Interviews

Recently, we were lucky enough to ask Lynne Truss a few questions about herself and her writing. Lynne’s latest book, Get Her Off the Pitch!, is a hilarious chronicle of her strange journey through the world of sports journalism. Author of the worldwide bestsellers Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Talk to the Hand, she is one of Britain’s best-loved comic writers.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m five foot nine. I’ve weighed the same for about five years, but every day I read the scales and say the same thing: “Oh, surely not.” I spend all my time writing and emailing. If I can’t get an internet connection, I panic. I text all day, or at least until all my texting friends drop from fatigue. I am in love with communication. The most tragic moment in literature for me is when that confessional note goes under that carpet in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I’ve just acquired a dog for the first time in my life, and he is bliss on little furry legs. His arrival has been an enormous surprise to my two aloof cats. They keep shooting glances at me that say, “How could you do this to us?” And I shrug and say, “Actually, you brought this on yourselves.”

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We recently had the chance to ask Patrick Gale a few questions about himself and his writing. Patrick is the author of, among other titles, The Whole Day Through and Notes from an Exhibition. His fantastic new collection of short stories, Gentleman’s Relish, is due out today from Fourth Estate.

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m the last novelist in England, or the first, if you’re sailing from across the Atlantic. I’m typing this at my desk, looking over our garden and barely resisting the temptation to get out there and start deadheading.

What books have had a lasting impact on you?

Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea for showing me what was possible. Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library for showing me anything is permitted in fiction if you do it with style and charm. Saki and Chekhov’s short stories for showing how much can be achieved in a tiny space.

Why do you write?

Compulsion. Also I think it feeds my profound curiosity about people’s lives. If I didn’t write I think I’d have to be a priest or a psychotherapist, probably the latter as it pays better and involves less silliness.

As an author, what are you most proud (or embarrassed) of writing?

I’m pretty proud of writing Rough Music. Although it was Notes From an Exhibition that won me a much bigger audience I think the earlier novel was a technical breakthrough for me. And it suddenly seemed to grant me permission to stop smiling, as a writer, and go into the dark places.

What is your biggest failure?

Not counting my earliest novels, which were crazily under written because I was so impatient, I’d say my Little Bits of Baby and The Cat Sanctuary. They’re not failures, exactly, and they each have a loyal following, but I had a pretty lazy editor at the time who was content with far less than I know I was capable of. I respond well to pushing and he didn’t push me nearly enough. They’re both stories that deal with very dark themes within a comic framework and if I wrote them now I know I’d go far deeper into those dark areas. In particular I’d listen more closely to what the female characters were trying to tell me rather than imprisoning them in my (very male) plotting. I think a female editor would have stood up for the female characters as my male editor didn’t.

When you were a kid, what did you think were you going to be when you grew up?

When I was really really small I had secret dreams of being a ballet dancer. Then I settled on music – I’d like to have been a cellist. I still play the cello but it’s a constant source of guilt that I didn’t threw it over for acting once I was a student.

If you could travel anywhere in time, for one day, where would you go and why?

I’d go to Clapham Station on the day Oscar Wilde was made to change trains there on his way to Reading Prison so I could push through the crowd of spitters and hecklers to slip him a letter reassuing him that his words would live on and his love be legalised and celebrated.

Do you like reading e-books?

I don’t know. I’ve never tried. But I love new technology so it’s probably only a matter of time. However I’m also deeply in love with books as things, with peculiar smells and creases and stains. I can’t imagine snatching an e reader from a burning house the way I can a book.

Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?

Francis Poulenc, Colette, Byron, George Cukor and Ann Tyler. But god alone knows what I’d feed them.

What are you working on at the moment?

A new novel is bubbling up nicely. It’s dark and fairly rambling at the moment, about the West Cornwall family of a very good priest who’s a very poor father.

What made you a writer, and when did you realize that writing was where your future lay?

I realized quite late in life, as these things go. A lot of people know they’re going to be writers when they’re children, but I made a conscious decision to become one when I was 22, when, because of my poor health, I saw other career prospects slipping away from me. I knew I could write – you couldn’t take the decision otherwise – but what I didn’t know was whether I could write fiction. I didn’t seem to be what people call a ‘natural storyteller’. I had to learn that bit.

How did you first come across Cromwell, and when did you decide to write about him?

I first came across him when I was a child learning history in a Catholic school. I grew up with the sainted Thomas More looking down from stained-glass windows. As I am a contrarian, it made me ask whether there was more to Cromwell’s story than just his opposition to More, and I carried that question with me. When I began writing, I registered him in my mind as a potential subject. This would have been in the 1970s, before I’d finished my first novel. There seemed to be a lot of blanks in his story, and it wasn’t easy to find out anything about him, but it’s in those gaps that the novelist goes to work.

When you eventually came to write about Cromwell, was there a discovery that helped you to unlock his character?

When I began writing Wolf Hall, it was the arc of Cromwell’s story, the transformation from blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, that fascinated me. I wondered, ‘How is that done?’ You’ve got to try to answer that question – it’s the very kind of question that novels are for. But what made me sure that I could work with him, so to speak, was a letter he wrote to a friend in the 1520s, when he was an MP. It is a huge rhetorical description of the course of Parliament and all the business it dealt with, which finishes with a simple, and totally deflationary, line. I paraphrase: ‘And at the end of it, absolutely nothing changed.’ The wry humour in that letter showed me there was a personality that I could write about.

Another thing that drew me was Cromwell’s will, which he wrote towards the end of the 1520s. When you’ve seen somebody’s life so minutely taken apart, when you know who’s going to get his books and who’s going to get his second-best gelding, and you know the names of the people in his household, you become part of that life. You see his daily existence and routine and his whole system of orienting to the world. Seeing the will was like being able to go into Cromwell’s house and take photographs.

How did you find a title?

I liked the idea of a book that was always in progress, right up until its last words. Wolf Hall, the Seymour house in Wiltshire, is where we’re going at the end of the book. But, of course, I chose it primarily for its metaphorical resonance: who could resist it? The whole of Henry’s court is Wolf Hall.

‘Alistair Campbell with an axe’ is one of the less flattering descriptions given to Cromwell by the historian David Starkey. What persuaded you that this unlikely hero not only required, but actually deserved an advocate?

I think Cromwell’s been given a very hard time by writers. In fiction and drama he’s been caricatured as an evil figure in a black cloak, lurking in the wings with dishonourable intentions. In biography he’s missing, because his private life is almost entirely off the record.

David Starkey’s phrase works wonderfully to alert you to Cromwell’s role as a propagandist for Henry, but Cromwell was a lot more subtle than Alistair Campbell – or at least, more subtle than the popular picture of Alistair Campbell suggests. Cromwell didn’t deploy his heavy artillery unless he needed to. He was a persuader and a negotiator and, to a degree, a compromiser.

I think the picture darkened with the Victorians. Cromwell’s image hasn’t always been bad: in Elizabethan legend and literature he was a hero, but to the Victorians he presented a problem. He wasn’t a varsity man. Historians couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a member of the lower orders rising so high in the hierarchy. There was also a sentimentality about the medieval world, with Cromwell seen as one of its destroyers. This idea persists today.

How did you tackle the challenge of writing about a period of history that is so familiar to modern readers? And why did you choose to do so in the present tense?

The Tudors are the great national soap opera; their story has been worked over so extensively that we see it as having a kind of inevitable, predetermined quality about it, so I needed to find a way of telling the story that would create an immediacy of viewpoint and cancel out the preconceptions we were brought up with. In writing the opening scene, of the boy being beaten up by his father, I was simply launched into the present tense. And I stayed with it because it was a way for me to capture the soundtrack inside Cromwell’s head – the immediacy of his experience. Also, though we may know how it all ends, Henry and his court didn’t. They didn’t know that the War of the Roses had ended; because the Tudor claim was weak, they dreaded that civil war might break out again. Henry didn’t know he would have six wives – even when he married number five, he couldn’t have known it. The present tense forbids hindsight and propels us forward through this world, making it new, just as it was, in every unfolding moment, for the players.

How did you go about finding a voice for Cromwell and getting under his skin?

Because they were so often dictated, letters, personal or impersonal, can give you a sense of the rhythm and vocabulary of the character’s spoken voice, and hence their mode of thought. So you look at those, and you look at what other people have said about your character.

The main person who tells us about Cromwell is the Spanish Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys, who was his enemy, but he was also his neighbour in the city and someone whom Cromwell saw a great deal of. Chapuys was a very astute observer. He tells us about how, when you were talking to Cromwell, he would fasten his eyes on your face, to calculate minutely the effect his words were having on you. He also paints a portrait of Cromwell as a very open-handed, generous, affable host, a man with whom it was wonderful to have a conversation.

Can you talk a little about what it’s been like to live with a character like Cromwell during the writing of this book?

There’s huge exhilaration in following a career like this, charting someone’s rise and rise. I do think without doubt that you become completely involved: someone of Cromwell’s strength and optimism can’t help but get into you. But the downside of it is that sooner or later your character will fall from the heights. Living with Cromwell has been a good experience so far, but you’ll have to ask me again when I’ve executed him.

Near the end of the novel you write: ‘It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust in their rattling mouths. We edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.’ How much of a responsibility do you feel towards your historical characters, who have had an existence independent of your imagination, when you pin them to the page?

In the lines you’ve just quoted, I am holding up my hands and saying to readers, you might think that what I’m doing in this book is dubious – it might even be thought reprehensible – yet we can’t help but reimagine the past; we have no choice. It is part of us, and we must acknowledge that it is we who reimagine it, we in the present moment, who can’t help but project our own insights and preoccupations backwards.

I think this creates a responsibility for the writer. I feel research must be as good as I can possibly make it, and guesses should be made only where there are no facts to be had. They must be plausible. Where gaps occur, the way you fill them must offer a possible version. I owe these characters as much scholarship as I can contrive, and all my care to try to get them right.
I should also say that it’s immensely rewarding to feel that you have, perhaps, succeeded in reanimating someone. There is a kind of magic moment where you feel your characters are really speaking, and you don’t have to think about their dialogue any more. I found that very early in this book, particularly with Thomas Wolsey. As soon as he began to speak, I felt that my job was simply to take down what he said, like a secretary. There is a peculiar pleasure to be had in feeling that you’ve brought someone back to life in that way.

You’ve written in a number of forms – short story, memoir, the contemporary and historical novel. Have any of these had a bearing on the composition of Wolf Hall?

Looking back, I think that writing my memoir was a kind of training ground for future novels, and something that was good for me as a writer. There are people who insist that almost all your memories of childhood are later reconstructions, but what I found when writing my memoir was that my childhood rose before me as an utter sensory wraparound, so that I was able to inhabit my past, and my work was to simply describe it. When you write fiction, the object is to achieve that on behalf of a character that you’ve invented or a person who is dead. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do it as successfully, in fiction, as I have in Wolf Hall.

What I also found when writing Giving Up the Ghost was that whilst I could capture the entirety of my childhood experiences, I often couldn’t tell the reader why things happened, or how the event I was describing linked to another, and I think I carried this discovery into Wolf Hall. When Cromwell remembers an incident from his childhood – for example, he recalls plunging the head of another boy into a butt of water – he has no idea why he did it, and I knew from my own experience that these gaps and holes are part of the texture of memory. In this book I was determined to reproduce a life from the inside. I thought, ‘Let us try to see a man in his full complexity. Even if there are bits that he himself doesn’t understand and can’t add up, let me still include them, because that’s the experience of being alive.’

Can you describe your mood on launching into the Tudor period once more, for the follow-up to Wolf Hall?

Exhilaration. I’m longing to be back in the thick of the action. Partly it’s because I want to know what’s going to happen next. When I write, there are often times when I go into a scene not quite sure what I think, knowing that the problem I have to solve revolves around one question, ‘How did this happen?’ And by the end of the scene I have an answer, because it’s happened on the page. So I am looking forward to getting back to those puzzles in the new book.

Also, I’ve been so heartened by the way in which Wolf Hall has been received. There’s always the danger with historical fiction that it may fall short as both literature and history. I knew when I took on this project that it was going to be a very difficult thing to do. But, ha! Who’s interested in what’s easy?

On September 3rd, Gary Kemp’s brilliant memoir, I Know This Much: from Soho to Spandau was published by Fourth Estate. One of the most well-written autobiographies to appear in years, I Know This Much is packed full of vivid anecdotes and great stories. In the following clip, Gary reads a wonderful passage describing Spandau’s arrival at Band Aid:

Gary recently recorded a great Q&A, posted here as a podcast:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST

Victor Lodato speaks to Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles

It can be very difficult to use teenage characters as narrators, to make them both plausible but also sufficiently articulate to convey the ideas of a novel. Did you find it difficult to create Mathilda’s voice?

Strangely, I didn’t find it difficult at all. Mathilda’s voice arrived in my head one morning, with great force and clarity. I knew immediately that this was the voice of a child and though the first words seemed a bit ominous (‘I want to be awful. I want to do awful things’), I knew that the words had no evil in them, but rather issued forth from a character of incredible willfulness and energy, someone refusing to be contained. I really can’t begin any piece of writing without this deep connection to a voice. If I have to struggle to get the voice right, I simply accept that this is not my story to tell, this is not a character to whom I can do justice. With Mathilda I felt, from the start, that I knew her in my body, in my breath. The music of her voice was natural to me, and I spoke every word out loud, for years, as I was writing the book. Truly, I felt more like a secretary than a writer. Where such voices come from is one of the mysteries of the writing process and one that I tend not to question.

Why did you choose to name the novel after Mathilda herself, even though the events of the book are driven by Helene’s life and death?

As I see it, this is clearly Mathilda’s book. Yes, Helene is a vital part of the story, but it is Mathilda’s quest to understand her sister that truly gives the novel its centre, its heart. Mathilda is asking the questions, Mathilda is the one trapped on the island of grief, as she calls it. And really the book is about much more than the mystery of Helene’s death. This tragedy sets the stage for Mathilda to act out her deep confusion, her anger, her sexuality. And though she does find some answers about her sister, the real reward is that she finds herself.

The world in which Mathilda and her sister are growing up is inevitably partly a creation of post-9/11 America, but you also describe a second major terrorist attack at a later date. Why did you decide to move the political landscape on from an entirely contemporary setting?

It was sort of an intuitive choice. But I guess, in some ways, by pushing the novel five minutes into the future, it allowed me to put myself (and ultimately the reader) in the same position as Mathilda – the position of an innocent in an unsteady world, not knowing what might happen next. This seemed to increase the danger and excitement of the story. The novel unfolds in a very ‘present-tense’ sort of way, with Mathilda recording events as they happen. During the writing process I was breathing with Mathilda, breath for breath, and rarely ahead of her. In wanting the reader to have this same experience, it was useful to include certain events in the larger world that would be as new to the reader as they are to Mathilda.

Mathilda’s social life reflects the intensity of friendships between teenage girls and the way that such bonds can be quite calculated. Did you find this tricky, as a man, to depict?

Again, not really. I grew up surrounded by women – I lived in a house with my mother and both grandmothers and I spent my summers at the home of my female cousins. Being a very quiet and shy child, I often put myself in corners, saying little but watching everything. In my plays my main characters are usually women. I tend to write from outside myself, sometimes from way outside myself. I have a play with all black characters (I am white). It just seems to be fertile territory for me. And it doesn’t seem so strange to me, to write from the perspective of a woman, or from a person of another race. Don’t we all have a bit of the other inside us? To recognize this, to accept this is, I think, a very civilizing thing.

Mathilda is often very manipulative; is this more of a hangover from childhood or the emergence of an adult trait?

Your question brings to mind the epigraph I included in the book, a quote from the writer G.K. Chesterton: ‘For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy’. Yes, Mathilda is manipulative, but she feels great wrongs have been perpetrated and she is willing to do whatever is necessary to bring the culprits, as she perceives them, to justice. She often lies, not least of all to herself. Over the course of the novel she begins to see her own faults more clearly and, in doing so, she becomes more forgiving of others. She moves from a merciless campaign for justice to her first fitful attempts at offering mercy. This movement, which is essentially one toward adulthood, brings her to a more grounded place, a place where her wiles and manipulations are less necessary.

Are there novels and novelists you would cite as an inspiration for writing Mathilda Savitch?

I have sometimes, playfully, imagined my book as a strange combination of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: two books, two voices, that I love – and books that, when I was young, made me want to write a novel. I’m generally inspired by a gripping voice, one with great authority, capable of taking me inside the heart and mind of another person (the ultimate virtual reality). Other first person novels that I adore: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow; Kazuo Ishiguru’s The Remains of the Day; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Anne Enright’s The Gathering; Willa Cather’s My Antonia; Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal; Dennis Cooper’s Guide; W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

Did writing something that you knew didn’t have to be realised as a stage production give you more freedom to tell the story just as you wanted?

One of the things that delighted me, in writing the novel, was the freedom to let the story unfold over a greater length of time. In a play, the magic circle drawn around the characters is usually, by necessity, much tighter. When crafting a play, I invariably find that I write more scenes than I can actually use. In a play too much extra material, too many diversions, can be fatal, especially if these things impede the sense of inevitability, the sense that we are witnessing characters caught in the wheels of fate. And while a novel’s power can be reduced by excess baggage as well (and, in writing mine, I do think I applied my playwright’s habit of precision), the form is, without a doubt, a roomier affair – one that allows the characters to have a few more detours of thought and situation. And, having fallen so deeply in love with Mathilda, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to give her a more generous life.

Will this be a one-off foray into novel writing or are you planning to write more fiction?

I loved writing this novel. It was incredibly challenging and I had to use all these new parts of my brain. I’ve already started a second book. And if your next question is: can you tell us something about it? My answer would be: no. I like to keep secrets. And the truth is, I really couldn’t tell you very much about it. Similar to how Mathilda Savitch began, all I have at this point is a voice, and a vague intuition as to where the story is going. As Arthur Miller once said (I’ll paraphrase): there’s a play in your blood and you write until you find it. Play, novel, poem, it doesn’t matter what I’m working on, at the beginning the writing is always a simple, and terrifying, act of faith.

Check out the Mathilda Savitch reading guide.

Over the last three weeks we’ve been publishing extracts from Nigel Slater’s Eating For England: here’s the trouble with tipping; the dubious delights of entertaining aged relatives; and an ode to good British fish and chips.

Eating for England is a collection of short, often witty essays about the British and their relationship with food – featuring rice pudding, custard creams, roast dinners and more. It’s a very different book from the Kitchen Diaries, his most recent collection of recipes, and it’s different again from Toast, his childhood memoirs.

Nigel’s an incredibly versatile writer – so what goes into all these books? How are they put together? What role is played by the editor? Here Nigel talks about the pleasures, and the difficulties, of his writing life.

On Monday Doris Lessing will formally receive the Nobel Prize for Literature – and tomorrow her Nobel lecture will be delivered in Stockholm.

Over the summer, while we prepared brand new editions of her most popular works, Sarah O’Reilly sat down with Doris to discuss The Golden Notebook, delving into her communist past and development as a writer – and got a glimpse of what’s coming next from Britain’s new Nobel Laureate. Read on!

You’ve written that The Golden Notebook is a book that people reacted to rather than read when it was first published. Can you speak a little about how it was written, and the unexpected reaction it got?

The first thing to say is that the book was written at absolute white heat. It didn’t take me much more than a year. I decided on the frame novel, Free Women, and then I interleaved it with the notebooks. And once I had ventured into the area of the book, a kind of pattern began to emerge in my material of which I had not previously been aware. You have to watch out for it.

In this case, although no one will ever believe it, I was completely unconscious of writing a feminist book. I was simply writing about what I saw. For example, I had a woman friend at that time who was very bitter about men, in a way that I don’t think women are now. She was a single woman, and she wanted a bloke, and she wanted to be married. But she was always having affairs with married men, and she was angry with them. Yet she was living the kind of life that invited it. I was interested in that.

A journalist recently said to me, quite severely, ‘You have these two women, and all the married men around see them as fair prey.’ I replied how very true that was. He was rather angry with me for agreeing with the statement — perhaps men are more faithful now. But I do remember that at the time when I was writing The Golden Notebook there was an atmosphere of women being angry that men left them to look after the kids, had affairs and so on. I was just writing what I saw; I wasn’t trying to make a feminist point with my book, although apparently I did.

Academics and the like will never ever understand this. They’ve been taught to look at the book not as a process, which is how a writer would see it, but as a finished object with this or that message. Still, I’ve always received letters from men about the book, some of whom have never even noticed that it was ‘meant’ to be for women. They’re interested in the politics. That makes me very happy. Not that I am saying an author should always be read as they wish to be — that rarely happens!

Why do you think its appeal has endured to this day?

I think it’s because of the book’s vitality, which I find most fascinating. I’m sure it’s because at the time I was writing everything was so fraught, difficult and contradictory. You must remember that in the 1950s there were two types of comrades, roughly: those who would rather die than admit that there was anything wrong with the Soviet Union, and those who knew it was in a terrible state and were waiting for someone to say that.

So when Khrushchev gave his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress (which satisfied neither side) half of them became terribly upset because he had criticized Stalin and the other half were furious because the job had only been half done . . . It was a terribly difficult time. People’s hearts were broken.

The experience must have left you very suspicious of any form of political ideology.

Very. I don’t think it’s easy for any of my generation to take to political ideology. We’ve seen too much of it — and how it ends up. Are there any political ideologies worth believing in today? I don’t think so. I just don’t like these big ideas because I’ve seen what happens to them.

What I do think is worthwhile is the smaller objective, because that can’t be overtaken by some lunatic or other. But there is a great vacuum at the moment. I am very interested in the growth of communities founded on religious principles that’s happening now because I’ve got a feeling that that is where the next ideology will come from. In terms of my lot, however, I think we’re immune. Or I hope that we are.

Do you worry that younger generations are so apathetic?

No, not at all — at least you’re not talking rubbish about the Soviet Union! I think it’s rather healthy. But there is a vacuum. I can easily imagine a charismatic chap sweeping you all away . . . and you wouldn’t realize.

In The Golden Notebook Ella is haunted by the letters she receives from women whose lives seem to have stopped dead in their tracks.

That was what I found then. This is an actual memory from the 1950s: I was out canvassing for the Communist Party in a big block of flats near Somers Town, going from door to door, and behind every one I found a woman going crazy, a woman bored out of her mind with small children.

I am from the colonies where women were much freer, but in England I found only a sink of misery. It was a shock. These women needed a social worker. They were talking in ways I’d never heard people talk. They wanted jobs, they wanted education, but their husbands weren’t going to help them — that all happened ten years later when the women’s movement came about.

When I found this was going on in the 1950s I went to the Party and said, ‘Look, I’ve found these women going crazy: they are bored, what are you going to do about it?’ and they were not interested. They did nothing, and I stopped canvassing.

What did you read, growing up?

When I was young, I read everything there was to read. All the classics. That was my education, really. I don’t know which influenced me more than others. Perhaps the Russians: Dostoevsky, Chekhov. That is true of my generation and the one after; so many were influenced by this constellation of genius, and there hasn’t been one really since, with the exception of Proust.

In The Golden Notebook Anna writes about Thomas Mann, comparing the modern-day ‘novel reports’ unfavourably to his philosophical works . . .

Thomas Mann marked the end of a kind of literary culture which I think, unfortunately, is now gone completely. We, all of us who revere that culture, know we’re just a lot of dinosaurs – the past.

Mann was writing out of an established, respected literary tradition which has been swept away. When I was writing The Golden Notebook in the late fifties I was looking back in time, and I was very conscious that things were changing, and, my God, have they changed — completely. Thomas Mann couldn’t be now. If he came out with one solid, theoretical, philosophical novel after another today, on and on to the end of his life, who would read him? Who would bother? I hear that a new, edited edition of War and Peace has been published, for example, which leaves out the philosophy. It’s just story now.

Do you regularly read anything by younger generations of writers?

I’m trying to write a book at the moment, and it is very hard to find time to think about anything else, because I have to grab an hour here, half an hour there. So reading other people’s books is more than I can stand at
the moment! Instead they pile up, leaning against the walls of my study. Too many books!

Do you always stop reading when you embark on a new book?

I have stopped with my current book, because my time is running out. I’m 87, I’m not going to live for ever and I want to finish this book I’m writing now. I’ll go back to being a good reader when I finish it.

Can you talk a little about the project you’re working on?

It is a book about my parents, who were very damaged by the First World War. I have given them normal lives, totally ordinary lives, as if there had been no war. It is a book that I really care about, but writing it is very painful because they had such terrible lives, these people. History treated them so badly. I want to give them a good life.

It is a very anti-war book. Though I’m not setting out to write it as such, that is what is emerging. Both my parents were remarkable in different ways, but it occurred to me rather late that whilst it was very obvious that my father was done in by war, the impact on my mother was much more difficult to see. Now I propose to put that right.

I once said in my autobiography that living is like going up a mountain: every time you go a little higher up, the view looks completely different. And that is exactly what is happening as I write this book: the view of my mother is looking completely different.

You left school at 14 and never went to university. Do you think this unusual path has been a help to your creativity?

Yes — it has been very good for me on the whole, although I come across great areas of ignorance that would have been covered in school had I stayed. But I know many writers who have been circumscribed by academia; when you’re always being taught to compare, it does stop your creativity.

I once visited a writers’ group run by a university in the States, and it was a most punishing experience. It was filled with extremely bright people; they had all read everything. One of their number would bring material with them to the group where it would be criticized viciously by the others. I would never have survived a creative writing course! They savaged each other, and what they were creating was critics, not writers. I’m prepared to bet on that.

You’ve written about the differences between writers and academics in the past. One would have thought the academic might have an understanding of the writer above all others . . .

I think there’s a complete gulf between writers and academics. We’re just different animals. An academic will always be looking for a point of comparison between one novel and another, because that is how they’re taught. But writers start with a clean slate. They are thinking how can I use this material best? And in what way? Not about resembling To the Lighthouse.

You’ve lived through one of the most tumultuous centuries in our history. How
has that affected you?

Well, I’ve lived through Hitler, ranting and raving; Mussolini too; the Soviet Union, which we thought would last for all time; the British Empire, which seemed impregnable; the colour bar in Rhodesia and elsewhere; the heyday of European empires. It was inconceivable to think these would disappear. They seemed permanent. Now not one of them remains — and I think that that is a recipe for optimism!

In your body of work as a whole, and in The Good Terrorist in particular, you’re very interested in groups, and group dynamics.

Very. I suppose it is because the Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia was where I started to think. Though I was too young to know much about anything back then, I did begin to notice how such groups worked, and I’ve continued to notice ever since. There’s usually a boss, and a younger person who wants to be a boss, for example, and the girls are nearly always tea-makers by nature.

When I was writing The Good Terrorist there was a squat opposite my house where all this sort of thing was going on. There was a woman who served everybody — or so it would appear — whilst the men were all writing up slogans and treating her abominably. I just had to look out of the window and there it all was. I’ve never been in a group with a woman boss. I imagine that would be interesting.

You mention the Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia. How did your friends in it react when you decided that you wanted to be a writer?

Oh, they hated it. Anybody in the left who wants to be a writer should keep quiet, because the comrades will always do you in! They would say to me, ‘Why do you want to waste your time on personal matters? Why are you wasting your talents on personal fulfilment?’ My husband in particular.

Did anything change when you came to London in 1949? Did you feel freer to pursue your writing career thanks to the change of scenery?

Not in the first year, but that was mainly because I had a small child, which landlords weren’t pleased about, and I couldn’t easily find a place to live. Eventually I moved in with a group of Italians on the Portobello Road. They were wonderful. All crooks and black marketeers, but I was so innocent I didn’t know how terrible they were!

Then I hit the comrades again. They were more sophisticated than the group I had joined in Southern Rhodesia. I became a member of the Party Writers’ Group, which was composed of very disillusioned people who’d been through the Party mill. Their dislike for the upper echelons of the Communist Party was vicious; they hated what they called ‘King Street’ [the Communists’ headquarters in Covent Garden]. But they didn’t put me down, at least, and by then I’d also acquired some confidence. The Grass is Singing was out, so I couldn’t be put down in the same way

You’ve written your whole life. Have you made sacrifices?

I have. You can’t have a vivid social life if you want to write. I know some writers flourish on it; they love going out every night and dancing till dawn, but I couldn’t do it. London was enormously attractive then in a way it isn’t now. There were wonderful clubs in Soho, full of witty, brilliant people: artists, writer, poets and painters. But I had a child who kept me on the straight and narrow. And now I give thanks for it because I wouldn’t have stood up to the nightclubs otherwise. I would have been lost!

In The Golden Notebook, Anna highlights curiosity as one of the qualities a person needs to write. What are the others?

I think you need to have been an observant child. People say you need to have had an unhappy childhood but I don’t say that. I say you need a stressed childhood; a childhood where you are taught to look at what’s going on around you; where you have to watch the expressions on grown-ups’ faces: that is very useful experience.

Sometimes when I’m with a family or a group of kids I look out for the one amongst them who is watching and I think, ‘Aha, yes, you’ll probably do it!’ Of course the other thing you have to have is perseverance because a lot of people have literary talent in this culture, but it’s no good just writing very well if you can’t keep at it. I think many people write one book and then give up. You have to be a bit of a slogger to succeed.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have often struggled to imagine their lives.

In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated there are now some 300,000 child soldiers.

A few months ago 4th Estate’s Editorial Director, Mitzi Angel, signed up the memoir of Ishmael Beah. She tells me that at the age of twelve, Beah fled attacking rebels in Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army when, for a number of circumstantial reasons, he found he was capable of ‘truly terrible acts’. Beah came to the United States when he was seventeen, and graduated from Oberlin College in 2003. He now lives in New York City and has addressed the UN on several occasions.

What must surely strike anyone who hears Baeh speak or reads his text is the humanity of someone who was once capable of commiting acts we’d quickly label ‘inhuman’.

Five years ago, after reading a tranche of books on Nazi Germany, I searched quite hard for a book that didn’t treat the landmark events of the 20th century as narrative history so much as analysis into the pyschological make-up and circumstances that create mankind’s often-catastrophic story. An answer to the ‘Why’ as much as the ‘What’ and ‘When’, if you like.

The closest I found at that time was a profoundly well-written and necessary book, Humanity by Jonathan Glover (Pimlico), which is still in print. You can read the first chapter of that book here, care of the New York Times.

Meanwhile, I think Ishmael Baeh’s book, A Long Way Gone, promises to be a different but equally valid attempt at such an answer, told from a literary and personal perspective. We’ll publish in May 2007.

Many thanks to everyone who listened to my first chapter this week. We’ll keep it up here in the months running up to publication.

Last week I came in to visit everyone who is going to be working on my book at Press Books. You can listen to an interview with me here, and also hear how to get sent one of ten free advance reading copies of Crow Stone.

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Imprint HarperPress is resuscitating a quiet classic on October 2nd by totally repackaging and updating a campaigning compendium book on regional food.

Fifthestate took the opportunity of putting some tough questions to one of its authors, Catherine Brown (CB), and Tom Jaine (TJ), the man who first published it at a small independent press, Prospect Books, 8 years ago.

Should we care about whether our food is regional and local? Is British food really worth celebrating, or are we just pandering to a yuppie obsession in over-fussing about food?

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