What marks a piece of literature as British?

Are British writers less prudish than others?

Do you think British writers labour under the weight of tradition?

Why is wit so strongly indigenous to British writing?

Why a flowering of ex-colonial literature?

Is there a relationship between British and American literature?

What is meant by success for a writer in Britain?

Is there a connection between literature and a sense of nationalism among the countries in the United Kingdom?

Does the Booker ever get it right?

Whom would you choose as your doubles partner: Martin Amis or Julian Barnes?

The Authors

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

WHEN the Paris Review first planned an edition devoted to New British Writing, discussion among the editors turned to what exactly constituted Britain (one or two at our office in New York had forgotten about Wales), or for that matter a British writer. Could it include Patrick McGrath, a London writer who'd lived in New York for the past 15 years? What about Amit Chaudhuri, a writer from a former colony living in Oxford for many years, whose books have originated in London? A writer from Northern Ireland who'd moved to Dublin?

With such special issues only a recent phenomenon, we'd never in the magazine's previous five decades given thought to issues of nationality, although in due course we have published many British writers - long ago the earliest work of Charles Tomlinson and VS Naipaul, an excerpt of Beckett's Malone, poems by the 21-year-old George Steiner, and more recently Martin McDonagh and Louis de Bernières.

A word about the Paris Review, which, counter-intuitively, is neither in Paris, nor publishes reviews: the magazine was founded in the French capital by American writers, including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton and William Styron, intent on bringing international literature to American readers, and was moved to New York some 30 years ago.

At a time now when assertions of nationality are increasingly fraught, we found while assembling this edition a great number of plucky agents curiously eager to forget Eight Hundred Years of History and hostility, as well as 70 years of independent nationhood, in order to present for the "British Issue" work by writers born and residing in the Republic of Ireland. By the time we'd instituted a passport check, one unpublished writer, temporarily residing in the American state of Georgia, had slipped through. In the end, with a nod toward the Dublin accords, we retained that story.

Being from a culture fond of committees, we convened a panel of experts to address these questions and others. The results, a feature entitled "The Man in the Back Row Has a Question," are reprinted below. Despite the English-continued insistence that we speak American, we expected testimony of increasing commonality in our literature. We had pointed to the emergence of the American-style literary memoir, Martin Amis's recent hard-boiled detective novel, and those American agents encroaching, jackal-like, on British writers. No such luck.

In surveying the British literary scene the editors noticed, with envy, a cultural discourse determined less by publishers' promotional strategies than by a high level of reviewing in the multiple national broadsheets. Furthermore, London writers have far better feuds (hence our question on preferred tennis partners).

Lastly, while most American literary readers find selections for their major national prizes consistently too low-brow (Pulitzer), abstruse (the PEN/Faulkner), or patently political and just perverse (the National Book Award), your Booker committee tends to select a serious book worth attention - perhaps as much as one can ask for in these things. To endless fascination over here, these last two themes dovetailed nicely when Paul Theroux in his recent memoir admitted to casting the deciding Booker vote against VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River, a literary act for which he may far into the future be noted.
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What marks a piece of literature as British?

Alain de Botton: Though there is no scientifically verifiable "essence" of any national literature, there are qualities found in certain British authors that particularly appeal to me and that I look to as my own version of "Britishness" - the passionate clarity of John Donne, the over-erudition of Robert Burton, the playfulness of Laurence Sterne, the Whiggish worldliness of Edward Gibbon, the humanity of Dickens, Hardy's descriptions of autumn, the schoolmistressy good sense of Virginia Woolf and the industrial wastelands viewed through Philip Larkin's thick spectacles.

Malcolm Bradbury: The question grows harder than ever to answer. For the British, nationality in literature, certainty of voice, clarity of tradition, inheritance of practice, the English lineage, is no longer a clear and definable thing. Yet in the British tradition this is not that novel. British writing was internationalised and cosmopolitanised after the Norman invasion (Chaucer, etc.), again in the adventuring of the Renaissance, again in the intellectual cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, again in the world-wandering era of Romanticism and so on. The tradition in the background, the statues on the shelf, the sequences of the canon, the structures of influence, have constantly shifted, constructing a new order. But elements of the order are there: the language itself, the Graeco-Roman inheritance, the vernacular and humanistic power of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the moralised subjectivity of Wordsworth, the social irony of Austen and the social capaciousness of Dickens, the narrative vigour of Stevenson, the passion of Lawrence, the subtlety of Woolf. Such familiar elements of "English literature" can still be found and heard in British writing, but along with a magic realism out of Marquez, the energies of new Caribbean and Indian voices, the power of Scots, Irish and Welsh voices, and an ever-widening sense of the sources and origins of narrative.

AS Byatt: Harder to say now than ever before. What delights me is the range and variety of current British writing. Irony and humour are perhaps the constant, even in serious writing, even in work by writers of non-British origin.

Giles Foden: British is very rarely used in book titles these days, in anthologies, collections and so on, and that seems symptomatic. Maybe we're embarrassed to be British; so what marks a book as British could turn out to be a certain shyness or evasiveness about militantly defining identity politics.

Paul Johnson: None: no such thing as "British literature". English yes, and what marks it is imaginative power and dignity.

AL Kennedy: British writing doesn't really exist any more. There's Scottish writing. Irish (published through London houses) writing, English writing and what one might call London writing. All but the last might be characterised by a certain love of darkness, the surreal, altered states, polarisations and a dry, ironic humour. Or the short answer would be - the spelling.

Auberon Waugh: A certain down-to-earth straightforwardness.

Hugo Williams: A sense that writing is a form of entertainment before it is a means of communication. Therefore, a sense of fun, brevity, say your little sermon and get off. A deep preference for Anglo Saxon over the Latin elements in the language. Also, probably, perversity of one kind or another, as part of the desire to amuse.

Are British writers less prudish than others?

AS Byatt: I don't think so. There are pockets of prudery in all cultures - including American and British - and acceptance of outspokenness in others. Being shocking is still a British preoccupation, which gets harder as people get harder to shock.

Carmen Callil: A little: less than Indian, Irish or African writers, probably not less so than European writers, certainly less so than most American writers.

Paul Johnson: No.

Will Self: Personally, I've no idea.

Auberon Waugh: No, Americans are much dirtier.

Hugo Williams: Than Americans maybe, it's something to do with not being so puritan, I'm told. A prudish writer couldn't be much good could it?
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Do you think British writers labour under the weight of tradition?

Alain de Botton: Any grand literary tradition is deeply off-putting for a writer, for to write always demands irreverence to what has come before. Despite the great number of distinguished British writers, contemporary British writers get away far more lightly than many of their colleagues overseas, because literature itself is not taken seriously at all in this thoroughly anti-intellectual country. This might be cause for lament, but is in fact the saving grace of British writers. Countries that venerate writers quickly cease to produce any good ones; see, for instance, the disaster that has befallen French literature in recent years.

Malcolm Bradbury: Possibly. The awesome presence of major past figures - for a novelist like myself, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, Joyce - is always a shaping force. Yet these are sufficiently various to open up many options, many fundamentally different ideas of what the novel is.

AS Byatt: No, not really, not anymore. I think they can take it or leave it, and I don't think tradition is necessarily to be "laboured under". I do think Shakespeare did irreparable damage to the British theatre just by being so comprehensively good, but that's another story.

Carmen Callil: No. To me writers from the USA seem much more confined: eternal novels about the Civil War, New York, the South, facing life as a man with attendant rites of passage, etc. Ditto Irish writing: the Troubles and the centuries of battles proceding those, and religion.

Penelope Fitzgerald: I don't think they feel they're labouring under a weight of tradition. It gives them something to reject, and that's valuable in itself.

Giles Foden: Sadly not. A good number of so-called British writers don't seem to read anything written before 1980 nowadays; whereas writers in many other countries are still in the throes of making tradition with a living past.

Paul Johnson: No: tradition is not a weight, but a springboard.
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Why is wit so strongly indigenous to British writing?

John Bayley: I'm not sure the English novel, taken as a whole, is particularly witty, but I am sure it’s full of humour. There’s not a clear distinction between the two, but there is a difference. Jane Austen is both witty (see the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice) and humorous, but her humour goes deeper, is less comprehensive, less definable. PG Wodehouse comes into a third category: he makes jokes. Sometimes the jokes don’t come off: more often they do. And they can also be both witty and humorous, like the man "who looked as if he had been poured into his suit and forgotten to say ‘when.’ " That is good-natured, like all good humour. And true humour animates a novel more than anything else.

Malcolm Bradbury: It’s sometimes said that wit and comedy are to British writing what systematic ideas or philosophies are to French, German and Italian writing, and I see truth in this. The extraordinary comic inventiveness of Chaucer and Shakespeare is the construction of a vision of a society, in which the brio of individual character is crucial, individual idiosyncrasies are developed, and the social traffic is itself oiled and watered by wit and irony. Comedy and wit are a means by which the British - a complex mixture of races, classes and regional cultures - have found a way to live together.

AS Byatt: Answering this would require an essay. I think it’s connected to the British interest in pragmatism and understatement, and is more related to Freud’s ideas of the sources of comedy in the hardness of the world than to the polite formalities of French wit, which depends on social codes.

Penelope Fitzgerald: Wit means self-concealment, meiosis, self-deprecation, a recognition that things are too desperate to be comic but not serious enough to be tragic, a successful attempt to make language (and silence) take charge of the situation, and all these are British habits.

Paul Johnson: Because behind this mask of courtly manners, the English like to laugh at each other.

Will Self: Is it? I know there’s a certain kind of febrile, class-based, dramatic irony that passes for wit in some quarters. Oh! And then there’s scatology of course - we mustn’t forget that pile of s***. But it strikes me that it’s only comparatively recently, with the opening out of English society and the influence - in particular - of American humour, that there’s been anything even passing for a sense of humour in this benighted country.
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Why a flowering of ex-colonial literature?

Alain de Botton: The idea that ex-colonial literature is flourishing is both an example of inverted racism and a journalistic myth. India has, for instance, been flourishing for many centuries. More interesting to think about is why this notion that ex-colonial literature is flourishing has become so fashionable. The best explanation lies in the deeply provincial attitude of Home Counties literary editors faced with novels with mangoes and butterflies in them.

Penelope Fitzgerald: I wish I could hope to live long enough to see whether the ex-colonies, India in particular, will go on speaking English at all. The language may recede, and the literature with it.

Paul Johnson: We gave them English as the key to unlock the door to the world - and now it no longer has strings attached, they are using it.

Will Self: The ex-colonial authors aren’t really especially good, it’s just that the British (and I use the word advisedly) like to continue their "martial races" policy even after the end of the empire. Thus the clever Indians can be seen to be good novelists, and the Africans surprisingly vibrant - if simple - poets. It’s absurdly patronising. Oh, and there’s a kind of inverted, reactionary snobbery: "We decadent whites can’t write novels any more in the 19th-century tradition - but you quaintly anachronistic ex-colonials can do just fine." It makes me want to hurl.

Auberon Waugh: The situation in the former colonies is fresher and more interesting. British society is exhausted and overexposed.
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Is there a relationship between British and American literature?

Alain de Botton: One might see certain British traits in American literature; for instance, empiricism and realism. But American writing seems far more religious.

Malcolm Bradbury: In my experience, a strong one. For my own generation, our American contemporaries were as influential on our writing as were other British writers, andthat close relationship has continued. On the other hand, there are significant differences. In fiction, one difference is the dominance of the Gothic tradition in America, as contrasted with the power of the social realistic tradition in Britain. Another is, in my view, a different notion of language; Britain still has the traces of a classical literary language, where the American tradition is ostentatiously vernacular. But all these distinctions are far less apparent than they were 40 years ago; the crossover now is considerable.

AS Byatt: There always has been, from Fenimore Cooper and Scott, through George Eliot and Henry James, Melville and Sir Thomas Browne, to Martin Amis and Saul Bellow. Malcolm Bradbury’s thesis that modern British writing is peculiarly invigorated by and derives from recent American writing seems to me to have a limited truth. It applies to men, like Boyd and Amis, but not almost any women I can think of.

Carmen Callil: Yes, of course - because of the language; it’s intertwined, over centuries. The gap grows wider now though.

Paul Johnson: The two are a continuum.

Auberon Waugh: A few writers, like, Martin Amis, become infatuated with the larger American market and greater sums of money to be earned.
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What is meant by success for a writer in Britain?

Malcolm Bradbury: Today, commercial - as opposed to critical - success is the dominant factor. As in the USA, publishing has become big corporate business; and there are probably far fewer small or independent presses in Britain. On the other hand, there is great cultural energy and a flourishing publishing scene. Creative courses now abound, writing can become a well-paid profession, and authorship and generic writing of all kinds flourish. But, though competent and interesting publication grows, great books of vision or experiment are rarer.

AS Byatt: Nowadays, big advances, TV, exhausting tours, too many letters, all of which, however good, cannot be answered. Better not to think about it.

Carmen Callil: a) esteem b) money c) sales.

Will Self: The only success that ever matters for a writer anywhere is sales. If you sell books you have readers - if you have readers you can tell your publisher, your agent, your publicist, the critics, the academics and everyone else to piss off.

Auberon Waugh: Favourable attention in the Literary Review.

Hugo Williams: Survival I’d say.

Is there a connection between literature and a sense of nationalism among the countries in the United Kingdom?

Alain de Botton: Fortunately, unlike France, there is very little connection between nationalism and literature. People don’t take books seriously enough.

Carmen Callil: Yes, particularly for those who are not English, for obvious reasons.

Paul Johnson: Yes, but a deleterious one.

Will Self: What d’you want here - a doctoral thesis? For a start, I would have to go into the mechanics of these four, separate nationalisms; then I would have to survey these four literatures; then I would have to relate them in terms of a definition of "nationalism", which is always moot.
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Does the Booker ever get it right?

Alain de Botton: The role of the Booker Prize is to get it wrong every year: in so doing, it generates controversy and something to talk about in the pauses at London literary parties.

John Bayley: Having been a Booker chairman myself, I don’t see how it can. One of the joys of the novel is that no two readers agree about the merits of any single one of them. It is the most subjective form in the whole spectrum of art. If War and Peace were to be submitted, you can be quite sure that the jury would split 50-50. Half of them would say it was too long, contained too much boring history, was too much about the upper classes . . . No novelist can ever do more than please some of his readers for some of the time, and that is how it should be.

Malcolm Bradbury: Meaning does it succeed, as it is supposed to, in selecting the best and most demanding literary novel of the year from Britain, Ireland and former Commonwealth countries? Yes: perhaps about a quarter of the time. It has helped establish major writers, including Salmon Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and AS Byatt. It has also significantly neglected or overlooked others, including Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

AS Byatt: Several good books have won the Booker Prize, and a great many good books have never even been shortlisted. The jury changes every year, which is a good thing. It is silly to regard the prize as anything but a lottery, a good publicity stunt and a way of causing passionate discussion of literature - which in Britain always includes indignation and whining (the true British vice).

Carmen Callil: Yes - see JG Farrell’s The Seige of Krishnapur for one - and there are others.

Penelope Fitzgerald: Perhaps competition isn’t the right way to judge the arts at all, but it’s a very long-established one. Novels are particularly difficult to judge because they’re read in solitude, but judged in committee.

Paul Johnson: No.

AL Kennedy: The Booker Prize gets it right in the end. Write a great book and you probably won’t win it. Write a lousy book five or six years later and you almost undoubtedly will. Which doesn’t do the books, the writers or the prize much good, but that’s life . . .

Will Self: I don’t think any award for artistic excellence can ever "get it right" - especially if it’s determined by a committee. As one of the "rules" of the Booker Prize is that no book can be advanced for the shortlist unless one of the judges "sincerely believes" it will win the prize, it means that the shortlist is an inevitable dumbing down of the long list, and the winner a further senseless equivocation. I pay no attention.

Auberon Waugh: Practically never.

Hugo Williams: I very rarely read novels, but I think I would like Kingsley Amis and Anita Brookner if I had a copy.
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Whom would you choose as your doubles partner: Martin Amis or Julian Barnes?

AS Byatt: I preferred playing singles, when I played at all. Now I go in for solitary, contemplative swimming. I would happily dine with either writer.

Carmen Callil: Julian Barnes, but I certainly wouldn’t say no to Martin Amis.

Penelope Fitzgerald: I’m long past playing doubles, but should like to see them play each other.

Paul Johnson: Neither, rather not play tennis.

Will Self: I don’t play tennis. Remember Montaigne: "Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously - it means he doesn’t take life seriously enough."

Auberon Waugh: Julian, of course. He is a serious wine drinker.
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The Authors