INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT236

Q&A with Daniel James

by XXXX XXXXXX

He’s a writer who isn’t afraid to take risks. As a journalist Daniel James took on the newspaper industry from the inside. With his fiction he played the dangerous game of putting his own life on the page. And now, as a biographer, he is exploring the very possibility of truth and attempting to unravel one of the art world’s biggest mysteries. James has his critics, but you can’t fault his ambition.

A news reporter for over a decade James was best known for exploring the cult of fame and contemporary culture, questioning systems of truth and authority, and exposing the hyper-reality of modern news coverage. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction his writing questioned the representation of reality through language, and our perceptions of knowledge and power. His interviews focused on personalities who were culturally, politically, and spiritually disenfranchised by these systems. When James reached the limits of what the newspaper industry could offer he did the only thing he could do: he went rogue.237

Now, he is reportedly set to publish under his own name once more. The project is believed to be an unauthorised biography of the reclusive artist Ezra Maas, who disappeared seven years ago. Little is known about the proposed book but, when it comes to James, we can be sure to expect it is a biography like no other.

Why did you want to become a writer?

To disappear. I read for the same reason. The only difference when I’m writing is that I get to create the world. Time and space contract, everything around me fades away, and I’m somewhere else entirely. I’m there with the character, in their world. It’s the same feeling I have when I’m reading a book and become completely absorbed by the story. I pass over into the text. When I return I find myself looking at the world around me with fresh eyes, a new perspective, greater knowledge, more empathy. That’s the power of fiction. It can change how you think, how you feel, what you see – everything.

I wanted to have that power.

What attracted you to this project?

I wanted to play detective. I have this theory that we’re all detectives. Every day we question the world around us, search for meaning, and seek to uncover hidden truths about life and ourselves. I think that’s why the detective genre is so enduring. There’s something fundamentally human about asking questions and trying to unravel the mysteries we’re faced with. Every time we open a book and begin to read we’re playing detective, whether it’s a crime story or not. Every reader is a detective, searching through the author’s words for clues, trying to piece together the literary puzzle, and discover the meaning locked within the text.

Mysteries are a gateway to the unknown, to places where every answer leads to another question. That’s one of the first things I was taught as a journalist. Question everything. And never stop, because that’s how you get to the truth. But what I love about certain mysteries is the way they reveal deeper, existential questions for which there are no easy answers, questions that challenge and unsettle your worldview, even your own identity, and lead you into the darkness.

Ezra Maas is that figure in the darkness. Every time you’re getting close he steps back into the shadows, so you can’t see his face, but you can’t walk away because on some level you need to know who he really is, only the truth will bring an end to the uncertainty. When I think of Maas, all I have is questions. His whole life was a mystery, from his childhood through to his fame in the ’60s and ’70s and eventually his disappearance. As soon as I read the story of how he vanished, I knew it would be the perfect set-up for a detective story.

It was an opportunity to explore the cult of celebrity238 through the lens of someone whose fame was generated by their anonymity, their absence, and withdrawal from public life.239 I wanted to discover who Maas really was and understand the impact he had on the lives that gravitated around him, his family, his friends, his entourage, his followers. The Maas Foundation actively cultivated his myth throughout his life, but not for fame, so what was really going on? What was Maas’s story? Who was he really?

Did you research biography as a genre before starting work on the book?

Biography is one of the oldest literary forms240 – and one of the most powerful. Through words, you can recreate a life. More than that, you can shape and control it. I’ve always found that fascinating and dangerous.

When I was an arts and culture journalist my interviews and features were essentially micro biographies – snapshots of people’s lives in that moment – so the move to writing a full biography was a natural progression in some ways. I read interviews with biographers such as Leon Edel,241 Hermione Lee,242 David McCullough,243 and Robert Caro,244 who famously said, “There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts”, to gain an insight into their methods and techniques, learning the rules of the game, so that I could subvert them, tear them up and produce something new. Each biographer described their process differently. For some it was like a love affair, for others a literary transfusion; but one common thread was the need to unravel the public and private ‘life-myths’ of your chosen subject and break through to the ‘real’.

But what happens when the public myth and the private life become blurred? Ernest Hemingway, even though he denied it, ended up becoming his literary persona. Marilyn Monroe was also Norma Jean. How does a biographer reconcile public and private myths? If we exist in the minds of others as a public figure, if we create and come to believe our own personal myths, if we exchange different masks, different roles, our whole lives, who gets to decide which one is real?

Speaking of self-mythology, do you ever consider that, by including a version of you in your writing, you’re doing the same thing as Ezra Maas?

I think if you’re going to write about people’s lives and you’re going to tell the truth about them, good and bad, then you’ve got to be willing to hold a mirror up to yourself. I don’t understand biographers who confess to the thrill of going through personal correspondence and uncovering other people’s secrets, but who say they wouldn’t want it done to themselves. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a hypocrite. I think there is a danger of putting your own life into fiction, but it’s a risk worth taking.

Is one of the dangers that people confuse you and your work?

I get angry sometimes when people describe me as the man behind the ‘Daniel James’ persona, especially as it’s usually said as a precursor to an attack on that identity. First of all, this is not a performance. People need to accept that. I’m not playing some sort of self-aware, ‘double game’ here. This is me. And, secondly, I’m sorry you don’t like who I am or how I live my life, but frankly I don’t care. I don’t exist for your benefit, and I don’t need your approval.

Have you ever thought what a biography of you might look like?

A maze.

Or a rhizome245 maybe?

Definitely rhizomatic.

You describe yourself as an ‘accidental journalist’, but you were clearly very good at what you did, with a reputation for asking difficult questions and finding the truth, whatever the cost. Looking at the industry, today, what do you see as the main challenges facing journalists?

How do you verify the truth in an era when images and news can be so easily faked?246 Who do you trust? How do you maintain your integrity and represent the public interest when the industry you work in is arguably as corrupt as the people you’re going after? It’s a minefield and I don’t envy anyone working in journalism today.

Technology is also radically changing the way journalists work and the way people engage with the news, for better and worse. They’ve been saying print is dead since before I was a junior reporter, and yet newspapers are still going; but it is getting harder and the financial pressures are clearly impacting the way journalists do their jobs. It’s the same for biography.

Maybe the Leveson enquiry might help clean-up the industry, but I’m not holding my breath. We’ve also got to be careful that we don’t end up in a situation where journalists are unable to hold evil and corrupt people to account. Journalism is far from perfect, and I’ll always have a love-hate relationship with the industry, but I genuinely believe the world needs a free and independent press.

If journalism and biography were accidental detours, in your career, what was your first love?

Fiction – and it still is. But, as I began to investigate people’s lives and research the past, I came to realise that everything I could ever want as a writer was out there, in the strange, complex, brilliant stories people had lived through, and in the beauty, violence, and poetry of history. I think fiction is richer and more powerful for being grounded in reality.

And we can learn more about the world through the lens of fiction?

Exactly. History tells us what happened, but fiction tells us who we are. Fiction is the real truth.

END

Notes

236. This is a partial transcript of an interview conducted by xxxx xxxxxx and intended for the literary podcast xxxx xxxxxx. The date of the interview is unknown but, based on Daniel’s tone and in particular the Leveson reference, I believe this was 2011. It was never broadcast and the full audio recording was lost. This partial transcript is all that remains – Anonymous.

237. After leaving the newspaper industry, in 2010, Daniel founded The Bleed as a platform for new and emerging artists, and as a subversive, unfiltered vehicle for his own writing. It was open to artists in any medium, from anywhere in the world, and each issue saw the magazine take on a new format uniquely shaped by its content. It was ambitious, challenging, and pushed the boundaries of what a magazine could be. The pilot issue featured cover art by Eisner award-winning writer-artist and graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot, and content from an international mix of new and emerging writers, artists, photographers, and illustrators. These included photographer Helen Taylor, artists such as Tom Boyle, Lauren Jane Forster, Nick Willis, Michael Barnes, Andrew Waugh, Rebecca Lowes, Karen Lusted, and Helen Gorrill, writer Philip Buchan, New York artist Meaghan Ralph, and the charismatic poet Lee Murray. Graphic designer Trevor Pill, working closely with James as Editor-in-chief, was responsible for the look and feel of the first three issues, including the legendary second issue, which was published in 2012. Jonny Speak designed issue three. Daniel took a step back from the day-to-day running of The Bleed in 2014 amid legal and financial controversies, with Victoria King becoming the new editor – Anonymous.

238. In his handwritten notes, alongside this chapter, Daniel briefly explores the history of celebrity, drawing a playful and potentially satiric comparison between the Greek heroes who fought for fame and glory (such as Achilles in The Iliad) and the reality TV stars of today.

239. Again, in his notes, Daniel identifies a number of other famous figures who chose to disappear, such as the ’60s spy novelist Adam Diment, and the poet Rosemary Tonks, both very interesting stories in themselves.

240. Daniel makes reference to the history of the genre, noting how Caesar used autobiography as propaganda to legitimise his rise to power and later dictatorship of Rome.

241. Biographer of the writer Henry James, Edel was the foremost Jamesian scholar of his age.

242. Lee wrote an award-winning biography of Virginia Woolf, as well as books on Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, and wrote a collection of essays on biography and autobiography entitled: Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005).

243. McCullough, a celebrated author, narrator, and historian, is famous for his biographies of American presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and John Adams.

244. Caro is best known for his epic and award-winning five-volume biography of former American President Lyndon Johnson.

245. Derived from the botanical term for a subterranean stem, a Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (1972 – 80). It describes a structure, any structure, in which each point is necessarily connected to each other point in a non-linear and non-hierarchal fashion. Deleuze labels the rhizome as a ‘multiplicity’.

246. Although this interview was conducted several years before the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ were popularised, Daniel clearly anticipates both the cultural shift and technological advances that will make ‘deep fakes’ possible while further complicating the role of the media in reporting news and events – Anonymous.