppy’s forelegs. I tried. Nothing worked: not the olive oil, the bitch’s efforts, or my own fumblings. At last we obtained the home number of the local vet. He’d travelled overnight from the Provinces, been asleep less than an hour and his telephone manner displayed the lagged thinking of the abruptly awoken. He told me he had sent his car away. I offered to collect him.

Dr Jalloh is the only vet in the country. No, that is not quite true. There are three government vets, employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. They wear rubber boots, but mostly deal with deal with figures, with capacities, stock and yields. There are also a small number of charlatans. Gudush Jalloh is the only qualified vet in private practice. The single person in the country to whom you might bring your sick dog, cat, monkey or goat.

The pup had never, not for an instant, known life. The body cavity was a huge fluid-filled sac, devoid of vital organs. By now we had moved Corre to the surgery and Dr Jalloh prodded at the dead puppy with a long pair of tweezers, declared this the second instance of such abnormality he had seen. Rosa turned away. I, whose paper-mask fantasies had never found expression, leaned in.A second pup suffered the same deformity. Another was stillborn. Four survived.

That first meeting made a deep impression upon me. In the years that followed I met Gudush Jalloh on one more occasion which was significant, and then socially perhaps five or six times more. At one point somebody mentioned his work with the street dogs, in which they thought I might be interested.

This is the country where I grew up. It was the 1970s. Here, as a child, I gathered, rescued, raised and lost more dogs than I can now recall. I have some of their names: Jack. Jim. Tigger. Apollo. Pandora. Bingo. KaiKai. Jupiter. Pluto. The turnover was so fast there are many more I have forgotten. My dogs died of disease, of being hit by cars, of falling off balconies, generally of life expectancy in the Third World. Sometimes they were lost or stolen. When I was nine Apollo disappeared. For months I scanned the streets during every car journey. One day, a long way from home, on the other side of the city, I saw Apollo. The driver stopped the car. We opened the back door, pulled Apollo inside and drove off at speed. I never found out who had taken him or why; he had not been mistreated. Nor do I know whether we were seen as we effected his rescue. I imagine whatever witnesses there were remained silent for fear of being disbelieved.

The third child and the youngest, I passed my earliest years as the beneficiary of what the experts call benign neglect. When I was three my father became active in politics. He was detained several times, once for three years. Amnesty named him a Prisoner of Conscience. My stepmother kept the family together. I collected dogs. My parents, if they noticed, did not pass comment, even when the household total achieved a high score of six. I read White Fang and Peter Pan and longed for a wolf and a dog which slept at the foot of my bed. Ours were strictly yard dogs.

Other animals passed through my life: a mongoose, a green parrot, a fawn. They interested me, fed my ambition to become a vet, but I did not love them. I loved only the dogs for reasons too complicated to elaborate upon, and yet also painfully obvious. In a time of lies, I found honesty and loyalty among the dogs. And if the memory of particular dogs has grown unreliable, then the memory of what they offered me in that time has become indelible: a retreat from the mutability of the human world, a place of safety.

There were a lot more vets back in those days. In the intervening thirty odd years they have all gone: pursuing opportunities overseas, fleeing a civil war that lasted ten years and killed countless and uncounted numbers of us.

We arrive late. It is nine o’clock. Outside the school building people and dogs wait beneath a steady drizzle. The dogs are collarless, held on lengths of electric cable, nylon rope or string. A woman in pink holds on to a brown and white dog. A boy cradles a furious pup. A man arrives with a large black and white dog, which leaps and twists at the end of a long rope. Another man leads his dog on its hind legs, holding on to the front paws, like a dancing bear. Inside the schoolroom a line of people and dogs wait upon on a bench and impassively watch a technician gently shave the balls of a sedated dog.

This is a street clinic. Bring a dog here and you can have it sterilized for free. On other days Jalloh’s team rounds up dogs from the streets, puts them in a wagon and takes them to the clinic to be vaccinated and neutered. The first time they tried to remove dogs local people chased them, demanding to know why the dogs were being taken and allowing them to leave only after the team promised the dogs’ return.

‘In Thailand,’ Dr Jalloh told me from the wheel of his Land Cruiser on the drive across town, ‘the authorities have a “keep your dog at homeday”. Everybody has to bring their dogs inside. Afterwards they go through the streets and shoot any dog they see.’ A few years ago the Freetown municipal authorities decided upon a similar cull of the street dogs. Dr Jalloh elected himself the dogs’ representative and spoke during a public meeting. Though the odds were stacked against him, he argued that most of the dogs weren’t stray but belonged to the community, that they – the dogs – performed a function and a service by offering security and protection. The mayoral dignitaries told Jalloh the dogs were dirty. Jalloh retorted that the opposite was true; their scavenging kept the streets clear of rotting rubbish. He had a point. There had been no systemized rubbish collection in the city for decades. The authorities backed down; the dogs were reprieved. ‘They say we are crazy...’he paused to answer his phone. The ring tone was a puppy’s whine. They said he was crazy. And that was just the beginning.

In 1952 Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring in which he set out the terms of ‘the Covenant’. The Covenant describes the relationship between human and canine, its beginnings and the stone upon which it is founded. A pack of jackals followed Stone-Age man’s hunting expeditions and surrounded his settlements, were tolerated, accepted and ultimately encouraged. Firstly for the warning note they sounded at the advance of predators, secondly for their ability to track game. The jackals, who initially followed the hunters in the hope of scraps and entrails, began to take the initiative, running before instead of behind the hunter, bringing to bay larger animals than they would be able to hunt without assistance. And so the covenant was created, an interdependent exchange of services.

This is how, fifty years earlier, Rudyard Kipling described the origin of the Covenant in ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’: ‘When the Man waked up he said, “What is Wild Dog doing here?” And the Woman said, “His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always. Take him with you when you go hunting.”’

For Lorenz, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, the contract between human and animal was: ‘signed...without obligation.’ Jalloh, closer to Kipling than to Lorenz, would disagree. There is an obligation, it is unequivocal and one-sided. Having brought the jackal into his sphere, having bred the wildness from him – man owes dog.

Four, then five, then six freshly neutered and comatose dogs lie in a neat row, the paw of one lies across another, strange babies sharing a bed. An assistant tattoos the ear of each dog. There is a general air of understated chaos. Dogs roam the room. Outside a circle of children gather to watch as recently anaesthetized dogs stagger, circle and crash to the ground. The technician with the tattoo machine clips the ear of a reclining dog which, far from being sedated, is merely sleeping. The astounded animal jumps to its feet and stalks huffily away. Elsewhere a technician attempts to inject a dog. It tries to bite him. The owner’s efforts to hold onto his dog are so ineffective that the technician suggests the dog doesn’t belong to him. The man insists otherwise. The waiting crowd wades in. He’s afraid of you,’ the woman in the pink top points out. A small boy steps forward and takes the animal. To me Jalloh says: ‘Some people think they are the owners, but they are only the proxy owner. Usually the children are the true owners of the dog.’

Sitting on the plane halfway across the Sahara two days before, I had suddenly remembered my rabies vaccination. I pulled out my yellow international health certificate, relieved to find there was month left before it expired. ‘Ah,’ says Jalloh, cheerfully, ‘but it is an inexact science.’ He tries to keep himself inoculated, but the vaccine is rarely available in the Sierra Leone. The staff wear doubled gloves. They have two or three muzzles in the surgery. That’s the sum of it.

On our way back to the surgery we stop at the government veterinarian offices, which Jalloh is keen to show me. He jumps from the vehicle and leads me inside, introduces me to three men dressed in overalls and wellington boots. The room is virtually empty of furniture and equipment. Dusty glass cabinets house aging texts. The sole piece of equipment appears to be an old freezer. In one of the cabinets I find an elegant wooden box.

‘Post-mortem kit,’ says Jalloh. ‘It will be empty.’ I open it. Nothing, save the abandoned chrysalis of a moth.

As a child I’d owned a dog that overnight turned suddenly affectionate. Soon afterwards his hips locked. I carried him to the vet, walked him up and down to demonstrate the strange gait. The vet instructed me to bring him back if anything changed. The dog wandered and late one evening returned, his hind quarters split open to the bone by an axe wound. Through the night I tended him, feeding him raw egg with my fingers and following him around with a bowl of water, from which the wretched animal heaved itself away time and time again. I remember the episode now and recount it for Jalloh. The dog was rabid. I worked it out for myself later. The vet had refused to admit it.

‘“Craze dog” they call it,” says Jalloh. And tells an everyday story of his own. Some months ago, a woman brought three dogs to him for a regular check up. In one Jalloh saw the telltale paralysis of the lower jaw. By the time the owner returned Jalloh had destroyed all three. He had no choice. It happens sometimes. In the slums the cry goes up at the sight of a drooling dog. Occasionally somebody will call him, but often by the time he gets there the dog is dead. Now that frustrates him, for diagnosis on a dead animal requires a post mortem of the brain. If the dog were alive he could gather a sample of blood. Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.

Gudush Jalloh was born in Kono, Yengema, in the Camara Chiefdom. His parents were Fula Muslims, the nomadic cattle owners of West Africa who drive their herds through Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Nigeria. By the time Gudush was born in 1959, the first son of the first wife and eldest of twenty-two, the family had abandoned their pastoralist ways. Still, the knowledge of his heritage interested the young Jalloh. His early ambition was to own a herd. His mother reared chickens and the occasional goat, dogs played an early role in his life. When Gudush was fifteen his father arranged a marriage to a local girl, told his son it was time to leave school and join the family business as petty traders of gasoline. Gudush refused either to marry or to leave school, finished his education with the help of a scholarship and a former teacher who employed him as a part-time lab assistant. He began to apply for government scholarships to read engineering overseas. In 1978, he was one of a dozen who won scholarships to Hungary, but then, on the eve of travel, the scholarships were withdrawn and awarded to candidates with government connections. A year later he won a scholarship to Moscow. The African students arrived in Rostov in late September, without a word of Russian between them. They worried about how to make their stipends last, how to cook potatoes. Some time during the year-long induction, Jalloh was persuaded by a colleague to switch courses and join him at the Moscow Veterinary Academy. He returned to Sierra Leone in the mid-1980s, the rift with his father healed by the prestige of having been chosen to study abroad. Jalloh tells me his father didn’t mind that he had become a vet; he didn’t know what a vet was. Later people said: ‘So your son spent six years in Russia just to treat dogs?’

That year, the same year Jalloh returned, his younger brother, the second son of his father’s third wife, was bitten by a dog. By the time Jalloh heard the news in Freetown, the boy had died of rabies.

Thursday. We are standing in the yard of an ocean-view house in the west of Freetown, close by the Mammy Yoko Hotel, where the great siege of the civil war played out. Guests hunkered down while the rebel troops of the RUF fought Nigerian led ECOWAS troops and American helicopters said to hell with the no-fly zone, landed on the beach and evacuated their citizens and a few others as well. My stepmother was among those who escaped. She told me how she was on the ship with a dozen working girls, scooped from the hotel bar and set down on the ship along with everyone else. They were excited. They thought they were going to America. Briefly, and for the first time, the world became aware of what was going on in our country.

From where I stand I can see terraced lawns reaching down to the waterside and an ornamental pagoda. No sign of the owners, a Sierra Leonean businesswoman and her European husband, or so I am told. There is just a watchman with a squint, a pronounced underbite and a diploma in passive aggression. The steward, who was supposed to fetch the prescription shampoo from the pharmacy and meet us back here, has still not shown. Teddy calls him. The guy swears he is on his way, but Teddy says he hears the sounds of a bar behind him. Dr Jalloh is not with us. He hates this kind of job, hates owners who don’t know how to handle their own animals, who won’t come to the clinic. Sometimes, he says, people just show him out to the yard, to a couple of half-wild beasts, and leave him there. He hates that more than anything. He’s a vet, he says, not a dog whisperer.

Teddy, Zainab, Nabsieu and I are here to wash the dogs, but nothing is happening. We are standing in the eye of sun while four dogs circle us, demonstrating various degrees of animosity. ‘Here, in this situation, the relationship between owner and dog has reached total breakdown,’ pronounces Teddy. ‘These dogs no longer trust human beings. They will not allow themselves to be touched.’ The dogs are flea ridden and one has a skin infection. The exception is a tall, slim brown and white dog with a cropped tail. It looks healthier than the rest and allows itself to be petted. The dog came from next door. His Colombian owner turned out to have been the mastermind behind the planes local people would hear landing in the dead of night at the airport on the other side of the water. Motorboats from a small jetty in front of the house ferried the cargo to the mainland and from here the cocaine was loaded onto mules bound for Europe. Neighbouring Guinea has already turned into a cocaine state. After the Colombian’s arrest the abandoned animal jumped the wall to join this pack. Teddy nicknames it ‘the gangster’. One thing you can say about the Colombian though, he looked after his dog.

Twenty minutes on we get started. The watchman, who has been asked not to give food to any of the dogs because we are about to administer an anaesthetic, is now giving one of them a plate of food. What is it with this guy? Poorly paid staff take out their resentment on the dogs, says Teddy. They sometimes feel the owners of the house care more for the animals than they do for them. Here the householders have been away for some months, which might explain the neglected state of the dogs and their hostility to humans. Ten more minutes more are spent persuading the watchman to fetch soap and towels. Finally we begin. Nabsieu inserts a dart into a hollow pipe, raises the mouthpiece to his lips and stalks the dogs with the quiet footfall of a hunter. The gangster goes down first. Nabsieu fells the remaining dogs one by one, a single dart each.

An hour later the job is finished. We have washed and scrubbed four dogs, searched for two in the nearby bush after the watchmen opened the gate and let them out into the street. Now four dogs sleep it off in the shade. Zainab, Nabsieu and Teddy sign off on the job, telling the watchman they’ll be back next month.

Back in the surgery Jalloh asks how it went. I say the whole thing is crazy. Jalloh shrugs and shakes his head. What to say? They service about twenty elite households in this way. The clinic needs the money. Maybe he’ll dig a dip out back. Even so, he muses, people like that still wouldn’t bring their dogs.

He says that the main problem here is neglect. People don’t have the money to care for and feed all these dogs, which I feel is broadly true, though the last two days have produced a strange, more complex picture. The slum-dwellers’ dogs are ten times healthier than the dogs of the country’s most wealthy.

Lunch in a nearby restaurant and a conversation begun the day before is reprised. Jalloh has a television crew arriving from Holland in a week’s time. On the drive back across town from the street clinic I’d asked whether he planned to allow the crew to film a clinic. Jalloh nodded. Some of what I had seen, I’d suggested, might prove unpalatable to Western viewers.

A small silence. Jalloh wrinkled his nose and sighed: ‘Oh dear,’ and then, ‘Europeans are so emotional.’

Ordinarily his tendency is to talk about the West in uncritical terms: as an animal nirvana where pets exist as legally protected family members. I wondered if this was a habit borne of the need to flatter, to treat everyone who visited from overseas – including me – as a potential donor. At the seminars and conferences Jalloh attends on his funded trips to Europe and America, the face the West wears is typically humane, rational, superior. Next to the representatives of international animal welfare programmes such as the RSPCA whose reserves of £150 million represent twice our nation’s annual revenue, Jalloh is the beggar at the banquet.

What the West reveals of itself at such times, naturally, is less interesting than what is concealed. In our street in London the kids with pit-bull crosses; the dead pit bull in a bin liner; the dog fights. Now, sitting over steak sandwiches and Fanta, I detail none of this. Instead I tell him about a photographer employed by a national newspaper magazine in Britain who was sent out to work with me on an assignment some years before. The woman suffered culture shock such that she was virtually catatonic, only showing signs of recovery within sight of the airport. Jalloh chuckles, his chuckle deepens into a laugh. Then for a moment he is quiet.

An American came to Sierra Leone to work for the Special Court responsible for trying war criminals, one of hundreds of lawyers and support staff employed by the American-backed court. She wanted to fly three street dogs to the United States and asked Jalloh to prepare the dogs for travel. He suggested she give the money to his programme instead. For the same money he could help a thousand dogs. She refused, spent 3,000 US dollars to transport the dogs He remembers her name and repeats it. In time it will become a running gag between us, a byword for solipsistic sentimentality. It made him think he should be doing a ‘sponsor a street dog’ programme, like those for sponsoring children. Send a photograph of the dog and a monthly update.

That would work, I agree: ‘She wanted to be a hero.’

Jalloh repeats her name. Shakes his head and laughs.

Then there are those dogs, larger than the other street dogs, who roam the streets, tattered collars hanging around their necks.We call them the ‘NGO dogs’, adopted by aid workers, abandoned when the contract is over. Not so very different to their relationship with the country. A departing staff member at the British High Commission recently left two dogs in Jalloh’s compound before flying home for good. Last year the High Commission denied visas to two of his staff members who had been offered free training places at an animal centre in Britain.

And yet some people think it’s Jalloh’s enterprise that is misplaced in a country officially the poorest in the world. Seventy-sixth out of seventy-six in the United Nations Human Development Index – a ranking we sometimes switch with Bangladesh. When last that happened, the President announced a national celebration. In the early days Jalloh found himself turned away by the World Health Organization and other international funding agencies, who told him animal welfare was not a priority. He argued, with incontrovertible logic, that human health and animal health were inseparable. He won.

The deputy Foreign Minister, lunching at a table nearby, comes over to say hello on his way out. The minister donated the old trailer Jalloh has converted in to holding kennels behind his surgery where a small shanty town is growing. Part of an old truck is being fashioned into a second unit. He keeps his vaccines in the freezer of the restaurant where we are lunching: the surgery is without electricity.

His is a makeshift existence. Before I arrived Jalloh had e-mailed asking if I might help him obtain consumables for a VeTest, an elaborate piece of diagnostic equipment someone had given him. The cost would have come to €2,800, the materials required an unbroken cold chain between the factory in Holland and Freetown. The VeTest sits, unused, beneath his desk.

He tells me of a British woman who wanted to set up a dogs’ home in Sierra Leone. ‘Who would pay for it? Who would adopt all those dogs?’ Of the international companies who offer him vast sums to exterminate the strays that roam their compounds.

The conversation will range over days: African pragmatism and reality, Western sentiment, the schism between the values of the two and the West’s own conflicted treatment of animals. Of Jalloh’s lot in trying to embrace, negotiate and reconcile so many ways of thinking.

Here, a man presses a knife against a bull’s neck, croons as he looks the animal in the eye and slits its throat. I have seen it happen many times and again. One occasion was a family celebration, the ‘opening’ of a house rebuilt after the war. A cow was to be slaughtered, cooked, and fed to one hundred people. In the forest behind the house five men prayed and held her until she died. The killing of an animal is attended with all the ritual of an offering. Indeed ‘sacrifice’ is the word we use. In Britain factory-farmed animals, strung up by single hind leg, inch along a conveyor belt to the screams of those who went before, emerge stripped of hair and skin, wrapped in cellophane.

I will ask Jalloh what he thinks of the dogs he sees in Europe, bred beyond the point of deformity for the show ring and the fashionable, a million miles from Lorenz’s noble working dogs. Jalloh will smile and shake his head: ‘And now they call our dogs mongrels.’

I will repeat the conversation I had with my London vet, about the link between the physical abuse of animals and the physical abuse of children. Vets are under instruction to report every incident of animal mistreatment. Jalloh will listen, ask questions. Who are the perpetrators? What sector of society are they from? He frowns. No, he has never heard of dogfights here. In England he once trained as an RSCPA inspector, although he never went out on patrol. He read about the torture of animals. He found it ‘interesting and very strange’. Another time he says: ‘People here believe if you do something bad to an animal, something bad will happen to you.’

Once, I remember, I visited a hotel looking for a place to house a writers’ conference the following year. A wild goose chase, as it soon became evident. The hotel had been abandoned since the war and was in an impossible state of neglect. In the bathrooms of a collapsed bungalow I found a litter of puppy corpses. The caretaker who accompanied me covered his mouth with his hand. ‘Bad, very bad.’ Nobody had seen the bitch for days, they’d searched for and failed to locate her pups. Perhaps she had been hit by a car. He shook his head, sure this was a portent of something terrible.

Says Elizabeth Costello, protagonist in J.M Coetzee’s The Life of Animals, in which the author uses a fictional setting to explore the moral argument about the treatment of animals: ‘I do think it is appropriate that those who pioneered the industrialization of animal lives and commodification of animal flesh should be at the forefront of trying to atone for it.’ Trying to atone for a crime she compares to the Holocaust, a crime of ‘stupefying proportions’.

Costello’s response is an ethical vegetarianism so extreme she is unable to sit at a table with meat eaters. On the other side of the table, Jalloh has just completed work on his steak sandwich. I have never met a vegetarian in Sierra Leone. Perhaps because there isn’t food enough to be fussy about protein sources. Or perhaps simply because there is a great deal less to atone for. In places where the distance travelled from Wild Dog and the creation of the Covenant is shorter, one finds neither the gas chambers nor the need to expiate, but rather a middle ground between the world of humans and the world of animals: A rough and ready equilibrium.

Still, it would be disingenuous to suggest crimes never occur. Jalloh chides me for my romanticism, reminds me, via e-mail in our continued conversation some weeks later, that sometimes the knife is blunt. There is no singing. In Britain he finds people who care. In Sierra Leone they tell him he doesn’t have enough work to do, to be wasting time on animals.

The Sierra Leone 1960 Animal Cruelty Act, a parting gift from the departing colonials, sits unchanged upon the statute books. Jalloh wants it updated and enforced, he tells me. In the lifetime of the Act there have been only two known attempts to bring a prosecution: Jalloh. Once against a man who beat Jalloh’s dog. The man was a neighbour who had taken a dislike to the dog, a sentiment the animal heartily returned. The dog barked. The neighbour, when nobody was watching, took a stick to it. Another time Jalloh attempted to prosecute a man who stoned a goat to death. The man claimed the animal had destroyed his crop, he’d warned it several times. Neither case reached the courts. The police treated both incidents as crimes of property. What struck me as I listened to Jalloh’s telling, what strikes me still, was the history, the very personal enmity between victim and perpetrator at the heart of both crimes. There existed a relationship, a warped and angry one, but one that existed – something no law of property could ever take into account.

There were those who disapproved of Jalloh’s actions, of the primacy he would give animals such that a man might be imprisoned. Jalloh would like to see rights for animals enshrined in law. Limited rights. The right to food and shelter. Not the right to life that animal activists in Britain would advocate. No, he shakes his head and thinks some more. Freedom from mistreatment, yes. An animal ombudsman, someone to enforce those rights. Someone like him.

Soon after his return from the Soviet Union Jalloh collected fifty signatures on a petition, called a meeting and launched the Sierra Leone Animal Welfare Society. A young engineering student, Memuna, attended the first of those meetings. Two years later they married. An afternoon in the surgery they sit side by side and reel off the names of the other attendees by heart, produce the original minutes on translucent onion paper, offer them for my perusal, laugh and touch hands.

And then came war.

Jalloh and Memuna fled across land to Guinea. They carried nothing but his vet’s bag and some antibiotics. Memuna was pregnant. ‘I was worried she would abort,’ he says. Abort, the terminology of a vet. In the Gambia they found sanctuary, Jalloh offered his services to the government, working on food security and cattle farming and once, administering an NGO-funded programme to neuter the street cats that clustered in hundreds around the tourist hotels.

Two years later Jalloh and Memuna returned in time for the rebels’ big push on Freetown. The street dogs grew fat feasting on the corpses. People thought the dogs would go mad, Jalloh tells me, from eating the drug-addled flesh of the rebel soldiers. Though who could deny they did the city a favour? A doctor who worked at Connaught, the city’s main hospital, described to me days spent collecting corpses during pauses in the fighting. He found people’s loved ones shoved down pit latrines, rebels left to the dogs. Once he tried to move the corpse of a young girl, a commander in the rebel forces, but furious locals refused to allow it. Leave her for the dogs. The fate she deserved.

The city was overrun with dogs. Jalloh chose that year to launch his campaign to protect them. More than once I have heard the story of how it all started. Now I hear it from his wife: ‘He gathered eighty dogs and brought them to the compound,’ says Memuna. ‘I had to cook rice three times a day to feed them all. That night it was a full moon. The dogs began to howl. Next day I had to go to each of my neighbours to beg.’ She laughs for a long time.

Today is Saturday. We are sitting together in the surgery and Memuna enters with wet hands, touching the back of hers to the back of mine. She excuses herself to return to the kitchen and oversee the cooking of tonight’s feast. It is the first day of Ramadan.

It vexes Jalloh – the new fundamentalism spreading from Saudi Arabia has now reached even Sierra Leone. It breaks down the relationship between man and dog, he says. Teddy gives an account of a cleric who told one of his congregation to scrape the skin away from his arm where he had allowed a dog to touch it. At that Jalloh jumps up, begins searching for the papers upon which he has copied Hadiths about animals from the Koran. He talks fast and waves a finger in the air. He went on Radio Islam to talk about the treatment of animals under Islam. Now he’s persuaded Alhaji Sillah, the city’s chief Imam, to read out some of the Hadiths during Friday prayers at the Central Mosque.

In all the years of his life Jalloh has never been diverted from his faith or his love of dogs. Only one thing came close to defeating him. His right eye, when it catches the light, contains a diamond-hard glint. I remembered hearing, when I was far away in England, that Jalloh was going blind. The glint is an intraocular transplant, an artificial lens. He is functionally blind in his left eye, having suffered severe optic-nerve damage and the resultant loss of ninety per cent of the sight. Two years ago he looked at the world through a tunnel, a six-inch span. He couldn’t drive, could barely work although he carried on. The cause was cataracts.

On a trip to the United States, a friend, an animal-lover and supporter of his, persuaded him to visit an optician. The optician referred him straight to a specialist who gave Jalloh six months before he lost his sight altogether. Jalloh had no money for the operation. The Dutch animal welfare agency who fund his work with the street dogs declined to help, informing him their funds were reserved for animals. Calls were made and the surgeon, who loved his two Labradors, agreed to waive his fees. Jalloh underwent the surgery but found he had overlooked the $10,000 hospital bill. The surgeon persuaded the hospital to cut the bill by half. Then came the $1,500 anaesthetist’s fee. A phone call and he too waived his fee. So it went. This is how his sight was saved. For the love of dogs, says Jalloh, stands up and spreads his arms. But for the love of dogs, he’d be blind.

Saturday is the day the responsible middle classes bring their dogs to the clinic. Jalloh cleans out ear infections, administers antibiotics and vaccines. The vaccines carried a half-dozen at a time in an ice-packed Thermos from the restaurant down the road. At my behest he demonstrates the correct way to remove a tick: burst the body and let it detach naturally. Make the mistake of pulling and the head will remain inside. Dogs, his own, move freely in and out of the surgery. Jalloh, his assistants and I circle each other in the narrow space between his desk, examining table and shelves labelled: Orals/Endoparasites and Ectoparasites/Emergency Injectables/Injectables for Infectious Diseases, Catgut Suture Needles/Surgical Gloves. New supplies have been stuck in the port for two months now. His wish list for a far-off future: an orthopaedic surgical kit (most dogs are hurt in traffic accidents); a binocular microscope (he can’t use his old monocular scope because of his eyes); an auroscope and – dreamtime now – solar power to run lights and a fridge.

We treat Emaka, Joffy, Fluffy, Cannis, Tiger, Rambo and Combat.

At two Joffy’s owner comes to collect her dog. Jalloh springs up and hands her a form for his latest initiative – a licence scheme – tells her to go to City Hall and license her dog. Later he outlines the scheme for my benefit. There is now a municipal by-law, thanks to Jalloh (one begins to believe the City Council has given up denying him anything) which states every dog must be vaccinated and licensed. The funds collected from citizens like Joffey’s owner are diverted to vaccinate and license the community dogs. That’s the plan anyway. The tax amounts to around two pounds for a sterilized dog and three pounds for an unsterilized dog.

Me: ‘Is the law enforced?’

Jalloh: ‘No. But it’s enforceable. This is a test run. First we’ll find out how much voluntary take up there is.’

Me: ‘Has anyone actually licensed their dog yet?’ There being, in my view, no real possibility of enforcement in a state still struggling towards a functioning police force.

Jalloh pauses, gives the habitual headshake, which I now know signifies disbelief. ‘No.’

And now I will tell you about the second time I met Gudush Jalloh. It took place a few months after our first meeting, less than two years after the end of the civil war. I had taken into my home a street dog, a yellow-coated bitch. I’d noticed her searching for scraps along the beach, checked with some of the beach boys who confirmed that nobody took care of her. With their help we bundled her into the back of my car where she stood on the parcel shelf and howled. The other strays, who’d scattered at the moment of the kidnap, gathered around the car, some howled back. A boy said: ‘Dis ’oman dae cam take you na heaven and you dae fom?’ This woman has come to take you to heaven and you’re complaining?

I named her Mathilda and wooed her with corned-beef sandwiches, just as I had on the beach. By five o’clock of our first afternoon together she sat to my command. By six she had learned to lie down. She became my companion during the long days of writing. Several people asked if they might have her when I left, for I had earned a reputation as someone who knew a good dog. And Mathilda was a good dog, though she never lost her skittishness around strangers, she gave me her devotion entirely.

Then Mathilda was hit by a car. In the early morning a man on his way to work passed a wounded dog lying in a ditch, recognized her and brought her to my house. I drove her to the only place there was, to Dr Jalloh’s surgery. Mathilda had two dislocated hind legs and, he suspected, a broken pelvis. He could try to slip the dislocated legs back into their sockets, but not if the pelvis was indeed broken. With no X-ray machine it was impossible to give an exact diagnosis.

The injured dog lay silent and still upon the table. A solution seemed unreachable. To attempt to relocate the bones into a broken pelvis would be agonizing and ineffective. I thought I knew what Dr Jalloh was saying, I might have to put her down. I stroked the top of her head. Then Dr Jalloh said he knew one person with an X-ray machine. It was possible they might let us use it. He offered to make the call.

Haja Binta, a Fula like Jalloh and recently returned from twenty years working for the NHS in Britain. Now she was the proud owner of a small private clinic on the other side of the city. I arrived, carrying Mathilda who was partially sedated and wrapped in a towel. The people waiting to see the nurse thought I was holding a baby, but when they discovered it was a dog, they gathered around:

‘Hush ya,’ said an old man.

‘Sorry-oh!’ said someone else.

Haja Binta led us to the X-ray room and laid Mathilda on a steel bed, beneath the eye of the giant machine. Several times she repositioned the dog, pausing only to adjust her hijab. Afterwards she offered to develop the prints while I waited. I returned to the waiting room. After twenty minutes Haja Binta came to find me. She smiled as she held up the X-rays. There was no fracture to the pelvis. The old man surveyed the images and gave a grunt of approval at the outcome. Somebody else said: ‘Na God will am so.’

Mathilda recovered over time, retaining a distinctive sideways skip. One day, during dinner at the British High Commission, I told the story. My audience were mainly expats, people sent to the country in the wake of war for one reason or another. One man took exception to the waste of time and resources on an animal in a country where people had so little. He told me so as he walked away.

But, you see, here’s why I think he was wrong. The people who had helped Mathilda: the man who reached into the ditch and brought her out, Dr Jalloh in his makeshift surgery, the Haja and her patients – they were Africans. They lived in the poorest country in the world. We were, all of us, two years out of a decade of civil war. We had survived the darkest place and we had all lost a great deal.

This is Milan Kundera’s test of humanity:

‘True human goodness can manifest itself, in all its purity and liberty, only in regard to those who have no power. The true moral test of humanity lies in those who are at its mercy: the animals.’

I did not see foolishness or indulgence in all those people coming together on a single day to save the life of a street dog. What I saw was compassion, a sense of community, the sweetening of a soured spirit. In other words: I saw hope.

To contribute to Dr. Jalloh’s work, email him on steriliseit@yahoo.com

You can’t choose your relatives. But you can love them, loathe them, rage against them or take after them. Right from the earliest issues of Granta, writing about the family, whether as fiction or personal memoir, has been one of the magazine’s strongest elements. Some of the finest pieces from the first fifteen years, 1979 to 1994, were collected in the first Granta Book of the Family, published in 1995. Now, The New Granta Book of the Family brings together a fresh collection of pieces from 1995 to the present, all of which explore the complicated, often fraught relationships that families involve. Here, Liz Jobey explains how the friction, fragility and intimacy of family life informs some of our greatest contemporary literature.

Most family relationships are difficult, and sometimes they can become the most difficult human relationships of all. They tend to combine, as George Eliot wrote, ‘yearning and revulsion’, as we are bound by biology to people with whom we might have very little in common. I owe the prompt for the quote to Jeremy Seabrook, whose memoir, Twins, in this anthology, describes the almost complete alienation from his twin brother that lasted from birth until his brother’s death. It was a separation orchestrated by his mother, who, Seabrook writes, ‘whispered to each of us her dissatisfaction with the other, with the consequence that we viewed one another with distrust and a fierce defensiveness of our wronged parent.’ The long-term consequence of this maternal divisiveness was that ‘Separation has been, perhaps, the single biggest determining influence in my life.’

This may be an unhappy place to start, and yet for a writer, the difficulties of family relationships are fertile territory; not only does the family unit offer multiple opportunities to examine human conflict, whether parental strife, or sibling rivalry or filial angst or any of the painful variants in between, but it offers many examples of extreme behaviour, whether bitterness and cruelty, or – sometimes as alarming – doting parental care. Few of us, I hope, have ever had to suffer the remedies to which Edmund White’s mother, a state psychologist, leapt at the suggestion that one of her children was physically or emotionally under par. ‘If my sister or I ever spoke of general apathy, a broken heart, listlessness, anxiety, Mother would say, “I think we should run an electroencephalogram on you,” or, “Maybe you need a good neurological work-up.”’ It’s fair to say that in most aspects Lila Mae White was an unconventional parent, and she too, like Jeremy Seabrook’s mother, exercised an uncomfortably intimate dominance over her son’s every move. When, as a teenager, he started to go out, Lila Mae would tell her son, ‘Remember, I won’t be able to sleep a wink until you’re safely back here . . . Please don’t keep me up all night, honey.’ And, when he did return: ‘I’d stand in her doorway at midnight . . . she’d want me to rub her back; sometimes she’d turn on a light and ask me to press out the blackheads. Her skin felt clammy. I could smell the whisky seeping from her pores; in a kittenish way she’d call it “wicky”.’ With a mother like that, one might be tempted to say, what better son to have, than one who became a writer?

In selecting this anthology from more than fifty issues of Granta, from 1995 to 2009, I could hardly fail to be aware that the memoir, the first-person autobiographical form that generations of writers were taught to avoid, is the literary genre that marks this period more than any other. And what made memoir during this period more notable was that it was men, as well as women, who were writing about their personal experiences and their emotions. In America, an early example was Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, published in 1989, which proved that this autobiographical form could have a novelistic resonance. In Britain, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992) used football, and specifically a love affair with the north London club, Arsenal, as a means by which to chart a young man’s emotional progress. It was followed, a year later, by Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which explored the relationship, rarely exposed so candidly in print, between an adult son and his dying father. It caught the frustrating, humiliating tension of a son trying to reconcile his love for a man who appears to him, in so many ways, an absurd figure: a self-assured cheat who has exploited his wife’s loyalty and failed to recognize his own faults. The memory of his father’s life allowed Morrison to examine his own and the book perfectly caught the moment when all children have to acknowledge that, however much we might hate to admit it, we have been formed, to a lesser or greater degree, by the character of our parents and by our experiences within family life.

The memoir soon became the fastest-growing genre in non-fiction. Granta had been in the vanguard of its literary form, publishing not only Morrison’s book, but an early passage from what became Mikal Gilmore’s 1995 memoir, Shot in the Heart, about his family, including his brother, Gary, who was executed for murder in 1977, and William Wharton’s terrifying account of the losing his daughter, son-in-law and two small grandchildren in a multiple car accident caused by the smoke from field burning in Oregon. But beyond the magazine it was the worldwide popularity of Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir of his grim, poverty-stricken Irish childhood, Angela’s Ashes, that developed the public appetite for ever more awful tales of family suffering, and by the turn of the century memoir appeared most frequently with the word ‘misery’ attached. As publishers vied with one another to produce an author whose traumatic experiences exceeded anything that had gone before, whole new sections in bookshops were devoted to the memoir, and creative writing courses, reacting to its popularity among would-be authors as well as readers, set up classes in life writing, as a new subdivision of literary non-fiction.

It was in the contemporary memoir, more than in any other form of autobiography, that the lines between accuracy of fact and accuracy of emotional description began to be blurred. All sorts of labels were used to describe this sleight of hand: ‘creative non-fiction’ (despite the pejorative echo of ‘creative accounting’) being one of the most popular. Against that background, Granta continued to publish memoir selectively. In Ian Jack, the editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2007, factual accuracy had its greatest defender, and any false flowering of adjectives or ‘atmospheric’ additions of, say, factory chimneys in northern towns long after they would have been demolished, would be quietly excised.

Whether or not it was related to the rise of the memoir, writing about the family, in the period covered by this anthology, was a particularly strong element in Granta. One only needs to glance at the list of writers collected here (and it would have been quite possible to assemble an alternative list, without loss of quality, from the wealth of available material) to recognize it. Omissions had to be made reluctantly. One positive decision, however, was to include fiction as well as non-fiction, on the basis that to exclude short stories about family relationships (which often have personal experience as their guide) would be to impoverish the reader to no good purpose. The longest story in the collection, John McGahern’s ‘Love of the World’, seems to me a small miracle of storytelling, a novel in miniature, which follows the passage of two people through marriage to parenthood, from love to hatred, and leads us, thanks to a judicious narrator, to see how the factors that affect some people’s lives move gradually to destroy them.

Many writers turn to fiction, even when using their own direct experience, because it gives them a greater freedom to discuss the characters of people they would otherwise have to identify, and, perhaps more importantly, to reveal the truth about their own emotions. Diana Athill, in a note at the end of her story, ‘Alive, Alive-Oh!’, which describes how a single professional woman’s life is overturned by a late and unexpected pregnancy, explained her reasons for choosing the third person when she wrote about the events forty years later:

My sense of recall . . . was sharp, yet the woman to whom this happened, though not exactly a stranger – I knew her well – was no longer me. Retelling this experience in the third person is my way of acknowledging the difference between ‘her’ and me.

Emotional truth is something Granta has always valued; the old diktat, that writing should ‘show not tell’, still pertains, as does the need for an author to establish the underlying sense of human morality in a story, which characters abuse at their own risk. So in this anthology, fact and fiction are distributed almost equally, in the belief that it provides a more rewarding reading experience. And while on the subject of statistics, for once – and this, too, came without any massaging – the gender split has come out fairly evenly. As it should, the subject of the family appeals as much to men as to women.

For anybody discussing writing about the family, it’s hard to avoid at least a mention of Philip Larkin. ‘They fuck you up’ provided a usefully provocative title for the first issue of Granta to concentrate on the family (Granta 37, Autumn 1991). But it is the final verse of that famous poem, less often quoted, that reveals Larkin’s disgust at the entire family project. Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can ,/ And don’t have any kidsyourself.

The instinct to procreate, though, is strong in most of us, writers included. One of the earliest pieces collected here is by the American writer Jayne Anne Phillips. When it was first published in Granta in 1996 it was a work-in-progress, part of what would become her novel, published in 2000, MotherKind. It describes a new mother’s struggle to orient herself in the first week after childbirth. Her own mother, who comes to stay, decides, partly as a treat, partly because she is recovering from chemotherapy and too weak to provide that kind of help herself, to buy her daughter the services of a Mother Care agency nurse to look after the baby. Thus Phillips introduces the idea of balance, between the new life of the baby and the decline of the older woman, and between them, the new mother who gradually, reluctantly, moves from a state of dreamy post-natal semi-consciousness to the realization of her new responsibilities. ‘She would not be alone again for many years, even if she wanted to be, even if she tried.’

The miraculous transfer of life, from mother to child, is consolidated at the breast, and in this, as in all her writing, Phillips is both accurate and poetic:

Absently she traced the baby’s lips, and he yawned and began to whimper. You’re hungry? Kate thought, and he moved his arms as though to gather her closer. Her milk let down with a flush and a surge, and she held a clean diaper to one breast as she put him to the other. Now she breathed, exhaling slowly. The intense pain began to ebb; he drank the cells of her blood, Kate knew, and the crust that formed on her nipples where the cuts were deepest. He was her blood. When she held him, he was inside her; always he was near her, like an atmosphere, in his sleep, in his being.

The newborn baby in ‘Mother Care’ is the passive receptacle of his mother’s emotions. The baby in Jackie Kay’s story, ‘Big Milk’, is a more robust character altogether. As the narrator tells us at the outset, the baby isn’t ‘really a baby any more except in the mind of the mother, my lover,’ and at the age of nearly two, the little girl is quite capable of the naming of parts, in particular, her mother’s breasts, which come in two sizes: Big Milk and Tiny Milk. Big Milk, the left one, is ‘enormous. The right one small and slightly cowed in the presence of a great twin.’ This relationship, between mother and child and the breast, forms a unit that leaves the mother’s partner out in the cold. She lies awake while they sleep soundly together; she is isolated, guiltily resentful of the baby that has taken her place in her lover’s arms.

The baby has the power. It is the plain stark truth of the matter. I can see it as I watch the two of them. Tiny puffs of power blow out of the baby’s mouth. She transforms the adults around her to suit herself. Many of the adults I know are now becoming babyfied. They like the same food. They watch the same programmes. They even go to bed at the same time as the baby; and if they have a good relationship they might manage whispering in the dark. Very little fucking. Very little. I’m trying to console myself here. It’s another day.

This grim, painful humour is part of Jackie Kay’s strong literary voice: she is able to make us feel both the seriousness and the absurdity of a situation; the ways in which we are fools to our own desires, ambushed by emotion in the face of reason. In response to the baby’s dominion, the jilted lover acts, in order not to be passive. Only when she is far away does she realize, ‘that the baby has engineered this whole trip. The baby wanted me to go away. She wanted her mother all to herself in our big bed.’

One of the biggest changes in family life since the 1960s has been the gradual break-up of the nuclear family. These days, children grow used to having four parents – two biological ones and two stepparents – along with step-brothers and sisters. In 2007 the marriage rate in England and Wales dropped to its lowest since records began in 1862; in America, there has been a thirty per cent decline in marriage over the past twenty-five years – and separations, between couples whether married or not, have become accepted as part of life. When John Updike’s novel, Couples, was published in 1968, the dizzying choreography of partner-swapping in a small New England town made marriage seem irrelevant, if not redundant. Updike said he was writing about sex as the ‘emergent religion . . . the only thing left’, but it was the arrival of the contraceptive pill that reduced the practical risks of adultery and allowed women to enjoy sex as carelessly as men. Towards the end of the novel, Piet Hanema hands over his wife, Angela, to his neighbour,
Freddy Thorne:

Freddy asked, ‘She’s on the pill, isn’t she?’
‘Of course. Welcome to paradise.’

But if separation and divorce have become a social norm, that still doesn’t limit the damage involved in trying to escape from a marriage, or trying to hang on to one. The way separating couples behave (and the way it affects their children) is drawn with horrible accuracy in Hanif Kureishi’s story, ‘The Umbrella’, when the narrator and his wife resort to a level of pettiness and cruelty that only two people who once loved each other can muster:

‘Give me one.’
‘No’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m not giving you one,’ she said. ‘If there were a thousand umbrellas there I would not give you one.’

The memory of the night his father left home for good, over forty years before, is the central image in Graham Smith’s short memoir of his father, Albert Smith. Though he came to know his father eventually, Albert Smith was never reconciled with his wife, and lived alone, a few miles away from his family, for the rest of his life. What comes through in the writing is not a child’s bitterness, but the mature recognition of his father’s self-destructiveness and what that cost him. It isn’t the only example in this anthology of the complicated emotional negotiation that has to be made when writing about a parent – between finding fault and paying tribute.

When Granta first published Raymond Carver in 1981, with his story ‘Vitamins’, it introduced a writer whose voice would become part of the magazine’s character. To enter a Carver story was like slipping into a pool of water at body temperature; you were in it before you realized, and even if the people and places described were far from your own experience, you recognized that what you were reading was real. There was a momentum in Carver’s plain, short sentences that meant the reader covered a lot of ground in a single paragraph. Near the beginning of one of his most famous stories, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, the sense of instability, of something temporary about the characters’ lives, is built in from the start.

The four of us were sitting around [the] kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa – Terri we called her – and my wife Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.

In 1998, ten years after Carver’s death, Richard Ford wrote about the things he most admired in Carver’s writing.

. . . to me the most arresting quality of Ray’s stories was not how much they drew on life, or how dire or spare they were (they often weren’t spare), but, rather, how confirmed he was, how unswerving was his election of art – stories – to be life’s consoling, beautifying agent. In the very imagining of fictive events, in their committal to shapely, objectifying language, in their formal depiction of emotions we readers will perhaps never have to face in life, there is pleasure and relief and also beauty.

Carver was one of my favourite writers a long time before I joined the staff of Granta in 1998, so when we had the opportunity to publish ‘Call if You Need Me’, a story that Carver had not published in his lifetime, and which therefore risked the condemnation not so much of literary critics but of those who thought that what remained was best left undisturbed, it was – despite the sceptics – a thrill to have him in the magazine again. The story is about a couple who leave their respective lovers and their teenage son to attempt a marital reconciliation.The first two sentences give readers all the background they need:

We had both been involved with other people that spring, but when June came and school was out we decided to let our house for the summer and move from Palo Alto to the north coast of California. Our son, Richard, went to Nancy’s mother’s place in Pasco, Washington, to live for the summer and work toward saving money for college in the fall.

If you are a fan of Carver, when you come to this story there will a shock of recognition at the familiar voice, and pleasure in the way it can put you into a room with a couple of bickering people and make the struggle that re-routes their lives feel like something universal.

There has always been a tension – sometimes creative, sometimes antagonistic – between Granta’s ‘English’ writing, by which I mean writers from Britain, and American writing, as exemplified by Carver, Ford, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, all of whom appeared in what is probably Granta’s most famous issue: ‘Dirty Realism’ (Granta 8, Summer 1983). But though it was fashionable, then, to prophesy the demise of the English novel, the work of writers on this side of the Atlantic has somehow managed to survive. In 1993, Helen Simpson was one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists, and few writers can match the naturalism of her stories of middle-class motherhood. Her female narrators, in recounting the small anxieties and compensatory pleasures of family life, nevertheless convey that underlying tension between fear and contentment so familiar to women with children. (I don’t have children, but when I once bemoaned this to friend, she said, ‘Once you do, you never stop being afraid.’)

The story published here, ‘Early One Morning,’ is bounded by the duration of the school run. It is told from the point of view of Zoe, who, as she drives, is half-listening to the banter of her son and his friends in the back, but because she has sworn not to interrupt or join in, is left to ponder her life as an increasingly middle-aged, dispensable parent (her son, George, is nine; her other children are older). She replays the compromises she has made in leaving behind her professional life to take care of her children full-time.

She’d done the sums, gone through the interviews in imagination, considered the no-claims bonus; she’d counted the years for which her work time would be cut in half, she’d set off the loss of potential income against the cost of childcare, and she’d bitten the bullet. ‘It’s your choice,’ said Patrick. And it was

Now, so many years later, she is one of a dwindling number among her group of friends who is still married. She appears to herself as a tired, careless, absent-minded woman who even forgets to wear make- up, but as she thinks herself into old age she wonders whether she might bloom again.

. . . perhaps the shape of life would be like an hourglass, clear and wide to begin with, narrowing down to the tunnel of the middle years, then flaring wide before the sands ran out.

Death is part of family life and we all have to deal with it. We expect to lose our grandparents, and then our parents, in that order, and for their deaths somehow to prepare us for our own. But when death comes unexpectedly it subverts the natural order of things, forcing on to mothers and fathers and siblings a level of grief and suffering they could never be prepared for. In Graham Swift’s story, ‘Our Nicky’s Heart’, a mother is faced with a decision that few women will have to make, or few families have to live with. But this doesn’t release the reader in any way from the agony of the struggle between the selfishness of maternal instinct and the pull of moral duty.

Nothing could have prepared David Goldblatt for the day his father, Ivor, was robbed and murdered at home in his flat by a couple of carpet fitters, and nothing could have prepared him for the aftermath. But in writing about it he found an episodic form that as it shifts between memories of his father, visits to the police station and trips to clear out his father’s flat, communicates a real sense of his bouts of fury and grief. The matter-of-fact sentences only make his underlying hysteria more apparent.

When anyone is murdered the police want to take a look at their home. When they’re murdered in that home, the police want to take a good long look. In Ivor’s case they examined his flat for almost a month. They looked at him for just as long – time enough for three autopsies, one for the prosecution and one for each of the two defence cases. We got to see him for ten minutes in the Uxbridge morgue, a low brick building of studied anonymity. Unadorned it is surrounded by stark beds of cracked earth and leggy municipal roses strewn with a thousand cigarette butts. Inside it’s suffused with seedy, thin, yellow light, furnished like a cheapskate undertakers.

It would be a mistake, however, to think this is a collection without happiness. There are many more pieces than the few I have mentioned here, and among them are those in which family relationships are fond, respectful, equable, even funny. The exasperation with which Tim Parks describes the bond between Paolo, his brother-in-law, and Paolo’s mother, who both sides of the family call ‘Mamma’, has a wonderful tolerance to it, though they drive him to the edge of his patience. Robin Davidson’s journey across the Central Australian desert with four camels makes a great adventure story, even before her unexpected liaison with Eddie, an Aborigine. Some writers have found it sufficient to celebrate the people who nurtured and formed them. A.L. Kennedy writes about her grandfather, Battling Joe Price, an amateur boxer who would have defended her with his life. John Lanchester, in remembering his modest, hard-working father, writes this: ‘He was a good man, in his unostentatious and shy way one of the best men I have known.’ Ali Smith sums up her feelings for her father – and his for her – in a final brief, perfectly executed snapshot. This is the kind of familial closeness that many readers will recognize and others will wish they knew.

Purchase Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Family

The record of Bou Meng’s suffering is inscribed on his body. A man of stunted stature, his sunken, toothless mouth and mangled ears testify to frequent beatings and torture. Decades-old scars from rattan sticks and whips are etched into his back and shoulders. Although the 68-year-old is animated – his speech is punctuated by broad, frantic gestures – he is equal parts anger and grief, a firestorm of emotion.

Bou Meng is one of only a handful of prisoners to have survived the S-21 detention and torture centre in Phnom Penh. He testified before the Khmer Rouge tribunal in July.

‘I never saw my wife again,’ Bou Meng told judges as his former captor, the chief of S-21, sat just feet away. Kaing Guek Eav went by the revolutionary named ‘Comrade Duch’ and is the first defendant to face trial at the UN-backed court. Khmer Rouge cadres separated Bou Meng and his wife when they arrived at S-21; for months, Bou Meng says, he was accused of conspiring with the CIA and KGB and violently interrogated. He remembers watching blood flow from his body to the ground beneath him and falling unconscious when electrical wires were placed near his genitals. He was only saved from execution when the Khmer Rouge discovered he could paint exact likenesses of ‘Brother Number One’ Pol Pot.

‘I was a victim and the scope of my suffering was incalculable,’ said Bou Meng, who brought a picture of his lost wife to the court hoping to learn more about her fate. ‘I was almost killed. We were treated like animals.’

Among his tormentors, he told judges, was Comrade Him Huy.

‘Cruel Him’ was known to many prisoners as a particularly violent staffer at S-21, though there is some uncertainty about his actual duties. While victims have reported that he was one of the detention center’s chief executioners, he maintains that he killed only a few people and primarily assisted in guarding and transporting prisoners to their deaths.

But when Him Huy himself took the witness stand several weeks after Bou Meng, with his plain, courteous country language and ill-fitting suit jacket, he appeared far from menacing. He told judges that while prisoners and lower-ranking staff may have feared him he was terrified that he would be purged by Duch and believed there was no escape from S-21.

‘Even if I tried to flee S-21, I would have ended up being arrested. Because where would I go?’ he asked. Into enemy Vietnamese territory? Leaving his family behind to perish at the hands of the Khmer Rouge?

‘We are all victims,’ he continued, lamenting the suffering of S-21 staff.

A questionable statement, perhaps. How could a man who killed dozens, possibly hundreds, of people, consider himself a victim? And while co-opting the use of this term may be inappropriate for Him Huy, the time I have spent reporting the Khmer Rouge tribunal has convinced me that casting perpetrators as one-dimensional monsters is not only inaccurate, it obscures the complex nature of culpability for Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Dubbed the ‘Red Khmers’ by King Norodom Sihanouk, the Marxist guerilla movement came to power in 1975 after years of fighting a revolution from the country’s jungles. The Khmer Rouge had recruited heavily from areas devastated by US bombing and many of the troops were young and illiterate and never understood the basics of communist ideology. For the most part, low-ranking Khmer Rouge believed they were fighting to liberate their country, and to protect Cambodia from Vietnamese encroachment.

But in the paranoid and arbitrary government established by the Khmer Rouge, no one was safe, not even the movement’s most loyal followers. The smallest mistake, most remote unsavory relation or slightest perceived lapse in ‘revolutionary consciousness’ could lead to death. The result, according to Rutgers University Professor Alex Hinton, a specialist in the anthropology of mass atrocity, was that ‘today’s perpetrators became tomorrow’s victims’.

While the Khmer Rouge did target certain ethnic groups – such as the Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham Muslims – the vast majority of the 1.7 million people who lost their lives under the regime were fellow Khmers. S-21 is actually a microcosm of this phenomenon. Although the facility was originally used to ‘smash’ foreigners and members of the old regime, it quickly became a vehicle for widespread political purges.

Internal purges are by no means unique to Cambodian communism. But what is particularly tragic about the Cambodian case, claims Hinton, is that such extensive purges were carried out ‘not just among the officials of the regime but also all the way down to the village level.’

In the minds of local leaders desperate to account for the regime’s failings, a lost cow or poor harvest became evidence of ‘hidden enemies’ sabotaging the revolution from within.

It is hard to know what any of us would do under these conditions. A few very brave souls might buck the status quo, but they would most likely pay for resistance with their lives. I believe the majority of people would sacrifice their ideals, to varying extents, in order to survive.

Him Huy, no doubt, is one of those people.

After seeing Him Huy testify, I wanted to talk to him in person, to learn how he copes with his past and whom he blames for the disastrous Khmer Rouge years. Huy Vannak, a reporter with Radio Free Asia, arranged a meeting for me. He began working with Him Huy and other perpetrators a number of years ago as a staffer at the Documentation Center of Cambodia and he has stayed in touch with some of them.

Huy Vannak wouldn’t really consider Him Huy a ‘friend’, he says as we drive the two hours to his house outside of Phnom Penh. But he stops by to visit whenever he is in the area and has brought some books for Him Huy’s nine-year-old son.

‘I’ve known him since he was a baby,’ he explains, ‘and his family is poor.’

Him Huy lives in a typical Cambodian stilt house just off one of the country’s highways. Downstairs are several cows he takes care of for another villager. He is paid for the work and can keep any calves born to the animals.

As we arrive, several of his nine children gather to stare. One, who is wearing an oversized John Cena T-shirt – professional wrestling is hugely popular in Cambodia – shyly accepts the books Huy Vannak has brought for him. Another of Him Huy’s sons is less interested in our presence. Him explains that he has ‘a lung problem’ (most likely asthma) and the boy’s bony chest heaves as he tries to breathe. His mother scrapes his back repeatedly with a jar lid – a folk remedy known as ‘coining’ – leaving long red streaks on his small torso.

Him Huy asks us to come upstairs and we climb a ladder into the house’s only room. As we sit on a new straw mat, he offers us tea and warm corn cakes. Immediately Him Huy strikes me as a charismatic person. He jokes with Huy Vannak about the court-issued jacket he wore to testify and when he laughs, the network of fault lines on his face crinkles into an all-consuming smile.

His demeanour becomes far more somber, however, when we start discussing Duch and S-21. Him Huy says he never wanted to join the Khmer Rouge, but because he came from an area that supported the guerilla movement, he had no choice. He left home to fight when he was around sixteen and tried to run away several times. Like a schoolboy, he says he even faked illness and fabricated family problems because he missed his mom and her homemade Khmer cupcakes.

Although his superiors told him and other young troops they were ‘fighting imperialist forces,’ Him Huy says he never understood Khmer Rouge ideology.

‘I was too young to understand,’ he says. ‘I asked, “What are imperialists? What is capitalism?” And they told us, “They are the groups that make the difference between rich and poor.”’

Him Huy fought with the Khmer Rouge for several years before they took control of the country. He says he does not know why, in 1976, he was assigned to work as a guard at S-21. Despite Bou Meng’s testimony, Him Huy maintains that his role in torture and executions was minimal and that he was only promoted because his superiors were repeatedly purged.

‘I was afraid for my life too,’ he says. ‘My colleagues were arrested and I did not believe they were enemies of the revolution. We ate together, worked together, and they were killed for no reason.’

As we talk, I notice that several of Him Huy’s children have gathered to listen to our conversation, lying on the floor and lingering in the doorway. Does he mind discussing his past so openly? I wonder. Is he worried he or his children will face discrimination from other villagers?

‘My children do not blame me, because they know I had no choice at that time. Even the villagers do not blame me. They feel sympathy for my situation.’

Him Huy does not think Duch would fare as well in his village, however.

‘If the court ever releases him, he would be killed,’ he says, with sudden anger in his voice. ‘I am still furious with Duch. Even in the court, I did not want to look at his face. It brings back too many painful memories of when I was ordered to arrest my comrades.’

When we’ve finished our interview, I ask Him Huy if I can look around his house. Studio portraits of family members cover the walls, many featuring babies posed with colourful fruit and flowers. They look like the pictures I have seen in dozens of other Cambodian houses.

Him Huy walks us down the dirt path back to our car and thanks us for coming. He stands at the highway’s edge, smiling and waving, as we begin the drive back to Phnom Penh. In so many ways, he is completely unremarkable. If he hadn’t been a certain age at a certain time in an area of Cambodia that supported the Khmer Rouge, he probably would have never become a killer.

Our meeting brought to mind my conversations with Theary Seng, a Cambodian-American activist who lost both her parents to the Khmer Rouge. Immigrating to the US as a child after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, Seng completed her law degree in America before relocating to Cambodia five years ago. She was formerly the executive director of the Center for Social Development, a human rights organization based in Phnom Penh, and has been a vocal advocate for victim’s rights at the tribunal.

‘Is the Khmer Rouge not I, but one degree removed at birth?’ Seng asked during a recent public forum, highlighting the role that chance and circumstance played in the movement’s recruitment. Had she been born in a rural area that supported the Khmer Rouge – and not to an educated Phnom Penh family – Seng herself could have been a young cadre. ‘There is depravity in each of us. We can perpetrate the violence we are denouncing.’

I have known her since I first came to Cambodia in 2004 and Seng has always impressed me as someone with a thorough understanding of the various actors responsible for the Cambodian tragedy – from high-level international powers to low-ranking Khmer Rouge village leaders.

Clearly, only a tiny percentage of those at fault will ever be held accountable legally. The tribunal itself is limited in scope. Its mandate is to try ‘senior leaders’ and ‘those most responsible’ for atrocities committed during the period of Democratic Kampuchea, from 1975 to 1979. What about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians killed before 1975 in US bombing raids, former Khmer Rouge supporters often ask. Or the Chinese government, which funneled weapons and technical support to Democratic Kampuchea?

It may be a dissatisfying answer, but no, they are not on trial.

‘Justice has always been selective,’ Seng told me, ‘and given the massive scale of these crimes can only be symbolic.’

But organizations like CSD have used the tribunal as a catalyst for outreach and education throughout the country. International actors may be unwilling to step forward and acknowledge their culpability, but Seng says that doesn’t mean average Khmers Rouge shouldn’t take responsibility for their actions. The guilt of others does not absolve you of your crimes.

‘Whatever the international political situation, at the end of the day it was Cambodians killing Cambodians,’ Seng says. Following Seng’s logic, even low-ranking cadres, like Him Huy, should move beyond merely blaming their superiors and claiming they ‘had no choice’. Indeed, they may have been killed if they had disobeyed orders. But they still made a choice, however difficult, and that decision comes with consequences.

I, and others, would probably feel uncomfortable condemning people who are forced to make such horrendous decisions. This is why, as Seng says, we should approach our judgments of former Khmers Rouge with ‘a sense of humility. If we had been in their position, maybe we would have done the same thing.’

In turn, those who committed crimes – even under threat of death – should find ways to reconcile with their pasts, and with those who they have made suffer. Cambodia’s national court system is notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional, so a far-reaching legal solution is not the answer. But there are other, perhaps culturally resonant ways, to achieve a sense of justice and healing.

For example, the mother of Youk Chhang, the head of DC-Cam, was deeply moved by the apology she received from a former Khmer Rouge village chief. The man had overseen the area where several of her relatives disappeared. After the regime fell, he rode his bicycle all the way to Phnom Penh, carrying offerings of meat and bananas, to ask for forgiveness.

‘Her attitude is a very Buddhist one and his act put her heart to rest,’ Chhang wrote in an essay for DC-Cam.

I believe both victims and perpetrators could benefit from such homegrown acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.

After a long day of testimony at the tribunal, during which he said he was too excited and nervous to eat his lunch, Bou Meng praised the court for its work. My ‘chest seems to be lighter’, he told judges, even though he understands that they cannot provide flawless justice.

For him, having a former S-21 staffer tell him where his wife was killed and buried would also bring a good deal of closure. He cannot perform a traditional Cambodian cremation because it would be too difficult to identify her bones. But, Bou Meng told Duch at the tribunal, if he could find out where she spent her final moments, he would ‘go to that location to get the soil from there to pray for her soul’. Both Duch and Him Huy maintain that they do not know exactly what happened to her.

‘Only the spirit of the earth knows where the soul has gone,’ Bou said of his lost wife, ‘or where the bodies are buried’.

He is still waiting for someone to come forward.

Click here to see the photographs that accompany this dispatch

The Southernmost wedge of Illinois is called Little Egypt. Towns are named Cairo and Karnak and Thebes. When Julio Foli and his brother Mario arrived there from Fanano, Italy, early in the last century, maybe they were expecting pyramids; instead they found coalmines. They hauled coal until they’d saved enough to buy passage for the rest, Alberto, Gaetano, Tony, Rosa, Ines, and their parents. Eventually the Folis quit the mines; they opened butcher shops and planted pear trees; they became aldermen and founded church choirs; they married well and also badly.

Rosa’s first husband was a tyrant who beat and belittled her. There were two impediments to divorce, the Church and a wheelchair. The man had been left handicapped in a car wreck, and in the 1920s the courts wouldn’t let you leave a cripple. Even if he threatened to kill you. Rosa’s husband used to explain, quite calmly, how he’d dispose of her body by tossing it over her parents’ back fence.

In Johnston City murder, mutilation, and the strewing of body parts were not idle threats. Williamson County was an almost comical nexus of American violence, like the dust devil of fists and pistols in a Tex Avery cartoon. All the big players in Yankee evil went at it here: the Ku Klux Klan fought the Mafia; coal barons battled corrupt sheriffs; skirmishes between rival bootleggers resulted in bombings, tank battles, and public hangings. Seven boys had been cooked alive in the Stiritz Mine blast of 1927. Nineteen more were killed in a massacre of strikebreakers at the Herrin Mine. My great grandfather, Guy Foli, bought his first house at a deep discount because he’d found the previous owner dead in a secret sub-basement. The man had been bludgeoned by Sheriff Arms, a lawman who, under the pretext of enforcing Prohibition, conspired with the Klan to terrorize Catholics, foreigners, and other alcoholic species.

Before he bought the dead man’s house, Guy lived in an apartment above his market and butcher shop. One night in the mid 1920s, Arms arrived with his Klansmen deputies. They bound my great grandmother, Mary, in a potato sack, and hauled her husband off to jail in Benton. (My grandmother, who witnessed the abduction, told me, ‘There were a lot of white people who didn’t want us living in their town.’ This was the first time I’d thought of my grandmother as non-white.) Guy recognized one of his assailants, a boy to whom he’d extended store credit. ‘I know you’, he said. The sheet concealed whatever shame he felt. The next week, the boy would be back in Foli’s Market buying salsiccia and penny candy that he couldn’t pay for. In Johnston City everybody was on the losing end of some battle.

It was, in my grandmother’s words, ‘a tough little town’, to say the least. So when Rosa’s husband threatened to dismember her, she had reason to believe him. In American lore, the small town is always a refuge from the stampeding inhumanity and dirty humanism of the big city. Immigrants suffer the purgatory of Chinatowns and Hells Kitchens before ascending to our Rockwellesque burbs and hamlets. This was not Rosa’s trajectory. To escape a homicidal husband and a tough little town, she did something remarkable, especially for a woman of the twenties. She boarded a train and travelled to a distant city where she knew no one.

If you kept bar at Salvedo’s on North Sedgwick you would not be surprised to see a tin bucket land on the icy walk across the street. You would drape your rag over the slop sink, fetch two bottles of Fox DeLuxe from the cooler, and place them in the bucket. Then you’d watch the woman in the second-storey window hoist up the bucket on a string. And even though your name would be Guy Tony or Sal, you would not be surprised when she greeted you with a cry of ‘Garibaldi!’

Rosa called everyone Garibaldi, as if every person in Chicago were a general. My great-great aunt was herself an armchair general. She performed the entire beer-bucket operation, and just about everything else, from a chair by the window. She sat like she had very little experience standing up and less inclination, but Rosa had given enough of her life to standing. After fleeing Johnston City, she’d worked as a maid at the Highland Park Country Club. She had outrun homicide and golfers, and now she wanted to sit. She wanted to drink beer and crochet.

And she didn’t waste her talents on granny-square trivets or wooly shawls. Rosa was an artist. On one wall hung her lace rendering of The Last Supper, history’s most depressing dinner party woven from fine yarn. The burden of sin and salvation was chain-stitched across Christ’s face. Rosa’s own expression was of grim contentment, grim on the verge of laughter, crochet hook in one hand, church key in the other. She cursed and wheezed and was loved.

The man who loved her was several blocks south, paring
radishes in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Paul had been an infantryman and a landscaper before rising to the rank of Head Salad Chef in one of Chicago’s finest establishments. He was humble and kind and the size of a doll, an Italian toy soldier. He chopped iceberg lettuce without violence, shaved carrot curls with a hand like a hairdresser’s. He dressed shabbily so no one would mug him as he walked home from work.

Paul wrapped two pork chops in the Tribune and clocked out, the bad news bleeding backwards on the cut flesh. He held hands with himself, trying to contain the residual movement from ten hours of labour. But it never worked. He chopped his way down North La Salle, pared the night air as he strolled along West Eugenie, peeled and julienned until at last he’d reached the dogleg at Sedgwick and Menomonee. He could see the lights from Salvedo’s, see the Syrian shadows dancing upstairs to their pretty music.

He climbed the steps and Rosa received her kiss. She wheezed a question; he answered with a laugh. In the kitchen Paul unwrapped his parcel and browned the chops with onions. He’d salted the meat and worked a spoon through a pot of cold polenta before little Melba ran in to kiss her father’s knees. His kitchen pants smelled of thousand island and Borax.

Six years earlier, when Rosa was forty-one, she’d been rushed to the hospital complaining of a stomach tumour. The diagnosis was not what she’d expected, and she told the doctors to go to hell; she was dying; don’t joke. Rosa and Paul carried baby Melba home with a look of surprise that would never entirely vanish. Melba would grow up to be a ballet dancer and a nurse and would marry a Sicilian. And all the Folis back in Johnston City would declare her a beautiful girl.

That night after supper Paul put on a few records and they danced to Bob Wills and Alberto Rabagliati. Rosa stood (she had to sometimes) and Paul was forced to gaze up into her eyes. The window was open and the bucket on the sill and the Syrian across North Sedgwick yelled into the night. He wanted to know what kind of music would make them dance so good. When ‘Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina’ was over Paul lowered Rosa’s bucket to the sidewalk. They heard the clink of two bottles and Rosa shouted, to no one in particular: ‘Garibaldi! Garibaldi!’ It didn’t matter who she meant. Back in Johnston City everyone had been losing some battle. But in Chicago everyone was a general.

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Five or so years ago I saw the Zhou brothers perform at Columbia University. I recall a saxophone player and a violinist joining the mix, as well as Bei Dao and Eliot Weinberger reading while the brothers dipped their mops into buckets of black ink and splashed and brushed an enormous hanging white sheet that in the end revealed a painting of what looked like a menacing rorschach crucifixion scene. When I was asked to have a go at translating Bei Dao’s Zhou brothers essay, my mind automatically flashed to that ominous image.

I’ve translated little prose; my love lies with China’s ancient and more ancient poets, whose work I’ve always translated for one reason: to gain a deeper understanding of their poetry. And if errors arise, only the ghosts of the ancients could haunt my dreams. But then I’ve always admired Granta and Bei Dao, and I was intrigued by these two eccentric Chinese artists settling in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to, its whispered name evoking images of Sun Ra in full Egyptian attire. Plus both the journal and author were supportive, the deadline was in a week, and what was life without additional sleepless nights? Not only that, I had also translated one other bit of Bei Dao’s prose (a preface he wrote for a book of poems by Gennady Aygi), was fortunate to have been the in-house editor for his book of essays, Midnight’s Gate, and had actually seen the brothers in action. Wasn’t this just the sort of Erfahrung push a translator needed?

As I embarked on my adventure I immediately started to feel that old hatred for simplified Chinese characters. I had never properly learned them and usually faked my way through when reading, skimpy vocabulary and all. My various dictionaries were beginning to crack. In a panic, I phoned my mother and calmly talked through a few paragraphs with her. I started to feel more at ease, found a slow rhythm, the characters began to bend their syntax into English. Gradually I even enjoyed flowing along with Bei Dao's telegraphic phrasings, peeking into his life in a narrative way that is entirely absent in his crystalline poetry while trying to carry over his balance of playfulness and seriousness. His prose is that of a master poet – clear and subtle, few wasted breaths, fewer wasted words, clauses clipping along like puka shells on a string. For many years during the Cultural Revolution Bei Dao worked as a blacksmith, and his writing bears this experience, the precise shaping of words. Here, too, was a humorous side of Bei Dao not found in his poetry – him flopping around on a dorm-room couch during a conference, trying to sleep; the self-parody of the famous ever-itinerant poet impelled into intellectual work-for-hire across the globe (he still cannot legally return to mainland China); the awkward situations and encounters that arise from such an existence. Because of this, rather than being a kind of traditional artist monograph that systematically runs through an artist's life and work, his essay is impressionistic, distilled from his ongoing friendship with the Zhou brothers, what he hears about them from others, what he's seen of their work, the irrelevant details that make up biography and history (their flat leather shoes). All of these literary traits can also be traced in the essays of Zhang Ailing, and indeed her Written on Water, beautifully translated by Andrew F. Jones, was in the back of my mind as I plodded along. If Bei Dao ever collected his essays in one volume, Zhang’s title would fit his book, too. Both writers blend techniques of fiction and poetry in their essays, the result fulfilling Su Shi’s reflections on writing ‘resembling traveling clouds and flowing water’.

As far as specific instances of wrestling with this translation – besides the usual agonizing over particle phrasings that seem to make or break the English and – I'll point to two. Bei Dao’s leisurely, travel-journal-like style seamlessly alludes to classical texts – a quotation from the Analects, a reference to the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, another to Jia Yi's essay “The Faults of Qin” [‘Thereupon the First Emperor discarded the ways of the former kings and burned the books of the hundred schools of philosophy in order to make the people ignorant.’] At one point Bei Dao begins a paragraph with a common four-character proverb, 時來運轉 shi lai yun zhuan, which literally means ‘time passes fate turns’ (i.e. after a period of bad luck there’s a break for the better). It’s a popular saying with a poetic, musical turn, that when spoken in Mandarin, tonally rings second tone, second tone, break to sharp fourth tone, long extended third tone. In the context of the Zhou brothers’ lifeturn, tucked in its perfect place in the essay, it relates beautifully, the box clicks, fate actually breaks at the character for fate. At least that’s how I hear it. Originally I put, “Time revolves reprieve,” and was quite pleased I even shortened the character-to-translated- word count by one. This also has the slight catchy ring of a proverb, and echoes the transmigratory roots where the saying possibly originated – in the translating of a Buddhist sutra (The end of the preceding paragraph was originally: ‘...to the point where the two transmigrate to another list of dismissed names.’ ) But perhaps its slight ambiguity seemed out of place to Granta as after some back and forth, it was changed to “But time brought a swift reprieve.” Not terrible-sounding, and quickly understood, a functional sentence, though ‘swift’ isn’t there in the Chinese. This, I should add, was only one of a few instances where I disagreed with the editors, and didn’t persist. Without their heroic and careful efforts, the entire piece would be incomprehensible. An interesting coda to this proverb: When William Dean Howell’s novel A Hazard of New Fortunes was translated into Chinese, it was published with the straightforward title 新財富的危害 xin cai fu de wei hai. It later only reached a popular audience in China when it was published with the title 時來運轉.

Lastly, I was also proud of the last paragraph of the piece that I felt stumbled along in drunkenness like the two figures staggering through the darkness. The last two sentences originally were: “On the road back to my room, my feet stumble over some garlic... and why isn’t it possible to walk in a straight line? Shan Zuo holds me up, leads me on, we, staggering, tumbling, pierce the darkness.” Perhaps a rough, slightly too literal first draft, but I unfortunately missed the removal of the garlic in the proofs, which I would have fought to keep. The irrelevant detail that makes its surroundings glow.

I am not a Chicagoan by birth, although I am a Great Lakes Upper Midwesterner. Born and reared in Milwaukee, roughly eighty miles north across the Illinois/Wisconsin state line, I moved to Chicago at the turn of the century after having spent the three previous decades living everywhere from New York City to Miami — if seldom for longer than a couple of years in succession — and, so it often has struck me, all points in-between. For reasons too tedious to enumerate, mine has been a gypsy/military brat existence. So that, their having become part of the tidal rhythm of my life, I ordinarily am unfazed by departures, good-byes, so longs, fare-thee-wells, sayanora’s and see ya’s. I typically do leave-takings standing on my head, and I needn’t qualify them, or console myself, with ‘until next time’ or ‘til we meet again.’ I remain too long in one place, I get...antsy. Nor am I partial to looking back — in anger or other ways.

Now, there are a number of time-honoured ways for denizens of the broad-shouldered city to take their leave of Chi-town, and while each may strike the non-resident as more dubious than the next, to a true Chicagoan — one, that is, who pronounces it ‘Chicawgwinn’ — they do not constitute reason enough to bestir the arching of a mildly interested eyebrow.

One, is to hightail it out of town, oftimes ‘riddled with bullets’ and bleeding, hotly pursued by the Law (or, alternatively, one’s fellow armed-and-dangerous, homicidally maniacal, professional hoodlums) for having committed a crime (or, alternatively, grave and unpardonable error in judgment) serious enough to merit such pursuit.

This is said to occur less often these days than it did in the past, but until I see the statistics, I’m not buying it.

Another, is to be escorted out of town by the Law, typically in handcuffs, less often in leg shackles, to a state prison or federal penitentiary. Al Capone, for example, was partial to this type of exit.

This is not said to occur less often these days than it did in the past, but until I see the statistics, I’m buying it.

Yet a third, is to depart the city at precisely the same moment that one departs the planet itself — pronounced ‘da ert’ — typically in a cement suit, pine box, or fifty-five-gallon drum, customarily after having been ‘struck down’, routinely in ‘a hail of gunfire’. John Dillinger, for instance, much-favoured the approach.

This is said to occur more often than it did in the past, but I don’t need to see statistics to know that this is so.

In my own case, I found myself flouting tradition. Which is to say that when, four months ago, I left the city, it was of my own volition. Not that I left eagerly, much less glady, but I did do so voluntarily, without a whiff of coercion or hint of violence.

I did not skedaddle or ‘blow town’ under cover of darkness. I was not chased or obliged to leave at the invitation of either local law enforcement or with the encouragement of neighbourhood thugs. There were no fisticuffs, handcuffs, bullets or blood. No one threatened me, or, if they did, the threat never reached my ears. There wasn’t even an exchange of verbal unpleasantries.

While living in the city, it is true that my son was stomped nearly comatose in an after-hours West Side skinhead bar — rushed to the hospital, it required three dozen stitches, staples, and sutures to sew his scalp back onto his bruised, bloody, twenty-three-year-old swollen hive of a noggin — but while my son stayed, I left altogether peacefully, and, as I say, of my own accord. If it was as melancholy a parting as I ever have experienced, it likewise was a strictly uneventful one.

On the other hand, if, at risk of cliché, Chicago can be said to be an existential state of Midwestern mind and heart and soul—tough mind, capacious heart, blue, bluesy soul — then perhaps I never left at all. Perhaps I am there still.

Despite its geographic proximity to my hometown, I had visited Chicago precisely once, prior to moving there, when, as a child, I was obliged to spend a long day shuttling interminably between the Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, Museum of Science & Industry, and Field Museum of Natural History. At least my parents had the good sense not to subject a nine-year-old to a leisurely stroll through the Art Institute introducing him to the fathomless wonders of French Impression and Post-impressionism. At the time, those eighty miles might as well have been 8000; Chicago was and remained terra incognita. Nor, later, did it beckon.

But there arrived that moment in my early-fifties when, shed of every practical encumberance, I suddenly found myself footloose and free enough to live wherever I might choose to live. It is not an uninteresting proposition: where to pitch one’s tent when the world is one’s oyster. Where to put down stakes in preference to any other place, all other places, on the face of the earth. Or even, da ert.

I chose Chicago.

As I recall, it wasn’t owing to the winters, although having grown up accustomed to far worse than anything Chicago might contrive in that respect, it wasn’t in spite of them either.

In fact, while living on the East Coast, my work had taken me to Chicago on a series of research trips. With each visit, I found myself tumbling more hopelessly in love with the place. It wasn’t anything in particular that accounted for my unaccountable response. It was, rather, everything in particular. It will sound odd, but it was as if the city was calling me back, back to a place I never had lived in the first instance, a place with which I was long and intimately acquainted, without having spent any time there at all. Everything about it was strangely, yet instantly familiar, from the ‘union-made’ buff bricks of the bungalows and two-flats, to the block upon block of connected back-alleyways running along behind them, to the slant of the dawn’s early light breaking over Lake Michigan, to the dramatic volatility of the weather itself. The place even smelled right, smelled of hotdogs (Vienna Beef), popcorn (Garrett’s), and beer (Old Style). How to explain that sort of deja-vu-like, unbidden connection, that zonal comfort, other than with the word ‘love’? And how to resist its call?

I could sing the praises of this most livable of all the world’s world-class metropolises from now until forever. I could limn the variegated shades of its local colour and enumerate its several more — and, yes, less — charming parochial eccentricities. I could applaud its architecture, laud its civic and cultural spirit, speak at length about the guileless resolve, resilience, and raw-earnest affability of its residents, who are far too sophisticated ever to wear their sophistication upon their collective sleeve. I could even mention that, while I lived there, on an unseasonably mild, early November evening in 2008, one of its own, one of our own, was elected to the highest office in the land and that the entire beaming, celebratory city, myself included, turned out, pilgrim-like, at Grant Park, to partake in the making of History, before returning home to write the words that subsequently appeared in the city’s literary journal, named, appropriately enough, MAKE:

Watching Barack Obama,
thinking of John Brown, mouldering
150 years in his grave, up and antic
dancing,
more alive this day, than ever in his own.

No man walks on water
but some few make history
which, sometimes, is no less miraculous.

Four months later, after having lived in Chicago longer than I had lived anywhere else in my adult life, I was gone. I couldn’t stay. I had seen what I had come to see, experienced what I had come to experience. It was time to go. My heart told me so. The way it beat. Antsy.

I left, but I took Chicago with me. I’ll always have it.

Purchase your copy of Granta 108: ‘Chicago’

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Translated from the German by Christine Lo

Ten years ago, Ingo Schulze journeyed to Chicago. Here, he chronicles eight encounters that gave him insights into the Second City.

With Roy by my side I feel like the whole of Chicago is family. ‘In Pilsen, I’m Mexican, on Milwaukee Avenue, I’m Polish, and here in Cermak-Chinatown, I’m Chinese.’ We are in a Chinese diner where every dish costs a dollar fifty. Roy nibbles at the deep-fried chicken feet with relish, one after the other. She is seventy. Born in Dallas to a Russian-Jewish mother and a Native American father, she moved to Chicago when she was little. Twice widowed, she has a daughter and a son, and has worked for the immigration authorities for thirty-five years. Over lunch, Roy tells me that the Koreans stick together and have established a monopoly of the laundry business, that many Poles work for Jewish families, and that she’s never had so much money coming in a month as she does now – on the fingers of her left hand, she counts off the various pension and insurance payments she receives – not counting the work she still does for Dr Hoy, the lawyer. Roy knows how to turn foreigners on visitor visas into American citizens.

Dr Hoy’s door is closed. Consultation by appointment only. But a face suddenly looms up behind the glass. We’re disturbing him at work, but Dr Hoy seems pleased that Roy has dropped in.

There hasn’t been any crime to speak of in Chinatown for as long as he remembers. ‘Our Chinatown is manageable,’ he says. ‘They all know each other and the police too, of course.’

A couple of gangs from New York tried to get a foothold here, but with no luck. Dr Hoy sees the children of well-off parents as a problem though. ‘The young ones have never worked. They hang around and get stupid ideas in their heads.’

The police are good, he says, but the FBI is a joke. ‘All those qualifications on paper, but just not streetwise,’ he says. They had him under surveillance for a year, and also watched one of his clients for over a year. ‘Think of how much that cost! You should have seen how they acted! How frustrated they must have been after that year!’ He splutters with indignation as he tells us how amateurish their disguises were. ‘Only kids would have fallen for it.’ Two FBI agents dressed as a tourist couple had ‘accompanied’ him shopping, but been trailed in turn by a horde of youngsters. ‘You’re being followed,’ Dr Hoy whispered to them as he passed, and the agents reacted immediately – the woman walked away into the road and the man stayed by the building. ‘Real professionals.’

Dr Hoy talks about prejudice in the well-heeled suburbs, where blacks, Chinese or Latinos are used as scapegoats to further the careers of politicians and lawyers. It sounds like a film set in the Deep South. ‘No,’ he says, ‘it happens very often here.’ He taps the calendar with his pen and is surprised himself to see that just such an appeal proceeding is taking place that day.

Roy is leading the conversation really – I just have to listen. She greets Dr Hoy’s replies with a melodic ‘hmm, hmm, hmm’ that rises and falls before ending in a low ‘o–kay’ that serves as the prelude to her next question.

‘He wants to find out about Al Capone,’ she blurts out, laughing.

‘Before “Scarface Al” came here, twenty men with machine guns marched into that house over there,’ Dr Hoy says, pointing at a building at the corner of the crossroads. ‘Ten in this direction and ten in the other. I’ve heard that from eyewitnesses. But if you want to know more, you’d better ask Mr Young – he’s a legend.’

‘O–kay’.

As we say goodbye, I ask Dr Hoy if I can take a photo of him. He shakes his head apologetically and smiles. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

Mr Young is not just a legend – he is also a successful businessman. Starting with one tiny outfit, he has built a small empire of gift shops. Two teenagers are standing in front of the swords on sale, discussing their merits. I am looking at a large coral necklace when Mr Young pops up in front of me – nearly eighty years old, short and gaunt, wearing a peaked cap. His mother was German but he grew up in a Chinese family.

Mr Young takes us out for some food – here we are at the same table we were sitting at two hours ago. The service is just as speedy as before, but this time we are treated like VIPs.

Mr Young has only just been discharged from hospital, three days ago. He is having difficulty speaking. He and Roy have never met, but discover in a matter of minutes that they have several acquaintances in common, who they chat about. I find his speech hard to understand. He swallows a lot of his words the way old men do. But the expressions passing over his face are so beautiful and his light-blue eyes are so bright that it is enough for me to look at him. Now and then Mr Young turns to me and says something in German. He spent the Second World War working in offices all over, from Casablanca to Berlin. It took him only couple of months in each country to learn the language well enough to make himself understood. He had dreamt of being a diplomat after the war, but his poor education made that impossible. And he didn’t have time to catch up on school. He had to earn money.

He pulls some photos of his family out of his briefcase. His second marriage started out as a marriage of convenience. Roy nods knowingly. Mr Young and his wife had been neighbours until she suggested to him one day that she accompany him on a business trip. A separate hotel room wouldn’t be necessary… He shows us photos of their daughter.

‘What about Al Capone?’ Roy asks.

Mr Young waves the question away. But then he tells us a story after all: he once saw a man spit into his coffee cup at the table next to him in a diner. When the waiter came over to tell him not to do that, the man threw the cup at him, stood up and walked out without paying the bill. The waiter followed, and a fight started – suddenly, a shot rang out and the man fell to the ground, dead. One of Al Capone’s men had shot the troublemaker from the building on the other side of the road, without even getting up from his rocking chair. ‘Without even standing up, just like that, over a cup of coffee,’ Mr Young says, his eyes dulled in an instant. ‘Even the police didn’t bother to turn up.’ A little silence falls over our table.

‘Why Chicago?’ I ask later.

‘I’ve never asked myself that.’

When we leave, we find that the bill has been paid.

‘Say hello to Berlin!’

We get stuck in the afternoon jam on our way to Milwaukee Avenue in a taxi. Roy directs the Indian driver to take a roundabout route. When we finally reach Milwaukee Avenue, we are a couple of thousand numbers too far along. Roy swears. She and the taxi driver have a heated, but always polite, argument. Fifteen minutes later, we arrive at the Travel Service office.

‘Please don’t give my real name – so many people know me!’ The woman laughs again. ‘I have so many friends in Germany! Just call me Samantha.’

Samantha is Polish. For her, everything started with a dream. Every week for three months, she dreamt that she was rowing a boat around the Statue of Liberty. ‘I asked someone what that meant and he said, “You have to travel to America.” But getting a visa was like winning the lottery. So I went to the authorities, filled in the forms and handed them in and they told me to wait – five minutes later I was holding a visa. There were over a hundred people there and I got the visa!’

The voyage from Gdansk to Montreal took thirteen days. There were buses waiting for the arrivals, but the one to New York was out of the question because of her dream – ‘I never got there!’ A man who she had got to know on the ship said she could stay rent-free at his house, which was in Chicago. So Samantha got on the bus to Chicago. Her travel budget was ten dollars.

She started as a babysitter and cleaner, and learnt English. She met the man who became her husband at a travel agent’s. ‘I saw him and I fell in love.’ They have been married for almost twenty-five years.

Why does she live in Little Poland? ‘I can speak Polish here, and there’s a Catholic church. There’s the bread too. You must go next door and buy the bread. It’s the best bread in Chicago. And there are Polish newspapers. But many people are moving away from here, further out.’ Samantha hesitates, as if she is ashamed of telling me the reason. ‘It’s because so many Latinos and blacks live here now. It makes everything worse.’

Samantha goes to Poland often. ‘I just went again, for two days!’ She starts laughing, as if she’s just heard the funniest joke. ‘Two days!’ she exclaims again, holding two fingers up as if she is making the victory sign. Then she picks up the phone. She’s speaking Polish. The customers coming in greet her in Polish too before sitting down to wait on the chairs by the wall.

‘O–kay,’ Roy says. It’s the sign that it’s time to go.

While we’re on the bus to Old Town and more and more blacks and Latinos get on, I wonder aloud why Lucy wanted to be called Samantha.

‘Maybe she’s a spy,’ Roy guesses. She bursts into laughter so loud that I’m sure that everyone is going to be staring at us. But no one on this bus takes any notice.

‘You’re from Germany? Which part?’ the saleswoman asks after our opening words. ‘Ich bin Berlinerin!’ she shouts, as if she wants the whole room to know it. She is a small woman, very pale. While she gets a bag out of the display window and waits for us to inspect it, we hear her story: she married a GI in the early 1950s and came to Chicago with him. ‘Big mistake. I’d be getting a proper pension now in Germany. It’s much better to work there: vacations, pay, health insurance. That’s all hopeless here.’ But what about the city? ‘Ach, Chicago! Winter all the time, wet and windy. You’ve got to go down south.’ She hands the bag to the cashier. ‘I would never move to Chicago again,’ she says. ‘But you’ll never get a bag like this anywhere in Germany, never – or only at three times the price.’ She walks over to the next customer.

‘This is the city of the big shoulders. Chicago is solid. This is where it all happens, grain, meat, steel…’ Rüdiger is in his early fifties and has worked at the exchange for almost a quarter of a century. His family is originally from East Prussia and he was born on the road when they had to flee the region. He has never known his father.

Their ship landed in New York on Christmas Eve in 1951, and they started off lodging at a farm in Michigan. The family sounds like a storybook success. His grandfather moved to Chicago with one dollar in his pocket and started working on building sites as a foreman. (‘Polier,’ I say after Rüdiger describes what his grandfather did. ‘I haven’t heard that word since my grandfather died!’ he says.) The grandfather earned good money and bought his first house after three years. It was directly opposite a synagogue, so the grandparents used to do the housework for their neighbours on Jewish holidays.

‘We all went to good schools and to college, and we all have good jobs and our own houses. We’re doing well.’ Rüdiger says this almost wonderingly, as if he can’t quite believe it himself.

When I meet him at the Visitor Center at the Chicago Board of Trade at 9 a.m. on Monday, he is wearing a blue jacket with a badge that looks like a caretaker’s uniform. ‘It’s quite simple really: some people want to sell and some people want to buy, because they think they can sell it for more money. It’s pure capitalism.’ We look down at the crowd of traders who are standing in various large enclosures, called pits. Then I’m allowed to go with him onto the floor for the moment when the shouting starts, from one second to the other, at exactly 9.30 a.m. Wheat is brought and sold several times over even before it has been sown. ‘Movement is the main thing in the market.’

We walk from one hall to the other and from one pit to the other, and Rüdiger explains what is traded where. The bond futures pit is the largest in the world. Rüdiger spent years standing in the crush here from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon. ‘I didn’t have time to show anyone around then.’ The more you can assert your physical presence here, the better your chances. The men and women shout and gesticulate, their hands giving their offers in a deaf-mute display: a fist is a full cent, the middle and ring fingers splayed like scissors is three-quarters of a cent, and so on.

Rüdiger points at the figures for May corn – he’s losing a lot of money at the moment. But he is perfectly calm – it doesn’t seem to matter to him at all. The weather channel is showing on the screens above us. Screaming men and women jump up and down beside us. Someone is sitting on the floor about a metre away from us, leafing through a newspaper.

It is not Rüdiger’s explanations but his tone of voice – only possible in American English – that presents the exchange as both a wonderful invention and foolish child’s play.

‘Isn’t it possible to pull off the most outrageous scams here?’ I ask.

‘Once or twice perhaps, but no more than that.’

It’s only then that the principle of the exchange begins to dawn on me.

Two days later, we go to dinner at Rüdiger’s house. He drives us past the Chicago Bulls stadium, with its statue of Michael Jordan. It must be pretty strange for a man to pass a statue of himself on his way to training. A couple of metres along, the central locking clicks like in a movie kidnap scene. We’re driving through the West Side. Only poor blacks live here. Rüdiger wants us to see this part of Chicago, this disaster area, too.

The windows in the blocks are broken or boarded up. Big cars, many of them damaged, are parked outside the dilapidated houses in the side streets, and hookers wait on street corners. Between two wooden houses, a kiosk with a tiny window looks like a bunker. Rüdiger gets anxious when we get stuck at a red light for too long. An old woman, practically toothless, holding a shopping bag in each hand, shouts something at us. She laughs scornfully. She is only a few steps away when the light turns green. There are police in the schools here, and the pupils have to go through a metal detector, like at an airport. Catholic schools offer the only way out, but you have to pay to attend them. ‘There are hundreds of initiatives, but most of the teachers have already given up. The city just demolishes the broken-down buildings,’ Rüdiger says in German. It’s impossible to place his accent. ‘But even if you get into the school, you still have to survive the walk there.’

We are suddenly in Oak Park, where Frank Lloyd Wright built his first house and where Hemingway was born and grew up. The scene changes from one side of the street to the other. Whites are in the majority again. We pass a huge Jewish cemetery and arrive in Riverside. The trees arch over the street like a cathedral. A Wright house has been on sale here for months, for seven hundred thousand dollars. ‘The windows alone are worth that!’ Rüdiger says. He has been to see the house, but does not have the seven hundred thousand dollars.

‘What would happen if a black person bought it?’

‘Jesus!’ Rüdiger says. ‘A black guy would never buy a house here.’

‘Why not?’

‘He just wouldn’t!’ The neighbourhood wouldn’t suit him, Rüdiger says, ‘but the schools here are good.’

We pass one dream house after the other, with green expanses and tall trees in between. The roads curve gently like paths in a park. Rüdiger’s house is one of the smallest. ‘It looks much bigger from the outside than it really is,’ he says.

His wife Noelle’s family is French, but she was born in Chicago. She works half-days in a school library. ‘I love this job!’ she says.

Rüdiger was drafted into the Marines, but did not have to go to Vietnam. After that, he did a degree in history and worked as a teacher. He started working at the exchange in 1975, first at the switchboard, then as a runner taking telephone offers to the pit. He started trading in 1980. ‘I borrowed money from family and from other traders – everything was sealed with a handshake. And it went on from there.’

He had five or six good years, from 1984 to 1989 or 1990. He made money then. The house could be bigger and the trading profits higher, but he wants to keep his risk low so that he can pay for good college educations for both kids.

‘And how does it feel when you sit at home waiting, wondering if you’ll be lucky or unlucky?’

Noelle waves away the questions. They never speak about it – even when things are going well.

‘But how do you manage? Surely it’s not possible to make a profit all the time over twenty years?’

‘This is the city with big shoulders. That’s Chicago for you.’

I have ten minutes with Francisco Barajas, a young Mexican. Francisco works for the UNO, the United Neighbourhood Organization of Chicago, which mainly helps immigrant Latinos to settle in, but also anyone else who comes to them. One of their many activities stands out: the campaign for parents to ‘Take Ten Minutes with Your Child!’ Immigrants often juggle jobs and have hardly any time for their children. Through schools, the UNO has reached out to about 7,000 families who have signed ‘family contracts’ to take part in activities at museums, theatres or at the zoo.

Francisco has a degree in Industrial Psychology from Mexico City, and has lived in Chicago for eight years. He spent time in Miami and Boston before that ‘but Chicago is cosmopolitan, clean and not overcrowded. Best of all, Chicago has proper seasons. You really feel the spring here, and the summer – and of course the winter.’

Edith picks us up in her car. Near the ‘Chicago’ ‘L’ station, she stops to show us a few galleries. The former industrial quarter has now become so fashionable that artists and gallery owners have started looking for space in other areas because the rents are rising. At the Fassbender Gallery, Edith introduces us as ‘people from my town’.

Edith was eight when her family left Germany in 1939. Before that, her father was imprisoned in Buchenwald twice. After he was released the second time, a farmer hid him until the family received a US visa from an uncle in Detroit. All her other relatives in Germany were killed.

Like many other artists, Edith lives in Pilsen, a Latino area not far from downtown. We drive through streets with empty lots where buildings have been torn down. In front of the houses that are still standing – impossible to tell if anyone still lives in them – the scene resembles a flea market. A couple of black people are inspecting spare parts of some kind. Three or four metres of graffiti stretch along an endless wall, above which the ‘L’ trains rumble. Much of the graffiti is faded or has crumbled away – little of it is new – but Diego Rivera would still have enjoyed it.

‘That’s where I live.’ Edith points at her house, which used to be a stable. Half of it belongs to her. Surrounded by a wall, the brick box with glass bricks at the sides doesn’t look too welcoming. When she operates the remote control, the entryway opens to reveal a more homely aspect: a front garden and flowers even, though they are on the neighbour’s side. We walk through a glass door and find ourselves in a gigantic studio. A wooden staircase leads to a mezzanine level where the living space is. We sit the open-plan kitchen and sitting room. The bedroom is separated off with discarded office furniture.

‘No one in my family is religious. They don’t want to know.’ She observes the Sabbath though, and is kosher. Edith looks ten or fifteen years younger than she is. She has two children and four grandchildren. All of them are blond, so she is the odd one out with her curly black and grey hair. She has lived alone since her husband died.

When she was invited to Altenburg by ‘her town’, a woman came up to her and showed her a photo: two girls holding their Zuckertüten, their first-day-of-school goody bags. The schoolfriends were meeting again more than sixty years later. Edith no longer spoke German and found it difficult to understand, and her friend did not speak English.

Edith tells us about a dream in which she saw a man sitting on a wheelbarrow. She thought she knew him, but did not know who he was.

She rang her father up and told him about the dream. It turned out that the man was a pedlar who Edith’s mother had provided food and clean laundry for when he was in town. That phone conversation opened up the memories for her, and started the dialogue with her father about their time in Germany.

‘I don’t want to lead the life of a victim like my father did.’ She does not claim reparation payments from Germany, nor does her brother. Her father suffered from panic attacks from the late 1950s onwards, and never went out except to present himself at the German embassy once a year, so as not to risk losing the payments due to him as a Jewish victim.

To overcome her fear, and in the face of resistance and incomprehension from everyone around her, Edith travelled to West Berlin in 1984, then to East Berlin, and, secretly, onwards to Altenburg and Buchenwald. ‘I had to do that.’

She took her father’s tallis, his prayer shawl, to Buchenwald. ‘He was alive – but he led the life of a victim, so he was really already dead.’ Her eyes fill with tears and she apologizes, but continues speaking.

As an artist, Edith is known for her abstract sculptures made up of different pieces of wood – quite apart from their beauty, they embody a wonderful sense of equilibrium. The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art has a few of her most beautiful pieces. She was a painter before she was a sculptor, and now she works almost exclusively on installations. ‘My real work is probably to talk to young people,’ she says. In Altenburg, she visited a school together with her schoolfriend, and spoke to a class. She wants to go again.

And now we get to the point. We have a mutual friend, an artist in New York. ‘Why do you live in Chicago and not in New York?’ I ask.

‘In New York you have no time for art. You have to earn money to stay there. Here you can really make art. You need three times less money here. It’s true!’

Dr Ronne Hartfield is Executive Director of the Art Institute, and one of the most prominent experts on museum education in the US. ‘I thought I would die at forty, that’s why I did everything so early. Every day after forty was a gift.’ Ronne is retiring, and has half an hour for us in between two retirement parties.

She was born in Chicago’s South Side. Her Native American mother was a housewife, and her black father was a factory worker. Ronne was a wunderkind who could write when she was three years old. At sixteen she graduated from college, where she studied history, theology and literature. She spent nineteen years on her PhD on stone as a metaphor in Neruda’s ‘The Heights of Machu Picchu’.

Her French husband is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. They lived like hippies in the beginning, then they had four daughters (including twins) and Ronne stayed at home for almost twelve years. Despite this, she was made Professor of Comparative Literature soon after, and eventually dean of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She moved into museum work after that.

For a long time, the couple put all their money into their children’s education. In a soft voice, Ronne proudly lists the top universities that her daughters have attended. Her study is filled with books, posters and a mind-boggling array of photographs and trophies. The list of her professional memberships, teaching positions and honours (she even has a medal from the president) fills a closely printed sheet of paper.

None of that matters during our conversation, but it is present all the same. The conversation goes from Neruda to other writers and she tells us about her visit to Hans Küng in Germany. She photocopies one of her longer poems for us, as the opportunity presents itself, then it’s time for her to go.

What about Chicago?

‘Everything here is first class: the museums, the jazz, the symphony orchestra, the universities, the architecture. People of every skin colour live here, and we can afford big apartments and even find a parking space in front of our building. Nowhere else on earth has all that, believe me.’

See the cover of Granta’s special ‘Chicago’ issue, designed by Chris Ware

Granta acting editor John Freeman introduces the ‘Chicago’ issue, in this short film

Read advance praise for ‘Chicago’

O’Rourke’s was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago’s Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was not discovered until maggots started to drop through the ceiling and on to the bar. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night behind the building. From the day it opened on December 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

Neil Steinberg, a young columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, invited me out to lunch one day to complain that he had missed out on all the fun. He had heard that the Front Page era in Chicago had a rebirth in the 1970s, centring around O’Rourke’s Pub and the two other nightly stops in the ‘Bermuda Triangle’, Riccardo’s and the Old Town Ale House. The triangle got its name, it was said, because newspaper reporters crashed there and were never seen again. Riccardo’s, equidistant from the four daily newspapers, was for after work. The Ale House had a late-night license and was for after O’Rourke’s. Few lasted through the whole ten hours. People would ride a while and jump off.

The regulars mostly knew one another. There were maybe a hundred members of the ‘O’Rourke’s Crowd’, perhaps fifty or sixty of them lasting the whole duration at that address and many following the bar when it moved to Halsted Street, across from the Steppenwolf Theater. It was driven west by rising real estate prices, the victim of the urbanization it represented. Jay Kovar, the manager from day one, the co-owner in later years, received a loan from the actor Brian Dennehy to finance the move. Actors had always been part of the mix, many of them from the nearby Second City. And folk singers, from the Earl of Old Town. John Belushi, John Prine, Steve Goodman.

Steinberg said he’d heard that on a good night you might see Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren there all at the same time. Yes, you might, but it was not always a good night. Nelson had an unrequited crush on Jeanette Sullivan, the Japanese-American co-owner, and was pleasant enough but didn’t come primarily to hang out with the crowd. During a disagreement with Tom Fitzpatrick, the Pulitzer- winning columnist, he and Fitz pelted each other with shot glasses.

Royko appeared one night after midnight, being supported by two volunteers, his trench coat a shambles. He was scheduled to appear the following morning on the Phil Donahue Show. I made it a point to watch. To my amazement, he was lucid and didn't seem hung over.

Few of the regulars often seemed hung over, although many must have been many mornings. Michaela Tuohy, ‘Mike’, accounted for that by the practice of ‘recovery drinking’, which you did until your act was together enough to be taken onstage at O’Rourke’s. As a general rule, most of the people in the bar were having a good time. There was a lot of laughter. Groups formed and shifted. O’Rourke’s stars like Jay Robert Nash, the prolific crime writer, commanded an audience. He said he had interviewed John Dillinger at his Arizona retirement home in the early 1970s, and told us about it. ‘He’s an old man now, with a shuffling step, and when you see him through the screen-door, you can tell from the bulge in his bathrobe that he’s got a gat in the pocket.’ Someone would always ask him, ‘What did he say?’ Nash would reply: ‘He snarled, Who are you? What do you want? I said, You know who I am, Mister Dillinger. He staggered back and shouted: Jay Robert Nash?’ We didn’t believe Nash was serious, but he never, ever admitted he was not. You heard a lot of stories in O’Rourke’s.

Nash was small and compact, a Cagney type. The bar’s Sydney Greenstreet was Alcibiades Oikonomides (Al the Greek), a mountainous man standing well over six feet and weighing perhaps 300 pounds, with a forehead so high it was said it required its own zip code. With this forehead he would head-butt friends as a gesture of solidarity, chanting, ‘To the ten thousand years we will drink together.’ Years prior to his present position as a professor of antiquities at Loyola University, he said, he had been an aide-de-camp for Haile Selassie in the Ethiopian–Somalian border wars, and had a much-creased photograph of himself in uniform, standing next to a horse, to prove it. He was a member of an ancient Greco-Venetian trading family that still owned a palazzo on the Grand Canal, he told us, and also was partner in a book shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. About Selassie I was not sure, but I met the cousin in the palazzo and stood under a Tiepolo ceiling, and when he took me to the book shop his name was on the door.

What brought Al the Greek night after night to this obscure corner of Chicago? O’Rourke’s was not boring, and embraced eccentricity. Ordinary yuppies, those who frequented the bars on Rush Street and Old Town, did not blend in. For one thing, they were unimpressed by the booths and tables, knocked together from plywood, shellacked, caked by years of smoke and sweat; for years the bar had no more air conditioning than central heating. O’Rourke’s was the ultimate singles bar, it was said: You went there with a date, and came home alone.

Cabaret could break out at any moment. Bag-pipers drank free. Everybody knew the words to all of the songs on the juke box, some of which had been on the machine since it was new. When Jerry Lewis would sing ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, it was not unknown for a customer to climb up on the bar and sing along. The songs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem played again and again, and customers would sing with them: And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you bloody well die. Press agents would bring visiting movie stars to view the local colour, and they were good sports, Charlton Heston one night autographing Natalie Nudlemann's bra while she was wearing it.

Not long after he won the Academy Award, Cliff Robertson flew his private plane down from Milwaukee for an unannounced visit, and found himself in the back of a red Sun-Times delivery truck on his way to the after-hours hangout Oxford’s Pub, in company including Al the Greek, a bag piper, and Jake the Dominatrix, who was flogging a new friend with a belt.

Most evenings, of course, it was not like that. When Chicago still had four dailies (the Sun-Times, the Tribune, the Daily News, and Chicago’s American, later renamed Chicago Today) it was as competitive as any newspaper town in America, and many of the reporters and photographers knew one another. Trucks would deliver bundles of the early editions for us to pore over. The day’s Royko column might be read aloud. Editors were libelled and publishers despised.

Jay Robert Nash told us that gangsters learned how to speak by listening to the dialogue in Ben Hecht’s crime movies. Some of us borrowed our personas from Hecht and MacArthurs’ The Front Page. In a way, I did. I arrived at the Sun-Times from downstate Urbana, a green kid, intimidated by legendary reporters. On the first Friday night I was taken to Riccardo’s, I had a couple of beers and was delighted by the wise-guy patter that surrounded me. I tried to talk that way, even though I was a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago before dropping out to go full-time with the Sun- Times. Many of us at O’Rourke’s became fake Irishmen, swayed by the Clancy Brothers and the big blown-up photographs of Behan, O’Casey, Shaw and Joyce. I was one-quarter Irish, but submerged the other three-quarters and assured people, ‘your blood’s worth bottling’. Fundraisers allegedly from the IRA would visit and we would naively give five bucks to the cause, probably not funding any terrorism because they were con artists preying on boozing Irish wannabes.

Above all we drank. It is not advisable, perhaps not possible, to spend very many evenings in a place like O’Rourke’s while drinking Cokes and club soda. Sometimes I attempted to cut back, by adopting drinks whose taste I hated (fernet branca) or those with low alcohol content (white wine and soda). Night after night I found these substitutes relaxed me enough to switch to scotch and soda. For a time I experimented with vodka and tonic. I asked Jay Kovar what he know about vodka ‘as a drink’. He said: ‘Sooner or later, all the heavy hitters get to vodka.’

I studied Jay as he worked behind the bar, trying to figure out how he did it. A handsome, compact man, fit, looking a little like Jason Patric, he steadily drank half-shots of whiskey and smoked Pall Malls. I never saw him clearly appear to be drunk. Indeed I saw relatively few of the regulars when they were drunk, although that could happen after hours at the Ale House. Some people, like Al the Greek, could drink terrifying mixtures of drinks to little apparent effect. Others were simply reasonable drinkers, but steady.

Hank Oettinger, the most-published letter-to-the-editor writer in Chicago, would turn up night after night with his pockets stuffed with letters that either had just been published or were about to be published. These he would read to us. Hank was a retired linotype operator, then in his seventies, a fervent leftist, a regular at every protest march, a confidant of Dick Gregory’s. His black hair slicked back over his big German-American head, he always wore a jacket and tie and ordered a beer. One beer. He had been making his rounds, sometimes composing his letters on a bar, since mid-day stops in the Loop. But only sipping beer. Making his way nightly through the mean streets.

A few of the regulars, I suspect, had little identity other than the one conferred by O’Rourke’s. John the Garbage Man was a regular, displaying his sculptures made from objects discovered in the garbage. He would take discarded silverware and melt it down into jewellery that looked like blobs of melted silverware. These were sold to be worn around the neck. I bought a chess set from him, but it was not a success because the pieces looked interchangeable. These I tried to use only once, while playing in an O’Rourke’s chess tournament that sprang up during the Bobby Fischer fever in Iceland. The winner, who played chess for money at the North Avenue beach chess pavilion, was Andre, a stringy hippie, tie-dyed and pony-tailed, who explained he had been the armourer of the Luxembourg Army before fleeing to America as a political refugee.

We regulars knew each other. We dated each other. We slept with each other. We met on Saturday mornings at Oxford’s for ‘recovery drunch,’ spelled with a d. Tom Butkovich would pull up behind O’Rourke’s in his old Volvo station wagon and unload the equipment to barbeque a lamb. His mother, from the far Southwest Side, would bring in covered dishes of macaroni and cheese and potato salad, while his stepdad, a steel worker, would dance with his T-shirt pulled above his belly, singing It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that. We went to each other’s marriages and funerals, and observed holidays together. We took a collection for bail money, or helped the Jim and Mike Tuohy family to move, which they did frequently, Mike once complaining that volunteers had failed to move her kitchen garbage.

The 1968 Day of Rage marches passed nearby, and Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer came in. We watched the moon landing and the protests after Martin Luther King was killed. We sang, laughed and cried. We rehearsed the same stories over and over. I said we knew each other.

We knew who we said we were, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing each other well enough. Now Studs Terkel, Mike Royko and Nelson Algren are dead, and so are John Belushi, Steve Goodman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Mike Tuohy, Hank Oettinger, Al the Greek and John the Garbageman. Jay Kovar walks his dogs. I'm telling you, Steinberg, you had to be there.

See the cover of Granta’s special ‘Chicago’ issue, designed by Chris Ware

Granta acting editor John Freeman introduces the ‘Chicago’ issue, in this short film

Read advance praise for ‘Chicago’

As I sat watching Kenny MacAskill trying to persuade the Scottish Parliament that he’d done the right thing by releasing the Lockerbie bomber, I kept remembering the face of Shannon Davis. It was an image I first encountered ten years ago while working on a television documentary on the effects of the atrocity. Shannon was a bright nineteen-year-old from Connecticut, a student at Syracuse University, and one of the 270 people who died when Pan Am 103 blew apart over Lockerbie in December 1988. I’ve seen many images from the Lockerbie calamity since but none has stayed with me like the picture of Shannon’s pretty, smiling face.

I’m still not sure why Shannon haunts me the way she does. Maybe it’s because I have a daughter who was roughly Shannon’s age in 1988, who’d been to school in the USA and returned with a broad American accent. Maybe it was because Shannon and her pals had enjoyed themselves wandering around my home city of Edinburgh in the weeks before they boarded Pan Am 103. Maybe it was because I’d spent an evening with Shannon’s mother Jane who had conjured up a vivid, loving picture of her younger daughter.

Maybe it was because there was a terrible twist to Jane Davis’s grief, because it was she who’d persuaded Shannon to make the fatal trip. Earlier that year Jane’s husband had been killed in a road accident in Saudi Arabia and Shannon had decided that the family was too hard-up to spend money sending her to Europe. ‘In fact she’d crumpled up the application form and thrown it in the trash,’ Jane told us. ‘I fished it out and told her that she had to go because that’s what her dad would have wanted for her. I’ve got to live with that.’

After MacAskill’s decision – and the outrageous but entirely predictable hero’s welcome accorded to Megrahi in Tripoli – I spent some time trying to contact Jane Davis to find out how she felt. In the end, my telephone search failed, but I was pretty sure that she’d be hurting, that the events in Scotland would have opened wounds that had never closed. Almost all the American families who were contacted by the British media were outraged by what they saw as MacAskill’s misguided and feeble decision.

They were not alone. The Scottish press, and particularly the red-tops, were strident in their denunciation of MacAskill. The Scottish edition of The Sun gave over its front page to one word – ‘abomination’. The Daily Express made the telling calculation that the length of Megrahi’s sentence worked out at two weeks for every victim. Opposition politicians in Holyrood waded in claiming that, had they been in power, Megrahi would have stayed in jail. And Alex Salmond’s SNP government reeled against the political ropes from where it will struggle to recover.

In the deluge of print I noticed the reaction of Kara Weipz, whose brother Rick Monetti had died at Lockerbie. ‘I cannot understand how the Scots can show compassion’ she told the Times. ‘It is an utter insult and utterly disgusting.’ Ten years ago I had sat with Karen’s parents Bob and Eileen Monetti watching a film of the fuselage of a wide-bodied jet being blown apart in a blizzard of fragments. The film had been shot by the Federal Aviation Administration at an airfield in Alabama.

‘What the FAA did was put the same size of explosive in the same place in the cargo hold as the bomb which blew up Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie,’ Bob Monetti told us at the time. ‘Now imagine that happening at six hundred miles an hour and at 30,000 feet. It would have been all over in a second. Rick and the rest of the folks on that plane would never have known what happened. That’s what we tell ourselves anyway.’ It was the bleakest of consolations, but it was one of the ways that the Monetti family grappled with their grief.

I’ve no doubt Kenny MacAskill – who I happen to know slightly – was genuinely touched by Megrahi’s wretched and terminal condition. But if he’d learned more about the measures some families took to cope with their losses perhaps his ‘compassion’ for Megrahi might have ebbed. Pamela Dix, whose brother was killed, showed us photographs of the indentation his body had made after falling 30,000 feet into the fields of Tundergarth Farm. For years afterwards she lectured to the police academy at Hendon on ways of handling bereaved families after catastrophes like Lockerbie.

Geri Buser – who lost her husband, her son and her pregnant daughter – found consolation in regular trips to Lockerbie where, she said ‘I feel closer to the three of them in Lockerbie than I ever do in New Jersey.’ Whenever she visited Lockerbie she’d make contact with her friend Ella Ramsden whose little council house was wrecked by debris and falling bodies. Georgia Nucci lost her twenty-year-old son Christopher a year after her daughter Jennifer had died in Ecuador. Nucci’s reaction was to fly down to an orphanage in Bogota, Colombia and adopt no fewer than four children (aged four, six, seven and eleven). ‘I just wanted a family,’ Nucci told us. ‘I had to have a family.’

Peter and Suse Lowenstein are a wealthy couple from Morristown, New Jersey. He owns and runs a plastics company and she is a talented artist and sculptor. After their son Alexander, aged twenty, died at Lockerbie they consulted medical experts to find out whether the boy would have been unconscious all the way down to earth. ‘They told us he would certainly have blacked out at the higher altitudes,’ Peter Lowenstein told us, ‘but that he may have regained consciousness as he fell into oxygen-rich air. I hope he didn’t.’

Suse Lowenstein’s response was to create life-size sculptures of naked, grief-stricken women, modelled by the wives, mothers, sisters and sweethearts of the people who died. One of them is an image of herself. They are frozen in the positions they struck when they heard the name Lockerbie. The sculptures sit in a circle in the garden of the Lowenstein’s big timber-built house in Montauk, Long Island. To date Suse has created seventy-six figures. She calls the project ‘Dark Elegy’ and says ‘This is my life’s work now.’

And twenty-one years have clearly done nothing to assuage the hurt and anger of Susan Cohen whose only child Theodora was killed on Pan Am 103. Susan and her husband Dan were relentless in the pursuit of Theodora’s killers. In the 1990s the Cohens became well known faces in the US media, filled with contempt for the US and British bureaucrats who, they declared, were doing too little. But ten years ago Dan Cohen had this to say: ‘One of the great myths about all of this is that tragedy makes you a better person. Oh no, it doesn’t. I’m not a better person than I used to be. I’m an angry and bitter person.’ And one who would have been quite happy to lob a few missiles into the heart of Libya. ‘I don’t believe in justice any more,’ he says. ‘I have no problem with the word revenge. I have no problem with at all, not any more.’

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, as it were, are the figures of Dr. Jim Swire and the Reverend John Mosey, neither of whom believe that Megrahi was the bomber or that Libya was involved. Both men lost daughters. Flora Swire (who was a twenty-three-year-old medical student) is buried on the Isle of Skye. Helga Mosey (who was working as a nanny in the USA) lies in the kirkyard at Tundergarth, near Lockerbie. She is one of only three Lockerbie victims buried there.

Jim Swire’s campaign to uncover the truth about Lockerbie is well known. It has cost him dear. Ten years ago he was claiming that the loss of his practice salary and his NHS pension rights had cost him around £1 million. ‘But I think there would have been a heavier price had I had to sit on my hands and do nothing. I think I would have exploded in some way, or come to grief terribly if I’d tried to do that.’

John Mosey, an ordained minister of the Pentecostal church says that the bombing shook but did not destroy his faith. Of God, he says, ‘He didn’t cause it, of course, but He could have stopped it and He didn’t. And He knows the reason why, and we accept that. We don’t like what happened, we certainly don’t understand why it has happened, because we prayed for our girl before she went for a safe journey. But we do trust God and we say Father, you know best.’

With the money that flowed into John Mosey’s church following the death of Helga the Moseys created the Helga Mosey Childrens’ Home in Luzon in the Philippines. The home takes in babies and very young children who have been abandoned. The Moseys take comfort from the fact that there are children now alive who would have died if Helga Mosey had not been killed. ‘Her loss is not like an illness you can recover from,’ John Mosey told us ten years ago. ‘It’s an amputation that you learn to live with.’

Judging by the media reports the anger that the American families feel for MacAskill and the Scottish government is palpable. But most of them, I suspect, will retain their affection for the town of Lockerbie itself. The people we talked to had been deeply moved by the way in which the women of Lockerbie gathered up the victims’ torn and blood-stained clothes from all over the area, carefully washed and ironed them, wrapped them in tissue paper, folded them into boxes and returned them to their families, wherever that was possible.

‘We were told by our own State Department that we couldn’t have the clothes back,’ recalled Aphrodite Tsairis, whose daughter Alexia (nineteen) was one of the bomber’s victims. ‘They said that the things were too soiled, too badly damaged. But the people of Lockerbie just did it. I cannot tell you how much that meant to us.’ It was a simple gesture which had an extraordinary effect.

A year or two after working on the television programme I went back to Connecticut to talk to Jane Davis. In the archives of Syracuse University I’d come across a collection of gaudy postcards which Shannon had sent back to the USA from various parts of Europe. Jane had donated them to the university. They sparkled with playful energy, affection and that strange argot peculiar to teenagers. It seemed to me that they deserved a wider public.

After I’d recorded my radio interview with Jane, and after a friendly dinner during which she’d cracked funny in her broad Texas accent, she asked me if I’d like to see Shannon’s grave. It was dark by the time we got to the small-town graveyard, but in the car’s headlights I could see a simple headstone under which the remains of Shannon Davis lay.

I remembered that headstone as I watched Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi being welcomed by cheering crowds in Tripoli and then, a few days later, listened to Kenny MacAskill defending himself in the blonde-wood interior of the Scottish Parliament. And I couldn’t help thinking that MacAskill, and perhaps the SNP itself, was about to learn that the road to political oblivion – like the road to hell – is lined with good intentions.

Begin Call

‘Only connect!’ beseeched E.M. Forster. Could Mr Forster have envisaged a world in which one person connected with another, thousands of miles away, through free video and voice calls, instant messages and file sharing, via a computer and broadband internet connection and a company called Skype? Humans are now so freely connected through computers as to cause consternation to governments like those of Russia and China.

Skype is on a mission to ‘enable the world’s conversations,’ says its President, Josh Silverman. ‘Allowing the world to communicate for free empowers and links people and communities everywhere,’ he believes. The etymology of the word ‘conversation’ is ‘act of living with’, or ‘to live with, keep company with’. But does Skype improve or impair that capacity for good human connection? How are conversations and thus relationships and identities changing in the age of Skype, as so many of us now have online presences?

Stemming from a wider curiosity (which has been encouraged by Skype and new technology), I want to connect with those far from me, researching for long-lost relatives, scattered family overseas, and friends and strangers, too. I want to learn more about how they might pass each day; their ideas about the world; the texture not only of their voices but of their lives. Indeed, I want to get back to the etymological root meaning of that word, conversation. The fundamental impossibility of being in two places at once has driven me to communicate virtually, and now to delve beneath the hype about Skype. Only connect, I think, as I begin Skyping. Far from being alone in my internet stirrings, there are currently 12, 868, 311 people online at the same time as me. There we have it – the breathing human and the virtual, in two places at once.

It is 1:03 a.m. in Sydney and the middle of the afternoon here in England. A white tick against a green background tells me that I am connected. I am ‘keeping company’ with those also bearing this status. ‘This is the best time to be using Skype, as I get to chat to people overseas,’ explains a long-lost Australian acquaintance, whom I’ll call ‘Ash’. Hearing his voice with all its quirks of accent elevates the communication from the brief exchange of written instant messages. The novelty is also in being able to see the person in glorious three-dimensionality, as well as hear their voices. I can see in the background the place where they live; the colours of the walls and pictures which adorn it – a glimpse of their context. For this is all we get in the virtual world: glimpses. I can see the expression on the face as they are talking and am more carefully attuned to it. As I listen to a tale of heartbreak unfold, hearing how Ash was cheated on by a girlfriend, I watch his face as it shows anger, upset, resignation, pensiveness, hurt, humour, a spectrum of human emotion passing over it in the space of just over an hour, as swift as an interplay of clouds passing through the sky, now overcast, now bright. Skype exhibits how much of communication is non-verbal (although the visual and phonic are allowed, touch and smell are of course still excluded). This becomes important with rather monosyllabic acquaintances, or those who have greater facility with the spoken than written word.

To what extent are these exchanges close to ‘living with’ (that etymological root of conversation) or actually a form of detachment; a pseudo-version of ‘to live with/keep company with’ and thus an inadequate substitute for the real thing? The performativity of the experience is in some respects akin to watching real-life television; an unfolding soap opera in which the players are not fictional. However, this is no television programme. At times, I am spooked by the experience. The connection is patchy and Ash’s blurred face breaks, as if it is a scifi movie and the pixels are about to disperse. His mouth cracks open and then the screen freezes, with an elongated black hole where his mouth should be. The frozen moment.

The screen freeze-frames a particular expression, that of the jilted lover, etching into the mind a mood that, were Ash in my presence, I may not even have noticed. Thus is the paradox of Skype; being at once removed and yet brought closer to seeing and comprehending through these strange glitches and hiatuses, the mobility of the human face and emotion it carries. As he scratches his head, the screen suddenly stops, leaving his image there, hand raised aloft – pensiveness freeze-framed. I have learnt about his life; work, love, education. There has been more knowledge exchanged in this conversation than in the previous twenty-something years of our lives.

But these glitches can also be just that – frustrating ruptures in the flow of conversation, breaking the illusion of closeness. Skype freezes at a crucial moment in the plot story of fraught romance. As he is explaining the complexities of his love triangle, the screen suddenly plunges into silence and blacks out. ‘Hello,’ I bellow, wondering whose side this mishap is on. The sound begins again but he is now caught up in the flow of the story and already sailed on, sketching characters and incidents, so I must pause him and tell him to rewind, go back to the moment when. . .

It is not only across oceans that Skype connects, but with people in the next room, as I discovered through an excited ten year old, who ushers me next door, eager to experiment with talking virtually. But it’s another patchy connection and when I re-enter the room, I hear my voice on the sound system as a tinny droning and my body is elongated. The experience is uncanny. It is the eerie sense of viewing a thing both alive yet not alive; or stepping into a fun-house hall of mirrors; the self distorted. The inherent comedy of the situation is appreciated by children: as the webcam works for a few moments, the key instinct is to exaggerate what is already distorted – to pull funny faces. The webcam has been recording and has forever captured the hyperbolic sticking out of tongues, rolling eyes and clownish grins.

The new generation is learning the language of these communications even in childhood and are taught of the dangers of allowing the private and public realms to overlap, the need for online protection. The way we adjust Privacy settings, allowing only a portion of our private world to be viewed, can also be a reflection of personality and identity: the sensible; the paranoid; the open and closed mentality; the small and wide social circle. Should I be myself or assume a cyber identity? This latter choice is not applicable to video chatting on Skype, of course. There is no hiding one’s true appearance behind a cartoon sketch or image of a politician or popstar (there is, of course, the option of putting a paper bag over one’s head during the video conversation if one does not wish to be seen, or just utilizing Skype as a telephone rather than as a video-cam). There remain manifold dangers of identity confusion, with multiple people of the same name, and no need to upload a photograph - as I discovered when searching for a long lost cousin in India. I am excited by the prospect of having found him, but how can I verify that I have the right ‘Sanjeev’? Via instant message (he doesn’t have webcam), I ask questions about mutual family and for his nickname. He cannot answer. He replies. ‘If that is your wish, then I am. I am whoever you want me to be.’ Cyberspace indeed offers a frightening capacity to be whoever we want to be.

Reciprocity can be difficult to read in the complex tangle of human relationships: was a glance a sign to proceed or retreat? Is the relationship now defunct? But there are many tools that more ostensibly exhibit reciprocity – or unreciprocity – on multimedia functions; being followed on Twitter and yet not following back, for example, or using ‘Limited Profile’ on Facebook, or ‘Blocking’ people.

The implications for the democratization of communication are clear in the very way that Skype is being censored by those opposing democracy. Reuters recently reported that Russia’s most powerful big business lobby has declared Skype a threat to national security and is working to regulate it. In October 2008, news broke that China has been monitoring and censoring politically sensitive words sent over Skype. Skype is free to those with broadband connection, enabling instantaneous communication between remote regions. But that other kind of ‘free’, the freedom of the written and spoken word, of the press, is a key limitation for non-democracies, thus Skype and services like it are being targeted for a clamp-down.

But is technology anthropologist Stefana Broadbent right to suggest, as she did in July this year, that a ‘democratization of intimacy’ has occurred? She also pointed out the eroded compartmentalization of work and family life. Skype has indeed woven multi-faceted, overlapping functions for itself. Whilst it is light entertainment for some, where funny faces might be pulled, for others it is a life-line and even a method of parenting.

Non-verbal communication becomes even more paramount when communicating with a child, for whom concentration spans are short and gestures and tactility are foremost. With high divorce rates and globalization, there is a new generation of ‘Skype Daddies’ and Skype children, who will know their parents primarily through their presence in their computer screen. Not for these children the touch of the human body – instead these Skype kids must learn a new kind of affection, dispensed virtually. Affection must be wired into the consciousness in new ways, not by touch, but by the intonation of voice, the observation of a kindly expression.

There is no denying that despite bringing me closer to some people, there is still the sense of a chasm, a loneliness leaking through these online messages, a heightened sense of the person being there and yet not there, a ghostly absent presence. Being in two places at once has been achieved – but at a non-monetary cost. Still, Skype is liberating me in my quest to connect with family and people I might not otherwise ever meet. Through Skype, I am cementing broken connections. I hear stories of how, in the time since our last being in touch, one has had a brain operation; another, a car crash; for another, life is ‘hard but good’. Online as I type is an old travelling companion in Ireland; a lost university acquaintance; and a relative in a village in Berbice, Guyana. It is sunset there, he tells me via instant message, and he is closing up his gas station for the day. ‘Only connect!’ remains an important philosophy, and we must keep learning how to do so in ever more effective ways…

But wait, excuse me for a moment, for as I type, somebody is calling me. Our words are connected across oceans as we swap tales of life in London and Berbice.

Then the screen flickers and our voices vanish.

In this extract from her new book, An Education, published in June this year by Penguin, Lynn Barber explains how a piece which appeared in Granta 82 was adapted for the screen, and meditates on the perils of writing from memory.

In 2002, I was chatting with a friend, a fellow journalist, when he happened to mention Peter Rachman, a notorious evil landlord in Fifties London. He started to explain who Rachman was, but I interrupted, ‘Oh yes, I knew him slightly, when I was at school.’ My friend was incredulous: ‘You knew Rachman? When you were at school?’ So then I explained that, while I was still at school, I had this much older boyfriend, Simon, who was in the property game and that we sometimes went round to see Peter Rachman (though we called him Perec, his original Polish name) at his various nightclubs. Telling it baldly, like that, I could see it sounded barely credible, and when my friend kept asking questions – sceptical questions, as a good journalist should – I gave up the attempt to explain and changed the subject.

But afterwards I found myself thinking long and hard about Simon for almost the first time in forty years. I hadn’t exactly repressed the memory, but I had effectively banished it to the very back of the cupboard. It was something I didn’t like thinking about, didn’t like talking about, saw no point in remembering. It was as if, say, I’d had a nasty car accident as a teenager which entailed many horrible operations but luckily I had made a full recovery so why go back over the gory details? There was no pleasure in remembering Simon so I preferred not to.

But then the Rachman conversation got me thinking, ‘Well yes it was very odd that I knew Rachman when I was only sixteen.’ But the more I thought about it, the more everything about my life as a teenager seemed odd. Why was I, a conventional Twickenham schoolgirl, running round London nightclubs with a conman? Why did my parents let me? Almost to explain it to myself, I wrote down everything I could remember and found that, once I tapped this untouched spring of memory, there was no stopping it. So then – being a great believer in Dr Johnson’s adage that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money – I shaped it into a short memoir and sent it off to my friend Ian Jack, who was editing Granta magazine. He had asked me to write an article on my love of birdwatching so ‘An Education’ must have come as a surprise, but anyway he published it in the spring of 2003.

Soon after the Granta piece appeared, my agent contacted me to say she’d had an approach from a film 
producer called Amanda Posey who wanted to meet me to discuss making a film of ‘An Education’. It was the worst possible timing – my husband was in the Middlesex hospital having a bone marrow transplant and I was virtually living in the hospital. But Amanda Posey said she would come to a nearby coffee bar and meet me any time I could get away. So, rather begrudgingly, I left the Middlesex for half an hour to meet her and her partner, Finola Dwyer. Amanda struck me as a very bright young woman but so unlike my notion of a film producer (I was thinking Harvey Weinstein) that I almost suspected she might be a fantasist. She asked if I wanted to write the filmscript myself and seemed delighted when I said no – she said she already had a screenwriter in mind. The whole meeting seemed completely unreal but then everything at that time seemed unreal, so I said ‘Yes, by all means make the film,’ and went back to the hospital and forgot about her.

Months later I received a contract the size of a phone directory and realised that Amanda Posey was serious. I also learned that the scriptwriter she had in mind was her boyfriend – now husband – Nick Hornby. This made the whole idea more plausible, especially when I met Nick. I found it odd (still find it odd) that this pre-eminently ‘boy’ writer should so completely understand what it felt like to be a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who was on the one hand very bright but on the other very ignorant about the world but, miraculously, he did. He even seemed to understand my parents, which is more than I could ever say myself.

Luckily I had the nous to put a clause in the contract saying I was allowed to see and comment on (but not alter) any script Nick Hornby wrote. This was an education in itself – as the years and drafts went on (I think there were eight in all) I learned a great deal about the art of screenwriting from watching Nick’s scripts evolve. The first draft stuck very closely to my story which 
cruelly exposed the fact that it had no proper ending – it reached a dramatic climax and then dwindled away. Over the next few drafts he battled to create a good ending and eventually did; he also fleshed out characters who had been no more than names before and created whole scenes that were not in my story at all. The girl who used to be me became a cellist in the school orchestra, and bought a Burne-Jones at auction, and went to Walthamstow dog track, none of which I did, while her parents slowly mutated from infuriating dinosaurs into perfectly reasonable human beings. By draft eight I found myself actually weeping with sympathy for my father – a weird and possibly even therapeutic moment in my life. The only bad thing Nick did was to change Simon’s name to David, which was my husband’s name.

Years passed, draft screenplays came and went, possible backers came and went. I would have given up by year two, but Nick and Amanda and their partner Finola Dwyer persisted and eventually, last year, the film went into production. Amanda invited me to watch some of the filming, and then the first screening of the rough cut. I loved it and started talking proudly about ‘my’ film. But I was completely thrown when people kept asking me ‘How does it feel to see your sixteen-year-old self on screen?’ Is there any polite answer to that? I mean, how daft would you have to be to believe that an actress, albeit an exceptionally good one (Carey Mulligan) was your sixteen-year-old self? But it set me thinking about memory, which has never been my strong point, and trying to remember as much as I could before it vanishes for ever.

I am of an age (sixty-five) where most people start worrying about Alzheimer’s and panicking if they forget a name. But I won’t even notice when I get Alzheimer’s because I’ve had such a flaky memory all my life. I can do short-term memorising. I can bone up for an exam or, nowadays, an interview by reading up the subject the day before and retaining it for precisely twenty-four hours but then – boof! – it’s gone. That’s why it’s terribly embarrassing bumping into someone I’ve interviewed – they expect me to remember all this stuff about their lives, but of course I had to erase it to make room for the next interviewee. Nowadays I can’t even always remember whether I’ve interviewed someone. Or, come to that, slept with someone. I am always a bit embarrassed meeting men who say they were my contemporaries at Oxford. Did we ever hit the sack, I wonder?

There are whole subjects I used to know that I have since forgotten. I have a certificate that says I can do shorthand at 100 wpm – how did I acquire that? Did I bribe the examiner? I got top marks in A-level Latin – eheu fugaces, I can’t translate a line of Horace now. In my brief, improbable career as a sex expert, I wrote a manual called How to Improve Your Man in Bed that was accepted at the time as an authoritative guide. How did I have the chutzpah to do it? I also spent five years researching and writing a book, The Heyday of Natural History, which involved reading all the popular natural history books of the Victorian era. Gone, all gone. I seem to have an auto-erase button in my brain that says that once I have ‘done’ a subject, I no longer need retain it. This is fine for my job, journalism, but not so good for real life. It hurts my friends’ feelings that I don’t remember conversations we had just weeks ago. ‘But I told you, Lynn!’ is a frequent cry. ‘I know, I know,’ I say quickly, ‘but it was so interesting I wanted you to tell me again.’

I have certain strategies for remembering. I have kept a daily diary ever since I was thirty (and patchily before that) so I can always look things up. Last year my elder daughter, pregnant for the first time, asked how long I was in labour before she was born. I had no idea, but found my 1975 diary, looked up 3 May and found – wow! – only two hours. If I’d told her only two hours, she wouldn’t have believed me, but then I wouldn’t have believed me either. But my biggest mainstay for most 
of my life was David, my husband, who remembered everything. Most usefully, he remembered people’s names and when we’d met before and what we talked about, so he could often give me discreet prompts in social situations. But even he was shocked once at a 
dinner party when someone was talking about China and I said ‘Oh, I’d love to go to China!’ And he said, ‘But you did, Lynn. In 1985. You hated it.’ And everybody stared.

But does it matter? Who owns memories after all? I once wrote an account of my Fifties childhood for the Independent on Sunday and my Aunt Ruth (Dad’s sister) violently objected to my saying that I ate nothing but scrambled eggs on toast for a whole year. She said it was slanderous rubbish and a terrible slur on my mother. But how would Aunt Ruth know? We only saw her once a year at Christmas and presumably then I was eating turkey. My mother, typically, says she has no idea what I ate. She is ninety-two now, and remembers what she wants to remember, and forgets the rest. That seems fine by me.

Some mornings I see him coming up through the mist. The grey shape of a long-haired man carrying a long-barreled gun amid the bare grey branches of the old apple trees. It is early winter. Just before dawn. Above him, the last fruit hangs dark and still as bullet holes in the fog. In an hour the sun will top the ridge and they will go red. But he is already beyond them, lifting a strand of fence wire, climbing through, entering the woods beside the cabin where I sit at my desk, my first mug of coffee in my hand, watching.

I know him from down the mountain. He lives with his aged parents in a trailer home on Sinking Creek just upstream from the pool his father dammed up to raise pet trout. Leviathan beasts. When the old man feeds them, scattering handfuls of dry cat food over the surface of the creek, the water churns with their frenzy: dim shapes down there big as sharks. Watching them, the old man’s face is all light reflected off the water. He makes low happy noises to his ripply fish. I once made the mistake of asking him how big he let them get before he ate them. He looked at me as if I’d suggested he barbecue his dog. An awkward moment. We got over it, as men will, by talking about meat. By the time I went back up the hill, he had offered me a jar of his favourite: canned squirrel, gutted and skinned and brought out of the woods by his son.

His son must be at least fifty. He is slow-witted, stuck with a mind not much grown beyond what it was when, as a boy, he first hunted on my father’s land. Now, watching him drift through the forest outside my window, his body secreted beneath the camouflage of his mud-spattered clothes, his shotgun looks like a wet black stick, the hair hanging down his neck grey as the fur of the coyotes that have returned to the hills, his beard long as an old gobbler’s and white as the flagged tail of a deer: that’s how natural he seems making his way through the woods. Then he is gone. The coffee’s steam is warm on my face. Out there, there is just the mist caught in the trees and the feeling of something moving, as if instead of watching my neighbor – the good man who, when he sees my headlights arrive at the cattle-gate late at night, drives up in his pickup to make sure it’s me, and not some stranger up to no good – I had glimpsed a ghost.

I might as well have. People like him, the people of this mountain valley, of this high hollow in the Blue Hills of southwestern Virginia where I have made a home, the people who stir in me the stories I tell, they are of this land in a way only those with roots going back before they were born, before their parents were born, can be.

A few minutes after the slow-witted woodsman passes by my cabin with his bird gun, he will step into an overgrown clearing where rhubarb has gone wild and pecans still litter the leaves. The old cherry trees have died and rotted. But there is still the cellar hole where an old hill woman once stored their fruit in jars. There are still the jars, broken and scattered in the black dirt like the century-old remnants of some long discarded sky. They must crunch beneath his boots as he passed by the still-standing T-post where Mattie Jones once slaughtered her hogs. She killed and cut them up herself, lived alone all the long years after her husband – gone mad, gone violent – was locked away: a real hill woman of the kind that are almost all gone.

There are none at all left as backwoods as the Sarvers, who lived even higher up on the ridge, even more shut away from the rest of the world. There were three or four families of them, what we might today call a compound. Then, they were their own village – infants, kids, parents, graves. Raised all their food, made all their clothes. On Sundays, in the dark hours before dawn, the whole clan would start the long walk along the ridge top towards town. Five or six hours later they would get there. They would go to the revival. They would sing, and holler, and sway with worship. Then they would turn around and walk back. By then, it would be almost dark. They would light torches. One by one, they would disappear into the woods until there was just the long line of flames flickering among the trees at the top of the ridge. A more spectral sight I can’t imagine. A sight like that you don’t forget.

I know because Russell hasn’t, though he saw it nearly eighty years ago.

‘Pine knot torches,’ he told me.

‘The resin?’ I said. ‘It burns that long?’

‘Oh my, yes,’ he said.

‘It must have been beautiful to see.’

‘Well….’ Russell has a way of stretching that word out until it says whatever needs to be said.

He is eighty-six years old, still unstooped, still steady on his feet, large-nosed and warm-eyed, beefy-armed and kettle-bellied and always wearing a sun-bleached hat. His palm is rough and his fingers are thick and his handshake betrays his gentleness and he’s my neighbor. The first visit I paid to his rambling, tin-roofed mountain home, we sat in his living room – that and the kitchen seem to be the only two rooms he still uses – with the TV on mute and the space heater cranked up. It glowed between us. Outside the windows, there was the blackness of a night unbroken by any other light but the stars.

I asked him if he’d always lived in the valley.

He turned, pointed to a small cot set-up in the corner. “I was born right there,” he said.

Since then, I have become something of a regular visitor, maybe the only one he has – his son works too much, too far away; he hasn’t seen his wife (he insists they’re still married) in twenty years; most of his long-time friends are dead. I walk around the dark porch and knock on his side door and he calls who is it? and then well come in! I do, to the sight of Russell in his suspenders and socks, the smell of the three boiled eggs he eats each night for supper. I bring asparagus from the garden or a bottle of whisky from a store. He gives me a jar of the apple-butter he makes each fall, maybe a dozen eggs from his hens, always a glass of moonshine poured from a quart jar. He mixes it with ginger ale. I take it how he does. We go into the living room to talk.

And every time I can’t see that cot without feeling the presence of the woman who gave birth to him in it. He still calls her Mama. When he was a kid, they used to wait out the long hours of winter days inside by the fire, hulling walnuts, the room heaped with piles of the blackened shells. No internet, or TV, or radio, or telephone, or even electricity. All the wood split by fall, and all the chores done by daylight, and it too cold outside to leave the house.

I asked him if they read to pass the time: Books? Magazines?

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess we got the Sears catalogue. It was pretty big. Took a while to read it.’ He grinned. ‘When we was done, we brung it to the outhouse. Took a while to use it there, too.’

Now, he has indoor plumbing and electricity, of course. Now, his son cuts the hayfields and raises the cattle. But each spring he still gathers morels in the woods (‘merkels’, he calls them), still plants in his garden the eyes of potatoes cut from potatoes cut from ones that were planted by his mother. He eats eggs from his own chickens, and won’t use butter that he doesn’t consider real – homogenized, pasteurized, packaged stuff. Instead, once a month he drives his truck some hours (at twenty miles per hour, tops) some unknown distance (‘one mountain into West Virginia,’ he says, ‘and then two mountains further’) on steep and winding and sometimes icy dirt roads to a Mennonite farm where he can get butter, as he says, ‘straight from the cow’. Once, he cut me a slice, handed me the knife, watched while I ate it off the blade.

‘That’s real butter,’ he said, smiling so the deep creases that run down from the corners of his mouth widen. They are stained brown. He wiped the chewing tobacco juice off his chin, his whole face showing as much pleasure from watching me taste the butter as if it was melting in his own mouth, as if it was not just churned cream but a sliver of memory: the way the cows teats felt between his small fingers and thumbs, his mother and sister in the milk barn beside him, the sound of the crank as they separated the milk from the cream, the happiness of the hogs feeding on the skim, the smell of the wood-baked bread steaming just before they spread the butter on. ‘Now that’s good,’ he said, letting his voice hang on the last word, drawing out ‘good’ the way he does ‘well’.

Twenty miles away – or as Russell would say, down two roads and over half a dozen hills – Sis is milking the last of her cows. She is a whole story in herself, a whole book, with her duck boots and thin mustache and dwarfish height and septuagenarian husband, Junior, who sits behind the cash register at the Sinking Creek general store, but that’s not why I want to go there now. Why is this: it’s dusk, and she is bringing the bottles of formula out to the calves. They are a gallon each, and heavy, and they fill her arms. She holds the bottles against her chest, arranged like four newborn babies, the rubber teats like knit caps. Inside the pen, the calves crowd her, push for the nipples. Soon, there is just the wet, rhythmic sound of their suckling. The low long whisper of a truck’s tires way off down the road. And Sis begins to hum. She sings to them, lullabies. And somewhere a cattle gate clanks, a dog barks, it is dusk. Yellow light in the small square window of the milking barn. Blue fields behind the silos. Up high on the ridges the rocks still hold the last of the snow, and the snow holds the last of the light, a lingering brightness that mixes with the low clouds until the ridge itself seems an apparition: it shifts, rises, falls – a limestone chest slowly breathing. Sis sings on. This is the valley as I know it.

At the end of the day, once I am done writing, I put on my sun-bleached hat, my mud-spattered coat, tramp across the field in my boots until I hit the trail that takes me up to the ridge. I bring a hot potato and shift it from hand to hand, warming my fingers in the evening’s cold. I tend to talk to myself, working out aloud the problems of a scene or a plot, sometimes waving my arms, occasionally shouting. Maybe a deer crashes off through the woods. Maybe a flock of wild turkeys bursts upwards into the trees. But the thickets of rhododendrons pay me no mind. And only rarely do I look up from the potato I have just split in two, the steam wafting into my wild beard, into my open mouth, and see a hiker coming down the trail towards me, frozen in mid-step, eyes wide, staring.

To see more of Josh Weil’s photographs of the mountain valley, click here

Nineteen eighty-three. Thirteen years old. I was at an all-boys high school, one year into my reputation as one of the class ‘faggots’. There’s an edge to being a freak, even at thirteen, but also a desperation to belong, made worse than there being nowhere to belong to. This sounds like a Jamaican high school play about American high school life, but our favourite pastime in 1983 was watching America. Pop culture, music, America itself wasn’t quite real until Michael Jackson. He was always there, but in 1983 Michael Jackson suddenly appeared. ‘Billie Jean’ came first, but my thrills came the way they did for every other teenager, through the music video. It’s hard to describe something that had no precedent. I would pull my pants up, shock my mother with a demand for loafers, and convince myself that with every step on the pavement, a tile would light up. And then several weeks later, at three minutes and forty-four seconds into a performance for Motown’s twenty-fifth anniversary Jackson reminded me of something my six-year-old self knew all along. Magic did exist.

Michael Jackson lost his childhood but he extended mine. He could moonwalk as if gravity was just a theory and Peter Pan fact. He could claim to be a virgin and make every nerd instantly cooler. By imitating Jackson I found a way to be me without being made fun of. But there was no way my mother would have approved of jheri curls, and that red leather jacket was impossible to get. We went for red windbreakers – nobody told us they would be hotter than the leather jackets. I never had a windbreaker of my own, but wore my older brother’s when he wasn’t around. My brother was enraptured too. Among his many feats of magic, Jackson got us to listen to his music, other people’s music and other people. He finally gave me an in to those once lost to me, like my far cooler brother.

My worst tormentors were some of my brother’s best friends and at school we made a point to forget we were family. But Michael Jackson gave us a reason to talk more than five seconds, even if it was only to find out if he could moonwalk yet, or if I’d gotten the lyrics to PYT. The same boys who designated me as one of the class fags now wanted to know if I knew when The Making Of Thriller would come on TV or if my geek friend Ricardo really did have photos of Jackson on the beach (he did). It was something to see, a line of teenage boys all in red jackets in Jamaican heat, stinking from sweat yet cooler than any of us would ever be again.

The thrill of Thriller was being part of something global and local at once. We weren’t really speaking to each other so much as saying the same thing: that Michael Jackson was the coolest human being on the planet. For a magical year and a half I felt like I belonged to something bigger and cooler. It was just a stay of execution. By the end of 1984, pop culture had splintered again and the tribes no longer had a common language to speak. Parents went back to being parents; boys went back to being boys. And I went back to being the school fag that nobody liked. In the absence of the common language of ‘Billie Jean’’s bass, ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Something’’s chant or ‘Beat It’’s guitar, boys went back to realizing how much they hated anybody not like them, which now included Jackson. I left him as well, grabbing hold of Purple Rain and a genius whose outcast originality struck a more curious pose. Of course Jackson died at fifty. His death may have been the only logical movement in an illogical career. I was startled but not shocked; the man was burning twice as bright as everyone else from the age of seven. His life didn’t end; it simply stopped. I will miss that crazy, mixed up genius. I miss the Jamaica that he briefly turned into a world of wonder. More than anything I miss the thirteen year old boy that believed in magic.

Alexander Chee and Maud Newton discovered a shared passion for the works of Jean Rhys this winter while anticipating Lilian Pizzichini’s new biography, The Blue Hour. They decided to read the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair with one another. This conversation is the result.

From: Alexander Chee
To: Maud Newton

Dear Maud,

I am imagining Jean Rhys finally holding the printed edition of The Left Bank and Other Stories, with its long strange preface by Ford Madox Ford. The preface begins with Ford describing his childhood in Paris, spending hard winters there, hating Paris, and then he gives a long description of Paris, and after fifteen pages, after talking about Parisians and the Rive Gauche, just when you have no idea who he is anymore, or why you would care, he finally says something about her.

Reading it, I thought, this must be what it was like to be his lover. To wait and wait for him to eventually say something to you, while he talked about everything else.

Acting as her editor, Ford’s preface goes on to complain about trying to get Rhys to include more descriptions. She was a Minimalist before Raymond Carver was born. She resisted and reduced her descriptive passages, Ford tells us, a detail I found odd since the preface was meant to praise her. Rhys’s objection to description is eventually given to us as the reason for the long tour Ford’s given us through Paris. He wants it to sustain the reader as we enter her stories. He ends by saying he wishes some small part of him would be with her when she is eventually laid to rest in the Pantheon, in Paris, as he is sure she will be.

By the time I turn the preface’s last page, and begin reading her, the experience is like the first cocktail after a long speech. Ford isn’t a bad writer, but here it feels like Ford the man was impersonating Ford the writer, and doing a bad job.

After the publication of The Left Bank, some years passed before Ford broke with Rhys, over her wanting to stay with her husband. He insisted she share him with another woman, but wouldn’t share her with another man. She left and wrote Quartet.

* * *

A decade before Ford ever met Rhys, in his novel The Good Soldier, a wife, Leonora, and her husband’s lover, Nancy, are talking. Leonora demands Nancy stay, saying, ‘He’s dying of love for you.’

Nancy refuses her.

‘I’m dying of love for you,’ Heidler says to Marya, in Rhys’ novel of their affair, Quartet. The scene was so familiar, I had to check the dates and characters. Heidler was the character Rhys created as Ford’s placeholder, with a name that was almost Ford’s original last name, a name he gave up to hide that he was German: Hueffer. Each time you read it in the novel, if you know his circumstances, it feels like a dig. Heidler.

Though she by then wore the name he had given her.

I wondered, as I read Quartet and then The Good Soldier, if Ford had the feeling of his novel coming true when he met Rhys. As a premonition of her. It seems to me the dialogue was either said by Ford, who had first written it in his novel, or Rhys put it in there herself, perhaps as a way to tell him what Nancy says at the end of that scene: ‘But we are not worth it – Edward and I.’ Ford describes Nancy as smiling at Leonora ‘with a queer, far-away smile, as if she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.’ Rhys’s trademark smile appearing well before she did.

Unlike in The Good Soldier, a novel of two couples, all four members of these two couples wrote books describing the affair afterward, with Rhys even translating her former husband’s book. There’s the literary juggernaut Ford, unlike any modern author since except perhaps Joyce Carol Oates, if she had a second job as Dave Eggers. Stella Bowen is his common-law wife, impatient with the strays he takes in. Rhys, a woman Bowen derides as being unable to even afford a personality, is known to Ford’s friends as ‘Ford’s girl’. With her is her husband, Lenglet, a stateless drifter, conman and bigamist, and a prisoner for most of the affair.

Ford wrote prodigiously, as a novelist, poet, critic and historian, producing more than eighty volumes, sometimes three in one year; Rhys published just eleven. Ford also fostered a group of experimental writers in Paris, with Hemingway as his assistant at the time he met Rhys. And yet of the novels he wrote, The Good Soldier is the only one we still read. Whereas with Rhys, we hunt for every little scrap. Bowen and Lenglet are mostly known for what they wrote of Ford and Rhys.

Poverty blunted Rhys while they were alive, but posterity now blunts Ford, and Rhys beside him, emerges an unlikely giant.

In Quartet, Marya is sent away from Paris by Heidler after he breaks it off with her. She is lonely in her hotel in the South of France and sits writing a letter to him, an angry denunciation of the way she’s been treated, as well as a request for money, so that she can go back to Paris and see her criminal husband who is going to return, albeit illegally and in great danger. She’s dismissive of the letter she writes, calling it delirious, and thinks to write it again, but then finds she can’t endure writing it again. So she sends it anyway. This struck me as the more apt description of Quartet.

From: Maud Newton
To: Alexander Chee

Dear Alex,

Isn’t Ford’s interminable preface to The Left Bank and Other Stories hilarious? To me it encapsulates his attitude toward Rhys, not only as a writer but as a lover. He wanted to nurture his protégé, and he did in many ways, but these over-the-top efforts to manage and groom and modulate threatened to steamroll the individuality right out of her. Or at least they would have if she’d actually been as weak as she pretended to be. What praise he finally offers for her fiction – ‘a terrifying instinct and a terrific – almost lurid! – passion for stating the case of the underdog’ – seems to vibrate equally with excitement and dread. He may be the editor who discovered the scandalous D.H. Lawrence, but he’s clearly a little bit afraid of this talented, mysterious, and sexy young woman who knows and can render the experiences of abandoned chorus girls with such stark intimacy.

I agree with you: Ford probably saw Rhys as a (tainted) embodiment of the love interest of The Good Soldier. And honestly, I believe he was hot for Rhys very specifically even before they met. He’d read a lightly fictionalized version of her journals, been struck by her acute renderings of loneliness and poverty, fantasized about her exotic Dominican background, and decided (assuming she was pretty, of course) that he, finally, would be the man to save her.

Even the most depressive writers spin out happily-ever-after tales when they’re plotting their own life stories, and Ford was no exception. That’s what I think.

* * *

What actually happened in the lead-up to their romance is difficult to prove. As Rhys’s best biographer, Carole Angiers, observes, Rhys deliberately obfuscated the timeline of those years in Paris to protect her husband, Jean Lenglet, who was tried and jailed for theft, and to prevent their daughter from learning that she’d been left in state-run clinics even before Lenglet went to jail. (Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 123) Yet it’s undisputed that, in 1924, Rhys asked journalist Pearl Adam for help placing some stories written by Lenglet. Adam’s reaction was unenthusiastic; however, she asked to see Rhys’s own work. (130)

The notebooks Rhys handed over tell the story of an aspiring actress, homesick for the Caribbean, who travels from one cold English town to another performing chorus parts in stage shows until she takes up with a wealthy man, who eventually rejects her. Out of work, out of money, and utterly heartbroken, the actress turns to prostitution, has an abortion, goes on an extended bender and then starts, obsessively, to write, only to abandon her talents soon afterward to model for artists and fall into bed with still more neglectful men.

While Adam judged Rhys’s writing ‘naïve’ and formless, she saw that Rhys had talent. So she edited the entries, divided them into chapters – giving each a man’s name – named the manuscript Suzy Tells, and sent it to Ford. His floundering the transatlantic review had published James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and a host of avant garde unknowns, and Rhys’s edgy work seemed a likely fit. (130-31.) It was.

By the time he read Rhys’ sad story, Ford was bored of Stella Bowen, the Australian artist who’d been his devoted partner for six years. His magazine was in serious financial trouble. He had just published Some Do Not, the first of his Parade’s End tetralogy, and needed, in Bowen’s words, ‘to exercise his sentimental talents ... upon a new object. It keeps him young. It restores his belief in his powers’.

Ford and Rhys met in October. She was as pretty as he would have hoped, and shy and desperately needy. In early December he published one of her stories, and by the end of the month her husband was in jail, leaving Rhys penniless.

As my friend Emma Garman, a critic and fellow fan, has observed, for someone who wrote so much about being abandoned, Rhys actually spent very little of her life alone. Soon Ford and (a reluctant) Bowen had taken her on as a project, and she had moved into their spare room so that she could focus on writing short stories under Ford’s guidance. Not long after that, Rhys and Ford wound up in bed. Thus began the affair that spawned four competing narratives.

* * *

To the extent they were intended to chart the authors’ actual experiences – and that is debatable – both Quartet and When the Wicked Man are remarkably self-serving books. Angiers pinpoints the main problem with Rhys’ Quartet – that Rhys villainizes Heidler, the Ford-inspired character, precisely by leaving out the thing that attracted the actual man in the first place: her writing. Drawn to Marya, the protagonist, solely because she is pitiful and alone and nearly destitute, Heidler comes off as a pretentious, opportunistic, and lecherous bourgeois who enjoys taking in young women, like so many feral strays, to stoke his own ego when he’s not writing. (By contrast, Heidler’s wife, Lois, is a ‘well-trained domestic animal’ who enables his affairs.)

As Angiers says, ‘we can’t really understand what Marya can love or want in him except the illusion of safety – and the reality of danger; nor can we understand what he really wants from her. He is simply a monster.’ Rhys’s stylistic mastery, well-paced scenes, and other, more fully drawn characters can’t fill the void at the centre of Quartet. Still this, her first novel, at least has some merit as art; Ford’s, which appeared far later in his career, is a furious, vengeful and unfocused mess.

Lola Porter – the outsized cartoon generally agreed by critics to be When the Wicked Man’s Rhys stand-in – is not the protagonist Notterdam’s lover, but he’s obsessed by her beauty, and her foreignness. When Lola clings to him ‘as if she had been a slave’ after her husband’s suicide, kissing his hand and begging in a ‘soft, stealthy voice’ for Notterdam’s help, he fantasizes about making love to her, so that (cliché of all cliches) he can find out what’s behind that smile.

Much of the book, before and after Notterdam invites her to move in with him and his wife, reads like an extended exercise in name-calling. Lola is a ‘devil’, a ‘malignity’, a ‘blackamoor’, and a likely practitioner of voodoo and probable ‘gipsy’ who runs around with men. While no one denies her talent, Lola, ‘quite a star journalist’, whose vivid writing offers ‘astonishing flashes’ into her late husband, is usually too soused to work. ‘Creoles are as noted for their indolence as for their passion. On that basis,’ the omniscient voice observes, in a characteristically vicious aside, ‘she became entirely comprehensible’.

What would motivate a writer of Ford’s abilities to stoop to such grotesque caricature? The Good Soldier is a wonderful novel; even having read others along the continuum, it’s hard to believe When the Wicked Man was written by the same hand. And Rhys was just one damsel in Ford’s long line of botched rescue attempts. So why this towering rage?

Well, you know my theory: the plaintive originality of Rhys’ work captured Ford’s imagination even before he laid eyes on her. She needed saving, he decided, and he was the man for the job. Then their affair went to hell, and she published a book depicting him as, not the hero he’d intended to be, but yet another spectacularly cold and selfish abandoning man. If she’d been a lesser writer, he wouldn’t have been so pissed off about his wrecked fairy tale.

From: Alexander Chee
To: Maud Newton

Dear Maud,

Ford’s mysteriously terrible novel, When the Wicked Man, made no sense to me at all until I realized it resembled, very closely, a kind of story I read from male students who are closeted. They write about women with little if any insight, their central character is always a man trying to be romantically successful, and he has a best friend, competing with him for the attentions of the same woman. Of course, if the friend is to have success with the woman this means the central character will fail to do so, and this cannot happen. And, all of the heat in the language is around the men. The women are portrayed as fairly flat characters, unbelievable, or as stock characters. Is this familiar yet? This novel is like an advanced case of that story; when, years later, the successful married man looks back and realizes he has won something he doesn’t want, he divorces his wife.

I had been thinking about this when I tracked down Max Saunders’s excellent two-volume biography of Ford, subtitled ‘A Dual Life’. I thought, I wonder if Saunders’s is saying that Ford was in love with Conrad, hiding his sexuality. I soon saw this was not the book Saunders had written. I dismissed my idea, as a kind of knee-jerk reaction, until I could make no sense of When The Wicked Man. As I read the part again about Kratch, the friend who is Notterdam’s financial backer for his publishing house, and who goes train-hopping with him, who he imagines being naked and dead with him after an attack by hoboes, I thought, oh. Of course. When they are dead they can be naked together.

This part of the novel also contains a description of Kratch as being responsible for putting up giant stone phalluses all over the city – Ford even used the word ‘erection’ twice in that passage. Dead erect penises, but permanently male.

Notterdam, the central character, is a publisher who can make or break careers, is victorious over rivals, deals equitably with his ex-wife, who he has never touched much, and by the end is a celebrity everyone loves, despite various depravities and even murder. The novel is a not-so-thinly disguised appeal to Ford’s own fantasies, written when he was at his most powerless – without Bowen, during the Great Depression.

This passage is like the one I found in A Good Soldier, but of the character he based on Rhys:

It said to me that Notterdam doesn’t know anything about women, like Heidler in Quartet, who Rhys describes as not knowing how to please a woman. And the smile! The premonition of Rhys from The Good Soldier now appears as the memory of her, as if she were the Cheshire Cat.

Afterward, it seemed to me neither of them had, in the end, really written about their relationship, not in any detail. Ford is omitted almost entirely from Smile Please, her unfinished memoir, for example, and is referenced only in a sidelong way, as a sort of minor character; at the same time he has no explanation or description, as if he is as self-evident as rain or sun. Rhys is likewise, in the main, missing here — as Quartet suffers in its internal emotional logic from the way the literary relationship Rhys had with Ford is obscured, leaving an inexplicably powerful if dull connection between Marya and Heidler, When The Wicked Man suffers for the way Lola Porter, the Rhys figure here, is the wife of a writer, a writer who Notterdam describes as ‘insufferable’, and with whom he has a disadvantageous relationship, via a contract created when he was drunk, that he hopes to end by canceling it.

It could be hard to see a womanizer like Ford as a closet case, but it occurs to me if no woman is the man he is looking for then he would never stay with her.

* * *

Much is made of the way Rhys relied on Ford financially, and of the betrayal that must have been the publication of Quartet, but as Weisenfarth points out, Ford funded his career as a writer and also his magazines on the wealth of the women in his life, beginning with Violet Hunt, his lover prior to Bowen, an established author ten years his senior who funded The English Review, and continuing with Stella Bowen, the backer for the transatlantic review.

Throughout Quartet, much mention is made of how Marya must respect Lois. We’re given to mean it is because she is his wife, though he himself as a husband isn’t doing a very good job of respecting her. But it seems to me also that he was aware Lois was paying for those hotels as well as he was.

Rhys is often portrayed as a shapeshifter, made exotic by her Creole blood, but the real illusionist, I think, was Ford, who went by at least fifteen different names in print, all catalogued carefully by Joseph Weisenfarth in his book Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women.

This underlying act of projection exemplifies to me Rhys’s life experience – most of what people have said about her was more true of the speaker than of her. Bowen’s criticism of her, for example, that she was too poor to afford a personality, shows Bowen is certain personality can be bought; also that Bowen believed she, Bowen, had the right personality. Rhys’s work in fact is undeniably the work of someone who was always herself, and felt betrayed by that. Perhaps the bitter wound to Bowen, after Ford’s affair with Rhys, was that while Bowen felt drained by Ford, Rhys left her relationship with Ford even more of herself than before, whatever she may have felt about that. Even after being given an alias of her own, by Ford.

Rhys really was an ‘amateur’, in the sense of the word as it was applied then: a kind of courtesan manqué, not quite up to the job of providing love for money or favours, but not quite able to take care of herself on her own, either. So, for that matter, was Ford. I think he admired her open passions because his passions, whatever they were, could never be let out. And in the end, I feel they were together because they were alike, in a way they only knew between themselves. The anger you spoke of, I think, may come from how left alone Ford felt with those trapped emotions, and very nearly exposed. When The Wicked Man is Ford’s fantasy of defeating the trouble Quartet caused him.

To: Alexander Chee
From: Maud Newton

Dear Alex,

Ford would be so disappointed by your reading. ‘Sir, I am a thoroughly manly person,’ he might say. He once wrote those very words to the editor of The New Age.

As Joseph Wiesenfarth observes, Ford was deeply invested in being ‘a proper man’ – unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, not to mention that pansy Oscar Wilde, whom Ford said he ‘always disliked … faintly as a writer and intensely as a human being. No doubt, as a youth he was beautiful, frail and illuminated. But when I knew him he was heavy and dull.’ (I’m smiling as I imagine how you'd parse this bizarre critique.)

Whatever Ford’s sexual impulses, and notwithstanding his own parade of female lovers, The Good Soldier, his best novel, famously centres on a man whose relationships with the women he loves are basically platonic. ‘I will vouch for the cleanliness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life,’ Dowell says. In case he wasn’t plain enough the first time, he becomes more explicit: ‘Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion.’

Florence, his deceitful wife, locks her door and takes to her bed by nine o’clock each night, ostensibly because of a heart condition, but really to wait for her lover, Dowell’s best friend Edward. Dowell’s affection for Leonora, Edward’s wife, is completely asexual. And after Florence dies, Dowell tethers himself to another chaste marriage, with the beautiful, young, and deranged Nancy, Edward's last and most beloved paramour.

Many of Ford’s protagonists fall prey to a scheming woman. The Inheritors (1901), a weird, slyly satirical, and generally delightful work of speculative fiction that Ford co-authored with Joseph Conrad, depicts a man naively courting a pretty girl who turns up on the road one day and claims to be from the Fourth Dimension. And Parade's End (1924-1928), his most ambitious project, is, in Graham Greene’s words, ‘the terrible story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife.’

In his own life, Ford was the double-dealer. He vacillated between women who mothered him, nurturing him back to emotional and financial health, and women who temporarily energized him but ultimately aggravated his depressive tendencies. He took what he could from them all, and, as you point out, often he took money. At his death he owed the once financially secure Bowen several thousand dollars. What he wanted from the liaison with Rhys is less clear.

I still believe he had grandiose visions of swooping in to deliver her from prostitution, encourage her writing, and transform her into ‘a proper lady’ (presumably the only suitable companion for ‘a proper man’). But I also agree with you that Ford and Rhys were broken in some of the same ways – both dependent on lovers not just for money and inspiration, but ultimately a sense of self – and that this affinity drew them to each other.

This passage from The Good Soldier seems to echo the line we both noticed in When the Wicked Man, about getting behind Lola Porter’s chilly smile by making love to her; it also perhaps points to what Ford’s protagonists – if not Ford himself – want from women:

[T]he real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported.... [T]hat will be the mainspring of his desire for her.

Rhys sought to be desired passionately and unconditionally, and indulged totally. She would have welcomed this kind of study of herself. For her, though, money was a crucial ingredient of attraction. In Smile Please, she writes, ‘the whole business of money and sex is mixed up with something very primitive and deep. When you take money directly from someone you love it becomes not money but a symbol.... [T]he woman’s deep-down feeling is “I belong to this man, I want to belong to him completely.” It is at once humiliating and exciting.’

Ford reminded her of an earlier lover, the first man who’d made her a kept woman and the first on record to break her heart. That man kept sending money indefinitely after rejecting her, while Ford sent an allowance for only a short while after their break-up, if he sent one at all.

But Ford gave her something far more important: confidence in her writing, and entry into publishing. Perhaps her work would have found its way to bookshelves had it not debuted in Ford’s journal, but it’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which Mrs Adam sends Triple Sec to another editor, who rejects it. Rhys had little patience for creative endeavors that did not bring quick success. She’d already given up the piano and the stage; probably she would have reverted to writing in secret.

Not that Rhys didn’t always prioritize language before all else. Even as a girl she held strong opinions about words: ‘mountain’ was ugly, ‘wisteria’ beautiful, and ‘pain’, ‘sea’, and ‘silence’ sad. Yet Ford offered the kind of practical guidance that young writers need from their elders. He encouraged her to translate her work into French when she was unsure of it. If a sentence didn’t parse in another language, it didn’t work in English either. As long as Rhys wrote, she wrote that way, and she credited him for it. ‘Ford helped me more than anybody else,’ she said. ‘I learnt a great deal from him.’

He was a natural mentor for her, in part because she was already such an independent thinker. As Carole Angiers writes: ‘Ford loved economy, clarity and strong emotion in writing, and so did she; he hated moral and political preaching, and so did she. But all these were things that found echoes in her, that were in her already. When he suggested something that wasn’t, she rejected it.... [T]he one thing that Jean was sure about was writing. She followed her instinct; and no one, not even Ford, could teach her very much.’

In Ford’s view, the writer’s temperament is the ‘sensitized instrument’ through which she sees life. The artist is ‘the eternal mental prostitute who stands in the marketplace crying: “Come into contact with my thought, with my visions... with my personality.”’

He drew these kinds of analogies throughout his life, over and over again in those eighty books of his, and Rhys would have seen his affirmation of her fiction as approval of her ultimate self. The end of their affair called that self into question even more fundamentally than did the spurning, years older, by her first love, the rich English gentleman. Rhys told Francis Wyndham that ‘she didn’t think [Ford] was ever in love with her, but only her writing, and he was, finally, false to that, because she couldn’t believe he could behave as he had and still be sincere about her work.’

Fortunately she was too committed to stop by then. She kept writing, in essence spending the rest of her life proving to herself that, however weak she felt and however tragically her looks faded, her story – her personality, as Ford would have it – could captivate not just one man, but an unlimited number of readers.

I write this in a town bordering England and Wales, east of the River Wye and north of the Black Mountains, as the sun shines over a festival where there are strawberries and stir-fry to feed the body and stories aplenty to feed the mind. Jacqueline Wilson has just been sitting beside me wearing a blue top embroidered with the silver words ART IS TRUTH. It is a slogan pertinent to festivals the world over, for beneath the billowing canvas of tents, writers explore, challenge and present versions of the truth from a myriad of perspectives.

Not all of the world’s border crossings are as peaceable as this idyllic terrain. Far away, at the Israel-Palestine border, four festival attendees were held for five hours during the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), the week-long festival supported by the British Council and UNESCO, with international authors touring Jerusalem and the West Bank. The police intervened on the first and final nights of the festival by closing down the venue, the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem.

From Manchester to Mumbai, the festival circuit has gone global including the Jaipur Literature Festival, Galle Literary Festival, Vancouver International Writers Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival and in Dubai the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature. Hay has exciting new initiatives: adding to its portfolio of Hay-on-Wye, Cartagena, Alhambra and Segovia are Beirut 39 (celebrating Beirut Unesco World Book Capital 2009 and 39 of the best Arab writers under the age of thirty-nine) and the Storymoja Hay Festival Kenya.

The imagination can also be a passport to places beyond the realms of our own experience, a lesson learned at festivals which have at their core the concept of storytelling. At Hay last year the events I chaired offered a journey through the ganglands of South London (two former gang members, Elijah and Maddox, joined us on stage to discuss their experiences, chronicled in Tim Pritchard’s thought-provoking Street Boys); a Russian prison and St Petersburg (author Tig Hague talked about his hair-raising nineteen-month stint in jail in Zone 22, coupled with author Edward Docx reading from his beautifully written Self-Help); the landscape of New York City post 9-11 and war-torn Serbia (Joseph O'Neill’s beguiling Netherland and Sasa Stanisic’s compelling novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone); the mind of a ventriloquist dummy (By George by Wesley Stace), the airfields of Pakistan (A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif) and the tortured mind of a bullied teenager (Submarine by Joe Dunthorne), thus showing the breathtaking diversity which descends upon the small town of Hay-on-Wye each year .

‘There is nothing to fear but fear itself,’ said Theodore Roosevelt, who I called upon for courage whilst chairing a sold-out event at this year’s Hay Festival with two distinctive and powerful voices, Sadie Jones, prize-winning author of The Outcast, and Matthew D’Ancona, author of the haunting Nothing to Fear, whose novels show how, even on such a sunlit day, a human being might become unhinged by fear. It is a motto D’Ancona’s characters have not yet learned, for they are scared of darkness and death, loneliness and intimacy. The theme of fear was a catalyst to a discussion ranging from how art offers the freedom to fail, to how creativity is using pain to good effect. ‘Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood,’ assured Marie Curie and indeed – as an enthusiastic audience agreed – both gripping novels shed insight into that primal human emotion.

The festival thrives on the sparks that fly from interesting juxtapositions, from conversation both on and off stage, but there is also a powerful dialogue between contemporary and past writers. The ghost of Kafka haunted the Dream Stage for an hour, as I talked with the entertaining comic writer James Hawes about his debunking of the ‘Kafka myth’.

The grandest literary ghost haunting the delightful Segovia Hay Festival was Antonio Machado, who taught and lived in the small city north of Madrid one hundred years ago, and whose footsteps I traced past the vast pillars of the Aqueduct, the Plaza Mayor and the San Quirce church. Machado’s plaintive metrical feet were haunted by the untimely death of his wife from tuberculosis, the Spanish Civil War, and by landscape, which exerts a strong influence in much Spanish poetry, as is clear after four days of engrossing lectures. The festival also paid homage to Octavio Paz, a decade after his death, in two events exploring how nature – sea, fruit, light – is a poetic reflection on his childhood, time, the body and spirit. The panel recalled the relative merits of Paz as poet and essayist; the moment he had an epiphany whilst gazing at the moon; and that ‘nobody uses semi-colons quite like him’.

The act of translation and transition – both linguistic and geographical – is at the heart of festivals. The etymology of translate is ‘to carry across, to bear’, and indeed we see what is lost and what is gained in translation. Headphones provide simultaneous translation from the original language, although it is telling how much meaning can be gauged from the texture, sound and intonation of words. The festivals reveal how the greatest writing can transcend its place and particularity and reach a universal audience.

The pink-shirted, snowy-haired Mario Vargas Llosa, speaking beneath a ceiling painted with angels and harps in the capacious Teatro Juan Bravo described his yearning to escape from his childhood town in Bolivia. It was reading books that ‘tremendously expanded [his] horizons’ and stopped him ‘dying of boredom’ at his military school. Through reading Sartre he came to believe that literature itself is a form of action, words are actions, fostering sensitivity, exacerbating motivation. ‘I look in the mirror and wonder if I would have been the same person if I had not read Tolstoy, Faulkner, Don Quixote. No, I think those stories have made me what I am.’ He extols the virtues of literature to ‘break provincial barriers’, create fraternity with those unlike ourselves, and enable us to change for the better.

His dream to be a storyteller, ‘the oldest vocation in the world’, was realized in the Amazon rainforest, where he saw how the entire community was held together by myth and stories, allowing people to know that they were not alone in the immensity. His decision that he would live by his pen was a psychological turning point, but ‘if I wait for inspiration I could wait forever. When you are not born a genius you can fill in the gaps with discipline, hard work, stubbornness, obsession. I work in a very disciplined way. Flaws can become virtues if you have determination and Flaubertian passion to break limitations’.

‘Insecurity is my greatest enemy,’ he confessed. A stirring voice from the audience wished to know more about his notorious real-life enemies. Vargas Llosa insisted that writers, like everyone else, have friends, enemies, phobias. He drew a distinction between ‘the public figure’ of the writer, and the ‘deep, repressed, irrational being, that core element of dark personality, that is released out of the cage when writing’. Audience questions can indeed be a highlight of the festivals.

Hailing from a landscape closer to the Welsh roots of the festival was the voice of a writer with a gripe to air. As co-founder of Friends of the Earth, Robert Minhinnick has a keen sensibility for the natural world, using the powerful image of the sea, ever in flux, to pose the question: are we able to change ourselves or are we stuck? However, ‘Most people who review novels are middle-class English people and they would inevitably describe a Welsh seaside town as “tawdry”, but I have lived close to that environment and I know it’s much more than that. This is the problem with that class system of British reviewing’. His interviewer, festival director Peter Florence, asks: ‘Do you see yourself as a transnationalist?’ As the Spanish sun shines outside the packed auditorium, Minhinnick muses: ‘As a writer you should never define yourself because that is to diminish yourself. I would like to think that people thought I came from nowhere’.

The same sun warms our disparate countries and it burned generously in Mumbai. Less reliable was the electricity supply. At the Kitab Festival the power cut out in the midst of a reading, bathing us in darkness, but candles were soon produced, endowing the room with even more atmosphere. Setting alight the festival with their words were writers including Amit Chaudhuri, Sonia Faleiro, Shobhaa De, Geoff Dyer, Toby Litt, Helen Simpson, Philip Hensher, and Esther Freud. It is such unexpected mishaps – the element of unpredictability rearing its head in plans; chaos amidst the order – that can cause both the pain and pleasure of a festival.

Wherever in the world, be it West or East, across land, water, desert and rainforest, what is shared is the impulse to tell stories. ‘The essence of human tragedy is in loneliness’, wrote Thomas Wolfe, and it is the epigraph to Matthew D’Ancona’s novel. Literary festivals can be a brief respite from the solitude as writers honestly reveal the fears and fascinations at the heart of the writing life, politicians debate what might make a better world, environmentalists discuss ways to save our planet, and comedians tickle our funny bones.

As we sat beneath the great stone arches of a Segovian church, Michael Ondaatje described how he drew strong literary inspiration from other arts; that it is possible to learn much about how to structure a novel, for example, by examining architecture, as painting, too, inspired the poetry of Octavio Paz. Indeed, the most powerful festivals are those which interweave art forms: at Hay the words which pervade the day give way to evenings of music, with stunning performances from among others the Amit Chaudhuri Band, South African legend Hugh Masekela, Asian Dub Foundation, Jane Birkin, and a dazzling display from a group of Kenyans, who fused elements of drama and music to explore the concept of tribe. Such intermingling serves to shed greater truth into the mysterious workings of art.

Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City, has isssued one environmentally-friendly edict after another: indulge in only five-minute showers, take up urban gardening, recycle despite the fact that no legitimate recycling plant existed yet in the capital. So I wasn’t paying much attention when he told us on a Friday last month not to hug or kiss each other. It was Mexico, where a kiss on the cheek is standard for every type of greeting imaginable. I wasn’t going to commit blasphemy without a good reason.

The good reason arrived quickly, as ‘SWINE FLU!’ appeared as the headlines in the local newspapers. Seemingly overnight, the government had decided to shut down public events, schools and theatres across Mexico City and warned of worse to come. I didn’t want to believe it. Pig flu? It felt like a practical joke that had gone wrong.

Very suddenly, the fear of contracting the flu transformed Mexico City into a much colder place than it actually was, and turned its residents into masked strangers afraid to be near each other. But despite a rising flu-related death toll and stories of friends of friends getting sick, I told myself I wouldn’t let it take over my daily routine. I called some friends and we met the next evening, a Saturday night, at a ritzy hotel. Most of the bars and restaurants we usually went to were closed.

We ordered cocktails and steaks. Across the room, a party of young Mexican socialites clapped their hands with glee when an acquaintance showed up wearing a mask in jest. We loudly expounded on the different aspects of this swine flu question, the hour growing later as our opinions became more fervent. The restaurant was filled, and the scene reminded me of a decadent royal palace before the revolution arrives at its door. We didn’t care. Each time one of us coughed or sneezed, the group burst into laughter. Our clothes and jewelry glowed in the candlelight and reflected on our open faces.

I felt as if I was also glowing, from the warmth of my friends’ bodies so comfortably close to me, from their casual touches on my skin.

‘I’m going to wait and see before I get worried about all this,’ my friend Paul announced to all of us, digging into his salad. We all nodded our heads in agreement, lost in thought. Who knew if this mysterious virus would turn into a disaster. Or if it was just our own selfish reason to bring ourselves together after busy weeks of missed calls and postponed dates. Either way, we huddled in close.

On Sunday, a surreal mood had descended upon the deserted streets. Being mask-less in the constant sea of blue surgical face masks made me feel like I was an extra on a movie set they forgot to put in costume. While out with a friend hunting for food, two men driving by in a car stopped to try to pick us up, but they didn’t even try to remove their face masks first.

I finally bought a mask a few days later and strapped it on to take the subway, still the most convenient mode of transportation in town, to the city’s historic centre. Normally riding the subway as a woman is a tricky balance of finding enough personal space to not rub against the overly friendly man standing next to you and not falling out of the car when the doors open at the next stop. But on that afternoon, I had all the room I wanted.

The guys who worked at the taco restaurant on my block, which was not allowed to have sit-down customers anymore, stood awkwardly outside in the heat adjusting and re-adjusting their blue-and-orange hats and saying hello every time I passed. While there were only so many different ways I could say that I was doing fine in Spanish, I appreciated the contact. Living in any metropolis can be lonely, but under an unknown crisis, it can be isolating.

On the way back, I listened sympathetically to the enraged taxi driver who complained the whole journey, from the historic centre to my apartment, about how the government was manufacturing the flu craze and depriving him of business. After leaving his cab, I stopped to talk with the manager of a dry-cleaning service also on my street who wondered, as I did, when this whole mess would be over. Swine flu had turned most of us into hermits, but it had also brought some of us together.

Mexico is a deeply Catholic country, so when the government announced on Sunday it would be canceling Mass to control the spread of the virus, I expected a public uproar. Instead something else happened. Just in front of the church, parishioners and clergy gathered without fear to worship outdoors. It was soothing to sit outside, amid the prayer and songs, bowing my head in the breeze. The priest leaned away from his podium to cough once, then the service continued.