Initially, it was meant to be only a simple interview;
something little about his works (as he has had quite a line of poems and
novels published, including the recently-translated Breakfast at Midnight) and then a question or two about the Prague
Microfestival that he is the co-creator of. Yet as it is with many things in
life, things turn out differently than one expects. It was soon after I sat down in front of his desk in the
office of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory that I realized that this
is no man of small talk, but one of many words that convey experience and fine
intellectuality. Putting my initial nervousness aside, interviewing him was a
mind-opening and unique experience – for the next hour I was in the world of a
writer. The following is an approximation of our
exchange. (Prepared by Anna Hupcejová)
Did you ever experience a writer’s block?
Writer’s
block? Nah. Over the years I’ve collected ideas for pieces I’ve had in mind,
putting them down in notebooks that I tend to lose, abandon or just forget
about. When I do start writing something, I don’t usually go like “this is the
way I want the story to go” – things usually unfold by themselves, so to answer
your question, no, I’ve never really experienced writer’s block. Thing is,
there’s this sense of anxiety people have when writing, this pressure to write
something…
Decent?
Yes.
So when you say ‘writer’s block,’ it’s probably just anxiety rather than
something specific to writing. But if you believe Freud, everything’s tied back
to anxiety anyway, even writing.
How did you get to Prague in the first place?
By
complete accident. Back in 1994 I was on my way to Seville for a conference and
on the way I stopped in Prague. The city struck me as a city of possibility –
pretty much anything was possible. Gradually I contacted people living here,
including people working at this faculty – Martin Procházka and Martin Hilský
being among them. It basically went on from there. I spent a lot of time
hanging out, moving between the different scenes – everyone wanted to be a
writer or an artist or a film-maker back then – there was a sense that it could
be a way of life instead of (as it seemed elsewhere) a professional occupation.
The usual criteria just didn’t apply. But that was a long time ago already…
What about your family and friends, how did they react
to you moving to the other side of the world?
I
don’t recall even asking my family about what they thought… Most of the people
who knew I was considering it thought I was insane, that it was career suicide.
The only person who thought otherwise was the wife of my supervisor, whose
advice was always pretty sound. She basically said “yeah, go for it.” I gave up
a big scholarship at Sussex for something that was completely unknown for me,
but infinitely more interesting. Maybe still is.
Would you compare Prague in the 90’s to Paris in the
20’s?
Well, maybe not exactly, though it’s been done – Alan
Levy, the founding editor of the Prague Post, famously made the
comparison. He meant there was a certain temper, a sense of being freed
from the various cultures of permission and the crushing materialism of the 80s
in the US and UK, also a sense of participation in a society that was very
consciously experiencing its own freedom after so many years of communism. But
unlike Paris, there was rarely that sense of conversation between different
cultures here – it was a melting
pot of sorts, but this went hand-in-hand with the fact that the different
cultures, of the ‘West’ and the ‘East,’ had been cut off from one another for
so long, except as objects of mutual fascination. I mean, imaginary objects. In
more ways than one, people didn’t speak each other’s languages. It was easier
for Paris to be comfortable with its role as an international artistic centre –
but this wasn’t the case in Prague, at least for those who ended up pulling the
strings.
Was it easy to find a publisher for your work, whether
poetry, prose or paintings?
Nah! (Shakes his head vehemently) Nah, it was
really hard. Publishing is a strange business which is often heavily localised
– whether it’s linked in to the official culture or to subcultures.
English-language publishing in Prague was extremely marginal – at the time
there was only Twisted Spoon Press, who published my first collection of
poetry. But it has tended to be the case that writers in English have had to
leave Prague in order to find a publisher – Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space was
written here, but it was only published years after he returned to the UK and
gained success with his novel Remainder. It’s a little different with
poetry, which is mostly a small-press business anyway. Justin Quinn is an
example of a Prague-based writer who has had his work widely published and
well-received – but again, even when you manage to do that, you’re almost
instantly drawn back into some external, national discourse: are you an Irish
poet, an Australian poet, a Central European poet.
Internationalism is a nice idea, but in the current cultural climate it’s
mostly a fiction, which makes living, working, publishing outside the usual
frameworks difficult, but also far more interesting. On the other hand, there’s
the question of translation. My novel, Breakfast
at Midnight, is getting published in Czech soon from Argo (looks at his computer screen, turning to
it), which is quite pleasing.
How? Did you contact the publisher yourself or…?
No.
Lad’a Nagy published a review of the English version in Hospodářské Noviny and
Argo became interested. It all went on from there. Straight away my friend
David Vichnar did the translation. Petr Onufer from Argo invited me for a
drink, we agreed on a contract, talked about cover art. Bang. It’ll be launched
soon at Jazz Republic [Note: a
report from the night follows this interview!], I should probably send out a
message about it (looks at his computer
screen again.)
Do you prefer spending time at expat bars or Czech
ones?
My
favourite place is Dobrá Trafika, not the one at Újezd, but at Korunní. Very
quiet, very low-key.
So did you always write prose?
Probably
I wrote songs first. But my mother was a librarian, so I used to spend quite a
lot of time in libraries. I remember the first book of poetry I read, which had
stuff by Auden and Kenneth Slessor which gave me some idea of what a ‘poem’ was
supposed to be – but I was too young to make much sense of it. Then one day I
came across Alexander Pope. I’d never seen anything like it, columns and line
numbers and hundreds of stanzas one after the other. I remember thinking: “Hmm…
(he frowns with his eyebrows, bewildered)
this is quite cool, I’d like to try writing something like that.” Of course, I had no idea what Pope was on about, but it
looked interesting.
How did that turn out?
(Laughs) Well, it was
terrible. I wrote lots of mythological garbage, ‘epistles’ to this and that,
like everyone does at that age probably, and all the weighty themes. At a
certain stage I began noodling around with the ‘inner life.’ I tried writing a
novel when I was sixteen. About Faustus, would you believe it? Pure gore! At about
the same time I read Baudelaire at school and went through that entire poète
maudite phase. Then Eliot. Terrible. I mean, the Eliot phase is always a
terrible one, you see it all the time, it’s like a disease you expect ought
should’ve been done away with by the advent of modern medicine, but somehow it
just keeps infecting people… Anyway, apart from all that, I mostly wrote songs.
I liked songs where the words and music didn’t quite add up, where there was a
certain tension between the two. I collected liner-notes. In terms of music,
though, I had a pretty spotty education. Bob Dylan, The Who, Ricky Lee Jones,
Pink Floyd (!). I remember setting some of Blake’s stuff to music. And from
there I discovered free verse, which is when it dawned on me that poetry had
nothing whatsoever to do with rhyme and meter – amazing!
Is there any book you repeatedly return to?
(Thinks for a while) Return
to? Hmm.
Like a book you open up whenever you got the time?
I
read a lot of books, all the time. (Looks around, narrowing his eyes as he peeps at the countless books in
the office’s bookshelves) Honestly I can’t think of anything just now.
How about your books, do you have them all lined up on
a shelf at home?
Nah,
they’re at the bottom of a bookshelf where I just keep copies so I don’t lose
them. Unless you mean that you think I sit there and admire them all the time:
“yeah, well done mate” (does this kind of
American flirtatious wink and onomatopoeic sound, his hand gesticulating a gun
that he aims at the imaginary shelf of his written books, smiles). I’ll save that for my pension plan. Steve Rodefer, the poet, lectured me
once about how easily your whole past can just slip away – even writers deemed
important fall out of print, like Faulkner did, or you look at the whole
Anglophone Prague scene from the nineties which almost disappeared without a
trace, to the extent it just seemed like a rumour. You know, left bank of the
nineties and all that. But in 2010 if you wanted to read what’d actually been
written back then, a decade earlier, it was almost impossible… But it happens
everywhere of course.
Back to the question about re-reading a single book;
so if you had someone, me for example, come up to you and suddenly say:
“recommend a book to me to read,” any tips you would give?
There’s
an Australian poet I’ve worked with for almost fifteen years, John Kinsella.
His volume of collected poems from 1994 is something I keep coming back to.
Burroughs is a favourite – Naked Lunch.
How about some writer today. Ian McEwan?
Not
a fan. I read (frowns, trying to
remember)… Atonement. Yes, it is
well enough written, but it’s driven by a rancid sentimentality and it takes an
impossible concept, like atonement, and turns it into a cheap literary parlour
game. It’s also heavily dependent on Patrick White’s Voss which, flawed in its own way,
is a significant achievement – an unrelenting self-criticism by a major writer.
McEwan isn’t.
What about Hemingway.
His
language is very efficient. No fat.
And Joyce?
Well…
I think I read some of his books once. I was always impressed that after
publishing Ulysses, he had the…
single-mindedness to write Finnegan’s
Wake. Many people at that time, including his closest friends, thought: What? Are you nuts? Publishing something
like THAT after Ulysses?!”
Back to your own work. Is there any peculiar English
word that appeals to you? Mmm. How about: “Glop.” Do you know what it means?
No. Is it some Australian slang?
Nah.
It’s English, an Anglo-Saxon word, though not common – Auden was fond of it.
Have you ever used it, even when you’re saying that
it’s obscure to you.
Yes,
in one of those (points at the stack of
three books he gradually gave me during the interview/conversation) I use
it a couple of times.
Now, what about the Prague Microfestival.
Olga
Pek [a slim, fragile-looking girl sitting
at a computer desk near us] is the person to ask about that, as she’s the
main organizer of the whole thing. Anyways… yeah, though not as high up an
event as, uh, the Prague Writer’s
Festival, that’s all the way up here (he
demonstrates the high rank in the air with his hand) and brings all the big
names to town, or whichever ones they can afford, and give the impression of
being very impressed with themselves, while the Microfestival is a more
community-centred an event that brings together both well-known and lesser-known
writer, mostly poets on the experimental fringe who aren’t usually respected by
the big commercial festivals. This year
we have Alice Notley, who’s quite famous, along with Robert Kiely, a young
Irish poet, who’s definitely someone to watch in future, and about twenty
others, including Slovak and Czech writers, such as Ondřej Buddeus who just
received the Orten prize and is one of the best poets in the country.
Leaving
the office with three of his books in arms, I immediately added them to my
summer reading list. Why? Mainly, to receive a better understanding of the man
I have just interviewed… and also to find out how the word “glop” can be practically used.
Louis Armand is the Director of the Centre for
Critical and Cultural Theory at the Faculty of Arts and author of the novels Canicule or Breakfast at Midnight, anthropologies and poetry volumes. Co-creator
of the Prague Microfestival. Find out
more about his works over at
