deadkidsongs
by Val Stevenson
[ people - april 02 ]
Toby Litt is the author of Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks and Corpsing. His latest book, deadkidsongs, which received the full complement of 'have my babies' reviews, is a bleakly funny tale of rural boyhood in the 1970, when Cold War paranoia was in full unlovely spate. By the end, two of the four boys in Gang are dead.
I arranged to meet Toby Litt in the foyer of the British Library by the metal bench in the shape of an open book, rather unnecessarily tethered to the marble floor by a large ball and chain. He had just been reading 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses', a favourite book. Litt has done a number of Internet and hypertext projects, and his most recent book, deadkidsongs, is also being published as an ebook. I wondered whether the ebook would have as dramatic an effect on writing as early novels such as 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses'.
TL: I've done two Internet projects; one was a novel called Om, like the Omega sign, which was for the Guardian website Shift-Control. I tried to solve the problem of it being online by having cliff-hangers and short chapters to entice the readers back, but I don't think it worked - serial fiction doesn't on the Internet. People may return to a site for news, but they don't come back to follow a narrative story. Being engrossed, totally involved, and turning the pages, is not the same experience as clicking with a mouse. Readers are more aggressive towards the thing they're looking at and more impatient: they are against you, and the fact that they are paying moment by moment only adds to the difficulty of online writing. Ebooks are not yet sophisticated in terms of hypertext. You can put in links, but it's a difficult process - the text has to be sent to a longhair in some industrial estate in America for a week. It's easier in HTML. The new generation of ebooks is easier to read, and I do think there are possibilities. The shortening of sections in books, staccato writing, is something that's been happening over the last ten years - there are fewer fade ins and fade outs, more smash cuts. Maybe it's to do with the fear that readers will be impatient with anything else, a sort of playing safe. I think it's important not to underestimate the reader; readers who are enjoying a book will want it to be longer. deadkidsongs doesn't play safe.
VS: The title deadkidsongs sounds very pulp fiction, but Kindertotenleider suggests something quite different. Were you aware of the genre before you started writing the book?
TL: I usually start with the title, but originally I had two. It was either going to be deadkidsongs or Descriptions of the English Countryside. I thought Descriptions of the English Countryside would be a Trojan horse title which could mislead some people into thinking they were reading a different book. I'd done that before: Adventures in Capitalism was in the business section in Heathrow airport, so some people on long-haul flights probably mistook it for a work on management efficiency and had a bit of a surprise. I felt, though, it would be best to let people know it was going to be quite a brutal experience. It was a shock to realise that Kindertotenleider was an accepted German genre, though not one that's been much translated, rather than just a piece by Mahler.
VS: Kindertotenleider are poems about passive, idealised 'seen but not heard' children, standing backlit in the doorway or atop some mystic hill. By contrast, the boys in deadkidsongs are masters of their own destiny.
TL: The absence of those children from the poems is extraordinary. It is a traditional fault of elegy, which always rebounds on the speaker: the attempt to bring people back to life is generally overwhelmed by the sorrow felt by the person left alive. The main English strand of children in literature, the one to fight against, is Wordsworth, who says in the Prelude that "Nature taught me to be moral." Nature is always a projection, but I disagree with Wordsworth: the boys in the book are taught by nature, but it certainly didn't teach them a socialised morality.
VS: So what are the literary antecedents of deadkidsongs? I was reminded slightly of the early Brontë stories, Wuthering Heights or possibly the Verdopolis tales, which is odd given that deadkidsongs is a real boys' book.
TL: I admire Wuthering Heights for being so totally unafraid of doing things which were not supposed to be done, certainly at that time. Lord of the Flies and The End of Alice were there somewhere, but Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, in which you get a sense of the network of neighbourhood spies, was in the voice of the first few chapters, where you can't identify the 'I' who is the speaker. I also wanted to distort traditional boys' adventure stories. My parents had four or five Foxfire books which were survival manuals which taught you to skin an elk or build a log cabin...
VS: Where did the fathers come from?
TL: Every father I ran across before I wrote the book, though they're not based on individuals. One is authoritarian, the other libertarian. Though they are individuals, they also stand for opposing ways of bringing up boys. I think everyone has, in their head, an angel father and a demon father, the idealised version and their current idea of what their real father was. The demonic side, the basis of the Best Father, represents the right-wing, authoritarian frame of thinking which was, until recently, so tied in with masculinity. You don't have to go very far within yourself to reach it: it's the view of the person stuck behind someone on an escalator or driving in a traffic jam - people always move at least one party to the right when they get into a car.
VS: In deadkidsongs you portrayed children's thoughts in a very adult way.
TL: Sometimes it's adult thoughts expressed in a childish way, sometimes vice versa. You can have a sophisticated style expressing something that's quite immature, but the basic style of the voice is of an adult who has not outgrown his boyishness. In the fifth chapter, where Matthew dies, he starts out speaking as a boy, but by the end he's speaking more as an adult. I hope it works to unnerve, but certainly so the prose acts as honest broker between the action and the reader.
VS: I was totally unnerved, because I had meningitis, and it was like reading my own thoughts at the time.
TL: The word wasn't mentioned in the book, so readers have to make their own diagnosis, but certainly in England, awareness of the symptoms has become more widespread. Sometimes I get a bit worried about giving things away in the book, but in the book, Matthew's death is the reason that things happened as they did. A stable group of four becomes an unstable group of three. From that point on, the boys are struggling to work out who is the leader. They're warlords. They think they're at war, so they adopt those values. Again, that language and those beliefs are such old ones. At the time I was writing, I felt that not many people would admit to remembering taking the Cold War seriously and the feeling of being aggressed by Russians who wanted nothing more than to bash us into a red pulp. Recent events have made the world feel less safe, and there is a greater understanding of that time. But that's nothing to do with me!
