Patrick Evan's new novel The Back of His Head explores ideas about art and genius through the story of Raymond Lawrence, a true literary 'monster'.
Lawrence is New Zealand's only Nobel Prize for Literature winner, and the novel traces his rise and decline, and the effects of his terrible behaviour on the trustees who are charged with memorialising him and his work.
The Back of His Head is at once a satire, and a troubling exploration of what it means to make fiction.
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| Patrick Evans |
The
Back of His Head is a novel that really deeply questions what fiction is,
and how it is made. It’s a game-playing novel right through to the final page;
even the author’s Acknowledgements puts question marks around who created this
thing. It’s a very effective way to steer the reader. Did you worry about
accusations of manipulation while writing it? Or is that part of the point?
No; I expect readers to feel manipulated because that’s what novels do;
they manipulate, and that’s something I wanted to show as I wrote – the
‘made-upness’ of fiction and how we buy into that aspect by ‘willingly
suspending disbelief,’ and how fiction relies on our doing that, how writing/reading
is a collaborative project. The ‘apparent’ authorship of The Back of His Head moves as you read it, from ‘me’ to ‘Peter Orr’
to ‘Thom Ham’ to ‘Patrick’ (whoever he is) to (possibly) the Master himself, in
the text and knocking on the door of the Residence later on, when the tapes
have been stolen (or is it just the police, called in to restore Order?). Above
all, The Back of His Head is a
reading experience in which the reader is moved around as s/he turns the pages.
Writing the novel, I
had a strong sense of the authorship moving away from me and of myself just
going along with that process: I don’t know who’s knocking at the door any more
than the reader does, or where Peter and the boy with spina bifida are going
near the end, but I know it’s someone important that’s knocking and somewhere
important that they’re going. The authorship of the novel has dissolved at this
point, and is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and the ‘tail’ of the
book has simply become layers of text, none of them describing a ‘fixed,’
‘real’ reality ‘back there’. Another way of saying this is that the novel has
become ‘de-Oedipalized’ (cf. the bone
people after the destruction of the tower two-thirds of the way through:
everything changes after that).
An aspect of this
recession of the idea of Authorship is the emergence of what I call in the
novel ‘the oceanic processes of literature,’ in which the idea of the Author as
Master is replaced by the notion of Writing as Master – in which (effectively)
all writing is a form of plagiarism and nothing is absolutely new (a notion which
itself is not new; cf. the Borges story in which a Frenchman decides to write Don Quixote). And of course you have to
ask the obvious questions if you believe this: what use is any literary trust
that exists to give permission to quote from writing that is taken from the
Ocean of Literature? Who ‘owns’ a book once it’s written – a trustee more than
anyone else who hasn’t written it?
Do you think that’s what literature – as
opposed to ‘pulp fiction’ – is best at doing: asking questions? This assumes a
certain degree of open-hearted and open-mindedness in its readers – do you
agree?
Literary fiction requires both those qualities in the reader, as well as
a willingness to be taken somewhere new and strange; otherwise, why read it –
why write it?
I think readers of literary fiction self-select to some degree, and
therefore know what they’re getting themselves into and, at their best and in
their Ideal Reader mode, are open to being shaken up and even (at the far end
of the process) shocked and disgusted if they think that is a part of their own
enlargement as human beings.
To open oneself up to such possibilities requires not only a willing
suspension of disbelief by the reader but a refusal to judge, and, particularly – and above all – a putting-aside of notions of political correctness. This in
turn requires an acceptance that a writer knows what s/he is doing and why s/he
is taking you to certain places – in other words, that s/he isn’t just being
grubby or self-indulgent. All this requires a sophisticated readership, one
which (for example) can distinguish between the material being who has written
the work and the work’s narrating author and characters, and can understand a
creative work as being about certain ideas and not simply as yet one more attack on particular people in the material
world.
The book kicks western culture’s
received idea of the author up its complacent backside. It is also a satire, on
one level, of the prize-culture around books and writers. How possible do you
think it is for a reader to get away from the hype, for a good book to be
quietly discoverable?
The Back of His Head is about a Dead
White Male Author (think Hemingway, White, Durrell, Lowry and many others of
the twentieth century) who is now a dinosaur as a new era of writing evolves
that is organized in new ways and for a completely different kind of readership
from before. To some extent this involves the return of a colonial Repressed
(think of the Master’s replacement in the bookshop’s advertising by the young
former refugee/writer and his new bestseller).
But this new era, it seems to
me, involves new modes of hype, most obviously the prize system Raymond
Lawrence turns away from after landing The Big One. That’s why he wants to blow
up the creative writing school, and at this point I have to say I’m close to
his way of thinking – not that I think we should blow up creative writing
schools (after all, I’ve taught in one for ten years), but I do think we should
become aware of what we’re getting into as literature becomes increasingly
commodified by global capitalism. Maintaining locally-rooted literatures,
supported by active small publishers, with alert, educated and open-minded
local readerships and informed, intelligent critical structures and readerships
are (I think) the way to resist the ‘post-colonial exotic’ and the hyper-real
hollowing-out of ‘the product’ in a world of superficial display.
As to getting away from
the hype: in my experience, the truth will out either way – that a ‘successful’
work isn’t really up to much, really, or a little-known work is. I have
first-hand evidence that good books can be discovered, recognized and
appreciated without getting a prize: David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) was completely ignored when it
appeared and long after; now it is widely recognized as a masterpiece, not
least by the second-year university students I recently taught it to. All that
was needed was that we catch up to it (actually reading it helps). There are
further, more recent examples of the way word-of-mouth can ‘get it right’ in
the long term – to some extent the bone
people began like that: I heard it was being written and was important in
1969, long before it was published.
Raymond Lawrence, the writer at the heart
of the new novel, is a colossus of a writer, a man who has won the Nobel Prize
for Literature, but who is an appalling human being. Other characters describe
him as a monster, yet they indulge him throughout his life. They enable his
monstrous qualities to some degree. Is the novel at least partly a comment on a
society that looks the other way if an artist is at work?
I’ve always been fascinated by people who are appalling human beings but
have a peculiar charm and magnetism that cause other people to love them and even
lay down their lives for them, acolytes who – yes, I agree – enable them and
without whom the psychopath in question would be nothing. Our belief creates
and sustains them: they’re ‘our’ monsters – think of Hitler Youths shooting
themselves after Hitler’s suicide, think of Stalin’s victims weeping when he
died.
Raymond Lawrence is just such a being, a man who has sucked the life out
of everyone around him and yet is loved and cared for by them – even Thom the
dimwitted weightlifter can see him as lovable late in the old man’s life, when
Lawrence has been ravaged by Parkinson’s. Peter Orr has been all but destroyed
as an individual, yet sits in the darkened Residence calling out to the dead
Master, the man who has destroyed him.
The
Back of His Head explores the notion that art can come from really
unpleasant places, the relationship between art and pathology, and the
well-known fact that many writers/artists are at best not very nice people and
at worst in the grips of some kind of sickness. This is the sort of thing Joyce
Cary wrote about with his potty artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth (1944), but in my novel it’s less cute – Jimson
is your standard Corbyn-ish anti-capitalist/anti-bourgeois; what I’m writing
about is someone who really might have tortured and murdered a young Arab boy
in the desert – and worse. All in order to qualify as an artist, the Master
says, all in order to find inspiration: a man who really does believe that a
successful work of art should conceal a crime.
It might be fair to say that the plot of
The Back of His Head doesn’t deliver
a set ‘truth’ about what happens, but at the same time, the sense I got on
finishing the novel was that a truth about the creation of fiction and an
ethical statement had been made. What do you think?
This is a sharp insight into the novel and mirrors my own feeling as I
wrote - it’s exactly the response I hoped for, a sensing of something that’s
there but can’t be defined, leaving the reading experience itself as the most
important part of the text.
Writing Gifted was easy but with The Back of His Head I really did
wrestle with the angel; in writing both, though, I experienced a sense of
increasing detachment as if I’d surrendered to the writing process in some way.
In a review of David Hare’s recent autobiography The Blue Touch Paper the playwright is quoted as saying that,
because his writing comes so independently from his
subconscious, it is, “at the deepest level, out of my hands” (New Statesman, September
2015).
This process is very familiar to me, in which the writing seems to begin
to write itself and the writer becomes, quite genuinely, a reader of his own
work as it is written, as puzzled and intrigued as anyone else by what is
emerging in front of him. Starting from the basic situation of a famous
artist-uncle and his nephew (a scenario that has been with me for forty years),
I am as surprised as anyone by what has emerged. It leaves me not with a
Message but with a trace, like a dream after waking (The Luminaries did this to me, too): in the case of The Back of His Head, something I can’t
spell out but which has to do with the importance of life outside literature. I
don’t know where the little boy in the wheelchair near the end came from, but
it must be somewhere important; and look what happens to Peter, Marjorie and
Robert when they fall under the spell of Literature. There is a right way to
live your life, and the Master isn’t an example of that.
Your two novels are about literary
writers who are, to borrow the title of your first novel, gifted. What has made
you want to continue exploring the idea of genius?
Henry James (somewhere) said that no work of art was worthwhile if it
didn’t say something about the form in which it was written, and since (like the
Master) I have reservations about how much any novel can make the world change
‘out there,’ I agree that writing, to a very large extent, has to be
inward-looking and aware of itself as a form – ‘in here’. The most interesting
recent writer in New Zealand, for me, is Carl Shuker, each of whose novels and
novellas challenges the reader to put all his/her assumptions to one side and
learn to read it as something new in the world of writing.
As far as I’m concerned,
when looking ‘in here,’ where better to start than at that curiosity of
curiosities, the inspirational moment itself, the unanswerable question of
‘where it all comes from’? The Back of
His Head was written as the third in a trilogy of novels begun by Gifted; no guarantee, of course, that
I’ll be able to write the second, but if I do, the trilogy thus completed will
be in honour of Janet Frame’s influence on my thinking as a writer and on my
life, and in particular in her fascination with ‘where it comes from’ and the
place of language in writerly ‘inspiration’. The Back of His Head is particularly influenced by Living in the Maniototo (1979), the
novel some consider to be Frame’s master-work. She never leaves me.
Why do you think literary estates, like
the one represented in your novel, are often such fraught organisations?
What comes immediately to mind here is Henry Kissinger’s suggestion that
academic politics are as vicious as they are because the stakes are so low.
There’s an aspect of the literary world that is the obverse of those soaring
humanitarian ideals behind the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in The Back of His Head I’ve been
fascinated to explore this kind of heroic pettiness – which isn’t particular simply
to literary trusts but extends into reviewing and the awarding of prizes and
writing residencies and even behaviour in public readings. By and large, the
smaller and more isolated the literary culture, the more (I’m told) this nonsense
goes on: issues of personal insecurity seem to be paramount as we all vie to be
Top Bitch At Crufts.
I’ve always been
interested in the a writer’s ‘corpus and corpse’ – what s/he writes, and then
what happens to the Body of Writing and the Body of the Author afterwards –
hence my fascination (after helping a friend with Parkinson’s for a few years)
with the corruption and dissolution of both the writer’s body and his sense of
Self – in this novel, of the Master’s Mastery: who is it who blows up the
creative writing school? (And, anyway, is that really what happens?) And who
inherits the Master’s Mastery after he’s gone?
The posthumous ‘secularisation’
of a particular writer’s achievement after his/her death and the use of his/her
status and power have always fascinated me, along with the question how a
literary guardianship might qualify an author’s heritage and even be argued, in
some cases, to have worked against the values espoused in the author’s work and
the posthumous reputation of the writer.
The Back of His Head is available in good bookshops and through our online bookstore now.
p/b, $30.
