Sacred & Profane: Haunted Paper
On the eve of a new Liverpool exhibition, showcasing the notebooks and collages of 2025 TLS Ackerley Prize-winning author Jeff Young, Mike Pinnington considers memory, nostalgia, and the writer’s creative process…
In Yoko Ogawa’s allegorical The Memory Police, things – birds, calendars, maps – are arbitrarily ‘disappeared’ from the collective memory, fascistically stripped of meaning; in Apple TV’s Silo, objects from a ‘before time’ (including a Pez dispenser) are designated as relics, and forbidden; Georgi Gospodinov’s satire, Time Shelter, revolves around ‘clinics for the past’ as a method of treatment for those with Alzheimer’s. These prove so successful as to precipitate a ‘referendum of the past’ in which European countries opt to vote for a bygone decade they want to recreate and live in.
Truth often proves to be stranger than fiction: after Franco’s death in Spain in 1975, a Pact of Forgetting was proposed as a means of moving beyond the painful legacies of the Civil War. But memory is a powerful thing. Both sacred and profane, the past – like it or not – tears through the years and decades. Inevitably it catches up with us, and remains present. It shapes our world view, the way we think and, to some extent, act.
Frequently, objects – as both Ogawa and Gospodinov demonstrate – are the locus of remembrance, voluntary or otherwise. Like the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, some things (they needn’t be cakes!), are imbued with evocative, mysterious properties, and can flood us with memories and feelings long forgotten, or thought buried. They suggest, provoke, exhume and resuscitate; conjuring time, place and feelings, they are infused with a kind of magic.
The writing of author and playwright Jeff Young has been known to have much the same effect. The worlds he invokes feel so close as to brush up against us. Ghost Town – his alt. city symphony shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography award – builds a picture of Liverpool as “a living thing”, as he calls it, so successfully that you feel you could open the book and step onto the city’s streets, walk in his footsteps; maybe even grab a coffee with him. Certain of its passages prick your eyes and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. “I had the feeling – still have the feeling – that the city was a living novel and we were walking through its pages.”
His most recent act of writing time and place into fresh existence is 2024′s Wild Twin, for which Young has just been awarded the 2025 TLS Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography ‘of outstanding merit’. Here, as it inextricably must be, memory is closely entwined with nostalgia:
“I began to dream of places I had been to and could no longer go. And so I went to where I always go, into the shadowplay of memory where I might find an echo, a reflection, the wild twin that always runs on ahead over the edge, into the beyond.”
As we know, there is peril in nostalgia. It is tempting, seductive. It is a kind of warping as much as it is a yearning. What do we want? Who do we want? A younger, more vital and fearless version of ourselves? Had that person ever really existed? Are we remembering right? Sometimes, we can haunt ourselves. For Young, though, it seems nostalgia isn’t something to be wary of. This isn’t a place to wallow and hide, shutting out the world, denying the present and hope of a future like a latter day Miss Haversham, or a reclusive, gone-to-seed rock star well past their prime. It is neither a cul-de-sac, nor simple aide-memoire; it is a creative provocation.
From it, Young excavates friends and lovers, old haunts, music shops, films, paperbacks, architecture, family gatherings, misadventures – the stuff of life that we all must accumulate to become ourselves – to produce something vibrant and alive in the here and now. Most obviously, this comes in the form of his lyrical, richly textured writing, which arrives with such warmth, and so fully realised, as to put us in the city, bar or living room he has reached back through time to vividly recall and present afresh.
The kindling for these works is provided in no small part by notebooks kept by Young, but also by companion collage and assemblage. Collectively, he describes these three-dimensional artefacts as ‘imagination batteries’, helping to invigorate, and provide the impetus and drive for the writing process. ”I see them as magic spells,” he has said. “An archive of fleeting moments captured before they fade away. They summon up ghosts, language, images, memories, ideas, incantations, hexes, ritual alchemy.” What he might not say, however, is that these are works of art in their own right, that beautifully complement the books they helped inspire him to write.
Two such collages adorn the pages of Wild Twin, a book dedicated to his dad, Cyril, who had died in 2023. Unvarnished, Young writes on this in the book’s final chapter. He writes also about these works that amount, in some ways, to family portraits; absences very much present in the “vessels [that] would act as time machines, as portals to the past” built while his dad slept.
As rich with meaning and suggestion as his writing, these accumulations plucked from life’s flotsam and jetsam, include: “Thimbles, foreign coins, medals, brooches, holiday snaps, acorns, pebbles, seashells, door keys, lucky charms, earrings, lace handkerchiefs, spoons, poems, cigarette and tea cards, the broken heads of dolls, marbles, cufflinks, dried flowers, corks, buttons, chess pieces, teeth.”
Channelling, he says, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, “In tobacco tins and cigar tins I curated memories.” And, he explains: “I thought of memory as being in the present moment, rather than in the mists of whatever ‘The Past’ is. I imagined my tiny museums and tobacco tin machines were living engines of today and tomorrow as much as they were reminders of the past.”
Maybe this is the best way to think about memory – and its own wild twin, nostalgia – as much the driver of the present- and future-tense as it is a place to wistfully visit on occasion, lest we get pulled down by the undertow.
Mike Pinnington
Dorothy X Jeff Young: Haunted Paper previews 6 August, from 5pm @ Dorothy, Jamaica Street, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool
Read Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay – A Conversation with Jeff Young
Images, from top: Film still, courtesy Matt Bell; Ghost Town; Wild Twin Collage, by Jeff Young; film stills, courtesy Matt Bell
