On Artistic Decorum

I received several calls from friends regarding the appropriateness or taste of a recent post (now removed due to a recent epiphany), and one from a party concerned who spoke to me about the “immaturity” of what I was doing. No offence, but fuck you.

I am a writer. I write shit. It’s what I do. It’s my thing. And what I do, like any writer, is mine the rich ore of my life to ultimately produce the finished, polished gem of my art – so what if the ore sometimes gets as dirty as fuck. This blog is about my writing, which is sourced heavily from my experiences, so I am going to write what is relevant, and in whatever creative style I choose to, once I don’t libel anyone. Graham Greene’s brilliant novel, The End of the Affair, is about his own adulterous liaison with a British socialite as you will find in any article on the damn book – no one took him to task, so get off my fucking case. Neruda’s greatest love poem, “Tango del viudo” is about the tempestuous crazy bitch, Josie Bliss, he was in love and lived with. Love, betrayal, pain is the stuff of life and the stuff of literature. My stories are the text, this blog simply serves as the Cliff’s Notes…on crack.

I believe the question here is to what degree should a writer conceal the truth behind his art, particularly when it involves the feelings of other people? My approach to this varies in relation to the urgency of the message, the facility of the portrayal in art, and, frankly speaking, my subjective view of that person. Some of my friends at the Bump, women I’ve had relationships with, Janet Jagan, Ravi Dev, my family, my son are all making appearances in Fictions – what is the formula for deciding to what level of disguise they appear in? And since the blog is essentially about the book, in fact a crucial part of the entire artistic endeavour, to what degree should I hide the models from which my characters and plots are made?

An anecdote: An ex-girlfriend of mine made a star appearance in my story, April. April is a story about erotic passion and danger and has a fair degree of sex in it, in addition to being the most accomplished story in my first book, Ariadne & Other Stories. The book was published two years after we ended our particularly torrid affair, and I saw her in the street one day with someone I found out was her boyfriend. We chatted briefly, and she asked for her copy and when I said I had none on me, she suggested that I drop it off at her boyfriend’s workplace which I did. I saw her a short time after and after loading me down with her “How could you?” stare, she started talking about some casual shit or the other. Near the end of the conversation, I asked if her boyfriend gave her the book. He had and they were no longer together. I never saw her again. Would it have been better, for the sake of their relationship, if I had never written “April”? I don’t think so.

“The Last Affair” is a story in Fictions inspired by my marriage and my relationship with the mother of my child, and the truth is the female character is the one that comes out of it far more sympathetically than does the male one in the end. It was started roughly three years ago and now has found its ending, its resolution, in the dissolution of my marriage. The judgments, the alleged scandal that was contained in that blog post will pass – what will endure is the text of the tale as will be published in the book. Should I, out of some moral qualm, not publish “The Last Affair” because of the ultimately unfavourable light it is going to hold me up to due to the portrayal of the character based on me? I don’t think so.

Literature is not literature if it does not move people, shake them off their comfortable centres. I am not in the business of pussyfooting, political correctness and catering to every damn objection to what I produce – if that were the case, I would not get any literary writing done. The truths I hope to invest Fictions with are going to piss a lot of people off, they will lose me many acquaintances, they will not endear me to the established political factions and their corollary of racist nut jobs. I am going to hear it from the black people and from the coolie people. All I can hope to do is make sure that my case is as airtight as can be, because when the dust settles, I believe what I have to say has validity, value and relevance in relation to the society I have chosen to stay in and write from. Hence one post about being cuckolded by Super Furby is not that major a concern of mine in the larger scheme of things.

This is my last post for now related to “The Last Affair” or else I might end up publishing the entire story in excerpts.

“Infidelity is foreign to human nature. No truly modern society has successfully evolved any acceptable system for it. Polygamy, extra-marital promiscuity, wife-swaps, ménages a trois, swinging, sex clubs, sex cruises. All synthetic, all ultimately proven unsustainable within the mainstream. Every affair is in fact an artifice, a house of cards, the flimsiest of edifices.”

Excerpt, “The Last Affair”, Fictions