Morning:
10°c
Back in my schoolteaching days, I occasionally had a pint with Ray, a Scouse PE teacher. Ray's interests were, in order, Liverpool FC, beer and women — so as long as we stayed off politics and poetry our sessions were genial.
Ray couldn't spell — he used to take his reports to my girlfriend for correction before parents' evenings — and I don't suppose he ever read anything outside the sports pages — but he was no mug.
One evening he went straight to the heart of the matter: “So, Sean, when yer writing a poem, like, how d'yer know what to put?” I had no answer; Ray was tickled pink. But his question stayed in my head, and afterwards words like “instinct” and “music” came to mind. Not that Ray would have thought it was anything but bollocks compared with Ian Rush and Kenny Dalglish. Years later I began spending time in the company of novelists while teaching on an MA creative writing course. I found Ray's question recurring.
How did these people know what to put? Though Ray wouldn't have phrased it like this, what was the masonic secret of their chosen form? And while we were at it, why did they and not poets have all the readers? Curiously enough, my new friends showed no inclination to answer these questions.
There was only one way to find out. Having always wanted to write a novel, I should either do it now or forget it. As well as poetry I'd written plays, essays, translations, and short stories, but what DH Lawrence called “the bright book of life” had remained out of reach.
Then I happened to visit a West Country graveyard and find a strange, rather sinister tomb. At first this seemed like the way into a short story, but it quickly drew several themes together, like a magnet. Now there was no choice but to press on.
This part of the process is very like poetry — the discovery of a focal point, an organising image. Which just leaves 70,000-plus words to find, along with various imagined people, their acts, conversations, desires and so on. Oh, and a plot — in this case one able to hold the reader's attention even though a significant part of the ending is revealed at the outset. This in turn involves running parallel strands in the present and the past …
Given this relatively complicated structure, it would be easy — nay, tempting — to produce a Poet's Novel: a work of brilliantly intricate detail, moving at the speed of a large rock across a horizontal desert. So greatly feared and loathed is the Poet's Novel that novels by poets are often reviewed as though to exorcise them, regardless of what the books are actually like.
Poets-turned-novelists trespass on other people's turf — though in fairness this is nothing to the disfavour with which novelists trying poetry are viewed by poets, and anyway, apart from Goethe it's difficult to think of anyone who has worked with equal success in both fields.
So… despite the fact that my favourite novel is Thomas Mann's spectacularly detailed and glacially slow Doktor Faustus, I decided to try to write a novel of love and death moving at an intensifying pace, ideally like Graham Greene's wonderful Blitz-set thriller The Ministry of Fear. Then no one would have grounds for calling the result a Poet's Novel. And the fact that Afterlife, the novel in question, is about poets and poetry and literary ambition and power is of course neither here nor there, is it?
Afterlife is published by Picador, price £14.99.
Reader views (2)
Is Sean O'Brien an alius for Susan Boyle??
- John, Croydon, 11/08/2009 15:39
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You can say Hardy was no slouch at both poetry and fiction. American poet James Dickey's one best-seller as his novel "Deliverance." And Raymond Carver's poetry has been praised. In France, Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars published poetry and fiction. There's no real reason one can't do both though, as Mr. O'Brien correctly observes, reviewers resist authors' efforts to escape a pigeonhole.
- Alfred Corn, Newcastle, U.K., 11/08/2009 11:01
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