Writing “The Naked Spur”

On writing my first novel and why I waited almost two decades to publish it.

It was mid-winter when I arrived in Berlin. I had a suitcase and an English-language teaching diploma. I found an unfurnished room in a top-floor flat in Kreuzberg near the Landwehrkanal. I had a mattress but no bed. I borrowed a desk and garden chair. There were no curtains on the windows and no curtain rails. The walls were white and with no pictures. I was always cold. I bought bedding from a Turkish homeware store over the canal. Walked to an internet café off Wiener Strasse to check emails but no replies from language schools had panned out. With no art materials or much money (which was depleting rapidly), I spent €20 on a portable Olympia typewriter in mint condition and began writing a novel. I sat at my desk and looked out of the window, which faced blank walls around a courtyard. Surrounded by windowless walls and the tops of birches swaying in the breeze – most often under a white sunless sky – I had no distractions. I typed and typed, hammering it out every day. When nine o’clock in the evening came around I stopped typing and wrote by hand. I lived mainly on black coffee and off-brand chocolate. In two months or so I had a novel manuscript.

You could be forgiven for thinking this a cliché, because it is. I was almost broke, in a city new to me – one freighted with a history of creative exiles and outsiders in search of cheap thrills and affordable accommodation – and my response was not to try harder to find a paying job but to write a novel. It was a novel that I did not know I was capable of writing and one nobody had requested. It wasn’t quite a desperate gamble; I knew there were teaching jobs available, no matter how elusive they were proving initially. As it turned out, I arrived in January and by March the first draft of the novel was done; soon after I had my first paying classes. But in many respects it was conforming to the nonconformist playbook, of putting art above all else. Pure unadulterated self-belief and arrogance fuelled me just as much as cheap chocolate and caffeine. After all, if you consider yourself an artist-writer above all, what is there to stop you writing a novel written for an audience you don’t have and may never have?

For my subject, I reached back a couple of years to a disastrous project that had driven me to poverty, despair and isolation. It was an idea I had to sell commissioned nude paintings to London hipsters with disposable income. A publicist had called it “The Naked Spur” and over the course of nine months a quartet of us made fitful plans to launch the scheme before it folded. It failed in every important respect – financially, socially, critically, personally – everything except artistically. The art was great but no one saw it, no one bought it, no one knew it existed except for four people, who drifted away and subsequently hardly gave it a second thought. The writing of the novel was self-aware replication of that failure. I would become an isolated broke author engaged in a private unprofitable gesture writing an uncommissioned novel about an isolated broke artist engaged in a private unprofitable gesture painting unsaleable pictures. The novel would be as sterile as the paintings – uncontaminated by commerce, uncompromised by any consideration of propriety. Maybe the next stage would be making a graphic novel about an author engaged, etc…

I retyped the manuscript (which I called The Naked Spur) on to my computer. Oh yes, I had a laptop the whole time. The novel could have been written much more easily (and quietly) on the laptop than on my typewriter but I wanted to do it the difficult way because that was what made it real. Suffering – even self-inflicted unnecessary suffering – made any achievement more worthwhile because it had been hard won. Looking back on my art and writing throughout my life, you might have perceived a pattern of doing everything the hard way and then failing to reap the due reward.

Extracts and a synopsis of the manuscript were sent to a handful of London literary agents, all of whom without fail declined to present the novel to publishing houses. I did not have any sort of name. I did not have contacts or a handsome head shot; there was no picturesque multi-racial family story to be presented in a press release. Many of the agents did not even read the extract. This irked me but in retrospect the agents’ rejections saved both themselves and me time: they did not want to sell such fare, none of the big publishers would have published it. We were spared the experience of their pretence of caring about The Naked Spur and my dawning recognition of their indifference. It was 2007; if self-publication through on-demand services existed, I was ignorant of it.

Despite not being able to see a way to publish The Naked Spur, I was satisfied. It was a good novel. It did what I wanted it to do. Nobody would read it but I knew it was good. At the time I left it at that. I moved several times in quick succession and ended up in a nice flat in Prenzlauer Berg, where I started to paint again and began working with a gallery to exhibit these new paintings. So, as far as I was concerned, my short sojourn into the foothills of the roman à clef (the Upper Reaches of the Novelised Memoir) was a brief diversion before returning my native homeland, the Plains of the Working Painter. I published art reviews and some poetry but I was (and still am) an artist whose trade is making images and selling objects not dealing in words. I forgot about the novel.

In 2025, what seemed like several lifetimes later, I thought again about the novel. For several months I had been arranging to exhibit paintings that were related to the art discussed in the novel. Having published many books (verse and non-fiction, with a handful of self-published story books) since 2011, publication of The Naked Spur seemed viable. The more pertinent question was not whether the novel could be published but why should I want it to be.

My London period was a long time passed. The disappointment of the experience described in The Naked Spur had faded. Having since proved my abilities as an artist and writer (at least to my own satisfaction), I was content that I did not have to hide my attitudes or my art, nor to apologise. My new conservative followers could take or leave stories about my very un-conservative art. Both they and I would be better off for knowing more of my story public. However one interpreted the novel, it could not be seen as an endorsement of the atomisation, individualism and liberalism that it documented. The toughest conservative interpretation was also a brutal critique of character: the protagonist only learned a lesson because he failed to profit from his art scheme; had he succeeded he would have continued in a fog of delusion. He failed to play the liberal game well enough to sustain his illusions. Failure educated in a way success never could have.

Having married in 2023, I had come to understand myself better. I could see some of the motivations and errors of the protagonist in a new light. Discussion and reflection enlightened me about how the events of The Naked Spur had occurred and why I had not learned all of the lessons of that experience at the time. Allowing The Naked Spur to reach a public which might be repelled or disappointed by the story and the related art was a part of addressing my past faults. It was part of a personal accounting from which I could benefit, rather than a posthumous legacy that could be published for the edification of others. Talking and thinking about what happened to me in London was part of my ongoing education, taking place at a time in my life when I was finally able to reflect and grow.

Only now, understanding myself better, with a small but dedicated audience and the companionship of a wife who loves me despite the many faults chronicled in my novel, could I publish this book, the very strange and personal Naked Spur.

To purchase The Naked Spur (Exeter House, 23 May 2025) follow this link: https://www.imperiumpress.org/exeterhouse/

The Kindle version is published on 30 May.

Attend the launch of The Naked Spur on 28 May in London by buying a ticket here: https://verdur.in/event/leaving-las-vegas/