Faustine

Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937, the eldest daughter of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, and Elizabeth, Lady Glenconner. Much of her childhood was spent at the family seat of Glen House, a neo-Gothic baronial castle in Peeblesshire, Scotland, which had been remodelled in the 1870s under the direction of her great-grandfather the Scottish chemist/industrialist Sir Charles Tennant
.

She published her first novel
The Colour of Rain
in 1964 under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy.
The Time of the Crack
followed in 1973. In 1975 she founded the literary magazine
Bananas,
its editorial policy influenced (in her own words) by ‘Borges and Marquez and [Bulgakov’s]
The Master and Margarita.’ Bananas
was committed to publishing original fiction and among its notable coups (alongside new work by Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard) were Sara Maitland’s first published story, ‘Andromache’, and Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’ – these works pointing toward the sort of fruitful re-imagining of myth and fable which would become Tennant’s own forte
.

In the late 1970s she re-established herself in fiction with what Gary Indiana has described as ‘a startling procession of novels unlike anything else being written in England: wildly imaginative, risk-taking books inspired by dreams, fairy tales, fables, science fiction and detective stories, informed by a wicked Swiftian vision of the U.K. in decline.’ A notable achievement was
The Bad Sister
(1978), in which film critic Jane Wild resorts to infamous acts under an evil influence. The novel was Tennant’s repaying of a debt of love to James Hogg’s celebrated
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824), and clearly signalled her passion for the themes of the gothic, the dualistic and the Scottish
.

These passions were further explored in
Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde
(1989) and
Faustine
(1992), both newly reissued by Faber Finds. In the former – styled, of course, after Robert Louis Stevenson – an impoverished single mother at the end of her tether finds dark pharmaceutical means to revive her looks and career ambitions. Tennant has said that her purpose was to show ‘how the frequently intolerable pressures for one woman today – single parenthood, need to compete in the marketplace, a Manichean split between ambition and ‘caring’ – can lead to disintegration and murder.’ In
Faustine,
which derives very clearly from Goethe and others, a 48-year-old woman who has expended her best years in the raising of her daughter’s child enters a diabolical pact by which she returns to the age of 24, with beauty and all the powers that attend it
.

The following discussion about these two novels and their themes and influences was conducted at Emma Tennant’s home in Holland Park on April 15, 2011
.

Q
.
The Bad Sister
was the first of your re-imaginings of a classic text. What was it about Hogg’s
Justified Sinner
that you found so compelling? And was it a gratifying experience for you to reinvent a literary work you had admired in that way?

EMMA TENNANT
: Yes, it was exciting to take a story and, with a tiny twist, show another possibility, another world. The world of
Justified Sinner
is just the most terrifying you’re ever likely to find. No English writer could touch it. It’s not just a case of ‘What a fantastically written book …’ Within its very nature, I think, is something more terrifying than anyone else – except for the Russians – have attempted to do.
The Bad Sister
got great praise but it then sort of vanished. Some people thought it was far too odd and violent, it frightened them. I had letters from people telling me they thought it was ‘extraordinary’ – so that one thought, ‘But …?’ It’s part-real, part-dream, different in that sense to
Two Women of London
and
Faustine
, which are fables. But all three of them are Scottish works – because the idea of ‘the double’ is so important in them.

Q
. On that point, you dedicated
Two Women of London
to Karl Miller, renowned literary editor and author of, inter alia, the acclaimed
Doubles: Studies in Literary History
(1984). Was he an influence on you?

ET
: Karl very kindly gave me huge encouragement from the beginning and had a tremendous input into everything I did, particularly to do with Scotland and ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’,
*
which is
the
Scottish thing to be suffering from. I think Karl’s work and his obsession with the double completely set me off – because it was so much what you wanted to read about, and you felt that no one had quite talked about before. The theme felt very Scottish, and Karl kept on saying to me that that was what I must remember I was …

Q
. Did you agree with him?

ET
: I did feel that, because I had been in Scotland so much. I grew up in this fake castle, ‘Glen’, which was frightening enough in itself, as far from England as you could get. And I had to come to terms with my peculiar family and my … peculiar everything, actually. The exterior of this castle looked so mad. And within it just felt like an amalgam of everything Angela Carter and such writers had ever invented in their imaginations – it was plain terrifying. My mother used to say that going up to bed in the castle was an act that took a lot of nerve, and probably quite a few drinks …

But during the war my parents were sent to Turkey [where Tennant’s father undertook Special Operations work] and it meant that I was alone there in this gigantic mad invention. All the editions of James Hogg, I should say, were in the castle library. And opposite my bedroom window, across a little valley, was a wood that I loved more than anywhere, which had inspired every kind of magical story. You could see why – it was the sort of place where you could imagine a man might turn into a three-legged stool … None of this existed in English literature. But as a writer it’s enough to keep you going for a lifetime because you’re seeing such peculiar but beautiful things. Where do you find that in the land of Jane Austen? England is wonderful and brilliant, of course, but it never becomes as terrifying or as real, in a way, as all the unreal things described in Scotland, which are so unlike what you find if you cross the border into England, just by one mile even, as far as Berwick. Scotland is just a completely different country and culture, and I don’t think people really think about
how
different Scotland is. It’s fearsome, actually.

Q
. For
Two Women of London
you relocated Stevenson’s
Jekyll and Hyde
to Notting Hill Gate, but you replicated Stevenson’s intricate narrative structure. Was that a challenge?

ET
: Yes, but necessary. It sounds like a simple idea – ‘There’s Jekyll, and there’s Hyde.’ Not at all, it’s the most complicated thing, and it demands that strange structure. I wrote a screenplay of
Two Women of London
for Paramount at a time when they had a London office that lasted about three weeks … But the script didn’t work at all, the novel is better. It had demanded that complexity, it was impossible to do it unless by smoke and mirrors.

Q
. Of course, famously Stevenson’s story has no women characters to speak of, whereas your cast-list is entirely female. You have described yourself as ‘a feminist writer – amongst other things.’ In
Two Women of London
the put-upon, maddened Mrs Hyde transforms into the fragrant Eliza Jekyll, but there comes a point when Ms Jekyll starts to welcome the change back to the aggressive Mrs Hyde – ‘the sensation of pure violence that poured through me was the most wonderful sensation I have ever had in my life.’ And this feels like a striking admission, because we’re familiar with men rhapsodising the idea of a beast within them, yet still it seems that woman are not quite ‘meant’ to have such feelings, much less exult in them
.

ET
: Absolutely. Of course every single woman has had those very violent feelings, just like every man. It’s just odd to think that where we are today, what’s going on – I’m amazed that so many women seem to have given up on any form of expression of those violent feelings. The anger has been siphoned out into consumerism – it’s a cliché, but that’s what happened. Women today who are told they must be like dolls – what can they be making of it? What do they think as they slide down the lap-dancing pole? ‘I am a
very
angry woman’ …? Maybe this is just one’s generation. But to me the point of everything is to get those feelings out and make something of them, not to conceal their existence or to allow what will happen if you leave them bottled up. Perhaps some new form of fiction could deal with this.

Q
. You yourself participated in the feminism and radical politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Was this a transformative time?

ET
: I don’t know how much it changed how men thought – not for me to say. But it changed women’s way of thinking for ever. It’s just that they don’t know it. And it’s as if all that has been erased. But it is there, like Hyde, waiting to burst out. From the unequal pay thing, at its mildest, to the expectations that women seem to swallow, just like that – and then, of course, are bitterly upset and disappointed when the dreams aren’t realised.

Q
. Both
Two Women
and
Faustine
are very much haunted by the particular struggle of lone child-rearing for women who still hope to realise themselves in other ways
.

ET
: Yes, women placed in impossible situations and never told that they
are
impossible. I couldn’t feel more for all of that nightmare. At least in ‘my day’ the radical movements were – sometimes ludicrous, yes, but actually fantastically useful. I remember going to early meetings in 1969–70 – they were funny, some of the women had gone too far, crazy with rage, shouting, ‘Why can’t
he
buy the loo paper …?’ You couldn’t help laughing, while wanting to be very respectful to the revolutionary atmosphere. But that’s the first time I heard it being expressed.

Q
. It’s a modest demand
…

ET
: Oh, I think so. I remember that woman’s angry face. No doubt planning to burn down several factories full of Andrex …

Q
. How angry were you yourself at the time?

ET
: I didn’t
know
I was angry. That was the point of those days – you discovered. You listened to the polemic and you thought ‘Oh god I don’t agree …’ But then it sort of seeps into you and you wonder if these people weren’t really right. That said, with Kate Millett, who went mad, or other feminist heroines – there was a lot to either snigger at, or else admire rather nervously. Even so, despite everything, those days made a huge difference, it did seep in. And in some glorious moment – in twenty years’ time or whatever, who knows? Things might work …

Q
. In both
Two Women
and
Faustine
the lead female characters suffer for feeling themselves unattractive –‘the inequality of beauty’ as it’s described in Faustine – and they trade some part of themselves in return for the renewal of their looks. Do you feel that a woman’s lot in life is severely reduced if she’s –

ET
: Plain? Well, it’s the imponderable, ‘the inequality of beauty’ – you can’t get away from it, but on the other hand it ruins everything. You can just see the women who will be, I suppose, victims of beauty, of the myth of beauty. You see them and you see what is likely to happen to them as they grow older – their surprise at finding they’re different. I think it’s a lot to do with difference, and difference is a killer – it just means you don’t lead the life you feel you ought to be leading.

But it can take many forms. My daughter told me about this psychological disease called dysmorphia [the obsessive concern with a perceived/imagined defect in one’s physical appearance]. She has a friend who’s a ‘handsome young man’ as she puts it, but his life is torture because he looks in the mirror and all he can see is a monster. And I wonder if this theory was born around the same time as Stevenson’s
Jekyll and Hyde
? There must have been a doctor who put forward the idea that somebody could look so terrible in one way and perfectly all right but unreachable in the other. It seemed to me to belong to that era. Maybe not …

Postscript. It was in fact an Italian physician named Enrique Morselli who coined the term ‘dysmorphophobia’ to describe a patient’s fear of having a bodily deformity. The term used today is ‘body dysmorphic disorder’ (BDD). Morselli first documented his research in 1886 – the same year as Robert Louis Stevenson published his
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.