by Ian Sansom
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …
About the author
Q & A
Life at a Glance
Favourite Books/Authors
About the book
A Critical Eye
Sandwich Spread
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About the author
Q & A
What objects do you always carry with you?
With me I always carry spare spectacles, too much change, credit card, debit card, library ticket, library books, my Homebase discount card, receipts, satellite phone, multi-band shortwave radio, two-litre water bottle, water purification tablets, Maglite, waterproof matches, whistle, gill net, candles, large metallic foil bag, Leatherman multi-purpose tool, plasters, antihistamine, sterile dressings and gauze, Vaseline, suturing needles, anti-diarrhoea pills, tetracycline, a hexamine block, a chequered handle picnic knife, an extra-expanding calf-skin gusset purse, some choice-blended China tea in willow pattern enamelled tins, a solid ivory fitted Russian leather dressing case with tortoiseshell comb and toilet requisites, a razor, strop, corkscrew, pencils (H, HB, B, 2B), correspondence cards, mounting solution, prayer book, Bible, Irish linen handkerchiefs, knee shawl, sleeping socks, leather gauntlets, Scotch yarn home-knit jersey, night shirt, Malacca cane, a door wedge, thimble, tape measure, bodkin, sewing needles, one card each of black and white thread, pearl shirt buttons, linen buttons, safety pins, galvanized iron padlocks, repeater alarm clock, 18-carat gold full hunter, eyelet punch, picture cord, piano wire, tack lifter, table vice, firefly grinder, files for fretwork, skinning knives, skull cap, folding opera hat, life belt, combination knife, fork and spoon set, steering compass, anemometer, rain gauge, portable sketching easel, leather carriage cushion, brushes for water-colour painting, unbleached handmade drawing paper, two bottle travelling ink-stand, fountain pen with 14-carat gold nib, moleskin notebooks, silver hand blotter, ivory paper knife, mortar and pestle, household lubricant, chicken broth, primus travelling stove, folding stretcher bedstead with spring wire mattress, rabbit’s foot, amulets, small memento mori figurines, smoking equipment, wood bound steel cabin trunk, Banbury cakes, potted meats, half a cooked ham, a tin of mixed biscuits, and some boiled sweets. I don’t get out much.
What is your greatest fear?
James Thurber has a little story, ‘A Box to Hide In’, in which a fearful man seeks refuge from the world in the haven of a box. The only trouble is, he can’t find a box big enough. What is it Larkin says? ‘Life is first boredom, then fear.’ I couldn’t possibly say what is my greatest fear. I’m kind of hoping things will all work out OK. I do know I wouldn’t want to be a chicken in a bag of cats.
Which living person do you most admire?
I try not to, on the whole, although of course one can’t help but admire all enemies of despair and ignorance, of enslavement, intolerance, torture, poverty, and injustice. But then just about everyone is admirable in some way, aren’t they? Even the promoters of despair and ignorance, even the total wasters, and the intolerant, and the people in television, the liars and the panderers, the professional heavy-hitters, writers even, and literary critics: the whole heap. To admire is not a virtue, and eventually everyone lets you down. T.S. Eliot lectured on poetry to 13,000 people in a Milwaukee football stadium, and he had that thing about Jews and rats, and he married his secretary. Samuel Beckett wrote his one-act play Ohio Impromptu for a conference held in his honour, ‘Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives’, held at Ohio State University, 7–9 May 1981. Pope John Paul played Wembley in the summer of 1982: he also did a rap on Abbà Pater. It’s best not to look up. Or down. ‘All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf.’ (Isaiah 64:6.)
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
That’s a poser. I’m not even going to try and answer that one, for obvious reasons; but let me use Milton as my excuse. In Paradise Lost, in Pandaemonium, after Satan’s ‘great consult’ with his fallen angels, some of the angels amuse themselves ‘with feats of arms’, others sing ‘with notes angelical’, some go exploring the four infernal rivers, and yet others, perhaps the most pathetic, sit apart,
and reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate,
free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.
Thinking about happiness can make even the fallen angels pious, so I’ll spare you my own glory and shame. Suffice it to say that I believe happiness to be a ubiquitous feeling most often encountered in love, in the religious and sexual emotions, in retrospect, in passing, possibly during sleep, and in the contemplation of, say-as I think Samuel Beckett may once have put it – a neatly folded ham sandwich.
Where do you go for inspiration?
The OED, Roget’s Thesaurus, The Enthusiast (www.theenthusiast.co.uk), Norfolk, Peckham, Auden, butter, milk, God, geniality, the garden, the park, the market, the seafront, the sea, the swimming pool, the bathroom, hospital, church, the New Yorker, the County Down Spectator (and Ulster Standard), the ball in your court, the cheese counter at Spice (on Market Street, Bangor), the gardens and tea rooms at Mount Stewart, BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Ulster, American National Public Radio, the salt of the earth, the opera, Old Town Clothing, McGrory’s Hotel, Sho’Nuff Records, the Bible, Whitstable, swings and roundabouts, Romania, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, life’s rich tapestry, Amazon.co.uk, the X that marks the spot, Bangor Public Library (80 Hamilton Road, Bangor, Co. Down, BT204LH; Hours: Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri, 10am–8pm; Sat, 10am–1pm, 2–5pm).
Why were you interested in writing about small towns?
A small circle is as infinite as a large circle.
Life at a Glance
BORN
I was born in a little town called Brentwood, which is in the county of Essex, in England. How unjust the world is to Essex.
EDUCATED
I attended primary and secondary schools in Essex, and the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge – which are OK, for people who like that sort ofthing.
BACKGROUND
These days I live in Northern Ireland and people from England often ask, ‘What’s it like living in Northern Ireland?’ and there are unpleasing aspects, obviously, but there are disadvantages to living anywhere, and Northern Ireland has its allurements: there’s the Giant’s Causeway, for example, and a lot of good agricultural shows, a fine tradition of home baking, Tayto cheese and onion crisps, the Fermanagh lakelands, the Mourne Mountains, the Linen Hall library, the Ulster Museum, the No Alibis bookshop on Botanic Avenue in Belfast, the North Antrim coast. And there are frequent flights to Stanstead in Essex.
Could you say any more?
Erm … No. Not really. Sorry.
Why not?
Oh, dear, I don’t know. I’m really not very good at this sort of thing.
What sort of thing?
This.
What?
This … book chat.
Book chat?
Yes. It gives me a headache. It always sounds so silly, frankly. It’s like when people appear on chat shows on the radio or the television, or at literary festivals or readings in provincial town halls, to talk about their film or their book or their new solo album – and I just think, oh no, please, don’t, please, stop, you’ve really gone and spoilt it now, you’re making my toes curl, stop, please, please, I used to think you were so great, and now it turns out you’re an absolute wally. I mean, really, do you think Herman Melville would have had anything interesting to say about whales on Parkinson?
I don’t know …
Well, anyway, believe
me, I really don’t have anything interesting to say about small towns. Anything I do have to say about small towns is never going to be as interesting as anything you could learn about small towns from reading, say, George Eliot or Chekhov or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small books or reading the local paper.
I see. So what was the point of …
Writing the book in the first place?
Exactly.
Writing’s not just about explaining. It’s not just about giving information.
So you’re just not into explaining?
Well, it depends on what’s being explained, obviously: how to cook perfect roast potatoes, for example, that’s fine. That’s important knowledge to impart. Or the history of the Ottoman Empire. Or phenomenology. That sort of stuff. That’s one sort of explanation. But explaining why you write or explaining the meaning of your book in public is just …
Just?
It’s like trying to explain one’s marriage or one’s children – it’s a recipe for disaster. It can only lead to doubt, and regret and self-recrimination. ‘You said …’, ‘No, I didn’t …’, ‘Yes you did …’, ‘But what I meant was …’. The attempt at clarification inevitably becomes a blurring and you’re on a hiding to nothing: you start explaining your books and it comes out as drivel, but if you don’t make the effort, well, it seems ungenerous. Also, if you keep asking yourself how and why you’re doing what you’re doing, you don’t do it – it’s like driving round the M25, or the North Circular, if you thought about it for too long, you’d just get a bus.
Other people manage to do it.
What, drive round the North Circular?
No. Explain their work.
Yes. I know.
Coleridge.
Yes. Precisely. Henry James.
Nabokov.
Exactly. Dave Eggers. But they’re different – at least three of them are geniuses. Me, personally, I just find it embarrassing to talk about my books.
Really?
Yes. Even to say that, ‘my books’, that makes me squirm. It makes me feel uncomfortable, like I’m running a slight temperature and am about to do something I know I shouldn’t really be doing and don’t know how to do: like kissing a woman who is not my wife, say, or operating some kind of heavy machinery, or sitting a Maths exam; it makes me apprehensive. Talking about ‘my books’, it makes me want to check over my shoulder for my younger self, a younger, slimmer, hairier self who I know would be seething and sniggering at my arrogance and pretension, or maybe just standing there ashen-faced, mortified, struck dumb, ashamed by this big galoot up front who’s assuming that anybody cares about what he has to say about some book he’s written; I mean, really, get back to me when you’ve got your Paradise Lost, and then we’ll talk. When I think of all those years when I’d have given an arm and a leg to be able to say that I’d written actual books – whole books! – and then to have them actually published, by actual publishers, and to see them on the shelves in actual bookshops, and then to have the gall to talk about my writing them, as if the writing and the publishing of them were something that just had to happen, the fulfilment of manifest destiny, as natural and as inevitable as for some other people it is natural and inevitable to have to get up in the morning and go to work at the post office, or to go fitting tyres and clutches or cleaning out septic tanks. Honestly. It’s just too much. Whenever I hear anybody, including myself, talking about their books, I find my inner Essex teenager rising up within me, my censor and my guide, saying, ‘Who cares?’ It’s a shame really. You dream and you work and you stay up late at night and you read the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook for years and years and then one day, by sheer luck and determination you finally have your book and your agent and your publisher, all your ducks lined up in a row, and somehow all you feel is shame and embarrassment, and there’s your chuckling younger self breathing down your neck and taking you by the elbow and pointing out the rows upon rows of newly published books in Waterstones, and all the 3 for 2 offers, and all the little signs and stickers and displays of recommendation and approval and bestsellability, and your book’s not there, it’s just disappeared almost as soon as it came into existence. So it’s a funny old life. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t win.
Don’t you think a lot of other writers feel the same?
I don’t know. I try to avoid writers as much as possible: terrible manners, and the language, honestly, you’d be surprised. But I guess a lot of people do feel the same: I mean, life offers everybody plenty of opportunity for embarrassment and disappointment, doesn’t it. I don’t think I’d be alone in feeling a little shy of the world. If anything, writers seem to me to be pretty brazen, on the whole, and more than willing to bang on about their own personal philosophy, and what life has taught them, and their great debt to the great writers of the past who mean so much to them, and blah, blah, blah, like some man at a party boring you to death with his pet theories. Not that I blame them. I mean, look at the kind of interviews you read with writers and artists in newspapers and magazines: all those clever people with something clever to say and a clever way of saying it, and nice clothes to say it in. It’s not their fault they’re not embarrassed: they have nothing to be embarrassed about.
Are you embarrassed?
Hmm. What? At this moment? No. Why? Am I dribbling?
Well …
Sorry. Now?
No.
OK. So, no, I’m not embarrassed. But I think embarrassment probably has a lot to do with the way I write like I do. It’s not that I think embarrassment is a necessary qualification for becoming a writer – not like, say, raging narcissism, which is pretty much an essential. It’s just that I’m not the sort of person who takes my shirt off in the summer. I’m the sort of person who’s quiet on trains, and in the crowd. I keep myself to myself, and even then I’m easily embarrassed, even in my own company. I have a beard for goodness sake. Maybe that’s the reason I write, in fact…
Because you have a beard?
No. Because I need to write about things that other people are unembarrassed to talk about. Maybe that’s it. That could be one explanation of what I’m doing.
Well, thank you. We got there in the end.
We did? ■
Favourite Books/Authors
Oh, I don’t know. Just off the top of my head:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Bible
The Mahabharata
The Bhagavad-Gita
Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Philoctetes
Euripides, The Bacchae
Aristophanes, The Birds, The Frogs
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
Aesop, Fables
Ovid, The Metamorphoses
Martial, Epigrams
Saint Augustine, The Confessions
Beowulf
Dante, The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
William Shakespeare
John Donne, Sermons
Francis Bacon, Essays
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Samuel Johnson
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
François Rabelais, Gargantua, Pantagruel
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions
Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Pts I & II, Dichtung und Wahrheit
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Henrik Ibsen
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park
William Hazlitt, Essays
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Hard Times
John Ruskin, Unto this Last
Anthony Trollope, The Chronicles of Barsetshire
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil
Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Tales, Dead Souls
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Anton Chekhov
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, The Conduct of Life
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno