From Ralph

11/28/03

Paperback writer: How my books are wrote.

"Don't write, Ralph — you'll bring shame on your family" — Hunter S. Thompson. GONZO Journalist.

So I don't- or wouldn't, were it not for the fact that I write better than he gives me credit for- or, as I protested, to his face, 'I can write better than you can draw!'

Hunter is jealous, not just of me, but of anyone who writes with some aptitude. He cannot bear it and that gives me great pleasure. I have found the only weak spot he seems to have. My 'gibberish', as he calls it, gets to him. I smile to myself as I remember when he told me not to write, in his kitchen at Owl Farm, because I had just declared that I was going to write a book and not just illustrate one. I chuckled when he scoffed his response, because I knew it was also an insult of affection. Don't smirk, it's true! He reserves his most brutal broadsides for his best buddies, testing their regard, and maybe their twisted love for him. He is desperately insecure. All writers are, or damn well should be, if they are any good. He surrounds himself with people who love him with twisted affection, or at least, put up with his outrageous personal habits, which are many and varied, and apart from his occasional visits to the toilet, or disappearances into his inner sanctum, his bedroom, for hours at a stretch, whoever is there, all his (waking) motion takes place at his kitchen desk, his dinner table, his command module, within easy reach of small drawers full of pills, hash pipes in ash trays, electronic control panels to change TV channels to other football channels, and his old IBM Golf Ball typewriter He activates his conference phone, so everyone must listen to the interminable adulation pouring out of the speakers from some local close friend. He simply uses a remote to dim the sound from the TV monitor, while sitting unnaturally upright, (proud, you might say), in a tall draughtsman's stool with low back, supporting a successful hip replacement. During recovery, after his operation, so I was told, he insisted on smoking while in an oxygen tent, which is pure GONZO. 'Write?' he continued,at that time I alluded to earlier, 'You've got nothing to write about, Ralph! You don't know anything!'. Which is true. 'Then I'll write fiction', I replied. ' To make a mark is merely human, Hunter. To imagine, is divine. Wouldn't you say that writing fiction is a kind of sanctioned lying?' 'Very clever, Ralph. You are the best lier I ever met. You should do well!'

But how do I write? That was the question. Where do I get my inspiration? What writing methods do I use to establish an idea behind a book? In the Swimming Pool, mostly. Yes, I swim every morning, and every evening, outdoors, come rain or shine, snow or frost, thunder and lightning. I get my best ideas in a thunderstorm. I have the power and majesty of nature on my side. By the time I am out of the pool and next to a notebook, I have forgotten most of what I wanted to say, but most particularly, how I wanted to say it. Like a snail in its shell, the thoughts slip back down, or up? inside my mind. I have tried having a note pad and ball point by the pool side, but then I don't think of anything, because my mind, perceptive as it is, knows that I am trying to capture its fickle muse, so it shuts like a clam.

Instead, the spectre of my English teacher, Miss Davis, rises up, looms, to be specific, and tortures me with the thought she planted like a limpet mine on the steel prow of my mind, and below the water line too, all those years ago: 'Writing is pain', she said. 'You are not here to enjoy my classes. You are not here to find a playful joy in words. I am not enjoying this either, so why should you? Boys! Take out your exercise books and copy what I write on the blackboard. You girls can get on with your knitting!' Girls were expected to knit, back then. She would turn away from us, an unbroken length of white chalk in her hand, like a bone. She squeaked her tortured message onto the black surface: I AM A BITTER (COMMA) FRUSTRATED SPINSTER(FULL STOP) I HATE MEN(FULL STOP) BUT I HATE BOYS EVEN MORE(SEMI-COLON) BECAUSE(HYPHEN)(AND SPACE) BECAUSE THEY GROW UP TO BE MEN(EXCLAMATION MARK)(TWICE) Squeak! Squeak!- and the chalk breaks on the last exclamation. Breaking chalk must have been her only orgasmic experience.

I think that is what she wrote, but maybe I am lying. Memory plays funny tricks. It caresses ones own prejudice and probably my hatred of English classes was my own lazy fault. Nevertheless, I have used that and other distorted memories to construct a kind of autobiography, DOODAAA, The Balletic Art of Gavin Twinge, which, not being true, I wrote about someone else, my alter-ego, Gavin Twinge, while I, the writer, am somebody else too, in order to distance myself from the subject, and even the distasteful act of writing. So I invented the 'biographer', Ralphael STEED to do the dirty work. I merely oversee the result of the torture and add the Coup de Grace, as it were, a Preface, but like the buggering fool Hunter says I am, called it a TRI-ography. Big mistake! There are no shelves for TRI-ographies in the big bookstores. It is not a recognized genre, so the book goes back to the warehouse, until a couple of acknowledged authors writes one themselves, and they will.

From this perch I have devised, I can view the plot, the action, the philosophy, and the confused lying, like a vulture waiting to pick at the bones after the massacre. Funny thing; usually the Hyenas go in first, before the vultures, strictly speaking, in the real world, but in the literary world, the hyenas, the critics, come in after the vultures have had their fill of the subject, and tear it to bits, if there is anything worth tearing left on the bone. At least, that is what happened to me, particularly because I am not a writer. I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me. Don't get me wrong. This is not sour grapes. I have even written a book about Wine called The Grapes of Ralph. The critics were very kind and I won a prize for my efforts. Not exactly a Booker Prize, but a Book Prize. I have done a book about the life of Leonardo da Vinci, which also won a prize, but with that book, and this is interesting. It was going nowhere. It had a stubborn lack of forward motion, until I decided not to write it being me, but to imagine that I WAS Leonardo. Immediately, I was free! I could tell you what it felt like to think like him. No Art Critic could fault it, because I had to know how I felt, didn't I? It was the perfect conceit and I felt his innate modesty and natural curiosity of life's mysteries. I could paint the Last Supper, which I did, albeit, one third full size, but it is still there, on the master bedroom wall. It is still there after 20 years and four years after Leonardo's began to fall off the wall, due to rising damp. I built a flying machine, had to- to know what it felt like to be him- trying. But I did the pictures as well for the book, and wrote the words in pencil on the back of each drawing. This kept me harnessed to the subject. I wrote a biography of Sigmund Freud, using his own book, Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious, which gave me insight into his thought processes. In fact, I actually went to Freud's house in the 9th District of Vienna, gained access to his first ever consulting room in the basement of the house, and lay down right where the famous consulting couch used to be. From this vantage point, I was a patient and Professor Freud loomed over me, and my eyeline saw what a patient saw. The ceiling, the corner of the room, the cobwebs, and even the wallpaper, which was still there.

When I did my book on God, The Big I Am, I wrote it in the first person, as God, because I was there, creating the Universe, with my wife, who gave birth to all the stillborn planets, and then being distraught and angry when my wife died in childbirth, giving birth to the Earth, which, as it happened, was supernaturally passed over to Me, who delivered it as a vomit-(the strongest insult I could think of at the time), which God describes as 'a screaming ball of unreason'. Hot, at first, it cooled and became a moody ball of scum- and I (that is- God) resented it. Then he watches over its development, and the ticks that proliferated across its surface. Disgusted by everything God sees, and the diminishing belief in his existence during the 20th century, God climbs back up to his own perch in Heaven, and as we believe less and less, so He begins to lose consciousness, which is how I brought an end to his misery. Likewise I wrote the text, in pencil, on the back of each picture, as the artist and not the precious writer. None of these books are now in print. Warehouse space is more precious. But, some can be found on my website:www.ralphsteadman.com.

These days I am loathe to 'illustrate' other people's prose. Such a lot of it, as I discovered for myself, is not much more than shameless self-indulgence. That I have produced the drawings for Bloomsbury's new edition of The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose BIERCE, 'America's Oscar Wilde', with a rivetting introduction by Angus Calder, is simply because my editor, BS, convinced me that it was worth doing for all the right reasons. No! Not the money. I have recently completed the drawings for Ray Bradbury's classic, Fahrenheit 451, because it is its 50th Anniversary Edition, and a vitally important theme- the burning of all Books. It will be a limited edition. Exactly 451 of them, signed by Ray and me.

As someone once said, I think it was me: There is nothing so dangerous as an idea. Particularly one whose time has come....

AND, for those who cannot believe...........

Riddled with self-doubt and avoided by the rest of the cast huddled together on a tiny beach of sand between seaweed slimy rocks and polythene heaven, Francobolli chewed thoughtfully on what was left of the broken wooden leg that had kept his left side upright for more than forty years.

A rogue meteorite hurtles unbidden from the dark side of the sun and vaporizes the bonded, chattering hump of humanity before his very eyes, who only a moment ago had seemed so happy.

'How can they be so lucky/' Francobolli opined, scrambling feverishly up the sandbank to gain a moment's respite. 'That meteorite was meant for me, I know it!' Luck had never been Francobolli's trump card. The piece of broken glass in the sand, lacerating his good thigh, had seen to that. 'Shit! Why don't people use the receptacles provided for trash?'

On his side now, bleeding to death on a deserted shore, at least 20 kilometres from the Adriatic Coast Town of Brindisi, the broken neon lights of the out-of-season beach front Lido opposite, beckoned pathetically, offering pi-zz-, swings and kareoke. Distorted musical sounds offered joy and heartbreak in equal measure, but there was not a soul in sight. Francobolli considered his future......

Opening chapter of Observations of an Incurable Optimist.......

That is how I would begin something that might well turn into another great unpublished classic.