What A.S. Byatt said

Here’s number four in the series of notes I took at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in October. So far we’ve covered what Salman Rushdie said, what Bernhard Schlink said and what James Ellroy had to say. So I thought it was about time we heard what a woman has to say.

You don’t have to read more than a hundred pages of any of her books to know that she’s big into research, so she spoke a bit about that.

She says she grew up on childrens books, and they’re very dear to her.

She speaks a bit about her parents. She says they were Utopian Socialists. And when she started to research The Fabians she realised that she hadn’t known her parents at all. Writing the book became a process of understanding them after they were gone.

She says of her father: ‘I didn’t know the kind of mental manure that fertilised his plant.’

and ‘Money always crops up, like muck, where humans are.’

She says of Olive, one of the main characters in The Children’s Book; ‘Women writers made money back then. Independence caused Olive to be generous.’

She says she was inspired to write The Childrens Book when she came upon the statistics of suicide in the children of children’s book authors.

She said she feels ‘it’s because there is no room for the child in the house where the writing is going on.’ and ‘So much misery in these households. There’s something intolerable in being the child of a children’s writer.’

Kenneth Grahame, who wrote Wind in the Willow’s had a son, Alastair, who committed suicide just before his twentieth birthday. So tragic. Byatt speaks of how Grahame had sent him The Wind in the Willows in letter form over the years while his son was at school.

She said, ‘for example, Christopher Robin, it couldn’t have been easy being him.’

‘The children feel pressured to remain a child. But the author is childlike too, which leaves the space of adult open.’ ‘The parent is also the child, so it’s harder for the children to remain children naturally. they have to grow up fast, while maintaining the muse of childhood for their parents.’

She also said of writing for children: ‘The imaginary world belongs to the constructor, not the reader.’

She speaks at great length about fairy tales. She says she adores Hans Christian Anderson, but his work is different from fairy stories. As a child she figured out that he was hurting her. She says: ‘He means his readers to be hurt. He is dangerous. For example if you are a girl who wanted red shoes, in the end you would get your feet cut off. That is the way it is with Hans Christian Anderson.’

She tells a story written by Hans Christian Anderson about a disobedient child who died and was buried, but then kept sticking his hand out of the ground. His mother would beat his hand with a broom until it went back into the ground again.

Charming tale.

On a different theme of the book she says that her ancesters were potters, which is why she always avoided it and wrote about glass in her books until now. ‘Glass is much more transparent,’ she said.

‘Ironically’, she said, ‘the best clay comes out of the graveyard.’

She calls The Children’s Book ‘an ensemble book’. She says the characters grew out of the reading and research she did. She says it starts with ghostly whisps of characters and builds from there.

Of her writing process she says: ‘For a moment the whole world hangs together in your head, that’s what happens when you have a click moment.’

‘I don’t start with characters, I start with a world.’

‘If you don’t come to writing for pleasure, you might as well give up.’

‘You imagine the room a scene is taking place in. That’s not wisdom, that’s pleasure.’

‘And the more awful the things you write, the greater the pleasure.’