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SPEECH IS MUTED | 0:00:02 | 0:00:05 | |
To the occasional bewilderment of critics and librarians, | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
the books of Julian Barnes are hard to categorise. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:30 | |
Works such as Flaubert's Parrot, | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
and Arthur and George combine fiction, literary biography, | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
history and essays, within the outward form of a novel. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:42 | |
Born in Leicester in 1946, Barnes was one of the quieter members | 0:00:42 | 0:00:46 | |
of a literary pack that included his close friend | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
Martin Amis, a noisy literary celebrity, | 0:00:49 | 0:00:52 | |
who brought some of the din onto Barnes when, in 1995, | 0:00:52 | 0:00:56 | |
Amis sacked his agent, Pat Kavanagh, Barnes's wife, | 0:00:56 | 0:00:59 | |
causing a much-publicised breach between the men. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
In 2008, Barnes published Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a reflection on | 0:01:03 | 0:01:08 | |
mortality and mourning, which proved to be cruelly prophetic, when later | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
that year, Pat became suddenly ill and died rapidly from cancer. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:17 | |
It was small consolation that these worst personal times were followed | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
by some of his best professionally, as he won the 2011 Man Booker Prize | 0:01:20 | 0:01:26 | |
for The Sense of an Ending, a novel about the treachery of memory. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:30 | |
His most recent book, Levels of Life, | 0:01:30 | 0:01:32 | |
is a memoir of bereavement, although one that reflects | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
the death of his wife through a typically-Barnesian melange | 0:01:35 | 0:01:39 | |
of biography, fiction and, finally, autobiography | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
I was reading some newspaper interviews from the 1980s, | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
when your first books came out, and you said then | 0:01:47 | 0:01:49 | |
that you wrote seven days a week, including Christmas Day. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:53 | |
Did that, and does that, remain the case? | 0:01:53 | 0:01:56 | |
I certainly like working on Christmas Day, New Year's Day. | 0:01:56 | 0:02:00 | |
I love working on the days when other people go to work. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:04 | |
I think the truth now would be five to six days a week, erm, | 0:02:05 | 0:02:11 | |
and Christmas Day included, yes. | 0:02:11 | 0:02:13 | |
I've more than once started a book on Christmas Day... | 0:02:13 | 0:02:17 | |
just as a way of, sort of, getting through it. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:19 | |
And what's the significance of that? | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
That it's... I mean, you'd be greatly helped in that by not | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
having had children. But it's doing what? | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
It's doing what other people are not doing on that day? | 0:02:28 | 0:02:30 | |
Yes, that's right. It feels sort of mildly transgressive, I suppose. | 0:02:30 | 0:02:35 | |
I get a pleasure of marching to a different drum... | 0:02:35 | 0:02:39 | |
..which is what writers and artists do. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:43 | |
I take the craft, as well as the art, deeply seriously. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:47 | |
And it always has been and remains a great pleasure, as well. | 0:02:47 | 0:02:53 | |
I'm often mystified when writers say, "Oh, writing's boring" | 0:02:53 | 0:02:58 | |
or "I have to listen to music while I write" and stuff like that. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:03 | |
For me it's hard work, but an intense pleasure. | 0:03:03 | 0:03:06 | |
I won't say monastic, | 0:03:06 | 0:03:08 | |
because you're very strict on the misuse of words, but it is... | 0:03:08 | 0:03:12 | |
it's about discipline, it's about taking literature seriously, in the | 0:03:12 | 0:03:17 | |
same way that a monk would take their religious practice seriously? | 0:03:17 | 0:03:21 | |
Yes, that's the great Flaubertian comparison. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
And also you are, you are self-employed, you have | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
to make your own time zones, you have to make your own discipline. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:34 | |
And I've often, in the past, thought about a particular book, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:40 | |
"This will be a 12-month book" or an 18-month book or a two-year book. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:45 | |
You have a sense of how long it takes for a book to be alive in your head. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:52 | |
And I think that came out of the somewhat exhausting | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
and depressing experience of my first novel, which took me | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
about seven or eight years to write. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
And by the time it was ready for submission, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:04 | |
I was well passed any, sort of, state of interest in it. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:08 | |
There's a moment in a Paris Review interview with you | 0:04:08 | 0:04:10 | |
where the interview says, "Surely the only pleasure in writing | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
"is having done it, not doing it?" And you disagree on that. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:17 | |
You actively enjoy the process of writing? | 0:04:17 | 0:04:19 | |
Yes, I love... I think the most enjoyable part | 0:04:19 | 0:04:23 | |
is when you're doing a first draft and it's really flowing and you fool | 0:04:23 | 0:04:29 | |
yourself into thinking that this is very, very close to the final draft. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
But that's always a mistake. | 0:04:32 | 0:04:35 | |
And then the real work starts, because most writing is re-writing. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
"Prose is like hair. It shines with combing", as Flaubert said. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:46 | |
But it's more than just making the hair shine, it's often, | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
the whole structure has to be reinvented as you go along | 0:04:48 | 0:04:52 | |
or the bone structure of it develops as you go along. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
For instance, you know, the passage that probably gets most | 0:04:57 | 0:05:02 | |
work in any novel is the first page, but very often, the first page | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
is nowhere near the first page that you write. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
I think I've only once or twice started at the beginning of a book. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:13 | |
I've only once or twice KNOWN that this was the beginning of the book. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:19 | |
But talking a couple years after you won the Man Booker Prize | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
for The Sense of an Ending - for many writers it brings | 0:05:22 | 0:05:24 | |
large sales, public invitations, a validation of their talent. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
You pretty much had those, so has it had any psychological | 0:05:27 | 0:05:30 | |
or practical effects? | 0:05:30 | 0:05:33 | |
It's sold a large number of copies of that book | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
and it's reanimated my back list, to a certain extent. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:39 | |
And I think any Booker Prize novel automatically sells into, | 0:05:39 | 0:05:46 | |
you know, a lot of countries. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
I was first shortlisted for Flaubert's Parrot in 1984 | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
and, had I won, then, maybe it would have doubled my sales | 0:05:51 | 0:05:56 | |
from 3,000 to 6,000. | 0:05:56 | 0:05:58 | |
But, it is, apart from anything else, an extraordinary marketing exercise. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:05 | |
In terms of affecting what I write next, no, it hasn't. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:10 | |
There's also relief, because you refer to this on the night | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
that had you not won on that occasion, | 0:06:13 | 0:06:15 | |
you would've gone into the dreaded bridesmaid category, | 0:06:15 | 0:06:19 | |
famously occupied by the late Beryl Bainbridge, | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
in which you become famous for not having won it? | 0:06:21 | 0:06:24 | |
Yes, that's right. | 0:06:24 | 0:06:26 | |
It is a, sort of, slightly irritating burden. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
But the thing is that, when you don't win - apart from | 0:06:29 | 0:06:33 | |
the first time, when you think it's all your own personal failure - | 0:06:33 | 0:06:37 | |
I found that the next two times I didn't win, | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
I felt I was letting down my publishers, | 0:06:41 | 0:06:43 | |
because they invest a lot in it - not financially, but, sort of, | 0:06:43 | 0:06:48 | |
psychologically - | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
and you feel, "Oh, dear, I've made them all unhappy." | 0:06:50 | 0:06:54 | |
Julian Barnes, for The Sense Of An Ending. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
And so, the relief of winning with The Sense Of An Ending | 0:06:57 | 0:07:03 | |
was as much so that I could get down off the rostrum | 0:07:03 | 0:07:08 | |
and face my publishers, who were, very sweetly, mostly in tears. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
So I knew I'd done...I'd done good. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:14 | |
At the time we're speaking, there have been, I think, | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
21 books by Julian Barnes - 15 fiction, six non-fiction - | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
plus four crime novels, under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
Clearly, some books come about through circumstance, | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
but if we'd been talking to you in the '80s, | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
would you have had a rough sense of how you wanted | 0:07:29 | 0:07:34 | |
the "Also by Julian-Barnes..." page to look? | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
Erm... | 0:07:37 | 0:07:39 | |
I think I would've wanted it to look as if I was consistently | 0:07:41 | 0:07:45 | |
producing through the years and that my main interest was fiction. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:52 | |
I think I would be... | 0:07:56 | 0:07:58 | |
Had I been given a preview of what that page looks like now, | 0:07:58 | 0:08:02 | |
I would've thought, "Well, that's a relief." | 0:08:02 | 0:08:05 | |
And there are writers - William Boyd, Paul Theroux - | 0:08:05 | 0:08:09 | |
who will, certainly in an interview, will say, | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
"Well, my next novel will be the Japanese one | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
"and then the one after that is the Hawaiian one | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
"and then there's the Jeffrey Boycott novel or whatever." | 0:08:17 | 0:08:21 | |
Are you one of those writers? | 0:08:21 | 0:08:23 | |
For a long time, I certainly had a notion of what the next one would be | 0:08:24 | 0:08:30 | |
and, of course, given that there used to be nine months to a year between | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
manuscript going in and it being published, then, you know, | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
I wasn't going to idle away that time, so I would've started something | 0:08:39 | 0:08:43 | |
so when the interviewer said, "What's your next book about?" | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
I'd give a rough idea of the area, rather than any details. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:50 | |
I mean, at the moment, I'm not sure what my next book will be. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
I know there will be one, but I'm just, sort of, looking around - | 0:08:55 | 0:09:01 | |
mooching. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:02 | |
So, when you're not writing a book, do you always write something? | 0:09:02 | 0:09:06 | |
Do you write a diary or journalism or something? | 0:09:06 | 0:09:08 | |
Yes, I get itchy if I haven't got work of some sort on | 0:09:08 | 0:09:14 | |
and I still do journalism, I like doing journalism. | 0:09:14 | 0:09:18 | |
I like the...discipline of it, | 0:09:18 | 0:09:22 | |
which is a completely different discipline to that of fiction. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
And I like getting a response to it. You know, you write the piece, | 0:09:26 | 0:09:29 | |
you send it in and then, a week later or a month later, | 0:09:29 | 0:09:33 | |
someone tells you what they think about it, | 0:09:33 | 0:09:35 | |
whereas by the time you get reactions to a novel, | 0:09:35 | 0:09:39 | |
you're often thinking about something completely different. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:43 | |
And the Leicester Mercury put your Man Booker victory | 0:09:43 | 0:09:46 | |
on the front page, rather touchingly. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:48 | |
This suggests you used to identify quite strongly | 0:09:48 | 0:09:51 | |
-with Leicester and Leicester with you? -Yes, I was born in Leicester | 0:09:51 | 0:09:55 | |
and I left when I was, something like, four weeks old. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
And I grew up the first ten years of my life in Acton, in West London, | 0:09:58 | 0:10:04 | |
but I'm very touched when the Leicester Mercury | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
count me as among the favoured sons of the city - | 0:10:07 | 0:10:11 | |
me and Sue Townsend, Colin Wilson, Joe Orton, CP Snow, | 0:10:11 | 0:10:18 | |
can you do any more? | 0:10:18 | 0:10:20 | |
Gary Lineker and Engelbert Humperdinck. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:23 | |
That's an important one that slipped my memory. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
Writers are... They're given bits of material by circumstance. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:30 | |
France was one of yours. | 0:10:30 | 0:10:34 | |
Neatly for biographers, both of your parents were French teachers? | 0:10:34 | 0:10:38 | |
Yes, that's right. And because of that, | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
I was taken to France as a 12-13 year-old for the first time | 0:10:41 | 0:10:47 | |
and it was the first foreign country I knew and the only foreign country | 0:10:47 | 0:10:51 | |
I knew until I was about 18 or 19, I think. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
So it was... it was my primary exotic | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
and it's had a huge formative influence on me. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
And, you know, had they been Italian teachers, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
I would've written Dante's Dachshund or something like that. Who can tell? | 0:11:05 | 0:11:10 | |
And as parents were, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
did they switch off the school manner or were they strict? | 0:11:12 | 0:11:17 | |
No, I don't think they were strict, but they certainly weren't lax. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:21 | |
When I was writing a book called Nothing To Be Frightened Of, | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
which is about death and family and memory, | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
all I could remember was my mother would occasionally say things like, | 0:11:27 | 0:11:31 | |
"You should never wear brown shoes with a blue suit" | 0:11:31 | 0:11:34 | |
and I thought, "Oh, I must remember that for when I get a suit." | 0:11:34 | 0:11:39 | |
Doesn't mean we weren't taught things. It means that | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
everything was in that very English way - it was implicit and osmotic. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:46 | |
You just... It seeped into you what you should and shouldn't do, somehow. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:52 | |
My reading of Nothing To Be Frightened Of, | 0:11:52 | 0:11:54 | |
the sections about your parents, | 0:11:54 | 0:11:56 | |
was that you were closer to your father than your mother? | 0:11:56 | 0:11:58 | |
Yes, that's quite correct. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:00 | |
I think, I think I was equally close to both of them | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
and probably closer to my mother in very young childhood. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:07 | |
And then, when I reached the age of sentience | 0:12:07 | 0:12:12 | |
and intellection, I think I felt closer to my father. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:18 | |
My mother was the more domineering of the two, | 0:12:20 | 0:12:22 | |
my father was more, probably more liberal, | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
more tolerant, both politically and in terms of behaviour. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:30 | |
The Frenchness you inherited, or the interest in France, | 0:12:30 | 0:12:34 | |
did you feel an immediate affinity with France and French | 0:12:34 | 0:12:38 | |
or was it just like Chelsea Clinton having to like politics? | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:12:41 | 0:12:43 | |
It wasn't immediate, no. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:46 | |
I remember the first morning I woke up in France, having had | 0:12:46 | 0:12:51 | |
a, sort of, bizarre dinner before, in which they put sort of vermicelli | 0:12:51 | 0:12:54 | |
in soup and stuff like that and being very anxious about food, | 0:12:54 | 0:12:59 | |
and my father sent me across the road to get the local paper | 0:12:59 | 0:13:04 | |
and I remember being terrified of, you know, axe murderers | 0:13:04 | 0:13:09 | |
or throat-slitters and I remember repeating 15 times | 0:13:09 | 0:13:15 | |
the words for "Give me the newspaper, please" or something like that. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
And I felt a tremendous sense of achievement, having done it | 0:13:19 | 0:13:23 | |
and paid for it and brought it back | 0:13:23 | 0:13:24 | |
and my father took it completely in his stride. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:27 | |
So, I think I was a highly-anxious child | 0:13:27 | 0:13:29 | |
and, I think, my first year, | 0:13:29 | 0:13:33 | |
the first time I went to France, | 0:13:33 | 0:13:35 | |
I was just baffled by the strangeness of it all. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:38 | |
But I think that was very good for me and very useful to me. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
I mean, it's lamentable that fewer people are studying | 0:13:44 | 0:13:49 | |
modern languages nowadays. They say, "Oh, well, why do we need to, | 0:13:49 | 0:13:54 | |
"because everyone else speaks English?" | 0:13:54 | 0:13:58 | |
You need to for deeper reasons than merely ordering your breakfast | 0:13:59 | 0:14:05 | |
in a hotel. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:06 | |
You need to, in order to feel what otherness is | 0:14:07 | 0:14:11 | |
and in order to look at your country from the outside. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
You are a, forgive my pronunciation, | 0:14:15 | 0:14:17 | |
Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France | 0:14:17 | 0:14:23 | |
and not even an OBE in England. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:25 | |
That could reveal your attitude to awards or to nationality or both. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:29 | |
Some people conclude from this that you do... | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
You define yourself as a European. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
I would define myself as English first, European second | 0:14:38 | 0:14:42 | |
and British third. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:43 | |
I think that...in terms of... | 0:14:46 | 0:14:51 | |
what I've written and what I like reading, | 0:14:51 | 0:14:56 | |
my influences are certainly European, rather than American, | 0:14:56 | 0:15:01 | |
though there are many American writers that I admire. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:05 | |
I feel myself part of a Continental culture continent, including Britain. | 0:15:05 | 0:15:13 | |
Because of genetics and psychology, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
we're encouraged to be aware of what we may inherit from our parents. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
Do you have those moments of thinking I got that from him, | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
I got that from her? | 0:15:24 | 0:15:26 | |
Well, even at this age, I, sort of, don't like to think | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
I got anything from my mother, which is probably rather, um, | 0:15:31 | 0:15:35 | |
savagely punitive of me. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:37 | |
I think, in temperament, I think | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
my temperament is very close to my father's. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:42 | |
I think I'm fairly peaceable, but beyond a certain point, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:48 | |
I won't be pushed. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
And, I think, a cast of mind, which has a, sort of, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:59 | |
an ironic slant to it, is similar, yes. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:03 | |
And the fact that language matters to you and speech | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
and whether people use who or whom and solipsism in the newspapers, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:11 | |
is that inherited from your father? | 0:16:11 | 0:16:14 | |
No, I don't think so. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
I can't remember my father ever correcting me, | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
but don't make me out to be more of a pedant than I am. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:23 | |
You are a bit of a pedant, though? | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
Well, most words mean specific things and, so, when I see... | 0:16:26 | 0:16:34 | |
And certain words are lost, you know. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:36 | |
For example, I bridle when the word decimate is used to mean massacre, | 0:16:36 | 0:16:42 | |
as it routinely is, whereas, in fact, it comes from the old | 0:16:42 | 0:16:46 | |
Roman legionnaire's punishment, which is to kill one in ten. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:51 | |
I mean, I was a lexicographer after I left university | 0:16:51 | 0:16:56 | |
and I tend to look at language with that historical perspective, | 0:16:56 | 0:17:02 | |
but because I'm an ex-lexicographer, I always think of language | 0:17:02 | 0:17:05 | |
as being in motion. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
This has never been a golden age of language. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:11 | |
I mean the, sort of, | 0:17:11 | 0:17:12 | |
the, sort of, linguistic pedants who you are slightly trying | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
to cast me as one of, the, sort of, assumption behind what they say | 0:17:15 | 0:17:21 | |
is that there was this perfect time, at some point. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
Perhaps it was when Johnson wrote, | 0:17:25 | 0:17:27 | |
perhaps it was when Shakespeare wrote, | 0:17:27 | 0:17:29 | |
when words and objects matched. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:31 | |
That was never the case | 0:17:31 | 0:17:33 | |
and the English language has always been an impure | 0:17:33 | 0:17:38 | |
and mongrelised language and the better for it, it seems to me. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:43 | |
In Metroland, published in 1980, | 0:17:43 | 0:17:45 | |
the central characters are two boys, Christopher and Toni. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
Toni with an 'I'. | 0:17:48 | 0:17:49 | |
Travelling to school on the Metropolitan line, | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
entranced, among other things, by French language and culture. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:55 | |
Writers dislike admitting that books are autobiographical, | 0:17:55 | 0:17:59 | |
but that one was clearly, at least, partly so. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:03 | |
Oh, yes. Especially in the first section. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:05 | |
Yes, I commuted for I think about an hour and five minutes | 0:18:05 | 0:18:08 | |
in each direction on three different London Underground lines. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:12 | |
The first section is very closely autobiographical, | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
particularly in spirit, | 0:18:15 | 0:18:17 | |
though I think I made the boys a bit, sort of, cleverer | 0:18:17 | 0:18:22 | |
than I and my friend, who amazingly was called Toni with an 'I', were. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:29 | |
And then, I think, as the book goes on, | 0:18:30 | 0:18:33 | |
I learned to exercise the imagination and think up, | 0:18:33 | 0:18:37 | |
you know, how my life might have gone differently. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
But, yes, I grew up in circumstances very similar | 0:18:40 | 0:18:43 | |
to those of Christopher in part one of Metroland. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
I'm fascinated that you changed your name, but kept his. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:51 | |
Why was that? | 0:18:51 | 0:18:53 | |
I don't know, I can't answer that, really. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
Maybe I wanted to tease him. | 0:18:56 | 0:18:58 | |
I don't think he liked the book. | 0:18:58 | 0:19:00 | |
Some people like to see themselves in books | 0:19:00 | 0:19:03 | |
when they're not really there. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
And others... | 0:19:05 | 0:19:07 | |
..if they know they're in it, | 0:19:10 | 0:19:11 | |
they have slightly mixed feelings about it, | 0:19:11 | 0:19:13 | |
so there's no pleasing some. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
On the other hand, there are people, like my brother. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:21 | |
My brother is three years older than me | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
and he's an ancient philosopher, in both senses of the words. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:30 | |
He's Jonathan? | 0:19:30 | 0:19:31 | |
He's Jonathan. He of Aristotle and the Pre-Socratics. | 0:19:31 | 0:19:34 | |
And when I was writing Nothing To Be Frightened Of, | 0:19:34 | 0:19:38 | |
which is the closest to a family memoir I've come, | 0:19:38 | 0:19:42 | |
I e-mailed him and I said, | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
"Look, I am writing stuff about us growing up, our parents and so on. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:52 | |
"I might have a lot of questions." | 0:19:52 | 0:19:54 | |
And he e-mailed back and said, "That's fine. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:58 | |
"And by the way, just to get this clear," he said, | 0:19:58 | 0:20:03 | |
"one - if your memory conflicts with mine, | 0:20:03 | 0:20:06 | |
"go with yours, because it's probably better than mine, | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
"and the second thing is, I don't mind anything that you say about me." | 0:20:09 | 0:20:14 | |
Which I thought was astonishingly generous. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
Philosophical, indeed. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:19 | |
I mean, I thought when I was writing the book, my memories are pretty | 0:20:19 | 0:20:24 | |
good on the whole and he was and is much more suspicious of memory. | 0:20:24 | 0:20:32 | |
He thinks of memory as something much closer to the imagination. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
He thinks that most memories are unreliable and probably false, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:41 | |
unless they're corroborated. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:43 | |
Which also comes in in The Sense of an Ending. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:46 | |
Yes, indeed, | 0:20:46 | 0:20:47 | |
and over the years, since I had that first exchange with him, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:52 | |
I think I've come round more and more to his point of view | 0:20:52 | 0:20:56 | |
and I distrust my memories more and more | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
and, I think, increasingly, that the memories that we have | 0:20:59 | 0:21:06 | |
from way back are not... | 0:21:06 | 0:21:09 | |
Their primary function isn't necessarily to be representations | 0:21:09 | 0:21:14 | |
of the truth, as it was, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:16 | |
but to be things that are useful or necessary to us, | 0:21:16 | 0:21:22 | |
in order to continue with our lives. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
MUSIC: "Double Bass Duo" by Moondog | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
'How often do we tell our own life story? | 0:21:30 | 0:21:33 | |
'How often do we adjust,' | 0:21:33 | 0:21:34 | |
embellish, make sly cuts? | 0:21:34 | 0:21:38 | |
And the longer life goes on, | 0:21:38 | 0:21:39 | |
the fewer are those around to challenge our account, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
to remind us that our life is not our life, | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
'merely the story we have told about our life.' | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
Told to others, but, mainly, to ourselves. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:55 | |
You also write in Nothing To Be Frightened Of | 0:21:58 | 0:22:01 | |
that you stopped believing in God in adolescence, | 0:22:01 | 0:22:05 | |
so that your dead grandparents would not be able to see you masturbating. | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
That wasn't, that wasn't... | 0:22:11 | 0:22:12 | |
That was one of several reasons, Mark, I have to tell you. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:15 | |
It wasn't just about wanking. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:17 | |
It was also about the usual reasons why you stop believing in God. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:22 | |
I mean, I didn't believe very much in God. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
I wasn't brought up... | 0:22:25 | 0:22:26 | |
My parents never took us to church as boys, I was never christened. | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
So God came into it, really, only when I went to school and there | 0:22:30 | 0:22:34 | |
were morning prayers and hymns being sung, and that, sort of, stuff. | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
But, yes, one of the arguments was that it would be grotesque | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
if my dead grandparents could actually see me masturbating. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:46 | |
I think that's quite a profound argument against God | 0:22:46 | 0:22:48 | |
and the afterlife. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:50 | |
But then, as I go on to say, later on in the book, | 0:22:50 | 0:22:52 | |
I think, of course, this presupposes | 0:22:52 | 0:22:56 | |
that my grandparents would disapprove, you know. | 0:22:56 | 0:22:59 | |
Perhaps my dead grandfather, up there in the empyrean, | 0:22:59 | 0:23:04 | |
was saying, "You know, go on, lad, have one for me. I can't any more." | 0:23:04 | 0:23:08 | |
I'm sure my grandmother would have been shocked. But still. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:10 | |
MARK CHUCKLES | 0:23:10 | 0:23:12 | |
You got into Oxford University, flitted around a bit. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:14 | |
It was French and Russian, then Philosophy and then French again. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:19 | |
Yeah, I made a complete mess of it. | 0:23:19 | 0:23:21 | |
I left my school, which was in Blackfriars in the centre of London, | 0:23:21 | 0:23:25 | |
for university, educationally and intellectually | 0:23:25 | 0:23:32 | |
of a reasonable maturity, | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
but socially and emotionally immature, for my age. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:39 | |
And I got in on a scholarship to read French | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
and Russian was my second language. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
And then, after a couple of terms I thought, you know, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:48 | |
this isn't really... | 0:23:48 | 0:23:49 | |
I'm just carrying on doing what I did at school | 0:23:49 | 0:23:51 | |
and I was a bit bored. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:53 | |
So I changed to Philosophy and Psychology, and, because I thought, | 0:23:53 | 0:23:57 | |
you know, these are, sort of, these are subjects which really grasp | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
what the world's all about and I will learn, I will learn how to | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
think and then I will also learn how the human being operates internally. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:09 | |
But the Psychology, which is experimental, animal psychology, | 0:24:11 | 0:24:16 | |
consisted of cutting up earthworms and stuff like that. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
And the Philosophy was just very hard for me to understand. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
I didn't have that cast of mind that my brother did. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:25 | |
So after two terms, I gave that up, | 0:24:25 | 0:24:28 | |
with my tail between my legs, and I slunk back to French. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:32 | |
Were you unhappy there? | 0:24:32 | 0:24:34 | |
Yeah, I probably was unhappy, yes. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
I felt I... I felt I didn't fit in to... | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
I didn't know where I fitted into the world. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:43 | |
And it took me a while to learn where I did. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:48 | |
I fit into the world now as a writer. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:53 | |
And I'm more able to speak in consecutive sentences, | 0:24:53 | 0:24:58 | |
which I couldn't. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
But you don't, you know, you don't become a writer by an easy process. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:06 | |
So it took me some years before I felt | 0:25:06 | 0:25:13 | |
the beginnings of being at ease in the world, yes. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
And then I came back and I read French and I got a second | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
and I was, you know, unqualified for anything, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:23 | |
but assumed I'd get a job, in the way that people did then. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:25 | |
I saw an advertisement in the TLS, I think, for an assistant editor, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:31 | |
editorial assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:34 | |
And I applied for that and got it, | 0:25:34 | 0:25:36 | |
which meant that I stayed on in Oxford for three years afterwards, | 0:25:36 | 0:25:41 | |
which was rather like, you know, | 0:25:41 | 0:25:43 | |
sitting in the bathwater as it gradually cools down, | 0:25:43 | 0:25:45 | |
because I was no longer, sort of, part of the university. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
Although from outside, it always seems, kind of, a glamorous job | 0:25:48 | 0:25:51 | |
or, at least, an interesting one to have had. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:53 | |
I think a lot of jobs are interesting to have had, yes. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
I think that's the way of putting it. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:59 | |
It was only words from 1880 onwards that I was dealing with | 0:25:59 | 0:26:02 | |
and it was only in the letters B to about G. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:06 | |
I was put in charge of sports | 0:26:07 | 0:26:11 | |
and dirty words, on the grounds that I was... | 0:26:11 | 0:26:14 | |
There were quite a lot of dons' wives employed | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
and, obviously, they couldn't give them to them, | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
so, yeah, I had some experience at the muckier end of lexicography. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:25 | |
You started to become a barrister, | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
but did you genuinely intend to practise law or were you hoping | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
something would come along to distract you? | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
I think I went with mixed motives. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:37 | |
I thought on the basis of this one job I'd had as a lexicographer | 0:26:39 | 0:26:44 | |
that all jobs were equally boring, so I may as well get one that | 0:26:44 | 0:26:49 | |
paid more and took me to London. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:52 | |
I was totally unequipped, then, to stand on my feet and argue a case, | 0:26:52 | 0:26:57 | |
I could probably do it now a bit better. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
And what was also apparent was that I started writing book reviews | 0:27:00 | 0:27:04 | |
about this time and I realised that, you know, doing a fiction | 0:27:04 | 0:27:10 | |
round-up for the Oxford Mail, | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
reviewing five novels and getting four guineas for it | 0:27:13 | 0:27:17 | |
was going to give me much more satisfaction than standing up | 0:27:17 | 0:27:23 | |
in court and defending someone on a charge of petty theft or something. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:29 | |
But you never went professionally into court? | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
I never went professionally into court. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:34 | |
I was a jobbing litterateur around London. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:37 | |
New Statesman - that was a significant period. | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
You met many people there, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:42 | |
Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:44 | |
Some people have described them, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:46 | |
then and now, as, you know, as a literary mafia. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
JULIAN CHUCKLES | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
I don't think it was much of a mafia. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
There is a suggestion, partly because, sort of, pieces written | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
by Clive James in both non-fiction and fiction, | 0:27:56 | 0:27:59 | |
that it was tremendously rhetorically competitive, | 0:27:59 | 0:28:02 | |
that you were all sitting round, trying to come up with the smartest, | 0:28:02 | 0:28:06 | |
a smarter remark than the person before you. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
Was it like that? | 0:28:09 | 0:28:11 | |
Yes, I found it rather...daunting | 0:28:11 | 0:28:17 | |
when I would first go along | 0:28:17 | 0:28:18 | |
to literary lunches with people like Clive James, Martin Amis, | 0:28:18 | 0:28:26 | |
Christopher Hitchens - | 0:28:26 | 0:28:28 | |
all of whom were extraordinarily good talkers | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
and competitive in their talking, yes. | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
I gradually got my confidence, I think, | 0:28:35 | 0:28:38 | |
and interjected a few things, but, yes, it was very... | 0:28:38 | 0:28:43 | |
There was a lot of dashing wordsmithery going on. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:47 | |
And in terms of literary confidence, | 0:28:47 | 0:28:49 | |
was it a complication that Martin Amis, | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
he was, literally, born to the literary world, wasn't he? | 0:28:52 | 0:28:56 | |
Yes, he was, and as a young man, | 0:28:56 | 0:28:59 | |
he had incredible literary swagger to him. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
I don't think I was put off by him, though. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:09 | |
I was put off by all my internal doubts and uncertainties | 0:29:11 | 0:29:19 | |
and thinking why would anyone out there want to hear from me? | 0:29:19 | 0:29:24 | |
The notion that, is there anything more to add to the file of knowledge | 0:29:24 | 0:29:29 | |
on humanity after all the great 19th-century and 20th-century writers | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
have had their say. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:35 | |
But then you, sort of, learn to forget that a bit. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
You have to put that aside. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:41 | |
The other obvious contrast to Martin Amis | 0:29:42 | 0:29:44 | |
is he has been the writer as public figure, for good or ill - | 0:29:44 | 0:29:48 | |
advances, agents, teeth, in public, always in the papers. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:53 | |
You have tried to do the precise opposite, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:55 | |
except when you've got dragged into it. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
You've tried to live the writer as private figure. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
That's true, that's true. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:03 | |
It wasn't, "Oh, that's how he does it, I must do it differently." | 0:30:03 | 0:30:06 | |
It's simply a reflection of temperament. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
I think I'm a fairly, by nature, a fairly private person, | 0:30:09 | 0:30:14 | |
but it's also to do with my...literary aesthetic. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:21 | |
I think that, in an ideal world, | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
the work would do all the work, you know? | 0:30:26 | 0:30:30 | |
The books would do the work for you and they would proceed, | 0:30:30 | 0:30:37 | |
somehow, by mysterious word of mouth, reader to reader and you wouldn't | 0:30:37 | 0:30:43 | |
have to put your personality on display to sell your books. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:48 | |
I have done, over my years, a large number of appearances | 0:30:48 | 0:30:54 | |
and interviews and so on, but I've always tried to draw | 0:30:54 | 0:30:59 | |
a certain line, you know. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:01 | |
I feel that my, on the whole, my task is to talk about the work | 0:31:02 | 0:31:07 | |
and deflect the interviewer's... | 0:31:07 | 0:31:11 | |
interest in my life. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
I've always tried to protect that and that of those around me. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:19 | |
Though, of course, we're talking more openly now, because this is | 0:31:19 | 0:31:23 | |
the interview that, when the news comes "the novelist Julian Barnes | 0:31:23 | 0:31:28 | |
"died two days ago and as a tribute, we're broadcasting an extremely | 0:31:28 | 0:31:35 | |
"abbreviated form of the interview he gave to Mark Lawson a few years ago." | 0:31:35 | 0:31:40 | |
So, when the line was crossed, | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
so, for example, the Martin Amis business, | 0:31:42 | 0:31:45 | |
when you were dragged onto the front pages, | 0:31:45 | 0:31:48 | |
that... | 0:31:48 | 0:31:50 | |
Well, I didn't say anything. Nor did my wife. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
It was...that's how we were. | 0:31:53 | 0:31:56 | |
Let him talk about it, if he wants to. | 0:31:56 | 0:32:02 | |
And I haven't spoken about it, as far as I'm aware, and don't intend to. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
Flaubert's Parrot, 1984. | 0:32:06 | 0:32:08 | |
At the BBC, there used to be this index system | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
which had a list of possible contributors | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
and then the subjects on which they could be asked to speak | 0:32:15 | 0:32:18 | |
and under "Barnes, Julian", for quite a long time, | 0:32:18 | 0:32:21 | |
it said France, Parrots, and this is a result of this...book. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:28 | |
Yes. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:29 | |
Kingsley Amis is supposed to have said at one point, | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
"Why can't he just shut up about Flaubert?" | 0:32:32 | 0:32:35 | |
Yeah, he did say that. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:36 | |
Yes, yes, he probably said it to my face. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
Yes, he got very irritated with all that sort of Froggery | 0:32:39 | 0:32:44 | |
and foreignery. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
But I haven't shut up about Flaubert, | 0:32:48 | 0:32:50 | |
as you've noticed in the course of our conversation. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
He is a great exemplar and a great icon. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:55 | |
So, Gustav Flaubert, 1821-1880. Why? What was it? | 0:32:55 | 0:33:00 | |
It was school, presumably? | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
I was struck by him when I was about 15, | 0:33:03 | 0:33:05 | |
I had an English master who gave us a reading list | 0:33:05 | 0:33:08 | |
and it had foreign books on it, one called Madame Bovary, | 0:33:08 | 0:33:11 | |
and I read it thinking it was going to be a hot book | 0:33:11 | 0:33:13 | |
and didn't see it at 15, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
though, later on, when I reread it, I thought, "It's quite hot, really." | 0:33:16 | 0:33:21 | |
I think that what made me attend to him more carefully was that, | 0:33:22 | 0:33:29 | |
when I was in my early 20s, | 0:33:29 | 0:33:33 | |
there was a book edited by Francis Steegmuller | 0:33:33 | 0:33:37 | |
about Flaubert's travels in the near East. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
It shows the Flaubertian sensibility, which is often about, it's ironic, | 0:33:41 | 0:33:47 | |
it's brainy, it's often about anticipation and disappoint... | 0:33:47 | 0:33:55 | |
anticipation and reflection being more satisfying | 0:33:55 | 0:34:00 | |
than the moment of life itself. | 0:34:00 | 0:34:03 | |
Now, that's a very Flaubertion sentiment. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
At the end of his novel, Sentimental Education, | 0:34:06 | 0:34:10 | |
there's a boy looking back | 0:34:10 | 0:34:12 | |
and he thinks that, perhaps, the best time of his whole life | 0:34:12 | 0:34:16 | |
was when he and a chum set off as 18-year-olds to visit a brothel, | 0:34:16 | 0:34:21 | |
but they never quite got there, so this moment way back then | 0:34:21 | 0:34:26 | |
of extraordinary anticipation was the highlight of his life. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:30 | |
And through the character of a widowed doctor, | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
Jeffrey Braithwaite, again, form is crucial in this book, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:38 | |
which I've read several times, | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
but it astonishes me, each time, the variety, | 0:34:40 | 0:34:42 | |
so chapters may take the form of a chronology | 0:34:42 | 0:34:45 | |
an examination paper and so on. | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
It started discussions on about what a novel can be, but did you, | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
were you consciously questioning what a novel can be made of? | 0:34:52 | 0:34:57 | |
Yes, I was. | 0:34:57 | 0:34:58 | |
I was thinking how can I make this new? | 0:34:58 | 0:35:02 | |
How can I make it interesting? | 0:35:02 | 0:35:05 | |
How can I tell the story I want to tell? | 0:35:05 | 0:35:09 | |
I knew I didn't want to write... | 0:35:09 | 0:35:11 | |
I knew I wanted to write about Flaubert because I was quite obsessed | 0:35:11 | 0:35:15 | |
by him, but I didn't want to write a biography, | 0:35:15 | 0:35:19 | |
I didn't want to write a novel-novel, you know. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:25 | |
I wanted to write something that mixed fact and fiction | 0:35:25 | 0:35:29 | |
that had... | 0:35:29 | 0:35:32 | |
in which the fiction was a, sort of, firm infrastructure to the book | 0:35:32 | 0:35:36 | |
and there was this enormous super-structure of facts. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
In my view, it's a novel about obsession. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:44 | |
Jeffrey Braithwaite is a man obsessed by literature, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
and Flaubert, in particular and, for whom, | 0:35:48 | 0:35:50 | |
as is the case for some people, something other than life, | 0:35:50 | 0:35:56 | |
ie art, is more satisfying than life itself. | 0:35:56 | 0:35:59 | |
His life has been disappointing to him. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
His marriage has gone wrong | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
and I think he quotes Logan Pearsall Smith, | 0:36:04 | 0:36:10 | |
the American, and Smith said, | 0:36:10 | 0:36:15 | |
"Some people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." | 0:36:15 | 0:36:19 | |
So it was that, sort of, person that I was having as Jeffrey Braithwaite. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:23 | |
'Books say, "She did this, because..."' | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
Life says, "She did this." | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
Books are where things are explained to you, life is where things aren't. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:39 | |
I'm not surprised some people prefer books. | 0:36:39 | 0:36:42 | |
Books make sense of life. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:45 | |
The only problem is that the lives they make sense of | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
are other people's lives, never your own. | 0:36:48 | 0:36:52 | |
Right through up until Levels Of Life, recently, | 0:36:56 | 0:37:00 | |
this is crucial for you, which, to some writers, it isn't, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:04 | |
the form, the structure of a book. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:06 | |
Absolutely. Yes. | 0:37:06 | 0:37:08 | |
Flaubert said there's no idea without a form | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
and no form without an idea, by which he meant, I think, | 0:37:13 | 0:37:20 | |
that you can have an idea for a book, but it's not really | 0:37:20 | 0:37:25 | |
a potential book until you come up with the form that fits it. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:30 | |
And I think form is very important to me | 0:37:32 | 0:37:36 | |
and the novel is a very capacious, | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
generous and informal art, | 0:37:39 | 0:37:44 | |
so it's a broad church. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:47 | |
But I believe that the idea and the ideas you have in a novel | 0:37:47 | 0:37:55 | |
are best served if they're helped by the form of the novel. Yes. | 0:37:55 | 0:38:02 | |
The experiment in form, perhaps most audacious, | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
A History of The World in Ten and a Half Chapters, | 0:38:05 | 0:38:07 | |
the individual sections are essays or short stories. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:12 | |
There's even a fold-out illustration of a famous art work. | 0:38:12 | 0:38:16 | |
Now, again, there was critical muttering about, is this a novel? | 0:38:17 | 0:38:21 | |
Someone actually said he could have got onto the Booker, | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
as it then was, the Booker Prize shortlist, | 0:38:24 | 0:38:26 | |
if only it were a novel. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:27 | |
I think of them as novels | 0:38:27 | 0:38:28 | |
and most of my fellow novelists don't have any trouble | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
thinking that Flaubert's Parrot or the History of the World is a novel. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:36 | |
It's always been a very porous and informal art form. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:43 | |
Go back to the first great European novel, Don Quixote. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:47 | |
It's got all sorts of stuff in it that you don't think | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
is the stuff of a novel and it's got all sorts of formal invention | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
and oddity about it. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
I don't acknowledge any lines in the sand between fiction and nonfiction, | 0:38:57 | 0:39:02 | |
even bits of autobiography or criticism or whatever. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
It's what the story and the book require and demand | 0:39:06 | 0:39:12 | |
and so, when I'm writing something, I don't think about... | 0:39:12 | 0:39:16 | |
I don't think about category and then it's only | 0:39:16 | 0:39:19 | |
when it comes to my publishers, that they say, sometimes, | 0:39:19 | 0:39:23 | |
"We're not quite sure where this fits" | 0:39:23 | 0:39:26 | |
and I say, "Well, just call it a book, you know." | 0:39:26 | 0:39:31 | |
In any library classification system, | 0:39:31 | 0:39:33 | |
the word that would be used to summarise content of almost | 0:39:33 | 0:39:38 | |
all the books, actually - death, I mean, this always strikes me. | 0:39:38 | 0:39:42 | |
It's right there, a chapter in Metroland called "The Big D". | 0:39:42 | 0:39:46 | |
Narrator of Flaubert's Parrot is a widower, | 0:39:46 | 0:39:48 | |
one section of A History of the World asks what | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
we can set against the presence, the inevitability of death. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:53 | |
That... | 0:39:53 | 0:39:56 | |
That has always been a central... | 0:39:56 | 0:39:58 | |
Well, it's always been a key concern of your books. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:01 | |
I think that's undeniable, | 0:40:02 | 0:40:04 | |
and I think that, in the last four or five, um... | 0:40:04 | 0:40:10 | |
I've written a lot about the approach to the end of life, death, | 0:40:10 | 0:40:15 | |
and in the most recent book, grief. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:19 | |
And it's certainly there, even from the first book. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:22 | |
It's there...it's been there in my life, you know, | 0:40:22 | 0:40:25 | |
since I first became aware of death when I was... | 0:40:25 | 0:40:28 | |
..seven or eight or... | 0:40:30 | 0:40:31 | |
I don't know, I can't remember, I can't remember when I... | 0:40:31 | 0:40:34 | |
I remember... I remember that it would come | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
when I would be lying in bed on one side, | 0:40:37 | 0:40:41 | |
not on the other. Er, mysteriously, this... | 0:40:41 | 0:40:47 | |
this awareness of extinction and what it meant. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:51 | |
So, I had it from an early age, | 0:40:51 | 0:40:53 | |
and it seems to me a matter well worth investigating. | 0:40:53 | 0:40:58 | |
You address this in Nothing To Be Frightened Of. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:01 | |
Conventionally, children and books are the things that people say... | 0:41:01 | 0:41:06 | |
I mean, they do survive you, we hope, in most cases. | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
But that literary immortality - is that something you believe in? | 0:41:10 | 0:41:15 | |
No, um... | 0:41:15 | 0:41:17 | |
I believe in, um... | 0:41:17 | 0:41:19 | |
I think that probably some of my books will be read after my death. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:24 | |
I think that they may be read for one or two generations, maybe. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:29 | |
Let's say they're read for eight generations or something like that. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:33 | |
But there will always be a last reader | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
and I fantasise about the last reader in Nothing To Be Frightened Of. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:41 | |
And, at first, I feel quite tender towards this person, man or woman, | 0:41:41 | 0:41:47 | |
who's the last person to read one of my books. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:49 | |
And then, I realise that what this logically entails | 0:41:49 | 0:41:52 | |
is that person refuses to recommend my books to anyone else. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:57 | |
You bastard! | 0:41:57 | 0:41:59 | |
What an unkind reader that is. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
Where were we? We were with death, where we always are, yes. | 0:42:02 | 0:42:06 | |
You've quoted a few times from Nothing To Be Frightened Of. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:10 | |
I remember hearing that book was coming out | 0:42:10 | 0:42:12 | |
and thinking that it was a most unlikely book | 0:42:12 | 0:42:15 | |
from a person as private as you were, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:17 | |
that it was, as we say, a family memoir. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
It has the experiences of friends, although disguised under initials. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:25 | |
But there just came... that book just, it began to happen. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
Yes, I think, er... | 0:42:31 | 0:42:35 | |
there had been various, sort of, scribbles in my notebooks, | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
and a first line for a book, | 0:42:38 | 0:42:42 | |
which went, "Let's get this death thing straight." | 0:42:42 | 0:42:47 | |
And I knew that... | 0:42:47 | 0:42:49 | |
Which certainly isn't the first line of Nothing To Be Frightened Of | 0:42:49 | 0:42:53 | |
and it's not a very good first line, | 0:42:53 | 0:42:55 | |
because it's got that terrible "th" together - death, thing, | 0:42:55 | 0:42:59 | |
which you can barely say or read. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
But the fact that there would be a death book | 0:43:02 | 0:43:07 | |
was in my mind... for a number of years. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:12 | |
And, I guess, I thought... | 0:43:12 | 0:43:14 | |
Well, the fact that my parents had both died | 0:43:15 | 0:43:18 | |
and that I had, you know, experienced what that was, | 0:43:18 | 0:43:23 | |
gave me a bit more field work, I suppose. | 0:43:23 | 0:43:27 | |
And I thought that doing it | 0:43:27 | 0:43:31 | |
within the context of some, sort of, family memoir might work. | 0:43:31 | 0:43:35 | |
Reading backwards, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
The Sense Of An Ending, which won the Booker, | 0:43:40 | 0:43:42 | |
and Levels Of Life, they form a sort of loose... | 0:43:42 | 0:43:46 | |
an accidental and, indeed, unwanted trilogy, | 0:43:46 | 0:43:48 | |
in that you first anticipate the possibility of bereavement | 0:43:48 | 0:43:52 | |
and then you write in the shadow of it. | 0:43:52 | 0:43:55 | |
So, in a sense... | 0:43:55 | 0:43:57 | |
I mean, those books are intricately linked. | 0:43:57 | 0:44:00 | |
Intricately linked, | 0:44:02 | 0:44:03 | |
but not linked by overall master plan, no. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:08 | |
Um... | 0:44:08 | 0:44:09 | |
Though, if we go... | 0:44:13 | 0:44:14 | |
I mean, four of my last five books | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
have been a collection of short stories, called Pulse. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:21 | |
Before that, there was Nothing To Be Frightened Of, | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
then Sense of An Ending, then Levels Of Life - | 0:44:25 | 0:44:27 | |
all of which are moving towards the end of life | 0:44:27 | 0:44:30 | |
and the consequences of the end of life, | 0:44:30 | 0:44:32 | |
both in terms of the person experiencing it | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
and then the person surviving the ending of someone else's life. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:39 | |
So, yes, you could say that they have... | 0:44:39 | 0:44:41 | |
They are intricately linked, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:43 | |
but I think that they're, sort of, linked by authorial chronology | 0:44:43 | 0:44:47 | |
as much as anything else. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:48 | |
I certainly didn't plan them that way. | 0:44:48 | 0:44:50 | |
"I'll do old age, then I'll do death, then I'll do grief." | 0:44:50 | 0:44:54 | |
I, you know... | 0:44:54 | 0:44:55 | |
You don't know how your life is going to work out in any case. | 0:44:55 | 0:44:59 | |
It's also true that two of them are... | 0:44:59 | 0:45:01 | |
..more personal and more... autobiographical | 0:45:02 | 0:45:07 | |
than... than... than stuff I've written before. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:12 | |
Um... | 0:45:12 | 0:45:14 | |
But again, that's just the way it turned out. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:17 | |
That was the story I wanted to tell. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:19 | |
And there is, as you will realise, | 0:45:19 | 0:45:23 | |
there was a shock for the readers of Levels Of Life | 0:45:23 | 0:45:27 | |
that you describe a period in which you began to think about suicide | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
and the way you would do it. | 0:45:31 | 0:45:33 | |
And if we've read The Sense Of An Ending, | 0:45:33 | 0:45:36 | |
we realise that that form of suicide is in that book. | 0:45:36 | 0:45:40 | |
Yes. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:42 | |
Yes, I... | 0:45:42 | 0:45:43 | |
Well, after my wife died, um... at a certain fairly early stage, | 0:45:43 | 0:45:48 | |
like...some people who have lost someone they loved for a long time, | 0:45:48 | 0:45:55 | |
I contemplated ending my life. | 0:45:55 | 0:45:58 | |
It seemed one solution. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:00 | |
There were other solutions - some of which seemed harder. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:04 | |
And eventually, as I describe in the book, | 0:46:04 | 0:46:06 | |
I come up with an argument against it. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:08 | |
I think this is quite common and... | 0:46:08 | 0:46:14 | |
even if fleeting, um... | 0:46:14 | 0:46:18 | |
and because I was trying to write about grief | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
as directly and as truthfully as I could, it seemed... | 0:46:21 | 0:46:26 | |
it never crossed my mind that I would not refer to it. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:31 | |
Because you don't think when you're writing a book, | 0:46:31 | 0:46:34 | |
"Oh, I wonder if this bit will get into the newspapers." | 0:46:34 | 0:46:38 | |
It never crosses my mind. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:41 | |
You're thinking about... yourself as writer, | 0:46:41 | 0:46:45 | |
the text, the world and the reader. | 0:46:45 | 0:46:48 | |
And you don't think of the, sort of, things in the interstices | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
between these sections of what writing and reading is. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:56 | |
You don't think, at some point, a journalist will get this | 0:46:56 | 0:46:59 | |
and say, "Oh, look, he says he wanted to kill himself, | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
"let's make a news story out of that." | 0:47:02 | 0:47:04 | |
-It just never crossed my mind. -Really? -No, I promise you. | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
Yes, I would have, um... | 0:47:07 | 0:47:10 | |
I would have used the method that Adrian had to kill himself, | 0:47:10 | 0:47:15 | |
um... | 0:47:15 | 0:47:18 | |
because it was in my mind. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:20 | |
Um... | 0:47:20 | 0:47:22 | |
And then, I subsequently wrote about it non-fictionally. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
I think there is a subtle distinction between the two forms, | 0:47:25 | 0:47:30 | |
in that, when I was thinking about doing it, | 0:47:30 | 0:47:33 | |
I was going to have a nice big glass of wine at my side | 0:47:33 | 0:47:38 | |
and I think, in the fictional suicide, there was no glass of wine. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:42 | |
But the method was exactly the same - a sharp knife and a warm bath, yes. | 0:47:42 | 0:47:46 | |
So, the old classical method. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:47 | |
But the other biographical connection is that you say in... | 0:47:47 | 0:47:52 | |
You talk in Levels Of Life, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:53 | |
which, again, is a common experience in bereavement | 0:47:53 | 0:47:56 | |
of starting to panic about memory | 0:47:56 | 0:47:58 | |
and the reliability of memory and the disappearance of memory. | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
In retrospect, THAT, it seems to me, went into the novel, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:05 | |
-The Sense Of An Ending. -Um... | 0:48:05 | 0:48:07 | |
I think that what was in Sense Of An Ending came... | 0:48:08 | 0:48:12 | |
Rather than being leeched back from a future book, | 0:48:12 | 0:48:16 | |
actually came out of Nothing To Be Frightened Of | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
and the discussions that I was having with my brother | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
about memory and the fallibility of memory. | 0:48:22 | 0:48:24 | |
Um... | 0:48:24 | 0:48:26 | |
I think that what... | 0:48:26 | 0:48:28 | |
The fallibility of memory in grief is a very specific thing | 0:48:28 | 0:48:33 | |
and I was assured it would come back. And it does come back. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:36 | |
But it's not the same kind of memory, because, um... | 0:48:36 | 0:48:40 | |
..because before the one that you loved died, | 0:48:43 | 0:48:46 | |
you had her point of comparison, so that memory was binocular, | 0:48:46 | 0:48:52 | |
BI-nocular, and now has become monocular. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:55 | |
So, your memory does change. | 0:48:55 | 0:48:57 | |
But this is the very particular memory of grief | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
and, in Sense Of An Ending, | 0:49:00 | 0:49:05 | |
I was dealing more generally with what happens to memory over time. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:10 | |
It's about what time does to memory and what memory does to time. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:15 | |
Do you have any sense ever of the reception of the book? | 0:49:15 | 0:49:17 | |
I mean, you can't think, | 0:49:17 | 0:49:19 | |
"This one is going to win the Man Booker Prize," | 0:49:19 | 0:49:22 | |
but does the outcome of a book, the public outcome of it, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:27 | |
is it ever predictable? | 0:49:27 | 0:49:29 | |
I don't think so, um... | 0:49:31 | 0:49:33 | |
But, um... | 0:49:35 | 0:49:36 | |
I... | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
And because I write different sorts of books, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:44 | |
I have, obviously, a core of readers who will go with me wherever, | 0:49:44 | 0:49:49 | |
but then there will be some people who come in | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
because this has won the Booker, | 0:49:51 | 0:49:54 | |
or the latest one, there will be people... | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
It's being given to lots of people who've been widowed, unsurprisingly. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
And I've had extraordinary | 0:50:02 | 0:50:05 | |
and deeply-personal responses to the book, | 0:50:05 | 0:50:08 | |
which, again, I didn't anticipate. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
I've had a lot of letters, | 0:50:11 | 0:50:13 | |
and I've had people coming up to me in the street | 0:50:13 | 0:50:17 | |
and just telling me things about their...about their own grief, | 0:50:17 | 0:50:22 | |
which are, on the one hand... chastening | 0:50:22 | 0:50:28 | |
and, on the other hand, sort of, flattering. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
You know, I had... | 0:50:31 | 0:50:32 | |
A man came up to me in the street and said, "I read your book, | 0:50:32 | 0:50:37 | |
"my wife died X months ago. Every day, I wake up | 0:50:37 | 0:50:40 | |
"and I think of a different way to commit...to kill myself, | 0:50:40 | 0:50:44 | |
"and my children don't understand, | 0:50:44 | 0:50:46 | |
"and so I'm going to write out sentences of your book | 0:50:46 | 0:50:51 | |
"and give them to them, so that they do understand." | 0:50:51 | 0:50:54 | |
It makes you feel that you have done a service, | 0:50:54 | 0:50:57 | |
which you, sort of, didn't intend, | 0:50:57 | 0:50:59 | |
but if it's helpful, you know, I'm...I'm pleased and flattered. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:05 | |
Um... | 0:51:05 | 0:51:06 | |
The American writer Joyce Carol Oates, | 0:51:08 | 0:51:10 | |
who, as you know, because you reviewed it, | 0:51:10 | 0:51:13 | |
-she wrote a book about being widowed, becoming a widow. -Yes, yes. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:17 | |
And when I talked to her, | 0:51:17 | 0:51:18 | |
she said her big shock was that she'd always, at book readings, | 0:51:18 | 0:51:23 | |
had fairly scholarly questions and polite responses, | 0:51:23 | 0:51:27 | |
and then people were coming up and hugging her, | 0:51:27 | 0:51:29 | |
which, I suppose, is the same phenomenon, | 0:51:29 | 0:51:31 | |
that people... They suddenly have a response to a writer or to a book | 0:51:31 | 0:51:37 | |
that they don't expect to have. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:39 | |
Yes, and because of the subject matter | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
and because, in this country, we're very bad at dealing with death | 0:51:42 | 0:51:47 | |
and we're very bad at dealing with grief, | 0:51:47 | 0:51:50 | |
I think that some of the things that I said | 0:51:50 | 0:51:55 | |
were articulations of things that people felt but couldn't express. | 0:51:55 | 0:52:01 | |
Um... | 0:52:01 | 0:52:02 | |
And that's when you're both... | 0:52:02 | 0:52:05 | |
you're grateful in more ways than one that you are a writer | 0:52:05 | 0:52:08 | |
because you can express such things for other people, | 0:52:08 | 0:52:10 | |
as well as for yourself. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:12 | |
"Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:19 | |
"One day means no more than the next, | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
"so why have they been picked out and given separate names? | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
"It also reconfigures space. | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
"You have entered a new geography, mapped by a new cartography. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:33 | |
"You seem to be taking your bearings from one of those 17th-Century maps, | 0:52:33 | 0:52:36 | |
"which feature The Desert of Loss, | 0:52:36 | 0:52:38 | |
"The windless Lake of Indifference, | 0:52:38 | 0:52:41 | |
"The Dried-up River of Desolation, | 0:52:41 | 0:52:44 | |
"The Bog of Self-Pity | 0:52:44 | 0:52:45 | |
"and The Subterranean Caverns of Memory." | 0:52:45 | 0:52:48 | |
As you know, there's a lot of talk about the catharsis of writing, | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
and, indeed, sometimes, in bereavement counselling | 0:52:54 | 0:52:57 | |
people are encouraged, non-professionally, | 0:52:57 | 0:52:59 | |
to set down their words. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:01 | |
Did it have any such benefit for you? | 0:53:01 | 0:53:04 | |
No, and I didn't expr-... I didn't, um... | 0:53:04 | 0:53:08 | |
No, and I didn't... I didn't expect it to have. | 0:53:10 | 0:53:14 | |
I've never... | 0:53:14 | 0:53:15 | |
I've never particularly believed in the therapeutic value of literature. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:21 | |
There is a parallel to the grief section of Levels Of Life, | 0:53:21 | 0:53:25 | |
which is an enormous diary that I kept throughout my wife's illness | 0:53:25 | 0:53:29 | |
and in the months and immediate years thereafter, | 0:53:29 | 0:53:32 | |
which is hundreds of thousands of words. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:35 | |
And that was written, in part, for therapeutic reasons, I suppose, | 0:53:35 | 0:53:42 | |
in part, to get it down, in case... | 0:53:42 | 0:53:44 | |
going back to memory again, in case I forgot. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:47 | |
I wanted to get everything down exactly as it happened, | 0:53:47 | 0:53:50 | |
in case I forgot, that was... | 0:53:50 | 0:53:52 | |
Because it's one thing to suffer through it | 0:53:52 | 0:53:56 | |
and see someone suffering | 0:53:56 | 0:53:57 | |
and it's another thing to forget that. | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
That's... That's another failure, you know? | 0:54:00 | 0:54:04 | |
So, I wrote everything down, and I didn't consult it at all | 0:54:04 | 0:54:08 | |
when I wrote the grief section of Levels Of Life, | 0:54:08 | 0:54:11 | |
because I wanted that to be the movement and process | 0:54:11 | 0:54:17 | |
and unshiftingness of grief, viewed from four years on. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:22 | |
At the mention of the journals, the ears of biographers, publishers, | 0:54:24 | 0:54:29 | |
possibly newspaper serial purchase editors will perk up. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:33 | |
You must have made a decision about this. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
You never would publish your journals. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:37 | |
I have no present intention to publish my journals, Mark, no. | 0:54:38 | 0:54:44 | |
But I'm aware that things...change. | 0:54:44 | 0:54:47 | |
I mean, the possibilities are I publish some of them before I die, | 0:54:47 | 0:54:53 | |
I burn them before I die, er... | 0:54:53 | 0:54:56 | |
they're published after my death, | 0:54:56 | 0:54:57 | |
to the irritation of many people, I put an embargo on them | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
so they're published after everyone who's in them dies. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:05 | |
So, you know, it's like... as soon as you make a decision, | 0:55:05 | 0:55:09 | |
you find it sort of countermanded. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
So, um...never say never, if that isn't a... | 0:55:12 | 0:55:15 | |
..title of a James Bond film. | 0:55:17 | 0:55:18 | |
An obvious question - there are stories of writers | 0:55:20 | 0:55:22 | |
when children or relatives are ill actually making notes, | 0:55:22 | 0:55:27 | |
making notes in the hospital and all the rest of it, | 0:55:27 | 0:55:29 | |
knowing they were going to write about it. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:32 | |
Did you always know that, at some point, | 0:55:32 | 0:55:34 | |
you were going to have to write about grief | 0:55:34 | 0:55:36 | |
-or did the writer side switch off? -No, I had no... | 0:55:36 | 0:55:40 | |
I had no... I had no intention of doing so, | 0:55:40 | 0:55:44 | |
and had you asked me for two or three years after my wife died, | 0:55:44 | 0:55:48 | |
I would have said, "No, I have no intention of doing it." | 0:55:48 | 0:55:50 | |
It's also how I did it, I mean, I... | 0:55:50 | 0:55:54 | |
Even on this matter, there are lines I drew which I wouldn't cross. | 0:55:54 | 0:56:00 | |
So, my wife was a very private person. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:04 | |
She hated seeing her name in print, for example. | 0:56:04 | 0:56:08 | |
And for that reason I don't use her name in the book, in fact. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
But I don't go back into, "This was how our life was together, | 0:56:11 | 0:56:15 | |
"and then this dreadful thing happened." | 0:56:15 | 0:56:17 | |
I start at the point at which grief starts, really, | 0:56:17 | 0:56:21 | |
with tiny little bits of backtracking. | 0:56:21 | 0:56:23 | |
So I certainly wasn't... | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
When I went through the... the dreadful months in 2008, | 0:56:28 | 0:56:33 | |
I wasn't thinking "This will be useful, this will be material." | 0:56:33 | 0:56:38 | |
Um... | 0:56:38 | 0:56:40 | |
The desire to write, that must have gone for a while. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:44 | |
Um... | 0:56:44 | 0:56:46 | |
What went, er...was concentration | 0:56:46 | 0:56:51 | |
and concentration even to read a book. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:55 | |
I could read a newspaper. | 0:56:55 | 0:56:57 | |
It was months before concentration to read a book came back. | 0:56:57 | 0:57:01 | |
And then, in terms of writing, quite by chance, | 0:57:01 | 0:57:08 | |
I had... | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
I had started writing a piece about George Orwell, um... | 0:57:10 | 0:57:15 | |
a review, a long review, | 0:57:15 | 0:57:17 | |
and I got a hurry-up message from the editor, | 0:57:17 | 0:57:21 | |
who, as it happened, didn't know my wife had died. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:24 | |
And I said, "Well, I don't know when I can." | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
And then I took that up, | 0:57:29 | 0:57:31 | |
and it's odd, in that there is meant to be a, sort of... | 0:57:31 | 0:57:36 | |
a hostile relationship between journalism and literature, | 0:57:36 | 0:57:40 | |
whereas at the start of my career | 0:57:40 | 0:57:41 | |
I found that doing bits of journalism, | 0:57:41 | 0:57:45 | |
while sometimes they took away time, | 0:57:45 | 0:57:50 | |
helped give me the confidence to write books. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:54 | |
There I was, and I had this book review | 0:57:54 | 0:57:56 | |
of which I'd written about a quarter, | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
and I took it up again, and I found I could get to the end of it. | 0:57:59 | 0:58:02 | |
Um... | 0:58:02 | 0:58:03 | |
And then I don't know how long... | 0:58:06 | 0:58:08 | |
I think I then...went from that to a short story or two, | 0:58:08 | 0:58:14 | |
which finished my collection Pulse. | 0:58:14 | 0:58:16 | |
But I would... not have survived so well | 0:58:17 | 0:58:23 | |
had I not had work. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:27 | |
I think that's... I've been very... | 0:58:27 | 0:58:30 | |
Insofar as I've been fortunate, I've been fortunate in that respect, | 0:58:30 | 0:58:33 | |
that I remained, and I hope always will be, a writer. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:37 | |
-Julian Barnes, thank you. -Thank you. | 0:58:37 | 0:58:40 |