Alchemy (47 page)

So I came back to London, went to the local grammar school and then eventually on to King’s College, London. I was the first in the family to go to university though my cousin did go to teacher training college. I tried to get into Oxford, inspired by one of my teachers, but I was only 17 and at the interview they said go back and have another year in the sixth form. Of course I couldn’t – I was in the care of the council at that point and my grant from them was finishing. So I thought, To hell with this, I’ve got enough A-levels anyway for King’s, so I went. I think I would have been out of my depth at Oxford – I might have been very seduced by academic life instead of writing, and I’d always wanted to be a writer.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

I was 12 when I decided. I was absolutely made up in my own mind, but with the sort of background I came from obviously nobody had ever been a writer. It was a great

‘I was 12 when I decided to be a writer. I was absolutely made up in my own mind, but with the sort of background I came from obviously nobody had ever been a writer.’

‘Once you’ve finished writing a book you feel completely bereft, totally lost, miserable and hellish, and you think, “I’ll never write another!”’

aspiration to become a teacher, so I had to conceal this decision I had made and pretend I was going to teach like everybody else. Even up to when she died in the eighties my auntie was still saying, ‘I know you’re doing very well dear but I do wish you had a proper job’!

What was the inspiration for your first novel, and how did you start writing it?

I didn’t want to be a novelist, I wanted to be a playwright but it was virtually impossible. I wrote my first full-length play in my third year of university and I sent it in for a competition which was the brainchild of Kenneth Tynan, run by the
Observer,
to find new playwrights. It didn’t win but they asked me to become a member of the Royal Court Writers’ Group so I joined and I was in it with Edward Bond, John Arden and Arnold Wesker. Arnold always says that he did some reading for the competition and he was the one who picked out my play. So I wrote several plays, but meanwhile I’d met a publisher. He was starting a list called New Authors at Hutchinson and said,’Stop wasting your time writing plays that nobody will put on. Write a novel and I will publish it.’ This was a pure con trick since he had no idea, and nor had I, whether I could write a publishable novel. But I was tired of not having an audience since it was incredibly difficult for a woman in those days to be a playwright. The only female contemporaries were Sheila Delaney and Ann Jellicoe and in effect they both had to give up, even though they were the most successful.

This editor’s request coincided with me
trying to make sense of my rather unusual childhood – the drowning man looks at past life routine – so eventually I wrote my first autobiographical novel, which is still in print. That was how I got into novels.

Alchemy
is full of historical detail. How and where did you do your research, and how long did it take?

I had the Culpeper so that was to hand, and Sidney’s
Arcadia
and Margaret Hannay’s scholarly biography of the Countess, but I use the London Library extensively, intensively, and I like to be able to carry things away from there. I used to do a lot of work in the Public Records Office and the British Library, but as I said I like to carry things away and surround myself with them. I go on researching – I don’t research and stop – so the book took a couple of years. There’s usually six months’ gestation before I start to write – I’m thinking, reading books, making notes – but the whole thing never takes less than eighteen months. Once you’ve finished you feel completely bereft, totally lost, miserable and hellish, and you think, ‘I’ll never write another book!’ I felt quite drained after Alchemy, particularly because it’s a big book and quite dense. I’m only now ruminating on the next one.

Both characters encounter gender prejudice. Do you think much has changed? Do women like Jade still come up against such prejudice?

At the moment, yes. One always hopes it will change, really change, but I saw an article just recently about how few top lawyers

‘I love doing plays-they’re much faster to write and you’re also working with people. There’s a wonderful moment when you go to the read-through and it works! It’s so good to witness your work coming alive.’

‘Our lives are pretty regimented and dull in many ways. It’s all very nice and comfortable but there is a loss of imaginative food, a loss of contact with the real and the concrete. So people need a sort of compensation, to be transported into something which is not immediately familiar but can feed the imagination.’

are women. The police and publishing are better; they’ve changed a lot. From time to time I do a head count in the pages of the
Guardian Review,
and of course the number of men who are reviewed, and are reviewed by men, still enormously outweighs the number of women. Women are reviewed by women, ethnics are reviewed by ethnics…it drives me mad. I feel very equivocal about the Orange Prize; it shouldn’t be necessary, but unfortunately it is, because again and again the Iists and judges are male-dominated. When I was much younger I would have imagined that by now the genders would be level-pegging, and they’re not.

Many of your novels and plays deal with sexuality, particularly homosexuality, and yet you are not known as a gay writer. Do you think such distinctions and names are helpful or a hindrance, and are they necessary any more?

I don’t think they’re necessary and I don’t think they’re helpful. I’d much rather people just came to you as a writer. Sometimes you’re exploring the experience of gay characters and sometimes you’re exploring the experience of straight characters. It was necessary when I wrote my third novel,
The Microcosm,
in the sixties because since
The Well of Loneliness
there hadn’t been a full-blown treatment of female homosexuality but, having done what I thought was an exploration then, I feel that such distinctions shouldn’t be necessary in 2005. You write about what you
want to write about; sometimes it’s one thing and sometimes it’s another.

Historical fiction is very in vogue. Why do you think that is?

Our lives are pretty regimented and dull in many ways. It’s all very nice and comfortable – the dishwasher does the dirty work – but there is a loss of imaginative food, a loss of contact with the real and the concrete. So people need a sort of compensation, to be transported into something which is not immediately familiar but can feed the imagination.

What has been the most satisfying part of your career?

I love doing plays – they’re much faster to write and you’re also working with people. There’s a wonderful moment when you go to the read-through and it works! It’s so good to witness your work coming alive. A real high was having my play
Rites
produced at the National Theatre – which was still at the Old Vic at the time – to go in there and see my play, that was great.

Who are your influences as a writer?

Oh, there are masses. Lots of poets – John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Milton, John Keats – he was my childhood hero – I was going to be John Keats! James Joyce and Joyce Cary – who is brilliant at interior monologue but is rather out of fashion now – then there was a whole clutch of American writers, especially Steinbeck when I was younger. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Genet and Violette LeDuc were all extremely important too. But you begin to forget who was important to you because you move on.

Are there any books that you wish you had written?

The whole of Shakespeare!

What do you do when you’re not writing?

I do copyright work for the British Copyright Council, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and the Copyright Licensing Agency, among others. If you can improve conditions for writers, for example by encouraging the government of Hungary to set up a public lending right scheme, it is very satisfying. And I like to garden when I can. I find that very therapeutic.

1933, the year Hitler came to power and the Loch Ness monster was seen.

State schools – Trowbridge High School for Girls, the Sarah Bonnell School, Stratford, and King’s College, London

Poet, playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Works for various societies including the Copyright Licensing Agency and the Authors’ Licensing and Collection Society. President of the European Writers’ Congress and the British Copyright Council.

London

Shakespeare

John Donne

Robert Browning

Gerard Manley Hopkins

James Joyce

Virginia Woolf

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean Genet

Joyce Cary

François Villon

William Langland

Dante

When do you write?
In the morning.

Where do you write?
Sitting in an armchair.

Why do you write?
Because I must.

Pen or computer?
Pen and notebooks.

Silence or music?
Silence.

How do you start a book?
An idea comes.

And finish?
Last sentence.

Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

The biro and the notebook are a ritual. I have to have the connection down through the hand, so it’s all longhand. And I can’t write at a desk; I have to be in a comfortable chair. Someone else types it up: I thought if I learnt to type someone would say you must go and work in an office. I hate typing.

What or who inspires you?

I don’t know where it comes from, it just sort of comes. I have an image of something suddenly, then that accretes.

If you weren’t a writer what job would you do?

I would probably be an archaeologist. I love digging and delving and reconstructing the past.

What’s your guilty reading pleasure?

Favourite trashy read?

I read the papers and watch telly, especially
Time Team.

By Maureen Duffy

Like most writers, I’m often asked how I get my ideas for books; how do they come to me? Mostly they begin with an image of someone in a setting that’s a bit blurry round the edges. I carry this about in my head for weeks, sometimes for months, like a faded photograph that, in the opposite of the usual direction from life, gradually becomes stronger, the image more coloured, more solid. The person gets a name, a present, some past, the beginning of a future which is a plot. I begin to write a note or two in a new spiral notebook, opaque notes that sound like nothing to anyone but me, a notebook that I am suddenly obsessively attached to and carry around with me everywhere. The journey, the process has begun, somewhere in a part of the brain Freud called the unconscious, bubbling away on its own like magma under the earth’s crust, a process that can’t be hurried by merely conscious thought.

So what was the image that came to me as the start of Alchemy? It was of a young woman in black leathers on a motorbike. I thought it was based on the niece of one of my closest friends, but he says it wasn’t, that she never rode a motorbike. Did I make it up then? Anyway there she was, a lawyer, like my friend’s niece, but further into her career, independent, with her own struggling law firm, Lost Causes. And her name, suddenly, was Jade Green, an echo of her own wry sense of humour and of a girl skilled in the martial arts, Jade from China.

And Amyntas? Because images can be sparked by literature as well as life, and
behind every book stands a line of other books like the ghosts that haunted Macbeth, s/he sidestepped out of
All’s Well That Ends Well,
via Sir Philip Sidney’s romance
Arcadia,
with its jousting ladies in armour, bringing her Sidney connections with her, and the charge of witchcraft, in an age when alchemy was transmuting into science.

‘Mostly my ideas for books begin with an image of someone in a setting that’s a bit blurry round the edges. I carry this about in my head for weeks, sometimes for months, like a faded photograph that, in the opposite of the usual direction from life, gradually becomes stronger.’

Witchcraft in its various manifestations as part of the body of English folklore has interested me ever since my dancing and singing years in the heyday of the post-war revival of English traditional music in my teens. Twenty years later I combined this interest with a largely Freudian interpretation of the supernatural in literature, beginning with the remnants of Celtic paganism and ending, for the time being at least (pre
Dr Who
and
Star Trek
), with the science fiction creations of Isaac Asimov, bottling up this collection of genies in my first non-fiction book,
The Erotic World of Faery
(1972), published in one of those recurring periods when critics and publishers announce that the novel is dead.

As so often in writing, the tap root for
Alchemy
goes back a very long way and even deeper into childhood stories like
Puck of Pook’s Hill,
or films like
The Thief of Baghdad,
or deeper still to a nightmare about a witch standing on one side of a blackly gleaming coalfield while I watched paralysed as she laughingly pointed her wand at the edge and shrank the whole mass to one small knob. Those were the years of coal rationing.

I knew that in Alchemy I wanted to write about the bigotry and fanaticism which seem
to be on the increase at this cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Both Amyntas and Jade come up against the glass ceiling for women of their time. Today, a century after the struggles of the Suffragettes, there are still very few women in the top echelons of the legal profession, and in the early seventeenth century it was hard for any woman, unless she was a queen, to pursue any profession, let alone as a physician. Those who did were usually midwives or ‘cunning women’ who ran the risk of being labelled witches.