Geoff Dyer: On not having a career

Abstract

Geoff DyerOn not having a career James Surowiecki and Geoff Dyer (bio) Over the past thirty-five years, Geoff Dyer has written an extraordinary number of books and essays on a dizzying array of topics, including D. H. Lawrence, jazz, photography, the Battle of the Somme, the Soviet film Stalker, and life aboard an American aircraft carrier. In all of his work, Dyer integrates personal experience with critical analysis, constructing a distinctive authorial voice that is casual, yet commanding. One is drawn to Dyer's books not necessarily because of what he is writing about, but because his relentless curiosity and inquisitive mind can turn any subject into an occasion for perceptive, stylish, and often very funny prose. [End Page 148] Dyer's most recent book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, is no exception, as he weaves together reflections on Federer, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Burning Man, John Coltrane, and much else into a clever and illuminating meditation on last works and on endings more generally. In October, Dyer and I corresponded about his writing, and why it is a mistake to say he has had a career. —james surowiecki james surowiecki Near the end of The Last Days of Roger Federer, you write that the theme running through your all work is "giving up." The book that brought you to real attention in the United States was Out of Sheer Rage, which is about procrastination and indolence and about not writing the critical study of D. H. Lawrence you were trying to write. You once said, "As soon as I get fed up, bored, tired, or weary of anything, I abandon it. Books, films, writing assignments, relationships—I just give up on them." Yet over the course of your life you've finished a dizzying array of projects and written a tremendous amount. The Last Days is your nineteenth book. How should we make sense of this? Is the obsession with giving up a kind of pose? Or is it something you think about doing but usually don't? geoff dyer I have no doubt that the desire to give up and quit has been the fuel that's not just kept me going but also somehow obliged me to keep slogging away. The two go hand-in-hand in various ways, most obviously in my not having the patience to do a lot of the donkey work of conveying facts and information in my nonfiction. By keeping that to a minimum—by not including what readers can get in other books on a given subject—I free myself to do the stuff that I enjoy, the stuff that, to paraphrase Walker Evans, only I can do, the stuff that makes a book uniquely mine. Many nonfiction books could be written by anybody possessed of a certain level of expertise about a given topic. [End Page 149] js Do you abandon things less often than you did when you were younger? gd Only because I start fewer and fewer things. I've actually completed a very high percentage of the books that I wanted to write. The only conspicuous failure was a book on tennis that I was supposed to write; I ended up writing the book on director Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker instead. Other than that, I abandoned a few essays—one on The Clock by Christian Marclay for Harper's—and a small number of other pieces. I've actually always had a highly developed sense of self-discipline and obligation. js Can you say something about how you write? In The Last Days, for instance, you talk about the difficulty you had getting the book started and the difficulty of finishing it. How do you finally get started on a project? And more generally, when you're working on a book, are you writing all the time, or do you procrastinate and then write it all in one rush? gd As you get older you come to dread starting a book because you know all the effort that will be involved. So I find it more and more difficult to get started. One thing to emphasize is that I don't do book proposals...