Will Self

I advanced an Argument from Hallucination, whereby you could prove reality is real by taking a strong psychotropic drug. When you were coming down, you took another psychotropic drug and if you noticed the difference it proved there must be a substratum of reality on which the two drugs must be acting.
Will Self, talking to the Guardian last month

This rather amazing undergraduate project in, er, practical philosophy or, as The Guardian called it, applied pharmacology neatly encapsulates the kind of hyper-intelligent, poker-faced, absurd logic that has exhilarated, mystified, amused and annoyed people about Will Self over the years.

In a mere ten-odd years, Self s literary exploration of the underworlds both of the tangible realm and the psyche, alongside his gift for satire of the funniest calibre and the blackest hue, have drawn comparisons with everyone from J.G. Ballard to Martin Amis to Jonathan Swift.
And whether you come down on the side of the fans or the detractors, the history of Will Self the writer has been the history of a tremendous intellect, panoramically well-read and endlessly curious, in whose writing the transcendent jostles merrily up against the preposterous, and whose tongue when it is not busy enunciating vocabulary of such esotericism it would confound Roget himself can be seen practically burrowing a hole through his cheek.
These literary tendencies have also been gleefully present in his work over the years for broadsheets such as the Observer and the Independent On Sunday, making him the scourge of posh lowbrows, untouchable media-culture monoliths and stuffed neo-Thatcherite shirts alike. Somewhat inevitably, his journalism or, as he calls it, his day job has come perilously close to eclipsing his more literary ventures and adventures; and his history of addiction, in turn, has been more than once in danger of eclipsing them both.
Self s publicly admitted use of narcotics often while on assignment made him perfectly placed to become a kind of sacred-cow-devouring Hunter S Thompson for the nineties, his barbed tongue, bad-boy reputation and infinitely cross-referencing imagination causing small literary revolutions in the realms of restaurant reviewing, literary and cultural criticism and political reportage. This culminated in 1997 with his rather spectacular sacking from The Observer after using heroin in the loo of John Major s private jet while on the campaign trail.
It s a different story now, of course. After drying out and cleaning up last year, and missing submission deadlines more than once, he has finally written How The Dead Live, the novel which, as he told journalist Lynn Barber, saved him and which The Guardian has called his best book since his first.
With this almost swashbuckling history of brilliance and self-destruction behind him, and given his various roles in the public realm as literary man, sharp-shooting journo and public whipping-boy, where does he feel people s main interest in him lies?
Well, I think it s a combination of all of those things, he reflects. But it s a kind of commonplace shibboleth, certainly here in the English press, to say that I m a far better journalist than I am a novelist or story-writer. And obviously my history of addictive illness is of perennial interest to people, and, you know, in a way that s fair enough. I mean I ve never shied away from writing about addiction, or the consequences of addiction, whether in my journalism or my fiction.
Indeed, for better or worse, not discussing Self s addictive illness would be akin to interviewing someone who is famous for living in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, and never ever, over the course of the whole conversation, using the word mountain . So, I ask somewhat reluctantly, tell us something about your relationship with heroin. There is a quite a nerve-racking pause.
Ahm , Self begins, in his sub-sonically bassy, slow-as-molasses London drawl. There is more silence. Mmm. It s a difficult question. I think that He pauses again. In the context of recovery, he enunciates with much consideration, I don t really have any more of a relationship with heroin than I do with LSD, mescaline, ketamine, MDMA, amphetamine, crystal meth, marijuana, alcohol, magic mushrooms, cocaine, any drug you care to mention. In the context of being clean and sober, I don t really have a defined relationship with any of these drugs, because I don t take them.
What they symbolise for me as somebody who does suffer from an addictive illness, is the threat that is posed by intoxication, to somebody who has that problem. I mean, if you had asked me that a year or two ago, then I doubtless would come up with a whole stream of complicated reasons to differentiate between heroin and cocaine, or between heroin and alcohol or whatever, as well as a lot of stuff about what heroin was intrinsically. But from the vantage point of not taking it, that all seems pretty irrelevant to me.
I expect so, I say. He laughs, thankfully shattering the seriousness of the moment. Phew.
I suggest that a lot of people who don t have a firsthand experience of drug addiction, forget about the addiction itself, and in its place there s a romanticism about artists who use drugs to see the stars so much more brightly.
Yes, that s right. But I think the point there is really that, you know, while it s quite possible to say that your first 5 or 10 joints or your first 5 or 10 whiskeys or your first 5 or 10 of anything, may produce interesting and illuminating insights, it s very difficult to see what the next five or ten thousand add to that insight.
He laughs shortly, ruefully.
And, you know, it s in the interest of people who are addicts to defend the notion that there s some kind of illumination, because of course they re or we are desperately trying to capture the first fearless rapture. And so that s why you have people like Thomas de Quincey or Samuel Taylor Coleridge who were such strong defenders, up to a point even though they saw it as a moral weakness to be addicts of the insights delivered by drugs.
We talk about pop culture: about how an international music magazine is currently running a cover story about dead pop stars who were haunted in life by various black dogs, from addiction to abuse to mental illness. Popular culture, I suggest to Self, is in love with the idea of creative people with Achilles heels, who flirt sexily with death, always one breath away from the possibility of being finally laid low. In short, we love people with moral weaknesses . We find them so much more interesting than creative people who are, so to speak, well-adjusted . And we forget how acutely painful, and ultimately mundane and tiresome, these things are to go through.
That s right. I mean you just generally have to stroll outside the building you re in and find somebody selling the Big Issues, and ask them about their addictive illness, and you ll find that what makes people who are creative and successful at being creative interesting, is that they re successful at being creative. What makes them profoundly boring and uninteresting, is that they suffer from the same malaises that all sorts of ordinary people do. I mean, in Ian Curtis case, of course, it was clinical depression. But in the case of a lot of other people who may have addictive illness, it may be schizophrenia. You know, who knows, it may be bunions. Doesn t matter, does it, really?
I tell Self about the hotpress reader s letter of a few weeks ago from a man who lost a grandson to heroin addiction, who suggested not only that decriminalisation was patently unworkable, but as well that drug peddlers ought to be hanged. What are his thoughts on decriminalisation?
Well, it s like any sumptuary practice, in some ways it s amenable to legislation and in some ways it isn t. It s a much more anthropologically rich question I think than people realise. You only have to reflect on the fact that public cigarette smoking was banned in seventeen American states in the 1870s, to realise how strange and chequered the history of sumptuary legislation is.
I mean, opiate use was extremely widely used throughout Britain and Ireland in the late nineteenth century, yet by the second decade of the twentieth century, it was virtually unknown. Well, what was responsible for that? It was the introduction of other forms of analgesia, namely aspirin. It wasn t a wholesale change in drug moris, at all.
Illuminating historical context thus provided, he returns to the nub of the present day problem.
What is awful is that three things. One is that people who suffer from addictive illnesses, whether it s heroin addiction or alcohol addiction, are placed in a social context in which they find it extremely hard to get treatment and get help. The other thing is that people make extremely large profits out of selling drugs that only fuel a cycle of violent crime in the society. And the third thing, really, is that a lot of people who wish to use some form of drugs that are currently illegal in quite a safe, responsible and recreational fashion, are criminalised because of that desire.
Now, how legislation can impact upon all of those things or not, it seems to me that it has to be a changing and shifting thing. There s no room for either a blanket decriminalisation of drugs or a blanket criminalisation of them.
And his personal feeling?
My personal feeling, and this is only a personal feeling, is that I would be inclined to be tough on injectable drugs, tough on crack cocaine, tough even on cocaine hydrochloride, but that I d offer people some sort of grey area, where they could have access to some form of opiate drug that fell short of these really quite dangerous chemical compounds.
But wouldn t you still then have the problem of people suffering from addiction?
The addiction is in the psyche of the person that takes the drug, it s not in the drug.
Em isn t it?
Well, there is a physical addiction to drugs, but that s not the same thing. The fact is that people, in my view and it s only my view who are unable to beat the physical addiction to drugs or alcohol, are people who have another addictive propensity within themselves. I know plenty of people who ve taken heroin, even to the point of having a physical addiction to it, who nonetheless have been able to give it up and not resume using it in that way.
But enough about Kilimanjaro. Let s talk about Lily.

When you die you move to another part of London, that s all there is to it. Period.
But, Mother, what about that performance at Golders Green? Weren t you in that coffin?
All right, I ll admit it, that part is a bit obscure.
The North London Book Of The Dead

How the Dead Live has its provenance in The North London Book Of The Dead, an early short story of Self s from The Quantity Theory Of Insanity, the 1992 debut which shot him to initial acclaim and notoriety. As in North London, the central figure is a feisty, superannnuated, tough-cookie Jewish American woman transplanted to London, who begins by dying of cancer, and thereafter starts the tale.
The character, Lily Bloom, is based in no small measure on Self s own mother, whom he lost to breast cancer in 1988, and the parallels don t stop there: in How The Dead Live, Lily is given two daughters, one of whom is a beautiful, but irrevocably lost, heroin addict, and her endless cycle of recovery, relapse and self-delusion is painfully and unflinchingly documented.
But one work is not a mere amplification of the other. Whereas North London is comedic, satirical, concise, based largely around a central conceit of dead people relocating elsewhere in London and carrying on much as before, How The Dead Live works on a larger canvas, and is to say the least a novel of ideas of which more later. How did you decide to approach this character and these ideas again?
I had been talking to my wife about my mother, and my wife never knew my mother, and it occurred to me that, immediately after somebody whom you ve known very well has died and indeed this is a common symptom of bereavement you imagine them still to be alive, still to be in view in some way. And even five years after my mother was dead, it was still in some sense possible to imagine her in certain kinds of contexts. But thereafter, somewhere between five and 10 years later, I became very much aware that she was dead, and then, furthermore, that she was kind of (and here he uses a term coined in How The Dead Live) deader .
In other words, to resurrect her at that point, with new car designs, and new technology around the place, and new fashions, would be blatantly anachronistic. So that led me back into the idea that the perspective of somebody who was deader in that way on the contemporary scene, and within the evolution of contemporary culture - would be a very interesting satirical and philosophic perspective, to have on contemporary life.
And then there s the whole complex of ideas that was behind the original story The North London Book Of The Dead: ideas about the extent to which our notions of death in westernised, largely atheistic cultures are startlingly perverse, and in a way shade the whole of our lives, in a very neurotic and desperate fashion you know, this idea of death as a complete annihilation. So I had this complex of ideas around, in some way, interpreting materialist, atheistic views of the world, from an oriental, mystical, transcendent perspective. And then, really, I just got interested in the idea of writing a protracted death scene from the point of view of the first person. I thought that would be a very interesting thing to do.
The memories and obsessions that haunt Lily both in her death and after she becomes deader are rather pathetically trivial and small, and depressingly non-transcendent: not what most of us would like to think we d be possessed by in our last moments.
Well, yes, he muses. I think they are an attempt by Lily to marshal what she thinks is worthwhile about her life. It s instructive, of course, that she leaves out a lot of the things you might expect a woman and a mother to include. And instead, she goes through those things which, as it were, are involuntary expressions of what, for want of a better word, could be described as her character defects her lust, her pride, her anger, her jealousy.
Are those purposely the seven deadly sins?
Well, they re not actually the Judeo-Christian seven deadly sins. What they are, are actually the six cardinal sins according to the Tibetan Buddhist. The whole book is what would happen to an atheist materialist if the Tibetan Book Of The Dead turned out to be true. And what a Tibetan Buddhist would say of a materialist is that, after you die, you enter this state called the Bardo, this after-death plane, where you have this subtle body , that thinks it s still alive, but can t swallow food, can t experience touch. And then what happens is that your psyche literally breaks up into its component sinful parts, that then torment you in this afterlife.
It seems a bit of a gyp that your psyche doesn t break up into its component lovely bits, that then give you pleasure and comfort, doesn t it?
If that were to happen, you would reach enlightenment, because it s the very awful nature of the after-death experience that confirms you in the illusion that you re still a sentient and existent being. People who have lovely aspects to their character, according to the Tibetan cosmology, would appreciate how illusory their identity is. It s only people who are bound to the Wheel of Sangsara the wheel of life, death and rebirth who fail to appreciate the fact that identity itself is an illusion. So, you know, the fact that Lily persists in her Lilyness is bound up with her inability to reach any kind of enlightenment, and that s of course why she suffers this rather tormented afterlife.
But I mean, really, I don t feel particularly harsh towards Lily, because she seems to me to exemplify a whole tendency in our culture.
People talk about how grotesque drug addiction is, but in a sense there is a sort of addiction writ large, at the social level to the idea of a painless death. In agnostic-cum-atheistic western societies, the fear of death is the fear of extreme pain followed by nothing. And you could argue that a vast panoply of medical resources are dedicated to alleviating fear through Valium and Prozac to opiates fear of our own lack of conviction in our transcendence, of our own ineradicable faith in our me-ness in our desire to get kicks in some way.

The phenomena of life may be likened unto a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, the glistening dew; and thus they ought to be contemplated.
The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

What do you think happens after we die? I ask Will Self.
Well. You know, I m interested in finding out.
But not right now.
Well, I don t know, he disagrees, unexpectedly. What I do know is that our attitude towards death as extinction, backfires. Paradoxically, the idea that death represents the complete destruction of whatever it is that we are, seems to reinforce us in our egotism. And I suppose that one of the underlying tensions in our thought and our attitude, that the novel is meant to point up, is that atheistic and materialistic explanations of existence tend to reinforce a kind of crude egotism.
I don t know exactly what happens after death, and I don t know what I would necessarily even wish for myself. But I do know that in my experience, a callow, atheistic and materialistic view of these processes is usually, as in Lily s case, a result of a fearful attitude towards life. So I don t even necessarily think it s death you re embracing, if you embrace death.
I think that life and death are very much two sides of the same coin, and it s a coin that you either hang onto or you chuck into the gutter. A lot of my writing over the years has been concerned with the darker and more unpalatable sides of experience, if not in real life, then certainly in the psyche. And you know, I think that the need to write about these things is a need to see life in all of its richness and perversity, rather than trying to reduce it to some to some kind of sightseeing tour of top cultural moments.
What does he make of the overall reaction to his book?
I think people are flummoxed by the book because they tend to read it as a sophisticated satire of some kind. It s not, it s a Buddhist allegory, which is He pauses. I think people perhaps don t associate me as a writer with that kind of thinking, but that s really my conception of it.
Is it true that you re thinking of leaving journalism? I ask somewhat fearfully.
Well yes I am He trails off a bit. I m a bit of a workaholic, and I find it very hard to contemplate giving anything up, but my real love is in writing fiction, and we ve only got a limited number of writing years available to us, and probably a limited number of ideas as well. If I didn t write fiction, I d love to be a really good journalist, and dedicate myself to that. But you know, fiction It s like having two mistresses, and one of them you find infinitely more attractive, so it would seem basically a better idea to dedicate yourself to that one.
But it actually pains me when anybody says to me, are you thinking of giving up journalism? I have the real freelance mentality, which is It s extremely hard to make a living out of this stuff, and I ve fought for years to do that and He snickers a bit. I don t want to piss off any editors who might be considering employing me.
But I ve had the great good fortune of doing both. But the books stand as the far more important thing. I wrote my first book, and then because I wanted to give up the day job, I built up a journalistic career. But it was always the second thing. Fiction is the first.

ON Thursday, April 10, 1997, midway through an internal flight from London to the East Midlands, Will Self, on assignment for The Observer, entered the toilet on British Prime Minister John Major s election campaign jet, chopped a line of heroin out on the side of the washbasin and snorted it up through a tightly rolled bank note.
At first, he didn t think he d been seen. A mile high he might have been in more ways than one but that didn t stop him filing 1,500 words for his Sunday paper before returning to his London home. But someone had noticed. The following morning he received a telephone call from the Political Editor of the Express On Sunday who enquired: Mr Self can you confirm or deny that you were shooting up heroin on John Major s campaign jet last Thursday?
Making a snap decision, Self decided to deny the allegation. When, moments later, his own editor, Will Hutton, having received a call from the Express, rang with the same question, Self denied the story a second time. By the next day, Sky News and the paparazzi were on his doorstep, but Self still held to his li(n)e. Will Sutton then asked Self to sign an affadavit confirming his innocence the writer stalled and tried lying low. But when, the following Wednesday, Sutton again asked for an affadavit, Self faced with lying on oath and possibly landing someone else in it finally cracked and confessed.
The repercussions were swift. The Observer sacked him immediately and the story broke with a bang, the front page of the next day s Mirror screaming: HEROIN SCANDAL ON MAJOR S JET .
Three months later, talking to Olaf Tyaransen in hotpress, Self reflected: It was so extreme a trauma. I made some profoundly wrong decisions over that period, starting, I guess, with not being prepared just to deny the whole thing to the fucking hilt. That would probably have been the best tactic.