The renowned poet, novelist, journalist, critic and librettist talks about his new novel – and living in Blackheath
BY BEN WEST
Blake Morrison is perhaps best-known for his acclaimed memoirs, Things My Mother Never Told Me and And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the latter having been made into a film starring Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson and Colin Firth.
His wide-ranging work has also included studies on the murder of Jamie Bulger and of the Yorkshire Ripper, while his novel The Last Weekend was adapted for television. He’s written a great deal of journalism (for The Guardian, TLS, New Statesman and New Yorker and others), spent more than 15 years as a literary editor (for The Observer and The Independent on Sunday), and been involved with a number of theatre and music projects.
Between all this he has managed to fit in being a professor of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. I catch up with him at a cafe in Blackheath Village during a hectic week promoting his new novel, The Executor.
Born in Skipton in North Yorkshire in 1950, he’s lived in the Blackheath and Greenwich area since his twenties, along with his wife Kathy, whom he met at UCL while pursuing a PhD in 1974. I ask him how he ended up living in this pocket of London.
“When I left Nottingham University I wanted to live in London and ended up in north London for six months at first,” he says. “I then got a job at South East London Technical College teaching English, so we looked at a flat [in Church Terrace] and have been here ever since. You end up in one bit of London and never leave, especially when it becomes home to your kids.”
They lived in Mycenae Road, then had a short lease flat at Macartney House at the top of Crooms Hill.
“It had a wonderful roof terrace overlooking Greenwich Park,” he says. “We had a view of St Paul’s from the toilet window. When we ran out of space with three children we moved over the heath near Blackheath Village.
“What I like about this area is the proximity of the park and the river. I’m still fond of walking over to the Henry Moore statue in the park, or the General Wolfe statue. I love those views, though it has changed enormously with the development of Canary Wharf.
“Blackheath Halls offers a lot, and the Greenwich Picturehouse, and there’s the Greenwich Theatre too. I like the proximity to central London. If I want to see a play or exhibition, it’s just 20 minutes away.
“What I don’t like is the kind of stuffiness you can get here. I don’t like the ‘keep people out’ mentality in parts of this area – I like an inclusive approach, I guess. Every so often you feel when living in the Borough of Greenwich, one of the poorest in London, some people assume Blackheath is elitist and affluent, which I don’t like.”
Morrison counteracts the sedentary writing life by playing tennis two or three times a week and by running: a route extending along Charlton Park and Maryon Park to the river is a particular favourite.
No doubt running is a good time to think of plots and develop characters, and to let the imagination run wild. Is there a form of writing that’s his favourite?
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I began as a poet and then after my memoir about my father was published I had a long period of only writing prose. I went into writing fiction as well as memoir, and I’ve recently gone back to poetry in my new book, The Executor. It’s a mixture of fiction and poetry. The main character is a poet, the logic of the plot demands that there be these poems.”
He was writing them through someone else, his character?
“Yes. I wrote the poems first before I thought of the novel. I didn’t feel the voice was mine, and then I started thinking the poems could be part of a narrative. Then I wrote extra ones in the voice of this man.”
The Executor, his fourth novel, is an elegant and unsettling novel about a man who becomes the literary executor of a friend’s estate, and the moral dilemmas he faces when he uncovers some unpublished, and potentially explosive, material. Morrison was inspired to write the novel because he’d noticed that there had been a lot of cases in recent years of people complaining of being victims of a book.
“Someone writes about their family in a book and a member of the family complains how they have been portrayed in the book,” he says. “Or somebody commissions a biography, and the biography reveals things that the family don’t like.
“I was really conscious of an increasing number of cases of people being written about objecting, asserting their rights rather than the right to freedom of expression. Now the right to privacy is being asserted. I think that’s what got me going. The battle between right of privacy and freedom of expression. It comes up in this novel, and the poet finds it extremely difficult.
“I suppose a most extreme example is Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian author who wrote about his family with searing honesty. They’re really, really powerful books, I got addicted to them. He writes unsparingly. His uncle led the chorus of complaints.”
Did he feel he shouldn’t be reading his books?
“A lot of memoirs, you think, ‘should I be privy to this?’ It adds to the thrill of reading it, I guess. It’s a voyeuristic kind of thrill. I’ve been lucky to have written two family memoirs and not really had any ructions within the family as a result. My sister and I still get on, I got on with my mother after the book about my father was published.”
At Goldsmiths, Morrison works with students who worry about the effects on other people of what they are writing, and this has contributed to the subject being a preoccupation of his for a few years now.
“The executor in my novel is gobsmacked at how the poet can write so candidly,” he says. “He feels he couldn’t write like that, about sex or the death of his mother, so there is that acknowledgement to be open and candid – and brutal really – about material.
“There are two kinds of writers, those who have inhibitions about writing about stuff like that and others who think, ‘it’s my story, it’s my life, it’s my right, and fuck everybody else.’
“There was an extreme case – you interviewed him, didn’t you, James Rhodes – where his ex-wife sued him for writing about his own experiences of being abused, and that was on behalf of the child. Anyway, he won his case and he had an absolute right to write it.”
Morrison has written at length on subjects that could be touchy for different reasons – the Jamie Bulger case and the Yorkshire Ripper. Did he worry about the reaction he might receive, writing about these notorious cases?
“They were very different things,” he says. “The common thread was murder, but the Ripper grew up near where I did. That was the idea, thinking about him growing up in the same area. I wrote about the Bulger case because I had been sent there by the New Yorker to cover the trial. I felt there was more to be said than in one article. I felt strongly about the age of criminal responsibility in this country, which I think is too low. They were horrible cases but there were things to be said that the newspapers didn’t manage to say.”
Morrison finds it difficult to decide on his favourite writers, there being so many, but plumps for Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Julian Barnes, Rachel Cusk and Ian McEwan for starters.
“I’m told that men primarily read men but I find that I read as many women as men now,” he says.
What would he have liked to have done if he had not become a writer?
“My parents were doctors and so I was expected to follow them, so I was a great disappointment to them in that respect, although I did get a PhD, allowing me to be called ‘doctor’. In my twenties I used to fantasise about being a taxi driver, having brief meetings with people, and writing on the side, a completely different job from the obvious ones for a writer like teaching or journalism. But of course I never did anything about it, it was a fantasy.
“In Yorkshire I went, with other people, for a trial at Preston North End Football Club, but was advised it wouldn’t mean that much, and then I got more into girls and school, and I never saw it as a serious possibility. But it was fun at the time.”
Morrison is known to be a Labour voter, so what are his thoughts on the political world at present?
“I have some ambivalence about Momentum and Corbyn. I feel let down by the Labour Party over Europe. I felt far more distraught about the European referendum than any election result, cutting our ties with Europe. I’m more of a centrist, which today I gather is a very dirty word. But I am more a Labour-voting centrist than a Momentum person.”
Many people say the UK is in a worse mess than for many years. Would he agree with that?
“I think it’s heading that way. We’re not in a good place. With the cuts to public services, the health service, we are in a worst place already, definitely. I’m afraid the political parties aren’t brave enough over taxation. If you put 2p on tax when you’re earning a certain amount, public services wouldn’t be destroyed as they are at the moment.”
And what advice would he give to aspiring writers?
“Keeping going is the main thing, not being discouraged,” he says. “If I was starting out now I would sign up for the kind of writing course we offer at Goldsmiths or you can do elsewhere. Because there are skills that can be acquired but more importantly the agents and the publishers are looking to these courses now to spot talent, so it makes practical sense to do creative writing courses, which, when they started, people thought ‘what’s this weird American import, creative writing?’. There are skills to learn. It’s the principle of showing your work to others and realising that writing is about communicating with others. You can get very solipsistic and in your own world and not convey what you want to convey, and that’s why getting a group of people to respond to your work is so helpful.
“However, with these creative writing courses if 30 a year are studying for an MA and one a year gets published, that’s a realistic expectation. But it can be life-changing in other ways than the commercial mainstream route. People write memoirs for their family, or going the self-publishing route, it may have been worthwhile simply to get that story out, even if the number of people reading it has been relatively modest.”
It’s cheering that Morrison is positive about the future of literature, despite all the chatter there is about of the effects of social media, the talk of dumbing down, shortening attention spans and a plethora of distractions.
“I think people always need stories,” he says. “But how they may consume them may change, on iPhones and iPads and so on. But that need for stories continues, and always will. I also think a whole generation has learnt about self expression in a way my generation didn’t have that outlet. In the past you could write letters, but unless you were writing to a girlfriend or something like that while you were away you didn’t tend to. However, today people are texting each other all the time. So they are developing an articulacy in the written word that didn’t exist before, an outlet they didn’t have before. So I’m not despairing about the future at all.”
Blake Morrison’s new novel, The Executor is published by Chatto & Windus, £16.99
Note: this article appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of Black + Green Magazine
