Her novels are celebrated for their weavings of fantastical tragi-comic plots and realistic characters, delivered with exuberant wit and sparkling dialogue. She talks to us about Sex and Stravinsky, her inspirations and writing processes and being given the label of a “South African writer”. She also tells us a little about the novel she is ‘brooding’ on at the moment, which may involve a lady who uses ‘a pet baboon to deflea the dog’…

Interview by Kit Toda

I know that some writers find it hard to explain but I was wondering whether you could talk to us about the process of creating a novel?

Characters rise in my mind and I hear their voices ? I usually know their names. I don’t quite see them – they’re like people in dreams, sort of shadowy.  I start writing down little vignettes about them, assuming by now that at some point they’ll intersect and I’ll work out why I’m writing about these people.

Right from my first novel, the process was very audial; I recited it all before I wrote it down and played with speech rhythms and so forth. It was quite a lot like writing music and I still do that.  I talk everything out loud and read it aloud and fiddle with the rhythms. That’s the fun of it really, for me.

I used to write late at night but I stopped because I was always falling asleep in my children’s beds reading bedtime stories and I’d wake up at four in the morning and think ‘Oh I did it again!’ So my son learnt to read rather precociously; he got so tired of me falling asleep. ‘It’s alright, I finished it’, he’d say when I took up the story next day.

But then I thought why don’t I get up at four o’clock in the morning and write then instead. I don’t know whether it was because I was closer to dream states but it made me feel braver about being more intuitive. I started writing in a way that became more patterned.

Talking of patterns, you have frequently used great artistic works as a recurring motif running through your novels. Temple of Delight had Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Juggling has Shakespearian comedy and this time, Sex and Stravinsky has the ballet Pulcinella. How does this come about? Does the work inspire the novel?

Mostly it happens quite unconsciously. This can sound very unconvincing when I say it, but what I do is work in this completely intuitive muddly mud-pie way.

In the case of Temples of Delight I thought, ‘Funny, everything is happening in threes in this book’, there were the three girls and the three boys and there is this very charismatic, slightly mad, captivating girl who captures Alice’s affections but is then supplanted by an equally compelling male person. Alice’s stammer dropped onto the page and then she noticed the ‘stammer’ in the Papageno song so there was some Mozartian stuff going on.

It was only after a while that I realised, ‘I know what you’re doing with this story – this is shadowing the story of The Magic Flute; such a weird story and kind of politically incorrect and as if written in a dream state. The opera has something one can’t define which is very powerful. I had some idea that it had to do with gender and unmediated desire. The book is full of sexual desire and…so really that connection placed itself quite unconsciously.

The same thing happened with Juggling. It seemed to fall into five parts with an ugly dénouement in the middle. I noticed very early on that the book was very acrobatical, that it seemed to be all about perpendicular and horizontal; people falling off spiral staircases, or there’s the boy who levitates and so on. Eventually I thought, this is taking the format of a Shakespeare comedy. It’s all about energy and balance, and once I’d realised that I thought, okay, I can be really brave at the end. I can do musical chairs and the characters can all hook up with the right people.

I know quite often reviewers talk about my intricate plots or sometimes they accuse me of plotting too much. But really the plots just drop themselves like acorns into the text without my being aware of it. Of course on some level it’s all stuff that one is unconsciously obsessing about in the back of one’s brain and it eventually works its way into the weave.  It’s like some kind of spider’s web. So, no, I don’t consciously base things on operas and plays and so on. But I obviously do obsess about them.

Are you able to say what it was that made the Stravinsky ballet Pulcinella the motif for your latest novel?

BT: As I said before, it’s a very intuitive thing and I get a feeling about the mood of a book, along with having some of the characters. I thought, this book is like a dance, it’s really balletic. There’s quite a lot about masks. I think one of the triggers was reading Stravinsky’s account of himself and Picasso as young men traipsing round Naples looking for a story for a Commedia dell’Arte ballet, which resulted in Pulcinella. Partly I thought, if you’re acting in a mask, those leather masks Commedia dell’Arte actors wore, then you can’t express emotion with your face, and so emotion becomes movement. I like the idea that the mask makes one stylise, and I had a sense that the book was a bit like a dance itself.

But then I put it by because it was getting much too hard for me, I was doing my usual staring into the dark, thinking, why do these two people both have names that begin with J, why this, why that. What is going on, and how does it all connect? So I put it by and I started writing Frankie and Stankie instead. That was much easier to write. I bought twenty-five school exercise books and wrote down this whole kaleidoscope of little stories from my early life. I’d decided to write only ‘true life’ stories, not make anything up, and also stick with small stories. I had such an instinct against writing one of those earnest, white liberal novels about South Africa, always in the hand-wringing position.

Once I’d finished it, I then thought, okay, now I’m going to go back to that hard novel because I’m beginning to see how it would knit together, and then my husband got very ill and I put it away for about three, four years, and finally I took it up again, and I thought, let me see if this book will still get up and dance for me. And I found that it would. It’s about being playful really, writing novels. Playing and energy.

Critics and readers have often commented on the lightness of tone in your books. But, like in Shakespearean comedies, many awful things happen – rape, abuse, violent deaths. Personally I often find that I’m more affected and shocked by these things than I would probably otherwise be, if you hadn’t maintained the incongruously light tone. You never seem to go for pathos. Is this something you very consciously do when writing and if so, is it difficult to maintain?

When I wrote Temples of Delight, I found the process very disturbing and the story powerfully sad. I remember splashing tears all over the page when Alice gets into bed with her dead friend. It was pretty gothic really, and operatic, but full of pain. Then some reviewers said how refreshing it was to have a book so happy, so frothy, and I thought: ‘You call that happy?’ She’s crossing the Atlantic with a lunatic. He’s got this child for her by an act of fraud; tampering with a will and lying to a priest. And The Travelling Hornplayer is about the saddest book one could read.

It’s all about comedy as ‘a better form of tragedy’, isn’t it, about having the energy and dexterity to face down gruesome things. Juggling was all about symmetry and balance and flying. It wasn’t about happy stuff, it was about the energy that’s needed to keep all the balls in the air, to create the illusion of something happy, even though you can’t be sure things aren’t all going to fall apart once the curtain goes down.

I don’t think it suits me to be earnest and I like restraint. I think readers of the books divide into those who understand that, and those who think I’m being inappropriately flippant about sad or horrible things. And I think: ‘No, no, I’m just practising emotional restraint.’ I also believe, as you say, that maybe the impact is greater if things are understated.

TL: Yes, I still remember that line, ‘as an act of the rape the episode was not of the most dramatic,’ in Juggling.

It’s a kind of tightrope walking act isn’t it? To get what you think is the appropriate tone. I try to get a sort of tragi-comic balance, which suits some readers better than others, I suppose. But it’s in my nature to feel that one mustn’t overwrite. Yes, it’s something I am aware of.

TL: Talking of tightrope walking, because of the South African setting of much of Sex and Stravinsky, you do inevitably end up facing the sensitive issue of race. In a previous interview with us Christopher Ricks said: “But then all great religious art is accusable of blasphemy, yet those accusations should not stick. So all erotic art is accusable of pornography. If the question doesn’t even arise then it must have played safe and nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe.” I often felt that you weren’t playing safe when you deal with racial matters in your writing. For example the character of Gertrude [a black South African servant who steals, is neglectful of her brilliant child and has started believing in her own racial inferiority] in Sex and Stravinsky is quite a difficult character I think…

Well, yes, but there’s no reason to believe that merely because someone comes from an oppressed group, she’s going to be pure in thought word or deed. Lots of employees steal in grossly unequal societies. It’s seen as a way to redress the balance.

The one thing that lingered from writing Frankie and Stankie that seemed to me to apply to this current book was that the ‘big’ story behind all these little stories was both how multi-ethnic the white community was, even given the racial caste system that divided us from black people. Any school class I’d ever been in was full of people who were first generation immigrants. They were Portuguese, Lebanese, Italian, German; every class was one third Jewish, there were lots of Greek immigrants, et cetera. That, and the fact that in all new world societies, people often have these very dramatic trajectories in which you visibly see them rising up or falling back, coming a long way from their origins. It interested me to follow such journeys in some of my characters. Also, in general, we live in this global world which is kind of scary and brutal and exciting, and just much more complicated than things used to be.

So I thought, taking characters with a background like Josh’s; someone who is the son of a trafficked convent orphan fallen on hard times, a boy who, rescued by a Liberal dissident family, comes to England on a scholarship. Or Jack the servant’s child. They undertake faraway journeys, but then they come together; the masks fall and they ‘see’ each other anew. It only struck me yesterday, that in a way maybe the book is a bit like The Tempest, in the way Prospero draws all these people to the island. Jack is the character who does this; he’s a sort of magical figure. I don’t expect him to be that realistic.  He’s the magnet who is going to draw them all back to this place, which unbeknown to them is actually the one-time servant’s cottage from which he started out.

I’d noticed, intermittently, when in late-era Apartheid South Africa, a slightly disturbing phenomenon in the households of well-meaning liberal white families who would have a maid who lived on the premises in a little cottagey hutch at the bottom of the garden and, being kind people, would not insist that any child the maid bore get instantly dispatched to the ‘homelands’* as the law required. Then gradually that child would be sort of seduced by the white family; by what it had to offer.

You might get a situation where, while the family’s own children would go to the neighbourhood state school, (and the state schools were pretty good because the Apartheid state was spending ninety percent of the education budget on thirteen percent of the children, i.e. the white children) of course the little black child wasn’t allowed, by law, to go to that school. So the child would either have to be dispatched to one of these ghastly rural ‘homelands’, or the family would pay for the maid’s child to attend a local private school. Twenty years earlier the Bantu Education Act had driven out all the rather good church-run schools for black children, but gradually some of the white private schools began cautiously admitting a few black children. They waited to see what the state would do about it, and, when nothing happened, they began admitting more. So you could get this odd situation sometimes where, for instance, a convent school would be ninety percent Muslim girls, whose parents then began to ask, ‘but why have our children got to go to Mass three times a week?’ And, in families like that of Jack’s mother’s employer, the white child of the family would be at the state school, while they would be paying to send the black child to a private school.

My daughter once quoted an incident she’d witnessed at a birthday party that such a white family was having for the little black girl who lived with her mother at the end of the garden. All the little private school friends came to the party, and the barefoot mother was serving them. She overheard the little black girl saying to her posh friends, ‘Do you remember when I used to be black?’ The masks in my book have something to do with confused identities.

The whole book seemed to be about masks and deception, and identities and masquerades… I suppose it’s a lovely idea that you can step into someone else’s life, or maybe get a second chance at finding out who you are and starting again. The boy Jack [in Sex and Stravinsky], having been sent to an elite pan-African boarding school in Swaziland, finds himself strongly attracted by French African culture, because he’s reacting against what he’s experienced in early childhood, namely British Imperialist racism.

TL: And French African culture looked at from a foreigner’s point of view would be more glamorous?

BT: All of those European colonizers were horrible in their own different ways, but I felt he would have that mindset. I enchanted myself, along with him, as he undertook his magical, secret journey through Africa to Senegal, which is a very beguiling place. I was drawn to the idea of making his journey seem romantic.

Thinking of Jack, I was talking to a young historian friend of mine some years ago, and I said, ‘I’ve got this character in my book who is really more a magical character, and quite shamelessly unrealistic’. I began to tell her about Jack and how he’d started out in the servants’ hutch and ended up in Milan, an intellectual in Prada shoes, writing about Dario Fo. She said, ‘But I taught that boy.’ As a lecturer, she’d gone into one of those London schools for the performing arts, to teach. ‘I had exactly such a boy from Durban in my class,’ she said. It’s reassuring when you find out that stuff you’ve invented occurs in nature. You have to believe in it yourself. Some of my friends were bothered by the boy who levitated [in Juggling], but I believed that he levitated; unless you believe things they’re not going to work, are they?

TL: Talking of all these magical things that happen in your novels, I was thinking how difficult it is to classify your writing – of course classification is something of an artificial and perhaps pointless business – but I find the way your books seem to defy classification quite interesting. Even though the characters seem quite psychologically real, and the dialogue seems realistic, it’s not realism, because so many surreal things happen. Have you thought about what genre your writing might be in, or how one might classify it?

BT: No, I haven’t much. I suppose because I was quite old when I started writing, and I was always too dozy to think, ‘I’m going to be a writer.’ When I was at university the English department was just obsessed with Leavis, and I remember reacting against that a bit, thinking, how can you say, ‘Here are these five great writers that you’re allowed to think well of, and everybody else is in some kind of sub-category.’ But I missed out on all the structuralism and what-not. I’ve never read any of the literary theory that certain academic critics assert have been my influences.  I had children, and made heavy weather of that, and somehow always seemed to be playing open house to everybody else’s children as well, so I think I just didn’t find time to read any fiction for about a decade.

So when I wrote my first novel, I made assumptions that came from way back, like the way I just bounced into the dialogue. A friend of mine said, ‘you didn’t waste any time on the scenery, did you?’ I had no idea that at the time it wasn’t fashionable to write a novel that was very much based on three-dimensional characters who would leap off the page. What you were supposed to be doing was tricksy things with plots and it was positively unfashionable to have characters who worked in any ‘real’ way. It only began to dawn on me quite slowly, that that was what the ‘literary’ books were doing. But now it’s me being written about in terms of ‘intertextuality’….

I just wrote, and afterwards I thought, ‘is it a novel?’ I had no idea about publishers, I had never heard of literary agents, and I stuffed my pages into an envelope without even a title and sent it to Cape. Cape wrote back declining it, so I put it back in the drawer and did nothing with it until six months later a friend said to me, ‘why don’t you send it to Gollancz?’ So I sent it to Gollancz, and they said yes. I had no idea that one publisher was different from another. Gollancz were very sweet to me, the book got wonderful reviews but for ages it was never in the bookshops. It was years before I began to feel in any way integrated with the literary world. Maybe it was good for me?

I realised very quickly that writing fiction was incredibly compelling and a gloriously playful thing to do; that it was somehow recapturing that pleasure one had in childhood, playing and inventing, or hiding in a shed with a book you couldn’t put down. I was very clear that what I was doing was for fun. For a while publishers said, oh, people will forget about you if you don’t produce a novel every two years. I thought, so what? I’ve never been ambitious.

So, in short, I wasn’t really aware of a need to classify what I did, and the models I had were very kind of… one feels embarrassed to say…. because all of us have our heads full of Shakespeare and Yeats, etc. But I’d catch myself thinking, ‘there’s something about the rhythm of that sentence. What is it?’ And then it would be Yeats, or Eliot – yet again. That’s the joy of having all this literary furniture in your mind.

There was that period when all those Magic Realist novels came out of South America and, while writing Juggling, I thought, ‘But we’ve got an English Magic Realist, and he’s the best, and he’s Shakespeare.’ So I suppose my genre is a kind of tragic-comic romance. It’s quite theatrical. I’m drawn to that. I like lyricism, and pastoralism, and also possibly because I come from South Africa, I am quite politically obsessed and a social realist as well, having spent a lot of my life around leftish, dissident people. It’s maybe a strange thing, trying to knit together that grittiness with the more pastoral dream-like stuff.

If you grow up, and you’re a bit aberrant, and you are open-eyed about the state – my sister and I woke every morning with our father swearing at the foreign minister on the radio – you very quickly develop a sort of instinct of defiance. I think I irritate some readers because they think I’m subversive and smart-alec. Some reviewers loved my first novel in spite of, as they said, this ghastly, messy, showy-off…bohemian family [the Goldmans]. I was quite surprised, because for me they were wish-fulfilment characters; the sort of people I wished I knew.

TL: The Goldmans are one of many Jewish families in your novels, although they tend to be agnostic and only culturally Jewish. I was wondering perhaps whether this was because your family, although not Jewish,  were ? I gather from Frankie and Stankie ? liberal dissidents and…

BT: Yes, that book was entirely a memoir: all real-life stories. My family is ethnically muddled. My mother was a bourgeois Berliner whose family had come from the Danish Friesian Islands. My paternal grandmother was a Sephardic Jew from Amsterdam who married a communist runaway from one of those strict little Protestant sects that you get in Holland where you read the Bible all Sunday and have twelve children and it’s all bonnets and long skirts and thou-shalt-not.

Also, as I said, South Africa was a hugely immigrant society. Certainly the intelligentsia and a large chunk of the professional class were Jewish; every doctor and dentist I ever had was Jewish. Plus, when I grew up there in the 1950’s, Jews were noticeably dominant in anti-racist politics. They were the people you could count on to have civilised views; they were often cultivated people who read books and played the violin. They believed in equality and human rights. Almost everyone I ever fell in love with was Jewish, as a result. They weren’t Zionists, or Jewish nationalists in those days.

TL: I thought, perhaps because you grew up in this intellectual unconventional left-wing household – all the hallmarks of a certain ‘type’ of Jewish family —

BT: My family was very unlike the Goldman family, for all that they were bookish and musical: for one thing, they were fanatically neat and tidy. I found myself very confined by that as a child. But many of my friends when I was growing up found being in my house refreshing. My school-friends were very drawn to my parents; in fact my best friend so stole the hearts of my parents, that they liked her a lot more than they liked me, for quite a while!

[Later, by email, Barbara added the following:

Re the Goldmans and my own parents. My Ma played the piano, but she was very shy and diffident, as was my dad in his way. They were not only tidy to a degree, along with being hygiene fiends, but they were pretty shy about sex and bodily functions - what I mean is, they would never have discussed such things, or gone in for public displays of affection. They were not much like those noisy, opinionated, mucky Hampstead people and would probably have given the Goldman family rather a wide berth. Incidentally, numbers of people, both known to me and un-known, have written to tell me that I obviously based the Goldmans on their family. Weird, isn't it? One person - a Californian beach belle in her time - said to me, 'I recognised myself in Jane Goldman, but why did you have me doing all that cooking? I don't cook.’]

Another thing: something that began to change in South Africa since my time is that far more Afrikaners and people in other non-Jewish white groups began to think ‘No no, this system is wrong’. The again, a factor that has had a negative effect on the younger Jewish community is the increasing horribleness of Israel. I find it distressing trying to get my head around this shift, since I still have the expectation that Jews are going to be leftish, progressive, non-racist and open-minded people. I find myself reduced to deep gloom by the odd blast of knee-jerk defense of Israel’s actions.

As to the looking-in as an ‘outsider’, it becomes a part of you, if you have this somewhat multi-ethnic background. My best friend in Oxford comes from an old family in England and almost anybody you mention: ‘Oh, second cousin of mine…’  She’s related to everybody.  It must be very different to feel so rooted: to be in a place where your family has been for generations, to look around at your furniture and it’s all something that Mummy inherited from her great grandmother. Everyone in my family has always sort of left behind the houses and jewels and property and run from A to B with one small suitcase which they’ve usually dumped in a ditch on the way. I think it triggers fiction writing. If you have this feeling of not being quite sure about your identity, you explore that, and inevitably…

Well, I don’t consciously base my characters on anyone. Just occasionally for scene shifting or walk-on parts I’ll use some real-life person and that’s a very two-dimensional character. Ironically, the imaginary ones are the ones who have real life. But in some way I don’t understand, all the characters, regardless of age, position, gender and so on must be ways of trying out oneself. And that has to do with not quite knowing who you are. You’re always flowing into other people.

Click here for Part II

TL: I found whilst reading Sex and Stravinsky that my ’so-called favourite character’ was the one you happened to be focusing on that point. So that when I was reading the story of the superhumanly capable Caroline…

BT: Yes. Incidentally, no sooner had I written her up, than I met a tall, clever Australian woman called Caroline who’s now my friend! Nature always imitates fiction in my experience. I had thought Caroline was a monster, but because as a writer you spend so much time walking in a character’s shoes and thinking through that person’s head, you start understanding them and you become more indulgent towards them.

TL: I found that when I was reading the chapters concentrating on Caroline and Herman, I found them far more attractive creatures who made Josh and Hattie seem rather insipid.

BT: Yes, yes.

TL: But I found when I was reading about Josh and Hattie that I thought of them as sensitive and cultured while Caroline seemed insufferably competent at everything and Herman just a jock.

BT: I also noticed that about my feelings towards the characters while writing. I’d waver. I wasn’t consistently in love with these people. It’s the two kids, the two adolescents that I consistently liked. I was rather keen on Cat when I was writing that rant of hers against her mother, but objectively, she is really rather ghastly. In spite of one’s deep involvement, it’s also necessary to be estranged. Recently I remarked to my editor: ‘Hattie and Josh are quite weedy aren’t they?’ and she got really defensive on their behalf! But, as you say, it’s Caroline and Herman who diminish them. Lots of people I know who have read the book say: ‘Oh, but I love Caroline, my heart goes out to her, poor Caroline, she’s so brilliant isn’t she’. Then I feel heartless.

I believe that these characters are the people they would be, given their particular and sometimes searing life experiences. For instance Jack would be as cold and ‘touch-me-not’. He would have had to become that way. Or that’s one of the ways he would project himself given the way his life has gone.

Herman is a character whom I hadn’t meant to make so prominent in the book but once he was on the page, he became one of those characters who starts pushing you around. He’s so irksomely alpha-male. Then I began to think: I can have some fun with this person. Afrikaners aren’t the world’s pariahs any more and he’s insidiously attractive. And that phenomenon, of a one-time Afrikaner nationalist, who has become an urbane bourgeois capitalist is quite common.

Afrikaans was a language despised by English-speaking South Africans when I was growing up, so I thought: actually, I’m going to throw a little bit of this delicious language into the text even though no English reader will literally understand it. I don’t think that matters. I’m going to chuck it in because it’s such an oomph-y, sexy language. We’ve associated it with the dour, Calvinist, white-racist ghastlies who used to run the place, but, historically, it’s a brown person’s language. It was the creolised version of Dutch that was spoken by Malay slaves and domestic servants; ‘kitchen Dutch’. Then it got transformed into this symbol of white Afrikaner nationalism. But it’s a fantastic language for swearing in, or being smutty in. It’s the best for dirty jokes and so on and I thought, Herman can swear at everyone in this language. He can give orders and they’ll all jump. He has such natural authority.

The other thing I noticed from writing the Travelling Hornplayer… I’ve always had fun with dialogue and different voices but in that book (and it’s something I’ve done in the Stravinsky book as well) I’ve given whole sections to a character, and what I began to notice is that everybody is an unreliable narrator – so Jonathan can go ‘RANT RANT RANT’ and sneer about Sonia, the media-don with whom he’s having an affair, but the next minute Jonathan’s wife is telling us about this wonderful sympathetic woman she’s met. She and Sonia become true friends and neither has any idea that they are sleeping with the same man.

Sally will be banging-on about Roger, her mathematician husband, about what an ineffectual nerd he is, with his crank diets and whatnot; then Ellen meets Roger and thinks SWOON, SWOON, this beautiful, brilliant man with his hair falling over his eyes. For her Roger is the ‘Dreamboat’. All of us are different for other people; nothing is static. I don’t like to be judgemental about characters.

So, I suppose it’s true of Sex and Stravinsky. I’m not sure I was aware of whom I liked and disliked: I was simply aware that the characters would show up good or bad in different contexts; that Hattie who is so loved by Josh, will irritate Herman so much that he becomes almost sadistic to her: well, he would, because he’s that kind. He’s a predator really, isn’t he – if you’ve got a small, dainty balletic wife like that, who is culturally rather different from you, she’s going to drive you crazy and you’re going to start entertaining yourself by picking on her. And he wouldn’t do that with Caroline; he’s generous and supportive to her; he knows she has it in her to knock him down and he respects her for that. So I don’t know if any of them are particularly good or bad, or nice or alluring. I’m interested in them for who they are.

TL: But I did find that you gave the more sympathetic characters better taste. So: Caroline has her beautiful clothes that she hand-makes, and the horrific Greek character goes around in a ‘nipple pink’ Chevrolet

BT: I wondered if that was frightfully snobby – that ghastly stuff and the nude statue in the swimming pool?

TL: And the doll toilet paper cover…

BT: Yes.

TL: …which was fantastically vulgar.

BT: That was naughty of me.

TL: It seems from reading you that you very much like nice things. Is that just because when the characters are sympathetic you want to give them nice things?

BT: [laughs] Not entirely. For instance the Silvers; Josh’s family, are impervious to visual effects and their house isn’t smart though they’ve gathered together these paintings that become valuable, merely because Bernie Silver was buying them from impecunious artists out of kindness, or getting them in return for money he’d dished out and so on – so no, I don’t necessarily think superior people are all frightfully House & Garden as you can see, but – I suppose I’m sensitive to the visual aesthetic, but I… you know – Caroline is a brainy graduate, whereas those wretched people like the crooked Greek, those are small town white-trash people.

TL: But Caroline’s ghastly mother, you know: she has no taste at all.

BT: She has rather stifling would-be genteel furniture… I felt she was the kind of person who would have those horrid little figurines  (I hope the makers of them don’t sue me). I was slightly aware when I was giving Caroline’s mother her not-nice furniture and the sweatshop rug and so on – and with the Greek’s house where he’s spending all his captive wife’s money on this vulgar stuff – I thought, ‘Is this a bit snobby?’. You know, one’s very aware that English comedy is hugely based on social class. Yes, I think that’s quite valid what you say: that the superior people have nicer things and eat nicer food.

[Later, by email, Barbara added the following:

Re the ‘nice’ people having nicer furniture/ clothes, etc, it occurred to me that I don't much like Herman and he has some pretty classy chairs and objects. And his clothes are pretty classy as well. I'm also fairly un-sure about whether or not I like Caroline, who appears to have a highly developed aesthetic. Likewise, that French woman in Juggling, with the grey Parisian flat. I’m not sure I like her, though I very much like her flat! ]

You know, when I was writing Temples of Delight, one of the things I asked myself was why is everyone always eating in this book? And then I remembered Lévi-Strauss’ words: to eat is to fuck and I thought, well: it’s to do with sex; this is a very sexy book. But the Catholics are always eating nicer food than the Protestants: it’s because the heroine is being gradually seduced by Catholicism and she’s going to convert, isn’t she? Because not only did Catholic Jem tell her wonderful creative lies about her own imaginary family, filling Alice’s head with images of her ‘mother’, the French farm girl who does this marvellous cooking and then there’s real-life Catholic Giovanni, the Italian American whose family run a patisserie. It’s sensual and alluring. Even the kindly priest has a fancy for German apple cake. The ‘nice’ things are signifiers.

TL: Well, Catholicism is the most glamorous religion, I think personally.

BT: It’s certainly rich in symbolism and sensual effects

TL:  Yes, I’ve always wanted to be a lapsed Catholic!

BT: Yes…yes. I converted to Catholicism but after about seven years I lapsed… but I loved it and I was able to use my baptismal experience for Alice. The white robes, the holy water, poured over her head from a scallop shell; all that, and there was my poor secular, lefty husband thinking, ‘My wife has gone over to the dark side.’

But for those seven years my whole life felt like a sacrament. The liturgy gathers up all your emotions and elevates them. And of course I was lucky because there was a local church that went in for a sung High Mass every Sunday – I think if I’d had one of those churches where they sing crappy hymns and it’s all foot-washing and folk guitars, I would have thought, no, God’s not here. [laughs] After seven years of striving to believe, I thought: face it; you’re only here because you love the music and the paintings: it’s an aesthetic experience for you. But so what? In truth, the main thing that made me lapse was all this male-chauvinist banging on about contraception and abortion: it seemed to me to be very anti-woman. And I really loathe the Vatican. At the grass-roots, all over Africa and Latin America, the priests and the nuns are fantastic: they run hospitals and schools; they are the good dedicated people working their lives away for the poor – and then there’s this hateful Pope in the Vatican spouting his reactionary bigotry about condoms and such-like. It’s grotesque.

But in Temples of Delight Catholicism is alluring and sensual and very elevating, isn’t it? So, yes – that was another case of me attributing nicer stuff to the people that the novel was more in tune with; certainly nicer food! Whereas Flora’s family were eating all this gristle and cornflour. A friend of mine who is an analyst said: ‘you know, these three girls Alice and her two friends Flora and Jem; they are parts of the same girl, aren’t they? Alice is this conflicted girl: we all have these different strands: Jem so sensual, Flora so life-denying and crushing and judgemental. And I thought: yes, that’s probably true.

TL: One of the pleasures of reading Juggling and the Travelling Hornplayer is recognising characters from your previous novels. I was wondering whether you were planning on writing more novels in which we might meet the characters from Sex and Stravinsky.

BT: You know, people say this to me: ‘Are we going to meet Ellen again?’ Or Jonathan? Or Christina? I hadn’t reintroduced characters until I wrote Juggling – as I was saying earlier, I began by thinking, ‘Why am I writing this book? Where is it going?’  I think the book’s motivation had to do with the fact that Temples of Delight, the previous book was such a troubling one for me that I was still brooding on it. I began to realize that I was writing about these two little girls who are so weirdly close together in age because they had to be Alice’s children! I was still worrying about Alice from the previous book, you see. I’d been thinking, ‘Why is it that she’s only dragged out of her trance by these bright, charismatic but slightly unbalanced people like Jem, and then Giovanni?’ I thought: you have to bring this out of the closet and make it clear that these little girls are Alice’s children. So I used Alice and her husband as a kind of backdrop to the story about Christina and her sister Pam, which meant I could unravel the mysteries of Alice’s head along the way.

Then, having completed Juggling, I was having tea with my friend Michael Dibdin, who is now sadly dead, and he said: ‘You know, now that you’ve written two books that connect, you have to write three.’  So I did, and it was such a pleasure, because one gets so involved with one’s characters, and it’s a kind of bereavement when you have to bury them and make new friends. It’s really hard. The thought that I could treat myself to resurrecting more characters! And many readers remarked on how they enjoyed it.

After what Michael said, I thought, now who is there who would be interesting to explore further? Who haven’t I properly explored in Juggling? There’s that bit at the end, when Peter comes back with his French lover who is Jago’s twin, and they’re both watching the two little schoolgirls, Roland’s daughters, Lydia and Ellen, carrying on about their gym stuff and whatnot, and the French lover thinks they’re hilarious. The English school girls seem exotic to him because they’re a cultural phenomenon that he hasn’t encountered before. I thought: those two little sisters Ellen and Lydia – I would love to write about them; their story.

My German mother had recently died when I started writing the book, and I thought, ‘What is all this Teutonic stuff? Aren’t you the person who likes to send your characters to Italy and now there’s this kind of Gothic love-and-death stuff entering in. The dark woodland and the Erl King. I think it was because I was brooding on my mother’s past. All this German romanticism that was coming into the book. My parents used to sing and play Schubert Lieder together – and I was sitting in a Schubert recital in the Sheldonian one day and my mind started wandering. I had the text in front of me, and I thought: ‘Gosh, I’ve never taken any notice of the words of these songs before.’ The words were kind of fake-pastoral. And I thought: you can take something quite mediocre and make something fantastic out of it, which is what Schubert had done. And as I was following these poems about the miller who dies of betrayed love, I thought, ‘Your story is about a girl who dies because of an act of infidelity. I’d reversed the genders in my mind. I thought, ‘Oh my God, one of these lovely sisters is going to die’. I found that heartbreaking, because I’d no sooner got Ellen and Lydia on the page then I thought one of them can’t live. And then I thought, ‘I know who would be unfaithful and that’s Jonathan Goldman. Oh good, I can bring him back. Naturally, since he’s quite a favourite of mine, I knew he was too decent a man to have an affair with a schoolgirl. But it seemed possible that Lydia would die by accident, rather as a by-product of a minor extra-marital affair that Jonathan was having with that mischievous, flirty Sonia.

I don’t know how all of that fell into place, but it was obviously an inter-connection with the two previous books. Then there was quite a break [between those three novels and Sex and Stravinsky]. (And Frankie & Stankie was a complete holiday from my usual sort of writing; more a memoir than fiction.) There was one moment during the writing of Sex and Stravinsky when Hattie, this character in Durban, visits the UK with her daughter. I mention in the text that she goes to visit her schoolmaster uncle. As I wrote that, I thought, ‘I wonder if her uncle is Roland Dent?’ He’s the schoolmaster in Juggling who marries the exquisite French woman with the grey flat and later hooks up with Christina. And then I thought: no, let that go. You can’t let this book take off in too many directions.

In general I always end up throwing out great bin bags of extraneous material, because I write very long, then I cut and shape ruthlessly. And because I don’t begin with a plot – I kind of intuit the story into being by following the characters around – it can go off in all sorts of meandering directions, which I then edit out. Quite often I write beyond the end, just for my own gratification. I have a sense of when the curtain should come down. I feel I’m shining a spotlight on a particular section of peoples’ lives – but, obviously they’ll have had lives before the focus of the story and will continue to have them afterwards.

TL: So…do you think we might meet the characters in Sex and Stravinsky again?

BT: Yes, that’s what you were asking. Let me see. Just possibly Zoe and Cat. Especially Zoe. It’s interesting how sometimes, as one writes, one’s brain is saying: ‘You’re being so cruel to this person!’ I felt I was being quite cruel to Zoe, but then again, I considered that she would be the major casualty of the adults indulging themselves. For the moment I’ve been brooding on quite another sort of story and I haven’t thought much about whether I’d use Zoe again. And certain characters in Sex and Stravinsky, I don’t think we’d want to meet again! [laughs]

TL: No? I don’t know! I do like some of the characters and I’m quite interested to see what happens to Cat.

BT: The two girls are interesting, it’s true. And it may be that something quite significant would happen to Cat. She’s a very able girl after all, isn’t she? But headstrong and spoilt and possibly heading for a crisis.

TL: Even though she is ghastly while she is sixteen, but a lot of sixteen year-olds are.

BT: It would be rather interesting – you know how Zoe is at first so enchanted with the idea of what’s happening to them, because it’s like being in one of her favourite ballet stories, Masquerade at the Wells, where the two girls secretly swap lives. Here, each girl longs to have the other one’s mother, but when the fantasy become real…Well, Zoe’s left thinking, ‘Where is my mother?’ Even though her mother Caroline was so demanding and judgemental with her. It’s created a huge dependence.

It would be interesting to have those girls eventually get to know each other, wouldn’t it? Because Zoe is so alarmed by Cat and so careful to keep out of her way. She’s so sure that Cat sees her as this drippy little creature reading baby books. Cat is a person who stamps and shouts and gets what she wants. She has such a sense of entitlement, doesn’t she? A rich white girl with a dad and aunts and uncles who love her and indulge her and drive her around in 4×4s, while Zoe has always had to do without the things she secretly yearns for. So yes, it could be quite an interesting relationship to explore.

A friend of mine recently said: ‘I want you to tackle the subject of old age.’ Oh dear. It is quite sad but true, that the young are so much more alluring and interesting because they’ve…

TL: …got the glamour of youth?

BT: And they’ve got their lives ahead of them. Also I find childhood and adolescence so interesting. It’s a difficult time for one thing, isn’t it? I remember the year I turned 30 thinking thank God I’m not that young anymore because being young is so difficult. Childhood is a minefield; families are a minefield, aren’t they? And of course childhood is very intensely felt. Siblings can destroy you. The whole politics of family life is complicated, unless you’re one of those unusual people who finds the art of living very easy…

I loved watching my own children’s adolescence. The brain is growing and it’s a time of great confusion. Adolescence is a sort of disease from which a minority never quite recovers. So I do empathise with adolescents. I feel for them. But old age is interesting as well, of course, and it’s such a big subject these days, when all of us live for far too long.

TL: Your early novels mostly centred on one protagonist. But your more recent books, particularly The Travelling Horn Player and now Sex and Stravinsky, are more sort of ensemble pieces without one single dominant character, and with those multiple storylines coming together in this big kind of denouement at the end. What made your writing structure change so dramatically?

BT: Well, as you know, I don’t consciously construct or think much that way – but yes, certainly, the first novel is written in the first person from one point of view.

Incidentally, I thought, when one vehemently feminist reviewer wrote that it was a book in which ‘the women smile and knit and the men have all the good lines’, that – well – it’s Catherine who is telling the story. She’s the David Copperfield person; the observer of all things. The language in which she narrates the story reveals her as clever and articulate. And I don’t think that, in order to indicate that people are ‘clever’, you need to have them talking all the time about Virginia Woolf and so on. Clever people on the whole tend to reveal their intellectual competence through their syntax, don’t they? Even though they’re merely talking about whether or not they’ve fed the dog, or filled the pepper-grinder. It has to do with the cadence of their speech, but I’m digressing.

What I did with my first novel, is simply take like-minded people whom I could love. That is to say, I didn’t literally know them but they were a little bit like the kind of people I knew, except they were probably cleverer. They were the sort of people I felt were from the kind of milieu in which I operated. After the first novel, I thought it would be more interesting to go outside that comfort zone and bring in other sorts of people; get inside other points of view.

TL: Partly the reason why I was so seduced by the first novel I read by you, Temples of Delight, was because it was one of the first books I’d read that I felt was about someone a bit like me, my milieu: Surrey middle-class intelligentsia-type people but they were more attractive. They seemed a bit like the best possible versions of the people that I grew up with. Something like a novel by Steinbeck…although I think his novels are wonderful, I can’t empathise with it as much because it’s set in a world of which I have no personal knowledge. It was nice to come across something that was such an attractive story about people that I knew, that I could so directly empathise with.

BT: I see…I am very reassured by that because it is such a strange book. I’m glad it didn’t put you off. I have a writer-friend who’s much younger than me, who got to know me after I had written about four or five books and she said, ‘Every book that you’ve written has somehow made a marker for different phases in my life.’ For instance, her discovering that she was a lesbian as Alice does when she finds Dulcie. Dulcie was one of those characters who was meant to be a mere scene-shifter but I thought: no, I love this girl, she wants to be in my book. But Alice’s family, yes, they are a ‘nice’ family; decent suburban types and all at sea with the likes of Jem and Giovanni. Mind Alice’s mother does conceal the letter. And she does feed Giovanni the mussels….

Sorry – you asked me about writing from one point of view and then going on to bring in all these different characters. It’s to do with an ever-greater fascination with complex patterns. Goodness knows. It just happens. The characters plant themselves on my pages. Then in retrospect I try to analyse where it all comes from. With Sex and Stravinsky, trailing in the back of my mind was a childhood love of girls’ ballet books, along with masquerades, Jacque le Coq and Tiepolo’s paintings of acrobats. I think, with Temples of Delight, there was a memory of how much I’d loved girls’ school stories as a child. Especially the philistine but page-turning Enid Blyton.

My daughter Anna wrote an A-level English essay on girls’ school stories, and she pursued a sort of Betty Friedan model, trying to show how in the original ones girls are depicted as independent and high-achieving. Then by the ’50s you get these Enid Blyton girls where, if anyone wants to be an opera singer she ends up getting pneumonia ? ‘Mavis can’t sing any more. She can only croak!’ or a girl who aspires to be an Olympic swimmer ends up dashed against the rocks and paralysed. It’s very oppressive to female ambition: that was her thesis.

Nonetheless, I’d adored these girls’ storybooks! By the time Anna came across them, she was eighteen and more sophisticated and capable of sending them up. It was her observations that were the inspiration for that rap in The Travelling Hornplayer that Ellen and Lydia perform, about Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland and the lesbian-bondage under-text.

But why am I telling you this? [laughs] Different voices. Yes, Temple of Delight. It started out in a way almost like a girls’ school story and then I think, with that Roland episode, about the boys in the car, traveling to the boarding school in Northumberland ?  I was balancing the girls’ story genre with a boys’ school story. Most people who read the book think that Roland is a pompous prat, but I began to respect him as a wholly honorable man.

TL: A good honest, English chap!

BT: He was! But with hidden depths. The way he got along so well with the dreadful troubled daughter of Alice’s landlord. Punk-y Iona, practising self-harm with a Swiss Army knife. I thought that spoke well for him! And I could see why sparky Christina would fall for Roland. He was one of those characters I kept company with for long enough to find myself thinking – to my great surprise – ‘I actually hugely respect this man. He’s the person I’d go to if I were in trouble.

And at the end of Juggling – those musical chairs again ?  Christina’s the one who’s left standing. Then suddenly there is Roland whom, until then, she’s mistakenly thought was her estranged father. Very Oedipal, isn’t it? And if you’ve grown up with an egotistical male parent like Giovanni against whom you rebel, well you would want to append yourself to somebody un-preening like Roland, wouldn’t you?

TL: You’ve said before that the stories in Frankie & Stankie are all true, in which case I wonder why you fictionalised it and changed the names. Is it to protect the people who they’re based on?

BT: No, not at all. It was more to do with a kind of book-politics going on at the time. After I wrote The Travelling Hornplayer,  Penguin gave me a very handsome two-book deal, but the down side was feeling pressured by an imminent deadline. I’d started writing Sex and Stravinsky and, as I said, it then became rather hard for me. Day after day I was lying on the floor, listening to the original Pergolesi version of the Pulcinella song (which is not in fact Pergolesi, as I say in the book) and then to the Stravinsky ‘re-composition’ of it. I kept thinking that I knew my story was in there. I felt that its secrets lay somewhere between the two versions of this little tune.

But the new editor-in-chief kept ringing me up and saying: ‘How’s the book coming along? You have a deadline in December!’ All I could think was, ’Oh help.’ It’s much too hard for me and I don’t know where it’s going. ‘ And because I’d started scribbling down all these little autobiographical stories for the book that became Frankie and Stankie, I suggested giving her that book first. I explained that it was rather different from anything else I’d written; more of a memoir really; more social realist and with a simple linear structure. Penguin was very unhappy with the idea; very rejecting of it. Their reasoning was that since I was known for a certain type of book, the sales reps would have a problem trying to flog it to book-sellers. They’d want more of ‘Barbara Trapido weaves another of her magical, musical romances… etc.’

It all got a bit heavy and I was left feeling rather disempowered, as if I’d been a bad girl, who was playing hookey from the legitimate book and defecting to the wrong sort book. At high school I was always the bad girl, being summoned to the Head’s office. Wearing one’s indoor garment outdoors; eating chips in uniform. Eventually, since my beloved ex-Penguin editor was now at Bloomsbury – and she positively loved the new book – I defected to Bloomsbury. It was their decision that the most judicious thing would be to publish it as an autobiographical novel, and I went along with that, given that Penguin had thought this categorising such a hurdle. I simply trusted them to know about marketing books – though, frankly, I still think it reads more like a memoir. So, in answer your question as to why I ‘fictionalised’ it: I don’t think I did really. I’d thus far always cautiously avoided writing autobiographically, because so many autobiographical novels tend to be about settling scores and grinding axes. Also, I wasn’t sure whether my own story would have any magnetism for a reader. I felt I could more easily tell if the characters worked if I wrote about my sister and me in the third person and gave us different names. I tend to envisage my writing as a kind of acting anyway; as putting stories on the stage.

I thought, if I put these two little girls out there on stage, and I think of them, not as my sister and me, but rather as the children who are living all aspects of our lives, then I’ll be able to achieve a proper degree of estrangement. It’s always a kind of paradox when you’re writing, because you’re having to get inside your characters but, at the same time you need to be outside them. Unless you get that estrangement and are able to watch them and make a distance, you loose your judgement; you’re too close to them to move the story. And sometimes, of course, you need to be cruel to them.

TL: Does it hurt you when you’re cruel to the characters that you like?

BT: Well sometimes I’m quite alarmed by it. I think: Gosh, is this horrible thing really going to happen to this person? But I think, as I say, there is that kind of cold estrangement that you’re practising in tandem with being very close to them – it’s quite a difficult thing to describe – but in the case of Frankie and Stankie I used that third-person distancing device precisely in order to insure that I could make objective judgements about this story as a story, rather than it just being about me practicing a form of personal exposure all over the page. In addition, where I’d written about old school friends, or my sister, I showed the subjects what I’d written, because I thought, ‘if they don’t like this then I can’t publish it’. But nobody objected.

And I confess that, since I went to school in the 40s and 50s, I could assume that most older members of the cast were dead! What astonished me about the reaction to the book was how many people, regardless of age, I mean even really young, post-1994 people who had grown up in South Africa, said: ‘Oh I loved that book, because it told the story of my life’. I was puzzled. I thought, how could it, when the country had so radically changed. But clearly, some things about it rang bells for lots of people – including English people, who, like me, had grown up on the Beacon Readers, etc. It’s a book about stories and predominantly, I like to be a storyteller – that’s what I love about books; that business of being drawn into the world of a story. You want to be seduced by a book. I don’t think that, because you write, anyone should feel obliged to read you. You don’t want to be bending people’s ears and being coercive. I want the books to be alluring.

TL: I enjoyed recognising what I thought were maybe the prototypes of characters in your novels.

BT: I noticed that as well. Writing about the real-life people in my own past made me realise where some elements of my imaginary characters had come from. Roger Goldman’s violin-playing, for example.

TL: And there was that friend you had who was a bit like Jem.

BT: The wild inspiring friend, yes. She’s in Rome now. She’s lived in Rome as long as I’ve lived in England. Actually, when I gave her the typescript to read she phoned and said (with regard to her own rocky childhood experience, as I depicted it), ‘It was all so much worse than I ever let on, you know’ and she produced this gruesome elaboration involving her stepfather, which I chose not to use, but it explained why she’d been fast-tracked into that convent boarding school at the tender age of six.

It was wonderful for me to write that autobiographical book. It was driven by a need to shore up a world that was either going or gone. And mercifully so. Given the recent ending of Apartheid, the book was a sort of celebration. The downside is that ever since I wrote it, I’ve tended to get put in a ghetto. Before Frankie and Stankie I was a writer. Now I’m a ‘South African writer’.

TL: You’ve been an English writer for so long.

BT: Yes, exactly. Most of my readers were wholly unaware that I’d come from South Africa.

TL: No, I had actually assumed at first that you had grown up in the Home Counties, because you wrote so convincingly about growing up in the Home Counties.

BT: I was quite young when I emigrated. I was 22 when I came to England. South Africa was such a horrible place at the time I left, that I blocked it all out and remade myself as an English person. I thought that I had become an English person, and of course I’m never quite that.  American publishers have sometimes said of my work, that it’s ‘too English for us’. I think, ‘Can’t they tell that I’m a sort of anthropologist among the English; I’m inside-outside?’  Like Anita Brookner. I don’t think I’m much like her as a writer, but we do have in common that we’re both inside and outside at the same time.

TL: I think a lot of writers have always been a bit ‘outside’.

BT: Absolutely. It triggers the writing I think. I once talked to Michèle Roberts about language, for instance, of being a child who starts out speaking one language, then switches to other. That triggers something. The new language becomes your subject, in a way. You engage with it more intensely. My parents spoke German at home and then at school we spoke in English and yes, I think I fell in love with the English language as a child. I never quite took it for granted.

TL: I was wondering, are you writing something now?

BT: I’m not actually writing, but I am brooding on things a bit.

TL: Can you tell us anything about what you’re brooding upon, or do you want to keep it under wraps?

BT: Oh no, I spill things out all over the place. I don’t have any of that feeling that some authors have that if you talk it all out, you lose it. I remember one comic writer saying, ‘I never talk about it’. This is a notably un-funny person, who writes funny books. So curious, that.

TL: A lot of comedians tend to be very shy and un-funny in person.

BT: I know a woman who writes rather gruesome books about murder and rape and violent sex – and yet she’s a pretty, happy, sociable person. I remember commenting to a mutual friend, that where I’m a complicated introvert who writes sociable, user-friendly books, she’s a sunny, easy-going person who writes depressing books. Life can be very unfair.

TL: Perhaps one uses up certain traits in writing it.

BT: Yes, perhaps. I don’t mind talking about what I’m doing but it’s too hazy for me to be clear about it. I’m intermittently thinking about a story triggered by something my late husband told me. He was writing various pieces for the new Dictionary of National Biography when he told me about this woman, an impoverished eighteenth century aristocrat who needed to make a judicious marriage. She had two men in mind, but in making a bid for the one she really wanted, as against the one who would have been more available, she blundered and ended up alienating both. The subsequent manner in which she rescued herself seemed both ingenious and admirable to me – and (Oh joy!) the story would involve a dog. I’ve long wanted to write a dog story, but when I read Paul Auster’s Timbuktu I thought, ‘Oh, he’s done it so beautifully already’. And maybe it’s a recipe for disaster – people can display a knee-jerk species bigotry when it comes to dogs in books.

Anyway, my thoughts are all in a muddle. And usually what happens is that something that you start off with ends up being mere scaffolding. It disappears along the way. So I can’t really say anything about what’s next because, for the moment, it’s all nonsense and nothing.

But yes: I would love to write another book and that would please my editor who’s been so good and loyal to me whilst I’ve been a hopeless, unproductive person all these years. I found I couldn’t write whilst Stan was so ill and needing me. I didn’t have the energy for it. It takes a lot of energy and playfulness and I simply couldn’t do it. But yes: I’m not at all sure what kind of book will come out of my rather cloudy thoughts, or whether I might use some of my characters again. It’s a mystery to me.

TL: Well, I think that’s all the questions now, thank you very much indeed.

BT: Thank you. I’m sorry I’ve been so long-winded in trying to answer them

Copyright: Philippe Cheng

James Shapiro is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of the award-winning 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. His most recent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? explores the origins and various incarnations of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s plays. The Literateur was fortunate enough to meet James in London, and emailed off some questions regarding his latest work.

Questions by Zoia Alexanian and Dan Eltringham

The Literateur: It seems like the biggest problem plaguing Shakespearean biography is scholars’ projections of current world-views and beliefs onto literary works from a vastly different era. All the same, as you point out, there are definite similarities between Edmond Malone’s annotations to The Plays and Poems of WilliamShakespeare (1790) and Stephen Greenblatt’s speculations in Will in the World (2004). What do you think accounts for the radical break in how people wrote (and read) between the 17th and 18th centuries, when not much seems to have changed (in terms of approach) between 1790 and 2004?

James Shapiro: Everyone who writes about Shakespeare’s life and works runs the risk of anachronism and projection. I don’t see any way around this. It’s especially the case for those who write ‘cradle to grave’ biographies that try to account for the so-called ‘Lost Years’ (from the early 1580s when we know that Shakespeare left Stratford and his wife and three children to the time he resurfaces in London in 1593). The past decade or so has seen a good deal of speculation—that Shakespeare experienced a crisis of faith, or of sexuality, or a familial crisis (or all three). That may well say more about our own views of maturation or artistic development than anything about Shakespeare. I’m one of those scholars who believes that there are very real differences between early modern and modern worlds. That complex shift—and it didn’t happen overnight—seems to have occurred by the closing decades of the 18th century, and explains why Malone has more in common with the assumptions of Stephen Greenblatt, writing 200 years later, than he does with, say, Ben Jonson, writing 200 years earlier. But there remains a lot that we don’t know, and that social and cultural historians are continuing to discover, about that sea change from early modern to modern.

TL: Do you think that what makes ‘autobiographical’ readings of Shakespeare’s work so tempting to critics on every side of the debate is largely external to the plays themselves – changing assumptions about the creative process, for instance – or are there internal factors involved as well? Of course, internal factors will always be interpreted according to external structures, but would Freud have been as adamant about equating Shakespeare with Hamlet if it hadn’t been for all the soliloquies?

JS: When we hear Shakespeare’s soliloquies, it’s often hard not to believe the poet is speaking as himself. Of course, you soon run into the problem of which soliloquies are confessional on Shakespeare’s part: Edmund’s about being a bastard in King Lear? Shylock’s, in which he wants to take a knife to Christians? Timon’s, in which he says he despises mankind? Juliet’s, while she is awaiting her lover? I’d say none of the above—though I recognize that one of the defining qualities of Shakespeare’s writing—and something that sets him apart from the best of his contemporary playwrights—is the extent to which we find ourselves in his works, feel that he is speaking directly to us through them, and, by extension, seem the genuine and authentic voice of the author, rather than of a character.

TL: ‘Autobiographical’ readings of Shakespeare’s works appear implicitly paradoxical. The usual impetus behind these readings, which you highlight in your section on Mark Twain, is the assumption that one can only write about what one has personally experienced—so that, for instance, only someone who had actually been to Italy could have written The Merchant of Venice. But doesn’t this standard make all biographical writing impossible? No one from the 18th century onward had personal experience with the man from Stratford, or Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford. How do the Oxfordians reconcile the fact that they can put together a history of Oxford-as-Shakespeare just by looking at books and records, but that Shakespeare couldn’t do the same to construct his plays?

JS: You make a very good point. That’s why the great 19th century biographer Halliwell-Phillipps called his massive work on Shakespeare an ‘Outlines’ rather than a traditional biography. And why the greatest Shakespearean of the 20th century, E. K. Chambers, chose to publish William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems rather than a conventional biography. Like them, I think it’s next to impossible to write a ‘cradle-to-grave’ biography of Shakespeare. The closest we can get—and what I tried to do in 1599—is to fill in the professional and cultural contexts that defined Shakespeare’s career at a certain moment—what was going on at a particular time, what he was reading, where was he living, what was he writing, and so on. It’s partial biography, and Shakespeare’s interior life remains largely unknown, but that’s the closest I think we can come. That book took me fifteen years to research; I’m working on another year at the moment, 1606, the year of Lear and Macbeth, and I think it will be even harder to glimpse Shakespeare the man in that year, though I’ll do my best to at least bring him out of the shadows.

As for the question you ask about Oxfordians—you’d have to ask them. Even after immersing myself in their work, I have a very hard time understanding how they justify their anachronistic biographical assumptions.

TL: While I was always taught to be extremely careful about confusing poets with the speakers of their poems, it seems like Shakespeare invites such confusion in the Sonnets by including puns on his first name (most explicitly in Sonnet 135—‘Whoever hath thy wish, thou hast thy Will’). How is this different from when Shakespeare invokes himself in the alternate epilogue to The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, which you argue is ‘the closest we ever get in his plays to hearing Shakespeare speak for and as himself’?

JS: Epilogues in Shakespeare—and I’m thinking here especially of those like the ones that end The Tempest and As You Like It—are typically liminal, mid-way between play world and real world. Those that follow The Second Part of Henry the Fourth—for there are two, written for separate occasions but since stitched together by editors—are even more rooted in the actual world of the playgoers. The one delivered at court, in which Shakespeare speaks ‘as himself’—by which I mean as the author of the play, which is still a role—is, to my mind, the closest we get to him speak for and as himself, insofar as he was the person who wrote that play, and says he accepts responsibility for it at this performance before the Queen. But it is still a role and not the man, though you could say that in all our public interactions, especially professional ones, we are playing a role.

You are welcome, like many others, to feel, even believe, that Shakespeare is unpacking his heart in the Sonnets. He may even be punning on his wife’s name in Sonnet 145, and seems to pun repeatedly on his own in 135 and elsewhere (though proponents of William Stanley’s candidacy think that Stanley is the true author of the Sonnets and punning on his first name here). The effect of the Sonnets depends in part on the fiction of their confessional nature. The danger in collapsing speaker and poet is: how do you distinguish such punning from reading the rest of what goes on in the Sonnet sequence as autobiography? Since I don’t know when or where or if Shakespeare is speaking as himself, I steer clear of reading these extraordinary poems as autobiographical. I’m not denying that are elements of Shakespeare’s personal experience woven into the fabric of these remarkable poems. But I am insisting that it is impossible to know how or when such personal elements appear. And I don’t know how anyone, based on the limited information that has come down to us about Shakespeare’s personal life, can tell us where he is writing in a confessional way. It seems rather circular to me to construct the life out of the works and then read his other works as autobiographical.

TL: Do you think that part of what makes Shakespeare’s plays so appealing to this day is that we don’t know how he ‘really’ felt about his characters or how he ‘really’ meant certain scenes to be understood? Is there an upside to the largely absent authorial presence that has caused Shakespeare so much posthumous grief, a freedom of interpretation that doesn’t have to be reconciled with authorial intent?

JS: I don’t see the freedom of interpretation as causing posthumous grief—though I have read and seen some pretty bad interpretations. Another defining feature of Shakespeare’s plays is their capacity to speak so clearly in different lands, different languages, and across the centuries. That allows critics and directors who deeply feel the relevance of a play to help us see the play that way. If we really knew what Shakespeare felt about Hamlet or what he meant by him, for example, and chose not to stray from his interpretation of his own creation, the history of literary criticism would be greatly impoverished.

TL: In the Epilogue you mention attending an Oxfordian reading of the Sonnets by Hank Whittemore. Did you have an occasion to speak to any Oxfordians directly about their views? Did any of your research ever lead you to doubt, even for a moment, that someone other than Shakespeare could be the ‘real’ author of the plays?

JS: No, in the course of my research I never had the slightest doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I think that I would have to be someone attracted to conspiracy theories of all kinds to experience that sort of doubt. And I’d also have to have a different relationship to evidence and to truth, rather than, say, truthiness. After watching the experience of mainstream Shakespeareans who engaged directly with anti-Stratfordians—and I’m thinking in particular here of David Kathman and Alan Nelson—I saw that dialogue was pointless and self-serving, so chose to focus on what people have written. I think, in retrospect, that this was a wise decision.

As it happens, Hank Whittemore showed up a week or two ago at a talk I was giving in New York City, asked a question from the floor, and spoke with me after. Lovely guy. He even bought a book and asked a friend of his to take a photograph of the two of us together. I wondered if my talk—or even my answer to his question–had any impact on his thinking (he is one of those who believes that Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Oxford had a child together, the Earl of Southampton, and that the Sonnets are historical documents detailing Oxford’s attempts to save his son’s life in the aftermath of the Essex Rebellion). A day later I saw that he had written about our encounter on his blog and that if anything, it had only strengthened his resolve and commitment to Oxford’s authorship of the plays. The experience only confirmed the pointlessness of engaging in dialogue with someone who has radically different views of evidence, authorship, and history.

TL: At the heart of the authorial debate is a desire to understand the nature and origin of imaginative genius. Shakespeare isn’t the only author that critics have spent decades trying to explain (Emily Brontë is another famous case). Where do you think this desire to unravel the products of imagination, sometimes to the point of banality, comes from?

JS: Who wouldn’t want to understand the nature of genius—whether it is Newton’s or Mozart’s or Shakespeare’s? I’d say that we struggle to do so, not to the point of banality, but to the point of increasing frustration: we simply don’t know what makes someone an artistic genius. I don’t presume to have any answer to that in my book, other than to say that those who believe that a genius of Shakespeare’s order had to be from a higher social station, or have a university degree, and so on, reveal more about their prejudices than they do about the nature of genius.

TL: Can you think of a way in which literary criticism might benefit from setting out to find its subject ‘guilty’? Or, put differently, what kind of pleasure do you envisage there is to be had in a reading motivated by the desire to unearth conspiracy, and how does it relate to the more traditional pleasures of reading and studying literature?

JS: Most books about the authorship controversy take the form of detective fiction: there is a mystery, a few clues that previous investigators have overlooked, and a solution (and, of course, the gifted amateur who is able to solve the problem, see things in a fresh and original way, invariably in contrast to those bumblers with false or undeserved authority). The pleasures of being that detective are obviously great. There’s a reason why bookstore shelves groan under the weight of mystery and detective books—and it is not surprising to me that the authorship controversy emerged at the same historical moment as the ‘who-dunnit.’

TL: In your recent talk on Contested Will at the London Review Bookshop (22.04.10), you said that your title, besides being a treble pun on Shakespeare’s first name, the crucial documentary evidence of his will, and the issue of willed intentionality, is also a ‘sharp elbow at’ Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘fanciful biography’ of Shakespeare, Will in the World. In what ways is it fanciful and deserving of elbowing? How does his biographical method compare to your own in 1599?

JS: I admire Stephen Greenblatt—the best American critic of Shakespeare—this side idolatry (the best living reader of Shakespeare anywhere, hands down, is Frank Kermode). Like every other student of early modern culture, my work has been profoundly influenced by Greenblatt’s scholarship. In gently elbowing him, I’m acknowledging both indebtedness and disappointment. Stephen Greenblatt speculates in ways that seem wrongheaded to me, and dangerously so, because in reading Shakespeare’s life out of the works he uses—and thereby legitimates—the same method employed by those who believe another writer wrote the plays. I align myself with those, like Charles Nicholl in his wonderful The Lodger (about Shakespeare’s Jacobean years under the roof of a Huguenot family, the Mountjoys, when he lived on Silver Street), who are trying to write partial biographies, relying more on archival evidence. That’s not to say that in 1599 I didn’t at times speculate; it’s impossible to write about anything that happened 400 years ago without speculating. But I do my best, and will continue to do my best, to steer clear of speculating about things we know nothing about, such as Shakespeare’s inner life.

TL: Is there a sense in which you consider writing Contested Will a form of martyrdom, to save other scholars from having to endlessly refute the conspiracy theorists?

JS: No, the thought never crossed my mind. I would put it quite differently. There are two ways of going about writing a book on Shakespeare. One is to address the kinds of questions that have long obsessed you; the other is to write a book about questions that obsess others. I’ve written both kinds of books (Shakespeare and the Jews is a good example of the former; Contested Will of the latter). Over time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that scholars, and not just Shakespeareans, need to write books about problems that preoccupy others. I read last week that the majority of Americans don’t believe in the theory of evolution—which tells me that scientists are not doing a good enough job of writing books that explain their case more effectively. One of the most rewarding things about writing this book has been hearing from teachers—especially in the UK—who are grateful that I have given them the material to respond to students who are curious or confused about who wrote the plays, or who read on Wikipedia that there are major doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship.

TL: Lastly, what sort of proof do you think it would take to put the controversy to rest once and for all?

JS: The beauty of conspiracy theories is that there is no ‘proof’ that would put matters to rest. Despite overwhelming evidence, there are still people who maintain that the U.S. government, or the Mossad, was really behind the destruction of the Twin Towers. And that men never landed on the moon (it was all filmed in Morocco). In these cases we are dealing with some of the best documented events in recent history. What chance do we have of satisfying those who are convinced that there was a conspiracy to suppress the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and who will read any newly discovered document confirming Shakespeare’s authorship as something planted to mislead those not savvy enough to see through this sort of thing? I look at the matter differently: the controversy over Shakespeare’s authorship tells us nothing about Shakespeare. It does, however, tell us a good deal about the way we read now and how we evaluate evidence. And much of this is discouraging. One of the most deeply depressing discoveries I made while writing this book was that two current U. S. Supreme Court Justices—Scalia and Stevens—believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays long attributed to Shakespeare. If that’s not sobering enough, there is the more recent news that filmmaker Roland Emmerich is shooting a movie, called Anonymous, that maintains not only that Oxford wrote the plays, but also that he was son and lover to Queen Elizabeth.

TL: James Shapiro, thank you.

Copyright: Sarah Lee

Hanif Kureishi is one of the most popular and acclaimed British writers today. His first play was produced at the Royal Court theatre when he was 22. He reached a new level of eminence when his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Academy Award and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia won a Whitbread First Novel Award. Since then he has written many critically acclaimed novels, short stories and screenplays including Intimacy (1998), The Mother (2003) and Something to Tell You (2008). In 2007 he was awarded a CBE in recognition for his services to literature and drama. Last month saw the publication of his Collected Short Stories.

Interview by Catherine Fildes

Have you been writing this morning?, I ask Kureishi as we sit down to the shrill French music playing in the background of his regular haunt – for interviews at least – Café Rouge. Yes – well – I’ve done a lot of fucking about, he replies. Our conversation is not lively at the start: he’s had his head in the essays of his students on the Creative Writing MA at Kingston University, and I’ve been nervously flipping through the 600 page-plus volume of his recently-published Collected Short Stories. He’s curt and I’m shy. Nonetheless we proceed and in the next hour cover topics from David Cameron to how writing can feel like a ‘waste of time’…

The Literateur: When I was reading some of your essays about how to discipline yourself to write, I found it quite similar to the way I have to discipline myself to do a PhD.

Hanif Kureishi: Well there are resistances aren’t there? Eventually you have to get on with it. Once you get on with it, it’s fun – I like the idea of it rather than the actual work though. When I have an idea for a story I find it much more exciting to have the idea than to have to write it down. Once I’ve had the idea, writing it down’s pretty boring.

TL: What about editing?

HK: That’s even worse.

TL: I wanted to ask about my own PhD topic, which is on ‘British Muslim’ literature – a very fashionable topic at the moment…

HK: Is it?

TL: Well, you must know…

HK: I don’t know very much about Muslims. I’m sure you know more about them than I do. I’ve written about some of the things that I heard about. A writer can steal stories from anyone, from anywhere.

TL: Yet I know you conducted research within the British Muslim community for The Black Album, visiting mosques and sitting with young Muslims whilst they were listening to the Friday khutba. Do you think the environment for Muslims is still the same?

HK: No, no. I mean, when I did that research, that was 1991-2. Obviously not: the turning point was 9/11. I think Muslims think of themselves differently. I mean, ‘Muslim’ was really associated in 1991 with the ‘Rushdie affair’ – that you were a Muslim meant that you were radical, that you saw Islam as a political ideology. Now someone would call themselves ‘Muslim’ in the sense that they have a certain attitude to God, and to their own history or tradition or background. So, what happened since, as it were, has helped Muslims to think about who they are and where they stand… the whole landscape is completely different. Radical Islam was originally a form of liberation, like colonialism really…

TL: Well, the Iranian revolution was definitely associated with Marxist ideals at least – whether it fulfilled those ideals was another matter…

HK: That’s right. That’s a good way of putting it.

TL: I was interested in the ideas of liberation and liberalism, and how they are both a part of Islamist ideology and Islamist reform movements, but then get distorted. I was re-reading The Black Album, which is really fascinating for my own research. At points in the novel, Islam does seem to be equated with liberalism from a materialist, late-capitalist culture, and at other points it is wholly opposed to it – so there are different ‘liberalisms’ within the novel…

HK: Liberalism can be a battering ram, or it can become a fortress: it might become a battering ram rather like Marxism itself, whereas in certain circumstances it can become a prison. You have to ask what these ideologies are being used for – that’s a more interesting question to ask than ‘what are they in themselves?’. That’s how I like to look at it. What is ideology for? How is it being used? Who is it being used by? And the most important question: when? Radical Islam as it was used in Iran wouldn’t be the same as radical Islam in London today, and it’s not the same as Islam in Leeds or Bradford today.

TL: Do you still feel angry after the Rushdie affair? A lot of writing – including The Black Album – was produced in response to the Muslim reaction.

HK: Do I still feel angry? I think it was a good opportunity for us to reflect on what writing was for, what books are for. We take it for granted that books are a jolly good thing and you should say whatever you want in them: now all of us have questioned our practices. What is respect? How far can you go? What can you say? What does it mean to use violent language against somebody else, etc. These are really important questions, and the Rushdie affair brought all that back, really brought it out. This was a worldwide controversy about a book, that most people hadn’t read, and even those who did read it were none-the-wiser. It was a fascinating time.

TL: I think it’s true that people decontextualise radical or extremist Islam even when they think they’re speaking about something very specific: it is to do with location as much as anything and what it’s reacting against. Things which seem to be liberations often turn into fundamentalisms but different fundamentalisms in different times and places. What I thought of The Black Album was that it was articulating something very specific about British Islam as reacting against Thatcherism. Whereas in Salman Rushdie’s writings or Nadeem Aslam’s writings there are very different kinds of fundamentalisms being exposed.

HK: I guess as a writer, I’m more interested in character than ideology. Or, I’d be interested in the way this person believes. For me, it isn’t about working out what I think, and then saying: ‘I believe in free speech in this way…’ Rather, what’s interesting is the argument, and how Islam or Marxism is used, and how it relates to someone’s life, under a political context. Keeping all of that going, and showing it. So the argument is to show the argument. In the end, what one believes as a liberalist or a fundamentalist is quite banal. They’re all truisms ultimately based on force. It’s the other stuff, the superstructure of things that I’m interested in.

TL: ‘My Son the Fanatic’ is a short story dealing with the same issues as The Black Album. I wondered about the form of the short story in relation to what you are saying: are they able to represent the psychology of a single character more neatly than a novel?

HK: The story – some of them are long and some of them are short. It’s not like a film. All films are between 1 ½ and 2 hours, so they’re quite formal – but a story can be any length. So it’s a more luxurious form for a writer – you start, and when the story’s finished you stop.

TL: Yes, well some of the new stories in the Collected Short Stories are very short…

HK: They were long when I started off, but then I spent the whole of my time editing: when you get to the end you think, it took me ages to do that, is that all it is?

TL: This reminds me of Raymond Carver – that kind of brutal editing – do you have an editor who will do this job for you?

HK: I wouldn’t allow it. I wouldn’t hand something over to somebody else. American editors are like writers. They really shorten the stuff. They’re co-writers, and you don’t really consider it to be your own piece in the end. I wouldn’t allow it now. I’m old enough to stand up to it. But when you’re thirty-one, and some editor’s attacking your work, it’s really hard.

TL: Has your relationship with editors and publishers then changed considerably? Do you have more bargaining power nowadays?

HK: Well, I wouldn’t with a film. With a film I’d be nobody: the producers and directors have a lot of power. But with a short story I can write what I like.

TL: Was it your decision to bring out the Collected Short Stories then?

HK: No, it was my editor’s. Basically what you have to do, if you’re a writer, is to repackage the stuff over again, just rebrand it, put it in a different cover, and then it gets re-reviewed and so on and so on… You’re trying to sell books so that you can make a living. And also it’s getting much harder, especially for younger writers. I was lucky, my career coincided with a boom. In the 1980s when you were a writer you could earn a lot of money. I really believe that’s over. People are going to start downloading stuff really cheaply. In the old days you’d buy a hard-jacket that cost £15. And now people can download stuff onto their phones and onto the iPad for a fiver. And soon they’ll find out, like my children do, how to download it all for free. My children download music all the time and they never pay for it, and it never occurs to them to go to the shops and buy a CD.

TL: You do start to wonder when the book will be completely outmoded…

HK: I didn’t say that. I think the book will remain moded. I just don’t think people will want to pay for it. A bit like the newspapers: it’s outrageous that the Sunday Times wants me to pay to read it. Why would you pay? There’s no need for it. I don’t think the book is outmoded, it’s just whether people will want to pay for it. But then, it’s the case that my children rarely read books…

TL: Do you think that will change as they grow up?

HK: They think it’s really nerdy. For them it’s shameful to be seen reading a book. I do think too much importance is attributed to reading books though. But on the other hand, that’s what I’ve wasted my life doing.

TL: Do you still feel that writing is a waste of time?

HK: Well, what would you prefer to do – if I had to choose between going for a bike ride with one of my sons, having lunch in the park, sitting around gossiping, then going home – that’s what I did with them yesterday – would I rather do that or sit in my room writing a book? I’d rather be with my sons. That seems a much more valuable and spontaneous life to live. What I mean is that I think people often fetishize books and reading. A kid who reads is a ‘good’ kid, i.e. he’s not noisy; but on the other hand you’re not interacting with other people, you’re interacting with a dead text. So I have lots of questions about all of this, interesting questions.

TL: I do think that the novel has been extolled as a symbol of ‘democracy’, and something which you can learn from and which will change your life. And I don’t think that’s true to the extent at which it’s been propagated.

HK: Yeah, but if you were living in a fascist or a communist or a radical Islamic state, which most people in this world have done, then the book would represent something very important, especially in Stalinist Russia, or in Pakistan today. The book would be a very liberating thing in that context.

TL: The novel has been extolled in the West also…

HK: It is a very liberating form, because people do speak, and they speak freely as they can from their unconscious…

TL: Do you find that with the ‘bigger’ forms like films and novels, that you can speak more freely, that there are multiple perspectives, or can you achieve that in an essay and short story as well?

HK: Probably not in an essay – an essay would be written from a single point of view. But yes, if you take a film like My Beautiful Laundrette: when it came out it was considered to be very radical. It wasn’t a big deal when it was shown in Soho, but everywhere else people were shocked by it. People came up to me and said: “I was thirteen years old when I saw that film, and afterwards I realised I was gay”. A lot of people.

TL: Do you see yourself as a spokesperson for multiculturalism?

HK: I like hybridity and I like mixing up, but I’m not a fan of multiculturalism anymore: I’ve become a Marxist in the last three days. I was a fan of multiculturalism when it was useful to have it, in the 1970s, and now we have it and I don’t think it’s very interesting. On the one hand it’s just festivals and food. And on the other hand it’s everybody being the same. The one thing that multiculturalism can’t deal with is the fact that some things are not compatible with one another. Multiculturalism creates a mush where everything’s nice, and I think that’s really oppressive.

TL: Another criticism of ‘multiculturalism’ was that it placed the emphasis on communities rather than individuals: whereas ‘cosmopolitanism’ proposed that you could pick and choose identities, that you could become individually hybrid, ‘multiculturalism’ tends to segregate people into groups…

HK: Segregate them and make them the same though, in their blandness. A bit like saying, ‘we’re all religious’. I only like religion when it’s really horrible, when it’s hateful – only then does it have any point. Look at what’s happened with the Catholic Church – it’ll soon be so regulated that Catholicism will become really bland – there won’t be any hatred left. It’ll be a bit like David Cameron: there’ll be no Tory hatred left, no fire in it. I mean I liked Thatcher because I hated her.

TL: I was thinking about the generational difference between us. My generation hasn’t had any experience of Thatcherism; we’ve grown up in a discursively ‘multicultural’ environment where racism isn’t as big a deal as it was in the 70s and 80s. Yet a lot of your characters have grown up in this period…

HK: And multiculturalism grew out of that… But now I think multiculturalism’s useless.

TL: So do you have any idea of what we should be moving towards?

HK: I think a class-based politics.

TL: Maybe the election will bring that to the fore…what did you think of the ITV debate between the three party leaders?

HK: I was pretty bored by it. I thought there should be a class war and an attack on the bankers, and also on the government that would have allowed this to happen – the government that is making the public repay a debt that the others have made – this seems to me to be grounds for revolution.

TL: Maybe we are in a more apathetic age, where it’s only the religious reformist movements that seem to have any angry spirit in them.

HK: I think we need a new Left, and a Left that needs to evolve – that will emerge and form new ideals – certainly focused on education, and housing, and health: it would be a radical attack on current government.

TL: You don’t think the Liberal Democrats could provide that?

HK: I’m probably going to vote Lib Dem; I’m not voting for Labour and I’m not voting for the Tories. Yet it’s a shame that this is an Obama moment and we don’t have anyone with radicalism or intelligence. I like Gordon Brown but I couldn’t forgive him for the Iraq War and I couldn’t forgive him for something worse: the liberation of the bankers who have ripped off the public. I don’t blame the bankers – if you leave your doors unlocked you can’t complain that a burglar has come into your house.

TL: A lot of critiques have discussed the cosmopolitanism in your writings: the ability to pick and choose your identity. And yet at the same time, when I was reading your short stories I was really struck by the materiality of them, the fact that you can’t escape the body. Are there limits to how cosmopolitan you can be?

HK: Yes, you can’t just pick up any identity: you have the parents you have, you have the country, the time and the class; and you can mess around with that. To get a new identity means giving up something, and you might have to give up quite a lot – you can’t just pick and choose, like buying a new coat or a new purse. It’s very limited. But then identities are very limited too, and that’s why I think that identity politics and multiculturalism are quite limited – to define people as ‘gay’, ‘woman’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Jew’ or whatever – these are very important labels for certain times and certain circumstances. But I think in the West now, these have rather worn out their welcome: you’re not only gay, you might also be a parent, you use the health service, you identify with other people who are unemployed. Identity is useful for some things at certain times and not for others. You do have to be flexible. On the other hand, as I say, you can’t just become anybody.

TL: And you’re moving towards an idea of identities as dialogic as well – the fact that you’re always articulating your identity to somebody.

HK: Yes, exactly. These things are only useful in terms of where the argument is, what it does and how it works. The place. And that’s why in a story you have lots of characters to speak to each other.

TL: The word ‘important’ seems to repeat itself extensively in the collection, as former ideals are revised or dropped, replaced by new desires or left blank. An especially interesting transition is between the ending of ‘Blue, Blue, Pictures of You’, where Laura admits that ‘she had only wanted a good time’ in her youth and now ‘wanted something important to do’, and the beginning of the next story, ‘My Son the Fanatic’, where Ali turns to Islamism in defiance against his upbringing because ‘there are more important things to be done’ in life. Would you agree that your stories are about the longing for, if not the realisation of, the ‘important’?

HK: These are real questions – the relation between hedonism and meaning, or between being selfish and being good. The value of what you do. Freud doesn’t talk about this but Jung writes about it a lot. When I’m looking after my son I don’t question what I’m doing – I’m just looking after this boy because it’s a good thing to do and it makes me a good father. If I’m writing a story, I may think: ‘do I need to write a story or shall I go down to the pub?’ These are questions that we have; it’s easy to drive out meaning. Meaning is often tenuous – you can create meaninglessness by the stupidity of the questions. The right way to live is something you work out for yourself all the time.

John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London and a columnist for The Guardian. He is the editor of several novels by Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and other Victorian authors and in 2005 he chaired the Booker Prize committee. He has published criticism on contemporary bestsellers and reading culture as well as a bestselling series of literary puzzles, including Is Heathcliff A Murderer? The Literateur met him at UCL, the university with the oldest English department in the country.

Interviewed by Ling Low

TL: I’m intrigued by your work as a literary journalist.  Your work tends towards the study of reading cultures, how people consume books and how they treat them.  You’ve been referred to as a cultural critic.  How do you feel about that?

JS: I decided quite early on that there were certain things I couldn’t do.  I’m not a good critic; I don’t have a good ear for poetry. I’m very interested in the sociology of literature: what it is that makes literature happen.  A lot of people think it’s just storks in the back of Waterstones bookshops – that books are just found like Victorian babies under gooseberry bushes. I don’t think it works like that – there is a kind of machinery behind literature as end product.

I got very interested in the machinery and I thought that was something I could engage with. I remember quite distinctly how it happened.  I was in Edinburgh at the time, working on manuscripts, Thackeray manuscripts that were scattered all over the place because autograph hunters had valued them.  I came across a bundle of contracts he’d made with the [publishing] house of Smith, and it occurred to me these contracts were shaping the novels that came out the other end.

Many would say Thackeray’s best novel is Henry Esmond – it’s a three volume novel whereas most of his other novels were serialised.  But this novel was defined by the publisher, who wanted it for the library market, not the news-stand market.  And you can see that the contract in fact shaped the product and the publisher, George Smith, also had a very strong input into the literary end product.  I’m interested in that: what you could call the sociology of literature.

TL: As well as editing Victorian Fiction, you’ve written books about contemporary bestsellers.  It seems to me that there isn’t a big disparity between these interests, since the Victorian fiction market was very commercially driven.  Novels now canonised as classics were bestsellers of their time.

JS: I suppose my interest in Victorian fiction, like a lot of people of my generation, was something imbibed in mother’s milk in the sense that the first books I read at school were Victorian novels.  I can distinctly remember my first reading of Harrison Ainsworth.  I was born in 1939 which means if you do the sums I was quite close to Victorian England.  One didn’t need a time machine to go back there, it was around you.  And also there was the shortage of new books so one was driven to old books.

So my interest in Victorian novels is almost inherited – but it has always been non-canonical.  My estimate is there are about 70 – 80,000 works which one could bring under the definition of ‘Victorian Fiction’.  But if you look at what is called Victorian fiction on the average curriculum, it’s usually four or five novels, and short novels at that. Silas Marner, Hard Times, perhaps Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights.  These are unusual for Victorian novels because they’re very good and most Victorian novels weren’t very good.  But nonetheless you have to understand the bad to understand the good.  These novels don’t emerge from nowhere: they grow from a sub-soil, and that sub-soil is ordinary or even plain bad fiction.

I believe, like the Russian Formalists, that the energies of literature are volcanic: they come from below.  They don’t trickle down from Henry James.

TL: I understand that while researching The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, you read some 5000 novels.

JS: There was a moment, in the early nineties, when I thought that I understood what the Victorian novel was.  It doesn’t last, but it’s a wonderful feeling.  But it takes time.  It takes not just time, but unharrassed time.  And one of the things that has happened in universities is partly that the driving forces are all outside universities, the inspectorial regimes.  These are people on the outside telling people on the inside what to do.  That never used to be the case.

The image used to be that of a high wall and the government came with a sack of gold, and they threw the gold over the wall, and you could do what you liked with it.  But that’s no longer the case.  Now they want “accountability”.  It seems to me that accountability kills initiative.  It also kills that profitable idleness which is necessary for English studies – although you can’t make a case for it.  You can’t make a case for a department in which people just do bugger-all except become learned, keep up with their colleagues, create a kind of ambience.  That is no longer possible.  It may come back – but that wonderful idleness, leisure which the study of literature needs – that’s a change.  It’s probably immutable.

TL: We’ve recently heard of humanities funding cuts at universities in England, and UCL is among several London universities affected.  Are you worried about the survival of English Literature as a discipline?

JS: One of the few compensations of having been around for a long time is that you can see fairly large rhythms and movements in your discipline.  What one can call literary criticism or the study of literature in higher education has shifted quite a lot in the last forty or fifty years.  When I came into it in the sixties, it was still the case that a war had been fought quite recently for ideological and cultural motives – against totalitarianism, for liberalism.

A lot of people felt that literature enshrined many of the things that one had fought and died for.  As a result of which English studies was really central, in a way which would I think be quite unfamiliar to anyone coming into the profession today.  In the 1960s and 70s, the Provost of UCL, Noel Annan, one of the lineal descendents of Bloomsbury, stated very confidently that the heart of the UCL enterprise was English studies.

No Provost since then, no one in a position of authority in a university state apparatus would say that.  Mandelson has come out recently, very strongly, with the opinion that the humanities spectrum, including History, Philosophy and English, is to some extent periphery – icing on the cake – and what you really need is technology and science.  One does feel peripheral now.

TL: Picking up on this idea of profitable idleness, I notice that you’ve written various books of literary puzzles, such as Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? I suppose I deduce from this that you expect people to read repetitively, obsessively, but also to read for narrative pleasure.  Is that part of profitable idleness as well?

JS: Very much so.  I’ve done seven of these books – I’d have done seventy but the publishers indicated that the vein was running a bit dry after the seventh!  They grew out of the fact I’ve edited a lot of fiction.  It seems to me editing is like marriage: you get to know a person very well if you sleep with them.  One of the things I did when I was annotating was to put in questions I couldn’t answer.  Readers would usually write back to me, and say ‘well if you look at chapter…’

There is a huge community of people out there who read very carefully – and not only that, they read very literally.  They read fiction not as the theorists see it, as a semiotic sign system, but as if it was real.  And so I got very interested in these questions.  Why is it, for instance, that Heathcliff has good teeth?  Does Heathcliff actually kill Hindley?  Very often it’s just errors on the author’s part, but it’s very interesting.

For instance, the first experiment that the invisible man performs in HG Wells’ novel is to turn a piece of white cotton invisible.  But later on it turns out he’s got to walk through Oxford Street naked, being jostled by all the people, because he can’t make himself an invisible suit. Now why is that?  These kinds of questions, questions which are really kind of ludicrous.

It was a gamesome thing, but it was also very communal.  One of the worst things about being a PhD is that it’s like being Scott of the bloody Antarctic.  You look around and you’re there all by yourself, you know more about this subject than anybody. It’s the wilderness of higher scholarship.  And yet there is a community of people out there.  They’re reading this stuff, and reading with hawk-eyed attention.  So these puzzle books are attempts to hook in to that, to get away from the loneliness of scholarship and to have some kind of dialogue.  If you do journalism, what you discover is that there’s always someone out there reading the paper that knows more than you do.  It’s a very corrective and important thing to discover.

TL: I suppose another example of this culture can be found on TV, with people picking over the mysteries in a series like Lost.

JS: I think the most interesting things happening in narrative right now are on American TV.  I’m thinking of things like Big Love, about a recusant Mormon family.  Or Breaking Bad which is wonderful, about a chemistry teacher who makes Methamphetamine because he’s dying of lung cancer and gets himself in terrible difficulties.  Or Damages, which is extraordinarily adventurous in its narrative in terms of cross-cutting and jumps.

I suppose that a lot of these things skin off from The Sopranos, or Dexter, which has done something quite unique – it has rediscovered creative ways of using voiceover.  A lot of Dexter is soliloquy, of a rather amiable serial killer. In The Wire they seem to have re-discovered the art of Victorian serialisation.  If you read a novel like Vanity Fair or Dombey and Son in the 1840s, it was a two-year experience.  With The Wire, you have that same kind of long engagement with a narrative – a sense of going somewhere.

TL: I wanted to ask you about offence.  In your book Magic Moments you write that offence is an important quality, “worth retaining”.  Do you feel that people are now desensitised to horror in both visual media and in literature?

JS: Years ago now I wrote a book about de-censorship.  In November 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover was acquitted at the Old Bailey and that changed the whole literary landscape.  Martin Amis could write things that Kingsley Amis would have been prosecuted for.  People became more thick-skinned.

In the fifties, our sensibilities were raw – 80% of the population had lived through the Second World War and seen terrible films of the concentration camps.  We were much more sensitive.  And sensitivity is, it seems to me, really very valuable in literature.  George Eliot said that the function of the novel is to extend sympathy. To make you feel other people’s pain, or to make you capable of feeling other people’s pain.  One didn’t just want to just weep over the fact that Dorothea Brooke is unhappy: one wanted to appreciate that, as Eliot put it, human beings have equivalent centres of self.  “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.”

It seems to me that in certainly some areas now there is a terrific callousness – literally unfeelingness.  American Psycho is a great book, but the first version which Bret Easton Ellis sold to Simon and Schuster was found to be so offensive, particularly in its violence against women, that a woman editor leaked the proofs and there was enough protest for the publishers to withdraw.

The book was eventually brought out in a modified form by Random House.  Even so, pretty hard stuff.  When one compares that, or any of the Saw movies for instance, with the kind of censorship willingly accepted in the forties and fifties, one can look at the terrific furore over what now seems like a very innocent adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1954: questions were asked in the House, one poor citizen apparently even died of a heart-attack watching the final scene in Room 101!

So there has been a loss of sensitivity, which goes against the grain of what one likes to think literature does.  Literature doesn’t make you a better person: that’s a myth.  It doesn’t necessarily make you a happy person.  But you could argue that it does refine your feelings.  It is what Flaubert calls a “sentimental education.”

TL: Ian McEwan wrote an article after 9/11 in which he said that the ability to imagine ourselves as other people is the core of humanity.  He argued that the terrorists’ crimes included a lack of imagination, an inability to empathise.

Interestingly, it was a novelist, Vernon Lee, who invented the word ‘empathy’, in the nineteenth century.  You can see why, it’s a natural concomitant of fiction.  When Ian McEwan complains that the tragedy of 9/11 was in some way a narcissistic act – narcissism being so engrossed yourself that you don’t realise other people exist – I think he’s right.

McEwan is an interesting case.  I think he’s a great novelist but he arouses horrific antipathy.  In February 2009, readers of The Guardian were asked [to nominate] the worst novel of the decade.  And the remarks about McEwan were the verbal equivalent of grievous bodily harm.

TL: Was this for On Chesil Beach?

JS: On Chesil Beach, Atonement, all of them, but principally for Saturday.  The language was vile – there were 893 responses, and not one was in favour of McEwan.  A number of people said they thought there was a conspiracy in the London literary world to promote certain writers and there was a kind of revolutionary feeling there.

Cultural revolutions are often accompanied by a kind of technological breakthrough.  The French Revolution was partly made possible because of the printing press.  In the 1960s the paperback revolution was incredibly influential.  And now we’ve got the internet, which has released a huge vox populi and that vox populi is certainly not subservient to what you’d call the cultural elite.  Poor McEwan is regarded, I think, as a creature of that elite.  Very interesting things are happening to the relationship between literature and the reading public.  It’s liberation, but like all forms of liberation it’s rather terrifying.

TL: I think it’s somewhat comforting that people are raising so much protest, because it does mean that people are reading books and have strong feelings about them.  But do you think that reading has declined as an important activity in people’s lives?

JS: Books have been very influential for me.  But I don’t think that they would have had the same impact on the personality of someone born in the nineties.  I’m not sure books are a major force now in terms of maturing a person.  I didn’t travel abroad until I was seventeen, so books were a kind of passport, taking me to interesting places.

But reading is probably still in as good a shape as it was – it’s just that people have wider choice and much less time.  150,000 titles were published last year in the UK, and 60% of those will go to the pulping mill unread.  In the post-war period, in the forties and fifties, it was hard to get access to books but now there is a surplus, and it is expanding exponentially with new media.

With the Google library project, you have in your hand 15 million titles, and half of them will be free.  But when will you read them?  How are people going to fit it in?  And competing media are more attractive to young readers.  There’s really something very sterile about looking at tiny black marks on a white surface and creating a world out of them.  It’s very wonderful and a great human trick, but books will have to fight hard to survive.

The e-book will be interesting – people see it now as a transcription device, a vehicle.  But it would be possible to have sound – to have soundtracks, the author’s voice, and all sorts of fluidities which a printed book doesn’t allow.  Look at what mobile phones were ten years ago and what the iPhone is now – you realise how fast technological change can happen.  In the future, the e-book could incorporate many new features that might bring about a revival of reading.

TL: I think the future is an excellent place to finish.  John Sutherland, thank you very much.

JS: Thank you.

Self has a daunting public persona, as his varied appearances on television and radio indicate. For this reason I was somewhat nervous on approaching his London home and made even more so at his startled, staring reaction on discovering that I don’t take sugar in my tea. However, once ensconced in his writing room for the interview Self became interested and encouraging, talking openly about humour, negativity and long, long walks in the desert.

Interview by Christine Fears

The Literateur: My first question is about your work so far. You often tend towards comic modes. Is there a particular reason for this?

Will Self: It was just the way I came into writing. Before I wrote fiction seriously, if you can be serious about writing comic fiction, I did other things. I was a newspaper cartoonist for a while so I was used to thinking in terms of structuring gags. I did, and still do some stand up comedy so it came naturally to me, the idea of trying to make people laugh in that way. And I suppose that’s how the stories in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, my first book, came to me. They were riffs to begin with, they were things that I would entertain people with – these preposterous stories. So it was a natural outgrowth of the sort of things I’d done before. Turning them into more serious fiction. It’s interesting to me that for a long time I was was so welded into a comic mode that I couldn’t really understand writing that didn’t at least have some jokes in it. I mean, Tolstoy’s got jokes. Proust has lots of jokes. You know, for some there does seem to be a kind of fetish around the idea that the less jokes you have in something ipso facto the more serious it is, and I never really quite understood that. It seems to me that jokes are just one of the modes of experiencing the world. But it has to be said that in recent years I’ve written quite a lot of less funny stuff, and now I do see that comedy is a mode that I moved into because of this pre-existing sensibility.

TL: What made you shift away from it more recently?

WS: I just don’t find things as funny any more really [pause] I also don’t think anything is funny twice. When I worked as a cartoonist I really felt I’d exhausted the medium by the time I was twenty-five. I drew professionally for about three or four years and by then I felt I’d drawn all the cartoons that I was going to. But certainly I think there’s something very interesting in spot gags. They’re kind of like ideograms, they’re like Chinese characters, they have a symmetry about them and an expressiveness, but I felt that (and I wasn’t a particularly good cartoonist) but I still felt that I’d exhausted it as a genre quite early. It was done, and maybe I feel something like that about comic effects in writing as well. I mean, it’s a combination of that and that nothing’s really funny twice. I don’t think. I raised this question the other day with a table-load of very eminent writers and they all started telling jokes that they still thought were funny, but actually they weren’t funny to them. They were maybe funny to the people listening because it was they first time we’d heard them, so what they were really getting off on was our experience of the humour for the first time. But actually nothing’s funny twice. Even in literature which is a very, very broad thing and there lots of possible comic modes within it, once you’ve done them you’ve kind of done them [laughs and shrugs]

TL: Moving on, I read that you once said ‘a lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me’ which strikes me as a rather amusingly backhanded compliment. What value do you think there is (if any) in the academic approach to literature?

WS: For whom?

TL: For contemporary and working writers, rather than the classics?

WS: Well, I realised by the time I was about seventeen that studying literature was a bad way to go for a creative writer. You study it in the sense that you read and you understand the mechanics of how books work and that is the only education for a writer. But studying it formally and academically, and certainly theoretically, is I think the kiss of death because it starts becoming artifactual rather than art at that level. I did an English S level – this is back in the seventies obviously – and deconstruction was just coming in and I started getting acquainted with things like that when I was in my teens, and thought ‘woo, no’ for all sorts of reasons. Partly because critical theory is just a sort of refuge for philosophy rather than being anything in its own right, and particularly with deconstruction. But also because it’s deadly for your perception of literature I think, if you’re a creative writer. Every field now has its spurious professionalism, and in the last ten years we’ve got double the number of university students in this country than there were previously, and double the amount of graduate unemployment [laughs]. But there’s always been this sort of attitude. I remember when I first started publishing, and it occasionally resurfaces, there’s this idea that you can’t be a proper writer if you haven’t got a degree in English Literature. It’s like you’re a plumber or something and you haven’t got your Corgi Gas Installation Qualification [laughs].

I find it kind of laughable actually myself. It’s faintly ludicrous. But as regards Lit Crit approaches to my own work, I don’t really have an opinion. The beauty for me of being a writer is that you put it out there and how people choose to approach it is absolutely their own affair. I’m stunned by the number of young people who…well, not that many, but the few and increasing numbers who approach me when they have a thesis to do on my work and say ‘Will I help them with their thesis?’ I always write back and say, ‘Look, you’re the critic. There’s the work. Your job is to actually respond to it, not get me to help you respond to it.’

TL: You use the phrase in Psychogeography and elsewhere, ‘the modern sublime’. I wondered how you characterise this against traditional ideas of the sublime?

WS: Well, it’s man-made in essence. I suppose if you wanted to stretch the parallel… Well, I think people do experience it as sublime, is the thing. They don’t experience it as sublime, they experience it as quotidian in fact, because they can’t allow themselves to experience it as sublime, because to experience it as sublime is to acknowledge all sorts of things about humanity. One: we’re animals. Two: we’re part of the natural world. Three: there is something kind of monstrous and frightening about us. The key experience of the modern sublime for me is standing in a wood outside O’Hare airport in Chicago while looking into the face of a startled deer. While a Boeing 757 jet screams overhead. That’s the modern sublime. It’s the juxtaposition of the natural world with the man-made/natural, uber-natural or meta-natural world. Which is terrifying, but as I say people don’t experience it as terror because to do so is too upsetting. It undermines too much. I mean, flying is the thing that really strikes me as this strange sublime. The most radical experience, physical experience, that any of us will have, apart from surgery, childbirth and death, in our lives. And yet it gets drowned by a kind of incredible panoply of boredom and things to damp it down and make it, you know, ‘nine pound ninety-nine one way to the canary islands with Easyjet’. The whole iconography, the semiotics of it is designed to lull you into accepting it as an integral part of [shrugs] you know. Whereas, we’re on a flightpath here. If one of, just one of, these jets came down in central London, you’d be back in the sublime.

TL: Do you not think that people, after the airport experience, when they’ve actually got on the plane, feel fear then?

WS: For a moment their guard will drop, or if something goes wrong – there’s a glitch during take-off and then they’ll be open to the sublimity of it, the experience. But that window closes very quickly and there is plenty of stuff lain on them to dampen it down again so they forget about it, yeah.

TL: I’m always surprised when people choose to close the windows. Why would you want to when you’re above a cloud? That’s when I feel the sublime – seeing a sight humans aren’t designed to see.

WS: That’s right, but you know, you get on a flight and you’re maybe particularly labile that day and you may get up there and think ‘This is astonishing. This is a kind of god-like perspective three hundred miles across these enormous cumuli clouds’ or whatever it is you’re seeing. And then your eyes will stray to the John Grisham novel being read by the person next to you, and then you’ll think about the beef stroganoff that’s arriving in a plastic tray and before you know it you’ve forgotten all about it. It kind of works all of that.

TL: You’ve spent a lot of time in the Orkney islands, where a lot of my family are from, so I’m interested…

WS: Oh OK! Do you know it well?

TL: I know it…I wouldn’t say well. I haven’t been for a long time, but I loved it up there. So I was wondering what it was about Orkney which draws you, when your natural habitat seems to be London?

WS: Well, sadly the friend whose house I stayed in a lot and wrote in a for a decade died a few years ago so my tap-root into it has somewhat gone. So I haven’t in fact been back since, well for the past three years. Well, I think – without being overly romantic about it – I think places choose you. I mean, I didn’t choose to go to Orkney, I had this friend who had a house up there and he encouraged me to go up. The first time I went I didn’t like it particularly. Then, in the early nineties I needed a bolthole from London and I went up and lived there for four or five months over the winter, and that’s when it really bit into me. I think with Orkney in particular it’s the sheer density of the Neolithic romance and the fact that it’s… Well, islands I think are enormously appealing to novelists because they’re fully apprehensible. You know, a book is a synecdoche, its kind of part of the world, but the whole of the world and a whole which is itself part of the world. And that’s what islands are like as well. And in Orkney in particular there’s this very, very strong Neolithic presence in Skara Brae, Maeshowe, Midhowe. The island that I used to stay on, Rousay, has…did you know it’s called Little Egypt by archaeologists? It has the highest density of Neolithic remains I think anywhere in the world, certainly in Europe. So that sense of the island as not only a synecdoche but also a palimpsest. It was overpowering. The house I used to stay in had a broch right next to it and almost certainly was a Neolithic living site as well. You know, in London we pride ourselves on having a two millennium old city, but it’s really bullshit, it’s a Victorian city. So it’s that sense of the enormous weight of the past, and yet in a comparatively deserted and natural setting.

All of those things made it very appealing to me. I like the fact that unlike the Western Isles there had never been, or there’d been relatively little, landlordism. There’d only been one clearance in Orkney so the pattern of land-tenure and the independence of the place has in a way been maintained. I liked the fact that it wasn’t Scotland, that it was a place apart and that separated it from the rest of Britain. So all of those things.

TL: So, now to move onto Psycho Too, and also walking, because I enjoy walking myself. You say in one of your articles that ‘it is the curse of the speculative writer to see his fictional creations cancelled out by the prosaic march of time.’ But have any of these fictional creations gradually turned out to be true or realised?

WS: Well, yeah. Quite a lot [laughs]. It sounds faintly immodest…I mean, the big ones that haven’t happened yet are the extinction of the anthropoid apes in the wild, which underpins the whole schema of Great Apes. But it will happen, within the next twenty or thirty years. It sounds like I want to be around to see it, but of course I don’t. If you go back to Quantum Theory, which was written in 1990, so nearly twenty years ago, it said that all that would characterise the millennium were some rather dull television retrospectives [laughs]. I was bang on there. The increasing preoccupation with traffic in London, which was bad then, but the pathological obsession with the car and traffic becoming almost the governing or organising principle of society in some bizarre way, I think that’s there as well. The rise of the mobile phone – there’s a story in that collection called ‘Mono-Cellular’. It’s about the coming age of the mobile phone. I think that was relatively prescient for the 1990s. So, you know, quite a few things. But I don’t think of myself as being…well, it’s one of those odd things. I think if you try to write speculative fiction you’re probably not going to hit it are you? It tends to be a kind of serendipity in that way.

TL: Psycho Too is at times quite touching, when you talk about time spent with your children for example. This is quite a different experience for a reader, compared with How the Dead Live or Great Apes. Do you think your well-documented change in lifestyle and young children has changed the way you write and the way you think about the world?

WS: Well, yeah, sure. I’m certainly a lot more domesticated [laughs]. Inevitably. I mean, my older children who are now nearly grown-up, I didn’t live with them so much as I have with the younger ones, so I didn’t have that kind of domestic scene. The pieces in Psycho Too are of course newspaper journalism primarily, so they’re much more ephemeral. So it only seems right to have them kinda integrated with life in that way. I mean, it’s strange: the book I’m writing at the moment is a pseudo-memoir, but there’s not a lot of family in it, or it’s enormously distorted in that way, and certainly not particularly touching [laughs]. But you get older, I mean, nihilism doesn’t look good once you hit middle age, because if you’re that nihilistic why aren’t you dead? Nor does existentialism. My favourite catchphrase is ‘You never saw Simone de Beauvoir pushing a Maclaren buggy along the Rive Gauche’. It just doesn’t…you know, you have kids, then you have to at some level broker an accommodation with the world as it is because that’s the world that you are bringing them up in. Therefore at all kinds of levels you have to broker an accommodation with it. Or else it’s just unsustainable, you can’t look after them, it can’t be done.

TL: Your opening essay ‘Walking to The World’ tracks a walk from J. G. Ballard’s house to The World archipelago in the United Arab Emirates. I wondered why you chose this particular method of commemorating Ballard? When reading the book I could understand why you were doing it for your own state of mind; it almost seems like a rite of passage from your description of it. I wondered why was it appropriate to commemorate him in this way?

WS: I think it was what Dubai represented as a very Ballardian place. It seemed to encompass so much of his thought and his speculative fiction, you know, this kind of…this vast city of unbecoming that’s doomed to be an enormous ruin in half a century’s time. It’s so like the places he describes in collections like Terminal Beach, that idea of the dated quality of futurity. It’s very him. And then just the sort of conceits, like The World itself, or the Burj Dubai, the highest building in the world. That seemed right and proper. I mean, I have to say, there was an element of conceit about it. I was looking for somewhere to go. I had a commission and originally I had intended to walk across Tehran, which I thought would be very interesting (from the airport obviously) but it was looking increasingly difficult to get a working visa, a journalist’s visa, so I shifted to Dubai. But I’d been talking to Jim a lot, relatively speaking, in the last few months before he died and so it was obviously very clear in my mind – him and his thought.

TL: Do you think a city like Dubai, which expanded massively as the result of a financial boom, is almost like a contemporary dystopia which could have been predicted from knowledge of prior expansion and industrialisation in a country like the UK? Could this have been part of the draw to it for you?

WS: Well, it’s entirely predicated on oil. I think Thesiger[1] understood what would happen with oil. Or certainly in between when he crossed the Empty Quarter and when he went back to Dubai, or to the gulf, I think in the sixties or even the early seventies. Of course, then these cities were nothing like they are now. But he could see it coming at that point. I mean, they are essentially monocultures, the real estate is. There’s no reason for it there at all. It’s all on the oil. When the oil is gone there’ll be nothing. Why would you want to have an office in the Gulf? It’s not even near anything else.

TL: Were you drawn to the surrealism of The Palm and The World?

WS: Oh, yeah.

TL: I found them fascinating, strange ideas.

WS: Yeah, they are strange aren’t they? They are strange. They’re really odd. They’re really odd, and it is kind of…obviously I’m not setting myself up as a student of the evolving Arab world view, but there did seem to be something odd going on there and… well, I write about it a lot in the piece. I’m not clear about whether it’s a Potemkin village of some kind or whether it’s actually a weird monumental calligraphy, or what it is. These pictograms of land mass, its very, very strange [laughs]. Of course, it was the surrealism that drew me there. I have to say, as I say in the piece, I found it, because there is this helot class who are building it, I found it repellent actually to be there. It made me feel ill. It’s the sort of place where I couldn’t relax for a second. Maybe that’s a sort of fastidiousness, because the reality is that a lot of our lifestyle here has been off the back of a helot class that have been spread somewhere else.

TL: Some of the description of it in Psycho Too did remind me of the literature of this country during the industrial revolution. The view of the vast divisions in living standards and the images of dirt and suffering are modernised, but essentially describe the same phenomena.

WS: Yeah. Of course, when Blake’s dark satanic mills were in Farringdon, you only had to walk a mile or two down the road to see it. And in a sense the underclass is right over there, it’s across the road from here [gestures out of window to the estate opposite his house]. It’s not that it’s not present, it’s just not as raw as that. It’s not people working in hundred-degree heat for less than five dollars a day with no medical cover. That’s pretty raw.

TL: Thinking about comparing Dubai to London many years ago, and London now as you said, I was wondered what the palimpsest of time-frames which exist in a cities like London or Dubai tell us about ourselves and our past?

WS: I think the interesting thing about London – and this is part of the next novel I’m going to write actually – is that London’s Modernist moment was about 1900, and that actually it’s a city that’s been decaying for 100 years but people don’t grasp it for all sorts of reasons. Not to be too Hegelian about it, but I think the world spirit moved on a while ago. Think about London in 1900. You had stock market prices from the Bourse in Paris and from Wall Street instantly accessible by telegraph. You had a deep-level tube system and you had the phone. That was it really. It was the most modern city in the world. And in a way nothing that has followed afterwards has really…the only substantial technological innovantions that have come, transatlantic air travel and the internet, de-centre the importance of the city rather than re-centering it. So then Britain which is no longer an industrial power in that way, nevermind the trading power it was, is de-centred and so London is. And the great temptation for people is always to believe that the future is ‘futuristic’, but what I cleave to is the idea that it’s dated in some sense. You know, a city like Dubai is a non-city. There’s no reason for it to be there at all. It isn’t a city: it’s a set. I think that that explains a lot about British, or English, society’s confusion about what it is. England seems to bask in the dream of its own imagined futurology still, with no apparent reason. But that’s me [laughs].

TL: What evidence of this decline do you see in London and the rest of Britain?

WS: Well, there’s no public building of confidence, or style, or wit, or sophistication in this city at all, is there? What you have is a sort of modernist desktop ornament like these, don’t you? [shows me some small wooden replicas of the Millennium Wheel, Gherkin and other buildings from the London skyline] Like the Wheel, and the Gherkin. But they’re not part of a Nash style imagining of a London cityscape. They’re plumped down in the Victorian city. They’re not part of the unified conception of the built environment or urban space in that way. I mean in a way that’s what’s charming about London.

TL: I think that is what’s charming about London. You go along a street and there’s so many different styles.

WS: Yeah, it’s a very anarchic city. You know, that’s kind of charming, but…it’s charming [shrugs]. Where does that get you? It doesn’t take you forward really, does it? The only new building that has had swagger has been dealing rooms, for the fraudulent policy scheme that was the financial world in the past ten or fifteen years.

TL: So, hypothetically, could you suggest how you think the ideal city should be architecturally? Or do you have a favoured city?

WS: Oh, I don’t know. You have to deal with what you’ve got don’t you? I’m not a kind of gourmand when it comes to anything. It’s like when people call me up saying ‘What’s your favourite X, Y or Z?’, I can never really answer. I don’t really think in those terms. The things I like, are not the things I think are good. I like L.A. a lot, I’m writing about Los Angeles at the moment, I’ve always liked Los Angeles. It doesn’t mean I think it’s a good city. Quite clearly it’s fucking dreadful. But I find it really interesting. Maybe it’s so interesting that that’s a form of good, but I doubt it. I think it’s perversity in me that makes it interesting to me.

If I look at a kind of alternative, parallel life for myself, one in which I am not as I am, but perhaps saner, better adjusted, happier, then I certainly think you should be able to walk out of a city in the morning. So quite clearly all of these cities are way too big, they lack a human scale. I mean I don’t think a city has to be tiny, but – I think it’s Cyril Connolly who said that a city should be no bigger than it takes a man to walk out of in the morning, or a woman for that matter. And I think that is true. They’re too big. I think a city ought to have a kind of harmony to its parts. It ought to have a kind of a good weight between its different components, and it should certainly have a sense of equality about it rather than being dominated by expressions of inequality. Whatever they are, hierarchical divisions of where people live, great pomp and great misery in that way. These things may be pleasing in a dilettantish way, but I don’t think they’re great for the people who have to live on the bottom of the pile. I often idly think, just on the size issue and the accessibility issue, that I wish I’d lived in the North. Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester: they all have terrible disadvantages, but they all have that advantage of being accessible to an interesting interlay. You can get out of them in that way. Not true here. It takes a full day to walk out from here to green fields, and a long day. I speak as probably one of the very few people who’s done it.

TL: Do you have any particular way of exploring new areas when you walk to them? And do you have a specific aim, or do you just wander?

WS: No, I have to have an aim. That’s why all of them have been animated by an aim in that way. I’m not a good sight-seer, and I’m not good at being aimless at all. I’m rather driven. So most of these journeys, as you see in the assembled literature, have been animated by these ideas of the modern sublime, and the juxtaposition of walking and mass transit systems. Attacking mass transit systems, if you like. Exposing and satirising these systems by doing these airport walks or walking to meetings with people, so you’ve got a kind of Austenian timeline juxtaposed with a contemporary one. I’ve always had to do things like that. The truth to tell is I got rather fed up with it [laughs]

TL: I noticed that in your opening essay. You seem to get fed up of the idea of the walk when you’re in the middle of it.

WS: Ah, I did get fed up with it. Very fed up with it. But that’s good. That’s kinda good. It’s honest. It has an honesty about it. I got fed up with myself. It’s quite lonely, a lot of that. The thing is that writing is a solitary occupation anyway. It’s a busman’s holiday – there you are, on your own in another environment, which you’re then going to write about. It feels like some sort of awful auto-cannibalism that you’re involved in. And this book I’m writing at the moment, which is called Walking to Hollywood, which is about a 120 mile long circumambulation of Los Angeles, which I fictionalise. I got terribly fed up with that as well [laughs].

TL: How often are you tempted to jump in a cab instead?

WS: Twice in Dubai. Once when I was walking out along the Sheikh Zayed Road and I thought: this is just ridiculous. The story here is the people. I think I mention Johann Hari’s very fine long piece in The Independent where he did that. He spoke to the people. A very different kind of piece, but I almost had an intimation of that kind of alternative bit of reportage that I would have been more interested in writing, rather than a piece which of its nature was theoretical. And then out in the desert purely because I was getting heatstroke and it was really quite tough. It was the second day’s walk and it was physically very, very tough.

TL: It’s quite dangerous, I’d imagine, in the extreme heat and cold of the desert?

WS: Yeah, well, not super-dangerous. It’s not like being Ben Fogle and dragging your sleigh across the Antarctic, but by the standards of a largely sedentary middle-aged man it was fairly dangerous. But that’s alright. It’s all good, but I’m slightly…you know. I’m going to finish this Hollywood book and I don’t do the Psychogeography column in The Independent any more and I haven’t got the pretext. It was kind of a bit of a phase. I love that about being a writer. I love the way in which you can move through phases and say I’ve done that, I can do something else.

TL: Is it like the comedy? Do you think you’ve exhausted it?

WS: No, no. Well, I mean, with exhausting the comedy I mean I just wanted to write some things which weren’t so funny. I was very shocked when The Butt won the Wodehouse Comic Fiction award. There’s not a joke in it, it’s a story of unconcern. It’s what psychologists call the halo effect: people think you’re funny, so then they pick up anything you write and start giving out rich belly laughs because they assume it must be funny. But I still do some stand up stuff and I still do some comedy. With the walks, there is another long walk I want to do that I’ve promised myself, from here to Orkney. I love John Hillaby’s book Journey Through Britain which is probably the best account of the Land’s End to John O’Groats walk, but Hillaby did it in the late 60s. It’s a very moving book if you get a chance to read it, I don’t know if it’s still in print. But he avoided the cities. I think it’d be fascinating, and I haven’t read an account of somebody who walked through the cities. So I’d love to do that, and I promised myself I’d do that for my fiftieth birthday as a present to myself. But the publishers are a bit fed up with it all. And they’ve said that they’re not really interested. I don’t know whether I’ll find the wherewithal to do it on the basis that my publishers don’t really want me to write it up.

TL: You mentioned a moment ago that it’s the individuals you meet that interest you. I noticed that throughout Psychogeography you write about an area, but focus in on an individual like Peter Buxton or Ivan Bustamante. What about the individual suggests something about the place you’re in?

WS: Well, they’re going to be indicative of the place, aren’t they? And I think the worst kind of travel writing is to imagine that your perception…I mean, most travel writers are tourists with typewriters. And that’s a terrible thing to be isn’t it? I mean, tourism is a dreadful thing. It’s really awful, it narrows the mind, and then narrows the mind of the people who read it, if you’re a tourist writer. But, I mean, I’m not overly confident that a lot of my stuff isn’t like that anyway. But try and at least get the perspective of somebody who’s there. The best kind of writing about place is by the people who spend a long time there, not by people who aren’t parked there but just sort of blow through. In my defence, the amount of offers I get to go to Turkmenistan or to visit the Ituri Pygmies, I couldn’t even shake a stick at them, and I do turn 99.9% of them down. But it’s not much of a defence.

TL: I don’t know, I think you go into different places from other travel writers I’ve read. You look at interspaces and the forgotten things.

WS: Yeah, absolutely, that’s all I’m really interested in. I think established destinations are within the man-machine matrix. They’re just part of it, so you can’t learn anything from them really.

TL: Do you think you escape the man-machine matrix on your unusual walks outside the system?

WS: Not really, ultimately, no.

TL: Do you think it’s possible to escape it?

WS: I think you’ve got to stop flying. I think you’ve got to stop flying for all sorts of reasons. I think you’ve got to stop flying because you’d impose these localisms on your perspective. You’d stop thinking ‘I understand China because I can get a plane there’ and you start realising you know fuck-all about China. So it places the world back in scale. I think you’ve got to stop flying because it’s killing the fucking planet in all sorts of ways. And it’s not so much that by stopping flying you’ll be able to save the planet, because I very much doubt that that’s the case, it’s really that you’ll save yourself. There’s something vulgar about it. It’s an aesthetic thing for me. I think it’s very vulgar when people say to me ‘I’ve just been here and I’ve just been there, I’ve got a jacuzzi and a Bentley.’. But they don’t understand it as being like that any more. It’s the vulgarity of the rich.

TL: Would you suggest travelling any other way, or sticking where you can access by foot or car?

WS: Trains are good, for all sorts of reasons. I don’t know, it’s early days, but I’m on course for a year without flying which will probably be the first year without flying for a long time. Because I’m quite a mercurial person I’m worried that it may bite. I can see already that it’s a problem for me. Like most people I have family in the States. I’m a dual citizen, I have lots of reasons to go to America. So if I actually decided that I can’t go to America any more it would be quite a thing, but who knows, it may happen.

TL: Throughout your work you’re very open about your influences and the traditions you’re writing in. Are you aware of writing in a tradition, or making a contribution to one, or is it where you’d be writing naturally if you didn’t read and enjoy other books?

WS: I don’t know, am I any more up-front about it that anybody else?

TL: I’d say, for example, in the essay at the front of Psycho Too you’re writing directly in homage to J. G. Ballard, and we’ve already discussed the Ballardian feel of Dubai. I’m sure other writers talk about their influences in interviews, but not everybody might foreground it so boldly in their work.

WS: He is the only one though. There isn’t anybody else. When I got rid of Burroughs about ten years ago, I wrote a long essay on him that sort of pushed him away. I summed up and apotheosised the extent to which I was influenced by him and moved beyond it and by extension the whole beat thing, and by extension really around that time I accepted the death of the avant garde. For writers like me, if there are writers like me…yeah, writers like me. It’s this label of ‘cult fiction’ or you know, it’s what the avant garde used to be isn’t it? I think anybody smart realises there can’t be anything like the avant garde any more because there isn’t any taboo to be broken. So how can you have an avant garde? You can write anything you want. The avant garde of necessity represented the people who were prepared to write down the things that people commonly thought but were unable to express because of all sorts of taboos. It no longer exists any more and hasn’t since, it’s hard to say, probably since 1980. It’s an arbitrary point, OK? So then it becomes cult fiction which is like the identity politics of literature, it’s like having sections of a bookshop like ‘troubled lives’, ‘feminism’. So I think I kind of moved away from that association. I suppose I did feel as I set out to write, actually, even in the late 80s, that while there was a discourse within which you could say the things I wanted to say it wasn’t coextensive with what people thought of literary fiction still. And that still seems to be the case. I think a lot of literary fiction, what is perceived as being the significant contemporary literary fiction still seems incredibly recondite. Well, not recondite. Incredibly reactionary to me. It’s like Modernism never happened a lot of the time, isn’t it? They’ll write three-decker kind of Victorian novels, A. S. Byatt or Ian McEwan. They seem very recherché to me and also what’s permissible within them still seems very toned down. That being said, there’s still no avant garde. It’s not about taboos. So do I feel influenced. Well, I feel influenced by everything I’ve ever read. Which is a lot, as you’d imagine. It’s interesting. It’s nice being middle aged. It’s quite exciting, because you get to re-read stuff that was very formative in your late teens early twenties. Increasingly, I write introductions and things like that. I look at texts again, and that’s interesting because then you see what the ambit of that influence is. Do I feel I’m contributing to anything? I just don’t know, I don’t know. I get very pessimistic about this because of this salad bar. I think when the avant-garde existed you could feel you’d done a good job just by writing the word fuck. You know, there seems to be so much literature, to me. Doesn’t there seem an awful lot published to you?

TL: Yes, there does. And when you look back at previous periods in which there has been an awful lot published, and out of all of this writing only a comparatively few writers last over time in any significant way, because they were perceived as doing something new. It’s struck me how hard it is to navigate contemporary writing sometimes as there’s so much, it’s difficult to find the things which are really appealing.

WS: Absolutely. I think a lot of writers and people feel ‘let time do the job’. So you don’t tend to read the contemporary stuff, you read something which has lasted. But even stuff which has lasted, it may not have lasted consistently. It may chime in with the current era for some reason and swim back up into popular esteem in that way. I’m very wary of all senses of the canon, there’s a lot of instability around the idea there are some things that are inescapable and quite clearly there. But I suppose, maybe surprisingly, I just don’t think I’m that good to be honest.

TL: Really?

WS: It never even occurs to me actually [laughs]. Less and less.

TL: You’re one of the contemporary writers I’ve come across who I really enjoy, if that’s not too sycophantic…

WS: Enjoy is good. It’s better than don’t enjoy. I mistrust, well, maybe it’s a kind of magical thinking – maybe I secretly hope that there’s something canonical there. But I think that by consciously thinking that I’m rooting myself out. I’m big on magical thought, you know. I still don’t tread on the cracks. Yes there are some writers who have a late surge but on the whole, you tend to do your best work in your thirties and forties, and I’m nearly out of that. One of the problems with writing professionally for a living is that you get very aware of stratigraphy and layering, you get acutely sensitive to it in your own life and in culture, and you begin to live in it, where you’ve got an awful vision of it and you see all of that stuff. I’m very aware of it. Also I think, there’s no doubt in my mind, that there are lots of middle age writers who get badly affected by posterity disease. You can see it growing on them like mildew, and it takes the form of imagining that they’ve made it. They’ve taught on a university course, they’ve received the right kind of accolades, they’re consistently printed, they’re everywhere and they think they’re one of the immortals. And I’ve no doubt that, as you say, for the vast majority of them it’s an absolute illusion. And it must do nothing but poisonous things to their inability to be fresh with what they’re doing. So maybe in a way it is prophylaxis to try and keep…you know , for me to get up in the morning and write a book as if you were making a table, it would be terrible. I cannot be bothered unless I feel driven to do it. There’s an urgency. There has to be an urgency at a formal level about what one is doing. You have to try and think to yourself not ‘I’m going to make a table’, but ‘I’m going to try and make a new surface for people to eat from’. There’s got to be a new way with this whole table thing. And if you don’t really feel that way about it why would one bother? You’d just become a hack at that level.

TL: What is it that makes you continue writing, despite the doubts you’ve just talked about?

WS: I keep having ideas. I can’t help it. I mean, I keep having ideas, and it’s how I earn my living. The other thing is, and you’ll have experienced this if you’ve embarked on a writing career of some sort, I don’t teach creative writing because I think it’s a fatuous thing to do, but if anybody young asks me for advice, what I say to them is: ‘Do you, when you look back at a page of your work get inflicted with a dreadful sense futility and a sense that it’s cardboard, and it’s meaningless and that it doesn’t express an iota of what you wanted to say, and that it’s hackneyed, and it’s clichéd?’, and they go: ‘Yeah’, you go: ‘Right, you’re always going to feel like that. Accept it. It doesn’t matter how many languages you’re translated into, or how many awards you win or accolades you receive, you will still feel that way about what you do’. That is not all art, that is the virtuality of being a writer. So given that that’s true, how do I know that my negativity is built in? If anything I have grown more negative, it’s true. But that’s good [laughs]. Negativity is good.

TL: [laughs] Negativity is good?

WS: It is. Because it’s critical. It means you’ve maintained your critical edge towards what you’re doing. You’re not resting on it in any way [pause] I think.

TL: When you first started writing you said that you were ‘overawed by the canon’, and that it stifled you…

WS: Yeah, I stopped reading.

TL: That’s how you got beyond that point?

WS: I found that I was one of those writers who couldn’t read fiction while writing my own, and I’ve been very fortunate to be prolific, so I’ve never had a long hiatus. I mean, you know, I’ll read 2, 3, 4, 5, novels a year, half of which will be classics, and that’ll be about it. So newspapers and magazines always ask me ‘What do you think is happening in contemporary British literature?’, and I’ve more idea about what’s happening in military history in Poland. I just have no idea at all, which I feel slightly guilty about. But you know, as we were saying, there is this astonishing amount published and you think ‘Well, I can’t navigate this. That’s somebody else’s job’.

TL: Well, instead of asking about what you think is happening, where do you think you can go as a writer bearing in mind there is no taboo? A lot of fiction centres on the tension between what can be said and what can’t, and new ways of saying things. If there’s no limitation on what you can say, where does fiction go from there?

WS: I was terribly interested – well, I wasn’t that interested because it was terribly boring, but you know – when Hilary Mantel won the Booker this year. I like Hilary; she’s a nice woman, not that I know her that well, but I’ve met her a few times. She came out with this old crappy canard, some journo asked her ‘Why do you write these historical novels?’ and she said, ‘Because I’m not a journalist’. They said ‘Is there not anything to write about now?’. And she said, ‘I think you have to let events settle down: I’m not writing journalism here’. But while it’s true that there is a type of fiction which is reportage masquerading as something invented… there is fiction to be written about now and it’s important that it’s written now. If it’s not written now, it’s like when you see a film of The Great Gatsby that was made in the seventies: it looks like the seventies. That’s always going to be the case; there’s always going to be that built-in obsolescent decadence about it. It’s important that writers who can write, write about now. Maybe the death of the avant garde is just a punch you’ve got to roll with. Whichever way it falls, you’ve got to accept that. I mean, the book I’m working on at the moment is about film, which I think has died as the dominant narrative medium now. And while it’s something that’s recognised, this new shoot ‘em up video game which came out last week which is the highest grossing entertainment, so it’s kind of recognised as such. So for example, the novel was always pitted against film. Why is that? The novel is its own form, but you have John Dos Passos, writing USA back in the 1940s, trying to write a novel like a movie, or even something like Burroughs’ Naked Lunch which is like a series of film routines. So the novel in some way measured itself as a narrative form that can grasp the zeitgeist in contradistinction to the film. Now, arguably, the relationship between the novel and the film has been like the relationship between the West and Soviet Communism. It needed it. The novel kind of needed film to say what it was not. We’re not like those fucking Soviets with their awful Gulag, we’re not like movies. So how is the novel going to respond to the pre-eminence of video games (which is, after all, totally unlike either the novel or film, in that the audience grabs control of the role of the writer to a limited extent, operates as a sort of pseudo-creator within the defined parameters of the new environment)? How’s that going to affect the novel? I don’t know, but those are some of the things I’ve been interested in, trying to respond to that and to write something about that relationship between the novel and film and the coming, emergent narrative technology. I think that’s interesting.

TL: A lot of your work is also associated with visual culture and particularly modern art, partially because of your association with Ralph Steadman and the contemporary art on the covers of some editions of your novels. How would you describe your relationship with this form?

WS: Friendly. Just by sort of accident of proximity I was around all of those people like Hirst, and Mark Quinn and Tracy Emin when they were starting out in the early nineties. I knew them personally, and was interested in their work. Ballard said, I think I quote him somewhere in the Dubai piece, that Hirst was basically a novelist who wrote very short books. There was a literalism to their work that is not a literary quality, but I think that made them appealing. Their conceptual artwork is obviously much closer in spirit to writing than it is to the plastic arts, so I think that’s something to do with it. But beyond that it was just propinquity and kinda the thing of belonging to the same generation as that group of artists which came along. There was nothing comparable in literature. It wasn’t like I felt any great affinity with my literary peers. In fact I don’t have any literary peers that I feel…well, Brett Ellis in the States to some extent, and there are kind of isolated writers, but still, he’s different to me. I feel more of an affinity with his work than, than…I mean, I can’t think of anyone else. I’ve got lots of friends who are writers but I don’t feel any creative affinity with them. I shouldn’t. I can’t think of anybody who is really mining in a shaft near mine. I haven’t felt that in my career, but I did feel with those visual artists that there was a bit more. Also they threw way better parties.

TL: I imagine so!

WS: Way better. Just stratospherically better at every level. Artists as a rule are much more gregarious people, they’re much more convivial. They can work with people around them: they’re not isolated.

TL: A lot of the contemporary novels I’ve read, seem to talk about the modern world through dystopian worlds connected with this one or partial fantasy versions of this world, for example Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie. Do you think that’s true of your fiction, which often uses other worlds to explore this one?

WS: I don’t think that’s true of my work. I think I’ve got different levels. The mistrust of naturalism is a huge contention like any other and I think that the absorption into naturalism betrays a very narrow conception of what the world is: it’s basically a non-mysterious place, the literary naturalistic world. And it has its own deep psychology anyway. For example, contemporary naturalistic novels have a kind of – it’s wrong to call it a depth psychology, it’s more a shallow psychology, it’s normally just second-hand Freud of some kind or another. They read these books and set them recognisably in our world and people kind of watch GMTV…and lo and behold it turns out they’re really animated by a sexual motive they’re not aware of or something. Do you know what I mean? It’s all kind of quite fucking obvious in one way or another. I did a lecture on literary naturalism for Radio 3 this time last year in which I picked apart the strands. Now, I can’t speak for Rushdie or Atwood; I mean I have read a Rushdie novel more recently than I’ve read an Atwood one, and I don’t know what’s going on with him. I mean, to me it reads like a cod 1001 nights; it’s always this Scheherazade-schtick of some kind. But I do think… I mean, maybe they both feel as I do that naturalism is a convention anyway so you may as well be more expansive. That being said, there are passages and there are things I do write which veer very close to being naturalism. I mean in Liver the novella ‘Leberknödel’, or the contemporary sections of The Book of Dave which are in many ways naturalistic. So it’s more that they shade into other forms and ways of describing the world.

I mean, I’m a transcendental idealist. I just don’t believe in the common sense external world myself so why would I write books that supported that idea? For me it’s a kind of ideology. I read naturalistic novels and they seem to me to be written by people who read too many naturalistic novels. They just seem to be full of convention, that’s all. But I’ve always felt that way, I’ve never bought it. The writers who I loved when I was becoming conscientised were Kafka or Bulgakov, they were never stern. I think what people think of when they think of the archetypal novel in this country is Austen or George Eliot. What’s that about? And even when you get to Dickens, actually, Dickens is not a naturalistic writer.

TL: No, he’s got a lot of fantasy and surrealism.

WS: He’s got postmodernism. Look at the opening of The Tale of Two Cities. That’s what gives the lie to naturalism as an ideology because it seeks to knock off all those corners and impose a coherent vision onto what isn’t actually that coherent.

TL: I wanted to ask you about your work with Ralph Steadman and the interaction between his columns and your art. How does that work, first of all?

WS: Well, it’s really pretty simple. Sometimes I send him a bit of writing and he responds to it, and sometimes he sends me a picture and I write to that.

TL: It’s a two-way thing?

WS: Yeah, it’s always been like that. I started off writing in response to his pictures rather than him illustrating me, so we’ve always kept that kind of discourse going. It’s interesting actually because people come and say ‘What is it between you and Ralph, and what’s going on there?’ And in a way I always sit here and think, ‘What’re you on about? There’s nothing there. There’s nothing to it; either he sends me a picture or I send him a bit of writing’. But actually of course it is a sort of relationship, but it so much happens at the level of product that I don’t have to think about it at all.

TL: Which of the columns in Psycho Too would be you responding to Ralph Steadman?

WS: It’s hard to know because these would have been selected and I’ve given them all new titles. The one called ‘The Sordid Act of Union’ was, I think, one of me responding to him. ‘The Carpet Moves’ was, I think, me responding to him. ‘The Green Zone’ was me writing in response to him.

TL: Oh really? For some reason, possibly the article’s specific involvement with the moment, I would have assumed he responded to you.

WS: No, he was doing those pictures. ‘Mad Masterchef’s Tea Party’ is his picture and my response. Even the last piece, ‘Against the Dying of the Light’ is my response to his picture. ‘Grisly, Man’ was my response to his picture, so it’s not as much as fifty-fifty I would say, but certainly sixty-forty. Forty percent of them are Ralph’s drawings or pictures that I would respond to.

TL: What is it about his pictures in particular that have meant you’ve formed a partnership which has gone back such a long time?

WS: It’s only ten years. We started together in ’97 – oh, twelve years, yeah, on the 1997 election. I mean, I loved his drawings when I grew up in the 70s: it was love at first sight. He was what I wanted to be as a cartoonist. It’s one of those great things when you’ve really admired somebody when you’re young and you get to work with them. Maybe that’s it. I’m a fan.

——————————————————————————–

[1] Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger. A travel writer and explorer who (amongst his travels) first explored the Empty Quarter of the UAE between 1945 and 1950; he wrote Arabian Sands, his most famous book, about the experience.

He is the author of such renowned works as Milton’s Grand Style, The Force of Poetry and Dylan’s Visions of Sin as well as the editor of the still authoritative edition of Tennyson’s poetry. A staunch defender of traditional approaches, he was noted for his vocal opposition towards theory during Cambridge’s ‘Theory Wars’.

He has held the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford and now teaches at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Recently he has become involved with the new T.S.Eliot Research Project, a major new initiative that is funding the development of the first scholarly annotated editions of Eliot’s poetry, prose, letters and plays.

The Literateur caught up with Christopher Ricks to discuss everything from his childhood influences to his recent work on Eliot. He proved to be as charismatic and incisive in person as his public lectures suggest. He remains unashamedly hostile towards “theory”, particularly those advocates of it who he feels are foolishly dismissive of their predecessors. Whether one agrees or disagrees with him, theorists will ignore this formidable adversary at their peril. Now in his seventies, the concept of resting on his laurels is clearly alien to him; even during this interview he continued casting his keen critical eye over unexamined assumptions.

Interviewed by Kit Toda

PART I

The Literateur: You are at the moment involved in the complete and annotated edition of Eliot’s poetry. Is there any particular aspect of it that you find most exciting?

Christopher Ricks: I mostly enjoy parallel passages and sources, though this can clearly be overdone – my edition of those early unpublished poems, Inventions of the March Hare, was deplored by many reviewers for being over-annotated in this respect. But it intrigues me to think of what goes to the making of a poem.

In my opinion, what goes to the making of a poem doesn’t necessarily go into the meaning of the poem. But one should be interested in it all; one should be interested in the process as well as the product, though I myself belong to the old school that thinks that the product is more important than the process.

TL: One would have thought that’s sort of obvious…

CR: William Arrowsmith the eminent classicist used the word ‘palimpsest’, which suggests of course that in some way the strata are as interesting as what you might think of as the surface. There are claims you can make for the geology, the archaeology of the thing. But it’s a different thing to be interested in: equally interesting, but raising different questions.

TL: Do you foresee any hurdles in the project?

CR: No, I don’t think so. I am, as you know, a co-editor – Jim McCue and I are editing this together. Jim has done an immense amount of work on the manuscripts and indeed he’s done more work on the manuscripts than I would have been willing or able to bring myself to do. He is at work full-time on this now.

A lot depends for us on the efficiency of the edition of Eliot’s letters that is in progress. There’ll be a big edition of the letters and a big edition of the collected prose as well, and this edition of the poems. (There’ll also be an edition of the plays but that is on hold for the moment; this will turn the enterprise from being a triangle to a quadrangle.) As to the prose, Ronald Schuchard has very valuably found some rare items not in Gallup [Donald Gallup’s bibliography of Eliot’s works]. That’s the very phrase, not in Gallup:  Ron has found things, sometimes in typescript, sometimes hitherto unrecognized as Eliot’s – but with the exception of these we have been able already to read all the prose. What we can’t do is read all the letters until they are made available. (The letters in some respects are more important than the new edition of the poems because they will for the first time be available to be read.) So the edition of the letters is the opposite of a hurdle, it’s a desideratum. It’s early days. I caught myself saying this the other day and then realized it’s actually early years. There’s a huge amount of work to be done on this. Partly, just to take one instance, that the translation of St.-John Perse, Anabasis, hasn’t been attended to as closely as many others of Eliot’s poems.

TL: You said last night [at the British Academy in conversation with Hermione Lee] that having a favourite Eliot poem would be debasing to both Eliot and yourself but that you thought ‘Gerontion’ was Eliot’s best poem.

CR: Yes, I do think the game of picking one under either epithet is a bit of a mistake. The point I wanted to make about favourites is that it has a certain cosseting. ‘Favourite’ goes with one’s feeling affectionate towards something. I suggested by way of comparison that you shouldn’t really have a favourite book of the Bible. So I think there’s a slightly different sense to the word. I don’t quite see the point of, as it were, the Balloon Game in which you throw out from the balloon all but one poem. But I do think that ‘Gerontion’ is very very extraordinary and more immediately compelling to me even than The Waste Land.

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is superb and – this is something I’ve said before – as the first poem in someone’s first published book of poems, it is an astonishment. I’ve asked people to suggest candidates for a better first poem in a first book of poems and nobody can ever think of any. So that would be the poem I suppose I would start with if I wished to persuade people much younger than I am to love Eliot. Read that poem, and particularly read it aloud. It has so much which is the best of Victorian verse in it.

I think ‘Gerontion’ – if one is playing this strangely competitive game – is even deeper than ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Yet this is sort of idle –  I don’t mean to be rude about the question and I probably shouldn’t have said anything last night when asked it.

TL: I was wondering do you feel it permissible to have a favourite among your own books?

[pause]

CR: Well I think one shouldn’t feel affectionate towards oneself! I’ve written an essay on self-congratulation and how odd it is because of the prefix ‘con’. ‘Self-condolence’ would be very strange. How do you condole with yourself? I mean the point of it is that you’re doing it with somebody else.

One can think that one of one’s books is better than the others. And my edition of Tennyson might be more continuingly useful and valuable than anything else that I do. That’s alright.

TL: Robert Crawford criticised you last night for not engaging with the King Bolo poems [a series of humorous sexual and scatological verses] in your book Eliot and Prejudice. I was wondering whether you had anything to say in response to that?

CR: I hadn’t read the unpublished King Bolo poems then, and I haven’t read all of them even now. I did include some of them in Inventions of the March Hare, which came out long after Eliot and Prejudice – those of them that figure in the leaves that were torn out from the notebook. I was editing that particular body of poems, you’ll remember, from one particular notebook, and those leaves were torn out and sent to Pound, ‘Chansons Ithyphalliques’.* I had read them by then because of that. But Eliot and Prejudice is about what Eliot published, and he didn’t publish the King Bolo poems. A few of them later got into the Faber Book of Blue Verse, and of course when the first volume of the Letters came out, you met some of them there. Crawford is right to say that if you are going to have a thorough-going account of all of the prejudices that might be in Eliot, racism in some form or other might be one of them. It may be there in ‘Hakagawa bowing among the Titians’ [‘Gerontion’], though it’s deliberately very elusive. You have to think about that. I believe that Eliot raises the question of prejudice often in order to disabuse us of the idea that prejudices are simply bad. We all have preconceptions; we can’t see anything without preconceptions. Richard Gregory says very finely that ‘To see is to read the present in terms of the past in order to predict and control the future’. So in order to see, there is a movement from preception to perception. You cannot perceive without preceiving. You never know what to do about things that people didn’t publish. If he or she didn’t publish it, this may be what he or she most meant and then didn’t dare say; self-censorship or prudence comes in. On the other hand, you could take the opposite view and say: well, if he or she didn’t publish this, it was because it wasn’t in the end what he or she really believed. It’s tricky, that.

TL: I think there is also an aspect of… it’s very hard to talk about, particularly joke about sex and be – I don’t like this term but – ‘politically correct’.

CR: I am not sure what to do about ‘politically correct’ because of its particular historical conditioning. That is, in general having to be correct or needing to be prudent about certain kinds of risks has always been the case; the Beckett remark about ‘the quantum of wantum does not vary’. So it irritates me when people make out that now there are constraints of cultural/political/social situations, as if there used not to be. I don’t know a society in which there aren’t pressures to conform. And anyway I don’t think conforming is a bad thing. So I’m not one of those people who use the word ‘subversive’ as if it’s automatically a good thing: ‘The great thing about literature is that it’s so subversive’. There are lots of things which should not be subverted. The idea that you have shown that someone is a good writer because you have shown that he or she has challenged the orthodox opinion… Orthodox opinion is often immensely to be valued. But then all great religious art is accusable of blasphemy, yet those accusations should not stick. So all erotic art is accusable of pornography. If the question doesn’t even arise then, it must have played safe, and nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe. You’ve got the relation of blasphemy to religious art, pornography to erotic art, of sexism to all art that deals with relations between the sexes – which could include same-sex relations and so on. Any engagement with matters Jewish and so on will be accusable of anti-Semitism. Sometimes in Eliot’s case the accusation does, I’m afraid, I believe, stick. But very infrequently. ‘Gerontion’ to me is not an anti-Semitic poem because I’ve never met anybody who would wish to be Gerontion, who, reading the poem, would think: What a wise voice this is that I’m hearing, what a healthy consciousness this is that I’m meeting here.

TL: I was struck by your argument in Eliot and Prejudice against those apologists for Eliot who say, ‘well…this was written before the Holocaust…’ and make the excuse that when Eliot was writing his earlier poems, antisemitism was, regrettably, common and widespread.  Do you not then differentiate between before the Holocaust and after it? You pointed out that pogroms had occurred before the Nazis and so forth but despite that, I think it undeniable that the Holocaust changed people’s opinions as to what was acceptable in society regarding antisemitism.

CR: Well, we have to do justice even to people who are unjust. Prejudices are a form of injustice. It’s odd that in one sense of the word ‘discriminate’, discrimination is indiscriminate. The paradox is that when we accuse someone of discrimination we mean that he or she lacks discrimination, that they don’t differentiate this person who happens to be French or Italian from another person who is; it’s a kind of lumping-together of people. I don’t see any way out of that generally. I think one is always having to avoid making excuses for things, that is, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, which has been called the devil’s sentimentality.

It is a minefield. I don’t think anybody has written about this and remained unaccusable.

TL: You have described your memory of the thrill of getting hold of the latest book by Beckett and other such great writers who have written within your lifetime. Are there any current writers for whom you feel the same excitement?

CR: Well, I feel it certainly with Geoffrey Hill. A new book by Geoffrey is a matter of immediate excitement; I want to get it the minute it comes out. There are, of course, sometimes new things from dead writers. Living at the same time as Bob Dylan is for me very very exciting.

When Empson, interviewed by Karl Miller, was asked about new poetry, he said ‘It’s the first thing to go’, partly as if it were like a failing sense (your hearing is not what it was and so on) which is sort of true, and partly as if it were like a grand piano and you’ve moved into a smaller room. Not being able to hear new literature or see new paintings imaginatively and generously is commonplace. As one gets older, one more and more re-reads books rather than start new ones. So I don’t think there is anybody, except for Geoffrey Hill… no, not for me.

TL: You just mentioned Bob Dylan and you have famously written a book-length literary analysis of his lyrics and music. Are there any other popular musicians whom you think would stand up to such close literary scrutiny?

CR: I don’t know them well enough. I do think The Beatles are very good and so on, but. One of the reviewers said that ‘Ricks has never met a Dylan song that he doesn’t like’ which is not true: I don’t write about the ones I don’t like. I know which they are. ‘Neighborhood Bully’ I don’t think is a good song.

I was brought up in a Leavisite** world. I was very lucky. I had two schoolteachers, Mr. Swan and Mr. Harrison. Mr. Swan was a Leavisite; he’d been educated at Cambridge and very valuably thought you should read James Joyce and Eliot. Remember this is the mid- to late forties when I was fifteen or sixteen. (I was born in 1933.) It was a bit of luck to have Mr. Swan and it was also a bit of luck to have Mr. Harrison who was rather old-fashioned and knew that Milton and Tennyson were very good poets who shouldn’t be accusable in Leavisite terms. There was that feeling of valuable disagreement.

I was thinking on the whole that unless you are Leavis – and even if you are Leavis – most of the time you do well to write about things that you think well of rather than things you think ill of. – though it may be necessary every now and then to do that sort of work, which is in Leavis’ word hygienic. You may think that something is a portent. You attack C.P. Snow because there are people going round thinking he’s very good when they should be reading George Eliot.

I listen to Dylan and I listen to Haydn. I listen to quite a lot of music but I never have any ideas about it.

TL: Talking of writing about things you like, you were lamenting last night the recent tendency towards ungratefulness in literary criticism, in that critics seem increasingly to glory in ticking-off writers. Does it seem to you then that there is something perverse in choosing to write about work that they don’t admire?

CR: No, but I think it’s very easy for the pleasure of repudiation and the pleasure of discrimination – of being more stringent than other people – to become addictive.

The Leavis danger was to so elevate stringency as to make the best the enemy of the good. If you take a certain view of the Great Tradition, then anything not in the Great Tradition is somehow not worth bothering with. Edgell Rickword, who started the Calendar of Modern Letters [a literary review 1925-7], forming part of what became Leavis’ world of Scrutiny [a literary quarterly 1932-53], explicitly attacked minor poetry – there was no point in reading minor verse or light verse. That seems to me very foolish. We have wonderful minor accomplishments. It’s part of what’s good about them, that they don’t aspire to certain things. To despise them would be like thinking that only fortifyingly nutritional food was worth eating.

So there’s always this double duty, neither to make the best the enemy of the good, nor to make the good the enemy of the best. Scylla and Charybdis. The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing the right thing is steering between two equally dangerous opposite bad things.

Do you remember that Eliot was billed as giving a talk on ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and he’d realized that they’d simply misunderstood. That is, when he was asked what he was going to talk about, he’d said that these things were always a matter of Scylla and Charybdis and so forth, and this became the title of the talk so that we got a talk on this subject because they’d slightly misunderstood what he was saying. But it’s true to him.

And Samuel Johnson is profound on this. He asked why are we more lenient towards foolhardiness than towards cowardice. If you think of them as being equidistant from the right thing, two opposing faults. Why are we more lenient to the one? And the answer is because it is self-correcting. If you’re foolhardy, you bruise your shins. You find out, you learn from it. If you’re spendthrift, you learn as the miser never does. The spendthrift runs out of money, the miser never runs out of anxiety about money. Equidistant from the true course but one may prove preferable.

We need people to remind us that the good is the enemy of the best and we need people to remind us that the best is the enemy of the good. We need to protect ourselves from the dangers from both flanks.

* Chansons Ithyphalliques: Eliot sent some of the King Bolo poems to Ezra Pound who sealed them in an envelope marked ‘Chansons Ithyphalliques’.

** F.R.Leavis (1895-1978) A highly influential literary critic instrumental in the shaping of the study of English Literature. Author of such works as Revaluation (1936) and The Great Tradition (1948). The Great Tradition set out a canonizing view of literature that singled out such writers as Jane Austen and Henry James as the best novelists.

CLICK HERE FOR PART II

Christopher Ricks: I wouldn’t deny that that there are critical works of genius. I make a difference between professorial professional people like me on the one hand, and Eliot, Coleridge and so forth on the other. There’s no reason why a work of criticism can’t become in itself a great work of literature. But on the whole, the greatness of literary criticism is in some way commensurate with, though not equivalent to, the greatness of the literature itself. It’s only great works of literature that call out great works of literary criticism. You don’t get great literary criticism about a poet who isn’t much good. It’s a little bit like singing, in relation to the wording of the song. Michael Gray will say that Dylan sings something absolutely wonderfully; he’s never sung better, but the song isn’t very good. That to me doesn’t make any sense. For me the greatest singing can be elicited only by a great song. The greatest acting comes when you’re given a great part to play. Though there can be immense skill and valuable risk-taking in converting a minor part into a great performance, in general that can’t be the thing.

I want to say that there is nothing that precludes literary criticism from becoming great literature but that’s not the world of me, or even of people I admire very much like Frank Kermode, Donald Davie, or Hugh Kenner.

TL: Following on from that, I want to ask a bit of a personal question…I was wondering why you haven’t written creatively yourself?

CR: Not any good at it. Wrote poems in the school magazine deploring Christianity — but not at all well. Wrote one sour poem about thirty years ago but yes, not any good at it.

Eliot said that artists should have the kind of knowledge of themselves that you expect athletes to have. He was astonished by the misjudgements that artists often make as to whether they’ll be any good at certain things. If you are an athlete, you know that the particular form of sprinting you’re good at is hurdling. You might wish to train yourself for other things But people suppose that they could write a novel when that is not their …

TL: Like Henry James and theatre…

CR: Yes, Henry James and theatre would do it, that’s right.  It’s strange, strange. But yes, I’m not any good at any of the other things.

TL: That surprises me because you write…elegantly, almost creatively. I mean your prose is hardly workman-like.

CR: Well, I overwrite a lot. When I was younger, friends were much less busy, and I could ask them to read things that I’ve written; they would devote themselves to it and I would read theirs. I spent a lot of time reading the manuscript of Phil Horne’s very fine book on Henry James and revision; then dear Phil locked himself up in his room to deal with my immensely detailed notes; I think that he was at once heartened and disheartened about all this that I was asking him to consider. People used more often to do the same for me.

Every now and then I am really pleased with something that I’ve written, but I never like writing, though I like having written. I never enjoy writing. I still feel confidence sometimes that it will all be alright in the end but I don’t enjoy the actual writing.

TL: You say in your Panizzi Lectures preface that ‘the difference between high talent and genius is often made manifest in revision’. Sometimes it seems to me that often what makes a great writer is a combination of being able to write prolifically, and being in possession of such exquisite taste that you can sift out the brilliant from the merely good and mediocre.  Do you think that a necessary quality for a great writer is the ability to judge one’s own work?

CR: I think so, while thinking too that  ‘brilliant’ quite rightly carries certain reservations. It’s a bit like ‘clever’.

One of the reasons I went into scholarly editing was that a powerful figure within Oxford University Press – way way back when my Milton book had just come out or was about to, Dan Davin, a very interesting man who would get drunk sometimes, swayed in front of me at some English Faculty event and said to me, thickly: ‘You’re brilliant but unsound’.

Some little part of me thought that the way to be sound, you see, is to do things like editing. Editing doesn’t need to be brilliant, it needs to be sound.

About being prolific: I enjoy working – which is a bit different from whether I enjoy writing when I’m doing it. But I don’t think it’s the case with great writers that they’re all prolific. My son David, my eldest child, thinks that it is often the case in the world of music; that is, the greatest composers have written an astonishing amount of music: Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, Bach…extraordinary. That’s not so true I think of literature. Marvell did not write a lot and…

TL: Eliot…

CR: And Eliot did not write a lot, yes exactly. (Of poems, that is.) Thank you, that was well said. There have been great writers who have written a great deal, Wordsworth and Tennyson and Dickens and George Eliot, but there have been many for whom that simply isn’t true. I think that it is the same for critics. Have all the great critics written a great deal? I don’t know. Empson wrote a lot, Donald Davie wrote a lot…

TL: There is of course a difference between having published a lot and having written a lot.

CR: Yes, that’s true too. Keats speaks as if revision is an admission of weakness, but that’s not actually how he proceeded. There is that great letter in which he asks why should he afterwards sit down coldly and consider that which, at the time, came out with fierce vivid critical attention. That is the combination of criticism and creation. But of course we know he did revise. We have evidence that he did. Poetry should come as naturally as ‘leaves to a tree’, and yet you have to prune trees.

TL: Ha ha, that’s a very good point! Sorry, that sounds rather patronising…

CR: No no, not at all, not even matronising.

TL: You are noted of course for your anti-theory approach to literature and were one of the foremost defenders of the traditionalist approach during Cambridge’s so-called theory wars. How do you feel about the relatively new (2004) Cambridge MPhil in Culture and Criticism, which concentrates very much on cultural and literary theory?

CR: I don’t know enough about it, I really don’t. The theory wars are something else; they had a lot to do with what seemed to me to be wanton disparagement of what had previously been the case.

It suits people always to make out things were very bad in the old days so that there is need for new days. I’ve heard Empson and Eliot referred to as horse- and-buggy criticism. A lot of anger (mine and other people’s) in those matters had to do with mis-descriptions of the past. ‘We no longer believe in the myth of the solitary genius’. Now who did believe in the myth of the solitary genius? It’s the phrasing: ‘We no longer…’. ‘We are no longer naive empiricists’. Alright, now was Eliot a naive empiricist? It doesn’t look like it to me.

A colleague at Boston University (I’m not in the English department at Boston University anymore, partly to do with the presence of people like the one I’m about to quote) announced at a graduate class: ‘At least since [recent year slotted in], it has been necessary to think about literature.’ I mean, Aristotle didn’t? Coleridge didn’t?

This is, of course, what Eliot called a parochialism of time. But the dead hold shares; it’s not true that only the living hold shares. Who are the critics post-Eliot who most matter? For me, they are Empson, Trilling, Kenner, Davie, Yvor Winters. And the idea that these people represent totally antiquated positions, empty or used-up? The demon of progress in the arts, as Wyndham Lewis called it, led to the demon of progress in the humanities.  In an essay of mine on ‘Literary Principles as Against Theory’, I quote all these people all the time saying that the only thing worth doing is theory, confident that everything else has been superseded or exposed.

What was the characteristic of the “theory” course at Boston University? That it was mandatory. I would have been happy to teach in it. But when I asked, for instance, what place there was in it for the study of literary biography, the answer was ‘None-na’. It was rather lovely, because the word ‘none’ was pronounced with a very strong emphasis on the end, it wasn’t just ‘None’ it was ‘None-na’.

So literary biography has no place at all within the world of theory? Well, this has recently changed, but only grudgingly.

One big enemy of literary studies is recency, an inordinate claim, proportionately, for contemporary or recent literature. So I’m against the invention by literary theorists of the term ‘post-contemporary’

TL: What does that even mean?

CR: It means being ahead of the minute. Being up to the minute is alright, but being ahead of the minute is even better.

TL: How can you be ahead of the minute? It seems a contradiction in terms.

CR: Prophecy! You prophesy to the wind! You say what is about to happen. Which of course you have to do in the word of technological advancement, you have to think what’s going to happen next.

TL: Because you’re thinking about it in the present, it’s never going to be in the future… You can’t be ahead of the present. It’s impossible.

Well you can-you can- well, no, of course you’re right, you can’t. Anyway, ‘the proper study of mankind is everything.’ That’s fine. Is it worth attending to The Simpsons? Yes of course it is worth attending to. Do you give the same kind of attention – I’m not saying the quality of attention but the same kind of attention – as you give to King Lear? I think, on the whole, not. I think sociology and anthropology, and cultural studies, are manifestly  worth undertaking, but is the right aegis for them the English Department?

It’s partly the inheritance of Leavis’ belief that study of the literature in one’s own language is the queen of the sciences. Once upon a time it was theology. Then for Marxists it becomes economics. One thing that is at once the foundation for everything and the crown of everything.  There has long been this gigantism about English Studies. The world could be saved if people took English Studies seriously.

TL: What you said about the difference between ‘None’ and ‘None-na!’ reminded me of what you say in ‘Literature and the Matter of Fact’. You wrote that ‘one of the reasons why Britain won the war (with a little help from our friends) against Nazi Germany was Churchill’s refusal to pronounce the word Nazi as the Nazis might have wished’ but as Nar-zee. This is an extraordinary claim. It is evident from your writings that you have an incredibly sensitive ear to words. Do you think that everyone is as reactive as you are but that they are simply less aware of it?

CR: I don’t think it’s my thought. I mean, it was not my idea that simply how you pronounce something puts up or doesn’t put up a resistance. The pronunciation either concurs with how they see themselves, or dissents from them. It’s a tiny example but if I say that ‘one of the reasons we won the war was Churchill’, that can’t be in doubt, and one of the essential  things about Churchill was his oratory. When it was said by the enemy that England will have her neck wrung like a chicken, ‘Some chicken! Some neck!’ Now that’s absolutely wonderful, that sticks its neck out. The vividness of the colloquialism. But back to Nar-zee: I do think that a terrific lot can be affected simply by how you pronounce a word.

Geoffrey Hill’s decision, a major decision, to take the italics off the word ‘voyeur’: he originally prints ‘voyeur of sacrifice’ with italics on ‘voyeur’. To take off the italics is to escape the complacency that thinks that voyeurism is foreign to us. We’re English, it’s an English poem. To italicize is to Frenchify it. To let us off. In the nineteenth century, someone said of the word schadenfreude that we don’t have a word for it in our language, we don’t get sick pleasure out of other people’s discomfiture. But of course we enjoy schadenfreude, we just also enjoy saying that we don’t have word for it. To have to go into German somehow makes it clear that it’s not a national propensity on our part, this gloating at somebody’s discomfiture. I used to like it when waiting outside Blackwell’s bookshop for it to open, some person- a self-important little twit?- comes up and tries the handle but it doesn’t open and he looks very irritated. There is a sort of pleasure you can get in his discomfiture. Does he think we are standing out here because we’re smokers or because we have nothing to do? We’re standing out here waiting for the shop to open.

If you think we wouldn’t have won the War if it weren’t for Churchill, then it’s quintessential to Churchill to not go along with some things which would give comfort to the enemy. ‘We are not interested in the possibility of defeat’ is the position to maintain. We are not interested! It’s not saying that there isn’t a possibility.

I remember Maurice Bowra who was given an honorary degree in the States and all three of his names, Cecil Maurice Bowra, were mispronounced. They couldn’t find out how to pronounce any of his names, and that’s how they honour him?

TL: Talking of words that we don’t have in English, do you know this book Tingo?

CR: No.

TL: It’s a lexicon of foreign words of which there is no one-word equivalent in the English language.

CR: Oh, very good! What’s the title again?

TL: Tingo. It’s an Easter Island word meaning ‘to take things from a neighbour’s house one by one by asking to borrow them’.

CR: Oh very good, yes. That useful process. The only reference book I have read straight through – you’ll see the train of thought I hope – is the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, which is a really wonderful thing. There was a phrase ‘Gloucestershire kindness’ – giving something to somebody that you yourself don’t want. But what’s good about it is that it’s an irony, not a sarcasm. It’s not giving somebody something that’s worthless. It might be worthless, I suppose, but you don’t have to rule on that. There’s a recent book by Jerome McGann that I passed on to somebody as an act of Gloucestershire kindness. If you have certain interests you will care about this book, but I don’t care about it.

TL: One might think that having a word that expresses something that other languages don’t have is revealing on some level.

CR: The difficulty is that having a word may – but only may ­– mean that you recognize the existence of a phenomenon, that it is real to you. Or, of course, since we use words often to disguise phenomena from us, it may mean exactly the opposite.

My students tend to think that something is most potent when you’ve got a word for it. That is, once we got the word ‘rationalise’ – we didn’t have the word for a long time – we must be wiser about rationalisation for now we have a word for it. But we often use words actually to nail things down that are not nailable down. Having a word for it is often a bit like doing that [claps hands as if dusting off a job done] to it; you know, we’ve placed it.

It’s like making a list of the money that you owe – Dickens is very good on this – it’s as if you’ve paid it, in a way. Are you more aware of it? Maybe you’d be more aware of it if you hadn’t just tidied it up into feasibility.

The word ‘reify’ – not a word that comes lightly to my lips – there, you’ve tidied it up into a clear thing. You’ve got a name for it. In a way people may have been more sensitive to what sympathy was when it hadn’t branched off into empathy as well. Maybe these things are not as distinct as having a separate word for it might suggest.

TL: On the topic of teaching at Cambridge you have said that ‘Except by showing off, you cannot retain an audience. Why should people go to lectures at all if it doesn’t affect their mark or their standing with the people who write references for them?’

CR: Did I say that? Gosh, how coarse of me!

TL: Do you think that perhaps the lecture system in some universities needs to be overhauled in that perhaps academics should start lecturing on things which are directly relevant to what the students are studying at that particular time? Or would this lead to stale and forced lectures?

CR: Well I’m not happy with my having put it like that, but I certainly thought that the role of lectures at Cambridge, indeed of all university teaching in Cambridge, was insufficiently thought out. Nobody has (or at any rate had) to attend any lectures at Cambridge. I attended very few lectures at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. I sat in my room reading and reading and re-reading and so on and I didn’t go to many lectures. I had weekly tutorials. There were advantages in that. But when I did go to lectures, unless it was someone remarkable as a lecturer… Oddly, C.S.Lewis, though he was very remarkable as a writer, he was not as a lecturer. Tolkien was the worst lecturer I’ve ever heard. Took no trouble at all about anything, it was amazing how indolent he seemed to me to be. But meanwhile, of course, he was actually laying up his immense treasure.

TL: You said you hardly ever went to lectures at Oxford but you have described yourself as having been a ‘morbidly conscientious’ student.

CR: Oh, I guess I suppose I was. I don’t remember having said that but…

TL: Oh, I know you better than you do!

CR: Exactly, you have my dossier. You probably know my blood group and my astrological sign.

TL: As a scholar what do you say to the general idea that too much study is unhealthy?

CR: Well, too much anything is unhealthy; it’s built into the ‘too much’. ‘Too much of a good thing’ — can you have too much of a good thing? Yes.

TL: Well, ‘a lot of’ then, the idea that a lot of study is unhealthy.

CR: I think that a price is paid for absolutely everything in life. That we’re sitting here, you and I, means that I’m not sitting in a sunken sauna and you’re not having a gin and tonic. Everything we do must mean not doing something or other.

I think study is professional. But it must not become simply professionalised, it must keep in touch with amateur virtues without yielding to the amateurish. So that’s a Scylla and Charybdis.

When the unhealthy question comes up: I believe it is unhealthy as a professional to believe that the professional hasn’t paid a price. It is not true that the professional study of literature just makes people more sensitive to literature. It makes them in some respects more sensitive and in other respects less sensitive.

One trouble with teaching is that it mostly rests on the assumption that having re-read things umpteen times over a long period means nothing but gain. So there is almost no attempt to build into studies undertaken by young people the advantages of the season of Spring against the season of Autumn. It’s all to be autumnal. (Sometimes it is actively wintry.) But anyway it’s clear that we don’t have blossoms and fruit at the same time.

I think the unhealthy thing is people’s kidding themselves that there is nothing but gain in study.

Of course, if I didn’t think there were real gains from study I would seek an honourable other kind of work. But doctors are both more and less sensitive to pain, generals are both more and less sensitive to the horrors of war, and yet there’s a reluctance in people who study  – whether it’s the students or the teachers – to acknowledge that what we are trying to do is maximize the ways in which things have been gained and minimize the ways in which things have been lost. But if you never ask yourself what you’ve lost, then you can’t be effective about minimizing this.

I use my brother as an example in this case. Donald cared about poems in ways which are no longer possible for me. There is an academic pretence that somehow we’ve got something which is all gain. I think that’s unhealthy.

TL: You once said very honestly that “Like many-

CR: [starts giggling]

TL: Ah. You once…

CR: Yes…I was… [laughs] OK, hmm…

TL: Well, usually you’re incredibly insincere but you once said very honestly…

CR: (Am I always authentic?)

TL: …that ‘Like many people I sometimes had to protect myself at school, and I did it partly through snobbery. And that included thinking that I must be the only person at school who was reading Paradise Lost for pleasure’. How would you respond to the suggestion that partly the reason why people enjoy highbrow literature is that it gives them the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club?

CR: The uniqueness of oneself (not the same as belonging to a club, clearly):  I think this weighs less with me than with some other people. I’ve never had an identity crisis or anything like that. I don’t mind being a type. It’s one of the difficulties about talking about stereotypes. A lot of people apparently don’t like being a type; I like being a type. I wouldn’t like to be only a type, but it’s fine for me to be a septuagenarian bald English lover of Bob Dylan. There are lots of us- although it’s not so much that there are many of us, as that we’re a particular type.

The Wordsworthian word commonalty, ‘of joy in widest commonalty spread’. Now, if I were nothing but in common, or interchangeable with other people, that would be depressing, but being markedly oneself all the time? I don’t like such selfhood as an ideal.

The Eliot phrase, that about everything there hangs the shadow of the impure motive. If we were really determined to extirpate all the impure motives that pervade everything, where would we be? There’s nothing inherently wrong in liking the idea of belonging to a group of people that is, in one sense, exclusive.  Empson was always very good on that. Although it was sad and sometimes bad that people had recourse to snobbery, it wasn’t as bad as their having recourse to some other things. His brother of course had been knighted. That was alright. Was it alright for him to be Sir William Empson? Yes, it was fine.

I don’t know…We all need protection against things. You just say to yourself, what price is paid for this particular self-protection?

TL: Just one more question, what is the proudest moment of your career?

CR: [long pause]

Well you’d better not print it…

[laughs]

It ought to be when I got a letter saying ‘Would you like to be knighted?’ It had better be that, for it would be rather insulting, would be lèse-majesté, to say that it was not. So it’s a tricky one. But I think the election to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford was wonderful in ways that nothing else has been. In a way, the letter that had been most intense was the one that simply had  ‘10 Downing Street’ printed in the corner. (Nothing about London.) That was Mrs. Thatcher, saying that it was her duty to recommend a name to the Queen for the King Edward VII Professorship at Cambridge, and would I…?

But I think the Professorship at Oxford was the one that was really it.

TL: Professor Ricks, thank you very much.

CR: Thank you, you’ve been very nice to me.

Daniel Eltringham and Kit Toda

TL: Despite having lived in America for over 20 years, your works are still full of references to Ireland and the Irish. Do you see yourself as an Irish poet?

PM: Well, I mean, I suppose I was born there but I don’t go round thinking…I suppose I am an Irish poet. But sometimes i’m described as an American poet. I don’t think all that really matters.

These days I think of myself as someone who writes poems. Not a poet but someone who, from time to time, writes poems.

I was born in Ireland, lived in Ireland, now live in America and from time to time write poems.

I do think that many writers begin to take themselves a bit too seriously.

I suppose that is a bit of a mouthful really. I think I’d be delighted to belong to anyone who would have me.

TL: We’re in The Groucho Club…

PM: Yeah yeah I was just thinking that, what was the line again? That he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as a member, is that right?

TL:Yes

PM: Well, I mean of course that’s the other thing. I’m sure that’s probably true of many writers, it’s true of me too in that one doesn’t really want to belong to anything. The minute one is categorised…

I like to think this is true of my poems. It’s one of the reasons why they’re various. I’m sure they fall into some patterns and I hope they’re not different for the sake of being different but I like difference. I like variety. I think most people do.

TL: In your essay on ‘All Souls’ Night’ in The End of the Poem, you use the analytical method of phonological correspondence (as with ‘muscatel’, and the perfect rhyme of ‘bell,’ and from ‘muscatel’ you jump to Keats’s ‘musk’). Is this a method you apply to composition as well? Does it work both ways, in other words? If you look for it in other poetry, do you intend it in your own?

PM: The short answer to that is yes. It’s not that one puts it in like a currant into a loaf of bread, but one is conscious of it. I’ll give you an example. Along the way I’ve mentioned some of the relationships writers have with their own names. It happens all the time – let’s say I have a student called Faith, for example, and two or three week into the course the word ‘faith’ appears in her poem, and she is not always necessarily aware of it. I know that sounds very strange, but I’ve seen it again and again.

Just the other day, I was trying to write something and the word ‘loom’ was used in the poem. It struck me for the first time that there is a relationship between the English word ‘dune’ and my own name. At the age of fifty-eight I realised it’s something that’s been staring me in the face for some years, that the ‘doon’ component of my name refers to a hill fort.

I think some of these links are very tenuous – absolutely, they are – but that doesn’t mean they’re not real.  With something like the muscatel, the ‘musk’ that he [Keats] is using refers to a scent.

Many, many poets [pun on their own names] – William Shakespeare, for example – and John Donne, with ‘undone’ – this isn’t something I came up with myself last week. Some of these readings are a little bit tentative, and they’re certainly more tentative than most well-behaved, strict academics would engage in. But you see, yet again, I am not well-behaved, I’m still that mischievous kid, and I think many writers are.  I like to have a bit of fun, and if people want to come with me, great. And if they don’t, that’s fine, they should go and do something else.

TL: In your ‘Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, you seem to make great efforts to preempt any potential accusations of pretension or pomposity, saying at one point that you sometimes feel you ought to shout in your own ear ‘get over yourself’.  Being a successful poet and a professor at Princeton, you must inevitably move in intellectual circles. So is coming across as or becoming pompous a great concern of yours?

PM: I do think that many writers begin to take themselves a bit too seriously. It’s pretty evident, you don’t have to go too far to see it. They think that because they’ve been doing this for years that everything they do is really good, and that somehow because they’ve been doing it so long that they actually know what they’re doing. Unfortunately all the evidence suggests that if you get too cocky that can lead to deep, deep trouble. It’s difficult to keep on writing in any case, and the other side of it is that the stakes are raised all the time, one has to try to do at least as well [as previously].

…to imagine that one is somehow ‘good’ at [writing poetry] is a problem. It just does not work like that…you have to learn to write that poem.

TL: Because there’s always a new generation?

PM: Oh no, it’s not even that, they’ve got their own problems. I’m not thinking about them, they’re thinking about themselves, that’s okay. I think many writers, I myself, certainly, don’t think about being in competition with other [writers]. The only person I’m in competition with is myself.

Those very tendencies that you’re describing, of becoming content, in some way, and thinking that you’re good – to imagine that one is somehow ‘good’ at this is a problem. It just does not work like that. For the reason that we were describing earlier on, every poem, as well as wanting to be itself – you have to learn to write that poem. It’s unlike anything else, though of course they end up looking quite a lot like other things.

I think the minute you relax into thinking you know what you’re doing, and thinking that anything you do is going to be okay because you’re doing it, and that you are this mythical creature – you really don’t have to look too far to see poets who run into deep trouble in that regard. I suppose I’m hoping not to do it, despite all the evidence. But it’s likely that one will do it. On some level one’s thinking, ‘is it time to quit?’ all the time.

TL: Also in your ‘Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’ you say you are a person ‘tempted by the post-Romantic urge expressed by Keats, in the aforementioned ‘Sleep and Poetry’, when he describes ‘the great end / Of poesy, that it should be a friend /To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man’, yet quite disavows the notion of poetry as a moral force, offering respite or retribution’. Poetry with a moral force does however of course exist, the psalms for one. Whether poetry nowadays has a moral force or not is a huge topic for debate but I think one can argue that there is far less poetry written that has a moral purpose. Do you feel that for poets writing nowadays, having an obvious moral purpose is too old fashioned?

PM: I’m sure there are poems that have all sorts of roles in the world, and it’s conceivable that a poem might have a moral force and be very successful. In general though I shy away from poems that have designs on one. In some sense all poems have designs [on the reader], but I mean poems that have designs as pamphlets or items of propaganda. I’m always very wary of poems that most immediately aspire to some kind of political position. Which is not to say I haven’t written any myself.

When we know there’s a problem in the poem we are testing it against what we know it might have been.

On the moral front poetry may include that as a component, but one of the things poetry has been asked to do, and I wonder if it’s not unreasonably asked to do, is to stand in for various other institutionalized systems of moral force, most notably of course organized religion. I fear that I myself am not a fan of organized religion, and one doesn’t have to look much further than the Catholic Church, in which I was brought up, to see the hypocrisy of so much of what I was being told as a kid by these guys who were operating outrageously double standards. Of course there are those who say that they are just men, and that doesn’t make them the Catholic Church. I don’t know about that.

There is a component in a number of poets, say someone like Czeslaw Milosz, where part of their thinking has to do with their connection to Catholicism. I’m always a little bit wary of that. I think we have to take it case by case.

TL: A general rule in poetry?

PM: I think so, I really do think so. The minute you begin to make generalizations in favour of this, or in favour of that, you risk running into trouble.

TL: I’d like to talk about the responsibilities of translation. In The Pie Is Opened, you translate Irish Ballads, and Wulf and Eadwacer [Old English poem].  Do you think that when you’re translating an anonymous poem your responsibility towards the poem and its ‘author’ is lessened, or heightened, because you’re working in dialogue with a whole culture rather than an individual poet?

PM: There’s always a moral charge to any discussion of translation. A couple of things come to mind here. First of all I think all poetry is in a strange way anonymous. To come round to Eliot again, this idea of the impersonality of the poem I find quite attractive. Even though one knows that the DNA of the poet is a significant component of the poem, including The Waste Land, which is charged with his own private, personal life, and episodes therein.

But on the other hand I do like the idea of the poem being central to the mission. One is really in the service of the poem, be it written by an anonymous Anglo Saxon author or somebody you had dinner

Pride and poetry are really antithetical…The minute you get proud I think you’re sort of dead.

with the night before. One is in the service of the poem, and the service of what it, in so far as one may construe it, wants to be as it comes into this new language, having tried to figure out what it wanted to be when it came into its first language.

Actually one can check back from that as to what it wants to be from the outset.  That’s one of the things we do when we read poems. When we know there’s a problem in the poem we are testing it against what we know it might have been. When we say there’s an image there that’s not quite worked out, or a simile that’s not quite worked out, we’re actually doing the same work as the poet, though perhaps coming to a different conclusion.

You can actually enter the world of the poem and see what it was attempting to be. That’s how we decide whether or not a poem works, right? I know it’s banal in some ways, but it’s not stated often enough. It’s an idea that informs these essays, or lectures [The End of the Poem], that one truly may look at the poem and see what it was attempting to be. People shy away from that, but in fact we do it all the time.

The way we determine whether or not something is successful is within the terms of that particular attempt. The poem sets out its own ambitions, and they vary from poem to poem. You don’t read Paradise Lost the way you read ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence.’

TL: Do you think that being a Northern Irish Poet means as much for the new generation, without the injection of tension provided by the troubles?

PM: I think Northern Island continues to be a subject, for those of us who are from there. It hasn’t exactly gone away. There are tensions there, interesting tensions as well as deadly ones. And any of those poets that we associate with Northern Island, I don’t think that was the only string to their bow, or arrow in their quiver. I think it was a component of our lives, at times a really major component of our lives, and will continue to be.

TL: Do you see it in young Northern Irish Poets now?

PM: They’ll have a rather different take on it, some of them were born into it in a way that for someone of my generation [was not the case]. It is a phenomenon that has erupted again, and again, and again, over the centuries.

TL: In The Message, his book on the relationship between poetry and pop lyrics, Roddy Lumsden draws up a tongue-in-cheek table of correspondences between the poetry and pop worlds, in which he equates you with Elvis Costello. What do you make of that? To give you some context, Don Paterson is Puff Daddy; ‘V’ is Never Mind the Bollocks,’ etc….

PM: [laughs, looks at book] I think with David Bowie and Hugo Williams, I can see the similarity there. And I see Phil Spector and Craig Raine are connected. Phil Spector’s in jail now isn’t he? Is Craig Raine in jail? Well, I always liked Elvis Costello, so I think that’s very good.

TL: So how does writing lyrics for your rock band Rackett differ from writing poems?

Posterity’s not really a thing one can think too much about. Apart from anything else, the sun is going to burn us up one of these days, if we don’t all drown first.

PM: It’s similar but different. I’ve always been interested in writing songs, writing for music, and I love rock and roll. I’ve always wanted to have a go at it. It’s a lot of fun, a hobby, a bit like playing golf.

TL: A couple of questions left. What is the proudest moment so far of your career?

PM: Pride and poetry are really antithetical. We were talking about it a little bit earlier. The minute you get proud, I think you’re sort of dead. In that sense I don’t even feel that I myself, though I’m sort of implicated I suppose, have much part in it. I am a medium for the poem, it’s really not about me. Anonymity is almost an ideal in art, for me.

TL: So do you never worry about posterity?

PM: It would be nice to think that some people might read some of these poems, of course. You can’t worry about posterity any more than you can worry about whatever we call the people who are around right now, the present. You can’t make them like you. Every week there are lots of films coming out that want to be liked, and they often run into trouble for that reason.

Posterity, first of all, would be the least of my concerns. One is trying to do something for the moment, for oneself, to make sense of things. If someone happens to read it down the road, sure.

If you open an anthology from 1900, and see the list of names of the poets who were big in 1900, most of them you’ve never heard of. That’s kind of chastening. Then you think of poets like John Donne, Emily Dickinson – it’s debatable even whether Emily Dickinson is really being read even now. Versions of the poems really only over the last few years have been established as the semi-definitive texts.

John Donne was barely read at all, or at least read in a very different way, so different that he might as well not have been read at all. Until he was discovered by our friend T.S. [Eliot], in some ways – rediscovered, repositioned in the market.

So with those ideas in mind posterity’s not really a thing one can think too much about. Apart from anything else, the sun is going to burn us up one of these days, if we don’t all drown first.

TL: So do you never see writing as a passport to immortality?

PM: I think that the more we know about how the world works, the less that is something one would be exercised by.

TL: But you still write for readers, not entirely for yourself?

PM: I write initially for the poem. I write on its behalf, to help it into being.

TL: Kind of a service?

PM: A service. A service industry.

TL: Paul Muldoon, thank you.

Dan Eltringham and Kit Toda

On the evidence of his poetry, Paul Muldoon is an intensely erudite man with a formidable intelligence. However, in person, he comes across as a charmingly ordinary and affable guy with something of the child about him still.

Take, for instance, when I happened to be seated in front of him on a coach headed on an excursion to Burnt Norton, courtesy of the T.S.Eliot International Summer School. The coach became stuck down a country lane and the driver had to do much manoeuvring to extract it, which caused a rather horrible squeaking and rumbling noise. Suddenly I heard behind me a voice:

‘NNNNGRRRAAAEEEEEEeeeeeeirirrrrrRRRRRAA!’

Bemused, I turned around to find the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet meet my eye unabashed and carry on his rather impressively accurate imitation of the coach:

‘GNNnnnnnnaaarrgeeEEEEEEroooooooo!’

He grinned.

Later, we had a chat, not about Heideggerian poiesis or deixis in Eliot’s Four Quartets, but on how moles were sadly under-appreciated and how we should perhaps start a Mole Appreciation Society…

Therefore it was with a great deal of pleasure, rather than the usual nervousness, that I swung through the doors of his club (with fellow interviewer Dan Eltringham) to interview the mole-loving Paul Muldoon.

We traipsed into the bar and settled ourselves down as he kindly ordered us some tea and asked some polite questions about us. He seemed genuinely interested in the answers. But of course we were not there to talk about us so, dictaphones on tables, we began…

The Literateur: During the reading you gave at the T.S.Eliot Summer School this year, I noticed that you broke off frequently during poems, to tell an anecdote that came to mind, or elucidate something you’d just read out. This seemed to me unusual and refreshing, and I wonder if it indicates an irreverence, or a sort of disregard, for notions of the ‘whole’ poem being somehow untouchable or sacred?

Paul Muldoon: Well, you know there are two aspects to it, I think at a reading one is, on the one hand, doing one’s best by the poem. I think that’s what one is there to do, to present it in a way that makes it find its way into the world in a way that is going to be persuasive to people listening to it.

Of course at a reading one can never expect anyone to have read the poem in advance so it’s a very particular kind of contract, in which the poem is flying by the audience member’s ear and she or he really doesn’t have much of an opportunity to…well, put crudely…linger over it. One hears it flying by.

TL: We were discussing how a lot of your poetry is very complex…

PM: Some of it is yeah, some of it is. And for that reason, I often would give a little gloss on things which, if one were reading it on the page one would have no trouble checking out – you know  you’d just go back and re-read the line.

There’s a certain reverence I think for the poem. But since it is a social occasion, right? I certainly don’t mind breaking off to give a little gloss. I’m not sure if that’s what I should be doing. I don’t know, but I sometimes do it, for sure. Probably not too often.

One is always warned against [...] taking candy from strange clichés-or familiar clichés-as a kid. But on the other hand there’s a reason why they’re clichés, which is that they’re spot-on..

TL: It did seem to me very natural, to be quite an unplanned thing…

PM: Oh yeah, yeah I don’t plan my readings. I don’t plan my readings at all – well, for the most part. That’s not to say I don’t end up reading some of the same things again and again. But usually when I stand up, I don’t even know often which poem I’m going to start with.

TL: There is of course a difference between reading your poems and someone else’s. I mean they’re your own so you have the right not to treat them with reverence.

PM: You know that’s very interesting I think. For example last night at the [Faber 80th] reading in Queen Elizabeth Hall, I was  – in so far as I get nervous and I only get nervous when I think about what i’m doing – I was getting nervous in regard to reading the T.S.Eliot poems because first of all it’s [wry smile] rather well-known.

One doesn’t want to screw up basically. With my own poems it doesn’t really matter. But one does seem answerable to T.S.[Eliot] on some level you know? So when reading other people’s poems, I’m much more concerned.

TL: At the Eliot Summer School poetry reading, you mentioned that Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ influenced you very heavily to the extent that you wrote hundreds of poems all in the style of ‘The Hollow Men’.

PM: I don’t know about hundreds but certainly…did I say ‘hundreds’?

TL: You were being hyperbolic…I think.

PM: Yes…dozens I’d say, literally dozens. Metaphorically hundreds. A LOT. They were all in the style of ‘The Hollow Men’…and I think other Eliot poems too.

It was actually Eliot who really made me think as a teenager that poetry was an exciting thing and also somehow, for some reason, that I might be able to do it myself.

Strange because on the one hand Eliot was quite daunting. He is a kind of institution almost, you can imagine him as the fifth face on Mount Rushmore. On the other hand I think I saw the fun in Eliot. The humour in him, an ordinary guy too, on some level. Also teenagers think they can do anything.

TL:“The arrogance of youth” and all that…

PM: Yes, yes, it’s a cliché because it’s true. You sort of think I can do that.

TL: Wayside Shrines makes use – in a very Eliotic way – of both high diction (‘anathematized’ ‘calamitous’) and the colloquial (‘helter skelter’ ‘call somebody’s bluff’)…

PM: You know that’s so…I think that’s absolutely right. I wasn’t going to make anything of it, say “by the way would you care to remark on the fact”, but I think you’re absolutely right. And that I think is one of the reasons why I read it. I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it but it is a sort of Eliotic poem.

I’m sure the combination of different dictions is one of Eliot’s great legacies. Of course he’s not the first person to have done that. Shakespeare and…even Chaucer did it too. So it’s not as if it rose fully formed from someone’s brow. However I do think in the twentieth century he excelled at that.

In that excerpt of The Waste Land I was reading [‘A Game of Chess’], the high diction in the first part of it is so…contorted. It’s actually somehow overwritten. One discovers that as one is reading it aloud.

That’s another aspect of poetry readings; one is involved somehow in an act of criticism. One is critiquing the poem – be it Eliot’s or one’s own – elucidating it.

The syntax in ‘A Game of Chess’ is really, really…under a lot of stress. It’s syntactically a bit cluttered. That’s part of what he’s doing. At that point he’s revelling in the overwrought aspect of what he’s describing. I suppose that his description of it is mimetically overly ornate. I guess that’s what he’d be telling us if he were here this morning.

TL: Also like Eliot’s works, I thought that ‘Wayside Shrines’ has at its heart a great deal of emotion but nevertheless it seems to constantly avoid emotive language. Do you think that perhaps due to the prevalence of emotive language in the media, we’ve come to regard it as somehow crass in poetry?

PM: I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to rule anything out in poetry. I’m sure there are occasions when emotive language is absolutely right.

Chaucer, Shakespeare, [...] Byron. These were guys who could have a bit of fun while writing poetry, which I think is not a bad thing to have from time to time.

But it is a massively troubling subject. I saw something the other day, which in a way I wish I’d seen before I wrote the poem [‘Wayside Shrines’]. I was in a city centre and on a street corner there was a child’s bicycle, which had been painted entirely white, with very thick white paint. A child had obviously been run over there by a truck or something. It’s very…a very powerful image.

I don’t think the poem is going very deeply into how we memorialise, but I suppose that’s part of it.

TL: But even your most emotive poems like ‘Cradle Song for Asher’ refrains from using emotive language.

PM: What would emotive language be?

TL: I suppose obvious ones would be ‘ a cry’ or ‘piercing’ or ‘weeping’…

PM: Ah I see, I see.  I suppose we don’t have much of that in contemporary poetry do we?

TL: No, no.

PM: Funnily enough one of the places in which I think I am more likely to do it and one is more likely to see it is in various forms of song, including the opera.

TL: Like your libretto.

PM: Yes I do try that from time to time. In that genre of course one of the great things about it is characters do come out and say ‘Oooh I am weeping, my lover’s left me I feel bad…so terrible…’

I think there are different ways of presenting emotional material.

I do think that many writers are at heart mischievous little kids.

TL: Perhaps now there is a great deal of danger of obvious emotionality coming across as clichéd.

PM: Perhaps so, perhaps so.

TL: But you are fond of using clichés…

PM: I am, that’s right.

…in unexpected ways to “make it new”. ‘Symposium’ in Hay is the most obvious example. [A poem made up entirely of clichéd phrases moulded together that includes lines like ‘A hair of the dog is a friend indeed’]

But it crops up often in your poetry. Even in your latest, ‘Wayside Shrines’ there is a lily ‘pulling rank’ but failing to ‘lend much weight’. Do you feel a conscious fascination with clichés and how we use them?

PM: I think I do, yes. I mean of course one is always warned against them, one shouldn’t be taking candy from strange clichés…or familiar clichés…as a kid. But on the other hand there’s a reason why they’re clichés, which is that they’re spot-on.

I remember, years and years ago, reading a poem about pearl fishermen, people who dived deep to find pearls and oysters. The last line of the poem was ‘the oyster is his world’, which is of course turning around “the world is his oyster”. I mean it’s silly in some ways and yet it’s revelatory in some ways.

TL: Do you think that there is a tension between a desire in every new poetry to express something in new ways and the desire to say something spot-on, which is often a cliché? Are you wary of that?

PM: Yes one is wary of that but at the same time…

Funnily enough yesterday I was walking down the street and two clichés came into mind, which I thought might be interesting together, that may or may not come together. But I just got these two lines come into my head, which were ‘lock, stock and barrel’ and ‘hook, line and sinker’.

Right? I mean you immediately laugh at that but I’d never thought of them together. So ‘lock, stock and barrel / hook, line and sinker/ something something something’. It may or may not work but one of the things it elicits also is humour. I mean, you both laughed at that and I’ve always been interested in poetry as a reader that was from time to time humorous. Chaucer, Shakespeare – to think of more obvious examples – one of my great heroes, Byron. These were guys who could have a bit of fun while writing poetry, which I think is not a bad thing to have from time to time.

TL: There is a special pleasure in seeing a poet break a rule and do it well.

I think, ideally, the poem is saying, ‘You better write me’.

PM: You know I do think that many writers are at heart mischievous little kids. And I know as a parent – and as a kid – that the minute someone says ‘No you really shouldn’t do that’, I think ‘Okay, let me see…’

Things that are off-limits always become interesting so I’m sure that in some of my poems I’m saying, ‘Is this really how it should be?’ But then I think most writers are questioning the idea that this is how it should be.

I think there’s always a bit of a revolutionary component in a poem and in fact the overturning of cliché would be an example of that. That’s not very profound. But it’s some kind of subversion.

TL: You also experiment a great deal with form in your poetry and that’s also a kind of subversion I suppose…

PM: I suppose in one sense you could describe it as an experiment. Of course perhaps all poems are in some sense an experiment and in some ways avant-garde because it shouldn’t quite look like anything else you’ve ever seen. It is something that has, ideally, not been done before.

But on one level whether it’s traditional in form or not, it should be determining its own form or how it looks. Quite often in my case the forms are specific to the poems.

TL: Yes, you do everything from elegantly turned out couplets to haikus.

PM: I’ve always wondered about poets whose poems all look the same. You think, why do they all look the same, how could this possibly be? Sometimes you see poets whose last lines are always a single hanging line or those whose form is always indented on the page. And you think, why? Why would that be?

I think often the reason is just that they’ve got used to it.

Poetry is a bit like architecture or engineering. It’s really about holding things together or keeping them up.

TL: They’ve got into a rut.

PM: Exactly.

TL: Do you tend to start writing and then the form suggests itself?

PM: Yes I usually don’t know how it would look. I sort of think of how it looks, as it were, [rather] than how it sounds.

I mean it is the case that sometimes I have written to order. For example a couple of poems were written along with my students for an assignment. We decided to write a sestina, just as an exercise in a class. Often what we do is determine what the six end words would be. Everybody writes a poem with six end words and we put them together.

But in general, they’re not written to order. They’re written to their own order.

Actually I remember Andrew Motion had quite an excellent idea about this; he said that all poems are, in some respects, commissioned. I think, ideally, the poem is saying, ‘You better write me’.

TL: Your poetry seems to have more of an emphasis on rhyme and echo than most contemporary poetry. I was wondering whether you felt that rhyme needs to be reclaimed a bit more?

PM: Well, I think it’s quite hard to write rhymed poetry. It’s also quite hard to write unrhymed poetry. It’s all quite hard I’d say.

‘Wayside Shrines’ has a lot of rhymes that are a little bit dicey, strictly speaking one shouldn’t get away with it – though there is a long tradition of getting away with it.

TL: It’s the feminine rhymes, the two-part rhymes that have that oddity to them particularly.

PM: Yes there’s a bit of that, yes, that’s right. But i was thinking more of the internal rhymes. The end word of the first line is picked up with an internal rhyme in the second line, in the first stanza of each part. That actually is, among other traditions, a feature of the Irish tradition. Internal rhyme is a big, big, big element in the Gaelic poetry tradition. So it’s a little bit harder to pull off in English I think; we’re not used to it.

Though mind you, I think Anglo-Saxon poetry, that was a component of that too, the linkages and little echoes within the line.

Poetry is a bit like architecture or engineering. It’s really about holding things together or keeping them up.

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2 OF THE INTERVIEW