Going Dutch with German Writers (11): A horse named Stickado

Who?

Clemens Meyer is a Leipzig writer. He’s written four books: the novel Als wir träumten, the short story collection Die Nacht, die Lichter, the diary-format collection Gewalten and now another amazing novel, Im Stein, which is shortlisted for the German Book Prize. I’m a big fan of his and we’ve known each other for some time, travelling in the UK together to promote my translation of his second book, which we called All the Lights (because the literal translation would have rhymed).

Where?

Restauration Tucholsky, Bötzow Privat, Berlin-Mitte

What?

Buletten and beer in Tucholsky (Clemens had Aquavit afterwards), whisky at the Bötzow (I switched to beer in between)

What did we talk about?

This time it wasn’t hard to get chatting. Clemens is hard to stop once he gets started, and he starts by telling me he’s been to the restaurant before, with a film producer. Because Als wir träumten is being made into a film, which is exciting. We talk about the election the past weekend. He says he was in Frankfurt on his reading tour but went back to Leipzig to vote and found they’d cut his electricity off. Right now he’s in the money though so he paid the bill. He tells me which party he voted for but the whole of Saxony votes CDU so it wasn’t much use. He wants a political party that doesn’t tax writers and artists, because writers and artists have such unstable incomes. This year he’s doing very well but next year, who knows. Ireland doesn’t tax writers at all for some kinds of income, he tells me, and then he tells me a couple of German writers who’ve been tax exiles in Ireland in the past. This is new to me.

We talk about blogging. Clemens used to write a blog for the FAZ but he wasn’t very good at it. He was very enthusiastic to begin with and wrote pages and pages, but then he found he was cannibalizing his ideas and couldn’t write other things, and it drifted into nothingness and they stopped paying him. He didn’t get many comments and he didn’t respond to the comments he got, except that he registered himself under another name and wrote his own comments. He wasn’t sure why they wanted him to write a blog anyway, for a newspaper website, when a column would do. Now the papers seem to have abandoned the blog idea altogether and he writes a column for Die Zeit, which I’ve never seen because it’s only in the East German edition and he doesn’t think you can get that in Berlin. I ask does he feel like an East German and he says no, well yes, and I say, but you were only a kid in the East. And he says he was thirteen at reunification and that was the end of his childhood. Clemens is fond of dramatic statements, but he relativizes it and adds that it would have been anyway, it was puberty. But yes, he spent his formative years in the GDR and his parents and grandparents most of their lives.

Our Buletten are not bad (later we critique them) but we both add mustard. Clemens is drinking Berliner Pilsener, which I don’t like, and I have Radeberger, which he doesn’t like. At this point I’m drinking faster than him, which worries me slightly because Clemens Meyer is not known for being a modest drinker. But he’s had a cold, he tells me, and it’s really tough being on a reading tour with a cold. He had a nosebleed on stage last week. I wonder what on earth people thought, given his reputation. He did a reading with the other writers shortlisted for the German Book Prize and he could hardly speak. But he met Reinhard Jirgl, who he thinks is great. I’m not sure I could read an entire Jirgl novel all the way through, and Clemens says well, he hasn’t quite managed that either but it’s still amazing writing. We talk about how difficult it would be to translate Jirgl because of his crazy orthography. Clemens can’t tell what the rules are but he’s sure Jirgl knows them. Amazing guy, incredibly intelligent, and he just does his thing and doesn’t sell many books and that’s fine.

I’m not sure how, but we start talking about music. He and his friend Uwe do a DJ show occasionally – only in private – and it’s anti-disco. They make stupid jokes and announcements before every song, he says – and he does an impression of himself with a very strong Saxon accent – and then he does a couple of three-minute readings in between. They start with Heino and Schlager (I cringe) but nobody dances to that so they play classic stuff like Michael Jackson and Elvis. He says he’ll invite me along if they ever do it in Berlin. His dad writes songs for fun, he says. Clemens sings one about men digging for gold in the Sierra Nevada and I deliberately avoid looking at the people at the next tables. I refrain from singing one of the songs my dad writes for fun but we agree it’s a coincidence. We talk about my trombone-playing uncle too, and Clemens says he plays the trumpet himself. He used to play in the church choir but now he only plays when he gets home at night, like Sherlock Holmes with his violin. He does an impression of himself playing the trumpet. He likes free jazz but he’d have to practice a few weeks before he could manage that. I get another impression of Clemens Meyer playing free jazz on the trumpet. 

We talk about the research for Im Stein. How did he find out about the Hell’s Angels, for example? He reads the press very carefully, apparently, including biker magazines and blogs and all sorts of obscure publications. And of course it’s fiction so he made a lot of it up. He certainly never had an interview with a Hell’s Angel like the one in the novel, good God, no. Plus they’re called Engel GmbH in the book. I start worrying about the people at the next tables. Clemens likes the place, he says, because it’s not full of tourists like other bars round here. I’m not sure about that; they’re speaking English on one side of us and Swiss German on the other, but Clemens doesn’t have very good hearing so maybe he hasn’t noticed. He always talks very loudly indeed and I’m used to that now, but still; the tables are very close together. I suggest we go elsewhere and we move on to the former Bötzow-Stuben just along the road. On the way we pass the Tucholsky Buchhandlung and admire Clemens’s book through the window. It’s a tiny bit embarrassing because the bookseller is still there and hears us talking. There is some slagging-off of other books on display, but we both approve of Terézia Mora.

A loud voice is a good thing

© Privat

At Bötzow Privat they have a good choice of single malts. We sit at the bar and I go for Talisker and Clemens has something unpronounceable starting with ‘La…’ from the isle of Islay. Very peaty, he says, just what he likes. But his friend who’s a vet likes Talisker too, so he approves of my choice. He’s the vet who put his dog down when he was old and sick, and he did a very good job, he says. He seems very fond of him; his name comes up every time we talk about Leipzig. He likes coming to Berlin though because Leipzig is so small with only one real centre, and people keep coming up and talking to him to him in the street. If you have a bar you go to regularly, everyone knows where to find you. They only have one newspaper and they keep putting his picture in it, which doesn’t help matters. I try to look sympathetic but luckily it’s fairly dark. Not everyone in Leipzig likes his new book; it’s more difficult to read than Als wir träumten and it’s not really about Leipzig. But he says he wants to write books he wants to read, not books other people want to read. That makes sense to me.

We get a little nostalgic over the whisky. Clemens says he must have drunk forty bottles in the end phase of writing Im Stein. Actually it’s sort of thanks to Clemens that I learned to appreciate good whisky, in Edinburgh. And Clemens had to check on his horse that same day, which was racing somewhere or other. Poor old Proust (he didn’t choose the name), he wasn’t a very good racehorse and he’s dead now. He broke his leg. Now he’s got a new horse, and he tells me the horse’s name and I can’t remember it now but I do remember I thought it was Stickado, like the salami, which I found very amusing, if a little tactless. We talk about the Als wir träumten film; they’ve done the casting now but it’s going to be Andreas Dresen’s most expensive film ever, four million euro. Four million euro doesn’t sound much to me but apparently it is, for a German film. Because of all the actors, children and adults, and the props and costumes and locations. They were going to film it in black and white but they decided against it. What a shame, I say, and do you know that film Rumblefish? Clemens does – Coppola, gangs – and I’m quite impressed at myself for coming up with the comparison. But they’re using some kind of special colour filter instead and Clemens is going to have a cameo role, if he manages it. I hope the very nice bar staff are listening in at this moment. It feels very good indeed to be drinking whisky with my friend Clemens Meyer, who’s going to have a cameo role in the film adaptation of his novel. There are moments when his loud voice is a good thing.

At some point towards midnight a man comes dashing in and asks if the kitchen’s still open. Clemens laughs and tells him to go and get a kebab, but the very nice bar woman says he should go to Ständige Vertretung and explains you always need one place that serves proper food late at night for tired bar staff to go after work. The place near the theatre, I ask, and she’s not sure there’s a theatre there and I try not to hold it against her because I’m too drunk to remember the name of the theatre. Later she takes our picture with my crappy phone, because Clemens’s phone is even crappier than mine. His hair’s very short right now, isn’t it? That’s because he fell asleep at the hairdresser’s.

We talk a bit more about Im Stein. I say I thought the main character’s son was gay and Clemens is surprised. Maybe he is! Yes, that military academy, that thing his dad says at the end… he hadn’t realized but maybe he is actually gay. Maybe he should have added a whole new strand… and maybe the character could have had a daughter too and she could have… I like the way he’s relaxed about me reinterpreting his novel for him. Somehow, we also end up talking about Benedict Cumberbatch (Clemens says “Cumberbitch” the first time) and that other one, Martin Something, who’s great and was in the Hobbit film too, which I didn’t watch, and whether Sherlock Holmes is gay or not, which we agree is brilliantly treated in the series, and whether Hercules Poirot is gay. I say he definitely is because of all that crème de menthe. But back to Arthur Conan-Doyle. Apparently he was still writing in 1915, and I’m amazed because that means he and Kafka were contemporaries, or at least overlapped, and they have nothing in common. Ah, says Clemens, but there’s the deduction thing in Sherlock Holmes and if you compare that to the machine in “In der Strafkolonie” then it’s like thesis and antithesis, with the machine hammering the man’s crime into him. So they are alike. I can’t quite follow his argument, or indeed render it here, but I agree that they were thesis and antithesis because Conan-Doyle was all about people understanding, applying logic, and Kafka didn’t seem to want his readers to understand what happened in his stories; his was an anti-logic. Like those horses sticking their heads through the window in “Ein Landarzt” – what on earth is that about? And then we talk about James Joyce as well but I’ve only read Dubliners, which we both love for its dirty little stories, and I think maybe we drink to dirty little stories, or maybe we don’t and we just say “dirty little stories” a few times for emphasis.

We pay the bill, which is complicated because Clemens has drunk more than me but I say what goes around comes around. He wants to place some bets on the computer when he gets back because he’s going to the races in Paris on the 4th of October. He’s looking forward to that more than the book prize ceremony, he says. He’s made a plan in case he wins the big prize – he tells me what he wants to say on stage but I’m not sure he really will say it, if he does win. And he does want to win it but it’s not important, it doesn’t make his book any better or worse. He wouldn’t mind if Jirgl or Mora won either. But he was genuinely pleased to get the Leipzig book fair prize, wasn’t he? Yes, but that was different, that was in his home town. I can’t quite work out what would be different about that but I keep it to myself. I think I try to prepare him mentally for not winning, even though I really want him to win because it would be good for foreign rights sales and I really want to translate this book. How many are on the jury? Is it seven people for six books? Then that only means two out of seven people liked your book better than the others. Or didn’t, rather. We’ve skirted the issue all evening but sometimes he seems to think he will win and sometimes he doesn’t. I suppose it’s preying on both our minds. There are worse problems.

We might be the last people in the bar by now, or maybe we aren’t. I think we aren’t actually, but we leave anyway. Clemens needs pointing in the right direction, which makes me laugh. And I walk home and cross at a red light in front of a policeman.

Hangover?

Amazingly, no. Either that or it’s taking ages to kick in.