Geoff dyer space in time3/10/2023 ![]() They were both very happy living these nomadic lives, though Cherry was less at odds with the world than Lawrence was.īut it’s not the case that one is seeking out experiences to write about. In different ways they’re kind of kindred spirits. I don’t have it with me in California at the minute, but it would go hand in hand with the other thing I like to have with me wherever I go, which is some kind of picture of Don Cherry. Just as whatever the opposite of a memento mori is – a memento vivere? – it feels like a lovely living presence in the flat. My wife works in the art world, but I realised that the art object I most wanted was a letter by Lawrence. ![]() His work has meant so much to me, and his life has been so important. To be more serious about it, Lawrence was dead before I was born, of course, but as a reader I feel I’ve had a very intimate relationship with him. In the context of the nightly performances of a book tour, it makes sense to compare these to remembered phrases in jazz: in our email correspondence, he referred to Berger’s upcoming ‘gig’ as a good time for our own.Ī Geoff Dyer - No, but I did think that one way I could recoup some of the cost was to write something about it. As a transcript hides in plain sight, the boundary between Dyer’s prose and conversation is noticeably permeable his talk fills with flashes of his writing. Lawrence archives, the very existences of which represent scourges of the establishment being canonised. With this in mind, I sat him down in front of the Berger and D. In Ways of Telling ,and then again in his introduction to Berger’s Selected Essays ,he argued ‘it is not enough for us to argue for Berger’s name to be printed more prominently on an existing map of literary reputations his example urges us fundamentally to alter its shape’. Following George Steiner’s advice that ‘the best readings of art are art’, that book fictionalised the lives of jazz musicians, developing what Berger learnt from Joyce: ‘to separate fact from fiction is to stay on dry land and never put to sea.’Ĭonsciously initiating the mature phase of Dyer’s writing, But Beautiful observes that ‘so often in jazz, a paradox is at work: to sound like themselves, musicians begin by trying to sound like someone else.’ The further paradox is that Dyer’s unhierarchical attitude to influence is both pure Berger, and, I think, distinctively his. Dyer was one of the first people I got in touch with when I started cataloguing Berger’s archive, as he wrote his first book, Ways of Telling, about Berger, and dedicated But Beautiful to him. The question was particularly present in this interview because John Berger was also in London to give a poetry reading. If he’s being canonised – if Dyer studies are becoming an area of expertise in themselves – it seems an appropriate time to think about what his place in a canon would be. If there’s a party after that, he’ll hardly be crashing. It’s only fair, then, to take the outsider ethos of his own – ‘a literary and scholarly gatecrasher, turning up uninvited at an area of expertise, making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two, and then moving on elsewhere’ – and compare it to his acquisition of the trappings of the insider: his teaching contract at Iowa, his two essay collections, the recent republication of most of his backlist, his listing in The Guardian’s 2011 ‘Britain’s top 300 intellectuals’ (under ‘Critics’), and the upcoming academic conference on his work at which he’s keynote speaker. ![]() As he walked into a British Library meeting room this May, he seemed physically and intellectually undiminished.Īt one point in the interview that followed, Dyer questioned the value of writers’ self-definitions. In January this year, a few months short of turning fifty-six, he suffered a minor stroke and wrote it up as an essay for The London Review of Books, ‘Why Can’t I See You’. Interview with Geoff Dyer ‘I’ve always believed that an artist is someone who turns everything that happens to him to his advantage’, Geoff Dyer writes in But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1991).
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