I woudl never hit them – I’m not into violence. And let me say this, when I take my kids to school. I’m probably the only fooking dad who is there every day. A lot of dads turn up on the first day  to show off in a fast car and younever see them again till the end of the fooking year. I’m there every day. Pick-ups and drop-offs.”

Blackpool manager Ian Holloway is a football master after guiding his team of misfits and rejects into the Premiership on a shoestring budget. He is also a man who gives very good quote.

“He’s six foot something, fit as a flea, good looking – he’s got to have something wrong with him. Hopefully he’s hung like a hamster – That would make us all feel better. Having said that, me missus has got a pet hamster at home, and his cock’s massive.” (Speaking about Cristiano Ronaldo)

“Paul Furlong is my vintage Rolls Royce and he cost me nothing. We polish him, look after him, and I have him fine tuned by my mechanics. We take good care of him because we have to drive him every day, not just save him for weddings.” (Speaking about striker Paul Furlong)

“I don’t see the problem with footballers taking their shirts off after scoring a goal? They enjoy it and the young ladies enjoy it too. I suppose thats one of the main reasons women come to football games, to see the young men take their shirts off. Of course they’d have to go and watch another game because my lads are as ugly as sin.” (Speaking of the rule prohibiting players from removing their shirts)

The general election is coming up – who will you vote for?
I’m not telling you. Doesn’t matter who you f*ckin’ vote for – it’ll still be sh*t unless you join a band.

In a soft voice, chuckling frequently and gazing intently with his grey-green eyes, McCarthy talked about his latest book, The Road, sharing his views on ageing, writing and technology. As the afternoon chat went on, it got dark and the discussion moved to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Dressed in crisp jeans and dimpled brown cowboy boots, McCarthy began with a Bombay Sapphire Gibson — onions, up.

The 76-year-old author first broke through with his 1985 novel Blood Meridian, a tale of American mercenaries hunting Indians in the Mexican borderland. Commercial success came in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses, a winner of the US National Book Award and the first instalment of the Border Trilogy. Critics relished his detailed vision of the West, his painterly descriptions of violence and his muscular prose stripped of most punctuation.

The writer himself, however, has proved more elusive. He won’t be found at book festivals, readings and other places where novelists gather. McCarthy prefers hanging out with “smart people” outside his field, such as professional poker players and the thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical science foundation in New Mexico where he has been a longtime Fellow.

In recent years his circle has inched farther into Hollywood. Now, set for release in January, is a screen adaptation of The Road. As intimate as it is grim, the book tells the story of a man’s bond with his young son as the two struggle for survival years after a cataclysm has erased society. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and was promoted heavily by Oprah Winfrey as a surprising selection for her book club.

The film, starring Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee (11 years old at the time of filming) as his son, closely follows the book’s bleak narrative, including encounters with cannibals. The director, John Hillcoat, is an Australian who made the 2005 Western-style revenge tale The Proposition, set in the Outback. To replicate the blighted landscapes in The Road, Hillcoat shot much of the movie in wintertime Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where remnants of the region’s coal and steel history lent to the desolation.

The backstory of McCarthy’s novel is personal, springing from his relationship with his son, John, 11, who he had with his third wife, Jennifer. As death bears down in The Road, the main character obsessively protects his son and prepares him to carry on alone: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.”

John Jurgensen: What kind of reactions have you had to The Road from fathers?

Cormac McCarthy: I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one from England — but they all said the same thing. They said: “I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3.45 the next morning and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them.”

Why don’t you sign copies of The Road?

There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book.

How many did you have?

Two hundred and fifty. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, “I have a signed copy of the The Road”, and I say, “No. You don’t.”

You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in the South. Why did you end up in the Southwest?

I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.

You grew up Irish Catholic I did, a bit.

It wasn’t a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don’t remember religion ever even being discussed.

Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in The Road questions and curses?

It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the [Santa Fe] Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart”. And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

When you discussed making The Road into a movie with [the director] John Hillcoat, did he press you on what had caused the disaster in the story?

A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteorite to them. But it could be anything — volcanic activity, or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do?

The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who’ve gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor there that is now about 100ft high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years, or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

What kind of things make you worry?

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realise that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognisable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw The Road in your head?

I guess my notion of what was going on in The Road did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [The director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago [The Gardener’s Tale] and I thought, “This is just hell. Who would do this?” Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.

But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared with the solitary job of writing?

Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

All the Pretty Horses was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

It could’ve been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can’t do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released he would have to cut it down to two hours.

Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

For modern readers, yeah. People apparently read only mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written 100 years ago are just not going to be written any more and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like The Brothers Karamazov or Moby-Dick, go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

How does the notion of ageing and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

Your future gets shorter and you recognise that. In recent years I’ve had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to take a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Does getting older make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

I’m not interested in writing short stories. If it doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide, it hardly seems worth doing.

Can you tell me about the book you’re working on, in terms of story or setting?

I’m not very good at talking about this stuff. It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl.

Some of your critics focus on how rarely you go deep with female characters.

This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She’s committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

The past five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying breadcrumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote. And she said: “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

This is an edited version of an interview first published in The Wall Street Journal

AN EXTRACT FROM ‘THE ROAD’

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I’m all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It’s raining. Yes, the man said. I know.

They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he’d seen a running ledge of rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.

When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked out to the road and he took the boy’s hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding with the lamp between them. He’d brought the boy’s book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I’m asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.

He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.

Yes. Of course.

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not now.

And we’re still going south.

Yes.

So we’ll be warm.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay what?

Nothing. Just okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay.

I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?

Yes. That’s okay.

And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?

Yes. Of course you can.

What would you do if I died?

If you died I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes. So I could be with you.

Okay.

by Cormac McCarthy. © M-71, Ltd. 2006

Interview by John Jurgensen , The Times Nov 2009

The celebrated crime writer reveals that after his last book led to a breakdown, drugs and divorce, this time he has his demons in check

Some illuminating pre-interview James Ellroy research shows: “America’s greatest living crime writer” (some would root for Elmore Leonard) feigning joyful masturbation for the benefit of the Playboy Channel outside the house where a girl he used to spy on as a teenager once lived; Ellroy growling at the presenter of a radio show, “No, I’m not mellow. I floss with barbed wire and gargle with the Aids virus”; Ellroy showing off about the size of his “donkey dick”; Ellroy telling the whole world that, artistically speaking, he is rivalled only by Beethoven.

To me it all sounds like chest-beating self-aggrandisement in the style of a wrestling champ. And certainly his fans, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, lap up the alpha male, genius writer, tough-guy rhetoric.

But there is a minority who take offence at his perceived grandiosity (the word “jerk” comes up often on internet threads), and even his admirers, literary critics among them, have been known to find fault with his heavily abbreviated writing style, and his use of homophobic and racist language, a claim he seldom feels the need to justify.

Alongside the Playboy video is a series that Ellroy has written entitled Why I Chase Women, in which he describes himself as a “tenuously reformed pervert” and details his messy adolescence, chaotic relationship with drugs and alcohol, and his overwhelmingly obsessive relationships with women, including the odd prostitute.

Helen Knode, his second wife and best friend, nicknamed him “a zoo animal”, while they were still together. When the marriage broke down, she told him: “You drove around Carmel in shit-stained trousers. My parents heard you jacking off upstairs. You peeped women while you walked Dudley [the dog].”

I assumed he was going to be a handful.

But in the plush Langham Hilton, Ellroy appeared tall, slightly hunch-shouldered, dapper, bald, energetic and bespectacled. I later watched him being interviewed by the cultural commentator Mark Lawson and expect that he would have behaved very differently had I been a man. Lawson, all British tea-parlour politeness, soldiered on in small-talk mode, unable to cope with Ellroy’s habit of, I think unconsciously, baring his teeth in an appearance of light menace and batting away questions with one word answers, usually “No”.

But in the Langham, the Demon Dog of American literature behaved as genially as a puppy: chivalrous, engaging, kind, warm, every word carefully chosen. How infuriating. Where was the obnoxious, at times juvenile, man who, not seven months ago, had feigned masturbation for a soft porn site?

“The interview for Playboy had no dignity,” he said, with the air of a person who has awoken remorsefully with a hangover. “I was encouraged to exercise the worst aspects of my rude behaviour. I’m an accomplished public performer and I can act. And I go on book tours and I’m like a dog cut off its leash.

“I spend a great deal of time on my own and I’m very serious in my pursuits, and put a camera in front of me or put me in front of an audience and I’m there to convert, to seduce, to take over, to dominate and I can be harsh and I can be domineering and I can be brusque. And I’m learning to be less so.”

Why bother, if the persona works?

“It’s just a better way to be. It puts fewer people off and I’m trying to grow up. Yeah. At no loss of youth or vigour, I’m just trying to grow up.”

Ellroy is now 61. But he never tires of talking about the pivotal moment of his life, the rape and murder of his mother in Los Angeles, when he was 10. The rest you should do yourself the favour of reading about in My Dark Places, a terrifically crafted memoir that I suspect women enjoy more than something like American Tabloid or L. A. Confidential, complex and macho novels that require a working knowledge of mid-20th-century American history, slang, conspiracy theories and politics.

His early erotic attachment to his mother, his desire to know her and understand the motivations for her murder, and an abstract wish to live in the period in which she was killed are explored most explicitly in Why I Chase Women, which will appear in book form next year under the title The Hilliker Curse (Hilliker is his mother’s maiden name). But the same themes, it transpires, also drive his new novel Blood’s a Rover, if in more roundabout, semi-disastrous ways. “It ripped my f***ing heart out,” he says. “I didn’t think I could go on much longer at certain points while I was writing that book.”

One of the joys of interviewing Ellroy is that there is none of that paranoid guardedness you get with so many male authors. We move swiftly on to a second turning point in his life, a breakdown he had in 2001. It began innocuously enough with a spell of insomnia and morphed into an addiction to sleeping pills and hypochondria. He spent an unsuccessful spell in a health retreat being slathered with healing oils and doing transcendental meditation. And when antidepressants didn’t work, he went into meltdown.

The whole thing was brought on, he says, by “knowledge of ultimate incapacity and death, suppressed emotion, unexpressed sexuality, romantic longing, a life lived very, very, very hard”. He was also working like a man possessed, promoting the prequel to Blood’s a Rover, The Cold Six Thousand, which “began all the events that lead to all the horror. I was exhausted. Even a phone call was taxing. I had money. I didn’t particularly need to work, I had film jobs, I was trying to sleep around the clock. I needed to rest. I needed to shut 55 years of very, very hard-lived life off.” Most of all, “I needed to fantasise, I needed to have crushes on women. I mean, I never acted on them, I was entirely honourable.”

He produces for me his list of infatuations: Anne Manson, the former principal conductor of the Kansas Philharmonic; a lesbian FedEx courier; and the Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. “The strangest group of women ever. I just needed to go off by myself and drink coffee and think.”

Coffee notwithstanding, his breakdown put an enormous strain on his marriage to Knode, culminating in her suggestion of a more open arrangement. Given his compulsive romanticism, she might have foreseen what happened next. As he says, “You shouldn’t offer a guy like me a deal like that because I’ll do it”. Anyway, he had soon met and become fanatically engrossed with a woman who he decided to turn into a character in Blood’s a Rover.

“I was 56,” he said. “I didn’t have anybody. I didn’t have any … body. And it was the strangest, most pathetic place to be. Helen hated me at the time. And I met this woman and I should have smelt misalliance, potential obsession … and then at a certain point I had to reveal to Helen I’m seeing someone, it’s OK, she initiated the deal, it wasn’t a cheat or infidelity and I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy and I left. I wanted to be with her and we wanted to have a child.”

It was a disaster, of course. Ellroy was needy to the point of delirium and would have panic attacks whenever left on his own: “Yeah, and I’m a big f***ing shit-kicking A-type American guy.” Probably wisely, his new partner terminated the relationship and Ellroy swiftly found himself relocating to New York. One hardly needs to ask why. “At a reading performance I had spoken to a woman for two minutes. And, why not? Why not move 500 miles because there’s some woman you met for two minutes in a chaste conversation?”

Well, I could think of plenty of reasons. None of these remotely fazed her new paramour: “It’s just this motif, I always tend to get what I want, and all I’ve ever wanted was to write great books, live a big life, know God and commune with women of great substance. And I’m disarming. It’s not an unreasonable goal if you look at it from a certain standpoint. I don’t want to be President of the United States. I don’t want to be a rock’n’roll star. I don’t want to chase showgirls or do anything stupid like that.” In the end the relationship didn’t work out but the pair are still friends and she also went on to become a central character in the book.

From an author’s view it’s all very well to draw from real life. But is he so sure that these women were keen on being immortalised in this way? “I intended nothing but love for these two women. It didn’t pan out that way,” Ellroy says. “I could have slunk away, been cowardly, or I could honour them by doing what I do best, which is write fiction.”

What Ellroy does magnificently is draw key moments from history to interpret the events of the time, in the case of the Underworld USA trilogy, the years spanning 1958-1972. His fiction, he says, is approximately one third fact, which he uses to stand up every mid-20th century American conspiracy you’ve ever heard: JFK was killed by the Mob; Martin Luther King’s assassination was linked to the head of the FBI. How conspiracy-minded is Ellroy?

Not at all, he says, though the idea for the Underworld trilogy sprang from Don DeLillo’s reading of the JFK assassination in his book Libra. On King’s death, Ellroy says: “FBI men have wondered how James Earl Ray managed to stay out of prison with impunity for over a year and assassinate Martin Luther King and was as stupid as a brick, and always seemed to have money. So I do sense a collusion.

“And I do sense repressive factions coming together to quash revolution and also I make the case in King’s case, even though I revere the man above all other 20th-century Americans, that he was losing a little bit in the last years of his life. I think because he had been so courageous for so long that he just wanted relief from all this suffering.

“So he’s down at the garbage workers’ rally in Memphis and gets shot. He was becoming more demanding, more grandiose and turning a lot of his supporters against him. So what I felt upon research was just a convergence of dissatisfaction and word passing here to here to here, and somebody shoots him.”

Living in the past as Ellroy does with such relish must make the present seem terribly dull. Yes, contemporary life, he says, shocks and bores him. “Satire irks me; irony irks me; nihilism irks me; loud, discordant music irks me. I find the canonisation of rock’n’roll especially puerile: institutionalised rebelliousness of the worst sort. Yeah. I can’t believe the staying power of rock’n’roll when you can listen to classical music or jazz. I’m not a misanthrope, but I crave peace and quiet or intense rapport.”

He avoids “distractions” such as newspapers and television. What little he claims to know about current affairs, he says, he picks up inadvertently from the plague of televisions that have invaded restaurants in the US. “The American language has become horribly mangled. Especially among young women, it’s as if feminism never existed. Young women in LA — pierced, lacquered, varnished, enhanced, tattooed — they could not have coarsened themselves more. It’s only a brief moment before they say ‘it’s like’ or ‘I’m like’.”

To illustrate his point he recalls a conversation he recently overheard: “A young woman was trying to tell her friend that she had turned down the advances of a suitor. And she couldn’t even say, ‘I rejected him’. She said: ‘It’s like, it’s like, it’s like, like, I’m like, it’s like … No!’ It was the most amazing thing! So you have a full generation now who sound equivocal, mitigating, befuddled, unable to exposit their lines in any kind of direct language whatsoever. Whatsoever!”

One suspects that he is particularly angry about this state of affairs because befuddled women are exactly the kind he doesn’t find attractive and so his pool of potential fantasy figures has become dramatically reduced. But who is to blame?

“Kinetic art, I think, is partially at play.”

What does he mean by kinetic art?

“Movies are very, very fast-paced. I tried to watch one of the Bourne thrillers with Matt Damon. Couldn’t watch it, felt like I was having a coronary. And the vulgarity of reality television shows. People seem to be proud to be stupid. I’m just not a liberal and I’m trying not to mess with people’s heads as much as I used to. I’m trying. Yeah.”

This idea of redemption and the reformed character are key themes in his life and his work: it’s there in Blood’s a Rover in the form of an unprecedentedly hopeful ending and it’s there when he says, repeatedly, that he’s trying to grow up, and that this time he’s found The One, a woman called Erika.

What about the tenuously reformed pervert. Is that still him?

“I’m a son of a woman who was raped and murdered. It’s core-deep with me. It’s suffused with discernment and I grew up in an era of privation and so sex wasn’t available and the era of privation, fuelled by my unhygienic state and lack of social skills, induced a great gratitude for me when I finally grew up and changed my life a little bit. And it fuels me still. I’ve never lost a teenage boy’s awe pertaining to sexuality. It’s the old joke, ‘I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he’s working on now’. It says it all. It Says It All. I live there.”

Which I suppose explains why, when I asked him whether in Erika he’d at last found peace of mind, he suddenly looked quite agonised: “There is a sob in my throat from here on up for women and at times it’s almost unbearable,” he gasped. “It’s just f***ing unbearable.” I believe him, although I doubt it’s the first time he’s said so to a female interlocutor — it’s the kind of save-me vulnerability that so many women find irresistible.

Half an hour later he’s on stage, thrilling his predominantly male fans with his all-American alpha male act. The talk is all conspiracy theories and the Mob. He’s a woman’s man but a man’s writer. And, surrounded by men, there is no trace of the impulsive, complicated, mother-struck, lunatic romantic that will always be lurking underneath.

Biography

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His mother was raped and murdered when he was 10. He was expelled from school and was dishonourably discharged from the army just before his father died. By 18 he was living on the streets, drinking heavily, taking drugs and involved in petty crime. After rehab he worked as a golf caddy and published his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, at 30. He earned critical acclaim for the L. A. Quartet and wrote a memoir, My Dark Places, an attempt to trace his mother’s killer. The self-described best crime writer in the world has written 18 books. He has been married twice and lives in Kansas City.

Small talk

On his writing

I want to move people. I want to obsess people. I want people to live at the extreme mental pitch that I work at when I write a book.

On Los Angeles

It’s uncivilised: there are too many cars, too many people. Parking’s a pain in the ass.

On language

The idiom has always lived in me. Alliteration, Yiddish, racial invective, hipster talk, general profanity, it’s been there and I’ve always loved words and I’ve always been talking to myself and having conversations with myself when no one else is in the room.

On Beethoven

There’s a 20-minute piece of Beethoven that describes the conjunction of men and women for me. It’s the third movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata. It’s the most sublime slow movement in solo instrumental history.

From The Times

November 14, 2009

Ten minutes later, Larry David stumbles over in person, dressed in black and looking exactly as he does on screen — a groovy rabbi. “Danson says you’re the laziest man in the world,” I say. “That bum,” David barks. “He’s not with me when all these scripts are prepared. I’m the guy who makes him look good.” But he says you stayed over when divorcing from your committed environmentalist wife, Laurie? “Yeah, but first I went home and turned all the lights on,” he grins.

Of course, Danson is wrong — deliberately so. C’mon, this is Hollywood. He was ribbing. David may actually be the funniest man on the planet. He is, at least, a comedy master. (“Master?” He looks scornful when I say this. “I am not a comedy master.”) With Jerry Seinfeld, he devised, wrote and produced Seinfeld — still the most successful sitcom in history, famously based on the concept of “a show about nothing”. Of the show’s four regulars, the smart Seinfeld fan always loved George, the atavistic, solipsistic and egotistic version of Larry David.

After the series finished in 1998, David wrote and directed the movie Sour Grapes, then — initially as a one-off stand-up special — created Curb Your Enthusiasm for HBO, in which he seems to play himself, a retired sitcom millionaire coping with the eccentricities of LA life. David’s character, confusingly called Larry David, is the human id fully grown. What he wants, he tries to take. What he thinks, he says. And what he doesn’t like, he pretty much makes plain — although he attempts the occasional awkward evasion to fit in with social convention, which always leads to fresh nail-biting humiliation. Meeting a deaf woman, for instance, he accidentally signs vicious insults to her. Then, when attempting to make up with her, he happens to have his neighbour’s pest exterminator with him — it’s a long story —  and the man mistakes her chihuahua for a rat, bludgeoning it to death in front of her horrified, screaming face. Later, walking down Sunset Boulevard, a beautiful woman tells him: “Hey, smile!” “Hey, mind your own business,” he replies. “How about that?”

“That’s based on real life,” he nods. “When I was walking around New York in a foul mood, people would always say, ‘Cheer up.’ Why would you say that to someone? What if I yelled, ‘I just found out I’ve got cancer’?” For a second, he looks regretful. “I should have put that in the show.”

David’s delight in the minutiae of embarrassment and the epic, insensate fury the tiniest irritations can produce in all of us has shaped modern comedy perhaps more than any other single influence. With Seinfeld and Curb, he begat everything from American shows such as Friends, Everybody Hates Chris and Sex and the City to British offerings such as The Office, Marion and Geoff, Peep Show and even Outnumbered. Ricky Gervais, Ben Stiller, Steve Coogan and Woody Allen are professed fans; Stiller, Mel Brooks, Shelley Berman, David Schwimmer, Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen have appeared in Curb. Woody Allen has even cast David as the lead in his latest movie, Whatever Works, because he loved the show so much.

Is there any difference between the real-life Larry and the on-screen Larry?

A: He’s a person I would like to be.

Q: How’s that?

A: Well, he’s honest; he’s not shackled by all these social conventions like the rest of us are. He says what he thinks. I don’t think he’s a mean person, or even a curmudgeon. In fact, I am sort of melding with the character as time goes on.

Q: The character is changing you?

A: Yes. The character is changing me.

Q: Is that like therapy?

A: Yes, I love the Curb Larry, and I’ve always hated this Larry, so I’m becoming a little happier.

Q: Where do you come up with the ideas?

A: I don’t know, I just… I’ll look at my daughter’s doll and think to myself, this doll could use a haircut. And if I did cut the hair, what would happen? Oh, boy, my daughter would be really upset. And I can see that could be really funny. [It was: see the Curb episode called The Doll, from season two.]

Q: Have you cut off your daughter’s doll’s hair?

A: No. I love my daughters. Most of the TV shows they watch, I’ll watch just to spend time with them. So I watch Gossip Girl.

Q: Do you like it?

A: No, not especially, but I can see why they do. I’ve watched Hannah Montana… I mean, you can’t believe what I’ve had to watch. I told my daughter just the other day, “Do you know how much I love you? I sat through Rugrats in Paris. Okay?”

Q: Do they watch your show?

A: I didn’t let them for a long time, because it was inappropriate. Now they can watch it, they don’t have any interest in it. They’ve never been fans of the show, and they’re not fans of their father. I have to edit my show every day for six hours — it’s brutal, to tell you the truth. I look horrible. I just can’t believe people would watch me. It’s grotesque. I can’t even laugh at it, it’s too horrifying.

Q: Does that explain the title?

A: Yes. I mean, who likes enthusiasm? It’s sickening, isn’t it? To see enthusiastic people when you’re miserable. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to ask “How’s everything?” and hear: “Fabulous! Things are fantastic! I feel great!” No. You want to hear: “Ehhhh, you know.”

With anyone else, the downbeat misanthropy would feel like shtick. In a world of professionally morose funnymen, however, David seems like the real deal. His route to the top was not just accidental, it was wilfully perverse. His almost-first gig was when, while working as a bra salesman, he tried to gate-crash the stage at a New York comedy club because he couldn’t believe how bad the guy telling the jokes actually was. When he was working the circuit a few years later, much of his material went over the heads of the two-drink-minimum Saturday-night crowd. One evening, he stepped on stage, surveyed the audience in silence for a few minutes, sighed, said “This isn’t going to work”, then walked right off.

“People say to me, ‘Is he really like that?’,” muses Jerry Seinfeld, whom I meet a few weeks later when he is in Europe to promote a new venture. “Maybe it’s because I’m a comedian and he’s a comedian, but I don’t see anything in him that seems odd. That’s normal to me. Everybody else is odd. He’s one of my favourite people in life that I’ve ever met.”

He recalls their working relationship as perfection, but that can’t be entirely true. During Seinfeld’s fourth season, there was a running story about how the real Jerry and Larry actually pitched the show Seinfeld to NBC (although clearly Larry is George, played by Jason Alexander. Keep up). At the height of the meeting, George butts into Jerry’s desperate pitch, insisting: “It’s a show about nothing. It’s just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read.”

“You read? You read on the show?” the NBC exec says, aghast. “Well, why am I watching it?”

“Because it’s on TV,” George barks, testily, brushing aside Jerry’s plaintive “Well, we won’t have reading…” “Okay, look,” George storms, “if you want to just keep on doing the same old thing, then maybe this idea is not for you. I, for one, am not going to compromise my artistic integrity. And I’ll tell you something else: this is the show, and we’re not going to change it.” NBC throw them out then and there.

Was there more than a grain of truth to this scene? “Umm, sort of, yeah,” David smiles wanly. “Seinfeld was pitched as a one-camera show, like Curb, but that was ‘no sale’. Like in the scene. And that’s when I said, ‘This is not the show!’ I looked at one of the guys from the production company and he was going, ‘Jesus Christ, who is this guy? What the hell?’ And I’m there yelling, ‘This is not the show!’” Of course, the show was made — the first to command $1m ad slots, the third-highest-rating finale in history, yada yada yada. For those millions of Seinfeld fans, the seventh season of Curb, already airing in America and here next week, includes a full-scale Seinfeld reunion. “I always said we would never do that, it’s a lame idea,” David admits. “Then I thought it might be very funny to do that, on Curb.”

written by stephen armstrong – the times oct 09

“Those two episodes of Curb really belong in the Seinfeld DVD box set,” Seinfeld explains. “We actually did one more episode — and it’s a great one. Although it was a little odd. We would be rehearsing a scene, and we would forget it was actually a scene in Curb. Larry would come on the set like he always did and say, ‘You know, I think it would be funnier if you stand over here and she stands over there.’ Then, in the next take, we would do that, and he would say, ‘No, no, no — you don’t actually do that. The point is, I tell you to do that.’ Ah, of course, it isn’t Seinfeld, it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was like three-level chess.”

It’s that improvised element that adds the real docu-soap feel to Curb. David sketches out scenes, but the actors vamp the lines themselves. “My first big scene, the only direction Larry gave me — no script, mind — was ‘Rip Jeff a new asshole’,” explains Susie Essman, who plays the foul-mouthed wife of Larry’s best friend, Jeff. “I thought, ‘Okay, I can do that.’ After the first take, he pulls me aside and says, ‘You’re not going for it. Make fun of Jeff’s fat.’ I said, ‘He’s my friend, I can’t.’ He said, ‘It’s okay, he knows you’re acting.’ So I did — ‘You fat f***!’ Later, Larry says to me, a bit taken aback, ‘Wow, you really went for it.’

“But Curb has spoilt me,” Essman continues dolefully. “I read the outlines Larry writes and I can’t believe how funny it is. Then I get these other scripts and I say, ‘I can’t do this crap.’ Larry tells me all the time, ‘You’re never going to have anything as funny as this for the rest of your life.’ Gee thanks, Larry.”

Jimmy McGovern’s righteous reputation — he is one of the Twelve Apostles of modern British screenwriting — became apparent within minutes of the new series kicking off. The plot was simple: principled pub landlord Bob Hoskins bars a weedy teenage kid, Callum, from his pub, after he smokes in the toilets. In retaliation, Callum’s dad, local gangster Thomas Miller (Liam Cunningham), says he will come to the pub at 3.30pm tomorrow and break Hoskins’s ribs unless he unbars his son. Hoskins remains obdurate. And that’s the entirety of the set-up, five minutes in.

So having gone with such a clean, unadorned set-up — in itself the casual gift of a master — the joy of the next hour was seeing just how McGovern was going to play it all out. The late Alan Coren’s advice to writers was: “When you hit on a third thought, pick up the pen. That one is just yours.” With McGovern, however, what you’re dealing with is what appears to be the ninth thought along. He can bust a third-act twist that will make you simply stand up and applaud the screen.

So here’s Bob Hoskins, due to be beaten up, at 3.30pm. Where would any other screenwriter take this? Let’s go through the possibilities:

1. The local community come together and save Hoskins and “their” pub from the bully. You can never crush the spirit of the people! We are at our best when we are united. Yeah!

2. Hoskins’s wife and the gangster’s wife get together and, through some loveable fishwifey collusion, save their daft menfolk from their own foibles. Tsk, those men! Let’s all have a lovely Baileys anna ’ug.

3. Hoskins’s kids and the gangsters’ kids get together and through some inspiring can-do young-folk idealism, and some side-plot to do with “the internet”, save the old folks from themselves. Tsk, those adults! Let’s have great party, on a roof, with sexy teenage kissing. Cor.

4. Something to do with someone finding out they have cancer. Realisations about the important things in life all round. Sad.

5. Something to do with an unexpected cameo from Sue Johnston. Probably involves a secret abortion in 1971. Crying.

6. Plane crashes into the pub. Tsk, those Iranian bombers! Politics.

7. A letter arrives … from an alien! Hoskins has Mars powers, and will laser the gangster with his eyes! Sci-fi. Woot!

8. The Moldavian revolutionaries massacre everyone, except Joan Collins.

So what did McGovern do? In the event, he sent proud Hoskins off for his beating. Then he sent the battered Hoskins round to the gangster’s house, and told him that he and his son were now welcome at his pub, and that drinks tonight would be “on the ’aaaaase”.

Standing behind his bar that night, Hoskins could barely see through the stitches to his eye. And when the gangster and his son came in, he started to pour their drinks.

“Do you think I should have barred you?” he asked Callum, the gangster’s son, as the glasses slowly filled.

Callum, actually quite a sweet lad, nodded.

Hoskins served him his lager — finished with a cocktail umbrella and a pink straw.

“If you’re bringing him up like a tart, then I’m gonna to serve him like a tart,” Hoskins bawled, in front of the whole pub.

Callum looked at his dad with tears in his eyes. His dad wasraising him like “a tart”, and they both knew it. Hoskins had won. As a final twist, Hoskins then kicked out every single customer in the pub, for not supporting him in the first place.

It was a conclusion only Jimmy McGovern would have come up with — as unique and wonderful as a fingerprint on a wineglass that, on closer examination, looks exactly like Ava Gardner’s face. As far as scriptwriting goes in Britain, everyone else still has to step to this.