Recently I posted my review about The Messiah of Morris Avenue, a great debut novel by Tony Hendra. Through the power of social networking and email, I recently had the opportunity to interview this author and greatly enjoyed doing so because I not only found the book interesting and engaging but he coincidentally is the creator of one of the funniest bits of television I have ever seen. Ka is a wheel. While my questions were relatively short, I found Mr. Hendra’s answers to be much more insightful, interesting and frankly lengthy than I ever could have hoped to receive. I guess that it is like how the essays written for an in-person exam are much shorter than those provided when given a take-home test.
In trying to keep things to a nice round number, I asked Tony a total of 10 questions. 8 questions were about the book and his career and the last 2 were about some recent controversies to which he has been linked. Here is the exchange:
JL: First off: Do you believe in God? If so, how would you describe this higher power?
TH: I do believe in god but less as a person or presence than as than the inescapable conclusion to a couple of very fundamental questions: Why not just nothing? Or Wittgenstein’s ‘the question is: why does the universe exist at all?’ This is not to detract in any way from science, in particular astrophysics, quantum physics, relativity theory, string theory etc. I believe the science-religion face-off to be a totally phony one. On the other hand I think these disciplines don’t answer – and often dismiss – such fundamental questions as irrelevant or superstitious or semantic, when they’re not. They’re a profound part of human inquiry: questions that have always existed and always will. That said, the imminence of this force, reality or dimension, its presence in our lives once accepted is also inescapable – in the minute grungy details of everyday life as well as the vastness of the universe(s). As Jay says ‘we’re (meaning god) the architect of all existence but we’re also its super’ I find that idea exciting even comforting. If there is a god he she or it, is just as present in the pixels of this screen I’m writing on as in that nebulae a trillion light years away across the immeasurable reaches of space.
JL: I believe that Christianity took about 400 years to truly catch on from the time Jesus lived (Constantine the Great legalized the religion in the 400’s). How long would it take for a new religion to make its way into the mainstream these days?
TH: Historically I’m not sure about that. Christianity certainly took 300 years to sort itself out and find its way through the thickets of what it called heresy but were actually competing versions of Christianity or vestiges of other older belief-systems that had attached themselves to it. The Council of Nicaea in 325 called by Constantine might be considered some kind of watershed I suppose. As to the far more fascinating prospect of how long it would take now – well I sort of address that in my epilogue. If the Messiah is successful enough I would love to write a second volume taking as my starting point the epilogue: the development of a new Christianity in the mid-21st century and tracking it through say its first century. Could be fantastic.
There was a fabulous book in the mid-50s called Canticle for Lebowitz, which did much the same thing. After the nuclear holocaust which wiped out most of the world, a new organized religion begins, akin in many ways to the Christianity of the early Church but weirdly skewed; the author creates a grim and magical version of the Dark Ages but set in the future – and what’s more in the US not Europe. It’s a great model. I’d love to have shot at that.
JL: How realistic of a portrait does the book paint about what is going on in America and the rest of the world these days?
TH: Very close – I think this is fiction that might almost be considered non-fiction. The way the book came about was: in November 2004 as I watched these Republicans preening themselves over a victory they attributed to their ‘Christian’ values, I couldn’t help thinking how far it was from the Christianity I grew up with and was nurtured in by Father Joe. And the best way I could think of to do that was to have the real Christ showing up and revealing these people for the unholy thugs they were/are.
I had toyed with this idea – Christ returning or versions of Christ – before but always satirically. To make this premise stick I had to write it for real – create a credible Christ figure who however entertaining had to be convincing in contrast to the fundamentalists’ caricature of Christianity . It was quite a challenge but in another way a fascinating journey: because I was forced to consider at some depth what in fact I did believe or would like to.
Mark Twain I believe it was, said if Christ came back the Christians would crucify him. And in the Grand Inquisitor passage of The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor threatens to execute the returned Jesus. So the returned Christ is hardly new as an idea. Making it convincing in slightly future New York (Morris Avenue is in the Bronx one of the five boroughs – and the poorest – of New York City) was what made the book so intriguing to write. One of my favourite parallels to the Gospels is when Jay walks on the water – except it’s the filthy polluted East River. There are many darker parallels in the ‘Passion’ chapters in which the Messiah is tried, ‘scourged’ (tortured) and crucified (executed by lethal injection). I remember very clearly the day I first Googled an image of the lethal injection gurney and realized that when condemned prisoners are strapped to it, their arms and legs are in precise cruciform shape. As a writer it was an exhilarating discovery; as a human who loathes the whole notion of the death penalty it was chilling – not I suspect a parallel that had ever occurred to anyone, except maybe some sadistic fundo Baptist. So there are many realistic parallels to what’s going on in the US under the Bush gang.
As to the future I believe that at no point in the close to half a century I’ve lived in the States has the very nature of the US been so under threat. And I mean from within. Although I saw my book as set in a palpable future – 1984 was my working model – many interviewers and reviewers have barely noticed that – preferring to see my ‘parallel America’ as essentially modern, set now. And certainly I’m pessimistic that the theocratic pressures of the Christian right on the US are going to go away. On the contrary we’re going a lot further down that road, before true resistance sets in. One of the main reasons is that the liberal-center-left opposition – and I don’t mean only the Democrats – believes that the Christian right’s success is some kind of temporary aberration in the system, which will soon correct itself, without them having to put much effort into the process. Suicidal if you ask me.
JL: How would you describe the unique perspective that the English “bring to the table” when analyzing and writing about America and Americans?
TH: Well, as I said I’ve lived in NY for a long, long time – 42 years to be exact, far longer than I ever lived in England. I actually tend to be impatient with Brits who come here and start holding forth about the nature of America and Americans, after a whole month spent in NY and LA – however entertaining they may think they’re being. I learnt early on in my American life that you can’t really make people laugh (I was a comedian at the time) unless you’re inside the culture to a degree that you’re saying things from a shared subconscious, a shared set of assumptions and references no-one has to state consciously. In fact it was more of a problem when I went back to England in 1983 to write and produce Spitting Image and realized that in the twenty years I’d been away I’d lost touch with that shared subconscious in England.
That said I do think the tradition of satire I was born into is an immensely useful and solid grounding in both form and attitude. Brits do tend to be more sure of themselves – you might say more fearless – than Americans when attacking institutions and the humans responsible for them. And they understand more instinctively the fundamental irony of satire – that you are saying the opposite of what you actually believe, exaggerating it in fact, to get at how absurd or disgusting (or both) it is. I’m afraid a lot of Americans – at least younger Americans – have been inculcated with deadly literalism which makes them believe that when you’re saying the exact opposite of what you believe, you really mean it. Sigh.
JL: Throughout your career, why has your humor specifically focused on satire?
TH: Once again I’m not sure how true that is anymore. Most of my life I’ve been a satirist/humorist but I began to find that very unsatisfying about ten years ago. I’m proud to have been part of the creation of the Lampoon and Spinal Tap and Spitting Image, but as you get older, you realize that just getting laughs feels like you’re only firing on a couple of cylinders. The process of creating humor often means suspending your belief in the totality of life and reality, refusing to acknowledge the dark as well as the light. That doesn’t have to be the case – great satirists like Waugh Swift, Voltaire, Nathaniel West come to mind. And what-if is one of those forms of satirical suspension (I mentioned 1984 earlier, one of the most famous examples of what-if; another is Doctor Strangelove one of the greatest satires ever written).
I stuck to satire for so long though – what I believe to be true satire as opposed to political or topical humor (see 4) – because when it does work it’s sublimely satisfying, and once or twice in my life it really has. National Lampoon’s Lemmings comes to mind or The President’s Brain Is Missing aka Ron and Nancy on Spitting Image.
JL: How does this book fit in with other the bits of satire you’ve done on American society, specifically the “Spitting Image” series? (As an aside, my sister, father and I know most of the words of the entire “Spitting Image” White House themed episode, including the entire “Ronnie and Nancy” theme song. We believe that to be one of the best bits of satire ever produced and love it with a special love.)
TH: Following on from 5 really: this book is a satire in that what-if style – I have recently written pieces in the American Prospect and HuffPost that do this kind of satire also, taking on the voice and attitudes of my antagonists to do them in. But this premise is more complicated – at a certain point when the flesh-and-blood messiah shows up, the narrative has to becomes much less ironic in tone. That’s why I chose to have a narrator who would make that very tricky transition smoothly – he is a skeptic both towards the theocracy the Christian right has wrought and towards the teachings and spirituality of the messiah. That’s a good thing because as one reviewer pointed out (Jesse Kornbluth for bookreporter.com) satires can be a lot of fun for the first hundred pages but become very tiresome as they works they way out to a conclusion; whereas I shift gears into a much more passionate fiction at – according to Mr Kornbluth I hasten to add – just the right moment.
JL: Speaking of “Spitting Image”: Why where only four Spitting Image episodes produced in America? What happened? Did its humor not translate well to the American audience?
TH: A painful question in some ways. I was a co-creator of SI (with the puppeteers Luck and Flaw) and part of our plan was that in due course – once it was up and running in the UK – I would bring it to the US and put down SI roots there too. Of the SI team only I had the feel for American audiences (as described above in 3.) that would have made a show this extreme palatable to Americans. You would have to get it absolutely right to get away with it. On the other hand the declining Reagan years – not to mention the years of the unspeakable moron Bush 1 – would have been fertile soil. In the event TV politics intervened and I left the show long before I intended. The writers who wrote the HBO specials that were done here (as I recall there were only two), holed up in a hotel in NY for a fortnight with a pile of newsmagazines and tried to write material from that. Needless to say they didn’t have a clue what Americans thought funny or were willing to laugh at, and the specials bombed. Self-destructive these Brits. Had the original plan been kept to, we’d all be a lot richer than we are.
JL: Regarding your memoir Father Joe, Father Joe was obviously a very powerful influence on you. If that is so, then why did it take you more than forty years and two marriages to “straighten up and fly right”?
TH: An enormous question and one which I had to write a 250-page book to answer. Briefly put the world is a very attractive place and I lost my faith; perhaps we all do in a way even those who start with no formal faith. But few people are lucky enough to have so forgiving, and gentle and therefore immensely strong a person in their lives waiting for them when they’re ready to return. In biblical terms my Father Joe story was a modern version of the Prodigal Son; and I think it appealed to so many people because many men and women – even those without faith – feel themselves to be somehow prodigal children and long to return home and see a Father Joe waiting for them at the door. I owe whatever good I found in life – and myself – to him.
My last 2 questions were ones that Mr. Hendra declined to answer. I would be remiss however if I did not post them along with Mr. Hendra’s reasons for not answering them so here they are:
JL: First, in doing research about you, I was surprised to connect the dots and see that you are the same person that is involved with the controversy caused by the publication of your daughter’s memoir “How to Cook your Daughter.” How do you address its charges of sexual abuse, mental cruelty, explosive rages and exposure to danger that she suffered at your hands?
Second, why would Michael McKean accuse you of taking too much credit on “This is Spinal Tap?” especially as he made these accusations over 20 years after the movie came out?
TH: I don’t see the relevance of [questions] 9 and 10 to the current project (the messiah) which is a novel and whose content and thrust has nothing to do with my personal life. other than to reiterate that my daughter’s charges of sexual abuse are and always have been, utterly false, i cannot discuss any issues relating to her, as i have undertaken legal actions in the matter. Question 10 i will be happy to address – there are unaired issues here interest to spinal tap fans – but not in this context.