The story behind the story: Condensed Metaphysics

Last summer I contributed to a series on John Baker's blog in which writers discussed the questions of 'inspiration' and the creation of texts. In doing so, I concentrated on the story 'Compass and Torch' which is included in my collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World.

That was then something of an exception for me, as I've always thought the focus should be on the words on the page, rather than all this meta-stuff which tends to feed into the current obsession with the author as part of the fiction package. Also I'm dead against the current tendency for biographical readings of fiction, and I've always thought that pointing to any real-life triggers for fiction - even if it's only to point out the differences between the life and the fiction - is to reinforce the obsession.

But then I'm writing a blog, after all, and I've written here about some of my writing processes even if, so far, I haven't really related them at the time to specific pieces. And after the publication of the collection I did get into one or two brief discussions on here about specific stories in the book which did touch on issues of creation/production, and now find myself drawn to continue these discussions and talk occasionally about issues of creation surrounding some of the stories in the book.

So here goes, with 'Condensed Metaphysics', the first story in the book.

This is the story of a group of people out on the town who end up in a pizza parlour where a comic drunken conversation with the other customers punctures a few preconceptions and leads to some pretty serious realizations. It begins like this:

We're all drunk and Ellie's drunkest. She runs up to a guy with a begging cup outside the Babylon and asks him to lend us some money, we're hungry and want a pizza and none of us has got any cash.

In fact (as I've indicated before), the publishing history of this story neatly sums up the pitfalls of being drawn to talk about the 'real-life' elements of fiction (which, paradoxically, makes it hard to discuss its publishing history without doing so!). As soon as I had written this story I sent it off to London Magazine, which was edited at the time by the now sadly deceased Alan Ross. This is perhaps an indication of my pig-headedness: I had sent occasional stories to Alan in the past, but although he usually bothered to be complimentary, he had never agreed to publish any, and though I had long come to the conclusion that my stories just weren't his kind of thing - well, let's just say my granny was pretty stubborn too. So I was delighted when he wrote back very quickly and said he had found the story very funny and wanted to publish it. And then he asked me was it fiction or fact, because if it was fiction then I would have a long wait for it to appear in the magazine, but if it was fact then he'd be able to put it in the reportage section at the back of the mag next issue.

That wiped the smile off, I can tell you. Fact? My carefully wrought and imagined story, with all those made-up conversations and characters, that product of my imagination, not a replication or account, but an artifice of images and a hammock of words swinging rhythmically, a constructed vehicle for my own individual vision and themes? Wasn't it obvious from the shape, the patterning, that it was a made up thing?

I don't mind admitting I had a moment's doubt about the story, and in order to explain I do need to admit here that it was indeed based - based - on a real-life incident, more closely perhaps than most of my stories. I considered the fact that I had included real-life place names in the story, something I usually consciously don't do since what I'm aiming for usually is something a bit less realist - more universal, or mythic, if that's not too pretentious. Had this given it a kind of cod 'authenticity', especially since Alan (if he remembered) wasn't accustomed to reading that kind of thing in my work? Or was it something deeper? I had certainly written this story very quickly, it had come to me the moment I had woken up the morning after the real-life incident, and I had polished it off that day, and it was indeed steeped in the atmosphere of the real-life event. And the prose rhythms of the story were also tied up with the real-life experience; they did seem to have emerged from the particular hilarity of that real-life evening.

But of course it was fiction, (those rhythms were my own after all, and the characters and their stories were my fabrication), and so important was it to me to have it acknowledged as such, that I was quite prepared to wait for a lengthy period before publication. I wrote back to Alan Ross and jokingly told him that he was right in guessing that it had been based on a real-life incident but there was no doubt that the piece was fiction.

Well, now, maybe I was too cryptic, maybe Alan Ross was so busy he missed the point of my letter: imagine my dismay when the story appeared in the very next issue as reportage, indeed as a kind of travel piece, under the umbrella title Chinatown.

Why Chinatown? Because, presumably, the chap with the begging cup at the beginning of the story is asked by the revellers where he sleeps at night; he replies that he sleeps in an alley in Chinatown and before they can say any more he embarks comically on a lecture about popular misconceptions about the dangers of Chinatown. But we never find out if his version of Chinatown is the right one, partly because the revellers quickly forget all about him and Chinatown as they go on into the takeway place to order their pizzas. Any Chinatown of the story is not the specific place which a travel piece must reduce it to, but a Chinatown of the mind. This is a story not about a specific place or any specific places (in spite of my naming) but about viewpoint and the isolation of everyone from each other's experience and stories. It's a story about stories rather than reality, indeed it's about the difficulty of ever really pinning down reality - hence its ironic title 'Condensed Metaphysics'.

Best not even to get involved in discussions about the real-life sources for fiction, I say.

The State of Me by Nasim Marie Jafry

It's a particular experience, reading a book by someone you know - I always feel so personally involved, which is why I always write about those books on this blog rather than my other, more detached, critical blog. Quite often I've been party to the joys and struggles of the book's creation and/or publishing history and often I can't read the book without hearing the author's own real-life voice and envisaging the gestures which usually accompany it.

Nasim Marie Jafry's debut novel The State of Me, a revelatory depiction of life with ME, is an especially pertinent case since, for one thing, it is an avowedly autobiographical novel. Thus if you know what Nasim looks like it is just about impossible to read it without projecting her appearance onto that of the protagonist, and indeed the witty, wry, angry yet philosophical voice of that narrator-protagonist is the voice I know from emails and internet forums. In fact, many people will know Nasim as well as and better than I do, since it is also the voice of her successful and touching blog. This novel's publishing history is an interesting one: an agent persuaded a very reluctant Nasim that in a world where memoirs are the big sellers the book would be more easily marketable if sold as 'fictionalized memoir'. However the agent's first attempts to sell the novel quickly failed, since as an autobiographical novel it failed to meet publishers' expected parameters for memoir. The agent promptly dropped the book, leaving the author to tout it herself, but without the energy to do so, debilitated as she was by the condition which forms the very subject of the book. Instead, Nasim posted extracts on her blog and Clare Christian of The Friday Project came along like a fairy godmother and snapped it up, and now at last the book is published. Thus the author's real-life experience of having the book published after a long ME-troubled struggle becomes a kind of meta-ending for the novel's story, and in this respect the story of the novel and real life bleed into each other in a very particular way. This, and the identification which many must have with Nasim through her blog, may be why some commentators have judged that the novel should after all have been published as 'fictionalized memoir', which, in spite of the highly positive nature of the reviews, must be a dismaying thing for Nasim to hear.

In fact, it's nonsense. OK, so we may be able to see for ourselves, and Nasim's blog has told us, the things in the novel which relate to the real-life Nasim. But Nasim has also told us that there are things in the novel which don't relate to reality, and in my view, as in hers, that makes it fiction full stop. Come on, folks, there's no such thing as 'fictionalized memoir' (only insofar as no memoir can ever be truly objective - but that's not what we're talking about here.) You start making things up, you change the tenor of everything, you're making an artifice, which is what artists, including novelists, do.

So let's look at this book as an artifice, as a novel, as Nasim would want us to do. It's the story, beginning in the eighties, of Helen Fleet, a popular, lively university student of French who is struck down during her year abroad by a mystery illness which leaves her debilitated, cutting short her studies and forcing her withdrawal from life. Later tests reveal that her initial illness was caused by the coxsackie virus, and much later, physical tests prove that her muscles are no longer capable of producing enough energy. Initially, however - at a time before ME has been named, leave alone generally acknowledged by the medical profession - Helen encounters medical disbelief in her symptoms, and even after it has become acknowledged and her originally projected five years of the condition turns into six, seven, and finally, by the end of the novel thirteen, she comes up against both medical and lay resistance.

The novel is the story of Helen's rearguard psychic battle against the condition itself and her forced retirement, against such disbelief, and against the consequences for her relationship: the bond between Helen and her boyfriend, though ultimately strong, is stretched to breaking point as he sets off on the youthful adventures on which she can no longer accompany him. And her weapons in this battle are her wit, her verbal inventiveness and precision, her vivid eye on the kaleidoscopic world which is going on around and without her, her acute observations of character and physical detail, and above all her anger, which is the motivating, energizing force of this novel.

The amazing feat of this novel is to give one a physical sense of the pain and frustration of this condition, and yet to be bouncing with life, the inner life and the irrepressible psyche of Helen. For long stretches of time not a lot happens - which of course is the nature of the condition and the point of Helen's tragedy - and this may be why some commentators have insisted that it's 'not a novel'. Wrong again. Look at the word novel: the novel is called the novel because it has the capacity to constantly reinvent itself anew. It doesn't have to conform to conventional expections - the best ones in my view don't; it doesn't have to be action-filled or action-based, as long as it works, by which I mean it involves you emotionally, makes you want to keep reading, and this novel certainly did that for me. The story of this novel is an inner, psychological one; it's the story of Helen's fight to retain the sense of who she is while in outward ways the condition changes the kind of person she is or can hope to be, and of her psychological maturing in the process.

The ways in which the effects of this novel are created are highly literary (and novelistic), with precisely honed, sometimes lyrical prose and with highly stylistic devices. Helen uses the conceit of Play-School type windows through which her situation can be viewed via different viewpoints; intermittently she brings in an imagined conversation with a stranger who begins by expressing disbelief in her condition and must be educated into its reality and with whom she reviews her own progress.

The ending is inconclusive, which again seems to have led people to a reading of the book as memoir, but once again I'd say that formally this is the perfect novelistic end, replicating both Helen's uncertain future and the unfinished story of ME's acceptance by the medical profession. And, come to that, fitting that feeling of wishing a book hadn't ended...

Reading: Michele Roberts at Manchester University

A great evening on Monday - a reading at the University by Michele Roberts, which was of course guaranteed to bring people from as far away as Liverpool and Chester, and so I met some old friends I hadn't seen in a while. The reading itself and the Q & A afterwards were engrossing, and as people said afterwards, inspiring: Michele Roberts is wonderfully open and unassuming and engaging. Although known as a novelist, she was reading from her recent memoir in which she looks back on her time in seventies London as a struggling new writer.

Interesting to me, with my obsession with the subject, was the audience discussion with Michele about the differences between memoirs and novels. Asked why she had chosen this time to write a memoir, she laughed and said with typical openness that her publisher (presumably responding to the current appetite for memoirs) had suggested it. Then someone in the audience identified herself as a teacher of memoir and 'life writing' and said that she always told her students that (as I'm always saying) a memoir is as much of a construct as a novel, and asked Michele whether she had found that to be true. Michele said that she had, but that the linear shape of the memoir had made for easier construction. However, a further question prompted her to say that she had originally conceived of the book as structurally more complex, but that the commissioning publisher had wanted something more linear (and presumably more marketable). Asked if this had compromised her truth, she said that, actually, yes it had: she had wanted very much for the book to be about the difference between her two personae: that of the young woman she was in the seventies and the woman she is now, but that the linear form hadn't been as capable of carrying that idea as her original conception. But then she laughed again and said without regret that this was the situation in today's publishing market, which you just have to accept.

What was really interesting, however, is that, at least with Michele Roberts accompanying the book in person, you very much did get a sense of the differences between those two personae, and of the relationship she now has to her former self - which was actually pretty moving, to me and I know to others in the audience. Someone noted that while many writers like to distance themselves from their fiction writing (something which I tend to do as a protest against the cult of personality), Michele is very open about the relationship between her writing and her life and personality. Michele responded by saying that this stems from her sense (with Julia Kristeva) that writing comes from the body, is felt before it is articulated in language - something I can't argue with in the least.

Food for thought - and a really stimulating evening. (And some OK wine.)