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PETER ACKROYD
Essays on Peter Ackroyd in
British Literary Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium, ALL Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999
The Desperado Age: British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium, Bucharest University Press, 2004
The mind is the soul
Interview with PETER ACKROYD (born 1949), British novelist
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006
LIDIA VIANU: A Desperado author is not happy until his reader gives in to the novel as to a trance. Your books move back and forth in time, between centuries, between minds, pushing the reader into the experience of a perpetual present, which includes all times, all thoughts, all sensibilities. The highly narrative style is mingled with a lyrical suspension of disbelief. Although full of suspense and palpitating stories, your novels are preeminently lyrical experiences. Are you a poet as well? Is poetry more important than prose, when you write?
PETER ACKROYD: I began my literary career as a poet, and for many years thought of nothing else. It is the case that, when I stopped writing poetry, I began almost immediately to write prose. I believe the same sensibility simply migrated into a different medium.
LV. Is it your intention to create a new literary genre, a hybrid of fiction, poetry and drama? Hybridization of literary genres was the discovery of the stream of consciousness, but its real feats have been accomplished between the 1950s and now. Do you resort to it deliberately or instinctively (writing as the novel comes, which is the more plausible answer, but, hopefully, not the only one)?
PA. I am not particularly concerned with generic matters – just as you cannot expect a composer to write only symphonies or only operas, so a writer must be free to explore every available form of writing. You mention the hybrid of poetry and drama and fiction, but I would also like to include historical narrative as part of that mingling, for example. I am interested in creating a form that includes those elements which have been generally classified as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’.
LV. You create your own reader, the sharing reader, who has to lend himself to the author’s expert hand, and this author is never satisfied till he reaches absolute communion. You almost lead the reader to the point where he becomes author himself. The reader partakes of a sacred rite, which is your imagination. There is in most authors a Desperado stiffness which claims that the reader is not meant to do anything special. Are you aware that your reader is a creative reader? Do you mean your books to go on in the reader’s mind after creation and reading have had their say? Do you accept the reader’s interference in your own creation?
PA. I am quite happy for the readers to enter and recreate the world to which I summon them. Part of the meaning of my work might be seen as an attempt to construct an alternative reality. Or, rather, a heightened reality in which the sacred forces of the world are as plain as any more familiar elements.
LV. You have written the most remarkable biography of T.S. Eliot, which is at the same time a novel and a critical initiation. You mix there fiction, literary history and literary criticism. I should say you are a new kind of critic, the commonsensical, well-informed critic, who despises scholarly digressions from clarity and sense. Are you a critic? Eliot used to say creation itself was a critical act, too. As an Eliot specialist, I owe most of my understanding of Eliot in all his hypostases – stream of consciousness poet, critic and dramatist, master of hybridization – to your book. Yet you place fiction before criticism, I should say. Would I be wrong? How important is literary criticism in the context of your creation?
PA. I do not believe that I am a critic in any familiar or conventional sense. In my biography of Eliot I attempted, for example, to reproduce the cadences of the man within the style of my prose – thus offering the alert reader a means of understanding the true nature of his writing.
LV. You have used Eliot as a source of inspiration. I cannot say he has influenced you, but I find echoes from him in Hawksmoor, English Music, Chatterton. Your mind uses echoes as a technique of rising above time, and this is your major strategy both as a craftsman of the novel and a lyrical sensibility, that willingly becomes an exile from reality. It is your gift to melt together, in the alchemy of your creation, the soul and the story. Which comes first, when you write? Do you start with a story or with a mood? Do you plan your narratives from at first?
PA. The story seems always to introduce itself first, but it cannot really be distinguished from the cadence and ‘mood’ which I am attempting to create.
LV. Death is a recurrent theme, which burdens all Desperado sensibilities, from Graham Swift (Last Orders), to Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), Doris Lessing (The Memoirs of a Survivor), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient). You treat it like a sweet mystery. It is present in all your novels as a physical state, not as an incident. There is a life in death, a life after death, life and death are woven together. You make the reader see death as the courage to live beyond. Crossing the border, crossing all borders, is your lesson. Are you deliberately didactic, do you actually mean to convey a message, or does this lesson flow naturally from your sensibility on to the page, and from the page into the reader’s own sensibility? Would you allow the reader’s reading mood to float freely, without guiding it? How much are you aware of what you really do when you write, of the consequences of your books on other imaginations? What is your priority?
PA. There is no message as such – at least not one that can be identified except in the experience of reading the novels, which must of course differ from reader to reader. I never know the ending of the novels, for example, until the ending happens – it happens instinctively, almost by an act of chance or indirection.
LV. You are a great lover of narratives. Your pastime is to find new narrative modes. Hawksmoor ends one chapter and begins the next with the same sentence, in a new context. English Music plunges the main hero into trance chapters, going as far back as several centuries. You have a critic’s mind, seeing everywhere hints to be decoded, and the soul of a novelist, the dreams of a poet. The three combined make us share the story. Your reader is never excluded, or an outsider. You urge us to witness creation from the inside, to appropriate the text. Do you like your reader to reinterpret the text freely, maybe get out of it something you never thought of putting there? Do you like critics who come up with fancy (mis)readings of your texts? What is the profile of your ideal critic?
PA. If the reader understands the mysteries of time, if he or she is willing to suspend belief in normal realities, if the reader is willing to cross that threshold where life and death are the same, then any further act of guidance on my part seems superfluous.
LV. Poetry opens for you the door into the out-of-time. Most Desperadoes are not that lucky. They are dry and refuse access to the beyond. You are a great lover of words, I should even say a slave to words (in the meaning in which Valéry was a ‘galley-slave of nuances’, as he put it himself). Your sentences are short poems. You are not so much direct as evocative of moods. You combine the love for striking, memorable words of your stream of consciousness predecessors with the matter-of-fact narrative of the Desperadoes. You are a hybrid of two authors: one who means to enslave the soul of the reader, the other one who sets the reader free to find his own way, and watches him enigmatically. How much of yourself are you willing to reveal in your writings? How autobiographical are you? Most of your novels are not. Is there any one novel more autobiographical than others?
PA. There cannot help but be autobiographical elements in the novels. After all, I am writing them. The ‘I’ must reflect upon itself. The ‘I’ must conjure forth its own particular meanings. There are straight elements of autobiography, in terms of location, in First Light. Otherwise not a significant ostensible element.
LV. You ruin chronology in a subtle way. If Lessing is bitter, Lodge and Bradbury humorous, Barnes bitingly witty, you are preeminently tender. Your sensibility ruins the line of the story, diving into islands of is and was at random. History swallows the chronology of the narrative, and whatever the moment, we only know we are still alive, ready to live more, willing to read more. What is your aim when you dive into the past? You said in another interview you wanted to sketch a history of London. I think you want far more than that. You want to outline all history, the sense of history, not only just London. Would it be wrong to say that you are a philosopher of history while being a novelist whose inspiration is the sweet mystery of the past?
PA. The phrase philosopher of history is perhaps a little portentous. I do wish to create a sense of history or, rather, a sense of time passing as a melody. I am interested, too, in the topographical imperative whereby a certain spot of earth can actively fashion or harbour certain patterns of sustained activity over many generations. It is the presence of past time which envelops me.
LV. Unlike most Desperadoes, you are incredibly quotable. Eliot used to say poetry could communicate before it was understood. Do you feel fiction can, too? Because reason is by no means enough for your reader. Your reader must reach beyond mere understanding. You are a striver for the limit of understanding, and your readers learn to accept more than can be logically explained, which brings lyricism back into the picture once again. How do you think you relate to Joyce and Woolf (who flooded fiction with poetry) on the one hand, and T.S. Eliot (who fictionalized poetry) on the other?
PA. I would prefer to put myself in the line of Cockney visionaries, who saw elements of the sacred and the symbolic in their local circumstances. Among them are Blake and Dickens and Turner. I suppose we might count Woolf and Eliot and Joyce as honorary companions of that order.
LV. Virginia Woolf claimed there should be no love interest attached to the novel. An age later, the interest of the Desperado novel moves from the couple (which still existed for the stream of consciousness) to the lonely individual facing life. The character rejects chronological causality: the present is no longer caused by the past, and it does not cause any future to happen. Life is an enticing mystery precisely because it loses the line of love and time. Your novel becomes a communion with the unspeakable. How would you define this unspeakable for a student of your work? If it is not love interest, what words could express your main theme, your major obsession?
PA. My major obsession is with the love of the past for the present, and the present for the past.
LV. I think that by building everyday parallelisms for past ages, you debunk history. Your characters are projected in lines of similar heroes, who melt into one another. Your narrative situations slide in endless lines of similarity. Chatterton, for instance, is a book of fakes. A poet fakes his own death, a painting fakes Chatterton’s image by using another writer as a model, a painter fakes his master, a novelist fakes a good novel by copying the plot of another novelist, a humble librarian fakes family life by stealing it from his dead friend (whose death is probably the only real thing in the book, and the least appealing). Nothing is reliable any more. This love of interpretation as a perpetuum mobile is your way of showing humour. I do believe you have a strong sense of humour. Is that true? Where do you think your reader should look for that very Desperado irony, which no contemporary author can write without? Do you see yourself as sympathetic, detached, ironical, present or absent from your text on purpose?
PA. I do have a sense of humour, I hope, although it veers towards the pantomimic and the theatrical. I am not at all ‘detached’ from the texts, or ironical – I am all too fervently attached to them to be anything other than fully engaged. I suppose there is even some humour to be found in that.
LV. You create a dreamy novel. You mix in your novels fiction, poetry, drama, history, music, thoughts and dialogue. Yet you hate sentimentality, in good Desperado tradition. Because of the refusal to dwell upon the major link in human existence which is love (and which is felt in the background but never exploited as a source of incidents), your narrative is unwilling, it advances against the grain, pushed ahead by a haunted mind. What comes first when you embark on a novel, the mind (swimming in echoes of many arts and ages) or the soul (besieged by irresistible tides of lyricism)?
PA. The mind is the soul.
October 5, 2001
The Centre for Contemporary Literature in
Translation founded by Prof. Dr.
Lidia Vianu at the Bucharest University, with the support of The British
Council, interviewed the British writer
PETER ACKROYD, in a videoconference with Lidia Vianu’s students (PhD,
MA, second year majors), organized at the
BRITISH COUNCIL on May 9, 2006.
Each book is a different reason to exist
© Lidia Vianu, The Centre
for Contemporary Literature in Translation
STUDENT:
I have noticed that most of your books are full of historical personalities:
writers (Dickens, Milton, Chatterton, T.S. Eliot), architects (Hawksmoor) and
philosophers (Plato). Is your passion for history the reason why you chose them?
PETER ACKROYD:
I think it must be in part my passion for history, my interest in history. It
has been my abiding interest, ever since I was a student at the university, but
it was only in recent years that this interest became quick and enlightened by a
specific focus on the people whom you mentioned. The choice of characters, some
of whom you mentioned, was not an arbitrary one. In my opinion it was an
instinctive or intuitive one, but not arbitrary. In the case of many of them,
for example in the case of Dickens, Blake, Chaucer and Milton, I was trying to
help to explore the concept of a ‘
S.
Are there repeatable patterns of experience in
The Great Fire of London?
PA.
Yes, I believe that there are patterns, there are rhythms, there are clusters of
significant experience, themes connected to time. I’d tried to locate that in
some of my books, with what I called the ‘topographical imperative’, by which I
mean, there are certain neighbourhoods, certain streets, alleys, houses, which
actively influence the lives and characters of people who live there. It is not
a subject which is taught at the universities or in schools, but it is one that
interested me profoundly. I was asked two or three years ago to wrote a London
biography, which was a study of that aspect, in part a study of that aspect of
London’s presence, where the forces of the city, the earth, the soil on which
the city is based seem to have an indirect effect upon the people who lived
there. Whether in a pattern of habitation, whether in a pattern of activity or
whether in a pattern of accidents, crimes and so forth. So that aspect of
experiential patterns is one of great interest to me.
S. In
The Great Fire of London the setting
for Little Dorrit is set on fire.
Would you suggest that actually these patterns and the past which holds them are
at some point completely useless and should be destroyed because they become
barriers for understanding?
PA.
Yes, I see what you mean. I think that was just the ending of that particular
novel, I don’t think I would draw any great conclusions from it myself. That was
actually the first novel I ever wrote. And in certain aspects it’s slightly
naïve. I will only say in its defense it carries in it all the seeds of the
later novels which I’ve written. It’s a novel preoccupied with the layers of
times, you know, preoccupied with the nature of the city, whether invented by
Dickens or whether invented by me. And those ideas, those attitudes, those
preoccupations have continued ever since. For the ending of that novel, it was
simply a convenient way of concluding the narrative. I wouldn’t leap to any
metaphysical speculations about its purpose.
S. I
was wondering, if you were to draw a comparison between traditional, old
literature and modernist and postmodernist literature, would you say that
history, the past in general, had lost ground, or, on the contrary, that it had
gained a certain profounder importance compared to the past?
PA.
Ok, if I gather your question correctly, you are asking whether history is
losing its importance in a postmodern climate?
S.
Yes, exactly.
PA.
Well, I don’t think it is. I have never used the terms modernism or
postmodernism because they mean very little to me as such, but in terms of
historical consciousness history seems to be growing all the time. I don’t want
to speak personally, but when I wrote a book called
Hawksmoor, in 1986, it was considered
rather a joke to write a novel set both in the past and in the present. It was
considered a conceit. But over the last twenty years there have been any number
of historical fictions with one foot in the past and one foot in the present.
It’s become actually a genre of its own, and there are some novelists who are
specialized in it completely. And in fact that transitional writing, if I can
put it that way, between past and present, has also slipped into non-fiction,
and some historical narratives and biographical narratives now make use of this
device, confronting or transposing past and present. So as for its being a dead
issue or a fading issue, I think it’s becoming much more prominent in the
literature of
S.
How did you start using this technique? Did you rely on theories of
intertextuality or did you just start using it to see if it worked?
PA.
I certainly didn’t begin with
theories in intertextuality because I know nothing about them. I began writing
just because I enjoyed it. And I chose these things because I wanted to explore
them, there was no ulterior motive, no theoretical purpose behind my writing. I
don’t think there is any to this day. It would be very difficult for me to
locate or identify any theoretical or literary explanation for what I do. I can
only explain it in terms of what I have just tried to explain to you, the idea
of ‘cognate vision’, the idea of
S.
All your novels are extremely sensitive. Between the lines I feel some
kind of regret, not only for the present, but for everything, and this
especially in English Music and in
The House of Doctor Dee. Does this
regret focus on anything in particular or is it just a mood to be conveyed?
PA.
Well, I don’t have any deep secrets to reveal, and certainly it was conceived in
that spirit. It was written at a time, I suppose you might say, of mental
torment in my life, or whatever phrase you want to use for it, so it might be
that my state of mind enters the book in a subtle way. I was really interested
in trying to draw the strange figure of Doctor Dee. Necromancy
has always interested me ever since I
was a student. He was one of the figures that always remain in the back of my
mind, and sometimes in the front of my mind, as when I was writing it. So I also
wanted to try to bring to life that particular
S.
You say that when you try to write your novels you don’t have a
particular technique, literary technique in mind, you just try to write what you
feel. My question is, have you ever been tempted to guide your work and your
creation according to some technique used in modern literature?
PA.
No, I never made that attempt. I’ve never relied upon theories, as I tried to
explain before. And I certainly don’t subscribe to any modern literary theory. I
certainly wouldn’t want to feel that my work embodied any modern literary
theory. That would be far from my point. In terms of writing it just comes, it
emerges from the pen and almost
instinctively. I have very little conscious control of what I’m doing and, when
I’m re-reading it, it often seems to me to be the work of someone else or
something I don’t remember doing. And that happens in both biography and
fiction. I know the work is going well when that effect occurs, when the words
seem to spring unimpeded from the words which came before them. So my role in
the process is that of a person who allows reactions to take place. In that
sense I don’t have any control of what I’m doing, to such an extent that it is
quite impossible for me to fulfil any theoretical expectation whatsoever.
S.
When reading your novels, would you recommend that we should not take
into account any literary technique we might identify in your work and just read
and try to feel it, or should we look for a more technical side and try to
capture some literary technique?
PA.
Well, that’s entirely up to you. Any approach is reasonable, there are no laws
about this, there are no laws about reading, just as there are no laws about
writing. If it’s more appropriate to you, and more fulfilling, to discover
literary theory within it, that’s fine.
There’s no reason why it should not be there despite the fact I don’t
have anything to do with it. If the narrative is written in that way, that’s
absolutely fine with me. Some readers just read them for the story, and that’s
fine with me too. Other people read them just for the historical consciousness
which they evoke, and that’s fine again. Any kind of reading is good as long as
it’s reading.
S.
Some of your characters, such as Nicholas Dyer, appeal to occultism in
order to communicate with the past, with the spirit of the dead. Does it come
from any literary influence or is it a passion of yours for knowledge beyond
reason, beyond logic?
PA.
Yes, the hidden knowledge seems to be part of many of my novels. In real life,
this does not concern me a great deal. But in my fiction it seems to concern me
a lot. I don’t have any explanation for that. I think it has to do with the
sense that... let me put it this way: you can probably divide human kind into
two categories, those who are secular and those who are religious. And I prefer
to write religious or spiritual fiction rather than secular fiction. The means
of doing that are various, of course. My own way is to illuminate the passage of
time as it were, to celebrate the sacredness of time and the passage of time.
So, in that sense, you are right to divine the presence of a knowledge of the
dead within those books.
S.
Your work seems to be very carefully worked. Does this come easily?
PA.
Do the words come easily?
S.
You convey messages between the lines, like a
cry for beauty. You are trying to
express everything in the most beautiful way possible. You use hyperbole a lot.
PA.
That’s certainly possible, I wouldn’t put it that way myself, but I’m sure
you’re right to draw those conclusions. I began life really as a poet. My first
published volumes were all poetry. There were some three or four of them before
I was in my thirties, so I think the aspirations of the poet, the dreams of the
poet if you like, the knowledge of the poet, inform the fiction in ways I really
can’t begin to understand. Certainly I think of prose as a way of representing
beauty. So, in a sense I don’t think I ever left poetry behind. It sort of
migrated into my prose.
S.
How do you see the future of literature? Is the vision in
The Plato Papers your own vision on
the future of literature?
PA.
No, not really. I can’t remember what the vision was in
The Plato Papers, but I’m sure it
will survive. There were many prophecies, I think, at the end of last century
that literature was dead, books were becoming dispensable; in fact the opposite
seems to be the case. Now more books are being read; there are more bookshops in
S.
Talking about today’s literature, are there any sides of it that you
would change in order for it to become more valuable?
PA.
Well, I don’t read any contemporary literature, I have to admit. I don’t read
any fiction. I read occasionally biographies and histories, but I really don’t
have any judgment about those matters, because I’m completely ill informed about
contemporary fiction. I haven’t read a novel in ten, fifteen years.
S.
In the novel The Plato Papers
you show how past and present can deconstruct each other. Do you think that
cultural epochs can carry out dialogues with one another or they are just
deconstructing one another?
PA.
That’s a very difficult question to answer. I presume the dialogue is taking
place. I can’t remember the specific details of
The Plato Papers now, but in general,
in my books I’ve tried to say that there is a dialogue between past and present;
sometimes they communicate with each other, sometimes they understand each other
and sometimes they don’t. There were times, for example, when history seemed to
come to an end in some of the books, but I’d call it dialogue rather than
deconstruction, if that is what you meant.
S.
In historical metafictions, do the books about the past have any claim to
truth, even if it is a very limited truth?
PA.
No, they have no claim to truth as such, but they might have in biographies or
other studies. The concept of truth in this context is a very elusive one. I
wouldn’t claim my biographies of Blake, Dickens or More were true any more than
the fictions about Hawksmoor and
S.
In reading The Plato Papers I
found the glossary to be absolutely fascinating, and I was wondering if you ever
considered turning it into a dictionary or perhaps writing a book for children,
in which you could play upon words, something like Carroll’s
PA. I
see what you mean. I didn’t continue with it because I ran out of words I could
use. I went to the Oxford English dictionary, the Concise version, not the
twenty volumes, looking for words which could be used in that way, and I came to
the end, that’s why I didn’t do it any more. I don’t think I would do a book as
such, but it might be quite an interesting enterprise. It will be for children
to analyze the matter.
S.
When you write your novels, what is more important to you: the story, the
characters you write about or the language you use and how you write every
sentence?
PA.
Well I’m interested in all those things. There’s no priority given to plot or
character. If there is any priority at all, it has to be given to language
itself, the way it is written, the way it comes out. The language creates the
characters and the language creates the plots. And that might sound very silly,
but, in the case of many novels I written, I didn’t know what was going to
happen next until the language told me what was going to happen. There are cases
of course where you sketch out important details of the plots just as a sort of
vision in your head, but the actual chapter-by-chapter work, the narrative, is
almost always decided by the flow of the language, and sometimes characters
emerge almost by accident when you don’t expect them to. A sudden turn of phrase
or a sudden description will bring a character to life, and that character will
enter the narrative and change the narrative, so you really do rely upon writing
itself. I made that point earlier, that writing is writing, and the act of
writing, the experience of writing is absolutely essential to the creation of
any book, fiction or non- fiction.
S.
You said earlier that sometimes you sketched out the plot in your head.
Has it ever occurred to you might end up somewhere far away from what you
originally hoped for? Does this ever occur?
PA.
Oh, yes, that happens all the time. In fact I would say it happens continually.
It wouldn’t happen, of course, in biographies as such, where the character is
real, so you can’t mess around that much with it. But in fiction it continually
happens: a change of pen, a change of character, a change in the scene will
materially affect the course of the narrative and you can end up with quite a
different book.
S.
Earlier you said that words simply flowed from your pen, and, related to
Hawksmoor, I have a question. Was it
difficult to write in the language of the 18th century?
PA.
No it wasn’t difficult after a while, it required a certain amount of practice.
What I did was sit down in the reading room of the British Library, which was
then housed in the British Museum, and read every book I got my hands on from
that period, which was roughly, I think, 1710-1720. It didn’t matter what the
book was. It could be a treaty of mushrooms, it could be a book about clothes,
spells, I just had to soak in, soak out, I should say,
the diction, the vocabulary, the rhythm of the words, the tone, and I had
to do it to such an extent that I would be able to write 18th century
English as fluently as I wrote 20th century English. And after some
months that became possible, and then once again, as in so many other cases, the
flow of words created the reality. I found it by far the best way, for example,
to introduce the readers to the historical period, to the historical context,
instead of starting, like some historical novels, from clothes, buildings etc. I
began just with the language, and I found that, by recreating that language, I
was able to recreate the period with which I was concerned so it had more
authenticity, it had... Well, the reader
was drawn into it in ways which are quite uncommon in historical fiction. So in
that sense it was the same process as I’ve described before, the language coming
first and leading everybody forward.
S.
In the poem entitled among school
children you speak in the form of a lesson about some of the obsessions of
mankind, and I quote:
What do these words mean?
(a) love-cries
(b) quantum (c) unemployed.
My question is: do you
think that we are offered, even forced into the main coordinates of our
experience? Are we subjected to these patterns of experience and these
obsessions from an early age? Can they be communicated or should they be
transgressed?
PA. I
find it very difficult to answer that question. You’re talking about a poem
which was written many years ago and which I can hardly remember.
S.
The poem discusses some of the main obsessions of mankind: love, quantic
theory, unemployment, and some aspects of life. Do you think that these
coordinates of experience, these obsessions are forced on us from an early age?
Can they be communicated or should they be transgressed?
PA.
Well, I just don’t know the answer to that. I’m sure that they can be
communicated. I don’t know whether they should be transgressed or not. I never
thought of it.
S.
Is there a symbol, a particular symbol in your novels which you feel more
attached to? I think
PA. I
don’t know if you could call
S.
How about a message? Is there a particular message that you are trying to
send us?
PA.
No, there is no message as such. Only
perhaps a mood, an aspiration, a susceptibility to the past, but no message. It
would be wrong to impose a message on people. It would probably be
misunderstood, and I don’t see the point of messages. If you awake the
consciousness of people, if you allow them to feel the presence of other forces
around them, if you make them aware of their past, the past of their country,
the past of their area, if you convince them of the ethics of the past times,
and if you convince them of the persistence of past times, that in itself is
probably enough for any writer to do.
S.
Do you ever think of truth as a matter of free choice ? Some
philosophers say there is no truth. Everything is interpretable: I see a
blackboard which is obviously black, but you are absolutely free to see it green
or any other colour. Is that so, in your opinion?
PA.
Yes, I rather agree with that. Everything is interpretable, everything is there
to be interpreted. As I said before, as far as I can see, there is no truth as
such, only a series of interpretations, and some of them more convincing than
others. I think I would agree with you but in terms of...
Let’s take the case of biography. There
are lots of biographies around. I’ve just completed one about Shakespeare. There
must be 2000 biographies of that man already written. And it is not a question
of people saying you have discovered anything new. Of course I haven’t
discovered anything new, there is nothing new to be discovered. It is the nature
of the writing which is important. The only biographies that survived were well
written biographies, whether we are talking about Plato, or whether we are
talking about anyone else. The same truth, the same criteria. So it doesn’t
matter whether anything is true or not. It just matters whether it is well
written or not. And the better written a book, the more chance it has of
survival. So I agree, it is simply the interpretation that matters.
S.
You talked about the persistence of the past, and in reading
Hawksmoor I had the impression that I
could not catch the past. You yourself ended the novel by saying ‘I am a child
again, begging on the threshold of eternity.’ Isn’t that a sort of frustration
caused by an impossibility?
PA.
Yes, I suppose it is really. I haven’t thought about it like that, but I presume
you are right. I suppose it’s just a way of confessing the inability to make the
permanent jump from past to present or from present to past. It’s the failure of
the alchemist to make gold, I suppose. And the point of alchemy is you never
make gold, but the alchemical pursuit continues, so I presume that was more or
less what I meant.
S.
Have you ever identified yourself with your characters or do you just
write from a detached point of view ?
PA. I
never identified myself with any of the characters, for one thing because they
are too many to identify myself with. It would be like madness, I think. No, I
haven’t identified myself with any of them at all, neither with a fictional
character nor with the biographical characters. Sometimes I’m asked which
character I prefer. And in truth I don’t prefer any of them. The effort is
really not to enjoy their company or to like them, but to understand them. And,
by understanding them, convey their reality to the reader. So my own likes and
dislikes really don’t enter into it at all.
S.
Do you consider yourself an idealist?
PA.
Do I consider myself an idealist? Well, I suppose... What’s the alternative?
Materialist ? I don’t certainly consider myself a materialist, so I presume I
must ask myself what that means. I really don’t know.
S.
From your point of view, does this imply erasing everything bad from your
novels, everything obscene or
everything which can be criticized?
PA.
You mean, do I leave out obscenity ?
S.
Yes, that’s what I mean.
PA.
Well, I don’t, not consciously, Just as I said before, it is a question of the
way it happens, the way the lines go forward. I certainly wouldn’t leave
anything out. As I said, there are no laws, you can do whatever you want to do
in the narrative form.
S.
What’s your idea of a well written book?
PA.
My idea of a well written book is one that charges me with life and with
enthusiasm, I suppose. A well written book has to be almost spotless. You
shouldn’t be able to see the tricks which have been performed for your benefit.
A well written book also needs energy, needs animation, needs excitement, I
think. You need to want to keep on reading it. It’s like a person: when I say
about someone he is a genius, that some people have genius, like
S.
You mentioned earlier that when you had written in the language of the 18th
century, you had researched that language for a few months. What would you say
the proper period for research was, in order to come out with a well written
book? Do you think that long periods of research are necessary, or do some books
just come without any research whatsoever ?
PA.
Well it’s a good question. It depends on the book. Obviously some books do
require a lot of work. For example I mentioned the biography of Shakespeare:
that obviously required a certain amount of work to make it possible. Similarly,
the life of Dickens. Some novels require research too.
Hawksmoor, which you mentioned
before, required a great deal of research. Other novels, set partially or wholly
in the past, also needed a lot of work, of reading books from the same period to
get the language right, as I said before. Other books seem to come almost from
the pen, without any prior research necessary.
The Plato Papers is a book like that.
Dan Leno is another book like that,
where you just sit down and start,
and you finish when you finish. But when books have a more solidly historical
core, then obviously it’s important for you to immerse yourself in that
particular distinct culture before you undertake the task.
S.
When you go into that particular period or place that you attempt to write
about, do you approach it because you want to know it, or do you approach it
because you want to live in it?
PA. I
want to know it, yes, that’s one of the great pleasures of writing for me: the
undertaking to understand different periods, first for knowledge, first for
information. The need to understand a new period is for me one of the greatest
imperatives. Then to live it... Well, you can’t obviously live it, but you can
inhabit it. To move around it is equally important, it is a form of
virtual tourism, I suppose. It has its place in the writing of fiction
and in the writing of biography, but the
main imperative is to seek to understand. There are so many areas of human life
and human history that I don’t have any knowledge of at all, and which I’ve
tried very hard to understand a little bit.
S.
Have you ever written a novel just because you wanted to escape from this
reality, because you felt disappointed in the life you’re living, not your own
life but in general, the world you live in and the period you live in?
PA.
Well, no, not necessarily I have never felt that. I do find it almost impossible
to write about them. For reasons which escape me – I’m sure that someone will
know the reasons – I’m incapable of that. I can paint other cultures, other
civilizations, but I can’t paint my own world. It’s a terrible injury, but it’s
one I have absolutely no way of remedying. I just find myself quite unable to
write a novel set in 2006. Some of you may have the answer to that, there may be
a literary theory for all I know, but the truth is that I can only begin writing
properly when there is a distance of some 40-50-60 years between me and the
period.
S.
Why do you need this distance?
PA. I
don’t know, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. In fact I don’t understand the
reasons for it at all. Much greater practitioners than I had the same problem.
Shakespeare, for example, could never write about his own century. I’m not
comparing myself with Shakespeare, but he had the similar defect: he was only
happy when he was writing about distant times and distant places. So it’s not an
uncommon problem, but it is certainly a problem.
S.
Could it be because, as you said earlier, you can’t identify yourself with any
of the characters you write about? Could it be that, if you wrote about
something that was placed in 2006, you would automatically have to try to
identify yourself with one character or with one time?
PA.
Yes, that’s probably the truth, that might be one of the reasons. I have this
disinclination to look into myself. I’m not a self conscious person, and I
suppose it would mean to identify myself with myself if I wrote in the present
tense, and that’s something I don’t want to do. It’s probably some psychological
injury I have that I refuse to look into myself, so, since I avoid looking into
myself, then I won’t look into the period which I live in. That’s one
explanation.
S.
Don’t you think that your literature helps you create a sort of bridge over this
generation gap?
PA.
Yes, I suppose it gives me a bridge to walk on, so I feel more comfortable on
the other side. It certainly might be some sort of
displacement mechanism. It’s very
possible. But other people feel the same when they read my books, so there must
be another explanation, too.
S.
I know writers reject this idea of being grouped or being associated to a
particular trend. What is your own opinion on postmodernism?
PA.
As I said to you before, I don’t know anything about it, I don’t use the term, I
don’t feel the need to use the term. I assume it must apply to me because it
must apply to all writers after a certain date, I suppose, theoretically at
least, but it doesn’t impinge upon my life, upon my writing or upon anything.
S.
Do you feel that labeling a writer as a modernist, realist, or any other
label, somehow orients the reader’s attitude towards the work he is reading at
the moment?
PA.
Yes, it probably does, actually. It may have a harmful effect. I certainly think
it would, in my case, but on the other hand it may have a beneficial effects on
some authors who might not become comprehensible in any other way. So, it has
advantages and disadvantages. I do wish other terms might be invented, which
have a certain amount of subtlety.
S.
What sort of literature do you enjoy, if you don’t like modern fiction ?
PA.
The sort of literature which I enjoy these days is the literature which I need
to read for the sake of the next book, which sounds very overtly professional,
but I
hardly ever read a book these days without a pencil in my hand, so I can
mark in the margin all I need to know. I don’t really read books for pleasure
much any more. I just don’t have the time. If I’m working simultaneously on five
or six projects at a time, I need a great deal of reading and obviously all my
time is spent on reading the books I need to read.
S.
What are your projects for the future in terms of writing?
PA.
Well , let me think. A short biography of Isaac Newton has just appeared in
S.
Do you miss the period when you read a novel just for the sake of it,
just to have fun and enjoy yourself ?
PA. I
do remember that period.
S.
But do you miss it?
PA.
Miss it? No, not really, I became more focussed as I got older, I became more
involved in my work. When I retire, I’ll probably go back to that state of mind
where I could pick up anything and read it for pleasure, but not for a few years
yet.
S.
How do you choose what to write about?
PA.
It chooses me, I don’t necessarily choose it. Sometimes the idea will come from
someone else. It’s like the idea of writing the biography of the
S.
Do you think that being a dreamer helps you find more symbols in a book
than if you read it in a technical manner?
PA.
Yes, that’s possible. I don’t know. I got it into the habit of reading with a
pen in my hand, and it’s not one I will easily break. It’s a part of my routine
now, I suppose. I missed your point about being a dreamer, I think.
S.
I was saying that this technical way of reading a book might discourage
you, forbid you to find symbols that readers usually look for...
PA.
Oh, I see. Yes it probably does. Yes, you’re quite right about that, it probably
defends me when entering in the spirit of the book, being conveyed to another
place. I suppose that would definitely be true. I remember, when I was young, I
could read the novels of Thomas Hardy or George Eliot and be transported to that
world and love every minute of it. But I’m afraid now I’d be more concerned
about the use of dialect. I would be much more concerned with technical matters
now.
S.
What’s the use of imagination, since in
The Plato Papers we see enormous
imaginative resources to virtually no end?
PA. I
don’t know the answer to that, I’m afraid. I don’t even know what imagination
is, frankly I have never understood what it is.
S. In
your experience, which books are more appealing to the public and to the reader:
those which are much researched or those where creativity has a greater
importance and your sensibility just let the book flow?
PA.
It doesn’t seem to make much difference. As far I can tell, people don’t know
anyway what kind of research is done for the book, once it’s produced. I really
don’t think it makes any difference to anybody as long as they enjoy the book.
They don’t care you spent ten years or ten months on it.
S.
In Hawksmoor, how did you
decide and why did you choose to give the architect’s name to the 20th
century detective?
PA.
That was just a technical thing because I didn’t want the churches to be
completely identified with the real churches, the Hawksmoor churches. I wanted
to make it slightly more ambiguous in the novel. Of course, as it turned out,
everyone had seen they were the same churches, so I missed the point in a way,
but it was just a way of keeping the fictional plot slightly more ambivalent,
slightly more mysterious. Yet, as it turned out, it didn’t make any difference.
S.
Does the fact that you kept the name Nicholas for both characters have
any special meaning ?
PA.
No, I don’t think so.
S.
A theory of names says that last names represent something imposed on the
self, while first names represent the true self. Did you take this theory into
account when naming your characters?
PA. I
never heard of that theory before, it doesn’t make sense, I suppose, although of
course there are some first names and
last names that might cause difficulties. No, I think I called them both
Nicholas because I thought it was a good idea at the time. I can’t think of any
other reasons for it.
S.
What is in your opinion the difference between the real Plato and the
character Plato?
PA.
Oh, yes... They don’t resemble each other, as far as I’m aware. I thought it was
just a good name to give. There’s no connection at all, except of course the
form of Socratic dialogue, which I borrowed from Plato. That was the real point
of entry to Plato, I suppose. So looking back at it, there is a connection, yes,
you’re right. I thought of the form of the dialogue, I think, and then I gave
the name of Plato. Actually it can’t be a real connection between the two, they
don’t share anything in common as far I can tell, except for this dialogue.
S.
Is there a book of yours you like more than the others or a book you are
not so satisfied with?
PA.
Yes, there are books which I’m not satisfied with. Most of them. The only book I
really enjoy is the one I am actually writing at the time. The others...
I can see all the shortcomings, all the faults, all the mistakes, so I
never, never reread them. Only for some specific purpose will I reread anything
I have ever written. It doesn’t interest me, it just makes me aware of the
failures. So I tend to keep them firmly closed once they are completed.
S.
What are these failures? How would you explain them?
PA.
Well, if I read them, I will be able to tell you. I just know they are there,
failures of tone... It’s difficult for me to say, not having looked at them very
carefully. Let me think – no I can’t think of anything, because I don’t have any
real recollection of them. But I will know, there will be lots of failure in
them.
S.
If you reread one of your novels and you felt that you hadn’t exploited
the subject enough and you hadn’t made your point the way you think you could
have, would you sit down and write another novel starting from the same subject,
even though you might not end up in the same place?
PA. I
doubt that very much. It might be quite fun, actually, to rewrite the novel, to
rewrite the same novel. I never thought of that before. That might be a good
idea, but in fact it might hold a few problems, one being the fact the publisher
would think it was a mistake to write the same book twice. But that’s another
matter. In practice I don’t think it would be like that, I would never do that.
For one thing, you move on, the person who wrote
The Great Fire of London isn’t the
person who wrote the last novel I wrote. You hopefully get better, your skills
get better, you’re involved in a long journey, and you hopefully reach higher
with each particular book, so there’s no pointing in revisiting your past in
that sense.
9 May 2006
British Council Londra –
Consiliul Britanic din Bucureşti
Questions asked by:
Stefania Tarbu (MA student), Corina Nuţǎ, Elena Dumitraşcu, Adina Blotu, Lavinia
Zainea, Ioana Dogaru, Ileana Motroc, Anda Cǎlin, Flavia Lihet, Suzana Perial
(second year majors).
Editor of the text: Lidia Vianu