Geoff Dyer is the author of twenty-one books which together, and often individually, elude classification. Eclectic in theme, his body of work ranges across genres and forms. It includes But Beautiful (1991), his narrative tribute to jazz; Out of Sheer Rage (1997), a comic monologue about trying to write a study of D. H. Lawrence; The Ongoing Moment (2005), a treatise on the history of photography; novels such as Paris Trance (1998) and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009); the unorthodox travelogues Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2003) and White Sands (2016); Zona (2012), an account of a viewing of Tarkovsky’s Stalker; and his rumination on lateness and late style, The Last Days of Roger Federer (2022).

Dyer’s latest book, Homework, is a memoir of his upbringing as the only child of a sheet metal worker and a dinner lady in Cheltenham, during the 1960s and early 1970s. It ends with Dyer in his late teens, leaving grammar school with the grades required to take up his place at Oxford – a moment which provides the starting-point for this interview. On a recent Tuesday morning, at the flat in West London where Dyer lives with his wife, the curator Rebecca Wilson, we discussed his intellectual influences, his on-off affair with ‘theoretical’ writing – Marxist and otherwise – and the role this played in the evolution of his writing.

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What was the relationship between your identity as someone from a working-class background going to Oxford and being drawn to many writers who were Marxists or socialists?

The surprising thing is how entirely retrospective my understanding of class was. I came to it through literature. When I was at Oxford, there was the whole question of ‘Theory’ being introduced. I remember clearly a debate in the English faculty on course reform featuring Terry Eagleton. He’s been around so long now that it might be difficult to recall what an explosive presence he was back then, a radical threat to the established order. He was also a very charismatic figure, so there was a sort of cult attached to him. People were intoxicated by him and by the power of the ideas he unleashed. I went along to this debate, which also featured Neil Bartlett as a representative of undergraduate rebellion. It was exciting, momentous, I understood little of it and, if I remember rightly, nothing changed.

The other Eagleton-related thing that happened while I was at Oxford was that he invited this old duffer to come and waffle on. As with the debate I didn’t understand what he was droning on about. And that was of course Raymond Williams. My tutor, Valentine Cunningham, had urged us to read Keywords and maybe he’d even suggested reading Culture and Society, but at that point you wouldn’t bother reading a book like that, because you were doing Lawrence, say, for one week, so you’d only read the bits on Lawrence in these more general books. So I was aware of Williams’ name, but it was only after I left university that I started reading books like his. There was a lot of Theory in the air in those days. This was during that great phase of my life – anyone’s life – your twenties, when your brain has been formatted and disciplined by university, and you are free to read widely. All these people, connected and linked in various ways through that pervasive word ‘ideology’, were sort of poured into the willing bucket of my head – Foucault, Adorno, Berger and Williams.  

I knew there were texts and contexts – that Dickens wasn’t writing in some sort of vacuum, that there were slums and industrialization and so on. But it was only later, especially through reading Williams, that I began to have an understanding of the process that I’d been through. Culture and Society enlarges the idea of what literature and culture are, and with that comes an understanding of class as more than a combination of habits of dress and manners or tics of speech. Sons and Lovers, which I had read, is obviously about class as well. But I hadn’t properly cottoned on to that for some reason, even though at Oxford I was conscious that I was meeting people who had overwhelmingly been to private schools. And as an undergraduate I must have read Eagleton’s introduction to the Macmillan edition of Jude the Obscure, where he makes an obvious but brilliant point: that Jude as a stonemason ends up maintaining the walls that are excluding him. Still, what my experience was really about was lost on me. The overall point is that it’s a source of astonishment how belatedly this understanding occurred. I thought it was just my personal story, though I knew there were other people who had been through it.

Historic examples or near contemporaries as well?

At school we did Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, that bible of chippiness. If you read it now, it’s incredible how thoroughly the class-induced rage transmutes itself as – is expressed primarily through – misogyny, though that was lost on me at the time.

As we are talking about Oxford and class and texts, were you aware of John Carey’s views on modernism and elitism at that point in time?

No, I wasn’t. He was just another of these dreary lecturers droning on in a half-empty lecture hall. At Oxford, it’s a point of pride not to go to lectures. I went to one of his lectures, on John Donne, and it seemed boring. The teaching was consistently disappointing. The first term I was there, Cunningham was away, so we had this useless substitute called Something Dingley: tweed jacket, aged about fifty though he was probably only in his mid-twenties. One of these absurd Oxford types. No good at all as a teacher. I don’t know what became of him – probably very little.

You briefly were taught by Alan Hollinghurst as well?

Yes. Hollinghurst is, of course, an amazing writer but he was a pretty ineffective teacher, and that was in my third year anyway. But the great thing about the Oxford system – even though it’s designed to make sure that the dons don’t have to waste their time with students – is that it’s all about training you to find out things for yourself, meaning that you don’t ever need to take evening classes again. It’s a source of satisfaction to me that later on, I was able to review Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses, which is such an unbelievably shoddy piece of work.

You also had a pop, roughly five years earlier, at his collection of reviews, a book you would have been likelier to enjoy, Original Copy, comparing him unfavourably, as a putative populist, to Raymond Williams.

Well remembered! In any other area of life, he’d have got kicked out on his arse for that. There are different notions of what makes a book or writer great. But Carey managed to take quality out of the equation. It was all just chippiness. ‘Arnold Bennett is the greatest writer just because I’m so chippy’ – that, intellectually, was what it seemed to amount to. And the irony was that Carey had been so thoroughly within an Oxford quad for so long. Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t fall under the spell of a charismatic teacher: that made me more susceptible to the later influence of John Berger.

There’s something in your self-presentation as a freewheeling amateur that suggests a deeply democratic impulse, but of a radically different kind to Carey.

I got that from Berger, who crucially was never in the academy. He was always a properly independent thinker. When all is said and done, Williams remained very much within the academy. He never quite became the writer in the broadest sense that Berger did.

Would you say that along with a greater understanding, you had a newly politicized relationship to class?

It went hand in hand. After Oxford I became close friends with a guy I’d been at school with called Russell Campbell, who was at Balliol, a year ahead of me. He was actually in the CP – quite something to be a card-carrying Communist at this stage. There was another friend of his called Chris Whiteside, also at Balliol, from a thoroughly proletarian background who was and remained such a hard-line lefty he said he was thinking of emigrating to the Soviet Union. More broadly, in the early 1980s I was thoroughly at home in that kind of leftie, feminist, anarcho-alternative, squatting scene in Brixton.

Were you conscious of New Left Books and Verso publishing books that you were interested in?

Oh yes! There were two phases. First of all, in the early-to-mid 1980s, when I was buying books like Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology. Then the next phase, slightly later, when Malcolm Imrie who had previously been the books editor at City Limits was an editor at Verso: the period when Verso became, as he joked about it, Perverso. I think he was responsible for publishing those cool Baudrillard books.

Some of those formative influences were English – Lawrence, Williams, Berger. But then there are these continental figures that you gravitate towards.

Paris and French thinkers still had a kind of glamour back then. Lacan and Derrida were completely closed books to me. But quite quickly I started to realize, ‘Wow, Foucault is an amazing writer’. And Roland Barthes – my relationship with Roland Barthes was as passionate as it was with any other writer. So I loved Barthes and Foucault as writers: their distinct stylistic identities. Same with Adorno, especially Minima Moralia: dialectical thought raised to peak intensity. So among the figures I was drawn to, there were the continental ‘writers’, and then at another extreme, there were these homegrown people like Williams.

Would you say you admired Williams as a writer in the way that you admired Barthes as a writer?

The word admiration is not adequate. The relationship I had with Barthes and Williams was one of love. And being in love with anything or anyone is always transformative – for a while at least. I can vividly remember how powerfully I felt the current of Williams’s thought coursing through me as I read the closing sections of Culture and Society on a bus on my way to see a girlfriend in Sydenham in the early 80s. And a little later I read The Country and the City, that amazing part about the English country houses where, after acknowledging their splendour, he asks us to ‘think it through as labour’: surely one of the most powerful passages of prose in the English language. And I felt a great temperamental affinity with E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which Eagleton had recommended, I think in his introduction to Williams’s lecture. The emphasis on – and fidelity to – lived experience (almost irrelevant in the abstractions of Althusser, for example) was of course close to another experience: reading fiction.

In Homework, you quote from Thompson’s essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’. Was it just moments of Thompson that you found illuminating, or were you engaged with his theories of English history?

I didn’t engage with them – I lived them! He provided the deep foundations of a house – an English house – I was born in. And I always knew that my memoir would end with a quote from that essay, about ‘class’ not being a thing but ‘a happening’: a kind of long-delayed reveal…

Adorno and another writer you sometimes mention, Walter Benjamin, belonged to the Western Marxist canon, but unlike with, say, Williams or Thompson or Eagleton or Berger it doesn’t appear that you were reading them for analysis of social class or the society you came from or to understand the context of works of literature you knew well. What was the relevance of them being in different ways political writers? Or was it simply their feline skill as describers, arguers, and essayists?

I think there was a considerable overlap between what I was getting from both the Euro and Anglo theorists: namely the politicization of the aesthetic, or an understanding that works of literature and art, and music, were imprinted expressions of larger political processes. That politicization is done quite straightforwardly – and brilliantly – in, say, The Dark Side of the Landscape by John Barrell but in a much more complex way by Adorno when he’s writing about Beethoven (or anything really), by Benjamin on Baudelaire and in a more fun, frothier way by some of Barthes. Maybe Benjamin at that time was suffering from a degree of over-exposure by quotation, so he didn’t have the quality of personalized discovery that those other cats – remember, I was also discovering jazz! – offered. I have to fall for a writer and it never quite happened with W.B. There were two things going on with an accommodating degree of contradiction. On the one hand, I didn’t distinguish so much between the Euros (theorists) and les Anglais (empiricists) as I saw them both as a different kettle of fish from Dickens, George Eliot, Austen etc. – i.e. the fiction which had been my sole focus. On the other hand, as I said, the experience of reading Thompson was closer to reading fiction than was the sensations of reading the Euros. But – hey I’m really getting the hang of the Adorno-style dialectical switch-back – in some ways I liked those Euros for the same reason that I loved the novelists. Many of the bits I most love in Minima Moralia are not political at all: I’m thinking, for example, of the section where he writes about the bourgeois insistence on the right to walk, how the sight of someone running down a street always suggests they’re running away from something, thereby giving rise to a contagious sense of fear and threat. And then there’s the wealth of psychological revelations you get in Barthes, Adorno, and, of course, in George Eliot and Henry James. That’s always been my main area of fascination, and it’s probably why I love Nietzsche so much: as a psychologist, he is unmatched. A psychologist – and this is the extraordinary thing – of states of mind that were only in the process of coming fully into existence, that were, to a degree, created by his analyses of them.

Was it obvious what you should be reading? How conscious or systematic was it? At what point did you consider yourself an aspiring writer, and not an intellectual?

I sort of was an intellectual, briefly. The only time the word ‘intellectual’ came up before I was 18 was being a ‘pseudo-intellectual’. To be an intellectual was to be a pseudo-intellectual. But later on, I really was one. No laughing at the back there! I had a friend called Chris Mitchell who I’d known a bit at Oxford. We were sharing a house in Brixton. He knew more about everything than I did, and he was guiding me – guiding me also through jazz and cinema history. I was conscious of the sausage-machine funnel of specialization, which I’d avoided. Even though a PhD was considered a higher form of activity than anything else, every time anyone told me about their PhD, it sounded so crushingly boring and pointless, this search for somebody so uninteresting that nobody had already researched him or her to death. And this was also the era of Cult. Studs. – cultural studies – it was exciting that people like Dick Hebdige would write about punk style and this sort of stuff. Or Gilbert Adair doing his updates and reversionings of Barthes. So I was much more in tune with that kind of stuff. All of which was consistent with Sontag’s definition of being a writer: someone who’s interested in everything. And then there’s Berger whose effect on me was completely transformative, especially his ability to write about so many different things, in new ways and new forms. My idea of the essay was derived directly from him. I wanted to write essays like Berger. I always come back to one in particular, though it could be almost any of them, ‘Turner and the Barbershop’, where he asks: how can we explain Turner’s late works? His answer: it’s to do with the stuff he saw when he was a little boy in his dad’s barber shop. I like the brevity of it, the lightning-flash originality, and also, crucially, the way he evokes the scene in the dad’s barber shop: there’s a novelist’s skill in that.

Is it that combination? On the one hand, it’s almost a far-fetched sort of psychoanalytic theory. On the other hand, he gets in and out quickly.

Absolutely. It’s the Nietzsche method, treating ‘deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again’. The really amazing thing about Berger is that he was so nice about that unbelievably boring book I wrote about him.

This was your first book, Ways of Telling (1986), which you have often knocked. Were you writing things during that period, the mid-1980s, that you felt were closer to what would become your tone?

Yes. That book lacked any of the spin or sparkle of the essays I was writing. There’s no reason why anyone should, but I reckon you could go through that book and not detect my fingerprint at all. Except in my enthusiasm for Berger and the slightly combative tone I don’t think there’s any trace of me. I think there is maybe one good point in it, that we need to redraw the map of literary reputation – not just trying to have Berger’s name writ larger on an existing map of reputations, but to completely alter the projection used to establish the map. I do worry that with that book I used up a life. If you’ve only got so many books in you, then I squandered one. Oh well, it got a certain way of writing completely out of my system.

Were you dissatisfied with it at the time?

At the time it was the best I could do. It’s a bit like waking up in the night after a big drinking session and thinking: ‘Why did I do that, what did I say? Who have I woken up with?’ Well, I’d woken up with this unbelievably boring thing.

It’s possible that it helped you to metabolise an influence and figure some things out. It may have been enabling…

I have to believe that it was.

It was a book not in the spirit of its subject – Berger wouldn’t write a book like that – but perhaps it helped inspire the idea you now have and hold to, which is you must write the book only you can write.

Well, it was the only book I could write, but equally it was a book that anybody could have written.

In some sense, the experimental nature of the work you went on to produce came from this hyper-receptivity to other writers.

Yes. I’m a highly original writer, precisely because I’ve been so susceptible to influence. But even as I fed in all these things, trying hard to sound like x or y, the result always ended up sounding quite a lot like me anyway.

However much you try, someone from Cheltenham is not going to sound that much like Thomas Bernhard. So you can basically rip him off and then people will say, ‘What an English book this is.’

Ha ha, yes! I was just thinking of Bernhard. And Barthes had a real influence on me, stylistically. I was trying to do the Barthes thing, but it always ended up like somebody who speaks French with a very heavy English accent. That’s how it came out – I mean, in a sort of Gloucestershire rendering.

Which Barthes in particular did you especially want to emulate?

The highly personal, late Barthes – A Lover’s Discourse, Camera Lucida and the autobiography. I think it was the delicacy I liked, the fluency of thought and observation. But it needs to be stressed that I was still reading a lot of straight-down-the line lit too. I can see the Joseph Brodsky influence in my stuff, the tone of the poems and some of the essays. At that stage I was drawn to Calvino, another representative of the glamour and excitement of the continent, doing formally experimental things.

Are any of the people that we’ve mentioned so far remotely funny writers? I suppose Barthes is occasionally tickling.

Yes, that’s a good way of describing Barthes. I think what happened was that the Berger influence was so strong that although he enabled me to become a writer, it took me a while to crawl out from under the weight of the Berger voice, which is sort of humour-proof, and to let my natural voice emerge.

So you spent a lot of time reading desperately unfunny political writers in order to produce a very funny, culpably apolitical body of work?

Guilty as charged!

The writers we have discussed so far were almost all men.

Nabokov said his taste in writing was exclusively homosexual. For a long while mine was too. I thought I only liked reading male writers. Why did I think that? It’s what we call in the trade ‘patriarchy, innit?’ That’s the only explanation. Now most of the fiction I read is by women, not just contemporaries but the great female writers who’d been allowed to go out of print, before Virago brought them back – from the edge of extinction, as it were – and reinstated them in the canon.

Did you feel like there were places you could publish the free-form writing you were doing? Did becoming a writer, and not an academic, feel like a precarious pursuit in the 1980s? I suppose there was the dole.

Yes, the dole was a godsend. The period of its widespread availability coincided with another phase whereby ten pages a week were being added to the numerous supplements of the British papers. For a while Sunday was the big day then Saturday became a bulging print day too. There were so many opportunities for cultural writing. I used to joke that every weekend there’d be a new pull-out history of ratatouille through the ages, or something. There was so much need for content, as they now call it. Being a writer of books and journalism went together.

Was there openness to a less orthodox deployment of those journalistic forms?

Yes, you could do essays on this and that. Except you wouldn’t call them essays, you’d call them ‘pieces’. And even though the culture pages were expanding there was never quite enough space. A frustrating but good thing in some ways. You couldn’t just waffle on forever, as you could in the ink-prairies of The New Yorker. The other thing worth mentioning is that I never had a contract with anyone, so I was always slagging it around between different publications. If x didn’t want a piece, somebody else would make room for it. I never tailored what I was writing for any particular publication.

You have said you aren’t interested in writing anything that wouldn’t become part of a book.

Not quite. I was very happy publishing essays, would always feel a sense of pride if I had something in the New Statesman or the Guardian, especially when James Wood and Richard Gott were working at the Guardian Review. But always I was hoping that I could collect the best of these pieces in a book. If you look at what Hollinghurst has published: all novels. Occasionally he writes little things but I don’t think he has a great urge to publish his collected journalism, whereas I always wanted to do that, almost from the start, because I loved those collections of Berger’s essays.

You have reflected about the books you started publishing in the 1990s that you didn’t have ‘a’ readership, because people interested in jazz, the subject of But Beautiful (1991), aren’t interested in World War One, which you explored in The Missing of the Somme (1994). Often voice is formed with an idea of an audience but maybe yours hasn’t been?

I don’t know if this is just solipsism or self-delusion, maybe it’s me trying to turn never having had a big readership into an advantage, trying to claim ‘I’m glad that nobody has read my books. It’s been a great liberation.’ I think I had to transform my sense of what was basically a failed publishing career into a successful artistic trajectory.

Was there a point at which the ‘Dyer-ness’ became an identity or an advantage – something that you figured out or that publishers figured out?

It started happening with Out of Sheer Rage, and solidified with Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. That brought a retrospective awareness to things. Certainly it took a while. However I’m described, in a word or two, I always resent it. The essayist. ‘What about the other stuff?’ Comic writer or ‘humourist’. ‘How dare they?’ The one that depresses me more than anything – the travel writer. I don’t even like to be called a novelist. All I want is to be called ‘the writer…’ Is that too much to hope for?

In some ways your life sounds very enviable – you spent your twenties reading, then you wrote about what you felt like. But you have had to be quite self-propelling. If you were a specialist, one thing would lead to another. You, however, have to find something to interest you. Have there been moments when you haven’t known what to write about?

Yes, but that’s all just been part of living the life, and the great boon and privilege, the perk of my situation, is that I’ve never had any fallback. It’s always been writing or bust. The writing thing and the life have been completely entwined so it’s not ‘If I’m not writing, what do I do?’, it’s more, ‘Do I stay alive, which is part of the writing process, or do I do myself in?’ which I wasn’t about to do. And I’m glad I didn’t, because now I get to have mornings like this when I am effectively Raymond Williamsing it, taking on whatever NLR can throw at me!

In fiction, you’ve often written a kind of pastiche – of Borges and Calvino in The Search (1995), Fitzgerald in Paris Trance (1999), Mann in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009).

With a little hint of The Aspern Papers in there too, in that last instance. But pastiche is not right. I’ve depended on these illustrious predecessors partly because of my inability to think of plots. Instead you get a kind of crucible. Back in the day the Romantics would do a version of a myth – Endymion or Paracelsus or whatever. Now we’ve got these great novels in the background: the determining footprints, as Roberto Calasso says of the great myths. George Steiner writes somewhere that latent in a deep reading of any book is the desire to write a book in response. I believe in that.

Why haven’t you written more novels?

Because I never believed in the novel as my vocation. Just being ‘a writer’ was enough for me. All writing brings you up against your limitations, but fiction reveals something to you that is pretty definitive. Anyone can write a novel but to write a really good novel is so difficult to do. Another reason I’ve not written fiction recently is that whereas I love going to a gallery or looking at a book of photographs and concentrating in that Berger-like way, I don’t like going somewhere, say for a piece, and looking around with the requisite level of attentiveness. I don’t think I’m lazy when it comes to writing but I am lazy with the degree of attentiveness to the world that you need as a novelist. Hollinghurst must be noticing a lot as he’s walking around London. I notice nothing. I’m sort of on permanent holiday when I’m walking down the street. There’ve been several occasions when I’ve been walking down a street in Los Angeles and my wife has Rebecca said: ‘Did you see who just walked past us?’ It was some celebrity, who admittedly I’d never heard of. This is related to my face-blindness which is getting so bad I might have to stop going to parties. Zadie Smith says a great source of happiness in her life is people’s faces: a good passion for a novelist. The gradual failure of my facial recognition software and a general lack of attentiveness to the world are, by contrast, sub-optimal.

Yet the recollection in the new book is remarkable.

All that was embedded in my consciousness or, more deeply, it was stuff I’d been carrying around in my body, but the prolonged immersion in that period of my life means that I’ve never felt closer to my 14-year-old self. And speaking of stuff – physical stuff – the reason there’s so much stuff about stuff – toys and collecting – in the early stages of the book is not just a desire to come up with a complete catalogue raisonné of every toy I ever owned. There’s a latent narrative purpose in it because after the teacher at grammar school turns me on to reading, books fill the void left by growing out of those toys. It was a similarly solitary activity. And that also explains something else. Berger was always eager to collaborate. My friend Jonathan Lethem is always collaborating. I’ve never collaborated with anybody. Writing is still the private thing that this only child did in his bedroom – to the extent that I never write in cafés.

Anyway, to go back to the intensity of recollection: when I was 17 or 18 I had written a few things about the only thing I knew, my family life. I kept these pages and although of course they were utterly devoid of quality, they were packed with detail. I went through these pages and circled all the details, then I found that I could transfer that over to scenes I hadn’t written about, and this would help bring back a comparable level of sensory recollection.

The Spectator compared it to Proust.

That comparison is coming up the whole time and it’s nice even though I’m one of these people who can’t read Proust. I find it unbelievably boring, all the mopey kid stuff. You know, ‘For fuck’s sake, go and kick a ball around or something.’

You’re not a diligent novelistic noticer by disposition, but part of the pleasure of reading Out of Sheer Rage is the not noticing what you’re meant to be noticing. You may not be noticing the colour of the sky or whoever that was in the street, but you’re noticing something.

I am good at tracking the whirring of perception and consciousness, which, of course, takes us back to what Montaigne said he was doing, chasing all these rabbits of thought around his head. He would often do that in response to something that he’d noticed in the world and then in a solipsistic way, it ends up being about mental processes as well. That I can do. And Bernhard is all obsessive mental gurning. Quite often the thing that people respond to in my books is the train – the train wreck – of thought.

Without wanting to act like the genre police, couldn’t Out of Sheer Rage be classified as a novel?

I don’t think so – and remember: I don’t aspire to the novel, don’t worship at that altar. How do you write a successful memoir? The mistake many people make is to use that tense where you say, ‘We would go down to the shops on Saturday and on Sundays.’ Whereas you’ve got to have the specificity of fiction: the successive instantaneity. Whatever the kind of writing, it’s always about particularity and precision. Even fog has to be rendered precisely.

Your answer is more nuanced than the question. Isn’t lots of Out of Sheer Rage made up? Isn’t it a comic monologue novel?

I guess if it had been published twenty years later, a decision might have been made to call it a novel but for me the mere fact of its existence is enough. Anyway, yes, that lecture scene in Copenhagen was completely made up. I was invited to give a lecture, but I prepared for it very diligently and delivered it properly, whereas in the book it’s this knockabout comedy of ill-preparedness.

What’s unorthodox or form-breaking about Homework is that in the context of your body of work, it is quite traditionally done.

In my defence, it didn’t start out that way. Initially I was going to do it like an expanded version of that map of Cheltenham I did for the anthology of maps edited by Visual Editions Where You Are (2014). It was going to be about my life, but it would be arranged not chronologically but spatially. I thought this was going to be a new way of doing a memoir. I was writing all these scenes easily enough but when it came to sequencing them the form I’d imagined became a brick wall. I found that not only was it creating more problems than it was solving, it was actually doing nothing but throwing up problems. So the way to do it was chronologically – whereupon all the problems went away and it all became straightforward. I’m not somebody who thinks, ‘Ah, okay, I’m going to write a memoir, and I can see how you write memoirs, and I’m going to do it unthinkingly, as people have always done it.’ I always arrive at a certain form, the form is not pre-determined at the outset. So even though I’ve ended up with this rather conventional book, it’s the product of formal experimentation.

There should be a disclaimer announcing that you exhausted other avenues. We were going to do this interview in a more inventive way but ultimately decided that the Q&A format was the only way to do it. Do you think your tastes now run more to things being done straightforwardly but lucidly, and just laying bare the inherent interest in a thing?

With the Lawrence essays I edited, Life With a Capital L (2019), I was wrangling with the arrangement of that and the solution was easy and so obvious – a chronological arrangement of them. I think the consistency or continuity lies in the conviction that there needs to be an appropriateness of form to content.

You have talked about a process of tightening the prose and then loosening the prose. Is that still how you write?

Yes. Quite often I’ll write stuff, tighten it up, and then it sounds too uptight. It’s like the Archie Bell and the Drells song – ‘Do the Tighten Up… but don’t you get too tight.’ I always enjoy doing the loosen-up after the tighten-up. It’s like when you’ve got a bad back and a masseur presses and prods you into relaxing the knots of muscle. Sometimes you then need to tighten up the loosen-up! But having said all that, I don’t like it in reviews if people say I’ve got a ‘conversational’ style because it’s not conversational, it’s writing.

Yes, if it was just this on the page...

I agree!

How well do you feel you remember what goes on when you write something?

I’m very familiar with that stage in a book – because I’ve been doing it for a while now – when it has transitioned from being a bit of a chore to being able to sit there happily for hours and hours. If I was being Barthesian about it, I would call it a moment of arousal or something, but that would be too flirtatious. What would be a better word? Just feeling comfortable in the chair.

We have talked a lot about forbidding writers you read and the boundary-pushing of your own work. But you couldn’t say that any of the books you have written over the past four decades are forbidding or difficult to read.

Even though Berger is humourless – he would, I think, admit to that – he was always easy to read, easy to understand. I was conscious, with some of this theoretical stuff we’ve been talking about, that I couldn’t understand it. There was so much sub-Foucauldian work written by these academic drones. That held no appeal. Maybe if you’ve had a training in philosophy, which I haven’t, maybe you can actually read some of this stuff. I couldn’t bear it. By contrast, why was I so instantly enraptured by Nietzsche? Because it wasn’t a chore to read him. It was a lot of fun, and it was understandable. And, of course, Nietzsche provides an explanation of this, when he writes that those who are genuinely clever and have something to say, they say it clearly. Those who want to appear clever make it all difficult and incomprehensible. That’s partly why I could get to grips so readily with Williams and Eagleton. And if you think of the first Eagleton book I read, Criticism and Ideology, it was made up of highly enjoyable essays on figures I was familiar with. When I came to read somebody like Perry Anderson – the first ones I read were the synoptic books – I could see the elegance of Anderson’s style.

One of the things we haven’t emphasised enough is the excitement of certain books. Nietzsche is always exciting. Adorno too – actually, sometimes he isn’t, sometimes he just grinds out those dialectical victories so that they end up feeling self-defeating. I have a lot of Adorno here, scattered about here in my study. Let me re-phrase that: I have extensive holdings of Adorno! I feel I should mention that another thing was going on at the same time I was reading Adorno et al: Martin Amis was coming into full power. Talk about excitement! Fun too. If you’re writing a lot in magazines, as I started to in the 80s, he’s going to occupy a lot of headspace.

We’re now aware because of his collections that he was writing all these pieces. Would you have been aware at the time – there’s a new Amis feature in the Sunday paper?

I think so. And even before that, although I didn’t realize at the time the connection between them, part of the attraction of the Observer – for whom, if I remember rightly, Amis was ‘a special correspondent’ – was reading Clive James on TV. I didn’t know they were part of a whole little coterie. I only heard later that they all had a very low opinion of Berger, how everything they considered bad about writing was exemplified by him.

In a virtuoso passage from your review of Amis’s collection The War Against Cliché (2001), itself collected in Working the Room (2010), you quote an aphoristic moment you call ‘quick and brilliant’ but then ask: ‘can prose of such stylistic panache accommodate complexity and depth? Or does sustained analytical thought demand something akin to Raymond Williams’s furrowed qualifications and hesitations?’ Were you aware of a version of that quandary? Maybe Barthes helped provide a solution.

Barthes would do it by becoming more and more personal, foregoing the authority of being a semiotician or whatever for the subtler pleasures of being the very thing whose death he was associated with, namely an… author! This has made me realise something that I hadn’t grasped at an earlier stage in our conversation. You were asking about the extent to which I distinguished between the homegrown and the continental writers I was reading. What I really felt was the opposition between all those people and those like Craig Raine and John Carey who were anti-ideas, claiming there’s no room for ideas in literature. Whereas Berger and Nietzsche, for example – they’re packed with ideas. Ditto Calvino and Foucault. That was part of their excitement of, the throwing up and juggling with all sorts of ideas. There was a phrase of Calvino’s that I always liked, his definition of writing – ‘gestures of the idea’ or something like that. And that’s what I was drawn to, overwhelmingly. The irony is that the fine, precise observations you get in Craig Raine’s wonderful Martian poems, for example, they’re ideas. A metaphor or simile is inherently an idea. As is a joke.

In the final question of your Marxism Today interview with Berger in 1984, you quote from the play he co-wrote, A Question of Geography: ‘what do you see as the job of your life?’ What would your answer to this question be?

Don’t have one. Or at least I only have incremental or specific goals. In the last couple of years I’ve been trying to build up my shoulders in the gym: quite a challenge at 67 – which, incredibly, is a year older than Raymond Williams was when he died.

Read on: Raymond Williams, ‘Theatre and the Novel’, NLR 142.