MC (Continued): Since then though, it’s become my favorite book of yours. It’s sad and hysterical and critically perceptive and in it, you write, “Once I have finished this book on Lawrence, I will have no interest in him whatsoever.” But let’s talk about him anyway.
GD: And that proved to not be true at all. My wife is in the art world and she wanted to get me some art but what I wanted wasn’t art. I wanted a Lawrence letter. So she got a manuscript dealer to come round and two hours later I bought this letter to his sister-in-law, or maybe it’s—I think it’s to his sister-in-law. It’s from when he was writing Lady Chatterley. At the bottom of the page he says something like, ‘Painting is far easier than writing. It costs the soul far far less.’ I liked that.
MC: How has writing taxed you, in terms of a soul-toll?
GD: I don’t think it’s taken anything out of my soul. In fact, the net result has been a gain, soul-wise.
MC: In Out of Sheer Rage, you write—I think—about the costs society has inflicted on the contemporary soul. “To say we have flu is merely to express the common condition of urban life at the tail end of the 20th century.” It’s the 21st Century now. Are we still suffering from flu?
GD: Um.
MC: Or is it worse, like Avian Bird or Swine Flu?
GD: Living in a super crowded city like London subjects one to incredible pandemics.
MC: The flu wasn’t a metaphor?
GD: You felt it was a Camusian idea of The Plague? Flu is flu. I’m a very literal fellow.