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.