Status Anxiety

14 March 2009

I can well imagine my children saying to me: ‘This is off the record, Dad’

I was surprised by that last revelation, since my hunch is that Jake Myerson might have a case under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. British judges are quite sympathetic when a child’s right to privacy is at stake, and Jake could argue that his mother had violated that right. Interestingly, Jake’s father, who is a magistrate, has argued that his partner had a duty to publish in order to warn other parents about the dangers of skunk, a particularly strong form of cannabis. To my ears, that sounds like something he believes it is prudent to stress because in the event of Jake bringing a case against his mother that would be the central plank of her defence.

Of course, none of the above means Julie Myerson was wrong to publish the book. It is not just memoir-writers and journalists who have to wrestle with the issue of whether to turn their nearest and dearest into material — novelists and poets face a similar dilemma. To a greater or lesser extent, all writing is personal, and if you have a writer in the family the chances are that he or she will have upset some family members in the course of his or her career.

My view is that whether a writer is justified in ransacking his or her own life in this way hinges on just how much literary merit the work in question possesses. For instance, Philip Roth was criticised for allegedly basing a character in I Married a Communist on his ex-wife Claire Bloom, but I regard that as entirely justified since it is such a good book. The bar is pretty high, though. You have to produce something approaching a masterpiece if you’re going to ride roughshod over other people’s feelings like that.

Is The Lost Child in that league? I haven’t read it so I don’t know. But the difficulty for all writers who take themselves seriously — and Myerson clearly does — is that you have to proceed as if you’re going to produce a masterpiece and follow your muse accordingly, no matter how many people you upset. That utter ruthlessness is a necessary condition of being any good — what Graham Greene called the splinter of ice in the heart. Ultimately, I sympathise with Myerson because, like her, I labour under the illusion that one day I might produce something that actually has some literary merit.

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banana_the_poet

March 13th, 2009 12:13pm Report this comment

Human Rights legislation is only applicable against large publicly accountable organisations such as government departments and councils and such like. It is a protection against misuse of governmental power. It can't be used against individuals, so Jake's lawyer was quite correct.

David Short

March 13th, 2009 4:22pm Report this comment

What about libel?

Two sides to every story I know, but what I read of Jake M's stuff in the Mail seemed to ring true.

Even so, I suspect Julie M has scored an own goal with her women readers because of chucking out her son and leaving him to fend for himself.

Unforgivable.

The only explanation I can fathom is that she doesn't understand where reality begins and ends, and has an overly puffed-up opinion of herself because she is paid (probably more than for her books) for her opinions by the liberal media.

MsMarmitelover

March 16th, 2009 7:46am Report this comment

Difficult area this. I write a blog (http://travelswithmyteenager.blogspot.com/) which in part writes about bringing up my teenage daughter. But both my teen and I are anonymous. Unlike Myerson in 'Living with teenagers' I'm just as honest about my own mistakes and frailties as I am about the difficulties of being/having a teen. Myerson's column was so irritating, she was always the victim, it seemed, of her outrageously badly behaved children. She didn't appear to take any responsibility for their behaviour.
Toby, it will change as your children get older. They will start to object to being column fodder I'm afraid. lol.

Josa Young

March 16th, 2009 10:55am Report this comment

The Lost Child is a hell of a good read - this must be stressed. Julie writes wonderfully. It is moving, touching and the history is a fascinating insight into earlier parental attitudes. It is a kind of stealth bomb of parenting support for the middle-class mother, fairly certain that something is a bit wrong with her teenage son, who does not seem quite as he was, but is also interested in social history. It is full of visuals that stay with me - the girl going home in a carriage with her sister's coffin tied to the roof is one. Jake's poems are really rather good too, if he could just drop the skunk (it takes a while to get out of the system) stop consorting with the Daily Mail (a two-edged sword), go home and get on with his education, he has promise as a writer. The world is pretty harsh and doesn't deliver a good life to pot-heads on the whole. But that is the thing, he would not do what his parents (with their experience of building a good life for themselves by hard work) believe will deliver a good and happy future - always the distress and anxiety that teenagers deliver. And 17 is quite old enough to leave home and earn your own way if you really disagree with your parents - children from other classes do it all the time - he was 17 not a child? I have told my teens that I am happy to go on doing keeping them while they are being educated, but would not continue if they were just loafing around (we will see how this turns out!). I loved this book, and would recommend it to anyone to add a bit of steel to the parental spine when providing boundaries for teenagers. And cannabis - never mind skunk - is a horrible drug - sapping and leaching personality and the will to get up and go from the brightest of the bright.

Winston

March 18th, 2009 12:10pm Report this comment

STATUS

A girl asked me once what my status was so I asked her what, my financial status, my HIV status or my residential status? I didn’t want to go into my marital status at that time because it was a bit complicated.
What’s the big deal about status? What does it matter who your father is, who your uncle is or who your girlfriend is? What does it matter what neighbourhood you’re from, what district, what region? What car you drive, what phone you drive, does not impress me. Where you studied, what school you attended, what degree you have flying like a jet plane over my head is of no interest to me. What I want to know is, are you a human being? Do you have human status?
That might sound strange, and you might think I’m pushing it, but look around you. What is it that determines status? Is it not the things you have that separate you from the people who do not have those things? Does it not make you feel proud, important, to be ‘different’ from them? Does it not make you feel better about yourself? And does it not make them feel worse?
Class is an alien thing. No one knows where it came from. Someone, somewhere, got the idea that they were different to someone else, and to demonstrate it, they separated themselves from those people. The lines they drew to distinguish themselves from others were drawn with premeditation. It was important that the person you saw as being inferior, or ‘different’ to you was made to feel it. Unless he felt that way –unless he was made to feel that way – you would have no way of knowing for sure. Without a jealous, envious, resentful neighbour to contrast your own life against, you would be no different to him.
We have seen this class war in action all over the world. We have seen what the English did to each other in the name of being superior. We can see what they did to the world. We can see what their offspring, the Americans, have inherited. Some do it in the name of patriotism. Some do it in the name of oil. Some do it in the name of God.
In South Africa you had Botha. In Germany, Hitler. In Iraq, Saddam. In America, Bush.* Africa has suffered everything the class crusader can throw at it, and survived.
Race against race, weapon against weapon, tribe against tribe all over the world – except in Tanzania. But how long before the unity we have inherited from our past is discarded with the rest of our culture in favour of a more devilish present?
One can see from these examples how revealing the idea of class, or ‘status,’ is. What is it in a man that he doesn’t have that he must look for something from another man? Is this man not a thief, who cannot find in himself the respect he is looking for in someone else? Is he not a poor man, this man who thinks his money can buy him something that cannot be bought? There is only one man that can give you respect – and status – and that is yourself.
In my mind, the concept of class, or ‘status,’ does not exist. It remains nothing more than what it is: a concept. You might want to think that way, and other people you know might want to think that way, but I will not. I would prefer not to. I will see you as I see myself and I will see myself as I see you – equal. Whatever I have that you don’t have I will share with you and I hope you will share with me everything you have that I don’t have. There are no rich or poor people in my world, no important or unimportant people, only human beings with feelings. When you lose yours – or I lose mine – we will have lost our human status.

* Mr Bush, with the majority of the American people behind him (and Mr Blair, with his people) has killed over 27,000 innocent Iraqis and over 3000 American soldiers to date in the ongoing genocide of Iraq.

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