The limits of DBC Pierre

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, August 6-7, 2016

DBC Pierre is one of literature’s wild boys. His nom-de-plume is an acronym for his childhood nickname: Dirty but Clean. He doesn’t shave before posing for his book jackets. His prose is scruffy and profane, and doesn’t always kowtow to the laws of grammar and syntax (“I closed my eyes, put my best foot forward and punched through it.”) His epigraphs come from the likes of Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski. When he won the 2003 Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Little, he used the cash to pay off his drug debts. 

Nobody taught Pierre how to write novels; he had to feel his way into the job. Now he has written a book about writing: part memoir, part how-to manual, part political tract. The resulting work is amazingly uneven. The chapters about technique, which constitute about three-quarters of the book, are perceptive and illuminating, and generously crammed with the kind of detailed practical advice that all young writers crave. The chapters in which Pierre vents his political spleen are puerile when not incoherent. What makes us suppose that creative writers are better qualified than, say, candlestick-makers to pronounce on world affairs? Writers like Pierre make you urgently revisit that assumption. 

He is unquestionably useful, though, when discussing his own craft. All writers are haunted, when they start out, by the sense that they are doing something radically wrong – that their stuff is somehow inauthentic. Pierre offers consolation here. Any piece of writing, he says, is trash to begin with. To make it good, you need to write your way through the bad. “It’s far easier to improve crap than to originate brilliance.” Stick at it long enough and you will emerge into “clear, thin air where things finally gel.” 

At his most insightful, Pierre gets beyond the brass tacks of craft and elucidates the deeper mysteries of art. How, for example, do you write dialogue that sounds real? Not, Pierre correctly notes, by reproducing the anarchy of real-life speech patterns. To sound authentic on the page, dialogue must be heightened, tightened: made realer than real. Pierre’s best observations on such matters are compact enough to attain the status of aphorism: “structure is an admission that we want someone to read the work.” 

So much for how Pierre writes. What makes him want to? During his twenties, Pierre discovered that reality was more chaotic than he had been raised to believe. He’d been brought up, he realised, in a “microclimate” of falsehoods. When it struck him that our culture tended to “distort and reinforce its ideas in exactly the same way,” he became a writer. 

Thus, for Pierre, the act of writing is tied up with his self-image as a contrarian. His gift, he believes, is an ability to see through our culture’s “shorthand of convenient ideas” and spot the uncomfortable truths on the far side. “Throughout history one has only had to say the truth to be subversive, and that has never been more true than today.” 

What’s so special about today, though? Here we begin to butt up against Pierre’s limitations as a writer. Bracingly specific about technical matters, he can be maddeningly vague and crude when discussing the world beyond the page. Contemporary reality, he says, is a “headfuck.” Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, it is a “ratfuck.” No doubt his foul mouth is meant to be part of his charm, but it’s also a tic that lets him be lazy and inarticulate at exactly those moments when a bit of specificity is called for. Basically, our whole culture just irks him, in ways he can’t always define. He has a beef with technology. Science has let us down, somehow. “The news is bullshit.” Now more than ever, Pierre feels, we need writers who can tell us complex and nuanced truths. 

That bit is hard to disagree with. The question is whether Pierre himself is up to the job. As a sample of his ability to see things as they are, he offers the “uncomfortable” observation that a terrorist “can also be … poetic.” This isn’t necessarily untrue – terrorists can be surgeons and engineers, so why not poets too? But if the rest of us don't tend to waste much time thinking about what terrorists get up to when they are not being terrorists, that may not be because we find the question uncomfortable. Maybe we just find it irrelevant, or less relevant than the fact that the gentlemen in question want to kill us, which is a pretty uncomfortable consideration in its own right. If Pierre has any thoughts about the downside of terrorism, he doesn’t disclose them in this book. He raises the topic only once more – when likening Britain’s Terrorism Act to a witchcraft statute. 

Pierre has a strange conception of nuance, then. He thinks it means throwing out a glib paradox while dodging the central part of the conversation. He has a pretty limited sense of subversion, too, if the most daring thing he can bring himself to say about terrorism is that some terrorists can also be poets. In truth, Pierre has his own considerable knack for not perceiving or recording inconvenient facts. On the frequent occasions when reality would appear to be more complicated than his politics, he turns out to prefer wishful thinking to accurate seeing. 

Consider his virtuosic two-page attempt to demonstrate that the scientific world-view is no better than the religious one. Does the mystic embrace “ideas for which there may be no material evidence”? Well, so does the engineer, says Pierre. After all, science “routinely reverses its conclusions.” Does the mystic see “signs of his creator” everywhere? Sure, but only in the same way the engineer “notes the hand of science.” Does the mystic avoid certain kinds of food? Yes, but the engineer “might also be forsaken if he eats the wrong food, but in his case it’s food which science has rejected.” 

It’s remarkable how much energy Pierre pours into forcing an analogy he can’t possibly believe to be valid. Can he really be so ignorant as to think that revising a conclusion in light of fresh or better-understood evidence is the same thing as disdaining evidence altogether? Can he really think that not eating food that will make you sick is comparable to a religious taboo? 

Of course he can’t. Pierre simply wants these things to seem true, or true-ish, so he can get back to what he is comfortable doing – riffing about what he has called, elsewhere, the “ongoing fucked-upness of contemporary western culture.” If science is an improvement on prayer, then the modern western project might have something to be said for it – and we can’t have that. So science’s hard edges must be travestied out of existence, using Pierre’s favoured form of pseudo-insight: the bogus equivalency. All things are essentially the same, if you blur their outlines sufficiently. Somehow, while using this technique to airbrush away things he knows to be true, Pierre still manages to see himself as a progressive thinker, although it is hard to see why he should. His erasure of science would go down well at a Trump rally. But at least he has avoided the cardinal sin: that of appearing to judge the Other. 

Globalisation has created problems for all of us, not least for the kind of western writer who, like Pierre, relishes his status as an outsider. Through no fault of his own, Pierre came on the scene as a self-appointed critic of “our culture’s ethos” at almost exactly the moment when it became apparent, to everyone except the wilfully blind, that our culture, relatively speaking, does have a few things going for it. At that moment Pierre had a decision to make. One option was to admit to himself that he was, to some extent, an insider too – that certain hard-won western achievements, including his freedom to say whatever he liked in print, were worth defending. Accepting this would not have made him a lesser critic. It would have made him a better one, ready to complicate his writing to keep pace with a complicated world. 

Instead Pierre seems to have decided, along with many another pseudo-leftist, to cling to his purity at any cost, including that of turning his prose into a wheezing engine of denial and simplification: a machine for pumping out nihilistic equivalences, hobbled judgments, tactical untruths, and howling structural silences. Meanwhile millions of migrants move from basket-case countries to Pierre’s “fucked-up” West in search of a better life. It must come as an odd surprise, when they get here, to learn that some of our most garlanded writers can’t bring themselves to say that the Enlightenment was worth having.

The Art of Serious Reading

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, July 25-26, 2015 

 In his regular pieces for The New Yorker, the literary critic James Wood gives you hope for the ailing arts of reading and writing. Wood is a master of both things. He uses words as scrupulously as he listens to them; his prose hears nuance and has it. His stuff is like a reviver tent by the side of the information highway. When the traffic starts to dull your brain, Wood can always be relied on to remind you what real thinking sounds like. 

In his new book, The Nearest Thing to Life, Wood unshackles himself from the obligations of the critical review, and unfurls a sustained, free-ranging meditation about life, art, and the relationship between them. The project originated as a series of lectures, and Wood has risen elegantly to the challenges of that form, packing each hour to the brim with distilled intelligence. The result is a kind of verbal Tardis: the book looks small, but a lot goes on inside it. At one point Wood recalls his childhood love of Penguin classics, whose covers seemed to glow in his hands as if “irradiated by the energy of their compressed contents.” This is that kind of book. 

Wood’s first essay begins with a death. The author is at the memorial service of a young friend, whose life has been suddenly and randomly lopped short. Naturally these circumstances give rise to the question that constitutes the essay’s title: “Why?” Why are we here? What’s the point? 

Over the centuries, Wood says, the Why? question “has been answered – or shall we say, replied to – by theodicy.” This sly distinction is typical of Wood’s sensitivity to the weight of language – he handles words the way a serious shopper chooses fruit. In everyday speech, we tend to use the terms answer and reply interchangeably. Wood reminds us that they are, or can be, two very different things. Wood’s parents were devout Christians; when he asked them Why? as a youngster, they had ready replies. But the replies, he suspected even then, were inadequate. These days, when his own children ask him the same eternal question, he finds he has no simple comeback. 

On the plus side, he does think he has a complex one. It will take him the whole of the book to elaborate it, but a sneak preview is available in the title, which comes from George Eliot’s suggestion that “Art is the nearest thing to life.” Wood, it will emerge, believes that the meaning of life, in so far as there is one, can be found in art – or more precisely in literature, or more precisely still in fiction, which after all is his area of expertise. He thinks that serious reading, far from being a luxury pursuit, or a turning away from life, will in fact take you right to the heart of the matter. It will tell you why. 

Growing up in a pious environment, Wood found that literature provided a space for mental “escape.” Novels encouraged the kind of free thinking that the Bible explicitly sought to shut down. Although Wood admired the empathetic and “thoroughly novelistic” Christ who cautioned against casting the first stone, the Gospels contained a less humane Christ too – the Christ who declared that looking at a woman with lust was an act of adultery. That Christ seemed to be making the “thoroughly anti-novelistic” claim that “thought is action.” (Wood is too charitable to add that there are a few novels, including pre-eminently Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which we get to see what this principle looks like when enforced.) At any rate, the young critic came to prefer the “utterly free space” offered by the literary text. “To read fiction,” he says, “is to have non-actionable thoughts; we assert the humane, non-religious right to separate thinking from doing.” 

If fiction is secular in that sense, though, in another sense it grants us “the power of religious monitoring.” When we “peer into the thinking” of a fictional character, we acquire “the power to turn inside out the pocket of someone else’s private thoughts and watch the loose change of error fall incriminatingly to the ground. (Isaac Babel said that he could write a story about a woman if shown the contents of her handbag.)” 

A fine analyst of other writers’ metaphors, Wood is no slouch at imagery himself. The inside-out pocket is good, and “the loose change of error” is even better. Note, too, how useful Wood’s mention of Isaac Babel is. Wood can always casually throw in just the right illustration from anywhere on literature’s globe. Is there any writer he doesn’t know? When he fleetingly confesses that “I have still never really read” Wyndham Lewis or George Sand, the word “really” suggests he’s read them at least a bit, and the word “still” implies it’s only a matter of time till he tackles them properly. 

Dispensing with the old idea that the pious possess powers of moral insight unavailable to free-thinkers, Wood is ready to suggest something like the opposite: secular texts, as well as being more fun to read than holy ones, can also provide us with a deeper and more nuanced moral education. Reading fiction, we’re permitted to observe the failings of others, but we’re not encouraged to condemn them. This is because the others are products of the imagination – our imagination, as well as the author’s. So instead of deploring their shortcomings we tend to experience “proximity, fellow-feeling, compassion, communion. We have the uncanny powers of the monitoring Jesus, but the humane insight of the forgiving Jesus.” 

If Wood had less classy publishers, they might have marketed his book as a sort of highbrow self-help manual. On one level that’s what it is: a powerful argument for the real-world utility of serious reading. Fiction isn’t just good in itself, it’s good for you; it’s wholesome, it’s nutritious; it deepens your sensibilities in ways that will help you live. “Often, in life,” Wood writes, “I have felt that an essentially novelistic understanding of motive has helped me to begin to fathom what someone else really wants from me, or from another person. Sometimes, it is almost frightening to realise how poorly most people know themselves …” 

Why are we here? Why do we read fiction? They may not be the same question, but they may turn out to have the same answer. To know ourselves, and to know others. Literature helps us do both: it can give us “an almost priestly advantage over other people’s souls.” The words “almost priestly” have an ironic ring, if you’ve followed Wood’s argument this far. By now we may suspect that the priest, armed with his lone dogmatic text, will know less about his fellow human beings than the seasoned fiction reader does. 

Wood’s second essay, “Serious Noticing,” burrows deeper into the Why? question. Great writers, Wood argues, are in the business of seriously noticing things. With the force of their metaphors and the novelty of their phrasing, they refresh our picture of the world. When Aleksandar Hemon describes dollops of horse-shit as “dark, deflated, tennis balls,” he helps us see. When Saul Bellow has a middle-aged character grasp the “big but light elbow” of an elderly man, he evokes the boniness of old age in remarkably few words. Wood, having quoted Bellow’s phrase, throws out a killer line of his own: he says that Bellow’s character is “gradually disappearing into his own longevity.” 

It is as if the excellence of Bellow’s prose has rubbed off on Wood’s, inspiring him to do some serious noticing of his own. We’re all in danger of vanishing into our longevity. Literature, Wood dramatically proposes, can arrest or even reverse that process; it can remedy “the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention.” Great writing, by asking us “to look more closely,” helps us tighten our grip on “the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us.” It helps us grasp the present and remember the past. You might even say – and Wood says it – that literature can “rescue us from our death.” 

This is stirring stuff. Either consciously or unconsciously, Wood seems to be channeling the spirit of that seminal aesthete Walter Pater, who advanced similar arguments way back in the 1870s, thereby scandalizing his fellow Victorians. “We are all under sentence of death,” Pater wrote in the ornate but mighty “Conclusion” to his book on the Renaissance. “We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.” Pater electrified the likes of the young Oscar Wilde by preaching that this interval was best spent “in art and song … For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” 

Like Pater, Wood mounts a rousing argument for the centrality of art to life. Like Pater, he does so in prose that delivers the throb of art in its own right. At one point Wood makes mention of those artist-critics, like V. S. Pritchett and Virginia Woolf, who erase the distinction between creative writing and mere commentary – who speak “to literature in its own language.” If we didn’t know by now that Wood belongs in their ranks, this books confirms it.

Winning ugly

J. M. Coetzee writes the way Ivan Lendl played tennis: authoritatively but grimly. There isn’t much warmth in the performance. One doubts, for that matter, that either man would consider “performance” to be part of his job description. The Good Story is an exchange of letters between the Nobel Prize winning novelist and the psychologist Arabella Kurtz, who practices and teaches in England. The book is austere and mannered, especially on Coetzee’s side. But it’s rewarding too, in a purely intellectual way. Stick with the dialectic and you’ll be repaid with moments of limpid insight, like outbreaks of sunshine on a frosty day.

The project’s premise is that Coetzee, as a novelist “sympathetically disposed” to psychoanalysis, wants to open a dialogue with Kurtz about the connections between Freudian therapy and fiction writing ... [read more]

The wonder and the weirdness

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, May 9-10, 2015

In February of this year, Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who practices medical writing as an art, published an essay announcing he is terminally ill. The cancer that cost him the sight of his right eye nine years ago has spread to his liver; he can now count his remaining time in months. The announcement was made with characteristic understatement (“my luck has run out”). It was characteristic, too, in its verve. Skipping self-pity, Sacks spoke bracingly of the time he has left. Resolving to live the rest of his life ecstatically, he made you resolve to live yours that way too. 

On the Move, the loose and slightly stand-offish autobiography that looks destined to be his last non-posthumous work, is the book of a man who has already written his masterpieces. Writing about himself, Sacks never quite attains the focus and gusto of his clinical case histories, which have been collected in such books as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. A famously shy man, he is at his most incisive and forthcoming when examining minds other than his own. The current book offers some clues about why that is, but it’s up to the reader to put them together. Sacks isn’t interested in treating himself as a mystery.         

He was born in London in 1933. His Orthodox Jewish parents were both doctors – his mother a surgeon, his father a GP. When Oliver was 18, and just about to leave for Oxford, his father gently confronted him about his apparent preference for boys over girls. His mother was less subtle about it: quoting from the Book of Leviticus, she called her son an “abomination,” and said she wished he’d never been born.  

This outburst was never spoken of again, but it left its mark. In Britain in the 1950s, as in Australia, homosexual acts were against the law. Sacks mentions the haunting case of Alan Turing, the computer genius who helped crack the Enigma code during the war, and was rewarded by being prosecuted for sodomy. Offered the choice between prison and chemical castration by hormone treatment, Turing opted for the latter. 

The terrified young Sacks, then, was obliged to leave the country in order to have legal sex. He lost his virginity in Amsterdam the age of 22, in a less than ideal way. He drank himself into unconsciousness, woke up in the bed of a strange but friendly man, and was informed that he had been “buggered” in the interim. To put it another way, he was raped. Sacks himself doesn’t put it that way – it isn’t his style to make a big deal of things. Nor does he spend much time wondering, at least aloud, about the extent to which the fear and shame imposed on his sexual salad days overshadowed his later life, which has been dogged by a shyness that he has elsewhere called a “disease.” “It has sometimes seemed to me,” he writes, “that I have lived at a certain distance from life.” He reveals, strikingly, that after a “fling” on his fortieth birthday, he went without sex for a period of 35 years. If Sacks were one of his own case studies, he’d have energetically speculated about the reasons for these things. But this isn’t that sort of autobiography. We’re told, at one point, that he has been seeing the same psychoanalyst for the last 49 years. What they’ve been talking about we’re mainly left to guess.   

At the age of 27, Sacks left Britain for Canada and then America. The move wasn’t meant to be permanent, but he has lived and worked in the US ever since. His portrait of the neurologist as a young man, in San Francisco and then in New York, gives us a figure radically at odds with his latter-day image. The younger Sacks was a rugged long-distance motorcyclist, a record-breaking weightlifter, and a heavy user of LSD and amphetamines. 

He also harboured an ambition to write. His first book was Migraine, which arose from his work at a headache clinic in the Bronx. “There is only one cardinal rule,” he wrote in the book’s conclusion. “One must always listen to the patient.” That commitment has been vital to Sacks’s success, as both a physician and a writer. When I first read his headache book I was suffering from hellish migraines myself, and dreamed of encountering a neurologist as intrepid and engaged as its author. I can’t say I ever found one. 

Sacks’s boss at the headache clinic deemed the book “trash”, and fired him when he insisted on publishing it. This set a pattern: his peers either ignored or badmouthed his books, while general readers increasingly loved them. The trend continued with Awakenings, in which Sacks chronicled his work with patients entombed in their own bodies by encephalitis lethargica, or sleepy sickness. Sacks, who was shaggily portrayed in the movie version by Robin Williams, correctly intuited that these patients could be unfrozen by the drug L-dopa, which had proved useful as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. 

Sack’s extraordinary powers of empathy as a doctor seem to have come from his father, the old-school GP who was still making house calls at the age of 93. You get the sense that he comes most alive in the presence of his patients, the way his patients, in Awakenings, finally came alive in his. “In a sense,” Sacks confesses, he was “in love with” his patients – “the sort of love, or sympathy, which makes one clear-eyed.” 

Outside the clinic, Sacks has been less lucky in love. Although he doesn’t say so outright, his uncanny ability to connect with his patients seems to be linked to his diffidence in the world at large. He is a curious man, in both senses of the word. Compounding his shyness, and perhaps explaining it, is the fact that he is face-blind: he has a rare condition that limits his ability to recognize faces, even his own. Having already written about this in The Mind’s Eye, Sacks makes only cursory reference to it in the current book. On this question as on others, he passes up the chance to provide us with a final reckoning.   

But one could put that another way, and indeed one should. Sacks has given us a full and rich account of himself already, in his books about the exceptional brains of others. The charm of his case histories lies in their readiness to flit playfully between genres, including autobiography. Sacks the man, with his ardent and cultured mind, is always present in them. You never know, reading him, when you’ll encounter the flash of art, the nimble leap from the specific to the general – from the subject of the study to everyone else, including you. Writing about a man plunged into a world of grey by radical colourblindness, say, Sacks makes you aware, as never before, of the vividness of a life lived in colour. 

Something similar happens in the title essay of An Anthropologist on Mars. The subject is Temple Grandin, the autistic savant who lacks a sense of the world’s beauty, and must comprehend the universe with her intellect only. “But do you get a feeling of its grandeur?” Sacks asks her. Grandin replies that she doesn’t. “You get such joy out of the sunset,” she tells him. “I wish I did, too.” At such moments Sacks startles you into appreciating the routine miracles of everyday mental functioning. He’ll be missed for the reason any great writer is missed: for his capacity to evoke the wonder and weirdness of being here.