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Duck patéZoe Molver in conversation with Marguerite Poland
ZM: In her book Negotiating With the Dead (A Writer on Writing), Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood says, "There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine - 'wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.'" MP: (Laughter) It's a very odd position to be in, and one doesn't know, especially someone devoted to paté, what they feel about the duck. There are authors that I've wanted to meet as well, also because once you've read a book and really engaged with that author, then that book becomes completely important to you. If one discovers ordinariness or banality, that might be very difficult to cope with and that's quite silly, because often they're just ordinary people. There's also another funny thing about being an author, and I know this because I've got two names, one which is the writing name and one which is my own name. The expectations resting on each are different. I wonder if one can assume something when you're engaging somebody as the writer and if you're a different person or not. I just don't know. ZM: Nadine Gordimer, in her introduction to Selected Stories, talks about "the tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer." There are the two things. MP: I suppose those two things are lived out in one's life as well. Now that really is an interesting thing, because when you are making a character, and I know absolutely because I've done two historical novels and am working on something which has a historical baseline [Marguerite is currently writing a commissioned non-fictional text] that the people that I'm preoccupied with - and in fact most of them did actually live, so it's not entirely an act of the imagination - are so utterly present in my world all the time, and are so completely important and absorbing. Maybe I live in quite a strange unreality, I don't know, but it's completely real - things happen which make you know that they are there also, and they know what to do. I don't know how these processes work, but I do know that in the process of writing things happen that are so oddly synchronicitous you have to believe in them. ZM: The childhoods of writers are thought to have something to do with their vocation, but they are in fact very different. On the cover of Recessional For Grace you have a beautiful photograph of your mother. Tell me a little about your history. MP: It's quite an ordinary history, really. Writers are supposed to have anguished childhoods - mine was not the least bit anguished. Mine was a very ordinary, normal childhood. I have a sister who is older than me. My maternal grandmother lived with us all my life till she died, when I was 17. She was an extraordinary person; she was deeply gentle, a Scot. She read to us every single day from as early as I can remember. I like the process of telling stories. I still like to listen to beautifully read texts. Just the ordinary facts of it: I was brought up outside Port Elizabeth on a smallholding. But we weren't there for long - we went to what was then Rhodesia for two years, then we went to Johannesburg for a short time and then we came back to Port Elizabeth to the same smallholding. But I had a completely magical childhood in what is such an ordinary little corner of a town. And yet, in that bush - the 11 acres that we owned was in bigger bush that went down to the sea - was this world of plants and animals and birds that were quite ordinary, but which had a secret life of their own that completely and utterly entranced me. There were tortoises and puff-adders, grysbokkies, monkeys, meercats, all that sort of thing. I had a complete sense of belonging to it, and I loved it, absolutely loved it. I am a peculiar mixture - and I suppose this is a thing with writers as well - it is terribly important for me to have people that I love round me, yet have complete solitude. So there's this constant conflict between really caring about and wanting to be with people, and absolutely having to be alone, almost 24 hours a day. Otherwise I can't write. Because you go into the place where you're writing about, and to detach yourself from it is very difficult, one is so absorbed in it. I think that is quite a peculiar challenge, in that the need to contemplate these things by themselves is absolutely urgent. It wasn't acceptable to be a loner; there was always this constant guilt that I should be playing, but then I'd get on top of the roof, and the children would be looking for me. And then if they left me alone I'd be hysterical, because I'd been rejected! So I've spent my whole life living with this terrible trend of desperately wanting to be accepted, having really close bonds with certain people, and needing this space of real solitude that is absolute solitude, because that space is so figured, it is so populated. It is very difficult to explain that to anybody who doesn't know about writing and what it's about, and then people get resentful about it. They don't understand that taking an hour off can wreck a week's work. People always say to me, "you must take a break." The thing is, I don't want a break, all I want to do is to be left to write. And when I take that break, I need to be with someone who understands that. It's almost like a withdrawal thing: you have to withdraw from that thing to be okay for the next. Freud said, "As regards intellectual work … discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude." I usually surround myself (which I did not do with Grace, but with the book before that [Iron Love]) with these pictures of people that I was writing about, who, if the house had burnt down, I would have saved first. ZM: Their world has gone, is going. MP: Well, you lose them, you grieve for them, and those characters remain alive. When I walk into my house in Grahamstown, I greet them one by one as I go up the stairs - just as a matter of course. ZM: You'd have to have that detachment in order to recall. MP: You have to be there and then withdraw. You were talking earlier about how much of oneself one brings to bear in one's writing. Let's take a very simple physical process. I sit in front of a word processor - I used to write longhand - and I describe exactly, exactly what I see and what I hear. It is a movie that runs and I describe it exactly as it is. And then I may structure it and I may make endless notes about what I'm saying here and why I'm doing this there, or I will make huge plans about how this chapter is going to be. But then I've solved that and then I just describe the movie as it happens. And then I rewrite it because there are mistakes, because things need to be moved, because you've got to cut and edit. It's something that you hear, and it's something that you taste and you describe it, and I do not believe, even though I might take my characters to Antarctica where I have never been, there is nothing in a gesture, in a word, in a smell, in a feeling, that isn't related to experience. Grace is a complete composite of thousands, millions of things that have been my life. And I didn't think, "ah, I'll use this", or "I'll use that", or "I'll think about using this in the next thing." As I wrote the story, those things which are deeply engrained in my world view, in my way of seeing the world, slotted into her imagined story. Grace lives in a composite world; I have made a map in my head of where Grace's place was, and Grace's place was a composite of all my places in one place, with shades of people I have known. ZM: This is something I tell my students when I teach, when I talk about different ontologies. We may be very close to some of the characters, or the authorial voice may seem exactly the same as that of a character. But once you cross that strange, invisible boundary - and I draw a circle - you cross into another ontological universe. MP: Yes, that's it. Let's just take Grace meets Jack at university and they go for Sunday lunch in Jack's house. I have an absolute vision of that house in my head, but not a specific house that I know. But next door there is a house where the Hegartys live (Recessional for Grace, pp 115, 6,7) with their mantillas and their rosaries and all the rest of it. That house is a house in Grahamstown, but it's not next to the house where Jack lives, and the people that live in it, the Hegartys, are not the Hegartys, they are somebody else who live in Port Elizabeth in a house that doesn't look like that at all, but they live specifically in that house. And I know how that ivy runs and where the plumbing comes out, and the elephant ear plant next to the fence was in my driveway at home, which was in a completely different place. But I know what it feels like and looks like. I created that world and it absolutely is the reality of my world, altogether … sort of bonded together into a new place. ZM: So writer and place are never linked in any literal fashion. MP: They become a landscape of head/heart - with the same quality of what's familiar and yet rearranged, like when you dream. It's the sum of my experience. I observe natural landscape very minutely, so that when I create this world, it still has to have the authentic notes, if you like, that make you know, for example, you're in the Eastern Cape. That's why it's so difficult, especially with historical fiction - if you make a mistake, you can shatter that sense of reality. ZM: Why did you start writing? MP: I don't know why I started writing, and it sounds trite saying because that's what I had to do. I can remember when I first wrote a story, and I've still got it, the very first story that I ever wrote. And it was as soon as I had the mechanical skill to put down the words that I wanted to put down, to say something, to tell a story. It is a very long, complicated story. Everything I have ever written actually has its roots in that story, and that's not contriving it - every single thing is there, that's what is so extraordinary. I think that it was Camus who said you come back to those images which first inspired you. My themes, my images, recur, the places I need to belong to. And then there is the elation of discovery. A small example: yesterday, doing research, I found something in the library in Pietermaritzburg, which to anybody else would be the most boring thing in the world, but for months I have searched for this piece of information and I found it. It gave me an image, but the image is tied to a place I know and a whole group of people who were involved in this particular story which I'm trying to tell. It was like a pig snuffling out truffles, it's just so exciting, so stimulating, so wonderful. Am I sounding really foolish? ZM: Not at all. You're articulating a very difficult process. To someone who might not have that sense. MP: So for me, finding that piece of information yesterday, this shadowy character that I've been after all the time, a little bit of flesh was added to him, and one day I will look at him and his eyes will meet mine, I know that. ZM: It's like the shadow of the photographer in Grace. I think Recessional is the most marvellous book about the process of creation, about the process of writing. MP: Well, that's why I wrote it, to explore the process and to explain the strange journey a writer makes in doing it. It is the best book I have written about how we write, and how you become part of the story that you are writing. If I think about the book that I'm writing now, which is a straight historical work, I could never have written it if I hadn't written Grace, Iron Love or Shades. Every single one of those books has fed into this, and this book will feed into something that is waiting to be written. I'm not looking for it, I just know that it's a whole train of forces, something else which will probably grow out of this. And it's not that I'm looking for another book; I just know that it's a process and that I live the process, I really do live the process. I don't really know what to say about Grace, and in a funny way it was an actual test. It was the one that was least worked among the books that I ever wrote, it was the book that I wrote fastest, and I think, in a way, it was the easiest book that I ever wrote in terms of technical difficulties. I didn't have to do any research for Grace. That's the thing, it's the sum of everything that I've ever written. I didn't have to look anything up. I struggled with how I was going to structure it, quite often, and in a funny way, I pick Grace up now and open it and read and it is not that familiar to me. If I open Shades, I know exactly where I was writing this bit, where I found the research for it, how that happened … I can even tell you more or less the sequence of the plot of those other books. If you said to me, what happens in Grace? … I know obviously the main events that happen in Grace, but the way that they happen I don't know precisely anymore. I'm more engaged in characters in the other books than the ones in Grace because the characters in the other books I see, the characters in Grace I look through. I've chosen the picture on the cover, which is linked, but somehow incidental. ZM: That's very interesting in relation to the impact upon the reader. I have read the book twice, because I had a need to read it the second time, but it is still an elusive text, and I like that. In a way it does have closure, but it doesn't have closure on that level. I'm reminded of a comment made by Samuel Beckett when he said, "The duty of the artist is to fail." He doesn't mean that the artist gives up, but in a way that is what Grace is about - it is about process, it is always ongoing. So that book becomes a kind of metaphor for the whole process. MP: I don't know anything about the theory of writing. In dealing with Shades and Iron Love I had to do a huge amount of research, I had to go to those specific places, and then the people that populated them, and the people from whom others have come. In fact, in the most weird and bizarre way, I now live - and I mean this specifically - I now live within the text of Shades. What I started with Shades … well not what I started … what I observed in Shades and Iron Love is inextricably unified into my life and work now. ZM: Why did you move from writing children's fiction to writing books for adults? Although I think your children's writing is for adults too. MP: I think that is a difficult question and I really think that there are only two books that I ever wrote for children out of the eleven, and I don't feel great about either of them, they're very workmanlike. But the other children's books are not really children's books, they are allegories in a way, and although they are in language about creatures that children can understand and identify with, in many ways they are allegorical stories. There's a story I wrote about rats. I remember the day that I wrote that story we went to Bushman's River near Grahamstown, and went up the river crab-fishing with a whole crowd of people, and it was a jolly day with booze and people catching crabs and braaiing fish and things like that. And in silence on this river bank, there was this Boerboon tree. This story is a childlike story just about a family of rats, but it isn't actually, because it was about my loving of that particular place. But it also came out of the fact that at that particular time I was working on farm labourers' needs and a huge community development project I was doing at the university. And there were people I was interviewing that moved me enormously in what they had to say and the tragedy of their lives and I translated that into that story. Behind that story there's a massive community development project. You'd never know that that was the thing that sparked it. ZM: This is very interesting. My sense of your so-called children's fiction is that in a way they are different modes, not different audiences, they are collections of allegorical short fictions. A misreading? MP: Except, and this is my lack of skill, but also because I have written a children's story, that it still has to be in language that children can feel and understand, with the kind of characters children can enjoy. I know that they appeal to a certain kind of child only. They really took them into their lives. I remember going around with a child who said this is where this happened and this is where that happened, and this is where the next thing happened, and it was an Eastern Cape farm, and she said, this is the Boerboon tree. And so it was, it was an absolutely appropriate Boerboon tree, I could have shifted my tree there.
Nqalu, The Mouse Without Whiskers, which is very much a children's book, is also very much my autobiography. That mouse has sweaty paws and its whiskers don't grow and it can't do anything and all those kinds of things. But behind that book were my first explorations into the worldview of stars, birds, trees, everything that is now The Abundant Herds and Recessional For Grace, and those images which come out of an African worldview because of learning languages and because of the metaphor, because of the idiom, because of the imagery in Xhosa and Zulu. That informs everything that I have ever written and it's specifically one aspect of the children's books. The wonder and joy when I did those languages, all those images you will find in my children's books, they're all there. ZM: What do you enjoy reading and what are you reading now? MP: There are lots of things that I enjoy reading. Normally I'm reading what's to do with what I'm working on, because that makes sense. I've been reading Ben Maclennan's The Wind Makes Dust. Four Centuries of Writing in South Africa. The books that I love are such a strange sort of mixture. I've got a very strange reading pattern - I sit down and I read Thomas Packenham's The Boer War because I really need to know about that. And then I read Denys Reitz's Commando, because that's what I'm involved with at that particular moment; or something completely different, like a love story or biography. So it's a huge range of what you need for work and what you need for yourself. ZM: When you're not writing, what do you do? MP: Always doing the housework! I'm always ironing! I adore
gardening, my family, my friends, the Berg, my special farms in the Eastern
Cape. I would like to create a really beautiful garden. I cannot sit still,
I cannot relax. In my dreams I would love to go into wild places, except that
I'm a ninny. But those moments of living in a world which has other layers in
it that one is really aware of, is so incredibly exciting. The explorations,
that's the part I wouldn't change.
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