THE WRITING LIFE: AUTHORS SPEAK

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1 THE WRITING LIFE: AUTHORS SPEAK THE LITERARY WORLD Sarah O Reilly: Nowadays a writer s work doesn t finish with the final full stop, as Beryl Bainbridge describes. She s following by Peter Porter imaging a 21 st Century Shakespeare and Michael Holroyd on the rise of the literary festival. Beryl Bainbridge: I mean in the old days you wrote a book and if you were lucky it was reviewed and then after about a few months the whole thing was forgotten till you wrote another one. But nowadays, if you have a book coming out you go all over the country, you have to really flog it, your publisher expects you to and you re forever giving readings or talking about it on the telly or the radio. My last book was published about four years ago, and you could turn down invitations to America, to India, to Australia to all the different festivals. I always turn them down cause I hate travelling. You d have various articles in the newspaper, they d come round and interview you and take another dreary photograph, that would be the thing, and you d go from city to city doing readings, cause nowadays you see there is a festival, so called book festival practically every month, so there s always somewhere to go. Peter Porter: The way things are today you couldn t be as successful, in the sense of have your works put on and esteemed, as Shakespeare was and be completely unknown to everybody as Shakespeare was in his time. I mean if he were alive today he d be on everything. Every morning he d be on the Today programme, he d be having special sessions at the South Bank, he d be painted in 1,000 different pictures and he d be interviewed and he d be he couldn t avoid it. Michael Holroyd: When I my career started, you did perhaps something on the radio, the Third Programme maybe or the Home Service, and that was it. There was much more advertising, there were more bookshops and

2 advertising in newspapers and magazines but that didn t involve you. You might have an interview, yes, but then from the 70s onwards it became more and more a younger brother of the performing arts, so you have to go out and blow the trumpet and beat the drum in front of your book. I think that because we re no longer a literary culture, as we used to be, it isn t the word that speaks, you have to perform the word a bit, you have to demonstrate it, you have to appear, you have to be the book, and that s quite different. And there s something terrible about it really because you finish a book and it s not published for another year or so, possibly you re writing a different book, involved in that, and when people say, What s your book about? Well, what is my book about? A terrible blank that stares you in the face. The book should do the speaking and I should stay at home. Sarah O Reilly: If you aspire to be a writer what should your focus be? Wendy Cope, Linda Grant and Hilary Mantel. Wendy Cope: You can settle for the appearance of success. Celebrity, you know, is not the same thing as really being respected for being good at what you do. Being good at writing is different from being respected for being good on radio quiz shows, or being good on television. It s different. And it may be if you re lucky that you hang onto your artistic integrity and everyone likes your work so much that you make some money out of it. It doesn t happen in a big way if you re a poet, but I think it s more and more difficult and I m very depressed with, you know, this whole thing of young people just wanting to be famous for the sake of being famous. If you want to be a writer, a serious writer, your focus has to be on writing as well as you can and all those other things are incidental, and it s nice if you get some recognition but it shouldn t really matter. It s about writing the best you can and then you ve created something which may enhance the lives of people not just now but for a long time to come. But you don t actually do it for other people, you do it to be true to yourself and then it may be of value to other people as well.

3 Linda Grant: People come up to me and they say, I d have loved to have written a book, this formulation with a very interesting tense in it, which means not I would love to write a book but rather, I want the book to have been written and I m the person going into the bookshop seeing the book with my name on it and I m the person doing the book signings and the literary festivals. They want the life of an author but the life of the author is the place of total and complete solitude. Hilary Mantel: Seems to me that it s the nature of the literary world that authors have to be obsessed with rating themselves and matching themselves against other authors. I find it all laughable, because writing is not about status and if status is what you seek you re better off taking up any profession that will allow you to hang your certificates on the wall and to have the obvious trappings of success. There are times in your career when you stop and ask yourself where you fit - am I as good as, am I better than - but I ve always found that an impulse it s well to suppress. My considered wisdom is this, that there is nothing you have to do, you ve no task except to watch the curve of your own development as an artist and to serve that development, if necessary by getting out of the way of your own abilities, putting aside immediate and egotistical considerations, just get out of the way of your own book. Stand out of your own light. Sarah O Reilly: If status or prizes aren t your aim why write? Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Porter and Michael Holroyd. Beryl Bainbridge: I don t write for readers, I don t think many writers do, I don t think any they say they do don t they but well I only write for myself, and when somebody says, Oh your book has given me so much pleasure, I just think, How peculiar, you know, I don t know what to say [laughs]. Of course I don t say that, I smile and say, How nice, but it I think I d have written books whether they were published or not, I just liked writing.

4 Peter Porter: At a more serious level, literature is a sort of keeping going while the various destinies all around about you are being enacted. It s a way, I think, of coping with time. We don t seem to live very long and yet on the other hand twenty-four hours can be a tremendously big burden. Michael Holroyd: The only happiness one gets from one s work is doing a good day s work, of suddenly discovering something on the page which works, you pick up the page, you shake it, it s there, it doesn t come to bits, and you didn t know it at the beginning of the day and now you know it. Now that s a real happiness and unless there is some element of that, well why on earth is one writing? Because otherwise moving a pen across the page is not all that enjoyable. P D James: There are times of boredom, there are times of regret, there are times of disappointment and there are times of it s just hard work and times when you wonder if you ll go on today, better not leave it and wait till inspiration comes? Always fatal I think. But basically yes, hugely pleasurable and certainly a writer is happiest I think when either writing or plotting or planning a book, or most of us are. Although some people would say when asked if they were happy as a writer would probably say, No, not particularly but I would be very, very unhappy if I weren t a writer, [laughs] I think there must be a kind of compulsion about it, it s a sense of This is what I m here to do and this is what I do do, and this is what I must do as well as I can. Sarah O Reilly: P D James on the pleasure of writing. Maureen Duffy has the last word. Maureen Duffy: If I don t write I feel lost, bereft. You know, there s that dreadful vacuum, well it s more, it s a sort of palpable hollowness, because you re not living the alterative life, you see, and there is always the dread that it will go away. And then in a way you ve lost your reason for being. I mean, okay, yes, you have other reasons for being, other people depend on you and need you, there are other jobs that you can do, but if you are

5 probably any sort of artist then that is your reason for being. It s that line in Hopkins, What I do is me, for this I came.

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