Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  PM: You mentioned that Waterland was much more ambitious than anything you’d attempted before. Were you referring to this integrating of non-narrative, non-fictional material into the story?

  GS: Yes, I think that was part of it. I suppose too I rather relished in anticipation a slight perplexity on the part of the reader—where the reader comes to the end of one chapter and then finds a chapter about eels, or beer, or something apparently not connected to the narrative. The reader would think, well, what the hell’s going on? I rather delighted in that prospect.

  PM: Will you do it again?

  GS: I don’t know. I think every book dictates mysteriously its own terms. It says to you, well, you can get away with that or you can’t. And in any case it’s never a good policy to repeat a pattern.

  PM: Do you think it’s all right for middle-aged men to run off with small female antelopes?*

  GS: Well, they don’t.

  PM: Uncle Walter did.

  GS: It was all right for him. I might be wrong in saying they don’t, there might be a case somewhere! I’m very fond of that story, I suppose because of the antelope. It was a fairly early story of mine, a story which wrote itself. One invents a totally unknown, totally specious species. That’s just good fun.

  PM: There’s another story in Learning to Swim called ‘The Hypochondriac’ in which a doctor projects his clinical knowledge onto a young man, unaware that he’s also projecting his own denial of pain; and then to his immense surprise the young man dies. There’s a failure of medical knowledge, of scientific thought.

  GS: It’s a concern which is not unrelated to this business of ‘Is it better to know or not to know?’ It’s an illusion that knowledge is always coupled to authority. Knowledge doesn’t bring authority and authority doesn’t necessarily imply knowledge. The doctor in that story is a good example of someone who feels that they have knowledge, and indeed they do, but of a limited kind. The crisis of the story is really a man’s discovery that he has no authority: neither over people nor, as he once thought, over his own experience, over his own life. There’s a great deal in the story about how he’s dealt with his own marriage in terms of, ‘I know what I’m doing, I can deal with this, my knowledge and my clinical cool will hold things together.’ But it’s blown apart by an incidence of the supernatural, since the patient, who does die, reappears for one moment. Of course, such an event is quite outside the doctor’s range of experience. And he breaks down.

  PM: It’s a lovely, delicate ghost, a Jamesian ghost. It just flickers for a moment.

  GS: Not really a haunting at all.

  PM: Ghosts appear here and there in the short stories, and there’s an important ghost, Sarah Atkinson’s, in Waterland. Yet the earlier novels manifest no such magical or supernatural elements. Why is this?

  GS: They were there inside waiting to get out, and they did in Waterland. But it’s very hard to talk about the construction of a novel in terms of actual decisions to do this or that. Sarah does become a ghost, she returns in supernatural form, and she dives, as Dick dives; she returns to the water. She began as a solid, flesh-and-blood character who was the young wife of this very solid commercial man, and then I got to the situation where she’s knocked unconscious, literally senseless, and remains so.

  PM: She hits her head on a writing desk.

  GS: Yes, falls and knocks her head against a desk. I see no significance in the writing desk [laughter]. She’s another inarticulate character and for the remainder of her life she says virtually nothing. It’s as though she passes into ghostliness almost in her own lifetime. The people in the town turn her into this curious, angelic, saintly figure who’s invested with strange powers, or so they believe. Then when she dies, almost inevitably you know she’s going to come back, she’s going to continue to have an influence. But I don’t think there was ever a moment when, before writing, I said, well, this is what the character is going to do. You just see possibilities. Some of them you pursue, and you fall flat on your face. Sometimes the pursuit’s fruitful.

  PM: Two of the observers of Dick Crick’s plunge into the silt are American servicemen. It’s sunset. Overhead, bombers are flying off to their targets. Is this an implication of Americans in some final apocalyptic moment, in some sort of global plunge?

  GS: No, I haven’t seen it that way, but I don’t see why you shouldn’t. I thought you were going to say, can you see the presence of the Americans just as some indication of a New World—Americans from the New World who’ve come into this old and in some ways inbred and failing English world. There was possibly an element of that. And I don’t suppose I chose entirely by accident the state where those Americans come from: Arizona, the dry zone; and there they are in the wet Fens. One mustn’t forget too that historically it’s quite accurate; there were many American servicemen based in East Anglia at that time.

  PM: Do you really see Dick Crick as an individual?

  GS: Very much so, very much the character fiddling with his motorbike. I don’t see him as a sort of cipher, symbol, representation—he’s certainly very much there. Some of the little things he keeps in his bedside cupboard …

  PM: A bird’s nest?

  GS: Oh, he has little bits of animals’ skulls, and a pathetic sort of thing he made out of a tin for his mother on one of her birthdays.

  PM: There’s a fish hanging over the bed.

  GS: A stuffed pike, which is quite important in the story. I like the concrete. Novels should be this mixture of the intensely concrete and the world of ideas.

  PM: Many stories are told in Waterland, and one of the funniest is the story of Jack Parr’s suicide attempt. Jack is a railway signalman, and decides to end it all by sitting on the railway lines. So he sits there doggedly all night, while unbeknownst to him his wife is up in the signal box, throwing switches and making telephone calls, and lights are blinking all over the eastern Fens as expresses and goods trains are rerouted to avoid the unhappy man.

  GS: He’s fallen asleep by this time, and he never learns about the subterfuge. And is actually convinced when he wakes up that he’s been saved by a miracle. And nobody breaks this illusion.

  PM: He goes on the wagon and stays on it. Many events in Waterland are seen to have two explanations, often one logical, the other superstitious. A live fish dropped into a woman’s lap will make her barren, it’s said; and this is precisely what does happen to Mary.

  GS: Yes, you can imagine some of the old people in the Fens maintaining staunchly that the reason for all the trouble was the eel, the fish in the lap. There’s a parallel in some ways between superstition and the way fiction works, the way fiction can produce these rather magical moments, which aren’t entirely impossible, aren’t entirely beyond belief. I think it’s important for fiction to be magical, just as it’s important for fiction to embrace the real world, to look really hard at the real world.

  PM: Real world?

  GS: Whatever the real world is.

  PM: Now, this feeling for magic is quite new to the English novel.

  GS: Yes, that’s true, it’s not at all a recognizable English tradition. The phrase everybody comes up with is ‘magical realism’, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that’s been stimulating and generally a good thing. We can be terribly self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside.

  PM: What about France?

  GS: I think there’s always been a cultural antagonism between us and the French, but I think also that the French may have held the view, and justifiably so, that English fiction of the immediate post-war period, up to the Sixties and early Seventies, was terribly bound up by its own Englishness, that it just didn’t travel. But they’re more interested now in English writers than they used to be.
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  PM: Have they warmed to Waterland?

  GS: Quite. I was asked to go over there. It was entered for some prize they have for novels in translation. It was shortlisted but it didn’t win.

  PM: Who amongst your contemporaries do you particularly enjoy?

  GS: Well, I actually like very much a writer who’s originally American, Russell Hoban, who wrote Riddley Walker. He seems to me to be completely his own man as a writer; I think he’s got a real touch of genius. Then there’s a writer who’s originally Japanese, Kazuo Ishiguro, and he’s about to publish a second novel. His first was called A Pale View of Hills and it’s simply amazing. He’s a remarkable writer in an understated, very quiet, unextrovert way. There’s Timothy Mo, who’s also about to publish a new book. His second novel was called Sour Sweet, which is a lovely book about the Chinese community in London. Some of these writers I know quite well as friends. One of the pleasures of having written a successful book is that you do get more opportunity to meet other writers. For a long time, really till Waterland, I knew virtually no other writers. Not that it changed anything fundamentally, and in some ways you can argue that knowing other writers is a disruption, a distraction. You can become more concerned about how other people write, which isn’t necessarily good for your own work. I think in the end writing is a lonesome business. You have to go away by yourself to do it, whether you’ve got hundreds of friends or not. Nothing will ever change that.

  PM: Would you like a glass of beer?

  GS: Yes, please.

  * A reference to my short story ‘Hoffmeier’s Antelope’.

  Beer bottle label—for the film of Waterland.

  BUYING A GUITAR WITH ISH

  NAGASAKI, 1954–60

  Kazuo Ishiguro—Ish—was among the first novelists of my generation I met, though I forget exactly when. We’d certainly bumped into each other by the time we were both included among the ‘Twenty Best Young British Novelists’ in 1982 and group-photographed, all of us looking ill at ease, in a Chelsea loft by Lord Snowdon for the Sunday Times. The following interview with him—again for Bomb magazine—was made in 1989 after Ish had published The Remains of the Day. The work in prospect he tentatively refers to evolved into The Unconsoled, published in 1995.

  We’ve been friends now for over twenty-five years and he’s my only Japanese friend. That last statement needs immediate qualification, since I don’t really think of him as Japanese and I don’t think that, most of the time, Ish thinks of himself as Japanese either. The facts are that he was born in Japan in 1954, was brought to this country when he was five and grew up to be one of several novelists emerging in the 1980s who effectively challenged, by having their actual origin or their familial or cultural roots outside Britain, the meaning of ‘British’ or ‘English’ fiction.

  Ish is in many ways as English as they come. Since I’ve known him, he’s lived in such oriental locations as Goldhawk Road and Sydenham (very near, as it happens, to where my father and mother grew up). The facts of his birth and his earliest years must of course go very deep, and Ish’s first two novels were set in Japan, but then his next novel, The Remains of the Day, went to the very quick of Englishness—or to its fossilized, emblematic shell—in the form of the fastidiously spoken, emotionally hampered butler, Stevens.

  All of this has caused some confusion which I think Ish partly relishes, partly finds tiresome. There are those who were persuaded that he had latched on to some fundamental affinity between the English and Japanese temperament—both nations with a leaning towards reserve and formality (both nations also with imperial ghosts). Ish himself, while being one of the most easy-going of people, has a habit of not giving too much away, of being a little hard to ‘read’. Given his origins and the quietness of his literary style, this has sometimes led by clichéd association to his being deemed ‘inscrutable’.

  I think Ish enjoys playing up to this notional enigmaticness. There’s a mischievous gravity about him, or a grave mischief, which can be delightfully teasing. I think he even plays up sometimes to his Japaneseness. He once told me—mischievously but perhaps a little disingenuously—that he’d set his first two novels in Japan, not because his own knowledge of the country was so deep, but because for most British readers it was unfamiliar and remote enough to become a ‘pure’ zone, immune to close scrutiny, where his fictional purposes could work themselves out untroubled by issues of authenticity. It was like setting a novel in a made-up country.

  But Ish’s Japaneseness can’t always be a matter for playful irony, and I suspect that one of the chief burdens of his life has in fact been in confronting the marked contrasts between England and Japan, rather than in grasping the similarities. When he now visits Japan—there was a long gap before he ever went back—he does so as a celebrated author, but there can be moments when he finds himself, just as an individual, ‘unmasked’. He looks Japanese, after all, and knows enough vestigial Japanese to order a meal in the language, but as soon as the waiter makes some off-the-menu remark, Ish becomes lost, a man apparently bewildered by his own country. And such moments of incidental confusion must surely reawaken the much deeper confusions of being a boy of, say, six or seven in England, when his first five years were spent in Japan. He once told me how he’d been horrified by the image he kept seeing of a tortured, bleeding man on a cross. This was how the English saw their god.

  Ish’s actual early memories of Japan must indeed be precious. It would be natural to guard them in a lasting habit of reticence. One such memory that he shared with me I’ve always found particularly affecting. He said he could remember lying in bed as a child in Nagasaki and hearing his father in another room, at the piano, ‘practising the same phrase over and over again’. What strikes a chord, almost literally, about this memory is that there’s nothing specifically Japanese about it. It might be a memory of England, or anywhere. Though for me what strikes the foreign note—and touches a rather jealous nerve—is that it’s a memory of coming from a musical home.

  It’s perhaps not much known that Ish has a musical side. I was only dimly aware of it, if at all, when I made this interview with him, though I’d known him by then for several years—a good example of how he doesn’t give much away. Ish plays the piano and the guitar, both well. I’m not sure how many different guitars he now actually possesses, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in double figures. His wife, Lorna, sings and plays; so does his daughter. Evenings of musical entertainment in the Ishiguro household can’t be at all uncommon.

  One of the few regrets of my life is that I have no formal grounding in music. I never had a musical education or came from the sort of ‘musical home’ that would have made this possible or probable, though I was born at a time when an upright piano was still a common piece of living-room furniture. I need to be a little careful about what I’m saying. I never came from a ‘writerly’ home either: I didn’t feel that was a barrier, and if I’d got involved in music at an early age, might it only have thwarted my stirrings as a writer? Or just left me with bad memories of piano lessons?

  The fact is, I grew up very appreciative of music, but with no ability to make it, no knowledge of it from the inside, and always rather readily assuming that music was what those other, ‘musical’ people did. I’ve never felt, on the other hand, though a great many people who’ve grown up and read books have perhaps felt it, that writing is what those other, ‘writerly’ people do.

  This dichotomy is strange, since increasingly I feel that a lot of my instincts and intuitions about writing are in fact musical, and I don’t think that writing and music are fundamentally so far apart. The basic elements of narrative—timing, pacing, flow, recapitulation, tension and release—are musical ones too. And where would writing be without rhythm, the large rhythms that shape a story, or the small ones that shape a paragraph? I increasingly feel too that writing isn’t about words in themselves, but about getting words to register and vibrate to things that might lie beyond them or just at their edge. Th
us the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances. And what else is music but a communication without words, in which the silences count as much as the notes?

  As for that memory of Ish’s, of the piano phrase being repeated over and over again, that will surely chime with any writer who’s ever doggedly worked and worked over the same passage—trying, indeed, to get the phrasing right.

  But that shared memory of Ish’s also had its practical, stimulating effect. It’s not quite true that I’ve had no dealings with music from the inside. When I was a student I bought a cracked Spanish guitar from a friend for five pounds and subsequently, with the aid of a guitar book but in a very on-and-off way, tried to teach myself classical guitar (not the easiest of instrumental choices, as I discovered). Sadly, I finally reached a point which seemed only to prove my ingrained belief that music-making was for those other, musical people. Like many lost causes, the guitar went up into the attic to gather dust.