Gene Wolfe — author of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the 12 books and various stories comprising the "Urth" universe, beginning with The Shadow of the Torturer (1980, first volume of "The Book of the New Sun") and concluding (at least for now) with Return to the Whorl (2001); winner of the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and many others — and Neil Gaiman, well-known for the "Sandman" series of graphic novels and more recently for Hugo-finalist American Gods (2001) and current best- selling children's book Coraline — met in 1983 at the British Fantasy Convention in Birmingham, and became friends when Gaiman and his family moved to the US in 1992. They recently collaborated on A Walking Tour of the Shambles: Little Walks for Sightseers #16, published for the 2002 World Horror Convention where they were both guests. Their "interview" in the September issue of Locus was a series of talks with Gaiman interviewing Wolfe, overseen by Charles N. Brown and Jennifer A. Hall.
Excerpts from the interview:
GW: “I’m not nearly as good a writer at e-mail as I am on paper. I’m an old-fashioned guy. I need time to print it out and look at it and revise, scratch my head, pencil out words and pencil in words. The computer drives me nuts. I always remind people who talk about how writing is going to be revolutionized by the computer that Shakespeare wrote with a feather that he had to resharpen every page or so, and look what he did!”
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If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
288pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99
About a quarter of the way through Jon McGregor's first novel - a surprise inclusion on the Booker longlist this week - an elderly, working-class man racked with lung cancer laughs and then "clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel".
If the alarm bells haven't already rung countless times, then they certainly do at that sudden, gratuitous lurch into the world of art history. This is a novel where the contrived metaphor, the struggling simile, the romantic reference all come first.
Here is a nameless urban contemporary street on "the last day of summer". It's a day when the many residents - few of them identified by more than house number or hair colour - experience a terrible, violent, communal event. What is it? You will have to wait till the final pages to find out. Meanwhile, McGregor's doom-laden narrative - told mostly by an omniscient (and well-travelled and cultured) narrator - is punctured now and then by the separate voice of a girl who, after an impulsive one-night stand in Scotland, is pregnant.
This girl spends a lot of time woefully contemplating the fluttery feeling in her belly - how you long to point her in the direction of a Marie Stopes - and feeling alone. Finally she receives a mysterious visit from a young man whose twin brother (who lives on that street on that last day of summer) fosters a secret love for her.
I know I ought just to go with the flow. This is a clean, bare, sensitive and undoubtedly well-intentioned piece of fiction by someone still in his 20s. It's admirably adventurous. Its determinedly unpunctuated dialogue more or less works. And I know what McGregor is aiming for - how he wants to create 360o pans with his juddery word-camera and show us what's going on in a whole neighbourhood. How stuff that seems small and insignificant can have huge consequences. How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone.
But the trouble with largeness, with this wide lens, is that it can be oddly ungripping, colourless, unfocused. And focus, at the end of the day, is what makes us turn the page. So here, though we can see the whole street, we can't believe in any of its backdrop people, these stuck-on fuzzy-felt figures. And their comings and goings are hardly enlivened by being compared to soppy things like "wool on a loom" or "figures in a Pompeii exhibition".
There's a fatal lack of humour, but even worse is the way the narrative voice pompously tells you what the characters feel in language they'd never use. Though these people seem to be a careful racial and social mix, their preoccupations are still conveniently English Whimsical. How would it be, wonders the boy with the pierced eyebrow, "to know your own existence is a miracle?"
Yes, this is a novel about how our lives are "paler and poorer" if we don't see "remarkable" things for what they are. And yes, it's a good and true idea. But, though you couldn't say this is a poor novel (there's a writerly energy here that suggests McGregor will go far), it would be hard to imagine a paler one, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant.
· Julie Myerson's most recent novel is Laura Blundy (Fourth Estate).
THE GUARDIAN
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| Jon McGregor |
Among a Booker Prize longlist notable chiefly for containing a great many established writers and few surprises, the name Jon McGregor stands out as refreshingly unfamiliar. And there is a good reason why we haven't heard of him: McGregor's entry, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, is his first novel. Another good reason is that he is only 26.
Vogue magazine has included him in a line-up of new literary talent; his fiction has appeared in Granta, and, young though he is, he has already undergone that quintessential writer's rite of passage - an appearance at the Cheltenham literary festival. But if the buzz was already beginning to build before the Booker announcement, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is still the longlist's left-field choice. Even McGregor was taken by surprise: the first he knew of it was when his dad called early yesterday morning to say that Jon's name was in the paper. So did he go straight out and buy one?
"I got dressed first," he says, with his quietly dry sense of humour. "I was pretty shocked."
Published by Bloomsbury this month, McGregor's novel has caught most arbiters of literary taste unawares - it has scarcely been reviewed to date. The notable exception, besides inclusion in a round-up in the Observer, has been a rave from Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times, who hailed it as "a dream of a novel" and an "assured debut". The fact that she is also a Booker judge this year may have had some bearing on the fact that If Nobody was "called in" (which is what happens when the judges decide they want to read a book that a publisher has not made one of its statutory two submissions). Still, McGregor finds the idea that his name is now bracketed with such literary big-hitters as William Boyd, Anita Brookner Will Self and Linda Grant, "quite alarming".
"I need to justify that," he says. "Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published."
A graduate in media production, McGregor became used to seeing his friends from Bradford university going to London and earning proper money in the television or internet industry, while he lived in Sheffield doing a series of shift-work jobs to support his writing: in bakeries, postrooms, textile factories. Since he moved to Nottingham with his wife, Alice, a mental health worker with homeless people, he has worked part-time in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. He may be only 26, but perhaps some dues have been paid. "Yeah, I reckon," he says.
"Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating," he says, "but a bit embarrassing."
McGregor is decidedly not the type of author to be his own publicist. About 5ft 11ins, he is slim (a vegetarian since he was 12), freckled and bespectacled. With touches of grey in his hair, he looks a little older than his years and could easily pass for a youthful Ian McEwan - to whom he bears a rather striking resemblance.
He was born in Bermuda in 1976, where his father, a vicar, had a posting as a curate. The third of four siblings, most of McGregor's childhood was spent in Norwich (he is still a keen Norwich City supporter and can now afford to go and see the games). The family moved to Thetford, in south Norfolk, when he was 12; it was a rural upbringing, he says, "but with an edge of urban decay".
"There was very little to do in Thetford: no cinema, no nothing," he says. "As a teenager, you could sneak into pubs, but that was it."
He describes himself then as a "typical Thetford teenager", but one suspects that making films on Super 8, writing poetry and playing guitar were not quite typical.
"I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool," he recalls, "so I was quite up front about it."
He was still making films (video shorts) while at Bradford, but it was there that he began writing in earnest. Inspired initially by Douglas Coupland's Generation X, he started on short fiction. The breakthrough came in 1998 (his final year at university), when a series entitled Cinema 100 was published by Pulp Faction in an anthology called Five Uneasy Pieces. The following year, he decided he needed a literary agent and sent some stories off to Rose Gaete at the Wylie Agency. A friend advised him that a good question to ask a prospective agent would be who else they represented. The answer - Borges, Bellow, Roth, Amis - impressed, but fortunately so did he and Gaete took him on. On the advice that there was no future in short stories, McGregor set about a novel.
"The sparking point was the whole Diana thing," he says. "It was thinking about the contrast between the reaction to her death and the reaction to everyone else's deaths. I knew a woman whose granddad had died on the same day as Diana did, and she was very upset about how everyone was talking about Diana but nobody wanted to hear about her granddad."
McGregor's only personal experience of death was witnessing his own grandfather dying in a hospice a few years ago. "I felt very privileged and somehow it was very helpful for us all to be there. I found it very interesting."
Death, or a death, you can gather from this, is at the centre of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. From the outset, the reader is aware that something bad is going to happen, although McGregor maintains a degree of suspense about precisely what until the final pages. But it is actually much more a novel about life; the presence of death in the story is counterpointed by the narration of one of the main characters, a young woman who reveals that she is pregnant.
The novel presents a "day in the life" of an unnamed inner-city street. Like one of the characters, a young man who collects litter and junk and obsessively documents his existence with Polaroids, McGregor records people's ordinary lives through a series of snapshots on a late summer day. While the style is avant-garde, a kind of collage, rather than realist (McGregor doesn't like quote marks to denote dialogue, for instance, and his prose dips into a strongly poetic idiom at times), there is a drive to render the direct experience of the characters who populate the street: the "remarkable things" of the novel's title are very much the everyday. With its strongly visual and aural sensibility, its short scenes and rapidly edited changes of focus, it is easy to see the influence of filmmaking on his writing.
So how will the new literary status change things for McGregor?
Not much, he says. He is already signed to Bloomsbury for a second book. He will continue to live in the small, terraced house in Nottingham he shares with Alice. He will go on meeting friends for the weekly pub quiz at his local, the Frog and Onion; and he plans to grow peas and beans on the allotment he has recently taken on.
But he has quit his washing-up job at the veggie restaurant.
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| Edna O'Brien |
Each year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters invites a distinguished speaker to deliver the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address, on some aspect of arts and letters. This year, on May 15th, Edna O’Brien gave the Blashfield Address. O’Brien is the author of fifteen novels and five collections of short stories. She is a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy and a native of Ireland, where some of her books have been banned because of their sexual candor. O’Brien has published more than forty works of fiction in The New Yorker, the first in 1962, and the most recent this year. Her latest novel, “In the Forest,” has been described as an “unholy myth” and “a tour de force of finely restrained fury.”
Edna O’brien: Hello. Yes, I’m told it’s a great privilege to do this lecture. I won’t speak of the pleasure factor, because, well, you can tell why—Ian McKellen gave me advice about the microphone, which I’ve forgotten, something about the necessary degree of separation between me and it.
Down the years, the written word has incurred crucifixion, beheading, stoning, castration, burnings, outrage, vehemence, intemperance, and a bigotry that veers from the righteous to the superstitious. To take two tiny examples: Theodore Roosevelt described Tolstoy as “a sexual and moral pervert.” Subsequently, the Postmaster General prevented copies of “The Kreutzer Sonata” from being distributed, lest it imperil the morals of America. Stalin, the Kremlin mountaineer, who had liquidated millions, believed, in the occasional Faustian moment, that Mandelstam possessed the magical powers of a shaman. My own mother sustained such a revulsion for the written word it was as if she had read Molly Bloom in a secret incarnation and had to do atonement for it. Her constant adage to me, which is certainly open to interpretation, was “That paper never refused ink.”
Writers have been in the trenches from time beginning. Euripides, to my mind the greatest of the Greek dramatists, was driven out of Athens around 409 B.C., his crime being his unflinching depiction of the evil inherent in both God and man. Cutting across the orchestrated glorification of power and plunder, he wrote of the monumental folly of the Trojan War, supposedly fought over a bedizened, sensuous, and totally guiltless Helen of Troy. He fled to Macedonia and was devoured by the king’s hunting dogs, which is how he died. Danger comes in many guises—political, religious, sexual, psychological, and linguistic. The stymieing of thought and of ideas has always had precedence in every epoch. Followers of Confucius were burnt alive, the emperor Tiberius had those who criticized him starved to death and then crucified. The English crown, with a nicety inconsistent with much else of its conquest and rapine, solved it completely by forbidding printing except by royal license, thus creating an ethos of precensorship, which continued until 1695. Sexual censorship found its flowering, its glorious patronage, in the person of Queen Victoria and her vassals, who commenced the drive for the purification of literature. They might just have foreseen the advent and birth of the Jesuitical James Joyce, born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, a city that he left forever in his early twenties, disavowing Mother Church and Mother Ireland. Joyce, smarting under early rejections, wished that his work would glean the same wrath as Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” in short, to be so scandalous as to incur a public trial. His prayer was duly answered.
In Rome, he worked as a banker, and so impecunious was he that he had to receive his customers sitting down, because the seat of his trousers was torn. It was there that he first conceived of “Ulysses,” an epic in which, as he told his brother, he would put a bucket down into his own soul’s sexual department and draw up as well the muddied waters of Arthur Griffith, leader of Sinn Féin, Ibsen, St. Aloysius, Shelley, Renan—in short, the bodily fervor that runs amok in one and all. He was searching, as he put it, for fermented ink to whet his rage, in the same way as absinthe sizzled his young brain. He began “Ulysses” in Trieste in 1915, and, with the help of Ezra Pound, chapters began to appear in magazines, including The Little Review, here in New York. The two editors, Miss Heap and Miss Anderson, said they were moved, utterly, by the piercing spirit of Joyce’s words. Well, the piercing spirit turned traitor. Doubts began to simmer. And even Miss Harriet Weaver, his patron, had her misgivings. Whereas Emma Bovary’s longings were beautiful, lofty, and transporting, Joyce dismantled the human body, male and female, with the prodigality of a poet, the smut of a pornographer, and the objectivity of a mortician. When an episode from “Nausicaa,” of “Ulysses,” appeared in The Little Review, all issues were confiscated and burnt. A Mr. John Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had lodged a formal complaint, and Miss Anderson, the benighted editor, was summoned to a court in Greenwich Village before three judges, some doyens of culture, and intrigued New Yorkers. The chapter centers on Gerty MacDowell, a model of Catholic girlhood, who has gone to the seaside for a bit of relaxation. She who crimsoned at rude words finds herself yielding to the lascivious glances of a mysterious stranger, none other than Leopold Bloom. And while she swings her legs in and out and watches some fireworks, she gives the gentleman a good view of her nainsook knickers, imagines him to be in deep mourning, missing perhaps a wife, while Bloom, on the point of emission, reverts to his old drollery, at it again. Joyce was in no doubt about the flagrancy of this chapter. He described it as namby-pamby, jammy, marmeladey, drawersy style, with the effects of incense, Mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, chitchat, and circumlocutions. So, as the offending passages were about to be read out in the court, one of the judges asked if Miss Anderson could be removed as an act of propriety, forgetting that she must have read it, being the editor. The other two judges found it so incomprehensible they had to have a week’s leave to collect their faculties. At the summing-up, the prosecuting attorney became so apoplectic that John Quinn, advocate and lawyer, pointed out as clear evidence that “Ulysses” did not corrupt or fill people with sexual urges as did the mannequins in the windows of Fifth Avenue that it made people implode with anger. The ploy didn’t work. The editors were fined, fifty dollars each, and forbidden to publish any more installments of “Ulysses.” The book itself did not reach this country for thirteen years.
Now we move on to May, 1957. A police officer—no, two police officers—in San Francisco went into the City Lights bookshop and, for seventy-five cents, purchased a copy of “Howl and Other Poems,” by Allen Ginsberg. They then obtained a warrant for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s arrest, who was charged with violation of Section 311, for willfully and lewdly selling the book. That trial, too, had its moments of hilarity. One phrase that Joyce would surely have appropriated was “Seek filth, and ye shall find it.” At issue was whether “Howl,” with its discolored words and hallucinatory thinking, excited prurient interest. Allen Ginsberg’s odyssey of subways, Benzedrine, spilt brains, bare buttocks, and easy lays proved grist to the mill of its defenders, who argued that this nightmare world reflected this author’s rage and loneliness, and was figurative of America itself on the verge of breakdown. The judge, the Honorable Clayton W. Horn—Joyce would have also relished that—quoted Thomas Jefferson and concluded that the poem did not present a danger to society, and even had some redeeming social importance. Thomas Pynchon wrote, some years later, that the effect of that group of writers, which included Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, O’Hara, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, was exciting and liberating, and strangely positive. And it was. But I find their work audacious rather than dangerous. They were self-created Buddhas who spat forth their mantras, Ginsberg himself praising writing for its improvisation, far-outness, and bop. In their self-absorption, their vagabond existences, and their glorification of opiate-induced works, they conferred on themselves a prestige, an exoticness, and were lucky to live in a society that itself was bursting out of puritan bondage. But real danger, in any art, is usually born in solitary. Samuel Beckett writing of Jack Yeats once said, “The artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere, has no kith.” The twentieth century has a long, salutary, shocking catalogue of brotherless, sisterless writers, men and women who for an integrity of word and thought have been incarcerated, silenced, or never even heard of at all.
Mandelstam put it this way. He said, “There are two kinds of world literature, that with permission and that without permission.” The first he depicted as functionaries who from a state of animal fear tap out the given, the appropriate, the predictable, and the accepted. The second were those who, as he said, “took language as if it was stolen air.” I want to read part of the poem that caused his downfall.
“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, / Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard, / And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue, / Then they remember the Kremlin mountaineer. / His fat fingers are slimy like slugs, / And his words are absolute, like grocers’ weights. / His cockroach whiskers are laughing, / And his boot tops shine. / . . . Decree after decree he hammers them out like horseshoes, / One in the groin for him, and the forehead for him, for him one over the eyes, one in the eyes for him. / When he has an execution it’s a special treat, / And the Ossetian chest swells.”
The story is well known. Mandelstam recited his epigram, as he called it, to a small group of friends, and it was reported within days. Secret police in topcoats arrived in his Moscow apartment, ransacking, questioning, confiscating everything, before arresting him for sabotage against the state. He was even invited to recall poems that might have led to his arrest. So he mentioned a few, “The Wolf,” “Old Crimea,” and then he was ordered to recite the Stalin poem, which he spoke a truncated version of. But his captors knew the real thing. He and his wife were ordered to pack their few belongings and exiled to a town in the Ural Mountains. Akhmatova, who was present, handed him a boiled egg, and foresaw his fate as the banished poet, the betrayed one. Their sentence was commuted to an exile in Voronezh, in southern Russia. Life was bleak, fearful, isolated, and totally impoverished. He even asked one of his captors if perhaps he could get a job as a night watchman, begging, as he said, “alms from a shadow.” He was driven to suicide, but one jump and he was back in his mind again. Police and informers dropped in at any hour, seizing whatever poems had been written, Mandelstam snatching them back, a fistfight ensuing, great poems torn up, and Mandelstam pleading with his wife, Nadezhda, to remember what he had written, she his living lexicon. This is a fragment written during that incarceration: “These hundred carat ingots, Rome nights, / Those breasts that for young Goethe were a lure, / Let me be answerable, but not lose all of my rights, / Life still exists outside the law.” We have to ask the question—what harm lurks in those beautiful, tender lines. None. None whatsoever, only in the poisoned megalomaniacal minds of tyrants and their cohorts.
Let it not be forgotten or ignored that these barbarities existed in other dictatorships. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the “blue-eyed giant,” as he was called, had his works banned in Turkey for his Communist leanings. And it seems that some military cadets were found reading these banned poems, and he was imprisoned for thirteen years. This is a fragment of one poem: “I love my country . . . I’ve swung on her plane trees, been inside her prisons. / Nothing dispells my depression / Like her songs and tobacco.” The marvel is that such lyricism, such wonder, such luminous recollections could be sustained in a barred dungeon, subscribing, I suppose, to Borges’s claim of writing being “a vague, unreasonable, but ancient quest.”
Being only human, poor Mandelstam tried ways of ingratiating himself with the authorities, and he even worked on a long ode to Stalin—long, complex, dilatory, but unable to cross the crooked chasm into adulation. His mouth, as he feared, would be twisted by lies. When, in 1937, their sentence had expired, and they were allowed back to Moscow, they believed their servitude over. They were even treated to a stay in a sanatorium. But, in one of those ghastly reversals of fate that only Kafka could have written of, the cure was cut short. More uniformed men arrived one morning, and he was arrested, dispatched to a labor camp in eastern Siberia, where he was processed as a counter-revolutionary. Stories abound of his dementia, his refusing food, his scavenging in dustbins at night. But none, none tell precisely the hour, the place, or the cause of Mandelstam’s death. His wife learned of it on account of a food parcel being returned by the post office. It was sometime in December, 1938.
And what about now. What about now. What themes do writers choose. What barriers, what mountains of untruth and misinformation, what universes of torture and terror are there to be challenged. It is a vastly different world, at once freer, zanier, and more uncomprehendingly terrifying. The serious reportage that is being done at the moment in this country and in other countries is trailblazing; men and women at the cliff face, at the war fronts, at the sieged cities, the defiled manger, dispatching bulletins at once real and visionary, everyday Armageddons. Two of the most remarkable things I read this year were by journalists. One was Dexter Filkins, in the New York Times, describing Taliban prisoners in a truck from Kunduz. A Biblical tableau of captives, rags, and filth, flies swarming around them, bodies contorted, fighting for tiny corners of space and begging for only one thing, water. They gestured to the guards, their hands going up and down toward their mouths as dipping into a well. And what did their Northern Alliance tormentor do? He gave them a meagre amount, just enough to add to their thirst. The second was a searing essay in The New Yorker, by Jeffrey Goldberg, on the plight of Kurds in northern Iraq—precise, distilled of emotion, but with a haunting resonance. This is how he tells it: A woman is taken prisoner into a big room with over two thousand people. Women, children, all starving. One pipe spitting out brackish water. As people begin to die, the Iraqi guards outside demand the bodies be passed through the window. The woman’s six-year-old son fell ill and died, and soon after his body is handed out. Soon after that, again she looked, she looked and saw the legs and hands of her own son in the mouths of the dogs in the yard. And at that moment she lost her mind.
“Fuck you, America, with your atom bomb,” was how Allen Ginsberg put it, little knowing how the arsenal would spawn and propagate into unthinkable, unknowable proportions, vast enough to undo creation. We know the potent sounding names, Trident, Cobra, Apache, and the chirpy one, like Daisy Cutter, meant, no doubt, to infuse us with a comfortable semi-amnesiac feeling of safety. In silos, in submarines, in nocturnal repose, the beast, the nuclear beasts, the golems, waiting to be triggered into life, to be given purpose, to be given soul. We cannot write about these things because technology has jettisoned our imagination, and therefore cauterized language. Then, there are the leaders themselves—East, Middle East, West—insatiate, capricious, monomaniacal, self-deluding in their lethal cocoons, gods of a sort, each with a franchise, to be the god. But they are mortal, too. And it is our duty to remind them of that, to hammer it home. Writing, whether it be poetry, drama, literature, reportage, is more essential, more important, and more reverberatory than ever. It is a touchstone, a transparent trace of man’s potential humanity and ongoingness.
I read years ago a remark by Romain Rolland, which has stayed with me. He said, “Art is a great consolation to the individual but it is useless against history.” However, since everyone here today, and hopefully many others, are on the consolation quest, both as hostages to and witnesses of history, it is not the time to be pusillanimous or silenced by our helplessness.
I would like to end with Lear’s rousing summons to Cordelia, regardless of their fallen state. “So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, / Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out; / And take upon’s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out, / In a wall’d prison, packs and sets of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon.”
I thank you for your forbearance, and for everything. ♦
THE NEW YORKER
