293- ] English Literature - Duncan Fallowell

English Literature

Duncan Fallowel

Duncan Fallowell is one of the figureheads of modern British journalism. At 21 he was the Spectator’s first rock critic. He then released the anthology Drug Tales in 1979, before promptly giving up drugs to prevent “burning out”. Fallowell, who nearly became the lead singer of Can after Damo Suzuki left, was a friend of William Burroughs, has written on film, music and books, and has also penned novels that people seem to have a tendency to burn. Over calvados and shortbread in his west London home, Fallowell told me what drugs do to writing, and why this should be called the Literature Issue, not the Fiction Issue.

Vice: Your first book, Drug Tales, is not about what most people might expect. There are stories in it about green tea, for example.

Duncan Fallowell: I take a broad view of what a drug is. I included the elixir of youth in the anthology. One shouldn’t be too pharmacological in reading the book, it is meant to be a literary experience.

How did the book come about?

I used to know someone called Roger Machell, who was the editorial director of Hamish Hamilton in the buccaneering days of independent publishing. He sent me an anthology of short stories they were publishing about cricket—what a total yawn. That is for the Sebastian Faulks of this world; no self-respecting author can get passionate about cricket. It was embarrassing, even in the 70s. It was meant to be for fans of writing and fans of cricket, but it fell between two stools very quietly. But I told Roger I would like to do an anthology of drug tales. He dropped his glass and said, “Oh, what a good idea,” then promptly issued a dodgy contract—that was another feature of the good old days of independent publishing.

So Drug Tales was a sort of summary of drug writing to date?

I edited Drug Tales, but I actually included one story I wrote under the invented name of Peter Riviera. Then I found out there was actually a person called Peter de Rivier or something, who was the son of a record producer, who threatened to sue me. It came at the end of a drug-taking era. They always seem to coincide with the Labour Party being in government. The 60s and 70s were Labour eras and drug eras. The 80s and 90s were not. People talk about yuppies and cocaine and that is true, but I am talking about drugs being part of the creative world and being accepted as having a role in the imagination.

The Thatcherite, coke 80s was very much about making more money. When I came into drugs it was a cultural movement that, with acid, came to be the psychedelic thing. That drug era was followed by a dry period of “Sit up straight and wear a tie!”, Dynasty and Joan Collins. And then, at the turn of the century, we got another drug period, which I suspect is now coming to its end too.

There are drug problems in the world, but they are now linked with far more serious problems, political dissent being funded by heroin trade and then fading into organised crime. It much resembles the world of my first novel, Satyrday, which is full of terrorists, drug dealers and pornographers all somehow coming together and popping up at embassy receptions.

You first came into the drugs scene at Oxford, right?

Yes. It was rather an age of innocence. It came from that much earlier experience of Isherwood and Huxley on the west coast and Alan Watts and Zen. California during the last war was very much a crucible of what would burst out with the Beats.

I was interested in the Beats in terms of the territory—what you were allowed to write about. I didn’t find them very technically interesting. I remember once writing somewhere—when I was very young, one of my first book reviews, I think—that all revolutions in art were technical. I said that humans have had the same problems throughout history, but the way they were expressed could evolve. Graham Greene wrote a letter saying that it was a load of cobblers. I have been thinking about it since.

What is your view of the effects of drugs on writing and literature?

Well, in my own case, it rendered my work unpublishable. I was taking all of the drugs that were available at the time. I was never addicted to anything, I was never that organised. Taking drugs was never the objective, which they are in an addiction. Take dope, speed, alcohol, cigarettes, and sit down with a purple pen and you think you will be Gogol. And you are, until you present your results to other people. They get the Gogolian atmosphere, but your powers of communication have been impaired. My journalism was very off-the-wall at that time.

It doesn’t sound like they were particularly helpful.

The thing about drugs is that they were not a distraction for me. But they did inhibit my publishablity. What they did is they taught me to have a very sculptural, sensual and musical attitude to language. This was more the cannabis and acid side of things. Words were no longer just cars that carried meaning. The meaning and the word were one.

At the age of 30, I came off everything. I was burning up; it was all becoming either repetitive or just dangerous. Mark Hyatt, who wrote the poem “Randel” in Drug Tales, died very young. He might have become a professional writer if he had stopped taking drugs. That’s the other thing—there is a level of professionalism in anything. A writer must have a voice, a vision and something to say, but you must be able to get things across, as opposed to just fouling your own nest. Fouling your own nest taken to its logical conclusion is self-extinction.

Is there a drug that works best for writing? Or is that a silly question?

No, it is a very interesting subject that has not really been well addressed in what passed for debate on it. I used to use a lot of speed, and people know that speed turns you into a bore in these terms, because you lose your objective judgment. But it’s very exciting and wonderfully rewarding to involve yourself in a verbal universe. But that is not the same as writing a book. I don’t write for myself, I write to turn other people on. My whole drug period was in a sense an apprenticeship. I had produced this amazing material and some of it has found its way, in a highly differentiated form, into published work. But mainly I realised it was training for what would begin in my 30s, learning how to use language.

How did your attitude to writing change once you had stopped taking drugs?

I came back very slowly and carefully. I went to live in Hay-on-Wye, and I wrote my first novel, about sex changes. And that was when the absolutely enormous effort involved in writing a book that another person can read with enjoyment and excitement dawned on me. But I saw writing as an important art form that should be pushed forwards, and that took total commitment. And one of the by-products of my attitude is that people get extremely jealous of that dedication. I used to be bisexual, I am now pretty much gay, but I live here alone. I am a very gregarious person, and I hate the necessary solitude required to produce a significant book. In order to do the writing, I have to put myself in a place where there is nothing else to do, which means being alone in rather remote circumstances.

On the phone, you mentioned that you wished we had called this issue the Literature Issue, not the Fiction Issue. Why?

Fiction is such a turn-off word. Not because I am against imaginative work—I am not—but because there is just so much crap published as fiction. Fiction is like footwear or dairy products—I am not interested in it. I am interested in literature, whether it be history, poetry or philosophy. What I am talking about is high-performance language. Not just crap language to get the story across, not some commercial idea that is simply verbalised. I want high performance language operated by an expert.

When you travel on the tube these days, you notice that everyone is reading the same crappy book about vampire cheerleaders.

But these series of books today that you see everyone reading are not literature. They are not adding anything. This is a commercial enterprise. Mind you, there is always a place for it; I am terribly high-minded about what I do, but I am not going to tell people they shouldn’t be reading something. I just happen to think a book that is not performing at a high level linguistically is boring. Why should I waste time on it? I know many, many people who can read good and bad books and enjoy both. I can’t myself. Jean Cocteau, who has a reputation in some circles as a high-art fiend, used to love reading cheap detective fiction on the beach. Far too much money and energy goes into making sure there are bad books out there.

I have been re-reading books I read when I was a child, such as John Buchan novels.

He has become very fashionable recently. People talk about Greenmantle as the ultimate page-turner, but I found it very tiresome. I kept seeing Peter O’Toole standing on top of a train. I am trying to get to grips with Dante, but it’s not easy. I am very interested in the classics. If you want to talk about European identity you have to go back there, to the classical world. You have the Pope these days issuing statements about the influx of Islam and the dangers of imported beliefs. But it’s all hogwash—Christianity is an imported religion and not, may I point out, the religion of Christ. Jesus was an interesting guy, but he was hijacked by the same old farts, I am afraid.

Are your literary interests firmly anchored in the European tradition?

Well, I should hope that by 60 I would be anchored in one thing; we all need anchorage. If I had got to this age without it I would probably be some sort of awful glop that gets thrown out the back of a supermarket. I don’t think I have to apologise for admiring European values and what they mean in terms of the human spirit. I think that Europe has, in intellectual terms, been the powerhouse of the modern world, but then you have to wonder if this is necessarily a good thing given the way the world seems to be burning up.

Your novels aroused some uproar, did they not?

Someone described my book Satyrday as a late-20th-century version of Vile Bodies. But it’s much more discursive than Vile Bodies. People got very annoyed about the second novel, Underbelly, because they thought it contained extreme violence. The art critic of the Telegraph told me that he was reading one passage and that his hand clenched so hard he couldn’t let go of the book for a minute, but that when he could, he threw it across the room. He wrote about it in the review. Another person, a friend of mine who read it in the south of France, said her husband took it off her and threw it in the fire.

My fourth novel, which I have just submitted, is a ghost story; I describe it as a post-spectralist ghost story. I discovered the most frightening thing is to gradually undermine the methods by which you tell whether something does or does not exist—that is what it’s about. Most of us live in this abyss most of the time, but it’s only when you become aware of it that it becomes alarming. I suppose that is what happens to mad people.

Your Wikipedia page says the following: “Graham Greene did not like his first novel, but thought it belonged to the 21st century. William Burroughs relished his books”. How do you feel about that as a summary of your life’s work?

Well, it’s a very 20th-century quote, and we are now in the 21st. Graham Greene was an awkward bugger, he wouldn’t be interviewed. I tried to drop the names of the Sunday Times, the Telegraph—he wasn’t interested. Finally I said, “What about Penthouse?” and he said, “Oh yes, I will do it for Penthouse.” Good Catholic. I went to see him and he blew me out. So I called him back the next day and it was sorted out. But he had very conventional tastes, and was very censorious. The thing he most liked were the collected journals of Byron, which he seemed very engrossed with. I sent him Satyrday, which he described as “not his cup of tea”. He obviously felt bad afterwards and added, “But something for the 21st century.” Bill Burroughs was more of a friend really. In his old age he became a very sweet old man. He was always kind and encouraging. He used to send out Christmas cards. Can you imagine it?

What is your favourite type of reader?

A slow reader.

Going as Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book by Duncan Fallowell is out now, published by Profile Books.