On the surface, Tom Morris had it made. A degree in English from Trinity College Dublin. A two-book deal with Faber & Faber. His brilliant debut short-story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, won prizes and a critical mass of great reviews. As editor of the Stinging Fly magazine, he was a friend and mentor to some of the finest Irish writers of their generation: Sally Rooney, Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery.
If all that wasn’t enviable enough, he was also a talented footballer, playing in the Welsh League as a teenager and a trialist for Cardiff City.
But appearances can be deceptive. He may have been a literary aristocrat, but he was also a member of the precariat, without a home, never mind a room, of his own. The average author does not earn much, but the short-story writer is usually the poor relation.
So Morris moved home to live with his mother on a remote farm up a mountain above his native Caerphilly, in south Wales, to write the novel he was contracted to. He had saved almost €10,000 to write full time, but as the money dwindled and the months passed, stress levels mounted, and it triggered memories of growing up poor in a single-parent family when such units were being demonised by Tory governments and the right-wing press.
“It was an anxious-making place to be,” Morris says. “I felt a lot of pressure to write something that would take me out of poverty, so I began to resent the novel as a form. Whenever I had an idea for a story or a character or a situation, I would desperately try and stretch it out and make a novel out of it, like a computer image that you try to enlarge until it becomes too low res.
“But, deep down, I knew I was putting the cart before the horse. My work is much better when I just follow a thread and let it become whatever the story needs, rather than what I think it needs to be.”
Morris was facing another challenge, however. His debut’s success suggested a mastery of the short-story form, but he felt this masked that he had reached an impasse. “I felt at the end of the first collection I had reached the limits of my potential of the form.” He wasn’t his harshest critic, though. That was his mother.
“My mother had said to me, ‘I’m proud of you for having written it, but I think you are capable of more.’ It pissed me off, but I knew what she meant. There were areas I wasn’t getting to. I was searching for some sort of change, artistically, aesthetically. I really felt I needed some kind of blood transfusion, ideas, a new way of entering the work. I’d hit a ceiling and didn’t know how to get beyond it.”
Morris was drawn to explorations of the interior life, by writers such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector.
“Writing when I had a job was my alone time, whereas when I was writing full time I was always alone. I went deeper into myself, which was valuable for the book. I went places I didn’t know how to reach for the first book. I’d always lived quite far from my feelings, which might surprise people, but I was hiding an awful lot. Suddenly on the farm, I was feeling things I hadn’t felt the first time round, from my childhood. I got very low, very down, I got stuck, to be honest. I won’t say writing pulled me out, but it showed me the way to go.”
In his first book, he was trying to write a really good story. Now he was trying to understand parts of himself he hadn’t encountered before, led more by instinct and following feelings rather than beginning with an idea.
“I often don’t know how I think or what I feel until I’m writing. I had to go down to the basement to understand my emotional life. I think I had quite a shallow sense of it in my 20s. I wasn’t aware of the current flowing through me.”
If his first collection is the work of a master plumber, the second is that of a diviner.
“For a long time, I was hiding. I hid my stammer. I hid that we were poor. My characters are at a point where they can’t hide any more. To survive they have put on a false self, and it isn’t working any more. The coping mechanism I developed in childhood has got me here, but I’m now stuck. I can’t thrive by keeping pretending I’m something I’m not. It’s essential to take off that shroud. Writing can do that. I know it’s not physically dangerous, but it does feel like a risk to put these feelings on the page. I know, as a reader‚ when I come across passages like that I exhale — I’m not alone.”
Morris had been faithfully trying to create a novel, wedded to a process that was “very literary and painful”, when he started to cheat on it, fooling around with some seahorses. This writing project was just a bit of fun, without the weight of knowing what it was about, but suddenly there was life to it; he had characters talking to each other. “It’s the same lesson I keep learning,” he says. “If I decide ahead of time what I’m going to do, it dies. The writing has to catch me off guard. Had I known I was going to spend two years writing a 15,000-word novella about seahorses, I might not have written it,” he says, laughing.
Aberkariad is a tender, tragicomic delight. It’s a freighted examination of family, love, childhood and fatherhood, a way for Morris, whose parents separated when he was very young, to reflect on how this affected him. The gravity of this is somehow removed by setting it in the underwater world of Welsh-accented seahorses, where the male of the species gets pregnant and the female makes herself scarce. A father raises six boys, naively awaiting their mother’s return, while his wayward brother tries to persuade the youths to join him in Aberkariad, where males and females meet to mate.
With the blessing of his publisher, Morris abandoned the novel and began to develop the stories that would become his very different but equally impressive second collection, Open Up.
“I wanted a title that was an invitation, something that would encompass all the stories without suffocating them. I realised at the end how much the writing required me to open up.”
The striking cover image of a bouquet of flowers bursting out of the neck of a sober grey shirt suggests realism with a surreal twist, a deep-rooted flowering of the imagination.
The five stories’ recurring themes are troubled masculinity, punishing poverty and magical thinking, fantasising or catastrophising, as characters reach a crisis point. “Poverty and precarity sneaked up on me in the stories. Poverty takes up so much mental bandwidth. It affects all my characters.”
In Wales, in the short opening story, Gareth is taken by his father to an international friendly match. His parents have split up and the threat of the repo man hangs over his home, so the young boy makes cosmic bargains. If his dad doesn’t come in, Wales will win. If Wales win, the house won’t be repossessed.
Open Up is a suite of stories, although Morris thinks of them more as little worlds he has created. Wales is a prelude that introduces themes that recur and morph as the book progresses. Little Wizard’s protagonist Big Mike is a small man whose promising soccer career was stunted by his failure to grow, which threatens to be the story of his life unless he takes a risk.
Passenger is Geraint’s story. On holiday with his girlfriend Niamh, his poverty-formed chronic lack of confidence threatens their relationship. As his anxiety overwhelms him, the walls between reality and his subconscious break down. “I wanted to uncover what was at the heart of this character’s anxiety. I can bring more empathy to a character than I can to myself.”
The final story, Birthday Teeth, was the first Morris tried to write. An agoraphobic man, who identifies as a vampire, makes an appointment to have his teeth filed into fangs. It’s an exploration of online relationships. “I’m fascinated by how you can get into very intense, vulnerable relationships online and what happens when you meet face to face and also how therapy talk can be weaponised, characters urging others to open up for their own gain, not out of care.”
Passenger took four years and 82 drafts to complete, “which sounds insane to me now”. Little Wizard came suspiciously quickly; Aberkariad and Birthday Teeth took two years each. But because he had sold film and TV rights to a couple of stories and started teaching and mentoring part-time, he stopped writing from a panic mode of “I need to make money”, and his writing benefited.
Being raised and educated bilingually had a huge impact on Morris’s decision to write. An inspiring early teacher was the Welsh-language poet Dafydd Islwyn Huws. His Welsh A level was his most rewarding two years of study. “It was such an exquisite grounding in language and literature, the first time I felt as if I were encountering something eternal or metaphysical on the page.”
His time at Trinity, where he met so many working and aspiring writers, taught him that such a career was legitimate, possible. But he kept his love of soccer secret, instinctively feeling football and literature did not mix. Ironically, I first met Morris a decade ago, playing five-a-side at Trinity with his fellow writers Colin Barrett, Michael West and John Patrick McHugh.
Living in Ireland also reinforced Morris’s conviction that independence from England is in Wales’ best interest.
“Wales is a lot poorer than Ireland. It has internalised a learned helplessness after years of systematic neglect by Westminster. I’ve always felt a lot freer in Dublin. I’m literally a card-carrying supporter of Welsh independence. I remember a teacher presenting the British empire as something glorious, without using the word “colonising”. Coming to Ireland, the scales fell from my eyes, how different my life and my friends’ life would be if we lived in a country that wasn’t dependent and looked after its people.”
Morris is equally clear-sighted about his industry. “Publishing can feel like a loss of innocence — once a price is put on one’s writing, it can change one’s own relationship with their work. It took me a long time to not conflate the external financial value of my writing with the intrinsic value of writing the work in the first place. I think I’ve realised now that I write as a way of being alive rather than as a way of making a living.”
- Open Up, by Thomas Morris, is published by Faber & Faber on Tuesday, August 15th
