Will Self

In My End is My Beginning

“If you show me your breasts I’ll give you £35,” was perhaps an inopportune remark to make to the middle-aged commuter sitting opposite me in the first-class carriage of the 14.30 Taunton service out of London Paddington on Tuesday afternoon. I was only going as far as Bath Spa, but from the expression that darkened his features I immediately realised I was already in very hot – and possibly even sulphurous – water.

The worst thing about the situation was that I didn’t even particularly want to see his breasts – I just spoke on impulse and out of boredom. Not, you appreciate, proximate boredom – that’s for kids – but a deep, gnawing, existential kind of boredom. Besides, he was reading The Times in a way that convinced me he was just as afflicted with tedium vitae as I. I thought: I’ll hand over the 35 quid, he’ll take off his tie – striped blue and lighter blue – and unbutton his shirt – white, not especially fresh – then simply part the sides so that I can ogle for a few seconds or minutes his slack, sparsely-haired moobs. That’ll be it: no fuss, no drama – I doubted that anyone else in the carriage would even notice.

Of course, if I’d paused for a second to think about my proposition I would’ve realised that it was just another attempt on my part to indulge in the pornography that swells in every moist and hidden crevice of contemporary society. Yes, that’s the thing: ever since a revelatory encounter with the late Andrea Dworkin, in Manhattan, in the late 1990s, I’ve accepted that pornography, far from being a harmless little vice, is in fact a crime – and a crime with victims like any other. Granted, it seemed unlikely that this man was in danger of experiencing himself as a sexual object (indeed, he might even have welcomed this if I’d put it to him nicely), but there it was: I was objectifying him.

The strange thing was that as he became more and more irate, and threatened to call the conductor – I found myself getting aroused. I suppose you can guess how it all ended… But then, I thought to myself as I zipped up my flies, smarmed my hair, shut the toilet door, and descended to the platform at Bath Spa, in my end is my beginning – surely a sentiment Pope Benedict would concur with?

The Dog Walks the Writer

My daily go-round has a menacing stereotypy: I walk the dog with such regularity it’s hard to know which of us is on the lead. I’d like to be able to say that the business of publicising a new book – with readings, interviews and so on – is something of a departure, but it ain’t so. I’ve been trundling to Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham year in year out for almost two decades now, so that these journeys have the quality of an annual progress by some cut-rate monarch viewing his papery pop-up dominions.

Not that I wish to be dismissive of the audiences who turn out for my readings, or the journalists who trouble to interview me – I value them all. I cleave to Cocteau’s view of the artist, that we are all hermaphrodites engaged in feats of parthenogenesis: we inseminate ourselves, gestate our mind-children then deliver them on to A4 beds. We raise them, and eventually – when they’re hulking and hirsute – we load up their belongings, drive them to another town, buy them an electric kettle, open a bank account for them and cut them loose. It’s not our fault if they subsequently end up as crack whores – or, worse, provincial solicitors.

So, the audiences and the journalists in Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham are effectively foster parents, or beadles, or possibly “moral tutors” (which is what the member of the academic staff charged with student welfare was called in my day); because it is unto them that the fully-grown mind-child is delivered. And just as it’s no longer the writer’s responsibility as to what becomes of his books, so these transitional figures may fold, spindle and mutilate them as they will.

The Essential David Shrigley

Shrigley illo
From The Essential David Shrigley

“I am a regular if not exactly enthusiastic patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it’s important to maintain those businesses that put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services. If we bought everything on the internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument – one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.

“Anyway, over the years I’ve not exactly grown friendly with the staff of the bookshop, but we do tolerate one another. They know I’m a writer – obviously – and they do me the kindness of displaying signed copies of my books in their window. On a couple of occasions I’ve even given readings at the shop. What I’m trying to say is that this is a functioning relationship, albeit one of a circumscribed kind: I write books; they sell books; I buy books from them (although not my own, because I know what’s in those ones already).

“Then, perhaps a year or two ago, one of the men who works in the bookshop told me he had written a book and asked me if I would take a look at it. This happens to me quite a lot – some people are looking for advice or assistance to get their work published, others simply require a generalised affirmation. None of them, I suspect, is looking for genuine and heartfelt criticism such as: Your book is dreadful, you are wholly without talent, please never try to do this again – although I’m glad you showed me this, for, having established quite how vile it is I have been able to burn it and so stop it falling into the hands of someone less worldly-wise and more vulnerable than me, who might be so depressed by your execrable efforts that they self-harmed or committed suicide.”

The Essential David Shrigley is published by Canongate Books for £20. Read the rest of Will Self’s introduction to the book here.

“Will Self’s just flashed me …”

The Scotsman’s verdict on Walking to Hollywood: “There must be a word – I don’t know it but Will Self will – meaning envy of eloquence, jealousy of the ability to use a large vocabulary convincingly to make the reader’s mind bounce around different levels of reality. That’s one reason Self remains such an engaging writer: the other is that underneath even his weirdest imaginings lies the kind of truths that can only be absorbed through a pair of walking feet.”

For the full review, go here

Meanwhile, Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent, writes: “When you turn to page 225 of Will Self’s new book, Walking to Hollywood, you get a modest surprise – or perhaps that should be an immodest one. There, at the bottom of page 227, is a picture of a naked man. As in the Duchess of Argyll’s notorious Polaroids, the man is in effect headless as the picture has been taken in what looks like a bathroom mirror and the reflection crops him off just above the nipples. Unlike the Duchess of Argyll’s Polaroids, it is a sexually innocent image, the shadows in the shot concealing all anatomical detail. One arm hangs down beside the torso; the other is out of sight, presumably holding the camera with which this odd image has been taken. And what makes it particularly arresting is your reasonable assumption, as a reader, that this is a portrait of the author. “Will Self’s just flashed me,” you think, before you turn your attention back to his prose – which both demands and deserves it.” Read the rest of his article here.

Sutcliffe also discusses Self’s new book on Radio 4’s Saturday Review with, among others, Iain Sinclair. You can listen to it here.

Website exclusive: Foie Humain read by Will Self

Val Carmichael credited Pete Stenning — who was called ‘the Martian’ — with getting him off the gin and on to the vodka. “Cleaver cunt, the Martian,” Val said to the assembled members, who were grouped at the bar of the Plantation Club in their alloted positions …

Listen to Will Self read the start of Foie Humain here and then here, the first of his four part story-cycle in Liver, which is available as an unabridged audio book from Whole Story Audio Books for £19.99 here.

Slow politics

“In the tense weeks leading up to the general election there was much media blether about the constitutional conundrum presented by the possibility of a hung parliament. It seemed that so short was the institutional memory of the state, no one in Whitehall had the least idea of what to do, were it the case that no single party gained an absolute majority.

“Yet I recalled perfectly well the mid-70s when the Lib-Lab pact was formed, and I am but a callow 48. Politics in this country is conducted at a breakneck speed, and by necessity this means there can be no looking back. No looking back and, it would seem, not much looking forward. In the days following the election, as preening Lib Dems – looking like teenage girls who’ve been asked to the school disco by everyone – trotted in and out of negotiations with Labour and the Tories, the adage that a week was a long time in politics had never seemed so recherché. Now an hour is a long time.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Men’s Health article about slow politics here. He also wrote about slow sex too, here.

Devilish Business on the South Downs

A curious incident on the South Downs: driving my eldest son and his stuff down to his new rented accommodation in Brighton, prior to his second year at Sussex University, we pulled the van off the motorway and drove up towards Devil’s Dyke. I wanted to show Lex the Dyke, and also his youngest brother, Luther, who was along for the ride. My own father used to take me up here on the weekends we spent in Brighton at my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace, and he would always tell the folk tale about how the Dyke was dug by the Devil to flood the Sussex Weald, but that he was surprised in the middle of the night by an old woman cotter lighting her oil lamp, and taking it for the dawn he jumped all the way to the North Downs where he landed forming the Devil’s Punchbowl on impact.

I digress – although not without purpose, the Dyke also features in the book I’ve just published, Walking to Hollywood. What goes around … Anyway, instead of taking the spur to the Dyke car park in towards the golf club we found the road closed with a police barrier and a bored-looking WPC standing in front of it. “You can’t come this way,” she said when I’d wound down the window, “haven’t you heard about the body found on the golf course?” Well, no – but what none of us Londoners had heard of before was cops so keen to impart. In the Smoke they wouldn’t give you the time of day, but down here in Miss Marpleville we got all the dope: according to the WPC, said corpse was “badly charred” and – here her voice dropped to a conspiratorial undertone – “the feet had been chopped off”.

I suggested it might’ve been that most loathsome of crimes, an “honour killing”, but the WPC looked at me as if I were a fool. Maybe she thought it was the Devil what done it.

Loose Ends

Will Self is a guest on this week’s Loose Ends on Radio 4 at 6.15pm on Saturday September 11. Clive Anderson’s other guests will be the Labour MP Peter Hain and the actor Russell Tovey, with music from Imelda May. You can listen again here, until 18 September.

JG Ballard on Resonance FM

On Wednesday 8 September, from 7pm to 8pm, on the London arts radio station Resonance FM (resonancefm.com), journalist and will-self.com co-manager Chris Hall will be talking about the life and work of JG Ballard with James DC, John Churchill, and Howard Aggregate in the first of a new series of Atomic Bark covering SF, fantasy and horror.

Real Meals: Aberdeen Angus Steak House

Established in 1976 – or so their crest proudly claims – the noble house of Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses seems always to have been among us, yet I cannot recall ever speaking to anyone who admitted to eating in one.

My own definitive experience of the chain is definitely a case of le lèche-vitrine. Heading dreamily up west on a Saturday afternoon in late March of 1990, I emerged from Leicester Square Tube to find myself in the middle of a pitched battle between police and anarchists. It was, indeed, the pivotal moment of the poll-tax riots: the police, having forced the demonstrators back against a building site in Trafalgar Square, were now being attacked by lithe young men hurling scaffolding poles, apparently with all the skill of hoplites.

I watched, awed, as the Met – some on horseback, others forming a loose testudo with their riot shields – retreated up Charing Cross Road. I was struck by the timelessness of the scene; this, I felt, could have been the Peasants’ Revolt, or the Gordon Riots, such was the perfectly achieved choreography of the Law and the Mob. Still more atavistic were the spectators who filled the mouths of the side roads; they were in festive spirits, laughing and pointing when someone managed a particularly accurate pole-throw or truncheon-swipe.

But most remarkable of all was the behaviour of the diners I could see plumped down solidly on the leatherette banquettes of the Steak House on the corner of Cranbourn Street. These hefty American tourists, far from being intimidated by the biggest civil disturbance central London had witnessed in decades, continued unabashed with their bovine noshing. The rich, far from being eaten – as the Class Warriors would have wished – were still eating.

Back in the day there were 30-odd of these establishments, poised to capture unwary tourists as they staggered from London’s mainline terminuses. With their red paint and black leather decor, and their menus of uncompromising naffness – prawn cocktails, steaks, chips, gateaux – the chain had by the late 1980s become a synonym for “clip joint”.

No self-respecting native would ever dream of setting foot in one. But 20 years on, revolutionary socialism has been reduced to a mere rump – and so, for that matter, have the Steak Houses: there are only four left.

When I rang at Friday lunchtime to see if I could book a table at the Cranbourn Street branch for dinner that evening, the woman who answered was mildly incredulous: “We don’t take bookings,” she said, “and to be honest you really don’t need one.”

The small herd of three prime young men I’d assembled to dine with me were equally thrown when I revealed our destination. They muttered about cholesterol, prions and – most important, this – the terrible solecism of natives eating in such a tourist trap.

“It can’t be that bad!” I cried, leading the way. “Besides, I’m paying.” Such arrogance, for just as the Steak Houses barely survived the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, so the bill took a near-fatal chunk out of my bank balance. It was £130 for a single course for four, with no wine to drink, only four Cokes (plus 15 per cent tip on top). True, the bullocks all had fillet steaks, while I had a sirloin, but there was no tricky preparation involved – just beef + fire – and as for side orders: chips and salad, d’oh!

The strange thing was that although we had to wait a ridiculously long time for our steaks, the meat was of a premium quality and perfectly cooked. The bullocks grazed contentedly, while I too happily chewed on someone else’s cud, ruminating that as beef production is such a wasteful and environmentally devastating business, it was probably entirely apt that those other steak-holders, back in 1990, ignored the civil disturbances within feet of their snouts, for wasn’t I doing exactly the same thing 20 years later? Granted, there wasn’t a riot going on, but all meat is by definition murder, and somewhere else in the world someone was suffering the attendant grief.

Not I, though. I paid the bill, said goodbye to a pair of the bullocks and, accompanied by the third, headed for home. Herding him down Charing Cross Road, I shared some of my thoughts with this, the prime cut of my loins. “Dad,” he interrupted me, “can we get some Krispy Kreme doughnuts?” And people say the young have lost all interest in politics.

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