Zen Cymru
by Peter Finch
Seren Press; Paperback;
72 pages; Price £7.99;

ISBN:978-1-85411-500-3

Rory Waterman

Cardiff does not have a Poet Laureate, but if it did Peter Finch would surely be a shoo-in. Few poets enjoy Finch’s popularity or ooze such a sense of place, and this has been reflected in countless commissioned poems for the city, several of which make their way into Zen Cymru. He is also a brash, innovative, prolific and furiously up-to-date performer of his work, and the back cover of this collection states that ‘his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic impact of pieces conceived for the stage’. But when found on a book cover this sort of comment begs the question: do they maintain their dramatic impact on the page?

At the bottom of one discursive poem, Finch refers to what he has written as ‘a gob / of verse’. This suggests impulsiveness more than introspection, recklessness rather than subtlety. And this is, for the most part, apposite. More often than not, Zen Cymru disappoints in the way the work of performance poets is wont to disappoint when presented in book form. So, for example, ‘The Bosoms You Have Brought from Outside’ begins:

We have taken out the contents of the

mini bar and are considering replacing it

with replicas from the supermarket

This is prose cut into verse; and it is all too immediate, devoid of nuance. And so the poem rolls on down the page until the speaker beds his woman, or she beds him, in their hotel room: ‘I am older now yet they [the eponymous bosoms] are still exciting. / Unfortunately, I am unable to move’. Similarly, ‘Foul Drainage’ might be a hoot in a hall, but it reads like a stand-up comedian’s notes for a would-be sketch abandoned at the draft stage:

[...] radio

with P16 strapped to outer-casing

using insulation tape eight hundred

plus tax decide to shit

in the woods

There are moderate successes in a similar vein, such as ‘N Wst Brdg’, a text message take-off of Wordsworth: ‘Deer GD! vry hses seem slp | | / + all tht BIG HRT lyng still!’. Funny, in its small way, as is another poem following the footsteps of Wordsworth in which we encounter an ‘unreadable notice shot to buggery’. This is modern Britain, right enough, but apart from the typically colourful use of the vernacular and a sort of cheeky Shane Meadows-style irreverence, it isn’t all that interesting. And when at the end of the poem the speaker stops to ‘take a leak in a mess / of bramble’ a reader might be inclined to sigh with him.

Some of the work in Zen Cymru tests the boundaries of what constitutes a poem – a courageous thing to attempt. So ‘Index to the Grand Holiday Club Timeshare Sellers Handbook’ is (yes) an index with wry entries. ‘Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen at Speed’ is ‘a translation from the Welsh original made by running past the original text much in the way that motorway drivers pass roadsigns’: ‘light and little proud ah / Lleucu heart broken / Merioneth’. ‘The Ballast Bank’ comprises a mainly alphabetical list of about one hundred and fifty words. A note claims that ‘The poem delineates the races, language groupings, trades and ideas which flowed in and out of the burgeoning industrial town [of Cardiff] as it exponentially developed’:

Norman

Northwalian

Orthodox

Norwegian

Potato

Raiders (Viking)

Russkii

Rhondda

The things Finch does well, he does very well. He has a keen ear for the strange and funny things people say, dropping punctuation to get the tone just right. In ‘Looking for the Southern Cross’ the guard outside a museum ‘said cross / boy you want Jesus. Maybe I did’. This poet also has a habit of writing in sentence fragments or little ungrammatical salvos, or of using self-consciously long sentences in his choppy verse. So, for example, in a typically zany poem called ‘The Trial of Phil Spector’:

The hair lacquer past where multiple percussionists drive

like motorbikes round a circular track is the place where it all

begins. Dance dance three-minute teenage angst.

The best poems in Zen Cymru are on weightier subjects, and there aren’t enough of them. ‘Chelsea Hotel’, about the famous hotel in New York, turns quickly to an analysis of that city’s – and America’s – post-9/11 culture of ‘fear’, and of jingoism: looking at the hotel from the street, he observes that ‘Little has changed other than America itself’. The speaker is stopped three times by ‘the cops’, who are hunting for ‘semtex’ and ‘dynamite’, and on the Fourth of July,

In the twilit mass, steaming along Roosevelt

the crowd swear endless allegiance,

sing the star-spangled, shout for victory,

sway in the dusk, sweating and certain.

This is readable, perhaps accurate, and has a subtle, sinister edge to it lacking in so many other poems here.

Throughout the book Finch often cuts an empathetic figure, and a few of these poems can move us for their humanity and clear-sightedness even if the poetry is not always what it might be. And every now and then, he just gets it right:

We walk in the garden where the plants no

longer have names and the birds are blurs.

You are holding onto me with that clutch of

yours that crushes bones. Who are we,

mother and son in a rain which keeps getting colder?

The mouth won’t answer, it doesn’t know,

but the body, that remembers.

But too often the poems in Zen Cymru attempt to be amusing, stylistically innovative or brash, and fall short – at least on the page.

Rory Waterman has written for the TLS, Dark Horse, Agenda, PN Review and various other publications. Carcanet will publish a selection of his poems in an anthology next year. He co-edits New Walk Magazine for poetry and the arts: www.tinyurl.com/newwalkmag

And when the light came, the darkness was confused and flew under the skirting. We tried to get it out with a broom handle and a ruler but it was like the time my friend’s room was infested with ladybirds which bred like ladybirds in her wainscot. I made the others leave and tried to coax it out. We talked about everything the moon and space what the darkness wanted to be when it grew up but still it hugged the insulation between the walls like a blanket. Eventually we left it and went back to the lounge pretending not to hear its gentle sobbing. Later when I returned to my room it was sitting wearily hunched on my bed waiting for me. Hello I said. Hello it said.

THE LAST PATRIARCH
Najat El-Hachmi
Serpent’s Tail; Paperback; 306 pages; ISBN 9781846687174; RRP £9.99
Published April 29th 2010

Alice Kelly

Najat El-Hachmi’s debut novel, The Last Patriarch (L’últim patriarca in Catalan), is effectively three stories in one: simultaneously a trauma narrative of abuse, an immigration narrative and a female bildungsroman. As a bestseller in Spain and the worthy winner of the prestigious Ramon Llull Prize in 2008 – which, at ninety thousand Euros last year, is the most renumerative prize in Catalan letters –its UK publishers, Serpent’s Tail, are keen to repeat that success over here. The Moroccan born El-Hachmi emigrated as a child with her family to Catalonia, and her previous work, the autobiographical I Too Am Catalan (Jo també sóc catalana, 2004) shares similar concerns to The Last Patriarch: questions of assimilation and integration; hybridity and border transgressions; and the construction of diasporic identities.

Narrated entirely from the perspective of Mimoun Driouch’s unnamed daughter, who will eventually escape the violence and sexual abuse of her despotic father (the last patriach of the title), the text is also concerned with cultural and imagined histories, and the importance of origin stories. El-Hachmi satirises and plays with these modes as much as she imitates them: the opening chapter, entitled ‘A long-awaited son’, charts the birth of Mimoun and comically begins ‘On that day, after three daughters, a first son was born to Driouch of Allal of Mohammed of Mohand of Bouziane, etc.’.

Split into two halves, totalling thirty-nine vignette-like chapters, the first half tells the story of Mimoun’s birth, childhood including his fratricide and sexual abuse by his uncle, his marriage, and his emigration to Catalonia, detailing throughout the violence, sexual abuse and rape he inflicts on the women around him. His daughter makes explicit her unreliable narration and her imagined reconstruction of his past in her desire for a cultural history: the events are frequently prefaced with ‘probably’; ‘We expect…’; ‘it isn’t beyond the realm of probability that…’; and ‘He must have felt like…’. This deliberate fictionalisation later becomes a mode of repressing trauma: ‘As my memories seemed so unreal I have no choice but to turn it all into fiction’. The text is unstinting in its depiction of domestic and sexual abuse: Mimoun’s cousin ‘felt him lacerating her flesh with the chains they used to tie the dog up in the outside yard’ and he plagues his daughter with ‘those tennis-ball-thud kisses’. At times these unrelenting descriptions feel a little over-done and Mimoun risks becoming a caricature, detracting from the clear, concise narration and characterisation elsewhere.

The narrative details the problems Mimoun faces as a Moroccan in what he calls ‘Barciluna’. His patriarchal authority is considerably diminished by his estrangement in a different culture, where he ‘understood very little of what people said’, resulting in alcoholism and more adultery. After his boss can’t pronounce his name, he becomes ‘Manel’ and eventually starts a business in a culture he doesn’t understand: ‘Construcciones Manel SA. I don’t know what the S and the A stand for, but it’s what you have to put if you want to look like a real company’.

It is these questions of assimilation and the enaction of the cultural script that El-Hachmi is able to insightfully explore in the second half, when the narrator and her family join their father in Catalonia. Interweaving these two narratives of sexual and domestic abuse, and the oppression of the immigrant, along with the growing self-awareness of the protagonist herself, generates a rich hybrid text, replete with a litany of daily prejudices.

The issue of homelessness and displacement is a common trope in immigrant narratives but the narrator’s solution to this is unusual: she ‘started to read the dictionary’, and Catalan words and their definitions soon come to punctuate the narrative and conclude chapters, such as ‘Daci, dàcia, an adjective, dació, an action and dacita, a rock’. Her progress through the dictionary becomes a means of delineating and learning to read her experiences:

I was probably at C in the dictionary when Father took us to meet Isabel. Ca is a dog. Or ca, the letter K. Or ca short for house, a ca l’Albert, for example, to Albert’s house, or a ca la ciutat, to the city.

As the protagonist is learning that ‘it wasn’t normal for your father to bite your knees when you’re growing up’, she is simultaneously becoming acculturated

to her new home. References to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, The Simpsons, and Whoopy Goldberg (purposefully spelt wrong?) in The Colour Purple start to appear, as well as references to the writers Víctor Català and Mercè Rodoreda, which root the text in the Catalan literary tradition. This voluntary hybridisation is entirely opposed to the discourse her father enforces on her and her brothers, making them ‘repeat what [he] forced us to say’, recording false testimonies of their mother’s alleged infidelity on tapes to send to their Moroccan grandparents. This acculturation increases throughout the second half of the novel, with chapters titled ‘Nocilla, Super Mario and sex’, and culminates in the daughter’s break away from her family. The well-written, shocking conclusion didn’t however convince this reader of the ‘revenge’ of the chapter’s title, but rather suggests the legacy of trauma that childhood abuse leaves behind.

The questioning of dominant discourses may well account for the book’s popularity in Catalunya. The resurgence of Catalan literature and the reclamation of Catalan, after years of repression under Franco, has marked Catalan as culture of resistance. El-Hachmi here forces Catalans to hold a mirror up to themselves, writing in Catalan and challenging them to imagine those subdominant, often immigrant discourses within Catalunya.

The story itself, of triumph over a domineering father figure and the difficulties of immigrant life, is not particularly innovative, but its resonances within a culture defined by its own cultural and linguistic oppression make this a particularly interesting immigrant narrative. The subnarrative of the story  – the legacy of Franco, known as the Patriarch – will not have passed Catalan readers by.  Equally they will be aware of the colonial history of Spain’s claims over Morocco. The history of oppression of Moroccan migrants in Spain here becomes a type of ‘writing back’, as Moroccan-Spanish authors claim a cultural inheritance.

The British publishers of this text, however, seem keen to reduce this complex text to simple polarities, as the back cover blurb of the proof copy tells us this ‘powerful saga of a Moroccan family’ is about ‘the conflict between duty and desire, set in rural Morocco and urban Catalunya’. This, combined with the faux-Arabic letters of the English chapter headings – a touch that will no doubt annoy postcolonialist critics – means the book is more likely to be read as a popular text of self-discovery and liberation, rather than as a nuanced postcolonial narrative of the impacts of domestic and sexual abuse, and of migration, both for migrants and host communities, and an example of how immigrants in Catalunya insert themselves into the dominant discourse, albeit it in what is considered a minority language.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Hamish Hamilton; Boxed Set Paperbacks; 672 pages;
9780241141823; Price £18.99

Michael Sopp

It seems that if you open any novel written by a man in the last decade there’s a good chance its protagonist will be a prepubescent genius. It’s difficult to trace the origins of this phenomenon. In England at least it may have something to do with Mark Haddon’s best-selling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and its autistic, prime-number-obsessed narrator, which seems to have spawned a literary virus that has since spread across the Atlantic and beyond. Oskar, the nine year old narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a vegan, tambourine-playing inventor cum private detective; the nine year old Saul in Adam Foulds’ The Truth About These Strange Times can (among other feats) reel off pi to a bespoke number of decimal places; and the twelve year old T.S. Spivet, whose Collected Works formed the subject of Reif Larsen’s debut novel last year, is a world expert cartographer. A preteen protagonist with anything less than an Ivy League phD must be considered a chronic underachiever in this context. Indeed, the child genius character has become as ubiquitous a postmodern device as mad fonts or rambling footnotes. It was therefore with early anxiety that I learnt on page one of Paul Murray’s second and most recent novel Skippy Dies that its teenage protagonist, Ruprecht Van Doren, is ‘an overweight genius’ with a penchant for Yahtzee and ten-dimensional superstring theory. Unfortunately, early fear quickly turns to palpable disappointment as Murray’s novel, which is lazily written, very loosely plotted and just plain too long, gestures towards ‘tragicomedy’ (to quote the blurb) but ends up being neither serious nor funny.

Disappointingly, our physicist hero is just one of many cardboard cut-out characters that populate Seabrook College, the exclusive Dublin boarding school that is the setting for the novel. The staffroom consists of a collection of pedagogical stereotypes that, were it not for their being at least nominally Irish, might have been dragged directly off the set of Dangerous Minds. Thus in addition to the prematurely cynical history teacher Howard, there is the harmless old blunderer Jim Slattery, the attractive, enigmatic Miss McIntyre, and the erstwhile teenage rugby star Tom Roche who, having been cut off by injury in his prime, now runs Seabrook’s games department and, bitterly single, is married only to the school. Of course one cannot set a novel in a Catholic Irish boarding school without, at the very least, intimations of either physical or psychological abuse. In Skippy Dies the staple coupling of Catholic catechism and deviancy is found in the figure of Father Green. He teaches French (making him a literal Père Vert), and has a habit of publicly interrogating Skippy and his peers with regard to their sexual proclivities. One scene in the first book (the novel is divided into three parts – entitled Hopeland, Heartland and Ghostland) in which Skippy is induced to vomit over his classmate under Father Green’s interrogation is one of the book’s rare highlights, successfully combining farce with horror. However, this is not a Lord Dismiss Us sort of institution; Seabrook is very much a twenty-first century boys’ school, i.e. a neurotically heterosexual one. Nor is this Joyce’s Clongowes Wood, and aside from the dubious Father Green, the Paraclete Fathers at the school take a back seat, and the Catholic element in the novel remains largely incidental.

It is possible to faintly make out a central narrative to Skippy Dies, one which surrounds Skippy and Ruprecht, improbable roommates who are brought together by their search for love and extra-terrestrial life respectively. Both prefer to engage with life from a distance: whilst the physics Wunderkind Ruprecht uses the telescope in his room to monitor UFO activity and inform his painstaking work with the global SETI project, Skippy is employed in more terrestrial pursuits, directing the lens over towards the neighbouring St Brigid’s School, and getting various close ups of the girls in its courtyard. One of these girls, Lori, becomes the object of his affection, and much of the novel is concerned with their burgeoning, prescription-drug-fuelled love affair, a relationship which is complicated in no small part by Carl, the maniac sometime boyfriend of Lori, who spends his evenings terrorising restaurateurs with his Vietnam-War-obsessed droog, Barry. The gravamen of the problem with Skippy Dies is thus the fact that, despite its considerable length, there are too many characters and too many stories. After an eventful prologue, in which the titular death mysteriously takes place following an eating competition at the local Doughnut emporium, the novel divaricates all over the place. In the first book alone, Howard’s infatuation for the staffroom femme fatale Miss McIntyre, Carl and Barry’s knock-off pharmaceutical dealings, Ruprecht’s experiments with his Velocity Accelerator in the school’s basement, and a calamitous Hallowe’en party make up multiple narrative branches that are, at best, half-heartedly pleached together. Nor is the novel grounded in any sense of place, and readers who know Dublin will scour their copies for evidence of the city in vain. The social milieu is very much south of the Liffey, but you could change a couple of place names and transpose the novel to Reading without too much difficulty. With the exception of the occasional pejorative ‘spa’ or phatic ‘alright so’, the language of Dublin is equally absent. The nuances of boys’ school vernacular also seem to elude Murray’s reach – “Von Blowjob, find a dictionary and look up ‘interesting’” is, I think, more of an imagined playground insult than something a fifteen year old would actually say – though the perma-use of the word ‘gay’ is spot on, and made this reader, at least, breathe a nostalgic sigh for his schoolboy years.

Readers who enjoyed Murray’s debut An Evening of Long Goodbyes will be disappointed by this follow-up effort. Whereas Murray’s first novel, a much funnier book, is held tightly together by its epicurean protagonist Charles Hythloday, who at his best combines Ignatius Reilly’s manic indolence with the caroming debauchery of a Sebastian Dangerfield, the narrative of Skippy Dies is too diffuse, and its central pairing of Ruprecht and Skippy cannot hold. Beyond these structural flaws however, there is just too much bad writing in this book. Naturally, there are all the writerly devices that some readers will love and others will find distracting, such as heavily worked zeugmas – ‘It is tomorrow. Skippy’s bare-legged at the edge of the pool, chlorine and earliness stinging his eyes’ – and similes, as well as Murray’s constant shifting back and forward, via Skippy, between the second and third person. But worse than these are the dud passages of clichéd interior monologue. This is Howard: ‘when the initial sting has abated, he admits to himself that Farley might have a point. Yes, Miss McIntryre is beautiful; yes, what happened in the Geography Room was exhilarating. But did it actually mean anything?’ Or the snowballing tropes that run on for lines and lines without showing any sign of relenting. ‘Frozen in a moment he drifted into’, Howard thus begins the novel phlegmatically stringing together the ‘clouded necklace of imitation pearls’ that make up the ‘pale torpid days’ of the ‘grey tapestry of okayness’ of his existence. Phew. A few paragraphs of this are enough to leave the reader’s head spinning from some sort of metaphor motion sickness; unfortunately, the novel goes on for over six hundred pages. Ultimately, Skippy Dies is overwritten, overlong, and under thought-out. If you haven’t already, read An Evening of Long Goodbyes instead.

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.

Eley Williams

We tug along the cats’ eyes, thinking of you.
Below us the roadkill is a pheasant rainbowfaced, and the radio and I
Are spaniel tenors, just bawlin’, darlin’:
Sit in on our traffic jamming.
We’ll sing you the hairpins, and the zebras, and the bottlenecks.
Crested beauties, breasted cuties; yeah, I’m-a gonna do that all day ‘til you roll those pretty amber eyes right out.
To think: all these pedestrians are allowed faces, but none of them are yours!
We got you all atomised, my piñata: we always drive singing from you,
But also, somehow, always, to you.
(Kerb that thought.)
I can honestly swear, with hands on wheels, I shall think on you for miles yet.
Mindwanderlust, the radio and I;
We’re just fussing with the idea of
The burst silt of the thought of the look of you in the bypass
With our hands, untentative, ten-to-two.

]]> http://www.literateur.com/2009/12/with-hands-on-wheels/feed/ 3 http://www.literateur.com/2009/09/a-jury-of-her-peers-elaine-showalter/ http://www.literateur.com/2009/09/a-jury-of-her-peers-elaine-showalter/#comments Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:54:45 +0000 Literateur http://www.literateur.com/?p=1551

A JURY OF HER PEERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS FROM ANNE BRADSTREET TO ANNIE PROULX

Elaine Showalter

Virago, Hardback, 400pp.,ISBN 978-1844080786, Price: £22.50

Janette Currie

In her latest book, Elaine Showalter revisits the contested territory of her pioneering study of English women writers, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977). A Jury of Her Peers concentrates on the American counterparts and as such, attempts to reshape American literary heritage. Showalter aims to make the “invisible visible” by shining a light on “neglected” and “forgotten” American women writers and their more enduringly famous sisters.

Audacious in scope, A Jury of her Peers examines over four centuries of American women’s writing, positioned within pertinent social and historical contexts. Engaging and accessible, Showalter masks her scholarly credentials in plain prose. She is brilliant at encapsulating the period significance and essential qualities of the writers and their works. Here she is on “American Eliots”:

During Reconstruction, the clash between old ideals and new aspirations, the Lost Cause and the woman’s cause, inspired Southern women’s interest in Eliot’s realism and broad social understanding. “The old life of the south has passed away,” says a character in Sherwood Bonner’s Like Unto Like (1878). “It only remains for the genius of a George Eliot to grasp these old materials, and from their wreck build a memorial of its glory in a Southern ‘Middlemarch’ ”. (177)

Showalter, rightly, gives a whole chapter to a discussion of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, “not only because they were giants of their age, but also because of their commitment to an art beyond the limitation of gender. [...] American women’s writing could not fully mature until there were women writing against it” (271). By ‘writing’ Showalter really means fiction and poetry. There is very little discussion of non-fiction, biography, history, or scholarship. Many of her own peers are absent. For example, there is an adroit analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

[A] significant novel of the eighties … a haunting, metaphoric novel about two kinds of women—those women in the tradition of Anne Sexton’s “Housewife,” or Shirley Jackson’s novels about agoraphobia, who like to keep their houses and to stay in their own rooms, however small, dark, and poor; and those less visible women, in the tradition of the fairy tale, science fiction, and utopian narrative, who cannot be housekeepers or be kept in their houses.(472)

Yet, Robinson the essayist and political activist only gets the barest mention: [Robinson] “only wrote nonfiction for twenty-four years before publishing her second novel, Gilead (2004)” (474).

In a work of such breadth, in its selection and organisation and wide-ranging array of writers, there are the inevitable casualties and flaws. Pulitzer-prize-winning Anne Tyler published the first of her thirteen novels in the 1960s. However, Showalter categorises her under the 1980s because it marks “her breakout decade” (474). Tyler is a popular author who writes uplifting novels about families, marriage, children and the humdrumness of carrying on. In her democratic novels, women are not passive victims of circumstance but make choices. They are equals, accepted by and speaking from positions of authority. At pains to shine a light on the “forgotten” women writers, many of whom are dismissed as “sentimental”, Showalter is in danger of marginalizing Tyler, who occupies less than one page out of the 586 because, it would seem, she writes ‘popular’ fiction about the human experience. Another Ann, Ann Patchett (The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician’s Assistant (1997), Bel Canto (2001), Run (2008)) is left out from the listing of her contemporary peers, which includes Alice Sebold, Amy Tan and Jodi Picoult.

Keeping with Virginia Woolf’s assertion that a woman needs to be freed from the daily drudgery of domesticity in order to create, or have “a room of one’s own”, Showalter follows a chronological organisation to confirm her thesis that American women writers have escaped from the confinement of domesticity and social pressure and now are “free” to “take on any subject they want, in any form they choose.” Under this scenario, the 1990s is a watershed, the endgame of the female struggle for equal acceptance within the traditional male canon. This is patently not true. However, Showalter anticipates debate with knowing asides. “I am aware that literary judgments are subjective” (xviii) she admits in the introduction. Beguiling, bewitching, with A Jury of her Peers Showalter entices us to believe in the truth of her thesis.

Tom Bailey

The Literateur: Sir Frank, it’s a privilege to be here to interview you today. Thank you very much for giving your time.

First off, you have been some years outside of the academic machine now – much, it appears from your memoirs, to your delight. Broadly, how have you been spending these last few years? Have you picked up any late critical hobbies or new lines of interest?

Frank Kermode: I don’t suppose I have. I occasionally go and do a lecture somewhere, for which I have to do a little bit of reading and thinking. At the moment I’m quite busy, but that’s rather accidental – normally I am not. It’s a pleasantly lazy life. I still write articles for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books amongst other things.

TL: A couple of years ago you ran an interview with John Sutherland in which you gave firm thoughts on the state of English Literature education. You’ve also mentioned in several works your apprehension that the study of literature is being eclipsed by the study of Theory. In the 2002 publication Life After Theory you suggested that deconstructionism and other contemporary Theory will of course have its day, and will pass towards a new critical discipline. As the years have gone on, have you come across anything which might suggest what these new paradigm shifts in criticism might be?

FK: There was a major shift in the 60’s, and there’s been an immense amount of work done along those lines. But these things do come in waves. For a while the New Historicists were taking over, as it were – Steven Greenblatt replaced Derrida. But if you look at it from England (which is an important qualification) the people who are quite well-known – John Carey, Christopher Ricks – people of that calibre, they’re not theorists. But now the people who are quite well-known tend not to be theorists I think. Then again, there are people like Terry Eagleton, for instance, who’s an extremely good speculative Marxist theoretician. But the whole subject of literature hasn’t been drowned in Theory, as we all thought it was going to be. It’ll come round again, of course. I was always amazed that people would treat literary theory as if it was a brand new subject – Aristotle wrote a whole book about it. There was nothing unique about being a student of literary theory when I was an undergraduate, since we had to read Aristotle, Horace, and so on.

The particular French contribution – and it was a very valuable contribution – was narratology, as it came to be called. Narratology had some brilliant practitioners, but they were French, so that gave them an extra kind of glamour, you see. But I can’t answer for America really. The machinery is different in America. What would happen in the 1960s and early 70s is that someone would set up a course in literary theory, it would be tested and it would be liked, and would then be established. What the Americans call a ‘line’ would exist for that particular subject. And this means that, barring a big disturbance, that course is always going to be there. In America they’re never going to be short of literary theorists because the ‘lines’ were created for them 30 years ago and they’re continually being refilled. There are changes within this system, but not radical changes. In England we’ve done our usual thing in the face of any kind of philosophical thinking – get it over-and-done-with as soon as possible.

TL: How do you think the critical/ academic reception of your writing – in particular your seminal work of literary criticism, Romantic Image – has changed over the years? Might it be that, as well as being an excellent work of literary criticism, Romantic Image has survived so well because it foreshadows the later structuralist/ post-structuralist concern with discoursing about the image, particularly of writers like Barthes?

FK: No, I don’t think so. Romantic Image is about 50 years old now. I’d be surprised if a lot of people were still reading it. It’s still in print though, so it must be selling a few copies. It was a very old-fashioned book really: it had nothing to do with the kind of work that was going on only a decade later in the 60s. Another book of mine, The Sense of an Ending, did make some impact and continues to make a mark. This was much more like the French theory of the time, although of course I wasn’t much aware of the theory since it only came to England at the end of the decade. I then became more fully theoretical for a while, publishing The Genesis of Secrecy. But I was never really seduced by theory.

However, Romantic Image was astonishingly well-received when it came out. When I wrote it and started sending it around to publishers (there were more publishers then who would publish that kind of book) and was turned down. Finally Routledge took it, not because they really liked it but because they thought I could write another book – they liked the idea of it. So nobody expected it to go off with a bang or anything. But then it received a very favourable long review in the TLS and that, I think, launched it. The TLS was powerful in those days. The review was anonymous but later turned out to be by G.S. Fraser, who really went overboard for it.

TL: You’ve mentioned in some of your later writing, particularly your memoirs, Not Entitled, of the rather sudden loss of posthumous public interest in eminent literary critics – Northrop Frye, Wayne Booth and William Empson to name a few. Does the future reception of your work ever concern you?

FK: Oh, I’d be foolish to bother about that. It is an interesting and mildly astonishing fact that the really powerful people who changed the subject and the whole way of teaching it, like the people you mentioned, should disappear almost as soon as they die. I was having lunch with Cleanth Brooks three days before he died. He had had the most amazing success with a book which we don’t really use in this country, which is used in almost all American schools. He made a fortune and became very rich, he was almost as famous in America as Leavis was here. And yet just before his death Brooks was able to say that people no longer recognised him. Students didn’t recognise him in the street at Yale. He was very rarely mentioned in critical discussion.

Regarding Northrop Frye, he really had a world-beating system and was a very powerful mind. He was a man of extreme and orderly intelligence, and I admired him a good deal. As for his critical disappearance, I can only guess at an explanation – namely that when people really did begin to consider the world-beating system that he built, they began to see that they didn’t want it. He ruled out value judgements. When you do that you are reducing the interest of literature. You just have a kind of model for the whole of literature, you just have a system which places everything in the right kind of cog-hole. And also, of course, he grew more and more interested in the Bible. That shouldn’t have harmed him much in America but I think it’s fatal here, where nobody wants literary criticism about the Bible.

Empson was a kind of genius, but self-destructive. A very strange career he had, too. But there are still some very talented people about. Christopher Ricks, who is not a theorist, is a very ingenious reader, as well as John Carey.

TL: Touching on Northrop Frye and the idea of literary value, this leads into my next question. In Life After Theory your conception of literary value was covered; discussion of what literary value actually is remained, perhaps intentionally, inconclusive. But you once offered what I think is a good analogy for historical literary value – the Warburg Institute library. As you described, just as Warburg’s library traces recurring concepts throughout historic works of art, literary value can be measured by the continuity of conceptual traces that are embodied, from time to time, in art works throughout history. However literary value may be described, it seems to be central to the art of good literary criticism. But which critics that you know of or admire, besides Ricks and Carey, are questioning this literary value of works today? Might it be said that the style of what you called ‘old fashioned’ literary criticism has taken on new guises?

FK: I suppose it’s always taking on new guises. But my horizons are limited. All around the country there are people whose works I don’t know and are no doubt very good. That will always be true and I’m glad it is true, you needn’t always look to Oxford and Cambridge for success in excellent literary critical thinking. I don’t know. In the Cambridge English Faculty which critics are studied today?

There’s perhaps a strong Marxist emphasis, particularly on Adorno. Derrida is of course still widely discussed. That’s surprising, I would have thought that people would be losing interest in Adorno by now. Maybe except musically. For literature students, I think the musical theories remain quite sidelined. Adorno was a composer, you know. I don’t think you can study Adorno without studying his music.

TL: Central to your practice of literary criticism is the idea of fictiveness. I’d like to ask about this in a little more in detail. In the introduction of Poetry, Narrative, History the critic Howard Schweizer makes the following comments on your work:

“Thus, however internally consistent and historically consistent Kermode’s setting up of word against word and works against works, his fictionalist position is itself a theory of crisis or a fiction of criticism, because he cannot give a privileged epistemology to his own discourse.”

He also makes reference to “Kermode’s Nietzschean conviction that, lacking other consolations, we must live by fictions alone.”

First, if I may offer the argument, Schweizer has possibly misrepresented your idea of fiction, if I am right. In your essay ‘Freud and Interpretation’ you reiterate the claim that fictions are “consciously false”, and you borrow the term figura veritas from St. Augustine. The truth can be interpreted through a fiction, and that fictions are necessarily a part of our ‘hermeneutic’ attitude towards the world. Fictions are fundamentally part of the present, and everything we interpret can be understood to be seen through the lens of a present fiction. These fictions, of course, generate from the past and will continue in some form into the future. Could you possibly expand on your idea of ‘the fictive’ – its critical reception, and the way your thoughts on it have changed over the years?

FK: I think I agree with the way you expressed it. I was greatly taken with Vaihinger who’s not really a name to conjure with anymore. He’s a Nietzschean who wrote a book called The Philosophy of As If [1919], which was always scorned by professional philosophers. I think that’s because philosophers prefer to go directly to Nietzsche. Bernard Williams also held very similar sophisticated philosophical ideas to Vaihinger. So the Nietzschean emphasis behind the idea of the fictive was strong. But I’m not a philosopher, I don’t find it easy to debate these things with philosophers since they’re so good at pulling the rug from under your feet. On the whole, yes, some kind of theory of fictiveness, a universal hermeneutic possibility. Another thing that has never been taken very seriously by literature people in Cambridge is Gadamer, who was also an influence. His is very heavy stuff, but full of illuminating statements about the characteristics of fiction and the concept of horizons and so on. Heidegger too, I suppose. But I had my theoretical days back in the 60s and 70s.

However, I haven’t really noticed any change in the way the idea of fictiveness has been received. I don’t think I really have any critics in that sense, I don’t think people much bother with me now. I’m getting old, you see, I’m going to be 90 soon, so it’s very hard for me to take part at the level of the 40-year olds.

You were talking of continuing fashions and of course you see these periods come and go. If you lived through the Leavis era, you’d know what it was like for a whole doctrine of literature to be created, defended and lost. There are very few Leavisites now, as you know. There was a time when every grammar school had a Leavisite English master.

TL: Schweizer’s second assertion is that your writing, since it is concerned with the comparison and elucidations of fictions alone, has no underlying epistemological foundation. Although it is clear from your writing that you are highly aware of many different kinds of reading and many different contemporary ideologies – indeed, you have been credited with first engendering engagement with these continental theories at UCL – you choose not to orientate your criticism within any particular ideology: Marxist, New Historicist, etc. Perhaps with the dominance of Theory, there is a pressure an all critics to approach a text with a strong ideological agenda. But rather than seeing a lack of orientation with a particular ideology as a deficiency, do you think that the essence of literary criticism is that it deliberately remains detached, fluid, somewhat aloof, elusive as a discourse, even somewhat reticent in its treatment of the variety of artistic objects?

FK: I think that part of the answer is that when you shift the focus of interest to literary theory, you’re creating a new subject. Someone once said that when you start finding out all the rules (or what I.A. Richards called the philosophy of rhetoric), you get another subject on another level. That level is not higher because its more valuable, it’s higher because it’s more abstract. It’s like having a specialist in concrete, a man who is interested in the stresses of the material, but who is no longer interested in the building. And yet he’s got a very important subject which lends itself to certain kinds of analysis which are different from other levels of analysis. I.A. Richards was extremely important because he tried to speak on both of these levels, and did them really quite well. Empson did it quite differently. He very sensibly said something along the lines of: ‘Let’s not bring in theory at the wrong stage of the affair. Let’s trust our noses when we’re reading, and only bring in other speculations only when we need them.’ It’s a strange thing for him to have said when he wrote so much that looks like theory – The Structure of Complex Words, for instance. But that was the way he worked.

I’ve been reading a lot of E.M. Forster’s criticism lately (which I don’t think is any good really), but he had this idea that literary criticism was not an art, but that you must make it as pleasant as possible. I’ve also just been reading De Quincey, who I’ve not really read before. He’s a marvellous writer. You read what he has to say about Coleridge not that you’re going to do a thesis on Coleridge, but because his awareness of Coleridge’s faults and virtues are so lucid, and for the manner in which it is written. He was a good writer: I see no reason why literary critics should not be good writers. If I had to give you my principles, that would be one of them. I can’t stand ill-written criticism; it’s a kind of insult to literature. But our methods of teaching and training people conduce just that kind of trouble. I can remember, when I was still supervising PhD candidates, that I could never break them from this habit of thinking that there are two stages of operation in preparing a PhD. One is amassing a lot of facts, which takes a couple of years. Then you sit down and start worrying because you’ve got to write it all. But I used to say to my students: ‘Write something every day, it doesn’t matter what, you can always erase it. But do something, don’t lose the habit of writing. But if they don’t do this, the PhD student gets to a kind of crisis, a situation when they have to write it all up, and then this parched PhD English takes the place of good writing. You have to let people loosen up a bit. Otherwise we get the worst kind of literary criticism.

But of course Forster was not really writing for PhDs, he more or less wrote to please himself – tea party talk and all that. (We don’t want that sort of thing in PhDs either). But I think a certain severity of tone is what is required.

TL: That’s interesting you mention severity of tone; I want to ask more about the role of the critic, in particular your ideas about criticism. In Romantic Image you write of Matthew Arnold as a “disengaged, anti-didactic critic; still seeing widely and steadily, but talking of society, not so much the poet in society, seeking to end rather than analyse that problem by reform of society; dealing, at any rate, in life, not in art, but being.”

Elsewhere, you have offered the more temperate proposal that criticism can remain a civilizing, enriching and enlightening force, especially in the wider public sphere. Broadly, how have your ideas about the ability of criticism to provide reform and civility changed over the years?

FK: It’s absolutely no use going in for literary criticism if you don’t like literature. That seems like quite an elementary point to begin with. But one must take great pleasure in it. One of the things we tend to forget when we professionalize literature, as we’ve done, is just that: It’s meant to give pleasure. To read well gives you an enormous kick. That, I feel, is the first necessity.

I don’t think I’ve ever believed that being a good critic, or being a good poet, makes you a good man. Let’s not get that mixed up. Milton said you had to be a good man to be a good poet, and Samuel Johnson said it too. Of course what ‘good’ means is a whole other topic. Was Rimbaud a ‘good’ man, for example? But what I’ve always said is that I don’t want any easy connection between aesthetic pleasure and moral virtue.

TL: Following the publication of The Sense of an Ending you have been called a ‘critic of crisis’. This made me think of Walter Benjamin’s more extreme Marxist-Kabbalist notion of historical criticism, that it must invoke a sense of historical crisis to engender fundamental socio-political change. In relation to apocalyptic criticism, Christopher Norris has written of the ‘apocalyptic tone’ of some of Foucault’s writing and Derrida’s later work, such as The Gift of Death. Yet throughout, the range of your criticism it seems that you rarely indulge in critical pessimism and rarely write with the rhetoric of apocalypse. Do you at all subscribe to this label of ‘critic of crisis’?

FK: I suppose that I do. There was a time when I wrote a lot about apocalyptic literature. The Sense of an Ending was written in 1965, not necessarily a traditionally apocalyptic time – not near the end of a century or something. But when you start studying crisis and the ideas of ‘end-time,’ things like that, you do find yourself going back to the Book of Revelations, which is a kind of paradigm that informs how we think about crisis.

But the idea of perpetual crisis is bound to come up before long. It’s no longer possible in the modern world to escape the sense of crisis. We’ve lived under nuclear threat for half a century, and now with the ecological crisis. We go from one critical point to another. But we also think of our own lives in crises; it’s a natural habit.

The history of apocalypse and the developments that it has undergone are very interesting. The craziness that it has engendered is quite important. We perhaps laugh at these sects in America – although not always, as some are very violent and destructive. There is mass attendance, of which we hear nothing about, at these meetings of apocalyptic sects. Absurdities like this business about the faithful being ‘snatched’ from whatever they’re doing, so that aeroplanes might crash because the pilot has been taken to heaven. These people are guilty of a very elementary reading error. They need a good literary critic. They need a commentary on the Book of Revelations that is actually sane – which is of course possible, it’s been done many times.

TL: Your idea of the fictive as ‘consciously false’ is promoted in direct opposition to the unreflected-upon myth. Although you’ve touched upon it already, what are the myths of today, if any, from which you think we need to awake, become conscious of?

FK: Well, we’ve mentioned one of them, as well as the ecological crisis. It is interesting that we’ve managed not to be blown up by nuclear weapons, and we’ve managed to live without the genuine terror of them that we all had in the 1950s, where we really thought that the war has ended and the next thing would be a total wipeout. And in 1961 the actual confrontation of the Americans and Russians over Cuba, that was a very close encounter. Everybody thought they were going to be dying in the next day or two. The interesting thing is that we forget those fears, we even forget the bombs. We live in a terrible world, everybody knows that. You could say it’s the application of a myth of crisis to certain facts, but that doesn’t help. The remarkable thing is that we’re still here to discuss it.

TL: Returning to the specifics of your work, an holistic idea of the monadic individual completeness of a work of art was discussed in Romantic Image. To briefly recapitulate , quoting A.W Schleigel, the work of art,

“creating autonomously like nature, both organised and organising, must form living works, which are first set in motion, not by an outside mechanism, like a pendulum, but by an indwelling power like the solar system.”

This biologist analogy with literature is an idea with which you seem to have stuck with, most recently in Life After Theory, in which you talked further of the need to approach works from the attitude of organic wholeness, or at least, expansiveness. Yet near the close of Romantic Image you write of the impossible task of the critic of symbolism, who “cannot ever expect to achieve finality in his own work; he is doomed to be limited, even if he remembers the symbolic origin of the discourse he is extracting.”

What perhaps characterises your work is its absence of rigorous ideology, its reticence from outspoken argument and firm conclusions. Unlike more dissecting, deconstructive critical works, do you think that there appears in your writing a will to preserve this whole, this holistic, self-contained object of criticism?

FK: The quote of Schleigel is very familiar, it’s part of our literary atmosphere since the time of Coleridge, coming up with these contrasts of the organic and the mechanical. And very useful they’ve been, so they’ve passed into ordinary parlance. People will still talk about the organic quality of some work without realising the whole epoch of philosophy behind it. But we’ve got to approach it with a conscious notion of the fiction of biological organism. It’s a kind of metaphor really, that’s proven so successful that people have stopped distinguishing between its tenor and vehicle. It’s a metaphor that’s hugely important to modern literature from Coleridge on. If you want to make the intellectual effort to read without the application of even the slightest notion of some organic idea, then you are going to have quite a difficult task in front of you. We don’t like extreme forms of mechanism like the rule that a play must have five acts.

There was a Racine play in Cambridge the other day. What you saw, for all the originality of his mind, was that Racine did know that there were rules that he had to keep – there had to be five acts, and so on. We were always glad that, in the Anglo-American tradition, we always knew of the five act system that went back to Horace and so on, but we’re much looser about these rules. Shakespeare of course wrote in five acts, but if he didn’t fancy it he didn’t have to do it, he just wrote a play with a lot of scenes. The English have been much more opposed to Aristotelian attempts to impose rules for tragedy. Mechanical approach to literary form is something that the English have always disliked. We have a very different literature from the French by consequence.

TL: In Romantic Image, you quote J. B. Yeats, who wrote: “The artist, out of his pain and humiliations constructs for himself a habitation…” In your eloquent essay on Wallace Stevens in An Appetite for Poetry you talk more extensively about ideas of poetic dwelling. It is perhaps clear from your book of memoirs, Not Entitled, that you are more settled in Cambridge, specifically outside of the academy, than you have been since leaving the Isle of Man. I wanted to ask you more about matters of dwelling. You mentioned in your memoirs that the statue of Diana at the end of your garden is a “household God or Goddess to assure me that I was at home”. It resonates with the description you made of Wallace Stevens who lived, as you wrote, among the “fortitudes of earth that solace us and make a world, or, like the Tal-Coat painting that hung in his house these years, an angel of reality.”

Is it possible that you are now, in old age, dwelling poetically, or anything near what Stevens wrote of?

FK: No, I think that was just a kind of terminal flourish I was doing there. I don’t live in that house any more, but the statue you mention is outside in the garden here. I was perfectly prepared when I bought that house to live in it for the rest of my life, but then personal reasons intervened: it was more manageable for me to have a flat. These are more prosaic reasons, nothing to do with the complexities of the German word for dwelling.

TL: You have written movingly, in Not Entitled, of the remorse you feel at leading a peripatetic life of endless flight. I wanted to return to William Empson, a critic who pops up here and there throughout your work. There is a verse in Empson’s Autumn on Nan-Yueh which struck a resemblance to your own thoughts on escaping academia.

“And it is true I flew, I fled,

I ran about in hope, on trust,

I felt I had escaped from They

Who sat on pedestals and fussed.”

He then goes on to ask:

“But is it true one ought to dread,

This timid flap, that shirk, that lust?”

I lastly want to ask following this – looking back on it, what might be the virtues of a life of flight, of obeying to this impulse to move on, of experiencing a variety of life which poetic dwelling cannot provide?

FK: One of the differences between people of your age and mine is that you’re much less likely to be shoved-about than we were. When I was an undergraduate it was useless for me to plan to dwell because I knew I was going to be called-up and spend the next six years doing the stuff I didn’t want to do. In a sense that pressure gave one a sense of irresponsibility towards dwelling places, and also towards authority. So it’s got a very complicated effect. People getting worked up about A-levels now: they think they’ve got a monumental task ahead of them, which perhaps they have. Although they’ve got to go and find work, nobody is going to put them in a uniform and send them to Burma, which of course did happen in the past.

But all that Heidegger stuff really got to me at that time. In a long life, you’ve really had time to see many changes of fashion in your own head. The poems that you secretly recite to yourself are not the same ones that they probably were fifty years ago. Some would be. In my case a lot of Yeats would be. We’re never one stable personality.

TL: Sir Frank, it’s been a great pleasure to speak with you. Thank you.