How I nearly Died and What I Did While I Was Doing That

Like most people, I expect, I associate the British farce tradition with sudden brutal reminders of mortality and death. Unlike most people I have some biographical cause for this association. The other year, the morning after watching a pretty good performance of Noises Off by Michael Frayn, I fell to my bathroom floor after suffering a sudden massive brain haemorrhage. I did quite a lot of vomiting, as you can imagine. Screaming was also involved and there was a longish period where I thought I might be a Chinese peasant (I am not). For about a fortnight I was in the tenuous middle ground between being alive and life's opposite. When I finally got a correct diagnosis I was told that I had a blood clot the size of a golf ball in my head. 

This sort of news makes you quickly re-evaluate any opinions you might have had about the relative smallness of golf balls.  I had always previously looked on them as being on the fiddly side. From now on I would view them with a proper respect. I was also informed, in a frank way, that my brain was gearing up for having another go at the whole haemorrhage project, with the intention of correcting the first one’s failure to finish me off. Did I mention I couldn’t see? I couldn’t see, or not much. The haemorrhage had squashed a good part of my visual cortex. Again, when faced with this kind of news one quickly re-evaluates things. You remember the game about what sort of hypothetical impairment would hinder you the least? Few people opt for loss of vision but when made aware that a haemorrhage occurring a few inches to the right or left might have wiped out your ability to walk, say, or your memory, then losing, as I did, most of my peripheral vision strikes me as relatively fortunate. In one of his (silly but anecdotally abundant) books Oliver Sacks tells of someone who had a brain haemorrhage which, like mine, affected the visual cortex, only with far greater impact. Not only could they not see at all, the haemorrhage had erased any memory of having had seen. Like I said, relatively fortunate.

The immediate effect of all this, once the (exemplary and wonderful) NHS staff had saved my life and sent me home, was a worrying one. I became a nicer person. I like to think, in retrospect, it was some looming knowledge that my brain had designs on me, but in the months leading up to the incident I was something of a horror. Grumpy, morose, prone to small-scale tantrums and with a premature fear of getting old, I was rarely mistaken for a joy to be around. And that went, at least for a while. Nothing rids you of the fear of getting old like almost dying young. After this, middle age, responsibility, senility itself, seem like eagerly anticipated treats. I became benign, avuncular, appreciative of the smaller pleasures (a decent book, a good cup of tea, the company of loved ones… that sort of thing). I developed a childlike glee at the company of mammals, in zoos and in the home. (My cat, it should be said, while ill-tempered enough, was stalwart throughout this period). I treated my girlfriend, now my wife, with the loving-kindness that was surely her due. Bedridden and blessed with a new found aptitude for life, I chose for myself a task that would suck away at all this fresh wisdom like a zombie with a straw. A task that would render me, by the end of the year, an anxious self-torturing pain in the arse. I chose to write a novel.

Before you dash in panic from the screen, I should stress that this wasn’t a completely absurd choice. I had attempted twice before to get one started, but abandoned them both due to laziness and the vague belief that no one has anything useful to say until out of their twenties (I recognise that this belief puts me at odds with the wider culture which tends to assert the opposite). I had written scraps of stories and I had read a great deal of literature which I was naive enough to think would help. Proust, I reminded myself, had written much of his best stuff while prone. Homer, Joyce, Huxley and Milton would all have needed help crossing the road but were none of them slouches with a quill. (It was around this time I was awarded a white-stick by the council. It was unnaturally short and made me look like a drunken Sooty). Lying on my back, I set to work.

I was determined not to address the issue of my illness in this work. (What’s that, you say? I should? Well one day, perhaps). Instead I had chosen for a theme the romantic lives of the conspiracy theorists. In my day job I’d had various dealings with the differing movements and sects that make up the UK conspiracy movement, such as it is, and found their differences and similarities intriguing. I thought, that, allowing for some exaggeration, their shifting worldviews could tell us something about life and about fiction, and the perils of confusing the two. Characters and plots sprung up and reported for duty. I was enjoying this. Free from the demands of readership, I could pretty much do as I liked. The problems came later.

Flaubertian perfectionism is maybe a little unfashionable nowadays, when the preferred literary model is the confessional blog or opinion column, but I found I just couldn’t give up on an urge to get the words right. Never mind my girlfriend’s argument that this was what editors were for (there are still editors right? Like, four or five, of them, somewhere). I was confident, if that is the right word, that for my book to be even considered by a publisher there could not be a word out of place. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had a brain haemorrhage,-maybe you did and it worked wonders- but one thing it failed to do in my case was give my vocabulary a boost. Instead one thinks through a gauze of befuddlement, a hangover made permanent. On more than one occasion my girlfriend returned home to see me weeping over an adjective. My unedited prose had the power to make me physically sick, like hearing your voice played back and hearing a nasal shriek. And when, I was done torturing myself over word-orderings then the extra-textual anxieties would kick in. Was my novel too anti-realist or was it too wedded to realism? It was set in the North of England and this would surely repel publishers? What publishers, anyway? The book game was surely over, was slowly being replaced by downloadable vampire porn written by and for horny Baptists. I didn’t go to Oxbridge –none of my characters went to Oxbridge- did this make me an autodidact? Was I any good and would it make any difference if I was?

Reader, you will be relieved to hear I passed through this phase. The book sits, strange, on my computer, taunting me with the suspicion that it might be good. It deals with a lot of things –conspiracies and fiction, love and the loss of love. It has sentient cats, Men’s Right activists, astrologers, rationalists and quite a lot about motorway service stations. While I can’t say every word is perfect and in place, I can say with confidence that some of them are lovely enough. I am perversely proud, in a sub-Oulippian way, that the word “conspiracy” does not appear anywhere in the text. I think it’s rather funny, in parts. On the whole I think you’ll like it. If you’re a publisher or an agent you might want to get in touch (there are still four or five of you out there, right?)

Despite vowing not to address my illness in the work, I find upon re-reading that the haemorrhage has snuck its way onto the page. Two major plot points factor on characters being hit painfully on the head. Characters experience the loss of beliefs or relationships as small deaths, blurring their fixed and static selves, opening themselves to the point where they become different, transformed beings. The image of the mind as a struck, reverberating gong appears and reappears. More to the point I realised, during the writing, that trauma, physical or emotional, makes conspiracy theorists of us all. We force our minds down narrow and circling tracks, too scared to leap towards the bumpy grasslands to the side. We repeat, we fixate, we go over until we perfect. Eventually if you are lucky you jump. My novel is about those who find they can’t. It is called The Movement and I hope one day it will be read. My next one will be started in full health, although I cannot promise how I’ll be by the time it’s finished.

On Being Made Anxious by Sheila Heti

I am a re-drafter. Here is what I do on a writing day: I sit and I get myself in a mess about sentences. I rock backwards and forwards, I consult my thesaurus, I pace in circles tugging at my moulting hair. On more than one occasion, my girlfriend has come home to find me weeping over the correct placing of a comma, as if it were a tormenting pea hidden under my mattress. And, when I reach the requisite number of pages, I print the whole thing out and I start again. (It’s worth remembering that I’m not writing Madame Bovary here. My novel features pornography-addicted cats, chiliastic cults and a Men’s Rights activist called Furious Patrick. I am quite possibly putting myself through hell for no good reason).

Still, Flaubert, I tell myself, would be on my side. Perfectionism is time-warranted, proven to work even at the cost of sanity and good health. Then the other day Sheila Heti, talking at the LRB shop, sweetly announced that “oh, no one drafts anymore”. She was, she said, no longer interested in style. There was something vaguely illicit about this, something naughty. My girlfriend nudged me with an air of triumph -see? Not everyone does this crazy shit- as the author began to read an excerpt from her autobiographical work. Hackles on alert, I waited for sloppiness, for errors. And, obviously, there were a few if you were looking. The odd word I might have removed, the odd phrase I would have struck a line through. But the main thing was; it worked. It was direct, it felt true, whatever true is, it was funny and naïve and open and fresh. A naivety that could only be the result, I hoped, of deliberate agonised craft. Couldn’t it?

As she read on, I felt, with my rewrites, my struggled-over plots and my prematurely creased forehead, like Rick Wakeman, interrupted in creating a triple gatefold, flugelhorn-heavy concept album by the sound of Pretty Vacant crunching from the speakers. Instantly obsolete, a brontosaurus lumbering through my paragraphs while sprightlier beasts leap on ahead. Now, if I have a belief system it lies in a) making stuff up and b) rewriting it an awful lot. And these beliefs are beginning to seem, well, a little bit old-hat. Not quite pre-Copernican but getting there.

A few words of caution. Ms Heti has told me via Twitter that she does redraft, just not in the laborious, faintly mad physical sense I described. Two, even if she doesn’t, she speaks in naturally beautiful finished sentences. Not everyone could dash out an autobiographical piece and make it read like hers (and her new book did take six years- she's not doing some Jack Kerouac spontaneous prose thing). Three, she said later on that she has, in fact, rediscovered fiction and can’t be placed naturally in any anti-making-things-up camp.

Still, it’s fair to say that in recent years the literary world (or the very narrow part of it known to English speakers) has experienced a loss of faith, both in literary stylishness and in the novel itself. A lot of writers find they no longer can sign up to the making-things-up and then-making-them-read-well project. Off the top of my head (in the new spirit of instantaneity) there’s David Shields calling for us to make it essayistic, make it a memoir, make it true. There’s Zadie Smith worrying if Tom McCarthy’s Spartan modernism is actually where it’s at. There’s Ian McEwan falling out of love with the novel, Will Self’s anxiety about the fictive conventions he’s used in most of his work, Karl Knausgard setting out to write his whole life. There’s been the critical backlash against the confident excesses of the 80s Granta generation, with their wars against clichés and their unfashionable belief in the value of stories. Clearly I’m conflating different arguments and examples here (you can be pro or anti literariness without being pro or anti fiction and many or most of those I mention would see themselves as revitalising not getting rid of novels), but you sense the general trend. If these discussions end in unconvincing affirmations of the need for fresh fictions, these tend to have an arriere garde feel to them. Resolute defenders of stylish novels can have a Fustian, High Anglican, quality, as though holding out against the barbarians, half-revelling in the dying of a form.  

I can think of a few reasons why the novel looks in trouble although obviously I’d be grateful for more. The Granta novel of the turn of the decade, with its ever-expanding cast-lists and forced desert-suited cosmopolitanism had become a silly thing, well worthy of a backlash. Critical theory has now reached the point that even novelists read it, with the sometimes paralysing results you might expect. TV shows have annexed a great deal of what used to be the turf of the novel (how many fat sagas has The Wire rendered instantly unnecessary?) When the book itself is under threat, then the future of the novel is hardly to be taken for granted. Technology has made patient Flaubertian redrafting seem oddly affected, like baking your own bread. Davids Foster-Wallace and Eggers have led to a new cult of sincerity. “Literariness” may even be subliminally associated with male power, with patriarch connoisseurs like Amis and Bloom. Time is short and if you have something to say, there’s the temptation to get on and say it with the minimum of artifice. Jot it down, upload it, make it sincere. Make it true.

It’s also quite possible that the novel has had a good run and is going the way of verse drama and music hall to be replaced by quick-scribbled autobiographies, instantly available online. Intriguing as many of the attempts to forge new forms are (I definitely look forward to reading Heti’s book), I find myself hoping otherwise; that in the end they end up lending fresh strength to, rather than replacing, the novel itself. If the novel has survived so long, it is surely because of the sponginess of the form, its ability to borrow from its rivals. Although this may just be my own feeble affirmation of faith. Certainly if the novel is to survive it will need serious thinking about what it can do. It will need hard work. It may even need a lot of re-drafting.

The Other Side of Orwell

I’ve been reading the large Everyman edition of Orwell’s Essays and discovering how instrumental the shorter Penguin version has been in fixing the idea of Orwell beloved of a certain sort of English leftist (and, I should say, by myself). The Penguin Orwell is right about everything. On the rare occasions he gets things wrong, he at least does so in quixotic, admirably wrong, so that you wish that he'd been right. He takes the correct and decent Labour reformist view on British Imperialism, the Spanish Civil War, the struggle against fascism and the Soviet Union, in that order and with the emphasis, in the Penguin, on the last two.

The Everyman Orwell is a stranger writer, closer to the Marxist left, more open to crankish enthusiasms (he comes close to recommending Esperanto in an essay that also shows him to have a more flexible view on language than he’s often credited for), and much more obsessed with Catholicism – to the extent of denying that Catholics can write decent novels (when Waugh and Greene were in their respective primes). He is also wrong about things. He insists until very late in the day that fighting Nazism will only lead to British Fascism, an opinion he went on to mock in exactly the same cocksure tone he used in making it. He is unconcerned about the bombardment of civilians, on the strange grounds that civilians call the loudest for war anyway, a theme he returns to repeatedly. He recycles material, often for use in entirely different arguments. He is more flawed and more interesting than the saintly radical-patriot of the Penguin.

Despite all these changes, the familiar pleasures of reading Orwell are all here. We have the entertaining and sometimes unfair swipes at the proto-Guardian gang of pacifists, middle class liberals and high minded fellow travellers whose descendants still litter the English scene.  We have the analytic enthusiasm for "late-capitalist" (he uses this expression) flotsam –junk shops, penny dreadfuls and “good-bad books”- that make Orwell the nearest Britain has come to Walter Benjamin. We have a morally driven worldview that never loses sight of the ordinary and the everyday. And we have a test, that of returning, repeatedly, to the defence of the underdog, of making sure that one is always on the victim’s side. It is a test that those of us who consciously write "after Orwell" should set ourselves more often.

In Defence of Book Snobbery

Matt Haig, a novelist and Twitter personage, recently posted a list of 30 Things to Tell a Book-Snob, to general delight. The consensus was that this was one in the eye for the highbrows, viewed as turtle-necked Martin Amis enthusiasts with thin lips and sneers of cold command. While I applaud much of what Matt says –about the weird privileging of realism and the way literary fiction pretends to itself it isn’t another genre- something about it bothered me.

My first concern is that Matt’s list –ostensibly anti-snob- seems to have a problem with pretension  Now for me, the act of consciously making art is always going to be a pretentious one. Shakespeare, who Matt approvingly cites, would probably have stayed a glove-maker if he hadn’t had the pretension to do otherwise. Matt and I are both Northern writers, and have probably inherited that area’s distrust of the Affected and “Fancy”. But as artists will be called pretentious even if they write like Tony Parsons they may as well embrace it. Would you rather be Oasis, grimly clinging to the mundane, or a dazzling butterfly like David Bowie? Pretension is what art is all about.

A fear –of fanciness, of the highbrow- infects the whole list, despite its many good points. So we are told approvingly that Shakespeare “didn’t go to university”, as if Shakespeare were a bluff Richard Branson type rather than one of the most complex and genuinely snobbish writers in English. We are told that Matt’s attempt at being “highbrow” was unsuccessful as though this were a general rule. There is much talk of magic and wonder and how “many of the greatest writers were children’s writers.” The overall tendency seems to be to that a book should be easily understood by almost anyone who picks it up, and engage the same parts of the mind as a conjuring show. We are told that walls are tyrannous, which seems unfair to the vital role they play in keeping us dry and warm. As an example of the universal artwork, Matt gives us the roof of the Sistine Chapel, which we are told every human being would have the same reaction to. Every human being apart from iconoclastic Protestants, Salafist Muslims and atheists, presumably.

I can’t help feeling this list confuses snobbery, which we can all oppose, with judgement, which we shouldn’t. As readers, unless we are entirely indiscriminate, we form value judgements and preferences, we make decisions. Is this snobbery? Only if we let it be. But to like everything is equivalent to liking nothing.

My main gripe with the list though is that I am unclear who it is targeting. The polo-necked Harold Blooms of this world are a dying breed. I am at the stage of trying to sell a novel myself and thus far no agents have asked me to make it more wilfully un-commercial and complex, less plot driven and “universal”. The non-snobs won- they teamed up with post-modern relativism and market forces and they kicked the highbrows out of town. Richard and Judy triumphed and TS Eliot’s boys took a hell of a kicking. We live in an age where Booker Prize judges calls for zippily accessible “thumping-good-reads”, where preferring James Joyce to JK Rowling is a mark of snobbery and where Kindles let everyone read porn on the tube. In kicking the book snob, Matt’s list kicks a strawman when he’s down.