A bit obsessed with explaining stuff: an interview about cultural journalism
Trading ideas with the Norwegian writer Simen Gonsholt
My novel The Boys is coming out next Thursday so what better time than to reassert my credentials as an arts writer or cultural journalist?
There have been a couple of reviews of the book this week: Saga magazine, giving it book of the month, called it ‘a cracking debut’ with ‘brilliantly drawn characters’ and ‘sparkling repartee’ and the Daily Mail called it ‘emotionally intelligent. . . Funny and wise.’
It’s available to buy here:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-boys/leo-robson/9781529428186
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boys-fresh-original-family-friendship/dp/1529428181
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-boys-a-fresh-and-original-debut-about-family-friendship-and-love-leo-robson/7810936?ean=9781529428186&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20920067905&gbraid=0AAAAABjGUH1eubIe-2o2ctCtAhGtFbRc2&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2tHABhCiARIsANZzDWq-5EkPDAlZId5AkYb5PLT4BdbyMvm4azCix5Fz1dW2FsDdrvkc4L8aAma8EALw_wcB
Below is a condensed and fiddled-with transcript of a few interviews I have done with the leading Norwegian critic, editor, and football writer Simen Gonsholt. He asked in particular about research-heavy articles I wrote about the revival of John Williams’s novel Stoner and also why it ‘failed’ in the first place (in the New Yorker) and emergence of the football book as a recognisable literary and commercial genre, and football as a middle-class interest and pastime, in the early-to-mid 1990s (in Bookforum).
In an article in the literary magazine Vinduet (The Window), Gonsholt once noted that I exhibited a habit, which belies my advancing age, of sporting an earring and quoting at length from canonical literature and French movies. But I forgave him.
SG: I feel like there’s a fairly specific thing you do – in that you connect the books you write about to the year they were out, and other books that came out at the same time, or same period, and argue that it’s all connected, one book invariably leads to the next – or in the case of John Williams's Stoner, doesn’t lead anywhere, but could have.
The Stoner example is a bit of an exception. It is quite rare that one can a find a phenomenon that is worth looking at yet didn’t have any decisive impact or imprint. The freak revival of that book meant that you could go back and say that that was a year when either there was a path not taken, or that book was on a path people didn’t care about at that point. If what one tries to do is cultural history that contains elements of reviewing or aesthetic response, you’re generally talking about things that did come off, cultural highlights and touchstones, for example Pete Davies’s book about the 1990 World Cup All Played Out. In a sense it didn’t lead to any other classic brilliantly reported sports books, and there haven’t really been any other great books by Pete Davies, not that we talk about in that way at least. He didn’t take football journalism by the scruff of its neck and make it his or anything like that. That’s not the story. But we know that book exists, it’s still in print, people talk about it, and it probably led to things like Hornby’s Fever Pitch.
One has to be a bit conjectural, willing to embarrass yourself by saying things changed at this point, and not always because of identifiable events like the hydrogen bomb or Trump being elected. You have to be willing to take a punt that there are currents that shifted. I have been trying to pattern stuff so that it doesn’t just sound like it’s what I think, although the pattern is a product of what I think, possibly a product of my imagination.
SG: Yeah, but you make a persuasive argument that that is not just what you think.
Well, it’s not me banging about how good Pete Davies is, and partly because I don’t think I would do that very well. All Played Out was definitely a cause and effect in the commercial sense. But that in itself was a consequence of the editor who commissioned the book, Tom Weldon, now the most powerful person in British publishing give or take, sensing there was something in the air. These things never come from nowhere. But sometimes there is sufficient path-breaking that they might as well have come from nowhere. It can be hard to see the roots.
One of the insecurities one can have doing arts criticism is it can be quite arid and almost a little controlled world. I guess I think we should explain more than just why we think something is good or bad, and that’s led me down some kind of long and winding paths. This is a bit of an ugly word, but I feel like the goal is to be as ‘multifactorial’ as possible. And obviously the cost is the reader can end up wondering, ‘Yeah, but what do you think about this book?’ That is a legitimate question. I don’t always put my head out.
SG: I like that about your criticism, it feels like journalism, or like you’re searching.
Yeah, I really think it is a kind of search. It’s not a put-on. And sometimes you might get a thing where you don’t know how this tessellates. Because you can research something as much as you want, but unless you know what you’re researching, you won’t get there.
It helps if you start with a question: why was Stoner revived? And why didn’t Stoner thrive to begin with? I had no fucking idea. I didn’t know that John Williams was a fan, almost a disciple from afar, of this great if bonkers anti-romantic critic Yvor Winters, or that those ideas were not consistent with the very passionate, feeling-based culture that drove a lot of post-war American literature and art.
I like the French word 'recherche', as used by Michel Butor in his essay on the experimental novel. It usefully fuses research, and what you just said, like searching for something. And if you’re not doing that, it just feels maybe a bit low-stakes. There’s this weird division between criticism and feature writing. For instance, it would be weird if a critic quoted the subject in a review.
SG: But it would be sort of great too, is that what you’re saying?
Well, it adds texture and a human voice, and that immediately gives you a voice that is not your own, but I think also it just adds a bit of folk wisdom, and material that’s not necessarily in books. You’re trying to build a form, not exactly journalistic, it’s sort of a compound of different things or explanatory disciplines.
In the time since roughly T.S. Eliot, the richness of thought that has circulated around thinking about literature and culture – well, you couldn’t read it all in a lifetime… That’s a license to greed, to try to write well and to make pompous generalizations and show that you know about low-culture content or connect larger aesthetic movements, or deploy an unfamiliar adjective. Everyone has their thing. Trying to tell a story does seem an undernourished route. It was certainly relevant that the cultural journalists who were cleverer, better-educated, and more talented than me, which would make a long list, rarely do this kind of slightly more historicising thing. Not because they’re not able. I mean, probably because it’s a fucking pain in the ass.
SG: Do you see that kind of longform criticism as part of a tradition? Is it part of, I don't know, the Warwick school of thought [a reference to a university in the West Midlands] or the Simon Hammond school [a reference to an unusually demanding New Left Review editor]?
I don’t think so. It's not really a thing, is it? One of the reasons why I have written a few things like that is I have been frustrated as a reader, not being given that filigree. I certainly learned things about cultural history and explanation from academics who were around at the University of Warwick when I went there, or who passed through there before my time but I learned about. The list includes Jonathan Bate (especially his early book about the eighteenth century, Shakespearean Constitutions), V F Perkins (his writing on Bazin in Film as Film and Peter Wollen in ‘Film Authorship: The Premature Burial’), the sociologist Steve Fuller, I had endless fruitful conversations with him, Mark Fisher of course, Germaine Greer, Gillian Rose, many classicists and philosophers. I’m not sure why, but it was the site of a conference, which became a fairly useful book, devoted to the most culturally and historically-minded English literary critic, Frank Kermode, who went on about taste and canons in his books The Classic, The Genesis of Secrecy, Forms of Attention, and History and Value, Pleasure and Change, and could be reticent, many said, about his own opinions on things. I saw him when he came to chat about Henry Green, who’s a great subject for anyone interested in cultural fashion (and in my personal review, a great novelist). But I don’t think I can quite blame the weird use I have made of some of my time on Simon Hammond, despite all the damage he’s done to my quality of life and peace of mind. I would if I could.
In terms of a tradition: Pauline Kael's essay on the evolution of Citizen Kane, published thirty years after its release, may be the best-known example of an act of criticism in the form of storytelling and research. I'm not sure I've ever read every word of it. And it doesn't really count because she started with an agenda.
She may not have been entirely conscious of this as the backdrop, but she didn't like the 'auteur' theory essentially because she felt that it misrepresented what was most exciting and distinctive in American movies. She might have preferred the phrase used by Bazin, who was also sceptical of the auteur policy though it had appeared in his magazine Cahiers du Cinema – 'the genius of the system', meaning the studio system, bit like the Brian Eno idea of 'scenius.' Citizen Kane isn't precisely a beneficiary of the auteur policy because Orson Welles was a writer, director, and actor. It never had to be saved. But it was still, or especially, a salient example of a film in which the contribution of the person credited as director (no matter what else he did) really crowded out the role played by the screenwriter, in that case Herman J Mankiewicz. So with help from an UCLA academic, Howard Suber, which she never acknowledged, she set out to show that Welles’s contribution had been less central or solitary. She preferred the idea of Citizen Kane as the culmination of the script-led newspaper comedies of the 1930s, written by often Jewish playwrights like Mankiewicz who had gone to Hollywood after the arrival of sound, when the was a sudden need for people who could write smart dialogue. And behind that stood the ultimate debate, what is attractive and appealing about movies.
That's slightly conjectural on my part and one would need to conduct another exercise in cultural history or historical journalism in order to prove it. . . I don't know the circumstances in which that project came together. I’d need to look at the biography. But essentially with Kael’s essay on Kane or the phantom essay I’m sketching here on Kael on Kane, we're talking about labour-intensive exercises and they're more likely to be books, for example Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, a genealogy of Marxism-Leninism that goes back through earlier theories about cycles of history, would be one. I think you need to start with a question, and not a thesis, so not ‘I reckon Herman Mankiewicz is responsible for what's banging about Citizen Kane’ but ‘oh I wonder where historical materialism came from?’
By temperament I am a bit obsessed with explanation, explaining stuff to myself, occasionally forcing it on other people, for whatever dark unknowable reasons. I do think generationally people of our age are at an advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) if they want to do that. A small part of it was that people no longer tussled about 'theory,' the body of largely Continental thought that refreshed literary and film studies with influence from philosophy, sociology, Marxism and political science, intellectual history, cultural critique. It was just there and one can use bits of it. Someone took a photo of me twenty years ago in a library reading a paperback of Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology, something I'd still be extremely liable to do now. Discovering certain little books by Perry Anderson, perhaps especially the little book on theory, you might say attack, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism . . . that was heaven. Knowing even a bit of stuff makes it hard to resist the sense that there are bigger questions than what you happen to think is good about a single book or film, or be content to say 'we all love Stoner now' or 'On or around September 1992, poshos started caring about football'.