Ramblin' Man

Walking To Hollywood is the third – and possibly final – book in Will Self’s series of psychogeographic adventures (its predecessors Psychogeography and Psycho Too derived largely from his Independent column, illustrated by Ralph Steadman). Somewhere between Iain Sinclair’s extrapolative rambles and Hunter S’s absurdist journalism, the book documents a sometimes deranged, sometimes melancholic expedition that takes him from the streets of LA to investigate the death of film as the predominant popular 20th Century art form, to the eroded Holderness coast of East Yorkshire. It is a very strange book, even for Self, one that seems split on whether the act of perambulation aggravates the unquiet psyche, or functions as a sort of lucid dreaming, allowing the mind to reorder itself.

“Yeah, or disorder itself!” the author says via cellphone from London. “Over the last 10 years or so of doing this walking/writing gig, I’ve learned to be quite accepting of what comes. If you set out thinking, ‘This will help my mental state,’ you may be terribly disabused. And by the same token you may set out in a kind of angstified condition and it may really calm you down. But there are no guarantees.”
One thinks of the classic image of the Beckett-like schizophrenic, traipsing the streets, his condition exacerbated by the environment.
“Yeah, that’s definitely what happened to me in LA. Things got very gloomy really, and I felt increasingly shut off from the world and shut out by it, and indeed that’s been the tendency of the last few years. And I’ve stopped walking! (Laughs). I mean, obviously I walk, I don’t jog everywhere, but the last sort of big walk I did was over a year ago in March of 2009 when I went from JG Ballard’s house outside London to Heathrow Airport and then flew to Dubai and walked across Dubai for two days into the desert.
“Jim was dying at the time and the idea was to pay homage to him. And there’s that weird archipelago of artificial islands called The World in Dubai, so I thought I’d walk to The World, and walk to the analogous position on the island of Britain to Shepperton, and that would be a very Ballardian trip. But I loathed Dubai so much, I thought it was such a disgusting slave city that only exists because of globalisation, and that kind of put an end to my airport walking. I haven’t flown since then, I can’t face getting in a plane, I couldn’t face coming to Dublin for this publicity. I said I could only go if I could go by ferry, but it just didn’t pan out.”
Did he know Jim Ballard well?
“I wouldn’t say I knew him very well. I met him in the ‘90s and then corresponded with him for quite a long while, and we had dinner a few times in the two or three years before he died. He was quite an isolated man in all sorts of ways, so oddly I think I was fairly close to him at the end. He’d had this quite patrician childhood in the 1930s in Shanghai, and he never lost the kind of noblesse oblige that people from that class have. But of course he’d had this very traumatic time as well, and in many ways the kind of life he led in Shepperton, where he slept on an old army cot and mended everything with fuse wire, was a kind of traumatised recreation of the concentration camp they were in during the war.”
All three acts of Walking To Hollywood are haunted by the ghost of an unnamed and largely undiagnosed crack up. Each section riffs on OCD, paranoid psychosis and Alzheimer’s respectively, but the narrator never explicitly disgnoses his own condition. What was the source of the radiation crackling behind the lines?
“Well, I think it’s as I say in the afterword, there was this sense – inevitable in the life of a writer who’s in many ways so cut off from the common wheel – of a growing dislocation. There were these three deaths: the kid who was murdered outside my house, my father-in-law’s death and Jim Ballard’s death, that fell throughout this period. I wouldn’t call it depression exactly, I’d call it more a very melancholic period one way or another, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think one of the problems with our culture is we kind of medicate away feelings we really should allow ourselves to feel.”
Self’s friend Nick Cave once spoke about how sadness is often sent to the back of the class, away from the other children.
“Yeah, whereas I think sadness really needs to play with the other children as much as possible and contaminate them! I’ve always written about death, my first published story was about death. There are only two subjects for writers, life and death, and really they’re the same subject.”
The last section of the book, entitled Spurn Head, uses the image of accelerated coastal erosion as a metaphor for the mind’s decay. It’s a subject that stayed with Self after the book’s completion.
“Yes, I’ve gone on thinking about that. Now my older children are in their 20s, it just crystalised within me. My dad was born in 1919, he was an adult before the Second World War. I didn’t get on with him and we had a very difficult relationship, but I found him fascinating, and my kids just don’t find me fascinating, they’re not intrigued by me in the way he intrigued me. And what it is of course, is that his life had moments in it where it coincided with apprehensible historical change, and that just isn’t true of us and our children’s generation. We’re just the same. What can we say to our kids only, ‘Oh, the only video game we had when we were young was Space Invaders.’ It’s not very intriguing is it? That’s all in Spurn Head as well, that shoveled up permanent Now that we live in, and that sense of discombobulation. I mean, even with this latest economic plunge, and I know it’s hitting really quite hard in the Republic, it doesn’t seem to have ruptured that yet. So there’s a melancholy there about – to be blunt – our lack of significance.”

Walking To Hollywood is published by Bloomsbury.