Soul Bay Press - Howard Cunnell interview

Howard Cunnell Interview in Total Tattoo

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Copyright: Ashley, May, 2008. Reproduced with kind permission www.totaltattoo.co.uk

Ash. So Howard, where did all of this start?

Howard. I remember my mum giving me one of those old Ladybird books with writing on one page, pictures on the other. This was before I could read. I got a piece of tracing paper and traced the writing rather than the pictures as I was fascinated by the arrangement of the words on the page even though I didn’t know what they meant. My mum always encouraged me to read and to write, she had a lot of books. She was the person who encouraged me to read. From very early on, writing was what I wanted to do.

Ash. Tell us something about your childhood.

Howard. I grew up in Eastbourne, East Sussex during the late 60’s and 70’s with my mum. I had an older brother. There was no dad on the scene. Most people think of Eastbourne as being somewhere full of old people waiting to die, Howard Cunnell

but because its by the sea, the wonderful thing about Eastbourne is that it has the beach, so in the summer it was a place of real freedom, self-transformation, sexual experimentation and hedonism and that whole culture of being on a beach, which is a unique, marginal, magical environment and that love of beach life and water is something that has stayed with me ever since and that theme is something that has been explored in my writing, particularly, Marine Boy. I grew up in a culture of teenage tribes. It was the time of punk, rockabilly, skin heads – you could get into ﬁghts because of the music you listened to and the clothes you wore – now people are getting stabbed and what have you for straying into the 'wrong' neighbourhood. I got caught up in some of those conﬂicts, partly because I hero worshiped my brother, who was a skinhead, and very tough, very glamorous, and I always wanted to be like him, but was, in fact, nothing like him at all. So I did get caught up in conﬂict but not to the extent that Kim does in the novel, but there were certainly elements of me wanting to be like my brother, wanting to be tough and getting into trouble because of that. At the age of thirteen or fourteen being seen as a tough kid, a rebel, an outsider, seemed appealing and in some ways it still does. At the same time I had another group of friends, who are still friends, who weren’t seduced by the whole tough boy image, they were into more creative things, they were into writing, making music, and these were the boys who saved my life, they turned me on to writers, many of whom I still love now - Kerouac and Burroughs of course– this gave me a context in which to be creative – before the idea of being a writer seemed as remote as going to the moon. It was from my friends that I came to realise that writing was something I could do and that probably saved me.

Ash. How did the fact that you grew up without a father impact on your life?

Howard. In many ways I’m still trying to work that out, but I certainly think that I overcompensated in many ways. There was an absence that added to my sense of otherness, a permanent sense of being different.

Ash. Did you in some ways like the sense of otherness to which you refer?

Howard. That’s a really good question. I think that what happened was that when I was on my own, wanting to be creative but having no peers to share that with, things were difﬁcult, but when I met the boys I spoke of – suddenly I wasn’t on my own and was different for a good reason - I was different because I was part of this creative group who had somehow escaped the destructive behaviour that so many young boys, including myself, fall into, because going out there, getting into ﬁghts, being tougher than everyone else, is almost what is expected of us. So there was that conﬂict, I was absolutely split between wanting to be a tough kid and wanting to have nothing to do with that at all, wanting to explore this world of creativity, experimentation and daring, because looking back it was the creative ones who were brave, daring to dress differently, listen to different music and think about new ideas. The tough boys who were ﬁghting all the time were not so open to the possibilities of life - being violent and destructive was the only way to express how they felt about themselves.

Ash. Do you consider yourself to be damaged?

Howard. I think it would be unfair for me to say that because of the way I’ve been brought up. My mum was, and is, a wonderful presence in my life. Retrospectively, in my everyday life, no I wasn’t damaged by the absence of my father but psychologically, for one reason or another, it's something that grew to obsess me. I had a profound sense of otherness, and I tended to focus on my father's absence as the reason why. It wasn't the reason, but back then I used to think about trying to ﬁnd him, I used to wonder if I had half brothers or sisters and I used to think that maybe he had gone away because of me, that it was my fault.

Ash. So you carried a lot of guilt?

Howard. Yes. In the wider scheme, these things are not momentous but they can feel so to the individual at the time. Principally I felt, and still feel to an extent - destabilised in the world I lived in – except in the summer months when everything made sense. I was someone who wanted to be a writer and someone who felt this profound sense of something missing, and also someone whose sensibility didn't chime with mainstream culture - people seem be chasing things that don’t really matter. The writer Jim Harrison said that the problem with civilisation is that you can piss your life away on things that don't matter, and that makes sense to me.

Ash. So what were you chasing?

Howard. Well I'm still not quite sure, but back then, honestly? Girls mostly! Beach girls, having fun, partying, getting high and staying out all night. I thought I might ﬁnd the answer there. So the usual stuff but always with the sun on my back and the beach, that always makes me feel like I’m home. And I tried to write about these things.

Ash. From all of this turbulence, it would seem that the creative won over. How did things develop from there?

Howard. There was a blessed period in the history of this country when you could go on the dole, and nobody asked any questions and you got a regular cheque every week, so you could write, paint or play in a band or whatever, that was a fantastic period when you could take the time to try and work all of the creative stuff out, that’s what we all did. We all lived in small rooms close by one another, my friends and I, and shared our dole cheques and had various adventures, I tried to write a novel, which was terrible, but I needed to go through that process. After that I moved to London. During that period of my life there was a lot of substance abuse going on, a lot of bad behaviour of one kind or another, I got pretty lost there for a while. I guess I fell for the idea that writers are self- destructive. This is nonsense, but, I did get caught up in all of that for a long while. Writing is a craft, like carpentry or tattooing or anything else, and you have to practice. I was trying to write but with everything else I was up to I wasn't really getting anywhere with it. There's a joke about two writers who meet in the pub. One says to the other, What are you working on? Writing a novel, the guy says. Neither am I, his friend says. That kind of sums up this period, the late 80's and early 90's. A lot of talking about writing.

Ash. What kept you going?

Howard. Just bloody mindedness and the idea that I might have something to say. I struggled to ﬁnd the self-discipline to write as well as work and party. I did ﬁnally write another novel but didn't get anywhere with it.

Ash. Where did things go from there?

Howard. In the mid 90’s I decided that I’d spent all of this time in my head and it wasn’t healthy, so I completely changed around and I ended up going home in one way, because I trained to be a scuba diving instructor. I went around the world teaching diving and in the summers I was working as a lifeguard in an open-air pool, Brockwell Lido in Brixton, but by that point I had a young family and what I was doing wasn’t bringing in enough money, so I had to rethink things. I thought about going to university, got accepted at University Of London to do a PhD, which is what I did for the next four years.

Ash. What was the title of the PhD?

Howard. It was called, ‘Condemned Men, Representations of Masculinity, Race and Class in American Prison Writing’. In many ways my interest in that topic goes back to my brother and that whole fascination of understanding how and why boys, particularly in patriarchal societies, become socialised in destructive self models of behaviour. That is really the theme of the novel too as much as anything else. And it also reﬂected my interest in what I guess you would call outsider literature. I looked at a bunch of texts by men who had gone to prison and become writers there, as opposed to writers going to prison and writing about it. These were men who were by and large self educated, whose identities are submerged, literally entombed, they are locked away, invisible, behind these walls their identies almost erased, they have just become convicts. One of the ways for them to inscribe or to declare their indidivuality is to write, so you have a lot of protest literature in prison writing and you have a lot of prison ﬁction that comes out of the United States, the body of prison writing in America is huge and you can tie it in directly with slave narratives and other captivity narrative. H. Bruce Franklin, who wrote the ﬁrst study of American prison literature in the 1970's, talks about slave and prison writing being the only literature indigenous to America – everything else is imported. What I was interested in was the way in which which prison narratives by men always seemed to represent a stylised hardening of the self, projecting a hypermasculine self image as a means to negotiate and survive these kind of gendered environments. So I looked at a variety or writers who were doing that and realised that the same story was being told with a central character that had to be tougher than any other in order to survive.

Ash. Did things differ much from a racial perpective?

Howard. Surprisingly not. What I would say however, and what Franklin argued, is that in white American prison writing, prison is something that happens to ‘me’, the individual, whereas in African American prison writing, it's about something that happens to ‘us’. For politicised African American or Native American prison writers, America iself is a penitentiary, freedom is not something that a jailor can give or take away, their narratives speciﬁcally link their prison experiences with a history of genocide or slavery. However, in terms of the gendered aspects there are strong similarities in prison writing between the races. For different reasons, hyper masculinity is central to the work of contrasting writers like Edward Bunker, who wrote The Animal Factory, and George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother. I was fascinated to see where that came from and wanted to explore the idea that for these men, these writers, you could trace a process of masculine becoming where, from an early age, as kids, usually from racially and/or economically disadvantaged or circumscribed backgrounds, they have gone through the usual things which I was familiar with, youth crime, youth violence, youth detention centres where they have learned to put on a hard mask, they have learned to be tough. So you can chart this process of becoming, until they end up in these terminal conditions, long term imprisonment where their toughness is their currency but it's also something that's learned. And then I discovered Finding Freedom, by the San Quentin Death Row writer Jarvis Masters. Masters charts this self- destructive process of becoming, but he goes on to write about his discovery of Buddhism, and his determination to unlearn these destructive patterns of behaviour and, just as importantly, help other men in prison do the same. Finding Freedom is a wonderful and uplifting book by a writer who is still on Death Row. What I took from it, and from the other texts I studied, was the idea that identity was a process, and if it was a process, nothing was permanent. One of the things that distinguishes prison literature is the fact that men start reﬂecting on their behaviour, they start thinking about how they have come to this situation and a lot of that goes back to them having been socialised into these destructive acts. Just because we are men, we don’t have to be violent or destructive.

Ash. Did you learn about your own concepts of masculinity during the process?

Howard. I think so. I learnt that I could change and you acquire the tools to do so, I realised I didn’t have to remain locked into destructive patterns of behaviour where I was angry all the time – though of course ﬁrstly I had to realise that I was locked in. Their were other ways to be a man, which sounds obvious now, but when I was growing up was not so.

Ash. (Compared to the work on On the Road) your latest book constitutes a very different style?

Howard. My ﬁrst love was ﬁction and I’d been writing versions of this novel, Marine Boy, for the best part of twenty years. I’ve got old manuscripts with that title, about two brothers growing up in a seaside town going back that far. What was interesting when I was researching Kerouac was that all of these various difﬁculties which he was having On The Road over the years revolved around him ﬁnding a voice to tell the story in and that was really intriguing to me. Before working on the Kerouac book, I had got to the point where I had started to write Marine Boy again and it suddenly seemed to be in the voice in which it should be told. After writing the PhD and before the Kerouac book was when I did the main body of work on the novel, I wrote a draft within about eighteen months to two years and was still tinkering with it as I was working on the Kerouac book. Once that was completed, I went back and ﬁnished my novel.

Ash. Can you give us a brief synopsis of Marine Boy?

Howard. Marine Boy is the story of a boy called Kim, who’s sixteen and growing up in a small seaside town on the south coast of England and who hero worships and wants to be like his older brother, Scott, who is nineteen and the leader of a local gang of skinheads who are trying to control the drug trade in this small town and are therefore ﬁghting with a gang of Persian men for that control. The person who controls the drugs trade is a man called Doug, a biker, and his daughter who is a skinhead is Kim’s girlfriend. The action takes place over one summer and Kim, because he’s trying to be like his brother, gets involved in various acts of violence and other crimes. I don't want to give too much away but what happens next is basically the fallout which happens over the next twenty years resulting from the events of that summer. Kim spirals out of control, his brother is sent to prison and then travels around the world and isn’t seen again for many years. One of the ways in which Kim rescues himself is through his relationship with a tattooist called Steve Tardelli. Kim sees the process and practice of being tattooed as part of a healing process. All of the kids I knew when I was growing up had tattoos and all of those were tough nut kind of tattoos. That comes across in the early part of the book, what later comes across is the difference between those sort of tattoos and the sort that Steve is doing and the positive message that he is trying to put across.

Ash. So the book is ﬁctional, but it seems to me that there are many autobiographical references entwined there.

Howard. That’s a question that’s often asked. I always think that all of it is and none of it is. Fiction, as someone once said, is about writing about what isn’t, in order to say what is! The town is a representation of the town in which I was brought up, some of the characters are representations of people I knew, what happens to Kim is another story. I wanted to metaphorize various ideas about being a boy and about masculinity but the actual narratives about tattooing is as close to how I feel about those processes and about being tattooed as I could get.

Ash. From what I have read the novel is very descriptive and you talk a lot about the power of the tattoo to make people feel better. You told me previously that this has deﬁnitely been the case for you, so could you talk about that?

Howard. I think this is a common theme that comes across whenever you hear tattooed people talking about themselves. If, for whatever reason, you have grown up with a fractured sense of self, or a diffuse sense of identity and you are ﬂoundering, tattooing can have this anchoring function. Personally I have found that getting tattooed was a way of belonging to a particular tradition – a way to make visible and permanent my sense of self as an outsider. But tattoos also have an empowering, magic function. Here I have to mention my tattooist Jim MacAirt, who when I started getting tattooed was working from a studio called Good Karma, in our home town Eastbourne but who now works out of Alex Binnie's Into You 2 in Brighton. Jim is fully aware of the magic power of tattoos and obviously if you look at the cultural history of tattoos and tattooing in all societies this idea of magic, protection and empowerment is strongly felt throughout. Unfortunately Tardelli. Kim sees the process and practice of being that’s something that we have lost here. The power of the tattoo can amaze. To put it simply, if you dont feel positvely about yourself and if, all of a sudden, you have a beautiful ﬂower tattooed onto you, then there will be a part of your body and a part of yourself that you will feel good about. That, coupled with the process of being tattooed, the fact that it is painful, the fact that you endure that pain, can also be helpful.

Ash. You believe the pain to be an important part of the process?

Howard. Absolutely. One of the other things that I particularly love doing is swimming in very cold water. I swim every day at Brockwell Park Lido, I swam there this morning. They now have plans to heat up the water, what’s the point, the point is its coldness! It's the cold water that gives you the buzz. I wouldn’t say that the point of tattooing is the pain but it is something that cannot be divorced from the result. When I look at pictures of guys with the Moko, I wonder just how they could sit still and take that amount of pain, you can see how deeply that ink is bashed in from the grooves on the face. Once you have gone through something like that, you can imagine that there would be very few things that could faze you, very few things that you wouldn’t be able to overcome.

Ash. In the Western world we always tend to see pain as a negative experience.

Howard. Exactly. And it can be transformative. There are two things about the pain that strike me, the ﬁrst is that it is transformative and you are enduring it and there is something positive about that. The second is that if you don’t know how painful tattooing can be, then you don’t know how wonderful it can be when it stops! We tend to go through life on autopilot and if you can have those experiences where you are intensely alive, whether that be diving or the pain of getting tattooed, or intensely alive with the joy of that pain stopping, that lightness when its over, the idea of holding on to those feelings as a means to move on through the world has been important to me.

Ash. How important, in your opinion, is the relationship that builds up between tattooist and customer?

Howard. I can’t think of another kind of relationship where you put so much trust in somebody else. You have to let down all of your barriers and put all of your trust in something and someone, so I couldn’t think of anyone better to have that sort of relationship with than Jim. Now, when I go to see Jim, I joke with my wife and say I’m not going to see my tattooist, but my teacher. Perhaps I should explain that by saying that Jim has had a very long commitment to Buddhism, and one aspect of Buddhist teaching is this concept of skillful means, which is the idea that you transmit the message of Buddhist teaching in any way you can. So its not just a quesiton of a monk or a teacher, sitting down with you in a formal environment, it can be done in any way at all. Jarvis Masters does it from a prison cell. Jim transmits Buddhist lessons while he is tattooing in a very discreet and caring way. I remember that a guy came in to him after just having been released from prison with forty quid in his pocket. He came rushing into the shop in a state of great excitement. Jim asked him what he was going to do when he had spent the forty quid, to which the kid said that he could always go out and knock somebody over and get some money that way. Cycles of destructive behaviour repeated, in other words. So Jim put the tattoo onto this kid, at the same time as telling him about his own background, his own problems with authority in his youth as a wild young man. When he had ﬁnished the tattoo and the guy had become more calm and steady and went to pay Jim, he wouldn’t take the money. Hopefully that guy went away with that example of kindness and spread it and maybe not be so destructive in the future. I try to follow that example and of course I fail, all the time, to be as kind as I want to be, with my family or my friends or just in the world generally. I also try to follow Jim’s example as a conscientious, hard working, creative artist; somebody who practices his craft, in all senses of that word.

Ash. Do your own tattoos have any special signiﬁcance to you or were they chosen purely for the design?

Howard. For the most part my tattoos have a sea theme and/or a Buddhist theme. So there is meaning in terms of decorative value, meaning in terms of tattoo culture – like the Sailor's Grave, and meaning from a spiritual perspective. Jim has tattooed a series of Buddhist mantras on me, the one around my neck is a mantra of compassion, clearly the philosophy behind that is that if you remember you have it on you, you will behave in a compassionate way, which is no bad thing. The signiﬁcance of the tattoos is also about the reaction that tattoos generate and about that positive sense of self image that they can invoke – when I was lifeguarding I spent a lot of the time by the pool, wearing few clothes, and kids especially will chase me around and call me ‘tattoo man’. That’s not so much about them thinking I’m cool, because I'm not, but more about them thinking I’m funny and I love the fact that kids ﬁnd it both hilarious and kind of normal. It reminds me of when I was a kid and used to draw on myself or plaster myself with Scooby Doo or Harlem Globetrotter stickers that you could buy in packs, with bubble gum. The best thing that anyone has ever said to me was when I was going diving off Maui and I took of my shirt and this guy said, “you must eat lots of bubblegum.”

Ash. Its interesting that its always non tattooed people who harp on about how tattoos spoil the body etc, but never seem to recognise that for those people who are inked, the tattoos do so much to raise self esteem.

Howard. That’s true. I think that many people who get tattooed do so initially because they may have low self esteem but the physical processes involved in getting tattooed turn that around. Tattooing helped me ﬁnally embrace this sense of myself as an outsider. Nowadays however, to some degree that whole ‘outsider’ aspect has been lost as tattoos are almost being seen as a sign of conformity as opposed to a sign of rebellion, which is regretable. Tattoos are a way of opting in to some kind of normative, ersatz rebelliousness, rather than a sign or a means of opting out, of elective displacement from the mainstream – which is what being tattooed means to me.

Ash Going back to your novel which has just been published, what would you like people who read it to get from the experience? Is there any particular message?

Howard. I have to be honest and say that all I want them to get out of it is a good story. One of the things that I was interested in doing was to represent a place in English ﬁction that I thought was under represented,the whole southern, white working class beach culture and experience. Other than that I think its risky to start thinking too deeply about a message. I would like readers to believe that the boys were real and that the events truly happened – because then I'll have done my job. If its good enough, it allows readers to enter a world and stay with it for as long as it takes to read then come out at the end and hopefully they’ll remember it. So one thing I wanted to achieve with Marine Boy was to honour the place I came from, and to honour my brother Mark. A lot of him is in the character, Scott.

Ash. How do your family feel about the novel?

Howard. Mark was quite affected by it I think. He is an extraordinary man, incredibly resourceful and resilient. Self-contained. He’s been travelling around the world since he was twenty, he’s forty-seven now and has just returned from a nine month trip through Indonesia, Australia, the Phillipines, and Japan. He travels alone. We've had a difﬁcult relationship in part because there have often been many thousands of miles between us. When Mark read the book, he phoned me, and was quite emotional and during that discussion we really started talking to each other for the ﬁrst time in many years, and for me, that's the best thing to have come out of writing it.

Ash. In terms of your future, do you now feel established as writer?

Howard. Things are going well at the moment but I wouldn't put it in those terms – I feel established as a human being, if that doesn't sound too arsy, and so writing becomes easier. I’ve just been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at Sussex University to do some more work on Kerouac. My aim is to write a book that tells the full story of ‘On The Road’, a biography of the book, using all of the manuscripts and various versions that Kerouac wrote before the book was ﬁnally published. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m already working on my next novel, a follow up to Marine Boy about diving. If I’m lucky enough, and I feel particularly lucky and blessed at the moment, I’ll just keep on writing books. Sometimes I'm sure I'll have to take other jobs to earn money – this summer I've been working as a day labourer – but that's OK, that's ﬁne. It doesn't matter what you do but what's in your heart while you're doing it.

Ash. Will you also continue with your tattoos?

Howard. Deﬁnitely. Hopefully soon I’ll get Jim to ﬁnish my back and then move south, I still have lots of space on my legs.

Ash. Do you want to say anything else about your family?

Howard. I think that if tattooing has played a large part in my life, which it has, and if I’m getting anywhere as a writer now, its because of the kind of love and support I’ve had from my wife, who has always believed in what I have done. She may, or may not, like my tattoos but she has never asked me not to get tattooed.

Ash. Is she not keen on tattoos?

Howard. I often rush home from getting tattooed by Jim and show her the newest piece, she’ll say, “that’s lovely”, and that will be that, but she is a very different person from me and she is the love of my life. I consider myself to be enormously lucky to have someone who is so supportive with what I am doing, but she is a creative artist herself and she understands the ups, the downs, she knows how difﬁcult it is to secure any kind of living as an artist. If it wasn’t for my wife, I would’t have got near to ﬁnishing my PhD and that was what kick started what has happened since.

Ash. How do you feel in terms of your life as it is at present?

Howard. I have never been happier, I have never felt more blessed and I honestly think that tattooing, and Jim in particular, have played a huge part in that. I’m not ﬂoundering, looking for myself anymore, I know where I am and that’s a nice place to be.