Bio

Background

Books

Other work

Bibliography

Interviews

Essays and Academic

Free Classics!

Links

Agent and representation

Mail this site

From Trinity News Feb 2003.
Aoife Kernan conducted this interview by email for Trinity News, Dublin. It was edited down into 2000 word format to suit the needs of the paper, but is reprinted here in its entirety.

A: Where did your inspiration to write about Clara Schumann originate?

JG: Clara Schumann - as a name and not much else - I first encountered in a music teacher's classroom when I was in Secondary School. He mentioned her in passing as "the only woman composer" adding quickly that she wasn't very good! Neither of these things is true, of course, but it was the start of an interest that never wholly died away. As for when the idea of the novel occurred, well. That was a more gradual thing. Analysis as to why something attracts is always a bit after-the-event: the truth is you don't really know what the source of the fascination is at the time, though it's certainly possible to reconstruct rationales after the event. I suppose I've always been motivated by trying to express silence or silent states of being, silent people, or people who are constrained from telling their own story for one reason or another. Or who say it and no-one listens. I'm interested too in watchers; the women and children and servants and seamstresses and the last desk player right at the back of the second-violins, the generally unrecorded voices in all sorts of histories. Clara's story is full of resonances that would appeal to me on that count alone. It's not a music book, not a biography or something for a specialist. Heaven forbid! It's a story about a woman first and foremost - a woman trying to cope with her own near-incompatible ideals, and trying to maintain her own moral imperatives. The book is for a general reader - I'm a great fan of the general reader - who is simply enthused by the human condition. I guess I ought to say too that the book is not really "about" Clara Schumann as an individual. I think it's about creativity and love, silence and sound - and these through the lens of that one life and the lives that surrounded it. It's not a disguised biography or a "historical book". I hope there are contemporary resonances all the way through.

AK: You have commented in interviews that you don't believe in the existence of a Glasgow "School" of writing, that it is a very nineteenth century idea. How does this relate to your perception of the "tradition" of Glasgow writing? Do you differentiate between the terms "school" and "tradition"?

JG: I guess "school" means to me a group of people who openly share precepts and who have a definite "agenda" in their writing which they share, les Six, for example. A tradition is more a historical set of precedents - a series of givens attaching to a physical or intellectual location. I perceive them as little as humanly possible. The roots and drive of writing are surely more an emotional than deliberately selected thing. I don't think in schools or "place" things in that way if I can help it. I think I would find it very inhibiting to the process of trying to write, which requires much more of permission and freedom than the traditionally critical mentality fosters. There is an essential difference - hostility, even - to me between the processes of academic criticism and creation: though both are necessary if literary fiction in general is to survive, I see and feel them as fundamentally very different things indeed.

AK: Do you believe though that there is room for dialectic between the academic criticism and creation? And if so, where is this best cite for the expression of this dialectic?

JG: Good lord. This is a bit like asking a marmoset its ideas on how to facilitate the zoo's plans for its study and welfare. It has no ideas, except perhaps going on being a marmoset to the best of its abilites...

AK: Although your roots lie in Ayrshire, you live and work in Glasgow. Do you see your fiction as belonging to the Glasgow tradition?

JG: No - see above! I don't see my me or what I do in that objective way at all. That's an academic's approach to a text, not a writer's in my experience. To academicise or categorize in that way is quite alien to me, even counter-productive.

AK: n terms of writing and production, what is your practical approach to writing?

JG: No different, I suspect, to anybody else's who prefers character-based stories to plot-driven. Submerging, I guess. Putting a character on like a skin. It's akin to acting in that I imagine being different characters, trying out their mindsets. Most writers write in a rather t trance-like state, in much the way people watch movies, only the movie is inside their head, not out. If you constantly become distracted by, say, the structure of the set within which those characters are playing, or too focused on anything other than the characters themselves, you're sunk!

AK: Neither your recent novel "Clara" nor your second novel "Foreign Parts" are set or located in Scotland. Was your decision to move away from a Scottish setting a conscious attempt to distance yourself from the genre of "Scottish" writing?

JG: Again, there was little that was conscious about the original decision. I didn't make the decision, it came and got me. You know the old, "You don't drive the material, the material drives you," maxim? That. I write about what interests me, what interests me so powerfully that I can sustain the three to six years' writing involved in carrying the idea through, and that certainly needs more than a political impulse. It's not a "choice" in any conventional sense. Having said that, whilst carrying out the work, I often found it was a relief not to have to openly embroil myself in the expectation that I was fascinated by my own geographical origin. No-one expects it of English writers, or indeed American, French or German ones. The focusing on "whither Scottishness" is horrible - a kind of throwback to not having any real belief in your country's right to exist. It is very gradually becoming the case that Scottish writers do not have to sweat this one through as a rite of passage any more. I also anticipated a rough ride for Clara on the back of it being "not Scottish enough" for those who think Scotland, if it has permission to think at all, may only think about itself. That didn't happen save in one very small corner indeed!

AK: You indicate here the existence of an inherent inferiority complex in Scottish writing that is slowly and thankfully disappearing. Could you perhaps clarify for me from where you think this complex might have stemmed?

JG: The complex is not merely in writing, in fact less in writing than most things! National inferiority complex, and it is direly complex, is always a favourite subject and answering it would take a book or three! TC Smout's History of the Scottish People might make a start, then Lanark by Alasdair Gray, then dear god. Ask Woody Allan why Jews worry.

AK: Do you feel pressure as a Scottish writer to conform to a specific literary agenda? Do you think that the production of current fiction in Scotland feels pressure to conform to a stereotypical literary identity?

JG: My own publisher has never put pressure on me in any direction whatever. Maybe they think it's a waste of breath, and they'd be right! On the other hand, I think any publisher worth their salt would not put that pressure on a literary writer. You can only say what you have to say. No amount of goading will push an idea or style that's not your own. I do agree, however, that there was a pressure on the early 90s for Scottish writing to be "urban and gritty" and it mostly came from the needs of magazines and newspapers to "explain" or categorize it for their own journalistic purposes. Writers who came from places as diverse as Aberdeen, Oban, Dundee, Leith, Ayrshire, the Highlands and Orkney all became "Glasgow Writers" who were "urban and gritty" according to this shorthand, whether it fit or not. At home too, there was also a fair amount of media "storying" on the back of this same writing by certain elements of the so-called Scottish Arts Media, almost all of which was negative. The Scottish press and its inability to deal with literary art as literary art (instead of as a tourist-trade opportunity) is beginning to be overcome, but this is till a difficult one for some reason. A failure of trust. There is also enough second-class-nationhood neurosis around in Scotland for the odd letter to the press (ah, again the press) from "Disgusted, Musselburgh" arguing that all Scottish writers should write about is Scotland and Scottish history, but dear me. That's not a serious thing at all. That's just sad. How many other nations do that? Think they are not allowed the whole world and its doings to regard as their own, to comment upon and learn from? I hope very few.

AK: Could you perhaps clarify the 'failure of trust' - is it a lack of faith on the press's behalf in the ability of Scottish writers to perceive the world correctly or is there a failure of trust in art and literature in general as a valid mode of expression? Why do you think this lack of trust exists?

JG: A mix of both, but more the latter of the two possibilities you suggest. The failure to see Art as a "real" subject, in the way that MPs salaries and defense spending and mainline politics are "real" subjects is endemic to British culture in general. Simon Rattle has been expounding splendidly on this subject for years in England, many others, in different ways, in Scotland. This is nothing new. Recently, the Scottish Arts Council, in the persona of James Boyl, even joined in which was a heap of fun. On the back of this and Tessa Jowell's latest visit to Germany, There appears to be a vogue for arts funding in papers at the moment, which is an unexpected sign of cultural health.

AK: It would appear that there has been a gap in Scottish literature that was for years screaming to be filled by a female voice. Would you agree that many of the male characters of the Glasgow novel tradition are in essence effeminate characters out of place in the world around them?

JG: "Effeminate"? Goodness. The central characters in most novels since the advents of Existentialism has been characters that "don't fit" in varying degrees of distress about their situation. I don't think that's an essentially Scottish condition! Alasdair Gray's central male characters see women as stronger than themselves, much more "in control" or despising of the outside world than the chaps are, and certainly apart from women, not "effeminate" at all. There are certainly gender issues, as it were, in this country, where domestic abuse is greater than in any other part of Britain - this is not without meaning - but there is no such thing as a subject women writers in this country "should" tackle. On this subject, one of the things I found very difficult in writing Clara was rendering her as interesting and GOOD. Rendering that still, self-contained, yet deeply passionate person whilst making that stillness as gripping, the central focus is the toughest thing I've done. We're so trained by movies, tv, music and stories into enthusiasm for the feckless, the reckless, the riotous or the extreme: we are not trained into admiring steadfast and womanly notions of family duty and love. Writing Liszt, for example, was falling off a log by comparison with writing Clara's quiet, very unfashionable heroism. Also, Clara had no access to or enthusiasm for irony, snide asides, smart put- downs. I had to "vulnerablise" the 21st Century voice I was more used to writing in and be prepared to open the character up in a more terrifyingly direct way. Robert was awkward, of course: I wanted to write a "madman" who was the genuine article, who acted oddly only reluctantly and despite his best impulses out of being unable to be the Good Man he wished to be. It was not good enough to have him merely rave, and there was a conscious wish to disallow mental illness to be romantically slewed as a version of creativity, which is a conflation I loathe. Even so, writing that was easier than Clara's self-containment. I think my conclusion here would need to be that misplaced or mal-placed men, those you refer to in your question if I understand it right, are seldom feminine! The battles, the place on the landscape, the training for life and what is to be gained from it. They're all too different.

AK: As a woman writer in Scotland, do you identify with the isolation and conformity characters such as Joy Stone or Clara Schumann experience? If so do you enjoy the isolation? Do you see it as a disadvantage or rather a window of opportunity? If you do not identify with it, could you explain why?

JG: I identify with characters only as long as I am writing them. They're not me. At a personal level, I do feel isolated, but that's also part and parcel of the nature of my job. I would not extrapolate that women in general feel isolated in this country any more than they feel so in England, or Ireland, for that matter. I don't think it would be too foolhardy of me to say that women writers in Scotland do feel isolated: only this morning I was reading one of these "poll" stunt things for World Book Day, and it seems people undisclosed (possibly librarians, though it's hard to tell from the handout I read) had drawn up a shortlist of ten books that "say most about Scotland". Only one woman was on this list . This in a country that boasts Jackie Kay, Alison Kennedy, Liz Lochhead, Muriel Spark, Kathleen Jamie, Agnes Owens, Shena MacKay, Candia McWilliam... well, you get my drift. This is entirely infuriating and entirely expected, which is all the more irritating, I'm afraid. To cap the daftnessof it, the one woman listed, Janet Paisley, is someone who worked on the Women's branch of Pen for a number of years campeigning for greater visibility of women and woemn's perspectives in public and literary forums! No, I can't say such constant reminder of the invisibling of the contribution of women to Scottish writing feels like a benefit!

AK: In The Trick is to Keep Breathing there is evidence of a distrust of women's magazines and popular culture. How do perceive popular culture to relate to Scottish culture?

JG: Not a particular Scottish question, this is global! The rise of idiot pastimes on tv and magazine culture, the commonplace rubbernecking on human misery and pointless wealth and greed, the likes of Big Brother and Hello! I guess, where loss of human dignity passes gleefully as entertainment, is something that makes my skin crawl. We're not encouraged or indeed perceived to "need' libraries much: they don't rake in money. OK! and as much Bread and Circus and football and trashy sex-slathered game-shows are "what people want". The relentless promotion of celebrity is certainly tends a number of cash-cows, but what else it does is lessen aspiration and possibility. Knowing how Kylie keeps her bum in trim or how Posh had her hair extensions done would surely not have kept many people alive in the Warsaw ghettos. Jeez. It's not "harmless": it's demoralizing nonsense and limits our horizons and sense of wonder or understanding. At a more crass level, such things simply increase our self-loathing and sense of inadequacy. Suicide rates of the young are at an all-time high. It's not surprising.

AK: You have stated before that you don't think women's priorities are considered as "normal." As much of your writing considers the concerns and problems of twentieth century women, there is the danger that your work could be labeled simply as "feminist." How would you react to your work being described as "feminist"?

JG: I wouldn't. If people want to label things, it's hard to stop them and I have better things to do than to persuade them not to! The work is all I have to say, really - it's my only argument. I find head-on argue-the-toss regarding categorization kind of embarrassing, to tell you the truth! Categorizing is an academic's game, and a bad academic's game at that. I'd rather folk simply read for what there was to hear rather than getting involved ion the business of labeling. I reckon they might get a better deal from their reading - of anything - by doing that.

AK: Cairns Craig argues that the body of Joy Stone is representative of Scotland itself. He writes, "That 'black hole', that 'nothing at all' is the image not only of a woman negated by patriarchal society but of a society aware of itself as only an absence, a society living, in the 1890s, in the aftermath of its failure to be re-born." Do you agree that there is a nationalistic agenda behind your work?

JG: I'd rather leave such conclusions up to the individual reader! I certainly don't work from readily definable political agendas: I work from what I feel to be the drive of the story and the characters' psychology. If there is more to be gained for some readers, different things again for others, that's splendid, but there is no agenda I'm aware of other than my wishing to write it well, which inevitably means the "meaning" will be different for different people. I'm always delighted when two people in succession offer their ideas about my work to me and the "explanations", as it were, are at sharp variance.

AK: How do you research the psychology that informs your characters?

JG: By being alive and interested! Who isn't surrounded by puzzling human psychology day in day out? I can get some of the puzzling out by writing it down. It's a simple human interest taken to a logical conclusion, really.

AK: Do you perceive nationalism to be a valid force behind modern Scottish literature in general?

JG: Yes. Whatever gets the words on the paper is fine, I think. If that does it for some, if it helps give voice, fair enough. It will undoubtedly be in my consciousness somewhere: very hard to be a Scot and not have some ideas about nationalism, whether for or against. It was very much a subject for the greater part of the 20th century. Now? I'm waiting to see.

AK: You mention in your interview with Christie Leigh March that you like to push your readers to acknowledge that they also come to a read book with an agenda. As a writer, surely you must to a certain extent anticipate the agenda of your readers?

JG: No. That would be to know who "my" readers are. I don't. That's a publisher's concern!

AK: Surely though you are consulted when it eventually comes to marketing your fiction and that eventually for the sake of selling your work is eventually pitched towards a certain readership? Do you have any say in this process?

JG: No, I'm not and I don't. These days I'm asked if I have ideas about who to send books to when they appear, but I'm no good at coming up with anything. I get to have a say over covers and the design - then how my books are written includes a lot of deigns demands intrisically. Neither do I think Cape "aim" me at anybody, at least not so far as I am aware. You've got me wondering now. To be truthful, I have no idea who reads my books, except for those who write letters and tell me who they are, and I can't plot any similarities from that! I guess I have the freedom to agitate for more influence over these things, but I have never wanted it that much: there's enough stuff to clear out of the head to allow writing to begin as it is, without my inviting in this kind of clutter. I'd be too intimidated to write at all!

AK: What pre-conceived agenda do you think readers might have in approaching (a) your fiction and (b) Scottish fiction in general?

JG: I don't know. I only know they are individuals and as such have different, unimaginable experience to bring to their reading. I don't, can't, indeed shouldn't, know what they bring, I merely know they bring it! Readers are not empty vessels waiting for words from the author to tell them what is happening, how to think about it: a very 19th Century idea. Any contemporary author surely needs to remain aware of the participation of the reader if they're bringing their own light to bear on what is said, the intelligent reader's wish to participate in making up the moral meaning of a book. Not writing that in (no stereotypes or political imperatives, please) is important. To leave space for the reader to conjecture, to feel and run with the text, is simple respect.

AK: I really like that you anticipate an active reader - a reader willing to engage in the book's process and progression. May I ask who your major influences are?

JG: Major influences. Well then. It's always kind of hidden in there that you'll answer in literary terms, but actually, the influences on something like that, what determines how you imagine other people, comes from much more than books. Rather than go into major dissertation mode on this, I guess the big written influences on that thinking would be Alasdair Gray and Marguerite Duras. I could probably extend the list into the middle of next week if I was on major typing mode, but I won't. Dear lord, most of what you've read and been moved by, really genuinely and thoroughly moved by, will influence you in some way. Books that imply the awareness of a reader, but subtly, they're the ones that speak to me most powerfully.

AK: Would you agree that there is a tendency of critics and publishers to over-categorize and label Scottish writing in general in an effort to sell more books?

JG: Not publishers, not in my experience anyway. It does happen in reviews and "critical appraisals" sometimes. In my experience, it more degrades the work in question, and its potential readers, than promotes it. I have seldom seen it done (except in American publications, in fact!) to praise work or offer it to a readership. This is another matter to reviews of course. Anyway. There's a lot I could say here that's not of interest to most people I don't think, so perhaps I won't. These things in general seem out of my hands.

AK: It has come to my attention, that much of the literature within the Glasgow tradition concerns itself with the plight of lonely, frustrated and depressed schoolteachers. Joy Stone of The Trick is to Keep Breathing was also a schoolteacher and I understand that you also worked as a schoolteacher yourself. (Although I am not for a minute suggesting that you are or ever were lonely, frustrated or depressed!!) That said, why do you think so much Scottish and particularly Glaswegian literature concerns itself with the plight schoolteachers?

JG: Teachers are permissible book-readers! Hangover of guilt from old Scottish Socialist ideas that education is a great thing so long as it is general and mostly gleaned from the public library service that is now dead! What more can I say - Scotland is obsessed by teaching and all forms of missionary work.

AK: Two final questions and I sincerely apologise for their obviousness, but they have to be asked! (1) What are you reading at the moment? (2) What are you working on at the moment?

JG: Not obvious, merely interested, which is an easy thing to respond to. I'm reading Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie and The Good Women of China by Xinran. For study, I'm also reading a compendium called The Obsterician's Armamentarium, partly to do with a current project, which is a collaboration with Orcadian sculptor, Anne Bevan. We are putting together an exhibition (with attached book, if we can talk a publisher into something with that ma y photographs and line-drawings) exploring obstetrics and obstetrical implements. Some of the words will be written directly onto the sculpture, I hope: other pieces will be projected onto muslin or other cloth sheeting which surrounds the sculpture, others again will exist only in the prospective book. It is being extraordinarily interesting: birth involved everyone! I enjoy collaboration very much. It necessarily breaches boundaries or shifts ground. If it doesn't, it's not really doing its job. That's healthy and refreshing, as anything that shakes up your thinking a bit tends to be. I've worked with Anne on three other projects and it's always full of fun and learning. Who wouldn't want that?

AK: It sounds fascinating. May I ask how the idea for this project originated?

JG: I've worked with Anne on three occasions now,always at her instigation. She did the hard stuff first, in other words. First we did a piece called PIPELINES which resulted in a publication full of pictures of the sculpture and ongoing work, and the words I had written. To write those words, she took me down inside the pipes that supply Edinburgh with water which run under reservoirs in the Borders, hard hat and all. I'm not what you'd call outdoorsy. I can hear the hollow laughter of my friends at the mildness of that description now. So it was all a little hair-raising, but eventually great fun too. After that, we worked on something at a harbourside (more field trips) then in a wood in Aberdeen (ditto). When it came my turn to decide how and what we might do together after that, partly as a joking response, I tried to think of as "interior" a space as we could go ­ hence gynaecology and obstetrics. Of course, that mild joke was merely the original kick. It's a subject of intrinsic interest to most people I'd think. We've all been at one end or another of obstetric practice at some stage! How to hone down such a vast territory has been the most demanding thing: the work on this has been very natural to both of us.