On the train up to London yesterday I read the first three stories in the new collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn. This is a wonderful book. I was captivated (as almost always happens with writing that turns out to really mean something to me) more or less from the first sentence. It’s not the content necessarily, not at that point, so much as the way a writer has of shaping a sentence, of getting the words to ring cleanly, to fall in exactly their proper order. When I hear it I know.
I took a chance on the book after seeing it reviewed in The Guardian. I can now say I feel immensely grateful to the reviewer (Corinne Jones) for having the grace and good sense to talk about the collection on its own terms and without referring even obliquely to the unusual family background of its author. If I had known in advance that Watkins’s father (who died when she was six – she barely remembers him) was Paul Watkins, a one-time member of the infamous Manson Family, I might have feared (wrongly) that Battleborn was being unduly hyped because of that, and as a result I might never have bought it. As it was, I came to the collection knowing little about it and with few prior expectations – which has to be the best way of reading anything. I read the first story, ‘Ghosts, Cowboys’, with a mounting sense of delight at the way Watkins handles language. By the time I moved towards the final third of the story, in which Watkins gradually reveals the facts about her origins, I was already won over. The experience of ‘discovering’ a writer in this way was so weird, so unexpected, that I even found myself asking: is this real?
In a recent interview for the New York Times, Claire Watkins said she chose ‘Ghosts, Cowboys’ to lead off the collection because she wanted it to function as ‘a legend or key for reading the rest of the book.’
As to the blending of genres, while that’s an apt way to describe it, I never thought of “Ghosts, Cowboys” as anything but a story. It invites the question we ask after reading a lot of stories, even more traditional ones: Did this really happen?
I loved hearing her say that, because it’s precisely the way the story worked for me. There’s also a fascinating bit in the Q&A where she describes how her first stories – a series of playlets about an orphaned child – were recorded on a tape player, rather than written on paper. This threw me back instantly to some of my own first experiments with fiction, also recorded on a tape player (one of those heavy old brown push-button cassette recorders – my brother and I each had one) at exactly the age Claire Vaye Watkins was – about seven – when she recorded hers. Mine were all Doctor Who fanfic, replete with phrases such as ‘we’ve got to get back to the Tardis’ and ‘no, please, anything but that.’ I used to recap the previous cliffhanger by saying (very determinedly) ‘now if you remember rightly’ at the top of each new episode. But like Watkins I was obsessed with improving them, with getting them right. I’m also afraid to say I behaved in a similarly dictatorial manner towards my brother and the two unfortunate friends I dragooned into service for the minor roles (Scott and Robert Norris, I know you’re out there). We were lacking a Doctor Who Sound Effects LP at that point, so we had to improvise with (among other things) an alarm clock, a potato peeler, and (excruciatingly, in the case of the theme tune) our own voices.
Yes, it really happened. But this morning, after reading Claire Watkins’s interview, I feel less alone…
Watkins has said that one of the reasons she wrote ‘Ghosts, Cowboys’ was to ‘get the Manson thing out of the way.’ I see this as a brave decision. Answering the inevitable questions up front in such a way has allowed her not only to deal with those questions on her own terms, but to demonstrate her very special skills as a writer. Reading her, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Annie Proulx’s stories in Close Range (though Watkins says she didn’t read Proulx until relatively recently) and also – though the landscapes they describe are radically different – of David Vann, whose shapeshifting approach to memoir and autobiography is similarly arresting.
Watkins has urged her students (at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, where she now teaches) to ‘cultivate their inner vulnerability, and read like fiends’ – sound advice for any writer, and words that immediately brought to mind something Keith Ridgway said in this truly excellent interview over at John Self’s Asylum:
I stopped trying to write novels and just wrote, and wrote out of myself, relying on my own experience and perception, and shaping something that I feel is true.
I also found what Ridgway said about his love for and frustration with the crime genre to be absolutely spot on. I finished reading Hawthorn & Child just before our trip to Pendle and I think it’s doubtful that a better book will be published this year. People have talked about this novel’s relationship with the crime genre (troubled) – what’s not been mentioned so much is its relationship to slipstream, which is tight, dynamic and extraordinary. It’s a superb London novel, too, and above all just brilliant writing. I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly, honestly don’t understand how the Booker judges could have overlooked this one.
As with the Watkins, it’s a book that grabbed me, heart and mind, from page one.