Life after death, with Neil Rathmell
Life after death, with Neil Rathmell
How the poet and novelist brought his mother's near-century of experiences to the page
Hello again, readers. I’m racing to meet a few production deadlines right now, but am looking forward to judging the poetry competition next week and announcing the winners. Thank you to everyone who entered; we really ended up with a serious stack of work, meriting careful consideration.
Today I’m pleased to bring you a long-overdue interview with Neil Rathmell, whose book Dorothy was published by Valley Press last May. With a story spanning almost a century, Dorothy is a deeply moving and profound verse biography of the author’s mother, which the Poetry Book Society called “startling and tender”, and veteran VP poet James Nash described as “a work of near genius”.
Neil has brought a little poetry to his answers too, so the interview should be a particularly enjoyable read in its own right – but if you are moved to buy the book following the discussion below, it’s currently on sale for £9 in the Valley Press online bookshop. (P.S. Those of you who follow this blog looking for insight into publishing business models will want to read right to the end.)
How would you explain the concept of your book, Dorothy, to a stranger?
A biography that feels like an autobiography. Or, to put it another way, a biography in which the biographer tries to see things from the point of view of the subject without distorting any facts or avoiding any truths. I wanted the reader to be able to create their own picture of Dorothy out of the various events that she lived through, leaving the rest to their imagination.
Who was Dorothy? Or was the entire book an attempt to definitively answer that question?
Who? What? Why? Where? When? I hope that, in various ways, the book leaves readers able to answer some of those questions themselves. My intention was not to answer them myself, but rather the opposite. My mother had to die and I had to cope with that before I could write at all. There is nothing in the book that I didn't see for myself or that she didn't tell me. What does it add up to? Ninety-eight not out. Life after death.
What motivated you to write 200-plus pages of poetry about this subject?
It was just something that I needed to do. Before I could start, I had to make some decisions about how to do it. Somehow, those decisions led to 200-plus pages of poetry. That was never my intention. Form and content interacted to produce that unexpected but satisfying result.
To what extent do you think Dorothy – the character as created in those pages – is a role model of stoic endurance, and to what extent a cautionary example of a life lived without much agency? (If either of those contrasts is remotely accurate! It is not a book that embraces easy answers.)
Both, perhaps, though neither in her eyes. She felt that she had been cheated by life. She knew that, if she had had the advantages that my generation had, especially in education, she could have gone to university and done as well as I did. She didn't bear any grudges, just felt the unfairness. Her attitude, I think, was a mixture of resentment and resignation. I'm not sure whether her endurance was stoic or just that of a working-class woman putting up with things. Some of Samuel Beckett’s characters have that quality. Maddy Rooney in All That Fall, for example. What Dorothy needed was a fairy godmother. What my generation got was the next best thing, a Labour government and the Welfare State. [Note: Neil was born in 1947.] Conservative governments don't see the unfairness, they call it the politics of envy.
To what extent is the book a work of social commentary?
Only to the extent that a personal commentary must be social too. See above. No man is an island, entire unto itself.
“One evening
when they are sitting quietly together
she breaks the silence
and starts to talk”
The style of the poetry – I would almost call it staccato – is extremely distinctive. How did you choose this style, for this story? It seems extremely appropriate, a superb combination of form and content, but I can't quite put into words why that is.
On the morning when I sat down to start writing, I did not know how I was going to do it. All I knew was that it should not – could not – be written as a conventional prose narrative. Thinking about this and looking for alternatives, I remembered Brown Girl Dreaming, an autobiography written in free verse, that I had read and enjoyed a few months previously. I began writing in that way and found that the form gave me the freedom I needed. Everything, including the ‘staccato’ style, flowed from that. A deliberate avoidance of narrative links, instead a string of beads.
You break from the main style just twice; once mid-book at a moment of tragedy, and later at a more joyous moment. At what point in the writing process did you decide on these two breaks? (It is an extremely effective technique, and made me reflect on the nature of memory.)
Both of these events felt too important to be written in the same form as the others. Dorothy's hour of stillness and silence with Rowland after his death seemed to need the seriousness of blank verse. Her time in India consisted of events that I felt could best be memorialised in a sequence of prose poems. In both cases, it was the difference that mattered. They had to be special.
Do you consider the book one long poem, or a collection of shorter pieces arranged chronologically? Do any parts potentially stand alone, and if so, did you submit them anywhere during the writing process?
It is both, I hope, each piece contributing to the whole, but principally the former. I wrote continuously every day for about a month, starting at the beginning and going on to the end. The story was there already, pieced together from things that my mother had told me at various times in my life, but especially in the last few years of her life. All I had to do was write it, I didn't have to make anything up, which meant that I could give all my attention to whichever piece I was working on and in that way the whole poem would take shape. So, no, I don't think any of the individual poems could stand alone and never considered submitting them for publication as poems in their own right.
The back cover places the book in the genres of “poetry/biography” – but would you agree almost all poetry collections are biographies (or autobiographies) of some kind?
I suppose that’s true to some extent, but I'm not a big reader of poetry collections, just poems, especially old ones, so I can't really say. But I do think it a pity that any book has to be labelled as belonging to one genre or another.
How did you approach writing your own appearances as a character in the book, in the third person and viewed mostly through the eyes of others? That must have taken some thought, and was another very successful (if minor) aspect of the work.
As I have said in answer to another question, I wanted to keep myself out of it. My intrusion would have upset the balance of the book, so I made a decision at the outset to make myself just another character in her life, to be written about in the third person. To begin with it felt rather strange, but I soon got used to it and came to enjoy the anonymity.
You have had two volumes published under your name: a novel by Faber in 1976, and this book by Valley Press in 2023. Would you say a few words about the former experience?
It began in 1970 with two short stories in Faber's Introduction 4, a series of anthologies of stories by new writers. The deal was that the writer was paid a small fee and Faber had an option on their first novel. That was my motivation for writing The Old School, which otherwise would probably not have been written, as until then I had been more interested in writing plays. The reviews were, at best, lukewarm and rightly so. It was an unplanned pregnancy and would have been better terminated. I wrote two more short novels after that, both submitted to Faber and both rejected. I went back to writing plays, but my confidence had been dented.
How has the world of literature, and publishing, changed between the two publications?
Changed enormously and mainly, I think, for the worse. Literary agents are now the gatekeepers. Faber and other mainstream publishers accept submissions only from agents, not from writers, who must therefore submit their work to an agent first. It all takes time and is thoroughly demoralising. Fortunately, independent publishers like Valley Press are making a difference, putting literary merit before commercial potential when responding to submissions. Even so, they still have to sell and market books to make a living. So what's the answer? Self-publishing? Selling door-to-door? Walking the streets of university towns, as the poet, Jon Silkin, used to do, selling copies of Stand to students?
The now-standard finale: is there a question you’d like to ask me, about publishing (or anything else)?
I liked your ‘hybrid’ publishing model, in which production costs were shared between writer and publisher, not least because it's closer to how things used to be a century or two ago. Is that the way forward?
‘Hybrid’ publishing gets its name from being a combination of self-publishing and traditional publishing, and it was a key part of my business strategy between the pandemic and my departure from the company in spring 2022 – not coincidentally, a time when Valley Press employed several full-time members of staff. It was supremely useful for lowering the risk of each publication and safeguarding those jobs; but I have no plans to offer hybrid contracts again in the future.
I did not abandon hybrid on moral grounds: I consider it to be an ethically sound model, so long as the contract is crystal clear on who is paying what, and the risks and rewards are truly shared. Although the first rule of Valley Press is: “Great publishing is for everyone and anyone” – and not everyone has the cash reserves to invest in hybrid publishing – I’m always going to be pursuing some kind of paid book production work alongside the traditional publications, and as long as I keep offering free submissions and publication on a regular basis (and don’t put the VP logo on anything less than superb) there’s no harm done.
So why not keep that option open? The problem, from my perspective, was the shift in the balance of power; when publisher and author are equal partners, the publisher can’t overrule the author, even if it’s in their best interests. There were times when hybrid authors ignored advice from booksellers (passed down through our sales agency) and ruined their book’s chances with a few bad decisions we were contractually obliged to honour. A similar thing happened financially: making firm commitments to a budget may be good for contracts, but the publishing process can be unpredictable and slow. When those inflexible projects spanned periods of high inflation, like 2022, our chances of making a profit had a tendency to evaporate. (I could take those two obligations out of the hybrid contracts, of course, but then it ends up being “give us your money and hope for the best” publishing, not such a popular model.)
This is why on the current iteration of the Valley Press website, our efforts are strictly divided into ‘Services’ (you pay us, you call the shots) and ‘Submissions’ (we pay you, we call the shots), and never the twain shall meet – mostly. Neil gave me permission to share with you that Dorothy started out as a ‘services’ project, fully intended for self-publishing; in fact, the work was completed during the summer of 2022 when I considered myself retired from the industry (but was still doing a bit of freelance work). It had no connection to Valley Press at all… except, it was almost the quintessential Valley Press title. I completely fell for it, and to make matters worse, it came out exactly as it would if I’d had absolute creative control! So when I was forced out of retirement and back to Valley Press at the end of the year, I brought Dorothy with me. If you pick up a copy, I think you’ll see why.
Many thanks to Neil for taking part in this interview, and asking such an interesting final question. It reminds me that there haven’t been any “Readers’ Questions” for a while – perhaps you’ve all now learned absolutely everything you wanted to about publishing? (Perhaps a bit too much?) But if not, you know where to find me – and even if you have, I’ll still be going on about publishing anyway, so you may as well help choose the sub-topic. See you next week!