Interview with Nicholas Murray

Nicholas Murray is a freelance author based in Wales and London. Born in Liverpool he is the author of a book about the city, How Spirited a Town, several literary biographies including lives of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold, two collections of poems, and two novels (A Short Book About Love and Remembering Carmen). He is a regular contributor of poems, essays and reviews to newspapers and literary magazines. He is a member of the Welsh Academy and of English PEN. He has lectured at literary festivals and universities in Britain, Europe and the United States. From 2003-2007 he was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary, University London and is currently an RLF Advisory Fellow.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for A Corkscrew is Most Useful?

Nicholas Murray: I have always been interested in travel and travel writing and in fact my first book, in 1993, was about Bruce Chatwin, the most glittering recent example of the genre, though he always said he loathed the designation 'travel writer'. I have also had a long-standing interest in the Victorian period in which I specialised at university and I wrote a life of one the most eminent literary Victorians, Matthew Arnold, so you could say two strands of personal interest came together. Travel of course, as I try to show in my book, got big in the 19th century, both in terms of the boom in exploration, in imperial adventure, and mass tourism under the capable guidance of Thomas Cook so it's overall a very interesting phenomenon with all sorts of political reverberations which, partly for reasons of space, I hint at and suggest rather than approach polemically. There is a continuing debate about the role of Western scholarship and presentation of "the East", crystallized by Edward Said's "Orientalism" which still seems to annoy a lot of people but he won't go away. How we write about, think about, speak about other cultures has deep political implications and couldn't be more relevant to current scare-politics about the Muslim world.

MT: How long did it take you to write and research your book? What was the most interesting thing you learned?

NM: People always ask me this and, because I work very fast and slightly frenetically, and because I am a full-time writer not an academic doing it in spare time, I manage to research books very quickly and I sometimes feel guilty at my facility in comparison to the more slow-moving scholars. Let's say two and a half years. But how long is a piece of string? There was, with this one, masses of material so I could only sample the vast field of travel writing in the period. The most interesting thing I learned I suppose was that there was such diversity of thinking in the high imperial noon. Not every Victorian traveller was a reactionary imperial beast and some were quite sensitive to what the academics now call The Other. Even the larger than life figures like Sir Richard Burton could swing between racist piffle and quite enlightened observation and understanding.

MT: Do you enjoy the research or were you impatient to get down to the actual writing?

NM: I do enjoy the research but nothing can beat that magic moment when you know you are ready to start writing and the truly creative shaping starts.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

NM: I write directly onto a computer (except for poetry which I still write by hand with pencil and paper) and although I wouldn't go quite so far as Ben Jonson did in saying Shakespeare "never blotted a line" I do always hope that what comes out in a first fluent stream is going to be the best version and that revisions and self-editing (vital for any writer) are just that, ways of improving the first and inspired draft. Too much fiddling and unpicking can hamper as well as advance a piece of writing and it can lose its spontaneity.

MT: Previously you've written novels, poems and you are well known as a literary biographer (of Kafka, Huxley and Andrew Marvell) -- why then the move into this kind of history book?

NM: Partly, as I have said, because the interest was there but - and I have always been quite frank about this in articles and lectures - the publishing climate is changing. There no longer seems a willingness on the part of trade publishers to commission serious literary biographies of the kind I wrote for over a decade. They are pushing writers towards more "group" portraits or general historical works which are perceived as having more sales potential. History does seem to be on the up-and-up and literary biography peaked some time ago. It's partly therefore a question of fashion. But there are some worrying trends in publishing and I have to fight hard against pessimism, because I am instinctively one of nature's optimists, however slight the justification. Ultimately it is the ordinary reader who is being sold short when dumbing-down gets into its stride.

MT: Are we likely to see another novel from you Nicholas?

NM: Yes, certainly. I am working currently on this. But some of the same strictures about the publishing climate apply. This is a tough time for serious novelists (I do hate the term "literary novelist" but that is what I mean I suppose).

MT: You are also a blogger! How do you find blogging? What have you learned from your time in the blogosphere?

NM: Well, the obvious thing about blogging is its freedom and pleasant anarchy. Some blogs are surprisingly good; some of them are crap. But I think overall the blogosphere is a good thing in allowing a thousand critical flowers to bloom and challenge the cliquish and self-satisfied norms of contemporary reviewing, though, to my surprise, it has its own forms of cliquishness and sycophancy here and there.

MT: Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the responses to your books? Have you learned anything from them?

NM: I have been asked this before and I always say yes because it seems to me arrogant to say that one has nothing to learn from them. That said, reviewers are a funny lot. I have had mostly good reviews but even the good ones sometimes miss the point, fail to describe what one is actually doing in the book. The bad ones are often bad, not because they expertly skewer some shortcoming, but because they seem motivated by a curiously arbitrary malice. I know almost no one in the literary world so why anyone should want to tilt at me I haven't the foggiest. And mostly they don't, but I recall a snide aside in The Observer by Fiona McCarthy about my little book on Bruce Chatwin which can be explained simply as the need to put down an upstart who had the effrontery to write about a highly fashionable writer without being someone one knows don't-you-know. This sort of thing should have died out but it lingers on fitfully here and there. And then there are the people who should never have been given books to review in the first place because they haven't the slightest trace of ability to do so. Apart from that, all reviewers are wonderful, sage and impossibly charming.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

NM: Read, walk, travel, listen to music, and amuse myself in countless ways. I am a professional hedonist and I am a happy sort of chap but I have no obvious "hobbies" as such and I prefer watching paint dry to all forms of sport.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

NM: I think I ought to have such an idea because I believe writing is about communication and an act of communication needs writer/reader, speaker/auditor, but I fear I don't have a clear picture of that ideal reader. It sounds arrogant to say: "I write for myself" but in a sense one does or "for people like myself" who like literature for its own sake, for the pleasure and illumination it brings, for the joy of language, not for any of the other extraneous reasons.

MT: What are you working on now?

NM: I am brooding like an ugly fat hen over that novel I mentioned. I am polishing a sequence of poems about love. And I am earning my living writing another big fat book, this time about the poets of the Great War.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

NM: Shouldn't this be the easiest question of all? But I always find it so difficult because I am so eclectic and exploratory and always want to find new writers rather than keep re-reading favourites. But I re-read The Great Gatsby recently and told myself I should revisit books more. I have never shaken off the impact of first reading Joyce as a teenager in Liverpool and I am just reading some more Henry James and realising what a master he is. I adore Proust but because of a stubborn determination to read him in the original I still have not finished. Is any novelist better than Dostoevsky? Conrad is another master.

I so despair at the quality of most contemporary fiction that I read mostly classic literature but I have always enjoyed J.M. Coetzee, John Banville, Graham Swift (though he should get out more), and I read a certain amount of contemporary French fiction. I also like the ludic Europeans (Kundera, Perec, Calvino et al).

I read as much poetry as I can. I have just written an essay for the next issue of "Slightly Foxed" on Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals which, for sheer, unadulterated pleasure is unbeatable. But you want to know what I would take to the desert island: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Complete Works of Yeats/Hopkins/Marvell/Donne, A La Recherche, Anna Karenina, The Trial, Lord Jim and of course Don Quixote. But if the boat was sinking then just Shakespeare's Sonnets which would keep me afloat better than any life raft ("So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.")

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

NM: Read, read, and read again. Steep yourself in the best that writing has achieved and let it permeate your soul. Embrace language as a lover. And never study the market or be canny.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

NM: Thank you for asking me to field these questions. I have also recently published (though it was written before "Corkscrew" was begun) another book, about my native city: So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool which I enjoyed writing and I think people will enjoy reading.

More sententiously to close: if there is a contest between Literature and Life (I am not sure there is) let Life be triumphant. Living well is perhaps more important than writing well.