MARK HADDON
GROWING UP, I should have been listening to the Sex Pistols and the Clash like everyone else under eighteen in the U.K. But I was sent away to a boarding school as a teenager, so I was pretty cut off from the mainstream youth culture. It was not a pleasant place and I never felt at home, which is one of the reasons why I became a lifelong non-joiner of institutions. In that strange, hermetically sealed little world in the middle of the English countryside, I think I was seeking out a music of my own—something I could like that no one else liked. Outsiders’ music, music for non-joiners.
Having heard very little music beyond my father’s mild jazz collection and Top of the Pops every Thursday night, I hadn’t had too many formative listening experiences. But on two occasions, I heard a piece of music that changed the way I saw the world. The first was Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia,” which was performed at school by the choir. And the second was hearing Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew.
Miles Davis was hugely popular, of course, but not in the English shires of the late 1970s. I think I understood at the time that I was listening to something absolutely extraordinary. The sound of someone inventing a completely new language, but one that was nevertheless totally whole and endlessly articulate.
It wasn’t just the music that struck me. It was also Ralph J. Gleason’s liner notes, the way the music and the liner notes echoed and explained one another.
There’s a passage at the end which moved me then and still moves me now:
it’s not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty. the other beauty is still beauty. this is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever been before.
This is the definition of art which has always most excited me, the feeling of being taken to the very edge of the universe then just over that boundary into the surrounding darkness. It’s not an experience that happens very often, but I’m willing to wait. I’ve never enjoyed music in general, or contemporary fiction in general, or films in general, or theater in general. I’m standing on the runway waiting for the next big one to come in, trailing some of that outer darkness in its wake.
Reading the liner notes lines again, I realize there was something else that was clearly important for me about this passage. I was born in ’62 and like a lot of kids of that generation, the space program played a hugely important role in my imagination. I wanted to be an astronaut—we all did. Of course, it rapidly dawned on me that I was too anxious and oversensitive to be an astronaut. You had to be a fighter pilot to start with, and be ready to kill people, which I wasn’t. Plus I had a lazy eye, so I’d have flunked the medical on day one. Reading this passage, however, is a reminder that there are other ways to get to the edge of the universe.
One other thing. I loved the fact that the liner notes were all written in lowercase. It was the coolest thing. An official printed text with no capital letters! Whenever possible, I still write in lowercase and curse modern word processing programs with their insistence on capitals at the beginnings of sentences, for proper nouns, for “I.” When I have the time, I’ll go back and meticulously remove them because they look so untidy. And it’s all Ralph J. Gleason’s fault.
There’s only one passage in the liner notes which fails to ring wholly true for me. Gleason writes, “we can always listen to ben play funny valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than hodges playing passion flower?” He’s saying that new forms don’t invalidate the old forms, which retain their power. And maybe that’s true for some listeners, but less so for me . . . As I grew older, I stopped listening to most jazz that was recorded before Bitches Brew, and quite a lot recorded after it. It took me a while to formulate exactly why. It think it’s this: If I can imagine something being played in a hotel foyer, it’s not the kind of music I want to listen to. Sadly, a lot of jazz—which was, of course, intimately interwoven with the experience of slavery and the subsequent continuing oppression of black Americans, a music of protest, a celebration of pride and difference—was co-opted by commerce. As most things are, eventually. It’s become background music for most of us, and for me it lost that angry beauty. I’ve come to realize that much of the music I like is music that is going to annoy people sitting in that metaphorical hotel foyer. Not lyrically, but musically. Bitches Brew passes that test. It’s beautiful, but it’s not bland.
When a writing student shows you a piece of writing that’s not working, it’s relatively easy to help them improve. But it’s very hard—if not impossible—to tell someone how to write well. After all, there would be more good writing around if there was a formula. I think it’s because the best writing—like the best music, the best theater, the best art—always does something you don’t expect. It doesn’t have to be radical, it doesn’t have to be a wholly new invention, but is has to surprise you in some way. If it’s merely an improvement on what went before—that’s just craft, isn’t it?
I think it was Jean Cocteau who said fashion is what seems right now and wrong later. Art is what seems wrong now and right later. Great art has that slight discomfort to start with. It takes you a while to think, Yeah, this is right. I just didn’t realize that it was right at the time.
I think art grows out of a place of discomfort, too. For me it does, at any rate. I’ve come to accept that I’m going to be bored and frustrated for long periods. I’ve come to accept that I will be regularly dissatisfied and that I will have to throw a lot of stuff away. I have to be patient and slog onward and trust that something better will come along. I’m constantly trying to balance ambitions and withering self-doubt. I spend a lot of time pacing up and down getting absolutely nothing done.
I often say to people when I’m teaching that if you’re having fun it’s probably not working. And for me, the job of writing is pretty uphill most of the time. It’s like climbing a mountain—you get some fantastic views when you pause or when you get to the top, but the actual process can be tough. I’m sure there are people out there who enjoy writing, and I wish them all the best. But I’m not like that. I wish I could enjoy the process more. But I think I’ve come to accept that for it to work, I have to be uncomfortable.
Becoming a writer is not a decision I ever actively made. It’s more like coming to terms with a borderline pathological obsession, an activity I simply have to do regularly to feel human. At root, it’s a desire to understand the effect extraordinary books have had on me and then, in turn, to attempt to give other people a similar experience. That, combined with a complete inability to do any other job. I simply cannot turn up at the same place every day five days a week and be told what to do by someone else. Which is one of the reasons why I’m at home writing books and drawing and painting pictures. I’m quite lucky I’ve been able to make a living in that way.
I think you need two things more than anything to be a successful writer: imagination and bloody-mindedness. You’re going to sit on your own in a room for a very long time. If you can’t do that, it’s not going to be worth starting.
I used to quote Philip Pullman, who when he was asked if he had any advice for young writers, said: “Just don’t.” It’s quite funny, but it also encapsulates a truth: If you have the requisite bloody-mindedness, you’re not going to take advice from anyone, even Philip Pullman. (The coda to the story is: I was talking to Philip Pullman and said, “I often quote what you said about advice to young writers.” He said, “I didn’t say that! But I am going to say it now.”)
Whenever I sit down to write something new, I just think: “Please let me be able to write something—anything—that works.” And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve doglegged all over the place and ended up lately with writing short stories. I have an overwhelming desire to write well, but an inability to stick at the thing I’m doing right now. I’ll go anywhere to find something that works. That’s the only plan.
The liner notes and music from Bitches Brew are connected in my mind as they are connected for no one else on the earth: with an illustration which I first saw in a science book I had when I was a little kid. It was a reproduction of an engraving from Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire, which depicts a fake medieval landscape. A guy in a robe has walked to the edge of the picture, to the edge of the earth. He’s somehow managed to poke his hand under the bottom of the smallest of the bounding spheres, and behind it he can see the machinery of the universe: the cogs and the wheels and the smoke and the fire. That’s what I want art to feel like, and for me it’s always connected with Gleason’s image of stepping outside the spaceship.