Peter Carey

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The Unexamined Life

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SOURCE: Carey, Peter, and Ramona Koval. “The Unexamined Life.” Meanjin 56, nos. 3-4 (September-December 1997): 667-82.

[In the following interview, Carey discusses the works of Charles Dickens, his inspiration for writing Jack Maggs, and the impact writing has on his life.]

[Koval]: When I read Jack Maggs, I thought, of course he's our hero. Why did we ever think that anybody else in Great Expectations was the main person? Is that why you wrote that book?

[Carey]: Well, it's one reason. I was a bit slow in coming to Dickens for all sorts of reasons, but there's no doubt that what that book encourages you to do—what so many of the books we grew up reading encourage you to do—is to take the British point of view. And with that view, you love Pip, he's your person, and so suddenly Magwitch is this dark terrible Other. And then I read the book, you see, and I put it down at once recognizing that I'd read a truly great book—maybe a perfect book. But I was sort of mad with Dickens too. I mean why was Magwitch's money worse really than Miss Haversham's money? And so when I entered into re-imagining this book and putting a writer in the narrative, a writer who knew the truth but distorted it, I was angry with the writer figure, the Dickens figure, the character who finally became Tobias Oates. And it took me a long time to complicate that character and to stop being hard on him and to love him a little.

Why did it take you a long time to get to Dickens? Most of us had to do him at school.

I escaped that somehow. It was Nabokov who began to persuade me with those lectures that he gave at whatever east coast college he was lecturing at. He persuaded me about Bleak House and the weather at Bleak House and the mud in Bleak House. But as I got further into it I found this nauseatingly good little girl, a saccharine little creature, and I know a more adult person and a person really more interested in literature would have overcome that prejudice and found a great work of art. But I couldn't and so that really blocked me on Dickens. I was very fortunate you know in reading Great Expectations that there are no good little girls like that in it, and so, you know, I found Dickens. I didn't read all that broadly. I read The Pickwick Papers. I read David Copperfield and I read Our Mutual Friend, which was wonderful for me because there you recognize not only that you have a great writer at the height of his powers, but also a writer who is occasionally faking it, who has tremendous facility and finds his way through it into greatness. But it isn't always great and that's sort of comforting to me along the way too.

You said you may have found a perfect novel in Great Expectations. What is a perfect book?

Well, I don't know how to substantiate that at all except to say that it was a book that I wasn't arguing with and that I couldn't think of anything that was wrong with it.

Except its point of view …

Well, I don't have a problem with its point of view. I mean the point of view is a point of view of its time and its period, and I think it's perfectly fine that it should have that point of view. But I thought it would be interesting to take the other point of view, the point of view of Magwitch. And I've always been very interested in our convict history—the degree to which we deny it and the degree to which we suppress it. And I just thought it was interesting stuff to mess around with, but I could never think of a way in which I might begin to engage with it. I don't think I've finally done what I thought I might do, but it was a way in which I thought I might enter that arena. And it seems to me to be such an Aussie story. I'm sure Dickens wasn't thinking about this at all, but it is such an Aussie story that this person who has been brutalized by the British ruling class should then wish to have as his son an English gentleman, and that no matter what pains he has, what torture he has suffered, that would be what he would want. I think that that's a very Aussie thing. I hope it's like the Australia of the past, not the Australia of the future. Probably that's so, but still it is an Aussie thing of my life and it was really good to engage with that.

Jack Maggs is full of love, actually. He is a brutalized man and a tough man and a man who takes risks, but he's got this burning love for this image of this young boy who helped him. It is heart-breaking to know that the boy doesn't feel the same way about him.

Well, why would he? I mean the boy's life experience has been in no way like Jack Maggs'. I don't spend a lot of time imagining what that life might be, but you can imagine that that boy has had a very tough life and has got a whole lot of other decisions that he's had to make. He's not a fine person, he's not an altruistic person, but he's a person like all the characters in the book, who have got to worry about survival and about money in this very harsh early nineteenth-century capitalistic society, which, like modern America, in a way even like modern Australia, doesn't necessarily make people very nice. You know, one could easily imagine another whole set of circumstances in which Henry Phipps would have been a finer person, but this is a kid, five years old, about to go to an orphanage, and suddenly a benefactor arrives, money out of the blue. It encourages, I think, a certain fraudulence in his response, or an opportunism.

All through the book you are having fun with language and with Australian vernacular, set in that London environment. But the language of the book is very nineteenth-century, I think. How do we know?

Well, we don't, do we? Somebody said to me the other day, ‘I really liked your short stories but now I've read this, it's very different. You know, it's all set in the past and your stories were often set in the future in these weird places.’ And I said ‘Well, to me there's no difference.’ I mean, this is really like a science fiction of the past in a way. None of us has been there. We have a whole lot of received opinion and it's intimidating to write because there are all these experts, but we don't really know. It is terrible to admit this, because you would want to have some more substantial authority than a dictionary, but I just spent a lot of time browsing through these dictionaries of cant, criminal slang, wonderful, wonderful books, scary in a way. I don't know whether you have ever looked at Eric Partridge's Historical Slang, you know, all the sexual stuff in there, the hatred of women is really amazing, so vivid but so strong. There was also a book I found in a bookshop at Yale, which was a dictionary of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century slang and it was really great. So I just read it all the time and when I found the opportunity to use something I'd use it.

And Dickens himself?

Well, Dickens. I stopped reading the novels because it was no longer helpful. I would not imagine my writing is in any way like Dickens' prose. But Dickens' life was interesting to me and there were all sorts of things that any writer reading about another writer could find to identify with.

Like what?

Oh, he had a lot of energy. He worried about money. He was always wanting to be loved, and I don't think this is my major psychosis or anything like that, but you can see that to greater and lesser extents writers' relationships with their audiences are often … you know. If you are a writer you can feel that thing of all these people loving you, and then you go out on a cold night and no-one even knows who you are. Dickens at the end of his life went on this huge reading tour with this special reading stand that he had built with these lights at the top and a special lectern that he used to assemble at every place, and he killed himself doing this but what he got from that tour were these huge crowds and all these people loving him and, given his feelings of neglect and abandonment as a child, I always found that very interesting.

So, Dickens. As I said, I went through this thing of being a bit mad with him because I thought there was a real Magwitch. This is not the real Magwitch. He's lied about my ancestor and so I was a little mad with him. But I began to read about him and I discovered he had been a passionate mesmerist and had treated a woman called Madame de la Roux for a condition she had called tic douloureux, which I later gave to Jack Maggs, an acute horrible pain in the face. In Dickens' notebooks there are notes of their mesmeric sessions and some very odd stuff is going on there. Different to my odd stuff, but the notion of the writer raiding, burgling the soul of his subject was really interesting to me, and especially when I realized I had this sort of oppositional force, you know, where the writer was a thief and the thief would be a writer because Jack Maggs also tells the story himself. And I like that idea—not because I ever write in that way because I never write close to life—but because I wanted the idea that there was a true story and that the writer would finally not tell the true story. And I wanted him to know exactly what the character's life had been, to steal the story.

Mesmerism was pre-, I suppose, psychoanalysis.

Yes, it was absolutely. And I was occasionally quite nervous, you know, the degree to which I was being anachronistic in the sort of insights that Tobias Oates the writer has. Tobias recognizes finally—he is not looking for this—but he realizes this thing like the pathogenic secret, the event that has caused the pain, and he has this insight well before Freud did. But it's also true of course that there is a direct like through mesmerism to Freud, and before traditional Freudian analysis was begun hypnotism was the way into the unconscious. So I guess I've been a little bit out of time in a way, but I thought it was OK.

Talking of time, I remember your saying you would never write something in the nineteenth century again after Oscar and Lucinda because it was all too difficult to research and all of that. What did you think when you found yourself drawn to the nineteenth century again?

Well, I only ever have one idea at a time for a new book and there was my idea and it was to do with Magwitch, so I had no choice. I think this time I was less apprehensive because I knew it was possible. When I began Oscar and Lucinda I really felt I had no right to possess the English past, that it was not my past but their past. Of course, it is as much our past as it is that of anyone alive in the United Kingdom today. But it still remains a little bit weird for me to have English readers. The early responses have been very enthusiastic, but I always feel a little fraudulent. I was talking to a friend of mine, an English film director, and he said ‘I read your book and I was in the Seven Dials just two nights ago and I was thinking this is what he means. This is it! That's the door!’ And I suddenly realized that he was carrying in his head a huge London that he could apply to my book, and my London was a much smaller London, little corners here and there, but it could connect with his bigger London. And his London, the London that he reads, is a much bigger, richer world than anything I can imagine, but together through that wonderful thing that happens in reading, he got this big world. I didn't make it. He just thinks I made it.

Tell me where you stand on the debate about whether a writer can write about anything or only about what he knows.

Well, firstly, I would always say to people that it is a writer's responsibility to imagine what it is to be others. It's an act of empathy, and it's not only what we do, it's a socially useful act to imagine oneself to be other than one is. So I think a man can write as a woman and a woman can write as a man and a straight can write as a gay and whatever. But, at the same time, I do remember coming to Sydney and not having lived there very long and writing Illywhacker and feeling anxious about it because it was not my town. I can't write about Sydney: what do I know about Sydney? And then I realized that you could research things and you could find things out. But writing about England or Britain is more complicated, and I think some colonial issues do come up that have to do with possession of territory in the sense that (and this is for me, I'm not going to speak for everybody) I would allow them to possess us, but it wasn't right that I could possess them. In the process of writing Oscar and Lucinda I found indeed that I could possess them just as much as they could imaginatively possess me.

Lots of literary critics, especially overseas ones, call you a postcolonial writer. Is that important to you, that kind of classification? Do you think that means something?

I suppose I feel like those people in those old war movies, you know, just spell the name right. We are a postcolonial culture, there's no doubt about that. I mean, we are a barely postcolonial culture and I think it's a very interesting state to be in and so, to that degree, I am. What that means to them and what that means to me are probably two quite different things. I don't spend an awful lot of time reading criticism and, you know, some of that's to do with the fact that criticism has moved into areas of language beyond what I understand, frankly. It's become like a very specialized form of poetry that I can't have access to. Maybe I could, but I don't feel one thing or the other about that. I mean, I know these people are having discourses and I just don't feel part of that conversation.

It must be strange to have people building careers on what you've written?

Hell, I don't know. I'm not at all hostile to the notion. I'm not even perhaps as uninterested as I seem to be pretending to be. The world is full of readers and academic readers are a sort of reader and everybody brings their life to bear on the text and whether your life is, you know, life as an insurance salesman or whatever it is, you bring your baggage and different ways of illuminating the text. Academic readers have particular ways of illuminating the text. I don't think that they are in any way worthless or anything like that. That isn't how I think. I guess I've been lazy, that's all.

Have you ever read anything that made you think: Is that what I'm doing? Oh, I see it now.

Occasionally, I've read things that illuminated patterns in my work—of abandonment, orphans—and made me recognize that where this pattern came in from my life was probably the trauma of going to boarding school, which I had never thought was a trauma. I mean, I was the happy camper: a lot of energy and enthusiasm and getting on with it. The homesick kid was that kid over there weeping in the corner; it was never me. And so, finally, reading somebody else writing about my work, I recognized what the psychological roots of some of my invention were, that I continued to have orphans and I continued to have abandoned children and so on. Having seen that, I really don't think it helps me. In fact, I felt a little less strong and less powerful for knowing it; self-consciousness was not helping me there. So, I like to say to my friends in New York, who are all totally committed to their therapists, I like to say to them that the unexamined life is the only one worth living, and I get a cheap laugh out of it, I suppose.

Since we're talking about you, the unconscious, and whether one ignores it or what one does with it, I was wondering, given the magical surreal writing that you have gone in for and done so well, whether you have vivid dreams. I wonder if someone who has your sort of imagination dreams at all or if you just pour all of your unconscious life into your books.

I think it's the latter. I mostly no longer remember my dreams. All my life, in a weird way, I've been very good at denial. I've been very good at not looking at what's going on and so, no, I hardly ever remember my dreams. There's a woman in the United States, a literary escort, you know, those people that pick you up on tours to take you from one gig to the next interview, and she was like many of these people that do that work, very interesting and well-educated and just good to be with. Anyway, she wrote a book. She used her time to interview authors about their dreams and she got all these famous American writers talking about their dreams and it was quite interesting. And I would have loved to have been in her book but I didn't have a single dream to tell her. I mean it's embarrassing, I would like to have some dreams that I can remember.

Over ten years ago you told Candida Baker that your father never read your books and that your mother said she never liked any of your books and that that didn't bother you, and I read that and I wondered whether it really didn't bother you.

Well, this is really like the dream question. It's the same sort of thing. I really don't know whether it bothers me or not. I think in the case of my father, it's pretty clear to me that it doesn't. I mean this was a wonderful, wonderful man who was kind and funny with a lot of courage and humour and who was very poorly educated and never read any books, and I didn't take it amiss. I know, in my heart, that I didn't take it amiss that he never read anything. The things we used to read together were Biggles books on holidays, and he'd always go to the end just to see that it all ended OK and then we'd sit back and we'd read them. I was probably about ten and he was probably about fifty and we both read Biggles books on holidays.

What was he checking for?

He just needed to know that it ended happily or that everyone was OK, and then his anxiety being reduced he could enter into the beginning of the narrative. So I don't feel mad at all with him. And also I think that my mother probably read the books and found them upsetting, you know, that she read The Fat Man in History and found all this weird stuff there that she would really not think her son was thinking. And I think, given who she is and where she is coming from, that that's perfectly fine. So, they were, in their different ways, proud of me and I really don't feel hurt. It's hard for me to think of it as in any sense a hostile act, I think it's just fine.

I believe your next book is about the Ned Kelly story. What do you think needs to be retold about Ned Kelly? Because, as far as I understand, even though Ned Kelly was supposed to be a criminal, everyone in Australia admires him.

Well, I think it's still very split actually. And even if they did all admire or all hate him, then even that would not be the point. We all think we know it so well, but when you start to read about it, it's like a white map with these little dots and some clusters around the dots. Some contemporary writers have written good books about the subject: Rob Drewe, Jean Bedford. I still can't get Douglas Stewart's play out of my head. For me, it's the Jerilderie letter, which is the letter that Kelly wrote or dictated to defend his actions that was meant to have been printed and distributed and never was, that has this amazing voice. It's finding a bit of DNA which you can somehow make the creature from. And the wonderful thing about it is that there are all these big gaps to get from, say, point A on the map to point B, there is all this white territory. So I like that. I saw Nolan's paintings in New York and I was quite anxious going there, saying, I like these paintings but they're probably not going to look any good here. I'm going to see them and I'm not going to like them. And I went there and the opposite happened. They seemed more powerful there and real and had this great grace and awkwardness and then I started. I went there a few times. And I'm telling my American friends the story and it gets stranger and stranger as you tell it.

What do they find strange?

Oh, well, where to start? They try to understand quickly as you tell the story and they say, oh well, it's like us and Jesse James. I say, no, it's more like you and George Washington. By which I mean the size the story occupies. I mean, we don't have a George Washington story. Is there a story in the big culture about a political figure? Billy Hughes? I don't think so. Parkes? I mean, who's going to occupy that space? Ned Kelly comes close to occupying that sort of space in a national story.

A kind of revolutionary without a revolution.

Well, I'm inclined to believe that. Well, I don't know. No, enough, enough, because I don't want to start talking out my book.

You must live in your head a lot to live in a place like New York and be writing about the nineteenth century in other places in other countries—London, New York, Australia.

Writers always live in their heads. I think one of the things that I really know is the degree to which young writers really don't see the world. It's not just that they don't see the weather, they don't see what people look like, they don't see how they move. Writers are very good at knowing how they feel, and some of us then get sort of moved beyond that. It's very rare to find a writer who is actually really naturally good at seeing the world. So, I think writers as a caste mostly do live inside their heads, and then we get given credit for being able to see into other people's souls and knowing what other people feel, when really we are very inward-looking and self-obsessed.

I've just come back from America, where everyone's got a Master's from somewhere. Now you're a man who left university after one year and started to write. And you wrote and you wrote and you wrote lots of things that didn't go anywhere or that you weren't happy with and you did it until you did it right. Now that you have been teaching writing …

Well, obviously, no teacher can give anybody talent, and if they haven't stuff to write about you're not going to give it to them. If they can't work and if they haven't got any discipline you're not going to be able to make them do that. But I think you can save them some time. And you can certainly see them get better, which is sort of a relief if you are teaching the course. And a small proportion of them will go on to be writers, but a lot of others will do other things and they will have an understanding of writing and of literature and probably a lot of them will never give up writing either because, as one student said to me ‘If I was a painter and I came out every Sunday and painted because I loved to paint no-one would ever think that it was weird that I kept on doing it because I had never had an exhibition.’ And he said ‘I really hope that I'm going to be successful and publish but if I'm not published then I can't really imagine that I'm going to stop because I like to do it.’ That was such a wonderful answer, I mean it had such dignity and integrity, it was very nice. But others will become agents; some will become critics. I think it's OK. First I thought it really was some sort of a scam and I suppose there is a certain degree of self-deception that everybody engages in, you know, they're applying different standards to what they would apply out in the world. And the students support each other and go to each other's readings and call each other writers and play at that life and, in the end, life will catch up one way or the other, and some of them will be writers and some of them will be critics and …

Do you wish you had that kind of mentoring when you were younger?

I did. I had Barry Oakley. They say to me ‘Did you ever go to a creative writing thing?’ And for a long time I'd say ‘No, not me. I never did that.’ And then I started to realize that that was in fact what Barry had provided me with, as a friend, an older friend and a better educated friend—books, criticism, encouragement. And I think anybody at Columbia or NYU would probably rather have that—one person who would pay some attention to them and give them some help—although they do recognize that one of the things they get in their course, apart from a $60,000 debt that will take half their life to pay off, is a network of friends whom they expect to go on to positions of influence.

I was just thinking then about the kinds of writing you've done and I remembered that you had written a children's book called The Big Bazoohley. What made you try children's literature?

I've got two kids and The Big Bazoohley is a story about a kid who sleepwalks out of a hotel room and has adventures and my oldest son, Sam, who is now ten, did such a thing at the Harbour Castle in Toronto on a literary tour. In the middle of the night he went to the bathroom and opened the wrong door. The door shut behind him and he was out in the passageway and the air-conditioning was loud in the room and the doors were thick and his only way out of it was to walk down the hallway knocking on doors. Anyway, we got him back. The security rang us, but the thought of your kid walking down the hallway in a foreign city, knocking on doors and being dependent on what sort of person answers the door is pretty scary. So I guess I wrote it for a number of reasons, but I think it was just a sort of reinvention of history for both him and me. He wouldn't read it until it was in proof because then it was a real book, and then he read it and I hovered around like the most anxious, needy writer you can possibly imagine. He put it down and then I came to the door and I said ‘What did you think?’ And he said ‘Not bad.’

Oh—horrible children!

Oh, no. He was being honest. He wasn't being at all mean to me. He said ‘Not great but not bad either.’ He meant it wasn't as good as R. L. Stine or something like that. And so I said OK. I thought it was a pretty good answer and I said ‘Well what did you like best?’ And he said he wasn't scared. So that to me was a really good answer for the book. So that's why I did it. But I did think it would be a lot easier, to tell you the truth. I would always be very impatient with someone who wanted to patronize children's writing and say it was easy. I would have always said ‘Oh, rubbish!’ But in fact, in my secret heart, I thought I would do it in a couple of drafts and it would be done. But it was as hard to write as anything I have ever done. And as it got harder to do, I first got very irritated that it should be so hard and, of course, in the end got a lot more satisfaction and pleasure from the fact that it had been hard.

But you said before that you don't write from life.

The beginning is from life, I mean the notion of the kid. Then I started to do all this stuff with it, like I made the father a gambler. So then the kid's choices as he goes down the hallway are a lot to do with the culture of gambling—which door he will select—and the notion of chance and risk became thematically part of what it was about. I suppose I entered into that situation and it was a ‘what if’ thing. My short stories were all ‘what if stories’, what if this happened and that happened? And this was a ‘what if’ story too.

What is this gambling business with you?

I really don't know. I've never really gambled. I don't know too much about it. Although the one thing I did think, when I made this father a gambler and the mother an artist, was that they are the occupations not unlike writing for a living. It always seems to me like a very risky business that here you have these two children in this household and what are you doing? You're making up all this stuff and hoping you can sell it and so it feels a gambling sort of a business. The father in The Big Bazoohley seems to me to contribute to the family very well. They both do. But I was a little shocked to find people disapproving of the father. It had not been my intention to say that he was a gambler and was therefore irresponsible. I think there is no evidence in the book at all that he was irresponsible, but I guess there is a lot of prejudice against gambling.

I can't believe that you still feel that what you are doing is a gamble. I mean after all your success, and you had a successful advertising agency as well, and you talked always about the fact that you could chuck away a book if it wasn't working out.

Well then I could. Now I can't. Looking back on it, I was often very, very angry working in advertising but the one thing that it did give me was the time and the freedom to not worry about whether a book sold or didn't sell. Now, I live for my writing, so it's a whole different ball game. But what can you do about it? So the paradox is that you have this anxious person writing for a living, only being able to find any sort of safety in doing something that terrifies him. I would be very bored doing something that I thought I knew how to do. I've got to do this thing that is risky, so I go and do it with a lot of bravado, but then I spend a lot of time doubting myself and that's how it all goes. I have this brief period, like now, and I come out and smile about it and sort of act like, Oh, isn't that funny, he's so anxious, and I feel momentarily successful and then I go back to that other state.

When you said that things about advertising made you angry, is that why you decided to trade the freedom that it bought you for whatever it was?

Almost from the very beginning when I met Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie, all of these people who were writers and who were writing, I decided I was going to be a writer. So all the time I was in advertising in my head there was only one thing that I was and that was a writer of literature and I only did this other stuff because I had to do it and the minute that I would be able to just write all the time that was what I was going to do. I'm stubborn and that was my idea and that's what I ended up doing. So that wasn't the sort of anger that I felt. The things that made me angry in advertising were not necessarily anything to do with morality or politics or issues of consumerism or anything like that, but just with control. There were people stopping me from doing what I wanted to do. And that made me mad.

I saw Morris Lurie yesterday. He was running around the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne when I was driving into work about quarter to eight in the morning. I read that Morris had actually told you not to be a writer.

Oh, yes. But mind you, he would have told Sidney Nolan not to be a painter. I was so impressed with Morris. He was twenty-four years old. I think I had seen about three art exhibitions in my life and the Kelly paintings were the second and I went with Barry Oakley to Georges Gallery. Georges the store had an art gallery at that stage in Collins Street, and I was in there with Barry looking at paintings and Morris walked in, walked briskly around the paintings, occasionally pausing to give a full frontal sort of assault on a particular painting, looked around the room and said ‘Sorry, Mr Nolan, 'fraid not,’ and walked out. I was shattered because I had been very impressed with the paintings, but I was really impressed with his confidence in making this assessment and walking out like that. During the period that I knew him he wrote some amazingly good short stories and, yes, I think he told me not to write anymore. He certainly told me not to write advertising any more and not for moral reasons but because I was no good at it. And then later, when the The Fat Man in History was reviewed in, I think it was Nation Review, Morris took it upon himself to review the book badly.

Have you spoken to him since then?

Absolutely, yes. I feel … well, you can see, I'm smiling all the time I'm talking about him. I don't feel hostile to Morris.

But it must have been something to get over, someone telling you not to write.

I'm not even sure that's totally true. I suppose if I've said it before it must be true but the thing I remember is the review and it did take me a little while to get over that. Because when I first knew Morris I had just crashed an MG and I had a broken tooth at the front before there had been time to put the cap on it. And Morris, years later, like ten years later, reviewing my first book, wrote about ‘broken-toothed, rhythmless prose’. So I did understand that he was carrying a lot of personal baggage about me that I had not been aware of.

Things must have changed now when you are so successful.

Oh, I doubt it! He can see through my caps!

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