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When asked where my books come from and what they are about, I’m often at a loss – the impulses are from the deep unconscious Following the publication of Tolkien’s Gown , in 2004, I was occasionally asked to give a public account of it, and by implication of myself. I found this rather difficult. Not for reasons of shyness – I love being in front of an audience – but because I didn’t, from the outset, know how to begin. I couldn’t do it. I still can’t, not without stumbling about, not in a nutshell. Give me 10 minutes, or better yet an hour, and I can tell you. But ask any publicist – and I did – and they will recommend that you give a quick and accurate précis of your subject. Can you, in one sentence, give a clear indication of what your book is about? Does this sound stringent, and unnecessarily taxing? It isn’t. “A bored bourgeois French doctor’s wife embarks on an affair, which doesn’t work out, so she kills herself.” If you change the integers just slightly, and make the husband a minor Russian functionary, you will have quickly defined the plot difference between Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Oh, but surely the differences and the details are what is important, not the summary of the plot? Of course. There’s something wrong with the question, if a publicist can frame it so blithely. Asking an author what his novel is about is likely to elicit a ferocious scowl, and the suggestion that if you are so interested, read it. You wouldn’t ask a painter what a painting is about, would you? Nevertheless, if you invited Flaubert to talk at the Bournemouth Writer’s Circle, or fancied having that bushy Mr Tolstoy to a literary lunch, you would expect them to sing for their suppers, and tell you, however ungraciously, what their books were about. “The morals of provincial life,” Flaubert might mutter. But when I finish a book, I am at a loss, and clam up (relatively speaking) because I cannot quite understand what I did, and why. They sneak up on me, books, and the impulses are often unconscious. Why was I so identified with my poor local Coventry City football club, so devastated by their repeated failure and bedazzled by their occasional success? Why did it matter so much? My book Staying Up: A Fan Behind the Scenes in the Premiership (1998) was catalysed by a story in the Sun, sometime in the summer of 1997, suggesting that Gary McAllister (remember him? Lovely, cultured player) was about to sign for Coventry. What? Surely that couldn’t happen. It did. And it left me feeling raw, as well as overjoyed. A few weeks later I made an appointment with Bryan Richardson, club chairman, and asked permission to write a behind the scenes account of the coming season. “What sort of book?” he asked. “I am,” I said, “a university teacher as well as a season ticket holder. I am trained in habits of analysis. But trying to understand what is happening at a Premiership football club by watching from the stands is like trying to infer the principle of locomotion by watching a train go by … ” (He nodded, and didn’t throw me out.) “I find this maddening. What I would love to do, for this coming season, is to be in on things, talk to you and to [manager] Gordon Strachan, be on the training ground, in the bus, the hotels, the dugout. To understand. And then to write a book about it.” To my surprise, and to his credit, he gave me the go-ahead, and by the time the season had ended I knew how a football club worked. Curiously, the effect of this was to diminish my engagement with the team, as if part of the appeal had been the aura of mystery that surrounded the progress of a football season, and imbued the players with their mystique. Tolkien’s Gown had a similar body of underlying frustration at its core. How can I reconcile a lifelong fascination with literature, with philosophy, with psychology, with the content and inwardness of literature, and at the same time be so compelled by rare book dealing and collecting – by the fetishisation of objects that had previously appealed to me only for their contents? This kindling was ignited, unwittingly, by the wife of a colleague of mine when I taught at Warwick University, to whom I (foolishly) showed a copy of my first catalogue as a rare book dealer, in 1982. She leafed through it. “How disgusting!” she said, and pushed it away as if it were child pornography. It took 20 years for that one to mature, but I got a book out of it, so I suppose it was worth the insult. With Outside of a Dog (2009) the genesis was more direct, and brutal. In my divorce some years ago, part of the messy settlement ended up with me losing all of my books, thousands of them, which apparently went with the furnishings of the house I also gave up. It had a powerful symbolic effect on me. I was devastated, nauseous, dizzy with anxiety. Why such a silly over-reaction? I am lost without something to read. I hate thinking, it makes me feel alone, and anxious. Reading deflects this, redirects the energy, allows me to lose myself in a story, a person, a narrative. So my ultimate terror, in this respect, is to have nothing to read. To lose my books, as it were. What, I had to ask myself, is the role that reading – not serious reading, just plain bloody reading – plays in my life? Why am I addicted to it? Because, in some inchoate way, it has made me who I am. So my most recent book was both generated by the loss of my books, and is a long reflection of what they had meant to me. I once heard that excellent Australian novelist Sonya Hartnett answer the question “Where do you get your ideas?” with an exasperated: “Where do you think I get them? I make them up.” I was consumed by admiration, and envy. Lucky her. I wait for ideas to come, and then they don’t. So, in the meantime what do I do? Fiddle and faddle about at the bottom of the garden at my writing desk, doing the sorts of things men do in their sheds. Every now and again a book happens to me. I neither let it nor impede it. It has a relentless quality that makes me pay that sort of fitful heed that I call attentiveness. The driver, it seems – and I have only recently recognised this – is that there is some unresolved and unconscious anger at the foundation of each of my books, which result when some set of internal contradictions is ignited. But if this is necessary it is certainly not sufficient. Loads of things, more and more things, irritate me. It’s one of the symptoms and pleasures of getting old. But just because my soul is filling with grit does not mean it is producing many pearls. Anyway, I don’t write about what irritates me – why bother? – I write about my enthusiasms. About football, rare book dealing, reading. Things I love. I just need the right gritty catalyst. I am now starting work, fitfully, on a new book, and having made myself aware of the unconscious motivation of my previous ones, cannot seem to locate the impulse that compels composition. Making a book, it appears, involves resolving something about which I am angry. I rather wish I hadn’t come to understand this. Making the unconscious conscious can be dangerous, and strip you of the power not so much of inspiration as of composition itself. This is why some creative people are anxious about entering psychotherapy, for even if it helps to resolve some issues it may depotentiate whatever it is that simmers in the darkness. But there’s always something that impedes the onset of a new book. And if there is nothing to be irritated by at the heart of this one – which is about lost works of art – I suspect that’s because I haven’t located it yet. Or it hasn’t located me. It’ll come. Rick Gekoski guardian.co.uk