Wish I was here by M. John Harrison
Finished 07/09/2025
What to even call this book? The cover presents as an “anti-memoir” by the legendary writer M. John Harrison. While it does include reflections on his life and his work, it draws these reflections from notes copied and recopied and digitized from notebooks that no longer exist; he calls them “nowtbooks” (“a place to store things”, he says on p. 113). These copies were ultimately llusory, selective narrations of some real past that he, at age 77 is now interpreting like an archaeological site (there are many ambiguous artifacts in this book!). Even the memories themselves are less about organizing events in time, and more impressionistic, subtle, and metaphorical. As he says “the memory is not what you remember: the memory lies further down, or away, or whatever.” (P. 11) This interpretive process, of crafting a narrative of something unnarratable, materializes and indexes a broader set of tensions and contradictions that Harrison sits with in this book, between experience and representation, between the past and present, between writing as a process and writing as a product, between escape and confrontation. It’s both how he thinks about life (his own, and others) and how he thinks about writing.
I read this book, and then spent time wondering what I wanted from it and whether I got any of that. It’s a book that is “about writing a book” (p. 211), as Harrison says, and there is writing advice, of a kind, in it. As a writer myself, and someone who sees in Harrison’s writing a brilliant and inspiring model of articulating life and its contradictions, I wanted to see how the sausage gets made. But so much of the book is about the contradictions of writing, of representation, of metaphor, and what is gained and lost by any author in navigating such contradictions, that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around, or to even think of this book as a guide in any straightforward way.. In other words, I came to this book wanting to know why Harrison’s vivid, subtle, intricate prose and unconventional ideas have the profound effect on me that they do. What I was left with, upon conclusion, was something more ambivalent and unresolved. Maybe that’s the point?
Most memoirs resist contradiction. They organize and narrate a life, through the vantage point of the writer, translating something fragmented and anisotropic into a smooth clean line stretching up to their present moment. By necessity, most memoirists lean on their own completion. The very act of deciding to write a memoir assumes someone fully, finally assembled from the very history they narrate. Harrison rejects both premises. What he favors is something more critical and uncertain, sitting within those contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. And I find myself trying to sit with those same contradictions as I read WIWH, but with far weaker tools than those Harrison has cultivated in his long writing career, trying to narrate, for my own understanding, what he’s trying to “do” in this book, and what I can take from it. So what follows less of a review than a sort of scattered set of notes.
The book is divided into four sections: “Losing it”, “Understanding Maps”, “Collision Avoidance”, “The Fall Line”, as well as a brief epilogue. In great generality, the first section is about his early life in Warwickshire, and his eventual removal to London. The second section is less directly biographical, instead focusing critically on writing, “weird fiction” and the tensions between experience and representation. The third section vacilates around his experiences with rock climbing and his retreat from it, and the award-winning novel “Climbers” that he wrote from those experiences. The final section, “Fall Line” fragments his current life, as a 70-something in Shropshire, into a series of impressionistic vignettes, by turns thoughtful, tired, and funny.
I think the following, on page 19, might be a kind of unified field theory for Harrison’s approach to writing, and to his own recollection of his life:
“Massive amounts of what happens to you in life will hapen via invisible and/or unparesable causal chains. Much of life, you will never know what happened to you at >all, let alone anyone else. Much of what goes on around you, you will never even notice. Though causes are everywhere present and dependable, the search for causality >is to welter around looking for explanations you can’t have, using epistemologies and ontologies at best provisional.”
This is part of what makes Harrison’s writing so inventive and engaging. He trusts his readers to accept the premise that we can’t really know much about what goes on around us, and that the tools we have to try are imperfect or even broken. Its why his short stories often contain characters or narrators who are either seemingly adrift or so certain of something preposterous or even maniacal. In his novels, this tensions slows down or simmers–I think about Climbers, with its year-long attempt to escape the pain and incoherence of the world through free-climbing pieces of it across England. But having such first principles also begs the question of how to write with them, through them, against them.
One way Harrison does this is to complicate and fracture prosaic material things. I love how Harrison writes about objects, whether they are landscapes, streets, or trinkets. There are objects on his desk that “I bought to convience myself I was alive” (p.117). A museum described as “one of those wet-weather retreats of Margate or elsewhere” is full of stuffed animals and paintings that look “sad, beaten down, and really quite difficult to define” (p.199). The fields around Leicestershire from his childhood “used to fill up with white mist like industrial separation tanks….the late afternoon sun in November turned the air pinky gold” (p.16). The house he now occupies in Shropshire “makes noises when you walk about. It’s seen a few things. It’s ‘like a ship’, whatever that might once have meant.” (pp. 181). All of these objects, and the language describing them, index ephemerality and ambiguity, which Harrison so frequently draws on in his prose. As he says, “the aim of the writer is not to become an exhibitor of found objects, but instead to not quite succeed in curating that which might or might not have been there in the first place.” (P. 53)
Harrison’s writing “advice” (and I wondered as I read it whether anyone but him could take it up?) is scattered throughout the book, but gets the thickest when he writes about genre and place (p.77-124). Some of it builds on his insights sketched out in his essay/blog-post “Against World-building”, where he sketches the political content of the dominant escapist narratives of science-fiction and fantasy, and finds they align quite well with neo-liberalism’s persistent cultural drumbeats of the heroic, self-fashioning consumer. The book doesn’t foreground the political content of this earlier essay, but he remains insistent that “plot” is a kind of easy trap that reduces a literary work to a kind of culturally palliative dance-card, carrying the reader along from fulfilled expectation to fulfilled expectation. There are rich, elusive discussions of weird fiction (“a way of writing about the real…not a genre in itself, it is a process”, pp. 77-78), landscape writing (pp. 88-96) and disaster fiction (writing about “the disaster…which has already happened” pp. 97-104), Sometimes the advice is as direct as it can be, as when he says, on page 53, “For God’s sake, never use a metaphor & then explain it.”
The people in this book are pseudonomous or maybe even fictional. There’s Map Boy, an eternally youthful rover, maybe the boy Harrison imagined himself to be. Beatrice or B is a writer who shows up to dispense literary criticism and advice. Grannie and Peat are two climbers who lead Harrison to new or dangerous outcrops. There are other, less pointed characters; roommates, friends, editors and other writers. Perhaps the the richest character in this book is Harrison’s nameless cat, who accompanies him to South London after his climbing days run out, and who stalks around Harrison’s rooms and gardens, fighting, stalking birds and moths, and going “about his business, and that’s the zen of him.” (p. 146). Harrison clearly loves this cat, and in some way all cats; his novel “The Wild Road” (co-written pseudonymously with Jane Johnson is a thoughtful fantasy about the secret and rich lives of cats, and one of the more conventional novels Harrison has been involved in.
At one point, Harrison says
“You have to look at the major transitions of your life with a metaphor that makes aesthetic and emotional sense.” (180)
And I think that the brilliance of this book is that it is about doing just that; on writing, and being a writer, and trying to use the inspiring and insightful modes and techniques that he’s honed in his fiction on himself and his own life. Writing is a process that’s violent, or even cauterizing on the flow and heat of life, fixing it into something interpretatble and Harrison doesn’t want to see it used for ends mundane or malevolent. This book isn’t easy, and it doesn’t suggest that writing (or reading) should be easy, but it is profoundly thoughtful, metaphorical, funny, strange, and ultimately worth grappling.
