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Simon Armitage |
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Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in West Yorkshire. Widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, he is also a playwright, travel writer, song lyricist and has written extensively for radio and television. He is the author of All Points North, The White Stuff and the biography Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist. Other books include Zoom!, Xanadu, Kid, Book of Matches, The Dead Sea Poems, Moon Country (with Glyn Maxwell) and CloudCuckooLand.
Currently teaching at the University of Leeds and at the University of Iowa, USA, he has worked as a probation officer, shelf-stacker, reviewer, poetry editor and lathe operator. As a broadcaster he presented BBC Radio 4's poetry series Stanza for five years, made travel programmes in Iceland and the Amazon for BBC Radio 3, and was once a Radio 1 DJ for two hours. He lives in Huddersfield.
Simon Armitage, one of the country's best-known poets, has released his first novel, Little Green Man. Simon talks exclusively to Penguin about the transition from poet to novelist, male friendship and the difficulties of representing autism.
You're already well established as a poet, but Little Green Man is your first novel. Has it been a long-standing ambition to write one?
I think there just came a point where I wasn't satisfied with producing a book of poems every three or four years, it didn't seem like a proper job or like enough work. There were moments between poems where I was just kicking my heels. Also, ideas were coming along that I didn't think I could deal with in poems, they were bigger ideas, they needed more substance, more fabric. Eventually there just came a point where I had to turn to prose. There's an excitement in dabbling in other fields as well, a little bit of a thrill of being an outsider. I've also felt [an outsider] when I've written drama because I'm a poet dabbling in another territory. I feel kind of blameless.
Little Green Man doesn't feel like a poet's novel. Was this a deliberate move?
I think I deliberately wanted to keep away from writing a poetic novel, if I started along those lines I would have got all legged up with lyricism and melody within the writing. Also, the subject matter of the book is very much set in the here and now, and deals in conversational dialogue between real people. That doesn't strike me as being poetic subject matter, so I wanted to do something very much away from the poems, keep the two things separate.
Do you read much contemporary fiction?
I have to admit that I don't read much contemporary fiction. One of the things that I've always said about writing is that I think you do need to be a little bit green or naïve. I'm very susceptible to influence, I'm a very good mimic, I always have been. I worry that if I read too much I would just start imitating somebody else's voice, so I tend to read classics. It's almost as if I'm catching up. The Go-Between, for example, is one book which was in the back of my mind when I was writing this. It's a book that also starts in an attic. There's something about the narrator's voice in Little Green Man which perhaps has a connection with The Catcher in the Rye, but I've avoided books in the same genre.
It's likely that critics will compare your work with that of Nick Hornby or Tony Parsons. Would this be a surprise?
I must read Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons before people start making these connections! You know, that's fine. I obviously don't feel as if I'm in a school of writing because this is a new venture for me, but I'm quite happy to be compared and contrasted with other people.
Is your approach to writing a novel very different to that of writing a poem?
Writing a poem for me is very much about composition, it's not something that I do sat down at a table with pen and paper or a word processor or whatever. It's something that I do in my head, it's something that I do in the bath, it's something that I do in the car - it makes me a very dangerous driver, actually. Poetry is a kind of daydreaming, you can hold most of a poem in your head at any one point and be working on it throughout the day. Prose, it seemed to me, was very much a job of work. It required getting up in the morning sitting down at half eight and really staying with it until one o'clock, two o'clock in the afternoon, something like that. It felt like a proper task, and there's no getting away from that. 250, 260 pages; there's a lot of words in there, and they have to be written down at some point. I got quite disciplined about it in a way that I've never been with the poems.
Did you find writing a novel more a joy or a chore?
Sometimes I was really enjoying the writing of various chapters and sections and I actually found myself looking forward in the morning to getting on with it. There were some bits in the book that I resented having to write and I felt guilty about that. I wondered if that meant that that part of the book wasn't going to be very good, but when I've talked to other novelists about this they've said the same thing.
Was the book fully conceived before you began writing?
I was scared stiff that I wasn't actually going to be able to finish it once I'd signed on the dotted line, so I made sure that I'd blocked out each chapter and some of the dialogue so that I knew where I was going, that I wasn't just headed towards some vague nebulous conclusion. I knew where the narrative was going and that probably says something about the way that I am generally in life. I like things to be neat and tidy and have some clear instruction and direction. When I submitted the proposal for the novel, everything was mapped out, of course changes happened afterwards but it was pretty clear to me what the task was.
So did anything change halfway through?
I think what happens when you're writing is that if you produce the book that you've set out to write, it won't be very good. Writing must always startle you in some way; new things come along but they're small things, they're just moment to moment things. There's one character, the main character's brother….. I wasn't quite sure how big to make him in the book. At one point he was looking like he was going to be the reason why the narrator was doing certain things, but in the end it seemed too pat and I pushed him down a bit.
Can you tell us a little about what happens in the book?
The book's told from the point of view of a guy called Barney; he's in his mid thirties, he's a bit of a layabout, a waster, a slacker he might be called these days. When he was younger he was part of a gang of friends who used to do dares for a little green jade statue that they'd found in the dirt one day. Twenty years later, Barney is rooting about in the attic and finds the statue again, he has it valued and it turns out it's worth three-quarters of a million pounds. On this basis he gets the group of friends back together. He reconvenes the friendship and they start doing the dares again, but this time it's for keeps. Whoever wins in the end keeps the statue and the money that comes with it. So, because they all know each other from the past, they start trading on their psychological knowledge and vulnerability. That's one strand of the book, the narrative strand. The counterbalance to that is that Barney has an ex-wife who he maintains contact with, and an autistic son that he has a difficult relationship with, mainly because the autistic son who is 6 or 7 can't engage in game-playing and have a normal boyhood, which is what Barney wants him to have.
The book is very contemporary, but there's also a lot of flashback to the 70s. Are you nostalgic about the past?
In a way I've always believed that the past is the only place that you can go with writing, it's this huge reservoir of information and experience. I like excavating memory, I've done that in the poems as well. I quite like the idea that the past, when you're 14, 15, 16, is an age of endless possibility, anything can happen. As to whether or not it's direct experience my feeling is that most kids of my generation used to hang around with a group of five or six mates and get up to the same things. I'm not really thinking of particular friends, although my guess is that if certain friends read the book they might see certain incidents and remember them and hopefully laugh and not get on the phone to their lawyer!
I found the book to have an underlying air of sadness, would you agree?
Yes, I think there is an underlying sadness to the story. Part of that might be to do with the situation with the character's autistic son, that's something that can never really be resolved, it's an incurable condition. I think that leeches out into the rest of the book and many of the other situations and incidents. I've always been somebody who's tried to avoid strong conclusions in writing, I always try to work towards an open-ended sort of position at the end of a book. I've done that with poems as well. I think there is an element of that in this book as well, it finishes on the cliff tops and it's not just because I'm thinking about a sequel, it is a natural ending for the book.
Do you think the male characters play games with each other because they can't express themselves emotionally?
The main character in the book certainly has difficulty in expressing views about anything, he's very self-enclosed and much of the book is his inner thought process. He's playing games with himself inside his own head. There is something about the emasculation of men which once again touches on the autistic son and the autism which I believe is latent in most men. I think it's very much a male trait and what happens when these guys get back together again is that they regress, they go backwards, but that's partly because it's the only thing that they have in common. They have nothing of their contemporary lives that they want or can share with each other.
The book focuses on the particular kind of friendship that young males have. Do you think this has to disappear with the years?
With a lot of men who've grown up in a circle of friends, and then have become separated or distanced from those friends, there's a feeling of guilt that you've got responsibilities to these people, and you'd walk under a bus for them if they asked. You're not quite sure why because you have nothing in common with them any more and don't even particularly want to see them, you're just bonded with them in a way that's hard to explain, almost like they're family. I think I was trying to play around with some of those ideas in the book.
The books deals with autism, which is a very sensitive issue. Did you find this difficult to handle?
The autistic boy in the book, Travis, is very much modelled on my sister's little boy. He's the exact model for that character and it's something that my family have found it very difficult to come to terms with. I suppose I'd always felt as a writer that I'd got some sort of responsibility to deal with it and this was the right time. I've been very careful to go back to my sister and ask her if this is OK. One of the things about my writing in general is that I've always felt an accountability to the community that I live in. Part of that community is my family, my parents, my sister and my grandmother. They all live within about six or seven miles of each other and I'm part of that community, so I wanted to make sure that I'd got it right and that I wasn't upsetting anybody. I was continually going back to Hilary, my sister, with the book and saying is this OK? Do you feel alright about that? I think in the end she's been very pleased that he's being written about in this way, as if it's out in the open.
Do you think people may be shocked by some of the things Barney thinks about his autistic child?
Barney's pretty screwed up about most things and I think it could sometimes be seen as cruel the way that he deals with his son, the way that he thinks about his son. But you have to remember that the novel is told from his point of view and I think that's a way of almost celebrating Travis as a character and without swamping him in sentimentality because as a subject it just commands such sentimentality and sympathy.
Do you think autism acts as a metaphor throughout the book?
Yes, there's a scale or spectrum of autism that runs right through the book, and I think if it's part of everybody's character. It also begs the question, who is the little green man? Is it the green statue, is it Travis, is it Barney? That's something that unites them all. I think the statue is a metaphor for that inability to speak.
Having finished one novel, do you think you'll write another?
At the moment I've got no ideas for a novel and I'd really like to wait and see how this one does. If it just goes straight down the toilet then I guess I probably won't! If it does really well I might be encouraged to do it again. I used to think that dabbling in other forms of writing was just a way of keeping the poems going, as if the poems had almost become the shop window but they're not really enough to support me. They don't pay the bills as it were, but prose has become more important to me now as another outlet for feelings and ideas, so I think there are other prose works in me. I don't know whether it will be another novel…..I might try and do a little bit more travel writing, something like that.
Are you concerned with how the novel will be viewed by other poets?
No, in fact it's nice to get away from the poetry society for a while and exist in another parish.
