Backlisted - The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

Episode Date: February 20, 2017

Max Porter, author of 'Grief Is The Thing With Feathers', joins John and Andy to talk about The Horse's Mouth, Joyce Cary's story of the life of the itinerant artist. Also discussed are Dark Money, Jane Mayer's account of the nexus of politics & wealth in the US, and Doreen by Barbara Noble, reissued by Persephone.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)5'47 - Doreen by Barabar Noble13'07 - Dark Money by Jane Mayer22'51 - The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dine-in only until 11 a.m. So, where have you been? I've been... Where have you been? I've been... The night before last, I was at the very excellent Independent Publishers Guild conference, which is ten minutes down the road from where I live.

Which publishers would members of the public, were they permitted to attend such an event, which publishers would they expect to find there? I don't know. Oddly enough, we're unbounded, remember. So, like Serpent's Tale? I don't know. Serpent's Tale, I don't know.

Faber are, I think. You probably have, I don't know. They're nice. Lots of very small search press. That kind of thing. It's a very, very jolly room of people who've been going forever.

I just had to do it. I had to tell a few stories, Andy. I told the great Waterstones Guide to Books story. Produced a mail order catalogue that was an inch and a half too big for the average British mailbox. Many of us still have our copies. The grey order forms, do you remember?

I do remember the grey order forms. When they were faxed to the mail order department, nobody could read what thousands of orders coming in, nobody had any idea what they were. And I told a few of my, as you know, I like to tell the stories that backlisted listeners may hear in a forthcoming podcast if it all comes off, stories of Neil Aspinall and the Beatles.

Shall we start? Please, please. Please get on with it. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. We're gathered cosily around the paint-splattered kitchen table in the ramshackle riverside shed of our sponsors Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today is Max Porter.

Hello, Max. Hello. He is there. Very happy to have you here. Hello. Max published his debut book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in 2015, which was shortlisted for more awards than we could count, although he's showing us on his hands.

Now, that's a lot. I'm amazed you've got that many fingers. Grief is the Thing with Feathers earned him the award of Sunday Times Young Author of the Year. Max is also Editorial Director at Grant Books, and he's another member of the Masonic group known simply as ex booksellers so which which bookshop did you work for daunts a branch of yeah i did two new branches of daunts one in

holland park and one in the old pan bookshop oh yes yeah the pan bookshop at a very happy time what uh what tended to sell in Daunton Holland Park? When you looked at a reviews page... Polish poems. Those were the golden days as far as I was concerned, where you would get the nuclear family, the well-heeled nuclear family, buying a book per family member,

so the kids would get a book each, the mum would get a book each, the mum would get a novel and a cookbook and dad would buy Michael Gove would buy a history of Pitt the Younger, and she probably voted for Pitt the Younger didn't she? Anyway, that was good but it being London I loved that roll of the

dice, that one minute you get Harold Pinter to come in and give me a hard time that we aren't stopping his plays God rest his angry soul, and the next minute a builder who buys his get Harold Pinter to come in and give me a hard time that we aren't stopping his plays. God rest his angry soul. And the next minute a builder who buys his one crime novel a week and really, really cares that you get it right. So I love that.

I miss it. I worked down in Kensington High Street and we used to find that telegraph readers were the ones who would read the papers and buy books. Times readers would come in and buy the books by their friends. Telegraph readers would come in and buy the books that were reviewed. And Guardian readers would come in and look at the books

and then not buy them. That was our general experience. I'm not sure that would be true everywhere. Send whinging letters to you afterwards about the range of stock that you had in the store. That did occur, yes. But Diane and Rigg used to come in quite frequently, nod at whoever was at the downstairs till,

find her book, place it face out on the front shelves and table and then leave. That's the thing about London, so many people came in and it was a brilliant who's who. And you can judge an author by how they behave in a bookshop. Jonathan Coe, for example. Perfect gentleman. Perfect gentleman. Anita Bruckner wins the prize.

Never once announced that she was Anita Bruckner. I happen to know her, so I could have the chat. She'd be mortified if you said, can you sign a book? That would not be the done thing. That listed listeners will know that I've just got very excited

at the fact that someone other than me introduced an Anita Brooke anecdote into the podcast. I was just going to go on. You went in her flat. So we should say that the book that Max has come in to talk about is a novel called The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey and Max and I met at a thing last year and I mentioned about, Batlister and I said is there, you know if you would like to come on and talk, is there a book and you said immediately The Horse's Mouth.

There's so many I'd want to talk about but The Horse's Mouth is the one that gushes forth. Well we're very glad that you did and we should go on to that in a moment. But I should start with asking the question that we always ask, Andy. What have you been reading? This week. I've been reading another book republished by Persephone.

Persephone republished this about ten years ago. It's called Doreen. It's a novel called Doreen by a writer called Barbara Noble. And it was published shortly after the... Yeah, 1946, it was published shortly after the Second World War by William Heinemann. And it's a novel about the evacuation of children during the Second World War,

the effect on their parents, the effect on the families to whom they were evacuated, and the effects on the families to whom they were evacuated, with whom they were evacuated, and the effects on the children themselves. And I bought it before Christmas as a present for my mum, who is in her 80s, whose name is Dory. Now, my mum and I, as anyone who's read Year of Ream Dangerously will know, we don't really see eye to eye about books. And she is much more of an Alan Titchmarsh reader

than she is anything else. She loves Alan Titchmarsh. She often tells me that I need to be more like him in order to be more successful as a writer, which is undoubtedly true. You've got a nice cardi. I have got a nice cardi, yes, and I've got a

cheerful manner. Amen. So me buying her this book was a not insignificant gesture. I thought, well, you know, it's called Doreen, she's called Doreen. She wasn't evacuated during the war, but she did move around a lot during the war. So I gave this book at Christmas. She rang me up two days after Boxing Day and said,

Andrew, not Andy, Andrew, I can't put this book down. It is absolutely wonderful. It's so evocative of what it was like for me as a child being moved around from family to family while your gran was basically moved from one munitions factory to another munitions factory. And my mum spent a lot of time not living with her mum, and my grandfather was away in the military police in the desert,

so she had a kind of quite stressful existence from the ages of 8 to 15. And the little girl Dorian in this book is 10. The thing that's really, and the word is correct, remarkable, worth remarking on in this book... Nice distinction. Thank you. ..is the extent to which Barbara Noble absolutely brilliantly is able to show you how the 10-year-old child can see things

but not process them. So the information that you're being given is constantly shifting based on what little Doreen can deal with. The other thing that's worth saying about it... Isn't that one of the great theories about why so many novels are set in

you know, not just buildings Roman, but they're set in childhood because of that ability to deliver, because children don't process, they don't make sense, but they're fantastically, if you want to capture the sensual reality of something, doing it through a child narrator, sometimes it's easier than doing it through a hyper-articulate kind of middle-aged...

I think it does because it precisely coincides with that unique ability that the novel has to allow its reader to intuit things that aren't necessarily on the page. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like the go-between. The go-between works because of what the adult reader brings to it. So it's that gap between... I mean, anyone who enjoyed...

We did, a few episodes ago, we did a book by Jane Gardham called A Long Way From Verona, which similarly has a 12-year-old narrator. Similarly, one could say it has its wartime setting, has many of the same features that this book does, Dorian by Barbara Noble. And I think if you enjoyed, if you've read A Long Way From Verona, you would enjoy this.

That's a great collection. Do you know Jane Gardner is huge in Germany. Now. Amazing. I said to someone in Germany, like Frankfurt, what's big right now? And they went, oh, Jane Gardner is huge. Good. I love that. It's a strange thing. I'll tell you who else is huge in Germany.

Virginia Ironside, who writes columns about ageing for the oldie. Just going back to this book very briefly, the thing about the novel Doreen by Barbara Noble, which is brilliant, we'll read you a tiny bit. She's so good. As someone who's grown up over the last 50 years listening to different people say my mum's name,

it's brilliant at placing how different classes of people say the name Doreen. We say in our family Doreen. We think that's neutral. Doreen is quite working class. Doreen is quite faux upper. Well, it's so weird because you couldn't get a more working class woman than my aunt or auntie, me auntie Doreen, who's from Ashton in Makefield. Well, she was from Ashton in Makefield. She's sadly dead now, but my mother's

sister. And she was definitely, very definitely Doreen, our Doreen. So I just, there's a little bit here which sums up the two things I was just talking about. So Doreen is out for a walk. At the Osborne's gate, the Wormans and Doreen parted. For a moment she looked after them as they straggled down the hill, and then she turned away and began to walk along the drive, her eyes fixed with proprietary pride on the fat bunch of primroses she carried in both hands. She didn't see the soldier leaning against the trunk of a tree until he made her jump by speaking to her. Hello, Doreen, he said in a quiet, almost sleepy voice. He pronounced her name as her mother did, with the accent on the first syllable. She noticed it behind her startled apprehension.

Don't you remember me? He straightened himself and moved towards her slowly, hesitatingly. I'm your daddy, Doreen. You remember me? His voice was pleading. My daddy's not a soldier, Doreen whispered, but she was unconvinced by her own doubts. I live with Mr and Mrs Osborne now, she said. I like it here. He glanced round him then, as if remembering for the first time where they were. I know they're sore. I talked to Mr. Osborne. His tone was resentfully contemptuous. He means well, but he likes to interfere too much. You'll be well shut of them, I reckon. Doreen's mouth grew dry with terror. Are you going to take me away, she whispered. He laughed, good-tempered again, releasing her shoulder and putting his hands in his pockets. Where'd I take you? Back to camp?

I'm a soldier now that I didn't used to be. Look, he took off his cap and knelt on one knee, bringing his face on a level with hers. You remember me now, don't you? I used to give you toffees of a Saturday. His breath smelt queer and distasteful. Instinctively, she backed away a little, but it was true that she remembered him.

It's really... I can't recommend this highly enough. It's one of these wonderful books that Persephone bring back, which is just sitting there quietly. Did she write anything else? I don't think she did. I don't think she did. Someone can correct me on

that, but there's nothing else in print. No journal. Sorry. Not yet. So, John, that's what I've been reading. What have you been reading? I've been reading something shocking, not quite as contemporary as you think it is.

It's a book called Dark Money by Joan Mayer, who is one of the ace investigative reporters working for The New Yorker. The subtitle is How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know, except that it's a brilliant bit of forensic journalism, I think. I mean, she's very, very good at doing that, getting under the skin.

And it's a terrifying uh or inspiring story depending from your when was it published it was published a year ago it was 2016 so it was it was a year ago that I was first vaguely aware of it the reason I read it was I bumped into Peter York the style uh kind of aficado, and he was saying that Trump was really just a kind of a useful idiot, a front for, you know, an extraordinary cabal of American billionaires, of which the Koch brothers, that's how they pronounce their name, Koch Industries, which is the second largest privately owned company in America, including the brands of Lycra and Stainmaster.

But they were oil refiners and chemicals. Their father, Fred Koch, cut his teeth making oil for Stalin and then went on to found Winkler Koch, which supplied all the fuel for the Luftwaffe through the Second World War. So their dad was an out-and-out Nazi. They're merely extremely, extremely libertarian right-wing. Libertarian. They were described by William Buckley, famous conservative icon, as anarcho-totalitarians. So they are extreme right-wing.

They are extreme libertarians. And they have ploughed, I mean, incalculable amounts of money, not just into funding political parties and candidates, although they've done that. One of the two brothers, David, ran for vice president in 1980 and was completely obliterated. But since then, they've basically waged a sort of a war of ideas. I'll just read you a little bit as it gives you the sort of flavour. They've subsidised networks of seemingly unconnected think tanks and academic programmes and spawned advocacy groups to make their arguments in the national political debate. They hired lobbyists to push their

interests in Congress and operatives to create synthetic grassroots groups to give their movement political momentum on the ground. They financed legal groups, judicial junkets to press their cases in the courts. Eventually they added to this a private political machine that rivaled and threatened to subsume the entire Republican Party. So what you've got is a kind of completely separate, almost sort of privately run, privately controlled political force in American political life that goes a long way to explaining the rise of Trump, the success of Trump. And this thing that we find almost impossible to understand is how can billionaires be seen as the sort of the poster boys of a grassroots, blue-collar American revolution?

And a lot of the answers are in this book. It's a sort of... I know that essential reading tag gets... But if you want to understand modern American politics i mean you know these i've got a question if i were to read this book would it manage my anxiety uh by providing me with information or would it increase my anxiety about the future well i always feel it's a good question i always feel it's good to be informed but it is is pretty depressing. I mean, it's depressing because I'm thinking of Bernard Hill playing Ferdinand the King in Lord of the Rings. What can we do against such reckless hate?

I mean, what can we do against such reckless profligacy? How can you win against people who've got... So they have bought the votes of poor working class people by feeding back to them the message that they want to hear without having any intention of really bringing jobs back to middle America. It's a robbery. It is. It's a con job on a massive scale.

You mentioned Lord of the Rings. That was a very good line in a piece that Frankie Boyle had in The Guardian yesterday, which is a brilliant piece. If anyone listening to this hasn't read it, go and find it. It's superb. Line for line, it's superb. He said, you know, Trump's next big project is to erect a burning eye above Trump Tower. Somebody

had photoshopped that. But just on that, the discovery this week of Donald the Unready, true to our account, has been one of the great... It's superb. No. Canute, weak king.

We're going to be so tough on the sea. Sorry, John, just recap for people. What is that book called? It's called Dark Money by Jane Mayer. It's published in the UK by Scribe and the subtitle... Naomi Klein on the cover calls it utterly brilliant and chilling.

It's been pretty much given triumphantly good reviews. Because just in terms of... I mean, it's just very, very... It's well written. It's very, very, very exhaustively in the full American fact-checking style. It's very, very well put together. You, as the publisher of Granter,

you publish Barbara Ehrenreich, don't you? I do. And also, perhaps more explicitly, more chillingly relevant to this is we publish Masha Gessen, whose analysis of how an autocracy shores itself up and how it draws from the past with religion and with trade. The parallels are absolutely extraordinary, especially for our industry,

especially the way estate state machinery like that handles its intellectuals, handles its... I mean, there's some pretty terrifying... Their nanny was such a Nazi. Their brothers were growing up. Yeah, I saw that.

She moved back to Germany, right? During the war, because once they'd taken Paris, she said, I'm going back. I'm going home. It was a faderland. I'm missing this

incredible party back then. Yeah, yeah. Party, yeah. And then apparently their father, Fred, just took over by sort of literally, he would beat them with sort of sticks. And they were, I mean, again, it's that sort of troubling specter of white supremacism

that's there, you know, when it's always that thing that, you know, dog whistles or whatever, but, you know, when they're talking whatever, but when they're talking about Christian, what they're really talking about is white. Before we move on to the horse's mouth, and in your capacity, Max, as editorial director of Granter, we did, Rachel Cook came on to Batlisted last year, and we did a Granter grant book which we all love

which many of our listeners have subsequently discovered and loved called All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook and we have an opportunity to tell people that that book is coming back into print.

Is that right? We will do it. I can't actually tell you when we're going to do it but we're going to do it probably this year. That is an exclusive. It's happening. That is genuinely

amazing. It's fantastic, isn't it? What's a fantastic thing? It's an incredible book. And any publisher can go into their archive and look and see incredible books that have got lost, but some of them you have to make a case for bringing back. And you have been instrumental in that, you and Rachel. But I think reading that book

now as a style piece and as a piece of analytical writing about the writer's mind and about the British mentality it's definitively a classic so we need it in print

You were saying before we started recording that you were looking for you had been before we started recording that you were looking for you had been hunting for the manuscripts and you didn't find it but you found something else we found a load of stuff and the most extraordinary thing we found is the Jack of Jumps

it's the handwritten in blue biro manuscript of Jack of Jumps in its entirety Jack of Jumps is Seabrook's second book about the Jack the Stripper murders, but you found the handwritten manuscript. Without a single error. There's one word crossed out, but other than that, it's completely pure, delivered to his editor like that.

It meant hundreds of hours of handwriting. And I suspect, intuiting a bit from what you've discovered and what other people have said about Seabrook, probably that's how he wrote. He wrote in that kind of torturous word by word way. But it's quite a thing to see on the page.

The sense that I get, I subsequently, to doing that episode, we took part in an event, a public reading of All the Devils Are Here from cover to cover, which Ian Sinclair was present at. And Ian Sinclair said that he first encountered Seabrook because Seabrook would come to the second-hand bookstore that he ran in Upper Angel here

when there was a kind of series of antiques shops and a bookstore. And Seabrook would come up to him and monologue at him for half an hour at a time on subjects which subsequently, he said, when I read the manuscript of All the Devils Were Here, it was his monologue that he had written down, and clearly in blue biro, that he had good to go, and there they all were. So he had worked everything out in his head, you know.

So, yes, speaking of... That brings us nicely to the... Powerful intellectuals and problematic individuals. Things that are apparently stream of consciousness but are in fact incredibly carefully crafted. Quite so. Calibrated intellectual gains. We'll pick this up again after some adverts.

Stay tuned to this. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast. Only $6 at A&W's in Ontario. Experience A&W's classic breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11 a.m. So, The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey. Where did you first...

Can you remember when you first discovered this book or how you felt when you first read it? I think I was an art student and I was at a stuffy university doing art history and I was living in a damp basement in Brixton which actually had rats

and I was living with a beautiful Joyce Carey, Gully Jimson, who's the character in the book, type friend who never, in the two years we lived in that flat, washed his towel. Never even dried. He used to just pat himself down with this fetid rag every day.

You know, he's one of my best friends. This is a lot of fetid in this book. But we smoked a lot of weed and we were quite depressed and we were quite disillusioned. And this book, I think I picked it up in the second-hand bookshop, and it just screamed into my life it was such a relief because also you think about the kind of tight-ass prose you're reading in contemporary fiction at that time yeah this this abandon this lusty bawdy and and such um

I mean it felt like reading a painting and it felt very difficult to read and I liked books are difficult to read and it felt like a secret thing I was discovering and also because it was written about a London that has been tarmac'd over and especially a kind of looseness between the class system

that no longer exists this drunk, smelly guy just wandering into these millionaire's houses you can't live that way anymore but I wanted to live that way the coppers arriving yeah i i've wanted to read this book for ages max and when you said that you wanted to do it i was so happy because i thought okay i'm gonna have a pretext for reading it and i've read it over the last few the last week or so, and I have to say, as I went along, I found it quite hard work, which I don't mind.

But the last time you come into the final straight, I was thinking, what a privilege to have read this, and to be able to talk about it. It's one of my favourite things that we've ever done on here. And you said to me the other day, you said a brilliant thing. You said, the last time I read it I swore I wouldn't read

it again. You loved it so much. But the anguish of it as well, you know. This man, the centre of this book is horrifying. Isn't he? On one level level he is the unfettered

fetid but unfettered artistic ego run amok you know and if you're a writer or a creative person of any kind it's slightly unsettling to read

this and see someone just whose selfishness is and yet whose perceptiveness he's very very uh honest about his selfishness and he wasn't i mean that's one of the things i love about it is it you feel he has sort of the story of how he started off as a clerk and had a you you know, great job and wife and kids. And then he just starts to sketch and some explosion goes off in his brain and suddenly he can't stop. He literally can't stop.

And he's just never stopped. And this absolute main character has absolutely not a shred of self pity and he's critical of it elsewhere which I love yeah absolutely he's a phenomenally good psychologist as well

it's completely I know what you mean about challenging in that it is the prose is it is relentless but it is the prose is is it's relent the prose is relentless right yeah um but it is also you can't skip because if you miss a sentence you're missing some of the great sentences yeah and some of the great british sentences ever written yeah i completely agree i think some of the best i think i think some of the best i think some of the best descriptive passages i have ever

read and certainly one of the best books ever about painting but i think you've got at one at one end of the scale, you've got, you know, we mentioned this earlier, the Dickens of Our Mutual Friend, which I'm sure was there somewhere in the background. At the other end, you've got kind of Mighty Boosh. I mean, it's quite, there's some fabulously funny... It is a bit Fawlty Towers.

It's like Karamazov off screen, when they all start dicking around, when Dostoevsky's not focusing on them. And some of the best, I mean, Coca. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's phenomenal. I mean, what a character. But that's why it's got under my skin so much, I think,

as getting something right, is that if you're compelled to make something... I can certainly see myself going back and reading it again. Also, he has a dialogue through the book. It's with Billy Blake, William Blake. And it's set on the Thames and London. But what I love about it, he's reading what I call hardcore Blake. Stuff that I've forced myself to

read because i'm an idiot when i was at university the long poems and that's and it's punctuated with these long undigested passages yeah yeah which i think might also be adding to your uh you know chewy no i just the chewy is fine the chewy is fine i saw just feel, you know, we've done other books on Backlisted, which I can understand that you would engage with immediately, and they would carry you along, right? You're on Spark, this is not. Yeah, this book requires you to lean into it somewhat, right? But that's fine, that's good.

We thoroughly approve of that. That's why we're here. I just am saying to people, you know, get ready. But the payback is so superb, right? I mean, it's a send-up as well. So that friendship he has with the guy, and then they discuss Spinoza, and he's like wrestling with it all the way through.

What does he call it? He calls him the old death... Old Ben. Diamond death dealer or something and he said why do you call him that and he said

I have no idea why they call him that but for readers I think it's important to explain he wants to paint he must paint he isn't painting

because he's a criminal he's been in prison then he's got nowhere to paint and then he's offended everyone then he's getting locked in but all the time

so even sitting here with you he'd be like oh Andy if I could just get you to sit like oh Andy if I could just get you to sit like that God if I could just whip that

if I could just knock that nose into shape the whole thing is like Titian struggling to get back to the canvas because everything

is painting everything is like when he walks through London he's like oh stunning little bit of blue the descriptions

yes exactly and also they're unceasing that's what's so brilliant about it that you feel the character is kind of the character is being driven forward constantly by this thing that he can't suppress you know the way he looks at the world and then is trying to find expression of it um i'm trying to think of any novel i've read where life force is more

i mean he is yeah yeah golly jimpson is is just... Because he's 67 in this book, which is brilliant. And the romance with... Sarah Mundy. Yes, Sarah Mundy. It's brilliant. I think I loved it because I had a step-grandpa who wore, as I imagine Gully does, like a mustard roll neck.

And he was about 90, this guy, when I knew himully does, like a mustard roll neck. And he was about 90, this guy, when I knew him, and he lived to be ancient, and he was a soft pornographer. He did pin-up girls, airbrushed pin-up girls, and he used to say to me, come and look at my drawers, and he'd pull out his drawers and there'd be hundreds of photographs of all his neighbours, all the women that lived on his street would come and model for him. And he did calendars and he did cigarette companies and everything like that.

But he had this... It was borediness, it was risque, and he would play against political correctness the whole time. But ultimately, it was exactly what you're saying, it was this extraordinary energy to make images all the time. Every conversation he had was... I must just tell you this as well, the character of Gully Jimson.

So Gully Jimson, he's a painter, he's a boozer, he punches people of either gender, he's a... Just out of jail. He breaks windows, he steals stuff. Anyway. Almost uncontrollably.

It's almost like a sort of Tourette's. That scene where he's just half-inching snuff boxes. The great Kirkdale books on Twitter, when he saw that we were doing this, he said, oh, you know what, that's my dad's favourite book. I've always been meaning to read it. And so he was

reading it, and he tweeted me, and he said, now I understand. My dad is Gully Jimson. And then yesterday he tweeted me and said, now I understand. My dad is Gully Jimson. And then yesterday he tweeted me and said, and this is exactly what he said, and I'm quoting him directly. As promised, I spoke to my dad, re-horse his mouth. He said, trust me, the advice on how to throw a bottle is spot on.

Which is to throw it like a dart, not to throw it like that. I would say I could now see what would Gully do would be a thing because it's just his reaction in circumstances the lack of self pity because he's absolutely

his poverty is constant throughout the book despite the endless ridiculous schemes to try and extort money. The way he calls people is so good. He does that, I'll give you 20 bob and you give me four gillings back, and then I'll give you a pound, and we'll just call it quits. He does that reverse polarity thing,

and then somebody says no, which was a strong response. And then he says, you've done very well, haven't you? And he just robbed them. I'm going to ask Max, I'm going to ask you to read a bit in a minute. I'm just going to read the blurb on the back of this Penguin Modern Classic, Penguin Modern Classic,

which has a fantastic Stanley Spencer painting on the front. A detail from desire by Stanley Spencer in the collection of Lady Wollstone, it says here. So I'm just going to read the blurb to help people just fix here. The horse's mouth is a portrait of an artistic temperament. Its principal character, Gully Jimson, is an impoverished painter

who bothers little about the customary obligations and decencies. But although he is a bad citizen, he is a good artist. We can debate that in a minute, everybody. He's a bad citizen, he's a good artist. So wholly preoccupied with his art that he is willing to endure any privation for its sake. Gully Jimson, however, is no

self-conscious martyr. He is so wholly allergic to conventional values as to find a sardonic delight in flouting them. And the only morality he practices is the devotion he gives to painting and then there's a quote a wonderful quote from John Betjeman where Betjeman said Mr Joyce Carey is an important and exciting writer there's no doubt about that to useyson's phrase, he is a lord of language. If you like rich writing full of gusto and accurate original character drawing, you will get it from the horse's mouth.

Mr Carey is the right horse. And I think that's the thing. I agree with John. The thing I agree with Betjeman there is, I read another one of Carey's books, Mr Johnson, which as well is problematic, very problematic in some ways. But the thing that drives it is the thing that drives the horse's mouth, which is depth of character.

You know how you were saying you've got to read everything and if you miss a bit, you'll miss a brilliant sentence. You'll also miss... He buries plot. Sentences, a sentence or two will contain miss, he buries plot. Sentences, a sentence or two will contain a very significant bit of plot which he then will expound upon via character for two or three paragraphs.

Brilliantly, I think. It's incredibly carefully drawn. I'm reading this interview with him where he says that the prettiest thing anyone ever said about the book was that it felt improvised. And he said, of all my books, this was the one I drafted again and again and again. Seven or eight times, he clicked it all down into place.

It's so carefully calibrated. As someone that writes now, I feel the urge to get back to writing, that ticklish, frustrating thing of, fuck, I wish I just had five minutes to get that down, or it's a bus ticket in my pocket and it's burning a hole in my pocket. I cannot think of

a book that nails that better. I've got two bits. Shall I do one? Yeah, please. This gives you a good sense of it, I think. I've got to read it fast, because that's the only way you can read it. And I went out to get room for my grief. Thank God! It was a high sky on Green Bank, darker than I expected,

but at the edge of the world was still a long way off, at least as far as Surrey. Under the cloud bank, some was in the bank, streak of salmon below, salmon trout above soaking into wash-blue river whirling along so fast that its skin was pulled into wrinkles like silk dragged over the floor. Shot silk, fresh breeze

off the isle, sharp as spring frost, ruffling under the silk-like muscles in a nervous horse, ruffling under the silt like muscles in a nervous horse, ruffling under my grief like ice and hot daggers. I should have liked to take myself in both hands and pull myself apart to spike my guts for being Gully Jimson, who at 67 years of age after 45 years of experience could be put off his intentions,

thoroughly bamboozled and floored by a sprout of dogma, a blind shepherd, a vegetated eye, a puffed-up adder of moralities. Ooh, girl going past, clinging to a young man's arm, putting up her face like a duck to the moon, drinking joy, green in her eyes, spinal curvature, no chin, mouth like a frog, young man like a pug, gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint

reading the words of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, puggy. That isn't a maiden you see before you. It's a work of imagination. Nail him, girly. Nail him to the contract. Fly, laddie. Fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think.

I mean, he could go on. I've gone all red. Absolutely genius. I'm going to read this next bit, which is the bit that Andy said he wanted to read. Oh, you're absurd. Yeah, quite right. This is horse's mouth full flow. Hang on, I've gone all sweaty. That's right, though.

I want you to feel that in order to read the horse's mouth adequately, a bit of booze needs to come out of your skin. So he's gone into this flat where he's going to kind of try and get a commission, and then he's going to end up causing all kinds of hell in this flat with a sculptor. I wasn't quite reassured until I saw the flat. Luckily the beaters were out to tea and I was able to look around. A real hall, a big studio with gallery,

a little dining room off the studio, two bedrooms and chromium bathroom. Usual Persian rugs and antiques, vases, marbles, African gods, bloody bloody blah. Old portraits in the dining room, modern oils in the studio, drawings in the dining room. Modern oils in the studio. Drawings in the bedroom, watercolours in the hall. Usual modern collection.

Wilson's steer, water in watercolour. Matthew Smith, victim of the crime in slaughtercolour. Utrillo, whitewashed wall in mortarcolour. Matisse, odalisque in squattercolour. Picasso, spatchcock horse in tortercolour. Gilbert Spencer, cocks and pigs in thorta colour. Stanley Spencer, cottage garden in horta colour. Brack, half a bottle and half a

porter colour. William Roberts, pipe dream in snorter colour. Wadsworth, rockses, blockses and fishy boxes all done by self in norter colour. Duncan Grant, landscape in strorter colour. Francis Hodgkins, cows and wows and frows and sows in chortle colour. Ruo, perishing saint in forticolour.

Epstein, Lear waiting for Jacob in squatter colour. All the most high-toned and expensive. I can see your friends are rich people, I said. Whoa, Max. Whoa. It's fun. It's very misogynist. We should say that straight away.

Gully's dislike of his violence towards women is relentless It's a weird thing isn't it artistically he knows what to do with women in all other respects we're seeing somebody who is incapable of expressing himself in any other way

I agree with you it's quite disturbing to read just as Mr Johnson has race issues, which I think now you would... Couldn't print it. The thing about Mr Johnson, which is set in colonial Africa, is that...

Which he spent it carrying himself. He did, yeah. It has many of the same features as The Horse's Mouth. It's all through character. It comes through character. In its own way, it's another great book. But the thing that's so interesting about it is, on one level, you can see now it would be very problematic.

It is very problematic to read it, but I think even then it was quite problematic. It's the book, Johnson is the book that inspired Chimuara Chebi to write Things Fall Apart because he read it and thought well this isn't my version of my country that I recognise

at all. Whatever the skill with which it's been done. But the opening page of Mr Johnson he says you there, I love the way your breasts are moving. Totally. I know this is But the opening page of Mr Johnson, he says, you there, I love the way your breasts are moving. Yeah, totally. I know this is dangerous ground, but I think there is a... That's amazing.

Gully's pretty offensive to everybody, really. I mean, he just doesn't have that... He has that sort of Blakean innocence, in a way. This passage, I love this. This is his old paramour, Sarah Munday. And I think it's a good old people sex scene, of which we seem to have... Didn't we have one on the other week?

Yes. Can't remember what that was. Muriel Sparks. Exactly. Don't say that, Sarah. I said, givering another squeeze and meaning it. For you couldn't help liking the old trout. The very way she was speaking, easy from her soul,

as a jug runs when you tilt it to a wet lip. It made me tingle all over. It made me laugh and sing in the calves of my legs. It made my toes curl and my fingers itch at the tops. It made me want to go bozo with the old rascal. What a woman, the old original, clear as a glass eye and straight as her own front. The very way she worked her great cook's hands,

jointed like a lobster round a glass, and lolled her head on one side, turned up her eyes and heaved up her bosom when she sighed, enjoying the feel of herself inside her stays. It made me want to squeeze her till she squealed. I mean, it's kind of... Yeah, it's misogynistic, but it's also, it's a good writing. But also it's full of lust and love.

So we're just going to, we're going to come on to the film in a minute. But just to say about Carey, so Carey was an Irish writer. He wrote a book a year for like 25 years and was very famous in his own time. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He was, you know, extremely well known, sold a lot of books, widely reviewed. He is the subject of the seventh ever Paris Review interview. And there's a little, I've got a little thing here about that

from that where they ask him about the horse's mouth and the interviewer says and this is great, the interviewer says you can depend around here on practically everyone having read the horse's mouth. Do you think that's because it's less philosophical or just because it's a penguin? And

Carey replies the horse's mouth is a very heavy piece of metaphysical writing. No, he's joking. They like it because it's funny. The French have detected the metaphysics and are fussing about the title. I want le tuyau incréable, the unbustable tip. They say this is unworthy of a philosophical work

and too like a roman policier. I say, tant mieux. So much the better. But they are unconvinced. I mean, reading these interviews with him, he seems to have had quite a relaxed attitude to being a man of letters. I don't know.

He didn't mind. I think he recognised, and I respect this so much now when writers are kind of renter gobs and then they get hanged a year later for something they said off the cuff at a festival or whatever. I love this here. He says, you know, people went into full philosophical flow so well.

I mean, we joke about Trump and the squashing of language down to yelps of hatred or capital letters, but God people had good language. You know, so this is him just in a chat about the novel. Anyone can deny the freedom of the mind. He can argue that our ideas are conditioned, but anyone who argues so must stop there.

He must deny all freedom and say the world is simply an elaborate kind of clock. He must be a behaviourist. There's no alternative in logic between behaviourism, mechanism, and the personal God who is the soul of beauty, love, and truth. Can you imagine novelists these days just trotting that out? And then the interviewer says, how do you fit poetry into this? Because I heard

you describe it as prose cut up into lines. Would you stick to that? And Joyce Carey says, did I say that? I must have been annoying someone. No, I wouldn't stick to it. It's excellent. There is a freedom, isn't there? That's what I kind of loved. We were having an interesting discussion about comedy and comic writing

and how literary fiction has sort of abandoned. It came up in the Amos book, which I have to say, I don't know whether Amos read Carey, but there are bits of this that I think... Well, Kingsley certainly would have done. Yeah, yeah, must have done. Have you read, this is, we should also say, this is the third part of a trilogy. Yeah.

Written from the perspectives of the different characters. So the first one is called Herself Surprised. That's about Sarah Munday. Right. And then To Be a Pilgrim, I don't know which character that's about. That's separate, that's unrelated but it forms a trilogy in his mind it's about frustration

and so have you read those other books? I read Herself Surprised years ago it's an NYRB classic I don't know whether the other two are I remember liking it but finding it not comparable to The Horse's Mouth it was a pure

I think the point is you don't need to read the first two to read this not comparable to The Horse's Mouth. Yeah. It's a pure, pure... I think the point is you don't need to read the first two to read this. Jimson's voice is the thing, isn't it? Yeah. I read a thing about... I read a novel by him, A Rural Irish Childhood. It's called A Quiet... I can't remember what it's called.

A Quiet Childhood. It's a memoir, basically, a novel. Beautiful book, but almost like early John McGahan. Really surprising. I mean, I think he was very versatile. I think he's one of those novelists that never quite decided what he was doing, had a huge brain and a great appetite to write.

I mean, some of the best things in this book of interiors, I should say, I noticed on my way here this afternoon, this Selected Essays of Joyce Carey. I opened it up and the Ex Libris sticker in the front is Barry Humphreys That's just Ex Libris It must be the Barry Humphreys as well, look at it

It's absolutely brilliant little thing It's also got some great arguments against being an artist the very Dickensian boy with the stutter, nosy Well we're just going to hear that now. In fact, I'm just going to interrupt you to say they made a film of the horse's mouth.

We're just going to play a little clip from that now and then I'm going to say something about the film. Disgusting, I call it. How did you get in? Through the hatch. It's disgusting what they've done to your picture, Mr. Jimson. They've ruined it. I can patch it.

It's the little air gun holes that are the nuisance. They've written names all over Eve, Mr. Jimson. Mr. Jimson's just gone out. He saw you coming. I brought you some coffee and sausage rolls. Don't they ever give you any homework? It's the holidays. If you want to get that scholarship and go to oxford and get into the civil service and be a great man and have two thousand pounds a year and a nice wife and a kid with real eyes and open and shut go home and work it's nice and hot mr jimson there's sugar in it

mr jimson won't be back for some time i'll drink it for him now go home so we so I should say that that was Alec Guinness playing Gully Jimson, that Alec Guinness adapted it so he plays the part and adapts it and Ronald Neame the director tells a brilliant story about the actor Claude Rains

had approached him and said I've just read this book The Horse's Mouth it would make a terrific film and Ronald Neame read it and said I couldn't get on with it. It annoyed me. Two years later, Alec Guinness says to me, hello, Ronnie, I've just read this amazing book, The Horse's Mouth.

So I said, and at that point I thought, well, both Claude Rains and Alec Guinness are probably onto something. And in the film, which I think is terrific, and Ronald Neames said, his exact phrase was, we scratched the edge of the book. That's for sure.

To try and get it in. But the paintings, the incredible paintings that are in the film, The Horse's Mouth, are done by... The great John Bratby. Friend of backlisters, the painter and novelist John Bratby. They are... There's an incredible scene at the end of the film and the book

where Bratby spent a week painting an enormous outside wall. Something bad happens to the wall. And they said, in terms of dealing with Bratby, Ronald Neame said, by the time we got to this point, Bratby had lost his mind. He stayed up for two nights to finish painting the wall and then,

quite somewhat the worst aware, and then had to flee because he couldn't bear the knowledge that it was going to be not there shortly thereafter. But Guinness based his version of Jimson slightly on John Bratby as well. So he's channelling the book,

but he's also channelling this real larger-than-life painter. It's interesting, the film was quite successful in its day, wasn't it? It was shortlisted for Academy Award. I'm just interested as to why the book, which was an early Penguin Modern Classic, and certainly when I... I was first aware of it when I asked a teacher to give me a reading list for the holidays.

Yes, Miss, could I have a reading list for the holidays? And she gave me basically a list of great English 20th century novels. And I just remember I probably read half of them over my lifetime. Not that summer. I read one over that summer. But Horse's Mouth was on there, along with House for Mr Bisbois by B.S. Naipaul and things. And I just wonder why it hasn't survived.

What do you think? I mean, we all really enjoyed it. And I don't know, I'd love... It's a shame in a way we don't have a woman around the table to say... to give an alternative reading. But I... Pamela Hansford-Johnson loved it. Yes, she did.

I think we don't... I'm torn about this because I think publishing in a whole patronises readers and underestimates readers and is often very apologetic about any challenging content or even a challenging prose style and thinks it'll put people off and that's not true. Readers time and time again prove that isn't true. But also I think the novel has become phenomenally conservative and easy.

Novelists have adapted to an architecture whereby novelists need to slip down like a lozenge. And the best novels, the most interesting books, the books that stand the test of time, are the ones that don't and are tricky and gritty and knotty. Time and again on Backlisted I've been expecting lozenges. And you actually get these spiky, complicated,

difficult, challenging, often by women. In this case by a man. but it's fascinating I read this book it gripped me from the first, it's a cracking opening The Thames, it's sort of got that Dickensian kind of authenticity it's properly comic

I mean, and I think that's the thing I agree with you John it's so rare to get something that's as unbuttoned and you know, the painting scenes there's one earlier in the book which is so mad. They mention about a painting. He's thinking on his feet about a painting.

While you look for it, I'm just going to say that I'm reading a book at the moment. Reading yet another Anita Bruckner novel. But this is... While I wasn't looking, there it goes. I'm reading one of her novels, a novel called Fraud, which I'm enjoying very much.

There's a line in that where she says very simply, the creative life is a law unto itself. And I thought that's so applicable to this book. In a sense, that's what Jimson is. That's what Carey's trying to create with Jimson, the idea of personification of the creative life force, which is lashing out in all directions

when it can't focus on painting. You know? Well, I think for those of us as well that make a living dealing with writers who have fragile egos, sometimes torrential power storms of imaginative ability that sometimes needs marshalling, sometimes needs keeping in check, sometimes torrential power storms of imaginative ability

that sometimes needs marshalling, sometimes needs keeping in check. It's an astonishing insight into the danger of being someone completely obsessed with your vocation. I find it, despite how comic it is and how silly it is and how exhausting it is to read i find it i find it very very um soothing i find it i find it some something is missing in modern life that isn't that it that exists in the horse's mouth and that that may be a personality type it may be a freedom it may be just a pure energy thing i think there's a rhythm in it there's a remote there's a remorse this is the word we've used but

there's like a relentless forward motion to it you know as you were saying earlier, the way it ends is tremendous. I mean, in a sense it ends, but it stops. You know, the sense of the life force beating away, beating away, beating away. You know, I don't want to give away the ending. It's fairly joyous in that respect, I think. There's a kind of... Great last line.

There's a kind of... The whole last bit from when... I mean, I don't want to give anything away, but from the thing that he does, which is such a terrible thing to do, and it sort of starts to dawn on him that he's done this terrible thing. And that's such a comic scene. Her last line. It's hilarious.

But yeah, I mean, I think it leaves you with that sense that you've been exposed to an intense performance, the ramifications of which, for you emotionally, might be quite some time before you understand them. Like, it's a thing, this book, outside of itself, and that's what makes it. I love the... I'm not going to read the book,

but I've got another bit which I love, which just gets you that thing of continually, greedily trying to find things to paint. You know, everything is that um oh god that line of Joyce is about the ineluctable modality of the visible but that's what he just everything is he just wants to paint what he sees what's in front of him just then the beaters came in Sir William and Lady big man with a bald head and monkey fur on the back of his hands voice like a Liverpool dray on a rumbling bridge. Charming manners, little bow, beaming smile,

lady tall, slender, Spanish eyes, brown skin, thin nose, Greco hands, collector's piece. I must have those hands, I thought. Arms, probably too skinny, but the head and torso are one piece. I should lead them together. It's almost like a kind of... It's almost like a sort of... You can imagine it almost like a sort of mad Jack the Ripper kind of you know

it's like the Raft of the Medusa isn't it none of us are human beings we're all just body parts that you might use but he's like lovely thigh I could knock that around a bit I could put a bit of blue on that and suddenly it's off the page it's lifting off I thought this was just a I just thought this was a magnificent book

it's one of those books I mean I like many of the books that we do on here but this is the one that when I was reading it I was thinking, wow, if someone listens to this and goes home or goes out and downloads or buys this book, I'd be so happy.

I realised there was a couple of projects I abandoned years ago, writing projects, and one of them was this kind of picaresque private detective who's hired to go to Suffolk, and he's pure gully. That's probably why I never carried on with it, because it was just gully Jimson.

I think there is a danger. You can sort of feel that, that sort of rat-a-tat-tat sentence thing. Well, you reading it just then put me in mind of that bloody awful grief is a thing with feathers thing that you were talking about in the beginning beginning yeah so maybe maybe that's what he is the that guy is the carry to no sure yeah yeah oh tasty cheek nice hairline oh i'll have a bit of that oh putty beard like that

oh you're reading from your book that's nice here's gully jimson just bringing it around we're always trying to find patterns on on the slightly on the this is on the people the people is just as big a danger as the government i mean if you let it get on your mind because there's more of it more and worse and bigger and emptied emptier and stupider one man is a living soul but two men are an india rubble milking machine for a beer engine and three men are noises off and four men are an asylum for cretins and five men are a committee and 25 are a meeting and after you get to the mummy after that you get to the mummy house at the british museum and the sovereign people and common humanity and the average and the public and the majority and the life force and statistics and the economic man brainless eyeless wicked

spawn of the universal toad sitting in the black bloody ditch of eternal night and croaking for its mate, which is the spectre of hell. That's so Brexit, man. Make Britain great again. Because this is from the essays. This is about what is a politician. His decisions affect millions of lives as his mistakes destroy whole nations. The private citizen who ruins himself or his family may suffer the anger of his dependents, but the statesman can bring upon himself

the hatred of a whole generation. And if he is an honest man, this is exactly the risk he has to take. Michael Gove! That is why the easy judgments of history, especially popular history, strike us as so often unjust. Before we call any statesman a fool or a crook,

we should ask what problems he faced, what kind of people he had to handle, what kind of support he got, what pressure he withstood, what risks he took. But our final question will be still, was he an honest man? Brilliant. To be slipped into the suggestion box, Theresa. Well, I think we've probably got to the end of that motherload of loveliness.

It's an amazing book. We should say thank you to Max. Oh, I've got something else to say thank you to Max. Can I just say thanks to Max? When I went to Iceland last year, Max recommended that I read two books, both of which were fantastic. Actually, I've talked about on here, in fact. The Blue Fox by Sune and Independent People by Hal

the Lass, that's published by you, John. One book in English translation. I just thought it was lovely to say to everybody that this weekend on Twitter I was discussing laxness with Sune. What a world. Worth looking up, actually. He's said some great things. Well, that saw it. What a world. Worth looking up, actually. It's great. He said some great things.

Well, that's it. Thanks to Max. Thanks to our producer, Matt Hall. Thanks again to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, at BacklistedPod, Facebook, at the BacklistedPod page,

and on the page on the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk or.com now, forward slash, Backlisted. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight with another show. Goodbye. Bye or.com now, forward slash and backlisted. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight with another show. Goodbye.

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