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An Interview with AS Byatt
by Jenny Newman and James Friel
originally published in Cercles
AS Byatt is one of today’s most ambitious writers. Her fiction, with its gripping plots, diverse characters, and refusal to limit itself to a single viewpoint, often redeploys the complex narrative strategies of great Victorian novelists, especially George Eliot, on whom she often writes as a critic.
Committed to the ‘novel of ideas’, she also describes herself as a realist, albeit consciously so. The scope of her recently completed The Quartet, for example allows Byatt not only to follow her characters from 1953 to 1970 and beyond, but also to chronicle conflicts and trends in spheres such as education, biology, religion, television and the arts (Should these be capitalised), both in London and the provinces, up and down the social scale.
The first volume of The Quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, appeared in 1978. Like much of Byatt’s later fiction it can be read as a historical novel, with Alexander Wedderburn’s Coronation play as the first of her many fictitious ‘intertexts’. The role of Elizabeth I is played by the brilliant, egotistical Frederica Potter, younger daughter in a dysfunctional Yorkshire family. Strikingly diverse sisters feature in Byatt’s earlier novel, The Game (1967) and Still Life (1985) continues the story of Frederica who goes to Cambridge University and contrasts it with that of her sister, Stephanie who marries and settles – reluctantly – into motherhood and domesticity. Still Life also draws on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, the subject of The Yellow Chair, Wedderburn’s second play. The painterly and sensuous descriptions of colour and light look forward to The Matisse Stories (1994), where each of the three tales takes as its starting point a pen and ink sketch by the artist.
Byatt took a break from the demands of The Quartet to write the Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990). Part literary detective story, and part-Gothic thriller with a climactic graveyard scene, the novel is subtitled A Romance. Its parallel plots each has its love affair: one between Victorian poets, Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, and the other between two of the twentieth-century critics and scholars who study them, and become ‘possessed’ by their subjects. By this time a lecturer at University College, London, Byatt satirises critical theory– often with amused affection - through her account of the views of her rival groups of British and American scholars.
By writing the poems, letters, diaries and scholarly articles which contribute to Possession, Byatt also proved herself brilliant at pastiche. In Babel Tower, the third novel of The Quartet, she manipulates contrasting discourses - - academic, journalistic, biological, legal - - to comic and sinister effect. She also continues the story of Frederica’s younger brother, Marcus. In The Virgin in the Garden Marcus may be the closest she comes to an author-surrogate, andhis perception of his surroundings is unsettlingly and kinetically geometrical. Now in his twenties, Babel Tower depicts him as one of a group of biologists at work on the Yorkshire moors, investigating genetic memory in snails, an aspect of Byatt’s deep fascination with biology, and an important comment on the moral world of the novel.
Through her virtuoso use of the omniscient narrator, Byatt has developed a capacious and flexible narrative style, and her characters’ feelings, actions and thoughts are often linked to the world at large as in A Whistling Woman, which concludes The Quartet. In this novel academic life is disrupted by student protest, and a peaceful therapeutic community on the moors near the imaginary University of North Yorkshire (the site of the Coronation play in The Virgin in the Garden) is hijacked by a compelling but crazed leader. Likewise, the rich and measured language of Agatha’s fairy tale with which the novel begins can be seen as a comment on the modishly fractured appearance of Frederica’s television show.
Although she describes herself as an atheist, Byatt’s novels incorporate moments where the characters’ vision approaches an almost mystical awareness of the physical world’s meaning and structure. The Quartet’s final scene, where Frederica and her son Leo are reunited with her lover, Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, is set on Yorkshire moors lit up by gorse, and freighted with echoes of Paradise Lost., its final mood optimistic, even anticipatory.
Though Byatt has become a prolific commentator on the contemporary literary scene, most of her novels at some point revisit Yorkshire, and she draws on her knowledge of it even when writing about the Cévennes, in France, where she spends her summers, and where Yorkshire becomes what she calls ‘an analogical hook.’
INT. In your essay ‘Memory and the Making of Fiction’ you quote George Eliot's description of childhood memory as ‘a sweet habit of the blood.’ Do your childhood memories relate to your beginnings as a writer?
ASB. There are two kinds of memories, at least in my case: firstly, memories of things, about half a dozen things that are part of my very early childhood, which in a curious way seem to be part of me as a writer. There was a cast iron stove with the brand name ‘Tiger Stove,’ and I could see it wasn’t a tiger or a stove. There was also a certain walk we used to go on when we lived in Pontefract, which I remember with a pleasure which is verbal because my mother came with us. She wasn’t terribly good at doing things with children, but she told me the name of every flower, both Latin and English, as we walked along the road. There’s always something verbal behind my early memories which is more than a mnemonic; it’s me being excited by language.
I spend a lot of my time wondering why human beings ever invented metaphor, and why they bother to make works of art. You know, why don’t they just get on with their lives? I think the answers to both questions are involved with each other. We get a kind of physiological excitement when two threads of the mind cross. Because the Tiger Stove wasn't a tiger or a stove it somehow caused a fizzing in my brain, and I think I make works of art to repeat that excitement.
INT. In The Virgin in the Garden you look back at Elizabethan England through a series of flower metaphors.
ASB. I finished that book in Gladstone's library where I found a Victorian book of flower names and got excited by the metaphoric structure of the names of the grasses that Marcus was looking at, so I put them all in the novel. It's obviously a deep, human excitement, because every three or four years I get a letter saying, ‘By the way, I do like the metaphorical flower names.’
INT. Don’t you also associate a direct, non-metaphorical relationship between word and thing with the Edenic state?
ASB. In my PhD thesis I wrote about a theory we then believed in called ‘the dissociation of sensibility,’ which was an imagined point in time when words ceased to be interwoven with things. Foucault wrote about it at length in the 1980s; but I was thinking it out in the 1950s.
I've been asked to give a lecture in New York about a work of art which affected me as an artist and I’ve chosen ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ which is, in a way, an answer to the questions we've so far discussed. Coleridge has an obsession with words which were things. I’ve been thinking how ‘ice mast-high went floating by, as green as emerald,’ which I associate with the transparent green boiled sweets my paternal grandfather used to make. When I read about the ice and the snow and the water and the sun and the moon in 'The Ancient Mariner,’ it was like living in a mythic world; so I want to talk about how scholarship intensifies this excitement, rather than diminishing it.
INT. That excitement could have led you to become a linguist or a philosopher. To have become a novelist and found ways of dramatising those ideas, you must have had a great interest in telling stories.
ASB. I used to think, like George Eliot, that I wasn't a born storyteller. When Eliot started writing, George Henry Lewes said his one doubt was whether she could tell a story. He knew she could do all the other things, but in those days nobody thought that the novel could do all those other things! I knew I ought to write a novel, but I grew up at the time when E.M. Forster said, ‘Oh, dear, yes, the novel tells a story.’ That was one thing we were being told not to do through most of my apprenticeship as a novelist. I thought it was a rather vulgar gift compared to Virginia Woolf’s, or Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s, and that it should be abolished or kept down if one had it. Then I realised that actually you owe people stories.
There's also a cussedness that makes you, if you get hold of one end of any stick, want to go right to the other end of it. You don't want to stop in the middle, or say, ‘Well, that will do now. I know enough about that.’ My first editor was Cecil Day-Lewis, and he used to talk most beautifully about Wordsworth's Highland girl singing, and say how important it was for Wordsworth to stop listening. Well, I can't stop. Cecil would stop when he found an image he could use. Then he could say, ‘I don't want to know any more.’ But I would go ferreting on and ferreting on. Usually it produced something much more interesting, but it was very tiring!
INT. With Ignês Sodré, you speak about novels you read and study, and think and dream about: a way of reading a book which is almost a life's work. Is that the way you wish to be read?
ASB. I do want to be read like that, and feel that professional criticism over the last twenty years has made it harder, not easier, to read a book with the whole of yourself and the whole of your body, to be what I call a ‘greedy reader.’ I’m worried about the increasingly judgmental element teachers introduce into the reading process: we have these techniques which mean we know better than the writer does what the writer is doing. With highly complex French theorists this may be true with some of the writers they choose but mostly I don't believe it. Readers should be empowered to skip, which sounds simple but isn't. They now read every word, and feel they should always be forming a judgement; whereas I never review a book without reading it through first very fast. I will make a note of what strikes me but won't expect to have a thought. You just read it to see if you can read it and, of course, at this stage in my life, if I can't read it, I don't.
If you don't see art as being profoundly related to the pleasure principle there's something wrong with you. Art is not there for making sociological observations or political decisions or, really, to be a substitute for psychoanalysis; though the great novelists are wiser than most politicians, most sociologists and most psychoanalysts, except the very great ones of all those. I think that, while Martin Amis feels it is required of the modern novelist to write something about the atom bomb, it probably isn't. We're all afraid of it and it will come in at the edges of whatever we write. What we in this country feel about war with Iraq is for a great journalist to take on, not for me as a novelist. What one offers the reader is a much more slow and complicated relationship with an individual habit of mind.
I want my readers to want to read and reread me, and if they don't quite understand, ask themselves, ‘Now why the hell is it snails she's interested in?’ I get letters all the time, and particularly from America, saying, ‘I thought your Victorian poets were real, and I looked them up and found they didn't exist, but I did get out Tennyson and Browning, and, dear Mrs Byatt, can I tell you what pleasure I got out of The Idylls of the King, which I was told I should never read because it's a very bad poem.’ I like to spark people on to reading another thing and another thing.
There's nothing wrong with being consumable on the surface, which I was taught there was. It was meant to be absolutely wonderful to be as difficult as Robbe-Grillet, because that was a sign of authenticity. I think Gabriel Jospovici still believes that a kind of resistance to easy reading is a guarantee of a novel’s merit. But all sorts of great things have an aspect which is easily graspable. You can read almost all my books as though they were just romantic novels. That's also true of George Eliot, Dickens and Dostoevsky, and even of Proust, if you've got the staying power. It's true of Lawrence Norfolk, who is the best of the young novelists now writing.
I would like my readers to take me on trust, which is difficult in the present academic climate. It isn't what Coleridge meant by a suspension of disbelief, but I need them to suspend judgment until they have a sense of how the novel fits together. I have an image that Walter Jackson Bate used about Keats: the bird in the nest with its mouth open for more and then more and then more. There's a woman who says that every time she finishes one of my books she immediately starts again! That's what one wants, people who reread one's books.
At the moment I'm joyfully rereading Balzac. One can reread George Eliot; and I go on rereading Jane Austen. I knew her by heart before I was a teenager, and yet when I open one of her novels I read one sentence and then another. She didn't write in order to be against slavery, though I'm sure she was a good woman and like most intelligent English people at the time she was against it. But that isn't the point: the point is telling a story that is better than other people's stories, and more compulsive.
INT. Do you see yourself as a religious novelist?
ASB. I'm an agnostic, and always have been, and have had no experience that I would describe as religious as opposed to aesthetic. I had a strong religious upbringing, because I was sent to a Quaker school, and Quakers have a religion which is accessible to irreligious people because it's a form of contemplative silence and real morality. The other thing is that if you have read literature, you see that the world I grew up in was a Christian world. Even people who didn't think they were Christian had Christian points of reference and ways of expressing their morals. I don’t think I knew anything about Judaism when I was young, but, insofar as Judaism is the Old Testament, it is subsumed. This is no longer true, and we don't know the source of our moral authority. I try to write religious novels about that.
The person who understood that was Iris Murdoch, but she would have liked Christianity to have been true if it could. I never believed it was true. If something isn't true, you should jettison it, even if you find yourself in a cold, dangerous, empty place. On the other hand, in place of a religious framework, we have taken to using reality television and celebrity gossip, and a dreadfully exhausting interest in our own personality. Nobody has written a novel about that, and so far we haven't got a climate in which novelists can see right round it all.
INT. Do you see Freud as the source of that interest in the workings of our minds?
ASB. I'm talking about something much less beautiful than Freud, because he carries the whole of European culture with him: the classics, Judaism and Christianity. Frankly, I find it boring as I get older when people discuss their personalities with me, because they do very much resemble each other! It must have been interesting to be a Father Confessor, because he had certain parameters. A sin you hadn't met would be fascinating.
I do miss the cosmic dimension to the sense of what it is to be human. Marcus in The Virgin in the Garden is a self-portrait: somebody baffled by things being far too much and not fittable into any of the languages you were offered. I can recognise 'The Ancient Mariner' for what it is: a cosmic poem of no religion. It's on the edge of Coleridge deciding for Christianity but, whatever he thought it was, it's not Christian: it’s about strangeness.
INT. When Possession was published in 1990 you were in the middle of a quartet. The Virgin in the Garden had appeared in 1978, and Still Life in 1985, but with Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002) still to come, the quartet was taking you some time to complete.
ASB. Most of the gap was caused by the death of my son. I went to teach at University College simply to pay his school fees, and he got killed the week I accepted the job. I wouldn't have otherwise become a teacher, I wanted to become a writer. Added to which I was pregnant, so the slowness of the novels, given a full-time university job, a new baby and a dead child can be put as a flat, autobiographical narrative. Quite how I survived and went on thinking I don’t know, but I instinctively made the right decision because I knew the students would keep me alive, as I couldn't at that stage keep myself alive. Teaching them Coleridge and Milton and John Donne kept me going. Also, being in University College caused me to have the sort of thoughts I had in Possession which I otherwise might not have had. There were two things going on in my mind: one was that I knew that Babel Tower ought to be a parodic novel in several voices, and I thought that I wasn't technically skilled enough. Also, I had planned to kill Stephanie before my son had died. I thought almost every day that I wouldn't go on with that, because it was too much. Nevertheless, it was unfinished business, so I did it.
INT. Do you see Possession as a Rubicon in your career as a writer?
ASB. I see it as a comedy, although it makes people cry. That's nothing to do with me at all; it's about those primitive pleasures we were talking about, the tiger stove, and metaphor and language. I stopped teaching in 1984, and thought that if I started a novel just for pleasure I would learn how to write much faster and write the novel that I now wanted to write as opposed to one that I had planned twenty years earlier. It liberated me, not just because it was a success but because the words fell into place.
INT. You’ve talked about not being a poet, but in Possession you liberated yourself into poetry.
ASB. Yes, and they all tried not to publish it. No American publisher would take it for ages, and the English publishers tried to make me take all the poetry out - and when they failed they pretended they never had! I was doubtful about it. It was more than ventriloquism; it was a sort of a homage to Browning and Tennyson, then Coleridge, and Milton far behind them. I was saying how much I loved them. I thought Ash’s poem ought to be about Swammerdam, who comes in the Preface to the Comédie Humaine. I wrote down a few metaphors and just ran at it and wrote the poem instead of writing an essay on an imaginary poem, which is how I'd first conceived Possession – I’d thought there would be a lot of, as it were, spoof essays. Then I saw that the novel ought to be in what I think of now as C Major, in that there should be real poems. I thought about Christina Rossetti and decided that I really don't like her, so had a go at Emily Dickinson. I managed to combine them and make a whole new person.
INT. Do you see your own texts as gendered?
ASB. I've played with trying to understand what the word means, but use either ‘sex’ or ‘men and women’ instead, partly because the word gendered has caused many of my friends to write work that is bordering on not saying anything. I have always had a romantic idea that the writer or the artist was, as Coleridge and Virginia Woolf said, androgynous. The whole of The Virgin in the Garden quartet is about the desirability of an androgynous mind.
I am too old for the women's movement in America or this country. I was fighting battles for the freedom of women, all by myself as I saw it, in the Fifties. I was partly amazed by the organised fight and partly appalled, because freedoms it had been hard for us to win - to be taken seriously by men as equal people to talk to - were suddenly thrown away by the idea that women should band together and talk to each other about each other, about women, and have Women's Studies in women's buildings.
I learnt never to write a list of my favourite painters or writers without women in, but, equally, I would never write one without men in. I don’t think you can live in the world if the battle between the sexes is more important than communication between the sexes. It never was, to me - I like men. My father was one of the most important presences in my life, and he was rational and sane and liked women.
What Hélène Cixous does is fine for Cixous but it doesn't get me very far. You can't play the kind of games that she and Lacan play in a language like English which isn't gendered in its ordinary nouns. The moon in French is female, in German masculine, in English neuter. We think about things as things, because we have a neuter. The interesting thing about French is that it is a language with only one source, which is Romance. I love the mongrelness of English.
INT. I notice that the quartet which begins with The Virgin in the Garden is sometimes called The Frederica Quartet.
ASB. My paperback publisher, you will be glad to hear, is going to make it a boxed set, and it's just going to be called The Quartet. It isn't Frederica's book – though she's the sort of person who would muscle in and try to take it! I should never, in a way, have killed Stephanie. I only worked out about three years ago - and I don’t think I shall say much more about this - that all the people I kill are myself. If people die in my books I think on the whole it's better I kill myself. Stephanie is the nearest to me. I killed the elder sister in The Game as well.
INT. We don’t expect Stephanie to die. It's like the death of Gerald in E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, where Chapter 5 begins, ‘Gerald died that afternoon.’
ASB. That was one of my inspirations; and in a novel by Monica Dickens the whole of the first chapter is devoted to a pregnant woman putting the kettle on and waiting for her husband to come home: then the kettle explodes and kills her. Her husband is called Daniel, the name I gave my character. When I met Monica Dickens I told her I'd done this as a homage, not a theft, which she said was absolutely fine. These are the two deepest thoughts I have about the art of the novel. The first is the thought about metaphor and why you get excited about two being one, and the second is about chance and order. All the way through his novels Balzac says, ‘chance which is order,’ ‘chance which is fate.’ If you can feel the novelist predicting a death, saying, ‘This character is doomed never to live,’ you haven't got a representation of life. Few of us, if we're not born with a debilitating disease, are born to die, and yet we’re all born to die. I wanted to put death in a novel.
I also wanted to disprove D.H. Lawrence, who said in Women in Love that nothing is accidental. I wanted, on the one hand, to prove that fate is fate from the moment it's happened, and, on the other, to prove that there really are accidents. It was very unfortunate that my son got killed in an accident, because it didn't feel like an accident, it felt like something I had caused by thinking about it. It was far too bad for that sort of thing to matter much, but it didn't help, exactly.
Stephanie has a life wish. The accident through which she died: that accident happened to me. The bird was quivering under the fridge, and I had two small children sleeping upstairs, and I did think, ‘Help, I’m being electrocuted - what will happen to them?’ I didn’t bother about myself at all. That gave me an idea of what to do with Stephanie, who was brooding about what would happen to everybody else.
INT. The bird in the novel flies out of the room afterwards. Was that true as well?
ASB. Oh, yes! The only thing I couldn't get in was that our window was under the altar wall of Durham Cathedral, and it was midnight. Buried in Durham Cathedral is the Venerable Bede, who made a bird flying through a lighted hall and into the night an image of life’s brevity.
INT. You wrote in one of your essays that you take random events and make them significant.
ASB. It was around the time I wrote the stories in Sugar- a book nobody talks about much but which was immensely important to my development as a writer - that I began to see, partly because I was stopping teaching, that everything can be made into a story. My ex-husband had the theory that it was to do with the death of both my parents. From then on the only person who had any expectations about what I might do was me, which was in a way a liberation. A lot of the stories in Sugar are for them, but they weren't going read them. The title story was rather like that of the bird. It presented itself because of my finding - aha! - the metaphor of the sugar.
When my father was dying I talked to him about his father and realised that all that family was vanishing with him. I remembered my grandfather cooking the sugar and catching the air in the glass and making the twist of the dark and the white, and realised that the twist was a perfect metaphor for my mother always telling lies and my father always telling the truth, and both of them telling the right story, in a way. I had to write it because I'd found the right metaphor. I don't like autobiography, and didn't want to write it, but the shape required it, rather like the shape of the bird story required it. It’s neither discovering nor creating an order; it's in between, and neither verb will do.
INT. You call yourself a realist writer, albeit a self-conscious one, and have said that the realist novel allows its characters to be thinking people as well as feeling people.
ASB. When I first started thinking about that, what was exciting the world I lived in were the French nouveau roman and critics like Gabriel Jospovici saying, very loudly and very frequently and very elegantly, that realism was dead. I remember being moved in the Sixties when Frank Kermode said that we still haven't come to grips with the innovations of Forster and Lawrence. It struck me that for writers there are all sorts of beautiful things in Forster and Lawrence, in their pacing, in the way they could move from an idea to an action to a sensation to a thought.
You can't do that anywhere near as easily if you are Robbe-Grillet. You are writing much more on one note. Re-reading Balzac recently, I saw things which even Proust's method has rather ironed out and stopped you from being able to do. There's loss as well as gain. Balzac is making an image of the cosmos in the shape of Paris, and it's the human comedy in the shape of the divine comedy. He's really thinking big.
INT. You are not afraid of using an omniscient narrator.
ASB. Some of my best teaching experiences were with Middlemarch and also with Dostoevsky, who uses a completely different omniscient narrator to George Eliot’s, because he plays with it as though it’s a wonderful orchestra. Sometimes his omniscient narrator is inside people's heads and sometimes it is above, uttering judgements about the nature of the universe. The novel I'm obsessed with at the moment is Dostoevsky ’s The Demons or The Possessed, however we translate it, which sometimes is just the gossip from the town, which is very much what George Eliot does. I get angry with critics who say that Eliot was using the God's eye view because she was very dignified and thought she was God. She didn’t. It was just that she wanted to say whatever she knew in whatever was the best style to say it in. She orchestrated the styles.
I used to ask students to look at the times she uses the first person plural: ‘we all feel this.’ She does this to make a statement about a universal trait. Sometimes she says, ‘You may think…’ and she is actually addressing somebody she's not sure she agrees with. Sometimes she says, ‘he thought,’ and sometimes she almost suggests that she doesn't quite know what somebody thought, but that it was a bit like this. She can do all those things, because she's got a flexible instrument. If you choose a first person narrative you've thrown away every single one of those opportunities; but you may have an intensity that she doesn't have.
When I was a student at Cambridge under Dr Leavis, he was very proud of himself and sure that he was right and everybody else was wrong; but he was also sure that the writers were more right than he was; whereas now a perfectly legitimate attempt to question the authority of the text has skidded into a feeling that the text has no authority and its author doesn’t understand anything. In which case you may as well give up studying literature and study Acts of Parliament. Good authors have authority and I respect them.
INT. The Virgin in the Garden is set mainly in Yorkshire, and in other novels you often take your characters there at some point. Do you see yourself as a provincial novelist?
ASB. I find it quite hard to do the earth if it's not Yorkshire earth. I'm beginning to be able to do the Cévennes, where I live in the summer, but that's not unlike Yorkshire. I have a kind of analogical hook. I don't like the kind of novel that's a disguised travel document. I like the feeling that for one thing I say there are twenty things I could have said. I can only really do that with Yorkshire, though the next novel has to be set in Kent or Surrey or round about there, so I make my poor husband go out and research the earth every weekend in a car, and we have a lovely time.
When I started writing novels there was a completely wrong idea that the angry young men, the Wains and Braines, were writing the novel of the provinces which had never been written. Yet we'd already had Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence who were both infinitely better novelists than any of them had any hope of being. It comes up in every generation. now there's a particularly angry Scottish version. I feel that the Scots are rather like the women in Possession: they are in a position of power because they are grouped, and have a big noise going for their group. A novelist like me living in London isn't part of any group. Your world is your own world and you fight your own battles. There isn't a discussion in any paper in this country or anywhere else of the English metropolitan novelist. There will be a discussion of the English provincial novelists, and the English woman novelist, but not of the lady novelist in Putney who tries to write books as large as she can push herself into.
INT. Do you see yourself as a historical novelist?
ASB. Yes, rather to my surprise. I read historical novelists like Walter Scott and Georgette Heyer all through my youth and never wanted to write like any of them. I didn't understand until many years later that Scott was describing societal changes almost as though they were geological changes, or Darwinian changes, which is what Balzac knows he's doing. The older you get, the more you see that you not only have your own past but the past of the society which formed you - by its limitations as well as its possibilities. For example, Hitler has become history and can be studied, whereas there's a sort of dip just behind you that you can't study at all, because it's too close. The only time I’m not planning to write about is the time just before I was born, which was when my parents met each other. A lot of the young male novelists I wrote about in the essays in On Histories and Stories are interested in exactly that time: how their fathers were in the war; whereas I feel strongly that that's a time that I can't get at yet. Give me another ten years and I may do.
A Whistling Woman is partly a historical novel, because I had left so long between it and Still Life. It was written for an audience of people who were not born when the events in the novel were taking place.
INT. Surely most great British novels are historical?
ASB. We don't understand that George Eliot was writing about her childhood or her father's childhood, because we haven't enough historical imagination. There's an article that's written every time the Booker Prize is judged which asks. where are the great novels about contemporary life? I remember Malcolm Bradbury saying, ‘The Berlin Wall went down six months ago. Where is the great novel about it?’ The Germans are beginning to write great novels about it, but you can't write one straightaway.
INT. There are many scenes in A Whistling Woman which suggest you were planning the end of the quartet from the very beginning.
ASB. I always knew who John Ottokar was, vaguely, but when I first thought of the beginning of The Virgin in the Garden I certainly had not invented Peacock. But there was room in the structure for that to happen. Frederica's marriage and divorce existed, though Leo didn't. I feel she has a good relationship with Leo, rather to her surprise, and that was one of the things I thought through: what would she do if she found she had a child? She wouldn't realise how much she loved him until the scene where he followed her and got hold of her and kicked her.
INT. When discussing Possession in Portraits in Fiction you say near the start that every reader will see a different Maud and that seems like a fault; but by the end you say it's a particular virtue of the novel as opposed to cinema and, presumably, radio.
ASB. I want viewers to come back to the word on the page, which has the glory of not only letting you skip, but letting you go back twenty pages to see what it was you might have missed. Your relationship with a novel is much more empowered than your relationship with a film, which is seducing you and also moves along at its speed not yours. Even when you try to pin a character down and say, ‘She had three little brown spots at regular intervals on the back of her hand,’ nobody will see the same hand. This seems part of the inexhaustibility of the novel: everybody sees a different woman. Equally, it's glorious that we all stare at the same painting and get something different from it. But it is the same painting, it doesn't change, it represents unchangingness. The thing about a novel is that you or I or anybody see different Fredericas on different readings: she doesn't stay stable. Whereas once you've got Gwyneth Paltrow as Maud it's hard to get your proper Maud back.
INT. In an essay on his contemporaries Norman Mailer talks about 'the glance round the room'. When you glance round the room, which other novelists do you see?
ASB. I greatly admire Lawrence Norfolk, who is doing all sorts of things that I would never have thought of doing but seem to me to be akin to what I do in the sense that he makes huge mythical structures, and plays with levels of reality, and winds the whole culture of Europe into fantastic tales: he's an immensely ambitious writer. I like the same quality in Ghostwritten, the novel of a much younger writer called David Mitchell. It’s a perfect example of the readable novel that nevertheless reveals more and more, a kind of international novel that hops between cultures and worlds with great confidence. Both those novelists are doing things I recognise from where I stand but are quite different from what I do. I also liked Philip Hensher's Kitchen Venom. He observes very well, and is a morally generous man. I don't like people who pin their characters to the page and watch them squirm. Hensher does occasionally observe people suffer and occasionally mocks them but he has a kind of generosity and a curiosity about how people are going to behave, both in his little books and his big book. Again, he's stylistically ambitious; he's imitating nineteenth-century writing and good modern writing and Persian poetry.
I like Ali Smith's Hotel World very much, and Helen de Witt’s The Last Samurai: two extraordinarily inventive novels. I also like A. L. Kennedy, speaking of the theocratic Scots! One of the good things about British writing at the moment is its immense variety. There are all sorts of people doing all sorts of things and it's only journalists talking about the Booker who say we ought to be writing more about what's going on in contemporary Britain. It's only the people who are trying to fulfil that prescription who bore me. One of my daughters interviewed Zadie Smith in San Francisco and said she's very serious and very ambitious. I like that sense of energy. Another journalistic commonplace is that all the energy is in the American novel, and the British novel hasn't got any. I don't think those journalists ever read British novels, except Martin Amis, who certainly has energy and is wonderful too. But they sit there solemnly saying everybody isn't as good as Don DeLillo. Don DeLillo is very good but we have things just as interesting and in some ways more complicated than Don DeLillo’s fiction.
I once said in the British Council in Paris, ‘I can name forty-two living writers in England who either have written a great novel or might write one.’ Somebody said, ‘All right, do it,’ so I wrote them all down on a piece of paper and missed Charles Palliser sitting in the front row who again has interesting, strange, complicated structures. And look at Robert Irwin. His book about the Arabian Knights is wonderful; but he's written five or six novels, none of them resembling each other. Exquisite Corpse is a beautiful novel. It looks light and easy and has all sorts of depths. It's a study of surrealism and the nature of loss and love, and of the turning point at the beginning of the Second World War. In some countries he would be being taught as their major writer.
INT. You often write about the effect of television and computers and the World Wide Web on reading.
ASB. Television has changed our imaginative world in ways I don't quite understand because I come from the reading world and live in the television world. There are many people who don't open books. I don’t, however, think everybody has to read. Dr Leavis believed that the university English department was the cultural centre of the world, and I never wanted to believe that. I thought that biologists were doing something that English Literature students had no idea about, which was actually very important; so were the philosophers and so, even, were the lawyers. But if you want to be moral, if you want to communicate, you have to use language. Novelists still do it better than anybody else, except for Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson.
INT. So you feel there's no such thing as a moral painting or televisual image?
ASB. If you're going to argue about how to behave, you're going to need language. You can arouse people's anguish with Oxfam pictures, but you need to say it with words so that society can think out what to do. Language remains the element in which we move, rather like air, which means it will be quite hard to kill the novel. The novel is one person talking to another person at every single level in language. I often feel that the theatre is the thing that's died, and not the novel. The theatre has been killed by film and television. It used to create the kind of emotion you got in a church when you had a service or sang a hymn. It's much more closely connected to a religion which is dying, and to a presentation of life and language that goes with religion. I can perfectly well imagine a world without the theatre, whereas I can't quite imagine a world without the novel, or film. The novel began, in a way, with agnosticism. It's an alternative story to the Bible even if sometimes it appears to be supporting the Bible. Dostoevsky will use paradigms of Christ, or his characters will stand against a wall with their arms out being crucified, but they're ordinary people in a secular world.