{"id":11814,"date":"2020-10-01T04:36:29","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T04:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=11814"},"modified":"2020-10-01T04:36:32","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T04:36:32","slug":"mardean-isaac-will-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=11814","title":{"rendered":"Mardean Isaac – Will Self"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The half-Jewish English writer\u2019s new drug memoir, \u2018Will,\u2019 dives from Hampstead Garden Suburb into an underworld<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Will Self\u2019s new memoir recounts a youth spent smoking, snorting, injecting; itching, puking, shivering. Looking for drugs, using them, running out and looking for more. Doing work on drugs\u2014and to buy drugs\u2014and failing to work having taken drugs. Meeting and discarding people through drugs. Having sex on drugs, not being able to because of drugs. Taking drugs in order to think while on them, including about drugs. Perceiving reality and your own life exclusively under their influence, and in the wake of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self was born in 1961 to an English father (Peter Self, professor of political science) and a Jewish American mother (Elaine Rosenbloom, who worked in publishing) who separated when he was 9. He was raised in a suburban-style house between the Hampstead Garden Suburb and East Finchley, in north London. Following a turbulent childhood, during which he began using marijuana and amphetamines in early adolescence, he went to Oxford, where he consolidated his heroin addiction. An itinerant period of drug abuse followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Self did what he always wanted to and became a professional writer, while continuing to use drugs and alcohol. He published his first collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity<\/em>, in 1991, since when he has become a distinct figure within British culture, as both surrealist and comfortably domicile representative of its peculiarities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self\u2019s overt commitment to the pursuit of self-derangement and the unchecked development of his independent sensibility mark him as one of the most unusual British writers of his time. His fiction, consisting mostly of satirical novels of the grotesque, is the product of deep-seated literary influences and intellectual orientations. The central reason that a broad perception of Self\u2014who is known for writing books usually shunned as deliberately difficult, verbose, and unreadable\u2014exists in Britain, is his public persona, mainly expressed on television panel shows. Through his great height (6\u20195\u201d), confrontational visage<\/a>, and a sepulchral voice that sounds like it has traveled a long way to reach us, he exudes a blend of gloom and antic joviality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His new memoir, titled Will<\/em>, told in the third person, represents an unprecedented foray into Self\u2019s experience, even as it refers to some of the public aspects of his life as a writer. The book is arranged dischronologically in five sections, each of which immerse the reader in the April or May of a particular year: The earliest begins in 1979, just before he leaves Hampstead for Oxford, and the latest passage deals with his first institutional attempt to get clean in 1986.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike his fiction, which locates horror in the seemingly sober, rational, continuous world by scaling the dimensions of that world into grotesque fantasy, Will<\/em> confronts life as it is lived. Self performs that confrontation, however, by portraying the skirting of every commitment except to inebriation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self\u2019s family life was recounted in Self Abuse<\/em>, his brother (and sole full sibling; his mother had a son from her first marriage) Jonathan Self\u2019s autobiography. That book engaged directly with the great harm his parents inflicted on Jonathan and its legacy in Jonathan\u2019s own abusive behavior, tapping into a more familiar purpose and tone for the memoir of childhood abuse and its adult legacies, including the stated desire to improve as a person and feel and transmit love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Will Self has gone in the other direction. In Will<\/em>, there\u2019s no sense-making, emotional narrative, or arc of reclamation; no uplift, self-saving, or saving of anyone else. Will<\/em> is life as sheer consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Hampstead, altitude informs attitude. An elevated area further raised by a rare pairing of money and culture, its remote and imperious mansions suggest exquisite connections to other worlds. Hampstead has developed in many stages\u2014Jews have been prominent catalysts of its local richness\u2014and this has added to the area\u2019s particularity rather than diluting it. The Hampstead Garden Suburb\u2014where Self lived at the \u201cunfashionable end\u201d\u2014is a century-old planned project that left the writer with an \u201cacute ambivalence about suburban development.\u201d According to Self, his father, who was chairman of a major policy planning association, probably knew Raymond Unwin, who designed it. If Hampstead provides its own concentric circle of reality within London, so too did the Suburb within Hampstead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this already strange environment, the Self family has ample opportunity to turn its own strangeness inward. \u201cSuburbia is all [Will] can see\u201d from his bedroom: \u201ctousled hedges, shaggy trees and back-combed lawn.\u201d Behind the artifice of Number 43, \u201chis parents\u2019 pushing and pulling has compressed the stale atmosphere in the gloomy little rooms, with their palpable air of neglect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will\u2019s mother is dominant (\u201che doesn\u2019t need to tell her what he\u2019s doing this evening, or where he\u2019ll be staying tonight\u2014she already knows\u201d) but fragile and strange. She introduces Will to private and social alienation. The family is surrounded by Jews\u2014but they are \u201ccolourless English Jews\u201d like the Smith-Simonses \u201ctwo doors down, with their absurd and recently acquired hyphen\u2014imagining they can somehow pole-vault their way into the upper-middle classes with this little typographic stick.\u201d His mother is also prone to class self-consciousness. The precise status of liminal<\/a> areas on the periphery of Hampstead, which is both an administrative area with various technical boundaries and a sociocultural area with an essential identity, becomes a parallel to Will\u2019s own status oscillations. In context, though, his mother\u2019s relentless vulgarity stands out: \u201cYour father\u2019s a fucking shit <\/em>\u2026 she\u2019d casually remark.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will\u2019s mother dotes on her son even as she abuses him and encourages his burgeoning drug habits. She intertwines herself with him controllingly: \u201cThere\u2019ll be no escape from the Mother planet\u2014Will realizes this intuitively: even if he does blast off for new worlds, he\u2019ll touch down only to find her footprints already in the dust.\u201d She grows weed plants \u201con the kitchen windowsill,\u201d which Will prunes too avidly for their own health, \u201conly out of a desire to connect with her adolescent son.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Will, his mother\u2019s \u201cJewishness seems quite different to that of the English Jews who live around them,\u201d and this extends to religion. She exhibits no positive or substantial transmission of Judaism, only nominal local gestures: \u201cWhen the others had been getting bar mitzvahed, he\u2019d played Jewish as well, so attended shul a few times. The kippah he\u2019d had to borrow would be gently wafted skywards by the thermals issuing from the under-floor heating system: a little circlet of black crepe-paper returning\u2014unlike Will\u2014to Yhwh.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But she does encourage Will and his brother to join her in laughing at \u201cthe stodgy English absurdity of all their father and his family did and said.\u201d His father, a \u201cflickering presence\u201d in the home and in his life, brings coldly playful rhetorical styles into the home. When Will walks in on him shitting, \u201clacking any sense of physical shame or embarrassment, the old man would simply look up \u2026 and smile<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite fucking him up for life, both parents (as both brothers have publicly attested) preferred Will, and were excited by his prodigious intellect. In this book, Will and his mother would sit \u201cwordlessly bonded in absorption of words, their only exchanges infantile ones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Downward mobility has its disadvantages: Buzzing around on speed (and regretting his decision to ingest some before seeking to buy more) Will gets a gun pulled on him at his dealer\u2019s door. Neither the repressed politeness expected of him by his class nor the disorder of his home help him when scoring, even if they do pathetically inform his methods of pleading with dealers and other addicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Hampstead, aged 17, Will snorts his first hit of heroin\u2014the \u201cpale-beige powder\u201d like \u201cmud finely networked with cracks.\u201d He understands that through a \u201cpiffling act of will\u201d he has now \u201ctransformed himself into a godlike figure\u201d with an \u201cOlympian\u201d perspective. Then he apologizes to his friend for having taken too much and pukes out the car window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main revelation from the Oxford sections is Caius, a barely disguised version of novelist Edward St Aubyn, probably the most significant personage in the book and one of a handful of recognizable individuals in the book. (Self and Aubyn did meet at Oxford and were friends but have for several years refused to discuss one another, or explain why that is, in public.) They slump through self-indulgent haute cuisinelunches while heavily addicted to heroin. Caius invites Will and a friend to a Shakespeare production at the Globe in London; they go in a black cab which waits for them, meter running, before bringing them back to Oxford. Will has an almost lustful attraction to Caius (\u201cCaius, for all the thinness of his blue-veined skin, would never die<\/em>\u201d) and a hopeless distance from his styles and securities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Oxford, \u201cWill had no plan whatsoever beyond staying put: lingering here on the threshold of the straight world, with one eye roving the outer darkness.\u201d It worked. Constantly off his head, Will subsists off welfare checks and money from his girlfriend, fleetingly enduring \u201ccramped eternities of clock-watching\u201d at various corporate stints. Unscrewing the single light bulb left in a London house lent to him by Caius, \u201cgloved by a tea towel,\u201d Self brings it upstairs from the kitchen to the bedroom at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not a life premised on faith in emotion or belief in interpersonal relationships; there is no baseline of human solidarity that might provide fulfilment. In London as a heroin addict, \u201cthere are only rainy Tuesday afternoons, and debts, and persistent skin infections.\u201d When withdrawal hits, the external reality of \u201cbills, fines and creditors \u2026 unreturned phone calls and ripped-up letters\u201d imposes on a private world so strange it at one point finds Will placing a Polaroid of his father (\u201chis father\u2019s plump, ruddy face now coated in rime\u201d) in the freezer before eventually burning it along with the flesh of his own hand. Will\u2019s sexual instincts are fraught with a kind of self-consuming frenetic quality; Self\u2019s description of the \u201cgrinding of her pubic bone against his\u201d gives the right impression. He laughs at his own limp penis in the bathroom of an empty flat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will Self\u2019s sense of the shitness of England has always been implicitly linked to his not being fully English, even if his Jewish aspect never transcended his English aspect.Share\u2192\ufe0eTwitterFacebookEmailLinkCopied link<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will\u2019s \u201ccurdled comedy\u201d is an exercise in the antisocial. Rejected after pleading through his dealer\u2019s mailbox, he reflects on his Oxford-educated superiority to the \u201cfucking thief and parasite\u201d blocking his high: \u201cIt means I\u2019m like your social worker: you\u2019ve GOT to let me in.\u201d Looking at the drugs brought by his friend Pete, whose father owns gambling machines, he jokes that the \u201cgenuine purple hearts\u201d on an injectable preparation of methadone meant it \u201chad come, in a roundabout way, via Pete\u2019s fruit-machining father.\u201d He contemplates how much responsibility his brother should take for his own rape as a child. He envies the repeated rape of his friend Caius by his own father: He got \u201ceverything \u2026 even these extreme experiences, which, self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make good <\/em>copy.\u201d (This term is his mother\u2019s legacy; her \u201cstock response to almost any of his fuck-ups or misadventures was: that\u2019ll make good copy.\u201d) Regarding the \u201ctranscendent state of mind\u201d an overdosed friend was in upon dying, Will asks: \u201cWhy did he put them all through the utter misery of his funeral?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The headspace of this book is anti-beauty, and its gutspace is pro-nausea. Will experiences \u201cdead roads and lost opportunities\u201d under a \u201cgrey sky lowering above the grey streets.\u201d London provides many objects for Self\u2019s fixation on vileness: \u201cpeeling paint and tarmac lumpy with fungus, London\u2019s skin and Will\u2019s own having entirely engrafted, such that they share the same wanting.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is terminal distance, in Will<\/em>, from the possibility of participating in meaning. He sees voids where others see presence\u2014character, ethics, adulthood, coherence, continuity or progress\u2014and drugs replace the meaning that exists for other humans in those voids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no buy-in to any frame of reference for that distance. One rejected frame is psychology: Will has no specified depression or search for trauma; no neurosis, despite his parents\u2019 fondness for the term: \u201cI\u2019m feeling neuro<\/em>,\u201d his mother would say, \u201chaving invented her own collective noun to encapsulate the vast swarm of her obsessions and compulsions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self does have a subversive interest in psychoanalysis; institutionalization provides surreal context for artificial worlds, psychotic epistemologies and abuses of power and captivity. He was inspired early in life by the liminal space between madness and inspiration, into which drugs act as a kind of flashlight. A teenage misdiagnosis of schizophrenia fused with the seduction of the junky subculture. If there is a conceptual current passing through Will<\/em>, it is William Burroughs\u2019 vision of drugs as a system of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self does not seek to normatively redress the disgrace and humiliation that comes with addiction. Instead of pain and trauma as meaning-generating, dynamic forces that first lead to addiction and then revelation and improvement, Will\u2019s relentless drive toward dislocation and derangement becomes the engine of life itself, the shaper of personal reality. The hunt for new experiences, and drugs, is connected to the sense that \u201csecondary qualities of things exist not in the phenomena themselves, but only in the mind which perceives them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drugs, in that sense, are not only the subject of Will<\/em> but the tense in which it is written. Heroin provides a \u201cstate of gilded gradation\u201d through which to perceive time-space; amphetamine \u201c[divides] moments by instants.\u201d Will \u201cbelieves\u201d that drugs \u201cmemorialise chance and fleeting occurrences, fixing them forever in fantastical varnish.\u201d Every description here is a kind of abstraction of moments from their immediate consequences into a contemplation of their particularity. There are two critical points when Self moves from third to first person, when referencing his mother (\u201cfar from restraining Will, her internalised voice usually eggs me on<\/em>\u201d) and when bringing his nostril to the rolled up pound note (\u201che bends to my fate<\/em>\u201d) to take his first hit of heroin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self-destruction is Will\u2019s condition, not his goal. While his overdoses are novel and extreme and therefore thrilling, he doesn\u2019t want to die\u2014just to get as close as possible to death before life reins him back in.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will<\/em>\u2019s England consists of a decrepit aristocracy, a cultureless middle class, and a drug-connected underclass defined more by its place within systems of control than its socioeconomic heritage. Self\u2019s sense of the shitness of England has always been implicitly linked to his not being fully English, even if his Jewish aspect never transcended his English aspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response to the 2006 Israel-Gaza conflict, Self \u201cresigned\u201d his Jewish identity through an Evening Standard<\/em> article. But in 2017, he wrote that his Jewishness persists as \u201canother distancing factor from a nation that, lest we forget, has a national church helmed by its head of state.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an agile 2010 exchange<\/a> with half-Jewish novelist Adam Thirlwell (which begins by Thirlwell making it clear neither speaker chose the title \u201cA Beginner\u2019s Guide to Jews on the Edge\u201d), Self discusses Jewishness with some texture. When Thirlwell tells Self that Cynthia Ozick wrote a letter harshly criticizing Thirlwell for his piece \u201cOn Writing Half-Jewishly,\u201d Self perks up: \u201cHow good is that?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t want to be a gentile for all sorts of very obvious reasons,\u201d Self continues on halfness. \u201cIt\u2019s not cool, basically. And as a writer in English society, it doesn\u2019t give me any torsion. As a satirical writer, it\u2019s very useful for me to stand outside the great white Christian majority. It would be invidious of me to claim a Jewishness I don\u2019t necessarily feel; so I\u2019m so happy being half.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Will<\/em>, Jewishness ultimately exists in the form of negation: of time and family, those primary Jewish literary values, and in the negative image of Englishness. But Self\u2019s treatment of Englishness, while full of rejection and absence, is not complete. His class-conscious ventriloquizing of English speech brings Englishness into him with one hand and lets him handle it with the other. You can feel this trapped distance, for example, when he rehearses the variations of his father\u2019s futile \u201cgentle reproof\u201d of Will\u2019s habit: \u201cI do think you might \u2026 It could be an idea for you to \u2026 If you could just be a little more \u2026 moderate.<\/em>\u201d Will\u2019s opposition to all the ways people form bonds and negotiate relationships expresses itself in constant performative caricature and self-social rambling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1997, Self admitted to taking heroin in the bathroom of a plane while on assignment interviewing prime ministerial candidate John Major. He was fired from The Observer<\/em> as a result, describing the decision as hypocritical since the paper had been recently marketing him as \u201csome kind of latter-day Hunter Thompson.\u201d Self has been clean since 1998. In a combative 2001 exchange<\/a>, tabloid columnist Richard Littlejohn called Self\u2019s views \u201ctypical of the self-regarding, self-appointed metropolitan elite\u201d and asked him if he was still on heroin. That cheap shot is typical of one register of disdain that Self attracts, but it doesn\u2019t cover the whole spectrum. The presence of Self on the English cultural landscape is seemingly always accompanied by skepticism and negativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A widely circulated and celebrated review of this memoir in the London Times<\/em> notes (critically) that Self \u201cspends more time describing fecal matter than other humans.\u201d The memoir\u2019s built-in response is: What\u2019s the distinction? When criticized by a counselor in rehab for merely going through the motions of recovery, Will responds: \u201cIsn\u2019t life all about going through the motions\u2014the getting up and the lying down, the wanking and the shitting?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mardean Isaac<\/a> was born in London to Assyrian parents from Iran and Iraq. He studied English at Cambridge University and Syriac Studies at Oxford University. He is currently writing a novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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