A master’s ode to melancholy (From The Argus)

A master’s ode to melancholy

6:50am Saturday 23rd January 2010

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With food and festivities but a memory and nothing but the darkness of winter stretching out before us, January can be a deeply uninspiring time of year. For many of the country’s academics, this moroseness finds it sharpest focus on Monday, January 25, one of the most depressing days of the year, and it’s on this very day that novelist Will Self is inviting the people of Brighton to “come along and be immiserated”.

Lugubrious Monday at Komedia will see Self interviewed by his former housemate and fellow novelist Matthew De Abaitua, with whom he shares an interest in warped but recognisable futures. The former, some way through a new novel, says he finds January a particularly bleak time.

“I suffer from chronic depression, but you have to look at it in the context of a global misery,” he says.

With continuing financial gloom, and widespread disappointment in the results of the Copenhagen summit, I ask if there’s more to be depressed about in 2010.

“Did you think Copenhagen was going to produce a binding, legally enforceable agreement on emissions? Grow up. That clearly wasn’t going to happen, from the get-go. That’s one of the problems with depression, it starts to infiltrate the future and become a dreadful pessimism. I had no hopes at all for Copenhagen and precious few for 2010.”

That’s cleared that up then. In print, Self’s words make him sound like a miserable sod, and perhaps he is, but there’s a dreary melody and mischief at work in his speech that point to both his charisma and an acute self-awareness.

Born in 1961 and raised in a London suburb, Self worked as a cartoonist after graduating with a degree in philosophy from Oxford University. His first collection of short stories earned him the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and he has since built a reputation as an author of vehement satire and prickly humour.

As a writer working for the most part in isolation, does Self feel any better insulated from the contagious workplace gloom that sees most of us moaning at one another for being broke, bloated, with no holiday left?

“Well of course I have my own corporate culture in order to cope,” he explains.

“I’ve got my office party tonight... I get a couple of bottles of wine in and drink them very quickly in the corner of the room where I write, shouting. It’s normally fun at the time, but obviously there’s a lot of shame the next day. In January, we try to have team-building exercises and a new mission statement for the year but, invariably, my sub-personalities are pretty fed up with each other by then. You know, there is often a very bad atmosphere.”

The gloom, he says, is likely to be perpetuated by a meeting with his old friend Matthew De Abaitua. The pair lived together in Suffolk in the mid-1990s and Self says each of them attempted suicide on the same day.

“We were both crying for help in separate rooms in the house, so we couldn’t help each other,” he says.

“But you know, we’ve kept in touch... I think more out of guilt than anything else. There’s no love lost between us because there’s no love. Matthew is sick as a parrot, really. He can barely wipe himself he’s so miserable, and as the older and more established depressive, I’ve got some interesting ideas that I think will help everybody in January.”

And what are they?

“Drugs. Large quantities of drugs. Prescribed drugs, obviously. A lot of people try to palliate with illegal drugs, but it’s a mistake in my view. That’s what you have very large pharmaceutical companies for – to manufacture drugs, quite obviously, and anything you can get your doctor to prescribe... in my case they’re usually very willing.”

Much has been made of Self’s own palliative approach, and his sacking from The Observer for being caught in the act on John Major’s campaign jet, but today’s novelist has indulged in nothing stronger than caffeine and nicotine for more than a decade.

In his most recent book Psycho Too (illustrated by Ralph Steadman) – a second “best of’” collection of his columns for the Independent – Self shares a relatively recently discovered passion for the very healthy habit of walking. He writes about a two-day trek through Dubai in the book’s introductory essay, and this month will see him confined to his Post-It note-plastered study as he works on a fictionalised account of a 120-mile walk through Los Angeles. The book will be called Walking To Hollywood.

For all of Self’s misery, his appearance at Monday’s event is something of a good turn; the night is organised by New Writing South, a Brighton-based regional development agency with the wider aim of getting new writers together to discuss their work. Self says this was never something he did when he began his own short stories.

“I never did any of that sort of stuff. I don’t think you should do that – it only makes people unhappy. Expressing yourself is always going to be a bad idea. Better to keep it bottled up.”

He believes the bleak publishing climate of the new decade will make it even more difficult for new writers to make themselves heard and earn anything approaching a living.

“The last five years was about worrying about the domination of the chains, or Amazon, or Waterstone’s dictating what you should write in novels. But that’s so kind of noughties, that’s over, and now we’re completely f*****. It’s free content that’s the demon.

“The truth of the matter is that the whole relationship between words and money has broken down. What’s going to go happen to publishing in the next two to three years is going to be what’s happened to music - it’s just going to be impossible to maintain copyright.

“Even perfectly well- established writers like me are going to see a massive loss in revenue, so for people starting out, it is grim.”

With Lugubrious Monday behind him, Self will continue trying to fulfil the mission statement, as set out by his committee of sub personalities at the start of the new decade. Perhaps predictably, the outlook is far from rosy.

“You know, I had to let parts of myself go last year, and I think there’ll be problems keeping up the desired levels of literary production this year.”

* New Writing South presents: Lugubrious Monday at Komedia, Brighton, on Monday. Tickets, priced £12, are available on 0845 2938480.

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