Viva Lewes Issue #140 May 2018

ON THIS MONTH: LITERATURE
Blake Morrison
at Charleston Festival
You’re appearing at
Charleston Festival this
month to talk about
your latest novel, The
Executor. What do you
make of the rise of
festivals? In general they’re
a good thing – a chance
for writers to meet their
readers and vice versa. The
smaller the festival, the
greater chance there is of
that happening. Charleston
is one of the best organised
and most congenial.
The Executor tells the
story of Matt Holmes,
who is asked by Robert
Pope to oversee the
terms of his will. When
Pope dies suddenly Matt
has to negotiate the rather contradictory
terms of the will and the concerns of Pope’s
widow, Jill. Do you have experience of being
an executor yourself? I haven’t appointed a
literary executor, and though I’ve agreed to act
as one, for a friend, he’s younger than me, and
with luck I’ll never be called on. Many writers
leave behind contradictory instructions in their
wills. Often they’ll ask for work to be destroyed
that embarrasses them but which deserves to be
preserved. If wills were followed to the letter,
then we wouldn’t have Kafka’s novels. Executors
have to weigh up how best to serve the author’s
interests. Sometimes they’re loyal, paradoxically,
by betraying them. After all, if writers really want
things they’ve written to be destroyed, why not
do it themselves?
A lawyer briefs Matt on the law concerning
literary wills in the novel.
How did you research
this? At an academic
conference on ethics and
life-writing at Goldsmiths
a few years back, I heard a
very good talk by a lawyer.
Afterwards I followed up
some of the cases he’d
alluded to as well as finding
a few more – all of them
relating to the eternal
war between the right to
privacy on the one hand,
and freedom of expression
on the other.
Robert Pope’s will sets
off the action of the
novel. You make him
a poet, not a novelist,
a playwright, or a
memoirist. What was it about making Pope a
poet that appealed to you? It wasn’t a deliberate
choice, more serendipity. I wrote the poems first,
over a number of years, didn’t feel they were
really ‘mine’, began to see how they could form
part of a novel, and then developed the character
of Robert Pope – revising the poems and adding
new ones as I went along.
At one point Matt reflects on what makes
a great writer. Have you thought about this
yourself? I think about it all the time, but I don’t
have any answers beyond the obvious. Style,
subject matter, intelligence, a responsiveness
to the zeitgeist that also addresses the eternal
verities – all play their part. John O’Donoghue
Blake Morrison is in conversation with Hermione
Lee at the Charleston Festival, 5.30pm, 20th May.
charleston.org.uk/festival
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