We caught up with John Muckle, author of London Brakes (Shearsman Books), and he regarded us enough to answer a few questions:
John, you’ve been an editor, a copywriter, a care worker, a sheep wrangler, and a bookshop assistant. This begs the question, where and when did writing begin for you?
In my spare time. Or sometimes, when inspiration seized
me particularly forcibly, I’d throw down the sheep and scribble out my fresh
thoughts there and then. It began when a teacher encouraged me at school,
putting up my prose poem ‘The Old Chrysler’ on the classroom wall, or perhaps
it was slightly earlier, I don’t know. I started writing other poetry and
stories in red notebooks at home, soon developing a whole parallel life as
someone who defined himself by writing. I’ve worked as a lecturer and as a
teacher, at various other jobs – but somehow the sheep always called me back to
my wrangling ways.
Where did you grow up and how much of your childhood experience makes its way into your writing?
I grew up on a small council estate in a village about
fifteen miles from London. I’ve always been somewhat back-looking so bits and
pieces of my childhood memories can be found in lots of my pieces, my father’s
world of fixing cars and motorcycling, the river Thames, hanging around in my
grandparents’ kitchen and listening to people talk … it’s not nostalgia
exactly, but I found a sort of phantasmagoria, sometimes grotesque and
humorous, in these remembered
voices …
Can you talk about your growth toward becoming the writer you are today?
I’ve tended to stick to the same old things, same old subjects, ideas and influences, and, after straying for years, I’ve found ways of circling back and looking at these things in a new way. I developed naturally as I grew up, read more, and struggled to integrate this new knowledge and experience into my own writing.
You’re both a poet and a novelist. FIREWRITING AND OTHER POEMS (published by Shearsman Books in 2005) is captivating. Your credits also include THE CRESTA RUN (Galloping Dog Press, 1987), BIKERS, which you worked on with Bill Griffiths (Amra Imprint, 1990), and CYCLOMOTORS, which was an illustrated novella (Festival Books, 1997). Is it the same creative force? Or is there a distinction to be made between John Muckle the poet and John Muckle the novelist?
Poetry and prose are so mingled as to be virtually
indistinguishable in my head, but they often inhabit very different spaces out
here in the world. You’re writing for different people, sometimes, out of
different writerly influences, and, yes, trying to achieve different things. My
first book was a collection of short stories which tried to capture the speech
idioms of people where I grew up. Bill Griffiths was a wonderful poet with some
of the same preoccupations. ‘Bikers’ was a mixture of his poems and my prose.
‘Cyclomotors’ was based, in part, on an old scrapbook which a friend had found
in the rubble of a demolished block of flats. Like most people I’m looking for
connections of one sort or another, but you have to cope with other people’s
distinctions and categories. Poets tend to wish I’d write more prose, novelists
opine that I should stick more closely to poetry.
Your affinity for poetry is something your friends and fans speak about. You’ve done quite a bit of editing, reviewing, essay writing, (PN Review, Jacket), you were the general editor of the anthology THE NEW BRITISH POETRY (Paladin, 1988) and are credited with the creation of the Paladin Poetry Series. Poetry, particularly in the era in which we live, is a wayside practice. Editing is perhaps one of the most thankless endeavours. What has sustained you?
I was lucky enough to find jobs in publishing, so
editing was for me, if thankless, at least paid. ‘The New British Poetry’ was
an idea to bring together a few different strands in British poetry, the
modernist-influenced crowd who started writing in the sixties, who’d been excluded
by a highly traditionalist establishment, some newer experimentalists, some
poets who’d begun writing under the impact of the women’s movement, and a
generation of poets, mostly children of immigrants from the West Indies and
Africa, who were fresh, ripe, and just about to drop from the tree. The editors
of these sections, Gillian Allnutt, Fred D’Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric
Mottram, did a grand job and the book had an impact at the time. I enjoy essay
writing and reviewing – again, it connects me to others and their work. Poetry
seems to be booming at the moment – but who wants to be just another solipsist
with their finger jammed on the send button …
Who are the writers you admire most?
I was influenced by rock and roll, pop music in
general, folk and blues singers, Arthur Rimbaud, Samuel Beckett, the Beats;
later on I studied and admired American modernist and post-modernist poets, eg
The Objectivists, the New York School, Black Mountaineers. I especially admire
D.H. Lawrence, James Hanley, Kerouac, Faulkner, many science-fiction, crime and
detective writers, poetic naturalism, the English Romantic poets and William
Hazlitt, Walter Benjamin, John Berger … many women writers in all categories,
Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers (recently), Lorine Niedecker and her
descendants, and, I don’t know, all sorts of other, later things.
What inspired LONDON BRAKES? What is your favourite
part?
When I was working as a blurb-writer writing copy for hundreds of books a year – I used to enjoy writing copy for titles from the SF backlist – I got into Philip K. Dick’s non science-fiction novels, mostly about small town Californian life in the fifties, which were only published after his death and were being issued in paperback by us. Anyway, I was entranced by them. One day, possibly after reading ‘Confessions of a Crap Artist’, I wandered out of the stifling office to watch the lunchtime traffic hammering down Regent Street, a row of motorcycle couriers were popping wheelies in front of me … and somehow that was going to be my next book. I’m not sure I have a favourite part – the clubbing of the priest? the lawyer dragged into the street by his lapels? – unless it’s a scene in which my uncle Roy is seen bounding boyishly up a steep wooded hillside.
A hundred years from now if someone were to remember you based on what you’ve written or will write, what kind of writer would you want to be remembered as?
I’m unlikely to be remembered. Anyway, there’s
something a bit creepy and distorting about the whole notion of doing things in
order to be remembered a certain way in a hundred years time, although it does
seem to work out quite well for some people. I say ‘Pah!’ to the future! But
sometimes I do think like that. I definitely believe I’m fully afloat on the
sea of time and I look around to see who I can drag onto the big memory-raft.
For up-and-coming authors, authors who have novels that haven’t yet been picked up, writers who are looking to start that first book, what advice do you have, or perhaps more specifically, what would you like to say to them?
Work hard. Be persistent. I do believe that if you’ve
got the talent you’ll be able to do something with writing. People are never
going to stop playing around with words anymore than elephants will one day desist
from sucking up water with their trunks and squirting it onto their backs. But
you do have to be realistic, you might need to change direction. Be flexible
and honest with yourself. Try to get a small break from someone who has a
genuine or passing interest in your abilities, or your point of view. Good
luck.
John Muckle, we are pressed for time and so I'd like to conclude by thanking you for your time and congratulating you on a sustained, impressive, ongoing career and of course on LONDON BRAKES. Thank you for speaking with us.
It was my pleasure. Many thanks to you and all your readers. I'm looking forward to our next chat.
(Interview by Shokry Eldaly)
- See our review of John Muckle's London Brakes