A A p p p p e e n n d d ix i x
Interviewing Penelope Lively
On a rainy September morning – it was Friday the 22nd to be exact – Penelope Lively welcomed me in her house in Islington, a Victorian terraced house with a dark green door. No name corresponds to the doorbell or to the street number.
Penelope Lively is now 73. Her hair is styled in a loose bob, she wears large glasses and in spite of her age has a deep resonant voice.
She received me in her study, a small room with a sofa, a desk, her personal armchair, the walls completely covered by books – as one would imagine. She offered me a cup of coffee. I gave her a present which I brought from Italy.
And here we are, sitting one in front of the other. Penelope Lively asks me what she can do to help me with my work; I draw out a small tape recorder and my notebook full of questions. The conversation runs smoothly. She is thoroughly unbiased and answers all my questions. She seems to be accustomed to this all. I go from literary theory to personal subjects, passing through her last book and her recurrent themes. What strikes me most is her humbleness and her realistic view of life. When I define her as a famous writer, she corrects me saying that most of her neighbours do not know that she is a writer. Indeed she is, with more than 40 books published.
Friendly and warm, she eventually gives me some material to photocopy together with one of her novels.
What follows is the transcription of our conversation.
September 22nd, 2006
AL – What is your writing process like? How do you choose the subject of your books?
PL – Well, I think for me any novel has a quite long period of gestation, of thinking about it. And usually, for me, most novels spring from some sort of driving idea. It's a sort of intellectual preoccupation, something in which I'm interested. Several novels have been prompted by an interest in the operation of memory, the way in which memory works. Whether memory is something that we are encumbered by or whether it's something we can't do without and what memory does in any person's life. For instance, there's a fairly recent novel called The Photograph which is about the discovery of a photograph and in which the past upsets everybody's life as it were. So I get a sort of idea of what this novel is going to be about and then the problem is to find the story, the narrative and characters and the setting, which are going to be the vehicle for the idea. And then I spend a very long time, I mean, before actually starting to write a novel, taking notes for several months in an untidy notebook, a sort of instructions to myself. Sometimes, some novels require a lot of background work, require a lot of what I hesitate to call research, because in a sense that implies
of a different kind. For that said, some novels need a lot of background work and I need to be in libraries a lot of the time. I use the British Library, the National Library... so that's somehow how a novel begins. A short story – I've written lots of short stories – is quite different. There the idea just seems to come suddenly: see something or overhear something and a whole short story unfolds. It's different.
AL –Did you study books about time perception?
PL – Well, my reading has always been very explorative. I mean, I've always read a great deal of history and I'm very interested in archaeology.
And archaeology has crept into quite a number of my novels. The same is true for a sort of related area, palaeontology. There's a novel called Cleopatra's Sister, which springs from palaeontology. So often, you know, the novels will have been prompted by an area of reading but I never really go thinking this will be a source for a novel. It's just what I'm interested in anyway, it's what I want to read...
AL – Have you got a theory about time?
PL – No, I don't have any specific theory. I've read a lot of books on time, I think most of the time books are up here... maybe they're upstairs.
Yes, I've always been interested in theories of time, but I haven't studied in any conscious way, I'm just interested in the way time affects our lives...
AL – And do you think that this has changed? From the beginning of the 20th century up to now, passing through two World Wars... Has time perception changed?
PL – Oh, that's an interesting question but I really find it hard to get an answer. I think I will have to say I don't know. I haven't studied theories of time in sufficient depth to be able to answer that. But I think that at any point, attitudes towards time, particularly perhaps the attitude or the interest of writers towards time varies. It's an abiding subject. I'm very far from being the only writer interested in time and in the operation of memory. It's a subject which is very much engaged by novelists. And I think that probably there was a different approach to it. But it'd be hard to identify exactly what the change has been over the century.
AL – Do you recognize yourself under the label “Postmodernist writer”?
PL – Ah, I hate to be labelled as anything. I mean, there's been a lot of labelling going on over the last few decades. People who labelled as a feminist writer, or as a postmodernist writer or as a magical realist writer.
I'd hope to escape labelling. I would simply be writing novels without a label attached.
AL – Let us now turn to some questions about Making It Up. How did you come to write an anti-memoir?
PL – Well, I think probably it's something that arises, it's a thought that arises when you're getting old. I'm of a certain age and at your age I bet you don't think so much about that kind of things. But when you are my age, you look back over your life and you are rather surprised at being the person that you are, doing what you do, with the children that you've got and the husband that you had instead of all the other alternatives whatever they might be. And you are caught at looking at your own life and thinking if I had done that back then instead of what I did do. How'd it be? and so it was really how the idea came to me, looking at alternative lives. I suppose I also rather liked this idea of the possibility of a sort of infinite number of narratives. The book has 8 or 10 sections but of course it could have gone off in all sorts of different directions. It could have been endless. And so I think that idea was lurking in the back of my mind but obviously doesn't result practical to try to write a book which has an infinite number of different stories.
AL – At the beginning, did you think of different forms in which this book could be written?
PL – I felt it always had to be in this form. I couldn't see a way in which you could make it into a novel, a conventional novel. And I didn't really
want to do that either because I wanted to keep the character who is me, as it were, on the edges. I didn't want it to be about me. Necessarily in most of the stories the character who is a possible alternative of myself is somebody who is standing rather on the edges and it's about other people. I knew from the beginning that that was the way I wanted to do it.
AL – And you made clear the connections with your story in the prefaces...
PL – Yes, the little bits at the beginning and end of each chapter make clear what really happened.
AL – This book is half-way between an auto-biography, a biography and fiction.
PL – Yes, I mean it's not a memoir, which is why I call this an anti- memoir. It's a non-conventional form of writing and I think it puzzled my publishers rather. They didn't quite know how to define it: it's fiction, it's obviously fiction, it's not true but at the same time it's not a conventional novel. A novel isn't exactly a collection of short stories because in the collection of short stories each story stands up independently. They have no connection with each other whereas in this book there is a connection, a thread that runs through. They said it was quite difficult to them to know how to treat it.
AL – What do you think is the role of the writer today? Do you feel responsible towards your readers?
PL – Well, I find it difficult to answer because, when you're actually writing, you never think what it is my role. You're just trying to produce a good book. But I think, probably, what I like in other writers, novelists, is to reflect the society in which they live, to say something about the world that they see. How their society and their time appear to them. I read a great deal of fiction, obviously, and if I want to know about another country or another time I go to novelists. So if I want to know about nineteenth century prompts I go to nineteenth century fiction. And equally – we don't do enough translation in this country, so it's not good to read nothing in translation – but if I was going to revisiting Turkey I will be trying to read some contemporary Turkish novelist. I think novelists should be reflecting their age and their society and, of course, everybody does it differently.
Every novelist's view is different, which is why we need many novelists.
AL – You are a public character, a famous writer and so many of your readers have an image of you which is not, of course, you. Are you frustrated about that?
PL – Well, first the sort of novelist that I am, what is called a literary novelist, you know, serious novelists are not hugely famous. I mean, most
of the people in this street have never heard of me. The number of people who read literary fiction, serious fiction, in this country is not enormous. I mean fortunately quite a lot, yes, but famous is not quite the right word.
Yes, readers have an image... To be absolutely honest it is not something I think about a great deal. I don’t know. I'm a reader myself and, of course, I have an image of writers whose work I admire and enjoy. It happens that my image doesn't fit the person himself. In a curious way, I sometimes think it's better not to meet the writer that you admire. I mean, I know many great writers – when you're a writer you meet other writers – but I’ve sometimes thought I quite like admiring somebody from a distance. Maybe there's a sense in which the work and the person should be kept apart.
AL – At the end of Making It Up, you write that the book has been "a different way of enlisting story to complement reality". Literature must reflect society, it's a sort of cultural memory of our time and so how can we define the relationship between history and literature?
PL – Well, that's huge... I'm somebody who reads a great deal of history.
I studied history at university. I went to Oxford University and I read history there. I've been reading it ever since and I think that what I find intriguing about history is the way in which it's constantly changing pattern, constantly shifting pattern. It's always been re-written. I went to very bad school and when I went to university I thought that history was a set of
received facts. That was history and you could study it and it was just this set of received facts about what happened. At my first week at university, at my first tutorial with an Oxford academic, I discovered that that's not the case at all. History is a matter of conflicting evidence, it's a matter of argument, discussion, constant re-assessment. This is what I find interesting and exciting about it and also historians always finding new approaches – how to write history, how to do it. Most history should be expressed in terms of discussion of the politics of what was going on. That changed in the next couple of decades to a very exciting innovative kind of social history about analysis of society and the way in which society operated during the centuries. This is the kind of history I've always wanted. Talking about history, because I'm still searching for a way in which to slot history and literature in together, when I look back, at the Oxford teaching - which was extremely good - I now realize there was a sense in which literature didn't come into it at all. I mean, for instance, when we were studying the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution in this country, I don’t remember ever been told to go and read some Dickens. I did read Dickens anyway because I've always been a sort of reading person but the way in which great literature weaves into history is the sense in which it expands history. Well, I think great literature gives the spell that I mentioned to make history of the time. For instance, if we think of Tolstoj's War and Peace I don't think that if you are interested in nineteenth century Russian
society you could possibly not read Tolstoj. Yes, you would read the history as well, you would read the historians but you would have to read Tolstoj too, to have some idea of what that time, that society was like. So, it seems to me that history and literature complement each other. In order to perceive that time and that society with any accuracy you need both.
AL – Have you ever been to Italy?
PL – Yes, many times. I came back early two weeks ago. I was at the borders of Tuscany and Umbria. I was helping some people in this country run a big literary festival. They also run a course. It's a lively place just outside the village called Lepiano, near San Sepolcro. They take this lively eighteenth century villa and they run a two-week-course for people - such a holiday running - for people who want to do some painting or some writing.
I went along too to run a book discussion. People who wanted to rediscuss certain books from four books that I suggested. But I've been many other times.
AL – What relationship do you have with the Italian publishing industry? They've published many of your children's books but not as many of your novels. Do you know why?
PL – Yes, you're quite right. It's rather interesting. Italian publishers do a lot of children's fiction in translation and the explanation of this is in a
sense that there's a stronger tradition of children's literature in Anglo-phone writing, in English or in Scandinavian as well. The Scandinavians have a great tradition of writing for children. As do we and as do the Americans, we have a stronger tradition of writing for children than you do in Italy.
And that's why there's a lot of translation. So yes, a lot of my children's books have been translated but not so many of the adults’ ones. There's has been...
AL – The Photograph, Heat Wave and Moon Tiger of course...
PL – Moon Tiger was a long time ago. I've the feeling that there's something that's coming soon. What is it? Surely something recent... Salani is doing Cleopatra's Sister. I suppose some time next year.
AL – And now? What are you working at?
PL – I've just finished a novel which will come out here next year, called Consequences. It's an unashamedly romantic novel. It's about three love affairs, it's about three generations. A young woman in the 1930s, and then her daughter in the 1960s and then at present day. There are three loves and there's a sort of link that runs all the way through and it's affected by the Second World War, as well. And so it's quite sad and very romantic. So I've just finished that, it's in the course of the production and I've just started a new one. So I haven't retired. Novelists never retire.
AL – The first time I tried to contact you I sent an e-mail. Someone replied to me that you don't write e-mail. What is your relationship with technology?
PL – Well, the reason why I don't have a computer and write no e-mail, is not because of technological idiocy. I have a physical problem. I have spinal arthritis. And it's very painful for me to seat at the screen. I've tried everything, also a laptop but it doesn't work. So I can't use a computer. I work on an old-fashioned electronic typewriter. I type on that sitting on my lap and then when it's finished, when the book is finished, it goes to agency.
I've a mobile phone and I've learned how to use it. Oh, I have to. I have granddaughters. I have teenager granddaughters. And if you have a fifteen- year-old granddaughter you have to know how to use a mobile phone. I'm very proud of myself because I just had the sixth grandchild. Number six was born on Wednesday. I went to see him yesterday and I was able to take photograph of him on the phone and then send it to the other ones, to the teenaged cousins. So I'm very proud of myself.
Occurrences of city in BNC
1. A04 523 This is not true in Philadelphia, where a new city decisively overwhelms the old.
2. K1S 1841 Now the sport the Americans call their summer game…
baseball is beginning to take off in this country… the city of Gloucester has just launched its own team… the Meteors…
3. G15 2182 The city was dropping into its restless slumber.
4. HRL 829 The city glitters like a forme of type,
5. FAV 531 The city is committed to the advancement of modern management systems and performance measurement.
6. FSU 839 In Slovenia and Croatia a serious peasant rising, led by Matija Gubec, threatened the city of Agram (Zagreb) in 1573.
7. J2R 124 The city is growing at the rate of 6,000 people a month, whilst 90% of the state's water supplies are currently used by just 6,000 farmers.
8. FX5 641 poisonous gases in various parts of the city.
9. EBT 1107 Here, every city has its own traditions and makes its own demands.
10. CRC 2045 When that happens, Sarajevo's defenders will hand in their light arms, heavily armed Serb besiegers will withdraw with their weapons –; and tens of thousands of those in the city will bolt.
11. H4A 287 Yes, there is a two tier G Ps service developing in my city and in the shire.
12. CGJ 296 Permission was granted and the vessel sailed for the King George V Docks in that city.
13. JXU 2706 `I'm surprised you didn't set up somewhere in a city'; she went on, tearing her glance from his face.
14. A0K 771 As a uniform constable, my boundaries were very clearly demarcated and my peers in the city centre division set out the parameters of my social reality.
15. A89 489 Then, my eyes were lifted up to the hill which overshadows the old city.
16. A64 1385 In Samara city another hostile faction, the Workers' Opposition, had been very strongly entrenched up to March 1921.
17. BN8 197 It is a commonplace now to acknowledge the difficulties involved in drawing a boundary around the inner city.
18. CAU 1080 There is also an interesting warbirds museum (with attractions like an airworthy Dakota still flying regular pleasure flights) and an excellently stocked pilots' shop (Flight Accessories), all in an idyllic setting south of the city.
19. CES 103 In most city homes the television is now the focal point of the room, many dwellings being built without a grate at all.
20. H89 1975 From all directions people were still pouring out of the maze of the Old City and heading towards one of the three gates of the Jama Masjid –; three seething crocodiles of humanity heading towards the same walled courtyard.
21. HH3 13154 My parents, children of the Depression, had a credit account at the city's major department store which they kept up to date every month.
22. HJW 208 From the Roman Forum, once the city's most important political and social centre, to the Colosseum, perhaps the city's best known monument, to the soaring Baroque dome of St-Peter's and the Vatican city with its superb collection of paintings and sculptures, to the Trevi Fountains and the Spanish steps through to the twentieth century Victor-Emmanuel monument built to commemorate the unity of Italy –;
23. HKT 2306 Cases involving city mayors
24. HY0 345 Thereafter he became abbot of one of the city's suburban monasteries, and then bishop.
25. K7G 59 Now in the bakery at that time it was one of the most progressive bakeries in the city and it must have employed at least about a hundred bakers.
26. KRL 4491 And there are places all over the City.
27. FAD 616 I have elsewhere shown (J. Milroy, 1982b) that the range of variation in (a) is greatly reduced in speakers outside the inner city.
28. HH3 2462 `Comrade'; is still widely used, but people from Western China often say `friend'; and Westernised southerners may use
`miss'; or `waitress'; and in this city we say `teacher'.
29. HWB 595 Hadrian based this on the Temple of Serapis and the Canal of Canopus in the city of that name near Alexandria, where the cult of the god Serapis flourished.
30. J10 4222 They worked outward from the city to a point not far south of the Souk al-Gadira and then returned, thus making two sweeps of the river bank.
31. K3T 944 ECHO chief photographer Stephen Shakeshaft found himself in the middle of a real cat and mouse game right in the heart of the city as he caught up with cartoon characters Tom and Jerry.
32. K51 1837 Duncan Young, area sales manager covering the Ponteland, Hexham and Gosforth offices of General Accident Property Services, has been put in charge of a further two more offices in Newcastle city centre.
33. K5M 3202 The news came four days after Derek Hatton, the 45- year-old former Labour deputy leader of Liverpool city council, was
cleared of charges of conspiring to defraud the council over two car park sites in the city.
34. KS0 39 He stated that the bus companies wanted to reinstate the dual bus lanes, and that these should be extended, and that traffic generally in the city centre should be reduced, and that public transport should be encouraged.
35. KS1 750 The impact of the section has been very broadly based in the city,
36. ASW 684 All this was done by the morning of the I twelfth day; and all that day the people of the Cid were busied in making ready their arms, and in loading beasts with all that they had, so that they left nothing of any price in the whole city of Valencia, save only the empty houses.
37. B29 829 These parks range in character and facilities e.g. the older, 19th century parks form an integral part of Belfast's social history, while the `newer'; less formal parks on the outskirts are virtually pieces of the countryside within the city.
38. CCK 1231 When construction, or rather demolition began, thousands of people had to wend their way through the mud and debris to get from their homes in the south of the city to their work in the north or to the shops and market.
39. ED1 222 Simply visit the office, pick up a guide book, and a walk along this line will take you past every major sight in the city!
40. F9H 1544 And all this on the edge of a great industrial city!
41. FAD 796 It appears to be inner East Belfast (Ballymacarrett) that provides the model for working-class speech in the city (L. Milroy, (1980, 1987); this is represented by the (relatively) fully employed Protestant population of East Belfast.
42. FRJ 1733 Those who did live there all knew Father McGiff and they were able to inform the ignorant that he had been a close friend of the Rabbi ever since the Jews had arrived in the city.
43. HRF 1111 Fortunately he was on form the following week for shooting at White City stadium, in West London.
44. J2Y 676 The governor of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo declared a state of emergency in Cubatao in early July after pollution levels in the city had reached four times the acceptable levels.
45. A7D 1236 Sam and Graeme Fifield-Hall were quite happy living in the city and running a business.
46. BMB 2003 Berlin was always more densely textured than other European capitals, with industry, offices and homes jumbled up together even in the inner city, and, in spite of being a free-market island in a sea of socialism, west Berlin was the country's biggest industrial centre.
47. BNC 1668 She must have, for it was late then, the pubs long closed, and she was still in the city centre.
48. K5H 2908 The plans were prompted by the decision of Sainsbury, the supermarket company, to build a 75,000 sq ft food store on an adjacent site in the city's Craigleith area.
49. CJA 3589 We got an apartment in the city, lots of space and nothing to put in it.
50. G3R 244 The Shah replied" But the troops are in the city."
51. HJ0 23798 A conference is to be held in April 1989 in Mexico City.
52. CBN 2107 `Though they may cheat each other, it is not so bad as in the city.'
53. K5M 2263 Members of the Doyle family had worked for a company operating a fleet of ice-cream vans in the city.
54. ANU 1734 Down the mountainside above the city at dawn on 10 November –; almost 17 months to the day since the civil war had begun –; there filed column after column of Syrian tanks, artillery and troop transporters at least 20 miles of them, clogging the valleys with clouds of blue exhaust fumes.
55. K5A 1343 On that basis they cite staging or importing work of high quality as a key aspect of the first festival, reminding you of the critical acclaim attracted by artists like Michael Clark in the city.
56. B1H 369 The photographs show another example of changing an old, unplanned industrial area, with its derelict factories and waste tips, into a pleasant local recreation area for the people living in a city.
57. FAT 2388 `I shall be going into the city tomorrow.
58. HLD 3121 The Chinese government in May 1990 rescinded the martial law order in Lhasa (imposed in March 1989 following outbreaks of secessionist unrest), although a heavy armed presence remained in the city [ see p. 37454&rsqb.
59. G21 1226 The lack of financial resources affects the quantity of projects which can be undertaken in the city, and with about £2.5 million in their pockets (Glasgow spent around £40 million last year), I asked Lewis Clohossey, organiser at the Dublin European City of Culture office, whether this had been a hindrance.
60. B1N 607 Meanwhile the number of beggars in our city streets increase.
61. AMC 1738 We came to live in the south side of the city, and joined the local parish church which, by coincidence, had been Leslie's mother's church; he himself had not been a member, nor had I attended it.
62. JNF 302 Now a Glasgow inner city area migh may seem light years away from all this but in many ways the need is just as acute.
63. HP2 504 Within six months of the blitz which had devastated the city centre, an exhibition of sketches and plans outlined a redesigned city centre, based on the principle of pedestrian shopping precincts, zoned development and an inner ring road.
64. CMC 119 Orc war machines battered the city's gates and broke its walls, and soon the Waaagh was inside the city itself, burning and destroying while the helpless citizens fled to the hills.
65. A6B 1934 Admired and rejected, the primitive rite is also linked with the city; the isolated last line of the poem's second section summons up the field and its dancing, leading to a juxtaposition with the urban world which follows.
66. EFX 458 This was principally because he had taken up fire- watching duties there, and once or twice a week he would go up on the roof: he would have heard the sound of the aircraft, and the bursts of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns, while all the time scrutinizing the" blacked out" city for the evidence of fires.
67. ASF 409 Every city and village and field will be restored, just as it was.
68. FR0 2290 Her head turned automatically over to the city on the horizon.
69. K1L 2199 Photographer Robert Doisneau has been taking pictures of the city for sixty years.
70. BM9 976 On the night of 2nd April 1916, air-raid warnings sounded throughout Edinburgh, but it was not till five minutes past midnight when a huge explosion shook the city.
71. K5D 625 ANGOLA'S government appeared on the verge of military collapse yesterday as the Unita rebel movement was reported to have captured the country's second most important city.
72. ABF 362 While this is correct, you neglected to mention that Poland occupied the city against Lithuanian wishes, through the actions of the Polish army.
73. CL7 23 In mid-December last year the Foundry opened in an old mill building and the balance has been redressed in favour of the city with the highest density of climbers in the country.
74. HRM 15 Yet notions of country and city form a regular part of people's experience and understandings.
75. K1F 2607 Archaeologists are using radar to survey a city's historical past.
76. H89 1310 The Emperor wanted to raise a city as a memorial to his rule; for, as the contemporary historian Qandhari observed: `A good name for Kings is achieved by means of lofty buildings… that is to say, the standard of the measure of men is assessed by the worth of their buildings.'
77. J39 349 He called on the government to triple the number of existing monitoring stations, to ensure that each town and city with more than 250,000 people was monitored for all known pollutants.
78. CKW 537 Napoli 99 is a private organisation founded in1984 to improve the negative image that the city was acquiring.
79. CAC 326 When he eventually died, Alexander built a city in Bucephalus' honour and died himself shortly afterwards.
80. HWB 888 In Rome alone, it has been estimated that over 340 million gallons a day were needed from the 11 great aqueducts which poured into the city.
81. CBE 803 A spokesman said as much as 70 per cent of the food being airlifted and trucked into the city might be disappearing from the distribution system.
82. K6R 40 When I was about ten years old, a trip to the village from the South end was a bigger thrill than a trip to a big city would be to a present day child, later working in the village as a teenager, the dances every Saturday and Monday night was enjoyment never to be forgot.
83. FBB 1109 was right to say that it was only with the Peloponnesian War that the real migration from country to city took place.
84. ASF 786 For example, when Rome's first sundial was brought to the city from Sicily in 263 BC, during the first Punic war, and was
erected in the Forum it was inaccurate because it indicated the time appropriate to the place whence it came which was more than four degrees to the south.
85. HJD 28 That night, even as Grant's and Springfield's combined troops were mustering in Rockford for their council of war, the Prophet returned to his luxurious city apartment from the final meeting of his latest highly successful and highly profitable crusade.
86. ALH 1269 The bus ground its way through the heavy New York traffic toward the middle of the city.
87. K5A 2843 After 30 years at Coates Crescent, in Edinburgh, the Royal Caledonian Curling Club is to move its headquarters across the city next month to 81 Great King Street.
88. G0S 1783 The train was passing through a part of the city she did not know; it jolted along slowly, so she could not draw.
89. APP 1000 McCann suggests that the idea of having a march through the city centre to commemorate him was inspired by this desire to provoke the authorities; but given the importance of the centenary, it is likely that some kind of parade would have been organised in any case.
90. CE9 1679 Eventually Durham was reached and the long train drew into the ancient city.
91. HLG 750 The Pakistani authorities banned the proposed protest on Feb. 6, and on Feb. 7 deployed 40,000 security personnel along the border and blockaded roads in and out of the Azad Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad; nevertheless, 7,000 JKLF supporters set off from the city on Feb. 11.
92. K5M 10248 The commander of the UN peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, General Philippe Morillon, said he had finally reached agreement with local Muslim authorities to begin evacuating Serb families from the Muslim city of Tuzla in northern Bosnia.
93. GTD 859 (William) Grey (1910-1977), neurologist, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, 19 February 1910, the only child of Karl Walter, a British journalist then working on the Kansas City Star , and his wife Margaret Hardy, an American journalist.
Occurrences of city in City of the Mind.
1. The city, too, bombards him.
2. Through him, the city lives and breathes; it sheds its indifference, its impervious attachment to both then and now, and bears witness 3. The city digests itself, and regurgitates. It melts away, and
rears up once more in another form.
4. A million to one chance, that the city throws two people thus together twice.
5. The city feeds his mind, but in so doing he is manipulated by it, its sights and sounds condition his responses, he is its product and its creature. Neither can do without the other.
6. The city unites and divides, with impartiality, with finality.
7. The chronology of each day may be blurred, but the city is intensified, a cornucopia of incident, of image.
8. The city has fragmented in another sense also; it has split up into a confederation of villages, within which people huddle, sniffing the acrid winds from elsewhere, guessing, hoping, waiting.
9. The city is full of such flukes and oddities.
10. The city mutters still in Anglo-Saxon; it remembers the hills that have become Neasden and Islington and Hendon, the marshy islands of Battersea and Bermondsey.
11. The city becomes tawdry and stagnant, a receptacle for Coke tins and crisp packets.
12. and beyond the window the city roused itself into the distant roar of dawn.
13. And the city too has dissolved and been reformed as cliffs of ice, opalescent gleaming façades among which they drift, watching the birds that wheel and turn in silver flocks against the icebergs.
14. Time and space are illusory, and the city itself absorbs and reflects, so that here and there, at crucial points, it is both the same and different.
15. He stares at them, and past them at Dance's Ionic columns, and the city performs its conjuring trick. It folds in upon itself;
once, twice.
16. The city has switched its mood, gone are the shirtsleeves and the blown summer skirts; the place drips and glistens.
17. Whereas the city itself, of course, is without such constrictions. It streams away into the past; it is now, then, and tomorrow. It is as
anarchic as the eye of a child, without expectation or assumption. It is we who are tethered to circumstance, not the world we inhabit.
18. 'This city,' said Matthew, 'is entirely in the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect. Without you and me it hasn't got a chance.'
19. A cathedral in the ice; a city of the mind.
20. He is also momentarily intrigued by a telephone engineer perched on the edge of a crevasse in the road, hauling out an armful of cables in primary colours, the city's mysterious intestinal life.
21. For her, the city is alternately mysterious and familiar, baffling and instructive.
22. This city is laid out for entertainment; that is its function.
23. The city has many points of view, and many climates.
24. A city is an organic growth and here the profoundly arrogant assumption was being made that you can bulldoze the past, replace it with new constructions and expect the result to be anything other than the semblance of a place.
25. he found himself thinking incessantly of change and flux, of people as pawns, of the city as some uncontrollable organic force.
26. Matthew and Alice pause on the pavement and he thinks of the city flung out all around, invisible and inviolate.
27. We see the city stratified. Decked out according to the times, furnished with costumed figures, with sedan chairs or hansom cabs.
A chronology, a sequence.
28. An extension built onto the house some ten years or so ago jutted out at right angles to Matthew's window, giving him the perfect opportunity, in idle moments, to study in detail the city's system of rebirth.
29. He thought of how the city lifts again and again from its own decay, thrusting up from its own detritus, from the sediment of brick dust, rubble, wood splinters, rusted iron, potsherds, coins and bones.
30. How's the city of the future?
31. He notes the resilience and tenacity of the city, and its indifference.
32. And London, he saw, was turning into a glass city.
33. a pale morning moon hanging above the city,
34. For this is the city, in which everything is simultaneous.
35. And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then.
36. Thus he coasts through the city, his body in one world and his head in many.
37. Well, there hasn't been a fatality on a Docklands site yet, and if and when there is, it won't be the first sacrificial blood shed in this city.
38. They were moving now through one of the city's most turbulent areas of metamorphosis.
39. That time is behind glass, i n n o c e n t a n d i m p r e g n a b l e , a s d i s t a n t a s t h e p r e v i o u s unblemished city, which seems some strange imagined incarnation of today's splintered, pockmarked, cratered, dusty, smoking labyrinth of distress.
40. and was sidetracked by an elegant reissue of the Victorian street map of the city.
41. He went to the window and looked out at the complex grey expanse of this city in which people were engaged in doing unspeakable things to one another.
42. They are entering Docklands, the land of promise, the city of the new decade,
43. It tilts their plastic helmets and induces a sudden surge of elation in these three men, who have seen all this before, but are struck with wonder, lording it over the city, which reaches further than the eye can see, swallowed eventually in haze on this bright spring morning:
44. He thought of the unstoppable force of profit, of wealth flooding down decade by decade, a stream becoming a river, gushing through the city over centuries,
45. The world is turning still, here in the dishevelled stricken city.
46. Matthew slots himself once again into the moving city.
47. The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time.
48. Was a real girl – vanished now into the city, as irretrievably as into a dream.
49. Kingsway is one of the city's frontiers;
50. It is shirt-sleeved, cold drink city summertime.
51. A child of the city, street-wise in every sense, she is an expert on buses.
52. Matthew, in his daily peregrinations of the city, had become a connoisseur of its various forms, from cheap and basic to lavishly ornate.
53. The roof-line made a complicated black silhouette of chimney pots and angles against the ochre-orange city sky, while the buildings themselves were a dark mass brilliantly packed with the squares and rectangles of lit windows.
54. All around, glass was soaring above the old structures of brick and stone, dwarfing them, distorting them so that they swam shrunk and misshapen in the shining surface of the new city.
55. From the chair, on these August evenings, with the curtains undrawn, he can occasionally see the stars, when the miasma of the city permits.
56. City stars are polluted – frailer creatures than the crisp brilliants that pepper country skies.
57. They were passing the florist's stall, a rainbow in the city night.
58. In the following days they set him upon a cart, with his boat, and brought him into the city and paraded him about the streets, 59. Sometimes when I walk about this city I feel that one should
see thousands of mirages
60. And then he is on the bike and launched upon his navigation of the city, picking his way across boundaries,
61. So that when eventually he swings onto the saddle of his bike, and pushes off across the city again, it is raw, chill morning.
62. Matthew, moving about the city in a state of heightened consciousness, is aware as never before of the fallacious nature of space.
63. There is no sequence in the city, no then and now, all is continuous.
Equally, all is both immediate and inaccessible.
64. He moves about the city, doubling back and forth, navigating time and space.
65. On alternate weekends we sample the city, Jane and I;
66. He is, for a few instants, disembodied – aware of himself as subsumed within the crowd, the horde of humanity that has been
sifted through the city, and died, and been reborn. He is both sobered, and uplifted.
67. He considered this, as he picked his way west and north through the city, until the reflection was pushed aside by something else.
68. Rutter moved daily through the same city,
69. And so they ride through the city, father and child, seeing, each, a different place.
70. or as he moved through days and through the city, from Finsbury to Docklands to Covent Garden to Lincoln's Inn.
71. He would turn a corner, and then five minutes later Matthew would meet up with him again, plunging on, hurling himself purposelessly, it seemed, across the city, empty-handed, shouting.
72. an Intercity hurtled past in a blur of red and white, aimed at King's Cross, at the city, at the heart of things.
73. brought from the brick-fields to the north and east of the city.
74. On the far side of the gravel-pit is the skyline of a city, shining towers which rise from the muddy bank in crystal slabs of turquoise, pink and gold.
75. It becomes imperative to visit this city,
76. crossing one of those invisible frontiers which section the city off into areas,
77. The calm perspectives of the terrace, he saw, provide the essentially domestic mood of this city.
78. Get the city lit up with fires, and then come in with the thousand-pounders and the land-mines.
79. And Matthew is filled suddenly with a vision of the city as a place of terrifying haphazard loss and severance, of people circling in search of one another.
80. And Matthew, contemplating the city sky from his chair,
81. Time, like the city, is blown apart, wrenched into a shattered parody of itself.
82. The young man was seen no more, lingering only as an image of disquiet, of unease, of the city's soft underbelly.
83. he joins up with the city and becomes a part of its streaming allusive purpose.
84. The city had him in its current; yesterday withdrew.
85. He sees, too, that the city speaks in tongues: Pizza Ciao, King's Cross Kebab New Raj Mahal Tandoori, Nepalese Brasserie.
86. If the city were to recount its experience, the ensuing babble would be the talk of everytime ad everywhere, of persecution and disaster, of success and misfortune.
87. And was gone – visible briefly stepping away down the street, then blocked by others, cut down to a glimpse of red, until she vanished, swallowed up by the city, quite gone.
88. She is gone. With nothing said, no arrangement made. Whether by accident or design he cannot know. Digested again by the city, which surges around him now, uncaring, pressing about its business.
89. The wave of planes has passed, but the city has flowered in their wake, dappled with fires, echoing with sirens and hooters.
90. He would look about him at the ceaseless performance of the city, millions of people propelling the place forward in a fit of collective absence of mind – buying, selling, building, servicing, while concerned with more important things. Public life fuelled by private passions. The immortality of the whole ensured by the transience of the many.
91. 'And other things. But the point is that you have been digested.
The city has taken you over, in a sense.'
92. Swallowed by the city – gone, vanished as effectively as if they had died.
93. Here is an efficient machine for living which is also a creative element in the design of a city.
B B ib i bl li io og gr ra a p p h h y y
Situation of the studies on Lively's works
There are only two major studies on Lively’s novels and themes. The first is by the American scholar Mary Hurley Moran and it is called Penelope Lively (1993). Moran reviews plots and themes of all Lively’s adult novels up to City of the Mind (1991). It is mainly a descriptive study which lacks a definite critical approach and it is sometimes vitiated by the tendency to read Lively’s personality through the behaviour of her characters. In fact, Moran often defines them as Lively’s spokespersons.
The second is by the German Ebel Kerstin, ‘…something which people can’t do without’: The Concepts of Memory and the Past in the Work of Penelope Lively and Other Contemporary British Writers (2004).
Contrarily to Moran, Ebel writes a kind of opus magnum in which she analyses with great accuracy each work according to theories of time, memory, and history borrowed from several disciplines (mainly psychology, psychiatry and history). Quotations and excerpts from all the novels are mixed up and used to illustrate the different theories.
On the background of these two fundamental works lay other articles and essays published in miscellaneous volumes or journals and reviews.
Two of these studies are by Moran: the first focuses on Moon Tiger (1987) attempting a feminist reading1; the other reads Lively’s most experimental novels – Moon Tiger, City of the Mind (1991), Cleopatra’s Sister (1993) – as evidence of the vital situation of Postwar British Fiction.2
The majority of the articles on Lively centre on her award-winning novel Moon Tiger, such as Kotte’s3, who reads the novel through Levinas’
ethical theory; Montedescoa4, who reflects upon its temporal structure; and Jolly5, who comments on the feminist involvement of the novel.
Only few deal with other novels, among them Hart6, who analyses The Photograph holding that Lively makes an unconventional use of the photograph’s indexicality which confounds instead than confirming people’s assumptions about the past; or Purdy7, who tackles The House in Norham Garden as an example of ethnographic ghost story in which a
1 Moran, Mary Hurley."A Feminist 'History of the World'" in Frontiers, vol. IX, 1990, pp. 89-95.
2 Moran, Mary Hurley. "The Novels of Penelope Lively: A case for the Continuity of the Experimental Impulse in Postwar British Fiction" in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 101-120.
3 Kotte, Christina. “Ethical Encounters with Alterity in Lively’s Moon Tiger” in Kotte, C. Ethical dimensions in British historiographic metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001, pp. 138-177.
4 Montesdeoca Cubas, María del Pino, "La Subversión de la Cronología: Moon Tiger de Penelope Lively" in Brito, Manuel (ed. and introd.) y Oliva, Juan Ignacio (ed. and introd.), Polifonías Textuales: Ensayos in honorem María del Carmen Fernández Leal, La Laguna, RCEI, Spain 2001, pp. 239-241.
5 Jolly, Margaretta. "After Feminism: Pat Barker, Penelope Lively and the Contemporary Novel.
In (pp. 58-82) Davies, Alistair (ed.); Sinfield, Alan (ed.), British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945-1999, Routledge, London, England, 2000.
6 Hart, Janice. “The Girl No One Knew: Photographs, Narratives, and Secrets in Modern Fiction”
in Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 37, 2004, pp. 111-124.
7 Purdy, Anthony."Like People You See in a Dream: Penelope Lively and the Ethnographic Ghost
chronotope-like object (a drum) allows the flowing through and into other times and spaces.
As regards other scholarly works, four unpublished theses have been written in Italy and France.8
Finally, an incredible number of reviews and interviews (see, for instance, Mumford 1988, Coles 1988) do exist. They are not so easily available but Mrs. Lively keeps them all and usually lends them to people who, like me, go to interview her. They chronologically cover her entire production and all the published works. Due to the fact that I have these articles in photocopies, the bibliographical references are sometimes incomplete: dates and page numbers are often missing.
On the whole, the bibliographical material is not so vast, although the bibliography attached to this thesis is remarkably engrossed by studies related to the themes of her novels.
8 1) Reyssat, Bénédicte. “Histoire and mémoire dans l’oeuvre de Penelope Lively” [Thesis].
Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne, 1994.
2) Pillot-Labat, Jocelyne. “Past and present in Penelope Lively’s fiction” [Thesis]. Université de Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, 1990/1991.
3) Panuccio, M. Ilaria. “Moon Tiger di Penelope Lively: l’ordine nel disordine” [Thesis]. Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne, Milano, 1992/1993.
Lively in Italy
Up to date, Lively is still unknown to the majority of the Italian reading public. The first of her books to be published in Italy was her children’s novel The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which was awarded the Carnegie Medal. It was 1988 when Salani issued it.
To the same year belongs the first edition of Moon Tiger by De Agostini, whose title was translated rather well as Una spirale di cenere.
During the 1990s there was the publication of other children’s books:
Astercote, il villaggio scomparso (1998), Il viaggio della QV 66 (1990 and 1998, 5th ed.), Fanny e i mostri (1991 and 1997); Alieni a lieto fine (1992), Debbie e il piccolo Diavolo (1994 and 1998, 3rd ed.), Ombre del passato (1995 and 1999); Un viaggio indimenticabile (1997); La casa del grande giardino (1998, 9th ed.); Tre fantasmi e altri ospiti (Mondadori 1998). They were all published by Mondadori and are now out of catalogue except for Il fantasma di Thomas Kempe, Alieni a lieto fine and Tre fantasmi e altri ospiti.
According to Lively, the reason why Italian publishers translate a lot of children’s fiction is that we do not have a strong national tradition in this field and so we ‘import’ foreign literature. In fact, it is quite surprising that eleven of her children’s book have been published, while only four of her
In 2004 Guanda published La fotografia, which only two years later was reissued by TEA. Moon Tiger was re-printed in 2005 by Guanda under a different title, Incontro in Egitto and in the same year Un’ondata di caldo was published. In spring 2007 the Italian edition of Cleopatra’s Sister should come out.
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1971. The Whispering Knights, Heinemann, London.
1983[1977]. The Road to Lichfield, Penguin, London.
1989[1984]. According to Mark, Perennial Library, New York.
1988[1987]. Moon Tiger, Penguin, London.
1988. The Writer as Reader, Cheltenham Literary Festival, Cheltenham, England, October. Unpublished talk, courtesy of Mrs. Penelope Lively.
1992[1991]. City of the Mind, Penguin, London.
1993. Cleopatra’s Sister, QPD, London.
1996. Heat Wave, Viking, London.
1999[1998]. Spiderweb, Penguin, London.
1995[1994]. Oleander, Jacaranda, Penguin, London.
2004[2003]. The Photograph, Penguin, London.
2005. Making It Up, Penguin Viking, London.
2005. Making It Up. Unpublished talk, courtesy of Mrs.
Penelope Lively.
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A A ck c kn no ow w le l ed d ge g em me en nt ts s
The present work, born during the last year, is the product of an untidy and jerkily activity, which has occupied and preoccupied my life to the utmost. Yet, I would do it again and I would like to thank you my professors for their friendly availability and Mrs. Lively for the great pleasure of meeting and interviewing her. Now that the work is done I realized how many other questions I have for her.
I thought a lot whether writing or not this acknowledgements, and in the end I resolved to do so. I persuaded myself that this could be an occasion not only to thank for all the external contribution but also to record a moment of my life. The moment in which a phase end and another is at the door.
Therefore I want to thank all the people who travelled with me up to this point and I hope – and I know – will continue to be at my side. And with the mind’s eye I can see David, who is a friend only for a few months and yet so important; Cate and Marty, the efficient, affordable and ever present
“council”; Luci, who differently from David has always been near me but only recently really close. And then my family: my grandmother, my
parents and in particular my little sister, who, when I was studying, tried in everyway to test my capacity of concentration.
For better or for worse. For what has been and what is to come: thank you all.
