... In conversation with Phil
Lecks
Twilight of Love
is a memoir, travelogue and literary biography; elements of
which often appear in your work. Individually these genres are
proving most successful. If I called your books "self help"
too, and well may they be, you'd have it wrapped up. What relationship
is there between the actor, the memoirist and the novelist?
I think,
like André Gide, I am actually a 'moralist'. Memoir, biography
or travelogue are just the forms I use to give structure to
my thoughts. I don't moralise - although some of my characters
do - but, whether the story I am telling is invented (as many
of the stories in both my fiction and non- fiction are) or drawn
from my own or others' lives (ditto), I am basically talking
about how to live a good life. Or at least a beautiful one.
All I do is give my readers the words they've been looking for
to articulate what they already know. I try to write books that
turn my readers into narrators.
You have been described as "unorthodox".
Whose customs, pieties and beliefs might you be undermining?
In Night Letters your narrator proclaimed "Heresy is
sacred" and I don't think he just had Albigensian libertinage
in mind.
In Freudian terms, like Sartre
- and for the same reason: no authoritative father figure -
I lack a superego. I don't rebel, don't campaign for or against
anything, don't even reject - I just don't accept most of the
supernarratives of our culture. In my books they are usually
narratives about the family, love, sexuality, religion, political
ideologies, success, 'the good' in life. My characteristic response
to these narratives is 'Oh, really?' People with strong superegos
- Catholic or Marxist convictions, for example - tend to find
my books irritating, digressive, inconclusive - they like books
that validate their deep structures. That's why, I suppose,
some readers were surprised to find I'd written a novel about
a gay man with HIV without once mentioning the words 'gay' or
'HIV'. I particularize, my readers generalize.
You regularly reflect on pre
Freudian, Jungian and Marxist writers to develop your themes
and ideas. Do you have a preference for the pre-Modern; is this
where you are nourished most? Do Homer, Sappho, Checkhov, Dante
et al, like Turgenev, elucidate our nature and time after the
twilight?
It's a matter of education - my
education, during the most important years of growth and discovery,
was overwhelmingly in 19th-century Russian thought and literature.
It's not a question of right or wrong, but of where the heart
lies. An education such as mine makes you resistant to Modernist
(and post-modernist) ideologies (and art, architecture, political
theory, economic practice), which appear dehumanizing, drained
of beauty, of the sap of lived lives. On the other hand, while
I enjoy reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, when I take
up my pen to write I don't turn to realist models at all - I
have no gift for telling long, rationally connected stories,
as they did. I have no aptitude for certainty. But then, like
most writers, I love all sorts of writing I have no inclination
or ability to try my hand at myself - detective fiction, for
example.
After thirty years friendship
with Turgenev you chose to travel with him after bumping into
him in Baden Baden. What prompted you to make your journey then,
when I presume you had the opportunity to visit, Courtevenal,
Ferne and Spasskoye before?
I'd wanted for years to write in
more detail than I had in my autobiography A Mother's Disgrace
about Russia and my experience of it. On the one hand I seemed
to know Russia too well to need to, having visited it many times
over decades; on the other hand, not being a historian or expert
on Russian affairs, in a sense I do not know enough to demand
my readers' attention. Twilight of Love is my way into Russia
and what Russia has given me. It took me years to gain the confidence
to write it. It's not all factual, but it is all true. And now
I feel I can turn in other directions.
In various places you describe
Turgenev as a child of the Enlightenment with Romantic inclinations,
a pitiful old-fashioned Voltairean and a nihilist who contrives
to fall in love (well that's Bazarov, but you get my drift).
Are you in any way akin to Turgenev? Can you measure your debt
to him?
We have things in common, Turgenev
and I - we're both mystical rationalists, or rational mystics,
we're both sceptical about religion but nostalgic for infinite
possibilities,we both turned, as young barbarians, towards France
to teach us about civilization, we both value civilization above
almost everything else - except love, I suppose. And we both
believe that it is in the experience of love in its infinite
variety that life becomes beautiful and worth living. And refuse
to accept the socially approved structures for loving.
Mortal loves can be soulless. "We
can love in these ways without actually existing, except as
a doomed tangle of neurones and synapses with a mouth that says
I." In Night Letters you spoke of the potential for a de-schooled,
pre-religious sexual Garden of Eden. You now reflect upon the
serious, deferential cult of the body and the trivialising of
sexuality. You see sex as the main arena now of experiencing
the self. How or why do you think this has happened? Like in
Juvenal's Rome, you say, our understanding of the word love
is out of joint. How might we repair that understanding? What
chance is there of resuscitating/rehabilitating love in our
time?
What I really think - and wrote
about in Corfu and Twilight of Love as clearly
as I could - is that intimacy is what most of us strive for,
with just a chosen one or with several. When we're young, the
sexual dimension to intimacy is particularly important to us
for good biological reasons - indeed, intimacy without it is
almost inconceivable - but as we grow older we start to explore
the possibility of achieving intimacy in more imaginative ways.
Limiting ourselves to the sexual variety in fact impoverishes
us as time goes by. As I see it, sexual liberation has been
a two-edged sword: it has allowed Westerners to experience themselves
sexually with a lack of guilt never before known (outside the
aristocracy), but at the same time it has pushed other ways
of being yourself into the wings, leaving sexual performance
as the main measure of the man or woman. And in Twilight of
Love I contemplate the idea that the free-thinking world-view
that made sexual liberation possible at the same time makes
love in the old senses of the word impossible - two bundles
of neurones and synapses can't 'love' each other: 'love' ends
up being a Romantic illusion in the service of biological ends.
As always, I believe, it is balance which makes life rich and
beautiful. And balance takes patience, intelligence and utter
honesty.
Turgenev's Romantic armoury and
the weapons at hand failed him in his battle with time and an
indifferent universe. His anguish and spiritual panic is truly
pathetic. With what might the faithless be armed today, presuming
the battle hasn't been concluded? You do not find vera impossible.
If it is not too personal, may I ask what guides your deliberations
and actions? What comforts and consoles you? Do you regard these
as pathetic distractions or as something more significant, even
essential?
At three o'clock in the morning
nothing much comforts me. There is pleasure to be had in the
new world of the 21st century, but little comfort. In Corfu
I try to suggest that one avenue we might explore with more
enthusiasm and understanding - and avenue closed off by modernism
and post-modernism for many years - is beauty (rather than meaning):
what it can mean, how it transforms our experience, redeems
the ordinary as well as why and how to find it and hold onto
it despite everything.
Turgenev irritated you by not
taking an interest in any spiritual thinking after his dismissal
of Bog. (As well as his self indulgence.) Does God as Dante
describes Him, the measureless movement, answer any of the questions
you put?
Almost everyone, at some point
in their lives, even if it is just for a few months in adolescence,
looks for God (tries to give a meaning to the word 'God'). In
the end, in Western countries, if we're to believe the statistics,
few manage to give it any useful meaning. I think (again, like
André Gide) that that may be because they're looking for the
wrong sort of god - for the Russian 'bog' in Turgenev's case.
Like Philip Adams, our most famous parlour atheist, we're told
what to look for at an early age by salesmen for religious corporations,
and when we don't find it, decide that 'God' doesn't exist.
I am not interested in dogma, I am interested in experience,
Commonsense materialism does not describe my experience.
Would you please describe yourself
before and after your Berlin Wall ecstasis in 1965?
Before I climbed up to peer over
the Berlin Wall in 1965 I was tempted (as any thinking young
person might have been) to suspect that the stories we had heard
about life behind the Iron Curtain were fabricatioans of the
capitalist press. Indeed, I was tempted to believe that there
was no Iron Curtain, or, if there was, that happiness could
indeed be legislated for, goodness could indeed be engineered
in human souls - on the other side of it. Well, suddenly, here
it was, in Berlin. It took about thirty seconds for that fantasy
to evaporate into the foggy, autumnal air. I went on, of course,
to live and study in Moscow, but at least in Moscow nobody at
all, not even the Party bureaucrats, believed in the fantasy
- it was purely a social control mechanism (as I suspect much
religious doctrine is). Belief was a luxury indulged in by Western
intellectual - and still is in small pockets in our universities:
in its limp-wristed post-modernist form.
Turgenev was not interested in
politics; more intimate concerns formed his backdrop. He wrote
"I pay attention to politics only in so far as a writer called
upon to depict contemporary life must" Are you interested in
politics? It rarely figures in your writing. Perhaps you aren't
interested in depicting contemporary life? (More the living?)
Do you think that to be good you must live in a good society?
I'm interested in politics as an
Australian citizen, but no good at writing politically themed
stories. I'm more interested in values - what my readers do
with or make of these values will no doubt inform their politics,
but values are the level I'd rather operate on. My narrators'
values are obviously at variance with, say, the Bush administration's
or John Howard's or Archbishop Pell's or Fidel Castro's, and
much more in tune with Bob Brown's or Carmen Lawrence's, but
I'd rather let the values illuminate the political arena than
describe it directly Again, I think this is related to the lack
of a superego - and the consequent lack of any desire either
to command or obey.
And no, I don't think being good
has much to do at all with living in a good society (do you
mean Iceland, by the way? Or is there another?). I think it
probably mostly has to do with a sense of being loved and trusted,
especially in childhood. A cliché, but true.
Decades after finding civilization
you found the boundary stones illusory and, with Eratosthenes,
find it preferable to divide people between the Good and the
Bad. I wonder why? What game of division might we play that
didn't involve team sports? (Presumably we wouldn't have to
police the borders.) We all desire, maybe need, freedom and
mobility and tradition and belonging. Is it possible to defend
a form of life which is nonchalant or cynical about justifying
itself?
The trouble with team sports, however
exciting and entertaining they may be, is that they lay us open
to manipulation by the powerful. They coerce us into shouting
slogans we may not actually believe in. They blur particularities.
I am less interested in whether or not someone is 'French' or
'gay' or 'Muslim' or 'a Labor supporter' or 'a vegetarian',
say, than in whether or not he or she is a thinker or just sings
along with the tribe. Perhaps the most promising division for
me is between travellers and tourists, those who make up their
own script as they go along and those who live out other people's.
Do you think there is a gay
sensibility? What might gay fiction be? Edmund White described
The Line of Beauty as post-gay novel: it could have been written
by a hetero.
Yes, I do think there is such a
thing as a gay sensibility, at least in Western countries. Not
all homosexuals have it while many heterosexuals do have it.
(Alain de Botton, for instance, who is a certified heterosexual,
seems to me to have it, while Alan Hollinghurst in The Line
of Beauty exhibits only a few flashes of it.) It comes from
living in a culture where socializing your sexual identity is
a life-long battle. There is only one narrative line of consequence
(literally) in our society: breeding. In order not to lose the
battle, in order to protect ourselves against hurt and failure
at society's main games, in order to redeem our fear of inconsequentiality,
I think many of us develop a heightened sense of theatricality
and role-playing - indeed, for many of us life becomes theatre.
We are forced to become imposters. We resort to art and artifice,
as artists do when faced by the triviality of lived lives. So
at one extreme (the banal) there is a taste for interior decorating,
fashion and life lived as a television sit-com, a love of glamour,
and at the other extreme a constant search for a meaningful
narrative - which heterosexuals find provided by the family.
Unlike heterosexuals, we excel at the discontinuous narrative,
joy in the particular, friendship, words, the unheroic, self-irony
, self-awareness ,ambiguity, uncertainty, love with no consequences,
dissimulation, self-deprecating humour, feeling, pleasure. We're
more likely to be poets than novelists, actors than bank-managers,
designers than builders, vagabonds than pilots, librarians than
computer salesmen.
Why do you live in Hobart? (Apparently,
thinking of Plato and Pericles is out of the question in Tasmania.)
Why don't you like big cities anymore? Had you been "floundering
with unseen horrors beneath the surface until the island appear(ed)
in the horizon to release you from disorder and aimlessness?"
Is your Tasmania the self you would like to be? Are there monsters
there?
In fact, it's often (but not always)
on the margins that artists feel freest to experiment - there's
nobody looking over their shoulder. Great paintings, great novels,
great poems, great plays are not by any means mostly created
in the great metropolises. Yes, you need conversation, intercourse,
stimulation, in order to create, but nowadays that's available
everywhere. And Hobart does have an airport. The truth is that
big cities struck me about four years ago as draining more out
of me than they were putting in. I like to visit, but for living
I prefer a beautiful island.
And when I thought about Hobart
seriously as a place to move to, I realised that, amazingly,
it was the very image of the fantasy city I have half-dwelt
in since childhood - the city of K. I describe in my first book,
A Mother's Disgrace. Something about it fitted my notion of
the Ideal City. Not everyone's, but mine. Are there monsters
here? I hope so.
You described good writing as
a clear-eyed homecoming. Turgenev would look at all he'd known,
write what he saw, being who he'd now become. Is writing for
you an Ithaca? Would you have any other advice to those who
would write?
For me writing is always a homecoming
- I am wandering far away and then gradually start circling
around the idea of Home - the place where I am most truly myself.
This gives me eyes to see and ears to hear. And a sense of wonder.
And someone to write home to. Unless you have a sense of Home,
you don't know when you're away.
What interests you at the moment?
Are you still disgracefully happy? Are you well?
At the moment I feel very much
at home, flying in and out of my nest with its view of water,
trees and hills. My mind, however, is in France and North Africa
- I've just jumped into a whirlpool called André Gide and (almost)
every morning I feel what he used to feel in Algeria on his
early trips: reborn. Am I well? Well enough to do all the things
I love doing. It would be greedy to ask for more.
What do you make of gay marriage?
Not an awful lot, to be honest.
Like 'gays in the military'. One of the nice things, I thought,
about being openly gay is that you don't have to get married.
(And why would you want to join the military?) There are so
many other possibilities for two people who want to spend most
of their time building a life together.
The important thing, from my point
of view, is that anyone's primary, enduring, loving relationship
should be protected by law, regardless of who it's with, regardless
of whether it's sexual or not. It might be with the man or woman
you want to have children by, or your mother, your best friend,
your same-sex partner ... that should be nobody's business but
yours.
You can already celebrate same-sex
unions in Australia, you can have a wedding, frock up and throw
a party, you can call the relationship whatever takes your fancy
(call it a 'marriage' if you want to) - it's just the question
of equality in law which hasn't been resolved.
I've been living for nearly 25
years now with one partner - I don't call it a 'marriage', I
just call it 'love'. We stay together, not because of vows,
but because it seems almost perfect. I'm quite happy for heterosexuals
to own the word 'marriage', they're welcome to it - it's just
the rights and privileges I'd like to share.
