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Interview

Helen Simpson

talks to Daneet Steffens

From Issue 35 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2007

Helen Simpson is cat-sitting in Edinburgh. She’s using the opportunity to work on a story, a commission for the William Boyd-edited 50th Jubilee edition of Granta, out early next year. She also has some writing going on the side: With only feline company to entertain her – a large, grey ball of fluff peers balefully through the window at us half-way through the interview – Simpson’s been keeping a cat diary for her friends’ amusement on their return. ‘Yesterday the cat brought a mouse in,’ she says, smiling but matter-of-fact. This is, after all, just nature running its course. ‘The mouse was alive and he had it in his jaws and he just sat under the sofa and growled. Cats love to do that; they like to play. This one’s quite the same.’

The cat-sitting gig, it turns out, is most timely, as Simpson’s daughter has just finished her A-Levels. ‘That’s why I came here,’ she says. ‘I saw the dates and I knew as soon as the exams stop, they’ll all let it rip, that it would be like the last days of the Roman Empire at home.’ She laughs. With her deadline looming, ‘this was perfect: seven days of a place of my own. I’m nearly done with the first draft. I was going to take this afternoon off and reward myself with a visit to the Richard Long exhibition, but’ – wry smile – ‘I’ll be finishing this damn story.’ She’s returning to what’s left of the Roman Empire the next day.

Relaxed and comfy in khakis and a zip-front jumper, Simpson talks warmly for a cosy couple of hours over mugs of ginger tea. After reading her cunning and canny stories, exquisitely poised somewhere between bittersweetness, rage and satire, I fully expected to see a glint of mischief in her eyes, but in fact, under terrifically tousled reddish hair, she’s got a refreshingly open gaze, her nearly-grey eyes soft but direct. Similarly, her voice is pleasantly low, with moments of huskiness that lend an element of gravitas to it. You get the sense that if she detected any bullshit, she’d just turn away, recognising it as a waste of her time. This is someone, you apprehend, who understands the preciousness and limits of time, and guards hers fiercely. But gain her attention, as I was lucky enough to, on that sunny Scottish morning, and you command it completely.

Simpson has perfected the writer’s art of hoarding ideas, events, anecdotes, squirrelling them away, then, when the moment is ripe, drawing from them to turn the shrapnel of everyday life into gems of irony, humour, sadnesses, frustrations and love. Sit down with her for a chat, and she entertains you with stories from her life – catching up with an old tutor in Edinburgh, a family walking holiday in Northumberland, having someone die on a plane a few seats away from her – and you wonder which one she will draw from next to create a barebones-but-complete snapshot of this modern life that fascinates her; she captures it perfectly in her short stories, sans frills, but with kind touches of compassion and forgiveness for our oh-so-human foibles that can, too often, keep us at odds with each other.

‘I liked Restoration drama…it was the first modern note I could hear in the dialogue between the men and women.’

Her tales – collected into Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and Constitutional – utilise a cogent mix of farce, on-the-money timing and even surrealism as she speaks to the realities of working and non-working mothers, kaleidoscoping neatly those moments in relationships that pit men and women against each other in competition, when kids invade the marital bed and new parents find that fatigue comes in ‘concentrated doses, like a series of time bombs….’ Her raw materials are the mundane, the minutiae, the ordinary, the extraordinary of daily life; mothers numbed by sleepless nights and hectic days; humour stemming the struggle to hold together family and home, while attempting to stave off the horrors of ‘suburban purdah,’ night-feeding and episiotomies. You both feel for the characters – and laugh out loud: ‘“How would you like it?”’ one fed-up wife says to her husband, ‘“It’s like a doctor saying, ‘Now we’re just going to snip your scrotum in half, but don’t worry, it mends very well down there, we’ll stitch you up and you’ll be fine.’”’

Her descriptions create unique images – Simpsonisms: A jealous husband invades his wife’s dreams, ‘face like a censorious turnip,’; Baked Alaska, we learn, is ‘a nightmare of a pudding…the Ur-recipe for disaster.’; and a tall, mournful doctor with ‘something of Belgium about him, the lack of life in the streets, the uncurtained windows,’ hung about in my mind for days.

Then there are the moments of optimistic freedom that give succour to her characters: a new driving instructor speaks magical words (‘no point in making this life harder than it is’), allowing a young woman to reach an epiphany – ‘this well-lit moment’ – while achieving and maintaining biting point; a mother relishes the joys of snuffling a child’s warm neck; and an exasperated wife reminds her husband: ‘“It’s about how well you’ve loved and how well you’ve been loved.”’

Simpson’s incredibly straightforward about the amount of time and sheer labour that writing requires. She wryly admits to a routine that ‘lurches from four-hour window to four-hour window,’ and gives the unmissable impression of a grafting, jobbing writer, who has patiently and impatiently woven family and home life together with her work, work that’s of the utmost importance to her. ‘It was very important to me always to earn my own living,’ she says. ‘It was just something that I’ve always seen as completely central. It earns you freedom of speech – other freedoms too – but that’s the important one to me, that I can say what I think. Also, if people want to buy what you’re writing, your voice is being heard. And it’s dignified.’ She nods. ‘You’re standing on your own two feet.’

Born in Bristol, Simpson grew up first in Wealdstone, then near Croydon with two younger siblings, a primary-school-teaching mother and a naval architect father who later taught. She tangibly recalls her earliest reading adventures, from skipping down to the newsagents for comics, to holding onto an armchair for dear life, utterly absorbed by the description of a tornado.

'If you put enough work in before writing, you shouldn’t have to do huge amounts of rewriting – I usually do about five drafts.'

She recalls discovering short fiction with the deceptively pleasurable O Henry: ‘I remember reading his stories and thinking, “Oh, they’re good!” and reading some more and then feeling sick like after too many chocolates. I stopped enjoying them because after a while you realise you don’t really care about anything en route, you’re waiting for the twist, reading for the ending each time.’ Katherine Mansfield provided the remedy: ‘I read her first as a teenager; she’s wonderful. I like seeing something that intense over a short distance.’ With A-Level French she discovered Maupassant. ‘That was terrific,’ she says rapturously, ‘He’s a treat. He wrote the most tremendous, short, dry, hard stories. Some of them had a twist and some didn’t, but they are all complete and perfect.’ She’s always loved the short form, but doesn’t exclude the possibility of eventually attempting a novel because, she says, ‘I don’t think you can explore character in quite the same way in a story.’

At Oxford – where she met her husband – she thrived. ‘I just loved it. We did the canon chronologically from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. And the beauty of Oxford,’ she smiles, ‘was a treat to the eyes after Croydon.’ She stayed on to study Restoration Comedy, seduced by the writers and wit of the 17th Century: ‘I liked Restoration drama because it’s very sharp and it was the first modern note I could hear in the dialogue between the men and women: there’s a lot of scenes where you’ll have a man and a woman talking as equals. I loved the writers’ way with language. They’re very unsentimental, insouciant, very truthful.’

Two years into her research, she famously won a Vogue talent competition – and a job at the magazine – with a made-up autobiography, situated firmly in Wuthering Heights territory (hers, she felt, was far too dull). ‘For the first year I’d be stopped in the corridor by the worried managing editor asking, “Helen, are things alright at home now?”’ – there’s the mischievous glint! – ‘I’d be red-faced, saying, “Mmm, getting a bit better, yes,”’ she laughs, enjoying the silliness of the memory. She finished her post-grad research in the British Library in the evenings, and scribbled short stories in a nearby church at lunch. ‘But,’ she lifts an eyebrow markedly, ‘before family life you have a lot more time and energy, I must say.’

Soon after Vogue published one of her short stories, Simpson suggested a feature by Julian Barnes and had to call his agent, Pat Kavanagh: ‘She said “Oh, you wrote that story! Bloody good!”’ They’ve worked together ever since.

By the mid-80s, after five Vogue years, as her stories were selling and she was commissioned to write a recipe book (The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea is still bringing in royalties), she took the freelancing plunge and has stayed solidly afloat, publishing a collection every five years and expanding her family by two. ‘People do families in different ways,’ she says. ‘I remember reading something about the Canadian airforce: “You can slow down, but you can’t stop.” Well, I didn’t even try to slow down, I just did!’

‘You hope,’ she explains, ‘that whatever you’re interested in in your life at the time – at any point in your life, you’re going to be obsessed with something – will give some sort of unity to a collection. But I don’t do it in advance; I just let them build up like a coral reef.’

She’ll be re-drafting her current story (‘I did a lot of reading on global warming for it’) back home (‘The last days of the Roman Empire must be flagging by now!’), and that, she says, is ‘the nice bit. If you put enough work in before writing, you shouldn’t have to do huge amounts of rewriting – I usually do about five drafts. The second draft is interesting,’ she continues eagerly, ‘because you get to cut, to work out where it sags and where it’s boring, or just work out the rhythm of it. The second and third are still proper hard work,’ – she gets really excited – ‘but then it’s lovely, it’s the polishing bit, it’s the “oh, good!” bit, you know, getting obsessed with each sentence and how it fits. It’s where, as Chekhov said, you ‘rewrite it lacily,’ trimming around until you have something light and beautiful. And then,’ her eyes positively glitter, ‘that’s where you get enjoyable obsessiveness, almost like OCD. You’re sitting there thinking, “That comma....” That ‘Scan’ story [in Granta 98], there was a comma in the last sentence and I was thinking “No. Yes. No. Yes.” I spent a couple of days musing on it, which is sort of mad but it’s very enjoyable too. “Do I want that rhythm or don’t I? But if one does that, this one has this effect....” That’s when you know the thing is nearly done.’

Her next commission is for Radio 4, marking RSC actor Alan Howard’s 70th birthday this year. ‘They haven’t given me a subject, though obviously I’d be nuts to give him a mum in a schoolrun car.’ She laughs. ‘It will be from a male viewpoint, I’d imagine. Apart from that I don’t know what the story will be. I remember seeing him in plays and so I have a memory of sorts of his acting temperament, and the sound of his voice. I’ll look at the ideas I’ve already got and keep him in mind, but then something will just have to emerge.’

Allowing stories to emerge seems to be key to Simpson’s work, both in terms of writing them as well as how she creates her collections: ‘You hope,’ she explains, ‘that whatever you’re interested in in your life at the time – at any point in your life, you’re going to be obsessed with something – will give some sort of unity to a collection. But I don’t do it in advance; I just let them build up like a coral reef.’

Simpson mines many of her treasures from home life and visibly bristles at the ongoing kerfuffles that pin tags like ‘boring’ and ‘women’s lit’ to portrayals of the domestic. ‘What are they on, these people?’ She looks at me incredulously. ‘They’re rubbishing the lives of most women in the world if they say domestic is boring! Look at painters: Matisse painted armchairs and Van Gogh painted boots and all the genre painters with their women pouring jugs of milk – that’s not called trivial. It’s such a stupid criticism, because it is the daily reality of most women in the world, being indoors, in kitchens, with children. And it’s actually very hard to write about because it’s wordless – children don’t speak much for the first few years!’

Among her favourite authors are Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro, and she’s recently read Sylvia Brownrigg’s The Delivery Room, Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom and When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson. ‘That’s really a fully achieved novel.’ She’s excited, smiling. ‘It’s a comedy and I love comic writing and there’s not enough of it.’

In Simpson’s very comic ‘The Festival of the Immortals’ published in The Guardian last year, two seventy-something ladies attend a time-bending literary festival with the likes of Charlotte Brontë, Katherine Mansfield and Thomas Hardy. (Shakespeare arrives by helicopter, Alexander Pope by high-powered sports car; Woolf can’t participate for another five years for copyright reasons). The story nicely elucidates two elements that seem to run through Simpson’s life and work: time and hope. “It’s taken me so long to notice how the world works that I think I should be allowed extra time,” says one woman. Time, for Simpson, is of the essence, and as for any working writer, it often dictates what gets accomplished. (The cat diary, Simpson confesses to me, started off very flowery earlier in the week. ‘But towards the end,’ she grins, ‘it just gets curt: “Rained again; caught mouse.”’)

But raising high the flag of hope that threads like glinting silver through Simpson’s stories, the second woman says: “I’m more than what’s happened to me or where I’ve been….And I’m not dead yet, so I can’t be summed up or sum myself up. Things might change.”

‘I was at a party recently,’ says Simpson, ‘and met an elderly poet who told me, “I’m 76!” So I asked him, “Well, how are you doing?” and he said, “Oh, I got divorced last year!” And I thought, “Nothing stays the same! The most extraordinary things happen.” They do all the time, don’t they?’ She marvels. ‘I thought getting older would be boring, but no! It’s the opposite, isn’t it?’

HELEN SIMPSON started winning story competitions while at Oxford, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993. She lives in London with her husband and their teenaged son and daughter.

My first memory

‘is of a soft thin cream fabric printed with small dark red and yellow flowers with green leaves. I think it was the coverlet on my parents’ bed.’

My first writing

‘was a piece for the Croydon Advertiser when I was seven. My mother got me to enter a competition they were running for children: write about My Pet. I remember her being excited to see it in print, and my own annoyance that they’d changed one of the sentences.’

Thanks to…

‘my agent Pat Kavanagh. She manages to combine complete professionalism with the rare quality of never saying anything she doesn’t mean. Unbeatable.’

The first book that affected me

‘involved a description of a tornado. I can’t remember what the book was (it wasn’t The Wizard of Oz as I’ve not read that), but I was about five or six, sitting in an armchair in my grandmother’s front room. She called for me to come through to the kitchen where she and my mother had got tea ready but I couldn’t move. I knew I had to grip the arms of the chair in case I was pulled up into the air and whirled away.’

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*35 The Simpson Method

• Keep an idea or two in your head. Once you focus on one that you’re going to use, do a lot of reading around the subject, educate yourself
• Get focused on a certain subject and notice how it opens up to you.
• Leave the idea for a bit and let it settle in your head. Allow yourself to think about it without working directly on it. Let it do its own work; let a story take shape based on the research you’ve done.
• Always give yourself time to think over what you’ve read about, what you’ve learned. Mull over what that information will bring to bear on the story, how you want to use it and what you will use.
• Characters have to come out of the story: it’s people reacting to a situation.
• Work through the necessary drafts until you get to the polishing bit. Get obsessed with each sentence, each comma, how they fit, the rhythm they create.
• Pack a few bits of scrap paper when you leave the house, even just for a walk or an errand, so you have a place to write down notes if thoughts come to you.
• Observe unusual things or events that people are riveted by.
• Block out a story. If you have an idea of the word length, lay out sheets of A4 paper so that you can see them in front of you like a canvas, so that you can have some idea of the space you’re allowed to occupy.
• Write longhand. Keep a favourite series of notebooks, and jot down story ideas or overheard phrases at the back.
• A good, brisk walk clears the head and stimulates the writing muse.
• Woolf was right: make sure you’ve got a room – or even a house – of your own, so that you can work away when necessary. House-sit, pet-sit, plant-sit, go on retreat, residency, writing course – or just make sure your family, friends and neighbours respect your closed door
• The world around you is your writing material, whether you are enabling the daily schoolrun or skydiving.
• Think about the shape and the rhythm of the story before you start writing. Try something different, formally, each time. The story ‘Constitutional,’ for instance, was in the shape of a circle, a circular walk and a woven wreath of memory and anticipation.
• Always have your dictionary at your elbow when you’re writing.
• A large part of writing is knowing when to linger and elaborate – and when to keep quiet.
• Scribble a motto onto a Post-it note on the wall by your desk for a while. A current favourite: ‘Faire et se taire’ (Flaubert) which, loosely translated tells me to shut up and get on with it.

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