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Now it's time for Meet the Author with Jim Naughtie. | :00:00. | :00:00. | |
John Banville developed as a young writer in Dublin imbibing | :00:00. | :00:09. | |
the literary folklore of the streets. | :00:10. | :00:11. | |
Now, after decades as a celebrated novelist, | :00:12. | :00:12. | |
winner of the Booker Prize, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize, | :00:13. | :00:16. | |
he's decided to set down some of his early memories, | :00:17. | :00:19. | |
the days when he was learning his trade in a town where there seems | :00:20. | :00:23. | |
to be a poet living on everything street and someone in every pub | :00:24. | :00:28. | |
who's capable of making a poetic utterance, perhaps | :00:29. | :00:30. | |
Time Pieces is a memoir that is also a walk round one | :00:31. | :00:37. | |
You raise a question quite early in this memoir that seems | :00:38. | :01:01. | |
to have haunted you really through your writing life - | :01:02. | :01:04. | |
Well, it probably is unanswerable, but it is a question that | :01:05. | :01:12. | |
I mean, I think as a three-year-old I was nostalgic for when I was two. | :01:13. | :01:18. | |
We think we live in the present, but the present doesn't exist. | :01:19. | :01:24. | |
The future is, you know, a mere plausibility. | :01:25. | :01:35. | |
The past is, it accumulates, it supports us. | :01:36. | :01:40. | |
Everything that we've done is deposited there and we only | :01:41. | :01:44. | |
remember some of it, we forget most of it. | :01:45. | :01:47. | |
If you think that our lives really are made up of fragments | :01:48. | :01:54. | |
of the past, that's how we create the people we are, you point out, | :01:55. | :01:57. | |
in your very touching memories of life as a young man in Dublin, | :01:58. | :02:01. | |
Simple things like the coal or wood fires in your aunt's apartment, | :02:02. | :02:09. | |
which happened, but you can't remember how the wood got | :02:10. | :02:12. | |
there or where it went or where the ashes went. | :02:13. | :02:16. | |
I mean, Freud says that what is remarkable is not | :02:17. | :02:24. | |
that we remember, but that we forget and it is extraordinary the things | :02:25. | :02:27. | |
that fall out of our minds, out of our memory and | :02:28. | :02:29. | |
fall completely, not leaving a trace behind. | :02:30. | :02:31. | |
Why does whatever happens to the past, when it becomes | :02:32. | :02:38. | |
the past, why does it confer this luminous quality on experience. | :02:39. | :02:42. | |
It's easy to read this memoir and realise the affect | :02:43. | :02:44. | |
A young boy from Wexford, coming to the big city, | :02:45. | :02:50. | |
which gleamed and glittered and had all kinds of magical qualities | :02:51. | :02:53. | |
which people from other backgrounds and in other places will recognise, | :02:54. | :02:56. | |
that thrill of recognition, of a place of excitement. | :02:57. | :03:02. | |
Now, it's clear why you should remember that and cherish it. | :03:03. | :03:04. | |
For instance, we didn't have buses in Wexford town, where I was born, | :03:05. | :03:13. | |
so the smell of diesel fuels, even still sometimes when I catch | :03:14. | :03:18. | |
it, it gives me this sense of romance, adventure and... | :03:19. | :03:20. | |
The noise of trains or buses, that kind of thing? | :03:21. | :03:23. | |
It's very strange because Dublin was a grim little city, | :03:24. | :03:28. | |
We're talking about the 50s when things were pretty | :03:29. | :03:37. | |
Stayed is a very nice word to use, it was a bleak time. | :03:38. | :03:42. | |
It was a poverty stricken time, in terms of, not just in terms | :03:43. | :03:45. | |
of money, but in terms of spiritual lives. | :03:46. | :03:48. | |
The Catholic Church had absolute power in the country. | :03:49. | :03:55. | |
Tell me, one of the alluring aspects of the book is the sense | :03:56. | :03:59. | |
of your own opening out as a young man, not just as a writer-to-be, | :04:00. | :04:03. | |
but as someone having the experiences, which we can | :04:04. | :04:05. | |
all remember, being in the back row of the cinema, seeing | :04:06. | :04:08. | |
The great thing for you, it was happening in a village that | :04:09. | :04:22. | |
almost had a life that was unbelievable rich, | :04:23. | :04:24. | |
I mean in terms of its literary culture, the characters, | :04:25. | :04:29. | |
It was, as I said a spiritually poverty stricken time, | :04:30. | :04:34. | |
there was great gaiety, I suppose, in the same way | :04:35. | :04:39. | |
that there was great gaiety, I'm sure, in Budapest, | :04:40. | :04:48. | |
Prague and Moscow in those terrible years. | :04:49. | :04:50. | |
Gaiety against, you know, the people who were | :04:51. | :04:53. | |
I sort of missed it, I fell between generations. | :04:54. | :04:59. | |
The generation of Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and so on, | :05:00. | :05:03. | |
that had largely died out by the time I... | :05:04. | :05:05. | |
I mean it was going on when I was there, | :05:06. | :05:07. | |
Also, I was disdained from it because I wanted to be a great | :05:08. | :05:14. | |
European novelist of ideas and these were mere local artists. | :05:15. | :05:18. | |
Well, trying to be a great European novelist of ideas in Dublin brings | :05:19. | :05:21. | |
you up against a huge problem in the persons | :05:22. | :05:28. | |
of Joyce and Yeats and, I suppose, going right | :05:29. | :05:30. | |
What is it about the literary tradition of Dublin that has allowed | :05:31. | :05:34. | |
it to reproduce so regularly and so spectacularly | :05:35. | :05:36. | |
Well, I think it's the tension between the English language, | :05:37. | :05:46. | |
which was imposed on Ireland in the 19th Century, | :05:47. | :05:48. | |
tension between that and, if you like, the deep grammar | :05:49. | :05:50. | |
that is built into us in the Irish language. | :05:51. | :05:52. | |
Because the Irish language and the English language | :05:53. | :05:54. | |
The Irish language is very oblique, very poetic. | :05:55. | :05:59. | |
It's almost a motivation rather than communication. | :06:00. | :06:04. | |
Whereas basic English, that we gained in the 19th Century, | :06:05. | :06:06. | |
was rather like the Latin of the Roman Empire. | :06:07. | :06:09. | |
The tension between those two produced a new literary language. | :06:10. | :06:13. | |
It's interesting that you elude to poetic, almost a kind of bardic | :06:14. | :06:17. | |
culture there which throbs away underneath and brings something | :06:18. | :06:21. | |
completely different to the experience of | :06:22. | :06:22. | |
Do you think that's really, in the end, been the engine | :06:23. | :06:30. | |
of so much literary creativity in Ireland? | :06:31. | :06:32. | |
We love telling the story of ourselves, we love telling it | :06:33. | :06:40. | |
I always feel that you can get away with anything in Ireland | :06:41. | :06:48. | |
You know, politicians and churchmen, we don't so much care | :06:49. | :07:00. | |
about the egregious outrages that they committed, | :07:01. | :07:02. | |
what we want to hear is how they're going to explain | :07:03. | :07:04. | |
You talk a lot about human failure and the human | :07:05. | :07:08. | |
It's often said of you that you don't like re-reading your books | :07:09. | :07:12. | |
I'm sure there's a twinkle in your eye when you say | :07:13. | :07:17. | |
I distrust any writer who says that he or she re-reads | :07:18. | :07:28. | |
I couldn't, I just read it with embarrassment and horror | :07:29. | :07:31. | |
When you start again, do you always think - | :07:32. | :07:35. | |
it's going to be different this time? | :07:36. | :07:37. | |
One part of me thinks - this is going to be | :07:38. | :07:41. | |
But you know you're telling yourself a lie? | :07:42. | :07:45. | |
Oh, I know, but there you have it, we love telling ourselves lies. | :07:46. | :07:48. | |
Which means, I have to ask you, what's next? | :07:49. | :07:51. | |
You've written a memoir, what comes next? | :07:52. | :07:54. | |
Ah, well, I'm writing the sequel to Henry James' | :07:55. | :07:58. | |
Now, here is the young man who wanted to be a great | :07:59. | :08:08. | |
European novelist of ideas and you've now decided, | :08:09. | :08:09. | |
at a fairly ripe old age, not a very ripe, but ripish old age, | :08:10. | :08:13. | |
after a very, very distinguished career as a novelist, | :08:14. | :08:15. | |
you know, crime novels, literary novels, the works, | :08:16. | :08:18. | |
to take on Henry James, do you do it with trepidation? | :08:19. | :08:20. | |
I don't have to struggle with myself. | :08:21. | :08:33. | |
Novel for novel, if you look at the masterpieces | :08:34. | :08:42. | |
Equally, you know that, in the end, you'll be glad | :08:43. | :08:45. | |
I suspect I will like this book because it won't be mine. | :08:46. | :08:54. | |
James himself was going to write the sequel, but never got round to | :08:55. | :08:59. | |
With that arrogance and foolhardiness | :09:00. | :09:02. | |
Good evening, we will lose the chilly easterly wind into the | :09:03. | :09:25. | |
weekend, but the weather charts looked distinctly | :09:26. | :09:27. |