Here are the much-delayed answers to your questions-

*To what extent is your novel autobiographical ?

This is a question often asked over the years and justifiably so. It is certainly true that I was homeless as a teenager. That I came from a very working class area in Belfast. That I had troubles with my family and that I studied at Cambridge University. Perhaps even more autobigraphically I was definitely very pretentious and annoying when I was a young man.

There is a theory that all fiction is autobiographical so that if I write about a woman or an old man I'm still basically writing about myself. I've always felt there was at least some truth in this.

*Why do authors like Dickens and Wells appear regularly in your novel ?

It's not Wells but George Orwell. They are the two great literary models for writing about dispossession and poverty in the British Isles. And certainly, in the case of Dickens, an enormous influence upon my writing. Dickens invented the English novel (though well after Cervantes had invented the novel itself). He wrote beautiful English - he was in fact incapable of writing bad English and showed clearly how developments in the modern novel and the modern city were contiguous. Anyone who shows any interest in the English language should read Dickens.

*Did you imagine yourself as a tramp before writing Ripley Bogle ?

I didn't really need to imagine myself as a tramp before writing this novel since I had already experience the state of being SDF. And there parts of that experience that I don't think I could have imagined. Particularly how it changes your relaionship with your city. Since you sleep on the streets you have a deeply intimate view of those streets. Think how well, how intimately the average person knows their bed or their pillow and that is how the tramp knows their city. That is not something you can really guess.

*Have other authors inspired you ?

The list of authors who have inspired me would take many pages to write. In a sense all the authors I have ever read have inspired me. You can learn almost more from the bad ones than you can from the good ones. When you ask of Balzac, Tolstoy, Rushdie or Hrabal why is this so good, the question is often unanswerable. But of bad writing the question why is this so bad is often more clearly detectable. And that is what you try to avoid.

But briefly, Tolsoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Austen, Camus, Heller, Salinger, Joyce, Svevo, Rushdie and Martin Amis.

*How do you justify the hardness of the descriptions of certain events ?

Ex : the death of the father, Deirdre's abortion, etc.

I don't need to justify anything. Justifying is not what novelists do. Sometimes things are just the way they are and the only answer the writer can give is because I say so. These events are harsh but these events could hardly be treated in any other way. When the novel first appeared in America there was quite a lot of complaining about all the disgusting physical details. The guy was filthy and always vomiting, the whined. And I found this extraordinary. He's homeless after all. What did they expect? (By the way, in English the abbreviation for example is always Eg. Thank you for the one tiny opportunity to correct you)

*Why does the story take place in four days ?

And especially, why does it begin one Thursday ?

I want you to answer this question, not me. An author has to retain some mystery. I'm sure you could come up with something with your sparkling English.

Hope these are ok.

Robert Wilson

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