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This interview with Toby Litt was conducted by
Kevin Patrick Mahoney in
the summer of 2000.
KPM: How long have you wanted to be a
writer?
Toby Litt: A poet, from thirteen; a novelist, from
twenty-one.
KPM: What was it like growing up in Bedfordshire?
Toby Litt: Put it this way: I really used to look
forward to going to Milton Keynes.
KPM: What are the places you remember most?
Toby Litt: Ampthill, where I lived until I was twenty.
KPM: With the sprawling suburbanisation of the nearby Milton
Keynes, do you foresee a time when Bedford will have changed character
completely, torn down like Neal Cassady's Denver? What would your feelings be
if this were to happen?
Toby Litt: At the moment Bedford is being built round
rather than torn down. I worked on the survey that preceded the construction of
the Bedford bypass (nothing glamorous: doing roadside interviews - Where are
you going? Where have you come from? What is the purpose of your journey?
etc). Someone told me that it was,
subsequently, the least used bypass in England. The shopping centre of Bedford
is just like that of Norwich or Bolton. But the Embankment is very pretty. In
Spring, the tulips are well worth a vandalize.
KPM: According to an interview in The Times, your first passion
in writing was for poetry. How did you make the transition from poetry to
prose? How has poetry added to your prose style?
Toby Litt:
After school, I hardly
wrote any prose at all. I used to average 100 poems a year. Then, during my
final year at university, I wrote a short story, called ‘Happiness’. A while
later, I realised that if I wrote 1,000 words a day for two months, I'd have a
novel-length thing. It might not be a novel, but it would be as long as one.
After I left university, I went to Glasgow and wrote 1,000 words a day for two
months. The result is an unpublished novel-length thing. For me, prose is the
fascination of what’s difficult. Compared to controlling the rhythm of a long
paragraph, constructing a sonnet is a piece of piss.
KPM: How important was the creative writing MA at UEA for you?
Toby Litt: I learnt a great deal. Most particularly,
to trust to the contemporary. Not to hedge. Not to try and write something that
looks like Literature, smells like Literature, etc.
KPM: Are you eternally grateful that Ian McEwan signed up for the
MA that first year?
Toby Litt: It would be disingenuous to say no. The
mutual luck-out of Angus Wilson, Malcolm Bradbury and Ian McEwan, co-inciding in 1970s Norwich,
is hilariously improbable.
KPM: What was day-to-day life on the course like?
Toby Litt: Watching Big Brother has reminded me of a
number of things I’d forgotten. (The year I was in has done pretty well
subsequently: Richard Beard, 'X20', 'Damascus', 'The Cartoonist', Bo Fowler,
'Scepticism Inc', 'The Astrological Diary of God', Sue Hubbard, 'Depth of
Field', Janette Jenkins, 'Columbus Day', John Boyne, 'The Thief of Time'.)
KPM: In 'Beatniks', Mary starts to dislike Jane because she's
writing a novel about the place she lives, the rather enclosed community of
Stewartby. How much of your own life has gone into your writing?
Toby Litt: (I like ‘rather enclosed’.) All of it and
none of it, I suppose.
KPM: Where does real life stop and imagination begin for you?
Toby Litt: Short answer: The desk. Long answer: real
life and imagination are if not indistinguishable then at least indivisible.
KPM: You've written about the Beats in Beatniks, and now you've
taken a central role in formulating The New Puritans. Now, this involves
making sacrifices as part of your Puritan Pledge: you won't be able to write
poetry in your novels (as you did in Beatniks), or include flashbacks (like
those incendiary gunshots in 'Corpsing'). What's that attraction of
submerging your individualism into such a literary supergroup?
Toby Litt: Oh, God - you make it sound like Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young. (In which case bagsy Neil.) The New Puritan rules
were formulated entirely by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne. The
story I’ve written The New Puritans anthology, called 'The Puritans' is a
one-off. I’m not signed up for the re-union tour.
KPM: Practically every English novel I've read this year has
mentioned Soho, or has featured a Soho media type. So much so, that it
seems like Soho means as much to the current generation of writers as Bath did
to novelists in Austen's era, only in a far less genteel way. Is Soho
really such a crucial place for English writers?
Toby Litt: Bath/Soho is a nice analogy. It probably
fulfils a similar plot-function for a lot of writers: a place to meet
unsuitable partners.
As you know, 'Beatniks' was set in Bedfordshire, Brighton and the USA. The new
novel I have just finished, 'deadkidsongs', is set in the invented English
county of Midfordshire.
I will try to avoid Soho as much as possible in future.
KPM: The New Puritans were inspired by the Dogme 95 filmmakers
and their original ten-point 'Vow of Chastity'. My critique of the Dogme
signatories would be that they're living very much in self denial if they're
refusing to be acknowledged as directors, and that they've resuscitated that
tired old auteur conker and started bashing it about again. This dogmatic
vow seems very privileged to me (e.g. if they're not even supposed to lease a car
for a Dogme movie, then how do they pay for the colour film in the first
place?) Dogme would also seem to give a director more 'authority', since he has
to deal with less people (couldn't see a set designer pledging allegiance to
Dogme, for instance). Then again, the Dogme signatories don't take it all
too seriously. You've flirted with screenwriting. To what film
theory would you subscribe to, if any? What would be your preferred
method of movie making?
Toby Litt: The Low Pragmatic School. With, hopefully,
the rider that it's better not to make a film at all than to make a bad film.
Even if Dogme 95 had produced nothing more than 'Festen', that would be enough
to justify it entirely.
KPM: In your Times interview, you criticised the
limited 'hero's journey' Disney type of movie. I would hesitate to
describe any of the protagonists in your novels as heroes (or anti-heroes, come
to that). For me, these characters are very attractive because they're
very human, neither just plain good nor absurdly evil. None of them seem
to have a predestined idea of where they're going, even if they are following a
'hip' map. How well do you know your characters before you start writing?
Do you do a lot of research regarding character and location, or just
rely on inspiration?
Toby Litt:
I always do lots of research.
It never seems enough. And, in the end, I hardly use any of it.
I think the point of research is to make you feel confident enough to ignore
the research you¹ve done.
KPM: Bearing in mind the Beat religion, could you say that you've
ever met a happy or even content Buddhist?
Toby Litt: I've only met the camp followers of Zen. And
I don’t count that as Buddhism. It's the export lager version - gassy,
piss-weak and devoid of taste.
KPM: You've criticised environmentalism as being too close to
religion (in 'No Absolution for Pollution'), and Mary does her best to wean
Jack away from his devotion to the Beats in your first novel. Do you
think that such belief systems are just too irrelevant and hackneyed now?
Toby Litt: In that LM article, I was trying to say that
environmentalism is the Myth of the Fall in disguise. Pollution is the
introduction of serpentine, knowledgeable matter into a pristine, Edenic world.
This, while a useful lie (for environmental groups), is still a lie - and, as
such, is ultimately damaging to the thing it is intended to help protect. A
nuclear power station is no less Natural than a spider¹s web. However, a
spider’s web doesn’t cause childhood leukaemia. There is no such thing as the
‘environment’.
Belief systems are always, and have always been, irrelevant and hackneyed.
Because they are systems.
|
Visit
our Toby Litt page
for Toby Litt biography, Toby Litt bibliography, Toby Litt short stories, and
other Toby Litt interviews |
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