David Baddiel Artsnight


David Baddiel

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This programme contains some strong language

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In the 19th century,

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the thinker Thomas Carlyle came up with the great man theory -

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a view that the main dents in history would always be

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formed by the impact of charismatic, intelligent and powerful men.

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It was, in Carlyle's vision, of course, always men.

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Now, in terms of actual history, that is,

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in its disavowing of social and economic factors, balls.

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But I would argue that, whether or not he exists, the idea of

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the great man, the myth of the great man,

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until very recently, still held a huge sway over our imagination.

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Carlyle was talking mainly about politicians and statesmen

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and military figures,

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but in the latter half of the 20th century, I think, that balance

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shifted towards great artistic, sporting and cultural figures.

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And lots of these figures were worshipped as

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Great Men in their own lifetimes.

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Writers like Bellow, Mailer and Roth dominated literary

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fiction for decades, and they based themselves here, in New York.

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Their prolific output and towering egos defined

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a golden age for the novel in the latter part of the 20th century.

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About ten years ago, though,

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I noticed that these men were kind of dying out.

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So is it just that we did have a lot of great artistic male

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talent in the immediate recent past or has something else happened

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to who we worship and how we worship?

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A few years ago, I wrote a novel called The Death Of Eli Gold.

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Eli Gold is a great American novelist,

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a mashup of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Norman Mailer -

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all those guys who bestrode literary culture like colossi

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at the end of the last century.

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By the end of the novel, Eli Gold is in a coma here,

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at Mount Sinai Hospital, and his son, Harvey, is saying goodbye.

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"I'm glad you're dying, really, Dad, because you're a great man, Dad.

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"Yeah, everyone says you are. I fucking know you are.

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"But no-one is great any more, Dad.

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"Greatness is gone, it's over.

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"In the old days, if you got called great in the right quarters,

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"that was that.

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"Now there are too many people who can speak,

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"who can have their say, who can say, 'No, he's not great,

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"'he's shit, he's a fucking useless wanker.'

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"And they say that stuff all the time because they all hate

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"the idea that anyone is great because it means that they aren't."

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Is Harvey right?

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Has our present-day, technology-fuelled opinion Babel

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left the great man dead in the water,

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drowned under a billion thumbs downs on YouTube?

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Or is he still out there somewhere?

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Well, I'm going to go and see if I can find one.

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Like the character in my book, the real Great Men wrote

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and lived in a way that made them global superstars.

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Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer

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and the Nobel Prize, John Updike won two Pulitzers

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for his subtle depictions of American suburban life,

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and Norman Mailer was celebrated for just being Norman Mailer -

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a combative egotist still regarded as one of the great literary

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giants of his generation.

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But not all of the Great Men have gone.

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I've found someone who, like my fictional character, Harvey,

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actually is the son of a classic literary great man but who

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also might be themselves a bona fide living example of the thing itself.

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Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, has written 12 novels.

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He's one of our greatest living writers and he has lived here,

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in New York, for the last five years.

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Literature used to be about gods.

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Then a great falling off about demigods -

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only one of your parents was divine.

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Then kings and queens, then knights and barons and all the rest.

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Then great figures of statesmen and generals, you know, fighters.

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Social realism took its grip in the 19th century

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and the novel became about you and me - ordinary people.

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In the 20th century, which had been called the ironic age,

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you started writing about people who were lower than you were.

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The absence of Great Men is very much in that line,

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in that progression.

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The most powerful force in our society,

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for the last couple of generations, has been democratisation -

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so, you know, levelling.

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So there's no longer a pool of adoration,

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waiting to seize on this or that figure.

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There are many more writers than there used to be,

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many more critics, you know, everyone online is a critic now.

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That's the world we live in now, where someone...

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..taking offence at a page of literature

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is asserting parity of ego with

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the writer, and that is a completely new kind of thought.

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And is that... That's a mixed blessing?

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Well, it's delusional, on the part of the aggrieved reader,

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who is objecting for socio-political reasons.

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I wonder if the creeping sense that we might be talking about here,

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that a need for writing not to offend,

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a need for writing to conform, whatever, to pre-placed

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ideas of socio-political ideas, might lead to...

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That is real doom for the novel, where there's

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so many constraints,

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socio-political constraints bearing down on you,

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that you hardly dare write the word "woman," you know,

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or African-American or whatever it might be.

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It's so drenched with revulsions

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and sensitivities that you can't go near it.

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But you have to go near it.

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You have to press on as if those voices don't exist.

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That's, I think, the issue.

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That's where we get to the nub of it, which is, I think,

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that untrammelled greatness,

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which may have to involve all sorts of darkness,

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is difficult to achieve for that reason -

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that people are too worried about being criticised for being

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ugly or dark and all the things that literature has to be,

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and art in general.

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Well, maybe that was the distinction of the so-called great man,

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was that he didn't care what anyone thought of him - absolute freedom.

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Do you think Kingsley was someone who particularly didn't

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care about what people thought, in those terms?

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-Yeah, he also didn't care about posterity.

-Really?

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Well, he used to say that, used to say...

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-"That's no fucking use to me, is it, cos I'll be dead!"

-Yeah.

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But I think he did care.

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But that's what keeps you honest, is that you're not going to find out

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if you're good, if you're going to last, cos you'll be dead.

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Yeah.

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So that's when I feel very reassured,

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when, in a signing queue, someone who's 25 years old comes up

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and I think, well, they've got another 50 years to live,

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-so I'll last that long, if they're real fans, you know.

-Right.

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-So posterity does matter to you?

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

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Let me quickly read out just a few sentences from an essay

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written by Kingsley in '56.

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So he's talking about an earlier generation of Great Men

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and a Great Woman he mentions here.

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"The literary giants have passed from our midst.

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"There is a case for arguing that it could represent a gain as well.

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"The one unifying characteristic of our giants - the Jameses,

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"the Woolfs, the Lawrences -

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"was the immense seriousness with which they took themselves,

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"indefatigable writers of prefaces to their own works,

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"unflinchingly pretentious about themselves

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"in their letters to friends,

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"inflexibly determined to regard themselves as the highest possible

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"artistic valuation throughout their huge egomaniacal journals.

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"They grew to be giants partly

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"because of their readiness to explain their qualifications."

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That is very interesting,

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that in 1956, there should be someone lamenting

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the passing of the literary giants because, in my mind,

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and possibly just because I'm a different generation,

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it's just about to usher in, to some extent.

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Time makes the only value judgements.

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All the guff we read in reviews, saying it's too this or it's too

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that or not enough this, etc - those are all just preference synonyms.

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-It's all rhetoric and time makes the only value judgements.

-Mm.

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We live in a speeded-up world,

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so I wonder if now, we don't have the time for that.

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You could always count on time to rescue the awkward talent who

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wasn't appreciated in his day, and I've got my doubts about

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whether there's enough time to do that any more.

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Can I ask you, where do you think, if greatness does exist of a type

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on a par with Bellow, with Picasso, with David Bowie,

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where's it gone? Where does it go now?

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It's still there, it's just quieter and less highly regarded.

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But Don DeLillo said, maybe 20 years ago,

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he said the poets and the writers will not determine

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-the mood of the culture any more - terrorists will.

-Mm.

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And we cannot doubt their power to affect our mood.

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After Paris, November 13...

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..one's mood was more violently affected

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than by any writer you've ever read.

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-Mm. Mm.

-September 11.

-Mm.

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And that, again, is another symptom of levelling

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and democratising in a malevolent way, in that these actors,

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you know, an actor with a bomb, if you're very conceited,

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you have a high opinion of yourself

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and you want to make a mark on the world, you have to...

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It's a lifetime job, that.

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But if you're a terrorist, you can do it in an instant.

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When I started out, in the '70s,

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the superstructure of literary celebration wasn't in place.

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Writing was a worthy hobby, and then,

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-it all grew with the fattening of the media.

-Right.

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And that's catapulted the novelist

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to the fringes of kind of showbusiness.

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But if it should retreat, as it sometimes shows signs of doing, to a

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minority interest sphere, if it came back to that, I would be undismayed.

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-All it means is you have to get a day job.

-What would you get?

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Academic, you know, more journalism. I wouldn't sort of go out...

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-You wouldn't become a plumber?

-No.

-It's too late?

-No, too hard.

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-Too hard!

-Unpleasant.

-Yeah.

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Being a great man wasn't just about being great.

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It was also about being A Man.

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So many of the men that I'm talking about, both their work

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and their lives,

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were characterised by what we might call unrestrained marital behaviour.

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So was being a shite husband and father part of the contract

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of being a great man and has it now been struck out?

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New York writer Meg Wolitzer's breakthrough novel, The Wife,

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has at its heart an archetypal great man author.

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But the focus of the book is not on him but his wife and what

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she's doing behind-the-scenes to keep his great man reputation alive.

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I guess I see that the word great suggests that somebody

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is off the page or offstage, calling someone great.

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It's the question of being anointed, really.

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So you need somebody to anoint you.

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Some writers didn't have someone to anoint them, so who got anointed?

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These guys anointed one another, I think, back then.

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So greatness also suggests people who aren't great

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because you can't have a lot of great people.

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Then the concept of greatness doesn't mean anything.

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I had seen these kind of big guys. I'd seen them growing up.

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I'd seen them on the shelves of my parents' den, you know.

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All the sort of very shiny titles, big, big letters were there.

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And a publicist friend of mine said, when it's an all-typeface jacket,

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-it says, this book is important, this book is an event.

-Yeah.

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So you would see, on the one hand,

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books by men that had, like, these huge typefaces

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and then, recently, even now,

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books by women that had a kind of dreamy picture of,

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you know, a girl in water or something on the cover,

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which says something really, really different.

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So I grew up kind of seeing that and thinking,

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"Are men writers different from women writers?"

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At that time male writers were a kind of celebrity..

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-People like Norman Mailer, they were on talk shows.

-Yeah.

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God may now be calling upon some of the powers that were once Satanic.

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You know, such as libidinousness.

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You know, its healthier proprieties, whereas the devil's quite fond of

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libidinousness in its more unhealthy varieties.

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That's interesting. Which is the unhealthy variety of libidinousness?

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-Oh...

-The devil's kind?

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-Oh, you know, screwing on drugs, that sort of thing.

-Yes.

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-Playboy magazine.

-Yes.

-Sex...

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You know, the kind of sex that whips a dead horse...

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That's part of what I'm talking about, is these great men,

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they were sort of stars, they were icons, to use a much overused word.

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Yeah, you had writers like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer

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and John Updike and they were all different writers from one another

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but there was this feeling that that was at the centre of the culture.

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One of the things about all these men that I'm kind of interested in,

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that I was interested in in my novel, The Death of Eli Gold,

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and I think you maybe interested in in The Wife,

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is the private lives of these men,

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the marital lives of these men seemed to be part of the package.

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It seemed to be part of the package for Norman Mailer to have seven wives...

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-And stab!

-..and stab one of them.

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In Eli Gold, there's a suicide pact in which he kills his wife

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but he doesn't die

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and that came out of the fact that Arthur Koestler did in fact

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kill his wife, they both die, but it's very clear to me

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from reading their suicide note that Cynthia didn't really want to die...

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-Right.

-..but just felt that she should do what Arthur did.

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-Yeah.

-You know?

-Well, you know, actually...

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And that's how subjugated some of these women were.

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One of the first readings I ever gave from The Wife in New York,

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a woman waited patiently on line and came up to me and said,

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-"I was married to Norman Mailer, I'm the one he stabbed."

-Wow!

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There were so many of these men whose virility,

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self-advertised through the way they behaved with women,

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seems to be part and parcel of why they were supposed to be worshipped.

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Yeah, and everybody sort of went along with it.

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I feel like almost if you wanted to kind of write

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something about that era you could call it, Because I Said So.

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You know, "Why am I big?" "Because I said so."

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That they sort of,

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they wrested control of the culture in some ways,

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and partly because of their books and, look,

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-some of this writing is fantastic,

-A lot of it's fantastic.

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It's energetic and muscular and important

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and all kinds of things that matter.

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But, getting into huge fights all the time is not,

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and it's embarrassing and not good

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-and doesn't make you more important, doesn't make it big or great.

-Yeah.

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I think that just, the sort of what they did, like when they got

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into trouble, when they had fights with each other on talk shows,

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like, the idea that that was an important thing.

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The truth is I want to live in a world in which writers can

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get into a fight on a talk show and that's news in a big way,

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but I don't want it to be only those writers,

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because the fact that they had the loudest voices meant that

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other voices got shut out.

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So they're writing and getting the most attention

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and meanwhile there's a lot of other really interesting writers

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who are not doing that, and quite a number of whom are women.

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If you were going to anoint someone, who would it be?

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Oh, you know, I don't even think that way.

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I think that that excitement around writing

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has moved into so many different areas

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that have nothing to do with writing.

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I mean, if you're looking at greatness as like how many hits you get,

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-then Kim Kardashian would be our George Eliot.

-Yeah.

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-That sounds bad.

-Yes.

-What you've just said.

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Since the Great Men ruled the literary roost

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many modern critics have found their apparent prejudice and misogyny problematic.

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But Katie Roiphe, whose new book explores in detail

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the final hours of some of these writers,

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feels that the backlash against them may have gone too far.

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I don't think it would be unfair to say that I have a certain

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kind of nostalgia for that generation of writers,

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and I think it's important to bring up

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something Norman Mailer wrote about, which is that

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when people were attacking him for being sexist and misogynistic,

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which he undoubtedly was, he brought up that

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in his writing, often the writers who are attacked as misogynistic

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are really not saying, oh, this sex scene is so great,

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and sort of revelling in it, they're saying it's actually sad

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that people can't connect,

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and that there's a lot of, like, just despair wrapped up in some of

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those scenes that have been seen as kind of violent

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or, you know, this kind of un-throttled contempt for women,

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but it's much more complicated than that.

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And so I think that judgment of somebody as misogynistic

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and the dismissal of their work is often really unsophisticated

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and really crude, and doesn't actually allow the complexity

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and the ambition -

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and when I say that I mean of the passages themselves -

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and doesn't give them their due.

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What about the fact that so many of these men,

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of the mythic great male narcissist,

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sort of use their genius consciously or unconsciously

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to live extremely unrestrained sort of lives privately,

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and got away with it then, as if license gave these men,

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you know, genius gave them license to behave incredibly badly.

0:19:160:19:19

-Is that true? Is that one reason why they've been downgraded?

-Yes.

0:19:190:19:24

I think that that idea of genius or greatness,

0:19:240:19:28

certainly if you look at somebody like Dylan Thomas, you know,

0:19:280:19:32

who, in his last days of life, takes his mistress to a party and then

0:19:320:19:36

goes upstairs to sleep with his host and comes back down to his mistress.

0:19:360:19:39

There were infinite numbers of women who were just throwing

0:19:390:19:42

themselves at him when he was so clearly a mess,

0:19:420:19:45

just somebody that you just, you know,

0:19:450:19:47

a sane person would run a mile away from, and yet,

0:19:470:19:52

there's some allure to that,

0:19:520:19:53

and I think there's some sort of self-sacrificing allure

0:19:530:19:56

that, especially at that time, was very powerful

0:19:560:19:59

and part of the mythology of the artist or the poet or the writer.

0:19:590:20:02

So I wonder if that was a thing in that time,

0:20:020:20:05

that that was a sign of their greatness, that they wouldn't be

0:20:050:20:08

bound down to one woman or one child or whatever it might be?

0:20:080:20:12

I think so, and I think the idea of the artist or the writer

0:20:120:20:16

as a rule breaker was much different then,

0:20:160:20:19

and I have to say, I think now we are much more materialistic.

0:20:190:20:23

So right now the artist is, wants to sell his novel to Hollywood.

0:20:230:20:28

You know? So now people are much more fixated on living

0:20:280:20:30

a bourgeois life like the banker next door,

0:20:300:20:33

rather than living according to no rules,

0:20:330:20:37

so, along with that loss of those kind of disgusting men,

0:20:370:20:43

we also have a kind of rise of a kind of extolling

0:20:430:20:48

of safe, healthy bourgeois culture.

0:20:480:20:50

So I think that's the other side of it,

0:20:500:20:53

is that everybody wants to be...

0:20:530:20:54

Those writers are too busy going to the gym

0:20:540:20:56

and shopping at Whole Foods and they want to have a nice townhouse

0:20:560:20:59

and they're not really willing to commit to the kind of bohemianism

0:20:590:21:03

that some of these people were willing to commit to.

0:21:030:21:06

Shagging is the word I was looking for, screwing is too crude a word.

0:21:090:21:14

Shagging is the word I wanted and I lost.

0:21:140:21:16

No-one knows this city or the great men who lived here

0:21:160:21:20

better than Adam Gopnik,

0:21:200:21:22

a writer at the New Yorker for 30 years.

0:21:220:21:25

I'll tell you a story about the first time

0:21:260:21:28

I had dinner with Norman Mailer,

0:21:280:21:30

-if you can, if you can bear it.

-Yes, please do.

0:21:300:21:32

We were invited to dinner with Norman Mailer.

0:21:320:21:34

I was, you know, a young pug writer

0:21:340:21:37

and I thought, "This'll be interesting,"

0:21:370:21:39

and I thought to myself it'll be interesting cos I'll get to meet

0:21:390:21:42

the real Mailer behind the mask -

0:21:420:21:44

because he had this big publicity mask - and I went to meet him

0:21:440:21:48

and it was exactly as though you went to have dinner with

0:21:480:21:51

Elmer Fudd and you thought, "Now I'm going to meet the real Elmer,"

0:21:510:21:54

and Elmer turned to you and said, "I'm gonna get that kwazy wabbit."

0:21:540:21:57

Because he turned to me and he said, "Have you been following..."

0:21:570:22:00

He talked Mailer-like and he said, "It's nice to meet you,

0:22:000:22:02

"have you been following my fights with the feminists?

0:22:020:22:05

"Have you been following my fights with the feminists?

0:22:050:22:07

And I said, "Yeah, yeah, I guess..."

0:22:070:22:08

He said, "Do you know what I call them? Know what I call them?

0:22:080:22:11

"I call them woo-woos because they're women who've had the man

0:22:110:22:13

"removed from them, that's why I call them woo-woos.

0:22:130:22:16

And I'm deeply embarrassed cos this is such puerile stuff

0:22:160:22:18

coming from this great writer.

0:22:180:22:20

And I had come prepped, as we do when we meet great writers,

0:22:200:22:22

you know, with, you know, "In The Deer Park, did you mean...?"

0:22:220:22:25

And he was obsessed, frankly in a very puerile way with

0:22:250:22:28

-the attacks on him...

-With the woo-woos.

-With the woo-woos!

0:22:280:22:31

He was obsessed with the woo-woos and he would not let it drop,

0:22:310:22:34

he would not let it drop.

0:22:340:22:35

And, as I say, he was like you want to say, "Elmer, Elmer,

0:22:350:22:38

"save that for the cartoons, right? Tell me...

0:22:380:22:40

"Enough with the kwazy wabbit,

0:22:400:22:41

tell me what it's like just being Elmer Fudd, and he couldn't.

0:22:410:22:45

There is always this sense of, like, to break out be the great man

0:22:450:22:49

you have to some extent leave women and children behind.

0:22:490:22:52

Yes, you know, that's certainly true.

0:22:520:22:54

In my generation among writers we are all good husbands

0:22:540:22:58

and good fathers and proud of it -

0:22:580:23:00

that was our obsession,

0:23:000:23:02

but it also wasn't in the sense that it was natural to our generation,

0:23:020:23:06

and that's how we defined ourselves.

0:23:060:23:08

And there are as many women fed up with guys like us,

0:23:080:23:11

who are unable to be Dionysian adventurers,

0:23:110:23:15

as there are women, like our wives, I hope,

0:23:150:23:18

-who are proud to be associated with us.

-I interviewed Katie...

0:23:180:23:21

-Katie Roiphe.

-..earlier.

-She despises guys like me.

0:23:210:23:24

-I don't think she despises you.

-Maybe not me personally.

0:23:240:23:27

Your name didn't come up in a despising way.

0:23:270:23:29

Generationally she despises those of us

0:23:290:23:32

who have our aprons on and our stir-fry cookbooks out

0:23:320:23:35

and are tweeting about our children and writing these tales,

0:23:350:23:39

and I understand that, I see...

0:23:390:23:40

Like every other gain in human existence, it comes with compensatory losses,

0:23:400:23:45

and I think that just as the great men you are talking about

0:23:450:23:49

had often to censor their own impulses towards

0:23:490:23:53

tenderness and quieter kinds of affection,

0:23:530:23:56

to domesticity, which certainly existed in their lives, but

0:23:560:23:59

they had a very hard time writing about in any persuasive way.

0:23:590:24:03

They had trouble living it, experiencing it in life,

0:24:030:24:05

and as anything we have trouble experiencing we have trouble

0:24:050:24:08

organising as a literary emotion.

0:24:080:24:11

It's not just gender identity that's shifted since these great men were kings,

0:24:130:24:18

the way in which we consume culture

0:24:180:24:20

and the speed at which we do so, have transformed irreversibly.

0:24:200:24:25

Where do you locate greatness on the computer screen?

0:24:250:24:28

The internet has changed our capacity to absorb art

0:24:300:24:33

that isn't immediately stimulating or isn't immediately shocking

0:24:330:24:37

or surprising or winning in some way, that's definitely true,

0:24:370:24:40

and I think that has changed poetry in some way.

0:24:400:24:43

Nick Laird is an award-winning poet,

0:24:430:24:46

and his latest book, Go Giants,

0:24:460:24:49

explores concepts of greatness in art and politics.

0:24:490:24:53

He now lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

0:24:530:24:56

You see, my students don't buy books any more,

0:24:560:24:59

they just read them online, and you go to the poetry sites

0:24:590:25:02

and the poems are categorised by things like

0:25:020:25:05

"pets" or "time" or...

0:25:050:25:08

-one of the categories is "indoor activities".

-"Indoor activities!"

0:25:080:25:11

Yes. So the idea of, like, now, in the way that Napster or Spotify

0:25:110:25:14

destroyed the LP, the idea that a book of poems arrives

0:25:140:25:17

and you read it from cover to cover, from start to finish -

0:25:170:25:20

that's not how poems are being absorbed by certainly my students,

0:25:200:25:24

they're more like 45s now -

0:25:240:25:25

you get your single and it arrives and you like it, and you put it

0:25:250:25:29

on Twitter or whatever it is, then you move on to the next writer

0:25:290:25:32

who's written a poem that in some way is shocking or surprising.

0:25:320:25:35

That's about speed, isn't it? Again...

0:25:350:25:37

-It's our need to have technology disseminate information in some ways.

-Yes.

0:25:370:25:41

Is something lost?

0:25:410:25:42

I guess, something Martin Amis said which I thought was interesting,

0:25:420:25:45

was we were trying to sort of perceive what it was

0:25:450:25:48

about those men that might be specifically different

0:25:480:25:51

-and one thing he said was that they didn't care.

-Yeah.

0:25:510:25:55

They didn't care about the fact that they were, you know, being...

0:25:550:25:59

Either about the way they behaved in their private lives or about the way

0:25:590:26:03

that they wrote or whatever, there was a sort of freedom to it.

0:26:030:26:05

Now, I'm not sure that's entirely true,

0:26:050:26:07

there were probably lots of ways in which they did care but,

0:26:070:26:10

of course, they weren't assaulted by a huge superstructure by which

0:26:100:26:14

-people could tell them what they should care about.

-Right.

-You know?

0:26:140:26:17

And so what difference has that made to people who write,

0:26:170:26:20

people who create art?

0:26:200:26:22

People are infected with doubt in a way that I don't think

0:26:220:26:24

Mailer, Bellow, Updike were.

0:26:240:26:27

They were pretty sure of their place in the world, geopolitically even,

0:26:270:26:31

like, America was the leader in lots of ways,

0:26:310:26:34

there was no sense that, you know, America wasn't the land of the free,

0:26:340:26:37

it wasn't the leader of the free world.

0:26:370:26:39

To be white and male in America at that time was to have won the lottery.

0:26:390:26:42

Certainly there was no way of undermining writers,

0:26:420:26:45

or attacking them, like there is now.

0:26:450:26:47

So, is there a great man left somewhere in our culture?

0:26:590:27:04

Well, the truth is that the veneration of the great man

0:27:040:27:08

was often undemocratic and sometimes misogynistic,

0:27:080:27:11

and that with a new type of thinking,

0:27:110:27:14

with micro-history on the rise

0:27:140:27:15

and art forms that celebrate smallness and transience -

0:27:150:27:19

a Vine is seven seconds long - we have to accept the idea

0:27:190:27:23

that the way forward artistically

0:27:230:27:26

must be away from the old idea of greatness,

0:27:260:27:29

and towards something else which hopefully will also be great,

0:27:290:27:33

but perhaps with a smaller G.

0:27:330:27:36

A great man, Bertolt Brecht,

0:27:470:27:50

once wrote a play about the life of another great man, Galileo,

0:27:500:27:54

at the end of which a character says to Galileo,

0:27:540:27:58

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes."

0:27:580:28:02

And Galileo replies,

0:28:020:28:04

"Happy the land that needs no heroes."

0:28:040:28:07

# Whatever happened to the heroes?

0:28:100:28:15

# Whatever happened to the heroes?

0:28:170:28:21

# No more heroes any more No more heroes any more

0:28:240:28:29

# No more heroes any more

0:28:290:28:33

# No more heroes any more... #

0:28:330:28:36

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