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This interview was conducted with Dörte Eliass for the Austrian magazine Buchkultur, Vienna, in 2003.
Reflections on Clara
DE: In 2002 your novel 'Clara' was published in Great Britain, telling the story of Clara Wieck-Schumann, who was married to Robert Schumann. The story is told from the perspective of an observant narrator, but goes very much into detail concerning Clara's history, her feelings, her views... Clara was, at the time, a very famous concert pianist who raised, beside her frequent concert tours, eight children. Nevertheless, nowadays as with many artistic couples, Robert Schumann seems to be more known in the musical world than his wife. What made you write this book about Clara in the first place? Where does your interest in music come from?
JG: What made me write about Clara Schumann is that she has a great story. She was first mentioned to me in my music teacher's classroom when I was in Senior School, when I was told she was the "only" woman composer (not true) and that she wasn't very good! I disliked the instant judgment and all it implied immediately, and her name, who she might have been, never went away. That I might write a novel came about as a much more gradual thing. I have always been enthused by watchers, waiters, the silent and the lonely; in what ART might be and who serves it and how; what appears to the case and what actually IS the case; what history records and what it ignores or relegates as "unimportant", and complex psychological dilemmas - and Clara Schumann fits extraordinarily well into that rang of interests. The spur came from listening to (and loving) Robert Schumann's Frauen-Leibe und -Leben (A woman's Life and Love), finding the words only a fraction of what that title might convey. The book has eight chapters to mirror the eight songs, but allows the eight song titles to mean very different things. Clara's meld of apparent fame, apparent involvement with "high art" on the one hand with what one knows of the difficulties of the artistic life (and of life in general), then, intrigued me as something to try and render. It's not a music book, not a biography, so Clara as the great virtuosa is not the pivotal thing: it's a story of someone coping, someone finding what to do when there seems no way of going forward. I was involved in music myself for a short time (at school and university) and my son's father is a pianist, so I have had some chance to look at that kind of life and try to measure it dispassionately and from the intensely involved point of view. My present partner is also a musician, a singer. What this says about me I don't know!
DE: I was amazed about the amount of research which must have been necessary to write the book. How did you set about acquiring all this detailed information on clothes, living habits, German ways of speaking, the details of her concert tours, the way the cities looked at the time? How did you go about garnering information about her circle? Most of all, how does a foreign writer get to know the German way of speaking?!
JG: The research was not only huge it was sprawlingly, almost uncontainably and possibly even unnecessarily huge. This partly from my natural preference to stand on as much STUFF as possible before I start, and from the range of things I wanted to know. There's obvious research (names, dates, figures) then the inobvious stuff (likely patterns of wallpaper, preferences in teaching methods of under-fives, fashions for women's walking boots etc) which is certainly as crucial to the process of constructing what is meant, once it's finished, to read as a living consciousness.
I started with the Schumanns themselves and in their own words - volumes of letters and diaries and journals and lordknows what else to each other, friends and acquaintances like Brahms and Verhulst and Viardot and Mendelssohn and so on, and to their families. There were household books, notes and jottings with which I could get an idea of the running of the household and how they spend their money, also what they did when they were running out (which they frequently did). Alongside that I could medical reports and autopsy papers, love-letters (a terrific amount) and pictures of the children - anything that might give a texture to their personalities and everyday environment. What mattered what matters in general to my writing - was that everydayness, that detail. I knew from the first I did not want to write about "genius", for what of a better term, as a separate state. What makes people interesting to me is not what the world later decides is their "achievement" so much as the circumstances under which their lives were lived and their work produced merely as their everyday work. Which, of course, is what it was. To root the whole thing in practical reality, and quite doggedly, almost, get away from academic or elitist notions of artists being "different people" was part of the point, so there had to be a great deal of detail - the texture of a life rests in the detail. Aside from that, of course, I also read a political and military history of middle-Europe, books on clothes and household management, transport, obstetrics and medical material in general, especially the care of the mentally disturbed - anything that could add to my idea of what their everyday realities might have been. I read the books they enjoyed, and the books they thought they ought to read, which were often different. I read Robert Schumann's own literary and musical criticism and Clara's transcription notes and, of course, read and listened to a lot of music: musicians, both players and composers, say a good deal about themselves in none-verbal ways.
This lot, of course, sat on top of the biographies - both of the Schumanns and Mendelssohn, Brahms, Paganini, Liszt etc - for some accurate chronology. Chronology is not overwhelmingly important in itself, but matters as clay. The better the grip you have on that clay, the more convincingly, or organically, maybe, the final work can be shaped. The work, however, its shape and pace, matter more than the clay itself. Of the bios, Berthold Litzmann's three-volume work on Clara was certainly the one I used most often. What helped root the whole thing once all that reading was well under way (it was never finished, how could it be finished?) was visiting places that had been meaningful to either Clara or Robert as individuals. Looking into the Rhine from the bridge in Dusseldorf not far from Bilkerstrasse, where they lived when Robert attempted suicide, or visiting the ThomasKirche in Leipzig, for example, was very powerful. The real motivator, however, for any work of fiction has to be in the white space: most people do not lucidly articulate their lives, or shy away from revealing, even to themselves, what is too close to the bone. The gaps in the diaries, contradictions between his and her accounts of things, the unspoken, unrecorded tranches of childhood were where I saw my way in. The background research, its facts and pack-drills were a room to work inside: the empathetic reconstructing of a credible psychology from those facts - that's the work. To allude to motivation and deeper character, the hows and whys and tangential nature of decisions and things that change a life is the novel's territory. But the writing of any book, research or no, is accomplished in the same way, which means alone, with as much tactile imagination as is musterable. The research is almost neither here nor there to that process.
I take as a great compliment that you suggest I attempted to grasp a "German way of speaking" because I set out to grasp that very thing with serious intent! My own German is not impressive, but reading a good deal of German texts of the time, and the words of the Schumanns, Mendelssohn, Jean Paul Richter, Brahms and so on in their own words, even in translation when I had to, helped formulated the different phraseologies of characters in my head. Wieck was the most fun to write - his sentence structures are very definite. His letters are shockingly direct!
DE: In a former interview (with Christie Leigh March, Edinburgh University Review 101) you said that Clara kept a diary for most of her life. To what extent did she actually write about her relationship with Robert? How accessible are these diaries and how open was she? Where is the line between fiction and your imagination? For example, passages like on page 156 where Robert says about their marriage: "Not that he will stop her playing - not at all! She will play endlessly, he hopes, but suitably, appropriately, at home." Is this based on actual fact?
JG: Perhaps a lot of this has been answered in the question above. Yes, pieces of diaries are accessible, and even in translation so I did not have to overwork my very poor German! She was not very open at all - trained by her father to write her own diary to his dictation (a happenstance that recurred with Robert years later too) and acutely aware that posterity - people like me - would read it years later, that her family would be able to read and be hurt by personal comment, her diaries are mostly rosters of practice, pieces, people she met and loyal remarks about her nearest and dearest. The odd sentence where she confesses how tired she is, or how much she longs to have more time to play, glare out from the rest almost as aberrations. Noticing these "lapses" is what gives the clue to another layer beneath the written words, and that is the territory of the novelist - as are the later snippets where she frets about presents for the children while she is touring, or tells her mother where to find the laundry from far away, domestic concerns still haunting her! This is common experience, and it mattered to me to say it: Clara Schumann was a magnificent artist, but primarily a woman trying to keep her family together the best she knew how and these tiny glimpses show you the woman, not just the legend.
In terms of his writings, Robert, on the other hand, was much more candid about all sorts of things - he had not been trained into writing as other people approved to nearly the same extent - and his writings are extensively available. The contradictions between his and hers are also prime territory for reflection, for material. Any diary fragments quoted in the books are genuine, however - I made none up, though some are heavily condensed. Robert's beautiful little love letter to her from Altenberg coach station is quoted in full because it is so moving - in my own translation, to keep his manner of speech flowing in my head! And yes, the opinion expressed by Robert that you quote is taken directly from letters, certainly from more that one written to her during their enforced separation. (Berthold Litzmann's three-volume biography of Clara between pages 275 and 299 cites such opinions in Robert's letters to Clara in Vienna repeatedly.) I am a bit confused as to the question whether I would make something like this up - what would the point of that have been? Unless I intended to write a book with some simplistic political agenda, this makes no sense. I spent six years on research to ensure I was as clued in to as genuine a set of opinions, as genuine a set of ways of thinking as possible. There was no need t invent in such an essentially dramatic story. Neither do I think, as you suggest, that it's clear he wanted her to be solely his interpreter it seems to me his feelings about his wife's work were very mixed, his fears about what other men might think of him as a result of "allowing her" too much freedom were very mixed. In that he is not different to many contemporary men. I think Robert struggled about most things his own feelings of success and lack of it, his own high ideals, his own weaknesses and jealousies of Clara's applause, his own wish to be "the breadwinner" and take care of his family as other men of his generation thought it manly to do. Nothing on Robert's thinking was very "clear" in that he was torn consistently, and his thinking was also prone to sabotage by his illness. This is nothing new, I think. It is a dilemma for contemporary men and women and entirely recognizable to me. So to read these opinions in the letters was no revelation, it was a kind of "coming home" to the deep ambivalences about marriage, about commitment and confidence we all share. Entirely familiar. What's "imagined" are the psychologies, the words they spoke aloud to each other - but I hope I have made those imaginative leaps from a basis of very sound research and respect for the expressed opinions of both, such as I found them. And her childhood, of course. It was a great freedom to be able to attempt to make a credible childhood from the tiny fragments that are recorded of that.
DE: What is the difference between writing about persons who actually lived and people you invent totally yourself? I guess, with a person you invented yourself you have much more freedom to shape the character the way you want to? Is an already existing person maybe like a structure you use to fill the gaps?
JG: This is a good description! Yes, I'd go along with it by and large, though it's perhaps more detective work than "filling", which suggests a culinary metaphor! This happens in straight fiction too - characters, you will hear writers say it repeatedly, take on a life of their own ad the writer feels, if they are thinking their way into that character correctly, that they are just following. In that respect, writing from the "real" bases of the Schumanns is no different: research and think until they become "characters" is the truest sense, then write. The process of writing fiction from either basis is exactly the same when that point is reached. I guess looking back, what pushed the fictional basis of the book was my trying to write a picture of traditional female "goodness" Doing her duty, being a good wife and daughter, was something she demanded of herself and her need to keeping playing had to be rationalized through it. In a way, that became her point. Establishing the strength and endurance of Clara herself became mine.
DE: The book is very much centred on Clara's point of view and clearly takes sides in her favour - would you regard yourself as a 'feminist' writer, whatever that is? What is the situation of women publishing literature in Scotland at the moment, has there been a change in recent years as to the amount of published works by women, for example?
JG: I take strong issue with the opinion that I take sides! Writing is not a matter of taking sides, it's a matter of trying to represent correctly, and it was important to me to write the novel from Clara's point of view. Keeping within the point of view of a woman is still a rather aberrant thing to do in literature, to make her the middle, and not the often more active, more visible, more traditionally "interesting" men. And her story can so easily be one where she passes hands father then Robert, then Brahms potentially that to look at things from her rationalizing was pressing if I wanted to tell it as HER story. And I did. This is not "taking sides" but choosing a perspective to write through, without which I'd have been writing, in all probability, just another traditional "historical" novel. People do not ask men why or for what political reason they write about male characters or through male characters there is an implicit suggestion of eccentricity or deliberate waywardness if women are asked to explain themselves in this way. I went out of my way not to demonize or sideline Wieck, for example (another easy and rather pointless thing to do); I do not, I hope, sell Robert short: but neither have I a mission to tell their stories as the forefront. Her feelings towards both these men, what these men do and how they think, are burningly important factors in trying to render her psychology convincingly, but they are not her, so to clarify their mindsets more than I already have would surely be almost an apology for making her the central issue. I was trying to imagine her drama her mind, her emotional makeup, her triumphs and terrors; what motivated her, what made her, what moved her. That is not "taking sides", unless merely to chose a central character is "taking sides", that is being clear and true to the central premise of the writing, which is to tell her story the best way I know how. I don't think it requires explanation that most of my central characters are female:
No, I don't regard myself as a "feminist" writer. I regard myself, if at all, as a writer trying hard to get things, states of mind, as clear as I can make them. And that means to come from the middle of characters not standing apart. Trying to render people faithfully is a big deal with me. And the only way to do that, the only way I'm aware of at least, is through empathy and respect. For Robert and Wieck, for Clara herself, the chop-logic of stereotype was never applicable or appropriate. In a book that took six years of research and writing, I needed to have that empathy simply to remain interested and enthused! I think one of Clara's remarkable gifts was the capacity to make the best of everything she was given in her life, including the stuff that would have sunk less stout-hearted people. She would never have seen her husband or father as ciphers and it mattered not to fall into that trap even for light relief. When I was writing Wieck or Liszt or Clementine Wieck, for example, I would certainly attempt to come from the middle too, to see things as they might, rationalize as they might for the duration of that section. (Writing Robert in this way was especially draining as you might imagine.) But the constant, the thing that mattered, was the silent Clara herself, and to render her faithfully, without trickery or bad faith, going through the stages of her rationalization of what surrounded her- getting it RIGHT was the point.
DE: You wrote three novels, all of them differ very much in setting, storyline, main characters (apart from the fact that all the main characters of the novels are women). Your first novel 'The Trick is to Keep Breathing' deals with a woman in severe crisis after her partner died and is set in some Scottish town, the second novel tells the story of two Scottish women travelling around France ('Foreign Parts'), the third novel now is 'Clara'. None of the subjects seems to be particularly 'Scottish', especially not 'Clara', the last novel. Was it a conscious decision to go away from more Scotland-oriented subjects, like urban novels or stories dealing with very typical Scottish themes like as to Glasgow, for example, working class subjects, Catholic-Protestant conflict, crime etc.? What role does classical music play in Scottish culture?
JG: Ah the Scottishness. I wondered when you'd ask about that. Thank god I am starting not to wonder what it means any more, this "Scottishness". There has been such a local obsession with it for the past three hundred and so years that the weight is not easy to shift, but I do believe that writers who live here are starting to shift it at last. Having to obsess about nationhood can feel like pigeonholing - something to attach a set of assumptions or expectations to. I think I have always written about intense states of mind, and about loneliness and how creative the human head can be in its attempts to survive. I think CLARA is a development of that, and that the other novels were attempts in the same direction. I don't think it was a deliberate attempt to "shift" my own focus, just a more intense look at territory I have always written within, but from a different angle. What's most markedly different I guess is that this character has, or had, a real-life source. For all that, she is fictional - I am making up the psychology of the character from a great deal of research and strong sympathy, but making it up, in the end, is what I am doing. I don't think writers do "choose" consciously when it comes to material. Material presents itself. The role of classical music in Scottish culture is no different to the role classical music plays in most European cultures at the artistic level, at least. We fund it poorly, however. Very poorly.
DE: More recent writers from Scotland, A.L. Kennedy, for example, use a very distinct style with often grotesque, surrealist elements or are very outspoken as to subjects like sado-masochism, aggression, sexual fantasies etc. Alison says, 'Our history has become nightmarish - our fiction reworks past fears into terrors we call our own. And if any sense lingers that we are suffering for our past sins, that our self- loathing can never be entirely adequate, we can both chasten our imaginations with stories of doom and damnation. (...) Our history of silence and lies is making us consistently outspoken. Our fears, rather than isolating us, are leading us to communicate and - for good or ill - our traditional access to alternative realities is providing unlimited scope for shocking, uplifting and unparochially Scottish fiction.' (Scotland on Sunday, 4/5/97).Would you agree with her in this explanation? Or where does your own tendency to make use of grotesque situations come from?
JG: Grotesquerie is merely another method. Scottish writing has long been steeped in the telling of dark tales - from Border Ballads to Burns' Tam O'Shanter to Hoggs' Confessions of a Justified Sinner to Scott and Stevenson to Alasdair Gray and Muriel Spark - that perspective is part of our culture and something we're at home with. It's a way of seeing from this dark landscape, perhaps, and goes way back before what Ms Kennedy seems to be here referring to as disenfranchisement and loss of political voice. I believe it to be more rooted that that suggests, more to do with weather and long nights and traditions of childrearing than overt politics - Swedes and Norwegians and Finns can trace the same lines of thinking in their traditions. I bet the Inuit can too. I bet.
DE: Your style of writing is very distinct - one interviewer calls your texts 'physical'. In 'The Trick is to Keep Breathing' for example, the scene where the main character, Joy, opens a can of vegetable soup, you can feel the thick substance of the soup, hear it, smell it, see the liquid. How does a passage like that come into being? You also make use of very different text genres, like newspaper headlines, horoscope etc, often with a very humorous effect. What was your intention behind it?
JG: It's natural, as well as deliberate, to attempt to render things at a visceral level. Being able to touch, taste, feel from the black marks on the page is a stunning thing, and something I seem driven to try and effect. Not all the time - you'd make readers sea-sick! - but when what's happening, when the characters' states of mind seem to cry out for it. I guess it's partly from a belief that the splendid, multi-layered repression that still exists to a great extent in Scotland, married with what is, I believe, the genuinely a passionate, "Celtic" nature, means emotion often comes through the skin before characters can rationalse them, or even register they're feeling them. That viscerality helps root the characters in their emotions and makes them, I hope, more real. The other thing is that this seems to me to be part of what writing is about - to suggest the human. And nothing can be more human than feeling life through the skin.
DE: What are you working on at the moment?
JG: My most immediate project is with sculptor Anne Bevan, from Orkney. We have worked together three times in the past, and this is our most ambitious project to date ie a physical and verbal examination of obstetrics. It has included visiting hospitals and a lot of research into older beliefs surrounding of birthing and contraception too. Anne has already made quite a number of the pieces and I have worked out most of the text. This time, we are quite sure we want my words attached in a physical way to her objects - they've always been so separate before, and this is a natural development, a stage on, to make it a more thorough collaboration. Anne is so inventive and lateral a thinker, a pleasure to work with. It puts the fun back in! After that, maybe another novel. That last takes a lot of persuasion, though: novels are brutes.