0:00:02 > 0:00:07This programme contains some strong language
0:00:07 > 0:00:08In the 19th century,
0:00:08 > 0:00:13the thinker Thomas Carlyle came up with the great man theory -
0:00:13 > 0:00:16a view that the main dents in history would always be
0:00:16 > 0:00:20formed by the impact of charismatic, intelligent and powerful men.
0:00:20 > 0:00:24It was, in Carlyle's vision, of course, always men.
0:00:24 > 0:00:26Now, in terms of actual history, that is,
0:00:26 > 0:00:30in its disavowing of social and economic factors, balls.
0:00:32 > 0:00:36But I would argue that, whether or not he exists, the idea of
0:00:36 > 0:00:38the great man, the myth of the great man,
0:00:38 > 0:00:44until very recently, still held a huge sway over our imagination.
0:00:44 > 0:00:48Carlyle was talking mainly about politicians and statesmen
0:00:48 > 0:00:49and military figures,
0:00:49 > 0:00:52but in the latter half of the 20th century, I think, that balance
0:00:52 > 0:00:57shifted towards great artistic, sporting and cultural figures.
0:00:57 > 0:00:59And lots of these figures were worshipped as
0:00:59 > 0:01:02Great Men in their own lifetimes.
0:01:04 > 0:01:08Writers like Bellow, Mailer and Roth dominated literary
0:01:08 > 0:01:12fiction for decades, and they based themselves here, in New York.
0:01:15 > 0:01:18Their prolific output and towering egos defined
0:01:18 > 0:01:22a golden age for the novel in the latter part of the 20th century.
0:01:24 > 0:01:26About ten years ago, though,
0:01:26 > 0:01:29I noticed that these men were kind of dying out.
0:01:29 > 0:01:33So is it just that we did have a lot of great artistic male
0:01:33 > 0:01:39talent in the immediate recent past or has something else happened
0:01:39 > 0:01:41to who we worship and how we worship?
0:01:48 > 0:01:52A few years ago, I wrote a novel called The Death Of Eli Gold.
0:01:52 > 0:01:55Eli Gold is a great American novelist,
0:01:55 > 0:01:59a mashup of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Norman Mailer -
0:01:59 > 0:02:03all those guys who bestrode literary culture like colossi
0:02:03 > 0:02:05at the end of the last century.
0:02:06 > 0:02:10By the end of the novel, Eli Gold is in a coma here,
0:02:10 > 0:02:14at Mount Sinai Hospital, and his son, Harvey, is saying goodbye.
0:02:18 > 0:02:23"I'm glad you're dying, really, Dad, because you're a great man, Dad.
0:02:23 > 0:02:26"Yeah, everyone says you are. I fucking know you are.
0:02:26 > 0:02:30"But no-one is great any more, Dad.
0:02:30 > 0:02:33"Greatness is gone, it's over.
0:02:33 > 0:02:36"In the old days, if you got called great in the right quarters,
0:02:36 > 0:02:38"that was that.
0:02:38 > 0:02:41"Now there are too many people who can speak,
0:02:41 > 0:02:43"who can have their say, who can say, 'No, he's not great,
0:02:43 > 0:02:47"'he's shit, he's a fucking useless wanker.'
0:02:47 > 0:02:49"And they say that stuff all the time because they all hate
0:02:49 > 0:02:53"the idea that anyone is great because it means that they aren't."
0:02:56 > 0:02:57Is Harvey right?
0:02:57 > 0:03:00Has our present-day, technology-fuelled opinion Babel
0:03:00 > 0:03:02left the great man dead in the water,
0:03:02 > 0:03:06drowned under a billion thumbs downs on YouTube?
0:03:06 > 0:03:08Or is he still out there somewhere?
0:03:08 > 0:03:11Well, I'm going to go and see if I can find one.
0:03:27 > 0:03:30Like the character in my book, the real Great Men wrote
0:03:30 > 0:03:33and lived in a way that made them global superstars.
0:03:34 > 0:03:36Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer
0:03:36 > 0:03:40and the Nobel Prize, John Updike won two Pulitzers
0:03:40 > 0:03:45for his subtle depictions of American suburban life,
0:03:45 > 0:03:50and Norman Mailer was celebrated for just being Norman Mailer -
0:03:50 > 0:03:53a combative egotist still regarded as one of the great literary
0:03:53 > 0:03:55giants of his generation.
0:03:59 > 0:04:02But not all of the Great Men have gone.
0:04:03 > 0:04:06I've found someone who, like my fictional character, Harvey,
0:04:06 > 0:04:10actually is the son of a classic literary great man but who
0:04:10 > 0:04:15also might be themselves a bona fide living example of the thing itself.
0:04:19 > 0:04:23Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, has written 12 novels.
0:04:23 > 0:04:28He's one of our greatest living writers and he has lived here,
0:04:28 > 0:04:30in New York, for the last five years.
0:04:32 > 0:04:34Literature used to be about gods.
0:04:34 > 0:04:37Then a great falling off about demigods -
0:04:37 > 0:04:40only one of your parents was divine.
0:04:40 > 0:04:44Then kings and queens, then knights and barons and all the rest.
0:04:44 > 0:04:49Then great figures of statesmen and generals, you know, fighters.
0:04:49 > 0:04:52Social realism took its grip in the 19th century
0:04:52 > 0:04:56and the novel became about you and me - ordinary people.
0:04:56 > 0:05:00In the 20th century, which had been called the ironic age,
0:05:00 > 0:05:03you started writing about people who were lower than you were.
0:05:03 > 0:05:06The absence of Great Men is very much in that line,
0:05:06 > 0:05:08in that progression.
0:05:08 > 0:05:10The most powerful force in our society,
0:05:10 > 0:05:15for the last couple of generations, has been democratisation -
0:05:15 > 0:05:18so, you know, levelling.
0:05:18 > 0:05:22So there's no longer a pool of adoration,
0:05:22 > 0:05:25waiting to seize on this or that figure.
0:05:25 > 0:05:28There are many more writers than there used to be,
0:05:28 > 0:05:32many more critics, you know, everyone online is a critic now.
0:05:32 > 0:05:37That's the world we live in now, where someone...
0:05:38 > 0:05:43..taking offence at a page of literature
0:05:43 > 0:05:47is asserting parity of ego with
0:05:47 > 0:05:52the writer, and that is a completely new kind of thought.
0:05:52 > 0:05:55And is that... That's a mixed blessing?
0:05:55 > 0:06:00Well, it's delusional, on the part of the aggrieved reader,
0:06:00 > 0:06:04who is objecting for socio-political reasons.
0:06:04 > 0:06:09I wonder if the creeping sense that we might be talking about here,
0:06:09 > 0:06:12that a need for writing not to offend,
0:06:12 > 0:06:16a need for writing to conform, whatever, to pre-placed
0:06:16 > 0:06:19ideas of socio-political ideas, might lead to...
0:06:20 > 0:06:25That is real doom for the novel, where there's
0:06:25 > 0:06:26so many constraints,
0:06:26 > 0:06:29socio-political constraints bearing down on you,
0:06:29 > 0:06:34that you hardly dare write the word "woman," you know,
0:06:34 > 0:06:38or African-American or whatever it might be.
0:06:39 > 0:06:43It's so drenched with revulsions
0:06:43 > 0:06:47and sensitivities that you can't go near it.
0:06:47 > 0:06:50But you have to go near it.
0:06:51 > 0:06:55You have to press on as if those voices don't exist.
0:06:55 > 0:06:56That's, I think, the issue.
0:06:56 > 0:06:59That's where we get to the nub of it, which is, I think,
0:06:59 > 0:07:00that untrammelled greatness,
0:07:00 > 0:07:03which may have to involve all sorts of darkness,
0:07:03 > 0:07:05is difficult to achieve for that reason -
0:07:05 > 0:07:07that people are too worried about being criticised for being
0:07:07 > 0:07:10ugly or dark and all the things that literature has to be,
0:07:10 > 0:07:12and art in general.
0:07:12 > 0:07:17Well, maybe that was the distinction of the so-called great man,
0:07:17 > 0:07:24was that he didn't care what anyone thought of him - absolute freedom.
0:07:24 > 0:07:27Do you think Kingsley was someone who particularly didn't
0:07:27 > 0:07:29care about what people thought, in those terms?
0:07:29 > 0:07:33- Yeah, he also didn't care about posterity.- Really?
0:07:33 > 0:07:36Well, he used to say that, used to say...
0:07:37 > 0:07:41- "That's no fucking use to me, is it, cos I'll be dead!"- Yeah.
0:07:42 > 0:07:44But I think he did care.
0:07:44 > 0:07:47But that's what keeps you honest, is that you're not going to find out
0:07:47 > 0:07:52if you're good, if you're going to last, cos you'll be dead.
0:07:52 > 0:07:53Yeah.
0:07:53 > 0:07:56So that's when I feel very reassured,
0:07:56 > 0:08:01when, in a signing queue, someone who's 25 years old comes up
0:08:01 > 0:08:06and I think, well, they've got another 50 years to live,
0:08:06 > 0:08:10- so I'll last that long, if they're real fans, you know.- Right.
0:08:10 > 0:08:12- So posterity does matter to you? - Oh, yeah, yeah.
0:08:12 > 0:08:17Let me quickly read out just a few sentences from an essay
0:08:17 > 0:08:21written by Kingsley in '56.
0:08:21 > 0:08:25So he's talking about an earlier generation of Great Men
0:08:25 > 0:08:27and a Great Woman he mentions here.
0:08:28 > 0:08:32"The literary giants have passed from our midst.
0:08:32 > 0:08:35"There is a case for arguing that it could represent a gain as well.
0:08:35 > 0:08:39"The one unifying characteristic of our giants - the Jameses,
0:08:39 > 0:08:42"the Woolfs, the Lawrences -
0:08:42 > 0:08:45"was the immense seriousness with which they took themselves,
0:08:45 > 0:08:48"indefatigable writers of prefaces to their own works,
0:08:48 > 0:08:51"unflinchingly pretentious about themselves
0:08:51 > 0:08:52"in their letters to friends,
0:08:52 > 0:08:56"inflexibly determined to regard themselves as the highest possible
0:08:56 > 0:09:01"artistic valuation throughout their huge egomaniacal journals.
0:09:01 > 0:09:03"They grew to be giants partly
0:09:03 > 0:09:06"because of their readiness to explain their qualifications."
0:09:06 > 0:09:08That is very interesting,
0:09:08 > 0:09:11that in 1956, there should be someone lamenting
0:09:11 > 0:09:13the passing of the literary giants because, in my mind,
0:09:13 > 0:09:16and possibly just because I'm a different generation,
0:09:16 > 0:09:19it's just about to usher in, to some extent.
0:09:19 > 0:09:21Time makes the only value judgements.
0:09:21 > 0:09:25All the guff we read in reviews, saying it's too this or it's too
0:09:25 > 0:09:30that or not enough this, etc - those are all just preference synonyms.
0:09:30 > 0:09:35- It's all rhetoric and time makes the only value judgements.- Mm.
0:09:35 > 0:09:36We live in a speeded-up world,
0:09:36 > 0:09:40so I wonder if now, we don't have the time for that.
0:09:40 > 0:09:45You could always count on time to rescue the awkward talent who
0:09:45 > 0:09:50wasn't appreciated in his day, and I've got my doubts about
0:09:50 > 0:09:54whether there's enough time to do that any more.
0:09:54 > 0:10:00Can I ask you, where do you think, if greatness does exist of a type
0:10:00 > 0:10:06on a par with Bellow, with Picasso, with David Bowie,
0:10:06 > 0:10:09where's it gone? Where does it go now?
0:10:09 > 0:10:15It's still there, it's just quieter and less highly regarded.
0:10:15 > 0:10:19But Don DeLillo said, maybe 20 years ago,
0:10:19 > 0:10:24he said the poets and the writers will not determine
0:10:24 > 0:10:30- the mood of the culture any more - terrorists will.- Mm.
0:10:30 > 0:10:33And we cannot doubt their power to affect our mood.
0:10:35 > 0:10:37After Paris, November 13...
0:10:39 > 0:10:42..one's mood was more violently affected
0:10:42 > 0:10:44than by any writer you've ever read.
0:10:44 > 0:10:47- Mm. Mm.- September 11.- Mm.
0:10:49 > 0:10:53And that, again, is another symptom of levelling
0:10:53 > 0:10:59and democratising in a malevolent way, in that these actors,
0:10:59 > 0:11:03you know, an actor with a bomb, if you're very conceited,
0:11:03 > 0:11:06you have a high opinion of yourself
0:11:06 > 0:11:10and you want to make a mark on the world, you have to...
0:11:10 > 0:11:13It's a lifetime job, that.
0:11:13 > 0:11:16But if you're a terrorist, you can do it in an instant.
0:11:17 > 0:11:21When I started out, in the '70s,
0:11:21 > 0:11:25the superstructure of literary celebration wasn't in place.
0:11:25 > 0:11:28Writing was a worthy hobby, and then,
0:11:28 > 0:11:32- it all grew with the fattening of the media.- Right.
0:11:32 > 0:11:35And that's catapulted the novelist
0:11:35 > 0:11:37to the fringes of kind of showbusiness.
0:11:37 > 0:11:43But if it should retreat, as it sometimes shows signs of doing, to a
0:11:43 > 0:11:48minority interest sphere, if it came back to that, I would be undismayed.
0:11:48 > 0:11:52- All it means is you have to get a day job.- What would you get?
0:11:52 > 0:11:58Academic, you know, more journalism. I wouldn't sort of go out...
0:11:58 > 0:12:01- You wouldn't become a plumber?- No. - It's too late?- No, too hard.
0:12:01 > 0:12:03- Too hard!- Unpleasant.- Yeah.
0:12:12 > 0:12:15Being a great man wasn't just about being great.
0:12:15 > 0:12:16It was also about being A Man.
0:12:19 > 0:12:22So many of the men that I'm talking about, both their work
0:12:22 > 0:12:23and their lives,
0:12:23 > 0:12:28were characterised by what we might call unrestrained marital behaviour.
0:12:28 > 0:12:32So was being a shite husband and father part of the contract
0:12:32 > 0:12:35of being a great man and has it now been struck out?
0:12:40 > 0:12:43New York writer Meg Wolitzer's breakthrough novel, The Wife,
0:12:43 > 0:12:46has at its heart an archetypal great man author.
0:12:48 > 0:12:52But the focus of the book is not on him but his wife and what
0:12:52 > 0:12:56she's doing behind-the-scenes to keep his great man reputation alive.
0:12:58 > 0:13:02I guess I see that the word great suggests that somebody
0:13:02 > 0:13:07is off the page or offstage, calling someone great.
0:13:07 > 0:13:09It's the question of being anointed, really.
0:13:09 > 0:13:11So you need somebody to anoint you.
0:13:11 > 0:13:14Some writers didn't have someone to anoint them, so who got anointed?
0:13:14 > 0:13:17These guys anointed one another, I think, back then.
0:13:17 > 0:13:20So greatness also suggests people who aren't great
0:13:20 > 0:13:23because you can't have a lot of great people.
0:13:23 > 0:13:26Then the concept of greatness doesn't mean anything.
0:13:26 > 0:13:30I had seen these kind of big guys. I'd seen them growing up.
0:13:30 > 0:13:33I'd seen them on the shelves of my parents' den, you know.
0:13:33 > 0:13:37All the sort of very shiny titles, big, big letters were there.
0:13:37 > 0:13:41And a publicist friend of mine said, when it's an all-typeface jacket,
0:13:41 > 0:13:44- it says, this book is important, this book is an event.- Yeah.
0:13:44 > 0:13:46So you would see, on the one hand,
0:13:46 > 0:13:49books by men that had, like, these huge typefaces
0:13:49 > 0:13:52and then, recently, even now,
0:13:52 > 0:13:56books by women that had a kind of dreamy picture of,
0:13:56 > 0:13:58you know, a girl in water or something on the cover,
0:13:58 > 0:14:00which says something really, really different.
0:14:00 > 0:14:03So I grew up kind of seeing that and thinking,
0:14:03 > 0:14:07"Are men writers different from women writers?"
0:14:07 > 0:14:10At that time male writers were a kind of celebrity..
0:14:10 > 0:14:13- People like Norman Mailer, they were on talk shows.- Yeah.
0:14:13 > 0:14:16God may now be calling upon some of the powers that were once Satanic.
0:14:16 > 0:14:19You know, such as libidinousness.
0:14:19 > 0:14:22You know, its healthier proprieties, whereas the devil's quite fond of
0:14:22 > 0:14:24libidinousness in its more unhealthy varieties.
0:14:24 > 0:14:28That's interesting. Which is the unhealthy variety of libidinousness?
0:14:28 > 0:14:30- Oh...- The devil's kind?
0:14:30 > 0:14:32- Oh, you know, screwing on drugs, that sort of thing.- Yes.
0:14:32 > 0:14:35- Playboy magazine.- Yes.- Sex...
0:14:37 > 0:14:41You know, the kind of sex that whips a dead horse...
0:14:41 > 0:14:45That's part of what I'm talking about, is these great men,
0:14:45 > 0:14:48they were sort of stars, they were icons, to use a much overused word.
0:14:48 > 0:14:52Yeah, you had writers like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer
0:14:52 > 0:14:55and John Updike and they were all different writers from one another
0:14:55 > 0:14:58but there was this feeling that that was at the centre of the culture.
0:14:58 > 0:15:01One of the things about all these men that I'm kind of interested in,
0:15:01 > 0:15:03that I was interested in in my novel, The Death of Eli Gold,
0:15:03 > 0:15:06and I think you maybe interested in in The Wife,
0:15:06 > 0:15:07is the private lives of these men,
0:15:07 > 0:15:10the marital lives of these men seemed to be part of the package.
0:15:10 > 0:15:13It seemed to be part of the package for Norman Mailer to have seven wives...
0:15:13 > 0:15:15- And stab!- ..and stab one of them.
0:15:15 > 0:15:19In Eli Gold, there's a suicide pact in which he kills his wife
0:15:19 > 0:15:21but he doesn't die
0:15:21 > 0:15:24and that came out of the fact that Arthur Koestler did in fact
0:15:24 > 0:15:26kill his wife, they both die, but it's very clear to me
0:15:26 > 0:15:30from reading their suicide note that Cynthia didn't really want to die...
0:15:30 > 0:15:32- Right.- ..but just felt that she should do what Arthur did.
0:15:32 > 0:15:34- Yeah.- You know? - Well, you know, actually...
0:15:34 > 0:15:37And that's how subjugated some of these women were.
0:15:37 > 0:15:39One of the first readings I ever gave from The Wife in New York,
0:15:39 > 0:15:42a woman waited patiently on line and came up to me and said,
0:15:42 > 0:15:44- "I was married to Norman Mailer, I'm the one he stabbed."- Wow!
0:15:44 > 0:15:47There were so many of these men whose virility,
0:15:47 > 0:15:51self-advertised through the way they behaved with women,
0:15:51 > 0:15:54seems to be part and parcel of why they were supposed to be worshipped.
0:15:54 > 0:15:56Yeah, and everybody sort of went along with it.
0:15:56 > 0:15:59I feel like almost if you wanted to kind of write
0:15:59 > 0:16:02something about that era you could call it, Because I Said So.
0:16:02 > 0:16:04You know, "Why am I big?" "Because I said so."
0:16:04 > 0:16:05That they sort of,
0:16:05 > 0:16:08they wrested control of the culture in some ways,
0:16:08 > 0:16:11and partly because of their books and, look,
0:16:11 > 0:16:13- some of this writing is fantastic, - A lot of it's fantastic.
0:16:13 > 0:16:15It's energetic and muscular and important
0:16:15 > 0:16:17and all kinds of things that matter.
0:16:17 > 0:16:20But, getting into huge fights all the time is not,
0:16:20 > 0:16:23and it's embarrassing and not good
0:16:23 > 0:16:26- and doesn't make you more important, doesn't make it big or great.- Yeah.
0:16:26 > 0:16:29I think that just, the sort of what they did, like when they got
0:16:29 > 0:16:34into trouble, when they had fights with each other on talk shows,
0:16:34 > 0:16:37like, the idea that that was an important thing.
0:16:37 > 0:16:41The truth is I want to live in a world in which writers can
0:16:41 > 0:16:44get into a fight on a talk show and that's news in a big way,
0:16:44 > 0:16:47but I don't want it to be only those writers,
0:16:47 > 0:16:51because the fact that they had the loudest voices meant that
0:16:51 > 0:16:53other voices got shut out.
0:16:53 > 0:16:56So they're writing and getting the most attention
0:16:56 > 0:16:59and meanwhile there's a lot of other really interesting writers
0:16:59 > 0:17:02who are not doing that, and quite a number of whom are women.
0:17:02 > 0:17:05If you were going to anoint someone, who would it be?
0:17:05 > 0:17:07Oh, you know, I don't even think that way.
0:17:07 > 0:17:12I think that that excitement around writing
0:17:12 > 0:17:14has moved into so many different areas
0:17:14 > 0:17:16that have nothing to do with writing.
0:17:16 > 0:17:20I mean, if you're looking at greatness as like how many hits you get,
0:17:20 > 0:17:24- then Kim Kardashian would be our George Eliot.- Yeah.
0:17:24 > 0:17:27- That sounds bad.- Yes. - What you've just said.
0:17:30 > 0:17:33Since the Great Men ruled the literary roost
0:17:33 > 0:17:38many modern critics have found their apparent prejudice and misogyny problematic.
0:17:40 > 0:17:43But Katie Roiphe, whose new book explores in detail
0:17:43 > 0:17:46the final hours of some of these writers,
0:17:46 > 0:17:49feels that the backlash against them may have gone too far.
0:17:54 > 0:17:57I don't think it would be unfair to say that I have a certain
0:17:57 > 0:18:01kind of nostalgia for that generation of writers,
0:18:01 > 0:18:03and I think it's important to bring up
0:18:03 > 0:18:06something Norman Mailer wrote about, which is that
0:18:06 > 0:18:09when people were attacking him for being sexist and misogynistic,
0:18:09 > 0:18:12which he undoubtedly was, he brought up that
0:18:12 > 0:18:16in his writing, often the writers who are attacked as misogynistic
0:18:16 > 0:18:20are really not saying, oh, this sex scene is so great,
0:18:20 > 0:18:24and sort of revelling in it, they're saying it's actually sad
0:18:24 > 0:18:26that people can't connect,
0:18:26 > 0:18:30and that there's a lot of, like, just despair wrapped up in some of
0:18:30 > 0:18:33those scenes that have been seen as kind of violent
0:18:33 > 0:18:36or, you know, this kind of un-throttled contempt for women,
0:18:36 > 0:18:38but it's much more complicated than that.
0:18:38 > 0:18:42And so I think that judgment of somebody as misogynistic
0:18:42 > 0:18:47and the dismissal of their work is often really unsophisticated
0:18:47 > 0:18:50and really crude, and doesn't actually allow the complexity
0:18:50 > 0:18:52and the ambition -
0:18:52 > 0:18:55and when I say that I mean of the passages themselves -
0:18:55 > 0:18:57and doesn't give them their due.
0:18:57 > 0:19:01What about the fact that so many of these men,
0:19:01 > 0:19:04of the mythic great male narcissist,
0:19:04 > 0:19:08sort of use their genius consciously or unconsciously
0:19:08 > 0:19:12to live extremely unrestrained sort of lives privately,
0:19:12 > 0:19:16and got away with it then, as if license gave these men,
0:19:16 > 0:19:19you know, genius gave them license to behave incredibly badly.
0:19:19 > 0:19:24- Is that true? Is that one reason why they've been downgraded?- Yes.
0:19:24 > 0:19:28I think that that idea of genius or greatness,
0:19:28 > 0:19:32certainly if you look at somebody like Dylan Thomas, you know,
0:19:32 > 0:19:36who, in his last days of life, takes his mistress to a party and then
0:19:36 > 0:19:39goes upstairs to sleep with his host and comes back down to his mistress.
0:19:39 > 0:19:42There were infinite numbers of women who were just throwing
0:19:42 > 0:19:45themselves at him when he was so clearly a mess,
0:19:45 > 0:19:47just somebody that you just, you know,
0:19:47 > 0:19:52a sane person would run a mile away from, and yet,
0:19:52 > 0:19:53there's some allure to that,
0:19:53 > 0:19:56and I think there's some sort of self-sacrificing allure
0:19:56 > 0:19:59that, especially at that time, was very powerful
0:19:59 > 0:20:02and part of the mythology of the artist or the poet or the writer.
0:20:02 > 0:20:05So I wonder if that was a thing in that time,
0:20:05 > 0:20:08that that was a sign of their greatness, that they wouldn't be
0:20:08 > 0:20:12bound down to one woman or one child or whatever it might be?
0:20:12 > 0:20:16I think so, and I think the idea of the artist or the writer
0:20:16 > 0:20:19as a rule breaker was much different then,
0:20:19 > 0:20:23and I have to say, I think now we are much more materialistic.
0:20:23 > 0:20:28So right now the artist is, wants to sell his novel to Hollywood.
0:20:28 > 0:20:30You know? So now people are much more fixated on living
0:20:30 > 0:20:33a bourgeois life like the banker next door,
0:20:33 > 0:20:37rather than living according to no rules,
0:20:37 > 0:20:43so, along with that loss of those kind of disgusting men,
0:20:43 > 0:20:48we also have a kind of rise of a kind of extolling
0:20:48 > 0:20:50of safe, healthy bourgeois culture.
0:20:50 > 0:20:53So I think that's the other side of it,
0:20:53 > 0:20:54is that everybody wants to be...
0:20:54 > 0:20:56Those writers are too busy going to the gym
0:20:56 > 0:20:59and shopping at Whole Foods and they want to have a nice townhouse
0:20:59 > 0:21:03and they're not really willing to commit to the kind of bohemianism
0:21:03 > 0:21:06that some of these people were willing to commit to.
0:21:09 > 0:21:14Shagging is the word I was looking for, screwing is too crude a word.
0:21:14 > 0:21:16Shagging is the word I wanted and I lost.
0:21:16 > 0:21:20No-one knows this city or the great men who lived here
0:21:20 > 0:21:22better than Adam Gopnik,
0:21:22 > 0:21:25a writer at the New Yorker for 30 years.
0:21:26 > 0:21:28I'll tell you a story about the first time
0:21:28 > 0:21:30I had dinner with Norman Mailer,
0:21:30 > 0:21:32- if you can, if you can bear it. - Yes, please do.
0:21:32 > 0:21:34We were invited to dinner with Norman Mailer.
0:21:34 > 0:21:37I was, you know, a young pug writer
0:21:37 > 0:21:39and I thought, "This'll be interesting,"
0:21:39 > 0:21:42and I thought to myself it'll be interesting cos I'll get to meet
0:21:42 > 0:21:44the real Mailer behind the mask -
0:21:44 > 0:21:48because he had this big publicity mask - and I went to meet him
0:21:48 > 0:21:51and it was exactly as though you went to have dinner with
0:21:51 > 0:21:54Elmer Fudd and you thought, "Now I'm going to meet the real Elmer,"
0:21:54 > 0:21:57and Elmer turned to you and said, "I'm gonna get that kwazy wabbit."
0:21:57 > 0:22:00Because he turned to me and he said, "Have you been following..."
0:22:00 > 0:22:02He talked Mailer-like and he said, "It's nice to meet you,
0:22:02 > 0:22:05"have you been following my fights with the feminists?
0:22:05 > 0:22:07"Have you been following my fights with the feminists?
0:22:07 > 0:22:08And I said, "Yeah, yeah, I guess..."
0:22:08 > 0:22:11He said, "Do you know what I call them? Know what I call them?
0:22:11 > 0:22:13"I call them woo-woos because they're women who've had the man
0:22:13 > 0:22:16"removed from them, that's why I call them woo-woos.
0:22:16 > 0:22:18And I'm deeply embarrassed cos this is such puerile stuff
0:22:18 > 0:22:20coming from this great writer.
0:22:20 > 0:22:22And I had come prepped, as we do when we meet great writers,
0:22:22 > 0:22:25you know, with, you know, "In The Deer Park, did you mean...?"
0:22:25 > 0:22:28And he was obsessed, frankly in a very puerile way with
0:22:28 > 0:22:31- the attacks on him...- With the woo-woos.- With the woo-woos!
0:22:31 > 0:22:34He was obsessed with the woo-woos and he would not let it drop,
0:22:34 > 0:22:35he would not let it drop.
0:22:35 > 0:22:38And, as I say, he was like you want to say, "Elmer, Elmer,
0:22:38 > 0:22:40"save that for the cartoons, right? Tell me...
0:22:40 > 0:22:41"Enough with the kwazy wabbit,
0:22:41 > 0:22:45tell me what it's like just being Elmer Fudd, and he couldn't.
0:22:45 > 0:22:49There is always this sense of, like, to break out be the great man
0:22:49 > 0:22:52you have to some extent leave women and children behind.
0:22:52 > 0:22:54Yes, you know, that's certainly true.
0:22:54 > 0:22:58In my generation among writers we are all good husbands
0:22:58 > 0:23:00and good fathers and proud of it -
0:23:00 > 0:23:02that was our obsession,
0:23:02 > 0:23:06but it also wasn't in the sense that it was natural to our generation,
0:23:06 > 0:23:08and that's how we defined ourselves.
0:23:08 > 0:23:11And there are as many women fed up with guys like us,
0:23:11 > 0:23:15who are unable to be Dionysian adventurers,
0:23:15 > 0:23:18as there are women, like our wives, I hope,
0:23:18 > 0:23:21- who are proud to be associated with us.- I interviewed Katie...
0:23:21 > 0:23:24- Katie Roiphe.- ..earlier. - She despises guys like me.
0:23:24 > 0:23:27- I don't think she despises you. - Maybe not me personally.
0:23:27 > 0:23:29Your name didn't come up in a despising way.
0:23:29 > 0:23:32Generationally she despises those of us
0:23:32 > 0:23:35who have our aprons on and our stir-fry cookbooks out
0:23:35 > 0:23:39and are tweeting about our children and writing these tales,
0:23:39 > 0:23:40and I understand that, I see...
0:23:40 > 0:23:45Like every other gain in human existence, it comes with compensatory losses,
0:23:45 > 0:23:49and I think that just as the great men you are talking about
0:23:49 > 0:23:53had often to censor their own impulses towards
0:23:53 > 0:23:56tenderness and quieter kinds of affection,
0:23:56 > 0:23:59to domesticity, which certainly existed in their lives, but
0:23:59 > 0:24:03they had a very hard time writing about in any persuasive way.
0:24:03 > 0:24:05They had trouble living it, experiencing it in life,
0:24:05 > 0:24:08and as anything we have trouble experiencing we have trouble
0:24:08 > 0:24:11organising as a literary emotion.
0:24:13 > 0:24:18It's not just gender identity that's shifted since these great men were kings,
0:24:18 > 0:24:20the way in which we consume culture
0:24:20 > 0:24:25and the speed at which we do so, have transformed irreversibly.
0:24:25 > 0:24:28Where do you locate greatness on the computer screen?
0:24:30 > 0:24:33The internet has changed our capacity to absorb art
0:24:33 > 0:24:37that isn't immediately stimulating or isn't immediately shocking
0:24:37 > 0:24:40or surprising or winning in some way, that's definitely true,
0:24:40 > 0:24:43and I think that has changed poetry in some way.
0:24:43 > 0:24:46Nick Laird is an award-winning poet,
0:24:46 > 0:24:49and his latest book, Go Giants,
0:24:49 > 0:24:53explores concepts of greatness in art and politics.
0:24:53 > 0:24:56He now lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
0:24:56 > 0:24:59You see, my students don't buy books any more,
0:24:59 > 0:25:02they just read them online, and you go to the poetry sites
0:25:02 > 0:25:05and the poems are categorised by things like
0:25:05 > 0:25:08"pets" or "time" or...
0:25:08 > 0:25:11- one of the categories is "indoor activities".- "Indoor activities!"
0:25:11 > 0:25:14Yes. So the idea of, like, now, in the way that Napster or Spotify
0:25:14 > 0:25:17destroyed the LP, the idea that a book of poems arrives
0:25:17 > 0:25:20and you read it from cover to cover, from start to finish -
0:25:20 > 0:25:24that's not how poems are being absorbed by certainly my students,
0:25:24 > 0:25:25they're more like 45s now -
0:25:25 > 0:25:29you get your single and it arrives and you like it, and you put it
0:25:29 > 0:25:32on Twitter or whatever it is, then you move on to the next writer
0:25:32 > 0:25:35who's written a poem that in some way is shocking or surprising.
0:25:35 > 0:25:37That's about speed, isn't it? Again...
0:25:37 > 0:25:41- It's our need to have technology disseminate information in some ways.- Yes.
0:25:41 > 0:25:42Is something lost?
0:25:42 > 0:25:45I guess, something Martin Amis said which I thought was interesting,
0:25:45 > 0:25:48was we were trying to sort of perceive what it was
0:25:48 > 0:25:51about those men that might be specifically different
0:25:51 > 0:25:55- and one thing he said was that they didn't care.- Yeah.
0:25:55 > 0:25:59They didn't care about the fact that they were, you know, being...
0:25:59 > 0:26:03Either about the way they behaved in their private lives or about the way
0:26:03 > 0:26:05that they wrote or whatever, there was a sort of freedom to it.
0:26:05 > 0:26:07Now, I'm not sure that's entirely true,
0:26:07 > 0:26:10there were probably lots of ways in which they did care but,
0:26:10 > 0:26:14of course, they weren't assaulted by a huge superstructure by which
0:26:14 > 0:26:17- people could tell them what they should care about.- Right.- You know?
0:26:17 > 0:26:20And so what difference has that made to people who write,
0:26:20 > 0:26:22people who create art?
0:26:22 > 0:26:24People are infected with doubt in a way that I don't think
0:26:24 > 0:26:27Mailer, Bellow, Updike were.
0:26:27 > 0:26:31They were pretty sure of their place in the world, geopolitically even,
0:26:31 > 0:26:34like, America was the leader in lots of ways,
0:26:34 > 0:26:37there was no sense that, you know, America wasn't the land of the free,
0:26:37 > 0:26:39it wasn't the leader of the free world.
0:26:39 > 0:26:42To be white and male in America at that time was to have won the lottery.
0:26:42 > 0:26:45Certainly there was no way of undermining writers,
0:26:45 > 0:26:47or attacking them, like there is now.
0:26:59 > 0:27:04So, is there a great man left somewhere in our culture?
0:27:04 > 0:27:08Well, the truth is that the veneration of the great man
0:27:08 > 0:27:11was often undemocratic and sometimes misogynistic,
0:27:11 > 0:27:14and that with a new type of thinking,
0:27:14 > 0:27:15with micro-history on the rise
0:27:15 > 0:27:19and art forms that celebrate smallness and transience -
0:27:19 > 0:27:23a Vine is seven seconds long - we have to accept the idea
0:27:23 > 0:27:26that the way forward artistically
0:27:26 > 0:27:29must be away from the old idea of greatness,
0:27:29 > 0:27:33and towards something else which hopefully will also be great,
0:27:33 > 0:27:36but perhaps with a smaller G.
0:27:47 > 0:27:50A great man, Bertolt Brecht,
0:27:50 > 0:27:54once wrote a play about the life of another great man, Galileo,
0:27:54 > 0:27:58at the end of which a character says to Galileo,
0:27:58 > 0:28:02"Unhappy the land that has no heroes."
0:28:02 > 0:28:04And Galileo replies,
0:28:04 > 0:28:07"Happy the land that needs no heroes."
0:28:10 > 0:28:15# Whatever happened to the heroes?
0:28:17 > 0:28:21# Whatever happened to the heroes?
0:28:24 > 0:28:29# No more heroes any more No more heroes any more
0:28:29 > 0:28:33# No more heroes any more
0:28:33 > 0:28:36# No more heroes any more... #