13 Questions for Wendy Erskine
Wendy Erskine is the author of two wonderful short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. Her newest work is the novel The Benefactors.
Wendy, self-portrait
What are you reading now?
I usually have a few things on the go. I’m reading Ursula le Guinn’s The Dispossessed because I overheard two people talking about it in a bookshop. Also, I’m re-reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair because I thought it might help me think about how to approach something new that I might do. Becky Sharp, what a grifter. I’m reading Arifa Akbar’s Wolf Moon because I am going to interview her soon.
I remember hassling my mum about it and saying, how could someone think that? Would there be something wrong with them, that they thought that? You know, did they have some kind of illness? And my mum said, oh that’s just the kind of thing that people say or think in books.
What book(s) most altered your taste in literature?
I’m going to go back into the mists for this one. I reckon I had just started to read independently. There was a passage in a book where a character mistook a house in the distance, covered in nasturtiums, for a house actually on fire. I remember finding it really perturbing. Like, it seemed ridiculous that someone should make that mistake. I remember hassling my mum about it and saying, how could someone think that? Would there be something wrong with them, that they thought that? You know, did they have some kind of illness? And my mum said, oh that’s just the kind of thing that people say or think in books. That’s the way they behave. So I suppose that was a very early introduction to the artificiality of literature and the buy-in expected from a reader. It didn’t alter my taste as such, because at that stage I had no taste. But it established my expectation.
Describe the last time a work of literature affected you physically?
Certainly. I could even, were you in the house with me right now, point out exactly where I was sitting when I read a certain passage from Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. It involves the central character, Edith. I shouted out, oh my god no! Don’t! I don’t tend to laugh that much at literature. I find most of it not that funny, most specifically the stuff that is trying to be funny.
Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.
Alright, I am going to reach for the nearest book and because this is question 4, I will go for the 4th line down on page 44. The book is Jonas Eika’s After the Sun, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg. Here we go:
The boyfriend straddles him and lets loose on his face. In his rage, he grabs a rock, thick red pool next to Ginger’s head. Then he gets up and turns, flees along the water, and she runs after him. Me and Jim hurry to bring Ginger’s body up into the changing room before the other guests see the hole in his head.
What I think about this passage is that things go wrong pretty quickly. Know what, I’d like to give it a go with another book, 4, 44, again, to see if I turn up something more edifying.
So let’s do it. Lightning Striking by Lenny Kaye. Alright, this is about Carl Perkins and Blue Suede Shoes:
It hits Billboard’s Hot 100… By March, Carl is riding high on all three—country, r&b, and pop—countdowns, but the first day of spring finds him recovering from a broken shoulder and head injuries in a Delaware hospital, unable to capitalise on his big break.
Can you believe it? More injuries. We’re on a roll with the injuries.
How do you treat the books you read?
I dogear, bookmark, highlight, underline, write in the margins, write shopping lists in the back of them. If it’s a really massive book, like say, David Keenan’s Monument Maker, I’ll get a Stanley knife and cut it into three. I never treat them as pristine artefacts. And I like to see my marginalia of yesteryear. I’m normally bemused by what I found significant.
A meretricious parading of ‘cleverness’ dampens my spirits.
What quality do you most appreciate in a novel?
I’m not a driver. I’ve failed the test 7 times, but I always feel that I can tell if someone is a good driver within a minute of getting in the car with them. Same thing with hairdressers. Even just with one stroke of the brush, I know if they are going to do the job well. And so it goes with a novel. I like to feel that I am in good hands. I like it when there is ambiguity, complication, confusion even, but I think, I trust you. I am happy to go along with you, embrace a kind of Keatsian negative capability.
What I don’t appreciate is people not trusting me as a reader. Also, I don’t like people trying to convince me they are clever. A meretricious parading of ‘cleverness’ dampens my spirits.
Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?
It’s a hard one, because I could name an individual and they might consider themselves to be doing very well indeed—and here am I, saying that not enough people read them. Potentially, it seems to me, it’s simultaneously a compliment and a dig. It’s like when I met my hero Gordon Burn and I said that it was a pity that some of his books were out of print. I meant that that was a shocking state of affairs, but it didn’t come across as I intended it. Although all was eventually well between me and my hero. I suppose ultimately what is important is to be read well, rather than widely read. When I was starting out, I remember a wise and pretty successful writer friend of mine say that the most you can expect with your book is for it to mean something, truly mean something, to 10 or 11 people. At the time, I thought, oh my god, you are setting the bar so low! 10 or 11 people? But ultimately, they were probably right.
But anyway, to avoid any bad feeling, let me pick from among those no longer with us the writers I feel should be more widely read. Rachel Ingalls. Jade Sharma.
What book are you avoiding reading?
I wouldn’t say I’ve avoided her as such, but I’ve never read a book by Rachel Cusk. But when I think of the profile, the way she is discussed, the fact that I have never read her is probably tantamount to avoiding her. I heard her talking on the radio about driving and I didn’t vibe with it.
What novel would you add to our current season (on Family) and why?
One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden. It’s a week in the lives of three sisters in the early 1990s and moves between that time and their childhoods. It’s full of political and familial tension and what I find interesting is that within the one family there are so many different shades of political opinion or affiliation.
What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil?
Sometimes, to amuse myself, I’ll imagine that whatever I’m seeing, I am actually viewing for the last time, that I’ll never see it again. So I’ll walk down my street and see someone cleaning their car and I’ll think, you’ll never see this ever again, or you’ll never see that particular bus stop ever again, and so everything gets imbued with great beauty and significance, no matter how lowly it is. I suppose when the actual time comes I would want the reading equivalent of that: something that says this is life and it is wonderful. Maybe I would read Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, where Emily comes back from the dead and notices the beauty of clocks ticking, sunflowers, coffee, newly ironed clothes, hot baths. Is Wilder regarded as cutesy or kind of second rate? I sometimes get that impression. But I think Our Town is pretty pitiless, in its own way.
If you were to design a literature course around a singular word, what word would that be, and what books might appear on the reading list?
My single word would be ‘polyphonic.’ I would choose books like Will Ashon’s Passengers, Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, David Keenan’s This is Memorial Device. I suppose I’d be asking all the usual questions of the demands a polyphonic text makes on the reader in terms of engagement and disengagement and whether, because of the number of perspectives there becomes more room for the reader to create meaning and make connections. I would throw in a bit of writing too, I think. I’d ask people to take a text that is resolutely not polyphonic, something really tightly from a single perspective, and insert other voices into it, force it to become more capacious. Who knows, maybe their additions will be more interesting than the original?
I don’t really read like that: mapping characters onto me, or mapping myself onto them.
In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?
Do you know what, I’ve sat thinking about this for ages. I’m in a room here full of books. In front of me there is a tower of them, over six feet high and I’ve run my eyes up and down, and along the shelves, wondering if there are any characters in whom I recognise myself. For sure, I can think of times when someone in a book thinks something I have thought, or acts how I might act. But it’s usually a fleeting thing. I don’t really read like that: mapping characters onto me, or mapping myself onto them. Recently I would say though that I felt a real affinity with Shaka in Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton. It’s my business as to why. In my own writing, loads of the characters have elements of me.
Why read literature?
To feel connected, to feel disconnected, to be comforted, to be shocked, to be challenged, to be made to think, to be made to feel, to be turned on, to be turned off, to remember, to forget, to have everything confirmed, to have everything challenged, to escape, to be delighted, to see the world differently, to see other worlds, to be thrilled, to be amazed at the strangeness of people, to be soothed, to be agitated, to make friends, to hate. I could continue all day with this. The one thing it won’t do is make you a ‘better person.’ I know plenty of people who have read a shitload of books. I know plenty of people who have read none. The idea that the ones who have read all the books are more decent and empathetic and generous than the ones who haven’t is total nonsense. In my opinion.