PLUS GAINSBOURG QUE GAINSBOURG

Based on a conversation between the authors and NWR editor Gwen Davies at Hay Festival, 30 May, 2011

Horatio Clare is the author of Truant, Notes from the Slippery Slope. Richard Gwyn's memoir The Vagabond’s Breakfast was published in April.

NWR: Richard; In your memoir you tell how your good friend calling you a ‘prisoner of duality’ helped you relinquish nine years of vagrancy, mainly in Crete and northern Spain, and return to your family near Crickhowell.

…the experience is not one of sadness or regret for a path not taken, but a fluttering excitement, a… thrill at the thorough randomness of all existence, of the multitude of choices laid before me every day that I lived as a wanderer and a vagrant. TVB

Horatio; you were a dope addict a decade later, during the 90s. In Truant, you initially share this grandiose worldview, ‘the fundamental point of taking drugs was to peel away the road, to see through dark glass, to find and open invisible doors’. Later though, you decide to cease wanting that other, the extra, the alternative.

There are more things in heaven and earth …but [I have] all the proof of those ‘more things’ that I will ever require. I mean to leave it all alone. The surface of the world is more than enough for me. Truant

Is addiction a refusal to accept one single, present reality?

HC: Yes, though a single reality seems slightly suspicious to me, as though we had an encompassing view of all that reality may contain. If we agree that there is a single probable reality, then I would say that wilfully and chaotically re-odering their perception of it allows dope smokers to play in that overlap between what we sense, what we suspect and what we think we know.

So, I can go to Abergavenny station and take a taxi home and it's a very nice drive. But if I do the same thing having eaten a lump of hash, the station may become as exotic as Grand Central, the evening mist might seem as mysterious as the fogs of time, my sense of self might fragment, as if I am living in Italo Calvino novel - If On A Winter's Night A Traveller Swallows Some Hash... And the taxi, however it is driven, might seem like Aladdin's magic carpet ride. Addiction is what happens when you can't bear to allow Aladdin's carpet to turn back into Station Taxis.

RG: I’d say possibly, Yes, it is. If you have a predisposition to always be looking beyond or outside your present reality – then intoxication (whether with alcohol or drugs) will likely exaggerate that impulse. If you are an addict then you suffer from a progressive illness which will only make your disengagement from a single, present reality the more extreme. The drugs, or the alcohol do that. But in the line you quoted, when I say I was seduced by the idea that every instant contains the potential for an infinity of outcomes, well that is a theme that the book deals with at some length, and I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with addiction. In fact I see it as a good thing, at least when you are young. It simply reflects a state of terminal inquiring restlessness, of seeking out new pastures, something which age, with any luck, diminishes.

However, to go back to addiction, constant immersion in an altered state of mind does lead to an entirely subjective way of experiencing life, a solipsistic universe in which the addict takes on god-like qualities, feels himself or herself to be master of the universe. The quote from Marguerite Duras says it all: “Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.” It encourages us in our folly, so we believe ourselves to be god-like. It is a complete delusion of course, but addiction, in my experience, mimics the characteristics of a spiritual quest. When I was drinking, I was on a kind of mission. But perhaps that’s the kind of attitude I have anyway; I’m kind of obsessive in pursuit of whatever I happen to be doing at any given moment. Alcohol and drugs just make it worse. The problem is that when you’re in that state, any ability to actually do things well goes out the window, and you end up being ridiculous.

NWR: Horatio, your book is particularly good on the attractions of the ‘anti-hero’

A bad boy does not necessarily lack friends, associates, even good women. There is a blend of resentment and exultation in him… Look out, here comes trouble. Anything could happen now.Truant

And, Richard, your memoir is a publicist’s dream: ‘writer has year to live unless he gets a liver transplant!’ Publishers can market an addict’s chaotic life or an insomniac’s hallucinations much more easily than they can accounts of comfortable, orderly lives. These memoirs have their quotas of ‘eccentric characters’ and ‘colourful anecdotes’ involving illegal possession of milk floats, cooking roadkill goose, jumping freight trains and polishing a desk to within a splinter of its life.

‘Riding the Freight Train’ from Truant by Horatio Clare

'Plus Gainsbourg que Gainsbourg' from The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn

Both memoirs quote Blake’s the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’.

Do you find yourself playing a publisher’s game of marketing ‘excess’, inventing hierarchies of addiction or pain?

RG: It’s never occurred to me, no. I would find that completely disingenuous, adapting my writing towards a market. I can only write what I want to write. Besides, life is too short to do otherwise. Of course there are hierarchies, just as in re-hab there is a hierarchy of addictive valency, a kind of inverted worthiness depending on the severity of one’s addiction, or even drug of choice. Rightly or wrongly, some addictions are just considered harder than others.

HC: I was never in the running for biggest stoner - I was an addict, but within that vast hierarchy I was not a heavyweight. It was never my intention to market excess: I wanted to explore its ordinary consequences. I wanted to show what happens when a fairly normal individual smokes a fairly normal excess of what has become - sadly - fairly normal dope (skunk) and finds he has a fairly common reaction to it: psychosis. It seemed to be a common story which had somehow escaped the exploration of proper telling - you used to hear, oh, so and so lost it. Or, poor so-and-so came off the rails - and so another life became a footnote. I wanted to write about the people in those footnotes - how they survived, or didn't.

Of course I wish I had written Fear and Loathing in Crickhowell, for the title alone, and naturally publishers and reviewers and bookshops want the superlative: the most appalling, the most degraded. James Frey, for example, had to make it up to give it to them. One reviewer complained that my activities weren't sufficiently scandalous; he would have enjoyed the book more if I had embellished. But entertaining reviewers is not my job. In 'Truant' my job was to give the most honest and clear-sighted account of what I had heard, seen, done, researched and discovered.

NWR: One of Truant’s mantras is times with dope and no money pass easier than times with money and no dope. Vagabond meanwhile regrets the waste and waiting inherent in the vagrant lifestyle, and later registers the irony of time-expanding insomnia caused by hepatitis C.

Do addicts experience time in a different way? How did you explore the theme of time in your books?

…the hours spent outside cafes nursing a single drink, of rendezvous with potential employers who never turned up, of having to listen to the interminably tedious advice of a certain breed of traveler, of the inane chatter of junkies and petty criminals. TVB

RG: That mantra [about 'time with dope'] is a catchphrase from the hippy comic magazine The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers that came out in the seventies. How funny that it has survived. When under the influence, yes – time moves very differently, especially with psychotropics – and even when drinking, yes. That’s just the drug working on your brain. My experience of time expanding with insomnia is rather different. If you don’t sleep, some very strange things start happening with your perception of time because you do away with the ordinary frontiers of day and night. The waking hours and sleeping hours that the rest of the world takes for granted, they disintegrate. You inhabit a kind of perpetual twilight. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. In writing the book I was influenced by the way my perception of time was affected by sleeplessness, and the effect I sought to reproduce was of slipping in and out of the past, of the ambivalence of being in a present while waiting for a life-saving operation without which there would be no personal future. Imposing this flaky experiencing of time on the architecture of the book was probably the hardest task I have faced as a writer, but once I understood what I was doing, it made a lot of sense. We don’t necessarily experience time as a linear narrative, so why should we reproduce it in that way?

HC: Time passes slowly and with great intensity when you smoke cannabis. Howard Marks points out that since time cannot slow down, the only possible explanation is that the brain is working faster. With the rush of serotonin you experience, access to memory seems enhanced (the destruction of memory may be related to a powerful overlaying of new and intense thoughts, apprehensions and suspicions).

I would say that in the ascendant phase of smoking there is a transformed sense of self - partly an erasure of self - in the light of a wonder (and, often, an amusement) at the world. Unfortunately in the descending phase the price you pay may involve a refocused and negative sense of self - paranoia - and of time: so either you stay stoned, or you drop out of the capsule, back into the world, perhaps aware that you have wasted a lot of time... Or perhaps feeling you had a delightful afternoon.

I am not anti-dope, incidentally. I am anti ignorance, and anti skunk, and anti the criminalisation of dope. (I think it should be legalised, and treated as recreational pleasure with risks, like alcohol or sky diving. You don't see teenagers drinking meths, because society has a regulatory method for booze. You definitely don't see much black-market sky-diving, without instruction or safety systems.)

Truant traces time and addiction experienced in waves, according with a pattern of giving up and relapsing. Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened to me on dope was a mystical experience in a bus on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, when I felt I fell through time. At the time it seemed like the merest - though most terrifying - brush with the hand of God. I can understand why an observer might think it was down to too much skunk colliding with the mysterious and well-documented relationship between time and buses, however.

NWR: Many reviewers have singled out your lack of self-pity and blame in Vagabond, Richard. In press coverage you made great pains to emphasise how badly you treated your family, and there is no ounce of psycho-analysis in the book; fitting, I suppose, for someone trained as an anthropologist. And you too, Horatio, blame no one for your dope addiction, aside from a brief rant about Rizla and some joking about policemen as surrogate fathers. Instead, you both chose to recreate specifically historical periods. Richard, in Vagabond, it is the 80s, yourself a self-proclaimed ‘exile from Thatcher’. You describe an ‘appalling sense of mission’ which you think your peers shared, and identify it as a reaction to the purposeful role World War II created in your parents’ generation. In Truant, Major’s 90s yuppy society is also dubbed a ‘protracted political adolescence… [marked by] childish security… [and] absence of war’.

All the commuters, all the office workers, all the rich and anxious… making money, then coming in to get drunk, calling their dealers, sorting out their drugs for the weekend… like first class passengers in one of the beautiful jets which soar… over the pub… Nothing can go wrong, what could go wrong, nothing’s wrong… so far, so good… ‘But it’s not the fall, it’s the landing.’ Truant

Whatever the cause, I experienced a hunger for danger… It took me years to figure out what it was I was lacked, why I had this appalling sense of mission, but I believe now that it was… because young men of my generation had no war to go to… the context in which we grew up, inundated with tales of bombing raids and struggle and hardship and loss… we… felt our own escape to be a kind of curse. TVB

Does war help young men resist addiction? Are you substituting a sociological cause for a psychological problem?

HC: I say in the book that the absence of war in the 90s, or rather the absence of war's reality to us (we could bomb distant countries without paying any obvious price) contributed to our hedonism, our spiritual materialism. In using that phrase I was talking about the absence of cause, of call, of peril, of consequence, in marked contrast to the experiences of our parent's generation. And I wrote about a sense of frustration that late capitalism - though many of us felt it stank, knew it stank - was held to be the only game in town. I stand by that analysis: dope smoking rocketed, statistically, throughout the nineties.

It has actually dropped slightly and levelled off in this century. That might be because suddenly the certainties are gone, the consequences are with us, and the causes - be they peace, or the environment, or just financial survival - are suddenly more obvious and urgent. Maybe my generation's experiences and choices look less attractive to the next generation. It seems anecdotally true. I don't think war helps anything, but if you read Sebastian Junger's wonderful book, War, there is no question that a craving for intensity of experience is a young man's trait, and that war supplies that intensity. Why else are playstations so popular? Playstations may be preferable to actual combat, but they are also depressingly compatible with over-indulgence of dope.

Of course some of us are born with underlying psychological vulnerabilities; most of us, I suspect, since to be alive is to be psychologically vulnerable. But only the foolish or the unlucky head straight for the thing that will trigger the problems. I was certainly more foolish than unlucky.

RG: What young men do, across cultures and across history, is look for trouble. And they compete. In pre-industrial societies they compete for food in the hunt, compete for women, compete for property. This is elementary stuff, whatever political correctness might suppose. I don’t think I was saying that war helps young men resist addiction – I mean, look at Gertrude Stein’s ‘Lost Generation’ of poets and novelists after World War One, so many of whom became drunks and addicts. No, what I said was that there is always a pressure on young men to compete in some way, and historically there has been an expectation on young men to compete with the warlike actions of their ancestors. It is only very recently, and in affluent cultures, that this tendency has begun to unravel. Young men grow up today without a clearly identifiable set of role models. They can choose from a whole range of models, real, invented and virtual. From an anthropologist’s perspective it is an unprecedented and unique situation. I play down psychological causes because they aren’t of great interest to me as a writer (or as a reader for that matter): I prefer to record what I see around me and allow readers to draw their own conclusions about psychological motivation.

NWR: The image, Horatio, of yourself at fifteen at boarding school, wearing your home-made poncho, is striking, and you evoke it to raise the possibility of some innate 'madness' that led to your vulnerability to dope, which in turn led to addiction and fed into or caused what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder.

…the madness… and… depression [have] never come without drugs… take drugs, act mad, stop drugs, get depression, get better, take drugs. Truant

Half of your book, Richard, deals with hepatitis C, which brought you close to death in 2007-08, and which has symptoms of hallucination and acute insomnia. You have specialised as an academic in ‘narratives of illness’.

Is addiction an illness? How did you approach writing about illness?

HC: If addiction is an illness it is a strange one. Are smokers ill? In as much as nicotine dependency is causing their brains to demand another cigarette, which is killing the smoker - yes. But the first steps along the road to that illness were taken in full knowledge of where it would probably go. To start and to give up are choices - whereas you can't choose not to have most illnesses.

Science is beginning to identify various genes linked with addictions. Conditions previously associated with willpower or self-control are being found to be a response to the stimulation of certain receptors in the mid brain. Does it mean that some of us are more vulnerable to the 'illness' of addiction? Perhaps. But you might argue that in the absence of drugs to block these receptors we who are addicted (I have nicotine and caffine issues) simply need to practice more self-control. It is certain there are stages of addiction - to alcohol, for example - that are unquestionably illnesses.

Dope is not supposed to be physiologically addictive, but it is - can be - so habit-forming that the distinction is meaningless. I know people who are never without dope - never. They are perfectly habituated to it, so although they are certainly addicts they do not apparently suffer any ill-effects. Thus they are not just living with an illness, but relishing it.

In my own case, and in many people's, dope can light the fuses on all sorts of psychological demolition charges - depression and mania are particularly nasty illnesses, and linked to dope smoking. I thought of my Truant years as a dark and swirling and shameful swamp - by writing I hoped to construct a path through them, see them clearly, and hopefully illuminate them for anyone else who might be interested.

RG: Substance abuse doesn’t start out as an illness: it usually starts out as a way of having fun – or else experiencing life in a more involved and exciting way. Ironically it sometimes develops into a way of shutting out the world, for some people more quickly than for others. So addiction doesn’t start out as illness but will lead to illness and is therefore rightly pathologised. Once illness sets in, most other considerations become secondary. Addictive illness has a way of taking over a person’s life, and unfortunately not only the addict’s, but the lives of those close to the addict also.

NWR: I am no mystic (nor Christian), but I was struck by the similarity of a guardian-angel figure, associated towards the end of each book, with a revelation and your recovery. InRichard’s case she is a ‘gypsy waif’ who ‘dances down the aisle’ of Barcelona’s Santa Maria del Mar. In Horatio’s, she is an androgynous, agile, hooded Muslim snooker ace. As Horatio says, ‘a revelation on drugs is not a revelation at all’.

What is your attitude to moments of apparent revelation or salvation attached to a guardian angel figure?

HC: A skeptic might say that a revelation might simply be a moment when the brain produces a clear thought - miraculously, perhaps, from the addled mess you have made of it. Such moments as I have experienced range from the "Ah, yes, of course," to "Oh my Almighty Lord, I see now that I am a worm, and you have given me, just for a moment, an encompassing vision of that wormhood - I have become a worm fully conscious of my worm-ness, and just because a philosopher might argue that that is impossible does not mean it did not appear to this worm to have happened to this worm. And I am going to try to be a better worm in future..."

My attitude to revelation of any sort is thus gratitude, and - during one or two particularly intense experiences, a mixture of Holy dread and humbleness. Guardian angels come in all shapes, though I have noticed many of them are driving taxis. I had a quietly revelatory conversation with a taxi driver in San Francisco a while ago. 'Everyone smokes dope - I mean, 70 percent of my passengers,' he said - which is strange because far from being a paranoid or inarticulate city, San Francisco is the future. Whenever I have been I have seen things that eventually come here. People working in cafes and at home on computers: I saw it there years before it became normal here. Then there was Pilates! I should have opened a studio back in the early nineties - I would have been rich. And now? Well, in their present and our future, all city taxis are hybrids, and there are medical marijuana facilities which mean those who need it can get it. The city and the state of California has a mature attitude to the stuff: I don't mean a free for all, I mean an intelligent approach which treats it with as much caution as we should treat alcohol, and a discrimination which allows the informed enjoyment of a natural pleasure (with clear cultural quality controls - no San Franciscan would touch the poisonous rubbish that British children have pressed on them by their street dealers) without the hypocrisy, criminality and ignorance which have done so much damage here.

RG: Revelatory moments, moments of epiphany, are deeply rooted in storytelling. They are a universal feature of fairytale and myth. I guess writers almost unconsciously absorb them as tropes into their writing. But I’m not sure writers (or even ex-addicts) have any more of a penchant for fantasy than other people. Whatever we call it, most of us spend a large proportion of our waking hours daydreaming – indulging in some kind of fantasy. Among the archetypal or iconic figures we conjure are ones that we recognise from reality, but also invented ones. And we map these iconic figures onto our own reality. Or else the opposite happens, and figures from our own reality suddenly take on iconic or mythic status, which sometimes happens when we fall in love. I think that happens a lot. Our waking lives are configured with characters from myth. We might recognise Dionysus or Aphrodite or Hecate in our actions or the actions of people around us. Part of our job as writers is identifying them.

‘Taxi HQ Spiritual Home’, from Truant by Horatio Clare

'Gypsy Waif', from The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn

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NWR Interviews Maria Donovan, author of Pumping Up Napoleon

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MARIA'S NEW STORY, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIELD!

NWR: The title story takes the concept of women being addicted to ‘unavailable men’ to extremes, even turning the phenomenon of the blow-up doll on its head by creating a woman’s fantasy hero, resurrected and fast-decaying as he waits for a new nose to be grown from cells on the back of a lab mouse. This and other stories such as ‘My Cousin’s Breasts’ and ‘Girl on a Pedestal’ suggest you have a fascination with the body escaping its physical parameters. Can you suggest a source for this and are you developing the theme in current work?

Maria Donovan: All the stories in Pumping Up Napoleon have something to do with the body: (the working title for that collection was Falling Apart). The body as a physical entity, its animal biology, does fascinate me: I’ve studied anatomy and physiology and am interested in medical developments and how ideas about the body push the creative impulse. I’m also aware of the body as the vessel that contains our conscious selves. Looking back, it all stems from my first realisation that I would die one day. I was four or five and outraged as well as frightened to discover that I couldn’t count on existing indefinitely: I just hadn’t realised there was a beginning and an end to me. I’m not consciously developing that theme at the moment in quite the same way, but death and how to live with it does matter to me: the story ‘Pumping Up Napoleon’ is meant to be funny as well as sad. On the whole, thinking about the time when I won’t be around anymore is what drives me to write. The act of writing (particularly if it ends with publication) is partly, for me, about transcending boundaries.

NWR: Vanity (also related to the body) is important in ‘The New Adventures of Adromeda’, while a similar flaw of self-regard, pretentiousness, is the focus of ‘Girl on a Pedestal’. I like the way its protagonist, an art critic back home working on the local paper, allows her sense of context (fame, importance, community) to expand and shrink as physical considerations (such as being in a small place or a crush on art agent) come into play. Is this manipulation of focus (from navel to horizon) important in your writing?

MD: Though there’s often some bigger idea behind the stories, I like to see how that plays out in the detail. Sometimes what happens is that there’s an agglomeration of detail that amounts to something bigger. Also, when I was writing those stories I used to rest my eyes by looking at the distant mountain. Then back to the screen or page.

NWR: What I hesitate to call Catholic guilt seems heavy in ‘My Cousin’s Breasts’ and ‘The Real Thing’ (the latter’s sibling witnessing an incomprehensible sexual world reminded me of Atonement). Do you regard yourself as an Irish Catholic writer or have you gone thoroughly native?

MD: I was brought up a Catholic in a small seaside town in England and I think that kind of religious education stays with you. My first school was a convent and when I was young my belief was very strong. I spent hours in church waiting for statues to give me a sign. Though my family’s Irish connections are obscured in the past, the parish priest was usually Irish in those days and there were other Irish Catholic families around. It was all part of the things I knew and had an intense effect on me. I think when I write about that kind of Catholic guilt I’m acknowledging it and at the same time trying to purge it from my psyche. I like being in Wales for many reasons, not least because it allows me to be someone else.

NWR: You have a specific sharp, economical and visual humour. ‘Harvest’ has farcical elements but the power of its ending (poor dog Brandy as prawn-bait) is in the way it potters along then veers into that last sick image, ‘“Waste not, want not, Michael,” said the Commander. “I’ll hold her and you pluck.”’ Do you think that any specific type of humour especially suits the short story form?

MD: This question made me think about some of the writers who have influenced me: Ray Bradbury, Katherine Mansfield, Maxim Gorky, P.G. Wodehouse. Though they all seem to be quite different, they are all economical, revealing of human nature, and in P.G.’s case, very aware of how to put words in the right order to make them sound funny.

I particularly like humour that is playful but leans on something heavier that underlies and instigates the need for humour. Sometimes I think you can be humorous and fierce at the same time. I think of the domovai in ‘The House Demon’ (Sing Sorrow Sorrow, Dark and Chilling Tales, ed Gwen Davies) tearing off the doors and eating them like biscuits. It’s not a laugh-out-loud moment, but it’s a little incongruous and that works for me, in a story that’s mostly about loss and anger.

NWR: The stories ‘Burying Dad’ and ‘Transit of Moira’ indulge individual fantasy with wish fulfilment taken to an extreme (this is also true to a gentler degree of the mother’s deathbed scene in ‘Invitation’). Was it a conscious decision to combine naturalistic stories with speculative ones as a means to stretching degrees of fantasy in this way? Were your publishers happy to market the mix of genres your collection covers (naturalistic, fantasy, comedy, romance, myth)? Are you likely to write more speculative fiction?

MD: The mix just came naturally and I’m very glad the publisher accepted that. I’m aware that in marketing terms it’s helpful to have a theme and it might have been easier if I’d stayed with my working title and made obvious that all the stories are linked by ideas about the body. Then we’d have known what hook all the different forms are hanging from.

All these ideas float around or are lodged in my head and I’m usually glad if I can just fish one out and give it a life of its own. Sometimes sitting down to write can seem daunting and so to be playful, to amuse myself (and then, I hope, others) is a way of getting things going. At other times it’s a question of externalising something I would really like to communicate.

I have already started to write more speculative fiction (for example a story called ‘My Own CVA’ that appeared in The Lancet and the more recent ‘The House Demon’) though I’m aware it makes it harder to put me in a category when these run alongside more naturalistic stories. To me, it’s all speculation.

I’m engaged in writing a novel at the moment, but I do have ideas about theming, perhaps another collection of stories around place and displacement: my time in Holland, a year I spent moving around Europe. I’d like to have one set under the heading ‘Strange Dorset’.

NWR: ‘The House Demon’ featured a subset of sprite, the buca. May your interest in escape and wish-fulfilment be explored via the fairytale in future?

MD: The wish to write something about the house demon was in my mind for several years before all the elements came together in that way. I published a very brief story with the same title (quite different in style) a while ago, in a collection of what I like to call my short shorts, Tea for Mr Dead. It includes some variations on Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and so on, making use of various ideas I had jotted down that didn’t seem to have the legs for longer stories.

For my MPhil in Writing at Glamorgan I produced a study called Good Enough to Eat: cannibalism in history, myth and fiction that includes some work on ‘Hansel and Gretel’. I’m interested in the way fairy tales originate, have been passed on, collected and written down. I do have a long-term idea for an historical novel in which one of the characters disputes the Cinderella model as an ideal for women, but no other immediate plans. That might change the next time I take the dog for a walk.

NWR: The setting of ‘The Disappearance of Baby Joe’ is a futuristic Amsterdam. This reminded me, as did your new story for the current issue (92) of NWR, ‘Slaughterhouse Field’, that you have spent some time in the Netherlands. Did you think much about settings when you put the collection together? Do you think fantasy settings can sometimes militate against qualities such as a sense of place and atmosphere that are associated with the short story tradition in Wales?

MD: The funny thing there is that ‘The Disappearance of Baby Joe’ does have a realistic setting. It’s just a bit unusual. The igloo Baby Joe lives in is based on the kind of bubble that people with extreme allergies are sometimes confined to for their own protection, but the warehouse that smells of cocoa was a real place, as was the artificial island in Amsterdam Harbour, which provides the wider setting of the story. I lived on that island for a year or two in the late 1980s. Of course, ‘Slaughterhouse Field’ was also set in a real place. Maybe it’s the fantasy that militates against the real setting?

In the collection Pumping Up Napoleon most of the settings exist, if only in my memory – or as a combination of memory and imagination. ‘Harvest’ has its place on the Dorset coast, though the house is not there. It’s where I’d like there to be a house, preferably one I might live in!

If I do make a place up, I try to inhabit it. So even when I use fantasy settings I like to have some kind of realistic detail as an anchor: in ‘Transit of Moira’ the spaceship is imaginary, but it has a layout I can describe and then there’s the idea of scuffed plastic, stale air, and fingermarks on the glass, space travel turned into the everyday as coach travel. The later story ‘My Own CVA’ is about a doctor who’s suffered a stroke and is being kept in a kind of pod, stacked up with all the other patients. One thing he can hear is the call of a chaffinch, like an ice pick in his head. It’s a long bird call very familiar to me. The constant repetition was a joke my late husband and I shared because when we lived in west Wales we were so thrilled to recognize it at first and then it started to get on our nerves. We then recognised it in all kinds of settings: it leapt out of TV dramas and came through the open window of the car when driving. I put it into the story to bother the character of the doctor and to help me feel what it would be like in his situation.

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NWR Talks to Dylan Thomas Prizewinning Elyse Fenton: Interview: Nia Davies

NWR: Which living poets have had great bearing on your poetry and how?

Elyse Fenton: I have trouble with this question, in part because the poets who have had significant ‘bearing’ on my poetry are not necessarily my favourite poets. And the poets who have had the most bearing on my poetry are no longer alive. So, poets whose work I’ve read and been affected by in loose chronological order include: Gary Snyder, Louise Glück, Marie Howe, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, Yehuda Amichai, Robert Hass, Yusef Komunyaaka, Carolyn Forché, Bruce Weigl, CS Giscombe, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Gary Young, Natasha Trethewey, CD Wright, Michael Longley, Dean Young, DA Powell, Terrance Hays, Kevin Prufer, Thomas Heise, Katie Ford, Matt Rader, and recently, Major Jackson, Beth Bachmann and Shane McCrae.

NWR: In a recent radio interview the reporter spoke of your collection Clamor winner of the 2010 Dylan Thomas prize, as ‘inspired by the poet’s husband’s experiences as a soldier in Iraq’. But of course it’s not directly about his experience but rather about your experience of his. The poetry seems to spring from that emotional tension and distance. But your husband spoke about how his active duty as an army medic was, in the day-to-day sense, quite mundane. Do you think there is cause for his concern that your poetry might be mis-understood by general audiences as a straight depiction of his life there? (That is if the radio editing was a fair presentation of your views!) How do you reflect on how the book has been read?

EF: This is a subject that radio interviewers have seized on recently, and, yes, over-dramatized a bit for the sake of a good human-interest story. Any heated controversy it may have sparked has been more present in the blogosphere than in any personal relationships.

In terms of how this book gets read, I think among most poetry readers (ie poets), there’s the understanding that poetry is not a form of journalism, that the speaker is mostly a construction, that a poem’s ‘truth’ might be removed from an objective, originating truth. A poem happens on the page, or in a reader’s interaction with the page, so who cares what the flesh-and-blood poet’s husband did or didn’t do? Or that she has a husband, for that matter?

The cause for concern, as you put it, comes when a reader wants to read a poem as having some dutiful obligation to an objective set of facts. According to this reading, there is some value assigned to the ‘authenticity’ of a voice. I’ve had audience members ask if my husband did, indeed, once catheterize an Iraqi soldier. What becomes troubling to me in this reading is the privileging of that authentic voice, which has the effect of silencing all other voices deemed ‘inauthentic’. Because what does it take to be ‘authentic’? To be dead? The lone survivor of a firefight? The witness of a firefight from a distance? To love a survivor? To love a witness to a survivor? Who is to say that the experience of one soldier is any more authentic than another? Or that a civilian cannot write authentically about a country at war? Once we start playing the authenticity game, we’re sunk. We’re silenced.

And yet, it’s more complicated than that. Because, as it turns out, I can’t escape the authenticity game myself. When an amateur blogger recently wrote that I should not call myself a “war bride”, because, he presumed, my husband had never been in “real danger”, I bristled. I drafted a response in my head outlining all the reasons he was wrong (and laughably ignorant) before I caught myself. I’d put the book out in the world — happily! —and who was I to begrudge a reader this interpretation, ignorant and tone-deaf as it was? Why did I have to parade out my husband’s experiences — or my own — as a kind of credential? And why did I feel so desperate to set the record straight, if I really believed that a poem’s truth has no strict fidelity to the objective truth?

And right now, that’s the crux. As it turns out, being a poet and being human are not mutually exclusive propositions.

NWR: In your latest poems, including one published in NWR 92, the summer issue, you write about new motherhood in a way that is both loving and also original, wild and surprising. Clamor is about love, war and death. You’re happy and accomplished at writing about big human themes. But do you think that poetry should always deal with big questions? Or is there a place for the silly, trivial or humorous?

EF: I don’t think there’s any particular should for poetry. Yes, absolutely, there’s a place at the poetry table for humour, just as there’s a place for the ‘big questions.’ And I think more often than not, they’re rubbing shoulders, or should be. If I’m not turning to humour, it’s because I find it incredibly difficult to do well.

In the past few years, I’ve wanted to move away from the breathlessness and relatively narrow language of Clamor, so I’ve been working on play and recklessness, trying to explode or at least expand my register a little. But – surprise! – there’s distance and longing and terror and the potential for loss even — or especially —in poems that attempt levity. Because what’s laughter without the potential for ruin? And vice versa?

NWR: There’s a strong narrative and thematic arc to the poems in Clamor. Were there poems that didn’t fit that story: that you held back from that collection to publish later, or were the war and the love so all-engrossing that it was all you wrote about at that time?

EF: Once I started writing the poems in Clamor, I was pretty much riding it until the end.

NWR: You’ve won prizes for your work on both sides of the Atlantic, which is unusual for a young poet. What do you think about the occasionally insular stance of American poets? Did you find the Dylan Thomas Prize, which you won in autumn 2010, a good way to discover literary worlds over the pond?

EF: In my experience, yep, American poetry can be pretty insular. This is not to say there isn’t a healthy translation community alive and kicking, just that there are enough American writers jostling shoulders (most often in mutually beneficial and productive ways) that it’s hard to expand the scope. I mean, I have a friend who’s a Canadian poet, and we hardly even speak the same language. Maybe I exaggerate. Matt Rader — he’s a terrific poet — introduced me to Michael Longley, whom I may never have encountered otherwise.

Also, I’ll be at the Hay Festival this June, and am hoping to have my American poetry insularity blown to pieces. Feel free to interpret this as a challenge.

NWR: Meryl Streep endorsed the popular anthology Being Alive, and Catherine Zeta Jones said how happy she was that a poet won the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize. How surreal was the moment of meeting CZJ and Michael Douglas? Do you think that Hollywood has a secret love of poetry?

EF: Oprah magazine or somesuch recently did a fashion spread on Emerging Poets. Seriously. If that’s an indicator of Hollywood’s secret love of poetry, I’d say we won’t see a poet in Hollywood for a very long time.

NWR: Do you think you will return to the subject of war?

EF: But is war a subject? I guess it is, inasmuch as ‘love’ is a subject. Of course, there were years in my life when it wasn’t a subject but a shadow. So I guess it feels like a privilege to be able to think of war as a subject, as something you choose to return to.

NWR: Your poems are full of images of the natural world and some have a riddle-like quality with their use of kenning and self-description. Are your poems informed by these or older poetic traditions?

EF: I think it’s hard to be an American poet and not be a product of some American landscape — urban, rural, suburban, sub-rural, Brooklyn.… We have so mythologized (or de-mythologized) our landscapes beginning with the Transcendentalist, that the natural world’s gotta show up in some way. I read a lot of Gary Snyder and Ken Kesey and Beat poets as a teenager on the East coast, and then moved West, pretty much for good. As for the riddle-like quality, well, I probably owe that to a combination of Lorine Niedecker and Michael Longley.

NWR: Where is home? And where is away?

EF: Right here. And there.

NWR Interviews Roshi Fernando, author of Homesick, and 2011 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and Edge Hill Prize nominee

NWR: You were an unpublished writer up to 2010 but had accelerated success lately, culminating in the Sunday Times and Edge Hill nominations within a few weeks of each other this spring. How did this come about?

Roshi Fernando: My history as a writer began when I became a reader. My mother was an English teacher, and she and her mother who looked after me when my mother worked, taught me to read and write when I was about three. I was off school: at home for days, sometimes weeks because I was severely asthmatic as a child, and we had none of those wonderful puffers then. So my reading ability was convenient for all concerned. My mother brought home leftover O level texts, and I was reading Dickens, Shakespeare, Eliot when I was seven or eight: completely above my head, and much punctuated by Enid Blyton! I did a BA in Philosophy and Literature, which was torture when I was twenty, but has proved its worth again and again: literary theory is much more useful to a writer than one would think. I applied for an MA in creative writing, but when I met Stevie Davies (based in Swansea University Creative Writing department), she offered me a mentorship for a year, which fortunately was funded by the Royal Literary Fellowship. I completed the first novel I wrote with Stevie as a wonderful guide. I sent it out a few times, but it needed a lot of revision, and I wanted to move on to fresh ideas. I went on to do a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Swansea. I have just submitted this: Homesick, my composite novel was the creative part of that PhD. In 2009, I went in for the Impress Prize, and much to my horror and wonder, I won. Horror, because I had only completed about a third of the book! I went on to write the rest of it in about three months, with revisions throughout 2010, Impress published the manuscript in the same year, and a story from it, “The Fluorescent Jacket” (reviewed here) has just been shortlisted for those Sunday Times and Edge Hill prizes.

NWR: May this broader profile change how you work and what you write about?

RF: Success won’t change the way I write. It has come quite late in my life – I’m in my mid-forties. Children [all four of them], my family, ground me. I have the next three to five years planned out, work-wise. I know what I want to say, and how I want to say it. I think only the outer world and its politics will change the themes and the underlying message. Success simply makes me hungrier.

NWR: How did you judge “The Fluorescent Jacket” to be the right story to submit to those awards?

RF: “The Fluorescent Jacket” is the story that won the Impress Prize too. I cut my short-fiction-writing teeth on it: it took me almost a year of crafting to get to its final shape. Not a word is superfluous, I hope. It is a difficult story, and the reactions I’ve had were sometimes astonishing. A reading of it was staged at the Oxford Literary Festival in April, as part of the presentation of the Sunday Times Award. The actor, Bhasker Patel, broke down as he read it! And people in the audience cried too. I found that extraordinary.

NWR: Homesick is described in its current Impress edition as a “composite novel”. Was there discussion with your publishers about its definition and whether to market it as a collection or a novel?

RF: There was none! I called it a composite novel, and that’s how they sold it. The marketing was mainly based on the Impress prize. Having “winner” of something on your book cover always piques interest. I can’t emphasise enough how important prizes are to the new writer.

NWR: May your recent success affect your attitude to writing short stories, whether interlinked or not, in future?

RF: Yes! I keep going back to “The Fluorescent Jacket” to see how I did it! I love the short story as a genre – the freedom, the ellipsis, the depth, the protraction. How to do it again? It is a precious art, and I do not want to lose my ability to practise it.

NWR: Homesick is about a large, loosely related group of Sri Lankan immigrants to Britain. How does your personal/family background relate to this material?

RF: On reading Homesick, my sister said it was like reading about a community whose lives were happening in parallel to ours a couple of streets away. None of the characters were painted from life. But of course, all of them are from my experience.

NWR: The opening title story, with its preparations for a party and its easy fading in an out of individuals’ viewpoints, reminds me of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Was this an influence. Did you realise what a task you had set yourself with such a large and varied cast in the wider novel? Did you ever struggle to juggle viewpoint?

RF: I hadn’t made the connection with Mrs Dalloway – but of course, it is reminiscent. I loved Woolf, and Forster, when I read them in my teens. Perhaps they were a benign influence, when I wrote “Homesick”. I wrote that story last, once I knew how many characters I had developed in the wider novel, and exactly what I was dealing with. I didn’t really struggle with viewpoint. Each story stands alone, and was treated as a separate entity. I treated each one with as much respect and anxiety as I would the writing of a novel. A short story is a whole life.

NWR: A few of the male characters in the novel are engaged in casual work that leads them into great danger (“The Bottle of Whisky”, “The Fluorescent Jacket”). Your ear is finely tuned to nuances in the world of such work, for instance those markers of belonging that a job, however menial, may bestow. Did such aspects of immigrant life involve research or is it something you instinctively understand?

RF: I do instinctively understand them, I think: immigrants work hard. It’s simply what we do. It’s pride, a desperate need to do well, a desire for belonging that legitimate work gives you, the self-respect in a pay packet.

NWR: Sexual abuse is an important theme in the novel: did you find that hard to write about?

RF: Yes. I tried not to dwell on it: sensationalising something like that is simply unacceptable. But it happens in so many families, and it must be faced head on. I was saying, Look: even in these immigrant, hard working, well-respected communities, this happens.

NWR: I read the themes in “Love me Tender” to be bullying, isolation and affinity in children’s relationships. Preethi ultimately moves on from her troubled friendship with the boy the other kids call “Danny the mong” via what looks like assimilation. Are you trying to show in your writing how children and working adults face similar issues, especially if they are immigrants?

RF: I think this story is about how children have moveable loyalities: assimilation is too strong a word. I am exploring how children form their identities and characters from the influences around them, and then make clear decisions about love, friendship and life. Although Preethi knows she is very low in the social strata of the playground, she knows Danny is even lower, because of his arm. Her kindness toward him is similar to her unquestioning love of her father, an alcoholic who beats her. By accepting both people for whom they are, she hopes others will accept her. And of course, she is proved wrong. They both want her to be something else. She “loves them tender’ – but do they love her in the same way? Do they hell.

NWR: “The Turtle” is different from the other stories in that it displaces what I took [wrongly, it turns out] to be a white British family in Oman. It is a very exact and painful exploration of control in motherhood. What is its role in the wider novel?

RF: Control is a good word. Jenny is Mr Basit’s daughter. Mr Basit is a Sri Lankan Muslim who worked for gangsters when he first came to England. Jenny has a fear of Islam, simply because it was her inheritance to reject it as a religion. Jenny sees a move to Oman as a return to Islam. She worries that the Imam’s cries in the morning will echo back through her to a forbidden past, where she will be limited. Jenny equates Lucas’ autism with an unquestioning loyalty to a religion and lifestyle she doesn’t want to partake in, but which is forced on her by her English husband, Mike. It sits within the novel as another story about a second-generation woman who cannot escape her historical make-up.

NWR: There are echoes of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in “Sophocles’ Chorus”, with its mixed-race teenage characters and references to Howard’s End. Was ZS an influence?

RF: I loved On Beauty, but I don’t think of it as an influence. On Beauty used Howard’s End as a template for the plot, updating it to the modern US. I used a number of texts that Preethi was studying, for her to wander, dream-like, in and out of, when she was in a coma.

NWR: My favourite pair of stories is “Mumtaz Chaplin and “The Terrorist’s Foster Grandmother”. Mumtaz looks destined for a happy ending and a proper family, which I’m so pleased about! His relationship with the elderly Gertie is incredibly touching. Comfortable, perpetually on the lookout for her “lost” foster child, Gertie is the perfect bulwark on the bus on 7 July, big enough to block Mumtaz’ flirtation with terrorism. The image in this story of Jihad as Ribena is unusual. How did the themes of terrorism evolve here?

RF: I’m so glad you noticed the Ribena image – it is a key statement, actually. The British Empire was represented on maps as a large swathe of pink. Al Quaida means “the plan” – an assimilation of Arabic and then non-Arabic countries, to be ruled over by one caliphate. I wanted to write about the fundamental preachers who are finding proselytising fairly easy in this country. There are so many young people who feel disenfranchised because there is no place for them in society. I did set out to write about terrorism – it was the phrase “homegrown terrorist” that inspired me. Why not “homegrown doctor”, baker, road-sweeper or bank clerk? These are all jobs people like Mumtaz do every day. But it suits the combative polarisation of the tabloids to ignore the steady day-to-day life of the majority of immigrants, and since 7/7, it is mainly the young Muslim male who is vilified. I wanted to write about Mumtaz as an individual within a society that lumps everyone together.

NWR: Tell us a little about your new novel, serialised in Issue 92 of NWR (published on 25 May), The Elephant’s Wife. Are the themes, cast, scope, style similar to Homesick or is this wholly new territory?

RF: I can only really write the way I write – so not wholly new territory. The cast will be smaller though: Homesick was an exhausting juggling act. The themes are widening as I type this. It is all still unclear: early days. But also, in my head, the characters are walking around speaking: it is all I can do to scribble down what they’re saying. I’m excited about it – I’m almost ready to plunge in and do the huge amount of work needed to get it written. It’s like getting ready for a six-month circus tour. That’s what I’m doing at the moment – the last minute tyre checks, the canvas repairs. Once I’m on the road, my goodness, it will be fun!