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Ramona
Koval
TASTING LIFE TWICE: CONVERSATIONS WITH
REMARKABLE WRITERS
ABC Books, $34.95 pb, 357 pp, 0 7333 1544
5
TASTING
LIFE TWICE is a collection of twenty-six
interviews conducted by Ramona Koval
over the past ten years at literary
festivals, on radio programmes and in
the homes of such writers as Les Murray,
Morris West and Joseph Heller. Any randomly
selected shortlist of these writers
would impress: among them are Toni Morrison,
Michael Ondaatje and P.D. James, and
some who have recently passed away:
Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Malcolm
Bradbury. Koval, of Radio National’s
Books and Writing, is passionate about
books and ideas, informing us in the
introduction that her interviews revolve
around ‘questions of how one evaluates
a life, the getting of wisdom, facing
death, the meaning of love, and whether
a book ever changed the course of history’.
These ‘remarkable writers’
have spent a lifetime attempting to
answer those Big Questions, and now
do so, by and large, with a sense of
having failed in their endeavours. Saul
Bellow, who died in April 2005, laments
the way ‘the soul is not recognised
in the modern world’. But this
‘truth’ is revealed tentatively
(‘I’ve never been able to
cancel my conviction that there is such
a thing as the soul’), as Bellow
admits to the difficulty in thinking
beyond ‘the example set by science’.
In the end, Bellow’s final comment
— ‘I don’t know the answers.
I only know my answers’ —
is intimated in all the interviews.
Koval moves gracefully between philosophical
discussion and questions about the writer’s
life. As she points out, writers are
practised in this subject. Indeed, the
somewhat crafted quality of their responses
is part of the charm. Amos Oz’s
stories about growing up in Israel are
too good to be spontaneous. In one,
he recollects a postman who left messages
on envelopes; comments ranged from ‘never
trust the British’ to ‘your
washing has been hanging on the line
for 3 or 4 days now’. Oz talks
candidly about his parents who, when
asked, would claim to feel ‘born
anew’ by their role in the establishment
of a Jewish state, but whose modus operandi
was silence and the directive, ‘you
better don’t ask’.
Just as the writer performs, so too
must the interviewer. In her 1992 collection
of interviews, One to One, Koval says
she must act out the role of the ‘interested,
serious journalist’. This act allows
her to anticipate the writer both intellectually
and emotionally, leading Sontag to ask:
‘are you telepathic?’ The
Joyce Carol Oates interview demonstrates
the importance of Koval’s thorough
research, as well as her ability to
manage the unpredictability of an encounter
between strangers. Their discussion
— about Marilyn Monroe, writing
thrillers under pseudonyms, the ‘physicality
of writing’ — is interesting,
but it is the subtext that fascinates.
Oates begins by giving short, terse
answers. When Koval describes moments
in Oates’s novels that take the
‘breath away’, the novelist
responds: ‘is that a question?’
Koval replies, ‘it’s a kind
of conversation, really’, to which
Oates says, ‘well, I was waiting
for a question mark’. The interviewer
remains undeterred, ploughing on to
ask about two relatively unknown Oates
novels. Oates is confounded (‘you’ve
read those? Nobody has read those books’)
and everything changes. She becomes
sincere, thoughtful and expansive. Early
in the interview, Oates evokes the subtext,
explaining that when she speaks there
is a ‘tickertape’ at work,
a kind of italics to the spoken ‘roman
type’; a voice that says ‘what
you really mean is …’. Koval
— unafraid of risky territory —
asks: ‘What are the italics saying
now?’
Sitting in his wheelchair and sipping
champagne on stage at the Edinburgh
festival, John Mortimer speaks warmly
of his father. When Mortimer told his
divorce-lawyer father that he wanted
to be a writer, the latter responded,
‘well, you might be a writer. You
might be a moderately successful writer,
but consider the horrible life your
wife would lead if you were a writer.’
Martin Amis’s charge that the writer
becomes a ghost to their own life and
that ‘you’ll go down in the
evening and say to your wife, “How
was your day?” and you’ll
add in square brackets, [“as if
I give a shit”]’, seems to
bear out the divorce lawyer.
Koval wants to reinstate the ‘pleasure
principle’ in read-ing. A.S. Byatt
and Judith Wright speak about the value
of ‘giving in’ to forces beyond
oneself. Literary criticism is sometimes
seen as being out to curtail this aspect
of reading, and nowhere is this more
evident than in discussions around postmodernism
and deconstruction. Most of the writers
here dismiss such challenges (Koval
sees the postmodern condition as equating
‘a holocaust with a circus’).
On the other hand, history looms large
in these interviews, such that a belief
in aesthetic primacy comes across as
somewhat obscene. William Gass argues
that ‘everything needs deflating’,
and that apparently includes the Holocaust.
Koval challenges him on what he sees
as a divide between aesthetic and moral
codes (in The Tunnel, Gass writes ditties
about Jewish people being made into
soap), asking: ‘how do you expect
me to read this without thinking about
what really happened?’ The Harold
Pinter, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gore
Vidal interviews provide indispensable
interpre-tations of ‘what really
happened’, with Vidal and Pinter
detailing a corrupt, deceptive and morally
contemptible US government. It’s
August 2001 when Vidal tells Koval,
‘it’s amazing how seldom’
people retaliate against America.
Even when I found the manner of some
writers (Ian McEwan, Sontag) off-putting,
I was left wondering at what point those
personalities entered the books I had
enjoyed. In any case, it is the ideas
that dominate here. As if a testament
to this, I find myself closing by quoting
a (riveting) sexist-egocentric, Norman
Mailer, who inadvertently sums up the
tickertape running through Tasting Life
Twice: ‘truth is a mystery …
we approach the truth, we never find
it.’
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