Dark energy transformed into light

IT is a disquieting thought, but even before I pick up the phone to interview John Burnside I know too much about him.

IT is a disquieting thought, but even before I pick up the phone to interview John Burnside I know too much about him.

Burnside Sr was a deeply flawed man, an alcoholic, fantasist and bully whose capacity for violence towards himself and others indelibly coloured his son's boyhood and youth. Several years ago, by way of expiation, that son wrote a memoir called A Lie About My Father. Its story, of a threadbare working-class upbringing in post-war Scotland and England's industrial north, and of a father-son relationship mired in almost murderous hostility, would have been intolerable had it not been so beautifully told.

But while I am familiar with all this, as well as with the fallout from Burnside's early life -- the drugs and drink that ate into his 20s before finally landing him in psychiatric care -- I should not have worried. In person, he is courteous and thoughtful; he recasts the same damaged biography in eminently sane and self-mocking terms. "I'm working on a new memoir now," he says, when I ask what happened after the events described in A Lie About My Father. "It's a very strange book, actually; I'm trying to write about being completely dull."

What happened next, apparently, was that Burnside grew "tired of being who I was. I was essentially crazy. I was in and out of lunatic asylums and doing a lot of drugs and I couldn't seem to stop. I was in debt, in all kinds of trouble. I had to jump and the only place I had to jump was into the suburbs."

Having recovered a fragile equilibrium during his time in hospital, Burnside took refuge in normality. He found a job as a software engineer and hunkered down among the millions of white-collar workers in England's southeast. "I wanted to be the guy in a semi-detached, going each dayto his pointless job, with a complete sense ofirrelevance."

I think this sounds like one of Burnside's favourites, the American transcendentalist and proto-greenie Henry David Thoreau, who "wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms", but he is adamant that the decision not be romanticised. "I didn't do this to settle down. I just wanted to get out of a big pile of shit," Burnside says.

The only problem was that the suburban solution turned out to be rather boring.

"I was terrible at it," he says. "I misunderstood the nature of the everyday. I confused normality -- social normality -- with something else, much more important and vital to poetry, which is a sense of the magic of the world, the energy of the quotidian."

This boredom had the unintended consequence of driving Burnside to write. And what began as an exercise in time-killing became a habit in itself. Poems began to trickle out. Soon he was sending them off to little magazines. In 1988, he published a first volume, The Hoop, which won a Scottish Arts Council award. In 1992, he won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Feast Days. By 1994, he was included in a list of Britain's next generation of poets, alongside Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy and Don Patterson. During the subsequent decade he produced seven more books of poetry, to swelling critical attention.

As one critic observed, Burnside's is "a devouring eloquence, unfazed by generic difference", and this is surely true. As soon as Burnside learned to write poetry, he began producing proseas well: short stories where the ordinary ismade incandescent through language; novels half in thrall to the dark worlds they describe. Buthow to decide what shape initial inspiration should take?

"Ideas dictate their own form," Burnside responds. "The approach is different but you need the same kinds of energy, like having money and spending it in three different stores.

"Early on, the beginning of something would come and I would assume it was poetry, and get frustrated when the poem petered out. It was only later that I realised this might be the kernel of a short story or longer fiction."

The first novel, The Dumb House, appeared in 1997, with Burning Elvis, a volume of short stories, coming three years later. (No Scottish writer since Muriel Spark has been so welcome in the pages of The New Yorker). His sixth extended fiction, Glister -- a dystopian murder mystery set in a near-future Scottish dockland community -- will be published this month.

Since 1996, when he went freelance, university positions have ridden shotgun to the writing. Burnside is presently reader in creative writing at the University of St Andrews, a role that comes with a substantial teaching load and sundry academic obligations.

How does he keep up the pace?

"I basically do two jobs at once," he says. Even his holidays are put to use. In past years, for instance, longer works have been hammered out during a month or two in France. This summer he will do the same, as a guest of the Isle of Jura writers' retreat, off the west coast of Scotland.

Burnside acknowledges that this industriousness comes at a cost. "I don't stay in touch with people. I spend most of my time on my own. All I do is work, and spend time with the kids." (Burnside has two young children.)

When I wonder how he clears space for the slow sifting of sense-data that a poem requires, he offers an elegant description of the process. "I don't sit down with a poem. I tend to work on them on the move, or travelling. I write, as (the great Russian lyric poet) Osip Mandelstam says, 'on the lips'. But I need to keep moving, since the poem stands or falls on its rhythmic power."

This solitude, whether spent during the small hours at the kitchen table or while driving through the B-roads of Fife is, of course, the engine of his poetry. Burnside loves the first-person singular; however removed his poetic or fictional creations are from his biographical self, the same brilliant eye (a "loner's gift for landscape", Karl Miller calls it) is "drinking up details" of the external world.

The result can possess a porcelain stillness -- Burnside often cites Japanese writing and aesthetics -- or grow blustery and elemental, blending exterior place with the poet's inner weather. Animals, too, are constant presences, as are ghosts.

Unsurprisingly, Ted Hughes is mentioned as a looming presence in his poems. "In Hughes -- in (Seamus) Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, too -- there is that special quality of attention to the everyday also, a sense of elan vital. Even in their darkest celebrations, there is a sort of energy."

Is this the same dark energy that Burnside embraced during the self-destructive years? "You can never forget the sheer 'rightness' of that sensation of falling," he admits. "Even in that destructiveness there is an affirmation of a kind of wildness in the human self which is not allowed socially, a celebration of some kind of unacceptable energy. For a young working-class man one of the only forms of celebration available is to fall into this cycle of dark vitality."

Although he doesn't say it now, those earlier times were also part of a great gamble, a stepping-stone out of a limited existence. In A Lie About My Father, during his first period in psychiatric care after overdosing on the toxic and hallucinogenic plant deadly nightshade, the poet looks back and acknowledges what was at stake.

"What had happened to me was the outcome of an experiment in which my life was not that important, or rather, was something I was prepared to risk in the process of effecting an absolutely necessary sea change," Burnside writes. "I wanted to become something other than I had been, and I didn't care what the transformation cost."

Geordie Williamson is a Sydney literary critic.
John Burnside will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival.