And though I have become cut off from England I don’t feel cut off from my Englishness
Posted in General on 30. Jul, 2010
“And though I have become cut off from England, I don’t feel cut off from my Englishness. However long you’re away, your identity is so bound up with being English – your mind and culture, your understanding of things: you don’t lose these. When I ask him which novelists had particularly influenced him he comes up unexpectedly with Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, and then, more predictably, with Faulkner, Conrad and Golding.Does he feel his life of exile has cut him off from England, where his new book is largely set, and where his readers mainly reside? He considers carefully. He does not think of himself as an exile, so much as a perennial outsider.”I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through,” he says. Born in a Durham pit village, educated at Stockton-on-Tees grammar school and Manchester University, he is essentially of the generation of working- class Northern writers – Braine, Wain, Sillitoe, Barstow – which rose to prominence in the Fifties.Unsworth was a later starter He was 36 when his first novel was published. And he has followed his own trail, but one sees him nonetheless as a tough survivor of that generation. He attends a lecture of Creasby’s and asks him if Nelson ever “had a black woman” during his early years in the West Indies.There is something astringently and honorably old-fashioned about Unsworth – the shady quiet of the house, the disarrayed bookshelves, the longhand drafts, the talk of “moral concerns” and “human condition”, the emphatic way he describes the writing of Sacred Hunger as “toil, but happy toil”.
A bearded novelist who has written a book about the slave trade even makes a brief Hitchcockian appearance. The difficulty was to weave them all together.” He notes also a “bitterness” in it, different from earlier books.It has certainly an element of veiled autobiography – truly a book about book-writing. It’s a single rope – the rope has different cords, different colours. He became a bright angel on the 14th of February 1797 during the Battle of Cape St Vincent.
I became his dark twin on the 9th of September 1997, when I too broke the line.”It is a concentrated work, a kind of interior chamber-piece He says he hopes it has “a simplicity of achievement. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance. With great skill, Unsworth develops a vein of ironic comment on the dangerous obsessions and hidden psychological agendas of the biographer.The stylistic tone of the book is downbeat, almost Greene-ish, but as always there are passages of luminous Unsworthian prose, as in Cleasby’s strange meditation on heroes or “angels”:”Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. He is a kind of Nelson-nerd: a collector of curios and mementos of his hero; a stalwart of the Nelson Society; a re-enactor of battles using model ships on a converted billiard-table at home in Belsize Park.