Outsider Artist

James Lasdun Writes Without Borders

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, December 27, 2006

James Lasdun packs a prodigious literary pedigree. The London-born author has published two acclaimed novels and three collections apiece of short stories and poems. Mary Gaitskill wrote of his first novel, “If you possess a spine, The Horned Man will set it aflame”; Seven Lies was long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Lasdun’s story “The Siege” was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci (as Besieged). He’s won numerous major awards, and he isn’t quite sure what he does for a living. “I don’t think of myself as a professional poet,” Lasdun demurs over coffee at new Woodstock eatery Oriole 9. “Right now, I’m trying to be a professional fiction writer.” Most would say he’s succeeded, but Lasdun seems to carry an unusually pernicious strain of self-doubt. Dark and lean, with intelligent eyes and a faintly mournful aspect, he resembles The Crying Game star Stephen Rea. When he laughs, which he does rather often, his face is transformed by an unfettered grin. The author wears a zippered gray pullover, blue jeans, and boots that would look right at home in the vegetable garden he tends on a hilltop in Shady. Though he emigrated two decades ago, he’s retained a mellifluous English accent—at least to American ears. “My mother thinks I sound American,” he comments with some satisfaction. Lasdun moved to New York in 1986, when editor Ted Solotaroff found teaching jobs for him at Columbia and Princeton. “I thought I’d stay one term, but the minute I arrived in New York City, I realized that I wanted to stay,” he asserts. The ’80s were “an exuberant time in New York. It was the Reagan era, a time of real extremes, and there was a feeling of life all around, in exciting, bizarre, and disturbing ways. I liked that.” He also liked being a foreigner. “I never felt English,” he says. “It became clearer, once I moved here, how alienated I already felt. It was a relief to formalize my outsider status.” His father, eminent architect Sir Denys Lasdun, always told his children they weren’t English. The Lasduns were nonpracticing Jews, descended from Russian and Eastern European immigrants, and young James was acutely aware that his family was different. “When I was growing up, England was very homogenous, very Church of England. There was always a pull between belonging and not belonging.”