The Galley Beggar Q&A: James Clammer

I. The book…

Tell us a little bit about Insignificance: the storyline, the characters, and when it first began to take shape.

Insignificance follows a day in the life, possibly the final day in the life, of a man named Joe Forbes, a plumber who’s returning to work after a long lay-off.  Halfway through the job he has an unexpected and disastrous encounter with his son Edward, who’s been released from prison after committing a particularly nasty crime. The original idea for the book came from a job that I did myself many times when I worked as a plumber. This job was extremely complex and I thought nothing like it had been rendered in fiction before. One day, taking inspiration from Thomas Pynchon, who wrote technical manuals, and some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, I sat down and wrote out the whole procedure. When I was finished I knew I had to get it into a book, but then course I had to figure out how to dramatize it properly because nobody wants to read dry technical descriptions. When the character of Edward sailed in on the winds, I was away.

You’ve said elsewhere that you see Insignificance as a kind of working class response to modernist, day-in-the-life novels like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway – and that you think everyone should be given the chance to naval gaze. Do you think that wtyorking-class writers and characters have not had much of an opportunity to feature in this kind of fiction? 

Well, I grew up in a fairly middle-class household so I can’t properly present myself as a working-class writer. Still, these things are relative. It wasn’t a world of ski-trips, private schools and second homes. I met some of those people later. I was educated at a comprehensive and in my year only six went to university. I’ve never had a profession or worked at what you might call a middle-class job. Those are the credentials, such as they are. Now, one of the things that baffled me for a long time when I began to read literature as a teenager was why the world of work never figured in any of the books I read. I know, now, the good dramatic reasons for it yet it’s still a huge omission of human experience in a form that should, after all, be trying to encompass everything possible. So yes, we need more working-class writers, more black writers, more Asian writers, but more than anything else we need to do away with the stigma that literature is only for the middle-class. We need readers possessed of a ferocious new confidence who refuse to be fobbed off with the same old shit.

Tell us about the composition of Insignificance. Are there ideas in there – or a plot thread, or a character – that you can trace back to definite sources?  

As a child I was very ill, and that I suppose was the formative experience of my life. The disease was asthma but not the mild variety. I have vivid memories of oxygen tents, collapsed lungs, doctors in the middle of the night trying to find veins for the latest drip to go into. That went on for years and by the time I was twelve I’d stared death in the eye more than once. The accompanying hand of death, by the way, isn’t cold, it’s hot and sweaty and it takes every micro-joule of energy you have to prise it off. By the time I was twenty things were more stable but the side-effects of all the drugs I’d had pumped into me in order to keep me alive were kicking in. Predominantly that was depression, and eyesight problems. I was partially sighted for two or three years in my early thirties, until I got up the courage to have the operations done. Luckily those worked out. All these things leave impressions which aren’t so easy to brush off. If anyone wants to know why there’s a lot of illness in Insignificance, that’s why.

Do you have a writing routine? When and how do you get things down on paper? (Also, how long did it take to write Insignificance?)

Usually I start about six in the evening and finish around midnight. For the first hour or so I do almost nothing. Often I know what I have to write and sometimes even have the first sentence in my head but a sort of stupefaction overwhelms me so I can’t even bring my hands to type out the words. I think it’s a subconscious distancing from the concerns of daily life and a husbanding of energy required for later in the evening. I frequently go to sleep and when I wake up, that’s the dangerous time, when I’m most tempted to quit. But I force myself to get a few words down – say twenty. Then another twenty. If things are going well, from thereon I pick up speed and sometimes the ideas come so fast it’s hard to keep up. Soon comes the magical time when the ego disappears and you’re immersed. You look at the clock and 90 minutes went by without you noticing. After, say, three or four hours of that, I get tired and pack it in for the night. 

I wrote Insignificance, in first draft, in 121 days.

Editing. Do you edit as you go, or do you wait until you’ve got a full draft in front of you? (… How much do you cut? Or rewrite?)

With this one, I got the first draft down before going back to edit. The important thing to understand is that, although the initial rush of idea and image in first draft feels wonderful at the time, eight or nine out of ten of them won’t be any good or won’t be appropriate for the overall effect you’re trying to achieve. That means each one has to be examined and a choice made about it. Do you integrate or discard it? Writing is really nothing but an endless string of decision-making and problem-solving.

Tell us about one of your bad writing habits. Any tics?

Generating too much material. My single biggest hurdle.

OK. Other writers. Name some favourites. 

I can’t answer this one. I get something from almost everything I read. Reading in a way is the main activity. I try to alternate between fiction and non-fiction and keep the spread of subject matter as wide as possible.

And what are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. It’s the ur-play from which so many of the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies stem. Poor old Kyd; he fell in with Christopher Marlowe and got picked up and tortured to death by Francis Walsingham’s thugs as a result. I haven’t read Marlowe either, but I’ll probably do him next.

Do you ever imagine your ideal reader? (Or: who would you most like to write you a fan letter about Insignificance)?

It would be nice for John Berger to have read it but sadly he’s gone now. Anyone who reads and responds to it I’m grateful for.

II. The world…

What gets you mad? 

Racism, patriotism, the class system in this and every other country, the lies of the media, smear campaigns against good men and women. Also the builders next door are taking an age and royally pissing me off.

What makes you happy? 

New books, and time to lie on my bed and read them. 

You’re in charge of EVERYTHING. What’s the first thing you do? And what’s the big signature program you’d put in place to make the world better? (NB: No violence! This is a peaceful takeover.)

First thing, without a doubt, end benefit sanctions. They’re the single biggest driver of people needing to use food banks. Ten years ago nobody in this country knew what a food bank was. Everyone in Westminster knows benefit sanctions don’t work within the terms in which they’re supposedly framed, ie motivating people to look for work. All they do is cause starvation and malnutrition. Abolishing them could be done, literally, overnight.

My big signature programme would be an extension of that. There’s enough food to go round in this world, if it was distributed equitably. Unfortunately the refusal of rich countries to share their Covid vaccines with poor ones doesn’t encourage me to think that an equitable distribution of any sort is going to happen soon.

How much do you hate SUVs?

A lot, but no more than other vehicles. I suspect they’re driven by the conformist, the frightened and the psychologically-disembowelled.

What exactly is wrong with people? 

We have deep-embedded definitional genes designed and fine-tuned for hunter-gathering in small groups. These genes go back millions of years to various hominid primates long before homo sapiens ever came into being. Now we have to live in cities and run huge systems by computer, while constantly being encouraged to compare the value of our lives against the impossible fantasies of a supercharged consumer- and entertainment-capitalism. It’s cognitive dissonance on a supreme scale. I’m surprised things aren’t worse, to be honest. They easily could be.

Any cause for hope?

I have a guarded, cautious, hope that society will improve. We’ve come a long way in the last two hundred years. On the other hand, stepping outside nature and thinking we can dominate it without consequence might ultimately prove fatal to the human race. I believe it’ll come down, in the end, to socialism or barbarism.

III. On a different note…

Tell us about something fun to do (in one sentence).  

I don’t really do fun. I’m not built for it. I sometimes do pleasure, but that’s something else. (Sorry Galley Beggars, I know that’s three sentences but they are short ones).

What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

I’ve never listened to the negative stuff, but I can tell you the best piece of writing advice I’ve been given – or heard, rather, on the radio. Nadine Gordimer, being interviewed, said, ‘It’s not about what others can do, it’s about what you can do.’ Hearing that, a lightbulb went on.

Boris Johnson has just walked into a fridge to hide from the press. What he doesn’t yet know is that you’re already in there.  What do you do? (No violence, again. Sorry.) 

Get the hell out. I don’t want to be anywhere near that man.

You’re not a writer, you’re a musician. What band would you be in?

The Beatles circa 1966 would be acceptable. Alternatively, any band where I could acquire, somehow, any small crumb of musical talent. I’m tone deaf and couldn’t even master three chords.

Same again – only this time, you’re not a human, you’re a furry animal. Which one is it?

A woolly opossum. It’s a spectacular acrobat, has enormous front-facing eyes, and the ability to grasp. In the woolly opossum you get the best of being both a marsupial and a primate. Pretty cool.

Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayer?

I haven’t read either of them. I haven’t read Henry James either. My ignorance is endless. Send for the firing squad!

James Joyce or Samuel Beckett?

Trying to choose one over the other would be like trying to separate conjoined twins. One or both might die in the attempt. Let’s keep them alive and in close contact.

Bacon roll or fried egg sandwich?  

Both, thank you. Who’s paying?

Coffee or tea?

Symbicort and Salbutamol

Can you think of a better question to end on than this?

Why should writers be expected to know about anything other than writing?

Insignificance, by James Clammer, will be published by Galley Beggar Press on 20 May 2019. You can read an extract here, and pre-order a first edition - sent to you with a signed bookplate - here.