Chaucer and Shakespeare are Zadie Smith’s working-class heroes
‘Working-class life is a daily experience … People in England feel it’s a mark of birth, and it’s never removed’
THINK of an author who chronicled working-class London life, and Charles Dickens will likely spring to mind.
But Zadie Smith, the best-selling novelist, has declared that Chaucer, Keats and Shakespeare are the only writers with whom she shares a “class allegiance”.
Smith was raised by working-class parents in Kilburn, west London, an area that provided the setting for her debut novel, White Teeth, and her 2012 novel, NW.
Her latest project is The Wife of Willesden, a play adapted from The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, transposed to the modern day and featuring a Jamaican-born British woman as the lead character. Rather than 15th-century English, the dialogue is written using “the vernacular of my neighbourhood”, Smith said.
Explaining her fondness for Chaucer, Smith told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “To me, there aren’t many writers in the English canon who I can feel some kind of class allegiance with. Maybe Keats. Shakespeare. I’m talking about dead guys here.
“There are some very complex religious and philosophical ideas in The Canterbury Tales, but they’re never presented in any way other than the speech of the people in the street.”
Smith, who studied at Cambridge University and is a professor of creative writing at NYU, has said that she can no longer call herself working class.
“You could absolutely call me upper middle class,” she told a American interviewer. “Working-class life is a daily experience and once you’re removed from it … People in England feel like it’s a mark of birth, and it’s never removed. I was born working class, but I’m not working class any more.”
In a light-hearted piece for Vogue, Smith also described the Queen as “distinctly lower middle class”, with her taste for Eastenders and cornflakes.
The Wife of Willesden is running at Kilburn’s Kiln Theatre, and came about by accident. Smith agreed to write a piece in support of her local area when it won the London Borough of Culture last year, but she had envisaged a onepage monologue to appear in a local magazine. To her surprise, a news release was then sent out announcing that she was writing a full-length play.
“Once it was kind of out in the ether, I felt duty-bound to do it,” Smith said.
It is her first play, and she said her own experience of attending the theatre included walking out of shows.
“I don’t get more of my money’s worth by being miserable for longer,” she said. If audience members choose to do that with her Chaucer update she “would be really sad, but I have to defend the freedom of art appreciators of all kinds”.
Speaking on the Today programme yesterday, the novelist Zadie Smith talked of how, in terms of the English literary canon, she felt a class allegiance with writers such as Keats, Shakespeare and Chaucer. Wryly observing that these were all dead males, she nevertheless noted that they spoke to the people in a way that is rare in literature, that they could wrap up the deepest, most philosophically complex thoughts so that everyone could identify with them. Smith has used Chaucer for her playwriting debut, The Wife of Willesden (reviewed below), which takes the poet’s sexually rapacious, domineering Alison (aka the Wife of Bath) and places her in modern-day north-west London, Smith’s home turf and the setting for a lot of her work, including her debut, White Teeth.
Smith has a clear, watchful voice; she is capable of creating a bird’s-eye view of modern British society which is very, very funny and socially conscious. Yet her comment yesterday also highlighted a gender gap when it comes to creating fiction for everyman – or woman. Our history is chock full of brilliant, versatile, imaginative female writers, but surprisingly few (Smith aside) have offered literature that appears to bridge the class divide.
Naturally, this is tied up in historical fact. From as early as the Middle Ages, any lowly man who had been given the luxury of literacy had the opportunity to make it as a writer. Shakespeare, though in thrall to the might of the crown, never forgot his roots and invested characters such as the porter in Macbeth or Touchstone in As You Like It with a sort of state-of-thenation clarity that his more patrician characters were denied.
The vernacular was both a great leveller and a tool for psychological directness. Keats, the son of a groom, conveyed such important abstract ideas as transience through a language that was certainly poetic but also free of the artifice that sometimes straitjacketed literature of the time.
Certainly when women were allowed to find their voice (to a degree) in the 19th century, several did their best to raise the subject of social justice, but never did this manifest itself in a way that would rouse the subjugated. I adore George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, but I am also aware that their novels often seem as if they are for middle-class liberals, a way of pricking consciences.
Compare this to Dickens whose great novels such as Nicholas Nickleby or Bleak House go straight for the emotional jugular and have a deliberately mass appeal. Who could not read about the plight of the wretched Smike or Jo, the chimney sweep and feel utterly devastated, or be as entertained by Dickens when he was at his most hilarious but also most truthful (think of David Copperfield’s charming, feckless Mr Micawber)? No writer was more perspicacious (or funnier) regarding the spirit of their age than Jane Austen, but of course she had to use the refined, confined spaces of her own experience to speak wider truths.
The odd thing is that the writing of fiction was one of the few areas in 20th-century life where women could gain a foothold, and yet the beat of the street of which Zadie Smith speaks remained the reserve of the men, and often working-class men at that. Think of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole or the novels of David Storey before he became beholden to the Hampstead intelligentsia.
The extraordinary female talent that emerged at this time was rather different. Certainly, writers such as Sylvia Townsend Warner or the newly reappraised Barbara Comyns commented brilliantly about society, but there is a strangeness there, an obliqueness which doesn’t have the same urgency as the
male writers mentioned above.
Barbara Pym, as great a chronicler of society’s mores as Jane Austen, was, like her forebear, often confined (perhaps willfully so) to genteel environs which, in Pym’s case, meant London mansion flats or north Oxford. It often seemed as if the great female novelists of this era were duty bound to speak about emotion rather than assert their thoughts about social reality because that was what was expected of them. Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Bowen wrote with a great eye for realism, but often it is the psychology in these novels that dominate and the result is very subtle.
Yet, sometimes, obliqueness does end up having a mass appeal. The most celebrated British female novelist of the late 20th century, Iris Murdoch, often found herself at the top of the bestseller list which means she must have been popular. It’s strange to think now that her 30-odd novels, so often wrapped up in philosophical debate and often unfurling in the form of pages and pages of near-platonic
Few female writers have had the chance to bridge the social divide
dialogue, were hits, but somehow she must have connected with readers in a way that Smith talked of yesterday.
Murdoch is a one-off; there has been no one like her before or since. But one wonders whether most women writers
have ever been allowed to find their voice in a way that didn’t limit them to their gender, or perhaps to the shelves of genre fiction. In the white heat of the Sixties revolution, it took the decidedly upmarket Nell Dunn to write entertainingly and successfully about the plight of ordinary people in books like Poor Cow and Up the Junction. Working-class female voices were still frustratingly few.
In the years that followed, I can’t really think of anyone whom Zadie Smith could call a true social ally – which is why we should cherish her, and one of many reasons why publishing is in need of a shake-up.