Peter Ackroyd stops at a little restaurant on Clerkenwell Green. “Ah, my favorite,” he says to the boss. “But it’s too expensive to eat here these days.” “Nonsense!” the boss says. “It depends how much you eat and drink.”
“Ah yes, of course,” Ackroyd says.
We continue our tour of Clerkenwell, which is the setting for Ackroyd’s latest novel. The Clerkenwell Tales is a brilliantly imagined thriller, set in 1399, about the overthrow of Richard II. Ackroyd has borrowed Chaucer’s characters and transported them to the district on the edge of the City of London, where the Guardian happens to be based.
We are now outside the Marx Memorial Library, and Ackroyd is explaining how Clerkenwell has always been a hotbed of radicalism. “Wat Tyler led the Peasants’ Revolt. Lenin edited a weekly newsletter from here called The Spark, and his office is still there,” he says, with a general wave of his hand. “The Morning Star used to be round the corner. And the Big Issue was here. And the Guardian, which I suppose is leftwing, is over there.
He breathes heavily as we walk, and I feel anxious. Ackroyd is a portly man, and a few years ago he had a heart attack. His greased-back hair is nicotine yellow, as is his moustache and jacket. There is something both menacing and comic about his appearance. At times he looks like a 50s East End gangster, then, with a twitch of his ‘tache or wrinkle of his nose, he turns into the campest of dandies.
He says the place has changed a great deal over the past 600 years, but it still retains its revolutionary spirit. This year, the Mayday protesters gathered on Clerkenwell Green. Ackroyd talks about the “territorial imperatives of an area”, how the same kind of activity tends to repeat itself in a neighborhood through the ages.
In Clerkenwell Tales, he revels in the textures of medieval life: his streets bustle with plotters and crooks; they smell of dirt and cooking flesh. He tells me, proudly, that the language is authentic. “I went through all the texts of the medieval period, whether medical handbooks or geographical descriptions, and I just took striking phrases.” Typical Ackroyd to walk into a library and work his way through every book from a period.
At the Three Kings pub, Ackroyd addresses the landlord. “Unfortunately, I put your pub in my new book, John.”
“Did you? Oh you fool! You’ve done something terrible to it, haven’t you?”
“Not at all. All I said was that that was the site of the hostelry.”
I ask Ackroyd what he would like to drink.
“Just a non-alcoholic fizzy water,” he says.
Ackroyd is best known for his chronicling of London. He is paid huge amounts for his biographies, which imagine the lives of the subjects as much as record them. His books on Dickens and Blake won him an advance of £650,000 in the early 90s. Critics said that was crazy money, but both books made a profit. London the Biography has been a huge success, and this autumn he will present a television series about the city.
There is something machine-like about the way he lives his life: writing from 7.30 a.m. till 9 p.m., with breaks for household chores and food. You seem ferociously disciplined about work, I say. “What else is there?” he says. Is there anything else? “Not in my life, no.”
He is more taciturn than when he was playing tour guide. He answers questions politely but briefly. He stares out of the window, and makes no attempt to fill in silences.
A while ago, I read an interview in which he said he had done with love and relationships. Is that true? “I don’t know where you get these cuttings from. I have no opinion about love. But I couldn’t live with anyone any more, if that’s what you mean.” Why? “It is difficult when you’re writing a great deal of the time because the other person obviously feels excluded from the activity.”
We talk about the structure of Clerkenwell Tales.
Actually, he says, at the same time as he was writing Clerkenwell Tales he was also writing a biography of Chaucer, which helped. Blimey, I say, you must be going mad with information, how d’you keep all this stuff in your head? “I dump it all. I don’t keep it in my head, as you can tell. I can’t even remember about that book we were talking about now. No, I can’t,” he says joyously, “And the same with Chaucer. I can barely remember the date of his birth. Or his first name. Yes, if I kept everything in my head, I’d be, as you say, a mess.”
Does he spend a lot of time living in the past? “No, not at all.” He pauses. “I don’t believe necessarily the past is in the past. It’s eternal, it’s all around us. He talks about the Aztecs, who regarded time as circular, and the Incas who saw time as a recurring 20-year period. “So when people talk about the past, they’re talking about something I don’t recognize as being past.” Is that spiritual belief? “I don’t know if it’s spiritual, I think it’s just common sense.”
Ackroyd was born in East Acton in 1949 to a working-class mother. He never knew his father, who left when he was a baby. Did his mother work? “She worked as... a personnel officer, I think the phrase is.” He lived on a council estate till he was 18, when he won a scholarship to Cambridge. After studying at Yale, he became literary editor of the Spectator. More than anything, he says, as a young man he wanted to transcend his origins. “I had no problem about shedding my background. I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.”
Yet London is his great love. Virtually all his books, whether biographies of Dickens or Blake, or novels such as Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, have been, in one way or another, about London. How would he describe the character of London? “Well, I think it’s male, a great age, unpredictable, it’s diseased, it’s impatient, it’s energetic... that’s it.”
Is the character of London close to his own? “No. No, I don’t think so.” Describe your own character, I say. “It’s male, it’s old, it’s diseased, it’s impatient. I don’t know, that’s it.” It sounds pretty close to London, I say. “Does it really? Noooooooah. No similarities at all.”
I ask him if he meant it when he said there was nothing to life beyond writing. “No, no, no,” he says. So what gives him pleasure? “Well...” He splutters with laughter and comes to a stop. “Have you got enough now? You must have.” He sighs wearily.
Close your eyes, I say, and think of something else that gives you pleasure. He closes his eyes. “Annotating my notes. It’s the point where you amass all the references to one specific thing, so you’ll have 50 books on, say, the stretch of road here and where it led. It’s the point where it all comes alive.” He’s licking his lips and speaking faster. “That’s when you discover revelations in the interpretation of all the evidence put together.” He talks about the life of Shakespeare he’s working on. “I have about 20 files, that big, and hundreds of books and I’ll number the files and I’ll give the books an alphabetic identification, A,B,C etc, then it will say ‘John Shakespeare’s will’ A9, G14 etc. And that’s the bit I like. It’s like a new creation, a rabbit out of a hat, the creation of new knowledge.”
Does he have strong opinions? “No, I have none.” None? “None. I have no opinions about anything. Ask me about anything.” Iraq? “I don’t know, I can see both sides of it.” Hitler? His head nods to one side, then the other. “Y’know, I don’t know... it’s a difficult one.” Was he a good man or a bad man? “Well... he was probably a very bad man,” he finally concedes. For so many years, he says, he had to fake political opinions at the Spectator when he was bored silly by public matters.
You’re allowed to go now, I say. Suddenly he seems less eager to run off. Are you sure you’ve asked all the questions, he says. He looks at my notepad. “Have you ticked off everything. What about number 13? What does that say?” He reads the question playfully. “Was I class-conscious as a boy? No. Yes, I was. Of course I was. What am I talking about?” Now there’s no stopping him. He talks about Clerkenwell, and all the things he loves about it: restaurants, pubs and food. He’s scrutinizing my question sheet, determined to ensure we’ve missed nothing out. I tell him he’s been a very good boy, very patient, and he’s welcome to leave the table. “Thank you so much, Simon. Am I allowed to go now? Ah!” And he sighs ecstatically.
- Arab News Features 28 August 2003
