‘Where is the wailing?’

Editor at Granta, Max Porter, on life, his first book, and his great political anger

August 20, 2016 04:05 pm | Updated August 22, 2016 04:32 pm IST

Max Porter.  Photo: Lucy Dickens

Max Porter. Photo: Lucy Dickens

Max Porter’s first book, Grief is The Thing with Feathers (Faber), won the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2016. It’s a slim book — hybrid in intent and form, encompassing elements of poetry, fable and essay. The book opens with feathers. A young woman has died suddenly, leaving behind her two boys and her husband (a Ted Hughes scholar). Enter Crow — part myth, part real, part therapist-trickster-bully-friend. The book is shaped as a triptych of voices — Dad, Boys, Crow — and takes its title from a play on Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers . Porter’s day job is senior editor at Granta Books. We met in London where we talked about poetry, death, fraudulence and other uplifting matters. Excerpts from an interview:

When did you have the idea to write the book?

I really did it by accident. I was thinking for a long time about the brothers and how to tell that story. And then I had a meeting with a guy who had known my dad, and who I hadn’t seen since my dad had died [Porter’s father died when he was six], and the conversation with him was revelatory. Though that wasn’t the point. The point was what stories do we tell our children and what were the stories I was told as a child and what stories would I have preferred to have been told, not necessarily truth or lies but the style of it.

How did you negotiate using your memories and your brother’s memories while writing this book?

I think it’s fine to use memories as long as you’re quite rigorous about recognising that power. Was I going to use them just because they were fully formed, or was I going to change them sufficiently. More importantly, why was I changing them? Was I changing them in order for them to work in the music of the book? I was thinking of it as a piece of music. If something was too loud I would have to turn it down. There can’t be a noisy soloist going on. Crow has to be done in small bits so he doesn’t upset the balance of the more tender or sentimental things. So it never really felt like writing a book, it felt like wrestling with a set of materials and assembling them in the right way, like collage.

Now that the book is out, has there been a settling of those memories?

There’s a settling. That’s exactly what it is. Some things that felt quite raw to me now feel worked out enough for me to move on. I’m someone who always wishes to think about the people that are not here and send them love letters. If I could, I would send my grandmother a letter every week just to tell her I’m still thinking about her as I raise my children, as I vote, as I take offence, and in a way the book is that — it’s almost like a permanent note to self, that these were the things I cared about. And so for the next book I hope it won’t be about death. Yet, there are preoccupations in this book that will be carried on. Mainly childhood; I am interested in childhood.

Your interest in crows is primarily from Ted Hughes?

From North American creation tales that I read as a kid. And fairy tales — French, English, Russian fairy tales. And then Hughes. I read the crow poems as a teenager because they’re so angsty and ugly and angry, and you think, finally there’s this poet that speaks to me, to the 20th century, to these bombs and violences against the body…. I stopped reading Hughes because I didn’t want his voice in my crow.

At what stage did the title come into play?

About halfway through, when I felt that by giving Dad this professional preoccupation with Hughes and bringing it alive, I was finally saying what I wanted to say about poetry. I’d always been preoccupied with Hope is the Thing with Feathers as a kind of key to why Emily Dickinson is so big and so unimaginably brilliant, and I thought the fresh thing would be to put the whole thing under this umbrella of vandalism — that you take the poem and play with it because you love it, or because you hate it; the point is that these people are dead and the poetry isn’t.

It’s interesting, the life of a poem, how you can change just one word…

Poetry is such an exact art, you have to honour that, and there are degrees of honour. So, for example, I wouldn’t have reanimated Dickinson and had her move in with a bunch of depressed feminists. That wouldn’t have worked, partly because I respect her too much but partly because there isn’t so much to fiddle with. Hughes brought upon himself so much to fiddle with and I’m so interested in the sort of prurience of the English imagination about that trauma... the sort of, hmm let’s find out who he was having sex with and all that nonsense… I wanted to poke at that. I’d hope that a Dickinson fan might walk into a bookshop and, just from the title, think are you suggesting you could swap hope and grief, that grief is comparably as flexible and generative and interesting a thing as hope? I mean there’s a lot of questions you could ask just from the title, and these are precisely the kind of questions I’d hope someone would be asking. I reckon particularly in this country, we’re not very good with critical homage. Maybe because we’re so fixated on the canon with the rigidity of where everybody fits.

You’re very clear that you won’t write something again unless you’re grabbed by a similar compulsion. Why?

Because everywhere I look in the modern world I see fraudulence, or the making of work for the sake of it, or the imitation of other things in order to make money. There’s so little these days that is true and good, but also because I didn’t plan to be a writer.

Is the bit where Dad meets Ted Hughes from a real life experience?

No. I never met him. The only thing that’s really true is that my brother and I did kill a guppy fish, and we felt bad about it — it was a transformative moment that we discussed in later life. The other thing is I remember being told is that my dad had died and wondering why there was no noise. I felt what a shabby world we must live in that this event has occurred — we’ve had this huge death… it’s like a car crash and where is everybody? We just walked down the stairs, said goodbye, got in our car and left. And I remember thinking, any minute now there’s going to be something huge, and I think I’m still living with that. I still feel that. Where is the fuss? Where is the wailing? And this is my great political anger — how dare you as a politician say that you care about the dead, that you commemorate the dead, because you obviously don’t, because you’re still involved in the making of wars, the selling of arms, the lying to the public. That to me is fundamental. That is why I invented the Crow because he is the person that says that’s not okay, and that’s the thing that sickens us.

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