Paul Auster: "I Don't Know If I Even Consider Myself a Novelist."
Sean Bell
(First published in the Sunday Herald, 1 November 2009)
"Once these characters came into my head, I understood what the novel was really about," Paul
Auster tells me. "The passion of youth, but also the innocence, and how when we're young,
many times we get in over our heads. We fail to understand the people who are talking to us,
and often get into trouble because of it."
To a twenty three-year-old in conversation with arguably one of the most significant authors of
the past quarter century, comments like that can throw a spanner in your works. It's a relief
when he continues: "But without that willingness to take risks while young, nothing much is
going to happen to you."
We're talking about Invisible, the prolific 62-year-old's latest novel that, through three
intertwining narratives, tells the story of Adam Walker, a student and aspiring poet at Columbia
University in 1967 whose own youthful passion and innocence are overwhelmed by visiting
professor Rudolf Born - a monstrous intellectual far more terrifying and mysterious than the
Hannibal Lecters of this world - and his enticing, enigmatic girlfriend Margot, with whom
Walker begins an destructive affair. Forces of sheer personality and damaged humanity, their
involvement in Walker's life leads to a crisis, the reckoning of which only culminates decades
hence.
Auster has been almost ideological in his past refusal to blur autobiography and fiction - 1982's
The Invention of Solitude, a meditation on his father, is one of his few forays into memoir - so
he's quick to kill off any superficial comparisons between life and art. "Every writer borrows
from his or her life, but it’s so transformed by fiction that the autobiographical links are severed.
So yes, I was a student at Columbia. Yes, I was the same age as Walker in 1967, and I did go to
Paris that Fall. But I don’t know if that really means anything. Especially for a reader."
While Walker is a character of engaging, deceptive simplicity, Born is "a tricky character.
There’s a lot of charm and intelligence and seductiveness in him. There’s also tremendous
anger, violence and cynicism. He’s a damaged soul - something went out of him during his years
in the army in Algeria." I mention how the character reminded me of Henry Kissinger, another
'quiet psychopath'. "That’s a very interesting comparison," he laughs. "I’ve certainly always been
frightened to death of Kissinger."
Conscious parallels are drawn by Auster between the Machiavellian professor and his real-life
namesake, Bertran de Born, a 12th century aristocrat and Occitan troubadour best known for
his cameo in Dante's Inferno, wandering Hell while clutching his own severed head. Early in the
novel, Walker recounts how joyfully de Born would write of bloodshed and discord with a
fascinated horror Auster seems to share. "I think the poem I translated for the novel is one of
the scariest pieces of literature I’ve ever read. I’ve never encountered such exultation at the idea
of murder and war in an artist... Quite remarkable," he chuckles.
We don't dwell on narrative technique, since it is often what's talked about most in relation to
Auster; it has been, ever since the New York Trilogy appeared in the year I was born and
brought him accolades as the most stylish of postmodernists (a label he never sought).
However, he allows, the multiple narratives deserve comment. "This book is unusual for me. It’s
the first time in many years when I’ve written with more than one point of view. It felt right for
this story to do it in that way - I can’t justify it. I’d never written in the second person before, for
example, and it seemed to give me a different kind of energy."
While not based on his own experiences, the characterisation of Walker as a young poet is
something Auster can relate to. "Poetry is something I did very intensely during my youth, but
by the time I was about thirty, I ran into a wall and stopped. I haven’t written a serious poem
since, just funny poems for family occasions. I do feel I’m still writing as a poet in my novels; I’m
terribly interested in the music and cadence of prose. I’ve always felt that reading a novel is a
physical experience as much as a mental one. If you can hear the music in the language,
something happens inside your body, and that transmits a kind of meaning that’s very difficult
to articulate."
In recent years though, Auster has joined authors such as Michael Chabon and Denis Johnson in
penning songs for the band One Ring Zero, and also for Sophie Auster, his daughter by wife and
fellow novelist Siri Hustvedt, an emerging singer currently working on her second album. "Her
mother and I are going to go and see her tonight in a little club in New York," he says with
palpable pride. "I’ve written a couple of things for her, and enjoyed the experience a lot. Those
were very personal things. But of course, writing a song is nothing like writing a poem."
Auster, though unmistakably American - his taste for noir, urban disconnection and Nathaniel
Hawthorne see to that - stands apart from much in American literature, particularly its
perpetual and faintly ridiculous project, 'the Great American Novel', echoes of which can be seen
in everything from Hemingway to Jonathan Franzen. "I don’t know if I even consider myself a
novelist. I’m telling stories. A lot of writers’ ambition is to record the social history they’re living
in. It’s certainly a legitimate project, but it’s something that’s never interested me. I’m much
more interested in the questions we ask: Why am I here? What does the world mean? Why am I
going to die? What is love? All those questions that torment you when you’re young..." He sighs.
"And you never find answers to when you get older." Aw, nuts.
So looking back with the perspective he has now, would he change anything about the intensity
of his own youth? "I can’t really regret the paths I took. I know I made terrible mistakes as a
writer while young. I was biting off more than I could chew, and therefore failing constantly. But
if I had been more modest in my attempts, maybe things would have been less interesting. What
happened happened, and here I am... Still breathing."
Now, he writes in an apartment three blocks away from where he lives with Hustvedt - "a
Spartan place. Nothing to do there but work. Only three people have the phone number." What
motivates him now? "Ultimately after all these years, it is pleasure as much as anything else. But
also, there’s a compulsive side to writing, almost as if one is suffering from some illness, and you
have to do this in order to keep yourself together. I probably need it."
Auster's views on literature as a whole, meanwhile, are not quite as doom-laden as some of his
contemporaries; he has no fear about 'Kindle' e-readers or the death of literacy. In fact, he's
charmingly optimistic. "Everyone’s in a panic about this all the time. I’m over sixty years old and
I’ve been hearing it ever since I was young. But look at all the good writers around the world it’s an impressive moment right now. Besides, my daughter, her boyfriend and I had a
conversation a few months ago; they’re in their twenties, and they love books and paper and
print. They think this fascination with electronic devices is for middle-aged people. I mean, how
old are you?" Reluctantly, I tell him.
"Oh, so you’re just a kid," he says with that peculiar New York warmth. "Well hey. Good luck to
you, huh?"
The Sweet Life is Even Sourer
Sean Bell
(First published in the Herald, 18 March, 2010)
When Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes announced their separation this week it was front page
news. Few, if any, try to justify that. Complicity works better, and we are all involved. We mere
mortals cannot help our voyeuristic interest when people’s lives become a spectator sport. That
is "The Sweet Life", or La Dolce Vita as Frederico Fellini entitled his celebrated Rome-set movie
about journalism and celebrity, which is 50 years old this spring. "He calls this journalism?"
sneers one of Fellini’s grotesques at a hack chasing the beautiful people. You can see what he
means.
Will we ever get the point of La Dolce Vita? As its follies are clumsily repeated, lessons unlearnt,
history suggests otherwise. Yet the stylised dreadnought of European cinema has endured to
see its 50th anniversary, sending ripples throughout the lives and spheres it has affected. Victor
Ciuffa, a 77-year-old gossip columnist, attracted attention recently when he claimed that it was
his life which inspired the film. Felice Quinto, the tabloid photographer who was the model for
Fellini’s parasitic "Paparazzo", passed away in February, age 90 - the age Fellini would be, were
he alive today. Meanwhile, the director’s daughter has parted ways with the foundation set up
to preserve his memory, taking his Oscars with her, in a public spat almost managed to
overshadow the Italian première of Nine, Rob Marshall’s abortive musical remake of Fellini’s
other masterpiece, 8½.
Why does so much reflected glory and notoriety still exist? Today, the film is well known and
little seen, yet its legacy abounds. It has been updated in Woody Allen's Celebrity, homaged in
Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, named as a influence by everyone from Martin Scorcese to
Pedro Almodovar, and even recreated in a Peroni lager commercial. It christened a subspecies
of sleazeball "paparazzi", taught us that Jesus travels by helicopter, and Anita Ekberg - a onewoman answer to the "size zero" debate - gifted her improbable silhouette to the ages from the
waters of the Trevi fountain. Yet for all its self-conscious imagery, it is a movie that aimed to
hold up a mirror to the society that produced it. Remember that, and the funny parts become
hilarious - and the sad parts, tragic.
"You, sir," Fellini was told by the producer Lorenzo Pegoraro, "are a sadist and you like
ugliness." A harsh judgement maybe, but Il Maestro never denied the charge, but later shrugged:
"If I’m a cruel satirist, at least I’m not a hypocrite: I never judge what other people do." Luckily,
Pegoraro didn’t produce La Dolce Vita - that honour went to Dino de Laurentiis, the fearless
Neapolitan who threw money at unlikely productions from Blue Velvet to Flash Gordon - and
Fellini was unleashed. A stalwart of Italian neo-realism, Fellini had made his name with heartfelt
dramas of everyday Italian life, examining the hardship of the underclass in films suh as La
Strada and Nights of Cabiria. La Dolce Vita, though, marked a new direction for Fellini; a
departure into the baroque, flamboyant, symbolic and absurd territory that would become
known simply as "Fellini-esque".
Documenting the eponymous ‘sweet life’ of post-war Italy, a nation both exhilarated and
exhausted by Mussolini’s fall, it follows a self-loathing gossip hack (Fellini’s favourite lead,
Marcello Mastroianni) through the ghastly society parties, celebrity "events", pretentious salons,
sham-religious spectacles and meaningless sex that take up his days and nights.
At the Milan première, Fellini was both cheered and spat upon, while the movie itself was
hastily condemned by both the government and Catholic Church, proving the apolitical Fellini
could parody the ruling classes just as brutally as his friend, the Marxist enfant terrible Pasolini.
More than one wag has noted the film could serve as a wry epilogue to The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire - Fellini’s fiddle, played as a decaying civilisation finally burns.
However, his most incendiary provocation was reserved for the culture of celebrity. In the film’s
best-known chapter, the American starlet ‘Sylvia’ (a clearly Swedish Anita Ekberg) descends
upon Rome in a heavily-staged publicity tour, while a pie-eyed gutter press (including
Mastroianni) prostrates itself pathetically before it. Ekberg’s performance is extraordinary: for a
role partly based on herself, she apparently wrote most of her lines, and thus delivers a
devastating portrayal of a ditzy airhead - who is, essentially, her. We should laugh at Sylvia, and
every vacuous celeb she personifies - the film certainly invites us to. It is made explicit enough
that the diva is quite sensationally dumb, and not sympathetically so. Yet we fall in love with her
as ridiculously as the fawning press pack. To know La Dolce Vita is to know Sylvia, and while she
frolics barefoot in the Trevi fountain (a feat Mastroianni required a wet-suit and a bottle of
vodka to emulate), we’re not mourning the decay of civilisation - we’re looking are her. As
Ekberg later said, "It was I who made Fellini famous, not the other way around."
The celebrity may be fake, but she is not. Chances are, a still of Ms Ekberg and her embonpoint
accompanies this article. Fellini never judges us for being enraptured by the bustle and glamour
of the sweet life, and the narcissism that comes with it - he simply shows us the emptiness that
exists when there is nothing else.
Much of the film’s immortal imagery was a reflection of Italy at that time: a statue of Christ was
indeed flown over Rome, en route to the Vatican, in 1950. Two girls in the town of Terni briefly
enraptured press with their "visions" of the Virgin Mary, and a party held by millionaire RH
Vandebilt saw a notorious striptease that found its way into the narrative. What would such a
patchwork look like, were it composed of the 21st century’s excesses, eccentricities and
atrocities? It’s hard to imagine it being as stylish.
Fellini portrayed a nightmare in La Dolce Vita, creating an awesome piece of art as a kind of
afterthought. It leaves the audience with little meaning, failed redemption, no hope. Fifty years
later, is such harshness justified? The vacuous netherworld shown seems tame compared to the
tabloid culture we now live in. "By 1965, there’ll be total depravity," sniffs another of Fellini’s
revellers. "How squalid everything will be." After half a century, La Dolce Vita forces us to make
our own judgement.
WE CALL UPON THE AUTHOR TO EXPLAIN
(First published in the Sunday Herald, 30 August 2009)
by Sean Bell
July, T in the Park: Nick Cave is in good spirits.
Snake-hipped and Stygian in the evening's fading afterglow, the supremely confident 52-yearold has obliged, indulged and thrilled the audience. He has wished his Bad Seeds bassist a happy
birthday. Now, halfway through a demonstration of what former Cave collaborator Lydia Lunch
acidly described as “his genius” – convincing “goth kids to listen to their grandfathers' music” he pauses to thank Canongate, his publisher, for just being a really swell bunch of guys. From
that moment on, The Death of Bunny Munro is inevitable.
I have a friend who, when alcohol has perchance been involved, sometimes takes it upon himself
to explain in blistering detail exactly what I do and do not know about Nick Cave. “Ironic
detachment,” he tells me sternly, “is not an option for him or his audience. A nudge and a wink
won't get you far.”
On this, if little else – my colleague resolutely prefers the Birthday Party, Cave's smack-drenched
post-punk debut band, whereas I veer towards the Bad Seeds, his current ensemble of
electrified outback bluesmen – I agree with him. Too often Cave has been treated as a
phantasmagoric novelty, from the predictable rubber-necking over booze and drugs (Cave, for
those who care, has been clean since 1990) to some critics' palpable discomfort over his deeply
personal conception of God - a faith most prefer to gloss over as a kind of exotic ornamentation
to his music, like Dolly Parton's cleavage. Yet playing the emotional tourist through Cave's
religion or addiction is to refuse to engage with the powerful, troubling art he is capable of.
Cave's side-projects are always worth keeping track of, from his self-penned 'Australian
Western' The Proposition to his sadly never-realised script for a Gladiator sequel (in which
Maximus is reincarnated by Roman gods and eventually haunts a Vietnam-era Pentagon).
Arguably the most intriguing amongst these was Cave's first novel, And the Ass Saw The Angel.
Written in Berlin as a young man approaching the worst depths of heroin addiction, who
idolised a fire-and-brimstone God the same way a teenager might idolise say, a smack-addled
Australian Goth rocker, Cave bled out the narrative of Euchrid Euchrow, deformed mute and
holy fool, set in a nightmarish Deep South populated by deranged Ukulites and judged by the
kind of God who is always in the room but never says a word.
Reactions were positive, not to mention surprised; few believed a rock singer could write a book
that was readable, let alone allegorical, personal and blackly comic. Published in 1989, it became
Time Out magazine's Book Of The Year for 1990 and elicited complimentary comparisons with
Faulkner and Burroughs.
Flash-forward to today, and the circumstances could not be more different. Cave's second novel,
the Death of Bunny Munro, was written while touring Europe, “on the bus, late at night in hotel
rooms, in bars, taxis. I saw it as 'work' in the same way I see songwriting,” he explained in the
Guardian, “essentially an experiment to see whether it was personally possible to create
something amidst the chaos and exhaustion of a tour. I found, to my surprise, that I was swept
away by the process.”
Things aren't just different for Cave. Twenty years after And The Ass Saw The Angel, we no
longer think of Bob Dylan's sprawling, psychedelic tome of failed prose-poetry Tarantula, but
charming, impressionistic revelries of his memoir Chronicles; Julian Cope now writes stately
guidebooks to megalithic sites around the UK; Ryan Adams' Infinity Blues, a collection of short
stories and poetry, was received warmly on publication last year. The snobbery that says
singers should stick to singing, and by extension implies that rock music is an artform
fundamentally below literature, has faded – perhaps because critics realised that if you treat
singers like morons, they will become moronic almost out of spite. It might have taken Girls
Aloud to provide a painful counterpoint, but people are slowly becoming okay with singers who
actually want to be artists.
So, the question becomes, what kind of a novel does a songwriter produce? There are few
precedents, and The Death of Bunny Munro certainly doesn't imitate Cave's apocalyptic debut.
The novel takes in three generations of the Munro family - a grandfather, a father and a son, all
named Bunny, all trapped in a recognisable world that's “a hard place to be good in”. The middle
Bunny, a travelling salesman perpetually on the verge of self-hatred and haunted by the recent
death of the wife who was his only stabilising influence, takes Bunny Junior on the road along
the south coast of England, facing and fleeing hustled customers, demonic apparitions and most
terrifyingly of all, the spectre of the ultimate Bunny patriarch.
Graeme Thomson, author of I Shot A Man In Reno (a history of death in popular song, which
unsurprisingly led him to cross paths with Cave's work) tells me, “It's very much based in the
real world, even though it spins off into this hellish descent. I was struck by how much it departs
from what you might expect from a Nick Cave novel in the way the characters are drawn and the
fact that it had a discernable plot. However, there are clear thematic elements he will return to –
he's like a murderer coming back to the scene of the crime.
“I think, with the Death of Bunny Munro, it's not clear it's by a songwriter at all. It stands on its
own completely, and I think that's a real triumph for Cave. It would have been easy to write a
very dense, elliptical and not particularly coherent novel, so I think this is a real evolution for
him as a writer.”
Thomson is also grateful for Cave's distinctive humour, which infects the novel far more than in
And The Ass Saw The Angel: “He's never really more than one step away from self-parody. The
way he writes is as a kind of roaring descent into himself, and you're always at the mercy of the
whole exercise becoming slightly ridiculous. Luckily, Cave embraces that.”
There will always be those who have a baffling amount of bile for polymaths. That all art is
linked by virtue of being art is a truth that will be grudgingly admitted, and then ignored: it
tends to threaten academic distinctions. Ivory towers may be given cause to wobble. However,
the alternative would a world in which we did not have The Death of Bunny Munro, and that
would be a world deprived.
Chuck Palahniuk Pulls No Punches
(First published in The Herald, 31 May, 2010)
Chuck Palahniuk, whatever one may imagine, is not easily defined. Ironic then, that he's one of
the most aggressively tagged and labelled authors working today. The associations, not all of
them unfounded, have endured for over a decade: social degradation and desolate humour,
extreme violence and bodily fluids, and a parade of eloquent anti-heroes summoned from
America's lunatic fringe.
There are two sides to such an image. It's not for nothing that Palahniuk's website is called 'The
Cult', and I can remember friends who spent their university years with some of Palahniuk's
more iconoclastic quotations emblazoned on t-shirts. Conversely, there are some who still cling
to a superficial, reductive perception of his work - a view that, in the words of an infamous Salon
review by Laura Miller (which prompted a rare, pissed off rejoinder from Palahniuk), his novels
"traffic in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered
Nietzsche and Nine Inch Nails". Beyond the hagiography and the hatchet jobs however, to read
Palahniuk today is to witness the rare sight of a writer genuinely in flux, as opposed to on the
make.
"In a way," he explains, "I feel like I have enough of a readership that I can take these risks. I can
experiment, and risk troubling or even losing some people for the sake of the glorious
experiment of discovering something new and striking. My intention is not necessarily to piss
[my readers] off, but to show them something different - not just to shock them or make them
laugh, but to find some way of very effectively breaking their hearts."
Palahniuk's latest novel, Tell-All, is what critics tend to call "a departure". Consciously recalling
Sunset Boulevard, the uniquely stylised narrative centres around Katherine Kenton, once one of
Hollywood's greatest screen legends, her star now almost faded. A combination of Norma
Desmond, Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor at their most addled, powered by brittle vanity and
adamantine self-delusion, Kenton has survived booze, drugs, showbiz marriages and cosmetic
surgeries, with her only constant the steadfast Hazie Coogan, her live-in handmaiden, who for
better or worse sees to it that her mistress survives. Which naturally makes her suspicious
when, in the twilight of her fame, the dashing, sinister Webster Carlton Westward III begins
making advances...
When Palahniuk's last novel (the underrated Pygmy) was published last year, he expressed
fears that it would be perceived as a political satire, rather than the coming-of-age novel he
intended it as. There is a similar risk of misconception with Tell-All; already, some early reviews
are treating this Palahniuk's assault on celebrity culture. But there are larger themes at work: "It
deals with our tendency to use the mythology of each other to self-aggrandise ourselves,"
Palahniuk says reflectively, "usurping the stories of other people's lives, so that once their dead,
you can combine the power of their narratives to make your own that much more grand."
Palahniuk had said previously that most of his novels deal with characters who hid in isolation
before ultimately rejecting it; Kenton, on the other hand, despite being insulated by the rotting
glory of her stardom, is desperate for affection, recognition, contact. When I ask what prompted
this change, the answer is immediate.
"The big difference with Tell-All was that I was writing it in the year my mother was dying of
cancer. I gave up my household so I could go and live with her. Much of the novel was written
bedside in her hospital room, which was a completely quiet, stressful place, or it was written in
her home while she was being treated and sedated, and very slowly dying. There was a sense of
isolation in both those situations. She died almost exactly a year ago." I tell him I'm sorry. "Me
too," he says with a sad chuckle.
Pygmy, despite dealing with familiar themes of anti-capitalism, alienation, and a broken
American Dream that are recognisable as far back as Fight Club, was arguably his most
stylistically daring work - an epistolary narrative is in the form of secret reports from a teenage
sleeper agent sent to America from a totalitarian nation to effect a terrorist atrocity, written in
fractured pidgin-English - and Tell-All continues the experimentation: its prose utilises a
mixture of novelistic and cinematic devices, peppered with "a veritable Tourette's Syndrome of
rat-tat-tat name-dropping" of Hollywood stars, historical figures and brand names.
"I researched the conventions and structural form of that era, which was gossip columns Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and so on," he explains. The scandal sheets of Hollywood's
Golden Age "were able to invent language in an ongoing way, so that they could almost
copyright or control the language regarding social phenomena. For example, when there was a
celebrity couple that was secretly fighting and might divorce at any time, Walter Winchell would
call them a 'don't-invite-'em'. It was code for saying that theirs was a troubled marriage and
they would not be pleasant to be around. To a certain extent, we still continue this practice of
owning the language by inventing new terms - 'Brangelina', and so on. We elevate celebrities to
something special and unique, but also minimise and label them with one cute, slangy term."
Some of the funniest scenes in the novel are descriptions of Kenton's imagined, fabulously
bizarre filmography, through which she inserts herself into history and gives her life apparent
meaning: grappling with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository, designing the Abomb with Einstein and Christian Dior, and escaping from Nazis with Jewish babies clamped to
her breasts. "I'm just stunned by how Hollywood can take historical events and treat them with
absolutely no regard. Years ago, I was talking to a reporter about the movie Titanic, and he said
his father had been the surgeon on the Titanic, and had died on the ship, so he really hated that
movie. By transposing this melodramatic love story onto an event that had its own weight and
history, they had negated the actual tragedy with this fake tragedy."
So while this isn't as bloody a deconstruction of celebrity as it might have been - if Palahniuk
had intended to eviscerate the Heidi Montags of this world, there were clearer ways to do it - the
peculiarities of that world necessarily inform the novel. It's a world that Palahniuk, two of
whose books have become films while the rest of his bibliography is in varying stages of
Hollywood development, has been ideally suited to observe.
"There were some experiences that were so inspiring they went right into the book. When I was
last at the Sundance Film Festival with Choke [the Sam Rockwell-starring adaptation of
Palahniuk's novel of the same name], I remembered there were all these incredibly beautiful,
perfectly groomed actresses, surrounded by paparazzi. And each of these famous, famous
women was completely unencumbered - they didn't carry a coat or a purse, nothing. They was
almost as innocent as a deer, wandering into the city with wide eyes and being photographed by
tourists. It was amazing. But always, about twenty feet behind, there would be this little dumpy
creature burdened with all the coats and tote-bags and make-up cases and all the crap that went
into creating this gorgeous, pristine thing everyone else was looking at. So I was absolutely
fascinated by this shadow army of women who were overweight and grumpy and not made-up,
who had basically been turned into pack mules. It goes back to the days of ladies-in-waiting court servants to keep the figurehead perfect."
A prolific and disciplined writer, Palahniuk says he's constantly working on three or four novels,
either in his head or in note-form. Right now, he's absorbing the oeuvre of Judy Bloom, the
enormously successful 'young adult' author of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, in
preparation for his next novel, Damned.
"It's about an eleven-year-old girl in Hell. It's part of that literary tradition where a seemingly
innocent creature ends up in horrible circumstances. In America we had Pollyanna, where the
girl is orphaned and sent to live with a wealthy aunt far away. It's basically one of those stories:
Pollyanna in Hell," he explains with a note of mischief. "You can get a lot of humour when you
present something horrific, then fail to have a character react to it in a socially appropriate way.
So my protagonist, Madison, doesn't buy into the fact that Hell is all excrement and blood and
razor blades. She's like Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm - she just sighs and gets on with it."
Undeniably a Chuck Palahniuk kind of story. And that's no bad thing.
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk is published in hardback on June 3rd from Jonathan Cape, priced
£12.99
Sufjan Stevens: 21st Century Renaissance Man
(first published in the Sunday Herald, 9 October 2009)
"I actually don't like soundtracks," says Sufjan Stevens. "But it's unavoidable - there's music
accompanying us in shopping malls, airports, in our cars, on the TV. There's a part of me that
really loathes music's omnipresence." He pauses. "But at the same time, music is constantly in
my head."
Sufjan Stevens doesn't pause much, so there's a temptation to regard every one as meaningful.
It's wiser to pay attention to what he's saying. Those used to his singing voice, diffident yet
affecting, might be surprised by his talent for monologuing like a dorm-room philosopher. But
Sufjan Stevens lives to surprise.
He set the world on fire with Illinois - part two in his "Fifty States Project", a plan to record a
concept album for every state of the union - and acted like it was no big deal. He's produced an
album of electronica based on the Chinese zodiac, five EPs of Christmas songs, choral folk,
orchestral arrangements and has an upcoming set of improvised instrumentals designed 'to
evoke insomnia'. Last year - one of his busiest ever - after scoring Natalie Portman's 22-minute
directorial début Eve, he said he was unlikely to write anymore original soundtracks, with
exceptions made should Cassavetes, Antonioni or Kieślowski return from the dead.
Despite such sentiments, Stevens now offers his fascinated fanbase The BQE, a multi-headed
animal comprising of a film, an original score, essays, photography and a comic book, all
inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a subject which seems unlikely even for the man
who rhapsodised Michigan.
"I intended to create a non-personal, non-narrative piece. I tried to reduce my own personal
investment as much as possible, and I refused to incorporate one of my strengths, which is the
song. I was relinquishing my greatest weapon," he chuckles.
The expressway itself is not looked upon with love by most New Yorkers; it's notorious for
traffic congestion, noise, smog and depressing physical unattractiveness, and no-one knows it
better than Stevens: "The music is an imposition - it's a heightened and transcendent, and the
BQE itself is not a very enlightened experience. It's an ugly, monolithic source of traffic and
pollution and the object of scorn. So I decided to go the other way and recreate the BQE as I
would have imagined it, which is as an object of beauty and perpetual motion and reflections
and lights and colours. But it's a complete fabrication; the beautification of a monumental beast.
I think that's typical of me, so if there's anything personal in the project, it's that."
In early 2007, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (better known by its Flintstones-esque acronym,
BAM) approached Stevens with a loose brief: "The only stipulation was that it be 30 minutes
long and about Brooklyn," he remembers.
From there, unsurprisingly for Stevens, the project grew increasingly, confidently grandiose. A
16mm film was made, documenting New York from the BQE's point of view. A band was
assembled, and then an orchestra. A trio of hula hoop artistes was included and provided with
costumed identities; the 'Hooper Heroes', who star in the vinyl edition's accompanying comic
book (written, of course, by Stevens). All of which came together for three successive nights of
performance at BAM in November 2007, each night selling out the academy's opera house
without advertising. What was the experience like?
"Stressful. Reckless. Everything hanging by a thread. The video had to match up with the music,
cued by a score-reader, triggered by a videographer, with a conductor keeping thirty musicians
together. The music isn't necessarily sophisticated or revolutionary, but it's very... athletic."
An inescapable comparison for a piece such as the BQE is Philip Glass, one which Stevens
invites. "He's definitely an unavoidable influence in all contemporary music. He plays a huge
role in almost everything I write, since I listened to so much of that music as a kid. BQE makes
pretty strong reference to Koyaanisqatsi, but the score is way more romantic than anything
Glass has ever done. He's very consistent in his ideology; his classroom hasn't really changed in
the past thirty years. That's his thing, and he helped create it, so more power to him."
After the 'cinematic suite' was played to a mixture of classical music aficionados and soldiers of
Sufjan, Stevens took to the stage in his trademark rainbow-coloured eagle-wings to play some of
his better known numbers, including a deeply emotional rendition of 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr', his
ballad about the Illinois-born mass murderer with a day job as a children's clown. Entirely free
of serial killer chic, it poignantly meditates on the best and worst that humanity is capable of,
but afterwards, Stevens suggested he no longer wished to play the song, since he no longer felt
as he did when he wrote it. I inquire if this is still the case.
"Your relationship with your music changes pretty dramatically over time. That song is
problematic because of the subject matter, and requires a certain psychological investment that
isn't always fruitful... or healthy. At the time, I was fatigued, and just too despairing and
existential to get through it. Now I feel a real healthy disassociation to my songs, and I no longer
have to reconstruct the emotional climate at the moment of writing it in order to sing it. I played
it on my last tour, and I never stumbled."
Those who can sort the myths from the reality - a few years ago, Stevens was putting it about
that he was abandoned on his parents' doorstep in a milk crate - will know that Brooklyn is not
Stevens' first home. He was born in Detroit, and lived in Michigan until he was in his early
twenties. Despite or maybe because of this, he feels a powerful connection to the city and its
mythic undertones.
"New York was pretty abstract to me when I was growing up in Michigan; so foreign, so
gargantuan. My first trip out was when I kind of quit college and moved to the city to see if I
could make it - and it was a very tragic year for me. I went back home, finished college, but felt
like I wanted to give it second try. I felt galvanised. The character of New York seemed greater
than all the characters within it. And if you're going to exist and survive here, you had to learn to
yield to that."
I ask how he feels about Robert Moses, the city planner who designed the BQE itself and about
whom every New Yorker seems to have strong opinions. "He was in a position of power in postwar America, when there was incredible federal funding for reshaping the cities, so he was able
to transform on a massive scale - more than anyone before or after him. And now, we're living in
the shadow of a building boom in New York, but it's all private investors focused on capital,
devoted to a very personal kind of corporate greed, so there's been an interesting change of
opinion about Moses. The people now long for a master plan."
As with all his work, the BQE is being released by Asthmatic Kitty, the record label he helps run
with his former stepfather, Lowell Brams (and named for Sara, the cat Brams rescued, pregnant
and starving, from the woods near his home, and which sadly passed away last December). How
are they dealing with the latest recession?
"Our label's suffering a lot, because people aren't buying records any more. But at the same
time, it's teaching us to be much more resourceful and industrious. We'll see how we fare. I'm
invested in music and art and I couldn't care less about money. I know we're a business, but
we're a business of artists. You have to keep your priorities straight."
He takes one of those could-be-significant pauses. "Not enough people have drawn a
relationship between our economies and the sustaining of resources - that kind of green
revolution is inversely correlated to the recession. Not enough people are making comparisons
between those two things, and celebrating the side-effects. Society cannot be maintained by
eternal, infinite, exponential growth." He sighs. "We're only here for a short time."
I ask if he feels like taking it easy in 2010 after the year he's had. He perks back up. "Oh no. I
want to do a lot more, actually."
The BQE by Sufjan Stevens is released on October 19th from Asthmatic Kitty, priced £12.98.
TESTAMENT OF YOUTH - The Creative Writing Class of 2010
(First published in The Scottish Review of Books, Volume 6, Issue 3, August 2010)
Stanley Roger Green, in his charming (if forgivably rose-tinted) memoir of literary Edinburgh, A
Clamjamfray of Poets, offers a mournful appraisal of our republic of letters’ contemporary
denizens: “I am soon made aware of their sobriety and watchfulness… They don’t seem to go to
parties for fun, but to ‘network’. No one ever makes a remark that isn’t calculated, and there’s
never a Dionysian or Apollonian in sight. It is hard to resist the notion that one is in a market
place, that writers are subject to deals and negotiations, that literature is the stuff of commerce.”
Such a conclusion will hardly surprise many. Scottish literature is, regretfully, a market place,
and an increasingly desperate one at that. The recession – another notion that is difficult to
resist – has made everyone involved a little more hungry-eyed and grubby-handed. The Moving
Finger writes, and having writ, isn’t paid much for its trouble. Concurrently, it also appears –
especially if one wallows in the narcotic nostalgia of literary history – a less enthusiastically
colourful and more business-like place; less wilfully eccentric and ultimately more concerned
with its own self-preservation.
Particularly threatened, both in Scot-land and beyond, are short stories, which even prior to the
economic collapse were long perceived to be a shrinking niche, regarded as indulgent and
unsaleable by many publishers and largely bereft of the markets that sustained them
throughout the last century. So here we have two new collections, superficially as
representative of new Scottish writing as one could hope for, which, according to one’s
perspective, may repudiate some of these impressions, or offer grim confirmation of others.
The Year of Open Doors, edited by onetime Alasdair Gray apprentice Rodge Glass, is at first
glance, a defiantly uncommercial venture. Intended in the tradition of Lean Times (the
influential 1985 collection featuring stories by Gray, James Kelman and Agnes Owens) and
Children of Albion Rovers (a 1997 anthology including Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, which did
much to cement Rebel Inc’s adventurous reputation), it has been assembled, according to
Glass’s introduction, by concentrating on newer, less known writers, with no age limit and an
“internationalist” outlook. The second collection, labouring under the unfortunate title
Sushirexia, draws its contributions exclusively from the well-regarded Masters course in
Creative Writing at Glasgow University, whose alumni include Louise Welsh and Glass himself.
“The Year of Open Doors isn’t about trying to claim these writers for a Scottish cause, or fit them
into a tradition where so-and-so begat so-and-so and all is tidy,” writes Glass in his disarming
introduction. While this is no Year Zero manifesto for sweeping away what has come before,
there is a sense – articulated in Glass’s introduction and in evidence in many of the anthology’s
offerings – that the young writers present have been released from the constraints of legacy,
from the constant, jaded awareness of Scotland’s literary history that some might
understandably find stultifying. We may chuckle and marvel over oft-told anecdotes of MacCaig
and MacDiarmid, Stevenson and Hogg, but we may also wonder how long before these stories
become ghosts that haunt young writers – and what might they do to exorcise them?
Despite Glass’s contention, Scottish literature has never been “tidy”, even for those with strong
opinions. Across several decades – and, unfortunately, at some points within these two
collections – there is that recognisable strain of Scottish writing which Norman MacCaig termed
“kitchen sink kitsch” – sentimentality disguised as social realism, full of working-class clichés
and twee melancholy. MacCaig’s criticism comes with ample evidence – so what do we do with,
say, The Big Man by William McIlvanney, which is both sentimental and social realist, and offers
no repudiation of MacCaig’s distaste other than being very, very good?
We can at least argue, especially from our twenty-first century vantage point, that the literature
of the country which produced both Burns and Trocchi has few rules, but an abundance of
arguments. Furthermore, based on The Year of Open Doors, it seems few are interested in having
those arguments anymore. Scottish literature is apparently a less divisive and ideological place
than it was forty, thirty or twenty years ago, and that is – probably – a good thing. But the easygoing environment has maybe not forced those writers who have grown and emerged in it to
justify their decisions, even to themselves. The judgement is enormously difficult: I, like Glass,
would be unwilling to forge a chain between young writers and any imagined, abstract ‘legacy’
of Scottish literature. They should not have to carry such a burden – but they should, perhaps,
be more aware of it.
In as much as an overview is possible, The Year of Open Doors offers plenty of variety, but lacks
adventurousness. Possibly the most experimental effort is Kirstin Innes’ ‘Beefcake’, a story of
delusion and desire, which shows a knack for extreme imagery and only occasionally lowers
itself to shock tactics. New York-born Nora Chassler has a gift for translating vivid emotion into
the parlance of small talk, but her story, ‘She’s Awfy No’ Well’, suffers both from its epistolary
format – the story-as-email is a device that has yet to find its feet – and its perspective; viewing
one’s homeland through foreign eyes can be revelatory or tedious, and unfortunately Chassler’s
digressions on the mysterious attraction of pies and Irn Bru fall into the latter. Alan Bissett’s
story, ‘Celebrity Gossip’, is one of the most assured in the collection, capturing a poignant
despair over the adolescent fascination of modern junk culture, but lacking the space or the
savagery to deconstruct it effectively. ‘Playground Rules’ by Doug Johnstone, meanwhile, does
not break any new ground in its snapshot of a grieving widower and his young son, but as with
any honest work dealing with violence, succeeds in becoming positively unpleasant to read.
Kevin MacNeil’s ‘A Snake Drinks Water And Makes Poison, A Cow Drinks Water And Makes Milk’
is the most successful and epic story in the book, an escalating narrative leading up to the Asian
Tsunami, which pulls off the difficult trick of being both fast-paced and introspective.
The lack of adventurousness mentioned earlier may have as much to do with the editing style as
the content, however. In his introduction, Glass explains that stories were jointly selected by
himself and Mark Buckland (who set up Cargo, the publisher), each acting as the other’s
deterrent: “I was more of a Carver man, he was an admirer of Borges. I was always looking to
use less [sic] words, more ordinary words. Mark wanted the opposite.” Having established this
opposition, which might have yielded a more fascinatingly varied collection, the pair then
decided no story would be included without a vote from both of them. With this in mind, it’s
astonishing any stories were chosen at all, and I cannot help but wonder about the stories too
extreme in their convictions for the partnership, beloved by one but rejected by the other. But
then, as the editors proclaim in a rather ominous frontispiece, in what Douglas Adams might call
“large, unfriendly letters”, “A SHORT STORY COLLECTION IS A JOINT EFFORT”.
This communal ethic continues in Sushirexia, though since all its writers emerged from the
definable community of Creative Writing at Glasgow University, it is perhaps more natural. It
also helps that all thirty-two stories are themed around Hunger. As any such collection should
do, it fully explores the possibilities of interpretation that a single concept can encompass. And
as with The Year Of Open Doors, it is a mixed bag: the title story, by Jackie Copleton, does not
quite justify its grim voyeurism; Duncan Muir’s ‘The Crabman and the Fishwife’, admirably
grotesque, owes a little too much to Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, while ‘Whit Div Ye Want Me Tae
Say?’, Fiona Ashley’s deceptively light-hearted story of sexuality and weight issues, is the
collection’s best example of writing in Scots, a test of skill that avoids the perils of transcribed
Broons dialogue and successfully evokes the musicality of language in Scotland. The best and
most confident entry, however, is Linda Duncan McLaughlin’s ‘First Taste’, an unapologetically
romantic portrait of youthful emotion, stunningly presented through a juxtaposition of poetry
and prose, possessing the bravery to have an embarrassment of style.
Sadly, it is the exception rather than the rule. Zoe Strachan, one of the alumni of Glasgow
University’s Masters in Creative Writing argues in a blurb that the anthology “absolutely gives
the lie to the notion that creative writing courses churn out formulaic work.” And she is not
entirely wrong – and then again, not entirely right, either. One can understand the snippiness of
those talented writers who emerged from a Creative Writing background over its arguable
merits, especially when so many of them seem intuitively sound: how could young writers do
anything but benefit from being in each other’s company, and learning from each other’s
criticism?
The answer is the fear that the detriment of such an environment – much like the editorial
compromises of Glass and Buckland – may be if not a lack of ambition, then an excess of
humility. It may sound glib, but this is the last quality a young writer needs. Where flashes of
daring appear, one wishes such extremes would be embraced, rather than shied away from. This
is not to imply the conditions that spawned such stories were gulags of sterile conformity, but
still, one wonders how many gorgeous notions may have been killed by the cloying kindness of
classroom advice, and how much such practices have contributed to creating the networking
“stiff-backed generation” that Stanley Roger Green bemoans. But then again, the most important
lesson of creative writing classes may be to teach young writers to ignore the criticisms of
morons… This critic included.
Both of these collections – whether in Glass’s comparison with Lean Times and Children of Albion
Rovers, or the impressive track record of Glasgow University’s Creative Writing course – seek to
live up to standards set before them, while at the same time escaping such legacies. An obvious
solution to both would be to allow writers to turn inward and reject the advice and influence of
their peers. Literature is not formed by committee, and writing, whatever some may say, is
rarely, if ever, a joint venture.
Rodge Glass is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 14.30 on
21 August and 15.30 on 30 August
THE YEAR OF OPEN DOORS Edited by Rodge Glass
CARGO, £13.99, ISBN 9780956308320, PP235
SUSHIREXIA:THIRTY-TWO STORIES ABOUT HUNGER Edited by Gordon Jenkins and Robert Smith
FREIGHT, £9.95, ISBN 9780954402464, PP240