helen
sandler | journalism
Sarah Waters |
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A
diabolical library Her latest work is a
sensational Victorian novel set in the house of an evil pornographer, but
Sarah Waters is getting ready to write something closer to home, as she tells
Helen Sandler At a reading in
London’s Glass Bar last year, fans cheered and whooped at Sarah Waters
as if their favourite popstar had taken the stage. The writer seemed relaxed
as she read out some of the raunchier passages from her books, but did admit
later, when pressed, that she’d found the level of adulation
disconcerting. With her usual modest charm, she gave a puzzled smile and
said, “It was a bit odd, wasn’t it?” It is certainly not the
usual response of an audience to a literary novelist. But then, Sarah’s
first novel, Tipping the Velvet (to be serialised by the BBC with a
screenplay by Andrew Davies), still tops the charts of lesbian books, and she
has a place in the heart of the lesbo nation that clearly pleases her. Her latest novel should go
down well (so to speak) with the fans. A gripping Victorian saga, Fingersmith
(reviewed last month) has a mistress/maid storyline of seduction and betrayal
that will be popular with many a dyke. But this description does not do it
justice. In a plot with more deadly twists than a country lane, one of the
biggest themes is cruelty. It’s a theme the
author first explored in the middle section of Tipping the Velvet, where the
wealthy Diana kept our heroine, Nancy, as a living sex-toy for a while before
throwing her out on the street. While that picaresque novel was attaining its
classic status – largely by word of mouth – Sarah was busy
writing the haunting prison tale Affinity, to pursue the theme of
“people being cruel to each other”. But even that was not enough
to purge her system: Fingersmith is more fiendish than ever. “Once I’d got a
taste for it,” she laughs, “I did plan Fingersmith with all that
diabolical stuff in mind. I thought it would be rather fun.” As it
turned out, it was not all fun. In fleshing out the story, she realised that
the characters each had their own painful reasons for their callousness,
reasons that started to disturb their creator. The book opens with the
tale of Sue, who lives among petty thieves (‘fingersmiths’) and
is recruited by the dastardly ‘Gentleman’ to play a part in a
criminal plot, as a lady’s maid. They conspire to defraud the lady in
question – Maud, who lives confined with her cruel uncle in a big house
in the country where she is obliged to assist in his life’s work,
collecting and cataloguing pornographic literature. As the story twists and
turns, the awfulness of Maud’s life in particular is striking, but the
author felt more of a connection with her than with Sue. This is only partly
to do with their circumstances: “I wasn’t raised by a family of
thieves – but then, I wasn’t raised by a horrible old
pornographer either.” The challenge was to let the reader see any good
in the girl who was raised by a
horrible old pornographer – raised by him, trained by him, tamed by
him. It has already been
revealed in these pages that, unlike Affinity, Fingersmith does not end in
tragedy. Rather, the ending suggests that lewdness has its uses. “It
didn’t always finish on that note,” says Sarah, “but
I’m glad now to have the new ending. Maud was such a victim of
pornographers, though, that I wish I’d done even more to turn it
around.” Her research showed that
pornography was a thriving industry in the nineteenth century, written in a
way that both matches our stereotype of the Victorians as prim and staid and
yet is quite explicit. “I like that contrast, but some of the
literature is so unpleasant that it’s not really a turn-on,” says
Sarah. She admits to having seen rather a lot of the stuff but, unlike Maud,
was not forced to give readings of the more misogynist content to select
gatherings of twitching gentlemen.
Maud has certainly suffered
from her treatment. “She is so alienated that it was hard to make her
sympathetic.” So what is it that her creator has in common with her?
“She is more articulate about her feelings than Sue, who is fairly
straightforward. Maud is also more anxious – and I identify with
that.” As a child, growing up in
small-town Wales in a family that tended to keep emotions in check, Sarah was
prone to feeling wildly over-anxious and would compensate with rituals, as
Maud does. “It manifests in adult life around jealousies and
insecurities. It’s more interesting, that underside –
that’s what’s worth talking about. The fears that people have
alone are most telling, but we rarely get to see them.” Fingersmith also looks at
ideas of madness, of who is locked in the asylum and why, and how long you
can stay ‘sane’ when treated as mad. There are echoes here of
Affinity, of sleeping drafts and visions. Indeed, is anyone in Sarah’s
work quite sane? “I’d hate to
seem flippant about mental health,” she answers, “but it is more
interesting to write about someone slightly mad – whatever that means
– than comparatively normal. And women are prone to be labelled as mad
when their behaviour is unorthodox.” Sarah’s own anxiety
lifts when the writing is going well but gets worse when it’s going
badly, which means that her everyday life is very much affected by her
writing, though she doesn’t always note the connection at the time.
“It’s like when you get your period and realise you had
PMT,” she says. Halfway through
Fingersmith, the writing stopped altogether when she and her then-girlfriend
split. So there was no more tragedy for a while for her characters, whom she
pictures sitting like actors in a green room somewhere, waiting to go on. She
is quite sure they were glad: “I had a sense of them rubbing their
hands in glee that I’d gone to pieces.” In normal circumstances,
however, writing comes first. She works from home and treats it as a job, but
not everyone sees it that way. “Other people don’t think
it’s a real job – they think you can help them move house or go
shopping. Yes, you do have flexibility but it has to be on your terms –
you write for two hours and then you’re pleased with yourself and might
want to go for a walk, but not before.” She thinks like this and
then worries that she’s being precious. “But the fact is that the
writing lifestyle – the nerdy lifestyle – suits me, and when
I’m not doing it, I’m very edgy… At school, I loved doing
projects, they gave meaning to my life.” She laughs. “I’m
still doing it.” It was her PhD thesis that
got her hooked on writing and then she composed Tipping the Velvet to satisfy
something for herself, her circle of friends and other lesbians. (In fact
there was a wider readership, which is just fine with her as long as she
hangs on to the dykes.) Affinity was more of a struggle, as is often the case
with a second novel. The response to Tipping meant that the readership was real
to her in a way it had never been before, and Sarah frequently found herself
paralysed by the idea of people paying money to read what she was writing, so
that even when she managed to finish a sentence, she would immediately think
it wasn’t good enough. “But I’ve got over that now. And
ultimately, the books are just for me.” Up to now, they have
fulfilled her desire to write the kind of books she likes to read. She has
always enjoyed Victorian fiction, particularly the ‘sensation
fiction’ of writers like Wilkie Collins (whose classic The Woman in
White inspired parts of the plot for Fingersmith). “I like those novels
and wanted to write one of my own. But it’s impossible to take on the
formulas without thinking about psychological depths that Victorian novels
don’t touch as we would want to – what it would actually feel
like to be given up by your mother, say. We’re so used to people
talking about their feelings.” From her teens she read
Hardy and Austen, later she came to love Dickens. “Unlike the sanitised
versions made for family viewing on TV, the real Dickens is so strange, with
a lot of violence, strangeness, queerness, more than most Victorian
novelists.” Modern writers of
historical fiction have also influenced her, including Chris Hunt, whose
novels feature gay men, and Philippa Gregory, whose Wideacre trilogy is
“straight but perverse and kinky, and yet within the genre of
women’s racy fiction, with embossed gold letters on the cover”.
She even put it on the syllabus of a course in women’s writing, because
“it’s so clever about the dilemmas women have faced – and
using that for a feminist agenda”. But why choose to set your
books in a period when women in this society were so badly off? “I hate
the idea that it’s nostalgia,” insists Sarah. “Ideas of
entrapment and repression are very exciting and I wanted to do something with
that. Because urban lesbians have a lot of freedom, perversely that’s
become not very interesting for me. I’m not yearning for a twilight
world. But in a nineteenth-century setting, small gestures become very
important and you get a lot of drama out of them, which is exciting.” But her next novel will
probably be set in the 1940s. “Now that I’m trying to leave the
nineteenth century aside, I realise it also allows you to do grand
melodramatic things. Affinity and Fingersmith got very gothic and the value
of that is that the characters do really big cruel things – but as a
writer you’re still talking about what people do in real life, the
cruel ways they treat each other.” If her previous work has
used exaggerated events to explore the intense feelings that come up in our
own modern-day relationships, Sarah is now struggling to see how a story that
is set in the twentieth century and actually about relationships can be interesting.
As she nervously plans just such a story, she reassures herself by looking
back at books like The End of the Affair by Graham Greene: “a very
quiet novel that shows how people treat each other in devastating
ways.” She is also nervous about
another new development: her own life is forcing its way into the story.
Single again, and having recently moved with a friend from one of the oldest
squats in Brixton into a nearby flat with a view across London, it is as if
she has also gained some perspective on all that went before. “I have this urge to put a particular relationship on paper,”
she says, caught out by an autobiographical imperative that many other
writers would describe as their driving force. For Sarah, it’s scary.
“It feels weird and exposing.” Still, close to home or not, she
looks set to get on with it, just as she has done for six years now, with
three books and a clutch of awards to her name. So is that it then? Will she
always be a writer? “I don’t know what else I’d do,” she replies. “I’m unfitting myself for anything else.” She doesn’t seem too concerned about this narrowing career path. And for her cheering lesbian readers, that can only be a good thing. © Helen Sandler 2002 This piece first appeared in Diva, March 2002 |
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