Interview: Robert McCrum

Today we welcome Robert McCrum to Me And My Big Mouth. He agreed to field questions posed by readers of my blog and here he is with the answers.

Robert's career includes lengthy spells as editor-in-chief at Faber & Faber and also as literary editor for The Observer. He is now associate editor of The Observer and has recently started a blog called Robert McCrum on books which is very good indeed. He is the author of several books including My Year Off: Rediscovering Life After a Stroke and the biography Wodehouse: A Life.

SP: What criteria did you use as a literary editor when deciding which books to review?

RMcC: I always tried to choose the very best books available on the shelves - and on many weeks I felt I never had enough space. Plus, I tried never to lose sight of the fact that The Observer is a news-paper. The books we covered had to satisfy some fairly basic (literary) news criteria. what do I mean by that ? Well, a new novel by Philip Roth or Milan Kundera is automatically more newsy than almost any first novel, unless of course you decide -- as literary editor -- that, say, Zadie Smith is a new voice to watch out for. Actually, we covered White Teeth pretty intensively, and I'm proud of the fact that we tipped her long before many others, even though she was being backed heavily by Penguin. Which leads me to...

SP: Do you think smaller, independent publishers get a fair deal from the broadsheets? These is a strong feeling from my (possibly biased) readers that they don't.

RMcC: I confess I had a bias towards the small independents, Canongate, Profile, Serpents Tale etc, and was very resistant to big imprint hype from the likes of HarperCollins, Random House, Orion etc. Of course the small presses lose out -- there's just not enough space - but my sense is that the perceived big-publisher bias is no more than an inevitable reflection of the nature of the book environment aka jungle.

SP: You have interviewed many great names of literature - Vidal, Roth, Mailer - but which contemporary authors do you feel will stand the test of time well enough for the McCrums of the future to want to interview them?

RMcC: Tricky one. In no special order, here are my contemporary future greats: Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Toibin... The obvious point is that the development of literary greatness is very hard to predict. But these are all serious - and very good. America is even trickier, but I'd tip two women: Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson, who are both exceptional

SP: Do you ever miss being a publisher?

RMcC: I occasionally miss working with the authors (that's a unique relationship). I was lucky in that I was at Faber during a sort of golden age and worked closely with Peter Carey, Paul Auster, Jane Rogers, Garrison Keillor, Milan Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danilo Kis, Michael Dibden, Harold Pinter, Hanif Kureishi, Lorrie Moore, and Simon Gray all of whom became friends. But I've stayed in touch with those who are still alive, so perhaps I'm not missing too much. I'm certainly glad to have missed the last 15 years of book publishing - the meetings, the madness and the relentless shift away from editorial towards marketing considerations. I'm all in favour of shifting a high volume of copies, but not at the expense of first novels and so-called 'difficult' books.

SP: Can you think of any reviews that you let through that you now think, hindsight being a wonderful thing, you/they got spectacularly wrong?

RMcC: I've forgotten most of my mistakes, though when I think hard I recall that we failed to recognise how exceptionally brilliant Stephen Greenblatt's life of Shakespeare, Will in the World, really is in an already crowded field.

SP: What book are you most looking forward to in 2009?

RMcC: The book I'm finishing now, Globish: The Making of Global English for the 21st century.

SP: Who, for you, is the finest undiscovered writer out there at the moment?

RMcC: 'Undiscovered' ? If you mean 'under-appreciated', I'd nominate Paul Muldoon.

SP: And finally, can you recommend a favourite book for us to all run off and read?

RMcC: My favourite novel, which I re-read almost every year is The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, really a prose-poem but the one truly great US novel of the 20th century. A tragedy and a love story and a portrait of an age. The English novel I really rate is Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier , a forgotten masterepiece of narrative bravura. My desert island book is Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. Sublime.

Comments

[http://www.extremejohn.com]

You probably know I’m a reader, but HI!

[Chas Newkey-Burden]

Three Men In A Boat as a desert island read - good choice!

[kevin duffy]

A very interesting review although I have a problem with his reviewing criteri ie: that he would review those books that are newsworthy, from Roth et al, first. Given that many readers of The Grauniad and The Observer would know about or see these new books in numbers and in prominent positions in bookstores, doesn't it behove the lit ed to lay out first for the delectation of the reader that which is NEW from new and up and coming writers and then review the books from Roth etc. As most readers know what they will be getting from these famous authors it is the job of lit eds to guide their newspaper readers towards what is new and possibly exciting. If we stick to what is newsworthy, does that mean forever and a day we will only see reviewed the 'new' works from Amis, Rushdie and McEwan as long as they do not leave this mortal coil?

[Vintage Rings]

Thank you for interesting interview! I read the first book of Robert McCrum and I liked it. I'll be glad to buy and to read his new books too, I like his style of writing. Thanks for the post and good luck to Robert!

[valerie yule]

I wish someone would turn from ideas about simplifying English vocabulary to the strange story of what is happening to English spelling. Robert McCrum could do the job.
The Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerrière’s 1500-word Globish http://www.globish.com and the Indian Madhukar Gogate’s Globish, with a phonemic spelling, http://www.mngogate.com/e02.htm, follow on earlier attempts to simplify English vocabulary like Ogden’s Basic English and practical international forms of English like Seaspeak.
As important for international communication is improving English spelling.

Forget about radical phonetic reforms requiring everything to be reprinted and a new system learned. We need to mend the present system, like every other mostly-literate country that has had a writing system reform in the past hundred years. There are good reasons to have standardized spelling. It makes written English a consistent logography and it makes speed reading possible.
Nerrière’s system has had wide publicity, but the possibility of updating our present spelling is ignored, despite the accumulated proofs of its unnecessary difficulties as a barrier to literacy.

Turn the reasons given why spelling should NOT be reformed into how it could be reformed. The visual and auditory routes to reading, importance of morphemes in English, links to our culture and etymology, the ‘Chomsky’ line about word families with underlying phonological similarity, the familiar appearance of text, the problem of growing dialects, the trends of popular spelling in SMS and the internet, and the world-wide importance of English all give clues. Spelling reform of our present system to remove the confusing exceptions can improve all these features. Even Spelling Bees are a demonstration that most people cannot spell because the task is too hard for them.
The costs of so much illiteracy and semi-literacy contrast with the costs of this reform.
We could start eny time with five reforms:
1. Omit surplus letters from words, eg climat, minut (time, as contrasted with minute- small), infinit.
2. Keep the 35 most common irregular wurds as ‘sight wurds’, which make up 12% of most text.
3. Dictionaries copy the French Académie Française reform of 2009, which allows 6000 easy spellings as optional in the dictionary.
4. Dictionary pronunciation gides as the first lerning for beginners to bild on, e.g. based on a modified BBC text pronunciation gide.

5. An International English Spelling Commission is needed

(The previus paragraf is in Spelling without Traps for Reading.)

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/spelling/htm