The Tunnels That Lie Beneath Literature: David Keenan Interview

David Keenan tells Stewart Gardiner about losing himself to writing fiction, keeping the voices at bay and letting Xstabeth loose

“By the time we crossed back into the town everything had changed.” Says Xstabeth’s narrator Aneliya deep into the novel. Her experience echoes that of the reader’s, for after reading Xstabeth things are not the same. All great and dangerous fiction (the danger is that you get lost down inside of it) must do more than transport the reader for a spell while reading. It should have a transformative effect on reality after as well as during. Subtle shifts in the fabric. When a night out is no longer the night and coming down is still up. It doesn’t last but doesn’t disappear either. There is before Xstabeth and after Xstabeth.

But you can’t escape the changed world because you haven’t read the book yet. All it took was one reader and something got out. Xstabeth is loose and even David Keenan can’t put her back in. But he was willing to speak of her.

Music plays a vital part in your novels, yet you avoid the cardinal sin of having characters just listen to the hippest stuff you – the author – listens to. How do you decide what music your characters listen to? Or do they let you know over the course of coming to life on the page? Do you listen to the chosen music when you’re writing?

I listen. Like, in Xstabeth, when I was in the living room with Aneliya and Tomasz I just tried to listen to see if I could hear what was playing. And it was Nick Drake. And Leonard Cohen. I have no interest in demonstrating my knowledge of music or even my taste through my books, I follow the demands of the text entirely. I mean, I’m not much of a Nick Drake fan even. But I was blown away when Tomasz and The Snork stuck on Bob Desper’s New Sounds, though it made perfect sense that they would dig it. Still, I didn’t know what relevance it had to the story so again, I just listened to Tomasz and The Snork talking about Desper and I found out; light in darkness, darkness in light. But no, I never listen to music when writing.

As someone who writes about music, I understand the inherent difficulty in trying to convey the elusive qualities of music in words. Could you talk about your journey from music journalist to novelist? What doors into the music does writing fiction offer that a review or feature perhaps doesn’t?

I don’t really write about music anymore, I don’t write for The Wire anymore and haven’t done any music writing for five years or so, I like writing fiction the most. But my apprenticeship as a music writer was key. What fiction offers for me is long term projects that I can immerse myself in for years, I like that best, or maybe I just came to the age where I liked that best. Lester Bangs was one of the first writers who really made me want to write. But I never wanted to be a critic. Rather, I considered myself an evangelist. I didn’t want to dissect the music, I wanted to celebrate it, to make as much noise as it. I enjoyed reading Lester’s pieces as much as I enjoyed listening to Lou Reed’s music, I got the same energy from it, and that’s what I always wanted to do as a critic, to communicate that energy, more than, to literally transmit it across time and space via words. I wanted to write pieces that did not betray the music, pieces that were equal to the music in performance. To that end you can get very experimental, you end up in this synaesthetic zone that feels closer to writing sci-fi. But I’ve done all I came to do in music writing. I am lost to the world of writing fiction, I am captured, and if I’m successful and I write my way out the other side, then I’ll disappear and live without demands in secret till I pop it.

You certainly can’t be accused of repeating yourself across your first three novels. This Is Memorial Device, For the Good Times and Xstabeth each offers a suis generis fictional universe for readers to explore. Yet it is also abundantly clear that only you could have written them. What makes a David Keenan novel a David Keenan novel? Are there multiple David Keenans?

Energy? A certain energetic engagement perhaps? I love Edna O’Brien so much, and one of the reasons I love her is that every book is so different, from The Country Girls to Night to Girl. Picasso said, “God has no style”, by which he meant God has no one fingerprint, he is omni, “the elephant and the mouse”, Picasso calls it, and of course Picasso is the same, a single period in Picasso’s art is the equal of another artist’s entire career. I too aim to have no style above the application of new energy. I’m not sure there are many David Keenans, I’m not sure there is any ‘David Keenan’ but ‘David Keenan’ does seem to contain multiple characters or entities. I think maybe when you have a proven knack for bringing these entities down, they all tend to flock to you and pester you and line-up to be written into life, and you never know what is going to step through next.

Xstabeth opens with nods to Nabokov (in the framing) and Roland Barthes (with the death of the author, by suicide no less). Classic Russian literature is also baked into the text. There’s no anxiety of influence on display at all however, as you completely make the material your own. How do you tackle such influences? Do you ever feel there’s a danger that they could infect your work? Or is it about how you deal with the infection?

Well, I never read for inspiration. I read for enjoyment and to experience awe. I feel as if my own writing project is separate from all my reading, and has much more to do with listening, than, say, thinking about reading and writing. I think all literature, ultimately, is connected. There are tributaries that run beneath books, that link certain texts, like wormholes, there are textual gaps and echoes you can run through, I love all of that, I love the tunnels that lie beneath literature and I like to play down there, in the subterrania, but I think it’s unlikely I will ever be overwhelmed by self-conscious anxiety over influence. I feel confident as a listener, so it never really comes up for me as an issue. But I love Nabokov and the classic Russian novelists so much. Lermontov. I love Lermontov. He is so modern; I feel as if I know that guy. Plus I grew up on Dostoevsky.

Returning to the death of the author – the suicide of David W. Keenan. Was this a gesture that had to be made? Did you lose yourself writing this book? Indeed, you’ve said that you have little memory writing it (which, I realise, may render a number of my questions impotent).

I want to get myself out of the way. I feel that my previous two novels were vague ideas that I have had since I was young, I always knew I would write a book about the magic of small towns and underground music and living like a mad artist and falling in love in Airdrie, plus I knew I would write a book set in the Troubles inspired by how my father and my uncles talked. These were both written out of gratitude, like a kind of debt to the world for all I was gifted with. But I could never have thought up Xstabeth. Now I’m writing books that want to come through regardless of my ideas, but then that is possibly because I no longer start from ideas, I start from voice, tone, rhythm, sentence length, breath, and the ear, most of all. Writing is magic, words is magic, literature is high magic, I am getting back to that, that magical power that words have to transmit objects across time and space, people and places too, it’s incredible, wake up to magic, all you have to do is read, or write it. But it’s like we have forgotten this, and now literature is debased by ideas and points and the worst idea and lowest form of art ever, which is mere critique. The greatest artists know that there is no better moment than now, that there is nothing, now, that is not perfect, and that Being trumps Becoming and that ‘is’ is the only word an artist can fully trust.

The prose style of Xstabeth is intriguing, with sentences broken down, full stops employed instead of commas and thoughts running into dialogue. Even my notes started to take the form of your prose after a while (“Her father singing. Leonard Cohen.”, I wrote at one point). Was this the voice that the book demanded of you?

Ha ha. Good notes. Yes. Aneliya began to talk like that and as I listened I realised she never questioned anything, she was so open and pure, that there was never a questioning inflection in her voice, that’s when I realised that to capture it I couldn’t use question marks. And then no commas too, best caught her voice, which was a series of short gnomic declarations that were often deadpan funny but that were inquisitive and naïve and open. I was possessed by the voice and wrote it all the way through start to finish like that. I’d never written anything like that before, was much more used to long, flowing, sometimes chapter-long sentences, so this was something else. I enjoyed it so much and it never once felt like ‘me’ even as it travelled to places in my own history and had its own adventures there.

There’s a beautiful passage where Aneliya hangs a calendar that her father made on the edge of her bed. “And the pictures on the calendar matched the view outside my window. And of course made it more like a forest. A forest on an endless loop. Which is of course what all forests are. And what childhoods are too. When you’re right in the middle of them. Or when you’re looking back on them from way yonder. From afar.” Reading it is like literally stepping into another world. Was this a concept you already had in mind or did it emerge in the writing unbidden?

I love that passage too. I think you can step into paintings and photographs and most of all books, and inhabit them, and haunt them, I think it comes with a good grasp of incantatory powers, and also I like to use textual things like how Xstabeth manifests in Xstabeth, like using punctuation and syntax and grammar to somehow puncture the text and to divine ingress and exit points in and out of the text at certain points like this ( ) like a wormhole. I get into this idea of penetrating the subterranean of literature really deep in my next book Monument Maker.

You write in To Run Wild in It, your Rough Trade pamphlet with Sophy Hollington: “When someone says that they don’t believe in Magick, ask them if they believe in Art.” I might be making a leap here, but the ideas of magick and ritual appear to be important to your work. Do you have any writing rituals you’d like to share? What magick takes place when you put pen to paper?

I have very few writing rituals beyond a glass of mezcal, a candle and a signed photo of Perry Como. My rituals are much more to do with keeping the voices at bay when I am out and about and just going about my day. I never take notes. I never even allow a stray thought about whatever I am working on to inveigle its way into my brain like a demon when I am not actually writing the damn book. Otherwise I would be overwhelmed and unable to function. I have had to instigate these kinds of controls in order to stay sane. And also to make sure I am not just listening to myself instead of the voice of the book.

You make golf sound like the most important thing in the world in Xstabeth: “This isn’t chess. This is more like writing. Always starting from scratch. On the blank sheet. Always beginning again. Even when you think you’ve cracked it.” Was that one of the ideas that unlocked the novel for you? I’m also interested to know whether you play golf.

I played golf as a kid with my dad at Easter Moffat Golf Course in Plains, outside Airdrie, but I dropped out pretty young and it was my brother Peter who went on to be a brilliant golfer, at one point he considered going professional. But I am really ignorant of golf. I don’t watch it on the TV or anything but I have holidayed in St Andrews since I was a kid and I still go there regularly, and one of my favourite things is just to sit down at the 1st tee and the 18th hole at the Old Course and just watch, and observe, that’s where all the golf came from in the book, I guess, I certainly never thought I would be writing about golf in a book, but it’s some of my favourite writing. You realise that everything is endlessly deep; to get obsessively deep on one thing is to run up on the deeps of everything.

Trump learned (without learning anything at all) that he had lost the election while playing golf. Was this Xstabeth at work?

I don’t doubt it. Xstabeth is loose. I suspect she is causing carnage. And making dreams come true. And protecting women, and girls.

You’ve mentioned Jack Kerouac as a writer you admire before and I think you talked about Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs around the publication of For the Good Times. Are Burroughs and Kerouac writers that speak to you as a writer? Have they had any direct impact on your work?

God, yes, I loved Jack and Bill growing up but I don’t feel they are direct influences on me as a writer. Bill in so far as everything in his books seem to happen in an uncanny alternate universe that feels curiously alive, yes, that’s what I take from him most of all, he is such a beautiful writer, simple sentences, images that I can’t forget, I do use a recurring single line Burroughs image in For The Good Times as a potential wormhole, just in case there is mutual activity between our two books, mutual relations, at some point. Kerouac, well, the writer as yea-sayer, that’s what I most take from Kerouac, and the romance and mystery of 20th century America, and the myth of the rainy night, and his amazing dharma writings, and Mexico City Blues, which I re-read every year, and of course The Subterraneans and Visions of Cody, immortal books. I dearly love those two, I don’t care if it’s unfashionable, they made me gasp in awe at everything that was up ahead when I read them as a young man. I owe them so much in my life. Gratitude.

I might live in London at the moment, but Glasgow is still my city (although I grew up in the north east of Scotland before moving there for university). What makes Glasgow so special creatively? Even writing out the following names of record shops seems to conjure something: John Smith’s / Volcanic Tongue / Monorail.

It’s my favourite city in the world, still, Mexico City coming in at number 2, and to me it’s just a very romantic city, a very beautiful city, with so much green space, amazing original Victorian tenements with bay windows and high ceilings that you can afford to rent, the mad energy of the streets, the love of story telling and that vernacular joy in patter. Glasgow is a city that can rip the piss out of itself too. Thank god. I think any culture that can’t is barbaric. When you live in Glasgow you are regularly re-acquainted with the fact that God has a devilish sense of humour and is basically a rogue.

Faber Social, White Rabbit Books, Lee Brackstone and Andrew Weatherall – discuss.

Geezus, well, that is the story of my life over these past five years or so, Lee changed my life by taking a punt on an unknown author who had just slaughtered in print a book that he had edited, I don’t think anyone else would have taken a punt on This Is Memorial Device, and then going to Faber Social events and coming across this incredible evangelist energy that Lee had somehow marshalled and the feeling of goodwill and mutual support and just fun and positivity, I had come out of underground music and that scene is kind of a whiny downer where any success at all is frowned on or must be evil and then when I started hanging out with DJs like Andrew and Sean Johnston and Richard Norris and Justin Robertson I realised we had so much in common, all of us, they were all so into esoteric ideas, gnostic sonics, performance as ritual, and they were all book hounds too, and so well-read, and plus they were stylish and into clothes like me, and going to The Social and summer festivals, I had never been a summer festival guy, or so I thought, in my own cliched idea of who I was – identity is such a trap, such a barrier to experience, I realise now – but as soon as I tanned some MDMA in a field in England in the summer for the first time I had a total epiphany, it was a Weatherall set, at Port Eliot, me and Andrew got so wasted, it was total euphoria, and we did an interview together that day, it’s on-line somewhere, we were in this caravan that was the green room behind the Heavenly stage and we were both tripping so hard and it just felt so good, what a beautiful soul Andrew was, we only had a short time to get to know each other but we hooked up so hard, a true old soul at the helm, you could tell when you looked into those amazing eyes.

And now it’s White Rabbit and a whole new world and White Rabbit feels to me like a scene, an underground, it’s the most exciting place to be right now because no one fights harder for visionary counter-culture than Lee Brackstone. It is absolutely incredible what he has done, and continues to do, for the culture, bringing so many different disciplines together to help continue to make a vital counter-cultural contribution viable.

I once took Pale Fire and The Magic Mountain to read on a holiday in the sun. This was during an overly serious phase, but even then I wished I’d taken something lighter with me. Is there ever a wrong time to read the right books?

I believe that books come to you at the right time, always, which, practically speaking, is a nightmare, cause I keep dropping one as soon as another likely candidate rocks up.

What music has helped you get through 2020 and what was playing at David W. Keenan’s funeral?

Ghosteen – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Freedom for the Stallion – Various Artists
Sign O the Times – Prince
Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-87 – Various Artists
NFR – Lana Del Rey
Superstar – Harry Pussy
Emergency ALFOS Broadcasts by Sean Johnston
Spotify playlists by @memorialdevice
+ anything by Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn

I think “Purple Heather” by Van Morrison is what was playing at David W. Keenan’s funeral.