Conversation with Darran Anderson (I)
#Scurf199: The writer on objects telling their stories, Marxist landlords and the bright side of day jobs
After a couple of weeks’ delay we have a brand new edition of Conversations. Here, I speak with a personal favourite writer, documenter, Instagram specialist, and erstwhile X rage — Darran Anderson. Anderson is an essayist and memoirist writing at the intersections of culture, politics, urbanism, and technology, has been recognised for his debut Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (2015), a hugely ambitious analysis of real and imagined cities throughout history, and Inventory (2020), his searing memoir about growing up in poverty in Derry. Anderson was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2023.
This is the first part of the conversation. The second will be published next Friday.
I’ve been reading your work since I first came across one of your viral cities architecture related tweets in 2017. I remember reading your essays on cities, architecture alongside Calvion’s Invisible Cities. There’s also a fair bit of drinking, walking and discoursing about the way our cities look and how that affects us on an emotional level. I read Inventory earlier this year and felt completely drawn into the world it talks about. It was one of those books that I wanted to finish reading as soon as I could, but also wanted to savour it for as long as possible.
Along these lines, can you talk to me about how you came around to writing Inventory in its current format?
The easiest answer is I don’t know, Anandi. If I knew, there would be no book. I have friends who are writers, and they start books with a blueprint in mind and know exactly what they are doing, how and why. My mind, unfortunately, doesn’t work like that. I’ve lived quite chaotically, there’s a been lot of wandering, and I write in a similar way, usually collecting lots of different fragments and working on five things at the same time. Eventually, something resembling a book will start to form. It’s only afterwards that I can look back and try to work out why I wrote something or why it wrote itself. Writing is a puzzle to me, and it always will be.
I think a large part of it is I have a fundamental mistrust of certainty. If you grow up in a place dominated by a church and an empire, you learn from a very early age to mistrust official narratives and orthodoxies. I think that’s a healthy place to be for a writer, if you can handle a degree of solitude. When I hear certain writers today singing from the same hymn sheet, it turns my stomach. I guess it’s about trying to stay receptive, capable of change. There’s a line in one of Camus’ notebooks where he wrote: ‘The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind’. But it goes even further than that. Certainty is dangerous. We are prey when we are certain, however clever or comfortable we think we are. It’s been shown time and time again that everything depends on the gadflies. You should come away from a book with more questions than you began with. Anything else is atrophy.
In terms of Inventory, the stories came to me, regardless of my intentions. My father worked in a cemetery and used to bring back strange antique objects he’d dug up, all of them containing ghosts of the past. My grandfather was a trawlerman and smuggler, who used to haul things out of the sea, from fish to mines to bodies to pieces of submerged planes and ships. My mother was a social worker and though she couldn’t share her stories with us, because of the confidential nature of her work, when she came home with a black eye, you immediately asked yourself, ‘What happened?’ So, the tales were there, long before I’d known of the existence of Walter Benjamin or whoever. And the form was already there. When you do chance upon a writer that resonates, it feels more like recognition rather than something new. When Joyce writes, ‘My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up most everywhere’, it chimes. And if there’s enough pebbles and rubbish, you’ll eventually be tempted to assemble something from them.
I promised myself that I would try and write something that did some justice to the place I’d grown up in and the people I’d grown up with in Derry, a city in the north of Ireland that has been crippled under British rule. It’s built on the banks of the river Foyle, which played a huge part in its existence for centuries but is now this kind of very beautiful backdrop but ominous too, given the suicide rate there. T.S. Eliot said something once to the effect that those who grow up next to a river are different from others, and I believe that. It’s always there calling you, no matter how landlocked you might be in present life. And all the stories I wanted to tell, about back home, led to the river, the way rain always tries to find its way back to the sea. My maternal grandparents had earned their living on the river as fishing folk and my paternal grandparents drowned in it. So I began to write a surreal nature/war book called Tidewrack from the river’s perspective, at night in an attic in Sydney overlooking the Pacific, listening to the same Bad Seeds song over and over again, and it ended up in an all-too-familiar tale of development hell with the publisher, even though the version I’d shown them was fairly toothless compared to the final draft I’d written, which they never saw.
Years passed, stuck in a kind of limbo and to break out of it, I wrote a different book entitled Inventory, in a fortnight or so, inspired by Georges Perec. If they wanted a misery memoir, I’d give them an Oulipo misery memoir. I don’t think they understood it, and it was allowed to fall through the cracks, but I didn’t really expect them to. I know from friends from other places that writers from working class communities or colonised countries or migrant backgrounds, or all of the above, all run into the same problems. You’re not allowed to have the free reign afforded to writers who’ve come through the approved ‘respectable’ channels. They make a box for you and you’re expected to remain in it. And if you try to escape, you’re creating a problem. In terms of Irish writing, it still comes back to Stage Irish cliches. You can be a comic buffoon or a traumatised noble savage but nothing more, nothing others are allowed to do, even when you can show you’re capable. So, you try and make the box as big as possible or smuggle in the suggestion of other boxes. Contingency was important in the book. Each chapter was an object, and you could have picked a whole set of different objects, and it would’ve been a completely different book. About three or four different versions of Inventory exist or could be assembled. More was written than used. It's a book that readers especially overseas have been so generous about and I’m grateful for that, but the objects tell the stories rather than the author. It’s their book really, not mine.
I remember tweeting to you in 2017-18 about the movie Columbus (2017) and asking you if you knew of any other such movies where architecture played a huge role. Recently, I watched Sidewalls (2011) and was immediately reminded of our twitter exchange. Sidewalls shows how characters can sometimes be hindered by the physical structures that so casually, routinely surround them. This also, in some way, forms the main meat of your work. Would you agree to that?
I think so. It’s certainly the origin. I came into writing as a trespasser and remain so. I was born and bred in a city that was territorialised into military and paramilitary places. It wasn’t safe to go into another neighbourhood or into any security zone, but that taboo was always there goading you, inviting. My entire youth basically became a case of venturing into places I shouldn’t be and it’s a lesson I’ve tried to carry on into writing. I still feel the attraction of it. If I’m in Eastern Europe or the States or anywhere really and I chance upon a derelict building, it’s hard to say no. And it feels that way in terms of writing. If there’s a subject, you’re not allowed to go near, I’m instantly drawn towards it. Every warning sign is a challenge.
Last year you won the very prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. In your interview with Irish Times at the time, you said: “The award will make a huge difference. I work in retail in central London and I write on my lunchbreaks and at night when I should probably be sleeping. You start to realise precisely how rare and precious time is. If the award allows me more time to continue to be a writer and, more importantly, a father, I will be thrilled but I’m grateful, regardless of what the future holds.”
One year later, how would you say your life and writing practise has changed after the award?
If you say, things are better, it’s tempting fate. The devil’s ears prick up somewhere. Obviously, it was a huge surprise, and it was cool to just walk out of work one day and not return but I miss that place too. The best part of the award, aside from temporarily assuaging the crippling financial anxiety of living in London, was hanging out with people like Percival Everett, dg nanouk okpik, Ling Ma, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and co. I loved them all. And to do talks there, inside that miraculous marble cube at the Beinecke was a joy. A week before the announcement, I’d been told by a publisher I’d been speaking to for a year, about a global cities/hedonism/music book, that they basically didn’t see a future in writing for me or my kind. So, the experience was restorative in the sense that it reminded me that some publishers don’t necessarily know what the fuck they’re talking about. Or know as little as the rest of us know about the future.
At the same time, I liked my job and loved the people I worked with. Class is ludicrous in Britain. There are very few writers or artists of any kind whose lives resemble how most people in this country actually live. It’s unbelievable but culture is more elitist and has less social mobility than industries like banking. Culture here is full of privately-educated charlatans, with secret incomes and so on. I’ve lost count of how many Marxist landlords I’ve encountered. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so maddening and wasteful. And by contrast, the people I worked with in retail, warehouses, call centres have been so interesting, talented and original. I’ve done those jobs for twenty years now and would and will happily go back to them if necessary, despite the shit pay and the nightmare managers. Those are my people, not critics or socialites or whoever. At the same time, I’m immensely grateful to those at Yale for their generosity and I think that Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell’s legacy is one of such incredible love and solidarity, and I’m especially grateful because it bought me time not only to write, given I was only able previously to write on my lunch breaks, but to also be a better, more available father to my boy.
Can you talk a little bit about the role of physical structures, buildings, parks, housing complexes, pubs in your understanding of the city and by extension your life in the city?
You learn far more aimlessly wandering a city or even finding ways into derelict buildings or just listening and observing than you do through most urbanist historiography where everyone is using the same century-old references. The same names, the same citations, the same locations (usually imperial capitals). We need more than this, there’s a vast complex world out there, and I hope to find it.
If there’s any honesty in my work, it comes from the setting and not the author. I’ve no office. I write in pubs, basements, rooftops. I try to walk five to ten miles a day through the city, whichever city I’m in, each day in a new direction. I’m sure it all seeps into the writing. Abstraction is the devil’s path. There is nothing better than throwing yourself into the bedlam of a place. That’s where the real education is to be found.
I’m yet to read Imaginary Cities—your book about how fictional cities and fantastic architectural ideas seep into the real-life cities we live in. Could you share a bit about the origin of the book?
I wrote it in Phnom Penh. I was helping and hindering my friend Chris Kelly who was making the documentary A Cambodian Spring at the time. I was writing loads of harebrained fantastical fictional books there. One evening, I was sitting with my friend William and our partners at the time up on a roof and I saw a thunderstorm literally roll towards the city as we sat there and the downpour was so colossal, the river started to flow backwards, and I thought to myself I am done forever with fiction because there is nothing I could invent that is as insane and wondrous as this place. And that will be the manifesto of my life until the day I die.
Through your writing, books, tweets, Instagram posts, I feel that you try to convey a sense that the cities we inhabit were not necessarily this way earlier. They are a constantly shifting mesh of interrelated elements that are alive to our treatment of them. How do you think that sits within the structure of the current global climate change crisis? Did we meddle too much with our cities?
There’s an arrogance and hubris, to ‘progress’. So much of it is not remotely progressive. It’s frankly delusional how the most entitled people on the planet believe they are the most righteous, and I look forward to the day, distant though it may be, when that hubris meets its nemesis. In the meantime, I think it’s important that we retain what we can from the past (which once gone is gone forever), and recognise that, in terms of climate change, for instance, it was partly progress that got us here. It will take a great degree of engineering and technology to undo the damage civilisation has wrought. I don’t believe in austerity models, which simply punish the poor and marginalised further and usually end up in corrupt profiteering schemes by the rich and well-connected. Cities are here to stay. They’re not going to suddenly become utopian or disappear, regardless of whatever solarpunk or ‘back to nature’ fantasies we might entertain (we forget that swathes of the countryside in places like England are essentially manmade). If anything, they need a lot more meddling, from ideally from the bottom-up, where you’re at least closer to practical reality and consequences, rather than top-down. There are other routes we can take other than the endless grasping desire for profit and monopoly (‘everything in the world is for sale’) or degrowth anti-natalist puritanism (‘the world would be better off without us’).
Ideally, we’d also grow out of the false dichotomy of modernism versus tradition, and instead let’s think of hegemony versus vernacular. All that architecture and urban planning that tries to turn everywhere into nowhere versus that which has been constructed locally in response to the specific culture, topography, history, meteorology and natural conditions of a place. The important thing is to reject duplicitous framing. It’s not conservative to want to protect the things your ancestors campaigned to achieve, and it is not progressive to demolish and replace. The etymology of ‘radical’ is to dig into the roots, to return to our origin, to remember why we even started, why were cities founded and why was it worth it. The sooner we remember that the better.
How do you think Calvino would’ve reacted especially to the way Venice is expected to be particularly vulnerable to climate change?
I’m tempted to say that Venice is the canary in the coal mine in terms of climate change, because any sea-rise is so dramatic and immediately felt there. But it’s a unique place too, a black swan in some ways, and climate change will impact places around the world in vastly different ways.
Calvino was mercurial. I can’t imagine what he would say but I know it would come in an oblique manner, a fable or a puzzle box containing things that will last much longer and delve much deeper than the daily news or political rhetoric. If we lose Venice, I’m not sure we deserve to save ourselves. So, there is something we can tangibly fight for. There is one of the frontlines.
“There's a strange desperate hope in realizing how much of life is fiction. Writing about it is like trying to wriggle out of quicksand—but I can't think of a better plan for the time being.” I’ve found so much comfort in this quote of yours from a 2014 interview.
Thank you, Anandi. Peace of mind is underrated and if I’ve had anything to do with that, I’m grateful. I think as I get older I realise more and more that no one, however esteemed or exalted, knows what life means. Which is not to say there isn’t meaning, it’s just that it’s probably forever out of reach, like Tantalus. There’s comfort in that somehow. One of the most compelling arguments for God, though I am a heathen, is that if your only master is God in heaven then all the masters here on Earth can be discounted, which is quite a radical notion, something the Labour politician Tony Benn tried to get across to me when I met him as a lost and foolhardy youth. I spent a winter once, living next to an abandoned airbase, reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and it goes hard, but in the end, it’s just an idea, a proposal, as everything is, and after a while, it all becomes a kind of celestial joke. The more serious it is, the more absurd and hopeless, the more hilarious. Beckett knew. And Gogol, Kafka, Abe, Bulgakov, Spark etc etc.
All cities are fictional. Someone invented the name. And then innumerable people turned their thoughts and dreams into buildings. It was all contingent. So much of what we take for granted as natural or inevitable was actually imagined into existence. We build so much of our world on entirely questionable fabricated ideas – race, class, left and right, nations themselves are attractive fictions, borders are constructs. That’s not to say that these things have no weight or consequence. I like to think of it like the cricket in the original Pinocchio, which I used to read to my little boy, the one the puppet kills because he does not want to hear the truth. The boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes would, these days, suffer a similar fate, given so many people are invested in untruths. Untruths pay well, truths get you ostracised. It’s been ever thus. One of my favourite cities is Abidjan in the Ivory Coast not just because of the place but because of its name which is this monument to doubt and even ignorance. An explorer came along and asked a labourer the name of the settlement ahead and he replied “Min-chan m'bidjan"(“I just cut the leaves”) which was then bastardised into ‘Abidjan’. I wrestle with this everyday, living in London, with all the flags and politics and stupidities, and you realise laughter is the greatest maybe the only revenge and tonic.
The second part of this conversation will be published next Friday!