You’ve said yourself, I believe, that novelists are formed very young indeed, whether they know it or not. Is it possible to be at all precise about the way you were formed as a novelist?
I meant that statement in general. What I feel about it would apply to any novelist. What interests me about novelists as a species is the obsessiveness of the activity, the fact that novelists have to go on writing. I think that probably must come from a sense of the irrecoverable. In every novelist’s life there is some more acute sense of loss than with other people, and I must have felt that. I didn’t realize it, I suppose, till the last ten or fifteen years. In fact you have to write novels to begin to understand this. There’s a kind of backwardness in the novel, an attempt to get back to a lost world.
Given that that is shared, then what specifically in your case would you say about your childhood led or would lead a future biographer to say: Oh, yes, already he was this, that, or the other?
I was brought up at Leigh on Sea, which is a suburban town, part of Southend on Sea. I led the normal life of a suburban middle-class child, but the snag was that standing in the way of a smooth progression to a normal suburban middle-class adulthood was a love of nature. I can remember even as a small child that I always adored green things, I adored going out in the country. I was fortunate. I had an uncle who was a natural historian, and a cousin who was also a natural historian, and those were the highlights of my first ten years, going out to look for butterflies or birdwatching, country walks. Then Hitler helped me greatly because we were evacuated to Devon and I had five years in a remote Devon village. That was a formative experience for me. I was a lonely child, but my friend was always nature, rather than being the company of other boys.
When you say you were lonely, did you think that that sort of solitude was enriching on the one hand, and on the other hand good training for the solitary life of a novelist?
I think solitude is a very, very good signal of the future novelist, an inability…
Or loneliness, which? Solitude or loneliness, because you can be lonely without being solitary.
Yes, you’re quite right to make that distinction. I think a sense of personal loneliness, yes, is a better definition of it. I wasn’t solitary in a sense, of course. I went to school and all the rest of it, but I think now that if I was shown a class of children and asked can you pick out the future novelists, I would look for the ones who are actually probably inarticulate. Above all, the ones who do not at any given present contraction of events show up well, the people who back down in an argument and who then walk away inventing a new scenario for the argument that has happened. It’s important for a novelist to live in two worlds, and that I would say is really the major predisposing factor—an inability to live in reality, so you have to escape into unreal worlds. I would say this is true of all art as a matter of fact, but perhaps above all for the novelist.
This is you now in 1977. Do you remember feeling this when you were about fifteen or sixteen?
No, not at all.
Because you were head boy at school, good at cricket, that sort of thing, which would seem to be…?
Yes, yes. I was a split child, certainly, yes. I mean I was quite good at cricket and I adored the game. I still adore it. I mean when the test matches are on, no work gets done in this house, but still. I also had a peak in my cricketing career. I had Leary Constantine second ball once, for a duck. I feel, you know, after that I couldn’t really progress much. That sort of public school, First Eleven cricket, where you did during the war have a certain number of test cricketers and county cricketers playing against you, that was lovely.
There’s one picture of twentieth-century English writers going through public school and hating it and rebelling against it, and being, by their own account anyway, unnecessarily victimized by it and not good at what public school expects them to be good at. Did that in part or in whole happen to you too?
I was not happy for the first two years of public school. I went through the stock experience, but then I suppose I joined the system, because you know public schools are cunning at brainwashing little boys. I was certainly brainwashed by this. Public school head boys at that period had extraordinary power. I was in fact responsible for the discipline of six hundred boys, and so every day I had to organize patrols—you know, to catch boys out after lockup, and all the rest of it. Every day I had a court in which I was both judge and executioner. It’s terrible now when you… I hate meeting old boys from that school because I keep on thinking, did I once beat them?
But at the time you didn’t feel guilty. You felt this was the way it was?
I joined the system. Then again the war helped me because I went straight into the Royal Marines. From having been a little Gauleiter in school, I was right at the bottom in the Royal Marines and I loathed that comprehensively. The Marines helped me discover what I was, which was a profound hater of all authority, all externally imposed discipline. I really think I shook off the whole public school thing in those two years. One doesn’t shake off those things immediately, but fairly soon afterwards, certainly by the time I’d finished at Oxford, I felt I was a different person….
You started writing then in your mid twenties, is that right?
Yes, I should think it was about then.
But it wasn’t until you were almost in your mid or late thirties that the first novel came out?
Yes.
What were those ten years like while you were writing but not being published? Were you in a state of expectation or frustration or both or what?
I think mainly frustration, yes. It wasn’t that I was submitting novels and getting them rejected. I just knew they weren’t good enough. Partly I was also bound up with The Magus during that period and I just knew it wasn’t what it had to be, and again and again I would spend six months, nine months on that, and again I’d know I was defeated and put it away. I really wrote The Collector to try and get out of the sort of quagmire I felt I was in over The Magus.
You said you wrote that in a month?
I wrote the first draft in a month, yes, and I revised it considerably. I didn’t take a month, you know, between my starting and my completed work.
Was it snapped up instantly as a film?
I can’t remember the exact time lapse. Yes, fairly soon.
And that enabled you to pack in teaching, did it?
Yes, I think I sold it for five thousand, which was, I suppose, a bargain, but I never regretted getting that money. That did set me free from teaching.
Did you give up teaching instantly and say: OK, this is it, I’m going to be a writer full time?
Yes, almost.
And what did that entail? Did you rush off into the country or did you stay…?
No, we went on living in London for, I can’t remember now, two or three years. I then began to feel that as I don’t like the literary life and all the rest of it, I didn’t like London anymore. Not because of London, but I don’t like big cities anymore. I also felt an increasing draw towards the country, and so simply one day we set out and started looking for a house. It’s not really because one or two of my ancestors are West Country people. In as much as I feel I have a home province in England, it’s certainly the West of England. It’s partly to do with the fact that I spent those war years in Devon. My father’s ancestors came from the Somerset/Dorset border. I have a Cornish grandmother. It’s something to do with the temperament of the West of England which has always appealed to me.
Did you come here then principally for the landscape, or did you build much of a social life, an antiliterary life here, or…
No, not at all. I’ve never needed other human beings really, I suppose, which doesn’t mean to say I don’t enjoy meeting them sometimes, but I need other people less than most. It’s much more to do with mysterious things like climate, the sort of precocity of the West of England, that’s something I’ve always loved. The fact that spring starts here a little bit earlier than it does up country, and I adore the sea. I don’t think I could live now out of sound of the sea. I’m one of those mysterious people who loves coasts, beaches, shores, and if I had to define a perfect place to live, my one constituent would always be that you go to sleep with the sound of the sea somewhere….
You’re constantly referring to other writers, a lot of English writers. Do you feel yourself very much part of a company and a tradition of writers?
I feel myself very much, although many reviewers would tell me I’m not, but very much in the English tradition, although I’ve been much more influenced than most English writers by French culture. There are no modern schools of English novelists. I think this is one of the troubles of the English novel. We all live so far apart, we’re disconnected. We also get absolutely no backing from English universities. I don’t think everything is wrong, you know, about the backing that American universities do give fiction and the problems of fiction. And some of the American theoretical work on fiction is good. I don’t agree with it all, but at least it’s alive and it’s being discussed. In this country you have to be dead for anyone to take any serious notice of you. The English part of me understands that. Perhaps it’s a good principle to say, you know, until a person’s dead then forget him or push him down, but it doesn’t help the novel in general.
Do you feel, although you live in Lyme Regis, do you feel yourself to be an exile here?
For many years I have felt in exile from English society, perhaps particularly English middle-class society. I’ve never felt an exile from England itself, from its climate, its countryside, its cities, its past, its art, but, yes, yes, I do feel in exile. I think this is a good thing for a novelist. If a novelist isn’t in exile, I suspect he’d be in trouble.