Max Porter: ‘Loss of control is the most beautiful thing’
The writer talks to Anahit Behrooz about long-term self erasure, letting others answer his questions and the fearless freedom of a blank page
Max Porter – author, cultural collaborator and one of our six current Southbank Centre Associate Artists – discusses political convictions, power in collaboration and knowing when to swap writing for waiting tables, with Anahit Behrooz.
My first free Zoom session times out before I remember to ask Max Porter a single question about his work. We have to re-join the call. The topics we discuss until then – most of them enthusiastically brought up by him – range from what to do in Glasgow after signing books in his publisher’s warehouse, anti-fascist actions, his son completing his GCSEs the day before, the legacy of the Greenham Common protests and his blossoming friendships with Ken Loach and an 85 year-old wood engraver who lives in his hometown. The experience of speaking with Porter is a little like that of reading his novels: fragmentary, forceful, intertextual, and extremely rooted in the stakes of the world at large.
It quickly becomes clear that for Porter, the work of literature – and the arts more broadly – is inextricable from these stakes. While some intellectual figures retreat behind their creative output, using it as a mechanism to both mediate and distance themselves from real world politics, Porter is extremely disinterested in letting Max Porter The Artist sublimate Max Porter The Citizen. ‘It’s almost deemed eccentric or vulgar to have political convictions nowadays, as if it puts you in a category of some sort of dangerous errant,’ he says. ‘It’s fashionable to say, ‘let the work speak for itself,’ but I think that line of thinking is in complete denial about how political every gesture is within this economy.’
To understand Max Porter The Artist, then, necessitates understanding Max Porter The Citizen. Porter may be best known for his bestselling novels – Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, Lanny and Shy: polyphonic works that push the boundaries of novelistic form and linguistic expression – yet the formalistic quality of his writing, and its ongoing preoccupations with masculinity, parochial English identity and outsider culture, is entirely informed by his organising work within his community, his role as a parent, and his anger towards the structures of power he lives within. He is as likely to reference the organisation Fossil Free Books or the protest action at the Elbit Systems factory as he is the Carcanet poetry anthology Apocalypse or Naomi Klein’s latest nonfiction work, and liable to take greater pride in a speech against the arms trade than in a new book deal with a big name publisher.
Within his artistic endeavours, this fierce politics reveals itself through an instinct towards collaboration which he has been increasingly fostering in his career. His recent publication All Of This Unreal Time began as a film installation scripted by Porter, directed by Aoife McArdle and performed by Cillian Murphy in Manchester’s Central Hall; the script is now published with Rough Trade Books, and will be part of a Royal Festival Hall event celebrating 50 years of the publisher, with Porter reading alongside live music by This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables.
‘It’s fashionable to say, ‘let the work speak for itself,’ but I think that line of thinking is in complete denial about how political every gesture is within this economy’
This kind of collaborative work hits the same creative note as translations and adaptations do for him, waking his work up to him in new and exciting ways. ‘Seeing a play of my book in a language I don’t speak, and feeling that was the adaptation that moved me most, made me realise that although I pay such attention to language, it is in fact prelinguistic underneath,’ Porter explains. ‘I’m not a clean project person: I’m borrowing and repurposing and reseeding, and the whole thing feels like this lovely, tangled, diversely populated tapestry, of which I am not the controller.’
Porter is forever walking this line between seeking full creative freedom and abdicating control. For him, the two states do not exist in contradiction, instead embracing his decentralised position as a creator is the way he accesses freedom – by allowing himself space to play, experiment, and refuse the aesthetic and political boundaries typically imposed within the industry. ‘As a young person I was very torn between visual [art] and music and literature, and missed one when I was playing with another,’ he says. ‘I think I want to re-child the cultural space. I used to talk about it in terms of dissolving the silos, because it felt like an anti-capitalist proposition to not have these distinctions between art forms, but increasingly it feels like getting back to the inherent state of things. The painted gesture, or the calligraphic mark, or the carved surface – it’s the same as what I’m doing with language. The break or concrete imposition or juxtapositional energies you get when you work in a hybrid form is my natural state. That loss of control is the most beautiful thing.
Author George Saunders once said of Porter, ‘[he] is one of my favourite writers…he’s always asking the most important questions and then finding answers’. The quote appears on the front page of Porter’s website, because he thinks it is ‘a cool formulation,’ but he disagrees somewhat with its second part. ‘I ask questions,’ he agrees, laughing, ‘look at my [2026] English PEN lecture, which is entirely written in questions, and you’ll be like, ‘Christ, may this motherf*cker never ask another’. But the answers aren’t mine. I get what George is saying, and it’s beautiful, but actually he’s the one who has found the answers.’
‘I feel enormous amounts of fear as a parent, as a citizen, as a person in a room. But when I come back to the blank page, I properly disappear.’
This openness to inquiry rather than response as a mode of creative engagement also forms the basis of Porter’s three-year project with the Southbank Centre as an Associate Artist. Although the details of the project are still under wraps, Porter promises something ‘interdisciplinary’, exploring these same ideas around collaboration, generic fluidity and community access. ‘I want it to be the answer to the questions I’ve been asking for the last few years,’ he explains. ‘What is a good way of presenting literature? What are you trying to give an audience? What are you trying to take from your audience? What is the relationship between spoken word and the page? [I want] a flavour of brokenness, glitch, improvisation and disharmony that spills out and wobbles off in strange directions.’
You may be forgiven, given Porter’s love affair with every form of art out there, for wondering if writing has taken a backseat for now. But Porter remains a writer, and specifically a novelist, at heart. His experimentation with other forms and approaches – the performance and the collaboration and the dramaturgy and the film writing – fascinate him in their unknownness, a ‘kind of gymnasium for the technical processes I am interested in,’ he explains, but it is in writing – the openness of the blank page and everything it might allow – that he experiences genuine freedom. ‘It’s the one place I don’t feel the fear,’ he says. ‘I feel enormous amounts of fear as a parent, as a citizen, as a person in a room. But when I come back to the blank page, I properly disappear.’
He can’t, he explains, talk much about the details of his next novel, coming out next year with Faber. But it is one of his favourite things he has written: his first female protagonist, who became for him a kind of ally and companion through the writing process. Yet although this book marks a departure from Porter’s hitherto marked explorations of varying kinds of masculinity, the same aesthetic inquiries that have occupied him until now remain. It may seem a little strange that such a linguistically and formally experimental writer keeps returning to the novel, a form that has such a burden of tradition behind it. But for Porter, it is precisely this history that gives him the kind of freedom of possibility he longs for. ‘The artificiality of the novel has been massively underplayed,’ he says of his ongoing fascination with the form. ‘We behave as if the novel is a standard, [but] it’s a relatively recent and eccentric art form to suggest that you can make up someone else’s consciousness and then go on a journey in it. So I do want the radical strangeness of the proposition high in the mix.’
‘We behave as if the novel is a standard, [but] it’s a relatively recent and eccentric art form to suggest that you can make up someone else’s consciousness and then go on a journey in it’
Yet for all the excitement a new Max Porter novel promises, for Porter his work can only exist within a constellation that is much bigger than him, a rhizome of creative energy and processes in which he can both give and take. The novel matters, but so do the collaborations and the music and the actions on the street and the school runs and everything else that makes up our collective ability to make and absorb art. ‘The day that I’m like, ‘here’s the new novel, make sure my name is big on the cover, I’ll do Edinburgh, Cheltenham, and Oxford’, it’s over,’ he says. ‘I’d rather work in a café. Because it won’t thrill anyone – it won’t thrill me, it won’t thrill you. So maybe, ultimately, it’s a sort of process of erasure. Maybe there’ll be much less Max Porter as we go on.’
See Max Porter with us
An Evening with Rough Trade Books
5 things to know about Rough Trade
A look at the much-loved independent label as it celebrates its 50th year.
Artist on artist: Raymond Antrobus on the irreplaceable Benjamin Zephaniah
The multi-award-winning poet shares his personal lifelong connection with the hugely popular figure once dubbed ‘the people’s laureate’.
Shabaka: ‘If you don't follow the artistic path, you have nothing’
In an in-depth interview the musician and composer discusses Tomorrow’s Warriors, taking a saxophonic sabbatical and performing jazz with a small ‘j’.