The last time I sat down with Peter Ackroyd to talk about the idea of England was over a very long dinner, involving, at his cheerfully belligerent insistence, four bottles of wine, bookended by several rounds of whisky and brandy. That evening, 25 years ago, ended with the biographer of Charles Dickens and William Blake lying flat out on the cobble stones outside a restaurant in London’s Charterhouse Square, disputing the material reality of the moon, while repeating a demand to “take me home Timmy and tuck me up”, an invitation I declined.
When I arrived to resume that conversation a quarter of a century on, last Tuesday, Ackroyd recalled our previous encounter with a bit of a wince. “I think we did this before in my drinking days,” he suggested, by way of hello. He runs through one or two recollections of that night as if from a former life, including his memory of trying to tell my fortune (“something once happened to you near a river…”). Ackroyd is now 74 and looks far trimmer and brighter-eyed than I remember. It is, he says, seven years since he gave up the drink (even a decade ago he was suggesting that he was down to two bottles of wine a night). “In the end I just got tired of it,” he says. “And also, it wasn’t good for my health. I mean, I was drinking far too much; it was like Niagara Falls.” He misses nothing about that previous life, he says, with half a smile and half a grimace. “Not least because it caused immense embarrassment and frequent physical pain.”
If those particular revels have ended, what has not ever for a moment abated in Ackroyd’s life is his other brimming compulsion: a devotion to the written word. Even since we last met he has added nine novels to his personal canon, and 34 works of nonfiction, including full-length biographies of Turner, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Chaplin and Hitchcock, a landmark six-volume history of England and several additions to his ongoing inquiry into his native city including London: The Biography, London Under, and Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day.
I duck the question “and what have you been up to?”.
Ackroyd’s new book is about the evolution of Christianity in England, from the venerable Bede to Justin Welby. The book carries the title The English Soul, what he defines now as “a convenient shorthand for qualities which we don’t understand”.
As with all of Ackroyd’s books, you arrive at the end of this procession of mystics and evangelists, heretics and headbangers briefly cleverer than when you began. His history takes in lives of a multitude of believers from Julian of Norwich, through John Donne and John Wesley, to GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, with numerous enjoyable diversions along the way into the likes of Abiezer Coppe, who insisted on preaching the gospel naked, and the cult of the curse-making followers of Lodowicke Muggleton, which persisted from 1651 to 1979.
“With me,” Ackroyd says, “it’s always a voyage of discovery. I’m telling you what I didn’t previously know. And in my case, that’s a hell of a lot. And in the case of that book, the soul, it was almost completely new territory.”
On the wall beside his desk are portraits of some of his other subjects: John Milton, Oscar Wilde (in whose voice he wrote a novel), the Elizabethan occultist John Dee. “You develop an affinity and eventually a sort of companionship, when you get to know them well enough,” he says. “Of course, that’s an illusion. But it’s something which spurs you forward.”
He says there is a fleeting quality to these friendly obsessions that puzzles him, though he doesn’t interrogate it too closely. “Most writers, I presume,” he says, “keep a sort of a memory of events and details of people’s lives when they write a biography. But in my case, it just completely vanishes once the book is done.”
He wouldn’t be much use in a pub quiz?
“It would be embarrassing. The things I wouldn’t be able to remember about Dickens, say [subject of a 1,000-page plus Ackroyd bestseller]. I can now hardly remember who he was married to or the names of any of his children or the order the books came in.”
He likens his methods to “a form of intellectual bulimia: you eat a great deal of knowledge. And you sick it up. And then you start again.”
He once observed that his books were all really one book, and that he was always filling in missing chapters. He gestures towards his laptop screen and the shelves of research material behind it. “I’m doing a book about Auden,” he says. “I did TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. So it feels like a natural progression.”
***
All of this industry takes place these days in the study where we sit in his large mansion flat in a grand block immediately behind the Harrods department store in Kensington (that epic industry has been well rewarded). He has been here for 20 years. It seems a slightly soulless place for a man so steeped in the historical layering of London, giving out as it does on to a row of shops selling £2,000 handbags. “I just happened to be looking for a flat and this one was advertised,” he says. “I didn’t take much time thinking about it. It’s got richer because of the influx of foreign money.”
Until fairly recently he would travel across town to work in a different home in Bloomsbury. He also had a Georgian house in Islington – at the door of which I now remember depositing him by cab – along with a house in Devon. “They’ve all gone. I’ve got a slight disability now,” he says as he pats his left leg, “and I can’t walk very far. So it’s important for me to have a central place.”
One way of understanding the Kensington address is that it is about as far as possible, in Dickensian terms, from the place he grew up: with his single mother in a council house in east Acton, on an estate “literally overshadowed by the looming walls of Wormwood Scrubs prison”.
“I remember,” he says now, “there would occasionally be sirens, meaning a prisoner had escaped, and we all had to lock our doors.”
I mention that I was walking that area recently, researching a story about the new HS2 terminal that is being built there (and which has optimistically chosen the name Old Oak Common, rather than Wormwood Scrubs). House prices, I suggest, are on the up.
He laughs, rehearsing his theory that some places in London resist all attempts at gentrification – the past always seeps back in. “My memory of the common itself is quite a pleasant one,” he says, “it was a sort of combination of wasteland and swamp. A good place for surreptitiously smoking cigarettes.”
He never knew his father, who upped and left while he was a baby. Ackroyd’s mother worked in personnel at the Metal Box factory; they would come up to the West End on the top floor of the bus and look down at the shoppers in Knightsbridge. Ackroyd’s life changed when he first won a scholarship to the Roman Catholic public school St Bede’s and then a place at Cambridge. His mother lived to be 82. I wonder what she made of what he became?
“What did I become?”
The towering man of letters?
He guffaws. “Now you are being funny. She was alive while my books were being published, but I don’t think we ever discussed it. I think both of us would have been too embarrassed to have mentioned it.”
When I last saw him, he talked about having been contacted by his father, Graham, by letter. Did they ever meet?
“No, I never did meet him. He died a few years ago, I believe. But I never wanted to meet him, no curiosity at all. I suppose that’s a weakness or a fault on my part. But I never regretted it.”
A psychologist might develop the theory that Ackroyd has spent a lifetime trying to fill that father-shaped hole by constructing his unending succession of imaginative lives of heroic and formidable men. But he’d have none of that. He has the biographer’s paradoxical dislike of any kind of theorising about his own motivations. Instead you read between the lines of his books, looking for clues to his sympathies.
The current volume, a procession of believers trying to mansplain the universe in earnest ways, has a certain comedy to it, I say. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Whether it’s a farce or a burlesque I don’t know. But there certainly is a comic element in all of these deeply religious people. But I have come to think that everything is absurd, essentially. Including all of my own most so-called precious beliefs.”
One of the things that jumped out of the book, I say, is that he makes a point of noting the date of birth and the date of death of each of his saints and sinners. It’s almost like wandering a graveyard. Does he find himself thinking more about mortality?
“It’s funny you should ask that,” he says, “because I have an idea for a book, called Last Days, which would concern itself with, let’s say, the final acts of Tolstoy or Walt Whitman. And look back upon their earlier reflections on death. I haven’t started, of course, it might be a few years down the line.”
This talk leads to questions about the heart attack Ackroyd had in 1999, a couple of days after he completed his mammoth biography of London; he recovered after a bypass operation. “My health is good now,” he says. “Apart from the fact I have diabetes, which is not a big deal these days. I’m fine.”
He has lived alone for nearly 30 years, since his long-term partner, Brian Kuhn, a dancer at the Ballet Rambert, died of Aids-related illness in 1994. His solitary life has led to an impression of withdrawal from the world, which he insists could not be further from the truth.
“I’m not unsociable at all. I have one or two good friends. We go out to restaurants every night. I think that impression may just arise from the fact that I spend most of my day working and writing.” One casualty of his stopping drinking is that he no longer accepts invitations to book parties or publishing dinners, “hell on earth” he says, even when drunk, and unthinkable sober.
Has the famous working regime changed? He sighs.
“Well, I get up at 6.30. Have my breakfast, inject myself with insulin. And then begin working. Always from say, eight or nine until six every day. And then go out for dinner and that’s it.”
He has talked in the past of having “monkish” inclinations regarding writing, but those do not extend as far as faith. He was raised as an altar boy, but he lost even a sentimental attachment to the church when he was about 14. Has he ever missed God?
“Not at all. Except, of course, in the books where the sort of appetites or the yearning for the spiritual or the transcendent seems to appear – but not in my life.”
In the “soul” book he refers in passing at one point to the church’s apparent ongoing belief that “homosexuality is incompatible with scripture”. That must be a part of the antipathy he feels?
“No, no,” he says. “I honestly don’t think that affected me at all.” He insists that he doesn’t keep up with the embarrassing and shameful debates in which the church finds new ways to express its homophobia. “No, no, no. I don’t follow in the least. I just don’t find it interesting. It’s sort of beside the point of my own interests.” (He once observed that his mother had warned him off strange men; he was pleased to never have taken her advice.)
* * *
Because of his slightly Blimpish exterior, the bristle of a moustache, it has always been tempting to place Ackroyd as an establishment figure, but he rejects that notion out of hand. If he has a creed, he says, it is of fierce independence. In a “letter to my younger self” he wrote not long ago for the Big Issue, he said “there were gangs of boys on the estate [where I grew up], but I never joined any of them… and that is a principle I have maintained. I have never joined a group, whether of protesters, of letter signatories, of writers – because I was acutely aware that I might lose my individuality.” He became literary editor of the Conservative Spectator magazine when he was 23 and was associated with it for many years – did he feel at home there?
“Not particularly no,” he says. “It was just a job. I had no particular affection for the people I worked with or for any of the causes they represented… ” In the current book you sense his prose and his blood quickening when he details the lives of dissenters and nonconformists, the ranters and the lollards.
“The highly individual voice is very attractive to me,” he says. “Blake, of course, is the obvious example. But there’s plenty of others. John Bunyan. Some were constantly hounded, persecuted, beaten up, imprisoned, defamed, but all of them carried on with a sort of burning light, which led them forward. That’s quite a remarkable quality.”
It’s a courage, or single-mindedness that he fears he lacks in himself; he has no sense of conviction. “The reason I used to drink a lot was I wanted to get over my self-consciousness,” he says. “Drink was one way of removing that burden from me. But I’m much better writing about things I am interested in than conversing about them. I generally don’t know if I really have anything to say – but I can write. And that’s the paradox.”
What is he most proud of? “My novel Hawksmoor,” he says. “The London biography. I remember those. But I don’t take any pride in them as such, because it strikes me as being, in the long term, no achievement at all… All my convictions float. They’re not real to me in some sense. I’ve just been reading a lot of Montaigne’s essays. I read them all the time. His point seems to be that he has no settled feelings about anything, and that is how I feel.”
But, like Montaigne, he has earned the freedom to keep exploring new ways of expressing that?
“I suppose. I don’t know if I’ve earned it, but I certainly use it. I’m not depressive. And I’m certainly not lonely. I’m always sort of eager to go on. I’ve never lost my appetite or interest in what is going to happen next.” And then, with a smile: “But ask me again in another 25 years.”
The English Soul by Peter Ackroyd is published by Reaktion Books (£20) on 1 March. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
