Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  Which brings us back to the seaside, to where two different, if interpenetrating, domains collide. ‘What is it about the sea that summons people to it?’ One reason we go to the seaside perhaps is because it’s there that we hope, if only for a week or two, that dreams might become real or reality might turn into a dream. In Margate there is a well-known amusement park called Dreamland. It has certainly seen better days and its brick entranceway now looks more like the gate to some prison than to a land of dreams. But then that wishful, seaside dream—of sheer amusement—can in any case quickly turn thin. As Ray, one of the characters in Last Orders, reflects:

  It aint much. It aint much to write home about, if it’s what you get. If the sea’s just the sea, wet desert, and the rest is knick-knacks. A pier, a postcard, a penny in a slot. Seems to me you could say that Jack and Amy were spared, after all, Amy was spared. It’s a poor dream. Except all dreams are poor.

  So there are deeper reasons. We go, we return, to the seaside because once, if we were lucky, we were taken there when we were small and we never quite outgrew that primal thrill. So perhaps, as Jack and Amy in Last Orders belatedly intended but never achieved, we retire there, late in life, in order to discover, maybe, a second childhood, or because it seems only appropriate that we should end our days where the land itself—the land of the living—stops. Whatever else the sea is, it’s not us, it’s the beyond. It makes us feel, and even be reconciled to, our insignificance. It’s the great place which is no place, where no one lives. The sea is destiny, eternity, oblivion, death.

  Jack Dodds in Last Orders has his own particular and precise reasons for wanting his ashes flung into the waves at Margate. They have to do with Margate. But all the characters in the novel register that this journey towards the sea is a journey we all make. The four men who travel to Margate Pier are drawn there by their allegiance to Jack, but also by the tug of their own inner tides of memory and longing. When they arrive, one of them observes that the sea actually smells ‘like memory itself, like the inside of a lobster pot’. Even Amy, Jack’s widow, who mysteriously decides not to join the men on their mission, absents herself, among other reasons, for seaside reasons, seaside memories.

  The sea is destiny, and is present in Last Orders not just as a physical destination. More than one character in the book has been a sailor. And one of them, Vic, who served in the navy in the Second World War, is the cause of a whole detour in the novel’s central journey in which the four men, with Jack’s ashes, visit the naval memorial at Chatham, where are listed the names of those who, in the proverbial phrase, ‘have no grave but the sea’. It’s Vic who most broadly equates the sea with death. And he should know, since Vic is an undertaker. His business, literally, is death, and during the war one of his duties was to prepare corpses for that abrupt ceremony known, with its poignant verbal attempt to transpose two elements, as burial at sea. But in equating the sea with death, Vic also equates it with something, positively, more: with our mortal democracy, our common human denomination, with the fact that we are all, in the end, not so different from each other:

  But Jack’s not special, he’s not special at all. I’d just like to say that, please. I ’d just like to point that out, as a professional and a friend. He’s just one of the many now. In life there are differences, you make distinctions … But the dead are the dead, I’ve watched them, they’re equal. Either you think of them all or you forget them. It doesn’t do in remembering one not to remember the others … And it doesn’t do when you remember the others not to spare a thought for the ones you never knew. It’s what makes all men equal for ever and always. There’s only one sea.

  I’d like to stick for a while, or digress for a while, with death—if death can ever be a digression. Reviewers and critics have noted that death crops up rather a lot in my work. One English reviewer of Last Orders went so far as to christen me, good-humouredly, the ‘terminal novelist’. In one sense I accept, cheerfully, this description. Mortality runs through my work: Last Orders, Ever After—those titles tell you something. Last Orders is about a man’s last wishes; Ever After deals with a husband’s grief for a dead wife. The main action of The Sweet Shop Owner occurs on the last day of the protagonist’s life. And throughout my work there’s a fair amount about that wholesale supplier of death, war.

  But against all this I would say, firstly, that my work deals with many other things too; secondly, that an interest in death is a natural, rational, even healthy concern of anyone in any sense alive; and, thirdly, that in none of this do I think I’m in any way exceptional. Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don’t claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I’m in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life’s joys, pains, confusions. We’re all in the same boat.

  One of the writers of the past I keep coming back to, and I say this not just because I’m here in France, is Montaigne. And I hasten to add that since my French is pitiful, I read Montaigne in English translation, particularly the marvellous contemporary one by John Florio. Montaigne was plainly fascinated, amid much else, by death. The very titles of some of his essays betray this: ‘Of Judging of Others’ Deaths’; ‘That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die’, and so on. But there’s one essay of Montaigne’s in particular that I keep coming back to, called, in English, ‘Of Exercise or Practice’. In it Montaigne makes the unassailable point that though there are a great many things we can practise, and perhaps perfect, there’s one thing we can never practise: death. But, he suggests, we can get close to doing so. He then vividly describes an incident in his own life—or you might say, near-death—when he fell from his horse and, as a result, also fell into a state of apparent unconsciousness during which he was assumed by those around him to be dying, though all the time he himself was aware, as in a kind of vigilant trance, of everything that was happening. It gave him the rare opportunity, he says, actually to observe what it must be like to die; and, he concludes, it was, really, not so unpleasant at all. It’s worth quoting a little from Florio’s version:

  Me thought, my selfe had no other hold of me, but of my lips-ends. I closed mine eyes, to helpe (as me seemed) to send it forth, and tooke a kinde of pleasure to linger and languishingly to let myselfe goe from my selfe … I knew neither whence I came nor whither I went, nor could I understand or consider what was spoken unto me. They were but light effects, that my senses produced of themselves, as it were of custome. Whatsoever the soule did assist it with, was but a dreame, being lightly touched, and only sprinkled by the softe impression of the senses. In the meane time my state was verily most pleasant and easefull. I felt no manner of care or affliction, neither for my selfe nor others. I saw mine owne house and knew it not; when I was laid in my bed, I felt great ease in my rest … To say truth, it had beene a very happy death: For, the weaknesse of my discourse hindered me from judging of it, and the feeblenesse of my body from feeling the same. Me thought I was yeelding up the ghost so gently, and after so easie and indolent a manner, that I feele no other action lesse burthensome than that was …

  It’s a wonderful, and wonderfully comforting, passage, but perhaps the greatest wonder is that in it Montaigne unconsciously —and that’s the operative word—achieves what elsewhere in the Essays is his avowedly conscious aim: to make, amid a wealth of subject matter, his principal subject himself: to offer himself to the world. For suddenly in this passage where, ironically, the concern is death, Montaigne comes palpably, intimately alive: this man who on a precise day, in precise circumstances, in the late sixteenth century, fell from his horse, nearly died, yet whose living curiosity was so strong and insatiable that he did not omit to make a study eve
n of this possibly terminal experience.

  Why do I dwell on this passage? To illustrate that an interest in death can be an interest in life? In part, yes. If Last Orders is about death, then it’s about death in order to be about life, or it’s about life getting in the way of death, as it does with Montaigne, an intrusion or obstruction which can sometimes be, as I hope it is in Last Orders, affirmatively comic. One of the principal tasks of my book is to make a dead man come to life again: to give back life. The same pattern is there in Ever After, which begins with a death, with an end, but ends with a beginning. And that making things ‘come alive’, that simple siding with creation, is a mainspring of fiction.

  But I refer to that essay of Montaigne’s for another reason. My subject is place. We naturally think of place as a spatial condition but of course we all, just as much, have our place in time. That fall of Montaigne’s from his horse is thoroughly placed in time yet, in Montaigne’s account of it, it leaps magically free from that dimension. It’s the humble glory of us all that while we can share the same physical places with others, our place in time is unique, unrepeatable, irreplace able; the particular conjunction we embody of an inner world with an outer one is ours and ours only. Our glory, yes, but also our fixity, our isolation. Only death, perhaps, seems to tell us we are part of something beyond personal place and time. Yet we can—and really quite easily—transcend this historical isolation. Montaigne transcends it or transcends it for us as he comes alive at that seeming point of death, and it’s in the nature of both the writing and the reading of any work of fiction that we transcend it.

  When some readers suppose that fiction is really a version of fact—disguised autobiography—I think that is their sad loss. The whole appeal, the whole challenge and reward of fiction lies in its liberation from personal fact. The very least we should expect of it is that it will, to use the common phrase, ‘take us out of ourselves’, take us out of the place we normally and sometimes narrowly inhabit. That process is sometimes disparagingly labelled as escapism, a term which can be usefully applied to some bad fiction, and perhaps to seaside amusement parks, but surely that initial escape is vital, and can be profitable if we are led back in the end, with something more than we started with, to ourselves.

  You don’t have to have been born in the Fens to set a novel there; you can make the imaginative journey. And that journey applies just as much, indeed more importantly, to the human and psychological content of a novel, since even if you set your story in territory that is geographically close to home, if your characters are to be convincing, then you must still undertake the mental journey to them. As I’ve said before now, one of the great functions of fiction is to prompt us to try to understand what it’s like to be someone else. That attempt is of course vital in life generally, but fiction offers a special stimulus towards it. We all know that the journey from ourselves to another human being, even one who’s normally very close to us, can sometimes be immense, yet, in a flash, the imagination can leap the distance. And that imaginative journey to someone simultaneously near yet far is essentially no different from the imaginative journey I might make to someone living in China or Peru, or to someone living in another time, like Montaigne in the sixteenth century, or even to some character in a novel who has never actually existed at all.

  There’s one place, I’d like to suggest, which belongs peculiarly to fiction, to all good storytelling, while belonging to us all. You don’t have to have been born in the Fens, or ever have gone there, in order to read a novel that’s set there. It’s the job of the novel to take you there. I think we all recognize as readers the often rather delicious sensation, as we begin a novel, of entering a previously unfamiliar world and of starting to inhabit it as if it were our own. And we all recognize that much more intense and resonant thrill a novel can give when something in the narrative or in the internal workings of a character makes us stop in our mental tracks and say to ourselves, ‘Hold on—I’ve been here too. I’ve been in this place too. It’s unfamiliar, but it’s not.’ It’s surely this ‘I’ve-been-here-too’ territory with its countless possible external approaches but its common centre of identification which is the real heartland of fiction, the real destination of storytelling.

  All my books contain, I think, a sense of place, and Last Orders could be called my most local book. It’s not just set in a particular corner of England, it’s even written in a local language. Yet it also goes against locality in being the only one of my novels to make explicit, in its very form, that if we are creatures of place we are also creatures of motion—travellers, wanderers, rovers. Sailors haunt its pages, so do gypsies. There’s a good deal of running away and absconding, of leaving or seeking home. One of the chief physical props of the whole story is a camper van: that paradoxical contrivance, a travelling home.

  If we are all, at least in our minds, travellers, if to write or to read a book is to go on a mental journey, then it is also true that books themselves travel. One proof of this is that books get translated, something which could hardly happen if the experience being purveyed could not be recognized and felt to be true in more than one place. Writers are always trying to touch, to grasp the universal. And the way not to do this, it seems to me, is to write the avowedly universal, global, cosmopolitan book—the sort of book that ought to be written in Esperanto. The key to the universal is always the local, if only because it’s a universal truth that all experience is and must be local, all experience is placed. If I read a book set in China or Peru, or indeed Nice, a great many local references may pass me by, but that doesn’t matter, it even helps, because through them I nonetheless sense the true, the genuinely local texture of life as it’s really lived.

  The theme of this somewhat roving talk of mine seems to be that we are all, at one and the same time, inhabitants of place and of placelessness, creatures of tenure, attachment and of no fixed abode. This is nothing new. This almost exhausted twentieth century has taught us, often cruelly, sometimes kindly, that we live in an increasingly dislocated world, a world in which cultural as well as geographical boundaries become ever more volatile and confused. Of course, writers should respond to this, but it might be thought that writers, who have to write from some personal fixed point—and particularly writers of an indigenous kind like myself, an Englishman born in England, who’s lived most of his life in the same city—would be at a disadvantage. But I don’t think so, if only because of the nature of that central imaginative act. I think if you start a story that’s going to go anywhere, you have to involve yourself, from the outset, in a kind of inner uprooting; you have to become, with all its freedom, risk and excitement, unattached. I think all writers, whether they’re of the settled, the nomadic or the involuntarily displaced kind, would recognize that mental dislocation is part and parcel of what they do. It’s even what initiates and inspires what they do. I’ve always thought that all narrative starts with the sense of the strange—a strangeness that may be no more, or less, than the sudden appreciation of specialness, of that humble glory of our irreplaceable place in time. As Ray in Last Orders observes:

  But a few things happen anyway, a few things happen. Like we haven’t seen or chosen them, though we would’ve if we could’ve, but they happen anyway, like they saw and chose us first, they saw us coming, like we aint been missed or overlooked altogether …

  Stories begin when strangeness slips into our lives, as it always will and must, because life is, however much we try to domesticate it, constantly, wonderfully, dangerously strange. Terra incognita may of course be that remote wilderness at the edge of the map, but it can also be, as we all have occasion to discover, just around the corner.

  FISHING WITH TED

  DEVON, 1998

  After I published Waterland in 1983, having published the year before a collection of stories called Learning to Swim, it began to be supposed that there was something aqueous about me. My lecture in Nice, many years later, acknowledged an attraction to the seaside, but the
wateriness had already gained circulation when, back in the early 1980s, I started to say, in answer to the question writers inevitably get asked about what they do when they’re not writing: fishing.

  That answer was, in truth, a rather complicated mixture of fact, bluff and wish. One Christmas long ago, as this book has already mentioned, I was given a fishing rod. I was certainly of an age by then when I no longer begged Father Christmas for such things. The rod came, along with a set of tackle, from my real father, though it could be said that I’d angled for it. It was anyway a present that added a dimension to my life. I remember, that Christmas Day, repeatedly laying out for inspection the little lead weights and cork floats—far more important to me than any Christmas-tree baubles.

  My first outing with my new rod must have been on the day after Boxing Day, in thick snow by almost iced-over water, but I was not to be deterred. I fished as a boy and as a teenager, with moderate success and no great ability, but always with contentment, and when other things gradually began to take over (including the desire to be a writer), I think I knew I was only putting the fishing side of me into abeyance—though I didn’t know that it would be fifteen years or so, by which time I’d become a published writer, before it would emerge again, at least in the form of an answer to a question.

  The element of bluff in that answer was very effectively called when at a party given by the now long-defunct Fiction Magazine I met David Profumo, then its assistant editor. Our conversation quickly turned piscatorial—and a little inquisitorial. Was it all hokum, this thing I claimed, or was it real? I think David sensed that it was a bit of both, but essentially sincere. What I was really saying was: I wouldn’t mind going fishing again.