The real With nails
Working for thrill-seeking writer Will Self proved a true revelation for one author in the making
Self & I Matthew De Abaitua E ye Books €17.99 ★★★★★
You’re 23 and an aspiring writer, being asked if you’d like to be the assistant – or rather, to use the correct literary lingo, the amanuensis – to the most notorious, most thrill-seeking novelist in Britain. Your first interview involves being asked to roll a ‘special cigarette’. Your second involves nearly being killed in a Citroën, then shooting whisky bottles in the garden with an air rifle.
To be fair, the employer with the questionable driving and interviewing methods – Will Self (right) – lived as wildly as he wrote back then. His second novel, My Idea Of Fun, featured bestiality, necrophilia and an unreliable narrator (of course). As this book begins, Self is 31 and getting divorced, isolating himself, woozily, in a rural Suffolk cottage. Matthew De Abaitua is a fresh-faced Lancastrian ditherer on the University of East Anglia’s creative writing course; today, he is an acclaimed sci-fi novelist whose award-nominated debut, The Red Men, is being adapted into a feature film. His memoir of six months working for Self begins as an intoxicated, madcap romp, before it takes some unexpectedly touching turns.
The Self & I title is a deliberate homage, however, to the funny, melancholy slovenliness of cult film Withnail And I. Back then, Self could have passed for Richard E Grant’s character, wafting about ganglingly in long, dark coats.
‘Light bends towards him,’ De Abaitua writes, ‘like he’s a black hole.’ The two dash around the countryside with amusing results. ‘Never underestimate the importance of a pickled egg,’ Self announces to the locals in a chip shop. De Abaitua tries to write poems by mixing up words cut out from a newspaper’s gardening pages. Together, they swim in the eerily hot waters next to the Sizewell B nuclear power station to cure Self ’s swollen head, before building a campfire in which they burn their sausages.
Early on, De Abaitua is writing, perhaps deliberately, in the verbose shadow of Self ’s style. There is much ‘auguring’ and ‘entailing’. At one point he feels ‘cockshrunk and dithery’, at another his penis, disconcertingly, is an ‘opium poppy reared in Martian soil’.
But as we find out more about the author’s early life, myth separates itself movingly from reality. There is the moment De Abaitua realises he could be socially mobile (‘after being punched in the face I remain eminently reasonable – that is what marks me out as ready for the middle class’), and the story of how his unusual, Basque surname emerges from a long-lost thuggish grandfather.
He also quashes any notions of prestige about being a writer: ‘As a vehicle for ambition, the novel is a f ****** jalopy… If you want to earn the admiration of your peers and a steady income without the need for a steady job, do not accept a lift from the f ****** novel,’ he hams.
A final section about an old, lost school friend is devastating too, beautifully exploring what happens when our dreams run away from us. ‘It is only through the story of other people that I can tell the story of myself,’ De Abaitua writes and, standing alone, Self aside, his tale really ascends.
‘They swim in the eerily hot waters next to Sizewell B nuclear power station ’