There are a couple of things I’ve been wanting to write for here, one about Chantal Akerman, mothers, letters, and my friend and fellow writer-in-residence Tom’s manuscript, and another about Anastasia Berg, The Point, and whether we always mean what we say and say what we mean. I’ve stalled on both, but for now some news: my novel, called How to Live Together, has been bought by Fitzcarraldo. It’s coming out in 2027, with them in the UK, Ecco in the US and Text in Australia, and Anagrama have the Spanish and Catalan rights. It’s very exciting. This, and the prize shortlisting which brought it about, have also entailed a new level of visibility, and constitute a kind of recognition that is basically quite new.
I was invited to write something for the press release, and I wanted to have a go at saying something that accurately conveyed how I felt, in a press release-friendly way, but what I drafted sounded in the end quite bland and so I said nothing. When I’ve seen other people’s Bookseller announcements in the past, I’ve often been a bit embarrassed on their behalf for the hyperbole of the genre and the kinds of things people have to write for them. I think of the phrase ‘I’m humbled’, which I had got so used to reading that I was surprised to find an older writer complaining about it, and while I see her point, I also know what it is that people mean by it: honour and humility feel oddly close because, or at least when, the honour feels hardly deserved – perhaps you feel small, now, alongside the other people who have received the same honour, smaller than you felt before, among all of those who had not received it. Honour requires a reconfiguration of your sense of your position in the world, a stripping away of the kinds of pride that go with being un- or under-recognised. And recognition of any kind involves a kind of humility – to find that someone was listening all along, knew you all along, destroys the pride that it is tempting to take in believing yourself beyond earshot. Of course, it feels amazing, too; but honour, like love, entails the shedding of a lot of protective layers, and I can see why people have begun to reach for the idea that they are being humbled. From now on they can be a disappointment.
Something that really did feel humiliating was the way that the press release described me as an academic, and the rest of this post is about why I am not an academic, or at least, why I felt ‘owned’ by being described as one.
The reason I might be described as an academic is that I teach at a university. But I only do this a couple of hours a week – it is materially and in other respects a side gig. A friend said that it’s the university who should feel owned for not giving me a proper job, but I don’t actually want one, and stopped applying for permanent teaching and research positions several years ago. If you don’t want to be doing casual teaching, it is not a good job, and I have been involved in anti-casualisation campaigns at a previous UCU branch. But one thing we came up against there, which I found frustrating, was that a lot of people did not want us to demand the abolition or reform of casual teaching, because the work suited them, despite being contractually insecure and not paid well enough to be the sole source of income. The particular positions they held could have been worse, and having had several of these ‘could be worse’ positions there and where I teach now, I know what appeals about them. And one of the ways this job is appealing to me is that it allows me to have it both ways – to have all of the benefits of teaching at a university (which include things like access to libraries and resources, and the lubricating status that an institutional email address and line in your bio confer, but also the enormous pleasure of teaching, and of work which is for the most part rewarding and worthwhile) while not having to be an academic.
Why am I not an academic? To my mind an academic is someone who has or is working towards having a permanent job in HE that involves research. I applied for all of the jobs of this sort going for a few years – which, in German, isn’t many – and then at some point realised that I disliked, and wasn’t particularly good at, almost every aspect of the job in its contemporary form. I didn’t suffer from the delusion that it was nothing but lecturing to rapt undergraduates, writing about poetry in a book-lined study, good wine at High Table – perhaps for a small number of people this still is the core of the job, but even at Oxford and Cambridge these are ever fewer, and I at the time was one of them, with a tiny salary and no job security but living a life almost entirely of the mind. The part of the job that I disliked was the endless applying for jobs and grants, the planning and proposing and ‘anti-writing’ of cover letters and project summaries that only had to be convincing and not true, the insisting of the relevance and importance of your work; and the delusion I suffered from was that this was something I was able to do and wanted to be doing for a living for the rest of my career. (Later, as one of my side gigs, I did do this for a living, drafting bid applications for an arts charity; but it is very different when you are doing something as a way to support the thing one really wants to be doing; and the smooth running of contemporary HE/‘academia’ relies on people believing that this is the thing that they really want to be doing to justify the workloads and energy and commitment involved.)
The turning point came when I interviewed for a much worse part-time teaching position at another institution and found that I couldn’t answer a question about a key conceptual term because I had no idea what it meant. It had been in the job description, but I had forgotten, or hadn’t been bothered, to find out what this specific subdiscipline even involved. In the abstract I had been happy, even excited, to ‘pivot’ to whatever the new thing in Modern Languages was, but in practice I had shown that I wasn’t able to do it.
Modern Languages is not one thing, and across its history as a discipline people have disagreed about what it is and is for. There are still people doing fairly ‘traditional’ literary scholarship in Modern Languages – as there are doing what is now ‘traditional’ theory, film studies, etc. – but all of these are basically dangerously humanities-focused at a point where departments in the humanities are being restructured or closing altogether. The German theorist Friedrich Kittler once said in an interview, ‘I had to cover up all I wanted to say with nice stories about young German poets.’ I have always remembered this line, taken entirely out of context, because I have never known if I also covered up what I wanted to say with nice stories about German poetry, or if I covered up what I wanted to say – nice stories about, or rather nice readings of, German poetry – with something more obviously relevant. My PhD was a way of doing the former, but very quickly after that I realised that whatever I did want to say, nice stories about German poets were unlikely to get me funding or a job or whatever.
But then the things that I said I wanted to say also didn’t get me funding or a job, and by that point I’d gone four years without saying anything: my monograph had come out, and an article, but they had been written long before, and in the meantime all I had written, at least in an academic context, were applications for grants and jobs. And conference papers, but they were intended for performance and not publication. And then reviews and essays of a non-academic sort, which I basically found I found more rewarding, and a good medium for saying what you wanted to say under the cover of nice stories about children’s books or folk song or nature writing or whatever it was – that were nonetheless also about children’s books and folk song and nature writing, the concrete and the particular more than just a pretext for the abstract and the general.
So, when I first stopped applying for jobs, the idea was that I would be a writer, by which I meant critic or essayist, writing some kind of non-fiction. But quite soon again I realised I couldn’t afford to spend time pitching, and in any case it had become yet another form of living one’s life entirely in projections and not in doing the thing itself. (I often wondered how architects got any satisfaction from their profession; recently I asked one, and only then realised that for architects, or some of them at least, the idea is the point, and the actual building the less intellectually satisfying, the more compromised part.) After many years of trying to convince my friend Hugh that criticism was an art, or at least as noble as one, I let myself be convinced by him instead, and tried to be an artist.
In May 2023, my friend Sam invited me to a workshop on art writing at which Kate Briggs was the guest of honour. She spoke about teaching at an art school, and the difference between art school and academia, particularly in terms of the ‘hard-earnedness’ of speech and writing in both. In an art school, she said, students are given the right to speak and write immediately, and, as part of the process, are moved or perhaps forced to do the kind of work that makes what they are saying true, and worth hearing. In academia you have to earn that right, and precisely because you have to earn it, you then feel resistant when you feel others are speaking without having earned it.
I was obviously resistant. I thought about a group I was part of with some friends, a collaborative creative research project, and how steep the learning curve had been for me at first, learning to work in a more intuitive way and respond to the others (many of whom are, in fact, academics!) in our discussions, coming up with ideas that were associative rather than backed by exhaustive reading. In the end, this is hardly that different from the way that a lot of academic research in the humanities begins with a ‘hunch’, but what was different was how unafraid people were to make connections that weren’t ‘true’ in the ordinary way, but, in another way, like rhyme, uncovered some more profound truth. At the same time, I knew to be suspicious of rhyme, and connections that felt as though they ought to lead to truth but didn’t, and was afraid to make the kinds of leaps others felt able to make, in case I was wrong.
What Kate said made perfect sense in the context of this group, and it seemed the way forward had to be something like the process that she offered as an alternative to hard-earnedness – to do something, and in the doing work out how to make the thing you were doing good and truthful. The way that I tell the story to myself is that the week after the workshop I began writing the novel that became How to Live Together (the title borrowed with gratitude from Kate’s translation of a lecture notes by Roland Barthes). I’d actually already started it, although initially as an essay, and I’d also already decided to spend my spare time writing it after the workshop and the associated preparation was over. But when I did write it, I thought of Kate’s talk.
I went from academia to art because I wanted to do something different to what academics did. But the two have, I think, never been closer. On the one hand the tendency, in contemporary poetry for instance, for art to borrow academic discourses and the essay form, which Hugh has written about (in a poem) here. And on the other, the fact that academia so often now turns to and funds creative practitioners as part of research projects, or in the context of postgraduate programmes – the rise of creative-critical and practice-based PhDs or postdocs. A friend finds this a bit dismaying, thinking of the students who have a good idea for a purely academic research project who now have to compete with established practitioners of various kinds for funding – that academic vs creative knowledge is now a zero-sum game. From the side of the practitioner this is, or seems, nothing but good news. Funding of this sort in the arts is increasingly hard to get, and comparatively tiny. If you’re an organisation, you might get project funding over three years, but not as an individual. I often think of the fact that a Leverhulme postdoc is worth three times the Turner Prize, in some cases three times the Booker.
Academia is increasingly a conduit by which artists (i.e. including writers) can get paid at all, whether as teachers or through grants and projects; the organisation I used to write bids for now gets most of its funding through university partnerships, for instance. Perhaps the comparison above was provocative – unlike a prize, a Leverhulme is still a job, with strings of various kinds attached and a manager to whom one is accountable, although for early career academics they are basically treated as something like a prize. But it seems that if the best living for artists is to be made via academia – with all of the compromises that having HE as a patron involves, including the particular way that projects in HE have to be conceived – this has to be limiting for the kind of art that is made. (I obviously think this goes for scholarship too.)
The same goes in another way for the artists who are brought on board to large research projects as part of the public engagement strategy. As the same friend pointed out, the increased incorporation of creative practice in the traditional humanities correlates with, in her words, ‘a massive decline in the prestige of academic knowledge’. If anything an academic in the humanities might do with funding is treated with incuriosity and indifference, if not scorn, then some of it might as well go to an artist, who can also be commissioned to put on a workshop or two as a way of outsourcing the engagement with local communities or lay audiences that is now a condition of public funding. (I’m not against workshops, but have been involved with some that were so underattended that they did not really engage anyone, and were put on essentially so that all parties in the partnership could tick a box. And, at the same time, funding is pulled from things that people do actually attend and which have a real function in the community – I’m thinking of the situation in Great Yarmouth, as described by Lotte L. S. in a recent Red Herring Press newsletter). The openness to the new ways of knowing and working that art promises academia, while admirable its own, is a consequence of an anxiety about the old ways of knowing and working, which, if rigorously pursued, will probably get your department shut down. But the flourishing of art within the humanities is, by the same token, a sign that no one really cares about what art is and can do, either.
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Some of these ideas are also in the novel, but I’ll do a proper introduction to it at some point. 2027 feels a long way away. It’s unbelievable to me that Fitzcarraldo (and Ecco, Text, Anagrama) have backed me and the novel to this extent, and hard to talk about it in a way that is neither gushing nor stilted. But I’m very glad whatever the case. If you’re in the UK then I hope you are enjoying this good spring day.
