Dead and alive, p.25
Dead and Alive, page 25
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Maybe the name Bogle is where it started. I am the child of a Jamaican: the name of Bogle has never been strange to me. But the Bogle I was familiar with was Paul. Labour activist, leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion, national martyr and hero, Paul Bogle was executed on the eve of my own birth day, albeit a hundred and ten years earlier. Yes, I’ve always liked the name Bogle. And it’s my best guess that it was while reading a story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the Tichborne Claimant – ‘The Improbable Impostor, Tom Castro’ – that my eye must have passed over the name Castro and the name Tichborne to fixate instead on the name Bogle. For there he is, the Claimant’s constant companion, greatest defender, and star witness at the trial: ‘Ebenezer Bogle’. And there, too, are the broad biographical details: black, ex-slave, radically underestimated:
Bogle had another quality, as well – though some textbooks in anthropology deny this attribute to his race: he was possessed of genius.
From here, I probably googled ‘Tichborne’ and ‘Ebenezer Bogle’ and at that moment discovered that the name is a (deliberate?) error on Borges’s part. Andrew Bogle was the man’s name. Who turned out to be, like Paul, a Jamaican. Yes, my interest would have been piqued right there. And then that odd coincidence: that the man whom they called Tichborne should have happened to be buried a hundred yards from my door, in old Paddington Cemetery…
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I have always been very susceptible to coincidence. The same way certain visual artists feel about ‘found objects’, I feel about coincidences. They compel me; I have the sense that I can and should make use of them wherever they appear, and it’s a strange fact, looking back, that all my novels have been prompted or fired by coincidence in one way or another. But in the case of The Fraud, coincidence piled on coincidence to such an extent that I really got to the point where I felt the book was hardly mine at all, and I’d only been dragged in at the last minute to write it – to do the grunt work. For everything else about it fell into my lap. Ainsworth, for example. I knew about the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, mainly because I often buy those little local histories you find on the front desk of local bookshops. I knew Dickens was his best friend, and that the two of them used to hang out. I knew that he was wildly popular at the time but was now totally out of print. And I knew that he used to live in a big house in Kensal Rise. This much I knew of his life and it had always amused me. How fleeting literary reputations are! And how contingent on their context. Nothing was easier for me than to imagine some reader, two hundred years from now, picking up a novel of mine and finding it completely unreadable. (I can also imagine that scenario in the present.) The topic seemed to me a funny idea for a novel: I tucked it away. Filed it somewhere in the back of my mind, alongside a wise thing I once heard a great writer say many years ago, when I was young. He said: ‘It’s not like you sit around every day thinking, I’m writing a terrible novel. Terrible novels just happen to you. You don’t know they’ve happened till afterwards.’ My memory is that as he delivered this line he was laughing – a little sadly – and that I couldn’t understand him. I was still at the age where I couldn’t understand why anyone would ever write a bad novel, or do a bad anything. Then I got a little older, and I understood it, and found it both funny and sad. It seemed to me a deep thought, that went far beyond the parochial act of writing to the very idea of life itself. Delusion is everywhere. We suffer from it individually and collectively. We tend not to see our delusions until we’re no longer under them, and by that point, we’re usually under some new ones. Of course, a world full of only the deluded would certainly be a difficult and a pitiable world – but it would also be a comic world. A world of the innocent. But the world isn’t solely the province of the deluded. It is also a tragic place, in which delusions are exploited and utilized at every turn by the powerful, the malicious, the cruel, the violent and the sadistic. Whole economic systems can be maliciously, sadistically deluded. Whole countries, too.
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It was a long time after having this thought that one day I woke up and had another. I thought: I’m going to finally write that comic novel about William Ainsworth, and self-delusion, and ambition, and human foolishness. So I started hunting down old Ainsworth books, and finding the few accounts of his life, and following the footnotes in the biographies of greater and luckier men than William. I learned all about his literary dinner parties and how, although he happened to be a very bad writer, he was also a convivial and a pleasant man. And that’s when the coincidence happened. One day, while reading about his dinner guests, I followed a footnote attached to one of them, a young Irish poet called Edward Kenealy, who – years after his acquaintance with Ainsworth – ended up a lawyer in the improbable case of the Tichborne Claimant…
You don’t have to tell me twice!
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By the time I came to seriously writing The Fraud, around 2020, it was no longer a comic novel. By then it was more like life: comic and tragic, both. As I wrote, I could have sworn it was Trump who was at the forefront of my mind, that strange and dangerous character, who, like Tichborne, triumphed in the public consciousness by presenting himself as a paradox. Another working-class aristocrat. Another lordly hero of the people. Another honest liar. But the evidence of my Yahoo! inbox suggests that this paradoxical figure goes back a long way with me. The innocent murderer. The rich poor man. The white black man. The black white man. In such paradoxical people the personal and the political, the comic and the tragic, the existential and the absurd, collide. They obscure the truth and sometimes distort its very nature. They are what happens when fiction bursts out into the world, and sometimes – because of their unholy reliance on the tropes of fiction – they can make us suspicious of fiction itself. But I love fiction. I love the way it lies to tell the truth. And with The Fraud I hoped to remind myself of fiction’s power, which, IMHO, is precisely its relative powerlessness. That is, its ability to play with, stimulate, provoke, challenge and even change our minds without ever, ultimately, controlling them. That dark skill is the preserve of demagogues, algorithms, propagandists – whoever aims to establish power over us.
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‘A good novel tells us the truth about its hero – but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.’ So said G. K. Chesterton. I can’t tell you the truth about the author of The Fraud: I don’t think I really know it. And perhaps the truth about ourselves is always for others to decide anyway. We are the main characters in the novels of our lives, yes, but it is always others who read us. In The Fraud there are no real heroes – with the possible exception of Andrew Bogle. But there are a lot of human beings. Some of them are wholly criminal, some sociopathic, some kind, some brave, some stupid, some talented, some bold, some cowards, some political, some apathetic, some progressive, some retrogressive – several are a mix of all these things at once. It has become the fashion for novelists to dictate to their readers, to tell them which characters to respect and which to despise, whom to love and whom to admire, whom to fear and whom to befriend. I prefer to think of readers making their own judgements, fierce or sympathetic as the case may be. That’s the kind of reader I am. I like to draw my own conclusions. Make my own analogies. But I am also a writer. And I know that to write a novel at all is, of course, to press one’s hand upon the scale. No novelist is innocent of that. But it’s one thing to write a story, quite another to insist on your own interpretation of it. To do that is to fence the reader in on all sides. What I will say about The Fraud is that the not-so-secret word which runs, like a watermark, through every line of it – and which ran through all of nineteenth-century British life – properly belongs to Andrew Bogle. That so many people failed to fully understand the meaning of that word – both at the time and right up to the present day – may be at least partially explained by another line of Chesterton’s: ‘Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough.’
Some Questions from El Cultural
When I still had my public-facing NYU email, I often got emails from young people who wrote to tell me that though they’d never read a word of any of my books, they did quite like my interviews. So I thought I’d include an example here. This one, sent in the middle of the pandemic by a Spanish journalist, is a fair representation of where my head was at, at the time. I’ve left the posed questions in the same Google Translate form in which they were presented (charmingly) to me.
– A few months ago, you confessed to having endured the first confinement much worse than your children, is it easier a second time?
I think so. You can get used to anything, and now I’m used to the cancellation of the future and having no plans. Some of that is good and some is worrying. I find it bizarre to switch on the news and see ‘1,564 dead today’ – as I just did – and somehow feel less shock and fear than I did in March when the numbers were so much lower. It’s a depressing aspect of the human character: the ability to become habituated. I used to interrogate my father about the Blitz and the Normandy landings and he would describe them as if there was nothing remotely dramatic about either event. They were his reality and he was habituated to them. The challenge is to retain your sense of horror and anger because those are the rightful responses to our current predicament.
– Now comes to Spain Feel Free, a book where you elaborate on various topics, but highlights your vindication of all kinds of culture, from great literature to neighbourhood libraries. Why is it so important and what has it meant in your life?
Why is what so important? Culture? For me that is life. I’m a limited person and that’s where my sense of pleasure is, my reason for living. I don’t know why – I’ve been that way since I was a child. The mediation of reality by other people is ‘my jam’ as the kids say. Perhaps I find reality itself overwhelming – I don’t know. It’s true that nine times out of ten I’d rather read about a sunset or look at a visual representation of one than actually see one. I don’t think that’s a virtue in me – it’s just the way I am constituted.
– In this cultural tour highlights your love for music, specifically hip hop. Do you think it is easier for the voices of the working class to be raised in it than in other fields such as literature or art?
I don’t think that’s a matter of opinion – it’s evidently the case. That is one of the reasons I love hip-hop, but I’d be lying if I said it was the primary one. I love its verbal genius, its attitude, its endless creative metamorphosis. But when I interviewed Jay-Z and we talked about the history of hip-hop, at one point – in my memory – we realized when you got right down to it the thing is the beat. You either find syncopated drum patterns utterly irresistible or you don’t. I do. Historians and anthropologists might trace this affection for pure rhythm all the way back to Africa, and I like to think of it that way, too.
– Critics and readers highlight your sharpness when analysing society and the freshness and naturalness of your style. How do you balance a critical eye and accessible language?
I don’t think of it like that. I think about clarity. I think: ‘How can I say what I mean in the fewest words with the least verbal baggage?’ Partly this is an aesthetic, and partly it is a memory of once being an uneducated and unsure person constantly alienated by my reading. Books that I sensed used language as a class marker. Latin tags and French phrases and things you had to be of a certain class to recognize and understand. When I got older and read philosophers like Wittgenstein and Russell and Fanon – or the essays of Virginia Woolf – it occurred to me that there are few thoughts so complex that they can’t be expressed in clear, accessible prose. It’s a discipline. You keep working at the sentence until it does exactly what you intended, no more and no less. I didn’t use to write like that, and I still don’t write with the clarity I’d like. But the other thing that has transformed critical writing in my view – or should have – is the existence of the Internet. When I wrote White Teeth all that excessive research was done in libraries and the war museum and so on, and I brandished it like any tedious young academic who wants you to know all the things they know, all the work they’ve done. Now ‘information’ of that sort is totally devalued. That’s a good thing. Anyone can gather information – in a second. And this changes the practice of writing – it creates a new kind of discipline. Now I can refer very lightly to things and know my reader is a cyborg and can look up any reference, follow any lead, in a moment. All texts are hypertexts now. And that means the surface of what you write can be accessed in different ways by different people. But it’s important to me that at the level of the sentence the door is wide open for all. How deep into the house you go after that is up to each reader alone.
– A few months ago, we could read another book of essays, Intimations, which you began to write after reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, saw the light here. Why do you think that in the pandemic (at least in Spain) we have turned to reading the classics? What other readings have accompanied you in these uncertain months?
I haven’t noticed that here, but I have noticed a resurgence of interest in fiction generally. I can’t speak for Spain or England but in myself I feel a need for evidence of alternative visions. I’m so tired of this endless scrolling version on the Internet called ‘the news’ or ‘my hot take on the news’. The recycled phrases, the familiar rhetorical positions, the ‘yeah but what about x’, the back and forth of fake debate…it seems to be a place of diverse views but the deeper truth is it’s all taking place on the identical platforms with identical aesthetics and in the end an identical motive: profit. It’s such a narrow version of ‘the real’. I just have to open Mieko Kawakami or Thackeray or Dostoevsky or Bambara and I’m in a completely alternative perspective, unsponsored, uncontrolled, unmediated by anything apart from language. It’s not an important vision of reality because two million people upvoted it. It’s important because I am communing with it and being transformed by it.
– ‘Writing is always resistance. Perhaps that is why it is a noble activity and sometimes even useful’, you affirm in a moment of Intimations. In what sense can these essays, or any writing, promote social change?
That’s beyond my remit – to tell people how my writing would promote social change! That’s what the platforms do. I don’t instruct people on the utility of my writing. Being a reader is an activity not an identity. We meet in the text. But what happens in that meeting is finally beyond my control. The scope of possibility is in the language. ‘The dog is brown’ cannot mean the same as ‘The dog is blue.’ But outside of the most simple and declarative sentences there is always ambiguity and ambivalence and therefore space for the reader to think independently from me.
I can speak instead of what I hope for. When I wrote Intimations I hoped for three quite simple things. First and foremost, to make money for the organizations I had chosen: the Mayor’s New York Fund for Covid and the Equal Justice Initiative. Secondly, I wanted to create a verbal space in which the mind that communed with those pages could move at a different speed and in a different way than that same mind operates when it is online. I wanted to give that mind an alternative way of being, if only for eighty-two pages. Finally, at my most idealistic I wondered whether that same mind, given eighty-two pages of relief and redirection, might take itself into the world and operate slightly differently there, too. My own socialist, humanist and existentialist point of view is of course clearly present in my writing – that view is a part of its essence. But I don’t have self-aggrandizing illusions about the power of writing. I know that mass movements change societies, not individual books. The good news is, though, that Intimations is not the only book interested in those principles. There are many going back two thousand years that will provide the same service so I’m in very good company.
– In many of these essays you fully undress yourself, transcend fiction to offer snippets of your life, your doubts, your desires…How do you feel about this exhibition?
Fully undressed is an exaggeration. People reveal more about themselves in one week on Instagram than I’ve done on the page in twenty years.
But I felt it was impossible to write about such shared and banal emotions without putting some of my own skin in the game. There’s nothing exceptional whatsoever about my reactions to the pandemic. I just wanted to record them clearly and honestly and leave space in each sentence for people to express their own feelings in their own heads as they read. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m not trying to hide anything. Here are my privileges, here are my mistakes, here are my fears, here are my inadequacies. Your own will be different and depend on a million different vectors. You’re richer or poorer than me. You’re a different race, a different gender, a different political persuasion, a different faith. OK. I don’t need you to think like me or be me or vice versa. All I want to do is demonstrate what a certain kind of thinking looks like. That lesson can be adapted to anybody else’s projects or arguments. But I think it’s important for all of us to remind ourselves that the thinking that is done on the platforms, the form of it, the way it shapes our minds, is not the only possibility.
– In Swing Times you already explored the first person for the first time. Does that experience help you write essays as personal as Intimations?
