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For fear of being sued?
Perhaps out of professional caution. Or maybe out of kindness to patients, believing they should be allowed enough room to make up their own minds and come to their own conclusions.
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In that book, is there any specific mention of twentieth century literature texts?
Kafka and Yeats are the two twentieth century ones. I have a chapter on Shakespeare and Macbeth; there’s the chapter about Ancient Greece, a chapter about Delphi and sibyls in Grecian-Roman times, and some material on pre-Hispanic Mexico and on Africa. There is some wonderful stuff in the Old Testament, which I was surprised to find. The model I was working on was the notion that you consulted an oracle when you knew there was a god. You knew the speech came from a god but the god didn’t speak directly. So it would be different from atheism where there is no god to talk to, and different from revealed religions where the god speaks directly to his people.
So you see the interest in the theory. It’s a sort of Derridean moment where there really is a god but he only speaks in signs. The interesting thing is that, apparently, after the days of Moses, the Hebrews also had oracles. So when it says in Samuel, ‘they inquired of the oracle’, it means they went to the temple and did whatever oracular practices were ruling then. So it’s exactly the same as with the Ancient Greeks. And as in contemporary Africa and other cultures as well. There is a formal, institutionalized mode for consulting chance. It’s a very interesting device.
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Many of your examples in this oracle work are familiar to anyone who knows your earlier writing but how does the African dimension come into it?
Because that’s another place where there’s a lot of good, well documented anthropological material about oracles. But there is a question with this stuff that I haven’t found a way to answer. The stories themselves are more interesting than how they play out.
Macbeth is a perfect instance. The details of the story don’t make any sense really unless you know the ending. If you don’t know the ending, the idea that ‘no man of woman born’ means ‘nobody’ is the rational interpretation, not the foolish one. But there’s no interpretation of the play that allows us to see that as a reasonable interpretation. It has to be felt as a foolish inability to see the real meaning.
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And it sets up the pay off in the later line containing the ‘untimely ripped’ information.
Yes, you can’t imagine a human situation where somebody consults the witches and the witches say, ‘No man of woman born can harm you’ and you say, ‘Are you talking about Caesarian births or not?’ That’s what I’m interested in, the idea — and the story of Oedipus is like this too — of how the reaction that would seem like the natural response, is made to seem foolish, and the one that seems totally absurd is made to seem the only option. So there’s a powerful plotting effect here which, in its most extreme form, could be described as a conspiracy of the play against the characters. In the case of Oedipus it seems like a determination on the part of Socrates and the whole of Greek culture to make sure Oedipus is not allowed to be right in his scepticism about the gods.
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Speaking of Oedipus reminds me of a film that has been called ‘Oedipus in Chinatown’: those scenes in Chinatown where Noah Cross keeps saying to Jake Gittes, ‘Just find my daughter’ — the ambiguity of that word, ‘daughter.’
Since we are moving from literature to film, there’s another question I wanted to ask you. How did you make your move from a book on Stendhal to a book like America in the Movies (New York: 1975)? How did you get from one to the other?
Well, it was a mixture of accident and non-accident. What’s accidental, or contingent, or merely biographical, is that in the early sixties I had a Research Fellowship in Cambridge, after having done a degree in French and German, and having a PhD in French. I was writing a book about what I thought of as the comic novel, which had a chapter on Stendhal, one on Cervantes, another on Fielding. But I gave it up when I decided that all novels were comic. Some of the work I had done turned into the book on Stendhal. It started off in a sort of accidental way. I got a letter from Graham Hough, who was then editing a series, and he asked me if I would write about Proust, and I said no, I wasn’t ready to write about Proust. But I would write about Stendhal and that’s how that book happened.
At the same time, I’d become a film-goer. I do say a little bit about filmgoing in America in the Movies. For a lot of people, the sixties was the time to discover cinema. I wasn’t a great movie-goer when I was a kid, because my parents wouldn’t let me go to the movies on my own. But I knew a lot about them because my mother would go to the movies and come home and tell me the plots.
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So the movies first existed for you in a re-narrated form!
Yes. So I knew the plot of Prisoner of Zenda and The Double Life and many Ronald Colman movies. It was pure narrative, with no interpretation, just the story.
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No actor either! In America in the Movies you say you ‘worked as a writer on a couple of movies produced in England’ (12). What were they?
When I was an undergraduate, everybody liked all kinds of movies but we hadn’t really got on to directors and thinking about directors. Then, when I started working on my PhD I went to Paris for a couple of years, and everybody was going to the movies. Those were the days written about by Susan Sontag in her piece, ‘The Death of Cinema.’ I disagree with almost everything in that article except when she says that it was a time when there seemed to be a new masterpiece every fortnight. It did feel like that. You didn’t have to wait very long to see a new film by Bergman, or Truffaut, Antonioni, Godard, Chabrol, Visconti. It did seem quite extraordinary.
So a lot of us were then going to see all these new movies and after I took up my research fellowship, I was living part of the time in London and I met a guy called Maurice Hatton who was then a stills photographer for the Guardian, a freelancer. His ambition was to make movies and he was part of a documentary film company called Mithras. The most famous member of that group was John Irvin who went on to direct a lot of Hollywood stuff. They did a whole lot of films about working class life, labour movements, a whole series of very interesting shorts. Then Maurice got some money from somewhere to make a short film for Columbia Pictures called Scene One, Take One. He managed to get Susannah York who’d only just done Tom Jones. She had also been very successful in a long run on the London stage of Wings of the Dove. She couldn’t afford to make any more money that year so she did it for nothing.
Maurice had the idea and I wrote an extended treatment. We left lots of space for improvising. The story line involves a woman playing a nun in a movie who has a row with the director and walks off the set, and when she comes back, everyone has gone. So she’s in a nun’s habit and she’s in East London and she’s alone and she has to get around. She has various adventures. It was sort of sub-Truffaut, Shoot the Pianist in London, and there were some very good gags in there. It was quite charming but it was just two English guys trying to do Truffaut.
Then we did a full-length film called Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition (1968: GB) with Maurice directing. We wrote that one together and then we parted company on the final script because we didn’t agree about the direction the story should take. This was quite amicable. I thought it had to remain a kind of black comedy and Maurice thought it had to start as a comedy and move to something more politically engaged. We weren’t disagreeing about the politics, we were disagreeing about what to do with this film! So at that point, Maurice finished the writing of the film and it went the way he wanted. That film I think of as sub-Godard rather than sub-Truffaut. Have you seen it?
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Not for a long time, but that is still available on 16 mm for rental in Australia, and is shown on SBS TV from time to time.
It was good fun but I don’t think the acting was very good in that film. A lot of it was very heavy. Then after that, we wrote several screenplays at various times. Maurice died about three years ago. He made Long Shot (1978: GB), a wonderful film. The glossiest film he made was Nellie’s Version (1983: GB) which was based on Eva Figes’ novel. He also made a film called American Roulette (1988: GB). It had Andy Garcia, although he wasn’t great in it. He was supposed to play a kind of Carlos Fuentes figure, a poet-president who was in exile, and involved in politics, in London.
Maurice’s best film, I think, is Long Shot, which he made with some black and white stock that he got for free. The film is about these guys who are trying to find Sam Fuller at the Edinburgh Festival. All they do is trawl around Edinburgh looking for Fuller based on the rumour that he’s about to appear. But he never appears. It’s like Waiting for Godot. But they run into John Boorman and they run into Wim Wenders, and it’s very good.
We did several other things together. The problem was always getting enough time to sit down together and really work on the script. And then the problem was getting money. We did two things that were never made. One was a film about an owner of a fleet of tankers, a kind of Citizen Kane Rosebud story. Maurice had discovered that people bought the tankers by mortgage. You could buy a tanker on mortgage and pay back the mortgage on the trips. It was a story drawn from The Last Tycoon and Citizen Kane. We both were very excited by the visual possibilities of huge boats with, you know, sailors who rode bikes to get around the long decks, and had to climb into these vast holds.
Then we had another idea that we worked on for quite a long time. This was more recent, in the last ten years or so. It was a version of The Changeling — which has been made into a movie since, but not very well, and not our version. We had moved it to a 19th century mental hospital in Spain and done a lot of things to it. And we decided that we didn’t need verse but that we needed some language that would match the great lines in the play. So we persuaded Anthony Burgess to write some dialogue for us. He wasn’t going to write a line until he got paid, but he would have done it we had got the money. We had visions of a Foucauldian 19th century mental hospital, with all sorts of surveillance.
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It doesn’t quite lend itself to a high concept pitch, does it?: Middleton meets Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish....
That was ten years ago. Our collaboration was sort of hit and miss, depending on where and what we were doing. Maurice had other schemes going and so was able to do this and that. He would sometimes think he needed a certain kind of writer and sometimes I was the person who could do those things and sometimes I wasn’t. I always found it hard to take time out from other things that I felt I should be doing to devote to something that might not happen. Sometimes I regret that; I should have done more of it because it’s easy not to do it. An occasional fantasy crosses one’s mind that it would be good to have a screenplay filmed.
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Lawrence Alloway figures in your America in the Movies book and a bit earlier you mentioned Robert Warshow. Are there any critical writings on film that you are drawn to, that you like?
Well I’ve always loved Pauline Kael. First, I always liked her writing, the quality of her writing. It’s got tremendous bounce and energy and shows her passion for the movies as an art and a business. She loves the movies. I thought she was usually wrong about films she liked, usually pretty disastrously, and pretty right about films she disliked. I would always, when living in New York, go to a movie and then religiously read her column but always with a slight apprehension that I would have liked something she was going to trash.
I like Stanley Cavell a lot too. I say something about him in the second edition of America in the Movies — rather grudgingly, and rather too late. But I’ve always liked his work.
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America in the Movies came out a few years after Cavell published The World Viewed.
Yes, I read The World Viewed back in 1971 and I thought it was completely cockeyed, wrong about virtually everything. But it’s also a book you can’t forget and you have to keep thinking about. After that, I did write a long review in Raritan about Pursuits of Happiness and about a philosophy book of his, The Claims of Reason. The review was quite harsh but also appreciative. I think he’s one of the most interesting writers around, both about philosophy and about film. He’s an endlessly fertile, thoughtful and interesting person. I like his idea of a triangle linking film, philosophy and a certain kind of American studies, a certain rethinking or reclaiming of American philosophy. Cavell’s new book, the book about melodrama, is an attempt at an inversion of the book about comedy. But you can’t invert that idea. It’s such a terrific idea, the notion that in order to be married you have to be remarried, the idea that the only marriage that works is the one that’s done twice. It’s a terrific idea, and it worked beautifully for the films. That is how Adam’s Rib works, it’s how The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth and The Lady Eve work. It’s a genuine genre, it’s a genuine insight into something that the movies can do.
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What do you think of Cavell’s persistent comparisons of Shakespeare and the movies?
I don’t think it does justice to either. I don’t think the movies need hoisting up in this way. So I think there’s an error of tone there that’s important. But against that, I think it would be safe to say that Cavell’s not embarrassed to say how good he thinks things are. He’s saying that Hollywood is as good as Shakespeare and although I think the comparison is not the point, it’s good to actually come out and say it, if that is what you believe, without any kind of cultural embarrassment.
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In The Children of Silence, you have chapters on Stephen King’s writing and you make some points about literary and popular cultural domains. You’re quite unashamed about your range of aesthetic choice —Stephen King, Latin-American writing — and also about saying whether you think the work is good or not. Is something happening there that is a kind of underlying comment on recent literary-cultural battles conducted about the high cultural and the popular cultural domains?
I think one can always talk about whether things are done well or badly done. I think one can talk about labour. These are terms that still seem to me useful in any area. I do resist the idea of constantly asking whether X is a great writer or merely a good writer, or is this a major work. I think these are not serious judgements. Time can probably make them and, if you need to know such things, you can consult the history books. ‘Major’ will just mean whatever it means at that time, but it’s not a critical judgement of any interest. And I don’t think preferring high culture to low culture actually makes any sense as a kind of judgement. But nor do I think that if you don’t do it, you’re saying everything is the same. I can’t imagine a writer of any kind, or a filmmaker, who is not interested in whether things work. Put yourself in the position of a writer rather than a reader or a consumer or a cultural critic. How could a writer or a poet or a filmmaker not know that some things work and that some things don’t? And how could they not prefer to have the stuff work rather than not? How could they not want somebody to tell them if it’s working or not? It’s not conceivable that they wouldn’t want that.
Although even then, I think, I wouldn’t want to make the judgement the central act of criticism. I would still think that trying to make sense of things and say how the piece works or why it matters is more important than making a judgement. Even if you say everything is good of its kind and make all the allowances, the judgement is still a verdict and the trial is more interesting than the verdict. The game of tennis is more interesting than the result. If you missed the result, you will still have watched the game.
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Would you see your comments on the notion of a text’s working or not as connecting with an interest in a kind of an textual formalism concerning, say, narrative systems, or some concept of an enabling representational system on which someone performs his or her operations; what tricks are being performed, what techniques are deployed.
Yeah, that probably does inform choices. I love crime fiction, I read lots of it. I’m reading James Lee Burke at the moment, a new person for me, fantastic. I can read anything as long as it seems to me well written. But I can’t read badly written stuff, even in areas I like. So I can’t read Agatha Christie. By well written I just mean sentences. There’s a certain kind of sloppy sentence I actually can’t really get interested in. The same is true for films. I’ll watch any Brian De Palma film, however terrible it is, because this is someone who knows how to make a movie, and you can feel that in the first few frames. I have the reverse problem with, say, The Rock. I thought it was just disco and had no cinema composition. In a way, this is a form of prejudice but I always feel the first few minutes of a film and the first few sentences of a book tell me whether this person knows how to do film or do sentences. This is not an end verdict — the thing could still be terrible. But I’m going to stay with it; if I have confidence that the person knows how to put the pieces together. At the other end, if I don’t feel they can put the pieces together, I’ll find someone who can put these pieces together. Stephen King is a good example because he doesn’t write all that well but he writes well enough for the purposes of what he needs to do, and sometimes he writes very well.
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Speaking of beginnings and knowing you are in good hands, I’ve always liked the opening of one of the many books you have reviewed, Don DeLillo’s thriller, Running Dog — ‘You won’t find ordinary people, not on these streets, not at this hour. But you know that already. It’s why you’re here.’ Or, in the case of film and De Palma, as soon as I hear the opening voice-over of Carlito’s Way, I know I’m in good hands ...
Yes, there’s a sort of pleasure there. And I feel that with all art forms, music, painting. Often you can enjoy the other kind if you just stay with it, but you need another motive. If there’s something I think is badly written and if friends of mine have said they liked it a lot and they want to talk about it, then I’ll stay with it. In some cases you do get something if you stay with it long enough. Sometimes your initial thought turns out to be wrong, or sometimes it turns out to be like D. H. Lawrence — all badly written but worth staying with!
There’s a very satisfying feeling about thinking you’re in the hands of a person who knows the craft, whatever the craft is. Even if you disagree — just the sense of being with, dealing with someone who handles the craft at a good level and you don’t have to worry about that.
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You mentioned your interest in crime fiction. What’s your pantheon?
There aren’t many English writers that I like. My sense is almost exactly the opposite of W.H. Auden’s, in his ‘Guilty Vicarage’ piece. He loves all the English crime stuff, and I don’t really like it. I love all the American hard-boiled writing. Although I’m not as keen on Chandler as I used to be. I find him just a little too ripe for me. Hammett holds up better, and also Ross McDonald. And I’m a great fan of a writer called Ross Thomas, whom not a lot of people read for some reason.
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A friend of mine, Paul Thomas, a New Zealand crime writer who has written four crime novels, also likes Ross Thomas a lot.
I love Ross Thomas. I came across him about the same time as I came across Elmore Leonard. Leonard was just starting to become very well known, and Thomas was turning out a book every year but not getting anything like the attention that was going to Leonard. Ross Thomas’ books are not all that easy to find, people don’t talk about him. But he’s a wonderful example of a person who always writes well; the job is always done. You wouldn’t highlight the prose as brilliant prose or as fine writing or anything. You just feel that this is a man who knows his job.
There’s a moment in a Ross Thomas novel — I think it’s The Briar Patch. The set-up of the beginning is that a man’s sister who is a policewoman has been killed. He’s investigating the death of his sister. They take him to her apartment and the apartment is described in complete detail — like a Balzac novel — everything is described. And the guy then says, ‘No, my sister didn’t live here.’ And they say, ‘yes she lived here.’ And he says, ‘No. If my sister had lived here, the place would be like this’ and he offers a rival description of the room, kitchen, the food, the books, and says, ‘That’s my sister’s place, that’s what it would be like if she lived here.’ It’s so good! I keep thinking I should do something with it, in an essay on realism or something. It’s beautifully done.
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Is there another book lurking in you, a sort of parallel collection to Children of Silence in which you collect a lot of pieces on crime fiction
?
I don’t know. At the moment, I’m doing this oracle book and I’m supposed to be doing a book about Proust. The problem with it is that the work on it, the reading is such fun that there’s no real impulse to get down to the writing. You read in Proust, and around Proust, and the whole end of the 19th century in France.
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Are you caught up in considering the new translation?
Yes, and there are all the new biographies, there are the letters coming out in English, and there’s all this stuff that allows you to dabble: Proust and medicine because his father was a doctor, Proust and music, Proust and painting. What I’m trying to do is to make the book into an essay on biography with Proust as its central instance.
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How did you come to make the principal shifts you seem to have made— both across countries, especially the regular moves between England and America, and also the regular moves between writing about literature and literary theory and writing about film?
Well, I think I always knew I wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t think I’d make a living at it and I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be. The academic stuff was fairly easy or I was lucky with it. I went to grammar school in Lincoln, I got a state scholarship to go to Cambridge and that seemed an obviously good place to go. And I did languages — French and German — because I was good at that.
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Were you taught by anyone in particular that you remember?
Quite a few, but in particular a wonderful person called Peter Stern, J. P. Stern, who was a Czech. He left Czechoslovakia just as Hitler invaded, came to England, was in the RAF, got shot down and then finished a degree at Cambridge after the war. He was a fellow at St John’s and he was my supervisor. I did all kinds of things I would never have done otherwise, just to be taught by him. It meant I had one-on-one supervision for two years. I did a special paper on Goethe, a paper on the classical age in German literature. He was the person who was for me a model of what the intellectual should be.
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Which is?
Which is that you have to be interested in ideas and you have to not really care where they come from — that I guess is the short version. His tastes were much more highbrow than mine. He took intellectual quarrels seriously, in a way that I don’t. I’m never going to lose a friend over an argument. I prefer the person to the argument. He was always falling out with people at Cambridge and not speaking to someone because they had some disreputable opinion about something. But he was a wonderful, wonderful man. And very tough. He didn’t speak to me for two years, once. After I got to New York I wrote a piece in New Society about New York as a Jewish city, how the culture was Jewish in all kinds of exciting ways. I was talking about Saul Bellow, and Phillip Roth, and the city, and about Jewish jokes. Peter said, ‘This is just the same thing that anti-Semites say only you’re in favour of them. It’s the same caricature, and it’s totally disreputable.’ I don’t think he was entirely right about it but I could see the point.
When I did a PhD in French, I went over to Paris and did most of my movie-going there. At that point I had not decided to become an academic. I’d decided that I’d got a degree and I hadn’t learned very much but I had more or less learned how to learn and, if I had a bit more time reading books, I’d put it to good use. And I also played the piano in a Latin-American band and I did that for a while. I thought I would play in a band, read a lot of books, and watch a lot of movies. Then I finished the PhD in four years, with two years in Paris.
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The PhD was on ...?
It was on symbolist theatre; it was on Maeterlinck and Claudel. So the stuff about ambiguity was already there. And when I started thinking about this oracle book, I had a sort of memory flash to the time when I was looking around for a PhD topic. I wanted a topic that I could say something about, and finding something to say meant finding a topic that was in some way unresolved. So it was not unlike the Belle de Jour question. I found these murky symbolist plays and I felt, ‘here’s something to go at.’ Effectively, it was close reading of some plays by those two writers. There wasn’t much historical context. I’d read a lot about theories of the symbol. But I was mainly interested in the idea of how symbols worked. Because I’d come up through French and German, I hadn’t read much English criticism, so I didn’t know about the New Criticism; my PhD was a kind of haphazard reinvention of the new criticism and close reading.
When I finished the PhD I was still hesitating between the BBC and British Foreign Service, and an academic life. Having spent years thinking I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I felt these would be acceptable. So I applied for a job with the BBC and I applied to the British Foreign Service and I applied for a research fellowship at Cambridge. My sense of the odds was that my best chance was at the BBC, the second chance was the foreign service and the third chance was the fellowship at Cambridge. I didn’t get into the BBC or the foreign service but I did get the fellowship at Cambridge.
And that was when I met Maurice and we started doing things together, writing a few movies. Then I wrote a novel that I didn’t like very much and nobody else liked very much either! And then I turned the novel into short stories which were even worse. Then I did those two screenplays. It was around about that time that America in the Movies was born when someone asked me to write a sociology of cinema.
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Were you in America by then?
No, I was still in England. I did two spells at Columbia University, the first from 1964 to ’66 and then I went back to England for a couple of years. It must have been in that second term back in England before I went back to Columbia that the film book proposal came up. I realized I couldn’t write a sociology of cinema because I wasn’t a sociologist and wasn’t interested enough in sociological stuff. But I did write a book that I thought was only half a book. What I thought I was going to do was describe the world of the movies like an anthropologist describing the native behaviours inside these films. Then I would compare it with the world outside, the historical world. Then I realized there wasn’t another America, a real America to be compared with the fictions of the films: that was it. Or rather, there were lots of Americas, but none of them simply, unproblematically unfictional. My only real regret about that book was that I didn’t understand what it was about until two years after I’d written it. If I’d understood what it was about when I wrote it, I would have been firmer about its argument — which is an argument about the decline of American confidence, how you could lose your confidence while asserting it — the stuff that appears in the chapter on musicals.
This is also the answer to the question about the link between films and literature. I like the specificity of any medium, and whether it is literature or film is incidental. I’m drawn to writers or filmmakers who I think are doing something with the medium. I like to feel the medium is being tested, or pushed or stretched. There are other respectable ways of being a writer or a filmmaker, but this is the one I’m interested in. Something that totally mystifies me when we have conversations about ‘English as a discipline’ is that I don’t know what the object of study really is, here. It can’t just be narrative because I’m interested in things that are non-narrative. It can’t just be imaginary people because I’m also interested in the same situations with real people. And it can’t be literary language because I’m interested in ordinary language versions of the same thing. Instead, it’s something like this whole world of represented behaviour that requires somebody to do a batch of interpretative work.
It’s the interpretative work that appeals to me; there is something here that’s not unlike the detective’s work, although it doesn’t have to be a puzzle to crack. It’s just that there is something here and we’ll all be better off if we understood it better. That could be a movie, a book, it could be real life.
Having said that one must respect the medium, it’s not the fictional status that’s interesting or the high or low status — it’s the sense of the interpretative job to be done.
For example, when I first came to Princeton, I gave a talk to the Department, partly some stuff from my Nabokov book and partly more theoretical stuff. It was about mistakes that turn out not to be mistakes; again, not unlike the oracle material. There is a moment in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight where the hero, a writer, is dying, and his half-brother wishes to get to his bedside. He arrives but doesn’t go to the bedside. He sleeps in the next room, hears his brother’s breathing throughout the night, communes with him, and the next day realizes he’s got the wrong guy. Then he recuperates the error, and says that although it was the wrong man, or because of that, he learned more than he would have done otherwise. I was interested in that recuperative gesture. It’s like up-beat deconstruction: instead of everything letting you down, it can’t go wrong. I also think it’s dangerous to recuperate but there’s something touching about that moment where people are unable to just accept their errors as errors.
After the talk there was a bit of discussion and one of my now-colleagues asked a question. Since I seemed to be answering with examples taken from real life and literature without any kind of discrimination, was I talking about literary instances or was I talking about actual things? At the time I was just sort of baffled by the question and didn’t have an answer. Thinking about it, I realized that the reason I didn’t know how to answer the question was that I don’t make any distinction! It would be a piece of represented behaviour — usually it’s language.
On this interpretation issue, it is sort of baffling but the bafflement is not only mine. Other people are not quite sure of the centre of their interest. Some people are — particularly in English departments. Some people know exactly what their area is: they are print culture people and they belong to a certain period and they’re only interested in fiction, not history — it’s a perfectly defined object. But it’s also true that a lot of other people are interested in these other things. I have a colleague, Claudia Johnson, she’s an 18th century scholar, a Jane Austen person who loves movies, particularly adaptations of novels for the movies. She writes very well about these things. She also loves cartoons, animated film. I’m sure that she would say (as I would say) that these are not two interests, film and literature, but that there’s a single interest being pursued across different realms. It’s not that one is treating films as literature but somewhere behind the medium itself is something that’s interesting. Claudia just wrote a piece about Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth for the TLS. She gives you this wonderful sense that it’s a film about how you become useless and how you render that in a film or a book. It addresses the question of imaginative representations of uselessness.
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On the matter of writing such things for such journals, let me say what I’m sure others have said: it’s good that you’ve eventually found a way to make a life of writing. You make some points about the practice of reviewing. For you ‘it involves providing readers with the strongest possible sense of what it feels like to read the work in question, and thereby with the means to make their own judgement; and also speculating, within the space available, on where the work leads, what’s at stake in its picture of the world, and why we should care about it.’ (10). In the case of something like your pieces in LRB, do you make choices about what will be your mode, your register, to the object you’re describing? You were writing there on both films and books, so how do you conceive of your reader and how do you conceive of the act of writing?
I think that the short answer is, if you write a good first sentence, then everything else is going to be OK. I guess I do feel that if I haven’t got a first sentence, I haven’t got anything. I can do nothing with my ideas until that sentence takes shape.
I remember when I was back in England in the sixties, after I’d been at Columbia for two years, when we lived in Wiltshire. We’d just got married and I was making a living as a freelance writer and a journalist. We lived in this cottage, and there was a mailbox in the village on the street outside the cottage. The last mail was at five o’clock — there was no fax. In those days, if you caught the last post it would be delivered the next day. I had a short piece to write about a Gunther Grass play — because I was trying to make a living out of doing that. I had to do different things for different papers, so I was doing German literature for The Observer, fiction for The Times, philosophy for The New Statesman and science fiction for some other place. Anything to make enough money and not get the wires crossed completely. I was supposed to write a 300 word review of this play. I’d read the book and I had all day to write it. I was at the table at 8 in the morning and by 5 in the afternoon I still hadn’t got the first sentence. It was only 300 words! I’d written various drafts that I’d scrapped. In the end, I just wrote something and sent it off; it was a terrible piece.
But I don’t think I’ve ever again quite had a whole day like that, where nothing would come. That’s why I so like that phrase of Buñuel’s, ‘nothing occurred to me.’ It’s what he said when I asked why a particular film of his (A Woman without Love) was so terrible. He said he kept filming hoping he would have an idea, but he didn’t. ‘Nothing occurred to me’.
But I think the other thing — it’s not deliberate but I now know it’s what I do — is that I try to assume a position of sympathy to the artist or the writer, and I think about what I take to be his or her best interests. That is, if I were doing this, this is how I would want it to work. That means sometimes you are very disappointed that it doesn’t work, so you have to say that. That feels instinctive but it must have been a choice, since, manifestly, there are other options.
You think a little bit about the audience of the paper — not hugely but a bit. Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review is a great editor — as is Mary-Kay Wilmers at LRB — they’re fantastic editors. His view (which I always use as a guideline) is that the readers are really smart and there’s no problem about being intelligent. You can be as intelligent or as difficult as you like but you but you must give them the materials to think with. So don’t drop any names, and don’t assume any specialized knowledge.
So the sort of rewriting I regularly have to do is, say who these people are. My idea of writing also involves a certain idea of stealth, one should creep up on the subject from the side, rather than from head on. Bob always says, think of those people out there. They are smart people. They just don’t know who William Empson is. Allow them in. They’re just as smart as you are. Allow them in, and then do what you want. I think that is always helpful. Sometimes you’ve got to remind yourself to fill in that detail.
The London Review is more likely to take risks than is The New York Review. I wrote a piece about Quentin Tarantino which I had more or less finished and then I had this thought which seemed just right for the last sentence: ‘I’m half-afraid it’s the style I’d like to have if I turned out to be a psychopath.’ I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by that but the sentence had presented itself to me and it felt true although I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. I also thought it was a dangerous sentence and I could imagine letters coming in to the paper saying ‘So you employ psychopaths?’ I also knew that Bob Silvers would not have printed it. So I wasn’t going to put it in at all. Then I thought it had a kind of music to it so I left it in and sent it to Mary-Kay Wilmers saying, ‘you’re not going to want to print this, so take it out.’ But she didn’t. And there weren’t any letters.
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There was a similar thing in the English press during the very first vogue of Tarantino — it was a cartoon that had a person pouring tea and saying ‘Shall I be motherfucker?’
The other thing about writing is that, in the early days, I thought I wanted to be a writer of fiction and so on. I supposed the writing had to do with what sort of person you were — a novelist was a certain kind of person. Now I think writers just have a certain relationship to language, and that’s what being a writer is about. At times I wish I was not writing so many reviews and teaching so much so that I’d have time to experiment with other genres. At this stage I wouldn’t want to be a novelist. I would like to think of other things, slightly more experimental forms of writing. I would like to give myself a break from the commissioned writing I’m already doing. But I do think you learn certain things about this, that you write certain sentences for pleasure and that this is not centrally to do with their meaning. They’ve got a meaning and the meaning is why you’re writing them but that’s not quite where the pleasure lies. The first time I realized this consciously was when I wrote something for The New York Book Review and the editor suggested it wasn’t quite clear and I should revise it. I thought he was right, it needed fixing, and I fixed the sentence so it was clearer. Then I realized I didn’t like the sentence half as much once I’d fixed it. That seemed both perverse and natural. It seemed perverse to prefer the sentence that doesn’t say anything to anybody to the sentence that does. On the other hand, I was happy to write the sentence that was clearer and happy that it should be clearer. But I was interested in my regret, and that sense of loss of this other sentence.
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It reminds me of a nice thing Jane DeLynn once said to me about her way of writing. ‘I start writing sentences until I find sentences that can lead me some place.’
Wonderful. It’s like an upbeat version of Roland Barthes. Barthes says a writer is a person for whom language is a problem. But you could also say a writer is someone for whom language is a pleasure. It’s a problem and a pleasure but that space is where it’s happening. The language is almost a tangible substance.
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Can I get straight the years you were in particular places? You’ve mentioned you had two stints at Columbia and you were back in England at Exeter for a few years, and now you’re here at Princeton.
I went back to Columbia University in 68 and I was employed at Columbia until 1982 but I physically left there in 1980 — left the university. I had a visiting lectureship at the National University of Mexico, taught there for a couple of years. We wanted to spend a bit of time in Mexico. My wife is Mexican and we wanted the kids’ Spanish to improve by living there. I’d spent six months in Mexico a couple of years before when I was working on the Buñuel material. We did think of staying there because we had the idea that it would be nice if the kids could grow up in a place where one of us was a native. But Mexico didn’t really work out for various reasons. I couldn’t get a really good job and the kids didn’t like their school much and they weren’t settled. But we did like it there a lot. And then this job at Exeter came up and I thought if we don’t move from New York to go here, we never will — so we did. Then I think we thought we’d settled there, we bought a house and the children were settling down. They went through all their schooling there and all went to university there.
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It’s a very pleasant part of the world.
Oh, it’s a terrific place to grow up in. We were living in a place about ten miles from Exeter, on the estuary — it was beautiful. And the University was a very good place, with good people. I still have lots of friends there. I really thought we’d stay there. But then, after the children grew and went to university and the moment Tony, who was the youngest, was about to go to university, it seemed we could move if we wanted to. I thought I’d done what I could do there and that’s when the job at Princeton came up — so it was perfect timing. But I liked coming here — Princeton is a terrific place for people who like dabbling. For people who have interests in other fields and like to talk to intelligent people in other fields, Princeton is incomparable. If you want to talk philosophy or about films or Latin American studies, all kinds of stuff. So, for me, it’s a really good place to be.
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You mention Barthes frequently in your writing. Was he an important figure for you?
I’ve always been interested in philosophy — not as theory, but just as philosophy. I came across Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero in the British Council Library in Warsaw. I was totally bowled over by it. After that I read everything by Barthes as it came out. I never quite converted to theory, I just liked Barthes. And I was interested in Levi-Straus’s structuralism and I thought Derrida was fantastically interesting — I still do. It never occurred to me that one had to be for or against this kind of thing until I got to England in 1982. Then it was clear that if you were not militantly in favour of theory, you were aiding and abetting sheer reaction. So without being a theorist I became a pro-theory person, on these political grounds essentially.
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I would have thought your writing showed you to be someone who managed to move between the two quite successfully, by performing theoretically-informed readings of literary and filmic texts.
I did in a way. There was a time, just before I came to Princeton, when I was thinking it was time to move from Exeter, and various possibilities were up for discussion. At one point I was being considered as the person who should go to one place to help them fight against theory, as the person who should go to another place and help them fight for theory, and as the person who should go to a third place and teach them theory with a human face. So there is something elusive about this role. But when asked, I felt quite clearly that one had to be for theory against its enemies. Barthes I found very engaging, and Derrida too. I’ve never fully acknowledged it but a lot of the things I do, a lot of my ways of thinking, I’ve learned from Derrida. It’s not straightforwardly working in Derrida’s mode. But there are certain moves that he teaches one how to make that are very useful.
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This could be your equivalent to Foucault’s relation to Nietzsche contained in his remark that there are philosophers one learns from and philosophers one writes about.
Exactly. Even the stuff I’ve been saying about oracles, I wouldn’t be able to think through without Derrida’s notion of the trace. The trace is the thing which allows you to construct the notion of the origin but all you’ve got is the trace. Or what you call the trace. Or even those thoughts about Catherine Deneuve and the role. The trace is the thing which allows you to construct the future that left the trace and then forget you’ve constructed it. That’s exactly how grammatology works. And then, among English people, Empson is very important to me. I’ve written quite a lot about Empson at different points.
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Does that link in with Christopher Norris’s work on Empson?
Yes, he wrote a very good book on Empson. I’ve written a piece about Empson in the new Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. I think there’s something wonderful about his recklessness. I still read him and I think there’s also a model there. We should never be afraid of taking things apart because we may not be able to put them back together. Only things that are not very good are going to suffer under this kind of scrutiny. It’s very different from other kinds of cultural criticism. My friend Louis Menand thinks that practical criticism is usually just nit-picking and being clever, and that the big questions are all really interesting. I think he’s terrific about the big questions — and he can also do the nit-picking, so he sells himself short a little bit there. But his posture is — who cares about all this close-reading stuff? Let’s talk about real issues. I think the reverse. I think the big issues are fascinating — for talking about late at night over a drink — but practical criticism does the real work.
There’s an essay by Lionel Trilling about Anna Karenina in which he has two or three pages on Tolstoy versus Dostoevski, about whom one should prefer and what’s at stake. This is a preface to a translation — a posh edition. Then he gets to a certain point and he says, ‘Well, that’s it. There’s nothing else to say about this book really, unless of course you want to analyse it or something.’ He doesn’t quite say that of course but it’s a perfect example of the very moment at which Empson or Blackmur or any of those formalists would have rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Trilling genuinely doesn’t see that there is anything to be done. He’s not saying, ‘There is this other field but it’s not my cup of tea,’ he’s saying, ‘I really don’t see what else can be done here.’
When I first went to Columbia Trilling was still flourishing. He was a little distant but he was very nice and interestingly ironic man. He was a little aloof from everyone and probably had a very complicated inner life. He was a generous-spirited man and very subtle. He would engage in these very subtle conversations.
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I never really picked up on that whole relation of the New York intellectuals to Marxism in the forties and fifties, the place of journals like Partisan Review. I know there are several books on it but I was always more focused on the British situation with Williams and Hoggart and Thompson and Hill through to journals like New Left Review, Screen, Economy and Society and all of those things.
Oh, there are plenty of books on it. It’s not that interesting though, it’s a provincial New York thing. Essentially none of them ever get over their anti-communism. They all somehow got fixed on the idea that the most terrible thing in life is to become an American communist; or to have been one. But it seems to me that it’s not the most terrible thing in life.
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Richard Rorty has some nice points on this in his essay, ‘Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.’
Well he was quite close to the Trillings, they knew his parents... I grew up with working class parents who were all socialists by definition and they weren’t really educated. My dad had Fabian leanings but he was not really educated enough to be a proper Fabian. But insofar as he could be, he was interested in that side of things. I used to campaign for the Labour Party, go canvassing, and all those sorts of things. But of course you never thought Communism was serious in that world, so you thought to yourself you could be a sort of Marxist — you didn’t even think about being a fellow traveller because the Communist party was a sort of joke party, down the road. So you never saw Marxism as some kind of terrible religion as they did in the US.
When my father and mother married, they worked in shops. He worked in a tobacconist shop and she worked in a milliner’s shop. He left school when he was twelve. His father came from Yorkshire and his mother was Irish. They worked as shop assistants and then my dad got a job as a meter-reader for the electricity board, so he rode around a lot on a motorbike. Then he went in the navy during the war and qualified as an electrician so, at the end of the war he was a petty officer and a trained electrician. He worked in foundries as an electrician and later in life he moved into the offices of the Electricity Board. My mother, quite late in life, got a job as a doctor’s receptionist which sort of made her life because she knew everything that was happening in the neighbourhood and everybody’s ailments. She worked there for twenty years or so and she liked it a lot.
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One last question on film. What do you think about the current state of contemporary cinema — American cinema and filmmakers or any others that are of interest to you? I suppose I’m asking you to position yourself in relation to that larger discourse I’ve mentioned, of critics who regularly ask, ‘why are the movies so bad?’, every decade or so.
There are filmmakers I like. I like David Lynch, I like Jonathan Demme, I like Mike Figgis and I always see their films and I would always see anything they would do. And I like Gladiator because I like all of Ridley Scott’s stuff with the exception of Columbus. I think that was beyond anything anybody could reasonably be expected to like.
But I do like this question about why are the movies so bad? I don’t know the answer but I like the question, although it seems wrongly put. It seems merely mournful and unhelpful and unhistorical. ‘Why are the movies so bad?’ is like, ‘why is the novel dying?’ — which people have been asking since the 1790s, as far as I can tell. So it can’t be right as a question. On the other hand, it can’t be right simply to assert either that we are always in a good period or that the films of yesteryear are always better. So there are three propositions here, none of which can be right. It can’t be right that the movies are always getting worse, and it can’t be right that they are always the same. And it can’t be right that, whatever they were, they were always better in the past. So presumably the real historical question would be, what constitutes a peak and what constitutes a trough within a national cinema? And how do we register that? But it is clear that there are good, lively periods in cinema. And clearly good movies set standards for other movies — and that probably is the answer to that question about the 70s. Not that it was a great golden age but that there were some movies that ...
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Raised the bar.
The bar was raised for a little while and everyone else would keep trying to get there until some sloppier, softer option came along. There is one thing that is striking about current movies, which has been around for the last five or six years or maybe even more. Movies that are conceptually very intelligent, that are well put together, that have a really good idea, that are quite challenging and intricate, actually lose interest in themselves before halfway through. The Fifth Element, dozens of movies. In all genres, it seems to me, whether it’s science fiction or horror movie or whatever, there are stories that are intelligently conceived and told within totally popular genres, addressing issues that are not stupid. An example of something that works in this way is Back to the Future. It’s intelligent all the way through, it sustains its interest in its own premise. Whereas these other movies seem to have an interesting premise and then ... I don’t know what happens — the story usually told is that there are too many executives.
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That’s right, and too many scriptwriters.
Yes, and they cut out all the interesting options. But the effect on the screen is more sort of ... whatever creative energy was going into this, simply gave up. These movies were abandoned before they were finished. And that is the single most striking and familiar thing about contemporary movies. I’m not talking about Gladiator here; one of the nice things about it is the way it just keeps going!
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And are you out there reviewing films on a regular basis?
I’m not doing a lot at the moment. Notionally I’m a film critic for The London Review of Books and I’m supposed to write about film for them all the time. When there are a series of good films, I do that. But it’s a couple of years since I’ve done a film review.
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You’d reviewed film books for them.
I do them on a fairly random basis. They were keen to do a piece about Don DeLillo — a sort of conversation — but he doesn’t like the idea. He said he would be happy to talk to me any time about movies, but he didn’t want to talk about his books. I think he didn’t want to go over his own career. He said he didn’t like to talk about his previous work, partly because he was on to the next thing and partly because when he saw it printed it didn’t sound like what he’d said when he’d said it.
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I love what he says in The Paris Review interview when he talks about sitting in the park and his discovery of the literary sentence, the Hemingway sentence, maybe from the start of A Farewell to Arms, about ‘the troops going by, the dust coming up, and the leaves blowing.’ His recitation captured perfectly a writer’s appreciation of the way Hemingway could use ‘and’! It was a brilliant observation-revelation, as were all the things he said about Cheever. So I urge you to keep chasing him up.
He also had a nice phrase in a letter to an Australian academic, John Frow who is now a professor of English at Edinburgh. This was just after Underworld came out and there was talk that DeLillo would come to Australia. There was some ambiguity about the level of promotion he was obliged to do to justify the large advance he’d received. He had to do readings and interviews in America, and in England. And it was thought ecstatically in Australia, for a brief time, that he had to go to Australia. It turned out he didn’t have to. And he told John Frow he would like to come to Australia some time but, ‘not with a book in my hand.’
He’s very good like that but he’s also highly reserved. He’s a very nice man. I know him a little bit because he’s a friend of Paul Auster’s. Paul was one of my first students at Columbia in the sixties ...
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Well, his book Leviathan is dedicated to DeLillo and DeLillo blurbed the first book written by Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt. Was it you who got Auster going on those French translations he did early on in his career?
Well, I went to Columbia and I taught a course on symbolist poetry in French and English. Paul took the course and he really wanted to be a writer. Paul’s a great success story. At that time he was writing a novel-memoir and he would bring stuff in for me to read and we’d talk about it. The stuff wasn’t all that good but his passion was tremendous. Then after that, he went to Paris and he worked there and, when he came back, he did a heap of that translation work. Meanwhile he was writing a novel, and then sending it out and receiving endless rejection slips and so on. Then, finally, he brought out this book and it was a hit.
It turned out that his wife was also a former student of mine at a different time — she was in a class at Columbia about ten years later. So we see them quite often — very nice people and very talented writers.
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