This month, ‘national treasure’ Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate, author, poet, political columnist, activist, broadcaster and Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London (whew!) will be at The Oxford Playhouse as part of his national tour of Getting Through It, a one-person show of two monologues; The Death of Eddie, which relates to the death of his son, and Many Kinds of Love, recounting Michael’s experience of intensive care during the pandemic.
It’s a grey morning in December when I meet not just Michael but also his cats. Two black and white beauties officially named after The White Stripes (Megan and Jack) but unofficially renamed by Michael. “I wanted to give them Yiddish names, I call that one Shpilkes and that one Schlump. I was just going with character because he's a bit shpilkes which, if you don't know, means nervy, and Schlump, because… well you can see at this very moment, Schlump is asleep”. Further proof (if any was needed) that Michael Rosen is a man who knows how to use words with meaning.
Have you always found it easy to express yourself so eloquently
I think it's something I've learned how to do. Somebody once said something to me that was really interesting: he was a youth worker and said what he had to cope with all the time was teenage boys pretending they don't have feelings. That they define masculinity not as a thing they do, but as a thing they mustn't do: be like women. They police each other's masculinity to spot any guy doing anything that could be described as feminine but of course, they don't use those words, they use pejorative, nasty words about women.
It was so interesting and so moving. Being a guy and having done the sort of masculinity policing myself – going first to a mixed school and then to a boys school and seeing the difference between the two – when he said this, it had such a powerful resonance.
What can audiences expect from your show?
I hope a sense that when tough things happen, you can recover from them. The show is really about recovery and finding a way to do that: how I navigated the death of my son, and also of being in a coma. One is a tragedy, and the other is more odd (rather than a tragedy) because – spoiler alert – I lived.
You studied at Oxford and I think I’m right when I say you come back fairly often…
Quite often one way or another. My college invites me back. I also came and told some of this story in the Holywell Music Rooms about four or five years ago. And I've been back for the Oxford Literary Festival doing shows in the Sheldonian.
Do you have anywhere you like to nip back to which reminds you of your student days?
The King’s Arms: I used to have lunch there, pickled herring and orange juice mixed with sparkling water which people may not think is very nice, but in fact, it was absolutely brilliant. I can remember all sorts of people I used to have it with, including Christopher Hitchens – no longer with us; Sally Alexander, who used to be at Ruskin College; Alun Howkins; and Don McIntyre – who went on to be the deputy editor of The Independent. I remember [Professor] Craig Raine coming in and telling me off because I didn't read enough Wordsworth. He was quite funny about it, but that was the sort of thing you had in those days: “Trouble with you, Michael, is you don't read enough Wordsworth”. Was it trouble? Really?
People talk about finding strength through adversity. Do you feel that has been true for you?
I don't think so. You hear footballers say, ‘because we were down one man, we played better because we were facing that’, and if people are booing them, they can take it as a challenge and feel stronger. I don't think that applies to me. I always feel instead that I have to find resources; say it's raining, you think, have I got a raincoat? Have I got an umbrella? You look for the resources to cope with the thing that might be a problem.
I guess that's the feeling I have: a sense that you learn your adaptive mechanisms. So, when you get knocked down with something you remember how you adapted, and you try to use that. Maybe that makes you stronger, but I think more it's that you learn the adaptations. You learn how you coped.
I can relate to that with my writing after Eddie died. I couldn't write, and then I found a way of writing, partly because my wife had shown me a poem by Raymond Carver, called Locking Yourself Out. It seemed so clear and simple and direct. I thought, why am I trying to complicate this? Why don't I just write down a thought? Don't worry about how and if a thought comes along that is a bit more complex. Let it just happen – but don't hunt for it.
When it came to the coming out of a coma, I knew that I was going to write again in the same way. I used the same adaptive: they kept saying to me, you were very poorly. Do they mean I had a cold? And then, another example – someone comes up to the bed and says, ‘we're taking your obs’. What are your obs? And they say, ‘it's what we see’. I start wondering about what is in your obs? Do your obs say ‘he looks like he needs a haircut? He looks less dead today?’. They're fragments, and I learned how to do that off the back of Raymond Carver.
When you talk about these events, you have a marked lack of bitterness. Is it deliberate? Do you try and cast out those thoughts?
I think there are times when I could go down the bitterness corridor. [Eddie’s] mother and I went to a cemetery in Paris not long after Eddie died, and there was a woman crying by the grave of her son. I talked to her and said that our son had died, and she said, ‘What did he die of?’ I said, ‘meningitis’, and then I said, ‘What did your son die of?’ And she said, ‘a car accident’. I remember thinking at that moment how different that was – it just came to me straightaway. And I thought, wouldn't I be just so bitter about that. Say it was the driver's fault, I don't know how you'd cope. As I say in the poem, I can't be angry with the bacterium. [Eddie] had a meningitis bacterium that happened to cross the membranes in his throat and go into his bloodstream. What do I do? Go out and find a meningitis bacterium and stamp on it and go ‘you bloody meningitis bacteria. It's your fault’. Instead, you find another corridor (to continue with the idiom) to come to terms with what bacteria and viruses do, and what we do in relation to them.
Again, with covid, part of me is angry at what they were playing with in March 2020, because they were playing with herd immunity; with the idea that they could sacrifice people and that would save others. [One of] the three government scientists even said, ‘in an ideal world, would pick up all the vulnerable people in a great big bag and drop them on Shetland’. What he meant was, ‘we'd look after the vulnerable people’. But they didn't do that either. If they had from January or February onwards, they'd have been identifying who was vulnerable and saying, ‘we must take urgent measures to protect the following kinds of people, and that would have included over 70-year olds’. They didn't, they played around and thought, let see what happens if the virus goes through the whole population, knowing that the vulnerable people would get very, very ill or die.
Am I bitter about that? I’m certainly a bit angry but am I bitter? No, but then, of course, I haven't died. I'm not bereaved. I've come through it. But if I was bereaved, if it was my partner who had died, I think maybe I would want to kick a wall and try to cope with the bitterness. Yes, so again, because it's me and I've survived, and I'm sort of angry rather than bitter.
When you're talking about this on stage, how does it feel when the audience responds to these huge things that have happened to you?
I'm a firm believer in people making of literature (or film or whatever) what they make of it. I can sometimes hear shock – a gasp – sometimes I can hear crying. Sometimes I can hear lots of laughter, which is lovely.
Sometimes it a sudden dip: suddenly the room goes into complete silence and it's like people absolutely freeze, and you hear the silence. That is always very powerful. It's very kind, in a way, because what people are doing is leaning forward in a way; ‘must make sure I don't miss this bit, did he really say that?’
There are some quite graphic descriptions of death in the show, but then I believe that we shouldn't hide death away. And then afterwards I do a sort of meet and greet or a book signing, and I have a sense that what I've done [in the performance] is allow people to feel free with their feelings. I say a little bit about this at the very beginning of the show: ‘I hope that by telling this, you can tell your story’
That's the power of literature and film, isn't it? That it gives you permission to have the feeling yourself.
Given the breadth of your achievements, your outputs and their significance, do you feel like you've conquered your Everests?
If I get to the end of [writing] a book and the editor's happy, that’s my little Everest. And the gigs as well. Before the gig you don't know what's going to happen, and something could go wrong. It's not that you're anxious necessarily, but there's a sense of expectation and not knowing.
Do you have faith?
I have faith in humanity, in us: human beings. I don't believe there is anything else out there.
I'm always interested when human beings overcome difficulties or express good feelings to each other – all those things. I once wrote a poem [Carrying the Elephant] about coming to the conclusion there's just us.
Michael Rosen will be at the Oxford Playhouse on 9 January with Getting Through It; A Double Bill of Love, Loss and Mortality. Tickets are available at oxfordplayhouse.com and for more information on Michael’s work, visit his website at michaelrosen.co.uk.
