Dapper in a crumpled blue Oxford shirt, Sebastian Faulks logs on to our Zoom call from his home in London’s Holland Park. He’s seated in front of a window that looks on to a garden presided over by a sculpture. She’s not a muse of literature, Faulks tells me, but “must have come from a graveyard somewhere. It’s the sort of angel that stands over a tomb of someone.”
The memento mori is an apt witness to our conversation about Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress. While Faulks, at 72, shows no signs of slowing down, “when some of your best friends die,” he writes at the beginning of this memoir-in-essays, “you have at least to give a nod to the arithmetic”.
I think people who say they don’t have any regrets are insufferably smug
Best known as the author of historical novels such as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, Faulks describes himself as a “reluctant memoirist”. He finds memoirs “boring on the whole” and “rather self-important”. In addition, “writers’ lives are so static and not particularly interesting. You’re not climbing Everest.” It was Covid that provoked a change of heart.
“After lockdown, when we all emerged blinking into the light, I felt that something in the world had changed really quite irreversibly,” Faulks says. Instead of feeling “slightly embarrassed” by the memories that he’d been jotting down for two decades, he found “they had acquired a sort of antique curiosity value, and that they were quite funny”.
RM Block
Indeed, the book’s elegiac quality for a vanishing world is tempered by its humour. While turning the gaze inward may be a challenge for a novelist who prides himself on not writing autobiographically, the tone (“slightly humorous and slightly dispassionate, but not in that cringey English way”) gave Faulks a welcome comic outlet.
“I’m a very facetious guy in real life,” he tells me, with a glint in his eye that comes across even on-screen. “I’ve always taken the work, the books, the writing, very, very seriously, and tried to my utmost ability to make them accurate, truthful, fair, interesting, imaginative, mind-expanding and so on. But I don’t take myself seriously as a person. I mean, it’s just one joke after another, really.”
Rather than a complete chronological telling of his life to date, the book is a series of 10 “focused essays” covering important chapters in Faulks’s life. The title comes from a 1973 song by Procol Harum, Fires (Which Burnt Brightly), in which “Keith Reid’s lament for the loss of youthful idealism was set to a wistful minor-key melody by Gary Brooker,” Faulks writes. The track, which he listened to on repeat at university, is one of many that feature in the book (and accompanying Spotify playlist), following Faulks’s and the culture’s evolution. Born in 1953, “by the time I reached the age of eight, pop music was really starting up in this country,” Faulks says. “And when I was 10, the Beatles released their first record.”
Faulks credits classical music with inspiring the structure of his novels. “Listening to great symphonies by Beethoven or Mahler or Sibelius, I was struck by how they were put together, the structure of laying out an idea and varying it, and then finally bringing all the themes together and recapitulating them. And that was the way that a lot of very good novels seemed to work.”
Classical music also prodded him to go deeper into emotion in his fiction. He points to “various arias in opera where somebody is singing about some unbearable pain ... the audience may have a tear in the corner of their eye, but frequently, the singer will take a deep breath and then plunge in even deeper. And so I tried to learn that as well from music: don’t be satisfied with just bringing a tiny tear to the corner of the eye. You’ve got to take a breath, go in deeper, hold your nerve and really make people sob.”
Faulks, who boasts a “pathologically retentive memory”, describes his early childhood near Newbury in Berkshire as predominantly happy – days filled with games with his brother and dodging the cold mutton that was served for lunch until the culinary influence of the Continent came into fashion. Their father was a decorated war veteran, thrice wounded, who had fought in six countries. Upon returning to civilian life, he worked as a solicitor and sat as a judge.
“[My father] came from a generation that believed in self-discipline and didn’t necessarily expect to be happy,” Faulks adds. “I think he was happy, but he didn’t think it was a right.” In an era in which “girls’ education was not taken nearly as seriously”, Faulks’s mother’s education was fragmentary, but she was “literary, musical, arty, friendly, determined”. It was she who sparked his interest in the arts.
Just before he turned eight, Faulks was sent to board at Elstree School near Reading, then attended Wellington College as a scholar. “I suppose what I think now is not so much how barbaric it was, but how bizarre,” he writes of boarding school. He slips into the third-person when describing the experience – a switch, he explains, which reflects the fact that like the army, you were “depersonalised to some extent” by the institution, turned from “a tiny sentient creature ... into a sort of cog in a machine”. Pastoral care has evolved since: invited back to Wellington to open the English faculty building, which was named after him, Faulks is disarmed to discover a co-ed school offering “lessons in happiness and yoga”.
As a teenager, it was literature that gave Faulks a portal into the emotional lives of others. A “nervous and shy” boy, “when I first started to read proper books when I was about 14, suddenly it was just a great revelation to me that everyone – old people, middle-aged people, young people, my fellow pupils – all had an inner life which was rich, complex, and that everyone was nervous, frightened, disappointed, hopeful, aspirational, all the sort of things that I was.” He credits DH Lawrence as one of his early influences, whose writing he admired for the tenderness which he showed his characters.
Following personalised tuition at Wellington for A-level English, Faulks read English at Cambridge, although, as he tells it, he spent more time in the pub than the classroom. A humorous episode described in the book was his college losing at University Challenge, having followed the advice of a producer to have a “nerve-settler” at the pub. Like music, booze provides a throughline in Fires Which Burned Brightly, watering Faulks’s university days, stints in France, journalistic career and an anxiety-ridden whistle-stop book tour of the US.
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Although he writes quite fondly of alcohol, drink and drugs were a contributing factor to what Faulks calls “a minor ‘breakdown’” in university – a time of neurodevelopment – in which he suffered from a period of acute anxiety and insomnia. “There’s no diagnosis for, there is no correct term for the sort of anguish that I went through ... you might call it a sort of disruption in consciousness,” he says. It’s this experience that gave rise to his interest in the workings of the human mind, as seen in his novels Engleby – a first-person account of a sociopath – as well as in Human Traces. Faulks’s favourite of his books, Human Traces explores the development of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the late 19th century.
One of the new book’s most humorous chapters recalls his time in the heyday of journalism in the 1980s, a bygone time of printing presses and boozy lunches fuelled by ad revenue. Following a stint teaching at a private school in Camden, Faulks got a job writing the political diary column at the Daily Telegraph. He worked his way up to writing features for the Sunday Telegraph, before becoming the first literary editor of The Independent and deputy editor of The Independent on Sunday until he got made redundant. He continued writing fiction in tandem to freelancing until the success of Birdsong allowed him to write full-time.
Looking back at his oeuvre, Faulks perceives two predominant themes. “I think the first half dozen books I wrote are about who are we, and then I concluded that we were pretty strange,” he reflects. “We can do so many things so brilliantly, but other things we’re completely incapable of doing. We are just wedded to violence, and we also have this strange mental instability. So I think the next half dozen books are about what are we and why are we so.”
A journalist once aptly dubbed Faulks a “state-of-the-species” rather than state-of-the-nation novelist. One of the thing humans are not so hot at, Faulks says, is diplomacy – a problem compounded by our post-truth politicians. “We can do science and exploration and art and literature and music brilliantly, but we can’t do politics.”
A new novel, The Music Mistress, is slated for publication in September of next year. “Quite a lot of it takes place in Palestine in ‘46-’47, the last days with the British mandate, and the failure of politics and the failure of diplomacy over decades.” Despite the 19 books under his belt and the plethora of accolades, “I’m still learning how to write better,” Faulks says, “and I feel that I’m maybe approaching a good period.”
Before we log off, I ask Faulks whether he has any regrets. “I think people who say [they] don’t have any regrets are insufferably smug,” he says. “Christ, yes ... I regret a lot of things, but once you’ve seen what you did wrong or seen what you failed to do, and come to terms with it, you apologise. You can’t go on hanging on to it forever. You just have to try and do better tomorrow. ‘And so we beat on, boats against the current,’ he concludes, quoting the last line of The Great Gatsby, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past’.”
