by Graham Swift
Though Waterland was for a while the bookies’ and the popular favourite, I’m not at all sorry it didn’t win (though the newspaper clipping shown after this piece would have it otherwise). I think a win might have seriously unbalanced the rather unready figure portrayed in Time Out. When I did win in 1996, with Last Orders, I was much better able both to sustain and to enjoy the process of winning. And the atmosphere in the Guildhall was a little less out of hand that year.
Guildhall Farce
There’s no real reason why a book, which is full of words, should require any other spokesman than itself, but try telling that to the assembled media when your novel has just been nominated for the Booker Prize. You won’t get a hearing. For me the prime symptom of shortlistomania (rare form of schizophrenia) was this condition of fundamental absurdity: the requirement to deliver what I did not have to deliver; the repeated obligation to give the two-minute, half-hour or thirty-second version of what, in the case of Waterland, took three years to produce.
Don’t mistake me. I’m not the total purist. A writer these days has to be either foolish or sublimely aloof not to accept that some extra-authorial hoop-jumping will help his book reach readers. And I was very chuffed to be shortlisted. But this doesn’t alter the raw sensations. Now the jamboree’s over, I hope I can get back again to the real thing.
The lesser symptoms were numerous—some just plain ludicrous. My diary, usually a white desert, became suddenly crowded. The phone rang a lot. Heinemann kept sending me pink bits of paper with my latest itinerary and timetable of interviews. To certain temperaments this state of affairs might bring euphoric illusions of stardom. For those of a nervous disposition it instils trepidation. With a four-week spate of it, I should have acquired the necessary glib techniques. Alas not. I bounced dazedly in and out of radio stations, not knowing what I had said but pretty sure it had been meaningless. LBC referred to me in my absence as the author of Wetland, then corrected it to Wasteland. After my fifth or sixth time behind the mike, I resolved not to worry and just to say ‘Waterland ’ as often as possible. I failed even in this resolution.
My television initiation, in some ways, couldn’t have been gentler. Book Four came to the safely familiar territory of my publishers. But not even the efforts of my editor, David Godwin, who got me well tanked up beforehand, or the patient reassurances of my interviewer, Hermione Lee, could quell my panic. What do they want of me? Oh, just two minutes on what Waterland is all about … I sit in the hot seat. Words come out of my mouth. Editing miracles may have been performed for the finished piece (which I never watched), but I possess a transcript of the original: it shatters the notion that novels are written by articulate people.
I travelled a bit. I was actually flown somewhere by my publishers. Only to Glasgow, but I could still indulge in jet-hopping fantasies. I did readings and signings. I turned up for a session at the Arts Council Bookshop to find there was no audience. So much for hype. I got whisked off to Cambridge by a Celebrity —the bulky, lugubriously jocular figure of Clement Freud, MP for the region where my novel is (only partly) set. My book, it seemed, had acquired political value, and Radio Cambridgeshire provided a royal welcome—for Clement Freud. ‘Nice to see you too, Mr Smith …’
I had high times and low times, got drunk a lot, missed a lot of sleep. My mantelpiece got stacked with well-wishes and I was continually touched by the support of friends and by sudden expressions of enthusiasm and sympathy from unforeseen quarters (along with their developed nervous systems writers have good noses for telling the genuine from the phoney).
I hired my penguin-suit from Moss Bros. After the four-week crash course—election campaign, paddock trotting, whichever metaphor you prefer—the Day, or Night, of Judgement loomed with sudden inescapability. I wasn’t prepared for high comedy. I’d evolved my own philosophic assumptions about the outcome and I sweated less over that than the prospect of another turn before the cameras. In the event, the sheer farce of it all actually cured my nerves. The evening deserves full-length description—if it’s not beyond it—and some serious analysis could be made of its contents, including what the cameras didn’t show, particularly Fay Weldon’s Chair-of-the-Judges speech. Since I’m trying to keep things light-hearted, I’ll only recall the more laughable moments: the BBC man who came up to me and said, ‘Ah, hello, Mr Rushdie …’; the extraordinary Selina Scott—was she there to ask questions or perform public seductions (‘Mr Swift, I’m Selina Scott and I’m going to interview you on the floor …’)? The spectacle of sloshed publishers living up to their image.
I congratulate J. M. Coetzee on his win. I congratulate him also on being well out of it that Wednesday night. The Booker Prize has boomed in the past three years. It has made a noise about fiction, which is no bad thing. I am thankful for the boost it has given to Waterland. The prize makes no difference, as John Fuller pointed out, to fiction-writing. It is certainly in danger of bursting its own inflated proportions. You cannot give something more prestige while turning it into more and more of a circus, or bring credit to writers by making public fools of them. Fay Weldon’s statements on the abuse of authorship undoubtedly got home to five authors present. Why reduce the craft of words to the point where words fail? To return to the mirth of it all, let my last word come from the end of that painful Book Four transcript (before I go and burn it):
GS: … I’m drying up, can we stop … [laughs]
INTERVIEWER: Excellent, good.
Surely some mistake.
TALKING TO PATRICK
NEW YORK AND LONDON, 1984–86
I made my first visit to New York in the spring of 1984 for the American publication of Waterland, my debut novel in the States. I later became, on rather tenuous, ill-defined grounds, a ‘contributing editor’ of the New York arts magazine Bomb, where three of the interviews reprinted in this book had their first appearance. They are the main evidence of my connection and contribution.
My connection with New York itself is also rather tenuous and hard to define. I recognize its force, energy and uniqueness, but it’s not a place I could ever settle in, though some of my best writer-friends have done just that, and they’re my real link with the city.
Patrick McGrath has now lived in New York most of his adult life and I’ve no doubt he’d say his heart lies in Manhattan, yet he remains, to me at least, remarkably untouched in person by anything New Yorkerish or indeed American. Meeting him in Britain, you’d never guess his home is across the ocean. New York can stamp itself pretty powerfully on even short-term visitors, and I’ve always found Patrick’s capacity to love the place yet remain virginally untransatlantic both baffling and splendid.
He comes to England for a few months each year, normally in the summer, and usually starts to get twitchy long before this time is up. He once took the considerable trouble to have transported to London an American-style air-conditioning unit —one of those contraptions that take up most of a window—and have it installed in the room where he works here in Kennington. But though he has this New World affinity (and an Irish name), his whole demeanour and speech could not be more impeccably—and amiably, charmingly, courteously—English. His Englishness even has its own mischievous nostalgia. The air conditioner may be an American import but the car he keeps in London is decidedly indigenous: a champagne-hued Jaguar which he calls ‘The Peckham Flyer’, a name that reeks of Ealing comedies.
And, based though he is in New York, Patrick’s fiction has always shown a strong urge for delving into an England, or London, that’s more morbidly and forsakenly behind the times, lost in fogs and shadows and sinister human miasmas: all of which Patrick can distil, like no one else, with grotesque relish. It’s as if he needs the brightness of the New World better to explore, mentally, the Old World murk and pathology. In his recent book of stories, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, there were signs of his wishing to ship out some of the murk—like that air conditioner but, in every sense, in reverse—and implant it in his
vision of New York. His latest novel, Trauma, is a New York novel through and through, though its ultimate domain, echoing earlier work, is the asylum. Perhaps the truth is, and Patrick is attuned to it, that the New World can hardly pretend to be new any more and for some time now it has been acquiring its own accretions of pathology.
But let it be said at once that, despite his penchant for the dark and spooky and though he was born the son of a Broadmoor superintendent, there’s nothing pathological or murky about Patrick. He’s one of the sanest, most good-natured souls I know. The interview that follows, which appeared in Bomb in 1986, was the beginning of our friendship and was the first, as Patrick put it when introducing the interview in a later Bomb anthology, ‘of many merry meetings’. (Would a true New Yorker, I wonder, have used that word ‘merry’?) The interview occurred, as Patrick scrupulously noted, ‘in a cold house off the Fulham Road’, with an adjournment to the pub, and was mainly about Waterland.
One of the nicest letters I’ve ever received from a fellow author came from Patrick, from New York, in 1992—just to let me know, as it were, that he’d met the actress Maria Aitken and that they’d simply had to get married. So they’d flown in nuptial haste to San Francisco, got a connecting flight to Reno, bought a marriage licence for $35, then, for another $35, actually got married and finally ‘emerged, stunned, but well and truly hitched, into the strong, clear light of a Nevada winter afternoon’.
For a man so keen on America, it was the perfect, breathless American escapade, the perfect stateside fairy tale. But in its principal human components it was a very English marriage, and a very fine one. I’ve seen Maria and Patrick on this side of the Atlantic and on the other. On either side they make a lovely couple.
An Interview by Patrick McGrath
PM: You make the point in Waterland that history moves in circles, or even spirals, our disasters worsening every time round. Have you been accused of fatalism?
GS: Not in any deeply offensive way. I tend to shrug that off anyway, because novels aren’t statements, they aren’t prophecies or philosophies, they’re stories, and there’s a great deal more going on in the novel than simply speculation about the fate of the world. I hope that what my novels give readers is an experience, not something from which they can extract messages. I rather shudder at the idea. I ought also to say that I don’t actually say those things. You can call this sophistical if you like, but it’s my character who says those things, it’s Tom Crick who holds those views. And he says many things, he says contradictory things. He’s a highly intelligent man but he’s in a state of personal crisis and his once-cherished and fairly coherent views of history are being challenged. So he’s voicing in the novel different views of history, of progress, the fate of mankind and so on.
PM: Yet Tom Crick carries moral authority in the novel. It is he who speaks, it is he who controls the narrative.
GS: He does exercise a great deal of authority. There is a tendency, I suppose, to take what he says as the last word on things, but against that there’s the plight of this man who is heartbroken and reduced and lonely. What becomes of this man? What becomes of Tom Crick? I think he’s a very sad and desolate figure, for all his intellectual powers.
PM: Tom Crick’s half-brother, Dick, is a fascinating figure. He is inarticulate and retarded, it’s implied that he’s half machine, that he’s half fish, half eel, even half vegetable, a potato-head; and he works with silt, which is another of those half-and-half things, water and land; and it’s into the silt that he makes his final dive.
GS: I’m not sure that I know, and if I did I wouldn’t say, what happens to him at the end. When he dives into the river, you could interpret that as an act of despair, a return to nothingness and so on, but it’s also, I hope, a sort of escape, so there’s some sort of feeling of liberation. It would seem I’m interested in inarticulate characters, characters who become silent, inert, vegetable. I think it may have to do with this question of whether knowledge is good or bad: Is it good to know the truth, or is it harmful? Are there situations where it’s best not to tell, or not to know? Or not to remember? Dick Crick’s a character who among his many ‘semi’ attributes has an ability not to remember. He lives in an amnesiac world, and while we pity him in some ways, can we be sure that because of this faculty, or non-faculty, he’s not better off than we are? Henry, his grandfather, goes off to fight in the trenches and comes back without a memory. There’s a great deal of irony in the book about recalling things or not recalling things. History is constantly confronting this basic choice: Why should we summon up the past? Why should we remember anything, whether it’s personally or collectively? Does it do us any good? Does it hinder us? I don’t attempt to come down on one side or the other, to resolve the issue, but I suppose you could say that Dick is a peculiar embodiment, among many other things, of this paradox.
PM: What is this thing beneath language that Dick has access to?
GS: I’m not sure that I know. It could simply be nature. Dick seems to be much more part of primitive nature and its primitive cycles than any of the other characters in the book, yet after all human nature does stand apart from nature, and I wouldn’t want for one moment to share in that romantic view that going back to nature is a good thing. On the other hand, a complete loss of contact with nature—an inability to see that human nature, even if it is a peculiar and separate phenomenon, is part of nature—is I’m quite sure a bad thing.
PM: Nature at its wildest, the old, wild Fens, provides the setting for one of Waterland’s most horrific scenes: the abortion that Martha Clay, an alleged witch, performs on Mary Metcalf. It is evil, and results in septicaemia and barrenness for Mary. Yet Martha Clay is as close to nature as Dick Crick.
GS: The reactions I’ve had to that chapter have been interesting: it’s a horrible scene; some people find it almost impossible to read. I’ve never felt that. I was conscious of wanting to construct a scene that was very sinister and strong, but with a fairy-tale feeling. It incorporates so many almost supernatural things. Even for Mary and Tom, the only way they can see it is as something out of fairy tale, in the gruesome sense of fairy tale. And I suppose there’s no sense of there being any positive outcome. Given that Tom and Mary do want to get rid of the child, one could imagine an outcome where the abortion is successful, if any abortion is. But from the beginning you have the sense that everything’s going to go wrong. It’s a central episode of the book.
PM: Is the nature which Martha Clay, the alleged witch, inhabits, the nature to which Dick Crick is connected in his inarticulacy?
GS: I’d be reluctant to make these schemes, but if Dick somehow has this contact with nature which the other characters don’t have, I wouldn’t put Martha in the same category. Her realm is superstition rather than nature, and there’s a great deal in the novel about superstition and its vices and virtues. Like many other things in the novel, superstition is paradoxical. I tend to have a paradoxical outlook. Superstition, when it creates an event like the abortion scene, is undoubtedly a bad thing. All the potions and the sheer crudeness, the unmedical nature of it all, this has disastrous consequences. But in another sense, in other areas of the novel, superstition, in terms of a need for something extra, is a benign thing. Even telling stories is a kind of superstition, an imposing of extra structure on reality. And it’s something very much needed by these people who happen to live in a landscape which almost says to them, look, reality is flat and empty. All you can do in life is make something, and in so far as superstition is creative it’s perhaps no bad thing.
PM: How was the idea of Waterland born?
GS: I think I started with the scene that opens the book, with a picture in my head of the corpse in the river, the floating corpse, and then certain things started to emerge around that, to do with location, setting, other characters, time. So it began as a kind of detective thing, a classic case of a dead body, a ‘whodunnit’. The other crucial moment in the gestation was when, having evolved the narr
ator figure as the boy who lived in the lockside cottage—one of the people who discover the dead body—I started to feel for some reason that this was back in the Forties, in wartime. But I wanted it to be seen and told from a much later perspective, the 1980s. So the question is, naturally, what became of this boy Tom in later life? Then, when I made him a history teacher, there was a little—not so little—explosion of ideas. I thought of all sorts of possibilities, all sorts of things I could bring in. It was very exciting. I think that’s when I said to myself, Well, all right, it’s a novel and now I can start it. But we’re talking about a process that went on for maybe a year before words got put down on paper.
PM: At what point did you decide to include a natural history of eels?
GS: Well, there’s always a large element of serendipity and also—though we’re talking quite seriously about this book—an element of fun. One does have fun when one’s writing, although the issues at stake may be very grave. The construction of a novel can be enormous fun. I knew about eels. I didn’t know as much as that chapter suggests, but I knew a fair bit about eels before I started writing Waterland. I’m a fisherman, I like fishing, I know a bit about fish. Eels have always fascinated me. The incredible life cycle they have, the mystery of it! And the extraordinary pseudo-science, through the centuries, of trying to find out how the damn things breed! And I thought, well, this is a wonderful little story in its own right, and wouldn’t it be great to have the opportunity to just fling it into the middle of some larger work? And the opportunity arose. I found generally in writing the book that I evolved a sort of form, or non-form, in which I could be totally digressive. I could have chapters in which the subject matter was virtually non-fiction, was no longer narrative, and the eels fitted superbly into that scheme, because after all the Fens are a region which abounds with eels. The eel has always had metaphorical overtones, like the landscape. And it suddenly seemed to me that the life cycle, the natural history of the eel, seemed to say so much about history generally and about our attempts to discover the origins of things, and so on. And all of that was quite apart from its being just an incredibly intriguing and amusing subject.