The Search for Truth: Michael Amherst in Conversation
.
To start us off, this is your debut novel. The process from conception to publication can be quite long, so can I ask when you started writing The Boyhood of Cain, and how has it changed throughout that time?
I feel like I’ve been writing it for years and years. I have written a novel before, which didn’t get published and didn’t go anywhere, so I like to think of this as my difficult second novel. After writing the first one, I enrolled to do a creative writing PhD at Birkbeck, which I didn’t finish, but I started working on The Boyhood of Cain there. And the idea at the time for the thesis was a novel, a much longer novel, which was going to be in three parts. When I realised that I probably wasn’t going to complete the PhD, or that the PhD perhaps wasn’t the best place to be working on it, the most formed part of the novel was what became Boyhood of Cain. Even as, post the PhD, I continued writing it, I imagined that it would be part of three. And as time went on, I thought, ‘Well, no, because, first of all, I might not have the energy or desire to do the other two bits, but also it’s got to stand on its own’.
For a very, very long time, I have been fixated on the Cain and Abel story and different retellings of it, or different things that are influenced by it. I suppose, in that sense, I knew that the genesis was that. Not necessarily two brothers but certainly starting with somebody, a child, who felt a sense of lack.
The title references the Cain and Abel story, and there are further nods to questions of religion in the epigraph and the plot. Which retellings influenced your interpretation of the story? How far did the biblical story play a role in the writing process?
I guess I should start with the fact that I lost my faith as a child, and I feel as an adult that I still have a hunger for it while being unable to make that leap. In fact, I was trying to articulate what I meant to somebody the other week, and I said, ‘I suppose what I’m really saying is that I’d like to have a faith without the bother of having to believe in something’. [Laughs.] I didn’t set out consciously to write a religious book, but there are elements there with the family, the school, the confirmation classes. I definitely find Old Testament stories fascinating. They’re such good stories, and often dark and terrifying stories as well. I don’t think it ended up in there, but the other story I’ve always been fascinated by was Jonah and the whale. For me, there’s something inherently relatable and likable about somebody who’s told they’re a prophet and says, ‘No, I’m not. Leave me alone. I don’t want to do this.’
It’s the opposite of a Messiah complex.
Yes, exactly. [Laughs.] But, yes, I suppose I had lots of different influences. My favourite film, which really affected me as a teenager, is Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I don’t think Ripley is in this book, at least I hope not, but I do find him fascinating. Personally, I think the Minghella film is better than the Highsmith novel – I think there’s more richness and depth there. And I was very struck by the fact that Minghella wrote the opening song, which Sinead O’Connor sings, called the ‘Lullaby for Cain’. He made it very clear that there was a link between Cain and Ripley, and that they shared that sense of lack and inadequacy. For me, it was really apparent in the Ripley story, this combination of love and obsession that was bound up with jealousy and resentment at the same time. You know, does Tom Ripley want to be Dickie Greenleaf or to have Dickie Greenleaf? On the one hand, a desire to eradicate the other, so that you almost take them on as yourself, but on the other, you would be destroying the thing that you love. I still think that there’s so much complexity there that I find really interesting and that makes the Cain and Abel story richer.
If there is arbitrary injustice, do you accept it, or do you fight it?
I kept on finding things during the course of writing the book, and then after. The William James quote, I found after the book was finished, and it felt so relevant, both in terms of the desire for religious faith, but also people who worry about those things. I hadn’t planned on having an epigraph but once I saw that, I knew it had to go there. Again, after it was finished, I came across Marilynne Robinson’s book on Genesis, where she talks about the Cain and Abel story. I didn’t know this, but apparently the origin of the word Abel in Hebrew is something like empty, with connotations of vanity. So, according to Robinson, the story was always about Cain. Abel is not the central figure of the story, Cain is meant to be.
Elsewhere, I can’t find it, but I’m sure that it was in reading some Adam Phillips, maybe on Jung, that there was an interpretation of the Cain and Abel story. This was while I was still writing it. From a psychoanalytic point of view, he said that the Cain and Abel story is about living with arbitrary injustice, that God rejects Cain’s gift when seemingly there’s no reason to accept one and not the other. He also says that it’s a story about the fact that when confronted with arbitrary injustice, there’s nothing you can do but shrug and get on with it, because otherwise it’ll eat you up with resentment. You can’t fix it. I don’t know how much I believe or agree with that, but it was one of the things that interested me about the story of Cain and Abel and its various treatments and versions. It’s that tension between, if there is arbitrary injustice, do you accept it, or do you fight it? And on the one hand, you know you don’t get any change unless you fight, but on the other hand, if you fight to a certain extent, you would have no peace. James Baldwin talked about the paradox of having to do both.
Danny has to wrestle with arbitrary injustice in the novel. He’s obsessed with the idea of the true self – he definitely feels that lack, as you said, like Cain – and throughout the book he is chasing an understanding of truth in general. Like Danny, did you feel that, as the writer, you were getting at a truth?
It’s something that I’ve long struggled with. I feel a commonality with Danny there, with his fixation on or obsession with truth. And over the years, I’ve sort of regressed to a place where I was more in my early childhood, where I believed in things or attached to things that don’t fully make sense. Post university, I got very interested in psychoanalysis, for example. And part of me still finds that really difficult, because I think, well, where’s the evidence? What’s the proof that this exists? How does this work, and why does this work? And then I had to accept that there are things that work in ways that are mysterious and we don’t fully understand, but demonstrably have value. And I feel that art and literature is like that as well.
Part of me wishes I had finished the PhD, because what I was obsessed with, in a way, was looking at what it means to write and think creatively in an academic context – which was probably why I wasn’t able to finish it. The fact that you can find meaning, and you can find something that is true and beyond argument and reason, understandably was not something which was very easy to then make into an argument that would satisfy some PhD examiners. But I think it was through the process of writing more and more that I realised that if I started with a clear idea of what I wanted to do or say, the writing would feel quite limp and dead, or it would be didactic in some way. For me, at least, the bits of my writing that have worked best and have meant the most to me have been where I thought I knew what I was doing, but the work will suddenly go in a different direction. It will reveal something to me that I didn’t really know was there. And I’m encouraged by the fact that writers that I admire talk in a similar way. I find it really interesting that accepting the idea that sometimes truth is revealed to you and you can’t rationalise it is difficult for someone like Danny, who is fixated on truth. But how do you accept that if you’ve trained yourself to have this really obsessively reasoning mind?
There’s a line in the book that speaks to just that. His mum says, ‘sometimes there isn’t a reason, and we don’t know why we do things’. And Danny’s response is that he ‘cannot believe it, and nor does it satisfy him as an answer’. It is interesting that you got at these themes, or questions, through the perspective of a child. Children do have quite imaginative minds, but they can also want to understand in quite black and white ways. Was his POV helpful, or sometimes frustrating?
It wasn’t a deliberate choice or conscious choice – to view these questions through a child’s perspective – but I think it really was helpful. I mean, I was a very irritatingly questioning child, but more generally, as you say, children are obsessively imaginative, and, actually, one of the awful things that occurs in childhood is that adults try and press that down, at least if there isn’t a suitable answer. Children are really interrogative: if you give them an answer that’s not satisfying, they’ll keep on asking. And I understand that you can be asked questions, and if you don’t know the answer, you just want them to shut up, rather than revealing the fact that you don’t have an answer. So, it wasn’t a deliberate choice, but I suppose it was a character that came upon me, and then I just thought, actually, there are children who ask and interrogate like this.
But perhaps the other strand that I was keen on, which was more obvious when I was thinking about and working on the ideas beyond this, was the question of: what happens to a protagonist, but perhaps particularly a child, who is aware of or has a sense of not being enough or not being appropriate or liked in some way by adults or their parents (and in this case, the teacher, Mr. Miller) and who then changes themselves to satisfy the wants and needs of others? That sort of behaviour, which I think is probably very common and that we all, adults to a lesser extent, do, furthers the excessive rationalism and living inside your head because rather than trusting your gut or what your body wants or what you want, you end up second guessing and reasoning. And as Danny retreated further into his thoughts and into his head, the more detestable and detached he became from the idea of having a body.
One thing that does provide Danny with some solace, if that’s the right word, is books and writing. Right at the start he says ‘he would like to write a story that carries all the way to the end’. And the centrality of books and writing for Danny’s character made me consider how much of this was based on your own personal experience as a child. Did you write much as child? How much is there of you in Danny, or how much is imagined?
There is certainly a lot of me in this, and I definitely did find solace in books when I was growing up, in a way that I think was both good but also set me up for failure. There’s a bit where he talks about seeing the psychologist on television and gaining a sense that people can be like books, that you can uncover their hidden meanings, through attentive reading. And I certainly think that there was a part of me which believed that for a long time, which I don’t think is always a good way to view people…
I don’t know how you can write fiction without drawing from life.
If I was honest, the bits that disappoint me about the book are the occasions where I didn’t trust the unknown and the direction that it might take me on my own, and where I would sometimes fall back on things that I knew. It’s not factual, but there are times in the book where I’ve leant into my own childhood. But, at the same time, I’m interested in the fact that so much of it is imagined. My stepfather likes to talk about it as if it’s a photograph or something, and it really isn’t. Even on the occasions where I would lean into my own childhood, the writing would then suddenly veer off. And those are the times where I feel that it would be most successful again. It would take me by surprise: I didn’t know where it had come from, but it would be alive in its own right.
It’s always a bit uncanny when you’re writing and suddenly describing something with so much detail that doesn’t exist…
Yes, and I think it can feel more real than a memory.
Definitely. I go on about this a lot, but I saw Joelle Taylor talk at a festival last summer, and she was saying that with her fiction, she’s getting at ‘a lie that is truer than the truth’.
I have a similar one. My friend gave me a book with an inscription once which says, ‘fiction reveals truth that reality obscures’. And I’ve always tried to find out who said it. Somewhere it says Emerson, but I’ve never found it. I don’t think it is Emerson.
While we’re talking about truth and fiction, you interviewed Garth Greenwell for the White Review a few years ago. You asked him about the distinction between non-fiction and fiction, and he said ‘it depends to what extent one’s allegiance is to the truth and to what extent one’s allegiance is to beauty’. Now you’ve written your own work of fiction, your own novel, how far do you agree with that distinction?
More recently, I saw Greenwell do an event for his new book, Small Rain. And I was very lucky to do an event with André Aciman as well. They were both railing against the term ‘autofiction’ – that’s become a thing – since both of them are talked about as ‘writing autofiction’. Greenwell said, by that definition, Augustine’s Confessions is a form of autofiction. Of course, it isn’t, and he was saying that all fiction draws on life which I think is true. I’m surprised that we’ve reached this weird cultural moment where, like Danny in the book, we’re constantly trying to work out what is true, what is based on someone’s experience, particularly in relation to work that maybe meets the definition of autofiction. And I don’t know how you can write fiction without drawing from life – Coetzee says, ‘in a larger sense all writing is autobiography’ – I don’t know how fruitful an inquiry or avenue that is. Particularly given that, as I’ve said, the writing that I’m most pleased with are the parts where it might start from a vein of truth, but then becomes its own thing.
So, I’d not disagree with Garth, but I think for me, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is slightly different. I’m not sure whether it’s so much the distinction between truth and beauty. Flannery O’Connor has this wonderful line where she says that the problem with students of literature these days is that they’re all looking for the meaning of a story, trying to decode it. As if it’s got a secret meaning, and you just need to find the right key, and then it’ll spring open like a musical box and there will be the secret, hidden meaning. And she says, if a story is like that, it’s not a very good story. When people ask her what her stories mean, she would say, well, it’s all in the story; if there was anything extraneous to it, then it shouldn’t be there, and wouldn’t be there.
She goes on to talk about the four different medieval scriptural levels of interpretation, and the final one, which I’d never heard of before, was anagogical, which was this level of meaning relating to the divine. I’m still not sure that I fully understand, but I think it’s a faith in a meaning that is mysterious and unable to be fully grasped. I think that, for me, the best fiction does that. You can’t fully explain what it is that it is doing, but it is doing something which is bigger and richer than a simple question of meaning.
So I think those questions of, well, what’s real, is this autobiographical, is it autofiction, did that happen to the writer or did that not, misses the fact that actually, if you reflect on personal experience and draw upon it, that something will happen within the creative process which will remake it, in the best circumstances, into something entirely different, with a different, deeper, relation to truth.
Coetzee said in an interview, ‘…you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place.’ I love that. This was certainly my experience at university with essay writing; I’d often find that I would have to write the introduction at the end, because it was only by the time I’d written my essay that I knew what I was saying. I also wouldn’t find it very interesting if I definitely knew what I thought about something before writing. There would be no need to, because I know what I think about it.
I thought, to end, I could ask a slightly easier question than the difference between truth and reality… In the book, the boys spend a lot of time in the art room, and talk a lot about art and different styles, or ways of approaching the depiction of reality. So I wanted to ask, if you could put your writing into an artistic style or era, which would it be? Impressionism, brutalism, cubism…?
I’ve actually realised that I’m a bit culturally stuck, in that a lot of the classical music and the art and literature that I love is in that period of the late 19th century, early 20th century, and I’ve become particularly obsessed with Ravel. I could listen to Ravel constantly and that would be absolutely fine. And I think that that is to do with both an impressionistic quality about it, but also the emphasis on the subjectivity of experience: describing, whether it’s musically or in art or in literature, the specificity of an experience and how unique and subjective that is for each of us. With that period, I really feel it in a way that feels quite different from either later or earlier periods.
Okay, so you’re an impressionist.
Yes, it would seem so.
.
.
Michael Amherst has been published in the Guardian, New Statesman, The Spectator, The White Review and Contrappasso magazine. His book-length essay, Go the Way Your Blood Beats, won the 2019 Stonewall Nonfiction Prize. He is also the winner of the 2020 Hubert Butler Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts. His short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and has featured at Stroud Short Stories, the inaugural London LitCrawl and the Accidental Festival at London’s Roundhouse. The Boyhood of Cain is his first novel.
Zadie Loft is a writer from Suffolk, now living in London. After reading Classics at Cambridge, she studied Creative Writing at Oxford and is represented by Becky Percival at United Agents. She works as the Marketing and Editorial Assistant at The London Magazine.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.