Under Self's "Umbrella"

After his introduction at the Harvard Book Store on Wednesday night, author Will Self strolled slowly up to the podium and bent his 6’5’’ frame over to fiddle with the height adjuster knob on the microphone stand. Immediately, a worker at the store came to assist him, but Self waved her off, uttering his first words of the night, “No, no, I’ve got it…. There’s always a problem with the height disparity,” in a caustic, bass-baritone drawl. Once the stand had been adjusted, Self paused momentarily before mumbling, “What am I going to say… I don’t really know.” He teased the audience with this initial verbal clumsiness—his extensive vocabulary and flamboyant articulateness are well-known.

Soon enough he began to discuss his 2012 novel “Umbrella,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the U.K. last year. Self opened with a comparison between the surname of his protagonist, Audrey Death, and his own, suggesting that each carried a certain “resonance” and slowly revealing, through the likening, the autobiographical elements of the Edwardian Death family he presents in “Umbrella.” The measured drama and poeticism of Self’s commentary underscored the intricate thought process that led to “Umbrella,” a complex familial quilt of historical wit and wisdom.

The novel, which is set dually in turn-of-the-century London and a mental hospital some 70 years later, traces Audrey’s contraction of encephalitis lethargica, a brain disease that affected thousands of people in the wake of the Spanish Influenza of 1918. Self was inspired by Oliver Sacks’s “Awakenings,” a memoir of the doctor’s usage of a new drug to rouse a victim from a coma brought on by the illness, which, in lesser cases, often made simple gestures take hours before sudden swings of manic physical activity. The disease compelled Self because of its ability to make the human body appear “machine-like,” which, in his opinion, mimicked the mechanization of society that occurred during the years Audrey lay in her coma.

Yet despite all of the historical and scientific allusions in “Umbrella,” Self spent most of his introduction discussing writing form. He was influenced in writing the book, he said, by high modernism, including authors like George Eliot, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. In “Umbrella,” he said he included many go-to elements of the movement, including use of the continuous present and stream-of-consciousness, to tell Audrey’s story. He made clear that he takes the style with a grain of salt, however, offering several novel augmentations and framings of its devices. In a contemporary example, Self laid out his concept of his proximate authorial relationship to Audrey as similar to floating behind the head “of an avatar in some kind of computer game.”

The scene that he read had a simple plot: In 1903, 14-year-old Audrey and her father, the arrogant garage manager Samuel Death, who also appears to be mixed up in some seedy dealings, walk from Charing Cross station to a book shop. Once there, the elder Death discusses a financial agreement with an Arab bookseller and eventually exiles Audrey to a café. After finishing her repast, she returns to stumble upon an odd and ambiguous sexual scene involving her father and a young woman back at the bookseller. Even with the nebulousness of Samuel Death’s encounters, the scene is still remarkably straightforward: the dialogue is sparse, the walk and Audrey’s meal are both brief, and the sexual encounter is only momentarily alluded to. The structure of the scene is filled in with lush and unconventional lines, such as one describing Audrey’s clutching of a nickel: “Metal discs replaced her knuckles.” His writing forms a full sensory experience of London alongside sudden glimpses into Audrey’s mind.

Self read the passage with theatrical verve, dropping into Cockney accent at a moment’s notice, giving each character a fully-formed and entirely differentiated voice, and never once stumbling over a word or breaking the spell of his oration. One of the first questions after the reading concluded was from an awestruck man who said he had “never heard an author read so well” and asked if Self had undergone formal training. Self responded that he had done several of his own audiobooks and questioned the point of public readings if they weren’t theatrically compelling. This question-and-answer portion of the event offered Self a chance to diverse knowledge. He offered insight on “quixotic American and British foreign policy,” the elasticity of time, and the necessity of opera. When asked about his 1990s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” he asserted that the source was “not well-written,” before backtracking, after a sly pause, and clarifying that, “I’m not suggesting for a minute that I’m a better prose writer than Wilde… I’m asserting it as fact.” Given the richness of Self’s excerpt and the riveting way with which he conveyed his ideas on the spot, his claim may be rooted more in fact than fiction.