By email, the actor and prolific writer (three memoirs!) apologized, sort of, for outgrowing D.H. Lawrence. SCOTT HELLER
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?
Jo, the crossing sweeper in “Bleak House,” is the character who has the most powerful effect on me whenever I return to that peerless book. (Incidentally, Miriam Margolyes’s reading of the audiobook is one of the wonders of the age.) Jo is a minor character really, not a hero, but he literally sweeps across the different worlds of the novel. And Dickens’s authorial voice denouncing the society that let him die is a masterpiece of fury and despair.
Your favorite antihero or villain?
Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby” stands out. There are so many Tom Buchanans in the world now. Running it. Or — to change a letter — ruining it.
In 2021, the Times described you as an “avuncular public intellectual.” How do you feel about that label?
Oh my lordy lord. Avuncular gives me great pleasure. But I disavow “intellectual,” just as I disavow “artist” (not that quite so many call me that). I am, I think, an entertainer, impure and simple. But I love the company of real intellectuals.
When were you first exposed to Greek mythology?
At prep school, which in Britain means aged 7 to 13. I instantly fell in love with the juice, energy and fierce delight of them.
“I see myself appearing a thousand times in the Greek myths,” you write in the new book. Where in the “Odyssey” can we find you?
Lazing on the island of the Lotus Eaters probably, not heroically outsmarting Polyphemus the Cyclops. When younger, I identified most with Telemachus. My father, although he “worked from home” as we would say now, as a scientist/inventor, was absent in the emotional way. At least I felt so. Happily, like the classical pair, we reunited fondly in the end.
What books are on your night stand?
One must always have a P.G. Wodehouse and an Agatha Christie in the pile — currently “Uncle Fred in the Springtime” and “Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.” Wimbledon is coming, so I’ve also got copy of “String Theory” handy: It’s a collection of David Foster Wallace’s writings on tennis. But on top is Stefan Zweig’s “Erasmus of Rotterdam.” Reading it now is like listening to two prophets who have foreseen the disruptions and upheavals of our age. Chilling and thrilling.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
The awful cliché that seems especially to beset middle-age males: I’ve succumbed to a preference for nonfiction, especially history. As one for whom a youth and early adulthood of reading novels was the gateway to untrammeled joy and fulfillment, I try to fight this lamentable tendency and read fiction when I can, but I drift into that other cliché of being more drawn to classics and old favorites than to new novels.
What’s the last great book you read?
Goodness. You do put a chap on the stand, don’t you! Hm. I reread “Howards End” recently for perhaps for tenth time. It’s incredible to me how Forster can change register, from lightly comic to almost theologically declarative, from delicate to grand. The last great more recent novel? Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”? A.S. Byatt’s “Possession”? Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” perhaps? Yes, I’ll choose that. But I’m the kind of rapscallion who often prefers the very good to the GREAT.
The last book that made you laugh?
“The Empress Murders” by Toby Schmitz, a classic whodunit and laugh out loud funny at the same time.
What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
My mother brought me up to be kind, so I’ll go to a dead writer, D.H. Lawrence. He was a wonderful poet. But “Women in Love,” “Sons and Lovers,” “The Rainbow” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” — I loved them at 16, but if I go back now they seem silly, often cruel and frankly ridiculous.
Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?
What an interesting question. Evelyn Waugh thought “Brideshead Revisited” misunderstood. People mostly think “Brideshead” is a nostalgic, almost sentimental, farewell to the great country houses and grandeur, grace and careless wit of prewar Britain. Waugh, a devout Catholic convert, insisted it was about “the Operation of Grace.” My feeling is that he is the one who misunderstood it.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
“Seven Men,” by Max Beerbohm.
You’ve portrayed Oscar Wilde on film. If there’s a latter-day Wilde, who is it?
If only, if only … there are dandies who manage to avoid arch peacockery, but few; there are verbal dandies who don’t want to make you run away dry heaving, but fewer; to combine Wilde’s insight, acuity, kindness, breadth of reading, wisdom, human folly and divine talent is asking too much of anyone in our culture.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Dickens for party tricks, jokes and manic gamesome energy. Wilde for … well, I need hardly say. Samuel Johnson for gruntingly profound good sense.
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