Julian Barnes Interviewed
by Shusha Guppy
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 165
Julian Barnes lives with his wife Pat
Kavanagh, a literary agent, in an elegant house with a beautiful garden in
north London. The long library where the interview was conducted is spacious
and quiet. Overlooking the garden, it has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a
comfortable sofa and chairs, an exercise bike in a corner (“for the winter”),
and a huge billiard table. On the walls are a series of cartoon portraits of
writers by Mark Boxer—Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, V. S. Pritchett,
among others— “some because they are very good cartoons, others because I
admire the writers.” There is a superb photograph of George Sand in middle age,
taken by Nadar in 1862, and a short original letter by Flaubert, a present from
Barnes’s publishers when they had sold one million copies of his books in
paperback. Barnes works down the corridor in a yellow-painted study with an
enormous three-sided desk, which holds his typewriter, word processor, books,
files, and other necessities, all of which he can reach with a swivel of his
chair.
Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and
soon after the family moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He was
educated at the City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford. After
university he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary and
then read for the bar, while writing and reviewing for various publications.
His first novel, Metroland, was well received
when it was published in 1980, but it was his third book,Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), that established his
reputation as an original and powerful novelist. Since then he has produced six
novels, including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) and The
Porcupine (1992); a
collection of short stories, Cross Channel(1996); and Letters
from London (written
when he was The New Yorker’s London
correspondent). At the time of the interview his latest novel, Love,
etc. had just been
published in England to good reviews; it will be published in the States in
February of 2001.
Tall and handsome and very fit, Barnes
looks ten years younger than his fifty-four years. His well-known courtesy and
charm are enhanced by acute intelligence and mordant wit. From the beginning, a
passionate love of France and French literature, specifically Flaubert, has
informed his work. Reciprocally, he is one of the best-loved English writers in
France, where he has won several literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis
for Flaubert’s Parrot, and the Prix Femina for Talking
It Over. He is an officer of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
INTERVIEWER
You are very European, which is unusual
for an English writer, but also very English, especially to a foreigner. In
France, for example, they think of you as quintessentially English. Where do
you place yourself?
JULIAN BARNES
I think you are right. In Britain I’m
sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather
dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in
France, they say, Oh, no! You’re so English! I think I’m probably anchored
somewhere in the Channel.
INTERVIEWER
Sartre wrote an essay called “Qu’est-ce
que la littérature?” What is literature for you?
BARNES
There are many answers to that question.
The shortest is that it’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of
producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any
assemblage of facts. Beyond that, literature is many things, such as delight
in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating
with people whom you will never meet. And being a writer gives you a sense of
historical community, which I feel rather weakly as a normal social being
living in early twenty-first-century Britain. For example, I don’t feel any
particular ties with the world of Queen Victoria, or the participants of the
Civil War or the Wars of the Roses, but I do feel a very particular tie to
various writers and artists who are contemporaneous with those periods and
events.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “telling the truth”?
BARNES
I think a great book—leaving aside other
qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book
that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is
recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way
in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been
previously available, certainly not from official records or government
documents, or from journalism or television. For example, even people who
condemned Madame Bovary, who thought
that it ought to be banned, recognized the truth of the portrait of that sort of woman,
in that sort of society, which they had never encountered before in literature.
That is why the novel was so dangerous. I do think that there is this central,
groundbreaking veracity in literature, which is part of its grandeur. Obviously
it varies according to the society. In an oppressive society the truth-telling
nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly
than other elements in a work of art.
INTERVIEWER
Literature, then, can take a lot of
forms—essays, poetry, fiction, journalism, all of which endeavor to tell the
truth. You already were a very good essayist and journalist before you started
to write fiction. Why did you choose fiction?
BARNES
Well, to be honest I think I tell less
truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those
media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism
your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading;
whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest
complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as
might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that
you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading.
INTERVIEWER
Did you want to be a writer at an early
age?
BARNES
Not at all. It is an abnormal thing to
want to be an artist, to practice an art. It is comparatively normal to
practice an interpretative art. But to actually make things up is not something
that, well, usually runs in families or is the recommendation of a career
master.
INTERVIEWER
Yet England has produced some of the
greatest writers, and perhaps the greatest literature, of the world.
BARNES
That is a separate truth. But there is
nothing when you are growing up, even as a reasonably well-educated person, to
suggest that you have an authority to be more than, say, a reader, an
interpreter, a consumer of art—not a producer of it. When I became a passionate
reader in my teens I thought writing was something that other people did. In
the same way, when I was four or five I wanted to be an engine driver, but I
knew that this was something other people did. I come from a family of
schoolteachers—both my parents were teachers—so there were books in our house,
the word was respected, but there was no notion that one should ever aspire to
write, not even a textbook. My mother once had a letter published in the London Evening
Standard and that was
the maximum literary output in our family.
INTERVIEWER
What about the Amises, the Waughs . . .?
BARNES
They are self-evident abnormalities, like
Fanny and Anthony Trollope. Writers are not like royal pastry chefs, handing
down their talent and their badge of office from generation to generation.
INTERVIEWER
You say that you read voraciously; whom
did you read?
BARNES
When I was fourteen or fifteen I was just
beginning to read in French, but the first time I read Madame
Bovary it was
certainly in English—the consequence of our English teacher giving us a reading
list that consisted mainly of the classics of European literature, many of
which I had never heard of. At the time we were obliged once a week to put on
army uniform and play at soldiers in something called the Combined Cadet Force.
I have a vivid memory of pulling out Crime and Punishment along with my sandwiches on a field
day; it felt properly subversive. This was the time when I did the basic spade
work of my reading. I suppose it would consist of the great Russians, the
French, the English. So it would be Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Goncharov,
Lermontov, Turgenev; and Voltaire, Montaigne, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine,
Rimbaud. In English I read more modern fiction—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene,
Aldous Huxley. T. S. Eliot, of course, Hardy, Hopkins, Donne.
INTERVIEWER
What about the English classic
novelists—George Eliot, Jane Austen, Dickens.
BARNES
They came later. I didn’t read English at
university and still haven’t read the full canon. George Eliot came a bit
later, and Austen has always been a bit hit-or-miss with me, I must say. Middlemarch is probably the greatest English
novel.
INTERVIEWER
So when did you think, Maybe I can be on
the other side and write those books that others would like to read?
BARNES
I think in my early twenties. I was
working on the Oxford English Dictionary and I was very bored. So I tried to
write and did produce a literary guidebook to Oxford, an account of every
writer who had passed through the city and university. Happily it was never
published, though it was bought. After I had done that, when I was twenty-five,
I started trying to write a novel, but it was a long and greatly interrupted
process, full of doubt and demoralization, which finally turned into my first
novel, Metroland, published when I
was thirty-four. So it was an eight- or nine-year process, and of course I
shelved the book for long periods of time. I had absolutely no confidence in
it. Nor was I convinced of myself. I didn’t see that I had any right to be a
novelist.
INTERVIEWER
Any contributions to the OED?
BARNES
I was an editorial assistant on that
four-volume supplement, writing definitions and researching the history of
words, looking for early usages. So I spent three professional years with the
language post-1880, in letters c to g. I doubt it shows through
in my fiction.
INTERVIEWER
As an undergraduate at Oxford you wrote
essays, like everyone else. Did any tutor detect a special talent in you and
try to encourage it?
BARNES
Special talent? I don’t think I had one
that was detectable. When I had a viva for my finals one of the examiners, who
was a rather stern Pascal scholar at Christ Church called Krailsheimer, said to
me—looking at my papers—What do you want to do after you’ve got your degree?
and I said, Well, I thought I might become one of you. I said that partly
because my brother had got a first and had gone on to become a philosophy don;
also because I had no real notion about what to do. Krailsheimer toyed with my
papers again and said, Have you thought about journalism? which was of course
the most contemptuous thing he could have said—from his point of view. He
doubtless suspected a glibness inappropriate for a serious scholar. In the end
I got a second and had no chance of staying on at Oxford anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you get a second?
BARNES
I didn’t work hard enough. I changed
subject twice. I started with French and Russian, then changed to PPP
(philosophy, politics, psychology) and then changed back to read French. It was
hardly a glittering academic progress.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that one year in PPP has
marked your mode of thinking, and therefore your work, in any way?
BARNES
Not really. You see, I wasn’t very good at
it. I chose PPP because I thought reading literature was a bit frivolous. I had
been well taught at school and I decided I didn’t need to go on doing French
and refining my French prose and my views on Racine for another three years. I
felt I needed something to get my teeth into and I thought philosophy and
psychology were proper subjects. Of course they are, but I didn’t seem to be
the right student for them; I don’t have that sort of mind. All those genes
went to my brother. And I was frustrated to keep finding that philosophy seemed
to consist of telling you one week why the philosophy you had studied the
previous week was entirely wrong.
INTERVIEWER
Yet there is a good deal of philosophy,
and of course psychology, in some great writers. Schopenhauer said that he
learned more psychology from Dostoyevsky than from all the books he had read on
the subject.
BARNES
Quite. And that is why the novel is not
likely to die. There is no substitute, at least so far, that can handle
psychological complexity and inwardness and reflection in the way that the
novel can. The cinema’s talents are quite other.
We have a great friend who is a clinical
psychiatrist in Sydney; he’s always maintained that Shakespeare’s descriptions
of madness were absolutely perfect accounts from a clinical point of view.
INTERVIEWER
So you chose novel writing as a
profession.
BARNES
Oh, I didn’t choose it as a profession—I didn’t have the
vanity to choose it. I can perhaps now state that I am at last a novelist, and
think of myself as a novelist, and can afford to do journalism when it pleases
me. But I was never one of those insufferable children who at the age of seven
is writing stories under the bedclothes or one of those cocky young wordsmiths
who imagine the world awaits their prose. I spent a long time acquiring enough
confidence to imagine that I could be some sort of novelist.
INTERVIEWER
Metroland was clearly autobiographical, as most first attempts
are. Did you set out to do it in that way?
BARNES
I’m not sure. Certainly the first third of
the book is close to my own adolescence, the topography and the psychology
especially. Then I began to invent, and I realized that I could. The second and
third parts are largely invented. When the book was published in France about
five years ago, one of the most gratifying moments was being taken by a French
television team to somewhere in northern Paris. They sat me on a park bench—I
think it was Parc de Montsouris, at least it was somewhere unfamiliar. So I
asked them, Why are you interviewing me here? and they said, Because just over
there, according to your book, is where you lost your virginity. Very French!
But I made it up, I said, and they were very shocked. That was quite nice,
because it meant that what had begun in largely autobiographical mode had
shifted into the invented without anyone noticing it.
INTERVIEWER
What did you hope to accomplish with this
shift into invention? What did you want to convey in that novel?
BARNES
Metroland was about defeat. I wanted to write about youthful
aspiration coming to a compromised end. I wanted to write a novel that was
un-Balzacian, in that, instead of ending with the hero looking down from a hill
onto a city that he knows, or at least believes, he is going to take, it ended
with the nonhero not having taken the city, and accepting
the city’s terms.
The central metaphor works like this:
Metroland was a residential area laid out in the wake of the London underground
system, which was developed at the end of the nineteenth century. The idea then
was that there would be a Channel tunnel, and pan-European trains would run
from Manchester and Birmingham, pick up passengers in London, and continue
through to the great cities of the Continent. So this London suburb where I
grew up was conceived in the hope, the anticipation, of great horizons, great
journeys. But in fact that never came to pass. Such is the background metaphor
of disappointment for the life of Chris, the hero, and of others too.
INTERVIEWER
By the way, not many of Balzac’s heroes
are like Rastignac and "take the city."
BARNES
But they think they are going to. They are
allowed to stand on the hill and look down on the city
INTERVIEWER
Balzac is not one of your heroes. There
seems to be this choice between Balzac and Flaubert, rather like that between
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Alain Robbe-Grillet dislikes Balzac, because he thinks
that his world is too ordered, cohesive; whereas Flaubert’s work reflects the
chaotic, unpredictable nature of the world. Do you feel the same?
BARNES
If the world has to be divided between Balzacians
and Flaubertians, then I belong to the latter. Partly because there is more art
in Flaubert. Balzac is in some ways a premodern novelist. Madame
Bovary is the first
truly modern novel, by which I mean the first through-composed novel. In the
nineteenth century, many novels, especially in England, were published as they
were written in serial parts in magazines; novelists wrote with the printer’s
boy tugging their sleeve for copy. The equivalent English novel to Madame
Bovary would be Middlemarch,
which in terms of structure and composition is more primitive—partly, I
believe, because of its serial composition. I’m sure that in terms of the
description of society Balzac is Flaubert’s equal. But, in terms of artistic
control—the control of narrative voice and the use of style
indirecte libre—Flaubert shows a new line and says, Now we are
starting again. And if Madame Bovary is the start of the modern novel, then
his unfinished novelBouvard et
Pécuchet, which was published posthumously in 1881, is the start of
the modernist novel. It is interesting that, according to Cyril Connolly, Bouvard
et Pécuchetwas Joyce’s favorite novel. I asked Richard Ellmann
about this and he said it was probably the case, even if there was no
documentary proof. Bouvard et Pécuchet—a novel
about two earnest, illusion-filled clerks who try to understand the whole of
human striving and the whole of human knowledge, who are defeated and then go
back to being copyists—is extraordinarily modern. And the second part of the
book, the thought of simply giving the reader an accumulated heap of rubbish
that the two heroes decide to copy down, is a phenomenally advanced idea for
1880; it is amazingly bold.
INTERVIEWER
What about other novels, like Salammbô,
which Flaubert himself didn’t like?
BARNES
Oh, he did! But he said a lot of
contradictory things about his work, as we all do. For instance, he said he
wanted to buy up every copy of Madame Bovary and destroy it because he thought that
it had overshadowed the rest of his work. In fact Salammbô was a great success—it was a social
success as well as a literary success. I think the Trois
Contes are among the
greatest short stories ever written. L’Education sentimentale is fascinating but possibly a hundred
pages too long. Salammbô is what it is—a jeweled contraption
that draws you in, and which you have to accept on its own terms. There is no
point as a reader trying to compromise. Then there are the letters, which are
instructively marvelous.
INTERVIEWER
The correspondence with George Sand, especially.
Nobody reads George Sand now, but in those letters she comes across as wise and
compassionate and lucid.
BARNES
I’m sure she was. When you read that
correspondence you often feel that Flaubert is right, but that George Sand is
nicer. Sometimes she is also right—it depends partly on your temperament. I’m
more convinced by Flaubert’s aesthetic arguments; on human psychology I think
the match ends in a tie.
INTERVIEWER
The correspondence with Louise Colet is
very illuminating too. There is this courageous woman who holds a salon with no
money, who is so hard up that she has to dry the tea leaves used at one
reception to serve at the next, yet keeps soldiering on; while Flaubert, who
has a much easier life, constantly whinges and is full of complaints and
self-pity.
BARNES
Flaubert was a great artist, George Sand a
very good novelist, and Louise Colet a minor poet. He reflects incessantly
about art. The strange thing about the exchange with Louise Colet is that
Flaubert is instructing her, page after page, on the grandeur and intricacy of
art. Yet he is an unpublished novelist and she is the star of the Paris salons
who has affairs with famous artists and so forth. In that sense, among many,
Flaubert is not at all like me; I certainly would not have had the nerve to
instruct Louise Colet before I had published a novel.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to your own work: after Metroland and the good reviews it received, were
you more confident?
BARNES
Seeing the book in physical form and
reading some good reviews was reassuring. But then, such is my nature—and I
assume I share this with lots of other writers—I thought, What if I only have
one book in me? So the second novel is always harder, though in my case it was
at least quicker. I still find myself thinking, Well, I may have written seven
or eight or nine novels, but can I do it again the next time? But I’m convinced
that a high anxiety level is the novelist’s normal condition.
INTERVIEWER
Of course, some novelists have produced
only one great book—Dr. Zhivago, The Leopard. In fact, should one be a sort of
jobbing novelist and produce lots of books at regular intervals? Why shouldn’t
one great book suffice?
BARNES
Absolutely right. No reason at all why one
should go on writing just for the sake of it. I think it is very important to
stop when you haven’t got anything to say. But novelists sometimes stop for the
wrong reasons—Barbara Pym gave up because she was discouraged by her publisher,
who said that her books had become flat. I’m not much of an E. M. Forster fan,
but he stopped when he thought he had nothing more to say. That is admirable.
Perhaps he should have stopped even earlier. But is any novelist going to
recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave
thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety
anyway, you could easily misread the signs. But I’m with you about the quality
of the two novels you mention, especially Lampedusa’s The
Leopard, which is a key book. Pasternak was always known as a poet,
who then wrote one novel, which became a cause célèbre, but Lampedusa was
thought of as this irrelevant Sicilian aristocrat who gave English courses and
ate pastries; then he came up with this masterpiece, which was only published
posthumously.
I think you hope, broadly, that your best
work will survive, but how you produce your best work is perhaps a mystery—
even to you. There are writers who are enormously prolific, like John Updike,
whom I revere, and who has produced fifty, sixty books. The Rabbit quartet is
clearly one of the great postwar American novels. But you can’t say to him,
Look, would you please write the Rabbit quartet and leave it at that. Some
writers are like cacti—every seven years here comes a glorious flower; then
there’s another seven years of hibernation. Others can’t work like that;
temperamentally they have to be writing.
INTERVIEWER
Then there are various literary genres
that produce a crop of writers and books and then fade. For example, magic
realism, which has worked well in South America and in third-world countries
generally. It has fared less well in the West and seems to be fading away.
BARNES
Yes. But magic realism is part of a much
longer and wider tradition—think of Bulgakov. And he—I may be wrong—seems to
come out of Russian painting as much as anything else. It’s a complex
imaginative tradition that existed long before the label was applied. The
argument against magic realism, to put it crudely, is that if anything can
happen, then why does it matter if this happens rather than that happens? Some
people think it’s a justification for indulging in hallucinatory fantasy. But
that is bad magic realism. Those who write good books in the genre know that
magic realism has to have structure and logic and cohesion just as much as normal
realism or anything else. The quality of product varies as in any other genre.
INTERVIEWER
The new fashionable form is to take an
historical character or event and build a fictional edifice around it. For
example, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, which is
based on the life of Novalis, or last year’s Prix Goncourt, La
Bataille, based on Napoleon’s battle of Eyleu. Maybe you started it
with Flaubert’s Parrot?
BARNES
Or maybe Flaubert started it with Salammbô?
Or Walter Scott. Penelope Fitzgerald is an excellent novelist. I think she won
the Booker for the wrong book, and her last four novels, which are her best,
are still underrated. But, to answer your question, I didn’t fictionalize
Flaubert. I tried to be as truthful about him as I could.
The novel based on a true historical event
is certainly one current literary trend at the moment. But it’s not especially
new. John Banville was writing about Kepler years ago. More recently Peter
Ackroyd has written about Chatterton, Hawksmoor, and Blake. Blake Morrison has
just published a novel about Gutenberg. I think this is partly a question of
filling a vacuum. Much history writing strikes the general reader as
theoretical and overly academic. Historians like Simon Schama, who believe in
the fictional virtues of narrative, character, style and so on, are rarities.
Straight narrative biography is also very popular. That is probably where most
nonfiction readers tend to go at the moment; so the biographical novelist hangs
about the street corner, hoping to seduce a few clients away from the straight
and narrow.
INTERVIEWER
Yet the traditional historical novel—Mary
Renault’s The King Must Die, to give a
quality example—is looked down upon as being rather lowbrow.
BARNES
I suppose because the old historical novel,
which tried to recreate mimetically the life and times of a character, was
essentially conservative, whereas the new historical novel goes into the past
with deliberate awareness of what has happened since, and tries to make a more
obvious connection to the reader of today.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say that you belong to the
straight realist tradition?
BARNES
I’ve always found labels rather pointless
and irritating—and, in any case, we seem to have run out of them in the wake of
postmodernism. A critic once called me a “pre-postmodernist”—neither lucid nor
helpful in my view. The novel is essentially a realist form, even when
interpreted in the most phantasmagoric manner. A novel can’t be abstract, like
music. Perhaps if the novel becomes obsessed with theory (see the nouveau
roman) or linguistic play (see Finnegans Wake) it may cease
to be realistic; but then it also ceases to be interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Which brings us to the question of form.
You once said that you try to make every work different. Once you have broken
the mold of the traditional narrative, it seems to me that you have to keep
changing—you can’t go on, say, finding new historical characters and events to
build stories around.
BARNES
You could. I remember at school in the
sixties we were being taught Ted Hughes by our English master, who was a bright
young man just down from Cambridge. (He was the one who gave me the reading
list.) He said, Of course everyone’s worried about what happens when Ted Hughes
runs out of animals. We thought it was the wittiest thing we had ever heard.
But of course Ted Hughes never did run out of animals; he may have run out of
other things, but not animals. If people want to go on writing about historical
figures, they can always find some.
INTERVIEWER
But don’t people always like to try
something new?
BARNES
It doesn’t work quite like that. I don’t
feel constrained by what I have written in the past. I don’t feel, to put it
crudely, that because I’ve written Flaubert’s Parrot I have to write “Tolstoy’s Gerbil.”
I’m not shut in a box of my own devising. When I wrote The
Porcupine I
deliberately used a traditional narrative because I felt that any sort of
tricksiness would distract from the story I was trying to tell. A novel only
really begins for a writer when he finds the form to match the story. Of course
you could play around and say, I wonder what new forms I can find for a novel,
but that’s an empty question until that proper idea comes along, and those
crossing wires of form and content spark. For instance, Talking
It Over was distantly
based on a story that I’d been told five or six years previously. But it was no
more than an anecdote, a possibility, an idea for an idea, until I apprehended
the intimate form necessary for this intimate story.
INTERVIEWER
What about England,
England, which is a political novel about a tycoon? How did you
find the form for that?
BARNES
The tycoon was based to some extent on
Robert Maxwell, the press baron, who was a grotesque rogue. England,
England is my
idea-of-England novel. That and Porcupine are my two novels that overtly treat
political matters.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “my idea-of-England
novel”? Can you differentiate it from the state-of-England novel, of which
there have been a few infelicitous examples lately?
BARNES
England as a functioning economy is
comparatively rich and healthy; many elements of society are comparatively
happy. That may be the state of England; but, whether it is or not, what is the
idea of England? What has become of it? The English are not very self-conscious
the way the French are, so I wanted to consider the idea of England as the
millennium turned. England as an idea has become somewhat degraded and I was
interested in what would happen if you pushed that, fictionally, to an extreme.
You take some of the tendencies that are implicit in contemporary Britain, like
the complete dominance of the free market, the tendency of the country to sell
itself and parody itself for the consumption of others, the increasing
dependence on tourist dollars; then you add in one of my favorite historical
notions, the invention of tradition. You take all this and push it as far as it
can go and set it in the future. It’s a garish, farcical, extremist version of
what the country seems to be getting like now. But that’s one advantage of
fiction, you can speed up time.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps because of your preoccupation with
form, some critics have compared you to Nabokov and Calvino, writers who have
played with form to invent their own prose space. Were they among your
influences?
BARNES
Influence is hard to define. I’ve read
most Nabokov and some Calvino. I can say two things: First, that you tend to
deny influence. In order to write the novel I’m committed to, I have to pretend
that it’s not only separate from everything I’ve written before, but also
separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This
is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity. The
second thing is that when asked about influence, a writer tends to give a
reading list and then it’s pick-and-mix time as to whoever the reader or the
critic decides has influenced you. That’s understandable. But it also seems to
me that you can be influenced by a book you haven’t read, by the idea of
something you’ve merely heard of. You can be influenced at second hand, or even
be influenced by a writer you don’t admire, if they’re doing something
sufficiently bold. For example, I have read novels and thought, This doesn’t
really work, or, This is actually a bit boring; but maybe its ferocity of
attack or audacity of form suggests that such a thing—or a variant of it—could work.
INTERVIEWER
But there is always one writer, a grand
progenitor, who really does mark you. For you it was Flaubert. Were you
conscious of his impact?
BARNES
Yet I don’t write Flaubertian novels. It
is the safest thing to have a progenitor who is not just foreign and dead, but
preferably long dead. I admire his work absolutely and read his correspondence
as if it were written to me personally and posted only yesterday. His concerns
with what the novel can do and how it can do it, with the interrelationship
between art and society are timeless; he poses all the main aesthetic and
professional questions—and answers them loudly. I agree with many of his
answers. But when, as a twenty-first-century English novelist, I sit down in
front of my IBM 196c, I don’t allude in any direct or conscious way to a great
nineteenth-century Frenchman who wrote with a goose quill. The novel, like the
technology, has moved on. Besides, Flaubert wrote like Flaubert—what would be
the use of anyone else doing so?
INTERVIEWER
Apart from Flaubert, were there others,
closer to our time, whose books you thought on reading them, Ah! That’s it!
That’s the stuff!?
BARNES
Not exactly. What I think when I read a
great novel, for example Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which I
think is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a greatEnglish novel—although Americans admire it
too—when I read something like that, I do, to a certain extent, absorb various
technical things, for example about how far one can push an unreliable
narrator. But the main lesson would be a general one: to take the idea you have
for a novel and push it with passion, sometimes to the point of recklessness,
regardless of what people are going to say—that is the way to do your best
work. So The Good Soldierwould be a
parallel example rather than anything you might set out to copy. Anyway, again,
what would be the point? Ford’s done it already. The true influence of a great
novel is to say to a subsequent novelist, Go thou and do otherwise.
INTERVIEWER
What about American literature? You have
already mentioned Updike. Did you read them early on? I mean particularly the
greats—Melville, Hawthorne, etcetera.
BARNES
Sure. Hawthorne particularly, then
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, James, Wharton—I’m a great admirer of hers—and Cheever,
Updike, Roth, Lorrie Moore, who I think is the best short-story writer in
America since Carver. But American novelists are so different from English
novelists. They really are. No point trying to write like them. I sometimes
think Updike is as good as the American novel can get, especially, as I said,
in the Rabbit books.
INTERVIEWER
How exactly are American novelists
different from English novelists?
BARNES
Language, primarily; also vernacular (as
opposed to academic) form; democracy of personnel; nowness. On top of this,
contemporary American literature can’t not be affected (as was British
Victorian literature) by coming from a world-dominant nation—though also one
noted for historical amnesia and where only a small percentage of citizens own
passports. Its virtues and vices are inevitably linked. The best American
fiction displays scope, audacity, and linguistic vigor; the worst suffers from
solipsism, parochialism, and dull elephantiasis.
INTERVIEWER
What about contemporaries, both
continental and English?
BARNES
It is difficult with your contemporaries;
you know them, and/or you know too much about them. The other thing is that
past the age of fifty, you realize that you last read some of those great
writers mentioned earlier when you were seventeen or eighteen and you want—and
need—to reread them. So when faced with the latest fashionable novel of several
hundred pages I think, Have I read all of Turgenev? And if I have, then why not
rereadFathers and Sons?
Now I am in a rereading stage. In France not much seems to be happening. Michel
Tournier still seems to me their greatest living novelist. No one else comes to
mind. But I wouldn’t claim to be keeping up as much as I should.
INTERVIEWER
People say nothing much is happening in
France, but French novels aren’t any more trivial than what is published here.
And intellectually France is still very influential, particularly in philosophy
and critical theory. It has conquered American universities, from Levi-Strauss
to Derrida.
BARNES
That’s true. A lot of their literature’s
energy has gone into theory and psychology; but apart from Tournier they
haven’t really produced anything substantial since the death of Camus. I
thought Camus’s posthumous Le Premier homme made you realize what’s been missing
in the French novel. Recently there was The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. It is a rough,
insolent book, deeply unpleasant in many ways, but definitely touched with some
sort of genius.
INTERVIEWER
What about up-and-coming novelists? If you
believe the reviews, we seem to have a huge number of first-rate budding
novelists. Foreigners envy the health of the English novel.
BARNES
In England I can’t think of anybody in the
next generation following mine whom I look at with particular envy. Short-story
writers, perhaps. In Britain, Helen Simpson; in America, Lorrie Moore—I’ve
mentioned before, a terrific talent. My own generation is as talented as you
can get—Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, and others. But I would say that, wouldn’t I? I
suppose I’m slightly impatient with the lack of ambition in the next generation
coming along. I don’t hold it against them wanting to make money—novelists have
spent a long time not making any money—and I don’t resent any twenty-five year
old who gets offered a hundred thousand pounds for a first novel and takes it.
What I do resent is that they mostly turn out something entirely conventional,
like the story of a bunch of twenty-somethings living in a flat together, the
ups and downs of their emotional lives, all narrated in a way that will easily
and immediately transfer into film. It is not very interesting. Show me more
ambition! Show me some interest in form! Show me why this stuff is best dealt
with in novel form. Oh yes, and please show me some awe at the work of the
great novelists of the past. Still, I was greatly cheered by Zadie Smith’s
recent first novel, White Teeth, which had both
high ambition and bristling talent.
INTERVIEWER
Your own book Talking
It Over, about a triangular love affair, was made into a movie; was
it good?
BARNES
It was made into a French film called Love,
etc. with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charles Berling. It lasted one
week at the Curzon Cinema. Yes, it was rather good. It was a proper film in its
own right, rather than a dutiful book adaptation.
INTERVIEWER
Talking It Over was in the form of a few characters talking to camera,
so to speak, taking it in turn, letting the story emerge that way. Nearly ten
years and several books later you have gone back and taken up the story again,
with the same central characters. And you’ve used the title of the film, Love
etc. The end of the story leaves the reader wondering what will
happen next. It seems to be the second panel of a triptych. Will there be a
third panel?
BARNES
I don’t know. I never thought I’d write a
continuation of Talking It Over. You’re right
that Love, etc. ends with several of the characters
at a point of crisis, which must be resolved one way or the other very soon.
Obviously, I could sit down tomorrow and work out those resolutions. But that
would only take me a few chapters into a new novel. What happens after that? I
have to allow my characters additional years of life so that they can provide
me with the material; that’s what it feels like at the moment, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
How do you create your characters? Are
they roughly based on people you know or encounter? Or do you invent them from
scratch? How do they develop in the course of the narrative?
BARNES
Very few of my characters are based on
people I’ve known. It is too constricting. A couple are based—distantly—on
people I’ve never met. Petkanov in The Porcupine is clearly related in some way to
Todor Zhivkov, former boss of Bulgaria, and Sir Jack Pitman inEngland, England to Robert Maxwell. But I never dreamed
of researching Maxwell—that wouldn’t have helped my novel at all. At most you
take a trait here, a trait there anyway. Maybe minor characters—who are only a
trait here and a trait there in the first place—can be taken wholly from life;
but I’m not aware of doing so. Creation of character is, like much of fiction
writing, a mixture of subjective feel and objective control. Nabokov boasted
that he whipped his characters like galley slaves; popular novelists sometimes
boast (as if it proved them artists) that such-and-such a character “ran away
with them” or “took on a life of his/her own.” I’m of neither school; I keep my
characters on a loose rein, but a rein nonetheless.
INTERVIEWER
You are very good at women characters—they
seem true. How does a man get into the skin of a woman?
BARNES
I have a Handelsman cartoon on my wall of
a mother reading a bedtime story to her little daughter, who’s clutching a
teddy bear. The book in the mother’s hand is Madame Bovary, and she’s
saying, “The surprising thing is that Flaubert, who was a man, actually got
it.” Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex—that’s
one basic test of competence, after all. Russian male writers—think of
Turgenev, Chekhov—seem exceptionally good at women. I don’t know how, as a
writer, you understand the opposite sex except in the same way as you seek to
understand any other sort of person you are not, whether you are separated from
them by age, race, creed, color or sex. You pay the closest attention you can,
you look, you listen, you ask, you imagine. But that’s what you do—what you
should do—as a normal member of society anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Jealousy seems to be an important theme in
your work, for example, in Before She Met Me, in Talking
It Over, and in Love, etc. Is this part of
the French influence also? Jealousy is a great theme in French literature—from
Racine’s tragedies to airport novels.
BARNES
I don’t think my preoccupation with jealousy
is French or French influenced. I frequently write about love and therefore
about jealousy. It’s part of the deal; it’s what comes with love, for most
people, in most societies. Of course, it’s also dramatic, and therefore
novelistically attractive, because it’s frequently irrational, unfair,
boundless, obsessing and horrible for all parties. It’s the moment when
something deeply primitive breaks the surface of our supposedly grown-up
lives—the crocodile’s snout in the lily pond. Irresistible.
INTERVIEWER
You are one of the few writers who are
genuinely interested in sports. What do you play? How keen are you in following
these sports?
BARNES
As a boy I captained my school rugby team
until the age of about fifteen. I’ve also played soccer, cricket, tennis,
snooker (if you call it a sport), squash, badminton, table tennis, and a bit of
golf. I was the school’s under-twelve, under-six-stone boxing champion. That
was a mixture of luck and calculation. I’d never boxed before, but noticed the
day before registration closed that no one else had entered this category, so
I’d get a walkover. Unfortunately, someone else had the same brilliant idea at
roughly the same time, so we were obliged to fight. He was marginally more
scared than I was. That was my first and last bout. I still follow most
sports—it would be easier to list the sports I don’t follow, like formation
swimming and carpet bowls; though late at night, glass in hand, televised
carpet bowls can prove strangely attractive. As for participation, nowadays I
prefer to go walking—daylong tramps in Britain, weeklong tramps in France and
Italy. The only rule is that the luggage has to be sent on ahead. You can’t
enjoy the landscape if you’re weighed down like a Sherpa. As for writers and
sport, male writers anyway, I think they are more interconnected than you
allow. Think of Hemingway—boxing, bullfighting; Jarrell and Nabokov—tennis;
Updike—golf; Stoppard and Pinter—cricket. For a start.
INTERVIEWER
In Cross Channel, the old man in
the story “Tunnel” says that in order to be a writer you need in some sense to
decline life. Do you think you have to choose between literature and life?
BARNES
No, I don’t think we do or can.
“Perfection of the life, or of the work”—that’s always struck me as Yeatsian
posing. Of course artists make sacrifices—so do politicians, cheesemakers,
parents. But art comes out of life—how can the artist continue to exist without
a constant reimmersion in the normality of living? There’s a question of how
far you plunge. Flaubert said that an artist should wade into life as into the
sea but only up to the belly button. Others swim so far out that they forget
their primary intention of being artists. Self-evidently, being a writer
involves spending a lot of time on your own, and being a novelist demands
longer periods of isolation than does being a poet or a playwright. The
creative to-and-fro of the collaborative arts has to happen internally for a
novelist. But at the same time it’s to fiction that we regularly and gratefully
turn for the truest picture of life, isn’t it?
INTERVIEWER
How do you work? Are you disciplined? Do
you keep regular hours?
BARNES
I’m disciplined over a long stretch. That
is to say, I know when I start a novel that it will work best if I write it in
eighteen months, or two or three years, depending how complicated it is, and
nowadays I usually hit that rough target date. I’m disciplined by the pleasure
that the work gives me; I look forward to doing it. I also know that I work
best at certain hours, normally between ten in the morning and one in the
afternoon. Those are the hours when my mental capacity is at its fullest. Other
times of the day will be fine for revising, or writing journalism, or paying
bills. I work seven days a week; I don’t think in terms of normal office
hours—or rather, normal office hours for me include the weekends. Weekends are
a good working time because people think you’ve gone away and don’t disturb
you. So is Christmas. Everyone’s out shopping and no one phones. I always work
on Christmas morning—it’s a ritual.
INTERVIEWER
Is writing easy for you? Perelman said
that there are two kinds of writers: those to whom it comes easily and those
for whom every word is a drop of blood being sucked out. He put himself in the
second category. What is it like for you?
BARNES
I’m not very sympathetic to the
bloodsucking complaint, because no one ever asked a writer to be a writer. I’ve
heard people say, Oh, it’s so lonely! Well, if you don’t like the solitude,
don’t do it. Most writers when they complain are just showboating in my
opinion. Of course it’s hard work—so it should be. But would you swap it for
child-minding hyperactive twins, for instance?
INTERVIEWER
One can like the result but not
necessarily the process, don’t you think?
BARNES
I think you should like the process. I would imagine that
a great pianist would enjoy practicing because, after you’ve technically
mastered the instrument, practicing is about testing interpretation and nuance
and everything else. Of course, the satisfaction, the pleasure of writing
varies; the pleasure of the first draft is quite different from that of
revision.
INTERVIEWER
The first draft is fraught with
difficulty. It’s like giving birth, very painful, but after that taking care of
and playing with the baby is full of joy.
BARNES
Ah! But sometimes it isn’t a baby, it’s
something hideous and malformed; it doesn’t look like a baby at all. I tend to
write quickly when I’m on the first draft, and then just revise and revise.
INTERVIEWER
So you rewrite a lot?
BARNES
All the time. That’s when the real work
begins. The pleasure of the first draft lies in deceiving yourself that it is
quite close to the real thing. The pleasure of the subsequent drafts lies
partly in realizing that you haven’t been gulled by the first draft. Also in
realizing that quite substantial things can be changed, changed even quite late
in the day, that the book can always be improved. Even after it’s published,
for that matter. This is partly why I’m against word processors, because they
tend to make things look finished sooner than they are. I believe in a certain
amount of physical labor; novel-writing should feel like a version—however
distant—of traditional work.
INTERVIEWER
So you write by hand?
BARNES
I wrote Love, etc. by hand. But
normally I type on an IBM 196c, then hand correct again and again until it’s
virtually illegible, then clean type it, then hand correct again and again. And
so on.
INTERVIEWER
When do you let go? What makes you feel it
is ready?
BARNES
When I find that the changes I’m making
are dis-improving my text as much as improving it. Then I know it’s time to
wave good-bye.
INTERVIEWER
What do you use your computer for, then?
BARNES
I use it for e-mail and shopping.
INTERVIEWER
What are your plans for the future?
BARNES
I’m not going to tell you! I’m a bit
superstitious. Actually it is not so much superstitious as practical. The last
piece of journalism I wrote was for The New Yorker about the Tour de France. Much of it
was about drug use in professional cycling. I did a lot of research, and I
found myself—unusually for me—talking about the research to people. When I came
to write the piece I was a bit flat. I found it very difficult to write. I’d
come back from having talked to, say, a Dutch sociologist of cycling about the
history of drug taking back in the 1890s, and I’d spill it all out to everyone
I met—because it’s quite fascinating—and then I’d sit down to write it, and I’d
think, Is this really so interesting? That was confirmation of a lesson I’d
learned long ago but momentarily forgotten: don’t talk it all away. It’s a
matter of self-preservation. I’m retentive by nature anyway. But there
will be other books, don’t worry.
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