On this episode of I Know This Guy, we have the great Ian Thomson. Ian is an author based in the UK with an extensive career spanning decades. We touch on his research process and why he considered becoming a writer at all. We also touch on an eerie incident where an assault lead him to be able to speak a new language!
Date: December 11 2020
Episode: 35
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Ian Thomson, an Award Winning Biographer, Reporter, Translator and Literary Critic
Subtitle: “When the writer is born into a family, the family is finished”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-35-bonjour-blanc-w-ian-thomson/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Ian Thomson, an award winning biographer, reporter, translator and literary critic
He is an English author best known for his biography Primo Levi and reportage, The dead yards and Tales of Modern Jamaica. In this episode we discuss about his research process and why he consider becoming a writer
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Ian 0:00
One thing I’ve learned, I think is the most important thing. For anybody who wants to write anything is just to write it. First of all, get it all down and then you can shape it’s sort of panel batshit. Do the surgery on it, when you need to.
Norman 0:25
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy. The podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell’s a bell?
Norman 0:59
All right Ian and welcome to the podcast.
Ian 1:01
Thank you very much.
Norman 1:03
I was talking to Marcello Bratke and he’s the person that referred us and one of the things that we were talking about were interesting people, that’s when your name was dropped. So I can’t wait to get talking. I saw a bunch, yeah, matter of fact, these all hit a nerve and they’ve been in I guess you’ve received awards for a lot of your writing. But, the one that gets me because I love Jamaica, I’ve been there many times. I was there when Bob Marley was buried. But what you’ve talked about here is The Tales of Modern Jamaica and I’m very interested to hear that because during the days of Bob Marley, the political corruption there was absolutely crazy and he had a few attempts on his life and then your book, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey through Haiti, can’t wait to touch on that. So Ian, I’m really interested in your backstory, I want to know what made Ian Ian. Can we go through your backstory and tell us details? I just want a quick summary.
Ian 2:05
I think what made me want to write in the first place was the fact that I was a complete failure at school and everything. I mean, I was a dead loss and considered as such, but my favorite school reports from my school in London, in about 1969, this was with bringing chickenpox into the school for boys solidly lazy, and it shows in everything he does, but still got this report and of course, when you’re conceited, when you’re perceived as being somebody who’s sort of fall short of the mark, who isn’t an achiever at school. You really in some ways, I think when you grow up later on want to sort of show everybody the adult world that you have the metal to achieve and actually do something and so for me, a kind of life raft was writing and I found soon enough that once I was in my teens, that I had a kind of flair, if you like, so a gift for writing and that was recognized by a couple of very important teachers. From there really, I think that the impulse to write to forget the fact that I was perceived as being a nonentity, an idiot and so a failure.
Norman 3:18
It’s interesting that you said that, because when I went through school, I had a teacher, it was a math teacher that was very, cut and dry. Norm, you’re never going to make anything out of your life and I kind of fell into what you were talking about. I was not the greatest student until I had to go back and I dropped out of school in 11th grade and then I went back and all of a sudden, I took it seriously. But I had a teacher or two teachers that changed my life and they took an interest, they saw that I had some talent in different areas, not in writing, but it’s amazing. If somebody puts a little bit of conceal a little bit of potential in you, and it goes from you’re never going to make anything out of your life, to Hey, you’ve got potential. So it’s interesting to hear that you said that. So now you’ve got a couple of teachers that are interested in you. Did you go to university?
Ian 4:16
Yes, but only after it was decided by these two teachers, these inspirational teachers, who what kind of Mavericks there were so slightly off piece, more very conventional types, and sort of teachers, you don’t really find that thing so much today in schools because everything’s a lot more standardized and wrote and kind of conformance. But it began really this notion that I might be able to go to both my parents went to the school for one of these awful Teachers-Parents Association kind of meetings, which my parents dreaded always because they’re always hearing terrible things about me and the teacher said, I knew the parents of Ian Thomson and they were convinced when they came home, but he was talking about another Ian Thomson. So I finally told my parents about anything that I did in private school and they still, I think, to this day, not quite certain that this was really interesting what they got. But anyway, after that, I took exams for Cambridge in the UK and got in there and I read English literature that they say, eating the sheep’s hair, instead of studying for some reason. Anyway, I read English literature there. Yeah.
Norman 5:26
So you got into Cambridge, and this is after the first teachers just basically kind of rubbing you off and then the two that took interest, that’s incredible. It’s interesting, we’re kind of going down the same path. Because the two teachers that worked with me were totally unconventional. These were teachers that would not be allowed to be teachers today, they just went off a different path. So so far, we’re going down the same life.
Hayden 5:56
So actually, I was gonna say, for both of you, what are some ways that those teachers influenced or supported you? Or like, yeah, well, the difference between those teachers be, or what would the difference be between those teachers and like Ian said, like conventional teachers today?
Ian 6:10
That’s a good question. I mean, Norman, if I could start. I would say that one of these teachers who’s still around his name is Dr. Jan Piggott. What he did in the first class he had with us was to present us with the lyrics to this song called Subterranean Homesick Blues. Very few of us even knew who Bob Dylan was, then. This is in, I think about 1978. Dylan was, of course, famous and bright. But all us teenagers never knew much about him in the UK for some reason. Anyway, he gave us these lyrics, and then cranked up the actual song on some speakers he bought into the classroom. So the walls were sort of shaking, and we were levitating out of our seats. We’ve never heard anything like this before and for me, that was a crucial moment. What it did; it showed me that pop or rock music could have lyrics that were up there with cheats and shelling, but also that there were different ways of teaching and this was one of them. Absolutely and I teach my students at the University of East Anglia today, I still play them Subterranean Homesick Blues first and then the sort of mentors teach them.
Norman 7:25
For my side, it was and this is kind of crazy because mom, Hayden can’t ever believe that this happened. But when I went back to school, the teacher, two of them saw where the first saw my writings, I was kind of into the avant garde. Anyways, the guy’s name was Jim Majors, he loved it. He loved what I was writing, he loved the direction I was going on. He introduced the book, actually, outside of the school. He actually had a psychologist or psychiatrist look at it, because it was kind of dark. But anyways, I was older and we could go for a beer together. Because I dropped out, I came back and just hearing that and also with poems like writing poetry.
Hayden 8:16
You were writing poetry?.
Norman 8:17
Yeah.
Hayden 8:18
What? For our listeners, this is a first.
Norman 8:24
Yeah, I got some of the stuff still here. I kept some of it. But anyways, yeah, he was great. He just kept pushing me to do stuff that, Hey, before this, I don’t want to say lazy but kind of just jock-ish, go in the back, have some smokes, skip, but now I was really into his classes and he would break it down just the way that he would talk and show us or talk to us about English. I just kind of got hooked. Then the other one, he was an art teacher and I really got into art. Again, I got into surrealism, and he kept trying to push and push the limits. But what he got me involved with was animation and film and so he would help me after schools develop these at the time, every piece of animation was done by hand. He would come over to my house and help out and then we started entering into film festivals. Because of this, I ended up going to the best film College in Canada. Yeah, I would never have gone down that path.
Ian 9:34
Yes, and these are Maverick figures you’re talking about? We need them soon. Yeah.
Norman 9:41
They actually came to my wedding. Anyways, right now those two people, they would have lost their job. First of all, because we went out for a beer but so then, but just the type of the way that they conducted their class. They had full class participation. It was pretty much you could say what you want and that was unheard of. I don’t know, you’re just kind of completely relaxed you weren’t kind of talked down to anyways. Yeah, I don’t want to take this as your podcast Ian, but it’s just kind of interesting that we went down that same path. Now, I did not leave Cambridge. I want to talk a bit more about that. How was that experience?
Ian 10:24
Well, this was 1981 when I went up to Cambridge and at that time the college I was at because the universe is made up of lots of individual colleges all male so it was a very strange environment. Today, it’s a co educational thing but in those days, there were only guys and I remember there was a freshers disco and they played this freshers disco very inappropriate to me, a song which was a talking head psycho killer, which was played on all the airways at the time. So I have that memory of this rather kind of confined and retrogressive study backward looking fossilized institution, this college called Pembroke in Cambridge and I think, for the first year could be diluted because the teaching there just wasn’t up to the scratch of the teaching. I’d had a school with these Maverick two teachers I mentioned and it was only after I started studying American literature, things began to open up. But the first year was kind of a write off and just spent a lot of time going to parties and drinking, which is fun, but if you do any studying. Now, as I say, it’s changed a lot. But Pembroke Cambridge
Norman 11:43
Isn’t that incredible? We’re not talking 100 years ago, we’re talking 1980.
Ian 11:50
Yeah, and I was there for three years, I left in 1983 and a degree in English literature in those days was the sort of shortcut to what we call in the UK, Social Security. Now, it wasn’t really much help and looking for work or a degree in English literature. So after that, I got a diploma in teaching English as a foreign language and I had a room where I lived for nearly two years and that was quite an eye opener for me. Culture shock,
Norman 12:22
Culture shock, how was Rome compared to Cambridge?
Ian 12:26
Well, very different. I had no Italian. So I had to start from scratch and I learned Italian the hard way just picking it up off the street, watching television, listen to radio and I left after a very mysterious head injury sustained in Rome where I woke up in which I was renting near terminus station with was lying on the kitchen floor basically with backdoors left ajar and my family came home and found me lying in a very macabre pool of blood with best Hitchcock tradition, and telephone dangling off and hand prints of blood all over the walls. I still to this day, don’t know what happened. But anyway, I was taken to the hospital in San Giovanni in Laterano, which is one of the big main staples and I was operated on for the internal fractions. So, but one of the strange things that happened to me then was when I came to, in the hospital, I didn’t speak in my mother tongue, which is English, but in the language that I was learning at the time, which is Italian and these quirks of language not uncommon for Britain is when the brain remax itself or for some kind of trauma, you often get these strange sort of linguistic quirks and years later, I found the surgeon who operated me. Strange name, but Professor Spleen, and he remembered me well enough, and to my disappointment, he was not at all fazed or taken aback by what I described to him as a strange facility. I certainly haven’t spoken Italian. He just said to me, Well, it’s not the Berlitz method. Put a blow to the head, just one sustained and probably one than someone when it comes to learn a foreign language. But the police investigated the episode because there was some suggestion that someone had broken into the flat and hit me. See, again, I have no idea what happened to me. What I can tell you is I started speaking Italian and in the ward, where I was recuperating in this hospital, which was all men, there are a lot of kids who’ve been knocked off their best motorcycles, scooters, and they weren’t wearing helmets because it wasn’t obligatory then in Italy between to wear them. It is obligatory today, not everyone was and there were just a lot of pretty severely traumatized people with bad head injuries. But for me, that was an incredible turning point in my life. When I was young, relatively early 20s, everything knitted together. In the summer, the wards in this hospital became so hot and stuffing, but I implored the nurses if I could sit out or lie out in the corridor, and they didn’t even best, put my bed up on the roof of the hospital. I had this incredible view of all Rome, and the Basilica of San Giovanni with the sort of saints kind of standing there looking at me, but that was some kind of education. Rome was Maya and ever since then, I’ve had this great, deep love of Italy and Italian culture.
Norman 16:03
I’ve got to ask you, did you have to learn English all over?
Ian 16:08
No, although it had become after the operation quite rusty and some words that I was more fluent with more familiar with sort of drop from my memory, I was very curious and I had to sort of work at getting the language back in some other curious factor. But, there are lots of stories that will now some had phantom limb syndrome, where he was almost blown off. I think the bachelor father was it and he was convinced that he still had an arm, or because when the brain remaps itself, plays these sort of tricks on the nervous system, so it was, I think, with me, it’s like one of those stories you read Oliver Sacks, his wife who mistook husband for her.
Norman 17:01
That’s really crazy. So you just ended up in a pool of blood. You have no idea what happened and even to this day, you don’t remember anything about that event.
Ian 17:16
Well, I have moments of lucidity. One of them is the porter tracks on came in the ambulance with me and my then girlfriend who was more family, to the hospital. When I interviewed him many years later, for the London Review of Books, I was trying to sort of establish what happened. I found the same concierge living in the same block of flats and this would have been 25 years later and either he’d had a lapse of memory, or what I don’t know, but he said he wasn’t on the ambulance with me and that spooked me out a little bit. To add to this story, I don’t know if you’ve seen a film by Nicolas Ferrari. It’s about some sort of haunting and Bennett’s, it’s a brilliant film and it’s sort of very spooky. What I found in this flat wedge behind the chest of drawers, the wardrobe in the entranceway and the flat where the film is, it was an X-ray of the previous occupants of his flat. He was also an English person. We also had the same injury hematoma with a fractured scar. That was deeply deeply spooky enough. But that’s all absolutely true.
Norman 18:58
A little bit more than a coincidence, I’d say.
Ian 19:01
Yeah, it was.
Norman 19:03
So okay. I guess you left for Rome after that. Probably running. What ended up happening after that? After Rome?
Ian 19:12
After Rome, I sort of settled in London, where I was born, and sent out feelers in the world of publishing journalism and writing. At university, I had written for asylee come to culture-ish magazine called Broadsheet and that sort of gave me the confidence to try the magazines and journals, newspapers in London, CFM one me, most of them backprojection six, but a few sort of gave me a chance to write something. One of these great editors was a man called Alan Ross, a very key figure in my life and in the lives of lots of writers in the UK actually. Alan Ross was the editor of London Magazine this sort of German month of June and he said, Well, would you like to review this for me, and it turned out to be something I didn’t want to do at all, I have no interest in it and it was a book about Beatrice Webb, who was the founder of the Fabian Society, in the UK. So she was on a left leaning friend of Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, and was very kind of pro Stalin, even when it was clear that Stalin was executing people on a sort of huge scale. So she was insanely naive woman anyway, also keen to get this with you wife, I spent about a week in the local library, mucking up and searching everything, I called on the bedrooms about Beatrice and then this review was published in London magazine in about 1984 and I have to say that everything I’ve written since then, cannot equal the great excitement and for them being imprintable fullsteam. It was indescribably powerful and Alan Ross, the editor of London Magazine, then took me on almost, which I did, so I kind of began there with Alan and Alan was also a war poet. He’d been quite a gifted second World War poem. He was also a sports journalist for the observance. He was a cricket post. So kind of an all rounder renaissance man who was for me an inspiration and I kind of owe a lot to Alan, as I do to these two Maverick teachers I mentioned, Jan Piggott and Laurie Jacket and incidentally, both Jan Piggott and Laurie Jacket at the school and one more intelligence had taught. You might know Dachi will be English patients turned into film. Yeah and he will say towards an English writer called Grand Swift, and many others. So they had this gift, where they’re bringing out the best in people. Somehow, they had magic in war, they were kind of gifted in it and so after writing a lot of London Magazine, I started writing the New Statesman, which is a sort of political, cultural journal for the spectator, which is the same but more kind of writer center, logically if you like, listen to them the New Statesman, and I wrote a lot for Evening Standard, which is a daily newspaper in London, and The Independence Telegraph, just hacking, writing a lot of reviews, it was a bit of a sort of alright for anyone who is willing to pay a bit more cheesy. Now, I can afford a banner just for anything.
Norman 23:13
So at that point, you’re writing with four different papers, writing for anybody that would pay you. What got you to the next step, like writing novels?
Ian 23:27
Well, I had written novels, most of my books that I’ve written, I suppose might be considered in parts sort of blend of fiction and nonfiction, and nonfiction, by way of reference and short stories, but kind of what started me writing books, I think, was just a condition that kind of fell on my desk one day from the London publishing house, Collins, and they wanted me just to write on a travel guide to seven isn’t. It was as simple as that. Pretty kind of humble, sort of undertaking more ambitious proposals. But, I did it, and it became a book and I’m still quite proud of it. It’s sort of humorous for consumers and I can say this for the first time. Because the editor who commissioned it will probably forgive me for saying this now, a long time ago, but I was so annoyed by the advance money I bought for this time that I invented an island and put it in the book, which doesn’t make sense. The island is off Sicily, which of course is itself called Para news and it has a population of wild goats and maybe a few fishermen. I just left it at that. To my delight, I saw like a game of Chinese whispers that this fake island was then picked up by another travel guide, and they published it and so it was pretty ripped. I felt bad about this when I got a letter from what I would have judged to be quite an elderly couple because the handwriting was so shaky The calligraphies were uncertain who said, We’ve been looking for this island but we can’t find it anywhere and we’ve asked, and asked, and asked but there was no sign of it. So I felt bad. I said to them, well, it probably went under in the bullpen and with no trace of it. Anyway, slightly impish, cheeky guide to Southern Island and then, still in the 1980s, this is when there was quite a lot of money sloshing around London publishing and one of the editors who work for publishing rules for batching, which is today part of Random House, big, big, lumbering conglomerates, huge organization, had this particular interest in French culture, and in particular, in French culture in the West Indies, in the Caribbean and he said to me over one of these sort of boozy lunches, publishing seems to help. Why didn’t you go to Haiti or Haiti, and write about the island and it’s all great. It’s fantastic and this same editor whose name is Yuan Cameron, had been Graham Greene modern spring greens press offices in London, during the 70s, and 80s and as you may know, Graham Greene wrote a famous novel in 1980 called The Comedians, which is the sort of political saturn, about the dictatorship on the transformed devalue father, Papa dog, and later baby dog. Anyway, I went to Haiti, and started to research the book, which is a sort of history book, as much as anything else. Sort of history and adventures and a story I have about Haiti is that I was staying in this wonderful, ramshackle hotel called the Hotel Oloffson, which you have to imagine something like, creation out of the Addams Family cartoons. It was sort of a rickety, ancient construction with wobbly overhead fans in the dining room and so collapsing, bandanas and everything creaky, nothing worked, you have to take a spanner into the shower and to get the things warm and my girlfriend came up from England, to see me. This will be in about 1991, 1990 and I proposed marriage in the hotel. At the moment, I went down in traditional fashion on one knee, and also, by the way, pre ordered a bottle of champagne. So certainly it’s going to be accepted. The moment I went through all this ridiculous brick more, there’s more mighty versus machine going on and the maid came in with a bottle of champagne for a motion and I asked her in sound subterra, What’s going on? She said in French, she said that I didn’t send off the exam tomorrow. Which indeed it was. The President’s sort of coming up with variable one. Anyway, I’m still married to Law, said this hotel must be a good fit. For me, it sort of has a lot of good sort of things attached to it and when I came home to the UK, which became so.
Norman 28:55
Can you tell us a little bit about the journey through Haiti, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey through Haiti?
Ian 29:03
Yes. Well, first of all the title. Bonjour Blanc will translate to kind of roughly as Hello Whitey or Hello White Guy. The thing about this is it doesn’t matter what your ethnicity, or religion is, where you come from, what your skin color is, if you’re a foreigner in Jamaica, you’re always hailed as one. So you could be an African and obviously, so by the clothes you wear on racks, and you still be a blonde, bombshell blonde, hair blonde. It’s just a sort of a thing I heard the most frequently. So I decided to call. In some ways, in the history of the Great Black Liberation leader to Sandy tune, who was a nation former slaves who led only successful slave revolt in human history. He kicked out the colonial French from the Island, and it declared independence in 1804 and as I said, this was the only successful slave revolt in history and to celebrate cheer had managed to not only expel the colonial French, but also the British who were interested in claiming this island as one of their own to go with Jamaican British Colonial Island Dependency. But to Toussaint L’Ouverture, defeated the British Redcoats who were sent out in the 18th century and as far as I know, this is the first time in history that a white army has been defeated by a black gent and when Haiti declared independence in 1804, they said that anyone could stay on the island with the understanding and the understanding that they will be ideologically black. So even though there was a contingency of white polish fighters who had gone over with Napoleon troops, and had defected, whatever to my insurgent slaves, they were to be considered black not white. So for me, this is the first time in history that the word black has been used in a modular, logical sense, if you will and so this is fascinating history and it kind of foregrounded it in the book, very much so. So it’s as much a history as it is kind of an account of me going around the island. In those days, I was pretty reckless, I have to say, or do things then. But today, I think, for example, I’m just taking off from without any contacts in the hills and just talking to anyone that kind of cross paths. Because I was always much more interested in talking to a lot of new people, rather than representatives of the government on the other side of the desk. It does give you some kind of conventional stock answer to the country’s problems, not the real kind of problems you get from the ground and support so much construction, the voices of people and it’s still in print. So, books have a pretty short shelf life these days, unfortunately. But that one came out, I think, in 1992 and then it was republished in paperback edition not long ago, with an introduction by a science fiction writer, as some of you may have heard of Canada, called JG Ballard. He wrote a book called Empire of the Sun, which is made into former students. Anyway, so jJG Ballard wrote the introduction to the paperback, and it’s still in print and it’s still kind of consulted by people. Interesting thing about that instance.
Norman 33:01
I wish you were with me back in the 80s. This isn’t Haiti, this is Jamaica. I went there by myself and I was just sitting at a bar and just talking with this American couple doctor and a nurse and they said, You want to see Jamaica? Or do you want to stay at the resort? So yeah, let’s take off. So they rented a car, I kind of was a third party, third wheel and we ended up, I don’t know how but into the mountains at this village is basically a Rastafarian Village, and we kind of just hung out for, what was only for the night and the next day we took off, but it was just seeing what other people, okay, yeah, I can go have another, whatever. We would be drinking back then. But let’s just say a beer. But it’s just not Jamaica and I think from that day forward, I don’t want to be that resort person. I always want to be going out and not going with a tour guide, but just doing something completely different that’s not on the beaten path. But I gotta tell you, Haiti in 1992, or when you were there, I wouldn’t have done that. You must have, I don’t know the best way to say this. But I definitely would not be walking the streets of Haiti. I would be afraid for my life.
Ian 34:35
Yes, I mean, what I often did was to, if I was going into an area that was my sample, that those political upheaval, I will often go in with the local age worker, or a priest, often the Catholic Jesuit priests for great work and fun for Asians, no going with family so protection for one. So I wasn’t sort of blending in, quite sort of on thinking we kind of had a sense of what was dangerous and what not things. But it’s interesting you talk about Jamaican because I think that some of the most touristy region parts of the island in Jamaica are paradoxically the most dangerous. You can go to all inclusive resorts. But because those are places that are sort of fenced off from the local population, and often were only in US dollars and where people are given this sort of fake kind of Jamaican experience, there’s a lot of local resentment, understandably and if you leave your hotel in one of these places, you’re going into a much more dangerous place, and then you will be going into part of the island.
Norman 35:51
I gotta tell you the story, so Montego Bay, back in the 80s. Just being young and dumb, I ran out of money and back then, you didn’t have cell phones, I mean, even to contact the bank back home. So the Royal Bank, in Canada, they had an office down in Jamaica, but they weren’t communicating. I had to go to the bank. I was expecting a wire, I talked to them and this is just, they loaned me $20 not knowing if I’ve ever come back, so I can get a meal and basically I could either walk back to the resort, which was very dangerous, or get a taxi to take me there. But they actually gave me 20 bucks, just because they felt sorry for me, there’s a young, dumb Canadian, that absolutely run out of 100% of all their money.
Ian 36:46
Sounds like it’s a classic Jamaican story.
Norman 36:49
Yeah. Let’s also talk about, I know this is years later, but you also wrote about The Dead Yard: Tales of modern Jamaica, let’s get into that.
Ian 37:03
Okay, The Dead Yard. First of all the title again, The Dead Yard is the term that Jamaicans have for a house that is transformed into the place where a wake takes place on stone. So you have a period of mourning, night’s huge Mormon, where the place becomes the dead yard. So just as a sort of an abstract title for both, I thought it was quite sort of striking to use it and of course, I guess it has connotations, or, if you like, an island, which has stumbled after independence in the early 60s, when it detach from Great Britain, and the union jack came down. Jamaica didn’t kind of quite go it alone, as it might have done fully. So it’s still hanging on to the coattails of sort of, Mother Britain and for me, the hope for these kind of dependencies in the Commonwealth is ready for them to detach definitively from the motherland from Mrs. Queensland, the UK is sometimes called. So the book,The Dead Yard with that title, definitely had a sort of sense of critique of beyond and indeed, it is, and is quite a dark book I think and Jamaicans, like anybody else a brilliant disrespecting their own country, but they’re not very keen on others doing it, understandably and that book, had a very, very rocky publishing history. I was on a bus in London, when I answered my mobile phone after the book was published by my editor for Faber and Faber, publishing your published report, said to me, I’m really sorry to have to tell you this book, your book is not going to be distributed in Jamaica and I said, Why? He said, there’s been some pressure put on by a certain family not to distribute the book and this family who I won’t name, but they were white planter cratic Jamaicans living in this huge, sort of Neo colonial house, and it seemed to me replicating or trying to the sort of so Gone with the Wind style, sort of called savory days and I kind of satirize, and sent them up and they weren’t pleased. But this is a very, very powerful family and indeed, they were so powerful that they were able to put pressure on the island’s sole book distributor company called Mobile TH. It doesn’t sort of inspired by faith and so the book never appeared in Jamaica. But it started to accrue this kind of underground sort of sense, that semi kind of legal reputation or something you might get on the counter and shopping in a brown paper bag and so it was being bought a lot through Amazon and mobile, online sort of shops over and of course, if you ban a book, it becomes paradoxical, a lot more popular, which is what happened before with The Dead Yard. It’s a sort of compliment, with Bonjour Blanc, because Jamaica and Haiti are next to each other on the map. But they couldn’t be more different. So Jamaica is English speaking, Protestant, British, whereas Haiti is Roman Catholic, French, and 90% body songs are reduced. So a lot of people will be confident in Haiti, but they’ll also venerate African Elements to energies by country and what we call duty. So one thing that I was interested in both Jamaica, and Haiti was the prevalence of any former slave, in his religions and you get them in Jamaica as well, but not to the extent you do in Haiti and I’d have to say, not with the same race or beauty that you’re doing, or hygiene. So the Voodoo ceremony in Haiti can go on for hours and hours and hours. But they are choreographed with the sort of grace and beauty and the charming is donachie polyrhythmic patterns that these young guys saw tumbleweeds, dramas, and I went to lots Voodoo ceremonies and one thing I want you to do in that book in Haiti, and it was to kind of realign the idea we have in the West, that Voodoo is this sort of satanic cult or sticking pins in wax dolls and things and it’s been scrutinized by Hollywood. It’s nothing like that. It’s a very respectful fusion of Catholicism, African animism and so a big part of Haiti was my attendance with anthropologists. Maltese women’s.
Norman 42:21
Yeah, I guess I could probably get under your skin. When you go over there and you see what Voodoo is, and then how it’s portrayed with evil, pinzon dolls and everything else and I see that with Hollywood all the time. We were just talking about this movie and going, None of this is correct. This is all somebody some directors or script writers made up thoughts and unfortunately, the people that are going to watch this are actually going to think that this is real. Anyways, you just kind of touch on nerves that get to me too. Because if somebody says based on a true story, yeah, maybe, part of it is based on but it doesn’t show the real story.
Ian 43:12
Certainly. One of the big offenders of that in terms of Haitian culture was the James Bond movie Live and Let Die with Rogers, starring James Bond, and the novel itself Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming extraordinary picture of readings, this kind of all that sort of semi masonic cult. But it’s all to do with sort of planting and sticking pins in. So it’s not like that on the ground when you’re out there at all.
Norman 43:48
Was there any issue with you attending because you were an outsider?
Ian 43:52
No, that’s one of the things that was most peculiar to me. I would often just sort of the sound of the drumming in the countryside and just walk and a lot of people would be in semi states of possession. But I found in spite of my obvious, outsider status that nobody paid me any money and in fact, so long as I often made a point of turning up with a libations, bring one bottle of wine, the Voodoo priest or the home ban would take that courtesy and then pour some of the romance of the so called compass in the temple, and then I would just be left alone. So I never ever had any trouble. People are sort of moving in on me because I shouldn’t be there. What did happen there was in spite of your own rational self, your own Western sort of mindset, the drumming, the heat in the temple and aspiring bodies and music conspired to bring you as a spectator to a state of semi, not possession, but you were transfixed. So you entered into a kind of transformed state, where time kind of dissolved. So I could be in a home for up to two or three hours, sightseeing that often. So it seemed almost like a sort of strange mirror, sometimes religious.
Norman 45:29
Hayden, do you have any questions?
Hayden 45:32
Yeah. I’m curious, actually, did you notice how religion affected people in their day to day lives? Because obviously, with Catholicism or Christianity, like, people will follow the commandments and that really informs the day to day life, like how did Animism and Voodoo manifest in their day to day lives?
Ian 45:54
Yes, it is such an interesting question. For me, if you were poor, and 80% of Haitians are very poor, then just for one night, at a voodoo ceremony, you could be taken out of yourself and you could become part of this storming theater, where you can rise above these sort of dire economic straits, and you might find the famine in and be transported to a world of ancestral Africa and you could forget yourself. I found that the Catholic priests from France and Canada, actually a lot of them are really great, fascinating guys, were very respectful to Voodoo and would sometimes incorporate Ms. from Catholic mass where the American evangelical, kind of born a brand again, sort of Christians in the Mormons, in particular, were very contemptuous and sometimes uproot the temples and destroy them and they didn’t have a lift for the communities as the frontier. But I think even if you were a very wealthy, sort of pale skinned Haitain, you’ve been to school in Paris at the Sorbonne or something, you would have a maid in the house, who would be a different skin color. We would bring in African economists’ religion into the house, inevitably. So it is all over culture. It saturates every large sort of drop of Haitian culture. Some of the great Haitiain artists have been Voodoo priests. Some of the great musicians have been drummers that have kind of been brought up in families that have respected the rites and rituals of Fuji. So Haitians say that 100% Capital 110% reduced.
Norman 48:01
One of the interests I have, I love history and just an interesting fact and I hope these facts are correct. As I look back on the days, pirates, Captain Morgan, one of the interesting things I’ve heard about Jamaica, Port Royal, Kingston, Port Royal at the time, just prior to the earthquake, is that Port Royal was a multicultural city where pirates, privateers were, what was it? It was just a city of privateers. But one thing that Captain Morgan who led these privateers did not believe in was slavery. So while Port Royal prior to the earthquake was alive, and well, there was no slavery in Jamaica. After the the major earthquake that happened in wiped out for the most part most in Port Royal, then, slavery was brought to the island. Because the privateers were no longer there. I think that was amazing. Yeah, I would have thought for sure that and it was Captain Morgan, actually, that from what I’ve heard, probably one of the most famous people in Port Royal. But he was the one that stood out and just absolutely was against any form of slavery on Jamaica.
Ian 49:27
Yes. I mean, they’re all these British history is littered with these very interesting people who are dead set against slavery. One of my personal heroes is the 18th century lexicographer, and essayist, Dr. Johnson, Samuel Johnson, who lived off Fleet Street in London in the 18th century, and he took on a treat to make him space Samuel Barber has his own sort of view like valet or man servant but he didn’t abuse him. Change is in utmost respect, and Dave for his money to move on and said, British history has these sorts of exceptions as you mentioned, Captain Morgan, Dr. Johnson is another one. Exceptions that defy the norm, norm being slavery and your right and it actually was only after the English took over the island from the Spanish and the horrible promo, but it became this sort of massive slave mechanism for the transatlantic trafficking of slaves, human slaves but all kinds of commodities, sugar, warm, gunpowder, you name it. But really, in some ways, slavery is almost axiomatic. It’s almost a given that any society that has a history of slavery will be, in some ways, quite volatile, and at times, quite violent and I think the legacy of slavery and someone like Jamaica is just impossible to ignore, just as it is in Haiti. Anyway, these are all issues that younger people, people much younger than me, are very accessible now, because flatlines.
Norman 51:22
So, let’s talk about your novel, Kingston Noir.
Ian 51:28
Yes. Well, that’s a novella. I think it’s, I mean, I’m very flattered, you should pull them over. Because it’s not quite as long as it’s more like midway between a novella, and short story if you like. But the history behind that is, I was asked by a Jamaican writer called Colin, he’s a very good novelist. If I would write a short story for this collection called Kingston Noir and those are supposed as you can guess, from the title to be stalls and had a kind of dark sort of edge to them that will often to do with some sort of crime, as in the Hollywood films, 40s and 50s and I had an idea for this short story and I’m not terribly proud of it now. But anyway, I’ll tell you about it. I got a very, very bad review for this Jamaican book in a New York newspaper. I won’t tell you which paper but I thought it’s strange, as a writer is really only the bad reviews. A lot of think it’s true. But the way I exercised this bad review, was to have someone with a name in the short story that was very similar to the cricket for this New York Musical. Just like a hemangiomas near miss cheese mystays name, so it was almost the same but not quite. This guy goes out to Kings to the Capitol and dies in a hotel in Kingston while seeing a prostitute, and his son comes out to the island to repatriate the body tomorrow. So I had killed off the critic in the short story, and I’m not sure the critic ever found out. But anyway, I think writers often look for strange, sometimes quite disturbed, sort of laying to rest some sort of bad spirit and this was such a bad review, that it left me reeling. Actually, after writing the short story, everything was lifted, it was a cathartic gesture report, and the bad feeling went away. So in this short story of the critic, not the project gets killed and that’s what you do. You kill off your critics in fiction.
Norman 54:17
That’s great. Oh my gosh, I hope this goes really well, because I don’t want to be written off in one of your books.
Norman 54:31
Oh my gosh, let’s talk about out of everything you’ve written. What’s been your favorite and why?
Ian 54:41
Well, I suppose we’ve been talking about these areas of the world for Western, which for me, has enduring fascination because for me, they’re a collision of African and European cultures and they were modern place like Jamaica was modern before the United Kingdom’s more in the sense that intermarriage was already happening in Jamaica long before it was happening in the UK. So the sort of idea of a multicultural society is made up of indentured labor is originally from China, from Asia, India, from Africa, all kind of rubbing along together on this island in this coalition with sort of provincial and the local more than the European and the African, made these places incredibly fascinating for me, and very much. But I suppose the book that I’m the most proud of in that it took the longest survives, and it’s got nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about, up until this point, is a biography of the Italian writer, and chemist, Primo Levi, who I’m sure is known in Canada and is right there. Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and he was arrested by the occupying force more than in some other Nazi fascist, and deported to the death and hybrid labor and death camps in Auschwitz, and wrote this extraordinary book called If this is a Man, which speaks to people of all religions and backgrounds. It’s one of the essential kind of books of all time and after Primo Levi died in 1987, added by his own hand, to as a citizen, a publisher asked me if I would write his biography and I said, No, because the death was too recent and I felt that I wasn’t equipped to write a book with such gravity and seriousness and then, a few years later, another publisher asked me if I’ll write it and I then agreed. But what happened is that I arrived in northern Italy, where Primo Levi lived and most specifically in Turin the city in the north of Italy, where he spent most of his life and where he was born, when he died and I had no contacts to know who I was supposed to talk to. I just started to build up to kind of hit lists of people that I thought had known or would have some kind of inside knowledge of Primo Levi and telephone, this is in the days before mobile phones, and in the very kind of primitive, flanked by rented in the center of Turin with no phone. So I used to have to buy these Italian plastic phone cards, and use them in the public call box, in the main railway station in Turin and I made hundreds and hundreds of phone calls and I kept the plastic phone cards and put them in supermarket bags under my bed as sort of evidence of the amount of research that I was doing and I collected these sort of free bagfuls and form plants and plastic foam boards and often the lines were down, or the Italian connections were just rather faulty and it was just hard work. Interviewing people, I interviewed about 300 people in Italian because I speak Italian and also in English, in America, and with an interpreter in German and what I had, when I got to the end of the search was just a mass of tapes that I’ve transcribed. I have no idea how to write a story out of this, because to write a good biography, you need to borrow techniques and fiction ones. You need to have a beginning, middle and end. You need to have a sense of the sort of phases. You need to have, publishers call it through drive, sort of narrative line that takes you through the book or in the case of Primo Levi his life, from the cradle to the crematorium and it was very, very, very difficult to read and I got into quite a sort of semi panicky states about sheer quantity of material I had.
Ian 59:40
In the end, I cut 80,000 words from the moments which is a lot. For the 11th hour because I thought impeding the progress narrative and it was a particularly difficult publication for me because there was a rival working on the same subject. I came out to Turin shortly after I started my interviews, my research, but I knew she was in town and I would think that I was seeing buses in China. Give me a doppelganger and then one day one of my interviewees, somebody who had known Primo Levi, invited me, no, I think what happened is that I asked him if I could go back and read his own sure about certain facts, certain dates and when I got to this guy’s flat, the rival was there whether or not he initially sort of double booked in this guy, I don’t know. But I saw this rival, it was like a bad sort of Woody Allen formalism and I said, I’m not going to name and she said, Yes, and I know you the famous Ian Thomson, we shook hands sort of nervously. But this is an incredible publishing story. But it’s true, our two biographies, or what kind of neck and neck and they were both about to come out with big major publications, and finding my rival. But if one of us was to publish slightly later than the other, you would have to allow many years and I’m talking about four or five, or even six years to relax before that book could be reviewed on its own more be enough space between the one book and normal, because that’s publishing and so what happened is that these two publishing houses came to a sort of secret agreement behind our backs, behind my back and behind the back of the rival, that these two books will come out at the same time, which is what happened. But I was denied my solo flight, because I was compared and contrasted with the other in all the national and I knew then that only one of his books would survive, because in this sort of Darwin is struggling, books on our shelves, there’s no room for two and one would fall by the wayside and because the woman who wrote the other book was older than me, and was at that time, more established, ours kind of convinced that it would be horrible. When out if you might admit, it’s horrible. That’s how it was and this book that I read is still in print and it turned out to be a happy story and a very, very painful publishing story. But I’m proud of the way I look at it, because somehow I did it. Somehow my rotor was very, very tough. I didn’t think at the time that I could pull it off, so I can have it. It was difficult.
Hayden 1:03:08
That concludes part one of our interview with Ian Thomson. Make sure to tune in later this week for the second half of the interview. As always, make sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. So if you want to see dad’s beard and all its glory, make sure you check in there. That’s enough of me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:01
Hey guys and gals. Welcome to part two of our interview with Ian Thomson. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back and check it out or don’t, and make this a Choose Your Own Adventure podcast. If you’re looking to support the show, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. It helps you stay up to date with all of the latest episodes and helps us grow with the show. That’s enough for me and for the rest of the episode.
Norman 0:39
When you walked into that room, it must have been pretty awkward walking into a room and just seeing a competitor. How was the rest of the evening?
Ian 0:50
Well, I left quite quickly. It’s almost like one of those short stories. I mean, I mentioned that the Woody Allen film is so ridiculous, but it’s almost like a Henry James short story as well, something so weird and improbable. I actually had encounters with the rival often, once the books were published, so we both had to sort of talk them up at literary festivals in the UK. One time I remember in Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh Book Festival in Scotland. Afterwards, we both were given individual tables with piles of books of our own books on the table and people queuing up to have the book signed, the two different tables and we were like fishwives selling our goods. It was very sort of demeaning, actually, kind of thing. One thing I do remember that, and this is absolutely true, is that we both had to go on BBC Television to talk about Primo Levi, and about our books’ biographies and just before I went on air, I was in the makeup room with a guy who was a member of a band that you may know called The Monkees.
Norman 2:09
Oh, sure.
Ian 2:10
Micky Dolenz, I think, and he was being made up, he was touring the UK then, as a solo artist or with other members of The Monkees, I don’t know. But I couldn’t get this song out of my head, which is and then I saw a face. Which I think Neil Sudoko. Anyway, when I went out to confront my rival under the BBC studio lights, out this wretched song by The Monkees getting around my head, and then I saw things. I didn’t give a very good interview in the end of things, but I look back with some of that moment but it’s tough. I think that rival biographies pile up or tend to pile up in publishing, when you have an anniversary of someone important saying when Bob Dylan turned 60, there were a lot of biographies, he sort of crashed the party. In my case, it was just shared by block that there were these that there was a rival on the back. Right. But it was grim, it was quite grim.
Norman 3:23
Well, I don’t want to keep on this subject. Because it’s an unfortunate thing that happened. But it’s interesting. I wanted to find out because you have so much interesting content. I’ve got to check that one out. A matter of fact, after this podcast, I’m going to find that book on Amazon, I guess. Correct?
Ian 3:42
It was republished recently with another title, which is called The Elements of Alive because Primo Levi was a chemist. The Elements of Alive refer to the periodic table, which is the chemists stocking trade and that’s the addition to go for if you like, the one you’ll see on Amazon.
Norman 3:59
Okay, very good. So, what about influences? Do you have any people that influenced your work? Who are they?
Ian 4:08
As a teenager, I read a lot of writers, do what kind of outside the literary canon, a lot of American writers. But, transgressive writers like William Burroughs, Naked Lunch. Journalists will see these sorts of books, Yukio Mishima books just when taught at school, I don’t know whether they had an influence on me but I still have an interest in beat literature and writing and in jazz, kind of when it’s so often with those writers. I’m influenced probably these days by a lot of American journalists who practice what we call long form journalism. Writers like Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, Joseph Mitchell who wrote for The New Yorker, fantastic writer, his anthology of writings about New York, called Up in the Old Hotel is a book that I recommend to my students in university and they all absolutely love it. These are great sort of observational writers who kind of wrote, if you like from the street, they capture the essence of the city from the street. I like writers who write about the city and anything. So that might be TS Eliot, might be I’m sure writer Arthur Rambo, his parents or London bought his poems, illuminations, zoom in so. I read a lot of French literature these days, so I suppose as material for the book I’m currently writing which is a sort of half family memoir, whole history, setting the ball to find reading a lot of war correspondents works firsthand, witness accounts of bombings, roundups, deportations and grim stuff suffered in a way I covered in the Primo Levi and that maybe has a connection with the West Indian boats because they’re about diasporas, about displacements, about people on the moon, which was the Indian islands.
Norman 6:28
Yeah, doing the research, I was involved with drug addiction programs, I was on intake, the more I heard, like, okay, I thought it was the worst thing I’ve ever heard until I got the next phone call and it emotionally drained me. I was depressed, just hearing, doing the type of research that you do, and hearing about some of these stories and you’re talking about the West Indies, as well as some of these, well throughout World War Two, what was happening? Does that affect you emotionally?
Ian 7:00
I think on balance, not because I somehow developed this sort of, I suppose, a second skin that doesn’t allow any of this sort of grievous material to make inroads into my ordinary day to day life. Cold sweats and my sort of nightmares and mercifully because I think it would be quite hard to write about some of these things otherwise and in the case of Primo Levi, although he was deported to the killing fields of Poland that occupied Europe by he was more than just a witness to contemporary barbarism. The death camp with a scientist and an essayist and a journalist, and a novelist. He was many things and that kind of helped me, I think, to sort of take the subject on board. The book that I’m currently writing now, which has been a long time in writing and just on a deadline so many times now from my publishing house, which is Faber and Faber, the eminent Faber and Faber, which of course is TS Eliot’s publishing house, there so lost count themselves, I think, but with lockdown and COVID-19, I think it hasn’t been so grievously terrible for some writers that we’ve just been able to hunker down and get on with the writing. In some way, there’s nothing else to do, sort of writing reviews and journalism stuff. But I found the time and the confidence to get this book up on board, up and running and I should explain that my mother, born in the Baltic in Tallinn, which is now a capital of Estonia, and her parents Davis was part of the Russian Empire and she came to the shores in England to England in 1947 as a teenager, but I never knew that she wasn’t English until I was much older because she had reinvented herself to such an extent as an English woman, but she came across as an English woman, albeit with a slightly strangulated vowels in a very precise, sort of received English pronunciation, which a lot of people I think, from these career who came to Britain do have as a because it’s part of assimilation into mainstream British life is to forget the recent past the state and assimilate into the host country to such an extent that you become part of it, and become in some ways, English. So, the book this one I’m writing now about her past and my past because the discovery of my mother’s past is also in a way discovery of my past and it’s about this area called the Baltic, which was part of a European sort of bloodlines in the Second World War contested by both Hitler and Stalin, two apparently opposed ideologies, that in some ways, very similar in what they did to these parts of me, and the mass deportations of people from them and it’s an investigation, the book on writing into what it means to be occupied three times. So first of all this time, and Hitler started again, right up until the collapse of communism. France was occupied once pretty bad for the future generations, but to be occupied three times, is a very corrosive generation and looking at kind of what this means. It’s difficult to write, because the problem here is how to marry the bigger picture that history with the sort of the smaller picture I found in history and to get the balance right is not always easy.
Norman 11:22
There is a very short film that I’ve seen and it stuck with me, because my wife’s family is from Lithuania. During World War Two, there’s an incredible, shocking film, where you see this truck pull up, and you see about 20 men go over to a mass grave. You see them starting to be shot, executed and then there’s somebody playing with a dog, throwing a ball, dogs coming back, it was shocking to me to see this film and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. But I still just think whenever I think of Lithuania is this two minute black and white film of these people having to hop off this truck go, they know they’re gonna die and one of the soldiers is playing with a bloody little dog with a ball while all of this is going on. It was just incredibly, it just stuck with me. Anyway, you touched on COVID and I was wondering about that, like did COVID help? You said that you writers were able to hunker down and I guess that is one of the positive things coming out of COVID right now.
Ian 12:33
I think so and it’s too early to tell what kind of great novels are gonna come out. We just don’t know, I should explain that I teach at the University of East Anglia in Northridge, in the southeast of the UK. I was teaching a book that was published in the 18th century by Daniel Defoe,
A Journal of the Plague Year, and it’s about the 1665 Plague in Britain. But reading it today, Defoe talks about social distancing. He talks about quarante and talks about a mass exodus of people from cities to the countryside. He talks about people in the streets giving each other a wide berth. He talks about the hope that there is some kind of magic cure which has not been called a vaccine, but something similar. He talks about stylee on hinge sort of religious fanatics shouting in the street corners, the end is nigh and this is all God’s judgment on you. Paul’s sending people Memphis pandemic, how similar it all is, is uncanny. So I think my students have kind of in a grim way, have been very absorbed in the Journal of the Plague Year by Defoe and by the way, you asked for instances earlier and differ for me is one of the first gentleman’s tremendous right, I absolutely love his work.
Norman 14:07
Again, I have not heard of that writer. What was his name again?
Ian 14:13
D e f o e and Daniel. He lived in London. Well, I suppose he’s best known for the Robinson Crusoe novel.
Norman 14:24
Oh, okay.
Ian 14:25
He was also a journalist and a book he wrote on the plane, although he was only a child when the pandemic broke out. He kind of broke it down and gathered stories and looked at contemporary newspaper reports and then fashioned this into an incredibly American, which is sold very, very well in Britain during the pandemic here is the penguin paperback penguin classic. It has been sold a lot because the people understand grim fascination with pandemic.
Norman 15:07
Yeah. I wasn’t going to go down this path. But yeah, I look at COVID and I see what different societies are doing and I can’t believe it, Canada has actually been quite tight. Like, we’ve had locked downs, we’ve had some controls. But it just I think we got to a point where we’re three or four months into it, people started to gather again, and now we’ve exploded with issues. But in the States, like in Florida, going to football games, and I don’t know what to expect. I would have thought that people would have just, let’s do a two week lockdown, or three week or four week lockdown, and let’s have only essentials working and even at that, I’m not sure how you could just contain this virus. I don’t know about you. But I think we’ve just gone about this completely the wrong way and one of the things, I sell, and I coach people on Amazon and eCommerce and my family has a factory in China and one of the things that we manufacture is masks, which was way beyond like it just happened. It’s a coincidence. I know for a fact that the masks people are using are 100% ineffective. So I could put on a bandana, I could put on just a surgical mask, there’s doing nothing for these people and one of the things that’s really bothered me is that I haven’t seen and I’m not sure if you’ve seen this Ian, have you ever seen a commercial showing people how to not contaminate yourself when you use a mask?
Ian 16:53
Never.
Norman 16:54
It’s so simple. If you start touching your mask up here, you’ve contaminated it, or when to take it off, how to take it off. Ian, there’s health workers that are going door to door helping people and they take their mask off, just pull it off, put it in their pocket, put it back on and they’re wondering why people are getting this virus, give that Daniel’s a full book to the politicians. Maybe they’ll learn something.
Ian 17:25
Yes. Oh, that’s right. Yeah, these are very unsettled times and I wish there was an end in sight. When the pandemic first took hold last March in the UK, there was, I would say, a kind of vague sort of, among some people, this is going to be funny. No, it’s like indoor camping and it’s going to be sort of a challenge we’re going to enjoy and now there’s just merely fatigue, and a sense of despair. It’s very, very bad grim times. But as I said earlier, I think that for some people, obviously, it’s not been as bad as it is for others. So for writers, maybe, in some cases, if they haven’t gone mad, it’s been okay. It’s been more or less.
Norman 18:22
Did you have your family come back? But let’s talk about your family. So your wife, Laura, that you proposed in Haiti, and children.
Ian 18:35
Okay, so you’ve met one of my sons. Yes and we have Henry, who is also a teenager and then we have a daughter Maut, it’s M a u t and she is living away from home now with her boyfriend in North London. We’re all quite close to each other.
Norman 18:54
So Henry and Sydney are living at home right now?
Ian 18:58
Yeah.
Norman 18:59
Oh, okay.
Ian 19:00
Yeah and that’s okay. I didn’t know what the rules are in Canada now. But in the UK, it’s pretty difficult to visit friends and things analysis is done outdoors at all, in small groups. But with my mother, who’s 91, nearly 92, I make a point of seeing her once a week. She’s a widow. But I’m able to do that legally as a wall because I’m part of a support bubble. It’s cool. Yeah, I could be a care worker and she has Kayla. For all intents and purposes, Kayla. It’s tough.
Norman 19:44
It is tough. Similar. My parents, I mean, they haven’t gone out of the house basically since March and they are in the States. I’m not allowed to go to the states to see them nor would they have me in the house. But anyway, yeah, it was bittersweet because we have three boys, and they were away, and life is life. Usually they leave the nest, and you’ll see them occasionally. Kelsey was in Korea. Hayden was in Toronto at the time, but a professional musician, so he’s everywhere and then my other son was away and then all of a sudden, boom, it was like, wow, this should not happen and during my lifetime, where I’ve got my boys back, and it was kind of interesting, because so many things came out of that, which are a lot of fun. This podcast came from that anyways, then they went on their way again, of course, but it was a nice little three months of Wow, we’re all together again.
Ian 20:41
So the I Know this Guy podcast grew out of the COVID?
Norman 20:46
I was having a cigar on our patio, I had three phone calls come in roughly in around 45 minutes and one of the things that I said, common denominator was I know this guy, I’ve got a big network of people and then I think it was either Hayden or Kelsey that said, Yeah, you should make that into a podcast. Last thing I wanted to do was do any podcast work because I am terrified of being a host talking like this. Like if this was two years ago, this would not be happening. Anyways, we started off and we got our first one, then we got our second one and then we were changing the format as we grew and yeah, we’ve had, I don’t know, how many do we have now? 20 or 30?
Hayden 21:35
30 episodes out currently, and a bunch recorded.
Ian 21:38
You have to edit them afterwards, which is quite time consuming, I guess. Is it sometimes?
Norman 21:46
Oh, yeah. Just taking my Ums, and ahhs and so’s and yeah, all that out takes hours. Hayden does it.
Hayden 22:02
It all falls on this guy over here.
Norman 22:05
I was just gonna say so pre COVID. So balancing a freelance lifestyle, especially in the arts can be tricky. How do you maintain the balance between work life and family?
Ian 22:19
With difficulty sometimes. I think that the sort of boundaries between work and family become very porous sometimes and I’m not very good at maintaining the distinction between work and as a family. Somy wife hates this if something’s bugging me, and I’ll take it to bed with me actually have the piece of paper that is in bed. But, that’s not great in some ways. You should, and I can understand why some writers if they can afford it, have a shared at the end of the garden or flat somewhere else that they go and work in and then they clock off at six o’clock, as he would in a normal job, in an office and come home, and then you leave your creative life behind. With me, it’s not always been that easy. I’m better than I used to be. Because, it’s nice to be with the kids and now I’m with them all the time now because of COVID. Yeah, I’ll do my best, I think, to make a distinction between home and work.
Norman 23:43
Right. I should have asked this earlier on. But kind of curious, when you finish a book, does that give you relief? Or does that make you feel a little depressed?
Ian 23:58
That’s a very interesting question. I think a lot of writers have a kind of they go through a bereavement period when they suddenly don’t have a project that they’re working on. So for example, when my Primo Levi biography came out in 2002, and it took me so long to write. So from the first interview to actual publication, almost 10 years, I was direct and I kind of, I was depressed. I wasn’t at all elated. Quite the opposite and this can happen, I think, and I think writers, we’ll actually anyone who’s involved in any kind of a big project doesn’t matter what it is, sometimes has to be wary of what they do when it ends, or what takes its place. Now, be more wised up about this or have something in place, but I think it can be a dangerous period and I think it depends on the sort of individual but myself. I’m not sort of a naturally happy, clappy sort of person anyway, I tend to sort of work on the darker side of things. So I have to be wary of sort of falling into these dark places after finishing a project.
Norman 25:16
You were talking about research and bags of these plastic carts. When do you know when you’ve got enough research? So, Haiti, Jamaica, just different books. When is enough, enough?
Ian 25:31
Again, it’s so hard to quantify them. I think that just instinctively, it’s like eating a meal, you just sort of feel a certain point of time and it’s a little bit like that with for example, it might be the number of interviews you’re consulting or the places you’re visiting, whatever it might be, but the times you’re consulting, there comes a point, I think, where you kind of instinctively know that you just more research at this point will be counterproductive. But I think that all writers, and particularly non fiction writers, do more research than they need to. So at the end of a project, there’s always a tremendous amount of material that’s like lying on the cutting room floor. You kind of think, could be used often for a rainy day, for some other project, or could be sort of molded into a feature for a newspaper or magazine or something. So nothing is ever kind of wasted and I think if you understand that, then it’s much easier to say stop. If you think so if you tell yourself that actually, you’re stopping now, you’ve got too much research, but you have to stop now in any way. It’s not the end of the road necessarily, because you can use some of this material further down the line. That’s kind of what I tell myself, really. But it’s sort of a self comforting, sort of lie in a way because of course, you can never do enough research into the subject, realistically.
Norman 27:10
What about revisions? When you have to revise something, and you’ve got all this content, do you find that your book changes? Your idea for the book changes drastically because of revisions? Have you ever thought, Okay, I’m going down this path, but because of these revisions, and you have a different vision for the ending?
Ian 27:34
Yes, I think when usually in the sort of space between when you write what a publisher would call a proposal, like a synopsis, an overview of the book that you want to write and that has to often be very detailed, because the publisher will give you the advance the money up front, on the basis of that proposal. But very often, the proposal has no resemblance at all to the end product. Because you change midway through, and I’ve changed writing this book, the one setting the Baltic, I’ve changed and one of the most extraordinary ways I’ve changed it was that I started off writing the book with the wrong parents, I should explain that my father who was English, went to Tallinn on holiday and died of a heart attack. This was in 2001 and I had to repatriate with my sister, his body to the UK, quite a complicated procedure, that involved in bombing and zinc lined coffins and all sorts of procedures and bureaucratic red tape and I began the book with a description of my father’s journey home from Tallinn to London. But once I’ve done this, and datas, as I now see a torn state, the whole book was sort of doomed, because this wasn’t supposed to be a book upon my father, for the most part about my mother. So once I’ve killed him off in Freudian terms and killed my father, and started with my mother instead, the writing which sort of took fire in lockdown, went two heads sort of gained fluency to catch fire, but that was because I started with the wrong part. So to answer your question, absolutely. A book can change very radically and sometimes for the better and everything is realigned. Start on the wrong footing very often. The rest of the book which you’re trying to write is wrong. You don’t know why, what’s going on.
Norman 29:53
Wow, that’s interesting. I didn’t expect that. Anyways, that’s a great answer. We’re getting closer to the end of the podcast, interested in a quote, a quote that you might live by, or just something that’s interesting?
Norman 30:08
Yes, this is a quote by the Polish Nobel Prize winner, Milosz. I don’t know how to pronounce his first name. I think it’s Czeslaw Milosz. He said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” I mean, he said this in a sort of slightly ironic joking way and, of course, I think he was talking, I imagine he was talking primarily about life writing, not fiction. So writers who choose to write about their family are heading on or treading on hot coals. Because there’s always going to be some emotional fallout, it’s to do with who owns the story, who owns the family history, you have a view like a stake in it, and who has the right to write about it. So the book I’m writing, well I hope it won’t be so hurtful exercising family exposure, and I think inevitably, will possibly cause some reactions within the immediate family. Because these things are difficult. So Milosz meant that when you write about your family, it can be dangerous. I’m pretty sure that he was writing primarily about nonfiction and writers and of course, his written memoirs, about his time growing up and what was actually part of the Baltic thought of Poland and I think there’s always a special risk when you put a parent or a family member in any kind of nonfiction or what the English poets will Taylor Coleridge called self biography, you meant sort of memoir, because in the book, they don’t always recognize themselves as they are seen by other people. They don’t like the mirror image that’s held up to them in a book and so they can get very, grievously offended. Was I really like that? Was that how others see me? So it’s difficult, I think, in some ways, we are all of us three different people, the person we want to be, the person other people see us, and the person we would like to be and then the space between all these three areas, there’s an awful lot scope for misinterpretation, sort of things to go wrong. So I guess that’s what Milosz meant when he said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” But in some ways, although I said earlier it applies to non fiction, it could also apply as opposed to all kinds of writing, having a writer in family can be a curse for the family. I think that some writers feel very, very guilty about books that they’ve written because severe emotional fallout is caused and I can think of two contemporary writers who have had great difficulty with their families. So yeah, that’s why I chose that quote, because I think it’s particularly relevant to the book I’m writing at the moment. But maybe in the broader sense to writing.
Norman 33:50
Okay, let’s talk about some hurdles, hurdles that you’ve had to overcome, and what you’ve learned from them, and how you’ve applied that to your life.
Ian 34:02
I think a lot of writers have the defect of being perfectionist. So they can’t proceed with the project, until they think kind of psychologically that they’ve got it right and it can be a tremendous sort of hindrance and one thing I’ve learned, I think, is the most important thing. For anybody who wants to write anything is just to write it, first of all, get it all down, and then you can shape. It’s sort of panel batshit, do the surgery on it that you need to later on, but overcoming that psychological hurdle of the first draft, not necessarily being the best draft or the right one or the perfect one is something that’s been difficult for me to learn but I think I’ve taken that on board more and I think another lesson I’ve learned is not to be too precious about your writing. I always tell my students that the most important key on your word processor or laptop, or whatever it might be is the delete key. I mean, I don’t say that to be unkind, but I think that deleting, cutting out words, adjectives, adverbs, redundant sort of literary flourishes, is very underrated. Stephen King is a novelist that I admire very much, a brilliant book on writing, where he says more or less the same, you really have to delete, cut out in order to let more oxygen in. Or to use another metaphor for the boat to start to float a bit more and then once you throw in Jefferson Davis, a certain amount of dead cargo, then the thing starts to float. So I think that’s one thing I’ve learned definitely and another thing, I guess it’s not to give up the day job. So writing is not very well paid unless you’re Stephen King, and to have another kind of arm and in my case that’s the teaching University, I’m teaching literature and reviewing work journalism, as well as the actual writing is very, very important. Sometimes journalism can be very counterproductive, because you can be writing your book, you can be steaming ahead, then you get a commission to review a book and that sort of momentum that you’ve started to build up is destroyed because you’re on another project, suddenly, you’re writing 700, 800, 900 word review and that derails you. I find that quite difficult often, but I’ve come to accommodate, I think, better than I did in the past, the two sides of writing, so the sort of bread and butter sort of hack, while the journalism and the actual book writing more, it’s not always easy to get that balance right and I think that could apply to anyone, not just writers. So there’s some lessons.
Norman 37:25
Okay. Let’s swing it around in successes. What would you consider your biggest success?
Ian 37:32
I think when I mean, you’re kind of obliging me to blow my trumpet here. Yeah. But of course, when a writer receives a few prizes, that’s wonderful confirmation of what they’re doing. As an audience first off, there are people out there who want to read what you’re writing and it’s a sort of confirmation that there’s English teachers I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, who were such an influence on me in the late 1970s, in London were right that they sort of perceived something in me, that was a value. So I think that The Dead Yards, the book on Jamaica winning the Royal Society of Literatures on Ondaatje prize, which is given to any work of writing, it can be a work of fiction, it can be a work of nonfiction. So long as it conjures a sense of place. This is what it’s given to. So long as it sort of countries that sense of place vividly on the page. That’s where the prize is given for. So for me, that was fantastic. Another prize for the Primo Levi biography was the Chinaman prize, which in the UK was a very important prize for nonfiction. It doesn’t exist anymore. But that was very gratifying to receive that and of course, these prizes are a lot of money, and I can’t pretend that that’s quite useful sometimes if you’re writing and it doesn’t always bring in, right. So the Ondaatje Prize allowed me to take my family to Southern Italy, to Naples, which I did in August of 2018. It was so hot that these poor children suffered. I remember I took them to Pompei, to Herculaneum, and they just went on strike, not getting any further and in the midday sun under this sort of very intense Mediterranean neapolitan. This sort of pitiless sun, something they enjoy very much but talking to them now, they took a lot on it and the fourth holiday that dad was hoping to introduce them to just do this, climb the volcano. We went to Herculaneum in Pompeii, we explored all of Naples Great, so ramshackle, sort of a crazy city or another and they took something from it. But maybe at the time, it seemed like a penance, like, sort of punishment. But no, it was great to be able to take the family on holiday with that prize. So that’s definitely a success for me and of course, the book that you’re writing now, you heard will sort of win comparables and plaudits and good reviews from the political community.
Norman 41:01
I would think another success would be having your family on top of the Vesuvius, looking out and saying, and that’s where that imaginary island is.
Ian 41:14
I should have done that. Yeah. Instead, what happened was my youngest, Henry, who was very, very little then had heard about the eruption of the volcano, and just couldn’t wait to get out. There was going to be an eruption imminently now, everybody run! He would fall down to Vesuvius like it’s crazy. English family, right speech. But one thing that was beautiful about the Vesuvius was the changing climate and temperature, because after the midday sun of ankles, which is sort of crucifying me, Naples, as you got closer to the rim of the crater was wonderfully cool, there’s a mist in the air and so we also relaxed and decompress the arguments when someone says sort of vehement anymore within the home.
Norman 42:10
Well, alright Ian, at the end of every podcast, we ask one question, do you know a guy?
Ian 42:15
Yes, the one that the guy I’d like to nominate is called Colin Grant and he is primarily a nonfiction writer. He wrote a wonderful book on epilepsy, which happened in his family. It’s a wonderful biography of the Jamaican nationalist, black Jamaican nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey and he is written on Jamaica, otherwise, in lots of other places, he is of Jamaican ancestry. He has written a memoir about his father, who was this very extraordinary character, who had some sort of black baggy eyes from lack of sleep. So his nickname was Bageye and the book he wrote is called Bageye at the Wheel. It’s because his father was very proud of the car, books called Bageye at the Wheel and Colin Grant is a former employee of the BBC and well has worked there until quite recently, his resignation, and he’s now a full time writer and I know Colin a bit. But he’s a very good writer and I’d like to sort of put him forward as the guy that I am.
Norman 43:35
Fantastic. I’m looking forward to talking with him. I think we’re at the end. Wow, we touched on some really great topics today and Ian, thank you for sharing your time with us today. Thank you for coming on.
Ian 43:51
Thank you very much. Thank you Hayden, as well. It’s a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you.
Norman 43:56
You’re very welcome.
Hayden 44:02
That concludes our interview with Ian Thomson. Make sure to tune in next week for an interview with David Taborn. David is a British visual artist and this was one of the funniest interviews I think we’ve done yet. I know we had a lot of laughs and had trouble keeping up with him sometimes, but we loved it. That’s enough for me, and I’ll see you next time.
