A Conversation with Carlo Gébler

Carlo Gébler’s work spans fiction, nonfiction, memoir, history, theatre, and film. Born in Dublin in 1954 and raised in London and Ireland, he has published more than thirty books. The author of plays for stage and radio, screenplays, and documentaries, he has for many years taught creative writing in prisons, currently in HMP Hydebank and Loughan House Open Prison. I am fortunate to have been tutored by him at Trinity College Dublin. In this conversation we discuss his prolific working practice, and how he draws on memory and personal history in his work.

RUBY: What are you working on at the moment?

CARLO GÉBLER: I’m writing two nonfiction books. One is about my maternal grandparents—my mother’s mother and father—who my brother and I were sent from London to Ireland to stay with throughout our childhood. They lived in East Clare in a house called Drewsborough—the book is called Drewsborough—and they were remarkable people. John McGahern said, more-or-less, that until the 1970s everyone in Ireland was a Victorian, and Lena and Michael O’Brien, my maternal grandparents were exactly that. They were very strange and unusual people. Drewsborough is about what I remember of them and its focus is my half-understanding—and sometimes quarter-understanding—all the things I was hearing from them about the family’s back history. I got so much wrong, but all the mistakes and misunderstandings formed my psyche’s geology; the errors of comprehension are now me.

RUBY: When you return to these family memories, are you trying to restore something, or revise your understanding of what you experienced?

CARLO GÉBLER: The second. I’m trying to understand what I thought and what I think now which is different to what I thought when I was a child. I know so much more now—about Ireland then, about my family, about the forces acting on them. I’m also as I age increasingly attracted to non-fiction. I like that I don’t have to invent or fictionalize; and I’m just giving an account of that world as it was.

RUBY: And the second non-fiction book?

CARLO GÉBLER: That’s a book about death. 2024 was my death year. My mother died, and three other really important people also passed that year.

RUBY: Oh, I’m so sorry.

CARLO GÉBLER: But the book I’m writing, tentatively called No One Tells You; the final years of Edna O’Brien, is less about death itself, and particularly my mother’s death and more about the impact that death, and particularly her death, has and had on me.

RUBY: You also have a play in the works?

CARLO GÉBLER: Yes—The Elephant in the Garage. It’s a true story of a woman who kept an elephant in her garage in Belfast during the Second World War. The producer found the story through a connection he had with someone who used to run a jazz club in London and who told him this story which he told me. It’s remarkable story and fiendish to stage! My job is to write it, which I’ve done; the rest is up to the production team.

RUBY: You once told me at Trinity that writing is like descending into the basement, where the characters are already. How do you get down there?

CARLO GÉBLER: The unconscious is always communicating—in dreams, daydreams, slips of the tongue. You need to pay attention to the intimations and signals coming from below and when they’re signalling you to come, don’t tarry, make haste. And that place when I get to it is like an old theatre; and there they are, on stage, in costume, make up on, the characters and they ‘do’ the scene and I watch and follow and write it up. David Lynch says, which is not so dissimilar, that the creative space where the unconscious gifts you its fruits is a dark room with a TV in the corner playing something, and your job is to record or transcribe what’s on the TV. You shut up and you listen because there they are on the screen, in costume, lines learnt, your characters, acting out the scene. In order to facilitate access to this magical, numinous space where the unconscious gives you what it has, regularity helps: you do it, i.e. you write at the same time every day and pretty soon you’ll find your psyche will be ready at that time to offer you whatever it has. The unconscious wants to cooperate but the writer must make that process frictionless and easy. So, the writer mustn’t do things that mess that relationship up.

RUBY: Much of your work is memoiristic or rooted in memory. Is there nostalgia in that impulse?

CARLO GÉBLER: Of course. In times of chaos or disorder, it’s comforting to return to the foreign country of the past. But it’s more than nostalgia: the present and future are made by the past. Going back to excavate your own geology, you drill down through layered strata and find out what your life has been formed from which helps you to understand your present, the present.

Nabokov does this brilliantly in Speak, Memory. He does it by giving you pictures, one after the next, and as his understanding deepens, so the pictures he offers get richer and better and brighter. In the memoirs I’ve written or am trying to write, I’m attempting to do something similar, to give a deep understanding of the past and the connection of the past to the present, though obviously my efforts have never been and never will be as good as Nabokov’s efforts. I mention Nabokov’s memoir, among other reasons, because it’s always good to have a sense of what is possible, what can be done, which, even though better than what one can do oneself, nonetheless spurs one on.

RUBY: Your advice as a writing teacher was to describe events plainly, without sentimentality, and to avoid editorializing. How did that sense of restraint develop?

CARLO GÉBLER: From talking, listening to people tell stories about themselves, and talking about my own past over many years. What I learned is: get out of the way. Keep things plain. Don’t moralize from the present. Don’t tell the reader what to feel. Readers don’t like it when they sense the writing has designs on them—Keats put it far better than I ever could when he wrote, he was speaking of poetry but his observation applies to all forms, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”

All literature is a trick, of course. You’re smuggling images from your interior into someone else’s. The less interference, the cleaner the transmission.

RUBY: How do you decide whether a project becomes fiction or nonfiction?

CARLO GÉBLER: I would never voluntarily write a play—they’re too hard and too hard to get staged. So, it’s always prose. Then the choice is between fiction and nonfiction. How do I decide?  Each case is different. The first novel I wrote was The Eleventh Summer. It’s a fictional account (it might now be called auto-fiction) of life with my maternal grandparents, the Victorians in east Clare. It’s a novel built out of the evocation of atmosphere and mood.  It was published in 1985. But in the intervening forty or so years, I’ve learnt so much more about those people than I knew as a child. In Drewsborough I wanted to use that new material that has come to me, that has been given to me, but I decided I shouldn’t and mustn’t do it as fiction—though the material is fantastic and could happily be novelised—because to fictionalise would blunt the truth. The facts are so extraordinary it’s better to leave them alone than trick them into fiction. So here was the reason I chose non-fiction rather than fiction, though every case is different.

So, what do I mean by fictionalising ‘would blunt the truth’? Let me illustrate: for years my father—pugnacious, left-leaning, and contemptuous of what he called the Irish peasant class—maintained the O’Brien family fortune, my maternal grandparent’s money, the money that bought the estate and the house they lived in, Drewsborough, came from cough medicine sold in industrial quantities to gullible Irish navvies in nineteen century America who were dying of consumption. It sounded like pure myth and as a way to disparage my maternal grandparents it was a marvellous. I assumed it was a schtick. However, which I didn’t know as a child, and which I didn’t know when I wrote The Eleventh Summer in the mid-1980s, it’s absolutely true. But I only found out recently.

The details are as follows. Three O’Brien priests went to America pre-Famine and ended up in Lowell, Massachusetts. They were my great, great, great uncles. In Lowell they became pillars of the Irish-Catholic community and led the fight back against the Know Nothings. One priest became ill, probably with tuberculosis, and died; his brother, John, also fell sick, went to a chemist in Lowell, and was cured by a concoction of this liquorice-flavoured water the chemist made. His parishioners then began asking the chemist for “Father John’s medicine.” These requests put an idea into chemist’s mind. He went to Father John and he said, Let me use your name and picture; I’ll put them on every bottle of the medicine, and you’ll get a cut of every sale. Father John O’Brien agreed and the rest as they say, was history. Father John’s Medicine, made in Lowell, Massachusetts, was a best seller. It sold in incredible quantities and on the back these sales, the O’Brien family fortune was made, the fortune which bought Drewsborough, where I spent my childhood. Why fictionalize that? There’s no need It’s already more novelistic than fiction.

RUBY: And how did that myth—now revealed as true—shape the family?

CARLO GÉBLER: The fortune ruined my grandfather and his brother. The fact that Father John’s Medicine made a fortune was a freak event but it created in my grandfather and his brother a deep, subliminal belief that extraordinary financial salvation was always just around the corner. They spent insanely but because they believed they’d be saved they thought they were untouchable.  They weren’t. Financial salvation is never around the corner. The world is heartless and particularly heartless to those who get into financial difficulties, as Madame Bovary knew all too well. Debt and failure, with large side orders of shame, destroyed the O’Brien men. As a child, staying in that house, it felt almost gothic—Edgar Allan Poe by way of East Clare—and I could sense this dark past even if I didn’t then understand it or grasp how it came about. Understanding, as I said, came later. But the atmosphere experienced in childhood, wow, that was powerful and never forgotten.

RUBY: And what about memory itself? Its accuracy? Its falsifications?

CARLO GÉBLER: We’re all formidable recording instruments. Everything floods in and is stored according to associative rather than chronological, logic. When you write you sift patiently, and the more you do this, the more the details of the past are yielded up to you.

But accuracy is slippery. When I finished Father and I, the book about my father and my life in London in the late fifties and early sixties , I sent it to Peter Robinson. He was a neighbour who had lived beside us when I was a child. We were the same age and he was my exact contemporary. Peter read the manuscript, corrected various details, and then he rang me up; “I read the book,” he said, “and I don’t understand why you make absolutely no mention of the fact that for two years we walked to and from school together—sometimes four times a day.” “Did we?” I said. “Did we?” Yes, we had but I had and have no memory of that whatsoever.

RUBY: Not at all?

CARLO GÉBLER: Not at all. This is why memory is so tricky. On the one hand it’s true, the more you sift, the more the details of the past are yielded up to you; but on the other hand, some things you can’t find no matter how hard you look because they’ve been stored somewhere where you can’t put your hand on them, like my walking to and from school with Peter Robinson for two years. And by the way, the reason I think I have no memory of that experience, I can’t find it, is because I was happy and it was the opposite of happy that mattered more to me and that forms the pith of that book.

RUBY: You’ve been attending screenings of The Blue Road, the documentary about your mother. What is that like for you?

CARLO GÉBLER: I’ve been to several screenings, yes. It’s a marvellous film, a brilliant piece of work and I have enormous respect and admiration for the director Sinead O’Shea. Each time I see it I think I’m seeing a different film. And the conclusion I’ve come to—although it’s a very good film in all sorts of other ways—is that primarily it’s a record of somebody’s slide towards extinction. It follows my mother in her last years and as you watch, as the film advances, you see her, literally shrinking, vanishing. You see her edging towards the precipice, towards dying. That’s an unusual subject for a film but I applaud the filmmaker for offering that account.

RUBY: And how do people respond to that?

CARLO GÉBLER: My sense is that people mostly chose not to see that it’s a film about death. They prefer to project onto the film the things that have inside them that they want the film to carry.

RUBY: Are there recurring projections? Patterns in what people want the film to mean?

CARLO GÉBLER: They mostly want to see it as a film about progress, Ireland’s social and cultural and political progress. And yes, the film documents the changes that occurred in Ireland over the last seventy years. But for me the film’s kernel is something else entirely; it’s not an uptick film; it’s a record of a human being as their body gives up; in other words, it’s an unflinchingly study of evanescence and mortality (and as we’re a death-denying society this can only do us good) and it’s a film which asserts, also, that my mother’s primary struggle was the maintenance of a close and harmonious relationship with her unconscious. That was my mother’s struggle, and it’s every artist and writer’s struggle, and all the rest, the things that are traditionally associated with her, the parties, the glamorous friendships, the clothes, that was just, is just, chaff.

RUBY: Was psychoanalysis a useful framework for you as a writer, especially in writing about your family?

CARLO GÉBLER: Yes. When I was growing up, especially in adolescence, therapy and psychoanalysis were a subject of great interest to many if not most of the people in my mother’s social circle. It was as big a thing as politics. Everyone, or nearly everyone who came to the house, was interested in it and approved of it. The overwhelming consensus was that any form of self-exhumation was a good thing because it deepened self-knowledge. There were disagreements of course about the competing schools and approaches as was inevitable seeing as Jung, Freud, Reich and Adler all had adherents and devotees. I often heard discussions, even arguments, about which approach was best. But everyone, everyone who was interested in analysis, agreed about the principle of analysis, regardless of their school or their beliefs. Everyone was adamant: the unconscious mattered. Dreams, slips of the tongue, malapropisms, et cetera, all had meaning; these things, dreams especially, betrayed the inner truth, the inner life of the person, and one’s duty as a conscious, allegedly functioning human being was to engage and understand. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates had it—and everyone psychoanalytically inclined was signed up to that.

Much later, in the early nineties, I went into analysis myself. I mean I had it myself. It was traditional. Week after month after year I went at the appointed hour; waited for the summons, entered the consulting room, lay on the couch, saw the ceiling above, heard the analyst (who was sitting behind me) open his notebook and click his pen, and then I started to talk and I wouldn’t stop till my hour was up. I had always apprehended that there were deep seams of unexplored material down there, and when I started speaking and remembering I comprehended just how true that was. Talking catalysed deep excavation. The submerged was lifted into the light. I saw how my inner geology (or some of it at any rate) had been made. It was transformative; it re-made me as a person. I became what I was always supposed to be only more so as a result, or so I like to think. And everything I’ve written since—starting with Father and I—rests on that psychoanalytical bed and is the product of that experience. Psychoanalysis truly, for me, is the only begetter.

Interestingly, serendipitously, the analysis coincided (does this prove that after all perhaps there is a God?) with my beginning to work in prisons.  The analysis and the prison teaching nourished one another and fed into one another. On the couch I was being listened to very carefully and on the landings, I found or I learnt, I had to listen just as closely, just as carefully as the analyst. I had to practice active listening, the value of which cannot be emphasised enough. In active listening, you don’t speak, you don’t make yourself important. You stay very quiet and observe and tune in to what’s going on, and if you do this, you do discover everything that’s going on in time. I was getting that in analysis as I was trying this out on the landings. That’s what I meant by the two feeding one another, the analysis and the jail work. The importance of being quiet and watching, which I learnt on the couch and on the prison landings, still governs the way I live now. When I’m teaching that’s what I’m really doing; listening very carefully.

RUBY: You said that your mother’s experience with R. D. Laing and LSD was traumatic. Did that shape your sense of psychoanalysis’ limits?

CARLO GÉBLER:  My mother’s position vis-à-vis the social world, people, society, those amongst whom she found herself living, contrary to the impression she gave of being confident and at ease, was anxious and fretful. The world was unpredictable and uncontrollable and not easy. However, with what was inside, with what we can call the unconscious, she had an extraordinary relationship. It began in childhood. She was, in a way, an animist: she could ‘feel’ or ‘hear’ or ‘see’ the spirits indwelling in trees and stones and rocks and hills and so on, and she spoke to them, she communed with them, she interacted with them and they spoke and communed and interacted right back. And from the sense that these spirits—or their energies, whatever they were—were communicating with her, narratives emerged. That’s how she began making up stories. The trees, the rocks, the wind, the hills, they spoke to her and she spoke back, content accumulated and that content became narrative.

After that, her access to the unconscious was astonishingly easy. In the early years, when she wrote her first novels and stories (the 1960s, 1970s) she could pick up a pen and the text would simply come. Words flowed without thought. Not everyone has that. Flaubert said he was like a dromedary—slow to get going but able to continue for a long time once started. My mother was the opposite. She could drop straight down into wherever the words came from; or, if you prefer, as E.M. Foster liked to put it, she could lower a pail into a well and pull something up, instantly, just like that. The work came in quick, bright bursts—like magnesium burning.

LSD destroyed that, temporarily anyway. One, the trip itself was a catastrophe, a nightmare. It unmade her sanity. That immediate calamity was followed by the aftermath, another kind of calamity. She suffered from flashbacks. These went on for a long time. The flashbacks were ferocious and annihilating. The problem for her was the seat of this disabling and destabilizing content. It was the unconscious, which had always been the place from where the work came; but now, besides the work, for the work was still coming, it was the place from where the terrors which threatened to overthrow her, originated, and came. So, what had been nourishing became a place that in part she feared. For the writer she was this was devastating because it signalled the end of the open, easy relationship she’d had with her interior. After the LSD it became enormously difficult for her to maintain her previous easy, instantaneous relationship with her unconscious. She persevered—she kept on writing—but it was hellish.

RUBY: In the prisons, what exactly were or are you doing day to day?

CARLO GÉBLER: A mix of things. First, because I wasn’t in classrooms, I was peripatetic and unescorted, I acted as a point of contact—someone the men could talk to on the landings, and who might help them towards the education department and full-time education. I was fairly successful in that regard. Technically, i.e., according to the job description, I helped with creative writing, and I helped students studying for O-levels, A-levels, degrees—I helped them with their essays.

I ran several book clubs. I also helped with letters—especially letters of apology to victims. And sometimes, if probation required an account of a crime, particularly for prisoners hoping to transfer, I helped the prisoner to write an account of their crime, which they had to write before they could be considered for transfer. And, of course, there was always a gap between the version they wanted to offer—“there was a knife and someone unfortunately died”—and the truth in the probation files. You’d know, say, that the man who was being asked to write up his offence had stabbed another man forty-two times in a pub. My job in this instance was to bring the prisoner to the point where he could say, “I stabbed my victim forty-two times in a pub.”

RUBY: It does sound very close to therapy.

CARLO GÉBLER:  Not really—I wasn’t there to catalyse growth or even remorse; my job in this instance was entirely practical; the prisoner couldn’t transfer until he wrote an unexpurgated account of his offence that reflected the facts and I was just there to help him do that. However, I would be the first to concede that in another life perhaps I might have become a therapist. I think I might have enjoyed that. What can’t be denied either is that I relied heavily on the essentials I learnt in the consulting room from the experience of therapy: be very quiet, listen hard, be patient, don’t rush to judgement. And then on top of those principles there was what I learnt in prison and could only have learnt in prison (nowhere else could have taught me this but the landing): in a prison, a stranger, a visitor, like I was, must be self-effacing. An outsider in a prison is in someone else’s world, an ecosystem with its own rules, vendettas, protocols. The visitor might not like it but the visitor must fit in.  I certainly tried.

RUBY: How did you end up working in prison in the first place?

CARLO GÉBLER:  By accident. Before the Good Friday Agreement, the British state realised they needed to prepare the men in the Maze for release—they needed to offer education, training and so on in order that the 800 or so paramilitaries in the Maze, who the British Government knew would be going home after the end of the Troubles (though they told no one about this) could lead productive, non-violent lives on civvy street when they left prison. In simple terms, 800 paramilitaries couldn’t just be let ‘go home’. They need to leave equipped with skills and resources so they could live differently to how they had been living when they’d been paramilitaries. Thus, in the early nineties, this is years before the Good Friday Agreement, artists and other sorts of ‘inspiring’ types were brought into the Maze (Long Kesh by the way to truculent Republicans) to help the men develop new skills. The creative-writing part hadn’t gone well, and a woman called Mourner Crozier, who ran the Community Relations Council, who knew my work, and who knew me, thought that perhaps I might be able to make the creative writing component work, and came to see me and put the proposal. After a long process, I ended up in the Maze for six weeks, then twelve weeks, then three months and eventually several years, on and off. Then in 1997 I transferred to HMP Maghaberry, a Category A high security prison (for so-called Ordinary Decent Criminals as opposed to paramilitaries) where I was writer-in-residence for 18 years.

But back to Maura Crozier and her invitation. When she first asked me, I wasn’t surprised. On the contrary I thought, I’ve been waiting for this. My grandfather had been sent to a hard-labour camp in Co. Meath in 1914 as an enemy alien by the British State (he was technically an Austro-Hungarian living in Dublin), and as result of being incarcerated, my grandfather didn’t see my father, his firstborn son, for five years. My father believed that rupture damaged them both permanently, irreparably, because it stopped attachment. And my grandfather’s five-year absence in the camp did stop attachment; when my grandfather returned he and my father never bonded. I knew all this and in a psychoanalytical way, when Maurna came and asked me to go into the Maze, I felt I had to do it because by doing it I would be helping damaged fathers repair their relationships with their damaged sons. And it went even further than that. I believed (somehow) that it was my destiny to work in prison. My knowledge of my father’s miserable life, plus our miserable life, his and mine, for we never attached, my father and I, like he never attached to his father, my grandfather, had primed me for this role. Magical thinking I know—but as analysis teaches one, or it taught me this at any rate, I’m absolutely saturated with it.

RUBY: When you write about historical places and events—like internment, like the Ribbonmen, like ancient Thebes—how do you find your way into them?

CARLO GÉBLER:  I look at writers who do it well. Bruce Chatwin, for instance—In Patagonia, Chatwin’s great travel book, is full of history, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Conquistadors, gauchos, anarchists, et cetera, et cetera —but Chatwin makes the past compelling through language and selection. He got his style partly from Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia and partly from Isaac Babel and the Red Cavalry stories. James Salter’s summary of Babel is worth quoting here; Babel he said, ‘He has the three essentials of greatness: style, structure, and authority’ Another ‘inspiration’ is Alan Moorehead, author of The White Nile and The Blue Nile. Chatwin and Moorehead are travel writers, but they write history in a way that comes alive. Chatwin is particularly influential (with Babel behind) because he is so very concrete, so very selective, and so very concerned to arrange his language as if it were a line of dominoes. So, in Chatwin (and Babel behind him), you’re told something, and it leads to something else, which leads to something else, and on and on it goes, and you’re carried along pell-mell by this river of words and as a reading experience its thrilling, compulsive and entrancing. That’s the long answer. The short answer is basically, I just copied what someone else had done.

RUBY: I, Antigone has that sense of inevitability—even though it’s not historical. Events follow on like dominoes. It made me think of that quote by Anouilh: “The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job.” There’s a sense that the outcome is inbuilt into the design from the start. It’s scary but impressive.

CARLO GÉBLER:  Yes. You trap the reader. You put them on the train and drive them to the end. All the writing I admire has that internal, undeviating, relentless sense of conviction, certainty, and inevitability. The sense that the writer knows where they’re going and you’re going there to and there’s absolutely no escape.

RUBY: What drew you to the Antigone story specifically?

CARLO GÉBLER:  I was born in 1954, and as I was growing up in London I encountered the early, idealistic NHS and the social security safety net constructed by the post-war Labour government of 1945 to 1950. In my childhood, when we lived in Morden, in south London, there was still this vestigial sense that the world was going to be made a better place for people to live in, and I could feel that as a child and what’s more I was a beneficiary of that as a young adult. Throughout the 1970s I had free third-level education—first at the University of York and then at what was called the National film School (now the National Film and Television School). In order to get the money to go to these institutions, I simply went to the Greater London Education Authority, filled out a form, and they paid for university and film school. I didn’t have to do anything extraordinary or deceitful; the understanding was that I’d pay it back by working and paying tax. That was the contract, and it seemed entirely right to me. They’d help me and I’d pay them back—that seemed entirely right and reasonable and ethical.

And then all of that vanished. Suddenly I felt we were going backwards, that the world had tied itself into a terrible knot. This was around 2016, before or after Brexit. At the time I was reading Oedipus at Colonus—not Oedipus Rex and not Antigone, but the middle one. In this play Antigone tells the envoys from Thebes who’ve come to take Oedipus back to Thebes, “Yes everything you say about him is true, but none of it is of his own devising.” What she’s saying, as a Greek Classical audience would have known, was, yes, Oedipus killed Laius, Oedipus married Jocasta—all of it absolutely happened; he did it freely, and at the same time he had no option, no freedom, because everything he did was set in motion long before he was born, by Laius’s assault, his rape of Chrysippus, and that whole prehistory, none of which, as Antigone brilliantly puts it, was off his own devising, drove Oedipus’s life.

I thought: this is exactly our situation. We have agency, and yet we’ve surrendered it; we are agents of our own downfall, destroying the world in countless ways, and at the same time we’re trapped by precedents, nostalgia, inherited patterns which means we are not free and can’t act in any other way but the wrong way. Of course, if Oedipus had asked the Oracle a different question, everything would have been different. He asked, “Am I my father’s son?”—longing for confirmation—and this was the wrong question. The Oracle said yes, and he mistook what that meant; he took this to mean he was the son of his adoptive father, who he didn’t know was his adoptive father, whereas the Oracle meant was that he was Laius, his real father’s son. Oedipus should have asked “Who is my father?” but he couldn’t, he was psychologically incapable of asking a question like that because it would have overthrown everything he believed. The myth teaches that you must ask the right question, but here we are, a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, still asking the wrong ones politically, culturally, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s why I wrote I, Antigone.

RUBY: And obviously the Oedipus trilogy is central to the history of psychoanalysis. Were you thinking about that during the writing of it?

CARLO GÉBLER:  Yes, partly because I was reading Freud (occasionally) when writing the novel. But much more important, speaking psychoanalytically, than the figure, Sigmund Freud, though I understand how important he was, was what ‘analysis’ in general encourages, tuning in. What the analysand is encouraged to do is listen to the self—something most of us ignore, and don’t do. All those desires, wants, yearnings and needs that are in us get pushed down, set aside: attending to them is the path to well-being. At the same time, without a certain amount of denial and even lying, society couldn’t function; those mechanisms have their place. But within the safety of the consulting room, the task is to go down, to get to the bottom of oneself—which is, really, what we spend our whole lives trying to do. So, I, Antigone came out of that, peering into the self, determining what I was feeling about the world after 2016 (depressed) and then turning that energy or whatever it was into language, narrative.

RUBY: Do you think a writer’s job is to protect that unconscious space?

CARLO GÉBLER:  The single most important thing to remember is that everything you write comes from inside you. Even if you’re writing biography—the life of Samuel Pepys, say—you may have masses of research, but it’s what your internal being makes of that material, the stamp of yourself that you put on the material which comes from within, that makes the text sing. Everything comes from within.

Your job as a writer is to maintain your relationship with the unconscious—to keep it open and healthy and smooth. And you must not do things that interfere with it. The things that mess it up are the things you put into yourself: drink, drugs, relationships lived in the wrong way, the general garbage one can fill oneself with. How do you say all that without sounding pious? It’s impossible. I know I’m sounding pious. I’m aware of it. And hypocritical. I loved narcotics when I was young, went to parties, drank plenty. But as I’ve got older the drinking et cetera diminished and then mostly stopped—it’s partly age, the body not coping, and it’s partly because I’ve come to feel that the unconscious is everything and whatever I do I mustn’t do anything that mucks it up. I can’t even afford a hangover.

When you’re young you think you’re invincible. I took all sorts of risks—not just in the way I lived but simply bicycling, walking, everything. I wasn’t risk-averse. Now, at seventy-one, I think: I have to keep the unconscious functioning. I’ve spent years working in concert with it, making books, and I don’t want to rupture that process or impede it in any way by doing something stupid. So I’m much more careful.

RUBY: Has your writing process shifted with age?

CARLO GÉBLER:  Completely. When I was younger, I saw the whole book at once—like hills in a landscape. I knew I just had to climb them in order in which they appeared before me and the book would be born complete. Now it’s different. I begin, language catalyses, and suddenly there’s a path I didn’t expect. I see a forest. A lake. Oh I think, “I didn’t expect to be seeing that. I think I’ll just walk down and take a look.” That’s how it is now.

RUBY: You trained as a filmmaker—what made you turn toward writing as your main medium?

CARLO GÉBLER:  I was at the National Film School and got a term at the Polish film school in Łódź—L-O-D-Z. Łódź had about five thousand students, and I met so many people who were enormously talented, who had extraordinary scripts, but were working as cutters or scene painters or whatever, because they couldn’t get their brilliant scripts greenlit. This was the seventies, and Poland was an autocratic state. I remember talking to them and thinking: this is terrible. These brilliant scripts will never be made for political reasons. They’ll simply never reach completion. It was unhealthy, even damaging.

When I came back, I realised the same thing could happen in a Western capitalist environment. There are more possibilities under capitalism, but the risk of not completing is still there. So, I decided to redirect my energies away from directing and towards writing and publishing If you write a book and ten copies are printed, at least they exist; they’re in a library forever. You can write a brilliant film script, but unless it’s shot, edited, promoted, projected in a cinema, it may as well not exist. And I decided it would not be my fate, to be the father of unfulfilled, unmade film scripts.

RUBY: When you go down into that unconscious place- do you find it communicates in images or words?

CARLO GÉBLER:  It’s that you see and hear something that’s like a play, or like a film. Down in the making place, the unconscious, murky, misty, ethereal, real entities are just there and they do their stuff in front of you. And this happens in fiction and nonfiction alike—it’s just as true for one as for the other. You see the thing. It isn’t exactly cinema or theatre, but it’s not far from that either. You watch it, you transcribe what you see as words. But it begins with images. Images, scenes, then words.