We, Me, Them & It: The Return

The Paris Vertu’s Richard Gendreau traveled to Washington State to meet with Richard Pelletier to talk about the book that he says changed his life. The interview took place over two stormy days in late March. April 26 is the American launch of We, Me, Them & It, the cult classic by the English writer, John Simmons. The book is being reissued by LID Publishing in honor of its 21st?anniversary. This is part one.?

There are no direct flights from anywhere in the world to Clinton, WA. To get there you need to fly into Seattle, where, rumor has it, you should steel yourself for a positively criminal commute north. Or you can fly into tiny Everett, Washington (no direct flights there, either) then Uber over to the ferry dock ten minutes away and hop on a boat. From Paris we flew to San Diego. From there we flew into Everett. Minutes later we stood on the upper deck of the stately Issaquah ferry and felt the salt sea air kissing our tired faces.?It was raining.

At our first meeting the next morning at his hideaway cottage on the south end of Whidbey Island, (the fourth largest in the continental US), Pelletier began by complaining. The island's famous poet ignores him. There's too much noise from airplanes overhead. (There were none that we could see or hear.) He quickly told us that Alice Munro herself lived in a town called Clinton, although that probably didn’t mean anything.

Within minutes he’d stopped with the poet and the planes. He introduced us to his lovely wife Linda, and made us a perfect Cortado. Then he led the way into his cozy writing shed behind his house. Rumor has it that no one but Linda is ever allowed inside.?

The day was unremarkable if 25mph winds (gusting to 60) and torrential rain is unremarkable. Even with the wind singing through the trees, we could hear birdsong, horses neighing in nearby pastures, roosters and frogs. And the rare jet plane. Hanging on the walls of Pelletier’s shed are black and white landscape photographs of his beloved island. One entire wall is given over to books on writing.?

One shelf—near the top—is dedicated solely to the books of John Simmons, who Pelletier credits with his success as a writer which at the time of this interview can best be described as epic on the one hand and somewhat difficult to quantify on the other.

We were told that Pelletier can be an especially difficult interview, more prone to complaining and talking about himself, but he could not have been nicer or more generous. Over the course of a two-day visit, we took a few country walks to visit some baby lambs who lived across a grassy field, and to say hey to a few horses in the neighborhood.?

An inveterate walker, Pelletier was at his most expressive and expansive when we were plodding down a country road, or navigating a trail through the woods.?

RG: Talk about your first encounter with WMT&I. Where were you and how did it happen??

RP:?I was living in Baltimore, just a few doors down from the lifelong home of H.L. Mencken, the greatest American prose stylist after Mark Twain. It was early in my writing life and I was looking for a way to move my practice forward. Somewhere there’s a record of my search query, but I'm confident it didn't say, ‘Copywriting book that swoons over The Admiral Pulaski Skyway, Yeats, Raymond Carver, Dennis Potter, Dancin' broccoli heads, lost dogs named Lucky, and poetry. If memory serves (and does it ever?) I believe WMT&I popped up due to the misbegotten impulses of Amazon’s suggestion engine. Shall I say more??

RG: Tell us more.?

RP:?I bought the book on May 17, 2006. The record does show that at the very same time I also ordered?How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter?by Sherwin B. Nuland. My mother had died the previous March, and it appears that in my grief, I was trying to understand what had just happened and what might lie ahead. I wrote a five star review of WMT&I that began, ‘This is not a ‘how to’ book.” I was floored. For the first time in my life I sat down and tried to write a review of a book I’d read. I remember sitting in my back yard in Baltimore at our rickety little blue café table. Even in May, the temperature was 99 degrees and the humidity was the same. The drone of sirens rained down on me like BBs. I had pages and pages of notes, my laptop, and the book. I will tell you that in those sticky moments something exquisite and beautiful and deep had happened to me. I was so moved that I stayed in that chair for days on end and I worked. I’d found something so important to me that it deserved everything I could bring to it. It wouldn’t be crazy to say I had found my life. When I finished I was as proud of that piece as anything I’d ever tackled. I titled it?The Empire Writes Back. It landed on the front page of Marketingprofs.com for two solid weeks.?

RG: Then what happened??

RP: Everything. New clients, new projects—a whole new life. Beautiful friendships. Lines from that piece ended up in a best selling book on marketing.?Lines that veered perilously close to outright theft.

RG: What enchanted you??

RP:?Enchanted is precisely the word, Gendreau. Well done. It struck me as eccentric in the best possible way. There was a kind of loose and slightly mad love of language. There was a sense of?play. He talked about words giving pleasure. Words could be both medium and material. Words could be mischievous and marvelous.?

OR JUST?REALLY, REALLY LOUD AND BIG.??

or really, really quiet and small.??

Words could be so many things, depending. And Simmons was saying that we can—to some degree, if we're lucky—shape what they do. It's pretty fantastic that the same communication system that gives us?Tread Softly Because You Tread on My Dreams?can also give us?Your Assistance in Keeping the Aisles Clear of Luggage Would be Appreciated.?Which I have to say sounds like a perfectly realized Lydia Davis story. Anyway, back to enchantment. This was my first encounter with tone of voice. And that notion, that a?distinct?human voice, with a personality, could emerge from inside a business and out to an audience, wow. That was something new and enchanting and pretty wild. I was most appreciative.?

RG: In his book, Simmons utilizes various works of literature to make some of his arguments, such as when he cites Seamus Heaney and his translation of Beowulf.?

RP:?Gendreau, if you ever use the word utilize in my presence again— ?

RG: Makes use of??

RP:?Looks to. Explores. Investigates. As to Seamus. Simmons is never happier than when he’s flashing his Merton College Student ID card. So let’s discuss. This might be the most Simmonsy thing ever. He’s taking a kind of core sample. Or maybe it's a?forensic?investigation. Whatever it is, this falls within the?Me?section of the book and illustrates his thinking. Who are we? Where do we come from? What linguistic stream or tributary or compost pile do any of us draw our words from? Whatever is yours is awesome and wondrous and wicked. Exploit early and often. ?

RG:?I love where he mentions?big-voiced scullions.

RP: Exactly. Hold on, let me try something.?

Ed note: Pelletier jumped onto his computer and searched for a minute and then read out loud from his screen.?

RP:?So this is what Simmons does. He lights a torch, and then you’re compelled to follow him down one tunnel after another. So I’ve just googled ‘Seamus Heany – big voiced scullions’. Listen to this from a Dr. Mark Womack.?

“So. This is the way Heaney starts the poem, (Beowolf) quelling instantly the long (and tedious) academic debate about how to translate its opening word,?Hw?t. He gets “so,” Heaney explains, from his Irish relations, whom he calls, in a previous poem and in the “introduction” to this one, “big voiced Scullions.” Why “big voiced”? Because, “when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty directness, phonetic units as separate and defined as the delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf.” In their mouths, a sentence like “we cut the corn today,” says Heaney, “took on immense dignity”; when they opened a statement with “So,” the idiom operated “as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.” Heaney wanted, then, to make?Beowulf?speakable by one of his Scullion relatives; what he loved about the poem was “a kind of foursquareness about the utterance, a feeling of living inside a constantly indicative mood.”

Is that not beautiful? And so this is the glory of all this—the epic loveliness of?our own?linguistic traditions, our own?voice,?and all that it can do. And it was John Simmons—not your average copywriter, right?—who has told us, reminded us, that there are deep connections to be found if you go digging. If you are present for this, miracles can happen.

RG:?When did you two meet?

John Simmons at Finca?El Tornero de Abajo?in Spain

RP:?We met at the airport in Seville. I’d flown to Spain—this was 2011—to be at my first Dark Angels workshop. I was told to go to the airport where a flock of writers would be falling out of a Ryanair flight from London. We met, shook hands, and everyone climbed into a van and made the long and winding trek up to a glorious farm house in the mountains. We got in late and were met (and fed) by Stuart Delves one of the original founders of Dark Angels, and Charlotte Halliday, a wonderful writer from Edinburgh. Jaimie Jauncey, another founder, claimed to be in India. We all sat around a big table together in the kitchen and stayed up late. Angus Grundy was there along with Ed Yeoman, Jan Dekker, Rowena Roberts, Sue Evans, Paul Murphy, Richard Casebow. What a time. What a crew. The image I have in my mind is John Simmons reaching over to uncork yet?another?bottle of red. We talked films, books, music, politics. I remember telling everyone that America was crazy, but not so crazy that we’d ever elect anyone to the presidency as stupid as Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin. Ha, ha. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. They gave me a room of my own for having come so far. The wall to wall kindness and joy that prevailed was impossible to miss and has never once lifted in all the years since. ??

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Hi Richard—

You can most have of the Thursday 22nd in Seville with your wife. You don't need to get to Sevilla airport until our plane (Ryanair) arrives from London Stansted - due to land at 20.45. If you wait at the exit from the arrivals hall, we should all meet up there.

John

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RG:?Getting back to the book. Why do you think it’s had such broad appeal? It hit a nerve in you, but it also landed with a lot of other people. It may have even started its own movement, or community.???????

RP:?Not may have, it did.?A lot of copywriters are?writers, first and foremost. Lots of copywriters have dreams of being among the beloved and admired creators of memorable poetry, fiction, memoir, and screenplays. Commercial writing pays the rent. Simmons himself is one of these people—and he’s done it. He’s realized his long-held ambition to be a novelist. He’s got three books of fiction on the shelf now, and there’s another one coming. But at the same time it's an utterly ridiculous dream to be a writer. You have to be more than a little bit demented. You!? Ha! Dream on. But there was John Simmons in so many words, saying, 'yes, you, and yes, please dream on.'

So for lots of us, the Simmons book, the Simmons?thing, is like nectar.?We can pay the rent, while we swim with Shakespeare and Goethe and Cervantes and Milton and Carver and Dennis Potter and the advertising stuff, too. And let’s look at what they’ve done because it’s all absolutely amazing, and we can steal some of it for ourselves. Plus, at night after we have done this, we’ll drink and sing, and we’ll swap stories back and forth and we’ll encourage each other and we won’t feel so alone. What?book loving copywriter is going to walk away from that? There’s also this thing that James Hilman talks about, the soul’s code. This has to do with one’s calling. And I think for anyone reading his books, you feel that John Simmons has found his calling and that is a profoundly lovely thing to be inside of, right? You can feel his delight, his joy. It’s infectious.?

RG: Talk about, ‘There is no such thing as the correct use of language.’

RP:?Oh, man. Deep love. I wanted to hunt down every nun who’d ever shamed and tormented me and wave the book in her face. Do you see now?? I think that’s the moment when I thought, huh, he’s a bit of an English radical. I confess I turned that sentence over in my mind for years. But the longer I’ve been writing, the more convinced I am of the truth of it. A simple example. The old saw is to use the active voice over the passive. I think John argues for this to help slay the corporate voice we all know too well. But really? In every instance? I find myself kind of loving the weird spectral presence who's talking about luggage and clear aisles and appreciation that I mentioned earlier. It's almost as if the passive voice has been at the party for so long, we've all become friends now, and it's all okay. Oh, it's you again, hello. The only thing that matters is that meaning be crystal clear. Oh, boy. Here we go.

Ed note: Right then we heard an explosive crack and then a crash. A tree had come down. The power went out with a loud ‘CLICK’ which Pelletier said happens every time there was a light breeze. He was cursing the local power company as we packed up our stuff and left. We came back at noon the next day—the power had come back around midnight—and we picked things back up. That’s in Part 2.??

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