Any of my children will tell you that I can have a volcanic temper, although it never goes further than yelling, it passes very quickly and it happens quite rarely. It’s not a pretty sight. You might say I have an anger problem – except that I’m not quite sure it’s a problem.
Anger is a perfectly normal and natural emotion, and the English horror of it is, to my mind, somewhat misguided. Our determination to show a stiff upper lip or a calm front is culture-specific. The family of my first wife, for instance, is Italian, and they had no stigma attached to getting angry. It was just the way families were.
However, in my adopted culture – which I can only describe as English metropolitan bourgeois – showing that kind of negative emotion is a matter for acute self-reproach. Anger is not merely meant to be controlled or suppressed – for the true grownup parent, it is ideally meant to be excised from the personality.
However, I doubt that many of us, evolved though we might be in terms of other personality traits, really escape anger. It is an adaptive human impulse. My friend the psychologist Dorothy Rowe used to give talks to audiences during which – when she talked about the inevitability of anger – someone often put a hand up to claim that they were immune from anger. This always made Dorothy smile. “Try creeping up behind them and putting a plastic bag over their head and see what happens,” she said.
Anger is inevitable, although in our culture and many others, we are shamed by it because we “lose face” – that is to say in this case that we reveal our animal natures, aggressive as they are at heart. But as John Lydon used to sing, “anger is an energy”. Anger has propelled me through a great deal of my life. In childhood, anger at being treated as stupid because of my working-class status led me determined to “prove them wrong”.
I did prove them wrong, I think, but I’m still angry – or rather there is a streak of anger in me that will not be erased. I think it arises from fear of chaos more than anything else – which, as the world is chaotic, seems perfectly reasonable. Therefore I try not to be ashamed of it – as, apart from anything else, shame simply leads to more anger. In any case, I consider open anger more honest than the kind of passive-aggression that squats in its place, masking it in middle-class society, where a man – or a woman – may smile and smile as they politely stick a dagger between your ribs.
Middle-class hatred of anger is suffocating – not because it isn’t ugly to get angry, but because with all the mindfulness and yoga and good manners in the world, anger cannot be got rid of. If it were got rid of, we would be reduced as human creatures – rather as we would if we lost our sensitivity to pain. Like bacteria, there is good and bad anger and, like bacteria, we cannot do without it.
Which doesn’t stop me feeling bad when I lose my temper in front of my children. This is partly because I feel I am scaring them and also because I feel I am setting a bad example – although you could argue that I am making it apparent to them that it is OK to show negative emotion sometimes. I rarely saw my own parents angry – it was taboo in our household. Whether this was connected to my mother’s suicide, I will never know.
I mostly reprehend myself when I get angry for thinking I am behaving like a child myself. But I do not have to be a child to be angry. I am just a human being, which is to say, prone to negative emotions under pressure. If you doubt it, just check the comment thread after this piece. Or have some kids. Or, if all that fails, wait until someone sticks a plastic bag over your head.
