Take a look at a map of West Virginia. It's part of the South but not really southern. It's below the Mason-Dixon line, but only the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line separates its northern panhandle from Lake Erie and the Canadian border. It was called Kanawha before it was called West Virginia. It is officially known as the Mountain State, unofficially the Cog State, and affectionately Almost Heaven (thanks to John Denver). Politically and geographically it's a mixed-up place.
Look at its shape on the map. It looks like a water jug tipped backwards - withholding something. It also looks like a fowl or a game bird dressed for the pot.
West Virginia's finest writer was a mixed-up guy. So much so that he blew his head to pieces at the age of 27 in 1979 with only a dozen publishable short stories to his name.
I'm not saying that Breece D'J Pancake killed himself because the place of his birth was shaped like a headless chicken, or even that there was some tangible link between this deracinated would-be southerner and the shaky, ambiguous nature of his state's history. But to understand him we have to understand, or at least acknowledge the importance of, the place. It was the only place he wrote about: every one of his stories is set there, in the farm-dotted valleys and the mining towns. Ohio is like a distant land; Chicago is mentioned as if it were a fabled realm, or somewhere existing only in a dream.
The rural rhythms in Pancake's stories take the place of any sense of resolution. There is no finality. Things get a little better, or more often a little worse, but never end. People get ill and don't improve, but neither do they die. And when the do, they 'become soil.' The stories are full of euphemisms that don't soften anything. They do the reverse, in fact. They align the reader with the edges and the jolts that the protagonists live with daily.
In England there is writing about the countryside, about farming and rural industries. But this English writing is anchored in the past, in the social history of the land, in tradition. This gives it the tweeness of something kept in a padded box, or a show put on for outsiders. Think H.E. Bates. Why is it shit? Because it's packaged. A shit in a box, with a bow on it.
No-one wants a shit in a box. So more recent English writers have gone the other way, taken the shit out of the box and thrown it a the big intellectual, avant-garde fan. Adam Thorpe did this with his rural-modernist epic novel Ulverton. It was a noble effort, immunised against triviality by its all-encompassing range and ballsy arrangement, but it felt a little forced.
The Americans - Hemingway, Faulkner, Carver, Pancake - relied on their ear, and nose, for the nuances and current specificities of their respective landscapes. The word 'current' is important here. When these guys were writing they were still treating their land as a new land. Theirs was a pioneer language. They saw people fucking and fighting and they made new words for it, words that came out of the land, out of the mines and fields. And the stories feel fresh as a result. Like good manure.
Breece Pancake's favourite word was 'bullshit', or rather 'bull-shit' with that emphasis only certain Americans can give the second syllable. According to his mother he wanted to entitle his collection of short stories 'Bullshit Artist'. They are instead published as The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake and they contain less bullshit than practically any stories ever written. They are also among the very best.
Monday, 27 August 2012
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Station Winter: Observations and inferences relating to Yevgeny Yevtushenko
1
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is not a perfect human being, despite what the tens of thousands of people who fill sports stadia to hear him speak may have you believe.
He is honest, and people who are honest are almost never perfect.
'Zima Junction', his most important early poem, begins: 'As we get older we get honester'. The poem was published in 1956, when Yevtushenko was twenty-two or twenty-three.
This fact represents a sort of a conflict, if not a paradox.
The young poet is truthful; his statement is a truthful statement. If this is the case then it may also appear to be self-defeating.
In saying that we get honester as we grow older (and 'honester' is a strange hiccup of a word in itself), Yevtushenko implies that we start out with some base level of dishonesty, which may or may not vary from person to person.
It can be safely inferred that Yevtushenko, a man in his early twenties, has yet to reach his peak of honesty (which, incidentally, must surely occur at the point of death).
The young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a dishonest man. But he is aware of a difference between honesty and truth.
He has based his great work on the paradox of the dishonest lie or the honest fact.
Today, three days before his seventy-ninth birthday, after his four wives, after his implicit support of Vladimir Putin ('a man who has lost his way') Yevtushenko is an honester man.
2
Zima means winter. The literal translation of the poem's title is 'Station Winter'. Zima is also the name of the town, the poet's hometown, a town of 35,000 inhabitants on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The air temperature in Zima ranges from −50 °C in the winter to +40 °C in the summer. It may be difficult to become attached to a place of such extremes, leaving it in great heat and returning in dangerous cold.
'Zima Junction' is about a return from a kind of self-imposed exile. The town itself, like many in Siberia, is partly a product of exile.
Yevtushenko had exiled himself from a town of exile, perhaps thinking that two negatives make a positive. Finding that this was not the case, he returned to the grandmothers and dogs of his youth.
Yevtushenko is fond of his hometown. He accepts its faults. More generally, his ready acceptance of faults may be one of his faults.
I first read 'Zima Junction' on a train in Norway. I was hungover and homesick.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is not a perfect human being, despite what the tens of thousands of people who fill sports stadia to hear him speak may have you believe.
He is honest, and people who are honest are almost never perfect.
'Zima Junction', his most important early poem, begins: 'As we get older we get honester'. The poem was published in 1956, when Yevtushenko was twenty-two or twenty-three.
This fact represents a sort of a conflict, if not a paradox.
The young poet is truthful; his statement is a truthful statement. If this is the case then it may also appear to be self-defeating.
In saying that we get honester as we grow older (and 'honester' is a strange hiccup of a word in itself), Yevtushenko implies that we start out with some base level of dishonesty, which may or may not vary from person to person.
It can be safely inferred that Yevtushenko, a man in his early twenties, has yet to reach his peak of honesty (which, incidentally, must surely occur at the point of death).
The young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a dishonest man. But he is aware of a difference between honesty and truth.
He has based his great work on the paradox of the dishonest lie or the honest fact.
Today, three days before his seventy-ninth birthday, after his four wives, after his implicit support of Vladimir Putin ('a man who has lost his way') Yevtushenko is an honester man.
2
Zima means winter. The literal translation of the poem's title is 'Station Winter'. Zima is also the name of the town, the poet's hometown, a town of 35,000 inhabitants on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The air temperature in Zima ranges from −50 °C in the winter to +40 °C in the summer. It may be difficult to become attached to a place of such extremes, leaving it in great heat and returning in dangerous cold.
'Zima Junction' is about a return from a kind of self-imposed exile. The town itself, like many in Siberia, is partly a product of exile.
Yevtushenko had exiled himself from a town of exile, perhaps thinking that two negatives make a positive. Finding that this was not the case, he returned to the grandmothers and dogs of his youth.
Yevtushenko is fond of his hometown. He accepts its faults. More generally, his ready acceptance of faults may be one of his faults.
I first read 'Zima Junction' on a train in Norway. I was hungover and homesick.
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Swindon After a Dream
1
The dream I was having continued, just for a few moments, after I woke up. I had been appearing at some kind of literary festival which was more like a large popular music festival in its scale. I was about to give a talk, or had just given a talk, on Roberto Bolaño and the influence of his adopted hometown: Blanes, on the Costa Brava.
People were filing out of a large, roofless tent in which a stage had been set up. I climbed down off the stage and met Holly Partridge, the daughter of Andy Partridge, singer and guitarist in XTC. I went with Holly to a kind of makeshift pub in a building that was like a barn but had large windows. It was too well-lit from the outside to comply with our idea of a barn. I ordered drinks from a small Indian man at the bar while Holly stayed outside where she entertained herself by playing with two small girls who had a beach ball.
The drinks were a long time in coming - the barrel had run dry, perhaps - so I waited in a window seat from where I could see Holly. I gestured for her to come in and join me. She waved and smiled and carried on playing with the children. At some point she had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing something red and blue that made her look like a waitress at a roller disco, but without the skates. I am not entirely sure when the dream ended.
2
Swindon does not exist. Or rather it has not existed until now, when I invented it. If you are from Swindon you will instantly recognise this to be true. If you are not from Swindon and you meet someone who is he or she will be a character that I have invented, or written down. Swindon is the construct of the mind of an author or authors, much like everywhere else. At certain points in history Andy Partridge has been one of the authors to have invented Swindon.
3
At some point close to the end of the dream a song entered my head. The song is called Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her and was written by Andy Partridge for XTC's 1984 album The Big Express.
In the song the narrator is standing on the edge of a void. By the time of the song's conclusion he has neither jumped or retreated from the edge. Maybe he has thrown a couple of cursory stones into the unknown. The song is a snapshot of a moment in which nothing really happens, although the implication is that plenty could happen. It is a postcard of a rainy english seaside summer.
It is the negative of Roberto Bolaño's Costa Brava home.
Bolaño wrote about exile, and his final exile was from the void, an exile to a sunny Spanish seaside town. (It is easy and pointless to make comparisons between two writers or artists who probably have (or had) no knowledge of each other's work. What is the value of this? There is none. It is worthless. It is worthless to say that neither man learned to drive. That they have short-sightedness in common.)
Andy Partridge has invented a world in which Swindon is a centre point. An axis mundi must break the earth in two places. Partridge's axis breaks the earth in his invented Swindon, but the opposing pole surfaces in a void characterised by uncertainty. A post-apocalyptic beach with hallucinatory seagulls and an unobtainable girl. In Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her he has escaped from Swindon but not from the abyss.
The dream I was having continued, just for a few moments, after I woke up. I had been appearing at some kind of literary festival which was more like a large popular music festival in its scale. I was about to give a talk, or had just given a talk, on Roberto Bolaño and the influence of his adopted hometown: Blanes, on the Costa Brava.
People were filing out of a large, roofless tent in which a stage had been set up. I climbed down off the stage and met Holly Partridge, the daughter of Andy Partridge, singer and guitarist in XTC. I went with Holly to a kind of makeshift pub in a building that was like a barn but had large windows. It was too well-lit from the outside to comply with our idea of a barn. I ordered drinks from a small Indian man at the bar while Holly stayed outside where she entertained herself by playing with two small girls who had a beach ball.
The drinks were a long time in coming - the barrel had run dry, perhaps - so I waited in a window seat from where I could see Holly. I gestured for her to come in and join me. She waved and smiled and carried on playing with the children. At some point she had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing something red and blue that made her look like a waitress at a roller disco, but without the skates. I am not entirely sure when the dream ended.
2
Swindon does not exist. Or rather it has not existed until now, when I invented it. If you are from Swindon you will instantly recognise this to be true. If you are not from Swindon and you meet someone who is he or she will be a character that I have invented, or written down. Swindon is the construct of the mind of an author or authors, much like everywhere else. At certain points in history Andy Partridge has been one of the authors to have invented Swindon.
3
At some point close to the end of the dream a song entered my head. The song is called Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her and was written by Andy Partridge for XTC's 1984 album The Big Express.
In the song the narrator is standing on the edge of a void. By the time of the song's conclusion he has neither jumped or retreated from the edge. Maybe he has thrown a couple of cursory stones into the unknown. The song is a snapshot of a moment in which nothing really happens, although the implication is that plenty could happen. It is a postcard of a rainy english seaside summer.
It is the negative of Roberto Bolaño's Costa Brava home.
Bolaño wrote about exile, and his final exile was from the void, an exile to a sunny Spanish seaside town. (It is easy and pointless to make comparisons between two writers or artists who probably have (or had) no knowledge of each other's work. What is the value of this? There is none. It is worthless. It is worthless to say that neither man learned to drive. That they have short-sightedness in common.)
Andy Partridge has invented a world in which Swindon is a centre point. An axis mundi must break the earth in two places. Partridge's axis breaks the earth in his invented Swindon, but the opposing pole surfaces in a void characterised by uncertainty. A post-apocalyptic beach with hallucinatory seagulls and an unobtainable girl. In Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her he has escaped from Swindon but not from the abyss.
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño wrote like he knew he was going to die, even before that was the case, before his liver gave up at the age of fifty. He wrote as if he were on fire. He wrote like he wanted everyone else to write, as if he were in an abyss - sometimes hellish, sometimes beautiful, sometimes a void - and had no inclination to get out. There is no-one in the English language who can write like Bolaño, but then again there is no-one in the English language who can write like any Latin American. This isn't a criticism. The things English-language writers haved lived through are different to the things Latin writers have lived through.
Bolaño was known as a novelist who would rather be known as a poet. The first collection of his non-fiction to be translated into English, Between Parentheses (Picador, 2012) confirms what UK readers had always suspected: that he was also a consumate, idiosyncratic and above all honest essayist. It also confirms that he was a reader the like of which no longer seems to exist in this country, where reading is considered something that writers do to relax between periods of work. Many of the essays in Between Parentheses are about authors, and these exhibit no snobbery - only an anger, a trademark distaste at bad writing. James Ellroy's autobiography sits comfortably in Bolaño's bookshelves alongside such obscure works as Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of the Iconoclasts. Thomas Harris garners almost as much acclaim as Julio Cortázar or Juan Rulfo. Many of these essays read like short stories - albeit very Bolañian, very disconcerting short stories. They echo with truth, opinion and the space of dreams. More than anything else, the writing is alive in a way that indicates that the writer knows a thing or two about death. About life too, of course, and about the need to experience.
In the Bolañian fictive universe everything is linked, and the same goes for his essays - in this garden of forking paths we can begin with, for example, the Spanish civil war and trace our way, through and across texts, to the more recent bloodshed in Guatemala. We can begin in Geneva with Borges and end in Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin. The link is literature: the burning, amorphous literature that can hardly be distinguised from life.
If nothing else, this excellent, provocative volume is a reading list, and for Bolaño a reading list is a pretty good substitute for a manifesto or a pedagogical religious text. British and North American readers may be put off by the rapid stream of names, many of them untranslated Latin American or Spanish writers. That is because British and North American readers are, by and large, lazy and ignorant. Again, this is not a criticism. If our knowledge of Latin American writing stops at Marquez or, at a push, Allende (and it is easy to see how reading Isabel Allende could curtail anyone's interest) then why should we make the jump to Bolaño, Cercas, Piglia or Onetti? But research is easy these days. Books are cheap. Or you can steal them as Bolaño suggests. And to read Bolaño's essays you dont need to know about these other authors, not to begin with, because he introduces them like the characters in a vast unfinished novel, in the vast Latin American novel, which is what they are.
Roberto Bolaño was, for a while, a keeper of the flame, the precious or worthless Latin American literary flame - not because he wanted to be, but because he lived a life covered in petrol, playing with matches.
Bolaño was known as a novelist who would rather be known as a poet. The first collection of his non-fiction to be translated into English, Between Parentheses (Picador, 2012) confirms what UK readers had always suspected: that he was also a consumate, idiosyncratic and above all honest essayist. It also confirms that he was a reader the like of which no longer seems to exist in this country, where reading is considered something that writers do to relax between periods of work. Many of the essays in Between Parentheses are about authors, and these exhibit no snobbery - only an anger, a trademark distaste at bad writing. James Ellroy's autobiography sits comfortably in Bolaño's bookshelves alongside such obscure works as Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of the Iconoclasts. Thomas Harris garners almost as much acclaim as Julio Cortázar or Juan Rulfo. Many of these essays read like short stories - albeit very Bolañian, very disconcerting short stories. They echo with truth, opinion and the space of dreams. More than anything else, the writing is alive in a way that indicates that the writer knows a thing or two about death. About life too, of course, and about the need to experience.
In the Bolañian fictive universe everything is linked, and the same goes for his essays - in this garden of forking paths we can begin with, for example, the Spanish civil war and trace our way, through and across texts, to the more recent bloodshed in Guatemala. We can begin in Geneva with Borges and end in Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin. The link is literature: the burning, amorphous literature that can hardly be distinguised from life.
If nothing else, this excellent, provocative volume is a reading list, and for Bolaño a reading list is a pretty good substitute for a manifesto or a pedagogical religious text. British and North American readers may be put off by the rapid stream of names, many of them untranslated Latin American or Spanish writers. That is because British and North American readers are, by and large, lazy and ignorant. Again, this is not a criticism. If our knowledge of Latin American writing stops at Marquez or, at a push, Allende (and it is easy to see how reading Isabel Allende could curtail anyone's interest) then why should we make the jump to Bolaño, Cercas, Piglia or Onetti? But research is easy these days. Books are cheap. Or you can steal them as Bolaño suggests. And to read Bolaño's essays you dont need to know about these other authors, not to begin with, because he introduces them like the characters in a vast unfinished novel, in the vast Latin American novel, which is what they are.
Roberto Bolaño was, for a while, a keeper of the flame, the precious or worthless Latin American literary flame - not because he wanted to be, but because he lived a life covered in petrol, playing with matches.
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