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– IAIN SINCLAIR – transmuting experience into art, using a life-changing event to trigger the creative process.’ In every case, we register the writer at the desk, gazing out of a window, moving around the house, firing up a start, then pausing to question the process; wriggling against the necessity of labouring to a pre-ordained conclusion, labouring for money. An imaginative flourish will stall into reverie, into reaching for a supporting quote from some respected predecessor in the game: Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Herman Melville, Borges, Wittgenstein. Otherwise, writers must become teachers. ­Kavenna: ‘Yes, Anthony was also a tutor.’ Josipovici: ‘My frustration went on through my two years of graduate work and my first two years as an Assistant Lecturer in the newly formed University of Sussex.’ Markovits: ‘I’ve been teaching now for about ten years and there’s a line I use on students to describe what seems to me difficult about writing . . . But novels are about things happening, and so when we start writing fiction there’s this gap we have to bridge between the uneventfulness of our experience and the drama that we think is supposed to take place on the page.’ Where then is the truth, the true imprint of experience? Where is the author in all this? W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño tease us with apparent versions of themselves in fictions that behave like reportage, or essays as playful as novels. We make those identifications at our peril. ‘Real,’ Bolaño wrote, in A Little Lumpen Novelita, ‘only stands for a different kind of unreality.’ xii
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– Introduction – In a book called Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, I used the devices of fiction to test a mythology of place made from hard evidence and the traces of writers who had worked the territory in previous generations. I studded the story, to ghost at a sort of authenticity, with a series of transcribed interviews that I edited into seamless monologues. One of the interviewees, reporting on her past as a weekend ecstasy raver, asked me to disguise her identity. I used her words but tweaked certain details to make the young woman into an architect whose thesis was to keep everything theoretical. ‘No structure that can be commissioned, she asserted, was worth making. The aim of human existence was to do absolutely nothing, gracefully. Any intervention was doomed to make things worse.’ Soon after the book was published, I was approached by an architecture magazine asking for contact details, so that they could compose a feature about this exciting newcomer. I had to confess that I’d made her up. ‘Impossible,’ said the man on the end of the phone. ‘I met her at a party in Shoreditch last ­W e d n e s d a y . ’ The only fiction, as the Alchemy collective reveals, is that they are writing fiction. The element of self­interrogation is more fabulous than the more apparently contrived episodes. I believe in Joanna Kavenna’s troubled author with the halting visions that he is trying to extract from his projection of a phantom female on the lawn. The absurdity carries absolute conviction. xiii

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– IAIN SINCLAIR –

transmuting experience into art, using a life-changing event to trigger the creative process.’ In every case, we register the writer at the desk, gazing out of a window, moving around the house, firing up a start, then pausing to question the process; wriggling against the necessity of labouring to a pre-ordained conclusion, labouring for money. An imaginative flourish will stall into reverie, into reaching for a supporting quote from some respected predecessor in the game: Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Herman Melville, Borges, Wittgenstein. Otherwise, writers must become teachers. ­Kavenna: ‘Yes, Anthony was also a tutor.’ Josipovici: ‘My frustration went on through my two years of graduate work and my first two years as an Assistant Lecturer in the newly formed University of Sussex.’ Markovits: ‘I’ve been teaching now for about ten years and there’s a line I use on students to describe what seems to me difficult about writing . . . But novels are about things happening, and so when we start writing fiction there’s this gap we have to bridge between the uneventfulness of our experience and the drama that we think is supposed to take place on the page.’

Where then is the truth, the true imprint of experience? Where is the author in all this? W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño tease us with apparent versions of themselves in fictions that behave like reportage, or essays as playful as novels. We make those identifications at our peril. ‘Real,’ Bolaño wrote, in A Little Lumpen Novelita, ‘only stands for a different kind of unreality.’

xii

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