All the Fiction Heavy Inside Me: Cutwater Talks to Clinton Caward
Were Quadrant and The Australian your first publications?
CAWARD
Yes Quadrant was first. I wrote a poem and a short story about a woman I was infatuated with and sent them to Les Murray at Quadrant, telling him how great it would be if I could surprise the woman with a published homage to her. He sent me a postcard, saying he liked them and wished me good luck with the woman.
CUTWATER
Was Murray the poetry editor at the time? I am reminded of Frank Moorhouse's admission about his early publications that "it was to be quite a few years before I was published [in Quadrant] (or allowed myself to be published there)". Do you think there is a right time to publish something and a right place to publish it?
CAWARD
Murray was the literary editor. It's funny, often when I do mention getting published in Quadrant some people step back as if you'd just admitted to a drunken ménage à trois with John and Jeanette Howard. When you're unpublished you don't have the luxury of right and wrong times, you're just happy for the encouragement. But you do become conscious that different people read different things though, and you might get more selective about your audience, wanting the right people to hear what you've written. And there's never much point in trying to publish something that's been done to death, or subjects people are bored with. It has to be exciting for me, as well.
CUTWATER
You said in an earlier interviewer that reading Henry Miller validated your being a bit of a nomad. Do you think a breadth of experience -- say being a bum in Paris or working in an adult bookstore or escaping a cult or just generally scraping up against life -- gives a writer more to draw from? Were there writers other than Miller who gave you that feeling?
CAWARD
It was easier to romanticise that stuff when I was younger and had no responsibilities. Some things are much better in retrospect. There's nothing great about being a bum as in broke and sleeping rough. But, I'm happy to be a nomad as long as I can still pull cash from an ATM. I've never been a great fan of working, because so many jobs force you into shapes and forms and just seem so anti-life after a while. I did spent a lot of years on the dole, travelling and moving around, and I do think it's made me a better writer. Because you're not just gathering images and anecdotes or experience to draw from, but you're actually forming as a person. And the more formed you are as a person the more chance that you'll have something worthwhile to say. Miller really turned me on to the possibilities of tying life to writing. As did Charles Bukowski and Roberto Bolaño and others like Mary Gaitskill, Cormac McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq…
CUTWATER
In that same interview you mention a manuscript where the central idea behind it was that "terrorism, or the initial stages of, were part of a linguistic virus". There seems to be some thematic similarities between what you were describing there and what drives both 'Ali' and 'The Ghouls'. Is this manuscript Love Machine or was that something else on the way to working on LM?
CAWARD
I hadn't really made the connection with 'Ali', but I think you're right. And as far as the character of Warren in 'The Ghouls', well I actually lifted that short story out of the other novel you refer to. I temporarily shelved that novel to write Love Machine. That story was much more ambitious and I don't really know if I was quite up to the task when I did the initial drafts of it. I thought I'd put it aside for a while and work on something easier, but I had no idea I'd still be redrafting Love Machine almost four years later…
CUTWATER
What is a Love Machine?
CAWARD
Besides being the name of my novel, it's also the name of the Kings Cross sex shop that the main character works in. In a much bigger sense the Love Machine is the whole industrial sex complex of porn and sex toys that the character becomes a part of. That industrial thing that tries to keep us eternally aroused, yet never satisfied. It's like the lingerie of materialism, milking and suckling on jacked in users without which it couldn't exist. Mostly it's the lonely and the isolated that are drawn to the machine's promise of love and connection. But, the more one relies on the machine for human connectivity, the less one needs human connectivity, even though it was the desire for it that initially led them to the machine. So, even though the machine arose out of the pain of distance from others it made it easier to increase that distance. More and more the machine promises what humans cannot deliver. Knowable pleasures free from disease and attachment. The more virtual the machine becomes (it can't be that long until full size holograms of porn stars are performing in our lounge rooms) the more obsolete other people become.
Clinton Caward's Love Machine is released on February 1st 2010 by Hamish and Hamilton.
The full interview with Clinton can be read in Cutwater, available online and in bookstores across Australia.
Clinton Caward reading at the Cutwater launch. Photograph by Georgia Blackie.