By Jackie McGlone

POET, NOVELIST, critic, memoirist, journalist, librettist, dramatist and Professor of Creative Writing and Life Writing at Goldsmith University, London, Blake Morrison is a walking definition of a man of letters. Uniquely qualified then to write a stylish literary novel about a writer.

So what stopped him? “Generally, I have avoided writing books about writing. I always said I would never write a work of fiction about a writer, but I just thought, ‘To hell with it,’” admits the twinkly-eyed Morrison, clearly amused and perhaps somewhat puzzled by his decision to do so. For on the table sits a proof copy of his latest novel -- his fourth -- The Executor. It’s narrated by Matt, a youngish, somewhat slow-witted literary editor and struggling novelist who becomes a literary executor of his late friend, “the bow-tie poet” Robert Pope’s estate.

It turns out to be a poisoned chalice: a cache of unpublished, potentially explosive, apparently sexually revelatory material is unearthed as Matt conducts a near-archaeological dig into his friend’s archives only to be faced with a moral and ethical dilemma: to publish or not to publish. To invade privacy or not to invade privacy. The society of dead poets, it turns out, is anything but congenial. What went on between the sheets -- cotton and paper?

Matt also has two strong-minded women to contend with: Pope’s haughty widow and his own fabulously forthright wife. Towards the end of the book, we meet, albeit briefly, another splendid woman -- a straggly-haired, energetic classicist, “lively, accessible, critically astute,” whose mission it is to save the ancient world. Remind you of anyone?

Part morality tale, part detective story, The Executor is a cracking read -- and it offers the literary bonus of two enjoyable books for the price of one. The novel ends with a collection of 26 poems, Pope’s contentious final work, Love’s Alphabet, which begins with Anon and concludes with Zero.

As “an ex-poet” -- Morrison’s own description of himself on his website -- which was the most fun to write, the prose or the poetry?

“Both genres were really good fun to write in, although I am less of an ex-poet nowadays,” says the silvery-haired, 67-year-old erstwhile literary editor, whose last collection of poems, Shingle Street -- his first for almost three decades -- came out in 2015. To be fair, he began his literary career as a poet and critic of poetry, with Dark Glasses (1984), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, which he followed with 1987’s fierce The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper (and Other Poems) and Pendle Witches (1996), gorgeously illustrated by the great Paula Rego. He’s written a critical overview of the mid-50s poetry scene, The Movement, as well as editing The Penguin Book of British Poetry with Andrew Motion (1982). He started writing poetry when he was 15-years-old and will always be “a Larkin man.”

Sometimes, he quotes the poet Michael Longley: “There are only young poets and old poets. There aren’t middle-aged poets.” Well, says Morrison, in his bluff, cheerful, Yorkshire way, he’s “at the back end” now. “I’ve returned to poetry for various reasons. Over Christmas, I began going back into my own archive. I keep diaries, with notes at one end, poems at the other. I’ve crates of stuff, drafts of everything I’ve ever published. I have no idea what will become of the archive, perhaps the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds will take some of it. They have Simon Armitage’s -- and he’s younger than me.”

Skipton-born, South London-based, Morrison wrote the Pope poems as an experiment, testing himself to see if he could engage with a long-dead Classical poet, a conceit that affords the twist in the tale. “I actually hold that back in the novel. Before I began writing [the novel] I’d started adapting these poems, which are not a fully comprehensive translation but more a sort of remaking although they did not feel like my voice at all. Then I really wasn’t sure what to do with them,” he confesses.

“I feel some ambivalence about them. To have published some under my own name, I’d have felt, I don’t know why, awkward. I don’t think all of them are bad; I don’t think all of them are great poems. They are there for readers to decide how good they are because there’s quite a debate in the book itself as to whether they are any good because they are so different to Pope’s previous formalist work.

“Then I got this idea of the difficult position of a literary executor and I began to see how I could use the poems. It was an interesting exercise because I was inhabiting the character of Pope who was inhabiting the character of another poet.” At one stage, Matt thinks, “The over-identification was mad. But Rob had sometimes described himself as ‘slightly off my trolley...’ and he’d got odder in later years.” Additionally, Morrison is adept at writing in different voices since he’s adapted and translated many plays into broad Yorkshire dialect in collaboration with the mighty Northern Broadsides, the Halifax-based theatre company founded 25 years ago by his friend, the Glasgow-trained actor Barrie Rutter.

Writing poetry in Robert Pope’s voice was almost like performing, Morrison acknowledges -- not that he has ever been an actor, although he has been played on screen by Colin Firth in the 2007 film adaptation of his memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father? Anyway, he loves being in rehearsals with a company, he confides when we meet over coffee at a Paddington Station hotel, where a certain literary Bear looms large in the lobby. Morrison is on his way to Plymouth University to deliver a memorial lecture about Life Writing and the Writing Life, his specialist subjects so to speak, although when I list his many writing roles, he says he’s just a guy who can’t make up his mind.

“I think this novel came out of working with a lot of Life Writing students -- apart from my own life writing -- and thinking about issues they increasingly raise, such as worrying about the effect of what they write on somebody. People really do fret about that and there have been lots of cases in recent years with various controversies. Yeah, it’s that, ‘Whose life is it anyway?’ question. Look at the Plath-Hughes estate.

“At Goldsmiths, a lawyer came and talked about freedom of expression versus the right to privacy. That got me really interested in the ethics of it all. Anyway, I like novels that have a moral problem at their heart and that is what The Executor is supposed to be.”

In Life Writing, a playful poem in Shingle Street, he writes: “It’s safer telling lies about the dead,” but surely he’s entirely responsible for the plethora of Life Writing about the dead that pours out nowadays? When he wrote his eloquently moving, profoundly painful memoir of his doctor dad, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), it made his name. It also opened the floodgates for family memoirs -- some good, some ghastly.

“It is all my fault!” he exclaims, then says: “Absolutely not! When someone says as you have just done that it is all my fault, it’s always in a sense of blame rather than credit. I honestly thought there was a time when life writing was slipping away, but now there’s a new trend -- nature writing as part of recovery from illness, such as cancer.”

After his book about his father and his own childhood, Morrison wrote another memoir of his enigmatic, Irish mother, Agnes, also a physician, Things My Mother Never Told Me. In writing about his parents, he has written, his aim was to commemorate them -- “restore them to life even” -- with honesty and affection. “As a poet, I came to narrative and storytelling really late. It was only when my father died and I wanted to write about him, that I knew that I could not say in a poem what I wanted to. It took three non-fiction books, however, before I took the plunge into fiction.”

Twenty-five years ago, Morrison covered the James Bulger trial for the New Yorker, producing a 10,000-word essay, which he felt dissatisfied with. He spent four years writing As If (1997), his controversial book based on the case. In a recent Channel 4 documentary, he repeated his view that the two children who so brutally killed the toddler, were “small boys” and should not have been tried as adults.

“The morning after the programme came out, my son said, ‘Dad, don’t go on Twitter.” [He has three adult children with his wife Kathy, to whom almost of his work is dedicated.] It turned out he had been well and truly trolled. “I didn’t know because I’m never on Twitter anyway.

“But to look at them in that courtroom was to realise they were two wee boys, however disturbed. It hardened my feelings that we should not be treating children in the same way we treat adults. And however we judge their crimes, we should not do it in the way it was done in the Bulger case. I still believe that all these years on.”

The Executor, by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus, £16.99).