A. S. Byatt Interview - Paris Review

 A.S. Byatt is a writer known to me before prison, but who I did not read until I found myself in Fort Dix FCI. I liked her. Reading A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168, I find her admirable and questioning how much sympathy is in my own writing. I know I lack a lot.

INTERVIEWER

There’s always a spirit of sympathy in your work, and a conviction of the importance of being fair to what people—even fictitious people—might have meant or thought. I can’t think of many other writers who, in extremis, would resist the temptation to make fun, to be satirical.

BYATT

It could be seen as a weakness. I’m afraid of people making fun of other people. I was the child that sat in the back of the class and wondered how the class could be destroying the inadequate secondary French mistress. I was the child that wondered what on earth she felt like. I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they’re doing what they’re doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them. I remember having an argument with Iris Murdoch about that. I said, You know, I really do think it’s silly to take digs at people because of the clothes they wear or because of the way they express themselves. She said, Oh yes, but all novelists have to do that, which rather surprised me because she on the whole is a nondigger as well. It’s partly my father, who never said anything nasty about anybody that I ever heard, which doesn’t mean he was a weak or sentimental man.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think, to ask rather a leading question, that the 1960s notion that “the personal is the political” is at all compatible with the practice of writing novels?

BYATT

It got dreadfully overdone. It did more harm than good to the novel. I did a talk with David Lodge and Mervyn Jones at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London], I think in the early seventies. And we were talking about what happened to the Leavis great tradition novel. Has anything happened to it? Has it now died? Has realism gone away? All those things. We sat and had a perfectly reasonable but not inspired discussion, as I remember, in the theater, which meant you couldn’t see the audience. There was a man in the front row, rather an old man, who said he wanted to ask a question but didn’t know how to phrase it. He said, Why is the contemporary British novel set always either in academe or in the media or in the kitchen? The world is full of many other things. When I was younger—he continued in rather a patronizing voice that made everybody very furious—I was interested in those three things. Now I’m not interested in any of them. And David Lodge said, Oh, well, perhaps you ought to be. Mervyn Jones said quite dryly that he could take it or leave it, but they weren’t uninteresting. But I said that I rather agreed with him. What are you interested in? I asked. So he said, I’m interested in the politics of multinational companies. I’m interested in what is happening to the relations between nations and the shift in global power. The novel seems not even to be aware of that. At this point a feminist academic stood up and said with really complete contempt for him that she thought he would realize that the personal was the political and that he would find a paradigm of every possible political situation in the kitchen. And I said, That simply isn’t true. Then a sepulchral voice at the back said, Actually there are some novels that do have political power and do actually even cause people to march up and down in the streets. Günter Grass’s, for instance, or even my own work . . . And I peered into the dark and said, Who are you? And this voice said, I am Salman Rushdie. It was when he had just written Shame. But I’ve thought a lot about that irritated man. His objections were absolutely right. The personal is not the political, although the participants in the political are persons. The political isn’t entirely personal. The kitchen is not a paradigm for everything.

 I think this piece fits with my Heading Out With Maugham & Conrad and Edith Wharton - The Novel - Morality.

sch 7/2