Interview with Tim Parks

Introduction

“Once a book is fathomed,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, “once it is known and its meaning fixed or established, it is dead.” Tim Parks, quoting Lawrence in an essay, points out that even though we know that getting to the bottom of a book will essentially kill it for us, we can’t help trying to figure it out. “Oddly, then,” Parks writes, “the greatest pleasure we can get from a story only comes when the smaller satisfaction of having explained it away is thwarted.”

Parks’s work is its own demonstration of this statement. Few modern writers have more successfully thwarted the reader’s desire for simple explanations. His work - which now includes fourteen novels and several collections of essays - refuses to push the familiar buttons and then be put aside. The situations he depicts continually confuse our ordinary responses and stay alive in the imagination, because the characters’ dilemmas are authentic ones and have no permanent solutions.

An example: in one of Parks’s essays, a man named Alistair, deciding whether to end an affair or break up his family, maintains that “Passion and children were both absolutes. You couldn’t weigh them against each other.” Alistair stays suspended between the two options until external forces and “an overwhelming sense of compulsion” make the decision for him

“Old yearnings ever at loggerheads,” Parks writes in another essay. Characters in his work are often caught between choices that all seem to contain something absolutely necessary for them: the couple in Goodness raising a severely handicapped child and deciding how much of their lives is worth giving up in the child’s service; or the husband in Destiny, with a bond to his wife that he both wants to sever and cannot escape.

The resolutions to these books are usually as much compelled as chosen, and the author gives no indication that the real dilemma has been resolved; there is merely a respite until the next bout begins. Parks’s work demolishes the idea that a place might exist where all good things are simultaneously possible - or even that there is a point of equilibrium where, with enough knowledge, crises can be averted.

Czeslaw Milosz once wrote about his certainty that “a shining point exists where all lines intersect” - but there have always been writers, usually less celebrated, with an equally strong conviction that no such point exists, that a state of fixed philosophical certainty is impossible. Unable to believe in any of the usual received forms of knowledge and in the grip of dueling compulsions, Parks’s protagonists often attempt to create their own systems where contradictory and valid impulses can somehow be held together in the mind - where all the lines in the buzzing world of the book can intersect.

This task is, of course, finally impossible, and Parks’s novels rarely resolve themselves in any conventional sense. Instead, the books are periods of heightened intensity that, at the end of a feverish and often quite funny ride, simply exhaust themselves. Judge Savage ends, just as it has just generated a host of new questions, with the main character losing his last shred of energy and falling asleep.

If this indeterminacy denies the reader certain satisfactions, it also makes Parks’s books worthy of re-reading like few others. His collection of essays, Adultery and Other Diversions, contains pieces that, over the years, I have read a dozen times without exhausting their ability to generate new ideas and break down old ones.

Along with his novels and essays, Parks has also written two volumes of non-fiction about Italy, a book on translation, and a work of history on the Medici bank. He is a distinguished translator from Italian to English - after growing up in England and studying briefly in the United States, he moved to Italy with his wife and has been there ever since - as well as an incisive literary critic, whose work in The New York Review of Books has both celebrated the work of his favorite writers (Bernhard, Lawrence, and Henry Green, to name a few) and taken a much-needed scalpel to several bloated reputations.

Cleaver, his latest novel to appear in America, is about Harold Cleaver, a prominent British television journalist and documentary filmmaker who flees into the Tyrolean Alps after his son writes a novel with a thinly disguised version of his father as the unpleasant, narcissistic protagonist. Cleaver’s escape from the spotlight follows his greatest triumph as a reporter, a damaging interview with the American President in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Throughout the book, the reader (and the character himself) struggle to fit together the two versions of Cleaver - his own and his son’s - while attempting to unravel the various dramas of the peasants that surround Cleaver’s hut in the mountains. Neither task, as always, can be completely accomplished.

Parks’s most recent novel, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, which has yet to appear in America, is set in India and centers around the death of a character based on Gregory Bateson, who is perhaps most famous for developing the theory of the “double bind,” which suggests that schizophrenia is a result of people in an inescapable situation being presented with contradictory demands.

We exchanged e-mails for a few weeks in June 2008, discussing (among other things) the reputations of American authors abroad, and the gulf between American and European literature.

Tim Parks Interview

AA: Even in 3rd person, Cleaver feels like a return to the style of some of the earlier monologue novels, Destiny in particular. Reviews tend to describe these central characters as “unreliable narrators.”  You’ve mentioned somewhere that you dislike this term - why?

TP: The “unreliable narrator”.  Cleaver (and the author) is reacting against a media, a culture, that loves to label and pigeon-hole things so it can imagine it has understood them, then quickly forget them. Hence the voyage to a vast mountain space, a huge silence, that avoids all framing. I suppose I just see “unreliable narrator” as a rather crude form of labeling that puts multitudes of different books in the same pigeon hole. When was a narrator ever reliable? One of the pleasures of reading is a constant alertness to the mental state of the narrative voice and the particular spin it is putting on events. One could hardly put Cleaver’s unreliability in the same category as, say, Fowles’s Collector. Let’s avoid all terms that take our eye off the book.

AA: About pigeon-holes: the book continually dramatizes the mind’s tendency to slip into conventional phrases, generate conventional narratives. There is also an implication that moving away from these conventional interpretations is to invite potentially destructive ideas into your life (Alex complains in his book about his father’s “castrating take on all the things you have to be able to treat seriously for life to make any sense”). So I’m wondering what you think is gained and lost by an audience that has something genuinely complicated presented to it. For example, what if Cleaver’s documentary about the gypsies had included their treatment of the children instead of leaving it out?

TP: The answer to this question seems to require a complete statement about the human condition. However… Let’s say that the tendency of public discourse to slip into stereotype and commonplace is only the most crass and evident aspect of something inherent in language itself, its vocation for compartmentalization. Hence it seems to be a bias of consciousness itself. The useful side to it is that it allows for the construction of a convenient narrative or account of the world within the frame of which we can get on with our lives without wasting time thinking about our identity or whether Italians are really more creative or Germans really more rigid, or women really less logical, etc. Naturally the problem is when such narratives are so far from the truth, or let’s just say immediate reality, that they run us into trouble and we have to look into them again. For Cleaver to read his son’s book was a major reality check, obliging him to rethink the narrative of his life, but also the whole business of telling stories with words and images. Hence, again, the flight toward silence, toward a place he imagines without narrative. Though of course when he gets there he finds the Sudtirol and the family at Trennerhof have a very busy, dramatic story going on. Just that he is not part of it. At least when he arrives. I suppose what the book’s proposing is that as long as your alive there’s no silence and all is falsification, then re-examination, then more falsification. Hardly an original idea…

What’s in it for the audience if they get the complications on an issue.  Not so much that they discover the truth, but that they become aware of their bias toward simplification… In general, when a journalist asks you a question, they hate a complicated answer.

AA: Cleaver seems to have always been skeptical about the value of his profession, but his eventual conviction that the interview with the President made no difference also upsets him a great deal.  Would you agree with him about its impact?  If a damaging interview proves entirely irrelevant to an election, it would seem like televised political debate is pointless.

TP: The ineffectual nature of the debate confirms what he already knew. The fact that his narcissism had persuaded him to continue his career, imagining perhaps that he was an exception to the rule, is galling. TV debate obviously can have a major effect, but more as a beauty show than a matter of content. When a politician is on a roll for other reasons, it scarcely matters what he said. It takes an enormous amount of bad news before people are willing to put aside the illusions they live by. “People” includes me, of course.

AA: There’s a passage in Destiny about Blair’s wait-and-see approach to the EU, and Burton says “Even the wrong vision is better than no vision … Give me the delirium of a destiny … Any destiny, I insisted.”  The book was published here in 2000, but it’s hard now not to think of Bush and Iraq.  Do you think this line has any relevance to what happened at the outset of the war, or was something else going on?

TP: Akshay, you don’t want to take Burton’s comments on politics as much to do with mine. He’s a guy forever on the horns of a dilemma, and hence longs for clarity and decision-making. The irony being that the dilemma that, in the form of his wife, has shaped his life, is very evidently a destiny, a strong narrative generated by the fatal meeting of two characters. As for Bush and Iraq, it’s clear that some people go to a
bloodbath as to a wedding night. Perhaps at some level there is a huge relief in having taken the wrong decision from which there is no turning back. Things can’t get worse. You know who you are and where you are.

AA: Are there any American writers that you feel close to?  I’m curious since most of your criticism is about Europeans, and the narrative of the escape to wilderness is (maybe?) especially central to American literature.

TP: Who are the American authors I like? Aside from the classics - Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner - and more recently, Bellow, Mailer, the early Tim O’Brien - not many. Updike, very much, for his fantastic attention to relationships, his intense descriptions. I was hugely enthusiastic about the early Nicholson Baker, but haven’t enjoyed his recent work. Sometimes I admire Roth, but I find the books laboured and oddly old fashioned, rather hectoring sometimes. The American confidence that the reader is interested in long accounts of American history surprises me. There is something ingenuous about it. I’m not happy when the German press unaccountably compares me with Roth, though it would be nice to enjoy some of his celebrity. Couldn’t stay with much of Delillo, or Franzen. Simply can’t understand how Cormac McCarthy can be taken so seriously. American fiction I’ll go back and read and really love: Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and more or less any Raymond Carver. That said, I think there’s a profound divide between American and European fiction. No American author ever gives me the sense of recognition I get from Sebald, or Bernhard, or many many other lesser European authors.

AA: This might be an impossible question, but what do you think this divide consists of?  What are you recognizing in Sebald or Bernhard that you miss in the American writers you mentioned?

TP: I think the whole tradition of European pessimism, from Leopardi through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cioran and Beckett - and of course many others - that strand of negative Western thought that opposes to the enlightenment the simple reflection that “knowledge has not helped us to live”. I don’t see this in American fiction or thinking, which, even when pessimistic tends to go for pathos rather than that exhilarating clarity that comes out of, say, Sebald. It’s in this sense that someone like Roth seems to me oddly, for all his intelligence and narrative power, somehow weak, slightly pathetic, a little obvious. Same goes for Franzen. Even Bellow is lightweight beside Bernhard,
Cioran et al, and frequently one’s bound to reflect that were America not the economic power it is, these authors would not be so highly rated…

AA: There’s an indelible passage in the book when Giada tells Cleaver that his ability to see the patterns in her life and create an explanatory narrative around them doesn’t actually help her to live.  Do you think a belief in the therapeutic power of literature is part of what marks the weaker books we’ve been talking about?  Is Cleaver’s inability to write his great work, for example, despite his obvious talents, linked in your mind with his persistent desire to be helpful?

TP: Clearly the belief that books have, willy nilly, a therapeutic role is an easy form of complacency, as the general notion that self-knowledge makes it easier to deal with problems is ingenuous and an alibi for a lot destructive truth-telling.

Cleaver and his great work. No, I don’t know about this. I certainly hadn’t thought of it that way. Cleaver was simply based on two or three people I know, one of whom had this constant fantasy/ambition that one day there would be a great work. But in the meantime he was clearly too engaged with immediate celebrity. My suspicion would be that Cleaver never really settled down for long enough to do anything solid. But when I know a trait is “right” for the character, I don’t need to ask myself too much about it. Hence this is just speculation.

AA: You mentioned earlier that some of these inflated literary reputations might have to do with America’s economic power. How do you see these two things affecting each other?

TP: Akshay, you hardly need me to clarify that for you… Do you?  It isn’t obvious?

AA: Not entirely. I can see how America’s economic power might help spread the English language, but why would it compel praise for so-so art from people in other countries?

TP: This is rather extraordinary to me. It seems such an obvious equation. The world, certainly my part of the world, looks to America and the Anglo-Saxon culture in general as a model of the future, a motor of new fashion, the new thing. This despite all the hostility to American foreign policy. Books that are best sellers or much admired in the US are more or less automatically translated in Europe and other countries, because offering insight into the culture that drives the world.  A best seller in Serbia, or Norway, or Kenya simply does not draw this attention. A brilliant writer in Croatia might easily be completely ignored, unless some political aspect of his work intersects with international interest. And reputation travels. Nobody needs to “compel praise”.  It takes an extremely independent mind to read an author who comes on a tidal wave of hype and assess the material for what it is. Most people really do accept celebrity for quality. They do not question it. Add to this that very few countries have a tradition of independent criticism and the picture is complete. In Italy education does not train kids to imagine the majority might be wrong. It’s bad taste to scorn something universally admired. It’s unpleasant. Newspapers and publishers are owned by the same companies and work together and a journalist simply doesn’t set about taking to pieces a book that has been highly praised elsewhere and for which a great deal of money has been paid. At most they might choose not to talk about them.

Note, it is not a question of spreading the English language. Hardly anyone is reading Delillo or Franzen in English here. They are simply automatic exports the way our cinemas are automatically filled with the top ten Hollywood film, dubbed. But this was ever the way with the dominant power in the world. The Roman empire at its height was not admiring works coming out of Carthage or Londinium, nor was the British empire at its height paying much attention to anything from elsewhere, while all the world was reading Byron… To imagine that the success of books really depends on a large number of independent critical minds arriving at a positive judgment is simply not to pay attention to what’s going on. Obviously, certain qualities are required, but once the tidal wave of received opinion has begun to roll, success is guaranteed.

In the end, this is not something to oppose or grow indignant about. It’s simply the way things ever were and shall be. In the end, in my small way, I reap a few benefits too. It’s much easier for me to publish in a dozen languages than it would be for a similar Italian author.

AA: My assumption was that literature, being already marginalized, would be an exception to the general rule.  Especially since America has always had doubts about the value of its more serious cultural productions in relation to Europe - maybe something like Rome’s view of Greece. Other than the names you’ve mentioned, the largest reputations in this country are all British writers or Latin Americans.  As for Italy, I think Calvino and maybe even Primo Levi are more well-regarded here than almost any American writers from the same time period. Your thoughts?

TP: First, I don’t think literature has been entirely marginalized. The number of books (including novels) sold is higher than at any time, though certainly the written word no longer drives the culture as it once did. That space has been taken by other media. In the field of the novel more and more crowd-pleasing fiction is dressed up as serious literature, since obviously people enjoy easy pleasures and then like to imagine them as refined pleasures. However, a large quantity of good literature is still available. It may be that in the USA a certain intelligentsia looks to Europe, but in Europe the publishers pay a lot of money for the major American authors and do everything possible to present them as men and women with reputations beyond question or criticism. This is simply the state of play. There is a big market for American authors who are perceived as being at the core of American culture.

Today’s Corriere della Sera, for example, gives a page to Richard Ford. Last week to Cormac McCarthy. The week before to Joyce Carol Oates. Some time in between to Annie Proulx. Much as if America were the only source of narrative.

As for Italy, neither Calvino nor Primo Levi are important writers for me, though obviously they were both great talents. Calvino’s experimentalism always irritated me while, aside from his great book on the death camps, I never understood Levi’s reputation. There was a very fine generation of Italian authors from about the forties through to the seventies which now appears to have dried up. My favourites are Bassani, Buzzati, Morante, Ginzburg, Malaparte, Moravia, Brancati, Pavese. There were others too. But reputation is very much a matter of chance. I suppose what’s important is that readers develop independent minds and learn to nose around for what really excites them.

AA: I’m curious how you define “experimentalism,” and why you think it’s a drawback - not just in Calvino’s work but in books at large.

TP: I don’t really “define” experimentalism. And of course I experiment with things myself, so I can hardly object in general. Experiments make sense when they’re in response to a genuine need to find a way to express something that’s not coming out of a standard style. I’m a great admirer of Beckett’s work, or in a completely different way,
Henry Green’s. I simply feel with much of Calvino that he steers shy of real intensity and takes refuge in intellectual games. It’s arid, over-controlled. It can be tiresome. The work I like best is the early realism and the autobiographical pieces…

AA: Are you optimistic about the future for writers like Green?  Universities tend to ignore his books, probably because it isn’t easy to generate much writing about them.  And there are obviously a number of great modern writers in the same boat.

TP: I really don’t think about it. Henry Green was a wonderful writer. I’ve written about him, particularly in my translation book. I often talk about him. As for fashions in academic literary criticism, it’s hard to drum up much interest. Life is short. I try to read the writers that one or two friends I trust tell me are good…

AA: A last question: what’s your next book about, and when is it coming out in America?

TP: Well, it’s pretty difficult for me really to talk about the book. Suffice it to say it features a character somewhat based on Gregory Bateson, the rather unusual anthropologist, sociologist. The book beings with his son travelling to Delhi to meet his mother for the man’s funeral… Various tensions and mysteries emerge.

When will it be published in the States. Who knows?  The States is difficult for me.  Perhaps in a year’s time if all goes well.