Max Porter

I think what I want is a kind of constantly moving or fluid sense of no such thing as bacon slash all bacons.

And I suppose I'm pushing against, as an English reader who immersed themselves in a certain type of bacon book about 20 years ago, I'm pushing against the hagiographic idea

and prurient and sometimes voyeuristic tendency we had to tell of the masochistic Bacon abused by the you know the stable mates in his father's stables as a boy and you know always had this dark tendency terribly badly beaten by his lover you know these were the stories that were told of Bacon.

Drunk, Soho, always in the colony rooms and that has become both

well they're not so much cliches in as much as sort of representational boxes into which Bacon is easily fitted and so is the interpretive work around his work and around his paintings and I just suppose I find that a well-trodden enough path and I wanted to sound a slightly new note and because I'm interested in tenderness and frailty and guilt particularly at the deathbed moment I'm interested in that kind of

scrolling through the wheel of one's own life with images flashing up sometimes out of one's control and sort of blurring the line between the subconscious and the conscious as well and memories and misremembrance and one's own work but also the work of others so into your own thinking about was I a great painter was I a great painter in comes Velazquez to say never anything as good as me that kind of

That kind of torturous battle between the ego and the id and stuff.

So into that, it didn't feel like I needed to throw the bacon as vicious git or as deeply disloyal because those are quite familiar tropes and I didn't want them necessarily

more intimate perhaps than those more familiar stories allowed me but again you see in a way that question was it Catherine it's an ingenious question because it shows that that's a bacon that she brings to the mix based on her understanding of his life and work and so that that then means that the white space in my book is being filled with her energies and her her thoughts and intuitions about him as a person which is absolutely a dream come true for me as a writer playing around in these in these spaces yeah

Oh, gosh, that's such a good question.

I think one has to write the book, the book has to dictate its own terms, I think.

and any kind of experimentalism or I've got avant-garde tendencies or whatever in the line to do with the language I think need to be fitted quite closely to the bespokely to the project in front of you bringing a different toolkit to each story and so I think this one can go quite far and can abandon

things like narrative arc or plot or recognize any of the things that you might hope for as a reader or you know and I know that that's going to outrage a certain type of reader you know I can see I can I can log on to Goodreads and I can people I can find people saying it's an absolute load of nonsense it's a load of pretentious nonsense ignore it his last book was lovely this is horrible

But my last book was lovely only in as much as it needed to be lovely to ask the questions I wanted it to ask about the relationship between parenting and childhood or innocence and experience or Englishness or myth or all those things.

The loveliness was part of it.

And it needed to abandon certain conventional novelistic tropes as well as sometimes fully employ them.

So I hope it will...

I hope I'll always have quite a clear sighted sense of what the project needs and won't be doing anything for the sake of doing it.

But I do have an impatient at the beginning of the question, there was this sort of alluded to this sort of idea of conventional prose versus more experimenting.

I do have a tendency to break the line and to and to go for this hybridity to include