"I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is Cockney, Estuary, RP or Valley Girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learned it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got."

-Ian McEwan, "Mother Tongue," 2001. 

Last week, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend an interview with Ian McEwan at San Francisco's City Arts and Lectures.  The series has been a cultural gem in this city since 1980. City Arts & Lectures programs can also be heard in edited and delayed broadcasts on more than 170 public radio stations nationally.  

Readers will be familiar with McEwan, the prolific British author whose works include Amsterdam, which won the Booker Prize in 1998; Atonement (2001), which was made into a film in 2007; and the recently released Solar. McEwan was interviewed by Vendela Vida, which at first seemed to be an awkward pairing.  Vida, a novelist, journalist and editor and wife of Dave Eggers, appeared young, nervous and uncertain next to McEwan's British calm.  But she was quite well prepared, and McEwan proved to be a very open subject.  Despite the fact that I was among an audience of nearly 1,000, I felt like I was at an intimate dinner party with McEwan.

The discussion covered a broad range of McEwan's work, and gave intimate insights into his background, writing process, and personality. The passage I quoted above was one of the most compelling and enlightening parts of the interview: that this erudite and eloquent writer identified with a mother he described as inarticulate and fearful of language.  He talked about his working class background and how he grew past its linguistic markers through his education, while also acknowledging the lasting influence of his upbringing on his work. During the interview, he discussed this, as he also describes in "Mother Tongue," quoted here:

"But these adjustments of speech and writing were superficial, and relatively easy. They formed part of that story, familiar in English biography, in which children who received the education their parents did not, were set on a path of cultural dislocation... There are gains as well as losses, at least for a writer... the internal exile of social mobility, particularly when it is through the layered linguistic density of English class.

When I started writing seriously in 1970, I may have dropped all or most of my mother's ways with words, but I still had her attitudes, her wariness, her unsureness of touch. Many writers let their sentences unfold experimentally on the page... I would sit without a pen in my hand, framing a sentence in my mind, often losing the beginning as I reached the end, and only when the thing was secure and complete would I set it down. I would stare at it suspiciously. Did it really say what I meant? Did it contain an error or an ambiguity that I could not see? Was it making a fool of me? Hours of effort produced very little, and very little satisfaction." 

The audience also learned about McEwan's writing process.  I went into the lecture with the assumption that a major part of McEwan's writing process is research. His novels, though about quite disparate subjects, are each written with the detail of an insider.  The novel I most recently read, Saturday (2005), features a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, as the protagonist.  As a physician, I was impressed by the level of medical and surgical detail McEwan used in writing about the neurosurgeon's daily work, and the accuracy with which he was able to inhabit Perowne.  I was not surprised when I learned that McEwan had spent two years shadowing a neurosurgeon, Dr. Neil Kitchen.  

Surprisingly, when another audience member voiced the question I had been thinking, McEwan said that he has only of late been doing what he considers research before writing his books, and had not done so for his earlier novels.  However, in a comic moment, one member of the audience did not appear surprised by this.  The audience member, who introduced himself as a physicist, inquired if McEwan had any help in writing the scientific details in Solar, which tells the story of Michael Beard, a Nobel-prize winning physicist.  The audience member implied that the science in Solar was not entirely accurate.  To this awkward question, McEwan replied, "Well, good luck with your novel."

That response revealed a sense of humor that I was happily surprised to discover in McEwan.  I expected a breadth of knoweldge and a deep intellect, but for some reason, not so much humor.  He displayed a self-deprecating, dry wit, to me a very British sense of humor.  In discussing the research he did for Saturday, he said, that in the two years he had spent observing brain surgeries, he had been able to overcome any queasiness he might have had earlier, and indeed, he regretted that Dr. Kitchen "never let me have a go at it."  

But the best example of McEwan's wit that evening was the first sentence he uttered upon entering the stage.  Vida, who appeared quite nervous to be interviewing such a revered author, began her introduction of McEwan by describing the intense emotions and memories she associated with reading each of his books.  The first she read, when she was around the age of 22, was his collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, right after she had ended what she described as a bad relationship.  She talked about identifying with the narrator in those stories, marvelling at how much the author seemed to understand her feelings.  Ultimately, Vida continued, she had vomited, having gotten bus sick on a winding coastal Portuguese road.  I had no idea how McEwan could respond to that, but he simply said something to the effect of, "I was dreaming of making you vomit."

The interview confirmed my impressions of McEwan as a well-read and intelligent man with an insatiable and wide-ranging curiosity.  But with his openness in discussing difficult subjects and intimate personal details, I came away with much more.  At the end of the evening, I left feeling that I knew him as a person, with some knowledge of his writing process, sense of humor, personal history, and insecurities.  

An edited recording of the program I attended will air on 6/13/10 on KQED in San Francisco.  I strongly encourage any fans to check their local public radio listings for this fascinating, entertaining and insightful interview.

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Photo credit: Annalena McAfee, IanMcEwan.com