It's never just self-expression for me

An interview with Aamer Hussein

When I read Aamer Hussein I'm often struck by a vague mysteriousness and obliquity that I can't quite get my head around. With many of his short stories, I feel as though the final realisation eludes me. I feel an awkward sensation of having missed something that would allow me to fully make sense of what I have read.

Yet the stories give back so much, even with pieces of the puzzle missing (as a result of my own iniquities as a reader). They evoke my emotional sensibilities so subtly that I don't realise how invested I am in his characters until I pause between stories and feel that my gut is coiled with a strange kind of desperation.

His stories are about the complexities of living; they are about platonic love, deep friendship; they are about being away from home for so long that you lose your sense of belonging; they are about the role of art in the political and personal spheres; they are about the unavoidable human condition of longing, the intense emotional pull of nostalgia. They are quiet stories. They will not jostle for your attention with cheap, punchy opening lines or hyperbolic characterisations. Instead, like a soft, delicate aria, they will slowly break your heart.

Aamer recently shared some of his thoughts with me about his collection Insomnia (reviewed here), and about his writing in general.

As I Read

Initially, I'd love to know what your aims were with the stories that make up Insomnia. What you were trying to express, how they link together. And also whether you think the collection is a success in terms of how you might have envisioned it.

Aamer Hussein

The collection took a long time to complete, nearly five years; and it wasn't until I wrote the fifth story, which was the title piece, that I had any sense of a book nearing completion. So I can't say I had a vision for this book; the only link is in the reappearance of the character Murad in three different seasons - winter, summer, and autumn (spring, somehow, went missing).

Each story was an end in itself, until, as I reached the sixth story, 'The Angelic Disposition', I found myself in an echo chamber which I then went beyond by expanding the spaces around me.

There are recurring themes in these stories, of restlessness, of unease with the traditional comforts of life, of breaking away, even to an extent with the consolation of art in the face of such brute realities as war and natural disasters; themes that lead, in some way, to a tentative acceptance which I hope isn't quietist, or at its worst pessimistic. Much of the book is firmly set in the 21st century, but looks back constantly to WWII and to the partition of the South Asian subcontinent in the post-war years.

Yes, the book has some of my favourite stories in it, and works for me, I think, as a collection, particularly the last three stories: but I prefer my collections, and all collections, to be varied in subject and style rather than to embody any one theme, though one’s current preoccupations are likely to influence both the acts of reading and of writing.

AIR

I get the sense that the collection is bracketed by two distinctly different stories, stylistically speaking: 'Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda' starts us off with a group of very bare snapshots that create a strikingly oblique depiction of a journey and a loss; and we end with 'The Lark', a story in which the characters seem altogether more energetic than in the other stories, and a story which comes across as more tense, more tightly wound. How do you feel about these two? What influenced them?

AH

The narrator of 'Sanlucar' is seen, in the third person and in another season, in ‘Insomnia’, so those are the stories that are linked, and in that sense seem to me to frame the collection – a journey from restless insomnia to acceptance and the solace of a remembered epiphany which will recur at another time. But 'The Lark', which is something of a coda to the volume, in fact has structurally more in common with ‘Insomnia’ than with ‘Sanlucar’- they’re third person accounts, take place over a very short period, of about two days, figure groups of characters in conversation, and return to the recent, or fairly recent, past in flashbacks. And yes, much of 'The Lark' takes place in real time; it is very externalised, almost like a film, until the long internal monologue at its climax, while 'Insomnia' is very interiorised from the beginning. ‘The Lark’ is actually inspired by, though not based on, my father's student years in England. 'Sanlucar' evolved from a poem I scribbled in my diary one morning in Andalusia. All three texts are influenced by my own journeys in Spain, Italy, Kent, Sussex and Dorset, though I'm not the greatest of travellers.

AIR

You've mentioned the seasons twice already. Is the time of year important to the stories? 

AH

‘The Book of Maryam’ is based on a Christmas dream I had, and the contrast between the season of goodwill, the year’s shortest day, and the atmosphere of the impending war against Iraq are crucial to the story: in a way, they are the story. Similarly, ‘Insomnia’ is autumnal, with the narrator recollecting remembered seasons as leaves fall around him. ‘Sanlucar’ is drenched in Andalusian sunlight, and the transience of summer pleasures.

AIR

You are very good at creating characters with very real back stories, and in depicting your characters' lives as though you were writing a biography. I assume you take much literary licence and that in fact the stories are not as autobiographical as they sometimes appear to be. Is this something you are conscious of? Do you borrow heavily from real life and your own experiences?

AH

Am I conscious of borrowing from real life? Of course, with the license you mention. Though less from my own autobiography than you might think. I didn't have a rivalry over a Japanese girlfriend, and I haven't yet fallen off to sleep on a friend's bed in a strange hotel room. More seriously, my central characters are introverts while I’m quite gregarious and sociable, though shy: you could say Murad is my fraternal twin, not my mirror-image.

As for other stories: I wasn't around in the 30s or 40s, and no single real life prototype exists for Saadia, who narrates 'The Angelic Disposition', or for Lydia, whose phantom haunts the lake resort in the title story along with that of her lover.

I’d like to say something here about received wisdom. You can be told to write from experience if you’re in a life writing class, and to read a lot of everything if you’re studying poetry or fiction, but purely confessional writing on the one hand, and contrived intertextuality on the other, are pitfalls we need to avoid at all stages of our writing.

AIR

What is your favourite story from the collection?

AH

'The Angelic Disposition' and 'The Lark', because you can see the present in their mirroring of the past The title story is, in many ways, a key to the entire collection. It’s set in the moment in which it was written, and chalks out a trajectory I might have – or probably have – inherited from Urdu poetry. In the 19th century, you’d find something along these lines: ‘I find no release from the sorrows of love: how can I then worry myself about the world?’ but by the mid-twentieth, one of Pakistan’s greatest ever poets, Faiz, is telling his beloved he can longer love her as he once did, as there are sorrows (or pains, to translate him accurately) in the world, that exceed those of love. It’s a constant commute between the private and the public domain. I don’t often set myself the task of chronicling the travails of a particular period, but on the other hand most of my stories are firmly rooted in their historical background and many wouldn’t exist without the political events that shape their characters’ destinies. Would Saadia ever have left Delhi, if not for the partition of her country? Would Hasan abandon his studies in Oxford, if not for the threat of the coming war? What amuses me is when politics come in through the backdoor in a story that’s meant to be interior, as in ‘Sanlucar’ in which Andalusia’s Arab past is recalled through the callous eurocentric dinner conversations of incidental characters.

‘Hibiscus Days’, about life in military rule in 80s Karachi, took twenty years to reach its final form, as it was originally too close to the events it described. It really was found in a drawer, and I feel that it’s still unfinished.

‘Maryam’ is another old story, among my first; it’s inspired by a dream, but it seemed to lack a specific context until the invasion of Iraq when the poet’s protest suddenly became relevant. It hinges on a trick: the poet Tahira is actually reciting the story of Mary’s annunciation from the Quran, so a reader, for example a Catholic, who gets that reference sees what she’s doing: bringing together Christians and Muslims at Christmas, with an immortal parable about motherhood, at a time when political wars are being given a religious colour. (In my original dream-draft, a folk singer was chanting a Latin hymn). The irony is, her listeners don’t get it, and interrupt her with their own apocalyptic visions of a veiled world. And if the reader doesn’t get it, s/he’s reading another story, which is equally valid, about the way we unwittingly muzzle poets and writers by refusing to listen. .

AIR

There is a deliberate, careful and lingering feel to your prose. Is this how you write - slowly and carefully? Do you sit down to write every day or only when you get an idea?

AH

My stories gush out of me most of the time, though I do pause as I write, to get the precise meaning I want rather than for a word or image. I am very conscious of sound, though, because of my musical ear: I listen as I write, and I also like my stories to have the rhythm of speech, which needs work. Most of my stories usually emerge in a few hours or a couple of days, it's the redrafting that takes time, and that process is to expose the inner structure to the reader as far as I possibly can, though the stories are often minimal even as they first emerge. I rarely do multiple drafts, just several revisions of the same story, which often means adding details of time, place or history. That process comes from having retyped one manuscript of my stories on a typewriter from handwritten manuscripts for the first five years of my writing life, usually very close to a deadline!

No, I'm not at all slow when I'm actually writing, and I work on a laptop. But there are often long periods of silence between each story, and I have no desire or compunction at all to write every day unless I'm enmeshed in a piece of writing, and that goes for all genres. I'd much rather read a book in one sitting, see a film or an exhibition, go for a walk. As for ideas, I write a column every 6-8 weeks for a Pakistani Sunday book supplement, which has made me good at plucking out ideas from any possible source: it’s a very good mental exercise, and writing the column keeps my machine well-oiled.

AIR

In the title story, it is said that, 'Poetry or prose, it was all, in the end, a matter of working with pain, turning its blood and bones into something beautiful.' Is this the way you feel?

AH

If memory serves, that was my character, Murad the Melancholy, reflecting. As I said he is more of an introvert than I ever was. Having said which, those lines were written in the terrible months in which we had the massacres of 7/7 in London, and then the earthquakes in Pakistan, all less than a year after the tsunami, so they may well reflect my feelings at the time. But I have written from joy as well.

Am I ‘glad to be a writer’? Until I’d published my third book, I wouldn’t even have called myself that. Now, looking back, and looking at the articles, essays, reviews, introductions and even translations I’d already done by my mid-forties, and the sea of critical words I’ve produced since then in addition to the fifty-odd short and two long narratives I’ve published, it just seems inevitable that I did become what I was to become; rather than being glad, I’m just content that I did what I had to. I’m also very much a teacher of literature and history, so even after deciding, after some thought, to give up my tenured post, I feel I teach through some of my writing; it’s never just self-expression for me.

AIR

I think of you as a short story writer, yet you have also written a novel, The Cloud Messenger. How does novel-writing differ from short story-writing? Are there any more novels on the horizon?

AH

I've written a novella, Another Gulmohar Tree, as well, though apart from the slow and rather novelistic conclusion that was really more like one of my longer stories. Writing the novel was a pain - not its separate sections, but trying to bring together its various segments because I find chronological arrangements extremely boring to sustain over so many pages. I think in patterns, not in 'plots'. Comparing the techniques seems facile, because the claim that the story's brevity makes it easier to write is also incorrect. The chapters of a novel don’t demand closure in quite the same way. Putting together a collection often, though not necessarily, can take longer, but again it's a very different experience from being confined in the (to me) restrictive space of drafting one narrative three times over a year (which is how long TCM took, if I remember rightly).

I might one day write a long story like ‘The Angelic Disposition’ again, but at present my fictions have grown even more brief. I used to feel, before I wrote Gulmohar, that there was nothing that couldn’t be said in ten thousand words, but Gulmohar found its own ideal length at seventeen, and couldn’t really be shorter. After TCM, I managed to tell an entire life story in about two thousand. Ultimately, a story’s a story, whatever its length.

By the way, I turned to writing in my native language, Urdu, a year after my novel was published, and that was, in a way, an exercise in relearning the craft of writing succinctly, which I felt that four years of 'thinking long' had tarnished. A couple of those pieces covered only about a page or two. I was primarily educated in English, and later picked up Italian and other Romance languages, so calling Urdu my mother tongue is a claim I only make emotionally because it’s always been my second language in practical terms. But I’d often been asked about using a ‘second language’ to write in, and about what I borrowed from Urdu, which seemed odd to me because English has always my first language of expression. And then the time came to see what changes using Urdu - which I’d call my natural inheritance, like, I suppose, like Gaelic is for the Irish writers who choose to write bilingually - would make to my technique. Did the switch transform me? Yes, because I realised that my displacement was physical, not linguistic, and writing in Urdu was only a partial homecoming, though there was something visceral about the process of writing in a language over which I had less conscious control. However, my Urdu stories weren’t ever considered by my readers to have been written by any other than a native speaker, so you could say, with or without attendant ironies, that I finally got my tongue released from a postcolonial clamp. And I gained an entire new audience at ‘home’.

AIR

Your stories from other collections - This Other Salt in particular - use aspects of fable and myth. How would you describe your approach to telling a story? And how are you influenced by the old forms of storytelling?

AH

Yes, I am influenced by 'old forms', oral forms too, as much as by modernism or even

postmodernism. My impulse was always towards the former but it took me much longer to get there; modernism was easier to practice. I do often refer to, use, rewrite or retell folk or even fairy tales or legends and parables, though not, as far as I remember, myth. Some of my stories appear to be traditional but in fact are largely invented by me. Most recently, though, I've written some miniscule prose retellings of verse tales by the poet the west knows as Rumi and we call Maulana Jalaluddin of Balkh; I'll probably do more by other, similar poets. By the way, I was quite astonished when, the other day, a poet in his twenties remarked to me that he wished he had time to read fairy tales. I mean, what? They’re essential reading! As for my approach, everything I’ve read is now part of a heap of organic compost on which I plant my stories, whatever their species.

AIR

Which writers have influenced you and your work?

AH

As a younger writer: Tanizaki, Lu Xun, the two Marguerites (Duras and Yourcenar), Beckett, Cesare Pavese, Najib Mahfouz. I read a lot in Urdu. My favourite writer in my own or probably any other language is Qurratulain Hyder, who also wrote in English. I think she's acknowledged in Insomnia and actually appeared as herself in This Other Salt. She died a few months after Insomnia was published. I'm not aware of any direct influence over the last two decades, except that, indirect though enormous, of Maulana Rumi's French translator, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, who was also a wonderful anthologist of Persian tales and parables to which I often return. I came across her at a crucial stage, while I was writing Insomnia, and of her retellings found its way into ‘The Angelic Disposition.’ By the way, I seem to have mentioned too many novelists, but these days I’m rereading stories by the Iranian writer Simin Daneshvar nearly three decades after I first came upon her work, and wondering whether they influenced me in subliminal ways as I find them very moving on rereading them, viscerally so. I think voracious readers absorb so much unconsciously, not just points of craft, but entire emotional burdens, too, from their reading. I recently realised how much I’ve been influenced by Urdu poems I heard recited and sung when I was a child.

AIR

I'm interested in how writers make their money, and I know you taught creative writing (among other things) for a long time. How did that impact on your writing, if at all?

AH

I started as a researcher and reviewer, then taught Urdu grammar for ten years, Creative Writing (with an emphasis on close reading, not practical exercises) for nine, and arching over both English and world literature for about sixteen years. I wrote three books in the nine years I had tenure in CW, so no complaints, though I wrote fiction during my summer and winter vacations. And as I’ve said, I loved teaching, though the constant editing of very rough drafts, and marking, could be an occupational hazard I eventually decided to do without.

What I found disruptive and distracting was regular reviewing. I have a friend in my hometown, Karachi, who says 'those of us who read a lot write little'. She's right. I’m one of that breed, and feel that without the books I’ve read I would never have learnt my craft, since I’ve never attended a writing class as a student. But the amount of ephemeral writing I’ve had to produce over the years – after reading long novels I’d otherwise have thrown across the room, and trying not to tear them apart - was a drain of writing energy. Otherwise, for many years, I treated all forms of writing I wanted to do – a story, a memoir or an assessment of a favoured writer’s craft – as different aspects of my craft, to be approached with the same degree of dedication. I’ve always held that there’s nothing magical about writing prose, as opposed to writing rhyme or composing music; though I will admit now that creating stories raises one to an emotional level which can actually be an epiphanic space. After all, there’s a degree of feeling you have to convey to the reader. Criticism is cerebral, fiction emotive. When I look back at my pace, it’s always been slow to variable – I’d say an average of four years between collections though I broke that rule once, with Turquoise. I have a feeling it’ll be another two years before my next, as my stories are shorter than ever and, unless I publish a collection that’s as brief as a volume of poems (I’d love to), I’m going to have to produce a lot of them in order to justify a book. But I’m not yet jaded enough to contemplate the thought of a future without another book. So I do, increasingly often, consider my publisher’s idea of gathering all my scattered incidental recollections together as a book of memories. At 61, I'm old enough.

• Born and brought up in Karachi, Aamer Hussein moved to London, aged 15, in 1970, to complete his schooling. He took a degree in South Asian studies from SOAS, and later studied French, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. He began to publish short fiction, reviews and articles in journals and anthologies in 1987. He has published five collections of stories, Mirror to the Sun (1993), This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise (2002), Insomnia (2007), and The Swan's Wife (2014) – and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). His latest work is 37 Bridges and Other Stories (2015). He writes in both English and Urdu, still lives in London, and travels frequently to Pakistan.

Insomnia - Aamer Hussein

Hussein's characters are both wounded and nourished by their cosmopolitanism

The seven stories of Hussein's plaintive 2007 collection are soft, drawn-out sighs in the face of time's passing. Like sighs, they are whisper-quiet, yet convey so much tenderness, vulnerability, longing and loneliness in their subtle breaths.

Perhaps the barest and most poetic of the collection is 'Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda'. In its short nine sections, it is a rather tilted, oblique account of a trip through Spain. It almost defies interpretation, creating its greatest effects through those nostalgic moments sparked often by smells, sounds or tastes: 'Eyes shut, I breathe in, lost colours found again: jasmine white, fig green, hibiscus red and something new, unnamed: purple, perhaps'; 'The fan hums overhead. I recall one night's mad crossing, and a morning salutation: parted lips brush mine four times'; 'The smell I remember from Sevilla fills the air, from a bush behind my left elbow.' Memory haunts every sensation, memories mostly of loss, of a previous love, and yet the events of yesterday, the memories being created more recently, as well as the immediate future, have 'no shadow and no smell.' The narrator seems distant from the current events of his life, caught in the net of his longing.

Yet after 'Postcards' the collection takes a different approach. The opening story, quiet, poetic and stuttering, is exchanged for longer continuous narratives that explore how Hussein's characters are both wounded and nourished by their cosmopolitanism, how their relationships can be both a drain and a vital component of life, and how longing deepens as they move through life.

Recurrently, the personal world is threatened and indeed shaped by socio-political unrest. In probably the most successful story of the collection, 'The Angelic Disposition', a female writer is buoyed in her fledgling literary career by a correspondence with her contemporary, Rafi Durrani, while the Second World War and the chaos of Partition rages in the background. Yet the historical context is only referred to as it relates to the relationship between the two characters and their writing compeers, and this prevents the story from sagging under the burden of the past. Hussein's greatest power is in his control of the material, his preference for looking closely at human relationships in the face of such widespread torment.

This might be the reason 'The Crane Girl' seems to make the deepest impression, despite the fact it isn't the best story in the collection. The young Murad, who shows up in later stories as an older man, and who appears to be an alter-ego of sorts for Hussein, becomes embroiled in a difficult relationship with Tsuru, a Japanese girl, who holds an intense power over him. Towards the end of the piece Murad's friend Shigeo tells a heartbreaking story of how she was unfaithful to him when they were dating. The story as a whole spills sexual and emotional anxiety from its pages and leaves one feeling unsated yet strangely fulfilled - the type of ending Hussein does so well.
 

Insomnia is a commendably polished collection. Its melancholy life portraits of itinerant writers and artists seem to drift as on the oceans so often evoked, the pathways to home. The language Hussein uses is utilitarian, poetic in its brevity, yet the worlds he creates are emotionally and psychologically complex. This is certainly a collection for the modern era, where travel nourishes its characters even as it separates their world into pieces; pieces that don't quite fit together again in the same way.

pp. 133.
Published: Telegram, 2007.

Stay posted for an interview with Aamer Hussein in which the short story writer talks about his work, his foray into novel writing, and his use of his mother tongue...

Descriptions of Heaven - Randal Eldon Greene

In Randal Eldon Greene's debut novel, the author has some astounding ideas that, although they coalesce quite excellently, never quite attain the reach the reader is hoping for.

To his credit, Greene doesn't shy away from the 'big' metaphors. In Descriptions of Heaven we have the elusive 'lake monster', the house with its myriad hidden doors and passageways, the book on linguistics that Robert struggles with throughout. All of these things converge and rotate on the same axis - the impending death of Natalia, Robert's wife.

With their son Jesse they relocate to this strange house by the lake, a house built by an eccentric and mentally ill architect. When a supposed sighting of a monster in the lake brings news reporters to the area, we learn that Natalia is terminally ill. What follows is an attempt on Robert's part to make sense of both life and death.

A confirmed atheist, Robert reckons with language in an attempt to find much needed answers. But this is an area in which the author does not delve deeply enough. Aside from the odd reference to the scholarly book he is working on, the occasional lamenting of his 'analytical skill' in laying out words 'like cadavers' and 'measuring their spare parts', we see very little of his existential battle through his scholarly work.

In Natalia's character, as well, and in the character of the family as a whole, there is a lack which acutely affects one's experience of her death. Her shortening life span fails somehow to add tension or a sense of urgency, and fails even in bringing the family together and characterising them through their struggle. The threat of the ever-mysterious lake monster (a skillful objective correlative) subsides and goes unmentioned after the first third of the book (though it does re-emerge at the end to good effect).

Greene simply has difficulty getting the right tone. Robert is intelligent and imparts some interesting pieces of metaphysical wisdom, however the timing for these monologues is often slightly askew and sometimes his imagery stretches a little too far:

Where had the time gone? Had it drifted like summer's heat out over the ocean and up, even farther, past the atmosphere, and into the unreachable spaces where nothing but the residue of alpha's violent and ballooning beginning floats with no sentient thought to quantify it? And, beyond that, is it pulled finally into the mouth of omega, that infinitesimal puncture on the surface of God's perfect canvas where all creations paint will eventually drain. 

As an example, and as intelligently depicted as it is, this image takes us so far beyond the sense of time passing that it becomes almost nonsensical, certainly whimsical and superfluous.

Yet, despite its downfalls, Descriptions of Heaven has much to commend it. Greene does not give in, at the end, to Robert and Jesse's desperate need to find answers. There are mysteries in life that will always remain as such, and the novel is faithful to this fact. I was left with the characters' desolation, and thoughts of the eccentric architect of the strange house, who had tried escaping God by hiding in the hidden passageways he built into the house.

Descriptions of Heaven is a strong exploration of the constant, unfathomable presence of death. It falters, as anything that deals so nakedly with such a powerful topic will, yet is true to its own desolate philosophy. One might feel that, were it a little longer, it might have performed its hefty feat a little better. Certainly I look forward to what the author has to offer in the future.

pp. 130
Published: Harvard Square Editions, November 2016 (this is an Advance Release Copy)

Why should not old men be mad?

An interview with poet Keith Chandler

My memories of Keith are of the schoolteacher in his final year of teaching, cycling to the college through narrow country lanes to teach his class of sixth-form students the poetry of the First World War. He seemed, in the way he moved through the hallways (darkly dressed, slow ambling gait, tall, wearing dark glasses), to be almost larger than life. He seemed removed in some way from the reality we all shared. 

Yet when he began the class, sitting on one of the desks at the front with his feet up on a chair, a paper cup of coffee going cold beside him and Brian Gardner's anthology, Up the Line to Death, open in his hands, there was a vulnerable accessibility to the way he offered his expertise, the way he spoke to us. His voice was soft yet deep and authoritative, confident that the poetry we were studying would enfold our young minds and hold our interest (as it both did and didn't, at various times). He was subtly funny, but calm and careful in the way he approached poetry, the way he picked at it and encouraged us with gentle hints to find our own meanings.

He also had a number of poetry collections out, something we didn't know until later. To use the final words from his poem 'Chemo Nurse', he was 'The Real Thing' - quietly dedicated to poetry, un-showy, patient with us all in our teenage ignorance.    

I got in contact with him again recently, eight or so years on, and he was very pleased to give me some of his time in answering my invasive questions about his poetry, his writing process and his life. 

  

As I Read

I'd like to dive straight into your 2008 collection The English Civil War Part 2 (reviewed here) and talk about 'Postcards from Auschwitz'. The poems in this series share an insidious quality that seems to stem from the naiveté on both sides - Jewish prisoners and German officers. The Jews seem to trust that 'all may be well' (where the word 'may' is so much more devastating in its uncertainty than had you used 'will'), while the Germans appear not to be much more clued in to what is going on - 'My orders come from higher up the line.' I'm wondering whether it's denial at work here. Can you talk a little bit about what you hoped to achieve with 'Postcards'?

Keith Chandler

Any poem which tackles this darkest of subjects must somehow mediate between Adorno's question, "How can anyone write poetry that can comprehend the barbarity of the Holocaust?" and Santanya's assertion that "Those who do not remember History are doomed to repeat it." I have tried to evade this contradiction, tried to hint at just some aspects of the experience, by coming at them from a multiplicity of directions, viewpoints, styles. About half of these mini soliloquies were written as if from the Jewish victims' points of view...presumably some believed the official line that they were travelling to a work camp, many must have sensed the dreadful truth, while others perhaps preferred to be in denial? Another six or so of these overheard voices were written from a variety of non-Jewish perspectives - the train driver (part 4), the book keeper (part 6) the retired elderly guard (part 10) the Nazi Inspectors (part 5) etc, which mostly emphasise the ordinariness, the routine-ness, of their contributions to the horror. The overall design for this piece was for a spread of voices, tones and styles. Obviously, the main organising idea/metaphor is that of Postcards (as suggested in part 9) - postcards being brief and partial points of view. Some may be crying out, some self-exonerating. Partly this postcards idea may have been suggested by Craig Raine's Postcards from Mars collection, his "Martian" theory of poetry (1975?) suggesting that well-worn subjects and descriptions can be refreshed by being approached from alien points of view; it is strange to think of his essentially playful, indirect, approach being applied to the Holocaust.

AIR

That's certainly the sense I get with most of your poetry, a playful, indirect style that is applied to really complex, sometimes harrowing, events or issues. How do you balance that? I assume there is something going on in your mind about the dual issue of how not to make fun of important subject matter, but also how not to come across as morbid or sentimental.

KC

Yes, its's sharp of you to notice a predilection for looking at appalling subjects in a quasi humorous tone. In other collections I've written about cannibalism (in the Chilean air crash), Hiroshima, the Cambodian killing fields, a firing squad in the Phillipines etc etc. Come to think of it, I've also written about a lot of unattractive individuals too - a Tourettes sufferer, an autistic boy, a paedophile, a girl brought up as a hen, a Peeping Tom, innumerable disfigureds and cripples. All of which makes me a not very nice person? I'm reminded of John Lennon's memory of being fascinated by the assorted 'freaks' of Liverpool, often choosing to follow or sit behind them on the bus. Except that I'd like to think my interest in the tragic and victimised is ultimately sympathetic. I guess I feel that we must approach darker aspects of our humanity, contemplating, for instance, systematic evil in 'Postcards from Auschwitz'. (I've also written a lot of celebratory poems, about the brighter side of the human spectrum, especially in my latest pamphlet, The Grandpa Years.) With the darker subject matter I feel that it is perhaps best saved from becoming merely maudlin, mawkish, by being served up with WIT of tone and style - verbal humour which may offer a detachment, ambivalence, towards its subject matter. Wit is a quality I admire in much 17th Century poetry - the way Marvell, for instance, presents the execution of Charles I with such knife-edge equivocation. Wit seems to allow one to gaze at horrors while remaining detached. A sense of humour in general and verbal wit in particular may be qualities absent from a lot of post-Romantic poetry. We tend to prefer emotional intensities and authenticities of texture - poetry which is "close to the bone" (and the nerve). But I do think that humour can act as a corrective, almost a safety valve, to too much intensity. Question: could Sylvia Plath have survived the horrors of introspective self-therapy if she had been able to laugh about herself...and would the poetry then have been less interesting?

AIR

That's very interesting, that you question Sylvia Plath's 'introspective self-therapy'. Is that how you see your own poetry: a kind of self-therapy in which you can make sense of your own experiences? I'm referring more specifically to the shorter poems about your life, taken from the section 'Looking Myself Up' in Civil War.

KC

Yes, there is a bunch of mainly personal family poems in one section and more scattered among other collections. I don't know that I would go so far as to call them "confessional" (in the tradition of Robert Lowell and Ann Sexton) but they mainly describe an unusual childhood - being the son of medical missionaries in Northern Nigeria (in the area now devastated by Boko Harum). Such a provenance - the last days of the British Empire included - all feels politically incorrect these days, but I hope that, at least, it is an interesting background. I'm not sure whether these more personal pieces are "therapeutic"; the ones about a difficult relationship with my father probably are. As hinted in a previous reply, I have doubts about the health benefits of diving too deeply into oneself as in the later poems of Sylvia Plath (I rather hate her 'Daddy' poem) or in the Henry poems of John Berryman, which are really autobiographical. Both after all couldn't live with what they had discovered. On the other hand, to contradict myself, I love Ginsberg's 'Howl' and 'Kaddish' holy excrescences, which couldn't be more "personal".

So, to answer your question, yes, I do write directly from personal experience from time to time, but does that make more personal poems more or less authentic? In theory I prefer the idea of art developing a Yeatsian"mask" for oneself, or, to use T.S. Eliot's phrase, finding an "objective correlative" for the merely personal. But, again to be contradictory, I think that the most powerful elements in T.S. Eliot's own poetry (the period from 'Prufrock' to 'The Wasteland') are much more personal than he himself would acknowledge. He liked to claim that he was a spokesman for the classically non-personal ... but I suspect that the strongest elements in his own best poems are in fact the product of a sense of sexual sterility and confusion rather than, for instance, a vision of post-war Europe. Perhaps instead of "We are the Hollow Men" he should have written "I am a hollow man"?

AIR

In terms of Plath and Berryman, though, its obvious that their poetry wouldn't have existed absent their dysfunctionality. I think for a lot of poets, and artists of all kinds, the art takes precedence over life, in the sense of making a lasting impression in the world and of creating beauty out of suffering etc. (maybe you think this a naive way of thinking?). And that's what I love about their work, particularly Berryman's Dream Songs - they don't seem to hold anything back, or to be written in a Wordsworthian tranquillity, but instead seem to have been direct and necessary to the poet's existence. Does your own poetry take a secondary role to your life, or is it something constantly present in your mind, something necessary?

KC

The Art or the Life? That does seem to be a recurring question for, as you say, artists of all kinds. Yeats put it bluntly: 'The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the art'. Reading biographies of artists does seem to confirm a kind of necessary egotism - that 'chip of ice in the heart' as someone put it. Having recently read Jonathan Bates' biography of Ted Hughes, I am appalled by Hughes' attitude to the women in his life, for instance going off with one of many mistresses while supposedly on honeymoon with his last wife, Carol, or spending that famously cold weekend with yet another mistress during Plath's final attempts to contact him. Examples of artistic self-centredness abound.

As for myself, I seem to have drifted into the position of finding myself with a large dependent family without ever having had the courage to dare an alternative. Thus over forty years of school teaching while trying to fit poetry into the interstices of holidays and weekends... Does that make me an amateur - a "weekend painter" as it were, rather than a full-time "professional"? Certainly it does. It probably also made me an uncommitted teacher, thinking poetry while supposed to be marking or preparing lessons. "Get real" as my wife, hung around with kids, might have said. In more harassed moments I have envied the apparently family-free lives of such favourite gay poets as Ashberry and Edwin Morgan who seemed to have felt free to experiment with their lives as well as their Art. But that is a silly response; gay writers must depend on a range of relationships quite as much as any "family man".

Larkin, as you will know from several poems such as Self's the Man, prided himself on his family-lessness while at the same time, with typical complexity, seeming to regret it. Other artists seem to have been deeply touched/inspired by their family connections/constrictions. In poetry I am thinking of Chaucer's dedication to "Little Lewis"; or Shakespeare's wonderful sense of the vulnerability of children (maybe guilt-driven by the death of his son, Hamnet?); or of Browning's carer-role towards his wife Elizabeth; or the mutually supportive partnerships of Mr and Mrs Tennyson, Mr and Mrs Edwin Muir, Mr and Mrs William Blake... So that the Yeatsian Life/Art dichotomy may not be as clear cut as it would seem; probably the very tensions that it necessitates can be creative?

A clear case of the productive friction between having to earn a living for his family and yet being driven to abandon them for his art's sake is that of Edward Thomas? And Wallace Stevens, to judge by the "fat cat" photos of him as boss of the Western Union Insurance Company, was happy to commute between work and poetic playfulness.

I don't know what conclusion to your interesting question all this name-dropping is coming to. On the one hand you may get the bullish misogyny of a Picasso, on the other the tenderness of a Rembrandt towards Titus and Saskia. In my own unimportant case I have always felt driven by a need to think of myself as a writer as well as an equally strong, often contradictory, need to find security in the idea of family. So now I must go off and wipe the noses and/or bottoms of several grandchildren...

AIR

Is this why your poetry hasn't achieved mainstream success, this juggling of your art and your family life; earning a living while writing? Or is it a part of your sensibility as a poet? Do you, perhaps, see poetry as a free enterprise, a way of life rather than a way of achieving fame/recognition/money?

KC

I guess that my poetry hasn't achieved widespread recognition mainly because it hasn't been outstanding enough. I've had more than my fair share of chances, being picked, for example, as one of "ten promising English poets" in 1970 by Carcanet, who then published a first collection. But I've found it more and more difficult to gain publication, never mind recognition, since then. The market for poetry has become increasingly crowded and competitive, for would-be writers almost more than for readers. The "poetry scene" of my youth was dominated by a few big names (Heaney, Hughes, Betjeman, Lowell, Thom Gunn - all men!) and a few (male dominated) publishers. The "poetry world" has changed hugely. For one thing there has been a proliferation of creative writing courses (alas, none available when I went to Uni) which in turn has spawned probably thousands of would-be "creative writers" all toting for recognition/publication (and sometimes, one suspects, for the academic sinecures - those creative writing tutor jobs - that go with becoming a published "name".)

In such an overcrowded field, it would often seem to be necessary to have some kind of personal novelty/gimmick or interesting back story - coming from a different ethnicity, for instance - to begin to grab attention? Or perhaps a knack for self-publicity? Or perhaps, as always, the right personal connections? But I do think that the plurality of poetry outlets these days is generally much more healthy than the old Faber and London Magazine dominated days of fifty years ago. Also, thanks to desk top publishing (and the Internet) there are such a lot of really interesting little specialist presses and magazines to be sampled, from the avant garde (Prynne et al) down to the very local. And the poetic energies seem to be more widespread too - often coming most distinctly from what used to be called "the regions", i.e. not London.

In spite of this new more hectic, pluralistic, competitive atmosphere, I still do think, must believe, that the most outstanding talents, those with true originality of voice - Alice Oswald and Jo Shapcott spring to mind - can make it to the top of the heaving pile of would-bes. Almost every year fresh young voices emerge - last year Liz Berry and Jonathan Edwards particularly impressed. As for myself, I am probably one of thousands of 2nd or 3rd division "poets", all fighting like cats in a sack for our brief moments of local fame and recognition... (but certainly not for any money!)

AIR

What influences would you cite on your poetry? Have these influences changed as you've grown older?

KC

My first big influence was Chaucer; one of my A level teachers at school was David Herbert (who went on to edit the Penguin Book of Narrative Verse); he was very keen on Chaucer, going so far as to paint a mural of the Canterbury pilgrims around his classroom walls. So I guess I can blame that influence for having tried so many times to write long narrative poems - completely out of sync with contemporary taste?! My main tutor at New College was John Bayley, who also idolised Chaucer; his book on Troilus and Criseyde, The Characters of Love, is still a worthwhile read, I think, and must have reinforced my tendency to try to write those lengthy "story poems."

But, having decided to read nothing but poetry while at Oxford, I soon came upon other influences, especially Donne, Marvell and all the so-called "Metaphysicals", which, hopefully, had a more healthy influence on my own attempts to write, tightening up metre and toughening up style generally. The Oxford Eng Lit Syllabus famously stopped short of studying the 20th Century (probably it has now modernised itself?), but, since getting free of Academia and being able to choose what I read, I find I have rather preferred American poets - Emily Dickinson, John Crowe Ransome, Richard Wilbur, e e cummings, Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Stevens, Ginsberg, Ashbery etc... but especially Robert Frost who, together with his English friend Edward Thomas, is still a favourite. At best American poets always feel fresher than their European counterparts. Of course, having been a schoolteacher for over 40 years, I've also had to get to know and teach a lot of 20th century UK poets and have developed a more than grudging respect for such near-contemporaries as Hughes, Heaney, Gunn, Larkin, R.S Thomas and, more up to date-ly, Carol Ann and Simon A... So, thank you very much , Andy, for asking about "influences". I feel flattered... but also feel that I should have dropped a lot more contemporary this-century names into the mixture!

AIR

Not at all. You've given a pretty extensive account of your growth as a reader as well as a writer of poetry there. For my final question, I want to ask you about your current work. I know you have a pamphlet - The Grandpa Years - out at the moment, but what are you working on now? What does the future hold in store for readers of your poetry?

KC

I recently turned 70 - the "allotted span." Having had your questions to try to answer has given me an opportunity to look back, sometimes mournfully, always solipsistically, over what could be called a "career". I seem to be writing as keenly as ever, mostly confining myself to shorter pieces; I have a collection of these, The Goldsmith's Apprentice, for which I hope to find a publisher soon. I also have a dusty drawer-full of narrative poems which deserve an airing. The question is when to stop. Does one know when one is "past it" or, at least, past one's best? I'd like to think that I'm writing as well, if not better, than ever... but maybe that is just the usual self-deception? I remember when I was about 50 and attending a poetry workshop which was full of pensioners, I used to think "Why don't some of them just shut up? Don't they realise how OLD they sound, - 'old' in terms of subject matter, out of date style, or somehow just lacking in verbal energy/ vividness? Why can't they be more open to change?" But now I find myself in the position of those despised pensioners, carrying on regardless with a "writing hobby", still trying to compete in what is increasingly a young person's game... Anyway, to quote Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium", 'Why should not old men be mad?' Why not continue to experiment, to try to make poems, if only for my own interest?

An aged man is but a paltry thing, 
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing 
For every tatter in its mortal dress

• Since being selected for Ten English Poets (Carcanet) in 1977, Keith Chandler’s poetry has been published in four collections: Kett’s Rebellion (Carcanet, 1982), A Passing Trade (OHP, 1991), A Different Kind of Smoke (Redbeck, 2001) and The English Civil War Part 2 (Peterloo Poets, 2009). His most recent publication is the pamphlet, The Grandpa Years (Fair Acre Press, 2014). Having worked for over forty years as a schoolteacher in Liverpool, Norfolk and London, he now lives in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. His web-site address is keithchandlerpoet.com.

So Much for That - Lionel Shriver

A vastly important read despite its deficiencies.

Without a doubt, Lionel Shriver's power lies in her subject matter. She has a knack for alighting upon social concerns that are current yet, somehow, timeless. In her most famous novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, the issue she tackled was American high school shootings; in Big Brother, it was obesity and the relationship we have to our food. In So Much for That, a book which predates Big Brother but postdates Kevin, she critiques, through a fully formed narrative, the American healthcare system.

The question feeding the novel, as Shep Knacker postpones his plans to escape the daily grind by living abroad in order to care for his ailing wife, is: how much is one life worth? We see just how much Shep is willing to spend of his three-quarters-of-a-million dollar savings - and his lifelong dream - on medical costs.

What is stunning about this novel, though, is not that we see what havoc terminal illness can wreak on individuals and families, but that we also see the wounds it can heal, the way in which it can simplify one's life.

In a series of side-plots, we are put into contact with the resilience, or the reluctance, of families who must care for their loved ones in times of physical decay. Shriver's characters are hyperbolic, and this seems necessary to the way in which she bravely deconstructs human psychology during these struggling times. Often, her prose tends to lend itself equally to anthropology as to literature.

Interestingly, Shep's wife Glynis, thoroughly dislikable throughout the novel, is unchanged by her cancer diagnosis. She remains a rather rude pessimist, hating the intrusions of friends and family who come to 'make themselves feel better', paying their visit so that 'they don't have to feel guilty' if she were to die suddenly. Her attitude is about the only thing in the novel that doesn't change, which offers a welcome contrast to the stoic, born-again sufferer we have come to expect of people/characters with an incurable disease.

Now I slide over, somewhat jarringly, to mention the things I dislike about the novel, and there is one thing in particular - a big hoofing kick in the Shep Knackers - which utterly spoils this as a work of literature, though not (it's important to note) as an immensely important social critique. But we'll get to that.

It has been noted by various critics in the past that Shriver tends often to overload her dialogue with information. In this novel, the problem is worse than ever. Her characters, in a constant state of emotional, existential and physical crisis, are incomparably eloquent. Precise, detailed references to past events; medical information that both (or all) speaking parties are already privy to and so shouldn't need to be said; well-formed complex sentences with all the emphases and climactic build-up of  parliamentary speeches. That is how her characters talk to one another, and it is hard to read and maintain any sense of absorption in the reality of the fiction.

My main beef, however, with So Much for That, is in how it ends. And the more I think about the ending the more I dislike it, for it spoils what up until then was a thoroughly unsentimental journey through a person's terminal illness and through a healthcare system that in any self-respecting modern society should be illegal. Shriver's problem is not that she wades in the shallow end of cheap sentiment with her trousers folded up to her knees, but that she belly flops into the deep end, a triumphant war-cry banging off the tiled walls. From Chapter Eighteen to the end of the book, it seems as if Shriver has begun a victory lap to celebrate reaching the end of her latest novel. Yet the celebration is premature, because it is the very celebration that ruins it. The final eighty pages or so are a summing up, a tying up of all loose ends in an off-putting, sloppy and sickeningly predictable way. It is a process of smoothing over that is completely out of character with the rest of the book.

However, I am not going to spoil any of the plot, as I consider this a vastly important read despite its deficiencies, and wouldn't want to deprive anyone of a book that will stay with them for a very long time. Setting aside the ending, I know that whenever I come into contact with ill health, whether in family, friends or myself, my mind will flash on this novel, and in that way So Much for That will endure.

pp. 531.
Published: Borough Press, 2015 (originally published, 2010).

Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels

History lays its shadow over the present.


Reading Anne Michaels' prose is like experiencing a flood. You'll probably know what I mean only by reading her work, because if I say anything about packed metaphors, or if I use words like poetic, imagistic, intense, or unflinching, I will risk sounding trite. She is, anyway, one of those creatures whom we call Poet even when referring to her novels.



Fugitive Pieces is a poem. It is a lamentation concerned with no less than war, suffering, rescue, love, redemption. And what is the bold first line of such a poem? Time is a blind guide.

This tremendous opener gives a sense of Michaels' subject. She is concerned with time, with history and how history lays it shadow over the present. Her protagonist, Jakob Beer, 'bog-boy', surfaces from the mud during an archaeological dig in Nazi-occupied Poland, after witnessing the deaths of his mother and father. Athos Roussos, the man who discovers the boy, smuggles him home to a Greek island and guides Jakob in the world of learning. Through this new world obsessed with the discoveries of Greek geology and the metaphysical excavations of poetry, Jakob begins to dig up and study his own history, filled as it is with horror and suffering.

The author's most devastating gift is for ripping open the mundane to reveal the historical immensity beneath. In admiring the appearance of his lover Michaela, Jakob sees in her face 'the loyalty of generations ... the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful husbands, countless evenings in close rooms under the sheets, discussing family problems ... In Michaela's eyes, ten generations of history, in her hair the scents of fields and pines, her cold, smooth arms carrying water from springs'; and the converse to this, a way Jakob is able to protect himself from the crush of personal history: by writing about his past in English, 'a language foreign to their happening.' He feels that 'English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

In this sense, Michaels' prose itself is a kind of excavation, bringing up clumps of the past that are difficult to remove from the creases of one's hands, the underside of one's nails. History adheres to the cracks and lines of the present in this way, filling it out the way memory fills out the mind.

In the second part of the novel the perspective shifts to Ben, the child of concentration camp survivors, who begins a search for Jakob's journals after the latter's death. This part continues in a similar vein, snatches of memory interweaved with Ben's search in the house Jakob shared with his wife Michaela. The weight of history squeezing the present day almost out of all recognition.

But it is difficult differentiating Jakob from Ben. They narrate with identical poetic language, similar references. In fact, for a long time I wasn't even aware that a perspective change had taken place at all. The sameness between characters is disappointing.

This novelistic stumble should not, though, be given great attention. Her novel is a poem, to me, before it is a novel. And while I feel that the prose trembles on the edge of sensationalism at times, and find myself wishing that one of the characters might at least crack a joke once in a while, the profundity of Michaels' subject lends itself beautifully to her form of expression here. For instance, I was shocked on numerous occasions by some of the acts she describes as taking place during the Second World War: German soldiers throwing babies out of windows so that the soldiers below can catch them on their bayonets, or tearing them from their mothers' arms and throwing them in the air to be shot clay-pigeon style. Such difficult material requires a touch of gravitas, one feels - a tone of elevated seriousness.

In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels searches for redemption in war and its aftermath. She certainly finds a poetic beauty there, and an astounding purity of expression.

pp.294.
Published: Bloomsbury, 1997.

Albert Angelo - B.S. Johnson

I will never understand its almost infamous reputation as the book with holes cut into its pages.


A long time ago, B.S. Johnson was recommended to me by a friend. As often happens (life getting in the way, is what people like to call it), I forgot about the recommendation, but then recently stumbled upon a collection of three of Johnson's novels in the university library. These are: Trawl, Alberto Angelo, and House Mother Normal. I decided to first read the novel which my friend had praised all those months ago.

And isn't it an unprecedented little corker of a novel. One thing that struck me instantly is that Johnson is amongst that category of writers to whom writing is such  a natural form of expression. I can't quite put my finger on what it is about the writing that makes me feel this way (perhaps it's to do with the syntactical/grammatical imperfections that allude to a genuine unedited (or minimally edited) creativity), but there is an unstudied, uncalculated feel to the prose. I'm thinking Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Kerouac, Foster Wallace, just in terms of the naturalness, the way the words sit. They seem sprung onto the page with little effort, yet his sentences cohere into some really fine writing, funny too:

          'When Jenny left me, betrayed me for a cripple whom she imagined to need her more, my mother said never mind, perhaps he would die and then I could have her back again.'

Being experimental, post-modernist, Albert Angelo shakes the eiderdown of conventionality from its shoulders and shadow-boxes its own reflection. We find ourselves being skipped along like a smooth stone between tenses, perspectives, even form. There is drama, prose and poetry; first-person, second-person, and third-; simple linear prose and this system of two columns, one following the action, the other following Albert's thoughts simultaneously; there is also a series of short notes written by Albert's pupils (he is a cover schoolteacher), replete with spelling mistakes and colloquialisms, outlining the things they hate about their teacher. It is a wild sort of freedom the author has on the page, which allows the story almost to tell itself through a fragmented rush of impressions.

Yet Johnson never loses us. Never tries to lose us. It's not an academic thing, this mad jolting of structure, but a very functional approach to the novel. I can't remember reading a livelier book. And yet Johnson's most important gift is for using his humour, his ability to experiment successfully with form and structure, to hit the mark in a much deeper sense than any surface trickery. His man, Albert, is looking for distraction to help him deal with a break-up that happened four years ago with which he is still struggling. He and a friend, Terry, cruise around in the evenings looking for lively bars and places to drive, and they 'talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,' about their shared heartbreaks, 'as though it could make some difference.' Thus is created a niggling sadness that runs through the narrative, being chipped away at slowly, burrowing into the reader's consciousness and three-dimensionalising Albert, who we come to realise is filled with an intense, obsessive cycle of suffering.

Ultimately, the novel is about identity, about truth and appearance. There is a point in the third chapter (titled 'Development') where Johnson himself jumps onto the page with an impatient cry of 'OH, F---- ALL THIS LYING!' From there the novel proceeds into the phase called 'Disintegration', in which Johnson pulls apart the facade he has created, bemoaning the inability of literature to reflect real life in an exact, uncompromising sense. Here the true identities of all of his characters are exposed in an aggressive tirade against fiction, also known as 'lying', and his fictional world is obliterated.

A great, great piece of meta-fiction that I cannot recommend highly enough, though I will never understand its almost infamous reputation as the book with holes cut into its pages. Only at one point in the book does this occur, through two pages, and the outcome seems more of a small joke than a revelation of future events, as Johnson tricks the reader into assuming they have had a glimpse into what is about to happen. The novel is so much more than gimmickry. Johnson saw himself as more of a modernist torchbearer descended from the likes of Joyce and Beckett. To me that seems a little misguided, though not by much. B.S. Johnson is perhaps the English answer to those two clever Irish fellows.


pp.180.
Published: Picador, 2004 (originally published 1964 by New Directions Books).