271-] English Literature , William Boyd

271-] English Literature

William Boyd 

 Interview With William Boyd

 QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How do you go about writing? Have you always written in the same way?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, I have actually. I’m part of that pre-computer generation and I’ve always written in longhand. All my novels have manuscripts, which is rare for anybody under the age of forty. I used to write my first draft in my tiny anal retentive handwriting and then I’d write a fair copy in large legible handwriting. I would then give that second draft to a typing agency – that dates me – and the typists typed it up from my fair copy so that I could then hand it in to the publisher. I’ve always had this process of writing a draft and then writing it all again, however long it takes. Now, of course, I type the second draft onto a screen.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How much changes between drafts?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I change things all the time. When you are copying a sentence or typing it or rewriting it you think, ‘Oh, this is clumsy’, or ‘I can stick that word here’, so the difference from manuscript to typescript or manuscript to fair copy is often huge. It’s a very good editorial process and I wonder if writers who write directly onto a screen lose that. Of course, you rewrite and polish anyway, but there’s something about the two forms, there’s a real moment of decision, and just making that transfer, I wouldn’t change that working method now. I do write screenplays straight onto the screen, I do write journalism straight onto the screen, but I would never write a novel or a short story like that, I just seem to need the two forms – the handwritten and then the perfection of type.

 The last few months of my working life have been very simple: I get up in the morning and write the novel. I can write for about three hours and then I’m knackered but I can type up what I’ve written. I’ve been doing that seven days a week. I’ve been writing my latest novel since the early summer of last year and since December I’ve been working full-time seven days a week on it. I’m now polishing it and tweaking it but I’m already thinking about the next one and that makes me relaxed because that plane is circling and waiting to be called in to land.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you have a structure worked out when you sit down to write?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes. It takes me about three years to write a novel and I spend roughly two years figuring it out and one year writing it. Iris Murdoch, who worked in the same way, called it the period of invention and the period of composition. I think that’s quite a neat division. It’s become absolutely rigid for me now.

 I get an idea for a novel, which is usually one sentence or a concept. Then I spend a long time thinking about it, filling out notebooks, travelling, acquiring the library I need for the book. I set about making more and more elaborate plans for the narrative and making lots and lots of mistakes, going up blind alleys and developing characters or sub-themes that fizzle out. Even then, I haven’t actually started writing the book. That whole period of invention is absolutely crucial in my work. Eventually, and usually when I know how the book is going to end, I will write a draft of the last paragraph or the last few lines – so I’m that sure of it – and only at that stage do I write chapter one and start the book.

Then it takes me about nine months or a year to write it but I write with confidence – not particularly fast but with fluency because I’m not stopping to think, ‘What happens next?’ I’ve already made all those mistakes and all of those bad decisions and corrected them. Of course, I still get lots of new ideas as I’m writing but there’s a real template, or as I describe it a skeleton, and then I add the flesh when I write it.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you play around with the voice of your characters in the invention period?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, because those elements are the first questions you ask yourself once you’ve got your idea and the whole process of invention is a series of questions and answers that goes on over this period of two years. For example, I ask myself whether it is going to be in the first person or the third person, and that decision is absolutely crucial. Am I going to write from one point of view or from many points of view? Is my central character going to be male or female? The answer to these questions trigger a whole set of other questions: ‘Oh, it’s a woman, right, OK, how old is she? What’s her name? How tall is she?’ And so on and so forth and this aggregate of information begins to accrue and you see stories and storylines emerging.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — What are you currently working on?

AWILLIAM BOYD — It’s a novel that starts in Vienna in 1913 and it’s about a young Englishman who is an actor. He’s got a sexual dysfunction and he’s engaged to be married, so he decides to go out to Vienna to try out this new-fangled psychoanalysis lark to see if it can cure him of this particular problem. He starts being psychoanalysed and he meets another woman there and then, because it’s one my novels, things go from bad to worse and World War One begins.

It’s very long and it’s possibly one of my most complex plots ever because he gets embroiled in all sorts of Buchanesque adventures, but it’s got a lot more sex in it than John Buchan ever had. It covers a lot of ground but I now realise, two weeks before I hand it in to my editor, that it’s actually about lying and uncertainty which seems to me to be a very modern state of mind. And with Vienna in 1913-1914, we are at the beginning of the modern era and in the capital of a decadent empire. Something about the city then made it the focus and locus of what was modern.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How do you go about researching your novels? Do you read a lot?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, I often read novels set in the period I want to write about. For this latest novel, for example, I read Joseph Roth and Robert Musil. I find novels very useful because what a novelist saw in 1912 or 1913 is not necessary what a historian writing today will see. I also use photographs a lot. I’ve never really gone beyond the twentieth century – 1902 is as early a novel as I have set – so photographic evidence exists and I find books of photographs fantastically helpful. Then I use all sorts of newspapers, magazines, guide books – but all contemporary.

 It’s not about reading some book on the Viennese Secession, it’s about reading books that are much more banal because as a novelist the banal is what you are looking for. What struck Joseph Roth as he described a country scene in The Radetzky March is what I want to reproduce through the eyes of this young Englishman in Vienna for the first time. It’s a very selective process and if you get the detail right suddenly that world comes alive. As you sift through this material you find that you are not looking at it in the way that a journalist or a historian would look at it – you are looking at it for something that intrigues and seems unusual.

Take the business of communicating for example: you could make telephone calls in 1914-15 but only 20,000 people had telephones. The telegram and the telegraph offices were the main avenues for communication because you just popped one in the post at half a pence a word. These details make the book come alive but they have to be fed in seamlessly so that it doesn’t look like a gobbet of research. We’ve all read novels where you plough through three pages on the manufacture of rubber and you realise that the writer has been to Singapore to see a rubber plantation and by God are we going to hear about it. It is a very interesting process to make it seem entirely natural and yet at the same time you want the reader to be aware of time travel.

I always quote something from Ulysses where Bloom goes into a pub in Dublin and orders a glass of claret and a sardine sandwich. That seems very modern and it brings a Dublin pub to life in a way that knowing that Guinness costs one and sixpence doesn’t. Language is another thing. People swore as violently in 1913 as they do today, maybe not in mixed company but amongst men, and certainly soldiers’ language was as rich as anyone’s.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Where do you find traces of that? Because it doesn’t appear much in the literature of the time…

AWILLIAM BOYD — It does if you know where to look for it. I can give you two good examples. If you read the letters of James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 1909 or thereabouts, they are the most sexually candid letters you can find two lovers writing to each other. Joyce was in Trieste and Nora was in Dublin so they wrote each other some dirty letters for sexual stimulation at a distance.

 The other one is a novel by Frederic Manning which might be the best novel that came out of World War One. Manning wrote two versions of the book: one called Middle Parts of Fortune which is unexpurgated and another called Her Privates We which had no swearwords in it and was published at the time. Manning was an intellectual who fought at the battle of the Somme as a private soldier. The soldiers he writes about are all saying ‘Fuck’ and ‘Cunt’ like a soldier today would, but of course our image of the Tommy is of a plucky chap with a fag in his mouth saying, ‘Cor, blimey, it’s the Huns throwing over’.

This is what is so fantastic about Manning’s novel. You realise the soldiers didn’t give a toss about the war, they hated their officers, they hated the officers back home, and the only things they wanted were food, drink, and sex if it was available. These words weren’t invented in 1940. You just need to read Shakespeare’s soldiers to see that it’s an absolute truth, but gentility has tended to mask that so it does take some unearthing.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — What was the genesis of your forthcoming novel on psychoanalysis?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I became very interested in psychoanalysis, which is one of the three great scientific revolutions. There is the Copernican revolution, when we realised that the sun didn’t go around us but that we went around the sun. There’s the Darwinian revolution – we are animals – and then there’s the Freudian revolution – half the time we don’t know why we do things because our unconscious mind is at work.

 Whatever anyone may think of Freud and however discredited he is, there is no doubt that we are all Freudians. Even though the unconscious existed before Freud, he schematised and systematised it and changed the way we think about ourselves. So to begin with I asked myself, ‘What would it have been like to be psychoanalysed and to realise that half the things you do are driven by forces that you are only partially aware of?’ Then I decided I’d send my protagonist off to Vienna before the First World War when psychoanalysis was new and controversial, and off I went.

That was the idea that grabbed me and it’s nearly always like that. I start off with an idea and it has enough mass in it to be a four-hundred or five-hundred page novel. The ideas I get for short stories or movies or a piece I might write are different. There is a certain category of idea I get which is gravid enough or has enough potential to fill a novel. I’ve never written a short novel.

Some people like to start and see where they end up, but I’m not that kind of writer. I like to know my destination and my period of composition is not fraught with having to stop and invent, which is where novels get abandoned of course. The first sixty pages come like that and then you think, ‘What does she do next?’ I’ve never abandoned a novel because I never get to that stage.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Some writers say that once they start writing their characters take on a life of their own and become uncontrollable.

AWILLIAM BOYD — Vladimir Nabokov was always asked this and he was very much anti-Freudian and anti the unconscious. He said: ‘All my characters are galley slaves and I’m the man on the deck with the whip’. I feel rather like that because I try to make my characters live and breathe on the page as real and complex human beings. You are the master of that particular world and they are your creatures. Sometimes you don’t know where you get ideas from but it’s not the character taking over. That’s a romantic fallacy or convention – the inspired driven artist at the mercy of his or her muse. I think writing a novel takes so long that there is something very dogged and methodical about it. I believe in the Flaubertian-Joycean model of the artist controlling everything, not the drink-fuelled spontaneity of the muse descending.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How does that relate to when you are writing about characters who are already iconic figures such as Woolf, Picasso, Hemingway or Joyce? How do you create their voice?

AWILLIAM BOYD — They are usually people I have been very intrigued by anyway and I’ve read a great deal about them. It’s a kind of thought experiment. I think, ‘What would it actually be like to meet Virginia Woolf?’ I’ve never particularly liked Virginia Woolf and I’ve read everything and taught her books for many years but she just seems to me an unpleasant, snobbish, slightly bogus person. I know she was disturbed as well and that’s how I imagined her.

 If you read her letters and diaries, you see what type of person she is – we’ve all met them. The challenge as a writer is to bring that iconic figure alive in a way that makes them a real person rather than a postcard that you bought at the National Portrait Gallery. I’ve written stories about Chekhov, Wittgenstein, Brahms and Cyril Connolly, people I’m really intrigued by, and I try to make them live as characters in fiction. It’s about stripping away the myth and getting to the real person, but they are always people about whom I have been curious about and read a lot about. I can’t imagine writing a novel about George VI for example.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — The Duke of Windsor is much more interesting.

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, and that is the wonderful thing about writing fiction. I got Logan Mountstuart to meet all these people that I was intrigued by so I could present them through his eyes. Some people who knew the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who I have spoken to have said that their appearance in Any Human Heart is a fascinating and very credible portrait of them. Some of my favourite short stories of mine are these biographical short stories because when it is successful I feel like I captured the essence of the person in those fifteen or twenty pages and the reader gets a sense of them as a character quite apart from their reputation.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Does this tie in with your interest in blurring the lines between fact and fiction? Say with Nat Tate for example? Or is it really just a narrative device you are using?

AWILLIAM BOYD — That exercise was to make something utterly fictitious seem completely real so that the line is blurred, so that your suspension of disbelief is rocky, and it’s amazing how it could be done with tricks and presentation. And why did I do it? If you look at three books where I do this, The New Confessions, Nat Tate and Any Human Heart – published between 1987 and 2002, so that’s a long time – I think they stand up as a trilogy of books all exploring the same thing: is it true or is it false?

 There is an ongoing argument that somehow non-fiction is more powerful and gripping than fiction and I felt that I wanted to reclaim the top of the hill for fiction. These three books were a series of attempts to prove that something made-up could supplant what you might regard as real.