The PhD programme I am on at UEA is called Creative and Critical Writing, which suggests that the two types of writing might at least be considered in conjunction, while last year I gave a paper at a conference on the subject of Creative/Critical Writing, which suggests a different, perhaps closer relationship.

In my paper I explored what happens when the two terms are joined together: what happens when Creative and Critical Writing becomes Creative-Critical Writing – my name for that kind of boundary-jumping or boundary-ignoring writing.

In doing so I found myself reaching for metaphors to describe the relationship between the two disciplines. In a way the choice of metaphors was the whole point of the paper. They said everything I wanted to say about the subject. Here, then, sliced out of my academic paper and given a sort of brief, perplexed commentary, are my metaphors:

By Creative-Critical Writing I mean writing that elides the distinction between the two disciplines, or that cosies up to the divide between them, from one side or the other, to peer over the fence, or listen through the wall, and that sometimes, whether accidentally or on purpose, shifts or distorts that barrier, or otherwise disturbs the occupants or atmosphere of the neighbouring room, even if just to the extent of interfering with the television reception.

The idea here is clearly one of a divide as physical barrier, a wall or a fence, which immediately brings up the question of dimensions and materials. A garden fence that can be seen over, or leaned on and chatted over, and that might let through stray stems of a blackberry bush, or goose grass, or nettles, is very different to a 8-metre-high wall or fence – or, okay, ‘separation barrier’ – that would permit none of this.

When I wrote that the barrier might actually get shifted or distorted, I suppose I was thinking of cheap motel rooms, where you can hear the person next door, and so know they can hear you.  The point being, in the end, that Creative and Critical are, under the terms of this metaphor, very much open to each other’s influence, whether positive or malign, while always remaining entirely themselves, and that all of this is made possible by the barrier that separates them. (“Good fences make good neighbours.”)

It is debatable writing, as the land that once stood between Scotland and England, where one might have expected a strict border, was the Debatable Lands.

Here, in fact, the barrier is expanded, or dissolved, or exploded, to become a zone (interzone, demilitarized zone, no man’s land) where no rules apply, or different rules apply, or the rules are pending further definition, perhaps permanently so. I’m not sure that this metaphor helps us much: it is too temporary, too historically determined. History teaches us that one side or the other of such a zone will eventually prevail.

The discourse of Creative Writing, what I write when I write my novel, is confined to its pages, under what might be termed, in a slightly laboured analogy, laboratory conditions. Nothing that I write there can break out of its discourse to infect the wider, superordinate and dominant critical discourse of the department in which we sit, scribbling and squabbling.

The move from the physical or geopolitical metaphor to the medical, the corporeal, the intimate, is always going to raise the stakes of an argument. And yet there are paradoxes here. After all, what is the virus doing in the laboratory in the first place? It is being studied, and controlled, for the greater good of the community. (Is this what the Academy did when it let Creative Writing into its hallowed space?)

…the department, and my supervisors, were quite happy for us to think of those terms as not mutually exclusive, but as possible subjects for hybridization, without ever going into specifics about how that hybridization, or cross-fertilization, might take place – and now I’m put in mind of another reasonably current analogy: of genetically modified crops accidentally fertilizing ‘natural’ crops, though here I’m not sure which crop might be which, which I might be naïve enough to want to call ‘natural’.

An interesting scientific point: hybridizing two species to produce a ‘better’, ‘healthier’ hybrid can damage biodiversity, by driving out both original species, and thus diminishing the gene pool. Hybridization leads to homogenization. Nobody would want all writing to be Creative-Critical, every essay to be lyric, every novel to carry non-fictional under- or overtones.

In his poem ‘Meeting Austerlitz’ George Szirtes characterizes Sebald’s writing process as the use of “double exposure: He would unwind the world of memory and wind it up again a little off-centre as though it were a blind or hedge against bad luck”.

This is a lovely metaphor, though not particularly germane to our current discussion. The whole point of double exposure – whether it is two superposed images of the same subject, or of two different subjects – is that the lens through which they are seen, and the film on which their images are exposed, is the same. The double exposure is a concretisation of the Heraclitan same river twice, whereas the Creative-Critical dichotomy, or synthesis, or whatever it is, is about two different ways of looking, or seeing, or thinking, or writing, at one thing. To stay true to the metaphor, it would be like taking photos of the same subject, at the same moment, on two different cameras: an SLR and a Polaroid; or perhaps taking a photo and painting a watercolour.

‘Living On: Border Lines’ explores, or explodes, the idea of the edges or borders of a text, describing the text “[overrunning] the limits assigned to it”. Throughout the piece Derrida uses a specifically watery set of metaphors – that overrunning is ‘débordement’ – that makes one think of breached sea walls and flooded land.

Interestingly, Derrida’s metaphor moves in the opposite direction to my ones. In my medical scenario, for instance, the subject is a body that fears encroachment from outside, just as the motel guest worries about the stranger in the next-door room. In Derrida, however, it is the text that is the active force, breaching its walls and flooding the neighbouring fields. Which is not necessarily a destructive action.

If there is a sense of disturbance at the Creative and Critical discourses being brought into close proximity – angrily humming and growling at each other, like rival cats in a garden, or similarly charged magnets – then the least we can say is that particular sea wall is still partly intact.

As with the television reception in the cheap motel, what I like about these metaphors is the idea two things affecting each another simply by being brought into proximity. After all, all those medical and scientific metaphors insist on the actual, physical comingling of different substances, whether at the biological, molecular or genetic level, which is not something that happens with literature. There is no gene in a sentence, or paragraph, that makes it creative or critical, fictional or non.

Sebald, who called his medium not the novel, but prose, could be said to approach the lyric essay from the direction of the novel, cosy up to it and pull the hat from its head and put it on its own. Sebald is the lyric essay, the ‘non-fiction artwork’, in drag, or perhaps ventriloquised.

One category of writing masquerading as another is, I think, one of the least interesting manifestations of this tendency. Think of titles: how vogueish it is for novels to go out into the world with a non-fictional hat on. This is cross-dressing at its crudest. The chances of a book called A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian containing real actual knowledge on that subject are about the same as those of Lily Savage having a pair of X chromosomes.  That said, the title here does aspire to the blissful irony of the double bluff: it so clearly doesn’t do what it says on the tin that the reader is bound to step closer, intrigued, convinced that it must contain some interesting knowledge, if only because it so clearly semaphores the fact that it doesn’t, by pretending it does.

Conversely, think of the non-fiction title, whether of book, essay or thesis, that relies on its subtitle – that which comes after the inevitable colon – to say what it does, first drawing you in with the showier, flouncier, fictional-ier pre-colonic title.

Ventriloquised is better, subtler. We learn not to trust the clothing, but we do trust the voice. Close your eyes, and the crudest ventriloquist’s dummy resolves to his or her character, the dialogue between it and its master becomes a ‘true’ one.

Fence, virus, sea wall, drag act… the wider point to be made here about my increasingly frantic search for metaphors for that central relationship between the creative and the critical, is that this very action pulls me down firmly on one side of the divide. Metaphor is creative, not critical, by its very nature. It is anti-scientific. Where science tries to increase knowledge of a subject by measurement and analysis, literature – or, more traditionally, poetry – tries to know by describing, by comparing.

Science brings its object of study into the lab, out of the world, banishes the world in fact, from its investigations. Poetry, given an object of study, immediately casts around for something else to lay alongside it, drape over it, throw at it. It roots through the bin, tips out its handbag, opens wide the doors and windows of the lab in the hope of something wandering in that is different yet somehow the same.

By trying to pin down the difference between creative and critical writing through metaphor, I do anything but… for of course pinning down itself is a metaphor, borrowed in this instance from science – pinning down butterflies, the better to study them. Metaphor is the mark of the creative in the critical: the mark, the trace, the spoor, the taint… pick your metaphor.

Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady is – along with Wings of the Dove – his most morally searching novel. I recently returned to the novel for my seminar on consciousness, character and the novel on the Theory and Practice of Fiction course I am teaching this year on the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme.

There is a very famous scene which takes an entire chapter, Chapter 42, to play out. On the surface, not much happens. The heroine, Isabel Archer, sits by the fire in the house she shares with her husband, Gilbert Osmond. In the first part of the chapter her husband attempts to manipulate her into furthering the marriage of his daughter Pansy, Isabel’s step-daughter.

Osmond upbraids Isabel for her hesitation in setting in motion a marriage which she knows will not work. Her husband’s parting shot as he takes leave of her is that she ‘find a way.’ For the rest of the chapter Isabel thinks, and the fire burns low. The candles diminish. She stays there, alone by the fire, until dawn. At the end of the chapter, she rises and leaves.

In action terms, it’s not Die Hard. But this chapter is the fulcrum of the novel. Through the course of that long night, James sloshes through the turmoil in Isabel’s mind as she sifts through clues, realisations, fragments of understanding, discarded instincts, her own motivations, to try to understand how she has tilted her toward this moment of misery and – she begins to understand – betrayal.

The scene is demanding to read. It is dense with thought and recollection. It presents us with one of those controlled, supernaturally articulate furies of James, when he writes about a character’s inner upset. What it achieves, I think, even more masterfully than to show a woman grappling with her predicament, is to chart how the process of how Isabel Archer comes to understand consciously the things she already knew unconsciously – about herself, her husband, her marriage, her lot. Conscience is thought to be a project of the conscious mind, but it might more properly reside in the unconscious, where it is formed by sparks and flares of instinct. Above all else, Portrait of a Lady is a dramatisation of one woman’s reckoning with conscience, and how, having discovered it, she must pit it against her desires and instincts.

In class that day my students and I considered this topic of consciousness, character and (although it isn’t in the seminar title) conscience  as a vehicle to think about our instincts, motivations and ambitions as fiction writers.

The novel is a way to investigate what it means to be alive. The novel can also be a form of abstract thought, given life and depth and feeling through the creation of people who don’t exist. We wondered, why are we bothering to do this? Creating characters, especially believable ones, is difficult. Living with real people and oneself is hard enough. But beyond this, what is our interest, our obsession even, with character. What exactly are we trying to work out – or resolve – through these people we create?

I thought of the book I have just written, and the book I am presently writing. Both are about values, particularly in situations where inherited corruption and abuses of race and history are present from the very beginning of an individual character’s consciousness, and how these mechanistic forces leave their imprint on the individual. They are both set in Africa, where one has many opportunities to feel the pressure of history and politics, and to consider one’s position. It’s impossible not to ask, in Africa, who has rusted so that I can prosper?

To get back to the project of writing a novel, conscience is not a necessary ingredient for consciousness, although if you reverse the two a different relationship applies. It is impossible for an unconscious being to have a conscience, yet so much of our lives seem devoted to the aestheticisation of our true conscience, and to the creation of a false self – a betrayal of conscience.

In a recent article for The Guardian, Rachel Cusk defends the kinds of creative writing courses on which I teach (Cusk also teaches, at Kingston University).  She argues that the popularity and appeal of creative writing courses might have less to do with the desire to become a published novelists, and more to do with people’s famished need to speak with and of a ‘true’ self: ‘What is it, this book everyone has in them?’ Cusk asks. ‘It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the ‘true’ self. The novel seems to be the book of self.’ The would-be writer, Cusk suggests, is only that person trying to free him or herself from a prison of false expression which ordinary life has forced upon him.

The arena of self-expression and the arena of conscience are linked. Life as it is lived gives ample opportunity to discover your own principles, limits, fallacies, values and beliefs. But writing fiction is a way to extend the boundaries of that arena, and to think abstractly about what people will do and what they will not do, to draw the frontiers of empathy and understanding, and consider how events take us to inhabit simultaneous doppelganger selves, masqued alter egos who might, in the terrain of morality and assumption, never existed. In a nutshell: a good woman is made bad. The transformation is incomplete, though. She is both at once. The story is, why?

In class last week, we wondered if using the novel to explore conscience was now old fashioned. The novel in its modernist sense – ie post-Conrad, Henry James introduced psychology (or psyche, as the better term) as a definitive factor in peoples’ fates. Their goal seems to have been to explore the intricate fabric of choice, tendency, happenstance, circumstance, politics, fate, that collude to create what many of us think of as our fate. The external will of God, or some other determining deity, has played a very minor role in these investigations in the last fifty years.

Cusk does not say this in her piece, but her argument suggests that conscience might live in the writer’s idea of their true self, and that conscience risks being eroded by ‘life’. Instinctively, I agree with her about the core self, and the need to speak the truth and be heard. This careful listening is perhaps what my Masters and PhD students get from us, their teachers, which is most of value.

But what is it about so-called ordinary lived experience that nudges us into dishonesty and betrayal of our core selves? Some of this is obvious: the doublespeak of corporate and bureaucratic life, the envy factory of Facebook and other forms of social networking where we put forward heavily edited versions of the self; the compromise of family life; the indignity of bodily failure, the weak-willed gamesmanship of human relationships. ‘Writing feels like the opposite of being alive,’ Cusk observes.

Writing is a way to get beyond – rather than escape – the self. This is one of its great emancipations. For having transcended the boundaries of the compromised public self, writers become mulish, durable thinkers, not easily manipulated, non-conformists with a simultaneously unbreakable and flexible sense of self. Mr James  may have agreed that could be worth the effort of our often lonely fascination with the dimensions of the human spirit.

At a café in Bloomington, Indiana called The Runcible Spoon.  I’m seated near the front door – it’s the type of place in which patrons share tables, but I’m seated alone, near a potted plant, facing the Espresso machine and the front counter.   I’m writing in my journal, trying to figure out how to look like a writer rather than trying to write.   A group of four or five gathers by the front door, peering outside, one of them my waitress.  “What’s going on?” I ask.

“It’s Borges, of course,” she says, as though Jorge Luis Borges always comes into the Runcible Spoon.  In fact, it IS Borges.  My professor, Willis Barnstone, one of Borges’ translators, has brought Borges for a month-long visit to campus to deliver a series of lectures.  Until this moment, I had forgotten the exact dates of his visit and now he’s here.  As Borges makes his way up the path, guided by a graduate student, the people gathered by the door disperse, resume their studied nonchalant poses at their tables.  Someone lowers the music a bit.  Act natural, the patrons of the café seem to be thinking in unison because everyone looks so unnatural, including me as the front bell tinkles and Borges makes his way inside holding onto the arm of the student who glances around and sits him down at the closest seat to the door, directly across from me at my table.  The waitress appears immediately at the table and Borges and his companion both order coffees, espressos in my memory.  Of course, Borges is blind and at best I probably appear to him as indistinguishable from the potted plant beside me, and I am just as responsive as the plant.  Borges is my literary hero.  I am a comparative literature major and all my favorites are works I read in translation: Kafka, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, but none of the authors have ever sat down across from me at a table.  What can I say to him, my literary idol?  Most of us do not indeed have the writer of the original sitting across from us, as my father did with Singer and as I did with Borges.  In my father’s case, he was able to ask Singer intelligent questions, I’m sure.  But what did I do with Borges sitting right in front of me?  I couldn’t think of a thing to say, not a thing.  Of course what I wanted to say was, “I love your writing,” but what is the translation of that?  I think “I love your writing” could be translated simply as “notice me,” or “bestow some of your grace, your genius upon me” or perhaps something equally trite.  It doesn’t matter.  The idea is easily translatable, the idea of being without language, of being inarticulate in the face of wanting simply to engage.

For quite a while after this non-encounter with my favorite writer, I felt that I had missed a great opportunity, but then I started to view the experience a bit more philosophically, perhaps a little in the manner of Borges himself.  After all, this is the essential problem of being human, that we are each stuck inextricably in our own consciousness, and try as we might to understand one another, we most often fail miserably, except when the artist successfully translates what is going on in her consciousness into the mind of the reader.   And then perhaps we feel somewhat as I felt sitting across a table in a crowded café from Borges. I perceived Borges or some representation of him, and he, being blind, could not perceive me.  Isn’t this the experience of reader and writer, the writer vaguely aware of the shapes out there of his audience, but unable to see them clearly, while the reader feels as if he could reach out and touch the author, if only.  If only.

But writers like anyone else can be disappointing in person.  There’s a famous photo that the Writers’ Colony Yaddo uses for publicity sometimes, the class of 1950 it’s called.  In it, stand the poets Theodore Roethke, William Carlos Williams, Karl Shapiro, and a number of others, including my mother, in her early thirties, who when I expressed my awe at these literary figures she had known, disclosed to me that most of the men at Yaddo treated her like something “Wheeled by on a dessert tray.”  Some of her stories were truly shocking and took them down a notch in my estimation, but she countered in a resigned manner but not especially bitter, “They weren’t famous for their personalities.”

Just so.  And yet we still want to know the authors we love in ways that go beyond their books.  We want them to reach across the table and acknowledge us, maybe offer to buy us a cup of espresso, too.  “Thank you Mr. Borges, that’s very kind of you but I’ll never get to sleep tonight if I have any more caffeine.  But by the way, I wanted to chat with you about your story, “The Aleph,” if you don’t mind.  Oh, you do?  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ll just talk to the potted plant over here.”

Still, I, like everyone else, fetishize certain authors.  There are writers who are as famous for their personalities as for their works.  Hunter S. Thompson comes to mind, as does Hemingway, of course.  In Havana, Hemingway is as ubiquitous as Che.  You can visit Hemingway’s house, of course, ogle his boat Pilar, visit the hotel room in which he stayed, drink daiquiris at La Floridita bar beside a statue of Hemingway, and then visit La Bodeguita for a Mojito because Hemingway once wrote, “My mojito at La Bodeguita, my daiquiri at La Floridita.”  And so, drinking daiquiris and mojitos will somehow make you commune with Hemingway?  If so, you might be disappointed to learn that Hemingway didn’t write this sentiment, that he never liked mojitos, the endorsement with his signature on display is simply a forgery the owners of La Bodeguita penned shortly after Hemingway’s death to boost tourism.

For me, a truer hint of his personality comes as you peek at the roped off rooms of his house La Viglia, where you can glimpse in the bathroom the obsessive jottings down of his weight, which he tracked neurotically in his later years.  Drink enough mojitos and daiquiris and maybe Hemingway wannabes might also imitate his weight gain.  200 pounds when he died.

For me, it’s Kafka I fetishize.  And I’m only going to tell you this once.  Stay away from him.  He’s mine.  In 1990, I had the opportunity to visit Prague for a mere 24 hours, but I took it, via an eleven-hour train ride from Frankfurt to Prague, and I posed for a photo in front of Kafka’s house, which at the time was being renovated.  I’ve been to Prague several times since, and it turns out that Kafka’s house was not really his house, much as Hemingway’s mojito was not his mojito.  The spot identified as his house was indeed the site of his house, but not actually his house, which was razed, along with most other houses in the area during a fit of Austro-Hungarian urban renewal.

It’s a little disturbing, if not ironic, how much Prague embraces Kafka, the city he called “little mother with claws.”  But it was not the same city as it is now, a much more Jewish city then, and Kafka a speaker of German not Czech.  You can buy plenty of tee shirts and postcards and coffee mugs in Prague that commodify Kafka, but to find something approaching his soul, you have to look in his diaries.  The Kafka of the Popular Imagination is as much a construction as the Hemingway statue at La Floridita Bar in Havana.

Some facts about Kafka that belie the image of him as the tortured introvert:

Kafka used to joyride on a motorcycle through Prague.  He used to meet Einstein for coffee.  He loved the cinema and Yiddish theater.  Kafka invented Workmen’s Comp.  He could also be hilarious as he describes a horrible reading he attended of a man named Kellerman, a “mediocre writer with good passages.”   The audience members keep filing out, to Kellerman’s dismay, but Kafka sticks with Kellerman to the end.

When after the first third of the story, he drank a little mineral water, a whole crowd of people left.  He was frightened.  ‘It is almost finished,’ he lied outright.  When he was finished, everyone stood up, there was some applause that sounded like one person in the midst of all the people standing up who had remained seated and was clapping by himself.  But Kellerman still wanted to read on, another story, perhaps even several.  But all he could do against the departing tide was to open his mouth.  Finally, after he had taken counsel, he said, “ I should still like very much to read a little tale that will take only fifteen minutes.  I will pause for five minutes.  Several still remained, whereupon he read a tale containing passages that were justification for anyone to run out from the farthest point of the hall right through the middle of and over the whole audience.

Not escaping from poor Kellerman.  But returning to him.  To me, that’s remarkable, that generosity, that instead of leaving, instead of mocking Kellerman for his mediocre writing, he waits for and is rewarded by passages that justify the entire evening to him.

That’s the Kafka I want to meet, the Kafka I do in fact meet in his diaries, the one who confides in me and makes me think to some degree that I know him.  As a fellow writer, I can also sympathize with him.  Every writer suffers self-doubts, but probably not as great as Kafka’s.  He writes:

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.  Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing  the odor of corpses in a direction other than mine and the reader’s face.

It’s here in his diaries that I feel I know him, while in his work I get to know myself.

When I write memoir, this is about as close as I come to being known on the page, but even this is a construct, of course, and it sometimes surprises me how certain readers will expect one Robin Hemley from reading one of my memories and perhaps find disappointment when they meet the real me in person.  Not that I’ve been fraudulent in my depiction of myself, but I change from day to day, moment to moment.  How can a person ever be known to others when he hardly knows himself?  In this, too, I feel I understand Kafka.  My favorite Kafka quote is this: “What do I have in common with the Jews?  I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”  And yet we write to be known to ourselves and to others, but even the author after she has written their book sits mutely across the table from the person she was when she wrote her book.  Joan Didion said that she read her old journals to discover who she was at age 19.  I don’t dare read my old books but I know that the person who wrote each one is somehow different from the person I am now – the “I” of the book is frozen in amber while the “I” that still lives and breathes has become someone else.

Recently, I attended a select conference at The University of East Anglia, at which Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee was one of the invited guests, of which there were only about 30.  I feared I was going to have another Borges-seated-across the table experience with Coetzee or else suffer a fatal foot-in-mouth episode.  I had once met the remarkable short story writer Grace Paley with the splendidly original opener, “Long time no see!”  It took me a while for my subconscious to recover from that.  Coetzee, like Borges and Paley, is a writer I greatly admire.  He might be in fact my favorite living writer, and so I was certain I was going to feel completely intimidated by him.  Worse, I had heard he was socially awkward and that he probably would not respond to questions or comments with anything more than monosyllables.  One of my friends, a well-known British author, confided in me that has the same kind of panic attacks around writers she admires as I do.  At this same conference she had said one morning to Coetzee, “I dreamed about you last night.”  His response: “Let’s change the subject now, shall we?”

But to my great astonishment, I discovered that he was a human being, that he was more than the sum of the stories he wrote or the stories told about him.  One evening, he and I and several other attendees shared in one of the dorm rooms at East Anglia some Johnny Walker I’d picked up at Duty Free.  Another day, he held a door open for me and I thought, J.M. Coetzee just held the door open for me.  But by the end of the conference, I could call him John without too much awkwardness on my part, and one morning he and I met on the way to breakfast and he told me quite kindly and without any prompting on my part that he had enjoyed some remarks I’d made at the conference about my mother and her fear of me writing about her.

It’s an understandable fear, I see, because the writer who we would like so much to meet has made us vulnerable beyond words.  Thank God the author is sitting blindly across the table from us because if they could see us, they would see we had been stripped naked and that would be embarrassing for both of us.  Perhaps we don’t really want our authors to be human – it’s enough for us to recognize our own humanity in their words.  When our favorite authors step down to our plane – Coetzee’s example an exception for me, at least – we tend to be disappointed.

When in 1980, a student at The University of Iowa, I let drop – or, okay, I bragged, that Isaac Bashevis Singer was a family friend, the head of the Writers Workshop at the time, Jack Leggett, asked me to call Singer to invite him for a reading, so I did and this was our conversation:

“Hello,” he said.

“Mr. Singer.  This is Robin Hemley.”

“Robin Hemley.  What happened to you?”

“Nothing.  I’m at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”

“Are you married?”

“No, that’s my brother, Jonathan.”

“Which one are you?”

“Robin.”

“So how is your writing?”

“Great.  I’m having a wonderful time here.”

“And what is your brother doing?”

“He’s in L.A.  He’s an electrical engineer.”

“Is his wife there?  Is she a nice girl?”

“She’s there, and yes, she’s very nice.  I just called to say hello and ask if you might give a reading here.”

“This year, I’m very busy, but I would like to in the Spring.”

“That would be wonderful, Mr. Singer.”

“Call my secretary, Deborah.  She’s a nice girl.”

“Great.”

“And Robin, how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two.  My Gott.  How time goes quickly by.  You know this thing your brother did, becoming an engineer, is very good.  Publishing is bad these days. If you want, you should become an engineer like your brother.”

Maybe Mr. Singer was right.  Maybe I should have been an engineer like my brother.  Most of the time, my doubts circle me, much as Kafka’s doubts circled him, and so I identify with Kafka, I fear I’m more of a Kellerman.  Please listen, I have one more tale, only fifteen minutes. What’s the rush?

But if I must, I’ll settle for Kellerman if it means for the time being, I get to sit at the best table.

This piece was commission by Writers’ Centre Norwich. Robin attended Worlds 2012 in Norwich as a guest of WCN.

‘Bitter Pastoral – A Talk About the Cederberg’ is the title of an essay written by my friend Stephen Watson, a South African writer who died after a short illness in April 2011. In it he attempts to describe his relationship with the Cederberg, a mountainous area near Cape Town, and through it the relationship between writing and landscape.

What follows is a response to Stephen’s seminal essay, published in his last book The Music in the Ice (Penguin South Africa, 2010). This is a fragmentary piece; I don’t give much direction to it, ranging as it does unannounced over Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, Stephen’s beloved Cederberg, and the grasslands of northern Kenya. But this seems the right way to do it. Perhaps because the relationship between two such monumental entities – landscape, thought –  with their abstractions and their concreteness can never be fully explored. And perhaps because death itself is a fragmenting rupture; it blows everything to pieces.

*

February, 2011. Heathrow to Cape Town on British Airways. It is night and we are over the Sahara, which goes on forever.  I am watching damp English dystopia in the form of the film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let me Go.

Although we tend to think of dystopia as a purely futuristic premise, Ishiguro’s novel is cleverly set in the past, with recognisably late eighties/early nineties cars, architecture, uniforms. Yet in this alternate past human cloning has been developed, and a generation of clones are slaughtered piecemeal so that the genetic oligarchy can receive spare parts, and thus be preserved.

The novel and film are provocative in many ways. They demand we question how accepting we are of the way society is positioned – politically, morally, historically: of how accepting we are of the past itself. We think, it was like that because it was like that. But the film suggests all our pasts could so easily have been different, and we would be similarly accepting of a recent past which had led to advances in medical science, which had in turn led to an NHS organ donor programme involving human clones.

In my own alternate past I am on this airplane to work with a friend who is not dying at all.  We will have frantic conversations before my seminar with his students. He is that over-committed kind of teacher, always with a queue of students outside his door who simply want to talk to him.  At home he has two small children who he feels torn from, in a way he never expected. So for me, as a colleague he will be that elusive element, a seam of shining malachite glimpsed as it threads among so much crushed carbon. In the alternate past the dark material of death does not glitter in our futures.

At 4am the plane drops out of the sky. We are skirting tropospheric thunderstorms over Gabon. I’d raised my windowshade and seen the lunkheaded clouds towering far beyond our flight altitude level. Lightning shears the sky close to the wing.

Everyone asleep wakes suddenly and grabs the back of the seat in front of them. ‘What time is it?’ The Swedish woman next to me says, in Swedish, to her husband. ‘Fyra,’ he replies. Four. I hear the word fear. But we stay aloft and somewhere over Walvisbaai in Namibia comes a milky dawn, then the megawatt southern hemisphere summer sun.

*

The Cederberg is a mountain range in South Africa’s Western Cape province. It’s a largely arid area, although threaded by rivers and streams; in these thin oases citrus is grown.

Stephen calls this place ‘the land with no fat.’ The Cederberg is red, Mars red. Looking at its looming shale mountains, and the dry cut valleys between them, it is hard to see what connection the Cederberg might have with the pastoral, as a literary and aesthethic convention more about shepherds and fields than this raw place.

‘The pastoral impulse itself has never died out if only because it is based on a constellation of human needs that can never be eradicated from the human psyche,’ Stephen writes. ‘This is the universal, undying human need to find a place in the world other than the world  as we ordinarily know it.’

The pastoral is the place other to our everyday reality, he suggests. It is the place the ‘human mind ceaselessly constructs’ to evade ‘domestic irritations, political oppressions or metaphysical anxieties.’ It is a limitless reaching, a hunger for the ideal. But also a sacred place.

We might all have a vision of the perfect landscape, a place we journey to, imaginatively, in order to find solace or joy. But what if this place offers neither, at least on surface inspection? No brooks, fields, smudged Turner vistas, no Tuscan hill towns or wave-raked beaches.

‘I was forgetting, of course, that no one ever satisfactorily explains anything they love.’  This is Stephen’s caveat, declared at the beginning of the essay. ‘When the object of one’s passion is a range like the Cedarberg, one soon discovers that any attempt to define its spell, no matter how much one might have written about the place before is rather like trying to hit Mars with a pea-shooter.’

Why is it so hard to describe or explain what and who we love? What is the mystery which robs us of our expression? Could passion for a landscape be in any way like passion for a person, I wonder. Do they both render us mute to the same degree?

*

September 2011. I am walking 150 kilometres over seven days in the Namib desert, on the fringes of the Skeleton Coast National Park. The Ovambo called this place ‘The Land God Made in Anger’. The Bushman called it Bitterpits.

We walk 20-30 kilometers a day in tilt-a-wheel temperatures that go from 38 degrees during the day to near zero at night.  ‘Each of us has an image of freedom,’ Stephen writes. And how much better and more free to walk, even here, in the second oldest desert in the world: in his essay Stephen quotes the Latin motto solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking), about how, in walking – and especially extreme or expeditionary walking – we become ‘something almost bodiless.’

And it’s true; I don’t eat much these searing days, and we all watch as our bodies turn lean and brown like kindling. There’s a weightless, thoughtless, quality to our voluntary forced march that is not unlike being buoyed by love for a person, a kind of trudging mania.

But we are bodies after all. We battle blisters, sunburn, trying not to sit under the tick bush nor step on a puff adder. I try to take the measure of the emptiness of this place with its red cut rocks, the scar of bustards in the sky.

The Namib might be an example of what Stephen terms the ‘anti-pastoral’, with the ‘austerity of its stone world.’ Here, unlike in the Cederberg, there are no oases, no physical space where we might seek succour from reality. There is no dizzying contrast between the soaked citrus grove and the Namaqua desert beyond its borders. And yet it is a refuge, these empty no-time hours when we walk twenty kilometers in silence, the only sound the wind rattling through buffalo thorns.

These days have been an ordeal, but also never long enough. I sleep in the desert with only a bedroll – no tent. It’s mostly safe, if you discount the snakes, scorpions, hyena and leopard. The payoff is going to sleep under the curdled constellations, the floodlight moon.

At night I dream we are sand-surfing on what looks like windsurf boards mounted with spinnakers; imprinted on them are the names of Damaraland, the Kaokoveld: Koppermyn and Mon Desir, Torra Bay and Sorris Sorris. Such reckless yearning names for drunken hamlets with an Engen station and a bottle store. There is some formula driving this, I feel, an attempt to solve that persistent equation between lavishness and desolation.

*

February, 2011. February is the hottest month in the Cederberg. Tourists are scarce – not many people can take the heat; during the day it is over 40 degrees.

The drive takes me first high above the verdant valley of the town into a mountain pass. Here twisted cedars defy the wind. Strange boulders, wind-carved, line the highway like statues. Then the road plummets into a wide flat valley, as far as the eye can see. I pull up under huge drooping trees and book in at the farm office. Traveller’s Rest is one of those oases in the Cederberg, a sudden explosion of green amid ochre and shale.

‘It takes an unusual person to see beauty here,’ says Haffie, the dowager owner of the farm where I am staying. ‘It’s not to everyone’s taste. Most people want green, they want the coast.’

So I do, I think. Then why am I here? The truth is, I’ve come in bleak sympathy with Stephen’s predicament. I wanted to be entirely alone here for a few days, to see if I could work out my own relationship with the area. I’ve been to the Cederberg once before, in 2010, and I responded to its bruised mountains, cannonball sunsets, how the evening goes down on fire.  ‘The beauty of the Cedarberg, its charisma,’ Stephen writes, ‘is not separable from its desolation, its aridity, its poor soils and frequent droughts. At the same time, it seldom fails to offer us something more.’

Alone in my cottage, gold hours thud past. Columns of ants devour my food. The heat stuns all living things into a mid-day torpor.

Suddenly the electricity cuts out. Eskom, the electricity company, are doing work on the line and have cut off power to the entire district between Calvinia and Clanwilliam for the day. I have to shove everything in the freezer and not open it if I want all the food and drink I have bought to last in the heat. I flee for the day, driving to Lambertsbaai to have lunch, a hot drive made hotter by waiting in summer roadworks queues. When I arrive at the town I find a fish processing plant spuming stink over the harbour and down-at-heel hotels facing an empty sea.

On my way back a rainstorm brews. Cold cobalt clouds amass over the citrus farms that stretch for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. The clouds are rolling in from the north, all the way from Namibia.  I don’t know I will walk 150 km in the Namib desert in six months’ time – that decision is still ahead of me.

For the last eight months I have felt a pull to return to South Africa, as if I had to return to make sure this landscape was real.  I think of the day Stephen took me for a walk on the mountain above St James. We reached the top and he turned to me and said, ’You see how easy it is to become obsessed with this place.’  We were looking out onto False Bay, into the bony mountains that stab the southern ocean on either side. It was a Sunday in April, early autumn, but a thin heat remained.

‘Yes,’ I said, and felt it: the rush of obsession.  Stephen’s eyes devoured the horizon. I could see then for certain he was of this place. He would never make the mistake I have made, of loving a country that is not mine.

The nights in the Cederberg are rough. I feel alone, vulnerable. Anyone could come through the door; the bottom panel doesn’t lock properly. It is 28 degrees and I have no fan, so I have to leave all the windows open. I have a dream called ‘The Watching Eyes’, a Reality TV/simulated dystopia programme. People on a plane undergo experiments and change shape or matter. In this reality TV programme I am working at a Farm Stall like the one Haffie’s daughter Charity runs here.

I wake up exhausted from the dream. I open the curtains and a hungry red bores into my eyes. Today it will be 39 degrees.

*

September, 2011.  We are up each morning before dawn and so  observe how just before the sun vaults the horizon the wind picks up, out of nowhere. There is no breeze, not even a ruffle, only a convection of cold wind in our faces. When the interior of the country is cold at night, an east wind blows in the morning.

This is my third time in Namibia. I don’t know what keeps me coming back to this blasted landscape and its bizarre allure. Never go back somewhere you have been happy.  The return is never the same as the first time, because we are haunted by memories and harassed by expectations.  It’s not quite nostalgia, that living in a soft-focus citadel of the past.

Literary scholar Dennis Walder has written of nostalgia as a ‘tenderness’ for ‘fragments of our past, pieces of ourselves.’ A postcolonial theorist, he calls nostalgia a ‘global epidemic of longing’ for a place that was once safe, before rapacity and superficiality overtook us.

I’ve always thought of writers as nostalgics par excellence, that this might even be the definition of a writer: someone who spends too much of their time wondering not why or how things went wrong, but exactly when. I wonder if nostalgia is actually an unconscious understanding that we are not on a linear track through life at all, rather we are revolving like planets around an invisible sun, caught in time which is not an arrow but a spiral. We are only trying to get back: to the original moment when we were loved, where we were loved. Then there is the perverse, writerly longing to return to the moment just before things went wrong. The turning point.

For some reason I’ve kept the bar receipt from my final night on that last trip to Namibia, in Swakopmund, after we had finished our monumental Skeleton Coast walk, which has its own story of things going wrong, untold here.  It’s from the Tug, the ship-themed bar and restaurant that reaches out into the cold Atlantic. It is one of those thermally inked receipts which fade in time so you can’t see what you bought, or how much it cost.

*

February 2011. I speak to Stephen on the phone, because he is too weak to have visitors.

I say, ‘I’ll be back in August.’

‘Who knows, I might still be here.’ Stephen says. His voice is completely normal, not the sheared, exhausted voice of a sick man.

After we ring off I pace the garden outside for a long time, listening to the saw call of the Hadeda Ibis, the squeak of Cape guineafowl. The harbour is static in the afternoon heat; the supertankers twirl on their anchors.

I go back to reading his Cederberg essay.  ‘…here is a mountainscape both dry yet shining, desolate yet rich… it is one of those places where the world is pared back to its geological origins, to the stone which is the real floor of the world.’

Then I am overtaken by something very powerful, and I can’t read his book anymore. It’s about the voice I hear in my head as I read, his voice, which will soon not exist.

This is what I think now, after spending the last eight years in empty places – Antarctica, the Arctic, on ships at sea on long passages, South Africa, Namibia and lately the Northern Rangelands of Kenya: the land is speaking. It is broadcasting a message on a frequency which is ultimately inaccessible, but we can still detect it. If only we could decode it then we would have the key to an essential knowledge. Something about not wanting more from the moment than it is prepared to divulge, about letting go of expectations of any particular outcome.  It sounds like the wind, but it’s something else.

*

September, 2011. As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the PURE LAND. This painting, by New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, hangs above my desk in London. It is a horizon-awed canvas, a single Rothko line between a muted sky and land.

Ahead of me I see it, or a version of it.  We walk for seven hours with hardly any rest. The rains have been so plentiful this year we have been walking through undulating curtains of sable grass.

We are nearing the end of our expedition. The last hour up Doros crater is a vertical scramble.  At the top of Doros Crater we play Sinatra’s ‘Fly me to the Moon’ on a mobile phone. The view is so impressive it takes on a calamitous aspect. A khaki plain stretches for a hundred miles in all directions, punctuated by anvil-shaped drumlins. These Dwyka formations stretch all the way down to Table Mountain in Cape Town, where they dissolve abruptly into a cold sea.

I have brought only one book on this walk, Stephen’s collection of poems, The Return of the Moon, which is about the Bushman’s life and thought, and is based on the famous Bleek/Lloyd translations of the San language. The poems are written as if spoken by the Bushman. In one, the narrator says that a man is truly dead only when his spoor fills with rain, and that people who die become stars:

There are whole clans of people -

Men, women and children -

Long since become stars.

Stephen believed that the body of the writer absorbed the message the landscape was broadcasting.  That was why expeditionary walking was important to him; through its hardships, its rigours, through that pleasing click or refrain it places in your head, the body received the message, and understood what it needed to write. We become transmitters.

I sit up and look into the yellow wind of the Namib, trying to hear the tense, resinous tone of this land.  Instead I hear Stephen’s voice  – as a poet, as a person, it still rings in my mind; its intensity out of place with those languid Capetonian vowels, the humour that always loitered at the edges of even the most sombre sentence, his near-cackle of a laugh. Only when you stop remembering what someone’s voice sounds like are they truly dead.

*

February 2011. Towns of southern Mauritania appear and are surpassed on the Your Journey flightmap.

At the end of Never Let Me Go, Kathy, who we now know is a human clone, will soon be called up for organ donation service and so begin her piecemeal death. Her predicament is a metaphor of course, for how we are all being dismantled by time, by our human frailty, and how our acceptance of it is our only possible defence against our impotence in the face of death.

Her childhood friend and boyfriend have been killed. She is alone. She can ask nothing of her dead lover. She hadn’t understood that such a love was even possible. But at the same time she fails to feel betrayed by the system that has killed him, and will soon kill her. It is not a betrayal because nothing more was promised.

Kathy drives to sunlit field, where she gets out of the car to watch a plastic bag caught on a barbed wire fence flutter in the wind – a ruined pastoral, perhaps, this random field and hedgerow in an alternative England. We hear her thoughts in voice-over:  ‘Do any of us really ever understand what we have lived through, or feel that we’ve had enough time?’

We see her facing the field lit with the tangerine flare of a late spring sun in England. Something is moving through her. It is not the wind, or not exactly. Something else that cuts and cauterises. We don’t know her thoughts any more in that moment, but she seems to understand how it comes upon her, ungenerated by her desires, her needs. Then it passes through her like the wind.

*

I would have made the same joke about The Echo Chamber’s dedication had I not written those chapters. I’m Luke’s first reader and he is mine; to be given this position by a writer is to be allowed some input into, as well as access to, their creative process. It goes like this: once a writer is able to formulate her initial idea in writing, it may be grasped by a consciousness other than her own. At this point, she shares it with her first reader. The first reader has a consciousness of her own, but has become sensitised, through friendship, to the writer’s. She helps the writer formulate her ideas more precisely, so that it might be grasped by others. And this was the role I occupied on Luke’s project from its inception, Luke having begun it on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA where we met. Luke’s suggestion that I contribute a section to The Echo Chamber came after seven years of my having been its first reader. The shift from first reader to second writer was not so great, my contribution to Luke’s book being a kind of engaged reading of it, a reading of what had been written up to the point I temporarily assumed authorship, and a projected reading of what I knew to be Luke’s plans for the remainder. But what led Luke to make the unusual move of inviting me to contribute in this way? To answer this, I’ll give a brief precis of The Echo Chamber, and the story of how it came to be published.

The novel is set in present day Edinburgh. Its narrator, Evie Steppman, is a woman ‘no longer young’ who is compelled to tell her life story. She’s going deaf.  Evie has always believed herself to be possessed of preternatural powers of hearing (or ‘listening’), so that her memories are primarily aural in nature, her memory an archive of sounds, the most precious of which were formed during a magical, turbulent childhood in Lagos with her colonial officer father. The deterioration in Evie’s hearing therefore signals a concomitant deterioration in memory: Evie must get her past down on paper before it disintegrates into white noise. But she encounters a fundamental problem in the form of language, and by extension, narrative: language for Evie is a second language, sound being her first. This process of putting sound into words and the inevitable loss in translation – a loss only the self-translator can ever fully know —is, for Evie, a painful one. Her solution? Transcription: she completes her story by constructing it from other people’s words—by transcribing from the personal papers of those she has known. And so, when Evie comes to relate details of her one love affair, she does so via the entries from a diary now in her possession, kept by her former lover, Damaris. It is these diary entries that Luke asked me to write.

Luke enacted Evie’s own process of transcription by transcribing from another’s words himself. Similarly, Evie’s narrative fatigue reflected Luke’s own disillusionment with the novel form, and his failed attempts to remake it.

The Echo Chamber was an ambitious project for a debut novelist in his mid-twenties, a fact that Luke could not escape since he was working on the novel pretty much full-time. Luke’s sale of the novel’s publishing rights on a partial manuscript obviated, for a time, the need for him to work to support his writing; the impending deadline meant he had no choice but to write full-time with a few periods of working odd jobs to supplement his advance. So after seven years it was no wonder that he and Evie experienced a species of fictive ennui. The specifics of Luke’s situation and how this led to our collaboration are important to mention, I think: it should be acknowledged that books are of the world, and that this impacts on the making of them. And if you write with the aim of getting published, you cannot be innocent of market forces—even if you choose to turn your back on these. It is also important to acknowledge that if this is your vocation, the act of writing is labour, and creative decisions may often be informed by this unglamorous fact. I mention the contractual obligation also because it impacted on my response to Luke’s challenge: I accepted on the understanding that I would be free to write without direction, though I was obliged to observe the constraints of plot already established in the synopsis submitted to the publishers. These were as follows:

Evie’s lover Damaris is a woman. She’s a mime artist and the two are in their early twenties when they meet at The Edinburgh Festival, where Damaris is performing. It’s the early Seventies. Soon after meeting the two travel around America together, while Evie undertakes a project to record what she perceives to be ‘soon-to-be-extinct sounds’. Their relationship ends shortly after their travels.

I have set these out in order to illustrate my writing of these chapters as an ‘engaged reading’. My writing around these facts was informed by what I had read of Luke’s book up to that point: his approach to the foundational theme of silence and its inverse, sound, for example. Luke had aligned these with Evie’s isolation: her encounters with sound and silence are mostly solitary, and these experiences reveal just how unsuited she is to life in the wider world. I chose to develop this notion of her isolation by contrasting directly the silence of Damaris’ art with the sonic nature of Evie’s, using this dichotomy to foreshadow the end of their brief, but intense relationship.

Creating a character in Luke’s novel gave me the opportunity to play with representations of the character he had created. I was able to show Evie through another’s eyes, and in doing so, play with the image Evie had constructed of herself in the preceding chapters— even, crucially, undermining this. It also allowed me a part in realising Luke’s project to destabilise the notion of authorial authority, and certainly to undermine Evie’s own authority. All of this allowing, of course, for the possibility in the reader’s mind that Evie is nothing but a lonely fantasist and has written Damaris’ diaries herself; that Damaris never really existed. An unexpected and interesting consequence of this ambiguity was one reviewer’s suggestion—prompted by his perception of the novel as ‘tricksy’—that the acknowledgement which appears at the end of the book crediting me with writing the Damaris chapters might itself be a red herring, and that Natasha Soobramanien, supposed creator of Damaris, was in fact herself a character created by Luke.

*

Our collaboration wouldn’t have been possible if we had we not shared a similar aesthetic sensibility, the core of which were certain political concerns. A foundational theme of The Echo Chamber is colonialism and, more broadly, the exercise—and negotiation—of power in various forms. In this context, Luke’s urge to destabilise authorial authority, and his use of transcription—that is, Evie’s refusal to speak—assume political resonance. My engagement with Luke’s book and our discussions around our respective practices informed my approach to similar themes, and the idea of narrative absolutism, in my own first novel, Genie and Paul. This is a contemporary rewriting of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s 18th century romance, Paul et Virginie, written when Mauritius (where both books are set) was still a French colony. While Genie and Paul begins by assuming the authorative voice of the nineteenth century storyteller, my aim was to undermine this anachronistic omniscience by a series of standalone monologues, in which characters who are otherwise marginalised or oppressed take control of their own stories. Towards the end of my work on this, Luke and I discussed the possibility of full collaboration on a second book-length project. These discussions inspired one of the final monologues in Genie and Paul. It is the story of a Chagossian man whose family were forced by the British Government into exile – along with all other inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago – to expedite the leasing of the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the US Government as a military base in 1968. On reflection, I see Genie and Paul as a kind of proto-collaboration with Luke – he was my first reader throughout, and so had some creative input into the book. Our current collaboration is a development of these foundational conversations.

This project is a hybrid novel or prose work (to use W.G. Sebald’s term) called Diego Garcia. It’s a history of the island, from its origin in myth to its present status as British colony, US military base and appropriated homeland of the Chagossian Islanders. The book continues the interrogations of power begun (to varying degrees) in our respective first novels; in Diego Garcia we are examining how power uses narrative to enforce and extend its position, such narratives usually presenting themselves as the only story. One example of this is the 1965 government memo pertaining to the proposed expulsion of the islanders. This document, headed ‘Maintaining the Fiction’, emphasised the necessity of presenting the Chagossian Islanders as an itinerant population, rather than the settled inhabitants that most of them were. Under international law it is illegal to send into exile your own citizens but as an ‘itinerant population’ Chagossians would be ineligible for citizenship, and the government within its rights to evict them in line with plans to militarise the zone and clear it of non-authorised personnel.

*

Collaboration, then, seems a more appropriate strategy for this book than that of sole authorship, with its implication of a unique vision. Similarly, adopting Evie’s practice of transcription here—in this case, the transcription of extant documents relating to the island, such as ‘Maintaining the Fiction’—also has its place in our project to displace the author.

Collaboration is challenging. It is a risk. But it is necessary to take risks to allow for the possibility of interesting writing. And perhaps my opening comments were disingenuous, and my discussion here is actually, in part, an indirect comment on contemporary literary fiction — on its apparent reluctance (in its British form at least) to take risks. Of course, to take risks is to risk failure: no one wants to spend years working on a book that may, in blueprint, appear difficult to realise. At this point we might also consider the artworld term ‘art writing’, gaining traction on the more experimental fringes of the literary world. ‘Art writing’ covers many forms of art-related writing—including writing as art, that is, writing that seeks to engage with language and avant-garde literary practices in a way that what we consider to be literature aspires to do, and what we might term literary fiction often fails to do. But this is not the discussion I set out to introduce here. Instead I’ll conclude by returning to the topic in hand.

Artistic collaboration requires from those involved productive difference as much as it does correspondence on certain non-negotiable points. One example of such difference in our case is Luke’s long-term ambition to produce a book that contains no words of his own. As that suggested dedication for The Echo Chamber would indicate, my artistic ego is less evolved. Issues of gender and conflicted cultural identity no doubt play a part in my reluctance to relinquish a voice I am just beginning to test, though as a result of my conversations with Luke — and as I have suggested earlier, conversation is the essence and joy of collaboration — I would gladly join my voice with others’. And in relation to this I will offer one indisputable benefit of collaborative writing: if it does all go wrong, I will have, at least—to paraphrase one of my former students—‘some company for my shame.’*

*I gave a new class of creative writing students a questionnaire to find out more about them. In answer to the question, ‘Why do you write?’ one student gave this unforgettable reply: ‘To give other people some company for their shame’.

In a foreword to A Distant Cry, a collection of short stories from East Anglia, Louis de Berniers wrote “There is not a coherent, identifiable East Anglian literature.” Clearly it is often a writer’s sole aim and duty to be as individually voiced as possible. But the unique physical elements that draw writers to this region also tend to be the same elements that inspire the work they then produce. They leave their trait, leading to a distinctive creative output, often readily identifiable. In this essay I shall illustrate specificities of East Anglian place, season, nature, traditions and community. I believe it is by understanding these elements, and spotting their influence in the region’s literature, that we might begin to notice East Anglia’s literature as having notions of cohesion.

A sense of place is fundamental to the writer. For Malcolm Bradbury, writing about Norfolk, place is one of two things: “sometimes our place is our real subject, the basic material we work with, providing our vision, setting, landscape and theme. Sometimes it is a culture which stimulates our writing and lets it happen.” But perhaps more pertinent than place itself, is the extraction of the unique essence of the landscape that has inspired the writer, making its own particular connection. For East Anglia is a very particular landscape.

Without the great mountain ranges, deserts or savannah wildernesses of other continents, it may seem that as a nation we have been robbed of having wild frontiers to write about. Yet we do have the sea. The coast is our literary frontier, beyond which is an ancient and wild environment, and throughout our history it has inspired some of the best of our nation’s writing. But unlike the hard fortress-cliffs of Cornish granite that butt against the Atlantic, East Anglia’s edge is peculiar: it is porous, eroding, soft and malleable. It shifts from year to year with the tides, and in many locations the sea is held back by the merest of obstacles – a sand bar, a gravel spit, or dunes bound with marram. Why the sea does not simply roll over a land that is often at its level or even a few feet below seems to make little sense. As a frontier, it can often not be defined, and it is this unique character that’s often seen in the region’s writing. A sea’s presence that can be felt, but sometimes not reached, is a mysterious presence. An element beyond reach, it seems tailor made for narratives of mystery, isolation or ghost story. In Julia Blackburn’s The Mermaid, set on the Norfolk coast in the 1600s. A body traverses this frontier when a mermaid is found washed up. Throughout the story, it is the strangeness and otherworldliness of this coastal divide that is used to ignite the local community, reflecting itself in myth and folklore / paganism and religion / curse and fertility. Story arrives on the tide line of the shore, it washes up, like it did at Norfolk’s Winterton, where Robinson Crusoe was first shipwrecked, or at the quayside, as with John Skelton’s Bowge of Court.

Effectively, of course, the sea does often overrun the frontier, and it is this pull between the wilderness and the land which creates a very particular tension. Nowhere is this more evident than the most iconic of East Anglian frontiers – the salt marsh. Scoured by a relentless wind and criss-crossed with an intricate labyrinth of creeks and channels, it is an often impenetrable border. It floods, it disorientates, and it inspires a particular type of East Anglian character, represented in its literature. In Susan Hill’s The Albatross, this borderland is the home for the misfit, the outsider. In my first novel, Salt, I also explored this specific frontier, writing about characters who were on land, but at sea, living in a hinterland between the two elements and marginalised from them both. Between the sea and the land I found an imaginative territory that was free and exotic. For others, the salt marsh is a place of infinite isolation and, with its dangerous flows of creeks and tides, a place of psychic peril. In Hill’s The Woman in Black, the salt marsh and tidal causeway are the barriers to rescue, allowing the flourishing of an intact supernatural presence.

Labyrinths to lose you, barriers and dead ends to isolate you, East Anglia has long been associated with the ghost story. In M.R. James’s tremendously spooky A Warning to the Curious, it is the coast itself that has to be protected, utilising the three crowns legend of Aldeburgh. You disturb this delicate balance at your peril. Sparsely populated and full of perceived dangers, the East Anglian coastline is, for many, a coastline of fear.

The tidal feature which is most synonymous with East Anglia is the estuary. From the silt-fjord labyrinth of the Essex coastline, to the outpourings of the Suffolk and Norfolk rivers, these are the giant mouth-lung features that rhythmically suck in and expel the wilderness of the sea, twice each day. For the writer the estuary provides a landscape that has the duality of drought and flood, a changeling landscape that is held in continual balance. In Richard Mabey’s Home Country this tension reflects not just his spirit, but the spirit of the region at large: “I sometimes wondered if the closeness of these unstable edges of the land was part of the secret of Norfolk’s appeal to us, a reflection of a half conscious desire to be as contingent as spindrift ourselves.”

The coast is about dead ends, where characters are often portrayed metaphorically or – in some instances – literally washed up. But we can also see these dead ends in many of the other typical East Anglian landscapes. In Broadland we see the same watery half world of the estuary, but with the added enclosing aspect of more traditional environments where one could become lost: the wood, the marsh, or the fen. For Arthur Ransome, the Broads were the Arcadian idyll for a liberated childhood. But for others – and more commonly – Broadland is a confusing landscape where roads are cut off, or re-routed, at all times liable to isolate the characters and communities that find themselves there. The closer you are to the actual open water, very often the more tangled and impenetrable the land becomes. As a result, it is a bespoke landscape for narratives where characters will be haunted, isolated, or bewildered. In fact, it is very difficult to contemplate setting fiction in the Broads without it being a ghost story, as M. R. James, L. P. Hartley and many others have realised. Or, at least, a good place for a jolly satisfying murder, for example, C.P. Snow’s Death Under Sail. The components of the landscape are too irresistible: remote, unlit, pathways strangely orbiting the few places of open water, in many ways the Broads might be considered as similar creative territory to the outer-space narratives of science fiction. Quite literally, at Hickling Broad, no one can hear you scream.

In character terms, Broadland’s qualities lean towards being the perfect location to travel to when your relationship has broken down – we might consider Rose Tremain’s The Shooting Season as a fine example, where a former husband visits a woman whose life is held in the balance. Alternately the broads are a good narrative choice as a place to stay, if you never had the chance of a relationship in the first place.

The waterlogged world of the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads has its dry counterpart in the Breckland, another of East Anglia’s unique landscapes. Once, much of the region was covered in this way, with gorse, heath and forest. In Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places, he writes ‘lying just off the Suffolk coast is a desert,’ meaning the barren shingle spit of Orford Ness. But the same could be said for the huge swathes of Breckland, where its poor soil and the fact it consistently has the lowest rainfall in Britain means it’s as close as this nation gets to having its own desert. Gorse is the Norfolk cactus, and within its spiked corrals there is a similar sense of enclosure and impenetrable nature that we had with the tangled fen around the Broads or the labyrinth of creeks that surround the estuary and cover the salt marsh. Breckland’s wilderness, with its poor dry sandy soil, is virtually worthless to the arable farmer, so has remained largely unchanged over millennia, ever since Neolithic miners dug for flint nuggets in the chalk. For the writer, this allows a near perfect opportunity to view into the past and connect with the communities that once lived there. As a result, many of the narratives set in Breckland feature the literal discovery of ancient remains – Roald Dahl’s The Mildenhall Treasure is about the unearthing of Roman silver igniting a farmer’s particular greed and isolation from his community. John Preston’s The Dig sets its characters against the archaeological discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burials. Treasures, unearthed, are often the catalysts of East Anglian literature, and have produced some of its finest thoughts, too: the unearthing of Roman burial urns was the origin of Sir Thomas Browne’s philosophical Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, written in Norfolk.

For Malcolm Bradbury, “a landscape comes to life through what has been written in it.” It is impossible to consider the landscapes of the region, and their effect on the writing produced within it, without detailing its most extreme variation: the fen. Often considered to be brutal, industrial in its cultivation, divided by the rigid geometry of power lines, water channels and poplar wind-breaks, on first impressions it might seem unrelated to the soft amiable meanderings of the rest of the region’s landscape. But a closer look reveals that it, too, relies upon the same sense of isolation and claustrophobia that exists elsewhere. Here, we also get dead ends, with the fenland droves (roads) stretching for miles in perfect straightness, only to end abruptly with the apparently non-sensical dissection by a drainage ditch. As with the coast and estuary, we have the same beguiling relationship to water and its confusing behaviour: in the Fens, the drainage channels are often higher than the surrounding fields, and when one is passed, a second river is revealed, even higher – a series of watery flyovers that make very little reasonable sense, until you discover that the field you have been in is actually below sea level, and should ordinarily be considered part of the seabed.

Surrounded by such confusing and isolating pressures, it is not surprising that the narratives set in the Fens tend to have these issues very much at their core. Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites combines the isolating stagnation of a fenland town with aspects of sexuality, desire to escape, failure and hope. Graham Swift’s Waterland is similarly built around issues of seclusion, sexual angst and inescapable history. Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me features the evacuation to a fenland farm to elaborate her themes of loss and displacement. My own novel, Salt, uses the Fens around the Great Ouse to highlight the issues of entrapment, exile and cyclical behaviour. It’s a simple equation: small isolated communities plus large bewildering landscape equals unregulated growth of psychological anguish. It is also the perfect breeding ground for suspicion and secrecy. In Edward Storey’s No Other Word for it, the closed fenland community is explored through the lens of murder and scandal and the effects of wrong accusation. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Maze, the same sense of isolated community is evoked, but this time with the theme of ‘unearthing’ that is noticeable in Breckland writing, or the triple crowns legend of A Warning to the Curious, this time dealing with issues of fen / soil fertility and the suggestion of black magic.

In many ways, the fen is an anti-landscape. It is an absence where, without gradient and other usual definable features it can feel as though the true landscape has been scraped away. But what is left behind might be considered as so much more – a 180° view of the sky. Noticeable in nearly every example of writing emerging from East Anglia – from short stories to novels, genre writing to nature writing – are descriptions of the region’s famed skyscape. It is almost as though the sky is the super landscape that floats above the region, passing through all the narratives that are set beneath it. In Salt, the clouds were read by characters who lived on the salt marsh below them, very much as though the clouds were characters themselves.

Related to the width and breadth of the East Anglian sky is the quality of its light. I have lived in London for nearly twenty years, but when I begin to write I invariably return to my roots, starting with the soft-greenish watery glow that exists in corridors along East Anglia’s rivers and estuaries. It seems to be the meditative fertile light out of which any narrative might emerge. The Norfolk light, notably, is remarkable. It is highly particulate in nature, meaning there is a dustiness to it that colours the sky in curious ways. At a certain angle to the setting sun, a pastel lavender glow occurs. Under the harvest sun, a floury haze shimmers above the crops, the shadows pool under distant trees in shades of blue. In winter, the light seems ionised, made of pure ozone, blowing straight off the sea to bend the trees. Light is rarely missed as a descriptive opportunity for East Anglian writers, and it repeatedly shines off the page. In Trezza Azzopardi’s Winterton Blue, Anna tries to recreate the searing brilliance of the Norfolk coastal light, and ends up throwing glitter at a wall.

Common, too, is the sense of season. It would be atypical for a text to be set in East Anglia without mention of its particular time of year. And seemingly more prominent than fiction set in many other locales, season in East Anglia is very much associated with aspects of the natural yearly cycle: spring is correlated with aspects of fertility; summer is of abundance, harvest and surplus; autumn finds its correlation with slaughter and winter with a pared-down bleakness. Rose Tremain’s The Shooting Season is as much about the ashes of a former relationship as it is about the wider context of an autumnal slaughter, whereas for John Fowles, writing in his foreword to Mehalah, the Essex marshlands will forever be ‘set to the key of winter.’

Nature, oppressive or benign, challenging or rejuvenating, is a constant presence in East Anglian literature. In Elspeth Barker’s Carborundum a woman literally moves into the trees, living in a tree house for thirty years after her wedding day failed to happen. Her home is boarded up, still with wedding presents in it, but nature has saved her. Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure is also primarily concerned with the ability to reconnect with the restoring qualities of EastAnglia’s natural environment which, in turn, references another writer who tried – and failed – to balance mental depression with nature’s cures: the fenland poet John Clare.

It is not a coincidence that the region is the home for the finest writers in modern nature writing. Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Robert MacFarlane, Mark Cocker and Patrick Barkham have all been based in East Anglia, have set seminal works there, and their ancestry can be directly traced to the many Victorian rector diarists and rural life commentators that preceded them, all the way back to Sir Thomas Browne.

It is ironic, in an area often characterised by such isolated and static communities, that much of the region’s wildlife is migratory. Birdlife, in particular, regards East Anglia merely as a stopping-off ground on global flyways. But even this behaviour seems to have found its counterpart in East Anglian fiction. In W.G. Sebald’s writing, in particular The Rings of Saturn, we repeatedly find a narrative which is rooted, or searching for rootedness, alongside a migratory imagination which permits Sebald’s unique visionary roaming of place, time and memory. The author, rooted, the imagination in migration.

Malcolm Bradbury saw writing “as a constant intersection between the local and the universal, things near-at-hand and events far away.” For him, East Anglia’s spaces provided the lack of distraction that enabled a freely roaming creative imagination. We might suggest a similar process was at work with Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who wrote King Solomon’s Mines and other exotic adventures from a Norfolk background, in so doing inspiring a whole new genre of ‘lost world’ literature. One lost world, inspiring another. In my second novel, The Wake, a similar pattern emerged where the protagonist, stuck on a boat among the tides of the Deben estuary, was able to create a diarised fiction of a life he might have had and a journey across the Southern states of America. George Borrow, another Norfolk man, had a similar agenda, roaming Europe in his literature – only he made the mistake of satirising Norwich, and duly managed to get his works burned there.

Without the populace flow that has invigorated many other areas of the country, East Anglia is far from being a backwater, as these examples suggest. It’s a region where ‘thought’ has gravitated towards for many centuries. As Malcolm Bradbury wrote of Norwich, it was always “a place of learning, cultural activity, religious and political dissent. It too felt itself close to the continent, and was always enriched by ‘Strangers.’ The many Huguenots, and emigres from the French Revolution, joined with some of the great, often dissenting and reforming local families – the Frys, Bacons, Barclays, Gurneys, Martineaus – to make it one of the key regional capitals.” As a result, it spawned a whole tradition of writers from Anna Sewell, Amelia Opie, George Borrow and Harriet Martineau to the multitude of writers who live there today.

Assimilation, of all these voices, but the famed ‘separateness’ of the region has always persisted. Across the centuries, literature set in or inspired by East Anglia notoriously depicts static, unchanging communities. Some of these communities have been the subject of detailed observations and dissection themselves. Take Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, upheld as a seminal work of English rural writing, or the oral histories of George Ewart Evans working in Suffolk, Parson Woodforde’s diaries of village life, or George Baldry’s The Rabbit Skin Cap, detailing an impoverished upbringing that is nonetheless richly abundant with nature and closeness to the cycle of the seasons. Charles Dickens used Yarmouth (which he described as ‘the strangest place in the wide world’) as a key setting for David Copperfield. Perhaps most famously is George Crabbe’s The Borough, set in Aldeburgh at the start of the nineteenth century, which, due to the static nature of the community it portrays, is still largely valid today.

Writers are conduits of their environments, and it is the nature of these East Anglian communities that repeatedly suggest fertile narrative themes. Static communities are often superstitious, as seen in the stories of M.R. James, Julia Blackburn’s The Mermaid, or Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Maze, and as their populations rarely change, tradition is largely intact. Many of the oral traditions and myths of previous centuries are still remembered today and in East Anglian literature they are very commonly revisited and reinvented. Take the myth of Black Shuck, for example, the mysterious ghost dog of Blythburgh and other coastal locations. It is largely considered to have been the catalyst of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, has continually been spotted in a multitude of written, musical and fine art variations, and is still being revisited today, most recently in George Szirtes’ Shuck, Hick, Tiffey. In a region where stories have traditionally been handed down, and often kept alive with pub storytellers and the like, it is not surprising that fiction itself has essentially become folklore, able to be revisited and refashioned for a modern age – for example, the extraction of the Peter Grimes story from George Crabbe’s The Borough into Benjamin Britten’s opera.

Static communities are also by nature suspicious – of change, and of outsiders. And it is the depiction of insiders versus outsiders that is perhaps the most common and notable trait of much of East Anglian literature. In Susan Hill’s Mr Proudham and Mr Sleight, a woman renting a house near an odd and possibly gay old couple becomes fascinated by them – and the gothic wax models they make. Esther Freud’s The Visit features a woman connecting with the country partly through her investigations into a foreign (German) history. It exposes problems in her own life, and an alienation from a London world which is increasingly intrusive. D.J. Taylor’s Passage Migrants features a birdwatcher becoming obsessed by an exotic visitor – a woman holidaying in Sheringham. Ali Smith’s The Accidental has a stranger joining a family on holiday, with troubling consequences. In all of these examples we can identify one of two things: either characters are brought to a crisis by visiting East Anglia on holiday (i.e. behaving unusually away from home), or they are brought to crisis as a result of misunderstanding or being affected by the tensions between those who arrive (outsiders) and those who stay (insiders). This has long been the case as a narrative model in East Anglian literature – take Arnold Wesker’s play Roots, where a cosmopolitan London life is juxtaposed with an agrarian world, or M.R. James’ stories, where usually a visiting naïve gentleman scholar stumbles upon a local mystery, or L.P Hartley’s The Go Between, which straddles the worlds of turn of the (20th) century class division in Norfolk. However, it might be argued that the traditional narrative models of landed gentry living alongside a local working population have now been superceded by narratives concerning second home owners arriving in local communities, written about by Esther Freud, Penelope Lively, DJ Taylor, Ruth Rendell, Henry Sutton and Terrence Blacker, among others.

Writers react to their environments in a multitude of ways. It would be wrong to suggest that literature created in East Anglia is always readily identifiable and cohesive. But environment is so closely linked to inspiration, and inspiration to expression, that we should be keen to identify and react to the traits that the creative journey has left along its way.

The region is a frontier, a shore where writers and – by extension – their characters are able to assess the amassed experience of their lives. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go, Kathy ends the novel in a Norfolk field, “thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up.”

The image of a storm beach is a pertinent one, because East Anglia has this quality at its core. Sticking out into the North Sea, bordered on almost three sides by cold water, it is a region that naturally collects, both writers and their material. As Malcolm Bradbury put it, the region serves as ‘patron, producer and muse.’ East Anglia, as muse, has clearly proved itself across the centuries, from the mystic writings of Julian of Norwich to Sir Thomas Browne, and is still reinventing itself today in the cultural literature hubs of the University of East Anglia and Norwich. It is as vast as you want or need it to be, it is total isolation, it is on the way to nowhere, it is surrounded by water, covered by water, below water, below a thousand acres of sky, too. It is everywhere you look and it is, oddly, invisible: more of a state of mind than an actual, tangible reality, shifting its influence from writer to writer, from age to age, but always leaving its trace.

It looked as though it might have been shut for years. The two large display windows were more strewn than stocked. A stranded, bleached copy of The Hidden Places of Nottinghamshire curled up in the left bay, covered with nuggets of plaster. Nearby lay an electric razor, plugged in, and a cat-shaped draught excluder. The overlapping, mirror-backed shelves of an almost empty display rack chopped the neck from my pygmy reflection. In the top corner of the window, a suspended pair of riding boots promised Three Shelves Of Horse Books. The only evidence of recent intervention was a clock showing the right time and date. In the right window, a lamp like a ship declared on its sailing shade We Buy Books. Inside Is Like An Aladdins Cave Of Hardback Books said another sign. Growing on the flaking front of the upper storey, two buddleia bushes shook purple spears over the street.

In fact, the shop had only just, grudgingly, shut down. Until June 2002, Norman Peake (no relation to Mervyn the novelist, despite local rumour), its 81-year-old proprietor, could be seen standing at the door, picking out change for customers from the pockets of his suit. He was legendary for knowing his way around the medieval city of his stock – its towers, alleyways and dens. Browsing by oneself, however, was something like taking an eye test on an assault course.

Driff’s, the defunct guide to Britain’s second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, described the shop as it was in the mid-1980s:

Much declined from its former glory, not always poss to get upstairs, depends on owner’s mood. He is alleged to be related to Mervyn Peake and the place is very Gormenghast. Perhaps he is Mr Flay. Dislikes dealers espec this one! The day I was there somebody had thrown a brick through the window. I already have the alibi prepared.

We Are Not Members Of The A.B.A. (the Antiquarian Booksellers Association) declared a yellow sign set in a neon hoop in the doorway’s upper light: Lapidemus Igitur Norvicences Cornices (Let Us Therefore Throw Stones at the Norwich Crows).

During the few years I knew it, The Scientific Anglian was perhaps most reminiscent of Mr Krook’s Rag and Bottle shop in Bleak House – where, Dickens says, ‘everything seemed            to be bought, and nothing to be sold’. After my visit last year, I realised that I had unguardedly put down, and not picked up, a volume of the Sphere History of English Literature, just purchased from Oxfam. Inevitably, when I went back, it was nowhere to be seen – a small titbit to an insatiable maw.

Perhaps Mr Krook’s fate in Bleak House – spontaneous combustion – was at the back of the mind of the fire officer who finally insisted that the fuel-crammed premises cease trading, several years before its octogenarian owner had reckoned on retiring. Now, instead, Mr Peake was busy transferring the stock from his other Norwich property – an estimated 250,000 books, bought at auction and lured in by the ship-lamp over the years – to the St Benedicts premises, where he said that he would continue to live, with his cats, after selling off the contents.

The shop’s curious name, painted in white Gothic script on black across the shop front, was originally a combination of targeted messages. When Mr Peake moved to Norwich, the UEA – a mile or two away – was also about to open for business. It was expected at that time to specialise in agricultural studies, including geology. The ‘Scientific’ set out what he thought would be his stall; the ‘Anglian’ answered the charge that he was a ‘foreigner’, despite having been born in Essex. (A Norwich crow had told him that only Norfolk and Suffolk were really ‘Anglia’.) After thirty-five years in the city, there was now an occasional Norfolk inflection to his speech: ‘nearboy’.

Peake studied geology during the Second World War, but ended up working as a chemical engineer. He continued with geology as a hobby, and visited Norfolk on holidays, particularly at Easter, when the low spring tides allowed him to pursue his study of the chalk layer. He became an expert on chalk in the county, which was then regarded, academically, as ‘Cambridge’s back garden’. In 1960 he published the first account of Norfolk chalk, a work for which he ‘visited every conceivable hole in the ground, even rabbit holes’ – 340 in all – and explored the chalk tunnels dug under Norwich.

After that, Peake was regularly sought out to advise on the problems posed by these tunnels. In the early twentieth century a sleeping couple were suffocated when their house dropped into one overnight. More recently, a bus sank into the road where another caved in beneath it. One of his last commissions saw him lowered down three 150-foot holes in a cage, armed with a telephone and chisel, by the developers of the Castle Mall shopping centre.

He retained his passion for the substance. The basement of his shop was, he told me, solid chalk towards the bottom. And there was a building site up the road where they had just reached the chalk in their excavations. ‘I shall probably go and have a look at that tomorrow evening.’

We talked in the middle of the front part of the shop, Mr Peake parked squarely in the main gangway, while I sat on a stool in the narrow entrance to the Earth Sciences section. Short, white-stubbled, with thick, square glasses and various surviving teeth, he was dressed in an old tweed suit, dark-blue shirt and brown floral tie. Describing the geological underworld of Norwich, he sketched invisible diagrams with his finger down the spine of a cookery book called Creative with Cream. Behind him the labelled shelves ascended from Giles annuals to Nuclear Power – Weapons.

During the Cold War, Peake was a member of CND and the National Peace Assembly. He also belonged to the Communist Party. When his employers were taken over by an American company in the late Sixties, he decided to quit his chemical engineering job, fearing a McCarthyite witch-hunt.

He started the shop in 1967, moving up from Sussex and acquiring the Victorian premises from a greengrocer. The earlier name, Walkers Stores, is still visible, spaced down the seaweed-green tiles on either side of the Art Deco-era shopfront. In the Sixties the kiosk at the back, where regular customers came to settle their accounts, was still in place. Mr Peake recalled with relish a notice inside it on the subject of How to Sell Bacon. This featured a labelled dissection of a pig and a note advising the grocer, in case of maggots, to cut out the rotten area and sell as quickly as possible. Now the back room of the shop was dominated by a handsome wooden cabinet once intended for the sale of geological specimens – a sideline which fell through.

The Scientific Anglian was originally on three levels. The basement closed first, in 1974, when the ceiling was ruled too low to serve as a shop. The upper floor went next, in 1985, when two schoolboys started a fire by stacking open books face down (Mr Peake demonstrated with a copy of Biggles in the Orient) and inserting a firework beneath. It was shut for having no fire exit. Fire regulations finally closed the remaining ground floor, for lack of a rear exit, and for high shelves where over-reaching browsers might collide fatally with the fluorescent lights.

Even though the low piles of books once set out on the floor itself had been hustled away in an unsuccessful attempt to appease the safety inspector, the ground floor was still chock-a-block. The strange counter which ran down the centre of the shop was originally part of Walker’s Stores, its low, deep, slanted shelves – designed to display biscuit tins – packed with paperbacks. Around the walls, in amongst the bookseller’s wooden shelves, the grocer’s sturdy slices of marble were still visible, strata in the shop’s own geology.

The narrow ways between the tall shelves were awash with printed matter, other matter and dust, all monitored by a system of angled convex mirrors. In one of an infinite number of corners I found a squash racquet in a plastic bag, an orange safety helmet, a book on The Rise of Modern China and an ancient Midland and Great Northern Railway Ledger.

Between floor and shelves was an uncertain region of casual storage, an unstable moraine of (among other things) sunglasses, photographic slides, string, a scarf, a roll of brown tape, flat caps, maps, rust-speckled aerosols, shoe polish, sheet music, bulldog clips, a belt-buckle, a Real Ale beermat, a large scrap of floral pattern wallpaper, a badge which demanded Dogs Not Bombs, and a cat-food tin. Immaculate, outdated local bus timetables were kept in a pocket on one side of a bookcase, marked Do Not Remove. A pile of leaflets advertising dog racing years ago at Great Yarmouth Stadium lay on a lower shelf.

I asked about the plastic dinosaur skeleton suspended above our heads. Mr Peake explained that he liked to decorate the shop with symbols relevant to each section. There was a miniature ship’s wheel in the Nautical section, pressure gauges from a steam train for Railway, a desiccated crocodile’s head for Natural History, a cardboard cut-out Kodak girl in a bright yellow bathing suit for Photography. The dinosaur represented Earth Sciences. A bulbous anti-Zeppelin bomb was bracketed to the War shelves. These visual aids to navigation were, however, of less use in the latter years of the shop when – due to an increase in the average book size for certain subjects – the stock they represented gradually drifted to differently proportioned shelves.

Everything was labelled with little lettered stickers, black on white. The signs they composed had a distinctive humour – a mixture of irascibility and courtesy. A bulb dangles from a shelf in a little metal bowl-shade, the back of which barked More Light? Just Ask. One, below a genuine bee smoker – a conical contraption, dark with age, and fixed to the end of a book case – declared: We Regret That There Are A Number Of B – – Smokers Who Still Do Not Use The Ashtrays Which We Have Provided. It was, Mr Peake said, a ‘rather terrible joke’, although a metal ashtray, decked out with bright orange stickers, was accordingly provided – something else which must have given the fire officer palpitations.

Past the undecorated Poetry section (‘I couldn’t think of a symbol to represent Literature’) was a doorway which led into a corner bricked from floor to ceiling with Everyman and Similar titles. On the left a high square-paned window, veiled with dust, let a little prematurely aged light in from the street. Where the walls met, thick gossamer wefts connected the window to the books. To the right, stairs led to the upper floor through a ravine of books. Near the ceiling, an ear-like fungus extruded itself from a hardback copy of The Silence of the Lambs.

The shop was in an undeniably decrepit state, but its owner remained alert and active, despite a violent robbery seven years ago, which left him unconscious in a pool of blood. At some point, he told me, he would have to find the time to write a scholarly note to accompany the ‘Eel Pritch (Suffolk Pattern)’, which he was donating from his walls to a nearby museum.

A potted lecture. Eel-pritching was carried out in glass-bottomed boats by men who speared the eels in the mud with ‘pritches’. Pritches had backward-pointing barbed prongs, which made it impossible for the eel to wriggle off. The practice was outlawed in the early years of the twentieth century. This long forked thing was, said Mr Peake, the only example known of a commercially sold eel pritch, which were previously supposed to have been supplied directly by the blacksmiths to the eel-catchers. But his specimen’s thick black enamelling was proof of passage through an ironmonger’s, where paint was applied to prevent rust. Mr Peake bought it at the auction of a city-centre shop’s contents.

He seemed to have been a keen collector of local oddities over the years. Hanging next to the pritch was a strangely shaped ceramic grid, which turned out to be an unusual example of an insulator for laying electric wires, patented by a Norwich firm before guttapercha was employed.

As I took my leave, Mr Peake said, ‘My life has been so full of unusual things, if someone asked me to write an autobiography…well, it would fill a book.’ This prompted him to recall a witticism once lettered upon the Autobiography section: More Fiction Upstairs (And which reminds me, now, to mention that his History section started, decisively, From 1066 – Earlier With Archaeology.)

Peake’s cynical, non-conformist humour was also evident in the handwritten account of the shop’s battle with health-and-safety officials over the years, entitled FIRST FLOWERS – LAST STRAW and sellotaped to the split glass of the door. It ended with the municipal motto, NORWICH – A FINE CITY. But fine had been crossed out, and safe pencilled drily above it.

The shop is now a men’s outfitters.

Extracted from Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA (Full Circle, £28).

Note: This essay appears in the anthology Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA, ed. Giles Foden (Full Circle Editions, 2011)

In 1984 I was living in Bowthorpe, on the outskirts of Norwich, sharing a flat with an entomologist who was conducting complex experiments with aphids; I had no interest in aphids.   I had a BA in Humanities from Wolverhampton Polytechnic where the future Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson – terrifyingly articulate – had urged me in a seminar room in the back of the stands of Wolverhampton Football Club to voice my thoughts on  Hamlet; I had had no thoughts, not in Howard’s terrifyingly articulate presence. No interest in aphids, no thoughts about Hamlet,  just one desire: I wanted to be a  writer, not unpublished  but the proper published kind. You could say I was focussed or a bit mad, perhaps both.

To Malcolm: What was it that made you want to be a writer?

To Angela: Would you say that men want to be writers for different reasons to women? And does this type of question annoy you?

It was mid-September. I had a novel in draft about a very thin girl who was inclined to show her breasts to strangers. I had saved a year’s worth of wages from my job as a sorter in a film-processing factory. I was ready. I was readying, spending most days in  Bowthorpe’s dental surgery getting my front-teeth fixed as I waited  to take my place on UEA’s MA in Creative Writing, to share my novel with nine other students and my tutors Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. I was nervous and gauche, a  young twenty-three. I expected the MA to rescue me somehow. I expected the MA to turn me into one of Granta’s next ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, because hadn’t it managed that with previous students like Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan?

To Angela: What do you think of these statistics: ‘Best of Young British Novelists 1983’ – 14 male writers, 6 female; ‘Best of Young British Novelists 1993’- 14 male writers, 6 female; ‘Best of Young British Novelists 2003’ – 12 male writers, 8 female? And does this type of question annoy you?

I hadn’t been interviewed for the course;  I’d been accepted on the strength of my work-in-progress. I’d won writing prizes and had received a small arts council grant. I’d achieved much more than any of the other wannabes I’d met in the many writing groups I’d attended. I should’ve had bags of confidence but I was nervous, gauche, and  allowed myself to feel intimidated, almost immediately.

To Angela: How can I become as confident and as persuasive as you? Do you ever doubt your own abilities?

I was the worst kind of student. I made excuses. It wasn’t my fault. It was the room where we workshopped our manuscripts with Malcolm, the oblong room – with the line of office chairs and Malcolm sitting behind a desk, smoking his pipe – which was too grey, too corporate. It was Malcolm’s pipe smoke; it fogged the brain. It was having less time to write because the course had a critical component which had to be completed and completed satisfactorily.

To Malcolm: Will taking a module in post-structuralism really help me  with my writing?

It was the guests Malcolm invited to speak to us.

To Malcolm:  Do all agents wear bow-ties?

It was the tiny things in our work that Malcolm chose to focus on.

To Malcolm: Why is it so objectionable to split an infinitive?

I was the worst kind of student.  Pressing the self-destruct and not prepared to accept responsibility.  I wanted so desperately to become a writer – the proper published kind – but the MA  required of me more exposure than I was able to risk back then.  When it was the turn of other students to share their work I splurged my opinions onto their scripts – too hurriedly, with little consideration of my fellow students’ feelings – yet when it came to voicing these comments in class I couldn’t, just as in Howard Jacobson’s seminars I’d shaken  my head and refused to speak.  Then when I gave my work to the class for their verdict I wouldn’t accept – even hear – any criticism of it, no matter how delicately worded. I wanted  – foolish for any writer at any level – my readers to go away.

To Angela: How do you stop yourself from shaking those students who are wasting your time?

To Malcolm: Does teaching interfere with your own writing?

It was a dreadful year for me. I’d been given an opportunity and knew that I was squandering it.  I was with a bunch of people who cared so much about writing that one had moved from Italy and another had risked her marriage to take part in the course. I also had two experienced, kind tutors who were reading and thinking about my work, but I couldn’t value their experience …

To Malcolm: What would you say are the key differences between writing scripts and writing novels?

same as I couldn’t recognise their kindnesses…

Angela gave us individual tutorials in Malcolm’s office. On our first meeting she reached across to take a ruler from Malcolm’s pen-pot. The ruler was expandable. She played with it a little.  Smiled.

Lynne, she said; Do you think Malcolm measures his penis with this?

To Angela: Why has it taken me  so long to realise  your cock joke was not about you wanting to embarrass me but was your way of  putting me at ease? 

I missed my chance to know my tutors not only as writers but also as people.

To Malcolm: Your leg’s in plaster and you are on crutches and yet you still manage to work the lift and smoke your pipe at the same time – how?

To Angela: What do you and Lorna Sage talk about when huddled together in the grad bar? You’re always laughing; do you tell each other – cock – jokes?

I missed my chance to thank them.

To Malcolm: Do you know I hadn’t a clue about pastiche until you explained it to us?

To Angela: Do you know that more than two decades on I will be giving my writing students the same advice you gave me, particularly those students who write from the perspective of angst-ridden introverts  – remember, there are doors and there are windows and, no matter how preoccupied,  your characters will need to use both?

Note: The following piece was commissioned by Writers’ Centre Norwich. Each year, WCN gathers up to forty writers and translators from around the globe in Norwich for the Worlds festival. Writers talk to each other about the art and craft of writing, spend time in each other’s company and join readers at public events. In 2011, Worlds focused on the notion of ‘Influence’, with commissioned provocations from Alfred Birnbaum, Maureen Freely, Natsuki Ikezawa, Gwyneth Lewis, Joyelle McSweeney, Christopher Merrill and CK Williams. A number of writers were commissioned to produce a literary response of their choice to the four day gathering.

Water leaking from a cistern sealed off after the war seeps through a crack in the foundation of a house that no one wants to buy, streaking the cement between the sofa and a set of china packed in a cardboard box—a wedding gift left unopened these many years.

From the crown of a white oak a nighthawk scans the back yard for voles and rabbits. No. It’s a crow taking wing from a tree riddled with blight.

I wish to book a question here, said the moderator of the symposium on the imagination, and as the silence deepened in the room I realized that I had nothing—nothing—to say.

Don’t talk, the conductor bellowed to the student orchestra. Concentrate. The horns stared at a laptop set up in a trombone case: Germany was leading England in the Round of 16.

When an equalizing goal was called back, the musicians laid down their instruments and rose to their feet, as if to walk out of the rehearsal, until the conductor commanded them to sit.

How to educate the imagination? The last thing she did each day in her studio was paint over her completed assignment, preparing the canvas for the next one, mastering her technique, pledging her allegiance to the act of one brush stroke following another.

While the novelist said the well would run dry for him when he was halfway through a book, and there were days when he would lie in bed smoking and reading, waiting for the water to rise.

__________

You’re going to Worlds, she said over the telephone. Enjoy.

So I flew from Chicago to London, arriving early one morning, and took a train from Liverpool to Norwich. It was the summer solstice, the green fields rolled on and on, I dozed off reading a history of the English Civil War. And when I woke nothing had changed, or so it seemed, except for the theme of the symposium: influence.

China, Libya, Russia, Greece, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank, Nepal, Afghanistan, Chile, the Philippines—these were places that I visited on cultural diplomacy missions between one session of Worlds and the next.

Seeking to expand the American sphere of influence, as it were—though I preferred to describe it as sharing the fruits of my reflections on the nature of creativity.

Cosmologists describe spheres of influence—the gravitational pull exerted by a star, informing the orbit of planets, moons, and comets—and I am trying to discern what forces are shaping my walk in the sun, the course of which seems more mysterious to me than ever.

On my last night in Tripoli, for instance, I attended a wedding ceremony to which the bride was not invited. The imam said prayers, the groom signed the marriage contract, a feast was served. And when I checked out of my hotel the next morning I was not surprised to discover that a pair of security officers would follow me all the way to the airport.

I had not noticed them before, though they or others must have been there from the beginning of my mission—which may explain why my meeting with the minister of culture was canceled at the last minute. What did they know that I refused to see?

__________

The life of discovery: thus Brewster Ghiselin defined the process by which artists, scientists, and writers use their imagination to map new worlds, within and without.

Desperate to draw such maps, I went to his home on Princeton Avenue, in Salt Lake City, to seek his advice—that is, to show him my poems.

I hoped he would reveal to me the secret of inspiration, which I imagined could be passed on to any willing apprentice—that is, to anyone possessing sufficient willpower.

Utter folly: the source of poetry lies deeper than anyone knows—deeper even than desire, whose currents are as difficult to track as those of the will.

The literary world had forgotten him, and yet as he sorted through his correspondence, gathered materials for new work, and sketched out for me a vision of the creative process, illustrating points with drafts of his poems, some of which had taken him decades to complete, he betrayed no sign of bitterness: a crucial lesson of my apprenticeship.

Patiently he read my poems, bound his tomato vines and stored begonias for the winter, recalled an expedition to the desert to catch rattlesnakes. He spoke precisely, never repeating himself, rolling each syllable on his tongue, as if to sound the depths of its music.

After his death I searched through his papers to find an aphorism, which he had tossed off one afternoon as I typed out for him entries from his journal: The medium is the crystal into which the artist gazes. What he saw.

An excerpt from The Pantomime Horse. After losing his mother, brother, and, finally, his father, Boast learned that his father had been married with children before meeting his mother. He had two half-brothers that had been kept secret from him for twenty-four years. Just after his father’s funeral, Boast travels back to the south of England for a summer.

Early morning I disembarked from my flight and met Nanny at Heathrow. We drove down the M3 toward Southampton. It was raining, of course. Outside, everything was a bluer green than in America, the green of raw broccoli, the color I’ve always associated with the sunlight-bereft land of my birth. How can I explain? Maybe it’s jetlag beating all the nerves and tension out of me, but I seem to breathe easier in England, and the damp air leaves me feeling melancholy and pleasantly heavy, like I could sleep through the passing of another empire or two. I leaned against the car window, let my eyes close.

“Try to stay awake, dear,” Nanny said. “Otherwise, you’ll never be able to adjust.”

I was seven when Mom, Dad, Rory, and I moved to Wisconsin. Before that we lived in Ireland for four years, down in the romantic, remote, depressing wilds of the west, where travelers camped in painted caravans (hitched to Japanese compacts, not ponies) on the side of the road and Rory and I were taught Irish Gaelic by the sisters of the Convent of Mercy National School of Limerick. Still, growing up, I thought of myself as English. We went back once a year or every couple years, as often as Mom and Dad could afford it. By thirteen I was a snob. I came to loath everything American, fetishize everything English: the BBC, Thomas Hardy, Cumberland sausages, Twiglets, Jaffa Cakes, nationalized health care, the constitutional monarchy, Blur, Oasis, Supergrass, Pulp, Radiohead. (I worshipped Brit rock, even when the bands were ripping off American ones.) Though I’d lost my accent—an Irish accent, not an English one—when I was just a kid and spoke now with a nasal Midwestern honk, I still insisted on keeping up a few little quirks, pronouncing, for example, each of the fussy syllables in a-luh-min-e-um or the long round “O” in pro-gress and pro-cess. When we went “across the pond,” things got even more muddled, the diction came shoving its way back in, suddenly it was “holiday” not “vacation,” and I even started thinking in the Queen’s English again, or tried to anyway. (Rory and I got in fights over this. He hated the clumsy, gummy sounds of those peculiarly English words in my mouth.)

Why did I feel such a kinship with the place? The England I knew and loved was a shopkeeper’s England, and I scoffed at my classmates’ quaint notions about taking high tea and rambling along the misty moors. At the same time I let those illusions stand, hoping they’d let me claim a special distinction, an air of sophistication and genteel disdain for all things low, crass, and Yank. At Big Foot High, I didn’t fit in with the farm kids, who I made fun of, or with the rich kids who lived on the lake, who I despised and secretly envied, so I became the most zealous of anglophiles, a true native who’d somehow gotten stranded in “the States.” As soon as I finished college, I vowed, I’d be going back for good. Years had passed since then and somehow my return kept getting postponed.

“Almost there now,” Nanny said, as she always did when we came into the shambling outskirts of Southampton. “Recognize where you are?”

Red brick terraced houses stretched out on either side of the motorway, the cement monoliths of council tower blocks looming among them. Rust-spotted container ships bulked dirtily on Southampton Water. I cracked the window to get another breath of air; the thick smell of diesel exhaust atomized on wet asphalt, another signature of England, left a film on my tongue. The bus stops were scrawled over with graffiti—bad graffiti. Every road seemed to have a strip of vacant shop fronts, with only the bingo parlors, betting shops, and discos thriving. Men stood on corners trying to flog stolen goods: jewelry, power tools, knock-off England jerseys. Clusters of teenage boys with shaved heads hunched along the sidewalks in tracksuits, getting soaked and seeming not to care.

The last seventy years had not been kind to Southampton: Luftwaffe bombs, dockers’ strikes and brutal union busting, dumb city planning mistakes, several grandiose new shopping centers gone bust, the opulent Southwestern Hotel closed down, the Royal Pier destroyed, twice, by fire. Southampton continues as the berth of the Queen Mary 2, the Queen Elizabeth, and the Queen Victoria, but the world remembers only its great maritime disaster: The Titanic sailed from here. Look Southampton up in a guidebook; there’s no mention of its original Roman walls and mosaics, the ancient Bargate, or the Tudor buildings that miraculously survived the Blitz. Just a few pithy remarks about the “unsinkable” ship and a note that reads “little else of interest here.” My hometown. I felt the need to defend it against the general indifference of the world, but it seemed to get drabber every time I came back.

*

Nanny fed me enormous meals: fish and chips, chicken curry and chips, bangers and mash with gravy, freezer peas, and chips. In the evenings, we played Rummikub and Scrabble or put together jigsaws. We went out to see Nanny’s brothers and sisters, my great aunties and uncles. In dim, under-heated living rooms crowded with overstuffed settees draped with lace dollies, I sat listening to my great aunties (the uncles hardly spoke) talk about their gardens, swap news of the vast extended family, and rehash stories of bad service received in restaurants. Over the years, I like to think I’ve become a keen observer, a student even, of families, but my nanny’s family is like few others. At the time I’m writing about now, eleven of the thirteen brothers and sisters were still alive, all but one of them living in Hampshire. They all grew up together in a big, mold-infested house with an open well at its center, with an eccentric father who roamed the county poaching game and a mother who, well, birthed thirteen children. During the War, the older siblings worked in government offices and munitions factories, drove supply vans, riveted the wings onto Spitfires (picture frail, skin-and-bones Auntie Cis, her body vibrating to each jolt of the pneumatic riveter), and looked after the younger children. Now the younger looked after the eldest, who had finally started to succumb to heart trouble, aching joints, dementia, and a lifetime of surviving off English cuisine, circa-1945.

I took a lot of pleasure in my grandmother’s family. And I envied them. When they all got together, the jokes passed so fast between them, the store of shared memories was so great, I struggled to keep up. The siblings who had passed away lived on in that endless conversation, spoken of as if they were only momentarily indisposed, sent upstairs, perhaps, for bad behavior, and sure to come back down to join the fun soon.

Everyone was very gentle about my dad. A good man, they said. Good but quiet. Great Uncle Bob remembered him as being rather “deep.” (Which is not to say unusually thoughtful or sensitive, as meant in America, but introverted and a little dour.) When I told my great aunties and uncles how I’d learned about my dad’s first marriage and his two other children, they quickly changed the subject, as if to say, Well, never mind about all of that. They were worried about me living “over there” all by myself. “And how is Melissa?” they wanted to know. (In grad school, Missy started going by Melissa, but I’d never been able to make the change.) “Lovely girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes, lovely.”

“What?” gruff old Uncle Spadge said, speaking for the first time. “Enunciate, boy. E-nun-ci-ate.”

“Very lovely,” I said. “We haven’t been talking much.”

“What? Sorry? Honestly, I can’t understand a word the boy says.”

All through my teens I was a mumbler. Over here I was also painfully self-conscious about what my relations called my “awful American accent.” My mumbling was, and remains, a defense—it keeps me from having to talk about myself. Anyway, my great aunties and uncles were most of them so deaf, I could get through an entire visit saying barely a word. Finally, the conversation swung back to the usual: the family, the garden, and wasn’t the service so much better in American restaurants? and the portions so large! Now and then, someone would tell a story about life during the War or dust off some antique turn of phrase—“those mucky little pups,” “we were at sixes and sevens,” “she had a face like thunder,” “I didn’t come up on the down train, you know”—and I’d file it away in memory or sneak off to scribble it down in my notebook. Research for the great Anglo-American novel.

In private I asked Uncle Bob, who I’d always gotten along with, if he’d known about my dad’s other family. “Well, old chap,” Bob said, “I did hear about it all, yes. Through the grapevine, you understand.”