In 1982 or maybe 1983, I published my first short story, called “The Speech of Birds.” I had been directing plays and films in the years before that, and I had been pretty successful. But my interest in this kind of creativity was a detour from writing. I had been writing, and wanted to be a writer, from a very early age.
The Literary Review paid me thirty pounds and published “The Speech of Birds.” The chasm that separated never having been in print from being in print had been crossed, at last. I had come by publication honestly. I had worked hard. I had learned things, and I had put those things into practice. My interest in writing was also honest. I was a passionate reader. Books to me were sacred objects. And when I wrote, the catastrophist in me was subdued; I was no longer wary and tense.
What followed, however, was not exactly a life of writing, but a life in literature, a life on Grub Street. I wrote all sorts of things. I worked as reader and wrote reports. I wrote novels. I wrote reviews. I wrote plays. I wrote scripts. I wrote all kinds of things. I made some money. I paid my bills. I married. I had children. I moved from London to Enniskillen in Ireland. I went on writing and publishing. But in this strange new locale (Northern Ireland, Ulster, occupied Ireland, the Six Counties) I also did some things connected to literature that I’d never done before. I began to teach creative writing, first to local writers’ groups, and then to students in universities. I also worked with prisoners in HMP Maze and later HMP Maghaberry. I made films again. And – the biggest change of all – I began to write for newspapers on many different subjects and about many different things. In London I had been an author. In Ireland I became a writer and teacher.
Today, I am 56. Lately, and for various reasons – mostly because I’m aging and this is what happens when you age – I think about where I came from and what has become of me. I don’t read any more, or I hardly read any more. Not like I did. I have, now, become a sort of demon reader. All day, every day, I’m scanning print and uploading vast amounts of information. I have to do this in order to earn a living. The economics of literature insist on it.
Now many different kinds of reading task have played their part in the sorry process from author to writer but the most important, the single biggest, is the reading I have done for literary prizes (which is just one of the ways I make my living, and yes, it is a small way, a not particularly remunerative way, but still, it must be done). I have been doing this since the 1990s. The fees paid to do such work are tiny while the amount I have to read is colossal. A thousand euro in return for reading, say, fifty novels is not unknown. The effect of these peculiar economic circumstances is that I have trained myself to upload into my brain at speed incredible volumes of print – a talent I now use not only when reading for literary prizes but across the board.
If I have to (and I often do), I can get across (notice I don’t say read) five or six hundred pages in day. Now this speed of consumption, though terrific in terms of what it allows me to do, allows no time for the proper function of my imagination. How could it?
But it would be dishonest if I left you with the impression that if I were less frenzied and rushed and time-poor and less filled with anxiety about my own status, I would read slowly and soon I would find myself drifting off into the mild trance I used to go into when my mother read to me, or when I read as a child and adolescent. That capacity has not been killed because I am reading too much, way too much, and much too fast, for too long, but more prosaically it has been rendered redundant because my attitude has changed.
I started as an amateur, but at some point – I do not know when it happened; I only know that it happened – I became a professional, and once I became a professional my relationship to the world in general and to reading in particular changed utterly. I never simply enjoy the act of reading anymore. My authorial intelligence is totally and fully engaged. When I read, whatever I read, I examine and analyze. This is partly in order to judge the artifact and rank it, but also, and perhaps mostly, I am doing this so that I can learn from it. I want to know what I can appropriate. You could say – in fact, I will say it – I read primarily to steal. This attitude applies not just to books but to everything. In every situation, whatever it is, whether private or public, personal or impersonal, happy or sad, interesting or boring, exotic or quotidian, while part of me is involved and interacting and apparently sympathetic and human, there is another part of my personality that is scrutinizing my experiences and thinking two terrible things: What’s in this for me? And: Can I use this? Can I put it in a story? Can I put it in an article?
I may look like a happy and relatively adjusted man to those who see me from the outside, but I know, as seen from the inside, I am cannibalizing my life and all my relationships ruthlessly and without compunction. I try to be ethical. I am not a complete monster (yet). But gradually I lose the will to want to be ethical.
My life is crowded and fractured. After “The Speech of Birds,” I set about writing my first publishable and published novel, The Eleventh Summer. I could tell you the story of writing The Eleventh Summer. It wouldn’t necessarily be an interesting story, but it is a story I know. As I write this, I am a month away from the publication of a new novel, my ninth, called The Dead Eight. It was written over the last couple of years, but if you asked me I could not tell you the story of how I wrote it. Some of it I wrote longhand on the train to and from Dublin, where I teach creative writing. Some of it I wrote in the early morning before I had to attend to other cares. Some of it I wrote at night, and I do not like to write at night because I do not write well at night. Beyond that I have no sense of its creation for the very simple reason that the writing was crammed into the tiny gaps between the seven or eight or nine little jobs that I am running in parallel and that keep me alive, just about. I am always at work, always. Every day of every week, even if I am not at my keyboard, my brain is churning and I am processing information and plotting what to write next or making mental notes to go back and change something, or I am reading a book to review, or drafting questions for an interview, or fact-checking a story, or trying to see if I can arrange a meeting with someone important, or trying to dream up a project with which to catch the attention of someone whom I hope will give me some of their money. I am always in harness, always.
I also never sit any more, like I once did, and do nothing, and let my unconscious offer whatever it wishes. The relationship is now the other way round. I demand, and this beautiful resource has to meet that demand promptly. Our relationship is crude and brutal.
An example: I receive a request, say, for five hundred words on a set topic from a newspaper. I don’t pause. I just lower the bucket into the well. And once I have read the words over to check my spelling and grammar, I send it off immediately. It is not unusual, with this kind of work, to be required, by the editor, to return my copy within two hours. Sometimes, if a very short bit of copy is requested, I will either dictate it over the phone, or write it as I am talking on the phone. I am a well-regarded hack. I can produce a set number of coherent words on time, words that fulfill the brief.
I don’t reflect. There’s no time in this kind of work. I don’t recalibrate. Recalibration is absolutely essential to the process of improvement. I don’t rewrite and refine enough, certainly not the hackwork. My desire to be ethical means I still refine the literary work and the reviews. But how much longer can I resist the desire not to be ethical?
I am also bitter. I hope it doesn’t show, but I am. I am so fucked off with how the world has gone to the dogs and in particular that little bit of the world I think I care about most, which is the Kingdom of Literature: for on top of the abolition of the Net Book Agreement, all sorts of other deleterious developments have worsened the lot of writers (at least in these islands) over the last fifteen years, among which, and in no particular order, are the following: the rise of branding; the enslavement of publishers to media endorsement by celebrity presenters; the obsession with the physical appearance of writers which in turn has meant publishers demand ever younger, ever more photogenic authors; the decline of the editor in publishing houses in order to save money; the abandonment by publishers of the idea that writers have lifelong careers and that given the right support over a lengthy period they can develop; the failure of payment for literary endeavour either to keep pace with inflation or to reflect the actual amount of labour involved in literary production; the atrophy of community (writers have never been more marginal and their enterprise more quixotic and ridiculous); and, finally, the eclipse of literary forms that once helped writers to survive, such as the short story, especially the short story broadcast on radio.
I know this is just the way things go. I also know others have it worse than me, and their reasons for embitterment are more convincing than mine. Perhaps the greatest loss I have experienced by becoming a professional writer is that I no longer care about others, that I no longer want to hear their reasons. I give very little time (actually, no time) to those who are in trouble like me, whether fellow writers or fellow citizens: I’m blind to them: no, all that I see are the writers in front of me, the writers more successful than I am, those being reviewed and rewarded, féted and praised, loved and stroked, fluffed and fellated, and so on and so forth. I am filled with covetousness. I am enraged by their success. I watch these success stories obsessively and I judge myself against them; I measure myself against them. I do this all day, every day. I can’t stop. It is pointless and harmful: what I learn with monotonous regularity from these comparisons is always this: they are doing better, and I am doing worse.
I tell myself that these writers are competitors, and I try to reassure myself that while they may be successful – some of them, of course, deserve success; I have not lost all common sense – they are not as good as I am. But the reassurance is meaningless because no matter how often I assert this, it won’t and doesn’t change anything: they’re still ahead and I’m still behind. Nothing is going to change. No one is listening. There is no god listening to me and offering to pluck me from the rear of the field and pop me down at the front. That isn’t going happen. I am where I am and there I stay.
Now I know I am mad, I know I am (and you know that, too, having read the above) but as well as being mad, though you may find this hard to credit, I am also clear-sighted. I don’t go for the self-con: I know where I am, oh yes, I do, and I know what I am. I know exactly where I am and what I have achieved. My solution to the predicament of who I am and where I am is this: I am going to endure. I’m going to endure and endure and endure and I am going to keep on enduring relentlessly and monotonously and with every ounce of strength and guile at my disposal. And the reason I am putting all faith in endurance is this: if I endure long enough, all those literary stars I resent and envy, at least of my generation (not to mention those ancillary figures on Grub Street who have reviewed my books badly, sacked me, declined to publish me, spiked my copy, dissed me, misjudged me, snubbed me, shown me insufficient respect, refused to take my telephone calls, etcetera), I will see them all pass, I will see them all die.
Carlo Gébler lives in Enniskillen
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