John Banville

At one point during this interview, John Banville consciously lied. It showed in his eyes. When asked about the break-up of his marriage he snapped back "my marriage didn't break up" then, seemingly instinctively, devised the kind of beautiful sentence his critics say he often creates to keep readers and it seems, interviewers at bay.

However, this reductive criticism of Banville's work does miss out on one defining feature of his literary style the fact that, more often than not, he creates ghost-like landscapes that "circle round the central question of being" (as one student recently said to him) rather than nail down truth, too specifically or too savagely.
This is precisely what gives John Banville his poetic power. And nowhere more so than in his latest novel Eclipse, which tells the tale of Alex Cleave, a fifty year old actor who has "corpsed" on stage, and is fragmenting to his soul. But it is also a book that according to Banville himself focuses even more so on Cass, the actor's schizophrenic daughter. Either way, Eclipse does prove yet again, that, in the words of one awed reviewer, "Banville is one of the best novelists writing in Ireland, or anywhere, at the moment."
All that said, and despite John Banville's reluctance to reduce truth to "banal" specifics, he did, one day after this interview, phone and say: "Yesterday I shirked that question about my break-up with the missus. I think I should answer it."
And answer it he did, in a fax that contained this point of clarification. "Here are a few lines in reply to your question about my wife etc. I don't particularly want you to use them, but if you are going to go into the circumstances of my life I want you to have an accurate version." The quote has been integrated into the general body of this journalistic Book of Evidence, in the hope that, as usual, the hotpress interview will give an accurate version" of the life of and maybe even the inner life of the interviewee.
But do remember, before we begin, that John Banville is as hard to pin down as the truths he teasingly keeps out of reach of so many of the narrators in his novels. Indeed, he's a bit like a ghost himself.
Joe Jackson: A simple question to begin with. What drugs, drinks and stimulants do you use? Either that or what saintly or satanic pact have you taken that enables you to write a book as terrifyingly beautiful as Eclipse?
John Banville: (laughs) I wish it could be done on drugs or satanic pacts. That'd be easy! But I've been doing this for so long about forty years that I feel I might, possibly, be beginning to learn how to write! It takes about a forty year apprenticeship to be able to write fiction. So the banal answer to your question is: hard work!
Has any drug or drink helped you?
No. If I had a half glass of wine my concentration would be gone. The edge would be gone. I wish I could be a William Burroughs and be out of my skull all the time. Can't do it. Old-fashioned. It's an absolute obsession trying to get something right.
As in, spending a year on the opening paragraph of a book?
As I get older, it is getting easier at this basic level of manipulating words. But that, curiously enough, makes it even harder. Because the more you can do, the more you do. For instance, I've been working on a new novel since Christmas and I've written 50,000 words which, to me, is unheard of! But I read them over the other day and they are rubbish. The words are okay. But they're in the wrong order. You know yourself, from writing, that tone is everything. Once you get the tone right, the thing writes itself. But it takes a long time to get that tone. And I don't know how it is for other writers but for me, it's never my own voice. I don't know whose voice it is. Or where it came from. I sometimes catch myself reading what I'm writing. As I'm writing. And it's as if there was somebody else sitting behind me. Some ghostly figure chanting in this very high, plummy, Yeatsian, high-pitched voice. But it is the voice of my style.
In other words, the voice of our favourite "black-hearted bastard" to coin a phrase applied to Alex Cleave, the narrator of your new novel!
Yes. Well, when you get into your fifties you have been called a "black-hearted bastard" at least three or four times by three or four different people and you begin to believe it could be true. But then men are a bad lot. In the most part. That doesn't get any better as one gets older.
So the writing gets easier but being a man, a father, lover, friend, gets more difficult?
Getting older there is, I've found, a double process that seems contradictory. Things get weightier. The burden you carry gets heavier. But there's also a lightness. At times you feel you could float away. Maybe that's an increasing awareness of death. And an increasing acceptance of death. When you're young, death is this great tragic black thing you're being dragged towards, strapped to the machine. As you get older it becomes more mundane. It's not going to be this grand experience, it's just going to be the end of things. As Wittgenstein says "death is not an experience in life." And it's true. So, in a way, there is no such thing as death, with a capital 'D'. It's not this great force. I used to think it was. I used to read the great, gloomy German philosophers and think death was synonymous with there-ness. With being there. But it's not. It's not of any great consequence any more. That accounts for the lightness.
As Cleave says in Eclipse, looking back, he's astonished at how much life he has accumulated, how much baggage. All these women, children, jobs, failures and successes. And yet, as I look back from my middle fifties, I say "how can I be in my middle fifties? I haven't had fifty-four years worth of life? I've only had three or four years". So this is an interesting age to be at. When you're forty-four you panic, scrabbling to catch up with all the living you haven't done. When you're in your fifties, you get more thoughtful. This may sound banal but it is has happened to me.
Anthony Clare's book Masculinity in Crisis was described by some critics as little more than an externalisation of his own mid-life crisis. Is this true for you?
People tell me it sounds very personal. I don't see that, or hear it. To me, it's a fiction as contrived as any other fiction I've ever written. But people say they hear a different note, from my other books. If so, I certainly didn't try to put it there. I don't see Eclipse as confessional. Any more than The Book of Evidence, or Kepler. All fiction is, at some level, autobiographical. It couldn't be otherwise. Because the only material we have is ourselves. One is locked inside one's self. And all you can use is what you find in the deep, gloomy cavern one inhabits. So all characters are aspects of one's own character.
But that isn't always immediately identifiable. You once told me that writing Mefisto "nearly killed" you. Partly because it was written at a time when both your parents died, and only later you realised the book, at a core level, was about grief.
Certainly since Mefisto I've realised that most of the strong things that happen in my fiction are things I didn't intend. They oozed out of the side when I was concentrating on the pressure in the middle. And that's good. One tries, as one gets older, to work more by instinct.
So when the narrator in Eclipse says, about his parents: "When they died I did not grieve for them. Are these hauntings now their revenge" did that seemingly autobiographical statement seep out sideways?
No. When I talk about things seeping out I don't mean direct statement. It's more shadows, nuances, echoes behind words. As for that statement, the predicament for a lot of middle-aged men is that they couldn't grieve for their losses. Especially Irish people of my generation whose relationship with their parents was problematic because of the changes that were coming through. This country was being made when our parents were growing up and we reaped the benefits of what they put in place. And for a lot of us, the death of our parents meant a springboard. We could go forward into our "inheritance" and what seemed like freedom. This involved not grieving over much.
Though that is to externalise it. Maybe it is far more personal than this. Maybe I am just a black-hearted bastard who can't value human beings. I do think all artists are, at some level, inhuman. This is dangerous territory because one gets into the area of romanticism: the romantic artist, the renegade, the outsider. I don't think that is the case. I think there is something damaged at the centre of artists. Otherwise, why should we do this? Why would I, a grown man, spend my days, locked in a silent room, telling these absurd stories? Why would I give my life to that obsession if there wasn't something wrong with me?
So you see art as the consequence of damage, of scars?
All works of art are scar tissue.
When you say you may be a "black-hearted-bastard who can't value human beings" does that mean you didn't value your parents when they were alive?
I was anxious to get into the world and deal with it on my own. Move forward. And one of the things one had to do was reject what one came from. Where one came from. Whom one came from. This may be an artistic mistake. Maybe the old adage is true: that you should write about what you know. But I always found it more stimulating to write about things I didn't know, to learn about things.
But were you ever accused as Cleave is, by his wife, Lydia of "running back" when he "has a fright, wants his mamma."
I'm not in the kind of trouble Cleave is in. Never have been. God forbid I ever would be. He is a man who is floundering, has lost the run of himself, an actor who doesn't know how to act anymore. I've had moments of crisis like that many times a day! but they don't make me run back to Wexford to live in the house where I was born. That one does in one's fiction, but not in life. Besides, I couldn't live on my own the way Cleave does. I have to have people around me. Outside the door. I have to know they are outside that door.
Meanwhile, you're inside, writing a fiction like Eclipse, which could be said to reflect a man's quest to retreat to an Edenic past.
Again, I think all art is that kind of attempt. Baudelaire says "genius consists of being able to summon up childhood at will." That statement used to puzzle me when I was younger. But now I realise that although it may not be totally true there is something in it. The older one gets, the farther one moves away - literally - from childhood. But it also applies artistically, emotionally. Once Wordsworth lost his childhood he lost his gift. So that hold on childhood is very important. But why does the past seem so powerful to us? Why does it strike us with such piercing force? To remember something from childhood can be more vivid than remembering the most real thing we did today. The past has this extraordinary, Edenic power. We do feel we've been pushed out of somewhere we belong.
Yet this longing to go back, as Cleave's wife suggests, can be a sign of emotional weakness.
Cleave is weak. A dreadful creature. Completely self-obsessed. Cares about nobody else. He sees nobody else. He is the centre-of-the-stage. And the world is battening in on him, beating its fists against his chest, saying "look out here, at the rest of us, try to see something outside yourself." And he's incapable of doing it. Even the most appalling losses leave him invigorated. But the artist does feed on the people around him in order to feed the rat inside.
Do you? Have you ever been accused of being a "vivisectionist" as Cleave is a man scalpeling his way through life in the name of art?
Yes. People have accused me of that.
Your children?
No. My children think I'm alright. I think. Besides, that kind of thing is only said in plays by Arthur Miller! Whereas people talk past each other in my books. This is one of the reasons imperceptive critics say I can't write dialogue. I'm not trying to write dialogue. Everybody speaks in monologue in my books, which is how I believe human beings converse.
Tom Kilroy, in his review of Eclipse, says the monologue is the domain of the obsessive.
It is. But, as I say, art is obsessive. I don't see why it should pretend to be otherwise. What I'm trying to do, in my novels, is follow Beckett's precept, when he was writing about Proust: "in art, the only possible progression, is a progression that is in depth." So, in my novels, instead of spreading out and considering, say, the Beef Tribunal or who's sleeping with whom, I try to go right down into the well of a particular human being and find out what's down there. What I'm trying to do is get that obsessive, singular voice that expresses something about how it feels to actually be a single human consciousness.
Yet you shy away from any attempt to root, say, Eclipse, in any specific details of the single human consciousness that is John Banville. For example, hasn't your marriage broken up? Mightn't readers of Eclipse quite legitimately wonder if that found its way into the book, which also is a story about a marriage breakdown?
The facts of my so-called private life are no secret. I have two grown sons, whom I dearly love, with my wife, Janet, from whom I am... I suppose the word is separated, though we meet at least a couple of times a week, and get on very well. I also have two daughters, aged eleven and four, whom I dearly love, with Patricia Quinn, who is Director of the Arts Council. Any reader who imagines that knowledge of these facts will give a deeper insight into Eclipse, or into any of my books, past or future, is gravely mistaken. Of course, the turbulence, sorrows, triumphs and regrets of the artist's life must contribute to his artistic vision, but to believe that specific circumstances of his life form specific components of his art is a delusion. One's life is extremely complicated and there are all kinds of relationships that one has to keep in balance. But I would certainly not write about them in fiction. Not because I have any delicacy of feeling about them. I would regard it as too close to the surface, too banal. Art has to be mediated, distanced, differentiated. So, yes, the circumstances of my life creep into the fiction but, as I say, I don't put them there.
You said earlier that art is a consequence of damage. Have you identified that moment in your life?
When I say damage", I don't mean something happened to me. I think artists are born with a genetic quirk, or gene, which is damaged.
As in Cleave's daughter, Cass, who is schizophrenic. Do you have any direct experience of schizophrenia?
No. Yet some people who have schizophrenic relatives say I got it quite right. But I don't see Cass as schizophrenic. Don't voices speak to you in the middle of the night?
Not necessarily. But they certainly speak to you, as you revealed earlier, when you said you hear a Yeatsian voice chant, outside yourself, as you write!
I also remember when I was fourteen, fifteen, I used to walk around the fields with my dog and tell stories. Act out stories, in dialogue. I would even do interviews with myself. Fantastic interviews!
But did you ask yourself the kind of difficult questions I'm asking and you seem to be studiously avoiding?
I did! And I always gave superb answers, undid the interviewer who stumbled away ashen-faced!
That'll be the day! But, seriously, when you hear chanting, how far is that from a schizophrenic hearing voices?
Quite far away. I hope. I've never felt in any danger of going over the edge. I've no doubt that these are voices I've invented, and play with. Whereas being mentally ill you think these are real voices in your head, you're not in control and you are certainly not "playing" with them.
Like Cleave, do you find your fellow man "not particularly likable"?
Yes. One only has to look at this century, our own time, this little country, to realise that the mass of human beings are not particularly likable. Or admirable. I started looking at them that way when I was a boy. I always had a profound suspicion of people. Somebody recently asked me if I have a reputation of being "unapproachable." And I said "depends who wants to approach me and what they want to do when they have approached me!" But I think none of us wants to be handled by the world, really.
There is that image of John Banville being cold, cerebral. If true, can you really also be a loving father and loving husband? Or are you really, like Cleave, a "bad husband", a "neglectful father" and "monster of self-regard"?
I don't know where I got this reputation from. I am talking, to you, about humanity in general. I don't like humanity in general. But of course there are a certain number of people around me whom I treasure almost as much as I treasure myself. And that is saying an awful lot. We pretend, when we're young. We make pledges to people, say "I love you more than my life." Nobody loves anybody else more than they love themselves. But I do think I am articulating things that people, for the most part, don't like to articulate because it is not very pleasant. It's not pleasant to say you don't find the majority of human beings particularly likable. Or admirable. But this is the way it is. And, in terms of Cleave, this a man who is making a confession that he knows is going to damage himself. He's trying to be as honest as he can be.
But if we all were that honest we simply wouldn't be able to live with each other. You can live with somebody and be madly, hopelessly, profoundly in love for life yet still find them, on certain days, absolutely hateful. But if we all were to say "darling, will you please go away because I just don't like the look of you today, I'm having one of my off-days?" then human life would have broken down long ago. So we have to keep up fictions all the time. And it's right that we should. But when my narrators come to an extreme situation when their career has broken down or their daughter is mad they say "okay, now is the time to be honest because that is all that's left to me."
Would you hope readers of your books could look at their own lives with the same degree of self-honesty?
I don't care what readers do. That's up to readers. When you finish a book you push a paper boat out on the pond and it has to live its own frail life. It can only do that if readers give it new interpretations. And I'm always fascinated when people say they read something into my book I didn't put there. Intentionally. There's always a bit of magic in that. The greatest work of art standing by itself in the middle of an uninhabited jungle is nothing. It has to have human beings to animate it.
Let's look more closely at something that seems to animate John Banville. Did you ever think, as Cleave does, "if I spent a lifetime in rehearsal, I could not hope to aspire to the thoughtless elegance of this girl's most trivial gesture." In other words, do you ever feel invalidated, at a core level, when you compare a male's creation of a work of art with the female ability to actually create life?
This is one of the reasons so many great novels are written by men. Out of that envious desire to create life. It's also one of the reasons men, at a very deep level, hate women. Partly because of their power to create. And other reasons. For having power over them. The power of sex. The power of love. The power of nurture. Men deeply, deeply resent this. They've never forgiven their mother for withdrawing all those things. For the fact that they had to grow up. It's pathetic but true! We had such a good time when we were kids. There was this women saying "you are the greatest thing in the world, you are a prince, you can do anything, you're going to do wonders in the world." At least, if we're lucky that's the kind of mother we had. And then you get into adolescence, you push them away and you've got nobody. So you immediately start looking around for another woman to take the place of your mother, to give you the same old comforting sustenance your mother did. It is pathetic.
When you say men hate women at some deep level, does this translate into hating the mother?
I imagine so.
One reviewer has detected hostility towards his mother in your book.
Cleave is very hostile towards his mother. He s a mysogynist. And I, myself, am getting a reputation as a misogynist. My defence is that I'm not a misogynist, I'm a misanthrope! I hate everybody! Race, creed, colour or gender doesn't matter to me! I think they're all awful! I don't discriminate.
Seriously, why not address that accusation of misogyny in your work, the suggestion that you have actually hated women, from your mother onwards?
I do believe the war between the sexes is a very real war. It always has been. And I think the age we're living in is despicable. Nothing sets my teeth on edge more than the words New Man." A "new man" is somebody who has learned not to call women "ladies" or "girls" and has got used to never saying "he" but says, instead: "he or she." In other words, men have just learned the language. Underneath they are the same little tyrants they always were. And I think men and women should admit there is war, a constant jockeying for power and position and that this is one of the most creative aspects of human life The war between men and women. There is never a moment's rest in it. But it is terribly creative. And I'm not saying that as a platitude. And I don't underestimate the pain and damage it causes, to men and women. But it's simply a fact of life. There is no point in wishing it away. It's just there.
The war definitely gets violent, and descends into fisticuffs in Eclipse, with Cleave admitting he often feels like "hauling out and hitting" his wife.
But he doesn't. In fact, he says that when they were young they would hit each other. But that was another kind of love-play. Yet I don't see the relationship between Cleave and his wife as being pivotal to this book. She is on the periphery of his life and if I was to criticise the book along the lines of misogyny, it would be the fact that she is peripheral. Cleave doesn't take her seriously as a force in his life. Yet I don't see this as a woman-hating book. Cleave doesn't hate women any more than the rest of us men do. He just finds them more problematic. Then again, maybe hate is the wrong word, too emotive. Yet I don't know what to replace it with. Resentment is too measly-mouthed because there is, as I say, a healthy hatred between men and women and it is very, very productive.
Either way, you do, at one point in the book, write about the "angry pink frilling of the vagina." Why angry?
That's simply angry in the sense of being chaffed!
So it's not a depiction of the vagina as something hateful, which could conceivably be how it might be described by a man who hates the sexual power of women?
On the contrary. I see that phrase as a beautiful description of that woman. Here she is at her most vulnerable and, from some aspects, most ridiculous and he sees how extraordinarily moving she is. That dream is about how he sees the essence of womanhood to be both victim and controller. The woman lying on the couch is in control of the slave.
But you also write about the "erotic intimacy that binds the torturer and victim" a theme that was also central to Athena. So one could ask is that, ultimately, how John Banville perceives the relationship between men and women?
In Athena, I did try to look at that strange hinterland between pleasure and pain, between control and submission. I think also Story of O is a beautiful book and Athena is, in many ways, a homage to Story of O, which does catch something essential about the relationship between men and women. You read Story of O when you're an adolescent, as a "dirty book" then read it again and realise how subtle it is. When you read it in adolescence you think this woman is having all these terrible things done to her then you realise, afterwards, she is the one in control throughout. She's the one with the power. I wanted to do something like that.
And I can't understand why people didn't take more notice of Athena. It got a few good reviews but kind of sank. I thought it was a more important book than that. It was saying what, to me, seemed like interesting things about the relationship between men and women. The curious thing was it was fantastically well reviewed by women. Which I was disappointed by, I thought they'd all attack it. In fact, there was an article in the Bookseller about this phenomenon and the headline was "Knickers in the air for Banville's latest book." But even though an extraordinary number of very intelligent women reviewed it very well they didn't engage with the book in the way I thought they would. Maybe it's not as strong a book as I think it is.
But do you believe the natural state between man and women is a "war zone" operating in that "hinterland" between pain and pleasure, control and submission?
Yes. But it's like the set-piece wars they used to fight before the First World War. The set-piece battles where you send out one force against another force and then go home and the two opposing generals share a bottle of wine. Then the next day they battle again. It's that kind of stylised, emblematic, heraldic war between men and women. I don't think it is as visceral as the word hate would make it seem. But it is a war and there are constant skirmishes, constant battles. I suppose, at heart, I'm a Hegelian. I believe in the final synthesis of opposing forces which then break into more opposing forces and then synthesise again. Any relationship I've had with any woman, that's the way it's been. And that's what makes it interesting, Otherwise, you sink into the slippers and the cat sleeping before the fire and that's the end of it.
But in order to keep passion alive does it have to be a victim/torturer scenario with each shifting into the different sides of that equation?
At some level it must.
Complete with whips and chains!
No, not whips and chains. If so, I would have the marks to show it! The whips in Athena are a metaphor for the kind of emotional damage that each of them is trying to inflict on the other. This "soft" damage. And that is a large part of sex. The sense of mutual, joyful damage. To look at, sex looks like two people trying to kill each other! Locked in battle. A Martian coming down to earth would say "Good Christ, what are they doing to each other now? It's bad enough that one of them should get up in the morning and scrape the hair off his face but, at night, they get into bed and start doing this to each other! What sort of creatures are these?" And, of course, it would be the Martian's loss not to realise how much delight is going on in this strange battle.
What about the fact that Cleave and his wife resort to fisticuffs. Is that, too, part of the "war zone" of love as far as John Banville is concerned?
That's just another set-piece fight. They were just having a little warm up! If you think that's a bad fight you must never have been a bad fight with a woman.
So are you saying that kind of physical fight between a man and a woman or something more extreme doesn't signify the death of love, which is how many couples might see it?
I can only speak for myself. And I wouldn't see that as the death of love, no. God, no. I've had some knock-down fights. But I don't fight. I just stand there with a vacant expression on my face when people fight with me.
Which can be more maddening to the other person involved?
That's one of the reasons I do it. It's my weapon. But most men realise they are afraid to let go, afraid of what they could do. Emotionally and physically. Yet I think every man has had the sensation Cleave has, of his fist just itching to lash out. The amazing thing is that we don't do it. How is it that creatures like us absolute savages, the most dangerous creatures that have ever been on earth, possibly the universe don't haul off and hit each other? This seems to me to be a miracle.
A lot of men do hit women.
The vast majority of men don't. And the vast majority of women don't.
How important have women been in your life, in terms of being your muse?
Absolutely important. I find women very strange. I don't understand them at all. Yet I always had to have a girlfriend. From the age of about eleven on. And I would say that anything I've learned about the world, and maybe even about myself, I've learned from women. I don't much like the company of men. One of my worst nightmares is the dinner party which consists entirely of men. Nothing more boring, dispiriting. You know what's going to happen. All that testosterone flying around in the air and they're talking about their jobs, careers, cars. But drop one woman into that setting and the whole dynamic changes which, again, is the extraordinary power women have over men. Whereas if one man was dropped in at a table full of women the dynamic wouldn't change much at all.
If you were dropped in at a table full of females, had a few drinks too many, would you become a vengeful little devil, give vent to your darker feelings, like resentment, in relation to women?
I'd get silly, with a big grin on my face, talk nonsense, flirt with everybody and make a big fool of myself! And have to apologise the next day! And when I talk about resentment or hatred I'm talking about something deep inside all of us, very primal. It's what we have to fight against. But, overall, I think women are wonderful. I've never gotten used to there being women in the world. It seems to me if God wanted to punish us, it would be a world full of men. But he relented, said "let's civilise them a bit" and gave us women. Then the whole thing changed, became infinitely more interesting.
The cover of Eclipse features a painting, by Balthus, of a woman, though most reviewers are saying the book is about a man: Cleave.
It is about the daughter, Cass, really. She's literally the haunting presence throughout. Everything is turned toward her in a way even I, myself, don't quite understand. But I must admit that I am surprised by the overall reaction to this book. I think it has had only one bad review and the rest are quite amazing. I'm told! I don't read reviews anymore. But people definitely are saying Eclipse is more approachable and more easy to read than my other books. I thought people would absolutely loathe it, say "look at this self-satisfied prick, devising these beautiful sentences to keep us at bay." But they seem to have got behind the book, which is quite gratifying. Maybe I've actually created characters, which I've never tried to do before. Either that or I'm just getting older and more weary of myself and my own obsessions. Maybe I'm starting to look around the world a bit.
Eclipse has been described as "your funniest novel." So, before we go, any chance of putting on your red nose and telling us your favourite joke about death?
I'm glad to hear you say that about the book. Because I never understand why people don't see the humour in my books. It must be my face! Certainly in photographs that are taken to go along with this book I notice there is a definite resemblance between myself and Slobodin Milosoevic! That awful square jaw. Maybe I'll take over the country! My favourite joke about death? Woody Allen has one. "I don't mind dying, but I don't want to be there when it happens!"