Edward St Aubyn - At Last? The Culture Show

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Patrick Melrose is five years old. It's a hot summer's day

and his father goes to play an old game of theirs

where he lifts up his son and pretends to hold him by the ears,

only this time he changes the rules.

"Please let go!" said Patrick. "Please!"

He felt that he was going to cry,

but he pushed back his sense of desperation.

His arms were exhausted, but if he relaxed them,

he felt that his ears were going to be torn off.

The child is the alter ego

of novelist Edward St Aubyn.

When St Aubyn sat down

to describe the terrible thing that happened to him that day,

he was sweating with fear of what he was about to reveal.

I wrote it without wearing a shirt,

and just with a towel wrapped around my waist

because I poured with sweat so much.

The conflict and the tension of breaking this taboo

was so painful.

'St Aubyn doesn't normally give TV interviews.

'Ever since he conceded the facts of his biography -

'that he was raped by his father as a child,

'that he became a drug addict in his teens

'and suicidal by his 20s -

'he's been understandably wary of interrogation.'

'I'm paranoid and my basic assumption

'is that people are out to get me.'

The Melrose novels begin with an act of appalling incestuous violence

committed by an aristocratic father on his young son.

St Aubyn was five when his father first raped him.

He turned this day and the traumatic formative experiences that followed

into a series of books that critics rate amongst the finest achievements

of contemporary British fiction.

What he did with the grim material of his life

was transform it into exquisitely controlled prose.

He also made it wickedly funny.

This aloof novelist has so closely guarded his privacy,

that hardly anyone knows who he is.

But with his Melrose novels being adapted for the screen

and a new book just out,

he won't be a secret for long.

The novels you're best known for

form a quintet, I guess,

you could call it the Melrose Quintet.

And the core material of those novels

is your life as well, isn't it?

Yes, Patrick is an alter ego

and Eleanor and David are portraits of my mother and father.

I knew that enough people

would recognise the features of my own life and parents.

And then I was asked whether the books were autobiographical

and I felt that, as the whole mission

was to tell the truth,

that it would be rather pointless to crown it with a lie,

and so I said it was.

Although that's caused me a world of woe,

nevertheless, the right decision.

In Never Mind,

there's the extraordinary scene

where Patrick is raped by his father for the first time

and he has a kind of out-of-body experience.

Yes, he is totally unable

to understand what's happening,

and he starts staring at the curtain pole...

over the window in his father's bedroom.

"For a moment, Patrick felt he was up there,

"watching with detachment

"the punishment inflicted by a strange man on a small boy."

"As hard has he could, Patrick concentrated on the curtain pole

"and this time, it lasted longer.

"He was sitting up there,

"his arms folded, leaning back against the wall.

"Then he was back down on the bed again,

"feeling a kind of blankness

"and bearing the weight of not knowing what was happening.

"He could hear his father wheezing

"and the bedhead bumping against the wall.

"From behind the curtains with the green birds,

"he saw a gecko emerge

"and cling motionlessly to the corner of the wall

"beside the open window.

"Patrick lanced himself towards it.

"Tightening his fists and concentrating

"until his concentration was like a telephone wire

"stretched between them,

"Patrick disappeared into the lizard's body."

I mean, it's an extraordinary... process of kind of escaping...

Escaping from... He escapes from himself,

cos what's happening is so terrible to him.

Absolutely.

I think, on the one hand, he forms this sort of magical contract

with the surroundings of the house in France.

He's being protected by this landscape.

It's a massive substitute

for the care that he's not getting from his parents.

He's being looked after by geckos

and tree frogs and hiding places.

And do you remember...

You sat down to write it, what, when you were in your early 30s,

the first volume, Never Mind?

I mean, was that... Was that quite a tough thing to do

if it was made out of such terrible experiences?

Yes, I was actually 28

when I wrote the first chapter of Never Mind.

And I had to lie down,

thinking I was having heart attacks on the ground the whole time.

Every day after it had been accepted by Heinemann,

I... I rang up...

and when the phone was answered, I hung up.

But I'd been planning to say that they should withdraw the book.

I was completely...persuaded

that... That everyone would be disgusted

by what I'd revealed in the book.

And, you know, the shame I felt...

I'd projected the shame I felt onto the world

and thought it would be served back to me.

The events of St Aubyn's extraordinary upbringing

are soon to be turned into a series of films.

The Melrose novels are currently being adapted

by the writer behind the romantic comic novel One Day,

David Nicholls.

-Hi, David.

-Hello, hi.

-How are you?

-I'm good, thank you.

-You found a very balmy spot!

-I know. It's beautiful, isn't it?

Perfect spot.

Throughout the books, David Melrose looms.

And Patrick's a wonderful character

but I think his father, David Melrose,

is one of the great literary monsters,

a man full of self-loathing

and hatred and contempt.

And Patrick's struggle to acquire some kind of understanding

is a strand that runs through all the books, some kind of...

Not forgiveness, but at least comprehension

of what might have led his father to these crimes.

He is a dangerous presence

but a kind of thrilling presence as well.

I remember a conversation between the father, David,

and his friend, his spiteful friend, Nicholas,

about the courtship of Patrick's mother, Eleanor.

Yes, it's another example.

He cooks her a wonderful meal,

and as a test of her love,

puts it on the floor and makes her eat off the floor.

And she does it.

It's shocking and evil, really.

And you can't quite look away.

So do you think we understand,

from the first of the novels in particular,

why David, the father, does what he does?

In the first book, it seems to be pretty much about power.

Erm... A sort of twisted sense

of what a father should be.

He tells... The wisdom... He imparts wisdom to his son,

but it's all twisted and wrong -

never trust anyone, hate women, you know,

it's these terrible words of wisdom.

-Observe everything.

-Observe everything.

So he's doing what a father should do

but with this...terrible morality.

But there's a wonderful moment in the third book

where Patrick, who's on his way to becoming a father himself,

um, has an insight as to his own father's childhood,

er, the cruelty and abuse that he must have experienced.

So it's that old theme of,

you know, the sins of the father being visited on the son,

of it being a legacy,

something that's passed down through the generations.

And Patrick's job is to stop that,

is to stop that legacy

and to be a different kind of father to his own son.

As an adaptor,

looking at these novels,

clearly, the big challenge is

so much of it happens in peoples' heads

and, particularly, in Patrick's head.

How can you cope with that?

Yes, and when you turn a book into a script,

the emphasis is inevitably on what people say and do,

not what they think.

You know, Patrick is often very charming, often extremely polite,

and the voice in his head is vicious...

and spiteful or full of self-loathing

or contempt.

And, um... I don't know if we've quite cracked that yet.

"'Patrick, my dear,'

"he said in a strained and drawling voice,

"slightly delayed by its Atlantic crossing,

"'I'm afraid I have the most awful news for you.

"'Your father died the night before last in his hotel room.

"'I've been quite unable to get hold of either of you or your mother.

"'I believe she's in Chad with Save The Children Fund,

"'but I hardly need to tell you how I feel.

"'I adored your father, as you know.

"'I'm sorry to be the bringer of such bad news,' said George.

"'You're going to need all your courage during this difficult time.'

"'Thanks for calling,' said Patrick.

"'I'll see you tomorrow.' 'Goodbye, my dear.'

"Patrick put down the syringe he had been flushing out

"and sat beside the phone without moving.

"Was it bad news?

"Perhaps he would need all his courage not to dance in the street,

"not to smile too broadly.

"Sunlight poured in through the blurred and caked windowpanes

"of his flat.

"Outside, in Ennismore Gardens,

"the leaves of the plane trees were painfully bright.

"He suddenly leaped out of his chair.

"'You're not going to get away with this!' he muttered vindictively.

"The sleeve of his shirt rolled forward

"and absorbed the trickle of blood on his arm."

By the time he was 16,

St Aubyn's need to numb the effects

of the mental and physical violence inflicted on him as a child

had lead him to heroin

and then a lost decade as a junkie,

hanging out mostly in New York.

In the second novel, Bad News,

it's 16 or 17 years later

and Patrick has gone to collect his father's ashes from New York,

and all he can think about is drugs, really.

He's addicted to drugs, he wants to get drugs,

but it's weirdly a comic novel.

Yes, I think that...

I mean, as a child, it was the landscape and the animals

which were his consolatory system,

but now he's moved on and he's discovered heroin and cocaine.

It isn't obvious

why that should be funny,

but somehow it is.

I suppose a lot of humour depends on distance.

And Patrick's looking at his own life

as a kind of strange farce

from which he's detached by the drugs,

and that's why he takes them.

I mean, the headline about that part of my life

was that heroin did save my life,

you know, because it was a kind of limbo

in which I was not choosing to live

or choosing to kill myself.

It was a holding pattern,

and it was very useful to me at the time.

I think, without it, I would have killed myself.

-Really?

-Mm.

KNOCK AT DOOR

'In the books, his alter ego has a psychoanalyst friend,

'Johnny, in whom he confides,

'much like Teddy's own oldest friend,

'clinical psychologist Oliver James.'

You accompanied me on one of the scenes in Bad News,

where Patrick goes,

in the second novel,

to score in Alphabet City.

-And, um...

-Does he score from... I've forgotten now,

is the character who he scores from called Chilly Willy?

-Chilly Willy was the real name?

-Chilly Willy was the real name, yes.

But what I didn't put in the novel

was YOU coming down with me to Alphabet City.

It really was quite cool what you did, cos we were walking along...

If you remember, we were walking along that dark road

-in Avenue B way, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

In the days when that part of Manhattan

was actually really quite dodgy.

And as we approached some steps,

where there were five or six of the local inhabitants,

and they started to stand up,

as we approached them,

you moved your hand very, very gradually

inside your jacket,

and they were all just...

There was a sort of glinting of knives.

Seriously, I remember that. I really do.

And as you moved your hand in, they ALL sat down.

And I thought, "Holy shit!"

Cos I was trying to think about

what do you do in this situation, you know?

You're about to be sort of attacked by a mob of drug-crazed lunatics.

I just did it intuitively.

I mean, I had a huge advantage over you.

-Can you remember doing that?

-I do remember, yes.

I pretended I was carrying a gun.

I just put my palm to my sweaty armpit.

But because they lived by violence,

they assumed I WAS armed,

and they said, "He's packed"

and they all showed that they weren't going to attack us,

and we just glided through.

But I wasn't really cool.

I was, you know, detached because I was stoned - A -

and, secondly, I had a huge advantage over you,

which is that I quite wanted to die,

whereas you didn't.

-No, I certainly didn't!

-And, er... That gave me the edge

in a situation like that.

How long have you actually known each other?

The first time that I recall Teddy on my radar

was when I went to stay

at his parents' house in the south of France,

where the Melrose books are set.

He was nine, I think, um...

and I was 15,

and I shared a room with him,

and I really could not believe my eyes

when we went to bed

and Teddy was reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And I said, you know, "What is the matter with you?

"What on earth are you doing?"

And he said, "Well, I have to do this.

"I have to read - whatever it was - six or seven items every night

"and my father will test me in the morning."

And I said, "Well, you must be joking!"

I mean, Roger... I knew Roger, of course.

So Roger, who's David, his dad, in the books?

Yes. Yeah, Roger is pretty much...

I think Teddy would say pretty much indistinguishable.

I certainly do remember him being cruel to women.

My mother loathed him.

And I expect he did try to humiliate her,

and it wouldn't have been easy to do

cos she was a pretty tough character.

And what about the most terrible thing?

I mean, what about the fact that he raped his own son?

I mean, did you know about that

before you read the novelized version of it?

Er... Yes!

In fact, that's one illustration

of perhaps the way in which I am Johnny,

in that Patrick discloses it to Johnny.

And I can't remember exactly how it happened

but he then disclosed that he had been sexually abused.

He didn't give me any details,

but he just told me that his father had sexually abused him.

Um... Which was a bit of a sort of, "Oh, right."

Complete sort of gob-smacker.

And I worked in a mental hospital, you know,

but I was still completely gobsmacked.

There are bits of Bad News

where the novel is suddenly full of voices,

full of all these weird voices which are going on in his head,

-although they're quite funny.

-Oh, I mean, I think that,

as so many people who've had a lot of maltreatment

create little bits of themselves,

and I think he did have kind of sub-personalities,

and that's, you know, one step away from becoming schizophrenic

where you completely fragment

and you just become possessed by these...personae.

From a technical point of view,

the interesting question about Teddy

is why he didn't become schizophrenic

and also why he didn't actually kill himself.

He got jolly close to it, but he never actually did.

You say... How do you know he got jolly close to it?

Well, I mean there was one occasion where,

after a party I'd had,

he very deliberately tried to take an overdose.

He came out of the kitchen,

fell down and, you know,

he was obviously... He'd had an overdose.

And I rang the ambulance and went with him in the ambulance.

Basically, he was quite lucky, I think. It was a close-run thing.

'Patrick had greeted the day with the basic question -

'"Can anyone think of a good reason not to kill himself?"'

"Since he lived at the time in a theatrical solitude

"crowded with mad and mocking voices,

"he was not likely to get an affirmative answer.

"Elaborate postponement was the best he could hope for

"and, in the end, the obligation to talk

"proved stronger than the desire to die.

"During the next 20 years,

"the suicidal chatter died down

"to an occasional whisper on a coastal path or in a quiet chemist.

"When it returned in full force,

"it took the form of a grim monologue

"rather than a surreal chorus.

"The comparative simplicity of the most recent assault

"made him realise that he'd only ever been superficially in love

"with easeful death,

"and was much more deeply enthralled by his own personality.

"Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection,

"but in reality,

"nobody took their personality more seriously

"than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions."

It's really clever.

What a clever boy!

In 2005, St Aubyn, seemingly done with writing about his father,

turned his elegant rage on to his mother

and wrote Mother's Milk.

In Mother's Milk,

Patrick realises that his mother has been complicit,

in some ways,

in what his father did to him.

I mean, does that parallel

a confrontation between you and your mother?

Um... Yes, to some extent,

but like everything else in fiction,

it was a little more complicated than that.

I mean, she did go into a decline into dementia

and she did give her money away.

But he comes to the realisation

that his mother was a kind of collaborator,

that she was in this kind of sadomasochistic marriage with David

and that he was a toy within it,

and that she wasn't, you know,

planning to hand over her child to a paedophile

but, in fact, she tolerated it.

And her ability to split off

one part of her self from another

meant that she knew,

but was able to deny that she knew.

And she did ask me to help her commit suicide,

which is...

you know, an annoying request.

In the fifth and final book in St Aubyn's Melrose series,

Patrick buries his mother,

welcoming her death as "the best thing to happen to me since...

"Well, since my father's death."

So is that it for St Aubyn's alter ego?

He's just written a new book.

Patrick Melrose isn't in it.

So you've written a new novel, Lost For Words,

which seems a very different book

from all the other ones you've written.

Yes, well, it's a satire about a literary prize.

What amazes me is no-one's written a satire

about a literary prize before.

It's just begging to be satirized!

Time now to find out

who's won the literary world's most prestigious prize for fiction.

The authors on the Man Booker shortlist

have been wined and dined...

St Aubyn knows about the world of literary awards.

In 2006, he was tipped to win the Booker Prize for Mother's Milk.

It was the first time in nearly 20 years of writing

that he came close to major public recognition for his work.

But he didn't win.

I felt sick. I felt like someone had punched me.

I could not believe it.

I think to have written a book THAT good

and to be on a shortlist for a prize and not to win it,

I mean, Jesus Christ, so unfair.

To me, it was so unfair.

And you can probably tell, even as we're talking about it,

the injustice of it still rankles with me, you know.

I feel enraged about it, even now.

-Why do you think he didn't win?

-Well, I...

You know, I can't tell you that. It's unfathomable.

You know, I have pressed his books on people,

and I have been told by people who are voracious readers,

"Oh, no, "I'm not reading that. It's not my kind of thing at all."

And that may be because they perceive it to be posh.

But, you know, more fool them!

It's as daft as saying,

"I'm not going to read a book

"because there are working-class people in it!"

I mean, to me, it's just stupid.

I mean, his new novel, Lost For Words,

you know, is that sort of revenge, do you think,

for what happened to him?

There will be reviewers who will say this is sour grapes.

Um, but, you know,

they can all sod off, really!

At bottom, this is quite an important subject.

Prizes - what do they mean?

How have they skewed our literary culture?

Um...

And what this book, Lost For Words, is saying, I think,

is that on the one hand, prizes have never mattered more.

You know, if you don't win a prize

your publisher is, you know,

likely to pay you very little or to drop you from their list.

But in another way,

prizes matter not a jot.

And anyone who has won a prize

knows that in their heart.

Only posterity matters.

That's all that counts.

And, um...I think that that's, you know,

the quite serious point that this rather silly book makes.

"One thing about choosing the best novel of the year

"had become absolutely clear to Malcolm -

"Jo must be stopped at any cost.

"Her stranglehold over the shortlist was truly scandalous.

"He reinvigorated his alliance with Penny on the phone

"later that evening.

"She felt the same way about Jo's growing power

"and they agreed that, after reading her choices,

"they would compare notes over dinner

"and see which of her novels most deserved to be attacked."

THEY LAUGH

So what you do is you line them up and then you shoot them down.

And, you know, there are two of you doing the shooting,

so much the better.

That's how to get your way.

-I'm sure you've done that in your time!

-No...

THEY LAUGH

I mean, he's done, in the Melrose novels,

his dark materials.

And without that... I mean, is it as good?

Um...it's different.

My strong feeling is that there will be some critics

who dislike the novel.

-They will miss Patrick.

-Yes.

But I think he just thinks,

"Well, I'll do something completely different

"and make myself feel a bit better

"about the fact I didn't win the Booker Prize in the process."

And I say good for him.

Is your experience behind the satire?

I... Listen, I wrote a book using material,

as I've generally done,

which was just lying around and close to hand.

But I think...

I don't know that it's, uh...

That it's just about the Booker Prize.

It's also about the mentality of comparison,

of constant comparison,

which steals people's lives away,

endlessly wondering whether they are better or worse than someone else,

or richer or poorer

or stupider or cleverer.

And the prize, the prize is the climax of that mentality.

It's all about comparing and excluding.

And making lots of people unhappy

and then making one person provisionally happy,

until they have to spend the next two years being interviewed.

JOHN LAUGHS

I mean, at a deeper level, I think I was questioning

a kind of psychological contract

under which I had written all my previous books.

When I started Never Mind,

I made a deal with myself

that I would either finish a novel and get it published or kill myself.

I did finish Never Mind

and it did get published,

so I thought, "Well, that worked!"

THEY LAUGH

I better continue to work under the...

You know, the same employment terms.

And I did, and it always made it very grim and desperate -

"If I don't write, I'll go mad,

"if I go mad, I'll have to kill myself", and so forth.

And that produced a lot of books, but they were very unpleasant,

they were very difficult to write,

they were a grim obligation rather than a pleasure.

So with Lost For Words, I thought...

The question I was asking is

is it possible to enjoy writing a book

which other people enjoy reading?

And that was a very transgressive, daring thought.

I was throwing the old contract on the fire

and seeing if I could still write.

Of course, one of the ironies of writing this satirical novel

is that prize committees

will sit around reading it amongst other novels

and working out if they kind of dare...

choose it as one of the up-and-coming shortlists.

I think it's pretty bulletproof, really.

THEY LAUGH

I don't think it's going to be chosen by anyone, no.

So we've got through it, Teddy -

without too much suffering?

I can't feel anything any more, John,

so I can't really comment.

# Unsentimental

# Driving around

# Sure of myself

# Sure of it now

# You stand this close to me

# Like the future was supposed to be

# In the aisles of the grocery

# In the blocks uptown

# I remember

# Remember it well

# And if I'd forgotten

# Could you tell?

# In the shadow of your first attack

# I was questioning and looking back

# You were standing on another track

# Like a real aristocrat. #