Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcript 11

   These excerpts concern Nicholas Mosley's autobiography Efforts At Truth, which he was writing at the time that we were recording the interviews in 1991. The book was published in 1994 and we talked about its reception during the 1997 interviews. 

N - When I'd finished writing Hopeful Monsters, I thought I'd try to write some form of autobiography which carried on from the biographies that I'd written about my father, which were also about myself. The books about my father went up until the end of the Second World War, and I told a lot of my own autobiography in these books because I wanted to give the view of my father from the family angle, as well as his public life, and one way of doing that was to talk about the family and my relationship with my father. After the Second World War, I was close to my father for a couple of years – this was when he was out of politics and I was still in the Army, doing a sort of staff job in England. Then when I got out of the Army, I went to Oxford for a year. And I then wanted to get away, I wanted to get away from Oxford, from all past schools and families and ties and universities and everything, and I married my first wife Rosemary. We went off to be on our own as a young married couple, and, really quite openly, we wanted to get away from our families.

    Well, I wanted to carry on some sort of autobiographical writing about that, but I very much distrusted ordinary autobiographical writing, because it seemed to me so often to be a justification of the person writing. He sort of argued his case, he made out how he'd been right the whole time, and other people had been wrong, and all that sort of thing, with a few token mistakes thrown in that didn't seem too bad, you know. On the whole, I haven't trusted autobiographical writing much. But I thought that one way of getting around this, or getting through this, as it were, was to look at my early novels, which were very much autobiographical. I was the sort of novelist - as must have become clear, the way I've been going on - my novels have tried to be expressions of what I feel about life, what I think I've learnt about life. They're efforts to put into some form the difficulties and impossibilities and the paradoxes of life, etc., etc.. And so they are, to a certain extent, autobiographical. At the same time, they are not directly autobiographical... 

    So I got the idea of trying to do some autobiographical writing that would examine what I was saying in my early novels, what was written in letters at the time, and what I remembered of my life, and consider what relation there was between the sort of novels I was writing and the sort of life I was leading. Because one of the things that had come to interest me was the way in which so many writers of my generation, and of a later generation in particular, were writing about life as an absolutely hopeless business where no one made any communication with anyone else and life was a very dismal affair, and yet they - these people, some of whom I knew - seemed to be leading a happy life, they seemed to be able to make communication with other people, they seemed to be okay. And yet they were writing about life as if it were an awful mess. So I was interested in that. Then, when I looked back on my early novels, I found that I was doing the same sort of thing. After I came back from the war, I wrote Spaces of the Dark, which is about a young man who has returned from the war, where things had gone wrong for him, and for whom things kept on going wrong at home. This wasn't like my own experience. My own experience was that I'd got through the war okay, I'd been lucky. And when I got home I had a nice time. When I was twenty-four I married, and we were happy, and we went off on a long sort of working honeymoon. I was going to write my first novel, which I did.

    Anyway, that was one of the things that interested me. Why do these people write novels about life being a mess, when in fact their lives, to a very large extent, don't seem to be a mess. Then I wondered whether novel writing was actually putting up some sort of smokescreen, some sort of protection: you had to say life was a mess, because if you said life was not a mess then perhaps your luck would run out and you would become a mess. This would be rather like touching wood: you have to sort of get the worst out in novels, as some sort of self-protection. And yet at the same time, I thought my own novels - which were to a certain extent doing this - were also some desperate way of trying to break through the smokescreens and protections that one put up in ordinary life, or ordinary life put up around one. And so I thought I'd try to write about that.

    Another thing I thought about writing autobiography was… the more people tried to justify themselves, the more they appeared to be hopelessly thick-skinned and arrogant and, indeed, sort of stupid. This seemed to me to be the case with so many autobiographies by politicians. Politicians just tried to say that they'd been right the whole time and everyone else had been wrong, which seemed to me just sort of stupid. And I then read something that had been written by the philosopher Wittgenstein, who had thought of writing his autobiography, but then wrote in his notebook that he felt the only form of autobiography that would be valid would be that in which the writer told all the worst side of himself, all the ignoble and - I think his word was – “shameful” things, because this at least wouldn't be just self-justification, and it might carry some authenticity, rather like the Catholic idea of confession. If one confesses one's sins, one thereby gains a dignity which far outweighs the indignity of the sins which one is confessing. And I thought this was a very interesting idea. Wittgenstein didn't actually do it, he said he felt that he couldn't, so I thought I'd have a go.

   For the last year or so I have been trying to write this form of autobiography, looking at my early novels to see what I was doing with them, then looking at my own story of the time and trying to tell the bad things. I quote from other people's letters who were upset by me and angry with me and hurt by me; I don't quote from my own letters, which I suppose would have been self-justifying - or efforts to justify myself, I don't know. I haven't got these letters, anyway: an awful lot of my own letters seem to have been lost or torn up, thrown away, I don't know what.

   So I went along with that, and I became interested in this problem. First of all, there's the question whether novel writing is a sort of smokescreen, making a story out of chaos. Okay, to a certain extent it is, but then, insofar as one does this in a novel, one learns how to do it in one's life, one sees how one's life might be some story. One is actually making a story of one's life in the same way as novelists make a story out of their writing. And I think everyone does this, everyone actually does make their life, they make choices which make a certain pattern, and that is their life. And it helps if you see that you're doing this, because then you might have some little relationship with the pattern that is coming out through you, from you, with you. And then one of the things that struck me very forcibly was that if one only told the, as it were, self-justifying things about oneself, then, of course, one makes no pattern, there's no drama, it's just one long drone of self-justification, there's no interest. I don't know how people write - how people read, let alone write - all those autobiographies by politicians who try to make out that they're right and everyone else is wrong. There's no pattern, there's no drama. All stories, all human life, is an intermingling of the dark and the light, the good and the bad. All pattern, all shape, all life, is to do with the interplay of light and dark, and - as a human being – it is perhaps through one’s own knowledge of light and dark, and one's own vision of it, that one has some hand in the patterning.

   But as I went on with this, I found, of course, that there are very grave problems, because if you tell all the shameful things about yourself and quote other people's letters to you saying, you know, You're really doing very wrong, you're letting me down, why don't you do this...  if you just tell the other people's side of the story and you don't tell your own, that's alright for you, because you know the other side of the story, but, of course, your readers don't. And in the Catholic idea of confession, of course, the idea is that you should only tell your sins, you can't go to confession and start saying, Well, I've done this bad, but it really wasn't my fault at all! If you start doing that, you aren't doing it right and you don't get absolution, that's the theory. But, of course, if you're writing a book, you aren’t talking to God, you're talking to your readers.

   But then, one stage further than that, I wondered, hell, who is one writing for? In some sense or other, if you’re a serious writer, you feel that you're writing for what might be called “God.” And if readers don't understand you, who cares? The reader that you're writing for should - "should" in inverted commas, whatever this means; perhaps “could” - should understand that by telling the bad things about yourself, the shameful things about yourself, you are leaving out the other side of the question, and thereby they might - or might not - feel that you're gaining a sort of dignity by so doing. But, of course, the wicked ways of the world being such, the reader who is used to revelations in the News of the World and such stuff, and taking all this seriously, has, of course, got used to thinking...  I don't know what they have got used to thinking. What the hell have they got used to thinking? I don't know. This seems to me to be an unknown area. Supposing someone who's been caught by one of these absurd stories in the News of the World just held a press conference and said, "Yes it's absolutely true, sure, in this area I did a lot of stupid things, I was a bit of a shit" or "I did a lot of stupid things, haven't you ever done stupid things; so what?" Would he or would he not gain dignity? I don't know. I like to think that with a lot of people he would gain a lot of dignity. We'll see. Or we won't see: I'm not sure whether I'll ever publish this autobiographical volume I've been writing, I don't know.

   I would like to think that the mark of a hopeful monster would be the willingness… not just concerning  himself, but concerning other people, that if they what's called "came clean," he would give them honour in respect of their coming clean that would outweigh whatever dirt they'd gotten rid of in the process. That is, a hopeful monster would have the same attitude to sin as the Catholic God! I think that's quite a nice idea. [pause] But there is then the problem about other people. One of the things about the Catholic idea of confession is that one mustn't start confessing other people's sins, one can't. But the trouble with one's own story, of course, is that other people are involved, one's involved in a lot of black and white, sort of ins and outs, with other people. And one has no right to expose other people who don't want to be exposed, even if one is trying to tell all the bad things about oneself. Sometimes this isn't always right for other people. [pause]

   As it gets closer to the present it becomes harder. One can look back at one's early life with some detachment, I think; one can look back at what one was, doing a lot of stupid mean things and fighting for oneself. One can also see that one was doing quite a lot of quite honourable things, which one can't talk about without feeling dishonourable. This is one of the trick situations in life that I think I talked about earlier: the trouble with things like dignity and honour is that if one says "I'm being dignified" or "I'm being honourable" one straightaway isn't dignified or honourable. It's an undignified thing to say “I'm being dignified,” so you can't say it. One almost can't say "My good friend so-and-so is very honourable and dignified"! Because if you do, people think, Wow, that's the sort of thing that one can't say. It's much easier to say all the shit. It's more acceptable to everyone and more fun... as long as it's not too bad.

N - I think one looks forward in life; there's no pattern happening at the moment. If you look at the present, the relevant question is, What the hell's happening? There are a hundred thousand million things happening all at once. There's this strand, this strand, this strand, there are all these interplays, and you, the human individual, picks, or has picked for him, or her, this or that, according to - very seldom - conscious choice. Things happen and the outcome is this or that. I think one of the things I used to say a lot in these books is that what happens depends not on your choice but on everything that you've ever been and everything that you've ever done, on everything that you've been and done, everything that's happened to you. Every time that you've felt that you've had some sort of choice, you've made yourself into the character that you are, that makes an instinctive move here or there, that reacts to circumstance in this way rather than in that way. So the pattern that you do make out of all these loose ends, all these deadends, out of this chaos - the pattern that you do make, that you can see if you look back - you can see some sort of pattern has happened - that pattern is caused not by conscious "Oh yes, I'll do that and I'll do that," it's just what you've made of yourself throughout the whole of your life, and often in relation to other people, or one or two special people, husband or wife, and so on. One doesn't see any pattern in the future. The future, as far as one knows, is open, it's open to everything - chance, what you are, everyone else around you - it's just open. But the strange thing is that, looking back, you see the sort of pattern that makes you realize that you're actually forming a pattern at the time. 

November 1997 at the same location, "Peaklet" cottage in Sussex. .

JB - When we talked in Majorca in 1991, you were writing your autobiography, Efforts at Truth; were you happy about the result of that? 

N - I don’t know; it was a risky book to write. I wanted to be as honest as I could be. I’d written the two books about my father, in which I’d tried to be honest, I’d tried to be fair. And I was very fond of my father. I also admired him, his mental energy, and his courage in facing things...  up to a point, and then there was a point when he didn’t face things. I admired his mind, I didn’t admire his politics, the way he applied his mind. But on a personal level I admired his openness to different things, and I used to talk to him about things. When he was an old man he had an enormous curiosity about life, and I admired that. So I wrote the books which did not admire his politics - they were very critical of his later politics - but I tried to be honest about him: there’s no point trying to be honest about the man if I wasn’t honest about what I thought were the bad things, too. So I tried to be honest about him. Then I thought, well, I should try to write about myself in the same way. I tried to look on myself as I looked on him. I wouldn’t be able to suggest that there might be any good things about my life unless I were honest about the bad things. So I was honest about the bad things, I hope, and I think I was honest. And people did say, Wow, this is a pretty honest book; quite alarmingly self-exposing. And I didn’t mind that. The things I’m writing about in my novels, biographies, whatever, is that the good things don’t make sense unless they’re in the context of the so-called bad things. There is no sense in anything unless there is a pattern, and pattern is made by the interplay of the good things, bad things, darkness and light. That’s what pattern is. If you have all light, there isn’t anything, it’s a blank page. The interesting thing about life is the interplay; and the interesting thing about me, presumably, is the interplay. There are some rather shameful things, but they are part of the interplay. Well... of course, people who read it, if they wanted to say, Wow, there are some pretty crummy things in this book, wow, we can just look at them... And, of course, that’s what the publicity reviewers were sometimes rather apt to say. But no, on the whole, there were quite a few reviews saying that they found the honesty and the effort at truth to be... “exhilarating“ was a word that one or two people used, which I rather liked... i.e., life giving. Well, good, that’s fine.