Apr 2004 - Issue 4
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An Interview with Ian McEwan
One of the finest English writers alive, Ian McEwan speaks to Ramona Koval about writing, morality, science and love.
Ramona Koval: What about your time in the orbit of the famous novelist, critic and creative writing teacher, Malcolm Bradbury? You were Bradbury’s first student, in fact for a time his only student.
Ian McEwan: Yes, there was no class. I was twenty-one, I’d just finished
a degree in English at Sussex University. I was looking around to go and do an
MA somewhere. It was already September and I hadn’t found a university to go
to, and I was thumbing through a pile of brochures and saw that you could do an
MA in contemporary literature and literary theory—which wasn’t such a prickly
subject in 1970 as it is now—and that you could also hand in a bit of fiction.
I phoned the university, at East Anglia, and amazingly got through to Malcolm
Bradbury almost immediately, and he said, ‘Well, come and see me.’
I had a very lucky break that year. The course had closed down, that’s what
Bradbury said over the phone. He said, ‘This is the first year we’ve run it
with this component of fiction. No-one’s applied but if you want to come, we’ll
try you out.’
So I was there with a dozen other students who were concentrating mostly on
comparative literature and modern American literature. And I simply saw it as
my year to write fiction, It was the first real choice I’d made in my young
adult life. I wrote like crazy. I was full of a very Romantic sense. I wrote
into the dawn. I’d meet Malcolm every three or four weeks, usually in a pub,
for twenty minutes—he was always very busy. He never gave any real critical
comments, he simply said, ‘That’s fine, I think you’re on the right lines, what
are you doing next?’ And I would say, ‘Well, I think I’m going to write a story
about a thirteen-year-old boy who rapes his sister.’ And he’d say, ‘Well when
can I have it?’
In other words, it was morally completely neutral and at the same time he was
putting me in the way of writing that really made a huge impression on me. It
was in that year I read all the American writers that I still admire and keep
faith with: John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow; who seem to have dominated,
in my mind, fiction in English for the last thirty years.
I also read William Burrows and Norman Mailer. I felt rather impatient with the
texture of the standard mainstream English novel, which seemed to me rather
grey and un-ambitious compared to these expressive, explosive Americans with
their freedom and boldness with language.
Ramona Koval:
Because they didn’t have that English restraint that you had grown up with?
Ian McEwan: Yes and they also had a democratic, pluralistic sense of
what the novel could be. Saul Bellow’s characters were at ease on the street
and yet could think, what he calls ‘deep water thoughts.’ And I like that.
There was no sense in which you felt about Bellow’s characters that they were
upper-middle, lower, in between class. They were simply twentieth century human
beings, and he was exploring the condition.
My stories were tiny things by comparison, but I thought that I did want to be
bold. I did want bright colors, I did want something a little savage. And I
think that was reactive. For years afterwards, when people would say, well you
clearly write to shock, I would deny it. But I now realize that in fact it was
probably the case. Not as a conscious ambition, but as a reactive—yes, it was
reactive writing against that well-mannered, well-modulated, prevailing style
of English fiction at the time. Quite fussily attentive to issues of class and
social mobility and what the furniture looked like and how to describe the
tapestries and the… I was very impatient with that.
Ramona Koval: You said that you didn’t want to write with that sensibility about class and description; but in a sense Atonement has got a lot of that in it. What happened?
Ian McEwan: By the time I’d written The Comfort of Strangers and The
Cement Garden and In Between the Sheets, I think I was writing myself into a
corner. There was only so far one could go with that and I was desperate to
begin to enlarge. So instead of writing any more fiction, I did other things. I
wrote a television play, The Imitation Game, which was set in the Second World
War. I wrote a movie for Richard Eyre to direct, called The Ploughman’s Lunch.
I wrote an oratorio with Michael Berkeley which was really a response to the
new shift in the arms race in the early eighties. And allowed a lot more light
and breadth into my work.
So all those issues, whether one’s talking about class or social concerns, came
back into the fiction. I’d always felt, for example, up until that point, that
I should never reveal where any of my characters were, or when. I was very much
in the tutelage of the existential novel, and I knew that that was like walking
on crutches.
So by the time I got back to writing a novel, which was The Child in Time, it
was very much located in a place, in a time which was a sort of a future but
also very much the present. And from then on, I suppose, history became the
major concern to me. So all the things that I’d discarded, stripped down as a
twenty-one-year-old writer, I was anxious to reclaim in a different way.
Ramona Koval: Enduring Love concerns itself with the ideas of rationality and science versus more intuitive ways of thinking. It was a defense of rationality in a way, at least from one protagonist’s point of view. Delusional beliefs like the erotic delusion of Jed Parry in the book were explored, and the question raised about, how do you know if you’re in love or just simply off your head? Do you believe in falling in love.
Ian McEwan: Yes. If we could choose who we could fall in love with, we’d never get around to it.
Ramona Koval: Why?
Ian McEwan: Well, because if it became the slave to our rationality, we’d always think, well is she the wealthiest, more genetically endowed, etcetera … A rational choice would be that there is bound to be someone better. So much the better, in evolutionary terms, if falling in love was out of our hands. Then at least we could get started on providing the next generation. So usefully, I think, there are some things that are not subject to rational choice.
Ramona Koval: That’s a very rational way of thinking about falling in love, isn’t it?
Ian McEwan: Yes. But look how rationality then generates a very
interesting story. I think rationality gets a terrible press in literature. And
I blame Mary Shelley and Keats and Blake. They always thought that rationality
was sucking something essential and good out of life. And yet we all know that
in our personal lives what annoys us is when people are contradictory or
inconsistent or say one thing and do another. We require a degree of
rationality, even in our most intimate exchanges with people. You could
describe love in evolutionary terms, but still the inside of love, and being in
love and what it’s like to be loved, are no less stupendous for one finding a
history of antecedents for it.
I’ve thought for a long time that I would like to write a novel in which the
hero is super-endowed with a belief in rationality but he turns out to be
right. And the reader, and the police, and his wife, are all wrong. It was
something of a counter piece for Black Dogs, in which the central figure is
someone who is deeply suspicious of the rational. I think we still live in this
post-Romantic sense—especially in literature, less so in life. So typically in
a novel it’s the character who trusts his or her intuition rather than the
cold, abstract rationalist who wins through. But that’s not my experience,
actually. I think so many good moments in life are actually produced by clear
thinking, by thinking things through. Those things we value, like justice, are
surely products of rationality. Frankenstein is the great anti-rational novel.
It’s such a marvelous novel. It’s very hard to write a novel as fine as that in
praise of rationality, but still I think one has to have a go.
And I still think that comes back to this notion—and there are so many
instances, that first generation of Romantics that I said I loved, they had a
deep distrust of science. Wordsworth said, memorably, that a scientist was
someone who would botanize on his mother’s grave - a wonderful insult. But
perhaps some very interesting flowers would grow on your mother’s grave.
Ramona Koval: You think the achievements of scientists and their intellectual gifts rank with the work of literary genius that we often talk about. Who are your favorite scientists?
Ian McEwan: Darwin is such an interesting man and Turing, the
mathematician and computer scientist from this century. But actually it’s not
necessarily the personality of the scientist that interests me, it’s just that
science itself seems to me a great tribute to human ingenuity. It’s a great
mistake to exclude ourselves who are not scientists from it.
And I think we’re all entitled to embrace science. It’s part of what we’ve
achieved. The closest I ever got to any real sense of the difficulty of science
was at A-level— all the arts students were encouraged to do one year’s
mathematics, even though we were no good at math. But the good teacher took us,
step by step, through the calculus, and I realized I was at the very roof of my
intellectual grasp of something. I’ve never, ever, before or since understood
something so difficult as something that Newton and Leidenitz
invented two hundred and fifty years ago. And the teacher was very good, he
said, ‘Is everyone with me so far?’, and half of us would say, ‘No.’ So we’d go
back, and finally you’d feel, if I sneeze, the whole thing’s going to go…
And I realized what a lucky life us liberal arts know-nothings have. We never
really had to understand anything very difficult. And it was at that point I
thought that someone had invented this. Differential equations—the mathematics
that would show you the way something changed—to examine something as it
changed, seemed to me like a sort of logarithmic quantum leap of the
imagination. And I think one has to take it on as part of a celebration of our
own ingenuity. I take a humanist view of science. Why the physical world is
describable by math is some delicious mystery to me.