A dear old friend of mine, Ewan Gass has just published a novel. Titled ‘Clinical Intimacy’, it’s a really beautiful book, about sexuality and care and growing up, and it’s coming out from (fancy!) Penguin Doubleday on July 25th. I beseech you all to buy it.
I interviewed Ewan last month about the book and much else. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. For paying subscribers, I’ll send you the audio of the conversation in a separate mail later this summer.
James Harris: How long you got? How much time?
Ewan Gass: I've got up to an hour. All right.
JH: That's good. That's more than enough. Yeah. We'll see how how this goes. Are you ready to start?
EG: Yeah, I guess so.
JH: Where are you?
EG: I'm back in Cambridge. I've had to come back. It's a shame, because, uh, my fantastic plan was that we would be able to spend 12 days in Sweden together because I thought that after Covid, all the exams that that we mark at Cambridge were now on this online platform. But unbeknown to me, we've gone back to this old pre-COVID thing where they have to fucking handwrite their exams and therefore we have to kind of go around delivering exam scripts to one another once we've marked them, because it's all double blind. Anyway, I had to come back to Cambridge about five days earlier than planned. So I'm here without my daughter, without my spouse. This is my office.
JH: When I turned on, I felt you were very serious. I felt like I was late for a tutorial.
EG: Yeah, we are late.
JH: I am, I'm five minutes late. Having already requested an extension of 15 minutes.
EG: You’re behaving just like one of my students.
JH: I've done the reading, though. That's a good thing.
EG: As long as you haven't used AI to write your essay.
JH: Yeah.
EG: You're on the beach?
JH: I'm on the beach. I'm on the beach. Although that’s not going to make sense if this is a pure transcript, I have a visual image of a beach behind me. I think we should for readers of my newsletter who are well into, uh, four figures now, we should introduce each other and say how we know each other and why we're talking.
EG: Well, I'm Ewan Gas, although I have another name, Ewan Jones, but I can maybe talk about that later. But when you and I met, I was still Ewan Gas and we met many years ago. We've known one another for more than half of our lives now. And we met at Bilborough Sixth Form College, where I was in the upper sixth, and you were in the lower sixth as these things used to be called. Maybe they still are. And we hit it off because of a shared love of culture and being stupid together in often in pubs, often in one particular pub.
JH: Which is still there.
EG: Which is still there, called The Peacock. Maybe your readers will be touched to hear that it is listed specifically in the dedications for the novel that we're going to talk about in a bit. And I suppose over the first four or five years of our, of our friendship, we often repaired there, living in Nottingham as we did, or then when we went to uni, me going to Cambridge, you going to Oxford in unoriginal fashion. And then graduated and then the various ways in which you get miserable or pissed off at the world when you're a young person. When we were both in town, we'd meet and complain about things and also cheer one another up by talking about everything. So I have, despite the difficult times. And your readers will know a bit about that from your posts, about that time for you. I really remember those moments as little saving interludes for me and they have been very important for me. And then we have just stayed in touch really in the way that I think is quite unusual. We've stayed in touch and we've carried on talking and making one another laugh. Well, you've made me laugh. Don't know if I've made you laugh.
JH: Not yet.
EG: But I'm still…. Hope springs eternal. I kind of hope that my real reason for writing this book was in the hope that at least one of the lines might make you laugh.
JH: Is it funny, your book? I wouldn't say it's primarily a comic novel. It has some funny bits. But I don't think the drive of it is to be funny, right?
EG: No, no, it's got, I think, one joke in it that's like, you know, a joke that you, as a stand up might recognise as a set-up. One of the characters says something like the British are terrified of a pleasure that they cannot experience. And it's pure, unadulterated form. That is why their favourite food is sandwiches. Sorry. I'm laughing at my own joke. It's terrible. I tend to come up with one sort of succinct, concise joke a decade. And so there we are. I put that in.
JH: Well, obviously male friendship is a bit of a theme of Stiff Upper Quip, my newsletter. I was thinking of that internet meme the other day, which is the two women pictured sitting next to each other, and one is saying to the other, ‘I love you.’ And the other one's replying with ‘I love you.’ And it says underneath: ‘Lasts three months.’ And then next to it is two guys, one of whom is saying to the other, you're a fucking idiot, and the other one's going, you fucking twat: and the caption is ‘Lasts forever.’ I don't know if we've ever been insulting, but we have maintained a relationship on pretty bizarre in-jokes and shared insider references for quite a long time.
EG: Yeah. Well, of my two or three achievements on this planet, I'm particularly proud of being the unnamed eminence grise on Stiff Upper Quip. For moments, where, you know, you say a friend: ‘A friend and I have had our relationship maintained largely through an ongoing joke about [former Ajax and Ipswich winger - ed] Finidi George. Yeah. That's me. I'm coming out now readers. That was me. I'm very delighted. I mean, I wrote a novel, but more importantly than that, I did do this joke with you. I did consent to this joke for many, many years.
I'm very interested in male friendship, as are you. And I think frequently you get articles on this which show that, you know, the average man has 0.7 friends or something. And that's not been my experience. I've got and I think this is the same for you, James, so I don't know how unusual we are, not many but two, three, four male friends whom I've been very close to over decades now. And I think the challenge with a friendship like that is to stop it getting stop it decaying into nostalgia.
So the in-joke is a really interesting mode, it is a really interesting form because it's like a kind of catch phrase that you can hold to and it's got security as well, but that you can try and make it change and regenerate it in some ways. And that kind of stands for the friendship as a whole. And we've moved in different circles and gone to different countries and had different relationships over the course of our time together. And we found a way, at least I think so, you can tell me I'm wrong now, but we found a way to keep on talking, keep the conversation fresh. But another way of saying that is ‘You fucker’, or whatever.
JH: That’s a nice segue, because another thing we've always had in common is writing and we've both been into writing. I remember one of the first meetings we had, you gave me some poems which you'd handwritten. I remember one of them had something to do with trees and paths. I remember forest imagery in one of these, and, you know, it was very nice. It was very nice to get something handwritten because you're obviously risking I mean, I don't know how many drafts of your poems you were handwriting at this time. Maybe you were like a medieval scribe doing like 50 of them a night and handing them around. But I felt very, very pleased to be entrusted.
But it's also a nice development that now at approximately similar times of our lives, we're writing books. And you have your book coming out, which is called ‘Clinical Intimacy’. And I want you to tell us about it.
EG: Um, I'm terrible at this.
So it's going to be published on July the 25th by Penguin Doubleday. It's a book that I think is easiest to begin describing by saying something about its structure, which is a bit unusual for a novel. It's a series of interviews that an unnamed psychologist who's doing a research project conducts with a variety of people, and those people are all anonymized for reasons that become clear if you carry on reading it. So they're all anonymized as, numbers and letters, so A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, depending on how they relate to a central, also anonymized figure who's called S, for subject simply. And as the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that this S has done something that makes him worthy of a psychologist's interest. And what that thing is, I'm not going to say, because I want your readers of this Substack to buy the book and get interested and wonder what it is. But I will say that what this subject has done involves a whole series of questions that are both very personal and also socially relevant, and topical, that include that include control, touch, intimacy as the title suggests. And the book is about some things that really matter to me and that I think are important.
And it's no coincidence that we started off talking about this, including male friendship. There's a very important central male friendship at the heart of the book, I think the relationship between parents and their children as well. And then the sort of relationships between people that are caught in institutions as well, be they institutions of care, be they institutions of coercion. So the book is really a series of monologues where these characters speak directly to the psychologist who herself never speaks. And I'm trying to capture something of the variety and particularity of people who come from very different places but share certain basic human needs.
JH: That was great. I don't think you are crap at that. I think you're really good. You're going to have to get used to doing it quite a lot. I think with what you what you said, I should say as well, it's also a quite a good read, which is perhaps what you've undersold. It's not just like very abstract, there is a story and there is a mystery, and the mystery is what you describe which is: What exactly has S been doing? I hope we're not spoiling it to say that we do find out. We do find out what the answer to a lot of those questions is.
One thing I'm really interested in, and perhaps you didn't mention, is the central figure of the book is S, who is spoken about by everyone. The book exists because we we're finding out about this person who's had an impact. But we don't hear from S directly. And I wondered what you thought about this because there's always something quite interesting I think conceptually and also just as an act of writing to write a book with a kind of central figure, i.e. ‘Waiting for Godot’, who is not in the book directly. So I wondered how you felt about that in the writing of it, and how early on it was clear that you were going to have this figure who didn't appear. How early on was that clear to you?
EG: Well, so it wasn't actually clear to me in that when I first got the idea and thought, oh, this is an interesting topic. At first I entertained the notion that S might speak, that he might tell his story in some way. And I quite swiftly realised when I tried to do that, that it really didn't work. Partly, I suppose, through my own failings. I couldn't actually make him as compelling as I wanted to but also, more fundamentally, I think that again, without revealing what he's done, somebody that is chameleon-like, who's able to take on, the needs of others. In a sense, his strength is a kind of it's a weak strength, a weak power, in that he has no independent existence of his own, except insofar as he's able to give people things. And so I realised actually, in a conversation with a common friend of ours, who will remain nameless in classic Stiff Upper Quip tradition, when I was sort of trying to give an account of what I wanted to do to do with the novel, I suddenly realised actually, turn it inside out. Don't make him the central figure that speaks, because it's not really about him. It's really about the effect he has on other individuals.
And by kind of turning it inside out that way, by making him an absent centre and by focusing on the effects, it made it indirect in a way that I found quite interesting. You know, in a lot of novels, actually in most, the most influential characters are not the ones that speak directly, but the ones that are mediated to us by more representative figures. One could list a whole bunch of novels that do that. But it also, I think by, by focusing on the effects it I thought that it heightened the sense of moral uncertainty and ambivalence. That is also a really important part of the book. That if he spoke as himself directly, it would be harder to kind of keep open that space for ethical judgement. You would find yourself feeling about him as a particularised individual. And I wanted that moral ambivalence to be open as a possibility.
Not to say that everybody feels ambivalently about this character. Some people I know who've read the book feel very negatively about him. Some people feel quite positively about him. But I want that. I want those two possibilities to be open in a way that I think they're not often in a lot of work that gets published today because there's a pressure for it to be clear and closed down and morally. And there's a strong pressure for moral clarity. So I wanted to keep that space open.
JH: And I really think it works. It works really, really well. We're getting this huge range of opinions of or encounters with this guy. And as you've outlined, some of the figures in the book are very close or a direct blood relation to S. Other people had a series of encounters, and obviously there is a sort of like virtuosic “I get to try lots of different voices”. “He do the police in different voices” to quote the original working title of ‘The Wasteland’, which I have to say was probably one of Ezra Pound's better edits to get that one, to get that one changed. Red pen through that one. But what's interesting is because S is like the ostensible subject of all these reflections, it actually allows us to bring forward these different characters in the same way as if I got 40 people in a room and asked them, you know, ‘What does love mean to you?’, I would get wildly different answers.
S is a kind of pretext, but at the same time, S is a sort of very genuine, definite human human being. So I really I think that's the strength of the book. But I also think it makes a big difference in that S is a man. Because I think that if you've done the same with a woman, there would be a risk of a kind of male author having this kind of godly feminine creature who, you know, she's a mystery to everyone, and none of us understand her. But I think the maleness of S is, again, quite relevant there.
EG: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, you know, it was already apparent to me, but it's become more so since the composition of the book that these kind of, you know, these cultural objects that have absent centres. So they can be sort of, you know, abstract essences like God. Lynch's ‘Twin Peaks’ is a really good example of the sort of, you know, absent feminine, as you describing it, quite interesting way where she can stand for all kinds of things, sort of. Idealisations. Absolutely. Like with Wordsworth, when you kind of apostrophise his ‘Nature’ with a capital as a woman and you're not sure whether it's his sister or some purified goddess.
And there are also practical reasons why it couldn't have been a woman. And I can't say why without revealing the details, but you know, the question of S's gender is important. There are moments when there is one moment in the book where, uh, he wonders a little bit in a way that upsets somebody else, whether this capacity to be passive and responsive to the other makes him in some way feminine or like a woman and gets some blowback from the person that he's speaking to at that moment. So I think his maleness does matter on a sort of practical level, but you're quite right that when one is thinking about absent centres, that that does put some pressure on the question of gender in interesting ways.
JH: I should say that coincidentally and, I read your book last month, my own novel, which I've been working on for two years now, also has an absent centre, but mine is feminine. So on some sort of some sort of weird psychic level our collaboration has continued. Our dialogue continues whether we put things out or not. But mine is a sort of obsessive, absent centre of someone who disappeared, which is very much influenced by, by Twin Peaks and, and Laura Palmer, which I do think works, by the way, the absence of Laura Palmer. I mean, it is kind of really beautiful, but obviously it comes with a kind of cultural baggage. I think a male character doesn't have that and it makes your feel probably fresher than my two years of labour. But, you know, I'm pushing ahead, too late now.
EG: I'm just very happy that we're doing this formal interview now so that I can on record. I want this to be minuted. Yeah, I want to read your book. And I have been trying in more private settings to get you to send it on to me. Unless you’re telling me that I'm just too critical a reader.
JH: No, you know, I go through the levels of toughness. I'm quite careful on that. But yes, it will eventually be finished. Just as Guns N’ Roses classic album ‘Chinese Democracy’ saw the light of day. And we all know what a masterpiece that was when it came out.
EG: Well, you know, I think I'm definitely early Guns N’ Roses. If could describe this, this this novel, it would definitely be, uh, early Guns N’ Roses, but with words.
JH: I mean, it has that energy.
EG: Welcome to the Jungle.
JH. That was the original title.
EG: Um, Ezra Pound changed it.
JH: I want to bring this back because I kind of find it fascinating. And this is not something any conversation between two writers could bring up. But we very much come from the same stew, right? We grew up in the East Midlands at the end of the 20th century. We went to the same type of university. Well you went into an academic career, but we've always we've always been kind of quite attached to continental Europe and spending a lot of time there. You know, so we do have a lot of similarities in what and how we've spent our time. But what fascinates me about that reading your book was just how different the way we write is. I know that's m sounds a bit like a no-brainer, but that but that is kind of fascinating, isn't it, that two blokes who have an enormous amount in common and the same cultural hinterland in a lot of ways have such a radically different, I would say, style, perspective on the world, but also just concerns, because I think we're really interested in very different things and very different effects on the reader. And I wondered what you thought about that.
EG: I think, though this is kind of based more on conversations with you than necessarily comparison of our creative endeavours, I think we share a lot of concerns, be that, you know, some of the things we've just enumerated or in our friendship. We've got a shared interest in a lot of political questions and a lot of moral questions. Tough moral questions. So what I think is definitely the case is that our styles are different, but I mean, maybe some biographical background is useful here. I'm kind of touched by this anecdote about me giving you poems that are handwritten because I had forgotten that. Sounds like the kind of thing I would do.
I don't feel like I have a style. You know, people say this of novelists, that you’ve kind of got your idea and then that's your idea. You work it out. That's not necessarily a bad thing, right? You've got your obsession that you come back to and you know, again, David Lynch, seeing as he's just been mentioned before, he's a really good example of that. He's got his obsessions. And I guess that works for style as well. You've got your style right. And you recognise an author by their style, like you recognise somebody by the clothes they dress in. I've always felt very underconfident in that respect. At first I thought it was a kind of absence in me, a negative thing for me. And I think if anything else, this novel is an attempt to kind of turn it to my advantage in a certain sense. I've never felt like I have a style. I've always felt like I'm imitating a little bit. And that's true for my academic career as well. You know, like you're writing these reviews, you're writing peer reviewed articles. And I've always thought there's a kind of little bit of pastiche involved. Not that it's bullshit, but that I'm kind of dressing up the same way. It's kind of fancy dress. It's you know, you've got and the footnotes and the parentheses and the and the academic locutions. It's always felt to me a little bit like fancy dress.
And I think one of the reasons why I moved away from having S tell a story to having the characters tell the story of how they've been touched by him, is that in a sense, it removes a need, the need for me to have a style, because it might have been identified with S, right. And I don't feel identified with S, actually. So by speaking as all these other people, I think you're very right and astute to say in some ways I'm kind of showing off a little bit. I'm trying to say I can speak as this person. I can speak as that other person. There's also a definite, powerful desire on my behalf to get a bigger variety of voices into the novel than is the case with the contemporary novel, which, you know, you tend to get for all the diversity in other respects. You often get basically people that are all university educated and talk in a particular way. I wanted to do it differently. But also I feel like my style is none of and all of the people that are speaking
And what I think is different with you - this is my sense of you, tell me if I'm wrong - I've always felt that from the start you've had a very powerfully developed sense of your own style. Maybe it's just that I know you and I've known you for a long time, but I feel like the various things you've shown me through the years, I've felt myself. Oh, yeah, that's James, it's the tics and the quirks and the comedy and the everything else, but it's not just those things. It goes deeper than that. So I think you don't want to get too deep about it, but you got your own style and I don't feel like I do, and that quite interests me.
JH: I mean, I think first of all, in terms of the accusation of showing off, I actually think probably some people will actually, when they write about your book, respond in a critical sense I mean, the more clichéd version of that would be, ‘Oh, who is this man to do all these voices?’ But I actually think we're beyond that, even in cultural criticism now. I do think some people will respond to your book by saying, you know, this is this guy is showboating a bit to do all these different voices. I don't think that at all. I think it keeps it very lively.
But what is clear to me is that there are some of those voices you really, really enjoy writing. Like the camp old dude in there. He's got a slight air of actor manqué. And I really felt that you were just like, I love being this kind of fruity old chap. And because it's also quite a break with some of the more sober styles, but within the book, a kind of outlier. But doesn't that sort of mean that your style is polyphonous? That that's your thing. That's your style. Which interestingly enough, I mean, the readers won't know, but your background as an academic is very much in poetics. And that seems to me quite a kind of poetic approach to writing a novel, to have these kind of different voices, which you dip in and out of which you can hear very strongly. And you put them across.
EG: Absolutely. And so just because we happen to have been speaking about T.S. Eliot briefly, for which you're to blame. He’s not a big, big influence on me, but he's a kind of good example of that in that; it's not just ‘He do the police in different voices’, there are a whole bunch of different textual allusions or whatever. What's more interesting than that, I think, is the rhythmical variation. Yeah, polyphonic in the true musical sense of the term, where there are a series of rhythmical changes that sort of shape voices. So the subjectivity, the individuality often breaks down under pressure in earlier.
And what you have are these kind of rhythmical patterns that have the echoes of literary tradition and the rhythm is the voice. That is very important to me and very powerful to me. And I feel like that is important so that, as much as thinking about these as distinct individuals, I think of them as having a rhythm of speaking. But, you know, that is identity as well. It's maybe not as fixed an identity as other ways we have of thinking about who people are, but that that is, you know, the grain of the voice and the texture of the voice and the rhythm of it.
So the showing off thing, it's a risk that you take to speak in different voices because it has to it just has to convince. Right. And so if it feels too forced or too false, there’s a risk that that has failed. And so that character, C7 is a really true thing that you just said really astute that there is a relish that I experience when I was writing this character, and actually when I started writing him, he kind of came from nowhere. I was writing the early drafts and then and I was I felt like it was a labouring a little bit, like it was all very solemn and serious. And also I felt that these characters were all too similar. I was with the family members of S, and I wanted to write somebody that just came from somewhere else.
And so I started writing him, and I didn't have a sense of what he was going to do or how he would fit into it, but it was like a kind of explosion of energy, partly because I was allowed to take liberties with him that I couldn't with the more solemn individual voices. And I really enjoyed writing him. Maybe I enjoyed writing him a little bit too much. And there is a there's a sense in which I can he's a very learned person. So I do get all of those sort of high culture references and other things with him, and he's very funny. Well, hope he's funny. One of the interesting things is that, of the readers of the novel, and when I was trying to, you know, get a book deal and stuff, he really divided opinions.
Some people liked him, and some people really hated him because they thought he was just too much, too camp, too excessive, too florid. And I think there was something in those complaints. So in the earlier versions of the novel, he was even more grandiloquent and caricatural than he is now. It took lot of work in to make him not just a voice where I could show off, but also somebody who would have, uh, distinct sadness to him. And indeed, those two are linked. So the showing off is only his showing off. His highfalutin ways are only there because of a vulnerability. I'm beginning to ramble a little bit, but I think polyphony maybe captures very nicely what I am trying to do with this work. And maybe as you say, that is my style. I don't know, I'm kind of eager to see what I do next. Maybe I'll try and write something that's much more monological to see if I can do it. I don't know.
JH: I suppose that would be my question. Would you, would you try and write another novel in this mode? I mean, I know enough about writing to know that you don't entirely plan. But you think the ‘polyphonous novel’ for you is something you could imagine having another crack at? Have you developed a sort of idiom which is which is your thing for a bit?
EG: Well, in my life generally, I've been indulged in my desire to break away from the last thing I've done. I find that reacting against what you're supposed to be doing gives you a good energy. And so one of the ways I thought about this novel, well, I didn't think about it, one of the ways in which I got the energy that I needed to write the novel was as a rebellion from my official day job. Which has all kinds of luxuries and privileges but all kinds of constraints as well. So it was a way to smash those up and do something different. And of course, what starts as a boundary transgression ends up setting up its own normative constraints limitations. And so right now, I feel like I want to smash up whatever I've done with this novel. I'm not quite ready to do it because it hasn't even come out.
JH: It's not out yet.
EG: Yeah.
JH: You're gonna have to talk about it for ages.
EG: Be out there and be talking about it, to be absolutely fucking fed up with the damn thing.
JH: I mean, this is the awful thing about the novel writing process, which is so slow, is that by the time you ever actually get anything out there, you know, it's a sort of distant memory of the person you were.
EG: Well, it's less glacial than academic publishing, at least.
JH: It comes out when you're dead, you know?
EG: Yeah. Exactly. I hope that one day I can look back at this novel in the way that Radiohead look back at ‘Creep’, you know, they've gone through the phase of silently fucking hating the thing, and now they can be entertained by be charmed by it enough to play it in a way that has lost its sort of sardonic sheen and has got a certain amount of love when they play it as an encore.
JH: Just to be clear, readers, Ewan's novel is considerably better than ‘Pablo Honey’.
I wanted to to move to another topic which I wanted to talk to you about, which was related to our continental Europe shenanigans, which have been a big theme of our adult lives. I live in Brussels. You spend quite a lot of time in Sweden. You've been in Germany recently. Your wife is from Spain. Your child has a Spanish name and will no doubt have a big Spanish influence on on her life. We've spent time together in Paris. We both speak multiple languages. I speak French with a with a Malian accent. And you speak German with - Do you have a Bavarian accent? I don't know.
EG: No, no, no. The Germans think I'm French when I speak German.
JH: You will also remember the phase where my French sounded incredibly German and much more German than my French… my French sounded more German than my German. Yes, that was it.
That means that you and I both had a lot of exposure to what we might sort of a little bit stuffily call ‘the continental tradition’. So writing in French. Writing in German. I'm probably more influenced by stuff in German, you know, because I was there so long. You're probably more influenced by stuff in French because, you know, you've had such a deep cultural connection to France. But we're both open to all of it and interested in in all of it. And also now both interested in some smaller European languages as well. And I wanted to know how, first of all, that's kind of interesting in itself, right? That two kids from Nottingham on our little trajectory have that shared connection as well.
But also, I mean, in terms of the writing, I have always had a slight feeling that that influence from the continent wasn't necessarily helpful for me for getting my work out there in the UK or connecting with people on the basis of what I'm interested in. And I think you've done that very well in this novel, which is an extremely English novel in a lot of ways in terms of its setting, its cultural references, but also, I think has a kind of, I don't know, intellectual grounding, which seems to me quite kind of French, to be honest. I wondered if is that something you're conscious of as you write? Does that chime with you, the idea that knowing the continental tradition might actually isolate you a little bit from the mainstream of English writing?
EG: Yeah. Gosh, Jim, big, big question. I'm kind of intrigued as to why you feel like it hasn't been helpful, but maybe I can ask you that at the end of my answer, because I owe you an answer. So the there is I think that's again, uh, you're very good at this, by the way. You're very good at the interviewing things. I was thinking before I, before we started doing this, I was thinking, how is he going to stick to the script? You know, we've been unable to stick to a continuous thought for more than three seconds when we talk. But you're doing it very well. You're restraining my unruly tendencies.
So the novel itself, a little genesis story, the idea for the novel came when I was listening to French radio, France Culture. And they just had kind of interviews with people that did strange jobs and this set in train, the thought process that led to this novel. In that sense it's a kind of foreign question and, and that is sort of internalised within the novel as well, in that the moment when there is the reveal in the novel, uh, the revelation happens in part through a dialogue with a bunch of English people and some fancy pants foreigner who's French, Belgian, who is sort of glorying in how uncomfortable this whole moral question is making the Brits feel. I feel like some of the the moral ambivalence that I was describing a minute ago is powered by the strong British powers of repression and tactile discomfort. So that’s kind of, as you've just described it, poised on the cusp in some ways of a continental European culture that is informing this. But placed into a British culture where that doesn't fit so easily, so snugly because British people are repressed but also British people really want opportunities to express that repression in hyperbolic forms. And you just need to go out on the town in Manchester or even in Cambridge on a Friday night to see what that looks like.
That sort of, you know, compulsive and uncontrolled communication of what is repressed. That's very, very British. Whereas if the drama of the novel were in France, nobody would actually bat an eyelid. And the problems maybe wouldn't be there in the first place. So that's one way to answer it. Another way to answer it is it's true that British literary culture is famously parochial. And that might be one reason for the kind of resistance that you picked up on that you just alluded to. It's harder, I think, to get work out there that is either or both of the following intellectually ambitious, and formally in some way innovative. And I am not ashamed that I think this novel is trying to be both of those things.
I think the fact that it's at least got the possibility of an audience is in part because it's also, you know, it's a mystery and it is set in an English culture that is recognisable. Even though in some ways it's intellectual, it's also very, very direct or I hope it is. And the kind of formally innovative property is also something that is quite palpable rather than abstract. So if you think about the whole French tradition of the Nouveau Roman that often the formal innovativeness of that writing often purposefully distances us from the people in the novels. That's part of the project. Whereas even though there is a quite abstract play in my novel, so none of the people have names, they're all called things like A1, A2, A3. But I want that to actually bring those voices closer to the reader. So I hope that that's what's happened.
Like you, I love reading European literature, and I get depressed that there's not enough good quality European literature that's just translated so people can read it. We're lucky because we read in the original language. Sure. But I feel sad for the people that don't get to read enough of these great authors. I mean, the French tradition is important. But there are lots of other European authors who write in languages I don't read that have been important for me. So one example, Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist who and again, this wasn't quite conscious when I was writing it, but she's amazing at disappearing and not being a presence in her interviews, but somehow getting the people that speak to her to come out with the most amazing stuff. I don't know what she does. I don't know how she transcribes it, but that's a good example. It's hard to imagine her as a British journalist and that being published in the British context.
JH: There's a lot to say about what you said, but I think, first of all, like, it's worth saying that a lot of the French Nouveau Roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, these people.... It's quite boring and and quite difficult to empathise with in its sort of abstract bloodlessness. And what's great about what you've done is you've taken a bit of that influence, but you've also given it a decent story. And I think, I think that, you know, where where I'm talking about is there's a tightrope to be walked between the receptiveness to that influence. And the fact is that, you know, the English literature tradition has given the world some of the most popular authors is is related to the part that it is quite a narrative tradition and that of good storytelling. Now, what I think is the difficulty is that I think that storytelling within the Anglo-Saxon world, to sound very French about it, is valorised to an extent like it's the cardinal virtue of art.
And that's completely bollocks, because any work of culture, which has any kind of rewatch or re-experience value after the first time, the primary motivation for the receiver is not the narrative, it's just not. And also, you know, some of the greatest works of art, you know, ‘Withnail and I’, the narrative is two out of work actors go to the Lake District, get drunk, and then they part. It's incredibly simple. ‘Tokyo Story’, you know, parents come to visit their children in Tokyo. They realise that they're not as close to their kids as as they used to be. And then they go back, and then the mother dies. I'm sorry to spoil a film which came out in 1954. You actually, in terms of narrative, only need something very, very simple. And then if you've got the technique, you can hang all kinds of beautiful things on it.
I actually think your narrative is more than just simple. I think it's quite a neat little story which you have in your book. But I guess I feel there’s a balancing act for people who come from this English literature, you know, very storytelling-heavy tradition, which we have, but are also more receptive to this more experimental formal stuff. I mean, German theatre, for God's sake, German state theatre, you know, you go and see an adaption of Othello. There's like three lines of the play, and the rest of it's someone, like throwing a pie at someone or something. It's just got no resemblance to the play whatsoever. Now that for me is off piste, you know. It’s just indulgent. But I am open to it because I'm open.
I saw an adaption of ‘Peer Gynt’ at the Berliner Ensemble in the early 2000s, the Peter Zadek one, and you know the famous ‘Life is like an onion’ speech, it was at like a sausage stand and Peer Gynt had his sausage and his onion, which he peeled, you know, and that kind of playing around with the text was great in that context. So I guess what I feel like is that we're all, you know, the people who are in our position are walking this tightrope between the openness and the fact that when you go away from this narrative thing in the English-speaking world, it very soon gets into ‘You’re wasting my time.’ Does that make sense?
EG: Yeah. But it's interesting, right? So I would want to say there's a sort of sliding scale or there's a third. There's a third type of works that are interesting in the middle. Right. So, so you can, you can say, you know, on the one hand you've got your narrative, you've got your disposable narrative, which is your Netflix whatever that you never want to see once you've got to the end, you know, it's a Wittgenstein says it's a ladder to be kicked away upon ascending. So there's that and then you've got the mad stuff, right? I remember seeing a version of Hamlet at the Schaubühne as well, which is not the Hamlet I remember.
So, you know, you've got the kind of crazy stuff or the Nouveau Roman, which is not interesting for me. But then there's this kind of third category in the in the middle, where the narrative is a kind of excuse in some ways. But it's not only that. It kind of, it gives you energy that can be metabolised into something. And so you I mean, you mentioned Godot earlier. That's a really good example of something where this kind of, you know, Will he won't he turn up?, is beyond the point ultimately. But it gives you something to it, powers that work, and it powers it in the way in which you forget where you're going as well. Right? So, so part of the reason of narrative is to forget that you're going somewhere and to absolutely, 100% look out the window at the landscape. I'm very, very interested in that kind of effect.
I remember being at a friend's place when I was living in Germany and, and there being like seven or eight of us around, some of whom liked literature, some of whom really didn't care about literature. And my friend said, let's read a play. And the only play that we could find that we had enough copies of the book was waiting for Godot, because we got some. And I thought, oh God, people are going to hate this. And it went down really well. There was a guy that was already passed out asleep snoring on the couch. So he was Godot. A couple of other examples of this: ‘Attempts on her Life’ by Martin Crimp, one of the readers of my book who was was sent a proof, said it's a bit like that. That's another really good example of, in some ways a very anti-narrative play. But that is narrative in the sense that you're asking questions about who the person is again. So there's a kind of energy that comes from it. I don't like the nouveau Roman, but somebody I do like is Jean-Philippe Toussaint.
JH: Yeah, I read a book about football, I think.
EG: Yeah. But, you know, a novel of his, like, ‘Fuir’. I don't know what it's translated I as.
JH: What's it translated into English as? ‘Flee’. [Actually ‘Running Away’ - ed.]
EG: I don't know what it's translated as. But that's a really good example as well in the, in the sense that he's…
JH: In China in the first part.
EG: Yeah. All very obscure. And it's kind of more avant-garde, unforgiving tradition of the 50s and 60s. But and, you know, the characters in some ways are not real, but it's got this energy to it that is not quite narrative in the Netflix sense, but that comes from wanting to pin that, wanting to get a shape on what the landscape these people are travelling. So one of the great things about that novel is that it's written in the first person, but the first person sort of disappears halfway through the novel, and it's still being described, despite us not knowing where they are, which sounds really, really convoluted, but it actually is an amazing little twist. So the novel becomes described from the point of view of the other person in this relationship who's looking for the ‘I’ that we cannot place anymore. That could be super abstract in the royal tradition but actually really works. And the title where you get this sense of restless motion, restless energy.
JH: And I think the interesting thing is, before we because I think, I think we might be getting a bit into the weeds here, which is fine. I’m not going to cut anything. I might cut the bit about me having a West African French accent, but what this really is, is the Hitchcockian MacGuffin. You know, the idea, the Hitchcock thing, the undescribed object which drives the plot. And what I find really, really interesting and fascinating about this is you've actually reached a point where quite abstract, avant-garde literature has the same animating principle as the most boiled down genre stuff. And when you see a film called like ‘Crawl’, which is the one which is just alligators attacking people, or, you know, some of the various shark movies, and the plot is they're on a rig, there are sharks. It boils it down. With ‘Sharknado’, I mean, that that's a series of events which have aligned in a quite specific way. But then it apparently occurs three times, which is very beguiling.
When you boil down these kind of abstract genre premises to their ultimate, most filtered, pure form, like you know, ‘Lady, or the Tiger?’ kind of movie. Yeah. Uh, um, you know, this film lasts 70 minutes and it's in real time. What was the one that they they went up - is it ‘Fall’? It’s the two women who climb up a tower and they get trapped at the top of a tower, and then the then the ladder falls off and the film is them at the top of the tower. It's absolutely brilliant. I mean, it's a brilliant piece of genre fiction, but what fascinates me is that in that world of fear, it's sort of a bit the same. There's this momentum which is driving this, and it's very existential, and it's this propulsion.
So I find it kind of makes sense to me that my, my own influences are very, you know, Henry James, Kafka, Saul Bellow, quite kind of complex, rich. But also the majority of time when I'm tired, I just watch really boiled down genre stuff. I think that's an interesting I think there's actually quite a lot to connect it, because I think, I think the boiled downness of these things, what's between these is a kind of vast ocean of middlebrow, pseudo-profound. But these two poles have kind of an existential drive, which is often about survival. Right?
EG: Yeah, Hitchcock is absolutely the star of that because he realised that. And one of the many things I'm envious of you about is your knowledge of genre fiction. I mean, I'm an academic, so I know a lot of people who evince well-meaning condescension towards genre fiction of various kinds. And I like very much the way you've put it. You know, this seems to me just intuitively the case that the interesting stuff is very highbrow, very lowbrow. And what's boring is what's in between. And a lot of publishing today is what's in between actually. I think that has also been a feature of our friendship, you know, so our love of pop music, for example, and, and, you know, football, a really good example. So the fact that Touissant can just write an essay about Zidane and write about football without having to have these stupid, boring questions about dumbing down or selling stuff or whatever, you know? So it’s a recognition of that. Absolutely.
JH: Basically we were the original poptimists and we've been poptimists from the word go.
EG: That is very true. And I think that that says something about the time we grew up in, when it was still possible to kind of hack public spaces in interesting ways. So the KLF are a really good example of that. But if you watch Top of the Pops in 1995, most of what was on was really shit, of course, but there were moments when you might come across something that you had not seen before. So it might be whatever, Radiohead had got to number four with ‘Karma Police’ or something, yet there’d also be idiotic track that happened to be brilliant as well. And I think it's one of those profound throwaway things that you just said. I am absolutely a poptimist. I can't shake it, even though I'm completely aware that the world has gone in very bad directions over the past few years, that that kind of desire to, you know, hack the public's sphere. In some ways, it's born out of a cynicism. In other respects, yeah, that you could do that. And I think that a whole bunch of cultural objects that that have been important for you and me, that were formative for you and me, ranging from Chris Morris to The KLF, that show that, and we're betraying our age in that respect. I'm happy that we got to live through such things, absolutely.
JH: And a lot of it is in your book and the incidental pleasure of the people reading your book who are of our vintage, Old Millennials, will be to see the texture of this, of that particular cultural moment.
I think we'll gradually round this off now, we've had a great chat. But one of the first moments I realised Ewan was going to be, one of my great friends or was going to be a friend - he's probably surpassed the original expectation at this point, to be honest - was when he mentioned in his Bilborough debating society speech, the Millennium, but then stopped, paused and said, ‘Excuse me, Willennium’, to a round of laughter from… me. I thought it was fucking hilarious.
A reference that will make no sense to a lot, a lot of the younger readers, because I know that we do have some younger readers, but we also have some older readers who it will make an equally limited amount of sense to.
EG: Well thank you. There we are. I did make you laugh. We started off with me saying that.
JH: Yeah.
EG: My life mission to get you to that.
JH: But I think also I think you and I have always had a slightly amused sense of dropping, you know, slightly off-paced cultural references to each other, being either something slightly too cool or something slightly too uncool. And I think there's a joy in that in your book as well. And I encourage you to just cram the next book with that.
EG: It's like seeing seeing how much variety the world can tolerate. And the humour generated is also something that's not just funny, right. So I know if you I won't make you do this, but if I invited you to one of these tedious high table dinners at my college, somebody would be saying the grace in Latin, and you and me would be talking about Finidi George's depressing second season record for Ipswich Town. But the converse is true as well, because if you and me went to a match, say, Ipswich Town versus Liverpool, we’d spend the whole time talking about fucking Schopenhauer.
JH: We have a very good example of specifically this, where we went to see Brentford at home and…
EG: Tarkowski!
JH: … was playing left back, and the whole fucking time we were doing, “He's a bit slow, isn't he? Tarkowski. He's not really got going this half.”
EG: And now, now, of course…
JH: Now he's playing in the Premier League.
EG: Yeah.
JH: And every week.
But I think what we've identified in this, in this conversation to give the readers the moral of the conversation is that what has always linked us together and will always linked us together, is a huge openness to, to, to pretty much everything which comes across our path. You know that different languages, different people, different people, you know, different, different football clubs, you know different foods, you know, and I think that's just been something which has brought us both a lot. And I think it's reflected in what we write. And, and I really, really hope, before you give me your closing remarks. I really, really hope that everybody who reads this well, I hope you go and buy Ewan's book, which is out on July 25th. It's great.
It's a great read. I think I read it in about a week. And I'm busy. It kept me engaged. It's funny. It has one joke, as it's been confirmed. It has a story. And it has a nice cover. And it has a great author who I think is going to going to hopefully write some more. Are you going to write some more books for us?
EG: Yeah. I got a metrical translation of Love Island, the popular reality TV show. So that that that in my mind, that's the follow up. But I don't think that's the case for my agent, who is desperate for me not to squander what little, um, seriousness and cultural cachet book will get for me.
JH: Anything more to add before we go?
EG: Than other than that, I was terrified just now when you said closing remarks, because I just saw that fucking awful Starmer/Sunak stuff [Their debate on 04.06.2024 - ed]. Yeah. So I feel like I'm going to have 45 seconds where I need to. I'm not going to...
JH: Increase taxes?
EG: I'm not going to increase taxes. I should have said that more clearly.
JH: Well, I have no idea what we would clip from this conversation for TikTok. Maybe just 10 seconds of you going, ‘I don't like the Nouveau Roman.’ Pissing off Alain Robbe-Grillet TikTok.
EG: Well, there's a snap YouGov poll which says apparently 51% of people think you've won this.
JH: Yeah, well it's not… Actually this is a whole thing we didn't get on to. It isn't a competition. And I think, I think one of the biggest load of bollocks is the idea that you want your friends and your close people not to succeed. And I really hope this book is a success for you or, um, I hope that it's at least enough of a success which can keep you writing and keep you writing the next book.
EG: Well, that's that's really kind. What can I say? I'm touched beyond compare. You want friends like, that's going to get embarrassing in, in this format. But you want friends like that that actually are supportive. It's not it's not an easy to support and be supported and… Yeah, you’re brilliant at that, so thanks.
JH: When my ‘Chinese Democracy’ finally drops, my My Bloody Valentine ‘mbv’… When I upload my novel to YouTube on a Sunday evening at 10 p.m., I expect the same.
EG: I want to do like a reciprocal plug for, for you. And I was going to say read James's Substack, but you're already doing it.
JH: You're doing it. But you can buy my book as well. Which is on Amazon. It's called ‘Midlands’.
EG: Great.
JH: It's got more than one joke in it.
EG: Most of it's jokes.
JH: Isn't it? It's more, it's more a vastly embroidered canvas of ten years worth of jokes with a minimal framing device. We need a sweet spot between your novel and my novel. And that’s where Sally Rooney comes in. So on which note… Look, any conversation about books these days has to end with Sally Rooney, right? Like inshallah, you know. Inshallah.
EG: Okay. All right. I'm gonna… Lovely job.
JH: Stop recording.
‘Clinical Intimacy’ is released on July 25th.