Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcripts 1

On Mosley's early interest in fiction and his later emphasis on the concept of "knowingness".
May 6, 1991 Can Ravé, Majorca

JB - Why did you write fiction?
NM - Well I suppose I don't know why; it was just a gut level desire to do it. Telling stories seemed a sensible thing to do, but I did not at the start put it in terms of talking about life by telling stories, that the way to understand life was by telling a story.  I wanted to be a writer very early on, and the most interesting sort of writing, the sort of writer I wanted to be, was writing fiction. I didn’t work that out, that’s how I felt. Later on of course I got theories about this being the best way to talk about life and to understand life.

NM - When I was a boy I liked simple fiction; I was no sort of high-brow, genius boy who was reading Walter Scott at the age of eight or something. I used to read thrillers, the “Saint” books, they were the sorts of thrillers when I was young. And there were sort of snob sentimental thrillers by Dornford Yates - do you know him? - about elegant men and ladies in fast Rolls Royces who went to rescue people held in Austrian castles by wicked barons. My first grown-up book that I remember being excited by was Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, which was a sort of - I don't remember it well now - a comic, social comedy. I was at my prep school, my little-boys’ school, which was a very marvelous school, which nowadays gets a lot of publicity. There were quite a lot of well-known people who are now in the media world, and every now and again they write their reminiscences, and I brought it into my book about my father. So there were some quite sophisticated little boys of ten and eleven at this school, and one of them had Antic Hay, and I was thrilled with it, because it gave me a view of comedy - a sort of ironic way that one could look at grown-up life.  ...the heroes of those books were artists, writers, that sort, so I liked that. Going on from the Aldous Huxley sort of book, I remember Thomas Hardly, but that must have been later, when I was about fifteen. But I got quite carried away by that. Anyway, whoever I was reading... I never questioned that this was a most exciting thing to do, to write stories, to be able to read stories. Later on one works out explanations for what was a gut-level thing at first.

JB - Was this part of an escape mechanism?
NM - I suppose in a sense all stories...  I had a funny childhood at this time: my mother died when I was nine, my father wasn't often there; I lived in a house organized by nannies and cooks, and an auntie - a very helpful, nice auntie - who came and went, an elder sister who lived a life of her own, was two and half years older than me and was in a different world really. So I was pretty much a loner as a little boy, and I was let be a loner, allowed to be a loner, which I was very grateful for. And so I amused myself  - there was no telly in those days - I either amused myself in the garden, a lovely garden we had, with a river, going out in an old boat on the river, punting about, exploring round about, or when it rained, or in the winter, up in my room reading.

JB -  ...I was going to mention Henry Green, would that have been appropriate? That was later was it?
NM - I think not that much. I didn't read Henry Green until quite a bit after the war. I can't remember how I came across it first. When I came back from the war he was certainly one of the people who was talked about by people I admired. He was a friend of my stepmother's and I somehow came across him and I then read him with a certain amount of enjoyment. I read one that had been just published after the war, about a middle-aged couple who are having a love affair and their children are having a love affair, the one called Living I think, and I thought that was extremely clever and I admired it very much. And then people used to tell me much much later that what I was doing reminded them of Green in some way, which really hadn't struck me. I really wasn't conscious of him influencing me. But I admired the wit, and the conciseness of his sort of writing, what's called the “economy.”

JB - It was very light somehow and yet you had the sense that there was something going on around the corner.
NM - Oh, I see that, that might well be true. Then I read one of his famous ones, about servants - called Loving is it? - out in Ireland, and that I didn't much like. I thought he didn't have that quite right in some way; it didn't impress me. But I agree about the thing going on around the corner. The only one which I loved was the one about the middle-aged couple and the young couple; I was impressed by that.

JB - And then there was - you've mentioned to me, about the war - Ford Maddox Ford and Frederick Manning.
NM - Yes, well Ford I only read a long time afterward; I hadn't ever read it until just the other day almost, when I was in my sixties. And when I read him I wished I'd read him a long time ago, because it would have been an encouragement. And perhaps he would have influenced me, I don't know, because I'd never read him for some reason or other. Manning, yes, who wrote Her Privates We, or The Middle Parts of Fortune, yes he kept on changing the title didn't he. Yes I was very impressed by that. He was one of the authors who I was told about by Henry Williamson, whom I loved when I was a young man. Henry Williamson wrote these books about the first world war; there was an early set of books about the war, The Pathway and A Dream of Fair Women, which I thought were marvelous books. And I still do: I read them again the other day. They're a bit - I would call them now - sort of romantic, hopeless, in a sense, but when I was young that was what I was interested in, that was what I wanted to write. And then Manning's Her Privates We was a book very much recommended by Henry Williamson, and there was a book called Winged Victory, about the Air Force during the first world war.

JB - Well... obviously I'm most interested in this notion of [novels] being negative, or not doing enough with style.
NM - Well not using style to do what could be done with style... Yes I suppose this is the question what style, poetry, is trying to do; I suppose it's trying to give resonances over and above what the simple use of the words is saying, isn't it. Poetry gives you the feeling that there is much more going on than unpoetic words would be able to hold; so you get undertones, overtones, you get connections, resonances, which brings it alive, yes.

JB - And you'd agree that there's a sort of instrumental effect of your writing, that it is not just communicating resonances, but the effort needed to interpret or decipher the text is generating something.
NM - Well, I suppose, yes, a lot of my writing is about people who are undergoing some search. They don't think that what they are on about is very simple; they are trying to work out what it is that they are on about while they're on about it. I think I want to transmit this feeling to the reader: most of the time they're involved in something that's just a bit out of their reach - what's happening here? what am I finding out? - and at the end one hopes one gets illumination - Oh my God, that's what it is about, that's what I'm finding out is it! And then there's something else, so they go on. And that's what I think is the excitement about reading, that's what I get excitement reading books about, that there's always something going on just around the corner that I'm having to be alert to find out what it is, and then it is there. And when it is there - it's not something you can pin down and put into simple words, what's there, but what is there is something that you have had to look for, and your looking for it is part of what is actually there.

JB - I'm interested in the unspoken sense that you develop in the course of reading. You're making linkages but you're not able to articulate them; you're just sensitive to various connections, which you would probably express by talking in terms of resonances, but it's becoming attuned to a kind of rhythm...
NM - I think what I'm trying to indicate and to represent is that this is what is exciting about life. If you think you know exactly where you are in life, that you have the whole thing at your fingertips and under your control, two things: one, it is pretty boring, and, two, it isn't true, because I don't think life ever is under one person's control. There are a whole lot of things going on that are always just out of reach, out of earshot, eyesight, whatever it is. And to be aware of these things going on, to be aware of this fact, attentive to this possibility, is not only exciting, because you are involved in a process - I was going to say a game, but of course it's a very serious game, a life-game - you're involved in this yourself; and also, if you haven't got this sense, you've got it wrong. If you think you understand everything that is going on, the odds are almost an infinite amount to one that you are kidding yourself.

JB - Yes. I'm interested in the level of understanding, that you wouldn't be able to piece these things together in some verbal way; it's not even realizing quite that you see connections; it's not even at the stage where you say, Oh, yes, I see. It is just becoming attuned to it, and having one's mind move along with the style.  NM - Yes.  JB - So that there's a comfortableness. To me that's picking up resonances and connections on a deeper level, but it is not something that you could ever verbalize. That's the part of the wordless sense that is by definition out of verbalization. NM - Yes, well one's using words to get beyond what words can in a straightforward manner do. JB - But there is a sense of recognition on that level, a comfortableness, a sense that you're getting somewhere, and you know when that stops, when you're just lost. NM - From the way I write. JB - Well yes, from the way you write, but from life in general: there's a comfortableness when you're taking things in and making some sense on some level; you don't feel disoriented. NM - Yes I see what you mean. JB - And then there's a time when you know you just don't know what's going on, you've missed it somehow. N - Yes, yes there are times when you don't know what's going on and you're lost and it's chaotic, and there are times when you don't quite know what's going on but it's extremely exciting. JB - Yes. NM - And when I say exciting, I mean lively. JB - Alertness. NM - Alertness. Well this is like all the good things in life, like being in love: one really doesn't have the slightest idea what's going on but it's a very nice feeling. Being in a state of total "unlove" one also doesn't know what's going on, but it isn't a very nice feeling. It's that sort of idea.

 JB - Now is what you said earlier part of your spiel, part of your literary, newspaper spiel?  Because if it was, it was very good. NM - Oh I see what you mean. No [smiles]. No I think this is new. I've tried to put this into words when people ask me questions, but it's always touch and go. It's rather like what we're talking about. It sometimes happens, one has confidence, and sometimes trying to say the unsayable comes out roughly sayable, and sometimes it sticks and it's pretty obviously unsayable. It's quite an odd feeling this. And sometimes the people who come to interview me say, "I see, yes," but I'm not sure it lasts longer than the activity of writing it down, I just don't know.

JB - The only thing I'm concerned about, as a philosopher, is that this unsayable not be left, as Rorty would have it, just left to a wave of the hand. Because I think the sense of familiarity we have - I have anyway - reading your style, is important. And that unspoken sense we have of comfortableness in our environment, and the kind of rhythm between inner and outer is very important: that's the base for the kind of epistemology we have. It's true enough that we can't bring epistemological theory into that area, we can't start talking in terms of sense-data or - the word that's been used - "proto-thoughts". I don't think that helps very much.  NM - No.  JB - But it is essential that there's a level of understanding which can't be articulated but which is essential to the process of being able to articulate and bring things together. NM - Yes, well it does seem to me that this is simply the case: this is what one experiences.  JB - I think this is what you'd call “knowing,” a level of knowingness. NM - Yes, I used to be awkward about using the word “knowingness”, rather than “knowing”, but I now think that's right. It's a state of knowingness, which means knowing something but not being able to quite say what it is that one is knowing; knowingness without necessarily knowing what the object of knowledge is. JB - Yes, it's close to what Wittgenstein was talking about in terms of knowing how to go on, we've grasped the pattern and know how to go on, without being able to say quite what it is that you know. NM - Yes I think that's what it is, and that's when life seems to be ok, to have a meaning, a pattern, a strength, a liveliness... what words can one use? There are times when life seems ok and there are times when life seems a load of old rubbish, and this is all the difference between heaven and hell. Although one cannot tell exactly what the difference is, but one is geared into.... no that's not the right word.... Knowingness, but not being able, or even to try, to put into words what you're being knowing “of,” is a state of - I was going to say, but it's rather overdoing it - a state of grace, almost. It's a very good state, because if you know what can be put into words it is in your control, it is not exciting.

[This session then became a discussion of the concept of a mental state.]
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May 11, 1991

NM - Well in my early novels I think the style fitted in with the kind of thing I was trying to say, this idea of people being trapped. The heroes of my early novels were people who in certain ways felt themselves trapped. There was this young man coming home from the war, he was haunted by the war, he couldn't get out of the things that had been asked of him during the war, things he didn't want to do but had to do, or whatever.  He felt himself trapped by the past, by his own nature; he fell in love with two girls at the same time, this sort of thing.  He wanted to do the decent thing but couldn't think what the decent thing was - what the hell is the decent thing? Is killing Germans the decent thing or not? What does 'decent' mean? He felt himself trapped. And I think in my first three published novels there was very much this sense of people being trapped by the society, by the demands society made on them, and also by their own nature, the conflicting demands of their own nature that they couldn't deal with - that was a trap. And I think the style reflected this, it was often a sort of rhetorical style of people shouting against the fact of being trapped, the cries of someone caught in a snare or something, and they were shouting against it, saying it shouldn't be true, shouldn't be happening to me, life is like this but shouldn't be like this... so this was the style, it was a rhetorical, overblown style, as I now see it.

    One way I see it now is that it was both a smokescreen to cover up some feeling of being trapped - or pain, that I couldn't quite handle - it was also a desperate effort to break through the smokescreens that seemed to be put up by life, that were life; life contained this fog.  In a way novels were a desperate effort to break through, but they were also putting up their own smokescreens, ok...  But then after a time I felt that this style, these novels I was writing, were not actually representative of what I was learning. I was learning a bit about how to see; because if one could see the traps, one saw the pattern of the traps one was in, and by so seeing one had one foot out of them, as it were. And I started to learn that although one did not quite know what one was saying by saying this, what one was on about, I began to feel there was some way through the traps perhaps, or out of them. So then I found that the style in which I had been writing my early novels was somehow unsatisfactory: there were these characters shouting against the state of their experience - this is what the world was like - and yet the very fact that they could see that this was what the world was like [meant] that it was no good going on shouting about it, and they became accustomed - I became accustomed - to seeing that this was what the world was like. So ok, what's the point of going on shouting about it, it's like shaking one's fist at God, what's the point, it's silly.

    So that was the time, toward the end of the 1950's, when I stopped writing novels altogether for a number of years.... I have talked earlier about the influence that this Christian monk, Father Raynes, had on me, and for a time I did lead a more committed Christian life in an orthodox way: I went to church, I did the sort of things that committed Christians were supposed to do. And I gave up novels, because I thought there was a direct conflict between the way Christians saw a good life - which was being commit-ted to certain routines, certain activities, a certain way of life - was in conflict with what seemed to be necessary for good writing, which was to expose oneself to all forms of experience, not to cut oneself off, not to limit oneself when one was doing something that was useful for learning about life and writing novels about what life was life. So for about five or six or more years I didn't write any novels. I thought then that by so doing I had got through to some further form of understanding. And I got through to a further form of understanding even in the way I understood Christianity. Christianity seemed to me to be saying that after a period of commitment to God the Father, to Christ, to God the Son, after that period of commitment to rules and style, how to deal with the paradoxes by sacrifice... by commitment of oneself to that style of life, I thought that what one was being told that one should then learn was how to go ahead under one's own steam, as it were, and that one should go ahead under one's own steam. As I was saying earlier, at the end of the Gospels it seemed to me that Christ was saying specifically that if He stayed around on earth the disciples wouldn't be able to learn to do things for themselves, they would always be turning to Him. So He was going to go, He had to go; Christ said he had to go, so that they could learn how to do things for themselves, by themselves, in relation to themselves. And there was going to be this guiding spirit inside them, called the Holy Spirit, which was going to enable them to do this, and if Christ stayed around - that is, if one carried on being committed to listening to something else, some set of rules, or some style of obedience to a figure like Christ - one was going to be stuck. This is a process that one had to go through to learn, but when one had learnt it then one could not stay in it, then it would be once more being stuck. You had to get out on your own and listen to the dictates of this guiding spirit within one.

   Well now, ok, I started to feel I understood this, not with my mind but with my guts: I see, this is ok. So then I wanted to start writing novels again. I suddenly saw a whole new way of writing novels about people who were not stuck, people who didn't duck the complexities and contradictions and paradoxes of life but say, ok, I've got something within me that can deal with this. So I started writing my second lot of novels, as it were, which were Meeting Place, Accident, Impossible Object, and Natalie, Natalia, and they were about people not simply being stuck, but insofar as they knew what life was like, they knew that human beings had these difficulties, these predicaments - they had predicaments in themselves, between themselves and society - insofar as you knew this you were not stuck. This new attitude was epitomized in that sentence from Accident:  William says to Charlie, “Why can't novels just be about character, action, and society?” And Charlie says, “The trouble is that we know too much about character, action, and society now.” Then William says, “Why write novels?” and Charlie says, “That's the point, we can now write about people knowing.” And that's what I was trying to do, I was trying to write about people who were not a different type of human being, they just carried around in them the knowingness of what it was to be a human being.

   These people weren't any different from anyone else, or in a sense they weren't different from the characters in my earlier novels in that they still found themselves in the same predicament, at odds with themselves and at odds with society. But they carried around with them this knowingness and this gave them a different style of behaviour, a behaviour certainly of more energy, more hopefulness, and more freedom. They weren't these sort of doomladen people who felt themselves trapped. Ok, [one is] trapped, but so what, make the best of the trap. It is then that I got the image of how my characters behaved, of how to learn about being on a tightrope.  So these second set of novels were in a different style, there was not the long-winded rhetoric, there were not the sort of cries of the trapped voice crying out about being trapped. What I hoped, what I tried to get, was the voice of someone much more listening, much more talking and hearing themselves talk, and leaving a bit of silence and noticing what next was happening, and then, having heard what was happening, then doing something slightly different. Also listening to this inner voice, that one had been told could lead one "into all truth" [chuckles].  I said. Ok, that's fine, but one had better listen to it. Of course one doesn't hear a voice, but you pause and you listen, and perhaps something happens that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise; things happen which you wouldn't notice were happening if you just went on bellowing in the old rhetorical style.

    So I started quite a different style, more sort of elliptical, more sort of leaving things open, short sentences, pauses, the difference between what people said and what people were thinking, between what people said and what they thought they ought to have said, what they might have said. After they'd said something they were apt to pause and look at what they'd said. So this style that I'd evolved was quite a straightforward way of trying to say this thing that I'd felt was necessary for a human being to be what they really were. In a sense it was moving on a stage, but it wasn't really on another stage, it was just facing the fact of what humans actually are instead of making a frightful din, an uproar, about... how one couldn't face what human beings really were.

    And so those novels, Accident... and then Impossible Object started off with the sentence, "You know how love flourishes in time of war..".   So this got in two ideas: one, there is the paradox that love flourishes in time of war. By that I meant, literally, people are romantic in time of war: all these images of soldiers going off, and the love, and people on station platforms. Also love... love is a state of tension and war, in some sort of sense. "War" is rather an overblown word for it, but I mean love is...you are tense, you're trying to keep your head above water, you're both wanting to help the other person in every way you can to be themselves, you love them; you're also trying to hold them! In a sense everything is a contradiction: you love them and want them to be themselves, but you don't want them to be themselves at all, you want them to be you!  So I got this phrase, "You know how love flourishes in time of war...". But also the important thing in that sentence is that I was talking to you, I was talking straight to the reader: "Now look, you know how love flourishes in time of war, so cut all the crap about how you think love ought to be peaceful, a lovely state of bliss or "war is hell, we must stop all war, human being shouldn't go to war!" - now, you know how love flourishes in time of war.  And I then went on on that, and all the time I was trying to get knowingness, my characters with a sense of knowingness - ok, now we know all this. One of the phrases in one of the later novels was, ok, now we know all this, we know love is difficult, our children are wonderful but they're an absolute pain in the neck, we know all this, so what now? We face this, ok, then what?  So my characters were saying this themselves; I was saying this to the reader in my style:  I was inviting the reader in, in to participate in the effort to create a style of life through a style of writing... that would be able to be at home in knowing that this is what human beings were like and this was the human predicament.
JB - And that's the style of consciousness.
NM - And that's the style of being conscious of what a human being is. It's the proper style of self-consciousness, which is nothing to do with shyness and being scared. It's the style of heartfelt effort to face what is.

JB - It would be nice if you could make the connection between the Dantean line [in Natalie, Natalia], finding oneself in the wood, where you are the finder as well, so it's turning back on yourself, and finding it through the writing...  NM - Yes, that was the line - "Here I am in the middle time of life..."  JB - Well in Dante there is no knowing about himself, he's telling about himself...  NM - Oh, yes... well I can't really talk about "unknowing" Dante, that's going a bit out, but... well, yes, he was just talking about where I was in the middle time of life, and then I had to go down through Hell into purgatory before I got into Heaven. And I was saying, but alright, we know all this now, we've read Dante, or if not there was something about what he was saying that has sunk into our consciousness. Ok, so good old Dante, but we know this now, so we can waylay ourselves, watch ourselves, catch ourselves, look at ourselves doing this thing of having to go down through purgatory to get into heaven, so, alright, what's the style of knowing?

NM - ...Yes, well there was this line that I wrote in Natalie, Natalia, something like, "In a dark wood in the middle part of life I tried to waylay myself like a bandit ", and that was in reference to... well it's the start of Dante's Divine Comedy isn't it, and my point was that we know this now, if we know this pattern that human beings find themselves in, in one way or another, in the middle time of life they find themselves having to go through hell, and with any luck through purgatory and up again into heaven. Ok, we know this, Dante has written and something of what he's written has sunk into consciousness; not many people have read the thing, but this imagery has sunk into consciousness, of a journey through hell and purgatory into heaven, and so what if we try to catch ourselves and see ourselves doing this, waylay ourselves like a bandit... yes there's the image of "Stand and Deliver"!  So what have we got to deliver?  One's knowledge that this is the case... and so what?  How does one's knowledge alter the style of one's doing it, of carry on?  Does one really have to go the whole journey through hell, or, knowing it, is the journey slightly different?  That was the idea of Natalie, Natalia. My hero was someone who was a very sort of self-aware man. He could see himself doing some pretty absurd things, going down into some sort of hell and some sort of purgatory. He, as it were, didn't particularly want to stop himself, he though this was some sort of journey he had to go on, because knowing the pattern, he knew that one doesn't come out the other side unless one goes in the first side. But his style of doing this of course couldn't be too portentous: if it was, he wouldn't be seeing himself.  He had to see he was making a fool of himself, he had to carry around the vision that he was making a fool of himself, even risking himself and other people around him; he had to be a bit scared, he had to carry the knowledge that he would be scared, and he would be risking himself and others, but carrying around this knowledge in an ironic, joking way. And one of the things about Natalie, Natalia is that there are these quite sort of sad things happening often, but they're told in this way, Look, I know human beings are ridiculous, but this isn't a matter to lie down and die. Ok, if human beings are ridiculous, laugh for God's sake.

[This turns to a more detailed discussion of ways in which the action in Natalie, Natalia might reflect Mosley's views of the characters' mental states.]