by Will Self
The
Undivided
Self
— Selected Stories —
Will Self
Introduction by Rick Moody
Contents
Introduction: On Will Self, by Rick Moody
The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz
Flytopia
Caring, Sharing
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual
The Nonce Prize
Conversations with Ord
The Five-Swing Walk
Scale
Chest
Grey Area
The North London Book of the Dead
Ward 9
Understanding the Ur-Bororo
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Birdy Num Num
The Minor Character
Introduction
On Will Self
Will Self, short story writer, as indicated in the volume you have in your hands, has among his many awesome talents two that make him the singular writer that he is, at least according to this reader. These are his ear and his imagination. A disquisition on these subjects follows herewith.
By ear, of course, I mean his preternatural ability to ape the dulcet voices of citizens of the United Kingdom (likewise, occasionally, Americans) of every class, accent, dialect, and intoxicant. Not just the Oxbridge eggheads of his own university years, but Jamaican drug dealers, fox-hunting lords, middle-class shopkeepers, self-inflating novelists, you name it. As regards this perfection of audition, it’s almost as if there is no Will Self. It’s as if London and its environs are speaking through him.
It’s not only this ear for voices that I find so beguiling and which you will too in The Undivided Self. There’s also Self’s love of and facility with the twists and turns of language. His affection for old Anglo-Saxonisms is something that has long been apparent—ullage, thirrup, toff, hawcubite, gibber, flotch, spillikins, swingeing—though he is not above the odd Latinate gem if it is germane to his purposes. Accordingly, on each and every page, we find le mot juste, dozens, in fact. Leaving aside Martin Amis, with whom Self shares a love of the scabrous and satirical, there is no other flourisher of English (or American) who is quite so spectacular. Permit me to quote: “His socks had peristalsized themselves down into the ungy, sweaty interior of his boots.” (“Flytopia”) Such a blunt sentence and yet so great! And not only for the forcible use of peristalsis as a verb, but also for the juxtaposition of ungy and sweaty, the former of which occurs in no dictionary of American usage that I can lay my hands on, but whose slang appropriateness cannot be denied, especially if one has suffered—and who has not?—from the existential woe of boots and inelastic socks.
Or how about:
And by the walls of the abandoned shop premises they were skirting was a frozen wave of detritus, a fully evolved deco-system, where the squashed spine of an old vacuum cleaner was preyed on by the strut of an umbrella, which in turn was ensnared by a shred of gabardine, upon which suckered last night’s discarded condom, which for its part was being eaten away by the white acid of bird shit. (“The Five-Swing Walk”)
The Will Self ear, naturally hard-wired into a keen capacity for caustic observation, here finds its perfect evocation in the neologism deco-system, which, once employed, permits a great luxury, a torrent, a viaduct of trash, Rube Goldbergian in its aspect.
And even one further example:
Then the large, velvet-robed woman started to cough. It was … a particularly hoarse and rattling cough, with an oil-drum resonance to it, admixed with something like the sound of fine shingle being pulled this way and that by breakers on a beach. (“Grey Area”)
The foregoing will serve for the moment as a celebration of Self’s ear, and his ear leads naturally and inevitably to the next register of success I wish to address. As to Self’s imagination, it is, since Cock & Bull was first published in this country, legendary. Of the more fanciful examples contained in the book you are holding, we might single out: a British council flat in which a colony of silverfish arrange themselves so as to give advice to the tenant holder; a race of supersized pals called Emotos whose only purpose is to make each and every one of us Americans feel good about ourselves; an incredibly dull indigenous tribe who refer to themselves as the kind of people you would avoid at a party, and so on.
These two preternatural strategic weapons, ear and imagination, are impossible to acquire by dint of longing or, even, in most cases, through hard work. This I can assure you as a fellow engineer in words. Where, you therefore ask, does such a talent come from? Self’s early life was not unusual, though not without intellectual privilege. He was born of an academic father, a citizen of the UK, and a Jewish-American mother from Queens. He was raised mainly in North London, though he did spend a little time here in the States. He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied politics and philosophy rather than literature, and he works, in addition to writing novels and stories, as a journalist for a plethora of publications. He has served, on occasion, as both television critic and food reporter. He’s been twice married, in the current instance to a newspaper editor who is a firebrand and a steadying influence. He has four children, two from the prior marriage. He lives in a middle-class neighborhood that once spawned the likes of Roger Daltrey. Self appears on British television occasionally, as an astringent commentator. In all things, the author works assiduously, as even a cursory examination of his list of publications will indicate. His rate of production, as with many other aspects of his professional life, is much to be admired.
Of the author’s youth as enfant terrible, a fair amount is known, and I will not belabor this introduction with the inclusion of falling-off-barstool nights at the Groucho Club, nor accounts of high jinks on John Major’s airplane. However, few people, and especially few Americans (I accord him honorary status), are given second acts in their lives, as others have noted. Self, unlike other literary reprobates (of whom we could compile a long list), made a clean break over a decade ago, and to this reader you can see the revolution in the work.
He was, from the first, a great short story writer, whose longer works were conceptually catchy but sometimes unruly. He has since become a very great novelist and a great writer of stories. The Undivided Self (the title, besides being a pun that he must have saved up, is a backhanded homage to that social thinker of the late sixties, R. D. Laing) collects stories from each of Self’s five volumes of stories, of which two, it seems to me—Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys and The Quantity Theory of Insanity—are indisputable masterpieces of shorter prose. Each of these books is excerpted here liberally, as are a few stellar selections from the other three collections, Grey Area, Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, and Liver.
As there are any number of Will Selves, there are also many kinds of stories in this sampling. Biographically speaking, I would argue that Self is a restless person in the second act of his life, a man full to bursting with ideas. When he has learned enough about a particular idiom to excel, he puts it aside to try something else entirely. If the template here generally involves a Swiftian presupposition, we can also discern echoes of other great dystopian comic voices such as Laurence Sterne, Flann O’Brien, Roald Dahl, Anthony Burgess, and William S. Burroughs. Self is not content to make comic misery the sine qua non of his accomplishment. There are quite heartfelt stories tucked into this collection, though Self, as is his tendency, might deny it. For me, the relationship between mother and son in “The North London Book of the Dead,” which sketches out themes later expanded in his novel How the Dead Live, is genuinely heartbreaking. The fumbling, hapless attempts of a father to look after his children in the “The Five-Swing Wal
k” are equally tender. No short story collection, according to the argument I’m constructing here, is a success without use of the complete color wheel of human affinities, and The Undivided Self is no exception. Those who come in search of the traditional humanist epiphany are liable to get a kick in the ass for their trouble—deservedly, I might add. Still, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something deeply passionate running in the gutters of Self’s tragicomic United Kingdom.
Exile, Joyce famously noted, is a necessary precondition for art. If so, Self must feel himself abundantly exiled. He’s half American, but writes as sublimely and mercilessly about London as anyone in his generation. He’s half Jewish but has a keen eye for the hypocrisies of organized Christian religion. He’s a merciless skeptic about the sacred cows of liberal humanism, who occasionally writes with considerable tenderness, and who is also loyal to his friends and family in ways few tender people are. You are about to reap the rewards of this abundance of Selfish exile. Whether The Undivided Self investigates the crack trade or the banalities of contemporary psychology, it is inexhaustible, and no matter your cherished beliefs or hidden prejudices, there will be work here that alarms you, dazzles you, makes you laugh out loud. This, therefore, is the ideal volume in which to test the waters of Self. But don’t stand at the water’s edge getting your toes moist. Dive right in.
—Rick Moody
New York City, 2010
The Rock of Crack
as Big as the Ritz
A building, solid and imposing. Along its thick base are tall arches, forming a colonnade let into its hard hide. At the centre are high, transparent doors flanked by columns. There’s a pediment halfway up the façade, and ranged along it at twenty-foot intervals are the impassive faces of ancient gods and goddesses. Rising up above this is row upon row of windows, each one a luxuriant eye. The whole edifice is dense, boxy, four-square and white, that milky, translucent white.
Over the central doors is a sign, the lettering picked out in individual white bulbs. The sign reads: THE RITZ. Tembe looks at the luxury hotel, looks at it and then crosses Piccadilly, dodging the traffic, squealing cabs, hooting vans, honking buses. He goes up to the entrance. A doorman stands motionless by his slowly revolving charge. He too is white, milky, translucent white. His face, white; his hands, white; his heavy coat falls almost to his feet in petrified folds of milky, translucent white.
Tembe stretches out a black hand. He places its palm against the column flanking the door. He admires the colour contrast: the black fading into the yellow finger flanges and then into the white, the milky, translucent white. He picks at the column, picks at it the way that a schoolboy distresses a plaster surface. He picks away a crumb of the wall. The doorman looks past him with sightless, milky, translucent eyes.
Tembe takes a glass crack pipe from the pocket of his windcheater and fumbles the crumb into the broken end of Pyrex piping that serves as a bowl. Setting the pipe down on the pavement, at the base of the white wall, from his other pocket he removes a blowtorch. He lights the blowtorch with a non-safety match, which he strikes on the leg of his jeans. The blowtorch flares yellow; Tembe tames it to a hissing blue tongue. He picks up the crack pipe and, placing the stem between his dry lips, begins to stroke the bowl with the blue tongue of flame.
The fragments of crack in the pipe deliquesce into a miniature Angel Falls of fluid smoke that drops down into the globular body of the pipe, where it roils and boils. Tembe draws and draws and draws, feeling the rush rise up in him, rise up outside of him, cancelling the distinction. He draws and draws until he is just the drawing, just the action: a windsock with a gale of crack smoke blowing through it.
‘I’m smoking it,’ he thinks, or perhaps only feels. ‘I’m smoking a rock of crack as big as the Ritz.’
When Danny got out of the army after Desert Storm he went back to Harlesden in north-west London. It wasn’t so much that he liked the area – who could? – but that his posse was there, the lads he’d grown up with. And also there was his uncle, Darcus; the old man had no one to care for him now Hattie had died.
Danny didn’t like to think of himself as being overly responsible for Darcus. He didn’t even know if the old man was his uncle, his great-uncle, or even his great-great-uncle. Hattie had never been big on the formal properties of family – precisely what relation adults and children stood in to one another – so much as the practical side, who fed who, who slept with who, who made sure who didn’t play truant. For all Danny knew, Darcus might have been his father or no blood relation at all.
Danny’s mother, Coral, who he’d never really known, had given him another name, Bantu. Danny was Bantu and his little brother was called Tembe. Coral had told Aunt Hattie that the boys’ father was an African, hence the names, but it wasn’t something he’d believed for a minute.
‘Woss inna name anyways?’ said the newly dubbed Danny to Tembe, as they sat on the bench outside Harlesden tube station, drinking Dunn’s River and watching the Job Seekers tussle and ponce money for VP or cooking sherry. ‘Our ’riginal names are stupid to begin wiv. Bantu! Tembe! Our mother thought they was kind of cool and African, but she knew nothing, man, bugger all. The Bantu were a fucking tribe, man, and as for Tembe, thass jus’ a style of fucking music.’
‘I don’ care,’ Tembe replied. ‘I like my name. Now I’m big –’ he pushed his chest forward, trying to fill the body of his windcheater ‘– I tell everyone to call me Tembe, so leastways they ain’t dissin’ me nor nuffin’.’ Tembe was nineteen, a tall, gangly youth, with yellow-black skin and flattish features.
‘Tcheu!’ Danny sucked the inside of his cheek contemptuously. ‘You’re a fucking dead-head, Tembe, an’ ain’t that the fucking troof. Lucky I’m back from doing the man stuff to sort you, innit?’
And the two brothers sat passing the Dunn’s River between them. Danny was twenty-five, and Tembe had to confess he looked good. Tough, certainly, no one would doubt that. He’d always been tough, and lairy to boot, running up his mouth whenever, to whoever.
Danny, many years above him, had been something of a hero to Tembe at school. He was hard, but he also did well in class. Trouble was, he wouldn’t concentrate or, as the teachers said, apply himself. ‘Woss the point?’ he used to say to Tembe. ‘Get the fucking “O” levels, then the “A” levels, whadjergonna do then, eh? Go down the Job Centre like every other fucking nigger? You know the joke: what d’jew say to a black man wiv a job? “I’ll have a Big Mac an’ fries …” Well, I’m not going to take that guff. Remember what the man Mutabaruka say, it no good to stay inna white man’s country too long. And ain’t that the troof.’
So Bantu, as he was then, somehow got it together to go back to Jamaica. He claimed it was ‘back’, but he didn’t exactly know, Aunt Hattie being kind of vague about origins, just as she was about blood ties. But he persuaded Stan, who ran the Montego Bay chippie in Manor Park Road, to get him a job with a cousin in Kingston. Rootswise the whole thing was a shot in the dark, but in terms of getting a career Bantu was on course.
In Kingston Stan’s cousin turned out to be dead, or missing, or never to have existed. Bantu got all versions before he gave up looking. Some time in the next six months he dropped the ‘Bantu’ and became ‘London’, on account of what – as far as the Jamaicans were concerned – was his true provenance. And at about the same time this happened he fetched up in the regular employ of a man called Skank, whose interests included buying powder off the boat and cooking it down for crack to be sold on the streets of Trenchtown.
Skank gave London regular pep talks, work-incentive lectures: ‘You tek a man an’ he all hardened, y’know. He have no flex-i-bil-ity so he have no poss-i-bil-ity. But you tek de youth, an’ dem can learn, dem can ’pre-ci-ate wa’ you tell for dem … You hearing me, boy?’ London thought most of what Skank said was a load of bullshit, but he didn’t think the well-oiled M16s under the floorboards of Skank’s house were bullshit, and clearly the mean little Glock the big dread kept
stuck under his arm was as far from being bullshit as it was possible to be.
London did well in Skank’s employ. He cut corners on some things, but by and large he followed his boss’s orders to the letter. And in one particular regard he proved himself to be a very serious young man indeed: he never touched the product. Sure, a spliff now and then just to wind down. But no rock, no stones, no crack – and not even any powder.
London saw the punters, he also saw his fellow runners and dealers. Saw them all getting wired out of their boxes. Wired so they saw things that weren’t there: the filaments of wire protruding from their flesh which proved that the aliens had put transmitters in their brains. And hearing things as well, like non-existent DEA surveillance helicopters buzzing around their bedrooms. So London didn’t fuck with the stuff – he didn’t even want to fuck with it.
A year muscling rock in Trenchtown was about as full an apprenticeship as anyone could serve. This was a business where you moved straight from work experience to retirement, with not much of a career in between. London was getting known, so Skank sent him to Philadelphia, PA, where opportunities were burgeoning, this being the back end of a decade that was big on enterprise.
London just couldn’t believe Philly. He couldn’t believe what he and his Yardie crew could get away with. Once you were out of the downtown and the white districts you could more or less fire at will. London used to get his crew to wind down the windows on their work wagon and then they would just blast away, peppering the old brown buildings with 9-mm rounds.
But mostly the hardware was just for show. The Yardies had such a bad reputation in Philly that they really didn’t have to do anyone much. So, it was like running any retail concern anywhere: stock control, margins, management problems. London got bored and then started to do things he shouldn’t. He still didn’t touch the product – he knew better than to do that – but he did worse. He started to go against Skank.