Baddiel To The Bone

You’ve picked the wrong man for the job. Such was this writer’s initial response when offered the assignment of an interview with David Baddiel, a man whose career I hadn’t followed since he and Rob Newman were selling out Wembley ten years ago, back when comedy was being trumpeted as the new rock ‘n’ roll. Nor had I watched any of his TV shows on BBC or Sky. As for his association with Frank Skinner and that execrable ‘Three Lions’ World Cup tune, the less said the better. And despite the publication of two novels – Time For Bed and Whatever Love Means – I still didn’t associate the 40-something Baddiel, who lives in North London with the actress and writer Morwenna Banks and their daughter, with the stuff of Booker prizes (although he did sit on the judging panel in 2002).

As it turned out, the error was in my own judgement, because his third novel The Secret Purposes is an impressive and accomplished work. Drawing heavily on his own grandparents’ experience as German-Jewish immigrants in wartime England, Baddiel has fashioned a compelling, skilfully rendered story. Anyone doubting his literary cred needs to look no further than the book’s 22-page prologue, which describes the Rabbi Isidor Fabian’s walk over the seven bridges of 1930s Konigsberg, an habitual stroll that he uses to meditate on and atone for each of the seven deadly sins. The Rabbi’s journey, and his freedom, come to an end when Nazi officers erect a sign forbidding Jews to use the last bridge, cutting off access to the synagogue. From there, the story jumps to wartime England as Isidor’s son Isaac, a communist intellectual, finds himself interned on the Isle of Man.
Notwithstanding the weighty historical context, The Secret Purposes is essentially the tale of Isaac’s conflict, torn between his love for his wife and a Ministry of Information translator, June Murray, a woman determined to defy her superiors and expose evidence of atrocities perpetrated upon the Jews by the Nazis.
“All my novels seem to be about people who find themselves basically in the grip of desire at the wrong time when circumstances are conspiring against them,” says the bearded and casually attired Baddiel when we meet in the RTE canteen on a rainy day in April.

Peter Murphy: Most of the reviews of The Secret Purposes have earmarked this as your bid for heavyweight literary status. Scrupulous research aside, what I liked most about it was the old-school storytelling craft.

David Baddiel: It’s kind of banal to say, but I think there still exists in art, and certainly in the novel, a sort of idea that if something has a good narrative flow to it, somehow that’s too populist, a downmarket thing. And there’s an association with nothing happening being a high artistic work. That’s obviously bollocks. Not to say that there aren’t some books where nothing happens that are brilliant; my favourite writer is John Updike, and he’s not big on plot. But when I was doing the Booker in 2002 I was thinking, “Fuck me, I really wish some of these books would just tell a story.” The number of books of endless meandering about nothing in an attempt to create some sense of artistic work when they could just tell a story…

I used to be big on style, but I’m coming around to the idea that story is the great bullshit detector.
I completely agree. The problem is, I suppose, that a book like The Da Vinci Code, which is obviously a very successful book, is basically just plot, and at the end of every chapter there’s a cliff-hanger so you keep reading, and that, without slagging it off particularly, sort of devalues story. You just get one hit after another to keep you reading.

Reading that book is like being jumped on by a slobbering Saint Bernard. I kept thinking, “Fuck off! Stop being so needy!”
Exactly, there’s no economy. It’s like: “And then this happened…” and you gotta read on. And that is where people get the idea that plot is a bad thing. But I think it’s so crucial. At the top level of genre writing, there is some very, very good writing going on that is stupidly ignored by prizes and critics. Science fiction, fantasy writing, totally ignored.

Tell me about your experience as a Booker judge.
I wouldn’t recommend it. I liked one thing about it, which was that I happened to be with a whole bunch of really interesting people, the other judges. I’ve heard that it can be very acrimonious and horrible, but we did all get on and I liked talking about books with them. What I didn’t like was having to read books in a very mechanical speed-reading way. And also I didn’t like most of the books to be honest, I thought, “Fuck me, clearly very, very few great books are written.” And often I’m sure years go by without a great book being written. The idea that the Booker creates five great books every year is a lie. My year, there were some books that were good and some that were not bad, but nothing that I really wanted to champion.

Remind me what won that year.
Life Of Pi. And finally, after reading all this fucking British and Commonwealth shite, I got to read The Corrections, which rendered everything else pointless, an absolutely brilliant book that I’d have loved to have been able to champion, but nothing came within 500 miles.

Much of the research for The Secret Purposes came from your own family history. What drew you to that subject matter at this point in your life?
I think it’s to do with time. When you’re young, the stuff that happened to your parents or grandparents feels so long ago, and then as you get older your own sense of time contracts. I was born in 1964. My grandparents died when I was 18, and the stuff that happened them seemed very long ago. The trouble is that now, 20 years ago is when I remember talking to them. I was born 20 years after the liberation of Belsen. You think, “20 years ago I was just starting to do stand-up comedy,” and that doesn’t feel like a long time ago. So your interest in the past gets stronger, it’s at your heels in a way that it wasn’t before.
And also, I wanted to write something different, although both the other novels have got lots of stuff in there that is not the stuff of straightforward comedy novels. But I didn’t want to write another novel about 30-somethings in London and their sexual choices.

TV personality stuff aside, your evolution as a writer is not that different from most writers. I’m thinking of Roddy Doyle, who wrote a number of zippy, dialogue-driven books before graduating to weightier stuff.
For Roddy Doyle I’m sure that’s problematic enough, but it’s more problematic if you’re a TV comedian. First you’ve got to get over the hurdle that you write novels, and some people don’t like it at all, and then you try to write a serious novel and some critics will think you’re out of order completely doing that, but… fuck them, y’know? I’ve always thought the failure of imagination that involves is amazing. The idea that people are so narrow that this is what they do and then they have no other stuff that they can express, no other interests – no-one’s like that.

Is that an English public-school class-system get-back-in-your-box thing?
I don’t know. I don’t know.

Included in the book is a 1939 missive from the German Jewish Aid Committee, which urges refugees to effectively surrender their identities in order to blend in and behave like proper Englishmen.
That’s a real thing. The research came from stuff that my Mum gave me. She gave me this box of letters all in German that my granddad had written to my grandma when he was interned in the Isle of Man, and in it was this little booklet that said Information And Guidance For Refugees. I’d actually read about this leaflet in books but I’d never actually seen the real thing. It was about eight pages, all information on how to be English basically, for German Jews. I thought it was really funny. It said things like “Do not speak in German in a loud voice in the street” and stuff like that. I like the description of the English a lot, stuff like, “The Englishman is someone who’s very unostentatious in dress and says thank you even for a bus ticket.” You mean to say the Germans didn’t do that?!!

The parallels between the German-Jewish refugees and the modern equivalent from Eastern Europe and Africa are interesting. Isaac is a classic case of a college-educated intellectual reduced to slopping-out.
I didn’t write the book at all with any sense of having modern political relevance, except to correct this idea that the British were whiter-than-white throughout the war. But a lot of people have drawn parallels between the way Jewish refugees were treated and the way asylum seekers are treated now. Back then there was a mass right wing panic, tabloids like the Daily Mail said, “These people must be spies or terrorists – we should exile them to islands away from the mainland, we should send them back, most of their claims are fraudulent.” All that stuff went on throughout the '30s and during the war.

Given your background, how do you respond to this stuff?
Basically I’m first generation, my Mum was born in Nazi Germany and was a refugee as a baby, and as such it’s impossible for me to take seriously the Daily Mail mentality that most of these people’s claims are bogus. Maybe some of them are, but my guess is that to up sticks from your country and travel across the world to try and start afresh, something bad has happened in your country. No one would want to do that unless they were under enormous pressure. So my feeling is that people who go on about asylum seekers should think about the fact that this country’s record isn’t as good as people think it is. 10,000 Jews were let into this country, which is better than some places, but a tiny fraction of the amount of people being massacred.

This book is riddled with ambiguities, a sort of moral double-ness.
One of the things I try and tease out in the book is exactly what constituted British anti-Semitism at the time of the war, because it was obviously credibly there but… there’s this character in the book, Nigel Henderson, who is the assistant to the Ministry of Information, and an example of British establishment anti-Semitism: “We don’t like that German, systematic, rather vulgar jackboot anti-Semitism, but we don’t really want them in our clubs either.” And it was actually very important, that polite anti-Semitism, very common in Britain in the 30s, and that’s why TS Eliot and Ezra Pound were able to write the poetry that they could, because it’s indirectly what led to the suppression of information about the Holocaust, a sort of distaste for Jews and the troubles that were happening to them. Even some of the Anglo-Jewry in the 30s were very anti a huge influx of refugees because it would have made their situation more difficult. It was a really complicated situation.

One of the ideas in the book is the use of language as a dehumanising device. This notion of the Jews as a parasitic race with no fixed state, so they infiltrate the power structures of other nations and then you can’t get rid of them.
Language is important in the creation of a fascist state. The way you make one race into a second-class race is through language. You call them vermin or give them numbers or letters, particularly in Germany it was done through beaurocracy. My mother’s parents had to choose her name from a list of prescribed names for Jewish children. Right at the very start of life it’s language marking you, branding you in a certain way. Or refugees speaking German in England, the stuff coming out of your mouth branding you an apparent enemy and you’re not able to explain.
(Points to my notes)
I notice you’ve got “kabbalah” written down there. It’s an interesting thing. It’s an incredibly numerological religion, Judaism. I’m not religious, but I went to a Jewish primary school, so I was kind of soaked in it as a kid, and it’s obsessed with tying down reality to numbers, and I think it’s almost autistic in the sense that, as I understand autism, autistic people are very into numbers because they think it’s a way of controlling the world, and that’s what Judaism is like. Orthodox Judaism is like obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It’s funny – I can’t imagine Irish Catholicism having the same impact on someone like Madonna.
I don’t know much about Madonna or people like that being into the kaballah. It sounds stupid to me really, because having known lots of people when I was young who were religious Jews, I can’t really believe that Madonna’s gonna do that stuff. It’s an enormous drag on your life to really keep kosher. You’ve got to have three kitchens – well, I’m sure she’s got three kitchens! – but it’s a real pain in the arse actually observing to the level that religious Jews have to. But I’m very interested in Catholicism because it has a relationship to Judaism that I think Protestantism doesn’t have. There’s the mysticism and all that stuff. Also, having spent a lot of time with Frank Skinner, who’s a devout Catholic, what I realised is that every Catholic I’ve every met, there is something about their relationship to Catholicism that is fundamental to their lives. And similarly with every Jew I’ve ever met, even if you’re not orthodox or religious, it just does mark you in a very profound way. And that’s why I think there’s an ability for Jews and Catholics to get on… even though the Vatican were very bad to Jews during the war. And now they’ve got a Pope who was in the Hitler Youth – I understand it was compulsory, and he got out of it, but I still think it’s bad PR!

Have you encountered anti-Semitism in your own career?
I don’t know about that. I was asked that once by a very unscrupulous journalist, which is not bringing you into the equation at all, but it’s a difficult question. I started talking about how I’d had a conversation with Ben Elton about this, and he had said he felt some of the things written about him were anti-Semitic. And I said, “Look, it’s one of the most serious charges you can level at anyone, so I would never use it lightly. If someone doesn’t like me or doesn’t like my work, I would never say that they were anti-Semitic, it’s too serious a charge.” And then eventually I said, “But… if you’re gonna push me on it, every so often, I’ve felt that some of the most horrific things that I’ve read about me feel like they’re coming from somewhere deeper and more full of loathing (laughs) than just, ‘I don’t like this guy’s book or his comedy’. And that’s made me wonder about anti-Semitism.”

That sounds like a reasonable statement. What was the problem?
She cut out a lot of the qualification, and it ended up with me sounding like I was complaining about bad reviews being anti-Semitic, which really, really fucked me off ’cos I’d spent so much time qualifying it. So I’ll say again, I think anti-Semitism exists on an unconscious level for lots of people, and I feel it from time to time, but I come from a family where systematic violent anti-Semitism was imposed directly on them, and I think since the stuff that I’ve encountered is so much less than that, I wouldn’t really make a big deal of it.
I suppose what I mean is, sometimes when I read some of the nasty stuff about me, things that say that I’m smug, or that I’m clever-clever or that I’m a smart-aleck – put the word ‘Jew’ after those things and see how it sounds. They are all adjectives that tend to be ascribed to Jews, and I don’t think the people writing this stuff are in the frame of that, but I think there’s something going on below the level of consciousness that sometimes has to do with that. Particularly this idea that the Jew is a bit too kind of clever for his own good, blah-blah-blah.
Well, it’s interesting that even some of the serious book reviewers felt compelled to mention that you’d gotten something like four million quid for some TV show you did with Sky.
Which I hadn’t. It’s a weird thing about being in the public eye. Stuff gets written about you that isn’t true and then it gets repeated and then it becomes fact. Martin Amis talks about this in Experience. He said being treated by the British press is like being pushed about and then turned on and told it’s your fault that you were pushed about. And it is like that. Not always, sometimes there are nice things written about you… but even the nice things tend to be wrong!

The Secret Purposes is published by Abacus.