All Aboard to Alibi
Published Saturday, July 16, 2011 by Kevin Breathnach.
Some of you might be interested to know that I am now writing about books and visual art over at An Allegory of Labour. |
Colm Tóibin Interview
Published Wednesday, April 20, 2011 by Kevin Breathnach.
This article originally appeared in Trinity News.
Nearly five years ago, on the way to a first date with a girl who would soon after become my girlfriend, I saw Colm Tóibín, dressed in a long black coat, turning the corner at the top of Grafton Street in the direction of Baggot Street. When I got the pub, I told the girl that I had seen Colm Tóibín and that, noticing that I was carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tóibín had looked up at me and said something like: “Oh Eliot, is it? Very good!” In fact, he walked past me without a word.
What I had told was a completely unnecessary lie – the first of many I was to tell the same girl in the two years that followed. My arrival at Tóibín’s house to interview him about The Empty Family – his new collection of stories, in which the poetry of T.S. Eliot just happens to make a minor appearance – represents a small, personal exorcism.
It is now twenty years since Tóibín published his first novel, The South. Set in Barcelona, where Tóibín moved to immediately after graduating from UCD, it won plaudits from such luminaries as Don DeLillo and John Banville. Since then, he has published a further five novels, including The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, all to more or less critical acclaim.
After The Master, his fictional portrait of Henry James and arguably his finest work, Tóibín published a book of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons. It is a form in which he thrives. Now, in the wake of Brooklyn, yet another novel of huge critical and popular acclaim, he has turned again to the short story. A pattern seems to be forming. “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is that short stories are of no commercial value. But working with something that is of no commercial value is actually very useful. There’s a great purity about it.”
The Empty Family is a collection of nine stories that are each marked by some concern with the notion of connectedness and disconnectedness. Though the majority of its stories were commissioned and written in the last three or four years, Tóibín underlines the fact that some of these pieces were conceived a very long time ago indeed.
“I’d had a sentence for The New Spain since 1988. I had always planned for it to be a novel – but the only image that stayed with me fully was that the mother would put a chain around the fridge.” Going back even further, the story Silence, depicting the secret affair Lady Gregory had with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, has its roots in an entry marked ‘January 23d, 1894’ in the notebooks of Henry James – a document full of unwritten James stories which Tóibín plans to pinch from again.
Other stories here seem intensely autobiographical. The protagonist in The Pearl Fishers, for instance, is a gay writer from Wexford, living at an address quite close to the one I visited Tóibín at for this interview. But Tóibín is quick to point out that, though some of the details in these stories may seem autobiographical, their inclusion has more to do with being able to write better about the things you know.
“I could have put him living in a fictional space,” he says, “but I know what that space is like, walking up Kildare Street or Dawson Street. And once the word ‘murderous’ occurred to describe all those buildings filled with ad agencies and auctioneers, that was it. I mean, I’m not sure if the word even slightly accurate. But it still struck me and so it stuck.”
He stops to utter the word once more – “muhrrr-derous” – as if to prove its authenticity. “And so I brought him further along down Pembroke Road,” he continues, “because I have an idea of what that walk is like, which I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me to take him down the North Strand or Dorset Street. You’ve got a repository of images that you can raid.”
The protagonist in Barcelona, 1975 seems to be Tóibín again – a young gay man, who, on finishing his exams at the age of twenty, takes, “the boat first to Holyhead, the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona.” The character subsequently discovers himself sexually and ends up partaking in several gay orgies. “There’s an element of playfulness to it as well. Somebody reading this book of stories in particular could think: ‘Holy fuck! This guy is crazy.’ It would take a lot to explain to somebody just how dull your life is instead.”
Answering a question, Tóibín will often rest his hand ponderously on top of his bald head, his fingers spread out across his scalp as if some strange sea creature were making its home there. Though this meeting resembles it in no way apart from this very minor detail, I cannot help but think of the half-lit scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets the deranged clarity of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) for the first time. Willard looks feebly across the room at Kurtz who – watch it again, if you can’t recall – spreads his fingers across his moistened scalp in the exact same way. Holy fuck! Maybe this guy is crazy.
“You’ve got to raid memory a lot of the time,” he confirms, “and then when memory doesn’t work, you raid imagination. But once you’re working, you’re involved in self-annihilation and self-suppression. The self who might answer the telephone or give interviews to Trinity News ceases to exist. It’s simply not there. The page is blank. It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one. The page is blank. What you’re doing is filling it. The self might emerge metaphorically or using masks, but what you’re really interested in doing is finding a tone or rhythm.”
The tone and rhythm he finds embodies his narrative’s concern for shadows and half-light. Indeed, the space between what is said and almost-said, what is seen and almost-seen, what is understood and almost-understood plays an elemental role in The Empty Family, as it does in much of his other work. “It seems to me quite satisfying to create images of the light being grey or something or somehow of the end of the day being what they call in Italian l’ora ambigua – the ambiguous hour – when light is ambiguous. In other words, I create a world of shadows rather than a world of meaning. And within that world of shadows, a narrative of shadows in which much is unclear, much is unsaid, much is left in silence and much is half-understood.”
There are only two things in these narratives that come through purely: music and sex.
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the last songs of Schubert and the music of a (fictional, so far as I can tell) Pakistani band called Wooee seem to cast light on the half-light and draw truth from the half-truths in these stories.
For all that is merely suggested in The Empty Family, it is also a very explicit book. Three of the stories in The Empty Family contain graphic depictions of homosexual sex. In The Pearl Fishers, for example, Tóibín writes: “I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drinks than to have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.”
When his last book, The Pregnant Widow, was published, Martin Amis spoke quite a lot about the impossibility of writing good sex. “Novels can do bad sex, or unreal sex, cartoonish sex, insincere sex,” he wrote. “But no one’s ever written well about significant sex.” By the time the writer puts down the first details of the act, Amis believes that it has already become non-universal – too particular, too peculiar. It becomes “embarrassing for the reader and impossible for the writer.”
“It’s difficult to be prescriptive about this,” Tóibín replies. “I think with something like sex, you just have to be very precise. No metaphors, no similes. Just describe a set of actions. I’m not interested in society in the way Martin Amis probably is. I’m not interested in universality. I’m interested in psychology – the psychology of one.”
“But with regard to gay people, the sort of sex you have and how you remember it is surrounded by so much emotion that it’s almost not sexual when you’re describing it. It has more to do with fundamental areas of transgression. Writing it down has a sort of power.”
“But every person’s experience of sex for the first time or with somebody special for the first time is so memorable that it’s really very important. It has nothing to do with gay sex actually. If you’re trying to render truthfully what it’s like to be somebody, their memory of that is probably very important to them.”
“At the same time, with the gay thing, there’s an element of mischief involved. With Barcelona, 1975, I was aware that this had not been done before. You know, instead of saying, ‘they had a really good time; all the things they did were great,’ I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing and strange it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”
When Tóibín returned originally from Barcelona, he worked as a journalist for periodicals like Magill, In Dublin and Hibernia. I ask him what sort of effect journalism had as a training ground to his fiction. “Well I made my living that way, which you couldn’t really do now,” he tells me almost apologetically. “It was essential, too, in terms of learning to type and so on. But all of us were looking to America for people who we wanted to – not necessarily to model ourselves on – but to understand in some way. Writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul: these figures writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who were putting as much work into the openings and endings of their pieces as they were into their fiction.” But his intention was never to stay in journalism; he always wanted to write novels. “I never worked in a newsroom. And if I ever came across people who did, I found them very strange people indeed.”
Though he has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker, he has never won it and views the prize as something primarily for those strange people who work in newsrooms. “It’s worth remembering that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh achieved great fame and huge audiences without the Booker Prize. And, if you think of images of them, there was something about the dignity of those two which mightn’t have been there if they had constantly been wheeled in to make victory speeches for this and that.” Imagine, I suggest, what a nightmare Waugh would have been if he’d won something like the Booker. “Imagine,” counters Tóibín, “what a nightmare he’d have been if he’d lost to somebody like Rose MacCauley or Anthony Powell.”
Speaking of Graham Greene, when the Paris Review came to his house to interview him in 1953, he spoke to the two journalists for about twenty minutes before essentially kicking them out. After moreover an hour talking to Tóibín, the interview draws to a close, not because I no longer feel welcome – in fact, I feel the complete opposite – but because I have quite simply run out of questions.
As I turn to walk out the door, Tóibín promises that, next time he sees me walking down the street, he’ll say: “Hey, that’s an interesting book you’ve got there!’”
“Then,” I reply, “I’ll make sure it’s interesting.”
Nearly five years ago, on the way to a first date with a girl who would soon after become my girlfriend, I saw Colm Tóibín, dressed in a long black coat, turning the corner at the top of Grafton Street in the direction of Baggot Street. When I got the pub, I told the girl that I had seen Colm Tóibín and that, noticing that I was carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tóibín had looked up at me and said something like: “Oh Eliot, is it? Very good!” In fact, he walked past me without a word.
What I had told was a completely unnecessary lie – the first of many I was to tell the same girl in the two years that followed. My arrival at Tóibín’s house to interview him about The Empty Family – his new collection of stories, in which the poetry of T.S. Eliot just happens to make a minor appearance – represents a small, personal exorcism.
It is now twenty years since Tóibín published his first novel, The South. Set in Barcelona, where Tóibín moved to immediately after graduating from UCD, it won plaudits from such luminaries as Don DeLillo and John Banville. Since then, he has published a further five novels, including The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, all to more or less critical acclaim.
After The Master, his fictional portrait of Henry James and arguably his finest work, Tóibín published a book of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons. It is a form in which he thrives. Now, in the wake of Brooklyn, yet another novel of huge critical and popular acclaim, he has turned again to the short story. A pattern seems to be forming. “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is that short stories are of no commercial value. But working with something that is of no commercial value is actually very useful. There’s a great purity about it.”
The Empty Family is a collection of nine stories that are each marked by some concern with the notion of connectedness and disconnectedness. Though the majority of its stories were commissioned and written in the last three or four years, Tóibín underlines the fact that some of these pieces were conceived a very long time ago indeed.
“I’d had a sentence for The New Spain since 1988. I had always planned for it to be a novel – but the only image that stayed with me fully was that the mother would put a chain around the fridge.” Going back even further, the story Silence, depicting the secret affair Lady Gregory had with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, has its roots in an entry marked ‘January 23d, 1894’ in the notebooks of Henry James – a document full of unwritten James stories which Tóibín plans to pinch from again.
Other stories here seem intensely autobiographical. The protagonist in The Pearl Fishers, for instance, is a gay writer from Wexford, living at an address quite close to the one I visited Tóibín at for this interview. But Tóibín is quick to point out that, though some of the details in these stories may seem autobiographical, their inclusion has more to do with being able to write better about the things you know.
“I could have put him living in a fictional space,” he says, “but I know what that space is like, walking up Kildare Street or Dawson Street. And once the word ‘murderous’ occurred to describe all those buildings filled with ad agencies and auctioneers, that was it. I mean, I’m not sure if the word even slightly accurate. But it still struck me and so it stuck.”
He stops to utter the word once more – “muhrrr-derous” – as if to prove its authenticity. “And so I brought him further along down Pembroke Road,” he continues, “because I have an idea of what that walk is like, which I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me to take him down the North Strand or Dorset Street. You’ve got a repository of images that you can raid.”
The protagonist in Barcelona, 1975 seems to be Tóibín again – a young gay man, who, on finishing his exams at the age of twenty, takes, “the boat first to Holyhead, the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona.” The character subsequently discovers himself sexually and ends up partaking in several gay orgies. “There’s an element of playfulness to it as well. Somebody reading this book of stories in particular could think: ‘Holy fuck! This guy is crazy.’ It would take a lot to explain to somebody just how dull your life is instead.”
Answering a question, Tóibín will often rest his hand ponderously on top of his bald head, his fingers spread out across his scalp as if some strange sea creature were making its home there. Though this meeting resembles it in no way apart from this very minor detail, I cannot help but think of the half-lit scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets the deranged clarity of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) for the first time. Willard looks feebly across the room at Kurtz who – watch it again, if you can’t recall – spreads his fingers across his moistened scalp in the exact same way. Holy fuck! Maybe this guy is crazy.
“You’ve got to raid memory a lot of the time,” he confirms, “and then when memory doesn’t work, you raid imagination. But once you’re working, you’re involved in self-annihilation and self-suppression. The self who might answer the telephone or give interviews to Trinity News ceases to exist. It’s simply not there. The page is blank. It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one. The page is blank. What you’re doing is filling it. The self might emerge metaphorically or using masks, but what you’re really interested in doing is finding a tone or rhythm.”
The tone and rhythm he finds embodies his narrative’s concern for shadows and half-light. Indeed, the space between what is said and almost-said, what is seen and almost-seen, what is understood and almost-understood plays an elemental role in The Empty Family, as it does in much of his other work. “It seems to me quite satisfying to create images of the light being grey or something or somehow of the end of the day being what they call in Italian l’ora ambigua – the ambiguous hour – when light is ambiguous. In other words, I create a world of shadows rather than a world of meaning. And within that world of shadows, a narrative of shadows in which much is unclear, much is unsaid, much is left in silence and much is half-understood.”
There are only two things in these narratives that come through purely: music and sex.
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the last songs of Schubert and the music of a (fictional, so far as I can tell) Pakistani band called Wooee seem to cast light on the half-light and draw truth from the half-truths in these stories.
For all that is merely suggested in The Empty Family, it is also a very explicit book. Three of the stories in The Empty Family contain graphic depictions of homosexual sex. In The Pearl Fishers, for example, Tóibín writes: “I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drinks than to have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.”
When his last book, The Pregnant Widow, was published, Martin Amis spoke quite a lot about the impossibility of writing good sex. “Novels can do bad sex, or unreal sex, cartoonish sex, insincere sex,” he wrote. “But no one’s ever written well about significant sex.” By the time the writer puts down the first details of the act, Amis believes that it has already become non-universal – too particular, too peculiar. It becomes “embarrassing for the reader and impossible for the writer.”
“It’s difficult to be prescriptive about this,” Tóibín replies. “I think with something like sex, you just have to be very precise. No metaphors, no similes. Just describe a set of actions. I’m not interested in society in the way Martin Amis probably is. I’m not interested in universality. I’m interested in psychology – the psychology of one.”
“But with regard to gay people, the sort of sex you have and how you remember it is surrounded by so much emotion that it’s almost not sexual when you’re describing it. It has more to do with fundamental areas of transgression. Writing it down has a sort of power.”
“But every person’s experience of sex for the first time or with somebody special for the first time is so memorable that it’s really very important. It has nothing to do with gay sex actually. If you’re trying to render truthfully what it’s like to be somebody, their memory of that is probably very important to them.”
“At the same time, with the gay thing, there’s an element of mischief involved. With Barcelona, 1975, I was aware that this had not been done before. You know, instead of saying, ‘they had a really good time; all the things they did were great,’ I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing and strange it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”
When Tóibín returned originally from Barcelona, he worked as a journalist for periodicals like Magill, In Dublin and Hibernia. I ask him what sort of effect journalism had as a training ground to his fiction. “Well I made my living that way, which you couldn’t really do now,” he tells me almost apologetically. “It was essential, too, in terms of learning to type and so on. But all of us were looking to America for people who we wanted to – not necessarily to model ourselves on – but to understand in some way. Writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul: these figures writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who were putting as much work into the openings and endings of their pieces as they were into their fiction.” But his intention was never to stay in journalism; he always wanted to write novels. “I never worked in a newsroom. And if I ever came across people who did, I found them very strange people indeed.”
Though he has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker, he has never won it and views the prize as something primarily for those strange people who work in newsrooms. “It’s worth remembering that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh achieved great fame and huge audiences without the Booker Prize. And, if you think of images of them, there was something about the dignity of those two which mightn’t have been there if they had constantly been wheeled in to make victory speeches for this and that.” Imagine, I suggest, what a nightmare Waugh would have been if he’d won something like the Booker. “Imagine,” counters Tóibín, “what a nightmare he’d have been if he’d lost to somebody like Rose MacCauley or Anthony Powell.”
Speaking of Graham Greene, when the Paris Review came to his house to interview him in 1953, he spoke to the two journalists for about twenty minutes before essentially kicking them out. After moreover an hour talking to Tóibín, the interview draws to a close, not because I no longer feel welcome – in fact, I feel the complete opposite – but because I have quite simply run out of questions.
As I turn to walk out the door, Tóibín promises that, next time he sees me walking down the street, he’ll say: “Hey, that’s an interesting book you’ve got there!’”
“Then,” I reply, “I’ll make sure it’s interesting.”
Labels: books, colm toibin, interviews, novelists
|Geoff Dyer Interview
Published Thursday, February 17, 2011 by Kevin Breathnach.
This article originally appeared in Trinity News.
Faced with an inability to remain focused on any one particular interest, I find some consolation for my consequent academic mediocrity in a line from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. “I love brief habits,” says Uncle Friedrich, “and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness.”
There can be few writers whose back-catalogue alone expresses this Nietzschean love of brief habits as clearly as Geoff Dyer’s. He has written a book about the First World War. He has written a book about DH Lawrence. He has written a book about jazz. He has written a book about photography. He has even written a book about fucking yoga. His success is an enormous source of encouragement to me.
Born in 1958, Dyer is a self-described intellectual gatecrasher. Typically, he develops an interest in a specialist subject, writes about to huge acclaim both within and without the milieu of the chosen subject, before quietly losing interest and moving on. (We will return to this, as Dyer so often parenthesises.) With a further four novels to his name, the only stains on his work are the ringing endorsements he receives and reprints from the housewives’ favourite philosopher: Alain De Botton, Prince of Platitude.
Yet it is not his books, but his essays and reviews that he claims to be proudest of. In his first collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, he writes: “There were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing ‘proper’ books.” Ten years on from that, Dyer’s second collection, Working The Room, has just been published. Divided into four sections – Visuals, Verbals, Variables and Personals – the collection reigns in the disparate immensity of Dyer’s interests. “With all the books I’ve written, it’s quite difficult to know where to start. But I’d say the essays are a pretty good place to do so.” Dyer is not a writer who believes in the necessary superiority of the novel, steeped as he is the writing of Roland Barthes, John Berger and Milan Kundera.
It was a review of Kundera’s The Farewell Party, in fact, that marked his entry into the world of paid-for publication. The commission came following “a certain amount of subterfuge,” whereby Dyer lied about the amount of work he’d previously had published – none – to the person standing in for the holidaying literary editor at City Limits.
“I wasn’t calling up out of the blue, of course. At Oxford, we stopped at Samuel Beckett. But I’d caught up on my reading in the few years after, and I’d begun to grow increasingly frustrated by reading book reviews. In that not untypical way, I thought: ‘Shit, I know as much as this guy. Why should I be sitting here reading his opinions, when he could be there reading mine?’”
He pauses for a second. I look down to read my next question, but hesitantly he recommences.
“There seems to me something here worth saying about ambition. We imagine it as operating on this rather grand level – ‘I want to be Prime Minister, ‘I want to play for Man Utd’ – but ambition is almost always manifested in these very actionable increments.”
This is typical of Dyer. Reading his work, one finds him analysing the efforts of a particular writer or photographer with an engagement that would allow it to stand alone as a fine piece of writing. Without ever expecting it, though, one notices Dyer very quietly drawing some more general truth from the particular topic at hand.
So, in ‘The Moral Art of War’, an appraisal of books of reportage on the Iraq War, Dyer concludes that the history of storytelling is moving beyond even the non-fiction novel, towards “different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition.” Likewise, in a piece for Vogue about Paris Fashion Week, he wonders if, “the costumes with their amazing surfeit of plumage and jewels,” and “the models with their unnatural, clippy-cloppy, equine walk,” don’t play on some psychic residue left over from ancient religious ceremonies.
“One principle of editing Working The Room was that every piece should have something in it that made it of more general interest than the thing it was ostensibly about. So I’d hope that, for example, each of the book reviews included either add up to an appraisal of the writer’s career or raise some more general point about writing and literature.”
It’s a trait he shares with his mentor John Berger, the art critic and novelist whose magisterial ‘Selected Essays’ (which Dyer edited and introduced as a good starting-point with Berger) was in fact my starting-point with Dyer. Berger is an intellectual giant whose influence on art criticism cannot be overstated. After university Dyer began reading his work, interviewed him for Marxism Today and eventually wrote a book about him entitled Ways of Telling. Somewhere along the way, Berger became his mentor, providing Dyer with much encouragement, which, says Dyer, “is often the most valuable thing a mentor can do.”
“I was so in awe of him,” he says. “But then there’s a long history of the disciple going to meet the idol, only for the idol to turn out to be self-important and disappointing. When I met Berger, though, he was perhaps even greater than the books had led you to believe. He has the most incredible reservoirs of kindness and generosity and thoughtfulness. Ordinary qualities like these are not generally the preserve of extraordinary people. To this day, he still seems to me the greatest person I have ever met.”
It would be a lie to say that, in asking him about his relationship with Berger, I wasn’t hoping on some level that Dyer would offer to be my mentor. I have read Dyer’s books. I’ve interviewed him, too. And, so far, he has been hugely encouraging about my questions. So I venture another one which, were it to appear in that scene in Annie Hall where subtitles spell out what the characters actually mean, would read: Geoff Dyer, will you be my mentor?
“Do you have an ideal reader?”
There follows a pause which seems to me pregnant with some beautiful future.
“No,” he replies. “Definitely not. Sorry.”
This comes as a crushing blow. But already my thoughts are of moving on from the brief habit of Dyer – and somehow this seems appropriate. I’ll return to read his next book on Tarkovsky, of course. For the moment, though, there’re plenty more fish in the sea.
Now, who has Alain De Botton’s number? |
Faced with an inability to remain focused on any one particular interest, I find some consolation for my consequent academic mediocrity in a line from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. “I love brief habits,” says Uncle Friedrich, “and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness.”
There can be few writers whose back-catalogue alone expresses this Nietzschean love of brief habits as clearly as Geoff Dyer’s. He has written a book about the First World War. He has written a book about DH Lawrence. He has written a book about jazz. He has written a book about photography. He has even written a book about fucking yoga. His success is an enormous source of encouragement to me.
Born in 1958, Dyer is a self-described intellectual gatecrasher. Typically, he develops an interest in a specialist subject, writes about to huge acclaim both within and without the milieu of the chosen subject, before quietly losing interest and moving on. (We will return to this, as Dyer so often parenthesises.) With a further four novels to his name, the only stains on his work are the ringing endorsements he receives and reprints from the housewives’ favourite philosopher: Alain De Botton, Prince of Platitude.
Yet it is not his books, but his essays and reviews that he claims to be proudest of. In his first collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, he writes: “There were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing ‘proper’ books.” Ten years on from that, Dyer’s second collection, Working The Room, has just been published. Divided into four sections – Visuals, Verbals, Variables and Personals – the collection reigns in the disparate immensity of Dyer’s interests. “With all the books I’ve written, it’s quite difficult to know where to start. But I’d say the essays are a pretty good place to do so.” Dyer is not a writer who believes in the necessary superiority of the novel, steeped as he is the writing of Roland Barthes, John Berger and Milan Kundera.
It was a review of Kundera’s The Farewell Party, in fact, that marked his entry into the world of paid-for publication. The commission came following “a certain amount of subterfuge,” whereby Dyer lied about the amount of work he’d previously had published – none – to the person standing in for the holidaying literary editor at City Limits.
“I wasn’t calling up out of the blue, of course. At Oxford, we stopped at Samuel Beckett. But I’d caught up on my reading in the few years after, and I’d begun to grow increasingly frustrated by reading book reviews. In that not untypical way, I thought: ‘Shit, I know as much as this guy. Why should I be sitting here reading his opinions, when he could be there reading mine?’”
He pauses for a second. I look down to read my next question, but hesitantly he recommences.
“There seems to me something here worth saying about ambition. We imagine it as operating on this rather grand level – ‘I want to be Prime Minister, ‘I want to play for Man Utd’ – but ambition is almost always manifested in these very actionable increments.”
This is typical of Dyer. Reading his work, one finds him analysing the efforts of a particular writer or photographer with an engagement that would allow it to stand alone as a fine piece of writing. Without ever expecting it, though, one notices Dyer very quietly drawing some more general truth from the particular topic at hand.
So, in ‘The Moral Art of War’, an appraisal of books of reportage on the Iraq War, Dyer concludes that the history of storytelling is moving beyond even the non-fiction novel, towards “different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition.” Likewise, in a piece for Vogue about Paris Fashion Week, he wonders if, “the costumes with their amazing surfeit of plumage and jewels,” and “the models with their unnatural, clippy-cloppy, equine walk,” don’t play on some psychic residue left over from ancient religious ceremonies.
“One principle of editing Working The Room was that every piece should have something in it that made it of more general interest than the thing it was ostensibly about. So I’d hope that, for example, each of the book reviews included either add up to an appraisal of the writer’s career or raise some more general point about writing and literature.”
It’s a trait he shares with his mentor John Berger, the art critic and novelist whose magisterial ‘Selected Essays’ (which Dyer edited and introduced as a good starting-point with Berger) was in fact my starting-point with Dyer. Berger is an intellectual giant whose influence on art criticism cannot be overstated. After university Dyer began reading his work, interviewed him for Marxism Today and eventually wrote a book about him entitled Ways of Telling. Somewhere along the way, Berger became his mentor, providing Dyer with much encouragement, which, says Dyer, “is often the most valuable thing a mentor can do.”
“I was so in awe of him,” he says. “But then there’s a long history of the disciple going to meet the idol, only for the idol to turn out to be self-important and disappointing. When I met Berger, though, he was perhaps even greater than the books had led you to believe. He has the most incredible reservoirs of kindness and generosity and thoughtfulness. Ordinary qualities like these are not generally the preserve of extraordinary people. To this day, he still seems to me the greatest person I have ever met.”
It would be a lie to say that, in asking him about his relationship with Berger, I wasn’t hoping on some level that Dyer would offer to be my mentor. I have read Dyer’s books. I’ve interviewed him, too. And, so far, he has been hugely encouraging about my questions. So I venture another one which, were it to appear in that scene in Annie Hall where subtitles spell out what the characters actually mean, would read: Geoff Dyer, will you be my mentor?
“Do you have an ideal reader?”
There follows a pause which seems to me pregnant with some beautiful future.
“No,” he replies. “Definitely not. Sorry.”
This comes as a crushing blow. But already my thoughts are of moving on from the brief habit of Dyer – and somehow this seems appropriate. I’ll return to read his next book on Tarkovsky, of course. For the moment, though, there’re plenty more fish in the sea.
Now, who has Alain De Botton’s number? |
Parrot and Olivier in America
Published Wednesday, July 28, 2010 by Kevin Breathnach.
“‘From where will they get their culture?” he cried. “the newspapers? God help you all.’”
The Booker Prize is an award oft-disparaged. A media and publishing event more than anything, even the ceremony’s acceptance speeches have been known to criticise it. On receiving the award in 2005 for The Sea, John Banville remarked that it was nice to see the award go to a work of art for once. In his 1972 acceptance speech, John Berger noted that, “the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.” Martin Amis, whose father Kingsley won the prize in 1985, has written that the Booker Prize, which “demystifies and declasses the writer,” is only given to books that create consensus.
Nevertheless, given the influence it has on book sales, the prize deserves our divided attention at least. It's worth noting, therefore, that Peter Carey, author of the newly published Parrot and Olivier in America, is one of only two novelists to ave won the award twice.
Based partly on the American experiences of Alexis De Toqueville, Parrot and Olivier is an odd-couple novel jointly narrated by its eponymous heroes. John Larrit is a middle-aged English servant with artist ambitions, nicknamed Parrot for his skill as a mimic. Olivier de Garmont is a myopic young nobleman, sent by his parents to safety in America ostensibly to study its prison systems.
Before going any further, I should say that Parrot and Olivier stinks. Pages and pages pass by, and still Carey's prose stinks. “The smell was strong, even on the poop, a great stinking cloud of cheese.” “Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine.” “The air was thick with the smell of coffin wood.” Indeed, for a novel whose primary concern is often art and forgery, it is at least as stimulating to the olfactory as it is to the aural or ocular senses. “Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.” Perhaps there’s a greater truth in smell. Parrot can mimic any voice, and forge notes and works of art, but can smell be mimicked? When it recurs, as does the jasmine of Olivier’s mother and Parrot’s lover Mathilde, the connection is somehow stronger. “I smelled her,” Parrot sighs. “Her jasmine.” The richness of life is smelled, and it is no coincidence when Olivier discovers that, “each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d’aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odourless.”
Parrot’s is an involuntarily nomadic existence, and his character is a valuable study of displacement. Born in England, he is orphaned when, in the first great literary set-piece of the decade, Parrot loses his father when a pyrotechnic disaster befalls the illegal printworks where he and his father are employed. The link between the novel’s heroes, the part-noble, part-criminal Monsieur De Tilbot, becomes part-parent, part-master of Parrot. By way of Australia, he ends up in France, only to be uprooted once more, this time to America as both transcriber and spy of Olivier. It is no surprise that the chapters narrated by Parrot, invested with the wit and street-wisdom of someone who has lived, are the more enjoyable.
“In the morning,” he jokes, “we had what is called a tramp’s breakfast, that is a piss and look around.” What is surprising, and a true testament to Carey’s skill as a stylist, is that despite the abundant stale similes of an uneducated mimic – “as funny as a murder site”, “as bitter as a lemon tree” – Parrot’s prose still smells as sweet as his lover’s jasmine. “The eyes of children of old fathers,” Parrot reflects, “have a sad grey quality which I have observed on more than one continent. Perhaps it is not that they inherit an old man’s wisdom, but that they are born knowing they must soon say farewell to him who gave them life.”
Meanwhile, Olivier’s short-sightedness becomes far-sightedness. “I mean this, democracy. It is truly a lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.” The problem here is that a supposedly far-sighted Olivier De Garmont looks more like a hind-sighted Peter Carey. No matter the undoubted prescience of Alexis De Toqueville, much of what the fictional Olivier concludes – “that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals” – reads more like clairvoyance. Fact is often too incredible for fiction.
This expansive, back-and-forth novel is about many things: the budding and flowering of American democracy, the death of the ancien régime and the dynamics of class relations; but as the novel thunders on, it is the question of democratic discernment – immediately regarding art, with politics, finance, culture, criminality all implied – that Peter Carey seems most concerned by. “In a democracy,” says Olivier, “there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts.” But who needs a leisured-class, Peter, when we have the Booker Prize panel? |
The Booker Prize is an award oft-disparaged. A media and publishing event more than anything, even the ceremony’s acceptance speeches have been known to criticise it. On receiving the award in 2005 for The Sea, John Banville remarked that it was nice to see the award go to a work of art for once. In his 1972 acceptance speech, John Berger noted that, “the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.” Martin Amis, whose father Kingsley won the prize in 1985, has written that the Booker Prize, which “demystifies and declasses the writer,” is only given to books that create consensus.
Nevertheless, given the influence it has on book sales, the prize deserves our divided attention at least. It's worth noting, therefore, that Peter Carey, author of the newly published Parrot and Olivier in America, is one of only two novelists to ave won the award twice.
Based partly on the American experiences of Alexis De Toqueville, Parrot and Olivier is an odd-couple novel jointly narrated by its eponymous heroes. John Larrit is a middle-aged English servant with artist ambitions, nicknamed Parrot for his skill as a mimic. Olivier de Garmont is a myopic young nobleman, sent by his parents to safety in America ostensibly to study its prison systems.
Before going any further, I should say that Parrot and Olivier stinks. Pages and pages pass by, and still Carey's prose stinks. “The smell was strong, even on the poop, a great stinking cloud of cheese.” “Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine.” “The air was thick with the smell of coffin wood.” Indeed, for a novel whose primary concern is often art and forgery, it is at least as stimulating to the olfactory as it is to the aural or ocular senses. “Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.” Perhaps there’s a greater truth in smell. Parrot can mimic any voice, and forge notes and works of art, but can smell be mimicked? When it recurs, as does the jasmine of Olivier’s mother and Parrot’s lover Mathilde, the connection is somehow stronger. “I smelled her,” Parrot sighs. “Her jasmine.” The richness of life is smelled, and it is no coincidence when Olivier discovers that, “each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d’aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odourless.”
Parrot’s is an involuntarily nomadic existence, and his character is a valuable study of displacement. Born in England, he is orphaned when, in the first great literary set-piece of the decade, Parrot loses his father when a pyrotechnic disaster befalls the illegal printworks where he and his father are employed. The link between the novel’s heroes, the part-noble, part-criminal Monsieur De Tilbot, becomes part-parent, part-master of Parrot. By way of Australia, he ends up in France, only to be uprooted once more, this time to America as both transcriber and spy of Olivier. It is no surprise that the chapters narrated by Parrot, invested with the wit and street-wisdom of someone who has lived, are the more enjoyable.
“In the morning,” he jokes, “we had what is called a tramp’s breakfast, that is a piss and look around.” What is surprising, and a true testament to Carey’s skill as a stylist, is that despite the abundant stale similes of an uneducated mimic – “as funny as a murder site”, “as bitter as a lemon tree” – Parrot’s prose still smells as sweet as his lover’s jasmine. “The eyes of children of old fathers,” Parrot reflects, “have a sad grey quality which I have observed on more than one continent. Perhaps it is not that they inherit an old man’s wisdom, but that they are born knowing they must soon say farewell to him who gave them life.”
Meanwhile, Olivier’s short-sightedness becomes far-sightedness. “I mean this, democracy. It is truly a lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.” The problem here is that a supposedly far-sighted Olivier De Garmont looks more like a hind-sighted Peter Carey. No matter the undoubted prescience of Alexis De Toqueville, much of what the fictional Olivier concludes – “that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals” – reads more like clairvoyance. Fact is often too incredible for fiction.
This expansive, back-and-forth novel is about many things: the budding and flowering of American democracy, the death of the ancien régime and the dynamics of class relations; but as the novel thunders on, it is the question of democratic discernment – immediately regarding art, with politics, finance, culture, criminality all implied – that Peter Carey seems most concerned by. “In a democracy,” says Olivier, “there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts.” But who needs a leisured-class, Peter, when we have the Booker Prize panel? |
Without Clout
Published Sunday, January 25, 2009 by Kevin Breathnach.
Or have Morgan and Howard fooled us by presenting this overhyped, shallow media event as some great battle for truth between two great forces of modern democracy: media and politics? Answer: yes, we’ve been conned. Frost/Nixon is a historical fraud, a mind-boggling travesty of the truth. Let me hasten to add, however, that it is without doubt the most gripping, entertaining, dramatically clever and fascinating fraud I’ve ever seen.What?
Cosmo Landesman today points out that Frost/Nixon is historically inaccurate, underlining, for instance, that the late night phone call from Nixon to Frost on which the film balances did not actually take place. But, as you've read, he thinks it's a gripping piece of cinema in any case. I think he's wrong. It's an utterly predictable film.
The going gets tough for the Frost camp, as Nixon is found to be quite good at being interviewed, and it stays tough for a lot of the film. But things start looking up (as they threaten to do throughout the film) when Frost's researcher does two days of research, the tables are turned, and the tough going is overcome. All this as the film heads conveniently into the home straight, ready for the happy ending which comes when Frost elicits an (historically inaccurate) apology from Nixon for Watergate.
I don't think there's much drama in this film at all.
Even the exagerrated apology is tame. Despite the film's portrayal to the contrary, the viewer is left wondering, firstly, if Nixon didn't get away with it after all, and secondly, how Frost went on to such stardom on the back of such a poor interview.
An entertaining, but by no means gripping film.
Labels: cinema, film, frost, nixon
|The Frog
Published Thursday, December 18, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
YOU COULDN'T GIVE THEM AWAY
Published by Kevin Breathnach.
Walking into Trinity early this morning, I saw a woman employed by the Irish Independent to give out free copies of their newspaper. Of the five people whom I saw walk past her, all five refused her generous offer: a sight more refreshing than the icy matutinal air.
Labels: irish independent, trinity
|Revidalance
Published by Kevin Breathnach.
As well as being twin towers of 20th century intellectual life, Gore Vidal and the late Susan Sontag share the honour of being the favoured grandparents of the New York Review of Books. I can't remember the amount of times each has been the subject to yet another essay published its hallowed pages, just as I can't be bothered to find out. But figures aside, the answer is often. And so, again, in the holiday issue of the review, we're treated to another essay on each. The difference between the two, however, is that the new essays on Sontag generally say something new on Sontag. Not so with Vidal, poor thing, who, with the publication of any selection, collection or reflection in the last five years, seems to have had more or less the same essay written about him and published in newspapers, magazines and reviews.
Labels: gore vidal, intellectualism, literature, susan sontag
|Back to Black
Published by Kevin Breathnach.
When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver - What is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?This comes from The Lemur, John Banville's third outing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, which - at less than 200 generously-spaced pages - I had the pleasure of passing an afternoon alongside. The work is inconsequential, written to satisfy the coffers before the critics, but, for a book whose plot offers neither the pace, nor the suspense of Black's first two outings - to say nothing of The 39 Steps, written by John Buchan and alluded to above - it is nonetheless an enjoyable read. Much has been said about the difference between Banville and Black, yet, as The Lemur ably demonstrates, they share their strengths and weaknesses. Banville is often weak on plot, while Black, writing with a brow admittedly less furrowed than Banville's, is redeemed in this instance by an acuity of both observation and expression - two features which owe everything to the furrowed brow behind the mask.
Wouldn't make a bad Stephen's Day occupation.
Labels: banville, benjamin black, books, buchan
|TAKE DOWN THIS BOOK / AND SLOWLY READ
Published Friday, November 21, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
"And I quote from memory," they parenthesise.
There's something very irritating about those writers who, when quoting poetry in print, mention that they are doing so without reference to the text. There's no need to quote fallibly from memory when, in the age of the internet, a printed edition is always at hand. And, if you can quote infallibly from memory, there's no need to overshadow the chosen quote. Poetry worth memorising is more remarkable than memorising the poetry.
This afternoon, in any case, I at last found my way into the Yeats exhibition in the National Library. There's a small room in which a few of Yeats' poems are projected onto a screen, while recorded voices - famous, infamous and not famous alike - read them aloud. I somehow suspect that Ulick O'Connor's recital of 'When You are Old' was derived from memory alone. For, while his lively, polytonal voice carries the music of Yeats' poetry better than, say, the recorded efforts of Sinéad O'Connor, in at least two instances, Ulick gets the words mixed-up. Instead of "nodding by the fire", we hear "sitting by the fire"; and instead of "the sorrows of your changing face", we hear "the changing sorrows of your face." A pernickity point, perhaps, but every word is important in poetry - in shorter poems especially; you'd expect that the exhibition's curator to agree.
There's something very irritating about those writers who, when quoting poetry in print, mention that they are doing so without reference to the text. There's no need to quote fallibly from memory when, in the age of the internet, a printed edition is always at hand. And, if you can quote infallibly from memory, there's no need to overshadow the chosen quote. Poetry worth memorising is more remarkable than memorising the poetry.
This afternoon, in any case, I at last found my way into the Yeats exhibition in the National Library. There's a small room in which a few of Yeats' poems are projected onto a screen, while recorded voices - famous, infamous and not famous alike - read them aloud. I somehow suspect that Ulick O'Connor's recital of 'When You are Old' was derived from memory alone. For, while his lively, polytonal voice carries the music of Yeats' poetry better than, say, the recorded efforts of Sinéad O'Connor, in at least two instances, Ulick gets the words mixed-up. Instead of "nodding by the fire", we hear "sitting by the fire"; and instead of "the sorrows of your changing face", we hear "the changing sorrows of your face." A pernickity point, perhaps, but every word is important in poetry - in shorter poems especially; you'd expect that the exhibition's curator to agree.
Labels: literature, memory, poetry, yeats
|A Dreaded Sunny Day
Published Saturday, November 08, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
Though less than one year ago I lived no more than ten walking-minutes from its gates, until last week I had never strolled through the decorated aisles of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris; a non-act of laziness disguised as nonchalance. When, last week, I at last got around to visiting the cemetery, a weak winter sun scaled the morning azure like some great air balloon in the distance, its light bouncing off the cobblestones to make the cracks in between appear darker still.
And then I came upon this, an impressive tomb marked:
In April of 1875, at the dawn of the Third Republic, Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel died of asphyxiation during the ascent of their air balloon Zenith to over 8,600 metres, an altitude unheard of at the time. The scientists were survived by their colleague and co-pilot Gaston Tissandier, who at 8,000 metres had passed out, before again waking at 6,000 metres to find his both colleagues dead, having bled from the mouth, and the balloon cascading dangerously towards the earth. He roused himself sufficiently, and landed the balloon safely. Though he had become deaf, Tissandier went on to flourish as a scientists, as an aviator, as a chemist and as an editor of his own scientific weekly, La Nature; an owl of Minerva spreading its wings at his colleagues' last dusk.
I left before seeing either Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison, Père Lachaise's most famous denizens, but on parting, I did see pictures of each on postcards for sale next to the cemetery's back gate.
Keats and Yeats are on your side.
And then I came upon this, an impressive tomb marked:
CROCE-SPINELLI ET SIVELIntrigued, I did some research.
MORTS A 8600 METRES DE HAUTEUR.
In April of 1875, at the dawn of the Third Republic, Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel died of asphyxiation during the ascent of their air balloon Zenith to over 8,600 metres, an altitude unheard of at the time. The scientists were survived by their colleague and co-pilot Gaston Tissandier, who at 8,000 metres had passed out, before again waking at 6,000 metres to find his both colleagues dead, having bled from the mouth, and the balloon cascading dangerously towards the earth. He roused himself sufficiently, and landed the balloon safely. Though he had become deaf, Tissandier went on to flourish as a scientists, as an aviator, as a chemist and as an editor of his own scientific weekly, La Nature; an owl of Minerva spreading its wings at his colleagues' last dusk.
I left before seeing either Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison, Père Lachaise's most famous denizens, but on parting, I did see pictures of each on postcards for sale next to the cemetery's back gate.
Keats and Yeats are on your side.
Labels: death, history, Paris, pere lachaise, science
|Fluctuat nec mergitur
Published Wednesday, October 29, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
The first chapter of John Banville's new novel The Sinking City (in corso) is, for some reason, available to read on the Manchester Review's website. I'll be reading it tomorrow on a flight to Paris.
Labels: banville, books, notice, Paris
|Winterwood
Published Sunday, October 12, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
The men of the mountain! I said, just for the laugh.
"Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades," said Vladmir Nabokov, the author of the great confessional Lolita, "Let us worship the spine and its tingle." It was with the close of Patrick McCabe's Winterwood, whose narrator Redmond Place differs only from Lolita's in his unwillingness or inability to know himself, that I last sat down, artistically delighted, a tingle felt not just between the shoulder blades, but upon my cheeks. Winterwood, my first exposure to McCabe, is a psychologically labyrinthine tableau — often reminiscent of David Lynch's Twin Peaks — consciously painted with the simple, progressively darker brush-strokes of a stylistically unsophisticated, structurally manipulative narrator.
Labels: nabokov, patrick mccabe, twin peaks, winterwood
|Domestic Bliss
Published Tuesday, October 07, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
Order, order.
Nothing to show for the autumnal month of this year's summer holiday; there's only so long self-discipline will hold. But the mind is perked this week by the resumption of college, alongside which will resume, I hope, the normal, shaky service renowned in this quarter of the internet.
Labels: notice, pierre bonnard
|Who ate all the pi?
Published Monday, September 01, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.
The photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson confesses his great passion for geometry. "I do not believe in God", he said, "but I do believe in pi." He might have liked the composition of this, a photograph of someone called Yves, taken in 1967, which I found in a bundle of old polaroids left long ago in the pocket of a duffel-coat I bought second-hand in Paris this summer.
Labels: cartier bresson, france, Paris, photography
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