I spent a few days in Glasgow, seven hours thirty minutes away by train, the first time I’ve travelled anywhere alone since the lockdowns without near-debilitating episodes of ‘the thing’. But it always takes a while to get used to the sterile faux-homeliness, the boring contemporary hauntings of buy-to-let Airbnb properties – generic auto-generated wall art, traces of other city-breakers in the crevices, strands of hair, out-of-date exhibition leaflets – and the first night was shaky. Soon as I turned out the lights, my heart started racing, all the bad thoughts I’d ignored in the day circling round and round, alone in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar town. A friend once told me he used to deal with these nocturnal panics by trashing whatever room he happened to be in at the time, an archetypal fight over flight approach, neutering the inner terror by externalizing it, I’ve turned my insides out, making it no more threatening than a jumble of objects, pillows and books and clothes in disarray, ready to be rearranged and tidied up in the morning.
In Glasgow I met with an old writer-friend, we ate at Ranjit’s for cheap, had tea at the Pink Peacock, drank a lot of Guinness, gossiped, traded lockdown horror stories. There was some shop talk – where to submit work, which editors have a reputation for ghosting, who pays the best, who doesn’t pay at all. I was aware how jaded I sounded, how the mystery and excitement’s long since worn off, a cynicism no doubt enhanced by my failure, several days prior, to win a research grant that would’ve transfigured my current book-writing situation from ‘fiscally iffy’ to ‘in clover’, at least temporarily; occasion to acknowledge that I’ve only been able to produce work at the rate I have in lieu of this transitional period, where I’m paying peppercorn rent, have zero social life, etcetera. To earn anything approaching a living from writing is a feat very few can pull off, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. While this isn’t news to me, seems to be a universal truth about any art practice, it’s only since I’ve fully committed to this path, my shoulder well and truly to the wheel, that the weight of this truth and its attendant vertigo has hit.
Southside was vibey, a lot of looks, a lot of eyes. Felt more comfortable in the Manhattanish West End, roaming around the secondhand bookshops. Never have I ever read a single page of Hemingway, and considering his influence on Tennessee Williams and John Cheever, I figured it’s time to cop, so I bought well-thumbed Grafton paperbacks of the Essential Hemingway (fiction) and Death in The Afternoon (nonfiction), his peon to the art of bullfighting. Enjoying the latter, not so much the former, have given up on The Sun Also Rises, never been much interested in the Lost Generation, though I was momentarily sucker-punched by this chapter ending, evoking, as it does, the essence of those nocturnal panics:
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
Tennessee Williams sometimes put Hemingway on a par with Hart Crane, his beloved, beatified poet-guide (‘two of the best bed-partners a sick old bitch can have’). Cheever, meanwhile, found that Hemingway’s prose could produce in him an amphetamine-like effect, noting how the quotidian sights and sounds of a city street seemed newly heightened, dramatized, after reading one of the ‘master’s’ novels. Both writers were curious about Hemingway’s outsized masculinity. For Cheever, Hemingway ‘legitimized manly courage’ and created an ‘immense vision of love and friendship’ through his work. This from a man – Cheever – who spent most of his life tormented by his (bi)sexuality, in part because he often equated same-sex desire between men with ‘effeminacy’ in men, and this disgusted and terrified him. For a long time, and for manifold reasons, Cheever could only conceive of same-sex desire between men as ‘pure’ and ‘true’ by condemning the so-called ‘feminine’ in men, a manoeuvre as misogynistic as it was homophobic. The ‘manly courage’ that he wanted, needed, to be made legitimate by his uber-masc literary forefather speaks to this. Tennessee, meanwhile, was more tongue-in-cheek and to the point about Hemingway’s braggadocio, suspecting that ‘Papa’ harbored pretty clean-cut queer desires beneath all that manly courage, something, he thought, that couldn’t be made more obvious ‘if [Hemingway] drew pictures of pricks’.
Post-Glasgow, back in Wiltshire with the Big Yellow blues, fully gorging on socmed, screen time up 300%. The great Astra Magazine shutdown is still top of my TL, about which I have sympathy for the redundant staff, and a vague suspicion something fishy probably went down. It’s sparked a lot of discourse vis-à-vis the rarity of publications for serious-minded literature, discourse which often boils down to a sentiment that such platforms are basically good, and necessary, and deserve to exist. Which, sure. But there’s something very London Library, if I can put it that way, about that sentiment. It’s easy to get up in arms about a quote-unquote social cause that seems self-evident – ‘Art… it should exist!’ – much more difficult to get into the nuances, the ways that certain funded or legacy publications can themselves perpetuate colossal problems in the literary ‘ecosystem’. Consider: to what extent does a publication deserve to exist if it can’t pay its writers properly, or at all? If it can’t pay its staff properly, or at all? This before we even ask what lies beneath the bylines and mastheads and boards of trustees, the nepotism, superfluity of generational wealth, not-so-crypto conservative proprietorships, and so forth, so many concessions and negotiations writers are forced to make if they want their work ‘platformed’. But anyway, as above, none of this is new, and besides, asking nuance from Twitter discourse is a fool’s errand, why being very online is very stupid, you end up arguing with ghosts.
Hoping to make another London trip before year’s end, all this itinerancy a way to escape what has devolved into a not-good situation in my current lodgings, the (step-)parental abode, I have about one month left before this transitional period ceases being ‘transitional’ and becomes a certified state of affairs, the past three months are a blur, lack of concentration, lack of energy, there’s only so many more recreational drives I can take to Sainsbury’s blaring The Allman Brothers’ Decade of Hits on the CD player before I lose touch with reality completely. Tryin’ to make a livin’ and doing the best I can, me too, Dickey Betts, me too.
To make matters worse, my thrice weekly running route has been blocked by the introduction of a bull in the field behind the house. Coincidence, given the recent Death reading. I’ve been playing chicken with the bull, a real countryside thrill, nothing like some high-stakes aerobics, maybe today’ll be the day I get trampled. Yesterday, locked in a staring contest with him, the bull, which went on for at least a minute, he, the bull, I kid you not, released a great steaming pile of shit while looking directly into my eyes, into my soul. Was this his own fight-or-flight response? Was he evacuating his bowels in preparation to charge at me? Maybe it was a sign, a timely reminder from the animal realm: bullshit, steer well clear, it ain’t worth it. In any case, I turned around, and looked for – am still looking for – an alternative route.