Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcripts 4

   On the bench outside Peaklet Cottage, Sussex, England October 18, 1997. Discussing his idea of the hopeful monster and the search for meaning, Mosley was animated and speaking very quickly. 
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   N: Human responsibility isn’t to organize the next stage in evolution, it’s to listen for what might be the pattern of it. Humans do have the potentiality to do this. What I mean by that is: you’re listening to what is going on in the outside [world]. You’re keeping your eyes and ears open. It’s not that by the act of watching and listening you expect to hear anything - you don’t hear voices from heaven - but the very fact of listening means that your mind is open and you’re available to be affected by things that are happening. And it’s by the very fact of being in this way open-minded, open-eared and open-eyed...  it is by this ability and this attitude to life that you do see the patterns that you would not see otherwise. If you’re blinkered, if you think “I know exactly what I want, and exactly how I’m going to go and get it,” then you shut out everything else.  Open-eared and open-eyed, you are susceptible to what is going on.  And therefore what you do, your attitude to what is going on, is different, and therefore what’s going on actually changes. You find yourself going on paths that you wouldn’t have gone on otherwise. And that is what I mean by a hopeful monster. A hopeful monster is someone who keeps his - his or her - eyes and ears open and is open-minded and susceptible to what’s going on.  That’s the first step.  But then what a hopeful monster finds is that then different things seem to be happening than would otherwise happen. He’s open to different things and different things happen. This attitude of life isn’t simply a passive thing of sitting and watching: if you do this, things happen differently from what they would have done if you had had a different attitude. 

   J: It’s not a matter of confidence either, then. 
   N: It’s a matter of trust that if you do this it will make sense. When you first do something like this you’re going into the dark, you think you’re making a fool of yourself: “What am I doing? I’m trying to listen to some pattern, what does this mean?” I’ve called it the journey into the dark. But then you get used to it, you get used to doing this... and one has the experience that things do happen in a different way. You get an awareness of things happening In a different way from what would happen otherwise, so they do happen in a different way.. And then you get a sense of trust that this is going to happen. Sometimes it doesn’t: one’s keeping one’s ears open, but nothing's going on... [laughs] ..but what the hell, that’s life. This attitude does seem to be what they talk about in meditation...  I’ve never been someone who’s “into” meditation really, but I do see what they mean, that if you detach yourself, become aware of yourself in a meditative way; this isn’t a passive thing, it isn’t a passive indulgence; it means you are open to things. And by the fact of being open - your mind is open - then things come into your mind and you notice things in the outside world that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. And so it has a very practical effect.

   N: I think the actual, practical reason now why it can be said that humans have to change is that although they have for years had to survive by aggression, this attitude has now become too dangerous... Humans have been so used to fighting; politics and laws have been adversarial. But now one is forced by technology to face the fact that one does need a different attitude from that of “I’m right; you’re wrong.” And this has coincided with a much more subtle understanding about the way that evolution works. Evolution does not only work through nature “red in tooth and claw”; it also works by cooperation, learning how to cooperate, how to use one another and benefit from one another’s talents. There’s much more understanding of what’s called “symbiosis”: organisms and species helping one another and not fighting. You have to listen for other points of view, for what other people are doing. How can it all fit in?  It’s not just the imposition of one’s own point of view; it’s listening for other points of view. Listening and watching. And the hopeful monster is someone who does realize this, and he thinks that he can’t either survive or be part of evolution by imposing his own ideas, his own will. He or she listens and watches for what is the interplay of other wills, other forms of life. And then if you do this, if a hopeful monster does this, I think one can find that this is not a passive attitude of sitting back and listening and watching: you find there are patterns of interaction in nature, and you’re learning your own mode of interaction with all the things around you - and that’s the way to survive.  That’s the way not only to survive oneself, but not to want to blow up one neighbours the whole time... A hopeful monster is not someone who wants to impose they’re own view on other people, or indeed on himself. The learning over the past fifty years, the ecological learning, has been that although one thinks one can fix things, and one fixes some things, one causes immense disruption elsewhere. I think we are learning to look and to listen much more than we used to, in certain areas. But politics still seems to go roaring on in the old style... where you are not listening but insisting on your own attitudes. The hopeful monster is someone who by listening sees a pattern of how things actually do work: there is symbiosis, there is a pattern of things fitting in and not always being at one another’s throats.

   J: This is a style that you’ve not just talked about and wanted to describe, but which you’ve tried to elicit through your writing. 
   N: Yes, the way to describe this style, or the sort of person who embraces this style is not didactic: you can’t teach it; you can’t teach how to listen. What you can do  is write stories about the way this works, about how this happens. So I suppose my latest stories are ways of trying to do this. The characters start off on certain lines and patterns, and then they go wrong; they find this isn’t working or that isn’t working, so then they ask “What the hell is working?” And out of it comes something unexpected: “Oh yes, I see!” And then carrying on. 

   J: In your style itself you’ve wanted to give a sense of the uncertainty and the questioning and the search - probably since Impossible Object. 
   N: Yes. Impossible Object was a sort of love story, basically, and it was trying to face all the opposites of love: in love you’re both trying to hold the person, grab them and keep them as yours, but if you’re doing that you’re not loving them for what they are, you’re just loving the image of yourself.  So one wants both to love the person as they are, them as a free person,  and also hold them. So there’s a built-in difficulty, impossibility, about love anyway. And there’s no way of coming down on one side or the other - saying one just wants the person to have perfect freedom or that one wants to hold them forever - you have to play this by ear, which is very difficult. So one plays it by ear and sometimes it goes over the top, down the spout...  and sometimes it doesn’t, and eventually, when one looks back on one’s life, one says, “Oh, well I suppose  it hasn’t been all that bad; I’ve played it by ear and it hasn’t been all that bad.” Some things have been bad, but you’ve learned an attitude in which it makes sense. I mean, so much of writing nowadays is people saying that the whole thing doesn’t make sense, so let’s just say everything’s a great big screw-up... That seems to be the style of modern novel writing.

   J: We’ve talked in the past about what you’ve seen as a kind of hopelessness in a lot of modern novels, and a cynicism in public life... I gather that there’s an optimism about the hopeful monster. 
   N: Yes, well, I hope that’s true. Modern novels are very often about people having their aims and desires, and going for them, and failing - because they come up against other people’s different desires and needs - so it all ends up in failure and disaster; which does happen if you just get your own idea and go for it, because other people have their ideas and are going for it  But the point of this idea of hopeful monsters is that if you don’t, if you instead listen for what’s happening around you - and you don’t fit in as just being passive - but you see  listen and watch for what might make sense, then what you find is that it does make sense. The interesting thing about nature is that although there’s a lot of “red in tooth and claw”, it all fits in... bees make their honey but en passant they fertilize all the flowers around them. There’s this tremendous system of everything working if you look at it from the larger point of view. And this I think is what humans have lost the idea of; they’ve got the idea that they’re lords of creation, that they must fix it, that they can fix their own lives. And they can’t. All they can be successful and hopeful about is the sense of themselves as part of the larger patterning in things. 

   J: So there’s a kind of salvation, or hopefulness, in humility. 
   N: Yes, I think one has to be  humble about one’s own desires and needs, one’s own character; one has to see oneself as a bit absurd, but the fact that one can see this is not absurd; the bit that can see is not absurd, and that is very worthwhile!

   J: I remember when you were talking about being a Lord, you found that your style was incompatible with what is probably needed in order to be successful in public life. 
   N: Yes, I think all politicians, in the nature of their tradition, in the Western world, have to be adversarial: you have to be one side of the House or the other, you have to argue a case, then the other chap argues a case against it; then you have a vote, and whatever comes out comes out, but you have to get there by argument and confrontation. That is the way that we’ve been conditioned to run politics,  But I didn’t think that that was the sort of style that I was fitted for at all, as a writer coming into this. I was too wishy-washy, I saw both sides of the questions. One doesn’t know, if one puts ones vote here, who knows what result there’ll be in five years time? Maybe if you’d voted the other way it might’ve come out better. All these questions made me very unsatisfactory as a politician. But as a writer one can be interested in the larger pattern of the way unexpected things come out of actions that you take now; and you  can tell a story in which this is so.  But you can’t be a politician and stand up and say “Well, I don’t agree with this now, but of course it might all come out different in five years time!” You would not be a very popular or indeed effective politician. Although while you mention it, actually the House of Lords is much better in regard to the sort of attitude that I’m talking about than the House of Commons. The House of Commons has become more and more a sort of stupid slanging match... Yaboo, Suks, I’m right and you’re wrong!  The House of Lords has this sort of style of gentlemanliness, a broader view of things, although basically you are arguing for a point of view, a policy, on one side or the other.

   J: As you were saying earlier, a very strong part of the Western tradition is that balance is achieved through adversity. 
   N: Yes, balance is achieved through adversity,  and in the old days you fought, and whoever won the battle, won.  We’ve progressed from that to argument, and then have a vote. And the great merit of democracy was that whoever lost the vote stuck to it: if one lost the vote one accepted it, one  didn’t immediately storm out and start killing the people who’d won the vote. Obviously this was an enormous step forward in the history of the human race. But still the style is one of enmity, so it’s very difficult to listen and hear what might be larger patterns of things.

   J: This isn’t listening to make a judgment... 
   N:  No, absolutely: the point of listening is not to make a judgement; the judgement you make is when you stop listening. And when I say listening, it’s not that you expect to hear anything - if you think you hear something very clearly then you’ve probably got it wrong. The point of listening is keeping an open mind, heart, open imagination. Humans do actually have these faculties of listening and imagination, of seeing patterns in things, but they have to exercise them. It is keeping on listening and not making judgement. I suppose there are some things you make judgments about.. if there’s a serial killer, you make a judgement. But it’s not a passive idea, it’s seeing the pattern in things, which is there. The point is that either nature, the whole of the outside world, is a total illusion, or the outside world is one in which very intricate patterns occur and are being worked out the whole time; and humans can become part of this, not only part of it in an animal way - which they are anyway - but by being conscious of it they can guide it a bit perhaps - not force it, not push it, by confrontation, but just by observation of the patterns, the realization, they can slightly alter the patterns... with any luck. 

J: You’ve talked about hopefulness, and listening for patterns, but I wonder whether ultimately you’re talking about acceptance. 
N:  Well, I think yes. A hopeful monster, as I see it, is someone who accepts what life is like. I mean, life is tough, and unpleasant things happen, God knows. It is about acceptance; but it’s someone who finds, unexpectedly perhaps even, that if you do accept things, what’s curious is that this is a quite a life-affirming experience: one finds that one’s spirits are lifted by acceptance, rather than being downcast. I don’t see how one can argue this; one can’t argue that this is what happens. Sometimes it doesn’t, there are certain people who wouldn’t feel like this at all. But I think this is the experience of those who I see as hopeful monsters: one has a “feel-good” feeling of how extraordinary it is that life goes on at all! Why aren’t we all dead, why don’t we suddenly disintegrate” How does this happen? This is like the old thing of the glass being half-full or half-empty: life is half-full and half-empty; there are terrible things happening and wonderful things happening, and you choose to take your overall attitude from one point of view or the other. I think if you do listen and watch in the way I’ve said one is overwhelmed by the extraordinariness of life going on at all. 

J: I know it’s difficult to talk about these areas. You’ve used the word “unsayable” over and over. What is it about the style of the hopeful monster that you’re uncomfortable talking about? 

N: Oh, because if you do start saying you’re hopeful and optimistic, people ask,  What about the latest murders, the deaths of children? How can you use the word “hopeful”?  And this makes things very difficult. The world is just as full as it has always been of  horrors, although I do think there’s more ability to understand what is happening and a different way of accepting horrors. Once one tried to come to terms with horror by having religious systems which somehow explained it. Therefore one could be happy or hopeful under this system. Now we don’t have this religious system, this sort of faith, and it’s become difficult to accept the horrors of life. I think one can, but this is difficult to talk about. If people say, “How can you talk about hopefulness; you just have to open the newspaper, there’s all this muck; what’s hopeful about it?” then I think then one has to belt-up. One can’t start sort of justifying this really, but I think at the beginning and end one just murmurs how extraordinary it is that anything’s happening at all; life is happening: it’s most peculiar. 

J: You’ve said there’s a new taboo, which is to talk about life as though it had any meaning. Could you explain that? 
N: Well I think that has been for years, I think, yes.  It’ has been a fashionable thing in novels, certainly since the Second World War, probably earlier, with what they call “Postmodernism”. The literary attitude to life... the intellectual attitude to life, is that there’s no meaning to the  word “meaning” - things are what they are, texts are what they are.; they don’t mean anything different from what they are. This is the fashionable thing. James Joyce’s Ulysses has set the tone for a lot of literary attitudes. It’s a very brilliant book which hasn’t got any meaning!  It hasn’t got any meaning to it whatsoever, but it is terribly clever! I’m not sure about Beckett; I think he’s more interesting. But with these very fashionable writers.. it has not been acceptable to use the word “meaning”, because no one knows what it means! [laughs] So one has to posit: it’s a feeling, it’s an impression, that in the life that’s going on around one there is more than what is immediately available to one’s senses. And this makes sense scientifically. One’s senses filter out things, and behind what is filtered by one’s senses, there’s God knows what... there’s anything... One can say there’s nothing, or something... It’s up to oneself, one’s own attitude; And one partly chooses whether one has an optimistic attitude or not, or is it chosen for one? Does it happen to one? Is one’s life worked out by one’s genes,  that it so happens that this is the sort of person one is? I don’t know. 

J: You’ve also suggested that it is impossible to articulate whatever meaning there is in life... No, that’s not the right way to begin. I want to go on to the aesthetic point of view, that the meaning of life is glimpsed in the realization that it is not to be articulated. 
N: Yes, yes,  I’m with you. 
J: And the same problem is occurring when we talk about discriminating patterns: it’s not in the seeing of the patterns that we catch the meaning of life, it’s in the stance of openness and the realization that that’s all you can do. But in that stance itself... it’s like the flower: the petals are open; it’s open, and it’s in that stance that it’s beautiful, and it’s part of the aesthetic picture - and that’s what you have to be. That’s what I’m trying to get at. So, is there a link between the sense that there are patterns there which might be glimpsed, and your view that there is a meaning in life? 

N: Yes, and I think the way one can understand this is through thinking about art: what is art? When one sees a great work of art... this cannot be articulated. When you find yourself in front of a great building, say, the Parthenon, or the Rembrandt portrait... one says, “Ah, yes!” But if someone asks what you mean, you can’t articulate it. One starts talking about the “significant form” - all those phrases that art critics use. - but it’s gobbledegook. It helps to say something, but all you can say to someone is, “Well, go and look at it for yourself. What is your experience of it, not only your feeling, but your imagination?” It is not just a gut-level feeling, it’s intellectual, and imagination. And when one says “Ah!” one is thinking, “Ah yes, I’m seeing the paint and the canvas, but I’m also seeing that it has something else, a meaning...”  And what better word can one find than “meaning”?  One can use whatever words one likes... “significance”. But one is saying there’s something expressed through material means that is being something beyond that. Otherwise there’s no sense to art...  I mean, what is art?

J: And this is comparable to a sense that there’s balance and pattern in the events of life. 
N: Well I think so. That is harder, yes. But this is unprovable, God knows. But there is the sense,  just the feeling when you are in the presence of beautiful objects of art that you are in the presence of objects that are expressing something about meaning and pattern being there. But if someone asks, “What? I don’t feel that.” then you say, “Ok, you don’t feel it.” There’s nothing more to be said. But it’s a very curious thing that people do know what one means by art. And of course it’s very interesting nowadays when there’re all these arguments about modern art. Modern art sets out - often, it seems to me - to say that there isn’t such a thing as meaning... But this is complicated, if this art is saying there’s a meaning in a protest against there being no meaning... then there’s the meaning of meaning.... I think basically people are still trying to find something “numinous”, in modern art even. 

J: You’re saying, then, that the aesthetic stance is related to the stance of the hopeful monster. 
N: Yes, I think the hopeful monster, by keeping his ears and eyes open, does get some sense of pattern, and it’s an aesthetic sensibility which sees pattern and sees meaning, and therefore sees something about life in a sense of not just, oh,  struggling along rather pathetically, but life  in a sense of exuberance..., with the teemingness. I mean, life is very odd! It appears out of nothing, flowers burst into seeds, and the seeds fall, and it all happens, all goes on, with a teeming exuberance.  And of course in the exuberance a lot of things die, a lot of things die. And that’s where the acceptance comes in, you have to somehow accept this. And of course when it happens to oneself, it’s very hard to accept. It’s hard to accept when people very close to one die unexpectedly... but one can still have the feeling of... well, the exuberance includes death, yes.

   For a long time now my writing has been about this [a search for meaning]. When I was young and started writing I was writing conventional gloom and doom novels about people not being hopeful, and life being a pretty grim business. Then later I thought this was ridiculous; it was a hang-over from the war... But in my later writing I’ve been trying to say that if one does ask the questions, and if one keeps an open mind, and listens and watches, then one does find patterns, and the patterns are cheering, they cheer one up... 

   The core of my later writing has been about people  who are trying to find out about life, and I’ve been trying to find out about my life through writing about these people trying to find out about life. I have a sort of two-way-mirror thing: I’ve been writing about people trying to find out about life, then I understand more about my own life, and then that goes back into the writing. It’s not that I write directly about my own life, but I write about people trying to find out about life and that’s my own way of trying to find out about life.  And then also I think what’s interesting about this is that my readers who like my books, they quite often say... - they don’t just like having a nice read, though there’s nothing wrong with that - but they also say, You know, I felt I’ve found out something about my life. The reader says this. What’s interesting about your books, they say, is that I think about my own life. And I say that that’s exactly what I want. I want to find out about life, my books - my characters - are trying to find out about life, and if my readers feel the same thing, then that’s fine, I like that. This may sound pretentious, I don’t know, but it seems to me that this is what’s interesting about life... for God’s sake, what’s more interesting? You want to find out what it’s all about. And if someone says, I don’t think it’s about anything, it just is what it is, and that’s it... ok, but a lot of people don’t feel that. And it’s not a question of being intellectually clever; it’s very often people who are very sharp who don’t listen at all, they just listen to their own voices. It’s people who are out dealing with the world and have some time to reflect on this; they’re the ones who are interested in finding out what life’s all about. 

J: It seems that in your personal life - if I may say - and in your style, you’ve wanted to maintain excitement and passion. 
N: Yes... [laughs] Well, I suppose it sort of “happens”.  I mean, excitement is exciting, and passion is exciting, too. And I suppose I’ve been lucky in the way I’ve been able to do this. I’ve come from a privileged world, where one can perhaps indulge excitement and passion more than some other people. Ok, this is true, but one can’t therefore then say that because this is true I’m  going to cut it all out. I think one’s only obligation is to use one’s privileged circumstance  to find out about life. Ok, one’s able to do this, one’s able to ask more questions, one’s able to listen, one’s able to find patterns... one’s able to try to be an artist perhaps. you see. Ok, if you are privileged; don’t say “I’m going to castrate myself”; say “I’m going to use it perhaps for interesting purposes.” 

J: You could have chosen a more comfortable life, a settled life; what do you think it was about your youth, or what you saw - maybe in the war, maybe because of your father - that made you want to choose the kind of life you’ve had, a searcher’s life? 
N: Well I think certainly my childhood was extremely odd... with my father, my sort of dashing father. One of my first memories of him was of him being rather a star; you see, the star of the Labour Party - the  “young future Prime Minister” sort of stuff.  And then, before one knew where one was, he was a hate figure. And so one had to think about this. One couldn’t just say one didn’t understand it at all and not think about it; you had to think about it. And then, of course, going into the war... the war started when I was sixteen, and so by the time I was eighteen I was going out and fighting. My father was locked up in jail, because he was a security threat, and I was going out to the war to be a frontline soldier. And of course this made one think. One would have to be pretty stupid not to have to think about that!  But my father’s legacy was helpful here, in a sense; because he was someone who always questioned everything. He was a very difficult father in obvious ways,  but one way in which he was a very good father with me was that he was a questioner. In his middle-age, he was a very busy man, but he always had time, when he was at home, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen...I used to have tremendous arguments with him about the meaning of life! And he was very interested in this, he wanted to know, he wanted to think.  Of course he finally chose to put over his view of it; he wasn’t a very good listener. But he loved talking about it, and that was helpful to me. 

   But then to go on to the second half of your question...  I have been very spoilt in what I’ve been able to do, and in my life I’ve done what I’ve really wanted to do; and I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve had the means to travel and see things I’ve wanted to see and the leisure to read the things I’ve wanted and to learn.  And my writing - I’ve worked very hard at my writing at various moments of my life, I’ve kept my nose to the grindstone - but I’ve needed to do this in order to understand what I’ve seen, what I’ve read, or what I’ve had passion about. I’ve needed to understand how difficult passion is... it can be so wonderful and it can be so destructive, and I’ve needed to understand this. So I’ve tried to understand it through  writing my books... then I go back and see a bit more experience, then write about it.. There’s a sense in which, ok, I’ve worked hard - I might’ve just been a rich kid, lying around on a yacht in the Mediterranean (well, not on a yacht, on the beach in the Mediterranean!) but that would have bored me stiff; I would have become so distressed by that, as indeed people who do that do, they get very distressed, and they aren’t hopeful.. Whereas I, by asking questions about life, then going out and then trying to understand it, then coming back and trying to write about it to understand it, then going out again...  I have found that this, at least, has kept me hopeful. Although I’ve done what’s called “bad” things, I’ve made mistakes, and been very selfish, etc., etc.. But, trying to see this in the pattern, I admit this, I accept it, I’m sorry; I try to put things right, you know. But to try to understand does give one hope. The odd thing is that trying to understand does not land one in despair; as far as I can see; in my experience; it lands one in hope, which is quite strange. 

J: You’re saying that there’s something to be recommended in the writer’s stance to life for anyone? 
N: Well, I don’t know about that. No, I think everyone has their own.particular way of doing this...  I think your obligation as a human being is to learn from your experience, and to look at it, perhaps, yes, to look at one’s experience. I think writers go into this in a very detailed way: they not only look at their experience, they write it down, they look at what they’ve written. I don’t think everyone has to be a writer, for God’s sake, no. But I think people who grow old with a sort of serenity are people who have done this; they’re able to look on their lives and ask questions. They’ve been able to do this all the way through. The old people I’ve come across in my life who are serene are interested in looking at their lives, and always have been, and looking at what it means, yes, although the word “meaning” is such an unfashionable word. But people who do this are usually hopeful. I would like to say that it’s a sort of justification for using the word “meaning” that if you use the word, it makes one hopeful! [laughs]  Make what you like of that. 
J: [laughs] It's an interesting reflexive point.