We chat to acclaimed writer Rick Moody about finding humour in Virginia Woolf, writing fictitious hotel reviews, and why novels should mirror modern life
Hotels of North America by Rick Moody, published by Serpent’s Tail books
Rick Moody: controversial, riled against and hailed. His novels have criss-crossed from disintegrating suburban life to struggling slackerhood, and in his latest work, Hotels of North America, he has moved to the online world. How do we tell stories in this forum? Is it confession or performance? If we can present ourselves as anything, are we putting forth a true representation, or have we all become liars? And if we do choose to tell the truth, is it with irony or tenderness that we manage to do so?
These our some of the questions put forth in the book, released in spring 2016 – a deconstructed rush through one man’s life, told in the format of the minutely detailed hotel reviews he writes, and garners a devoted and vocal audience for due to their no-holds-barred confessional nature. Comedic, heartfelt, often tragic, the story spins its way across countries, through the many rooms, visitations, and memories that make up the life of Reginald E. Morse.
We sat down with Moody to talk TripAdvisor, the “fantasy-driven Internet world”, and finding humour in Virginia Woolf.
Where do you write?
Right now, I’m writing on a bed, while my wife looks at her phone beside me. But the site varies. I used to write in the car quite a bit. While it was parked, of course.
What are you working on at the moment?
An essay on Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
How has your writing changed since you first began?
I suppose I would leave it up to the critics to answer this question, though it seems to me I have changed a great deal. The earlier works were more narrative based, because I was figuring out what narrative is and how to use the large palette of the novel. But lately they have been more about consciousness and language, and more given to formal experimentation. Probably because I don’t like repeating myself.
How did you start researching your 2016 novel, Hotels of North America? Did you spend a lot of time in hotels or on TripAdvisor?
I started by staying in hotels. In fact, I didn’t really pay attention to TripAdvisor or Expedia or Hotels.com until I was nearly done with the first draft. I didn’t pay much attention to them at all, at the end of the day. Though they do have their delights.
Why did you choose the hotel review format for the book?
I chose the online review format because online life is life in the 21st century in many ways, whether you like it or not (and I don’t like it that much). I had started a more conventional novel, protagonist-driven in the somewhat traditional way, and I awoke one morning feeling like this work was totally fraudulent because it contained none of this fantasy-driven Internet world. The youngsters are almost always on there! It is where they live!
A novel that doesn’t take advantage of how life is actually being lived is a pretty ineffective mirror of its times. So I put down that novel, and began this one.
What do you think of review sites and the culture now where everyone can write a review, rather than just journalists?
Thrilling, democratic and totally id-driven, and thus both excellent and lamentably horrible at the same time.
A lot of Hotels of North America deals with the idea of an Internet persona – both in the character of Reginald Morse and the people he interacts with. How do you think the Internet has changed our ideas of identity?
I don’t think identity really exists; I think identity is a legacy of pre-20th century ideas of psychology. It’s useful to pretend identity exists, because it makes life easier, but I incline toward a ‘society of mind’ idea, in which we are systems of being who interact as selves on a temporary basis for particular social purposes. I don’t think there is a stable self, therefore, and the Internet reliably indicates as much. How many people on the web are transgender avenger ninjas? Quite a few, it would seem.
There seem to be two currents running through the book – the ironic motivational speaker and hotel reviewer, and then the tender side of a father and ex-husband. How do you consolidate these into a single work?
I always think that comedy and tragedy are obverses of one another and each makes cleaner and more compelling the incisions of the other. I can’t imagine a work that didn’t have each.
I was reading Woolf last week and remembering that she is very funny in spots, though she has a reputation for being earnest. The same is true of many writers I admire – Joyce, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard… They are funny and deadly serious at the same time. I want to make sure my work has a similar full spectrum of human emotions.
PORT meets Deborah Smith, joint-winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2016, to talk about independent publishing, learning Korean and the growing market for literary translation
Deborah Smith (left) and Han Kang (right) holding their Man Booker International Prizes – images by Janie Airey
Literary translators and their art often go unacknowledged. And although the process of translation is rarely hidden from the reader, the author’s name is usually the one that will be remembered. In the UK and the US, translated fiction accounts for approximately three percent of all books published. While this may seem like a disproportionately low figure, there have been recent findings that show this small portion is in fact selling better than English language equivalents (with bestsellers from Italian Elena Ferrante and Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård leading the way).
This year, the Man Booker International Prize opened itself up to both an author and translator for the first time in its history, with the £50,000 prize money split evenly between the two. As a result, the 2016 shortlist saw a diverse representation of new work, much of which came from translators seeking to address the underrepresentation of different languages present on the shelves of Western bookstores.
The first translator to share the Booker International Prize with an author is Deborah Smith, for her translation of The Vegetarian by South Korean author Han Kang. The novel follows a South Korean woman after she decides to give up meat, which is considered to be an unusual decision in her native country. As the architecture of herself and her family begins to crack, the prose parallels the action with disturbing and beautiful imagery – a difficult task to translate.
As well as translating three books in the last six years – having only started to learn Korean at 21 – Smith recently set up her own publishing house, Tilted Axis, in order to publish more experimental foreign fiction, specifically from Southeast Asia (including fiction originally written in Bengali, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Uzbek, and Japanese). Here, we sit down with Smith to talk about the process of translating an experimental Korean novel, her own path to publishing, and why she is taking part in a new initiative, the Year of Publishing Women, in 2018.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Translated by Deborah Smith, published by Portobello Books Ltd
How did you begin translating and what drew you to it?
I was drawn to literary translation quite consciously because it seemed to combine the two things I was most passionate about, reading and writing, as well as providing the perfect excuse to finally learn a language other than English. I’d always read more in translation than not, I think that was because my childhood and adolescence felt very limited, culturally and geographically. I began teaching myself Korean in 2010, the same year I started an MA in Korean Studies, which led straight to a Korean literature PhD. In 2012, I translated a novel called A Greater Music, by an incredible, experimental author called Bae Suah, herself a translator from German to Korean. My first published translation was Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which I pitched directly to Max Porter (read our interview with Max Porter here) at Portobello Books.
How do you view the relationship between translator and author? Is it different with every book?
With every author, yes, it’s different – or at least it is for me. Han Kang and Bae Suah are my main authors, and while Kang is unusual in having an excellent command of English, Suah isn’t able to read my translations. However, she’s a translator herself from German, which she also uses as a bridge language to translate authors like Pessoa and Sadeq Hedayat, so she believes that the translator should be as free from authorial interference as possible, and she’s perfectly happy for me to go away and be as creative as I like. That’s a particularly useful freedom to have when translating experimental prose like hers, though I actually think I’m more ‘faithful’ in practice than my personal philosophy on translation would suggest. I know Kang better than I do Suah, because she’s been over to the UK for two publicity tours and a residency, and it’s as much of a joy to be her friend as it is a privilege to translate her work.
What are the main obstacles you face when translating a work, specifically from Korean to English?
It sounds a little trite, but no particular aspect really strikes me as a challenge or a difficulty. Of course, there will be individual words or sentences that take longer to get right than others, but those won’t necessarily have any shared feature that explains that difficulty. There are certainly major differences between the languages. Korean is subject-object-verb, uses honorifics and sentence endings to denote varying levels of intimacy, formality, deference, etc. People frequently refer to each other by familial terms, e.g. ‘older brother’, ‘Ji-woo’s mother’. But because these are things that recur again and again, and follow strict patterns, after the first couple of times you come across them you’ll have a ready stock of solutions you can then use without thinking much about it.
Perhaps most importantly with Korean to English, you’re translating from a language which has a natural tendency towards ambiguity and repetition, and draws a lot of its elegance from that, to one with a far stronger preference for precision and concision (of course, I’m talking about convention, rather than any individual writer’s style). For example, Korean similes are usually very vague. The terms of the comparison (i.e. whether it’s to do with sound, appearance, speed, movement) won’t be specified.
At the end of chapter two in Human Acts [the second Kang novel translated by Smith] the Korean literally says something along the lines of “dawn broke like ice”. That’s just too vague to have the same power in English. So I had to think of a way in which dawn breaking might be ‘like ice’ that would make sufficient, but not too much, sense. It couldn’t be obvious or banal, because the original is neither of those things, and also because that would prevent it from being beautiful.
I decided that for me, the comparison was largely about speed, which meant I needed to specify that, but also a sense of majesty, of terrifying beauty, so “ice” became “iceberg”. And because English has the particularly beautiful, unusual word “calve” to describe a berg breaking from an ice mass, I jumped at the chance to work that in, so it came out as: “The dawn light was calved from the night slow as an iceberg”.
Panty by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, translated by Arunava Sinh, published by Tilted Axis
Can you talk about your publishing house, Tilted Axis, and its philosophy? How do you choose the books you publish?
I founded Tilted Axis to publish the kind of books that might otherwise be unlikely to make it into English, for the very reasons they excite me: artistic originality, radical vision, or the fact that they’ve been written in one of those so-called ‘minor’ languages used by the majority of people on the planet. So far, our list includes Bengali, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Uzbek, and Japanese.
I’m not a great fan of straight realism, and/or unremarkable prose style, so I look for distinctive aesthetics. Our first titles are, variously, surreal, metafictional, obliquely fantastical – an experimental weave of poetry and prose. This also helps ensure we’re putting out narratives that don’t conform to the cliches of certain regions, i.e. that anything from Southeast Asia needs to be some ‘lush’ historical romance, or to do with immigration.
You’ve committed to the ‘Year of Publishing Women’. Can you tell us more about this?
I got excited when it was announced, signed us up for 2018, then realised our first year list was already all women! It was something I’d already been thinking about, largely thanks to Joanna Walsh’s #readwomen campaign; the deeper I dug, the more I realised how naïve I’d been to imagine that literary quality (itself, of course, subjective) is the sole or even major factor determining what gets published and/or translated. There are all these implicit biases meaning that authors from certain groups, writing certain types of book, have a disproportionate chance of being published, and these are exacerbated when translation gets added into the mix.
What most resonated for me was Kamila Shamsie’s insistence that what we don’t need is “a year of publishing white, middle-class, straight, metropolitan women”. Essentially, looking beyond the establishment – which in most places is still dominated by men, but which also means thinking intersectionally – is the easiest and most effective way of finding work that feels fresh and innovative. When you diversify representation, you diversify aesthetics. It’s win-win.
We speak to veteran British soldier Harry Parker about his debut novel, which explores conflict from the perspective of 45 objects
Anatomy of a Solider, the debut novel by war veteran Harry Parker, isn’t quite what the name suggests. What sounds like one person’s memory of war is in fact a wider examination of conflict, and our ideas of it, as a whole. Parker employs 45 different objects as his narrators through a fictional lens – including objects of war (a gun, a tourniquet, a drone), post-war (a catheter, a prosthetic leg), and the objects that web away from war (a grieving mother’s handbag, the compensation forms issued by the army in response to mistaken deaths). The result is a disorientating, emotive experience, which sweeps the reader into the centre of a conflict and it’s aftermath as well as the personal and political systems behind them.
Parker previously served in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and lost both legs after an IED explosion – an event that also happens to one of his fictional characters in the novel, Sergeant Tom Barnes.
“One of the reasons I used fiction was political – a lot of nonfiction books have a political bent to them and I’m not really interested in that. I just wanted to write a good story,” Parker tells me. “When I wrote ‘I did this, I did that’, it felt wrong, and I felt squeamish about telling a war story like that… Using the inanimate object took out the sentimentality for me.”
The book’s writing is full of crystalline description – an approach that makes sense when I learn he came to visual art before creative writing. “The way I write is visual, the way I think about it too,” he says.
The language in Anatomy of Soldier is not lengthy or laden with simile. Rather, it takes a microscopic tone, picking apart war and reconstructing it through a building of detail. The result is cinematic. “The words are important – but they’re important inasmuch as they describe what I see in my imagination. But not for their own sake; I’m not trying to be clever with words,” he adds.
The author’s influences are diverse, from the ‘thing poems’ of the Anglo-Saxons (including ‘The Rude Cross’ from 400 AD – a poem written from the perspective of the cross upon which Christ was crucified), to the sci-fi novels of Iain Banks, to the stripped-back prose of Hemingway. Just before penning Anatomy of a Soldier, Parker explains, he read For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Anatomy of Soldier drops in and out of place and story, although as Parker points out, “the main themes of an object do come in sequence, even though the time jumps around.”
“It’s designed to be disorientating. I wanted to get across what it’s like to be in conflict, when you don’t know when you’re going to be safe,” he says. “When you’re injured, when you’re lying in a hospital bed, and the drugs – it’s a similar feeling.”
Harry Parker, Anatomy of a Soldier, publisher by Faber & Faber
As a double amputee, Parker’s own experience is particularly acute in some of the chapters, particularly those that take on the perspective of medical objects – a catheter, a blood bag, the electric saw used to cut through the bone when it becomes apparent the second leg must also be amputated. “It was interesting because these objects are keeping you alive – although they’re completely inanimate, they have this power. They go inside you,” he explains. “That was a very exciting point of view to write, because it just gives you a different take on the world.”
Anatomy of a Soldier is a war novel without rage, and one seeking for a representation of motive from all parties involved in combat. Although characters in the novel may be on opposing sides of warfare, they’re all similar in that they seem to be operating in systems outside of their control. “When I think about conflict, I’m drawn to the fact that – maybe I’m too trusting – people don’t necessarily choose to do these things, and the reasons for doing them are complicated,” he says. “I wanted to try and explore that. I wanted to show the human side of conflict, because conflict is so dehumanising.”
Pausing, Parker then reflects back to a question I posed earlier: what is the difference between memoir and fiction, except for an audience’s appetite for the so-called ‘truth’?
“I often get asked about how much of it is me, how much of me is in Tom Barnes, how much is my story. And, you know, a lot of it is,” he says. “But I feel like by writing fiction I could write something much more truthful than if wrote a memoir. It was much more true to itself as a book and to what I wanted to say. Some people won’t see it like that, but that’s how I felt creating it.”
Stories of frontline battle are increasingly told by those who have never taken part. Just how urgent are realistic narratives of current warfare and to whom should we look for these accounts?
Illustration by Tim McDonagh
Nostalgia. Melancholia. Wind Contusions. Soldier’s Heart. Abreaction. Effort Syndrome. Not Yet Diagnosed – Mental. Not Yet Diagnosed – Nervous. Exhaustion. Battle Exhaustion. Combat Exhaustion. Shell Shock. Neurasthenia. Traumatic Neurosis. Psychoneurosis. Fear Neurosis. Battle Neurosis. Lack of Moral Fibre. Old Sergeant Syndrome. War Syndrome. Combat Fatigue. Acute Stress Disorder. Acute Stress Reaction. Combat Stress Reaction. Post-Combat Disorder. Post-War Disorder. Post-Traumatic Illness. Post-Traumatic Disorder. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
These are just some of the phrases the military and medical community have used over the years in their attempt to diagnose and define the psychological effects of conflict. It’s a list that represents a potted linguistic history of their efforts to capture in words the long mental and emotional tremor of violence, most often committed and suffered far from home. It is also a list that begins with a word we use today with very different connotations – ‘Nostalgia’, first coined by a medical student in the 17th century to describe a psychological condition suffered by Swiss mercenaries when fighting far from their mountain landscapes of home. The word is rooted in this idea of longing for a homeland, comprised of the Greek Homeric word for ‘return home’ or ‘homecoming’, nostos and ‘pain’ or ‘ache’, algos.
I compiled this list of phrases for a scene in a play I wrote called The Two Worlds of Charlie F. The play was based upon the experiences of recently wounded service personnel, who also formed the majority of the cast, making the production a recovery project as well as a piece of theatre. But a recovery from what exactly?
For many of the frontline soldiers involved, their trauma, the ‘pain’ or ‘ache’ from which they were recovering was, like those Swiss mercenaries, associated with returning home and with a sense of longing. In working with the cast of Charlie F., however, I soon discovered that unlike their historic Swiss counterparts, the pain from which these contemporary soldiers most often suffered was not a pain of longing to return home, but rather a pain of returning home. Nostalgia – that desire to be somewhere else – still formed a crucial part of their condition. But now, in the 21st century, it tended to be no longer nostalgia for a distant homeland that haunted them, but rather a nostalgia for combat – for the very war and its experiences that had wounded them, either psychologically or physically, in the first place.
As we worked through the process of putting the play together I came to realise that the list of psychological and medical terms I’d written, although chronological and therefore linear, was actually a circle too: one in which the original meaning of its first condition, ‘Nostalgia’, had been inverted in the experience of its last, ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’. The pain of missing, if the contemporary soldier suffering from PTSD is anything to go by, is no longer a pain suffered in the field, but is now more a condition of returning home. And the longing at its heart is no longer for a place of safety where these soldiers once lived before the war, but rather for the war itself.
So what lies behind this inversion? And why is the mental condition of returning British soldiers today, whether diagnosed with PTSD or not, so marked by a desire to be away from home and back in combat?
Well, firstly we have a professional army of volunteers, many of them very young. And by young, I mean children really. Britain is the only country in the EU where a child of 16 can still join the Armed Services. With their parents’ permission they can begin the process of applying to join even earlier, at the age of 15. What this combination of youth and a professional army means is that every soldier I worked with wanted to go to war. Robert Harris once said “there is a hole in modern man where a war should be.” Well if you join the army that hole can be filled, and most soldiers want it filled. They want their war. As one young marine put it, if you don’t experience combat as a trained soldier, then it’s like “going to the fairground but staying off the rides.” When I asked these young men and women about their first reaction to being deployed overseas, the consistent answer was simply, “It was a chance to do our job. A chance to do what we’ve been trained for.”
In this respect these soldiers reminded me somewhat of actors. Actors train in their art, their craft, but can only practice it, can only ‘be actors’ after a series of hinge moments have swung their way – hearing about the audition, getting the audition, being cast in the role. Similarly all the soldiers I worked with felt, despite any amount of training, that they weren’t yet soldiers, they weren’t yet complete, without experience of ‘proper soldiering’. And by proper, they meant violent conflict. Being deployed overseas. Fire fights. Risks. Engaging the enemy. Kills.
Added to this professional desire to experience war is the fact that in Britain, as in many other countries, we recruit the majority of our infantry from the most disadvantaged areas of society. As such, many of the boys I spoke with weren’t so much joining the army as leaving their current lives – unemployment, difficult situations at home, trouble with the police, boredom or simply poverty and the lack of a regular pay packet. Once in the services, the desire to go to war is an extension of this leaving – a further progression away from everything that pushed them from their home life in the first place, and propelled them towards its polar opposite – the unusual, the foreign, the well-paid, the exciting.
Although the ethos of the professional soldier finally getting to put his training into practice might be sufficient to get a young man out to Afghanistan, once in the country, if he is a frontline fighter, then his motivation for performing his role often begins to alter, and at an accelerated pace once a soldier known to him is killed or wounded. From this point onwards fighting the enemy is no longer about ‘doing their job’, but becomes motivated by something altogether brighter and darker at once – love, and its rougher underside of grief and revenge.
To serve overseas in a hostile environment is, for the modern soldier, to experience an increasing compression of belonging – to your country, to your service, to your battalion, to your regiment, to your platoon, to your four-man fire team, all the way down to your ‘oppo’, the person with whom you form a partnership in the field, and whose back you watch because they watch yours. These are the people for whom the British soldier fights and this was another consistent answer from the soldiers I interviewed – At that moment, when the bullets and rockets are flying, for whom, I wanted to know, are they fighting? Every one of them said each other. “The soldier on your left and the soldier on your right.” What begins (and what is nurtured within the services) as a sense of belonging, under the pressure of these combat situations, becomes an attachment of much greater emotional depth. It becomes a form of love, and that is why when something happens to that soldier on your right or that soldier on your left, when they are wounded, killed, or blown up by an IED, it is love that defines your individual response, and love that fuels your killing of others. Loss, not politics, human rights or mission statements, becomes the reason for their fighting.
What starts out as mission objectives, tactical plans or ‘just doing your job’, becomes, for the individual frontline soldier, something much more personal. You want to kill the enemy because they hurt your friend. It’s as simple as that, and explains one young man’s definition of a “good day in Afghanistan” as being “when you see them drop”.
For many of those I spoke with the sense of attachment they had with their fellow soldiers was, beyond their families, the strongest emotional bond they had experienced. Similarly, other psychological hungers familiar to them at home were also satisfied in combat. The sense of doing something important – something that matters. Being valued. Being at the centre of things. Having a strong sense of identity and purpose. Laced with adrenalin and risk, life becomes sharper-edged, more precarious and therefore more precious.
And then they return home. Wounded or not, they return home, and with that return – especially if it coincides with leaving the services – those heightened qualities of life they discovered, and relished, while overseas, are lost to them. Taken away in a plane flight and the handing in of an identity card.
And this is what lies at the heart of that returning-home pain. The fact that life, for many of these soldiers, seemed simpler and better overseas in conflict than it does back home in peace. And sometimes not just better, but actually the best that it will ever get for them. Despite still only being in their early 20s, some of these young men, on returning home, live with a profound sense of aftermath – that the apex of their lives has been lived, and everything to come will pale in comparison.
There are multiple reasons why so many soldiers feel this way, many of them to do with what conflict provides and society does not – that sense of purpose, of belonging, of attachment and of feeling, in the face of physical danger, alive. But this contemporary returning-home pain is also born of two different kinds of distance. The first is of thousands of miles but breached easily and quickly (in around 13 hours in total) when a soldier flies home. The psychological journey back from war, however, lags far behind the speed of this physical transition, resulting in returning soldiers being physically back in their home environments, while still existing psychologically within a sphere of soldiering. Such a psychological disconnect with their immediate surroundings results in may of the issues associated with recent veterans, from feelings of distaste and disapproval for affluent Western living to homelessness and acts of violence, their internal scales having been tipped off-balance by their exposure to modern conflict. As one young marine said to me, “Punching someone and kicking them in the head isn’t violent to us. Firing a shoulder-held missile into a house. That’s violent.”
The second distance is harder to measure and, perhaps, harder to breach, but every returning soldier will tell you they are aware of it the moment they step off the plane, and continue to be so, sometimes for the rest of their lives. It is the distance of perception and knowledge between them and the society in whose name they have committed violence or suffered violence done to them. Again, this is largely the product of a professional army recruited mostly from the poorer and more disadvantaged regions of the country. As a society we have outsourced our violence to particular social groups, and in so doing have become adept at dislocating ourselves from the realities of conflict and its aftermath. The narratives of war are broadly confined to news channels and newspapers, or are harnessed in operationally specific ways by charities and interest groups. They are nearly always remarkably one-sided too. How often do we hear, in this age of asymmetric warfare, about how many enemy fighters or civilians our own soldiers kill and wound, or about the psychological effects of them having done so?
What is left, in this distance between a society and its soldiers, is a gulf of story. The personal stories of what war and conflict are like. The emotional and psychological details and consequences. The nuanced tones and textures of the shadows that organised and sanctioned violence casts. The concentric rings of damage that spread from one returning individual through his relationships, his children, his community.
In working with the cast of Charlie F., it was this gulf I found the soldiers and their families wanted breached by the play. They wanted general society to know what happens in Afghanistan: to British soldiers, Afghan fighters and civilians. They wanted an audience to be exposed to everything that those three letters – W A R – really mean, in as unflinching, uncompromised a way as possible. They wanted the full spectrum of their experiences to be presented – everything they felt they had gained because of their service, as well as everything they felt they had lost.
Having worked on Charlie F. and then drawn upon the same interviews to write a verse drama, Pink Mist, I have to say I’m convinced they are right in their desire for these stories to be told. As a writer I know it is the well-told personal story, the empathetic leap into the experience of the individual, that best cuts through bland public narratives and can most powerfully resonate in the universal consciousness. And this is why I believe that novels, poems, plays are best placed to shape and excavate those stories for meaning, resonance and emotional and psychological significance. But who, exactly, should be doing the telling?
I began this piece with a list of terms created by the medical and military communities in their attempt to capture in words the psychological effects of conflict. And I suppose I want to end it by asking the same question of the literary community. How best can writers today, if they should at all, go about trying to capture the stories of modern conflict? In the early wars of the last century the stories of those wars were often been best told in literature by those who’d fought or experienced them: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Keith Douglas, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Primo Levi. But in more recent conflicts, just as we’ve outsourced our violence to a professional army no longer including men who would always, perhaps, have been writers, so it seems the literary stories of those conflicts have increasingly been outsourced to professional writers. When those stories are told, it is now most often via a process of distillation, with writers becoming conduits for the voices of others – with those who’ve lived beyond the pressures that send boys to the army, ‘dropping in’ to report back, not from a foreign frontline, but from one at home, comprised of the experience of returned soldiers.
But should it be writers doing the telling at all? And in relying upon existing writers to tell these stories, are we in fact narrowing the scope of the stories told? Should we not be working harder to give those who directly experience conflict access to the means and skills to tell their own stories? And not just British veterans and their families, but also those exposed to conflict across the world, from the villager in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Afghan fighter in Helmand Province. I know, from having watched the soldiers in Charlie F. perform, that being told about the truths of conflict directly by someone wounded in that conflict carries a unique charge that can never be replicated even in the most skilful piece of reported writing.
My last question, and to bring this piece back to its first word, is are we, as a society, guilty of a nostalgia for the relatively easy narratives of past wars rather than engaging fully with the more difficult and complex narratives of our current conflicts? When one contemporary poet read Pink Mist, my verse drama based on the interviews I’d conducted with wounded soldiers and their families, he remarked it all seemed “a bit exotic.” And it was. To him. Because although he was well versed in the stories of WWI and WWII, he had never come into contact with anyone who was fighting a war today. And nor had he felt the need to. Because he did not agree with the war in Afghanistan, he felt no need to know about it, despite the streets of his town being occupied by young men carrying and spreading its violence and damage every day.
But perhaps he is right? Perhaps the time has past when literature can realistically expect to be at the forefront of bringing the realities of conflict home, and that role is now better served by YouTube, films or blogs? And perhaps it isn’t our place to be trying to tell these stories at all, but rather we should allow them to naturally emerge, in time, from the conflicts that birthed them? I don’t pretend to have the answers. But what I do know is that, however they are told, and whoever tells them, and however desensitised we might appear to them, the stories of modern conflict do need to be heard. Because if they are not, then a society allowed to remain unfamiliar with every facet of conflict, allowed to think of the realities of war as ‘exotic’, will continue to allow its leaders to resort to it as a solution, and nothing will change.
This article was first published in issue 15 of PORT. To buy or subscribe to PORT, click here.
Max Porter’s first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, has garnered considerable praise in the the two months since it was published, and has already found its way onto the shortlists of literary prizes including The Goldsmiths Prize and The Guardian First Book Award. It’s also resulted in confusion among booksellers, who’ve struggled to place it in bookshops. The book darts between poetry, fable, drama, and essay – all within a slim volume of 15,000 words. And as a former bookseller himself, Porter can sympathise with this confusion.
In his current role as senior editor at Granta & Portobello Books, he can also see that this confusion works, and that, despite much noise to the contrary, readers are excited by innovation of this kind, where narratives that play with form aren’t necessarily weighed down by plot. Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a small meditation on a huge subject, and, in a similar manner to the emotion it examines, it is structurally fragmented, individual, and brilliantly strange.
Ahead of the announcement of the 2015 Guardian first book award winner, we sat down with Porter to discuss the world of contemporary publishing, rewriting the definition for a successful novel, and paying homage to Ted Hughes.
Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a combination of several forms: essay, poetry and short story. Were there any other works that
inspired you to publish in this way?
It reflects my reading life more than any specific writers or works. Moving between essays (on the tube), poetry (on the loo), children’s books (all the time) and novels (before bed), allows me to be quite self-conscious about what works for me and what doesn’t, and what happens in the movement between those forms. But, of course, I’m endlessly inspired by other writers.
In the case of this book notably: Anne Carson, Basil Bunting, Emily Dickinson, Russell Hoban, and Ted Hughes.
Your debut pays tribute to Ted Hughes’ book of poems Crow, almost translating his idea of the character into your own. What role do you think homage plays in contemporary literature?
I think we have an uneasy relationship with it, in this country especially. The assumption is you’re stepping on someone’s toes, or stealing their energy, and the implication is that it’s fine to do that invisibly, but not visibly.
I’m all for rootling around in the legacy of our dead poets, and believe they wouldn’t want it any other way. It’s all a game, ultimately – writing against the backdrop of all that has come before. I’m interested in letting the rules of the game, the scaffold of the exchange, show through and be a part of the surface.
There have been a lot of opinions expressed lately about the longevity or death of the novel. Do you think the format needs to adapt in order to survive?
I think it already has and always will. It’s a remarkable and singular thing, the novel. It’s always been in crisis, and it’s always been flirting with its own demise.
The best novels ever written take this crisis as a kind of generative starting point. I think the industry patronises readers, and fearfully shrinks the consumer into neat little algorithmic boxes. It’s daft; readers are unpredictable. The novel will be holding up a mirror to us, and sneaking in the odd devastating challenge, for as long as we have eyes to read with.
What advice would you give to first-time novelists and what have you learned from writing your debut?
Don’t fuck around second-guessing the market. Write the book only you can write. Don’t write for an imagined audience. Don’t write for an imaginary critic. Challenge yourself according to your own intensely demanding critical apparatus. Give it to people who will be harsh. Read it aloud. Re-write and re-write and save the drafts.
The desk is no more, sadly – it made way for a cot. But I’m happy at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and a sharp pencil. On my work desk I have a David Jones postcard, a feather, and some LEGO. Sums me up, really.
Were there any challenges in getting published?
I was disgustingly lucky. Because it’s concerned with Ted Hughes, I sent it to Faber, thinking they’d either sue me or do it, and they did it. Beautifully. Other publishers have written to me to say they wouldn’t have had the nerve. But that’s the point. You have to see a way, and take it. Faber saw it from day one.
Is there space for the experimental novel in the publishing world today?
Yes, absolutely yes there is space for the experimental novel. Readers are willing to take risks. And I don’t think experimental work need be at the cost of emotional truth, humour, vulgarity, suspense or any of the things more associated with ‘popular’ writing. We can have it all.
Some writers say they’re afraid to write emotionally or sentimentally. Why do you think this is and how did you address this in your novel?
It’s the biggest trap, I think, for writers keen to avoid cliché. And perhaps there is a fear of being exposed. Someone read my book and said ‘people will think that sex scene is based on your real sex life’. Well, yes, but of all the risks a writer takes that can’t be the most frightening, can it?
I think great writing about emotional landscapes sneaks up on you. I like it when I’m undone by something in a text a little while after it’s happened.
PORT visits the Manhattan apartment of Gay Talese, the writer whose investigative curiosity and distinctive prose elevated journalism to the status of an art form
Gay Talese shot by Max Vadukul
Gay Talese stepped out from the basement office of his Park Avenue townhouse and a heavy-set postal worker making deliveries on the street brightened when she saw him.
“You look very nice today, Mr. Talese,” she said, complimenting his elegant grey suit and hat.
He smiled and thanked her, accepting a packet of mail, and continued to walk up the spiralling black staircase that leads to his front door, on which large a brass plaque reads, “Talese.” She watched until he entered, and then continued on her delivery route.
People enjoy appreciating Talese, as though he were some rare exotic bird. They appreciate his immaculate suits and signature leather and suede trimmed shoes, his preference to not own a cell phone, his expertise in preparing a gin martini, and that at 82, he is in sharp form, able to walk up and down the carpeted steps of his elegant five-story home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with relative ease. For those evaluating him as a writer, as an icon of American nonfiction, this appreciation seems to have only grown in recent years, in the form of awards, interviews, book reissues and young writers seeking his wisdom and time.
Journalists are often cursed, through the ephemeral nature of their trade, to be forgotten soon after their stories are told, but for the past 60 years Talese has been a unique American chronicler. His signature style distinguished him. As any journalism student in college can tell you, Talese implemented the techniques of fiction writing into the domain of nonfiction, first as a reporter at The New York Times in the 1950s, then as a scribe for Esquire in the 60s and then as a writer of ambitious bestsellers that undertook topics people considered ‘unreportable’. He wrote real stories about real people, but in ways that evoked the engrossing narratives of fiction.
“I wanted to write stories like fiction writers were,” he said. “But I wanted to write without fabricating, without imagining, without falsifying.” He’s cited as a pioneer of ‘New Journalism’, along with writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, but he’s always resisted the categorisation.
He is a master observer, often preferring the marginal tale over the big one; the piece not about the boxer, but about the man who made the boxer’s mouthpiece; the piece not about the politician who died, but about the man who penned his obituary. He favours losers instead of winners, seeing powerful tales in their in downfalls and redemption. He picks weighty themes, especially in his books, illustrating them with rich but factually verifiable scenes of human drama, spending months with his subjects, entering their heads. “When I write about someone, I make them my literary property,” he said. “Most journalism is a one night stand. A quick fuck and then you’re out. With me there’s no divorce. Stories are never over.”
Talese’s bestsellers could take a decade each to complete. Thy Neighbor’s Wife covered the landscape of the sexual revolution, generating controversy, as he became a participant in the lustful movement, in the name of his research, despite being a married man. Honor Thy Father cast a human light on the underworld of the mafia through the window of the Bonanno crime family, of whom it took Talese years to gain trust. In The Kingdom and the Power he put faces on the individuals behind The New York Times, illustrating the day-to-day dramas of the august news organisation.
But it was particularly through Talese’s work as writer for Esquire in the 1960s that he solidified his reputation as a unique storyteller. His articles have become seminal works, especially his 1966 piece about Frank Sinatra, considered legendary, in part, because Sinatra declined to be interviewed. And yet, Talese wrote about him anyway, speaking to the individuals in his sphere – his valet, his tailor, the woman who carried his hairpieces – and composing a portrait that some felt explained the man better than anything else. Esquire has singled it out as the greatest story they ever printed, and journalism schools around the country require it as reading. “I’ll never get away from that story,” he said. “I still don’t think it’s my best.”
Even as a young reporter on The New York Times, Talese stood out, painting more colour with facts than other reporters could. His poetic articles sometimes raised the eyebrows of his colleagues, who suspected fabrication at work. The creative restraints of newspaper journalism ultimately caused him to leave for Esquire in 1965. “I felt like I had gone as far as I could go,” he said. “I remember leaving, I got in the elevator, the same elevator I came in as a copyboy way back, and I was crying.”
He was born to an Italian family in the small beach town of Ocean City, New Jersey in 1932. His father was a tailor and his mother owned a dress shop. He traces his formation as a reporter to the days of sitting in her shop, listening to customers discuss their private lives: witnessing the art of interviewing in its fundamental form.
He’s now working on his next book, which will turn a lens on his marriage, and how it survived the scandalous research methods he used for Thy Neighbor’s Wife. He’s also working on a project he believes may be his best yet, but he prefers to remain quiet about it. And then he’s busy with the pilgrims – the young writers who seek his knowledge – or the reporters who want to quote him in a story, or those who want to honour him with awards, as the prestigious Norman Mailer Center recently did, or there’s the renowned art book publisher, Taschen, which has plans to bring his Frank Sinatra piece to life.
I’ve known Talese personally for some years, and we recently sat in his living room to discuss his career. The home throbs with literary history. Bookshelves are everywhere, filled with the works of old friends, titans such as David Halberstam, George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe. The novelist William Styron wrote parts of The Confessions of Nat Turner here. Talese’s wife, a prominent editor who works with Ian McEwan, is an influential figure in her own right. Some say his basement, where he spends much of his time, reflects his mind. Almost every article he has written, and observation he has jotted, is archived there in a box or filing cabinet.
A jangle of keys sounded from his front door. A dog walker entered, his wife’s two Australian terriers wagging behind her. “Everything fine, Angela?” he asked.
“Angels as usual, Gay.”
The energetic bodies of fur disappeared up the stairs behind her. Talese reflected on his contributions to journalism.
“I wanted to be a storyteller,” he said. “I wanted to write short stories with real names. I didn’t want to write novels like everyone else. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be a star of nonfiction.”
“If I’ve done anything,” he added, “it’s been to help elevate journalism to an art form. I do believe it can be an art form. And I’m not modest about that, because that’s what I set out to do, and have been doing, without shame, all these years.”
A letter from Jack Kerouac, written the year before his death, gives us a glimpse into the beat icon’s life and reveals the plot of his last unfinished book
Jack Kerouac with a copy of a railroad brakeman’s rulebook – photograph by Allen Ginsberg, September 1953
When a piece of correspondence from a deceased icon is unearthed, a lesser-known side of that individual’s character is often revealed. In the case of writers, these fragments allow readers – who have seen mostly polished end products – to glimpse behind the veil of a public persona and better understand the person’s psyche.
This typed letter, dated September 27, 1968, and signed twice by Jack Kerouac, is precisely that. Addressed to Kerouac’s literary agent, Sterling Lord, the missive contains the premise for his final book, Spotlight, which was never to be completed, and covers some of his life’s successes as well as embarrassments. Lord was a pivotal figure in Kerouac’s career and was also the man who managed to sell On the Road – Kerouac’s roman à clef that was written during a caffeine-drenched, 20-day typewriter marathon at a friend’s New York apartment in 1951.
The autobiographical letter traces the rise and fall of Kerouac’s great works and acts as a fascinating testament to the inner mechanics that drove one of the Beat Generation’s brightest lights.
The original letter is now up for auction at Boston-based auction house RR Auction until July 15.
As the dust settles after Paris Fashion Week, we asked Shakespeare and Company, the city’s famous English bookshop, to share their quintessential Parisian reading
Rooftops of Paris by Fabrice Moireau and Carl Norac This stunningly designed book conjures you up to a levitated Parisian dimension. Artist Fabrice Moireau has an exquisite eye for quirky rooftop detail and surprising vistas – and see if you can spot Shakespeare and Company among the golden chimneys and mansard roofs.
Pure by Andrew Miller
Based on the true and disturbing story of Les Innocents – the Parisian cemetery destroyed in 1785 because the dead were literally bursting through cellar walls – this outstanding novel evokes a fevered and liminal point in history (it’s been read by many as a parable for the French Revolution) and oozes with grotesque atmosphere.
Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach What a piece of luck that as well as being one of the great patrons of modernism, bookseller extraordinaire, and doyenne of the 20s and 30s Parisian literary scene, Sylvia Beach was also a luminous writer. This chronicle of her fascinating life at the forefront of some of the greatest literary achievements of the 20th century is shot through with her legendary warmth and wit.
A Parisian Affair and Other Stories by Guy de Maupassant No one probes the two faces of human nature – the dark and the light – quite like de Maupassant. These 34 short stories, many of which are set in the playboy and prostitute-ridden nouveau riche society of 19th century Paris, reveal the complexities of love and lust with style and insight.
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy Pink hair, evening dresses in the daytime because everything’s in the wash, gossipy hangovers… The Dud Avocado, written and set in the 50s, follows utterly chaotic and lovable young heroine Sally Jay Gorce around Paris on her girl-about-town exploits and remains laugh out loud hilarious.
Alaina Moore of US band Tennis talks to Port about penning a song in honour of T.S. Eliot’s wife Vivienne
Portrait of Alaina Moore shot by Luca Venter
My discovery of Vivienne Eliot was an accident. I was sitting at my kitchen table in the dark, even though it was only four in the afternoon. Winter, a historically desolate time for my psyche, had got me re-reading The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot is not my fair-weather friend; I don’t read Hysteria when I’m high on love or Prufrock in the warm thrill of summer, I go to him in dark moments… When I cannot work, when I am thick with doubt or when I can’t stop googling celebrity pets.
I had never read Eliot until my first bout with writer’s block a few years back, while working on my band’s second record and learning the meaning behind the expression ‘sophomore slump’. In times of crisis, I revisit his work with ‘sacred text’ levels of reverence, sometimes not even reading but just looking at lines.
On the day in question, I was reading carefully – perhaps with just a touch of aggression – and discovered Vivienne, his ‘institutionalised writer wife’. She was a dazzling type who, depending on what you believe, either inspired her husband’s best work or threatened to ruin it, published nothing in her own name, and whose coup de grace was a gossipy tell-all about Thomas’ inner circle. Where most people find inspiration in love, I find it in terrible marriages.
It is strange to write pop music for a living when you feel ambivalent about love songs, but I do. My co-writer and collaborator Patrick Riley is my husband of five years. I have written exactly 12 love songs for him, which is sufficient to the point of creepy/obsessive; it’s time to move on, but to what I don’t know.
It took me three months to eke out the lyrics to Needle And A Knife, a relatable song about my mother leaving her hometown of Canada to marry my American father and raise four children in the US. This is clearly an unsustainable pace, and no part of the result could be seen as a top 40 radio hit (sorry, record label!). Its potential for mainstream success aside, it was the first song I’d written in a long time that felt good. It felt accurate.
Months away from turning 30, I had a habit of reflecting on my youth in a way that rendered it frighteningly distant. It had become a pinpoint on the horizon. But, from this vantage point, a new closeness emerged: empathy for my mother and alignment with women whose talents were overshadowed by the men they loved, instead of encouraged like mine. I wrote the lyrics ‘I ain’t afflicted with a mind that’s either feminine or kind’, because T.S. once praised Vivienne for having a mind that was ‘not at all feminine.’
One by one, each line appeared, pliant, eager to be written. In less time than it takes an artisanal barista to brew a cup of pour-over coffee, I wrote what I later calledViv Without The N – it’s not a love song, but is just as intimate. Despite the unknowable differences, I share a fundamental connection with Vivienne. I am a bell that rings and she is the echo: quivering, distant. The album practically writes itself…
Non-fiction author Charles Rangeley-Wilson inspects the artistry and skill surrounding the fisherman’s flyIt is said that Tenkara, a Japanese form of fly-fishing in which the angler dances up the stream, caressing the water with his line and lure, was developed by Samurai warriors: that swordsmanship and art came together in pursuit of the Cherry salmon. There were, no doubt, easier ways to catch these pretty fish. But, the world over, something in the gratuitous beauty of fish that belong in the salmonid family seems to demand correspondingly ornate methods of capturing them. In British waters we have Atlantic salmon not Cherry, but these bright fish draw a similar response from the men who chase them. Nets are used by those earning a living. But when it comes to rod and line angling what matters is the art of it and the art is built around the fly.
The first was used 2000 years ago in Macedonia and was literally a fly, or a feathery representation of one: red wool and two feathers from under a cock’s wattles. The salmon flies here must look, if anything, more like small fish than insects but the line of evolution is clear, from the Macedonian bee to these baroque creations. They are late Victorian, and as filigreed therefore as salmon flies ever were before or ever have been since. Even their names have a sort of Highland romanticism: The Silver Spectre, Taite’s Fancy. For the fly called Jock Scott (middle right) George Kelson, author of the The Salmon Fly, 1895, reserved special praise: it was ‘the utmost triumph of harmony and proportion’. Of the Akroyd (bottom left) Kelson advised that Spey anglers should trial it with Mallard wing ‘for ordinary occasions’, that men of the Usk should use Black Turkey, whilst on the Earn, he noted, Mandarin Drake had been known to secure more than one tight line.
Did it make any difference to the salmon of the Spey, Usk or Earn even on ‘ordinary occasions’? Who knows? A taking salmon will, maddeningly, sometimes snap at anything, and sometimes only at one thing. Such intricate detail and artistic qualities, one suspects, were more about catching men than fish.
It is said that Tenkara, a Japanese form of fly-fishing in which the angler dances up the stream, caressing the water with his line and lure, was developed by Samurai warriors: that swordsmanship and art came together in pursuit of the Cherry salmon. There were, no doubt, easier ways to catch these pretty fish. But, the world over, something in the gratuitous beauty of fish that belong in the salmonid family seems to demand correspondingly ornate methods of capturing them. In British waters we have Atlantic salmon not Cherry, but these bright fish draw a similar response from the men who chase them. Nets are used by those earning a living. But when it comes to rod and line angling what matters is the art of it and the art is built around the fly.