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Interview with Bernice Rubens
For many years, following encouragement from my tutor and friend Mike Parnell at the (then) Polytechnic of Wales, I published in the New Welsh Review articles and reviews of the works of Bernice Rubens. Bernice was a Jewish novelist who was born in Cardiff in 1926. By the time she died in 2004 she had written twenty five novels and an autobiography. She won the Booker Prize in 1970 for The Elected Member. She also had made a number of documentary films. Famed for her ingenious plots, spare style and tendency to black humour (a description she disliked), she was a favourite at the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature for many years and a well regarded teacher of writing.
Shortly before this interview took place in 1992 I had published a feature article on her works in the New Welsh Review, called Surviving the Earthquake, which she had been kind enough to describe to me as "the best account of my work I've read." On the strength of that she granted me an interview at her home. The conversation ranged over many subjects. This transcript has been edited to focus on her views and advice on writing in general and her work in particular. As you will see, especially at the end of the interview, there is much good advice for the aspiring author.
NLM – Do you come from a family of story tellers?
BR – No. my mother never gave us tales, as far as I remember. We read a lot. My father didn’t either. They were too busy working for Zionism or refugees, or whatever. I’m not complaining about that. Parents are – you learn by example, don’t you. and I think everything I got from my parents I got from their example, and the way they lived. They wee good people. and whatever is good about me or the rest of the family we inherited from them. But they weren’t conventional parents in the sense we had bed-time stories. I don’t remember that.
NLM – music was an important part of your life. Most of your brothers and sisters are musicians
BR – And I wasn’t. But it still plays.
NLM The music is in the books. There’s music in there. There’s rhythm and sound and
BR – I’ve a big thing about rhythm and cadence as a writer. There also, it’s a gift one has, like a musical gift. You hear things, you listen, and I think it is terribly important to have rhythm in words. You can re-work them, and it does sound beautiful.
NLM – Do you read your stuff aloud?
BR – No. I only notice when I do readings and I realise that the cadence is right. But then I’m aware of it all the time. I think that, I think in English fiction that is lacking. It really is. I read a lot of modern fiction and I notice. It sticks out like a sore thumb. The awful rhythm, the non-rhythm, the lack of cadence in writing. Because in a way you sometimes should forsake grammar for music. Sometimes you have to. A preposition in the wrong place can make it cataphonic almost, although grammatically it may be quite correct. But I’d sooner hear it well than have it…proper.
NLM - It seems to me to give you the structure in a way which is strong enough to carry quite outrageous ideas. It enables the reader to trust what’s going. I mean, one of your characters is a baby that is writing a diary in the womb [1]. I mean, come on!
BR – I never, never concern myself with the reader. I think that’s death. If you think who’s going to read it, or what’s it all for, you might as well pack up and go and do something else. I’ve never concerned myself, and that helps me get through. In hindsight I think they’re crazy. But, if I thought of them, they’re not. Or maybe I’m crazy! Well if I’m crazy that doesn’t matter. But I think that a lot of my crazy work does seem to speak to other people too, so maybe I’m not that crazy. So I look at the world in a, I suppose, in a skewed way. I don’t know what’s normal, I really don’t know what is normal. I remember when I was doing a film on the parents of handicapped children, called Stress. This was a woman, and I had to talk to camera, she was the mother of a autistic child. Now autism is the very worst handicap of all, I think. Do you know autism? There’s no feedback. So what ever loving you give there’s no come back. and she had a child who was badly autistic and self-violent, and obsessive. It was dreadful, just dreadful. I got her to talk to camera, she liked the camera man and was at ease. And I spent months with her before hand before we even went to the master shoot and I got to know the boy well, in so far as you could. And she gave a long speech, she poured her heart out to camera. And at the end of it she said: “It’s the normal that is for me abnormal,” and I thought, yeah, that’s the kind of writer I am. So there are no laws. When someone says, it’s not normal, I just don’t know what they are talking about. Because what they are doing is talking from their perspective and their normality, which in my terms or in your terms might be up the wall. And very often people are very judgemental in their norms anyway. So, I think that whatever you think is without judgement, its valid. It may not be right, but its got to be non-judgemental. I think that’s most important. And although consciously in my books I’m not anything, I would hope that my books are not judgemental. They ought not to be, because I’m not.
NLM I don’t think they’re judgemental, except in that they’re on the side of the individual.
BR – Well what I think is right, other people might think is absolutely wrong. I think it’s important to say what you feel and what you think without inferring its what everyone else should think. Autistic children respond. There is a great deal being done at the moment: apparently music is one area where they respond well, that’s common to them all.
NLM – Yes, in my experience, to one degree or another. Some people, are very pro-music. It’s a way of communicating without language. Can you imagine what life must be like when you have no language?
BR - Well I’ve tried to.
BR - …Music is a way of connecting with other people and there is something there for autistic people but I don’t know enough about it.
NLM What made you start writing?
BR – I had nothing else to do. It was a simple as that. I was a teacher and I hadn’t yet started making films. My children were in school and I really didn’t have anything to do. I didn't want to go back to teaching and so I thought I’d have a go. it was as simple as that. I sat down . I was lucky. I always stress down to luck. The first book was published straight away to good reviews [2]. Had that not happened I don’t think I would have done a second one. I might have seriously gone into films. If I hadn’t been writing novels I would have been serious about a film career. Possibly now be making features. Though I was always more interested in documentaries. I never had the kind of need or urge to write. It was just something to do that worked for me.
NLM - Were you in Cardiff when you started writing?
BR - No. I was married with two kids I lived in London. My marriage was always a bit shaky. I suppose in the back of my mind I thought I’d better think about earning a living. I didn’t earn anything as a write till I won the Booker. But you can’t expect t earn anything as writer when you start out. but I suppose I thought I’d better start being my own person, and if I couldn’t make a living, too bad. You know, stop being a wife, because I wasn’t very good at it.
NLM - At that time, which would have been the 1960s…
BR - 62, wasn’t it?
NLM that’s the kind of thing you might expect a woman to say in the 70s or 80s or now,
BR I know. I think I was a feminist, whatever that means, before there was a word. My mother was suffragette. Unconsciously I must have picked it up.
NLM - …And yet, the family is a theme that runs through your work
BR – yes, it’s the only thing I write about.
NLM – It is certainly one of the main things
BR – Perhaps its what I know most about.
NLM – I wondered that. Why this emphasis on orthodox Jewish families. You make virtually no reference to the outside world.
BR If you were brought up a Jew in Cardiff there was no other world except the Jewish world. And Jews all over the world…see, I was brought up in a family that was concerned only at the time with saving Jews from Germany. And getting clothing, I mean our house was always full of clothes, on the carpet all over the place. For refugees. It’s all I seem to remember, cluttered floors. That was my parents concern, and nothing else. They saw that we were fed and clothed and went to school, but I don’t think their parenting went further than that.
NLM you had a pretty good education. You got your degree at 19, if I’ve got the dates right.
BR - Yes. Listen, you know, Jews were very, you got, I was very bright at school. They made sure, it didn’t matter what classes you were from, they made sure their kids were educated. That was the most important thing. It’s a historical thing. Education is portable. If you’ve got to run, you can’t take the furniture. This is why diamonds are associated with Jews, because it is portable wealth. A violin is also portable. You think of the number of Jewish violinists. As sewing machine. Its interesting that all or most of the talents they have are all portable. They had to be. Perhaps the reason for it, I don’t know. But a good education for your children, even if your children were stupid as hell. That was the most important thing. And university was. Going to university was all right.
NLM – But you didn’t go to Oxbridge?
BR – No, I didn't go to Oxbridge. I was unlucky. I did my higher certificate and I got a distinction in English. In those if you got a distinction in one subject you got a scholarship to go where you liked. That year they weren’t giving them away. So I was unlucky but I got every other scholarship going, so, Cardiff, the education didn’t cost anything. I don’t know if I would have done better if I’d gone to Oxbridge. I would have been different. I mightn’t have got married and I would have left home earlier. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?
NLM - I wonder what it is that is appealing about your books. I mean apart from the fact that they are well made, and so on. Orthodox Jewish society is not exactly top of the cultural pops?
BR – No, but you can learn a great deal from it, you see. I milk it! You’ve probably heard me say, I wrote a book about – not a very god book actually, what was it called, Ponsonby Post – a UN official: totally non-Jewish: Indonesia: totally non-Jewish; the UN situation, absolutely non-Jewish. It is still a Jewish book. Because what I am dealing with are the kind of priorities I knew in my childhood, like families and ambition and anger and envy, all those things which relate, and I’m dealing with it with a Jewish vision. That’s what makes it a Jewish book. So, its that that informs everything I write.
NLM – The Jewish vision, whatever that is…
BR – Exactly. You can say whatever that is because I don’t know what it is. But, I’m trying to think if Phillip Roth has written a book that is not Jewish, he hasn’t I think. They’re all obvious Jewish books. Perhaps he should try a non-Jewish book. Malamud, you see, The Tenants. Wonderful book. He’s a great writer. Its not Jewish at all, and yet it’s a Jewish book.
NLM – We live in British / western culture. It’s a Judeo-Christian culture. There’s likely to be a cultural link, some kind of bells that will ring somewhere.
BR – Don’t forget, the most important historical event of our time, possibly of all time, is the holocaust. And that’s a Jewish event. I’m not saying that gypsies and homosexuals were not, but basically it is a Jewish event. And now have to be Jewish to get on to that wagon. As you se from…I was judging the Whitbread prize this year and there were a number of novels who use it as a theme that not Jewish. But the fact that the holocaust is a Jewish event, one can’t help but be disturbed by it if you are a writer of this time. Even if you’re not Jewish. So how much would you be disturbed if you are a Jew?
NLM I think awareness of, to use a rather bland term, human rights abuses is something that is current or should be current in anybody who is aware of any interest in the world, at al. the holocaust so for the most systematic…oh that sounds very pretentious.
BR – No, its very difficult to talk about it, because words are not adequate. Silence is the only thing that is adequate. But you have to be affected by it. It would be very strange of you weren’t.
NLM – Your last novel, Solitary Grief [3] is a good novel. Its, well they called it a black comedy. It isn’t really. It’s pretty dark.
BR – Well, they put that label on every bloody book I write. I don’t think it is very funny, but I think it is a very sad book. I don’t know where it came from, and I didn't know where it was going. It just struck me at one point that he had to kill her. And it was quite a along time into the book, towards he end, that I understood that he was the only person, he had to kill her because he had he couldn’t understand himself.
NLM – He is a curious character. He’s one of your best characters, in some ways. He seems to me to be typical of your characters in many ways. He doesn’t seem to see what’s wrong in him. He’s a psychiatrist; he’s supposed to understand these things!
BR – It’s the last thing you expect from a psychiatrist. I don’t understand this, but I have an abject loathing of psychiatry. [4]
NLM – Have you been psychoanalysed?
BR – No. its not a personal beef at all. I see an awful lot of people, and some of them are my friends. They’ve been in analysis for ten, twelve years. I think that’s disgusting. Any person who can take on a person and treat them for twelve years is making themselves a substitute for living. So it’s a form of blackmail. It’s a living for him he gets £30 a week or whatever he gets from this one patient, and makes sure he gets hooked on to him and makes sure that he becomes the alternative to cure. And when this goes on for eleven years or so I think there’s something quite obscene about it. It’s never less than ten or eleven. It’s because of the loss of friendship, because that’s what is substituted. In the old days if you had a problem would could go to a friend and talk. Because a psychiatrist is only a paid friend. And I resent that. On the other hand I do believe in drug therapy for certain conditions. Schizophrenia. You can make a schizophrenic function in society. That’s the best we can do. But this one to one imaging and all the techniques they apply. I could kill them.
NLM – Do you research into psychiatry for that book?
BR – No. I know it instinctively. Psychiatrists tell me its right. I have friends who are in it. they tell me and I ask them. I know the systems. I spent time in America where everyone is so therapy oriented. I wrote a book called Spring Sonata, which is a book I like rather. I think that works that book. There’s a family therapy session in it. I had attended a family therapy session with a friend of mine. It a hilarious, disgusting waste of money! So I have very strong feelings about psychiatry. And yet I think I managed to make old Alistair quite sympathetic (even though) he was a murderer.
NLM I leant the book to a friend who has a downs syndrome child, and she’s a very close friend of mine, and she know of my interest in you. she loathed the book. She loathed Alistair. Perhaps not surprising, as you say.
BR Is the child still with her?
NLM - Oh yes.
BR I could see she would be disturbed that. It would be like giving Spring Sonata to a pregnant woman! There are certain books you don’t read at certain times! I gave a talk on that once. A father of a Down’s syndrome child said he found it absolutely riveting. He said that’s absolutely right. That’s how I feel.
NLM – It’s plausible. So certain things can happen in fiction that don’t happen in life…don’t they..? (both laugh).
BR – Yes, but you see, you can’t keep an audience in mind. If I were to say I can’t write this book because it will offend certain people…that thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind. I feel I don’t offend, but then I can understand that that woman would be offended. I’m sorry about that.
NLM - …Your characters go to remarkable lengths to survive. Most of your plots are how they got on with it, with dealing with what life has done to them. The question I felt after reading your books and working fairly hard on that article, I’d gone only just so far into your books and I knew there was an awful lot more I could have done, but what was required was what I’d done. And I wonder, what is survival? Your characters survive, yes. You address it quite directly in Brothers, where you have, is it, Jacob’s legacy that is passed down. In which you are almost saying, if necessary give up the outward appearance of being Jewish if you have to. it doesn’t matter about the outward appearance, you are Jewish. Perhaps one could see that as some kind of definition of survival. There’s fidelity to each other and to what one is. But in others who don’t have that strong culture, characters like jean Hawkins in A Five Year Sentence, survival is a tough option.
BR – I don’t know, the question has not been put to me, and so I’ve never thought about it. It seems to me, I did think about it, I was listening to a programme about euthanasia and whether it should be legalised or not, and apart from the usual things against it like it can be abused and so on, I am deeply against it. because I think you have got to survive. I don’t care whether it is worth surviving or not. I don’t know where this stems from. But I do believe that to live is better than to die and any price is worth paying for it. and I don’t think anybody has the right to say anything else, I hate these pontifications about euthanasia, because I hear people say, if I were ninety years old and I were senile I’d want to die. And I would say, you’re not ninety years old. When you’re ninety years old, then you have a right to say whatever you want to say, but from where you are standing, they’re all standing in great health and no pain. We’re talking about with dignity, they’re abusing words and that’s an abuse of the word dignity. I just believe, and maybe it’s a Jewish belief, I don’t know, hat you’ve got to live, even if you have nothing to live for. And I think its because I believe that death is the end, that there’s nothing after that, that there’s no cloud cuckoo land. You’ve got to do it here and now whatever it is. There’s that lovely story of the Jewish child prodigy, the violinist, who came home from school one day and says to his mother, I’m not feeling well. She says, go upstairs and lie down and practice. You see, its survival. The most important thing is to survive. I suppose that’s half of what we call the Jewish vision. I have a few hatreds in my life, like euthanasia, like psychiatrists.
NLM – Do you need these hatreds, do they keep you going?
BR – You need the passion. If you can’t find it in loving you have to find it in hating. But you mustn’t let it corrode you, that’s the thing. Hating can be a very self-destructive force. But then only if it is linked with envy or jealousy I think is it destructive. If it is for its own sake it is something else. Maybe. I don’t know.
NLM – Your characters in…
BR - Don’t ask me the names because I forget them!
NLM – So do I! You’ve written so many! Seventeen novels.
BR - It’ll be eightteen by Christmas, given a bit of luck. I’m not going to talk about it, but I’ll tell you the title and you can wonder what its about. It’s called Autobiopsy.
NLM – Thank you for that exclusive!
BR – That can mean anything. I have to say, it’s a good title, even if the book is no good. Its exactly what the book is about.
NLM – Its an unusual title for you. you don’t usually have one-word titles.
BR – No, but it’s the right title, nothing else will do.
NLM – do you start with a title?
BR – No. but it came pretty soon. Much sooner than usual.
NLM Do you need a title?
BR – No. they come out of it. I’ve never had a title so early.
NLM – so when do you think it will be out? Easter?
BR – No, I don’t want it to be out till September. I can say no when I want it.
NLM – You’re in a very fortunate position
BR – I think I want it out in September. Although everything comes out in September. You see, the problem is, I like to be on a book, I like to have started a novel by the time a book comes out. otherwise I will take my reviews seriously. Because when you are writing a book, it’s a funny process, you think you are writing the greatest novel that has ever been written. And when you finish it, you think, yeah, its good, its good. By the time it comes out you think its all right. But you only thisnk its al right because you’ve already started on the greatest novel that’s ever been written. It’s a kind of safeguard. I do it quite deliberately. If I weren’t writing the greatest novel that’s ever been written I’d get very worried about the reviews of a novel which I think is all right.
NLM – Do you read your reviews?
BR – On the whole not. I read them in time because I get the independent or the observer and I get these anyway. But in the fullness of time. The publishers send me a whole sheaf, and on the whole I don’t read them.
NLM – Do your publishers determine what you write? I remember at the Hay festival his year you said you wrote Mother Russia for money.
BR – Yeah, money I didn’t get, incidentally. They’ve gone bankrupt. The whole deal was absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, I wrote that for money. I’m not ashamed. It should have been good money. It was quite pleasant writing it. I don’t regret it at all. Its not the book I would have written.
NLM – It’s not your best. It works.
BR – I did a lot of promotion. That book sold more copies than I’ve ever sold in my life.
NLM – It was absolutely topical. Its timing was just right.
BR I got up at a Waterstone’s thing, the public were there, the publishers were there, and I got up and I said, “I’m going to read from the last chapter of “Mother Rubbish.” Because that’s what I thought the book was. If I had corrected myself it would have drawn attention to the mistake, so I went on anyway.
NLM – Did anybody hear?
BR – Yes, there was a pause, there was a reaction. I didn’t want to make a production of it. Mother Rubbish for money – money that didn’t come.
NLM – Don’t knock it too hard, it’s all right.
BR - If you have to do a history of Russia exam, it’s a lovely way, it’s a pleasant way. You get a story and a bit of a love story thrown in at the same time.
NLM – There was a lot of violence in it. It was the most violent thing you’ve done
BR – Was it violent?
NLM – Yes, incredibly violent. I can’t remember the characters’ names. The daughter of one of your main characters is kidnapped by the Russian security police, and she is raped. It’s quite graphic.
BR – Oh yes. And there’s the one whose face is eaten by a rat. NLM – yes. BR – It’s not my sort of stuff (laughs)
NLM – I know, Bernice
BR – But its true!
At this point the interview drifted on to other matters. Bernice was interested in my family and my experience of writing.
NLM – ...I tend to abandon many ideas fairly early because...
BR – Well, that’s a common problem. Its a guilt thing, it’s got nothing to do with writing.
NLM - Or else it goes off at a direction, you know, my Welsh farmer zooming off to the Bahamas and I know nothing of the geography. So errors can creep in.
BR – What makes you think they are errors? I would trust the reason and see where it goes.
NLM - I see…
BR – It would depend on my motive. If I’d just come back from holiday in the Bahamas it might be questionable, but if, and I don’t want to mythologize it, if it happens in a book, it happens for a reason.
NLM – Something I ought to trust to?
BR – Its faith
NLM – Have you had to teach yourself that faith, or was it there right from the start?
BR – No, I think it was there from the start. It becomes a habit. You know, I think you’ve got an awful lot to write about.
NLM – Yes, its finding the right subject.
BR – It’s about not knowing. That’s what I write about. It’s about not knowing one’s identity, and running away from it. A closet person, not just a closet gay, or a closet Jew, a closet human being.
NLM – Maybe that’s why I like your books. You’re speaking to things I can understand. Even if you don’t say them directly.
BR – I think the important thing to do. I think that everything is permissible, so long as no-one is hurt. I really think that it terribly important to try not to let go of that. Sometimes it’s impossible. But I think if you bear in mind that this is a priority, you’ll hurt them less. On the other hand, I don’t think one should live a lie.
NLM…I think I need to find some direction for my writing to take
BR – I think you are thinking about in the wrong way. I think you’ve got to sit down and do something. And then you will know which direction it is going. I don’t think you can dictate to yourself. It would be silly for me to sit down and say, I’m going to write a detective story. What I’m writing might turn out to be anything, and that’s the direction. You’ve got to do it first and that gives you the direction. You should try a novel. You might surprise yourself. It might work. You know enough about writing, the technique of it, to know why it doesn’t work if it doesn’t, and if it is repairable: or if it should be non-fiction, or a play. Trust it.
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[1] Spring Sonata features Buster, an unborn baby who overhears from the womb the lovely music which his mother plays on the piano. He also listens to his awful family arguing with her. So he decides never to be born. When his time comes his mother is taken to hospital for a caesarean, at which event a friend of her plays the violin. Buster manages to avoid the surgeon’s hands and to reach out and steal the violin. The mother is returned to the ward with a diagnosis of a phantom pregnancy, ‘all in her head’. But now she can hear her son play the violin, and as he grows inside her they begin to play duets. Of course they must each die, but before that happens they form a perfect intimate relationship, mother and son. Spring Sonata is subtitled, a fable. The story echoes the second movement of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata for violin and piano, one of the most perfect evocations of intimacy ever created.
[2]Set on Edge
[3] Solitary Grief is a novel about a cold and self-centred psychiatrist, Alistair Crown whose daughter is born with Downs Syndrome. The fact of his daughter’s disability triggers in him a display of guilt-driven behaviour that ends in disaster. It is an unhappy tale told with energy and with sharp observation, and a degree of feeling for the awful pain the novel’s most unsympathetic character is going through.
[4] Bernice is referring to certain kinds of practices that are more common in psychotherapy than psychiatry. Most psychiatrists deal with problems of mental illness such as schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and so on. Psychotherapists work with people who have long standing psycho-social problems including deep-seated and unresolved conflicts in relationships and identitity.
Shortly before this interview took place in 1992 I had published a feature article on her works in the New Welsh Review, called Surviving the Earthquake, which she had been kind enough to describe to me as "the best account of my work I've read." On the strength of that she granted me an interview at her home. The conversation ranged over many subjects. This transcript has been edited to focus on her views and advice on writing in general and her work in particular. As you will see, especially at the end of the interview, there is much good advice for the aspiring author.
NLM – Do you come from a family of story tellers?
BR – No. my mother never gave us tales, as far as I remember. We read a lot. My father didn’t either. They were too busy working for Zionism or refugees, or whatever. I’m not complaining about that. Parents are – you learn by example, don’t you. and I think everything I got from my parents I got from their example, and the way they lived. They wee good people. and whatever is good about me or the rest of the family we inherited from them. But they weren’t conventional parents in the sense we had bed-time stories. I don’t remember that.
NLM – music was an important part of your life. Most of your brothers and sisters are musicians
BR – And I wasn’t. But it still plays.
NLM The music is in the books. There’s music in there. There’s rhythm and sound and
BR – I’ve a big thing about rhythm and cadence as a writer. There also, it’s a gift one has, like a musical gift. You hear things, you listen, and I think it is terribly important to have rhythm in words. You can re-work them, and it does sound beautiful.
NLM – Do you read your stuff aloud?
BR – No. I only notice when I do readings and I realise that the cadence is right. But then I’m aware of it all the time. I think that, I think in English fiction that is lacking. It really is. I read a lot of modern fiction and I notice. It sticks out like a sore thumb. The awful rhythm, the non-rhythm, the lack of cadence in writing. Because in a way you sometimes should forsake grammar for music. Sometimes you have to. A preposition in the wrong place can make it cataphonic almost, although grammatically it may be quite correct. But I’d sooner hear it well than have it…proper.
NLM - It seems to me to give you the structure in a way which is strong enough to carry quite outrageous ideas. It enables the reader to trust what’s going. I mean, one of your characters is a baby that is writing a diary in the womb [1]. I mean, come on!
BR – I never, never concern myself with the reader. I think that’s death. If you think who’s going to read it, or what’s it all for, you might as well pack up and go and do something else. I’ve never concerned myself, and that helps me get through. In hindsight I think they’re crazy. But, if I thought of them, they’re not. Or maybe I’m crazy! Well if I’m crazy that doesn’t matter. But I think that a lot of my crazy work does seem to speak to other people too, so maybe I’m not that crazy. So I look at the world in a, I suppose, in a skewed way. I don’t know what’s normal, I really don’t know what is normal. I remember when I was doing a film on the parents of handicapped children, called Stress. This was a woman, and I had to talk to camera, she was the mother of a autistic child. Now autism is the very worst handicap of all, I think. Do you know autism? There’s no feedback. So what ever loving you give there’s no come back. and she had a child who was badly autistic and self-violent, and obsessive. It was dreadful, just dreadful. I got her to talk to camera, she liked the camera man and was at ease. And I spent months with her before hand before we even went to the master shoot and I got to know the boy well, in so far as you could. And she gave a long speech, she poured her heart out to camera. And at the end of it she said: “It’s the normal that is for me abnormal,” and I thought, yeah, that’s the kind of writer I am. So there are no laws. When someone says, it’s not normal, I just don’t know what they are talking about. Because what they are doing is talking from their perspective and their normality, which in my terms or in your terms might be up the wall. And very often people are very judgemental in their norms anyway. So, I think that whatever you think is without judgement, its valid. It may not be right, but its got to be non-judgemental. I think that’s most important. And although consciously in my books I’m not anything, I would hope that my books are not judgemental. They ought not to be, because I’m not.
NLM I don’t think they’re judgemental, except in that they’re on the side of the individual.
BR – Well what I think is right, other people might think is absolutely wrong. I think it’s important to say what you feel and what you think without inferring its what everyone else should think. Autistic children respond. There is a great deal being done at the moment: apparently music is one area where they respond well, that’s common to them all.
NLM – Yes, in my experience, to one degree or another. Some people, are very pro-music. It’s a way of communicating without language. Can you imagine what life must be like when you have no language?
BR - Well I’ve tried to.
BR - …Music is a way of connecting with other people and there is something there for autistic people but I don’t know enough about it.
NLM What made you start writing?
BR – I had nothing else to do. It was a simple as that. I was a teacher and I hadn’t yet started making films. My children were in school and I really didn’t have anything to do. I didn't want to go back to teaching and so I thought I’d have a go. it was as simple as that. I sat down . I was lucky. I always stress down to luck. The first book was published straight away to good reviews [2]. Had that not happened I don’t think I would have done a second one. I might have seriously gone into films. If I hadn’t been writing novels I would have been serious about a film career. Possibly now be making features. Though I was always more interested in documentaries. I never had the kind of need or urge to write. It was just something to do that worked for me.
NLM - Were you in Cardiff when you started writing?
BR - No. I was married with two kids I lived in London. My marriage was always a bit shaky. I suppose in the back of my mind I thought I’d better think about earning a living. I didn’t earn anything as a write till I won the Booker. But you can’t expect t earn anything as writer when you start out. but I suppose I thought I’d better start being my own person, and if I couldn’t make a living, too bad. You know, stop being a wife, because I wasn’t very good at it.
NLM - At that time, which would have been the 1960s…
BR - 62, wasn’t it?
NLM that’s the kind of thing you might expect a woman to say in the 70s or 80s or now,
BR I know. I think I was a feminist, whatever that means, before there was a word. My mother was suffragette. Unconsciously I must have picked it up.
NLM - …And yet, the family is a theme that runs through your work
BR – yes, it’s the only thing I write about.
NLM – It is certainly one of the main things
BR – Perhaps its what I know most about.
NLM – I wondered that. Why this emphasis on orthodox Jewish families. You make virtually no reference to the outside world.
BR If you were brought up a Jew in Cardiff there was no other world except the Jewish world. And Jews all over the world…see, I was brought up in a family that was concerned only at the time with saving Jews from Germany. And getting clothing, I mean our house was always full of clothes, on the carpet all over the place. For refugees. It’s all I seem to remember, cluttered floors. That was my parents concern, and nothing else. They saw that we were fed and clothed and went to school, but I don’t think their parenting went further than that.
NLM you had a pretty good education. You got your degree at 19, if I’ve got the dates right.
BR - Yes. Listen, you know, Jews were very, you got, I was very bright at school. They made sure, it didn’t matter what classes you were from, they made sure their kids were educated. That was the most important thing. It’s a historical thing. Education is portable. If you’ve got to run, you can’t take the furniture. This is why diamonds are associated with Jews, because it is portable wealth. A violin is also portable. You think of the number of Jewish violinists. As sewing machine. Its interesting that all or most of the talents they have are all portable. They had to be. Perhaps the reason for it, I don’t know. But a good education for your children, even if your children were stupid as hell. That was the most important thing. And university was. Going to university was all right.
NLM – But you didn’t go to Oxbridge?
BR – No, I didn't go to Oxbridge. I was unlucky. I did my higher certificate and I got a distinction in English. In those if you got a distinction in one subject you got a scholarship to go where you liked. That year they weren’t giving them away. So I was unlucky but I got every other scholarship going, so, Cardiff, the education didn’t cost anything. I don’t know if I would have done better if I’d gone to Oxbridge. I would have been different. I mightn’t have got married and I would have left home earlier. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?
NLM - I wonder what it is that is appealing about your books. I mean apart from the fact that they are well made, and so on. Orthodox Jewish society is not exactly top of the cultural pops?
BR – No, but you can learn a great deal from it, you see. I milk it! You’ve probably heard me say, I wrote a book about – not a very god book actually, what was it called, Ponsonby Post – a UN official: totally non-Jewish: Indonesia: totally non-Jewish; the UN situation, absolutely non-Jewish. It is still a Jewish book. Because what I am dealing with are the kind of priorities I knew in my childhood, like families and ambition and anger and envy, all those things which relate, and I’m dealing with it with a Jewish vision. That’s what makes it a Jewish book. So, its that that informs everything I write.
NLM – The Jewish vision, whatever that is…
BR – Exactly. You can say whatever that is because I don’t know what it is. But, I’m trying to think if Phillip Roth has written a book that is not Jewish, he hasn’t I think. They’re all obvious Jewish books. Perhaps he should try a non-Jewish book. Malamud, you see, The Tenants. Wonderful book. He’s a great writer. Its not Jewish at all, and yet it’s a Jewish book.
NLM – We live in British / western culture. It’s a Judeo-Christian culture. There’s likely to be a cultural link, some kind of bells that will ring somewhere.
BR – Don’t forget, the most important historical event of our time, possibly of all time, is the holocaust. And that’s a Jewish event. I’m not saying that gypsies and homosexuals were not, but basically it is a Jewish event. And now have to be Jewish to get on to that wagon. As you se from…I was judging the Whitbread prize this year and there were a number of novels who use it as a theme that not Jewish. But the fact that the holocaust is a Jewish event, one can’t help but be disturbed by it if you are a writer of this time. Even if you’re not Jewish. So how much would you be disturbed if you are a Jew?
NLM I think awareness of, to use a rather bland term, human rights abuses is something that is current or should be current in anybody who is aware of any interest in the world, at al. the holocaust so for the most systematic…oh that sounds very pretentious.
BR – No, its very difficult to talk about it, because words are not adequate. Silence is the only thing that is adequate. But you have to be affected by it. It would be very strange of you weren’t.
NLM – Your last novel, Solitary Grief [3] is a good novel. Its, well they called it a black comedy. It isn’t really. It’s pretty dark.
BR – Well, they put that label on every bloody book I write. I don’t think it is very funny, but I think it is a very sad book. I don’t know where it came from, and I didn't know where it was going. It just struck me at one point that he had to kill her. And it was quite a along time into the book, towards he end, that I understood that he was the only person, he had to kill her because he had he couldn’t understand himself.
NLM – He is a curious character. He’s one of your best characters, in some ways. He seems to me to be typical of your characters in many ways. He doesn’t seem to see what’s wrong in him. He’s a psychiatrist; he’s supposed to understand these things!
BR – It’s the last thing you expect from a psychiatrist. I don’t understand this, but I have an abject loathing of psychiatry. [4]
NLM – Have you been psychoanalysed?
BR – No. its not a personal beef at all. I see an awful lot of people, and some of them are my friends. They’ve been in analysis for ten, twelve years. I think that’s disgusting. Any person who can take on a person and treat them for twelve years is making themselves a substitute for living. So it’s a form of blackmail. It’s a living for him he gets £30 a week or whatever he gets from this one patient, and makes sure he gets hooked on to him and makes sure that he becomes the alternative to cure. And when this goes on for eleven years or so I think there’s something quite obscene about it. It’s never less than ten or eleven. It’s because of the loss of friendship, because that’s what is substituted. In the old days if you had a problem would could go to a friend and talk. Because a psychiatrist is only a paid friend. And I resent that. On the other hand I do believe in drug therapy for certain conditions. Schizophrenia. You can make a schizophrenic function in society. That’s the best we can do. But this one to one imaging and all the techniques they apply. I could kill them.
NLM – Do you research into psychiatry for that book?
BR – No. I know it instinctively. Psychiatrists tell me its right. I have friends who are in it. they tell me and I ask them. I know the systems. I spent time in America where everyone is so therapy oriented. I wrote a book called Spring Sonata, which is a book I like rather. I think that works that book. There’s a family therapy session in it. I had attended a family therapy session with a friend of mine. It a hilarious, disgusting waste of money! So I have very strong feelings about psychiatry. And yet I think I managed to make old Alistair quite sympathetic (even though) he was a murderer.
NLM I leant the book to a friend who has a downs syndrome child, and she’s a very close friend of mine, and she know of my interest in you. she loathed the book. She loathed Alistair. Perhaps not surprising, as you say.
BR Is the child still with her?
NLM - Oh yes.
BR I could see she would be disturbed that. It would be like giving Spring Sonata to a pregnant woman! There are certain books you don’t read at certain times! I gave a talk on that once. A father of a Down’s syndrome child said he found it absolutely riveting. He said that’s absolutely right. That’s how I feel.
NLM – It’s plausible. So certain things can happen in fiction that don’t happen in life…don’t they..? (both laugh).
BR – Yes, but you see, you can’t keep an audience in mind. If I were to say I can’t write this book because it will offend certain people…that thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind. I feel I don’t offend, but then I can understand that that woman would be offended. I’m sorry about that.
NLM - …Your characters go to remarkable lengths to survive. Most of your plots are how they got on with it, with dealing with what life has done to them. The question I felt after reading your books and working fairly hard on that article, I’d gone only just so far into your books and I knew there was an awful lot more I could have done, but what was required was what I’d done. And I wonder, what is survival? Your characters survive, yes. You address it quite directly in Brothers, where you have, is it, Jacob’s legacy that is passed down. In which you are almost saying, if necessary give up the outward appearance of being Jewish if you have to. it doesn’t matter about the outward appearance, you are Jewish. Perhaps one could see that as some kind of definition of survival. There’s fidelity to each other and to what one is. But in others who don’t have that strong culture, characters like jean Hawkins in A Five Year Sentence, survival is a tough option.
BR – I don’t know, the question has not been put to me, and so I’ve never thought about it. It seems to me, I did think about it, I was listening to a programme about euthanasia and whether it should be legalised or not, and apart from the usual things against it like it can be abused and so on, I am deeply against it. because I think you have got to survive. I don’t care whether it is worth surviving or not. I don’t know where this stems from. But I do believe that to live is better than to die and any price is worth paying for it. and I don’t think anybody has the right to say anything else, I hate these pontifications about euthanasia, because I hear people say, if I were ninety years old and I were senile I’d want to die. And I would say, you’re not ninety years old. When you’re ninety years old, then you have a right to say whatever you want to say, but from where you are standing, they’re all standing in great health and no pain. We’re talking about with dignity, they’re abusing words and that’s an abuse of the word dignity. I just believe, and maybe it’s a Jewish belief, I don’t know, hat you’ve got to live, even if you have nothing to live for. And I think its because I believe that death is the end, that there’s nothing after that, that there’s no cloud cuckoo land. You’ve got to do it here and now whatever it is. There’s that lovely story of the Jewish child prodigy, the violinist, who came home from school one day and says to his mother, I’m not feeling well. She says, go upstairs and lie down and practice. You see, its survival. The most important thing is to survive. I suppose that’s half of what we call the Jewish vision. I have a few hatreds in my life, like euthanasia, like psychiatrists.
NLM – Do you need these hatreds, do they keep you going?
BR – You need the passion. If you can’t find it in loving you have to find it in hating. But you mustn’t let it corrode you, that’s the thing. Hating can be a very self-destructive force. But then only if it is linked with envy or jealousy I think is it destructive. If it is for its own sake it is something else. Maybe. I don’t know.
NLM – Your characters in…
BR - Don’t ask me the names because I forget them!
NLM – So do I! You’ve written so many! Seventeen novels.
BR - It’ll be eightteen by Christmas, given a bit of luck. I’m not going to talk about it, but I’ll tell you the title and you can wonder what its about. It’s called Autobiopsy.
NLM – Thank you for that exclusive!
BR – That can mean anything. I have to say, it’s a good title, even if the book is no good. Its exactly what the book is about.
NLM – Its an unusual title for you. you don’t usually have one-word titles.
BR – No, but it’s the right title, nothing else will do.
NLM – do you start with a title?
BR – No. but it came pretty soon. Much sooner than usual.
NLM Do you need a title?
BR – No. they come out of it. I’ve never had a title so early.
NLM – so when do you think it will be out? Easter?
BR – No, I don’t want it to be out till September. I can say no when I want it.
NLM – You’re in a very fortunate position
BR – I think I want it out in September. Although everything comes out in September. You see, the problem is, I like to be on a book, I like to have started a novel by the time a book comes out. otherwise I will take my reviews seriously. Because when you are writing a book, it’s a funny process, you think you are writing the greatest novel that has ever been written. And when you finish it, you think, yeah, its good, its good. By the time it comes out you think its all right. But you only thisnk its al right because you’ve already started on the greatest novel that’s ever been written. It’s a kind of safeguard. I do it quite deliberately. If I weren’t writing the greatest novel that’s ever been written I’d get very worried about the reviews of a novel which I think is all right.
NLM – Do you read your reviews?
BR – On the whole not. I read them in time because I get the independent or the observer and I get these anyway. But in the fullness of time. The publishers send me a whole sheaf, and on the whole I don’t read them.
NLM – Do your publishers determine what you write? I remember at the Hay festival his year you said you wrote Mother Russia for money.
BR – Yeah, money I didn’t get, incidentally. They’ve gone bankrupt. The whole deal was absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, I wrote that for money. I’m not ashamed. It should have been good money. It was quite pleasant writing it. I don’t regret it at all. Its not the book I would have written.
NLM – It’s not your best. It works.
BR – I did a lot of promotion. That book sold more copies than I’ve ever sold in my life.
NLM – It was absolutely topical. Its timing was just right.
BR I got up at a Waterstone’s thing, the public were there, the publishers were there, and I got up and I said, “I’m going to read from the last chapter of “Mother Rubbish.” Because that’s what I thought the book was. If I had corrected myself it would have drawn attention to the mistake, so I went on anyway.
NLM – Did anybody hear?
BR – Yes, there was a pause, there was a reaction. I didn’t want to make a production of it. Mother Rubbish for money – money that didn’t come.
NLM – Don’t knock it too hard, it’s all right.
BR - If you have to do a history of Russia exam, it’s a lovely way, it’s a pleasant way. You get a story and a bit of a love story thrown in at the same time.
NLM – There was a lot of violence in it. It was the most violent thing you’ve done
BR – Was it violent?
NLM – Yes, incredibly violent. I can’t remember the characters’ names. The daughter of one of your main characters is kidnapped by the Russian security police, and she is raped. It’s quite graphic.
BR – Oh yes. And there’s the one whose face is eaten by a rat. NLM – yes. BR – It’s not my sort of stuff (laughs)
NLM – I know, Bernice
BR – But its true!
At this point the interview drifted on to other matters. Bernice was interested in my family and my experience of writing.
NLM – ...I tend to abandon many ideas fairly early because...
BR – Well, that’s a common problem. Its a guilt thing, it’s got nothing to do with writing.
NLM - Or else it goes off at a direction, you know, my Welsh farmer zooming off to the Bahamas and I know nothing of the geography. So errors can creep in.
BR – What makes you think they are errors? I would trust the reason and see where it goes.
NLM - I see…
BR – It would depend on my motive. If I’d just come back from holiday in the Bahamas it might be questionable, but if, and I don’t want to mythologize it, if it happens in a book, it happens for a reason.
NLM – Something I ought to trust to?
BR – Its faith
NLM – Have you had to teach yourself that faith, or was it there right from the start?
BR – No, I think it was there from the start. It becomes a habit. You know, I think you’ve got an awful lot to write about.
NLM – Yes, its finding the right subject.
BR – It’s about not knowing. That’s what I write about. It’s about not knowing one’s identity, and running away from it. A closet person, not just a closet gay, or a closet Jew, a closet human being.
NLM – Maybe that’s why I like your books. You’re speaking to things I can understand. Even if you don’t say them directly.
BR – I think the important thing to do. I think that everything is permissible, so long as no-one is hurt. I really think that it terribly important to try not to let go of that. Sometimes it’s impossible. But I think if you bear in mind that this is a priority, you’ll hurt them less. On the other hand, I don’t think one should live a lie.
NLM…I think I need to find some direction for my writing to take
BR – I think you are thinking about in the wrong way. I think you’ve got to sit down and do something. And then you will know which direction it is going. I don’t think you can dictate to yourself. It would be silly for me to sit down and say, I’m going to write a detective story. What I’m writing might turn out to be anything, and that’s the direction. You’ve got to do it first and that gives you the direction. You should try a novel. You might surprise yourself. It might work. You know enough about writing, the technique of it, to know why it doesn’t work if it doesn’t, and if it is repairable: or if it should be non-fiction, or a play. Trust it.
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[1] Spring Sonata features Buster, an unborn baby who overhears from the womb the lovely music which his mother plays on the piano. He also listens to his awful family arguing with her. So he decides never to be born. When his time comes his mother is taken to hospital for a caesarean, at which event a friend of her plays the violin. Buster manages to avoid the surgeon’s hands and to reach out and steal the violin. The mother is returned to the ward with a diagnosis of a phantom pregnancy, ‘all in her head’. But now she can hear her son play the violin, and as he grows inside her they begin to play duets. Of course they must each die, but before that happens they form a perfect intimate relationship, mother and son. Spring Sonata is subtitled, a fable. The story echoes the second movement of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata for violin and piano, one of the most perfect evocations of intimacy ever created.
[2]Set on Edge
[3] Solitary Grief is a novel about a cold and self-centred psychiatrist, Alistair Crown whose daughter is born with Downs Syndrome. The fact of his daughter’s disability triggers in him a display of guilt-driven behaviour that ends in disaster. It is an unhappy tale told with energy and with sharp observation, and a degree of feeling for the awful pain the novel’s most unsympathetic character is going through.
[4] Bernice is referring to certain kinds of practices that are more common in psychotherapy than psychiatry. Most psychiatrists deal with problems of mental illness such as schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and so on. Psychotherapists work with people who have long standing psycho-social problems including deep-seated and unresolved conflicts in relationships and identitity.