Lucky 13 Interview With Jonathan Taylor

1 – Can you start by telling us a little about your current book?

Well, actually my most recent book is an academic one, Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930. It was published earlier this year by Palgrave-Macmillan. It’s about the close relationship between violence – sometimes murderous violence – laughter and comedy in some nineteenth and early-twentieth century stories and memoirs. The most obvious example is First World War literature, where dark and grotesque humour often arose from violence, injury and death (cf. Blackadder Goes Forth). The starting point for the book was Edgar Allan Poe’s startling last published tale, ‘Hop-Frog,’ where the court jester ends up burning his master, the king, and his ministers alive in revenge. As the jester does so, he declares that this is his ‘last jest.’ That idea fascinated me, and became the central image for the book.

In many ways, the book grows out of my creative work: as various people have pointed out, one of the hallmarks of my own style is a dark humour, a mingling of apparently discordant emotions. In all my work, I want to explore moments where tragedy and comedy, horror and humour, tears and laughter intermingle in different ways. This is the kind of writing I’m drawn to: writing which is not monolithically emotional, which does not single-mindedly explore one emotional state, but which comprehends that we laugh at funerals, cry at parties. Keats knew this.

A poem can pivot emotionally round two or three words, and that’s what I was trying to do in some of the poems in my recent collection, Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). There’s one very short poem I wrote, ‘This poem is too neat’ (see https://clearpoetry.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/jonathan-taylor-three-poems/) which, when I perform it, has had an unexpected (to me) response from audiences: they tend to laugh in the first half, and then suddenly are shocked out of that laughter in the second half. It all happens in a few seconds. Michel de Montaigne wrote a wonderful essay on ‘How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing’ – and that mingling of emotions is an aspect of life that music is very good at encompassing, but poetry, and literature in general, can also at least try and capture it.

2 – Are you a plotter or a panster?

I think it depends on the nature of the work – memoirs don’t need plots (though they often have essay-like structures), and short stories suffer if there’s anything but the tiniest germ of a plot. So it only applies (in my opinion) to the weird, niche (!) form form of the novel. But even there, plotting can be so dull, can’t it? Even if you have an idea of where a book is going, the best stuff is what happens unexpectedly, while you’re writing it, in the gaps, in the moments where a sentence veers off in a direction you didn’t expect. For my first novel, Entertaining Strangers, I started off with two images: a starting point (in 1997) and an historical event (in 1922). I knew there was a hidden connection between them somehow, and I wrote to find out what that hidden connection was. Writing, in that sense, is a coming to light, an excavation of an unconscious storyline (rather like a dream – the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud would say).

3 – Savoury or sweet?

Savoury – though I’m not sure if it has any effect on my writing. Maybe my writing’s a bit savoury: crunchy, chewy, peppery. Or maybe not. How far does a writer really know how their work ‘tastes’ to readers?

4 – Three books to a desert Island. Go!

Firstly, Dickens’s Bleak House – perfect for a desert island, and it’s probably only on a desert island that I’ll get the chance to read it again. It’s infinitely complex, a labyrinthine fractal of a novel which you could study forever and never exhaust it. Secondly, Thomas Carlyle’s overlooked novel-memoir-pseudo-biography-and-philosophical-work Sartor Resartus: a desert island might give me the time and space to work out what it all means, and untangle its complex web of irony and seriousness, Romanticism and disillusionment. It’s a fascinatingly absurd book, where everything is in double or triple quotation marks – but now and then, in the gaps, you glimpse something transcendentally beautiful. Or perhaps not, and that’s ironic too. And finally: Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice,’ the story which I think inspired me more than any other. I’ve sometimes wondered if everything I’ve written is a (failed) variation on Mann’s strange, visionary and paradoxical story.

5 – Star Wars or Star Trek?

Oh, I love the original Star Trek and the original Star Wars. But both went downhill after that. The originals are both cartoonishly effective because they’re straightforward, stand-alone stories. As soon as the other baggage gets in the way (you know, all the taxation systems, the politics, the godawful world building), I lose interest. Not unlike the worst excesses of so-called literary fiction, the problems arise when they lose sight of simple storytelling, and get caught up with pseudo-Wagnerian-hubristic complexities. The Trouble with Tribbles is a great and entertaining stand-alone story – who needs anything else, when you’ve got Kirk, the Enterprise, space and thousands of fluffy enemies? It’s something that literary writers forget too: in the end, the primary job of a writer is to provide pleasure, to tell good stories. All the rest is padding, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement.

6 – If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

The ability to read more quickly, and take it all in. I’m a terribly slow reader, which is a real problem given how much I want to read – and how much I’m meant to read. I’ve got slightly quicker over the years, but it’s never been enough. I want to read more Thomas Mann novels, more Dostoyevsky novels, more Victorian novels – but time is an enemy, especially with a full-time job and twins. Maybe in the end reading is the real creative act, not writing – reading is a kind of superpower in itself.

7 – Music or Silence when writing?

I’ve written a lot while listening to music, or just after listening to music – and that shows up in the stories and poems themselves, sometimes explicitly (in terms of ekphrasis, or moments where particular pieces emerge into the stories), and sometimes implicitly, in terms of structure or rhythm, and sometimes both of these things. Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music – and that’s certainly the case for my attempts at ‘art.’ I sometimes wonder if my writing (and especially my poetry) is a substitute for musical composition. I did used to write music, and perform it, but was never a good enough musician to realise what I wanted. As Peter Porter once said, I’d far rather have been a musician – but being a writer is a good second best, in the absence of some musical-Faustian pact.

8 – If you could live anywhere in the world, and take everything that you love with you, where would you choose?

Britain but without the Tories.

9 - Your favourite karaoke song?

I only did karaoke once in my life, twenty-five years ago, and it ended very badly, both in terms of my hangover, and the listeners’ ears. I love music, play the piano (poorly), but singing is, erm, not my strength, shall we say. I was the only person ever to get kicked out of a kids’ choir I was in at the age of seven – a real achievement. Having said that, if I could sing – in an ideal world – and, for that matter, I was a contralto – I’d love to belt out something like Alfred Schnittke’s ‘Es geschah’ from his Faust Cantata, where Faust is ripped to pieces by demons to a tango (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR78SQeRiC4). No one would ever dare do karaoke again.

10 – One piece of advice to an aspiring writer?

Don’t get sucked into the competition model of writing – don’t believe the hierarchies. It’s a democracy of letters, not an aristocracy. The British (and Americans, for that matter) can turn anything into a competition – even baking, for God’s sake. It’s a capitalist illness which, as writers, we should resist. Writing is not a competition. Never lose sight of the fact that competitions, prizes, awards are arbitrary, a matter of luck, marketing and PR gimmicks, and – if you’re lucky enough to be successful in them – just sugar rushes to your writing ‘career,’ not a permanent sign of anything. Everyone gets twinges of insecurity and even jealousy – that’s part of life – but it’s always worth remembering that you’re not in competition with other writers, really: they’re doing something different to you. It’s not a limited pool, with everyone scrabbling around for scraps: it’s an infinitely expanding sea.

11 – You win £1 million, but you must give half to charity. Which charity do you chose, and what do you do with the rest of the money?

Oh gosh, wouldn’t it just be a mad, anarchic, almost-artistic thing to do just to give it to the first homeless person you meet on the street – and then just walk off, with no explanation, no further contact? In the end, as many people have said, money doesn’t have any real value, so why not just make someone’s day … well, year … well, decade.

12 – Horror films, yes or no? If so, any favourites?

I love horror films and ghost stories – I think one of my great ambitions as a writer is to write a really good ghost story, like M. R. James or Shirley Jackson. It’s so hard.

The horror films I particularly love are the beautiful ones from the 60s, 70s and early 80s – like The Haunting from 1963, The Shining, Don’t Look Now. Don’t Look Now is one of the few horror films which is worse the second, third, fourth times round – it’s more painful, more horrific. And now with twin daughters, I find it barely watchable. It’s one of those rare cases where the original story, by Daphne Du Maurier, and the film are equally brilliant, if very different to each other. Funnily enough, given what I said earlier, it’s another case of a short story which (ultimately) is a variation on Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’: a horror version of it. Maybe that’s the point of Mann’s original story: it’s an infinitely adaptable modern myth.

13 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently between books – my university work is so overwhelming at the moment, it’s hard to get proper time to write. The public sector in general is a pretty tough place at the moment, to be a writer or even a human being. But I am writing short stories, and I think that’ll probably be my next book – a short story collection. I write in lots of different forms, but in some ways, the short story form feels like a natural home. It’s such a meeting-place (a kind of hybrid) of different forms and genres, including poetry (in the language and compression), scriptwriting (in the dialogue), and fiction. I think it probably is one of the forms of writing closest to music as well: good stories are often musically shaped (and even sound musical when read aloud). For all the supposed-literary sophistication of the modern short story form, they’re also (ideally) very close to traditional storytelling. They’re tales, really, told round fires – which is why, no doubt, the ghost story has such a strong tradition.