Edward St Aubyn: 'I never read things about myself because I’m so easily crushed'

M ost interviews in the lockdown era are conducted by video, but the novelist Edward St Aubyn and I are talking by old-fashioned telephone because, his publicist warns me beforehand, “Teddy doesn’t do Zoom.” Of course he doesn’t. In truth, it’s a surprise that Teddy does telephones, because he often gives the impression that his presence in prosaic 21st-century London – as opposed to early 20th-century Russia alongside his great-uncle Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, or 19th-century Britain with his great-grandfather, the Liberal MP Sir John St Aubyn, first Baron St Levan – is an administrative error shortly to be rectified.

His novels satirise the foibles of the world around him with the savagery of a true insider, such as when he takes on the petty snobberies of social climbers, and the bemusement of one who finds the modern world a frequent source of frustration. Mother’s Milk – the fourth book in his Patrick Melrose series – was nominated for the Booker prize in 2006; it didn’t win, but he metabolised the experience into 2014’s Lost for Words, in which he described literary prize-givings with the horrified amusement of an alien gazing upon bizarre human rituals. (Alas, not even mockery could save him from being subjected to such indignities again: Lost for Words won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.)

His accent out-poshes the royal family: “house” is “hice”, “haven’t” is “huffn’t”, as in “I huffn’t got a second hice to escape to,” which he says to me, twice, when discussing his experience of lockdown. He says this with the wistfulness of one who lives in a milieu in which multiple homes are the norm, but also with the self-mockery of a man burdened with the kind of painful self-awareness not usually associated with his class. Judging purely from his background (aristocratic) and schooling (Westminster, Oxford), St Aubyn should be a paragon of privilege. But appearances are deceptive. He has a habit of hesitancy that I initially mistake for aloofness but turns out to be anxiety: “I’m always so nervous in interviews because I assume I’m going to make a fool out of myself. It’s odd, it hasn’t got any better since we last spoke. Yah! You would have thought that my paranoia would get eroded over time, but it remains defiant,” he says with an embarrassed laugh.

This is the second time I have interviewed St Aubyn, and although he sweetly pretends to remember our encounter 14 years ago (“But of course!”), he didn’t read the interview. “I never read things about myself. Not because I’m so lofty – on the contrary, it’s because I’m so easily crushed,” he says, and I believe him. Behind the plaster prestige is a fragile core that he works very hard to stabilise. He used to do this by alternately injecting speed and heroin, but he’s been clean since 1988 and so now relies on coffee “to try to be intelligent” followed by beta blockers “which then make me feel stupid”, he sighs.

His novels have a similar push and pull dynamic. Alongside the outwardly directed satire, the writing plunges inwards and excavates wounds, not least in the Melrose books, in which he fictionalised his own life, from being sexually abused by his father, to extreme drug addiction in his 20s, to anxious but loving fatherhood (St Aubyn has two children from previous relationships). But his books are not navel-gazing and the perspective often swoops between the characters, creating a mosaic of voices.

“That’s probably due to the disastrous plasticity of my personality, which was once completely shattered,” he says. He depicts this shattering in Bad News, the second Melrose book, in which Patrick, strung out on drugs, is tormented by dozens of internal voices. “I glued myself together again, but some of that plasticity is still there, and I do slip into the characters and feel like I’m hearing what they’re saying. There are levels of excitement in that: I can become molten.”

St Aubyn is talking to me from his home in west London, hiding in the smallest room in the house, “because tree surgeons are amputating the beautiful branches I look at from my bedroom. So rather than be caught choking with tears, I’ve moved upstairs to avoid the chainsaws,” he says. Even aside from the truncation of his tree, he is especially nervous today because he is promoting (“defending”, as he puts it) his new novel, Double Blind, which he sweated over for seven years. “There’s a danger of my other books getting ignored because the five Melroses have such a gravitational field to them. I knew Lost for Words and Dunbar wouldn’t achieve escape velocity from Planet Melrose,” he says, referring to the books he’s written since publishing the final part of the Melrose series, At Last, in 2012. “But I hope that Double Blind will.”

I hope so too. Writing about his past helped to free St Aubyn from it emotionally, but he did it so well that he doomed himself to being asked about it forever by journalists and fans, especially since 2018, when the Melrose books were turned into a series for Sky Atlantic, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and written by David Nicholls. When I ask one too many questions about Planet Melrose and its connections to his past, St Aubyn gently reminds me he’s been talking about all this since 1994, so would be ever so grateful if people occasionally asked him about something else. “But I totally understand Melrose has to be acknowledged, so please don’t delete your next five questions,” he says, as I delete my next five questions.

Yet the awkward truth is that his non-Melrose, non-autobiographical books, and Double Blind is his fifth, have not found as much favour with readers and critics, and despite avoiding reviews, St Aubyn knows this. When I mention that I’ve read On the Edge and A Clue to the Exit, his first two non-Melrose books, he almost shouts in shock: “Oh my God! Well now I know of four people who have read them.”

Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades. He tells me several times that Double Blind is very different from the Melrose books, and it is, but all of St Aubyn’s books are ultimately about the desire to break beyond the prison of one’s own subjectivity. He once described his mind as “a nest of scorpions” and the only drugs he feels nostalgia for – and he writes about them fondly in Double Blind – are “ones from the psychedelic realm, because they’re the quickest way to dissolve the subject/object division: you imagine the racing heart of the bird on the branch and you flow into the bird and the bird flows into you,” he trails off wistfully. These days, instead, he flows into his novels’ characters and the characters flow into him.

A desire to escape oneself begins with a desire to escape unhappiness. “Obviously if you think: ‘It’s absolutely great being me and there’s no room for improvement’” – he laughs at the thought – “then there’s little incentive. But that’s not been my problem.” His books stare hard at his deepest fears and dearest longings: “It isn’t worth writing a novel unless you’re saying what you assume is impossible to express,” he says.

St Aubyn grew up in London and France. His mother, Lorna, was an American heiress whose maternal skills he describes as “incompetent”, and his father, Roger, was a frustrated musician and a rapist. The first time he raped his son, St Aubyn was five years old. He describes this in Never Mind, the first Melrose book, and young Patrick imagines he is a gecko climbing the wall, “watching with detachment the punishment inflicted by the strange man on a small boy”. Patrick’s sense of self shatters, and in Double Blind St Aubyn looks into the connection between childhood abuse and schizophrenia. His father continued to abuse him for years.

As a child, St Aubyn dreamed of being the prime minister, “now rather a discredited ambition”, because he wanted to make speeches that would change the world. “I suppose that has an obvious psychological origin, in that I so much wanted to persuade everyone around me to behave radically differently,” he says. When he realised he had “a mortal terror of speaking in public”, he focused instead on writing. But he did make one monumental speech: when he was eight he told his father to stop assaulting him, and he did. “It was a short speech. But it changed the world,” he says.

It has long been rumoured that St Aubyn wrote another world-stopping speech: the eulogy read by his friend Charles Spencer at his sister Princess Diana’s funeral.

“Absolutely not, and I’m really bored on Charlie’s behalf that that rumour has gone around. He’s an excellent writer, he didn’t need me to write that speech,” St Aubyn says, and for the first time I catch a glimpse of something close to the imperiousness of his class.

Most of St Aubyn’s books include a thank you to the writer Francis Wyndham, who died in 2017 and was one of many quasi-paternal figures in his life. “I think inevitably someone like me who had an unsatisfactory relationship with their father will look for benign adults who do things normal fathers do,” he says. Other father figures included the director Mike Nichols and the artist Lucian Freud, and the quality that united them was their “unalloyed support and enthusiasm” for St Aubyn (his own father, of course, gave him neither). “Being admiring is always a sign of strength, whereas other people feel they’re losing something if they admire someone else,” he says.

One person who perhaps demonstrates the latter tendency is St Aubyn’s former friend, Will Self. The two knew one another at university and shared a similar taste for drugs, but grew apart. In Self’s 2018 memoir, Will, he writes about a man called “Caius” who bears an unmistakeable resemblance to St Aubyn. When Caius eventually tells him that his father sexually abused him, Self’s response is to sulk: “[Caius] got everything, whether they be material things and even these extreme experiences, which, self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make good copy.”

Did St Aubyn read the book?

“No, but there was a very mysterious period of my life when people were making bleak allusions to Will Self and raising their eyebrows at me, and I had no idea why,” he says with a mischievous chuckle. “Then somebody told me the fuller story. He wrote something nasty about me in – it’s an autobiography, isn’t it?”

I tell him that it was the most bizarrely bitter thing I’d ever read.

“What a pity. He’s an odd person. I think he’s very unhappy and I’m sorry about that, but he certainly doesn’t go to any trouble to disguise it,” he says.

St Aubyn is currently enduring the enervating effects of long Covid, “which have certainly gone on long enough for me”, yet our conversation continues long past our allotted time slot, and the more we talk, the less anxious he sounds. Before I leave him to recuperate I ask why his parents gave him the cuddly nickname “Teddy”, given how uncuddly they were. “It came about because the ancestor I’m named after was known as Teddy, so there was that. It is a cuddly name but it’s not a guarantee of cuddliness: Teddy Roosevelt used to go off shooting elephants! But I hope I make the grade,” he says, and he makes another self-mocking laugh, but this time it’s shot through with something that sounds almost like optimism.

Double Blind is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply,