Meet our Drink with the Idler guest Clare Pollard

Poet and author of the acclaimed novel Delphi Clare Pollard will be our guest on A Drink with the Idler, Thursday 13 October, 6pm London time. Buy your ticket here. Free for subscribers.

Tell us about your new book in a few words.

CLARE POLLARD: It’s a Greek Tragedy set during lockdown.

What was your worst job ever? 

CP: After university, I worked in a chain pub in the City, mainly frequented by depressed office-workers avoiding going home to their families. Smoking inside was still allowed and at the end of a shift my clothes reeked of cigarettes.

What was your best job ever? 

CP: My years as Managing Editor of the Idler in my early twenties, of course. The Idler was young and glamorous back then, and famous for its extremely cool parties. It was a lot of fun, and I suddenly got to meet all these artists and writers I’d read about in real life.

How many hours do you work a day? 

CP: That answer would depend, like many marriages, on the question of whether you class childcare as work. My writing life is very erratic and dependent on the muse – I can barely write a poem for months, and then a kind of fever descends and I can’t stop. I wrote a first draft of Delphi in a month.

Do you believe in the nap? 

CP: No. Sadly it’s always taken me a long time to get to sleep, so the concept of the nap has little use for me.

Stoic or Epicurean?

CP: I vote for a bit of both. Trying to live an ethical life, but also taking pleasure where you can in a cocktail, a garden, new books, good coffee.

Advice to your younger self? 

CP: I was always so desperate to be a novelist, I spent a lot of my youth depressed about rejections. But I got there in the end. There’s that great verse in Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” about the journey of Odysseus’s crew, which I wish I’d listened to more closely:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

(trans. Edmund Keeley)

Hear Clare talk on A Drink with the Idler, 13 October. Find out more here. 

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