hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with Catherine Rondell Catherine is a fellow at All Souls college she is the best-selling author of numerous children's books every morning she wakes up and does a cartwheel but most prominently for me she is the author of the recent book super infinite the transformations of John Donne which is this year so far
probably my favorite book of the Year Catherine welcome thank you so much for having me okay so John Donne he's an English poet born in 1572. what is your origin story of how you became obsessed with him um I have parents who believed in the power of memorizing poetry and in the idea that even if you memorize poetry that you don't understand there will be a time in your life when it will come
back for you so I was paid to memorize poetry and my mother used to put it on the wall next to the sink where we would brush our teeth and some of it was a lot of it was T.S eliot's Possum's book of practical cats but there was also some John Donne poetry and even though I didn't fully grasp it I found it to be faintly alchemic I loved it I loved it strangeness and its difficulty and so
I've loved him for a very long time now and how old are you at that initial point I was probably about eight and when does the flipping Age come when you think this is my thing I'm going to do something with this um I think probably in my teen years he in my favorite poet and a kind of a talismanic author I found him a place of Refuge against that which seemed to me often ungenerous in it's so much of
popular culture now offers a quite um an exciting vision of what your mind and language might be capable of and I found him a brilliant antidote to that a kind of Boardwalk against a kind of anti-intellectualism um and then also of course I had boyfriends who would send it to me and I I found that very romantic so the early John Dan he writes poetry about the transmigration of souls he
writes attract defending suicide that even suggests possibly Christ committed suicide quote you know on purpose uh was early John Dunn at all a Christian I mean it's a really good question the one that we will never know the answer to Is What precise shape did his inner religious life take because of course the central thing that most people who know a little bit about done know is that he was born into a Catholic
Family at a time when to be Catholic was to be persecuted and he died the dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral and that necessitated both the conversion and a kind of emphaticness in his allegiance to the religion of the crown so he didn't just cease to be a Catholic he wrote two major tracts against Catholicism pseudomata and ignatius's conglive and the question of how far he ever believed how far his Christianity
his his Catholicism was real and how far his later religion uh was real and how far it was a necessity born of poverty or or a kind of questing ambition is something that a huge number of people will never agree on personally I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was a time when many people changed religions throughout their lives and I think that his writing the passion
and further in his religious poetry the focus and intelligence in his sermons The breadth of dedication of thought and time it will have taken I find it very easy to believe both in the reality of his Catholicism and in the reality of his Protestant conversion just a general question for perspective if you take poets and intellectuals in early to mid 19th century England or London life what percentage of them do
you think believe not in God but in the trinity in literal Christian doctrine 19th century No No duns time 17th century right um I think belief is such a difficult word because it will have mean meant different things you will have had someone like kit Marlow who played very openly the idea of of real atheism the idea that we live in an empty universe and of course some people believe that
he was murdered for it other people believed that it was a brawl in a pub when he got knifed in the eye for not paying a bill and we'll never know I think I think I mean if you ask me to put a number on it a number yes this is a podcast right okay I'm gonna say for 70 of people found from if you read the letters that we have of the time people are often in their private lives expressing
um people are often in their private lives expressing very real comfort and Hope from certain forms of religious Doctrine the amount of knowledge that people would have had what the Bible actually said the amount of access people who have had two Bibles in English of course very limited but I think a lot of people believe because it was offered as a way to put down your anxiety your hopes your chaos it was a structure that
gave people purpose and meaning and then of course I think there will have been a lot of people who went to church it was against the law not to go to church but who went to church out of Conformity out of Duty out of not really caring that much and I'm sure in every church service there were the passionate devotees and the people who were thinking about lunch as there are now
for done can the meaning of a suicide ever be truly transparent no I think for done suicide is one of the things that dogs his life it was illegal during Dunn's lifetime to commit suicide it was a crime in that most strange of ironies punishable by Death suicides could be buried with a strike put through their hearts at the crossroads um in France there have been accounts of suicides dead bodies of suicides dragged
through the streets as a kind of warning and of course it was against religious Doctrine John Dunn's letters tell us about his very real and Urgent keenings towards death he was a man who felt the pull of he says his own sword and he wrote the first full-length treaties in the English language by Thanatos on suicide which argues that in very specific limited circumstances suicide is not a sin that Christ himself
was the one great suicide and so for done to be pulled towards suicide was both for him to feel he was being pulled towards sin but also to feel that it would be a shortcut a a leaping into infinity and into the presence of God and so for him it was never going to be in any way straightforward or transparent what's the political meaning of biathanatos to construct on suicide
is it asserting a right of self-ownership or how do we think about it is it egalitarian or what what is it doing politically in a very political time politically of course it's complicated by the fact that he wrote it but not to be read so he wrote a text that he explicitly told a friend when he went to Germany later in life uh neither burn it nor publish it uh you know give it not
to the fire but show it to no one because he was aware that it was a text that could lead him to be put in very real Peril not necessarily of anything dramatic like uh court cases but he would have probably lost his job and so for him the politics of it a a profoundly opaque and probably informed by a lot of his own desire to justify his own Suicidal Tendencies there are those within done scholarship
who think that by Thanatos was in fact a personal bid to write out of himself his desire towards suicide that in some ways those who talk about it a great deal are perhaps the least likely to commit it and that he was in some way protecting himself in that way so that it was a a personal text in a way that it doesn't look I don't think that it is arguing anything as radical as absolute
self-ownership because I think that would be anachronistic for the time but I think it's one of the texts that come closest to arguing that our certainties it famously says we have been sure about so many things and we have been wrong about them we've been wrong about the Stars so he is certainly saying all certainty has in it the Peril of being not just wrong but wrong in a way that will create misadventure in chaos
he is doing something quite radical there he is saying there is no single great truth upon which we can base anything and and that was bold whether or not you agree with it what is the best straussian reading of John Dunn straussian reading yes I don't think I know the answer to that can you think of one well if you think he might be an atheist uh I don't think he was but I think it's
a plausible reading that he never believed in the Anglican Church he became a Dean it was for survival and for income and for security what he cared about was his art and a lot of it was a charade and even in the early work he was a very sort of high-class Entertainer and in some way it wasn't sincere I don't know if I would defend that but I would give it a chance of ten percent yeah I think so it's certainly a
post it's a position that was very popular in the 1980s and John Kerry is completely spectacular book John Dunn life mind and art certainly gives truct that as a possible position one of the reasons that that Vision has really been shifted in the last 10 years or so has been the discovery of new letters and the dating of old letters to suggest that even after he had started to reach some form of real middle class wealth
and solidity he still kept pushing at a way that could have in fact been detrimental to him towards uh being ordained that um the King's favorite Buckingham was trying to put him off and was trying to offer him various forms of Secretarial ship maybe going to Venice maybe going um to Ireland and he in the face of these letters was pushing back and insisting on the pursuit of God and also
he reads to me in his letters like a man bent on some form of sincerity for every letter where there is flattery and a kind of ornate rhetoric that seems to have at the heart of it when you burrow through only a joke there are also letters that seem to express a man who wanted to be able to lay down truth in words and therefore I do believe in his religion now there's a superficial but possibly
true view have done that he wrote too many verses and epithomians for pay and the world would have been better if he had just done more songs than sonnets do you agree yes of course yes but I think you agree I absolutely agree but then you can say that almost any poet of the period for whom the need to make money meant that they had to compose in all weight ways which absolutely what step
by step in the fashion of the time and therefore held back their more radical and inventive impulses so when they weren't being paid they often wrote their best work for so long why was Ben Johnson so much more popular a poet than done uh partly because he was more famous partly because uh he wrote plays in the plays pleased first the queen and then the king partly because he wrote for the
boys of uh the boy players and the boy players had a real glamor at the time and Queen Elizabeth was borderline obsessed with them was Johnson ever a great poet or is it all just pretty good none of it sticks with me am I missing something if you're missing something I'm missing it too I admired Johnson's structural Ingenuity and I admire his Flair and I really admire his capacity for gossip because it gave us a lot of the
knowledge that we have of the time but I have never managed to find him a poet who uh gets into your intestines there's a recent book by Claire Jackson called devil land which I very much admire and it stresses how much British thought in life in the 17th century was I think she even uses the word deranged crazy it was a highly ideological error people started believing rioting doing
all kinds of crazy things do you agree and if so why did that happen then I know that's a big question but I've been very interested in this issue I think it does look to us now like a time where a kind of febrile intensity of thought became not just commonplace but contagious and certainly um you know you could wake up in the morning and you could see acts of great devotion and great violence before
breakfast you could see a man burned for his belief you can see a woman hung for hers you could see um people willing to push large beliefs on themselves to the point of death so certainly uh I think it was also exacerbated by plague by the fact that every few years in Britain the plague would come Galloping through major cities and thousands of people would die overnight so I think that that closeness
to death to war to pestilence also to Beauty to an influx of money uh to the fact that suddenly we had access to far greater knowledge because of the boom of the printing press the that's enough to create a febrile moment both intellectually and emotionally I think are we in some ways re-entering a Time somewhat analogous to the 17th century in England I think it does sometimes feel like we
are that there is something a similarly uh explosive moment where we have newly explosive possibilities and newly explosive fears and their feels like something similarly extreme happening although I would say from different causes when you're writing about John Donne what is the proper music to listen to William bird or is it you know Simon and Garfunkel one could if one wanted to listen to uh
Dr Atomic which is set back to my heart into an aria which is very beautiful the cage you could listen to some semi-contemporary adaptations though none absolutely contemporary the Campion version of the break of day um I wouldn't personally uh I would say maybe some Mala someone who believed in both chaos and Glory you know our next podcast guest is in fact John Adams what's your favorite word invented by
John Dunn um I um so the reason the book is called super infinite I do love impossibilitate um I think it speaks highly to his sense of that which did not look impossible but in fact when you look at it closely is so uh but most of all I love his talent for the super prefix that he added it uh to so many things a kind of insistence on things which lead outside language so
super infinite super miraculous super Eternal super dying these are the linguistic habits of a man who Longs for immensities I like just simple emancipation that's from Dan isn't it uh Miss of me not to offer the caveat that often the OED has always found first uses in canonical authors in part because they're just the ones who survive fire so of course he may have just been noting down a word in common
parlance rather than being in its inventor why did Don visit Johannes Kepler I think a fascination with the Stars I think that Dan was compelled by the idea of heavens and compelled by the idea which he found deeply troubling of scientific discoveries which were casting in doubt the great certainties of the previous generations he had a complicated relationship with Innovation I think he
went to Kepler to understand more about the ways that we moved around the Sun and that the moons moved around us in what ways was done in typical homeschooled child [Laughter] I was very brief ly I figured as much yes um of course the vast majority of boys of his class and religion were homeschooled boys because it was very hard to go to school as a young Catholic and as the book discusses going to
school at the time would have introduced you to a kind of Ruthless brutality that would have been difficult to recover from boys were beaten some of them to death um it was expected that you would fight your colleagues your compatriots from the age of about 12 and boys routinely died at school um I think that he certainly has some of the idiosyncrasies of thought of someone who did not grow up with a huge cohort
of friends but also he became a great maker and keeper of bosom friends his love for his friends is something I believe very truly and you know sir letters more than kisses mingle souls he wrote to Henry Goodyear a man who I think kiwi we know he would have given up a great deal to help now you have two books rooftoppers and skysteppers about rooftop walking some might call them children's books I'm not
sure that's exactly the right description but what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking oh well I mean it's falling off um but what leads you to fall off like if you're a rooftop walking if you were to fall off what would be the proximate cause of that event um Philippe Petit who is of course one of the great roof workers of the world and the man who strung the wire between
the Twin Towers in 1977 talks about vertigo as a beast that has to be tamed piece by piece it can never be overcome all at once and vertigo he says is not the fear that you will fall it is the fear that you will jump and that of course is the thing that when you are roof walking you are taming you are trying to unmoor your sense of danger and of not being able to trust yourself not to jump from your sense of Beauty
and the vision of a city that you get up high but I roof walk for very practical reasons to see views that would otherwise be not really available to me and increasingly privatized city of London and you're also learning to fly a small plane is that correct that's true yes for the same reason again for the feeling of height I come from a family of Pilots both my grandfather Vice and second world war
um and my uncle can fly a plane and so about five years ago I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it so if we're trying to build a unified theory of you how does wanting to see things from above fit into the theory because I don't I mean I enjoy seeing things from above but I don't put a lot of time into it and that's not
unusual so you're you're somewhat different right um I think I love the idea so I think it might be connected to fiction it is very difficult when writing a story to hold the whole of it in one's head uh if you complete a book that you feel you have achieved that that feels like a great gift you have given yourself it is very difficult to conceptualize a place that I have not
seen from above I like the idea of being able to understand the way a city works by seeing its movements from above also cities are more beautiful scene from above they things that look down at street level grubby and deeply human and you know crisprackers and old Burger papers from up high show the sort of prehistamic prehistoric elements of the way that people move in crowds does rooftop walking also improve
your research at All Souls um I don't think that I could claim that rooftop walking really feeds into my research on the grounds that most of my research has done in cold archives in libraries around the world looking at manuscripts and hunting for traces of done in in old books my hypothesis is that in the true unified theory of you which I do not have that rooftop walking does in fact improve your research that
there's somehow a convex combination of like way down low and way up high that you need to maintain intellectual balance that could be an argument that if you are someone who's work necessitates the dwelling entirely on detail because of course academic study of John Dunn which is slightly different from my book requires just borrowing into these very small details to understand about the
conditions of production of the moment and that the flip side of that is the kind of totalities of the view that you get up high in the Cold Outside Alone in the Dark at current margins where would you most like to do more rooftop walking um Paris has the best rooftops I think and they are quite easy to access I have quite a few friends who have spent quite a lot of time most of them are dancers
or acrobats on the rooftops of Paris what Epitaph do you want on your tomb oh um because you've written on this right I have reviewed books about epitaphs but um oh I don't know I I need a few more years to decide a few decades if I may what will you have on yours I don't want a tomb I want my body disposed and an effective altruist kind of way and somehow the proceeds liquidated and used for something productive
that sounds entirely reasonable should children be more mischievous yes and I think we should have more patience with childhood Mischief because children whose mischievousness is quashed become difficult thwarted and sometimes uh quite vile adults what are the most important lessons of governance from what are called children's novels uncompromising truths that we hope exist things like uh love will matter
kindness will matter equality is possible um I think that we express them as truths to children when what they really are our hopes uh but I suppose the best politics of children's fiction will be those that argue that um as Ursula leguin would say all that we have made we have made by man and it can be undone by man and that often the first way that we transform the world is through the art that she
calls her heart the art of words she would say it is the utopianist of children's fiction that allows us to imagine something better she might be right should the rest of fiction be more like what we call Children's fiction I would say it would be more that more people should read children's fiction because the rest of fiction performs other urgently necessary tasks I think uh the right to elongate and
experiment uh are jobs more of adult fiction uh so I would argue rather that adults should occasionally read children's fiction for pleasure but also for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have if I think of some fictional works I read as a child like Isaac asimov's Foundation there was a thrill to the complete newness of it that I now find harder to create because things are less
new to me how can we get back to what it was like to read as a child of course to an extent it's impossible because it is the freshness of new discovery that children almost every scene they read feels to them unlike anything they have so few collocates my argument I wrote a book called why you should read children's books even though you are so old and wise and um which you very kindly have and my
argument would be that reading books intended for people in the process of early Discovery can remind you if not what it feels like then something adjacent enough to that to remember that it existed and therefore it might give you a kind of galvanic push towards seeking out other versions of that feeling of Discovery because of course although we feel like our Discovery Time Has largely passed
that's fake that's not real your Discovery time has not passed there are still astonishments that await you should we let children vote there's a very brilliant long readers in New Yorker by someone arguing that six-year-olds should have the vote um and it's very impressive in its uh sweep of the objections um in England I would like to lower the voting age to 16 because I stand quite
far to the left of center and the Youth of course tend to skew more left and currently Britain excuse right if much younger children voted do you think the equilibrium is that more religious families would in essence have more voting power because say the eight-year-olds you might think Oh They'll care more about climate change but it might just be they do what their parents tell them there's some COC
Arrangement and it's more power to the religious which one may or may not mind but probably you don't want that right um it's certainly true that the demographics of it might well not have the impact that we think it would because children's idealism would be very much tampered by the fact that they would be voting in a court with their parents but then would they would children vote the way that their parents
told them to I don't know maybe they wouldn't I frequently did things my parents told me not to do perhaps I would also have voted against their wishes although I actually vote according to their wishes you know what they taught me I still believe there's some heritability to political views right there is exactly what's your favorite UK Bookshop and why uh I live very close to a UK Bookshop
called Primrose Hill books which is very close to where Dodie Smith lived the woman who wrote 101 Dalmatians and I captured the castle and it's both beautiful and in sight of uh Dodie Smith's house are you up for a quick round of overrated versus underrated yes and these will be easy first Edmund Spencer overrated or underrated underrated why uh because he is no longer red I think
the estimation we hold him in is correct but nobody reads him and people should put the side about a week of their lives and read the fairy queen it's painful but it's worth it when you come out the other side I agree with that but it took me much more than a week Diana Wynn Jones overrated or underrated underrated only because infinite estimation is what she deserves and therefore no matter how high her stock
why is she interesting I think she's a writer's writer who is somebody who believed that children should never be spoken down to and I think a lot of her children's fiction is so weird and so full of the furies and anxieties that are extending from childhood into adulthood that those books would also read as great texts for adults the obvious one being maybe something like fire and
Hemlock or house Moving Castle Sir Walter Raleigh overrated or underrated overrated because we have given him such credit for so many things he didn't do he didn't bring back the potato that's nonsense the speed of wombat [Laughter] um I think they don't get enough credit for the fact that over long distances they are faster than Usain Bolt so I think we have underrated that 17th century British entertainment I
mean how good was it so you read about bear baiting it doesn't sound fun to me at all and there's a cruelty to animals issue but it just doesn't sound fun I mean how good was it overrated or underrated barbading definitely overrated I just don't believe it kind of been that exciting I assume it was partly just vote to me you know people didn't have much to do but the theater
even though madly rated in Britain with gold still underrated because of what came before of how staggeringly new it was Belgium overrated or underrated now live there um Belgium I am aware that I because I spent my teenage years that have an entirely unjustified Fury against it and therefore all of my books have one joke against Belgium but you know I hope Belgium is strong enough as a nation not
to take it too personally I'm not sure Belgium is strong enough where in Belgium did you live in Brussels I see okay Mary Poppins overrated or underrated uh as a perfectly rated as a figure or as a film or as a book whichever uh I'm gonna say underrated because the books are much stranger and wilder than we know let's say you're back in the time some some version of you but you don't know how things turn out
which side of the Glorious Revolution would you have been on and why oh um oh I I don't know because it's so impossible to forget the way it turned out which side would you be on I would be very skeptical I would think these Dutch people are going to come over and Rule us I would think the resulting constellation of interest groups would be so stable it would mean Perpetual Civil War which is not how it
turned out so I think I would have been wrong yes I think I might have I might have had a wariness of the sort of dramatic shifts I might have been anxious about what might come but then again we would have been completely misplaced that's right you cut out the word adamantine from one of your books but kept the word renunciation why did you make that decision because adamantine was coming at a peak
Moment In The Narrative so it was the key showdown between a child and a gangster figure and I didn't want anything that would slow children but my general stance is with children's writing you can use pretty much any vocabulary you want because they will either guess or step over or find out the word and it rarely puts children off as much as we worry that it will are there any children's stories
improved by the addition of social media to the story uh do you mean featured in the story or like you can follow this story on Twitter No featured in the story can that possibly improve a child's story well it's just a bad thing I feel absolutely sure it could improve a children's story but I have never yet seen it done our social media their General existence out there making children's literature
harder to pull off yes uh we now compete of course with so many other forms of entertainment and it is a form of entertainment that offers a kind of uh it offers your insatiable hunger for being wooed uh absolute constant society and so what we are trying to offer to Children something slower and richer and ultimately you would hope punchier is vastly harder to sell to them should we be getting boys to read more
stories about girls or are we at an Optimum there we should of course get boys to read more stories about girls the data constantly reports that boys are by and large reading stories about boys and girls are by and large reading stories about both genders there is a difficulty that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in saying boys don't read books about girls and I don't know how we get around that problem
children's movies again I know that's a fraught term but what would normally be called children's movies what's your favorite one oh uh the railway children because of that final moment um the railway children is the story of uh some children whose father has been falsely accused and taken away and they go to live by a railway and at the end there is a moment in which the young
girl the oldest of the children who has had to step into the adult world of secret keeping and and adult care sees her father returned to her and she runs into his arms and she says Oh Daddy my daddy and in that moment she is allowed to return to Childhood and it's a staggering moment of filmmaking it's so beautiful I like a little princess very much do you know that movie no I've
never seen it coron it's a Mexican director but said in England so it's highly unusual and a sort of dark dark and nasty but cheery in some ways too wonderful ideal what is it the T.S Eliot failed to understand about John Dunn oh that's a really interesting question because of course usually John Dunn is rather usually T.S Eliot is given the credit of rediscovering John Dunn after the Victorian period in which his
fashion ability had really waned I think he got a lot right about John Dunn when he says he's trying to picture in John Dunn somebody for whom you know uh every element of his life modifies his sensibility that he is able to couple religion and body and the smell of a rose and the cooking of dinner into one great whole that I think he got right I think what he got wrong was he did not accentuate the
strangeness of John Dunn I think he offered to us a John Dunn who was trying to make things whole but of course John Dunn's poetry often carries with it a beautiful salute to human fracturing and human strangeness you know he was writing at a time when people were offering a profoundly coherent Vision of Love um you know Walter Riley writing about Queen Elizabeth as the rose or Philip Sydney
constantly iterating this image of you know the woman as the white dove that my her shoulders are two white doves and her cheeks are two white doves and John Dunn stood up in the center of that fashion and said no you are stranger than that and you deserve poetry that is Stranger Than That You Deserve poetry that uses the images of fleas and sucking fish and Suns rising and Compasses to express
the vitigenous and Labyrinth and quality of human desire and I don't think that T.S Eliot had a mindset at the time to recognize that what do you think of the view that Don is all about metaphysical Beauty and there's an extreme shortage of physical Beauty in his writings [Music] of his wife and Don who he met when she was very young 14 and they married when she was 17. you will find no physical
descriptor you will find no sense of whether she was curvy or slim or large or tall but what you will have is an understanding of what it is that physical Beauty does to the person witnessing it I think the poems are more about him looking at her than they are about her they're more about his his startlement and embracing and weariness and bitchiness about love than
they are about the specific bodily facts of the women he was with how well do you think Samuel Johnson understood done well of course the obvious answer would be not at all because Johnson Lowe has done and felt that there was something in done that was genuinely slightly dangerous because Johnson's vision of poetry still leaned towards the fashion of thinking of it as a monovocal exercise that there was a
correct form of poetry that its correctness was something to be prized and that the chipping away at that correctness would lead to you know social breakdown I think he was wrong about that but nonetheless remained grateful to him because he did read done and he did think about done and as such even if he didn't intend to kept him alive for you but what is most interesting and done sermons
I find most interesting would be difficult honesty that he has that you will find in so few other sermons of the time about the difficulty of finding God so he is a man who writes often with certainty about the idea of reaching the infinite the divine but he also writes this famous passage where he says I summon God and my angels and when God and the angels are there I neglect them for I forget what it is the
sound of a carriage a straw under my knee a thought a chimera and nothing and everything and that sense that even though he had a brain that could control incredibly rigorous poetry he did not have a brain that would control itself in prayer and he offered that to his congregation as a vulnerability and a piece of honesty that so few sermonisers of the time who thought of themselves more as a kind of
regulatory ideal that should never admit vulnerability uh would offer how do you think your life has been shaped by having grown up in Zimbabwe oh um I think it was profoundly lucky to grow up in Zimbabwe at a time uh I grew up with parents who allowed me an enormous amount of freedom and I don't know if they would have done that now but we were allowed to vanish for the day without adult supervision me and my
siblings and friends and The Shining quality of that of childhood time even quite young say 10 or 11 spelled in spent entirely without the presence of adults uh the freeing quality that gives your imagination I imagine has something to do with the fact that I became a children's writer do you think these free unruly childhoods like yours generate a better class of Elites oh um I would
I would question the terms of that question because I'm not sure that many people with free unruly childhoods become Elites and I wouldn't so if you took people who were maybe had high chance of becoming Elites and you gave them Freer more unruly childhoods would they turn out better right as a kind of retro engineering uh yeah not cross-sectionally but right right um I would not be surprised if they did
because the forms that kind of unruly quality takes um mostly spending huge amount of time outside might give you a more urgent sense of the necessity of outside and that might be something that ongoing Elites are going to need to hold hard and fast at the center of all their thoughts what is it like to eat a tarantula not delicious I sort of hoped it would be because some children I met in
um in the Amazon rainforest that told me that it was but I think there's a very real difference between fresh and canned tarantula and my tarantula was from a can who sells canned tarantula uh the same people who stock selfridges with um uh little scorpions in whiskey there there's a big market for that kind of thing it turns out I was surprised doctor markets and everything phenomenal if you just eat a fresh tarantula do you
get poisoned or are you fine no you're fine I think the poison is only dangerous when administered by The Stingers immediately I was I was not warned about any danger and none came to me as a kid how was it that you broke your bones oh I fell out of a lot of things um trees mostly so you wanted to see things from above even early on even early on and it because I didn't have the skill to match the ambition I ended
up with quite a few broken bones what for you is the most fun part of writing um the early stage where there is no imperative towards structural cohesion and you can just write scenes that seem to you Vivid and funny and interesting and joyful and then later when you have to make it cohere into uh something where the narrative itself is a form of metaphor that bits harder and less fun
what is your most unusual writing habit when I was younger I used to have many in a bid to meet myself meet deadlines that were broadly my own imagining um I would when writing my PhD have a pact with a friend that if we didn't do the requisite number of words usually a thousand words a day of our doctoral Theses we had to give a hundred pounds to a donkey sanctuary and it was chosen
on the grounds that it wasn't harmful to give that money to a Donkey Sanctuary but it also wasn't particularly beneficial because we picked the richest Donkey Sanctuary in England where they're kind of bathing in asses milk and covered in diamonds and so you couldn't tell yourself that it was a good but it wouldn't do harm if we screwed up so we wouldn't for instance give money to the British national party
or something like that and it really does work uh I didn't want the donkeys to have my money I only failed once so you've stopped doing it because you don't need to do it not that you think it's a terrible idea because I I no longer need to do it with quite such urgency a PhD is the hardest form of writing I think in terms of galvanizing yourself into wanting to do it why do so few writers use markets and
self-constrained so so many people will say I want to finish I want to finish earlier I want to finish my thesis but very few people do what you did I find uh you claim it's effective I suspect that's correct incentives matter and and no one copies that what's going on I think it might be that people want to keep their writing as a form of joy and Delight especially if it's not something
they do professionally and that adding those kind of sharp edged incentives will remove the feeling of luxury that writing often has that it's a luxury to spend time with the imagination do you feel that the Irish still have an especially Rich version of the English language even today I'm sure I really have enough knowledge about that certainly I think my Irish friends have a deep well of uh folk
stories that they were given in a kind of cohesive body in a way that perhaps English children are not but I'm not sure about the linguistic portion what do you think it seems to me they are still more narrative more engaged with longer trains of thought uh the fact that not too long ago so many Irish people had to learn English as a language as a second language so to speak I think still
exercises and influence and makes people more self-conscious about language certainly my Irish friends have a form of linguistic dexterity that a lot of my English friends lack and of course the stereotype that the Irish are witty I think although my Irish friends find it profoundly annoying does still push them towards enhancing that stereotype and they are all very funny and per capita there's really quite a
bit of excellent Irish literature even not per capita if you thought it well it was a nation of 30 million people you know you you would think well this makes sense how many good novels they have yeah it is remarkable and they keep coming to if we think about Continental novels of ideas what is your true love in that genre that's a really lovely question um I'm wondering what counts as a
continental novel of ideas though what counts as Continental umka so Kafka was going to be the obvious one that I would say um I was wondering if Madame Bovary counts as a novel of ideas well yes yes okay in that case Madame Bovary which I remember reading as a teenager and feeling like it kicked the knees from under me was kind of awe at the at least at the speed and richness and occasional
cruelty and generosity of that narrative but also um Kafka I have a picture book called my first Kafka which is a children's book retelling I didn't write it I just read it of metamorphosis and now I give them to all the toddlers I know I think they need to start young for the toddlers I think it's an ideal time to get to grips with Kafka sort of three to four year olds what's a book you can no longer stand to
read for instance I find it very difficult to narrate Dostoevsky I don't think he's a terrible author but it somehow doesn't click with me it fascinated me in high school but now it just Falls flat I still love dostoilski but I can't read Dickens anymore I used to be wildly in love with the atmosphere that he conjured of London and smoke and the smog but I now find very vividly visible the fact that he
was getting paid per word what do you think is both best and worst about the intellectual environment at All Souls oh um I think best would be the fact that it is a mix of old and young often it's thought of as a place largely populated by older white men but in fact a huge proportion of the fellows are under 40. um the thing that I loved about it sort of coming of age there I was made a fellow
at 21 was that you would come down to dinner and you would meet people who would unabashedly Keen to talk about their work in terms that were not compromising in detail or technicality or passion and that was a brilliant Coming of Age um the least good thing we are still struggling with uh both the overwhelming whiteness and the overwhelming maleness of the place because it's inheritance they only had
women in 1980 and that does still show let's say for a friend you're designing a two-week trip through the British Isles no London forget about Stonehenge it has to be something weird where do you send them and what you tell them to do um so I would tell them to first you need to go to Norfolk a place that is underrated in its Beauties there's a place called stiff key where
Rachel cusk's novelist used to live and if you weighed out um it starts to look like you could film sort of um Martian like films and indeed several extraterrestrial films have been filmed on that beach if you go right to the Sea there's a colony of seals who will come to greet you and that feels faintly like being churched that part of England is very interesting to me because it's one part where the
Industrial Revolution never quite came so it feels much older still in some ways exactly its landscape is often compared by people from um places like Texas or South Africa they often say that it feels the same sort of prairie feel to it not where you've been but moving forward how do you think of how travel fits into your work and your writing I would do in a way to offer Rich detail in the plots that I was
doing I think I think that I will stay more put these days um in but because of fears of the burning world and what air travel does to that um and in part a sense that I might be at a period of my life when Rhythm and um a kind of structure might be valuable I get much more tired than I used to the thing about doing a cartwheel every day that was true when I was 25 but it's not true now I'm 35.
it's become too hard uh it's actually you can see my flat isn't big enough I would hit the wall you mean the ceiling or the wall there isn't enough space for a for a cartwheel across without hitting that pole and you you must live near Oxford right I actually live in London and I commute I go to Oxford tonight and you take the train yeah what is it that you plan on doing next that you are able to talk about
the right a children's book that I am truly proud of and I'll keep going until that happens um so I'm currently writing a children's novel that I've been working on for five years and I think I think I might end up proud of it by the end I'm not yet um so I think that's what that's what my version of success would look like something that I didn't read and wince so that I think is my next step
if you think of your children's novel side and your All Souls John Dunn's side how do those two fit together in your mind but also in the minds of those at All Souls um in um in my mind I think it's that John Dunn's sense of the capacity of language to be something that you shake out of the confines of the day and use in a way that as much as possible fits the rhythms of your own
imagination that he insisted on the necessity of building your own language I think that I grew up with that and it is why my novels are often referred to as idiosyncratic and literary that they um that I want language that belongs to me so I think they refer to each other in that way um also just I think a love of poetry he taught me to love poetry and other poetry as well as his
um and I think that probably affects my prose uh All Souls I think would they would note that most of the novels have a John Don joke in them and you know that's a very obvious uh through line they don't know about the Belgium jokes or do they oh I haven't told them what do you find most frustrating about interacting with the world of publishing hmm and it's commercial publishing in your case right it is commercial
publishing in my case there is a great deal that I love I mean truthfully it's the necessity of deadlines I have never handed in a book without it being clawed from my hands um because I always want to do one last uh go and I would love there to be an extra four months built into it so that when it looks like a book I'm allowed to read it like it's a book and then make the changes that I would like to make but I
realized that that would be ruinous for the publishing industry and that that's the most rewarding side but what's the most frustrating or is it both oh that's also the most frustrating the fact that I'm not allowed to do that that they don't allow you to that they don't allow you to rewrite your books four years later if they would let us do that I know it would cause absolute
Havoc both the reading and writing populations of the world but my great dream would be to be allowed to look back at Super infinite in about three years time and you know some I think there are already some adverbs that annoy me I would go back and take them out yeah Pierre boules did that with compositions you could in fact do that it may not be profitable but is there actually anyone stopping you my
Publishers wouldn't let me I have asked my children's Publishers and they say no you need to write your next book you can't just keep rewriting your past texts and they wouldn't take care of those adverbs in super infinite they might need to say it was a typo you would lie and maybe they would know it wasn't quite true rather than fight the battle if it didn't require too much re-type setting I will try and I'll let
you know if I have success now let's say you're meeting younger writers and you're looking for someone who in very broad terms is like you and I'm not even sure what that means because you're quite in you have quite an atypical career uh but what would you look for in that person as a sign of their talent well obviously smarts work ethic and so on but beyond the usual what do you look for in young
writing Talent um the difficulty with that is you're asking an English person that which requires me to accept that I'm the in that I would look for someone like myself I wouldn't I would look for someone different and better I I can't deal with a question that presupposes assuming myself to have Excellence but if I were looking for excellence looking for someone better than you yes yeah yeah
um it would be really important to me that somebody had understood that it matters far or as much or far more the way you say the thing as what you say because the thing you want to say is probably a very similar thing that everyone else wants to say you know love love my season patience courage Valiants attention but there are only some people who have found a way to say those things with
such Flair and originality that they cut through your interlocutors complacent in attention and cut through time cut through space cut through cultural difference and grab you by the wrist so it would be a sense that somebody understood you are going to have to find a new and better way to say this how do you value the King James translation of the Bible oh very highly because of course that is the version
that infuses much of the work I love most not just obviously done and Shakespeare but also Philip Pullman talks about being an atheist but a King James atheist someone who was informed by the language of the King James Bible how about the book of common prayer is that just boring no no but wildly underrated the book of common prayer is more beautiful I think than we go credit for and again I think its
cadences have informed a lot of the Poetry that we hold there I don't think we would have Sheamus Heaney without the rhythms of the book of Colin prayer so how do we approach reading the book of common prayer so that it makes sense to us rather than boring us oh gosh that's really interesting I think you approach it for the how do you approach the book of common prayer which is as I agree
not an obviously galvanic text is particularly if you don't happen to believe in Christianity um think you would have to remember what it was intended to do the kind of hope and comfort it was intended to give and you would have to remember the many many battles that were fought to have it and that I think might make it feel alive and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is that book actually good
yes it is in some moments I think it is another one a little like the fairy queen that requires your patience that requires you to do something to take the edge off your Panic at The boredom that will ensue and for some people that will be um resignation I'm sure for some people that will be I don't know alcohol for some people it will be a kind of exhaustedness but something that will allow you to give in
to being quite substantially bored on the grounds that it will slow down the beat of your heart and it will force your imagination to Grapple with something slower and broader the way that Spencer talks about fashioning his ideal reader the texts tell you how to read them Catherine Rendell I'd just like to recommend to you all first Catherine has a short book called why you should read
children's books even though you are so old and wise she has a wide variety of best-selling children's books but her most recent book is super infinite the transformations of John Dunn which I recommend very very highly and of course I recommend done as well uh Catherine who also goes by the name Kate it has been great chatting with you uh we thank you very much and good luck with you so much thank you