How I Wrote
‘The praise received is mentally sent back / Or taken apart’
I
A teacher of after-school extra-curriculars such as drama and art, used to take a few of those she must have regarded as reliable to help set up stages or props in the P.E. hall. She once asked me to sit to the side to read material, highly derivative of Star Wars, which I had written in copybooks. She gave me a copy of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), a novel about a species of plants becoming the dominant species on earth following a cosmic event which causes mass blindness.
The diagnostic function of literature is what makes it my preferred form. The Kraken Wakes (1953) appeared to me at the time to be a serious and methodical consideration of some of the social outcomes of climate collapse, even if, as is often the case in canonical science fiction pre-dating the works of Samuel R. Delany or Ursula K. LeGuin, the proposed antinomy is between a Randian state of all against all versus a hazardous utopian vision headed by well-intentioned but impractical leaders forced into acts of despotism out of expediency. This scenario fails to draw a distinction between fascism and communism and ignores the totalitarian and patriarchal tendencies of contemporary liberal bourgeois society; its victory in this shell game is as foreclosed as it is specious.
My father bought The Guardian and reading the cultural weekend supplements I encountered Will Self. Though the socio-economic convulsions of the past two decades, the perennial turnover of literary generations and the path-dependency of self-branding as a curmudgeon have rendered him an an irrelevant reactionary, novels such as Great Apes (1997), How the Dead Live (2000) shaped my understanding of literature’s capacities. For those who may have been familiar with J.G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs Self would seem derivative and cheap but what makes those formative short-circuits so valuable are contained in their being involuntary, I consider myself fortunate that mine derived from a writer whose work was avowedly anti-mimetic. At the time I encountered Self his attitude to the Young British Artists had shifted from an early advocacy as their works became subsumed into a global art commodity market, underlining their lack of distance from a consumer society he made gestures towards rejecting, while appearing as a regular on the most wretched cultural forms of late capitalist modernity: news panel game shows.
For some reason I cannot fathom the relationship between conceptual art and contemporary society seemed very important to me. With entry-level media theory I derived from the writings of Neil Postman, I noted that in dystopian fiction high art was represented as antithetical to a totalitarian regime. Alongside more sophisticated variants of space opera crap, buffered by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s genre revisionism, I worked out the concept of a dystopia in which high art serves the interests of the state. I recall one section in which a talking-heads style documentary is presented at a state-sponsored film festival otherwise replete with films very similar to those of Jean-Luc Godard, though my own knowledge of his work can only have come to me through parodies of it. A static shot of an academic talking-head explaining things in straightforward terms prompts mass hysteria among the audience.
II
A friend once became depressed finding that her teachers sought to enlist her parents in encouraging her creative impulses in old school reports, something that, from her point of view, they had not done. I told her that expression has to be oppositional and that having her parents’ approval would have been a liability rather than a help. I believed this at the time, now I do not. In the absence of recognition, writing certainly depends on persistence but that persistence requires infrastructure.
III
The affluent suburb on Dublin’s northside I grew up in did not have a sub-culture. When I went to the Gaeltacht during the summers I would meet people — usually from Kilkenny, Waterford or Wicklow — who listened to bands I had never heard of, read comic books which were not about superheroes and had opportunities to live their lives recklessly. My mother disapproved of my gravitation to people she referred to as misfits, saw my aversion to sports as suggestive of homosexuality. I do not want to overdo this. The current trend for trauma-mongering in literary writing repels me not least because if I was unhappy for the first twenty-five years of my life it would be hard to envision a better one from a material perspective. My parents and their spouses were professionals. There were books, conversation, films and music in all the houses I lived between. At the same time what I do and how I think seems to speak to the fact that I have had multiple occasions to write short notes which I at the time believed would be final wills or testaments, to be read by others when I no longer existed. I wish I could write about mental anguish in a way that could cut through the insipid privatised #MentalHealth register on the one hand and a scrubbed literary self-pity on the other, get into the real discomfort that references to these subjects among relative strangers provoke but it is not helped by the fact that I do not find me or my life, in and of themselves, interesting as a subject.
My protagonists were what I regarded as a future version of myself; a depressive, cynical social outcast with substance abuse problems. I did not have substance abuse problems. I did not smoke either, but I aspired to after watching Dylan Moran’s Monster (2004) on television, typing his monologues into my phone as he spoke them so I could read them later. To this day I am not sure the voice I speak with is my own. A softening of hard consonants by reserving slackness in the gap between lip and lower teeth, unsettling the place on my head where my hair grows longest, practiced disdain, slowing the pace of speech to allow gestated acerbic similes to hit.
My impulse to write went dormant on befriending someone I regarded as a central conduit for the creative force of the universe in college. Every sentence I underlined or wrote down in a notebook, usually T.S. Eliot or Anne Enright, seemed to me offer a justification for principled refusal of writing. This passed once I finished my undergrad and I wrote a number of short stories indebted to Borges, Coetzee, Foster Wallace and early Beckett, who I wrote my masters thesis on. I was fortunate to secure a number of publications relatively early on, split evenly between print and online, Dublin and overseas.
After my masters I got a full-time office job but did not quit my previous gig in retail, working sixty hours a week to save money to do a doctorate. Myself and one other person would take the handheld trucks off the shop floor to meet the delivery which came into the back of the shopping centre at around half four in the morning. Once we found the steel shutter into the bay closed and the truck unable to get in. I pressed one of the keypads which gave me access to an unseen security guard on whom access to various parts of the centre outside opening hours depended and unloaded into the speaker a torrent of abuse. Through a thumb-sized microphone I could tell that I had rattled the man. The shutter lifted while he stammered an apology.
My social capacity had been radically attenuated. Via material I garnered from articles in The Guardian and New Statesman — Was Rihanna’s latest video misogynistic? Should the state and industry mandate a pay cut for all men? — I objected to everything everyone around me did and said, succeeding in alienating everyone who had not left for Berlin, Edinburgh, London, Norwich or Paris. I was constantly furious and felt myself justified.
Other images from this time:
-Peddling a bike on the Swords Road, into rain propelled into my face, dripping down my forehead into my eyes, impeding my progress forward but also keeping me from falling to the side.
-Two creases of dry skin which developed on both corners of my mouth, resistant to the dozens of anti-viral, anti-bacterial, moisturising, beauty agents products and chemicals — including diluted hydrogen peroxide, homemade toothpaste — I applied to them. These patches of skin became symbols of my repulsiveness to others, myself.
-Out on a walk along the sea during one of the first Irish summers averaging 1 degree higher than the half-century before, feeling like a burnt-out corpse trussed in a living skin.
IV
Everyone I knew in Trinity was middle-class, almost all of them were privately educated. Only a few were from money, but all those who did were English. One had the habit of gravitating towards people who he regarded as having the scent of future success off them. One now works for MI5. Another was genetically engineered. A friend once visited his house, a manor in south-east of England where he met Anthony Kiedis. The Tans were ahead of us in tutorials and essay-writing, the Leaving Cert curriculum rendered those of us who did not have academics for parents unable to advance our own judgements on texts as convincingly.
This milieu has the distinction of producing the defining Irish literary mode of the past decade; the Trinity campus novel as practiced by, amongst others, Naoise Dolan, Louise Nealon and Sally Rooney. My own experience of Trinity was not one characterised by creative and academic brilliance, passionate affairs with beautiful people or continental villas. Myself and my friends kept a distance from debating societies populated by degenerate wankers and scorned those trying to plant seeds for the advancement of their careers, a manoeuvre which probably made subsequent attempts to get published pointlessly harder. But this a narcissism of small differences. Toads is about the anxiety of petty-bourgeois intellectuals more educated than their parents but less well off, written by someone who attended the most prestigious university on the island and studied under lecturers who are tightly imprecated with international networks of literary prestige. Rooney also beat a path; the success she has attained has not only influenced others but has also generated an interest in more, from industry, and resultantly, audience.
V
On principle, whether aesthetic or in the name of a pseudo-objectivity, many critics or writers rule biographical accounts out of court. This is obtuse. The number of convincing works of literary fiction — and I use this term pejoratively — written beyond the authors’ lived experience is negligible in comparison to the amount with obvious social or geographic touchstones. The Dublin in Toads is the Dublin I knew when I was in this phase in my life, through the medium of the long and difficult novels I was reading at the time: Gaddis, Gass, Proust. I knew Dublin was fucked but it appears in Toads as fucked in the way it was from 2010 – 2015, when when parts of the city seemed not yet fully transformed into a playground for tech workers; those sections which do point to this were introduced in later drafts. As I no longer drink I do not have much reason to hang around the city centre, although racist riots I watched on my phone indicate some of ways in which Toads is out of step.
Toad’s avoidance, resentment and thin skin are therefore mine and in retrospect this was a mistake. Without a thorough and wrought prose style, depressive protagonists can not move forward; this is the reason Joyce gives Dedalus up for Bloom before page fifty. Toad is a woman, this was a choice. At some point in 2015 it struck me that most novels were about men complaining, a feature that was rarely offset by a sufficiently fermented prose style. Auster, Banville, Bellow, Roth, Updike, I had no use for these names. The potency of this gesture has since lapsed. On publishing a new book, authors, both established and aspiring write articles directed towards literary Twitter, an online cohort uniquely susceptible to the performance of being scandalised. One such talking point might be a broad dismissal of male writers, to the extent that it has become hackneyed. The representation of an angry woman is not in the present moment new either; Otessa Mossfegh has taken up from where Bret Easton Ellis left off, but it was not so obviously compromised when I had the idea six years ago.
The subordination of the curriculum to the tourism industry aligns more with my experience of doing a doctorate, a mandatory component of which involved attendance at self-branding and commercialisation seminars directed at students developing moisturisers or noodle flavouring rather than tracing the relationship of modern literature to the birth of capitalism. When I was approved to pass into my final year I took six weeks to concentrate on Toads. I finished it in lockdown, taking half the day to write my thesis, half the day to write the novel. I had a dual-monitor display, with Twitter consistently open on my left. Scrolling the feed I found myself unable to read it. The words stopped making sense. My brain felt like when the cursor on a screen is twinned with an hourglass but also somehow over-caffeinated. Panicked and non-verbal I saw myself riding a horse across the James Joyce bridge. Though I do not remember this, I am told I collapsed onto the floor and went into spasms.
VI
In 2012 Self published Umbrella, declaring it the first in a trilogy of novels which would effect a return to modernism as this represented the only means of establishing a new literary classicism. Around the same time Self criticised the films of the Coen Brothers for remaining stuck within the constraints of pastiche. As a critique and a positive programme this all looks quite shallow. Not only have the Coen Brothers’ career arced towards sincerity and classicism the networks of patronage, elite cultural consumption and gestation of mass society were the central predicates of modernism; one can no more repeat it now than we can bring back observation of the Sabbath.1 However, insofar as myself and those others in Trinity held views on points of aesthetic doctrine, it was a commitment to the spirit of experiment embodied in early twentieth-century modernism and post-modernism, both of which were lumped together as rejection of mimesis, simplistically understood. Joyce above O’Connor. Beckett over McGahern. Pynchon over Trevor.2
A return to modernism foregrounded a series of techniques for the representation of immediate consciousness with varying degrees of success. At an event at the London Review Bookshop Self made the case that this programme had its limits. Presenting the spoken word on the page as it actually is inevitably reads as insane due to the ways in which people repeat themselves, stutter, talk over each other. I took this as a challenge, thinking of RTÉ radio documentaries from the sixties and seventies before contemporary production values became widespread, sounding very much like two men and a woman sitting in an unvarnished kitchen in the midlands, and recordings produced by Louis Johnston (a.k.a. Wanda Group) a musician based in Essex. At time of writing Johnston’s Every Ear in the World consists of seven releases, with two tracks on each of roughly thirty minutes. These are radio cut-ups, recordings of him moving around his kitchen, coughing or talking or samples threaded together into shapes and textures on ancient software or abandoned equipment. I thought also of a sequence of audio pieces recorded by Garret Phelan, which were broadcast for about thirty days in early 2006 on the 89.9 FM frequency, regarding George W. Bush, the evolution/creationism debate and self-actualisation, derived from newspapers, books, or transcribed conversations from commercial radio. Phelan drawls through tedious rehearsals of ‘Fun fact’ items, interspersed with milquetoast banter from non-existent co-hosts in the same blank tone of an exhalation, while overplayed radio hits of the day sardonically intrude from a radio set Phelan has left on in the background.
At the same time that they conduct generalised critiques of artifice these works convey a deeply held and non-denominational commitment to sound, a stage that Self seemed unwilling or unable to push through to so I began writing down dialogue that I heard in cafés, pubs or around college, I understand this to be called found dialogue.
In defending my use of it to one of my editors I invoked Gaddis, whose novels include long passages of un-signposted dialogue spoken within large groups of people, giving the appearance of raw transcription. My editor made the point that Gaddis’ dialogue was not naive, but rhythmic, drawing on the beats with whom he was contemporaneous. Subsequent drafts cut a lot of the redundant dialogue, sections in which characters said —Yeah. —Lol. or —Haha back and forth at each other. Not all of this has been purged. I see in this residua a more lofty theoretical goal that my skill was unable to meet and a spurned opportunity for more extensive re-writes; I truly loathe these sections.
VII
The prose in my first stories remind me of an opinion Robert Frost offered to Robert Lowell on his first poems lacking compression. In their desperation to wring an aesthetic response from the reader they afford them no space. Each sentence is baroque and ungrammatically punctuated. It took me hours to write a single paragraph. The closest analogue is More Pricks than Kicks (1934) a collection of short stories in which Beckett’s failure to distinguish himself from Joyce is clear.
I do not see any effort to pare sentences back by way of reaction in Toads, but there is some compromise in its empirical commitments, an attempt to capture things within view in as few sentences as possible without violating a libidinal sense of rhythm. There is strain here, but also I think the strongest material. Successive re-drafts collapsed the boundaries between short sentences, shedding redundancy where it arose, an approach which I derived from Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance, the first two volumes of which I read while producing a second draft.
From the first to the last draft I shed about 20,000 words. In addition to the repetitive dialogue mentioned above an office romance and also a second, more serious instance of me wading into thematic waters beyond me were shed. The book benefitted from their loss. Someone more informed on such matters it is not uncommon in the French book market for a novel to be just over a hundred pages. I am unable to verify this but I am for it; almost all the contemporary fiction I read could lose 150 pages with no damage.
The novel comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion. The first half is not without its flourishes but in overall terms is a dreary trudge doing not much other than introducing three characters. The third chapter begins to do something with these, but not for long enough. Our focus finishes on Toad, inert. Daniel Goldhaber, the director of How to Blow up a Pipeline (2022), said in an interview that he did not want to make a film about a collection of climate activists failing. I could not think my way to catharsis here so I defaulted to a collage effect wedded to magical realism, the last refuge of a living novelist with no ideas. Toad and her ex-boyfriend Aodh hold a conversation very similar to one which takes place between Bloom and Mrs. Breen in ‘Circe’, followed by one very similar to one Sarah Michelle Gellar has with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson at the end of Southland Tales (2006). Toads has served its purpose as a place to deposit my influences and purge my twenties, its concerns appear to me now as very trivial, I am trying to write something more fundamental.
1Self’s criticism of the lack of ambition in British novels however remains as true now as it did then and his call for a British novel which registers the world-historical significance of the Iraq War should be extended to Irish novelists to consider the long-term social consequences of the imposition of austerity despite its unpopularity and ineffectiveness, the decline of Fianna Fáil as the natural governing party of the state and the prospect of unification.
2There was a moment of efflorescence associated with the term which coincided with the publication of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) and a number of issues of the literary journal gorse. This moment was overtaken by the 2016 vibe shift, whose morbid symptoms we have yet to digest.