I have been furtively googling Will Self over the last month. And those who should know Will Self, will know why so!
And I have been recollecting how far we go back.
Will Self and I do go back a long way or, rather, as I must clarify, it is I who go back a long way with him, rather than making him indulge in caring to acknowledge how far back he goes back with me.
Chances are that he would obviously understand what I mean. But before all that, I must say that, to me, Will Self is the last white man walking.
Coming back to my association with Will Self (the man who named himself thus, from William Woodard Self, and the man who continues to speak so fondly of his mother), there is not a single sesquipedalian word in this rambling vignette, thus far, so I had better just drop that in.
Having been an inveterate reader of his prose, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Psychogeography, Phone (of which he personally offered me a copy in exchange of my first book on the Indian Railways, in which he seemed to find the most unpretentious alacrity, for such is the man behind the persona!), and given his non-full-stop-oriented sentences, and his endless paragraphs, and his remorseless experiments with the English prose … he is someone I have known for the longest time to be ever faithful to English prose without tampering with it, and trying to dumb it down for the sake of media attention.
The inspiration behind the title of this much-belated retrospection comes from something that Self mentioned to me, among a few of his disciples, a few years ago; of a press byte that he had cursorily flicked, perhaps even “glibly,” as many misled aspirants generally think of him to be! For he had said, to a relatively curious but uninformed intern at a press organization, that he was one of the last “dead white men walking.” What he meant was, obviously, quite ironic. Will Self is one of the warmest spirits that treads over London today, and yet he is of a generation and a typology that is seen as almost redundant in that little sphere of the twenty-first century that likes doomscrolling itself into a massive artificially-inseminated ennui that it then labels as gainful occupation.
Will Self’s prose has been one of the greatest inspirations for me, after G. K. Chesterton, after Oscar Wilde, after the poetry, or the wry and cocooning wit of Emily Dickinson’s. I’m sure Will Self would like to add more contemporary and more stylized names to that list. He would probably refer to J.G. Ballard, to Peter Ackroyd (whose London sits brightest in my shelf and reminds me of the author of The Quantity Theory of Morality, instead), and to several others, including George Orwell, himself, whom Will Self is noted to dislike quite a bit; although it is not Orwell that Self dislikes, but the hallucinatory devotees of Orwell, particularly of his misquoted ideas from “Politics and the English Language.”
I do not mean for these words to be about me, but rather about Self. And it is with that intention that I must still add that the last time I saw Will Self, it was on a historic walk, as all my walks with him have been, both mental and real, or should I say both psychogeographical and geographical. It was a walk from near Covent Garden, across Tower Bridge, across the Thames, over a bridge that bears my name (as he pointed out to me with his intoxicating humor). And he told me that the next time I visited him, we would walk from Central London to the Horniman’s Museum (where I was helping curate an exhibition, a few years ago).
But so far that walk has not materialised. And a few months ago, I woke up with a lump in my throat, fearing the worst, fearing that that walk would never, ever materialise. To my utter relief, however, I have since then found his writings populate my Google notifications, and most recently seen him appear on a podcast quite suggestively titled The Rosebud Podcast, which brings back memories instantly of Citizen Kane, among other things. Incidentally, Citizen Kane was the first film that I attempted a rather—you know, Jeeves, it’s one of those whatsits—serpentine essay on, with the sort of archaisms that feign to have been inspired from Will Self’s sentences. He might forgive me, if he saw it, for it was almost eighteen years ago. But why blame Self for that, when I can more easily cite him for instilling in me a most delightful fancy for pschogeography!
And, there’s something even better to talk about, than that, such as Self’s own resilience despite all odds! Among the kinds of resistances that have been put before him, there have been personal, social, political, and now biological barriers …
Yet, having braved these gigantic footprints of our dratted civilization, Will Self has only walked on boots that keep on growing, the more someone tries to steal one from his pair and feed it to some phosphorescent make-believe hound! He has beaten one cancerous society after another, at its own game, and he has continued doing what he does best. His humility is so authentic that it strikes the worst of our society as being arrogant. His talents and knowledge are so deeply unplagiarized that they strike the charlatans as uninteresting. And his unorthodoxy is so edifying that it obviously drills fear in the hearts of all those who have helped build this Orwellian dystopia that the Self, that I know, sees through immaculately.
Will Self knows, and the readers of my book Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India, would also know, that the latter began with an epigraph, which was a poem dedicated to Will Self. It was a poem that alluded to one of Self’s expressions of how he was an ephemeral shadow of the great ephemeral buildings and beings that had shadowed London for centuries. The sentence continued to live with me into my next book, which was a meditation on a geological structure, located in the middle of an ocean, that is believed by Indians to have been built by a God.
I have been walking for many years with Will Self. Not literally, not indeed, so! But in most other ways that make walking worthwhile, at all! I do not mean to suggest that we are going to literally walk from Covent Garden to the Horniman’s Museum, someday. I am not trying to suggest that I am, or any of us is, an able companion to walk with him, to keep pace with his languorous sobriety; his insatiable inquistiveness towards life. All I merely mean to suggest is that it is an utter expression of my own feeling of being alive in being able to once again hear his lugubrious baritone and to hear it, once again, speak in that idiom that mirrors a society that does not want to see itself mirrored in its paranoid anticipation of the shallowness of its colours. Meanwhile, I have heard the ripples of the Thames sing, each to each, and they are still busy reflecting the tall, lanky visage, of the Briton that the Americans respectfully call, Mr. Self.
Arup K. Chatterjee 