The Galley Beggar Q&A: Mark Bowles
TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS: WHAT IT'S ABOUT, ITS INSPIRATION, AND WHEN IT FIRST BEGAN TO TAKE SHAPE AS A NOVEL.
All My Precious Madness is the story of Henry Nash, an academic at a London university. He’s just completed a paper for a conference, exploring the idea that every work of art is an uncommitted crime. He has a favourite local café where he goes to write, but his work is interrupted by a man called Cahun, an avatar of the digital age, the CEO of a company called Jabberwock. Through his gradually growing irritation and fascination with Cahun, we learn about the inextinguishable violence that characterises Henry’s past and present.
As for what it’s about, I should say that I didn’t have an ‘about’ when I started writing it. It began with a voice, Nash’s voice, slow and insistent, raging and rapturous. The story followed that voice to some extent, the story was what allowed the voice to flourish. I found it easy to inhabit and plug into that voice when I sat at my desk. And only then did certain themes emerge, to do with class, identity, violence and much more besides.
Some of the writing that ended up in the novel I started around 2016, but at that stage didn’t quite know my destination. They were separate bits of writing but it soon became clear that there were recurrent themes and obsessions. That they belonged together. For me this is usually how it is, the ideas and structure emerge from the writing, the writing reveals to me what I’m thinking and feeling.
THE NARRATOR OF ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS IS ACERBIC, CLEVER, ANGRY, MEAN AND OFTEN SAVAGELY FUNNY. HE’S NOT A LIKEABLE PERSON, DOESN’T TRY TO BE – AND YET HE CHARMS US ALL THE SAME. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS, HOW DID YOU MANAGE IT – AND HOW IMPORTANT IS IT THAT THE READER, IN LAUGHING ALONG, BECOMES COMPLICIT?
Honestly, I don’t mind him. But I think our complicity with the narrator has to do with a number of things. Most obviously, we don’t have any other perspectives. I think also that the targets of his irritation and ire are mostly uncontroversial: people speaking on their phones loudly and boorishly in small public spaces; people endlessly scrolling social media, or endlessly ambushing their experience with a camera before it has chance to breathe; basic discourtesy, rudeness etc. He’s nostalgic for a world where people live authentically and treat each other respectfully and in a non-instrumental way. He thinks we should experience the world more like a child does. There’s a romanticism there which I think people share, and I think his hyperbolic fury is a magnification of the irritations we – or some of us – share regarding some aspects of contemporary life. What I hope as well is that the reader is seduced by his language, its rhythms, its passion, its turns of phrase. As Henry says in relation to his students, vehemence and humour are the Trojan Horse that can smuggle in almost anything. And yes, it’s important to me that the reader is complicit to the point where there’s no turning back.
AS WELL AS BEING A VERY PERSONAL (AND OFTEN PAINFUL) STORY OF THE NARRATOR’S EARLY LIFE, THERE ARE SOME REALLY IMPORTANT THEMES IN ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS. I SEE IT AS A BOOK ABOUT CLASS, ABOUT IMPOSTER SYNDROME, A VERY ENGLISH ITERATION OF SOCIAL MOBILITY (ONE WHERE THE VISTAS SEEM TO WIDEN AT UNIVERSITY, ONLY TO CLOSE BACK IN…). IS THIS RIGHT – AND CAN YOU EXPAND A LITTLE?
Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. Henry’s background is very much working class, certainly culturally. After he discovers literature and applies for Oxford, he has to acquire a whole lot of cultural capital very quickly, not only literature and literary language, but a vocabulary (words like ‘copious’!) and a range of references that are very alien to him (he’s never seen an avocado until he’s at Oxford). He’s confronted at university with people for whom all this is taken for granted, whereas he’s had to labour and sweat to arrive at the place from which they begin. He, and I think working class children in similar situations, cannot shake off the sense that their new ‘identity’ is somewhat fragile, that the seams are all too visible, that it all might just come undone.
DO YOU HAVE A WRITING ROUTINE? WHEN AND HOW DO YOU GET THINGS DOWN ON PAPER? (ALSO, HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO WRITE ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS?)
I don’t have a particular routine. I just have to write when I can. I have a very fine nibbed pen and a small notebook. The notebook fits in my pocket so I can jot down anything that comes to mind. Most of All My Precious Madness was written in a café on Old Compton Street that serves the best espresso in London (IMHO). I then type up these notes on the desktop, usually with a candle burning and preferable with another espresso!
I’M VERY INTERESTED IN THE NARRATOR’S FATHER, AND HOW YOU SEE HIM. THERE IS SO MUCH LOVE IN THE BOOK – BUT THIS IS ALSO A TORTURED RELATIONSHIP. HOW FAR, AND HOW IRREPARABLY, DO YOU THINK THE NARRATOR’S WORLDVIEW IS SHAPED BY SOMEONE WHO IS ULTIMATELY QUITE A THREATENING, VIOLENT MAN, AND IS THIS AT THE HEART OF ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS?
Yes, the narrator’s father is certainly ‘a violent, threatening man’, but lots of other things too. It’s not simply that he has other sides but other stages, that he becomes different. In other words, at a certain point the violence snaps and pretty much vanishes. This permits hitherto dormant endearing eccentricities and affections to emerge. So in the later part of his life, he seems very different to how he was when Henry was as a child. Henry’s love for his father isn’t, however, due to this, that the father becomes more loveable. Love is to some extent a kind of calling unrelated to the particular qualities of the person. We can love someone almost despite themselves and despite ourselves. I’m not sure about that father shaping his ‘world-view’ but I think he recognises that he shares a certain eccentricity and childish glee with his father, a stubborn adherence to one’s own ‘form of life’ in the face of social expectation. That’s the real point of affinity with his father. That and the substrate of silence.
At the very end of the epilogue, I’ve tried to offer an image of him expressing love for his father in a way that should also make us slightly uneasy. But I don’t want to give anything away!
ON A LIGHTER NOTE: THE NARRATOR HAS A FRIEND CALLED CARVELL – A COMPULSIVE LIAR WHO OFTEN COMES OUT WITH THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS AND UNBELIEVABLE STORIES. CAN YOU TELL US ONE OF THEM? (AND DID YOU MAKE THESE STORIES UP YOURSELF – OR IS CARVELL BASED ON A REAL-LIFE FRIEND?)
So yes, Carvell is based on a real-life friend. Some of his stories I invented, but some of them are straight from him. For example, the story that his uncle was sewn up the wrong way after a bowel operation so that shit came out of his mouth! I made up the story about Seamus Heaney being spotted in a pizza chain eating nine slices of spicy sausage pizza whilst reading a biography of Benito Mussolini. However, even then, there’s a grain of truth. I was once sat in a bar on Frith Street with a friend (not Carvell) when we saw Heaney walk past (by himself). We decided to follow him and he was basically just looking at various menus in various cafes and restaurants on Frith Street and Old Compton Street. Eventually he went in to some place that looked pretty ordinary, so not really seedy but also not very salubrious either (I can’t remember which place, maybe the old Stockpot). Anyway, we then went back to the bar.
EDITING. DO YOU EDIT AS YOU GO, OR DO YOU WAIT UNTIL YOU’VE GOT A FULL DRAFT IN FRONT OF YOU? (… HOW MUCH DO YOU CUT? OR REWRITE?)
I’m constantly editing, in the sense of redrafting, tinkering. I also keep too many drafts and versions.
OTHER WRITERS. NAME SOME FAVOURITES.
I think some of my favourite writers are guessable, or will at least not come as a surprise: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Proust, Kafka, Duras, Genet, John Berger. The earliest work of fiction I really loved was Wuthering Heights. The two books I enjoyed most last year were (both preview copies) About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler and Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki. I also really enjoyed Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad.
SAMUEL BECKETT OR THOMAS BERNHARD?
I can see why you’ve posed the question, as the influence of both is perhaps visible in the book. But for me its Beckett without hesitation. A teacher called Webster gave me his copy of Godot when I was 17 and this really was my door into ‘Literature’. I read everything I could be Beckett – how strange it seemed, how beautiful. I also think this beauty, stark and melancholy and naked, is something we don’t find in Bernhard so much. At one point we visited Beckett’s wartime home in Roussillon in unoccupied France. It was for sale at the time and we fantasised about living there. But there was very bad subsidence, and a massive crack in the wall made the decision for us. I also made a pilgrimage to his Paris flat, still owned by his nephew, I think, so the name ‘Beckett’ is still on the letterbox. And the face of course. At 17 I hoped my face would grow into something as bird-like and otherworldly as that.
MOZART OR BACH?
Bach, no question. But it would be difficult to do without Requiem.
WHAT GETS YOU MAD?
I don’t really get mad these days. Maybe about certain terrible injustices and the complicity of the press. But like my narrator I have a few irrational and petty irritations. I share Henry’s disdain for people who drink their coffee in a takeaway cup but inside the café. Even more irrationally, I’m annoyed by people who point out that my bag is open on public transport. Or people that point it out in a particular ‘you need to be streetwise’ way. It’s usually men. Let me say that I’ve lived in London for nearly thirty years, and if my bag is open its because there’s nothing inside it.
AND WHAT ARE YOU READING AT THE MOMENT?
I’m currently reading UN AMOR by Sara Mesa.
WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY?
My family; good coffee; good wine; talking about literature and philosophy; Italy; the isles of Greece. Social justice. Any mixture of the cerebral and sensual. Bach. Elegance. Rivers. Sound of the sea uninterrupted by human voices. Lots of stuff, actually, thinking about it.