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.
