Wish I Was Here

‘These memories aren’t Proustian. They are hardly even memories. They are more like glitch art or soft errors – vague unhelpful frissons, flashes of recognition in which the real object remains hidden—.’

‘London in the rain, the beauty of it was this: you didn’t even have to be taking the heroin, you just had to look fragile & wounded by things. You just needed to be walking up Camden Parkway to Cecil Sharp House with your hands in your pockets, twenty-one years old and screwed up to screaming pitch and perpetual panic for no reason, or every reason, and waiting for the moment when Roy Harper’s thin wobbly falsetto would bring you some kind of calm and focus and lift you transiently into something past yourself. I abandoned that solace like everything else, and it would take a decade to find the next thing that worked.’

‘I have a professional interest in how fantasy propels or catalyses our casually saturated intimacy with illusion; but – while I have no difficulty reading out ‘floating wheelie bin’ from the picture, and indeed have lost all surprise at the absurd realism of an idea like that – it remains a picture and I really have no interest in what might be expressed thoughtlessly as the ‘possibility’ of a floating bin. I think it’s that, by now, I don’t care if a bin could float.’

‘I read Peter’s Room by Antonia Forest, in which the comfortable middle-class Marlow children discover Gondal, the obsessive fantasy world of the Brontë sisters, fail to learn the lesson of it, and as a result suffer all the psychic comedowns and consequences you would expect. To play with fantasy, Forest’s narrative warns, is to play with a loaded gun.’

‘—weird reading habits of mine can only be understood as a corrective, a retrospective manoeuvre: they back-informed an earlier self – that quiet, alienated boy whose family, entry-level middle class, went in awe of 1930s suburban Tudor – let alone the real thing – as a goal they knew they could never aspire to. By the time I was thirty I wanted to make certain he knew – I wanted that boy to understand perfectly – that it was no longer my job to escape, or to yearn, or to facilitate anyone else’s yearnings, including his.’

‘—near a National Park, this version of me could relax. In fact, he couldn’t relax any other way. Drugs had never worked. ‘Being a writer’ had never worked. Sex had never worked. It was a feeling that might be lost later in the day for any number of reasons, but for now the venue itself – the upland outdoors – acted like a tranquilliser and an antidepressant. It was mental health on a stick: Mental Heath.’

‘Never favour plot. Story is fine, but plot is like chemical farming. Closure is wrong. It is toxic. Work into a genre if you like, but from as far outside it as possible. Read as much about Hollywood formalism as you can bear, so you know what not to do. Break the structures – don’t just look for new and sly twists on them. Never do clever tricks with reader expectation. Instead be honest, open and direct in your intention not to deliver the things the reader expects. You won’t always be successful in that, because it’s harder than it looks. After all, you used to be a reader too—You aren’t a reader any more. You’re a writer, so don’t try to get reader kicks from the act of writing. Never tell yourself a story. That romantic relationship is over for you. From now on the satisfactions will be elsewhere.’

‘Structures broken or fallen, structures bricolaged on to one another, bits of structures banged and bolted together using the most and the least sophisticated of techniques, wilful structures which don’t just undercut expectation but which seem to make nothing you can know. Instead they struggle to imply there’s something different – some different way of describing things – to be had—There is just enough of a common motive to keep the relationship going, keep up the exploration of the territory. Writer, reader and text struggle off into the distances they have constructed together, gesticulating and out of sorts with one another, yet bound by the idea that something can come of all this. Characters: layer up the deep terror of these characters, whose lives are sustained like a very thin iridescent membrane around nothing—All stories should be ghost stories, in this sense.’

‘So what is the function of the novelist? Not to fellate the audience in the hope of delivering a more exciting product. At the moment I can’t think of anything more positive than that, because most other possibilities define the novelist as a philosopher, ideologist, politician, news reporter, historian, single-issue social engineer, creative writing professor, stand-up comedian, whatever. Most quoted but woolliest of all possibilities is to be an entertainer—The last thing you want to do is ‘tell stories’. Everyone claims to be doing that, from scientists to brand managers. As a result the whole thing has become nauseating. When asked, I now reply: I make things up, like everyone else in this very doomed & self-fictionalising culture.’

‘I redeem the old cat’s ashes from the vet’s on White Hart Lane—imagine falling over a curb and dropping him—having a broken hip and being covered in addition with the remains of your pet would be irretrievably uncool even in East Sheen—‘I know we’re in a weird place with this,’ I tell him. ‘For you it’s a transitional place. I appreciate that.’’

‘Like silence. Love a pork pie. Feel frail, although that’s probably not the case yet but an imaginative casting-forward. Often employ the rhetorical question ‘What am I like?’, meaning how can anyone be this fucked up, absent-minded or late. Keep some parts of myself severely to myself, am thus able to maintain a deep fruitful disjunction between the real world of the internet and the real real world of the real world. Always a fiction. Seventy-seven years old this year. No heroes. Will read for cash.’

'Q: Do you identify as a science fiction writer?
A: No, I identify nightly, or at least every second night or so, as someone who would like to be rusting under the Thames.'

When I was younger I thought writing should be the struggle with what you are. Now I think it’s the struggle to find out who you were.

I liked a notebook spiral-bound: it was easier to police. I couldn’t bear hasty scribble, interlinears, strike-through, muddle. If I thought of a better sentence, I was compelled to tear out the whole page and begin again. I wanted notes to be notes: I also wanted them to be pristine, finished, absolutely articulate little gems. Soon I was keeping two sets of accounts, the rough and the smooth, the instant and the perfected. Some notes didn’t seem worth the effort of polishing. These I labelled ‘nowts’, experiencing a vague resentment if I ever caught sight of them again. In the mid 1980s they would be transferred laboriously into their own computer files: dumped. Years after you abandoned it, a note like that takes on a new, often uneasy semblance of life. The file is as warm to the touch as the radioactive container at the end of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly: lift the lid and you could swear you hear, in a voice composed of both a whisper and a roar, the continuous repetition of a word.

Who has the right of way in these rites of passage? They fuck you up, but though you feel like the victim, you give as good as you get. I was a disaster area of rage and worry, and I admire the courage of people who felt they should try to bring some aid and order to it; they could have built a fence around me and walked away. I did. Back then, I was reading J. G. Ballard for the first time. That line of his, ‘Most of us were suffering from various degrees of beach fatigue, that chronic malaise which exiles the victim to a limbo of endless sunbathing, dark glasses and afternoon terraces’: I remember the frisson it gave me at sixteen or seventeen years old, the sense of being sucked into the heart of some point of view so oblique, so feverish, that it was obliged to clothe itself in the matter-of-fact. I was still trying to contract beach fatigue a decade later.

I hate concepts. Having a concept isn’t having something to write: having something to write about is having something to write. Never favour plot. Story is fine, but plot is like chemical farming…
The struggle to say anything is always the struggle to reinvent the wheel – to distinguish the description of an experience from all the other descriptions of it that might seem similar.

Unpredictable flashbacks, so brief they vanish as they arrive. Hard to grasp, impossible to trace. Prompted by the weather, the light, a sound, a thought about something else entirely, or – finally and worst – without any stimulus at all: leakage from someone else’s project, as if some unrelated occupier of the self is editing footage of your life for purposes of their own. Fields, hills, foreign cities. Sometimes a voice. Always objects in light. A figure or two, not many, glimpsed from across a room or a street. You can’t call these memories. They don’t last long enough. No events seem to be involved , or even implied. They don’t seem to have happened to you, only to have been recorded. Single images if you like. Mostly like photographs, but snatched away in the same moment they’re presented. Hardly registering on your real-time present. Too short a time to remember anything through. Absolutely non-narrative…