Beginning Byron Easy
For a writer, the problem of
beginning is, paradoxically, more like the problem of ending. The great dilemma of when – and how –
to call time on all prior, failed attempts. Those false starts and bum-steers that litter or plague
every writer’s so-called career (and, if it is a first book, he doesn’t have
one yet). At what point can he
definitively say to the world: ‘Hi. Here I am. Please give me a paragraph’s grace, because, despite the
oppressive weight of 400 years of soaring prose from Cervantes to Thackeray to
David Foster Wallace, I’m going to have a go myself’? Only when he can confidently announce the above will he be
able to put an end to stuff he secretly hopes will one day be appended to his Collected Works under ‘Juvenilia’.
Naturally, a beginning
shouldn’t be seen as merely a gauntlet set down by the greats. An artist must first have something to
say, as Kandinsky warned, axiomatically (and this, also, is worth bearing in
mind before you pick up the pen).
It’s how to say what you have to say that forms the crux of the
problem. The overall tone or mode
or register, let alone fundamental questions of exposition, or first-person
versus third, et cetera. The
opening line is a bell that has to be struck from the very first word. Heaney, in the introduction to his
translation of Beowulf, called this
‘finding the enabling note’. And the musical metaphor is apt. Start off in the wrong key, and it’s
all downhill from there.
Like the famous
deathbed line (Nelson’s, Larkin’s), the famous first line also exerts an
anxiety of influence. There was no possibility of taking a walk
that . . . If I am out of my mind, it’s . . . All happy. You get the picture. Judging by the preceding examples, a
quiet or neutral tone seems the best option. But thinking about it too much can be paralysing. The original first line of Byron Easy was: ‘I must never get my
hands on a gun’. I remember where
I was when I wrote it. I was lying
on a wine-spattered futon in a Crouch End attic room, not dissimilar to the one
Byron almost immolates in the novel.
At the time I was working in a recording studio and not earning much
money. I wish I could say I was
sharing a hipbath with Vicky Licorish, as Jeanette Winterson states in her
introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit, but I have nothing so glamorously demi-monde to offer. However, a roll-up cigarette was most
certainly dwindling in my pub-stolen Bass ashtray. A January rain was spitting inimically against the sash
window. And I was flushed with the
adrenalin of beginning. On
balance, I was pretty proud of the line.
I felt I had located the voice; had ended all my previous failed
attempts to hear it. What’s more,
this opening salvo was – rather self-consciously, as I knew Byron Easy was to
be a failed poet – a pentameter. I must never get my hands on a gun. I imagined this was mighty clever
until, many years later, my agent drew a crisp blue line though it, yawning
that she had ‘read it all before.’
And she was correct. It’s
the opening line of a third-rate thriller.
Thus began the
long process of revision. The
beginning pages of a novel are always the ones that endure the most stringent
re-writing, and Byron Easy was no
exception. Looking at the present
opening pages again, they are almost unrecognisable from those of the Crouch
End days. They seem more a
palimpsest, a mosaic formed from the competing demands of establishing
character, incident, narrative momentum, and, of course, voice. In the end, I settled for ‘My name is
Byron Easy’. Logical, perhaps,
with the book being an eponymous novel (although that title changed over time
too. One working handle was Station to
Station. Second-hand, yes, but not as egregious as Trimalchio in West Egg).
Announcing the protagonist in the first line has precedent, of course. Call
me Ishmael. Although,
frustratingly, little is made of this spellbinding narrator’s name in the
remaining 500 pages of Melville’s epic.
And maybe, looking back, too much is made of mine. It’s easy to get carried away when
juvenilia is still shackling one’s ankles. No matter. I
had solved the problem of beginning, and (not quite the same thing in terms of
becoming a novelist) of making a start.
BYRON EASY in Crouch End (Byron Crouchback?)
The worst thing a writer can do,
while in the act, is imagine the paragraph they’re struggling with between
stout crimson hardcovers on a shiny Waterstone’s table – that heart-stoppingly glamorous
moment of seeing the finished artefact sitting there, ticking intelligently; a
literary time-bomb, waiting to explode in the face of an unsuspecting
public. To become self-conscious
about the future of the work is fatal.
Just get it down, the mad
voice insists, inwardly. The same goes for the writing process, or one’s
authorial environment. However, it
is a little-discussed fact that where one writes can profoundly influence a
novel. At the moment, I have a
very strict and controlled regime.
Alarm, 6.10 am. Blind trudge
to the living-room desk, 6.30. An
oil drum of tea. Commence reading
back the previous day’s work, 7.30 . . . Helplessly peruse a paragraph of
Nabokov, Turgenev, Alice Munro – succulent breakfast sweetmeats, 7.40. . .
Then, at some point, inspiration will take one up on its wings, and actual
writing will get done. Until 9.30
am, when it’s time (for this author at least) to think about making a living as
a tutor of English Lit. But it’s a
satisfyingly predictable and ordered routine – undergone at the same desk, six
days a week. Trollope would have patted me on the head.
In
contrast, my debut novel BYRON EASY was penned all over the place – like one of
those road albums (Led Zep II, say)
where each track is recorded and mixed in a different studio. I always feel one can tell: can detect
the different textures, spot the joins.
The wide, plane-tree-planted streets of Crouch End, N8, were the
backdrop for the writing of the first chapter of the book, along with chunks of
the second and third. So far, so conventional. There probably isn’t a living room in
Crouch that hasn’t had a novel attempted in it over the years. And I liked my two years of living
there – maybe the lack of a tube station, the village vibe, informed the
fiction. There’s something hopeful and energetic and concentrated about that first
chapter. After this idyll, the rest
of the book was written on a helter-skelter ride through different locations. A streaking GNER train for the railway
sequences (literally looking out of the window, pen in hand). A Brockley back bedroom, belonging to a
girlfriend, for Byron’s back story (covering up what I was scribbling, like
Austen, every time she came noseying in).
The august library at UCL – oddly enough, some of the more erotic
passages were forged here.
Boredom? Or all that
dry-as-dust learning making one horny?
Other pages were whipped off in notebooks on the way to gigs; in the
bath; in stolen moments at eccentric times of the day. Finally, the book was completed on an
ailing PC in the Walthamstow flat where I still live; facing a cancelled piece
of brickwork to maximise concentration; endlessly reworking the last chapters. It’s a wonder any of it adds up. If you happen to be considering a novel,
don’t try this at home. Office
space, regular hours, and an en-suite Jacuzzi is the way to go.
Yet,
looking back, nothing can beat the unfettered freedom of those Crouch End
pages. The occasional luxury of writing
all day until dusk fell; then looking down from an attic window, Larkin-style,
onto the heads of people waiting for the W7 bus; a sunset honouring the green
glass of Alexandra Place. And all of it stored in the memory banks, ready to
force my hand across the virgin page the following morning.
Imaginary Homelands
Usually, by the mid-point of a
novel a writer realises the root of his protagonist’s problems lie, in the
Freudian sense, in his childhood.
Or at least in his early home life. If he hasn’t returned there by chapter two (the usual location
for the ‘back-story’ to be trotted out) he will do so by the middle. This is also the point where his
energies are flagging, his wife has left him, and the money has run out – his lunchtime
beans-on-toast is served sans toast (and very soon sans beans, sans hope, sans everything). This is fortuitous, as a
return to an imaginary homeland gives a novelist a great surge of energy – it
certainly did in the case of BYRON EASY, of which more later. As soon as an
author steps into the Narnian interior, the pen flies across the page. It seems so much richer than the
present. Naturally, as with the
opening lines of a novel, a return home is not without its attendant problems –
for most, this centres around the problem of autobiography. A large number of
writers have dispensed with making up people and situations and opted for the
truth – often with startling results.
Proust’s Combray; Kureishi’s Bromley; Roth’s Newark. Why invent a mythical hometown when the
actual one offers so many possibilities?
Why stick your imaginary toad in a synthetic garden when the real one is
still so vivid?
For
this author, not quite the same thing happened. Byron Easy’s Hamford is a mythical town in the Hertfordshire
commuter belt (a kenning of Ham, OE
for home; and Ford, the suffix that denotes a town lies by water, hence: ‘home
on the river’). Admittedly it does bear a resemblance to an amalgamation of
real Hertfordshire satellite towns, those Hicksville nowhere-villes where one’s
own ‘forgotten boredom’ is played out.
At this point the writer longs to have been brought up on the Gangetic
plains, or among the wind-torn towers of Chicago – anywhere but a place where a Greggs bakery and an antique market
provide the best cultural options on a Saturday afternoon (and it was pleasing
that the name Hamford took on connotations of ‘hammy’ the more I used it). Many nineteenth-century novelists found
the made-up-real-place a reliable option: Austen’s fictional Meryton
(Harpenden?) in Pride and Prejudice;
Hardy’s thinly-disguised Dorchester in The
Mayor of Casterbridge. For me, once I found my protagonist back in
Metroland, he immediately had to visit his grandmother, as I discovered that
it’s the places that stand behind
home that give it a sense of illusory permanence. Those day-trips to the seaside, or to relatives, that extend
for an aeon, after which one always returns,
centrifugally. These excursions
stand in opposition to the experience of adult life, where the movement so
often seems entropic: a series of rented rooms, or your own house if you’re
lucky. And this house is always an
attempt to recreate that first home – a longing for heimat, or simple nostalgia, in the original sense of the word (from
Gk nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’ – homepain, the pain of never being able to go back).
For
me, once I came to write about Byron Easy’s childhood and his visits to Grandma
Chloe, I found I couldn’t stop: I wanted him to return there for the whole
book. At the time, I was writing on an old PC in a back bedroom, facing the
wall; necessarily as the inward eye doesn’t need distraction of passing
ice-cream vans, or street-hassle, or the tawdry reality of one’s present day ‘home’. The usual head-scratching dilemmas of
which adjectives or adverbs to use (or whether to avoid them altogether), or
how a sentence should run, evaporated as intense recollections of Byron’s past
– emotional, visual, olfactory – swarmed onto the blank page. In this sense, the novelist’s problem of
mid-project doldrums, of what your editor will brightly refer to as ‘maintaining
momentum’ (for which read sanity, bank balance, coherent syntax) can be solved by
sending your characters back to the streets they once thought of as their own. The novelist begins to take on the role
of analyst, listening to his protagonist’s tale of his formative years for
clues that will elucidate his present disgraceful behaviour. What’s more, he quickly finds the
specific becomes weirdly universal, as every reader has a place they couldn’t
wait to get away from – or return to, if only in their imagination.
Jude
Cook Windmill interview - Featured Author
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Author piece will change every couple of weeks, each time showcasing a William
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question don’t worry, answers can be as long or short as you like.
Why do you write?
Strangely,
I don’t feel I have much choice in the matter. It’s always been a compulsion since the age of 13, when I
wrote my first novel and short stories.
In my 20s, I found I couldn’t write fiction with the same easy facility
– just poetry and songs. Then the
prose eventually returned, like a muscle recovering from atrophy. Attempting
some dramatic writing – screenplays and stage plays – helped enormously.
What’s your inspiration for writing?
Hard
to pinpoint. To respond to the
world by writing about it, by making music, pictures or sculpture about it, is
the lot of the artist. A curse and
a blessing. It’s simultaneously
the most selfish and altruistic act.
Far better just to enjoy life and consume other people’s beautiful
creations. Mostly, writing is, to use the cliché, ninety-nine per cent
perspiration. But inspirations are
everywhere. A seascape. A smile. A memory. Language itself.
What were you doing before you became a writer?
I was
a musician and songwriter for the band Flamingoes, which I formed with my twin
brother, James Cook. We released two albums twelve-years apart: Plastic
Jewels (1995), and Street Noise Invades the House (2007). I’m very
proud of both of them.
Who are your literary idols?
Bellow,
Roth, Larkin, Plath, Dickens, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Kawabata,
Franzen, Hollinghurst, Amis, Kureishi, Zadie Smith . . . and I’d better add
Byron.
And non-literary idols?
Dylan,
Scott Walker, Bergman, Kieslowski, Almodovar, Charlie Kaufman, Mike Leigh,
Barack Obama, Tony Benn.
Favourite book?
Vanity
Fair
Favourite film?
Hannah
and her Sisters (closely followed by Sideways, Withnail & I and Happy
Go-Lucky)
Favourite band/album/song (pick any, or all three)?
Today
the band is The Smiths/ Album: Big Moon Ritual by Chris Robinson
Brotherhood/ Song: Bowie, ‘When You Rock n’ Roll With Me’
What have been the landmark moments in your life to date?
Moving
to London. Getting a recording
contract. And, many years later,
signing a book deal.
Where are you right now?
At my
living-room table, which is also my writing desk.
Your guiltiest pleasure?
A hot
bath on a Sunday morning; Joni’s Hejira playing from the next
room.
What do you do to relax?
Play
the ukulele. Read poetry.
Approximately how many books do you own?
Must
be well over 1,500 by now.
Where were you born?
Hitchin,
Hertfordshire. Not the place’s fault.
Fantasy Dinner party. Who would be your four guests and
why?
Lord
Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Keats. No explanation needed.
Tell us about a book you own that you’ve never read.
Four
books. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria
Quartet. I’ve had them for
years in the classic Faber covers.
I’m waiting for a long illness.
Cats or dogs?
Cats,
of course.
Any bad habits?
Looking,
but not listening.
Hunter S. Thompson used to type out The Great Gatsby
to know what it felt like to write it. What would be your choice?
Humboldt’s
Gift
How many places have you lived?
This
is my tenth address in London.
If you could be anywhere now, where would it be and who
with?
In
Florence, with my Huckleberry friend.
What are your writing habits?
Six
days a week the alarm awakes me at 6.10am. Then to the dark desk, to read back
the previous day’s work, or bits of research, or other people’s fiction. By 7.30, I am usually in the act of
writing . . . and finished by 9.30. One to two hours of intense creativity I
consider a result. But sometimes I
only get a paragraph or a couple of usable sentences. Then I pace out the rest of the day in my private pool, or
reading Celine . . . Actually, I have to go to work, teaching English lit. They
tell me this will change.
What are you reading now?
Willa
Cather’s My Antonia; Grayzel’s A History of the Jews; and Fiona
Sampson’s wonderful book Beyond the Lyric. Oh, and Palin’s Python diaries.
What and where is your favourite bookshop?
Skoob,
Bloomsbury.
Who is largely undiscovered and should be read?
Cape
have a couple of terrific short story writers: Alexander MacLeod and Andrew
Porter.
Where is your favourite place to read?
On
the tartan travel rug that is my bedspread.
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