Graham Swift on the Human Wilderness
The narrator of your story “Bruises” is a former British soldier who fought in Iraq. He is clearly suffering from P.T.S.D., though he doesn’t refer to it in any way. What drew you to the idea of writing about this character?
It was never an “idea.” The story began, as several of my stories have begun, with just a phrase—an ordinary phrase—lodging itself in my head in an insistent, apparently meaningful way. The phrase was “The quiet ones are the worst,” a common enough phrase that might be used in many contexts. I felt it implied something ominous and violent. Before I knew it, the phrase was not so much in my head as in the head of my suddenly emerging central character and narrator—a man who wants to be quiet, who doesn’t like noise, but is in some way deeply disturbed. And, before I knew it again, I was dealing with an ex-soldier, suffering from what we now call P.T.S.D.—though in another time it might have been called something else or had no name at all. All this happened very quickly in my mind, in the same time it takes to read the first two paragraphs of the story. But, equally quickly, I knew certain other separate things—for example, that this ex-soldier was in a relationship with a woman who was starting to find him hard to live with, and her name was Shirley. Don’t ask me why.
The character’s P.T.S.D. has him going to a pub a few nights a week, in order to start fights, which he seems not always to win. What relief do you think he gets from that physical aggression, both that he inflicts on others and that others inflict on him?
I’m not sure that he gets any relief. That’s why it’s a repeated process—a compulsion, like a drug. There’s much in this story that isn’t rational at all: a “quiet” man who yet seeks violence, who starts fights in pubs. This same man has a job as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital. As he puts it, “It was work I could get,” but he clearly doesn’t find a psychiatric hospital strange or frightening, as most people would. He feels almost at home in it and identifies with the patients. He knows that he might easily be one of them.
The narrator seems to understand a lot of things about himself, and yet perhaps isn’t always able to make sense of what he understands. That must have been a complicated inconsistency for you, as the author, to convey. How did you walk that narrow line between insight and interpretation?
You’re right. The narrator has a strong sense of being—just—on the safe side of a line. He might be tempted to cross it and lose all control and understanding, but he doesn’t do this. Perhaps this borderline condition is more painful than tipping over into mindlessness. But my character isn’t deranged. On the outside, at least, he’s quite “normal” and likable—or I think he is. He genuinely does want a quiet life. He’s not unintelligent. He has his share of ordinary human decency, and he has, significantly, a resilient, stoical sense of humor. For most of the time, he exists quite well in the “normal,” sane world, but then, as he puts it, he will “go into himself”—into inner turmoil. It’s a challenge, perhaps, to depict such stuff—or, rather, to create a character who depicts it himself—but I think that this is part of any serious writer’s job: you sometimes have to leave the safe paths and go into the human wilderness.
All this said, I hope that my story finds its particular way of dealing with the narrator’s plight. To put it broadly, and to forget for a moment clinical terminology such as “P.T.S.D.,” my character knows about hell. When he “goes into himself,” he goes into a sort of hell: the hell of his memories of war and the hell of what war has done to him. “Hell” is a word, an idea that reverberates through the story, even in the common use made of it in the expression “go to hell.” My character is told to go to hell more than once in the story, but his underlying, if unspoken, position is that he’s already been there, or—more disturbingly—that he’s already in it. I’ve mentioned his sense of humor. I’d go further and say that my story is essentially a comic story. It’s about deadly serious stuff, terrible stuff, yet its central event is an almost slapstick enactment of the process of being sent to hell, of going to hell—which turns out, redemptively, to have the opposite effect to what was intended.
The narrator has an urge to confess his sins to a priest, although he isn’t Catholic. His sin, as he sees it, is murder—but he doesn’t know whether to think of it as such, since it was committed in the line of duty. I’m sure that many veterans have similar thoughts. Do you think your character finds some kind of absolution in the story?
I’ve already used the word “redemptively.” Let’s say the story ends quite happily—and not in hell. “Hell” has a primarily religious connotation, and my narrator, though not religious, does indeed have the urge to confess to a priest. He gets no further in this than just going sometimes to sit by himself in a Catholic church. It’s where he can be “quiet.” So: we have a quiet man who goes to pubs to start fights, who works in a mental hospital, and who sometimes, secretly, visits a church. We’re clearly in potent, volatile territory. I’m not alone among writers in being drawn to a line of Browning’s: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” which is followed, in the next lines, by the examples “The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.” Those last two contradictions, at least, would fit my character as he sits in a church, contemplating things that he’s seen and done.
“Bruises,” as you and I discussed while editing, is driven by this man’s particular voice, his locutions, what he is able or not able to express. How different would it be if it were written in the third person, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator?
The narrator of your story “Bruises” is a former British soldier who fought in Iraq. He is clearly suffering from P.T.S.D., though he doesn’t refer to it in any way. What drew you to the idea of writing about this character?
It was never an “idea.” The story began, as several of my stories have begun, with just a phrase—an ordinary phrase—lodging itself in my head in an insistent, apparently meaningful way. The phrase was “The quiet ones are the worst,” a common enough phrase that might be used in many contexts. I felt it implied something ominous and violent. Before I knew it, the phrase was not so much in my head as in the head of my suddenly emerging central character and narrator—a man who wants to be quiet, who doesn’t like noise, but is in some way deeply disturbed. And, before I knew it again, I was dealing with an ex-soldier, suffering from what we now call P.T.S.D.—though in another time it might have been called something else or had no name at all. All this happened very quickly in my mind, in the same time it takes to read the first two paragraphs of the story. But, equally quickly, I knew certain other separate things—for example, that this ex-soldier was in a relationship with a woman who was starting to find him hard to live with, and her name was Shirley. Don’t ask me why.
The character’s P.T.S.D. has him going to a pub a few nights a week, in order to start fights, which he seems not always to win. What relief do you think he gets from that physical aggression, both that he inflicts on others and that others inflict on him?
I’m not sure that he gets any relief. That’s why it’s a repeated process—a compulsion, like a drug. There’s much in this story that isn’t rational at all: a “quiet” man who yet seeks violence, who starts fights in pubs. This same man has a job as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital. As he puts it, “It was work I could get,” but he clearly doesn’t find a psychiatric hospital strange or frightening, as most people would. He feels almost at home in it and identifies with the patients. He knows that he might easily be one of them.
The narrator seems to understand a lot of things about himself, and yet perhaps isn’t always able to make sense of what he understands. That must have been a complicated inconsistency for you, as the author, to convey. How did you walk that narrow line between insight and interpretation?
You’re right. The narrator has a strong sense of being—just—on the safe side of a line. He might be tempted to cross it and lose all control and understanding, but he doesn’t do this. Perhaps this borderline condition is more painful than tipping over into mindlessness. But my character isn’t deranged. On the outside, at least, he’s quite “normal” and likable—or I think he is. He genuinely does want a quiet life. He’s not unintelligent. He has his share of ordinary human decency, and he has, significantly, a resilient, stoical sense of humor. For most of the time, he exists quite well in the “normal,” sane world, but then, as he puts it, he will “go into himself”—into inner turmoil. It’s a challenge, perhaps, to depict such stuff—or, rather, to create a character who depicts it himself—but I think that this is part of any serious writer’s job: you sometimes have to leave the safe paths and go into the human wilderness.
All this said, I hope that my story finds its particular way of dealing with the narrator’s plight. To put it broadly, and to forget for a moment clinical terminology such as “P.T.S.D.,” my character knows about hell. When he “goes into himself,” he goes into a sort of hell: the hell of his memories of war and the hell of what war has done to him. “Hell” is a word, an idea that reverberates through the story, even in the common use made of it in the expression “go to hell.” My character is told to go to hell more than once in the story, but his underlying, if unspoken, position is that he’s already been there, or—more disturbingly—that he’s already in it. I’ve mentioned his sense of humor. I’d go further and say that my story is essentially a comic story. It’s about deadly serious stuff, terrible stuff, yet its central event is an almost slapstick enactment of the process of being sent to hell, of going to hell—which turns out, redemptively, to have the opposite effect to what was intended.
The narrator has an urge to confess his sins to a priest, although he isn’t Catholic. His sin, as he sees it, is murder—but he doesn’t know whether to think of it as such, since it was committed in the line of duty. I’m sure that many veterans have similar thoughts. Do you think your character finds some kind of absolution in the story?
I’ve already used the word “redemptively.” Let’s say the story ends quite happily—and not in hell. “Hell” has a primarily religious connotation, and my narrator, though not religious, does indeed have the urge to confess to a priest. He gets no further in this than just going sometimes to sit by himself in a Catholic church. It’s where he can be “quiet.” So: we have a quiet man who goes to pubs to start fights, who works in a mental hospital, and who sometimes, secretly, visits a church. We’re clearly in potent, volatile territory. I’m not alone among writers in being drawn to a line of Browning’s: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” which is followed, in the next lines, by the examples “The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.” Those last two contradictions, at least, would fit my character as he sits in a church, contemplating things that he’s seen and done.
“Bruises,” as you and I discussed while editing, is driven by this man’s particular voice, his locutions, what he is able or not able to express. How different would it be if it were written in the third person, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator?
