Oilmen

So delighted to have made contact with the Iranian artists Amin Roshan  and Babak Kazemi through the blog this week – check out their websites to see some fabulous contemporary Iranian artwork relating to oil (and other things of course), and if you have any photographs of Khuzestan, old oil wells or the Bakhtiari knocking around they’d be very glad to see them!

Derrida, Foucault, Derrida again… This term I am, once again, the taught rather than the teacher. It’s great. UEA’s interdisciplinary seminar started its third series today, and I’m already hooked. As someone who uses a great deal of archival material (BP, The National Archives, The British Library), it’s about time I re-acquainted myself with what it means to go “into” an archive – literally or metaphorically. I’m mostly about the literal: the bundles of paper tied up with decaying pieces of tape, the indescipherable handwriting, and being told off by security staff at The National Archive for having too many boxes on my table. Archives can be boring and they eat your time, but they are also at the heart of every culture in the world. They are the stories we tell about ourselves, and what we become.

Today the seminar leader, Ferdinand de Jong, raised a number of questions that have lain dormant in my own mind. Crucially, amongst many, there is the issue of who decides what is archived – bureaucrats, archivists, curators – and why. Derrida calls those who make such decisions Archons, and they are the ones who create a meaningful framework for archive documents. As a writer, obviously I am also placing an interpretation on documents which have alreday been organised in a certain way by at least one, but more usually a chain, of people before me. I used to be very nervous about this, and thought what I was doing in terms of “imposing” a meaning, but we all do that to everything we see and do every day. It’s why people tell stories in the first place. It’s how we live.

My work is partly a reaction to stories that have been told about Arnold Wilson and Morris Young in the past. I have re-entered the same archive as the writers of ‘Adventure in Oil’ and ‘The Oil Hunters’ (those titles are enough to give youan idea of the kinds of stories they tell) to look for – what? Is it enough to say that I am looking for something different, too much to claim that I am ‘rescuing’ my subjects from misinterpretation? To say I am simply offering an alternative interpretation is insipid. It is also awkward, in a biography, to be constantly self-reflexive. I have tried that ‘this could mean’, ‘the possiblility remains’ kind of writing that keeps reminding a reader that I am looking at documents and forging connections between them, but it is ultimately unsatisfying. And not in a ‘leaves you wanting more’ way, more in a ‘leaves you a bit flat’ way. In the end I must abide by the scribbles I put on my students’ essays: ‘it’s your work, I know it’s your opinion’.

But there are those Archons who would claim a higher authority for their truths, who organise and collect in an attempt pursuade and subdue. Derrida also talks about the death-drive of archiving, the idea that by putting something in a box you petrify it. You turn it from a living subject into a dusty object that can’t answer back. Which is why, I suppose, it’s important to keep opening the boxes. They might have something new to say.

This evening I went looking for Dr Young,  knowing full well that I could not find him. Whilst most biographers I know swear by “footstepping” – visiting the places your quarry lived, worked or loved – it’s never done much for me, either in practice or principle. Pragmatically speaking, for most of Oilmen it hasn’t been an option. Khuzestan is located on the border with Iraq, and is not the sort of place to go wandering with a camera and a notebook just now (happily, the same reservations do not apply to Glasgow). And as far as principle is concerned, I find biographical empathy a very sticky subject indeed. Often it says more about the writer than the writee who will always be, in the end, unknowable. You cannot own a person, or even the afterburn of him or her (Julian Barnes writes about this – so does Lyn Barber). It was for this reason that I was bewildered when, in 2008, a huge Max Sebald conference held at the UEA devoted the whole of Sunday morning to a coach trip to Southwold and a group visit to the great man’s grave. I declined to participate, uncomfortable about what appeared to be a hagiographic exercise in sentimentality in the middle of an academic event. I did not want to stare at headstone of someone I had never met, in the company of others whom I had met no more than two days ago.

I am under no illusions about Young either. I have never felt the affinity with him some writers imagine with their characters. I do not believe that there is some kind of soulmate system for biographers and their subjects, no more than I can convince myself that the Glasgow I am finding my way around via GPS for HTC Sense is Morris Young’s city. I cannot stand in a room he may have stood in and feel for his presence. He is not here any more.  Still, it was a nice evening for a walk so, after a day in the Glasgow University archive I set off at sunset for 38 Hill Street; home to one Moses Youdelevitz for the academic year 1904-5.  The twenty-four year-old medical student was staying there with an individual, or perhaps a family, named Rubenstein. The famous Garnethill Synagogue, founded in 1879, was just down the road. The following year Moses would change his name to Morris, and graduated as Morris Y Young in 1906.

Hill Street is aptly named, turning off from the sharp incline of Garnethill.  From its summit you can peep down through narrow streets to the city below. As well as the synagogue Hill Street boasts St Aloysius’ College, a dominating Jesuit School dating from the mid nineteenth century, and in 1904 the Glasgow School of Art were spending their fifth year in the newly opened Rennie Mackintosh building on the next street down. As I searched for number 38 in the last of the light, someone was playing a clarinet nearby. But Morris Y Young, always discreet, did not disappoint. 38 Hill Steet appears to have become a children’s park, and all I could see of the synagogue was the glass dome that rose above the locked gates. The past is never quite where you left it.