272-] English Literature
William Boyd
Interview With William Boyd
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Is there a critique of the art world in the Nat Tate project?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — There is. I wrote the book in 1998, at the height of the Young British
Artists phenomenon. I was on the editorial board of Modern Painters at the time
and I was, in a way, answering that early urge to be a painter by writing about
art. I’ve written a great deal about painting and artists and I have strong
opinions about who’s good and who isn’t and it struck me that a lot of the YBAs
who were being acclaimed and making vast sums of money were, when you judged
them as artists, very average, not to say sub-average.
This also happened in the 1950s in New York
with the Abstract Expressionists, who are the first group of artists who had
that level of fame. Jackson Pollock was featured in Life magazine, which was
unheard of, like a film star… When you look closely at the Abstract
Expressionists you see that as figurative artists they are average. A lot of
them couldn’t draw to save their lives. Jackson Pollock’s attempts to draw are lamentable
and yet he is one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century.
After
roughly a year of doing his action paintings, he started painting really crap
semi-representational stuff, and I saw in those two moments how enormous
acclaim seemed to blind people to the merits of the art being produced. Nat
Tate is not a critique of any particular YBA, but more a kind of fable about
too much fame attached to too modest a talent. Nat is a case in point, a
perfectly OK painter, but when he comes up against a genius – a word to be used
very rarely – like Georges Braque, it shines too harsh a light on what he does
and he cracks and kills himself, having destroyed ninety-nine percent of all
the work he produced.
I
think Pollock wanted to die because he couldn’t live with his fame and he
eventually deliberately crashed his car. A lot of these artists died unhappy
and tormented – Basquiat is another who drugged himself to death. I think art
has to be evaluated, there have to be criteria, otherwise what’s the point? We
are entitled to express our opinions and my own touchstone is virtuosity of
some kind. I’m very interested in modern art and I think certain artists are
fantastically gifted and intriguing, but then there are others who are even
more famous who seem to me almost risibly bad, but such is the nature of the
art world and the art market that the whole thing can function on the basis of
four or five incredibly rich patrons, which seems to me very skewed.
I
had a big argument in Germany when Nat Tate was published there last year with
the editor of a German art magazine who said to me speaks in German accent], ‘I
am obsessed with contemporary art!’ He obviously thought I was some
retro-throwback figure and I said, ‘Well, I love contemporary art as well but I
do judge it and I’m not going to just take everything’. There’s a line in the
film version of Any Human Heart where Ben Leeping says, ‘I just bought an Andy
Warhol the other day, incredibly expensive!’ and Logan says, ‘Yes, I call it
snack art. You think you are satisfied but after an hour or so you are hungry
again’.
In
a way it’s facetious but you can go to see these exhibitions and you get it,
you know, you can get Damien Hirst, and you see what he’s done, and then you
set it in the context of contemporary art and think, ‘Just how original is it?’
and that’s another matter. Vitrines have been around for a long long time, as
have spin paintings. But is it as interesting as a small Georges Braque late
landscape? That’s the sort of question I ask myself, and I think, ‘No’, but I
still find myself amused, beguiled, provoked by contemporary art. They’re not
snake-oil salesmen, but they seem to me smart idea peddlers. When you go to art
schools now all the students are thinking, ‘What’s my gimmick?’, not, ‘Can I
draw a hand?’ It’s cyclical, and it will come back.
I
was in The Wolseley the other night and there was Lucian Freud. I think he goes
there almost every night. Nobody recognised him, this funny little man with
paint-stained shoes who paints nudes. He’s a figurative painter – Degas would
have been able to claim him as a fellow artist – and conceivably our greatest
living artist. I’ve also got to know David Hockney, that extraordinary painter
and intellectual, a virtuoso who can draw phenomenally well. He sends me little
iPhone pictures, absolutely stunning little figurative paintings. That’s just
my taste and the editor of the German art magazine would totally disagree with
me and think I was old-fashioned, but I think judging work by the virtuosity on
display is a very good system. If there isn’t any on display, there have to be
other things that make you evaluate it.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Is it true that you painted the Nat Tate paintings yourself?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — Yes, they are all mine. Again, that’s the frustrated artist in me. In
fact, we’re going to sell a Nat Tate at auction in June, I hope, so I’ve
‘found’ one in the attic…
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — What was the Nat Tate launch evening like? Were people really
pretending that they had once known him?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — Well I wasn’t even there – can you believe it? – I was on a book tour.
We were going to do two evenings. April 1 was Manhattan and then a week later
we had a huge equally glitzy party booked for London. I was going to be at the
London party and I had given big interviews in national newspapers and on the
radio talking about how I had discovered a forgotten artist.
The
plan was to launch the book straight up, saying, ‘Here’s a book, a monograph by
me about this forgotten artist’. I thought it might run until somebody might
accuse me in three months time of making the whole thing up. Phase one was the
launch in New York, which David Bowie, who was the publisher of the book and
one of the key conspirators, arranged with his chum Jeff Koons to have in his
huge studio in Manhattan. And of course, if Jeff Koons and David Bowie invite
you to a party, you go, so they got everybody there.
There
were very few conspirators. There was me, three people who had worked on the
book, and Bowie. Even Koons didn’t know. On his trip to cover the launch an
English journalist named David Lister overheard a conversation about how it was
all fake. He had bought it completely. He later claimed that he had been
suspicious and went looking for the Janet Felzer Gallery on Madison Avenue and
couldn’t find it. Basically, he had been hoodwinked and believed that Nat Tate
was an unknown abstract expressionist so he threw a hissy fit and to silence
him we had to bring him into the inner circle.
Lister
was the one that went around this glamorous Manhattan party with all the
glitterati and the fashionistas saying – and we weren’t planning on doing this
at all – ‘What do you think about Nat Tate?’ Bowie read three extracts from the
book, and he had actually written the blurb of the book saying he had known Nat
Tate which was very convincing, and I got Gore Vidal and John Richardson, who
was Picasso’s biographer, to reminisce about Nat Tate. It was a very elaborate
lie, a very carefully thought-out pretence, but Lister played agent provocateur
by going around asking people about Nat and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s so sad,
he died so young, and I think I saw a show of his in…’ and dug holes for
themselves and jumped in.
Then,
we were going to do exactly the same thing in London, but Lister realised he
was sitting on a huge story and about three days after the Manhattan launch he
blew it wide open in The Independent with a headline along the lines of:
‘British Novelist Fools Manhattan Art World’.
I
was in Paris on a book tour and I was quite pissed off because it had not been
planned like that and I came back into a twenty-four-hour news maelstrom as
everybody picked it up, which shows you that everybody loves a hoax, but who
was hoaxed and for how long, that’s a good question.
I
was on Newsnight for twenty minutes interviewed by Paxman. I was interviewed
around the world. With hindsight that was probably the best thing that could
have happened. When the original book sold out and went out of print, I said to
Bloomsbury, ‘Why don’t we reissue it?’ and that’s what we’re doing this year.
We’re doing that auction in June to coincide with that and if somebody will pay
money to own one, again, some sort of blurring between reality and the fictive
has occurred.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — You’ve written many different types of novels. Restless, for
example, was a spy novel and had clear commercial potential. Do you write
novels with the market in mind?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — I have always cherry-picked my genres. I do believe that the novel is
fundamentally about story and character and the more intriguing the story and
the characters, the more beguiling the book. My novels have always had a very
strong narrative line and often a very complex plot as well as everything else.
I became interested in spies and spying when I
wrote Any Human Heart because Logan Mountstuart is a spy in the war, and I’d
been reading a lot about Kim Philby, the master double-agent, just wondering
again, what must it have been like? From this, I thought I would write a novel
following on from Any Human Heart about a spy, but I decided to make the spy a
woman to refresh a tired old genre.
The
Blue Afternoon had a serial killer mystery lurking at its centre. Armadillo is
about a massive insurance fraud, borrowed from that corporate thriller world.
It’s the same thing with Ordinary Thunderstorms which is powered by that
classic innocent man-on-the-run. An Ice-Cream War is a kind of chase – one
brother following another. I’ve happily gone to genre to provide myself with
the motor for my novel, and then around it constructed a rather elaborate and –
I hope – beautiful automobile.
This
new novel I’m just finishing is another trilogy following Restless and Ordinary
Thunderstorms. It’s the final panel in a triptych exploring how to take a genre
and give it a different kind of energy, in the same way that The New
Confessions, Nat Tate and Any Human Heart were pushing the boundaries of
fiction into the world of the real and the documentary. There was no grand
plan, it’s just with hindsight I can see what’s going on: I’ve taken
ingredients that seemed familiar and given them a good shake-up.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Your characters are often beset by circumstances around them but
they tend to find peace at the end of their novels, to end at ease.
AWILLIAM
BOYD — I got an email today from a young theatre director I’m working with who
has just seen the DVD of Any Human Heart, and she said, ‘What’s going on
here?’, referring to Logan eating dog food, but also to Adam Kindred and his
triangle, and the passage in Stars and Bars where Henderson Dores runs through
Times Square wearing nothing but a cardboard box. ‘Why are you stripping people
down to their rawest?’ she asked.
I hadn’t thought about it. But I ended up
emailing her back and I explained that I do put my characters under stress and
I do make them fall back on their own resources as human beings. Whatever
they’ve got, whether it’s resources of character or ingenuity or particular
skills, if they come through then, you’re right, there is this sense in which
they’ve proved themselves in a way that that they never imagined possible. I’m
not doing this consciously, but I do give my protagonist in the new novel a
really hard time. Maybe it’s an exploration of the fragility of my own rather
comfortable and easy life.
In
Ordinary Thunderstorms, by sheer bad luck, Adam loses everything. Identity,
passport, credit card – all the social buttresses we use to create our identity
in the twenty-first century. I suppose you could go through all my books and
see characters challenged by circumstance. In A Good Man in Africa, Morgan
Leafy is blackmailed by a very clever African politician who asks him to
corrupt a man who is incorruptible. Same in Armadillo, or with Logan. It’s one
of those tropes that all my books can be boiled down to – the character finds
himself in a world he doesn’t understand and has to somehow get through to the
other side.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Is that why your characters drink so much?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — Well, it’s also a period thing. People drank a lot more liquor before.
Maybe it’s also a novelist’s thing. All novelists are drinkers, some of them
heavy drinkers. Anthony Burgess, who I knew, used to have a crate of gin
delivered to his house once a week. Twelve bottles of gin a week! His wife was
an alcoholic, but he kept up with her. Kingsley Amis was a bottle of whisky a
night man, and Lawrence Durrell, Malcolm Lowry – there are many examples of the
writer as drunk – let alone Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway.
Alcohol is a very good way of fixing a period
or fixing a character. Some of my characters are tea-total but drinking – I
drink wine – is part of the texture of my life so it seems completely normal.
When I’m writing about people, I ask myself, ‘What are they doing with their
hands?’ There’s quite a lot of smoking in my novels as well and I don’t smoke
and never have. It’s a period thing. When did women start smoking in public? In
1913 it was rather daring but a lot of them smoked. Virginia Woolf smoked like
a chimney, sixty a day. You forget that before the 1960s, before the cancer
scare arrived, smoking was almost completely universal. I remember flying back
from Africa as a seven or eight-year-old and the entire plane seemed to be full
of smokers. Proust was recommended that he smoke cigarettes to ease his asthma.
It’s part of the textures of life in a given period.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — One gets a sense that you see history as inexplicable and the
lives of individuals as a series of coincidences.
AWILLIAM
BOYD — I think that old saying, ‘All history is the history of unintended
consequences’ rings very true. The overriding theme of Any Human Heart is that
all our lives are governed by luck. Any life is the sum of all the good luck
and bad luck you’ve had and some manifestly had a lot of good luck or bad luck
but with most people it sort of evens out over the course of threescore years
and ten.
That world view is entirely plausible but it’s
faithless. There’s no deity so it is your human experience and your human
predicament ultimately and you better make the most of it while you can. That’s
very much my own view of life. There’s a sense that your present happiness,
whatever that may be, is actually an incredibly fragile thing and most of us
can’t bear to think about that but it’s quite good to have it at the back of
your mind because it does govern the way you make decisions. That contentment
or that stasis of happiness can be shattered at any moment. If you believe in a
God or Gods, then there’s a whole other story, but if you don’t you’re stuck in
the present moment keeping your fingers crossed, advancing with due caution.
That’s how I approach life and I dare say it colours the way I write about my
fictional lives as well.
I
recognised this very early on in Evelyn Waugh. His sense of humour is so ruthless
that he won’t reward his characters with what they deserve. Instead, he will
follow the implacable dice-throwing rules of the universe. At the end of an
early travel book called Labels, which he wrote as his first marriage was
collapsing, his main character says, ‘Fortune is the least capricious of
deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one should be
very happy for very long’. It’s not about being nihilistic or cynical, it’s
just about realising that good luck is as likely as bad luck.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — It seems that, through your godless perspective on the world,
you have evolved your own moral system which you impose on your characters,
whereby humans are depicted as flawed beings but capable of redemption on their
own.
AWILLIAM
BOYD — Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. What do you base a moral system on
once you remove the deity issue from your scheme of things? There seems to me
to be very simple adages that people have know for millennia, ‘Do as you will
be done by’, ‘Love is better than no love’, or ‘Being loved and loving in
return is fuller than anything you will experience.’ Although I don’t
articulate it in such a crude way, it powers a lot of my fiction. In Ordinary
Thunderstorms, even though Adam has killed a man and is now a hospital porter
with a false name, his life is made bearable by the fact that it has Rita in it
and their love is shared. I don’t offer that to all my characters.
If I was a devout Anglo-Catholic, no doubt my
fiction would be different. One of my favourite scenes in the film version of
Any Human Heart is when Peter Scabius says he’s converted to Catholicism. Logan
is, as it were, speaking for me when he says, ‘It’s all mumbo-jumbo mate.’
Scabius is having nothing of it and the two of them clash over it. It’s a
really interesting microcosm of two attitudes to the human predicament. Scabius
is completely bogus of course.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Scabius is an interesting character. Is he based on anyone?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — Someone wrote to me from the Graham Greene society to ask whether
Scabius was based on him. Scabius stumbles into a marriage, has two children,
didn’t love his wife, gets a job at a provincial newspaper as Greene did,
writes these techies and then hits gold with Guilt. Then he becomes a
portentous and rather heavyweight novelist. The other thing about him is that
he’s a pure egomaniac and you don’t meet many of them. I’ve only met half a
dozen. They don’t have to be famous or rich but all they think about is
themselves and the world only exists in so far as they see it from the glow
they cast. Scabius is one of those people who is oblivious of his own monstrous
ego. These people are actually very funny when you encounter them because you
can never dent their self-assurance. They’re absolutely impregnable.
Scabius
is a poor man’s Graham Greene in a way. Greene is someone I’m really interested
in as a writer and as a case study. His Catholicism seems to me to be a
complete sham, just like Muriel Spark, another writer I really admire who converted
to Catholicism. Waugh’s conversion, on the other hand, was genuine – he needed
it – whereas the other two I think did it and then found it useful to be
“Catholic Novelists”. I’ve read a great deal about both Muriel Spark and Graham
Greene and they seem to me to be the most irreligious people I can imagine.
They paid lip service to religion but it doesn’t wash with me.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Have you ever seen yourself fictionalised in a contemporary’s
work?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — No, I haven’t, and I don’t draw on life in that straightforward causal
way. I’ve been reading about H. G. Wells and Henry James recently. Wells wrote
a novel at the end of James’s life called Boon, which nobody knows about. It’s
a malicious portrait of Henry James and they were friends. And you think,
‘What’s going on there?’ James was hugely upset, and the friendship ended. What
motivated Wells to so thinly disguise Mr. Boon? It’s just a straightforward
attack. It does happen, but not in my fiction.
QTHE
WHITE REVIEW — Is Peter Scabius an embodiment of the writer’s fear of having
someone supersede you in terms of success?
AWILLIAM
BOYD — Gore Vidal famously said, ‘Every time a contemporary of mine succeeds a
little something inside me dies’. Within the community of writers, we all know
what the others are up to and how they’re doing. My first novels were published
thirty years ago and it’s been a long and winding road so for me the challenge
is keeping it going. It’s not about winning prizes or having films made of your
books. It’s more about how you ensure as a maturing novelist that your books
are still on sale in bookshops and are still being read. I know very eminent
novelists who are in their seventies and eighties and you can’t buy their books
other than in antiquarian bookshops. If you’ve written twenty-five novels and
they’re not there anymore, it’s hard to cope with. But it’s almost an
inevitable fate.
The model for Logan Mountstuart was William
Gerhardie, the terrifying case study of a very successful young novelist,
hugely acclaimed, who wrote his last book in 1942 and died in 1977 – that’s
thirty-five years of silence and neglect and oblivion. That’s the terrifying
fear, not how well others are doing.
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ABOUT
THE CONTRIBUTOR
Jacques
Testard is the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions and a founding editor of The
White Review.
Tristan
Summerscale is co-editor of Notes from the Underground, a literary magazine and
production company (www.notesfromtheunderground.co.uk).
THIS
ARTICLE FEATURED IN ISSUE NO. 2 OF THE WHITE REVIEW
William
Boyd
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