Geoff Dyer

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Geoff Dyer joins us from London. Hello again Geoff, welcome.

Geoff Dyer: Hello Ramona, nice to be on the show again.

Ramona Koval: You say in an essay about being sacked from a job that it takes a bit of getting used to the idea that spending 365 days a year doing exactly as you please might be a viable proposition. So how important has being free to waste your time as you please been to your emergence as a writer, do you think?

Geoff Dyer: Yes, it's been really, really important to me. It depends, I sometimes come across these people, and actually people who have senior jobs in publishing and they will do their incredibly demanding job in the day and then either at night or maybe even before they go to work they'll be writing chapters of the books. And it is possible to do that, but I've always found it necessary to have quite a lot of time at my disposal. I don't know, I guess I've just got used to it over the years, but I was sort of trained to operate like this. When I went to university, the convention was that you didn't go to lectures at all, you would just see your tutor for one session a week and the rest of the time you'd be reading on your own. So to that extent I've just kept up with that way of proceeding for an unbelievably long number of years since then.

Ramona Koval: Yes, it seems you only realised this though when you went through some diaries you'd kept from the 1980s. What did they show you?

Geoff Dyer: Oh yes, what happened, I was asked to contribute a piece to an anthology about getting sacked. As it happens, the anthology was never published, effectively the anthology itself got sacked. And I was trying to remember exactly what had happened, and anyway my wife found for me my old diaries and I looked through them. What struck me was what a fantastic time I was having in all sorts of ways in London, and we have this thing in England or at least we did, maybe we don't now as employment law has changed, but it was called unfair dismissal. And reading through these diaries I realised that mine was a case of un-unfair dismissal, I really did deserve to get sacked, and to me it was a real...I really did at that point think okay, this world of work is not for me.

And I'd always resented it because after these years of being a student and then being on the dole for a while, it just seemed such an incredible intrusion into my time and I realised I was much better off being freelance. And also I should say that this coincided with a period when it was actually starting to become possible with the support of the dole to lead some kind of freelance existence as a writer because all of the supplements in the papers were expanding, so every week there'd be a pull-out history of ratatouille through the ages or something, so there was lots of opportunity to write stuff.

Ramona Koval: I think we should say that some of the things that you had been doing in this diary in the '80s, there was a lot of drug taking, there was a lot of magic mushrooms, and you said once you got six weeks worth of magic mushroom...whatever you would call it, trips or something. And you are going to see a lot of films and you were reading books and you were having all kinds of interesting affairs, but you didn't seem to ever write about your work.

Geoff Dyer: No, as I say at the end of that piece, after I had done all this research into my own life I came to two conclusions; one, that was a lot of fun, and two, what an exemplary way to spend your early 20s, and it seems to me that's pretty much what you are meant to be doing at that age. I wasn't doing a lot of writing but I would say that it wasn't a complete waste of time, it was some kind of creative idleness.

For example, I put together at the local photocopying shop a little pamphlet, a deluxe limited edition of four for my friends called Memories of Hallucinogenics, and it was printed on nice blue paper. Anyway, fast forward to 1989 and my first novel comes out which is called The Colour of Memory, so I think you can see through the evolution of that. Some of that time started feeding into the stuff that I would eventually write about. And also because of being a student, I had this automatic...not exactly self discipline, but readiness to work and find out things for myself, that was built into my constitution by then I think.

Ramona Koval: I think we should say that you weren't one of those very wealthy people who had a history of being on an independent gentleman's wealthy salary, private income, because your parents were working class. They were actually in that posh town of Cheltenham but they were working class people. And your father's advice to you was never put anything in writing.

Geoff Dyer: Yes, that was a great bit of advice. Of course I didn't need a private income because this was the great heyday of the dole in...so to provide a bit of context, I left university in 1980, the height of Thatcherism and lots of unemployment, but all the support system of the welfare state was still in place. So actually for somebody who had studied English and was used to just seeing a tutor once a week, it was quite an easy transition to go from that to just having to sign on once a week. And it wasn't a huge amount of money, but...

Ramona Koval: I'm sure that's not what they had in mind at all.

Geoff Dyer: Yes, but the thing was that because there was a whole community or scene in the area I was living, you didn't feel poor, even though of course you were relative to what was going on with the yuppies or whatever you want to call them at the time, so it was really quite a good trade-off. Just to pick up what you are saying about my dad, he gave me another great piece of advice earlier on when I was deciding which A-levels to do, and his advice was don't do history because it's all in the past, which I think is fantastic advice.

Ramona Koval: Yes, obviously you bucked against that and you went for books in a big way. You've got an interesting piece in here about...we often talk about writer's block that you talk about a reader's block, and this is something we do suffer from. I find myself suffering from it sometimes, it comes and goes depending on what there is to read. Tell me about reader's block and you.

Geoff Dyer: I'd always been a heavy reader and then I was getting more and more trouble reading, and that essay I guess I published about ten years ago when this inability to finish things became really chronic. It was quite a complicated malaise because I was always not reading things in the interests of reading something better. To use a phrase from economics, the opportunity cost of reading a given book always seemed too great, so for example I would not be reading...as I said in the essay, I wouldn't read James Hawes because I'd be feeling I should be reading Henry James, but of course I couldn't read Henry James because he is too difficult.

And actually since then I've thought more about this, and I think it's just part of a standard actuarial process really. I read Tolstoy when I was 18, 19, and that represented such a huge expansion of my understanding of all sorts of things, of human nature, psychology, gesture, you name it, just vast. And when you start reading serious books, every particular book represents a huge addition to your understanding of the world.

Fast forward down the track, by which time you've read about 500 books, then the extra little bit of understanding you're going to get, it's going to be incremental and rather small compared with that initial great surge, so you are automatically going to become a more discerning reader and you become aware of conventions operating. And I think this is very, very common, you become increasingly impatient with the conventions of the novel.

There's a guy, an American, who published a manifesto recently called Reality Hunger where he talks about the way that he has pretty well given up reading novels. Now, I'm not like him, I'm not like David Shields, I'm not a total anti-novel Jihad-ist, but I completely agree with him that what I'm after from writing of all sorts it is (his great phrase) 'the deep plumbing of consciousness'. And I found that I wasn't getting that.

I should say also there is another actuarial or biological trend going on here; if you are a man then gradually as you get older you want to spend more and more of your time reading military history. So hopefully something always does end up coming in to fill the gap left by novels. You're absolutely right though, it really does come and go, and the other thing about it is it's really stupid, isn't it. There are loads of great books out there, there's no excuse, it's got to be one's own problem that you can't find anything to read, but nevertheless you do go through these phases. It's one of these many things, it's stupid but it is not unusual.

Ramona Koval: Yes, isn't there a tendency to go back towards the canon because you can be sure that quite a lot of people think that that's quite a good book to read, and you can never really be sure when you start something new by somebody that this will actually be worth the investment of time. And you're going to die soon as well.

Geoff Dyer: There is all that, but in terms of the canon, it's perhaps not as reliable a guide to excellence as you thought it was when you were a kid. Aged about 40 I decided I would really read Nostromo. That book is not only incredibly boring, I mean, nobody would dispute that, it's unbelievably terrible. But when you are young you read these things because you feel that some kind of enlightenment is going to be the reward for trudging through all this stuff. So yes, the canon is not infallible. I don't know, maybe you'll get somebody on the show one day whose idea of bliss is to read Nostromo and I'd be very interested to listen to that broadcast.

Ramona Koval: We'll send you an email when that's coming up. Talking about re-reading, you do sometimes re-read the books you love. And Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is one you come back to. Tell me about the experience of reading and re-reading that book.

Geoff Dyer: Yes, that's a really good example to pick I think because we were doing The Great Gatsby for A-level, quite a relatively simple book, but they encouraged us also to read Tender Is the Night which I kind of like, and it was one of those books that just kept lingering and haunting me. Part of the mystery of it I think is the...the most basic summary of what happens is that Dick Diver, this guy with his great aspirations, squanders his talent by moving in this rich, glamorous world and basically becomes an alcoholic.

Okay, it's a straightforward story of dissipation, but I always found that the more I considered the book and the more I re-read it, the real reasons for his decline become...they sort of recede as you appear to approach them, and I just had this idea after reading a whole bunch of unrelated things that there was something in...Dick Diver believed that there was something in his destiny, at some level he wanted to fail, he felt it was his destiny to fail, and I think there are people who have that kind of perverse urge in them. And so in a weird way what happens to him, that's why there's something weirdly heroic or, in the traditional sense, tragic about what happens to him.

Ramona Koval: Yes, you say you've written a version of Tender Is the Night in an attempt to dramatise this theory of failure and destiny. What attracts you to this idea of failure and destiny, because there is a trope I suppose in your work and even in your literary journalism, something about trying things and failing, trying them again, coming back to them. Like the book about DH Lawrence, a book about not being able to write a book about DH Lawrence is really part of this kind of music, isn't it?

Geoff Dyer: Yes, you're absolutely right. That's the interesting thing about Fitzgerald, isn't it, he was absolutely besotted by failure. Of course he loved wealth and all of this kind of stuff, but really what is striking is the way that right from the beginning he is writing about failure, even when he is in the midst of the most incredible success. I say in one of the essays that it was necessary for him to achieve early on these great heights of success in order for him to experience what he was really interested in which was the vertiginous thrill of absolute failure.

And to pick up on the other word you used, 'destiny', yes, it is really, really interesting, isn't it, especially now that we don't believe that what happens in our lives is all mapped out in advance by some sort of higher power. So what interests me I guess is the routine business, the daily business of trying to achieve your destiny. And what that means I guess is trying to work out always what you really most deeply want, and quite often there is a distinction between what you think you really want and actually what your deepest desires are.

Ramona Koval: And what about in you?

Geoff Dyer: Well, I'm still trying to figure that out. In a sense if you are a writer, your destiny is bound up with what you write. So it happens that I've just finished a crazy book which is all about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, and that film is entirely about people making their way to this room where their deepest wishes will apparently come true, and then of course it turns out that what they wish for isn't what they thought. So I can see now that that fits in with that kind of trajectory you were describing earlier on.

Ramona Koval: So these writers that you write about, that you think about, that you come back to, Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald and others that you write about...when you write a review about someone's work, Richard Ford's work or some of the other reviews in the collection, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, are you writing because you are interested in learning from them, are you thinking that some of your themes might sing with theirs? What is it about the people you are attracted to writing about, as a literary journalist, that feeds into your own work?

Geoff Dyer: On the one hand they are just the people whose books I look forward to when they come out. So I've been a huge Don DeLillo fan for so long. I'm just interested to see what they're doing, and in a sense it's not that different really being a reviewer to just being a reader in that if you are any kind of active reader, you read the book, you ask yourself what was going on, you articulate your response to your own satisfaction. The difference when you are a reviewer is you do all that in public, or in print at least.

But you're right again, it gets a bit more interesting than that perhaps when you are not just being a critic but a writer because there is a constant traffic between what you're doing as a creative writer and what you're writing about. So quite often there is a tacit lobbying going on. Several reviewers have pointed this out, that I talk about the way that, for example...in the case of John Cheever I say that his best writing is found not in the short stories but in his journal, and people have said that because I have tended towards marginal kinds of writing because I wouldn't want to stake my reputation on having written a straight-down-the-line big novel but I've tended to write in these...I don't know what you call them, peripheral or marginal forms, that I'm tacitly lobbying...

Ramona Koval: I think you could call them idiosyncratic and original though, couldn't you?

Geoff Dyer: Indeed, and that's the point I make, but quite often I make that about...instead of just beating my chest and saying that about me personally, I say that in defence of somebody else...

Ramona Koval: How very English of you.

Geoff Dyer: Yes, and I think it was TS Eliot who said that any kind of person who is a practising writer in their criticism they are always tacitly setting an agenda which is partially about what they are themselves up to.

Ramona Koval: Yes, I was then fascinated, having read lots of the things you've written and knowing about your interests in those literary people, that you are so interested in photography and looking at photos and writing about photography and conveying visual ideas. Tell me about your interest in photography and writing about it.

Geoff Dyer: Yes, I became interested in photography through the writing about photography that I was reading. That is to say, through those classic kinds of people, through John Berger who was a huge influence on me, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes. So it was through these people that I realised, for example, that there was this whole...you know, I was very familiar with the history of the novel and I got to realise that there was this history of photography.

So in a way a turning point in me...there was a picture of DH Lawrence that I really, really loved, a fantastic portrait, but that's what it was to me, it was a picture of DH Lawrence. It was only later that I came to realise this wasn't just a picture of DH Lawrence, it was a photograph by Edward Weston, somebody who in the history of photography is every bit as important as Lawrence is in the history of the novel.

At various times I'd got asked to write little essays on photographers, there are quite a few of those essays in my first collection Anglo-English Attitudes, and as I learned more and more about photography, so I became more and more fascinated in the way that the tradition of photography evolved, until, to cut a long story short, I thought I really want to learn a lot about photography and the best way to learn about anything is to write a book about it. So I wrote this crazy history of photography called The Ongoing Moment, and written really to bring myself up to speed. A lot of the stuff in the new collection of essays is stuff that I've written after that book came out, by which time I really do know quite a bit about that history and have become, in a small way...I don't want to use the word 'player' but some kind of participant...

Ramona Koval: 'Guru'?

Geoff Dyer: Not at all, some sort of participant in the community of discussion about photography. And the thing about photography...why am I interested in it? To give you that really straightforward answer; how could one not be, because photography is so interesting.

Ramona Koval: It is. But can you imagine a book about photography without the photos?

Geoff Dyer: Well, unfortunately I have been sort of forced to because one of the criticisms that was made of my book The Ongoing Moment was that some of the pictures that were there were far too small, and some of the pictures I discussed weren't in the book. That is really not my fault and I'd not written a book with pictures before, I had no idea of the incredible headache, the unbelievable tedium of trying to arrange permission. And also what I wasn't aware of was the hellish expense of it. Okay, so it's a bit of a drag, I sympathise with the readers, it would be nice if we had the book printed on really expensive paper, if the reproductions were all full page, et cetera. It's not as much of a problem now as it would have been because you can just look them all up on the internet. Of the Diane Arbus pictures that I talk about, none of them are reproduced because I couldn't get permission for all sorts of really fun reasons which we haven't got time to go into now.

Ramona Koval: But what about the problem of writing about something that is so tantalisingly not there?

Geoff Dyer: Yes, in a way I realised that it was a good idea to assume that the pictures you were writing about wouldn't be available for the reader to look at because if they were there it could induce a kind of laziness in you, that you would just assume what was there. So actually the effort to describe what is not there actually I think enhances what's going on which is that straightforward interrogation of the visible, which actually is not even that dissimilar to what you're doing in the process of writing fiction anyway, when you are trying to make the reader see something that's not there.

Ramona Koval: It is, it's exactly like that, but somehow when you're talking about something that could be seen, there is a temptation to the reader to just want to see it.

Geoff Dyer: Oh yes, and in this new book some of the analyses of the pictures are so detailed and I compare what's going on in one picture with a similar one, those pictures had to be there and that is an integral part of reading the piece. Ideally there would be a lot more reproductions. Having said that, I'm really pleased that there is...I mean, it's all bound up with economics anyway. There's an eight-page colour inset where some of the pictures that had to be reproduced in colour are there.

Ramona Koval: So what's your view about the digital world of photography manipulation?

Geoff Dyer: It's funny, I always get asked that but I don't have anything interesting to say about it at all, except that it is just the latest technological manifestation of something that has been around for a long time. So this question of the extent to which the photograph tells the truth is long-standing. To take the really famous old example, there's that picture by Roger Fenton, of the aftermath of...maybe the valley that the Charge of the Light Brigade happened in, so it's a valley that the Light Brigade charged down in the Crimea. And there's a picture of cannonballs strewn all over the ground, and the head of photography at the V&A, Mark Haworth-Booth, he noted that there were two different versions of this and the cannonballs were arranged differently in these two pictures.

So he took this to the great doyen of photography curators, John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he pointed this out to him, these two different documentary records, and Szarkowski looked at both pictures long and hard and he said, yes, you know, you're right, the one on the left has got more balls. So it is a long-standing thing, it goes right back almost to the very earliest examples of documentary photography.

Ramona Koval: You've mentioned Susan Sontag as one of the people who you were really influenced by, her writing on photography. She is an interesting case of somebody who is so well known for her criticism but desperate to be thought of as a novelist, and in fact she once berated me for calling her a public intellectual.

Geoff Dyer: Well, whatever you'd have said she would have berated you, that was the style I think.

Ramona Koval: But what about this ambition, wanting to be the novelist and not the person who talks about other people's work?

Geoff Dyer: She's great of course, she is a really interesting example of that in that I think in a way everything that made her a great essayist was working against her being a natural or instinctive novelist. In a way what she did in those later books, The Volcano Lover and In America, she found a way, just about, of arriving at some kind of discursive form where what were handicaps sort of became strengths. But actually for me Sontag would be a great writer on the basis of her writing about other people.

And although I can't remember the exact nuances and intricacies of my argument in the essay about Sontag in the book, I think I managed to diagnose what was going on there. I write fiction and these other things, but what I wouldn't do, and this is very different to Sontag, I would never claim it is my novels that are really, really important. I do like my novels but I'm so aware that as a novelist I am one of the most limited novelists around. The list of things I can't do is absolutely enormous. And also here we come back to something else we were talking about, I don't want to grant the novel the enormously privileged position that it had in the 19th century or in the early years of the 20th, because I think actually there are all sorts of other kinds of writing which are available now where you can make your claim as a creative writer.

Ramona Koval: I'm just thinking about how...I called you eclectic and there are lots of different kinds of interests that you have that you want to write about in the world, and you have kept yourself doing what you want and following your nose, I guess, through many years of being a writer. Does your wonder at the world and the ideas in it increase with the years or do you find yourself feeling a little bit jaded?

Geoff Dyer: That's a killer question actually because I've noticed unfortunately there is a real cycle I go through, so I'm really happy when I'm writing a book and finding out about something. So it happens that, as I say, I've just finished this book about Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, which really made me incredibly happy, and now I'm in that slight trough wondering 'what next?'. And of course there will come a point when you run out of things that you're interested in.

But I am absolutely convinced that...John Berger, for example, who is in his 80s now who is one of the most youthful, energetic people I've ever encountered, even at this advanced age, that thing of remaining interested in the world and also not succumbing to that thing where you decide that actually everything that's going on now...that there was some sort of cut-off point, it happens at various points where you decide that after TS Eliot, poetry was finished, or after Antonioni, cinema was finished. You've got to continue to be engaged with the present rather than falling prey to some sort of antiquarianism or nostalgia I think.

Ramona Koval: So what contemporary interest to you have to keep you young?

Geoff Dyer: Well, there's my allotment, that's a great source of...

Ramona Koval: I'm talking about the culture, mate, the culture!

Geoff Dyer: Oh loads; photography, writing. What I am conscious of, and this is probably not unusual, I'm really not anything like as up on music as I was, so musically I'm probably going to say the same thing that I said when I was last on your program, that people ask me what I'm listening to now, and what do I say? The Necks of course, I'm always banging on about The Necks, and that hasn't changed I'm afraid since the last time I was on. The thing about The Necks, they've been together for so long but it's still advancing, what they're doing. So how incredible, the last couple of albums, we got Tony Buck the drummer playing this incredible guitar. Sorry, we're not on the show to talk about The Necks, are we.

Ramona Koval: That's all right, I should say they're an Australian experimental contemporary music group out of Sydney, but often in Berlin.

Geoff Dyer: That's right, and that last album of theirs Silver Water is just an absolute storming masterpiece I think.

Ramona Koval: But what about writers? That was really my question. What are the marvellous young things that are keeping you from being cynical? Are there any?

Geoff Dyer: Yes, there are lots. In a way I'm instinctively going to say Lorrie Moore, and then I realise that Lorrie Moore is actually a year older than I am. I'm slightly embarrassed now that the names that spring to mind are actually people who are my contemporaries...

Ramona Koval: It might be just instructive, don't worry, not embarrassing at all.

Geoff Dyer: Oh okay. So a book that I absolutely loved, John Haskell's American Purgatorio...and now I'm getting this horrible thing that can happen when you're asked a question like this, my mind is going so blank and I'm just seeing this huge neon sign in my head flashing up 'Nostromo'...Nostromo is a great book!

Ramona Koval: Well, we'll just leave you with your dreams of Nostromo. Geoff Dyer, thank you so much for talking to us again on The Book Show.

Geoff Dyer: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: It's always a pleasure. Geoff Dyer, whose book Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 1999-2010 is published by Canongate.

Publications

Title: Working the Room : Essays and 1999 - 2010

Author: Geoff Dyer

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd