On writing what you know they don't want

OK, I admit it, I’ve been slack on the Substack front. In the back of my mind is the sense that nobody minds one less email alert in their inbox.

My substack energy was diverted to writing a range of news pieces, looking to support MY HEAD FOR A TREE as its North American edition muscles its way into life. I’ll let you know if they work.

Sections of the book from various drafts fell to the cutting room floor. One refrain from the book’s editors was that the book included too much “templing” – a word they coined and shared. They wanted less of me on the byroads of Rajasthan, emerging at one of the Bishnoi temples associated with Guru Jambhoji.

They weren’t wrong. I complied. Those stories are now emerging as newly written pieces on my website. Here you’ll find The Bishnoi temple at Lohawat – Martin Goodman … Many of the Bishnoi priests I met were lame in some significant way, while Lohawat’s young priest had quiet movie-star charisma and told some great tales

And here is the visit to The Bishnoi Temple at Jangloo, Rajasthan – Martin Goodman. My guide here was a businessman, with an intriguing take on a businessman applying the rule of being honest, always.

More to come!

At home, in the role of editor of these recent pieces, James has taken on the “too much templing” voice. “You’ve started with Guru Jambhoji again,” he laments. Well why not? He’s the equivalent of Jesus or the Buddha but with the ecological message for our times. Nobody’s told his story before.

But the world is fascinated by different things. I rewrite my pieces without him and they probably are better. But the next time I write he inserts himself. (You want a story about Jambhoji, a really striking one about miracles and buried gold, ne told in English for the first time? You really do? Then check out that Lohawat temple piece … and thanks!

Yesterday saw me take part in a live Substack event – the first public reading by writers on the Queer Love Project. It was a cheerful gathering in Book Soup, over in West Hollywood – a dream scenario for me, driving along Sunset Boulevard, through Beverly Hills, to my own book event.

The readings were powerful and the audience was warm. My own tale was a rare public expression of what I deem to be my mystical side. Hilary Mantel had this mystical aspect but opted to keep it mostly hidden from view. It’s there a little in her fine memoir Giving up the Ghost and more obvious in my favourite novel of hers, Beyond Black. Not foregrounding your mystical side certainly helps you gain literary credibility.

Having given mine an airing I may pop it back in the closet for a while.

Except for the odd appearance here, where I claim the right to be vulnerable.

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My Oscars engagement saw me attend a Friday matinee of The Brutalist just before the weekend ceremony.

As the film opened my odd response was “This is all made up – nothing is real,” and distrusting it as a result. I knew it was fictional so pondered my reaction.

It related to my own The Cellist of Dachau, a Holocaust-set novel. Its characters were fictional, but points of historical resonance in their stories were sourced in the lives of real characters. The Holocaust contains so many brutal stories that it seems aberrant to the point of complicity if you engage the imagination in forging new, fictional ones. We have to face the horror and accept that it was real.

I need my historical fiction to be anchored in the historical record. The Brutalist’s opening scene, with the main character backed naked against a wall, in a line with other naked men, all receiving blowjobs from prostitutes, declared the project to be one sourced in authorial fantasy. This was so much a young man’s film, its impetus seemingly drawn from some undigested sexual trauma. A scene of gratuitous and unlikely male rape confirmed my suspicions. The film’s cinematography was terrific – it all had the LOOK of a major film – but for another decade or so the director Brady Corbet needs someone other than himself to write the screenplays.

Of course he’ll continue writing his own scripts. Decades ago I read a letter about my work on my then-agent’s desk. Having reviewed my submitted novel,and rejected it, the editor advised that I should not take the family as my subject. “Impossible advice,” I thought. In fact it was good advice, but advice I could not take. Childhood trauma was seeking to express itself through my work. It didn’t want to be silenced. Like with The Brutalist, it left blisters in the published work. And then tried, once again, to work itself out in whatever I was writing next.

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In January, passing through London, I set a vase of daffodils on the kitchen counter. They give me the keenest sense of Spring. I’ve found a source in Los Angeles – till they bud they offer hope, though California doesn’t encourage a full blooming.

A brighter sense of the local spring is an influx of hummingbirds. They chirp, divebomb each other, and line up at our feeder – James is refilling it daily. The young are now arriving, fluttering their wings, waiting to be shown the feeder’s secrets.

Have a happy Spring!