"All children, except one, grow up." Thus J.M. Barrie begins Peter Pan, as literary critic James Wood reminded HBR in a recent interview . All children's stories, without exception, possess more grown-up truth than grown-ups are liable to credit, and so we regret to note that James Wood and wife Claire Messud have indeed grown up. Almost. If adulthood marks the conquest of fact over story, pragmatic over imaginative, time and habit over treasure hunting, then these two may also have escaped. In an interview with the Harvard Book Review, the couple discussed the grand adventures and obstacles of reading, writing, and real and imagined journeying. What ensued was the sort of world-hopping of time and space that can only arise from spry conversation, a Barriesque flight of the mind, or a very, very peculiar map.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

"'What is that noise?' The wind under the door. 'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'"

on voices. Messud's fiction has tried narrative techniques from the omniscient eavesdrop of When the World Was Steady to the first-person reminisce of The Last Life, and most recently in The Emperor's Children, a steady rotation of free indirect access to characters' consciousnesses, with the occasional glimmers - often in the middle of an otherwise stream-of-consciousness patter of experience - of a musing creator surveying the fictional world and its populace. It's a definite - and definitive - voice, yet Messud is hesitant to call it her own. "Is the first person the author? No." Later she tries again: "It's the voice of the narration. It's a voice, it isn't -" The voice hangs, undefined.

Wood interposes: "But do you recognize it being more close to your voice? I can see it's not identical, because writing is different than speaking. To HBR : "We both like Henry James a lot, and he's good at weaving an often ironic, often passionate authorial voice beyond the characters. It's recognizably James's voice - it's the same voice of the letters, his criticism - but it's also particular to each book." In part the flesh and blood author, in part the illusion of text.

"[Pynchon's] novels are manic factories which seem alive, but which are actually rather static, because they do not move. Yes, they move meaning around, they displace meanings; but they do not inhabit meaning. Readers of Pynchon often mistake bright lights for evidence of habitation."

"Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge... The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji ! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result... is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being."

 

on empty houses. Wood compacts and polishes the silt of ideas into palm-sized marbles—his metaphors—that lay bare and winking on the page. They roll along the argument, they disappear; the best ones shoot from essay to essay. The bewitched but vacant house, for example, haunts the reader even as it modifies its meaning to suit the subject at hand. Says Wood,

"It's the first business of metaphor really, to be pictorial, to flash an image, to do something quicker than the non-metaphorical prosaic form can do. Quicker, more compactly, more memorably. You might not remember anything else around that image, but you remember that. That's one problem with journalism, that it can become a little over-vivid... Journalism is given to a certain flashiness that's not in fiction. You have to hook the reader in fast, and you don't have very long, and you can't, of course be boring, and so one of the tools you have is metaphor. But there can be a danger... of being over flashy."

SYRACUSE

"Night followed day and day followed night over and over again. Sylvester on the
hill woke up less and less often. He felt he would be a rock forever and he tried to get used to it. He went into an endless sleep. The days grew colder. Fall came with the leaves changing color. Then the leaves fell and the grass bent on the ground."

on homes and mornings. "That place," Messud calls Syracuse several times, as if the name itself would be too much of a return. "I was miserable there." Messud spent a year in the University's creative writing program, but wryly observes that a happy match between a writer and a program takes two things: "if you feel you have a closeness of sensibility to other writers there, and if it's a place you're happy to wake up every morning." The quality of mornings that year is fairly easy to intuit: without a car, all her grocery shopping was from the 7-11. "In between the campus and me was a highway, so I'd walk through the underpass and then through parking lots all the way up the hill. In the first month I was there, three women were raped in those parking lots.... The local lake was very pretty but because of the mercury, you can't actually go in." As for the kinship of sensibility: a teacher of "controlled, muscular prose, a general ethos of men, guns and dogs. And then me, this namby-pamby from Connecticut."

"It was pretty bleak," Wood understates.

THE EMPEROR'S CASTLE

"The sun sank at the western horizon as they followed the East River northward, and she was holding tightly, still, to his hand, but the wide-eyed cast of her face was now of childlike wonder rather than fear, and when she turned and smiled at him, conspiratorially - they were co-conspirators, that's what they were - he was, even in the furthest ravaged brachts of his lungs, in the helicopter-throbbed tendons at his heels, in his very heart, suffused with some hitherto unexperienced delight."

on loveliness. Messud's sentences occasionally dazzle in the manner of opera necklaces and skipped stones - not for any single point, but for the dip and flow of relentlessly chained elements.

To pour such rushing luster of description on a scene both haloes and hazes over the other unignorable feature of this narrative moment: that it takes place on September 10, 2001, and that the fiction's tomorrow, like the real one, will drastically alter the course and connectedness of all characters involved. But Messud insists that she is neither a political pundit nor a historian. "That's not my job. It might be your [Wood's] job as a critic - "

"Maybe."

" - but it's not my job. I have no message for anybody, and I'm not trying to shape anybody. Except the story. And I don't see it as my job to pass judgment on my characters... It's not my job to make them likable, but just to show them as they are. Up close, probably none of us are very likeable. Show me the man with no flaws."

On the other hand, "The music is very important to me. The rhythm sticks with me," she says, a tune to the lines that her ear is "always aware of."

She stops, straightens, turns her head as if to pull us back to the left-off story - like an etiquette lesson remembered, or else this is what it looks like when the inner ear begins to hear. "But that's my aesthetic. You have much more metaphorical language than I do," she says to Wood.

When asked if they try to write the beautiful, or to write beautifully, both at once give a quiet but adamant "Yes. Absolutely."

THE LAND OF THE PUSHMI-PULLYU

" What in the world is it?" asked John Dolittle, gazing at the strange creature.

"Lord save us!" cried the duck. "How does it make up its mind?"

"It doesn't look to me as though it had any," said Jip, the dog.

"This, Doctor," said Chee-Chee, "is the pushmi-pullyu--the rarest animal of the African jungles, the only two-headed beast in the world!

on doubling the self. Though Wood is best known for literary criticism, his 2003 novel The Book Against God placed him at the opposite end of the critical gaze. The result was less a split than a growth of consciousness, however. "It probably did make me a more sympathetic critic," he says, though not for the first time: "Actually, the experience of living with a writer [Messud] and seeing her reviewed is more likely to sensitize me than seeing myself reviewed. But maybe that's a basic human truth, that pain suffered to someone one loves is always greater than pain suffered to one's self...Seeing stupid reviews of Claire's work - stupid or negative - stupid and, or negative - is more likely to make me reflect on what I do as a critic, how I hurt people and how I can be stupid - I hope not stupid, but unsympathetic."

In his essay "Virginia Woolf's Mysticism," Wood explores another point of kinship, even identity, between the critic and the creative artist: "The writer-critic, or poet-critic, has a competitive proximity to the writers she discusses.... In [Woolf's] criticism, the language of metaphor becomes a way of speaking to fiction in its own accent, the only way of respecting fiction's ultimate indescribability.... Criticism can never offer a successful summation, because it shares its subject's language. One is always thinking through books, not about them."

His own novel may have brought him closer to "competitive proximity," he says, noting by way of parallel, "The critics I like to read are likely to be people who wrote creatively. When there's some spilling over from their fiction to their nonfiction. There's a sense of literary energy in their criticism that seems indistinguishable from the literary energy of more creative work..."

"I like writers who deal with technical issues, who come to a text... to see how this works, why it's successful, why it isn't - from a writer's point of view. Someone like Nabokov does that... why the particular detail really was the best that Chekhov could come up with. I love that."

LONDON

"You disappeared for a time; then you were again found quietly living in Mixen Lane. Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the back premises of the inn half-way up; this meant a skittle alley. Another was the extensive prevalence of whistling in the various domiciles—a piped note of some kind coming from nearly every open door."

Here Wood lived upon graduating from Cambridge, determined to live "the great romance, to live as a man of letters." Beginning with articles on spec for The Guardian, Wood slowly began to carve a niche as editor and critic. Meanwhile, Messud lived a short train ride away, finishing her studies though not, as she had hoped, devoting time to her creative work. This would come next. For now, "the great romance" was to rent a room "this big," Wood says, carving a bathtub-sized space in the air. "The back of beyond," Claire calls the neighborhood of Herne Hill, at the outer reaches of London sprawl. "And it was freezing, that room, all the time." She shivers.

WASHINGTON

"And because so many of them were begging him to tell and tell again the story of his adventures on the peach, he thought it would be nice if one day he sat down and wrote a book.

So he did.

And that is what you have just finished reading."

on luck. In 1994, James Wood began ("by chance," he says; Messud disagrees) writing for The New Republic. While still in London working at The Guardian, Wood had received a phone call from writer Kathleen Tynan asking him to have a drink with "a friend." Knowing neither party (the "friend" turned out to be TNR literary editor Leon Wieseltier), Wood accepted and by the drink's end had offered to write freelance criticism for the magazine. Three months later, Wieseltier offered him a full-time editorship at the Washington headquarters.

Shortly thereafter, the group met again in London, again unexpectedly, this time for Kathleen Tynan's funeral.

"It was an extraordinary gift that she gave James."

"Yes, it certainly changed my life. It was a completely gratuitous act."

"An act of kindness."

"It was, it was."

MASSACHUSETTS

on the shelves. Currently Wood counts himself "lucky" to be steeped in the work of Thomas Hardy while reviewing a new biography of the literary giant. Messud is reading the fiction of Peter Ho Davies, a Welsh-Chinese author with a novel, The Welsh Girl, forthcoming this winter. With their two children, Messud and Wood read authors such as Roald Dahl (of James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, Matilda fame), Enid Blighton (the Famous Five author), and William Steig ( Doctor De Soto, The Magic Bone, and, in film, Shrek). But children's literature can't simply be a diluted or reductive version of a headier adult canon: "It's something to come up on these stories again," Wood emphasizes, the "something" holding the quiet weight of restraint and respect. "As in adult fiction, you feel within a few pages if someone has talent," as a Dahl or a Steig does.

On the other hand, Messud laughs, "It's amazing what passes - "

"Rubbish."

" - for children's books sometimes."

"It's drivel."

"Absolute drivel."

IMAGINARY RUSSIA

"A monk dressed in black, with gray hair and black eyebrows, his arms crossed on his chest, raced past... His bare feet did not touch the ground. He was already some twenty feet past Kovrin when he looked back at him, nodded and smiled at him tenderly and at the same time slily... and vanished like smoke. 'Well, so you see...' Kovrin muttered. 'It means the legend is true.'"

on the untrue. "My favorite Chekhov story," says Messud of "The Black Monk" above - then promptly she and Wood qualify with three or four other "favorites."

 

Claire Messud, who decided to be a writer "before the age of six," has taught creative writing and is the author of When the World Was Steady, The Last Life, The Hunters, and most recently The Emperor's Children.

Professor James Wood teaches English literature and is the author of The Broken Estate, The Book Against God, and The Irresponsible Self, as well as numerous essays and book reviews for magazines and journals such as The New Republic, of which he is a senior editor.

Laura Kolbe studies English and American Literature. She does not study cartography. She has not written any books.