Sat in an Irish bar in the Welsh capital with some friends, (the type of friends that you swing arms at over thick smooth ale as you argue about the merits of magical realism or whether England should have a fifth pace bowler), one of my closest friends asked me what it was I was working on at that moment. I replied that what I really wanted to do was write the Great American Novel. For this particular friend, a drama teacher and poet, fiercely working class northerner, few comments could have turned his stomach more. Why would I want to write the Great American Novel? How could I, a Welshman of limited education, want to attempt such a thing? And most of all, how could I let myself be won over by the bulldozing megalith of Americanism? He was mortally disappointed, fittingly ashen for a dramatist, and I had to admit, the moment I had said it I wondered what on earth I had meant. I understood what the concept of the Great American Novel meant as far as what it has symbolised for generations of writers from over the pond – it is the “Holy Grail” of American letters. And I cannot deny that for all my admiration of Emyr Humphreys, Alexander Cordell and the like, their names do not spark the same resonance within me as do the names of William Faulkner or Saul Bellow. But that is not romanticism, not the same thing that made me prefer John Wayne to John Mills as a child, it is much more than a gush brought on by Hollywoodised coolness. It has something to do with scope, ambition and not a small amount to do with admiration of intellectual arrogance.
But as far as defending myself on this issue goes, I have further to go to convince people than some. As a teenager I was steeped in Kerouac, I had a third edition copy of Howl, I had a tape recording of William Carlos Williams, I had seen a beaten old copy of Pull My Daisy long before BBC Four was a self satisfied blimp in the Auntie's eye. After that I lived in the United States for some time, but as friends like to mention occasionally in attempts at joviality, my naturalisation hit a few bumps in the road and it may be some time before I see those shores again. So, I have actually been on the road, I have hitched through the South, through Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, drank scotch and milk with a huge black construction worker at a bus stop in Memphis, Tennessee; been to a strip bar in a town that consisted of two hundred antiques shops and a Hooters, and on and on and on. I have had my adventures in the land of Twain and Kerouac. So it is quite tough when trying to convince people that I have not been beaten into some romantic submissive ideal by the American bandwagon, I have not been won over by a culture defined by style over substance. My idea is infused by my experiences, but it is much more than a single cultural outreach. Besides, the Great American Novel, as far as Twain and Kerouac are concerned, is beyond me mainly due to the fact that when my grandfather fled Ireland almost a hundred years ago he went right rather than left and ended up in Liverpool rather than New York. But over the time that passed since I made that rather pompous and ridiculous statement in the Cardiff pub, it began to dawn on me that I was actually identifying an artistic pulse within me to create a work that has its heart in the same place as the work of those writers I have always admired and feared on a grand scale. The likes of Faulkner, Bellow, Updike, Greene, Dostoevskey, Conrad (only three Americans in there for a start and one of them Canadian born) were offering me an ethos of the artist as effected by his or her surroundings, a definitive product of that society. One name for this is The Great American Novel, and you can write it about the Volga as much as you can about the Mississippi. The Great American Novel, to me, is identified with true artistic intent – writing to convey humanity as the breathing manifestation of a societal concept.
On top of the fact that the concept is universal, so does the form of the concept transgress all letters. When I spoke of my ambition I was referring to Whitman, to O’Neill, to Kafka and Chekhov, I was referring to an artistic desire to represent something within me that was gifted to me by my surroundings, by the time in which I was born, the politics, the socio-economic climate and lots of other tongue-twisting ology-isms that I know little about but which effect us all.
And with such high-minded ludicrousness I came to a point that I had never really considered before. I have always been the type of reader who enjoyed the author’s life, in some circumstances, as much as I did the work. That is why my adoration of John Clare was really put into its place by Jonathan Bate’s biography, that is why Kerouac is so alluring for so many, and so on. And that is what I meant that afternoon. That not only should one write about what one knows (as is more often than not, with a yawn, the first lesson to all writers) but one should live life to the full in order to reach out with the written words. Perhaps the perfect example is that of Herman Melville whose Moby Dick is often cited as the prime example of the Great American Novel (even though we only fleeting see the edge of the American nation, and the seamen we encounter could be of almost any nationality).
Melville had little formal education, indeed was regarded as “a little slow” by his own father, and so due to family needs and his own lack of academic ambition he soon got a job as a cabin boy and sailed to Liverpool. Subsequent trips took him round cape horn and a two-year stint living with the Typee tribes of the South Pacific Islands before returning to America. His accounts of these adventures, romanticised and dramatised, made him a household name. Novels such as Redburn, Typee, Omoo, and of course Moby Dick, have marked him in history as one of the great writers of the western world. That is where I want my work to be born, in those fires and those whirlpools, not at a desk overlooking an English country garden.
It is probably important to point out that that conversation took place several years ago, and it has taken me this long to explain to myself what it was I really meant. It will take far longer, if ever, to complete that next step.