Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcripts 5

   This main topics of this excerpt are: Hopeful Monsters as a love story and the series of coincidences which led to the climax of the novel; the theme of man's expulsion from and return to the Garden (also relevant to Inventing God), making use of adversity; and the evolution of Mosley's determination to not write novels of "gloom and doom."
There are images of the monastery here and of the castle on the Video Background page.
In the study of  Peaklet Cottage, Sussex, England, October 1997.
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J: Would you talk a bit about the effort of writing? 
N: Certainly one never quite gets used to the idea of coming down to the empty sheet of paper in the morning: there’s nothing in the in-tray.  So that is an effort. It’s a very peculiar business; there are times when I come down and I think it all goes frightfully well: I’ve got the ideas, and I go whipping along, things seem to flow, and often the next morning I look at it and it’s very second-rate stuff. I probably have to tear it all up and start again. And when one gets a really hard day, it’s like squeezing blood out of a stone, then you look at it in the morning and it’s okay. I don’t quite know... well, if that’s what happens, that’s what happens; that’s the way it is. One gets used to that idea. So even when you think you’ve got nothing in your head and it’s like squeezing blood out of a stone, there’s still the hope of, well, okay, this may be alright. But writing, it’s just something you have to do like a job, it’s important that when you do get stuck into it, you keep at it. It’s not quite like a nine to five job: it’s all going on in one’s head. A writer certainly has to stick at it, as long as he  thinks it’s the right thing to do, then he takes a break  If you can do that, it’s a nice life. It’s a hard life in that you have to be self-disciplined. 

J: Why have you kept doing it? 
N: Well, because I like it. It’s the only thing I want to do, and I like it. One has hard times, as presumably one has in any work. You have hard times, and you ask why the hell am I doing this, and you want to stop. But it’s the most interesting thing in life: I want to find out about life; and I feel I can do that by writing, and then I look at what I’ve written... and I go back and learn more about life after I’ve read what I’ve  written, and so on and so forth. I want to write about people learning about life. It’s what I like doing; it seems to me  to be what I’m supposed to do. There are hard times, in that one comes to dead ends, and there are hard times when it’s an awful sweat keeping going when one hasn’t got anything in one’s head. But, then, as I say, one does learn that that may not be all a bad thing: it means that what one has had in one’s head is going up a blind alley. It wasn’t very interesting, anyway. One’s got bored with what one’s doing, so one just has to hang about and keep at it, and think, and squeeze it out, and then one finds oneself on a new track. So having a very hard day can be a good thing. And then if you do have a hard day and it does come out right in the end, that’s a good feeling.  If  you have what you think is a wonderful day and it all comes out nonsense, that’s a bad feeling. [chuckles]  But that must be like life, I mean writers aren’t exceptional human beings, they’re like everyone else: they have bad days and good days.

J: I think you said once that you have a sense of task. 
N:  Well, yes, I do think... One mustn’t sound too pretentious about this, [but] I think if one has a talent for something, then one does it. I think one has some obligation; if one has certain desires, certain interests, talents, one has some obligation to do them, make use of them, and not just get drunk. I suppose a lot of writers get drunk because it is difficult being self-disciplined. In the 1930’s rather the thing to be was a writer who drank too much, and so on. 

J: Are some books easier than others? 
N: Well, yes, I suppose that’s true.  I find non-fiction is much easier than fiction, because when you’re writing non-fiction, you have the material there.  When I was writing the two books about my father, the memoirs, there was a huge amount of material: I had letters, I had the history; I was reading a lot of background history and the personal family material, and somehow the whole story fell into place. I don’t know whether I was lucky or if other people have found that, but I found that the form of the book very much molded itself, and I enjoyed doing that. Novels, of course, you have to do from scratch. It all has to come out of your head, so first of all you have to get something in your imagination, and then get it down on paper, and that’s sometimes hard - because you haven’t got anything in your head, or you lose your way, or you think you’re going in the wrong direction anyway, and so on - so you have to find your way. And that’s both hard, but also, if you  can do it, it you’re not too rushed and there’s not too much pressure coming from outside, that can be enjoyable. One can’t rush it too much; you go for little walks, have cups of tea, cups of coffee, and stick at it.

J: Do you think your writing of the sixties - which was more about love and the passions of love - do you think those books were written more as expressions of feeling than your later books?. 
N: Yes, I think my early books were very much getting something out of my system. My really early ones, my young-man-just-back-from-the-war gloom and doom books, with the romantic difficulties of love, were very much working through one’s own feelings, handling one’s own feelings and trying to express them, trying to understand what the hell one could say about them, how one could handle these feelings, yes. And then as one gets older it’s not quite the same sort of thing, but usually there are pressures in one’s life, one sort of love or another, pressures that one wants to express. One wants to express them to try to understand them, and then by understanding them one can go back and have another look at one’s life. One is  learning something about how to handle one’s life. 

J: People have been moved by those books. 
N: Moved by the early and middle ones?  J: I think those were the most effective books, in terms of the effect on the reader.  N: Well, yes, that may be so... There was that very romantic one called The Rainbearers, a sad love story; that was very emotional. People had different reactions to that: some people thought it was overblown, they found the over-emotionalism distasteful, but some people liked them, yes. Then the one’s after that were more tightly written, like Impossible Object and Natalia,Natalia. There was quite a lot of feeling in them, I suppose. As one grows older one does not go on feeling one is being pursued by the furies of love. [chuckles] With any luck, one stops and finds the furies have tailed off a bit, and so then one wants a different style... one is dealing in different problems. 

J: Now Hopeful Monsters, would you say it’s a love story? 
N: Well, yes, but it’s a love story about people who are trying to feel love in a little different way from my earlier novels. In my earliest novels people were helpless in front of love: they couldn’t deal with it. Then in what one might call my “middle period” novels, especially in Impossible Object - the impossible object was love, in a way, the impossibilities of love, that you both want to possess the person and you want to leave them free; you want to love them for what they are, but one also wants them to be oneself  - so one’s in a contradictory situation, which makes it all so difficult. But those novels were about people finding out how to handle impossibilities; they realized that it was an impossible object, so they didn’t bang their heads against a brick wall. They asked themselves, how shall we handle this situation, once we know what it is. And they used to say this. There’s the remark in Accident - we used to write about people being helpless, now we want to write about people knowing. It’s still quite difficult to handle, even when one knows.

    But when you get to Hopeful Monsters... the reason why these people are what are called "hopeful monsters" is that they’re slightly different. They probably start off with some slight knowingness, some slight mutation in the “knowingness,” and they accept from the very start that things are very difficult and paradoxical about love. So from the start they have some awareness of this, and then these two people, the hero and heroine in Hopeful Monsters, Max and Eleanor, meet, and they recognize one another. The reason they love is that each recognizes that the other has the same sort of feeling about the difficulties which they can’t fight against; they can’t deny that love is difficult; they accept it, and each recognizes that the other does.  And so they do from the beginning handle it, and they do allow one another a certain freedom in love. Not because they have a weak love, but because they have a strong love. They don’t have to grab and grip and get their hooks into the other - because they feel that’s a sort of weakness, if you have to get your nails and hooks  into someone, then that isn’t love, that is hooks. And they feel this from the start. But of course that lands them with problems, because you still suffer - you still from jealousy, you still suffer from loneliness, you still suffer from the other person’s absence - but it is a clean sort of suffering, instead of a tormented one, perhaps.

J. Then they each go on separate journeys. 
N: They meet when they’re students and they fall in love, they recognize this. But they each want to complete their own things; they don’t want to give up their work and just go off with one another, live in a bed-sitter and both be out of work.  They want to go on learning. Then they meet again, and they think they can stay with one another this time, but then for historical reasons it’s very difficult for them to settle down together: he has his work, and her parents are in German concentration-camps, and she can’t abandon that side of her life. So they then again separate, and then they regret this, believing they’ve made a mistake, but they haven’t, and they come together again. It’s a way of trying to express that perhaps a “truer” sort of love than the old romantic gloom and doom is to recognize that it’s difficult and handle it accordingly. 

J: And then you found locations which had some magical significance for Max & Eleanor. 
N: Well, yes, yes. The climax of the story was to take place during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and I didn’t quite know how to get the climax: I didn’t have a good location. So I went out to Spain to look at something which I had thought of, and while I was in Spain -[chuckles] this is a sort of corny story - my car was broken into and about a hundred pages of my rough, scribbled, draft, with the bad climax, was stolen, so I’d lost my climax anyway. But I was in a great stew - as one is when one loses a hundred pages, for goodness sake, even if it’s not very good. So I hung about, advertised, put up a reward, but there was not a hope. My traveler’s cheques were stolen, too. So I was having to make my way home by quite a different path. I had been going to meet up with someone on the west coast of Spain but all my plans had to be altered and I was going straight home over the Pyrenees. And while I was driving home on the new route I came across this extraordinary location, a sort of double location, a strange 13th Century monastery [San Juan de la Pena] under a cliff - which is quite a famous tourist place, though not many people know of it - and just next door, about twenty miles away, a 13th Century castle [Castle Loarre]. And in both the monastery and the castle there was a similar doorway, with an inscription over it... And I suddenly had the climax of the story. Max and Eleanor found themselves on different sides of the frontier in the Spanish Civil War - not because either of them was fighting on Franco’s side [chuckles], they were both good, liberal left-wing characters - then in some extraordinary way they met in the monastery and the castle. It was all worked out in a practical way, but there was also some mythical significance. They were in these similar, rather magical places. 

   In the monastery there are some extraordinary sculptures - they’re quite famous - of very “knowing” mythological or realistic animals and human figures, with big heads and huge eyes. I think they’re a very rare style,12th or 13th Century  These figures did seem to me  - I’d never heard of them before, I just came across them - but they did seem to me to be representative of hopeful monsters: they were very knowing, they were representations of humans and animals who were extremely wise. They had huge eyes, and they were hopeful, certainly hopeful: they were smiling, as though they knew all about the sorrows and agonies and tragedies of the world... okay, okay, okay - in other parts of the monastery there were crucified Christs and tormented saints, and people being martyred - and these figures were hopeful, and monsters. And by that time I was calling the book Hopeful Monsters - I knew exactly what I meant by “hopeful monsters,” and I came across these figures in the actual location that was going to be the climax of my story.

J: Max and Eleanor went on separate journeys; how did you get them back together again? 
N: That was the problem: I wanted to get them back together again by natural means, but also means that were a bit strange, with some feeling that there was meaning behind it, that there was a bit more going on than just chance. Then I found the monastery, up in the north of Spain - which in terms of what was going on in the Civil War at that time made sense for the story: it was just on the borderline between the two sides, the Republican and Nationalist sides, in a sort of no-man’s-land. And my two protagonists, Max and Eleanor, were  on different sides of the no-man’s- land - not because they were on different sides of the war, but because they happened to find themselves on different sides of this territory - and they came together by a series of coincidences, or were they coincidences?  sort of natural coincidences?  Things happened to Eleanor, who traveled up from the south of Spain, so she went this way rather than that way, and she ended up in this monastery  Max was coming from the other direction, from Barcelona, and things happened to him in a sort of natural way - there was the war and he got on a convoy that happened to go there rather than elsewhere  - so it was all quite possible, and they just found themselves, without knowing what was happening - they knew they wanted to meet, and hoped they would, but didn’t know how - and they did find themselves in this same area. Then they did realize that there was something a bit more mysterious going on... because both in the castle, where Max was a prisoner of war (he was taken prisoner by the Nationalists), and Eleanor, in the monastery, there were these archways...  They’re quite famous, semi-Moorish archways in these 12th Century buildings in Northern Spain with an inscription round them, which said, 

“Through this doorway there is a way to heaven for whoever of the faithful learns to connect faith with the laws of God.”

  That’s a complicated sentence, but it seemed to me to stand for.. whoever has faith in the way things work out - I mean, you do what you think right, and you do what you have to do, and you trust that life might work for you, and you may meet. This is what a hopeful monster is, someone who tries to stand back from his or her immediate situation, immediate desires and impulses, and to do what seems to be the right thing to do, the right task at the moment, but with the trust that if you do that, then things in life will work for you, coincidences may work for you. - so you do get what you do desire to want. So this climax of the story epitomized this: Max and Eleanor had gone to the Spanish Civil War and had lost contact with one another, and then they came together at this particular place, at this particular time, through just following their own paths. But their own paths so happened to meet at this strange place, where these two archways symbolized something about a meeting place, if you were a hopeful monster. And they were, so they met up again. So I thought that was a good place to have the climax of my story. 

   So Max and Eleanor found their way there by a strange series of coincidences, that led them there, and I found my way there by a strange series of coincidences. I hadn’t meant to go home that way at all; I’d never heard of the monastery; I had planned to go to the east coast of Spain. But because I’d had my car broken into and my typescript and traveler’s cheques stolen, I had to alter all my plans. I found my way to this place by very strange, coincidental means. So I thought that was all rather nice. You’re not saying, Ah Ha! Wow, this is the way life works! You’re just saying, well, that’s what happened, that’s actually what happened. And I think life is like that. Pfft! I think if you do try to not be trapped, in your selfish desires, wanting to grab things, if you do see, feel, you have a task to do, and you do, then you do find life works for you... perhaps... with any luck. One wants luck!

J: Then you wanted, I think, not too explicitly to connect their reunion with Kleist’s notion of the return to the Garden. 
N: Well one of the images I’d used earlier was one that the German playwright Kleist had about humans being turned out of the Garden of Eden because they’d eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so knew about the difference between good and evil. So this meant that humans couldn’t be just like animals, living for today, eating just when you wanted to, you killed your deer and eat it when you felt like it.  You began to feel that to kill to eat was wrong; you knew the difference between good and evil in human terms, so you got out of the Garden of Eden. Then you had a hard time, had to till the soil by the sweat of your brow. Then Kleist had this image, that the Adam and Eve figures who had got out of the Garden had to go right round the world and in at the back way. And I’ve always been very struck by that image, without having a very clear idea of why [chuckles]. But I think it does make sense. No human being just sort of sits in his perfect childhood; you don’t have a good life by staying in your wonderful family, or your wonderful schooldays, or whatever period; you have to go out, you have go through, you have to go round the world, you have to learn, you have to go through difficulties, you have to have experience, and learn from experiences, and then go back and put your learning to use, and so on. And then in the end if you do this, I think you do get a sort of serenity and understanding, as though you’d gone right round the world, and in some sense back into the Garden by the back way. I think that made sense  It made sense about people I knew...  I mean, old people who are sort of bitter, who say things like, ‘I don’t see how God can do this to us...' They’ve had a hard time and blame it on God... 'How can God allow this?'  They’re not in the Garden of Eden; they’re stuck somewhere, sitting outside the old gate, saying ‘How can God be so horrid, to do this to us? How can Life be so horrible?’ You needn’t believe in God. And then there are people who say, ‘Okay, this is what life is like,’and you face it, and you learn from it, and you go on and learn a bit more. Then you have a hard time, or a good time... but you’ve learned, and then you stop saying, ‘How can God do this, or Life...’ You’ve had a hard time, but you’ve learnt - you’ve had a good time. And that is like going right round the world and in at the back way.. 

J: It interests me that the back way is the serpent’s way, and the serpent of course represents knowledge and cunning, and rebirth. 
N: Yes, the serpent represents rebirth and cunning. There are various bits of the myth, you see. There’s a certain Christian tradition, perhaps not quite mainstream, that the serpent was okay, he  was a sort of “goody,” because without the serpent you wouldn’t have got out of the Garden - I’m talking about the Christian myth now - and if you hadn’t got out of the Garden of Eden then there wouldn’t have been Christ. He wouldn’t have had anything to do. So without the serpent there wouldn’t have been Christ... well, Christ would have been whatever, I don’t know  [points upwards, chuckles]. He wouldn’t have had anything to do. And so there’s a strong Christian myth about the serpent really being okay. And in the Catholic Church, or perhaps it’s in the Eastern Orthodox church, there’s a prayer which goes, “Oh happy fault...” O felix culpa.. that the serpent should have got you out of the Garden, because if he hadn’t, nothing would have happened.

J:  Well, you’ve used the image of the serpent in your novel Serpent. 
N: Yes, I used this imagery very much. My two protagonists accept the serpent. They are a sort of innocent young married couple who come up against some very nasty film people who try to do them down, and instead of being got down by these nasty people - instead of saying, ‘You horrible people, how can you do this to us?’ - they just say, ‘Okay, okay, do your worst!'  And they have to trust one another, to have great faith in one another, to be able to do this. And they do,  And they have a young child. And they say, ‘Do your worst;’ and then it’s okay. Because, unless you die, people can spread scandal about you, they can try to hurt you as much as they like, but if you’re just not hurt, if you say, ‘I don’t mind what you say; I’m not hurt,’ that’s okay. My young couple sort of use the evil of the serpent to learn a bit more about themselves and about life.

J: ...which you think mankind has to remember..? 
N: Well, this is very difficult to put into words, this is one of the things that it’s impossible to go on talking about much longer, because if you’re faced with real evil, one can’t just say, okay, that was really evil, but one just has to learn from it. It’s a very difficult thing to say. Perhaps the statement is, as it were, correct, but there are certain acts of great evil and one can’t simply say that one has to learn from them. Of course one can say it, but one can’t go on about it. This is very difficult, very agonizing stuff. I mean, evil’s evil, yes. 

J: Do you think that you’ve had a hard life? 
N: Well, to give a quick answer, I’ve in certain ways have a hard life, but I’ve been hugely privileged, obviously. When I was a teenager my father was running his fascist movement in England, and was very unpopular, and that was very difficult to grow up with. And then by the time I was sixteen, when the Second World War started, my father was locked up as a security risk. Sure, this was hard. Then I went into the Army and into the war, and that was hard. It was quite difficult going into the Army as my father’s son, but I don’t think that was the point; I think the war was very hard. Yes, I had a hard time in the war... but I was very lucky, because I wasn’t very seriously hurt. I joined a frontline infantry regiment, because that was what people like me did, people who’d been to the sorts of schools to which I’d been. The one way that one could justify one’s privileged public school upbringing was, if there was a war, you jolly well joined up jolly quick and went to the front. You didn’t go to the War Office or the intelligence corps... So that I did, and that was very frightening. I went to Italy, and a lot of my friends were killed, and that was hard. I had quite an adventurous war, but a very lucky war. I was very, very, very lucky. I was taken prisoner, and straightaway escaped. I was wounded, but it was a comparatively small wound. Then I went back. And I was okay.... at the end I was okay. Which is luck.. extraordinary luck... And a lot of my friends didn’t have luck. But it was luck, it is luck... if you’re wounded here rather than there [gestures], it’s luck. 

   But then after that I had a hard life for a number of years because I was so mixed up. I was what’s called a mixed-up kid after the war, in my early twenties. So I had great depressions and that sort of thing, from whatever the hangovers from the past were. But I was also very lucky once more: I was very privileged with money. From the age of twenty-one I was able to live without having to earn money. My mother died when I was nine - I had a hard time then, but okay - then I had enough money to live on, and time to write what I wanted to write, and to sort things out as far as I could sort them out. 

J: Do you think being brought up by a Nanny had much effect on you.? 
N: Well that I can’t tell, I don’t know; it must’ve had some effect, yes. But she was wonderful Nanny, she was completely loyal, she was always there. Psychiatrists say it’s very important to have someone there, for a sense of security, whether it’s one’s mother or a Nanny. But my mother was of a generation and the background that she was not very often there. By the time I was five she was an M.P., on call in her constituency. Neither she nor my father were there much. So we were very much brought up by Nanny, but Nanny was always there, and she was completely reliable and loyal and dependable. And I think that had an enormous helping effect on me, yes. 

J: Did you miss your father?
N: No, I don’t really see that children miss their father. He wasn’t there very much when we were young children, but he was always there enough, in my memory of him.  He used to always be there  in the summer holidays. When my mother and father went on summer holidays - this may sound pretty obvious - they used to take us with them; but a lot of parents with their background wouldn’t take their children with them, they’d send them off somewhere else with Nanny. We used to see him at set times, and at weekends every now and then. And when he was with us he was great fun: he liked to play stupid games with children, and tease us, and make jokes, which I thought very funny. I don’t think my elder sister thought them so funny, but I did. And when I got older he was very good at talking with me. When I got to be twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I used to start asking questions, and he was the one grown-up I knew, almost literally, who would always answer a straight question with a straight answer. He would never say, Oh, darling, I can’t explain that to you now, you wouldn’t understand until you’re older. One could talk about anything - the meaning of life, or sex, or anything - and he would always give his best answer. And I think that was very helpful to me.

J: I think you said in Majorca that there was some benefit to you in being left alone. 
N: Well, that was the thing about Nanny; she was always there, upstairs in the nursery, but she gave us an extraordinary amount of freedom. I mean, looking back on it - of course when one is a child one thinks that this is what everyone does - but when we were young, when I was about four onwards, we lived in a lovely old Elizabethan farmhouse in Buckinghamshire just by the river, and there were tributaries of the river, streams, all around the house, and it was a sort of deathtrap for children, one would have thought. It was the sort of place where mothers now wouldn’t let children out of their sight, or they would have erected fences all around the streams. My sister and I, from the age of five or six or seven, had complete freedom: we could go off on our own, make little hidey-holes in the bushes. We had little boats on the stream. There was a weir; we used to go rushing over the weir in little boats. There was a broken bridge that one could only cross by going across the handrail, straddling the handrail over this rushing weir. And, looking back on it, that was extraordinary; I would never have let my children do that, really. But I think that was wonderful. We were very independent; we had our own little world. We certainly had friends. Because we had this funny family, we made very close friends with our contemporaries very early on. 

J: And you had time to read. 
N: And I had time to read, yes, but I read pretty corny stuff until I was about fifteen. I loved thrillers, the Leslie Charteris “Saint” books, those sorts of things, until I was quite old. And then once I started reading what’re called “good books” then I just wanted to read everything, everything. I just wanted to read every book that anyone else would ever talk about.

J: Returning to the subject of your happiness again... was your writing a refuge for you? 
N: Well, I started writing quite late, you see. Often people who are going to be writers start writing for their school magazines. Friends who are writers rather pride themselves on that. It never entered my head to write a story for my school magazine, and I didn’t. When I was in the Army I started writing poetry - that was a bit of a refuge. I started keeping a diary - though not very much, actually - then I started writing poetry. I used to wander off when I could, and I wrote not very good poetry. But I always knew I wanted to write a novel; as soon as I could I was going to write my first novel. But I don’t know if it was a sort of refuge. But by the time I got out of the Army I was twenty-three almost, and then I went up to Oxford. It wasn’t that I really wanted to go to Oxford, it was just that if I went there I could get out of the Army quicker, so I did. But I didn’t like Oxford. I stayed up there a year, but I was too old to settle down. And I wanted to start my first novel. I then married my first wife, who I had met at Oxford, and we went off on our own, and then I wrote my first novel. I don’t know whether it was a refuge or not; I don’t know what one would call it. I just always knew I wanted to write a novel. And I had a novel in my head that I wanted to write, all about a young man who comes back from the second world war [chuckles], and I was a young man who’d come back from the war... and there’s a story there. A young man coming back from the war - it’s a basic story.

J: You said that when you were younger you wrote a doom and gloom novel about the young man coming back from the war and you didn’t have the skill or the courage to write a book about a happier life. Why? Could you explain?
N: Two reasons. I think I was very confused and mixed-up, and I did get very depressed quite often. But there is a much more interesting answer to that, which is that it’s very difficult to write happy novels; there are very few grown-up happy novels. Happy novels are about animals or children. Winnie the Pooh is a happy book, The Wind in the Willows is a happy book. You know... There are lots of famous good books that end happily, but in an arbitrary manner. But they all go through difficult times in the middle. Jane Austen’s people go through great muddle and confusion; in the end it’s supposed to be all sorted out and they all live happily ever after. But anyone, if they think about it, knows perfectly well that all the problems of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy start when they marry, but Jane Austen never talks about that. So that’s a very arbitrary convention. There are very few serious happy grown-up books about people being happy. When you’re happy, nothing is happening, you’re still, there’s quietness. Happiness is "inner" and it’s very difficult to write inner happiness. It’s easy to write inner turmoil; you have a stream-of-consciousness - 'Oh my God, how awful everything is!' - which is supposed to be interesting and readable. But to have a stream-of- consciousness saying, 'Wow, yes, it’s okay, I’m okay...'  nobody wants to read that stuff.

J: But you’ve tried to write a book that is not just a complaint, or doesn’t just try to mirror people’s complaints about life. 
N: Well, I tried, yes. My first book, of a young man coming back from the war, of gloom and doom, was a book of complaint really. My second one was still a bit like that. The third one I was trying to break out of it; and it was supposed to have an okay end, you know, [gestures] 'Ah, life is alright!'  But it didn’t really quite work, there was a lot of moaning in between the beginning and the end. But then I made up my mind that I didn’t want to go on writing about complaining about life, yes. I thought it was ridiculous. I’d got bored with it, and anyway, I liked my life enough then to think that if I wrote gloom and doom stories it was simply untrue, I was being false. But I then had to find a new style to write about life being okay. How does one write about life being okay without being false? Because an awful lot of life isn’t okay.