At Lunch with Hisham Matar and David Austen

The French House in Soho on a sunny, mid-autumn afternoon is just about as perfect a setting for a long, midweek lunch as one could hope to find oneself in. It has the wonderful quality of being gently suspended in time. The afternoon sunshine falling across Hisham Matar and David Austen, the noise of Soho far away, and all watched over by portraits of historic bon vivants who have wet their whistles here over the years.

Hisham, the novelist, and David, the artist, have been friends for twenty years. They have just launched their second collaboration, Elsewhere, at Cedric Bardawil Gallery, a short walk away on Old Compton Street.

We are sat by the window beneath a photograph of Samuel Beckett. Hisham knows its story: an Irishman visiting Paris discovered where Beckett was staying and, pushing the Irish connection, persuaded him to sit for a portrait. Hisham suggests the photograph has the quality of an encounter between relatives, or two people who have known each other a long time. Beckett is a fitting beginning for a conversation about friendship and the ways images and language shape our understanding of the world and each other.

Hisham was born in New York in 1970 to Libyan parents. His father, an opponent of Gaddafi, was forced into exile and so he grew up between Tripoli and Cairo before moving to London in 1986, first studying architecture and then later turning to writing. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Return, about his missing father, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2017.

David, a born and bred Londoner, works across drawing, painting, sculpture and film, and has exhibited across the world, from Dundee to New York and everywhere in between. He jokes that he became an artist because it was the only thing he knew how to do. They met and became friends, but it took fifteen years of friendship before they embarked on an artistic collaboration together, during the first lockdown in 2020.

In the early days of the pandemic David sent Hisham a drawing he was working on, intended just as part of the regular back and forth of creative friends who tell each other what they are working on. But Hisham replied with a paragraph of prose. And the correspondence continued, day after day, until it became an interlocking story and series of drawings, brought together in the book The Boys: An Adventure. “It was a bit like receiving Oliver Twist each day,” David says of Hisham’s dispatches, serialised just for him. Hisham would reread each passage imagining David reading it, then make changes. The drawings David did were not illustrations of the story, and Hisham was not writing what he saw in the images, but their mood and temperament informed each other.

“I’ve always assumed that to collaborate is almost a curatorial gesture,” Hisham says. “It’s like, you do this and I’ll do this. But this wasn’t like that. I was writing really only with David in mind.” “It probably would have had a different direction if you’d just written it for yourself,” David says. “I wouldn’t have written it,” Hisham replies.

“It was a correspondence,” Hisham continues. “Like with all friendships, we have a repertoire of conversations, different things that we talk about, inspirations and ideas we share. One of the constants of ours had been about the relationship between making work and life. So, retrospectively, it’s not a surprise that when it finally happened, our collaboration emerged with such ease.”

A few years on, they have returned with Elsewhere. A book, exhibition and series of readings. It brings together Hisham’s new story New Shoes, which was also published in the New Yorker, and a group of drawings by David. Both concern the double, or doppelgänger, though the works developed in parallel this time, rather than through the back-and-forth correspondence.

New Shoes follows a man who left Cairo at eighteen and now lives in London. His brother tells him that, impossibly, people back home have been bumping into him. A friend has seen him in a bookshop; an old schoolfriend has seen him arguing with a man on the street. The sightings unsettle his London life and revive the possibility of the life he might have lived had he stayed in Egypt. He sends money home, which helps justify his absence. The double in Hisham’s story suggests an unlived life, one that continues elsewhere without him.

David arrived at his own doubles through the physical process of making the drawings. He had bought some very light, delicate Japanese paper, which he had not used before. Working in charcoal on it, he discovered that applying fixative could leave a drawing damp enough for its impression to transfer onto a second sheet pressed against it, creating a mirror image of it. He began working on both, allowing one image to develop alongside its counterpart. “The doubles came about almost like imprints,” he says.

They are drawings of heads and faces, eyes lowered and turned away. These are not portraits of real people. They do not exist. But each has its partner, a similar head only facing a different direction and sat upon a different colour field background with a different texture.

The drawings do not illustrate the text, just approach its questions from another direction. The relationship between the two works is itself a kind of double: almost close enough to touch, but never identical. They also discussed Egyptian funerary art, including Fayum portraits placed over the faces of the dead, preserving a likeness while standing in for the body beneath. In Elsewhere, the image becomes a way of thinking about presence, absence and what remains.

“There’s something very natural, but in some ways quite miraculous,” Hisham says of working with David. “Despite our backgrounds, and that we’ve grown up in very different places, there is this sort of sibling equality between us, this sense of brotherhood.”

Over dessert the conversation turns to language, and the fluctuations it causes in expression and identity. Hisham’s education switched from Arabic to English when he was eleven, and English became his principal language. Even though Arabic remains close to him he has never written seriously in it. His relationship with English, he says, is passionate, but he is conscious of the assumptions embedded in words and of the power a dominant language has to shape what can be expressed.

“What happened to me is that I went from Arabic into English, this dominant world language, and because it’s so dominant, it only thinks of existence through itself, which is not a normal situation.”

They discuss Joseph Conrad, who also wrote in an acquired language, and Beckett, who taught himself to write in French to unsettle familiar literary rhythms and find new ways of writing. For Hisham, language can be both a home and a place of estrangement.

Near the end of lunch, Hisham recalls meeting a reader of his in New York and who had expected him to be a rather different person. From reading his work the man had imagined him to be a tragic, sombre figure, the author of depressing novels, and was surprised to be confronted with someone laughing and enjoying himself.

It is a fitting, final illustration of the distance between a person and the image others hold of them. The writer at lunch is not quite the writer on the page; the man in London may not be the man remembered in Cairo. The double is unsettling because there is no simple explanation and container for all of life, especially in art. There is still something elsewhere to be found.