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| Interview with Claire Tomalin by Melanie Ashby GRASSHOPPERS are singing in Richmond Park nearby, and sunlight is freckling the walled garden of Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn, the ‘Posh and Becks of literature’, as the pair have been dubbed. Stocks and wallflowers are in full bloom, lining beds that look as if they’ve been established for at least a century, but Claire assures me not. Having built the wall on one side, she spent all winter planting – ‘I can’t tell you how much, I’ve spent every day at it.’ In the midst of the hubbub of the Whitbread – which has made Tomalin as big a literary star as Frayn, whom she beat to the prize – the couple moved house. Then there was the opening of Michael’s play Democracy in September last year, and the death of her 98-year-old father. ‘It’s been an exceptional year,’ but at least, she smiles, the deadline for her next biography, of Thomas Hardy, is ‘long off’. But while Tomalin claims not to have sunk into the routine of work, her investigation into Hardy’s life seems to be in full swing. ‘Increasingly I think with biography, the slower the boil, the better it works,’ she remarks; in Hardy’s case it’s a labour of love that involves reading all his novels, his poetry (a copy of her favourite poem, ‘The Self-Unseeing’, is pinned to her noticeboard), gathering documentary material spanning his 88 years, and trawling through vats of personal reminiscence about the author ‘that aren’t that useful’. She is determined the process won't be the same as it was for Pepys… For the whole interview, read Issue 23 » Subscribe! Go to » Claire Tomalin's Method |
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For more on CLAIRE TOMALIN, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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