Precipice is set just before the first World War broke out. What interested you in British prime minister Herbert Asquith and his mistress Venetia Stanley?
I knew the story and I found it fascinating. He wrote her 560 letters. She kept them all. They are all available to read now. He destroyed all the letters she sent him so we have a lopsided view of the affair which feels completely obsessional and weird. I thought that one thing that I could do as a novelist was to invent her side of the correspondence and bring her back to life. The moment I did that, the affair began to feel completely different. We know from his replies to her that she was quite passionate. It was a more rounded affair than historians have thought.
There was one particular incident in August 1914 when there was a leak inquiry because he used to show her secret documents and some of them turned up in fields. So I decided to investigate the man in 1914 who has to find out why these top-secret telegrams have been found lying around the countryside. It gave me the third character – the policeman and MI5 man Paul Deemer who is finding out what is going on. He gives an outside perspective. He is tasked for the modern reader with giving a window into that world.
You specialise in historical fiction with books such as Munich, Act of Oblivion, Fatherland and Enigma. How much of Precipice is fact and how much is fiction?
Every letter from Asquith in the book is genuine. There are five or six thousands words of his letters in this book. That provides the framework. We know how the affair progressed, where they went, where they met and how often they met. We have an enormous amount of detail. I put in the telegrams that were going across his desk in the run up to the first World War and the cabinet meetings and war council meetings.
I used The Times a lot for what people knew at the time. The whole skeleton from the book from July 1914 to May 1915 is all factual. What I invent are her replies and obviously their intimate conversations. I can’t proportion it – what is fact and what is fiction. In a sense it is all fiction, but it is based on truth. I can’t really write unless I feel that something is true. I have to feel that something might or must have happened. That’s my golden rule.
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I try not to put anything in a novel that I know for certain is not true. I thought writing about real-life characters like Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener would be difficult. In fact, that was one of the most pleasurable parts of the book.
People will find it hard reading your book to believe that the 62-year-old prime minister was carrying on like a simpering teenager.
The letters were discovered after Venetia’s death by her daughter Judy in 1948. In 1962 a transcript had been made of them by the Bonham-Carter family, the descendants of Asquith. They were given to Roy Jenkins who was writing a biography of Asquith. He was the first historian to make use of them. He cut off the terms of endearment as all the letters end with a passionate declaration of love. “Have I told you much I love you? Just multiply the stars by the sands”.
They were incredibly passionate, but Jenkins left all of these out. It was not until 1982 that an edition of half the letters were published. It was only then that we got a sense of how besotted he was. It was an erotic obsession I would say. He was head over heels for her. During a quite busy part of the war, he would give up four or five days to travel up to Cheshire to see her.
The bit in the book about them lying out in a grassy hollow in the woods in north Wales and sitting looking at the stars from a bench in the garden are all real. He wrote about it very passionately to her. Clearly something went on between them. He used to take her off for a drive every week or sometimes twice a week out into the countryside. Historians think it was a platonic obsession, but it was more than that in my view.
In your book the British prime minister travels around and is not recognised. Was that really a possibility in 1914?
Yes, it is a fact. He was the last real Victorian prime minister of the country. He was born in 1852. He detested modern means of communication and the newsreels were just starting. Venetia Stanley did actually see him in a newsreel and wrote to him about it. He could travel around without a bodyguard or a secretary. He could go to the end of Downing Street and hail a taxi to go and see the king.
It was remarkable he could move around like that. He started after the outbreak of the first World War to get recognised in the streets and was followed around by what he called “loafers”. He was out of his time. There was something quite attractive about that, but it meant that he was easy prey to politicians like Lloyd George who were perfectly in tune to this era of the press barons and the mass media.
Ireland is a significant backdrop. I get the impression from your novel that he didn’t know much about Ireland and regarded it as something of a nuisance.
It was a problem that needed to be solved. The Liberal government was propped up for most of the time by the Irish nationalists and the Labour Party. It didn’t have a majority in the House of Commons.
By the summer of 1914 John Redmond (the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party) had said that the time had come for the promise of Home Rule to be fulfilled. It threatened to split the Liberal Party. The country was moving towards a civil war. There had been the Curragh mutiny. Asquith had taken over as the secretary of state for war to try and bring some steadiness to the British army. Until late July 1914, the preoccupation was with Ulster and how it could be avoided.
There was in some quarters a feeling of relief when the archduke was assassinated and Austria issued the ultimatum to Serbia. This meant the Irish problem could be postponed yet again which, indeed, it was. The Tories decided to take it off the table and Redmond agreed as well until the war was over. That was Asquith’s chief preoccupation in the summer of 1914.
You seem to suggest that Asquith’s infatuation may have had real-life consequences for the British war effort. Instead of holding Winston Churchill to account at cabinet meetings for his Gallipoli plans, he spent them scribbling love letters to Venetia Stanley.
I simply report the facts that in the war council meeting in January 1915, when the western front was stalemated and the British were looking around for places to use the Royal Navy, Churchill laid out the plan for Gallipoli. Asquith was at that meeting as we have a letter from him to Venetia which he wrote at that meeting. You realise that he is not paying full attention to, in hindsight, Churchill’s idea that he could take Constantinople with 1,500 men of the naval division.
I don’t know how crucial this was. I can only report the facts that 32,000 British troops died in Gallipoli. It doesn’t look to me that his mind was firmly on the job at this point.
There was also the political disaster of the 1915 shells crisis when there was a great shortage of shells on the western front. He made a speech in Newcastle that there never had been a shortage when in fact he had misremembered a document that Kitchener had sent him.
He didn’t have it to hand because he had sent it to Venetia. That did have big political consequences. When she broke off the affair with him, he seemed to have a mini-nervous breakdown. Five days later he collapsed the Liberal government and invited Andrew Bonar Law (the Conservative leader) to form a coalition. There was never a Liberal government again. She is woven into the history of the period in a remarkable way.
You were friends with Tony Blair during the New Labour era. Are you happy the current Labour Party is back in power?
I’m happy that the Conservatives are out of power. They have been ruinous for the country with Brexit. They have injected a kind of madness into British politics. My principal feeling is one of relief. It is early days for this government. The truth is that they have a very grim inheritance. The level of debt and the cost of serving the debt is so huge that is quite hard to grow the economy if you are increasing taxes, but it looks like they will have to do it. I can’t say I wake every morning with a song of joy in one’s heart about the government. There’s very little that they can do that is inspiring.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Yes, not far from where I live is a graveyard in Sutton Courtney in Oxford and almost side by side are the graves of Asquith and George Orwell.
What is the best advice you have got as a writer?
I will paraphrase a very good piece of advice from Philip Roth. “You will find you are writing a lot of crap. Have patience with your own crap. Keep going back to it and it will get better. You work on it and it gets better.”
Who do you admire the most?
I’m not a hero worshipper. I don’t have great villains or heroes so there isn’t one person I’m obsessed with.
What is the most beautiful book you own?
I have a first edition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which has the most wonderful cover. I’m very proud of that. I also have a first edition of A Clergyman’s Daughter inscribed by Eric Blair which is a great thing to have.
What’s your favourite quotation?
Cicero’s quotation about history. “People who were ignorant about what occurred before they were born are destined to always remain a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
A book to make you laugh?
I always found Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis funny.
A book that has moved you to tears?
I don’t think that I am moved to tears much by literary works. I’m moved to tears as I get older by athletes achieving something marvellous especially when the loser goes over to congratulate the winner. I find something moving about that.
Precipice is published by Penguin. Robert Harris is speaking at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, at 8pm on Tuesday, September 3rd. He will be signing copies of Precipice at Books Upstairs, Hodges Figgis, Dubray, Grafton St, and Eason, St Stephen’s Green between 11am and noon on September 4th.
