Three dialogues on literature

By Pablo D'Stair

Number Three: Nigel P. Bird and Pablo D’Stair

Part one:

NOTE: This dialogue is presented over the next four weeks in a style of “progressive fragments.” The exact order of inquiry and response as presented is not the order of inquiry and response as it happened between the two dialogue partners. Therefore, ‘Statements’ and ‘Responses’ from one week may not be directly addressed by both parties until subsequent weeks. It is the hope of both parties that the spaces between these responses allow readers the time and opportunity to more fully and experientially engage with the propositions, for themselves, rather than looking at the dialogue as a closed circuit.

NIGEL BIRD: Between the ages of about fourteen and eighteen, I used to hang out with a motley crew of great people. We were all sculpting our self-images, most of them more successfully than I, though that’s not important. To the outsider, we may have looked like a bunch of yobs, but we knew what we were doing.

There were the punks; the Factory Records gang; the indie set; mods; grunge fans; heavy rockers; the hippies; the beatniks; some squares; and the unwashed. We were like a huge overlapping Venn diagram, lots of circles meeting somewhere in the middle. There was a core of common ground and a great deal of difference. They were happy days. So, the literary and the genre writers are like a big Venn diagram. Circles overlapping in different and curious ways.

Do I write genre fiction? I guess I do. Do I write literary fiction? I guess I do. Do I wrangle over the camp I live in? No, not at all.

Does it matter that I mainly exist in the noir territories? Yes, I think it does. Like the group of folk I drank tea and lounged on parks and went to see bands with, we knew who we were and that we were an odd mix. To the outsiders, though, it probably helped to make a snap judgment and we helped them along with that.

You’re in a bar. Maybe standing there. A group of loud guys walk in. They catch your eye. You take in all you need in less than a second. You know whether you fit with them, whether they look like they’ll mind their own business or not, whether you need to remind yourself of where the exits are or figure out how long it will take to get a pool cue in your hand if it’s likely to be needed.

That’s like the need to wear a badge. To pin up your colours. My badge says, ‘I write in a way that’s really under the large umbrella of crime fiction and my smaller umbrella’s noir. I have other umbrellas that are smaller still.’ That’s a lot of writing for a badge. When read, it says that if you like the umbrella then you should have a look; stand under it with me. If you’re sick of getting wet and need a break, you might want to shelter for a while.

If you hate my kind of umbrella, the black executive kind with a sharpened point, then you might want to go over to the guy over there with the rainbow colours and see if you’ll fit under it better.

Umbrellas?

Fiction is like umbrellas.

PABLO D’STAIR: I’m curious as to the effects of that pigeonholing, in the writer sense, outside of the analogy. Because, the idea of being a youthful cat, trying this on, trying that on—this is kind of a defence mechanism, as much as it is anything else. Or it was to me. Not to say it isn’t genuine, but I wonder at the personal overlap with the more mature, personal choice (need) to write and keep writing toward some purpose.

When you’re a child, you want a group, want to feel comfortable. Is it the same for you, with writing? To me, the impulse to write has little to do with fitting in with this or that group or even finding others of a like mind, reader or writer.

So, did you decide ‘Hey, I’ll write this type of thing’ and then you stuck with it because even if you felt you wanted to do something else you’ve identified with this group (no one likes a tourist, punk one day, grunge the next, glam the next) and so kind of have to stay there?

Because, to me, those under umbrellas are kind of dubious—it’s like when someone says, in the scene, ‘I’m number one on the charts,’ then you say ‘Which chart?’ and they answer ‘Well Mystery/Thriller, Subsection Crime, Subsection Noir, Subsection Petty Theft, Subsection International and Subsection.’ I don’t think anyone, at large, categorises things like that, the subdivisions become kind of moot.”

Which is a long way to go to come around to my point—that you speak of a Venn diagram, that you are comfortable saying you exist in multiple spheres, but then you seem to indicate that really the more you can specify, the better. Do you feel a nervousness the subdivisions help with? and How much are you concerned, really, with the individual reader response—as once a following becomes large enough, surely this losing some meaning, person by person?

NB:Specifics.

I’ve been writing for years. Many. Diaries, travel journals, poetry and short stories.

I guess that my early attempts at short fiction and also at a novel were more ‘literary’ in the sense that they didn’t have a genre. I was just writing. At some point, I realised that my love of books tended to come down to a few areas. There was the crime genre – early on the detective and the PI; the Beats; Fitzgerald and Hemingway; Zola and Kafka; Sartre and Camus; Brautigan and Vonnegut; Plath and Woolf.

There was something in common to most of them—that they all spoke about bigger things than the story itself. Inside it all, behind it and wrapping it all up like a skin was something about reason for being. People struggling to find out what they were and what their position in the Universe should be. How to cope with the best things in life and the losing of those things. How to cope with the knowledge that things change and nothing can be preserved in a jar to be savoured forever—not birth, love, sex, scenery, not anything. And that we’re all dying—how do we deal with that?

That’s what my writing was about – telling a story that might help me to get some kind of understanding of it all, get a grip on a slippery slope and a foothold in the mountainside.

Because that’s the way the stories popped out, they’d have been seen as literary.

My first novel (as an attempt) had elements of crime, but was really about identity and genetics and revenge and memory as a young reporter discovered his father was not his biological beginning and that the man to whom he was genetically linked had happened to kill his mother accidentally along the way. The guy who was the real father was modelled on the late Captain Beefheart, musician, artist and recluse—who better?

I think the crime aspect arrived when I realised that, for me, the driving conflicts of a story tended to be about violence, death, theft and other forms of ‘deviant’ behaviour. Whatever I wrote, elements of this would creep in somehow. In the end, it seemed that the closer to crime it became, the more people liked it and the more I seemed to understand what I was doing.

That’s now the first thought I have—what’s going to go wrong for this character or that, or where things are more organic (and they usually are) what traits will a character have that will mean he or she is screwed by design or by a natural bent to getting messed up.

***

NB: Publishers should generally give a reader an indication of a certain style or quality to their output. Their badges are big and clear and don’t even need words to send a message. It’s in the logo—the penguin or the archer or the gun.

The indies—the self-published are also really important. Their influence is different depending on the prevailing circumstances. I grew out of the small press poetry scene. We were influence by those of the sixties who did the same. They had their influence and so on. They allow people to do their own thing. To be part of the lunatic fringe. To grow their ideas and develop styles.

It wouldn’t be fair if publishers were all – gatekeepers to what goes out into the world.

It wouldn’t be so easy and pleasing for the readers if there were no publishers.

PD: Wouldn’t be easy and pleasing for readers? Or for writers?

I personally think readers would find it jolly fine if there was no commerce of any kind connected with the written word (and already much enjoy as much ‘free writing’ as they can) if literature was just pieces of writing made available for inspection, nameless, formless, unbound.

Readers like to read and though they may become fans of writers. that’s just because that’s what their brought up in, a by-product they could leave off without feeling too gloomy. If a condition of having a book out was that the author name did not appear on it, it had no title, and it was available free, I don’t think readers would be bothered. Just writers would. And then, just some of them.

So, I’m going to, having exposed myself like that, press the issue a bit: What is, really, in your eyes, the purpose of publishing? Is it anything but commercial? Is it anything to do with the impulse in a writer to write, or something disconnected that just incorporates the writing after its writ?

NB: The purpose of publishing is to allow people to access material that suits a book, be that electronic or paper.

People, as far as I’m aware, have told stories since even pre-language. It’s what humans are – communicators.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Everything is a story. We don’t generally charge people to listen to them to relate a joke or the thing that happened to them as they went to the shops or about their new relationship or whatever they are talking about. That’s all free.

What isn’t free is the way we use the world now, the way financial institutions and economies have developed.

We have to pay for water and food for goodness sake, for clothes and for homes, for heat and for travel. We all have the choice to leave that society – go and live in the woods, wear furs and trap lunch, tell our stories to those who live with us (that goes back to that failed first novel, by the way). But we don’t, do we? Leave it all behind.

We decide that the food we can get is good and that we’ll pay for it because there’s an exchange mechanism (money) and that it took a farmer to tend the crops or a fishing trawler to scavenge the seas. Books need be no different – where’s the paper coming from? Or the e-book? It’s part of the way our world is, part of that capitalist exchange.

I like the idea of writers doing what they do best (my ideas for work and pay are actually slightly different than what we do to earn money as things stand, but that’s a very different set of discussions). Why not have a world where we get the best from people by allowing them to do what they do? I want to write every day. To be in a position where I earn enough to support my family. Dream it may be, but giving away the stuff all the time won’t achieve that for me on a personal level.

In the years of my poetry mag, I lost money every time. People had to pay for the books because we needed paper and ink and printers to put them together. I had to charge to get some of the money back. In the end, we folded anyway, due to depression, family ties and money.

I’m happy with money changing hands for art and writing within a system where money changes hands. Put me in another system and I’ll see where I stand then.