Robert, it's great that you're here today. Um, you're here because you brought out this book, Metamorphosis of Life in Pieces in 2023,
which is, uh, a memoir of your illness, but also a memoir about Kafka.
Um, well, first of all, why is your book called metamorphosis?
Uh. Good question. Um, so it's about multiple sclerosis and my experiences with with that disease.
Um, given the mess the Ms. makes of your insides.
I could have just as easily called the book mess. Uh, or mysterious or any other word that begins with M and ends in us.
But the reason that my design and my brilliant designer chose, uh, to highlight the M and the s, uh.
Or the beginning. The ends of the word metamorphosis, uh, is because, of course, it's a disease which, like other diseases, changes you.
It changes your insides. It also changes the way that you approach the world and your place in it.
And one of the models, I suppose, that I had at the back of my head when I was starting to think about it, was Kafka's story.
Uh, and that was partly catastrophizing, because at the back of my mind, I was thinking, what's going to happen to me in the future?
Will I be abandoned? Will I end up being there, dying and being chucked out with the household rubbish, as happens to Gregor Samsa?
And of course, that's not what happened. Uh, but Hardy says in one of his poems, um, if way to the better there be it exact a full look at the worst.
Uh, and that's what I was doing, I suppose, when I was thinking about a Kafka story.
Um, the production of metamorphosis that's on at the moment in London by, uh, Lemn Sissay.
Um, talks about exactly that, the shift from breadwinner to burden and the anxiety that comes with that.
So I found that very powerful in a book, but it's also about a change in the relationship to your body as well.
Um, yes. So, um, your body becomes a kind of foreign body to become something, not one that you inhabit unthinkingly.
Instead, it becomes sort of strange flesh that you carry around and have to work out how to deal with,
not just from day to day, but from moment to moment.
So, for instance, today, uh, a little peek behind the scenes for anyone watching this is that we are,
um, sitting in a rather grand room in Queens College.
Uh, my own college is maudlin, which is about 300m away.
A few years ago, that would have been a two minute walk for me.
Uh, I would have thought nothing of it.
Today it took me 15 minutes of very slow, very measured, very patient walking, uh, checking every possible crack on every paving stone,
every change in level to make sure I didn't do what I often do, which is fall over, uh, and, you know, crack my ribs or, you know, smack my wrist.
Um, so, yes, one of the things you have to do with any kind of disease like this is you have to recalibrate your place in the world.
And that's not just physically, but I suppose emotionally, intellectually as well.
You have to work out again where you fit in because the world seems different.
Uh, and you seem different as well. Well, I'm sure there are quite so many cracks and bumps on the paving stones in Queens.
Um, but, um, as you were saying that, it reminded me precisely of Gregor in, uh, metamorphosis,
when he wakes up and finds himself in a new body and has to recalibrate, uh, for his own movements.
So it leads me in asking, what role does Kafka and his metamorphosis play in your book?
So largely to begin with, it was just catastrophizing.
Uh, I was trying to work out through my reading what kind of literary models I might have
to try and decide what was happening to me and what might happen in the future.
And I think that's true of any kind of book, isn't it, that we all use books as lenses,
uh, that help us to focus attention on our lives in a different way?
Or, uh, we use them as kaleidoscopes. They help us to refract our surroundings, uh, in a slightly new pattern, to look at them with, with fresh eyes.
So I suppose it began like that.
But then, as I reread the story, when I hadn't reread for many, many years, I started to realise that there's a kind of subdued comedy,
uh, in it there's a kind of, um, so deadpan, sort of Buster Keaton style slapstick, uh, to it.
Now, I don't speak German, so I don't know whether this is true in the German as well,
but the certainly in all the translations I've seen, uh, there's elements in which we are rooting for this character,
but at the same time, the battles that he's having against this indifferent or hostile world is not unlike that of a silent comedian,
uh, who finds himself in a world that seems to be set against him.
Um, and as I got more and more ill, um, I started to realise that was a decent model for how I was going to tackle my, um.
Illness to think of myself not as a tragic figure, but as a kind of comedian.
I love that because everyone reads Kafka so often as full of disaster and despair.
But actually it's very funny. And particularly this, the sort of sense of him waking up as a as some kind of vermin insect.
And his first thought being, how am I going to get to work? Home.
Um, you talked about, uh, literature as a kind of homoeopathy.
Mhm. Um, uh, I think in, in the work and in interviews and I'm wondering does that so it inspired you but did it also enable you to,
to some of the, the difficult things. Yes, probably.
So reading um, some of my Beckett's, uh, plays like Happy Days,
in which Winnie begins the first act buried up to her waist, but can move her top half of the body.
Um begins the second act buried up to her neck and can't move anything apart from blinking and puffing out her cheeks.
That, in some ways, was a sort of parody of the decline that my own body was going through,
and the fact that she has this fixed smile and keeps talking about it being a happy day.
This has been a happy day in some ways, was a kind of joke,
but in some ways was a serious attempt for me to think about the attitudes that I could have to what was going on around me.
So yes, homoeopathy model lens.
I think the key thing is the books aren't just, um, for me at least they're not just sort of Tardis is, uh, that's transport.
You, uh, or, um, uh, allow you to look at your life kind of in a slightly different way.
They allow you to slip on someone else's skin. Try it on for size.
Um, in the case of Gregor Samsa, it's a very kind of scaly and kind of awkward skin, uh, to try on.
But it is that sort of, um, sort of cast catastrophizing narrative that allows you to imagine what might be
worse and how might you deal with things if and when they do get much worse.
One of the other central characters in in the text is Bruce Cummings.
Um, and you write about him writing a journal, um, as therapy.
Um, so that links again, doesn't it? Uh, I guess it was I was writing this through Kafka, also a kind of therapy.
Yes, I think it probably was. So one of the things that Cummings, who publishes under the pen name Bob DeLeon.
One of the things that he does in his diary is he treats himself like, um, uh, like an insect.
In fact, he was an entomologist. So he writes pamphlets on, on lice, um, and, um, bedbugs.
Um, and in some ways he treats himself like one of his own specimens, uh,
and calls himself, um, uh, he describes what he's doing as a study in the nude.
Um, and so, yes, in some ways that was another possible model,
because I started myself writing a diary on the understanding that we make sense out of our experiences by making up sentences about them.
Yes, we we frame we compose our experiences by putting them within some kind of story.
Um, and whether you're journaling or blogging or tweeting, uh, or simply telling someone at the end of the day how your day is being,
that sense of narrating what's happened to you is a way in which you can control and manage what might at the time be disorderly and unmanageable.
And of course, then reading reading other people's journals, like Reading Kafka, becomes a way of then testing your experiences against other peoples.
Yeah. Um, like Kafka, writing metamorphosis in a sense, was a way of him dealing with his own situation.
I was very struck. Um, Kafka is not the only writer that comes up.
Um, uh, I was I started writing down, you know, all the ones I spotted and what you heard about Beckett.
And there's Lewis Carroll in there. Um. David Bowie. Um, so the greats.
Um, and one of the things I've noticed very often is that writers.
Well, it's it's sort of like dealing with a pantheon of the greats. It's also about measuring yourself against other writers.
Does that play a part for you? Not. Not really. Um, not measuring against perhaps trying to find some company in.
So, um, like a lot of writers, um, I suppose, uh, I look for, uh, points of connection, uh, and opportunities for conversation.
And you might think that talking with dead people is a bit of a one sided conversation.
Uh, but if you listen closely, you see that they do still have things to say to you, but also sometimes to say for you as well that you realise that,
um, uh, the people that you're reading can articulate your own thoughts better than you could manage yourself.
Um, and that too, is something I found helpful, uh, in the months and then the years after I was diagnosed, realising that writers,
whether they are pop lyrics like David Bowie or they are of children's literature like Lewis Carroll or adult literature, uh, like like Kafka.
Um, they, uh, they met.
You realise that there are things you recognise as your own in their writing, but you could not have formulated those thoughts on your own.
And that's that's why they've become so important.
Um, that was a sentence that really struck me when I was reading, um, which comes up and you said links with just what you were saying.
I started to think of myself in the first person and the third person at once.
Um, and one of the things which is so striking about this text by Kafka and which students struggle with,
is the mixture of the first person and the third person.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
What was that feeling that came with the illness, or was it something that was inspired also by reading the text?
I think it's something that's always been there, partly because, like a lot of people,
I've always had a slightly, um, awkward relationship with my own body.
Uh, and I've never thought of it as as being me rather than something which I, uh, live in.
So I suppose I've always had a slightly kind of semi-detached kind of sense of, uh, of myself in relation to my body.
Um, but also, yes,
one of the things that happens when you do have what is a very physically damaging illness is that you do start to think of yourself,
uh, both in the past and the present and the future tense simultaneously.
Who I was, who I am, who I might be. And things carry on getting worse.
Um, and you also start to think of yourself as, um, uh, the person who is presenting to the rest of the world,
and then the person who is inside and perhaps isn't seen, uh, who is exactly the same as in my case, he always was.
But there is perhaps a growing gap between that self-perception and the way that the self is perceived by others.
And one of the things that you can do when you write about that is you can reconcile those two selves.
So there's a lovely line at the end of one of the the sonnets in Astral and Stella,
uh, by Philip Sydney, uh, where um, astrophysics says I am not I pity the tale of me.
Because by writing himself down, it might be that that can allow other people, uh, to, in this case his his lover, Stella,
to appreciate and understand him better than if he were simply presenting himself as himself because she can imagine him as a romantic hero,
a lead in a story, rather than just the kind of shambling, bumbling figure who presents himself to her.
And I guess, like a lot of writers, that's also true for me as well.
You know, if I'm writing about my own experiences, I want them to be helpful for other people.
But also I'm thinking of myself partly from the inside, partly from the outside, and saying I am not I.
If not pity, at least think about or I try and understand the tale of me.
Although that also goes precisely back to comedy, doesn't it?
Because it's that discrepancy between the two viewpoints that allows the comedy to come in?
Yes, absolutely. What Bowdler calls the power of being yourself and someone else at the same time.
In his essay on comedy. Um. And it's what then gives rise to puns and double acts and all the other, uh, kind of physical features of comedy.
And in my case, I suppose it produces slapstick.
Uh, we began by talking about the, uh, the, the tone of Kafka as being a kind of refined, uh, a kind of deadpan form of slapstick.
Um, and what I found is, when writing about my illness or indeed just trying to cope with tripping over and,
you know, bashing myself up, it helps to think of it as a form of, um,
accidental slapstick rather than a tragic fall, because that is a way of putting it in perspective, uh,
and then start to realise that a sense of humour and a sense of perspective are more or less the same thing.
And that's really helpful because that's what's going on in Kafka, I think, as well.
And it's one of the things that's quite difficult to get people to understand.
Um, so that's, um, that's wonderful. The book kind of embraces Kafka, and there's a beetle very prominently on the cover.
But how how is the work different? I mean, you you talk very, um, fascinatingly about this sort of drawing close to the various writers,
but also pulling away in the kind of self and other working in the text.
So but how is the book? How does it go beyond Kafka? How does it differ from Kafka?
So I suppose the key difference is that, um, the trajectory of Kafka's story, uh, is a slow, steady,
inexorable decline, uh, leading to, uh, being chucked out by the maid with the rest of the rubbish.
Um, my story begins. The first chapter is chapter 42, and then it gradually counts down like a clicking metre down to zero.
Zero is when I had a stem cell transplant, uh, which involved main stem cells being removed, frozen.
My immune system, uh, being, uh,
basically destroyed through chemotherapy and then the stem cells being reintroduced in the hope that it would stop my,
um, immune system from attacking itself, which is what Ms. basically is, and it seems so far to have been a pretty qualified success.
Uh, so that's although my walking is perhaps getting slightly worse.
Everything else is as it was, I'm still working full time and so on, which is why the last chapters of my book start ticking upwards.
1234567.
So whereas, uh, Kafka's story is one directional, uh, mine, I suppose I hope, uh, has, uh, more of a kind of an upward curve at the end of it,
except that Kafka's book isn't one of decline in the end,
and the last paragraph allows the sister that's true to go out to the family, leave, and go out into the sunshine.
The sister stretches, uh, and is about to become, uh, an adult and maybe marry and maybe start a family in which maybe somebody is going to be.
I mean, this seems to be as though you're you're actually right. It's one of those weird, um, genres, a tragedy with a happy ending, isn't it?