Julian Barnes

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the influences and experiences that most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the novelist, essayist and critic Julian Barnes, one of the most acclaimed and distinctive British writers of his generation. His early novels, including Metroland, A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters and Flaubert's Parrot, established his reputation for blending fiction, factual biography and philosophical reflection. Julian Barnes won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, and the same year won the prestigious David Cohen Prize for Literature, awarded for a body of work.

0:46A famous Francophile, he was given the title of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France's highest cultural honours in 2004.

0:59Julian Barnes, welcome to This Cultural Life. Nice to be here. You've just published your 15th novel, Departures, and you've taken the very unusual step of announcing that it will be your final work of fiction. Yes. Why? That's true. Well, because it feels like it. I've written a lot of books. I'm about to turn 80. Can you cite a good book written by someone after the age of 80? You can't think of Tolstoy with his terrible pamphlets that he used to write telling people how to live. No, it was a slow but eventually firm decision. Various things fed into it. One was age, obviously. One was the fact that I have notebooks in which I write down plans, notes for future books.

1:46And after I'd finished my last novel, I went through all my notebooks. I didn't see a single thing that spoke to me and said, you need to write this now. They were all ideas for things I might have written five years ago. So that was a sort of a hard realisation. Was it a hard decision to make? No, not really. the more I thought about it and wrote it the more I thought, you know, quit while ahead. You've called Departures a novel. Actually it's a hybrid book in a way. It's part fiction, there's a story within a story and then also we get these reflections on life and death and memory in particular by this character called Julian Barnes who shares much of your biography.

2:27I mean, was there a specific starting point for the book in those notebooks? No, I don't think there was. In fact, I couldn't tell you which part I started writing first because the process of writing involves the eradication of where you could have started, where you might have gone wrong. You called it a hybrid, which is exactly right, but you try telling that to either a publisher or a bookseller. Oh, hybrid books, they're over there behind the gardening, you know? Too confusing. Let's stick with the word novel then. The fictional element tells the story of a man and a woman who are lovers in the 1960s at university.

3:03Having been introduced by this mutual friend, Julian Barnes, who then brings them back together later in their life when they are single people, older people, wiser people in a way. I presume that those parts of the book, the supposed fictional elements, are fiction, are they? Or is that couple based on real people? I think my answer is that's for me to know and my biographer to find out. I mean, yes, it is a hybrid book. Some of it is autobiographical, some of it is fictional, some of it is non-fictional. But what it's saying is actually the truth comes in various forms and you can't necessarily tell the fictional truth from factual truth.

3:44And I want you just to read it as if it's all true. And early on in the book, you write, this will be my final novel. So did you write it, or it suggests that line, and it suggests that you were writing this knowing it was a swan song of sorts. Did it bring greater pressure, therefore? No. I wrote it thinking this might be true. It didn't put any pressure on me at all. Was there an aspect of you thinking, I better get this right, I need to go out on a high? Yes, I didn't want to go sort of, you know, wittering and dribbling on. When I first became aware of books and writers and who they were and what they looked like, It seemed to be the case that it was very fashionable once you became a reasonably well-known writer to write not just one autobiography, but a whole series of them.

4:33Leonard Wolfe, for example, and Anthony Powell, who wrote a multi-volume series of memoirs, one of which was called To Keep the Ball Rolling. And I thought, what a depressing idea, you know.

4:53On This Cultural Life, Julian Barnes, my guests choose the influences and the inspirations that have had the biggest impact on their own creativity. And your first choice for this programme is a Triumph Mayflower car, a car which you say took you to France with your parents in 1959, the first of several family holidays there. So really, it's France that you've chosen, isn't it? Not the car, as lovely as the car sounds. Yes, but the car was sort of part of it somehow because back then, I was about 12, no-one I knew had gone abroad. My parents had been abroad before the war. It was still moderately austere times and suddenly we got this car, which, just as a parenthesis, was once voted the ugliest car ever made.

5:39It was very boxy and had a very pretentious touch on the whatever you call the things in the middle of the hubcaps. The centre circle. The centre circle. The roundel. The roundel, exactly. The roundel was a map of the world. Which suggests this is a car for travelling. This is a car for travelling, yes. Anyway, we decided to... Well, my parents decided that we'd go to France. This would have been about 1958 or 9. And we did a little tour of Brittany and Normandy. But almost my favourite moment was we went from New Haven to Dieppe. We drove down to New Haven. and we drove to the docks, we drove onto the embarkation area, and we stopped the car, and then all of a sudden a crane arrived, and it descended on the car, and they put various bits of wood around it, and then it was just swung up into the air, and then dropped into the hold of the boat.

6:38It was extraordinary. No roll-on, roll-off ferries back then. And then the same happened at the other end, and it really felt like a rather dramatic transition. You are going abroad. Watch your car being swung through the air. And then my first morning in France, my father said to me, go and get a newspaper for me. I thought, oh, what do I say? Where do I go? That sort of stuff. I said, what do I say? So he told me. And I crossed the road very trepidatiously and went into this newsagent and said, Le Journal de la Région, s 'il vous plaît. And I threw down some money and he gave me the paper. And I felt I'd achieved an amazing thing.

7:21Wow. And I first noticed the different smells, the different looks of France. And then we went round Normandy and Brittany. And then every year thereafter, we'd do a similar trip to a different part of France. And so it was very much my first foreign country. I didn't go to another foreign country until I was at least 18. If you ask somebody to play a game of word association with the name Julian Barnes, the name France would come pretty high up on the list. So is this where that love of France starts then with these journeys? My parents were both French teachers and I read French and Russian at school.

7:56I suppose it does run deep, yes. You were born in Leicester, grew up mainly in the sort of outer suburbs of London. France must have felt like a very different world in the late 50s, early 60s. Yes, it was. And one sign of that was that cars were very distinctive back then. They didn't look like one another. And so you always saw another British car coming towards you when it was. And you waved. You waved at the cars. Some British cars hooted at us, and my mother thought that was vulgar. So we were allowed to wave but not hoot. As you say, both your parents were French teachers. So did you have a love of the language as well as the country and the culture?

8:37I can't really remember, because I think it was very slow developing. And every so often I think, you know, what if my parents had been Italian teachers? Many years down the line I would have written Dante's Gerbil or something like that. Some decisions about your life are taken before you realise that they are decisions. But your relationship with France has made its way into so many of your books. and also a deep admiration, clearly, of some of its literary figures, most famously, Gustave Flaubert. When did you first read Flaubert? I first read Flaubert on a hot summer's afternoon. I was staying with my grandparents in Beaconsfield, and my grandfather, who was a very practical man, had built a summer house.

9:23And I went and lay down there. I was about 16. I'd been given a reading list by not my French master, my English master. and on it was this book called Madame Bovary and I thought, oh, that sounds a bit fruity perhaps. Married French woman who seems to be about to have an affair. I didn't actually find it at all erotic. I was too sort of busy working out what was happening. Later on when I read it, I did find it had a strong erotic charge and of course it was prosecuted for immorality. So it was Flaubert's writing. It was his style and the story which appealed them. Yes, it was the story. And I think the book of his that really made me think he was special was, strangely enough, a compilation by Francis Stiegmuller, who was a great Flaubert East American.

10:18And he put together from Flaubert's letters and diaries an account of his travels in Egypt and the Middle East in 1856, seven, that sort of time. They were extraordinary in their candour and truthfulness and vulgarity and having a strong narrative voice. Your 1984 novel Flaubert's Parod, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is about a retired English doctor who goes on a kind of pilgrimage to Normandy to discover all that he can about his favourite author, Flaubert, who kept a stuffed parrot on his desk while he was writing one of his stories. For those who don't know the book, just explain the significance of the parrot.

11:04Well, there's a short story called Un Coeur Simple. It's about a woman called Félicité who had worked for a family, never married, and had a series of attachments to the children. and then she had her fiancé who dumped her and so on. And so it's a story about emotional diminution of her life. And she ends up, her final attachment is to a parrot, which she then has stuffed when it dies. And when she dies herself, she sees, and the sentence goes something like this, she saw before her the heavens opening and an enormous parrot descending towards her. So the parrot becomes a sort of parallel for the Holy Ghost.

11:50And it's a very good example of the Flaubertian grotesque, of the sort of transcendental and the very, very material. But Flaubert kept a parrot on his desk whilst he was writing to get a sense of what a parrot looked like and to describe it in great detail. Yes, he went to the Natural History Museum in Rouen and he borrowed a parrot. He writes in a letter to a friend, I've got this parrot on my desk. I need it to grasp the essence of parrothood, but it's really beginning to annoy me. Then he finished the story. He sent the parrot back. And 100 or so years later, I went on a Flaubert trip and tried to find the parrot in the museum.

12:36And they said, oh, well, come in. and they took me into a room where there were about 300 stuffed parrots all looking extremely elderly and dandruffy. They're all falling apart. So your novel sort of warns of the tendency that we have as readers to confuse fact and fiction because your protagonist in Flaubert's parrot is desperate to see the real parrot and he has a similar revelation that you had which might be that he could have been one of many, many parrots that Flaubert had on his desk. This, by the way, is the first book of mine which could correctly be described as a hybrid. It's a fiction and nonfiction mix.

13:16So that's when I started with my third book. And I've done various hybrid books ever since, but not always. Were you surprised at the success of Flaubert's Parrot? Oh, yes, I was very surprised. I mean, if you reverse it, in France, an unknown writer with two not very successful books behind him writes a sort of upside-down novel about Dickens. I don't think the French would have been very interested. But for some reason, it caught on. I mean, that must have been very gratifying. Was it more of a surprise that it was a hit also here in Britain? Yes, I mean, everything about it was a surprise. Both the first book that winged its way to the continent and it won a little prize in France and then it went to Italy and so on.

14:01And it's wonderful the first time someone of a different national, regional background reads your book and says, that's how it was for me. The very first time it happened, I was surprised on a trip to China. And there was a woman who had been brought up in the Black Forest in Germany. She said to me, I read your book Metroland. And my childhood was exactly like that. and I thought this is weird but very satisfying. I grew up in Metroland in Middlesex. The English suburbs. The suburbs and she grew up in the Black Forest and she was about 10 or 20 years older than me but there's obviously something in the book which spoke to her in terms of growing up, learning, being aware of life, fearing life and so on.

14:51That's the universality of good fiction, isn't it? Well, thank you for saying that.

15:02Your next choice for this cultural life, Julian Barnes, and I'm going to quote from the email that you sent to us in advance of this recording. You said, reading Crime and Punishment on a school field day wearing khaki uniform in 1964. What's the significance of the setting, first of all, and the uniform? Well, the school I went to had a combined cadet force, as it was called, and what it meant was that from the age of about 13 until we left school, every Monday you had to dress up in military uniform. You could be a soldier, you could be a sailor, or you could be an infantryman. I was an infantryman, and it was very, very embarrassing because I went to school on the underground from Northwood to Blackfriars, which involved three different lines.

15:47And there I was, very self-conscious, 14-year-old, say, looking like a First World War soldier. and it was like that because the original thing was called the officers training corps and it was to prepare schoolboys for officership in case there was another world war and there was another world war but still we carried on looking like first world war recruits and we've had a we went on field days which consisted of being given a lee enfield rifle which probably was never used and it was about 40 years old and then pretending to go on manoeuvres and do monkey runs and leopard crawls through the bushes and I couldn't have hated it more.

16:33And then on one of these field days, it was lunchtime, so I opened my pack and there were my sandwiches and there was a copy of Crime and Punishment, which I was reading. I sat down, I ate my sandwich and I picked up on Crime and Punishment And it was a feeling that this story, which was so alien to me about, you know, 19th century Russia and the senseless murder of an old woman by a sort of slightly crazed, hyper young man. It seemed to me more about real life than running through the gorse dressed as a soldier. You know, that seemed like fiction to me. And current punishment seemed like fact.

17:13Maybe this is my first experience of hybridity. It is, isn't it? But it's also, again, about the power of fiction, about its ability to transport you to a different place and time. And you have a sense of alternative lives. But you knew for certain that you were not officer material, that a life in the army was not one. Captain Vance. No, no, no. How well read were you at this point when you took crime and punishment out from your school bag? I was sort of averagely well read. I mean, my home contained books. Books were respected. I wasn't a writer in my family in any way. But teachers? Teachers, yes.

17:52My mother had once had a letter published in the London Evening Standard and she cut it out and put it on the mantelpiece and it was there for years. But the idea of being a writer, I think if I had any ambition, it was to be a good reader at that time. Were you academic at school? Yes. I mean, like a good student, good grades? I was a good student, good grades, scholarship boy. But you weren't writing any of your own fiction? No, that wasn't on the menu somehow. The other thing is, when you start reading and understanding literature, you're reading a whole series of great books. And you think, if you thought, I like to write a novel, you think, well, what's the point of writing a novel when Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Dickens and George Eliot and Jane Austen have done it before?

18:35The bar has been raised very high already. So the only way you can do it is to sort of put that all to one side. You went to Oxford to study modern languages, I believe, and then, interesting note in your biography, you worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary after graduating. What were you doing there? Were you refining, updating definitions or even coming up with new words? I was working on the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, and there had been a supplement, single volume supplement in 1933. And we were now working, this is in the late 60s, early 70s, we were working on a four volume new supplement.

19:12I was, for my sins or for my enjoyment, I was specialised in general vocabulary, plus sports and dirty words. That was my job. And the part of the dictionary that we were redeveloping at that point was from F to G, so you can imagine. Are there words that you define which still exist in the Oxford English Dictionary? I'm not sure, but I did improve the definition and illustrations of gully, as in cricket. Were you led to that job at the OED because of a love of language, do you think? No, I was led to that job, the OED, because that was the only job I could get. I spent a long time taking the civil service exams, which was a well-known ploy for wasting time.

20:01At the end of it, they said, well, we can't offer you a job in the Foreign Office and we can't offer you a job in the Home Civil Service, but you could immediately have a job in the Tax Inspectorate without further examination. What qualified you for that? I don't know. I mean, I hadn't got great maths. Maybe it's that thing about precision again. Maybe. Are you a pedant? I'm a pedant in some respects, yes. I once wrote a book called The Pedant in the Kitchen, which was about cooking and my approach to cooking. Are you a pedant about words, though, do you think, about getting words right and getting language right?

20:38Yes, I am, and there are obviously certain usages which annoy me, but at the same time I acknowledge that language changes all the time. What annoys you? And all for the better. Which words annoy you or misuse of words? Oh, well, the word decimate. Now, short lesson. Decimate comes from the Latin for 10. And to decimate originally and properly meant to reduce by one in 10. It refers to punishment amongst Roman legionaries. And there was one legion who had fought badly and lost their flag, whatever it's called. And they were punished by all lined up and one in ten was just killed like that. What has happened to that word in the last 80 years or so is that it's completely reversed.

21:30So it means that one in ten survive. So just wipe out almost. It means wipe out, destroy utterly. And so I sort of growl at that. But at the same time, I know that it's a hopeless cause. A lot of this cultural life listeners will be thinking twice before they use that word again, and having listened to Julian Barnes. Wise advice. Thank you, Julian.

21:54Your next choice is Liz Calder, your very first publisher who edited and published your first four novels. You said in your note to us, without whom? Without whom, what would have happened? Well, I spent about six years writing my first novel, which is only 160 pages or so. Desperate lack of confidence. rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. At the same time, being a journalist, doing book reviews and pieces. Working at The New Statesman? Yes, I was working at The New Statesman. So this novel was sent in to Jonathan Cape, who were the best publishers of fiction. And it went to two readers. And years later, I saw their readers' reports.

22:40And both of them said, you know, it's not really very good. You know, he might possibly write something interesting in the future, but no, we shouldn't publish this. As it happened, Liz Calder was coming into a new job at Jonathan Cape around this time. And she sort of heard about it and she may have read my TV reviews or something. And she pulled it out of the junk pile, read it, thought it was salvageable and gave me very good advice. and I really think that if it hadn't been published, if she hadn't been there, then I wouldn't have carried on being a novelist. I'd have thought, this proves I'm not a novelist.

23:21I'll just write non-fiction. I'll write reviews. So this could have been the end of any idea that you had at the time of becoming a novelist. The book was Metroland, which was published in 1980. It's about a young man from the outer suburbs of London who travels to Paris to study and the world is awakened for him. There are clearly some autobiographical elements in there because you've talked about travelling to France as a young man. But as we know from all of your work, we can't always be sure what's real and what's imagined. So what was the starting point? It was funny because Philip Espère was published in France first and then they went back and they published my earlier novels.

24:00And they said, oh, we've got to do a little television interview with you. and they took me to the sort of north part of Paris, Park Morsault, something like that. We're on a little hill looking over some 19th century buildings with slate roofs. And we did the interview and I said, just out of interest, why are we doing it here? It's a cold day. And they said, oh, Mr Barnes, because over there, just over there, that's where you lost your virginity. And I thought... I must have written it convincingly. This is the scene which Christopher, the protagonist, does lose his virginity, but they presumed it had to be autobiographical.

24:37Yes, and I said where it happened. No, it wasn't autobiographical at all. My virginity was either intact or in the same state when I returned from France. Just going back to Liz Calder, what does a good editor do for a novel? What did she do for you? Well, first of all, she focused on the last, in three sections, on the third section, and she pointed out where I was sort of coasting or where there was flab. She understood exactly what the novel was doing and she saw ways of sort of tightening and tautening it. And I took all her notes and then she read it again. She said, well, I think the third part's fine, but I'm not so sure about the first part now.

25:19And I said very grumpily, I'm not going to change the first part. The third part is interesting, though, because it's when the youthful idealism that you lead us through in the first part of the novel, when Christopher goes to Paris, leaves the London suburbs, he returns back to suburbia and it's almost like a failure because he's giving in to conventionality. Yes. That theme of ageing and that kind of shift from youthful idealism, that is something which has recurred in many of your novels. Yes, yes. I mean, in Metroland, it's partly a sort of defiance of the traditional growing up novel where the heroine in a Balzacian way is standing on a hill overlooking Paris thinking, I'm going to take that city.

26:10You know, there are still writers today who think I'm going to take New York and take London. Whereas this chap, Christopher, returns to his roots. He returns to Metroland and he sees that, you know, the gentle daily pleasures of married life and fatherhood are what he needs, that he doesn't have great bounding ambitions. He's happy with his lot. That book helped secure your place on the inaugural grantor list of best young novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Saman Rushdie, Rose Tremaine and many others. That was 1983. Did it feel like this is our moment? This is a kind of a seismic generational shift in the literary world?

26:57It probably looks like that in retrospect, but it just felt part of the fun of being a young writer around London and meeting other writers. We didn't recognise that there was a sort of sea change in that there was a new generation coming up who were diverse. You know, Salman Rushdie, Shiva Nipaul, Bukhia Macheta and so on. and we were photographed for the Sunday Times Colour magazine by Lord Snowden. And it's a double-page spread, you know, there was me in the middle with the red tie. And it sort of gradually became apparent that this was a sort of moment, that there was a new generation, that literary fiction could be sexy, that writers weren't just found on the literary pages, they could be found in the news pages and the gossip pages, and that publishers, noting this, started to pay us more money.