Conversations with Graham Swift

Donald P. Kaczvinsky

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496828477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Conversations with Graham Swift is the first collection of interviews conducted with the author of the Booker Prize–winning novel Last Orders. Beginning in 1985 with Swift's arrival in New York to promote Waterland and concluding with an interview from 2016 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the collection spans Swift's more than thirty-five-year career as a writer. The volume also includes interviews first printed in English as well as translated from the French or Spanish and covers a wide range of formats, from lengthier interviews published in standard academic journals, to those for radio, newspapers, and, more recently, podcasts. In these interviews, Graham Swift (b. 1949) offers insights into his life and career, including his friendships with other contemporary writers like Ted Hughes and the group of celebrated novelists who emerged in Britain during the eighties. With remarkable clarity, Swift discusses the themes of his novels and short stories: death, love, history, parent-child relationships, the power of the imagination, the role of storytelling, and the consequences of knowing. He also notes the influences, literary and personal, that have helped shape his writing career. While quite ordinary in his life and daily habits, Swift reveals his penetrating intellect and rich imagination—an imagination that can craft some of the most engaging and formally complex stories in the language.

An Interview with Graham Swift

Stef Craps / 2008

Originally published in Contemporary Literature (2009) 50.4: 637–61. © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

Graham Swift is one of the most successful and respected novelists writing in contemporary Britain. Since 1980 he has published eight novels, a collection of short stories, and a nonfiction book. His work has garnered critical acclaim and literary prizes, and it has won a large and appreciative audience throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. His most celebrated books are Waterland, from 1983, which is widely considered a modern classic, and Last Orders, which was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 1996. Both novels have also been made into films. His latest novel, Tomorrow, came out in 2007.

Swift belongs to a generation of talented novelists born around the middle of the twentieth century—including Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie—who, as they came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were seen to represent a new wave in British fiction. However, Swift has never allied himself with any literary school or movement, and his work defies easy categorization. For example, it seems too invested in the traditional concerns of the English novel (like exploration of character and storytelling) to warrant the label “postmodern,” which can be more readily applied to many of his peers, yet too self-conscious and formally sophisticated to fit comfortably under the rubric of realism.

With fellow novelists Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Caryl Phillips, though, Swift shares an evident and abiding preoccupation with issues of trauma, memory, and recovery. His protagonists—mostly first-person narrators—tend to be humble, unheroic, vulnerable elderly men who are forced by a crisis situation in their personal lives to face up to an often traumatic individual and collective past. They feel the slipping away of the foundations upon which they, and the society to which they belong, have built their existence, and by means of which they have sought to keep the trauma at bay. The question that they now face is how to respond to this situation of unsettlement and perplexity—whether to hide or flee from it or to try and engage with it in a meaningful way. While denial is shown to have catastrophic consequences, Swift’s work also raises the possibility that the process of working through trauma might create the conditions for a viable alternative modus vivendi based on openness to and respect for otherness.

This interview was conducted in the dining room of a beautiful and delicately restored Victorian pub in the South London suburb of Wandsworth, near where the author lives, on 31 January 2008. I had first met Swift some two months earlier at a conference in Liège, Belgium, where he gave a keynote address that I had been asked to introduce. The text of this lecture, titled “I Do Like to Be beside the Seaside: The Place of Place in Fiction,” was to find its way into Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, the nonfiction book published in 2009 which he was then working on. The writing of this new book, which involved revisiting and reworking several older pieces, put him in a retrospective mood, as did the introduction for a special anniversary edition of Waterland on which he was then about to start and which he had completed by the time we met again on the other side of the English Channel. The moment seemed right, therefore, for an interview that would focus not only on his most recent novel but also on recurrent concerns and evolutions across his work—an interview, in other words, that would take stock of where Swift stands as a writer twenty-five years on from Waterland.

Q: At your publisher’s request, you have written an introduction for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Waterland that will be coming out later this year. Am I right to assume that you have mixed feelings about this project? After all, Waterland is a book that has obviously brought you fame and, I hope, fortune, but whose huge reputation has also, to some extent, come to overshadow all your later work, with the possible exception of Last Orders; and now with this new edition coming out, it will be getting even more attention than it already did. Would it be fair to say that you have a love/hate relationship with this novel?

A: I think that’s a little extreme. I do have a mixture of feelings, as you put it. But even that phrasing suggests I might be more uncomfortable than I am. I’m actually perfectly happy to be going back to that book now. It’s nice that my publishers want to make a thing about its twenty-fifth anniversary. But there was a sort of middle period when that novel did dominate people’s impression of me. On the one hand, I was happy, like any author should be happy, that my name could be linked with at least one of my books. After all, there are many authors for whom that doesn’t happen. So I had become “the author of Waterland,” and in one sense that label was not a bad thing, but it started to hang around my neck a little. The more I produced after Waterland, the more I felt this to be the case. Until, I would say, Last Orders, which had a comparable success, in some ways a greater success, winning the Booker Prize and so on. For me, that virtually solved the difficulty. So now, with two novels after Last Orders, I feel I can quite comfortably go back to Waterland in this way and see what I feel about it.

Q: Would you say that Waterland is as relevant to the world today as it was to the world twenty-five years ago? Does it still speak to contemporary concerns?

A: Yes, it does. In fact, this is one of those things that, coming back to it now and writing an introduction for it, I actually address. What I’ve found is that it feels as relevant now as then. Not just because it deals, I hope, with some timeless things that are always relevant, but because even some things that seem to date the novel have their equivalents now. It was published in 1983, but it looks back to the late 1970s. It looks back to that time very much still within the cold war, and to the prevailing fear—I have a direct memory of it—of some nuclear Armageddon. Everyone felt it, but certainly young people of school age. Their futures were shadowed by this very real possibility. That fear is very much part of the book, and you could say that it’s all gone now, it went with the end of the cold war. But there are clearly other very apocalyptic notions around, which have taken the place, as it were, of that fear.

Q: I assume you’re thinking of terrorism, global warming, and so on?

A: Terrorism, climate change, global warming: all those obvious things, which, I would say, exercise the minds of young people, students, just as much as the nuclear thing would have troubled students back then. So on the one hand, I can see how the novel dates, like any novel dates. It belongs to the period of its writing, the period it refers to. But in another sense, I was struck by how it relates to the present day. Then again, you could take some of its central metaphors, the whole metaphor of the Fens—not that the Fens are just a metaphor—as embodying a process of history, human endeavor, an elemental struggle, preserving the land against water and flooding: all that seems to me to work just as well now and even to have certain applications, implications, that it might not have had then.

Q: Such as?

A: Well, I think you could say that the geographical quality of that metaphor is even more pertinent now, because, for one thing, we’re getting more floods. This country, many countries are getting more floods. The land that we live on is more physically under threat now in most parts of the world. So a landscape that embodies that constant threat and that constant need for preservation has all the more resonance now.

Q: Right, definitely. But that’s on the literal level still: what about the metaphorical level?

A: But I think the literal and the metaphorical really merge with each other. The physical process of preserving territory blends with the historical process of how we progress or not, how we survive, how we hold on, not just to physical and geographical things, but to civilization itself, how we face the future, how we acknowledge the past, how we use the past to face the future. All those things are implicit in the business of land reclamation. One thing that struck me, going back to the book, was how wonderful it was that at some point in the evolution of the novel I hit upon the Fens as my setting, this region that can look so flat and empty, yet which proved so rich in significance. It was a key moment in the genesis of the novel. It seems to me now that the metaphorical dimension is virtually limitless. You can make it work in all kinds of human dilemmas, in all kinds of historical situations, including those the world is in right now.

Q: I agree. It seems to me that Waterland offers a critique of ideological mystification. A central point that it makes is that redemptive ideologies more often lead to catastrophe than to salvation. As a kind of antidote, Tom Crick, the narrator of the novel, promotes the cultivation of curiosity. He champions a model of progress—progress as land reclamation—that requires a sustained commitment to the questioning of grand narratives which distort a complex reality.

A: Yes. Something very prosaic and, to use a word that the novel uses and dwells on, phlegmatic. Something undramatic, unsensational, very much not to do with moments that are going to change things overnight—revolutionary moments. It’s very skeptical.

Q: Exactly. These concerns were obviously very relevant in the early 1980s, when the Cold War—which was basically about two opposing redemptive ideologies coming into conflict—was still in full swing and the Falklands War, Britain’s then latest imperial venture, was still fresh in people’s memories. But they are also relevant, it seems to me, to our own era, in which we are still reeling from two disastrous wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were partly justified on the grounds of spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world—another ideological fantasy, perhaps, in need of debunking.

A: Well, one might have to be a little bit careful here with exact chronology. Waterland was published in 1983, after the Falklands, but it was being written before that. The writing of it really didn’t, in any effective way, register that event, though it was referred to in my next book, Out of This World. It would be a mistake, because Waterland was published in 1983, to see it as immediately incorporating things that occurred in 1982, 1983. As I say, it looks back to the 1970s. But more broadly, what you suggest is true. I wrote Waterland, which, among other things, deals with nostalgic, grandiose notions about British power, empire, influence in the world, and then, lo and behold, there was this event which made a huge appeal to that kind of emotion. Looking back now, I think there was a curious innocence to the Falklands episode, grotesque though it was. It was possible to say that there was a justification for it. That’s to say, there were those British citizens, living in those islands far away on the other side of the world, and they were about to be kicked out by a foreign power. Absurd though it was, you could argue that the British government had no choice but to do what it did, assuming it couldn’t solve the problem diplomatically. That little, questionable war had a kind of genuineness to it. The wars that we’re talking about now are not like that. They have no innocence—innocence is not the right word anyway, in connection with war, but they absolutely don’t. While I remember feeling skeptical and uncomfortable about the Falklands, I don’t think I ever felt about it the real sense of shame that I feel now about how my country is involved in Iraq. It’s shameful. My nation is besmirched by it in a way that I don’t think was the case with the Falklands. So we’ve moved on, or rather moved back, in a pretty appalling way. I guess that’s a real difference about the climate now—let’s forget the climate in the literal sense. The moral climate in this country now involves a feeling of shame. What is there to be proud about? I don’t think that was true in the 1970s or 1980s, for all the troubles that we had then, even including Northern Ireland. Even Northern Ireland didn’t produce the underlying sense of shame that exists now.

Q: It’s interesting to hear you talk about politics …

A: I seem to be doing so, yes. I don’t very often do that.

Q: Indeed. Which brings me to my next question. Do you think that writers have a political responsibility? I’m asking this because many other British writers, especially since 9/11, seem to believe this to be the case: Martin Amis, David Hare, Ian McEwan, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, and so on. However, in marked contrast to these writers, you have so far refrained from making public pronouncements on burning political issues such as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism or the war in Iraq.

A: Which I wouldn’t want to do. I would say that it’s not me. I’d be extremely hesitant, at least, about doing that. And insofar as I have been asked and invited to do that, I have always basically said no. I don’t think that’s the role of a writer, in fact. There’s a great tendency to think that if a person has some sort of expertise or mark in one field, they’re therefore good at everything else. So a writer with a reputation should therefore be able to act as a kind of leader of opinion on any number of subjects. I think that’s a very false assumption. I find it actually often rather embarrassing when writers, as it were, sound off in the press and media about this or that subject, which is not their real purpose.

Q: I’m reminded of your essay “Looking for Jiří Wolf,” published in Granta in 1990, in which you reflect on the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and politics. You describe your encounters with a number of dissident writers from the former Czechoslovakia who lived and worked under communism. From reading this piece, I got the impression that you shared the “secret wish” expressed by one of them not to be involved in politics, but that you also appreciated how under certain circumstances it becomes imperative for a writer to speak out and take a stand. Have you ever felt that need yourself?

A: No. I can conceive of finding myself in a situation which, as it were, demanded that I should speak out, but I don’t think such a situation has actually occurred in this country.

Q: So what would it take for you to feel the need to speak out?

A: I think I’m talking about radical and extreme political changes which would seriously affect freedom. I’m talking about the kind of thing, in other words, that would have pertained in Czechoslovakia and many other countries at the time I wrote that piece.

Q: Also in contrast to quite a few other writers, you don’t deal with the great dramatic events of the early twenty-first century in your recent fictional work. In fact, both Tomorrow and The Light of Day are set in the 1990s—that is, in the pre-9/11 era.

A: I’ve often said, a little teasingly, that I don’t believe in contemporary fiction. I don’t think there is such a thing as contemporary fiction. The great strength of fiction is that it isn’t and cannot be contemporary, because of the time it takes to write. If I was going to write a contemporary novel about now, today, late January 2008, that novel would take me—being me—at least a couple of years, by which time it would, in that sense, be out of date. Fiction has to handle time and change in a longer way. I think the contemporary area belongs to journalism. It’s the task of journalists to write about now, today: that’s what “journal” means. Novelists do something else. I think the notion a lot of novelists have—maybe young novelists more than older novelists—that they’ve got to be contemporary all the time, have got to put in contemporary references, have got to demonstrate that they are responding to the world now can be misguided. What the novel can do is to put a period, a long period of time, in perspective, so that the great novel—if there’s going to be one—about the war in Iraq, about my country in the beginning of the twenty-first century, may well not happen for another ten, fifteen years. It will take that process of historical ingestion, and anyway it will take the long process that it takes to write a novel. You can’t do it just like that. September 11 particularly has made some writers feel, “God, this is such an inescapable, such a huge traumatic event, with the world’s eyes upon it, that I must write about it, I must produce my 9/11 response in some form.” Doing that, with conscious effort and will, has landed some writers in trouble. I don’t think it works like that. Again, it’s journalists who do that work. One big change that has occurred in my lifetime in the world of writing is an ever-increasing confusion of the roles of the journalist and of the fiction writer—sometimes quite literally, because there are many fiction writers who, I think, would like to be journalists, or indeed who were once journalists, and vice versa. There’s been a growing lack of distinction between the two activities, but I think there’s a fundamental distinction, an important distinction.

Q: You are currently working on your first-ever nonfiction book. Who or what gave you the idea for it? I’m intrigued, because in the past you have only very rarely written nonfictional prose; in fact, you’ve been remarkably single-minded in your dedication to the art of the novel.

A: This book, which is probably going to be published next year, sprang up partly just as a matter of opportunity. I had finished Tomorrow, although I was still seeing that book through to publication. I was in the mood a writer can be in after...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Interview with Graham Swift
• Don Swaim Interviews Graham Swift
• Graham Swift
• Interview with Graham Swift
• An Interview with Graham Swift
• Graham Swift In Interview On Last Orders
• A Conversation with Graham Swift
• Interview with Graham Swift
• Graham Swift
• Graham Swift and the Sense of History: An Interview
• The Critic Faces the Unhappy Author
• An Interview with Graham Swift
• Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant
• Graham Swift Unpacks His Archive
• Kirkus Q & A with Graham Swift
• “When You’re Reading a Book, You’re On a Little Island”
• Graham Swift’s New Novel Shows Exactly How One Event Can Shape a Whole Life
• Graham Swift and the Power of the Imagination
• About the Editor