I have just heard that Pat Kavanagh died this morning. This is really shocking news. She was my first literary agent, and without her help I might not have been able to survive as a writer. When she signed me up as a client, I was living on less than the dole, and was very close to the end of my tether. She believed in me, she found me an audience, and when we did part it was amicably, for the best of reasons, and with regret, I think, on both sides. We had kept in loose but friendly contact, and I had been vaguely looking forward to having lunch with her in London again, some time... And now, damn, too late, too late.
She was a truly extraordinary woman, and will be hugely missed by so many people. Her husband, Julian Barnes, must feel cut in half. They were one of the great couples of our era of equality. It was an immense pleasure to see them together.
Her charisma filled the room, she was electric. This is hard to take in...
If you’re interested in my thoughts on the future of
the electronic book, I’m quoted in today’s Irish Times,
towards the end of this piece by the mighty Conor Pope. (And how quaint
“electronic book” will seem in a few years! It’ll read like “horseless
carriage” does now…)
Sample quote from me:
"I can't see how you can control the distribution of words. Good writers
could end up with huge readership but they will probably have to find
new ways of earning a living from it, which is fine. Good writers were
never likely to make much money. Yeats never made more than £200 a year
from his writing until he won the Nobel Prize."
Well, it's not the end of the world, but it's going to feel like it for quite a while. The US government bail-out plan was voted down by Congress a few hours ago. If the plan had been passed, it would have given the illusion that things were going to be OK. (Things would not have been OK.)
Now, we won't even have the comforting illusion.
An an Irishman with my fortune (eleven euro) in an Irish bank account, I have a keen interest in the future of the Irish banking system. The main question seems to me to be, in what order will they fail? I reckon it's going to be a photo-finish for first place between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life and Permanent. (Though will dark horse Irish Nationwide Building Society make a late surge for the line?) After that, who knows. But they're all banjaxed.
Every Irish bank is massively over-exposed to Irish and UK residential and commercial property, and to Irish developers who can no longer service their vast loans. The Irish banks have been keeping their developers afloat artificially for the past year, in the hope things would miraculously turn around. Things haven't, they won't for years, and soon all the bad debts will have to appear on the books, dragging both banks and developers under. If the Germans and Swiss find the books of the Irish banks too revolting, and can't bring themselves to purchase the wreckage, then the Irish government (with some very irritated help from the European Central Bank) will have to recapitalise the entire banking sector. All this will have to be done during a global financial crisis. It's going to be comically awful, like having to change your tyre in the middle of a demolition derby.
I lived through the Irish property boom of the past decade with ever-mounting incredulity. It really was the most extraordinary case of mass delusion since everybody drank Kool-Aid in Jonestown. And if you want cast-iron evidence that I'm not pretending to be wise after the fact, here I am on Irish television, in May of 2007, saying exactly that, to the stony silence of the studio audience, all of whom had just bought an investment property the day before, and would be buying another one the day after.
(Oh yeah. banks and hedge funds and other financial institutions will also be imploding across America and around the world after this, but I'm so bored with the USA, I thought I'd talk about Ireland for a change... Ah heck, one more US prediction: good, old-fashioned, retro, Depression-era bank runs in America, starting tomorrow.)
(James Wood teaching in Harvard, shortly before being kicked in the knee from behind)
My short essay on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Prospect, under the title The Rest is Silence.
The first two responses I received were both from James Wood, one of the three finest literary critics of the age (and currently top book bloke at the New Yorker). His first email started, “You have a lot of gall…”
I couldn’t really disagree. I took a wild swipe at him out of nowhere, late in the article. This is partly the result of the extreme overcompression that all my essays undergo as I write them. I try to jam about a book’s worth of ideas into the single page available, and so a long, nuanced sequence of subtle, gossamer-delicate thoughts gets reduced to a blow from a brick in a sock.
Though I do disagree with some of James Wood’s notions, I don’t disagree nearly as strongly as is implied by my rude and unfair sentence. (In fact, having reread it, I’m thinking of writing a letter to Prospect complaining about myself.)
(James Wood’s second email, an hour later, was a fine, dignified and reasonable restatement of his position on David Foster Wallace. Such a civilised response to being mugged reflects very well on the man. I look forward to arguing with him properly sometime. If he’ll ever speak to me again.)
The pro-guns, pro-liberty blog The Smallest Minority has suggested that a line from my piece ("If it has an off-button, it is not oppression"), should be put on T-shirts. A splendid idea.
And over on Prospect’s First Drafts blog, I am accused of fascism, and told to hang myself.
As ever, I agree with everyone. Many fine points, splendidly expressed. I shall go away, brood upon them, and reform my character.
I've spent the last few days writing a piece on David Foster Wallace for Prospect magazine. It should be out next week, in their October issue. I'm happy with the piece. "Happy" has a fairly specialised meaning in this case, one writers will understand: I was depressed and anxious writing it, as I tried to understand, empathise with, and explain, a depressed and anxious writer who'd just killed himself. But I was also exhilarated and, yeah, happy, because the piece turned out the way I'd hoped it would: it expressed crisply and well some things I'd been vaguely thinking, loosely feeling. So I felt much better after it. Well, writing is weird. It fixes broken things. And the process is not sentimental.
The credit for that last photo of David Foster Wallace, by the way (and the two I'm using to illustrate this post): It was taken by Steve Rhodes, at a reading organised by the San Franciso independent bookshop, Booksmith, held at All Saints Church in 2006.
Out of interest, I googled, and found a couple of accounts of that reading on literary blogs. One of them is by a blogger trying to interview David Foster Wallace after the reading, even though Wallace has clearly and repeatedly said to the guy, before and after the reading, through his agent, his publicist, and face to face, that he is uncomfortable with that and would prefer not to. The guy keeps asking... it's just excruciating.
The other is by a blogger who fancies David Foster Wallace something rotten, though she has never met him. She dresses up for the reading (slit skirt, best bra, because "you never know"). And then she slags him off in her blog after the reading, ostensibly because she asked him a question and found his answer tedious. (Though she's really slagging him, you get the feeling, because he didn't look up from the lectern half way through the reading, recognise how special she was, throw his book aside, rush up to her, kneel, and propose).
Both bloggers can see the world very intensely from their own point of view, but they can't see how they must be coming across to Wallace at all. They don't seem aware that, though this moment is new and unique and important to them, for him it is yet another in a long series of almost identically unpleasant encounters with needy strangers. It's totally understandable (God, I have done worse), but the lack of empathy, on both sides, is also totally heartbreaking. They know his soul, because they've read his book (which is just his soul in code), and so they feel he is their soulmate. But he doesn't know their soul, because he hasn't read their book, and so he feels assaulted.
And both these people are obviously very nice, otherwise sensitive people, trying to make a real connection to someone they admire enormously, and the harder they try the more they fail, and now he’s dead and they never connected and it’s all intensely sad.
If you've never heard of him or read his stuff, nothing to see here, move on. But on the small, strange, planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists doing their best to re-invent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain. You are going to be reading agonised analyses of who he was, how he died, and why he mattered, in every books section of every newspaper, on every major anniversary of his death, for the rest of your lives.
Well, OK, not for the rest of your lives, because newspapers won't have book sections in another six months. But you get the gist.
I liked some of his stuff very much. The last of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in his short story collection called, ah, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) is extraordinarily moving, effective, and technically tricksy. It is, I think, one of the greatest short stories of the past couple of decades. In it, Wallace tells a story of a man telling an unnamed listener a story about a woman telling him a story about a man raping her. All those frames within frames should push the pain far, far away, but they don't, they pull it closer. The story is post-modern and emotionally direct at the same time, and that's really hard to do. It is magnificent and you should read it.
But mostly I disagreed with David Foster Wallace, with his attitude to his style (comedy) and his content ( America). I had just finished writing a long essay about comedy and the American novel when I heard of his death. So the last thing I wrote about him while he was alive was negative, which seems very sad now, today, because the only reason I included him was because I thought he was important, and good, but could be even better.
What I would have liked was a long conversation with him, a few emails over a few months perhaps, wrestling with the big, fun, important stuff that nobody off our tiny asteroid cares about.
And now that won't happen. I thought about not printing my recent thoughts on David Foster Wallace, because they aren't positive, and it seems so mean to say something harsh about a guy who has just tied something around his neck to cut off the air to his brain because being conscious has come to hurt too much.
But he's dead, it won't hurt him. And if there is truth in it, then better to say it.
The essay is several thousand words long, I'll spare you. But this is the bit that mentions David Foster Wallace. Bear in mind that for every vice I mention here, he had a bigger virtue. He cared, he tried, he died. We can't do more than that.
"Meanwhile, much American writing is still comic. But something has gone terribly wrong with it.
Potentially great comic writers like George Saundersand David Foster Wallace use comedy as their weapon of choice. But they have been unplugged from electric, living America by lives spent inside the university, first learning, then teaching. (The immensely influential George Saunders is a tremendously talented writer who, at 49, has never left school, and never written a novel.) Disconnected, they have, like so many academics, become obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic.
Thus they spend much of their time attacking forms of language of which they disapprove (advertising, television, military jargon, corporate PR) This is literary criticism disguised as literature. These are grenade attacks on a theme park. Frequently, and disturbingly, they put this dead language in the mouths of aggressively outlined “ordinary Americans” foolish figures without college degrees and therefore without self-awareness. Bums. Thus they end up mocking those below them, not those above. The gun is pointed in the wrong direction. Shooting at the bums, they have become the Establishment.
In the absence of suffering, in the absence of a subject, American literary novelists again and again waste their power attacking America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop-culture. They attack it with the energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that pop culture (bad TV, bad movies, ads, bad pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating whimpering billion dollar cur. It has to be chosen in order to be consumed: so it flashes its tits and laughs at your jokes and replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, empty, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes."
Well, at the last, he found a moment that was unironic and authentic.
I wish he hadn't feared America so much. But then again, if we were able to ask him, he would probably say America killed him.
Regular visitors will notice that I'm doing some painting and decorating on the website this week. I'm also moving some of the furniture around, so you might bump into, or trip over, a few things, if you're wandering around the site. ("Yuk, I've stepped in a poem.") My apologies for any inconveniences...
Explanation: I run this website all on my lonesome ownsome, using a lovely, simple interface from Squarespace.
And Squarespace have just brought out Version 5 of their... thingy, service, interface, whatever you call it. Which has some fun new features, and has made some old stuff easier to do, thus my slightly distracted look, as I poke around in far off corners of the site, finding spiderwebs and the crust of a sandwich, remembering that plumbing job I meant to do last year... Hey look! There's those photos from Burning Man I never added comments to! Which reminds me, I must scan and upload those paper photos I found in the attic in Galway last month...
Where was I? Oh yeah, I was going to say, if you have any suggestions, please make them. I'll be up a ladder, faffing around with the site for weeks, so join in, help me make it better.
Some questions I'm wrestling with myself are: what colour should the hypertext links be? What colour scheme in general? Should the navigation bar be on the left, or the right, of the screen? What links should be in the top (horizontal) navigation bar?
And on a more macro scale, what do you like (if anything) about this site? What else would you like to see? Or see more of? Or less of? What brilliant things are other people doing on their sites that I should nick? What crushingly stupid thing does this site do that I've never noticed? What is the meaning of life?
The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.
I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).
The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."
I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.
He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.
I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.
Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.
Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about the short story, and the BBC National Short Story Award, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, later today (Friday July 4th 2008) at the maythesweetlordhelpus hour of 7.20 in the morning. (There's a seven-twenty in the MORNING as well? Who knew?)
Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).
I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.
There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog. I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...
I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)
Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)
By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet: “I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.” -W. H. Auden
If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.
I've roughly fifty subjects I'd like to blog on. Football! Monolines! Street parties! The Irish housing bubble! Popstar poetry! The mysterious Blau Blau Blau movement! How to write for the new attention span! My new life with Will Self's pig! Too many possibilities. Can't decide.
Tell me if any of the above interest you, and it might help me focus on one of the blighters, and get it done.
Meanwhile I have an article, on economics as a religion, in the new issue of Prospect (the wonderful London-based magazine of ideas). The issue also features a round-table discussion of the current global financial crisis. Several of my favourite thinkers on economic matters take part, including the philosophical hedge fund manager George Soros, and the very wise and grave chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf. After they have thoroughly depressed and demoralised the readership with the awfulness of it all, I provide the light entertainment, in a two-page afterword, "The Sacred Mystery of Capital".
A sample paragraph or three:
"... But religions evolve, and recent events show that capitalism has begun to evolve less in the manner of the Galapagos finches (whose beaks adjusted over millennia to suit the berries of their individual island), and more in the manner of the Incredible Hulk. Incredible Hulk capitalism can expand the muscle of its credit so swiftly that its clothing of real world assets cannot stretch fast enough to contain it. Expansion, explosion, collapse—Incredible Hulk capitalism sprawls, stunned and shrunken again, in the rags of its assets.
Or, returning to our religious analogy, if capitalism was a religion, it would now be a delightfully demented pseudo-scientific cult. Incredible Hulk capitalism is to the capitalism of Adam Smith what Scientology is to the Christianity of Christ. Both modern high finance and Scientology use the language and tools of science to ends that are religious, not scientific. Both meet a need, a yearning which the old forms of religion and capitalism no longer meet. The need for a mysterious power greater than us, in which we can believe. It must be powerful—but it must also be mysterious. And mystery has been vanishing from the world ever faster, ever since Galileo.
We know what the stars are made of, and can compute their course through the heavens for the next 10,000 years. We can explain the storms and floods that were once evidence of the wrath of God. But as the advance of science has removed the divine mystery from much of life, the advance of free market capitalism has put it back. Only modern economics can now provide forces that we don’t understand. And we need that in our lives."
The really rather terrifically wonderful Susie Maguire just sent me a nice picture of me sitting down in Dubrovnik. I won't explain what the heck I am doing, or why I appear to have a tinted monocle.
A chap needs to maintain an air of mystery.
My shoes are definitely the stars of this photo. They look like they're celebrating getting their own TV series.
I'm back from Croatia, and suffering an immense emotional hangover. That was one of the most intense, action-packed and enjoyable weeks I've ever had. I feel as though, since June 1st, I've lived an entire short, vivid life at high speed.
I was there for the International Festival of the Short Story, which took place this year in Zagreb and Dubrovnik. I cannot praise the festival highly enough. Best festival I've ever taken part in. And of course, as always, the quality comes down to the people. Charismatic organisers, magnificent volunteers, excellent translators, and great rattling crates full of terrific writers.
I'll post again on this, but right now I'm still too full of sights and sounds and memories I haven't processed.
Also, I can feel a lot of what happened in Zagreb and Dubrovnik already beginning the mysterious alchemical transformation into fiction. (Examples - I wrote a poem I really like, in the quarantine buildings outside the walls of Dubrovnik, and got the entire plot for a damn good film while walking through the Square of the Loggia. And there's more on the way, I can tell by the tingle... It's extraordinary to think that in 1991, the year I was enjoying a hit single in Ireland with Toasted Heretic, this city was being hit by artillery shells and guided missiles.)
So, anyway, I can't really blog about the most intense or interesting stuff, because it would interfere with the fermentation process.
But damn, I laughed, I cried, I swam, I ran, I nearly died.
It is not often an author is driven by circumstances to steal another author's pig, but recent scandalous events forced my hand.
Some of you will recall my glee when I was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize a few weeks ago, alongside such old and new stars as Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor and Joe Dunthorne.
A noble prize, previously won by books such as Vernon God Little, and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, the winner is showered in champagne and given a pig at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, just over the border from England. (You don't get to keep the pig, but they name it after your book, and take your photo with it, to the great amusement of future generations).
You can imagine then my dismay when I discovered, shortly afterwards, buried in the small print of the Hay-on-Wye festival programme, the odd phrase "Will Self, winner of the 2008 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize." Winner? WINNER?!?!?!
As the festival program had gone to print before the shortlist was announced, this meant that the prize committee had picked the winner before they had announced, or perhaps even picked, the shortlist. It was a stitch-up. But worse, I had been denied my rightful month of anticipation, tingling, hiccups and giddy excitement.
Also I'd put serious money on Alan Bennett to win. His The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. Something had to be done.
I thought long and hard. The prize is named after that comic god, P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of Jeeves and Wooster. What, I thought would Wodehouse have done, faced with such provocation? Sat in his room and written another comic novel, probably. That's how he reacted to everything, including World War 2. As I was already sitting in a room writing a comic novel this wasn't much help. Action was called for, dash it. So I asked myself, what would P. G. Wodehouse's greatest creation Bertie Wooster do, nobly backed by the genius of his manservant Jeeves?
And the answer came to me as in a vision - as though the ghost of Wodehouse himself whispered in my ear - he would steal the pig.
For if there is one constant in the work of P. G. Wodehouse, from Pigs Have Wings to Pig Hooey, it is that God put pigs on this good green earth to be kidnapped. Not a chapter goes by without somebody chloroforming Lord Emsworth's favourite sow, The Empress of Blandings.
And thus I made my way to the Welsh borders and, with the assistant of my trusty gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves (not his real name, but he would like to remain anonymous for some reason), I stole Will Self's pig.
I sent the organisers this, ah, pignapping video, containing my ransom demands. Tense negotiations continued up until the last minute. They, understandably, did not wish to give the prize to the man who had stolen their pig. I offered, as a very reasonable compromise, to deliver the pig to Alan Bennett's door in London if they would re-award the prize to him. They baulked - Will Self was in the program - his angry fans, denied, might rampage, torching tents, incinerating Gore Vidal in his invalid chair... The intervention of a bishop almost led to a compromise candidate (Joe Dunthorne), but we ran out of time.
This, of course, left them one pig short for the prize ceremony. And thus it was that, as you may have read in the Guardian and Bookseller over the weekend, Will Self was not awarded his pig. I was wondering how they would get over this, and so I attended the ceremony in disguise. The organisers, rather anticlimactically, pretended an outbreak of pig disease had kept the pig away, and they showed a video of a pig instead.
And so the situation rests. The pig is in a safe place, and receiving the best of care. For now.
It is to be hoped that the organisers of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize will give in to my very reasonable demands and re-award the Wodehouse Prize to Alan Bennett. Otherwise, I'm afraid they will get their pig back sausage by sausage.
Harsh, I know, but when you mess with the affections of six comic novelists, somebody's going to get hurt.
There's also some good films showing in their Film Club. May I most heartily recommend Todd Haynes' astonishing, poetic, jittery, thrilling dream life of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. In particular, Cate Blanchett's performance is as good as acting can get. It is more alive and true than most of our own lived moments. See it.
If you see me wandering down Church Street, don't be afraid to give me a shout.
I know that some reviewers felt that Jude: Level 1 was all Greek to them. Well, now Jude: Level 1 can be all Greek to EVERYBODY. It's being published next week by Topos Books of Athens, in a translation by George Betsos. George and I have exchanged many profound, cultured and erudite emails over the past year, as we tried to work out the best way to translate "Ardcrony ballocks" into Greek, so I know that he has done as fine and conscientious a job as could be humanly achieved. (And what a fecker of a book to translate, the man is a hero.)
One of the great, odd pleasures of being translated lies in checking out who you're now being published alongside. It's a bit like joining a very, very peculiar football team. Like the players signed by a football manager, the writers signed to a publisher's list do tend to share some indefinable attitude. Some publishers are attack-minded (lots of odd books, young writers, high-risk experimental fiction narrated by a squid). Some are defensive (rather obvious mainstream contemporary stuff and a lot of the more tedious classics).
If Topos were a football team, it would be very entertaining to watch. I was delighted to see that I now share a list with Philip K. Dick's Ubik (a book I bought for the second time, and reread with pleasure, earlier this year. Indeed, I've raved about Dick elsewhere on the blog). An impetuous, unreliable, unpredictable and possibly drug-crazed star striker of a novel, very likely to score the winner with a spectacular bicycle kick in the dying seconds of extra time. Also, unfortunately, quite likely to get arrested just before the match.
And, though I have no idea what position it would play in, I am deeply intrigued by a book called The Insane President and Female Pleasure by the Greek writer Pepi Rigopoulou. Freud, Bosch, Goya, Ovid, Duchamp... definitely my kind of book. Good to see, too, that Topos have an experienced midfield general in Fidel Castro, whose memoirs they publish in the autumn. Though Alain Robbe-Grillet may have trouble passing a late fitness test after dying earlier this year.
They do not insult you with money, either. Bollinger give you a shitload of champagne, Everyman give you sixty volumes of PG Wodehouse in hardback, and the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival names a large pig after your book. What a year you could have, reading Wodehouse, drinking Bollinger, and... er... whatever it is that you do with pigs.
Unsurprisingly, for it is marvellous, I had picked Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader as one of my Books of 2007. I even bought my mother a copy for Christmas. Now he and I rub shoulders on a shortlist. My mother is delighted. I can only hope that none of the others bought their mothers a copy of my book for Christmas, considering how filthy it is. Personally, I hope Alan Bennett wins. His book is far more suitable for the nation's impressionable youth.
I have always argued that comedy is superior to tragedy, and this excellent shortlist proves my point. The tragic is a rather narrow genre, the comic is infinite. What other prize would place a story about a refined elderly lady reading books, in competition with the adventures of a Tipperary orphan with two penises who urinates on a politician while a mob of fifty thousand enraged farmers burn down his orphanage? Now, that's what the people want to see in a literary prize - senile dementia versus penile dementia.
May the best book win. Or, failing that, my one.
Indeed, I do believe that Jude: Level 1 is the first book featuring a hero with two penises to be nominated for a major UK literary award. Of course, it merely follows the American success of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize with a hero who had both a penis and a vagina.
In the everevolving literary world, are two sets of genitals the new one set of genitals? Will the next Booker winner be a realistic, psychologically nuanced, slightly depressed novel featuring a funeral at which a dark family secret is finally revealed and it turns out to be sex abuse yet again, but with two penises?
As I passed through Orly airport on Saturday (about to fly home to Berlin), the woman running the x-ray machine frowned. She signaled to the man beside her. He frowned, and signaled to the second woman, further along the conveyer belt.
The second woman grabbed my rucksack as it came out of the X-ray machine.
"Is this your bag?" she said in French.
Oui, I said.
She frowned, perhaps at my pronunciation, and began to pull on her black gloves. I tried to think what the heck I was carrying, that could look so suspicious on an X-ray. The woman plunged her gloved hands deep into my rucksack, and rummaged. I remembered what she was going to find just before she found it...
Let us pause a moment, while I give you a little backstory.
I had spent the previous few days just outside Paris, working on the stage version of Jude: Level 1. I had wished to bring my noble co-workers a gift from Berlin, to give them strength for the coming ordeal, but there is no point bringing wine to France, chocolate is a problematic present, and what else is there? In duty-free I had almost despaired when I saw the discreet pile of cans marked in big letters Get One!, and in little letters, 1 große echte Spreewälder Gewürzgurke.
The perfect gift from Berlin! A huge local gherkin, in a can. "The gherkin snack from the homelandplace for gherkinfans" as the can said. ("Der Gurken-Snack vom Heimathof für Gurkenfans.")
So I loaded up with enormous gherkins, one to a can, and brought them to France. We had one each. However, I was so busy I forgot to eat mine, and thus it was that on my way back through Orly airport this refined French lady now found herself holding my enormous gherkin, canned, in her black-gloved hand. "What," she said in elegant French, "is THIS?"
I was distracted from her question by the dawning realisation that I was living through a postmodern, canned version of the great moment in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, when bass player Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector at an American airport by walking through it with a cucumber, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed down his pants.
Blinded by this vision, I couldn't remember the French for gherkin. Our conversation got increasingly surreal as she tried to guess what the lurid, warty, green thing, pictured on the can, might be. "Get One!" didn't really help, and she couldn't read German. At one point you could see her thinking "Glow-in-the-dark vibrator? Dildo?" In French. ("Vibrateur phosphorescent ? Dildo?")
Seconds from disaster, we finally communicated. "Cornichon!" I cried. "Ein große, er sorry, c'est un grand cornichon." "Ah!" she cried, enormously relieved. "Un cornichon!" All smiles, she handed it back to me, and I was able to bring meine große Essiggurke home to the banks of the Spree.
(An aside: I am shocked to discover that, according to Google, nobody in the long, rich, and well-documented history of the world has ever, before this glorious day, used the phrase "My Enormous Gherkin" on the internet. This seems to me extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don't say it at least twice.)
I spent last weekend in Kassel, pretty much spang plumb in the middle of Germany.
Why Kassel? Well - for reasons I may explain later - I wanted to visit the town which the young Samuel Beckett visited so often. (Between the ages of 22 and 26, he made eight lengthy visits to Kassel.) Beckett went there to see his cousins, the Sinclairs, and in particular Peggy Sinclair. Peggy and Sammy (as the kids in the neighbourhood knew him - they thought he was American, or English) had one of the all-time great disastrous relationships. He writes very cruelly about Peggy in his first book, More Pricks Than Kicks, and very tenderly in one of his late plays, Krapp's Last Tape. That's blokes for you.
She died of TB in 1933, and the Sinclairs returned to Ireland. Beckett never returned to Kassel after Peggy's death.
Many years later, a doctor in Kassel, Gottfried Büttner, wrote, care of Beckett's publishers, to say how moved he had been by a performance of Happy Days. Beckett wrote back, mentioned his connection with, and affection for, Kassel, and asked about the city. Beckett had heard much of it had been destroyed in the war. (The RAF smashed Kassel then burnt it, using high explosives and incendiaries, in late October 1943. Ten thousand people, the vast majority civilians, died as the medieval city centre was consumed in a firestorm.) I have a great affection for the RAF (after all, my dad served in it, and his RAF medals are on display in my parents' house, right beside my great grandfather's IRA medals). But I do wish they hadn't deliberately burnt down quite so many cities full of civilians.
Anyway, Beckett asked Dr. Büttner to find out if the Sinclairs' old neighbourhood had survived (it had, being a few stops by tram away from the town centre... which reminds me of my favourite German word. Strassenbahnhaltestelle. It means... tramstop. And that is why German translations of English books are always 30% longer... Strassenbahnhaltestelle. For tramstop. Jesus.). They continued to correspond regularly for many years, and even met up a few times in Paris. Beckett said he could never go back to Kassel, too many memories.
A highlight of the trip was meeting the Samuel Beckett Gesellschaft (or, in English, SamSoc), and many of their friends. All together, an amazing bunch of people. Frau Büttner very kindly allowed me to visit her house, and see the portrait of Peggy Sinclair by Karl Leyhausen. (Leyhausen, unable to make a living as an artist in Kassel, went to Paris shortly after painting Peggy. Unable to make a living there either, he killed himself in 1931. He was 32 years old.) The photo of it here doesn't do it justice. A gorgeous, lively oil painting, it looks like it was painted last week. The scarf hops and pops in blocks of colour. You worry the paint might not be dry. But it's over eighty years old.
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
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