GEOFF Nicholson is a distinguished and acclaimed English writer, born in Sheffield in 1953 and educated at Cambridge, who has taken an interest in topics of travel and movement in more than a 15 novels and delved into topics such as Andy Warhol and Frank Lloyd Wright in his prolific non-fiction output.

His interest in that Beat Generation moment is evident in many of the themes – the road and cars, specifically Volkswagens – that pervade much of his work, which has attracted critical recognition along the way from novelists such as JG Ballard, who called his 1987 debut novel Street Sleeper ‘witty, zany and brilliantly comic’.

Ballard was a man with a taste for sci-fi dystopias in ways that a fan of his, William Burroughs, shared. Yet Nicholson is a more sardonic, amusing commentator than that lofty literary pair: his work relies on wit and whimsy, black humour even, more than psycho-ideology or despair at the arc of Western history.

Pictured above: Author Geoff Nicholson, image by Caroline Gannon

Yet if automobiles, guitars and the USA have more than hinted at his deep-seated transatlantic inspirations, Nicholson also displays a more down-to-earth concern – walking is both his passion and his cause, with the ‘Right to Roam’, a celebrated political campaign to set the British countryside free for hikers, high up his individual agenda. His latest title Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps considers these issues.

Our regular interviewer MALCOLM PAUL tracked down Geoff Nicholson to explore his views on the Beat writers and the musical threads that feed into his experience, personal and artistic. His responses provide a lively interpretation of the role of literature and rock and jazz in the working life of a cutting-edge commentator…

MP: I’d like to ask a few questions about your possible connection with the Beats and also the ways in which music has shaped your own creative landscape. First those writers. When you started reading adult literature. other than the books of the time, did you encounter books like Kerouac’s On The Road, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’? 

GN: Yes, the Beats were the first writers I discovered for myself, Kerouac especially. I saw a copy of On The Road when I was hitchhiking around France – at the time Kerouac was considered to be the patron saint of hitchhikers, so I bought a copy and I was hooked. Don’t quiz me on it but I think I’ve read all his fiction.

I had my first glimpse of Burroughs even earlier. I went to a rather grim grammar school but one or two of the English teachers were cool.  We were shown it was OK to read things like Lennon’s Spaniard In the Works and  the Liverpool Poets. A teacher named Bill Scobie mentioned Burroughs’ Dead Fingers Talk, which he said was strong stuff but he thought we could handle it. 

Naked Lunch was the first Burroughs book that I read, then Junkie, then The Soft Machine, largely because I was a fan of the band.  I did write a dissertation as part of my final university exams on Kerouac and Burroughs – though Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin crept in there too.  The dissertation had something to do with adventure and experiment – in the lives and in the writing: Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose,’ and Burroughs’ cut-up and fold-in methods.

I was less of a fan of Ginsberg. I sometimes say I have a blind spot for poetry but it’s not absolute. I was a fan of the Liverpool Poets – especially Brian Patten. Do they count as Beat? The Beats seem to be an essentially American phenomenon but of course the influence spread far and wide. At university I was taught by the poet JH Prynne who was a champion, and I think friend, of Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Ed Dorn, so I certainly read those guys, Dorn especially

And I came very late to Gary Snyder. I saw him read in a tent at the LA Book Festival in 2005 or so and I was knocked out. I said at the time it was the best poetry reading I’d ever been to, and I haven’t changed that opinion. I did meet him afterwards back stage and I’d just read Iain Sinclair’s book American Smoke in which Snyder appears, though Sinclair’s portrait of him isn’t entirely flattering. Stuck for something to say I mentioned the book to Snyder and he said, ‘Oh yeah, that was a funny piece.’  I’ve never known if he meant funny ha ha or funny peculiar!

For a while I was ‘prose editor’ of the literary magazine Ambit, edited by Martin Bax. I had no say in the selection of poetry but Martin was full of stories about people he’d published, that included Burroughs but closer to home it meant Ivor Cutler, Jeff Nuttall, Ralph Steadman, Michael Horovitz, Michael McClure, Stevie Smith, one or two of whom I got to meet.

 

Pictured above: A selection of Nicholson titles

MP: If you did read these authors did they influence your writing style?

GN: I think an author is never the best judge of his own influences, but I’ll try. I started out writing plays – I wrote a couple of things that got put on at the London Fringe and the Edinburgh Festival, but I always had ambitions to be a novelist. My first novel Street Sleeper was an attempt to write an English road novel, and it was a satire of the American form. The lead character is trying to live out some of that Zen, Beat thing, and, although it was ironic, in my own way I still find that very appealing.

The Beats’ lives, with all their troubles, always sounded a lot more interesting than mine. Kerouac would go cross the country, meet up with Neal Cassady et al, and they’d go to a club and there’d be jazz and poetry and girls and reefers. I was envious. 

There are also notions of transcendence whether through art or sex or religion or music, a recognition that ‘ordinary life’ isn’t enough. And then there’s drugs. I was never much of a druggy but I do find drugs interesting – as in Thomas De Quincey and Coleridge. And different states of consciousness were obviously a major part of the Beat/hippy ethos, but anybody who reads Naked Lunch and thinks heroin is a good lifestyle choice is obviously out of their mind (I have in fact met such people).

MP: Having your read your books, the one thing I think you share with the Beats – and it’s only my opinion – is that you are fearless in your plotting, unafraid to celebrate the fantastical and those who might exist outside of so-called normal society. To give the drifters and the washed up, marginalised folks all, a place in the scheme of things is something the Beats – especially Burroughs and Kerouac delight in. I think it’s the willingness to take a risk on a story or a plot that others might think too outlandish that you share with the Beats. Do you think that’s a fair comparison?

GN: Harold Bloom says somewhere that all great art is strange. Which of course is not to say that all strange art is great. I’ve never consciously decided to be ‘zany’ in my writing – it comes out the way it comes out. But it’s true enough that I don’t find ‘naturalism’ very attractive. I recently read Jane Eyre for the first time (there are a lot of holes in my reading) and it’s great but it’s weirder than hell, which I don’t think is generally recognized. And Jane Eyre, the character, isn’t just Beat, she’s downright punk!

MP: The Beats were/are often about seeking a freedom inner and outer – often by experimenting with drugs, sex and alternative lifestyles, dropping out, taking to the open highway. Do you think that like the hippies – let’s regard them as the Beats’ radical offspring – were just were a bunch of guys mainly on some kind of ego trip, often abusing others and, as critics have often pointed out, merely a bunch of narcissists whose idea of rebellion and a counterculture contributed little to life or culture. Alternatively did they actually galvanise the post-war generation into  escaping the grey  world that was America of the 1950s? Big question…

GN: Big question indeed. I think we do come back to the effect of World War II – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was in the US navy throughout the war, became an ardent pacifist. And why wouldn’t he?  War was terrible; we should give peace a chance and all we needed was love.  None of that, of course, is exactly controversial.  But I think the early post-war generations had a sense that their parents were too serious, too materialistic, too scarred by the war; so let’s grow our hair, smoke dope and dance.   There are worse strategies.