No one could ask for better than this, from Olivia Laing–
“Wish I Was Here calls itself an anti-memoir, and there are elements of autobiography swirling through the matrix, but it’s also a manifesto on writing that ruthlessly reassesses the connection between writing and self-knowledge. Better to write from a hidden core, to let sentences eddy from a lost self, to resist familiarity and instead bottle the flagrant strangeness of the world.“
–Guardian Summer Reads, my italics.
Summer makes me increasingly strange, a condition I’m increasingly able to own & deploy. Some of this feeling of ownership stems from age, where “age” is sensed as a release, a freeing from restraints both external and internal. Some of it might be that I finally accepted summer is for sitting in the sunshine & not caring whether you’re illuminated–switched on–or not. Some of it might be to do with this recent change of circumtances, which I can hardly avoid acknowledging. Anyway, I like the heat & feel as full of an inexplicable optimism as Kerans on his doomed and fulfilling journey south. At last!
Your hands & feet are cold. There’s a certain amount of rain. The dogs are howling in the next garden. Someone in the street says, “Almost everything can be interesting,” & then, “August the first is too late.” You read:
“A few days later Lanny tried the crystal ball again, and there came something new. Blue water, sparkling in sunshine–everything was always bright in that globe, like a technicolour film.”
This leads you to wonder if Upton Sinclair–surfacing from the deep trench of your early teens to bob around 50 years later in a backwater bookshop in Much Wenlock–is, in fact, some sort of forgotten “influence”. Better read on, now you’ve got him home. But perhaps first close the door & find some socks.
published as “you left the door open”, August 2014
Remember the classic f/sf genre argument to the economic utility & resultant “proper” architectures of writing which, if you got sucked in, you could only escape by saying: “I see you’re still making a virtue out of not getting it”? There needs to be a line drawn under that. All of us–inside the silo or out–can just walk away now if we can’t be bothered to engage. The internet oversold ideas of “engagement” and “debate” the way it oversells everything, until eventually it became obvious that engagement and debate are only ever a rhetorical trap–an invitation to help shift the Overton Window against yourself. Look around at the politics we got from that. There’s a healthier path: time for us all to call goodnight & each go our separate ways & not be compelled to continue this mind-numbing exchange of opinions we didn’t really feel was necessary in the first place.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird:
“Write towards vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this.” [My emphasis.]
I’ve never read Anne Lamott, but I keep coming across this quote. It reminds me powerfully of Elizabeth Taylor on how life proceeds from the unarmoured, or words to that effect*. And I think that from “Write towards vulnerability” to “absent or fraudulent” this advice holds up. Not so sure about “Tell the truth as you understand it.” –that’s always seemed to be a get-out clause from any useful definition of truth. Not that there’s a useful one available anyway: truth is for religion & lawyers, it’s testamentary & the claim that you’re telling it when it’s just some words is demonstrably what got us into today’s mess & keeps us there. Something describable as a fact would be more to my taste (although I’m equally aware of the pitfalls inherent in the concept “fact” & not at all naive in that regard so please don’t @ me).
Anyway I rarely feel I’ve found a way out of the armour, not by writing. I long ago came to revel in the cover it affords, the ironic dissociations & evasions & conjuring tricks, the little self-protective shifts from terrace to terrace of self-awareness. I can’t approve of that aspect of myself, but I can’t disapprove either. It’s a useful tension. In a weird sort of way, if you’re faithful to it, the struggle between open & closed keeps you honest. There are intimacies, admissions and vulnerabilities in Wish I Was Here, but they’re bound into the structure by that tension. They aren’t presented in the traditional revelatory narrative of the medium, any more than they were in Climbers; & I think they gain from that.
*It’s in dialogue, on p57 of A Wreath of Roses.
Wish I Was Here has already done quite well for itself. For those who’ve lost patience with Wikipedia’s mule (determined as it is never to catch up or catch on) or who’re sick & tired of the swampy clumps of poor research and pure algo-comedy with which Google now overpowers everyone’s entries—here’s a round-up:
Reviews
Nina Allan noted in the Guardian,”Harrison’s writing is still vital and still angry, still engaged in the now, still fighting for purchase”. The International Times, itself fairly old school, concluded: “This book is old school experimentalism” adding, “It is also one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.” Subsequently there were raves in the Times, by Dominic Maxwell, who called it an “illuminating, challenging, self-questioning but wildly stimulating book”; in the TLS, by Madoc Cairns, who notes, “Memory no more records than writing represents”; and in the iNewspaper, by Max Liu. No one could ask for more. Every one of these reviews finds & articulately examines one of the book’s major themes. Chris Power’s, in the Sunday Times, is perhaps the most broadly insightful of them all.
Interviews
Anthony Cummins did an interview for the Observer on 20 May. Since then we’ve had two or three podcasts, including this one from the blog of the legendary Parisian bookshop Shakespeare & Company, centre of all things literary since Gertrude Stein. An interview by the remarkable Olivia Laing will appear soon at Granta online.
Readings & In Conversations
WIWH road-tested well at the Brixton Review of Books fifth birthday party at Foyles, an evening of readings organised by Will Eaves and Catherine Taylor. Publication day evening I had an hour and a half of laughs with my favourite interlocutor, Jennifer Hodgson of the gorgeous larynx, under the auspices of the LRB Bookshop (who, I think, recorded it for their podcast). Extracts from the book are available to read free in the birthday edition of the BRB and on the LRB Bookshop blog.
Forthcoming
There’s more to come from that direction, with reading/in-conversation events at Voce Books in Birmingham (chaired by Gary Budden); at Burley Fisher’s one-day festival on 23 September, in conversation with Goldsmiths Prize winner Isabel Waidner; at the Edinburgh Festival (19 August, chair to be decided); and at Sheffield’s always lively Off the Shelf festival (Saturday 21 October at 6pm, chair to be decided). Full details of all those, here & on Twitter, as soon as they’re available.
In June at some point the very experimental Matt Rogers will launch a purchasable recording of Haunt Game, our soundscape & spoken word collaboration, which appropriates some fragments from the book and turns them into a kind of… what? Sci fi fantasy? Dismantled autobiography? Who can tell? Not me. Usual story then.
I’m looking forward to all these events & more.
Acknowledgements
Wish I Was Here should really have been dedicated to everyone whose interest, advice, friendship & kindness over the years encouraged me to go as far as I could in directions I’d previously been too timid to explore. So here they are: Lindsay Duguid, Will Eaves; Deb Chadbourn, Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, Jerry Killick, Eileen Evans, Seth Etchells; Lara Pawson, Julian Richards & Dan Jones; Nick Royle, Sara Sarre, Jim Perrin, John Gray, Rob Macfarlane, Simon Spanton, Ian Patterson, Olivia Laing, Richard Ashcroft, Jon Day; Ra Page & Comma Press; Chris Priest, Nina Allan, Jen Hodgson, Richard Jones, Gaby Wood, Isabel Waidner, Helen Macdonald. Thanks to Tim Parnell and the Goldsmiths Prize team, 2020; and a tip of the hat to Booker panel companions Neil MacGregor, Shahidha Bari, Helen Castor and Alain Mabanckou, who did so much to make 2022 an enjoyable & intriguing year.
I also want to thank Will Francis & his team at the Janklow & Nesbit agency; Luke Brown at Serpent’s Tail, best editor; and especially Robert Greer who worked so hard to bring about the results noted above. Finally: Cath Phillips. Without whom (this would not have been proofread).
the m john harrison blog 