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| John Burnsdide |
John Burnside: a life in writing
'Having been, as it were, mad, and lived with horror I believed in, I know that rationality doesn't carry you all the way'
Sarah Crown
Friday 26 August 2011 22.54 BST
"What I'm interested in just now," says John Burnside, "is the Schrödinger's cat novel: two mutually exclusive possibilities sitting together without cancelling each other out." He achieves just such a balancing act in his latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, in which the narrator, Liv, wrestles with the question of whether a series of unexplained deaths in her island community can be laid at the door of a malign spirit – the huldra – said to haunt the Arctic forests where she lives. "I wanted readers to be able to believe that the huldra exists, at the same time as rationally thinking 'this cannot be'," Burnside explains. "Because, you know, that's how we live our lives."
It's certainly how Burnside has lived his. Here is a man whose first poetry volume, published in 1988 when he was in his 30s, turned out to be the pebble that called forth the avalanche: in the quarter-century since, he has written compulsively, pouring out an astonishing (and astonishingly well-received) 13 collections and eight novels. But here, too, is a man whose early life, set out in a pair of bleached and harrowing memoirs, was so catastrophic that it tipped him into a spiral of LSD binges, psychiatric wards and, finally insanity. In a scene at the beginning of his second volume of memoir, Waking Up in Toytown, he comes to on a bed, surrounded by bottles holding "a mixture of blood, honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine" with "a single feather, balanced precariously on each rim". The intention, as far as he can recall, was "to cast a spell that would stop the world from disintegrating . . . if one feather falls, then the spell fails". Rationally, it is impossible to square this vision of disintegration with the thoughtful, cheerful man currently sipping a beer across the table – but perhaps that explains why Burnside gives short shrift to rationality and its adherents. "I always feel saddened by intelligent people who say, this can't be true because it doesn't work in terms of rationality," he says. "What does? Inspiration? Art? Romantic love? Having been, as it were, mad, and lived with horror which at that moment I completely believed in, I know that rationality doesn't carry you all the way. Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful."
In A Summer of Drowning, it is both. The book has its roots in a family trip to the Arctic circle over a decade ago, when Burnside and his wife, Sarah, decamped to north Norway for the summer with their infant son. "Lucas's first birthday was on the island of Kvaløya, where the book's set," Burnside remembers (the couple now have two sons). "You sat outside your hut and gazed for miles: nothing but wind and sea and Arctic terns. It was gorgeous; it was like heaven to me. That's when I started this book. It took me 10 years to write it."
In A Summer of Drowning, it is both. The book has its roots in a family trip to the Arctic circle over a decade ago, when Burnside and his wife, Sarah, decamped to north Norway for the summer with their infant son. "Lucas's first birthday was on the island of Kvaløya, where the book's set," Burnside remembers (the couple now have two sons). "You sat outside your hut and gazed for miles: nothing but wind and sea and Arctic terns. It was gorgeous; it was like heaven to me. That's when I started this book. It took me 10 years to write it."
The magic of that summer infuses the book: a wide, white canvas lit by splashes of prismatic colour, it is at once the most ravishing novel I've read all year, and the most intellectually provoking. Liv, the young narrator, lives in beautiful seclusion on Kvaløya with her mother, a gifted but reclusive painter. A loner herself, Liv has little to do with her classmates, preferring to train her gaze on her environment, and visit her elderly neighbour, Kyrre, who beguiles her with local stories of trolls and lost children. When two teenaged boys drown in calm water under the midnight sun, "that still, silvery-white gloaming that makes everything spectral", Kyrre maintains that a huldra, a malevolent forest-spirit which takes the form of a beautiful young girl, drove them to it. At first Liv disregards him, but as the novel winds towards its convulsive ending, she becomes convinced of the literal truth of his tale. And we, who see everything through her eyes, grow simultaneously more aware of her profound unreliability as a narrator and less certain of what, precisely, it is that we're seeing.
For seasoned Burnside readers, the real wonder of the novel isn't the slippery subject matter, but that this is the first time he has fully succeeded in fusing the opposing strengths of his prose and his poetry in one book. In the past, the two have inhabited very different arenas – the first obsessively occupied with darkness and violence, the second with the gloriously mystical. But in A Summer of Drowning, bloodshed is balanced by beauty: the sensuousness of Liv's gaze, which lingers on food and flowers and the sea's "endlessly shifting maze of grey and silver and salt-blue", offsets the patches of pitch-blackness in a story that, like the legend of the huldra itself, has "chaos at its heart". Just as his fiction is beginning to incorporate some of the mysticism of his poetry, so Burnside's poetry appears to be absorbing the firmness of his fiction. Over the years he has established himself as a laureate of the transcendental, but his new collection, Black Cat Bone, shows a perceptible change of tack. "I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak," he says. "This new book is about things that nobody can deny. I'm always referred to as being interested in the numinous, the immanent, those kinds of words. I decided not to do it any more. This book still deals with the evanescent, but it's about sex, love, death – solid, real-life things." The two books, taken together, read like the works of a man in the process of making peace with himself.
There has been much to reconcile. Burnside was born in Dunfermline in 1955, to a mother fast realising she'd made a terrible mistake and a father who would cast a polluting shadow over his son's life well beyond his own death from a heart attack between the bar and the cigarette machine of the Silver Band Club many years later. Hard-drinking, hard-gambling, simmeringly violent, he was determined to bludgeon any trace of softness or sweetness out of his son. "What he wanted," Burnside says, in 2006's superb A Lie About My Father, "was to warn me against hope, against any expectation of someone from my background being treated as a human being in the big hard world. He wanted to kill off my finer – and so, weaker – self. Art. Music. Books. Imagination. Signs of weakness, all. A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself."
There has been much to reconcile. Burnside was born in Dunfermline in 1955, to a mother fast realising she'd made a terrible mistake and a father who would cast a polluting shadow over his son's life well beyond his own death from a heart attack between the bar and the cigarette machine of the Silver Band Club many years later. Hard-drinking, hard-gambling, simmeringly violent, he was determined to bludgeon any trace of softness or sweetness out of his son. "What he wanted," Burnside says, in 2006's superb A Lie About My Father, "was to warn me against hope, against any expectation of someone from my background being treated as a human being in the big hard world. He wanted to kill off my finer – and so, weaker – self. Art. Music. Books. Imagination. Signs of weakness, all. A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself."
This lesson in working-class Catholic masculinity was achieved through a series of viciously petty acts of cruelty, such as the burning of a favourite teddy bear, that continue to haunt Burnside's dreams decades later. Although his subsequent discovery that his father had been abandoned as an infant allowed him to forgive the man, he was unable to forget. "I cannot talk about him without talking about myself," he writes, "just as I can never look at myself in the mirror without seeing his face." Eventually, inevitably, Burnside followed his father into the same vortex of repression and release through alcohol – but in his case the vortex went deeper, ending in drug abuse and mental breakdown.
'I didn't set out to write about my early life," Burnside says. "One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: I'm going to write a book about my father. We were expecting Lucas at the time, and I suddenly thought, what stories do I have for my son? I didn't even have a family album with pictures of me as a kid: I'd refused all of that. My father told all these versions of his life – he'd been adopted by his uncle, he was the son of an industrialist and a factory girl, or of a lay preacher who'd strayed – so I went to see my aunt to find out what was true, what was false. She told me the full story, the whole foundling thing. After that the book had to happen."
He followed it four years later with Waking Up in Toytown, which details his struggle to shake off the shadow. He wanted "a normal life. Sober. Drug-free. Dreamless. In gainful employment. A householder. A taxpayer. A name on the electoral roll", and on the surface, at least, he achieved it. For 10 years, he slipped himself into a textbook middle-class existence: house in Surrey, job in computing, numbing visits to cinema and garden centre. But beneath the surface, this book is, if anything, more desperate even than the first. Despite his best efforts, alcohol sneaked back in, turning his nights into uneasy odysseys, leading him to a series of encounters with equally damaged souls: the mother who dopes her kids with valium-laced orange juice; the fellow-drinker who tries to persuade Burnside to bump off his wife. The suburbia he finds for himself turns out to be a fatally debased version of the television fantasy, not the safe haven he'd imagined.
"I realised I'd been faking 'normal' for 10 years, pretty much," Burnside says. "And I knew it had to stop. I ended up walking into my boss's office and saying, 'That's it, I'm done'. And he looked at me – I was a 40-ish guy, he knew I wrote poetry – and said 'I suppose you're off to write a novel?'. In the end he told me to do some consultancy work to ease the transition."
By now, the poetry that had welled through the cracks of his suburban life was flowing, and he was several collections in, despite a shaky start. "My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them. I'd sent some poems to Carcanet, and Michael Schmidt [the editor] was very encouraging and suggested a book. I assumed this was the first stage of a long process of honing, but instead they just put my poems together, with a picture of me in a tank top on the back. They sent me a copy, and I said 'oh, this is the proof, is it?'. I thought, god, I'm not doing that again."
He decided to give up poetry there and then, but felt obliged to do a couple of readings on the back of publication. At one, he met the poet Sarah Maguire, who persuaded him to send some poems to Robin Robertson, poetry editor at Jonathan Cape, before jacking it in. "I began working with Robin and everything changed."
Burnside got married at about the time he published his first novel, The Dumb House, and moved back to Scotland where he took up a writer's residency at Dundee University. Though he was well known and admired within the poetry world (he'd been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize, and had taken the Whitbread poetry award for his 2000 collection, The Asylum Dance), his longer writing took time to gel. The Dumb House, in which a Mengele-esque narrator attempts to discover "the locus of the soul" by carrying out surgical experiments on his twin children, was reasonably well received, but the follow-ups were, Burnside says, "disastrous".
"The second one, The Mercy Boys, was an emotional response to going back to Scotland, and probably an early way of trying to deal with some of the issues around my father – the gambling, the booze, the tension in that men's world. I shouldn't have written it. Then came The Locust Room," a curiously affectless tale about the 1970s Cambridge rapist, "which was very self-indulgent: a book-length apology for having been a dick when I was growing up, for having treated my sisters and my mother the way my father did." The next book, Living Nowhere, was "better", but he still hadn't hit his fictional stride. After the memoirs were written, much of the personal stuff he'd been trying to smuggle into the fiction was cleared out.
Nowadays, he says, for the first time he is "happy with what I'm doing. I feel as if I know where I'm going now – I can see four or five books ahead." Despite the forward planning, however, when it comes to the act of writing, he's sticking with irrationality. "I imagine the mind as a big house. You've got the parlour where you sit and have tea, your bedroom, your kitchen, your bathroom. But actually there are endless rooms around you that you don't use, and there's one room way at the back – the furnace room, maybe – where your thoughts begin. Sometimes they walk all the way up to the parlour to find you before you even realised they were coming. That's how it feels for me. I think good ideas work like that."
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