Matthew De Abaitua - Self & I: A Memoir of Literary Ambition

Matthew De Abaituas debut novel The Red Men was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. His follow-up novels IF THEN and The Destructives were described as extraordinarily visionarythe most intriguing and disturbing near-future speculations published for some years.

He lectures on creative writing and science ction at the University of Essex and lives in Hackney.

SELF
&
I

Matthew De Abaitua

Published by

Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

First edition 2018

Copyright Matthew De Abaitua 2018

Cover design by Ifan Bates

All rights reserved. Apart from brief extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without permission of the publisher.

Matthew De Abaitua has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN 9781785630743

I dont mean to say that books are bad. I mean to say that I have used them like a dope addict.

Saul Bellow

I was spark-a-loco the entire time.

Will Self,
on living with Matthew De Abaitua in 1 Hall Cottages

Contents

Nice Young Man

For six months in the early Nineties, my employer was the writer Will Self. I worked as his live-in assistant or amanuensis, an obscure word that translates as slave-at-hand, a person to take dictation and copy out manuscripts. JG Frazer, the anthropologist and compiler of The Golden Bough , also employed an amanuensis after his eyes filled up with blood during a lecture. My appointment was made after a similarly traumatic incident: Wills divorce, and his move out of the family home and into the rented, three-bedroom semi-detached residence of 1 Hall Cottages, Church Lane, on the outskirts of the quiet Suffolk village of Knodishall.

I started work at 1 Hall Cottages on 20 July, 1994, the day before Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, and this memoir the memoir of a literary footnote concludes with the election of Tony Blair to the office of prime minister three years later. Blairs journey from opposition leader to prime minister was indicative of a cultural shift across these years, a change which moved through our lives as stealthily as a pickpocket.

Will Self was prophetic when he wrote that The 1990s will come to be seen as the Gtterdmmerung of periodicity itself. [N]ever again will the brute fact of what year it is matter so much in cultural terms. This memoir covers the three years of 19941997, a sliver of history suffused with never-againness and no-moreness, and perhaps the last moment in the West to largely evade the digital recording of daily life. It was a time when great parties went untweeted, your relationship status was never updated, and the bleakness of Londons municipal parks had to be borne without the soft haze of an image filter. Because I cannot cue up the good old days on YouTube, I am writing this down.

No detail will be too trivial for inclusion in this memoir. Writers tend to be informal silly, even when socialising. Seriousness is kept in reserve for the books, for the paid words and august appearances. This is not a biography of Will Self. He appears in it as he appeared to me then: inscrutable, unpredictable, always thrilling. Its a memoir about the ambition of a writer, and that writer is as much myself as it is him. The philosophical and cultural implications of Will Selfs work are beyond my purview. I will refer only to his books and articles from this period. The miniature is an appropriate aesthetic. Discussions in 1 Hall Cottages revolved around tiny things model villages, post-it notes, small jobs. As Will Self has observed, you can uncork the meaning of something by using scale.

In our tiny cottage, enormity resided in the inner landscapes of memory and imagination, and this topography was contiguous with the flat corn fields, the sloping pebbled shore, the slate sea. Our ambitions were equally vast. In fact, as a young man, my literary ambitions were so grand that its hard to know what might have constituted their fulfilment. The reinvention of the novel? The transformation of the spirit of the age? Or prose that reprogrammed the mind of the reader? If this is a cautionary tale then it is a warning about ambition.

I hold up instances from my life as typical of the pains of an aspiring writer. For my transgressing upon the life of Will Self, I offer the following mitigating circumstances: there is nothing here as personally revealing as his journalism or his novels, when read in totality, or in the sourced gossip of Sunday supplement profilers. Also, it was more than twenty years ago. I am compelled to remember this time while I still can. For once in my life, I want to set things down as they seemed to me at the time. I want to write honestly and risk error, and do so without the greasy, insulating caution that has served me so ill.

There are gaps in my memory. Of course there are. There were gaps in our existence too: daydreams, undistracted afternoons of solitude with novels and something smouldering in the ashtray, the gaps between ambition and the realisation of success or failure. The lost boredoms of yesteryear. I am nostalgic for those gaps. I grew up in them.