How do you make Harry Ricketts disappear? Put him at the middle of a discussion about creative non-fiction. As impossible as it sounds, that’s precisely what happened during But Beautiful, the conversation with Geoff Dyer and Philip Hoare at the New Zealand Post Readers and Writers Week today.
That’s not a joke at his expense either, it’s a total credit to him. Creative non-fiction is a young and exciting style of writing, and both guests were so keen to talk about it they were leaning forward in their seats, carrying the conversation forward with a minimum of prompting.
Hoare shared fascinating detail of his five-year biography of Noel Coward. Gore Vidal would moan mid-letter about Truman Capote. Audrey Hepburn offered him crab meat from an already opened tin, and he thought he might die if he ate it. He learned that reporting and recording biography and history cannot be objective, and eventually he felt completely legitimised to put himself in the story. He uses archives a lot and his job was to process the information on a way that is sensitive and exciting.
Dyer’s take was that they were both drawn to creative non-fiction because they remained fans of what they were writing about; amateurs in a sense.
“You get fed the creation myth – the Dostoyevsky in a room approach where you write a novel no-one wants and eventually get one published. We’ve gone the other way.”
Both writers have worked under the heavy historical shadow of World War I. Dyer marvelled that For The Fallen, by Binyon, was written before most of the fallen had had a chance to fall in 1914, and noted the sense of history being written before its time. He is also fascinated by places where “time has stood its ground”, where history becomes geography.
Hoare reminded us of some of the forgotten decadence of life at the time of the of World War I.
“One hundred and fifty illegal nightclubs opened in Soho,” he said. There were transvestites in the trenches, ballgowns in backpacks.
What I enjoyed most about this session was that the writers talked about possibilities and the way they could process and create history and statistics to give us new ways of approaching our understanding of any topic. They talked of the possibilities offered by e-books, rather than the threats; the power of mixing illustrations in to help tell the story, the possibilities of mixed media approaches.
Both writers also have such a keen sense of history, and knowledge to boot, that they have the opportunity to let the story come out of what they are writing about. For me its a much more complete way of storytelling, compelling and powerful. I am in awe of their skill and will be reading much more of them in the future. You should too.
12 March 2010 at 9:44 am
And I forgot to mention Philip Hoare’s exhaustive description of his like clockwork working day. Geoff Dyer’s response: “I’m nowhere near such a weirdo”.
12 March 2010 at 11:42 am
I love modern non-fiction writers – think Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as one of the first and most brilliant. I’ve just started read Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man – it is awesome, unputdownable writing and she is right in the middle of the story. I believe she was supposed to be at the festival but didn’t come in the end.