From an interview involving shooting whisky bottles and smoking “special” cigarettes to an attempt to take a short cut through Sizewell’s nuclear power stations, the novelist Matthew De Abaitua is set to lift the curtain on the six months he spent as Will Self’s amanuensis in Suffolk 20 years ago.
De Abaitua’s memoir Self & I has just been acquired by Aardvark Bureau, a new imprint at independent publisher Gallic Books, which will publish it next May. It details the half-year period in the early 1990s when De Abaitua worked as a live-in assistant for Self: at the time, the novelist had just published My Idea of Fun, while De Abaitua was 21, and had recently completed the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia.
Self, whose novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and whose books also include How the Dead Live and Shark, declined to comment on the memoir. “Will is aware of the book but isn’t going to endorse it or anything like that, which I think is the perfect situation,” said publisher Scott Pack. “If he took against it, especially vocally, then that would be potentially uncomfortable for all concerned, whereas if he got behind it and supported it then people might possibly think he was too close to it. A dignified distance feels about right to me.”
An early extract published in Five Dials magazine sees De Abaitua recount the details of his initial interview with Self at Terence Blacker’s farmhouse. “Will Self arrives, six foot five, dressed entirely in black; light bends towards him like a black hole or a dilated pupil. He throws a gunnysack of weed at me and says, ‘Make something out of that’. I make the special cigarette. The interview proceeds in a fashion in which I cannot recall,” he writes.
The position, he is told, will include reading not only Self’s works, but those he will be writing about, as well as “a library of drug literature in the study” The list continued: “I can bring no Class A drugs into the house, nor am I permitted to drink more than the government-recommend twenty-four units of alcohol a day. I am to do whatever I am asked. Nothing is beneath me: laundry, transcriptions, fetching and carrying, and even roughing up literary critics in the Groucho if they diss ‘the Contemporary Novel’.”
De Abaitua said of the book: “I was a young man, and it’s written entirely from that point of view, I don’t put any hindsight on it. I started it 20 years after I had the experience – it was instead of having a midlife crisis. And as I started to explore some of the people who had influenced me, and my encounters with them, the more I started pulling at this particular thread, and the more it seemed it could stand in for quite big themes, not just about myself but about the times.”
His duties included sourcing an enormous map of London, and mounting it on a flexible screen, “so that we can bend it around us of an evening and sit in it, in his preferred mode of silence, reading and drinking, until we are sufficiently intoxicated for bed”, he writes in the extract, as well as aiding the author in his quest to reach the sea by Sizewell nuclear power station, which Self believes will help cure the self-inflicted scratches that were then covering his face.
“‘I’ve been scratching at my face all night,’ [Self] says. ‘I had image horror. Now it’s infected.’” Self is reported to have delivered these sentences to his assistant and a visiting gas man, from the top of the stairs, “naked, apart from a towel, which is draped over his head”.
“This explanation does not reassure the gas man. He moves briskly at a crouch into the garden. ‘I have a plan to deal with my face. I am going to take the Sizewell cure. Get your trunks’,” writes De Abaitua.
They set off for Sizewell, and try to take a short cut to the sea through the reactor complex. “Will suggests bunking over the fence. My job as Will’s assistant requires a relentless willingness to participate in the unusual,” writes De Abaitua. “But just because I am a grunt, enlisted in a very small and embattled infantry division in which Will Self is the sergeant major, does not mean that I will break into a nuclear power reactor with a pair of trunks and some sausages, and a man with a mutated face, just so he can take a short cut to the beach. No way. Not unless he insists upon it. Reason prevails. We walk around the perimeter.”
“It’s quite an intense thing to do and it does change you ... It was my job as amanuensis to roam the same imaginary topography [as Self],” De Abaitua told the Guardian. “It’s not a gossipy book, but I wanted to capture that almost Withnail and I-ish quality of it ... [And] I really wanted to celebrate how this was a time in literature when people didn’t really give a shit about readers. Writers were imperious; it was all about the dictating of our unconscious, and mining that … Obviously now writers are much more subservient, and set out on social media, desperately trying to corral people into giving a shit.”
De Abaitua went on to become deputy editor of the Idler magazine, and to publish the Arthur C Clarke award-shortlisted novel The Red Men, with a book deal struck for two further science fiction novels with the publisher Angry Robot. He also lectures on creative writing at Brunel University and the University of Essex – coincidentally, his office at Brunel is opposite Self’s.
“We’re still in touch,” he said. “And he’s seen the book. He’s going to not comment about it, which I think is the right thing. He is a very different person, physiologically and psychologically, from the period, and it would be weird for him to comment.”
