Interview: John Burnside, author

Published on Monday 23 May 2011 13:01

I'm in John Burnside's cottage, on a quiet country road near Anstruther, and I'm meant to be asking him about his latest novel. He's meant to be telling me about it. That is, usually, how these things work out.

Except Burnside is … What? Well, I could write ten different interviews based on the two hours I spend talking to him. I don't mean that he's self-contradictory: if uncommon, his view of the world is clear and coherent. Nor do I mean that he vacillates or dissembles, because he is almost preposterously honest. But two hours with Burnside, and the conversation wanders in all kinds of unexpected directions - the value of taking LSD, the potential of direct action and the reality of evil spirits, to name just three.

I first met him in 2001, when he was about to go to London to pick up the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for his collection The Asylum Dances - the prize's first winner for five years who wasn't either Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes. In the last decade he has written five novels, two volumes of memoirs that are already being talked about as modern classics, and six collections of poetry, with another one due in August. Most of his books have been showered with awards or nominations: I don't think any other Scottish writer produces so much work of such high quality across so many forms, and I'd say that even if he didn't also occasionally review books on these pages.

But Burnside finished his latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, a full year ago, and already you can tell that it's the book he's working on now - and the books that are already lining up behind it - that have him in their thrall. Because, in the meanwhile, the ground has shifted, and so has what he wants to write about. "For me, what happened with the banks was the last straw," he says. "And now, making spending cuts that will affect disabled people's mobility or affecting someone's education and all because some fat greedy cat decided to gamble the money away. It's unforgiveable. That's why the book I'm writing now, and what's in my head, is all about social injustice."

His politics, always radical, now have an angrier edge. Whereas for the last 20 years, he has optimistically looked to the Greens to end social injustice, now he is disillusioned with them.Being a real friend of the Earth, he argues, shouldn't mean backing government subsidies to help rich people get even richer by building wind turbines that will only work intermittently and often not at all when needed, on still, cold, winter days.

Hence the rage. Hence his renewed fascination with direct action, with the "dark green" politics of primitivism, anarchism - the part of the environmental movement that hasn't sold out, that still remains true to its ideals, that has got nothing to do with "rewarding human greed by making all electricity customers pay 25 per cent on their bills to guarantee fat cat profits for 25 years on large commercial turbines". And hence the change in what he wants to write about since he finished A Summer of Drowning.

It's not that he wants to disavow the novel or feels anything other than proud of it. A psychological drama on an island off the north-western Norwegian coast, it is written with great craft and assurance, although Burnside concedes that it is right at the uncommercial end of fiction's spectrum. "A modern version of The Turn of the Screw set in the Arctic Circle," he laughs. "You can see them struggling to sell that, can't you?"

In the past, much of Burnside's writing - his poetry as well as his prose - has been an exploration of how one should live: the key word is dwelling, both in the sense of thought and existence. The two volumes of his memoirs - the first a voyage around a hurtful, belittling, violent father, the second a failed attempt to find a respite from madness, drink and drugs in Southern England's samey suburbia - both stress the value of a responsibility to lead a fully individuated life, one whose course is not determined by others, which isn't necessarily predictable or obvious.

Angelika Rossdal, the Norwegian painter who is the central character of A Summer of Drowning, lives such a life on the remote island of Kvaloya, deep inside the Arctic Circle. It would have been easier to raise her daughter Liv somewhere less isolated, but her art requires solitude and an attentiveness to the landscape. So, I can't help thinking, does Burnside's own poetry. And perhaps there's a parallel of sorts to Angelika's withdrawal from the world in the relative isolation of the Burnsides' cottage, on a lane so quiet that its gentle rise up to the ridge can stand in his work as a metaphor for the course of a life. A lane he can walk in winter and find hundreds of pink-footed geese flying only feet above him as they head for a nearby feeding ground. Burnside is, remember, a poet whose work fuses both the religious impulse and the natural world: from such specifics as a midwinter overflight of geese on a quiet lane in Fife, he can and does craft poetry that opens out into the wider, deeper, world.

Yet the East Neuk isn't Kvaloya, not by a long chalk. Its isolation isn't as intense, nor are its summer nights as white, dream-like, or as haunted.In the novel, the haunting comes in the form of huldras, evil spirits that often take the form of a particularly beautiful girl who lures young men to their destruction. This is such a summer, and those unused to its midnight sun might, fatigued by insomnia, easily convince themselves that evil spirits walk the land.

But do they? That balance of uncertainty is what Burnside sets out to achieve, and he does so magnificently. And if The Turn of the Screw is the comparison he reaches for, it's a fair one: like Henry James's ghost story, Burnside's novel is neatly open-ended, with the reader left wondering whether the huldra actually exist or whether they exist only in the mind of the book's narrator, Angelika's daughter Liv.

The novel's setting matters. Burnside first went to Arctic Norway in 1996 and returned every year for the next decade. For such a committed environmentalist, here was a country where the wildness of nature was obvious, where a pollution-free world could still be imagined. If you were looking for a model of how man could best live in harmony with the natural world, Arctic Norway was a pristine example to the rest of us. Burnside botanised its flora, studied its folk customs, tried to learn Norwegian. When he first started work on a novel set there, in 2000, it was going to be aimed at young adults. It didn't work. He abandoned it and started again. The next version didn't work either.

Burnside can be a phenomenally fast writer: he's written novels such as The Devil's Footprint in just five weeks. Yet over a decade, he didn't give up on A Summer of Drownings, even when he'd written and scrapped two entire versions of it. What made him persist?

Part of the answer, I think, lies in Angelika's life. In some ways it's what Burnside would like for himself. "Absolutely. In terms of making herself receptive before she begins painting, her method is very much the same as mine is for poetry. It's important to have quiet time and isolation. People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself. Were it not for family responsibilities, I'd quite happily live in a place like Kvaloya. Not all the time, though - perhaps ten months of the year, and then two months in, say Chicago or New York!"

Does he believe that huldras are real? "Absolutely. It's like when you take LSD. That just removes the filtering mechanisms we normally use. Nobody is going to tell me that's a false state of mind just because you are shown more of the world than you normally experience. In a similar way, people who are in extremis sense things which are actually true, but which other people just don't see. That could be how they see huldras. "

He doesn't take drugs now or drink heavily, although his past excesses in both are made plain in his memoirs."Ken Kesey talked about 'LSD without LSD' - by which he meant, you can go beyond it, you don't need it any more. The state William Blake was in when writing his poems - "infinity in a grain of sand" - that's 'LSD without LSD' right there. But if you can only see infinity in a grain of sand by taking LSD you haven't got very far."

Burnside's memoirs also give one of the clearest accounts of what mental illness feels like, both at its worst and in its rare moments of transcendence. The form of mental illness he is most prey to is called apophenia - the experience of seeing meaningful patterns in random or meaningless data. Which sounds, I can't help thinking, the kind of disease you'd almost want poets to have.

He's not one for tiptoeing around the subject. "I don't like the term mental illness. I'd rather just say mad. Just like I always say loony bin, not mental hospital. But if someone has lived in this society for 50 years and not gone nuts for some of the time, I'd say they were either immensely stupid or gifted in some way. Because this is a society which is dedicated to taking away your centrality and eccentricity. It's there to serve rich people, landowners and banks, and it's an important part of serving those people that we are not too central, not too free-thinking, not too liberated."

At this point, the conversation starts to swing out towards what I think at first is a rant. An educated rant, admittedly, leavened with the odd quote from Emerson ("Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well"), and contains references to Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Grey Granite, Rainer Werner Fassbender, David Foster Wallace, but a rant nonetheless. Bankers' greed and politicians dragging an unwilling nation off to foreign wars are rather predictable targets, so I'm almost switching off.

"I remember a friend of mine, a great man," Burnside carries on. "He said one day banks will own third world countries, own all their debt, and they'll govern them. And I said, 'Corporations maybe, not banks.' And he said, 'You just wait and see.' That man, he's dead now. He's in the annals of the great traitors of America because he gave the secret of the Bomb to the Russians."

All of a sudden, he's got my full attention. You mean, I say, you were friends with a spy? With a man who kick-started the Cold War?

And in the living room of his cottage on a quiet lane in Fife, out spools a story that, as far as I can tell, Burnside hasn't ever told in public. Theodore ("Ted") Alvin Hall (1925-1999) was a physics prodigy so gifted that he was invited to join the Manhattan Project when he was only 18. After the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb - on which he had worked - was dropped on Nagasaki, Hall came to the conclusion that if just one superpower had nuclear weapons it would bully the rest of the world so he told the Soviets the secrets of the US plutonium bomb. He didn't sell them the secrets: this was entirely an act of conscience.Although the FBI questioned Hall, they didn't have enough evidence. In 1962 he got a job at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, which is where he met Burnside.

"I knew Ted for about 15 years from 1976. He and his wife and family helped me immensely. When I left the asylum, they brought me into their house and looked after me. Got me on my feet. I would like to admit that. They did so much to help me and I barely thanked them."

"But John," I almost shout, "you've just written two books of memoirs and he's not in them! You've a friend who is a spy who changes the 20th century and you've never ever written about him!"

Maybe it's something about being a journalist, that you innately know what a big story is, and you almost physically cringe if it's not told. It's like watching someone draw a flush at poker and fold instead of bet; an offence against the basic order of life's odds. In news value terms, spies and assorted secret-holders are aces - people who know that the world is ordered in a different way to that which is ordinarily supposed. In Burnside's schema, that's probably what poets are.

Burnside lost touch with Ted Hall in the 1990s. Even before that, Hall had never mentioned that he'd helped the Soviets, although he's admitted that he'd worked at Los Alamos. Then, in 1997, Burnside read a review in the New Yorker of Joseph Albright's book Bombshell that lifted the lid on Hall. "I felt betrayed, because he'd never mentioned any of this to me. Then I realised he was protecting me. He never even told his kids for the same reason. Yet for me he's a kind of hero. He made a decision (to help the Soviets] in complete disregard for his own personal circumstances or needs. He just thought it was the right thing to do and he did it."

It's this kind of direct action that fascinates Burnside right now. He has even given a lecture in St Andrews, where he teaches creative writing, about its heroic possibilities, which must surely have raised a few professorial eyebrows. The Weathermen, the revolutionary organisation in 1960s America that blew up banks and several government offices and which he is researching for his next novel, provide a further example of what he means. "Yes, they made mistakes, because they were young and working in a desperate situation, but for me those guys were heroic because for me the ultimate test is: do they sit down and make a decision for the greater good? Do they think hard about it and see if it is the right thing to do? That's what I expect from every citizen in my ideal world."

Burnside might well argue that Angelika Rossdal, painting away in the Arctic Circle, perhaps seeing evil and putting it down on canvas as best she can, isn't too different from the people he is writing about now. At least she has, like them, made up her own mind about the person she wants to be. But to me she could hardly be more different.From all I can gather, Burnside's next novel will be about engagement, not isolation; society, not individuals; cities, not nature. Not Europe, but the wild radical heart of America; not the random nature of evil but the planned blight of social injustice. Not a change of mind, but a definite change in the wind.

• A Summer of Drowning, by John Burnside, is published next week by Jonathan Cape, priced 16.99.