Cutting the story short: John Freeman's new literary journal

Today, though, Freeman has arrived at that hangover and is nursing it in Oslo, after launching the journal at an event staged partly in English, partly in Norwegian and featuring the distinguished Norwegian writer Dag Solstad. “A surreal experience, given that I don’t speak Norwegian,” says Freeman.

Of all the launches the 41-year-old is staging – he’ll be in Glasgow next week – the Norwegian one is surely the most fascinating because it centres on a long-form essay by the brilliant American novelist, essayist and translator Lydia Davis, known for the originality and daring brevity of her fiction. “The very-short-story writer,” according to the New Yorker. For Freeman’s, though, she turned in a concise 24,000 words, On Learning Norwegian, in which not one word is wasted.

To cut a long story short, this astonishing piece tells how Davis taught herself to read, and enjoy, a new, untranslated 426-page book in Norwegian – trekking across the knotty landscape of the language without any grasp of it beyond a few words, scraps of childhood German and minus a dictionary.

Dag Solstad’s “Telemark novel”, as it is called for short in Norway – “even in Norwegian since the full title is formidably long,” writes Davis – is a family saga. Described by some Norwegian critics as “tedious” and “unreadable”, it has been compared, in both size and dramatic interest, to a telephone directory, though it has also received much admiring praise, notes Davis, whose essay I have now read three times because it offers wondrous insights into a unique writer’s mind. When I tell Freeman this, he replies: “I know! I have never read anything like this essay. To commission a writer of this calibre is to enter into a magical space.”

This is the third time he’s worked with Davis, whoM he believes is capable of writing about anything. She wrote a story for him when he was editing the London-based quarterly Granta – he resigned abruptly in 2012 owing to a slashed budget – and again when he put together his anthology, about New York, Tales of Two Cities (2014).

In the summer of 2014, Freeman was in Norway to interview the Swedish writer and Nobel prizewinner Tomas Transtromer when he heard that Davis was learning Norwegian by reading one of its most difficult novels. “I’d wanted to ask her to write something for the first issue of Freeman’s when I began to put it together, but I didn’t think it was likely because I had recently finished working on and published her story, Travelling From Brooklyn, in Tales of Two Cities. Some writers always have something new – but she struck me as a kind of comet that comes every three years.

“She agreed, however, only asking if there was any upper limit on the word count. Finally, upon reading the piece she submitted, saying, ‘it’s really long!’ I read it and I felt, here is a book, not just an essay.”

What prompted the convivial, well-read and impressively well-connected Freeman, former president of America’s National Book Critics Circle, author of How to Read a Novelist, and teacher at Manhattan’s New School and New York University, to launch a new literary journal, especially after his experiences at Granta?

“I realised how much I missed Granta, which I edited for five years, when I was working with writers such as Lydia Davis, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers for Tales of Two Cities,” he replies. “I really loved that job, the collaboration with the writers I got to work with, although I didn’t think I would go back to [editing] for quite some time.

“But when I moved back to New York exactly three years ago, I was struck by the fact that the city’s income inequality is almost as great as it’s ever been. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The homeless shelters are stretched to breaking point and there are more and more homeless people on the streets. Although I kind of knew this when I was at Granta, because I commuted back and forth to see my girlfriend [literary agent Nicole Aragi], only when I moved back permanently did I see the scale of the moral dilemma – that to live in New York is to live with the constant awareness of this economic inequality. It requires you to some degree to do something about it or to ignore it.”

For California-born Freeman, the middle one of three brothers, the divide between rich and poor was doubly troubling. His younger brother, Tim, was homeless, staying in a Manhattan shelter three blocks away on the same street, where Freeman had just bought an apartment with an inheritance from his grandmother.

“In 2013, here I was renovating my own apartment and my younger brother was in a homeless shelter. I should say that Tim had not been left out of his inheritance, but he has a mental illness so had no immediate access to the money. I love my brother; I did what I could but he walked away into his separate life. So I did what writers do, I made a book out of it because I had this exclusive opportunity to look at what New York had become, a city at breaking point with more than one in three people existing at or below poverty level. I asked 30 writers, from Zadie Smith to Edmund White, to write about what New York is like today and how economic inequality has changed it.

“I put the book together fairly quickly because I wanted it to be timely but timeless. By the time I’d finished, I realised that I missed editing a lot. I’d been kicking around ideas about what to do with myself, maybe opening a bookstore, or a bar – something involving books and drinking!

“Then I thought, ‘why don’t I start a journal from scratch?’ Loads and loads of literary journals come and go all the time, but I wanted to create something about storytelling, a journal that was open to readers rather than literary cliques, an anthology/journal. I was lucky that Grove Atlantic wanted to work with me and they dissuaded me from making the journal a quarterly, so it’s biannual. I didn’t want to become the Ant and Dec of the literary world!”

He explains that he felt it was time to reassert the power of the story and the ability of narrative to transport us, “especially since we’re in the middle of a massive displacement crisis. By turning away from such things we make worse things happen. Is there anything more courageous than taking up your entire family and walking into the unknown with only a few belongings in your hands?”

Indeed, one of the finest pieces in Freeman’s – “the name is not an ego trip, I’ve always liked its democratic spirit and I hope the magazine will embody that” – is by Aleksandar Hemon. In Search of Space Lost chronicles the ways his parents, Bosnian emigrants to Canada, made their new country and the plot of land they occupy their own.

The second issue will be out in June. The theme will be Family. “I toyed with the idea of Humour, but then I began talking to various writers I’ve always wanted to publish – I have a wish list headed by the great John Burnside, by the way – and the idea of a Family kept coming up,” he says.

So are his contributors’ names under wraps?

“Well,” he replies, “I can tell you that the marvellous Scottish-born writer Aminetta Forna will be writing about her family story. I really want to publish things that are strange and wonderful – like Lydia Davis’s piece.”

And what of Freeman’s own family and brother Tim?

“When I told Tim I was writing about him in the Introduction to Tales of Two Cities, he said he wanted to write something for the anthology. And he did – it’s a terrific piece. He’s very, very bright. My brother eventually moved to Dallas, where he seems happy now. It’s warm, he has a car and things to do. I’m proud of him and still love him – even if he has become a Republican.”

Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on Arrival (Grove Press UK, £10.99). John Freeman will be in conversation with the artist, writer and designer of the magazine, Michael Salu, at a free event in the Wolfson Medical Building, Glasgow University, on November 24.