English novelist Julian Barnes has a yen for literary curios. Strolling around his North London home, he picks up one signed photograph after the other—Turgenev, Kipling, Borges—handing them over with the excitement of a true fan. "Who do you think this is?" he asks, presenting an antique postcard of a man in shorts. It turns out to be a gag photo of T.S. Eliot, which the poet had made into a photograph and sent to a friend.
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For a man who spent a good deal of his writing life contemplating his nether regions, hardscrabble West Coast poet and dog-racing aficionado Charles Bukowski has had an appropriately virile afterlife. Twelve years after his death, the archive of poems he selected for posthumous publication continues to cough up books, the latest of which is Come on In! Here are all the Bukowski concerns: the flatulence and falseness of the so-called real world; the beady-eyed self-loathing that develops out of the mere fact of rubbing up against it; and the slow way Bukowski climbed out of these depths by writing. "I thought,/Jesus Christ," he writes of reading a Truman Capote story, "if this is what they/want,/from now on/I might as well write for/the rats and the spiders/and the air and just for/myself." This is, of course, something of a posture, but Come on In! shows just how effective a Pied Piper it made of Bukowski. In a world of frauds, he was the voice you could trust—a Howard Stern of the poetry world. But there is an anecdotal now-ness to his poems that never seems to age. When Bukowski writes of shuffling off to a café to talk books with his lowdown friends, of hunching over his desk to write, it feels as if we are right there watching. In today's environment of willful poetic obscurity, this is refreshing and terribly charming. Like Kurt Vonnegut, he reminds us we can all still be young at heart, true to our own best selves.
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Barnes fiction can be a similar funhouse mirror for writers' lives. His genre-bending meditation on authorship, Flaubert's Parrot, featured a retiring English doctor who had become obsessed with one of the French novelist's stuffed birds. And his latest novel, Arthur & George, resurrects beloved detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle around the time the author began raising a hullabaloo about the real-life case of George Edalji, a part-Indian solicitor from Birmingham who was railroaded in 1903 for mutilating farm animals—a crime he did not commit.
Flaubert's Parrot seemed pretty hard on our desire to know more about a writer than just his work. And yet here you are writing about another novelist. Has your mood changed?
No, but Conan Doyle is a very different character. Flaubert had very strong opinions about journalistic prurience, he used to go into tirades about it, but Doyle was a famous man and a public figure. He was the sort of writer who was used to being in the open.
How did you stumble upon the case of Edalji—he seems like an obscure moment in Doyle's history.
I came across him reading about the Dreyfus Affair, in fact. And once I found out that Doyle began investigating George's plight at the same time he fell in love with a woman who wasn't his wife, that's when I knew there was a story there.
How did you get into the period?
Newspapers were good, and Conan Doyle's autobiography was quite useful. In writing the book, I found that a few antiquated words could go a long way—give the illusion of the time without actually using that many phrases. In any case, I didn't want to write an entire book in Edwardian prose.
It becomes a bit like one of those gauzy historical dramas they play on Sunday afternoons.
Or like repro furniture.
So here and there you used words like oleaginous to get the period across?
Yes, oleaginous as in oily. At one time it was a sort of anti-Semitic shorthand for Jewish. And it often was applied to villains.
Was it hard to write this book without thinking about how it applies to justice today?
When I am writing I am only in the book, but yes, it's hard, yes, because we're not that different, are we? For instance, there was that case in England eight or nine years ago, back where an Englishman of West Indian origins was found hanging from his belt from the park gates. And the police didn't turn anything up. His nephew started asking questions and not long after was found hanging from his belt from the park gates, too. The police merely remarked on how unusual it was that they used the same method to kill themselves. It takes a great shaming case to change things usually, and for a while it gets better.
And gradually the definition of what is English—or who is English—expands.
You know, I think national identity is something Americans think more about than we do here. The English have always been very good at not thinking at what Englishness is. The Welsh, the Scots, the Irish have all defined themselves—in part—against the English, politically and militarily. Now, thanks to the EU, people are talking about whether we lose our English identity.
Was this what you were writing about in your 1988 novel England, England?
In a more satiric vein yes. That novel was about the way, in an increasingly homogenized, nationalized, globalized world, nations still present themselves as having an identity, even though half the cinemas are owned by American corporations and half of High Street has stores you can find in any other European city. We won't notice this, of course, because we have David Beckham and Big Ben and we're still English.
It's funny how things don't seem to change. I think about the report that was issued revisiting George's case, and how it was published on a Friday afternoon before a holiday. It's just like politicians today.
Yes, the political habits are exactly the same. In fact, there were two things about this book that made me think of the present day. There was that case I mentioned earlier, and then on 9/11 a civil servant here published a memo on the day of the attacks saying that if there was anything that needed to be buried, now would be the time to do it.
Have you ever been so enraged about something in the public sphere that you decided, "Okay, that's it, I'm going to write a political novel?"
No, because it's not what I feel the novel is for. I think the novel is meant to tell a story and to convince you to believe in it. You keep this other stuff separate, at least you try to. I work hard to create a separate compartment where I can get these thoughts out—in an opinion piece, say. I've watched as some English novelists I admire do the opposite and I think their work has coarsened as a result.
But some events are so big it must be hard not to engage them, like 9/11?
That's interesting, because I just read the new novel by Jay McInerney, who is a friend of mine, and I did so with great apprehension, because it takes place around the time of those attacks. But I thought he handled it beautifully, since he comes at it from a bit of a side angle.
I guess you could say the same about Ian McEwan's recent novel, Saturday.
True, but I was slightly surprised at the way it was taken up as a novel about life after 9/11—there is certainly a hunger out there for that kind of book about the moment, which I think it was why Philip Roth's The Plot Against America was read as an analog for life under the Bush administration. I read it simply as a brilliant tale about the way a family can be threatened.