Penelope Lively / Features / Untitled Books

"My education was reading. So yes, my writing sprang from reading. Obviously not every voracious reader is a writer, but I’ve never known any writer who wasn’t a voracious reader, it goes with the job.”

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively has written many prize-winning novels for adults and children, including Moon Tiger which won the 1987 Booker Prize. She talks to Lucy Scholes about her new book, How It All Began, and on once being a children's writer.

Penelope Lively greets me warmly at her front door, insisting I bring my bike inside where it'll be safer, and mildly chastising me for not wearing a helmet. Once inside, she shows me upstairs to a cosy sitting room full of books. The walls are adorned with beautiful woodcuts and oil paintings by her aunt, the artist Rachel Reckitt - one wall devoted to the blitzed ruins of London; houses with their walls blown away leaving what's left of the room inside exposed to the outside world. Reckitt, Lively tells me, worked in London during the war where she spent what precious little free time she had sketching images of the destroyed city around her.

We settle into high-back armchairs across from each other and from the very beginning of our conversation I'm captivated by her sharp articulation, humour and warmth. Lively has been writing for forty-one years. Her first book, Astercote, a children's story, was published in 1970, followed seven years later by her first novel for adults, the Booker Prize shortlisted The Road to Litchfield. After being shortlisted again in 1984, she went on to win the Booker in 1987 with Moon Tiger. This month sees her latest novel, How It All Began, published by Penguin. So, I ask, how did her own career begin?

"I think I'd have to say that I was inspired to write by reading," she declares. "I'd always just read and read. I was born in Egypt and lived there until I was twelve so I was educated at home. My education was reading. So yes, my writing sprang from reading. Obviously not every voracious reader is a writer, but I've never known any writer who wasn't a voracious reader, it goes with the job."

She explains that although she began by writing for children, this is now all in the past.

"Sadly," she says, "the children's stories packed up on me a long time ago, I haven't written one for about 25 years."

Was there a particular reason for this, did it coincide with her own children growing up?

"They just left me," she answers. "I no longer think of myself as a children's writer. I'm a lapsed children's writer. A once-children's writer."

On discovering that their grandmother used to write children's books, her then eleven-year-old grandchild offered her expertise as a reader of any new work.

"I didn't try it though," Lively chuckles. "I just knew that the spark had gone. There's no point in flogging a dead horse."

"Short stories don't come anymore either," she continues. "It's been almost ten years since I wrote one. Before that I was constantly writing short stories alongside long fiction. I can't account for it. I guess some aspect of writing leaves you. I miss the short stories though, because it's an intensely difficult form, and a very satisfying one."

"They have something in common with writing for children," she adds. "They require the same economy and precision - you must grab the reader in the first line or paragraph. There's no room for slack in either, not that there's room for slack in the novel exactly, but I'm thinking of what Graham Greene said about linking passages - sections of the novel where there's a slowing down of pace or a ticking over - in a short story the whole conception has to be right, you can't just wander off into nowhere."

So how does she attack the writing process? Is it something that comes easily?

"Novels are very hard work," she replies, "like hacking away at the rock face. They're hard graft. I have always enjoyed them, but I always have a period when I don't know where it's going and I get stuck. I don't start short stories if I don't know where they're going - I would have conceived it as an entity before I started it - but I start a novel with only the framework in place and then it's the filling in where you can get stuck."

How It All Began opens with the mugging of retired schoolteacher Charlotte Rainsford on a London street. The fallout of this seemingly minor event then sends ripples across a variety of lives, some close to Charlotte, some not so much, the novel is the story of what happens because of this one event.

"Our own lives are buffeted from one contingency to another," she remarks. "You think you've planned your day and then it gets knocked aside because you didn't wear a helmet and you fall off your bicycle. History is the same - contingent events knock things sideways. Politicians think they can anticipate what happens, but can they really? The difference between choice and contingency has always interested me hugely, and history is just a mass of countries and people thinking they're making choices, but then being knocked sideways by some contingent event."

Does this mean there are similarities between the novelist and the historian?

"What the novelist is doing," she declares, "is imposing a pattern on events, but life doesn't really have a pattern. A novel is a contrivance; life isn't like that at all. So yes, there are similarities in that historians are trying to find a pattern in the events that have happened. It goes back to the perennial historical questions such as what were the causes of the First World War or the French Revolution, etc?"

Her earlier book Making It Up (2005) is a pseudo-autobiographical work that explores the roads not taken by the author.

"That," she states, "is a book that you can only write in old age once you can look back and think what if?" She found it "very alarming" to realise that the majority of the major decisions in life are made when one is still quite young. "Perhaps it was my lack of career path as such, but all these decisions clustered before I was thirty. You can't regret the roads not taken, because you don't know whether these might have led to something worse happening, but as a story-teller you can't resist trying to make up the stories of what might have been."

If she could go back and speak to her twenty-five year old self what advice would she give herself?

"I think it would have to be to never pass up an opportunity - and I think I probably haven't in a way - seize the day, do what you can when you can, try everything - I think I almost always have, I mean I've been chicken occasionally, but not really. I do have one or two regrets in relationships though. Remember that it is very difficult to repair relationships," she warns me wisely.

Changing the topic, I explain that I'm eager to know what she made of the controversy surrounding this year's Man Booker Prize. She sheepishly admits that the only shortlisted title she's read is the Barnes, and only after he'd won. But, having followed the press coverage, she does admit that she thinks Stella Rimington, the chair of the judging panel, perhaps did herself a disservice when it came to the focus on 'readability'.

"It was probably a word that slipped out," she considers, "but the 'rattling good read' comment was fatuous. There are some very good books that aren't easy to read - the fault might not be with the book, but actually with oneself. There are great books that I've had trouble with, Ulysses for example."

What then does she think about the plans afoot for a competitive award in the form of the Literature Prize?

"I don't like the idea of this polarisation," she says. "It will suggest that the Booker is all about readability, but it's important to remember that the Booker has done huge things over the years to get more people to read more challenging and interesting books than they would have otherwise done. I think it would be a terrible shame if that kind of publicity were lost. So all in all, I feel very ambivalent about it."

She's written so many different stories, and been so successful with each of the different genres that she's used, so does she see a different Penelope Lively writing each time?

"Well in a way, yes," she replies. "I look at Moon Tiger now and think 'somebody else wrote that'. But then again I was somebody else then - it was another incarnation of me before lots of experience happened. My favourite work is probably my children's story, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. I still get letters from children about it now."

She goes on to make the interesting distinction between what she calls "lived experience" and "intellectual experience", the latter, for her at least, having been "reading above all".

"Looking back over a lifetime at my age, I've realized how much I've been formed by reading. When I wrote Moon Tiger there was an awful lot I hadn't yet read. The person I am - it's an intellectual climb as much as the product of things that have happened to me along the way."

And how much of herself does she put into her books?

"Obviously you puts bits of yourself in, an arm or a leg," she chuckles. "But to go back to Claudia for example, the only bit of me I put into her was her interest in history, otherwise she's nothing like me - if only! She's much more feisty than I am, much more upfront. I'd have loved to have been more like Claudia."

What about the classic mantra chanted to aspiring novelists: 'write what you know'?

"If you only write out of personal experience it's far too limiting," she declares. "You start with gender limitations, but you can't write only as a woman, you have to make the imaginative leap and be able to write from a man's point of view, from a different age point of view, etc. I must admit that that's one good thing about getting older. You've been there and done that. In Moon Tiger I have Claudia dying at the age of seventy-six, and I was only about fifty when I wrote it so I didn't know what it was like to be seventy-six, but I do now. Once you're old you've been through every age, so although you might not have the experience fresh in your mind, you still know what's it like to be twenty-six or thirty-six or forty-six, and that's incredibly useful."

"I mean," she continues, "if you only wrote novels from the perspective of things that had happened to you, my goodness you'd be writing dull novels. And it works the other way too. After I'd written Perfect Happiness (a novel about widowhood) I received letters from women saying I must have had exactly the same experience as them, and I felt hypocritical having to write back to them and say, actually, no."

Now a widow herself, there's "no way now I would want to write about the experience of losing a husband. For example, Charlotte in How It All Began has lost her husband, but the experience of it happening doesn't come into the book. As a writer you want to get away from just writing about what you know. To go back to short stories for example, they always arose from something heard, something observed, something seen, but then danced off in a completely different direction that had no personal relevance to me."

Considering she charts her own trajectory as a novelist - from initial inspiration to continual intellectual experience - in terms of the books she reads, I'm interested to find out what and who she enjoys reading. Does she have any favourite authors? Are there novelists, or novels, that she returns to again and again?

"I'm an enormous Golding fan," she replies. "I read and re-read him."

Describing him as a "shape-shifting" novelist, she explains that each time she re-visits one of his novels she finds "a different stratum" that she hadn't seen there before. But it's not Lord of the Flies that she finds herself returning to again and again, but rather The Inheritors. Henry James' What Maisie Knew was also "seminal in terms of teaching me what a novel can do. It's so extraordinary, because you're looking over Maisie's shoulder - though I've never quite believed she's only seven, she seems more like nine or ten, but I suppose James didn't really know children - looking at the appalling behaviour of the adults around her and you're made to feel almost complicit in this because you understand the events you're watching whereas she doesn't. It's an extraordinary manipulation of the reader."

She then goes on to talk about her love of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, where "again, you're manipulated because of the gradual trickle of information. Your perspective changes when you discover some new factor you hadn't realised before."

"I re-read John Updike with huge pleasure," she continues, "and am also a great fan of Ian McEwan when it comes to that generation of writers. For me, he can hardly put a foot wrong."

What about younger authors? Has she read any debut novels of late that she really admired? She immediately recalls Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell.

"It's very rare that something really grabs me, but that one did," she says. "I get sent so many things, and do keep an eye on what's being published, but most of them aren't doing that thing of you stop reading one evening because you want to leave more for tomorrow."

I admit I didn't feel the same way about Hunt's novel, and we talk about it for a while, each conceding our ground a little.

As she we say goodbye, she repeats her concern that I'm cycling without a helmet. I head off down the road thinking about the 'what ifs', keeping a keener eye than usual on the traffic around me.

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How It All Began by Penelope Lively is published by Penguin Books.
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Monday, 7 November, 2011

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Issue 41 / February 2012

"My education was reading. So yes, my writing sprang from reading. Obviously not every voracious reader is a writer, but I’ve never known any writer who wasn’t a voracious reader, it goes with the job.”

Penelope Lively

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