Interview: Richard Gwyn

You may have noticed that I have paid rather a lot of attention to one particular book this week. The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn is a splendid memoir with passages of writing that kept me awake at night. I urge you to read it, it is wonderful.

Here is an interview with the author.

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So, how are you feeling?

I am good – very well and planning to be around for a while yet.

Thanks for letting me share some sections of The Vagabond's Breakfast on my blog. What has been the reaction to the book so far?

I’ve been pleased that so many people have responded positively to it, in spite of the lack of major reviews to date. It is quite a private book, and I wasn’t really sure how much people would identify with the rather extreme lifestyle it depicts. Above all, I wanted the book to be taken seriously as a piece of narrative writing rather than merely in terms of its apparently sensational content, and, by and large, that has happened. I have received very kind and enthusiastic emails from readers.

You have a PhD in 'the narrative construction of illness experience'. I can't pretend to know quite what that means but I am guessing it was of some use when writing the book?

My PhD examined the ways in which patients and their close relatives talked about chronic illness both inside and outside the clinical setting, concentrating on the way they use particular narrative devices and metaphors in the telling of their stories. I spent a long time in hospitals and clinics and talked to a lot of health professionals. And I know that world pretty well, having grown up in a medical family. The discourses and attitudes are familiar, so when I became ill I was very conscious of this duality – on the one hand I was just another patient; on the other I was something of an expert in medical discourse and the way health professionals behave around patients, so with one eye I was taking everything in and storing it away. As it turned out, I didn’t use nearly as much medical stuff as I had thought I might – it would have disrupted the schema or structure of the book. But it was very useful to have that professional background to draw on.

You mention running in to Roberto Bolaño, how did that come about?

As I describe it in the book.. I met Bolaño while working as an itinerant agricultural labourer in the south west of France. I was in a town called Lézignan for the grape harvest and one day in the café I was sitting on my own reading William Burroughs and this guy came and sat at my table and started talking about Burroughs. He didn’t speak English, but he knew a hell of a lot about the Beats as well as a heap of other writers I had never heard of. He talked and talked, in poor French peppered with Spanish, and we spent the day drinking together and exchanging travellers’ tales. He had an issue with his passport, a theme he kept returning to, but I forget the exact nature of his problem. In the evening we wound up in the park, attempting to play football with some gypsy kids. The memory is tinged with a kind of sunset pastel hue. We were both fairly drunk, of course. But when I saw his picture in the New York Review twenty-five years later, I recognized him immediately.

One of the things that struck me about the passages concerning your, shall we say, colourful past was that you weren't showing off. You appeared to be simply presenting the facts. How do you look back upon those times now?

I never saw it as a platform for showing off. To be honest, I feel vaguely embarrassed by my behaviour over fifteen years – and for some of my actions (notably ones that didn’t make it into the VB) I feel a profound regret. But I write about them as though they were the actions of a third person – a ‘he’ rather than an ‘I’. A Spanish writer, Justo Navarro, puts it this way: ‘Writing is a case of impersonation, of adopting a new personality. Writing is pretending to be another.’  I found writing the book very difficult until I managed to achieve that detachment, of ‘pretending to be another’ and began writing my own ‘character’ as though I were writing a novel. Now that I’ve done the book, I look back on those times through the prism of having written about them, which is kind of weird: the memories have been re-moulded by the act of writing. Now I find it easy to look on those memories as the actions of a person in a book.

Tell me a bit about Alcemi, your publisher, I was not familiar with them before they sent me your book.

Alcemi was set up by Gwen Davies, with whom I first worked on The Colour of a Dog Running Away (she was then fiction editor at Parthian Books) as the English language fiction imprint of the mainly Welsh language publisher Y Lolfa. Gwen is that rare and wonderful thing – a genuinely talented creative editor. When she found out I was doing a memoir she asked me if I would consider submitting it to Alcemi. The way things turned out, I am glad I did go with them, because I don’t know where else I would have found such a sympathetic editor. Sadly, Alcemi are folding now: they were only around for four years but published some very fine fiction in that time. Gwen has gone on to become editor of the excellent New Welsh Review.

What are your future plans, both in terms of writing and the rest of your life?

Rest of my life? Well, that has to be staying alive. In terms of writing, I came to publication quite late – for reasons that are now pretty well documented – so feel I have quite a lot of catching up to do. There is a new novel on its way, and I would like to do some more short stories. I also translate poetry, mainly from Spanish, so I’m kept busy. I have a full-time job at Cardiff University and run the Creative Writing MA there, and enjoy being in touch with what younger writers are up to.

And finally, I always ask guests on the blog to recommend a good book. What do you suggest we all go and read?

I have been commissioned to write an essay on Montaigne, and am very much enjoying Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. But for fiction I would advise anyone who hasn’t read it to go and buy Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. For me it is the most staggering and absorbing read of the past decade.

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Richard Gwyn's wonderful memoir is available now. You may have to ask your local bookshop to order it up for you (last time I looked only two branches of Waterstone's had bothered to stock it) if you prefer human contact but it is widely available online. I can also recommend a visit to Richard's website and cannot praise his debut novel, mentioned above, highly enough.

Comments

[Sarah]

Thank you for this interview. I've really enjoyed the excerpts of 'The Vagabond's Breakfast' that you've been posting. I love it when I'm introduced to something that I may well otherwise have missed, and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this.