Roy Fuller: An Interview

87 FULLER ROY FULLER ROY FULLER: AN INTERVIEW Roy Fuller kindly consented to this interview in Feburary or March of 1977. I dreamed briefly of being able to do the interview in the London suburb where he lives. Since that was impossible, I put together these six compound questions and mailed them to him on the first of April. The answers came back on the 22nd. Mr. Fuller is the author of eleven books of poetry, the most recent of which is From the Joke Shop, nine novels, three children's novels, and two books of essays written during the time he held the Oxford Chair of Poetry (1968-1973). He spent his working life as a solicitor for a building society. R.M. R.M.: Since you describe yourself as coming from the petty bourgeoisie, I assume you were drawn to the political left by forces outside your class. What were they? Did your affiliation with the Communist Party of Great Britain coincide with your first interest in politics, or was it a later development ? R.F.: I've just been rereading-after an interval of donkey's yearsGerard Manley Hopkins's letters, to Bridges, Canon Dixon, Patmore: indeed, the whole caboodle. One thing greatly struck me: some parallels between Hopkins's conversion to Rome in the 1 860s and my own (and others') commitment to communism in the 1930s. Needless to say, one must make allowance for enormous differences—the contrast between the religious and the social spheres, and a certain banality (as it so often proved) in the later metamorphoses-but the two processes had things in common. First, the sense of urgency. Hopkins wouldn't postpone his reception into the Roman Catholic Church even for a few months, even at the earnest request of his parents (who were shattered). I felt in 1 933 (was it?) a similar desire to join the CPGB, as though the world might further degenerate in any days or weeks of delay! I believe at least a couple of my friends (not intellectuals) felt similarly. And then there was the sense that communism provided complete answers to the great questions of belief and action. I didn't at that time differentiate between brands of communism. The 'official' version was good enough for me, indeed I expect would appeal to me for that very reason. 88 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW This 'conversion' or 'joining' followed a quite long period of being more or less vaguely interested in politics. The schoolboy hero of my novel The Ruined Boys (published in the prudish United States as That Distant Afternoon ) discovers socialism through reading by accident Robert Blatchford and a volume of Fabian essays. These things I myself read at fourteen or fifteen, and Shaw and Wells were literary heroes at that time, so that I suppose I believed in socialism just about as soon as I embarked on independent intellectualism. I don't know how I came to be an intellectual. My earlywidowed mother was not educated. There were no books at home, though my fathered had possessed some and my mother's family were musical and amateurs of the graphic arts. I read rubbish until I was, say, thirteen. As a matter of fact, I still read rubbish-if I may extend that term to murder stories, all pages of the newspaper, prose on cereal packets, and so forth. As a socialist I suppose I wanted to remedy the inequalities in the distribution of income by socialising the ownership of capital. That there was really enough money to go around, that human potential was held back through bad management of resources, that socialism would bring greater gentleness , greater art, greater happiness-this, I'm sure, I believed before I arrived at communism. The principles of 'scientific' socialism (for example, the nature of the 'state') were a revelation to me, when I came to read the Marxist classics, not least because they showed how simple socialist aims might be achieved in the complex contemporary world. Oh dear! I suppose all this sounds frightfully obvious or boring or both. Yet of course different paths could have been taken. When Oswald Mosley and other radical members first...