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TWO

I AWOKE suddenly from the dark pool of sleep, Alan was already stirring, slipping out from between my floral duvet and a white sheet. It took me a while to remember who Alan was. I could hear him pissing into the toilet as I put the events of the previous day into place. When Alan re-entered my bedsit I laughed because he hadn’t dressed and I knew that would have given the nymphomaniac who lived opposite me quite a thrill if she’d run into him on the stairs. Then I saw Hannah, my sex-mad neighbour, following Alan through the door. Hannah liked group sex and when she brought a bloke home who I found attractive it wasn’t unknown for me to join in.

Alan stood above me grinning. Hannah embraced him from behind. Her hands snaked around his torso and she stroked his cock into an erection, then held it tightly. Hannah put the index finger of her free hand into her mouth and proceeded to massage saliva into Alan’s left nipple. He squirmed with pleasure. I sat up and took Alan’s cock in my mouth. Hannah sank to her knees and began to rim him. As I lubricated the length, I could feel myself getting all wet. I got onto my knees and turned around, so that Alan could enter me from behind, standing up. Hannah removed her skirt and panties, then climbed onto the bed. She pushed my head down against the mattress and clambered onto my back, lying with her back against my back and her legs swung over Alan’s shoulders.

I couldn’t see anything, my eyes were closed but I knew from the sounds and movement of our bodies that Alan was licking Hannah out as he gave me a shafting. I came as Alan shot his load into my hole and from the way she screamed, I knew an orgasm had washed through Hannah’s body too. There was a tangle of limbs and Hannah struggled up. Told us she had to rush or she’d be late for work. Alan crawled into bed beside me and we slept for the best part of two hours. We made love when we woke up. The missionary position, nothing exotic. Eventually we dressed. I was out of milk so we went to Carmine’s on Union Terrace for an early lunch. Over pasta and cappuccinos we discussed literature.

Alan commented on my collection of Kathy Acker’s work – Great Expectation, Blood and Guts in High School, Don Quixote, Literal Madness, Empire of the Senseless, Portrait of an Eye, In Memoriam to Identity, My Mother: Demonology, Hannibal Lecter My Father, Bodies of Work, Eurydice in the Underworld and Pussy, King of the Pirates. Alan admired Kathy Acker but said he could never read through to the end of her books. He was surprised when I told him I just read passages at random, it made no sense to read Kathy Acker from beginning to end. At some point Alan told me that in her essays Acker fell behind the premises from which she started out in her fiction. I told Alan he didn’t know how to read. Imagine starting on page one with a book and then proceeding through to the end.

I’d heard stories about a number of the male writers Kathy lived with at varying times in her life. They tended to be less talented and less successful than Acker. It is alleged that one of these writers convinced himself that he was Kathy Acker while she was away on a promotional tour. When Kathy returned home, the young writer was unable to sustain the fantasy that he was a successful novelist and suffered a nervous breakdown. Alan didn’t think the story was true. It sounded suspiciously as if it was a fragment culled from a post-modern novel. Besides, Kathy was too cryptic to be involved in something so obvious. He began talking about Michael Bracewell, who I’d always thought of as a journalist. Alan produced three Bracewell novels from his bag. He told me Kathy Acker discovered Bracewell and took him to Serpent’s Tail, who published his first book.

Alan explained that Bracewell was one of the first style or club novelists, an achievement that should be placed in the context of the long history of fiction aimed at teenagers. I still have three of Alan’s Bracewell books and by looking through them I’ve been trying to piece together what he said over pasta at Carmine’s. You can see from the books that Bracewell learnt to write as he went along. The prose style in The Crypto-Amnesia Club and Missing Margate, both dating from 1988, is quite atrocious. By the time Saint Rachel was published in 1995, Bracewell was producing chiselled prose in the mould of Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh. Regardless of whether one likes the traditional English novel, it is still possible to appreciate the way Bracewell transformed himself into a prose stylist.

It is difficult to imagine Kathy Acker liking Saint Rachel, although Lynne Tillman admires it. Kathy would have liked everything bad about Bracewell. The flash. The coy iconoclasm of Missing Margate, which becomes a gender-bender novel when read alongside The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The way in which Bracewell’s nostalgia for an England that never was allowed him to be seduced by everything post-modern. Those are the things Acker would have liked about Bracewell. Alan made the point that Bracewell’s tragedy was that he’d learnt to write. The future was always leaking back and influencing the past. Having written competent works, Bracewell could never operate beneath the threshold of critical opinion.

The 80s ended in economic depression and while Bracewell’s early work was marketed as satire, it was ultimately a celebration of middle-class consumerism. Everything had gone wrong and as Saint Rachel documented, it ended in Prozac. Bracewell’s flaw was being more intelligent than Cyril Connolly. He knew from the beginning that he was a bad patriot, that the England he lusted after never had and never would exist. Bracewell was fixated on Englishness but his works described a different country from the land inhabited by the working-class heroes celebrated in best-selling books like England Away by John King. Bracewell came from Sutton and he overcame this lower-middle-class environment through celebrations of upward mobility.

In re-inventing himself Bracewell had to think through all the moves required to pass as completely bourgeois. The simulacrum was almost perfect but he lacked the arrogance and sheer stupidity of Anthony Powell. The broken relationships endlessly documented in Bracewell’s novels function as signifiers of his broken dreams. He was a pastoralist even when he wrote about the city. Bracewell’s second ‘major’ work was first published as part of The Quick End – works by three young novelists. When the time for reprinting came around, Don Watson and Mark Edwards were dropped and Missing Margate came out on its own. Bracewell was an 80s novelist. He lives on in journalism and TV appearances. Hotels, restaurants, designer clothes, a life-style organised around these objects of desire could never be sustained on royalties earned from moderately successful novels.

Bracewell had to fail in order to succeed. He’d a good reputation but hadn’t amassed the sales to justify 20-grand advances. It was the media that provided him with the readies to sustain a middle-class life-style. Many writers are tempted by the money to be made from journalism. Bracewell was smart, he didn’t strip-mine his subconscious by churning out confessional columns. Five-thousand-word features in the broadsheet press became his speciality, his name still carries connotations of quality. Bracewell hasn’t embarrassed those literary figures who backed him early on, he isn’t a Colin Wilson or Iain M. Banks. His early publishers are still proud of him.

The 80s have disappeared, most of the writers from that era are more or less forgotten. If Bracewell’s work as a novelist is compared to the musical achievements of Duran Duran or Culture Club, his fellow travellers in a decade that style forgot don’t even rank alongside the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Alan specifically mentioned John Wilde in relation to this. A hack like Wilde could only be compared to a band that never made it, a name that meant nothing. Having travelled in Bracewell’s wake, the best a scribbler like Wilde could hope for was an afterlife interviewing burnt-out celebrities, a freelance fantasy without beginning or end. Wilde was voodooed, hexed, left trapped in the very nightmare Bracewell successfully escaped through acts of bewitchment.

Alan wanted to play a prank on Suzy. He called her from a pay phone and got himself invited to her pad. I had to round up a bunch of people Suzy knew. Suzy lived near the campus and loads of students passed her first-floor flat when they were making their way into the centre of town. Alan explained to Suzy that he’d always wanted to have sex with a woman while she leant out of a window conversing with her friends. Suzy was up for it. Alan kissed and cuddled Suzy, then took her knickers down and fingered her clit. Once the juice was really flowing, Suzy leant out of the flat to see who was in the street. I was talking to Jill beneath her living-room window. Suzy greeted us and asked us what we were doing. I explained that we were discussing Iain Sinclair’s novels and that we both thought the deliberate ambiguity in his prose had close affinities with Andy Warhol’s pop art.

Suzy was leaning out of the window, net curtains splayed down her back. I couldn’t see Alan but I knew he had Suzy’s skirt around her waist and that he was humping away. I’d arranged for a great many of Suzy’s friends to wander down the street and soon there was a crowd of 20 people talking to her. Suzy’s face was flushed and her conversation was incoherent. Suzy didn’t like Michael, the guy who lived above her because he played Bob Dylan albums late at night. Michael was in one of my classes at the university and I’d rung him before Alan and I headed our separate ways. Michael had agreed that once a crowd of us had gathered in the street, he’d go and knock on Suzy’s door. Alan whispered to Suzy that he’d deal with the caller. He walked out of the living room and into the hall. Alan adjusted his clothing, then let Michael into the flat.

Suzy didn’t know it was Michael when he took Alan’s place behind her. Michael had always fancied Suzy and was glad of a chance to fuck her. Suzy was trying to hold a conversation, so she wouldn’t have noticed the change of rhythm when the two men switched places. Alan made his way onto the street and joined our group. He looked up at Suzy, greeted her and asked if she remembered him from the previous night. Suzy did a double take, her face a mask of confusion. Then she screamed. After Suzy came Alan explained the trick he’d played on her and with Michael still humping away this provided sufficient stimulation to give my friend a second orgasm.

Suzy invited everyone up to her flat and got the guys present to gang-bang her. I was up for having an orgy but Alan restrained me. He insisted that it was Suzy’s turn to be the centre of attention and that I shouldn’t deny her this moment of glory. Alan was going through Suzy’s books, she didn’t have that many but he was impressed when he came across a copy of the Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Dick Howard and published by the Monthly Review Press. This was ‘a radical America book’ from way back when in 1971. Likewise, Alan was amused when he discovered that Suzy had a copy of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. This book incoherently documents the author’s sexual obsession with Dick Hebdige, an English academic who was an intellectual celebrity during the 80s on the strength of Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

Subculture was Hebdige’s first book and it was published in 1979, at a time when students still thought a polytechnic lecturer incredibly hip if he could talk about youth culture. Alan had to explain this to me because by the time I went to university every campus boasted its resident experts on the subject. Alan was amused that 20 years down the line Hebdige was being consumed as an object of desire rather than an expert on consumer fetishism. Alan found trends in academic publishing an endlessly absorbing topic and once he’d had his say about Hebdige, he moved on to Judith Williamson. Either then or later I argued with Alan when he insisted that the true value of I Love Dick lay in the way it exposed the misery of academic life and dished the dirt not only on Dick Hebdige but also on the likes of Felix Guattari and Toni Negri. I insisted the section on Hannah Wilke was the most useful thing in I Love Dick, although I also appreciated it as a parody of post-modern theorising. Once all the guys present had given Suzy a shafting, someone suggested we go down the pub. People began to leave, drifting off in different directions.

Alan wanted to sell some of his books, so we headed to his place on Union Grove to collect them. Alan’s flat looked pretty much as we’d left it, a mess. He started throwing books around. Making piles of first editions. Shuffling paperbacks. He kept turning over works by Jean Baudrillard as though they were trumps. He told me that he’d been rereading Bracewell because he was interested in the way psychoanalysis had transformed and retrenched 19th-century notions of characterisation and literary depth. From there he’d got onto an 80s kick. Leafing through the copy of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus at Suzy’s place hadn’t helped. Kraus was married to Sylvere Lotringer, who’d played a major role in translating, publishing and generally foisting Baudrillard on English-speaking readers during the 80s. I Love Dick was a down-market American equivalent of Baudrillard’s Cool Memories where everything was allowed to hang out, including the fact that its author doesn’t hack it as a writer of aphorisms.

According to Baudrillard everything had become transparent, obscene, there were no longer any secrets. Alan wasn’t convinced by these claims, although Baudrillard doubtlessly provided Kraus and hipster hubby Lotringer with a theoretical justification for publicising their literary gang-banging. Alan didn’t want to live after the orgy, he didn’t even want to live out the death of the orgy, for Alan the orgy of history was without beginning or end. He wanted to deconstruct deconstruction. He wanted to sacrifice sacrifice. He wanted to seduce seduction and simulate simulation. He’d been reading Girard, Bataille, Marx, Hegel, Deleuze, Lukás, Hobbes, Virilio, Zizek and Irigarary. Alan wanted to be incoherent in his incoherence. The more he read the less he enjoyed reading. Derrida had been a huge disappointment. Having scanned Derrida’s disciples, he needn’t have troubled himself with Of Grammatology. He’d digested the contents before he consumed them, and after Derrida there seemed little point in rereading Rousseau or Lévi-Strauss. The more Alan read, the less he needed to read, it was an addiction.

I glanced at the ventriloquist’s dummy sprawled across a chair and whispered his name. Alan picked up a copy of Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science by Donna Haraway and screamed as he threw it across the room. It was a big book, nearly 400 pages, and it dislodged several paperbacks from a shelf before clattering to the floor. Alan complained that he hadn’t even started reading Judith Butler, let alone Donna Haraway. He probably didn’t need to read either, since he’d devoured Sadie Plant’s Zeroes and Ones in a single sitting, then flogged it. Where would he find the time for all this reading? It seemed as if he’d never stop living (the third section of Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, edited by Mike Gane is entitled ‘I Stopped Living’; In I Love Dick, Chris Kraus claims that at the time she was stalking Hebdige he told her he hadn’t read anything for two years). Was this the revenge of the crystal? Alan didn’t know, it was all becoming too much. A French theorist like Baudrillard would be translated into English by some two-bit publisher like Semiotext(e) with minimal proofing and distribution, then before you knew it translations were spewing out from Verso, Polity, Pluto, Stanford and Routledge. Similar things had happened with Deleuze and Derrida, while Barthes and Foucault had become Penguin classics. You didn’t need to keep up with it, you wouldn’t want to keep up with it, you couldn’t keep up with it.

Sometimes I wondered if what was going on between Alan and me was an exchange of subjectivities. The occasion of my second visit to his flat was the first time I got an inkling of this. Alan’s world was becoming my world. Having read his Guattari, Alan wanted to become woman and in the process I felt like I was being transformed into a man. Why did I want to acquire all the books Alan possessed when they clearly hadn’t done him any good? All Alan had learnt from his reading were more eloquent ways of explaining that he didn’t know anything. He’d acquired cultural capital but at quite a price. It was a Faustian bargain that made no sense. It was an endless shuffling of texts and Alan was literally tripping over books in the process. There were paperbacks scattered across the floor. Alan tripped, I caught him. Alan’s desperation to rid himself of these objects and simultaneously forget the words that ran through them was steadily increasing. The work was cut out for him. It was without beginning or end and that was where I came in. An alternative reading might be that Alan wanted to disappear, that he wanted to become an object. Since Alan had no religious beliefs he was unable to make a gift of his shadow to the devil and instead attempted to foist his subjectivity on me. Alan wanted to become a machine.

Alan showed me a yellowed newspaper cutting from the Independent on Sunday dated 21 July 1996. It was headlined ‘Sinking In A Sea of Words: As academic journals proliferate, Noel Malcolm suggests dons write less, and think more’. At the end of the article a strapline acknowledged that the piece had been reprinted from the then current issue of Prospect. The gist of the essay was that academics were unable to keep up with their own specialised areas of research. Because career advancement was dependent upon publication, academics were forced to produce an endless stream of articles. The cutting suggested that on average an academic article has only five readers but didn’t make clear whether this included the editor and two referees who were a standard feature of this part of the publishing industry. Alan wasn’t even an academic and if specialists couldn’t keep up with their own area of interest what hope was there for a general reader with interests across several fields?

The books Alan wanted to sell were double-bagged in carriers, then placed into a big rucksack. Although Alan had been kicking these books around his flat, as a good consumer he understood that he had to make it look like he cared about the crap he was off-loading. We didn’t spend long at the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. Alan simply accepted the money he was offered. He didn’t haggle. Once we were out on the street he’d said the price matched his expectation. Obviously he could have done better in London. While we were in the shop I bought a copy of Stasi Slut by Anthony Bobarzynski and now we were outside I gave it to Alan as a token of my affection. We walked down to the roundabout and Alan hailed a passing cab. We paid off the cabbie at Hazlehead Park, then went in search of the maze. Alan had read about it but this was his first visit.

The maze was locked up but the wire fence had been cut at the entrance and we pushed our way through the damaged barrier. It was a complex puzzle maze and we wandered back and forth for nearly an hour before reaching the goal. The hedge which formed the walls of the maze was in good condition and once we were at the centre we couldn’t see anyone, although we could hear voices all around us in the park. I remembered the conclusion of my dream from the previous night. At that point I hadn’t recorded it in my diary. I had to be careful, dreams are precious and easily forgotten. Alan had mentioned the Hazlehead Maze the previous day. I’d never heard of it and he showed me its entry in The British Maze Guide by Adrian Fisher and Jeff Saward. Since the book lists mazes alphabetically by place, Hazlehead, being in Aberdeen, is the very first entry.

In my dream I had sex with Alan at the goal of one of Saffron Walden’s two mazes. I’d flipped through several books Alan possessed about mazes and had taken in various pieces of speculation connecting them to fertility rites. That and the rampant shagging I’d been engaged in no doubt accounted for the content of my dream. We were sitting on a park bench that had been painted green and placed at the centre of the maze. The colour alone was enough to suggest procreative rituals. I leant over Alan and fumbled with his flies. By the time I’d got his cock out of his pants it was erect. I went down on Alan, nipping playfully at his meat. I worked his length with my lips, tongue and teeth. There wasn’t anything but the bench at the goal of the maze and I had no desire to experiment with sexual variations on the damp path, so I made Alan come in my mouth.

After Alan had adjusted his clothing we walked to a bus stop and chatted while waiting to get back into town. Alan was talking about novelists who deliberately set out to change their prose style with every book they wrote. Contemporary writers who did this tended to be viewed as wilfully perverse and while they’d achieve cult status among their fellow novelists, a broad readership would often prove elusive. Lynne Tillman was a case in point. Barry Graham was an equally good illustration. Graham’s first novel Of Darkness And Light was a horror pastiche published by Bloomsbury. By the time of his third The Book Of Man he was being published by Serpent’s Tail. This parodic retelling of the life of Alexander Trocchi carried endorsements from Irvine Welsh, Dennis Cooper and Lynne Tillman on the back cover. After that, Graham moved from his native Scotland to the USA, where he got Incommunicado to put out Before, which Alan perversely read as a heterosexual parody of Dennis Cooper. Alan hadn’t read Graham’s second novel and, given the way this author switched styles and themes, he had no way of knowing what it was like.

Thanks to our absorbing literary conversation, it didn’t seem like long before we arrived at The Washington, a café on the seafront. I had egg, chips and beans. Alan hoovered up a cheese omelette with chips and peas. I drank coffee, Alan drank tea. Our tête-à-tête continued over this repast. Alan mentioned Lynne Tillman’s Motion Sickness as an example of an anti-travel book. This was the first novel she’d had published in the British Isles. It had been preceded by Absence Makes the Heart, a collection of stories dating from 1990 that caused most English literary critics to write her off as a po-mo extremist. Tillman’s first British publication came with back-cover endorsements from Harry Mathews, Gary Indiana and Edmund White. Her first novel Haunted Houses had been published in the US in 1987 with cover puffs from Kathy Acker, Edmund White, Harry Mathews and Dennis Cooper.

In 1992 Tillman published a collection of stories in the US under the title The Madame Realism Complex. This came out in the Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, the editor of this series, Chris Kraus, would later publish her own work I Love Dick as a part of this list. While Alan admired all Tillman’s work including her fourth novel No Lease on Life, he was particularly fond of Cast in Doubt. This novel featured two major characters, Horace and Helen. It was narrated by Horace, a gay man who wrote crime thrillers but hoped one day to complete a serious work. Horace might be taken as representing classicism or modernism. Helen, a young American girl who has disappeared, can be read as romanticism or post-modernism. The story is about Horace and Helen and the failure of the aesthetic formations they represent to find any point of contact. Helen is an absence in the text. It struck me that there was a feminist reading to be made of this but I said nothing. Alan paid for our food and we left the café.

We found a quiet pub with a decent selection of malts. Our plan was to make an imaginary tour of Islay by consuming whisky from each of its eight distilleries. I bought the first dram but before it was knocked back, Alan set the scene by describing a trip he’d made to the Hebrides. He began at Kennacraig, where he caught the ferry from the mainland. I was to imagine sitting on the deck with magnificent views to my left of the Kintyre peninsula, and on my right the Isle of Jura. The sun would be shining and fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky. Alan told me that it takes a little more than two hours to reach Port Ellen, a planned village of beautiful white houses laid out in 1821. The Port Ellen distillery has been closed for more than 20 years and the site is now used exclusively for malting. Fortunately, you can still buy Port Ellen whisky and Alan made me nose the malt before I drank it.

After we’d downed our first drink, Alan got up and ordered seven different malts, he brought the single shots back on a tray. The 14 glasses rattled as he placed them on our table. Alan had to be careful as he put down the drams, the whiskies had been lined up in the order we would drink them and he made sure they didn’t slide out of their assigned places. Alan told me that the Laphroaig distillery is only a few minutes’ drive from Port Ellen. I was to imagine walking from the public highway through the whitewashed distillery buildings to the sea. Laphroaig is a large distillery and from the seashore close to the visitor hospitality suite we would look across the water to the coast of Antrim, only twelve miles away. Like Port Ellen, Laphroaig has a peaty flavour but with a distinctive medicinal quality. I’d never been much of a malt drinker but Alan was converting me, I liked the fiery Islay flavours.

Our next stop was Lagavulin, just a short ride along the coast. Alan told me to imagine I was standing by the stream that runs through the distillery. By looking out onto a promontory I’d be able to see the ruins of Dunyveg Castle, the oldest parts of which dated from the 14th century. I nosed my malt then drained the glass. The amber fluid boasted an impressive heaviness, the taste was smoky and medicinal. Ardbeg was to be our last port of call on Islay’s south coast, Alan told me to think of seals sunning themselves on the rocks close by this distillery. I nosed my shot and allowed it to sit on my tongue. I conjured up a tracking shot of the wildlife attracted to the wooded coastline that stretched up past the Victorian Kildalton Castle.

Our next dram was Caol Ila. The distillery is snuggled just along the coast from Port Askaig on the Sound of Jura. To get there we had to backtrack, since there was no direct route. We sped through Port Ellen and along the A846. The peatbogs flanking this remarkably straight road play a major role in giving Islay whiskies their distinctive flavour. We didn’t stop in Bowmore, Alan said we’d return later, we simply sped on through Bridgend to Port Askaig. I was told a five-minute ferry ride to Feolin on Jura would provide me with the best view of Caol Ila. I was to picture the boat putting out, then imagine looking back at Islay and seeing the distillery just north of the ferry terminal. Once I was off the ferry, I was to climb up to the track that runs from Feolin to Inver. Looking across the Sound would provide a perfect view of the distillery with the sea shimmering in the foreground. The malt was less smoky than those from the south of Islay but still highly enjoyable.

Alan had been to Craighouse, eight or so miles from Feolin, the main settlement for Jura’s 200 inhabitants and hence home to the island’s whisky stills. However, he wasn’t a fan of the whisky produced at the Jura distillery and since it wasn’t an item on our fantasy itinerary, we simply caught the ferry back to Port Askaig. The road north to Bunnahabhain was frighteningly narrow. Alan said he would park the car in the shoreside car park close to the distillery, then we would wander north along the coast before turning west. We’d cut across the north tip of the island, a two-hour trek each way with no roads to spoil the view and hundreds of deer all around us. On the way back, we’d get a brilliant view of the distillery with the Paps of Jura dominating the landscape from across the Sound. As I nosed and then drank my Bunnahabhain I was beginning to feel tipsy.

I imagined I was falling asleep in the car as Alan doubled back through Port Askaig and Bridgend. I was tired after our long walk. The Bowmore distillery was in the centre of a planned village of the same name. Despite being on a sea loch, Bowmore is the psychogeographical – as well as the administrative – centre of Islay. A single Bowmore Legend was my seventh successive dram and my palate was shot to pieces. Alan’s imaginary journey followed its own logic, a serious whisky drinker would have concluded with the heavier malts from the south of Islay, we had started with them. Alan told me to picture doubling back once again to Bridgend, then instead of heading for Port Askaig, we’d follow the road around Loch Indaal to Bruichladdich. This is the most westerly distillery in Scotland and after I’d downed my dram, we left the pub. Alan wanted to go home alone and read. Before we parted he gave me a copy of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, saying he’d like to know what I thought of it. I made my way to King Street, had a bath and took to my bed.