The Gothenburg book-fair in Sweden, one of the biggest in Europe, celebratedits 20th anniversary in the last week of September with a focus on Britishliterature. Though the book-fair is primarily a celebration of Swedishliterature - with several hundred Swedish authors present - each year has aforeign literature theme as well. A sizeable contingent of British writers waspresent this year. In the upper floor of the book-fair hall where the seminarsand readings took place, one spotted David Lodge walking into a Gore Vidalseminar (who, with Robert Bly, was one of the two American writers present as anexception to the British theme), Adam Thirlwell, the recent Granta discovery,gazing through glass walls at the crowds in the bookstalls below, and MargaretDrabble on the escalator wearing the same prim look that she had when acting asmoderator on various panels, but one which is hard to connect with her novels.
Talking about writing - there is something bothendlessly appealing and very exhausting about this. The British writers broughta special charge to it because their invented or interpreted worlds are greatlycontiguous with the real one. They are able in whatever they speak about to atbottom speak about themselves.
NovelistBeryl Bainbridge, while in conversation with Michael Holroyd, actually forgotthe names of one of her early novels (she’s written tons of them), but in thelight of her remark that she "can’t make anything up" and that all hercharacters are based on real people, this didn’t seem more surprising thanforgetting someone’s name.
The well-known travel writer, Jan Morris, one of the most engaging speakersat the fair, described her home in Wales, decorated with busts of herself and anEnglish admiral, told us in a marvellously conversational way how these oddthings had come to be there, and then went on to read from a 1950s travelogue inwhich she described a Sweden one recognised instantly - swanky yet made somewhatcomplacent by welfare. An elegant woman eating alone in a restaurant considersMorris’s attempt at conversation with "absolute confidence and noperceptible interest."
Yet the excerpt was as much about Morris herself - her sympathy, her irony, herviews on culture and nationality ("I don’t believe in race and I’mbeginning not to believe in nation"). Morris is seventy-eight and incrediblysharp, and there seems to be no place on earth where she hasn’t been andwritten about, including the other sex. She was James Morris till she underwenta sex change at the age of 46, has just published her last book, and her answerto the world’s conundrums - to poverty and puzzle of religion, toenvironmental chaos and gender riddles ("What are men for?") is ‘Bekind’. That talisman, again, is personal; it can only operate on the smallscale and for that very reason it is as futile as it is necessary. And Morrisclearly knows that.
The two poets I heard - Robin Robertson and John Burnside - appeared asconcerned with finding personal meaning in things, even if their manner was morewithdrawn (which could be because they were Scottish). They were quite openlydetermined to dodge questions of the book-fair audience variety. The poemsthemselves were extremely rich with evidence of an active engagement with theworld - mythology, family, drink, sex, death and nature ("Justice depends onunderstanding the environment," said Burnside). The interesting thing was howtheir voices seemed to be in conversation with their own selves, as if the poemswere written in lieu of the more public act of speaking.
Robertson seemed to corroborate this when he caustically told hisinterlocutor that all poets were dysfunctional because they could only speakthrough their work rather than being able to chat casually in front of a roomfulof strangers. Burnside had a poem written in the voice of someone who is aneighbour to him and observes his ways, without ever speaking to him. He iscontinually obsessed with the Arctic circle, which is the only place where hereally feels at home. Robertson’s poems were less eclectic than Burnside’s,but had a stronger poetic "I" in them, negotiating things with wit andunexplained sadness.
There is clearly still a very high value attached tothe individual life and its moral concerns in British literature. David Lodgehas written a new novel on Henry James. (Yes, yet another book on James.Apparently Colm Tóibín’s The Master is not the only other recentnovel on him. Emma Tenant wrote one a
fewyears ago, and Lodge revealed that there is a fourth writer who has written yetanother novel on the novelist and cannot find a publisher!) Lodge didn’t knowabout the other books till he had started on his own, but now findsjustification for his Author, Author in the fact that it deals with lessfamiliar aspects of James’ life, the material aspects in every sense of thatword.
As Margaret Drabble noted, Lodge’s is really quite a dark and sad novelabout James’ sense of failure. To portray this he has uncovered the sorts ofphysical and everyday details about James’ life that James himself wouldprobably never have wanted to make public - the kind of food he liked, and thefact that he had a dog, his possible sexual orientation and his dealing with thecommercial side of writing.
It is curious how self-evidently good or at least acceptable it seems to wantto write about these highly personal things. Ann Thwaite, who has writtenbiographies of Emily Tennyson and A.A. Milne, declared in another session thatbiographies of writers are certainly not written to illuminate their work. Thisseemingly startling remark was made while arguing against the reductive tendencyof reading off the work from the life, but it still said a great deal for howmuch pleasure and meaning British writers seem to derive from the personalnarrative. Beryl Bainbridge has just written a novel based on the life on SamuelJohnson. "I tried reading his epic poems and found them toodifficult", she said, when asked about the sort of research she had donefor the novel. "And in any case", she added, "I was moreinterested in the man."
Marrying fiction with fact both as a stylistic device and by way of contentis at least as old as the American New Journalism of the 1960s, though theinterest in fictionalised biographies or novels based on real people (especiallywriters) is relatively more recent. Biographers like Ann Thwaite look upon thisphenomenon with horror - it messes about with the truth and how dare one makethings up. Surely one can’t do what Peter Ackroyd has done in his biography ofDickens, she asked in a pained voice. But there’s clearly no stopping thisnow, and the trend seems actually to derive from the British passion forbiography, even if it eventually subverts the conventional notion of what abiography should be. The philosophical basis for this is still empiricism - thelove for portraiture and detail, realism and individual experience. Fictionseems to figure here as an extension of biography, a way of continuing to writeabout people when the facts about them have been exhausted or do not suffice tocreate mythologies that satisfy the questions of the time.
Serious British writing at the start of the 21stcentury seems to be more about reinvention and recovery, then, and less aboutcreating the entirely new, and perhaps this is why traditional genres are beingchallenged. Possibly the most interesting writer at the fair was a man calledIain Sinclair who writes books about London that combine travel writing, urbanethnography and folklore, memoir, fiction and documentation. His LondonOrbital is about walking the length of the M25 - the road that encirclesLondon and which, in his imagination, becomes the reverie through which onegrasps the city. This fascinating book is a critique of urban planning, of thegrotesque visions of developers and politicians, but it is also a very tangibleand visceral account of London - its alienating urban landscapes, enormousshopping malls, fake Alps, and roads that lead nowhere, people hooked on tocell-phones ‘locked away into an electronic otherness’, a city of intrusionand noise.
Sinclair spoke passionately about the other great London writers - ArthurConan Doyle and RL Stevenson - who ‘understand the city as dream’. Both sawLondon as two cities stitched together. The door that is hidden from view in Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde forms the symbolic passage between these two worlds -one of Gothic horror and the other of Baroque respectability. Sinclair is partof the same tradition of writers who mythologise London, but he does itretrospectively, he speaks of London as really a 19th century city andeverything consequent to the 19th century as being posthumous. He is suspiciousof memorialising and the tendency to seek out heritage from the past. The Thamesis heritage because it is a dead river, no longer the life-line of the city but‘a false memory, constantly referred to in terms of its back story [...]’.
Other recent books are concerned with the similar themes of urban life,memory and the engagement with the past. Novelist, Sarah Waters has writtenthree novels set in Victorian England. In conversation with Michael Faber, whoselatest novel, The Crimson Petal and the White is also set in that period,she pointed out how pornography and lesbianism existed at the margins ofVictorian life and fiction, and how her interest has been in bringing them tothe centre. She has taken the form of the 19th century novel, she said, and usedit to tell tales of lesbian sexuality. Faber read an extract from a 19th centurypornographic text called My Secret Life to illustrate a similar point. Intheir imagination, the Victorian era is a ‘hinged’ period, a time ofemerging modernity. Interestingly, it is narratives concerning sexuality thatthey both employ to explore and reinvent Victorian England, and this seems totake the place of the classic 19th century themes like childhood.
Sexuality remains a concern in the more serious fictioncoming out of Britain, but it looks like it’s no longer enough to just portrayit in the David Lodge kind of sexual capers fashion or even the Martin Amiscynical, you’re bound to fail fashion, even as the ‘chick-lit’ genreobsessed by the happily-ever-after love story grows by leaps and bounds.Twenty-six year old Adam Thirlwell is someone to watch out for - his Politicsis really about sex, and he has ironised it as skilfully (though not ascompellingly) as Milan Kundera. This seems so very un-English, but Thirlwelldoesn’t ‘like’ English novels, he says. What his novel seems to beimplicitly looking for is a way into one possible type of future English novel.Are there any taboos left? Margaret Drabble wondered in a session on Women andLiterature. Her colleagues seemed to think not. Thirlwell’s novel is a way outof this impasse. If there is no longer anything concerning sex that one cannotwrite about, if one’s creative energies can no longer be engaged, DH Lawrencestyle, in breaking taboos because there are none left to break, then the mostinteresting way out seems to be standing the idea of sexual liberation on itshead and starting all over again.
Actually, Drabble and her colleagues did recognise a new taboo that writersface. You can use the f-word as much as you like in your writing but you can’tuse the n-word, said Jenny Colgan. Drabble agreed. Her computer spell-checkrefuses to admit ‘nigger’ and "that can be a problem when quoting MarkTwain". Multiculturalism is the new taboo, said Drabble. There are no longersubjects that are considered off-limits for woman, but it’s not entirelyacceptable to be a white person writing about a black one.
Sex and race and gender came together on the closing day of the Gothenburgbook-fair in the performance of stand-up comedian Shazia Mirza - British, ofPakistani descent, the only known Muslim woman stand-up comedian who used toperform in a hijab but no longer does because - "I washed my hair". Mirzacomplained about being sensationalised by the media. Why are all these labels -British, Asian, Muslim, woman being constantly applied to me, she asked. Youdon’t say thirty-five year old white male Swedish writer every time you talkabout one.
Yet Mirza’s entire repertoire, indeed her very persona, is based on abreath-taking objectification of herself. All her jokes are jokes about thefamiliar trials of a modern Asian British woman - her parents’ attempts tomarry her off, marriage proposals from strange men in Pakistan (really on thelookout for a British passport), the experience of being molested in Mecca, thehypocrisy of Muslim men, the ludicrous aspects of Islam, the ludicrous behaviourof those who think every Muslim is a potential terrorist. "I don’t drink",said Mirza. "Because of my religion, you know. But I’ve taken Ecstasy. TheKoran doesn’t say anything about Ecstasy." Which could be another way ofsaying - religion doesn’t say anything about identity. Or doesn’t say enoughabout it. Another signal for one of the directions in which British literatureis going.
Anjum Hasan is a poet and programme officer at India Foundation for the Arts,Bangalore
