Feminists were right to tell us how oppressive public expressions of male desire could be. Adults, especially men, have to be careful about speaking to children in the street. Revelations of horrific and widespread child abuse have shocked us into uncertainty. For now we live uneasily with our sexual freedom. But I’m not so sure what would happen in the courtrooms of Twitter. If they came to court today, those novels of Joyce and Lawrence would certainly be allowed into the public domain without much trouble. The business was to find a boundary, then cross it. The legal struggles to publish Joyce’s Ulysses, the Lady Chatterley trial, the wild transgressions of books such as Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch persuaded me that to write fiction was to be obliged to take the reader by the hand to the edge – and jump. Fiction was part of a genial explosion in my life, of a sense that with my formal education more or less over, I could do whatever I wanted.Īnd as far as I was concerned, fiction was synonymous with freedom. I hadn’t caused much trouble, had uncomplainingly passed through the educational mill, and come to sex and drugs later than most – respectively, at 18 and 21. Up until my arrival in Norwich I’d been an intense, somewhat shy or reserved child and teenager. Besides, divorce is a rich subject, Hampstead a legitimate place. The 2010 “lost Booker” shortlist was powerful proof of that. Of course, English literary culture in 1970 was far more diverse than the so-called Hampstead divorce novel. Sometimes I persuaded myself I was some kind of wild man, a fauviste, kicking against the bourgeois divorce novel that people complained about.įorty years on from the publication of that little volume of stories, I’m bound to have a different view. Sibling incest, cross-dressing, a rat that torments young lovers, actors making love mid-rehearsal, children roasting a cat, child abuse and murder, a man who keeps a penis in a jar and uses esoteric geometry to obliterate his wife – however dark the stories were, I also thought elements in them were hilarious. I was meeting many new friends, falling in love, keenly reading contemporary American fiction, hiking the North Norfolk coast, had taken a hallucinogenic drug in the countryside and been amazed – and yet whenever I returned to my notebook or typewriter, a savage, dark impulse took hold of me. Violent, sexually perverse, lonely, they were remote from the life I was living in Norwich at the time. Other strange voices, other weird or wretched characters, surfaced in that year to haunt or infest my fiction. An MA was what I could do in my spare time. I regarded myself as a full-time committed writer. I wanted a fresh start after undergraduate life. Being in Norwich was the first major decision I’d taken in my life without reference to or advice from anyone else. Its narrator was a man who didn’t want to grow up – a strange choice for me because I considered myself that year to have finally reached adult independence. The story was called “Conversation with a Cupboard Man”, one of a handful I wrote that year that went into my first book, First Love, Last Rites, published in 1975. I worked on into the night, filled with a romantic sense of myself, the writer heroically driven by a compelling idea, pushing on towards dawn as the city slept. Within an hour, a strange voice was talking to me from the page. I had no notes, only a scrap, a dreamy notion of what sort of story this would be. At the end of my first week, with all arrangements made, I sat down at a card table by the end of my bed one evening and told myself that I would work continuously through the night until I had completed an entire short story. I had come to do an MA in English at the University of East Anglia, but my overriding purpose was to write fiction. I n 1970, when I was 22, I moved to Norwich and lodged in a small, pleasant room on the edge of the city.
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