I am currently completing a long piece of research, a book entitled On Marriage. A work that crosses serious scholarship with more creative elements, the book is an enquiry into the idea and practice of marriage that combines philosophy, cultural criticism, psychoanalysis and memoir. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. DS. It’s a very complex joke. You couldn’t just say, ‘Where was God during the Holocaust?’ No one listens. But you tell that joke and then, wow. DB. I always found you an unusual comedian. I’ve met quite a few, and they’re normally not funny. I find comedians can be the most earnest people. The moment they’re off stage, there’s a tremendous aura of seriousness about them. They rarely laugh at jokes. I wanted to make sure that certain sides of me, of Josh, of our marriage, and of our pregnancy, wouldn’t be shared. And we didn’t share those things. I wanted what we did share to speak to a more universal condition, not the specifics of our case.

At once universal and highly subjective, comedy points the way to our modes of navigating – and perhaps subverting – the social Other in all its incongruity. James A. Smith teaches literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Samuel Richardson and the Theory of Tragedy (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism (Zer0, 2019). His friends are mumbling something that sounds like “No, no”; but Josh has opened his floodgates, and the fears keep hurtling out. “There’s not [going to be] enough time for me, there’s not [going to be] enough love. I’m someone who needs endless affection and attention and then suddenly there’s this kid who needs it more than I do …”

About

My work on feelings has led to other projects, including my guest coediting of a special issue of Granta, Granta 146, on 'The Politics of Feeling', which draws together an anthology of responses to our contemporary moment. The issue includes an introductory essay and my long interview with Adam Phillips about ' Politics in the Consulting Room'. In Pure (opens in a new tab), select ‘Edit profile’. Under the heading 'Curriculum and research description', select 'Add profile information'. In the dropdown menu, select 'Research interests: use separate lines'.

DB. You’ve been left behind? I haven’t thought enough about that. But it’s true they’ve been much more successfully funny than you…. Another film I’ve helped to produce and also feature in is Josh Appignanesi’s forthcoming climate activism documentary feature, My Extinction, which includes some footage of a talk I gave for Extinction Rebellion during one of their public protests ( XR Writers Rebel). The film should be released in early 2023. And I was also invited to write and record a short piece reflecting on where multiculturalism meets or complicates responses to the climate catastrophe for the Royal Literary Fund’s Writers Mosaic project. You can find my essay ‘Distinctions and Extinctions’ here. During the weeks before our wedding when he was being truly awful, I thought I’d chosen the worst person to marry – which is why it’s so interesting that I still wanted to marry him.Film-maker Josh Appignanesi has in the past made successful movies: Song of Songs, in the high arthouse mode in 2005, and popular satire The Infidel in 2010. But co-directing with his wife, author and academic Devorah Baum, he has recently got in front of the camera and hit a rich new seam of autofictional or possibly autofactual docu-comedy. The New Man documented – or sneakily semi-fabricated – Appignanesi as the hyper-annoying expectant dad with madly dishevelled hair who is unable to help his pregnant partner in any practical way, and feels existentially undermined by the whole process. The biblical command to marry is expressed in terms of leaving your parents’ house and cleaving to your spouse. And the psychodrama of marriage seems very bound up with that confusion about where and to whom one belongs when one makes that transition. Somehow the person you choose has the job of taking you out of your comfort zone, which puts them, structurally, in constant competition with your family, no matter how much they may in fact like your family. So while at first you think you’re going to just repeat your own family set-up with someone new, soon you realise you’re going to have to reinvent this institution – marriage – between yourselves. It’s what makes tradition potentially so creative. We did have a lot of anxiety early on about being not serious enough subjects for cinema, but since making the film I’ve concluded: ‘let the work speak for itself – if it reaches people great, if not, fine.’ And by the end of the process I felt the film vindicated itself, partly because of something it’s also about: the urge to create. So, even if we don’t look like serious subjects, we still have a serious desire to create – and that’s to some extent a message that our film could only convey by being in other ways not serious. While in terms of my relationship, I think I’ve learned to respect Josh more. I’ve learned now that when he says he’s up to something, he probably is. While I, patronisingly, secretly thought we were only playing at making a film, not really making one. But also, at some level, in case we were actually making one, I was adamant about co-directing it at every stage so that I could determine what sort of film it would be. On the way to interview Baum at her home in West London, I try a little experiment. In the introduction to Feeling Jewish she writes: “Whenever I’ve been asked the name of the book I’ve been writing — the book you’re reading — I nearly always fudge or muffle my answer. Can I really say ‘Feeling Jewish’ out loud? Oh the irony, that ‘feeling Jewish’ for me at least , should be so neatly exposed by the way I feel about saying those very words.” I decide to travel from Finsbury Park to Putney Bridge on public transport, reading Feeling Jewish, just to see what emotions it evokes in me, and possibly other people, displaying something which acts as an instant “I’m Jewish” label. (Of course some people do this all the time by wearing a kippah, say. Not me, though).

Devorah Baum is having a baby; her husband, Josh Appignanesi, is making a film about her having a baby. Or to be more precise, Josh’s film is about what he feels about the pregnancy: because it’s hard work, this pregnancy lark, for Josh. While Devorah is hoping against hope that, after three years of fertility treatment, the couple really are going to become parents, Josh is doing the really difficult bit of pregnancy: he’s having a full-on, no-holds-barred existential crisis. On camera. It’s interesting that Devorah’s wanting to have children and having children has convinced you of the worth of having children, and the same has occurred in reverse for Devorah regarding your wish to make a film. DS. That was the Lacanian therapy session — and we’re about to end it. The event you’re describing was a Jewish event, and I think what you said was really well expressed. A lot of people had fears in that room. You simply did what a good comedian does, and made an observation. Throughout modernity, Jews have been subject to a great deal of suspicion and scrutiny and a swirl of unanswerable questions about their identity and belonging. In a fast-changing, globalised, “Facebook world”, these questions and uncertainties are ones that I suggest more and more of us have come to share – along with the insecurities and feelings that can accompany them, like self-hatred, envy, guilt, paranoia, to name a few I look at in the book. In the literature I analyse, these feelings have been quintessentially associated with the Jewish experience, and it places Jewishness at a kind of vanguard for understanding them, now that they’re ever more widespread. So I take examples from books, films, people’s lives, to find out how we’re living these feelings out, and maybe figure out how to live with them better, find out if perhaps they’re not as negative, toxic or unwelcome as they might appear to be at first. Perhaps they’re actually quite necessary and useful, if we can admit them. 2. What do you think readers will take away after reading your book? I had approached the book with a measure of doubt, wondering whether – being of an age with the author but never married – I would find myself excluded from its thesis. In fact, the reverse was true; Baum is interested as much in the expectations created around marriage, for women in particular, by a society that is still principally organised around married couples and the resulting family unit, and what those expectations mean for anyone who chooses to arrange their life and relationships differently. An entire chapter is devoted to divorcing. As she observes, “much as parents don’t own children, spouses don’t own marriage”; she notes wryly that when, during the course of her research, she canvassed both married and single people on the question of why couples still choose to marry, it was the singles who mentioned love.

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Entertaining, illuminating, candid and consoling, On Marriage is a critique and a celebration of the many contradictions of matrimony - its sorrows as well as its joys - and an enquiry into its effects on us all. Devorah Baum is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Southampton. She is the author of two books, Feeling Jewish (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke (Profile), and co-director of the creative documentary feature film, The New Man. She has written for a range of publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Tate Etc, Times Higher Education and Granta. Her guest co-edited special issue of Granta Magazine on ‘The Politics of Feeling’ came out in Feb 2019. Yeah, you’re right. I think we’ve dealt with a lot by making what goes wrong ‘part of the ceremony’ . . . we made what went wrong in the pregnancy part of the film, and we make the frictions in our relationship part of the pleasure of the relationship. And it’s done ceremoniously because often we only talk about these things when someone else is there. I’ve often noticed couples use the presence of others to enact some sort of surreptitious reconciliation work with each other. But with the film it was complicated. When he returned from Spain Josh knew, given what we’d learned was pending, that he couldn’t mention filming again. And I remember at a certain point realising that Josh was sad not only because of the loss of one of our children – possibly both – but because of the loss of his film. And realising that it was up to me to decide whether or not I’d force him to endure that loss. And because I knew the pain of the loss I was undergoing, I sensed what the prospect of that loss was for him too, though it took me quite a long time before I said we could start filming again. And it was when I made that decision that I stopped treating the film like this annoying thing, because I understood suddenly why it mattered existentially, for him as an artist and as a man. Though for me too, it became a kind of sense-making coping mechanism. Two Jews, Moshe and Itzik, are walking in the Ukrainian forest. In the distance, they see two local guys walking towards them. Moishe turns to Itzik, panics, and says, “Itzik, what should we do? There’s two of them, and we’re all alone!”