Welcome Page
Bio
Background
Books
Other work
Bibliography
Interviews
Essays and Academic
Free Classics!
Links
Agent and representation
Mail this site
This interview was conducted with Samantha Morton for the online archive for writers, inc.writers, a free resource for writers and academics, 2004
Clara and more
"The wonderful thing about human creativity, surely, is that work of genius comes from people whose lives were entirely full of their complement of humanity, of ordinariness and strife and banality."
In your recent novel, Clara, you appear to have struck a rich vein within yourself, which is reflected via the characterisation of Clara Schumann, the celebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer. How hard was it to depict this ‘real’ character in a fictional medium?
Complicated question. The book took six years in all, and the research was the ‘light relief’ part. Reading and ingesting and thinking and piecing together a psychology from factual details - all of that was straightforward compared to the demands of craft, of piecing together what I hoped would be a convincing set of characters who seem to have life on the page. A novel is a novel; it’s not a biography. The research was sprawlingly huge – all the listening, biographies, examining of letters, tracking down of autopsies and trawling of musical, instrumental, familial, literary, military and medical histories – but the chief demand was the novel to write on top, dealing with voice and verbal scenery and atmospherics etc. Writing fiction was the toughest bit. Marrying the research with it involved a kind of method-acting mindset it was not always easy to get into or stay with, but that is much the same when you are making the character entirely by yourself, just that the making has a kick-start from fact.”
How important is music to you and your work?
“Isn’t it important to everyone? I guess not just because I get so much from listening to music, but also because music changed my Life, as they say, it matters inordinately. I come from a background of pronounced and fairly hopeless poverty (in British terms, that is) and assumed there were things out there with possibility for me - good things in general, much by way of aspiration, all that stuff. Life was what my mother called “getting by” and much else did not occur, or was pretty thoroughly suppressed by liberal applications of the rhetorical question “Who do you think you are? The Queen of Bloody Sheba?” I guess my mother thought that Big Ideas of whatever stripe were likely to lead to disappointment by not being able to be realised, and she was trying to save me from that disappointment. “There is a life out there, but it’s not for us”. She wanted me to “do well” kind of thing, but not too well. There was a hovering, non-specific worry about conspicuousness attached to this now I think of it, safety in keeping your head down or something. You know the kind of thing. Anyway, I went to secondary school and met the head of music, Ken Hetherington, and he replaced all that worry and fear with permission. Every child was ear-tested and given an instrument if they wanted one; every child who could hold a tune was given a place in a choir, of which he ran seven. And it was tough stuff: Gesualdo, Britten, Kodaly and Bartok were favourites for the choir, while the orchestras, both chamber and symphony (this in a state school) and the ensembles ranged most things including in-your-face contemporary “classical”. The first thing he did was tell me how to pronounce Mozart. Of course you should know these things, his teaching said. You should hear these things, grasp these things. Of course. There was no question that whatever was out there was for me too if I wanted them. He encouraged me to compose and perform and I gorged on it. I nearly died of a broken heart when I left school, a depression that lasted years till I tried to apply some of that sense of possibility he opened up by myself. Ken is dead now, but I think of him every day. I am grateful every day. I can’t always listen to music though. Sometimes it is too much. But that is positive too. It’s good to have something like that, something that means a great deal. How this works on my writing is hard to pin down. It’s sometimes obvious (with Clara) and sometimes less obvious, for example in the preference for strong, clearly defined rhythms in the prose. But I’m sure it’s there all the time.”
What fascinated you about the idea of a historical character?
“That very fact. This was a lived life, not something that could be dismissed with the double-edges of the words “made-up”. I think because Clara’s life was so extreme, so remarkable, there was no chance - and no need- to make up something half so full of contemporary resonance. What matters does not change much in any life. She, and her husband, were a way of talking about things that mean a great deal to me regarding art and its making, the double-standards of supposed genius, the daft class assumptions and appropriations that attach to capital-A Art, the multiplicity of lives that creative women still lead compared to their less multi-taskable chaps. Make someone up to say or even approach those things and one is so easily accused of “agenda”: this is less tenable if the story is already extant, as hers was. Is. Mind you, I can confess to the strong desire to de-romanticise, to “defluff” some things that these lives do wonderfully well. The lives of the Great and Good are often so misrepresented; preconceived notions of Great Art or “genius” drive me round the bend. These were people first and foremost, who did the things we all do, not rarefied fantasies talking like Radio 3. To see them as people who did extraordinary things merely within their context as people, this before the music or whatever else they offered into the bargain, mattered to me. The lives of creative women, especially creative women with husbands and children, are routinely overlooked as dull while the bad boys - the mad, bad and dangerous to know sorts – are eulogized. There was a deliberate desire to address that. I’m also fascinated by mental illness, and this story makes it inescapable. Robert Schumann suffered from serious mental illnesses all his life. That is not a facet of genius (another misrepresentation that drives me barmy): illness is illness, from which his composing is separate, and the more remarkable for his managing it. If it had not been for Clara’s care – at times full of drudgery and endurance of the near unendurable – he would have killed himself long before he was admitted to Endenich. Even today, however, the weak-minded notion that bad or sick behaviour is merely “creative temperament” persists. The overlooking of Schumann’s illness or the sanitizing of it because Schumann was “Great” is horribly elitist. The wonderful thing about human creativity, surely, is that work of genius comes from people whose lives were entirely full of their complement of humanity, of ordinariness and strife and banality. I wanted to write the Schumanns as people, with all of that “ordinary” stuff intact.”
Clara Schumann seems to have been peripherialised by history, often misunderstood and buried beneath the mental illnesses of Robert, how hard was it to bring her to the page?
“Nightmarish! For reasons I alluded to above, we’re awfully well schooled into seeing the wild-siders, drama queens, self-destructives and oddballs as interesting that it’s almost easy to render that on the page. Writing Liszt was no bother at all to keep on the boil, or Weick, Clara’s father. Robert was more complex because he’s not a bad boy, not by a long chalk. He’s ill and often desperate to be calm, desperate to live well and decently and can’t. Clara, though, was driven to be Good. To serve everything and everyone the best she could. That is a kind of honour we don’t seem to think much of these days, and certainly we don’t find it terribly exciting, if we ever did. It’s often thought to be women’s natural state and blamed for being “victim-behaviour” or “unassertive”. In fact it’s hugely assertive of a great deal, and helped her survive too. It was not easy to try to keep that very determined, tough yet humane mindset at the forefront and trust folk would stick with her.”
One could say that Clara was a feminist icon, in the same ilk as Wollstonecraft; do you feel that feminism was a driving and central core to this book?
“No. I don’t use the word “feminism” if I can help it because it so often means automatic dismissal from talk of aesthetics or meaning or craft. You could say I’ve been bullied out of it, but for sure the word has become a corner for any writer. Alasdair Gray is a feminist author, but he doesn’t get sidelined by it – I would because I am a girly. Besides, Clara herself was a great believer in men first – men as more valuable and valued – not remotely like Wollstonecraft who advocated women’s re-evaluation in society from a moral standpoint (and at enormous personal cost) clearly and overtly. Clara’s heroism is not that: it’s in her survival, her bravery, her being the very best woman she knew how to be despite horrible odds. Feminist iconry is all to pot these days – you hear people seriously advocating the late Diana Spencer or even, god help us, Sarah Jessica Parker, as the same. How desperate is that? Time to focus on value as people and what that value consists in. Where does that leave the fair Jessica?”
The book tackles issues of gender, was this from research or do you feel that you drew on your own personal psychology? How did you tackle these two issues, research vs. the personal?
“Gender isn’t an issue, it’s a fact of life! Clara’s life was to some extent dependent on gender expectations of the time and place she belonged being followed or challenged: how do you write without that? It’s not “choosing an issue”, it’s being accurate. And of course it’s me. Who else’s eyes or perceptions can I see through? You can disguise and all that, mask, defy and deny within certain parameters to deliberately “slew” a character into “THIS IS NOT ME” but that’s more “issue” writing to me than acknowledging gender! Of course, it’s also necessary to try to think within the character, based on research, so far as you can. It’s acting, I guess”: you and not you, the way acting a role on stage is, if you do it with sincerity. What is it Muriel Spark says? “It’s not autobiography for heaven’s sake. But it’s me. How else would you write if not through the personal?” I guess that’s why they call how one delivers a novel, the style you write in, “voice”. It is something unique to what you are, and that cannot cut out experience and the personal. How could it?
What annoys you most about the industry?
"The contemporary predilection for “Celeb” books and autobiographies. What are these things meant to be offering people? They pay a fortune for the bloody things then market them like buggery. Anti-education – “the masses like this kind of rubbish” thinking. Drives me nuts."
Where do your ideas come from? Where does that initial spark come from?
“Desperation! Usually a distant memory kindled by a scent, a photograph, an object like an old brooch, a sensation like rain on the eyelids. That kind of thing. And ideas, of course, the provocations of contemporary life - things that irritate to such an extent, they need to be exorcised somehow, and writing is really the only thing I’ve got to do that with. I’m not a polemicist. And thank goodness for that.”
What has been your greatest moment as a writer?
“Jings. Finishing “Clara”. It was a BRUTE to write and took what seemed forever.”
What are you presently working on?
“I’ve just completed a project called Rosengarten with a sculptor called Anne Bevan. We have worked together three times in the past, and this was our most ambitious project to date and is on the subject of obstetrics. We chose it because I am fascinated by the idea of human intervention in that most vulnerable of situations – the desire to save life, sometimes at appalling cost, how the machinery that routinely saves lives nowadays grew out of daring and desperation. Birth is the one human experience we all share, yet how we arrived is often so closed, so covered. And obstetrics got a rotten deal from 80s feminism I wanted to look at it fresh, in a more humane way. The exhibition and book, both called Rosengarten, are called after the first major book on obstetrics from the 16th century, another collaboration of words and visual art in that it contained beautiful woodcuts. A great deal of research went into that too, especially for the history side of things. And we visited hospitals of course, though only one would let us in. I wrote pieces somewhere between prose and poetry for the book, while Anne made sculptures based on the shapes of obstetric implements. And now I need a break!”
Can you tell us about the editing process you go through whilst writing?
“I can try, but it’s probably going to read as very dull and circular indeed. I fret for ages and get what I loosely call “ideas”. These are usually whole sentences or images. I find plots very hard because I find plots alienating. What happens, topography, is the least interesting thing about writing a book for me. Then I do what I call loosely “starting” which means writing paragraphs and leaving them
alone, writing another para, usually unrelated to the first, leaving it alone and this for as long as I can stand it. I am a very SLOW writer, the slowest I know. The process of filling a blank page is very difficult for me. Editing is where the interest lies. I edit as I go to keep my spirits up and only write new bits when there’s no way to avoid it. I’m not sure why making decisions regarding plot are terrible – should she do this or that questions can leave me started for months, sometimes years – but they are. In many ways, my ideal would be for someone to write a shell then let me at it to do the bit I think of as the “real” writing! It’s the editing, the embroidery of psychologies, the detail and rhythms of sentences fitting together that grip me. And things, as you can imagine, go forward at snail’s pace in this way till it stops. Then I read what I have and work out whether it wants to go further, in which case it’s a novel, or whether it’s contained as it is, in which case it’s a story. Only with Clara did I know it was a novel before I had started.”
If you could give your younger self any advice what would it be?
“It passes.”
What do you think makes a great read?
“A book that not only invites you in, but then tells you something you didn’t know before, or gives you an insight you didn’t have before, or shows you a place on the landscape you couldn’t have imagined before, and does it with style, intelligence and fresh language and leaves you feeling you just brushed your brain like you brush your teeth. Then it should ring like a bell in your head for a long, long time.”
What do you think makes great Literature?
“See above. On a national scale, literature only exists if it is sustained. Scotland could win prizes at forcing literature into corners, forcing writers to reinvent their own traditions continually, losing focus on words as something it matters to foster. The present so-called renaissance of Scottish writing has been nourished by enough strong individuals turning up at roughly the same time, by mutual contact and support, by a wider interest by European and American publishing houses in the writing coming from this country. We can't rely on that winder interest to continue to flourish or the literature of a whole country depends on being seen as "foreign" and having to explain itself within that context - you know, a compulsion to write on "Scottish" subjects or in "scottish" voices for that ethnic appeal (Brigadoon syndrome, where one becomes a tame member of the tourist industry) and the Executive (Scottish Parliament) has to begin to foster sustained work to exist and not wither as it has for every fresh set of determined writers in the past.”
What one thing do you think damages writing and writers the most?
“Loosing hope.”
Where do you see yourself in ten years time?
“Happier, I hope. Life gets better. I wouldn’t do my twenties again for a pension, or my thirties, come to that, but my forties have been a vast improvement. Muriel Spark once told me her seventies were the best so I’m hanging in there for that.”
Finally, many writers have favourite words or sayings; can you share some of yours with us?
“Picabia. “There is only one way to save your life, destroy your reputation." Quite.”