American Psycho. P

Interview

Bret Easton Ellis: 'So you're a misogynist, a racist – so what? Does it make your art less interesting?'

This article is more than 13 years old

The American author on how pain is the inspiration for all his books, getting off drugs and telling the truth

Decca Aitkenhead

Monday 26 July 2010

W

hat is it about Bret Easton Ellis that sends people mad? Readers love him or hate him with a violence seldom found in the literary world; all the friends I canvassed either went dark at the mention of his name, or giddy with excitement. For 25 years Ellis has provoked wildly mixed reviews – on balance more bad than good – and has never won a major literary prize. Yet the author still inspires the kind of ferocious frenzy more typical of a rock star.

The irony is that Ellis himself is almost entirely absent from his novels. His writing deliberately contains no authorial voice as a commentary on the perspective of the narrator – so in American Psycho, it's not clear whether the murders recounted by its yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman even take place at all, or are psychotic fantasies.

On the other hand, Ellis's novels are entirely about him. The parallels between the lives of his narrators and the author come so close as to verge on farcical; Lunar Park is about a writer called Bret Easton Ellis who wrote a notorious book called American Psycho. His books read less like novels than an unconventional form of autobiographical therapy.

So we have the paradox of a writer whose voice is absent from his novels – even though they're all about him – yet whose personality is a literary sensation, arguably even more of a phenomenon than anything he's ever written. Variously constructed as a hip literary bratpacker, an enfant terrible, a drug-gobbling party boy, the Ellis identity is endlessly contested. Is he a misogynist? A monster? Or a master satirist? Is he a genius? Is he a fraud?

I spent a week following Ellis about, reading him and re-reading him, trying to work it out – and I'm still not sure what I think. But I'm pretty sure he's one of the most disingenuous people I've ever met.

Ellis hasn't slept for 48 hours when we meet at his Mayfair hotel, on account of a transatlantic flight. In a sweatshirt and jeans, sluggish with jetlag, at 46 he has outgrown the buff pretty-boy look of his youth – and some of his old habits too. Hoping to liven himself up, he orders from room service, and sighs: "I really need that coke." After a knowing smile, he adds, "Now when I used to say that, I meant something else. But I don't say that any more."

If you were casting an actor to play Ellis, on appearances the obvious choice would be Kiefer Sutherland, but when he talks he becomes surprisingly like Ben Stiller. His speech is slow and deliberate, conveying a faintly ironic impression of intimacy – but also the occasional suggestion of contempt, as if accommodating his interviewer's stupidity. At other moments, though, he adopts the role of the dumb ingenue, affecting innocent incomprehension with faux naive, Stiller-ish mannerisms.

Ellis has just released his sixth novel, Imperial Bedrooms, which revisits the cast of his 1985 debut novel, Less Than Zero, and its narrator, Clay. "I just found I had this internal dialogue the whole time," Ellis explains. "I kept wondering what would have happened to Clay." The answer, it transpired, was that Clay had grown from a rich, spoilt college kid into a successful screenwriter and full-blown narcissist – alienated, exploitative, sado-masochistic and amoral. The novel opens with Clay's return from New York to Los Angeles, where he quickly becomes embroiled in a Hollywood-noir thriller plot involving threatening texts from unseen stalkers, dark and duplicitous sex, sinister disappearances and the requisite scenes of unspeakable violence.

Funnily enough, Ellis himself recently moved back to LA after 20 years in New York, has become a Hollywood screenwriter, and lives in a minimalist apartment on Doheny Drive identical to Clay's in Imperial Bedrooms. Isn't that quite a coincidence? "No, I think it's completely my process, and it always has been with every book I've ever written. Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time. That's just the way I work. So to me it's not coincidence, it just means I'm going through stuff, and I'm working through that stuff in my novels."

When Ellis wrote Imperial Bedrooms, he was working through his return to the city of his childhood, following the sudden death of his partner of six years, Mike Kaplan. In a recent article, Ellis's old friend Jay McInerney said that before Ellis left New York, "He wasn't taking really great care of himself, let's put it that way. Sometimes we all need the geographical cure." Did McInerney mean he was taking too many drugs?

"Correct. That is correct. Jay is correct. And New York seemed to be a trigger." Ellis's hedonism has reached mythological proportions on Manhattan's literary scene, but he says he'd simply wound up with a "core group of friends who you are with to do drugs with". Every drug? "Pretty much every drug. But mainly college-educated, white people drugs. Coke. Coke and wine, basically." There was no rehab or AA – he just found that in LA he could "drift away" from drugs. "So that was one reason to leave New York – because of its associations with all the fun times." His voice drops to a whisper, eyes wide, mockingly naughty. "The endless weekends.

"But a lot of the reason why those endless weekends were happening in New York," he goes on more matter-of-factly, "and why there was a lot of overdoing it, was because the party was over. I was just – I was bored in New York. I wasn't interested in the publishing scene, I do not like going to book dinners every night, and I don't like being around people who just want to talk about publishing gossip. It's pretty fucking cool on one level. But it's a grown-up world, that's what it is, it's a really grown-up world. And I was wanting to get back in touch with, I don't know, my inner adolescent or whatever I guess. I wanted to relax."

Ellis said recently that he would "rather hang out with Robert Pattinson than Richard Ford", so I ask if he suffers from intellectual insecurity. "Yes, I do." He laughs. "I do. Or I did in New York. But not in LA! LA's easy to drift around in. I just find it fun."

It wasn't fun at first, though. Ellis felt lonely and isolated and paranoid. "Well," he shrugs, "I was working in Hollywood." The novel's portrait of the film industry is unrelentingly bleak – and for Ellis, whose novels have on the whole been disastrously ill-served by Hollywood when adapted for screen, you wonder why he'd want anything to do with its world. What is it about misery the writer finds so irresistibly compelling?

"Well, pain's interesting," he drawls languidly. "Depravity's interesting. All of my books come from pain. I mean," and he slowly starts to smile, "what's ever been interesting about joy?"

Fans certainly share his fascination. The following evening he gives a talk at the South Bank Centre to a vast auditorium packed out with a fashionable young crowd, and almost every question is about American Psycho, his most graphically violent work. Later that week he addresses the book club of a women's magazine, and the queue for signings snakes all the way back to the toilets.

The Rules of Attraction. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Before an audience of admirers, Ellis becomes a fantastic showman – flirtatious and quick-witted, riffing off the adulation. But when I ask if he minds that his detractors regard him as depraved, he looks blankly bemused. "Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don't care what an audience thinks of me."

In many critics' eyes, the excruciating violence his narrators like to inflict on women must make Ellis a misogynist – but to this charge he affects only well-rehearsed indifference. "If you're writing about a misogynist, does that then make a book misogynist? I don't think I'm a misogynist. But even if I was, so what? So you're a misogynist – so what? So you're a homophobe, or a racist – so what? Does that make your art less interesting? I don't think so. Call me a misogynist. I think basically most men are misogynistic. And it is what it is."

That's his stock answer to the misogyny charge these days, and it's not bad. But he also claims it never occurred to him that American Psycho would cause offence – "No, not at all. That was shocking" – which feels hard to believe. "I think Bret knew," his friend McInerney said recently, "somewhere in his heart, that that book was going to be tremendously controversial. His protestations to the contrary are a little bit disingenuous." I suspect McInerney's right, after Ellis tells me about a scene he has just written in which two women discuss rape fantasies. "And I know I'm going to get into soooo much trouble," he adds, looking the opposite of troubled. Yet when I ask if he enjoys causing a hoo-hah, he protests: "I never think anything I write is going to cause a hoo-hah!"

The sexual violence in Imperial Bedrooms comes towards the very end of the novel, and feels almost cursory, which made me wonder if the author himself was growing bored with it, and had only stuck some in because readers would expect it. Ellis agrees that "that sequence does seem kind of cursory" – but only, he goes on, because Clay is so numbly affectless that even rape and torture would look banal to him. One critic complained of the novel that Ellis had "never written with less vigour" – but the author took this as a compliment. "It's true. But I have to follow the narrator – and that's just what Clay is like. He just doesn't have a lot of vigour.

"I was taken to task by Norman Mailer about my approach to writing novels," Ellis goes on. "He said that Mr Ellis has this idea that he must follow every single thought of the narrator he has created, and not bring his own sensibility into the picture. And yes, when I wrote American Psycho I had a huge note on my desk saying 'NO METAPHORS!', because Patrick Bateman can't see something as being like anything else. There were so many beautiful metaphors I couldn't use, because I realised Patrick Bateman would never use them in a million years.

"Now I understand where Mailer is coming from. He's talking about that moment when the writer has established the narrator, this character, and he thinks, now buddy, it's time for you to get in there so the two of you are on the track. But I don't agree. It's just not how I work. I do admire certain novels where that occurs. But most of the time, these novels are about people who are not college professors, and yet they're thinking and speaking as if they were college professors, and I find that completely distracting."

For once, Ellis sounds completely sincere – and I suddenly begin to see his novels in a new light. Maybe what are often thought of as their flaws – the coldly unknowable quality of their characters, the absence of plausible emotions, or any kind of inner depth – might in fact be their genius. Maybe Ellis is one of very few novelists who can truly surrender to the gaze of his creations – however distorted their view might be. But when I suggest that this would explain why so many people get confused, and tend to mistake the narrator for the author, Ellis turns all coyly disingenuous again.

"Aren't there so many other things to be confused by? I mean, really. Just to be confused by me? You're stroking my ego," he purrs sarcastically. "I mean, really. So many people confused by me?"

Well, I say, when you write novels about narrators who live in your apartment, or share your own name, you don't exactly try to disabuse them of their confusion, do you? Very abruptly, he yawns, looks bored, and examines his sweatshirt. Feeling we've probably got to the end, I say I should go. In a flash, Ellis looks up. "Are you sure? Have you got it all? Are you sure?" Well, obviously not, I laugh. I've always got dozens more questions I could ask. "About what?" he marvels plaintively, pretending to find such interest in him unfathomable. "About what?"

Sometimes I think Ellis may in fact be less disingenuous than he seems. Perhaps he really is bewildered by all the fuss and fascination he inspires – and perhaps he's right to be. At the South Bank Centre he says he wishes he could write more books, only he just doesn't have very many ideas – and the audience falls about laughing. But what they take for a witticism might very well be true; most of Ellis's novels tell more or less the same story, about the same alienated ennui, and maybe they really are nothing more than the fictionalised diaries of an unremarkably unhappy man. Maybe the phenomenon of Ellis the literary rock star is just a figment of his fans' imagination.

When Less Than Zero was published a quarter of a century ago, Ellis says, "I would read about 'Bret Easton Ellis', and I'd go, Well, that isn't me. But I realised 'Bret Easton Ellis' was going to take over, and that I was more or less dead. But I get it; he's the better story. The audience's collective notion of who I am is a much better, sexier story." Does he mean he is more boring than 'Bret Easton Ellis'? "Of course I am. Because I'm real."

I have no idea how real Ellis is. He can be clever and engaged and funny and humane – or smug, humourless, and cold to the point of cruel. He also, as he has said himself in several interviews, likes to lie – especially to journalists. When I bring this up, he reacts indignantly – "I've been accused of that. I never have." But I've read quotes, I say, where you say so yourself! "I was joking," he says, rolling his eyes at my gullibility. "I don't lie in interviews. I never have. I've never flat out lied in an interview. I haven't lied to you once in this interview."

At the South Bank Centre the following evening, someone asks him why he'd decided to edit out a terrorist sub- plot from the final draft of Lunar Park. Ellis looks baffled. "There was never any terrorist sub-plot," he says. "What gave you that idea?" "But that's what you said in an interview I read," the questioner tells Ellis. The author thinks for a moment, then laughs. "Oh, yeah. Right. No, I made that up. I was just lying."

THE GUARDIAN