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 it s 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.

1. So how does the fact that you live abroad now affect your writing? Would you consider it particularly strange or particularly symptomatic of an English – British – writer living abroad to write a book like Ulverton, which is so deeply concerned with England?

Well, I started that when I was living in England. I wrote three chapters in England, and then the rest in France. Obviously that must have made a difference, and I’d be interested to know what I would have produced had I written the whole thing in England. Possibly something different, maybe the same, I don’t know, it’s very difficult to say, but I certainly think not being there was important. I mean, London is so different from the area around Ulverton that it would have been the same as living in France, in a way.

But no, I think living abroad obviously sharpens your instincts and your understanding because you’re surrounded by what isn’t English or what isn’t British so therefore you’re more conscious of what is British. As for writing about the landscape, obviously not being there in one sense is a problem and in another sense is an advantage because it’s “emotional recollections in tranquility” and the rest of it, and you filter it down to what you can remember; whereas sometimes being in front of something is bewildering, you know, there are too many details. So I was left with trying to capture, in a way, an essence that I remember and that I feel within me about that area, which is more important to me than detailing things.