Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcript 6

Outside Peaklet cottage, Sussex, May 1991. This discussion is mainly about Anthony Greville, the male protagonist of Natalie, Natalia, and the consequences of his efforts "to have his cake and to eat it too."  Just before this session Mosley had suggested that I might draw him out more if I were a bit more waspish. 
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JB - Several of what I think are important novels - The Rainbearers, Impossible Object, Natalie, Natalia - are almost exclusively about relationships, not just between men and women but between men and the rest of their world. Do you see some evolution from a view of relationship in, say, Rainbearers, to the one in Natalie, Natalia? 

NM - Yes, I suppose so. I think in The Rainbearers the man fell in love - he was a married man and he fell in love - and was sort of helpless in this situation: he didn't see any way out except through sacrifice, either of himself and his family life or of the girl who he fell in love with. So he felt himself trapped in this situation and there wasn't any way out except through suffering and sacrifice and all that sort of thing. And that was that stage of seeing things, which is to a certain extent true. I mean that if you do get into these situations then there isn't any easy way out; that is correct. And then by the time I was writing Impossible Object I thought, well, okay, insofar as this is what human life is like - a certain aspect of human life can be like this - isn't there something you can do except lay down and die, as it were, or expect someone else to lay down and die? And so by the time of Impossible Object and Natalie, Natalia, the hero of Natalie, Natalia, Greville, tries to handle it, he tries to keep the situation alive, he tries to be a sort of juggler - I used this image of being on a bicycle on a high wire, doing a juggling act - he tries to keep everything up in the air, to keep going with enough energy to keep these various what seem to be vital parts of life, which are, in a sense, antithetical to one another, going. He is trying to keep life going and not expecting someone or some part of himself to lay down and die.
    But at the time I was writing Impossible Object and Natalie, Natalia it was still a rather desperate business this. I mean, you are on your bicycle on a high wire and you fall off, all your clubs and balls fall down on the ground. And, okay, you slowly and painstakingly pick them up, pick yourself up, and get on the high wire again, and you carry on with your act. But this is a pretty... "desperate" isn't quite the word, but it becomes an exhausting business, as it were! It's not ultimately profitable. And I think after that, when I started to write the Catastrophe Practice books, I wanted to get some way of carry-on that was neither desperate in the way of someone having to lay down and die, nor desperate in the way of just slogging on one's one-wheeled bicycle, but to actually get some viable form of relationship amongst people in which this was accepted, accepted that you could actually have a sort of normal go-ahead life.

 J - But each of these men, in Rainbearers, Impossible Object and Natalie, Natalia, seem to want it both ways. The expression you use is that they want their cake and to eat it too. N - Yes. J - They want a nice comfortable life - wife and kids - and they want to be out there, completely free, without responsibility. 

N - Well no, no, that's not right. They want to be out there, but they realize they have the responsibility. That's why they're torn in two. They want to have a good life at home with the wife and kids, they know they have the responsibility, but they know that there is a life out there of something else, and they don't want to give up either one or the other. By the time I get to the man in Natalie, Natalia, he doesn't want to give up. In the Rainbearers the man knew, yes: he said, I have this responsibility, I've poked my nose out of the conventional way of life, and I've got into trouble, so I'll cut that, I'll sacrifice that, I'll sacrifice the woman, the other woman sort of thing, in order to take on my responsibilities. And that's okay. And then in Natalie, Natalia, he goes on, yes, he wants it both ways, he's seeing how much it is possible to have it both ways. I think this is the thing about life, life isn't a question of...  Well, you can have what sort of life you want: if you want a single-minded life, if you have one thing you want to do and you're willing to sacrifice other things for it, then you can do that, that's an okay life. Or perhaps it's not an okay life: it's okay if you're doing something good, it's not an okay life if you're a Hitler. You sacrifice everything for your wonderful vision and you have a bad life, okay, or you sacrifice everything for your wonderful vision and you have a good life.
    But on the whole it seemed to me that the idea of a good life, or learning about what a good life might be, might have to depend on learning about what human beings actually were. Human beings often are these split people: you do have different desires, different needs at different times; you have to learn different things at different times, and there are conflicts. And to have your cake and eat it is supposed to be a bad phrase, it's a phrase about something bad, but why? It's a phrase about something good! It would be very nice to have your cake and eat it. 

J - It would be very nice, but the consequence is that families are broken up, people get hurt, people are sacrificed, whether you like it or not. Isn't it the conventional view that growth and maturity and learning is the recognition that you can't have your cake and eat it too, that if you want to have a happy family and support the children and the wife, then you just can't create responsibilities outside the home, outside the nest you've created? 

N - I think insofar as there is evidence that that is the case, then there is, and that is the case. But there's an awful lot of evidence that that actually isn't all that good. If you concentrate too much on building your nest and making your nest comfortable, there's a certain amount of evidence that that may not be all that good for the children. The children feel strangled, stifled, in the nest, there’s the mother's and father's resentment about not having the sort of life that they might have had, etc., etc.. They've sacrificed everything for the kids by making a nest... that can cause a lot of trouble.

J - But surely this is a worst-case scenario. What about the people who are mature enough to know that they have the desires regarding things outside the family but harness them? 

N - If there are these people, that's good for them. I don't know any, so I haven't written about any. 

J - Well, others might feel that they are such people! 

N - Okay, they might well, I'm not going to argue with them. If they feel that, they're okay, they're okay by me. But one has to write from what one knows, what one sees and what one's experienced and... 

J - But what one sees in your work is people who want, more than anything, intensity in their lives. They want to be on the edge, they want to feel that they're learning, and have to learn all the time, just to survive. Now are you willing to say that, yes, but this is quite a small part of humanity, or quite a small part of humanity at different times in their lives, when they're going through transition, for instance?

N - Well, by the time I was writing Hopeful Monsters I suppose I was saying that the way ordinary humanity has been carrying on for centuries wasn't working anymore, was dangerous, because I think the resentments and aggressions in people were not getting worked-out. I think they were dangerous. I mean, people have a happy life in the conventional sense in a setting that is opposed to some other setting; they have to have enemies. Sartre said that stable relationships, a stable society, depends on a recognition of the enemy without and the traitor within. I think this is to a certain extent true. J - I agree with you, yes.  N - I think okay, this has worked. I think people can form happy groups, happy families, in this sort of context, of the enemy without and the danger of the traitor within. So there's a lot of sort of yakety-yak talk on that sort of level and the family remains stable. But I'm not sure whether that works anymore, I don't think it works in relation to the big outside world: it's too dangerous to have that state of mind, and I think... 

J - But this is something that you say from your point of view... N - Yes, from my point of view.  J - ...and given your interest in particular kinds of people. N - I want to write about this sort of problem, yes. J - But you perceive it as a problem of all people. N - I don't know, I can't make that generalization. I mean, I write what I feel and then I qualify it by saying "I just don't know", I don't know all people. One risks certain generalizations for the sake of writing, and then one says, okay, but I do know that this is a generalization, I don't know which part is true, I sort of hazard this generalization and if it's wrong, it's wrong. But it does seem to me that this sort of nuclear family thing, of the husband and wife who make a nest for the family and lead a good life and have their children, I think it's a wonderful. I think it can work, you see, but I think it's much more complicated than people think! I don't think you can do it just sort of easily, straight, because I think people do have resentments and enmities in them, selves that they're very unconscious of, and these come out somewhere. They often come out in the kids, in this sort of family. At the same time if one can be wise enough to recognize this and to make the thing work, that's marvelous! But there's no theoretical argument about this: it either works or it doesn't, if it works it's good, if it doesn't it isn't, that's all there is one can say. And I suppose that one can generalize about the sort of people that one knows and meets - I mean, London home-counties life in 1991 - I can generalize a little bit about my little corner of the world, that's all I can do.

J - Well what I was concerned about is the suspicion that you wouldn't want to recognize that it can work, [and instead contend] that there's something about human nature that makes it impossible, not just that it's difficult, that it requires some sacrifice, but that it's not possible, and it's not consistent with learning and growth. 

N - What's not consistent, the sort of stable family life? J - Yes. N - Well, one would have to qualify what you mean by stable family life. No, I think all growth is a matter of movement, I mean growth isn't stable! The word "growth" doesn't mean stability, it means growth!  J - But the “growth” parts might be learning to handle those parts of oneself that don't want to be stable! 

N - Perhaps, yes! And also there're parts that do want to be stable. But I mean...life is growth! Life is change, you see! Life isn't stability. Well, it's a paradox, it's constant movement in order to stay the same, and also it is growth. Now, this is a fact, I think one can say that it's a fact. So, okay, one recognizes this, and so the idea that suddenly there's one little corner of life that is, should be, completely stable - there's the sort of small family, mum and dad and three or four or five kids - seems to be a very odd thing to think! 

J - No, don't deny what you just allowed! N - What, what have I allowed?  J - That people might have learnt to be flexible, and to know that they have desires and interests which conflict with the stable family, but they've also learnt to harness them. N - Well "harness" is the operative, or the obscure, dangerous word. I mean, what do you mean by "harness"? If you mean by "harness" to have the reins on their wild horses, yes! Yes, they've learnt this, but the thing they would recognize is the wild horses. J - Oh yes. N - If you mean by "harness" to be all strapped up into some weird bondage system - which an awful lot of families are, I mean families get strapped up into what in sexual terms is called bondage, which is a very popular indoor sport, I believe! [laughs]

 J - The important thing is that they haven't, like some of your characters, like Greville, they haven't jumped onto the horse, the dark horse, and ridden off for a Natalie or a Natalia. 

N - Well, as you say, he wanted his cake and to eat it. He didn't want to just have his cake or just eat it, he wanted to have both. And so this of course is a thing of harnessing, of reins, you know: you're driving your chariot with your white horse and your dark horse. There's some lovely Plato image here isn't there, about human nature being this sort of charioteer with the white horse and the dark horse, but it's sometimes the dark horse that goes off the road and into the darkness, but then it gets him onto the road to the gods again. I can't quite remember if I've got that right, but it's something like that. You have to handle both your white horse and your dark horse. In human nature you have a dark horse. If you say, my dark horse does not exist, I have no dark side to my nature, then you're liable to come an awful fall. If you say, okay, I have got a dark side to my nature but, okay, I can handle it by building a nest - I don't know people who have done this. If they've done this, that's wonderful. 

J - Well, I think - I know - that there are lots of people who would say they would. It's not done easily, and it's not done through a kind of willful blindness. It's done with recognition that there are stresses. 

N - Well that's okay, what can I say? You've answered the question. If that is the case then that is the case.

J - Let's look at Greville more closely, do you mind?  Is there something about the uncertainty he generates in his private life - by having a mistress and a wife - that seems necessary to him for his freedom, for his sense of liveliness or creativity? 

N - Yes I think that's a way of putting it, but I think he wants to learn. All my character want to learn what the hell life is! What is human life? What is human consciousness? Here we are, we're part animal, we're part conscious, we're part human, we're part god, perhaps, whatever that means. What the hell are we? Well, you can be a philosopher and sit in your study and try to work it out in your head, or you can bum around and you can try to see what it actually is. You can go where life seems to lead you, and you can watch yourself doing this, and you can say, what the hell is this, what is life, what am I, what's a human being? You can try to learn. And I think that's what Greville was. I suppose that's what my characters are, at various stages of being able to handle this, of being able to answer these questions. They give different answers at different times. But yes, they are those sort of people who want to do that sort of activity, and if other people don't want to do that sort of activity, okay. But I suppose I am saying a little bit more than that, I think you're right. I'm saying that if you, yes, if you want to find out what life's all about, if you want to ask these questions, you have to ask the questions, yes; if you don't want to ask the questions then you don't have to ask the questions. If you don't ask the questions then you're not going to learn what the answers might be. That's alright, you just don't know what the answers might be.

J - Might a person go through that period of transition early in life, in their twenties, say, when they're looking for a mate, when there's friction with other mates and uncertainty, and then, as it were outgrow that, just have a different interest? 

N - If that's possible then it is possible! One has to look round and one has to know... one has to know people pretty well to be able to answer that question. [Perhaps] one really could only answer that question about oneself, [if] one knew oneself well enough. As for one's neighbours, one thinks they're having a lovely peaceful life and everything's happy, everything's rosy, and the children are okay, everything's calm... Wow! They've come through, they've learnt something early and settled down, something I never learnt early. And then one finds out: wham, crash, bang, you know, something happens to them. But I can't generalize about this. As I say, the point is that you don't generalize, you just... you do this and you do that and you try to learn. 

J - But you want to put finding out what life is like in terms of what Greville does, not in terms of what those other people do. 

N - I think... to learn accurately about other people is very very difficult. I think you have to be so nosey that you probably don't learn the truth anyway. I mean, no one tells you the truth about themselves. I mean, if you ask other people, "What's your life like?" they're not going to tell you the truth! You have to observe... J - No, hang on a minute, this is your experience! N - It's my experience, yes. What's your experience?  J - That when I ask you what your life is like, you tell me. N - [pause] Okay! But I tell you... I can't possibly tell you all the truth, because I haven't got enough time to do it in. I'd have to have a hundred years. J - You give me the shape and feel, you take shots at it. And I think they're pretty good shots aren't they?

N - Yes, I take shots at telling you what I see of the truth about my life, because that's my profession. I also do say the whole time that words are a cover-up, the very fact of words are a cover-up. I mean, what you know about my life is a mixture of what I say about it and what you observe, and your knowledge of my life would be your own judgment of the two. I can't tell you everything, you also can't see everything. I can't see everything! Yes. So it's all a shot! I have a shot at understanding my life! You have shot at understanding my life! You have a shot at understanding your life! I have a shot at understanding your life! And so on and so on.
    But all these words like "shots", they're not to do with nests...  What you're saying is, okay, I'm into a special sort of business, a special sort of activity of learning about life, so I write about these people who are doing this. Yes, this is absolutely true. The open question is whether really the people I'm writing about are at a rather adolescent stage of process, sort of like teenage kids who have to learn about life. Are my Greville characters sort of rather elderly teenage kids, or are these people who have got through this stage...?  (J - I didn't say that. N - No, no, you didn't; I'm saying that.) Or are there these people who have got through into this state... or, are the people that you're talking about, who might have got through, have they decided at some stage to put the blinkers up and settle for something which might be not recognizing the dark side of life or the dark side of themselves? I just sort of don't know. 

J - Well, you used the expression "putting the blinkers up;" what might be fairer is to say that they perhaps stopped being interested in certain dimensions of life. And that's okay, and it's okay for you to be interested in those dimensions of life. 

N - Yes. I think so, I really do think that! I mean a whole world of people like me would be hell!  I can't see what it would mean. And I think... yes, the world has to be full of different sorts of people. I'm a writer, I've got this role, my circumstances are such that I've become this sort of writer. I've had the freedom to be.  I've had the freedom to ask these sorts of questions. It would be stupid for me to make out that I hadn't had the freedom to ask these questions; I have. 

J - You were born out of the ordinary pattern of life, as it were - as you just referred to it. You were born into rather special circumstances: you had a freedom to do something more with your life than other people. In writing about Greville, at the most fundamental level might you have been writing about someone who wanted to get themselves out of ordinary patterns of life, someone who didn't, for one reason or another, want to see themselves in ordinary terms? 

N - Yes, I think that's true. I grew up into a political family in the 193O's. When I was sixteen the Second World War started. I thought conventional patterns of life were insane. The people of Europe were just destroying themselves, going off marching with banners and all this muck, and I thought this was insanity. Sure, I wanted to step out of the normal pattern. And, sure, I wanted to write about interesting human beings, "good human beings" - whatever you like to call it - so I wanted them to be out of what had been the normal patterns, yes. I grew up thinking the conventional patterns of European life were muck! [smiles] 

J - But people... most of us are ordinary... N - What do you mean "ordinary," you see?! This phrase is so peculiar! Do you mean the Royal Family is very ordinary, or the... who is ordinary, I don't know. J - What I mean is that as you get older, you look back on your life - you have a longer view - and you recognize that although at the time it might have seemed very interesting and extraordinary, what you did was pretty much in the pattern of ordinary life. N - I don't know...! Some things could be said about it and other things not, I don't know. [shrugs]  J - When people get a bit bored with their family life, they want to find something outside the home, they want to indulge their appetites, their curiosities... N - Yes, sure. J - I'd say virtually everyone. N - Yes, I see what you mean. What you mean is, if I said, you know, conventional European life just before the Second World War was muck, I was saying a very conventional thing, sure. J - Well I wasn't thinking of it in sort of worldwide, sociological terms, about a whole society, I was just thinking of lives in general, that in retrospect the pattern of them is pretty much the same, and yet, for each individual at particular times it's very intense and interesting and might seem extraordinary. N - Yes. J - So? What I'm wondering is whether Greville is just making a particularly heroic, or farcical, foolish, attempt to get himself out of the ordinary, and whether this is... N - Well, I thought that you were saying that his effort was in a sense ordinary, it's an ordinary effort to get oneself out of the ordinary. I don't see the force of... yes, if you look at it one way he's trying to get out of the ordinary, and in another way the effort to get out of the ordinary is very ordinary. This is a word game, isn't it? J - No, because at some point people might say, well, I'm tired of this, I recognize that I'm pretty ordinary, and I might have to get on with life on a more ordinary scale, without trying to have my cake and eat it too! N - Yes, but then what does this mean, an ordinary...?! I don't know. I don't think there's much difference. People are always struggling, they're always having conflicts with their kids, you know. I don't know whether you're really suggesting that somewhere there's this amazing nuclear family where the husband and wife never have rows, they never have any conflicts with their kids, their kids grow up...this doesn't happen, does it?!

J - No, in an ordinary nuclear family there are rows with the husband and kids, and so on, but they keep going, they don't, as Greville did, necessarily step out. N - But Greville did keep going, that was his thing! J - But he tried to have both, didn't he. N - Yes he kept going having both! [J & N chuckling.] J - Well, he didn't keep going having both. N - Well, he became... J - You ended the novel at the point where he wasn't keeping going. N - He either pretended or really became ill at one moment, and went away and had a nice rest and wrote a lot of letters, then he came back and kept going. This is what a lot of people do, this is quite a sensible thing to do. J - But you ended the novel at the point where whether he could keep both was to be decided.

N - Well, yes, I think I ended the novel because I had to end the novel somewhere. I think that wasn't a very satisfactory end, but it was as far as I could go at the time. I mean, you had a hard time, you sort of fell off your one-wheeled bicycle, you had a little bit of a lie down, time in a sort of hospital, as it were, and then you picked yourself up and... At that time, yes, I don't think I knew what else to do with him, except to have him sort of clamber back on for one more go and wonder whether he'd learn a bit more this time or not. But something had happened, I mean his wife and children were going off full of energy to have their own lives. This had happened. He had kept all his juggling act up in the air; he'd had his cake and eat it. And his wife and eldest son were full of beans and were going off to be liberated. His wife was not one of these moaning wives who at the age of fifty say, “Oh, I can't think what to do, I've got nothing to do, yaboo...”  His wife was going off full of energy; she'd been freed by Greville's sometimes grotesque efforts to keep up on his tightrope act, and so had his children - his eldest son had been freed because he wasn't kept down by dad, because his dad was in some sense a bit of a clown. So his son had been freed and his wife had been freed to do their own thing.

 J - Is it being freed or making the best of a bad lot?  N - I thought it was being freed. If you're full of beans at the age of fifty, and going off happy as a lark to do your own job, and your kids have grown up, I can't see the phrase "making the best of a bad lot" is a very accurate description. J - But if he, as you said, engaged in - what were they? - [grotesque] efforts to keep himself in the situation of having his cake and eating it too, then surely that's a bad lot... N - I don't think so, I think that's a good lot!  J - But didn't he destroy the home they had?  N - No! His home was there! It's just that the birds had flown. Are you suggesting that when you build a nest you have to sit in your nest until you're sixty-two... J - No, no.  N - ..without getting out. Then what are you suggesting? J - To take Natalie, Natalia as the case, there were young children... N - They were fine, they were in their nest as long... J - But this is in your fiction.  N - That's in my fiction, yes. J - What about life?  N - What about real life?  J - Yes.  N - Well, that was my experience. How are children freed from their nests? An awful lot of children aren't. Families I know who've had a very intense nuclear life and sacrificed themselves for their kids, their kids are stuck! 

J - Well, this is where we started. 

N - That's where we started.