Alcemi Talks to Richard Gwyn about The Vagabond's Breakfast
Alcemi: You have referred to yourself during nine years of vagrancy and travel around the Med as being a refugee from Thatcher. Was your decision to leave really politically motivated – indeed was it motivated at all - and what mainly kept you there or kept you away?
Richard Gwyn:My decision to leave was not politically motivated, but London was a fairly miserable place in 1981, and I wanted out. In the late seventies I had been involved with groups like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League in London, and yes, I had been politically engaged, as a Trotskyist, but something died around the turn of the decade. During my first year living in Greece, whenever I looked at the news from home I got this horrible sense of regression, what with events like the marriage of Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, and the Falklands War, both of which I thankfully missed. Besides I wanted to live in other countries, and to travel. There was an underlying notion that I would write, but I was not particularly well organised and not at all disciplined. I stayed away because on each return trip to the UK the country appeared more depressing to me than the last time, and I preferred other places, where I would find an abundant supply of cheap red wine and where the bars didn't close in the afternoons. I also felt temperamentally adrift in Britain. I had been too long in Mediterranean cultures to re-adapt to the repressive and tedious moral hypocrisy of the UK. I couldn't stand Eastenders, Marks and Spencers, perpetual grey skies, warm beer, pizzas topped with baked beans. After visiting in 1988 I vowed to myself that I was never coming back, but it didn't work out like that.
A: One notable aspect of these years is that despite homelessness, poverty, alcoholism, drifting, hospitalisations and “all manner of cerebral injuries” caused by barely provoked attacks, you managed to retain these experiences, to continue reading and also to pick up languages in situ as you moved from country to country. Is it a myth that alcohol kills your brain cells, are you just extremely clever, or is there some other explanation as to how well you survived this period and indeed seem to have reinvented yourself as author and academic? Explain the importance of reading during this period.
RG: There were long periods when I didn't read at all, I only drank. And there were periods when I read a lot, holed out in libraries, or in houses with leaky roofs. Yes, for a period I was in a lot of fights (nearly all of them in London) but I probably provoked most of them. I don't know about brain cells, I think we must have quite a few. I have seen plenty of mashed people with 'wet brains' though, so I guess I was lucky. Certainly I was very lucky to have survived my twenties and early thirties, because a number of my close friends did not. Perhaps it's also a question of having the determination, as well as the imagination to re-invent oneself. It doesn't happen by chance. Changing my addictive behaviour was the hardest thing I've ever done. I also learned that I need to change my routines every so often, otherwise I stagnate. As for languages, I have always found it easier to pick up languages and dialects at street level rather than in the classroom. Having said that, I studied Latin, French and a bit of Italian at school, I picked up some Greek on my first visit there at age eighteen, and Spanish came easily because of having Italian, and when I first came to Spain I was living with someone who did not speak English, so I learned quickly.
A: Your memoir explains life with illness, specifically viral hepatitis, and the consequent “brain fug” and insomnia that are among its side effects. You may also be in the school of thought that counts addiction as illness. Can you explain your interest in illness, and how it has affected your fiction.
RG: I believe addiction is an illness, but one that is self-perpetuating. For instance, the need to take another drink, or have a fix, or even to eat a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and make yourself throw up, these are not in themselves necessarily attributes of illness per se, but once the cycle of addiction is entered, illness sets in, and the addict needs to be treated as a sick person. I am not really sure that my experience and understanding of illness in general has affected my fiction at all, or even the way I live my life, but my understanding of addiction has. How we define illness is highly variable across cultures. The way different societies envisage certain types of illness interests me, just as shamanism and witchcraft and soul theft interest me. For example, I think we have forms of soul theft in contemporary society, but we call it by another name, we have medicalized it. These interests link back both to my study of anthropology and growing up in a medical family, but personally I don't think about illness much at all; in fact I can think of few things more boring than the kinds of conversations the chronically ill have among themselves.
A: Some of the experiences described in your memoir have fed into your writing, especially your novels, providing anecdote and colour unavailable had you been a 9-5 career man during this period. Was writing this work partly a means to exorcise these experiences, and are you ready to turn to some new field of experience in your future writing?
RG: I had a great deal of resistance to writing the book, until I tricked myself into thinking of the 'I' as a third person. By contrast, the two novels belong together, as a kind of diptych, and had a secret life long before I committed them to paper; they are, I suppose, adumbrations on my own experience over a particular stretch of time, and were probably easier to write than The Vagabond's Breakfast. I don't think I could ever have stuck at a 9-5 job, as you put it. But I don't feel nostalgic for or feel bound to the vagabond era of my life, and I don't feel compelled to write only about those years, or about those kinds of people – drifters and exiles – particularly now, having finished the memoir. So perhaps it was a kind of exorcism, although I would resist the word. Aren't we constantly in a process of clearing out and then re-stocking our creative and emotional lives; isn't it a process of continual renewal? I am certain that the next novel will feel quite different. It is important to know that what one is attempting to write is in some way a step into the unknown, a way of stating a particular truth in a new way. I also write poetry, which takes me in a different direction. And doing translations helps to bring new ideas to one's own writing. But a true writer, the only kind of writer I can be bothered with, is someone who takes his or her work as seriously as life itself; someone who attempts to create a world and live in it. Visits to the phenomenal world are then raids from that other place, raids on the unspeakable for booty and knowledge.
A: Current fiction reading?
Havana Red by Leonardo Padura, Herzog by Saul Bellow, While the women are sleeping by Javier Marías
A: Latest film?
Robert Bresson's A man escaped
A: Current poetry reading...
John Donne, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nicanor Parra
A: Best loved place: sitting on my roof in Rabós
A: Current reading, biography/politics/history?
Michael Reynolds' Hemingway: The Final Years (almost entirely depressing); Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (brilliant); John Berger's Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (profoundly moving and worrying essays on the plight of Palestine and Western indifference in Middle East).
Back to the Future