Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Katherine Rundell. Katherine is a fellow at All Souls College. She is the bestselling author of numerous children's books. Every morning she wakes up and does a cartwheel, but most prominently for me, she is the author of the recent book Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which is this year so far, probably my favorite book of the year. Katherine, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so John Donne, he's an English poet born in 1572. What is your origin story of how you became obsessed with him?

I have parents who believed in the power of memorizing poetry and in the idea that even if you memorize poetry that you don't understand, there will be a time in your life when it will come back for you. So I was paid to memorize poetry, and my mother used to put it on the wall next to the sink where we would brush our teeth. And some of it was, a lot of it was was T.S. Eliot's Possum's Book of Practical Cats, but there was also some John Donne poetry. And even though I didn't fully grasp it, I found it to be faintly alchemic. I loved it. I loved its strangeness and its difficulty. So I've loved him for a very long time now.

And how old are you at that initial point?

I was probably about 8.

And when does the flipping age come when you think, this is my thing, I'm going to do something with this?

I think probably in my teen years he became my favourite poet and a kind of a talismanic author. I found him a place of refuge against that which seemed to me often ungenerous in— so much of popular culture now offers a quite unexciting vision of what your mind and language might be capable of, and I found him a brilliant antidote to that, a kind of bulwark against a kind of anti-intellectualism. And then also, of course, I had boyfriends who would send it to me, and I found that very romantic.

So the early John Donne, he writes poetry about the transmigration of souls. He writes a tract defending suicide that even suggests possibly Christ committed suicide, quote unquote, on purpose. Was early John Donne at all a Christian?

I mean, it's a really good question. The one that we will never know the answer to is what precise shape did his inner religious life take? Because of course the central thing that most people who know a little bit about Donne know is that he was born into a Catholic family at a time when to be Catholic was to be persecuted, and he died the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. And that necessitated both a conversion and a kind of emphaticness in his allegiance to the religion of the crown. So he didn't just cease to be a Catholic, he wrote two major tracts acts against Catholicism, Pseudo-Marta and Ignatius' conclave. And the question of how far he ever believed, how far his Christianity, his Catholicism, was real, and how far his later religion was real, and how far it was a necessity born of poverty or a kind of questing ambition, is something that a huge number of people will never agree on. Personally, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was a time when many people changed religions throughout their lives. And I think that his writing, the passion and fervour in his religious poetry, the focus and intelligence in his sermons, the breadth of dedication of thought and time it will have taken, I find it very easy to believe both in the reality of his Catholicism and in the reality of his Protestant conversion.

Just a general question for perspective. If you take poets and intellectuals in early to mid-19th century England or London life, what percentage of them do you think believed not in God, but in the Trinity and literal Christian doctrine?

19th century?

No, no, no. Donne's time, 17th century.

Right. I think belief is such a difficult word because it would have meant different things. You will have had someone like Kit Marlowe who played very openly the idea of real atheism, the idea that we live in an empty universe. And of course, some people believe that he was murdered for it. Other people believe that it was a brawl in a pub when he got knifed in the eye for not paying a bill, and we'll never know. I think, I mean, if you ask me to put a number on it—

A number, yes. This is a podcast, right?

Okay. I'm going to say, pff, 70% of people found from, if you read the letters that we have of the time, people are often in their private lives expressing very real comfort and hope from certain forms of religious doctrine. The amount of knowledge that people would have had what the Bible actually said, the amount of access people who have had to Bibles in English, of course, very limited. But I think a lot of people believed because it was offered as a way to put down your anxiety, your hopes, your chaos. It was a structure that gave people purpose and meaning. And then, of course, I think there will have been a lot of people who went to church—it was against the law not to go to church—but who went to church out of conformity, out of duty, out of not really caring that much. And I'm sure in every church service there were the passionate devotees and the people who were thinking about lunch, as there are now.

For Donne, can the meaning of a suicide ever be truly transparent?

No, I think for Donne Suicide is one of the things that dogs his life. It was illegal during Donne's lifetime to commit suicide. It was a crime in that most strange of ironies, punishable by death. Suicides could be buried with a stake put through their hearts at the crossroads. In France, there have been accounts of suicides, dead bodies of suicides dragged through the streets as a kind of warning. And of course, it was against religious doctrine. John Donne's letters tell us about his very real and urgent keenings towards death. He was a man who felt the pull of, he says, his own sword, and he wrote the first full-length treatise in the English language, 'Biothanatos', on suicide, which argues that in very specific, limited circumstances, suicide is not a sin, that Christ himself was the one great suicide. And so for Donne to be pulled towards suicide was both for him to feel he was being pulled towards sin, but also to feel that it would be a shortcut, a leaping into infinity and into the presence of God. And so for him, it was never going to be in any way straightforward or transparent.

What's the political meaning of Biothanatos, Donne's tract on suicide? Is it asserting a right of self-ownership, or how do we think about it? Is it egalitarian, or what is it doing? Politically, in a very political time?

Politically, of course, it's complicated by the fact that he wrote it, but not to be read. So he wrote a text that he explicitly told a friend when he went to Germany later in life, "Neither burn it nor publish it." You know, "Give it not to the fire, but show it to no one." Because he was aware that it was a text that could lead him to be put in very real peril, not necessarily of anything dramatic like court cases, but he would've probably lost his job. So for him, the politics of it are profoundly opaque and probably informed by a lot of his own desire to justify his own suicidal tendencies. There are those within Donne scholarship who think that 'Biathanatos' was in fact a personal bid to write out of himself his desire towards suicide, that in some ways those who talk about it a great deal are perhaps the least likely to commit it, and that he was in some way protecting himself in that way, so that it was a personal text in a way that it doesn't look. I don't think that it is arguing anything as radical as absolute self-ownership, because I think that would be anachronistic for the time. But I think it's one of the texts that come closest to arguing that our certainties— it famously says, 'We have been sure about so many things, and we have been wrong about them. We have been wrong about the stars.' So he is certainly saying all certainty has in it the peril of being not just wrong, but wrong in a way that will create misadventure and chaos. He is doing something quite radical there. He is saying there is no single great truth upon which we can base anything, and that was bold.

Whether or not you agree with it, what is the best Straussian reading of John Donne? Straussian reading?

Yes. I don't think I know the answer to that. Can you think of one?

Well, if you think he might be an atheist, I don't think he was, but I think it's a plausible reading that he never believed in the Anglican Church. He became a dean, it was for survival and for income and for security, what he cared about was his art, and a lot of it was a charade. And even in the early work, he was a very sort of high-class entertainer, and in some way it wasn't sincere. I don't know if I would defend that, but I would give it a chance of 10%.

Yeah, I think so. It's certainly a position that was very popular in the 1980s, and John Carey's completely spectacular book, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, certainly gives truck to that as a possible position. One of the reasons that that vision has really been shifted in the last 10 years or so has been the discovery of new letters and the the dating of old letters to suggest that even after he had started to reach some form of real middle-class wealth and solidity, he still kept pushing at a way that could have in fact been detrimental to him towards being ordained. That the King's favourite, Buckingham, was trying to put him off and was trying to offer him various forms of secretarialship, maybe going to Venice, maybe going to Ireland, and that he, in the face of these letters, was pushing back and insisting on the pursuit of God. And also, he reads to me in his letters like a man bent on some form of sincerity. For every letter where there is flattery and a kind of ornate rhetoric that seems to have at the heart of it, when you burrow through, only a joke, there are also letters that seem to express a man who wanted to be able to lay down truth in words. And therefore I do believe in his religion.

Now, there's a superficial but possibly true view of Donne that he wrote too many verses and epithalamions for pay, and the world would've been better if he had just done more songs and sonnets. Do you agree? Yes, of course. Just flat out, you agree?

I absolutely agree. But then you can say that almost any poet of the period for whom the need to make money meant that they had to compose in ways which absolutely were step by step in the fashion of the time and therefore held back their more radical and inventive impulses. So when they weren't being paid, they often wrote their best work.

For so long, why was Ben Jonson so much more popular a poet than Donne?

Ah, partly because he was more famous, partly because he wrote plays and the plays pleased first the Queen and then the King, partly because he wrote for the Boy Players and the Boy Players had a real glamour at the time and Queen Elizabeth was borderline obsessed with them.

Was Jonson ever a great poet or is it all just pretty good? None of it sticks with me. Am I missing something? Dun sticks with me. If you're missing something, I'm missing it too.

I admire Johnson's structural ingenuity, and I admire his flair, and I really admire his capacity for gossip because it gave us a lot of the knowledge that we have of the time. But I have never managed to find him a poet who gets into your intestines.

There's a recent book by Claire Jackson called Devil Land, which I very much admire, and it stresses how much British thought and life in the 17th century was I think she even uses the word deranged, crazy. It was a highly ideological era. People started believing, writing, doing all kinds of crazy things. Do you agree? And if so, why did that happen then? I know that's a big question, but I've been very interested in this issue.

I think it does look to us now like a time where a kind of febrile intensity of thought became not just commonplace but contagious. And certainly, you know, You could wake up in the morning and you could see acts of great devotion and great violence before breakfast. You could see a man burned for his belief, you can see a woman hung for hers, you could see people willing to push large beliefs on themselves to the point of death. So certainly, I think it was also exacerbated by plague, by the fact that every few years in Britain, the plague would come galloping through major cities and thousands of people would die overnight. So I think that that closeness to death, to war, to pestilence, also to beauty, to an influx of money, to the fact that suddenly we had access to far greater knowledge because of the boom of the printing press, that's enough to create a febrile moment, both intellectually and emotionally, I think.

Are we in some ways reentering a time somewhat analogous to the 17th century in England?

I think it does sometimes feel like we are, that there is something, a similarly explosive moment where we have newly explosive possibilities and newly explosive fears, and there feels like something similarly extreme happening, although I would say from different causes.

When you're writing about John Donne, what is the proper music to listen to? Is it William Byrd or is it, you know, Simon and Garfunkel?

One could, if one wanted to, listen to Dr. Atomic, which has set "Batter My Heart" into an aria, which is very beautiful, the Cage. You could listen to some semi-contemporary adaptations, though none absolutely contemporary, the Campion version of "The Break of Day." I wouldn't personally. I would say maybe some Mahler, someone who believed in both chaos and glory.

You know, our next podcast guest is in fact John Adams. And I'm planning on asking him about Donne. Wonderful. What's your favorite word invented by John Donne?

So the reason the book is called Super Infinite, I do love impossibilitate. I think it speaks highly to his sense of that which did not look impossible, but in fact, when you look at it closely, is so. But most of all, I love his talent for the super prefix, that he added it to so many things, a kind of insistence on things which lead outside language. So super infinite, super miraculous, super eternal, super dying. These are the linguistic habits of a man who longs for immensities.

I like just simple emancipation. That's from Donne, isn't it?

It is. Although, of course, I think it would be miss of me not to offer the caveat that often the OED has always found first uses in canonical authors, in part because they're just the ones who survive fire. So of course, he may have just been noting down a word in common parlance rather than being its inventor.

Why did Donne visit Johannes Kepler?

I think a fascination with the stars. I think that Donne was compelled by the idea of heavens and compelled by the idea, which he found deeply troubling, of scientific discoveries which were casting in doubt the great certainties of the previous generations. He had a complicated relationship with innovation. I think he went to Kepler to understand more about the ways that we moved around the Sun and that the moons moved around us.

In what ways was Donne a typical homeschooled child?

I was very briefly a homeschooled child, so I take that as a compliment. I figured as much, yes. Of course, The vast majority of boys of his class and religion were homeschooled boys because it was very hard to go to school as a young Catholic. And as the book discusses, going to school at the time would have introduced you to a kind of ruthless brutality that would have been difficult to recover from. Boys were beaten, some of them to death. It was expected that you would fight your colleagues, your compatriots, from the age of about 12, and boys routinely died at school. I think that he certainly has some of the idiosyncrasies of thought of someone who did not grow up with a huge cohort of friends, but also he became a great maker and keeper of bosom friends. His love for his friends is something I believe very truly in. You know, "Sir, letters more than kisses mingle souls," he wrote to Henry Goodyear, a man who I think we know he would've given up a great deal to help.

Now you have two books, Rooftoppers and Skysteppers, about rooftop walking. Some might call them children's books. I'm not sure that's exactly the right description, but what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking? Oh, well, I mean, it's falling off. But what leads you to fall off? Like, if you're rooftop walking, if you were to fall off, what would be the proximate cause of that event?

Philippe Petit, who is, of course, one of the great roof walkers of the world and the man who strung the wire between the Twin Towers in 1977, talks about vertigo as a beast that has to be tamed piece by piece, that can never be overcome all at once. And vertigo, he says, is not the fear that you will fall, it is the fear that you will jump. And that, of course, is the thing that when you are roofwalking, you are taming. You are trying to unmoor your sense of danger and of not being able to trust yourself not to jump from your sense of beauty and the vision of a city that you get up high. But I roofwalk for very practical reasons, to see views that would otherwise be not really available to me in an increasingly privatized city of London.

And you're also learning to fly a small plane, is that correct?

That's true, yes. For the same reason? Again, for the feeling of height. I come from a family of pilots. Both my grandfathers flew Spitfires in the Second World War, and my uncle can fly a plane. And so about 5 years ago, I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it.

So if we're trying to build a unified theory of you, how does wanting to see things from above fit into the theory? I mean, I enjoy seeing things from above, but I don't put a lot of time into it, and that's not unusual. So you're, you're somewhat different, right?

So I think it might be connected to fiction. It is very difficult when writing a story to hold the whole of it in one's head. If you complete a book that you feel you have achieved that, that feels like a great gift you have given yourself. It is very difficult to conceptualise a place that I have not seen from above. I like the idea of being able to understand the way a city works by seeing its movements from above. Also, cities are more beautiful seen from above. Things that look down at street level grubby and deeply human and, you know, crispwrackers and old burger papers, from up high show the sort of prehistoric elements of the way that people move in crowds.

Does rooftop walking also improve your research at All Souls?

I don't think that I could claim that rooftop walking really feeds into my research on the grounds that most of my research is done in cold archives in libraries around the world looking at manuscripts and hunting for traces of Donne in old books.

My hypothesis is that in the true unified theory of you, which I do not have, that rooftop walking does in fact improve your research, that there's somehow a convex combination of like way down low and way up high that you need to maintain intellectual balance.

That could be an argument that if you are someone whose work necessitates the dwelling entirely on detail, because of course academic study of John Donne, which is slightly different from my book, requires just burrowing into these very small details to understand about the conditions of production of the moment. And that the flip side of that is the kind of totalities of the view that you get up high in the cold, outside, alone in the dark.

At current margins, where would you most like to do more rooftop walking?

Where would I most like to do most rooftop walking? Paris has the best rooftops, I think, and they are quite easy to access. I have quite a few friends who have spent quite a lot of time. Most of them are dancers or acrobats on the rooftops of Paris.

What epitaph do you want on your tomb? Oh. Because you've written on this, right?

I have reviewed books about epitaphs, but— Oh, I don't know. I need a few more years to decide. A few decades, if I may. What will you have on yours?

I don't want a tomb. I want my body disposed in an effective altruist kind of way and somehow the proceeds liquidated and used for something productive.

That sounds entirely reasonable. Should children be more mischievous? Yes. And I think we should have more patience with childhood mischief because children whose mischievousness is quashed become difficult, thwarted, and sometimes quite vile adults.

What are the most important lessons of governance from what are called children's novels?

Children's novels tend to teach the large, uncompromising truths that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as truth to children when what they really are are hopes. But I suppose the best politics of children's fiction will be those that argue that, as Ursula Le Guin would say, all that we have made, we have made by man, and it can be undone by man. And that often the first way that we transform the world is through the art that she calls her art, the art of words. She would say it is the utopianism of children's fiction that allows us to imagine something better. She might be right.

Should the rest of fiction be more like what we call children's fiction?

I would say it would be more that more people should read children's fiction because the rest of fiction performs other urgently necessary tasks. I think the right to elongate and experiment are jobs more of adult fiction. So I would argue rather that adults should occasionally read children's fiction for pleasure, but also for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have.

If I think of some fictional works I read as a child, like Isaac Asimov's Foundation, there was a thrill to the complete newness of it that I now find harder to create because things are less new to me. How can we get back to what it was like to read as a child?

Of course, to an extent, it's impossible because it is the freshness of new discovery that children, almost every scene they read feels to them Unlike anything, they have so few collocates. But my argument— I wrote a book called "Why You Should Read Children's Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise," which you very kindly have, and my argument would be that reading books intended for people in the process of early discovery can remind you, if not what it feels like, then something adjacent enough to that to remember that it existed. And therefore it might give you a kind of galvanic push towards seeking out other versions of that feeling of discovery. Because of course, although we feel like our discovery time has largely passed, that's fake, that's not real. Your discovery time has not passed. There are still astonishments that await you.

Should we let children vote?

There's a very brilliant long read, is it in the New Yorker? By someone arguing that 6-year-olds should have the vote. And it's very impressive in its sweep of the objections. In England, I would like to lower the voting age to 16 because I stand quite far to the left of center and the youth, of course, tend to skew more left and currently Britain skews right.

If much younger children voted, do you think the equilibrium is that more religious families would in essence have more voting power? Because say the 8-year-olds, you might think, oh, they'll care more about climate change, but it might just be they do what their parents tell them. There's some cosy arrangement and it's more power to the religious, which one may or may not mind, but probably you don't want that, right?

It's certainly true that the demographics of it might well not have the impact that we think it would, because children's idealism would be very much tampered by the fact that they would be voting in accord with their parents. But then would they? Would children vote the way that their parents told them to? I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't. I frequently did things my parents told me not to do. Perhaps I would also have voted against their wishes, although I actually vote according to their wishes. You know, what they taught me, I still believe.

There's some heritability to political views, right? There is, exactly. What's your favorite UK bookshop and why?

I live very close to a UK bookshop called Primrose Hill Books, which is very close to where Dodie Smith lived, the woman who wrote 101 Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle. And it's both beautiful and in sight of Dodie Smith's house.

Are you up for a quick round of overrated versus underrated? Yes. And these will be easy. First, Edmund Spenser, overrated or underrated?

Underrated. Why? Because he is no longer read. I think the estimation we hold him in is correct, but nobody reads him, and people should put aside about a week of their lives and read The Faerie Queene. It's painful, but it's worth it when you come out the other side.

I agree with that, but it took me much more than a week, just to be clear. Diana Wynne Jones, overrated or underrated?

Underrated only because infinite estimation is what she deserves, and therefore no matter how high her stock, it will always be too low.

And why is she interesting?

I think she's a writer's writer who is somebody who believed that children should never be spoken down to. And I think a lot of her children's fiction is so weird and so full of the furies and anxieties that are extending from childhood into adulthood, that those books would also read as great texts for adults. The obvious one being maybe something like Fire and Hemlock or Howl's Moving Castle.

Sir Walter Raleigh, overrated or underrated?

Overrated, because we have given him such credit for so many things he didn't do. He didn't bring back the potato.

That's nonsense. The Speed of Wombat.

I think they don't get enough credit for the fact that over long distances, they are faster than Usain Bolt. So I think we have underrated that.

17th century British entertainment. I mean, how good was it? So you read about bear baiting. It doesn't sound fun to me at all. And there's a cruelty to animals issue, but it just doesn't sound fun. I mean, how good was it? Overrated or underrated?

Bear baiting, definitely overrated. I just don't believe it can have been that exciting. I assume it was partly just faute de mieux. People didn't have much to do, but the thing Theatre, even though madly rated in Britain with gold, still underrated because of what came before, of how staggeringly new it was.

Belgium, overrated or underrated? You've lived there.

Belgium, probably accurately rated. I am aware that because I spent my teenage years there, I have an entirely unjustified fury against it, and therefore all of my books have one joke against Belgium. But, you know, I hope Belgium is strong enough as a nation not to take it too personally.

Personally, I'm not sure Belgium is strong enough, isn't it? Where in Belgium did you live? In Brussels. I see. Okay. Mary Poppins, overrated or underrated? Perfectly—

As a figure. As a figure or as a film or as a book? Whichever. I'm going to say underrated because the books are much stranger and wilder than we know.

Let's say you're back in the time, some version of you, but you don't know how things turn out. Which side of the Glorious Revolution would you have been on? And why?

Ooh, I don't know, because it's so impossible to forget the way it turned out. Which side would you be on?

I would be very skeptical. I would think these Dutch people are going to come over and rule us. I would think the resulting constellation of interest groups would be so stable it would mean perpetual civil war, which is not how it turned out. So I think I would have been wrong.

Yes, I think I might have had a wariness of the sort of dramatic shifts. I might have been anxious about what might come, but then again, we would have been completely misplaced. That's right.

You cut out the word Adamantine from one of your books, but kept the word renunciation. Why did you make that decision?

Because Adamantine was coming at a peak moment in the narrative. So it was the key showdown between a child and a gangster figure. And I didn't want anything that would slow children down. But my general stance is with children's writing, you can use pretty much any vocabulary you want because they will either guess or step over or find out the word. And it rarely puts children off as much as we worry that it will.

Are there any children's stories improved by the addition of social media to the story?

Do you mean featured in the story or like, "You can follow this story on Twitter"?

No, featured in the story. Can that possibly improve a child's story? Or is it just a bad thing?

I feel absolutely sure it could improve a children's story, but I have never yet seen it done.

Are social media, their general existence out there, making children's literature harder to pull off?

Yes. Why? We now compete, of course, with so many other forms of entertainment, and it is a form of entertainment that offers your insatiable hunger for being wooed absolute constant satiety. And so what we are trying to offer to children, something slower and richer and ultimately, you would hope, punchier, is vastly harder to sell to them.

Should we be getting boys to read more stories about girls, or are we at an optimum there?

We should, of course, get boys to read more stories about girls. The data constantly reports that boys are by and large reading stories about boys and girls are by and large reading stories about both genders. There is a difficulty that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in saying boys don't read books about girls, and I don't know how we get around that problem.

Children's movies. Again, I know that's a fraught term, but what would normally be called children's movies, what's your favorite one?

Oh, The Railway Children, because of that final moment. And why is that interesting? The Railway Children is the story of some children whose father has been falsely accused and taken away, and they go to live by a railway. And at the end, there is a moment in which the young girl, the oldest of the children, who has had to step into the adult world of secret keeping and adult care, sees her father return to her, and she runs into his arms, and she says, "Oh, Daddy, my Daddy." And in that moment, she is allowed to return to childhood, and it's a staggering moment of filmmaking. So beautiful.

I like A Little Princess very much. Do you know that movie?

No, I've never seen it. Cuarón.

It's a Mexican director, but set in England. So it's highly unusual. And it's sort of dark and nasty, but cheery in some ways, too. Wonderful. Ideal. What is it that T.S. Eliot failed to understand about John Donne?

Oh, that's a really interesting question, because of course, usually John Donne is— rather, usually T.S. Eliot is given the credit of rediscovering John Donne after the Victorian period, in which his fashionability had really waned. I think he got a lot right about John Donne when he says he's trying to picture in John Donne somebody for whom, you know, every element of his life modifies his sensibility, that he is able to couple religion and body and the smell of a rose and the cooking of dinner into one great whole. That I think he got right. I think what he got wrong was he did not accentuate the strangeness of John Donne. I think he offered to us a John Donne who was trying to make things whole, but of course John Donne's poetry often carries with it a beautiful salute to human fracturing and human strangeness. You know, he was writing at a time when people were offering a profoundly coherent vision of love. You know, Walter Riley writing about Queen Elizabeth as the rose, or Philip Sidney constantly iterating this image of, you know, the woman as the white dove. Her shoulders are two white doves and her cheeks are two white doves. And John Donne stood up in the center of that fashion and said, no, you are stranger than that, and you deserve poetry that is stranger than that. You deserve poetry that uses the images of fleas and sucking fish suns rising and compasses to express the vertiginous and labyrinthine quality of human desire. And I don't think that T.S. Eliot had a mindset at the time to recognize that.

What do you think of the view that Donne is all about metaphysical beauty and there's an extreme shortage of physical beauty in his writings?

I think it's certainly true that if you were to turn to John Donne to find images of his lovers, and specifically particularly of his wife Anne Donne, who he met when she was very young, 14, and they married when she was 17, you will find no physical descriptor. You will find no sense of whether she was curvy or slim or large or tall, but what you will have is an understanding of what it is that physical beauty does to the person witnessing it. I think the poems are more about him looking at her than they are about her. They're more about his startlement and embracing and wariness and bitchiness about love than they are about the specific bodily facts of the women he was with.

How well do you think Samuel Johnson understood Donne?

Well, of course, the obvious answer would be not at all, because Johnson loathed Donne and felt that there was something in Donne that was genuinely slightly dangerous because Johnson's vision of poetry still leaned towards the fashion of thinking of it as a monovocal exercise, that there was a correct form of poetry, that its correctness was something to be prized, and that the chipping away at that correctness would lead to, you know, social breakdown. I think he was wrong about that, but I nonetheless remain grateful to him because he did read Donne and he did think about Donne. And as such, even if he didn't intend to, kept him alive.

For you, what is most interesting in Donne's sermons?

The thing I find most interesting would be the radical honesty that he has, that you will find in so few other sermons of the time, about the difficulty of finding God. So he is a man who writes often with certainty about the idea of reaching the infinite, the divine, but he also writes this famous passage where he says, 'I summon God and my angels, and when God and the angels are there, I neglect them for—' I forget what it is— the sound of a carriage, a straw under my knee, a thought, a chimera, a nothing and everything. And that sense that even though he had a brain that could control incredibly rigorous poetry, he did not have a brain that would control itself in prayer. And he offered that to his congregation as a vulnerability and a piece of honesty that so few sermonizers of the time, who thought of themselves more as a kind of regulatory ideal that should never admit vulnerability, would offer.

How do you think your life has been shaped by having grown up in Zimbabwe?

Oh, I think it was profoundly lucky to grow up in Zimbabwe. I grew up with parents who allowed me an enormous amount of freedom, and I don't know if they would have done that now. But we were allowed to vanish for the day without adult supervision, me and my siblings and friends. And the shining quality of that, of childhood time, even quite young, say 10 or 11, spent entirely without the presence of adults, the freeing quality that gives your imagination, I imagine, has something to do with the fact that I became a children's writer.

Do you think these free, unruly childhoods like yours generate a better class of elites?

I would question the terms of that question because I'm not sure that many people with free, unruly childhoods become elites, and I wouldn't class myself as one.

But ceteris paribus, so if you took people who were maybe had high chance of becoming elites and you gave them freer, more unruly childhoods, would they turn out better?

Right, as a kind of retro-engineering? Yes.

Not cross-sectionally, but ceteris paribus.

I would not be surprised if they did because the forms that that kind of unruly quality takes. Mostly spending huge amount of time outside might give you a more urgent sense of the necessity of outside, and that might be something that ongoing elites are going to need to hold hard and fast at the center of all their thoughts.

What is it like to eat a tarantula?

Not delicious. I sort of hoped it would be because some children I met in the Amazon rainforest had told me that it was, But I think there's a very real difference between fresh and canned tarantula. And my tarantula was from a can.

Who sells canned tarantula?

The same people who stock Selfridges with little scorpions in whiskey. There's a big market for that kind of thing, it turns out.

I was surprised. So it's a markets and everything phenomenon. If you just eat a fresh tarantula, do you get poisoned or are you fine? No, you're fine.

I think the poison is only dangerous when administered by the stingers immediately. I was not warned about any danger and none came to me.

As a kid, how was it that you broke your bones?

Oh, I fell out of a lot of things. Trees, mostly.

So you wanted to see things from above even early on.

Even early on. And because I didn't have the skill to match the ambition, I ended up with quite a few broken bones.

What for you is the most fun part of writing?

The early stage where there is no imperative towards structural cohesion and you can just write scenes that seem to you vivid and funny and interesting and joyful. And then later, when you have to make it cohere into something where the narrative itself is a form of metaphor, that bit's harder and less fun.

What is your most unusual writing habit?

I no longer really have one. When I was younger, I used to have many in a bid myself meet deadlines that were broadly my own imagining. I would, when writing my PhD, have a pact with a friend that if we didn't do the requisite number of words, usually 1,000 words a day of our doctoral thesis, we had to give £100 to a donkey sanctuary. And it was chosen on the grounds that it wasn't harmful to give that money to a donkey sanctuary, but it also wasn't particularly beneficial because we picked the richest donkey sanctuary in England where they're kind of bathing in asses' milk and covered in diamonds. And so you couldn't tell yourself, myself that it was a good, but it wouldn't do harm if we screwed up. So we wouldn't, for instance, give money to the British National Party or something like that. And it really does work. I didn't want the donkeys to have my money. I only failed once.

So you've stopped doing it because you don't need to do it, not that you think it's a terrible idea.

Because I no longer need to do it with quite such urgency. A PhD is the hardest form of writing, I think, in terms of galvanizing yourself into wanting to do it.

Why do so few writers use markets and self-constraint? So, so many people will say, "I want to finish, I want to finish earlier, want to finish my thesis," but very few people do what you did, I find. You claim it's effective. I suspect that's correct. Incentives matter, and no one copies that.

What's going on? I think it might be that people want to keep their writing as a form of joy and delight, especially if it's not something they do professionally, and that adding those kind of sharp-edged incentives will remove the feeling of luxury that writing often has, that it's a luxury to spend to spend time with the imagination.

Do you feel that the Irish still have an especially rich version of the English language even today?

I'm not sure I really have enough knowledge about that. Certainly, I think my Irish friends have a deep well of folk stories that they were given in a kind of cohesive body in a way that perhaps English children are not. But I'm not sure about the linguistic portion.

What do you think? It seems to me they are still more narrative more engaged with longer trains of thought. The fact that not too long ago so many Irish people had to learn English as a language, as a second language, so to speak, I think still exercises an influence and makes people more self-conscious about language.

Certainly my Irish friends have a form of linguistic dexterity that a lot of my English friends lack. And of course, the stereotype that the Irish are witty, I think, although my Irish friends find it foundly annoying does still push them towards enhancing that stereotype. And they are all very funny.

And per capita, there's really quite a bit of excellent Irish literature, even not per capita. If you thought it, well, it was a nation of 30 million people, you know, you would think, well, this makes sense how many good novels they have.

Yeah, it is remarkable. And they keep coming too.

If we think about continental novels of ideas, what is your true love in that genre?

That's a really lovely question. I'm wondering what counts as a continental novel of ideas though. What counts as continental?

Don Quixote, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka.

Kafka was going to be the obvious one that I would say. I was wondering if Madame Bovary counts as a novel of ideas. What do you think? I'll say yes, yes. Okay, in that case, Madame Bovary, which I remember reading as a teenager and feeling like it kicked the knees from under me with kind of or at the speed and richness and occasional cruelty and generosity of that narrative. But also Kafka. I have a picture book called My First Kafka, which is a children's book retelling. I didn't write it, I just read it, of Metamorphosis. And now I give them to all the toddlers I know. I think they need to start young.

For the toddlers? Mm-hmm.

I think it's an ideal time to get to grips with Kafka, sort of 3 to 4-year-olds.

What's a book you can no longer stand to read? For instance, I find it very difficult to now read Dostoevsky. I don't think he's a terrible author, but it somehow doesn't click with me. It fascinated me in high school, but now it just falls flat.

I still love Dostoevsky, but I can't read Dickens anymore. I used to be wildly in love with the atmospheres that he conjured of London and smoke and the smog, but I now find very vividly visible the fact that he was getting paid per word.

What do you think is both best and worst about the intellectual environment at All Souls?

Oh, I think best would be the fact that it is a mix of old and young. Often it's thought of as a place largely populated by older white men, but in fact a huge proportion of the Fellows are under 40. The thing that I loved about it, sort of coming of age there, I was made a Fellow at 21, was that you would come down to dinner and you would meet people people who were unabashedly keen to talk about their work in terms that were not compromising in detail or technicality or passion. And that was a brilliant coming of age. The least good thing: we are still struggling with both the overwhelming whiteness and the overwhelming maleness of the place because it's inheritance. They only had women in 1980, and that does still show.

Let's say for a friend, you're designing a 2-week trip through the British Isles. No London, forget about Stonehenge. It has to be something weird. Where do you send them and what do you tell them to do?

So I would tell them, first you need to go to Norfolk, a place that is underrated in its beauty. There's a place called Stiffkey where Rachel Cusk, the novelist, used to live. And if you wade out, it starts to look like you could film sort of Martian-like films, and indeed several extraterrestrial films have been filmed on that beach. If you go right to the sea, there's a colony of seals who will come to greet you, and that feels faintly like being churched.

That part of England is very interesting to me because it's one part where the Industrial Revolution never quite came, so it feels much older still in some ways. Exactly.

Its landscape is often compared by people from places like Texas or places like South Africa, they often say that it feels the same sort of prairie feel to it.

Not where you've been, but moving forward, how do you think of how travel fits into your work and your writing?

It used to be something that I would do in a way to offer rich detail in the plots that I was doing. I think that I will stay more put these days, in part because of fears of the burning world and what air travel does to that, and in part a sense that I might be at a period of my life when rhythm and a kind of structure might be valuable. I get much more tired than I used to. The thing about doing a cartwheel every day, that was true when I was 25, but it's not true now I'm 35.

It's become too hard? It's actually, you can see my flat isn't big enough. I would hit the wall. You mean the ceiling or the wall, you know, horizontally? The walls.

There isn't enough space for a cartwheel across cross without hitting that pole.

You must live near Oxford, right?

I actually live in London and I commute. I'll go to Oxford tonight.

And you take the train? Yeah. What is it that you plan on doing next that you are able to talk about?

I want to write a children's book that I am truly proud of, and I'll keep going until that happens. So I'm currently writing a children's novel that I've been working on for 5 years., and I think, I think I might end up proud of it by the end. I'm not yet. So I think that's what my version of success would look like, something that I didn't read and wince. So that, I think, is my next step.

If you think of your children's novel side and your All Souls, John Donne side, how do those two fit together in your mind, but also in the minds of those at All Souls?

In my mind, I think it's that John Donne's sense of the capacity of language to be something that you shake out of the confines of the day and use in a way that as much as possible fits the rhythms of your own imagination, that he insisted on the necessity of building your own language. I think that I grew up with that, and it is why my novels are often referred to as idiosyncratic and that I want language that belongs to me. So I think they refer to each other in that way. Also, just, I think, a love of poetry. He taught me to love poetry and other poetry as well as his. And I think that probably affects my prose. Also, I think they would note that most of the novels have a John Donne joke in them. And, you know, that's a very obvious through line.

They don't know about the Belgium jokes, or do they?

Oh, I haven't told them. I don't think they've read many of the books, so hopefully not.

What do you find most frustrating about interacting with the world of publishing? And it's commercial publishing in your case, right?

It is commercial publishing in my case. There is a great deal that I love. I mean, truthfully, it's the necessity of deadlines. I have never handed in a book without it being clawed from my hands because I always want to do one last go, and I would love there to be an extra 4 months built into it so that when it looks like a book, I'm allowed to read it like it's a book and then make the changes that I would like to make. But I realize that that would be ruinous for the publishing industry.

That's the most rewarding side, but what's the most frustrating, or is it both?

Oh, that's also the most frustrating, the fact that I'm not allowed to do that, that they don't allow you to rewrite your books 4 years later. If they would let us do that, I know it would cause absolute havoc for both the reading and writing populations of the world. But my great dream would be to be allowed to look back at Super Infinite in about 3 years' time. And, you know, some— I think there are already some adverbs that annoy me. I would go back and take them out.

Yeah, Pierre Boulez did that with Compositions. You could in fact do that. It may not be profitable, but is there actually anyone stopping you?

My publishers wouldn't let me. I have asked my children's publishers and they say, No, you need to write your next book. You can't just keep rewriting your past text. Only Henry James.

And they wouldn't let you take out those adverbs in super infinite? What if you just say it was a typo? Just like you would lie, and maybe they would know it wasn't quite true, but rather than fight the battle, if it didn't require too much re-typesetting.

I will try, and I'll let you know if I have success.

Now let's say you're meeting younger writers, and you're looking for someone who in very broad terms is "like you," and I'm not even sure what that means. You have quite an atypical career, but what would you look for in that person as a sign of their talent? Obviously smarts, work ethic, and so on, but beyond the usual, what do you look for in young writing talent?

The difficulty with that is you're asking an English person that, which requires me to accept that I would look for someone like myself. I wouldn't. I would look for someone different and better. I can't deal with a question that presupposes assuming myself to have excellence, but if I were looking for excellence.

Looking for someone better than you, yes. Yeah, yeah.

It would be really important to me that somebody had understood that it matters far, or rather as much or far more, the way you say the thing as what you say. Because the thing you want to say is probably a very similar thing that everyone else wants to say. You know, love, love my season, patience, courage, valiance, attention. But there are only some people who have found a way to say those things with such flair and originality, that they cut through your interlocutor's complacent inattention and cut through time, cut through space, cut through cultural difference, and grab you by the wrist. So it would be a sense that somebody understood you are going to have to find a new and better way to say this.

How do you value the King James translation of the Bible?

Oh, very highly, because of course that is the version that infuses much of the work I love most. Not just obviously Donne and Shakespeare, but also Philip Pullman talks about being an atheist, but a King James atheist, someone who was informed by the language of the King James Bible. How about the Book of Common Prayer?

Is that just boring? No, no. It's awfully widely read.

But wildly underrated. The Book of Common Prayer is more beautiful, I think, than we give it credit for. And again, I think its cadences have informed a lot of the poetry that we hold dear. I don't think we would have Seamus Heaney without the rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer.

So how do we approach reading the Book of Common Prayer so that it makes sense to us rather than boring us?

Oh gosh, that's really interesting. How do you approach the Book of Common Prayer, which is, as I agree, not an obviously galvanic text, particularly if you don't happen to believe in Christianity? I think you would have to remember what it was intended to do. The kind of hope and comfort it was intended to give. And you would have to remember the many, many battles that were fought to have it. And that, I think, might make it feel alive.

And John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, is that book actually good?

Yes, it is, in some moments. I think it is another one, a little like The Faerie Queen, that requires your patience, that requires you to do something to take the edge off your panic at the boredom that will ensue. And for some people, that will be resignation. I'm sure for some people, that will be, I don't know, alcohol. For some people, it will be a kind of exhaustedness, but something that will allow you to give in to being quite substantially bored on the grounds that it will slow down the beat of your heart and it will force your imagination to grapple with something slower and broader, the way that Spencer talks about fashioning his ideal reader. The texts tell you how to read them.

Katherine Rundell, I'd just like to recommend to you all first, Katherine has a short book called Why You Should Read Children's Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. She has a wide variety of bestselling children's books, but her most recent book is Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which I recommend very, very highly. And of course, I recommend Donne as well. Katherine, who also goes by the name Kate, it has been great chatting with you. We thank you very much and good luck with the books.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.