Going Dutch with German Writers (2): Anecdotes involving Interpol

Who?

Francis Nenik has published two books, XO and Ach, bald crashen die Entrechteten furchtlos gemeingefährliche hoheitliche Institutionen, jagen kriegserfahrene Leutnants mit Nachtsichtgeräten oder parlieren querbeet Russisch, Swahili, Türkisch und Vietnamesisch, während Xantippe Yamswurzeln züchtet. He took second place in last year’s Edit essay competition and the new issue of Edit features a story by him. XO is a collection of about 400 loose sheets in a cardboard box; all Francis Nenik’s texts are also available for free online, via the quandary novelists.

Where? Killiwilly Irish Pub, Leipzig

What? Francis drank Guinness and Strongbow. I stuck to Wernesgrüner Pilsener.

What did we talk about?

We started off talking about Francis Nenik. It’s a pseudonym, by the way. I don’t know his real name but he told me he writes under various different pseudonyms; the idea was to have so many that he forgot which names were his. It hasn’t worked yet though. So I just didn’t address him by name and he pretended to be called Francis all evening. This was the first time he’s ever met up with anyone from the literary business, he said. He’s never appeared in public under his pseudonym, never done a reading from his books. The launches and events take place without him – he’s shy, he said, and other people are much better at reading than him. And there are so many more important things in his life anyway – literature comes in maybe at fifth place, after his daughter, his friends, paying the rent, his family, his skateboard – so maybe sixth place. Wasn’t it the same for me? Out loud, I supposed it was. I’m not sure whether I was telling the truth or not. I didn’t make a list.

Francis was quite forthcoming about himself, or about whoever he is, or about whoever he wants us to think he is. How did he come to start writing, I asked him at the sober end of the evening, and the ensuing story was long. His first job was as a professional golfer before he had a back injury and had to change career. Later in the evening there were some anecdotes about the early days of professional golf in post-89 East Germany, which I can’t remember very well but they involved Interpol. He comes from a tiny village near Leipzig, where he still spends a lot of time working on the farm. He likes to make things with his hands. Like tractors. He still likes sports. He told me the name of the martial arts thing he does and I instantly forgot it. He likes hanging out with friends, skateboarding. Anyway, then he went to university and studied various things – Latin, classical archaeology, something else, it later transpired – and then it was suggested to him that he embark on an academic career but he didn’t want to. He began writing for his daughter – one children’s book a year. It’s the village that keeps him grounded, he said, because nobody there cares about writing. Most people he knows don’t know he writes; there are people in the village who are illiterate and they get by perfectly well with a little help. Later on he used the word schizophrenic to describe the situation. It’s only now that I’m wondering how telling that was. Yet he did seem fairly grounded, or perhaps fairly persuasive.

We talked a bit about the literary business. Francis said he doesn’t read much – ah! like Finn-Ole Heinrich, I said, and he nodded and said he’d heard of him. Maybe he was bluffing. I told him about how Finn did this project where he just travelled round the country on trains, making videos of random people he met, and I said I thought that was a good way to collect up enough experiences to have something to write about. Francis talked about how he’d heard about the creative writing school in Leipzig – I think it must have been on the radio – and the students said their texts were picked to pieces in class, and they thought that was a good thing. Neither of us liked that idea very much. Why not just admire each others’ work, why do writers have to suffer such indignities? Francis doesn’t feel the need for his writing to be perfect, I think he said, because he doesn’t take it all that seriously. I’m not sure I believed him. I talked about envy, how I battle with envy of other translators, no matter how satisfied I am with the books I’m working on myself. Francis said he doesn’t have that problem. I believed him. I felt slightly foolish.

He reads very little, he said. But he seems to go to libraries and get fixations with things – Thomas Pynchon made him laugh out loud and get chucked out of the library the other day, apparently. And he discovered B.S. Johnson in a library. Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 were on the shelves – volume 6 was in a special room guarded by machine guns because it was a novel in a box. Hence XO. None of the German reviewers seemed to have picked up on that; they quoted all sorts of alleged inspirations of which he was entirely unaware, said Francis, but he didn’t mind. Now his book is in the machine-gun room at libraries (he looked proud). He saw it in one library catalogue but it said it had been bound. He rang them up, he said, and complained. He pretended to be from the publishing company.

Things got a little meta.

After our second round of beers we started talking about politics. I talked about ideologies as intellectual corsets – making it easier to get on with life (so not actually much like a corset now I come to think of it, sober) because you don’t have to think everything through, you just think, well, what would Marx have to say about it? Which is comforting but ultimately not terribly useful if you want to broaden the mind. Francis talked about student politics and about trying to make a difference. About how if you think about it, a lot of things you do if you’re a political activist are only ever a drop in the ocean, but you have to do them anyway or things will never change. You can help a hundred Chinese children who’ve lost their parents to AIDS and that won’t solve the overriding problems – but it will help those hundred children to get an education, which we agreed was the route to success in the emerging economies. Obviously we didn’t use the term “emerging economies”. That’s why he wrote his Bradley Manning piece – he couldn’t afford a train ticket to the demo in Berlin so why not do his bit in a different way.

We were getting a little self-righteous and maudlin. I was getting a bit quieter. When the Berlin Wall came down, Francis said, it turned a lot of people’s lives upside down. There were Russian teachers who were no longer in demand, so they retrained as French teachers and they only had a year’s head-start on their pupils. And there were academics who lost any kind of footing because they only knew about one thing and that was no longer relevant. Sad, I said. I was feeling rather less articulate by this point. Sad, but it wasn’t tragic, I said, because it wasn’t their own fault. What I meant was that it wasn’t a case of a fall from a great height caused by hubris, as defined by Aristotle, but I couldn’t quite put that into words.

What was worse, though, Francis continued unabashed – Francis Nenik can take more drink than I can – was what happened to dissident writers in Communist states. That was brutal. Not tragic or sad, I think I muttered. No, it was brutal. Daniil Kharms got put into prison in Leningrad and was crushed between two states – the Wehrmacht was attacking and the Soviets let the political prisoners starve to death during the siege. That was why he wanted to write about Ivan Blatny – the Czech poet in his award-winning essay – because he lost his sanity in exile in England. Brutal. And there were so many similarities with the English poet Nicholas Moore that he just had to put the two of them together. It was brutal. I ventured the opinion, supported by hand gestures, that Blatny’s life was less of a linear decline than Moore’s, because for a while it was really, really awful – in a mental institution miles from home, the staff throwing away his poetry – and then people helped him and he managed to write again. Whereas Moore just wrote and wrote and wrote and never really got published after his heyday. Francis smiled indulgently, suggesting if I liked to think so, well, I should go ahead and think so. Moore was like those Russian teachers, he said – or maybe I just think he said it, maybe it would just be a neat twist to the conversation or maybe the notes I made later are very muddled – it wasn’t his fault. His wife left him, that can happen to anyone, and then things went downhill. I nodded. But neither of them ever gave up. Neither ever gave up writing. No, they both carried on writing until they died. Yes. And that was a good thing.

At around about this point things got a little meta. We’d finished our third round of drinks and neither of us wanted any more. Or I didn’t want any more and Francis wanted to go out dancing. So we were wrapping things up and I told him I wasn’t sure if I believed everything he’d said. He’d told me beforehand that I’d recognise him by his red jacket when we met – there are no photos of Francis Nenik online – and there was a woman in a red jacket on the tram on my way, and I’d wondered whether Francis Nenik might be a woman. I’d told him that at the beginning, actually, but we returned to the subject. I mean, professional golf? Come on. No, he said, it was all true. And I was welcome to write whatever I liked; he didn’t want to check it. But actually he was meeting his second literary person the next evening: Alea Torik. I talked about how I’d felt rather deceived by Alea Torik; how Alea Torik had taken things a little too far by intervening in people’s (or my) Facebook lives in an attempt to prove a point. I said if I’d have accepted Alea Torik’s friend request I’d be feeling rather violated now for having taken her at face value. Francis Nenik insisted he wasn’t a fictional character. He was just the guy in the grey sweatshirt. I decided to take him at face value and be damned. I’m still not sure how genuine his comments about not reading are though.

Hangover: Yes and no. I didn’t stay out horribly late and when I got up in the morning I thought it was going to be a one-Alka Seltzer kind of hangover, and acted accordingly. But as the day went on my mood deteriorated significantly until there was nothing for it but to take an afternoon nap. That helped.