Proms Extra, unfinished work, the vital placenta...

From left:Tim McInnerny, your correspondent, Shahidha Bari

A theme of this year’s BBC Proms has been 'Unfinished Work', which makes rich pickings for anyone interested in the discerning matter of artistic decision-making, branching histories and all the things that might have been had we but world enough and time. 

I had the great, great pleasure of participating in a BBC Radio 3 Proms Extra discussion last Friday at Imperial College Union, hosted by Shahidha Bari with consummate readings by Tim McInnerny. The whole was expertly boxed by producer Simon Richardson into a 20-minute extract broadcast at half-time in that evening’s Prom concert. You can listen here, between 24:14 and 44:26, if you're subscribed to BBC playback services, and if not then the procedure takes a mere moment.

What is the principal allure of the unfinished? In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder wrote feelingly of how ‘the last works of artists and their unfinished pictures’ can be ‘more admired than those which they finished, because in them are seen the preliminary drawings left visible and the artists’ actual thoughts, and in the midst of approval’s beguilement we feel regret that the artist’s hand while engaged in the work was removed by death.’

Writers may die too soon even today but, generally, later than they used to. There are other intriguing reasons (excuses?) for not finishing. Writers can be very tough judges of their own output, never truly satisfied. They may come to find in their hearts that they should never have started the work in the first place, because they didn’t really know how to finish it – didn’t know, in other words, what the book was really about. But in the cases of writers of distinction the incomplete manuscript offers a privileged look inside the workshop and the writer’s struggles to fashion the raw material: our imaginations are piqued by the great unknowable of where we might finally have been transported.

One or two things I might have added to the broadcast, world enough and time etc:

- Another aspect of Ralph Ellison’s labours over what we now call Three Days Before the Shooting... is that some part of his inspiration was the hugely charged ‘moment’ in American race relations circa 1955, Brown vs. Board of Education etc; but that 'moment' just kept moving on, and Ellison couldn’t be uninterested in the real-world real-time transformation of his nation. It did, though, prevent him perhaps from getting fully astride of his material. If you want to write about the times you’re living through, it can be a helpful idea to pick a fixed moment from the recent past – five to ten years ago, say? – and to stay there.

- A chat about Kafka and The Castle had to be sacrificed for time, and I doubt I said anything new, other than maybe that, on the subject of perfectionism, all writers could do with being as hard on themselves as Kafka was. (Of The Metamorphosis, one of the few works he proposed to spare incineration, the most Kafka would say was that he was ‘not unhappy with it.’)

- Of Scott Fitzgerald’s struggles in writing film scripts, which gave us no cinema of note but a half-dozen chapters, at least, of The Last Tycoon – I still get a smile from Joan Crawford’s famous attempt to encourage him during those fruitless months at MGM: ‘Write hard, Mr Fitzgerald, write hard!’ This is kindly, hopeless advice. Either the stuff wants to come out or it doesn’t – willed exertion levels have little or no purchase in the matter.

- Any discussion of Jane Austen’s Sanditon leads one to the thorny business of other writers, or scholars or editors or friends, trying to finish an uncompleted work by unauthorised proxy. This to me is so inherently flawed an enterprise as to seem fatal. The most gifted mind you might summon to such a task is only going to make educated guesses at forbiddingly hard-to-know intentions. Notes and diagrams of the sort that Fitzgerald left behind don’t begin to say how the job ought to be done. Only a literary talent as large as the one who left the scene could conjure the sorts of sparks that come from self-editing and rewriting. 

Marguerite Yourcenar, in her magisterial monograph on Yukio Mishima, puts it best in addressing the question of whether Mishima truly completed his Sea of Fertility on the morning of his suicide (per legend) or actually on his summer holidays a few months previous:

‘ ... to finish the last page of a novel does not necessarily mean that this book is done: a book can be considered finished only the day it is put in an envelope and sent to the publisher... it is finished the moment it definitively separates from the vital placenta where books are conceived...’

My column on 'Politicians in Fiction' for BBC Radio 4 Open Book, recorded at Edinburgh Book Festival

The Open Book crew at Edinburgh, 17.08.2016

BBC Radio 4's Open Book, presented by Mariella Frostrup, is a terrific platform for literary discussion, and I was thrilled to make my first appearance on the show in 2015, discussing the centenary of Kafka's Metamorphosis with playwright Mark Ravenhill. Coinciding with the publication of The Knives, producers Nicola Holloway and Kirsten Locke offered me a treasured opportunity to write and deliver the show's regular column feature from a given writer on a personal theme; and as both Open Book and myself were at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Wednesday August 17, I got the chance to say my piece in front of a live audience.

You can listen to the full Open Book broadcast - my column (starting 00:11:30) amid a discussion chaired by Mariella, the panel being myself, Ben Markovits, Raja Alem and Nick Barley - here.

And for the boon, here is my text:

I’ve just written a novel about a politician. In idle moments I wonder if I’d have been better off making my story about a serial killer of kittens; or some job that’s equally popular with the general public – a traffic warden, say, or a bailiff.

This thought first came to me when I was describing the plot of my novel, The Knives, to a friend. As I told her that it’s about a fictional Home Secretary trying to manage the multiple daily crises that come with his job – I could see she looked troubled, somehow. And when I was done, her first question was simply: ‘Are we supposed to like him?’

Our sympathies are important to us, in our reading as in our lives. And right now, as a public, we seem to hold our elected politicians in very low esteem – lower than a snake’s belly. Routinely, they are characterised as careerists, connivers, charlatans, backstabbers – fingers in the till, noses in the trough.

This is nothing new, though. There’s never been a time when politicians were very much loved or trusted – and literature provides all the evidence we need. Take PG Wodehouse’s novel Cocktail Time in which Lord Ickenham tries to dissuade an old friend from seeking election as an MP: ‘Have you ever been in the House of Commons’, he asks, ‘and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.’

If fictional politicians are not portrayed as freaks, then they’re usually villains. Which is fine in a novel such as Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards, where Francis Urquhart is clearly a murdering psychopath and we’re supposed to ‘love to hate him’; or Robert Harris's Roman trilogy about Cicero and Julius Caesar, which is brutally honest about power and corruption but, conveniently, takes place two thousand years ago.

I’m not saying that people – including writers – shouldn’t be disapproving – even cynical – about politicians. In a democracy, that’s probably healthy. And it’s the nature of democracy that you will always find a largish group of people sweating with hatred over the fact they are governed by a party they themselves did not vote for.

It is, however, a problem for writers if they lose the empathetic gift they’re supposed to possess – the gift for seeing themselves in others, and others in themselves.

Norman Mailer, politically a man of the left, spent seven years writing a novel called Harlot’s Ghost about the C.I.A. – those bogeymen and women of the liberal imagination. When asked why on earth he bothered with such people, Mailer replied, 'They really are pretty awful. But on the other hand, who isn't?’

In The Human Stain by Philip Roth – set in 1998 when President Clinton was facing impeachment for sexual indiscretions in the Oval Office – Roth’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman becomes so wearied by the widespread damnation of Clinton’s failings that he imagines a banner wrapped round the White House, labelled to remind the public: A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

If that sounds a little extreme, nonetheless I think it contains a truth. In researching The Knives I met and talked to a lot of politicians – and, to put it mildly, I found them recognisably human. They do highly demanding jobs in which, sometimes, in spite of best efforts, things go wrong – just like in your job and mine. To suppose they are indifferent to the consequences of their actions or inactions is to deny their humanity – and a part of your own.

We look to fiction for a true reflection of what we’re like – what Elvis Costello calls ‘the deep, dark truthful mirror.’ As writers and readers, I think we should try to see at least the shadow of ourselves in our politicians.

Kafka's The Metamorphosis: It Lives, Again...

Kafka postcard, available at zazzle.co.uk

If Franz Kafka were living today do you suppose he could get a start in the writing game, recessive type that he was? You’d hope so; but then it is a self-promoting business, not ideal for one who reviewed his life’s work and concluded that the bulk of it ought to be consumed by fire. On the one hand it’s hard to imagine Kafka on Twitter; yet undeniably the man had a gift for aphorisms. 'In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world' – that’s 65 characters right there.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) turned 100 this year. At least, 1915 is when it was published, which is to say finished; and Kafka, of course, didn’t finish all that much. He did the main work on the story in the autumn of 1912 and completed a version of it on December 7 of that year. However, negotiations with publishers were complicated, and circumstances – inter alia The Great War, during which one prospective publisher (Robert Musil!) was called up, and another stopped printing – got in the way. But in 1915 it finally appeared, and has since come to be considered among the most famous, and greatest, short stories in the history of literary fiction.

On this centenary occasion I’ve had the pleasure of writing a long preface to the reissue of a rare translation of The Metamorphosis by A.L. (Albert Lancaster) Lloyd (known as ‘Bert’), which was, as of 1937, the first complete single-volume English version. (Lloyd, a folk musicologist, singer, arranger and author, was a key figure in the reflorescence of English folk music after the Second World War.) You can buy this edition as a Faber Find priced £4.99. 

Meanwhile BBC Radios 3 & 4 are about to launch a major commemorative celebration of Kafka's work, for which playwright Mark Ravenhill has written a new adaptation of The Trial. Mark and I were on Radio 4's Open Book last week talking to Mariella Frostrup about Kafka's imaginative genius, his women troubles, and his great and strangely neglected sense of humour. It starts at 13:16 if you follow this link.

Myths have accumulated around Kafka, largely because they are compelling myths, and this is one of the greatest of writers – as George Steiner has argued, perhaps the only author one can be thought to own a letter of the alphabet. Kafka made his own world on the page – recognizable but not quite real, precisely detailed and yet dreamlike – and it still feels original and hugely influential. Once you know that world, you do tend to see it around you.

Though his great fame was posthumous Kafka did have a reputation to speak of during his lifetime. Something else that happened in 1915 was that the winner of the prestigious German-language Theodor Fontane Prize, dramatist Carl Sternheim, bestowed his prize money upon Kafka as a mark of writer-to-writer respect. (Imagine a Booker Prize winner today declaring from the dais that he wanted to hand his £50,000 to another more deserving scribbler.)

One danger with great writers, though, is that you can stop reading them, and so lose sight – or retain only a stale notion – of what constituted their greatness. The trappings of the ‘Kafkaesque’ are easily recalled, especially the sense of an individual at the mercy of a big impersonal bureaucracy, feeling after a while that he can’t but take it personally, and haunted by the sense that perhaps, after all, he deserves it. And anyone who has glanced at Kafka’s biography knows about The Father: Hermann Kafka, strapping son of a butcher, ex-serviceman and purveyor of fancy goods, against whom Franz (Hermann’s only son) felt inadequate in every way

Certainly Kafka suffered neurotic misery, but then that is the making of many a writer. In his case he seemed to feel it could be no other way and probably ought to be so: writing, he decided, was to be in ‘the service of the Devil’, a pact that never turns out in one’s favour. (As he wrote in a letter of July 1922, two years before his death from tuberculosis: ‘I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.’)

But Kafka, though a wounded man, wished nonetheless to make an exhibition of his stigmata. And there’s something almost chilling in how he could step aside from himself, perceive his own plight, and twist it with such finesse into supple fictional shapes that had the force of parable.

That’s only the bare scratch of a start, though, in all one might say about Kafka. Revisiting him in order to write about him I was struck anew by how many stories he composed from the perspective of creatures: Investigations of a Dog, A Report to an Academy, Josephine the Singer, The Burrow. Simply put, it’s as if Kafka were saying, ‘You’re in the body you’re in, it makes the problems it makes, and the soul protests its fate whatever.’

Josephine and The Metamorphosis were recently re-imagined for children in My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, written by Matthue Roth and illustrated by Rohan Daniel Eason. I find this a pleasing and fresh turn in the more tired anthropomorphic bent of books aimed at kids. But that’s not to say the original wouldn’t work for them. For instance, I began composing my Metamorphosis preface beside a swimming pool during a family holiday last summer, and at one point a nine-year-old friend of my elder daughter picked up my old Penguin edition of Kafka’s original and started to question me about it, closely and with mounting curiosity. I like to think she had sensed something wise - sacred, even - in those pages. Kafka will tend to make you feel that way about books - such was his presence, now, then and, one somehow imagines, always.

The Chilcot Inquiry: if you are so drawn to it...

An increasingly nervy, impulsive, hair-trigger atmosphere surrounds the Chilcot Inquiry and reportage of same, as the media and the ticket-possessing public await Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday. The last few days have offered rich pickings on the legal aspect of the matter. I should say that it used to be one of my (innumerable) gripes against New Labour that there were far too many bloody lawyers sat round its top table. But then I’m not aware that anyone ever claimed these people were any good at being lawyers. (Cherie Blair has her claims in this department, of course, but nobody ever elected her, perhaps to her chagrin.)
What an assured legal performance we have had, though, from Jack Straw! Not just in his testimony to Chilcott but in the documents under discussion, such as his 6-page rejoinder to Lord Goldsmith. The BBC, who nurse a private and wholly personal wound over Iraq, are currently headlining that Straw is ‘defiant over ignored legal advice’ on the illegality of the war, which is, I suppose, one way of saying that Straw considered one piece of advice from the Attorney General to be more salient than another (differing) one from the FO’s man.
Similarly it seems to be headline news to some outlets that Lord Goldsmith ‘changed his mind’ on illegality, or that he had admitted such - something we were aware of, also of Goldsmith’s reasons for same, many moons and Inquiries ago; just as we know the unshakeable anti-war line that he only reviewed his options once the Yanks leaned on him. At any rate Goldsmith put it this way today: the question to his mind was ‘‘Which side of the argument do you want to be on?’ And I took the view I would prefer to be on the side of the argument that a second resolution wasn't necessary.’ That’s politics. As Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard has it, more sceptically than would I:
‘I'm sure many will seize on 'Goldsmith's Law' as proof of his wrong-headed approach to the law: make up your mind first where you want to end up and then design your verdict accordingly. Not exactly what some expect of an Attorney General. But maybe that's unfair, maybe he was simply reflecting the political realities of the consequence of his decision…’
Yesterday the principled Elizabeth Wilmshurst said her piece in cool and calm fashion, and Nick Witchell on the BBC 10 O’Clock News made sure we were told that members of the public in the hearing room applauded the end of her testimony. Not to defame these spectators en masse but I suspect a fair few of them are the sort who have made BBC1’s Question Time such a drizzle of loud nonsense whenever Iraq is discussed.
Ms Wilmshurst also got in her shot at Mr Straw and his ‘ignoring’ of the Foreign Office legal view: ‘He’s not an international lawyer.’ So, by implication, he lacks that rigour, that basis on such an universally esteemed and binding body of case law? Sure, Ms Wilmhurst and Sir Michael Wood may have been more fastidiously following the letter of law in making sure their opinions genuflected toward the legally clear primacy of that peculiar body called the UN Security Council - for all that this was to defer to the polluted world of politics. If only the membership of said Council were as pure and rigorous in their legal assessment of a case as Wilmhurst and Wood! But then maybe the proud French former imperium, the wounded and bristling Russian imperium, and the quietly confident Chinese imperium were all entirely principled and law-abiding in their considered opinion that the tyrant Saddam Hussein would not be overthrown by any imperial warmongering US/UK-led coalition, at least not on their watch. Or as Kafka's thuggish doorkeeper tells the Man from the Country who seeks admission to The Law: 'If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful...'
The illustration above comes from the online petition site Ban Blair Baiting.