From: James Diedrick
Category: Amis's Contemporaries
Date: 6/17/99
Time: 8:42:02 PM
Remote Name: 147.124.99.24
From your humble web site manager, a series of reports on my recent London trip, and participation in--I am quoting the conference program--
"The Contemporary British Fiction Symposium Sponsored by The London Network for Modern Fiction Studies In conjunction with South Bank University
The British Library Conference Centre 96 Euston Road, NW1 Wednesday, June 2nd 1999, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Organizers:
Dr. Philip Tew (University of Westminster) Dr. Richard Lane (South Bank University)
Featuring:
A.L. Kennedy Will Self Iain Sinclair
Professor Simon Crithcley (Essex University) Professor James Diedrick (Albion College, Michigan) Professor Rod Mengham (Jesus College, Cambridge)
The day consists of readings, Q&A sessions, discussions, analysis of the author's works and signings of two new books launched this week: Everything You Need (Jonathan Cape) by A.L. Kennedy, and Rodinsky's Room (Granta) with text by Iain Sinclair and illustrations by Rachel Lichenstein."
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Part 1--9-10:30 a.m.
First impressions:
--British novelists have more fashion sense than Anglo-American academics. Most of the latter (I reluctantly claim my place among them) came to the august spaces of the British Library dressed in tweeds and ties (I compromised with a black, European cut sports coat). Alison Kennedy and Will Self, on the other hand, who book-ended the conference, came in black leather. Coats, that is. A.L. completed the look with a blue open-necked blouse (the kind you could pick up in America off the discount rack at K-Mart), blue jeans, and tan-colored Converse All-Stars. Will him Self settled on a brown shirt, blue jeans, and black shoes. They both eschewed hair styling; indeed, Self's strands ranged about his head like convicts in the yard craning to win their freedom beyond the fence. Iain Sinclair, who spoke at the lunch hour, was equally casual, but opted for a quasi-Banana Republic look.
--Kennedy appeared first, well rested from her night in the Jonathan Cape digs where she's staying while she makes the London rounds to launch her new novel, *Everything You Need*--a title the author may have felt compelled to attach to a book that stretches to 567 pages. She was full of piss and vinegar: short, sharp, quick-tongued--and utterly engaging. In response to an audience member desiring to know why she writes, what she is striving to say, Kennedy was tart: "people will give you intentions; I very rarely have any." She said she writes a certain narrative because it needs to be written, calling writing "a necessity . . . like a psychological sneeze."
*Everything You Need.* Then Kennedy read a longish passage from *Everything You Need,* after warning the audience that "there's some rough stuff in here." Before hearing this, I'd read *Original Bliss* and the short story collection *Now that You're Back*--neither of which prepared me for the pitch-black humor of the new novel.
The passage Kennedy read involves an exchange between Nathan and his self-destructive editor Jack, and it explores some of the same territory as *The Information*--literary envy and bile. In the sample that follows, Jack is in hospital, in bad shape, and describing various literary awards he and his authors were up for (Kennedy, who has been on the Booker selection committee, noted that the "Head Fuck Prize" is her imaginative transmutation of the Booker itself) I won't transcribe it all here, but much of the "rough" stuff in question involves a dentist who gives Jack alcohol enemas in exchange for the exquisite (to him) pleasure of extracting Jack's teeth, in an escalating exchange of need and desire. A sample:
"Well, as you know, *Doctor Dee's Table* did terribly well. My girl and I--surprisingly--won ThemiddleclasswankersThankyoufortrying Award (sponsored by Gubbins and Muggins Electric Shock Batons Inc.). We were both of us rather chuffed." "Yes, congratulations." "And then we were long-listed for the Headfuck." "And then short-listed." "Yes, Indeed. Which meant we had to bib and tucker up and go off to the dinner, eat our humble crow and Armageddon pie." He sighed. "I went once before, a thousand years ago. But it hadn't been to do with me, then--I'd just been an observer, not taking it personally at all . . . "Either way, I'd forgotten what it was like. Everywhere you looked, we were all of us, visibly, shaking apart--nervous ticks and tremors, stumbles and fumbles and defects of speech bursting up out of nowhere. The whole place looked like a psychiatric ward in evening dress--one with inadequate access to Largactil and ETC. "And I'm in there, just like the rest, another bundle of mutating superstitions and indecent sweat and I'm fighting to keep the glass full and the smile in place and the hands as they should be and not gripping my own or some other fucker's throat and above the whole shivering ruck of us there's a haze of pure alcohol, just roiling up from every inch of skin as the pressure of undiluted professional terror simply fucking evaporates every drop we can manage to drink. "Then, when they've trotted us round the parade ring for a lifetime or so, wee're hereded in to sit up nicely and dine. And eating your own offspring in a floodlit slaughterhouse would be really much more pleasant and entertaining . . . " Jack grinned balefully, wiped his mouth. "So I'm holding my author's hand now under the table--not even attempting the gluey dessert--and Benedict fucking shithead tosser Kemmler is sitting at the table opposite because *he's* got a punter up for it, too--God piss on him in purgatory for ever--which means there are two books short-listed from the same infernal house, Christ help us--and he grins, he grins right fucking at me, the poisonous shit. The sleazy, bastard fuck. And, by now, this is not about winning, not even about being taken apart by whoever does fucking win, this is not about my book, or anyone else's, this is not about trying to keep myself from weeping, or crying out, or just replacing that smug fucker's eyes with my nicely polished, family heirloom cufflinks--it is simply about not dying, about getting through the next fifty minutes of nationally televised blood sport without dropping down fucking dead." Jack's colour was rising, taking on an unusual orange blush. He shook his head, continued. "And that is the point, the exact, fucking moment when you understand, very clearly, that what you are watching is the death of language and of truth and of whatever, at one time, might just have felt a little bit like your soul. And you sit, like a hollowed apple, rotting quietly beneath the lights, while the cameras close on another table--that opposite table--that may-you-baste-eternally-in-your-own-fucking-body-fat-right-in-the-heart-of-the-darkest-turd-in-the-arsehole-of-hell table--and you work out the winner before it's announced--*Last Seen Heading Athwart*--Kemmler's book. Kemmler's fucking punter. Kemmler's fucking book. The fucking winner is Kemmler's piss-fucking-poorly presented homage to fucking catatonia, his post-modernist colostomy bag of self-referential puss, his roman-a-clef-needed-it's-about-my-ex-wife wank, squeezed out of possibly the most ungrateful and boring typist to ever have spewed on a waiter at the Groucho Club. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. *Fuck.*
Gotta love that last sentence. Next report: Iain Sinclair, which I hope to post in the next week. Meanwhile, for more on Kennedy, visit her "official" web site (which contains some egregious illiteracies, like "person's [sic] seeking contact," but also some of Kennedy in her own words):