Willesden Herald, New Short Stories 6

I’m delighted to be able to say that a story of mine, Curtains, was chosen as one of the two runners-up in this year’s Willesden Herald Short Story Competition, organised by Steve Moran and judged by Roddy Doyle. Extracts from some of the stories were read out by actors from Liars’ League – Susan Moisan did a fantastic job with mine but I think all the writers present were just as pleased as I was – and the standard was not only exceptionally high (if that doesn’t sound too immodest) but also, to Steve Moran’s credit, extremely varied. Short stories can often fall into orthodoxies, particularly when competitions are involved (I chatted about this with Y.J. Zhu, another shortlisted author), so it’s a joy to find a reader who listens out with such attention for the voice of the story as it actually is, rather than as it should be. And it’s a sign of the respect writers feel for this competition that so many of the shortlisted authors should have travelled so far to be there on the night. That, and the giant pretzels…

You can buy the book from Book Depository, by the way. Just thought I’d mention it.

Michel Tournier, The Erl-King (on normblog)

Just over a month ago, Norman Geras did me the honour of asking me to contribute a second time to his Writer’s Choice series on normblog. The first time I wrote about Christopher Isherwood‘s second novel, The Memorial, due to be reissued by Vintage next month (and about time too). This time round I decided to write about Michel Tournier‘s second novel, The Erl-King, more commonly – but, I think, less felicitously – referred to these days as The Ogre. It’s a dark and challenging book, and it’s haunted me for years, for better or for worse. You can find out why I rate it so highly and why I’m intrigued and disturbed by the hold it continues to have on me by reading what I wrote here.

Vanessa Gebbie, The Coward’s Tale

I’m delighted to be hosting Vanessa Gebbie on my blog today. Her visit is part of a whirlwind tour of the blogosphere to coincide with the paperback publication of her extraordinary first novel, The Coward’s Tale (details of the complete tour here). As you may have noticed (see tagline at top right), this blog is mostly about books – I save my ranting and indiscretions for other places – but I wanted to say a few words about myself as an introduction to what Vanessa has to say below.

My partner Giuseppe and I became civil partners in the UK last month. We met almost 26 years ago and have lived together ever since, in Italy and England, so it wasn’t a particularly hasty decision. Our reasons for getting hitched after such a long engagement (although we never saw our relationship in those terms – it never struck either of us as incomplete or preliminary to something better) were practical: taxation, inheritance, hospital visiting; the kind of things that begin to matter when one passes 55. But the event was also – surprisingly for us both although less so for our friends – deeply touching and this set me thinking about the strange arc that had brought me from a childhood in which homosexuality was illegal – I was 14, and fully aware of my sexuality, when homosexual acts were finally, in part, decriminalised – to a late adulthood in which I could stand beside another man in the ceremonies room of a provincial town hall and repeat after a government official what were – to all legal intents and purposes – marriage vows. In Italy, of course, where we spend most of our time, these vows mean nothing, and even in the UK there’s an ongoing resistance that’s sustained by people who should know better, if only by their own estimation. Which makes what Vanessa has to say below even more pertinent. So I’ll waste no more time and hand you over to her straight away. It’s all yours, Vanessa!

Charles

 I am delighted to be perching on your illustrious blog today – thank you for the invitation.  And I bring with me a virtual Methuselah of bubbly and a vast bunch of roses – many heartfelt congratulations on your recent civil partnership with Giuseppe. I wish you a long and happy life together.

What think you then, of all the column inches filled with arguments for and against same-sex marriages? Don’t answer that – I can guess. I hope the negatives have not taken the edge off your celebrations. I guess you are probably just getting on with life, content that Popes and Archbishops are not speaking for you – as, increasingly they are not speaking for the majority of us – but they will go on pronouncing, sadly.

 I am female and have been married for over thirty five years to a bloke – but I have a considered view, so thanks for the opportunity to express it. It links nicely to a section of ‘The Coward’s Tale’, and I will give you a link to an early version of that section online, at the end.

I’ve just been reading some pronouncements from Pope Benedict against same-sex marriage.  I think these are direct quotes – if not they are paraphrases:

 “Marriage between a man and a woman must be preserved because it protects parents, children and the whole of society.”

“All our efforts in this area are ultimately concerned with the good of children, who have a fundamental right to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships.”

He may mean well, and is ‘just doing his job’, but coming hot on the heels of recent scandals which will not go away, his words ring hollow.

 “Marriage between a man and a woman must be preserved because it protects parents, children and the whole of society.” How so? Marriage had not protected either adults, children or society  at large from the damage perpetrated for decades by his employees however indirect he might like to say the employer/employee relationship is – and there is an argument that says they might not have damaged at all had they been allowed to express their sexual needs in a loving relationship.

“Children (…) have a fundamental right to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality.”

“ A healthy understanding of sexuality” would include a healthy understanding of all sexuality, wouldn’t it, not just one sub-section?  I remember hearing the writer Colm Toibin talking about times past in rural Ireland when young teenage blokes who weren’t attracted to girls would be told by their village priests that this was an indication that they were being called to the church.  No mention of the fact that this might be a perfectly normal thing, and what about boys? Perhaps because the priests didn’t know, or did know, and suppressed their own instinctive knowledge?

 He talks as if attraction to a person of the same sex is an illness. Goodness – I remember absolutely adoring an older girl when I was at school to the extent that I went weak at the knees when she walked by. In the Pope’s book, I should have been hospitalised. Or shot. 

 Jokes apart – the world is in enough of a mess, surely the churches can find better things to do than seek to prevent two human beings finding happiness and expressing their commitment to each other publicly? So much strife seems to be caused by exclusive religious posturing, doesn’t it? If you ain’t in my gang you ain’t going to heaven… Doesn’t that sound a little odd, these days? Can’t people be good human beings, and not seek to hurt each other, physically, emotionally, economically, and still ‘get to heaven’ if such exists? Don’t we need to recognise that an urge for companionship and fulfilment, sexual or otherwise, is a fundamental need? And if we are denied our basic needs, we are damaged. Rather as these poor priests who abuse do so partly because their job requires them to deny one of the most fundamental needs of all.

 In ‘The Coward’s Tale’, there is an old guy called Judah Jones. He is a window cleaner, an old man who still works hard, not able to retire despite his age, who pushes his bike and his ladders up and down the hilly streets of the town to make sure the people can see out of their houses. He lives alone, always has, and is desperately lonely. But Judah loves someone dearly, and has done for years. He loves a collier called Peter to the extent that when he sees him, he cannot speak, he has to hide, not walk past. He has wanted him for as long as he can remember. And has never done anything about it. Because the time and the place will not allow it.

 I felt desperately sad for this man, as I was writing him. He would have made a terrific partner, a terrific husband, a terrific wife. If times were different, he would have lived a more fulfilling life.  

 I make this point somewhere in his story: “If you have love to give it has to go somewhere, for it cannot go nowhere…” and so Judah Jones loves an image, on a window, in chapel. He cares for that image as if it was a person. He adores that image beyond reason. 

‘The Coward’s Tale’ is full of the tales of men whose lives are spoiled, held up, by issues caused by an incident that happened generations ago. And it is the same for Judah. His fixation with the window goes back… but perhaps I will let your readers follow the link to read his story as it was back in 2008, when it won a prize in the USA – before it was edited to become part of ‘The Coward’s Tale’. 

 http://www.percontra.net/10gebbie.htm

 But back to religion with a small ‘r’, if we may. If we must. I have been asked why Judah’s story finishes as it does. My great writing buddy Andrew is gay, and he found it hard to accept this ending. My only answer is that all my main male characters are based on images we have come to associate with the twelve men we know as The Twelve Apostles. Judah is based on Judas. And whatever else happens in the story of Judas, the ultimate sadness for him as a human being is that he kills the thing he really loves.

 Looking back on this story, I can see that it does reflect what I believe, although it was not written with those beliefs as ink. If society does not allow each one of us to love as we need to, then we are causing not only personal pain but inflicting unnecessary and often lasting damage on ourselves as a community. 

 Thanks for letting me perch, Charles. 

And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Vanessa, not to mention the roses and champagne!

Richard Gwyn, The Vagabond’s Breakfast

I was drawn to this book for a number of reasons. The first is that Richard Gwyn and I crossed paths briefly many years ago, in the council estates of East London, and – if I’m not confusing him with someone else, which is quite possible – he still owes me a tenner. But I’ll let that pass. The second reason for reading it, and one that does us both more credit, is that the book’s been very highly recommended by Scott Pack, who describes it as “utterly terrifying, funny, thought provoking and seemingly without an ounce of self-pity. A masterpiece”. As someone who’s also basked in Scott’s praise in the past, I can hardly doubt his judgement when he high fives someone else’s work. The third reason is that it gives me a chance to mention one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, The Last Time I Saw Richard, not because I want to talk about the last time I saw this particular Richard – my memory of the occasion is understandably vague given the excesses of that period – but because the text of that song oddly illuminates Richard Gwyn’s extraordinary book. It’s a song that explicitly condemns romanticism while implicitly rendering it homage. If it’s true that ‘all romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café’, it’s equally true – as the song admits – that the accuser’s eyes are also still ‘full of moon’, and that no one, finally, is immune from ‘pretty lies’. I suspect that Gwyn might play down the latter truth, and understandably so, but look at this:

We picked up the caritas blankets she had stashed behind the bar, went out into the square, grabbed an armload of cardboard from a skip, walked down a few streets and climbed a crumbling wall and through an archway without a streetlight nearby; this place is good, said Charo, this place is safe. We wrapped ourselves under the blankets and onto the card, she smelled like a warm animal, we burrowed deep into each other’s warmth, deep into the soft haven of each other’s sorrow, we lay under the canopy of night and listened to the wind tearing down the narrow streets of the city, listened to the howling of the wind in our warm and destitute embrace, until the drugs and sleep took us hostage, until sleep weighed down on us like mercury.

It’s no surprise to the reader, after passages like this, that a friend tells Gwyn he is a ‘prisoner of duality [...] addicted to the notion of the epic quest’. It’s as though his life has been lived to fulfil a need for sublimity, inverted, in acts and in language, to become a ‘singer prince [...] consigned to the kingdom of the gutter.’ A singer prince who is also ‘a person in the very process of disintegration.’ What marks him out from others who have trod this same hobo-ish track, though, can be seen in these last few words. If ‘singer prince’ belongs to the lexis of romanticism at its most sublime,  ’process of disintegration’ forms part of an entirely different register.

Because The Vagabond’s Breakfast belongs in a strangely hybrid way to two distinct genres: the literature of, for want of a better term, tramping and the literature of illness. On the one hand we have Kerouac, Genet, George Orwell; on the other Dermot Welch, Nerval, Dostoyevsky. What’s interesting about both groups of writers is the extent to which, with the exception of Orwell, they’re romantics; there’s a sense in all of them that hardship, pain, degradation bestow their own rewards and that to receive them is to be marked out in more than a merely negative way. It’s not just nostalgie de la boue – for many of these writers, it’s the boue itself. Gwyn, in this book, straddles the genres by sandwiching two memoirs – the story of his dissolute past on the other hand and, on the other, as consequence and antithesis, that of his current battle with illness. The illness is the result of the dissolution, but it’s also its mirror image – it’s a defining business, one that takes over the life of its host to the exclusion of almost everything else. This makes for some bare, and harrowing, writing. For example:

One night, I climb to the loft of the house, where my study is located, in search of a cigarette lighter. When I step into the room, swaying under the dual onslaught of sleep deprivation and brain fog, I am on a mission. I have a cheap lighter in my hand, but it will not suffice, since according to the demented logic of some fleeting obsession, the lighter I am searching for has to be white, and the one in my hand is blue, an aberration. I spot the power lead that connects my laptop to the mains, and it terminates in a rectangular white fixture, which I remove, thinking it might also function as a lighter, and I attempt to light it with the blue one, convinced that the only way to ignite a lighter is with another lighter. I can smell burning plastic, but because of the defect in my cognitive wiring am not immediately able to connect the smell with my own activity, until I realise that the melting fixture is burning my fingers. I am, at that moment, aware of myself as an alien presence, an utter anomaly, a man standing alone in his study having attempted, unsuccessfully, to set fire to a computer, or – which is the same thing – to his memory. The next day I find the blackened remains of the fixture hanging from my desk.

The absence of metaphor in this passage, the writerly curiosity and search for exactitude are in sharp contrast to the romanticising sublimity of ‘warm and destitute embrace’ in the extract above, and Gwyn is fully aware of this. Indeed, The Vagabond’s Breakfast is nothing if not self-aware, which is the opposite of self-pitying. Towards the end of this extraordinary book, in what stands as both an admission and a statement of intent, he writes:

It is something that I never seem able to escape, this constant interweaving and interplay between the two domains of experience that constitute my life, this life which is not enough for everything.

Dreamhouse, by Alison Habens

What an odd book this is. And in the best possible sense. I came across it some time ago in a list made by Scott Pack of books that hadn’t attracted the attention they deserved – a subject dear to my bruised, neglected heart. I ordered it (a used copy – the novel is now out of print) and then forgot all about it until I was looking through a pile of unread books behind a sofa – yes, I’m that disorganised – and found it, dusty, slightly forlorn, with the tagline you can see in the picture to the left of this: “One of the best first novels to appear this year”, which, given its current status (on Amazon UK, 11 used from £0.01) occasioned a rush of sympathy and anxiety, and the tiniest, tiniest pinch of schadenfreude, disguised as authorly fellow-feeling. I popped it in my bag and started reading it that morning, on the train to work. And I’m very glad I did.

The book was published in 1996 but the mood of the opening pages took me further back, to the early work of Mike Leigh: wonderful television films like Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, with their fascinated, unnerving and nerve-raw take on aspiration, usually represented by Alison Steadman (coincidence, surely?) The heroine of Dreamhouse is herself a Steadman-like figure called Celia whose lifetime ambition, to celebrate her forthcoming marriage by holding an engagement party, is about to be realised. Celia shares a house with three other people, two of whom, inconveniently, have decided to host their own parties the same evening. Unlike Celia, they live in a world where bottom drawers are less important than mind-altering substances and feminist cinema. What can possibly go wrong?

The premise is farcical, but also appalling, for Celia at least, and the novel develops both the horror and the farce as though there were no significant difference between the two. Which is rarely true in real life, but is certainly true in certain forms of art and recreational drug use. Habens skilfully yokes both to the chariot of her novel, which runs amok within the walls of the shared (dream)house as it transforms itself into an inverted wonderland. Alice’s descent, for example, is paralleled by Celia’s ascent as she climbs the stairs to the first floor. There, she finds herself in a themed fancy-dress party and it will surprise no one to learn that the theme is Alice in Wonderland. That Celia is dressed in an improbably old-fashioned pale blue dress and has long blonde hair only adds to the confusion. In one sense, the novel is driven by this sort of muddle and displacement, like the finest Feydeau. Who people might actually be becomes contingent on a host of externalities: dress, place, expectation. Even gender is called into play, as the novel fills with competing Alices of both sexes and Celia’s one true self, as much a mystery to her as it is to anyone else, is called upon to define itself.

Celia is an anagram of Alice (I hope this isn’t giving too much away – I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I didn’t cotton on to this myself but had to wait until I was told…) and Dreamhouse, in its disarmingly inventive way, is itself an anagram of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, their elements, or some of them, being taken up and rearranged with the casual disregard for identity, and logic, of the original works, and with all their wit and delight in wordplay multiplied tenfold. Because, for sheer linguistic exuberance, Habens gleefully outdoes her inspiration by weaving wordplay – puns, assonance, spoonerisms, half-rhymes – into the very stuff of the writing. Everything, from Carroll to Joyce via music hall innuendo, gets tumbled into the mix. Here’s an example:

‘Within a matter of minutes my trousers were terrified and trying to come off. I hurried to help her remove her dress too, frightened little bit of flimsy that it was, for she was bellowing “Get off! Get off!” at the bottom of her voice. But I couldn’t get the frock off fast enough for her; it was frozen with fear, and some of the bottons got pulled off in the panic. Well, by this time she was everywhere. She came at me with open legs. Her body was all over my hands. She rammed herself at my rod, so soft I thought she would swallow me up.

Linguistic high jinks but beneath the dazzle is the description of what might have been a rape; and once again, this disjunction – this arbitrariness, if you like, within the language itself – between what’s said and what’s meant is at the very heart of what’s going on. In the dreamhouse nothing is stable, least of all the subjects concerned, as their clothes, their limbs, their members begin to do their feeling for them. The final court scene, towards which everything converges both within the novel and in its status as parody and anagram of the Alice books, is an absolute joy, told with an hallucinatory energy that would have left the Victorian don reeling. But it’s also the point at which the world outside this ersatz drug-induced wonderland comes back into play. It’s a world on the brink of chaotic involution; the fact that Glenda Jackson appears at one point – to refute the notion of sexual crime as a crime against property rather than the person – only adds to the general feeling that something larger is about to break through, something more real than apparent, or less topsyturvy. Connections begin to be made. There’s a death, a real death…

At times, the energy of Dreamhouse is simply too much to absorb. Nothing, in the end,  is more exhausting than something that is itself inexhaustible. And for all its Aliceness, and its playful quizzical vigour, Habens’ novel is driven by something more than the final impossibility of defining what we mean by identity, and the fun this might produce. Like Tim Burton’s recent film based on the Alice books, it aims to do more and ends up doing slightly less. In both cases, it’s a question of narrative imperative being stronger than the kind of epistemological questioning Carroll engaged in. For all the visionary élan of Burton’s film, his need to simplify the story into good and evil plays against, and ultimately defuses, the gleeful relativism of the original books. In Habens’ case, the very real plight of Celia, of who she is and of what she might become, runs counter to the very procedures that give the novel its form, its charm, and its startling originality. In this sense, the novel is too rich a concoction for its own good; a concoction in which the parts of the book can begin to seem greater than the whole. But to say this is simply to recognise – and acknowledge - the book’s ambition, which is immense.

Whoops!

I accidentally published an unfinished review of Alison Habens’ novel Dreamhouse a couple of minutes ago. If you saw it, wipe it from your mind! The finished article is on its way…

One short blast on my trumpet

Some reviews are just too good not to share. This review of the title story of my collection, The Scent of Cinnamon, by writer and translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, is one of them.

Bear with me.