The Elegant Variation

THE LONG AWAITED, LONG-PROMISED, JUST PLAIN LONG JOHN BANVILLE INTERVIEW - PART THREE

Today's installment is slightly shorter than its predecessors, due to aforementioned food poisoning.  In this section, we begin our book-by-book review of Banville's oeuvre.  We'll probably wrap this all up with a big conclusion next week but it's possible we might stretch out to a fifth and final part. 

TEV: I wanted to talk about all the books. In book after book, I've noticed this repetition of the term "the thing itself." It seems quite a core concern of yours and yet I'm surprised that I never see it taken up in reviews or discussions of your work. It's present in numerous books.

JB: Well, you're right. That's what all my narrators are trying to find – some authentic thing. They all know they're not going to.

TEV: Well, I know that when people come to me and ask me which of your books they should read and why they should read them, I tell them that about this thwarted quest for authenticity.

JB: If they asked you what book to start with, what would you say?

(TEV Note: Herein follows a brief shocked silence followed by much unseemly stammering in which we desperately try – and fail – to avoid the wrong answer.)

TEV: (fumbling) I'm usually useless in that I usually end up suggesting three or four …

JB: (vaguely disappointed) Oh.

TEV: (continuing) … in that one of the things I'll do is point to the one that I read first, which is Eclipse. I came to it on the strength of a very positive review in the New York Review of Books, which you may recall. I also tend to recommend based on what I know about the reader, which can bring me to The Book of Evidence or The Untouchable … Oddly – and it's hard for me to say I have a favorite because it shifts –

JB: Oh no, I don't mean your favorite. I mean which would you say to someone, This would be a good place to start?

TEV: The Book of Evidence, I would say, because it's quite self-contained or –

JB: I would say The Newton Letter.

TEV: (of course, we knew that all along) The Newton Letter.

JB: It's pretty well all there. And it's short.

(TEV Note: OK, there's no way in the world we could admit that "Yes, we knew that all along" but in fact, in our defense, we did – ages ago – recommend just that title over at Tingle Alley, saying: "However, there’s a small novella in this group — The Newton Letter - that’s wonderfully written, refined and polished, and does expose a reader to JB’s central preoccupations and high style in shorter form." So there. It's pretty well all there. And it's short. We said it first. End of aside.)

TEV: I actually read the books out of sequence, because I read Athena before The Book of Evidence -

JB: (darkly) Oh yes.

TEV: - and which possibly remains my favorite.

JB: I don't understand why that book didn't do better. I gave them sex. I gave them violence. What more do they want from me?

TEV: By the way, I have something to show you, I didn't want to bother you with things to sign last night [at Three Lives], and I don't know if you remember this, but I came across this and it's got a story of yours.

[TEV Note: The "this" in question is a copy of Argosy – The Short Story Magazine from February 1974, which contains a short story of Banville's entitled "Return Journey" and subtitled "A ghost story - with a difference … "]

JB: (puts on his glasses and studies it in intent silence for a few minutes) I have no memory of this. (studies longer) Is it any good? It doesn't look any good.

TEV: I thought so. I mean it's clearly an early work. But it seems of a piece with some of the Long Lankin stories. It's so rare for me to stumble across something I haven't seen or read. I think the only things I haven’t read are "Persona" and "The Possessed".

(TEV Note: Banville requested these stories removed from the reissued collection of stories Long Lankin, and they can only be obtained in editions priced beyond the range of this humble blogger.)

JB: Hmph. It must have been one of my attempts to write popular fiction. Isn't that extraordinary? I wonder if the bastards paid me for it … It's amazing. I remember Argosy. They were supposed to pay very well. I was always trying to get into it.

(TEV Note: Bits of business ensued around finding the right pen with which to sign the magazine, which never finally did get signed. We began running into a time crunch, so I returned to the subject of his oeuvre.)

TEV: So let's touch on each of the books, and perhaps you might share a memory, an impression, a sense of how the title sits in your esteem today.

JB: Well, I hate them all, you realize that? I loathe them.

TEV: All of them?

JB: Yes.

TEV: Because you did say –

JB: They're all a standing embarrassment.

TEV: - talking about Nightspawn, that you felt it was in some ways the most honest thing you'd written. I wondered if that still stood.

JB: It probably was. My memory of it is that it's a very dreadful book. It was written in some mad fever of … I don't know what. I think I hated the notion of writing fiction.

TEV: Well you've said that the book was an intentional cheating of the reader's expectations.

JB: Yes. It was. All that was very pretentious. As we all are when we're young. But I did dislike – I still dislike – the novel form. It annoys me. Its requirements are too … You know, in a poem you can do anything. You can make it any shape or length. Novels, for some reason, have to be about two hundred and twenty pages long – in America, three hundred and twenty pages long. I don't know where this convention came from.

(TEV Note: We paused here to consult the dessert menus – desserts we would be forced to abandon when we noticed we were running out of time.)

TEV: Well, let's start at the beginning, with Long Lankin.

JB: Well, you see, as everybody nowadays wants to make a movie, in those days our ambitions were very humble. We all wanted to get a short story published in a good magazine. So everybody started out by writing short stories. It wasn't a medium that I particularly liked, although I suppose I still hearken back to Dubliners. I put together this rather inept book. I think some of the stories are quite good. They have a studied, glassy-eyed narrative voice that I sometimes wish I could recapture. There's a very silly long short story/novella which is awful … awful … awful …

TEV: But [the novella] introduces us to the character of Ben White (protagonist of Nightspawn).

JB: Yes. But it's my attempt to be cosmopolitan. I didn't know anything about the world. But I had always felt that this advice about "write about what you know" was bad advice. I always felt that you should risk. I don't know how I feel about the book now. It seems to be so far away as to be almost written by somebody else.

TEV: I know there's a structural similarity to the stories. Did you conceive of them as a cycle?

JB: Oh yes.

TEV: You wrote them all together?

JB: Oh, no, no. I wrote them over … from the age of about sixteen, seventeen … up to early twenties. It was published, I think, when I was twenty-four. So I wrote them over about a six-year period. But I wrote them to have this coherence.

TEV: Which you did while working for Aer Lingus.

JB: Yes. Aer Lingus. Which was great. My mother wanted me to be an architect. I even went to do some interviews with the architecture college. Then I was going to go for the usual Bachelor of Arts degree. But I couldn't wait to get away. I really couldn't wait to get away. And I took a job with Aer Lingus. Which was great because there was unlimited travel at ridiculous prices. I remember flying first class on Lufthansa from London to San Francisco for two pounds. First class was something in those days. But you know, the real price was a grindingly boring job as a clerk. But they also had another great thing. In those days, they made their money from the transatlantic route, which meant there was no work during the winters. So they would give what they called "winter leave." We'd get four months off – unpaid. They would give you a free ticket to go wherever you wanted to go. But looking back now, I should have gone to college. Not for the college itself, but I should have had those three or four years as a student.

TEV: What about Nightspawn? It was reissued not too long ago.

JB: Yes. I suppressed it for a long time and then a friend of mine who runs a very good publishing house said that he could do it. It seems to sell. I get tiny royalty checks every now and then. It's very much a young man's book. It's completely undisciplined and crazed and full of bad influences. I remember one of the reviewers saying, "Mr. Banville has been reading the wrong books." (laughs)

TEV: And yet it does seem like many of our subsequent concerns are already in evidence, however nascent.

JB: Oh, yes. Yes. I mean, I always hated the constrictions of the novel and I was fascinated by the contract between the reader and the writer. You know that thing when you buy a novel and you know it's all made up and yet you sit there on the edge of your seat – what's going to happen? Who's Becky Sharp got married to? I mean, that's an amazingly tender relationship between the reader and the text. And I'm still fascinated by that. Pushing that, to see how elastic it is. But I feel an embarrassment about Nightspawn. I was so young and I thought I was middle-aged, cosmopolitan, and I was just a kid.

TEV: What about Birchwood?

JB: Birchwood. It's curious how many younger people now come to me and say that's the one they go back to or that they start with. I admire the creative … the exuberance of imagination … I wouldn't be able to allow myself to go that far now. I wouldn't know how to do it.

TEV: The gift of not knowing any better?

JB: Yes. And of course, when I think about it, I realize how much politics there is in it without my knowing it at the time. It was written at the start of the civil war in Northern Ireland. And obviously, there's a lot of that in it. So I have a vestigial fondness for it. And I regarded it as my Irish Book. And I was going to give up fiction after that. I didn't know what I would do. I just felt I didn't want to keep doing this thing over and over again. And then I went into what I call my "European novel of ideas" mode. In those days Fontana Books used to bring out a series of paperbacks called "Modern Masters" and would have George Steiner on Kafka and so on… and I could see my name on the spine of one of those. This seemed the direction to go in. Could one do a novel of ideas? I discovered that one couldn't but I spent a lot of years discovering that.

TEV: One couldn't?

JB: Not directly stated. Matters of astronomy just do not fit in fiction.

TEV: Which segues quite nicely to Doctor Copernicus and Kepler. You don't feel that –

JB: I think those books were a great waste of time. I spent a lot of time doing stuff that didn't need to be done. Research and suchlike. I was halfway through … well, not halfway through but the first thing I wrote for Copernicus was the first person narrative by Rheticus. And of course that was easy. Then I realized, "Christ, I'm going to have write this bloody book around this." And I'm going to have to look at pictures by Holbein and so on. And I'm going to have to read some of the biographies. Just tedious beyond compare. And I wasted a lot of time and energy. People used to say to me, look, don't be mesmerized by the facts. Facts are only facts. But of course, artists love facts. It makes it feel real, that this is the real world.

TEV: I remember attending an chat with Kazuo Ishiguro, who was discussing When We Were Orphans, and he said he basically didn’t bother to do any research at all on Shanghai, he just made it all up.

JB: I should have done that as well. But it's funny because when I was doing Kepler … well, when I finished Copernicus, I thought, never again. Never, ever, ever again. And then I began to think about Kepler, and Kepler is such a sympathetic character. Here you have a man running in circles, trying to keep hold of everything, trying to impose order on a chaotic world. And I – no actually, it was Copernicus: I was going to go to Poland, and I’d got a travel grant from the Arts Council, and I booked my flight and I applied for a visa to Poland. This was in the early 70s and the cold war was distinctly warm. And they wrote back and said yes, of course, I could have a visa to come to Poland, they would send it along. The visa came six weeks after the date I was supposed to go to Poland. So, luckily, I said to hell with that. I'll make it up. And I made it up. And then when I came to do Kepler, I couldn't resist Kepler, and I thought how am I going to recreate Prague? And it was uncanny – when I went to Prague … I went with a friend of mine to Weil der Stadt in Germany, where Kepler was born, about three years after the book was published and it looked exactly like Weil der Stadt as I'd imagined it. And then I went to Prague, many, many years later. And I said, "Jesus, I hope I got it right." Because you realize the world is a simple place. There aren't many – you go to Hindustan and at some point you realize these are people just like us. We're all just the same. (laughs) This is a great discovery .. naïve, poor bastard imagining he'll go to Prague and find himself on Mars but "Oh, no, it's human beings, all the way down."

TEV: You spoken at length about some of the intricate structuring of Kepler –

JB: Oh yes … It was a way of working. It was a good thing to do. I enjoyed doing it, I enjoyed the technical challenge of it. It tamed the sentiment of the book as well. Because Kepler is such a wonderfully sympathetic character. I remember hearing around that time that Bartok used to base all his music on the Golden Section. He used to practically count the notes. I thought, "That's a good idea. That's a way to do this.”

TEV: The books are decidedly different in tone but do seem deeply connected to one another.

JB: I suppose the main thing about the great astronomers is their strange detachment from physical reality. They really didn't care very much how things actually are. What they cared about was a theory to explain, to account for –

TEV: - to "save the phenomena."

JB: Yes. I mean, Copernicus only took six star sightings in his entire life. And Kepler had double vision. But you know, I had to suppress at least half the misfortunes that befell Kepler. His life was infinitely more complex, more horrendous, than the version of it that I wrote. His life simply wouldn't have been believable. I mean, he spent something like four years working up that defense of his mother against the witchcraft. He got her off. She didn't thank him, and died a couple of months later. But I was fascinated by the scientific mind. Plus it was a way of writing about creativity without writing about art.

TEV: Which brings us to The Newton Letter. Which you would tell people to start with.

JB: Again, I think it's all there. It's short. Easily swallowed whole.

TEV: Much is written about how intertextual and heavily allusive your fiction is. To what extent do you feel that for a reader to have a fully satisfying experience with your book it's necessary to know all the references? For example, I won't pretend for a moment that I would have known on my own about the Lord Chandos Letter if I hadn't read something that advised me about it. Whereas the Elective Affinities references I did recognize from reading Goethe in my childhood home.

JB: No, I don't expect the reader to recognize intertexual allusions. I think it simply gives a resonance to the page. Most of the books I read, I don't get the references. How would I? And when I do, I'm always disappointed.

TEV: You're disappointed when you get them?

JB: Yes, I think, is that all it is? No, I just think that things resonate. Rather in the way that I was saying about Walter Benjamin saying you don't have to have read all the books in the library, the fact that they're there sets up some kind of force … And a lot of it, again, is simply a way of working.

TEV: Something that engages you.

JB: Yeah. You sit there thinking, what the hell am I going to do now? And then you think, well, this particular work of art has relevance here, for me. I don't expect – I don't do that anymore, really. Although in Athena …

TEV: … paintings are all made up. And the painters' names are all anagrams of John Banville.

JB: And when the German edition was coming out, they contacted me to say "the last painting that you speak about – was it the Birth of Athena? – we think we've identified it but we want to make sure." And I said, "I'm terribly impressed that you did all this work but the painting doesn't exist."

THE LONG AWAITED, LONG PROMISED, JUST PLAIN LONG JOHN BANVILLE INTERVIEW - PART TWO

This week we keep the introductory prattle to a bare minimum, except to say that Part Two is dedicated almost in its entirety to a discussion of Banville's Booker Prize nominated novel The Sea.  (It's not available in the US until March but you can buy it now from Amazon UK - see the rare Amazon link under the recommended sidebar at right.) 

TEV: Which seems like an ideal segue to talk a bit about The Sea. I remember an interview with you I'd heard as you'd just begun The Sea, or were contemplating it, and you anticipated the book would be a change of tone, a bit more idyllic, perhaps, in a gentler key with nostalgia for childhood but that it would invariably go all dark by the end. Which seems to have happened. I wonder how much of that might is self-fulfilling prophecy?

JB: (laughs) Well, I'll tell you the process by which it happened. I set out to write that kind of book – a very simple account of childhood by the seaside. I knew it wouldn't be that simple but that's what I hoped was going to be. There would be no narrator in the present. There would be an "I" saying "I did this" and "I did that" but the action would all be in the past. But it wouldn't work. It just would not work. I couldn't do it. I don't know why. It just would not … the chemistry was not … And then, suddenly, this narrator began to speak - in grief, as usual - and I suspect he's my link.  I think this is a transition book. After Shroud, people used to ask me … I remember a question and answer session just after some reading, a woman in the front row – I'd seen her watching me through it darkly and I knew she was there to get me – said "When are you going to stop writing about these awful men killing women?" And I said, "Look, I'm like Bart Simpson, at the start of The Simpsons, writing on the blackboard – I must get this right, I must get this right. When I get it right, I'll stop doing it." And I felt that in Shroud – dark and terrible as that book is – I felt I had got it right. For myself, that is - I'm not making a judgment, it's not my place to make a judgment on the quality of the book. But for me, this was … I had finally fixed it. So I had to move on. But of course, as always in works of art – and it is a work of art, again whether it's a good or bad work of art, whether it's a successful or a failed work of art is not for me to say - but things happened that I didn't expect.

TEV: For example?

JB: Well, I didn't expect the narrator to come in. I didn't expect that he would have lost his wife. This was all new to me. In fact, when that happened, I saw the direction in which it should go. And so suddenly the thing began to move and after that it only took about a year to write.

TEV: Wow …

JB: But I mean, I'd been working on it for two years before that.

TEV: And you'd been thinking about it. I'd seen the interviews where you discussed it. I heard an interview that you did with Michael Silverblatt who does a KCRW radio program in Los Angeles called Bookworm –

JB: Oh yes.

TEV: He was in Dublin for the Bloomsday celebrations.

JB: Yes, that's right.

TEV: I get a sense from the interviews I've read that you're a bit wary of one reading too much into things in your fiction. He asked you about the broken vase and what that represented, and you sort of suggested that it represented a broken vase.

JB: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

TEV: And it's just a minor thing, but I do notice a recurrence of names in your books. The one that caught me in The Sea is Morden because that ties back to Athena.

JB: You see, I've got so old now that I'm probably forgetting that I used it before. (laughs) No, it wasn't conscious. I like the name Morden. There's something about it – it seems a perfect Banville name –

TEV: There's Mordred and death connotations –

JB: Yeah. Where "Max" came from, I don't know.

TEV: And obviously, he's not remotely the same character but your fiction is very allusive –

JB: Well, names are terribly important. They are talismans. They are emblems that you can build around. I don't know why. It's kind of magical.

TEV: I've always felt these names like Maskell and Querrell speak volumes before you even meet the character. And Rose, I noted, went back to Birchwood …

JB: My God, I'd forgotten.

TEV: The obsessive reader is coming out. I apologize for that …

JB: Don't apologize, I'm flattered.

TEV: I'd like to think I know enough not to place the author too much into his work, or to confuse the character with its creator, but this book has the strong … stirrings of direct experience.

JB: Yes, absolutely. The childhood scenes are obviously based on my own … we used to spend our summers in Rosslare Strand, which is about fourteen miles south of Wexford. We would spend pretty well the whole summer there. A bit wild, I mean, we were like wild animals … We never bathed, we just swam in the sea all day … I don't think I ever put shoes on until the time I would leave. This is one of the things I wanted to do in the book - I mean obviously, it's blindingly obvious that having done Shroud, I would say, "Right, let's go right back and find something pure and fresh and vivid. And what could be purer and fresher and more vivid than childhood? I mean, one fell in love, or started falling in love, at the age of nine. No sex. We wouldn't have known what to do. But it was so intense …

TEV: Overwhelming sometimes.

JB: Yeah. I mean, I had a girlfriend, she used to come and stay at Rosslare Strand from her home in Liverpool. She'd come with her family. In fact, she stayed in a house that was very near the house that The Cedars is modeled on in The Sea, which is a house I used to go to with a friend of mine. So I've kind of conflated the two. But she would come every summer and we were just crazy about each other from the age of nine or ten. But we agreed that we would have an open relationship. (laughs)

TEV: Very worldly of you.

JB: Because we only saw each other for about three or four weeks every year, and when we were separated we would write these long letters in pink envelopes with S.W.A.L.K - "sealed with a loving kiss" - written on the back of them. And we would see each other every summer … my goodness, up the age of seventeen. And, of course, around the fifteen/sixteen years, I would see her coming across the field, and my eyes would pop out on stalks … My God, this beautiful creature! And I often think that was one of the most formative relationships of my life. There was no … I don't know what to say, I suppose we … I mean, how would you describe what people have at that age? It's not love as we understand it but yet it's something …

TEV: Well, it's the first time you experience that sort of connection with another person.

JB: And then in The Sea I go and sully it all by looking up the leg of the mother … horrid minded creature that I am. But you know, that, very simply, is what I was setting out to do – to catch, to mine … that's the wrong word … to harness, in the way that Ben Franklin harnessed lighting, to catch that flash. But, of course, the reason it wouldn't work was that it wasn't enough. We don't live in the past.

TEV: Some years ago, you cited a passage in The Book of Evidence as being the closest one could come to actually finding your own voice in your fiction:

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for her, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, the would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

TEV: (cont'd) Has that changed at all now with The Sea?

JB: No, no. I mean, I stick to that. That is the only time I have said this what I think and this is what I feel. And I do. I think this is what drives people to make art or do whatever they do – a sense of not being at home in the world. You know, people accuse me of writing grotesque, gothic fiction … dark, unreal. About ten years ago I was driving through Dublin on the day after Christmas Day, which in Ireland is one huge hangover, you don't see anyone in the streets. And I was driving along Pearse Street, which is a long, long, long wide boulevard. I was the only car driving. Nobody on the street – except at the street corner … three albino men, deep in conversation. Now, if I put that in a book, they'd say, "Oh, there goes Banville again with his grotesque imagination." I slowed the car as I drove past, and thought what are they doing? Is it a convention? Is there an albino convention in town? No explanation whatsoever. I mean, that's the world. The court case, the actual murder that I based The Book of Evidence on, it actually happened, he was driving along, this poor woman in the back, bleeding, she wasn't dead, when an ambulance was overtaken and assumed he was a doctor taking this woman to a hospital and said, "Follow us." And he followed them. And he drove into the grounds of the hospital! But then obviously he said to himself, "What am I doing?" and did a U-turn and drove away with her.

TEV: When I was on the radio in L.A. a few months ago, I read that earlier excerpt from The Book of Evidence on the air but I'd originally thought of reading the murder of Josie Bell, which is one of the most disturbing and unsettling murders I've found in literature … but when I read it, I thought, I can't – this is too intense. Too emotional. I've had nightmares in which I've killed someone, accidentally usually, and it spins out of control with that same horrible inevitability of one thing leading to the next … just chilling.

JB: I had that dream last night. In it, I had killed someone very close to me. Jesus Christ! I woke up saying "John, what the hell is happening to you? Get a hold of yourself."

TEV: Wow. Well, it's a scene that has left it's mark on me.

JB: Well, it's a tough scene. Curiously easy to write.

TEV: Really? How surprising.

JB: (nods) How exquisite this food is … it's almost too good to eat …

TEV: And the presentation is just lovely … (TEV NOTE: In our pre-interview correspondence, we invited Banville out for a meal, assure him that since we were "foodies" he'd at minimum get a decent meal out of it. He responded at the time: "The fact that you're a foodie is music to my ears" and complained of eating on the road. Hence the inclusion of this culinary digression amid talk of murder.)

TEV:(cont'd) I While I was preparing for this interview, I came across an interview that contained a fact about you that I hadn't encountered elsewhere, which was that you wanted to be a painter first.

JB: Well, I started writing when I was about twelve. My brother, who is eight years older than I, was in Africa and he'd been sending me books every couple of weeks. And he sent me Dubliners. And I was bowled over by this because here was a book that wasn't about cowboys and Indians, or murder at the vicarage … It was about something else. So I started writing dreadful imitations of Dubliners. I threw them all away but I remember the opening sentence of one of them, which was something like: "The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave." (laughs delightedly) I was a twelve year old. My God. Then, I kept at that for a few years, and then I decided I was going to be a painter. So I just decided I would be a painter, at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Bought some oil paints. Which are wonderful replacement toys … put aside the things of childhood for these new things of childhood. I had absolutely no gift whatsoever. Couldn't draw. No sense of color. These are distinct drawbacks of you want to be painter. And I plugged away at it for years, did these frightful daubs – I think my brother has some of them still. I have offered him good money for them so I could destroy them. But it did teach me about looking at things, looking at the world in a way that wasn't just linguistic.

TEV: Well, once I'd learned that about you, books like Athena and Ghosts – into which painting features so heavily – took on a considerably different cast for me. And now, in The Sea, you have the presence of Bonnard … and Poussin in The Untouchable … and I was fascinated by inclusion of painting and the return to the painter in The Sea.

JB: You see, in a way, all art is just evidence. It's what I see … it's surface. I can't know anything about anybody else. I can only know me. Not much of that either … I can't even write from inside. I mean, it's the surface of things that interests me. I don't like psychology. When I hear the word "psychology" in terms of a novel, I reach for my revolver. I was talking to a young novelist and she said, "Henry James, he's my favorite-est of all!" Me too - Henry James is (one of) my favorite-est of all but I regard James' books as great almost despite himself. Because I think that while he is fascinated by human emotions and human motivations, the books somehow drift free of all that. They become these glazed, transcendent objects … That sounds as if I've saying I like dead things, which I don't at all.

TEV: It does seem as there's almost something paradoxical at work, though? Your books take place in the interior landscapes of these men narrating these stories, even as you say you're not writing psychological fiction per se … but you're surely deep inside their thoughts. And beneath the surface.

JB: Well, what they're doing is they're talking about things. It isn’t that they talk about themselves. They're talking about things. And they're completely baffled. I realized the other day that I've been through the astonished/baffled/amazed/puzzled parts of the thesaurus so many times, and they're getting worn away. I'm going to have to invent some new words for it. But this is the main … my narrators just cannot understand. And they have this conviction that other people do. And that there's a huge secret that everyone else knows but they don't. And that must be something that I feel myself, as a human being, distinct from a writer. I must feel this bafflement. I sometimes wonder if the artist is slightly autistic. You know? A terrible, terrible thing from years ago … When my wife and I were married first, and we were having a dreadful row about something, as people do when they're first married, and my wife is quite brilliantly articulate, and she made this passionate statement about whatever it was we were fighting about. And I sat there watching her, and I made the mistake of saying "Do you mind if I use that?" And she said, "Oh you monster, you monster!" (laughs) There is something monstrous about being an artist. And I think it makes people careful. Sometimes, if I'm at a dinner party and someone's animatedly talking about something, and they catch my eye, I see them thinking, "He's going to use this." But I don't consciously do it.

TEV: An occupational hazard when a writer is in the room …

JB:  Well, I'm sure you know this very well, but the trouble about interviews is that one talks and talks and talks, but the simple springs of art are very hard to identify. Because they are very simple. I mean, when I sit down to write a book, first of all I want to get rid of this problem in my head. I have a friend who is a composer who put it beautifully: "I have this scream in my head and I have to get it onto paper." But that's one of the mainsprings of art – getting rid of this problem. But getting rid of it in a completely burnished, transcendent form. People are shocked when they ask me about how do I regard an audience? And I will say, I don't ever think about an audience. I couldn't. No writer - no artist – thinks about an audience. They could not. And I say that I realize that when I've published a book, if it's bought by 10,000 people, there will be 10,000 versions of that book. It's no longer mine. It struck me recently – it's a perfectly self-evident thing but it had never struck me before – the only person in the world who cannot read The Sea is me. Everybody else in the world can read it. All, however many billions of people there are. I can't. My wife says, "Yes, include me as well. I read so many versions of the bloody thing." (laughs)

TEV: Well, it's funny, because I confess I had this moment preparing for this interview of feeling rather intimidated. I mean, I've read pretty much all of your fiction that I can get my hands on. I've also read the criticism written about your work. And I've read most of the criticism you've written. And I said to my mother last night that I feel utterly unqualified to conduct this interview. But I think part of it is due to my trying to understand my responses to your work, and wondering if they are, in effect, "the correct response" before realizing in essence that it's actually not your book any more. It's mine now. I bought it, fair and square.

JB: Well, the difficulty you're having is, it's like when you're very drunk and you see two of everything, and trying to get those two images lined up. There's the image that you had of me … it's a difficult thing to do. It's like that awful moment when you fall in love with somebody and you say, "Let's meet for dinner on Wednesday night." When you wait at the restaurant, and you think "I'm not going to recognize her." Of course, when she comes along, it's immediate. Strange thing.

TEV: Let me jump back to my notes, there are so many things I want to get to. Another thing that struck me about The Sea – and one always wonders how much one is bringing one's own reading to things - but it does seem like there is something … emotionally rawer … tougher … Max seems to be less gilded in his reflections than, say, an Alexander Cleave or any of his predecessors. There is a more brute –

JB: People tell me that. I don't see it. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm just saying I don't see it. It seems the same old stuff I've always written about … He is monstrous. I mean, he's monstrously awful to his daughter. But I suppose he is rawer because he's grieving. He doesn't know what to do with himself. He doesn't know how to grieve.

TEV: There's a rare explosion of rage in the last half of the book that I don't immediately have a memory of having seen anything similar in your work prior, something where that anger, that rage is expressed that –

(From The Sea: You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you.)

JB: The people that first read it, the people around me, that was one of the things that they said – this is such an angry book. (shrugs) All right. Again, you know, I literally can't comment because I wasn't aware of any personal anger.

TEV: I wouldn't say it's an angry book but Max expresses anger in way that –

JB: Yes, my first readers were agreeing with you that these outbursts of rage, these resentments … that the other narrators, I suppose, are more stoical. They say "Everything is dreadful but I'm way above it so it doesn't affect me."

TEV: And I'm above it was style.

JB: Yes. But Max is caught with these people whom the likes of Alex Cleave or Maskell or Axel Vander would never have dealt with for long. People like the Colonel and Miss Vavasour –

TEV: Which is a great name, by the way.

JB: That's another good one, isn't it? Common in Ireland, actually. But Max has to deal with them. I think my favorite moment in the book is when the colonel gives him the fountain pen at the end. A little present. And of course Max doesn't know what to do with this act of simple generosity and warmth. But you know Max is moved, despite the fact that he's trying not to be. So I suppose that's a new thing … kindness and decency are creeping in. This will never do. I'll have to work on this.

THE LONG-AWAITED, LONG-PROMISED, JUST PLAIN LONG JOHN BANVILLE INTERVIEW - PART I

Well, there's nothing like being named to the shortlist for the Booker Prize to get our lazy duffs into gear, especially before everyone gets their John Banville profiles to press.  So we've begun a methodical transcription of our interview with John Banville but due to the length we've decided to break it down into four parts.  Each part will post on Mondays and should just about take us up to the Booker announcement.

What we're not going to do with this interview: Try to write an overview of Banville and his career.  There are plenty of others who have done this much better than we can, and we urge you to check them out.  A proper bibliography is planned to follow the last installment, but beyond that we intend to let the words speak for themselves.

What we will tell you is that Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945. He made his debut with the collection Long Lankin (1970).  His latest novel, The Sea, marks his second visit to the Booker shortlist (and we were incorrect in our earlier assertion that Shroud make the 2001 longlist; it was, we now believe, the IMPAC longlist). 

Contrary to popular rumor, "The Banville Variation" was never the working title of this blog.

Now, to set the scene.  We travelled to New York back in May to hear Banville read at Three Lives Bookstore as part of the New York Review of Books reissue series.  Careful TEV readers will recall that MOTEV's cell phone disturbed the proceedings not once but twice.  Fast forward to the following afternoon, as we're waiting for Banville to arrive at Bouley Restaurant.  Our 12:30 appointment came and went, and as 12:45 approached and the seat opposite us remained empty, we became convinced that this was retribution for MOTEV's cell mishaps.  As we were mentally composing the "Banville stood us up" post, he arrived, apologetic and blaming the traffic - which was to afflict us again before the day was over.

Polite, ice-breaking small talk ensued, beginning with food and foodies, touching on Paris restaurants in general and Taillevent (where Banville spent his honorarium for an interview with Cartier-Bresson) in particular.  Our scribbled notes from this point reveal "I am sitting at lunch with John Banville!!"  A much needed bottle of Sancerre was ordered (to our question as to whether it was too early, Banville grinned and said, "Oh, it's never too early.")  Banville seemed fascinated by what he called the "democratizing" aspect of blogs - to which he'd previously had no exposure whatsoever - and was full of questions, and this was where we turned on the tape recorder and got to business:

JB: I mean, as I say, I'm fascinated by the fact that obviously there was this great need there all along but people didn't really know about it. I mean, I suppose the nearest one would have gotten to it pre-computer was these reading clubs … the reading circles … book groups. But I'm amazed when you say that you get thousands of people a day.

TEV: And there are sites that have been around longer than mine and have considerably larger readerships.

JB: So the publishers must be thrilled with this.

TEV: There's a generational component. The younger, more computer savvy publicists and editors have embraced it in a way that the old guard hasn't quite managed.

JB: What about the newspapers? Is there any jealousy?

TEV: Oh no. I mean, they can be critical but blogs have been written up everywhere … in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph. The Scotsman was one of the earliest to take note. I know that my mention in the Guardian helped me when I contacted your UK publicists to get a copy of The Sea.

JB: And do you have advertising?

TEV: I don't. Some blogs do.

JB: So this is philanthropic?

TEV: Well, that sounds a bit grand, but it's a labor of love, certainly. Every blogger is different – I don't want the difficulty of managing that side of it.  So, what I wanted to do with you and I hope you'll bear with me and not find it too tedious, is talk a little bit about the New York Review, because obviously, that's why you're here. And I'd like to talk about The Sea. And then, in as much as you're comfortable, I'd like to talk about your body in work. Years ago I read an interview with John Lennon, and one of the things they did was to ask him about every Beatles song he'd written. And he offered a sentence or two reflection on each, and I found that terribly interesting. So one of the things I'll do is put this entire interview on my site, and each of the titles will be linked to purchase point, so readers have a chance to get the know them all.

JB: Fire away.

TEV: Great. Let's start with the New York Review of Books series. How did you come to be associated with that? I know you've been a longtime reviewer for them.

JB: They wrote to ask me to do an introduction for the one I read from last night, J.G. Farrell's The Troubles. They knew of me because of the review and I was happy to do it. You see, you see very few of those [New York Review of Books reissues] in Europe because those books are still in print … The Troubles is still in print in Europe, so we wouldn't see the New York Review edition. But the few that I saw, I thought were wonderful. Very handsome books, very well done. So I was happy to do it. And then, Edwin Frank, who runs the thing, asked me if I would recommend some, and I was perfectly happy to recommend things to them, and it became a sort of game, thinking of obscure books that might be out of print. And then I made wonderful discoveries. I discovered Simenon through them. I had never read Simenon in my life.

TEV: You reviewed that for the New Republic.

JB: Yes. And I was just bowled over when I read these three books. I was fascinated to see what could be done with that form.

TEV: So you weren't recommending exclusively Irish books?

JB: No, no. And then I did an introduction to the book of von Hofmannstahl's, the Chandos Letter –

TEV: - which informs The Newton Letter –

JB: Yes. This is the complete text, very few people have read. (thinks for a moment) I don't know quite how to put it. When I was at the Irish Times as literary editor, I felt that I had only one duty, which was to get people to read good books. Nothing else. Nothing else mattered. Everybody assumed that I had all kinds of agendas, that I was trying to get people, that I was trying to promote my friends … It's all nonsense. You don't work that way. I used to say to people, "Do you really think I have time to worry about you, and whether I should be out to get you?" It's just nonsense. Because, in my rather quaint, old-fashioned way, I believe in books. I believe they are a good thing. They're civilizers.

TEV: You were obviously well acquainted with Farrell prior to this reissue?

JB: Yes, I met him once, just for lunch. The day before he won the Booker Prize.

TEV: And he didn't mention it to you?

JB: Well, I asked him, what did he think his chances were, and he said that it was pretty certain, but I found from his biography later that he'd known the month beforehand. But the Booker Prize was much more decorous in those days than it is now.

TEV: How so?

JB: Well every writer thinks very ambiguously about it. You know, it sells books. Whether it gets new readers is maybe another matter. I was talking to a writer friend and we agreed that one has a core readership of about 3,000. What the Booker Prize does is it makes people think they must have the book, so you get maybe 20,000 people buying it.  But if you've even got 1,000 readers who stay with you, that's a wonderful thing.

TEV: But you're not convinced that readers come aboard and stay onboard?

JB:  I suspect that an awful lot of Booker Prize books are bought simply as Christmas presents. The prize happens in October, the bookshelves fill up with Booker books and people desperate for Christmas presents see "Booker Prize" on the jacket and pounce.  But again, you know, as Walter Benajmin said, you don't have to have read all the books in your library. The very fact that they're sitting there is a force in itself.

TEV: That's reassuring when I contemplate the size of my To Read pile.

JB: (sympathetically) Oh yes, yes. Well, you see one of the advantages of getting old is that you're able to say to yourself, "Well, now I know I'm never going to read The Faerie Queen. I know I should have but I'm not now ever going to read it.

TEV: Just let it go.

JB: But then I was saying that recently to someone, and she said, "I've read it. You should. It's great." And I thought, "Oh God" (laughs) …The whole social side of the Booker Prize thing is very vulgar but we're not angels - why shouldn't we allow ourselves to be pushed into a little bit of vulgarity every now and then? It's good for us. But I wish the prize-giving dinner wasn't quite so stupidly stuffy, with everyone in evening suits and gowns …

TEV: Oh, there's a whole ceremony to it?

JB: Oh yes. Absolutely. One has a sense that it's the bourgeoisie saying to writers, "Look, you're no better than we are. You're just as greedy … egregiously kowtowing as the rest of us. You'll put on your bow tie and come along." And it is a very bruising experience, there's no doubt about it. Because you don't know whether you've won or lost until the guy on the stage calls out a name.

TEV: Excruciating.

JB:  Yes. And you do discover things about yourself. You discover this childish side of you that wants to win. My wife said to me - in '89 when my book [The Book of Evidence] was shortlisted for the Booker – she said she hardly knew me for the period of four weeks or so coming up to it.

TEV: What about that period of waiting for the longlist to be culled to the shortlist?

JB: Yeah, it is a bit of an insult if it doesn't even get on the bloody shortlist. But I mean, John McGahern and I both had a couple of years ago, what was it … Shroud and That They May Face the Rising Sun. And neither got on the longlist. But even the shortlist has a huge effect.

TEV: Yes, Colm Toibin mentioned that when he was in town for the LA Times Festival of Books … that in this country, to be nominated for the National Book Award doesn’t have the same impact on sales as being on the Booker Shortlist.

JB: I used to sell maybe 2 to 3 or 4,000 copies in hardback. Ten to fifteen in paperback. Book of Evidence sold 40,000 in hardback and 100,000 in paperback. Just because of the Booker shortlist.

TEV: Somebody mentioned to me that they know people who, the day the Booker shortlist is announced, go into the bookstore and buy all the titles.

JB: Yeah. And it gives you a lot of clout with publishers. And that's very gratifying. Although I should state … people are constantly complaining about their publishers. I have never had anything but decent, honorable people that I've worked with, and I've been publishing since 1970. Maybe I've been phenomenally lucky. But I've had the best publishers I could possibly have. They've stuck with me through books that they thought were … The Untouchable was supposed to sweep all that had gone before and was completely rejected by the English prizes. But, you know, there's never a word of recrimination.

TEV: What do you attribute that loyalty to?

JB: Well, I think publishing is one of these strange little areas which are sort of the last redoubt of the gentleman. And I think people, enthusiasts like you, go into it out of love. They love books. Most of the publishers that I've dealt with actually love books, they love almost the physical object itself. It's a great thing in this day an age. As you know, it's diametrically opposed to the film industry – which is understandable, there's so much money involved. But in the film industry, you're never asked to be original. You're asked to repeat something somebody did last week.

TEV: Oh yeah - it worked once, so surely it must work again.

JB: Exactly.

TEV: Stepping back for a moment to the New York Review, have you experienced any fallout from your review of Saturday?

JB: Well, I've been called out on a factual error.

TEV: Oh really?

JB: I said that he won the squash match. Apparently, he lost it. I don't know anything about squash.

TEV: Really? I thought he won it, too …

JB: No, he lost it on a technicality.

TEV: Oh yeah yeah yeah …

JB: The guy did some damn thing, I don't know what it was. But again … I mean, the review got about half a dozen letters protesting vociferously about this mistake I'd made. And it's touching to see how committed people are to this book that they love. I mean, I have no doubt that by writing this review, I have offended maybe hundreds of thousands of people – the book is selling off the shelves. And what I'm saying to them is "you're wrong and you're stupid" and one doesn't do that lightly. Normally I would have sent the book back and said I don't want to review this, but I felt that … I really felt the book was so bad … and I had to make sense of that.

TEV: I hope you won't think I'm parroting your stance but some weeks ago I made some comments on my site that expressed similar objections, although I think I liked it a bit more than you did, but I felt that the set pieces rested uneasily – and surprisingly ham-fistedly – with the political –

JB: It was astonishingly ham-fisted. And I was surprised by it. And that's one of the reasons I wrote about it because I was shocked by the notion that the more transparently silly … this is one of the more transparently silly of his books … and it's having huge success. People seem to want … I'll tell you a little anecdote. A couple of years ago … I guess it was a couple of years after 9/11 … there was a very good book by Louis Menand called The Metaphysical Club, which I admired enormously. I didn't get around to reviewing it until about three months after it was published. I reviewed it in the Irish Times. No one had taken any notice of it, and it pretty well wasn't available. I wrote a glowing review which was about a third of a page. And even though the book was written before 9/11, I started off by saying America is now in trouble, it's suffering a severe case of nerves and shock but this is one of the books people should read here, in America, to find out where we came from and how America is a different place … One mention of 9/11, in the first paragraph. The literary editor decided to run a full page, huge 9/11 photograph. And the book became a runaway bestseller. Within days there banks of them in the shops. Because I'm sure that every single person involved at this point thought it was a book about 9/11. I'm sure they thought "What the hell is this? This is about some bloody philosophers' club?" So this is one of the reasons that I decided to attack McEwan's book, and I feel bad about attacking a colleague's book. It's not a good thing to do, and I don't like doing it. But in truth I was not really attacking his book, and certainly not him. What I was tackling, I hoped, was the phenomenon of this strange – as I said, in the final paragraph, are we so shaken in our sense of ourselves that we go to books like this? Because that's no fault of McEwan's.

TEV: No, certainly not.

JB: But I saw some reviews … there was a review in the Nation which said he should be given the Nobel Prize … and maybe he should, he probably deserves it but –

TEV: There's a fair amount of hype around the book and I'm surprised at how uncritical many of the –

JB: Absolutely! You see, the book was delayed coming to me from the New York Review of Books, so I took the opportunity to read Atonement, which I hadn't read. And I was bowled over by the first half of it. I thought it was a superb piece of English pastoral. Now, a lot of people say it's derivative but I thought actually he had managed to name all the ancestors … I thought it was a masterpiece of writing, beautifully written. And then I got Saturday, and I thought, this man is having a bad, bad day off. But then I began to look around to see the response it was getting, and I thought I've got to write about this.

TEV: I wondered if some of the response it got wasn't just a continuation of the momentum begun by the popularity of Atonement, which was also a very successful book. And I couldn't help but wonder if people were coming back –

JB: A friend of mine was in a book shop when the book was first in, and people would say "I want – " and they'd take the book down and hand it to them. And they would be Atonement people. But again, I really don't want to be unkind to Ian McEwan. I'm sure he won't believe that but I really don't. I don't like to take flying kicks at my peers. I've sent back many books to the New York Review of Books that I just didn't want to review because I couldn't say anything positive about them. But I think that this, as I say, this extraordinary loss of nerve that we seem to be experiencing … but again, as we talked about with blogs, there is obviously a deep need for stories … for stories about ourselves, stories that will explain 9/11 … But no story is going to explain 9/11 … it's quite simple, nothing needs to be explained about it. But the reaction in America to 9/11 has almost been religious, kind of religious terror. And America is going to have to cure itself of that.

TEV: Well, a new president would be a good start.

JB: Well, one of the problems, of course, for America – you might not be old enough to know this – is that America never cured itself of Vietnam. Instead of setting out … And Hollywood didn't help. After the war, Hollywood was able to go in immediately get women out of trenches and back into dresses as Doris Day again. There was no process of healing. There were honorable exceptions … there was that movie, a bit sentimental and a bit silly, I suppose but Grand Canyon by Lawrence Kasdan. Which I thought was wonderful, y'know it ended up they were at the Grand Canyon and that's the kind of thing Hollywood should be doing because it is the great people's art form but it didn't do well.

TEV: I'm leaping out of order but I'm prompted by something you've said – I'm sure you're aware of the people who have written critically about you, people like Joseph McMinn, Rudiger Imhof –

JB: I haven't read them.

TEV: You haven't? Because it's interesting … McMinn does identify what he feels happens in your books, that at the climax there's a return to nature or finding a solace there, and it's interesting that you invoke Grand Canyon in that fashion.

JB: I should say that one time that I saw the Grand Canyon, my wife and I arrived there in the afternoon, went to the edge, looked down and said, "Hm. Ok. Let's go and have a drink." And hit the bar and spent the afternoon drinking gin and tonics and having a wild old time knowing the Grand Canyon was out there. But yes, there is a side of me that is an old-fashioned pastoralist … an Irish pastoralist. In a way, Irish fiction was always pastoral, even when it was set in the cities. … It's all pastoral, it's all nature, it's all to do with the countryside. We never really got in to do cities, apart from Joyce ...

That's all for part one ... tune in next week as we turn our attention in detail to The Sea.  A sneak preview:

JB: (laughs) Well, I'll tell you the process by which it happened. I set out to write that kind of book – a very simple account of childhood by the seaside. I knew it wouldn't be that simple but that's what it was going to be. There would be no narrator in the present. There would be an "I" saying "I did this" and "I did that" but it would all be in the past. And it wouldn't work. It just would not work. I couldn't do it. I don't know why. It just would not … the chemistry was not … And then, suddenly, this narrator began to speak … in grief, as usual … and I suspect he's my link … I think this is a transition book. After Shroud, people used to ask me … I remember a question and answer session just after some reading, a woman in the front row – I'd seen her watching me through it darkly and I knew she was there to get me – said "When are you going to stop writing about these awful men killing women?" And I said, "Look, I'm like Bart Simpson, at the start of The Simpsons, writing on the blackboard – I must get this right, I must get this right. When I get it right, I'll stop doing it." And I felt that in Shroud – dark and terrible as that book is – I felt I had got it right. For myself, I'm not making a judgment, it's not my place to make a judgment on the quality of the book. But for me, this was … I had finally fixed it. So I had to move. And I thought that had better write a new book but The Sea I think is a transition.