Readers of this blog will know of my enthusiasm for the fiction of Quentin S. Crisp (who is, as every interview seems required to clarify, no relation to the gay writer and raconteur; unlike the latter, Quentin S. was born with the name). His novel "Remember You're A One-Ball!" was one of my favorite books of 2011, and his collection All God's Angels, Beware! contains one of my favorite classical weird tales of all time, "Ynys-y-Plag." His collection Morbid Tales also includes strong work. Quentin's new collection from Eibonvale Press, Defeated Dogs, is out this month. To accompany its release, I've interviewed Quentin on his life, his writing, his worldview, and his plans for the future. At about 10,000 words it's a long interview, but I think worth the space. Let's see if you agree:
What, aside from inertia, is keeping
you alive these days?
This is very much
to the point, which I appreciate. It has to be said, inertia
definitely plays a part, and probably a very large one. Perhaps I
should refer readers to the question in which I mention Dostoyevksy,
and specifically his story ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’,
because I feel this has a lot of bearing on this question.
I feel I should be honest about this –
the idea of ‘a reason to live’ is not something I take for
granted at all. I struggle with it a great deal. Some time back, I
read Tolstoy’s A Confession, and I see he also struggled
very much with it. In that text, Tolstoy equates life itself with
faith, and this is something I understand. To lack faith, for me, at
least, is also to be deficient in life-force. And yet I do go on. Is
it really just inertia?
I think I very much want to believe
that there is good in people. If there is good in people, then there
is reason to live. In fact, if we believe morality is possible, this
surely involves a belief that there is good in people. Therefore,
there’s a distinct case for saying that it’s the moral thing to
do to believe that there is a reason to live. But, as we know, human
experience is complex, and there are also plenty of reasons to doubt…
For me, nonetheless, the good in people is inextricably linked with
morality and a reason to live, and therefore, when doubt is cast on
one of these, doubt is cast on all.
Similarly, when doubt is cast upon the
doubt that has been cast upon one of these, then doubt is also cast
upon the doubt that has been cast on all of these. Maybe doubt of
doubt is one thing that keeps me going. I believe it is.
I think there’s also something to be
said for relative truths, which are the realm of psychology. In
‘Residents Only’, which is, in my opinion, one of Aickman’s
very best stories, there’s a line that goes, “Few transactions,
in this world or any other, are more personal than a mediumistic
séance. With great good fortune, the seeker may be told where to
find the lost key to the medicine chest. He will not learn the secret
of the universe…” To be able to use the key to the medicine
chest, I think, we have to be able to feel that relative truth is of
value. Perhaps it is of value because it has some relation to the
absolute.
Anyway, I continue to seek out these
keys for myself.
Describe some incident from
your past that you think might sum up some aspect of your life, or
reveal something about you that readers don't know.
Well, I hesitate before answering this,
and for a number of reasons. In the UK, there was a recent news story
about a 17-year-old police commissioner who had to quit her position
because of some remarks she’d made years previously on Twitter. One
of the big cons of the internet, of course, that we will increasingly
be made aware of. So, I basically have a choice between stories that
are compromising, embarrassing, boring, sound like I’m boasting, or
some combination of those four.
So, after some thought, I’m going to
go straight for the tabloid headlines and talk about an occasion when
I had mushroom tea as a teenager.
I suppose I was about thirteen or
fourteen. For reasons that I don’t now recall, I had the house to
myself. I always managed to avoid the typical scenario where your
place gets trashed by your drunken guests, because that’s the kind
of person I’ve been, but on this occasion three friends (I won’t
give their real names) came round to enjoy an evening of music and
relaxation, and two of them brought what I recall as many hundreds of
liberty caps. Tea was made, and the pot was full of them. I think we
also ingested some without tea. I have a clear memory that, when the
tea had been drunk by all, I scooped out the remains from inside the
teapot and swallowed all I could.
Two friends, Dallow and Spicer, had to
leave (or chose to) relatively early, leaving me with Pinky. As I
recall, we were having a pleasant enough time until, for some reason,
questions of identity began to arise in my head. I must have been
recollecting past words and actions and wondering who they really
belonged to, and I grew cold. Soon enough I was struck by a ghastly
truth – my entire life had been one grotesque and abominable lie.
The whole thing was impossibly absurd. I remember even now the taste
of that feeling, though it is, in true Lovecraftian tradition,
impossible to convey in words. I don’t know how long I was like
this, since time had become very strange. It felt like many hours,
but I think it must have been more like fifteen minutes. Anyway,
things got pretty bad. I tried to convey to Pinky, who was sitting in
the rocking chair, beaming, that I was losing my mind, but he just
told me not to worry about it. Taking stock of the situation – my
complete loss of identity and my inability to resume a life of
grotesque and hollow lies – I decided that the only possible course
of action was to make a phone call to one of my parents, explain the
situation, apologise for not taking good care of my mind, and request
that they please send me to a mental institution.
I was on the verge of doing this, but I
hesitated. Was I missing something? I ran the situation over in my
head. Was there some way that I could reclaim my sanity? Again, it’s
impossible to reproduce my thoughts and sensations, but they went
something like this: I asked myself, considering the fact that
everything is a lie, anyway, is it really any better for me to live a
lie by drooling in a padded cell banging my head against a wall than
it is to live the lie of more or less fitting in with the daily
absurdity that human beings call normal (although rather less
fitting in in my case, which is another variant of this whole
absurdity)? I concluded that there was no criterion by which I could
say it was a better thing to live the padded cell lie. Well, I asked
myself, was it all that unpleasant to live the lie I had been living?
If I lived it again, would anyone notice I was living a lie, beyond
them simply thinking I am weird in the way they already did? No, I
concluded on both counts – it was not really so unpleasant, and no
one would notice. Was I able to do it again? I did it before, I told
myself, so why not? Why not live the lie and to hell with it? And
that is precisely what I did. And do you know, that the moment I made
that decision, I felt myself lifted up from the dungeons of damnation
to the heights of mushroomy empyrean? Purple prose aside, it is true.
While I can’t exactly say ‘I’ve
never looked back’, nonetheless, I can’t help thinking I made the
right decision.
After recovering in this way, feeling
myself overcome with relief and bliss, it occurred to me (because I’m
not an entirely selfish person) to think of Dallow and Spicer, and I
said to Pinky (having explained a little), “But, we’ve got to go
to Dallow’s place now!!! Dallow and Spicer must be going through
what I’ve just been through and they’ll need our help!” I urged
him again and again, but somehow he dissuaded me. He, anyway, at no
point had had a bad trip. Speaking to Dallow and Spicer about all
this days later, I learnt that both of them had simply gone to bed,
bored, rather disappointed that the liberty caps had not had the
desired effect.
I think this little incident taught me
a bit of a lesson about subjectivity. For one thing, influenced by
the same chemicals, in the same room, the same person can experience
both hell and heaven. Secondly, influenced by the same chemicals, one
person might experience heaven and/or hell, and another might simply
yawn and go to bed.
On the occasions I remember this
adventure, too, it makes me think that, when people say, “There’s
no going back once you’ve seen the void” that it’s really a
load of rot. There is a going back. Not only that, but there’s a
skating around, a zigzagging through, a dwelling within, a hopping in
and out of, and many other things of that kind.
And, you know, U.G. Krishnamurti was
very interested in dairy products. And that’s why we love him. And
that’s the way life is.
I’m reminded of a story I was told of
a hermit of some stripe – a good egg who wrestled with the madness
of solitude. And, apparently, he always maintained a supply of
Maxwell House coffee.
Just as a kind of p.s. to this, I don’t
want to encourage the irresponsible use of etc., but for the sake of
damage limitation, if any person out there does find themselves in
the middle of a bad trip, wondering what to do, my personal advice is
this – apart from the very basic thing of remembering that it’s a
subjective state of mind that will pass, if there’s any way you can
access the songs of Laurel and Hardy, please do. It is my belief
there is absolutely no fuel for bad trips in them at all. I would
especially recommend ‘I Want to be in Dixie’ (the title seems to
vary) from the film Way Out West.
How did your aesthetics develop?
That is-- putting the question less pompously-- how did you first
encounter the forms and genres (Japanese literature, weird fiction,
or any other influences) that shaped your notions of meaningful
fiction? Do you think there's some link among those forms and genres
that defines your aesthetic, or does it contain multitudes?
Potentially, the answer to this
question could be a book, since aesthetics is a nebulous field, and
I’ve had my whole life to be influenced by various things
aesthetically. Therefore, the challenge for me is to give a simple
answer, which I’ll attempt to do.
I think the following elements are the
broadest, most general ones I can name, though some of them might be
redundant if they are included in others: fantasy, shadow, the
supernatural, beauty, imagination, dream. I suppose fantasy,
imagination and dream are a kind of trinity, overlapping but with
some distinction among them.
Now, I’ll try and put these terms
into a biography. There are always chicken-and-egg, nature/nurture
questions around early childhood, but it seems to me that if I have a
nature (I don’t really believe in tabula rasa) then it was
predisposed towards dreaminess. My earliest memory of a literary
experience was my father reading Lord of the Rings to my
brother and me. (I’m not counting things like The Hungry
Caterpillar, though perhaps I should.) I think that experience
was never duplicated – I was utterly transported, as if I no longer
had a body and was in another world. This, to me, is really the model
for literature.
I feel I have my own innate imaginative
core that has nothing to do with genre, but this core was attracted
to the more imaginative realms of literature. I call these, broadly,
fantasy. When I was still quite young, I discovered the perverse
attractions of the macabre, of sadness, of the minor key in music –
these are all the things I am calling ‘shadow’. Fantasy + shadow
= (any number of things including horror and Gothic literature).
As a teenager, I discovered, as many
have, the quintessence, it seemed, of fantasy + shadow, in the form
of H.P. Lovecraft.
But there’s another important
element, which is beauty. I don’t know when I really became
conscious of beauty, but there is a crossover between beauty and
fantasy. Or rather, beauty is intrinsic to imagination, within which
fantasy exists. I found I was able to be transported by beauty
discovered – apparently – in this world, as much as (more than?)
by the fantasy of another world. This is perhaps a slightly unfair
statement. I think that somewhere in ‘The Journal of J.P. Drapeau’,
Ligotti writes that the only value of this world is its power at
certain times and under certain circumstances, to suggest the
existence of another world. This is the perfect expression of
something I’ve long felt. Beautiful literature, even of the least
supernatural type, has something in common with fantasy literature in
that the very beauty of it suggests another world.
I think with my discovery of Japanese
literature, I became more interested in exploring another world
through beauty rather than the more literal forms often taken in
fantasy literature, not that I completely disdain those forms, and
they do still hold some attraction for me. And I think that, in very
basic terms, everything else has been an extrapolation of the
evolution described above.
However, there’s still something
about the term ‘supernatural’ that I feel I should address. I
noticed it was applied to me on Wikipedia. Generally speaking –
perhaps predictably – I don’t like labels, and I thought the
supernatural tag was possibly misapplied when I first saw it there.
However, I’ve come to think that there’s really something in it.
And I don’t quite know what or why, but there is a recurrence of
the supernatural in what I write. It’s not quite just ‘magic
realism’ or that sort of thing. There’s an element to what I
write that suggests the characters are aware of a normal reality and
discover a supernatural one. Maybe that’s it – the two worlds
idea. That’s why supernatural. This world and another.
And having said that, although I am
clearly heavily influenced by, have one tentacle in the ‘weird’
tradition, etc., I also feel that there is some kind of element to
what I do that is basically in tune with what I understand of
postmodernism. I mean, I may not actually understand postmodernism at
all. It wouldn’t surprise me. But there’s a continuous sense in
which I see reality as competing fictions. Therefore, surrounding
this ‘two worlds’ idea, I think is also a sense of radical
plurality. The idea that no narrative has ultimate authority is, I
believe, postmodern, but you can also find this wonderfully expressed
in the writings of Chuang Tzu, and particularly the section of the
Inner Chapters that is translated, in one of the books I have, as
‘The Sorting Which Evens Things Out’. In short, I do, very much,
see life through the lens of story.
How does one remain committed to
the recondite and the refined without becoming self-involved,
elitist, or downright silly? Or should one even worry about that?
Well, of course, ‘being elitist’ is
one of the big fears of our current age – it’s considered a very
great sin. I think it was back in 1937 that Louis MacNeice wrote an
essay with the title ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’. Now, of course,
vulgarity doesn’t need any defending whatsoever, and is, on the
contrary, practically obligatory. As your question suggests, it is
anything that departs from populism that today we feel we must
justify and defend.
We’re living in an age, to give what
I think is a representative example of the current attitude, in which
publishers are referred to as ‘gatekeepers’. I’m going to offer
a kind of allegory here to give some idea of what I think of this
attitude.
For about ten months during 2000 and
2001, I was resident in Taiwan. While I was there, I took the
opportunity – and, for me, it seemed a quite tremendous opportunity
– of visiting the National Palace Museum, which contains one of the
most extensive and magnificent collections of Chinese art in the
world. The museum has an interesting background. I believe most of
what is contained there was originally in the Palace Museum in
Beijing. The Japanese invasion of China prompted Chiang Kai-Shek’s
nationalist government to move much of the content of the Palace
Museum out of the way of harm. Eventually, a large amount of it ended
up in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-Shek’s government also fled when the
Communists took over. Some time after the Guomindang had taken refuge
in Taiwan, the Cultural Revolution swept mainland China, with much
upheaval, and with the widespread destruction of a great deal of the
physical culture (temples, art, etc.) thought to represent the bad
old times. Anyway, the artefacts that had been moved to Taiwan were
safe from this particular storm. Later, of course, authorities on
mainland China accused the Guomindang of having stolen these
treasures. It was countered, not unreasonably, that if the treasures
hadn’t been stolen they might not have survived – that, above
all, they had been protected.
Assuming that the human race lasts long
enough, I can envisage a time when the current triumphalism of
vulgarity finally ebbs, and people begin to feel that it would have
been of greater benefit to themselves if they had not, out of
vengeful spite, trampled upon what they thought of before as elitist
culture. At that time, if there is any vengeful spite left in such
people, they may say, “You elitists! You stole this this from us,
hiding it in your limited hardback editions and your coteries!” And
the answer may be given, “We didn’t steal anything. We were the
only people protecting this, and if we hadn’t you would have
destroyed it. You made the coteries by refusing to join them. You
created the limited hardback editions by refusing to read anything
other than airport novels.”
Having said this, that we have
‘elitism’ on the one hand and ‘vulgarity’ on the other
suggests to me that, in the English-speaking world, at least, we are
dealing with cultural polarisation. There’s a whiff of Manichaeism
here. I understand the attractions of Manichaeism, the stark call to
arms, for instance, as found in the work of David Lindsay or William
Burroughs, but I also have a recurring sense that Manichaeism is more
a creator than a solver of problems in our world. As with many
things, I feel ambivalent towards it. To live in reaction to
something – that, though it is tempting, is something that I would
like, ultimately, to avoid. The current triumphalism of vulgarity is
a reaction. I don’t want to fall into a similar reaction against
it, though I feel that I must do something also not to be swept along
with it.
To return to the original question, I
don’t think there’s any reason to be ashamed of finding meaning
precisely where we find meaning, whether that be in something
generally considered elitist or generally considered vulgar. I will
add that I don’t think we should be ashamed of curiosity, either.
Even pretending to find meaning where we really don’t, though it
may be a sin of some kind, is surely venial rather than mortal. Or
perhaps it will turn out to be the greatest sin of all.
On the question of finding meaning in
various places, I am reminded of a line from the (now rather old)
Tori Amos song ‘Happy Phantom’. She’s describing some kind of
post-mortem state and declares, “There's Judy Garland taking Buddha
by the hand.” My honest feeling is that even if Tori Amos had done
nothing else at all in her life, that single line would have
justified her existence. I feel like that’s pretty much the
blueprint for my ideal universe.
Name three books you've read
recently, and say a little about them.
As of the time of writing, the last
book I finished was The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I
think I can truthfully say that this book has consumed me, in the
last few weeks, like no book has done for many years. It’s not my
first Dostoyevsky. In fact, there’s a sense in which Dostoyevsky
was my gateway into literature. When I was fifteen or sixteen (I
could probably calculate it properly if I had the time), I went to
A-level college and one of my A-levels was English Language and
Literature. I had always loved reading, but had generally just read
unchallenging entertaining stuff (I’m simplifying things a little).
Anyway, I decided it was time I challenged myself and really got to
grips with Literature with a capital L. So, I went to the local
bookshop, and really on the strength of the very dour cover (and, I
recall, the quality of the paper and the close lines of print on the
pages), I chose Crime and Punishment. I very much enjoyed it,
too. Some time later I read The Idiot, which I considered one
of my favourite books for a while, and also, a somewhat Dostoyevskian
friend lent me Notes from Underground at some point. But all
that was years ago, and it’s taken me longer than it should have to
return to Dostoyevsky. For the first time in over a decade, I feel
like I really want to exhaust a single writer’s oeuvre.
Incidentally, I really want everyone to go to YouTube and look up the
dramatisation of ‘The Dream of the Ridiculous Man’ with Jeremy
Irons in it. Great performance from Mr Irons, of whom I’ve long
been fond, but also, what a great, great storyteller Dostoyevsky is.
He really wrote as if everything depended on it. I get the impression
from that story of someone who has lived through a great deal, and is
tired of hints and evasions, and really, even wearily, just wants to
lay everything on the line.
Another book I finished recently was
Inland, by Gerald Murnane – an Australian writer. His essay
‘The Breathing Author’ is viewable online, I think, and I would
recommend reading it. I found Inland to be one of those books
that is slow but worth it. Murnane has a very interesting style. He
is one of these people who is obsessed with precision. What I mean by
that is that we often make do with clichés when we express
ourselves, and these, of course, are imprecise. In Inland,
Murnane will say something, and then he’ll backtrack for pages
about whether that was precisely what he meant or not, and in the
meantime, he’s creating a kind of Indra’s Web of parallel
universes out of the things he may or may not have meant. There were
a number of moments during this book where I kind of sat back and
just reflected for a while, as if struck by something.
So, this brings me to the third book
I’ll mention here, which is Parmenides and the Way of Truth
by Richard Geldard. This is a scholarly work, but with a hint of what
I think Guardian readers refer to as ‘the Woo’. Recently,
I am very interested in Parmenides, and I’ll probably be reading
other books on him. The work in question is not bad, though here and
there Geldard’s writing style is so poor – in a way that often
happens with academics – that it’s hard to make out what he’s
saying, or if he is actually saying something at all rather than just
stringing words together. In The Little Prince there’s an
episode where an astronomer – Turkish, I think – discovers a new
star, and gives a conference on it, but his findings are laughed at
because he is wearing Turkish national dress, rather than a formal
suit and tie. I kind of hate academic language, because it’s the
linguistic equivalent of wearing a suit and tie in order to impress
your audience with the idea of your authority. This is something that
I think happens to varying degrees in philosophy (it seems to me far
more common in modern philosophy). At its worst, it’s really
despicable. This book is not an example of the worst of that kind of
thing, but it does have hints of it. There’s also that quandary
that always occurs with studies of the ineffable, which might be
summed up in the question, “If words are really all such bullshit
then why did you write this book?” I’m torn, in such cases,
between wanting to stay faithful to ineffability and so dismissing
all that is written, and thinking, “Actually, this is not badly
expressed, there’s something of substance here.” Torn, that is,
if the work is not totally idiotic. So, this book, in my opinion, is
not totally idiotic.
Incidentally, although Murnane claims
not to understand the concept of philosophy, I think there is
something Parmenidean about his writing, the way his alternatives
branch and branch again into ‘all that there is’.
Are you a collector of anything?
Books, artwork, stamps, teeth, crisp wrappers?
I don’t think I am, really, apart
from books. But, if I’m not especially a collector, it has been
suggested to me by someone who recently came to dinner, that I am a
hoarder. I don’t think of myself that way, but it’s true that I
tend to be horrified (and occasionally impressed) when people can
blithely throw things away.
… Actually, on reflection, I think
I’m a frustrated collector. If I think about my ideal life, it
would, in fact, include a great deal of collection, but the
circumstances of my life have never been conducive to maintaining
collections of things. I’ve never had much money or space or secure
lodgings. Therefore, rather than any virtue on my part (because I
think collection is basically seen as a vice), it is merely because
my spirit has been broken that I don’t now attempt to collect
things. The truth is, I do like beautiful, fascinating objects, and I
suppose that’s what collection is about. I’m very much drawn to
ceramics and things like that.
What do you do to unwind? Is there a
kind of entertainment-- books, movies, television, music, or
otherwise-- or a hobby to which you turn when trying not to think?
I think I am, by nature, an enormously
lazy person. At least, I have felt, almost for as long as I can
remember, that whatever other people wanted me to do, it was for
their good and not mine, so I am not enormously persuaded of the
virtues of work. Having said that, if I think about it, I spend
almost no time at all in a state of relaxation. I sometimes dream of
relaxation.
In terms of how I attempt to relax,
though, it’s all very simple stuff. I read. I read very slowly. I
like to spend time talking with people, in person. These two things
are the essentials in life, I think.
Also, I love the rain, and if there is
no rain, there may be wind, and if there is no wind, if you’re very
lucky, there may be silence. I hope that, before I pass from this
Earth, I manage to spend some days just listening, with no aim at all
in mind.
As far as films go, I enjoy them very
much, the kind of glamour of it all, being ‘transported’, as it
were, and being a passenger to the sensations and drama, and the
incidental music, but I very seldom have time even to watch a film.
As of the time of writing, the last film I watched was A Short
Film About Love. That was some weeks ago. There are a
considerable number of unwatched DVDs in my flat, and I have no idea
when I’ll get the time to watch them.
I wouldn’t like to give the
impression, however, that I don’t become fascinated by particular
things, because I do. Perhaps the most recent thing to capture my
imagination is this fellow called Busby Berkeley. I must have known
about his work from my infant years without realising it, anyway, but
it’s really just struck me what he did – he’s like M.C. Escher
but with moving patterns of chorus girls. I mean, I can hardly think
of anything more fantastic. Although I don’t often have time to
watch whole films, I must admit to mind-snacking on YouTube clips
quite a lot. It’s not unusual for me, for instance, to watch the
same thirty seconds of Ginger Rogers singing backslang in the song
‘We’re in the Money’ about seven times in a row, trying to
assimilate each nuance of her kooky lip and eyebrow movements, all
the while enthralled by the podginess and brassiness and general
glamour of the nineteen-thirties face shape. Sad, isn’t it?
How do you feel about the current
state of the world? Politically, economically, culturally or otherwise?
I’m not a very worldly person, but I
do occasionally notice the world. Al Gore, undoubtedly more informed
than an obscure and introverted author of frivolous fictions, has
written 592 pages in anticipation of ‘The Future’, apparently,
and though I haven’t read it, I would guess it’s far more
illuminating than anything I have to say about the state of the
world.
Having said that, I do have my own
version of ‘The Future’, which won’t take you as long to read,
and which I sent in an e-mail to someone recently, as follows,
presenting a list of 21st century (and beyond)
possibilities. I quote:
“And then, what lies ahead? None of
the apparent choices are attractive to me:
a)
Transhumanism, whereby tomorrow’s equivalent of Google, Microsoft,
etc., basically have the monopoly on god-making technologies of
longevity, virtual reality and so on.
b)
Ecological Armageddon, which kind of speaks for itself.
c)
An indefinite spread of mall culture, with science somehow managing
to clear up after each disaster and patch things up into cosiness and
muzak banality ‘forever and ever’.
d)
Egoless utopia – a singularity of consciousness. Perhaps the most
attractive of these options, it nonetheless could easily play out
like a more smiley-faced version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
e) Hit by
an asteroid, etc.
f)
Cthulhu wakes.
g) The
rapture.
h) The
long ascent and descent into obscurity, never at any point coming
close to a reason for it all.
i)
Etc.”
On a more hopeful – in a sense –
note, I do wonder about the kind of ‘White Man’s burden’ that
it seems many of us increasingly feel towards the world in general.
James Cameron (not the Canadian film director, but the British
journalist and CND campaigner) once wrote, I believe, in reference to
the US forces in the Korean War, something like: “What to think of a people who blow your legs
off and then earnestly and helpfully go to the trouble of fitting you
with shiny new artificial limbs?”
We could apply this to the human race
in a larger sense, in our treatment of other people, of other
species, and so on. It seems as if we – perhaps not all humans, but
certainly the interventionist type – are in some way compelled to
bring things to a terrible pass just so we can then heroically
attempt rescue. If we go on being successful in this strategy,
presumably it will culminate in us endangering the entire universe
and then saving it from the danger we ourselves have created. And
this seems to be the very strange thing that the knowledge of Good
and Evil does to us.
Occasionally, though, I really do get
the sense that things are just not up to us, and we should therefore
relax a bit. The other day, walking along Catford Road as the rays of
the sinking sun caught the rush hour traffic, I suddenly had this
feeling: none of this really depends on me. In the same way that the
universe doesn’t need us to explain it, but we feel compelled to
try and do so anyway, I don’t think (whatever our compulsions), the
world needs us to save it.
Then again, it’s certainly true that
humans continue to engage in those endangering behaviours, and one
way or another we’ll face the consequences.
Having got that out of the way, there
is one observation I would personally like to make about what is
happening in the world now, and this is to do with a growing
impression that people are increasingly becoming petty puritans. And
I very much dislike this.
I feel a general distaste for the
battle between left and right, but I feel I can observe this much: If
the right are becoming increasingly paranoid, then the left are
becoming increasingly dogmatic and intolerant. It seems to me that I
dislike left and right most where they have most in common, which is,
one way or another, that the more people identify with either left or
right, the less they can tolerate actual free speech or actual free
thought. And perhaps since my peers are generally on the left, I feel
this vile tendency more in the left than the right. It also comes out
with excessive concerns about safety and hygiene, of course, and with
the confusion of sexual hang-ups with morality – of any kind of
hang-ups with morality.
On the 1st of March, I
attended a Momus gig with some friends, in Dalston, London
(incidentally, a blindingly good gig). On the train back, slightly
the worse for alcohol, I’m afraid I must have bent the ear of Joe
Campbell (who recorded the interview I did with John Elliott),
because conspicuously left-leaning as he is, Momus has not succumbed
to the creeping ghastliness of political correctness, and this is not
only evident, but even explicit in his songs, and this prompted a
long lament on my part about what the world’s coming to. There was one
example, in particular, from that evening, which expressed my
feelings on the subject precisely – a song by the title of ‘The
Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko’. Again, I quote:
“In life remain considerate, in art
the Devil's advocate
Why deny that Pegasus has wings
In life remain considerate, in art the
Devil incarnate
Why deny the siren when it sings?
In games there must be no forbidden
things”
It seems as if people, even supposed
artists, have mostly forgotten this way of being and expressing
yourself today.
Anyway, a day or so after my drunken
peroration on this subject, I came across a review of Bowie’s The
Next Day, by Michael Hogan, in which he quoted Yeats’s
‘Politics’ and described it as being “as alarming as it is
amusing”. Why? Because “Yeats was in his early 70s when he wrote
this, and it's gross to imagine him leering at some unsuspecting
young woman.” Is it gross? (A word, incidentally, that I despise.)
The whole hypocrisy of this is visible in the clause “gross to
imagine him”; in other words it’s Hogan’s imagination, rather
than the reality, that is gross, but Hogan is blaming Yeats for this.
And why the word “unsuspecting”, which makes the woman into an
automatic victim? Why “leering”? This is pure ‘what will my
neighbours think?’ writing on the part of Hogan, and this is the
kind of priggishness we’re being subjected to more and more. I
mean, Michael Hogan’s review is not even the best example of this
(he is actually praising Yeats’s poem in the end, etc) – it only
struck me because it followed so closely on the heels of my harangue
on the subject. Hogan’s conformism here is of a fairly mild and
fairly non-toxic kind – but I do believe that this same tendency is
becoming very toxic right now.
In an essay called ‘The Prevention of
Literature’, published in 1946, George Orwell wrote that “it is
the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing
order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are
also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity”. Orwell
also observed what I’m talking about, so clearly it’s not a new
tendency, but it seems to me to be getting stronger. As Orwell goes
on to say, referencing the hymn ‘Dare to be a Daniel’, “‘Daring
to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically
dangerous.” But I am heartily sick of those who huddle together
under their ideology, finding safety in numbers, and bolstering their
own position with witch hunts and accusations of one kind and
another. What most of this amounts to is the craven attitude, “It
wasn’t me, it was him!”
Your new collection, Defeated Dogs,
is out from Eibonvale Press soon. The stories in it are uncollected
but not necessarily unpublished. What, if anything, guided your
selection of the contents? Do you think the stories have a unifying
sensibility, beyond that which all your work will naturally possess?
How do you think Defeated Dogs compares to previous collections? Does
its retrospective quality inspire any meditations on your development
as a writer?
Well, I basically sent David Rix
everything I thought was presentable that didn’t belong, in my
mind, to some future collection. He made a selection from this. There
was one story he suggested I re-write. Taking a closer look at it, I
decided it needed pretty radical re-writing, and, sadly, in the
event, I haven’t had time, so that one was dropped. A couple of
others also didn’t make the cut. So, the final contents have been
arrived at, as it were, by a simple process of elimination. Having
said that, I do feel like this collection has an identity. To me it
feels like a b-sides album. (Incidentally, I love b-sides, which,
often enough, and depending on the artist, are more interesting than
a-sides.) I suppose I would say that as a collection it is somewhat
(though not entirely) subdued. Although it is not a chronological
sequel to All God’s Angels, Beware! in a sense, nonetheless,
I see it as a kind of sequel. All God’s Angels has a defiant
quality to it; Defeated Dogs is, I feel, overall, somewhat
more fatalistic, as the title suggests. I’d like to mention that
the previously unpublished Lilo is the oldest piece in the
book, dated from some time in the nineties. In fact, it must have
been written in 1998, I’d guess, as I remember that both The
Matrix and eXistenZ came out the next year, and I was
really pissed off that now, any time I published this, it would
probably be considered a copy of the former. Of those two films, by
the way, I much prefer the latter. Re-reading Lilo now, I
don’t think it comes across as a copy of either – thankfully –
despite the huge overlap in themes. At the time of writing, it’s
also one of my own pieces of which I’m fonder. There was one part
that really needed rewriting, and I did that. Also, some of the
language is overdone, but I left that, as I didn’t want to tamper
too much with the feel of the thing. On the whole I was struck by the
fact that even when I wrote the story – I am often struck by this –
I knew what was wrong with it, but I just didn’t know at the time
how to fix it.
Regarding my development as a writer,
proofreading these stories does give me some ideas about this. I
think, generally speaking, I have been improving over the years. It’s
been a painstaking process. I do actually think I started, in some
sense, badly, and that I am a slow developer.
In his review of Aleister Crowley’s
The Drug and Other Stories, in the journal Wormwood,
Reggie Oliver mentions a fact I haven’t heard of elsewhere, that,
apparently, “The critic and novelist C.S. Lewis once described the
brief period when he became insane as the most boring of his life.”
This is quite a suggestive idea, and I think I understand it.
Sometimes, reading over my old work, I feel as if I am reading a
diary written during a period of mental illness. There’s a flatness
which is paradoxically also disturbing and quite intolerably
embarrassing. How, I wonder, did my passions and my ideas and so on,
spike into such repugnant forms, so grotesquely meaningless? There’s
something about it of the mania of the narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale
Heart’ – this terrible detachment, and the detachment itself
becoming an itch, a terrible, disturbing itch, and then, everything
seeming terribly wrong and upside-down and unendurable. This is the
feeling I get, sometimes, as I say, re-reading an old story of mine.
There’s a struggle here, that for me
is the very heart of writing, and may well be the heart of my whole
life. I started off childishly in my writing, but to write well the
socialising superego must have a hand – the critic who tells you
this is a cliché, that is bad characterisation, something else is
unrealistic, and so on and so forth, because he doesn’t want you to
be laughed at and hurt and trampled. He is ‘cruel to be kind’.
But, in order to protect you, the superego hides you away, like a
hideous child. This is the dilemma – to write well, you must listen
to your superego/critic who wishes to protect you. But to write
truthfully (which is the ultimate way of writing well), you must let
your hideous child out of the room in which, for his own good, he has
been locked up.
This is the struggle I am constantly
engaged in while trying to ‘develop my writing’. And the truth
is, I think my own hideous child is particularly hideous and
particularly childish. Sometimes when I re-read things I’ve
written, well, I can’t really describe it. I feel myself
shrivelling up like a threatened spider. There is a real question as
to whether I should continue. But then again, I do feel as if writing
is my life, so to continue living is probably to continue writing. If
we see our personalities as four dimensional, by which I mean, one
aspect of personality is the shape it makes in time, then, as
reflected in my writing, one aspect of my own personality is a
staggered slowness and lateness of development. This might sound like
I’m repeating myself, but what I mean is: I believe (hope) that I
do have something to contribute to the world of fiction, literature,
or whatever you wish to call it, but part of the very character of
what I have to contribute is this late-developingness of its shape.
This has been very painful for me, as perhaps can be imagined, but I
carry on partly from lack of choice, and partly from belief in this
late-development-shaped unique something.
You've indicated, in preliminary
discussions about this interview, a dissatisfaction with the current
state of your writing, and a possibly related desire to make a
change, in a variety of senses. Is there anything you'd like to say
about that?
Yes. I think that I should, though I’m
not sure how coherent I will be. It is partly because I am sensing an
accumulation of incoherent – or at least inchoate – new things in
me that I am trying to make changes at present.
Maybe I can start by saying that the
world itself seems poised on the brink of change to a degree that is
arguably unprecedented in terms of human history. My own part in all
this is infinitesimally small, but for me, of course, is everything
(more or less everything, depending on how Jungian one wants to get).
So, some of the small things that loom large for me are necessarily
to do with books and writing.
Recently, I announced (on my blog) that
I was ending my blog, basically because of disillusionment with the
Internet. I suppose it could easily come across that I’ve made up
my mind what’s what concerning the internet, new technology and so
on, but that’s not true. What I have made up my mind about is that
I don’t want to remain unquestioning and increasingly exhausted on
the treadmill of so-called progress. I don’t want to live by
default, which the current marriage of capitalism and technology
seems to encourage us to do.
If I don’t want to remain
unquestioning, naturally that means I want to question. One of the
things most necessary for me to question is the value of my own
writing. Does it have value? Is it relevant? Is it merely some kind
of vice that distracts me and possibly others from the truth? In the
world out there, so to speak, I get the impression that books (real
books that is, by which I mean both in a physical sense and a
literary sense) are seen more and more as archaic. This may indicate
that they really are becoming obsolete (as in, no longer relevant to
human needs), or, it may simply indicate to me that the human race is
tending in a direction that I must consciously deviate from. Either
way, there are implications for me in how I face the future.
A relatively brief way of expressing
this might be that I have come to one of those periods that visit
sometimes in the life of a writer (more often with some writers than
others) when all one’s doubts and suspicions that what one has been
engaging in is “vanity of vanities” gather together and swell
into a kind of crescendo. Yes, you ‘always knew it was vanity,
but…’ It is precisely at the time when the hollowness of it all
becomes unignorable, that you begin to think more urgently about the
purpose it might have. I suppose the purpose must be either to live,
or to find some alternative to life, but then the question is how to
do this most effectively and fully.
I was wondering how to bring this
answer to a conclusion that wouldn’t be entirely vague, and a
juxtaposition of things has helped me slightly. I was re-reading an
article in Spike Magazine about Houellebecq and Gnosticism, and I had
Sufjan Stevens playing in the background. I was reading the bit about
Dostoyevsky and the Gospel of Philip when Mr Stevens sang, “Still I
go to the deepest grave/Where I go to sleep alone.”
On the entry for the 8th of
March, on his Tumblr feed, Momus reproduces his article about
comebacks. He argues there against comebacks – that one should
simply never go away. It’s an interesting read, but, for myself, I
think ‘going away’, or “hiding in a mountain”, as Momus calls
it, is essential. Partly, this is probably, anyway, something that is
different between making music or films, and writing books. Books are
generally written in solitude and read in solitude – a message in a
bottle from one solitude to another.
I also think, however, there is a
general value in the whole “hiding in a mountain” thing, and a
value that is even perhaps more important now than it has been for
some time. You might also call “hiding in a mountain”, “going
offline”. The internet, among many things, is a kind of consensus
machine – you can see this, for instance, in the feature of the
‘like’ button on Facebook. This aspect of the internet is like a
non-stop talent show, the kind with a ‘clap-o-meter’, where the
applause is measured second by second, and if your tap-dancing lets
up in entertainment value for a moment, you are, as they say
‘nowhere’. There’s a kind of closed circuit that is created by
this – a feedback loop, I think it might be called. And I don’t
think that’s conducive to originality, to innovation, to deep
reflection, to genuine morality. Recently, when I think of the
internet, various ominous analogies come to mind. One of them is the
feast that Vlad Tepes laid on for the poor and sick in Targoviste.
They were ushered into a great banquet hall, and the doors were
bolted behind them, and then the hall was set on fire. I suspect that
we are being encouraged to invest everything – our hopes, our way
of life, our souls, if we still believe in them – in technologies
that will ultimately be disastrous. At the very least, I want to keep
a little back. And to that end, and other ends, I intend to spend
some time hiding in the abovementioned mountain.
Are you writing now? If so, what
have you been working on? If not, what was the last thing you wrote?
I am, though it’s going much slower
than I would like. After Defeated Dogs, there should be
something else coming out (fingers crossed), about which I am not yet
at liberty to say anything. I’ve been typing up and revising a
final story for this. The story in question, which I hope makes the
cut, is novella-length, and is called Blue on Blue, after the
Bobby Vinton song. I hope after that finally to revise The Hideous
Child, a novel whose first draft I finished early in 2011, and to
submit it formally for publication somewhere, but I don’t know how
long that will take. There are, in fact, numerous bits and pieces
I’ve been taking up and putting down again. Recently, I started a
new notebook for a new idea, which I hope will come to something. The
original title was Winter, and then Winter Carousels,
but now I’ve changed the title again, but I don’t want to reveal
it yet. If I ever finish it, it will be a massive and huge science
fiction novel set largely in London.
I’d also like to mention the fact
that I am busily involved in a collaborative project, under the aegis
of Daniel Corrick’s Hieroglyphic Press, through a special imprint
called Snuggly Books. Justin Isis, Brendan Connell and myself are
finishing a novel begun some years back under the title of The
Cutest Girl in Class. This will be a limited edition, all going
well, available for pre-order before long, with the goal of financing
my trip to Japan to meet Justin Isis for the first time (after seven
years or more of knowing each other, we still haven’t actually
met). The book has to be limited edition, because that’s the only
way of actually raising any money in the small press. The online
publicity material describes the project thus: “Fraught with double
crosses and missing mannequins, this is Waiting for Godot
meets Beach Blanket Bingo.” I’m feeling startlingly good
about this project, and can’t wait for the book to be officially
released into the wild.
And, on the subject of Hieroglyphic Press, I’d like to take this chance to make it known that I have a piece in Sacrum Regnum II. It’s not fiction, as such, and it’s unlikely to appear in any collection of mine in any kind of foreseeable future.
And, on the subject of Hieroglyphic Press, I’d like to take this chance to make it known that I have a piece in Sacrum Regnum II. It’s not fiction, as such, and it’s unlikely to appear in any collection of mine in any kind of foreseeable future.
After a few years and nearly two
dozen books, how do you feel about the state of Chômu Press? Has it
achieved what you hoped it would? What, in both concrete and abstract
senses, does the future hold for Chômu?
Life is uncertain at the best of times,
and I think the ecological niche of the literary small press has
always been especially precarious. For that reason, I can truthfully
say, I have very little idea what the future holds. In David
Copperfield, after the hero has returned from his travels in
Europe, he goes for a meal at Gray’s Inn, to meet his old friend
Traddles who “works in the law” or something. He finds the
waiters of the inn peculiarly unimpressed regarding just about
everything and concludes, “…both England, and the law, appeared
to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm”. Sometimes
it seems like, if you work in a populist medium like… well, pop
music, or some areas of the art world, all you have to do is wear a
dress made of frogs or something and “the world freely offers
itself to you to be unmasked”. But I think writers and publishers
are far more familiar with the experience known to David Copperfield
of the unimpressed waiters. All this is just my way of saying, it’s
really much harder than you might imagine – and I won’t go into
details on that score.
Those who have supported us, however,
have been very supportive indeed, which is very gratifying. What’s
more, if I put on my ‘half-full glasses’, although there is
certainly much more it would be great if we could do, I am proud to
be associated with all the titles that we’ve put out. Some of our
authors who I also know to a degree as people, and who are probably
not as well known to the readers who are primarily familiar with the
scene in which I’ve had my own work published, I view as neglected
national treasures, and living repositories of the flaming lore of
literature, etc. That may be a convoluted way of saying something
quite personal that won’t be widely understood. Let me put it more
simply: there is a flame that gets passed on. Some of this is more
widely known, and some of it less. The flame I’ve had the privilege
to act as custodian for with Chomu is generally less well known, but
it’s burning, and, in my estimation, more brightly than flames
around which larger numbers of people are gathered. I am glad to be a
part of that.
At present, we don’t have a lot
actually scheduled, but after P.F. Jeffery’s eccentric and
beguiling Jane, the next thing we put out should be a new
novel from Michael Cisco. We have other plans, too, which we haven’t
put on the schedule yet. Things remain fairly open, but what I mainly
hope is that we’ll be able to go on showing that the really
interesting stuff in contemporary literature is not happening where
people thought it was happening. In other words, I hope we continue
to celebrate diversity and off-centredness.
Given my appreciation for your novella "Ynys-y-Plag," I can't resist asking what you recall about that story's genesis and development.
Some of this is lost now – perhaps
sadly. I can say with some certainty that the story would not have
happened if a reader of my blog had not re-directed my attention to
Algernon Blackwood – to ‘The Wendigo’, I believe. I remember
reading this and thinking, “I really should have another crack at
the old weird fiction thing”, or something to that effect.
I can’t remember now the initial
germs of the story, except that it was to do with the landscape where
I was living at the time (in Wales) and also a general sense of
creepiness, by which I mean the
wanting-but-not-daring-to-look-over-your-shoulder feeling that is
lacking in much modern horror, where the emphasis has now long been
on simple gore, torture and so on. I am interested in creepiness, and
I do think this is distinct from visceral horror or the horror of the
daily news. I have experienced ‘the Hag’ a couple of times in my
life, and it seems to me, to put this in slightly materialistic
terms, that whatever part of the brain produces the Hag (presumably a
very ancient part), it’s also what lies behind all the most
compelling and mysterious horror tales. I think this is why Lovecraft
(rightly) stresses that a ‘Weird’ tale should be judged purely on
the pitch of otherworldly terror and strangeness it reaches at its
least mundane point, because this kind of creepiness is a distinct
effect that is hard to mix with and to judge alongside other effects
and aims (although I do like to mix up different elements).
Anyway, early on, as I was
contemplating this story, I was getting quite powerful creeps and
shivers. It was all about fleeting shadows, shapes at windows,
suggestion, that kind of thing, but it was strong and distinct. There
was something particular in the midst of all this shadow for me to
work with. And the strength of the feeling was a good sign to me –
that’s what I wanted to get on paper. Precisely that. My estimate
is that, somehow, I only managed to get, say, one third of that
feeling into the story itself, but even so, that’s pretty good
going.
I’ve just dug up my initial written
notes for the story. There may be more somewhere, but what I’ve
found is one page of notes. (It varies, but usually, for a story the
size of ‘Ynys-y-Plag’, I’d write at least ten pages of notes.)
So, I won’t copy out the whole page,
but it begins (some may consider these notes as spoilers): “A kind
of imp or sprite. Spiky face. Something appears to be hanging on the
end of the rope. Lost things. Weedy manhole cover. One night I heard
a terrible caterwauling, like that of children, seem to echo from the
manhole. My own voice as a child. I heard it. Lonely places. Nature
overgrows things. Gates. Bridges. Places to piss. The smell of piss.”
What these notes remind me of is this
interesting (to me, at least) fact: The original idea for the story
split into two. The caterwauling ended up in the story ‘The
Were-Sheep of Abercrave’. ‘Ynys-y-Plag’ and ‘Were-sheep’
are basically monozygotic twins, though, as with the brothers in ‘The
Dunwich Horror’, ‘Ynys-y-Plag’ “looks more like the father”.
Now, the page of notes I have before me
is divided into two halves – one in black and one in blue ink,
obviously written on different occasions. The second half, in blue
ink, mainly concerns the character Buddug (who, in the notes, is
referred to as ‘Ruth’). Incidentally, Buddug is a Welsh name
pronounced ‘bee-thig’, with a ‘th’ as in ‘them’. My main
objective was really just to make my own attempt at getting that
creepy Hag feeling on the page that is the essence of good ‘Weird’
fiction. It was a totally traditional thing (I think) that I was
attempting. In your review of the story you have mentioned, I
believe, its modern psychology. This is not something I consciously
set out to achieve, but if it has something of the sort, and if, in
doing so, it contributes something original to this area of
supernatural fiction then I’m very glad.
I’d also add that, I think I know
what aspects you are referring to, and for me these are largely
(though not entirely) facilitated by the Buddug character. I knew
that the creepy entity – the monster – in the story had to have a
secret, and Buddug knows the secret. I didn’t want to cop out by
not telling what the secret was, and I also did not want to cop out
with something stupid like ‘it’s allergic to [insert arbitrary
substance or symbol]’. I wanted the secret to be real in some way.
So, I lay down and let myself go deeply into the story and after a
while, all of a sudden, I knew what the secret was. And that is the
last thing that is written on this page of notes, and also, of
course, the last thing in the story.
Is there anything else you'd like
to say?
Well, there is something I’d like to
say, for my benefit rather than anyone else’s (which I suppose is
true of this whole interview). I had the feeling recently that I want
to stop doing online text interviews, but I felt I still had a little
something to say, so I’ve made a kind of pact with myself that this
will be the last online text interview I do this decade except in the
case that I’m only talking about Chômu Press. This may seem
ridiculously specific, but, apart from anything else, specific
resolutions are easier to keep. Also, if I state it publicly, as
here, then I am more likely to hold myself to it.
I can only hope that, if Quentin's resolution to abandon online text-based interviews holds, this has made for a worthwhile "last interview." Readers who want to explore his writing can buy the Chômu Press editions of "Remember You're A One-Ball!" and All God's Angels Beware from Amazon.com, and Morbid Tales is available in paperback and e-book from Tartarus Press. Defeated Dogs, which is currently at the printer and should be released very shortly, can be ordered from Eibonvale Press.
