Andrew Crumey

Andrew Crumey
Q & A (2003)

How did you become a writer?
I wrote a novel, sent it to a few publishers, and the fourth one I tried said yes.
Did you always plan on being a writer?
No, I initially planned on being an astronaut, then an astronomer, then (by my teens) a theoretical physicist.
Why the switch?
My real interest has always been "ideas"; philosophy, if you like. Physics is one way of exploring ideas; writing is another.
What influence does science have on your writing?
It makes me aware of the importance of clarity and consistency.
Which authors and books have most influenced you?
Cervantes: Don Quixote; Diderot: Jacques The Fatalist; Proust: In Search Of Lost Time.
How would you describe your novels?
Philosophical mysteries.
You're often described as a "postmodernist". How do you feel about this?
I learned my trade from "classic" writers like Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot and ETA Hoffmann. They get called "postmodernist" too, and I'm happy to be bracketed with them.
But postmodernism is also a philosophy; an idea of relativism.
As a trained scientist, I don't entirely share that philosophy.
And postmodernism implies a kind of ironic playfulness.
All the writers I've mentioned produced comic novels that are playful and ironic. But they are never "knowing"; never disrespectful of the form.
How do you go about writing your novels?
I assemble lots of unrelated bits and pieces, then try to fit them together in a consistent way.
Is there an overall plan?
No; I only find the plan once I've finished the first few drafts.
How would you characterise your style?
It is one of abrupt changes. These can be changes of subject, but also of tone, register, pace. Sometimes my writing is dense; sometimes very simple and swift. I hope in this way to avoid being boring. At least, that's the hope! I like the idea that the reader never knows what might lie on the next page. And yet everything has to resolve at the end.
There is something anarchic, sometimes almost dreamlike, about your writing.
Dreams are the archetype of all writing. As kids we all know the story that ends "then I woke up, and it was all a dream". Every novel has this as its unwritten final sentence, after the last page. You close the book, you wake up from the dream it has presented, and you get on with your life.
Is life itself a dream?
In a poetic sense, yes; but unlike the postmodernists, I do not confuse the poetic with the factual.
Yet your books often pose such riddles about the nature of reality.
That is what dreams can do. And when writing a story, it is very natural to ask "who is writing this"? Then that writer becomes a character, who is himself the subject of a story. Such infinite regress is quite natural, and it's fun. Writers have always played these games. Cervantes, for example, when Quixote enters a printing shop and sees that the book being printed is The Adventures Of Don Quixote. A delicious joke against the author of a pirate edition. Or Sancho's enumeration of inconsitencies earlier in the book. In Proust, the moment when the author/narrator decides to call the narrator/hero "Marcel": wonderfully disorientating.
Does your style derive from authors such as the ones you have mentioned?
I've certainly learned from them: learned, I think, how to find my own voice. But other things have helped shape what I could call my aesthetic sense. Science, perhaps; but also music, most certainly. Some writers are very visual; they are inspired by paintings, films, and so on. I'm not like that. I've always been inspired by musical models.
Are you a musician?
I taught myself piano when I was a teenager. It's one of my greatest passions.
What do you play?
The "classics". I love Beethoven's sense of form; the way in which themes are structural elements, unfolding in time. And I love the element of humour, which is also found in Haydn. Or the way that Schubert suggests something beyond the music; something intensely personal. As a writer, I'm very concerned with questions of form and structure, and I admire the way certain musical works give the sense that they somehow create their own form, in an organic way.
Your first novel was called Music, in a Foreign Language.
Exactly. Music plays an important role there; especially the Goldberg Variations.
In the novel, whole passages are repeated and varied in a 'musical' way.
Yes. I compare history itself to music - a kind of "variation".
This is surely the postmodernist idea of multiple realities. Your book is an "alternate history" - a dystopia about a Communist Britain.
The idea came to me from physics - specifically, Hugh Everett's "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. I learned about this when I was a student, and it made an enormous impact on me.
What exactly is Everett's theory?
It is very well known now, thanks to science fiction. The universe constantly bifurcates into multiple realities, but for some unexplained reason, we see only a single path.
This is like Borges's famous story The Garden Of Forking Paths.
Yes. When I first read that story, I was struck by the way that Borges to some extent anticipated Everett, whose theory dates from the mid-1950s. Of course, Everett worked in a cultural climate that was already influenced by the ideas that also produced Borges's story.
You are often compared to Borges.
Obviously he has been a great influence, and I have deliberately imitated him on some occasions. I agree with Proust's notion that a writer should sometimes write deliberate pastiche, otherwise their whole career might be spent writing pastiche involuntarily.
Which other writers have you consciously imitated?
A few. Perhaps this is another aspect of my "postmodernism"; though my motivation is always love and respect for writers who seem to me to be worth imitating. In my first novel, Calvino was a clear model - specifically his If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which contains many unresolved stories. There is some lack of resolution in Music, in a Foreign Language, but even in that first novel, my real novelistic urge - unlike Calvino's - is to make the pieces add together into a single story. Calvino himself, of course, was constantly compared to Borges; and Borges acknowledged a great debt to Swift and Kafka among others. Perhaps, as an author, the only way to avoid such borrowings is never to read anything. This is the path chosen by some novelists nowadays, who prefer to watch television or go to the cinema; but I don't much care for their results.
Did the inspiration for your first novel come solely from reading?
Of course not. There were many little incidents and experiences that got swept up in there. The most significant was a research trip I made to the University of Wroclaw in Poland, whose Institute of Theoretical Physics was situated in what, until only a few years previously, had been the local Communist headquarters. There was still much evidence of the former occupancy, and this labyrinthine building captured my imagination. But the only way I could bring it into my own domain, was to imagine such a building existing in Britain.
In your novel, the clearest influence must be Orwell's 1984.
I agree - though funnily enough, the influence was entirely unconscious. Orwell was one of my favourite authors when I was a teenager.
Who else?
Dostoevsky, Joyce. At university, I read quite a lot of Thomas Mann, Goethe. And also a lot of philosophy, though I don't think I understood any of it.
What did you read as a child?
Very little. My background is fairly typical Scottish working class, and not at all bookish. The books I enjoyed as a child were mainly picture books about science, nature and so on. But I was read to - Enid Blyton, mostly. And my father sometimes picked up old books in junk shops, attracted by their age rather than content, and these held some fascination for me.
How did you acquire a love of literature?
I think it was largely thanks to my English teacher, who also introduced me to music, philosophy, the arts in general. He was a very inspirational figure - my Jean Brodie, if you like.
Your second novel Pfitz is about an ideal city. Calvino's Invisible Cities is surely a clear influence here.
Like 1984, it was largely an unconscious influence. The conscious source of Pfitz is Diderot's Jacques The Fatalist, though I don't recall ever reading a review of my book that spotted this connection. That doesn't much surprise me, because Diderot is not particularly well known, in Britain at least.
How did you discover Diderot's novel?
I first spotted his D'Alembert's Dream; I knew D'Alembert's name from mathematics. Then I saw Jacques The Fatalist, with a jacket quote by Milan Kundera, comparing it to Quixote and Ulysses. That was enough to convince me that this was an author I ought to read.
Diderot's novel is about a master and servant, like Pfitz.
Yes, and like Quixote, which was Diderot's model, though his style is that of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. In my novel, there is a book-within-the-book which echoes Diderot in its use of dialogue, interjections, digressions and so on. But in Diderot's novel, the servant believes that everything is fixed by fate; my servant Pfitz believes everything is an accident. Both novels - Diderot's and my own - are about the philosophical problem of free will.
Do you believe we have free will?
I'm inclined to say no. The "Laplacian" argument is that the universe is like a clock, and once it's wound up, everything proceeds in a "deterministic" way, with no room for randomness. If some little voice in my head tries to beat this determinism by saying, "No, I won't walk that way - I'll go this way instead", then can we be sure that the little voice has free will; or is it too determined by fate?
Surely the quantum and chaos theories have disproved Laplace's clockwork universe?
No, they haven't. Quantum waves evolve in a deterministic way (so, indeed do chaotic systems); but when an observation or measurement is made, something "random" happens, called a "quantum jump". Nobody has ever figured out how this process works. Everett's many-worlds theory explains things by saying that these random "jumps" never happen - instead, we are sent along a path in a multiverse, and the apparent randomness is a matter of which way we happen to turn. The big picture remains deterministic.
And yet Pfitz argues that everything is random - even things which we believe to be "determined".
Yes. Pfitz is a joker; a diabolical figure. For a long time, physicists have wondered whether the laws of nature are themselves a matter of "chance". Again, you can account for this with "multiverse" ideas, which are quite popular among physicists nowadays. Perhaps it's all to do with the continued popularity of Borges, Star Trek and so on.
Pfitz is very much in the tradition of the "philosophical tale", which we know mainly from Voltaire.
Candide and Micromegas are charming; but I'm far more fond of Diderot. He had a genuine understanding of mathematics, science and technology - the Encyclopedie [edited by Diderot] is famous for the attention given to industrial methods, crafts and so on. Actually, though, Pfitz was originally to be set in the early nineteenth century - the time of ETA Hoffmann.
In both Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle, there is an element of Hoffmann in your use of the supernatural and bizarre.
Yes, and in the way that stories are nested one within another. I discovered Hoffmann through Schumann, several of whose piano suites take their titles from him - most notably Kreisleriana. Schumann wanted to be a novelist before he became a composer (Hoffmann wanted to be a composer before he became a writer). The world of Kreisleriana hangs over Pfitz, and also of Carnaval (there is even a character called Estrella, a name from Carnaval). Schumann was a wonderful composer of "character pieces", and some episodes in my novels are likewise "character pieces", with a particular voice, atmosphere and so on.
You've brought us back to music. Would you say your novels are suites, or symphonies?
They're more like sonatas: intimate in scale; celebrating solitude. In each chapter, there may appear some strange "modulation", some dissonance, which is a preparation for something that will reccur later on. And everything must resolve. I said this before, in relation to Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. The weakness of his novel, for me, is the lack of resolution. Think of the variation form in music - Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, for instance. It is so easy for that great work to sound very boring, like a lot of bagatelles. A great pianist is able to make it all add up. But a book cannot rely on the intervention of a skilled interpreter; it has to make sense to the reader, on a first reading.
Do you wish your books to be read only once?
I hope they will be read at least once. I believe - immodestly perhaps - that they are rich enough to bear repeated reading. But I can't assume they will receive it. The book has to work, on some level, first time round; otherwise nobody will go back for more.
Is it true that books are interpreted only by the reader? What about the role of criticism?
That's a valid point. We come to understand books through the influence they exert: this is the point made by Borges in his famous essay about Kafka. I once heard AS Byatt say that she came to Quixote through Borges; for me it is the same. There is a "Borgesian" Cervantes, just as there is a "Kunderian" Diderot. And that's all very well if you happen to be a "great" writer who's long dead, and can rely on being picked up by talented people. If you're alive and still building an audience, you have to concentrate on giving people a worthwhile experience that isn't dependent on lots of footnotes and a few university lecture courses. It's no good dreaming you'll be appreciated by posterity, if nobody can enjoy you now.
Staying with music, D'Alembert's Principle is called "a novel in three panels". Would it be better to call it "three movements"?
It was my American publisher who gave it the subtitle. I don't mind what my foreign publishers do, in terms of changing titles and so on. I always believe that you should leave such things to experts - they know their own market. As long as an "original" edition has appeared somewhere, subject to my own approval, then that's fine. In Germany, Pfitz is called "The Cartographer's Lover". In Italy, Mr Mee is "The Professor, Rousseau, and the Art Of Adultery". As for D'Alembert's Principle, I did think of calling it a "suite"; but everything I tried was somehow too corny. Really, I thought of D'Alembert's Principle as simply Three Tales; but Flaubert nabbed that title already.
Is the book a novel, or a trio of stories?
It lies somewhere in between; it has the unifying, resolving tendency of all my books, but since it has only three elements, the force of resolution is less strong. You have the story of D'Alembert, and then two documents in his possession. Given the degree of contrast between the pieces, some readers might prefer to have it billed as three stories; the connections are an added bonus. I think these distinctions are important, because readers have to understand what's going on; they have certain expectations.
Let's turn to Mr Mee. Both critically and commercially, this has been your most successful novel to date. Is it also your most successful artistically?
Each of my novels has done a little better than its predecessor, in terms of reviews, sales, foreign editions and so on. That's very reassuring - a great many novelists these days have all their success with their first book, and then everything goes downhill. Artistically, yes, I'd say that Mr Mee is my best book. There is less tentativeness; the changes of register, and the resolutions, feel firmer.
Your first three novels were published in rapid succession; Mr Mee came after a four-year gap. Has this helped?
My first novels were written before I started a family; hence the gap. I always discard a great deal of writing; books go through several drafts, and some novels are suppressed altogether. Between Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle, I worked on a story collection called Scenes From The Word Camera, which was never published.
Yet only a year separated Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle!
Some of the stories were expanded and reworked to become the D'Alembert book. Then I worked on a novel called Uncertainty, which was certainly lousy, though I needed several drafts to find that out. Then there was a book called Infinite Laughter, which was also lousy, and one called Impossible Tales. Well, along the way, some elements of these books turned into Mr Mee, and others paved the way for my next book, Mobius Dick.
Where then is the starting point of each book?
There is no starting point; only a slow emergence out of chaos. With Mr Mee, I spent some time writing "essays" about literature - Proust, mainly. These essays were terribly boring. So I invented a narrator for them, and gave him a love affair. Another story I had on the go was about a fellow who goes into a second-hand bookshop and finds something that sets him on some kind of trail. For a long time, this was a search for the author of the book. But like the essays, it was all very boring. Then I realised that the book hunt was connected with Jean-Bernard Rosier, a character who makes an appearance in D'Alembert's Principle (though I removed his name from the published version, feeling it to be irrelevant - a mistake, perhaps, on reflection). So I had a boring story about someone looking for Rosier's Encyclopaedia; and some boring essays. Then I found a voice for the bookworm. In part, it came from Gault's novel Annals Of The Parish - a smug, self-satisfied voice (though I don't think that's what Gault intended). I decided I could best express this voice in the epistolary way. And I made my essay-writer an expert in French literature, which encouraged me to read - among other things - Rousseau's Confessions. There I discovered Ferrand and Minard - their connection with D'Alembert made me home in on them, and I was intrigued by the way Rousseau describes them as a "couple". They seemed mysterious, and irresistibly comic. So I began to write their "story"; and in this way, I now had the three strands of Mr Mee. Once I had them, I could connect them, make them into a plot. That's how my books work.
An impressive feature of Mr Mee is the contrast between the three separate stories. Did you write each one separately?
Once I'd got going, I could write the chapters more or less in order, I think. I was aware that Mr Mee's chapters are consciously "archaic" - there is a direct quote from Hume, for instance, that is not too different from Mee's own voice. And the lecturer's chapters draw heavily on the French tradition - moralising, aphoristic, and so on. So the "modern" chapters are old-fashioned - and to balance this, I made the "historical" chapters - the Ferrand and Minard story - the simplest, swiftest and most "modern".
Mr Mee gets involved in the Internet. What is your own experience here?
Being a physicist, I started using it early on. I started up a website in 1996, devoted to Scottish writing, simply because I couldn't find much about Scottish writing on the web. The atmosphere then was quite pioneering; it wasn't all about people making money or being "cool". And the site became very popular. I'd get enquiries from all over the place, and I'd find myself trawling books in order to provide an answer. But of course, as the Internet grew, I got more and more enquiries, often from people who basically wanted me to write their university essays for them. There were also other sites emerging, with funding and so on, that could do a better job than me. And in addition, I realised that my site was inadvertently bolstering a "canonical" view which I didn't necessarily share.
You don't agree with literary canons?
Certainly not if they're based on ideology rather than aesthetics. You see, my website was devoted to "Scottish literature". But what does "Scottish" mean? Written in Scotland? Or written by someone who's Scottish? And who counts as Scottish? Of course this is a silly, nit-picking argument; but it's important, because kids go to university to study "Scottish literature". They learn that people such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn are "great" writers. Personally, I don't care for either - in fact, I know a lecturer in Scottish literature who shares my view about Gunn, but isn't allowed to tell his students! All I'm saying, is that the definition of such a subject is ultimately arbitrary and exclusive; more to do with national pride than literary criticism. For me, the greatest Scottish literary achievements of the twentieth century were Orwell's 1984 (written in Scotland), and the English translation of Proust (done by a Scot). My website was fun to the extent that I could propagate ideas like these; but naturally this wasn't what most visitors were looking for.
Mr Mee becomes equally disillusioned with the Internet.
He comes to realise that it's not the sort of online encyclopaedia he'd imagined, and he returns to good old-fashioned books.
He also discovers sex, and this too is disillusioning.
Mr Mee's sex life is grotesque and tragic, but the intention is purely comic. A few readers found it disgusting; most have understood the irony.
Which of your fictional characters do you most identify with?
All my characters are in some sense "me" - Flaubert also said something like this, of course. Writers are like actors. Among actors, you get ones who always play the same part, and then you get "character actors". I am, in writing terms, a "character actor". I don't bare my soul; I play parts. There's plenty of room in the world for writers of both kinds.
In addition to your writing, you are literary editor of a Scottish newspaper. How does being a critic affect the way you write?
It has made me a little less hard on myself.
What are you working on now?
I've just finished a novel called Mobius Dick. Superstition prevents me from saying too much about it at this stage, other than that it continues the progression of my earlier books.
What advice would you give to young writers?
No matter what people say about your work, don't take it personally. Especially when it's praise.