Memoir the making of a novel
Ivan Vladislavic explains that being true to the past is not so much about incidents as resonant details
Ivan Vladislavic’s new novel, The Distance (Umuzi), moves between two different voices, those of the brothers Joe and Branko. Joe is a novelist, Branko is a film and TV editor. There is, between them, a kind of brotherly friction, competition as well as care.
Joe wants to write about the scrapbooks he made as a child and teenager, when he obsessively collected and archived newspaper articles about Muhammad Ali — a compelling, powerful figure who represents something exotic, different and fascinating for a white boy growing up in early-1970s Pretoria.
Joe draws a reluctant Branko into his project. For Branko, the Ali material evokes their childhood, their family and home in Pretoria more than 40 years ago, and in the novel these memories of youth provide a parallel narrative to Joe’s musings on Ali.
The story of the global pop culture figure of Ali, boxing and performing his way across the world, is contrasted with the textures and feelings of childhood, making an intriguing and moving narrative that encapsulates that era, and brings it to a close in present-day South Africa.
Vladislavic has a wonderful sense of language, or languages — for many tongues speak in The Distance. Joe is drawn not just to Ali himself but also to the language of the sportswriters reporting and commenting on Ali, a rough-hewn but flamboyant, highly metaphorical way of talking about boxing. This trace of past words emerges in Branko’s narrative as well, in the specific colloquial expressions of the time, when schoolboys got into “a rort” with each other, and Dad told his children: “Don’t give me a thousand words!” language, a language more like fiction, to talk about these memories. I began to write some fragments about childhood, but in such a different language that I couldn’t make the two streams cohere in a single narrator. So I created another character, and then I had these two voices. That drew this language up in me.
I can’t separate out how the language works in relation to the memory. They’re almost fused together. When I think about that period, I find myself thinking in this language. The language makes it possible to evoke that period vividly. “Don’t give me a thousand words!” “For crying in a bucket.” There’s quite a lot of my father, and my mother too, in the book. My dad was a kind of repository of this language, a certain kind of South African English that has now drifted away. That’s the third strand in the book. Practically, as I said earlier, one decision generates another. Having started with Ali, then having decided there should be a childhood voice, which are quite far apart, I realised I needed a third strand, a contemporary strand — the relationship between the brothers as adults. That’s the strand that carries the conflict, the collaboration as well as the contestation between the brothers. It provides a contemporary context, so the book is not just about the 1970s.
It became possible to deal with questions of narrative voice, and the literary concerns of how you construct a narrative. It was useful to have a framework that felt immediate. Creating a space in which they’re talking to one another allows for various tensions. I had a fair amount of quotation from the boxing writers, and I wanted this because the text is a sort of museum of that kind of writing. Initially I had all that in quotation marks, and all the dialogue between the characters, between Branko and Joe, in quotation marks, and it felt like the text was bristling with
The Distance them. So I tried dropping the quotes on the dialogue, and I found that quite challenging. That involved a lot of rewriting. I like the fact that it produced a more fluid text. It does allow Joe and Branko to merge, in a way.
Then I thought it might be possible to do away with the quotation marks in the Ali material, and I had that in italics for a while in the working manuscripts. But I find italics hard to read at length. Eventually I figured I’d use a different typeface, which would integrate the elements more — you can read it as continuous, but as soon as you detach slightly and focus you see it’s a quotation. In that way, the book is ultimately a collage or montage, different elements that have been put on the same surface. To go back again to how the text grew, I was thinking at first of the childhood stream as memoir, but once I had the idea of the framing narrative, which is entirely invented, it shifted the whole thing for me. That freed everything up, and it became possible to invent.
But it’s a fascinating question: What does it mean to be faithful to a memory? In terms of writing, it’s maybe about what feels right. My father drove Zephyrs and Zodiacs; it would be impossible for me to write about that memory and make my father drive, say, a Rover.
I think it’s something writers often confront. We understand that, as far as what happened is concerned, one’s memories are unreliable. What you remember and what you’ve imagined become difficult to separate.
In my case, the things I’m wedded to are some of the visual details, and this language we’ve been talking about, but I’m not so wedded to the detail of event and incident. The characters are quite fluid. But I am faithful to the details. The real resonances are in the smells, the colours.
That said, you might remember some detail vividly, but you might have transposed it from another episode else. These things coexist in a fluid state, and you require that to be able to write fiction. You can’t make something up if you’re constantly trying to recover something you think exists, back there, in some pristine state. It’s a moment in which sport is morphing into entertainment. Boxing becomes a spectacle, so much money is involved, and it’s gladiatorial — two men on a stage, with a light on them. It’s theatrical from the start.
I think many people got interested in Ali who weren’t necessarily interested in boxing, or even sport. That moment feels like a template for a whole lot of things that have happened since, especially with the technology we have now. Now anyone can become a celebrity, anything can be staged for our entertainment. Ali was at the start of this shift. That’s part of the complexity of his character. He had to be an extraordinary person to carry this weight of myth.
I remember that feeling even as a teenager. There’s a lot I can’t remember, but I do remember thinking: “Who is this guy?”