The Guide August 2004
BLAKE MORRISON is a cool poet. A poet, author, critic, editor, journalist and novelist he's a literary man of the people who likes Charlton (football) and Chaucer (writer) in equal measure. He lives in Blackheath (the posh end) but is setting his new novel in Lewisham and Thamesmead.
He has a PhD in English Lit from University College London, an honorary doctorate from both Greenwich and Bradford, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a former chair of the Poetry Book society, a council member of the Poetry Society, a member of the literature panel of the Arts Council, was literary editor for the Observer and the Independent on Sunday and is professor of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths College in Lewisham although he prefers to ignore teaching literary theory in favour of encouraging students to, “make writing part of your life”. Phew - much more of that and he'd be Germaine Greer.
But Germaine he is not. Blake, 53, is cool, like the name, with a black open-neck shirt and rumpled white jacket, dark hair swept up like a cockerel's crest fades to silver at the sides. As a teacher at Goldsmiths he will be hopelessly unaware (or perhaps helplessly aware) that half his students have crushes on him.
I'm a writer
He calls himself, "A writer, because I m really an ex-poet you know. I've written a lot more prose over the last 10 years than I have poetry. And l do some journalism but I don't…" He leaves that open - journalism (among others he writes for The Guardian) is bread and butter but his main work is writing, doing his own thing. And that thing has made him one of Britain's most versatile writers today.
His first book, published in 1980, was his PhD thesis on English poetry from the 1950s. After that came two books of poems, a children's book and other editing projects (plus his day jobs in newspapers) kept him busy until he was 40. Then his father died and he published the book he is most well known for, And when did you last see your father?
Written following the death of his father from cancer it is an emotionally honest account of his father's life and death. It avoids sentimentality, and became a landmark book of its type. Literary observers suggest it even launched a whole genre of confessional autobiographies and gave voice to the previously silent emotional male - think Tony Parsons et al but without any hand-wringing angst.
He doesn't necessarily see it that way: “Founding the school of confessional literature I don't agree with at all. There were always those kinds of books around and those kinds of poems around where people talk about their own life. I do think it was part of a shift towards memoirs. That memoirs used to mean grand old men … but now you could be truly unknown and the publisher would say, ‘I like that’.”
And the other thing, “that it allowed men to explore their feelings. I mean I don't really know about that, l was just exploring mine.”
The book was written in 1992 in a state of grief he says. It only took him six months to write the first draft. At the same time he was following Neil Kinnock's election bus, reporting from the frontline of that year's general election. “That did him no good whatsoever. But it did me some.”
James Bulger
Morrison's versatility makes his work hard to summarise and while his flag is nailed firmly to the life writing mast (“it’s a term that has emerged in the last 10 years or so to cover all sorts of non-fiction writing: biographical, essays, travel writing even”) he has a broad range. “I’m keen to try everything,” he says. And he can't turn work down either.
But, he says, “I’m still trying to find the right thing, you know, that's really me. I suppose that these are the books that people associate with me, the book about my dad, and the book about the Bulger case.”
That book, As If, is about the trial of the two ten-year-old boys who killed the toddler James Bulger. Other work includes a long poem about Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper ‘explaining’ the crimes he committed. His subject matter sounds very dark.
“Usually it's unhappy stuff that draws me if I’m honest,” he says.
The Bulger book came about because he was asked by the New Yorker magazine to sit in on the trial and write it up. He produced a 10,000-word article but felt he hadn't finished with it. He had not got near to understanding why they did it. The result, after four years’ work, was As If.
“I walked the route, the two miles to the railway line and there were so many points along the route where they could have been stopped in their tracks.”
He draws up a list of 10 reasons why they might have killed him. They include the chemistry between the two, their backgrounds and their feelings towards younger siblings. “The one thing l resisted was saying Evil. They were overtaken by evil and evil did it. No, I don't buy that.”
Murder, death, he says, is not interesting in itself. But what is interesting is, “family, recognizable individuals … the ordinary dynamic and how that can lead to terrible things”.
Looking for an answer as to what draws him to the darker side he adds, floundering a bit, “the quest, the idea of a search for an answer”. He doesn't really seem to know.
But he is more sure of himself when asked for the five main themes that run through his work: “Death, family, masculinity I suppose, sex, erhmm, that's only four isn't it?” The other one of course is love.
Parents
All this talk of death and darkness makes him sound like a doom and gloom merchant, but that's not the case. In his book, Things my mother never told me, which, like When did... was written after the death of a parent, this time his mother, the bulk of the book is devoted to a love affair.
His father and mother courted during the war. Both doctors, Blake's father was sent to a variety of overseas postings where his talents were wasted treating sunburn and VD while Blake's mother - an Irish woman from Kerry - worked tirelessly at an ever-increasingly senior level in British hospitals. While apart they corresponded relentlessly.
The letters survived the war and were stored meticulously by Blake's father. After his parents died, Blake used-them to write up his mother's life. The result is something magical. The initial courteous notes following a dance and a kiss evolve into a full-on love affair, broken only by occasional weeks or moments together and then a full and frank discussion on how to resolve the Issue of his mother's Catholicism, a problem for his father.
They never really did resolve it. To her it was who she was and she gave up on the issue when her own mother died. She never spoke of her family openly - Blake only discovered his mother was one of 20 children after she had died - and closed her Irish heritage off (out of shame, embarrassment, repression or habit we never quite understand) to her English family. It stayed hidden until she died.
After the war they settled In Yorkshire where Blake grew up with one sister. His father, a “cock-eyed optimist” had a permanent mistress - she even went on family days out. But her role, the dynamic, was always ignored, or at least not mentioned.
London
This stifled-but-open family atmosphere didn’t do Blake much good. He was “fantastically shy” with the opposite sex. In fact he was shy full stop. He thought the academic life would be his, never dreaming he was good enough - in talent and background - to be a full time writer. Instead he came to London to pursue his PhD in 1974. He and his wife Kathy, who he met at university, were married in 1976 and have lived in south east London since then, at four separate addresses.
“I started off In Church Terrace at the top of Belmont Hill, went to Mycenae Road then Macartney House at the top of Crooms Hill. We were in a flat there for 11 years.” He enjoyed living that side of the heath, with the park and the river in easy reach. They only moved to Blackheath when they had three children (two boys now 22 and 15, one daughter, 20) and were bursting out of their flat. They have been there 12 years.
In London he started working at the Times Literary Supplement, graduating to full time staff and the other broadsheets naturally. At the Times he started out with Lynne Truss, author of the best-selling book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. They would eat lunch together and discuss full-stops semi-colons and the great Times Style Book.
“I’m trying to take credit actually,” he jokes, about last year's publishing sensation. But for all his credentials and experience he never quite believed he was in the right place.
Ask him what work he’s most proud of and you don’t just get a fairly longish pause, you get a surprising answer. “I’m proud that I got over the hang-up that I had - that went on into my 30s and beyond really - that my family was somehow not a fit subject for literature. To actually say look, you know your mum and dad are important and interesting enough to deserve a book. Whereas I grew up thinking that books and literature are far and away from my experience, my life.”
Like his mother, who hid her background when she came to England, he hid his - “up in Yorkshire, my parents in a village, who didn’t read books” - when he came to literary London. Even football wasn’t allowed. “I felt that was something you kept quiet. As a serious writer you shouldn’t let on you like football.” That changed, and so did Blake's belief in himself, his talents and his background. He grew up, his parents died. He coped with that, wrote about it, assimilated it, lives with it. It’s what happens, it’s what you do. It’s life.
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