Readers Place

Adam Thorpe interview/review

Interview with Sabine Hagenauer (Erlangen)

1. Adam Thorpe, could you first of all tell me a little about your early life and artistic development? The important bits?

Well, I think I first wanted to write early, when I was eleven. I remember trying to start a novel in the back of the optician’s where my mother worked; I got to, I think, chapter two, where I realized that writing novels was very tough, and then I started doing all the usual things that you do. I started writing poetry, seriously, I suppose, as a teenager, and really started writing poetry before I wrote prose, and published poetry before I did prose, of course, and then fell almost, in a way, by accident, into novel-writing. I didn’t think of myself as becoming a novelist, and it happened by way of the short story, and particularly when I conceived the idea of Ulverton.

1. So you did start Ulverton with a short story, didn’t you?

I suppose so, in a way. I mean, its not a collection of short stories, but I conceived of the whole idea quite some time ago, about six years before it was eventually published, and then wrote the first story, and started on the second, and then gave up for a couple of years. I thought of the first one as a story complete in itself and indeed one of the problems was to incorporate that. first story, to explain it; it is explained in the last chapter, although very subtly, why it is not written in the authentic manner, the authentic text and style of the period. But as for artistic development, well, that’s for others to analyze, isn’t it, if they want to.

1. So these are what you consider the salient bits, then?

Well, a writer, in all his work, writes his own biography. That’s a sort of accepted truth, really, so that everything that happens to a writer is important.

1. In what ways does biography come into, say, Ulverton? It seems to be a very detached novel – not detached in an emotional sense, but its got nothing to do with biography.

No, but most of the folk stories I based Ulverton on were known to me because I was in certain areas of England: some of them are from my family’s area of Derbyshire. One side of my family comes from Derbyshire, and so I went up to Derbyshire a lot and heard these stories, and the others comes from an area I knew from the age of thirteen on, which was the Berkshire-Wiltshire area, so the reason I liked certain stories and they excited me was for personal, maybe autobiographical reasons.

I think that the obsession with place, with one particular place, and the tracing of it back through time is possibly something to do with the fact that I’ve had a fairly peripatetic life, born abroad and living abroad. I find you’ve got this very internal, very poetic style which calls for a lot re-reading and re-working as a reader; it especially stands out in “Stitches” and in Still.

1. How did you work that out? Do you have any people you particularly admired, whom you started to imitate, or was it through your poetry?

I think so, yes, I mean I do have people I admire, obviously, and I’ve got very conventional taste in terms of novelists I like – I just love all the great modernists. But it’s very difficult to say how you develop your style, it’s pretty unconscious. Still I wrote in a fairly Edwardian style because it’s about the First World War and after about 350 pages I realized I was actually bored with it and went into a sort of crisis, really, because the deadline was approaching, and then suddenly this particular voice popped into my head and I followed it for the next 500 and odd pages and realized that this was really what the novel was about: the clash of now with then, and the clash of America and England, of American English and British English. It was all about contradictions and clashes and disjunction and that’s expressed linguistically and in the way the reader is taken through by the language and dragged on by the scruff of the neck, and things keep appearing and disappearing…

1. Do you believe that writing can actually make an impact on public life?

Well, it’s interesting because I never thought that it could, particularly in relation to my own novels, and then somebody sent me some publicity for an English organization, The Council for the Protection of Rural England. They used an extract from Ulverton in their publicity in order to express and promote the idea of conservation and I suddenly thought, well, that’s interesting, because there’s obviously someone on the council who’s read Ulverton and who’s picked on these particular passages as expressing something about the English countryside that we need to react politically to – to save it or to preserve it, and preserve it in the right way. That made me realize that novels are of course read by people in positions of power or influence, and even if Ulverton made a politician wake up the next morning thinking five percent more about rural England, about the need for conservation, then that’s very, very important. How that translates into political action one can’t even begin to analyse because it’s so subtle, but I think novels can influence people, they can turn people socialist, or they can turn them the other way.

The ecology movement , for instance, was started by books like The Silent Spring, there are key texts that fired people, and brought people together, and energized people, but it’s a very subtle thing. So I feel – I have only thought this recently – that Ulverton is probably making a difference, even if it’s tiny. It’s not just entertainment, or it’s not just for lovers of cultural theory.

1. Your novels are concerned with the relationship between public history and local, private history, and with the effects that the “great events” taking place in the outside world have upon individuals. Is this the sort of history you think ought to be written?

Yes, the secret history, the hidden history. And I think part of the political programme of Ulverton was bound up with allowing voices that have been suppressed or are suppressed even now, when you look at history, to have their say. One of the ironies in the book is that the long dialect chapter is, that’s uttered by a peasant but in a copy of the great modernist text, Joyce’s Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Ulysses. unierfurt.de