Interview: You did not read Faulkner!

Luke Davies was born in Sydney in 1962 and published his first poetry collection, Four Plots for Magnets, in 1982. It was thirteen years before his second poetry collection, Absolute Event Horizon, was published. His novels Candy (1997), Isabelle the Navigator (2000) and God of Speed (2008) were all published by Allen & Unwin, as were the poetry collections Running With Light (1999) and Totem (2004). Both these collections won awards. Davies co-wrote the screenplay of Candy with Neil Armfield, and that film was released in 2006. He has been writing film reviews for the Monthly since early 2007.

Luke and I first met when I was a publisher at Allen & Unwin and he signed a contract for the novel Candy. At the time he was a long-time resident of Bondi Beach, but he has recently moved to Los Angeles. I interviewed him at Hotel Lindrum in Melbourne, when he was here to promote the extraordinary God of Speed.

Sophie Cunningham: What was your first published work? Poetry?

Luke Davies: Four Plots for Magnets, a slim little collector’s item. Four-hundred-copy print run, twenty years old, 1982.

SC: So it was before a lot of the experiences you write about in Candy.

LD: I always wrote during those bad times, which is actually what’s different from the narrator in Candy, you don’t really have a sense that he has that life, but we brought that back into the film.

In fact, at the God of Speed launch [the launcher] Jane [Gleeson-White] said, ‘I want to read you a poem from this book of his. This is a poem called “The Death Fires Danced at Night”.’ I was sitting there shocked. Anyway, she read this poem from Four Plots for Magnets, which is clearly influenced by the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It’s a four-line poem that goes:

I was like, oh God, even back then … that’s kind of really ‘Luke’.

SC: And the next publication was also poetry.

LD: Yes, that was after the nightmare—Angus & Robertson, HarperCollins, 1994, Absolute Event Horizon. It was out the other side of all that stuff and rehab.

SC: When you were growing up, did you have a sense of yourself as being a poet, or did you think of yourself more broadly: as a writer?

LD: It was a mixture of both. It was both poetry and prose that I became completely immersed in and obsessed with at the age of thirteen.

SC: Were there particular writers who inspired you, who got you thinking about yourself in this way?

LD: Yes, there was a moment where the whole universe changed. The initial moment was the discovery of Cannery Row in the school bookshelves, and that was the moment where my life changed completely and forever. The memory of that is incredibly vivid. It’s like the first adult memory of the me now, here, sitting here with adult consciousness—the sense of continuum from that moment is incredibly satisfying, that this thing happened there that gave me the meaning and direction in my life. What happened after that was very rapid—this moment of reading Cannery Row—discovering this world that existed …

SC: Do you mean the world that the novel created, or the world of writing?

LD: No, it was really the world of the experience of feeling like a full human being, like an adult as opposed to a child, like somebody who had autonomy as opposed to someone who was told what to do. And practically rather than symbolically that was a turning point from twelve years old [when I was] given these class sets of books, with groovy seventies English teachers and a moral message—they would be American books and there was drugs and stuff in them. They were lame, and at twelve years old I knew they were lame. And at thirteen I discovered Steinbeck with that beautiful lilting sense of humour and the way in which I wasn’t being condescended to, and it was like ‘oh my God’.

Within three months of that experience I had discovered Faulkner, and it was like Steinbeck was the door that opened, but [with] Faulkner I stepped into this infinite palace and I’ve been roaming around it ever since. I didn’t really get what was going on in Faulkner when I was thirteen, but I knew that I was in an incredible place.

SC: Was it the language that evoked these feelings in you, even if you didn’t get exactly what the words were about?

LD: Yes, with Faulkner it became language more than with Steinbeck. There was a whole lot of stuff going on there. I don’t put Steinbeck in the same category as Faulkner, but my emotional fondness for Steinbeck is unbreakable … I can always go back to Steinbeck and recognise that his body of work is erratic but some of it is really great, but I love it. I love it. Whereas Faulkner is, by any definition, important and incredible. As I Lay Dying was the first one, probably one of the easiest Faulkners to read, over the Christmas holidays at the end of 1975. Anyway, I had a confrontation with an English teacher who asked, ‘What did you read [over the holidays]?’ and when I said Faulkner he said, ‘You did not read Faulkner!’

SC: As I listen to you talk about these writers I wonder if my asking about your writing of about poetry versus your writing of prose is a false distinction. Do you just see all language as poetry?

LD: I don’t think I’ve yet worked out the answer to that question. As the fantasy continued, as I became fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I very much saw myself as a poet. I was obsessed with searching for poetry. I loved anything in the English classes that was to do with poetry, which most of the other kids hated.

I was this spacey kid, completely happy spending weekends wandering the State Library of New South Wales and going through the poetry shelves and finding people who were no doubt obscure then and are still obscure now. Lost, forgotten books of Welsh poets or whoever. It was infinite—the possibility for discovery of this stuff excited me constantly. So I thought I was a poet. But as that fantasy continued, in a sense the concept of being able to be a writer was too grand, because as a fourteen-year-old kid you try and start writing what you think is a novel or a short story and you pretty quickly find out how fucking difficult it is to get that first foolscap page written.

SC: Because I’ve worked with you in the past I’ve seen early drafts of your work and it seems to me that you write in short pieces that you then pull together. Say, with Candy, you wrote it almost as short stories.

LD: Well, it began its life as two or three things, yes.

SC: And with God of Speed you wrote quite intense sequences that were quite short and then had a bit of editorial struggle really to get the order right, all that kind of stuff.

LD: And Isabelle was, to some extent, episodic too.

SC: Is that a poet thing to do?

LD: I think that’s a good point, and I think instinctively that I would tend to agree with it. I’d probably need to think about it a bit.

SC: It seems to me that in both your prose and your poems, there’s a central image that you write out from.

LD: Yes, absolutely. I do find that something that comes to me very clearly—a rock-solid overall image of what this poem is or even of what this chapter is or what this novel is.

SC: With God of Speed you seemed from the beginning to have a very strong sense of what you wanted the novel to do.

LD: I knew from day one what it was going to feel like. I didn’t know the details and I didn’t know what the struggle was going to be like to get there, but I never really wavered. The overall sense of what the book was going to be—what the tonal and emotional texture and temperature were going to be. That’s the thing, it’s almost like a visionary sort of thing: I know that, so now I’ve got to get there. You’ve got to put in the work and build the thing brick by brick.

SC: If you had to pick, is there any form you like writing in most?

LD: If I could get the recognition I felt I deserved for the thing I do that is most important, it’s the poetry. Poetry feels like the spine. But I’m also really wary about that thing of precious poetic novels. That can be a barb: oh, he writes novels like a poet.

SC: Talk to me about writing screenplays. Is it a different part of the brain you use when you write them?

LD: It absolutely is. What I find strange is that if you were having a discussion just about poetry and prose, if they were the [only] two things I did—well, there are certain things of me as a poet that make it into my prose, but there aren’t really things about me as a prose writer that make it into my poetry. You can’t go backwards and stuff something bigger than that into the neck of the bottle. But you would say that these two things are far apart, and yes, maybe they come from different parts of the brain. In fact, I would say poetry comes from the limbic stem in some ways, and prose is these additional layers of thousands of years of civilisation and Western consciousness.

Then you look at screenplay writing and suddenly these two things [poetry and prose] seem unbelievably similar because that’s so different.

SC: Is the difference painful and difficult, or exhilarating and liberating?

LD: It’s exhilarating and liberating. One of the interesting things is that with the poetry and prose—even though you’re at your best when you’ve stepped out of the way of yourself and your ego—the poem or the novel is the end product itself, it is the art object and you are effectively autonomous in creating it … but it’s absolutely different with a screenplay. The document that you write is not in any way the art object.

Information matters in the screenplay, clarity of communication matters in a screenplay. Pretty language gets in the way of good screenplays. So screenplay is much more about good story, and in the journey towards creating a screenplay there’s less ego involved, and it is for two reasons. One is that it’s a bullet point blueprint for a visual medium that’s going to belong to someone else, it’s going to be someone else’s vision ultimately, unless you’re a writer-director.

SC: How did you cope with that kind of collaboration?

LD: The Candy experience was a dream in so many ways, partly because Neil Armfield is such an incredibly talented and generous person, with whom a friendship developed parallel to the collaborative professional experience, which went on for five or more years because it was so hard to get a film like that funded. It’s also connected to recovering from drug addiction because I had to learn ways of stepping out of the way of myself, as I said, discarding the ego, which is such a problematic part of ourselves.

SC: Was Neil your script editor or did you have another script editor?

LD: No, that was a different sort of situation. Neil was the co-writer and he was the boss, he was the director of the film. We had a script editor, John Collee. He was the guy who wrote Master and Commander. John is an incredibly sweet, incredibly smart guy and really commercial, admittedly commercial, not speaking out of school to say that, and he has no ego, it’s the most delightful thing. He’s got a great understanding of structure, and from the perspective of Candy being a dark, difficult, indie film with drugs as its subject matter, the relationship with John was really interesting because he just throws ideas at you, and nine out of ten would be just, like, oh my God, what the fuck is he thinking? This is so commercial, this is ridiculous. And I’d say, ‘John, yeah, that doesn’t quite work, that’s not kind of the direction we’re heading.’ And he’d say, ‘No problems. How about this? How about this?’ And one out of ten would be just like, God, this is brilliant, this is so insightful, he has understood what we need to do to get ourselves out of this hole or this hole.

SC: Do you think that emphasis on narrative is going to be useful to your prose in the future?

LD: Absolutely. I had a vivid sensation of how incredible it was, this learning curve, this opportunity. This guy [Armfield] has been doing beautiful theatre for thirty years, and even though some people say that it’s dangerous, the theatre/cinema thing, he understands character and economy like I never have. My own screenplay, left to my own devices, would not have been as good.

SC: What screenplays are you working on at the moment?

LD: I got accepted into this AFC program called IndiVision—as writer-director. I love what I do as a poet, novelist and hopefully screenwriter, but another thing since the age of fourteen, fifteen, that I’ve fantasised about, is I’ve always wanted to make movies.

SC: As in direct movies or produce them?

LD: No, direct. Every since two or three years after the Steinbeck moment I had the Werner Herzog moment with Aguirre, The Wrath of God. So I applied for this program and I got it, and if all works out I’m going to be making this low-budget Australian thriller that I wrote about an eleven-year-old boy and his seven-year-old sister being chased through the bush by the man who has just killed their father. I have written this really deliberately kind of L-plates film. [And] I’ve written this … supposedly sci-fi film, [though] really it’s just a film about male friendship, which I’ve wanted to explore in a particular way. It’s about all sorts of things, it’s about robots and cops and what makes us human.

SC: Is the desire to direct related to actually having a bit more control over what you called the art object, which as a screenplay writer you don’t have?

LD: Yes, and as a novelist you kind of have, and certainly as a poet you have. Everyone leaves you alone as a poet! It’s absolutely connected to that. I loved the experience of Candy and I loved the end result but it’s not my end result, and having certain kind of controlling tendencies within, I want to have the experience of sinking or swimming on my own overarching vision: this music, or that camera angle or that way of expressing that emotional moment. It’s all about the same thing, though, it’s all about the desire to create the same spine-tingling moment for the audience member or reader who is receptive, in the way that I have been, to those experiences—those experiences that make life worth living. That experience of being fully alive is … sometimes it’s [caused by] other moments—sex, affection, family, companionship—but so often it’s that moment of artistic arrest: this extraordinary moment of deep gratitude. And I feel that really strongly still eighteen years down the track, this very conscious striving to live in the present more fully. Those years of addiction were so horrendously not that.

SC: Was the drug addiction about avoiding the present? Is that too simple?

LD: Yes, it is probably too simple but it’s a good summary [though] in some ways the chase for the drug moment was an attempt to eternalise the present. But it was a Faustian bargain.

SC: Another shift in your work is that since Candy you’ve more clearly stepped into other people’s stories. Was that a relief? That shift away from semi-autobiograhical writing? Or was it difficult to move out of your own experience?

LD: It was neither a relief nor … well ‘difficult’ is too harsh a word, but I’ve a conscious sense that it’s a struggle to move into that territory [but] it is absolutely necessary … the gaze has to turn outwards. Things can be investigated in much more exciting ways if you can begin to turn the gaze outwards.

SC: You told me earlier that you’ve begun a meditation practice. What kind of monasteries have you been going to?

LD: In the last twelve months I’ve been to two Benedictine ones …

SC: You’re going back to your Catholic roots?

LD: Sort of. [But] whatever monastery is available, I’ll go happily. One Camoldese, it’s pretty obscure, sort of Benedictine, and one Buddhist in the boon docks of Canada. It’s called the Birken Forest Monastery, and the nearest town is a town called Kamloops in British Columbia, it’s about six hours by car north-east of Vancouver. It is seriously in the middle of nowhere, and very ascetic—it was the most ascetic of my four experiences in terms of the vow of silence being close to complete and no solid foods after the eleven a.m. meal and it was really intense.

After all these years, [it was] time to enter into the utter insanity of the mind in cascading freefall—how fucking difficult that is. [I feel like] a baby at the beginning of this mountain …

SC: At least you can see the mountain.

LD: Yes.

SC: To get back to your interest in direction and your desire for more control—can one ever control a film? You wrote a couple of beautiful pieces about Heath Ledger after he died where you talked about the way he interacted with the script and what he brought to the script.

LD: Yes, there’s a lot of fear surrounding that: what do I think I’m doing, I’ve never worked with actors and what will that be like? I don’t know, I’m sure that’s a journey in itself.

SC: Are you working on poetry or prose at the moment? Do you have a novel project?

LD: I am going through the experience of poetry pouring out obsessively. I know that a lot of people say poetry is a young man’s thing … [but] I don’t want to feel my strength waning. I fret about that because it’s the most important thing within me, and suddenly in my mid forties I’ve got this feeling of ‘Oh, this is good, it is [still] happening.’

Anyway, I’ve almost finished my next book and that’s a really exciting feeling. It’s a very clear body of work that began when the Totem drawbridge shut, [and] this thing began. It’s coherent, it’s been four years, and I’ve just begun to write a few poems that don’t belong to that any more, so [maybe] there’s a future book.

SC: When you say you think the last three or four poems might sit somewhere else, is that because a poetry book or a cycle tends to come out of a particular set of experiences or a particular exploration, or is it about getting to a different technical place?

LD: It’s all of those things. It’s a really lovely sense of strength. It definitely comes out of a particular set of experiences. Totem was clearly and consciously a paean to love in many, many forms; it was a sort of exploration of exuberance and gratitude and sexuality. There was a whole lot of stuff going on in Totem that was coherently controlled. This new book comes out of a darker place. You could say that it’s an exploration of unease. It’s like you create the ocean and you know you’ve got to get to the other shore, so there’s some technical stuff going on there too. It’s like it has a coherent form that’s completely different from Totem because I wanted and needed to do something completely different from Totem. They’re psalms, basically, it’s psalmodic, and it’s not as tightly controlled as Totem. It’s like they’re almost prose paragraphs some of them, it’s like they follow the breath and it’s left-justified … there’s the beginning of your line, it might be one line, it might take up four lines, but I’m not trying to rhyme and scan and stuff like that.

SC: Is following the breath related to meditation?

LD: Oh yes, and yoga as well. It’s just the most important realisation, and it’s a return to some pretty primal roots because I’ve been thinking a lot about the origins of prehistory and breath and storytelling and ways of remembering poetry when it was oral. But that’s another story.

SC: So what are you doing with prose at the moment?

LD: For the first time since Allen & Unwin said yes to the book of Howard Hughes [now God of Speed], which then got superseded by Isabelle, for the first time, in other words, in twelve or thirteen years, I have no obligations and it’s a great feeling. I haven’t yet started writing the new thing, but there are two different things. Some time in the next month or two that first day is going to come where I open a blank page and it’s going to be, okay, I’m just going to write something here and see where this thing goes.

One [idea] is new, pristine, and it’s an opportunity to go to different places than I have before. It got really ugly with Howard Hughes in the middle … when I got into serious research, I hit a point where it was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Luke? This man is horrible in so many ways.’ And it was difficult.

SC: Were you having to commit to projects because you were trying to make a living as a writer?

LD: No. There was a naiveté then for which I have a great nostalgia now.

SC: You thought you could knock off Howard in a year or so and be done with him?

LD: All that stuff, yes. Really it was all such extraordinary icing in a kind of … what if I could write a novel? What if I could make a living?

SC: So how long did Howard take?

LD: The light bulb moment where I thought: I’m going to write this, I can’t quite pin it down. It was either late ’93 or sometime in ’94 that I wrote the first two chapters of Howard Hughes. One of them was the transcendental moment with connectedness with the god figure [who is] masturbating in the cockpit while hurtling towards the ocean at breakneck speed. The other one was a strange mixture of three things which are now spread through the novel in different ways: the bad plane crash, Beverly Hills 1946; the day of the flight the night before where the book is now set, 1973; and the round-the-world record, 1938. These things were all mixed in together and the masturbation scene was connected to that but I didn’t [have the] facts. The actual fact was that there were three other guys in that plane and it didn’t make sense to set that [scene] there. But that’s thirteen years or possibly fourteen years since the first chapter—with many breaks and interruptions, which I think were all absolutely necessary.

In the middle years with Howard Hughes I was experiencing not only the ugliness but I the practical difficulty of having written myself into a mess where it might have been sensible to think about giving up [but] I clung to his voice. I just had this determination to get it right. And so I finally [began] the journey with [my editor] Alice Truax where the book found its necessary form and leanness.

[Alice said to me:] ‘I’ve identified this, these are the types of writing you do, these are the pulses running through the book, this is when you’ve got ecstatic, you’re king of the world, you’re a god, flight. Here’s this dysfunctional, ugly, sexual blackness. Here’s some drug addiction stuff. There’s this. There’s that.’ She’d divided it all into codes to [show me] the structure. [Then she said,] ‘This clashes with this, this shouldn’t butt up against this.’ Unbelievably practical American stuff. It was really great.

SC: What’s it like living in LA? It’s strange that you should live there after you have finished Howard Hughes, because in some ways he is such an American character. How does it impact on your sense of yourself as a writer?

LD: I love it, it’s a gentle city as well and there are great people there, and there are also lunatics there—it’s a city of such contrast. [After a recent relationship break-up] it was like, okay, fuck it, I can be wherever I want. Life in Sydney is packed in boxes and I think I’m going to leave it that way at the moment. Definitely part of it was getting an agent. Practical reasons. I want to sell scripts, I want to make some money. I want some breathing-space money.

But beyond those practical things this other thing has arisen—I’m still writing my poetry and my prose and [being in LA] is really affecting it. Being in overwhelming and always foreign circumstances is definitely affecting my poetry. It’s been a surge. I went over [to LA] with all these very methodical, practical plans, but then, beyond the plans [the move] sparked off all this other creative activity, which is very pleasing. This kind of exile, it’s an appropriate state to be in because it’s time for a change and it’s appropriate to be experiencing great difficulty in moving out of the comfort zone into the discomfort zone.