Robert Menasse in conversation with Michael March

A description which could be anywhere in Vienna where Menasse claims to have been born in 1954. For certain, he is visibly the most prominent writer of his generation - the author of an outstanding trilogy: Happy Times, Brittle World; Sensual Certainty and Reverse Trust, as well as collections of essays on social aesthetics. He is currently working on a novel about his ancestor Menasseh Ben Israel, born in London in 1605, the author of Human Fraility and the Inclination of Man to Sin and the chief negotiator for the readmission of the Jews to England in 1655 after 370 years of external social engagements. He reads newspapers in the Café Spurl and gives interviews between picking up his laundry, buying wine and flying to Berlin. He likes to smoke and walk fast. The vegetation of his words do not need water.

Michael March: Do artists and novelists have an idea of the future?

Robert Menasse: In the future lies the question: will I be famous, will my work be known and appreciated. Artists can live very well with a world full of war, misery and injustice - as long as this world appreciates their art.

MM: Crawling back to the womb - you want to be loved.

RM: It's our link with a world of peace and justice - love me and everything will be OK.

MM: The refrain is "love me or leave me".

RM: A perpetual story of departure - (smiling) through ignorance of the other.

MM: Groucho Marx said: "Bring me a rose and leave me alone." But someone had to bring him the rose. From where do you receive your nourishment?

RM: From reality - but sometimes reality is so boring I have to read about it to feel it.

MM: So you foolishly create your own reality in order to live?

RM: Sometimes reality foolishly thinks it can create itself without art.

MM: In the form of a politician

RM: Politics is a very poor art - politicians have obligations. Politics is the art of finding compromises, but art hates compromise.

MM: And politicians hate art.

RM: Artists say - and this is one more reason for being hated by business men or politicians - that their compromises are not fair compromises between equal partners, but unfair compromises between powerful and weak partners. The compromises which Brussels finds between multi-national and the interests of people in certain regions can't be fair. Artists are not interested in a fair compromise - they are not interested in a compromise at all.

MM: Why did you write your novel ‘Happy Times, Brittle World’

RM: I can't remember.

MM: What happened after that?

RM: I had other ideas.

MM: Devilish ideas?

RM: At least the basic ideas of this century.

MM: Captured in the naked curiosity of ‘Happy Times, Brittle World’.

RM: Where I tried to show how a totalitarian system occupies the head, then implodes after a time - where I try to connect separate parts of reality which are secretly connected but remain unseen, remain separate in our eyes.

(looking out the window) I'm not able to give an interview now. It's not right situation. Let's make it later.

(later at the same table) To become an artist is a good option when you discover relatively early in life that your are extremely neurotic, extremely broken down, destroyed, looking for the possibility where your creative fantasies and destructive qualities can generate minimal privileges as compensation. To become an artist is a good profession because you can drink during work. As an artist you can sit half a day in a cafe and show you are doing nothing as part of your work. Any explanation becomes part of your work. You can do everything - and in the worst of all cases, it was research. You are accumulating insights into the way society works, accumulating information which is suddenly transformed when you stick it together telling a story. Suddenly you recognize that the world is working as your simple spirit imagines it.

MM: Why are we obsessed with usefulness, with productivity - excuses from the ledge from which we work?

RM: The idea of usefulness is a signification of customs: "used to do, used to be, usually he was, usually he is". Basically, we are useful in that we used to do something - but that is a custom and customs have other significations: borders, frontiers - between people, for example. We have to cross borders, we have to cross customs. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it is very difficult to survive alone: others always had to be useful. The fact that people can help other people to survive gave mankind this feeling power. But we can use everything in a contrary manner: to help survive and to kill. We are accustomed to killing.

MM: Love is one step from hell.

RM: We want to be lonely when we are loved too long by the same person. What we want is the need to want.

MM: We need imagination to be lonely

RM: It's very strange to hear the phrase: "I can't be alone." My greatest dream is to be alone. When I was six, I was sent to boarding school which I left when I was eighteen.

MM: With the same toothbrush?

RM: I have the talent to forget. I remember sleeping every night in a room with thirty other boys, waking up with thirty boys, entering the classroom with thirty boys, and at mid-day entering a lunchroom with a hundred boys, back to a classroom with thirty boys, and when we went to bed in the evening there was thirty boys in this bedroom. All these years I wanted to be alone in my own room.

MM: A hospital room?

RM: Where I would invent to be alone. In the boarding school there was an infirmary - but problem was that at least twenty boys had the same idea. For me, paradise was a room alone.

MM: But there are a lot of angels in paradise - paradise is crowded

RM: Historical paradise started with a man alone. Then God said it's unhealthy that man is alone. The end of history was this boarding school. Till today, now I am forty-two, I have not had the slightest problem being alone. Problems start when people enter my room. I can sit in a room and write or not write, I can think, hear music, smoke or drink a glass of wine - after a certain time I cannot honestly tell if its been one hour or forty-eight hours. For me, all time is one thick knot - and it's the most wonderful thing.

MM: The material realization of ideas

RM: I have a story or world in my head - and I like to construct it, every time more minutely, more concretely. Afterwards, the problem is to write it down page by page. It should be possible to write a novel only sitting and dreaming - with a helmet on your head transforming your thoughts into a computer with a writing programme. The writing itself is very hard work. But sitting alone, and dreaming and drinking and smoking and listening to music is so wonderful. I am unable to understand people who can't be alone.

MM: But you're not alone - you have a family

RM: Sometimes I am surprised that I have a daughter. When I am sitting alone in my room, I forget all these things, forget them completely. When I go home and I suddenly sit together with my wife at dinner and the child is kidding me, I like it very much - I love them so. But at the same time, I can't avoid the suspicion that I am an actor at this moment. I play an adult who had a family and sometimes I fear that someone could recognize that it's not reality - that I am only acting.