Introducing Readers on Writers – the series where our shadow judging panel interview the shortlisted authors for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
In this interview, shadow judge Ross Kelly (@readsbyross) speaks to Ralf Webb (@loco_mote) about his shortlisted novel Strange Relations published by Sceptre Books. Their conversation broaches researching through personal affinities, facing the critics as a writer, financial strife and the art of editing a text back.
1. This is a really meticulously researched book! How long do you think it took you from first idea to final draft, including all the research?
I first had the idea for this book (or a version of it) seven years ago, and so in a way it has taken that long to write it. But I think it took around twenty months to complete the book after finishing the proposal, including the research. I was already familiar with the authors and their works, though, having read and reread them throughout my twenties.
2. Were there any other writers or artists that you considered including in the book?
Too many! I wondered about including Jane and Paul Bowles, who shared artistic circles with Carson McCullers and who, like McCullers and her husband, Reeves, were married but also pursued same-sex romances. I would have loved to have written more on Norman Mailer and James Baldwin’s friendship-turned-rivalry, and to have spent some time thinking through the long shadow of self-destructive, semi-stoic masculinity Ernest Hemingway cast (and still casts) over much American literary production. One of several earlier iterations of the proposal included chapters on the Western, its depiction of paranoid male friendships, and the impact certain queer artists (Aaron Copland and Gore Vidal, for instance) had on the cultural icon of the cowboy.
3. A lot of the times you are examining dark moments in each of these writers’ lives and seeing as you are so close to them as a writer, did you find this emotional attachment tough?
I’m interested in to what extent one can be truly emotionally attached to the subjects one writes about, and whether or not such an attachment is desirable; whether it’s beneficial or prohibitive to the writing process. I think it’s probably easy to cultivate a fantastical (or even parasocial) relationship to a biographical subject, one which isn’t entirely honest and which is maybe done in bad faith, and I’m often suspicious of writing which explicitly interleaves memoir and biography, or uses the lives and experiences of biographical subjects to elucidate or frame or perhaps validate a personal story. At the same time, I don’t believe that it’s possible to invest so much time reading about and researching anyone’s life and not become, in some way, emotionally attached, and certainly in this book I’ve alighted on things in the authors’ lives and works that resonate with me on a deeply personal level – the whole genesis of the book comes from a personal affinity I have with the works. I think this kind of freaky tension is why literary biography is actually a very elastic and unstable and exciting genre, and why all biographies are to some extent autobiographies.
What was one particular thing you discovered about these writers in your research that has stuck with you?
Probably that their finances were, by and large, completely disastrous for so much of their lives and careers, and that each writer was only able to achieve the things they wanted to, artistically, through immense determination and dedication. I was also struck by their perseverance in the face of critical failure – all of these writers were, in different ways and at different moments, mocked or derided by critics, often due to their artistic depictions of sex, sexuality and gender. But they kept writing. There was a shared belief in the importance of artistic freedom and the value of artistic integrity, which often overlapped with a belief in personal freedom, and the creation of better societies and ways of living.
How did you decide which texts you would examine for each writer?
I wanted to select texts that were relevant to the book’s thesis without forcing the thesis onto those texts. I wanted also to balance better-known works against those that are less well-known, and to select texts that could chronologically align with the biographical ‘stories’ I tell throughout the book. There are moments when things dovetail in pleasant and surprising ways – Carson McCullers turning up at the try-outs for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for instance, to support Tennessee Williams’ intended message for that play. But the selection of texts wasn’t an exact science, and lots of stuff ended up on the cutting room floor. I cut several thousand words on the depiction of fraternal incest in Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone, for instance, which probably needed its own book.