Thomas Morris has just published his first collection of short stories, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing with Faber and Faber. Last year, he commissioned and edited Dubliners 100, a collection that comprised 15 ‘cover stories’ of Joyce’s original stories from Dubliners. He edits The Stinging Fly magazine, a space for new Irish and international short writing. He is from Caerphilly, and as his book’s author bio says, he ‘was educated solely through the Welsh language until the age of 18’, although this gives the somewhat misleading impression that it has been a great achievement for him to write a book in English. Instead, the book is an achievement in itself (even for a native speaker). Described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a beguiling and spellbinding collection’ and by the Irish Times as ‘fresh’ and ‘at times brilliant’, the book’s interwoven tales of Caerphilly locals are funny, sad, and really very good.
Disclaimer: Thomas Morris is also my ex. Ordinarily, writing publicly about one’s exes is probably best avoided. However, as Thomas recently wrote a nice piece in the Irish Times about his writing habits, which detailed ejecting me from his home on a cold rainy night at 1am so that he could write undisturbed (with my bike lights broken – a detail unfairly omitted from the original article), all seems fair.
Let’s start at the very start (apart from the copyright page). There’s a disclaimer: ‘These stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to real life is purely inevitable.’ I can confirm there are definitely details, characteristics and even entire characters nicked from real life, which seems inevitable in a book so filled with minute observational writing. How does that process work? When you’re writing a character or a scene, do you find yourself naturally adding little details you’ve been storing up? Does it ever go the other way round, so that you’re basically writing someone you know but have to change enough so that they don’t get angry?
Firstly, I think a lot writers can be dishonest about the source material for their work. ‘Oh, I just make it all up,’ – as if they’re just creating characters ex nihilo, and that it has no bearing on real life. Or maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But I do take an awful lot from ‘real life’, so to speak. I’m not sure where else you’re meant to find the stuff that’s real and feels authentic. But, if I’m being honest, rather than stealing from all friends and family, I draw a lot from my own experiences. I’d still feel odd stealing wholesale from someone else’s life. But there are little things: the way someone moves, or the way their leg shakes when they’re nervous or a particular feeling that someone has admitted to having. I keep using the word feeling when I talk about the book and I’m coming to realise that that’s what I’m most interested in – attempting to express particular emotional states at particular moments in people’s lives. And it’s going after those feelings, trying to pin them down, that ended up taking it beyond realism in some instances. I’m more interested in emotional realism than social realism per se.
That’s an interesting way of describing it, because it really does feel like the stories follow the logic of feelings – and that makes them unrelentingly realistic sometimes, hyperrealistic at others, and occasionally just weird.
It’s back to that idea of trying to capture what it’s like to be inside a human body and sometimes experiences can be so intense, so odd, that you have to leap over the fence in order to make it feel real. On the one hand, the attempt is purely personal – I want to get back to a particular painful moment (which is, often it seems, tied to a kind of head-loneliness). I think I just arrived at the point where I realised the more particular and minute you go, the better chance you have of that experience being one that someone else will understand and perhaps relate to.
The way that affects emotional relatability or distance for the reader is interesting. A lot of the more surreal or absurd elements aren’t necessarily in the writing itself, but in the characters doing or imagining seemingly batshit crazy things without blinking an eyelid – I’m thinking here of the narrator in ‘17’ setting up his women-wrestling booth by the castle, or the woman peeling her face off in ‘Fugue’, and so on. These characters don’t know what they’re doing, but a lot of the time the reader doesn’t either – they don’t or can’t explain themselves to us. If the book is driven by the internal logic of feelings, is that necessarily a sort of erratic logic? And does it have to be unknowable?
I do like those moments in my own life when I’ve done one thing, which has led to another, and before I know it, I’m eight links down the chain, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ With ‘17’, this particular scene isn’t in the story – but I always imagine him after a particular intense bout [of wrestling], beaming smiling, sweat dripping off his face, and then just kinda catching himself half-thinking, ‘Ah yeah…’. One of the greatest odd moments in film, for example, is the end of The Graduate when they’re sitting on bus having bailed from the wedding and they’ve run on and it’s all exciting and now they’re sitting there, side-by-side and it’s really difficult to read their expressions or to pinpoint the exact intended mood of the scene but there’s an overriding sense of them having got carried away, and now they’re at a pause and are like, ‘right, fuck, what now?’
I remember Sean O’Reilly once saying that motivation in fiction can be a dishonest thing. When you’re sitting in a bar, and you look around the room, can you actually know what people are thinking? Now you can take that in a whole manner of directions with writing but it posed an interesting question for me, this idea of what happens if you just have characters behave and allow their psychology to become behaviour. In that way the reader just had to try and deduce the motivation in the same way that we all have to deduce each other’s motivations day to day. It’s a convention of film and theatre, I suppose, where there’s less immediate access to the interiority of characters. But the advantage of fiction is that you can go deeply interior when you want. And when you’re writing, you can play with those ideas of distance – when to go close in on a feeling, and when to pan back.
Those absurd or meta-realistic moments seem important to you. And the epigraphs you chose are by Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan, writers we normally think of as really explicitly absurdist, countercultural or ’experimental’. It’s silly to class things in terms of genre anyway, and as we’ve mentioned there are lots of strange surreal moments in your collection, but the book is still predominantly grounded in realistic details and day-to-day life. And it’s been read by others as realistic or even restrained, notably by your own mother who felt you had ‘too light a touch’ if I remember correctly.
I’ve got such a great quote for this…
You can see where I’m going. If it’s only emotional logic holding it together, why are you still holding onto realistic models so much? Do you see yourself being more consciously experimental in other works?
Firstly, this quote from Barthelme is good: ‘That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, This one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of mind. There are only realists.’ But, to answer your question, yes, I feel a temptation to write something a lot less based in the grounded day-to-day stuff. But I’m between two places on this. On the one side you have all the new Americans like Ben Marcus wanting to create these ‘engines’ and ‘machines’ that deliver you to a feeling at the end. The language around all this is appealing at first. But I was reading a Keith Ridgway story the other day, the first in his collection Standard Time, and I was just blown away because he seems to have found a way to just plug you straight into a feeling. He doesn’t feel the need to create these elaborate machines that you have to get through in order to come out the other side feeling a certain way. Yet I say all this without having read a Ben Marcus story. What’s my resistance? Jealousy probably.
On these schools of writing… Given The Stinging Fly, could it be a bad thing for you to be so immersed in the world of stories and literature in general? I’m thinking of it a bit in the sense of the ‘difficult second album’, where a band gets popular based on its first album of songs about stuff and then loses everybody by writing a second album that’s mostly about being a band because that’s their life now. Not that I think you’ll start writing meta-things about stories themselves. But craft can take over, too, can’t it? I saw another little aphorism you wrote somewhere recently: ‘If you only allow other stories to inform your stories, you’ll create a hall of empty mirrors.’
Absolutely. It’s a big fear. I literally spend every day thinking and talking about short stories. It’s not particularly healthy. And the thing is – I’m not all that obsessed with books. There are writers I love and stories I love. But there are a lot of things I’d rather do than read a book that’s only okay. But the hall of mirrors is something I see a lot with younger writers. And you don’t want to be patronising and say, ‘Go out, live a little!” Because, like, I’m 29, what do I know? But when I look at the stories in the collection, how I wrote them, where the best bits come from… it’s all from having done things. Don’t get me wrong – the craft and the consideration of form, etc, is absolutely essential. But writing is a form of plunging, and you need things to plunge from. Additionally, you need to live a full life, because, well, what would be the point not doing that? And I mean a good life as something distinct from the writing, and not for the sole purpose of living a full life so as to be able to take stuff from it – you inevitably find yourself in a self-conscious bind then. But yes, I’ve become very interested in the idea of joy.
The book itself can come off as a bit depressing, in its litany of all the small, cruel ordinary ways life makes us sad and tired. But there are also bits of absolute hope and joy, of buzzing and pulsing with possibility and sheer fascination at Life and Other People and Oneself and Things Happening. Was there a conscious need to brighten up the stories? To give the reader something? Normally those bits of hope are still quashed at some stage in your stories.
I think the idea of hope is something that came to me as I got a bit more mature. I slowly grew the willingness to risk being called sentimental… I realised that it’s dishonest to the people I know — and the experiences I’ve had — to just have everything grey and bleak. I think a lot about something Julian Barnes said about Frank O’Connor’s writing: There are two ways to see things – 1. Life is beautiful, but it is depressing, isn’t it? or 2. Life is depressing, but it is beautiful, isn’t it?
Hope is a strange thing in fiction, though. When you read Amazon reviews, you see so many readers complaining about the lack of hope in a writer’s work and it had never been something I was even conscious of when I read. I just liked something, or I didn’t; I don’t think hope came into it. But then you look at Camus’ The Outsider, those final pages, the book is so bleak, so unrelenting, but Camus somehow finds something magisterial in it all, and it feels utterly genuine, and not at all tagged on. Reading George Saunders, who I really like, I sometimes get the sense that the stories are a kind of game for him: Let’s see how far down I can take this character, and then see if I can get them out of the hole in the last paragraph. He’s a propagandist for hope, I think. I once heard Ali Smith talking about Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’, where the nihilism is so, so strong, ‘Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name, give us our daily nada’, and so on. The thing she said was this: even if the content of the story doesn’t offer hope; the way Hemingway has written it – the artistry of the story itself – is a reason to be hopeful. I’m not saying I’m like Hemingway! But it was interesting to me that a story as object could have a hope index distinct from what happens in the story itself.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris is out now, published by Faber and Faber.
Words: Gill Moore
Photos: Sarah Davis-Goff
