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Robert Cormier
meets
Melvin Burgess
PART TWO
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| JD:
Obviously all parents have a responsibility to their children, all teachers
share in that responsibility, through being in loco parentis, and librarians,
booksellers, whatever, have a duty of care, however realised, to the children
they... Now, the division between that duty and care and 'censorship'
is quite a difficult one to negotiate sometimes. Do you feel the same
tension when you're writing? Are there time when you've felt censor, and
time when you've felt, No I've gone too far. How do you negotiate that
tension? |
| MB:
I'm always thinking I'm going to get a dodgy reaction this time.
When I go to what Bob calls an 'editing conference' but we call 'lunch',
every time I do something I'm thinking oh someone's going to worry about
it. In the end my editors have always been much more bothered about whether
the book works as a book, much to their credit, almost invariably. Censorship
at home? Well I remember my son, some years ago, he's 12 now, coming back
and saying can I see Alien2. He was only about 9 or something. I said
No you can't. He said, Well I've seen Alien1! So in due time we saw Alien
2 and it frightened the knickers off him and he decided he wanted to wait
a bit before he saw Alien3. Then we saw Alien3 when he felt ready for
it. He read Junk and he read Bloodtide and he didn't seem
too bothered about it. I remember my stepson, who's 14, saying to me,
When are you going to write something that's graphic? He really
wants to see something messy on television or on film or something
and I obviously haven't delivered yet. So I haven't actually had that
experience at home yet. You have your book and your voice and what you
want to do with it and you have to be really rigorous about that. Is it
working in the context of what I'm trying to do. Certainly that whole
thing about being controversial... if you start stepping outside the remit
of your book, then you've had it. The point about my books is not to be
shocking or controversial. I feel at the moment there are areas for kids
of 13, 14, 15 that people don't deal with very much. I feel as though
I'd like to do that and write about things like drugs, sexuality in a
way which isn't done much. I haven't come to the point yet where I've
thought I don't want my child to read that. Even though they're actually
too young for the books. The only thing I'd say is this. I do feel, for
example with Junk - my son read it when he was far too young, and
missed it. He just missed it. For Junk you've got to have
all your hormones before you read it. With Bloodtide it's the same
thing. If people read them too young, it just goes over the top... I remember
once going to a school in Berwick-on-Tweed, a very rural area, and there
were 10yr olds clutching their green copies of Junk and I thought
Oh my God what am I going to do. The teacher said Just do it, and I have
quite a feisty talk and I delivered it to them and they sat there and
it went straight over their heads. They weren't shocked. |
RC:
All writing is a matter of selection. Every word, every phrase... from
the beginning it's all a matter of selection. You're selecting words to
affect the reader. So it's a hard line to walk. I'm often tortured
by... not tortured, well tortured... not because I worry about the kids,
but just as a writer. I watch whether I'm indulging myself. I'm very aware
of choosing certain words. For instance, in Tenderness there's
a young girl, a sexually precocious girl, very well-endowed... I didn't
want to wallow in that, I wanted to go the other way from that... I didn't
even use the word 'breast', I talked about her top, and that was a very
careful selection, it wasn't being casual. That's why I get upset sometimes,
in fact all the time I'm censored, because censorship begins at home.
I'll tell you a little story. When I wrote The Chocolate War my
son was my guide as far as fads went with language and the way words were
used in school and when I finished it my daughter Chris was 15 at the
time and I had a chapter that I thought was very clever as I wrote it.
I was coming to the climax of the novel. Archie, the arch villain, was
trying to come up with scheme that would lead to the climax. He's alone
in this room and being alone he was engaging in an act of masturbation
and suddenly I had two climaxes, the climax of thinking of the plot he
was going to hatch and the other. I never used the word masturbation.
But there was no doubt about what he was doing. And it was graphic to
a certain extent. My daughter Chris wanted to read it. I took that chapter
out. I told her she might see a gap near the end, but not to worry. She
read the book, said Dad, I like it, then I put the chapter back in and
sent the book out. When eventually the book--it was rejected by seven
publishers-was finally accepted I went down to New York to a story conference
and an editing conference and the editor, a wonderful man by the name
of Fabio Coen, had some suggestions on the back of a memo. There were
very few suggestions. But, he said, There's one chapter that bothers me.
Very cleverly written, but almost out of context with the rest of the
book, and it called attention to itself. Immediately I said, The chapter
with Archie all alone? He said, Yes. And being a good editor he said,
Think about it. I learned my first lesson about self-censorship. Here
was a chapter I wanted to inflict on other 15 yr old daughters, but not
my own. That was a great lesson. And that's why when books leave my house,
as grim as they may be, and the language may be real, underneath there
is that self-censorship. |
| JD:
Both of you have got very visual writing styles. Yours, Melvin, is very
immediate, almost operatic and yours, Bob, also is very visual but in
a more broodingly Hitchcockian way. I read your books in black-and-white.
I'd like to ask about the impact of cinema on both of you and on the way
you write. |
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MB:
I don't think I can say that films have had the same effect on me as
they have had on Bob. It was books with me. Although, latterly, I think
a lot in terms of film. Particularly in Bloodtide. One of the
things about Bloodtide was seeing my son come home with the movies
he wanted to watch, and the computer games for his Playstation, and
I'd see the kind of imagery that they have and I'd think, particularly
as this is a boy and there's this problem about boys reading and books
for boys and all the rest of it, and I'd think well they're all so splashy
and dramatic, life-and-death and violent and I thought, Well where are
the books about this kind of thing? They do exist, but there isn't a
great range, is there? Certainly with Bloodtide I was thinking
Judge Dredd, 2001; you can see it on the cover, with those great buildings.
There's bits of Alien going on in there; certain 'Arnie' films...
I do think books need to make a step in that direction. I'd like to
make a step in that direction. Using that kind of imagery; having that
kind of viewpoint.
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RC:
I think the movies and cinema have had more of an effect on my books
than books themselves. My first eight years of education were in a Catholic
parochial school and we had English in the morning and French in the
afternoon. They were great on the basics, but I can't remember really
reading a book in those whole eight years that was literature. The movies
were my big love. And still are. I think my first lessons came form
the movies. We were eight children, I had a brother who died very young,
so we grew up as seven children, my mother was very religious and when
we were all very young she had a very serious illness. Graham Greene
is my great mentor. She did a Graham Greene kind of thing. She made
two bargains with God. She promised that she would wear blue and white
for the rest of her life. She had a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
And the other one, she gave up something she loved, she gave up the
movies. These were the movies of the Thirties, that told stories, no
special effects, black-and-white. I would go to the movies and I'd come
home and I'd tell her the story of the movie scene by scene. In fact,
I would act out the scenes for her. All around the house, while she
was doing her chores. I did a great Bette Davis! That was my first lesson
in storytelling. Because these were great stories. Even now when I write
I never talk to myself in terms of chapters, I always think in terms
of scenes. I let character growth come out of action rather than description.
I'm very aware of that. Certain books are in black-and-white.
Tenderness is one, We All Fall Down. Of course, eventually
I did discover books. Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Saroyan, all the
others. But basically my storytelling is cinematic.
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| JD:
Can I, leading on from that, ask you a question about each other's novels.
It strikes me that you are frightfully extrovert in what you write, that
the action is 'out there', whereas, Bob, you're writing is more psychological.
Fade gave me two nightmares. Internal monologues are very important
to your characters. Do you think that's a fair assessment of your own
and each other's writing? |
| MB:
The 'extrovert'...? I don't know. I'm not entirely convinced by that.
I like to think there's stuff going on 'in' there was well as 'out' there.
Bob's, as you say, are very psychological. The 'extrovert' thing...
I do want them to be visual and I do want them to be striking and I find
myself imagining images. One of the processes of writing that I go through
is I find myself with scenes, really strong scenes, then I find myself
filling in the gaps with narrative. I don't think the scenes would work
if they were all 'out there'... |
RC:
The strange thing is that I write cinematically and yet there are so
many interior things going on in my books As yet, a couple of films
have been made but they're unsatisfactory because of that. There's a
lot going on under the surface. The man who made a film of I Am The
Cheese became a friend after a while and we used to talk long into
the night and he said, The strange thing about you, Bob, is that you
write cinematically but your books are hard to film. I guess that's
true. I write cinematically but I never think of them as being films.
I agree that Melvin's 'right there'.
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| JD:
I've got one last thing I want to ask you about, which is where on earth
are you going to go next? I'm very worried on both your behalves. Melvin's
taboo demolition squad is getting fewer and fewer targets. And I'm even
more worried about Bob's novels, because they're shrinking. In a way the
economy of your style is so heightened that you've almost moved beyond
prose |
| MB:
As far as a hit list is concerned. I do have a hit list. I remember people
trying to sell me hash in the school playground. And that was 25 years
ago. And the thing that was attractive about drugs then was the culture.
It's not the substance, is it, it's the whole thing around it. And yet,
how many novels had people written for schoolkids about that subject.
Bloodtide was something I had on my agenda before Junk.
The other area I want to do is sexuality. Particularly boys'. Boy-girl
books are girly books. They're 'romances'. Where is the book about boys
and girls that is about boys? I wrote a book a while ago called Loving
Angel which has got a lot of boy stuff in it, but boys haven't read
it. Which is partly my fault because maybe I should have called it Shagging
Angel. It doesn't want to be a romance but it wants to be about...
I'm trying to that, but I'm finding it very very hard. There isn't a tangible
issue there. One of the reasons I think Junk was successful was
that people felt there was a use for it. It had a purpose in life.
It got behind the adults, and the adults got behind it. One of the things
about Bloodtide was that I really wanted there to be no identifiable
educational issue. |
RC:
I'm just finishing a book now... well, to all intents and purposes
it's finished. I tinker with them forever. This is probably another
diminished book compared with say Fade or We All Fall Down.
The next one after this I think is going to be a bigger book because
I've been having intimations about it... I've just finished a book
I call The Rag And Bone Shop, from that great Yeats poem. It's
a concentrated book. I love that tight writing, you know. It should
be out next year.
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