[Conducted by email.]

LU: How and when did you first meet the late Alaric Sumner and will you tell me about it?

BM: The first time I met Alaric was in the White Hart pub on Dartington estate, a pub that, anyone who has even been to visit Dartington College of Arts would know, is quite an epicentre of activity; and was the place where we staff used to often go for lunch.

Alaric was there to have a meeting with John Hall and Caroline Bergvall about doing a PhD in Performance Writing. It was a while before he was taken on as a lecturer on the Performance Writing course.

I was introduced to him only briefly on that occasion and my memory is of an enthusiastic but somewhat nervous man, probably understandably so, given that he was effectively having an informal 'interview' on that afternoon.

I also seem to remember him going into some detail about his name. The fact that ‘Alaric' was his third or fourth Christian name and that he chose to use it because it was the more unusual of his names. But this may have been later and not on that first meeting.

Many afternoons and evenings in the White Hart will blur into each other as this process of recollection continues, so you'll have to forgive any confusion!

The most memorable times for me were after Alaric got the job and we shared an office for 2 years.

LU: In what ways were they memorable? What was it like sharing an office with him?

BM: I was thinking and writing about these questions the other evening; and, of course, remembering more of the details of the few years that I knew Alaric. It was strange to try to write that down, mainly because one's memory works so differently to the kind of thought that reconstructs that memory into some kind of text - even one as straightforward as this. And it was strange, too, to be reminded that Alaric really wasn't around any more; but yet, I felt a kind of ‘Alaric-conscience’, a feeling that I really had to be accurate about what I said, so as not to misrepresent him, to be fair to him, and yet to also say what were the realities of my sense of the friendship and working relationship we had. Naturally this strained what I wrote and I realised that this was going to be a difficult task, very charged, very tender, very slippery. Hence my procrastinating strategies....avoiding getting down to answering your questions!

Anyway, the days of working with Alaric were memorable for many reasons, many of them banal, many of them things that I would remember that I'm sure he had long since forgotten (maybe??!) - things that were important to me.

Many of these memories are also gestural - Alaric sitting in a class, his legs stretching out in front of him, balanced on the edge of the chair, his body leaning forward - a taut bow, intently listening to a student, waiting for them to find ‘his’ way. Or Alaric's eyebrows flying upwards with real or feigned surprise. Or his body jumping backwards, with, I think, shock and horror at some example of him being misunderstood or misinterpreted. Or him on his bike, standing on the peddles, his trousers bulging out of his socks, as he stubbornly shoves his way up the hill to work.

Most of the time, I remember him in motion. Rushing, clapping, diving in or out a door, exclaiming about something or other, whatever. Although when he was listening he would become very very still, like someone taking aim.

Of course, these are just the tips of the memory, little peaks and co-ordinates, to tell me he was there. If I go deeper, I next remember conversations. For instance, an evening in our office (more about the office later), when I was trying to work out the solution for a piece of work I was trying to make; and Alaric asked me about it and we talked about it for quite a long time. And he gave me a range of ideas. We thrashed these about and I remember him really getting involved in the problem: he seemed to have a very clear desire, not merely to help, but to resolve the problem. Obviously, as is often the way with these things, the resolution we came to, was not the final outcome of the work; but, it was satisfying, in its own way, for both of us. I think he approached a lot of his interactions that way - particularly when talking about work / writing, either with friends or students - he had a tireless determination to get to the bottom of whatever it was that was being discussed.

However, on the other side of that, was a super fast retraction mechanism in him, should anything come too close or become too threatening. I don't mean by that that he would shut off the communication, but he would flinch or react, like a hedgehog, roll back into himself, before readying himself for the next round. 

I think that he was willing to go anywhere in a conversation, anywhere he had to, anywhere he had the capacity to go, if it meant understanding. but I think he also suffered in that. And indeed could make life pretty prickly for others too.

Essentially a relationship or a friendship with Alaric was never casual. It was often fun, light, stimulating, infuriating, exhausting, but it was never casual.

Not surprisingly, also, many of the memories I have of Alaric's conversations during our first year or so as colleagues at Dartington were also closely connected to food. We worked very hard on our job, all of us, but we also ate and drank, while talking, a lot.

Alaric was obviously very sensitive to food. It is a sad irony, and one that I'm sure he would hate, that it seems that this sensitivity did in the end get the better of him. He was so vigilant about it. At first I found it fussy and somewhat hysterical; but as I got to know him, I found that it was just how he was: he, and his system, repelled toxicity, in whatever form it came - food, smoke, language, sound. And yet, he, and his system, also seemed immune to other kinds of strain, that would get the better of most of us. He never seemed to notice the weather; he didn't mind getting wet, or cold or too hot. He could talk and work long after my mind had given up the ghost. He rarely, if ever, seemed to feel the pressure of social rituals and expectations. He was very much in himself, perhaps too much as it turns out - his own law, his own assailant (let down, lament).

Anyway, on a more anecdotal note, I mentioned sharing an office with Alaric. This was a very important part of getting to know him. I think had we not shared that office, I would never have become as friendly with him as I did. Sharing an office, though, is a slightly misleading way to describe it. Essentially I moved in to the office, brought furniture, books, equipment, notice board, posters, etc.; and because of all this, even the phone, when we got one was on my table. Alaric brought virtually nothing. He had a rickety table but no chair. He had half the bookshelf but not very many books. He unfortunately had the damp mould on the ceiling, although he also had the sunny end. And he had his bike. And a fluxus-type 'book' - a plant pot with, as far as I can remember, a piece of metal pipe in it with a tag tied round it. ¹

The other thing he had, which was very Alaric, though not particularly connected to the office, was his alarm clock. He didn't wear a watch, and instead would pull this little square clock out of his trouser pocket every time he had to check the time. Time, of course, always running out for him, never enough of it, always catching up on him. He would bounce in most mornings. I would be sitting at my desk; and, depending on the vibe I got from him, I'd either turn around and say hello, or wait till things seemed to settle and then say hello. Usually he was in a hurry to get somewhere else. He was always preoccupied anyway. He would buzz around for a bit, bounce off and a few hours later bounce back in again, ecstatic or infuriated, or exhausted.

Teaching was his power source. He was a conductor - in both senses of the word - when teaching he would 'conduce' energy; he drew it out from the students (with the patience and perseverance of an Inuit hunting over ice holes); and sometimes he returned to the office with this energy still burning in him; and other times he seemed totally spent. Sometimes, of course, he would arrive in the office in a less extreme state. And he would hang around and we'd chat and muse and perhaps adjourn to the White Hart to continue, me with a glass of Corbieres, him with a beer or a 'cold hot organic ginger beer'. He was well in with the bar staff at the White Hart. They knew all his dietary requirements and it was clear that they had decided to meet his good-humoured fussy ways with another kind of fuss. They seemed to share an understanding with him. And they liked him. He was, despite all his foibles, very likeable.

What was particular funny about sharing an office with him though, was that, although he didn't exactly occupy his 'share' of the space, I never dared to encroach upon it. To me it was totally his and he had claimed it as his. Partly this was just plain old respect for space, but also it was the way he did claim space - by layering his energy and neglect into it, so thickly, so consistently, that it could only be his. When we moved offices after a couple of years and he had his own space, I got the sense that this was a very important marker for him. He had, in a way properly arrived by that point. He had a place. He knew what it was and how to be in it. a place in Dartington, in performance writing, in the larger writing and performance community he interacted with; and I have to say he seemed very happy. I didn't go into his new office much. It wasn't that different really from how he'd used the old space. Loads of papers all round, everything everywhere. His bike. A few books. Now a computer and a phone. And his own chair.

After he died, I had to go into that office and go through what was there, sort things out. I have no idea how he would have felt about that. I suppose we all relinquish a measure of privacy when we die; but, for me, it was a fitting way to recognise his absence.

LU: When we were discussing our approach to this interview, you spoke of "the way Alaric approached teaching - and learning - how he negotiated his place and role in Dartington." You've said some of that very clearly, but I think there is perhaps more which could be said.

BM: It is a very difficult thing to do to describe, to even know what Alaric's relationship to Dartington and all its activities was. You say yourself that his take on it was very complex and ambiguous and I wouldn't disagree. Mostly I think it is hard to describe because, apart from a brief peep at Alaric in another city, when we went to New York together, his relationship to Dartington is the only one I saw him in.

When Alaric first came to Dartington, he came to be a student. That first meeting that I had with him in the White Hart was when he was coming to discuss his PhD. It was only subsequent to that that he became a lecturer on Performance Writing. And once he had the job, he did, as you know, also continue with his PhD. So he was always both a student and a tutor. This I think was one of the complications. It was also in a way, a defining characteristic, I would say, of his relationship to life and particularly those aspects of life tied up in professional status, institutional hierarchy, social order. And it was not so much about being two things at the one time, but never being any one thing - never really giving in to being a tutor, or a student, never settling in a position imposed from without.

On the other hand, I think that his relationship to a position - an ideology, an opinion, an identity, that he arrived at from within - by that I mean from within his own system of 'order', was a position he could take up with immense and intractable determination. And it was these positions that he would declare, vociferously, repeatedly and idiosyncratically.

For instance, when he first arrived at Dartington, he wore old gay activist badges - a different one each day - to declare his sexuality and his politics - or at least his political method. He was an activist. Not surprisingly. But while he came from a community of Marxist socialism - a pretty camped up and vampy kind of Marxist socialism of course, and would probably have aligned himself with those kinds of far-left politics, he was not, I feel, a socialist - of any description - because his politics were not social, they were personal. And that's what I mean by coming from within, his ideologies came from his personal experiences, traits, desires.

In that sense he often didn't see or didn't recognise the larger structure or order or system in which one personal interaction or other might be happening. And so he never really was a proper 'student' or a proper 'tutor' because he didn't ever really get the system that delineated those roles.

That is not to say, however, that he didn't know that system was there and that it was shaping his life - but he wasn't able (or willing?) to play along with it. Not, I feel, because he didn't agree with it - although that may have been part of it - but because he just didn't understand the game.

He had his own games to play. He was in that sense I think a genuine 'avant-gardist' (if there can be such a thing as an avant-gardist) and that may have been what drew him to Dartington, with its history of modernist experimentation. But while that history still held a fair amount of sway in the college, it also had been to a large extent, dislodged, by a contemporary post-modern ethos, one which put that experimentation firmly in the world - contemporary - political and historical. Now I'm not entirely sure quite where Alaric sat in relation to this, but my sense is that he was essentially still on the side of the modernists and in a way that is very difficult to describe, that had repercussions for his social place in the college. It was particularly something that affected his early days teaching on Performance Writing.

It is tricky to explain why this matters to the question of Alaric's role at Dartington and on PW, but it hinges upon the way in which Dartington - unlike many other art or performance colleges - ran, I believe, on an enormous energy of ideological innovation. PW, was, at the time that Alaric joined the course, still very new and in the course as well as in other areas of the college, your place, your life even, was totally bound up in the politics and beliefs of the practice you were doing and teaching. Who you were and how you were seen, was something that was established almost entirely through the activities of your working life. (I feel that it was an extraordinary imbalance, an inevitable one probably given the fact that most teaching staff moved to Devon only because of the job and while they were there, their lives were very much completely taken up with that job.) And as a result of this communities of like-minded people were also factions. And in a course with a staff base as small as ours, being in the wrong faction could really complicate finding ones position in the larger sense of ones life at Dartington. It also of course made for some fantastic argumentation and debate. And in the end I feel that Alaric's determination to explore these conflicts, gradually settled him into a place and earned him a great respect for his tenacity and his convictions.

Also, I think, as time passed, the urgency of developing a singular identity for PW relaxed and each of our different takes could be developed distinctly, while allowing for crossovers and mutual respect. In this process, Alaric also gained hugely from the respect and excitement that the students felt for him. His teaching was so different from anyone else’s (at least any of us in PW) that the students really responded to him. 

Sometimes of course they were also in despair at this refusal to give them answers, but in general, they seemed to love his energy and his commitment to learning rather than teaching. So over time, his way, which I think initially seemed so at odds with the ideologies of PW and other aspects of Dartington, became a way - and his security in that approach gave him ground and status, that I gather from things he said, was something he had never achieved before in the context of his writing life.

LU: Thank you for all of that. Can you tell me about your trip together to New York? Tell me about how it came about and how it went. Say as much as you want. I am very interested.

BM: Well this is quite a funny story, at least in terms of how it came about. That particular year, I had arranged with some Irish friends of mine to go to NYC for New Year and had noticed an offer in one of the newspapers of cheap BA flights if you collected so many tokens and by some miracle I managed to collect all the relevant tokens and was able to get a return ticket for £150. Part of this deal was that you could also take up to 5 people with you at the same price and I only discovered this just before the deadline for booking, when all my other friends had already got their tickets. So I was in the bar one evening, having a drink with Alaric, Caroline Bergvall and Jo Hyde and we were discussing everyone's plans for Xmas and New Year and I said, with a certain amount of 'joie de vive' "hey, why don't you all come to New York for New Year, you can get tickets on my booking for £150!!" They were all pretty keen, but I needed to know for sure by the following day. So they all raced off to try and find out about friend's floors to sleep on etc. and the next day, I guess when the sober light of day struck through, only Alaric had decided to go ahead and come with me.

Now I have to say I was somewhat ambivalent about how it would be to travel to New York with Alaric. Knowing him at work was one thing, going on a long trip across the Atlantic, and spending how ever many days it was, with him, was quite another! In the end however, it turned out to be a really great trip.

Needless to day, Alaric had some very clear agendas for his time in NY. He had been communicating with Perihelion editor Jennifer Ley and had arranged to do a reading at a poetry series that she organised. His confidence in his recent writing had been growing and I think this also contributed to renewed desire in his private life. He checked out a few of the gay bars in the city and had some enjoyable encounters I seem to remember, nothing major, but a sense of reconnection with the more urban side of his sexuality.

My memory of the details of what we did and when and with who is a little bit blurred, as I was meeting up with quite a few friends while there and Alaric was staying in a hotel in midtown, so we would meet him every other day, but he also did things himself without us.

One of the best evenings we had was after New Year, at this reading that Alaric had set up. It was in some pub in Downtown and we met there, him, me and a couple of my friends, in the late afternoon. The place was empty. Long, dark, with a small stage at the end. There were a number of other writers there, who were expecting to read and a few others who had just come to listen. It was hardly heaving! Alaric had primed me beforehand that he was going to persuade me that I should also read some of my writing. I had never read in public before; and, although I did bring some writing with me, I was very reluctant to read it out. In fact I was absolutely terrified.

Once I finally gave in to his unrelenting determination to get me to do it, I then thought I should have a little drink to settle my nerves. But no, according to Alaric, this was the worst thing I could possibly do and so I had to shake my way through his performance and a number of other readings, before I got to my own fateful moment. His determination to get me to read was funny, and I look back on it now, indeed, I looked back on it only  the next day, as typical of his belief in the potential of people to go further, to move beyond their own preconceptions of themselves. He really did have extraordinary belief in progress. At least where art was concerned. And art was always concerned in Alaric's life, at least as far as I could see.

And in this case, he was right to push me. Although I was very very nervous, I settled into the reading as it went on, and actually quite enjoyed it towards the end. I was also fascinated to see the writing coming back to me like a completely new text. Resonances and tempers of it were revealed to me, that I hadn't realised were there. It was quite something. And he knew he was right, and probably enjoyed that just as much as the readings themselves. Certainly when I did finally get that drink I'd been longing for, he was very chuffed. As was I.

The rest of that evening was great fun, we had dinner with a number of the poets who had come to the reading and ended up going to the Waldorf Hotel for pudding, as Jennifer Ley's partner was a chef there, and on duty that night!

The rest of my memories of that trip and in particular the time spent with Alaric are hazy - a fun night in an Irish bar in the East Village where we all argued about something or other, can't remember now what, but enjoyed it a lot - a new year's eve party in another Irish bar (it's a New York-Irish thing I'm afraid, can't be helped!), one which Alaric had been reluctant to come to, but decided to in the end and I think had a good night despite the crush - going to St Marks church on New Years day for the Marathon poetry reading and other various rendezvous in various cafes, bars and pubs in the city.

But I suppose my overwhelming feeling of that trip in relation to Alaric, which surprised me, is that we travelled well together. He was fun to be with, open to the endless trail of Irish people I introduced him to, generous with his own friends and acquaintances that he had arranged to meet, and independent of course also, happy doing his own thing. When I think of Alaric now, I often remember that trip as a turning point, a time after which I thought, we became friends, not just colleagues. And I often thought, after that trip, that now Alaric will always be in my life, no matter where I go or he goes or what happens, it was no longer just Dartington that provided a context for our friendship - we'd left the boundaries of that little patch of green and survived! - our friendship, our understanding of each other had been tested and not only survived but deepened. Sadly of course, that new found friendship had a short life in the end but the importance of that trip stays with me, even while its details fade.

Footnote

1) This was an art multiple by Erik Vonna-Michell. The label would have borne the name of the piece.