Is anyone writing just fiction anymore?

The general "fiction" section of the bookstore … can be a very lonely place – Donald Maass

A while back I joined a writers’ group on Facebook. It’s a friendly place, bustling with activity. Some authors are slogging away on that first book, others are there promoting a whole range. So, a whole mixed bag. Almost all of us have websites and blogs and although our primary reason for being there is to promote ourselves, as is the nature of the Internet, there is a general willingness to help each other out in whatever ways we can. One way is providing book reviews. We expect someone to review our books so it only seems fair that we review a few too. To help people out, someone cobbled together a list of all the members who were willing to do reviews and what their preferences were: sci fi, horror, romance, chick lit, YA etc. Not one of them listed general fiction, let alone literary fiction, and so I asked and one nice lady said she’d read just about anything. But this started me thinking. I began to look at the kind of books that members of the group were writing. There were paranormal romances, historical fantasies, psychological thrillers, prehistoric fantasies, gothic horror, campus murder mysteries but nothing that looked remotely like plain ol’ General Fiction. And I wondered why.

I subscribe to a number of writers’ websites, some published, some still trying, some not that bothered, but very few of them produce work that doesn’t fit neatly into one of the many, many genres that are out there. There are definitely still writers who don’t work in a genre because I get offered their books to review. Arguably many of them might be classified as literary novelists; I’ll come back to that.

Until recently I had never read any historical fiction. I got historical fiction mixed up in my head with historical romances. The few I have read since have taught me not to judge. These are serious novelists who do an astounding amount of research so that what we get to read is as accurate as possible and yet they’re classed as genre writers. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought the word ‘genre’ was a disparaging term akin to ‘pulp fiction’. No matter how much research an historical novelist does I can’t imagine one winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But who was the last fantasy author to win it?

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell envisaged novel-writing machines churning out populist fiction for the proles. Give the people what they want. Look at our recent TV schedules: House (medical), the various incarnations of CSI (forensic detective), The Event (science fiction), Rookie Blue (police procedural), The Good Wife (legal), True Blood (horror), Gossip Girl (teen drama) – and you could add and add and add to these lists, but how many plain ol’ dramas? I can think of a few that are so easily classifiable: The Big C, United States of Tara, Hung, Breaking Bad and Treme, but by comparison to the rest they pale into insignificance and two at least have been cancelled after only a couple of seasons. The UK’s schedule is no better, although I think it’s more clogged up with soaps and they’re not exactly written with the cognoscenti of Great Britain in mind.

All of these have their place – I can enjoy a sitcom like The Big Bang Theory and I’m a huge fan of Family Guy – but I do get tired of shows like Castle which Carrie and I watch and get a kick out of deconstructing every week. Seriously, you would think some of these shows were written by machine.

Which brings me back to my initial question, only now I think it’s the wrong question. Writers want to be read – or, in the case of scriptwriters, they want to see their work performed – and the general idea is that people will be willing to pay a modest amount to read what we have written. There are two ways of approaching this problem: 1) do your own thing, do a good job and hope that people will be willing to pay for quality, or 2) write what people want to read. At the moment a lot of writers are going down the second route, in droves in fact. And the flavour of the month is YA. Post-Harry Potter people have suddenly sussed that young adults are capable of reading and actually willing to do so, and the same thing is happening now as happened with the silent movies: there has been a sudden surge in demand and so anyone who can string two sentences together is in with a shot. This is not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing either. It’s just an inevitable thing.

I have it on good authority that I can string a sentence or two together so why don’t I write the next werevamp romance? Firstly, I have no interest; secondly, I have no ability – just because I can write doesn’t mean I can write anything – and, lastly, the market is already flooded with similar products. What I really need to do is work out what the next big thing is going to be and write that before anyone else gets their foot in the door. Seriously, ten years ago would anyone have thought that wizards and pirates would be dominating the cinema?

General Fiction is simply that: General. It doesn't fit in any genre category. Part of our problem these days is too many genres. When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein I bet she thought she was writing a literary novel. Genre is not new. It’s been around since the time of the Greeks. Plato divided literature into the three classic genres accepted in Ancient Greece: poetry, drama, and prose. Poetry was further subdivided into epic, lyric, and drama. Using that logic then ‘novel’ is itself a subgenre, a type of prose-writing which makes science fiction et al subsubgenres.

The other thing that I’m noticing more and more are people writing series. You know when any blockbuster appears in the listings before anyone has seen it they’re already planning the next one and the one after that. X-Men was never going to be one film, Spiderman was never going to be one film and you can bet your bottom dollar that Thor and Green Lantern will spawn sequels in due course, even if Spawn didn’t (although there was the cartoon). There have always been sequels but never like nowadays. Cervantes wrote a sequel to Don Quixote. Nowadays the two books always appear as a single volume but the fact is there are two books and if you’ve read the first there’s nothing really worth reading the second one for; I gave up on it, one of the first books I never finished. I know I wrote a sequel to my first novel and I did so because my public (okay the handful of people who read the early drafts of Living with the Truth) asked for it, but although the sequel ends on a cliff-hanger, I had no plans to write a third book and can’t ever see myself returning to that universe. All my other books were designed to stand alone.

In an interview with Michael Neff, the literary agent Donald Maass was asked:

NEFF: What exactly is meant by "general fiction"? Is it harder to break into than SF or mystery, e.g.?

MAASS: General fiction, to my mind, is the stuff that doesn't fit into any category, or is written on such a scale that it "transcends" category. Have you noticed how mystery writers, say, who hit the bestseller lists no longer have the word "mystery" printed on the spines of their books? Instead the hardcover edition will simply say "a novel." Funny about that. Actually, category lists and category sections in bookstores can be great places to grow. There are dedicated readers, magazines and awards to help build an author's career. The general "fiction" section of the bookstore, in contrast, can be a very lonely place. – Michael Neff, ‘Only the Best’, Algonkian Writers Conferences

I’m content for my books to be classed as General or Contemporary Fiction but I still think of myself as a literary novelist. And, as such, that means I want to play with the big boys but as soon as I imagine myself standing in a line-up with the usual suspects – the likes of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway – I suddenly want to scurry back to the safety of the General Fiction shelves, but the fact is at least two of my novels are hard to classify as anything else: Milligan and Murphy is a metafiction inspired by Beckett’s short novel Mercier and Camier and The More Things Change contains huge monologues, pages and pages long, and is basically about a bloke hanging around a park for forty years thinking about how crappy his life has been. Not exactly bestseller material; even I’m willing to admit that.

So, why write them?

Because those are the books that interest me. I look at so many of the books my contemporaries are churning out and I feel like such a snob but I simply cannot imagine reading any of them. Or writing any of them. I think perhaps if anything qualifies me as a literary writer it’s my approach towards my writing. I’m not interested in telling stories, I’m not interested in entertaining people, I’m not that interested in selling books (a few would be nice, mind) but I am interested in working things out through my writing. I write about people but I’m more interested in ideas.

A definition then, although not a definitive one:

Literary fiction tends to focus on character development over plot, and explore philosophical issues and ideology. In comparison to mainstream fiction, it often contains more introspection and exposition, and less action and dialogue. It is often said to challenge the reader. There may be layers of meaning beyond the surface story. The story may be about something "bigger"—more universal—than the story being explicitly told. Multiple reads are usually necessary to absorb all of the meaning embedded in the story. Literary fiction is most likely to break traditional fiction conventions, e.g. endings may be upsetting or ambiguous, plots may be next to non-existent, the writer may forego punctuation rules such as placing quotation marks around dialogue. – ‘Fiction: Genre vs. Mainstream vs. Literary’, Toasted Cheese

Okay, I would never forego punctuation rules but apart from that I can relate to that. That is what I aspire to. I was actually a little disappointed with Left when I finished it. It’s the best I was going to be able to do with the subject but I definitely felt that I hadn’t stretched myself. I simply couldn’t get my original idea to work on the page. It would work as a stage play; in fact if you’ve ever seen an episode of the short-lived American series Raines that is very much what I was going for. Wikipedia describes the premise as follows:

The series focused on Michael Raines (Jeff Goldblum), a 'mentally haunted' LAPD detective, who interacts with imaginary manifestations of dead crime victims in order to solve criminal cases. Raines must deal with his unique, unintentional method, as it causes problems with his co-workers and in his personal life.

And that is what I wanted, a daughter going through her father’s things who talked to an imaginary version of her father (not a ghost) and so was only privy to what she knew before he died or discovered while rummaging around his flat. It’s a good idea but I couldn’t make it work on the page. What I ended up doing was using the format of a mystery novel to tell the story, even if I handle it in a most unconventional way.

I have a similar idea buzzing around my head for my next book and I think I know how I can pull this one off, but it’s certainly not a commercial book. A part of me wishes I could come up with something a lot of people would like to read – the next Harry Potter, whatever – but I’d also feel like I was selling out, prostituting my art as I think Holden Caulfield would have put it.

Do I think that literary fiction is better than genre fiction? It depends what you mean by better. It suits me better. I like it better. And so, yes, I think it is better but I’m not here to proselytise, to try and convince you all to ditch your werevamp romances and write more literary fiction because there is already more out there than I will ever get the chance to read before I die, even if I live to a ripe old age. I have read some crime novels and marvelled at the writers’ abilities to structure them. The same goes for the spy novels of John le Carré. I could never in a million years come up with writing like that – and he is a damn good writer by anyone’s standards – so why try and denigrate what he does simply because it can be filed under ‘genre fiction’?

So where does ‘mainstream fiction’ fall?

Readers are interested in reading about people just like themselves in the same way that they are interested in knowing about the lives of their real-life neighbours. – ‘What Is Mainstream Fiction?’ Novel-Writing-Help.com

I think that assessment is basically true. I’m not a spy or a crime fighter or an alien or a monster or a Don Juan. I’m a bloke who lives in a flat in Glasgow with his wife who hasn’t done much different with his life than the girl next door or the couple downstairs. Why aren’t more people writing about people like us? I don’t believe the kitchen sink drama has had its day. There is still room on the shelves for modern versions of A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and Look Back in Anger. We are living in interesting times. There are so many issues that need exploring that don’t involve magic or horror or aliens or the ripping off of bodices. Who is documenting our times in fiction like these authors did theirs? Or are our times so bad that all people want to do is to escape from them into fantasies? Yes, they have their place, but writing is much bigger than that.

I discovered a new term a while back: quiet fiction. I like it. If there was a section in a book shop marked ‘Quiet Fiction’ I would definitely take a wander over there and have a shuftie. I learned the term when reading an article on Writer Unboxed by Jan O’Hara where she defines quiet books like this:

They tend to be about ordinary people facing ordinary struggles searching for extraordinary grace. The characters are warmly drawn, the world infused with subtle optimism. A good portion of the book’s magic comes via its themes and texture.

[…]

In particular, the holistic nature of their work defies the sound bite, the tweet, the tagging. Many times it baffles their cover artist. – Jan O’Hara, ‘But What about the Quiet Ones?’, Writer Unboxed, 19 September 2001

Another rough definition, this time in the Irish Echo Online from 2007:

Quiet books are usually called so because the joy we get from them is in the small things: a perfect emotional chord, the description of a properly-set table, the subtle power of emotional restraint. A handful of these things done well makes a quiet novel.

The more I read the more excited I get. Where can I buy these books? Who’s writing these books? I want to write one.

Orchestral music always sells better than chamber music. I have a huge classical music collection but it most definitely hinges on the concertos and the symphonic, the noisy pieces. I’m not saying I have no chamber music but I have to be in the mood for it. I’m the exact opposite when it comes to books. Big novels are hard work and the thought of anything epic is a complete turn off. But what classical music sells the best? Who, for example, hasn’t got a copy of The Planets or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in their collection? I wonder how many have a copy of Stockhausen’s Klang? And that’s the point. If you’ve bought the Holst or the Beethoven you’re more likely to move towards Vaughan Williams or Brahms. You’ll play it safe, stick to what you know. And that’s what happens with books. That’s why I’m rather glad I started reviewing books online because suddenly I was faced with books I would never have picked up in a bookshop, even in Bargain Books. It hasn’t changed my core tastes though.

The most recent sales figures I could find online were for e-book sales for 2010, a study conducted on behalf of Publishers World. The results surprised me. They may you. Literary/Classic fiction topped the study followed closely by Science Fiction which, according to what I’ve been reading elsewhere, isn’t doing nearly as well in paperback. People are still clearly attracted to good writing. One has to wonder why non-genre fiction is so hard to market because – clearly, the figures do not lie – there is a sizeable market there and someone needs to be writing for them.

(Not sure what the ‘20’ means – it’s not 20% because if you add all those numbers together you get 128.)

It Chooses You

You’ve broken it wide open, Pollock – Marcia Gay Harden to Ed Harris in Pollock

If there is one thing we authors have in common, it’s people. We may write about anthropomorphic animals or aliens or the undead but strip away all the gloss and we’re writing about people: the people next door, the people down the street, the people we met last week in a bring-and-buy sale, the people who taught us English, the people who gave us life in the first place. Such a diverse bunch and yet they’re all people. They eat, sleep, poop, get sad, laugh at jokes, give in to weaknesses, get outraged for no good reason, leave us, love us. People are fascinating. And there is no end to them. No sooner has one generation died off than another is set up to fill their shoes. Mostly. Sometimes they take their shoes with them.

Times are a-changing. When I was a kid no one had a home computer. We’re still a way away from everyone having one but it wasn’t that long ago that no one had television sets and now only about 1% of the population don’t. When I was a kid one of the few periodicals my parents bought was the Exchange & Mart. Think eBay with pages. In the United States they still have something called Pennysaver which is a kind of free community periodical (typically weekly or monthly) that advertises items for sale. According to Wikipedia:

Horace Greely and Ralph St. Denny founded the Pennysaver in Ohio in 1948, followed by the Chenango Valley Pennysaver in 1949 (published continuously since then). Greely bowed out, but St. Denny stayed on to become nationally known as an innovator, mentor, a pioneer and a true original, until his retirement in 1995. A number of independent, unrelated organizations use the name Pennysaver.

That was obviously before the Internet. Nowadays people are more likely to sell their unwanted stuff on eBay or on Craigslist. And yet the paper version of the Pennysaver continues because there are sufficient people without access to—or interest in—computers to make the production a viable option. There is an online version, of course, and it’s only a matter of time before the paper version folds, but not for a while yet.

Amongst other things Miranda July is a writer. She’s a twenty-first century writer which means she spends as much time checking her Facebook page and reading other people’s blogs as she does writing, probably more. We’re all guilty of it. When I began writing there was no Internet, not as we know it today, and so I know what it’s like to sit down and just write and not feel that pull. Miranda, as she is younger, doesn’t remember that time. When we meet her in the opening pages of her new book—a work of non-fiction for once—she is busy not writing the screenplay to her new film, The Future. There’s not a huge incentive to crack on because the film business is in a bit of a slump and, as she puts it, if you don’t already have Natalie Portman lined up to star in said film then you might as well forget it. That’s the least of her problems, however, because she’s been reworking the same scenes over and over again with no success. It’s a Tuesday which is significant:

I looked forward to Tuesdays. Tuesday was the day the PennySaver booklet was delivered. It came hidden among the coupons and other junk mail. I read it while I ate lunch, and then, because I was in no hurry to get back to not writing, I usually kept reading it straight through to the real estate ads in the back. I carefully considered each item – not as a buyer, but as a curious citizen of Los Angeles. Each listing was like a very brief newspaper article. News flash: someone in LA is selling a jacket. The jacket is leather. It is also large and black. The person thinks it is worth ten dollars. But the person is not very confident about that price and is willing to consider other, lower prices. I wanted to know more things about what this leather-jacket person thought, how they were getting through the day, what they hoped, what they feared – but none of that information was listed. What was listed was the person’s phone number.

Before lunch all Miranda had to worry about was her fictional problem—something to do with a guy called Jason and some trees—but now she has a whole other real world problem: should she call the guy whose phone number is listed in the ad? The thing is, she really isn’t that interested in a man’s large leather jacket. Also, as she puts it, “[t]he implied rule of the classifieds is you call the phone number only to talk about the item on sale.” Then again America is the land of the free and all she was wanting to do was exercise that freedom and what harm would there be if she engaged the man in conversation? That said, although America is the land of the free it is also a capitalist country and people are in the habit of paying for goods and services so she decides to make the man an offer:

Actually, I was wondering if, when I come over to look at the jacket, I could interview you about your life and everything about you. Your hopes, your fears… […] Of course, I would pay you for your time. Fifty dollars. It’ll take less than an hour.

Miranda meets Michael

Much to her surprise, I’m sure, the man, whose name she discovers is Michael, says okay. And so she goes to meet Michael and from there, Primila, Pauline and Raymond, Andrew, Beverly, Pam, Ron, Matilda and Domingo, Dina and lastly Joe and his wife Carolyn, all discovered through ads in the PennySaver. And what a motley crew they turn out to be. Few had computers and even those who did had little interest in them, and so this is a very interesting demographic to put under the microscope. Not that everyone jumped at the opportunity, even for fifty dollars, to be part of Miranda’s wee experiment, but those who did seemed more than willing to open up to her. Some were old, clearly lonely and desperate for a little company, but it was really more than that; it was the opportunity to explain themselves that they jumped at. None of them probed her about what she intended to do with the information but they happily opened up cupboards, dragged her into backyards and up stairs, plied her with food and regaled her with tales of their lives, both past and present, as well as their hopes for the future.

What started out as a distraction became a project but she had no plans to turn these interviews into a book, certainly not at the start. All Miranda could really think about is her damn screenplay that refuses to come together. But this is where the book gets interesting because I have been exactly where she was when she was struggling and getting nowhere. With me it was novels but the feeling is exactly the same and then inspiration appears from the queerest, the most unexpected of sources. And that’s what happens here. As she wanders round these people’s homes and learns of their lives she starts to realise what’s missing in her writing. It’s these people. Literally these people. She imagines who might play Dina or Ron or Domingo in her film and then realises:

The thought was offensive. No, clearly these people would have to play themselves.

Miranda meets Dina

She has this epiphany while visiting Dina and even goes as far as to screen test her sometime later but as soon as the camera is pointed at her the real Dina disappears and Miranda realises this might have been not such a good idea. Then she meets Joe, the last person she intends to interview, and that’s when everything comes together creatively for her. The book’s final chapter talks about the shooting of the film—which by now has finally received a title she can live with, The Future. Some of you may have seen it. In his review of the film in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw writes:

What Jeff Koons does to banal objects, Miranda July does to banal situations, feelings, conversations. It's a kind of affectless sentimentalism, and a commentary on the nature of coupledom, its secular theology.

[…]

If we live our lives as intelligent, 21st-century consumers, without religion, or high culture, or a great cause – all things about which we have a well-founded and highly developed scepticism – then what do our lives look like?

I think that’s a fair comment, not only about her filmmaking but also her writing. The people we meet in this book, and whose shadows persist within the film, are, on the whole, the most ordinary and dull bunch and yet no sooner had I finished one chapter of this short book than I wanted to find out about the next person or persons. In all seriousness I could have finished the book in a single sitting and if I’d started it earlier in the afternoon I would have done. After spending several weeks—I jest not—slogging my way through Apricot Jam this was such a change of gear.

"All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life," Miranda writes. She says it better than me, far more succinctly, and yet that’s what I was getting at in the opening paragraph of this article. There is no way in hell I’d want to live like Withnail and Marwood, or Albert and Harold Steptoe or Joseph Merrick or the two Edith Beales but aren’t these people fascinating? And the great thing is that we get to observe them at a distance, through glass, or through the written word. As Miranda says of Ron: “[E]xactly the kind of man you spend your whole life being careful not to end up in the apartment of.” Ron is selling a sixty-seven-piece art set; he’s looking for $65 for it. In the course of the interview he reveals he is wearing a house-arrest anklet:

Ron:	I’m going to tell you something that’s fact. An anklet can mean any one of three things. If you’re gang related, you get one on, or if you’re a threat to the community because you have more than one so-called victim, which could be business-related or –
Miranda:	Right.
Ron:	– a sex offender or a drug dealer. Not small-time but what they consider a dealer-dealer.
Miranda:	Right.

It turns out he’s been in prison but we never do find out exactly what he was in for. Probably something “business-related”.

Miranda meets Ron

Ron is the scariest person Miranda gets to interview. For my money the saddest—although it’s a tough call—would have to be Domingo, Matilda’s brother who lives with her. Above his bed is “an elaborate collage of women and babies” but that’s not what piques Miranda’s curiosity:

All over the floor were piles of manila envelopes filled with similar pictures and labelled PICTURES OF JAILS AND YOUNG GIRLS AND BABIES AND PICTURES OF LAPD CARS and INSIDE PICTURES OF LAPD SHERRIFS CARS AND NICE GIRLS AND PICTURES OF BABIES AND ALSO PICTURES OF A PRISON.

He’s not there when she calls to see his sister but when Miranda gets home and looks over some of the photos of the visit she can’t stand it; she telephones and arranges to call to see Domingo a few weeks later. Eventually she gets round to the subject of the collage, which has changed since her previous visit:

Miranda:	So tell me about these pictures on the wall.
Domingo:	I have, like, fantasies and stuff, like I pretend I’m an officer, you know, a deputy sheriff, things like that.
Miranda:	When did you start collecting?
Domingo:	I’ve had quite a few years doing this. Actually, I started after I graduated from high school. I was never able to become a police officer or a deputy sheriff or anything like that. And what happened there is that I built a fantasy that I’m a judge, that I’m a police officer, that I’m a deputy-sheriff, and then I investigate – I call and see what their working shifts are like. I’m going through some psychological, psychiatric treatment as well, and so I tell this to my therapist. He said, well, if it’s something that doesn’t take you away from doing other things, it’s okay to have fantasies, as long as you don’t go and tell people that you are what you say you are in your mind. And it is all in my mind. And then I put pictures on the wall that I’m a judge, that I have a family, that I have a cat, things like that. I have to have them on the wall for it to come true in my head. Because if I don’t put it on the wall –
Miranda:	You can’t see it.
Domingo:	I can’t focus it in my mind. So it’s got to be something that I, um…
Miranda:	You can look at a picture.
Domingo:	I can look at it and I have it there itself. I go to the librarian, my friend, and she’s the one that finds all these pictures for me. She knows what I have them for, so she knows that I never collect anything that’s, um, you know… naked pictures or anything like that.
Miranda:	It’s family life.
Domingo:	Yeah, with kids and things like that. You know, I’ve been doing this for years, and I usually change my pictures around when I feel like I need to change, to be somebody different.

In another life Domingo would be a writer or a filmmaker.

I cannot imagine what people do who don’t create. I can understand someone not being a writer as long as they’re a composer or a photographer or a sculptor or something. But what do the other people do? It’s the same with computers. Who doesn’t have a computer these days? Carrie and I now have nine working computers in this flat and I use four of my five every day. Miranda describes people standing in queues clicking away on their smartphones, interacting with, being with their true friends to the exclusion of the so-called real world and yet she admits:

Domingo’s blog was one of the best I’ve ever read, but I had to drive to him to get in, he had to tell me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could only be found accidentally.

Scientifically, my interviews were pretty feeble … but one day soon there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this exercise wouldn’t be possible. Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be: eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it is not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren’t always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I’d be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered.

This is a fascinating book and one I wholeheartedly recommend. To writers especially but to the rest of you too. The New Yorker reproduced five chapters from the book including some of the photographs that are included that really make this thing come to life. The opening chapter is here but that only really talks about where she was when she got the idea. Here are the other four chapters:

• Michael. Large Black Leather Jacket. Hollywood
• Andrew. Bullfrog Tadpoles, $2.50 Each. Paramount
• Pam. Photo Albums, $10 each. Lakewood
• Joe. Fifty Christmas-Card Fronts, $1. Los Angeles

It Chooses You is published in the UK by Canongate in hardback which gives it the feel, slightly, of a coffee table book but it is much more than that. My only fear is that having read the book this will spoil the film for me. In his review in The Financial Times Lionel Shriver wrote that, [d]ismayingly, [he] liked The Future less after reading this book.” We’ll just have to see.

Postscript – The Future

I managed to see the film a wee while after reading the book and I have to disagree with Shriver. I enjoyed the film immensely and I particularly enjoyed seeing things that I could identify from the book in exactly the same way as I enjoyed identifying where I recognised her co-star from. (He was the brother in The New Adventures of Old Christine.)

This is not a film for everyone. I’m not sure there’s such a thing but I suspect this will polarise opinion more than Mary Poppins. The story, such as there is one, is simple enough: Sophie, played by Miranda July herself, and Jason are thirty-five—he provides online tech support from home and she teaches little girls how to dance, although, when asked, she is at pains to point out that she is a dance instructor and not a dancer. They have decided to adopt a stray cat they have seen injured, who they name Paw Paw (and who serves as the film’s narrator). Paw Paw, they have been told, may not have long to live—six months, perhaps, but longer (anything up to five years) if they take care of him—but it will be a month before they can collect him from the vet and their new life can begin together. Which means in a month their old life—life as they knew it—will stop. Paw Paw will need constant attention and so one of them will always have to be in the flat. This realisation, especially the fact that if they do their job well this state might drag on for years, triggers a kind of midlife crisis in the couple:

Sophie:	We’ll be forty in five years.
Jason:	Forty is basically fifty. And then after fifty, the rest is just loose change.

On her website Miranda explains how this affects the two of them:

Jason responds to this predicament like an artist should; he isn’t making anything, but his decision to be led by mistakes and coincidences is the creative process. He’s not without doubt, but he keeps his faith, which leads him somewhere new. I wanted to show the side of creativity that is spiritual, even a bit mystical, and more about surviving life than about performance or production.

Meanwhile, with no less determination, my character, Sophie, attempts to create a YouTube dance – this is the other end of creativity, the entirely goal-oriented desire for attention. […] The Internet has both exposed and created a more acute awareness of our need to be reacted to. You only have to unplug it and bam – you are in a profound crisis, facing the empty void without distractions.

They quit their jobs. Jason signs up to sell trees for charity and wanders round the neighbourhood with a clipboard; Sophie cancels their Internet subscription and they both set about living this month as if it was their last, as if their lives will grind to an abrupt halt once they take on the responsibility of this injured stray cat. They are, I have to say, an odd couple but nowhere near as entertaining as Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau: funny-weird rather than funny-ha-ha; they are a melancholy pair to say the least, clearly a little lost and weighed down by life even though all they have is each other. We see the film in microcosm when Jason returns home to be told that they will lose their Internet connection within the next hour and they both sit there frantically looking up things one can only find on the Internet.

At the start of the film, if you discount the fact that it’s being narrated by a stray cat, it’s a perfectly realistic film, everything happens in real time to real people, ordinary people who aren’t spies on the side or anything like that. But as the film progresses weird stuff starts to happen and this is where some people will start to get lost when time stops and her favourite shirt begins following Sophie along the street and the man in the moon engages Jason in conversation. Miranda explains her use of magical realism in an interview on i09.com where she says she uses it for "things that are so excruciating that words fail, reality fails." On her blog she writes:

My character, Sophie, has a security blanket that’s a yellow shirt named “Shirty”. This shirt is based on my actual, real life security blanket – a much older, paler yellow shirt named, “Nightie”.

I’ve had Nightie my whole life, and if I were to ever forsake my soul, as Sophie does, I know Nightie would come crawling after me. I used to be ashamed of it and hope I would outgrow it, but instead I outgrew my shame.

The scene where Jason stops time is also heartbreaking because he realises that time is still moving at its normal speed outside of his little area of stasis. So in fact, only Jason is stopped, while the rest of the world keeps moving forward and as soon as he releases his control he will suddenly snap forward to the correct point in time. This makes so much sense to me because that’s what often happens to people following a breakup or a loss of some sort; for them time stands still and then one day—unexpectedly and inexplicably—they suddenly find themselves caught up with the rest of the world.

I liked this film very much. I liked Joe’s cameos. I liked that it didn’t feel the need to explain everything for me. I liked its poetry and I absolutely loved Paw Paw but then I’m a cat person. I can see people enjoying the book and not getting the film but I would be surprised if anyone who enjoyed the film didn’t also appreciate the very different side of Miranda July you get to see in the book. Let me leave you with the trailer:

Apricot Jam and Other Stories

[I]t’s pure physics: Human nature has not enough time to follow everything going on around it. An artist has to be placed at some distance from his object. If he just sets down his momentary expressions it will be more like an essay, a piece of reporting, than a work of art. Few authors are able to capture pieces of reality instantly. … The majority must have time for their impressions to settle down. And also at a certain age one begins to write not about the historical past, but about one’s personal past, about the earlier years of one’s own life. Why are there so many memories? So many people write about their youth. When? In their old age. In old age it often happens that old remembrances become more vivid. There’s some psychological law about it. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from the documentary The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Knot Part II’

The first novel I bought after leaving school, the first adult novel that I bought with my own money, was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I bought it in a small newsagent across from Burns Square in Ayr. I was sixteen at the time and the book cost me 35p. I still own it and I have reread it roughly every ten years since then. Over the next few years I read more books by him: Matryona’s House and Other Stories, The First Circle and Cancer Ward. And, yes, I still have my copies of these books. So, when I learned that Canongate Books were to publish Apricot Jam and Other Stories, a collection of stories written late in life, I jumped at the opportunity to see if his late prose could affect me in the same way as his early prose did. Just over thirty years separate the publication of that novel with the writing of these stories, about the same length of time that has lapsed between my first reading of Ivan Denisovich and now.

Expectation is a terrible thing. It leads inevitably to disappointment. Not that Apricot Jam was a complete disappointment, because it wasn’t, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped for; a final flourish. This doesn’t mean that Solzhenitsyn goes out with a whimper rather than a bang, but when he was writing Ivan Denisovich that was his life—the day he got the idea to start that book was the coldest day he ever had to work outside, -35º—whereas these stories were written in the comfort (luxury by comparison) of his offices in Russia following his repatriation in 1994. None are contemporary tales—they all delve into Russia’s dark recent past—but they have all been written with the benefit of hindsight and, in some cases, we do get to see what happened in later years. Not that he has forgotten how bad things were back then—in preparation for writing this article I watched the documentary The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn which were recorded in 1998 and it is clear that he remembers all too well how he and others were treated—but now it is history, no matter how vivid his memories still are, and, in many respects, a lot of what you get to read in Apricot Jam reads more like history and less like works of fiction, despite what he says above; these were the parts of the book I struggled with the most. Thankfully not all were like that and there were a couple of gems. For me. Others with more interest in the broad sweep of historical events might enjoy the ones I did not. It’s all a matter of taste.

That doesn’t mean there is nothing new here because there is: a style of writing I had not encountered before. Solzhenitsyn referred to them as binary tales, dvuchastnyi rasskaz in Russian, stories in two parts, not two chapters but, if I can compare them to something visual, more like a diptych. In the story ‘Zhelyabuga Village’, for example, what we get presented with is a before and after scenario: the first part of the story describes a day during the war where an artillery battalion is engaged in an assault during the one of the battles at Kursk Bridge in 1943 focusing on the members of a sound-ranging battery and there are clearly biographical elements here because during the war Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of one; the second part, set fifty-two years later (during the Yeltsin era), sees the narrator return to the city of Oryol to celebrate its liberation. While there, he and a colleague from that time (Vitya) visit the site of the battle which he narrated in the first part along with some officials, only to be accosted by some old women—they block the road and refuse to let their jeep by imagining them to be in some position of authority—and, if there is a single question hanging over the story it likely is: Was this what we were fighting for?

A woman in a grey checked kerchief spoke up, with a lot of emotion: “Us folk in the village have come to the end of our rope. There’s no living for us here, there’s nothing to eat.”

The small woman in the green kerchief said: “There’s no proper road here, we know that…”

The village soviet fellow had to justify himself before the regional man and quickly said: “I always keep an eye on things, you know. Nikolai, I say, are you bringing in the bread? I am, he says.”

The woman in blue spoke up now, sharply: “So you keep an eye on us, do you? When did you ever pay us a visit? You, the chairman of the village soviet, haven’t been here even a single time … None of you people have been here since Adam was a boy.”

Others now added their complaints:

“Things have gone to rack and ruin…”

“Everybody’s forgotten we’re still here…”

In ‘Nastenka’ what we have is a Sliding Doors or a What if…? scenario The first:

Nastenka’s parents died young, and her grandfather, Father Filaret, who by then had also lost his wife, raised her from the age of five. The girl lived in his house in the village of Milostayki until she was twelve, through the years of the German War and the revolution.

The second:

Nastenka had spent her childhood in Moscow—the old Moscow, on a little street near the Pure Ponds. The German War had not yet begun when she had already learned to read, and then Papa gave her permission to borrow any books she wished from his shelves.

Are these the same woman or two different women? It really doesn’t matter but it does provide a striking comparison between two possible lives.

‘Apricot Jam’ is similar in that the first component of the story presents us with Fedya, a worker at the Kharkov Locomotive Works, who is writing a letter looking for assistance:

[W]ho else can I write to? I have no family, no support from anyone, and I’ve got no way to set myself right on my own. I’m a prisoner here, near hand to dying and trapped in a life that brings one hurt after the other. Would it cost too much for you to send me a food parcel? Please take pity on me…

In the second section we are presented with a glimpse into the life of Vasily Kiprianovich, a professor of cinema studies, who has been invited by a famous Writer—Solzhenitsyn capitalises the word—to advise him “on types of screenplays and techniques used in writing them.” They meet in the Writer’s dacha, a Russian country cottage used especially in the summer, hidden from view by a tall wooden fence. While showing the professor round his home he has no problem boasting “about a remarkable new appliance—an electric refrigerator he had bought from Paris.” Of course we realise at the end who it is that Fedya has written to and there is no likelihood of a response. I had never really considered Solzhenitsyn a satirist—despite being influenced by Chekhov—but that’s what we have here, plain and simple.

Fridges crop up also in ‘Fracture Points’ where we see the progression of the life and career of Mitya Yemtsov, a seventeen-year-old in 1944, and what we get over seventeen pages is something of a potted history of Russia. He moves into manufacturing eventually and one of the tasks his department is assigned is to produce Russian refrigerators:

They had a refrigerator from England right there, and their only job was to make a copy of it. Lord knows, they made an exact replica, but there must have been some secrets that they still hadn’t grasped: a tube in the condenser coil would clog, or it would produce so much cold that everything would freeze. Buyers would return the refrigerators with complaints and curses: “The damned thing won’t stay cold!” The stores would submit claims for replacement.

It is an interesting take. So often when I’ve read about Russia I’ve been presented with the broader picture but here we have one man and how his life is affected by the changing political landscape. Like Ivan Denisovich’s day, Mitya’s life is, on the whole, an uneventful one. He works hard, toes the party line and mostly succeeds even when, in later years with the influx of cheap goods from China, he needs to reorganise his workforce, he tightens his belt and makes the best of things.

In some respects this story serves to balance out a story like ‘Time of Crisis’ which takes the life of another man born into a peasant family—there is definitely a thread here that runs throughout the book—who rises in the military ranks. Albeit the fact that Yorka Zhukov is nineteen in 1915 when the German war broke out, much of the same ground is covered. Peasantry seems like a rather old-fashioned word to me. When was the last time we had a peasantry here in the UK? And yet throughout its history the peasants come across as the backbone of Russia, if only in the propaganda. Solzhenitsyn’s father was a man like these I’ve mentioned in the last two stories who rose from humble beginnings eventually acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus.

The second part of this story caught my attention because we get to see who has narrated the first section; it is a contemporary of Zhukov, now an old man, and this is how he opens his story:

People believe that it is entirely appropriate and proper to begin writing your memoirs when you turn seventy. What I did, though, was begin seven years earlier. It’s so quiet here, and I’m of no use to anyone, so what else should I do with myself? One year passes after another, and all I have left is the spare time that has been forced upon me and that drags by so slowly.

[…]

There are some good reasons why I must write. Let it be for the record. Many others had already rushed to write memoirs; some have even been published. They’re in a hurry because they want to grab a bit of the glory for themselves. And of course they want to dump their mistakes on someone else.

That is dishonourable.

But what a job it is! Just sorting through your memories wears you out. Some of the blunders I made tear at my heart even now. But there is also much to be proud of.

That is something that comes out in every story. Russia may not have always have been able to hold its head high but there was much for the individual Russians to be proud of. Like in ‘Fracture Points’ when, having just come out of a war, they are thrust into a time of rebuilding:

The war was over, and yet it wasn’t over. Comrade Stalin declared that now we have to rebuild! Life went on in the same rigid military fashion as before, though without the military funerals. Rebuild! A year, two years, a third year of rebuilding meant that you had to go on working, living, and feeding yourself as if there was a war on.

This is not to suggest that other countries didn’t have to rebuild because, of course, they did. But the Russians do appear to have had a harder time than most because of the country’s leadership. All that mattered was that targets were met. As Fedya reports in his letter to the Writer:

Four thousand people or more had been collected here, and that was what they called a regiment. There was ne’er a bathhouse or laundry, and no one was given any uniform. They marched us off to work straightaway. What they told us in the support force for the Locomotive Works was: “You keep going till you drop.”

All of this so the targets set in Stalin’s Five-year Plan would be achieved in four years.

In ‘Ego’ though there is a brief cameo that reminded me of the old Zek in Ivan Denisovich, the one who raised his food to his mouth in the mess hall and maintained his dignity:

Once Ektov was speaking to an aged peasant from Semyonovsky Hamlet about the general breakdown of everything around them. Life, it seemed, was reaching the point where it could get no worse, and what would be left of it after all this?

“Never mind,” said the silver-haired old fellow, “the grass lives on beneath the scythe.”

In his book Russian Literature: 1995-2002 – On the Threshold of a New Millennium N.N. Shneidman writes:

It is well known that Solzhenitsyn, the great creative artist, has always aspired to become a major historian. It is, however, also known that the artistic quality of his short novellas such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Matrena’s House is vastly superior to the historical value and quality of narratives such as The Red Wheel. Most of Solzhenitsyn’s attention in the last decade has nonetheless been devoted to Russian political, national, social and historical issues.

I find I have to agree. Although he’s dealing with individuals, most of the stories here dwell too much on the surrounding events than on the people with the exception of ‘Apricot Jam’ and ‘Nastenka’ which, for me, were the two best stories. When books like The Gulag Archipelago first came out they opened people’s eyes to what was, and had been, going on in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, but now there is no USSR and what more is there to say?

‘Adlig Schwenkitten’ is the story I struggled with the most. Unlike the others, this is a story in twenty-four sections covering a twenty-four hour period but it was the sheer number of characters that lost me: Toplev, Boyev, Podkliuchnikov, Lepetushin, Gubaydulin, Gusev, Ostanin, Ishchukov, Larin, Yursh, Veresovoy, Vyzhlevsky, Tarasov, Kasyanov, Boronets, Myagkov, Kandalintsev, Baluev, Nikolaev and that’s not including the first names, ranks and patronymics that just added to the confusion. Too many people. After a while they all blurred into one.

As I said at the start, expectation is a terrible thing. A part of me was disappointed by much of what I read here but not all. The problem lies with me, though. I am not the boy I was when I first read Ivan Denisovich so why should I expect the author of these stories to be the same man that wrote that book? In some respects that’s what part of the problem here is, a dwelling too much on the past, but again not entirely. Also one has to consider who Solzhenitsyn was writing for and to, not the West, but his fellow Russians. In other writings of this time, e.g. The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century and Russia in Collapse, he did address contemporary issues but there’s not so much of that here. If anything (and these are words other reviewers have used) these are somewhat nostalgic, moralistic stories.

Has Solzhenitsyn lost his moral authority since returning to Russia? This is a question David Remnick asked the author Lev Timofeyev in his book Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker to which he received the following answer:

In the modern world, moral authorities are proof of a society’s inability to live a decent life. … To have to rely so much on someone like Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov is a sure sign that something is wrong. Nowadays, I can express myself not by quietly identifying myself with a figure like that but by writing, reading, voting, doing business, whatever it is. This is a good thing. Society needs a Solzhenitsyn in a time of emergency, far less so now.

Later on Remnick gets to ask the man himself the same question. He writes that “Solzhenitsyn looked down at the table and thought this over awhile,” and that was something I noted he did in the documentary I watched. He would pause for the longest of times—on the first occasion I thought my TV had frozen and then he blinked—but the following has to be a most considered response:

I know from the many personal letters I still get that for many people I am a source of trust and moral authority. But I cannot say if I am a moral authority or not. I do not feel that for humanity—not society but for humanity—moral authority is a necessity.

He may have felt that but that doesn’t stop people looking to the likes of him for direction. The problem is, as Nina Khrushcheva put it in an article in the New York Sun, “that Solzhenitsyn's ideas were too conservative, too tied to Russian nationalism, for him to become a symbol of democracy in a multinational Soviet Union.” She concludes:

The tragedy of Solzhenitsyn is that, although he played a mighty role in liberating Russia from totalitarianism, he had nothing to say to ordinary Russians after their liberation, except to chastise them. Yet perhaps one day we Russians will escape our false dreams, and when that day comes, the heroic Solzhenitsyn, the Solzhenitsyn who could never surrender or be corrupted, will be restored to us. But it is now that we need that Solzhenitsyn most. For to paraphrase Milton's "Paradise Lost" on the illumination of Hell, "Solzhenitsyn's is no light, but rather darkness visible."

Apparently someone has said that this collection of stories would be a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn—no doubt some publicist—and I can’t disagree, the first few stories anyway, but much better to dive straight into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and then find a copy of the new translation of In the First Circle which I hear is good. For those familiar with his work and still interested—perhaps that’s the key here—there is more here, though, than just wallowing in the past.

A Country Road. A Tree. Evening.

A place for everything, everything in its place – Benjamin Franklin

Writers are frequently asked to talk about what inspires them. It’s a difficult question for me to answer because I don’t believe in inspiration, not in any Romantic sense of the word and I never talk about my muse. I believe in ideas. My definition of inspiration is a good idea. And I can get a good idea anywhere.

I had a religious upbringing. It didn’t do me any harm but I can’t say my world view has not been affected by what I was taught. I never really got churches, though. Or graveyards. The idea that you need to go to a specific location to talk to a god or to remember your loved ones never made sense to me. You never got Jesus dashing off to the synagogue so he could commune with his heavenly father and why would I want to drive forty-odd miles to stand around in a graveyard my parents never went near in their lives simply to remember them?

I’m not big on place. That doesn’t mean I’ve never been to places. I have. Loads. And what I learned from going to all those different places is that none of them is that different. I’m sure I inherited that attitude from my father who never wanted to go anywhere. He used to say, and I never argued with him, that “contentment is being happy with whatever you had at any given point in time.” He never said, “…and space,” but that was implied.

There is, of course, no right way to be a writer. As a young boy in sixties Scotland I was exposed to the poetry of fellow Scots Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns along with a selection of English poets like Wordsworth, Tennyson and John Masefield. By the time I got to secondary school I was sick to the back teeth of babbling brooks, vagabonds and fields of daffodils and it took the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and the bleak verse of Philip Larkin to make me realise that there was much more to this poetry malarkey than nature poems. The poem that made all the difference to me was ‘Mr Bleaney’ by Philip Larkin and one of the things I liked about it was its descriptions. The poem opens:

This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him. Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land?
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
'I'll take it.

His depiction of the room is reduced to a checklist and I liked that; it respected me as a reader and allowed me to use my own imagination. One of my personal writing edicts is: Say what you have to say and get off the page. That doesn’t mean all I write is flash fiction but it does mean I’m come to appreciate how little you can get away with when it comes to descriptions.

Have you ever seen the film Dogville? Essentially it's all filmed on a sound stage. The buildings of the town are represented by a series of simple white outlines on the floor and a church spire suspended above the ground. Even the eponymous 'dog' is present only as an outline. No dramatic backdrops, or exquisite realistic period trimmings. All you are left to look at are a few tables and chairs. Oh, and the actors. Not everyone’s cup of tea but I loved it.

This is an expanded version of an article I wrote for Amy Tupper for her blog on the theme of ‘Writers And Their Chosen Settings’. When Amy asked me to write this article she suggested I include a section of my own writing. It wasn’t easy but I came up with this description from my first novel:

The town of Rigby had been built piecemeal over the years. It nestled itself uncomfortably in a sheltered escarpment not quite the archetypal seaside town it purported to be. But it did its best. Its architecture ran the full gamut from the seventeenth century on, though you’d be hard pushed to call what remained from that time Georgian. They were functional cottages when they were built; practical. Now, they were empty, but no one would commit to doing away with them out of some misplaced sentimentality. Most of the residential part of the town was of solid Victorian stock, though they’d been building ever since. It always smelled of paint and seaweed. It had a cenotaph with eighty-three names on it (eighty-four if you counted the graffito), a sizeable park complete with pitch and putt, a duck pond (but no ducks) and a statue of someone long-forgotten covered in bird-do. There were public baths, innumerable guest houses and B&B’s, a retirement home or two and a Town Hall, with a library grafted on at the rear. Its promenade was an austere place on days like this, when the holiday crowd was back working away wherever they came from. Most of the shops had been boarded up for the winter and it seemed like winter was getting earlier every year and lasting longer. He half-expected that one year they’d forget to open up at all and no one would notice. The shorefront was comprised of a huge arc bordered by a great stone wall a yard across. He’d walked the length of that more times than he cared to remember.

That description was not in the first draft of the novel and it was a chore to write. All I said in that first draft was that Rigby was a seaside town in the north of England and really that says it all especially if you make the connection to the Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby – “All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?” To my mind that’s all the information you need to conjure up the town in your own mind. It’s really an amalgam of every seaside town I visited as a child, although, I suppose, primarily the Scottish towns of Ayr, Troon, Saltcoats, Ardrossan and Largs. That said, I’ve seen enough films and programmes on TV to realise that there’s much of a muchness about all seaside towns, places to retire to and die, take for example the titular town in the recent BBC series, Sugartown (Filey) or the resort in the Michael Caine vehicle, Is Anybody There? (Chalfont St. Giles which also doubled as Walmington-on-Sea in Dad’s Army). But I could never say that any of those places inspired me. I needed to have my protagonist live somewhere and that was the right kind of place to put him.

My third novel is set almost exclusively in a park. The park I used as a model was the one at the end of my street, Victoria Park in Glasgow, but very little of the actual park makes it into the book, for instance:

The pond was shaped like a giant kidney bowl. It was something he noted every time he came to it. He also remembered that the Bible said the kidneys were the seat of the deepest emotions, not the heart.

The pond is not shaped like a kidney bowl. I wanted to include the remark about the kidneys and so the shape of the pond changed. I also added benches because I needed a bench for my protagonist to sit on. The swans were there already though. Bottom line, it could have been any park anywhere; I never mention it my name nor do I even say what city he is in not that it’s hard to work out.

Most of the action in my last novel takes place in the flat I live in at the present. It gets a makeover in the novel but the structure is still the same: three bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom. Not that I do much describing of anything. All we learn about the protagonist’s bedroom, for example, is that when her father moved house (while she was at university) he had taken photos of the layout and replicated the room to the best of his ability in his new flat. The only things I even mention are in the room are her bed and an Eyes of Laura Mars poster that she decides is creepy now and needs to go.

If I was to think of a word to cover all my writing, the poetry, the stories and the novels I’d probably go with ‘chamber pieces.’ Okay, that’s two words. The road that the two brothers walk down in Milligan and Murphy is just a road. I don’t even mention that the road is in Ireland. It’s obvious where it is and why state the obvious?

Phenomenologists are well aware of the close ties between self and place. In the early works of Beckett it’s quite easy to place the text in an Irish, frequently Dublin-based, setting. In Watt when Watt arrives by tram he alights at Harcourt Street Station in Dublin, from which he will take a second tram to Foxrock and then walks to Cooldrinagh, Beckett's family home, which was the model for Mr Knott’s house; none of the place names are mentioned but the action had to take place somewhere and that was where he was familiar with at the time. In the later works the sense of placelessness is much, much stronger. Where do Didi and Gogo wait for Godot, for example? Beckett may well have had a location in mind – possibly the high moorland south of Dublin – but that is pure conjecture and irrelevant; they could have waited anywhere.

“Place refers to the conceptual fusion of space and experience that gives areas an individuality, an identity of place. Thus, the geographical concept of place refers to the areal context of events, objects and actions.”[1] The French have a word for it:

MILIEU: the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops.

In English we might say ‘environment’ but it doesn’t really say it. People make places. We carry meaning with us. We don’t leave it lying around for others to enjoy. And, for me, the point here is that we carry it with us. When Samuel Beckett wrote Mercier and Camier he was in France. It was his first post-war novel and his first in French. And yet it was set in and around Dublin. Watt was Beckett's second published novel in English and, again, largely written on the run in the south of France during the Second World War.

So do I have places that I have an attachment to? Not so much. I accept that there are different mes depending on who I am with but I’ve never been able to perceive a different me based on where I am.

Bioregional animist psychology is focused on a concept of oneness, not unity per se but specifically oneness as unity indicates there are two things that are united or BECOME one. The difference on this point lays in that you do not become what you already are but you can become aware of what you are.[2]

I get that. I could wander down to the Clyde and watch the water and enjoy a few minutes of calm but I think too much can be made of the physical journey and location. Why can’t I simply imagine being there? I have access to that level of awareness anywhere. What if the Clyde wasn’t there or Wordworth’s Lake District or R.S. Thomas’ Wales? What if they’d been born in Brisbane or Seattle and I’d been born in Johannesburg?

George Ovitt, in his article ‘Fiction and Empathy’ makes this comment when talking about Proust:

[E]ach of us carries within his mind a world that is as real as the material one which we inhabit—the place where the authentic self resides.[3]

This is something I believe in strongly, the notion of place within us. I talk about this in a recent poem:

After Sisyphus


I return to the place
within myself
to begin again.

I take

a deep breath and begin
again, begin
suffering again.

This is

a sacred place, private.
One can suffer
anywhere, that is true

but it

is never enough to
simply suffer;
things must be done right.



Wednesday, 17 August 2011

The idea for this poem came from reading an article about depression which talked about it being rooted in self-centredness. As soon as I read that I got an image of the centre of a person as a place that one could travel to and the rest came naturally. I was reminded of the tabernacle that the Israelites used to carry around with them – literally a tent, a portable temple, that they lugged with them. Later the apostle Paul said, “Do you not know that your body is a temple…?” and so the idea of a location within the individual where atonement could take place was born.

I’ve used this idea before:

A Poem is not an Empty Room

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. — Pascal


A man walks into
an empty room.
There is nothing there
and no one there.

That is to say no
one else is there.
He is all alone
with his own thoughts.

Entering the room
is significant.
Being in the room
is significant.

Where the room is
is irrelevant.
Who the man is
is not important.

What it really
means to be alone
is something he
might consider though

while he's waiting.



Wednesday, 05 December 2007

The empty room is inside the reader. When he connects with the poem he does it within himself, he gets to connect with a part of himself that he might not have realised was there, as if he’d walked into a room with him. I view ‘place’ in an abstract sense. When you say that a person has found his place in the world you’re probably not talking about a physical location.

Some phenomenologists talk about a “storied sense of place” and my understanding of that is that when we enter an environment we begin to create a ‘story’ that comprises of our experiences in the landscape as well as our physical and intuitive awareness of the place: we impose a narrative structure rather than simply becoming aware of one. The writer Barry Lopez illustrates this here:

When we stop and look at a beautiful sunrise or sunset, for a few minutes we remember what life once was for people. It's not so much a moment of beauty as a moment of memory.[4]

When I first read ‘storied sense of place’ I actually misread it as stored and I imagined that we accessed this, that somehow we got in touch with a collective unconscious. I’m not sure that that exists. I certainly don’t believe in imprints or psychic energy hot spots or anything like that. When I went to Dublin it was naïve of me to expect to feel Beckett there. I may well have imagined that I felt him there if my imagination had been good enough but it was not.

In his essay, ‘An Intimate Geography’ Lopez writes:

Over the years, I have seen, heard, tasted, palpated, and smelled many remarkable things around the place. I do not recall a single day of attentiveness outdoors when something unknown, something new, hasn’t flared up before me. I’m kept from the conceit that there is anything singular in this, though, by the streams of tourist traffic that speed past the house daily, winter and summer, en route to recreation areas in the mountains or to launch points on the river. To most, my landscape must seem innocuous, ordinary.

Still, I’m happy in this undemonstrative, rural place. In my conversations with it, I know, once more, who I am. It inundates me continually with mystery, because its nature is too complex to be fully known. (italics mine)[5]

The phrase that jumps out at me here is the part I have italicised. If the place was possessed of more than mere aesthetic charm then I would expect more people of a sensitive nature to pick up on it and sensitivity doesn’t belong merely to writers and artists. Places can refresh us; I give you that. As a young teenager I was to be regularly found out wandering through the countryside or along the beach, the kind of “undemonstrative, rural places” mentioned above. Hard to imagine that when you see me now. But when I look at what I was writing back then there isn’t exactly a huge amount of nature poetry. There is some – I’ve been writing for forty years and there’s not much I haven’t written about at some time or other – but no one would ever call me a nature poet or at least not a poet of the natural world; nature fascinates me – human nature.

One of my literary heroes, whom I’ve already mentioned, is Philip Larkin. “Geographers are firmly bound to place. Space is not homogeneous: something always happens somewhere; everything takes place. Larkin takes the opposite view; he is the poet of undifferentiated space.”[6] Even a poem like ‘Here’ – ostensibly about a place (on the surface, Hull)…

                 a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates . . .

…is really, once you get into it, about anywhere and generic terms quickly take over:

                                            flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires —
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers —

I am writing this ‘here’ and you are reading this ‘here’ – your ‘here’, not my ‘here’. No one has ever seen ‘there’. We talk about it like we talk about tomorrow but ‘here’ is omnipresent. People assume that Hull was a source of inspiration for Larkin but just because he had a sense of the place – there is no doubt it suited him – doesn’t mean that it inspired him. Not all senses are pleasing and a sense of place can be as unpleasant as it can be pleasant. What Hull has is more placelessness than any place has a right to. I suppose in Larkin’s mind it was much like the set of Dogville, functional and undemanding.

                    it's not the place's fault...
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

(from 'I Remember, I Remember')

Quiet and out of reach, nowhere is the place Larkin really wanted to be. As he confirmed in late middle age: “As for Hull, I like it because it's so far away from everywhere else. On the way to nowhere . . . and beyond . . . there's only the sea.”[7] When I think about the places I used to wander as a boy on the whole they did little to distinguish themselves – a beach is a beach and grass and shrubs are grass and shrubs – and I suspect that was one of things I liked about them; that they didn’t encroach on my thoughts.

Place is unavoidable unless you write purely dialogue and the more I write the more I’m drawn to that mode of expression. My radio play, Vladimir and Estragon are Dead, for example, takes place in limbo – there are only the two characters, no props, no scenery – and in my novel, Left, a large section of the book takes place in cyberspace and is presented as a simple chat log. I’m not the first writer to do that kind of thing, in fact entire novels have been written as pure dialogue: Delores Claiborne, by Stephen King is one that might surprise most people – the story opens with a quote that does not close until the very last page of the book – but there have been other novels written in dialogue before: Nicholson Baker's Vox springs to mind, although it's not completely in dialogue, and there's also Corey Mesler's Talk. I've personally written two short stories completely in dialogue, 'Just Thinking', which was published in The Ranfurly Review and 'Ugly Truths' which appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears. It's quite refreshing actually to be able to forget about those boring descriptive passages.

I don’t think writers who feel the need to go to specific places to charge up are weird. Okay, I do think they’re a little weird but I respect their right to be weird just as I understand that there are those writers who need to write with their lucky typewriters (just ask Isaac Bashevis Singer or Cormac McCarthy about that). It takes all sorts to make a world. We need poets who know how to write a decent haiku and storytellers whose verse can quieten a class of eight-year-olds, we need writers who can recreate a place on a bit of paper for all of those who will never have the chance to visit and we need writers capable of unflinching inner vision, too.

I saw an interview with the artists Gilbert and George recently on BBC4 and I was very struck by something Gilbert Proesch said, which I’ll leave you with:

[W]e’d never want to go and see another city [other than London where we live] because everything is in the brain. We don’t need to see beautiful mountains, beautiful villages … We don’t have to be inspired by the Pyrenees or Egypt because, for us, it is all in the brain inside. – Mark Lawson Talks to Gilbert and George, 18 July 2011, BBC4

 

REFERENCES

---

[1] Gary Greif et Marcelo Cruz, ‘Reconstructing Urban Boundaries: The Dialectics of Self and Place’, Cybergeo : European Journal of Geography

[2] Self and Place, Bioregional Animism, 9 July 2010

[3] George Ovitt, ‘Fiction and Empathy’, Atticus Review

[4] Lois Wadsworth, ‘Between Two Worlds’, Eugene Weekly

[5] Barry Lopez, ‘An Intimate Geography’

[6] J. Douglas Porteous, ‘Nowhereman’, About Larkin

[7] 'A voice for our time', in P. Larkin (ed.), Required Writing quoted in J. Douglas Porteous, ‘Nowhereman’, About Larkin