Whitechapel Boys

My First Little Mark Gertler Book

2010-08-27T15:28:00.005Z

It's been a while. But I've been working. Honest. And I've got a new book to prove it. A little book that, hopefully, will be the harbinger of the bigger one, of The Novel. But I'm loving the smaller book at the moment, the intimacy of creating one and also reading them (Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion is beautiful).

Trees at a Sanatorium is the new book and it's part of Sylph Edition's new series of booklets exploring masterpieces of 20th Century British Art. You can read more about the series here. My story is a fictional meditation on Mark Gertler, on his desire to paint, his struggle with TB, and his love for the artist Dora Carrington. The piece was originally extracted from my novel-in-progress based on Gertler's life, though during the process of working with the publishers, it became a bit like a satellite that has detached itself from the rest of the novel and now exists as an independent creation, orbiting Gertler's painting "The Bathers".

It's been a real joy working with Sylph - and although I haven't seen the book yet (it's at the printers), I have read quite a few of their other booklets and they are all stunningly beautiful. It's so rare to come across publishers (especially small publishers) who are as interested in the writing itself as they are in the book as an aesthetic object, which, really, is about the reading experience. Their books make you want to own books. Their Cahiers Series is a treasure chest.

Jesus is My Favourite Jew

2009-03-01T21:15:00.003Z

I did some stuff with Jewish Book Week this year. But before it all started, the people from Jeneration got in touch to ask if I'd write a little something on "My Favourite Fictional Jew" for a freesheet they'd be distributing throughout the week. I said yes, because it sounded like a fun thing to do and, let's face it, I like the opportunity to get something in print. But I couldn't think of anyone to write about, and then - yes, it was an epiphany - Jesus came to me, and I wrote this: Even after twenty-three years of eating pork, I still get a thrill out of bacon. I grew up in a household where all things pig were ignored – they don’t exist! – yet treyf like oysters, mussels, abalone and snails were held in mythic esteem. Whenever my grandmother prepared snails, we’d traipse off to her house on Brighton Drive to watch my father eat them with that special fork as if they were something offered up to the High Priests of the Temple. Not changing the subject: I remember how shocked my uncle was when he went to sort out my grandfather’s things – he’d recently died – and found the New Testament by his bedside. I first saw Jesus in the rock-musical Godspell in a small community hall in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in the mid-70s. It was only when I moved to London that I came to rely on him. I know he’s not real – he’s a kind of fiction to me, like Moses and Job and Eve – but for many years, for most of the late 90s, really – I found huge comfort in Christ’s story, quintessenced in the image of him on the cross. I was suffering – I had a couple of crap jobs, very little money, my writing career was plodding along, my father was dying, and my nearest sibling was a 5-hour flight away – but the extreme pain, the frozen-in-time torment of the crucified man eased my anguish. I even – when no-one was looking – genuflected in a chapel or two. I have always turned to characters in literature for reassurance, and for lessons on how to be a man, a gay man, a Jewish gay man, a Jewish gay South African Israeli man in the world. And at times like now, Jesus has a lot to offer us – not for what people have made of him, but for what the stories tell about him: He was kind.

Make Me Write!

2008-11-23T15:41:00.003Z

What a great idea. You have to try this out.

	522

11

lab.drwicked.com

And this is what I wrote:

I've never tried this before but I'm willing to try anything - what with the way my life is at the moment and I barely have time to notice my breaths - to notice anything. I want to get back to a time when I took from the world - when I took time - sat in cafes and walked through galleries and noticed the way people behaved and spoke to each other and ate their cakes and drank their tea and milkshakes - (who invented the straw - what is the point of a straw unless you're in hospital - or want to look really prissy in a bar) - and I used to walk through parks a lot and sit on park benches and look at ducks and coots and swans. I want to be outside when it's sunny and sit with my face to the sun and feel fed by... The thing is I used to do this quite a lot and wrote so much about it that I'm not sure I could do it all again - I'm not sure I could do things that I have written about already - what I want is new things - Love? Travel? - I want something to write about - I want to go beyond the Whitechapel Boys. I want the days to be mine - to open up before me like an invitation and to be the party, the cocktail party that you go to with no expectations and land up having the best time you've had in years. I used to have those times (am I whining?) - those Friday nights when we'd go out dancing till the sun came up and then walk down to the beach in Tel Aviv and take off our clothes and swim naked just off the promenade, at the foot of all those big hotels that shield Tel Aviv from the sea, that would take the impact of the tidal wave or the terrorist attack that came from the sea - tourists and hotel workers first. Is that what I need to do? Go back to Tel Aviv for a while. Is there something I need to face there? And the point being, what? Ah, yes, so that is what writing used to do - take me to places that I wasn't sure I wanted to look at, places that the day to day of teaching and editing and preparing and promoting and hustling make so easy to avoid. I want to sit down and write like this every day - like now, while the spinach and chick-pea soup is boiling on the stove and the red cabbage and walnut salad is marinating in the fridge and I might go out for a run in about half an hour or take a nap before everyone turns up for dinner this evening - for dinner and a run-through of what we'll be doing tomorrow when we perform at Soho Theatre. Is that what's new? or the same? What if you sat down and did this every day - 500 words in 10 minutes.

click here to go there

Some Good News Items

2008-06-21T19:10:00.008Z

Today will be the longest day in 2008. It's a Saturday evening. It's the 21st of June. From tomorrow, the days get shorter. The main reason I'm sitting down to write this blog is to pause time for a while, to stop another month from going by without recording anything about the ongoing saga that is Whitechapel Boys. There is good news. A section of the project is going to be published as a booklet, a monograph, a kind of chapbook as part of a series on War Poets. We haven't agreed on everything, so I'll post all the details when we've signed on teh dotted line. This will be the Series' booklet on Isaac Rosenberg and will be about his last days in Arras, before he was killed on the 1st of April 1918. The narrative is woven in with a story about a guy who goes to visit Rosenberg's grave just as his own relationship is falling apart. It's semi-autobiographical in that it's about 3 or 4 relationships rolled into one.

The other bit of good news is that I finally printed out the entire Rosenberg section of Whitechapel Boys and I have a feeling that it's a book on its own, that it needs to be a separate book. I keep changing how I think the book should be structured - all three stories interlinked, three parts of one book, three separate books - but at the moment it feels right that each artist should have a book to himself, because, really, each of them brings up a whole different set of issues. With Rosenberg it's questions of poverty, of thanatos, of the deperate desire to be published, to be recognised, questions that concern every artist (every human being?) to various degrees throughout our lives. Yet with Rosenberg it comes with early death, with the sense of a thwarted process, or one that has been reduced to an essence. It has been and still is a challenge to spend so much time with Rosenberg, to stay in touch with that part of me that used to be much more like him: driven, miserable and desperate. I wonder if it is a necessary phase to go through in order to discover what the themes of one's life are, what the questions and dramas are that sit at the core of one's being.

More good news? I got to review Jean Moorcroft Wilson's new biography of Rosenberg (which apparently has gone into its second printing) for the Jewish Quarterly. It's my second review for the JQ. The first one was about Anne Landsman's The Rowing Lesson. The good thing about starting to review for the JQ is that I've been reading the magazine, and it's fantastic - it has its head in the right place and its politics are refreshing. The Rosenberg review should be out next month, I think.

More good news? I got a short-short story accepted by Clean Sheets. They said it should be out in July. The story is called "The History of Her Tongue." I've been going through stories that I have in my "Stories" file, pieces I wrote years ago, or even recently, but haven't looked at for a while. I love opening files I've forgotten about and discovering these little surprises, intense pieces that I wrote without a plan or an agenda in mind. Often they are stories that start in a workshop I am running or when I'm planning an exercise and try it out beforehand. The Clean Sheets story came out of an exercise I love called "The History of Your Tongue." Instruction: Write a history of your tongue. Alternative: Write a history of your character's tongue. Hey, write a history of God's tongue, of the lion's tongue, the ant's tongue, the nation's tongue.

So... I've been going through these pieces and trying to finish them up and find them a home. My other goal for the summer - besides finishing the Gertler section as well as the Rosenberg section - is to assemble another short story collection. I guess we're halfway through the summer. I guess I'd better get back to work.

A Big Chunk of Rosenberg

2008-03-31T11:12:00.003Z

Ninety years ago, today was the day before Rosenberg's death. I feel lucky and priveleged that my tribute to him "Specimens of Desperate Attempts: Sketches from the Life and Death of Isaac Rosenberg" will be coming out in the next few days. It's part of a new collection of short fiction, Desperate Remedies which is going to be launched at a Short Story Festival at Foyles Charing Cross. Because the piece is from the Whitechapel Boys work in progress, which is very much in progress, Rosenberg is still alive for me, still struggling to be recognised, struggling to write poetry and plays, hoping to get through the fighting in the trenches so that he can use everything he has gone through to create what would be his best work. That's how he felt. And then on April Fool's Day 1918 he was killed. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

An exhibition of Rosenberg's paintings opens tomorrow at the Ben Uri Gallery in St John's Wood.

Palestine

2008-01-04T10:05:00.000Z

Bomberg lived in Palestine between 1923 and 1927.

Three Intimate Portraits at the NPG

2007-11-19T11:46:00.000Z

Last Thursday I gave my Whitechapel Boys their first public outing. It felt strangely liberating and exciting to talk in public about what I've been working on for the past six, maybe even seven, years. It was like bringing a secret out into the open, and being able to do it in the Lecture Hall at the National Portrait Gallery was a real privelege, and also just the right place to talk about them. To bring the three men right to the heart of the establishment - a place they struggled to be part of.

I also used Power Point for the first time - and loved it! The talk is here below, but without the slideshow - I hope it works without it, too.

Three Intimate Portraits: Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg

I’m going to be talking about a project I’ve been working on for the past six years. It’s strange to work on a book for so long, because you see someone in 2002 and then, because of the way our lives are in London, you see them again in 2006, and you’re still on the same book. Ian McEwan has a story called “Reflections of a Kept Ape” in which an ape who’s just been dumped by its human girlfriend, a writer, observes her at work and wonders if writing is not just a wish to appear busy. After publishing two books based mainly on my own life, and without anything burning to say about myself, I had to find a way to look busy. What I came upon were the lives of three artists who have given meaning to my life as a writer for the past few years. They have kept my love for writing – that process of translating the images in our heads into words – they have kept that alive. Most of these stories are fiction.

What follows is a taster of some of the fragments I’ve been weaving together into a book about three London-based Jewish painters from the last century – Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, and David. This is still a work in progress. My story of the three Whitechapel Boys is a dreamscape, a chronicle of grief and love. How I came to write about three London painters who grew up within walking distance of each other and went to the same art school at the same time – around 1911 – starts in 1975 in South Africa with me in bed at night listening to a programme called “Poets and Poetry” on the BBC’s World Service.

My fascination begins with a line-by-line analysis of Isaac Rosenberg’s poem “Break of Day in the Trenches,” a poem he wrote within a year of enlisting to fight in the Great War. That was in 1916. In the mid Seventies, I was 13 or 14. What captured my imagination – besides the image in the poem of a rat running back and forth between German and English trenches – was that you could be a Jew and you could be an artist and you could be talked about on the BBC World Service. For a young boy in a small in the Cape Province, this was a revelation. Isaac Rosenberg was my first glimpse of what I wanted to be. I saw in him something of my future. Not a role model, but a possible way of being. Soon after that, my family left South Africa and immigrated to Israel. Happened what happened over the next 15 year, then I came to London. I think I missed the Diaspora too much. I was ready to slip back into English.

Just before lunch on March 11th 1911 George V and his entourage came into Room 30 at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square while Isaac Rosenberg was copying a portrait of Philip IV by Velázquez. King George, mindful of distracting the artist from his work, raised his index finger to his lips and gestured to his men, as they tiptoed behind Rosenberg along the back wall of the room – a quick sideways glance over the artist’s shoulder at his copy, then up at the original – as they made their way back to the Gallery’s Central Hall.

Rosenberg frowned at the shuffling behind him. He’d been thinking about a poem he’d started on his way here – only in night grows… no, glows! the flower of peace. He’d been walking along Great Eastern Road, then Old Street, then up Clerkenwell Road, passing Eddie Marsh’s flat. A raisin bun would do it. He could kill for one of those raisin buns Mrs Elgy made in large batches – thinking about a poem that began: The world rustles by me… no, the world rumbles by me. Ooh, and a liver sandwich, a cup of tea. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, stared at Philip IV, down at his own version, exhaled.

It was time for lunch.

Four years later, to the month, it is 1915 and Rosenberg has returned home from an uninspiring trip to South Africa. He fashions his self-portrait on the painting he’d been copying when the British monarch was about to intrude. In the picture, Rosenberg’s jaw juts out as King Philip’s does, his eyes squint to the right, he has the same thick bottom lip, and instead of the King’s blonde, shining quiff he wears a Tyrolean hat. The self-portrait is here now, upstairs at the National Portrait Gallery – well, it was, till they took it down a few years ago – Isaac Rosenberg by Isaac Rosenberg, oil on a wood panel, a religious icon, nailed to the wall.

Who would have thought?

Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890. David Bomberg was born in Birmingham in 1890. Mark Gertler was born in Spitalfields in 1891. Rosenberg was 7 when the family moved to London. Bomberg was 5. Gertler was 3 when the family left London and moved to Austria, and then 6 when they came home again. By 1897 they were all settled in the East End, as settled as one can be without much money, living in a ghetto. They all lived within a short walk of each other. The Whitechapel Boys Triangle.

There is not really any documentation of how they met and when, and what their relationships with each other were like. They must have seen and spoken to each other at the Whitechapel Library, which was open till 10 throughout the week, and where Rosenberg in particular spent a lot of time. They were at the Slade School of Art together around 1911. In 1913 at the Café Royal, Gertler introduced Rosenberg to Eddie Marsh. Eddie Marsh is the man who more or less kept them alive, put food on their tables, gave them faith in their work. Edward Marsh was Winston Churchill’s secretary. He fell in love with Gertler. He sent books and boots to Rosenberg when the young poet was fighting in France. Rosenberg always asked after Gertler in his letters to Marsh, though he had no idea that by that time Gertler had broken off all ties with Eddie Marsh over the war. Bomberg seemed to hang out with a different crowd.

The book was initially going to be about the undocumented points of contact between the three artists. But I began to wonder if the reason behind a lack of documentation – letters, in particular – was that they didn’t really spend much time together. Their paths crossed, the way paths do in the fairly insular world of any art scene, but they didn’t necessarily seek out each other’s company. There was a trip Rosenberg and Bomberg took together to the Isle of Wight in 1913. But that’s about it. But then, one of the main ways history has of measuring intimacy between friends is through surviving letters, and Rosenberg, Gertler, and Bomberg did not write to each other. I thought I was going to fill a gap in the stories their biographers have told, but I realised that I wanted to have a separate relationship with each one. I didn’t want them closing ranks, excluding me from their trio.

At the time of my father’s death, these three Whitechapel Boys were the only Jewish men I knew in London. Together we weren’t even half the number you’d need for a minyan, and I needed someone to say Yitgadal to. These men were my company. Three Dead Jewish Guys. They were the ones I felt closest to. The Canadian writer Margaret Attwood says that all writing of the narrative kind “is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” This novel was written out of a sense of grief and a fear that I had run out of things to say. I was ready for a trip to the Underworld. What I found were three men with struggles so similar to my own, that I felt I had chanced upon the perfect metaphor, the perfect subliminal activity.

All three painters were obsessed with death, but perhaps Rosenberg and Gertler in particular. Isaac Rosenberg, a pacifist, but penniless, joins the army to fight in the First World War, to try, as he says to Eddie Marsh “to get his head blown off.” He enlisted, he said, for the separation allowance that his mother would get to help keep the household going. He felt he had no choice. Some twenty years later in 1939 Mark Gertler killed himself in his studio in his garden. Towards the end of his life, Gertler wrote to Thomas Balston, a collector and a close friend: “I am really very depressed and disheartened. I have only sold one picture… I’ve only made about £50! which barely covers the expenses of frames… What is going to happen? I don’t know. …my immediate worry is the summer… unless I sell another two medium-sized pictures I shall be in a real hole. I feel so disgusted that I really don’t feel able to paint.” That was the end of May. By the end of June, Mark Gertler was dead. Almost twenty years after that, David Bomberg starves himself in Spain and is brought home to die in St Thomas’s Hospital, stark raving mad. But I’m not talking about the physical death that is the end of being, I’m talking about the echoes of death that are the constant fear of financial misery and the lack of recognition for one’s artistic creation.

But before all that, in amongst all that warding off of death, there were times of clean joy. I don’t think there was much in Rosenberg’s life. He left school at fourteen and was apprenticed to an engraver, a man by the name of Carl Hentschel, a friend of Jerome K Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat. Hentschel was Harris in the book and George Wingrave was George. George and Hentschel were almost forty when Rosenberg began his apprenticeship. The two men were united in their love for the theatre. George worked for Barclays on the Strand and would turn up around five to cart Hentschel off to a show. They’d march arm in arm across the studio, from the small office at the far end towards the front door, Hentschel’s head as high as Wingrave’s shoulders, past Rosenberg standing earnestly over the etching basin, feathering bubbles off the plate, frowning.

“Smile, for God’s sake,” Hentschel would say.

Rosenberg shook his head vigorously and tightly, like a hand-cuffed prisoner trying to shake a fly off his forehead, and he breathed in the nitric acid vapours – odourless and lethal – and thought he’d go mad from the boredom of it all. He could fall asleep right there and then, on the spot, no matter how loud Hentschel and Wingrave were, his lids heavy with lack of sleep, staying up nights to write poetry and paint, keeping himself awake to feel that at least an equal measure of the day was spent on art than was spent in this place, chained to a mangling-machine that provided him with just a few shillings to buy materials, notebooks, and chocolate. Nothing more.

“Are you coming,” George said.

The two men were standing at the door, waiting.

“Theatre!” George said. “Remember? Keep with it, boy.”

And they whisked him away.

In the cab on the way to the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel, they listened while Rosenberg talked. He’d seen the show before, so he told them about the puppets that came on at the start. Not at all like Punch and Judy. Yes, in Yiddish, of course in Yiddish. With Goldstein on the piano. You should hear the man. Fantastic. A genius.

Whitechapel High Street circa 1910 was a mess. The Yiddishe clamour and clatter, the noise of the Ghetto, street hawkers and prostitutes, kids running barefoot, the whole stereotypical megilah. It was like that. The Metropolitan District Railway, Whitechapel and Mile End Station, the trams, the buses, men in black and grey suits and caps. And the ones dressed for the theatre as if they were off to shul. That’s my shul, Rosenberg said, pointing to the Library, feeling regal and impetuous in a cab, as they drove up towards the corner of Vallance Street, got out, paid the driver, and made their way to their seats, ladies and gentlemen, for this evening’s performance of Thomashefsky’s The Straying Lamb.

“Excuse me,” said George to the couple with the child and the overflowing bagels. “But I think these are our seats.”

“It’s okay,” said Rosenberg. “We’ll just sit somewhere else.”

“Those seats over there are better,” the woman said, “I’m telling you – much better – better view,” indicating where they would have been seated if only they hadn’t bumped into the Fineberg’s – “Her cousin’s in the show,” she said, smiling at the Fineberg woman, who smiled back with pride, curtseying with her eyelids.

George was loving it. Hentschel was awkward. Rosenberg was staring at a young man at the opposite end of the circle, sketch pad on his knees, scribbling away in what seemed to be charcoal, looking directly at him. He wanted to take out his own notepad, make little scribbles, send little signs to the man across the circle, show him that he too was an artist. And then, when George leaned over to talk to Hentschel, he rested his open palm on the inside of Rosenberg’s knee, while Rosenberg gaped at the programme, at the news about the benefit concert for the East London Boot Fund, a notice about the draperies and carpets being supplied by Lazarus & Sons, while George’s hand stayed there – light and warm – as the curtain lifted and the table with the puppets was revealed, and the lights were dimmed, and the puppet masters from New York nog walked onto the stage with some puppets on strings and some with a hand up their tuches. And together with the audience, by this point louder than ever, Rosenberg sat up straight and whooped along: “This is it. This is it.” And George’s hand slid gently off his knee.

For Gertler there were times when he could forget the weight of destitution and pause in that incessant clawing for recognition. The years when Ottoline Morrell was his friend and patron and protector were like that. She made space for him at Garsington, her manor house in Oxfordshire, prepared him a studio, made her house his house. She never said no to him.

The servants brought in grilled salmon as pink as the streaks on the walls in the entrance hall at Garsington. Gertler loved the salmon on a white plate with a cheese sauce and fine brushstrokes of dill. He felt nourished here – Ottoline’s magnanimity, the gentle landscape, the generous portions. He revelled in the fullness of the house; though, sometimes, drunk and overwhelmed, he’d go up to his studio, or in summer, to the fountain in the garden. And he loved the calm, the thickness of the quiet – the opposite of his entire life: the noise of the East End, the zigzagging of his childhood, from Whitechapel to Austria, then back again. At Garsington his imagination was boundless. He brought its density of colour to his paintings. Bold, solid, fleshy, Jewish – each colour separate, as if he was back at Clayton and Bell designing stained-glass windows for the Catholic Chapel of Westminster.

They all fell in love with Mark Gertler. He was a beautiful man, playful and funny, and hard to resist. All his patrons – Thomas Balston, Monty Shearman, and Eddie Marsh – adored him. But Dora Carrington said no. In a letter to her, Gertler writes: “My love has now reached such a point that I can hardly bear it. For God’s sake don’t torture me by not letting me see much of you… I shan’t worry you for much ‘sugar’ if only I can see you and talk… if any other man touches any part of your beautiful body I shall kill myself…”

Carrington doesn’t want Gertler pushing against her, his face pressed against hers.

“I can’t breathe,” she says.

Like she’s being forced, like a stranger is pushing against her, licking her cheeks.

And yet his body is so delicate, a slimness she likes, but it scares her, tests her. Lytton doesn’t love her enough to demand anything. Gertler’s demands threaten to disrupt her fragile identity, the brittle sense of separateness she has from her family. And yet he is tender. She never feels she has to censor herself, or explain things. But when he is on top of her, she is paralysed, her whole body in shock.

“What’s going on inside you,” Gertler says. “What is it?”

“Don’t ask me to talk about my inner self,” she says. “It’s confused, too agonising to pull out.”

She becomes overwhelmed and withdraws, then feels guilty for turning away, as if there is something wrong with her, and all she really wants is for him to know her completely. One minute she’s excited, feeling like she could make love forever, and then one wrong gesture, a kiss that lasts too long, a tongue darting into her mouth, and she withers, becomes despondent.

“You make me feel ashamed and unclean,” she says.

“How can you say that,” Gertler said. “My desire for you is beautiful.”

“But your body,” she said. “I don’t want a man’s body pushing against me.”

“You yourself said I was as beautiful as a woman. You called me girlish and pretty.”

“But this,” she said, moving her hand down his stomach – so smooth and soft and pale, so like her own – and stopping at the top of his pubic hair. She didn’t need to look to know how black it was, how soft, how much darker than her own.

“What this?” he said. “My pork sausage?”

“Your kosher sausage,” she said.

“But we can be friends, can’t we?” he said. “I can’t paint without you. Nor live.”

“Let’s be like we were at Gilbert’s cottage. I’ve never cared for you so much as when we were there. You were splendid.”

“I want you to love me,” he said. “To love me properly. You’ve said how awfully happy you are when I love you.”

“I am,” she said. “You are such a good comrade.”

“But can’t you see that we need to fuck?” he said. “Just as painting expresses beauty, so fucking expresses love. You can’t have them separate. Then you’re just a crap artist, like – “

“Sh,” she said. “Don’t”

“They express nothing but their own stupidity.”

Carrington got up. Her back an invitation and a rejection – like all forms of beauty can be – her neck exposed, her hair even shorter than his.

“Now I know how Lytton feels,” Gertler said. “And Eddie. Perhaps I should offer my sausage to them. For I do love them. A love that is a form of gratitude. I need them, especially Eddie, almost as much as I need you.”

The word Intimate comes from the Latin word meaning “to make familiar with” [intimare]. My aim has always been to make Rosenberg, Gertler, and Bomberg as familiar to me as possible, to feel as if there were no secrets between us. It is voyeuristic – but I am a writer and that’s what I do – I look for stories under every rock, I peer through people’s blinds. I called this talk Three Intimate Portraits because I wanted to visit some of those unrecorded, unspoken moments in the lives of these artists, and those moments are often the times when they are naked, unobserved, or in the company of just one other. But I also wanted to visit the places they went to, the landscapes they walked through and lived in for various lengths of time, the sceneries they painted. I went to Arras, where Rosenberg is buried and near where he was killed. I went to Braemar, where Bomberg and his soon-to-be-wife Lillian Holt went on a painting trip in 1932, and I went, amongst other places, to Banchory and Mundesley, the sanatoria where Gertler, stricken with TB, spent months of his life in the 1920s and 1930s.

We walked through the grounds of Glen-o-Dee, the sanatorium in Banchory, yellow paint peeling off the walls, security fences around the building, and yet we manage to squeeze into that thin strip of pavement between fence and building. The grounds are overrun with rhododendrons, bushes of them 8 feet high. There is nothing manicured about this place. I pick daffodils, every unopened one I can find. I want the beauty of the sanatorium daffodil to be witnessed; I want these flowers to open in my living room.

I want to get inside. I will not be forbidden to tread in Gertler’s footsteps. I want to be everywhere he has been. How will I know him if I do not become him. And so we find an opening in the fence to slither through, the two of us – we walk along the paved veranda at the front of the building, the side that faces the lawn that slopes down into the forest of silver birches, Scots pine, and what my lover insists are elm trees. In the place of tuberculosis, two elm trees have escaped disease.

We are not the first to break in. The washbasins. The Bakelite switches. Mirrors. Wardrobes from the sixties. Paint peeling off the ceilings – like skin. This is what stays with me the most. The peeling paint – the paint coming off – curling – hanging from the ceiling like water, like something is leaking from the floor above. And the grand stairway, the stained glass windows – the names outside the doors on the first floor. The men dressed for golf and the women in evening gowns move like a herd of zebra and wildebeest to the watering hole, the dining hall at the end of the building. At first, Gertler was fed in his room. He watched two rabbits on the front lawn. It was six in the evening. There was only a hint of light. It took almost a week before he was allowed downstairs.
A few decades after Queen Victoria colonised the hills and glens around Braemar and Balmoral and Banchory – everywhere she could find along the River Dee and what is now the Cairngorms National Park, into the landscape traipsed David Bomberg and his lover, Lillian Holt. Carrying paints and canvases, easels and a tent. From Pitlochry to Braemar, from Braemar to Aviemore they went in search of the perfect light. Bomberg wanted to melt into the landscape, to surround himself, immerse himself in it so that he was no more than a thing. So we climb after them to the top of Creag Coinnich – 538m up – we walk briskly, almost running, as if the thing that will save the day is at the summit. The wind is wild – Lillian remembered that the wind “made it impossible to keep the canvas steady on the easel.” With tree logs, she helped Bomberg build an enclosure and then settled herself a little way off. “Working fiercely against the wind,” she said. “Two hours passed and the Cairngorms was completed.” (Lipke, 20) Then my lover and I went back into town for hot chocolate at the Victorian Tea Rooms.

I wanted to do the journey to Arras on my own. To arrive in France as Rosenberg had. The rain was unceasing and it took me a while to find a taxi driver in town who’d even heard of the cemetery. They’d been wet for the past three days; there was no way to get dry. No body-heat and no sunshine. They huddled together in the trenches, in those narrow grave-holes, Rosenberg nodding off with a soldier’s foot in his face. It was like trying to sleep at the bottom of a well, in a snake-pit, you learnt to regard the bodies of others as your own, their closeness never an intrusion. Life in the trenches was death and dead bodies, and the godawful boredom and monotony of waiting, sitting without moving on one side of a mound waiting for bombs to fall or for an order to attack.

Rosenberg’s uniform was a layer of cold wet skin grafting itself onto his body. Always failing – failing to get dry, to keep him warm, to make the rest of his body like it: reptilian, cold-blooded. And in that quiet at the end of fighting, the snoring as reassuring as crickets and barn owls, sounds of life and the wonder of nature in the embrace and sanctuary of night.

Then a German cannonball – cold, heavy, hard – pushes against his face until he wakes up with a boot on his chin. He likes to know there is something between him and death. The smell of mud and damp ashes, and he is in his mother’s kitchen with his cheek against the table’s wooden surface while she prepares dinner, the day’s vegetables on the table. Have they told her that he’s in the army? Does she know where he is on the days he rushes off to France to fight the Germans, then comes home for his supper? She insists he come home in the evenings.

“Mama,” he whispers. “Mama.”

“Sh. Enough already” she says, helping him off with his boots. “I’m not surprised you’re so tired.”

Let’s face it, I don’t have the lungs for a straightforward, linear narrative. I don’t have the staying power. I’ve never even had a lover for more than a couple of years. I knew a woman once who could talk for three hours without stopping, without breathing through her mouth. I know this because I timed her. She did it often, until one day I thought: I’m going to see how long she can keep going without asking me a question, without waiting for a response. She made me think of the time we went to see Rolf Harris at the Feather Market Hall in Port Elizabeth – I must have been ten – and he’d explained how to play the didgeridoo: you blow out through your mouth and inhale big chunks of air through your nose at the same time. The woman I know inhales silently, consistently and delicately through her nose while she speaks. She is not as interesting as a didgeridoo. With her, there is no room for your mind to wonder. But enough about her. And enough about all this.

Someone's Record Collection

2007-05-26T22:41:00.000Z

I've never had a friend with the same taste in music as me. That's what I was thinking in the bath this evening. I know plenty people who I can share books with, but no-one ever says to me: Can you burn that album for me, can I borrow that, can I listen to that, oh, cool, I've also got those at home, I listen to them all the time. It happens that people like what I listen to, but I don't know anyone who has Ann Nesby, Dwele (who is the only voice that can calm and soothe me completely), Al Jarreau, Lynden David Hall, Lauren Hill, Teddy Pendergrass. It's always been like that. There was a time when I had a friend in the 80s who loved Al Jarreau. We were both surprised to find each other - we met in a tent during our basic training in the army - and our love for the same singer was an important factor in our long friendship. We haven't seen each other for years - maybe fifteen - he's a furniture designer now and from the track on his site, he still has a laid-back taste in music. And then there was a lover who was into Rickie Lee Jones - not something you'd expect in a small bum-fuck town on the southern coast of Israel. But there we were, two gay boys listening to Chuck E's in Love in his bedroom, smoking dope for the first time, overcome by the munchies and ripping a roast chicken apart with our hands. And, I admit, we also listened to Everything But the Girl. Maybe it wasn't cool in London, but in Israel it was a needle in a haystack kind of experience.

So, record collections. Never make fun of someone's record collection. I learnt that from an ex. It's like laughing at what they look like from the inside. I rely on my record collection more than I rely on my books. I don't need to read most of my books more than once. I'm not the kind of person who rereads novels; stories - maybe, but not novels. Except one or two. There is a novel that I've read a few time. It calms me in the same way that Dwele's music does. It feels odd talking about this - there's something so private about the music we love, revealing - and maybe especially so when we don't know enough people who have the same tastes. The novel is Such Times by Christopher Coe. Coe was one of the members of the Vilet Quill, along with Edmund White and Andrew Hiolleran and others. Such Times is the most lyrical and unflinching (I love that word) work to come out of the plague years. The other novel I go back to is Their Eyes Were Watching God. What am I trying to say here? Something about the works of art that reflect our souls - the voices that we strive to imitate. The clues to the shape of our internal world. The sounds that we can't do without. I remember a couple of months ago being hit by the realisation that I won't always be here to love the books on my shelf, that there will come a point when I will no longer be able to listen to the music I love.

Mark Gertler at Foyles

2007-04-30T12:25:00.000Z

Last Friday I read "Mark Gertler in 13 Sketches" at Tales of the Decongested at Foyles. It's always a great delight to read at Decongested as there's a great audience, people who are interested in the short form, and the organisers - Rebekah and Paul - are always fantastic to work with. It was strange having Gertler's biographer, Sarah MacDougall, in the audience - I kept worrying that she'd feel I was stealing her Gertler from her and also wondering if the Gertler I'm wrirting about is the same one as she has, if she could see her Gertler while listening to me reading. Sarah was there with Rachel Silman - both of them experts on the Whitechapel Boys, and curators of exhibitions at the Ben Uri Gallery. Rachel was saying that they're having a big Rosenberg exhibition next year to commemorate 90 years since the day he died, and also 90 years since the end of the First World War. That's a real incentive to get me to finish the Rosenberg section of the Whitechapoel triptych. My daily hour-an-a-half of writing was going really well until about ten days ago - it's time to get back to Rosenberg; I can feel him waiting.

Running on the Spot

2007-04-04T19:24:00.000Z

I've got a new story up on the fiction site, Pulp.Net. It's a story about running, something that I haven't done for more than a month, which, when you're a runner, can feel like forever and that you'll never run again, in your life. Ever. But back to Pulp.Net - it's one of those short story sites that are always great to visit: great design, great listings, great stories - and there's also a regular column where writers write about their top 10 books: Bernadine Evaristo, David Mitchell, Hisham Matar - and me! - are all there, among others. The person behind it all is Lane Ashfeldt and she's committed to promoting short-story writers, and she's a fantastic writer herself. She's also the editor of Down the Angel, a book of short stories set in Islington. But what I was going to say about the running story is that there's a bit where I talk about my disappointment at not having photos of me running - that's all in the past, though - because there's a brief clip of me in tights doing the Nike 10K Run in Hyde Park. Check it out.

Glitz and Glamour

2007-03-21T21:50:00.000Z

I've entered all three Whitechapel Boys in Joshua Sofaer's Name in Lights project - the winning entry gets to see their name, or the name of someone they've nominated, flashing away from the top of Birmingham Central Library. You can see what Rosenberg and Gertler and Bomberg look like on a billboard, or you can enter your own name by clicking here. And if that doesn't satisfy a hunger for glitz, then seeing Jake Gyllenhaal sing "I'm Telling You" from Dreamgirls will. I went to see Dreamgirls last night with G and A and R. What would it be like to write a book that makes you feel like that. Can writing ever do what music does? Maybe a poem. Maybe not. I think not. Music takes you to a place further back than the verbal. Music is what we hear in the underwater before birth. Everything is music before we are born. Is writing an attempt to get back to that - using words to get to something that has nothing to do with words.

Tell Me Your Thoughts, Not Your Dreams

2007-03-10T21:06:00.000Z

Are we meant to forget our dreams? Waking up this evening after a short nap (I got up at 6am and taught all day), having just read Saidiya Hartman's beautiful and personal piece on the Slave Routes, I woke up from a dream that kept slipping away from me, and I thought: Thoughts don't slip away the way dreams do. Do thoughts and dreams happen in different parts of the brain? Why's it so much harder to articulate a dream? We can make thoughts happen, so why not dreams? I remember once, before going to sleep, it must have been around 1987, I asked the ancestors to visit me in a dream. They did. My grandfather and some other older family members who I didn't recognise were all sitting around in our old garage in the house on Jenvey Road. I don't remember what they said, but I remember the feeling of waking up and knowing that the ancestors had visited. Why are other people's thoughts often more interesting to us than their dreams? I don't appreciate people telling me their dreams - tell them to an analyst or a mystic. I feel responsible when people tell me their dreams, especially if they don't want to interpret them. Anyway, that's enough - my thoughts are beginning to lose my interest. Read more about dreams and where they happen here. To paraphrase Kurosawa, we're all geniuses when we're dreaming.

It Takes Two

2007-03-09T22:19:00.000Z

I recently tracked down a film about Mark Gertler (thanks to Anna at Indpendent Film Office who tracked it down at Concord Video) made by Phil Mulloy in 1981, with Antony Sher as Gertler. The film arrived this morning in a box with a canvas belt - like a secret document, like a miniature suitcase. I felt like somehow this was connected to Gertler, had belonged to him - something he had sealed together and kept in a drawer, like he did with Carrington's letters, until just after Lytton died and Gertler, by chance, came across her letters again and read through them all. And I don't have a VHS player (never mind a TV set) - and I still haven't found somewhere to go and watch it. But I will.

Last week I went to listen to Etgar Keret at Jewish Book Week. Hephzibah Anderson was interviewing him. Everything was nice. Keret was funny; Anderson was reverential and flirtatious and asked nice questions. Nice is sometimes the opposite of interesting. I got angrier and angrier and turned to K and asked her whether I should ask my political question. "Should I spoil the fun?" I said. She nodded. But I didn't ask my question, which was: "What's it like to be a writer with everything that's going on in Israel - the corruption, the atrocities Israel continues to inflict on the Palestinians, the apathy of Israelis." I think I did want to spoil the fun, rather than ask out of a genuine interest. A couple of days later I was reassured by Keret's interview on Night Waves, where Matthew Sweet asked all those political questions and Keret gave interesting answers about what he calls the "in the ditches mentality" in Israel where the general message is not to talk about certain things "till we have peace" - it's an old argument that keeps a lot of Israelis in denial with what they see as the justified excuse of "we're still fighting for survival." I like what Keret says about the boycotting of Israeli intellectuals - that boycotting "comes from the same place as public stonings... it's an action that doesn't take much out of you" - He comments on how trendy it is to hate Israel. And although I agree with him, I still think there has to be a way to force Israel to notice and rethink what it's doing. I don't know what - and I suppose it was partly because of my reluctance to take an active role in the dwindling minority that wanted to make Israeli leaders aware of the implications of their war crimes, that I left. I lost hope.

At Toynbee Studios on Wednesday contributors to Sable LitMag's queer issue paid tribute to Audre Lorde and read from her and their own work. Dorothea Smartt talked about meeting Lorde in London and then again in New York and it really felt like she was channeling her and bringing her into the room - it was fantastic. That was after the break. Before the break, Jackee Holder read from her beautiful work that is really a record of her struggle with writing, and the frustration and exhiliration that comes from that struggle. "It's all in the struggle," someone like Sisyphus said. And it is. When I can remember that it is a struggle - and not be embarrassed by it, or so quick to run away from it into "busyness" - and that struggle is where the treasure lies, then I know I am being a writer. I love the connotations that the phrase "The Struggle" carries with it - the fight against oppression and injustice and the desire for freedom. Ngawethu.

I Want to Live in Pedro Juan's World

2007-02-20T09:53:00.000Z

Okay, I tried. I cycled down to my local library on Blackstock Road and took out a copy of Martin Amis' Dead Babies (I'd hoped for a copy of London Fields, but there was none). The story starts on page 13, and part one is entitled Friday. This does not bode well. I got up to page 17 and couldn't take any more. I felt defiled. There was so much contempt for the body, so much showing off to the reader (whatever that is), and so little love. And the voice, the writer, whatever you want to call it was trying to get me to collude in his loathing and self-loathing and smugness and Benny-Hillesque approach to sexuality. Which can be fine, if only he'd admit that that's what he's doing. I'm going to stop now. I feel dirty just talking about the book. So let me tell you about Pedro Juan Gutierrez's Tropical Animal (the book that I'm reading now) - a book full of love and sex and delicious insights about people and existence and writing. Things like: "You have to be willing to flay yourself. You strip off your skin until you're raw meat, and then throw yourself headlong into the novel until you hit the bottom of the precipice. Smashing yourself, skinning yourself, and breaking your bones against the rocks. It's the only way. He who doesn't dare to do it this way is better off leaving his paper and pencils on the table and dedicating himself to selling tomatoes or real estate." Fuck, yeah. Gutierrez loves the body and loves people and loves the messiness of being alive. After reading his first book Dirty Havana Trilogy, I needed a break of a couple of years before getting into Tropical Animal; they're not hugely different, but they are both beautiful and sexy and queer as anything. It's as if the heat of Cuba makes sexuality more fluid and turns the body's smells into aphrodisiac potions. That's the world I want to live in.

Listening to Martin Amis

2007-02-19T12:09:00.000Z

In my attempt to do something writerly every day - or even more than one thing (because once I get started I want more and more and more) - I Googled "interviewing writers" so that I could listen to other people struggling with their work and find out what it took to make it. So, for some reason, the first writer I've been listening to is Martin Amis talking to Don Swaim in 1990 just after London Fields was published. I've never read Martin Amis and I'm not sure why. I feel awkward admitting that I don't read contemporary English writers. It feels like a secret, like something I shouldn't be telling people. But it's something to do with class and voice and history and turning to books to be challenged, inspired, and/or reassured. I don't find those things in English writers. Although having said that, it took me about 10 years of living in England before I could read Wuthering Heights and I was blown away. I felt reassured, taken by surprise. And I wanted more. I have what Martin Amis called "a sticky finger attitude" to writing - I like to imitate and steal and copy from other writers. I am backed-up by TS Eliot's saying that "Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal." So I think it's about time I dived in and started reading the English seeing as I'm writing a book that is about English-Jewish painters, abook that is very much about London and varieties of Englishness. I'm going to start with Martin Amis. Something else he says in his interview which I liked was that he believed that everyone had a novel in them - "the difference is the writer finishes the thing." He also advises the writer to "relax their intelligence" and to just write, to flow (yes, he uses the word flow), to stop editing as you go along.

How Sick Can You Get?

2007-02-08T21:01:00.000Z

I've been living on a diet of Vitamin C, Ibuprofen, some apples, a Magnum Almond, some oranges from the care package Andra brought over when I told him how sick G. and I have been. Two men with flu in the same house is not a fun thing. I used to be a happy drunk; I am not a happy sick person. I am not a pleasure to be around. But things are looking up: I went to the chiropractor/accupuncturist today who sorted out my back, which becomes like an s-bend when I'm in bed too long and don't get enough exercise (eventhough G. claims that men are meant to lie on their backs with their legs in the air for long periods of time), and I've gone for a brief walk and I even had a look at Whitechapel Boys for the first time since I got back from Spain around Hanukah time. One thing I did think about when I was more flu-ey than I am today, is what it was like for people like Gertler, who had TB for so many years - what it must have been like to feel feverish and shakey and to not be able to function on the level your mind wants to. There's not a lot creative in being ill - I think it's what comes after those days or months of sick-time (there must be a better word for that stretch of time) - because already I can feel a renewed energy in me, the kind of mania that filled Gertler when he started to paint again.

The Good News

2007-02-03T12:20:00.000Z

It was one of those emails I wait for. Like in the years when I used to walk with my eyes on the pavement hoping to find a £50 note. Or even a £1 coin. Well, after the Dear Shaun bit, they said The story you submitted to our 2006 contest, "Mark Gertler in 13 Sketches," was selected by our judge, Jonathan Safran Foer, as this year's first-placewinner. And then they said other things like we'll fly you to NYC and stuff. But by then I was in tears. And I thought: Now I know why those actors cry when they win the Oscar - it's years of hard slog and waiting and hoping and telling yourself that you're doing this only for yourself and not for anyone else. But those words "you have won" can bring you to your knees with gratitude. It's like arriving at the cathedral steps after a long pilgrimage. And, yes, on some level this is all hyperbole.

This is a real confidence boost for Whitechapel Boys - now I have to get this book done!

Snow in London

2007-01-24T10:44:00.000Z

Woke up to snow this morning. It's almost midday now and the roofs are still covered in white. The plan from now on is to do something writerly every day. Wednesdays are Poems from Paintings day. Andra and I have been meeting at the National Gallery for the past 3 weeks to write poems inspired by paintings. We're planning to go through every room, starting from Room 1 (which was closed on the first day we went due to industrial action over holiday pay, so we had to start at Room 9). I've always been intrigued by paintings and have seen them as a great writing tool, a prompt for stories, and since starting work on Whitechapel Boys I've become more aware of the actual brushstrokes, the way the hand moves on the canvas. But I think what really interests me is the story of a painting - what the artist chooses to put in a frame and the colours they use. And perspective. And where the eye goes first when you encounter a picture, the point from which the whole story fans out. I also love the way paintings are there to be used and ogled and played with - and how you can, through writing, own them, make them your own. What do painters get out of writing? In the days of the Whitechapel Boys and the Bloomsbury crowd, there was a much stronger connection between writers and painters and they sought out each other's company. Most of Gertler's friends were writers. Carrington had Strachey. Rosenberg tried to carry the two expressions inside him. What did painters get from writers?

Back to School

2007-01-23T00:23:00.000Z

After a really long break from teaching - having been on a writing residency in Spain for about a month, looking out onto hills and big skies, and then a week in Prague sitting in cafes and bringing Kafka back to life - I have my first workshop later today. Two new courses at the Bishopsgate Institute: a general creative writing workshop and another one about researching a novel. I'm particularly excited about the second one as it'll be the first time I'm running such a course and it'll be based on the last three years of my own research for Whitechapel Boys. I like the way a new workshop challenges me to put into words what I've been doing (in this case, to try and define that transition from researched fact into inspired fiction) and find ways to make the process I've gone through exciting for others, and to encourage others to discover their own process and trust their own creative process. In the creative writing workshop we'll be reading Andrew Holleran's book Grief, which I'm excited and apprehensive about - it's so sombre and beautiful - and I admire him so much that I want everyone to love his work.

When Writing's Going Well

2007-01-22T13:26:00.000Z

Just came across an interview by John Shor and loved what he said about the experience of writing - especially when it's going well. He says: "I’ll be honest—most of the time writing is without question extremely hard work. Having said that, moments of clarity exist that are profoundly enjoyable. For me, during such moments, characters seem to speak of their own accord, and scenes unfold as if I’ve already lived them. When I am in such a groove, I type as fast as I can, not caring if words are spelled properly or if everything makes perfect sense. As I type, the outside world simply disappears. I don’t think about what might be happening over the weekend or bills that need to be paid or house projects with my name on them. I’m simply consumed with writing as much as possible during this rare moment of clarity. What’s best about these moments is that as I write I experience a remarkable sense of contentedness—likely because I know that I am creating something that most people will find enjoyable. When reality inevitably chases me away from the computer, I always depart with great regret." I'm in the great regret phase at the moment having left my writing desk about a month ago when my residency in Spain ended.

What About Love?

2005-10-15T01:41:00.000Z

I've got the launch of my second book next week and I don't know what to read; I mean, I don't want to read out any of the stories in public. I want people to take the book and read the stories at home, in private. They're depressing and they make me feel stuck. Physically, I like holding the book and aesthetically it looks okay, and yet when I page through it and look at the stories, I dread the moment when I will have to stand up in front of an audience and say the words out loud. The stories were not written out of love. They are full of anguish and anxiety and despair and anger and frustration and a desperate longing for love (as well as a great fear of love). I want to believe that I am no longer in that place. I have a new lover who I am still getting to know. I am trying to keep my heart open, to be compassionate and attentive. I am trying not to whine. These things are not easy for me.

A Day Without Writing Is a Day

2005-09-28T23:37:00.000Z

Another day over and no writing has been done. A few more pages left to finish Bonjour Tristesse. I used to be able to write like her - that kind of intensity, that lyricism, that sense of wonder. Now I'm not sure who I want to write like, who I write like. I think of Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby and Co. I want something as fragmented and as coherent as that. What I need is a thread going through the story, like the narrator's grief, a reason why he is researching and writing about these dead painters. His motivation still feels unknown to me, though. The real reason is that I want something to do while not writing - to have a subject to write about while I'm not writing. It's like I've said all I want to say. I've done the writer thing. I don't want more, and yet I have no idea what I do want. Do I have to write in order to find out what I want to write about? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. What's stopping me from going back to writing the book? It's big, it's broad, it's probably going to be quite good. And that scares me. It's scope and it's demands, and it's invitation to jump right in and be engulfed.

Tristesse and Two Train Journeys

2005-09-27T10:04:00.000Z

Even this is hard to do, to sit down and write when I want to close my eyes and go to sleep, a mid-morning nap after not enough hours in bed. I got back from Cardiff yesterday. After a weekend with my new man, I need time to get back into my life here, which is not a life that I particularly feel pleased about. Being away was a reminder of what I like most - writing, reading, being in nature. We cycled the 6 or so miles to Castle Coch, a beautiful route along the river Taff, the two of us mainly singing - old Carpenters songs, some Nat King Cole, songs that are triggered by a word in our conversation - talking every now and again about childhood memories, trying to find things in common, to excite each other with stories.

A few hours later. Couldn't resist taking a nap - a deep sleep that kept me until about 2pm. I just want to lounge in bed, let me mind wander in and out of dreams, allow for connections to be made. I like that time; it's when stories shoot up out of the soil, their first contact with the light. The train journeys to and from Cardiff were a bit like that, the carriages quite empty, and the inspiration of knowing someone will meet me at the other side. I wrote well both ways. On the way back started reading John Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Just the right book for my book. He talks about painting as being about making continually present what is soon to be absent. I think that's what excites me the most about still life paintings, the deep knowing that these oranges, these walnuts, this membrillo, no longer exists. The apples have been eaten or they're vrot or they've decomposed into nothing. The same with people. It's more exciting than a photo for being about choice, less about randomness or chance. I'm not a great fan of landscapes.

Now I'm hungry.

In Cardiff, my man and I read to each other from Bonjour Tristesse. Her prose is so beautiful, and I can see how Christopher Coe might have been influenced from her - I can hear her in the opening page or two of Such Times. Lying on the bed together, reading alternate pages, we soothed each other into sleep - or at least that was the plan. I was restless and feeling confined and I had a deep ache to be fucked. That soothed me into sleep. Sometimes it is the only way to let go - fucking and sleeping - to not be in control or think you have to be. To not have to be concerned about other peoples' needs and pleasure.

Morning Dilemmas

2005-09-24T17:12:00.000Z

Today I'm working from home. I like saying that; it sounds as if on other days I work in more interesting places, ones where I have to deal with interpersonal dynamics and sit in a park to have my sandwich at lunch time. I just want to say that I'm constantly looking over my shoulder; it's like there's this voice in my head editing every word that I put down, trying to undermine me, telling me that what I'm saying is not genuine, is not the truth, and it's all just to impress others, or make others think certain things about me. What would my writing look like if I just said whatever came into my head. The fear is that there isn't enough in my head to create a story. I've spent most of my writing life writing semi-autobiographical narratives - and I've either grown tired of that, or I'm too scared to really delve down into the quagmire of my imagination to see what's there. The strange thing is that I know there is a lot of joy there, too - things have happened to me over the past five years that have made me happy (god, I hate that word) - the things that have made me happy are: falling in love with D., walking around naked in a public place for the first time in almost twenty years (then it was the nudist beach; now it's the sauna), meeting C., although sometimes I wonder if we're going to keep being friends; we seem to be drifting apart, caught up in mistrust, misunderstandings and blaming. Another thing that has made me happy is moving to a new flat about 6 months ago having lived in what became a shithole. By the time I left that old place I had grown to hate everything about it and everything to do with it: the neighbours, the neighbourhood, the shops cafes and restaurants in the area, the park, the streets, you name it I hated it (yes, it's Stoke Newington). And I believed that once I was out of there I would be able to write. I believed that this new place would give me the space and the quiet to create. Well, in the past six months I've written fuck-all.

Okay, so, I've completed some stories, I've typed up from my notebooks things I've written for Book #3, but that doesn't feel meaningful. It feels like a job and it doesn't make me feel bigger or worthier or whatever. I suppose what I've come to expect is some big emotional thing that will carry me, inspire me, be my muse. Every time I meet a new man I want to fall in love so that I can write. I want him to provide me with the security and the adventure and the torment that I need to write; I want continuity. The continuity and the reliability of emotional upheaval. Having lived in a warzone for almost twenty years, I've become addicted to drama. And that addiction to heightened states of alertness is accompanied by a desire for tranquility, for stillness, for moments (days, months) of unthreatened existence in its purest form. I don't know what to write about. Not this morning I don't.

I have 50,000 words sitting in the other room on my laptop waiting to be played with. I have 4 notebooks here on my desk with words that need to be typed up. I'm not sure what's keeping me from doing this, from just sitting down day after day and writing the fucking thing. Later today I'm going to Wales to visit my new - what do I call him? - boyfriend. I'm going to visit G., the man I'm going out with. Strange phrase: going out with. The person the world sees you walking hand in hand with. We spend most of our time indoors, though - fucking. I like the idea of travelling to Wales to see a lover.

My book is about 3 painters who grew up in the same neighbourhood at the same time, and later went to the same art college. It's so much easier to say what the book is about when it's not about me. I feel grown-up when asked what I'm writing about and I can say: I'm writing a book about G, B, and R; they're painters who grew up together at the turn of the last century. It sounds grand. It's like being asked are you happy and being able to say oh, yes, I'm very happy; never been happier; things are going my way. To myself I think: This is not interesting to me. Talking about happiness or about the subject/s of my book is not interesting to me. I suppose it should be. I'm not sure what I do want to talk about or write about. Maybe I just have to moan and whine. Couldn't I write a book that has a lot of complaining and miserabless in it?

I made the dough for oatmeal cookies yesterday. Now I must bake a few batches to take with me to Wales.

Write Write or Die

2005-09-24T07:37:00.000Z

I'm trying to finish my next book and I'm not sure what I want to say. I've been working on it for the past two years and it feels like I've been avoiding saying what I really should be saying. I'm not sure what that is, though. That's a lie. I should be writing about grief and depression and what it means to be stumbling through whatever this is - trying to make sense, trying to keep my head above water, trying not to turn my whole life into one long mourning-fest. My father died five years ago and for the past five years I have felt like I have no muse, no audience, no reason to write. Soon after he died I fell in love. The combination of his death and this great love changed me. Sometimes I think the change was for the better; I can bear myself more than I ever have been able to in my life. My sense of self-loathing very rarely reaches the nadirs that it used to. In the past five years I have grown in size. I am taking up more room in the world. Inside, though, I either see myself as a huge fat slob, or as a really tall and skinny firm model type of guy.

I tell people that I write in the mornings. Days go by and I write fuck-all. Today I wrote fuck-all. I read three mediocre stories and I saw a horrendous piece of theatre called What We Did to Weinstein at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Every fucking cliche about Jewish life in London and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was used in the most unimaginative and predictable way. I'm discovering that I enjoy being indignant, I enjoy being angry when crap writing is put out into the world. I think about the fucking torture it is to create one fucking decent sentence, the amount of energy it takes me to actually sit down and write - and the amount of energy that goes into resisting writing - and I think: How dare you put facile prose out into the world.

I did, however, enjoy going to the theatre with a friend of mine, and we enjoyed rustling our sweet wrappers.

Maybe I need to turn this into a testimony of bitterness and hate.