Hell's just some people

‘Hell is other people,’ wrote Sartre.

My own feeling is that in reality it’s only certain other people that are hell. And some of them one can adapt to.

For instance, crying babies in planes used to drive me crazy until I had my own children, at which point my attitude went through a complete reversal. Now, when I hear a child crying I just feel sorry for the parents. I know how embarrassed, upset and impotent they feel, as they struggle with an impossible task, quietening an unhappy child. Or an angry one.

I was reminded of that today when I heard a baby wailing in a flat next door to us. It didn’t last all that long, but while it was going on it was clear that the parents were completely unable to calm him. He wanted something, he wanted it now, they weren’t able – or perhaps willing - to supply it, and he was making his displeasure fully known. Not to just to them but, as in our case, to the neighbours too.

He knows he wants something and he knows he’s not getting it.
That annoys him. But at least he has the potential to learn

Still, the noise didn’t irritate me. I’ve been there, held a wailing child, wandered around in the moonlight with him on my shoulders at 2:00 in the morning. I know what it’s like and can’t work up any annoyance, just some fellow feeling and a trace of ‘thank God that’s not me any more’.

In any case, it’s easier to forgive noise from babies because they are creatures of pure potential. Who knows what they may turn into. And, above all, they could well learn self-control.

It’s far sadder when the noise is being made at the other end of life, when there’s so little less to hope for. Visiting my mother in hospital, where she’s struggling against a battery of conditions that tend to afflict a 93-year old, is pretty depressing and not just because of her state. On one visit, when I arrived in the ward I could hear a woman down the corridor shouting quite as loudly as the baby next door today.

‘Help me! Someone help me! I need help! I need it now!’

I was there for nearly two hours and the shouting never stopped. People in the nearby beds must have found it insufferable. She was surrounded by nursing staff who were, clearly, helping her, but her problem wasn’t physical, it went far deeper, to an area within her well beyond their reach. Like the child, she knew she needed something, and knew that no one was providing it, but had lost the capacity to comprehend that they could do nothing so that continuing to clamour was ultimately pointless.

What made things worse was that before I even left the four-bed bay where my mother was sleeping, the woman diagonally opposite her also started to cry out.

‘I need help. Now. Urgently. I need to see a doctor. Straight away. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. Come now and get me a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

The litany went on and on. At one point she spotted me.

‘You there. Yes, you. The man sitting in the corner. Bring me a phone. I’ll phone for an ambulance. They’ll get me into hospital.’

‘Err…’ I replied, ‘you’re in hospital.’

Not useful, I know, but I’m not much good in these situations. But simple pragmatism? It clearly wasn’t going to put her off.

‘I need a doctor. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

Then she decided to adopt a new tactic.

‘I’m getting out of bed now. I’m going to look for a doctor.’

She made ineffectual moves towards leaving her bed.

‘Now, Sylvia,’ said a nurse, ‘you stay in bed. You might fall down and hurt yourself.’

‘I need a doctor,’ replied Sylvia.

‘A doctor will come and see you. But the doctors are busy just now. They’re in the Emergency Department.’

‘Well, I’ll get up and fall down. Then they’ll have to see me.’

She may have been not entirely conscious, but I have to say, her logic was impeccable.

The sad thing about these older women was that, unlike the child, there was little hope of their getting better. Of developing new self-control. Like the child, they wanted gratification immediately, and they’re unlikely to learn what the child may, that there’s much to be said for deferring gratification. If only, to avoid immediate disappointment.

That makes their protests harder to bear than a baby’s. Though they’re still not the least bearable of all. Those are the wailing cries of entitlement that come from people who are technically adult and who have neither the excuse of the child who hasn’t yet learned, or the older person who’s losing the lesson.

One of the saddest aspect of the world today is just how many of such people are in positions of power. Supported, apparently, by growing movements, in nation after nation: nationalists in Italy or Hungary, backing Brexit in Britain, voting for Erdogan in Turkey, supporting Trump in the US.

Now those adult babies really are insufferable.

He wants gratification. He wants it now.
And there’s no prospect of his learning better.

Hell is other people. Or how one woman's music became another's noise pollution.

Spare a thought for Laia Martín, a promising young pianist from Catalonia, now facing charges that could land not just her but her parents in gaol for seven and a half years. 

Why? Because she practises the piano.

Yes, that’s right. You’d expect a budding concert pianist to have to play rather a lot. And when her parents bought her a piano and encouraged (I suppose the prosecution would say ‘incited’) her to play it, they thought they were behaving as devoted parents should.

Sadly, they were living next door to a woman called Sonia Bosom, clearly someone with a lot to get off her chest.

She sued for noise pollution and physical impairment. She’s moved away, which strikes me as sensible, but in the meantime the matter had been picked up as one for criminal charges. It’s true that Martín practices for eight hours a day, but that’s pretty much what I’d expect from a professional musician (particularly a soloist). She also keeps it to daytime only. 

All of which makes me feel that in asking for a seven and a half year sentence, the prosecutor who’s taken up the case is being just a tad excessive.

Noise pollution.
Seriously? Noise pollution?

And, believe me, my wife and I have plenty of experience of noise pollution. Our neighbour goes in for it less often than she used to, but when she lets herself go, we certainly know about it. First she starts off apparently enjoying herself. She and her friends laugh a lot; then the music comes on; and next it’s Karaoke, an invention, it seems to me, with only one purpose: however awful you may feel professional singers are, you’ll go back to them with alacrity once you’ve heard the amateurs.

Hard though it is to believe, things actually deteriorate after the Karaoke. That’s when the mood turns rough. Voices are raised but no longer in joy. Epithets are exchanged, accompanied by encouragements to engage in procreative activity. Elsewhere. 

Doors are opened and doors are slammed as various people are included or excluded from groups. In the latter case, they usually protest at a length that belies their words, that they care very little about their fate, in speeches generously larded with further procreative allusions.

As a general rule, there are tears, occasionally blows, sometimes even the sound of crockery being broken.

We think of her as our neighbour from Hell.

I imagine, however, that Ms Bosom and the Martíns feel exactly the same way about each other. Ms Bosom must have regarded the hours of piano as hellish; Laia and her parents must feel the same about the prospect of being gaoled for their devotion to music.

Which I suppose only goes to prove the truth of Sartre’s idea that hell is other people. The Spanish case seems to confirm it. So does our neighbour.

Fortunately, however, in my experience other people also provide the means to get as about as close to heaven as we’re ever likely to be. The existence of friends consoles us for the persecutions of the hellish other people of Sartre’s vision.

Right now, I hope Laia Martín and her family can find some friends of their own, in high places if at all possible, because they really, really need them.

An appeal - and an afterthought on Bin Laden

For a long time, I thought it was unbelievably difficult to write a novel. But now I’ve written three, it seems to me that it takes a lot of time and some persistence, but it’s not that hard. I don’t say it’s easy to write a good novel, and certainly one of my three needs such heavy rewriting that it may never be worth tackling at all, while the jury’s still out on the other two. But just getting the words on the page is less hard than I thought.

Much more difficult, it seemed to me, was getting a novel published and then winning some sales. But what I hadn’t thought about was just how difficult it was even to get a publisher’s attention. It’s like that moment in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom when French prisoners of war clamour for the bread the German guards throw them, and fight each other for it. The admirable character, the one we’d doubtless all hope to emulate, is the one who refuses to join the scramble.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I like the idea of going that hungry.

So it is with the 4000 or so of us who’ve put novels up on the ‘Authonomy’ website. You have to get your book to climb up to the top 5. Harper Collins have promised to review (not, I stress to publish) only that number. Like Sartre’s prisoners of war, we’re all therefore clamouring for notice. To be honest, to push the analogy a bit further, fighting for bread might not be enough – we’d have to borrow a guard’s machine gun and mow down our fellow captives.

Within Authonomy, each of us chooses up to five titles that we can ‘back’ by placing them on our virtual ‘bookshelves’. The more bookshelves a book appears on and the longer it stays on them, the further it climbs. There’s a lot of bartering – ‘I’ll put you on mine if you put me on yours’. I’m trying to be a bit more like the Sartre character, and only put a book on my bookshelf if I think it’s worth reading, though I have to confess that one of my two is there because I mistook ‘back’ (the book) for ‘back’ (to the previous page). It’s still there (for now) because I didn’t have the heart to remove it though I don’t really like it.

I’m taking my time over my other three choices, reading passages here and there until I find titles I think deserve support.

Would get by better with a little help from my friends

Meanwhile, what of my own Good Company? It may be a drawback that I chose to give it the form of letters (OK, I’ve called them ‘e-mails’ to be more contemporary, but it’s basically the same thing). I chose that form because I write letters with some fluency and ease. Unfortunately, that kind of epistolary novel was popular in the eighteenth century but may not be so appropriate to the twenty-first. The kindest comment I’ve had on Authonomy was from someone who said she’d love to receive letters like mine, though it may be significant that she didn’t actually back the book.

So far, Good Company has done reasonably well, climibing the rankings in just over a month from 4179 to 946. It’s great to be in the top 1000, but that does leave the small matter of 941 further places to climb. It feels to me as though the book needs a bit more support.

So do I get down in the mud and claw at my fellow prisoners with the rest of them? I’d prefer to find a compromise which avoids swallowing quite that much pride. A sensible compromise might be to turn to friends for help. And aren’t the readers of this blog my friends?

So this is my appeal to any of you who can spare the time, to:

• Logon to www.authonomy.com
• Register (you don’t have to use your real name)
• Navigate through to “David Beeson” 
• Read as much or as little of Good Company as you want
• Back it, please, if you think it deserves a review by Harper Collins.

And to those who find the time to do that – why, many thanks.

Unrelated postscript

Back here in Britain, The Sun, a so-called newspaper belonging to that noted philanthropist Rupert Murdoch, carries a headline today:

 

  Bin Laden unarmed – just like his 9/11 and 7/7 victims

 

Let’s get this straight, I think the world’s a better place for no longer containing Bin Laden and I applaud the US operation that rid us of him. On the other hand, I feel less good about the enthusiastic celebrations the event triggered – death may be a cause for relief, when it’s that of a truly heinous criminal, but joy always seems inappropriate.

 

As for The Sun’s headline, it implies that the behaviour of terrorists should be a benchmark for us all.

 

Am I alone in feeling that this sets the bar just a tad low?