Paul Stanbridge interviewed by C. D. Rose.
Paul Stanbridge, My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is (Galley Beggar, 2022)
‘Wanting to write books at all is stupid.’
It’s an odd thing for a writer to say, especially when they’re about to start promoting their second one, but Paul Stanbridge is — without a shade — an odd writer, who writes odd books. My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is (this second one, following 2016’s Forbidden Line) is — well: ‘I’m not really sure what it is,’ he says. ‘Its school report would be: aspires but fails to be a poem.’
What it is (according to me): a book about the North Sea, maps of the North Sea, maps in general, East Anglia, the topography of the ocean bed, a number of obscure poets, mathematicians and scientists, a horse called Clever Hans, chalk hill carvings, medieval graffiti, trees; an account of an attempt to write a book that is not this book; a homage to W.G. Sebald and David Jones; a book about the impossibility of knowing; a pitiless, unsparing gaze on the writer’s brother’s suicide.
What it isn’t (according to me): autofiction; a misery memoir (or much of a memoir of any kind); a pastiche.
‘It’s about seeing truth by looking away from it,’ says Stanbridge. (I resisted the temptation to google any of the stories the book contains, not for fear of finding out if they were not true as much as finding out that they are true.)
‘I did a lot of reading before starting to write this book,’ he continues, ‘and just as the aim to write a “factual” account of my brother’s life evaporated because of my failed attempts to write it, another cause was reading a lot of memoirs about bereavement. This pushed me away from the logical, linear, narrativized account of my reaction to my brother’s death.
‘I started by trying to obtain records held by the police, health service, CPS, coroner’s office, etc. about my brother, and by researching suicide and attitudes to death generally. My aim then was to write a true account of his life and death. But I very quickly came to the realisation that this was a preposterous idea. From that emerged the theme that became one of the guiding principles of the book as it developed: that there’s a difference between the facts of a case, and the truth of it. Trying to make total representation of a person, especially someone as complex and secretive as my brother, is futile.’
My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is begins like this: ‘It was at a particularly difficult period of my life, one which I continue to find myself unable to look at directly, that I first began to develop an interest in the toponymy of the North Sea’ — a sentence that immediately rang a Sebaldian bell for me, though when I went back to The Rings of Saturn I found the opening sentence of that book significantly different. Stanbridge is a lot more direct, yet also brings in the digression, which is more of a swerve, right at the ending of that first line. The reader is never on sure footing here.
The influence is almost literalised in one of the final sections of the book, where the narrator and a companion go looking for the Sebald memorial bench on the grounds of the University of East Anglia, where Sebald taught for many years. The bench proves to be more difficult to locate than they had anticipated, and whether they do eventually find it or not is never quite revealed.
‘Sebald is a massive figure for me, but the biggest influence on my writing is David Jones,’ says Stanbridge, who wrote his PhD on Jones’ Anathemata. ‘It took him 15 years to write, and he had no idea what he was doing, or where he was heading. Examining his method completely changed my attitude to writing. From then on, I wrote in disconnected fragments, generating discourse out of scraps of research data which I felt compelled to gather. Jones said art should be produced out of “what is actually loved and known,” he believed that the making of artworks is a sacramental activity: the manipulation of physical entities in order to make representation of a non-physical truth. In other words, art is praise.’
The whole book is a trace through the signs of things, and their possible connections, as well as their dead ends and false promises. Ontology and epistemology give way to mystery, a quality in writing Stanbridge prizes. (Tellingly, he also cites Olga Tokarczuk and Alice Oswald as influences.)
Stanbridge is a practising guitarist (‘I’ve been getting more and more into baroque composers over the past decade, as well as the more prog-y jazz like Partisans and Star of Jupiter-era Kurt Rosenwinkel’) and one way of reading the book is by following its apparent digressions as though a counterpoint or fugue. ‘When you are not reliant on a conventional plot and/or other narrative devices to structure a book, you need something else there — not just to make the book make formal sense, but also to instigate the writing process in the first place. I feel drawn towards working with repetitions, echoes, recapitulations, inversions, counterpoint, and so on.’
What My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is embodies, then, is a way of writing about something without writing about it, and is therefore not only a formal challenge (for the writer, not the reader), but the replication or enactment of the process of navigating traumatic grief. It is labyrinthine, evasive, occasionally messy, complex, disturbing, bleakly funny. It is a fascinating achievement.
‘As my brother has no grave or headstone, no memorial, I thought that a book would do the job,’ says Stanbridge. ‘All you can do is try to approach little glimpses of truth, obliquely, by stealth — which is what I think literature is for.’
Two statements, each of which go a good way to explain that while writing books may sometimes seem stupid, it is one of the most important things that we can do.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
C. D. Rose is an award-winning short story writer and the author of three palimpsestic books that recall the likes of Calvino, Perec or Borges: The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else and The Blind Accordionist (all three published by Melville House).
