Stewart Home Interview Part Three

Part 3 (of 3) of our exclusive full length interview with author Stewart Home, highlighting his non-linear fiction in recent years, conducted in November 2023 in London by linxi and CF. Full Transcript

You can find the other parts here:

• Part 1 – Neoism, Art Strike, Boot Boys, Pulp Fiction & the Historicisation of the Avant-Garde
• Part 2 – Brucesploitation, Genre Theory, Glam & Punk

Stewart Home Interview Part Three: Non-Linear Fiction, Psychedelic Bordigism & Fascist Yoga

Christoph Fringeli: Starting with Come Before Christ and Murder Love, your books saw quite a departure from your skinhead-influenced early novels. You started experimenting with different approaches to forms of anti-novels in books such as 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, Memphis Underground, The Nine Lives of Ray the Cat Jones and most recently Art School Orgy. Let’s talk about these different approaches and how they undermine literature as we know it.

Stewart Home: I guess one of the things that critics hadn’t realised with the earlier books was that I had read my way through a lot of classic modernist literature as a teenager. I mean, I’d mentioned the TV I’d see in the 70s and to be honest there wasn’t a lot on TV that I wanted to watch, so mainly it was late night kind of old material or some kind of music related stuff, old films. So I had a lot of time to read and I’d read about a book a day when I was a kid, I was a fast reader.

So as I got older people would kind of give me different books. When you went to punk gigs you’d meet some really groovy but old girl or woman, you know, who’d be like 22 or something, and you’d be thinking, wow that’s so old but she’s kind of groovy, who’d think you were intelligent and so kind of give you Foucault or Nietzsche or some other bizarre thing to read. Obviously I’d read through William Burroughs, Nouveau Roman, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarrault. Alan Robbe-Grillet…

I’ve mentioned, Beckett, Joyce. I’d read Ulysses. I don’t think I ever read the whole of Finnegan’s Wake but I did read the whole of Ulysses among others. Henry James, you know, everything – because you just kind of read your way through stuff. Burroughs was an influence, Trocchi, all those things had an impact on me and had influenced the earlier work but people only saw the kind of input from the pulp style of things which I also loved.

I loved a lot of pulp horror, all sorts of pulp writing, pulp detective fiction.

With Slow Death, I kind of felt I’d perfected the style I was trying to do using the New English Library youth culture novels. Pure Mania I didn’t write about skinheads, that’s more of a punk book, but the next all had skinheads and I just kind of got fed up with the critics saying that, you know, I was doing this thing which wasn’t actually what I was doing, trying to write pulp fiction. Which was never what I was trying to do. So I decided to write a non-linear novel to kind of show where I was coming from.

Come Before Christ and Murder Love (1997)

In some ways you could see it as a backwards step because I’d had this notion of postmodern simulation of the pulp plot as well as the kind of pulp prose but it was interesting to write a non-linear novel in the first person. So that’s what I did and using a lot of knowledge of parts of London, switching between Greenwich and Spitalfields.

I always like a humorous device to bring the book forward. So I had this idea of a character with multiple personalities whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm which of course meant there had to be a lot of sex in the book and the different personalities would have different tastes and things. I thought Atari Teenage Riot were great but in one personality the character would like Atari Teenage Riot but then he’d have sex and Atari Teenage Riot would be on his hi-fi system and he’d be thinking, oh this is terrible because he must have a different character and thought Atari Teenage Riot were absolutely terrible. And then I got a reaction from a few people, why don’t you like Atari Teenage Riot?

I do but you know the character, when he’s in one character he’s a schizophrenic character, he likes them, when he’s in another he doesn’t. It’s not my opinion, it’s the opinion of the schizophrenic character!

But anyway, having done this thing where there’s a lot of local history about specific parts of London as well where the narrator has lairs or pads or whatever or turns up frequently, particularly Greenwich.

I handed it in to Serpent’s Tail who were my publisher at the time and Pete Ayrten who has very great taste in highbrow literature, you might not always like what he did early on in euro translation, but the owner of the publisher really knew his onions when it came to those kind of contemporary euro modernist to post-modernist books and he loved the book, in fact he loved it a lot more than my earlier writing and hurried it out before Blowjob which was written a long time before.

But the editor he assigned me who mainly did his detective fiction couldn’t stand the book and told me that I needed to rewrite it in the third person because with the schizophrenic character it was impossible to follow what was going on when it was written in the first person.

This again was a switch from the earlier books because they were all written in third person, which when you’re learning to write is much easier to use because you’re not restricted to the perspective of one person.

But having a schizophrenic personality is a kind of way around that – writing in the first person but not having all the restrictions of it. But anyway, the editor hated the book and said it didn’t make sense. Fortunately his boss got what the book was about totally and told him no, this is perfectly fine, this is a good book.

So it came out as intended and I was very happy about it and lo and behold I got my first reviews suggesting that Alain Robbe-Grillet must be an influence on my writing which had been the case from the beginning – but I suppose it wasn’t so obvious. And I guess you do something, you try and work around with it and then you try different things to move it around.

I don’t remember in which order all the different books came out necessarily, but they weren’t published in the same order they were written which confuses critics sometimes and readers, general readers. But say with Cunt I just did a kind of parody of a picaresque novel, a kind of classic novel form but contemporary with a lot of sex. Serpent’s Tale had wanted to do that but wanted me to change the title, I didn’t want to change the title so it couldn’t be published by them so it ended up coming out with Do Not and I started switching around publishers a lot.

Memphis Underground (2007)

With Memphis Underground I wanted to make the first 30 pages like a parody of a really tedious piece of contemporary literature and then switch into what I was doing, so that’s what I did which made me put people off at the beginning.

69 Things to Do with Dead Princess (2002)

With 69 Things to Do with Dead Princess I had the title to begin with because when Princess Di died I was being asked by Attack Books have you got any good titles for stuff and I said well actually I thought it would be great to do 69 Things to Do with Dead Princess, like you had 101 Things to Do with Dead Cat but I’m not really sure of the plot. But then I was going down to see John Key in Clapham, I was living in a council flat in Shoreditch so I’m getting on the 35 bus and I just grabbed a book to read while I was going down on the bus and I happened to grab Anne Quinn’s Berg which I’d read when I was in a band called Basic Essentials. The manager Dave Tiffin loved it. I was a guitar player and I was this 18 year old kid who was interested in Burroughs and Beckett and all this stuff so he’d always buy cheap second hand books when he saw them and give them to me.

Berg by Anne Quinn was one of those books which I loved when I first read it and I hadn’t looked at it for years and when I read it on the bus going to see John who’s not, again not necessarily the author you’d associate with 69 Things to Do with Dead Princess, I thought wow I could yeah, I could reuse this, the beginning of this is fantastic but let’s move it to Aberdeen which is another town which was a big beach town in the 60s until people got holidays in Spain and stuff.

People from Scotland used to go to Aberdeen and I knew the beach and I knew all the stone circles around there and I can use all that material and make this non-linear book so in some ways just as I use Slow Death to perfect what I’ve done in the first four novels, I used Dead Princess to try and perfect what I’ve been doing in Come Before Christ and Murder Love. I could write a lot about the stone circles and I was also interested in switching between, I’d switch more to using first person narrative but also in terms of gender I wanted to write as a female not just as a male, not just from a male perspective, so I had a female character.

I didn’t think I could do the Aberdeen accent and kind of vocabulary which is known as Doric and they have all these weird phrases you don’t hear anywhere else in the UK. You know like a little kid who’s being a bit naughty with his granny it might be you wee nickum, you wee limmer and all this. I wouldn’t even try and attempt to do the accent so I needed to make the character an English student at Aberdeen University, you know from England rather than necessarily an English student because I didn’t think I was capable of dealing proficiently with the Aberdeen accent although I was familiar with it.

So it was great to set up a book in Aberdeen because again it was an ignored location, to use a lot of stuff about stone circles, to have the main character investigating whether a conspiracy theory about Princess Di’s body being taken around the stone circles in a occult ritual was true.

Which was kind of repeated when the Queen Elizabeth’s body was driven from Balmoral through parts of Scotland after her death which I hadn’t thought was going to happen – but when it happened it was like this thing of, oh I should have realised that when I wrote that book.

The main character, the narrator, meets an older man and discusses all these theories with him and goes to the stone circles and has sex and they also take a weighted ventriloquist dummy with them which is a feature of Anne Quinn’s Berg to test whether you could get the body of Princess Di to these various places and in one chapter the narrator sleeps in so the dummy takes over the narration for a chapter.

You know just having fun with all these things but also writing about a lot of these stone circles, I mean there’s the biggest concentration of stone circles in the world in Aberdeenshire and although they’re on a much smaller scale than say Avery or Stonehenge, a lot of them are really beautiful and in really incredible ambient places. So that was what I was doing with that book.

The Nine Lives of Ray the Cat Jones (2014)

The Nine Lives of Ray the Cat Jones was not a book I intended to write but a writer I’d known had written a kind of potboiler hack book to make money on great prison escapes and I have a relative, my first cousin once removed or my mother’s first cousin, there’s a lot of criminals in my family and he is the most famous of them so if you read books about crime in London in the 50s and 60s he turns up and he had an interesting story but he escaped from Pentonville Prison, I’d never tracked down the true story but Mad Frankie Fraser had this insane version of it where he kind of jumped off the wall and injured himself and fell through a skylight and dragged himself across railway tracks and was incredibly badly injured but still managed to escape and go on the run for a long time.

My family is originally from Ireland via Wales so they’re kind of Welsh-Irish, by this time identifying as Welsh because they came over in the 19th century and a lot of the more successful criminal elements came to London so there’s one of my mum’s uncles and also Ray the Cat Jones’ uncle was a gangster called Dinny Callaghan based in West London so obviously he had the family support network to stay on the run around London.

This was before criminals when they escaped went to the Costa del Sol but I just thought the story of his escape was utter bullshit and I said to my friend who’d written this kind of clippings potboiler, why didn’t you find out what the real story was? And he said well how do you do that and I thought you’re writing these non-fiction books what do you mean how do you do that? You go to the British Library, in the old days you’d guess a date from when the thing took place, you’d look through the newspapers until you found it. This escape from Pentonville would have been a big deal, it would have been in the newspapers. By this time it was quite easy because you had the digitised version so you just put in names until you found it and I went to the British Library and within probably 30 seconds I’d found the story.

He’d got over the wall without injuring himself and got away and so therefore I wanted to set the record straight to a certain extent. There were a lot of stories about him which I didn’t know whether they were true or not, so I spent a certain amount of time looking to find the truth of the stories. If it took too long because I’d already done a book on my mother, Tainted Love, and spent a lot more time looking into her. I knew that people in my family used false names, changed their names around, altered their date of birth on different documents and it wasn’t always easy to get to the truth, although if you persisted it often was possible.

I wasn’t going to spend a huge amount of time on Ray Jones trying to find the truth having spent a lot more time trying to find the truth about my mother. So, you know, I wrote that book and I read hundreds of books about both true crime and crime fiction to get the style and I wrote the book as a piece of fiction because I couldn’t verify all the material.

Even from the newspaper account you can’t be certain it’s true but it certainly looks more likely to be true than the kind of souped up version by Mad Frankie Fraser who’s a kind of celebrity criminal in London that came out later.

So that was written in a fairly straightforward kind of novelistic autobiographical style as if I was Ray the Cat Jones and again I think it was a book that people weren’t expecting from me because I was just changing what I was doing and then the most recent book, Art School Orgy, goes back in some ways to the earlier books with this insane amount of sex. Where I’ve spent two years probably researching Ray the Cat Jones and certain facts, you know, it took me months to find out because I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.

I needed to know, for example, why Ray didn’t get extra time when he escaped from Pentonville and that was all down to the fact that the law to do with prison escapes was that he got over the wall on a ladder that had been left out. If he’d turned a key to get out of a lock or threatened a prison guard that would be escape from prison and would have been an offence which would create more time. But because all he did was run up a ladder that had been left there and jump over a wall, he didn’t turn a lock, he didn’t break anything, he didn’t threaten anyone. So what he’d done was a civil and not criminal offence which means he could be punished within the prison but not actually have time added to his sentence as a criminal. So it was all these kind of little details that took a lot of time to sort out.

Art School Orgy (2023)

With Art School Orgy I just wanted to have some fun. It started as a kind of joke because I was teaching at Reading, I was teaching a term of art writing to fine art students. I much more enjoy teaching writing to art students than to literary students because art students have a much more open notion of what they can do and are less constrained by academic categories. And I was talking about how you can take material and plagiarise it and rewrite it. There’s a famous book in English called Tom Brown’s School Days and the follow up Tom Brown at Oxford isn’t so well known.

But I took that and rewrote it into the life of David Hockney at the Royal College of Art with a lot of BDSM and insane sex within it. So it was this idea of you could create this historical novel, sort of, without actually paying too much attention to the true history. So that was an attack on the obsession of correct detail in historical novelling. In the book about Ray Jones I did want to get the detail correct as far as possible and spend a lot of time on it. In Art School Orgy about David Hockney I really didn’t care and deliberately introduced anachronisms.

I refer to sex toys that didn’t exist at the time, for example. I mean, I know this is wrong. So that was to show that you can play with fiction and that you can write a… I mean, The Nine Lives of Ray Jones is in many ways a historical novel and a kind of correctly done one. It goes from the 30s through to the near present.

Whereas with Art School Orgy, which is more a kind of late 50s, early 60s historical novel, I really didn’t care about getting things correct. I just had fun with it and deliberately got some things incorrect. So that was another way of undermining literature, I guess. And also, with Ray Jones, it was a much more conventional book. It’s probably the most conventional book I’ve written. But, you know, it was making the point that you could have a class-conscious criminal.

CF: At this point it was time to wrap up the interview. There was just one big question left. What is psychedelic Bordigism?

SH: Well, psychedelic Bordigism is easy. It’s LSD plus voodoo equals communism. That’s where we’re going to: a post-capitalist society, a world of ever-growing ecstasy!

CF: And what are you working on right now?

SH: And what am I working on now? Well, strangely, I’ve been sitting like this for the entire interview. I am actually writing a book on Yoga, showing how that in all probability originated in California at the turn of the 20th century, and looking at a lot of the kind of occult bullshit in yoga and showing how it isn’t real, and also showing how yoga is connected not just to Indian nationalism, which is an important component once a lot of Western kind of Ling, Scandinavian primitive gymnastics had been taken up by Indians, but also a lot of Occidental yogis, people like Francis Yates Brown, Captain Fuller, who were very important in the early propagation of yoga, were actual die-in-the-war fascists, and how that pops up again with all the kind of COVID and post-COVID yoga kind of conspiracy theories, QAnon, pro-Trump.

The book will look at the historical roots of that and how you’re better off doing Pilates, lifting weights, or doing all sorts of other things than doing yoga.

THE END

• Transcript of Part One of the interview with Stewart Home
• Transcript of Part Two of the interview
• Articles by Stewart Home on datacide-magazine.com
• Stewart’s Youtube channel
• Stewart Home Society
• Wikipedia

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