A drug user's guide to not writing

John Berger was your mentor, wasn't he?

Yes, in a very informal way. He doesn't teach and he's not attached to an institution. But he was the best kind of mentor -- fantastically encouraging on a personal level -- and his books were such a huge source of inspiration. He was incredibly generous and always urged me to send him stuff, and whenever I did send him anything he would be really helpful about it.

Were you modeling "Out of Sheer Rage," your book about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, after these writers' works, or was it something that happened naturally?

The first book I wrote was this unbelievably boring book about John Berger ("The Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger"), an incredibly timid, sub-academic thing. I felt that I'd failed to make any use of all the freedom that Berger had made available. It was really inappropriate to process him in that straightforward academic way. But I got all of that academic stuff out of the way.

I then wrote a novel ("The Color of Memory"), but it was a novel without a story. After that I was really interested in jazz and so there's my book "But Beautiful," which is dedicated to Berger. I was really trying to listen to music with the same intensity with which Berger looked at a painting.

By the time I came to write "Out of Sheer Rage," probably the biggest influence on my writing was myself. That is to say I got quite confident and at home in this "neither one thing or the other" realm. Before then there had been my First World War book, "The Missing of the Somme," which is another of these uncategorizable books. Also, in terms of the prose, I was very much, in "Out of Sheer Rage," under the influence of that Austrian nutter Thomas Bernhard. That's where that grinding repetition, that insistent, interminable quality came from. So, by that stage, Berger wasn't at the forefront as an influence.

And your latest book, "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It," like "Out of Sheer Rage," came out of another book that you were trying to write, but didn't.

For ages I was stuck on this idea of writing a book about the ruins of classical antiquity. I became interested in that in Rome. Two things happened: a) I couldn't seem to make any progress with the book, and b) it seemed to me that if you were going to write a book about antiquity there are only two ways to do it. One, it should be a column in a newspaper. Or, two, maybe only the ruins of that book should survive. And in keeping with that, if you were going to talk about ruins, this book's falling into ruin [might be] due to the author himself falling into some kind of ruination. So then I was in that nice state where I was able to do that thing which I'm fond of doing, which is getting several things going at the same time.

One of my favorite passages was when you describe ruins and write that you think people shouldn't try to understand what they were before. Why do you think so?

I'd become very confident in the idea of being faithful to the vagaries of my nature. When I was writing the book about the First World War, for example, however hard I tried I could never get interested in the flurry of diplomatic maneuvers that led up to the war. I had an idea then of just being faithful to the contingencies of my own experience and being quite frank about it. I became interested in antiquity, but then I found that I got really bored when I was reading about it. It seemed to me that rather than trying to deny that -- again, I see this as a Nietzschean tactic -- I would take that as the starting point and try to articulate why it is that that's not an inappropriate reaction to what you're seeing.

What that does is put the onus on me as the writer to describe as accurately and precisely what I'm really seeing. There's that lovely line of Walter Benjamin's -- I think he's quoting Goethe: "There's a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so closely with the object under scrutiny that it thereby becomes theory." I liked this idea that by looking really closely at something and articulating what you're seeing, you might come up with a whole metaphysics or theory of ruination. I felt that knowing the whole history of what had gone on in Leptis Magna, say, might have inhibited that capacity for a form of reflection which had a great degree of immediacy to it.

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