(E) A. S. Byatt, Philip Hensher - The Art of Fiction No. 168

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168
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A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168
Interviewed by Philip Hensher
ISSUE 159, FALL 2001
A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and,
in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are
filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of
extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her
unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate
examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and
fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her
houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently
between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations
and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can
imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature.
No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of
English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in
contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the
example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of
that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of
“Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger
writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small
relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention
to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely
due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition. Few
novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a
daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation
and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian
theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion.
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20/11/2023, 22:37 Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 168
Her novels are Shadow of a Sun (1964), reprinted under the

originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun in 1991, The Game
(1967), Possession: A Romance (1990), which was a popular winner of
the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale (2000). The novels The
Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), and Babel Tower (1996)
form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s
onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Woman in 2002. Her
shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories (1987), Angels
and Insects (1992), The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the
Nightingale’s Eye (1994), and Elementals (1998). All these are much
translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a
formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism
and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an
anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national
character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the
anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely
one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now
living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE
(commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999.
Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the
summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We
talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the
one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled
into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both
sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale,
and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious
mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and
drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—
they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old
bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a
superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the
Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think,
enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous
activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the
conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of
delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-
conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift
movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual
curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind
as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.
INTERVIEWER
In what circumstances did you write your first novel, The Shadow of the
Sun?
A . S. BYAT T
Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat
there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this
novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no
good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman
at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I
didn’t know anything else, and had to write that sort of novel . . .
INTERVIEWER
And perhaps not wishing to put your life on hold until you did know
something else?
B YAT T
No, because looking back on it, I don’t have a driven desire actually to
be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement
about reading is to want to write. I think I was lucky at Cambridge. A
university English degree stops most people wanting to write. And it
slowed me down and embarrassed me a great deal about wanting to
write, but, at the same time, it intensely increased my desire to write.
INTERVIEWER
Did you write as a child?
B YAT T
Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left
boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter
from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a
whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It
was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’
boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of
childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the
smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got
up to, isn’t it?
B YAT T
Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew
said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his
sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game
with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about
going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot
of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find
the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the
whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen.
INTERVIEWER
To go back to your first novel, The Shadow of the Sun—how did it come
to be published?
B YAT T
Well, when I left Cambridge, I went and did one postgraduate year in
America where I actually started a second novel, The Game, having put
The Shadow of the Sun in a drawer. I then came back to England and
went to Oxford, which gave me a whole area of The Game—another of
the smokescreens in that it’s very much about what I think of as the
Oxford mind as opposed to the Cambridge mind. Iris Murdoch is always
asking me if I think there’s a difference, and I do.
I got married in 1959 and went to live in Durham, which is another
medieval place. In those days if you were a woman they took away your
grant for getting married. If you were a man, they increased it. So there I
was with no grant, which secretly at some deep level I was pleased
about, because I truly would rather have been a writer than an
academic, and I needed to be forced into making that decision. I
decided to put The Game back in the drawer and got out the first one. I
had two small children, and in a slow and rather unhappy way, knowing
that it was all inadequate, I rewrote and rewrote, with one or the other
child in a little chair on the desk, rocking him with one hand. When I
had finished it, I showed it to an academic at Durham who said, Oh, I
expect you’re going to put that in a drawer and do something else now.
So I never spoke to him really again. He turned up some years later at
my publishers’ claiming that he had been the first encourager of my
career!
I sent The Shadow of the Sun off to John Beer, the Coleridge man,
who was my friend in Cambridge, the excellence of whose work, his
thesis on Coleridge, had struck me, and whose ideas, I think, run
through almost everything I write. He wrote back and said that he
thought the first part might make a nice little book, and he wasn’t so
sure about the second part, but he sent it off to Chatto & Windus. I then
got a letter back from there, from Cecil Day-Lewis, saying, I have read
your novel with great interest. Would you care to come to lunch with
me in the Athenaeum? So I went to lunch with Cecil Day-Lewis in the
Athenaeum, where you had to eat in the basement because you were a
woman. He kept muttering, Boardinghouse food, boardinghouse food.
He didn’t really mention the novel. We talked about poetry and Yeats
and Auden and Shakespeare, and it was the literary conversation I had
never had. When we got out on the pavement I rather tremblingly said,
Might you be thinking of publishing this novel? He said, Oh yes, of
course, of course.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want
to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a
successful novelist.
B YAT T
In a sense, it’s a working-out of one’s relation to all those great figures
who stalked across the landscape of the Cambridge mind—particularly,
I suppose, D. H. Lawrence, with whom my relationship is extremely
ambivalent. F. R. Leavis’s book on him must have just come out about
then. Graham Hough at Christ’s was writing on him. Leavis was a very
important figure for me in the sense that I perceived him as a kind of
blockage to everybody who wanted to do what I wanted to do. At the
same time, he did teach reading. He really did teach reading. I went to
two of his seminars, which, you know, is a story I have told in Possession
—I decided I wasn’t going to go to any more because either I would get
like the other people who worshipped him, who derived an enormous
amount from him, but somehow didn’t make anything, or I would just
get angrier and angrier with what I saw as his manipulation of his
students into admiring him.
INTERVIEWER
And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering
automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements.
B YAT T
Exactly. He did do things which I do think were rather vulgar, like
throwing other people’s books in the rubbish bin at the beginning of his
lecture. And he was paranoid, and paranoia is a very bad thing for
anybody. Also, I have never wanted to belong to anything ever and he

was a movement. He was a guru. I’m trying to write a novel at the
moment with a guru in it. I don’t like gurus. I don’t like people who ask
you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think
independently. And, of course, he was a very ambiguous figure because
he appeared to be doing the one, and was doing the other.
INTERVIEWER
He became a guru because he couldn’t be accepted by Cambridge, so he
set up his own authority. And yet in some ways your values are quite
close to Leavis’s. You come from quite similar intellectual backgrounds.
I see quite a strong nonconformist streak running through your work
and through his, which I think in both cases comes from this strong
awareness of George Eliot and what lies behind her. Is that fair?
B YAT T
I think that’s absolutely fair, and, of course, it is worth pointing out that
Leavis, when he was a young don, taught my mother. She had her
undergraduate essays with Leavis’s comments in the margin, and they
were good teacherly comments—but she did come from a
nonconformist background.
I can understand both the delicacy and toughness of George Eliot’s
morality and the impatience with nonsense. I understand the rougher
edges of nonconformism that come through D.H. Lawrence’s
apocalyptic visions. I can take those as well. I like Bunyan, who Leavis
liked, the kind of ranting, roaring, visionary English nonconformist. I
don’t like the English gentlemanly high-church sort of refined person,
except for George Herbert, who is perfect and unexpected.
INTERVIEWER
Can I suggest something? I suspect that there comes a point at which
you think that the English nonconformist mind starts to label things as
cant and writes them off, when they are not cant at all. I’m thinking of
the passage in Still Life when Frederica reads Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim
and gives way to impatience with someone who is too ready to identify
pretentiousness. What is presented as pretentiousness may merely be
someone trying to live their life.
B YAT T
Yes. Exactly the tolerance advocated by George Eliot, or the Quakers
with whom I lived, who would not have managed to find Bernard, the
artist in Lucky Jim, funny. He is no funnier than Kingsley Amis himself

sitting there sneering at everybody, and he is certainly not as unpleasant
as Jim, with his nasty fantasies of sticking beads up people’s noses or
annihilating old ladies who are slowing down buses or, indeed, his
repulsive images of girls with big breasts.
And in my view all sartorial decisions are comic. I also took against
Philip Larkin for getting desperately impatient with an undergraduate
sweeping along the High in Oxford in a blue velvet cloak and saying,
Oh, my god, all that is starting up again. I mean, his kind of dour, I
refuse to have anything to do with the aesthetic,” is all that too. It’s just
another form of all that. Both of them are stances, pretenses,
ephemeral. I mean, for God’s sake, neither a caveman nor, indeed,
Oliver Cromwell would recognize any of it.
INTERVIEWER
The hateful thing in Lucky Jim is how much of this loathing is directed
towards Margaret, who is seen as a woman getting above herself.
B YAT T
Yes, and she wears the wrong clothes, which he is allowed to sneer at,
but she isn’t allowed to disapprove of anything or find anything wrong.
I’ve always felt that about Amis. In a sense, you can also feel it about
Evelyn Waugh. I’ve just been rereading the Sword of Honour trilogy, and
he takes a few blows, which he obviously thinks are terribly funny, at
the pretensions of a certain sort of non-upper-class soldier. And they’re
not really funny. They depend on a dreadfully artificial set of criteria.
Every now and then Waugh, who I think is a much greater artist than
Amis, knows how to undercut everybody’s pretensions, and you stare
into the pit. But every now and again he doesn’t do that. People of my
generation at Cambridge thought Amis was wonderful. They kept
saying he stood for qualities of decency. It seems to me it’s the one thing
he didn’t stand for at all.
INTERVIEWER
So starting to publish, you came from an excluded position. What did
you come into?
B YAT T
I was very naive, which I think saved me. You see, I thought I was
coming into English literature, which included everything from
Chaucer to Spenser to Shakespeare. What I was actually coming into
was all this sort of postwar no-nonsense, angry young men, nobody has
ever reported the English provinces, which is an extraordinarily
ignorant position to take up. What did George Eliot and what did
Lawrence do if not report the English provinces? All of them! It was
complete nonsense, and the journalists just fell for it. As they fell for it
with Look Back in Anger—as though nobody had ever reported lower-
middle-class anger before. It had been reported almost ad nauseam. I
am possibly related to Arnold Bennett, who reported it with infinitely
more depth, breadth, wisdom, and understanding than John Wain, John
Braine, Kingsley Amis, or John Osborne. I actually found them rather
boring, and Leavis had at least given one the proper arrogance to know
inside one’s soul that they were slightly boring and that they would pass.
But I was saved, in fact. I was saved, in the sense of feeling there
might be something I belonged to, by two people, one of whom was Iris
Murdoch, who was not writing that kind of thing. She was writing
philosophical novels, which contained myths about the nature of things.
And the other was Frank Kermode, who, when I discovered him, was
writing criticism about a literature that one might hope to add things to.
In a way, what Kermode said William Golding and Lawrence Durrell
were doing was more important to me than what Golding or Durrell
were doing. I didn’t discover Anthony Burgess until a lot later, because I
thought at the time he was another angry young man; but he’s another
person who is actually full of rich invention and a complete lack of
narrowness.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me that you were writing books that were what you wanted
to write and not second-guessing what the literary, the intellectual
scene would like to hear at the time. What kind of reception did your
first two books get? What impact did they make?
B YAT T
Well, now I’m over sixty I can simply say this: the reception of my early
books was completely meshed up with the fact that my sister Margaret
Drabble was a writer. Nobody looked to see what I was doing, not for
quite a long time. She had written more novels and she wrote them
faster. I think it was extremely good for me in the long run because I had
none of the things that most writers have, like the anxieties about
reception. I just had this simple terror of being referred to as someone’s
sister. So it was very important every time a book came out to have got
the next one underway. It was very important for quite a long time not
to read any of the reviews.
INTERVIEWER
That desire not to be your sister sounds like a negative urge, but
actually one could see how it could start to have quite a positive impact
on your work. A book like The Virgin in the Garden has an ambition to
be as extravagant as possible, to go in a completely different direction.
Was there a sort of freedom about that?
B YAT T
There was as long as I never read the press and didn’t do interviews and,
on the whole, didn’t go to parties and things, which I only partly did.
But there was a freedom, yes. I did a lot of my writing as though I was an
academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
INTERVIEWER
You have written distinguished critical books, and I wondered whether
you ever regretted that work on novels took you away from criticism in
any respect?
B YAT T
Not even for a moment. All my academic work has been done for one of
two reasons. One was to sort out something I needed to think about as a
writer. I think of my critical writing that I’ve enjoyed doing as being in
the line of Coleridge needing to write about poetry, T. S. Eliot writing
his odd essay, George Eliot’s essays, which I love.
I think of my criticism as being “writer’s criticism.” I taught an
extramural class for about ten years in London University, and I loved
that because that was where I learned the novels you don’t read in an
English literature degree. We did Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kafka, Beckett,
and we did Thomas Mann, and we did Ulysses, and by the end of it I
knew the novel, not just the English novel; I also understood that
people of very varying backgrounds when reading novels were
interested in almost everything. It teaches you respect for the lay
reader.
I took a university job in 1972 partly out of admiration for Frank
Kermode, whose department I went into, and partly because both of my
husbands said I had to get a paid job to pay for my son to go to boarding
school. My son Charles got killed the same week* so the whole thing
became the most dreadful knot. And I taught for eleven years. Really, I
didn’t want to teach. I did actually weep all night after I accepted the
job. Of course, in a way, after my son was dead, it was a very good thing
to have the students. It was a very good thing to have the literature. And
it was a very good thing to have the form of life that required you to
keep moving up and down London when you would rather have sat in a
heap and never moved again. Looking back on it, I treated my academic
life very symbolically. I went on teaching for as long as my son had lived,
and the moment I’d taught for that length of time I stopped.
But I never ever saw myself as an academic. I never, I think, ever saw
it as anything other than a way to earn enough money to write a novel
and have a bit of independence, though I do see scholarship as an
extremely important and wonderful thing.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a very strong response in a lot of your books to rather a curious
thing, which people sometimes underrate, which is the romance of
scholarship. If you were to write a really big academic book, what would
it be?
B YAT T
If I suddenly realized I would never write another novel I would start on
a book about what effect the idea of Napoleon had on the European
novel. Nobody’s done it. And he haunts Dostoyevsky, he haunts
Stendhal, Flaubert, he is still hovering around in Proust. He haunts
Turgenev, he haunts the English, always in a low comic form, but he’s
there in Thackeray. It is the most brilliant topic. Raskolnikov and Julien
Sorel are nothing if they are not ideas of what it was like to be Napoleon.
INTERVIEWER
And The Count of Monte Cristo.
B YAT T
And The Count of Monte Cristo. But you would need another whole life,
and you’d need to be able to go and sit in the British Library, and pursue
it to every single little corner. I know I can’t do that. I can’t stand the
thought of what I can’t do, but it would be a good book, wouldn’t it?
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me that you do respond very well and very excitingly to
something that, perhaps, we’d given up on in this country—the big
public novel. The Virgin in the Garden, for example. It’s not small, it’s
not parochial, it is about big subjects, and I wonder what on earth
people made of it in 1978.
B YAT T
They made two sorts of things of it. Quite a lot of the reviewers
approached it in a sort of crabwise respectful way and said, This is a big
book, and I haven’t yet worked out exactly what’s going on, which is
reasonable. And then there were a few people who said, This is another
novel by somebody rather like Margaret Drabble.
What it is trying to do, I think, is to see what you could do if you
wrote Middlemarch now. It partly came out of my extramural class
where I had sat with Tolstoy and with Dostoyevsky. I’d had the idea of
The Virgin in the Garden in Durham in about 1961, which was the year
my son was born there. I suddenly realized I had lived some history. I
had lived, as it were, the war. I had lived the early fifties. I was in the
sixties, and I saw the sixties, unlike many others, not as a time to make a
revolution but as a time to look at the history I’d lived through.
And, also, I was thinking quite hard technically about the form of
novels. I had read Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot and
been very struck by the accident at the beginning. I actually thought up
the death of Stephanie in 1961. I thought, I’ll write a series of books, and
I’ll make the death be one of the central consciousnesses, so that the
reader will be upset as you are by a real death and not as you are by a
fictional death. Every two or three months, I get a letter from somebody
saying, How dare you do this to me. I sat and cried all night. You know,
you can’t do that in a novel. You have no right to kill people in novels
like real people. It’s not fair.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, people arguing with the splinter of ice in the heart.
B YAT T
Yes, that’s right. I didn’t have the splinter. That is, I formed the plan, got
the splinter and wrote the accident. But anyway, all those things were
going together. I also think, because I was teaching all this wide range of
things in my novel course, I thought I might find a form. I was very
surprised to find it far back in my thesis on Spenser and Milton. There’s
a Spenserian aspect of Milton that I love. It’s the exotic. It’s the
extraordinary metaphors. It’s the luscious sensuousness of him. It isn’t
the stern puritan. I think I made something of Spenser that was the
presence of stories about unreal things in a serious, real world. It crops
up in odd forms even in things like The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,
which is about the serious life of the fairy tale. He was quite useful in
The Virgin in the Garden when I tried to get in the coronation of
Elizabeth II—when everything was quoting Elizabethan language and
we were all given a children’s magazine called The New Elizabethan,
which was full of stories about the old Elizabethans. I had a hair-raising
experience when I tried to look up what the weather had actually been
like on Easter Sunday in the year of the coronation. I went to the
London Library and checked the files of The Times, and the third leader
had this immense passage all about Spenser. It was talking about
mutability and the death of Queen Mary, the mother of George VI. One
queen dies and another queen is born.
INTERVIEWER
This was the beginning of the great explosion of literary playfulness—
the arrival of Calvino in England, the advent of the English
misinterpretation of South American writing as magic realism, all those
explosive influences on the English novel. You were there even before
the beginning.
B YAT T
Well, I think I was there before the beginning. I remember my first
meeting with Angela Carter, with whom I became great friends later. We
all went to hear Stevie Smith reading her poetry—lots of writers around
her, rather like a bullring—and she stood in the middle and read. On the
way out this very disagreeable woman stomped up to me, and she said,
My name’s Angela Carter. I recognized you and I wanted to stop and tell
you that the sort of thing you’re doing is no good at all, no good at all.
There’s nothing in it—that’s not where literature is going. That sort of
thing. And off she stomped. Then about five years ago she said that she
had realized that she was a writer because of fairy tales, because she was
hooked on narrative as a child, not by realist novels about social
behavior or how to be a good girl, but by these very primitive stories
that go I think a lot deeper. It wasn’t until she said it that I felt
empowered, which is why I have to acknowledge that she said it. As a
little girl, I didn’t like stories about little girls. I liked stories about
dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and
the four musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls
making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what
the other little girl did or did not do. My poor grandchildren live in a
world where children’s books are about how awful it is to live in horrible
blocks of flats in deprived areas of cities, which they ought to know, but
you can understand entirely why everybody fell upon Harry Potter,
which is more grown-up also.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think The Virgin in the Garden is so much present in the
culture, still sells, is still read, is still hugely popular? I know it’s an awful
thing to ask a writer to account for her popularity.
B YAT T
Well, my ex-colleague John Sutherland wrote a piece in The Bookseller
recently saying that it was completely unreadable, and that he and a
colleague of his and mine at University College had a bet about whether
any of them could finish it and none of them could! He actually
published that. So I’m always deeply surprised when anyone says
anybody is reading it. I think it is popular with a lot of young women. I
think it’s partly popular because it does give an image of a not agreeable,
furiously ambitious, rather done-down woman. But I like to think it’s
popular because it’s writerly and it includes a lot of things. I had a very
nice letter the other day from somebody in the north of England who
said that she loved the way it kept changing tones of voice, and she
loved the way I actually had a very wide range of people in the class
structure of England, none of whom I particularly liked or disliked, but
all of whom I could write about. I think a lot of books last if you don’t
dislike anybody too much, or take a poke at them.
INTERVIEWER
It’s no accident that you do have a huge readership in Europe who
responds very profoundly to your concerns and interests. When did you
start to become aware of that?
B YAT T
I’ve always wanted to be a European simply, you know, for a trivial and
profound reason, which is that I’m good at languages. I love countries
because I love their languages. I did French, German, Latin, and English
at school, and then I learned Italian at Cambridge in order to do Dante.
This means that I can actually read European literature with its own
rhythms even if I have to have a side-by-side text for the difficult bits.
I don’t think I did have a European readership, really, until
Possession. Simply because I wanted to be in Europe I rather
deliberately wrote a lot of short texts, which I hoped people would
translate. I think that was the only really public piece of maneuvering
I’ve ever done in my life. The result is, of course, that the Europeans
tend to think of me as an elegant short-story writer and a fantasy writer,
and they don’t know about The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and
Babel Tower, which on the whole are not translated, though the Danes,
the French and the Germans are now setting out on the whole thing.
God knows what they’re going to make of them because they don’t fit
the Europeans’ idea of who I am. I remember once talking about The
Virgin in the Garden in the early eighties at a French literary festival,
and somebody saying, Why should we be interested in the coronation of
Elizabeth II? Had this young man read the book, he would have seen it
was actually about Ovidian myths of fertility, which he could have
understood, or at least I hope he could.
INTERVIEWER
Well, the answer is always the same. Why are we interested in
Napoleon’s wars? Why are we interested in the Duchesse de
Guermantes?
B YAT T
At that same literary festival, Kazuo Ishiguro was sitting there saying
that he had just written this novel about a butler and that he was
translated into twenty-seven languages and that you had certain
responsibilities to your readership. He had actually gone to the trouble
of learning about what sort of spoons and forks the butler would have
put out. He had then taken out the local references because he was
writing what he called, with no derogatory intention, an international
novel. I wrote a little article in The Times asking what had happened to
those little local details, which are why you write at all, things you want
to save from oblivion, things that are specific to the time and place
you’re writing in. I went on to mention Tolstoy. Tolstoy describes
gathering mushrooms in Russian forests. I’ve never been in Russian
forests, and I’ve eaten mushrooms, but not those mushrooms. But you
know exactly what they are. That’s the difference between a good
writer, who can make you care about the Duchesse de Guermantes or
that particular mushroom, and somebody who can’t, who is somehow
expecting you to call up a set of associations that they haven’t created.
INTERVIEWER
There’s always a spirit of sympathy in your work, and a conviction of
the importance of being fair to what people—even fictitious people—
might have meant or thought. I can’t think of many other writers who,
in extremis, would resist the temptation to make fun, to be satirical.
B YAT T
It could be seen as a weakness. I’m afraid of people making fun of other
people. I was the child that sat in the back of the class and wondered
how the class could be destroying the inadequate secondary French

mistress. I was the child that wondered what on earth she felt like. I
think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really
hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they’re doing what they’re
doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you
hate them. I remember having an argument with Iris Murdoch about
that. I said, You know, I really do think it’s silly to take digs at people
because of the clothes they wear or because of the way they express
themselves. She said, Oh yes, but all novelists have to do that, which
rather surprised me because she on the whole is a nondigger as well. It’s
partly my father, who never said anything nasty about anybody that I
ever heard, which doesn’t mean he was a weak or sentimental man.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think, to ask rather a leading question, that the 1960s notion
that “the personal is the political” is at all compatible with the practice
of writing novels?
B YAT T
It got dreadfully overdone. It did more harm than good to the novel. I
did a talk with David Lodge and Mervyn Jones at the ICA [Institute of
Contemporary Arts, in London], I think in the early seventies. And we
were talking about what happened to the Leavis great tradition novel.
Has anything happened to it? Has it now died? Has realism gone away?
All those things. We sat and had a perfectly reasonable but not inspired
discussion, as I remember, in the theater, which meant you couldn’t see
the audience. There was a man in the front row, rather an old man, who
said he wanted to ask a question but didn’t know how to phrase it. He
said, Why is the contemporary British novel set always either in
academe or in the media or in the kitchen? The world is full of many
other things. When I was younger—he continued in rather a
patronizing voice that made everybody very furious—I was interested
in those three things. Now I’m not interested in any of them. And David
Lodge said, Oh, well, perhaps you ought to be. Mervyn Jones said quite
dryly that he could take it or leave it, but they weren’t uninteresting.
But I said that I rather agreed with him. What are you interested in? I
asked. So he said, I’m interested in the politics of multinational
companies. I’m interested in what is happening to the relations between
nations and the shift in global power. The novel seems not even to be
aware of that. At this point a feminist academic stood up and said with
really complete contempt for him that she thought he would realize that
the personal was the political and that he would find a paradigm of
every possible political situation in the kitchen. And I said, That simply
isn’t true. Then a sepulchral voice at the back said, Actually there are
some novels that do have political power and do actually even cause
people to march up and down in the streets. Günter Grass’s, for
instance, or even my own work . . . And I peered into the dark and said,
Who are you? And this voice said, I am Salman Rushdie. It was when he
had just written Shame. But I’ve thought a lot about that irritated man.
His objections were absolutely right. The personal is not the political,
although the participants in the political are persons. The political isn’t
entirely personal. The kitchen is not a paradigm for everything.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s talk about Possession. The central figure, the avenging angel of the
book, is a surprising one. It’s Beatrice Nest, isn’t it?
B YAT T
Yes. And she, of course, is Dante and Beatrice. It’s a terribly
overdetermined womanly name. She looks like a nest, but certainly isn’t
one, because she’s a maiden lady. I feel immense sympathy for her. She
really suffered from being put down by male English departments. The
one where I taught was well-known for excluding the women members
by conducting all its business over beer in the pub. And as late as 1964,
women were not allowed in the senior common room. They could only
go in the women’s senior common room, which was known as the
Margaret Murray Room. Beatrice was the generation who was told that
because she was a woman she must work not on Randolph Ash, but on
Ellen Ash—it’s disgusting to want to work on Randolph, he was a man.
INTERVIEWER
It’s underestimated to what degree women understand men, and vice
versa. It’s increasingly presented as a fantastically complex thing, which
nobody could ever be expected to achieve, but if that were the case, we
all might as well give up writing novels or, for that matter, reading them.
B YAT T
I found myself doing an interview about Patrick O’Brian on the
television. It was very amusing. This man came into my house and said,
Why do you like the novels of Patrick O’Brian, and what do you like and
what don’t you like about them? I said, I really don’t like his women
characters, who I think are romantic constructs. We went on talking a
bit more. We talked about O’Brian’s nature study, and how he does the
sea, and how his plotting is completely surprising at any moment. Then
he said, Yes, but an awful lot of this is about, you know, the life of men
together in ships. What interest is that to women? I found myself
saying, as though it was an incredibly surprising thing, Yes, but women
like men! You know, women like Dick Francis’s books too.
INTERVIEWER
Are your characters taken from real-life models?
B YAT T
None of the people in Possession has much of an original in a real human
being, but Maud had an original in a student I had who was very
beautiful and who never took her hair out of a very tight green
handkerchief, which she seemed to have put on as a form of self-torture.
She was such a beautiful woman I couldn’t see why she had done it. One
of my daughters once said to me, My generation is afraid of the word
love. We will use almost any other word, but not that one. I’ve always
said it’s a dangerous thing writing novels about people younger than
yourself, so I had to rely on little clues to that generation.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s talk a bit about the poetry in Possession. One of the things people
always comment on is how solid and credible the pastiche, if one can use
such a word, how absolutely unfaultable it is.
B YAT T
It was a very odd experience writing that poetry because I’ve always had
a self-deprecating belief that there are things I can’t do, one of which is
sing in tune, which I certainly can’t and never will, and another of which
was write poetry. I knew I was a prose person. When teachers at school
tried to make me write poetry I used to say, This is no good, I can’t do it.
I’m sorry, I haven’t the ear. All the way through university I only wrote
essays on poetry because you could learn it by heart; and it was easy to
quote the whole poem in an exam and get a good mark. It’s much easier
to analyze a Donne sonnet in an exam question than struggle around
with Ulysses. So, for that reason, I’d studied poetry, but at the same time
I had eschewed it. When I was first teaching in the extramural classes
the students used to keep saying, Can we have a concurrent class on
poetry? I would say in a timid way, No, no, you know, I can’t do poetry. I
do the novel. That’s what I know about. But anyway, for all these
reasons, I was terrified of the poems. I had this conversation with
Dennis Enright. I said to him, I had the idea that I would do what
Robertson Davies did in his book about the opera about Orpheus, and
take a very unknown set of poems and stick them in. I thought I might
take Ezra Pound’s early poems that were pastiche Browning. He said,
Don’t be ridiculous. You must write them yourself. In some ways, partly
because he had been my editor, this was a challenge. I thought, Well, I’ll
go back and just write one and see if it works. And then I did have this
dreadful experience, which of course was just what I was writing
against, of the language speaking through you. It really was a sort of
experience of being possessed. It was an experience of all the Victorian
poems that didn’t exist and should have existed suddenly crowding up
like ghosts in Homer and trying to get out. There was no problem to
writing any of it. I didn’t have to think about it. All my life I had had a
passion for Victorian poetry, which had been denigrated and despised
by both T. S. Eliot and the Leavis school. There was nobody who liked
it. I only knew one person in the world who really thought Victorian
poetry was great poetry and that was Isobel Armstrong, whom I had
met by accident in the cafeteria of the British Museum. She became a
good friend because we discovered that both of us really had a passion
for Browning, a real passion. The book’s dedicated to her.
What I have written, to a certain extent, is modern poetry that is
Victorian poetry, although there isn’t an anachronism. It also does
things that the slightly feebler Victorian poems that annoy you, like
some of Matthew Arnold’s lesser works, don’t do. It has metaphors that
I did like when I was studying modern poetry. There are things I got out
of T. S. Eliot and I convert them back into the Victorian poetry he got
them from. But it was all done at terrible speed. When I wrote the novel,
I was writing against the idea that we are spoken by the language. I do
have this idea that an author writes, an author is an author. But in these
poems, something was speaking to me.
INTERVIEWER
What was the experience like of going back the next morning or, for
that matter, going back now and actually re-reading the poetry? I mean,
can you see clearly where it’s coming from, or does it still seem like, as
you say, modernist poetry as written by a Victorian poet?
B YAT T
Well, it is all structure, all part of the novel. Another thing I should say
about Possession is that it’s the only one of my novels that’s been written
on the whole without interruption, without somebody getting ill,
without a disaster happening, without having won the Booker Prize,
without being pushed around by book tours. And it has that kind of
dreadful energy that comes of having written it from the first word to
the last with the whole book in your head.
I very rarely—almost never—reread my own work once it’s
published. I do actually enjoy reading the poetry because it surprises
me. I like the really wicked poem, which is just a great chunk of Henry
James, which was actually in blank verse anyway, to which I’ve added
about four words. It’s the one about the connoisseur and the beautiful
tiles, which is just Mr. Verver and the golden bowl. A Henry James
scholar, a very eminent Henry James scholar in New England, suddenly
noticed this and got into a terrible rage and said I was cheating, that this
was plagiarizing. So I wrote her a letter saying that this is a postmodern
text, it is an homage to James. It isn’t nicking him. And we became
friends.
INTERVIEWER
Something that’s been striking me quite forcibly is that you place a lot
of weight on the simple evocation of simple things. What I’m thinking
of is the weight, value, and energy you draw simply from the magical
names of colors in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
B YAT T
I think the names of colors are at the edge between where language fails
and where it’s at its most powerful. One of the things I noticed when I
was working a lot on van Gogh in Still Life was how he doesn’t decline
his color adjectives. It is as though all the colors remained things. So if
you’re talking about quelque chose blanche he just leaves it as blanc.
Apparently you’re allowed to do this because it isn’t quite clear whether
they are nouns or adjectives. That in itself is very beautiful. I also read
and reread Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color in which he asks how do we
know when we say red that we mean the same thing? There are no
guarantees, in a way, that if you write something people will read what
you wrote. I used to go round the department when I was teaching at
UCL, when I was writing Still Life, and try out not the big color words
but the little color words. There’s a particular very subtle English
language expert and I would say to her, If I put in malachite, what do
you see? She’d say, I haven’t the slightest idea, and she didn’t know what
ocher was, or gamboge, or viridian. Those people who do will have a
completely different experience of what I’ve written from those who
don’t. I’ve just this morning had a letter from my friend and French
translator, Jean-Louis Chevalier, who is translating the bit in The Virgin
in the Garden about Wilkie’s glasses, which were sometimes Cambridge
blue and sometimes Bristol red. He’s translated Cambridge blue as bleu
clair, which is, a, accurate, but, b, not quite right. He obviously doesn’t
know Bristol glass, so he can’t see that particular red that Bristol glass
is. He gave me a list that went on for about a line and a half of French
possible words that might do for this particular kind of red. I couldn’t
find one that was the right red for Bristol red. This made me
despondent and at the same time very gleeful.
INTERVIEWER
It’s a question of taxonomy, isn’t it? I mean, there are languages, such as
Italian, in which what we call blue has two different names, blu and
azzurro, which probably have the same incidence.
B YAT T
One of my favorite books, which I read again and again, is John Gage’s
book on the theory of color. He talks about how green and yellow in
ancient Rome probably meant blue.
INTERVIEWER
Purple in Shakespeare pretty definitely means blue.
B YAT T
And purple in French always means red, which I didn’t know. I wrote a
whole beach scene in Still Life in which the Wittgenstein philosopher
talks about how on earth Proust can refer to something being purple
when it clearly isn’t. And of course I didn’t know then that actually
pourpre doesn’t mean purple, it means red. I don’t think any English
person seeing it in French will not have a quick visual association of at
least a very reddish purple or purplish red. It’s one of the areas in which,
as a writer, you get very interested in your readers because you know
that they will have very quick physical reactions to those words, and
some of them will immediately see what you see, and some of them will
see quite some other thing, and some of them almost won’t see
anything. And this can lead you philosophically to think about the fact
that really, truly no reader reads the same text as another reader. And
yet they are all in a fair degree of agreement about what it is they’ve read
or what it is that they’ve been asked to visualize.
INTERVIEWER
One of the intriguing things about your books is that you are very
interested in science, but also explore very effectively some of those
magical concerns, some of those divisions between the scientific

investigator and the charlatan.
B YAT T
I remember reading an article by Frank Kermode in which he said in a
rather small voice, “Will no one stand up for reason?” Actually, I think I
am a rationalist. But I think our descriptions of the world are
inadequate. I think most of the scientific descriptions of the human
place in the world are as inadequate as those of the magicians or
religious people, though I’m completely on the side of the scientists. I
am at the moment reading a completely ludicrous book by a popular
follower of Jung about the importance to everyone of the zodiac. I think
the zodiac represents human poetry at its most ludicrous and arbitrary.
If you actually look at those things in the sky they are not, God help us,
a ram or a bull or a virgin. They are a series of dots. There’s a wonderful
bit at the end of a novel by Cees Nooteboom where the man is sailing in
the ship of death down the Amazon with a lot of other dead people, and
he meets a Chinese sage who is also dead, who points out that all the
alchemical symbols, all the astrological symbols have different names in
Chinese and are differently arranged. I fail to understand why human
beings need these systems, but they do. It’s ingrained in our natures in
the way in which we seem to feel that we need to celebrate birth,
marriage,and death. We must have a form to go with them.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve talked and written a good deal about Darwinism, and I’ve been
very struck by the fact that you often place it intellectually in
relationship to Christian belief.
B YAT T
Certainly, for Darwin himself, there was a dreadful conflict here. It’s
partly to do with the fact that Christianity is an historical religion. It
might be much easier to be a Buddhist and a Darwinian than it is to be a
Christian and a Darwinian, because the Darwinian image of history
undid the Bible. This is interesting in terms of the novel, which is a
narrative about incarnate beings. If you see them in Darwinian terms
you are losing the whole biblical structure of the kind of skeleton of a
narrative as well as all the beliefs about the dignity of human beings that
you might have had. Some nineteenth-century writers recognized this,
and some of them didn’t. I don’t think Dickens did. I don’t think
Dickens really saw what was being done to the mindset, whereas
Browning deeply and profoundly did, and hung on to his Christianity
knowing that he really didn’t think it was true, and not having worked
out the modern churchman’s positions at all about how a thing can be
true and not true.
INTERVIEWER
Tennyson began to see something of it even before Darwin, surely.
“Nature, red in tooth and claw” is before Origin of Species.
B YAT T
And “man who built him fanes of hopeless prayer” and “stretching your
arms to that which we believe is good indeed and faintly touch the
larger hope”—that’s not quite exact, I know. Tennyson, much more
than Browning, was a man through whom ideas spoke. The whole idea
that Tennyson wasn’t intelligent is rubbish. He was a profoundly
intelligent man. He did exactly what T. S. Eliot said he didn’t do, which
was think the world out solidly with metaphors that held the idea in a
solid object. Of course, Eliot was a Christian working against the grain
of his time, so he wanted to believe that Tennyson didn’t believe in
incarnation, whereas Tennyson, in some much deeper sense, knew what
it was better, I think, than Eliot.
INTERVIEWER
Darwinism is fundamentally an intellectual structure without any
element of redemption, running alongside a universal conviction that to
make art one must console, and to console one has to have a myth of
redemption. Can we do without redemption in a work of art?
B YAT T
I don’t think we can, or at least I don’t think almost any of us can. The
person one needs to read here is probably Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s idea of
strong pessimism and his sense of pleasure in not being redeemed is a
way where it is possible to be intensely happy just to be and to see how
things are. This has the danger for the artist of meaning that your art
gets to mean too much for you because your intense happiness probably
consists of just enjoying the fact that you can actually do it. I notice that,
partly out of a sense of the lack of redemption, I have been introducing
more and more into my recent texts people who are very good
craftsmen, people who are very good at something, people who do
something perfectly that is almost a reflex action. You know, like
someone cycling down a mountain, or the little tailor, who is not made
happy by finding the beautiful woman but by being allowed to go on

making perfect clothes.
I’ve just finished a fairy story about a cold princess who manages to
make a compromise, having married a glass-blowing prince who comes
from a very hot place, where they live in a place where both of them can
survive, but neither of them is then completely comfortable. I
nevertheless felt compelled to end it with the fact that she made a
scientific study of the things that were on the mountainside (I made her
go into very long and very distant correspondence with people about
particular plants). I’ve come to see redemption as people doing things
human beings do as best they possibly can before they’re snuffed out.
It’s the opposite of Herbert: “Teach me, my God and King, / In all
things / Thee to see, / And what I do in any thing, / To do it as for
Thee.”
INTERVIEWER
But redemption is an element, a solution, a structure that literature
reaches for and has reached for so often and for so long that it’s very
difficult to know where we can go without it.
B YAT T
Absolutely. I don’t know that we can. I don’t think we may be
historically in a position to know. Iris Murdoch has asked that question
again and again, and has given no answer, but has described the
structure of the question. The way she puts it is, From where do we get
any sense of moral imperatives, given that all the forms of God have
gone away? I love the moment in The Time of the Angels when the
priest turns on the philosopher and says,“If there is no God, what you’re
doing is pointless. It happens again in A Fairly Honourable Defeat.
There are modern enchanters who know that there is nothing, no
transcendent source of value, that Nietzsche is right. But, again, Iris
always leaves you with a few beetles that are continuing to go about
their path. In a sense you can be all right in a world if you just look at the
beetles. The beetles do become terribly important. The sense I have of
possible redemption now is to do with stopping us destroying all the
other species. I’ve come right round to Coleridge’s early vision of one
life, which I used to think was just a metaphor, that we and the tree and
the bird and everything are all one. It was a kind of pantheon.
INTERVIEWER
Why was there that sudden Europe-wide appeal of the absurd for about
twenty years? Why did it start and why did it stop?
B YAT T
I think the absurd may be connected to Nietzsche. I think it may be
connected to an interest in nonsystems. It used to be said that before
the war there were big descriptions of grids, that was the word that was
always being used. There were Marxist descriptions of the way
everything functioned, or there was Freud’s. Or Frazer’s, and the
anthropologists’. Then they said the grids had broken up and what were
left were a lot of little bits of unrelated absurd things. You’ve got Black
Mountain poetry in America and Zazie dans le Métro. I think Iris
learned a great deal from the French surrealists, and then somehow
went and sat in Oxford and became a slightly less interesting novelist
than she would have been if she had stayed in contact with the world of
Beckett and Queneau—she would never have gone into Sarraute-like
writings. I think she developed a theory about the virtues of Jane
Austen that wasn’t all that good for her.
INTERVIEWER
In your books you talk about poststructuralist systems that are not
systems but antisystems, and I think you are interested but wary about
them.
B YAT T
I don’t know of a system that I believe in. I do feel a compulsion to
respect people who build systems, because it’s obviously a human thing.
I don’t see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and
then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their
lives constructing joke palaces think you do. They think it’s a form of
sanity in an insane world, but I’m not sure it is. I love Tinguely’s
machines, which don’t do anything, but it’s rather like framing the
urinal. You can’t do that very often. Then you start thinking, Well,
wouldn’t it be more interesting to look at a machine that lets the water
out of a dam, that really works, or wouldn’t it be more interesting to
look at why the Aswan Dam has killed the Mediterranean? You get to
feel it’s a kind of preening narcissism. The one thing I really don’t like is
narcissism. I don’t like writers sitting there admiring themselves for
being so clever. I suppose what one ought to think about is what one
does love in postmodernism. If you asked me what I wish I’d written, I
would say Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” That is a
completely pointless postmodernist structure of total beauty that
nevertheless has a profound point.
INTERVIEWER
What about Italo Calvino?
B YAT T
Calvino is analogously wonderful. He isn’t quite as much like a knife
cutting to the center of the problem but he’s been immensely liberating
to me. There was a wonderful moment of liberation when I realized I
could write tales that came out of my childhood love of myth and fairy
stories, rather than out of a dutiful sense of “I ought to describe the
provincial young man coming up from Sheffield and how he can’t cope
with the aristocracy in London.” Anybody would rather write about a
princess who had to live in the snow. Calvino in Baron in the Trees and
The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount gives you the
permission to do this at a very elegant level. Similarly, reading Karen
Blixen’s Tales of Imagination, which I did before Angela Carter had got
going at all, I thought, If she can do this, one day I can. It isn’t really the
absurd in that case, though. It’s the liberation into the invented, but the
invented is deeply connected back to the myths that underlie our
society. I remember the moment when I realized that the myths only
exist because we all believe them; I was very annoyed with Iris Murdoch
for behaving as though only she could write about the flaying of
Marsyas, and suddenly I thought, She’s done it, I can’t. But of course the
point about Marsyas is that unless many people write about him, he
isn’t there. The gods are us but more so. Then I had this idea about
Diana of Ephesus being more alive than I am because more people
believe in her—a lovely thought. That in a sense comes out of a
response to Karen Blixen and Calvino. I read Calvino’s Italian fairy tales
in Italian, and a great, wonderful joy they were. Hans Christian
Andersen on the other hand is a deathly person because it’s all dreadful
Christianity and Danish imperialism.
INTERVIEWER
And redemption.
B YAT T
Yes, and redemption. The glory of Calvino is that he goes right back and
goes as far as he can go. I love his Invisible Cities—the way he builds
them up and they fall down again.
INTERVIEWER
The wonderful one is about the city suspended on ropes between
mountain tops, the one that ends with the observation that this city’s
happiness is less uncertain than those of other cities, since it knows its
life can only be so long. There’s a wonderful sense of rejoicing in the
brevity of life on earth—just like the bird in the barn in Bede. Or the
Wallace Stevens poem “Sunday Morning.”
B YAT T
Yes. In a sense, this is the opposite of redemption, because redemption
requires an imaginary structure of time and eternity in which you
transfer goods from time to eternity because you’re redeemed. At least
that’s one way of looking at redemption.
INTERVIEWER
Given the place of Tolkien in Babel Tower, what is the place of Tolkien
in all this?
B YAT T
It can be connected to what I got out of Calvino and Blixen, a sense that
there were still mythical worlds going on. When I was teaching in the art
school, student after student was painting pictures out of Tolkien, those
who weren’t painting hard-edged abstraction, that is. Sometimes they
were doing both—a hard-edged abstraction given a Tolkien name. They
would say, You know, I haven’t read anything since I was a child that I
enjoyed, and then suddenly there was this. I think the cult of Tolkien in
England was quite different from the cult in America. In America it had
to do with the frontier, with the sense of Thoreau and Walden that the
wild was better. One of the emotions I feel in Tolkien is to do with my
ecological emotion—that he’s describing a world in which the landscape
is as big and as endless as it is if you’re a human being who has to walk in
it. It’s simple things like that. I don’t actually like any of his people very
much, but I like being in a world where you experience the midges and
you can’t ever get away from the midges. That I like, and a lot of its
readers like that. It also crosses over into the world of Dungeons and
Dragons. I went to take my youngest daughter out, when she was at
Newcastle University. There’s a kind of deep dingle next to this rather
good restaurant. As we arrived these Land Rovers drew up, and all these
people got out in cloaks and swords and things. They were all dressed as
different people out of Tolkien and they just vanished into the bushes!
It is immensely powerful. I think you can read Tolkien, and you can
identify with the very small people with furry feet, or you can identify
with Aragorn, who has the weight of the world on his shoulders. You
have to do it in a very primitive way. If you start thinking, you’ve got to
stop reading. I read it as a sort of soporific. I read it when I’m very tired,
and I read it partly because there’s no sex in it. I read it because it’s not
stressful, which is why I don’t think the argument that it’s too simple
because the good are going to beat the evil carries much weight. You
ought to know that. It’s that sort of story. It’s good that you know that
nobody you really care about will die except the very old. That’s very
soothing, and children, after all, should have their literature.
INTERVIEWER
You haven’t written about your son Charles’s death directly, apart from,
I think, in one short story in Sugar. But do you think that a new valuing
of indirectness, of not saying exactly what is in your head came into
your work at that point?
B YAT T
After Charles’s death, I also came slowly to value comedy, because I
began to see that tragedy and terror are things for the young, to whom
nothing dreadful has happened, that there are things that are almost
unwriteable, and you shouldn’t write them if you don’t know them, and
you don’t have to write them. Whereas very great comedy,
Shakespeare’s or Jane Austen’s comedy, curiously appears to be more
important when you’re in a world of desolation and devastation. I
suddenly thought, Why the hell not have happy endings? Everybody
knows they’re artificial. Why not have this pleasure, as one has the
pleasure of rhyme, as one has the pleasure of color? Once I’d worked
through Still Life it took me away from heavy subjects and heavy
events. My novels know that these things happen. When you are young
you write tragedy, because you know that the world is terrible and so
you feel a moral need to face up to it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe in consolation equally for the inventor and his audience?
I was thinking of that novel of Kazuo Ishiguro’s, The Unconsoled. His
concept of the artist is that there’s always something missing, some
vacuum within the artist that he is always struggling to fill, and never
will.
B YAT T
I don’t think I have that idea of the artist. It depends how much you
mind no work of art being perfect. Ishiguro is a perfectionist. One of the
things I loved about The Unconsoled was that it was the nightmare of an
artist who is stopped from exercising his or her art. Paradoxically,
although this is a terrifying and terrible novel, every time that pianist
gets to play the piano the worst thing doesn’t happen. Somebody comes
along and stops him from playing. But he doesn’t play badly, and to that
extent it isn’t about the perpetual inadequacy of art. It’s about living in a
world in which you can’t do it right, and you can’t get enough of it;
politics interferes with it and book tours—that’s the great novel of the
book tour, which I know about!
I used to think that I agreed with what Iris Murdoch says: that tragic
art is the refusal to be consoled at the very highest level and all art below
high tragedy is consolation. I don’t think I set art as high as she did. It
happens to be the thing I care about in the world, but I think there are
perfectly valid ways of living that have nothing to do with art. And,
given that, I think it is one of the functions of artists to make people
happy, to give pleasure.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think there are works of art in which the consolation is so
excessive that it seems to cure things which in reality couldn’t possibly
be cured? I’m thinking of The Winter’s Tale, which does infuriate
people.
B YAT T
It infuriates me. I write against E. M. Forster. I have spent most of my
life writing against The Winter’s Tale. It is really quite bad cheating, to
take away a woman’s whole productive life, the whole of her years of
sexual activity, shut her in a cellar, and then say if she comes back as a
statue that’s fine, that’s consolation. That’s one thing. But I am
increasingly consoled by the underlying Persephone myth. I’ve reached
an age where I actually am consoled by the fact that the spring will go on
being the spring when I’m dead, whereas I don’t think I was at all
consoled when I was thirty. I thought, It’ll be absolutely dreadful
because it’ll just go on heartlessly being spring and I shall be old and I
shall be dead.
INTERVIEWER
With rocks and stones and trees.
B YAT T
With rocks and stones and trees. But now I think that’s fine. It’ll go on
coming out as long as we haven’t snuffed the planet out. And probably
it’ll go on coming out on some other planet even if we destroy this one.
INTERVIEWER
Can you say something about The Biographer’s Tale?
B YAT T
It began with the idea of a short story that was going to be called “The
Biography of a Biographer.” My idea was that a biographer has a
secondhand life because a biographer spends all his time or her time in a
library looking into somebody else’s life. Then when I started to write it
I realized it was about a lot more than that. I got the idea of writing the
biography of a man who tries to find out about a biographer but only
finds fragments of three biographies that the biographer hadn’t written.
I decided to juxtapose bits from the lives of the three people I happened
to want to find out about at the time: Linnaeus, the taxonomer who
invented the Latin names we now have for the plant world and the
animal world. Sir Francis Galton, who was Darwin’s cousin and is
infamous for inventing eugenics but also who invented the deviation
from the statistical mean and weather balloons and couldn’t stop
inventing things from one minute to the next—an amazingly interesting
innocent sort of a man who was constantly making extraordinary little
mechanical objects for measuring things. He went through the streets of
London measuring the responses of animals to sounds above the sound
level by blowing on a sonic whistle, and then he pricked his hands
depending on whether horses or dogs or cats responded to this noise
and then he came home and counted all the pricks he had made on his
hands and wrote it all down. He invented a machine for reading
underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked. One of
the things I quote in this book is an extraordinary description of him
coming up and realizing that he had been drowning. My third character
is Henrik Ibsen, who invented what strikes me as the most amazing
image of the person who hasn’t got a center, hasn’t got an identity,
which is Peer Gynt sitting on the stage saying, “I will get to the center of
this onion” and he peels it and peels it and peels it. And in the middle
there is nobody. This novel of mine is in a sense an onion; there is layer
upon layer of description of all sorts of people. None of them is
complete, but nevertheless the whole novel is a description both of my
hero, Phineas G. Nanson, and of the biographer he’s chasing, whom he
never finds, and of course of myself, because I didn’t know why I
wanted to know about Linneaus, Galton, or Ibsen, though I realized
afterwards that they were people who described human beings
according to different systems. Linnaeus did a taxonomy, Galton did
psychology and statistics, and Ibsen was a great tragic dramatist,
possibly the last great European tragic dramatist.
INTERVIEWER
How do the names of your characters come to you? Phineas G. Nanson,
for example.
B YAT T
He is called after an insect. The biographer is called Scholes Destry-
Scholes and that is because he wrote a biography of the great Victorian
Sir Elmer Bole. The beetle that caused elm disease and killed the elm
trees is called scolytus destructor and I wrote to my entomologist friend
Chris O’Toole and I asked, What preys on the beetle that preys on the
elm tree? He said, There is a parasitic wasp called phaeogenes nanus. So
I sat and thought for about five days—my hero has obviously got to be
called something that calls up phaeogenes nanus—and I finally called
him Phineas G. Nanson. Halfway through the book I realized he had to
say what the G stands for so I put in Gilbert. This is uncanny: when the
book was going into proof, my publisher pointed out that Phineas
Gilbert Nanson is almost an anagram of Ibsen, Galton, and Linnaeus. I
do not believe in coincidence or magic, but I did not intend that. I just
picked the Gilbert because it sounded nice.
INTERVIEWER
And finally, that inevitable question here. Your writing methods?
B YAT T
I write anything serious by hand still. This isn’t a trivial question.
There’s that wonderful phrase of Wordsworth’s about “feeling along the
heart,” and I think I write with the blood that goes to the ends of my
fingers, and it is a very sensuous act. For that reason I could never learn
to write what I think of as real writing with the cut-and-paste on the
computer because I have to have a whole page in front of me that I
wrote, like a piece of knitting. On the other hand I do my journalism on
the computer with the word count. I love the word count. I can write a
piece now to the word, to the length, and then I put the word count on
and triumphantly it says three hundred and two. It’s a quite different
thing. But I’ve never written any fiction not with a pen. I sit out of doors
with very large numbers of very large stones and other objects on top of
the pieces of paper that blow away in the wind. I’ve got a cast-iron
mermaid and an enormous ammonite that a French ethnologist gave me
that came up out of the bed of the road. I put these on the paper and I sit
there scribbling in a kind of tempest. It’s great fun.
*Charles was killed at age eleven by a drunk driver while he was

walking home from school.
Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.
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20/11/2023, 22:37 Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No.

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THE DAILY THE QUARTERLY AUTHORSPODCASTABOUT

A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168

Interviewed by Philip Hensher

ISSUE 159, FALL 2001

Her novels are Shadow of a Sun (1964), reprinted under the

anybody. Also, I have never wanted to belong to anything ever and he

artist in Lucky Jim, funny. He is no funnier than Kingsley Amis himself

how the class could be destroying the inadequate secondary French

magical concerns, some of those divisions between the scientific

happy by finding the beautiful woman but by being allowed to go on

What about Italo Calvino?

*Charles was killed at age eleven by a drunk driver while he was

Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.

©2023 THE PARIS REVIEW. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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