Interview: Sir Andrew Motion

Sir Andrew Motion's illustrious career has seen him traverse much of England's literary and cultural landscape. He's won the Whitbread Prize (for a biography of his friend Philip Larkin), he's edited thePoetry Review, and he's held the post of Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. In addition to publishing a rich selection of poetry and prose throughout his life, in 1999 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom - a position he would occupy for the next ten years.

After leaving the post (and receiving a knighthood for his services), Sir Andrew returned to prose with Silver; a sequel to Treasure Island, the much-admired novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Published 15th March 2012, the novel takes place a generation after the original, though it stays faithful to its celebrated seafaring spirit.

Ahead of his appearance at the York TakeOver 2012 Festival (on 30th May 2012), Sir Andrew spoke to Joe Burnham about his new work, his attitude to writing and the value poetry can play within our lives.

To begin quite generally: I'm aware that you did a great deal of research on Robert Louis Stevenson's work when preparing to write Silver.

I pretty much read all of it, I think, and I learnt a lot. Even though most people know a certain amount of his work - that's to say, Jekyll and Hyde, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island, of course - there is a great deal of largely unread Stevenson. This is a pity, because a lot of it is extremely good, and there are one or two things which certainly deserve to have the same sort of popular reading which his best known books have.

So I just immersed myself in it all. But I have to say, most of my time was spent endlessly re-reading Treasure Island. I simply wanted to inhabit it in an obvious way - and no doubt, for obvious reasons. Not because I wanted to sail too close to it in what I wrote; that's a competition I wouldn't like to have. But just so I knew my way around it absolutely, intimately, and in quite a relaxed way - so I could bring little bits of it in when I wanted to, and also depart from it when I wanted to.

What was it like to write a new story, set within a world created by different author?

It felt like a lot of different things. It felt cheeky and - well, I don't want to say 'bold', because that sounds as if I'm patting myself on the back. When I started, I was very aware that it was the kind of thing that might get me into trouble if I didn't do it right, because it would look as though I was sticking a lump of chewing gum on a much-loved national monument.

But it also felt - and, perhaps less predictably - as though doing it in a totally serious way (as I was doing) wasn't a million miles away from the way other types of artists think about their work in this day and age. For example, a lot of visual artists quite candidly quote material by their predecessors. Musicians are doing it all the time: quoting and mashing things up, introducing little bits of other songs in their own work, and so on.

I want to stop myself from sounding grand, but I think it's possible to look at what I've done in the book as being symptomatic - or empathetic - with the same things being done by visual artists and musicians around me.

It's interesting that you refer to Treasure Island as a national monument.

Well, the book is so famous - although to be honest, it's not clear to me how many kids still read it. But whether kids read it or not (and whether they know it or not), they're still absorbing it a lot of the time; if they go see Pirates of the Caribbean, somewhere in the background is a 'Stevensonian' experience. There's also a new animated movie being advertised at the moment [The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists] which clearly has a Stevensonian influence.

Part of Stevenson's genius is to have created characters that are, in a sense, archetypes.

Jekyll and Hyde are archetypes of one kind, the boy in Kidnapped is an archetype of another kind, and Long John Silver is certainly the definitive pirate figure. I think those archetypes are fascinating, and potentially very creative - provided that we remember (and I think many new stories don't) that while part of Long John Silver's personality is about adventuring and having fun, there's another part of him as well which is seriously grim. That's the bit that tends to get forgotten, as though it somehow stands in the way of entertainment.

When we're watching Pirates of the Caribbean, we never really think that Johnny Depp's going to get his head blown off, or suffer some other significant injury. But when we read Treasure Island, we definitely think the people around Long John Silver are going to get knives stuck in them.

It's almost a shame that Pirates of the Caribbean involved a lot of supernatural elements. For me, the power - and the fear, really - of Long John Silver wasn't that he was a particularly strong man: it was that he was very good at playing people off one another.

Yeah, that's right. I think that's the seat of his power, and why he's so magnetic: he's profoundly duplicitous. One moment he's being all smiley and nice to Jim, but the next moment we know he'd just as easily string him up; that's the bit which tends to get forgotten, I think. You're quite right about that, and you might almost say there is something supernatural about Long John's ability to show that behaviour.

Interestingly, it's an element which isn't developed in the original book. To put things slightly differently: if we think about pirates in a way which is grown-up and serious, we really ought to be thinking about Somalia pretty soon. And again, that's the bit which thePirates of the Caribbean-style treatment doesn't really seem to cap on. So when I wroteSilver, I didn't want to re-make the original book; I certainly wanted to write a good and exciting story, but I wanted it to be seriously, seriously grim - and sort of realistic, too.

Silver's tone certainly is dark.

Yes, I think it is. Again, I didn't want that to stand in the way of Silver being a good story, but the characters still have to think about some very serious things. They have to think about the relationships between children and their parents, they have to think about what piracy is, and they have to think about what greed is. When they get to the island, thinking that they're children of the next generation (and therefore a type of post-enlightenment people who can expect a better life), they also have to think about what it's like to live in a reality where the bad, old world keeps churning out crap.

That seems to be a theme of the novel: the loss of innocence

Yes, I think that's really what I wanted to write about - I mean, as far as one's ever aware of what's driving you on to write about things.  I wanted write about the loss of innocence, and I wanted to write about the survival of wickedness in what we perceive to be 'better' worlds. In the background while I was writing, I was thinking about Afghanistan, Iraq and - towards the very end - I was thinking about Libya too. Those are all very good examples of people going in saying "We know better, because we're enlightened" and then coming a cropper.

One thing which struck me when I re-read the original Treasure Island was the lack of female characters, with perhaps the exception of Mrs Hawkins. However, yours features a very strong central female character: Natty.

Yes. Of course, she has to be in disguise a lot of the time but she is [a central character]. Her being a girl mattered to me.

There was another thing which mattered to me a great deal. I couldn't do very much about the fact that slavery was still happening in 1802, even though I made my central characters particularly enlightened about it, having them think that slavery was a terrible thing and ought to be stopped. But I couldn't change the reality that slavery still took place at the time.

But, what I did feel I could do, was to change (in quite a fundamental way) the attitude that the young characters take to the natural world. Even though Darwin hadn't come up over the horizon yet, it's perfectly plausible for people of that age to take a completely different kind of interest in nature. If we think of the young John Clare, who is more or less the character's contemporary, he's looking at nature in England in a way that I hope a lot of us now pretty much take for granted.

Again, it's a sort of a post-enlightenment attitude. Stevenson himself speaks about "dumb creatures" but my young characters know better than to think of them that way. They think of themselves as representatives of the species, living among other species. And again, that mattered to me very much because it was a way of manifesting the generational division between Stevenson's book and my own.

I can see how man's relationship with nature is a theme of the book. For example, there's a scene in the beginning of Silver, where Jim has to destroy a jasper nest.

Yes, and he admits to a kind of destructive impulse in himself as he does it. But he's also very aware of them as an intricate society. Actually, quite fascinatingly, I've just been reading the journals of James Audubon, having previously only known his bird illustrations. He describes his plunking around America in the 1810-30s, and he has absolutely no compunction at all about shooting things while at the same time having a kind of reverence for their wonderfulness.

It's an amazing combination, which can seem strange to our eyes.

It is. Well, we see a version of it - I suppose - in sort of old-style country people who have forever been shooting things, ploughing on horses, and chasing after foxes - but at the same time, sort of loving the animals really.

When it comes to the narrative voice of Silver, was it a conscious choice to try and adapt your own style to match Robert Louis Stevenson?

Well, yes and no. People have been nicely saying it sort of ventriloquises Stevenson - actually, I don't think that was ever my intention. This is for the very simple reason that my book, as we've said, is set 40 years later, and my Jim has been educated very differently to the way in which 'Jim one' (his father) was taught. I imagined that my Jim probably attended a dissenting academy in Enfield.

So he's been better educated than his father, and that allows him to narrate in a different tone of voice - and again, I thought that was rather important. I wanted to come up with a voice that was broadly sympathetic to the original book and made you, the reader, aware that you were dealing with something which was set back then.

Because of the interest in natural things - and various other elements in the story - this was created in a way which was at once very sympathetic, but different. In other words, I wanted the book to be a kind of homage, really - but a living homage.

Many of the characters in Treasure Island don't feature within Silver, so there must have been a lot of invention as well.

Exactly. Well, I thought that, and that really takes us back to where we came in. I think the reason the road to hell is strewn and paved with bad sequels and prequels is because people make (what seems to me) a very unwise move: they take the original on at its own game.

A much more liberating and, I think interesting approach is to hit the original story at an odd angle or move it on a good deal; this also means you're more likely to get away with it. Onwards, sideways or, indeed, forwards. As I'm saying this, I'm thinking that the two sequels and prequels that I like most are Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz Are Dead and Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Both of these have very interesting things to say about the texts they refer to, but both also take a very big step away.

Though even with a new cast of characters, Long John Silver is still there.

I thought we had to meet him. I mean, I partly thought we had to, and I partly couldn't resist it. But of course, he's now a vastly old man - a cobweb of a person - and although he's feeble in all kinds of obvious, physical ways, I thought it would be right to allow the readers to think that he was still full of menace - and really, rather seriously creepy.

I mean, what is this relationship he's had with his daughter? We don't quite know, and we fear the worst of it, because that would be a way of helping us to understand why the younger characters felt they had to leave; particularly why Natty had to go - perhaps she had to get away from it.

But - much like Jim and his father - she has to become her father's equal somehow, and the only way that she can think of doing that is by going to the place which gave him his reputation, the island, and matching his activity there in some way. This is a way which is equal to her father in courage and ingenuity, and so on, but also one which is headed in a slightly different direction - because it isn't driven by the same malice which drives her father.

One thing I remember strongly from the original - and I'm sure that lots of others do as well - is the speaking style of the characters, and Long John Silver in particular; his way of posing questions, his way of communicating himself.

Yes, it's absolutely extraordinary, it's one of the most interesting things about Treasure Island: the way Stevenson comes up with this completely kind of crazy language. It's full of nautical terms that I simply don't know; that weird mish-mash of sailing slang and nautical terms. It's very extraordinary.

I had a serious conversation with myself about whether to try and come up with an equivalent of it, in my own style, and in the end I thought 'I can't do that'. Not only because I can't sort of rise to it, but also because it's so associated with Stevenson, and he does it so well, that I'd be crazy to take it on.

I can imagine that that would be very difficult; I couldn't imagine taking it on.

Yes, but actually I think you touch on something very interesting about Treasure Island, as you said that all the characters have quite distinctive ways of speaking, even if it's a rather bland way of speaking - like the doctor, and so on. This means when you're reading the book, I think, you feel that everybody in it isn't quite understanding what everybody else is saying. That leads to a sort of confusion in the book, which is part of the adventure.

That must have been a consideration when you went into Silver: how much of that to continue featuring?

Very much, yes. What communication can there be across generations? What kind of communication can there be across types of personality? How much is communication between people who might seem nearly equal, like Jim and Natty, damaged or not by experience that they might have had?

In other words, is there something frozen in Natty by her relationship with her father? I think, probably, the answer to that is definitely yes. I'm exploring all these things a bit more at the moment because I'm, very slowly, setting off into the next book - and because I want to bring the characters back to England somehow or other.

One thing which we touched on a little bit earlier was the theme of slavery within the book. One character which obviously stands out is Scotland (a slave). I read in an interview that you named him that quite overtly to highlight Scotland's and England's role in the slave trade.

Well, I did. Not to punish Scotland.

To bring it back home, if you like.

Yes, absolutely, to bring it back home. I mean, when I was writing the book, I was very conscious that Stevenson was a Scottish writer, and actually I've been particularly pleased by how liked my book has been in Scotland, where I thought it might get a bad reception. It's been a big relief for me.

But I thought by calling the character Scotland, I would be saying, you know, the story begins with somebody who comes from a country which was as involved in slavery as we (England) were. Not to point a finger in an aggressive way, but simply to make that point in passing. I also thought it would give a jolt to the idea of how an imprisoned person might speak, if the reader expected him to speak like, as it were, Bob Marley. But instead, he speaks like Alex Hammond.

I've heard you have a very rigid routine when it comes to writing, waking up at 6am every day. Would you recommend that?

Well, I would in the sense that it suits me personally. But actually, the recommendation that I most happily make is to find out what rhythm suits you.  I talk about this quite a lot, because I'm on this creating writing MA course at Royal Holloway. Some people work really well at night; I don't personally because I'm tired, probably because I get up so early! But I also want to watch the telly, talk to my wife and feed the cat - all that kind of thing.

Some people work well in the afternoon, but frankly I might as well be asleep at that time; the afternoon is often my sort of downtime. But I'm pretty wide awake in the early morning, and I've been getting up early for such a long time now - I simply don't notice it. My alarm goes, I get up, and half an hour later I'm at work. That's wonderful for me.

You know, the house is quiet, the cat's been fed and I know I've got three hours (if I can resist doing my emails) before I have to think about doing anything else, by which time I would have written myself out more or less of that day.

Returning briefly to what we spoke about earlier, when you were saying how you did a lot of wide reading on Robert Louis Stevenson. I read in an interview that you felt he went a little bit overlooked because his work had such a strong focus on story.

Yes, I think there is a question about how seriously Stevenson is taken within the academy. If you think of him as a person who is essentially interested in the same sorts of things that [Joseph] Conrad is interested in - writing more or less the same sort of time, particularly in that late imperial moment - then it is rather striking how people in the academy are all over Conrad like a rash, but they're not really all over Stevenson.

I think that's to do with something very basic: people teaching at universities are nervous of good stories. I mean, they think it can't be any good if he [Stevenson] tells a good story. Whereas a book like Portrait of a Lady, which - as it were - hardly has a story, almost has to be good because it doesn't have one. I don't want to "diss" Henry James, because I revere him, but you see the point I'm trying to make. And I think that if there's an equilateral benefit to come of all this, it would be that Stevenson is taken more seriously within the Academy. I'd certainly love to see that happen.

Would you say that there are authors who often focus on the stylistic concerns of their books more than their actual stories?

Yes, I think that probably is true. Although we know perfectly well that in the books which work best, and this includes Henry James as well as Stevenson's best work, there's an extraordinary deep marriage between the way the language is working and what the story is interested in telling us.

This feature of James's prose actually makes the story of the characters' consciousness manifest. And the much limped, driving, energetic, sort of spring-heeled prose that we find in Stevenson's best work tells us something about what he thinks about the benefits of action, let alone the excitement of it.

Going back to your former life as the Poet Laureate: do you think that writing poetry is something everybody can benefit from, or will it always be something which is only suited to a certain type of personality?

I think that's a very interesting question. My instinct is to say that everybody should read more poetry, and everybody should write more poetry, but I think you can't realistically say that and expect it to mean very much - unless you also say that different people write poetry for all sorts of different reasons. I write poems because, if I didn't write poems, I wouldn't know who on earth I was. For me it's like breathing, and I want to make beautiful things which (I hope) will live longer than I do. That's sort of it, in a nutshell.

It's a form of engaging with the world, in a sense?

Yes, and I want to tell people - if they want to listen to it - true things about their lives, which I say in a way that they find interesting, beautiful, memorable and so on. But if I was running a poetry workshop for a group of prisoners - or people in a hospital - or wherever it might be - I would quite clearly have in mind an idea of the value of poetry.

The main concern isn't the production of masterpieces; it's definitely more to do with the release of pent-up feelings, which is something therapeutic if you like it.  Provided that you're clear in your mind about what you're expecting - and what you're trying to create - I have no problem saying that the experience of reading and writing poetry creates an interestingly big spectrum of different possibilities.

You've also created a new project: a huge online archive of poetry, as read by the original authors.

Yes, the archive is a very interesting manifestation of this, and it actually does prove something else that is latent in your question. We tend to think of poetry as having a rather small share, and it's certainly true that book sales are pretty small, but the audience figures for the online archive are absolutely amazing.

We have a quarter of a million people using it every month and 1.5 million pages of poetry. For me, that concerns something I've always believed: we might grow up thinking poetry is a sophisticated thing, but actually it's as fundamental as breathing.

It's interesting that we're talking about the online world and how that interacts with poetry, because that's obviously changed how a lot of writers - young writers, in particular - get their work out there.  Personally, I've felt the danger that - because the internet is so vast - it can almost make a person's work feel more lost than perhaps it might have.

Well that's another very interesting paradox isn't it? The opportunity to get work out there is very exciting, and rather validating. It makes you feel as though you've been published in some way - but if you're publishing in deep space, who the hell is reading it?

I think the future of these things is likely to rest on a combination of old technologies and new technologies. For that reason, among many others, I think the book is not an entirely doomed sort of thing. But, the question is how interesting and varied the experience of reading a book can be made to be. One thing we can be absolutely sure about, in a rapidly shifting and uncertain book world, is that it's the content that matters most.

When young writers are starting out, they often want to receive objective criticism about their work, but they're at a loss for how to find it. They might not want an anonymous opinion from the internet, and they might be hesitant to show their teachers. What would you suggest?

I think the really important thing is to set-up - or join - small groups of like-minded people who agree that this is a perfectly sensible way to be spending your time; in fact, it's probably the most valuable way you can spend your time imaginable. That way, you'll be able to generate a little sense of community within the larger society. I've noticed in my teaching how much benefit that has for students; I mean, I sit in my workshops and tell them what I possibly can about their work - and my larger thoughts about things - but I have absolutely no doubt at all that they get just as much (and possibly more) benefit from the conversations they have with one another. So join a writers' group, and just arrange to meet once a fortnight and so on, and circulate your work amongst yourselves. And be nice to one another when you can.

Are you looking forward to seeing York? Have you been here before?

Yes, I've often been to York, and I absolutely love it; God's own city. I have some good friends who live there, so it'll be a real treat to come back. I mean, who couldn't like it? It's so beautiful. I used to go there a lot when I was living in Hull, so I got to know it fairly well back then. But because I have friends who live there now, I'm in the city reasonably often.