What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Here is a diary entry, written when I went to meet Al Alvarez for the first and only time:

"13/6/2017

A sunny day, making Hampstead look even more high-end than usual. Al Alvarez lives, almost literally, a stone's throw away from the shops in a ground floor flat (he's 87) that's full of books. On reflection, that was the most telling detail for me: not the books themselves but the fact that they all seemed to have aged into the one colour. There was an original Sidney Nolan on the wall of his study – a crayon image in the flyleaf of a book that he had drawn as a wedding present – and a photo of two men on the bookcase, one of whom is Alfred Brendel. The carer showed me in, and there he was, looking like an old pirate. His legs don't work – he has that look of being welded to the chair that old people get – and his hands have swollen into potato tubers but there was still a glint in his eye that comes and goes. (At one point he was trying to remember a name and he looked bewildered. He was searching upwards just as though he was trying to catch his breath.) He was reading a newspaper, which made it easier, somehow, for me to show him the magazine. He looked at it then looked at me and grinned.

"Is that all you want?"

I made sure that it was, and I do have regrets. He offered me a proper drink and I turned it down; I told him that I didn't want to overstay my welcome. More, I didn't ask him about people like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, which I might have done. But I was right, I think, to quit while I was ahead. We talked about Hampstead ("I've been here all my fucking life!") and then poetry for a while ("It gives you up", he said; "you don't give it up") and about his own writing. I explained about the magazine and I told him that, in a lot of ways, he was our presiding spirit.

He said: "I thought I was..."

"Forgotten?"

"Yes."

"No!", I said, and I told him about all of the people that I know that read him. He pushed his chest out slightly and sat up in his chair.

"I can't tell you how much that cheers me up," he said.

So. I got out of there before I could muck it up. There was a sense of anti-climax, of course; it had been a gratifying exchange but it had been an awkward one, too, what with those moments when we briefly ran aground. It was definitely best to quit while I was ahead."

I still wish I'd had that proper drink. Why was I there? Because he had agreed to let me use an extract from his book, The Writer's Voice, in the first issue 0f One Hand Clapping, the magazine that I still edit. I had rung him (cold called him, to be more precise) on a Sunday morning and, rather than tell me to fuck off, he graciously asked what the magazine was about. I didn't know. I found myself saying, "We want to give unknown writers more exposure by placing them next to those who are better known." Even as I heard myself saying it, I knew that it was true. Rather, it became true. It was a performative utterance insofar as I could feel it begin to make something happen. I still think that it's one of the best things I've ever said.

It didn't start out like that. As I've written elsewhere, I once submitted a poem to a magazine which dictated what print size I had to use. I took a deep breath and did it anyway but I'd be lying if I said I didn't swear out loud. Since then, I've had the reasoning explained to me but I can't remember it and, to be honest, I feel exactly the same way about it now as I did then: that it was a power play, more or less. We, they were saying, are the proprietors and you're not. Poetry – we all know this – is about as marginal an occupation as you can get. Most poetry magazines are tiny fiefdoms, all trying to punch above their weight, and all magazine editors, including me, are keen to make themselves feel more significant. If poetry makes nothing happen (and the jury, I think, is still out on that) then it can seem like editors are keen to make sure that they, at least, are doing something, even if it's just inconveniencing you.

Perhaps it's simply that, as a rejected writer, I often felt like a magazine was my opponent. The font size thing had left me feeling both indignant and insulted and, the very next day, I decided to start my own magazine. The first impulse was entirely selfish. I wanted to build my own stadium; to put my ball on the pitch and play by my own rules. I was tired of banging my head against a wall that consisted, I was convinced, not just of a perfectly understandable indifference but of contempt. Well-hidden, I know, but I was certain that I could feel it. I'm prepared to be told that I'm over-sensitive, but haven't we all sometimes felt this about the places that we submit to? That they look down on us. That, at the end of the day, they have no interest in us at all. Perhaps it's just that exclusion often suits them more than inclusion does. A club (or a clique or a movement or a "school") is shaped, let's face it, largely by its omissions. And we are all, all of us writers, excluded more often than we're not. I got to the point where I was looking at myself in the mirror (this may even have been literally rather than figuratively) and saying: "So what are you going to do about it?"

One Hand Clapping was what I did. Here, written for the inaugural print issue, is my first editorial:

My favourite bit of writerly advice comes from Ernest Hemingway. In Death in the Afternoon, he recommends that you think hard about an event in order to arrive at the most significant details. What you’re trying to discover, he says, are the specific sights and sounds that make that event so memorable. I like this partly because surprisingly few writers seem to do it. Here is Hemingway describing what he has “really seen” at a bullfight:

“When he [the matador] stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean unbearably clean whiteness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important.”

Yes, you think, that must have been incredibly dramatic, and while it’s true that there is a certain amount of, shall we say, overeager reiteration in this account it’s also worth noticing how Hemingway has found precise, specific details in order to communicate things properly. Pick up a book some time and look at the adjectives. If there’s a cup of coffee, is it “steaming”? Is there a “monstrous howling”? (I found these more or less at random.) So much prose seems to be simply a means to an end; a medium that transports you, relatively painlessly, from one climax to another. Good prose, on the other hand, approaches the truth of things; it’s one in the eye for so many of the magazines and tabloids and video games that are currently attempting to shape our world. Good prose is moral, in other words.

You have in your hands something of an experiment. I want to offer great writing, for free. To proselytise, if you like. But I also want unpublished and under-regarded authors to share a space with established names; to help to create something that feels like both a dialogue and a platform. There are writers here whose work I have been reading (and listening to) with the greatest of pleasure for several years and there are writers (and a photographer) who, up to a couple of months ago, were as new to me as they are to you. Everybody has a voice, or a distinctive way of looking at the world. (This amounts, very often, to the same thing.) I’d like to thank all of our contributors for giving so generously of their work and time; I hope that you enjoy the pieces here. Please think of the first piece, by the incomparable Al Alvarez, as our manifesto.

A little bit stiff, I think, but I'm glad that I had been forced, by my encounter with Al Alvarez, to formulate a more inclusive rationale. He had been poetry editor of The Observer – he'd been friends with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and, I think, with Robert Lowell – and it's important, at this point, to acknowledge how important the writer and journalist Harriet Griffey was to the whole process. One Hand Clapping literally wouldn't have existed without her: she financed it; she helped to edit it; she offered advice; and she gave me contact numbers, one of which was Al's. My main contribution, at first, was my idea, and I'm still proud of it. The more I thought of it, the wider its application seemed. No guidelines! I meant it, too. Perhaps it's a lack in me, but I can never see guidelines as anything other than an irrelevance. Here's the idea: you send us your best work – it could be a poem or a story or a piece of art or a piece of music – and then, if we like it, we publish it. It's as simple as that. And, yes, you're right. That means that we exclude people too. Exclusions, it seems, are inevitable. ("You're a gatekeeper now," a friend said to me, and it doesn't make me feel very comfortable.) I can only say, somewhat weakly, that what I do feels different to what I used to hate. It's true that I have fiercely held ideas about what constitutes good art. I've always tried to control the quality of what we do as carefully as I possibly can and I've been told that I edit more extensively than a lot of editors do. But, see, I think that, paradoxically, this enables us to be inclusive. Right from the beginning – before we went online (we only did one print issue) – great writers have always wanted to contribute. I attribute this to Al, our patron saint, as much as I do to anything else. But they keep saying yes, I think, because of the quality of the work that we include. It's been like a snowball gaining momentum, and so far we've featured (among others) Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel, Geoff Dyer, Louise Glück, Les Murray, Lydia Davis, Mark Doty, Colm Toibin, Paul Muldoon, Martin Parr, Paul McCartney (his photographs), John Burnside, David Harsent, Tess Gallagher, Anne Carson, Carol Ann Duffy and many others. Unknown writers really do get the exposure that I always hoped they would. There they are, cheek by jowl with some terrific, and terrifically successful, writers, artists and musicians. It's a thrill for them. I know it is, because they tell me so.

To reiterate: we accept anything, in any style, about whatever you want it to be about, as long as we think it swings. I think that's inclusive too, although I might be stretching the definition. We have no – literally no – agenda apart from the fact that we want to publish great work. Are we a club? No. I did think at some point that we might be a movement. I had visions of a One Hand Clapping anthology – of a One Hand Clapping "style", no less – but our writers are so diverse that I couldn't make it work. (More power to them.) I was ready to kick down the doors of the publishing world; to herald in a beautiful new dawn. Or something like that. But, of course, it never happened. Life (literary life) goes on. People get published or they don't, and we have nothing to do with it. But I'm proud of what we've achieved. It's given me a lot of pleasure, too. Editing, and gaining confidence in editing, enabled me to go back to my own work and polish it more successfully. I've made contact (and made friends) with a lot of impressive writers; writers whose work is expert, vivid and engaging and who really do deserve the exposure that we give them. Proper substantial poets – John Burnside, for example, and David Harsent – have emailed me their unpublished work. Nick Coleman, a writer whose work I liked so much in the 1980s that I would pick up Time Out in the newsagent's and flick through every page to see if he was featured, has contributed several times. What's more, I'm not sure if I would have been published at all if I didn't have One Hand Clapping at my back.

So there. We exist, and I'm glad we do. What is the sound of One Hand Clapping? What would we sound like if you could listen to us? Like Babel: a beautiful cacophony. But the opposite of Babel too, because all of those voices are confident, in their own way, and communicate precisely what they want to say in the way that they want to say it. They all, I like to think, get heard. Or, at least, amplified. We have a new issue coming out on December 4th. We've started a competition, too: we're going to offer prizes to the best poems by young people, aged 17 to 25, that we've received. (There'll be a reading in Blackwell's in Oxford on the 6th December. It will also include some of our other contributors.) It might be our last issue, but I always say that. David Harsent once offered to take it off my hands. I couldn't, quite, bring myself to relinquish it but I would have been fascinated to see what he made of it.

The link's below. Do pop across and see what it is we do. You'll like it. No, you really will. Perhaps, if we do another one, you might submit. And I promise never to ask you to write in a certain font.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his first novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. Rough Music, his second novel to be published, is now here.