Booked (May 1998) — Muriel Spark, Christopher Hitchens and Nigella Lawson

wales land of the midnight sun and booked us come here for a special edition from the literary festival from hey on why now every year 30 000 book lovers swoop down on this little town population 1300 number of bookshops 36 number of great big rivers one the y which flows from here down into the wherefore and thence to the great rolling sea they come here to listen to authors talk about their books read aloud and complain about their publishers and 300 of them come here because they want to be part of the audience for booked [Music] welcome to this special edition of books from hey on y this is the last in the present run but the first to be filmed inside a tent with cocoa and marshmallows after the show and our specialist subjects for discussion today are the holocaust the book of job the code of the woosters and the life and works of dame muriel sparks oh mastermind eat your heart out my guests this week are day muriel spark herself writer and broadcaster christopher hitchens and where would i have been without her nigella lawson who's been here plugging her own new food book first up guilt and moral responsibility in post-war germany when this book the reader by bernhard schlink was published in hardback last year many critics went balmy with enthusiasm it's out in paperback on monday will probably be one of the most talked about books of the summer it starts in the germany of the 1950s with a passionate affair between a 15 year old school boy called michael and an older woman called hannah then hannah vanishes years later when michael's a law student he sees her again on trial for war crimes it turns out that she'd been a member of the ss and agada auschwitz michael like the rest of his generation is forced to confront the terrible things that ordinary people did in the not at all distant nazi past nigella that's a synopsis of the plot but what do you think the book's actually about well to a great extent it is that very germanic thing the buildings roman and a boy's sort of the rights of passages he comes of age with this very important sexual initiation in the beginning but of course from there i mean that's that's quite a significant part of the book but from there of course it opens up into the the idea that the legacy also of the young boy is is post-war germany and he is having along with his contemporaries to grapple with his parents his parents generation and that the whole burden of uh how much he is also part of the blame and the shame and how much he has to free himself from that day muriel do you think this is a good book yes i think it's uh i think it's gripping i think there are faults in that of plausibility and one doesn't altogether believe that this school boy could have a prolonged affair with a mature woman of her class without being discovered in some way however this is a germanic situation and maybe they can christopher what do you think i think it's a negligible book i think it's a bogus book and the carpentry shows in part in the fact that you can't believe a word the guy is saying they don't exchange names till they seem to know each other forever he doesn't really get to know anything about her the the the fact that it turns out that she may have may or may not have played some minor role in the final solution is i think simply and i must say i'm i think objectionably added to the narrative in order to give it the air of um spurious um moral seriousness that i'm depressed to see so many reviewers falling forwards i think when they're confronted with a book that has this extraordinary atrocity is its central theme they don't dare say actually this person doesn't really feel strongly about it at all he isn't making any effort to confront history or conscience or or hasn't indeed been prepared to go to the troublemaking believable character now joe let's talk about the holocaust theme in this because one of the criticisms that's been made of the book i want to come back to some of the others is that in some ways it's an apologia it's an apology i find it doesn't surprise me that it's a hugely defensive book and i may say on that score it does not surprise me that where it's been incredibly successful is in france this seems to me of a piece that it is defensive to an offensive degree that it is look she she was illiterate she didn't know what she was doing she was you know she was only obeying orders and uh actually you know well uh the church was hit by an allied bomb so who can say who's guilty and who's innocent we are all guilty wash my hands of it it can now be made into a film we can watch it and not feel too bad i mean i'm gonna have my my three pennies here because i think that this there are some faults in this book but i think that this book absolutely courageously confronts uh in a way that almost no other book does or that i've read does this question of responsibility he says this is the boy i mean whether or not it's plausibly he would have had an affair with her and so on as as dave muriel says this could be germany or it could just be novelists whatever lots of implausibilities are found in novels but he says i wanted simultaneously to understand hannah's crime and to condemn it but it was too terrible for that when i tried to understand it i had the feeling i was feeling i was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned when i condemned it as it must be condemned there was no room for understanding but even as i wanted to understand hannah failing to understand and meant betraying her all over again now this must be how it really is although it's incredibly difficult to say that makes it that that quote makes it sound the book is grappling with something the book is attempting to distance something which is very different well i don't and she can't read so she manages to transfer from a factory job um i think working for siemens i think he even mentions one of the german capitalist corporations that actually sponsored the rise of nazis and they wouldn't know that but she's able to make a smooth transition without being able to read or write from there to the to the ss and then to have people in her care accidentally killed by the raf now in um in hannah aaron's book on the trial of eichmann in jerusalem she coined a phrase that i think everyone's now heard namely the banality of evil the the the the stunted human scale of the perpetration so this is well below that and i think actually illustrates the evil of banality but but but but but christopher i mean the fact is i mean this nigel has made a lot of the fact is an ally bomb but the fact is the responsibility is not dodged here it's quite clear that they could have let these women out if they'd wanted to do so and she's talking in the in the courtroom the hannah character is talking to the judge to whom she twice poses the all-important question above which there is no more important question well what would you have done which is something we don't like to ask about that particular period because we assume that we are something other and then we are confronted with a bosnia and we wonder how other we actually are but she says you know we couldn't just let them escape we were responsible for them we guarded them the whole time in the camp and on the march that was the point that we had to gather them and not let them escape that's why we didn't know what to do we also had no idea how many of the women would survive the next few days so many had died already and the ones who were still alive were so weak now that's a pathetic apology and she's not allowed off the hook is she well i don't know that she's not lied off the hook i think there is a sense in which it's being almost borish it was bad form to go on about really what would happen have you noticed the word jew is hardly mentioned in this book that would be kind of it is that would be tremendously unsubtle i i don't think that she is exonerated but on the other hand i think we are asked to rephrase the question and i think what why are we being asked to rephrase the question i'm sorry if it makes bernhardt schlink and his generation feel bad but that isn't really my major concern yeah david i think i have to second nigel again because if this had been the first book to come out of um berlin writing about on this topic one would say um well it's got all these faults now does mention but after all you know it's an attempt to grapple hasn't the idea of collective guilt versus collective responsibility in germany been reasonably well thrashed out addressed by some quite sophisticated and brave people some people with real moral and mental toughness by now it's not as if there isn't a single person in this room who doesn't already know what we're talking about and and yet it's it does read as if it's a first draft of an attempt to claim in other words therefore the uh the courage that doesn't really belong to you they mural can you mediate for us no i think again i do agree that i don't uh like books that milk the holocaust holocaust as they do i think there's been enough of that just to get a public that you only have to mention that word or that subject and there's an enormous public for it on this on in this book i do think that you do you are invited to say what would you have done well i think that anyone would have unlocked the door of the church any same normal person and these people were obviously insane or very evil and i certainly wouldn't have had anything more to do with such a woman myself you know if i'd been this young man and i don't think um i don't think they can make a lot of that no i suppose my argument will be there i suppose my argument would be that they don't try we're gonna have to move on unfortunately from this book now the readers published in paperback on monday priced five pound 99 from phoenix now let's lighten up a bit with dave muriel's book choice uh which is this or part of this the book of job job is the 18th book of the bible stuck between esther and psalms there was a man in the land of us whose name was job is how it begins where is the land of us you may ask where is ours to which the answer is we is in hey on why old job is one of god's best beloved upright pious and big on sacrifices and offerings so god rewards him by inflicting upon him a series of appalling curses just to test his fidelity at one point he's reduced to sitting on an ash heap trying to scrape the boils off his face with a bit of old crockery job's faith remains intact despite a spectacularly unhelpful dialogue with his so-called comforters a dialogue that fails to answer the question why does god make the righteous suffer demurial spark you've chosen this when did you first read it first when did you first read it right back in when i was a child because i went to a school where we were always reading the bible but i was fascinated i started writing about it in the 50s so that's a long time ago and i've always been fascinated by it and i've gone through several interpretations but i must say that the book of job is the one book in the bible that is not remotely historical we are not obliged to believe there was a job it's like the good samaritan it's a parable there was a legendary job a babylonian job the land of us was obviously babylonian and the author who was a brilliant poet of the book of job took the beginning and the end as a prologue and an epilogue in very formal way and in the middle he stuck a quite revolutionary type of book in the most beautiful poetry imaginable is it the poetry that really appeals to you i mean is there a bit that you yes i can where god comes out of a whirlwind and says you know who are you i'm me who are you and um then he says i made this and i made that the most wonderful poetry and it sort of takes job out of himself i think it's sort of almost therapeutic this wonderful look at my creation my universe my horse is my this that yes and it has a lot about fearsome nostrils in it as well yes indeed there's a bit uh would you like me to yes please do this is god's war horse has thou given the horse strength hester clothes his neck with thunder cans thou make him afraid as a grasshopper the glory of his nostrils is terrible he poureth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength he goeth on to meet the armed men he mocketh at fear and is not uprighted neither turneth he back from the sword the quiver rattleth against him the glittering spear and the shield he swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet he saith among the trumpets haha and he smelleth the battle afar off the thunder of the captains and the shouting the uh all right before we just move to to christopher and nigel and the theology in this seems a bit odd i mean after all it all comes about because god's been having a bit of an argument with satan hasn't it and satan says and the lord said unto satan when's comist thou then satan answered the lord and said from going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it and says actually it's not as good as you think it is god and god says no look at job and satan says yeah well old job you know he'd give in if you just sent a few nasty things to him and so this capricious dreadful god says all right then we'll load the whole lot on onto job that's right it's a marvelous novel actually accident for some people something christopher's story and then in the end job gets back all his property and children everything but that's only a formality from the myth his daughters are called cinnamon eye paint various things and chris what do you think there is that under-remarked aspect that i think may be one of the origins of manichaeism that there are god in the devil as you say are having a conversation and without loss of time god delivers his one of his most favored subjects as so to speak an experiment uh it shows in a sense how totalitarian religion can be you mentioned some you hit it at this i mean i remember in um used to be a joke in albania about the chap who says when he comes out of prison for five years um they are what we win for nothing that debbie silly only get two years for that that if this is if this be a god if if this be a god then the question is not why doesn't he stop suffering but why does anyone want to worship except possibly out of holy terror now there's a thing we all have for have in common here i think which is a certain amount of jewish blood each you can argue about the proportions and it doesn't give us i think and i don't believe it's in the g that there's any genetic claim on the old testament either but my rabbi the man married me rabbi goldberg who was the emeritus rabbi of the american reform congregation and you couldn't get married by the old no no i needed i needed an einsteinian agnostic when he was at the hebrew union theological seminary he did his thesis special doctoral thesis on the book of job because as he said it's the stupidest book in the bible it may be in some ways the most beautiful i mean man is born into trouble as the sparks fly upward that could be east class but um this the what's so obvious is that it's a man-made god god thinks he proves his power and glory by persecuting some old fetch who's surrounded by other old collections no uh the to invert what is said in saint john um i think it's some john god does not make man in his own image man makes god in his own image and that's why god is suffering at barbados do you agree with that well i think certainly that it is an extraordinary manifesto for the atheist but i also think it's very interesting that they mural responds to it as a catholic because what it's saying is there is just there is a there should be a relationship between man and god no one in between i will speak to god and god will speak to me and that's that's not like normally the catholic view of these things the last word well i think it was uh prefiguring the new testament where i i think jesus christ was the ultimate job i really challenged the whole uh works the whole um establishment and that this was leading on to that okay are you so popular with the establishment the book of job is available from all good book shops or from those nice west indian women in hats who knock on your door on saturday mornings when you're in your wife france or you could pinch one from a hotel bedroom onto christopher's choice the code of the woosters by pg woodhouse it's a rattling jeeves and wooster yarn with an impossible to summarize plot involving a mad aunt daft girls a silver cow creamer a stolen policeman's helmet a vicious scotty dog and a villain called spode who bears more than a passing resemblance to fascist leader oswald mosley christopher you're known as a terrific left winger you've chosen a book all about running around a country house yes there is that well um well first i knew that we were going to go from the holocaust to job i knew that already so i thought i'd better have a pretty strong return sir when it came to my choice and i i i tossed aside how green was my valley and i think i don't know if i've ever bored you with my theory but do you who here has not seen the importance of being earnest i should think there isn't a single cell what's the first line of the importance of being earnest i'll tell you young man obviously in either may pharaoh berkeley square or piccadilly discovering playing the piano on his own butler comes in chat doesn't notice him he can use to play butler remains in passive butler is noticed did you happen to uh hear what i was playing lane says the young man i didn't think it polite to listen the next person who comes in is the most terrifying aunt second most terrifying perhaps in english literature lady bracknell and augusta stupid romances sounded hearts extraordinary engagements that are all about money the removal to the country house the rural genes the uh absurd figures i think it's very obvious that the whole as well moral and mental atmosphere of woodhouse is derived from from us go out and i think that the code of the worcesters is the most perfect realization of it it is his importance of being honest it's the summer of his work and so why do you like it only if you want an ideological justification for it published as it was in 1938 the figure of sir roderick spoke you could go through the whole of anthony pole supposed to be the great tory social realist of england and the novel in that period there isn't a single fascist in nanjing paul's depiction so roderick spo leader of the black shorts and movement says to his friend gusty wait about that he sounds grassy by the way gusty when you say uh shorts you do mean shirts don't you and um guys says no the shirts had run out by the time rodney started this movement so bertie says what you mean they walk around in footer bags because he says yes but he says how perfectly foul it's the most at the scene where spode is unmasked i can't spot it for you is i think one of the great anti-fascist scenes ever written it certainly tells you an awful lot why about why fascism never really took off in uh and then the metaphors you see i mean it was always one on every page he ride like an electric fan um of all the things all the soups i've ever been in this one wins the mottled oyster i think ice formed on the upper slopes of the butler is in there there is really hardly there's hardly a word out or phrase out of place it's a masterpiece no it is it is a must and also there is one other thing that he does which is quite extraordinary if you think about it this is all narrated by somebody who's supposed to be thick and yet it has to be immensely perceptive i just want to read this little bit he's talking about madeleine bassett who uh wooster doesn't get on well with women one way or another he says i call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl the woosters are chivalrous but they can speak their minds a droopy soupy sentimental exhibit with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits i remember her telling me once that rabbits were gnomes in attendance on the fairy queen and that the stars were god's daisy chain perfect rot of course they are nothing of the sort i was going to say there is a theological dimension to it so he lays about he lays about him he he withered like a salted snail he jumped like a pee on a hot shovel this is extraordinary nigella is it is it it is funny but this is a bit of a sort of boy thing this well if if that's the case then i i'm a boy because i love this actually it's not and it's interesting that you mentioned anthony poll because i find it impossible to read him as a female reader it's absolutely impossible yes whereas uh whereas wood house and woodhouse i love and i and i find i mean it's it's not really anyway what's going on is neither here nor there in a way it's just so it's it's as a stylist i mean he's so wonderful so i don't really mind that i can't be gutty think nothing who would want to be gussy think that's that's not the point dave muriel the the the woodhouse world sort of only exists on these pages the world perfectly constructed by woodhouse himself do you find it an attractive world no i don't find the woodhouse i can't read this it's uh i really can't take it i i can understand that an author wishes to exclude every real world in order to create his own but you must want to live in it and i don't want to live in this world at all i i don't like the diction i don't like the talk i don't like this stage door johnny deb chat i cannot take it and you don't like the tuttling i know tootling and bally this and i [Laughter] how do you come out on the the phony confected world of the importance of being earnest i think it's much more elegant the importance of being earnest it's fun and it's the words are better chosen and the plot is better woven it's all together a superior production and they should only be one of them yes books and books i certainly think i would give i would i would give wild the palm in spite of the electric fans and the p on the shovel in the world well i will give while the palm and that's also part of my defense i mean wild must be counted as one of the great radical and subversive figures of our literature if we can claim the irish as being ours for the moment or let's say our comrades which i think it would be an honor to be able to do um there where was i uh yes the world the world of the importance of being earnest is a touch artificial nonetheless but though it's obviously there are there are thrusts of the salisbury family in it and but but on woodhouse christian and when and when convinced dave muriel in a sentence but i don't think that matters i can't see why it matters that a fictional world is a fictional world because in the sense it's not you know you say you wouldn't want to live in it i'm not sure even though everyone always says the idyllic world that woodhouse creates i'm not sure that one's meant to think of it as an idol it's i i no one reasonably wants to inhabit it except for as a reader and that's the perfect way of living in it christopher well exactly but i mean woodhouse uh there are serpents in his eden always i mean there's the vile so what can bassett the repressive magistrate there's constable oates the endlessly official literal minded cop there's madeleine basset who as you say thinks the stars of god's daisy chain and he thinks would be capable if if a wife of coming up behind him at breakfast with a hangover he with the hang of putting her hands over his eyes from behind so so yeah so so damn dave muriel should be reassured that there are nasty things oh yes there's some gritty realism there's nobody that nobody had told in it that you couldn't take out your insects prey the code of the worcester we start with is published by vintage price five pound ninety nine sadly it's time to say goodbye and thank you to christopher hitchens and to nigella lawson after the adverts dave muriel spark and me see you in a moment [Applause] welcome back to book dave muriel spark is one of britain's greatest living writers but she's been up there for so long now it's easy to forget just how extraordinary her world is it's full of ruthlessly manipulative young women in cd bedsits twisted gay fake vicars really vicious old people fascists blackmailers and ruffians who fight in tunnels with the bones of dead nuns murder rape betrayal and savagery of almost every description look around every corner there ain't nothing like day muriel day muriel i mean people think of dames as being demure um there's nothing in any way demure about your books you're pretty savage aren't you well um i don't know it just uh i i start writing and i think i better liven things up and i i i if i'm boring myself i stop so i have to amuse myself while i'm writing you know it's not it's not on if i get bored i feel the the reader's going to be bored let's get this absolutely straight do you if you find yourself getting slightly bored with your book you introduce a piece of savagery no the the characters themselves take care of that i really do see i don't think they're all so savage i think miss brodie is a very correct person i think she ought to be dame dame jane brody she should but um to say that she's a flawed character is not to assume great moral superiority over her but not only is she absolutely betrayed in the book but she in a funny way betrays because she is so egotistical and un and lacking in an ability to see the the people around her as people she's very possessive of her her group and overpossessive i think that's the the main criticism one could level well she's also a fascist well i don't know she i don't say she is she's accused of that she admired mussolini well a lot of people did you know including the italians but she didn't think she was living today you'd call her a fascist at all she certainly had no um she had no class consciousness of any great order it was uh more her distinctions were based more on common sense but she but she's an egotist isn't she oh absolutely and and quite a lot of the characters in your books are distinguished by not just their egotists they're monstrous egotists they they tend to go on doing in old age what they uh rather more emphatically what they started off doing as young people but is that because that's what you think people are like it's what i thought uh people were like yes when i wrote the book but i don't think that that's what i think people are like actually are you like that well you know that's for my friends to tell me really i don't know i hope not so so people are like that but you're not all all authors are gods over their work i mean you we talked about job early and faye weldon has said about the book of job it's the ultimate sort of authorial book it's the book of authorship job seeking to make order of the world around and god being the even bigger author and you're quite a capricious god over your characters aren't you well i do what i like with them yes uh i think there's no point in being an author if you can't make them do what you want them to do the only thing is i like it to be plausible i like to pull the reader into thinking it's real and make them feel it's a true story but you're very unsparing with them and sparing of what i'm sparing of their of their humanity they the terrible things happen to them um they do terrible things they're in a sense you're always at pains to bring out what's bad about them what's um it is human but it is awful well i don't know i find some of them very lovable even if they're um very flawed i rather like my some of my characters i don't like evil people though the truly evil are not really people who are making a noise about being alive but in memento mori you as a you were 41 when you wrote that you created this terrible world of old people didn't you yes yes um i could create an a having reached the age of 80 i could create even more terrible world really can tell you yes now do you consider yourself you converted to catholicism do you consider yourself in any way a catholic writer like war and green word not like them no i don't feel the need to proselytize i don't feel the need to put across a catholic point of view but if i wasn't a catholic um i couldn't not believe if i wasn't a catholic i wouldn't be able to write as i do the freedom i i don't know why it just gives me a certain freedom does it give you an insight into i don't know a way of thinking is it i don't know is it about mystery is it about it's about mystery yes it's about mystery and it's about confidence spiritual confidence a spiritual conflict yes i tell you you have to believe in the holy spirit of things moving around the world if you don't believe in that then you don't believe in anything you don't believe in anything no life is a mystery you were born however a camberg i was born an oronovich now being born though we weren't religious and like same with your family my father's jewish my mother's not but being born with a name like that gave you a sense of an identity or almost of the tradition that you inherit yes um why then was it that catholicism appealed to you when you could have had the jewish god in a way couldn't you the jewish god is is too limited tell you the truth stops there and although i find the jewish people much warmer than the christians to deal with much warmer i don't find the jewish god warmer but the jewish god is a shouty god whereas the catholic god's a sort of sulky god isn't he well i don't know i think that the catholic it's a trinity in in the first place i do believe in the holy ghost the the uh jesus christ and in god the father as a kind of uh trinity i can't not believe it seems in every way sound to me the jewish god just ends there as a great father picker the reason why i became a catholic is because i wanted to be a christian very much why i mean i was convinced by reading cardinal newman and it by wanting to go on from where i live but i wasn't brought up as a as a jew no i was brought up in a a presbyterian school and i was brought up as a christian in a in in the sense that it was my mother's tradition but but nevertheless with this name kamberg and this sense you've written yourself about the inheritance of of judaism yes as you you read earlier in in the hay festival one of your short stories which calls the gentiles that's right in which you talk about a grandmother who she will admit to the family that she's jewish but outside she doesn't want to be that's right she says she kept the shop of all sorts in watford she'd not like the jewish part of our recipe no because it was bad for business yes uh she was a very very special character in fact she was she wasn't a jewish she her father was a jew but she was married in a parish church and uh to a gentile so that she was a what she called herself a gentile jewish there's no suggestion that back in the 50s that being a jewish writer was bad for business oh no no no no i didn't i didn't become a catholic because it was bad good for business i wasn't thinking of business anything it might be more business-like to stay my father was quite keen on me being a catholic he didn't mind at all and i was in front of my father the jewish side as part of my mother too but i preferred my father every time and i think that i had so many different religions pressing in on me that i found that the catholic was the final answer do you think that you are a sense of jewish writer as well i that that's a difficult question to answer but i think that there must be something there because i have jewish blood and uh obviously it is part of my formation genetically when i'm not conscious of being a jewish writer intellectually damn muriel thank you very much indeed this is the last in the present series we'll be back in the autumn thanks for watching thank you [Music] you

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Published: Sat Jun 11 2022