The 58th in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the December 1993 issue. Nigel Cox interviews Barbara
Anderson, who died this morning, aged 87. She was a wonderful woman and a
wonderful writer of short stories and novels: there was also an autobiography. One of the great pleasures
for me as literary editor of Metro in
the late 80s/early 90s was that I got to publish her. So here is Nigel Cox
interviewing her 20 years ago.
The intro read:
Before becoming a prize-winning writer, Barbara Anderson was a naval wife, which could make readers of her new novel All The Nice Girls wonder if perhaps it mightn’t be a little bit autobiographical. “Well, yes,” she tells Nigel Cox, “there’s that marvellous phrase of Margaret Atwood’s, where she says she likes to know the furniture of what she’s writing about. And certainly I know the furniture of being a naval wife...”NAVAL GAZING
“The bit in the book when the ship comes
home, for example, I can remember that particular feeling when the men have
been away for a long time, the excitement on the wharf, so to that extent, yes
— but none of the characters is based on anyone. You pinch bits here and there,
and make them up.”
Reading Anderson is like being in the
company of a brilliant talker, a phrasemaker. Listening to her you get that
same voice, worldly, wry, precise, amused. She’s that rare thing, a writer who
can talk well about what she does. A particular feature of her conversational
style is the ability instantly to summon comments by other writers, like the
reference to Atwood above.
“I like what Hemingway said,” she says,
“when someone asked him what was the hardest thing about writing he said, ‘finding
the right words’.” When asked if she writes in longhand she says, “Yes. I agree
with that thing Nabokov says — the hand supports the thought.” The sense you
get is that these distillations are part of the furniture in Anderson’s head,
where they guide her and keep her company.
All
The Nice Girls [reviewed on page 32] describes a
culture where women support their husbands by keeping the devil from finding
their hands idle, and Anderson, who’s been a late starter as a writer, seems
to have kept hers full of books and reading. Storing it all up.
She was born in Hawke’s Bay in 1926,
completed a science degree at Otago and, 30 years later, an arts degree at
Victoria. In earlier incarnations she’s been a school teacher and a laboratory
technician, as well as being married to the navy. Now it’s her husband who
supports her by typing her manuscripts up and, she says, acting as her toughest
critic.
One of the other partnerships Barbara
Anderson shares with her husband is the world of sound. She is partially deaf
and he often has to catch a word for her, which is a surprise when you think of
her remarkable ear for dialogue. Her other strength is her marvellous command
of character. So, when she’s at work, is she mainly focused on her people, or
on the language?
“Both, I think. I like to try to create
people who seem rounded, and yet to take pleasure in the words. When I’m
reading I like it when an author can make the words sit up and beg. Janet
Frame, for example, where you get that delight in unexpected phrases. But I
also very much like the way that the Victorian women novelists, and those who
preceded them, give you a fully rounded character that you feel you know.”
She pauses. “I don’t see how you could try
to write unless you read a lot of writers you admire.”
So whom does she admire? Barthelme is a
name that she gives without hesitation, but then the conversation begins, in
the happiest sense of the word, to degenerate
Listening to her, it’s impossible not to wonder whether, now that she’s
got four books under her belt, writing comes as effortlessly as talking about
other writers.
“Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, that’s the sort
of writing I like. That bit in More Die
Of Heartbreak, where Mrs Layamon was talking about how the wedding boutique
had ‘screwed up the dessert sets’, and in that one phrase you get the whole
thing of what the woman’s like — she’s getting married again and her main
interest is in how the dessert sets are screwed up. That juxtaposition of
slanginess and meticulously chosen words, that’s making words work. Wonderful
book.
“But no, it doesn’t get any easier. I think
you become more conscious of the process, so that instead of just writing
you’re sort of watching yourself do it. I do so agree with Virginia Woolf where
she says the most difficult thing about writing is getting your character from
one room to the other. It’s so difficult. What are you going to say — she
hopped, she moved, she crawled? You get sick of it, you just want to tip them
through the wall without having to go into it. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say it
gets any easier.”
This time, she says, she wanted to write
about “authority and acceptance, or the non-acceptance of it. How you can toddle
along your apparently predestined path and then like one of the characters in
the new book, think, as in Rupert Brooke’s poem: ‘Fish say they have their
Stream and Pond/ But is there anything Beyond?/ This life cannot be All, they
swear/ For how unpleasant if it were’.”
She wanted to set the novel in the
“pre-feminist early 60s, a long time ago now, but I hope that people will recognise
the sort of vicarious lives that I think a lot of women used to live in those
days. It’s a smaller canvas than Portrait,
but you get to know the main character quite well, I think, and see her coming
to terms with being a naval wife.
“ I read a thing in the Malaysian Times, oh, years ago, that I
kept, and this woman was saying then, ‘What is femininity, what is masculinity?
Anything that deprives a person of their full development is a bad thing.’ I
mean, I’m all for people living vicariously if that’s what they want to do,
but...”
The stories in her first book, I Think We Should Go Into The Jungle,
saw her being compared with Flaubert, a comparison which was reconsidered in
the Guardian recently as “not seeming
senselessly extravagant... this must be the sharpest collection in English
since Raymond Carver’s Cathedral”.
Her first novel, Girl’s High, had the London Sunday
Times describing her as “a born writer” and, on the strength of Portrait, announcing that “it now seems
only a matter of time before Wellington replaces New York as the literary
capital of the world”. Roll on.
But this admiration has been less readily
forthcoming at home. When Portrait
became the first novel by a woman to win the Wattie (Other Halves was first equal), critic Andrew Mason announced on Sunday Supplement that this was “an extraordinary
decision” which over-praised an “enjoyable but forgettable” novel.
Sue McCauley’s Listener review said, “It may be art but it’s not a square meal”.
Other reviewers were niggardly, and the book wasn’t even shortlisted for last
year’s NZ Book Awards. Why could this be?
“Well, I would be the last to know,
wouldn’t I,” says Anderson. “What they liked in the UK and what the man at
Norton’s in America liked, was what they called the economy, the freshness.
Perhaps we’re more used to that type of writing here.”
Personally I’d be surprised if we’ve had a
surfeit of writing as stylish and engaging as Anderson’s.
It will be interesting to see how All The Nice Girls fares here, as it’s
appearing almost a year before it comes out in England, this time under that
most prestigious of imprints, Jonathan Cape. I suspect that the time when we
will recognise this superb storyteller has arrived.
Victoria University Press remembers her this
way.
UPDATE:
Paula Morris interviews
Barbara for the Listener in 2008.
Damien Wilkins interviews
Barbara for Sport 36: Winter 2008.
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