As the poet and novelist turns 80, he muses on mortality, the Beats and open mic evenings
John Fuller’s house is deceptive. It sits at the end of a quiet street in north Oxford, whose broad, leafy vistas have long been the province of dons and daydreamers, although those denizens have now been joined by the super-wealthy, with their iceberg basements and climate-controlled wine cellars. Fuller, who celebrated his 80th birthday on New Year’s Day, settled here in the 1960s, and spent his academic career teaching English at Magdalen College where he eventually became vice-president. One of his duties was conducting an inventory of the college silver; the whole business was, he says amusedly, “almost like being a butler, or the social secretary”.
He also raised his family here, repeatedly extending the smallish house rather than moving, and so the experience of wandering through it is quite peculiar, with doors opening on to parquet-floored new rooms, all filled with books, pictures, chess sets, pianos. I use the word Tardis about three times, and then the photographer arrives and does the same; we’re both a bit embarrassed by the poverty of our imagination, or at least our cultural references.
I don’t think anybody would write a poem unless somebody had previously written one
I was craftily ensconced in this rather cushy job where you were being paid to think about literature
We all thought the Beats were apolitical – we were suspicious of that
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