Charles Boyle interviewed by James Tookey.
In 2008, the McKitterick Prize, awarded to first novels by authors over 40, went to Jennie Walker for her novel 24 for 3. One of the first books to be published by CB Editions, a new independent press founded and headed by the poet Charles Boyle, the novella was receiving excellent reviews and selling well; however, Walker was a recluse and the award ceremony was to be her first public appearance. When she stepped up to receive her cheque, and was clearly a bloke, many assumed that her agent or publisher was accepting the award on her behalf. This was half true; in fact, Jennie Walker was Charles Boyle himself. The Evening Standard ran the headline ‘Shepherd’s Bush Author Reveals Sex Secret,’ which Boyle now has proudly framed on his living-room wall.
It is a living-room which doubles as the HQ of CB Editions, the space split into two by an overflowing bookshelf. Further books were piled high on tables, or could be seen peeping from the top of cardboard boxes, and it was clear that this living-room/office was also a stockroom. Boyle operates as commisioning editor, typesetter, designer, distributor, and publicist. As such, there is a real sense of unity in the body of work that CB Editions publishes, because their output is dictated by an individual’s taste: reading through their catalogue is like being given a suggested list of books by a cleverer, cooler friend. I sat down with Boyle to discuss his literary one-man-band.
3:AM: How did CB Editions come about?
CB: I worked for Faber & Faber from 1990 to 2005, and this was at the point when publishers suddenly realised there was this new technology, and said ‘Hey! We don’t need typesetters, we don’t need designers — we can do it all on these new machines!’ So I just happened to be at the right place at the right period to pick that up, and learnt typesetting and a certain amount of design know-how. The trouble with new technology, though, is that it feeds upon itself. It all became over-bureaucratic. By 2005, when I left, I wasn’t doing any editing at all, I was basically spending all my time filling in databases and sending things to freelancers. But after I quit I continued freelancing for them, along with a couple of other publishers, for two or three years. And then, an uncle died and left me £2000, and I thought: either this goes to the taxman, or we can do something fun with this. So that paid for 250 copies of each of the first four books CB Editions published. Typesetting was no problem because, as I’ve said, I picked that up. Covers were no problem, because, not knowing how to photoshop, I decided to do typographic covers.
3:AM: I think your covers are beautiful, but it sounds as if this was not so much from design as necessity.
CB: It was thrift as much as anything. You know, I’m not competing for the 3 for 2 table at Waterstones; I don’t have to have full-colour covers. Another thing was that, traditionally, there is always — with every single book — an argument between the author and the publisher as to what goes on the cover. I thought this was a neat way of bypassing that. I still have the issue where an author will complain that the type on the cover is greeny-blue, whereas they wanted bluey-green. But, basically, we avoid serious disagreement. The aesthetic is important: I need to have a book in mind visually — the way it looks on the page, the typeface, the cover — before I take it on.
3:AM: Do you think your preoccupation with the way words look on a page comes from being a poet?
CB: I don’t think so. I think it’s more that I enjoy books as physical objects rather than simply as texts to read. When my kids were at primary school they used to get these great homeworks: ‘Make a boat’. ‘Make a bridge’. And I really got off of on those. I remember making a working model of Tower Bridge using toilet rolls that you would turn to operate the mechanism. I also make boats inside bottles. (He indicates the mantlepiece where three intricate boats sit inside three milk bottles on their sides.) I like making objects. CB Editions is an extension of that.
3:AM: Can you tell me a little about the first books you published with CB Editions?
CB: One was some stories translated from the Polish by my vodka-drinking companion who had been telling me about them for some time — so I told him to go and translate them. Another came about because I was doing some freelance work for a place called the Literary Consultancy, which gives feedback to writers in their garretts, and there was one book I liked very much and I couldn’t see anyone mainstream publishing it. So I contaced him directly and asked to do it. And the other two were by me, under pseudonyms: Jennie Walker and Jack Robinson.
3:AM: What was the thinking behind that?
CB: Pure pragmatism, like the cover design. I didn’t have to pay author advances if I was the author. And the pseudonyms came about because I didn’t have any representation or plan, and my distribution method was to go around the independent bookshops myself, saying ‘This is a really great book, want it?’ And if it’s my name on the cover, that’s not terribly convincing.
3:AM: How would you characterise Jennie Walker and Jack Robinson as writers? Are they very different to your own voice?
CB: Oh certainly. Jennie was stumbled upon by accident. She’s only done one book, which is a short-fiction book. I started the book in male, first-person narration and was getting bored with it, and if I was bored then God help the reader. So I switched to female narration, and it was only then that I started getting interested in writing the thing, and that meant taking a female pseudonym seemed a natural thing to do. Jack does other things, more journalistic. Jennie hasn’t resurfaced, but Jack has, a couple of times. One of the things about tiny presses is you can be more indulgent. You don’t necessarily have to follow extremely long so-called ‘lead-times,’ which means you don’t have to announce what you’re publishing a year in advance, and the cover six months in advance. So at the beginning of 2009, what with the banking crisis, I was feeling a bit annoyed, and I just wrote this 60-odd page book called Recessional, which is a mixture of anger and quotations and photographs. I wrote it in February, and published it in May. That’s the kind of thing Jack does.
3:AM: The use of photography and the blurring of fact and fiction reminded me of the work of W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair, but most of all of Patrick Keiller, who has made a series of films in which the protagonist is named Robinson. Was this a conscious influence on Jack’s books?
CB: Definitely there’s an affinity with Patrick Keiller’s films. But Robinson himself is a whole genre of literature. There’s a Robinson in a Kafka novel, in a C éline novel, in Fielding, in Henry James — you name it. Everyone’s got a Robinson. He’s an old literary type, he’s been around for centuries.
3:AM: And who is he?
CB: He’s a pirate. He’s a ne’er-do-well. It wasn’t totally a premeditated decision to name Jack after Robinson, but I’m very happy for him to be part of the family.
3:AM: Did you think you would continue past those first four books?
CB: I had no intention of continuing. But I had some good breaks, which were mostly centred around the Jennie Walker book. It’s a book about cricket and infidelity, which references Samuel Beckett and I thought, this might be enjoyed by that man who does the Saturday review column in the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard. So I found out where he lived, and went and posted the novel through his letterbox, and he took the bait. A Nicholas Lezard review will send people out looking for a book. He has a real following of readers who trust his taste
3:AM: Speaking of Nicholas Lezard, he once wrote about CB Editions that you are ‘anti-everything that is wrong with contemporary publishing’. What is wrong with contemporary publishing?
CB: Ah! In the few years before I started CB Editions, when I was earning an income solely doing freelance work, copy-editing and typesetting for mainstream publishers, there were almost no books that — had I been in the privileged position of deciding what to publish and what not to — I would have said ‘We’ve really got to publish this’. Almost none. So why is that? Oh God, we could go into a whole great big thing here. There’s the economic argument, which seems to roughly go along the lines of that once upon a time mainstream publishers were able to poodle along with really quite low profit margins, and they were able to do so partly because a lot of the people who worked there were in quite socially privileged positions, so weren’t entirely dependent on their salaries for their livliehood. And then came the mergers, and takeovers, and with that the expectation of higher profit margins, and once you’ve got higher profit margins it becomes more of a risk to take on a book. So you tend to play fairly safe. If a book doesn’t sell as much as you want it to, then how on earth are you going to pay for your publicity people, and your marketing people, and your editors, and your water-coolers, and your sofas in your reception. So there developed an inbuilt conservatism. I do rant about this, but please don’t think I’m totally anti mainstream publishing as a whole. Some of them do publish some wonderful books, and get them to more people than small publishers ever could. But I do think that a lot of books are published not because they’re wonderful, but because they’re fairly safe bets. They’re books that are similar to what sold well the year before, or they are like so-and-so crossed with so-and-so.
3:AM: Do your books ever get pinched by these bigger publishers?
CB: This does happen. It happened with Jennie Walker, my cricket and infidelity book, which was taken on by Bloomsbury, and is still in print with them. And I did a poetry book with Christopher Reid, who is normally published by Faber & Faber, but he was having a tough time I think, and offered me this book, The Song of Lunch. And we did it and it was wonderful. But then a weird thing happened: someone decided this wasn’t a poetry book, it was a film script. So it ended up being made into a film with Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman for the BBC, which was a fun thing to happen for a small press. I had to call Christopher Reid, though, and say ‘This is great, but I can’t promise I have the clout to take this further, and get these books piled high on the tables of Waterstones’. And the following year Faber were going to do his collected poems, so we sold it onto them, and they are now the publisher of that book. This thing of a small press taking somebody on and then the big publishers going ‘Woah! Where did that come from?!’ and snapping it up can be really good for the authors, the most conspicuous example being Eimar McBride, whose novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing was going around for years without any interest, until a little press in Norwich called Galley Beggar took it on. It then got a lot of attention, and was hoovered up by Faber. They do that. So to say the larger presses ‘pinch’ isn’t quite fair. If you’re going to sell in the quantities that Eimar McBride does now, most of the small presses are simply not equipped to feed that amount of books into the system.
3:AM: What’s the funding situation for UK small presses these days?
CB: O.K., there a good number of smaller presses that do receive Arts Council funding, of two kinds. One, you could be on their national portfolio, meaning they guarantee you funding for either three or five years, so a press can plan ahead somewhat. The other is a different system whereby an individual project is backed. They don’t supply all the money that is needed, but it certainly goes a long way. The books of CB Editions have, so far, benefited from neither of these sources of funding. But you should understand what really small sums are involved here. If you’ve got an office with the water-coolers and the sofas, and have staff, you have to sell a heck of a lot of books to maintain that situation. I’m not paying staff, I don’t work from an office: I have almost no overheads. My expenses are printing bills and small author advances, usually around £200 against 10% royalties, sometimes a little more. Small presses don’t have big risks. If a mainstream publisher publishes a book and it doesn’t sell, it’s considered a mistake. If I publish a book and it doesn’t sell, hey, nobody’s lost their livliehood, nobody’s drowned. It was something I thought was worth doing. You see, I don’t see it as my business to sell thousands of books. It sounds a bit naive, but I see publishing as a continuation of my reading and writing. They blur into one another. I am just sharing what I enthuse about.
3:AM: Do you see CB Editions as part of a literary ‘scene’ in London?
CB: In a way, yes. One of things I’m proudest of is setting up the Poetry Book Fair in London in 2011. In that year, the Arts Council cut regular funding to some poetry presses, and late one Friday night, with at least a bottle and a half of wine inside me, I thought it would be fun to get these presses in a big room, with the public, and do an old-fashioned book fair, where the publisher sells their work directly to the people, without going through distributors and bookshops. I thought there would be about six presses involved to start with, and we ended up with twenty-four that year. That has become an annual event, which does now have arts council funding, and there will be eighty presses at the next event in September.
3:AM: What are you reading?
CB: I’m reading a lot of Stendhal, in preparation for what may be the next Jack Robinson book. But I’m just finishing The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu. I was in a bookshop with a friend and she bought it for me. I’m enjoying it so much, I’m reading other books rather than finishing that one, just so that I can keep going a little longer.
Reccomended Reading:
Agota Kristof, The Notebook
Slavoj Zizek wrote of The Notebook that through it, he ‘discovered what kind of a person I really want to be.’ Written in first-person plural, the book tells of the wartime experience of twins in rural Hungary during World War II, although this is never specified. These children do exercises to toughen the body and mind:
We put our hands over a flame, we cut our thighs, our arms and chests with a knife and pour alcohol on to our wounds. Each time we say:
‘It doesn’t hurt.’
As they become more and more hardened, they steal, they torture others as they torture themselves and they kill. However, they also feed and clothe an enemy soldier they discover in the forest, and look after their neighbour, a young girl who has been abused by the local priest. They do what is necessary, falling back on an animal morality as societally constructed norms withdraw under a volley of artillery shells. As Zizek says in the same essay quoted above, they have replaced sentimentality with ‘a cold and cruel passion.’ For the boys, life is truly poor, nasty, brutish and short – but crucially, it is never solitary.
Kristof wrote two sequels, also published by CB Editions, in which the twins are seperated, and the narrative of the first book is destablised and questioned. These are interesting on questions of identity and trauma, but lack the steely, terrible simplicity of The Notebook, a genuinely apocalyptic fable.
Jack Robinson, Days & Nights in W12
W12 is an area of London which doesn’t quite have the central pomp and swank of W8, with Kensington and Holland Park, nor can it claim the more suburban richesse of W4, which encompasses Chiswick and West Hammersmith. It isn’t as cool as W11, which boasts Portobello Road; it’s not as cheap as Acton in W3. Each of these neighbours is definably something on a scale: rich; poor; hip; square. W12 is hipper and squarer and poorer and richer than all of these areas, less easily characterised as any one thing.
Robinson’s keenly observed book of snapshots (each page features a paragraph and a photograph) captures something of the many-headed area, and doing so, evokes urban wonderlands everywhere. Jokes and stories and prose poems pile up like so many discarded objects in a junkshop, calling to each other across the pages, never quite illuminating their neighbours, but at least keeping them company. Each one is ‘another mundane object [that] finds its way into a whole new pattern of meaning’. Robinson is a bricoleur, a ‘theorist of waste’ in the tradition of Benjamin and Sebald (as read by Gay Hawkins), who wears his flânerie lightly.
Robinson has written one other book, which Boyle mentions above: Recessional. It is out of print but can be found in its entirity here.
May-Lan Tan, Things to Make and Break
May-Lan Tan is biting, funny and deeply nostalgic, and that’s just the first paragraph of this book. The 11 short stories that make up the book are consistently good, a very rare thing in collections. And what is particularly impressive is the way the style changes while a cohesive tone hangs over everything. Tan can write in a simple, spare register of short sentences and bald facts on one page, and on the next in a sumptuous, figurative prose: either way, a sort of distracted sense of dread is achieved. One story in particular — “101” — exemplifies this odd combination of dreamy drifting and threat. A nameless narrator is the maid-of-honour at the wedding of her sister; she is also in the early stages of a relationship with the grooms brother, the best man:
Standing either side of the bride and groom in the sun-splashed chancel, we were taller, darker and leaner, like shadows. Our eyes locked as the minister declared them man and wife. When they kissed, we turned away.
Tan’s narrator often seem to be in the shadows, just behind the pace, a moment too late. In another story, the narrator finds a set of black-and-white nude photographs in her boyfriend’s desk, and begins following one of the girls. She turns herself into a shade of someone else. Later in “101”, the siblings (who are defined as such despite their being the focal point of the story, as if they are peripheral even in their own lives) sit together,
laughing at the TV and passing a box of Cheerios back and forth… I thought I glimpsed a year or two of borrowing your sweaters and seeing you were glasses at night. Your soft, shiny hair, clogging my sink.
The potential relationship is dreamily prefigured through a mythologising of the banal, the small things that mean big things. See how Tan softens us up, and then, ever so calmly, every so sweetly, suggests something darker. A shiny, soft clog, made of bits of us.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
James Tookey is a reader living in London, after studying in Canterbury and Geneva. He splits his time between mixing martinis and metaphors.
