How not to speak in public

As I've said before, my new novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September. Its launch will be in October, in The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia. There'll be a string quartet then me; a soirée, but in a boozer. The Wheatsheaf is in the book. I like to think of the launch as being a scruffy version of one of those immersive things they do in galleries, like making you stand in the middle of Van Gogh's sunflowers.

No matter how good it ends up being, though, it will almost certainly not be as good as my first launch. It's a funny thing: you can plan and plan – you can send email after email – but a lot of the best things seem to happen in a way that is entirely serendipitous.

To begin at the beginning. I love Dublin. Largely, this is because of James Joyce and Ulysses. I often think of Joyce. He was a strange man: a man who seemed so remote as to be barely there but who would, after many glasses of white wine, perform what his friends would call his spider dance, his arms and legs flailing in all directions. But this was the same man who had written Dubliners, which was a complete departure: a set of stories with the appearance of authorial intention carefully siphoned out. (In other words, 20th century literature starts with Joyce.) Ulysses (God bless it) is often all-but-incomprehensible but it also contains the best writing I know: poetic and precise in a way that most of us can only hope to be. As for the Wake... (You have to imagine me, here, with my head in my hands and a book on the floor where I've thrown it across the room.) Joyce, more than anyone else I can think of, was who he chose to be. He was the artist as envisioned by Harold Rosenberg. That is: "a person who has invented an artist."

And, to an extent, a place. One of Joyce's stated aims was that it should be possible to treat Ulysses as a kind of encyclopaedia. “If Dublin were to be destroyed", he wrote, "Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.” He had a point. You can walk the streets of Dublin, as I did in 2022, and use the book as a kind of A to Z. Bloom's house no longer stands, but you can walk past the O'Connell statue, past "Tommy Moore's roguish finger" and even do what I did: lift your finger to blot out the sun, just as Bloom does halfway through the novel. It was like being in an enormous pop-up book. Later, in the pubs, you could feel the atmosphere Joyce writes about. No music; no TV - just a whole crowd of people engaging with one another. It's easy to get into a conversation with a stranger in a Dublin pub and it's easy, moreover, to become a part of it; to find yourself not minding when people press against you on their way up to the bar and that you've discovered in yourself the desire – more: the ability – to talk. Walk around central Dublin after eight o’clock at night and it’s like being in the middle of some urban festival. I loved it, but I think that I liked it more in the day. In the day, if you’re a fan of Joyce, there are buildings that give off a kind of heat. One of the most obvious – one of the most redolent – is Sweny’s Pharmacy.

Sweny’s looks like 1916. It has a bright white frontage, with what I believe are called pillasters. (Say that in a Dublin accent and it sounds like a curse) Its name appears to be gold leaf (it isn’t) and, once you’re inside, the prevailing impression is of varnished wood and big glass-fronted cabinets. Books, too, which appear to be packed everywhere. Old fashioned décor, and a collection of jars and philtres, and then this other layer of Joyce memorabilia. There’s a wasp that lays its eggs inside a spider and then, when they hatch, the larvae burrow their way out. This is what I always think of when I go to places that seem to have been emptied by their own historical associations. Kafka’s house, for example, in Prague, turned out to be just a white room full of what, in memory, was a teetering pile of Kafka mugs and T-shirts. (All very Kafkaesque.) Sweny’s is not like that. What you feel around you, like limpid water, is a sort of no-time. Book time, call it. Joyce was here and now he isn’t but he also still sort of is. To complicate it so was Bloom, who "strolled out of the shop… the coolwrappered soap in his left hand." That portmanteau word is appropriate: everything – history; décor; the thrum of the traffic outside; books; fridge magnets – is wonderfully cheek by jowl.

I was, as is my wont, not so much charmed as almost unbearably excited. Whenever this happens, I feel the need to talk to people. I was soon boasting that I had read Ulysses between ten and twenty times. PJ, the proprietor, looked me squarely in the eye and said slowly and steadily: “I’ve read it forty times.” Then he offered us a glass of scotch. Rude, we thought, to refuse and then, of course, one thing led to another and we came back in February, with friends. I launched my first book of poetry, A Brief and Biased History of Love, in Dublin. There was no practical reason for doing this. But there I was, in the middle of Ulysses, if only in my imagination.

This being Dublin, the pub across the road allowed us to ferry the Guinness over. It’s a tiny space, which meant that it felt crowded, and I found, about half a pint in, that I was enjoying myself. I once heard a famous author read from one of her books in a university common room. It was the aural equivalent of watching a bird swoop down on a mole or an unsuspecting rabbit. She managed (I don't know how) to boom and precisely enunciate at the same time. Before she began, she gave us a lecture. I can't remember what she said, exactly, but I remember the point, which was that what an audience needed was drama. You had to take the book by the scruff of the neck and shake it til it sang. I've always been ambivalent about this sort of thing. When I was in the sixth form, my writing teacher refused to read anything with any feeling at all. It was cheating, he said. The words should be able to stand alone and what you were doing by acting them out was effectively hiding them. It was, he said, a form of fancy dress. I've thought this myself, at poetry readings: that some poets seem to be more enamoured with the flow of words than with the words themselves; that drama, in this instance, is deemed to be its own reward. And I don't agree. Words and phrases have their own specific weight. It's like building a wall. Will it stand up? Will it persevere? Does it feel like a wall? If it doesn't, then no amount of lighting will make you want to sit on it. I found that I was both enunciating and not; engaging and not. Mildly engaging, that is, and enunciating softly. I found that, if I ignored the fact that each poem I read was mine, I was able to concentrate on the more important stuff: clarity; feeling; a rhythm that swings, hopefully, but not too much. (My dad used to own an LP that had the wonderful title “Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently”.)

When I was in a band, I could never hear the audience. Partly, this was because there were so few of them. But partly it’s the nature of the beast: the instruments drown out, or else cocoon you from, the noise, if there is any, that's coming from the audience. Of course, there’s applause – at least, there’s meant to be – but applause is applause is applause, I find. It’s rare that it exhibits any character. No, what was different in Sweny’s was that there was a feeling of reciprocity. Almost complicity. I could hear people breathing in agreement. Even a friend, not remotely a poetry man, quite liked them. Well, some of them. (He said: “What do you know about St Paul?”) That was surprising: that some of them might be decently accessible.

And it was fun. They'd asked us to contribute to the catering, and there were piles of M&S food everywhere. Ditto bottles of wine. PJ, who I don't think had read a single poem of mine, introduced me as "the greatest poet in the world". (Whiskey's a wonderful thing.) There was a whole crowd of eccentrics, some of whom took the opportunity to read from their own work. Later, we hit the pubs. I don't remember very much. It was a success, in other words. Not many people came; it wasn't, in any way, a lever or a significant event: nothing was changed. Nevertheless, I loved all of it: the place itself and the people and the prevailing tone of eccentricity, both purposeful and not. Mostly, though, it was the feeling of engagement that swung it for me. Of everyone gathered around you just as though you were all about to try to light a fire and then the feeling, right in the middle of it, that, whatever this was, it was something that we were all fashioning together. Fanciful? Possibly. But it did it for me. What it wasn't was solitary. Which, after all, is what most of your life as a writer is. It was, a little, like being let out of a corset. More of this, please.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. His second novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September.