GEOFF DYER
The term “unclassifiable” is something of a hackneyed PR-friendly label pasted on the backs of often very classifiable books, but when it comes to the works of Geoff Dyer, it feels both accurate and deserved. The author of 11 non-fiction books and four novels, including Out of Sheer Rage (1997), Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2003) and White Sands (2016), Dyer has written on a dizzying assortment of subjects – war, tennis, D.H. Lawrence, jazz, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, photography and Burning Man – with charm, wit and erudition. Born in the UK, Dyer now lives in Los Angeles where he is writer in residence at the University of Southern California and a frequent contributor to numerous publications and journals. In his latest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer (2022), Dyer turns his attention to mortality and finality by way of Bob Dylan, Jean Rhys, Friedrich Nietzsche and J.M.W. Turner, in what ultimately becomes a looping meditation on the endless cycle of beginnings, endings and the infinite in-between.
Interview by Matthew JanneyPortrait by Guy Drayton
Matthew Janney Why Roger Federer?
Geoff Dyer Well, he’s a joy to watch, because of the grace and the balletic quality and all this kind of stuff, but I think that the crucial point to make is that he demonstrated this very unusual thing in sport, which is that the most effective and efficient way of playing could also be the most beautiful. We can think of so many examples, Mourinho versus Wenger, let’s say, where efficiency and aesthetic appeal are pulling in opposite directions, so it’s lovely when it turns out there is that consummation. Aside from that – for somebody like me who grew up in that effing-and-are-you-fucking-blinding era of McEnroe – it’s the graciousness with which he and Nadal, and to an extent Djokovic, have conducted themselves.
MJ Though he appears in the title, Federer doesn’t actually appear too much in the actual book. I’m reminded of that anecdote that you told some years ago about signing a book deal to write a book about tennis and then submitting a book on Tarkovsky’s film Stalker instead. Is not writing about tennis something of a creative fuel for you?
GD This is very definitely not a very belated delivery of what should have been the tennis book from God knows how many years ago. Tennis, it turns out, is incredibly difficult to write about interestingly. For a while I was tormented by the fact that I felt I had missed the bus in terms of writing a tennis book. Now that’s not a concern for me because much of what I wanted to say about tennis has been rolled up either into this book or in the various articles I’ve written over the years. The short answer is I’ve had my say about tennis.
MJ If The Last Days of Roger Federer is not about tennis, you could make a strong case that it is a book about music. There’s so much of it in there. Clearly, it means a lot to you personally, but it’s also a subject ripe for exploring these themes of time, ageing and late style.
GD With Federer, I’d really just set my heart on the title – I really liked it – but it was never going to be anything other than a book about all these different people. And I’m glad you’ve mentioned music; I knew Beethoven was going to be a big part of it. Although I am qualified to write about tennis, to the extent that I can play, music is a complete other world to me. I can’t play an instrument, I have no understanding of the language of music, but I’ve always been drawn to writing about musical things. One of the problems that led me not to write the tennis book is that I couldn’t think of a tennis-like form in order to do it. It’s always been important for me to find a form in each of my books that was uniquely appropriate to the subject. With this book, there’s a lot of stuff going on in it musically; there are certain themes that return as they do in music; certain phrases are introduced and then picked up later on in a subsequent section or movement. So I felt there was that closeness between form and a big aspect of the content.
MJ It’s also in three parts, another musical gesture.
GD There are these three loops. At one point, I discuss William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and when I was thinking of a subtitle, I was thinking of using “Three Disintegration Loops” – I liked that. The reason I liked it was for the same reason I think a lot of people might have regarded it as rather pretentious. It’s important to stress that I don’t impose a form on what I’m writing about, but hopefully a potential form emerges from the material. As Nietzsche became probably the single most important person in the book, I liked the idea of a form that replicated his idea of eternal recurrence. Then I thought, if I had 60 sections going round three times, well, that’s got to make people think of time, which is what the book is about. So, 60 seconds, 60 minutes, adds an obvious temporal dimension to the structure. Early on, I write about Christian Marclay’s film The Clock as a filmic representation of eternal recurrence, and about the way that the same day just unfolds endlessly, forever, each day lasting 86,400 seconds. Then you’ll remember in the postscript I talk about the length of the book being 86,400 words. I like the idea that we’ve got these loops of 60 within an overall structure of a book of 86,400 words – a word for every second of the day, just to really tie up that structural conceit.
MJ You’ve written about a lot of different subjects over the years, but I think time, and its relation to space, cuts across them all. I’m thinking of The Missing of the Somme [1994] and one of my favourite passages from White Sands where you write about Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico.
GD I would agree. Of course, the related thing to all this is memory and one of the things that this book does is raise this question of when the end really begins. It was funny, as addressing this thing of the end, I was – in some Gatsby-like way – borne back ceaselessly into the past: that early experience of being on that Duke of Edinburgh Award trip for example, when the sensational news of George Best’s retirement was announced. For a 12-year-old boy, it was our English equivalent of hearing that JFK had been assassinated.
MJ The book naturally deals with exits, particularly exits of writers, artists and musicians, from public life and life itself. I want to ask this delicately, but is there some kind of preparation here? Or is this just a theme that you could only ever be interested in at this later stage of your life?
GD I’m interested in this subject now in a way that I wasn’t 20 years ago. I began working on it at a particular time, which I think in retrospect was the perfect time, especially since it coincided with the larger experience that we all had of the world as we know it coming to an end. In the process of writing, I realised how absolutely perfect the moment was for me to be doing it. But I’m not worried I could die in the next five years or whatever; I really don’t have that sense looming over me. When I was writing it, I was really feeling, “Oh, yeah, God, you’ve still got it!” I was not conscious of some sense of “I’d better get this done.” The only thing I’m conscious of in that regard is things like, I can’t write my way out of a hangover the way I used to be able to do, Graham Greene style. Unless you’re a chronic alcoholic, everyone realises that you can’t drink as much as you used to. Moving to California, I’ve ended up in that much healthier, much less booze-driven culture than is the case in good old London.
Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer, Canongate Books, 2022
MJ In the book, you often stop and reflect on the process of writing the book as you’re writing it. For example, after that lyrical passage describing listening to The Disintegration Loops on a balcony in Ladbroke Grove, you reframe what you’ve just written as a kind of pastiche of your earlier style. How has your writing changed over time?
GD I think that’s quite cunning, that passage. I feel that in my early books, But Beautiful [1991] and The Colour of Memory [1989], there’s a lot of lyricism. Then almost like an actuarial fact, that lyrical capacity declines as you get older. That was no bad thing, because those early books suffer from a super-abundance of lyricism, but it’s a classic dodge actually, that elegy for the lyrical becoming a lyrical passage in itself. There’s a long history of writers doing that. In terms of the process, it’s increasingly just murder getting going on any piece of writing; any difficulty you have with writing a short piece is amplified with writing a book. At first, I just want to accumulate as much material as possible, often really not caring about the grammatical shape the words are in. Once I’ve got a certain amount of material, then I feel more confident and I can start thinking, “Oh, there’s a book here.” Once it’s there, in some rough form, I really enjoy crafting it. I have to tighten and tidy up the mess and then quite often I go in afterwards and loosen it to make it look more casual. That casual quality of my writing has always been arrived at quite carefully actually. I’m so happy revising, as many people are, and will get to the point where instead of having to force myself to write, to put a certain number of hours in, it gets to that blissful point where I really don’t want to do anything else – that’s every writer’s idea of bliss.
MJ Is mess another kind of creative fuel for you? Rilke, who you often quote, writes about “living the questions”, which I think could be an accurate description of what reading, and perhaps writing, one of your books is like.
GD I should say, I don’t think I live my life in a messy way. I teach writing now, and students ask for advice, and I always say, “Well, I don’t know, you just have to find it out on a kind of trial-and-error basis.” It seems to me that writing is an inherently inefficient thing; you can’t answer the questions in advance. Should it be in the present tense or the past tense, first person or third person? My only way of ever having been able to answer questions like these is to just do it and see which is the least bad way of doing it. Given that that’s an inherently messy way of proceeding, I think I proceed in quite an efficient way within that overall inefficiency.
MJ You once asked John Berger how he wrote so many books over such a long period of time. So, I’d like to pose that question back to you.
GD My version of this is that I’ve been convinced that I’ve been finished as a writer for the bulk of my career, so that’s what has kept me going. The other thing that’s really kept me going is the desire to quit, the desire not to keep going. That’s been a very empowering and very effective fuel to have used.
MJ What are you working on at the moment?
GD I like this idea of an extended version of something I did a small version of for an anthology: a map of my childhood. Normally on Ordnance Survey maps you have a sign for a church or a PH for a pub, but this would be different; there’d be a glass to show the various pubs I’d got drunk in or a kiss sign for where I’d had sex. As you know, on those Ordnance Survey maps the key to the symbols is called a legend. I’m thinking of doing an extended version of the legend of the fundamentally uninteresting period of my life up to when I was about 18, something like that, within the town of Cheltenham where I grew up. ◉