Words By Bruno Bayley, Photo By Michael Otero
The email that preceded my meeting with Roger Lewis was the best of the year: “I have a meeting at 11.30 at the Cabinet Office (don't ask) that might drag on until 1-ish. So how about 1.30-1.45 at the Groucho Club? Thence to a stool for lunch up at the bar at Sheekey’s? Do you have an expense account at Vice? Let's blow your budget.”
Roger Lewis, the controversial biographer of Anthony Burgess, is currently suffering at the hands of what he calls a philistine publishing conspiracy. His 2002 biography of Burgess polarised critics and his latest book, Seasonal Suicide Notes, is a diary-cum-memoir that made me laugh until I pissed myself on the 185 bus. Thankfully he had been “over-served” at a party at Michael Winner’s house the night before, so the planned expenses rout was put aside over coffee in the Groucho Club.
Vice: Would it fair to say you’re not a huge fan of the state of writing in the UK?
Roger Lewis: One of the ways to be a success in England is to be mediocre. If you are extremely talented people brush you aside and dismiss you as eccentric, you don’t get asked onto the right panels or committees. You don’t get roped in, and that’s the problem. How else can we explain Michael Palin or Ben Elton? Go into any of these shops—they are piled high with celebrity ghosted memoir rubbish. Ant and Dec and all these people that we would like to assassinate. It’s terrible, I don’t understand the world I am living in. It’s a cruel hoax. I thought people were meant to be individuals, but it only really works if you have a wife with money—private income helps. Or, like me, you have to live in obscurity in remote Herefordshire because you can’t afford the London mansion flat. Mind you, the upside of rural obscurity is that people in the provinces are unaware of the poetry of what’s going on. The Age Concern toenail-cutting scheme was wonderful, they went around doing chiropody with “trained volunteers”. And there was a great crime wave involving ornamental robins and plastic swans being thrown in ponds. Aside from the public’s love of celebrity trash, what else is holding back good writing?
Money. Back in the 1980s people used to get £1 a word for freelance writing, now it’s 40p. It leaves me so full of rage and hatred, all I need is a cape and bag and I could run around slashing people. There are so many people I would cheerfully kill. The thing is, if I was sent to Broadmoor I would be so much better off. My life would basically be the same but more financially secure. Anyway, people are paid very badly and I just can’t really see how there’s any solution. When the economy picks up the editors are not going to suddenly say, “Oh, let’s increase the freelancers’ pay”. There’s a lot of sadism involved and a lot of philistinism—they don’t really care about the writers. They want advertising space, we just fit in the gaps around that. I would love to tell them to go and fuck themselves when they cut my pay, but you know, you just can’t. After Peter Sellers had made Dr Strangelove, he suddenly had a lot of money, used to call it his “fuck you money” because now he was rich enough say that. As for fiction, you started out being in love with it didn’t you?
I loved it passionately—that, by the way, is the other thing that’s disallowed in England: being passionate about anything. You have to have this sort of chill, a coolness towards the subject matter as if you are only interested in it in a sort of amateurish way. Reading was all I ever did. I came back from university with a £2,000 book bill. I loved literature, and then my father-in-law, who was a physics teacher, said, “Oh I never read novels, fiction is all made up”. Now, all these years later, I absolutely agree with his sentiment. I think after Tolstoy and George Eliot, Chekov’s short stories, great nineteenth-century novelists, James Joyce, it all came to an end. So take Anthony Burgess. He is my hero, but nevertheless everything that he wrote is in the shadow of James Joyce, it’s full of Joycian allusions and parodies, it’s really sort of pastiche. But crucially I fell out of love with fiction because it is made up and to me there’s enough complexity and interest within the real world without having to manufacture an alternative one. So now I can’t be bothered to buy modern fiction—it’s all rubbish. Are there any recent writers whose work you enjoy?
Kingsley Amis I quite like, but with all these people I prefer their memoirs and essays, their non-fiction to their fiction. To me, Martin Amis is a wonderful literary journalist, but his novels are just created out of Roget’s Thesaurus—it’s all fancy big words and it’s all construction. And Iris Murdoch. Her books on philosophy are fascinating, like the work she did on Sartre, but her novels are just attempts at creating stories to illustrate some of her interests in existentialism and metaphysics. The great creative geniuses don’t write novels now, they make movies or are in television. Wait, you prefer film and television to new books?
Yeah. I think that’s where the creative energy is. In the nineteenth century we didn’t have these magic lanterns. The great artistic creative people wrote novels, whereas Orson Welles or Terry Gilliam, the equivalent majestic figures, they make movies. That’s what happened. Are there any particular movements in fiction today that upset you?
They’re all reading Dan Brown, aren’t they? Graphic novels are the next thing, apparently. Fewer words, more drawings; it’s like being in infant school. I do like Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes stories, P.D. James. I love classic detective fiction, with their nineteenth-century idyllic world of Holmes and Watson, or these murderous vicarages in Agatha Christie. They’re always killing each other off, it’s incredible. Can you ever imagine fiction becoming of significant interest again?
How can it? How can anyone ever write anything as great as War and Peace? Those were great pages of genius. Truman Capote tried, he thought that with Answered Prayers he was going to do for Manhattan society what Proust did for late nineteenth century Paris. He couldn’t, and he said he lost the manuscript, or it was destroyed; he obviously couldn’t pull it off. Yet In Cold Blood and his travel sketches, or his profiles of Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, or Elizabeth Taylor, there he did manage greatness. I believe journalism is a true art form, it’s not some lesser echelon of achievement. People feel compelled to write a novel. They say in a grand way, “Oh I’m working on a novel” as if we’re all meant to be impressed! I mean, leave the fucking thing in your bottom drawer, I don’t want to see it! So you’ve never even been tempted to write a short story?
I think I would be catastrophic. Anything can happen in a novel, to me that’s really meaningless. Spaceships can land, people can turn into cabbages in front of your very eyes. It’s the death of the imagination. Science fiction? There’s enough to worry about with science fact. I think we should go into Waterstone’s, park a skip outside and throw in absolutely every single modern novel published since Ulysses then dump it in the sea. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing would be lost. So why do you think people publish all this crap?
Publishers are part of a big conspiracy to put Ant and Dec everywhere. They don’t have to print all of this rubbish and give millions to people who are already millionaires. These well-educated people who go into publishing are to blame for forcing this stuff on the public. It feels like a philistine conspiracy. They imagine what their readers are like and publish accordingly. They are usually completely wrong. But people do seem to buy copy after copy of bad biographies.
If you go into Waterstone’s, that’s what is piled high on the table. The classics are kept away from people, with forbidding black spines, they look intimidating, like you need A-levels and degrees to get past the preface. The classics aren’t on offer to the majority. Everyone should be encouraged to enjoy great books. Surely that’s what English at school should be about, creating this hunger, this interest in literature. Now it’s all about spelling and grammar and phonetics. It’s boring.
They might do half a poem or something and then spend two years not just reading one Wilfred Owen poem, but moaning on about how World War One was. No one is reading for the fun of it. On that subject, I think faculties of English should all be closed down and turned into Travel Lodges. It’s just a load of lazy dons spending months on end fixing the roofs of their homes in the Dordogne. Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it Is Lived is out now published by Short Books.
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Roger Lewis: One of the ways to be a success in England is to be mediocre. If you are extremely talented people brush you aside and dismiss you as eccentric, you don’t get asked onto the right panels or committees. You don’t get roped in, and that’s the problem. How else can we explain Michael Palin or Ben Elton? Go into any of these shops—they are piled high with celebrity ghosted memoir rubbish. Ant and Dec and all these people that we would like to assassinate. It’s terrible, I don’t understand the world I am living in. It’s a cruel hoax. I thought people were meant to be individuals, but it only really works if you have a wife with money—private income helps. Or, like me, you have to live in obscurity in remote Herefordshire because you can’t afford the London mansion flat. Mind you, the upside of rural obscurity is that people in the provinces are unaware of the poetry of what’s going on. The Age Concern toenail-cutting scheme was wonderful, they went around doing chiropody with “trained volunteers”. And there was a great crime wave involving ornamental robins and plastic swans being thrown in ponds. Aside from the public’s love of celebrity trash, what else is holding back good writing?
Money. Back in the 1980s people used to get £1 a word for freelance writing, now it’s 40p. It leaves me so full of rage and hatred, all I need is a cape and bag and I could run around slashing people. There are so many people I would cheerfully kill. The thing is, if I was sent to Broadmoor I would be so much better off. My life would basically be the same but more financially secure. Anyway, people are paid very badly and I just can’t really see how there’s any solution. When the economy picks up the editors are not going to suddenly say, “Oh, let’s increase the freelancers’ pay”. There’s a lot of sadism involved and a lot of philistinism—they don’t really care about the writers. They want advertising space, we just fit in the gaps around that. I would love to tell them to go and fuck themselves when they cut my pay, but you know, you just can’t. After Peter Sellers had made Dr Strangelove, he suddenly had a lot of money, used to call it his “fuck you money” because now he was rich enough say that. As for fiction, you started out being in love with it didn’t you?
I loved it passionately—that, by the way, is the other thing that’s disallowed in England: being passionate about anything. You have to have this sort of chill, a coolness towards the subject matter as if you are only interested in it in a sort of amateurish way. Reading was all I ever did. I came back from university with a £2,000 book bill. I loved literature, and then my father-in-law, who was a physics teacher, said, “Oh I never read novels, fiction is all made up”. Now, all these years later, I absolutely agree with his sentiment. I think after Tolstoy and George Eliot, Chekov’s short stories, great nineteenth-century novelists, James Joyce, it all came to an end. So take Anthony Burgess. He is my hero, but nevertheless everything that he wrote is in the shadow of James Joyce, it’s full of Joycian allusions and parodies, it’s really sort of pastiche. But crucially I fell out of love with fiction because it is made up and to me there’s enough complexity and interest within the real world without having to manufacture an alternative one. So now I can’t be bothered to buy modern fiction—it’s all rubbish. Are there any recent writers whose work you enjoy?
Kingsley Amis I quite like, but with all these people I prefer their memoirs and essays, their non-fiction to their fiction. To me, Martin Amis is a wonderful literary journalist, but his novels are just created out of Roget’s Thesaurus—it’s all fancy big words and it’s all construction. And Iris Murdoch. Her books on philosophy are fascinating, like the work she did on Sartre, but her novels are just attempts at creating stories to illustrate some of her interests in existentialism and metaphysics. The great creative geniuses don’t write novels now, they make movies or are in television. Wait, you prefer film and television to new books?
Yeah. I think that’s where the creative energy is. In the nineteenth century we didn’t have these magic lanterns. The great artistic creative people wrote novels, whereas Orson Welles or Terry Gilliam, the equivalent majestic figures, they make movies. That’s what happened. Are there any particular movements in fiction today that upset you?
They’re all reading Dan Brown, aren’t they? Graphic novels are the next thing, apparently. Fewer words, more drawings; it’s like being in infant school. I do like Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes stories, P.D. James. I love classic detective fiction, with their nineteenth-century idyllic world of Holmes and Watson, or these murderous vicarages in Agatha Christie. They’re always killing each other off, it’s incredible. Can you ever imagine fiction becoming of significant interest again?
How can it? How can anyone ever write anything as great as War and Peace? Those were great pages of genius. Truman Capote tried, he thought that with Answered Prayers he was going to do for Manhattan society what Proust did for late nineteenth century Paris. He couldn’t, and he said he lost the manuscript, or it was destroyed; he obviously couldn’t pull it off. Yet In Cold Blood and his travel sketches, or his profiles of Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, or Elizabeth Taylor, there he did manage greatness. I believe journalism is a true art form, it’s not some lesser echelon of achievement. People feel compelled to write a novel. They say in a grand way, “Oh I’m working on a novel” as if we’re all meant to be impressed! I mean, leave the fucking thing in your bottom drawer, I don’t want to see it! So you’ve never even been tempted to write a short story?
I think I would be catastrophic. Anything can happen in a novel, to me that’s really meaningless. Spaceships can land, people can turn into cabbages in front of your very eyes. It’s the death of the imagination. Science fiction? There’s enough to worry about with science fact. I think we should go into Waterstone’s, park a skip outside and throw in absolutely every single modern novel published since Ulysses then dump it in the sea. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing would be lost. So why do you think people publish all this crap?
Publishers are part of a big conspiracy to put Ant and Dec everywhere. They don’t have to print all of this rubbish and give millions to people who are already millionaires. These well-educated people who go into publishing are to blame for forcing this stuff on the public. It feels like a philistine conspiracy. They imagine what their readers are like and publish accordingly. They are usually completely wrong. But people do seem to buy copy after copy of bad biographies.
If you go into Waterstone’s, that’s what is piled high on the table. The classics are kept away from people, with forbidding black spines, they look intimidating, like you need A-levels and degrees to get past the preface. The classics aren’t on offer to the majority. Everyone should be encouraged to enjoy great books. Surely that’s what English at school should be about, creating this hunger, this interest in literature. Now it’s all about spelling and grammar and phonetics. It’s boring.
They might do half a poem or something and then spend two years not just reading one Wilfred Owen poem, but moaning on about how World War One was. No one is reading for the fun of it. On that subject, I think faculties of English should all be closed down and turned into Travel Lodges. It’s just a load of lazy dons spending months on end fixing the roofs of their homes in the Dordogne. Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it Is Lived is out now published by Short Books.