Open Page with Peter Conrad

Why do you write? It’s the one thing I know how to do. I could never catch a ball when I was a kid, couldn’t balance on a bike, can’t drive a car – not to mention other inadequacies. It’s a relief to think that I have one area of competence, relatively speaking. Are you a vivid dreamer? My specialty is ghastly nightmares. In order to dream, I’d probably need to sleep more hours than I usually manage. I hate the sight of the digital clock announcing three a.m. Where are you happiest? In my house in London, and my apartment in New York What is your favourite music? Opera, which is the subject of my latest book, Verdi and/or Wagner. I’m a verbal fellow, so the words are a sort of lifebelt that keeps me from drowning in the ecstatic sound. Which human quality do you most admire? Creativity, the obsession with altering reality and redesigning the world – the blessing and the curse of our strange species, since no other creature is discontented enough to have this compulsion. What is your favourite book? A very worn copy of Shakespeare’s plays – and poems too! – that I got as a school prize in Hobart in 1962 when I was fourteen. It saw me through almost forty years of teaching at Oxford, and although by now I can recite whole stretches of it by heart, it never ceases to surprise and amaze me: the portrayal of people as they make themselves up, using language that always tells us more about them than they seem to know. Who is your favourite author? Well, inevitably Shakespeare. But in a way he’s out of the competition, so there is always room for others – many of them. Sometimes I think Isak Dinesen is my favourite. But like all readers I’m promiscuous, and could never be satisfied with one favourite. And your favourite literary hero and heroine? Coriolanus, that magnificent egomaniac; and Rosalind, the wise heroine of As You Like It. How old were you when your first book appeared? Twenty-five. Too young, but I wouldn’t have agreed if I’d been told that at the time. What, if anything, impedes your writing? Journalism has taught me to be a pro and not accept impediments. In a phrase, how would you characterise your work? That would be like characterising myself: I couldn’t do it. How do you regard publishers? In general, with dread. In certain cases, with gratitude. In one instance, with adoration: Carmen Callil helped me to loosen up and stop being a disembodied head by coaxing and bullying me to write about growing up in Tasmania. What do you think of the state of criticism? In universities, dire, strangled by theorising and political gripes. In the best newspapers and magazines, very healthy. If you had your time over again, would you choose to be a writer? If I had my time over again, I might choose to live rather than to be a spectator of life, which is what writers are. But my life has been so lucky that I don’t dare think of altering it. What do you think of writers’ festivals? Mixed feelings. Writing is solitary, so the notion of a madding crowd of writers disconcerts me. But I love the audiences, always so involved and receptive: I suspect that I like readers more than I like my fellow writers. What alarms me is the part where you have to sit at a desk with a pen poised in your hand, hoping that you have customers. Do you feel artists are valued in our society? In Australia, yes, if only because they are helping to define an evolving national identity, and because they are one of the country’s world-class products. In England or the United States, not at all. (And sometimes rightly not, because art has got so muddied by showbiz, celebrity, and phoniness.) What are you working on now? A book about the world’s love–hate affair with America since 1945.

From the New Issue

‘Portrait of a friendship: In memoriam Katerina Clark (20 June 1941–1 February 2024)’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Cancer Finishing School: Lessons in laughter, love and resilience by Peter Goldsworthy

Critic of the Month with Ian Dickson

Tremor by Teju Cole

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