Writer's Life: Patrick McGrath's sunny outlook on life is a far cry from the dark characters that inhabit the pages of his best-selling Gothic novels, writes Donald Clarke.
'I think people expect me to look like Will Self," Patrick McGrath says. "I just get this feeling that that is what they expect and that they are then either relieved or disappointed when they discover I don't look like that." This makes a screwy kind of sense. The louche, vampiric Self looks not only like the kind of man who might write the books he does (apes rule the planet, life after death proves disappointing), but also like the kind of man who might write the books that Patrick McGrath does (hunchbacks prowl Victorian wetlands, psychotic children murder their mums).
As it happens, 54-year-old McGrath radiates a warm energy. Square and rugged with an enviable mop of grey hair, he resembles a less threatening version of Ted Hughes. As one of the few serious writers to make sense of the Gothic novel - a trite definition but he tolerates it - for a modern audience, McGrath admits that he has attracted a readership that expects a grimmer presence at book signings.
"It doesn't seem very complicated to me," he explains. "The way our imaginative processes work is not the same way our personalities work. When I go into a room and write, I am accessing parts of my mind that are not necessarily on display when I am elsewhere. Our private personalities are often very different to the ones we show to the world." His latest novel, Port Mungo, like such earlier sombre melodramas as Asylum and Spider, wallows in madness and moral transgression. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence rewritten by demons, the book leads us through the troubled life of an English painter as he abandons home, first for New York and then for central America where, stewing in the heat with his boozy wife and two young daughters, he allows unhealthy instincts to develop.
Thumbnail biographers searching for clues as to why McGrath turned out to be the writer he is, have always focused on his unusual childhood. As the son of the progressive, Scottish-born superintendent of Broadmoor mental hospital, he came into contact with psychologically-troubled patients every day, and his subsequent interest in mental illness should not, therefore, surprise us. But he has always denied that he had a depressing upbringing and that the downbeat tone of his work results from any youthful trauma.
"In that orderly mental hospital, the truly disturbed men and women were secluded in parts of this great massive institution where the children of staff would never encounter them," he explains. "What we encountered were well gardened terraces, sports fields, patients on the way to recovery who worked on the estate. It was an England of a past time. It was a benign and actually rather serene place."
After graduating in English from Birmingham University, McGrath headed for Canada where, accepting the help of one of his father's professional colleagues, he worked for a while as an orderly in an Ontario mental asylum. It was here that he came into contact with the seriously disturbed individuals who would inspire characters such as the eponymous hero of 1990's Spider.
Years of drifting followed. In the early 1980s he found himself living in Manhattan with an artist girlfriend. It was, it seems, a tempestuous relationship and it did not end well. "Yes, it ended quite messily. We lived together for 10 years and then broke up in 1990. It was a long, important relationship, as any would be that lasted that length of time, but we are friends now. It was important because she is an artist and taught me a great deal about how one went about creative work. She explained the necessity of getting to New York, for example."
Ah, now this sounds familiar. McGrath is describing the plot of the first half of Port Mungo. In the book, the hero, Jack Rathbone, while still a student, falls in with a wild, drunken artist named, appropriately enough, Vera Savage. An older woman, she urges him to go to New York, the centre of the art world, and, in between spates of crockery flinging, helps him develop his nascent talent. "Yes. Yes. That's right," McGrath laughs when I point out the similarities. So has his ex read it yet? "I don't think so. It has only just come out in America. But I will probably be hearing about it quite soon. I think she will recognise that it's not exactly her. She is not a drinker, and that excludes a lot of Vera's personality."
So does he often get into trouble with friends and family by turning them into the various grotesques that people his books? "Well, I usually disguise them quite well," he laughs. "But my wife can always see the bits that I have lifted Magpie-like from her personality."
I had wondered about this. Port Mungo is narrated by Rathbone's sister and it would seem only natural for a male writer to test out such a female voice on the woman in his life. After all, the current Mrs McGrath is the actress Maria Aitken, who should know something about adopting personae.
"Well, I tend not to show it to her until I have a first draft," he says. "But when she read this book she immediately said: 'You know who this is, of course? It's me.' Well, I was amazed. You get caught up in it and what you are hearing is this voice in your head which has, as far as you're concerned, no connection with any real voice. Then later you think: of course."
There is something quaintly ingenuous about McGrath. Here is a writer of terrible stories who seems rather befuddled by the most basic aspects of the creative process: where the ideas come from. I wonder if he can explain how he ever found himself writing Gothic fiction set in glum, drizzly post-war England. Surely New York in the 1980s - all glitz, cocaine and useless affluence - was not the most obvious time or place to come across stories of grey tea, stale biscuits and pathetic, hopeless love.
"Well the New York art scene was, at that time, quite conducive to the idea of the pastiche," he explains. "Warhol was the supreme arbiter and to take a pre-existing form - be it a soup can or a Gothic novel - and reproduce it was very common practice at the time."
McGrath's first collection of stories appeared in 1988 and his first novel, The Grotesque, followed in 1989. He remained in New York after the break-up with his partner and in 1991 bumped into Aitken at a dinner party. What followed was very much not the sort of thing you would expect to happen in one of his novels. After a brief courtship, they sped off to, of all places, Reno, Nevada and got married in a quickie wedding chapel.
"Well, it was a whirlwind romance," he explains. "There was nothing for it but to get married. We were eager to show the world we meant this; we meant business here. I had heard that you could get married in Reno without blood tests or having to wait or whatever. But actually we really should have gone to Las Vegas. Reno is where you go to get a $25 divorce. I kind of got that wrong. But we did then go to Cape Fear. So I suppose that was a bit more 'Patrick McGrath'."
Happily, the marriage survived the unhappy omens. The couple now spends half the year in Aitken's house in south London and half in McGrath's apartment in downtown Manhattan. "We now have a rhythm and a routine. You keep a pair of slippers in one house and a pair of slippers in the other," he chuckles.
It sounds like a very convenient arrangement. Since his marriage, however, his dinner table has become a little more crowded with celebrities, some of them members of the Aitken family. Jack Davenport, the rising young actor who came to fame in This Life, is now a stepson, and Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory MP who found God after serving a prison term for perjury, is a brother-in-law. About both, he is warm. His 1996 novel Asylum (the film of which was shot recently in Dublin) was dedicated to Davenport, and he refuses to bad-mouth Belmarsh Prison's most distinguished alumnus. "I know Jonathan well," he says. "I don't really want to go into his business too much though. His is an extraordinary story. He has been through his travails and is now a happy and contented and good man."
Listening to his descriptions of his civilised life, it becomes increasingly clear that McGrath is a stranger to the extreme tortures and bad behaviour which Port Mungo's hero thinks are necessary to create great art. Jack Rathbone feels that masterpieces can only come from total immersion in the work and the shunning of all civilised values. I suspect McGrath thinks this hogwash.
"Here is a man who has justified all kinds of cruelty, harshness and worse, because of his art," he explains. "But then the question arises: what if I am not a genius? What if you make a deal with God or society or whatever, that you can behave as badly as you like - be a Sacred Monster - to produce great art, but the art ends up being no good? What then?"
What indeed? McGrath seems to have managed the happy compromise of living a decent life while still producing first-rate art. I do wonder, however, if he ever feels the need to write a sweet romance set in Godalming, or a story with children gambolling in glades, just to show he can. Is he ever tempted to prove he is not just a gloom merchant? "Well I often plan to and hope to," he sighs. "I intend to indulge in quieter, more muted effects. But I just have a taste for melodrama. Giving it up is a life-long struggle. It's like giving up cigarettes, I guess."
Port Mungo is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99 in UK)