[900 words]

Over the last few weeks in Madrid, I’ve fallen into a heartwarming and tri-generational triumvirate.

The group consists of three poets: 

• Mickey McC
  A 22-year-old Humanities undergraduate who upped sticks from rural Pennsylvania to do a degree in a country he’d never been to, and in a language he’d only just started learning
• Alan E Smith
  A 72-year-old professor emeritus of Spanish literature
• and Me
  The Malcolm-in-the-middle at 34. Supposedly here to represent the human in his prime, standing proudly on his two feet – but currently to be found nibbling weeds in the no man’s land between academic pastures, and still without a great work to his name.

We’ve met up in the miraculously untouched 1920s Jeréz-style sherry-bar ‘La Venencia’, where the waiters don’t take tips and the prices per glass range from 2 euro to 2-fifty; in the terraces of the same Plaza del Angel which had been graced by the wild, all-night parties of the sibylline, charmed, charming, half-saint and Empress-to-be Eugenia de Montijo almost two centuries before; in the Café Gijón, last-standing of Madrid’s Grand Cafés, watering hole of literary luminaries and political powerhouses; under the arches of the Plaza Mayor and in the corner bars of La Latina. 

We recited Wang Chi, Tao Qian, Geoffrey Hill, Hart Crane, William Empson, Shakespeare, Vallejo, de Vega, both Ortega and Gasset, the brilliantly truncated verses of Baroque anonyms, and ourselves.

Among the many interesting storylines which emerged from these encounters, I will, selfishly, isolate the one I found most helpful here. 

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At La Venencia, I showed them my most recently completed poem. 

Alan responded thus.

I enjoyed the poem thoroughly. It totally took me in: it demanded my identification. The poem’s ‘I’ is vulnerable and tender – and I’ve been to every one of the places they describe. It made me feel a hell of a lot less alone.

Another day – in the aptly, if unimaginatively, named “Cervecería Restaurante Plaza Mayor” – I read to them from my first novel.

Alan responded thus.

This is more orphaned than any myth I’ve ever heard. It’s like a comet suspended in actual emptiness. A comet is already pretty homeless as it is; but imagine it without even the space it travels through. That’s the impression your work – not just this piece, all of it – leaves in me. I don’t know either when or where you are, man.

Unsurprising irony of ironies, and undiminished delight of delights, that delving so deeply into my aloneness should eventuate the cause for me to feel so wholly seen. 

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Last night, Mickey McC was back in Philly, and so Alan and I met as a duo, at the Cervecería Alemana; on the corner between the thespians of the Spanish Theatre and the scholars of Madrid’s “Athenium”, it has been the preferred drinking place of both for a hundred years. 

We talked mainly, of course, of women. Rather than bawdy, it was direct – but the overarching sentiment was still melancholic. That conversation having run its course, we tilted naturally towards the contemplation of sin. We started with the ignobility of misogyny, which led on to the question of hatred. This topic is the only hobbyhorse I’ve seen Alan evidence. It was the third time he had pronounced upon it – and as before, he explained that the reason he dwelt on it was as a reaction to a conversation already a year gone.

From there he turned to laziness and boredom; two more nigglingly troublesome foes in honest point of fact. He said he had been winning his fight against them in this life. 

This offered me the opportunity to bring forward the question I had arrived wanting to ask: what of ambition?

I told him that my friend Julieta – who has recently become so dear to me – asked me about it the night before. 

“Does it matter to you, how famous you become as a writer?” she inquired out of genuine curiosity. “How famous do you want to be?”

I had come to Alan seeking absolution, but he responded instantly and much more forcefully than I could have hoped.  

“Surely the answer is obvious! As famous as possible!”

“But isn’t that a dangerous level of ambition, Alan?”

But it’s not ambition at all! It’s the imagination of a very joyful horizon. Ambition is something detestable. What you want to do is an invocation. Calling out to something that is already there. It is not violence, but a voyage. And that voyage is a joyous one.

Ambition is grubby-handed grasping. It means shoving someone else from behind to take their place oneself. It is inherently related to power.

“But isn’t this related to power as well? To manipulate language, and thus the thought and emotions of another? To set, and raise, oneself apart?”

No. You’re not playing gatekeeper or highwayman for anybody. Look, David. The key is that it’s not ‘consequential’, but simultaneous. You don’t seek to become a famous writer so that, as a consequence, you wield power over others. Conception, composition, and reception are all just three instances spread out in time of one act of atemporal summoning. Your being read and celebrated are the echoes of the single note you are already sounding. You are already there. And if you are there, then you are there.

So I put a pause on my current novel at the count of 80,000 words, and return to Oxford to teach Creative Writing for a couple of months with some sense of satisfaction and self-respect.