Hard Raine: Vidyan Ravinthiran in conversation with Craig Raine, September 2009

V:  Well — congratulations on Areté’s 10 year anniversary!

CR:  Yes, it’s amazing, actually. I remember Robert McCrum wrote a piece in The Observer saying buy this [Issue 3] because it’s not going to last beyond the next issue.

V: Why did he say that?

CR: Because he doesn’t like me. See my reviews in The Observer since he took over …

V: I thought it might be about the cost of putting Areté out.

CR: No, I think it was a truism — little magazines usually fold quite quickly. You have to have an iron will. I don’t have an iron will — but it gives me an enormous pleasure to prove Robert McCrum wrong, on anything, including this. Actually, it becomes easier as it survives. There are two things the magazine has going for it initially: one is the design, which is absolutely beautiful, the best looking literary magazine ever, I think. It’s designed by Richard van den Dool, who does it for nothing, who is a friend. It looks classical, as if it’s been around forever, and people want to write for it. Milan Kundera said it reminded him of the literary magazines of his youth. Six years later he gave us two pieces for publication. The other thing is that if you’ve published Updike, Kundera, Rushdie, T.S. Eliot, Stoppard, McEwan, Amis, Barnes, six Nobel prize winners, Patrick Marber, William Boyd, oodles of good writers, then people think — I want to be in this. So it becomes much easier. We were also lucky that Pinter had a real soft spot for little magazines. When I was setting it up, it took the best part of about nine months, just getting the template right. My assistant was called Jeremy Noel-Tod, and he asked me, what is this magazine going to look like? I hadn’t even thought about this. I took from my shelves a book of my poems which had been translated into Dutch, and said, ‘like this’. So I rang up various people, and eventually, I found it was designed by Richard van den Dool. I phoned him and asked what is the typeface you’re using here? And he said it’s the Haarlemmer font, invented by Jan van Krimpen, in 1938. You can get it from the Dutch type library: here’s their phone number.

The typeface, if you want to buy it, costs £1500. I didn’t have £1500. I rang him back and said, suppose I fax you something, showing what I want for the front cover, how many letters would I use? He explained to me, you can’t just buy individual letters, you have to buy the whole font. He must have thought I was a cretin. But he didn’t show it — he’s a very laconic, laid-back guy. And I said to him: I know you’re very busy, but you wouldn’t design this for me and do it for nothing, would you? And that has turned out, I think, to be the biggest stroke of luck of all. And another stroke of luck was my friendship with T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie: she gave me for the first issue unpublished T.S. Eliot letters, all of them about setting up the Criterion. So the first issue is, I think, outstanding. It has a fiction extract from Ian McEwan, a fantastic thing, an exchange of letters, written in the camp, from somebody who survived Belsen; it has a piece of reportage by Frances Stonor Saunders who’s now very well known, but wasn’t at the time, about Swiss slave-children, a big hushed-up scandal. And very good reviews.

Actually, I’m surprised that it’s still a little magazine. Part of me is glad of course, because otherwise I’d be running this sort of Tiger tank, and you’d have to appear regularly, on a particular dates, whereas Spring-Summer is a long period of time. We’re trying to put together the Autumn number now, which I wanted to do by the end of September, but people have been late with their copy. That’s fine, though: it’ll be in Blackwells, there are lots of new students … being small gives you a lot of flexibility.

V: Is there anything that you’ve wanted to do which you haven’t done, or would like to in the future — any way you’d like to change the magazine?

CR: Hmm — no — that sounds as though I haven’t any ideas. And actually of course, I don’t; you have an idea, and then you have another … I wrote a piece about Harold Pinter in one issue, because we didn’t have enough copy, and Harold had just died. So I wrote it, and then thought — it would be a good idea we did a Harold special, if I got other people to write pieces about him too, so I commissioned, not just well known people like David Hare, Richard Eyre, but close friends of Harold. I found out that Paul Johnson’s wife Marigold, who’s a very good friend of Antonia Fraser’s, had actually done the tango with Harold, and apparently he was a fantastic tango dancer. So, a very good cross-section, lively, unexpected, marvellous. So I thought this time: Updike’s dead — I’ve reviewed Updike twice in my life, both times rather savagely, by Updike’s own high standards, though actually I really admire him as a writer. So I decided the next number would basically be an Updike number; I got Nicholson Baker, Martin Amis to write pieces, Louis Menand, who writes for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. I’m so full of this, I don’t have time to think about what the next thing will be. But it’ll be fine — I’ll have an idea. And it’s actually easy if you think of a themed issue.

My idea is — never to have an editorial, never to say what it stands for, because whatever it stands for, it has to be interesting, it has to be well-written. And you need a mixture of established names, people you admire (there are many people who are established, who aren’t in the magazine, that’s no accident) and unknown writers, like Adam Foulds, who’s just made the Booker shortlist. Whom I taught for just one term as an undergraduate — 15 years ago? And then he disappeared, went to UEA. I didn’t hear from him a while — I started Areté, he sent me some short stories, and I did quite a bit of work on them, but decided finally they weren’t right and turned them down. Later, he sent me this amazing book-length poem, The Broken Word, and I published all of it. So part of the function of the magazine is to discover new writers — you really want to discover major people.

V: Speaking of short stories — you’ve had two stories published in The New Yorker recently, and I’ve heard on the grapevine, and read on Wikipedia, that you’ve also written a novel. Is this a move away from poetry into prose?

CR: I have written a novel — actually I’ve written two. I’m trying to decide which I’m going to publish first at the moment.

V: What are they about?

CR: Hmm — very difficult to answer that, actually. One is called Heartbreak — and that’s what it’s about. The other one is called The Divine Comedy, and it’s about the slightly malicious, ironical nature of life. Is it a move away? — yes, partially — I don’t really know how to write novels. So it’s interesting for me to write them. I do know how to write poems. If you said to me, write a publishable poem by midnight, I could. You’re constantly waiting for something to really push you.

V: Is the problem to do with the different texture of prose, or with the architecture of whole novels, their plot?

CR: They’re completely different forms. Let me put it like this. Two words strike dread into the heart of the ordinary reader, rightly, and they are ‘poetic prose’. A poet’s novel, just full of description, and nothing else. The novel eats up ideas — and I’m really interested in plot.

V: That’s interesting because you’ve written so well about prose stylists — Nabokov, obviously, Updike and Nicholson Baker.

CR: Well, it’s got writing in it, but everything serves something. There aren’t sculptures of confectioner’s custard posing in their prosing pouches, waiting to be admired — it’s got to push on. Everything is doing things. So it uses up a lot of material but it’s very interesting for me to do it. I’m quite a slow worker, actually — 300 words is a good day’s work. Whereas if I’m writing critical prose, I could write 4000 words in a day, and not change any of them. Because you can quote, you can comment. Whereas in fiction you have to invent all this stuff. My working method is: get up at 6, start working at 6.30, having had coffee and a shower; work till about 11.30, shop, cook, eat, siesta from 2 till 4; break for a cup of tea, work from 4:30 till 7, then a late dinner. But I’ve done nothing else. The TLS asked me to review John Carey’s book about Golding, and I said — actually, I’m writing a novel full-time. Critical prose is much easier to write.

V: To talk a bit about critical prose: one of the things I enjoy about your pieces in Areté and in your essay collections is that you have this kind of jokey ease, which maybe does things that more academic criticism can’t. Is that fair to say?

CR: Academic criticism — a lot of it, how can I put this nicely? is deliberately professionalized. It’s a form of discourse which is only really available to other professionals. I’ve never been interested in that form of prose, which is ugly, jargon-filled … I always think it’s better to be memorable, to take the imagery where you find it. So that’s how I write — I write like a journalist. Many academics don’t like it — so you just have to be better at criticism than they are, show them you’re not stupid, that you’re well-read. In other words: I am an academic; I wouldn’t say I’m a scholar, but I’ve read a lot, and I know a lot. By a scholar I mean somebody who’s actually discovering authors we’ve never read, that might have no literary claims on our attention. But this room is full of books I’ve read and I’ve got a good memory, and I choose to write in a way that is — available.

V: I suppose it’s a style of writing that may get bashed out of you when you’re an undergraduate. I enjoyed reading your essays before I came to Oxford, but to an extent as a student you’re just not allowed to write that way.

CR: In a way I can see that it’s quite sound advice; if you write like me, you aren’t going to do very well in Finals. People like the smell of — themselves. You can pick up an essay, smell it, and say it’s a First. And that just means it’s couched in a certain kind of way. I remember saying to one of my students — that’s funny, that’s memorable. And they said to me, well, somebody else told me I shouldn’t do this. And I said: well, make your choice.

V: Let’s get back to Areté. Your website quotes The Wall Street Journal’s description of the magazine: ‘lively, engaging, sometimes disturbing and even annoying … ’ Would it be fair to say that Areté frequently aims to be annoying, to be provocative?

CR: We run a series called Our Bold. And there is a waspish, deliberately waspish, element to this … I think all literary magazines should have an element of mischief in them. Private Eye always portrays me as a score-settler — they cite Peter Conrad as an example of my score-settling, but actually Peter Conrad is an old friend of mine. It just so happens that he said Razumov commits suicide at the end of Under Western Eyes. He’s obviously thinking of Nostromo and Decoud, and he gets it wrong. So we twist his tail a little bit. But he’s an old colleague of mine … James Fenton, whom we’ve also done, is a very good friend.

V: Is there a sense that if you’re contributing to a discourse which is going to have lots of lively dispute anyway, you might as well be forthright — there’s no point hedging yourself in  with perhapses and it-is-possible-to-argue-thats?

CR: ‘Damn perhapses.’, as Ezra Pound says in the margins of The Waste Land. ‘You Tiresias, you damn well know.’ Okay: I’m not Tiresias, but there is in academe this pretence of hesitation when people actually already know what they think. And I say things straightforwardly. I think this is bad, this is good … I think criticism should be judicious but judiciousness shouldn’t be a manner — not really sincere, just a way of approaching what you want to do, hedged around with false modesty. Seems crazy.

V: Correct me if I’m wrong — Areté doesn’t have a letters page, does it?

CR: It does have a letters page, sometimes.

V: So would you be willing to accept articles for publication which might take issue with articles which have already been published? I remember disagreeing in particular with the piece on Daljit Nagra, Adam Thirlwell’s piece, which was written in this effervescent way which made you want to respond to it, immediately. And not really having an avenue to do that …

CR: It’s true we don’t get many letters, partly because there’s a three-month gap between issues. But we did a huge interview with Robert Craft, 80 or 90 pages: I thought it was very interesting and that no one else in the world would do this. Only Areté. Or The New Yorker, in the old days. Craft took to pieces the Stravinsky biographer, Stephen Walsh, and Walsh replied. His reply is about 4 pages long. So, you know, we do have a letters page, and if you’d wanted to disagree, I would have been delighted. I like letters — shows people are reacting.

V: I wanted to ask you also about your experience as an editor. You’ve edited for lots of things, including The New Statesman and obviously Faber and Faber. What is it that you really enjoy about that kind of role?

CR: My wife is always saying give it up, just write. I’m mildly addicted — to magazines more than publishing. Publishing was fun, but I was pleased to leave. The difference between publishing and academe — you still get up at 6.30, but in academe you’re reading Dickens. It’s mostly good stuff; whereas in publishing you read a lot of rubbish. I suppose what I like about it is that it’s kind of instantaneous, relatively speaking. You have the book, you persuade the reviewer to do it, the piece comes back, you edit the piece, and it’s out. It’s doing things. I like the idea that the magazine has good criticism in it. Most literary journalism has really gone down the sink. Maybe I think that because I’m an old fart now, but I don’t think so. You think: this is criticism? Here I am, in my latest incarnation as a novelist — I’m already dreading my novel’s reviews. Because they consist of a plot summary and a one-sentence verdict. This is laughable — well, at least with mine they won’t be able to summarise the plot. But they’ll find plenty to attack.

Real criticism needs more space than it gets. You don’t want things to be as long as they are in The New York Review of Books — although actually they aren’t anymore, because Bob Silvers, the editor, put a cap on all these long pieces. Nothing gets more than around 3000 words. Whereas people like my editing because I don’t give a length. If my contributors go too long, I cut — I say this is interesting, but it takes too long to get to the text you’re supposed to write about, can you take out this page? And on the whole people agree, they trust me as an editor. The other thing that’s addictive about editing is that people write differently for different editors. This is subliminal. When I was an editor at Faber, we were putting together a book of John Carey’s occasional criticism — I asked what happened to the television reviews you did in The Listener? He said he thought those were too tied to their particular programme — but I said, let me have a read. And we took out the ephemeral stuff, but basically these were very good pieces. I told him these are very fine. ‘Unnecessarily’ well-written for TV reviews. John said, I didn’t want to let Karl down. Karl Miller was editor of The Listener, and people were slightly scared of him. So they always performed better; their pieces were drier and funnier because Karl is a dry, funny guy. I don’t know how this happens — you ask people to write for you, and there is some kind of subliminal change. I think they also feel that I won’t be saying, listen, you can’t say this, this is a friend of mine. All the gloves are off. And that liberates people.

V: Is there the problem that people start to write like you — because they want to impress you?

CR: Possibly. I’m not a great fan of long sentences. I like sentences which are well-written enough and polite enough for you to know where they’re going and what they mean first time. So you’re not constantly saying — pardon? Could you speak a little slower? Sentences have to get there first time. If you have to read something twice because it’s ambiguous, I will say to people, take out this ambiguity. And obviously if you then have people writing for you on a regular basis, they become used to this, so you do less and less editing, it’s great.

V: To talk about style a bit: something I like in Areté, in your recent piece on Golding, for example, is this kind of minute, close-up attention to language, to prose texture, poetry or whatever. Is that something you think there should be more of, in reviews generally?

CR: Yes — but to do that you have to quote. You can’t quote in newspaper reviews; you can quote in the TLS, a little. Basically there isn’t enough space to do this vital thing. And the Golding was simply saying — he wanted to be a poet, so where is the poetry here? Language which can accommodate this kind of approach. He’s a terrific writer.

V: It’s not always clear exactly where such close textual appreciation is supposed to take place. If you can’t quote much in reviews, it also seems there often isn’t much space for this kind of thing in literary criticism.

CR: Well, there are so many forms of literary criticism. There’s the theoretical approach, where the text is a pretext for whatever theoretical model’s being run past you. The postcolonialist position where you discover, amazingly, that the writer against colonialism is also implicated in colonialism, and only the superior critic can see this. Or deconstruction in its many forms, where you arrive at predetermined indeterminacy. That kind of literary criticism looks like close textual criticism but is often doing what Derrida called ‘working the text, working the passage’: the clever thing in deconstruction is to achieve two polar readings of the same passage. Which is a demonstration that language is inadequate. That’s the given telos — so there is a kind of monotony here. And also a kind of perversity — it’s about working the material until metal fatigue sets into the language. Then there’s historical criticism, which is more interested in anything but literature. Perfectly sensible, intelligent academics are actually bored by literature. They want to get into history, to do philosophy. They’d like to do politics. And obviously you get loads of this — Said’s reading of Mansfield Park, it’s all about the sugar trade, it’s all about slavery. Well, actually, no it isn’t. He’s aware of the element of travesty, of course, he’s a sophisticated man — he’s perfectly aware that he’s bringing something 20^th century into this which isolates, focuses, magnifies … it’s a cropped reading of the novel. It takes a tiny bit, blows it up and says isn’t this interesting? And it is quite interesting, but it’s not a reading of Mansfield Park. So there are all these different things. I’m slightly dreading at the moment the idea that we’re all going to be doing scansion. Mainly because loads of people can’t scan. You’ve got to have an ear, you’ve got to train yourself. And as soon as someone comes into the room with a suitcase of rhetorical terms, you know they can’t scan. That will be close reading that will kill close reading for a hundred years.

V: I’m currently writing my DPhil thesis on Elizabeth Bishop, and a lot of the time I want to just talk about how the writing works, rather than trying to excavate — then I find myself just wanting to stop and say, isn’t this brilliant?

CR: Is it Eliot who says Matthew Arnold is a quoter of genius? To quote well, to say ‘isn’t this wonderful’; you’d be amazed how many people don’t know it’s wonderful until you’ve taken it out and shown it to them. And of course Elizabeth Bishop is full of wonderful things. The yacht like Fred Astaire, the fireflies exactly like the bubbles in champagne. These are brilliant things — and you think, and I think, that everyone can see this things. But no — I remember when, in Literary Review, Clive James, at the behest of Ian Hamilton, wrote about Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur — Wilbur who isn’t even in the same town. I mean, she is wonderful, and he is slightly mediocre, to be absolutely honest. He says how good this Wilbur is, and what is wrong with this Elizabeth Bishop poet — he doesn’t get it.

V: He has criticised her use of personification — of the lighthouse in ‘Seascape’, for instance.

CR: Clive is usually quick on his feet, but he was fucking stupid about her. When she died, I was editing Quarto, I got Blake Morrison to write a piece about her. And we were the only English paper that ran anything about her. All her reputation has been after her death. And she is, as you know, a wonderful writer. But people did not see it, and now you think ‘how could they not?’ So it’s always worthwhile to say — look at this, this is brilliant. Even a DPhil thesis should have the room to do this. The other thing that’s amazing to me is, you see someone develop a reputation, and you think, what is this about? There’s nothing here. Why is there this enormous fuss about Don Paterson? There are good things here and there but he’s nothing like as good as Simon Armitage. Then you realise of course, he’s everyone’s alternative to Simon Armitage. It’s what happens in the poetry world. You have somebody who looks like they’re going to get away with success, and the poetry world invents a rival, whom they promote. And that’s Don Paterson. He’s everyone’s answer to charming, brilliant, funny Simon Armitage, who really can write.

V: But in your Areté piece on Don Paterson, isn’t the problem partly in your different approaches to writing — that the kind of exactitude that you’re looking for is not always what his poetry is trying to achieve?

CR: Well — if you read his books of aphorisms, he’s always saying poetry shouldn’t get more complicated, it should get more simple. And I can see that there is a kind of poetry written, for example by Sean O’Brien, where instant comprehension is not what you’re going for. The poem wants to lock you into a syntactical mystery. But, no, the bits of Don Paterson I object to is when he’s trying to explain something, like the Romulus and Remus thing, where it’s just incompetent. It’s not a question of me wanting accuracy and him trying for something else; it’s a question of him wanting accuracy and being unable to deliver it, manifestly.

V: So which poets writing at the moment do you admire?

CR:  I thought the The Broken Word by Adam Foulds was wonderful. I think Armitage is a terrific writer, I really do. And I turned down his second book, at Faber, because I hadn’t read Zoom! I thought the second book was derivative Muldoon and I didn’t need another Muldoon. And it is derivative, that second book, but the first book is a fantastic book. And if I’d read it I’d have known he’d find his form again. Obviously Zoom! owes a lot to Frank O’Hara, but it’s all assimilated. There’s a very rich matrix of material, he’s got the northern probation officer … all that stuff, he’s writing about real things. There’s also quite an old guy, who lives near Grimsby, called Sam Gardiner who I publish a lot in the magazine. I like some of Paul Farley. Some very good touches in Jen Hadfield: ‘turned sausages ejaculate.’ About ten really good poems by Alice Oswald.

V: I’ve been very interested recently in Frederick Seidel’s poetry.

CR: How familiar are you with Lowell?

V: The early stuff in particular is very Lowellian. For a long time I disliked Lowell, but now I’ve started to really get into poets who are influenced by him, like Seidel and Michael Hofmann, it’s made me go back and have another go at him.

CR: Hofmann — Acrimony is a terrific book, I don’t like any of the others particularly. It’s a really interesting book because it’s a derivative book, it derives from Life Studies and is impossible without Life Studies, and yet the sheer force of its subject matter, and the unblinking way he notices his father’s ‘anal pleats’ beside his eyes, under his magnification of his glasses … that sort of ruthless stuff is tremendously memorable. The sequence about his father is very interesting — it derives from Lowell, but it’s also original, and I think nothing he’s written before or since matches it.

V: Lowell seems very hard to get away from — at least I’ve found that. A lot of people are supposed to get annoyed with whoever they’re working on for their thesis, but I think with me it’s been deflected onto the people around Bishop; I’d get very irritated with Lowell as I was reading him.

CR: I used to think that Lowell was absolutely mesmeric until I read the Collected Poems — there’s something in Areté that’s an account of the scales falling from my eyes …

V: There’s a lot of dross in that Collected.

CR: Anthony Hecht pointed out that the original version of ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ had exactly the same number of lines as Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. And there’s a bit of Lowell who was up there with the big boys, or wanted to be up there, from the beginning, completely the opposite of Elizabeth Bishop, who was awfully modest, and tough, and slightly resigned. Only eight people show up to her poetry class at Harvard … she’s only that famous. She’s not rated at all — whereas Lowell went straight to the cloakroom and took the cloak. There he was, kitted out with a sceptre from the word go.

V: But she seems to have had this sense of achievement after actually finishing individual poems, which stands out in comparison to Lowell manically re-arranging things.

CR: Yeah — her craftsmanship was unwavering. She wouldn’t publish anything until it was finished, she’d wait for years. Lowell was greedy, hungry, actually very charming, aware of literary politics in a way that isn’t absolutely healthy. In Notebook there’s a poem about Oskar Kokoschka, where he says, Kokoschka said to me, in a man’s life his reputation vanishes twice. He’s thinking about my reputation, where is it …

He was tremendously charismatic, when he was alive, full of mischievous charm. I met him only once, and I loved him, I thought he was very funny. There was this great moment at the Oxford Union where someone asked him which English poets he liked. And he said: ‘Well, I like … Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Porter, George Barker, Edwin Brock, Anthony Thwaite,’ and he just went on … and when he’d finished, it took around ten minutes to get through this thing, he said — ‘I hope I didn’t leave anyone out.’ It brought the house down. So he was very charming — he was aware of his reputation, his wife edited for The New York Review of Books, so his poems were always appearing in prominent places. Whereas Bishop was still getting turned down by The New Yorker late in her life. Lowell always had a seat reserved at the top table. Some people feel this way about Tom Stoppard, in the world of drama — I once said to somebody, another playwright, why is it that they dislike Tom so much? And she said, oh, you know, he just uses up all the oxygen. And Lowell used up all the oxygen. He was a blaze of attention. And Bishop no one regarded. I remember saying to Julian Barnes in New York, this was years and years ago, before he published a novel, saying would you get me the Farrar Strauss edition of her poems, I’d be very grateful. And he said, are they any good?. He’d never heard of her. So there’s been a great reversal there. There are always big figures, colossi, who’ve turned out to have one foot in the sandpit.

V: What do you think about Geoffrey Hill, who is quite fashionable at the moment?

CR: Well, he’s fashionably unfashionable, isn’t he? I think Mercian Hymns is a terrific book — that’s it.

V: So you’re not a fan of the later Hill?

CR: I’ve written about him, in Areté, about Scenes from Comus. I think the piece is called ‘Scenes from Comas’ … it’s perfectly clear that I’m trying my level best to make sense of this. People quote perfectly good but not especially wonderful bits of description — currants in a huge bun of obscurity. You find two of the fuckers and say, what’s the problem here — filled with currants. But it isn’t. The donut is made of semantic semtex — boom — you have no idea what he’s talking about.

V: There is a kind of awe to his reviewers. And the blurb quotes he gets …

CR: There is always somebody with the gall to say — I’m of the quality of Milton. It happens all the time. Brodsky did this. A complete fraud. But people accepted this valuation, and with Geoffrey Hill it’s the same. Because most people aren’t that interested in actually reading poetry. And there are other people — like Lowell, I mean I fell in love with him myself, and then out of love with him. And I suppose falling out of love with him meant reading ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ and thinking this has got to make sense. And then making sense of it and thinking, right, this makes sense, but this passage here is baloney.

V: People do seem to idolise certain poets, in a way that’s so locked in.

CR: Well, Hofmann wrote a piece in The London Review of Books saying the poets he initially admired and still admires — Paulin, Brodsky, etc — were all chosen arbitrarily. Like declaring yourself a supporter of Leicester City football team. That’s who you support, so you support them. Brodsky used to have a huge amount of support. I remember, when I was about the only person in the world who wasn’t on side. I turned him down at Faber, without realising I was turning him down. Matthew Evans, the chairman, put his head round the door and said, is Brodsky any good? No, I said, not even looking up from the letter I was typing. And that was that, we’d turned him down. It’s been very interesting to me to watch the argument against him gaining ground.

V: What is it you call him in your essay, a nervous world-class mediocrity?

CR: Yes, Michael Hofmann still hasn’t forgiven me for that.  So there are always going to be people like this, and I think Geoffrey Hill is one of them. He’s an academic poet; his vocabulary is fustian, with the odd contemporary turn popped in to make it vaguely plausible — and academics love this. They think he’s Milton because he sounds like Milton. But for God’s sake, who wants to sound like Milton, now?

V: I’ve been quite disappointed recently at how polarized the poetry world can be. When I’m in London speaking to young poets and people there, they like a range of poets — then I get back to Oxford, and talking to graduate students it can seem sometimes like the only poets taken seriously are Hill, Muldoon, Prynne — these are the serious poets.

CR: You can see why. There is a great difference between those poets, but they all have something in common — difficulty. If you’re a graduate student — this is professionalization again — you want to admire something that other people can’t read, where there is work for you. Those three poets represent an employment opportunity. They wouldn’t like Elizabeth Bishop because she is, relatively speaking, quite easy, although she isn’t really that easy — as you know. But there are so many local pleasures, and you persist. ‘Filling Station’ — how can anyone resist it? Well these people can. Because it’s witty, it’s lovely, and they understand it. It appears to offer them no opportunity … what critics want is a pommel horse they can pirouette around, which will continue to support them while they’re being brilliant themselves. Elizabeth Bishop — well, there’s no place for your brilliance, because the thing itself is brilliant. It’s made out of glass. It’s a piece of sculpture. Young people always like difficulty. You want to be outdistancing people. When I started doing a doctorate, it was on Coleridge’s philosophy — and the reason I did it was because I wanted to be able to say to people at a dinner party, ‘I think if you’d read Kant’s Critique der Reinen Vernunft, you’d know that … ’ I wanted to be able to silence people. It’s a terrible impulse. But of course in the end I couldn’t get through Kant, it was unintelligible. But that’s what I wanted to do — so I recognise this impulse in all these graduate students. I suffered through it myself once.

V: Let’s talk about description a bit. You’ve written about people whose feats of description you admire — like Nicholson Baker, Nabokov, Bishop — and those whose description you’re less keen on, like Charles Tomlinson, or the more abstract bits of Wallace Stevens. What makes for really good description?

CR: Economy, economy. Tomlinson: it’s a bit laboured, slightly pedantic, it doesn’t move quickly enough for me, pseudo-scientific — everybody knows you can describe something in scientific terms that obliterate the object. In Carey’s book What Good Are The Arts, he talks about a bit of Lord Of The Flies, where Simon’s body is washed out to sea, surrounded by a seethe of plankton creatures — and Carey says we don’t know what they are. If you ask a zoologist what they are, and I did, I asked Dawkins, and he told me to look it up on Wikipedia, and its description meant nothing to me. So the exact thing, the scientific thing, is what stops you seeing it — because it’s only available to science, it’s professionalized vocabulary again. But Golding’s describing them in a way that makes you see them. And I think that Tomlinson is kind of conscientious, nothing more. There are people like Elizabeth Bishop who just do it — like that — and then there are people who are like Alf Ramsay, the old England football coach, and that’s all about work-rate, putting in the hours.

V: It can be about you watching the writer struggle.

CR: You mean, that’s the pleasure of it? The struggle for description …

V: Yes — and this can also mean the poet, wrestling in a rather macho way with intolerable difficulties, shabby equipment …

CR: There’s a Kafka story called ‘Description Of A Struggle’. Invert that and you get ‘Struggle of a Description’. Well, that may have some mileage in it. But I mistrust poetry about poetry. It happens, people do write about it. This is another tic of the academy at the moment, that all poems are about poetry, writing poetry. And what amazes me is how these truisms get into circulation and how hard they are to get out of circulation. And then when they are out of circulation, everyone’s thinking — how could anyone ever believe that? Helen Vendler — all poems are about the writing of poetry. No they’re not.

V: So is the job of description in prose different? I’ve just been reading Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, and what’s interesting about that is that you don’t know if Michael’s black or white, and yet certain details are easy to visualize nonetheless, because of the way in which they’re described.

CR: Coetzee is a very interesting novelist in this respect. I think actually he’s a kind of middling talent … very intelligent, very well-meaning, I think, but actually, he can’t really do it. But he has a reason for not doing it, which is very interesting — he’s essentially a colonial, Africa is not his continent, so how would he be able to describe it? That’s his rationale, when he writes about it. The master can’t come, take the land, describe it … describing it would be a form of appropriation. But actually, of course, this is a nonsense. Kipling could go to Africa, India, Japan, anywhere, and describe anything. Because he’s a genius. As Joyce said — ‘I can do anything with language’. And he could. Kipling is a wonderful describer. And it’s not a question of appropriation, it’s a question of writing. Coetzee has a plain, dogged, well-meaning, slightly mediocre set of abilities. But he fits marvellously into the university’s postcolonial program. Did you read Disgrace?

V: I did read Disgrace.

CR: What did you think of the denouement, the rape of the girl, the idea that she accepts this is OK because she’s co-opted into colonial guilt and she accepts responsibility for this.

V: Well — I should say, I really enjoy his books. For a while I wondered about how several are about an older man and a younger woman — but is that really what he’s doing? It’s more philosophical, he’s interested in the working out of a certain kind of problem.

CR: Well, I don’t think there’s anything disgraceful about older men and younger women. Is Charlie Chaplin a monster, because he married Oona O’Neil? The idea that there should be this — apartheid? And in Disgrace the university committee presents it as a form of paedophilia, but it’s not. In Disgrace the man sleeps with one of his students — say she’s 20, he’s 35, 40. This is human life, for god’s sake. It is not paedophilia. And it may be uncomfortable/inappropriate in all kinds of ways, but — I take it this is the moral dynamic of the book — when it comes to it, he refuses to make the orthodox apology. He won’t do it. Then when you get the rape of the girl by the black men: like her he thinks this is terrible, but we brought it on ourselves. In other words, he accepts a more unpleasant orthodoxy, which seems to me to be, frankly, morally insane. I find that part of the book repugnant. The idea that it’s OK to rape anyone, provided they come from a class of oppressors. So — I read him with real interest, I think some of his essays are absolutely brilliant — they’re another example of good journalism. He’s an academic, he’s completely theorized. You can tell from the way he writes, but he writes for The New York Review of Books, and they won’t publish that kind of stuff. A typical Coetzee essay will begin with this emblematic example of someone’s writing, and then he’ll say, they were born here, etc., give you the stuff, as if he were Samuel Johnson. And then take you through the criticism, and it’s all beautifully lucid. Mediocre is too strong. But not a great writer. You have to put him against someone like Kipling. Why do I say Kipling? — he’s just a natural writer. Natural writers do it again, and again, and again and again. Think of Joyce — ‘Buck Mulligan slid open the scone and plastered butter across its smoking pith.’ It’s a fucking scone. He’s just endowed it with amazement — brilliant.

V: Let’s return to Areté to finish. You’ve expanded into a press recently, publishing Christopher Reid’s collection A Scattering, which has been nominated for the Forward prize.

CR: I hope it’s going to win. We’ve reprinted 500.

V: Are there any plans for publishing more books?

CR: Yes, it’s not impossible. But the great thing is that — bigger publishers are a machine, and a machine has to be fed. So in any publisher’s catalogue, there are going to be ten books that they want to do, and forty that they don’t, maybe thirty … that’s what happens. If you publish like we do, you only publish when you want to publish something. And I think his poems are wonderful. And I was really pleased — well, fuck it, I’m really sorry we didn’t do Adam Foulds’s little book, because we could have, if I’d thought of it then. But something else will come along, and I’ll think — yeah, we could do that. So: no plans to do anything at the moment, but no plans not to, either. We might do a best of Areté, but that might be better coming from a commercial publisher.