John Freeman interview: Arrival
After leaving Granta under a cloud, internationally renowned literary critic John Freeman returns to the limelight with Issue 1 of his new publication Freeman's, featuring writers as vital and varied as Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell and Lydia Davis.
“I think you’re the first person outside America to read it not in Romanian.” A high honour and a good starting point to talk about new literary journal Freeman’s, whose first themed issue – The Best New Writing on Arrival – features the work of some of the world's finest writers, hailing from the UK, Sudan, Jamaica, Japan, Iceland and beyond.
John Freeman, former editor of Granta and the guiding hand in assembling this globe-sprawling network of stories, spoke to The Skinny in a conversation strung between Glasgow and Oslo as he prepared for the Scandinavian leg of his tour to launch Issue 1, before heading our way to a free event at Glasgow University in late November.
The chance to read tales told from places we’ve never been, and by people whose life experience differs drastically from our own is hugely compelling, but Freeman is quick to point out that simply featuring writers from a wide variety of countries was never a goal in itself.
“I think the best kind of storytelling is very specific in its details and its roots but it somehow refutes nationality,” he suggests, pointing to JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as an example. “He starts with a very specific inspiration and then tries to back out of news and into allegory.” It’s this quality that raises Freeman’s first issue above the level of a multicultural curio, striking at something deeper than the set dressing of each writer’s particular locale. In bringing together stories from cultures of every kind, it powerfully affirms how insubstantial the boundaries between them really are.
John Freeman: Granta and modern literary journals
He brings up Coetzee by mentioning a biography of the South African author which he happens to have been reading recently, and throughout the interview nods to books and essays that have influenced his thinking. While working as a literary critic Freeman was famously prolific, often blazing through five or six books in a week, and now, skipping easily between late capitalism, James Kelman’s formalism, post-colonial politics and cognitive science. The impression you get is of a mind so well stocked with literature of all descriptions that there is almost no water the conversation could flow into where he would find himself adrift.
There’s something in his measured way of speaking too that reflects a literary background, the careful cadence of his sentences matching the contemplative pace of long form writing. It’s obvious at all times that, beyond the impressively vast store of sheer information his head now houses, the ideas he expresses are those he has sat with and considered deeply, and he’ll happily let the conversation pause while he locates the precise words he needs to express them.
At Granta he was praised for modernising the magazine, and with Freeman’s he now has a blank slate on which to scratch out his idea of what a literary journal for 2015 should look like. Bringing together such an international crew is a good fit for an age which has brought people on opposite sides of the planet within tweeting distance of one another, and the opening issue’s loose but relevant theme of arrival brings further into focus the question of what it means to be a citizen of today’s highly global world.
The issue of where we call home and what that means for our own identity is as old as time but it’s possibly never been more pressing – in an era where, as Freeman himself puts it, “home is a very elastic thing,” the issue of how and where to anchor our sense of ourselves might be more complex than ever before.
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He jokes about his own sense of “DeLillo-esque displacement,” stemming from nights spent in impersonal, identical hotel rooms scattered across the globe, before pointing to the myriad, often much more traumatic experiences of some of his featured writers. “You mark certain parts of yourself in certain places and to me some of the most devastating pieces in this issues are about what happens when that place is destroyed.”
Aleksander Hemon’s story tells of a family forced to abandon a rich life in one country to start from scratch in another, while Garnette Cadogan’s essay recalls having to learn a whole new code of behaviour to negotiate the prejudices of a new place.
Others stay in the same physical location but are stripped of their sense of belonging by other forces in their lives – Laura van den Berg and Haruki Murakami’s protagonists are left lost by the betrayals of their loved ones while Helen Simpson’s calmly faces the betrayals of her own body and the new demands its age will make upon her identity. The settings and specifics of their stories vary wildly, but there’s a human current running deeper than time, race or place that connects them all.
“I think storytelling is a way for us to reconceive who we are in more intimate boundaries” says Freeman, “We live in a society now where people can move so quickly across physical space and all kinds of boundaries. I think that when we lived in smaller groups in older ways, gatherings and leavings and arrivals were ritualised to a greater degree. I find stories, to some degree, are that ritual.”
The first issue of Freeman's
This first issue is full of writers leaving and returning home, visiting new places and re-discovering old ones, adapting to their environment and adapting their environment to them. Originally written in a panoply of different tongues and set against backdrops ranging from Middle Eastern sweatshops to Arizona acupuncture clinics, each acts as the same attempt to ritualise the writer’s movements through the world so that they might understand it better – and be better understood: “We all need to know where we are and have a sense of it. Books imagine the world that we live in so we can live in it.”
The first issue of Freeman’s is suffused with the same gentle, reflective tone its editor speaks with; a kind of calming counterpoint to the frenetic pacing of contemporary culture. The speed of life has been ramped up to new heights, both physically and virtually, as modern technology allows us to rush from place to place while firing data off around the globe in all directions with even greater rapidity. Culturally there’s now also an expectation for ideas and opinions to be generated and consumed as quickly and constantly as possible – ideal if the goal is to Google a quick fact or sly quotation but less so if you’re looking to really understand an issue or another person’s reality.
Having written quite extensively about the potentially damaging effect of our newfound reliance upon communication technology, Freeman is no Luddite raging against change, but simply someone who knows the value of good storytelling and wants to push for its place in the modern world. Anywhere in the world, at any point in time, sitting with a more slowly composed story and absorbing it steadily can offer something of tremendous value.
With its first issue, Freeman’s acts as a bold testament to that value, as he concludes: “There’s nothing quite as sobering as witnessing what happens when someone who really needs a story gets one.”
Freeman's Issue 1: Arrival is out now, published by Grove Press, RRP £10.99