Hirst's thirst for life

Gordon Burn: "I dug it out the other day, the Sylvester book. And it's weird, when I looked at it, I'd gone through it six or seven years ago writing DH in the margins." Damien Hirst: "I haven't read it for years ... D'you mean what I say is like Bacon?" It is not what Burn means, but the comparison is inevitable. Francis Bacon is Damien Hirst's top artist, and these conversations with his friend Gordon Burn clearly have the precedent of Bacon's interviews with the critic David Sylvester in mind.

But the contrast is spectacular. Consider. During his interviews, Bacon ages from 53 to 77; Hirst from 26 (just after the flies and the shark) to 34 (last year). Sylvester, a brilliant art critic, was almost 20 years younger than Bacon. Burn, a writer with a special interest in serial killers, is about 20 years older than Hirst. The Bacon-Sylvester interviews, concentrating on art, were edited, shaped, rephrased for publication. The Hirst-Burn dialogues are transcribed as live, with "no off-limits" and wander and jump all over the place - art, Saatchi, drugs, restauranting with Matthew Freud. And Sylvester certainly never said anything like: "There was an incident in Dublin last month when you dropped your trousers in the hotel bar and inserted a chicken bone in your foreskin." What Hirst says is nothing like Bacon, either. His frenetic, stalling, spiralling spiel is an unwieldy instrument for getting things said. He doesn't do the quotable line, such as Bacon's "leaving a trail of the human presence ... as the snail leaves its slime".

But still, things are said. Like: "It's, like, if a tree falls down on your land, or in your street, it looks ... bigger. You drive to work every day, everything's the same, you know where you are. Then one day you drive to work, and a tree's fallen down, and you go "Fucking hell!" You look at the tree and it's massive. You never notice it until it falls down. Artists do that." Or like: "It's just like: Fuck off ! I understand the history of art. And I know Picasso's a bit of an egomaniac, and I know de Kooning was, and I know Matisse was, and I know Jackson Pollock was. The fucking great ones. They never failed artistically. And, basically, that's what it takes. It's like: Fuck everything you hear. Carry on with what you believe. It's fantastic, and it works." These aren't epigrams (though the first could be sharpened into one). What they are is speeches, the kind of speeches many playwrights would be happy to write, and many actors happy to deliver, with the rhythms of modern British drama. Hirst has Bacon in his head, Jimmy Porter in his mouth.

That would be one reason to read this book. If you read it for content it's like walking against a high wind. The dialogue is unfocussed.

Hirst talks sense and rubbish indiscriminately. As you'd expect from his work, he's very sharp on the languages of contemporary art, and there's much barstool philosophising about life and death. But the real subject here is getting what you want.

On the Way to Work should be sold on the self-help shelves, along with Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and similar. Hirst's example, his vitality, drive, defiant will - how to get the world to work for you just by picking up the phone - are enormously more energising than the coaxing precepts of your average book of counsel.

And then come success and the horrors. "I smashed a fucking huge hole in the plasterboard. It was the first time I ever realised that anything had actually happened at all. Look you fuckers, I inhabit a world you don't even know exists. It was the first time I realised that I did." "You get to a point where you run out of people to be more famous than. Then what happens?" And everyone is out to destroy him, and tame him, and use him, and willing him to lose it, and wanting him to die, but he'll show them. And for a long time he doesn't do much art, and lads it about, and gets out of his head.

No irony, really. For Hirst, everything is about power. Art is sheer power, " massive effect". "Great art is when you walk round the corner and go, 'Fucking Hell, what's that!' And it's hard to separate that from other kinds of power, such as money, esteem, making a big noise, cutting deals, leading the gang, being on a fantastic high, no surrender, no slowing down."

Yet, what strikes you, too, is the contrast between this exhilarating sense of power, and the narrow compass within which it's exercised. It doesn't strike Burn. In these interviews he's not so much questioner, more stoker. Awed, he says only what he hopes will set Hirst off on another awesome riff. "No off-limits" - but no serious challenges. So when Hirst at one point tosses out "Rachel Whiteread has played a very safe game", Burn certainly does not reply: "Well, Rachel Whiteread, after years of political trouble, has got a Holocaust memorial in Vienna off the ground, whereas you, after years of getting off your face in the Groucho Club, have opened a smart restaurant in Notting Hill - very dangerous!" He says things like "People suspect that ... in some way you're pushing back the boundaries of what it is to be alive now." But, in a way, it is an exemplary life, a lesson in self-belief: as a virtue, handy, as a religion, the abyss.