An Elemental Way to Be with Charlie Porter

They fall in love the way you’d like to: suddenly, then easily. A moment of epiphany for one of them, a kind of recognition for the other. The shock of that encounter is at the heart of Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House, published last month by Particular Books. Set in the near present, the novel slips into Johnny Grant’s memories of his first love with Jerry Field, the past familiar in every moment, alive in the home they shared together. Jerry’s death from AIDS-related illness—is that what he died from, what people die from? government inaction, yes, a more conscious gatekeeping, more fitting—comes fourteen years after the earliest cases were diagnosed in London and mere months before HAART would become widely available in ’96. Porter’s first novel, which follows the decades he’s worked as a fashion journalist, marked by two non-fiction books on the industry’s place in art and literature, enters a canon fraught with clichés and a Catholic tendency towards martyrdom. He navigates that history with a study of how one life overlaps with another, the sterile smell of the hospital tempered by the heat of the sauna, the sweat of the dancefloor, hands buried in the garden outside their flat—embodied acts of agency. Nova Scotia House insists on life in a genre that is almost always oriented towards loss. (Nearly a quarter of the page count follows Jerry’s death, a physical reminder both of the life he should have lived and how he is intoned in Johnny’s everyday.) Porter leans into the counterculture of Jerry’s era, a shared commitment to the earth and our mutual well-being that guides Johnny in his solitude. As he spoke with me from the terrace of the British Library, the dissonance of nearby construction coming through my computer, Porter described Nova Scotia House as an ‘elemental manifesto of living’. Here is a chance at restoration, a turn towards freedom.

Noah T. Britton: You wrote this novel by hand, right? What did you get out of that experience?

Charlie Porter: Yeah. I'm left handed, so writing is a physical, full-bodied act, and I like to write in that way—to be as full-bodied with the language as possible. I write in longhand, and I write in capital letters because my handwriting is really bad. But I do it at a pace that allows for thinking during writing, that allows for breathing. I do think that a lot of writers, when they write, especially on a laptop, they kind of go [breathes in deeply, holds his breath]. You can feel it in the sentence, that there's no breathing while this happens. We breathe as we speak, so we should breathe as we write. 

Also, I think it’s because I've always written fiction underneath the surface; it's always been the thing I do in addition to other things. It's not like I go away and write for three months solidly. There's two or three months where I won't do any, and then I'll go back and I'll do another 3,000 or 5,000 words, and then there'll be a pause. I'm 20,000 words into the next fiction. I'll probably have it finished by the middle of next year, maybe. There's no rush. It's nice.

That rhythm is such an important part of the book. You had this line about Grace Jones’ ‘La Vie en rose’, about the way she's telling you how she wants you to hear her music. Does that translate to your own writing?

Grace has taught me a lot. I had the good fortune to be an adolescent when Grace’s records came out. My first cassette, which I bought when I was 12, was the compilation album Island Life, where the first track is ‘La Vie en rose’.  That record very clearly set out what it is: it's long, and it takes its time. There's no waste. That was a real education. And then the Slave to the Rhythm album came out around the same time, and the experimentation of that record—that album is actually a lot of different versions of the same song—was so adult to me, so enabling. 

When I walk to the library, I listen to a lot of music on Bandcamp. It's very clear to me straight away whether I like a track or not from that sense of, are they using the opportunity to set out the space? Do they know what they're doing? I was listening to a track on a label I normally love, and it's like they were too scared to let the sound be the sound. They had to add in some sort of bell noise or something to fill up the space. They weren't brave enough to let it be. I like that sense of setting things up. All three books I've written have 200, 300 words at the beginning that pretty much set out what it is. It's like throwing scaffolding up so the reader knows straight away what's going on. I get really bored by messing around. 

Do you usually come to the page knowing what you're going to say, or do you figure it out as you're physically moving across the page?

It's both. The chapters usually have some sort of plan: This is where I will discuss this, or this is the chapter where they will go here, or this will happen. After that, a lot does happen in the writing because I want the characters to have agency. I'm often surprised by what happens. 

I wonder about that element of surprise on a line level, how words and phrases come to you. I think you called Jerry’s belly a ‘cum catcher’.

I was completely obsessed with the way that Will Oldham would start a line in a song, and you never knew where it was going to end. I loved the work that he did in Palace Music and then as Bonnie Prince Billy in the late ‘90s and early aughts. Obviously, he's still great, but with all the people I love who make music, there are particular periods that I love—I love Prince from ‘85 to ‘89, you know, very specific. All these lines were so truth seeking, getting a real sense of how he felt: his yearning, his desires, his desire to control someone, his admittance of being a shit. You never knew where it was going to end. That really stuck with me, and it’s always been an ambition to try and make that happen, to never have it so that, in anything I write, you know where the sentence will end.

Are you editing yourself in real time as you write?

It happens. I mean, if there's something I don't like, I'll cross it out—there's no anxiety about it. It's not like it has to be exactly as it goes down, but pretty much what I write is what goes into the final thing. The editing happens when I type up what I've done after two or three days. And then my editor and I go through a few weeks or months of back-and-forth—we have a really rigorous relationship. She'll say, ‘What about this? Why is this like this?’ If I can say, ‘This is why’, then it stays. But if I can't, then it's like, OK, I need to make it more explicit, or I need to make it stick its elbows out a bit more and be a bit stronger. 

We breathe as we speak, so we should breathe as we write.

I was thinking about other books related to the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially ones written before antiretrovirals were available in ‘96: There’s David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, which includes essays from after his diagnosis, and Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, with its diaristic, day-by-day element. They both have this urgency that you get with the narration style in Nova Scotia House, this consciousness that's very immersive and present in the moment. I wonder if that feels related to a sense of time or maybe a certain lack of time that is part of this literary canon?

The heart of the novel takes place from ‘91 to ‘95. I wanted to look at this period because a lot of AIDS narratives, in terms of fiction and plays, are usually about the beginning of the crisis. The Normal Heart is up to ‘85 or ‘84. Angels in America is ‘85. I really wanted to look at a period of urgency, but also resignation, desperation, exhaustion. It was a different period, culturally—everything had changed. 

Urgency is central to the book. Jerry has to try and tell Johnny as much as he can about life before the AIDS crisis, which is the point of the book: trying to reconnect with experimental living and queer philosophies from before the AIDS crisis. And then the urgency in the present day is Johnny trying to work out his life, not to stagnate but to actually try and regain that urgency—urgency in anger. Close to Knives is a very angry book, quite rightly. Jarman is angry too. 

The way the book is structured, you feel the weight of that history. There’s this collapse of time. I loved the very first party scene, Johnny and Jerry’s first night out together, which is immediately followed by Johnny’s own night out in the present day. 

You know what? I can't even remember how that happened. Their first date is at a warehouse rave. I used to go to parties in some railway arches near London Bridge. It was a party called Sabresonic, Andrew Weatherall’s weekly party—that was the first rave I went to. I like parties in railway arches, so I just invented a kind of illegal rave. That party has no named tracks because I wanted it to have that sense of when you go to a party and you've got no clue what the music is, no clue who the DJ is, and it's the best thing that's ever happened to you. After I'd written that scene, I wanted to bring it to today and let him have pleasure now. It was really important for there to be pleasure in the book. I wanted to give them a good time.

With the nights out and the sex in particular, how do you approach writing into scenes that are so physical and ephemeral? 

With Macho City, we used to do a weekly newsletter where we just gossiped about what happened in the room. It would be like, someone fell over, or this happened, or we'd make up a name for someone, you know? We’d just gossip about the night.

Then I did a party called Chapter 10 with two friends, Dan Beaumont and Morgan Clement, and we have a very chatty voice for the club. We have no interest in sexy, sleazy, embarrassing language for ‘Hey, come to our night’. Because I write the newsletters, the language is very clear. I mean, the experience of what a club is, is very clear to me. I think it's often written about as this kind of, ‘As they stepped on the dance floor, the rush of the music…’ It’s bullshit. It’s not that. It's incredible, but it's not that. And so it's trying to let it be what it is, which is often administrative details or directional details or weird things that happen, rather than how you imagine you should be writing it. It's very elemental to write about, as elemental as writing about walking, food, or sex. 

Can I ask, on a personal level, what you get out of clubbing and going out?

I don't go out so often anymore because I'm 51, and I need my sleep. I also need to write. But I went out at the weekend, and I loved it. I didn't know I was going to go out, and I was out till half five. I get energy from it, I get charge, I get unexpectedness. I get a difference from the norm. I get pleasure. I mean, I love music. I love congregation.

I love that sense of summoning spirits and summoning people to the dance floor, particularly when it's music from the ‘70s or early ‘80s, like at Horse Meat Disco. I love it when it's music that was danced to by those who then lost their lives; honouring that is active memory. It's wild to me that most national newspapers have no clue how to write about the thing that hundreds of thousands of people do all the time, that music pages and newspapers don't know how to write about the most interesting music being made. It's undervalued and underrepresented, and I think it's a wildly important cultural form. That's why it's so important to present it in the book as just a normal part of life.

I love it when it's music that was danced to by those who then lost their lives; honouring that is active memory.

What, for you, makes a good night out?

I'm really someone who understands a smoke machine. Very few places do.

Nova Scotia House charts the transition from cruising and more organic hookups to Grindr culture. Did you write differently into either experience?

I set myself a challenge to see whether I could write about sex, full stop, but then also whether I could write about this app that is clearly Grindr in a way that wasn't naff or cheesy, whether I could actually put on the page the experience that you have when you're in it and the message comes up. I'm married, I'm not on Grindr anymore, but during my Grindr period—I would only hook up if there was some chat. If there was no energy in the chat, there'd be no energy in the sex. But it was very important to me that I wasn't just necessarily writing about Grindr culture as a bad thing. It's more just remembering to always be creative with sex. 

It was really important to me, if I was going to write about HIV/AIDS, to write about sex. I didn't want to go down the path of just being elegiacal, which I think doesn't tell a whole story. It was important to express the sexiness of the time, to present sex as part of the action, part of this elemental manifesto of living that the book is presenting, which is eating well, trying to grow your own produce, caring, volunteering, talking, walking— just trying to be as elemental as possible.

When you were entering the landscape of writing related to AIDS, what was your awareness of the field? Was there anything that you wanted to do differently from the onset?

I grew up through it all. I was eight in ‘81 when the first cases were reported. Also, I knew I was gay when I was eight, so the two were interlinked. I've grown up with it and then have read and seen a lot. Through my journalism work, I've always tried to express what I felt had happened because of the AIDS crisis, what Sarah Schulman writes about in The Gentrification of the Mind: It's not just people that died; ideas died. I was a menswear journalist in London. At the time I started doing it, there was no young menswear. Why? Because everybody died, or the customers died, or the infrastructure died. At the time, if you studied menswear in London, it was just assumed that you would have to go to Milan or Paris to get a job in a fashion house. No one was considering what has been lost. I tried so many times to say this, but it's hard because, in journalism, you have such a short amount of space. It's clear I needed to write a novel to express what I wanted to express about the AIDS crisis and for it to be about reconnecting with ways of living that were jeopardised or decimated.

Also, it was very important to me that the book never exploited the crisis. I don't want to use it as a plot device. It's there because we need to talk about it. I need to write this to be able to talk about it. 

It was important to express the sexiness of the time, to present sex as part of the action, part of this elemental manifesto of living that the book is presenting.

Did it change your sense of how we might talk about the AIDS crisis, especially in a way that isn’t solely oriented towards trauma?

I want the book to be about possibilities. People who are a bit older than me—10, 15 years older than me—they've often said that during those years, they would go to funeral after funeral, and they would be expected to just carry on as normal. Part of the novel is giving those people the space to grieve, and by doing that, hopefully opening up the possibility for changing how we talk about it. I like readers to be active. All my books, to me, are an open invitation to think and to be activated. 

There’s a scene where Johnny's at a protest against a pharmaceutical company withholding research on HIV treatment. After he gets arrested, he says something like, ‘We talked through what would happen. I knew what would happen’, a reminder of how much strategy went into actions from this era. Thinking about how the book lives in the world right now—in the context of the US, where I'm from, where rights are being rolled back for trans people and funding and research and access to HIV treatment is being scaled back—there’s something reassuring about looking at how people have organised historically.

I think it's clear that there never were any rights that were won. It's a constant vigilance that's needed, and also a constant sense of, ‘What am I doing? How am I living, in terms of my own queerness, with my friends, with my community, my family?’, and starting from there, rather than relying on rights to be given to us by someone who will take them away.

By no means am I saying, don't also fight for rights. Jerry in particular—they know they're never going to be allowed to be how they should be, which I think moves it away from this idea of ‘rights’. If we try and live our lives in ways which are queer in everything, then we're allowing ourselves to be. And then when we get rights, we're already being ourselves.

For me, the work of Nova Scotia House is imagining who we can be outside of all of the systems that have been imposed upon us. As you were writing into that idea, were there any realisations you had about who you wanted to be in the world? 

I started it when I was 46, so I started writing it early in my midlife, and it's published now where I'm very definitely in midlife. I might get to live another 20, 25, 30 years, and it's that thing of, ‘What am I going to do? Who am I going to be? What can I do?’ Really challenging myself and pushing myself and absolutely trying to imagine myself, with humility, as if I've got my arms stretched out all around in all ways. If I allowed myself to really be—how can I do that? And let's just give it a go, you know? Not defining yourself in opposition to heteronormativity, but actually being like, who are we in ourselves? That's the whole point. 

Did the book clarify any of those questions for you?

A whole lot. It's wild to me that, until two weeks ago, I was someone who'd never had fiction published, and now, I'm someone who has. It's kind of like losing your virginity. This change happened in my life, and I have the chance to continue writing fiction. I guess a huge part of the clarity for me has been like, ‘OK, let's go, let's see what else I can do with it. The time is now.’ That's the clarity: There's no time to mess about, get on with it. 

I want to read this quote to you, from when Jerry was in the hospital. He says, ‘You must continue…to love, or all is lost, do not lose it, live for love, live with love, fight for love, welcome love, accept love, embrace love, love in this hell. It's all I can give you Johnny it is everything you have given me’. Can you tell me a bit about centring love as part of the narrative and the mission of this book?

I wanted to see whether I could write with my feet on the floor saying what I want to say without having to preface it, to see whether I could have the characters say what they want to say without embarrassment, without shame—to express themselves clearly and truthfully and say heartfelt things about their feelings. That's also how I want to live. With love and also with queer love, I want them just to say what they say and let that be.

Charlie Porter is a writer, critic, and curator. He is the author of two acclaimed books: What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion. He lives in London. Nova Scotia House is his first novel. @theCharliePorter

Noah T. Britton is a writer from Georgia based in Barcelona, Spain. He is the editor at Apartamento.