A S Byatt on The Children’s Book
The impact of writing on families
In The Children's Book you consider whether writing children's books is necessarily good for the children. When did you start to investigate this idea?
I noticed that the children of the great writers for children often came to unhappy ends - even suicide - and this interested me dramatically. Kenneth Grahame's son, for whom The Wind in the Willows was ostensibly written, lay down on a railway line when he was at Oxford. Two of the Llewellyn-Davies boys, for whom Barrie wrote Peter Pan, ended in suicide, one also as an Oxford student (though it may have been a drowning accident), one, in later life, in front of a train at Sloane Square. And Alison Uttley, whose countryside filled my imagination as a very small child, lost both her husband and her only son to suicide. My initial thesis was that the writers wanted to prolong their own childhoods and that the children thus had no place to be themselves. My own character, Olive Wellwood, doesn't, I think, write for those reasons - she had a darker childhood herself, and is, in her way, capable of being grown up.
In researching the book what did you learn about the fairy tales of that period?
In a way, I didn't need to research the fairy tales of the period - they were what I had read as a child. I reread E Nesbit and above all Kipling - as a girl I lived in the Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill, and rereading them I saw how extraordinarily well-written they are. I went to Kipling's house and looked at the landscape and the hills - I think I got much of my feeling for English earth from him. Before I began the book I had been working on Hans Christian Andersen - another perpetual child who didn't like children - and although he's earlier in time, things about him got into the work. I was interested in how forward looking Fabians could also write fairy fantasies and I wrote to Jack Zipes, the great fairytale expert, and asked him if he could see a connection. He replied that the fairy tale was the natural form for hopeful socialists, and put me on to Laurence Housman and Evelyn Sharp. And this was also the great period of the coloured Fairy Books of Andrew Lang. I have always had a wider interest in the fairy tale and the magical, and one of the things I wanted to do was look at the darker German ones, which excite me more than the elegant French ones - the German characters really came into the novel with the fairy tales.
The Children's Book opens in 1895 and pans right through to the end of the First World War. Was this war a period that you had always wanted to tackle or was it unintentional in the sense it followed this era of great children's book writing?
No, the war happened to my novel as an accident - as I think it happened in history. I have never wanted to write a war novel, although my husband has a large library of books about the first world war, and he was able to be very helpful to me. I remember school history classes where we wrote down The Causes of the First World War, in lists, as though there was an inevitable scientific process which inexorably led to the war. The more I read, the more I thought there were no such hard causes - only muddle and the fact that the Kaiser was mad. (The second world war was different.) I found I had a lot of plot and characters before, looking at chronology, I saw where they were all heading. I wondered briefly whether to stop in 1913, or 1914, and then thought the readers would be furious and feel let down not to know what happened to everyone... Then I looked at the statistics of how many were killed.... I was glad I already had the German interest and the German characters - I was reading people like Stefan Zweig, and his (Austrian) account of the total unexpectedness of the outbreak of war is very shocking.
The Children's Book tackles the responsibility of writing and the impact that it might have on family and friends. In your own life, have you been conscious of the impact your writing career has had on your family and friends?
One impact of writing on families is that the writer has to spend long periods alone with a pen, and this time, and this attention, is taken from the family. I knew a writer's family where the children buried the typewriter in the garden. I do try very hard not to "put people into stories." I know at least one suicide and one attempted suicide caused by people having been put into novels. I know writers to whomI don't tell personal things - which is hard, as these writers are always the most interested in what one has to tell. All writing is an exercise of power and special pleading - telling something your own way, in a version that satisfies you. Others must see it differently. As I get older I increasingly understand that the liveliest characters - made up with the most freedom - are combinations of many, many people, real and fictive, alive and dead, known and unknown. I really don't like the idea of "basing" a character on someone, and these days I don't like the idea of going into the mind of the real unknown dead. Oscar Wilde appears in this novel, but the novelist doesn't say what he thinks. I am also afraid of the increasing appearance of "faction" - mixtures of biography and fiction, journalism and invention. It feels like the appropriation of others' lives and privacy. Making other people up, which is a kind of attack on them. Now we have the blog and the facebook everyone is a writer, and everyone's idea of anyone else, kind or cruel, just or unjust, is available on the Web, to be believed, or mocked. Blogs and facebooks too have caused suicides. Writers often realise the power of writing too late.
It's reported that your next book is about a 12th-century monk. Can you tell us a little bit more?
The monk is a short story - a kind of jeu d'esprit about a monk from a silent order who finds himself transported to Tooting Bec in 2009. It is called Silence, and is about the fact that there is no more real silence. My next project is a myth for the Canongate series of myths - it will be Ragnarok, the ancient Scandinavian myth of the end of the world. Beyond that, I'm reading about psychoanalysts and surrealists, separately and together, French, German and English. I'm interested in both psychoanalysis and surrealism, in their early days, as professions for women. And in the way both groups make mad metaphors.
You famously spent the Booker Prize winnings for Possession on a new swimming pool in France. If you won in 2009 with The Children's Book then what would you spend the money on?
The swimming pool has, I think, kept me alive and mobile. I have a dreadful feeling that any new money should be stowed away for care in case of Alzheimer's.What do I want? I want to stay alive and mobile and keep on writing. One small indulgence is buying duplicates of books online, so I don't have to lug them from one place to another. And then I lose them, and buy more. So maybe ingenious space-saving bookshelves.
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(Interview by Sophie Rochester)
