THE HOME OFFICE psychiatrist came to see me today. He said he didn’t think he would be able to recommend that I ever be released into the outside world, but if I co-operated he might get me a cell with a window. So I have agreed to write down everything I know about why I wrote my Aberystwyth books and about the voices in my head. It will be nice to have a window.
Aberystwyth and Babylon
To write about a place, you have to love it, or hate it, or do both by turns. — Raymond Chandler
I discovered two important facts at a very early age: When you say the name Aberystwyth, people laugh. Also the people of Aberystwyth eat a lot of jam and cheese sandwiches.
This second piece of information was instilled in me by my grandparents. During my years in the town I never actually noticed any real evidence to corroborate this claim, but I cling to it now out of respect for their memory, and on the grounds that it does, I feel, embody a poetic truth that transcends the limitations of that which we directly apperceive.
Aber is Welsh for ‘river mouth’ and thus Aberystwyth means mouth of the Ystwyth. By the same token, Babylon would be Aber-Euphrates in Welsh. This is not the only similarity between the two towns. Aberystwyth shares a property in common with a number of cities of the ancient world such as Troy, Gilgamesh, Shangri-La and Timbuktu; namely, it has a talismanic name. What this means is, a lot more people have heard of Aberystwyth than is decent for such a small place. A lot of them have even heard of Constitution Hill which puts the cliff at the end of the Prom in the same pantheon as Mount Olympus and Kilimanjaro. I even met a tribal elder in Borneo who had heard of Constitution Hill.
On the Similarities Between the Author and His Hero
To tell the truth, there is not much in the way of similarity. My hero is a private detective, in the classic American dime thriller tradition popularised by Raymond Chandler, who created Philip Marlowe. He is not usually called a private detective, instead he goes by a lot of other names such as Dick, Sleuth, Shamus, Peeper, Snooper, Gumshoe, P.I. etc. Marlowe lives in L.A. ( ‘A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup’). In my books the gumshoe lives in Aberystwyth. This was my radical innovation. Aberystwyth does not have all the personality of a paper cup.
Both Marlowe and my gumshoe, Louie Knight, are what literary professors call ‘motifs’. This means they are not true to life. In the real world private detectives spend their lives in steamed up cars parked at night outside suburban houses, trying to take video footage of people doing adultery. Whereas in books, the first thing the P.I. says to the prospective client is, ‘I don't do divorce.’ This is because he is the descendant of the man in the cowboy films who always had a horse with a white star on the forehead.
He drives a car with one hand whilst holding a pint of whisky with the other. He carries a gun in the glove compartment, but it is never called that. It goes by the name of Gat, Iron, Rod, or Heater. As in, ‘See if he’s carrying any iron!’ Whenever he needs to make a phone call he stops at one of the many drug stores, which, in contrast to the chemists of Aberystwyth, seem to sell everything, including whisky by the pint. Another good thing is, the girl behind the counter always falls in love with him. This romance plays out in a moral twilight zone where the cops are crooked and the gumshoe has to bend the rules to win. Usually the girl slaps his face but after a while she goes to bed with him. She also calls him a heel.
His trademark, apart from the pint of whisky in the glove compartment, and a bruise on the back of the head from being hit with a tyre iron, is the wisecrack. All snoopers crack wise. I think this is another area in which they differ from real life private detectives, but I don’t really know because I’ve never met one. Best of all, he carries the torch for the rest of us. In a fallen world of sorrow, injustice and suffering he does what no one else can. He make everything all right in the end.
And for that he charges $25 a day plus expenses.
Some characteristics that author and hero have in common:
i We never hit ladies
ii We never carry a gun
iii We are haunted by demons and drink to take away the pain
But most importantly of all, we are both consumed by a hatred of injustice born of long years childhood servitude on the school games field.
The Welsh Gulag
‘I fought a big bully in Germany in 1941.’ Scripture teacher, Ardwyn Grammar School, circa 1972
The Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn begins The Gulag Archipelago with a nice story that he read once in a magazine about a work-party of convicts, who are known in prison camp literature (and in prison camps) as ‘Zeks’. Digging in the frozen wastes of Siberia, they uncovered a lens of prehistoric ice which contained, perfectly preserved, some prehistoric fish. They were so hungry that they melted the ice and ate the fish. As a former Zek, Solzhenitsyn said he understood the hidden truth of this story.
And I did too, because for many years I was a Zek of the rugby field, the 20th century brother in suffering to the chimney sweep of the 19th century. We once found a prehistoric lens of ice under our games field. But there weren’t any fish in ours.
They say Rugby is a religion in Wales. This is because the ball is shaped like an egg, which means it is some sort of fertility rite. The aim is to make a ‘Try’ and in order to do this you have a warrior class of big boys whose job is to kill anyone who gets in their way; and they are opposed by a group of small boys who are good at lessons but not at fighting warriors. The priest wears a track suit and his vocation, as with all religions, is to prepare his charges for the bitter road of life that begins outside the school gates by teaching them the meaning of suffering.
The only way to escape being killed is to have a ‘note from your mum.’ This is a sort of magic talisman. In my novels, Louie Knight’s vocation in life as champion of the weak derives from an incident when he was 15 and watched his friend Marty sent off to die on a cross country run in a blizzard. Marty had tuberculosis and had a note from his mum, but the games teacher rejected it. This was a pivotal moment in Louie’s life and is based on a true story from my school days. Although I have embellished it: the boy had a cough and not consumption; also he didn’t die. Consumption has a more distinguished literary pedigree than mere coughs. Authors are allowed to do this, but if anyone else does it, it is called lying.
My Disembodied Voice
I wrote my books on the instructions of a disembodied voice I heard in the Philippines. I am not the first to hear a disembodied voice.
St. Patrick heard one say: Holy Boy, we are asking you to come and walk among us again.
Saul heard one say: Rise, and go into Damascus!
Dick Whittington’s said: Turn again, Whittington, Once Mayor of London!
And mine said, It’s Aberystwyth Jim, but not as we know it.
The Hunting Girls of the Philippines
This was my first time in the Philippines and people warned me about the hunting girls of Rizal Park. In particular they warned me about the sort of beautiful girl you meet in a bar who is really very wicked. First she goes back to your hotel room and makes love to you. Then in the middle of the night there will be a knock on the door. It will be her father with a policeman and they will say the girl is only fifteen and it will cost 10,000 pesos to make her older. This is known as a honey-trap.
It’s all a big lie, though. I waited for weeks in Manila and didn’t manage to fall into it once. Eventually I gave up in disgust and travelled south to the coastal town of Puerta Gallera.
There I went for a drink on a floating bar and met a beautiful girl who was crying. Her name was Mahal which is Tagalog for darling. We decided to travel to her home for the Easter Fiesta. I imagined her home as a flower-bedecked stone cottage in a village with a volcano in the distance puffing smoke into the sky. The psychiatrist told me this image was derived from the BBC natural history series Flight of the Condor, which was filmed in the South American Andes and not in the Philippines.
When we arrived at her house I discovered that she lived in a wooden crate, with some straw on top. She shared this wooden box with her mum, her little sister and two little brothers. There was no electricity, no running water and no glass anywhere. Nothing, in fact. Just three chairs and a spider. And in the trees behind the ‘house’ was a pig.
Upon my arrival her little sister took my shoes off me and went to wash them in the river. She did this every hour. This was the one aspect of stone age living that I liked.
I always thanked the little sister for this task but it made her uncomfortable, but I don’t know why. She also showed me where to make pee-pee and ooh-ooh. Pee-pee could be done with the minimum of ceremony, just about anywhere except in the house and ooh-ooh was to be done in the scrap of ground behind the hooch where the pig lived. Always take some leaves and a stick to fend off the pig, she advised me. On no account was I to let the pig eat the ooh-ooh, she told me with solemn, eight-year old mien, because next week we were going to eat the pig.
Mahal and I spent a lot of our time drinking Tanduary rum and it was thus while wandering around in a state of a psychic collapse that I heard my disembodied voice. It said: ‘It’s Aberystwyth Jim, but not as we know it.’ This threw the purposeless meanderings of my life into sharp focus. I realised I was being summoned to be a Chronicler: my task, to take the townspeople of Aberystwyth, those crazy jam-and-cheese-sandwich-loving loons, and capture them in what Nabovkov once described as the ‘zoo of words’.
As epiphanies go, it’s not great; I know. But it is all I’ve got. Can I have my window now, please?
