Joe Ridgwell is an iconic British beat writer in the small alternative publishing industry who deserves wider recognition. His novels include last days of the cross (2009), The Buddha Bar (2011), Burrito Deluxe (2015) and The Cross (2018). This short essay will examine Ridgwell’s Kings Cross novels, especially how they represent Joe, the first person narrator, and his quest to become a writer.
Joe Ridgwell grew up in public housing in the East End of London in the 1980s and “to get away from all the distractions” he travelled extensively around the globe, partly to find material for his early poetic aspirations. In a 2018 Bold Monkey interview https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2018/05/interview-with-joseph-ridgwell-24-may.html he says of his early attempts at writing:
“Actually I tried to write before I travelled, but my efforts were poor, amateurish. It frustrated me. I travelled to get away from everything, family, friends, lovers. The artist has to go it alone for a number of years if they are to achieve anything. In Mexico I decided to be a beach poet and one sultry evening in Bali, I made a breakthrough. It was like someone turning on a brilliant white light. And yet it wasn’t the end, it was only the beginning of a hard road to travel.”
In the biography to his excellent short story collection Ridgwell Stories (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2015) Ridgwell states that after a drug-induced epiphany on a remote Mexican beach he invented “Cosmic Realism”. In the later BM interview Joe elaborated on the concept:
“I was under the influence of Peyote on a small cove, just south of Puerto Angel. It was a starlight night. In the sky I saw a face. The face told me to believe in the one true spirit. The face looked very wise. Maybe it was a God. Anyway, I had the idea for Cosmic Realism, right there and then. CR is the ability to tell a story that is obviously not based in reality, but which the reader readily accepts as the truth. I didn’t know what it meant then or even how to do it. I also decided to fictionalise my entire life, from cradle to grave. True story novels. But to make them interesting you need to add Cosmic Realism.”
This idea of using one’s life as a source of fiction is, of course, not new. The French refer to it as auto-fiction (“self-fiction”), the narration of one’s life “lifted almost unchanged from the reality, selected and judiciously, artfully told.” The genre has evolved over the decades to the point where the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in My Struggle, has created a six volume autobiographical series of novels, 3,5000 pages in total, in which he shamelessly exposes the private lives of his friends and family, whose real names in his books remain mostly unchanged.
Although Joe Ridgwell, like Knausgaard, are the main protagonists in their novels, Ridgwell is more selective and actually shapes a story out of his experiences. Knausgaard work is comparatively plotless and tends to include all the clutter of his life.
Last Days of the Cross (Grievous Jones Press, Cardiff, 2009) is Ridgwell’s earliest novel and recounts in fictional form the exploits of an English tourist in Australia on a one year working visa in the late 1990s.
Joe is an aspiring poet who sees it as his duty to become “Ridgwell, the Bard of Kings Cross”. Early in the book after drinking a beer from atop the McElhone Stairs he views Sydney and thinks, “Surely this city would inspire me to write something truly great. Surely these streets, these people, these Australian visions would oil my creative juices and enable me to produce the great work I was convinced was within me!”
This self-confidence is contrasted with the nagging self-doubt he expresses immediately afterwards: “I descended the staircase. Worrying and fretting about the immediate future. Had I been deluding myself all along? I mean, who was I to think I could write? Why didn’t I stay at home and go to college and study for something concrete like a career? Why, why, why? Why, because that sounded like hard work and boring hard work, that’s why. Hmmm, there was no way of avoiding it. I was a fake, a charlatan, a daydream believer.”
This pattern of self belief and doubt is repeated throughout this hip Künstlerroman, about Joe’s artist’s coming of age, similar in genre to Knut Hamun’s Hunger (1890), Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939) & Bukowski’s Ham On Rye (1982) to name a few of the more digestible ones. Joe’s inflated enthusiasm to write is only superseded by his initial lack of experience & talent and his paralyzing writer’s block.
Joe’s naïve and idealistic struggle to become an artist is a great source of angst but also of self mocking humour in the novel. Shortly after flying to Sydney he rents a small room in a budget boarding house in Kings Cross and even before he has written a single line he imagines his childhood home in future years being turned into a museum and shrine by the Ridgwell Appreciation Society. He also fantasies that there will be a celebratory guided tours of his old stomping grounds in the Cross: “Ridgwell drank in this bar, sat on that very bar stool – his favourite tipple a schooner of Toohey’s New. Now, it was on this very corner that the legendary working girls of Ridgwell’s eloquent prose plied their dubious trade…”
‘Joe’ soon realizes that it is not enough to get away from all the distractions of back home but he also has to pay his own way to survive. He arrives in Oz with $1500 Aussie in his pocket and urgently needs to find work. The jobs he pursues- selling caramelize nuts on Manly Wharf, shifting bricks on a construction site and working as an attendant at a posh long-term aged facility, add considerable interest, realism and joy in our reading of the book.
The real Ridgwell says of his Australian experience: “The Cross in the late 90’s was an exciting happening inspirational place. The place was alive. It had yet to cleaned up, although the process of killing it was already underway.I came to Oz because they let young British people work there. Being working class I needed to work to survive. There were no William Burroughs trust funds for me. I stayed for five years, living as an illegal immigrant for the last four. The Oz experience was fundamental to my development as a writer as it provided me with a wealth of material. I worked a succession of dead-end jobs, travelled up and down the East Coast, and got to know all the characters of the Cross intimately. Also there’s hardly any literature about the Cross- all I could get my hands on was an anthology of short stories, which wasn’t very good. I mean, Dulcie Deamer - the Queen of Bohemia? Really?”
After a few failed attempts at writing, instead of observing people from the detached position of his room, the novel’s narrator Joe decides to actually enter the Cross to gain some real experience to stroke his creative jisum. He indulges in booze and drugs and falls hopelessly in love with Rosie, an 19 year-old Aboriginal sex worker who he sees as a potential muse, “What a beautiful girl, I thought to my drunken vision she appeared like an angel of the streets- someone sent to save my soul, to inspire my writing, to talk to in the lonely midnight hour.”
In a way, Rosie inspires some of his first poems. After she steals $200 hidden in his socks, Joe gets drunk and flamboyantly cranks out seven poems. Yet his attempt to “immortalize” the characters of the Cross keeps hitting snags because of his self doubt and writer’s block. In a remarkable scene he picks up a prostitute who turns out to be a transsexual. He is sickened and stumbles out onto the street. He wanders into the Kings Cross Hotel, grabs a beer and ruminates on the event:
“What would Bryon have done, or Rimbaud, Verlaine, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Bukowski et al? undoubtedly they would’ve all steamed in, thrown caution to the wind and then wrote about it afterwards. Maybe that was why I was unable to write. Maybe I just didn’t possess the wild and rebellious nature of the true poet.”
Later, Joe lies and is given a job using a Kango drill to remove tiles from a concrete bathroom wall. Seeing himself as “the great poet of his generation” he waves the drill around like a gun and a title for a poem pops into his head- Ode to the Kango drill. He wryly smiles knowing the poetry would have to wait for him to “earn a crust.” The builder gives Joe a job of carrying bricks when he realizes he can’t operate the drill. Joe mockingly stares at a pile of building material and wonders vaguely if he would be able to write a poem about it. He concludes humorously, “There was nothing poetic about the material- it was just a big pile of stuff used to build other stuff.”
While working as a brickie with Trevor, who is in his mid 40s, he wonders whether his life will ever mount to anything: “I knew was that I didn’t want the same type of work when I was his age. I’d rather kill myself…Then I thought about my life. Where was it headed ? Would I ever write any decent poetry, or was I headed down the same road as old Trevor?”
He comes to the realization, tinged with anxiety that he has to go for it, to write poetry while he is young, otherwise, “I’d never get another chance to do it again.”
“Still, I was consumed by anxieties and fear- fear of an uncertain future and a sneaking suspicion that the world I lived in was slowly driving me insane. I didn’t get the way people walked, the way they talked, the way they made love, the way they killed each other and other things- their houses, children, schools, offices, governments, rules, laws- I didn’t get any of it.”
Despite his intense desire to write, little follows and as his plans with Rosie begin to crumble Joe stops writing altogether. Last Days of The Cross is a raw and compelling first novel. It reveals warts and all, Joe’s attempts to be a writer and his ultimate failure.
Joe Ridgwell’s novel THE CROSS was initially published in March 2016 in three installments by Paper and Ink Literary Zine in a limited edition of 50 copies. Earlier versions of some sections originally appeared in his short story collection Oswald’s Apartment & Other Stories (Blackheath Books, 2010), 3AM Magazine, Paper and Ink Literary Zine, Savage Manners and Protest. In 2018 Ternary Editions (New York) published the novel in one volume for the first time and is available here: http://ternaryeditions.com/order.html
In Ridgwell’s THE CROSS (2018) he has a second crack at the cherry. Joe arrives once again for the first time in Sydney after spending three leisurely months in Indonesia and establishes himself in Kings Cross. He has $200 in his pocket and must find work to survive.
This time Joe leaves London to get away from ‘The Family’, mafia-like heavies whom he owes a past ambiguous ‘debt’. In an interesting plotline, they send him Jonathan, a young thug who needs to be exiled in Oz for an unspecified period for a serious but unrevealed crime.
In this reimagining of his Australian adventures, Joe is more street smart, more ready to seize the moment, and his descriptions of sex and drug are more explicit and adventurous.
Instead of emphasizing his struggle to become an artist in THE CROSS this aspect is marginalized and merely bookended in this novel.
Shortly after moving into the St Elmo apartment in the heart of the Cross he applies for a job as an orderly at a private hospital and reflects on his literary output to date:
“I pulled a battered notebook that had accompanied me on my recent travels. Nine poems were written inside. I re-read them for about the hundredth time. They were good, powerful, approaching close to what I wanted to get down, but there were so few. The writer’s block was puzzling, but not alarming. I was still young; there was plenty of time to write, years in fact. From here on in I’d concentrate on the living, live first write later being my new motto.”
Towards the end of the novel after forcing himself on a Dutch backpacker during an end of Millennium fireworks celebration, the following morning outside the Sydney Opera House at dawn, Joe experiences an epiphany related to his new task in life:
“I would never return to the UK. Instead I would wander Australia, from one place to another for a period of five years like the hero of a Henry Lawson story. I would become an observer of the Australian people and landscapes- city, bush, and outback. Then, when my wanderings were over, I would write my opus. A two thousand page tome about the lucky country, simply entitled, Australia, A Journey.”
THE CROSS certainly focuses more on living a full and real existence rather than vicariously through the abstraction of writing. In contrast to last days of the cross, instead of interminably wallowing in anxiety, self doubt and on his failures to produce art, Joe simply seizes the moment. As he ironically tells his flat mate Estelle early in the novel, “Life is short and I was meant for the high life, and by the looks of it so were you.”
A major focus in last days of the cross was on Joe’s misguided focus on Rosie, “the love of his life.” In THE CROSS Rosie takes the form of Bianca, a 14 year old junkie. She is only mentioned a few times in the novel and is quickly discarded. Overall, the novel demonstrates a wider range of emotions, provides a greater variety of incidents and is very skillful in the ease and credibility of its narration.
In the last chapter ‘Aftermath’ Joe wakes in the morning beersick after the riot in the Square and when his mate Schooner tells him he is flying out of Australia soon, Joe makes the profound realisation:
“Alone now, I stood there in Barncleuth Square not knowing what to do. And yet I did know what to do. I would return to the Cross, it was my destiny and if I couldn’t write a book about the place, I could at least write some poetry. I’d write about all the people I’d met and all the things that had happened. That’s what I’d do. I’d return to the UK, get my shit together, and head on back.”
It took Ridgwell many years to get his shit together but last days of the cross (2009) and THE CROSS (2018) are a testament to his resilience as an artist.
He told me today:
"I wrote Last Days very fast, in a little over two weeks, and then spent a couple of years editing. It was a homage to John Fante's Ask the Dust, which you correctly identified as an influence. An Australian homage for sure, but Ask the Dustis the biggest influence on that particular novel. Also it was my first attempt at a novel, actually there was one before it, but a first attempt and best forgotten. As I wrote more novels and my writing skills improved, I realised there was tonnes of material about Kings Cross, that I'd yet to write about. There were some published short stories and poetry, but little else. So, I knew there was enough material for another novel. And in real life I had left Australia and returned on two separate occasions, so once again the narrative was based on real life events."
Ridgwell also offers a useful parting tip on BM:
“A tip I’d give to aspiring writers is to write about what you know. It’s a cliche but the budding author should start there. That’s what I did. I wrote about what was happening in my life. As my writing skills improved I began adding elements of pure fiction. Once you possess the skills set you can move further afield. But be careful, keep it real, for if the reader thinks you are just making it all up, you will lose them. There are a good deal of writers out there writing about shit that they have no first hand knowledge of. I call them literary voyeurs. They are a corrosive influence on our literary heritage and I urge them to desist.”
Resources
Read a review of last days of the cross‘stations of the cross’ by Darran Anderson (3:AM Magazine): https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/stations-of-the-cross/
Essential Reading:
Burrito Deluxe is the best produced of Ridgwell’s early novels I have gotten a hold of. Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow, it has a beautifully rich, smooth feel. The front cover is a reproduction of an intricate Jose Arroyo work carving.
Burrito Deluxe can be purchased through Leamington Books, Edinburgh here: https://leamingtonbooks.com/books/burrito-deluxe
The Buddha Baris an amazing tale of the narrator Joe’s attempt to set up a bar in Thailand: https://www.amazon.com.au/Buddha-Bar-Joseph-Ridgwell/dp/1937073734
