Ian McEwan believes poetry is the "superior and ultimate literary form" | Audible.ca
Ian McEwan believes poetry is the "superior and ultimate literary form"
"What We Can Know," his latest novel, is set over one hundred years in the future and keeps poetry at its heart, while delivering stark warnings around climate change and privacy.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible editor Katie O'Connor, and today I'm honored to be speaking with award-winning author Ian McEwan about his latest novel, What We Can Know. Welcome, Ian.
Ian McEwan: Thank you.
KO:What We Can Know is set in 2119, where climate change and nuclear disaster have dramatically shifted both the physical and socio-political landscapes. Our hero, Tom, is a scholar who has become obsessed with a lost poem from the year 2014 called “A Corona for Vivien.” His research invades both his professional and personal life. When he thinks he has finally discovered the poem, he instead uncovers a crime that shatters the past he thought he knew so well. I found both the future and the past so vivid in this story. What was the originating idea for What We Can Know?
IM: Well, one of the originating ideas, and I—although I didn't know it at the time—was reading “A Corona for Prue,” which is a sonnet sequence of 15 sonnets with some pretty stringent rules and conventions written by a wonderful poet, now in his eighties, John Fuller, published in the TLS. It was a poem that celebrated long love. It was a wedding anniversary present to his wife. I sat on it; it made a deep impression on me. It's easy conversational tone, I thought, was masterly given the rules of the sonnet, which I won't go into now, but they're quite challenging. And he manages this warm, loving, conversational tone, a celebration of nature, reflection on mortality. They're soon to part. Death will part them one day soon.
I've been thinking a lot about, well, of course, climate change. And we might come to that because I think it poses particular difficulties for a novelist, but also what our moral obligations are to the future. And then I thought too about a famous dinner set way back in 1817, at which Wordsworth and Keats and the essayist Charles Lamb all met. There are various other obscure people there, too, in the house of a painter, mostly forgotten today, called Benjamin Haydon. Apparently, it was two or three days of eating and drinking, incredible wit and humor. And the poets read their poems. They all knew their poems by heart.
I began to think again of the John Fuller poem and the future, and I imagined it then, in my notes, suddenly the scholar appeared out of nowhere, writing in about a hundred years’ time about us with a mixture of disappointment that we didn't solve many of the problems that were facing us. But also, of profound envy. He was living in England, which is now an archipelago, rather sleepy place, rather hideously conventional, crushed by all the disasters of the recent past. He wished he was living in our time. So, slowly, these things all came together. And I started with Tom in the Bodleian Library, which is a famous library now in Oxford. But, in my speculations about the future, it's Upper Mountain in Wales.
KO: Yes, I loved the terrain as you laid it out, both terrifying, but also just sort of deeply fascinating. And I read in an interview that you recently gave in The Times, where you said you didn't do any research for this book. You said, quote, "I've lived enough life, and I want to just treat my mind as a garden through which I can stroll." Did that approach feel freeing to you as you were writing?
IM: Yes, it does. I mean, I've loved doing research for novels. Often the research is almost inextricable from the writing itself. I often do them simultaneously, rather than do all the research and then set about writing a novel. The exploration, or the investigation, that is the writing is also the exploration that is the research. But in this case, and I guess in my last novel, Lessons, I was just able to draw on, you know… I've been writing now well over 50 years. I've been celebrating at various places, 50 years of being published. And there's enough there for me to work on for the next 150 years, I should think.
KO: I love that. I want to circle back to what's to come. The heart of this story is the lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien.” And at one point, Tom muses: "A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet." Why did you decide to circle this story around poetry as opposed to prose or a painting or another form of art? I know that, you know, you mentioned that poem that inspired you, but I'm curious if you ever considered other forms of art as you started the novel.
IM: I had no hesitation about this having to be a poem. As a novelist, I regard poetry as the superior and ultimate literary form. I envy the poets, the great poets, the good poets. I know it's even harder to make a living as a poet than it is to make a living as a novelist. But I think poetry is the original literature. It's closely connected to song. It derives from the, I think, very pulse of our being. It’s connected to dance, I should think, to the rhythms of life, the celebrations of the moment. That's why love, I think, is one of its central subjects. And the novel is a much more recent, newfangled development. I guess, within our English literary tradition, the novel really began in the 18th century. Although, of course, you can find other forms of literature that sort of approximate the novel.
But the complex form that we have as the novels of 18th and 19th century forms, were its classical periods, it built up its methods over time. We learn a lot from Jane Austen. We learn a lot from Fielding, and, of course, the great masters of the 19th century: Flaubert, Dostoevsky, et cetera, George Eliot, and Joyce. Modern writers, of course, much-shaped by modernism of the early 20th century. But poetry has a much, much longer, you know—we are reading Homer, for example, in translation. We're in touch with people who were living 2,700 years ago. So, this is a poem in my novel, which is read aloud at the second immortal dinner, we should say, to some family and friends who are sort of half listening. They're quite drunk.
Yeah, they had a lot to drink. They started with gin and tonics. They've moved to a lot of red wine. They're sort of hearing the poem, sort of liking it, sort of understanding it, sort of not, sort of drifting away—as a lot of us do when we're at a concert. Either thinking about, you know, what they've got to do tomorrow or thinking about the problems in their life, and then snapping back into the moment. The poem is a gift. Francis Blundy is the poet, a famous poet. About as famous, I'd say, as Seamus Heaney, but a completely imaginary figure. And he's made sure that the scroll on which he's written this poem is its only copy. He wants to make it really precious and hand it to his wife. What she does with that poem, we do not know as readers, at least at the beginning of the book. Over the succeeding years, people know about the poem from the people who sat and listened to it at the dinner.
Its reputation just grows and grows. It's like a blank sheet, as you say, onto which people have projected their own concerns. Some of them are to do with the destruction of nature. Some of them are some of those concentrations and legacies of the poem to do with love. And, again, long love. I've picked up a cue from my poet John Fuller. So it never could be anything else. It could not be a painting; it could not be a statue. It could not be a novel. It had to be a poem.
KO: I love that. I wanted to talk to you a bit about performance, because What We Can Know is beautifully performed by Scottish actor David Rintoul and British actress and performer Rachel Bavidge.
And I thought, while listening, it really gave a feeling of oral history to this story as well, because with the poem being lost, there is this element of oral history too, and only remembrance through these stories told. What is it like for you having your work performed and getting to experience it in different mediums?
"With audio, you've got a huge tradition. And yet the thing itself is revealed in its original form without being transformed, worsened, heightened, improved, disintegrated, chopped up by other hands."
IM: I love it. And I feel really honored to have those two wonderful voices: warm, rich, nuanced. And it really flows. It's a thrill to me. I mean, it's one of those transitions that I'm often asked about is, you know, quite a few of my novels have been turned into movies. There, it's filtered through other minds, other hands, you know: directors, costume designers and so on, and money, of course. With audio, you've got a huge tradition. And yet the thing itself is revealed in its original form without being transformed, worsened, heightened, improved, disintegrated, chopped up by other hands.
So, that's why I'm a great fan of audio. And David Rintoul, I heard on audio for the first time a while back. For me, it's delightful. I don't sit around reading my own work, and I don't lie in bed listening to my own work, but I certainly, uh, can go along to the studio wherever possible. In this case, I was only able to meet David Rintoul, and we had a lovely glass of white wine afterwards. I sat in the studio while he and the producer worked together. I know from having done it myself—I read On Chesil Beach—how demanding it is on actors.
KO: Yeah.
IM: I mean, often, they're doing this in between theater work, film work. They have three or four days free. It's very intense. It's very physically demanding. It requires stamina. They're in the studio seven or eight hours a day. There's a lot of repetition, trying to get the nuances right. It's very important, the collaboration between reader and producer. And watching the speed with which the producer could prompt, and also stand back when it was clearly necessary, dramatically necessary, was wonderful to watch.
KO: Did you wish at all, you know, thinking back to your experience, narrating your own work before, did you ever have a moment of being like, "Oh, I do kind of wish I was on the other side of that booth right now."
IM: No. I sort of regretted saying yes to doing it, partly because I had flu at the time.
KO: Oh.
IM: But the studio was booked, and there was no other time. So, I dosed up and did it. But I realized that, actually, it is very demanding. There are all these wonderful voices around of actors, trained voices, or experienced voices, I should say. And, yeah, it was fun, but it deepened my admiration for those who do it so, so beautifully.
"I come back to the idea of treating your mind like a garden. You can do it at the age of 17 or 77. But recapture the luxury of solitude. You cannot have solitude on the internet. Solitude, I think, is one of the crucial ingredients of writing. "
KO: Yeah. I understand that it is quite physically taxing. And again, you know, they both do such a wonderful job with this story.
IM: They've done a beautiful job on it.
KO: Your novels are often laced with overt social commentary. The warnings around climate change in What We Can Know are very clear, with the island-heavy landscape of the 22nd century. But you also emphasize the issue of privacy. You write at one point that "we have robbed the past of its privacy" and later muse that if people in the past want to keep anything secret, they all need to get off their computers. What drove you to make this point?
IM: Well, remember, we're talking about 100 years from now. And it has every email, every encrypted social media message. So your WhatsApp, your Signal, or whatever channel you are on, has become available to the future because the software. I mean, we are now in a golden age of software writing. In fact, we're now getting AI to write the software, and it'll crack open everything we thought was secret, private. So, what my man in the future is, my scholar Tom, is saying in the future is, "If you've got a secret, whisper it into the ear of your best friend and stay away from your screen."
I'm sometimes asked, Katie, what advice would I give to a young writer? And I always say the same thing: Spend at least two or three hours a day away from this wondrous, compelling, device. Well, I come back to the idea of treating your mind like a garden. You can do it at the age of 17 or 77. But recapture the luxury of solitude. You cannot have solitude on the internet. Solitude, I think, is one of the crucial ingredients of writing. And you really need to go deep into yourself with this. So create that silence around you and not feel that, at the click of a mouse, you could see breaking news or what some friend is saying, who's trying to get hold of you.
KO: I often talk to my kids about the beauty in boredom, that the moments need to be quiet for you to kind of let creativity come to you sometimes.
IM: Absolutely. Here we are, you and I, we’ve been complete hypocrites: We're connecting via the very technology that we're deriding. But, I was lucky, well, on two counts: One, as a writer, there was no shortage of solitude in the '70s. I was also lucky as a parent, as a father, to allow my children endless unsupervised play which many children are losing out on—the socializing power of having to organize themselves in a game without either a screen or an adult intruding. I watch it with my children now, who are parents themselves, making that space usually by getting their kids to come on hikes and camping and lots of sports, of course. But also boating and swimming and just getting out in the world but also playing with cousins and friends.
So, I guess my man in the future has the internet. It's there as a tool, but he's oppressed by it in many ways because there is so much information about his poet. All his emails, texts, et cetera, are available to him. All the lectures he gave, all the readings, all the interviews, all the TV and radio interviews and press: It's all there on the Nigerian internet.
Nigeria is the local hegemon, local power. The United States is in a long series of civil wars and the various factions are claiming to represent the spirit of the glorious imperial days when it was the most powerful country in the world. So, Nigeria is quite a plausible choice, I thought, since it's going to be the, the third most-populous country in the world by the middle of this century.
I would say that I wanted to remind readers that we have a great deal that is precious—to just get away from the internet for a moment. We still have vast areas of beautiful countryside. We still live in an age of extraordinary technical and scientific advance. It's very exciting. What's happening in all kinds of areas of biology and medicine at the moment. You go into any bookstore, you are almost knocked over by the heaped recent book tables with their recent novels, recent histories, recent art books.
So, there are two bookshop scenes in this novel. Tom watches a video of a bookshop in Oxford, England, and is knocked out again by just how rich the book covers look; how many titles there are; how much industry's going on. Vivien, who is the poet's wife, Vivien Blundy, goes into a bookstore on the Upper East Side of New York, and she has the same experience. There are so many new novels; so many new books on history, et cetera, et cetera, science for the layman. And by after half an hour, she feels just like falling on the floor and falling asleep. So, we can take for granted the riches we have. And Tom really wishes he was with us.
KO: Yes, Tom is definitely quite guilty of romanticizing the past.
IM: Yeah.
KO: You've written about the past, present, and future over the years. Would you consider yourself good at staying in the now, or are you ever guilty of romanticizing or glorifying other eras?
IM: I think it's tempting to, and I fall victim to that temptation. I read a lot of Wordsworth, and I still check in with his poetry because I'm a hiker. I do a lot of hiking. I think he transformed our attitude to landscape. I think he transformed human consciousness in a way. Things that the early 18th century might have thought of as ugly—mountain ranges just looked like threatening chaos because of our first disobedience in the Garden of Eden. But Wordsworth transformed that view.
But I know that if I was transported back to 1800 or 1795, when maybe Wordsworth was at his very best, I'd be panicked by the fact that I couldn't get a hot shower, or if I had appendicitis, there'd be no anesthetics. I mean, to live in an age without anesthetics! That the cities were crowded and really stank to high heaven, and so did people, and their teeth were rotten, and there were no oranges to eat in winter. So, yeah, we have many privileges that a medieval king would envy us for. I guess part of Tom's purpose in this novel is to remind us of that.
KO: And remind us, he does! [Laughs] Tom and his colleague-turned-wife Rose have a debate about biography. You know, Tom has decided to write a biography about Vivien Blundy, the subject of the poem at the heart of his research. As we said, it was written by her husband, Francis Blundy. Tom feels like he knows Vivien. He even feels like he would've loved her if he had met her, and starts to make inferences about her choices. Rose scolds him that he can't possibly know the things he's writing as fact, and they argue about the role of inventing in biography. Your novel also gives a very careful lesson about personal diaries and journals and how people often invent about themselves to, you know, either soothe their own conscience or to make themselves look better for future generations. Do you think healthy skepticism is the key to understanding history?
"All of us cannot know quite the subjective states, the interior states, of the people we know well, or even the people we love. It's that barrier that makes me love the novel as a form, because it creates the illusion that we can absolutely enter the minds of others in ways we can't do in ordinary life."
IM: Well, it's a very good question, and it really leads straight to my title, you know, “what we can know” of other people. And yes, biographers, I think are forced to either invent—or struggle with the idea of invention—in order to bring their subjects alive. They're often working with suppositions about the interior life of their subjects. So even with Tom's avalanche of material from the early 21st century, there are many things he does not and cannot know about the woman he's writing about and her husband. That extends into the present. All of us cannot know quite the subjective states, the interior states, of the people we know well, or even the people we love. It's that problem or that barrier that makes me love the novel as a form, because it creates the illusion that we can absolutely enter the minds of others in ways we can't do in ordinary life.
And within the single novel, you can live inside several characters' minds in ways we cannot do. And yet, we still call them, and call it, the “realist tradition.” The realist tradition is very high artifice. It really is a beautiful and developed invention. We stand on the shoulders of giants—just like Newton said he did in science. We've invented ways of representing character, ways of inventing subjective interior flows of thought and feeling. The biographer is often lingering on the outer edges of the novel.
I quote the example of a biographer I much admire, Richard Holmes, an English biographer who was writing about how his subject, the Scottish writer Stevenson, the man who wrote Treasure Island. And in this case, Holmes tracked Stevenson's route across the mountain range in France called the Cévennes. Stevenson, writing a hundred years before Richard Holmes was writing, Stevenson went with a donkey. It was called Travels with My Donkey, a wonderful, wonderful book. And Holmes tracked that same route that Stevenson took. Every day, he walked more or less the same miles, although sometimes, Stevenson was ahead of him, sometimes he was behind him. And he got so close to feeling that he, that Stevenson was his friend, that even in one village, he stopped and waited for him on a bridge to come because he knew he was a couple of hours ahead of him. And then looking down the river, he saw a ruined bridge and knew that that was the bridge that Stevenson crossed. And he, Richard Holmes, was waiting on the wrong bridge and felt the huge gap between himself and the person he wanted to know and, of course, separated by a barrier of time.
And that's really Tom's experience. I mean, he tries to enter the mind and life of Francis Blundy. He constantly wants to invent. Rose, his lover, his wife, eventually, she's the one who's skeptical. But Tom says, and I think he has a point, that a biography that doesn't warm the subject up can become a very dry matter, you know? So, it's an interesting problem for all biographers, I think, how much they invent, how they slip almost unconsciously into inventing the minds, states of minds of their subjects. But yeah, it's just a problem. We can never solve it.
KO: No, we can't. And I think it’s important for everyone to kind of keep that in mind as they, perhaps, fall into what we were talking about earlier with Tom and his romanticizing. One device that you do so well—and that I love—is that you don't necessarily write in a linear fashion. The listener doesn't get all of the information upfront. Instead, you peel back layers as we go. How does this impact how you organize yourself when you start writing?
IM: I think the withholding of information is one of those crucial tools of storytelling. It's very hard to read a novel without curiosity. So the only times we do this, unfortunately, is when we're young at college or at school, and we're given books we are told to read. And some of them we're not curious about. They drive us mad with boredom. I remember at the age of 13 or 14, I had to read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in a very unattractive book that the pages were kind of onion skin. You could see the next page through the page we were reading, and you could see that the next page was as boring as the page that was in front of you.
So, withholding information, manipulating readers expectations, I'll write there from the beginning. I mean, I knew by the time I was, you know, a few months into the writing this exactly where it would end and how I would get there. Although I didn't know all the things that would happen along the way, only by writing it can you discover all that. So yeah, arousing curiosity in the reader from the start, I think, is a vital tool. Of course, if I was to read Julius Caesar now, reread it, and I have, I could read it with immediate pleasure and, well, more than pleasure, profound joy. The age of 13, it was a killer. I mean, it could have put me off Shakespeare for life.
KO: Most things at 13 [laughs] are hard.
IM: Yeah, quite. It's a hard age, I think: 13, 14. It's tough. You've got one foot in almost adulthood, one foot, childhood still clinging to you, like, sort of unwashed soap. You are on that hinge of life. You're not allowed, you know, you can't drink. You're still kind of supervised beyond what you think you should be. It's tough.
KO: It is tough.
IM: But my escape was actually reading, I mean, Shakespeare was hard—by the time I was 16, I could read Shakespeare easily. Still, I was reading novels by then.
KO: Yeah.
IM: I mean, grown-up novels, and they made me think, "I can't wait to be a grown-up."
KO: I had that experience reading you at that age.
IM: Oh, really? Oh, well—
KO: Yes [laughs]. Perhaps a little bit younger than I should have been. Um-
IM: Well, it seems to have worked out well.
"I wished I'd written 'What We Can Know' as my first novel, but I had to live an entire life before I could learn how to do that."
KO: Yeah, it led me on a literary path, which I'm grateful for. But you've been publishing for 50 years this year, which is such an incredible achievement. How has your approach to writing changed over the decades? Or how hasn't it?
IM: I think I was a cautious beginner. My first two books were short stories. I was very hesitant. I worked incredibly slowly. It was often extremely hard work. My pleasure was only ever in finishing. And only slowly did I sort of find myself, my own rhythms, my own pleasures in the unfolding of things. Not until, I’d say, my fifth book, did I really expand into the subjects that were going to really hold me for the rest of my writing life. And that novel was The Child in Time. So, time itself, science, history, love, the beginnings of love, the end of love, politics, social change—all those things that I was so cautious about, became part of the mix for me. Now I can write with a far greater ease, I take much greater pleasure in it than I used to. And I wished I'd written What We Can Know as my first novel, but I had to live an entire life before I could learn how to do that.
KO: What do you consider to be the most valuable lesson you've learned as an author?
IM: Oh, if I knew that… Well, I come back to solitude, the vital element. And we must make that distinction between solitude, which is choosing to be alone. It's a great luxury. Many of us, you know, living in, say, in a crowded apartment, can find it very difficult to get there, which is why public libraries are so vital still. But you have to not rush, I think. You have to spend time between books. I'm very good at not writing. When I finish a book, published, I've talked about it a good while, and it recedes from me, and then I want that space of just filling the emptiness: of reading, listening, talking, cooking, hiking, basically becoming a sponge to existence. And giving, too, that's important. But not forcing anything, just keeping a notebook. Keeping this private relationship to ideas as they come by and letting your own life, self-hood, shift a little. A move to another space is inevitable, if leave that six months or a year.
So I think it's, yes, I'm not a believer in anything like writer's block. All you have to do is rename it, call it hesitation, creative hesitation. V.S. Pritchett, a great English critic, was writing a rather negative review of a wonderful writer, and he'd been very unfair about him. That writer was Ford Madox Ford, who was active in the '20s and '30s and '40s. But Pritchett said something, and Ford was a very social being. He loved a party. He had an enormous number of friends. He was very communicative, and I think a lovely man in many ways. But Pritchett said he didn't have the vital ability of the novelist to exercise—and these two words really meant a lot to me—"determined stupor.”
I think he's referring to a kind of passivity that's important in the time, in the run up, to starting another piece of writing. It's a kind of watchful waiting as they call it in medicine. Just waiting and not pushing anything. Just letting it evolve. And that can only be done in silence, can only be done in solitude, which must be distinguished, of course, from loneliness. Loneliness is the ache of, you know, the lack of company. Solitude is a wonderful luxury of civilization—which as to come back to our starting point—the internet threatens.
KO: Absolutely. You know, you mentioned that there have been some parties this year marking this 50th anniversary of publishing. I'm sure the word “legacy” has been thrown about a bunch. When you hear that word, when you hear the word legacy, what comes to mind for you as you look back and reflect on your own career?
IM: On legacy, well, it's closely associated with death. So, I try not to think about it too much. Yeah, it is just something out of one's control. Other people can sort that out. I won't be here, and I won't be watching. I'll be in eternal oblivion. Yes, of course, I would like to be read in 50 or 100 or 500 years time, but it's so out of our control. You hear sometimes people say, "History will be our judge." I think history will be as flawed a judge, or as good a judge, as the present.
And one of the reasons I was interested in this poem that's gone missing—it's history that makes a foolish mistake of projecting into it all their own concerns, all their own anxieties. History will have its, anytime in the future, will look at the literature through a certain kind of lens of their own obsessions, anxieties, dreads, hopes, and so on. Just as we do with our literature. For example, I don't read my reviews much these days, but I know very well this novel will come out. And in the same day, there'll be published, maybe a glowing review and, in another newspaper, it'll be damned to hell. And I think history will be just the same: It'll damn me, or it will love me, or it won't even know about me.
KO: I find that last one hard to believe.
IM: Well, you know, it would be nice to have an afterlife and peer down through a telescope and see what's going on. But I don't hold out much hope.
KO: So what is next for you?
IM: Next is, I'm rather enjoying putting together a collection of nonfiction, lectures I've given, various bits of journalism I've written over the years. And I'm trying to not just make it a sort of catch-all and dumping into it every last opinion I've ever had. I'm trying to make it flow from reflections on my childhood and becoming a writer. Then being a young writer in London and meeting the young contemporaries before we ever published: Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, and many others, Julian Barnes. And then it moves on to the art of fiction writers that have mattered a great deal to me and so on. Then to a whole section on human nature and science.
And a long look at the importance of originality in literature, but the importance too of originality and science: to be first. You can be second with an idea, and if you haven't published it and someone has got there just before you, oblivion could be all yours. Darwin had it when he received Russel's pages, which came through the post from Malaysia to him, and he saw that Russel had—while he was ill and had a fever—he suddenly understood natural selection. And so he jotted this down, and Darwin had been working on this for 35 years. And he said, you know, “I'm so ashamed of my unworthy self that is so cast down by the idea that I won't be first." And so it was interesting to compare that with originality in literature. Everyone in literature could be— You could write the worst novel in the world. You could be the first one with it but—and we hope the last—so there's a difference. But that, still, the idea of originality is very strong in art, too, as well as science. So, I mention that, because that's the piece I've been looking at editing this past week. So yeah, it's a nice thing to go— It's almost like the evidence of the garden that I mentioned that could be one's mind. There it is: thousands of words written over 50 years.
KO: Well, I look forward to it very much when it does come.
IM: Yeah, me too. I'm so looking forward to not talking about imaginary people. But the real world.
KO: Careful with biography [laughs].
IM: Yeah, exactly. So careful with everything.
KO: Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a real joy getting to speak with you.
IM: Well, it's been a real pleasure talking to you, and I hope to meet you again.
KO: I hope so, too. Thank you so much. And listeners, you can get What We Can Know by Ian McEwan right now on Audible.
