Sebastian Faulks

0:04Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures discuss the influences and experiences that inspired their own creative lives. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the author Sebastian Faulks. He won huge acclaim for his first World War story, Birdsong, which, along with the girl at the Léon d 'Or and Charlotte Gray, forms part of a trilogy of historical novels set in France. Since it was first published in 1993, Birdsong has gone on to sell more than 3 million copies worldwide, and he's taught in schools and universities on both English and history syllabuses.

0:40His other novels include Human Tracers on Green Dolphin Street, Engelby, and most recently, Farewell to Eden. A team captain on the Radio 4 literary quiz show The Right Stuff for over a decade, Sebastian Foulkes was made a CBE for Services to Literature in 2002. Sebastian, folks, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. On this show, my guests discuss the most significant influences and experiences that have informed their own creativity. And your first choice is your mother, Pamela. But before we talk about her influence on you, let's set the scene. You were born and brought up in Berkshire.

1:19What was early family life like for you? It was great. We're talking about a time after the war when people are trying to put their lives together again, rather. My father had lost all his 20s to the war and had rather reluctantly become a lawyer in the local town, Newbury. And my mother had been in the Women's Air Force and she'd had a rather difficult childhood but was very happy to be married. I had an older brother born in 1950 and he was a great influence on me because he was that bit older than me. So it was a very ordinary, tranquil, modest childhood. No one had any money. We didn't have any money, but that was fine.

1:58And, you know, we made our own fun in those days. What about cultural upbringing? Were there books in the house? There were a lot of books in the house. My father had had a pretty straightforward education and he read a lot. And he belonged to a book club, which in those days was a very normal thing to do. And you were sent the book of the month choice. Frequently seemed to be Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, that kind of writer whom he liked very much. But my mother was much more sort of culturally active, you would say. Her mother had been an actress of really no great distinction, I think. But my mother had a gramophone and she had quite a big record collection.

2:35You know, the sort of fairly cut price boots or Timothy White's purchase of there was Mozart, Beethoven. If you asked her, have you got any Mahler? She said, well, I think I've got some somewhere. And she was a very keen reader, largely self-educated, really. but she had discovered Dickens when she was young and I think quite unhappy and found in Dickens stories and characters which rather spoke to her. So you talk about this unhappiness and this difficult childhood that your mother had. What were the circumstances? Well, simply that her parents divorced when she was a baby and neither of them really wanted to look after her.

3:10Care of the child was given to the father because it was very much a fault divorce in those days. But the father was a sports reporter, my grandfather, and he was out and about all the time in Scotland, you know, reporting on golf or in France, reporting on rugby, whatever it was. And so my mother was brought up mostly by her grandparents in a rather sort of haphazard way. Did they encourage Dickens, do you think? I don't know where she picked up Dickens and indeed all the others, but even when I was a child, I remember her coming to pick me up from the village school when I was about six, and she would always get there early and she'd always be reading a book in the car, trying, I think, in a way to sort of make up for the gaps in her education.

3:48She also would take us to the theatre whenever she could. And then one day she took my older brother Edward and me to the National Gallery. I mean, this was excitement beyond belief. And then we did the Tate in the afternoon. So she was quite sort of active in encouraging us. She recognised the empowering qualities of art and culture then? I think so. When she read to us every day after lunch, clearly books meant something. and then I would see her sitting at her little portable typewriter typing away and she was trying to write her own plays. I don't think they ever got very far. She'd send them off to the BBC and the BBC would send them back again and she was constantly being disappointed but constantly trying again.

4:31Did you ever read them? No, I never read one of them. You don't know what she was writing about? I suspect they were sort of fairly middle-class family comedies with a slightly sad touch probably but it did make me feel that having some sort of creative ambition was a possible thing to do. It wasn't completely weird. And certainly of the little boys and girls at the school, I was the only one whose mother was trying to write a play before she came to pick us up. But there's a lineage there, isn't there? Because your grandfather was a writer, sports reporter, your mother was trying to write and clearly it's been passed down in some way through the genes.

5:04What age did you think, hmm, that's the life for me as well? I think when I was about 14 or 15 and I'd read a lot of adventure stories as a child and then I sort of moved on to Sherlock Holmes, who I loved a lot, and then Agatha Christie, Alastair MacLean, who was a sort of great thriller writer, Night Without End, Where Eagles Dare and so on. And then I hit a bit of a sort of block. And I think this can happen when you're about 13. You finish with children's stuff, but you're not really ready to go on to, you know, Henry James or whatever. But then about 14 or 15, I started with Pride and Prejudice and then David Copperfield and then D.H.

5:42Lawrence, Sons and Lovers. And I was quite unhappy at this time. I didn't really like the school and I felt very rebellious. And I found in these characters people who really spoke to me. And all these authors, even Jane Austen, was very anti-establishment. And I thought that she was going to be very boring and so on. But she wasn't. She was right with me in her mockery of posh people and vicars and so on. So you're in senior school. You went to Wellington, didn't you? I did, yeah. And it was really then, not now, a very second-rate school. It didn't really reward accomplishment. It really was there to turn out people who'd go off to the colonies and administer and not make a fuss.

6:24But, you know, that might have been OK in 1860, but we're now in, you know, 1969. And, you know, that really didn't cut the mustard anymore. and I ran away from school and I made a tremendous fuss and wanted to be removed. But we came to an agreement, which was that I could leave the school basically and go and live with a retired master in the village nearby and then I would bicycle in every day for a sort of tutorial. And finally, in my last year, I was lucky enough to have two extremely good teachers. Finally, the school came up trumps and I just had a lesson a day with them on English. Was it disdain for authority or were you unhappy there?

7:06I hated the school. I thought it was utterly second rate. And I have to say it isn't anymore. It's now a sort of model of what a private school can be. It's co-ed and very good academically, very good in every way. But hang on, you say second rate. What did you have to compare it to? Well, I suppose compared to the school I'd been to before, where if you did well and came, you know, top of the class, you've got a chocolate bar and a pat on the back and a pair of striped socks if you did well at football. and it encouraged you a lot, whereas Wellington didn't encourage you. But it suggests that you knew you were clever and you sort of deserved a bit better in terms of education than the teaching that you were getting at Wellington.

7:41Well, I suppose that's right because I'd won the top award going into the school and I'd been top of the class in the previous school. So, yeah, I suppose I felt, you know, this could be better. This could be more enlivening and enlightening, yeah. Was there anything that you came away from that school with that steered you towards this path of writing? Yes, I think the fact that one couldn't do anything in the evenings except read. There were televisions, but you weren't allowed to watch them. You could listen to your radio for about 15 minutes. So essentially between about 6.30 and 10.30, all you could do was read books.

8:16And so obviously I read an enormous amount. And also my last year was fun, and I don't want to sound too cruel about the school. I did get something from it in the end. You talk about the unhappiness there. And later, when you're at university and after university, you suffered bouts of mental health issues and further unhappiness. What were the circumstances? My issue started in my second year at university in Cambridge and it consisted of panic attacks, agoraphobia, insomnia. And, you know, it was in a bad way. There was nothing sort of deep down wrong with me. There was nothing genetic inherited or any serious psychiatric illness at all.

8:57But when I look back at it, I think it's a bit like having cramp or gout. These conditions are in themselves not serious, but they're very, very painful at the time. Try telling somebody with gout that, you know, your pain is trifling and they won't believe you. But actually, it isn't a very serious disease. And so anyway, my crisis passed over after about a year or so. But how did the crisis manifest itself? Just fear of going out, really. I mean, agoraphobia and thinking I couldn't get to the end of the street without having a massive panic attack. And so I was taking quite a lot of prescribed pills from various doctors.

9:38But eventually, after I'd left Cambridge, I spent a year in Bristol and I came across a very good psychiatrist there. And he helped me a great deal. Your 2005 novel, Human Traces, is very much about the evolution of psychiatry in the late 19th century and early 20th century. What was the inspiration for that? But were you drawing on your own experience? I think at that time I thought when I got better, I used to go to this hospital for twice a week as an outpatient for treatment. In Bristol? In Bristol. And there were people in there who were seriously ill. And I just thought to myself, if what I've been through is so trivial, I mean, what must it be like to be really, really ill?

10:18And I think I put that in the back of my mind as something I would return to one day. It took a long time for me to get back to it, to feel ready to tackle it, because it's such a huge subject. I had to learn a lot about neurology and evolution, psychiatry, the history of it. And for someone with almost no scientific background at all, this was extremely hard work. But I think I was also drawn towards it by the fact that I had met a number of people who suffered from schizophrenia. One of our best friends when we were children, my godmother's son, our next door neighbor. So I think just knowing these people and feeling that there was very little help or understanding available for them.

10:58In fact, more than that, that their condition had been fundamentally misunderstood. The question people asked was, is it real or is it all in his mind? And to me, that was a completely false antithesis, you know, because the question was, is it real or is it not real? Or is it all in the mind or all in the body? Well, actually, the answer is, A, it's real and B, it's all in the body because your mind is only a function of your brain, which is obviously part of the body. Part of the body and an organ. But it took me a long time to work this out. A lot of work. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, historically, you are drawing on sources and science.

11:30But two years later, 2007, you wrote a book called Engelby, in which the protagonist is mentally ill, but he's an unreliable narrator. His biography is very closely aligned to your own. He's kind of schooling his university education and then his work on a Sunday newspaper. What were you trying to achieve with Engelby? I wasn't positively trying to achieve anything because the book kind of wrote itself. I was waking up one morning and this voice started up in my head. My name is Mike Engelby and I'm in my second year at an ancient university. And when I got to my desk an hour or so later, I found I could sort of dial in and this voice just continued.

12:12And I didn't know where it was going at all. I won a prize to come to my college and it pays my fees My family's poor I took a train from school one day after I'd sat the exams and had been called for interview I must have stayed in London on the way but I have no memory of it My memory's odd like that I'm big on detail But there are holes in the fabric It was like a sort of, I suppose, a Jekyll and Hyde or some weird alter ego and I found that I was able to sort of drop a sort of pipe or pump down into sort of the very dark regions of my unconscious and this is the voice and this is the story that came out.

12:52But I'm very happy to say that, you know, I remained uncontaminated by Mike Engelby. Yes, he is a very disturbed individual, isn't he? And a possibly murderous one as well. I didn't know that he was going to have done these terrible things when I started writing it, but about halfway through it became clear that he had. And then I went back to the beginning of the book and made sure that it was all fair with the reader. And it was all in there. It was all buried. It was quite clear all along to an attentive reader, unreliable though he is. But then I thought to myself, well, if he's done these terrible things, what's the matter with him?

13:23And I'd been to visit Broadmoor when I was researching human traces and I'd become quite interested in the question of personality disorder, which is a very strange, very controversial diagnosis, which is basically done on a questionnaire. and I sat the questionnaire, I found it and I sat it first of all as Mike Engelby and it came back that there are about 10 different types of personality disorder and he was at very low risk on all of them bar one. You were channeling his answers, the answers he was likely to have given. That's right, I sat it in his persona as it were but he was off the charts for schizoid personality disorder so I felt very pleased that I'd actually created a complete pathology for a fictional character But then I thought perhaps I'd better sit this as myself as well, just to make sure.

14:12I scored very low on all personality disorders bar to my wife's amazement and amusement, narcissistic personality disorder, which there was a sort of mild risk.

14:29Your next choice, Sebastian, folks, is the Jeux de Paume Gallery in Paris. When did you first visit it? When I was 17, I left school and I had a year before going to university and I went off to Paris because it sounded like a good idea. And I found this little room off the Avenue de la Grande Armée, which is not a very fashionable or interesting part of Paris, really. And I had no money, but I could just about speak French. And then I learned how to speak French by imitating a Frenchman speaking French, which was fine, except that they then assumed I was French and then rattled off at a million miles an hour, which I couldn't really understand what they were saying.

15:10So I just walked around all day, really, and I was in theory doing a course at a college for an hour a day. But really I walked and walked and walked, and I went to cinemas, and I joined the American Library in Paris and read yet more and more and more books. But the Jeux de Paume was a gallery in the Tuileries Gardens. It was a kind of offshoot of the Louvre. and they had in it basically all 19th century French art, including the Impressionists. I mean, the pictures which are now... In the Musée d 'Orsay. In the Musée d 'Orsay, yeah. So it was the precursor of that. And I didn't know much about painting at this time, but I went in and I was just sort of enraptured by the whole century, but particularly by the Impressionists.

15:51I think Pissarro was my favourite. And what I liked about them was that they seemed very personal, these paintings. They were impressions of a moment in a house in the countryside outside the streets of Louvciennes under snow. But also they seem to get at something eternal or something universal. And not just of that place, but of all of France itself. That rather chimed with something that I suppose I had stumbled on while reading books at school was the idea of the emergence of the universal in the particular. And I've always thought, really, that's what art is, actually, whether you're talking about paintings or musical books.

16:32In the years since you have been so closely associated with France thematically, and clearly you have a great love for the country, did it start there with that first visit to Paris? Did you feel immediately at home and think, you know, this is the place for me, these are the people that I want to be part of? Yeah, well, I sort of didn't really like Paris, but you don't have to like it. You have to be interested by it. It was certainly interesting. And, you know, so this is in early 1971, and there are still people with no legs from Verdun, from the First World War on the metro. Everyone's smoking in the metro, by the way, at this stage.

17:06There was one non-smoking carriage. And I didn't particularly like Parisians either, but I liked the cars. I liked the Citroën, DS in particular. I liked the food. I liked the wine. I adored the landscape. But I think really for me, France was, it was like Narnia. Here is this place, it's 20 miles away, and you go into it, and everyone, all their presumptions, their way of living, their way of thinking, their way of speaking, are completely different from ours. To me, that's been one of the great things about living in London or in England at all, this proximity to this wonderful, almost sort of Disney-like world to me.

17:44But then the more I thought about it, the more I studied, the more I read about it, and I understood the great tragedies and difficulties of France in the 20th century. and I began to understand why it had this rather shuttered, closed, post-traumatic feeling. So you're talking about the landscape, the food, the wine, the art. What about the literature? Yeah, I wasn't really 100 % on French literature. There seemed to be a lot about hating the bourgeois in it, what Henry James called the puerile dread of the grocer, which has sterilised a whole province of French literature. But I hadn't read a lot.

18:25I had done, I snuck in an extra A level at school in French, so I'd done a bit. But it wasn't really the literature at that point. It was the painting. Perhaps your most famous works, the trilogy of The Girl at Léon d 'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Grey, of course, are all set in France during different periods of the early part of the 20th century. You once said that going to France, you could write the sort of novel that you wanted to write. What did you mean by that? I found living in England just didn't inspire me. And looking at the kind of writers that were being published at that time in England in the early 70s, late 70s, I wasn't really very enthusiastic about them.

19:07But I found that if I went to France, particularly in the Citroën DS, which I now possessed, having bought for 600 quid, I just would roll off the Route Nationale onto some sort of back road. and strange stories began to suggest themselves to me. I just found the whole culture, the whole landscape, inspiring and liberating. And to me, I think the real liberating breakthrough was to realise that I was not going to write about myself or some version of myself, despite what we've been saying about Engleby. But The Girl at the Lyon d 'Or is set in 1936. It's about a 22-year-old girl from a different country from mine, living in a different time, having had experiences completely other than mine.

19:48And somehow this tapped into a part of my mind and it just freed me to write. Do you think that means that as a writer you needed the challenge of unfamiliarity? Yeah, absolutely, yes. And I really didn't like the sort of thinly disguised autobiographical fiction, which is what, to be, you know, without sounding too dismissive, a lot of young people do because they have this ambition but they don't, you know, they don't know what to say So they think they'll do a version of, you know, my breakup at college with so-and-so. And it didn't really interest me at all. Birdsong became such a huge word-of-mouth hit rather than a critical hit originally and was then later voted one of the nation's favourite books.

20:29What was the initial inspiration for the novel? Well, I suppose rather like Human Traces, which I first started thinking of when I was about 11 or 12, probably about the same age, having to read out at my little school the names of all the boys who'd been killed in two world wars and ending up with a throat so raw that I had to go and see the nurse. Because there were so many names to read? So many names to read. And this was only a small school. And then the fact that our teachers seemed rather reluctant to talk about it, they tended to rather hurry on through that and then on to the Nazis. You know, they're more at home with the Nazis, really.

21:04And I suppose they were of an age that they would have had an older brother or a cousin or a family friend certainly who would have been one among many of those who died. And then I got really into it when I was writing The Girl at the Lyon d 'Or and her childhood had to have been during the First World War. And I didn't really want to open that box. I thought it's too repulsive, too much mud and blood and lice and rats. No one's interested in that. But then I read a book by Alastair Horne called The Price of Glory, which is about the Battle of Verdun, which really shaped modern France. and it's just started up again in my mind and really the question that intrigued me the more and more I read about it was how far can you go?

21:44I mean, how many men would the politicians and the generals have tolerated being annihilated in Europe for no reason that anyone's really been able to determine? And so that was the theme of the book in my mind. How far can you go and still be human? And what does it mean to be human? With one minute to go, the realisation struck him as it struck all the men, there was no way back. He threw a glance of longing down the clogged communication trench, then turned to face the front. A whistle blew, and clumsily the men began to clamber up the ladders, weighed down by their heavy packs, into the metal air.

22:23Stephen watched their foolish, crab-like movements and felt his heart seize up with pitying love for them. He pushed his way through to follow. How did you go about researching birdsong? Did you talk to veterans of the song? I did talk to a few, and I went with a group of them to Flanders one time, and I think that was a big moment for me, standing in the mud with a 95-year-old, I suppose, and him holding my hand and pointing out to a pillbox on the horizon and saying, oh, that's still there. And I says, where are you standing when my best friend was killed? and he described how he'd picked him up, his friend had been blown apart, and he picked up the body parts and put them in a sandbag.

23:05And to me, I think it was the physical connection with this old man in the very place where he had stood, and I was standing in the footprints of his best friend. And somehow it seemed to be not so much history as something which was still happening. It was sort of concurrent in some way I can't quite explain. Was he telling you in a very sort of matter-of-fact way? Yes, very matter of fact. Later on that evening, I said what happened? He said, I don't know. He left his dog tag on the piece of wood that he'd marked the grave, or maybe there was a rifle upside down, I forget. But that evening, I was walking with him in one of those beautiful Commonwealth war grave cemeteries where every headstone is white and everyone has an immaculate little shrub at the foot.

23:49And we came across this name engraved on one of them. The name was Malthouse, which was the name of his friend. And that was the first time he'd seen him for 70 years. So they had found the body in the sandbag, all the bits of the body, and they had given him a proper burial. And I was with him when he saw this. And it was a very powerful moment. How did he react? He said, oh, I say, oh, I say. That's how a 95-year-old Yorkshireman reacts. But it's also about that stoicism, isn't it? That acceptance we were talking about. You just do your duty. That's right. And it was interesting talking to these old guys, but they tended to tell you the stories they thought you wanted to hear and really to get the contemporaneous feel of what it was like to be age 18, 19, 20, 21, you had to go back to the letters and the postcards.

24:41I went to the Imperial War Museum and read hundreds and thousands of documents from their rather ill-catalogued, at that stage, collection. Did Birdsong start with a single image in your mind or a single character or did the whole story, which interweaves between time and place actually, and there's a very important romantic relationship there at the heart of the story, Did it all sort of coalesce around a particular moment? It started with the theme, which is my preferred way, but you can't control these things. You're at the mercy of what comes in. And the theme being how far can you go? And I therefore needed a main character who was prepared to go all the way through the war.

25:22And then the next great thing as a writer you do is avoid cliché. So he wasn't going to be a blue-eyed officer and he ignored he was going to be a cheery cockney, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag type. I needed someone perverse and difficult, not necessarily altogether likeable, but someone whose curiosity would drive him on. So that is Stephen. A much more normal, natural response, really, to what they see is embodied in the other main character, Jack, who is a simple, devout, God-fearing man, who the more he sees, the more he loses his faith. He's the tunneler who worked digging the tube tunnels in London before the war.