The Paris Review - Fall 2016

This was the era of the Vietnam War?
INTERVIEWER
Yes, oh yes.
PRYNNE
INTERVIEWER
Was that a transformation of political opinion for you? Or a continuation?
PRYNNE
That’s a very difficult question to answer accurately. I certainly, as time
went on, became much more committed ideologically to what would be
regarded as a left-wing, rather European-influenced point of view. I’m not
quite sure when this transition occurred, because I don’t think I would ever
have thought of myself as inclined towards Marxist opinions when I was a
student. I certainly objected to Raymond Williams’s ideologies when he was
my teacher. He didn’t promote them very actively, but it was clear that they
were an important part of his work. It was partly because he was a stodgy
performer. He didn’t have brilliance. He didn’t have wit and sharpness of
mind. Stylistically, it wasn’t an attractive pursuit. But nonetheless, his opinions
ought to have aroused more of an echo with me, and they didn’t. It was
curious because my parents were both staunch socialists.
And now?
INTERVIEWER
PRYNNE
I would probably now describe myself as a peculiar and extraneous Marxist,
in some sense of that word. Keston Sutherland, who was my student and who
is now exemplary and active in our friendship as poets, is a more committed
and ferociously ideological Marxist than I am. We have quite frequent
exchanges, because he’s become deeply enmeshed in Hegelian interpretation
and argument. I have tried to persuade him that just as I’m not really interested
in the exemplary nature of authorship, and the influential nature of didactic or
instructional presence in the lives of others, so I regard the Marxist argument as
a humanistic projection of political narrative. When we have these arguments,
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