ESSAYS: PATRICIA CRAIGreviews Making an Elephant: Writing from Withinby Graham Swift
MAKING AN ELEPHANT is an eclectic collection. Graham Swift is an admired and capable novelist and, in his fiction, a classic example of the “disappearing author” – that is, he carefully avoids the autobiographical when it comes to devising plot and character. Writing, for him, is “a liberation from personal fact”.
"I've never been a butcher, a prison-visiting detective or a son of the Fens," he asserts in his introduction (referring to Last Orders, The Light of the Day and Waterland), before adding that the current work, on the other hand, won't altogether eschew self-revelation. The "personal touch" will not be excluded from it.
But is it? Well, yes and no. The book is far from being an exercise in autobiographical writing, but it does contain a few disclosures about the author’s life. We learn, for instance, that he spent the year between school and university travelling abroad, by himself, finding a literary hero and exemplar in Isaac Babel, and getting into a pickle in Greece. We get to know a bit about his talent for friendships with fellow-authors, even if he’s now estranged from one of them, Salman Rushdie – whose Christmases in the days of the fatwa used to be spent in the Swift household while members of his Special Branch guard ate turkey and pudding upstairs. We discover that Graham Swift’s recreations are guitar-playing and fishing: the latter we might have deduced for ourselves, perhaps, given the aqueous element that slides through his fiction like the eels of Waterland.
“Rivers get to me,” he writes. “They get in my veins.”
The bulk of his Elephant, though, consists of some recycled essays and talks, a couple of interviews with Swift (both illuminating, though available elsewhere) and one by him, some reminiscences of sober days and drunken evenings, a lot of cogent reflections on the craft of fiction (distributed throughout), and one or two engagements with aspects of a London suburban childhood (this is another place where the personal comes in).
There’s also a surprising section in the middle of the book containing poems written by Swift at a time when no novel was under way – and about which the only possible comment is that these are products of a weaker impulse than the author’s compelling fictional drive.
LIKE OTHER successful authors, Swift has often been asked to participate in events abroad – and globetrotting as a consequence of literary celebrity leaves him a bit bemused but none the less resolutely self-contained. On one occasion he is sent to Prague to track down a dissident writer named Jiri Wolf – a mission illustrating the satisfactions of the search irrespective of the outcome.
This piece, which was written to order, has a professional gloss which is actually less appealing than the occasionally awkward intentness of the title essay (say). Making an Elephant is a tribute to Graham Swift’s father, a fighter-pilot who survived the war and spent the rest of his working days as a clerical officer in the civil service. “Drudgery” was what he once wrote against “occupation” when filling out a form. But the job enabled him to acquire a car (in the 1950s) and a semi-detached house on the outer edge of London – the once-splendid Victorian suburbs which would come to activate his literary son’s most pungent sense of place.
The suburbs and the seaside — whether in its bucket-and-spade incarnation or as a dangerous, ambiguous intersection between land and water: these are the localities we associate most strongly with the novelist Graham Swift. And when he gets to grips with local history – in Wandsworth 1851-2005 – he produces the richest, most highly concentrated essay in the book.
Making an Elephant, then, leaves a lot unsaid – and why wouldn’t it? – but it adds up to an amiable and thoughtful assembly of occasional pieces and other side-issues from a crowded working life.
Patricia Craig is a critic and biographer. Her most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble(2007)