Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists

The prolific British novelist Patrick Gale is known for a large number of commercially successful and critically praised novels, many of which feature a mixed group of characters in terms of gender, sexuality, and age. Armistead Maupin has long been a vocal admirer and supporter of Gale’s works. Born in 1962 on the Isle of Wight, Gale went to Winchester College and Oxford University, after which he moved to London and immediately began a fiction-writing career.

Gale’s first two novels were The Aerodynamics of Pork (London: Abacus, 1986) and Ease (London: Abacus, 1986), published simultaneously. Kansas in August (London: Century, 1987), Facing the Tank (London: Hutchinson, 1988), Little Bits of Baby (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), and The Cat Sanctuary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990)—which featured only women characters—all followed. In several works, Gale has stuck to the fictional milieu of “Barrowcester,” a provincial English town based on his experience of Winchester.

The novella “Caesar’s Wife” appeared in the coauthored volume Secret Lives: Three Novellas (with Tom Wakefield and Francis King; London: Constable, 1991). In 1995, Gale’s most ambitious novel, the epic The Facts of Life (London: Flamingo, 1995), was published. This featured the lives of three generations of characters from a single family and sought to draw analogies between the experience of tuberculosis sufferers early in the century and gay men with AIDS in the 1980s.

Next came the collection Dangerous Pleasures: A Decade of Stories (London: Flamingo, 1996) and, most recently, the novel Tree Surgery for Beginners (London: Flamingo, 1998), loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Gale completed an unfinished novel by his friend Tom Wakefield, The Scarlet Boy (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998) with an “Afterword” by Gale. He has recently published a short biography of Armistead Maupin (London: Overlook Press, 1999) as well as another novel, Rough Music (London: Flamingo, 2000). He lives on a farm in Cornwall, though this interview took place on Tuesday, August 18, 1998, in Holland Park, London.

RC In The Cat Sanctuary there’s an account of the novelist Judith’s creative process. How does your experience compare?

PG Judith has a pretty idealized view of the writer’s life. We have in common the setting though, and Judith plays around with real events and people, often unconsciously—something I certainly do. The trick she plays of changing genders—which you first see in the story “Dressing Up in Voices,” then again in The Cat Sanctuary—is something I’ve always done. I’m nervous if I’m consciously putting a real person in, so I change the gender, partly to protect a person’s identity. Also, suddenly it can throw an interesting light on a situation. [Laughs] It means you end up with an awful lot of butch women and fey men though.

RC Judith’s unable to stop one character going a particular way. Are your own plots subject to a similar loss of authorial control?

PG I always start a novel with a tiny idea. With Kansas in August I had this image of a young man finding an abandoned baby. With The Cat Sanctuary the idea was the husband being blown up. It was nothing to do with the “all-female book” then, though I knew I wanted to write one. I play around with one idea for ages. Then I try to plot out a book’s entire arc. That usually starts in my head. I do an awful lot of work while walking the dog. I go for long walks and find it quite liberating to have no pen or paper in sight.

PG Yes. It keeps it fresh and fluid. I feel if an idea works, I’ll remember it. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t worth remembering. I don’t get paranoid about things slipping through the net. Then I try to get a narrative arc down on the page in quite a lot of detail—even chapter by chapter. Especially with a complex plot I find that helps. But I never stick to it. Always, two-thirds of the way in, the characters snowball. They acquire characteristics, an inner logic. Funnily enough, I don’t panic. That’s the moment I know the book’s starting to work: when it takes on a life of its own and rebels against the plot I’m setting for it.

I’m currently having a terrible time with the work-in-progress, Rough Music. It’s a double story, rather like The Facts of Life. Rather than telling first one story, then the other, I’m trying to tell the two simultaneously. It’s a bit like an old J. B. Priestley time play, swinging between the present and the 1960s. The same group of characters does similar things in the two periods. I’m starting to worry I’ve made it too complex for me to relax enough to let it take on its own life.

PG It’s peasant folklore. Most people know it best from The Mayor of Casterbridge. The locals turn up with puppets and make a lot of noise outside the window. Rough music exists in some form in every culture. It’s a way a community can express disapproval—usually for a sexual misdemeanour; something which isn’t governed by law but personal morality. If, for instance, a wealthy older man married a woman the community deemed far too young, they could turn the rough music on. They’d bang pots and pans outside his window.

There are all sorts of terms for it. I particularly like Rough Music because within my plot it has multiple meanings. The heroine in the 1960s is introduced to soul music by her brother-in-law—the lover she commits adultery with. The music’s part of his seduction of her. She has a very pure musical mind and hasn’t been exposed to that stuff. When suddenly he plays her Aretha Franklin, it’s very rough and mind-blowing. Also, in the modern section, there’s a character from The Aerodynamics of Pork, Roly. He’s now making sound sculptures out of bits of old driftwood and stone. They make a noise when the wind touches them.

RC Beyond not writing things down at an early stage, isn’t it important not to talk about work-in-progress? You’re talking about Rough Music.

PG I don’t talk until I’m very secure in what a book’s going to be. Then it becomes my nemesis. I can’t escape it; nothing’s going to stop it; no amount of talking makes it go away. Actually the talking can help. Sometimes in talking it through I suddenly realize what the book’s really going to be about. It might begin being about one thing and become something quite other.

PG Yes, but never fiction. The novels have all come to fruition sooner or later—though sometimes not in the form I thought. There’s an original film project I’m working on now which I was going to write as a novel.

RC In 1991, when Secret Lives came out with “Caesar’s Wife” in it, your biography mentioned two screenplays.

PG Yes. All these screenplays are kicking around. If they don’t appear, it’s usually because the production companies that commissioned them ran out of money or met a dead end. Some just take a very long time. Little Bits of Baby I adapted as a miniseries for the BBC. It’s one of their many dead scripts, sitting in a file somewhere. I find that enormously frustrating, though I imagine if I wait long enough, the rights will revert to me. I still think it’s viable. Kansas in August, optioned three times, is now finally happening. It was meant to go into production this month. Now it’ll be summer 1999, I hope. It’s funded with lottery money, having begun as a BBC project, then a Really Useful Group project. There’ve been three different scripts—originally by me, now coscripted.

PG That’s very sad. It was going to be by me, Kevin Elyot, and a straight writer. Funnily enough, it was the straight writer’s idea. We wanted to write a sitcom that was entirely gay, though not all the characters were gay. My idea was that all the straight characters, sooner or later, would be proved to have had some kind of gay experience or temptation. It was a fantasy sitcom, to that extent. Every bit part, like a policeman in the first episode, would turn out, by coincidence, to be somebody’s lover. So there was no such thing as a bit part. From the actors’ point of view, it would’ve been a lot of fun. Once the viewers realized this was the format, they’d have great fun waiting to see when somebody was going to turn up in the central position.

You just have to let the thing go. Legally we’ve no control; it belongs to the BBC. Channel Four have their own Manchester-based gay series coming along, Queer as Folk. Cynically, I imagine if the Channel Four one was a huge success, the BBC might suddenly remember they have a perfectly good gay series in their files and will dust it down again. The sad thing is I don’t think I’d necessarily want to write it now. I feel so sour about the whole thing.

RC You always bring your novels to fruition, yet several collaborative projects haven’t seen the light of day. Why persist?

PG Crude economics. When I write a novel, I know it’ll be published in two years. With the film projects, I’ve no idea. The difference is, the advance I get for a novel is a fraction of the money I’ll make from a film—even one that never gets made. In an ideal world, I’d like to alternate: do a novel one year; a film script the next.

Writing novels is very lonely. You’re entirely self-reliant. I find it enormously exciting to get out there and start collaborating. The Kansas in August script has been so much fun. Working with a cowriter on the final version helped enormously. Ian Sellar and I enjoyed working together so much we’re now both working on an original idea of mine. I’m learning a lot from Ian about filmmaking. He’s also a director; he made Venus Peter. I’m also learning from Angela Pope, who made Hollow Reed and is now the director of our project. It’s terribly good for me to learn because I’m a lazy writer.

There’s a syndrome you can get in movies where big money is involved, however. They end up written by committee. You start with a wonderful original project, written by two writers at most. Then the financiers and producers have ideas. Everybody gets his oar in. You end up with a project so far removed from the original it doesn’t really hang together. It’s amazing how often when you see a film you can see somewhere in there the ghost of the original script. Then you see these layers of other people’s ideas stuck on. Part of the problem’s economics. There’s so much money hanging on a film now people can’t bear to leave it alone. The great era of movie-making was when films could be made very cheaply. They were all made in-house with a repertory company, including writers who slaved away producing scripts that weren’t fiddled round with. They were more like playscripts—and it showed in the finished project.

RC So, considering the money, does the potential frustration at seeing a film project remain unrealized not matter?

PG With Kansas in August I’ve reached the point where I’m almost prepared to wash my hands. It’s gone through so many drafts it’s a long way from my original idea. I feel a grudging affection, but it’s become a Frankenstein’s monster now; not really my baby. I never thought I’d reach this point, but now I could say: “Do it on ice! Do it with rock music! Just do it and pay for my new kitchen!”

RC Some novelists are conscious of working in a less prominent medium compared to film.

PG People are pointlessly gloomy about that. They keep saying the novel’s dead. It clearly isn’t. It’s thriving. What you have to accept is that it reaches a small audience compared to television. That’s one thing I’m learning, working for television and film. It puts my other work in perspective and reminds me that most people haven’t heard of me and never will, which is salutary. I’ve a very Protestant streak in that way. I feel it’s good to be taken down several pegs regularly; to go into meetings with film financiers, to whom the idea of me being a novelist cuts no mustard at all.

PG I churn them out! I still feel guilty about being only a novelist, not a priest or doctor; something useful.

PG I had a very religious upbringing. My parents clearly hoped I’d be a priest. They sent me to a Church of England choir school. I appeared fairly pious as a child and have a love affair with High Anglican church culture which I’ll never really get out of my system. I love the architecture, the music, the King James Bible. I have a major problem with religion, that’s the trouble—though it’s a minor stumbling block, judging by some priests I know.

There’s a priestly tradition in the family. My grandfather and great-grandfather on my father’s side were both priests. With my father, I think it’s highly likely he’d have been one, had he not married and been diverted. He became a prison governor—a kind of priest. You’re looking after lost souls on a daily basis. There was a terrific sense of duty they instilled in us all. My brother’s a doctor and my sister an epidemiologist. They’re both involved in changing or saving lives.

It took me a long time to gain any self-respect as a writer; to think it could be worthwhile. So it matters enormously when I get letters. For some reason—I think because of the things I write about—I get a lot of letters. At the risk of sounding like Patience Strong [popular British author of sentimental verse], it’s awfully nice to have people write to you, saying “your book changed my life,” or “it cheered me up when my lover had died.” Then I can see writing does matter; it does reach out to people.

RC Did you imagine doing anything else? I read about you descending on Notting Hill from university and apparently just starting writing.

PG I was incredibly lucky. I got a bedsit in this house in Notting Hill run by a mad old French woman. When she discovered I wanted to be a writer, she refused to cash my rent checks. She put them in a drawer, saying: “I’ll cash them when you get your first advance.” Of course when I did, it disappeared into this black hole of unpaid rent. But that was wonderful. And I was incredibly lucky getting published so quickly. My first and second novels were published the same day. It caused a ripple and got them widely reviewed. By the time I’d finished Ease, I’d found a publisher for the first, The Aerodynamics of Pork, who wanted the second as well. Just as the deal was going through, they—Abacus—were bought by Penguin, who wanted to clear the decks of old projects. It worked very well. Ease went into hardback and was published as if it were my first; The Aerodynamics of Pork appeared alongside it in paperback.

Ease was actually written a year after The Aerodynamics of Pork. Looking back, I regard both, and Kansas in August, as juvenile scribbles. I’ve an affection for them, but they’re very underwritten and under-edited. They’d probably be twice the length if I wrote them today. I think of Facing the Tank as my first mature work. I hesitate to say “mature” as I was only twenty-four when I wrote it, but it’s the first novel I don’t feel embarrassed by. The other three I’d dearly love to rewrite. They wouldn’t change greatly, but I’d take more time over them. They feel so thin, as if I’m skating over the surface of the characters. I find it hard to see how I could’ve written the characters so thinly, compared to the way I write now.

PG No. It’s youth. Those books have a youthful vigor to them I can’t imagine getting back now. The other joke is that those three books were written on an electronic typewriter—one of those dinosaurs that came and went in the early eighties. It wasn’t quite a word processor. It had a finite memory you couldn’t expand. Basically, when the memory came to an end and was full, I’d think: “That’s the end of the chapter.” So they had terribly short chapters. From Facing the Tank onwards, I got into the habit of writing my first drafts in longhand. As a result, the books became much longer and fuller.

RC Your midperiod works Facing the Tank and Little Bits of Baby still feel pithy and concise, as if you’ve relaxed your prose style subsequently.

PG Yes. In some ways I miss that concision and want it back. I got terribly baggy with The Facts of Life. Part of it was the way I planned my books then. Each chapter was like a short story, with beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes I think I should go back to that. I’ve taken to writing books more like films. They’re far more fluid. But I do enjoy a novel where you think: “I’ll read one more chapter before bedtime,” and it’s very satisfying because it packs the punch of a short story.

PG Barbara Trapido. She and Carol Shields are wonderfully deft writers. They have humane understanding in their books, yet they hide their technique. They make it look the easiest, lightest thing in the world. Yet each chapter’s carefully structured and packs an emotional punch. The cumulative effect is enormously satisfying. Barbara Trapido in some ways is like a female Armistead Maupin. She enjoys weaving together characters who didn’t think they were going to meet. Also, the latest Alison Lurie I enjoyed enormously—The Last Resort. Again it plays that game.

PG I was reading her a lot when I began writing, along with early Iris Murdoch, who I absolutely love: A Severed Head or The Bell.

RC The Bell in particular might be an example of the High Anglican tradition you describe emerging in English fiction.

PG That tradition comes out in many ways. One important one is morality. I think my books are very moral. They play wicked games with immorality and amorality, but they’re actually quite old-fashioned, in terms of judgments passed on characters and punishment meted out. Take the hero of the modern section of The Facts of Life, Jamie. Obviously, AIDS isn’t a punishment, but there’s an element in which Jamie is made to suffer, one way or another, for being so superficial when the book begins. There’s a process by which we see his character deepening in the course of his illness.

The Anglican tradition also comes out in my interest in the idea of “community.” I’m fascinated by closed, monastic communities and whatever the female version is: “convent communities.” I’ve got these two imagined religious communities on little islands which I refer to occasionally in the novels. Also, in The Cat Sanctuary, I posit this all-female world.

I was educated at Winchester—a very strange experience; quite unreal. I was living in these ancient buildings of unparalleled beauty, surrounded by gardens, water meadows, rolling green hills, lovely trees, and beautiful music. Winchester is in large part my model for the imagined cathedral city of Barrowcester. I have a love-hate relationship with it. My parents still live there, so I go back regularly. It’s so beautiful; so comfortable. It offers you the luxury of thinking you can just sit back and spend your days reading or in quiet study.

Winchester’s also something I’ve fought against. I was very tempted by the academic life. I was offered a place to do research at Oxford, which I found so appealing. I think part of me’s very frightened by the outside world; dealing with people. I’m very shy. I find it very hard going to parties. I’d like to withdraw from the world. I suppose I ended up doing that by moving to Cornwall, where I have a very simple life most of the time.

PG They do withdraw from the world. Maybe one day I’ll end up doing it myself. I’ll just stop writing and become a farmer.

RC Iris Murdoch’s novels have this very mixed tapestry of gay and straight characters, worldly and unworldly, moral and immoral. In that sense they’re rather like Angus Wilson’s.

PG Yes, but Iris Murdoch’s far more comforting. She’s a more generous writer than Angus Wilson. I enjoyed his books a lot, but there’s something profoundly uncomfortable about them. Like her, though, he’s very moral. Anglicanism does come out in that way. Unlike her, he doesn’t offer playful solutions. What I find intoxicating in her fiction, especially her early to middle period, is this sense of the novel as a game. She’s playing with these characters. Though they’re real, in another sense they’re not. She puts a philosophical distance on the whole thing I find intoxicating.

PG I’d be enormously flattered if somebody said I was writing in that tradition. But I think I’m probably not. I lack her detachment. I fall in love with my characters too much. I think I’m in danger sometimes of overweighting the argument in favor of the gay characters. I try to give my gay characters—therefore my gay readers—quite a hard time. I force them to spend time with straight people, for instance. One of Armistead Maupin’s great achievements was to make a whole generation of gay readers fall in love with this single straight man, Brian, and understand the similarities in what he goes through, compared to a gay man. That’s something I’d like to do. I find straight male characters very hard, yet I persist in trying to write them.

RC The breadth of experience you cover is another link to writers like Iris Murdoch. Few gay novelists write about the experience of pregnancy.

PG That’s something I find quite bewildering in the way books are received: the assumption that you can only write about things you know. People keep saying: “It’s so surprising to find a gay man who likes writing about women.” I think: “What kind of novelist would I be if I couldn’t write about people other than myself?” After all, it’s nothing new. The great nineteenth-century male novelists all wrote enormously memorable female characters. The women wrote some incredible male ones. Half the fun of the form is losing yourself in these other personalities. I’m very aware that my social breadth isn’t particularly wide, though. Occasionally I try to broaden it.

PG Yes. Class is so unavoidable in the British novel. Ultimately it comes down to mechanics. If you have characters from very different social backgrounds, it can set you plot problems. They’re unlikely to be interacting in the way you want them to. To that extent, I don’t mind being like Iris Murdoch—quite rarefied. It sets you free to write about what you want—for me, relationships. I’m not very interested in writing about politics or class. Others do it better.

PG Manners, ultimately, are to do with communication, with how much you reveal of your appetites, how much you recognize the misbehavior of others—or choose not to recognize it. To that extent it’s the stuff of my novels. It sounds awfully puffbally though. “Comedy of manners” always sounds desperately light. I’d almost rather have “sex comedy” than “comedy of manners.” The problem is, it has overtones of “mannered”—the kiss of death for a novel.

But I think manners in the old-fashioned sense are fascinating. In some ways for me they have a moral implication as well, in terms of the revelation of character. My father has what I consider absolutely perfect manners. He treats everybody the same, regardless of who they are or where they come from. He’s at pains to make everybody feel comfortable. That for me is inseparable from the ethics by which he lives his life. It’s very easy to think of manners as being about how you hold your knife and fork. But I think ultimately they’re to do with how you treat each other. Manners in the truest sense are what make us civilized and what hold a community together.

RC You spoke of forcing your gay characters to live among heterosexuals. That suggests contrivance or artifice in your fictional worlds. You’re not interested in writing mimetic works about, say, current realities for gay men. You wouldn’t write a novel set in the urban gay ghetto.

PG No. Or if I did, it’d only be precisely for its artificial qualities, perhaps: rather like in The Cat Sanctuary, it’s a closed community. To that extent my books are highly artificial. I’m constantly aware I’m playing a game. I perceive the plot as a kind of arena into which my characters—and readers—are forced to enter, and in which they enact various conflicts. I don’t for one moment think of them as “slice of life” novels, which I don’t see the point of. We’ve got the news for that. I want people to be able to escape, but not necessarily without being made to confront things. Sometimes you escape in order to look at your life with a cooler eye and be returned to it transformed. In an ideal way that’s what a book should do.

RC One consequence, though, might be that you’re compelled to avoid ascribing obvious motives to certain characters. You’ve invented a series of gay protagonists, for instance, who’d never dream of moving to the city—a move which we know in reality is quite common.

PG We know it’s common, but, at the same time, the moment I left London, I realized there was an enormous gay world out there that has nothing to do with the commercial scene. There are farmers, postmistresses, and teachers all across the country who haven’t set foot in a gay pub in their lives—and don’t see why they should. When it comes down to motivation, I think that circles back to what I was saying earlier about having a fixed plot in place, then, part-way through, finding the book rebels against the system I’ve set for it. There comes a point where motivation is character. The character that’s built up by chapter ten will steer someone in a certain direction.

RC Armistead Maupin insists that the pluralist, half-gay, half-straight world of Barbary Lane is absolutely true to life. You’re saying something rather different about the construction of your fictional worlds.

PG I think we probably approach things from different directions, but you end up with the same effect. He’d say he takes a reflection of the real world. I’d say my world starts out utterly artificial. The irony is that by filleting out all the stuff that doesn’t interest me—what some might call realistic motivation—I often end up with a psychological or emotional truth which people recognize as a reflection of their own reality. So where I think I’m telling a fantasy, for some people it’ll be exactly what they’ve been going through.

RC I wanted to ask about the peculiar hairpin bends of plot and the cool precision of sentences in your middle-period fiction. Was Ivy Compton-Burnett an influence?

PG Ivy Compton-Burnett I love. She’s definitely an enormous influence on my earlier novels, particularly in terms of dialogue, and having passages which are nothing but dialogue; where you have to infer what’s going on. Compton-Burnett is one of the great writers of dialogue.

PG Yes—artificial as Molière. Hers is almost like an eighteenth-century, powder-puff world. Yet what her people say is incredibly shocking sometimes. I think she’s one of the great figures of sexual experimentation in English literature. In some ways, she’s the first great gay novelist. Because her work is so odd, people didn’t notice, I think. One novel begins with two men, one sitting in the other’s lap while they’re talking. You don’t realize at first. I was devouring her work at the same time as early Iris Murdoch. I’m sure they both fed in as influences. I even quote from Ivy Compton-Burnett at the beginning of The Aerodynamics of Pork.

PG I don’t see what’s wrong with that. People are silly about this. There are so few plots to go around. If you find a subject that interests you, you should carry on writing it. You could say her plots are all the same; then, you could say every family’s the same. Even as you say it, you know it’s not strictly true. The structure may be the same: a father, a mother, so many children; problems with money. But it could be interpreted many different ways.

One reason Compton-Burnett’s work is so fascinating is that she’s almost like a composer who decides she’s only going to write string quartets. It’s like a problem she’s going to work and work at until she’s turned the thumbscrews so tight that the problem cracks. She takes the family and goes and goes at it, goading it into weird twists and deformities until the family will never look the same again. If you read all her books in succession, you’d have a very strange view of things.

I think this assumption that we must all come up with each book very different from the one before is fed by the publishing industry. It wants its novelists to get bigger and better all the time. For me it’s nonsense. If you find a writer you like, you like them because of who they are and what they write. If they keep changing from book to book, it gets enormously frustrating. You want more of the same. At least I assume people do. I think there are enough writers out there for us all to be doing very different things. If we repeat ourselves, it really doesn’t matter. We won’t entirely be repeating ourselves. Iris Murdoch repeated herself, but each book’s slightly different.

PG Yes. I hate waste. If you’ve created a fictional world, it seems an unnecessary labor to create another, parallel world. Why not build on the world you’ve already got? I think it’s rather fun for readers suddenly to recognize that somebody passing through this novel is somebody they’ve spent a lot of time with in a previous novel. It can evoke nostalgia in them, because they miss that character or want more of him or her, but this time ’round it’s only a fleeting, bit part.

RC Tree Surgery for Beginners has roots in Barrowcester, the community you use so often. It is, though, relatively footloose.

PG Yes. That’s partly to do with the form. Tree Surgery for Beginners is very self-consciously a fairy tale for grown-ups. Writing in that romantic tradition, I felt the hero had to go on a voyage, an adventure. Although in part I’d taken as my model the madder, late Shakespearean comedies, where the character ended up going to Bohemia or some mythical version of it, I chose America—our late twentieth-century dream factory. America’s where all the legends come from nowadays, so it seemed a fitting place to send Lawrence. But it’s not America; it’s an entirely mythical version.

Keeping to the same town settings is a kind of shorthand. Barrowcester, for better or worse, has become a kind of all-purpose middle-class English community in which anything can happen. I think it’s because I want to cut to the chase. I’m impatient with having to make up a wholly new place; I want to get on with the characters’ emotional lives. Rough Music is again set partly in Barrowcester, though the world I’m describing is very different to the town we’ve seen before. It’s Barrowcester prison. It’s about prison life and is based on my strange childhood memories of growing up in Wandsworth Prison where my father was governor. That was my first closed community, I suppose.

RC Hardy is perhaps the most celebrated of novelists to have created a fictionalized “map” of England.

PG Yes. His Wessex is real, but not real. Similar is Simon Raven, whose extraordinary Alms for Oblivion sequence I’ve just discovered. Raven brings back characters repeatedly. You can watch someone who begins as someone’s rather mousy wife rise to a position of monstrous importance and power. He does it so deftly. In some ways his is a far better record of early twentieth-century history than Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which is remarkably flat by comparison. Quite apart from Raven writing like an angel and Powell writing in a rather dry style, Raven’s understanding of history and psychological motivation is so acute. If somebody is due for a revival, it’s him. Alms for Oblivion covers much the same period of history as Powell but isn’t hung up on trying to be an English Proust. It has a much more vigorous, Anglo-Saxon approach.

RC Regardless of their own merits, Proust and James are ambiguous models for writers. Your books are full of people struggling with Proust.

PG Proust was an early love of mine, as was James. They’re both writers I reread religiously at regular intervals. Every time I reread them now, I’m faintly appalled at what they expected of their readers, and how much they did themselves down. Both Proust and James are terribly funny, but it’s as if they couldn’t bear to be thought of as only comic. So they reached for this monstrously prolix prose style that, however elegant, ultimately serves to mask the real business of the novels, which is arch, high camp basically. Time and again in James you think: “Get on with it; it’s so funny when you do.” But they’re very bad influences in some ways. James’s fiction can be a wonderful influence. Someone who took The Spoils of Poynton or Turn of the Screw as a model would be doing very well. The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors, however, have that high seriousness creeping in, which rapidly turns into pomposity.

I think America suffers in a related way from teaching creative writing in this very homogenized way. It’s like a writing factory, churning out these young writers who all write the same way. Gradually, they find their own voices—but so late. Some never find them at all; they give up or disappear. One great advantage in this country is that—the University of East Anglia aside—we tend not to teach writing as a discipline. It’s something you pick up by reading; by being immersed in lots of different voices.

PG I think you can’t separate the two. When people say, “How do I become a writer?,” I say: “Write.” You just have to get up and do it and do it, but never lose touch with this amazing pool of writers around you. I know ultimately that was my way of learning: imitation, basically.

PG I’m very nervous about other voices and plots slipping in, so when I’m on a real roll with a novel—as opposed to being in the early, chugging stages—I tend to stop reading fiction. Often I’ll read related works of nonfiction. When working on Tree Surgery for Beginners, I read a lot of books about trees. I’m fascinated by botany and wild flowers. I also read a lot of books about the Caribbean and holistic medicine. With The Facts of Life I was immersed in nonfiction about the war and AIDS respite care. With the current book, which is really about my parents’ marriage, I’m not sure what I’ll read for research. Probably their photograph albums!

PG I wish! I used to do that until I got a dog. Now I have to get up to walk the dog. Morning’s the time my brain’s most awake, so I tend to get up fairly early. I try to write all morning. The afternoon’s for lazier things—reading and gardening.

PG Yes. Some days I can tell very quickly it’s not going to be a productive day. I’ve learned the best thing to do is something completely different; something that gives you a sense of achievement so the Protestant guilt doesn’t kick in. Now I have the perfect way. My lover’s a farmer in Cornwall. If I’m having a bad day, he’ll give me a tractor or combine harvester to drive. I can harvest five fields of barley and end up completely exhausted. I really feel I’ve achieved something. I haven’t done any more to the book, but I don’t feel guilty. I used to find it very hard to find other things to do that didn’t just leave me feeling I was frittering my day away.

PG I will if I’m ready to. But you can’t force it. I can always write something. I find it very easy to write things. That’s half the trouble. But if my heart isn’t in it, I’ll just produce a load of crap and throw it away the next day, so there’s no point.

PG One advantage of writing in longhand rather than on the computer is that it’s very easy to polish as you go to some extent. You can see your crossings out; you can reinstate passages you’ve cut. I try to do as little of that as I can in the first draft. I just get a version down on paper so I can stand back and see the weak points. Also, there’s a kind of superstition to it. There’s a relief if you can get a version down on paper. You can see the skeleton of the book, then go back and put some meat on the bones.

RC After getting rid of the electronic typewriter, did you keep to writing in longhand?

PG Absolutely. In the mid-eighties I got a word processor like everybody else. I very quickly learned to mistrust it. It produces a superficially polished version, which looks so finished on the screen, whereas if you look at a big fat notebook full of crossings out, it stops you relaxing too much and thinking: “It’s done now.” It keeps the book alive for me—though it’s also terrifying, because you have this physical thing you carry around which you can lose very easily. I keep it with me at all times.

PG No, thank God. I’ve lost things on the computer though—whole chapters. I do the whole first version in longhand. The second draft takes the form of me typing it into the computer, and in the process, polishing and changing it. There’ll usually be a third draft, and probably a fourth.

PG Yes. I don’t look at it for a couple of months. Then I reread it. Also, I involve my agent and editor very closely. I use their feedback. If I’m really nervous, my agent will occasionally get all the women in the agency to read it. He knows I value the input of women. He invites me in; we all sit down with a bottle of wine. Then they tell me what they think. It’s quite terrifying.

PG I think a lot of writers fib by pretending they do it all themselves. I think most writers need and use a sounding board somewhere in their life—a partner, an editor, whatever. I’ve nearly always had women editors, though I briefly had a gay man editing me. I’m much happier with a woman editing me. I need that different gender viewpoint.

RC It sounds rare to have such strong relations with both editor and agent, and to use these in polishing your work.

PG Yes. My agent used to be an editor, although he’s very cautious about suggesting changes. He knows I want reactions though. My editor’s very bold. She’ll never suggest major changes, but she’ll encourage me to talk about them, often because she knows that, by being forced to justify something, I’ll be led to see where the weak points are and I’ll strengthen them myself. She’s quite canny that way.

PG Funnily enough, I don’t involve my friends—I think because I have such a horror of friends of mine giving me a novel to read before it’s published. I involve friends sometimes for proofreading. I’m a lousy proofreader. I have some very persnickety friends who’ll spot things I won’t. Publishers have so little money nowadays to spend on proper proofreading. It’s notoriously something that doesn’t get done. Copy-editing’s done on a very superficial level as well. I do a lot of reviewing and am shocked at how often a novel has been desperately under-edited, never mind under-proofread.

PG It’s always useful to have a bit of reviewing going on in the background. It gives me something to do on the bad days. If I can’t do any farming or writing, I sit in an armchair all day and read somebody else’s novel. Sometimes reading a book completely unrelated to your own gives you a way back into your own work. My agent hates the idea of novelists reviewing each other because often it’s one of his clients savaging another. But I’m not very savage. If anything I’m a painfully generous reviewer. Literary editors get rather pissed off with me for being too kind. But I don’t see the point in a bad review. If a book’s bad, I often won’t review it. I send it back. So many novels are fighting for so few spaces. I don’t hold with the view that bad reviews make for good reading. I’d far rather turn to a books page and be told about a wonderful novel I might’ve missed. Also, as a novelist reviewing novels, I think you can’t help but be fascinated to see what others were trying to achieve. Often, rather than pan a book out of hand, I’ll try to see what a book’s trying to do. An interesting failure can be a lot more stimulating than a polished success which may not have attempted anything as brave.

RC There are clearly a lot of women writers you respect; you like women reading over your work. Do you theorize about this?

PG As a writer I’m just far more interested writing women than writing men. I think women, like gay men, have to make themselves up as they go along to some extent, if they’re not to have completely downtrodden, mundane lives. They have to assess their situation early on and take quite bold steps to make up a personality. Nobody’s going to give them one—whereas heterosexual men can run on such smooth rails until relatively late in life. They tend to have their crisis in their forties, whereas women have theirs much earlier on. As a result, they’re far more interesting to write about.

Women juggle their lives more. Gay men do too. They tend to have secrets. An awful lot of gay men are not out at work, and therefore have more interesting lives. They might not be nicer, happier lives, but from a writer’s point of view there’s a lot more potential conflict. Similarly, a woman who works will often have to be very different at home. She’s called on to nurture at one time, then to be brutal at another.

I’ve been told by women friends that my female characters are quite monstrous; quite hard and unscrupulous. Maybe they are. Certainly I grew up with very strong female role models. I was raised largely by women. I didn’t really know my father’s personality until I was well into my teens. I think he wasn’t very comfortable with small children. He was very loving, but I didn’t have much sense of him being there until later on, whereas I was very much under the care of my grandmother, mother, and sisters. As a result, I grew up knowing a lot more about women than men. Certainly straight male culture remains largely a mystery to me. I’m learning as much as I can, and don’t particularly like what I’m learning.

PG Talking to people. Television. I eavesdrop a great deal. I often sit in public spaces alone and listen. I take a lot of public transport. I’ve discovered you learn an awful lot through the Internet. Lots of men out there pretend to be women and infiltrate women’s chat rooms. I do exactly the same, but pretending to be a straight guy interested in cars. It’s extraordinary. You find yourself in this stifling atmosphere with all these competitive men. They don’t seem to like each other. I don’t know how they survive—talking as blokes about cars, sex, whatever. Occasionally I think: “How weird—maybe all the people in this chat room are pretending, and none of us is male. We’re none of us “blokes”!

PG Yes. That comes down to personality. For better or worse, when you read a novel you’re spending three or four hours in intimate company with that writer’s personality. I find the company of women more congenial. That probably extends to my reading tastes. I’d find it hard to enjoy a Martin Amis novel. He’s a wonderful writer and incredible technician. Will Self too I admire on a technical level, but I find the character—the writer’s personality—so rebarbative that if it’s a choice between spending time with him or Barbara Trapido, there’s no contest. I want to be with somebody who’s interested in other personalities, not just forcing his or her own personality onto the reader the whole time. That seems a particularly heterosexual, male way of writing. They get out there and show off, whereas for me the whole point of fiction-writing is to lose your own personality; to mask it in order to ventriloquize, basically; to take on other voices.

RC You talk of reading as spending time in a writer’s company, yet think of writing as an escape from personality.

PG Yes. I don’t kid myself that my personality’s disappeared. But I’m very aware that at least in trying to make it disappear, I’m doing something very different from the writer who tries to force that personality on you. Ironically, Jeanette Winterson, I think, writes like a man. She’s a very heterosexual, masculine writer. It shows in the way she’s been lionized by that coterie of straight male writers. They regard her as one of the lads, and she writes just like them. It’s not a style that interests me particularly.

PG Saul Bellow. It doesn’t get to me at all. If I wanted to have all that, I’d have become a psychotherapist and listened to it for hours on end. I’d never say they were bad books. I’d just have to say they do nothing for me. For that reason I’d refuse to review one if I was asked, because I couldn’t give it a fair hearing.

RC I want to return to The Facts of Life, much bulkier and stylistically different to your earlier novels. Did that come out of its subject matter?

PG Partly. I knew it was going to be a family saga. My agent and Carmen Callil got together and decided I should do a family saga next. I thought: “Preposterous.” But it took root. I originally planned a trilogy of shorter novels, each about a different generation of the same family and a different social disease. We were going to have the first book about tuberculosis, the second about the clap, the third about AIDS. As I started work on the first, though, I realized the subject matter was going to be so interlinked that I could gain far more by allowing the middle act to implode and act as cement for the first and third acts. That’s what ended up happening. The unsung heroine is the woman who’s treated most harshly: Miriam, the daughter of the first half and the mother in the second. She doesn’t really get her say. But the subject matter was always going to make a long book. These aren’t stories that can be told quickly.

PG Yes. There’s a slightly magisterial quality. I think that comes in partly unconsciously when you know you’re working on a big book. The style gets big to match, whereas in Tree Surgery for Beginners, which I always knew was going to be mischievous, the style became lighter and more playful. Short stories are another case in point. When I work on a story—which I find far harder than a novel—I’m aware all the time that it’s only going to be, say, seven pages long. As a result, the prose has to be very finely honed. There’s no room for excess baggage.

RC Some writers would reject the idea that you could plan a novel in terms of themes; knowing what a book’s “about.” Many novelists say writing the book involves finding out what it’s about.

PG Yes. For me that’s quite alien—though, as I said, midway through a book, it takes on its own momentum and life. Rough Music I began thinking was going to be about a husband and wife’s marriage. Now I see it’s far more about a character who was going to be just a member of the family. Suddenly I’m aware she’s the victim of the story and its prime mover. She’s hijacking the book, basically, and I’m having to rethink all my plans. [Laughs] Another monstrous woman!

RC The subject matter of AIDS must have brought particular difficulties for The Facts of Life. At one point Jamie, the character suffering from AIDS, is reading novels about the syndrome, and finding them unsatisfying.

PG Yes. The Facts of Life was written in a way as my response to what I saw as a failure in AIDS novels to date. They weren’t speaking to me, giving me comfort. They were more like a brutal kind of journalism, if wonderfully written. The Anglican in me wanted to offer comfort, rather than just report from the battlefront. Take, for instance, Edmund White and Adam Mars-Jones’s collection The Darker Proof. It was trailblazing when it came out. Adam’s stories were breathtaking, but cold in a way. They were brutally accurate, but weren’t giving the reader anything. They were just saying: “This is how it is,” which is what was needed at the time. But I was writing The Facts of Life a good ten years on, and trying to put AIDS in perspective as the latest in a series of social diseases. Particularly the TB parallels seemed a way of doing that. Also, I wanted to put the gay character with AIDS firmly back into a family context—once again, to show perspective; to say: “He’s dying from AIDS, but ultimately he’s just dying.” People die of all manner of things. Families have a way of coping. The structure of a family will extend around and beyond the death.

PG They do. I’m in love with death—always have been. I have a morbid streak.

PG Yes. There can be an Agatha Christie feeling. You think: “Oh, which one’s going to die?” You can be sure one of them will.

RC Doesn’t this tend to contradict the idea of becoming too devoted to your characters?

PG In The Facts of Life I found it terribly hard to kill off the mother in the first book, Sally. I was completely in love with her. That was very much a case where the plot had begun to take over. Somebody had to die. I realized I wanted it to be a book about a straight man’s very slow and painful education in how to love and accept. Sally, Edward’s wife, was always a loving and accepting character. Brutally getting rid of her would force him into having to be the witness, rather than her. But she was hard to kill.

I use deaths as a very formal plot device; not so much for the morbid satisfaction it gives me to kill someone off—though if it’s a bad character, that is great fun. But I tend to kill off characters I love. It’s more to do with the chance it gives me to have an emotional explosion following the death; the warmth that can generate. It’s usually related also to my abiding fascination with the broader family, and the way in which as a structure it can absorb the impact of a death and is forced to restructure itself afterwards. Tree Surgery for Beginners offers a perfect example. It’s about a family that’s forced—first by a divorce, then by a child’s death—completely to break down and rebuild itself into a bigger, stronger structure.

I think the extended family’s an experience almost peculiar to gay people, precisely because so many of us are rejected by our families when we come out. So we tend to form tribes when we leave home. We don’t marry and often take a long time to find a partner who fits. Along the way we form very deep friendships, and a broad, often quite complex network of ex-lovers, friends, friends’ ex-lovers. Heterosexual people often miss out on this. They tend to marry quite young and put all their eggs into one basket. Then they’re desperately vulnerable. Something I enjoy doing in my work—in Tree Surgery for Beginners, for example—is giving straight people a gay education; in other words, making them learn that you’re far better off with this bigger structure than just with this immediate family, and that it’s terribly hard for anyone to be a good parent. One way to make it easier is to encourage your children to elect other parents to take up the slack. Gay people do this naturally. We tend to find and elect new mothers and fathers. I know I’ve had several mothers—not all of them women.

PG Yet it isn’t. It’s perfectly natural. As the century draws to its close, we’ve a crisis in the family caused mainly by economics; by the fact both parents need to work. The family isn’t there because the parents aren’t there. If only we encouraged more of this trans-familial bonding early on, the way it would be naturally in an African village tribe where children freely move from one hut to another, there’d be less talk of neglected children and less conflict between parent and child in later life. One thing I’ve learned living in Cornwall is that this still goes on outside big cities. Where I live, basically a village, people tend to marry very young. They go back to work as soon as they’ve had their children because they need to economically. They use grandparents in a way we’ve forgotten in cities. The children get parked with grandparents from a very early age—and often also with somebody else’s grandparents. You see this much tighter network as a result. Crime levels are incredibly low. That’s partly to do with living in a tighter community where everyone knows everyone else. You get a little crime blip in the summer when tourists come along. They’re the ones who break into houses and steal cars! But I think it’s also much more to do with the sense of social cohesion you get if you throw your net a bit wider and don’t just rely on your parents.

RC Part of the “liberation” in many early, self-consciously “emancipated” gay novels was the idea that you left family behind. Your novels, though, have a deliberate social heterogeneity in which family relations remain important. In part that’s to do with the small community setting.

PG To some extent. Also, I write as I see. Luckily I wasn’t thrown out by my parents. There’s been continuity in my life. To some extent, though, I think I’m harder-nosed about this than gay writers who turn their back on the family, in that I know the family’s something you cannot escape. Sooner or later you have to deal with it; a parent will get old and need looking after. For better or worse, we were all made by families.

RC Turning to the short stories in Dangerous Pleasures: the preface indicates that each story was written with a single reader in mind. Does that condition the story that results?

PG Yes. The great difference between my stories and novels is the stories tend to have a specific cause—a commission, or a specific person or reason for writing the thing: to cheer somebody up whose boyfriend has just dumped her, whatever. Sometimes I combine the two. I’d be asked to write a short story for a collection and I’d be thinking: “What am I going to write?” Then I think: “This might cheer so-and-so up.” So I’ll do it for the commission, but send it to the person that needs the story. They all have very personal elements in.

PG That’s the nightmare. You need to find story matter that packs the emotional punch of a novel but doesn’t just feel like a first chapter. I haven’t always succeeded. In some cases I’ve gone back and resuscitated a character for a novel. Several characters in Tree Surgery for Beginners cropped up in stories. Bee and Reuben, the sister and brother on the cruise liner, were in the first story I had published, “Borneo.” The Cat Sanctuary grew out of “Dressing Up in Voices.” Six years on, I wanted to know what happened to them next. So I revisited them.

PG They have to be so disciplined, unlike a novel. Space is so limited. The prose has to be very tight and deft. The subject matter has to be right. Quite often I’ll begin one, then think: “This isn’t going to work; this is too big a subject.” Other times you pick something too trite. It’s that balance between narrative and revelation. Most of my short stories have a revelatory moment: a breakthrough or realization, or somebody cracks and takes action. But it’s a finite thing.

RC In one daring story you omitted, “The Road to You,” someone deliberately punctures a condom, potentially to expose himself to HIV-infection by his lover.¹

PG Yes. It was very personal. I wrote that when I’d fallen deeply in love as a present to the person I was in love with. He’d been fretting that he was so much older and more experienced than I was. I didn’t include it because I felt it’d never really grown beyond its personal context. I felt it meant so much more to me than to others reading it.

RC You choose tangential titles for both stories and novels. Few make clear statements: Facing the Tank, for instance.

PG That’s a playful one. You’ve no idea what it means until you reach that moment. I don’t know where the titles come from. They just pop up.

PG Usually pretty early. The bluntest one so far has been The Cat Sanctuary, but even that has double meanings. It refers also to all these women you’ve got fighting it out.

RC The Facts of Life is nearest to a statement of intent; it announces a serious book.

PG No. All my novels were published in America up to and including Little Bits of Baby. Dutton was taken over by Penguin and I was spat out promptly. I didn’t make enough money. I’ve just signed a new contract in the States for Tree Surgery for Beginners [New York: Faber and Faber, 1999]. They’re talking of bringing out The Cat Sanctuary and The Facts of Life in years to come, depending on how Tree Surgery for Beginners does.

PG Yes. I was doing really well. Little Bits of Baby had a wonderful review in the New York Times Book Review, which is always the benchmark. Once you get into that, you think: “I’ve arrived now.” So I was just relaxing about the States, thinking it was time they got me over for publicity and they never did. Very frustrating. It halved my income overnight.

RC People ascribe notions of Englishness to your works—does that help cultivate readers abroad?

PG I have no way of knowing. I have to accept my books are intensely English, for better or worse. My style is quite fey, and their landscapes, despite the occasional excursion to America, are very much rooted in the English countryside. Maybe that’s part of the appeal. Certainly when I was being published in America, that was something they picked up on and liked. But it seems a Catch-22 situation. American publishers either say: “We love this book—it’s so English,” or: “We can’t publish this—it’s so English.”

RC I wanted to ask about chapter divisions. You’ve a slightly old-fashioned tendency of starting chapters at earlier points than where you’d previously arrived.

PG I didn’t realize I did that until a few reviewers started getting quite bitchy, saying it irritated them intensely. I quite enjoy doing the backtracking, in terms of filling in somebody’s recent history. It’s rather overloading it if you do that when you first introduce a character, so sometimes I’ll defer it, get you into the action, then wallop you over the head with three solid paragraphs of backtrack.

RC You withhold information for an age at times, too—the affair between Joanna and Julian in The Cat Sanctuary, for instance. Presumably you plan such dramatic devices carefully.

PG Yes. It’s playing with you. I think you’ve not just to play with the reader but play the reader as well. You know certain psychological effects can be induced if you withhold information until later, or give him or her a shock at a certain point. That’s one thing I’m learning more from working on film scripts: learning to view the novel not as a linear thing but as an arc. You need pillars at certain points to hold things up; at others, you need an injection of new material. I’m learning to view the novel rather like a film in terms of rhythm. Ultimately though, you have to write a novel you’d like to read.

RC In the early novels, what you describe as injecting new material is there, perhaps in a slightly different way. You seem to offer an ever-expanding range of characters.

PG That’s true. You’ll suddenly get a quite in-depth viewpoint from somebody you’ve never met before and never see again.

PG Yes. It’s all new characters until you’re about ten chapters in. Then you start going back to ones you’ve already met. That was self-consciously my homage to Trollope and those big Victorian cathedral novels. I wanted to have a big cast list.

PG Yes: can you juggle all these balls at the same time? The satisfactory ending’s always a challenge as well—tying the ends up. With Tree Surgery for Beginners I had a lot of fun with that—daring to marry everybody off. Even a man who’s murdered his mistress gets married off in prison.

PG That’s true. You know the territory you’re in; you can therefore relax and enjoy it. Some people found that book a bit disturbing at first. People who’d never read me before thought they were in for a detective story. They were bewildered when these characters suddenly go on this Caribbean cruise and desert P. D. James territory.

RC Have you ever wanted to write a novel in the first person? There’s only your novella “Caesar’s Wife” and a few stories. Otherwise you’ve kept to indirect, third-person discourse.

PG I enjoyed doing the first person in “Caesar’s Wife.” But I couldn’t help thinking that part of the irony of telling a story that way is in what you’re missing out. Readers are well aware there are other sides to this story they aren’t getting. Mostly I’m more comfortable giving all the different sides to a story—partly so you get a more rounded viewpoint. But it’s also to do with what I was saying earlier about losing my own personality; using the characters as masks and splitting myself up in ten different directions. That feels more natural. With “Caesar’s Wife,” doing just this one personality felt very much like a camp turn.

PG That’s true. The thing I’d always beware of would be the “gentle reader” approach—being arch and knowing—which is quite easy with third-person narrative, especially comedy, unless you’re careful. That’s why I try to write from inside personalities.

RC You mostly lean very heavily on an immediate sensibility, but not always. There’s a recognizable narrator’s sensibility too.

PG Yes, I still have that. It kicks in in “backstory” passages. For instance, in Tree Surgery for Beginners you get quite a long passage in the beginning describing Lawrence’s birth and his fascination with trees. There’s a long passage about his mother’s relationship with his uncle—her backstory. At those times my narrator’s voice comes out. Then I try to kick back into personality-led narrative.

RC At those points, you’re also offering a generalizing narrative voice, one which offers a summary of shared understandings.

PG Yes; “we know this is the way things are”—that sort of voice, if you can keep it quite cool and waspish as well.

PG I think it’s more that the novel itself becomes a sort of community if you have these multiple voices, none of them quite arriving at the truth. The reader, one hopes, comes to a point where having all these different voices is like being in the heart of a community. He or she can see things as they are.

PG Ronald Firbank, perhaps. His Vainglory was very much a starting point for Facing the Tank.

PG Eliot for me feeds straight into the Iris Murdoch tradition of providing what’s basically entertainment with higher philosophical concerns. When it works—Middlemarch—it works absolutely brilliantly. Even if it doesn’t work—Daniel Deronda—it’s fascinating to see what Eliot’s trying to do. With Trollope, though, it’s pure entertainment; Facing the Tank likewise. There’s no axe to grind. I wrote that while living in France, feeling terribly homesick. It’s a nostalgic romp.

RC Do you think of every book distinctly? If someone described your books in the same way, would it concern you?

PG I’d be a bit disturbed. But I’m philosophical about that, once the books have flown the nest. I do feel they’re pitched at different levels. Although the plot structure may be similarly wild from book to book, the tone varies. The Cat Sanctuary’s essentially dark; Facing the Tank light. I think of them as swinging between urban and country novels, and between gay and straight novels. Each reacts against the one before. Tree Surgery for Beginners was distinctly light compared to The Facts of Life.

PG No. A lot of time was taken up working on television series that didn’t happen, like Little Bits of Baby.

PG No, it’s conscious. I do it as much to give myself relief as the reader. I’m well aware most people don’t read the books in the order they’re written. It’s up to them to make their own way. From my point of view, if I’ve been submerged in a very dark narrative world, it’s sometimes a relief to stretch out into something lighter. Rough Music’s a hybrid. It’s high comedy, but rooted in very dark, painful family stuff as well.

RC When you spoke of Eliot’s moral tradition leading into Iris Murdoch, I wondered how you responded to modernism.

PG In some ways I feel modernism was a dead end. People had to try to stretch the novel as far as it could go, but what resulted was a realization that ultimately the novel form, a bit like the symphony, is essentially fairly conservative and not very flexible. It works best when you play on certain areas. I’m shameless in thinking of my books, however modern their subject matter, as very old-fashioned in structure and manner. That’s as much to do with accessibility as anything else. It also cuts back to what I was saying about the male heterosexual voice drawing attention to itself. I feel for a narrative to work well the writer has to be almost invisible. Certainly any labor that’s gone into the prose should be invisible. If you can see how hard the work’s been, the writing’s failing. For me, what matters is the communication: getting a story and involving the reader. If the reader’s noticing the nuts and bolts, you’re not getting through to him or her, just drawing attention to your own cleverness.

PG I find Woolf more of theoretical interest than anything else, precisely because she ends up showing why it doesn’t work, though we all learn from her. One thing we get is the use of interior monologue to get inside a character’s personality. No one would think they were doing that because of Woolf, but what she did fed into the tradition and had an effect. But other things I do are things she found anathema.

PG Exactly. She fudges everything. E. M. Forster’s a writer I devoured as a teenager, like Conrad, and have never been able to read since. I think gay men would hate to admit him as an influence. Actually, though—the terrible Maurice aside—I think Forster’s books are unwitting early exemplars of what the gay novel was going to do. They’re quite old-fashioned in structure, but address moral dilemmas.

PG Yes. The whole trouble with a novel, as opposed to music, is that it’s not performed by an expert but by whoever reads it. Ultimately, it’s got to be something their “instrument” can play, whereas with a string quartet, you know the players you’re writing for. You know they’ll be able to give it the best possible performance. Whether it’s accessible is another matter. That’s why I feel modernist writing is ultimately always sterile. You’re expecting your reader to do things most readers can’t. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, amazing though it is, fills me with horror: so much labor to produce something so few people will ever be able to appreciate. It communicates so little to so few. That’s a kind of artistic nightmare—especially in a writer who showed that, if he were prepared to be traditional, he could write so beautifully: in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and big chunks of Ulysses.

RC You talked of “masculine writing” as drawing attention to itself. Arguably, though, other prose styles do that and are often taken as subversive. Baroque or mannered writing, for instance, doesn’t prioritize accessibility. As soon as your own sentences move away from the cadences of everyday speech, they head towards manneredness.

PG Absolutely. They’re very high-flown. I think the distinction is between books about other people and books about the writer. Most books fall into one camp or the other. It’s to do with the extension of sympathies; that Forsterian thing: “only connect.” It’s funny how I’m always so queasy about Forster. He’s so patently a huge influence, so he’s probably the last writer anyone’s likely to admit as one because his influence is so strong. Forster’s the perfect example of someone who absolutely writes about other people. You have very little sense of who he is in those books, though maybe he’s everybody. You get an almost Buddhist sense of loss of self in search of the truth. Of course, it’s all completely artificial, because he’s a novelist writing that book. But in terms of the world of the book as you read it, that’s what comes across, whereas with Hemingway, say, you can barely see over the big man’s shoulders to the story he’s ostensibly telling.

PG Certainly in the American tradition there is. I speak as somebody who devours a lot of American stuff. Like a lot of gay men, my first encounter with any gay writing was through American books—so much so it was quite confusing, growing up in the provinces where there was no gay world at all, and all my earliest images of it built by American fiction. It was all New York. Dancer from the Dance was a very early book I read; Edmund White’s novels too. And awful things like Larry Kramer’s Faggots. The strange thing about that was that it was a very black comedy but published as a lurid romp.

PG Absolutely. When I read them, I switched off all critical faculties. I remember as a teenager adoring those terrible Gordon Merrick novels like The Lord Won’t Mind. I knew they were complete trash, but they were so exciting.

PG I can’t begin to separate them from the personal, educative role they played. The real breakthrough, of course, is when gay fiction starts to write bad gay characters; people who aren’t heroes.

PG Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star are real breakthrough novels in that sense. They both have obsessive, rather unlikable men as their voice; men who’re also dominant sexually, which is rare. I feel the last ten years have been a breakthrough period for gay publishing, to the point where it’s redundant. Mainstream publishers have realized that literature by out gay men doesn’t have to be ghettoized. There’s a whole group of us floating off in slightly different directions. I wonder whether in ten years there’ll actually be an identifiable genre at all, or whether people will think this was a funny little period the novel went through.

RC For publishers, “gay” has been a useful marketing niche; a way of reaching more people. Yet many gay writers complain there’s a ceiling in terms of potential markets—a pretty low one, if you’re sold as a gay novelist.

PG Yes. My publishers took a long time realizing a lot of women love reading my stuff. I think I have a bigger female than gay readership nowadays—not least because I don’t write many hot sex scenes. That’s one of the hooks for a male audience, whereas women are very interested in character. A woman will happily read a novel about a gay relationship if it’s about the relationship, rather than just about sex and cruising.