Man, I Feel Like a Woman
Arena, August 2008
From personal experience, I will now pass on some essential advice about what to do when your motorcycling, canoeing, hiking and generally manly man friend tells you he’s about to have a sex-change.
Don’t laugh.
That’s it. Failing this, you must not under any circumstances go on to say what you’re actually thinking, which in my case was something like this:
You ride a motorcycle called The Flying Pig and are an expert on remedies for shaving rash. You have a dismantled crank-case on the table in your front room. You drink lunchtime pints of Smiles Old Tosser and you work in the engine-room of a 7000 ton ferry. You are not a woman.
‘From now on,’ my friend Drew said, ‘I want you to think of me as she.’
I laughed.
She was wearing her usual outfit of black combat trousers and a ragged fleece, but also pearl earrings and a brushed-down fringe. She’d waxed her forearms. I had an awful, immediate sense of no going back, followed just as quickly by an attack of paranoia. If this was funny (and it was second nature with male friends to search for the joke, the protection) it was a boyish prank being played at my expense.
Men pretending to be women are funny. They’re having a laugh, an old favourite from the dressing-up chest at the back of the British music-hall. But how funny is it to be a woman trapped in a man’s body? Is it alright to have a sense of humour about this? What exactly is the joke when Bugs Bunny dresses as a lady?
Easy. He’s a rabbit.
Sitting in her flat, that first day when some unknown force had doodled pearl-stud earrings onto the person I thought I knew, I found everything she told me questionable.
When did this start? How? Why? The predictable, loaded enquiry about sex – are you now or have you ever been attracted to men? (To me – that’s who I had in mind.) It was hard to avoid a nasty tone of inquisition, because the information she offered seemed unreliable. We knew each other pretty well, well enough to share on a regular basis the one-and-a-half man space in your average two-man tent, and want to do it again. That well, and not at all. If she could hide the truth that she was secretly a woman, then why believe anything else she said?
I went to the library and read some books. They didn’t always help. The medical information had me squeezing my legs together while the personal accounts were mostly witness autobiographies by Americans. America loves the transgender story (‘As Seen On Oprah!’) because it has obvious themes of transformation and re-invention, liberating a you-go-girl inner being just bursting to get out there and shake it.
The story is given a recognisable shape, a Hollywood heart-warmer with the bonus feature of sprightly details involving the wonder of vaginal dilators. The protagonist starts out as redneck Bubba and ends up a torch singer in a velvet lounge-bar. If she’s lucky. If not, she’s the strap-line on an afternoon victim show – My Wife Is A Man!
I wasn’t convinced that this model offered a true reflection of the here and now for this friend of mine in England, how it had started, how it was going to end up.
My friend switched her combat trousers for a denim skirt, with a Gerber multi-tool on a red lanyard clipped to the belt loop. It was a day or two later, and I was back at her place making a second attempt at an acceptable first reaction.
Some of her explanations sounded learnt, memorised from the FAQ page of a minority-interest website. She admitted that to get female hormones on prescription, she’d had to jump through hoops for a psychiatrist at the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London. She even talked about ‘putting a name to my gender issues’, a sure sign she’d been exposed to language a psychiatrist might like to hear. It didn’t sound like something she’d normally say. But then the denim skirt didn’t look like something she’d normally wear.
It had started, so she said, one New Year’s Eve when she was given shore-leave from the her ship, which was berthed in Weymouth for the holidays. Her girlfriend travelled down from Bristol, and before hitting the town’s party-pubs the two of them decided to swap clothes.
‘Low-necked three-quarter-length black velvet dress, mid-length sleeves,’ she said, with instantly perfect recall.
‘Make-up?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Shoes?’
‘Alas, no. My Doc Martens. Size ten women’s pumps are hard to find in Weymouth on New Year’s Eve.’
‘I bet they are.’
‘And in fact at any other time.’
Footwear apart it was a more than fair swap against a standard issue boiler-suit, but had the change really started so late? What the hell did I know?
Only what I’d read in books, so the second time round at her flat I resolved to keep my mouth shut and avoid the more bone-headed questions.
‘Why skirts and dresses?’ I couldn’t help it. ‘Why can’t transsexuals wear trousers? Women do.’
That was the fault of the system, apparently. The internet support-groups let it be known that anyone turning up at Charing Cross in trousers could be marked down for showing insufficient commitment.
‘To what? Marie-Claire and side-salads?’
‘To the operation.’
Christ, I thought, you only put the earrings in a week ago.
‘And by the way,’ she corrected me, ‘transsexual is an adjective.’
At the same time, my friend seemed strangely unchanged. There were the clothes and the jewellery and the make-up, but these were on the surface. Underneath, and not that deeply either, the old Drew was visible, and however many questions I asked, I soon realised they were all foothills to the one central mountain of a question:
Was this believable?
I wanted to be loyal, to be understanding and accepting, but the main obstacle was the possibility that appearances aside this new incarnation was simply not true. It was a charade, a deception, a jape. It was Bugs Bunny, and no-one wants to be fuddled and duped by the cheeky wabbit.
Did I believe in my friend as a woman? I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but this was the same woman who knew the flight patterns of RAF Tornados, who thought that fewer than three pints at lunchtime didn’t count as lunch, and who cleaned out carburettors with a toothbrush. She just didn’t seem like the kind of person with whom nature had made a mistake.
When we’d first met years before I’d liked her immediately. Here was a real man with a motorbike and a real man’s job, in the engine room of the Channel Island ferry. That was her appearance and I was happy to accept it. She was a manual worker, a member of the working class! I was slightly in awe. She also liked her drink, as I did, as well as books and camping. She was so straightforward.
I can see now that this must have been a bad time, and the drink was a factor. I wonder what else I should have seen, but taking her as I found her, I wasn’t looking for anything else. I may even have believed that with friends it was bad form to look any further, with a view to making a judgement, and maybe that’s how I missed her churning desire to appear to the world as she really was.
It felt like a failure in our friendship, and I think there was a sense of disappointment on both sides. She let me down because she never told me. I let her down because I never guessed. I’m a writer. I’m supposed to be sensitive to such things.
I go over it again and again. Were there any clues, any feminine traits that could have alerted me? I remembered a blameless life of cheery self-reliance and outdoor pursuits, but suddenly she was taking to the streets of Bristol in a dress, and had no idea what she was doing – she went out looking like a transsexual. I remember one particular outfit: black stack-heeled zip-up boots, a sleeveless brown corduroy dress, ash-blonde wig. The full Oxfam rig, and although I had no intrinsic objection to any of these bits and pieces, I didn’t want to see any of them on Drew.
She took jolting doses of female hormone and changed her name by statutory declaration from Drew to Drusilla, while still working on a P & O ferry, the ear defenders infecting her newly pierced ears. I made a big effort to say ‘she’, not always successfully. I had, and occasionally still do have, severe outbreaks of pronoun anxiety, because ‘he’ and ‘she’ now carried more weight than pronouns felt designed to bear. They were the keys to an elaborate and disturbing deception, elaborate because it involved so many of us pretending that Dru was she, and disturbing because the lie was possibly the truth.
That’s what I ultimately wanted to find out – if ‘Drusilla’ was true. Luckily for me, when I suggested the idea of a book, she seemed keen on sharing the story of her life, ‘except if I die in surgery, obviously.’
‘Right. Don’t want to ruin the heart-warming ending.’
I wanted to be fair. That’s what friends are for, and the stakes were very high. If ‘Drusilla’ was not true, then instead of a good person to go camping with my former friend was a real life horror story, a fizzing combination of modern afflictions. She was probably psychotic, possibly sexually deviant, certainly attention-seeking, and conceivably a secret special agent of the patriarchy. No wonder candidates for surgery have to see so many psychiatrists.
But that comes later in the story. For now, I’m supposed to be offering advice to Arena readers on what to do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. So far you already know not to laugh and not to say what you’re thinking. You should also avoid the kind questions that come from nowhere to fill embarrassing silences, like ‘is it catching?’ and ‘I suppose camping’s out of the question, then?’
Dru gave me a withering look. Of course camping wasn’t out of the question, and nor was going to the pub. She was a woman, not a blushing wallflower.
Becoming Drusilla is the book that came out of a two-week walking and camping trip we made to Wales a few months after Dru’s operation. It’s also the biographical story of how Drew became Drusilla. I had to confront prejudices I didn’t know I had, often in public places, while Dru tried to convince me she was the same person and a woman. Try that today on one of your closest friends, if you think you know each other well enough.
Bigging up the Short Story
November 2008
www.theshortstory.org
Talking up the short story is an admirable enterprise, especially in Britain. The short story has been having a hard time, with outlets for publication shrinking and collections barely able to reach an agent’s desk. The idea of short stories making money has become as quaint a notion as travelling by commercial balloon. It is therefore quite right, and compatible with the national instinct, to support the underdog. We take the side of the short story and try to big it up.
One way of doing this, which short story enthusiasts will recognise, is to suggest that a story is as challenging to write as a novel. Each line must be impeccably precise, no word can be wasted. This is true. The bad news for writers is that every line should be equally meticulous in a novel. There’s no letting up on quality just because more pages demand to be filled. The writer has to write well for longer, at the same time administering the vast bureaucracy of a novel: the structure, the people, the places, the meals, the transport – all the required paperwork.
Or perhaps, as some people argue, the short story has a particular contemporary relevance because these days time itself is shorter, or shorter than it used to be. This may be so, but another contemporary phenomenon is greed, and there’s a sense of frustration that comes bundled with every short story ever written, and especially so in the finest examples. I can recognise why the writer stopped writing, but as a greedy reader if I like what I read I want more and more of the same.
How about another 200 pages or so? At which point, of course, the story may start to resemble a novel. The main limitation of the short story is its shortness, which is one reason the novel has developed into the dominant form it now is.
The shortness of a short story (there it is again – impossible to escape this defining feature) is also a major attraction to novelists. The same, only easier. The writing process is instantly recognisable – do one thing you can’t do and which is difficult, and when that’s done do another – but this series of difficulties comes to an end much sooner. Writers have a vested interested in talking up the form.
There are other pleasures. It can be interesting to sacrifice some of the what-happens-nextness (the engine of a novel) for more of the what’s-happening-nowness (the focus of a story). Beyond that, the challenge for a writer is not technical but conceptual: identifying and sorting ideas into the right shapes and sizes. I get different types of ideas (thankfully) and because different forms offer different opportunities I’ve written a sports book, a travel book, and a biography. This is how I know that writing novels throws up the most problems quickest, and therefore offers the best apprenticeship for all other forms of creative writing, including short stories.
I came to short stories late, and it may be that my ideas are getting smaller. I’m running out, or running down. I’m also using up what’s left over. Stories are useful for that, too, with the added advantage of avoiding The Best Book In The World syndrome, which can make writing books so daunting. There’s always the temptation to delay work on a book because it has to be The Best Book In The World. Now. Today.
Stories are more relaxed, more comfortably likened to a game of Patience: set up the cards and arrange the conflict (black on red, red on black) – sometimes it comes out, and sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, as with any other type of writing, it’s because the words fit the sentences fit the paragraphs fit the structure fit the form fit the ideas fit the writer. And when that happens, when everything comes together, small is just as likely to be beautiful.
York, who took the place of Gloucester, was in alliance with Cambridge, though the main Yorkist network was in the South and West. The Lancastrians rose in Kent. Norfolk was for York, but not Warwick, while the king was stricken with measles at Durham. The Earl of March drove the King to Wiltshire in July and August. York was summoned to Leicester but retired in spurs to Sandal, in Yorkshire, where he was joined by Warwick and Salisbury. Buckingham and Dorset were wounded and carried home in a cart. York became the stronghold of the Lancastrians while Exeter, remembering St Albans, beheaded Salisbury, the son of Buckingham. Somerset went north and the ensuing battle took place in a blinding snowstorm.
Or a fog. At Barnet, Warwick turned the king’s left flank, but Warwick too was turned while Oxford from Lancaster overlapped the Yorkist left before getting lost. He eventually arrived in Somerset’s rear, whose flank had already been routed meaning a pedestrian Warwick battered to death.
On balance, historians believe, the winner was England.
National Association of Writers in Education Magazine
Spring 2008
Andrew Cowan’s Questions Questions, published in the Spring 2007 edition of Writing in Education, brilliantly explored the divided loyalties of a practising writer and full-time lecturer in Creative Writing . The article was entirely in the form of questions, some more rhetorical than others, sounding out the gaps between the aims of University Creative Writing courses and their outcomes.
More agonisingly, Cowan asks whether the full-time teaching of institutionalised Creative Writing might not actively inhibit a writer’s ability to write. Cowan’s formal ingenuity allows each reader to provide their own response, but from where I sit, trying to make a living as a writer, the prospect of teaching Creative Writing in a University doesn’t look so grim.
There’s the money. Writing books is a full-time job that doesn’t pay, whereas teaching Creative Writing, although it isn’t writing, is recognisably in the rightish writerly area. I know the work is manageable from teaching Arvon courses and University workshops, and going full-time seems less of a backward step than becoming, say, a full-time postman. Let’s face it: writing books, or having written books, is not a qualification that opens many doors.
After four novels and three books of creative non-fiction, I can, with the minimum of inventiveness, frame the move as a well-deserved reward for years of hard work. A full-time university post would be a welcome and significant validation of my writing. Entering an institutional structure from the side, as it were, my books become credentials. I have no PhD and no teacher-training, but at least my books, at last, have some concrete value.
Already Andrew Cowan’s question-marks start dancing before my eyes. Is this really the best way to approach a new job? Should teaching be a fall-back position, a safety-net? But Cowan does the questions – I’m supposed to be supplying answers, from the point of view of a writer still, just about, viable outside the academy.
I have so much to gain. I can give my family a grounding sense of stability. I can teach and write – why not? There are writers doing exactly this in Universities all over the country, and not just here, because in America every writer alive seems to have been University-attached at one time or another. The unattached are dinosaurs from the era BCW, Before Creative Writing, and suffered accordingly. But why suffer? These days isolation and poverty are no longer obligatory, and a possible job at a college is an opportunity not to be scorned.
The financial model favoured by publishing companies means that a mid-list book can make an acceptable income for the publisher which is not shared by the author. The longer a writer stays mid-list (my next book is always a best-seller) the more the financial risk (and emotional investment) is shouldered by the writer alone. This situation has partly been allowed to develop because of the flourishing Creative Writing industry. Educational institutions take up the financial slack, so why not join in? Don’t be so precious. Get your feet beneath a faculty desk, because this is how writing works at this time.
Writers teaching Creative Writing is the most accessible contemporary template for a literary career. It has superseded the less pleasant modernist saga of rejection and poverty followed by irresistible late acclaim, itself a throwback to the Romantic requirement for writers to go to the edge and look off the side. I can’t be the only writer to start every day with a Do I have to? Again?
So it’s not just the money.
The relationship of many writers to paid work is nicely expressed by John Irving in The World According to Garp. ‘It was for his writing, in the beginning, that he had never taken the idea of a job seriously. Now it was for his writing that he was thinking he needed a job. I am running out of people I can imagine, he thought.’
Along with the money, and the spirit of the times, there’s the company. Colleagues! Conferences, meetings, coffee in plastic cups! Gossip! I look forward to a life of exclamation marks and conversation, the nourishment that comes from the simple fact of daily human contact. I can divide my time between widely-read colleagues and students, learning from one and all. This is very tempting. This is very necessary.
In his Questions, Questions, Andrew Cowan refers to Malcom Bradbury’s Classwork, and Bradbury’s retrospective manifesto for his MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Bradbury hopes his course created ‘a significant climate’ around writing, with students ‘treated as members of a serious profession.’ As a former student of Bradbury’s, I can confirm a mission accomplished, and the climate of seriousness felt like a preparation, or at least an imitation, of how the writing life might be.
Unfortunately, in the profession itself – publishers, agents, booksellers, critics – the sense of significance around serious writing is often hard to identify. Literary fiction, in particular, is not in fact a serious profession. If it was, it would be rewarded as such.
It may be that MA courses in Creative Writing are now the only place where Bradbury’s significant climate reliably exists.
A significant climate, money, security, the zeitgeist, company, social and professional validation – that’s a lot to gain. All the same, Cowan’s eloquent questioning nags away, his doubting of the compatibility between teaching Creative Writing and just writing, his anxiety that either one or the other must suffer.
There is, I think, a central misgiving that informs all of his pertinent questions. Despite the journal you’re now reading and the association that guides it, there is no such thing as a writer in education. A writer in education is a teacher.
Adverts for full-time University teaching posts usually ask for ‘evidence of a strong commitment to teaching.’ I have no evidence of that, because it never existed. What I do have is yards of evidence of a strong commitment to writing, including books, no house, no car, an impatient family and no sense of seriousness except that which I supply myself.
At this point, Andrew Cowan’s questions become relevant as an examination of good faith – can any of us honestly, or satisfactorily, live with two strong commitments, a kind of professional bigamy? Cowan surrounds this one core question with so many others that his own experience seems to suggest not, or not happily.
Personally, I don’t believe that good writing is created at three in the morning, drunk, by candle-light, overseen by angels. In that sense, breaking writing down into component parts is not anathema to my own way of working. I do believe there are learnable techniques that ease the writer’s task. These include, but are not confined to, the syllabus stalwarts of characterisation, setting, point of view, ‘and the rest’ as Andrew Cowan puts it.
I also believe the disciplines and skills explored through Creative Writing are transferable, with the understanding that students training in writing are not being trained to earn a living as writers. The writers, and there will always be one or two, will benefit from a comprehensive tour of the basics, and add the finishing and more important touches themselves (perhaps by candlelight, drunk, at three in the morning overseen by angels – there are no wrong answers).
I’m therefore in no doubt or denial about the educational value of Creative Writing in itself. I just don’t believe it needs to be taught by me, or by any other practising writer. My commitment to writing (not teaching) has informed techniques and strategies that have worked for me, but I can’t honestly say that these individually evolved techniques are going to work more generally for anyone else on other projects. If Creative Writing is to become a subject like any other, a repeatable set of established and assessable procedures, then a qualified teacher is best-qualified to lead the way. As teaching credentials, my books are and should be worthless.
Many writers do turn out to have a talent for teaching, but that’s good fortune rather than good university governance, and serving two masters is no more comfortable for a writer than for anyone else. Faced with the full-time teacher’s obligations to reading, reports, admin, institutional crises, budgets, departmental politics, as a writer I might be forgiven (might I?) for reminding myself, and perhaps occasionally my colleagues, that the position was offered as a reward for writing, and in every tight spot I may (perhaps should) shirk my paid responsibilities to concentrate on writing (to which I also have a responsibility, and in which my identity is invested, and for which I was in the absence of qualifications employed.) Obviously, for a teacher, this is not an encouraging attitude.
Or perhaps it happens the other way round, in snatched moments at home and in the long vacation. Faced with the writer’s obligations to the desk, concentration, truth, beauty, originality, endurance, as a teacher I might be forgiven (might I?) for reminding myself I am, after all, a professional University lecturer. That’s what I’m paid for and what puts the bacon on the butter on the bread. For a writer, this is the beginning of the end.
Here is the fault-line that runs between writers and education, and I’m not sure it can be crossed with an association and a two-letter preposition.
It’s not the only job in the world that most of its practitioners would give up if they could, but until the writing works out we’re just working, doing something we don’t want to do for money. I’d like to suggest that this makes a writer in education a less than ideal employee. The writer J.M. Coetzee spent many years at the University of Cape Town, an experience that may have influenced the attitude of the narrator in his latest novel: ‘I would cheer myself up by telling myself that at heart I was not a teacher but a novelist.’ J.M.Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature. He no longer teaches.
This does not exclude writers from education, and remember we need the money, the company, the validation, ‘and the rest’. Writers need these jobs, but whisper it, the courses don’t need writers. This is going to become more rather than less true, unless writers in education are clear about what they can offer that teachers can’t. Otherwise they’re just teachers, often without qualifications, and with an undeniably ‘strong commitment’ to a possibly conflicting discipline.
Given that practising writers are often gifted teachers, able to communicate with energy and urgency, there are ways in which institutions can continue to benefit from this vitality. Along with Andrew Cowan (if I understand correctly one of his more rhetorical questions), I think I can be swayed by the anti-egalitarian idea of the masterclass. It seems more honest. Writers are then permitted to be experts on what they know best – their unique methods for solving their own problems as writers.
Other solutions have been pioneered by individual writers like Harry Mathews, the great American experimentalist. In recent years Mathews has taught courses at the New School, New York, in Creative Reading. In this way his talents and insights, his passion and energy, have been available to students without burdening Mathews the writer with the weight of a Cowanesque questioning.
Another suggestion is that writers should be employed in pairs on a four-year cycle. Working two years on and two years off, this would confront some of Andrew Cowan’s anxieties about the creative limitations of entering the academy, while requiring the writer to renew, periodically, a commitment to succeeding or failing as a writer (by finding from writing the money to make up the biannual financial shortfall). The students would also benefit from hearing a range of voices and approaches.
It is by innovating, in this or other ways, that educational employers can recognise that a writer is not exactly, or not always, a teacher. We can then make sense of being something distinct yet still of definite value: writers in education.
Andrew Cowan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UEA. His most recent novel is What I Know (Sceptre 2006).
Irving, J., The World According to Garp, Black Swan 1986 [First pub: 1976]
Bradbury, M (ed), Class Work, Hodder and Stoughton, 1995
Coetzee,J.M., Diary of a Bad Year. Harvill Secker, 2007
Questions for Gail Jones on the novel Dreams of Speaking by Ayano Fukuda, Aki Irimajiri, Asuka Kimura, Tadayuki Kin, Hiroyuki Koreeda, Joyce Jie Xuan Lim, Yusuke Matsumura, Chihiro Seko, Yuichiro Tanakamaru, Reiei Tei, Junichi Tran, Yasuhiro Wakai, Erika Yamauchi
Tokyo University 28/06/06
Can you explain the title Dreams of Speaking? [We have one theory that Mr Sakamoto is too elegant, tolerant, and even omnipotent (for example the episode of the waiters). He can be seen as a symbol of perfection (especially on how to live with technology) and exists to offer Alice a kind of salvation. His sudden death can be interpreted as the end of a reverie, a dream. Whatever the imaginary Mr Sakamoto communicates therefore represents the ‘dreams of speaking’ of the title. How do you feel about readers interpreting your work in this extreme kind of way?]
What a wonderful theory! I think that texts finally belong to readers and I’m delighted at such an ingenious and interesting reading of the text. According to Maurice Blanchot, the French philosopher, the text doesn’t come into being until it is read and that there is a kind of collaboration in meaning-making. I don’t think of Mr Sakamoto as having a dream status, but he does offer Alice salvation because of the force of his humanity. The novel was originally called The Voices, but I had to find a new title when another novel was published with that title just before mine. So the original idea was to meditate on the status of the voice in relation to friendship and technology – what people say and don’t say to each other, what families, friends, lovers say and don’t say. But I prefer the title Dreams of Speaking and for me the ‘dream’ is in part the aspiration to a kind of open and honest conversation.
A critic in the London Times has said that Dreams of Speaking is no page-turner. But in fact the scattered nature of the episodes and biographical stories encourages the reader to turn the page to discover what you the author have in mind. Was narrative tension a consideration in how you structured the many episodes in this novel? If not, what determined the order?
I wanted lots of mini-narratives so there was a sense of the many lives and stories that contribute to our own. I’m, not really interested in the linear plot and the idea that there is a classic arc of building up tension and then resolving it. I’m more interested in a structure that gives a particular “texture’ to reading, so that there are intellectual and emotional tensions operating at many levels in the text. The order of episodes was rather random; I wanted some things at the beginning of the friendship the cinema, the telephone, the forms that connect Alice and Mr Sakamoto – and I wanted more complex (even more painful) kinds of technology – like the MRI imaging machine – to come at the end. But I had no fixed sequence and tried to find my way intuitively.
Alice makes an impulsive decision to visit Mr Sakamoto in Nagasaki. She lives in Paris for a long time off an unfinished writing project. Alice and Mr Sakamoto strike up an immediate rapport in a train. What role does authenticity have to play in this novel?
I’m not really sure what ‘authenticity’ means. I do think there are forms of honest and intimacy that I wanted the pair to discover, and most of this is achieved in conversation (actual or in email). Alice is not really sure who she is, but Mr Sakamoto has a very firm sense of self, achieved over his lifetime and by contact with suffering an a catastrophic scale. So I do privilege him in the relationship as the wise one.
Mr Sakamoto’s ‘scientific’ messages are primarily biographical rather than centring on discoveries or inventions. The sense they give is that no matter how far technology develops, it will never overcome man’s sense of doom and his emotions. Does the biographical emphasis suggest that the human mind and heart will always be superior to modern technology?
Yes, I suppose so. Mr Sakamoto is interested in the life behind the invention, and the fact that there are hidden narratives to every object we use. He is a kind of radical humanist; he no longer believes in god, but he does believe in beauty, community and the power of love.
Most of Dreams of Speaking is about Alice, but it is not written in the first person. Did you ever consider writing the novel in the first person, as a way of allowing more immediate access to Alice’s emotions?
I wanted Alice to be a little remote. I can’t imagine writing an entire novel in the first person (but who knows? Maybe I will some day.) It may be a problem for readers that Alice begins so detached; she is the one who has to learn that the head and the heart are not separated (I’ve never believed in this cruel and banal division).
There are many pauses in Dreams of Speaking. It seems sometimes like a haiku, and you refer to haiku several times in the novel. Is there a deliberate resonance between your style of writing and the style of haiku?
I’m very pleased with this question. I do have an interest in haiku, and also love Sei Shonagon’s Pillowbook. What interests me here are small illuminated insights we have that are very fleeting but very precious, moments in which we sense the mystery of things, and their beauty. There is a book by Elaine Scarry called On Beauty and Being Just and she says that when we come across a beautiful thing – an orange-mauve moth on a brick, or a perfect sentence – it is like a tear in the fabric of the world that pulls us through to a vaster space. I’m very interested in the poetics of concision and in the honouring of small special moments.
‘With carefully chosen images and words, the reader is transported across the tyranny of time to face a century of terror and awe.’ This sentence comes from a review of Dreams of Speaking in Time Pacific magazine and it sums up your book beautifully. However, your carefully chosen words are at times long and difficult to understand, especially for non-native speakers, often requiring a dictionary. The unusual academic vocabulary can give the impression that you’re writing for a specific group of readers, but not everyone - the reader can sometimes feel excluded. How much do you think ahead toward the concerns of potential readers, or do you accept that the readership for a novel like Dreams of Speaking is limited?
I hope I’m not excluding any readers, but I understand your question. I’m concerned not with an ideal of transparency in language, but in drawing attention to language and complicating the texture of the prose. As a reader I always love discovering a new words in a novel, so I’m hoping this is part of a form of discovery and pleasure – not exclusion – for any readers willing to take the ride.
The story of Mr Sakamoto’s early life, and his home in Nagasaki, provide a useful means of including a discussion about the atomic bomb. However, he seems slightly unreal, to be pushed around in the service of the novel. Is he modelled on any real Japanese person?
Oh dear: I hope Mr Sakamoto isn’t “pushed around at the service of the novel” because he is truly the centre of value and I want readers to feel a kind of grief when he dies. He is not modelled on anyone in particular, but I hope the character pays respect to a certain type of Japanese masculinity – one who has learned to cross cultures, who has developed a deep understanding of human struggles and experiences. Last week I gave a lecture on Murakami Haruki, The Wild Sheep Chase, and the ‘boku’ of Murakami is the opposite to Mr Sakamoto. He is not the post-modern subject who is drifting and lost and on a strange quest, but someone grounded in the dense and painful history of his own place and respectful of the complexity of Alice and Uncle Tadeo.
To what extent do you, as the author, recognise Alice’s own responsibility for her solitude? Her aloneness creates the melancholy mood of the book, but although she herself seems unaware of this, her loneliness can often be seen as self-inflicted. She chooses to stay in a small hotel room and has a meal alone rather than going out. Also, when talking to Norah, she hides specific facts about Mr Sakamoto. If she has no intention of opening up to others, then it’s not so surprising they keep their distance. Do you think Alice Black is guilty of self-pity, of being her own worst enemy?
Alice Black has a lot to learn. She probably is responsible for her own solitude, which is why Mr Sakamoto’s spontaneous gift of friendship surprises and delights her. I didn’t want an all-knowing heroine, but someone very flawed. The tensions between her intellectual world and the life of the body (her windsurfing, her wound when she windsurfs at the end of the text) are meant to suggest what she has not resolved. It is only in losing the beloved body of Mr Sakamoto that she begins to understand her own lack of humanity. Or rather, what she cannot speak. In the end she must speak about Mr Sakamoto.
At the end of the book, the scene where Alice talks to the answer-phone is great. However, the adoption scene that precedes it seems to raise some problems. Loneliness, isolation and a sense of lost identity are ubiquitous in the modern world, a theme the novel explores. However, Alice’s loneliness is ultimately attributed to the secret of her birth, and this revelation excludes readers from sharing Alice’s feelings of alienation (as they have done previously). Adoption gives a persuasive, rational explanation to her sense of isolation. Why did you choose to add this explanation at the end of the novel?
Yes, you’re right. If I had another chance to edit the book I would take out the adoption. I realized only after Dreams of Speaking was published that the adoption would be read as an “explanation” for Alice’s character and I really wanted to make her more subtle than that. You’re such a clever group of readers to make this comment, and absolutely right that it over-rationalizes her loneliness.
Is the death of Mr Sakamoto the beginning of Alice’s recovery, of her reconciliation to ‘nuance and eternity’? Or is it a new source of suffering to add to Alice’s deep loneliness as described since the beginning of the book? If so, is there any positive message at the end of the book – where can Alice expect to find help? Do you have any opinion about happy endings?
I hope that the last sentence, that implies that Alice will now tell the story of her friendship, implies that speaking will allow her to move from grief to wisdom. So although the novel is framed by grief, it also shows the reconciliation of the sisters and insists on forms of recovery through story. The speech-act with the answer phone, when Alice speaks truly of her feelings – is, I hope, the beginning of recovery. I’m not sure that all stories can have happy endings: this one is certainly mixed, since it is only through loss that Alice achieves growth. There will be a transformation, but she will always be shaped by loss.
I want to conclude by thanking you for such clever, sensitive and compelling questions. It is an honour to have such a brilliant group of readers. These sort of questions help me as a writer to become more circumspect about my process. I do hope Dreams gave you some pleasure – or at least some food for thought!
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of the National Academy of Writing. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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