Robert Greene: 'I felt like a child exposing what the parents are up to' Photograph: Amanda Marsalis for the Guardian
Some people think
Robert Greene
is evil. They're the ones that read The 48 Laws of Power, his
bestselling 1998 debut, saw the world depicted as a writhing snakepit of
treachery and mind games, and felt that the author must be part of the
problem. Other fans think he's the solution, including Will Smith,
American Apparel CEO Dov Charney (who calls it "the Bible for atheists")
and so many rappers, from Jay-Z on down, that the New Yorker dubbed him
"
hip-hop's Machiavelli".
But when you advise your readers, "Discover each man's thumbscrew" (Law
33) or "Pose as a friend, work as a spy" (Law 14), some are prone to
expect the worst.
Mastery
by
Robert Greene
"I'm not who people expect me to be," says Greene, an earnest,
thoughtful 53-year-old with a somewhat tense smile. "I'm not Henry
Kissinger." In conversation at his London publisher's office, as in his
books, he always has an apt quotation to hand. "Charles de Gaulle said, I
realised that when people met me they were expecting to meet Charles de
Gaulle. I had to learn to be the man inside the quotes. But generally I
prefer to be myself. I don't have to pretend to be this mastermind."
Greene
doesn't think he's evil, obviously, but nor does he consider himself
particularly good. He says he's just a realist. "I believe I described a
reality that no other book tried to describe," he says. "I went to an
extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out
there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me
angry."
Even if The 48 Laws of Power can be read as a bastard's
handbook, he wrote it to demystify the dirty tricks of the executives he
encountered during a dispiriting period as a Hollywood screenwriter. "I
felt like a child exposing what the parents are up to and laughing at
it," he says. "Opening the curtain and letting people see the Wizard of
Oz."
Greene is accustomed to defending his first book, but I
suspect he's trying to move beyond it with his latest, Mastery, which
studies how talent is developed, using a heavily researched slew of
examples including Einstein, Darwin, Goethe and John Coltrane. "I was a
little worried that young people would think the only game was being
political and manipulative when really the bigger game is being so good
at what you do that nobody can argue with your results," he says.
Mastery
is an illuminating book but its message (the secret of success is
working incredibly hard for many years) is much tougher and more
exacting than the follow-your-dreams manuals with which it will share
the self-help shelves. "I hate them," he says. "I was under a lot of
pressure to write something faster and shorter and easier for people to
consume and I resisted that. So maybe this book won't sell because I've
loaded the donkey with all that baggage, but I do at least try to debunk
the idea that it's all about your parents and education and wealth."
On
that subject, Greene himself had an "insanely middle-class" upbringing
in Los Angeles. His father sold cleaning supplies while his mother was a
housewife with thwarted artistic ambitions. After studying classics at
college, Greene travelled around Europe, working dozens of menial jobs
while trying to find the right outlet for his writing. Back in the US,
he meandered through journalism and into Hollywood, before finally
publishing The 48 Laws of Power in his late 30s.
His bestsellers
(including the similarly gimlet-eyed The Art of Seduction and The 33
Strategies of War) have made him a wealthy man, but he could be even
richer if he took all the offers that came his way. For one thing, he
doesn't think he's a great public speaker. "I'm not like Malcolm
Gladwell, who makes millions from that kind of thing. Maybe it's a
shortcoming. I'm so earnest in trying to give people so much information
that I overdo it." He laughs almost inaudibly. "I need to get a
shtick."
He turns down a lot of consultancy work because he is
only drawn to people with interesting life stories, whether Charney
(he's on American Apparel's board of directors), 50 Cent (they
collaborated on 2009's The 50th Law) or Barack Obama. He is now working
with labour organisers in Latin America, and his liberal politics
disappoint some of his fans in the business world, who expect him to be a
champion of the ruthless go-getter.
"I'm a huge Obama supporter,"
he says. "Romney is satan to me. The great thing about America is that
you can come from the worst circumstances and become something
remarkable. It's Jay-Z and 50 Cent and Obama and my Jewish ancestors –
that's the America we want to celebrate. Not the vulture capitalist.
These morons like Mitt Romney, they produce nothing. Republicans are
feeding off fairytales and that's what did them in this year and
hopefully will keep doing them in for ever, because they're a lot of
scoundrels."
Greene claims that most of the emails he receives are
from readers who used his first book to understand and outwit
manipulative people, but surely he has inadvertently created a few
scoundrels himself? "There are people on the borderline and maybe the
book helps them to move into that sociopathic realm so then I feel bad,"
he concedes, "but mainly it's positive."
Mastery is so much
warmer and more encouraging than its predecessors that I wonder if his
view of human nature has softened. Instead of backstabbing brutes, are
we in fact marvellous creatures?
He pulls a face, resisting the siren song of Pollyanna. "I'm not sure I'd go that far."
