Andrew Hemsley writer and journalist talks about the writers that have influenced him

Andrew Hemsley, writer and journalist for the Hastings and St Leonards Observer, talks with HOT’s Chandra Masoliver about the writers who have influenced his own writing. This will be followed by a second article with his own writing and the blog he will launch.

CM: Andrew, I first met you during Covid, you were sitting in the shelter by the Stade, well wrapped up, a few beers lined up, reading and writing or listening to music. What does it mean to you to be outside like this, alone, in all weathers?

AH: I remember very well encountering you back then. I think you were the only person not to automatically assume that I was a homeless person or tramp. On at least a couple of occasions I was offered hot food by Surviving the Street or one of the other front line groups that do such an amazing job. When I said ‘No, I’m fine. I live in the Old Town up the road.’ There was a disbelieving look in the eye which said a silent ‘Yeah, of course you do….’

Those Covid winters taught me a lot about how to layer up against the cold, how to read the wind and where to sit to avoid it. I have always loved being outside but in that time it became an obsession. I could have been at home in the warm but was somehow determined to be out there in January and February in all temperatures and weather conditions. Perhaps it was a reaction to life being so uncertain. The fact that nature carried on oblivious to any virus or the harm it may cause us. It taught me what parts of my body were most prone to cold – my hands it seems. I even discovered you could turn pages of a Kindle, or iPad, by using the tip of your nose while fingers remained encased in warm gloves. I was no stranger to being alone before that time, though most of my sitting out in a park or garden, enjoying a beer and a book, was acted out in the spring, summer and golden autumn months.

I have increasingly enjoyed my own company. It struck me many years ago that- why go to a noisy pub and spend money on overpriced beer? Improvise, create your own environment, one where you are surrounded by trees, greenery and changing light, rather than the four walls of a pub.

It is also conducive to creativity. Tellingly, many of the prose poems I have written relate to sitting outside in a certain location. It can bring thoughts unexpectedly into sharp focus and create zen like moments. I appreciate the aloneness of it but in being outside you are also opening yourself up to random encounters and opportunities. When you step outside your door it is like being in the flow of a river. You never know quite where you are going to end up or who you might unexpectedly meet. Overheard snatches of conversation. Stories can form from this.

Aside from that I love to be out among the air and weather. It is true, also, that the more you occupy one spot the more you become aware of the infinite variety in life. The sky is a changing map every time. Light quality, what is growing around you in different months and seasons. Each day, each moment has its own currents.

Sitting still, anchored, but with the mind in perpetual motion, it has an appeal that both earths me and sets me adrift. It can become an addiction – quite compulsive.

CM: I was interested to know what you were reading and writing. Who are the writers that have most interested you and influenced you writing?

AH: It’s a bit like being asked ‘what’s your favourite band, piece of music, or album’. There is an ever expanding galaxy of writers I admire. So many words that have penetrated my soul and psyche and continue to pass through me like a continuing wave.

Perhaps best to start with those who have a direct influence on my own writing. Curiously, these are largely English. Those who continue to light up my universe are Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and M John Harrison – a triumvirate I honestly believe to be the greatest living English writers.

I could talk about Moorcock forever. I first started reading him when I was 14 or 15 and am still re-reading his works and discovering exciting new things now at the age of 61. He’s a polymath and his work transcends time.

Iain Sinclair is not an easy read for most people – the literary equivalent of free jazz, but so worth putting the time in. His mastery of language and acid sharp observation has become an addiction for me. Sinclair is unique. There is no-one who can remotely come close or outgun him when it comes to the English language in my view. Persist, crack the code of understanding his writing, and your head will explode in a million different directions. I remain a committed disciple.

 

M. John Harrison is an English surrealist who conjures magic from the common-place. He is a gutter magician, whose sleight of hand summons an unsettling sense of beauty from the ordinary and every day. He taught me about the importance and power of resonance in writing. When I first read his short stories, I was slightly disappointed that there was often no resolution or neatly tied up conclusion, yet they haunted my thoughts for days, weeks, months and refused to leave.
His book Course of the Heart is a masterpiece.
I learned that it was ok to break the rules so religiously preached in many writing guides. Push beyond the prescribed formula. His work, brilliant as it is, largely drifted below the radar for many until his recent novel The Sunken Lands Rise Again, netted a major literary award. Well deserved but so many were late to the party there.

And then there is Christopher Priest, another of the great English word-poets, who lived for a while in Hastings. His short story collection An Infinite Summer remains an influence on me, imbued, as it is, with timeless, melancholic nostalgia.
He sadly passed recently but people unfamiliar with his written work may know the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige, based on one of his novels.
Another great English writer who has plummeted between the cracks, is Keith Roberts. He could easily be numbered as an English magic realist. Pavane, is one of the most overlooked works in contemporary English literature.
I have enjoyed all the work of Gareth E Rees, a writer who re-located to Hastings. His poetic urban explorations are essential reading opening up new interiors.
One hugely overlooked English writer is Robert Aickman. His quiet, unsettling, visions of the English landscape and urban life are masterful.
Brian Aldiss is another writer I came to later in life. Lazily slotted into the Science Fiction envelope by publishing houses, he is a polymath and hugely important writer. Aldiss is a global writer but if you want that English magic realism vibe then I would suggest his novel Greybeard and his myriad short stories.

CM: As in your own writing you love the images of other British writers.

AH: Spicing up the mix, for their use of beautiful, hyper-real imagery and hallucinatory perspectives, are JG Ballard and the French writer Clezio. There are massive nods to Brian Catling for his Vohrr Trilogy, written so late in his life, and to Alan Moore, whose latest publication The Great When, evoking a parallel London, is a masterpiece.

Still considering direct influences – the American writer Richard Brautigan, an often overlooked figure on the fringe of the Beat scene, gave me posthumous permission to write prose poetry. His slim volumes such as Revenge of the Lawn, are composed of the essence of moments or fleeting feelings, trapped in time and shining with the facets of perfectly cut diamonds.
His style was to capture moments in words in the same way that a camera would capture a scene.

Malcolm Lowry, best known for Under The Volcano, is a writer I regard very highly. All his slim body of available work is worth reading. Last summer I made a walking pilgrimage to his grave in the village of Ripe, in the heart of the Sussex Downs.

CM: These are male writers, I’ve seen you reading women writers too.

AH: Around 20 years ago, a mysogynist in a pub challenged me to name any good female writers. I was caught off balance in an unwelcome headlight. Now I can easily trot off so many – Woolfe who I have already mentioned, along with Angela Carter, Iris Murdoch and many others.
But my favourite female writer, beyond Woolfe is Anna Kavan. She was a fast living heroin addict (when opiates could be freely prescribed by GP’s) who was closely involved with the Paris motor racing scene, having affairs with drivers, many of who died in crashes. My favourite is ‘Sleep Has Its House’ but all of her output is brilliant and her novel Ice brought her closest to the mainstream.
Other female writers I adore include Jean Rhys, best known for her novel The Wide Sargasso Sea – a contemporary sequel to Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. But it’s her short stories that shine for me.

The Finnish author Leena Khron is worth anyone’s time discovering, though her translated work can be hard to track down.
I recently discovered the feminist writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Born in the late 19th century.
I loved her book Lolly Willowes, about a staid, well to do, English woman who throws off the shackles to follow her secret desire to be a hedge witch.
Photo 7
Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget. Born 1836) is a notable writer. A well travelled polymath, with an extensive knowledge of ancient history, she is best known for her supernatural tales, which often see the return of the old Gods. She has a painterly imagination, injecting her scenes and descriptions with vivid colour.
I also love Tove Jansson’s Summer and Winter books.

CM: You’re the most widely read person I know, what about other countries? Let’s start with America.

AH: I loved Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, against my expectations. I was expecting it to be a stuffy period piece yet what I found was an exquisite prose poem to the obsession of love and desire. It spoke to me deeply.
Likewise I had avoided Hemingway, thinking I would not enjoy his stripped down prose, that somehow he was a brutalist writer. A Moveable Feast, set in Paris, convinced me otherwise. There was an economy of words for sure, but it breathed feeling and poetry. Likewise, The Old Man and the Sea is a true original and has stayed with me. I love being surprised by writers, having my expectations over-turned, and it happens often.

For down-beat American realism shot through with poetic truth, I would encourage anyone to read the short stories of John Cheever and Raymond Carver, while also taking in Charles Bukowski, Dos Pasos and John Fante. All have an amazing insight to everyday American life, with Carver and Cheever finding crafting jewels from everyday hum-drum suburban life. These writers, between them, cover an entire microcosm of human life and behaviour.

I always find myself re-visiting Nabokov. Strangely, I have yet to read Lolita. His go to for me is Pale Fire and Bend Sinister, while the real treasure trove can be found in his short stories.

And straying into Latin America, Borges is a big influence. The way he breaks down the barriers between reality and fiction a father of magic realism. The Argentinian writer Roberto Bolano too with his strong themes of exile, obsession and the elusive nature of truth. Again, a great magic realist.
Julio Cortazar is a also a master.

I recently discovered The Invention of Morel by Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares, presented as the diary of an unnamed fugitive hiding. On a mysterious island. It is a surreal masterpiece.
Outside of these, I also enjoy Gabriel Maria Marquez and Vargas Llosa.

CM: And Europe? Which writers would you say have touched you – and how?

AH: Proust goes without saying. An early memory of reading In Search of Lost Time, is a two page description of Hawthorn blossom in a hedgerow, without a wasted or misplaced word. I love some of the French surrealists, most notably Louis Aragon for his Paris Peasant, though I sort of enjoyed Andre Breton’s flawed novel Nadja. I adore George Perec’s work – a genius and member of the Oulipo Group, best known for Life A User’s Manual. Still in France, other favourites are Celine, and Baudelaire’s prose poems. I’ve recently discovered Simenon’s exquisite Maigret books. I had never really been drawn to detective fiction, but these are intricate puzzles that also bring to life all the colour and minutia of Paris and France in a lost age.
Gaston Bachelard is a big influence, particularly his work The Poetics of Space. It is essentially about the difference between inhabited space and geometric space. He uses a house as a metaphor but it’s really about our relationship with art and objects and our own intimate topography.
Antoin De St Expury was a stunning writer. Night Flight and Southern Mail are exceptional.
He was a pilot in the early 1920s working airmail routes across Europe and Africa. His books appear to be about the beauty and perils of flying but are essentially about the perils of love. I loved A Happy Death by Camus.
W G Sebald’s work is to be highly recommended. Austerlitz is his best known, but all his books are indispensable.
His work is essentially about the spirit of place and the essence and nature of memory, more importantly, the unreliability of memory.
He wrote in what he called ‘an elliptical way’ breaching the boundaries of supposed fact and fiction.
His death, in 2001, from a heart attack while driving, was a great loss to the literary world as he was at his peak.

 

A number of Italian writers have left an indelible mark on me, particularly Calvino and Eco. I have read pretty much their entire output, including the non-fiction, and enjoyed it all.
Calvino was an experimental post-modernest who created an incredible body of diverse work. His work often wove together scientific principals with fantasy and absurdity, which reflected the human condition.
His best known work is If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller and Invisible Cities, but the entire output is great.
Ecco considered himself more a philosopher than a writer. His books are elegant and deep and he wields a formidable power with words and language. Focault’s Pendulum and The Island Of The Day Before remain my favourites.
Then there are the Russian authors. Dark Avenues by Ivan Bunin is short stories which are essentially poetic prose. I adored A Hero Of Our Time by Lermontov, an existential classic which sees the protagonist meeting his demise in a duel as Lermontov was also to do a few years after writing it, still in his twenties.
Bulgakov’s surreal parable The Master and Margarita was unforgettable.

And while in Europe, how could I forget Hesse? Steppenwolf was an absolute beacon in my reading journey and came very early on. Its beauty and strange dream-like melancholy spoke directly to me.

CM: I can see from your own writing how much Japanese culture interests you, what’s that about? And you write beautiful and thoughtful prose poems, so let’s move on to poetry.

AH: I love the Japanese Haiku poets such as Basho. They taught me that less is more, that restriction actually grants you freedom. When you narrow things down, you are forced to condense things into a vital essence, so that which really matters rises to the surface. Haiku is both discipline and infinite freedom.
Things can blossom unexpectedly from supposedly dry ground. It’s a good lesson to learn.

French poetry connected with me easily. It made me realise how polite and reserved English poetry is by contrast, much in keeping with our natural characteristics of inward reserve, never making a fuss. French love poetry is visceral, almost brutal in its honesty. Where an English poet dances around the hurt and pain, a French one will literally say ‘You have ripped my heart out and here I am wearing it bloodied on my sleeve’. There is an authenticity and honesty about that.
Poetry has to make you feel something. Ideally it has to pull the rug from beneath you, wrench you out of stale perceptions – offer a new way of seeing.

Outside and beyond of the French poets, Rilke has always spoken the most deeply to me and, being a romantic at heart, I admire the work of Pablo Neruda, while T S Eliot’s Four Quartets is also beautiful. Many of W B Yeats’ poems have a special place in my heart.

CM: And the book closest to your heart?

AH: If I had to choose one book to take to the mythical desert island, it would have to be The Book of Disquiet by the Portuguese writer and poet Pessoa.
Pessoa was not one man but many – possessed by the spirits of three different imaginary poets, whose names he adopted – all aspects of his own psyche and moods. His prose poem epic The Book of Disquiet was tellingly written under his own name.
It’s a book of fragments, each as ethereal and beautiful as the next. There is no narrative or plot, You can literally open it anywhere and find beauty and truth. It’s a unique and outstanding work that deserves wider recognition.

CM: Thank you Andrew, and I look forward to your next article, so people can read some of your own writing,

Also in: Hastings Life

International Women’s Day 2025 »