One of the most valuable things the AWRF did for me this year was to include Geoff Dyer in their line-up, thereby allowing me to solve one of my longest-running literary doppelganger cases (my personal term for those pairs of authors you always mix up), that of Geoff Dyer and Geoff Nicholson. I’m not saying that I’ll never be unsure again as to which one wrote Bleeding London and which one wrote Paris Trance, but I have definitely locked the name Geoff Dyer to the tall, skinny, gelled-hair, supercilious (at least publicly) guy who writes about art and jazz, which means, by default, that Geoff Nicholson is the long-haired, slightly chubby fellow who writes about rock guitar, food, and interesting obsessions.
At the Opening Night Party, having “found” myself next to Geoff Dyer while reaching for a glass of wine at the bar, I seized the moment to tell him how much I was looking forward to his session, and, since he is clearly a person with a sense of humour, to tell him about being one of my literary doppelgangers and ask him if he had a suggestion for a mnemonic which might help me keep my Geoffs straight.
He looked puzzled, but not, as you might be thinking, by the concept of the literary doppelganger. No, he was having a hard time identifying this other “Geoff”, also a writer, of twenty books, from the same generation, who had also made his name on the London scene, whose first book had appeared practically simultaneously with his. “Geoff who?” he said, drawing his brows together and peering over my head into the distance. “Nicholson? Nicholson… Nicholson…”
Eventually he got it. “Ah yes, Geoff Nicholson!” So did he have a suggestion? He put his head back and laughed, but as he brought it back down a gleam was forming in his eye. I am sure he was going to rise to the challenge. This is a man who thrives on cleverness. Unfortunately, I will never know, because at that moment Karl Maughan appeared and took him by the arm. “Geoff has to meet his new publisher!” he said, and carried him away (or as some might say, saved him from me). How had I forgotten that when writers are on the circuit, they are always working?
By the time Geoff Dyer’s session rolled around, a talk about “Life and Art”, I realised I no longer needed the silly mnemonic anyway, although of course need had never really been the point (I hope you all got that!). But the capsule description offered by the event chair Gregory O’Brien in his introduction was interesting. “Public intellectual, writer, journalist”, he described him. I’ve always considered Geoff Dyer first and foremost a writer, and it’s not that common, I was thinking, that a writer is also a “public intellectual” (as compared to the “public intellectual” who writes books, Isaiah Berlin, say, or Umberto Eco). Nikos Kazantzakis comes to my mind first, but he’s dead; Pasolini, same. Also Leonardo Sciascia and Vaclav Havel. Of people alive today, who? Amos Oz, Wole Soyinka, maybe Ha Jin.
What’s the first thing you notice about that list? Was it this? “Traditionally speaking,” Geoff Dyer pointed out, “English fiction has been hostile to the idea of ideas”. His own description of what he set out to do was “Criticism, commentary, original… that 'in-between' space was a place where I thought I could operate” and “I’m at odds with the idea that the novel is the sole outlet for creative writing”.
He says he is not what he calls a “career writer”, someone who finishes a book and then starts a new one, and he writes about non-mass market topics. “Would jazz be an example of that?”, asks Greg O’Brien. “Actually, it was quite a canny move. Jazz has had three revivals during my lifetime” Dyer says gleefully.
His first book was about John Berger, a “huge figure” as Dyer calls him, a writer about art, whose novel G won the Booker Prize. Dyer says his book about Berger was unbelievably boring – “It was my surrogate PhD” -- but then he met Berger, who was incredibly encouraging. "John Berger is the one who taught me about creative non-fiction” he testifies.
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His new book, Zona, is a meditation on film, art and life, all through the lens of the Andrei Tarkovsky science fiction film from the seventies, Stalker. Tarkovsky’s film can be told in two sentences, he says, and then does it in one. “People in a place where at the centre their dreams come true.” “You don’t have to have seen the film. My publisher hasn’t seen it yet. I’ve come to view the film as being a trailer, an advert, for my book.”
The Geoff Dyer mannerisms amuse me. He is a good story teller. He story tells as images from the film show on the screen. I loved it. “The book is about an obsession. There is just one train station now in Cheltenham, where I grew up. When I was growing up there were four. My father used to take me to watch the trains at xxx (mumbled name of closest station). It closed when I was four, but at eight or nine I used to go play there with my friends. It was all rusted, decayed, tracks overgrown with weeds, nettles, dandelions.”
“Here we are” says Stalker. Home at last.
The book’s epigraph is from Camus. “After all the best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly."
As Dyer likes to say, “Whatever else people think of my books, the epigraphs are fantastic”.
As the hour draws to a close Greg O’Brien says the three adjectives that come to his mind about Dyer’s writing are “Boredom, impatience, and xxx (mumble).” What could it be? I'd happily give my vote to "candour". Or was it "irritation"? This is, after all, the man who wrote a book called Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, and who had this to say to Gregory O'Brien and the public at AWRF 2012 about his new book, the one he had come to talk about:
“I stop listening when someone starts to pitch a book to me and especially if the pitch is about the contents. Of course the only thing to pitch is the tone, so take a look at the first paragraph and if it irritates you, go ahead and read it anyway!”
I plan to.
May 15, 2012
Life and Art: Geoff Dyer at AWRF 2012
May 12, 2012
Opening night gala at the AWRF 2012
The New Zealand Listener Gala Night, the opening event of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, can be declared a resounding success. I can't remember having been at any Writers and Readers Festival event during which the ASB Theatre so resounded with laughter and applause - the latter explicitly solicited by the beautiful and perfect Carol Hirschfeld as MC. Carol personally led the first rounds of applause, which she performed in a sort of flamenco style, arms upraised, a few to the left, a few to the right. I think she was simply trying not to clap right into the mike, actually, but whatever the reason, it added quite a touch of style.
The event used the "True stories told live" format, "live and true storytelling, unscripted and unmediated" as the programme assured us, on the theme What the Dickens?, honouring Charles's 200th birthday. As could be expected when storytelling is involved, and whether it was done on purpose or not, having half the presenters be Irish was certainly a master stroke in terms of laughter.
In this sense, the revelation of the evening, at least for me, was Eoin Colfer (double revelation actually, because I also found out to my surprise that his name is pronounced "Oh-in" and not "Ee-in"), who warmed us up with a short intro about how he once appeared at an All Irish (Go Irish? something like that) event with Roddy Doyle and Colin Farrell, where the organiser took him to one side and told him "Your Irish accent is not very good, could you spice it up with a few colloquialisms?" And his reply was, he said, "What? No, I'm a serious writer, bejeezus!"
Roddy Doyle's story of a night he spent in the Dublin A&E was the most Dickensian of the stories, while Geoff Dyer, who instead of a story performed a lecture on Jackson Pollock, with a lot of commentary on binge-drinking and baldness, may have cut the most Dickensian figure on stage. He kept falling into long pauses and announcing he had to go consult his notes, and doing it, which I took to be one of those English upper class habits where you are so confidently upper class that you can be kind of shabby and amateurish. I'm not very good at recognising English classes. But my English-born friend Helen thought that was very funny when I confided it to her at the after-opening party. Apparently not!
I got done laughing at that just in time to hear this thought from one of speakers who had lined up to christen the festival, the CEO of Creative New Zealand, Stephen Wainwright: "You know... in the dark ages when there was no reading... we don't wanna go back there!" Agreement was written on all the faces present, except perhaps those like myself who were trying to handle the exceptionally slippery canapés, little triangles of soft white bread permeated with melted cheese. Mine slipped right out of my fingers and onto the floor, prompting an incredibly quick response from the world's foremost Nabokov scholar, Brian Boyd, who will be speaking on Saturday about "Why lyrics matter" in conversation with Iain Sharp, an event I highly recommend. Brian deftly swooped down on my fallen canapé with a serviette just as I imagine Nabokov might have brought his net down on a Karner blue butterfly, and waving away the suggestion that this was anything but routine.
Now that's class!
January 08, 2011
Literary doppelgangers
New Year's Resolution: Resolve those literary mix-ups
Does this happen to everyone to have authors you always mix up with
another author? Let me say without shame that until just recently I was
forever confusing the poets John Berryman and John Ashbery. "What? How
can he have a new book of poetry? Didn't he kill himself?" Actually, if
it comes to that, at one point I used to get James Merrill mixed up with both of them -- that "err" again, and a long-term partner named David like Ashbery's.
James Merrill got out of the mix when I read about him and David and
the Ouija board when Alison Lurie's memoir about them came out -- five
hundred pages of poetry dictated by a Ouija board was definitely madness
enough to distinguish him forever. My problems with the other two
persisted until a friend of mine declared John Berryman to be his
favourite poet, which astounded me since of course I confused him with
the long-winded, dare I say pompous (just my opinion) John Ashbery.
It feels so good that I've resolved that the first literary thing I'm
going to do in 2011 is to clear up the other cases of literary
doppelgangerism which I find so annoying, which would be:
1. Richard Wilbur and Richard Howard
Richard Wilbur:
born 1921
Poet, translator of French literature (Moliere, Racine, Mallarmé)
US Poet Laureate
Pulitzer prize winner
Richard Howard:
born 1929
Poet, translator of French literature (Camus, Baudelaire)
Poet laureate of New York
Pulitzer prize winner
Which one has a French bulldog named Gide, wore capes and hung out with Edmund White?
2. Geoff Dyer and Geoff Nicholson
Geoff Dyer:
born 1958 lives in London
clever British author of both fiction and non-fiction
Geoff Nicholson:
born 1953 divides his time between London and Los Angeles
clever British author of both fiction and non-fiction
Which one wrote Paris Trance and which one wrote Bleeding London? Which one wrote The lost art of walking and which one wrote Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It?
3. WD Snodgrass and WS Merwin
WD Snodgrass:
American poet, born 1926
wrote a beautiful poem with a lute in it
WS Merwin:
American poet, born 1927
wrote a beautiful poem with a flute in it
Which one looked like an elf, was married to Dido and they were friends of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Answers:
1. Richard Howard
2. Geoff Dyer wrote Paris Trance and Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and Geoff Nicholson wrote Bleeding London and The lost art of walking
3. WS Merwin
I've definitely got the Richards and the Ws straight now, but I still
had to look back at the catalogue for the Geoffs. They're going to take
some more work. Maybe someone out there has already devised a system?
Please let me know!
In the meantime,here's a modern Inferno from the brilliant John Berryman:
Parting as descent
