Maggie O'Farrell

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0:28Hello and welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the author Maggie O 'Farrell. She's written nine novels, including Hamnet, her hugely acclaimed story of the death of Shakespeare's son. The book became a bestseller and won the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. The theme of mortality recurs through so much of Maggie O 'Farrell's fiction, from her debut After You'd Gone, which won the Betty Trask Prize in 2001, to her most recent novel The Marriage Portrait, which is set in 16th century Tuscany.

1:07Her 2010 book The Hand That First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award. Maggie O 'Farrell also wrote a memoir in 2017 called I Am, I Am, I Am, 17 Brushes with Death. Maggie O 'Farrell, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much for having me. You were born in Northern Ireland, spent part of your childhood in Wales and Scotland. You've lived in England. You now call Edinburgh your home. But when people say, where are you from, what do you answer? It's usually a long and rambling answer, encompassing all those geographical locations. I don't really have an answer. I think if I was going to locate a kind of geo location, my blue dot would be somewhere in the sea between Ireland and Britain.

1:53The Irish Sea. Yes, exactly. I don't know. Is there an overriding national identity within you? I mean, my passport was Irish, but I think anyone who grows up in a place where they weren't born, or if your accent doesn't match your passport, you have an identity that has a schism in it, and that's always going to be the way. I think I've accepted that now. And geolocate your earliest years. Where did you spend your primary school years, for instance? My primary school years, it was in South Wales, and I was there, my whole primary school, and the first two years of comprehensive school were in South Wales in a town called Bridgend.

2:27And what about cultural upbringing at home, artistic influences? Was it a literary household? No, not particularly. My dad taught economics and my mum had been a history and geography teacher. They were big readers. My mum's always been a big reader. We had a lot of books in the house and we used to go. I was lucky, very lucky actually, in that the town I grew up in South Wales had a Carnegie library and we used to go every week. and we'd have one of those really beautiful kind of soft cardboard, Dewey Decimal System library card. There was always this kind of fascinating ritual that you'd get stamped and then you'd have a piece of cardboard be taken in and one be put out and they were in these very beautiful sort of oak, very long, deep drawers.

3:09I can still even now sum up the smell of the floor polish because it had these beautiful herringbone parquet flooring. Big Victorian building. Huge Victorian building with a massive lift that fascinated me, which I never went in, but it was one of those cage lifts that went up the centre of the staircase, and I always really wanted to have a go in it, but I never did. But a big reader from a young age, though. Yeah, I was. Also, the Welsh education was very canted towards the arts. You know, we were expected to learn poems off by heart. We would recite them in English and in Welsh. Every morning began at school with quite a long period of singing hymns from a huge hymn sheet, and the teachers would play the piano.

3:50It's kind of expected in Wales. Yeah, that's just what you did. And you did a lot of drawing, a lot of music. The education board funded amazing amounts of music lessons for us. And we had school-like Stethfords every year, in which we were all expected to perform and sing and sing in a choir and recite. So it was very much a living part of my early education.

4:15On This Cultural Life, Maggie O 'Farrell, my guests choose the most significant influences and experiences, the people, places or cultural works that inspired their own creativity. And your first choice is the Finnish artist Tuve Janssen, the creator of the Moomin series of books. Before we hear about your introduction to those books, just describe the Moomin world for those who don't know it. So Tuve Janssen was a Swedish speaking Finn. And the things she's most famous for are her series of books for children, which are about this family called the Moomins and they look a little bit like hippopotamuses but they are fantastical creatures They're trolls aren't they?

4:54Yeah they're called Moomin trolls but it's a particular kind of troll, it's not a troll per se and it's very much about a family and the Moomin Papa, Moomin Mama and the Moomin and they live in a valley and they have an awful lot of adventures and when I was young and reading them living in industrial South Wales it seemed like the most fantastical universe. They'd go on boating trips, they'd have picnics under pine trees, Moomintroll and his friends had this incredible liberty to wander through these valleys. And when I finally went to Finland, when I was early 30s, I would say, when you go to Finland and you go to the Finnish archipelago, you realise that it's not fantasy, it's real.

5:35That's just what the Finnish countryside looks like. So did you go there on a Tuve Janssen pilgrimage? I did. I have loved Toby Jansen since I was eight years old when I read Moominland Midwinter for the first time. Who introduced you to those books? Well, I was very ill as a child and I was in bed and somebody, and I don't remember who, and I wish I knew, brought me a book. I was given lots of books actually by very nice well-wishers. But this one I remember opening very late at night in hospital and it opens with a scene of hibernation. so Moomins hibernate over winter. But Moomintroll wakes up for no reason in the middle of winter.

6:14All his family are completely asleep and the whole of Moomin Valley is filled with snow and ice, which he has never seen before. And he's frightened, of course, because he's alone and everything that's familiar looks different. What's this white stuff? It's so cold. It's snow. Yes, I've heard all about this from Mama, and it's called Snow. It's very quiet. The whole world has died. It belongs to someone else now. I need to find someone awake. Someone to talk to. He's lonely and frightened, and I just remember so clearly reading that. It was like being doused in cold water, the shock of it. I thought, what is this?

7:09What world is this? Who are these people? What's going to happen now? And when I look back at it as an adult, it seems like a perfect metaphor for actually what I was going through. I was alone in hospital. I was in an isolation room. We should explain you had encephalitis as a child. I had viral encephalitis and I was in an isolation room in intensive care and it was nighttime. My family were far away. And obviously it's like a metaphor for a child who's ill because you find yourself in this peculiar world where everything is different. It completely resonated with you. Yeah, it completely resonated with you.

7:41And I never forgot it. Even now, in fact, I have them in my original 1980s copies. I still have them. So I keep them and I do look at them still quite a lot. And I remember it's the immediacy of her language and her world and also her compassion. The creatures in Moom and Troll, they're more human than humans in some ways. They love each other. They fight with each other. they argue, they're kind and I think actually Moomin Mama is my absolute role model as a parent quite often I find myself thinking well what would Moomin Mama do and it's always the answer I also have on the door of my study in the house I have a picture of Töve Jansson and she is swimming in the Finnish archipelago I suspect she's naked, you can't see and she's wearing a flower crown and she's got this incredible beaming smile on her face swimming in this freezing ocean and I think as I go in and out of my study I think I've got to live like Turba she understood in a way that was very unique to her the absolute gift of the life of an artist and how unbelievably lucky we are if we get to earn a living by what we create and how we need to live it to the full because I think she did.

8:57Did you first start reading the Moomin series when you were in hospital or were you already a fan? That was the first time I ever opened one of her books. And this was an illness, the encephalitis came on very suddenly, and it was very, very serious. And you've written about this experience. It was absolutely horrific. How aware were you at the time of the severity of the illness? Well, I knew that something was very wrong. Because, you know, one day on a, I think it was a summer holidays, I worked with a really, really bad headache, a headache like I'd never had before. And within a few days, I was losing motor control.

9:31I wasn't able to hold cutlery or a glass and then I suddenly couldn't walk. And at that point I was taken very quickly into hospital in Cardiff and intensive care. So I knew that something was wrong, but I hadn't really... And I think also as a child, people don't necessarily explain it to you. You know, there was a lot of taking my parents out into the corridor and talking to them there. And you don't really expect to be explained to when you're a child. But I did find out I was lying in bed and I had a nurse with me 24 hours a day and I heard another child making a noise in the corridor and a nurse told the child to be quiet because there was a little girl dying in that room.

10:08And my first thought was, how awful to be dying as that poor girl. And then I thought, oh, OK, they mean me. And actually my first thought was, I felt a bit foolish because I thought, well, actually, of course it's me. Why did I not realise? You know, that's what all this means, this room and this nurse. and I felt slightly embarrassed because I thought, I can't believe I didn't realise that. Embarrassed rather than terrified? I just thought, why did I not know that? You know, why did I not realise? Interestingly, there is a scene in your book, The Distance Between Us, in which a girl overhears somebody saying, there's a child dying there.

10:45Yes, I think that was the most... So you just took that experience. I did. I think, actually, I mean, I don't really think of myself as an autobiographical writer, but every now and again there is something which will inevitably filter through. I think fiction is an interesting palimpsest always of things that you make up and things that you borrow and also things that you just transcribe from your own life. I was reading The Hand That First Held Mine and there is a description there of a childbirth, a caesarean section, which goes wrong, which that again was something that you have written about as personal experience.

11:18Yes, that's what happened to me with my first child, my son, in 2003. Looking back now, I think I and my husband actually were in shock for several years after that. I don't think kind of PTSD was sort of part of a discussion or a wider discussion at that time. And I look back at the person I was in 2003 and I think she needed some help. You know, she really should have gone to talk to somebody, but I didn't at the time. So have you put it in the books as a way of coping, do you think? I think I probably did. I mean, I wrote about it in fiction first. and then I think, you know, I think all books in a sense lead to the next book in a way.

11:53One comes out of the other. There's a kind of interesting thread of DNA that goes through them all and sometimes you need to write. I obviously needed to fictionalise it and give it to somebody else first before I could actually own up and say actually it was me. I think that's what writers of fiction do. You take things and you, maybe things that are indigestible to you at the time and a way of explaining it to yourself in a way is giving it to someone else. You look at it from a different angle. You missed a couple of years of school whilst you were recovering from the encephalitis. How long in that hospital bed did you spend?

12:29I was in hospital in and out for a couple of months and then I was at home recuperating. So the Moomins resonated with you during that illness. Has there been a longer legacy and impact of the writing of Tuva Janssen on your own fiction, do you think? I think so what Janssen is very good at doing is getting the reader immediately into the scene I remember being amazed that she started a chapter or maybe even a book with dialogue somebody says something and I remember being surprised because I thought there's no once upon a time here there's no one day there's no so-and-so got up in the morning and you just plunged straight in you were straight in obviously a very basic level I was thinking well what difference does that make why is that good why does that work why is that exciting and she also doesn't explain too much.

13:15She never ever talks down. She expects children of quite a young age to completely keep up and be immersed in this entirely fantastical, magical land. That's what you do with your novels as well, isn't it? I mean, so many of them start with a situation. It's not explained. We dive straight in and there's usually some kind of conundrum or a mystery or a problem which is then unravelled. I suppose what I would say I learnt from her is that you should never, ever underestimate your reader. Readers know that if you're talking down to them or over-explaining, you've got to know that they can join the dots.

13:50When did you first start writing your own fiction as a child, if you did? I did. I was always... I don't know where it came from, but it's just always been there. And I remember saying to my mum, when I was quite young and I really want to write a poem, but I don't know how to, will you write it for me? And she said to me, but if I wrote it, it would be mine, not yours. And I remember being amazed that the idea of authorship and ownership was a revelation. And it was a good answer because it spurred me on to doing something myself.

14:23Your next choice for this cultural life is the poet Michael Donaghy, an Irish-American writer who lived here in the UK and who taught at City University where you attended his poetry classes. Why have you chosen Michael Donaghy as a major influence? I joined his poetry classes when I was 22 or 23. I thought I wanted to be a poet at that time. And he just was the most astonishing teacher. I think mostly because he was so passionate about poetry and the reading of poetry and the enjoyment of it and the writing of it. But the classes always began not with the writing but with reading. And he had the most astonishing photographic memory of hundreds of poems.

15:07and his eyes would move from left to right as if he was reading it in the air. It was quite fascinating. I've never seen anyone able to do that as well as he could. In his very kind of gentle and charming way, he would give us very strict rules for writing. One of the things he used to say all the time was quoting William Carlos Williams, which was, no ideas but in things. He had a passionate hatred of abstract language. It had to be concrete, it had to be tangible, it had to be a thing. and he would talk about the rule of three, how if you're going to use adjectives, it's better to use three than one.

15:42It worked out better that way. And even now, I still think about advice that he gave us then. And one of the things that he said, which I still think about today, was that if you are going to write, it's necessary to build scaffolding around what you are constructing. So in the middle of your scaffolding, you put together your building and he said at the end, you have to remember to take the scaffolding down, which so many people don't remember to do. It was a more aligned idea of rigour, I think, that he introduced me to personally, as well as the kind of absolute relish of a language. The idea that you draft and you redraft and you redraft and you keep going until all your scaffolding is gone.

16:19Oh, I see. So it's about stripping back. The scaffolding is... Yeah, it's about stripping back and the idea that every single word has to pull its weight and also the idea that you keep working at it. you don't just write a poem in a fit of inspiration. That's just the very, very first step. The many, many steps after that are working it and reworking it, pulling it to pieces, putting it back together again. And do you still apply that advice when you're writing your fiction then? Yes, absolutely. I'm a huge redrafter. The first draft that I write of any book, nobody sees that. And there's something really special about writing that first draft.

16:56It's very exciting because you are finding out what the book is and you're getting to know the people and you're just working in a bubble, you know that no one else is going to see it. But at the end of it, I look at that as raw material, like a sculptor might look at a block of clay. I think the novel's in there somewhere. Now the real work begins. And give us a sense of Michael Donoghue's character as well. You say he was charming. He was very charming. He was very funny and he had a great appetite for life, I think. He was a musician as well, wasn't he? Yes, that's right. He played traditional Irish music on the baran and the flute.

17:29He actually taught me to play the Buran once in a pub. This was in a pub after the session. All of us used to go to the pub afterwards. This is the Irish hand drum. Yes, that's right. He taught me how to do that. Yeah, he was an amazing force of life and it was just devastating when he died so young. He died at 50 years old, didn't he? That's right, yeah. Was it a brain hemorrhage? Yeah, that's correct. So it was very sudden, totally out of the blue. So he was a great teacher for you. I presume also you were a big fan of his poetry. Yes. One of my best memories of being in his classroom is when he said to us, I've written a new poem, would you like to hear it?

18:00And we all said, obviously, he said yes, yes. And he recited from memory his dramatic monologue, Black Ice and Rain, which is about a love triangle, actually, and the narrator talks about how he's in love with this girl and he realises she's with someone else. And the other man dies in a car accident of Black Ice and Rain. Inside, each crucifix and candle shone, transfigured in her chrysalis of grief. she spoke about the crash how she'd been driving how they had to cut her from the wreck and then she slipped and called me by his name even now actually I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising because it's an astonishing poem with such power and that he read it to us and it hadn't even been published no one I don't think had seen it there was just absolute silence in the room and even now when I read it I can still hear his Boston Irish voice reciting it.

18:56But it seemed an amazing gift to his students to do that for us, to share his work with us. He must have died before you were published, didn't he? I'm not sure. I think he disapproved that I'd gone into fiction. I'd gone into prose. No, he was, I think he was very nice about it, but he said, you know, you should stick to poetry. So he really thought you should have pursued it. Did he think you had the makings of a poet then? I don't think he ever would have said that to any of us. I think he was just always encouraging. He was very low key, I think, with his praise, which was good. So if you did get a tiny morsel of praise, you knew it.

19:28It meant an awful lot. Your novel, The Marriage Portrait, which is set in 16th century Florence and Ferrara, was initially inspired by the Robert Browning poem, My Last Duchess. So when did you first read that poem? I first read that poem at university. When I came to it, I knew nothing about it which I'm really glad I didn't because it was like reading a thriller you know and I remember reading that line and all smiles stopped together full stop I remember skating my eyes skating onto the next line and thinking hang on a second and then going back and thinking oh my god she's dead well you better just explain the scenario for those people who don't know my last duchess is about it's set in the voice of an Italian duke and he is showing a visitor around his art collection and he pulls back a curtain and says I'm going to show you something very special now this is a painting of my last duchess my previous wife he's also I should mention talking to a family of the representative of the woman he now next hopes to marry and he shows the visitor this very beautiful portrait look isn't she beautiful isn't she wonderful and then he says actually I found her a bit annoying and so I had some words and then all smiles stopped together Bam, full stop.

20:40But I remember when I read it, I thought, he's killed her. And I was really shocked. It was like watching a thriller and suddenly, you know, Norman Bates' knife comes through the curtain. It was that kind of shock. And then he goes on to kind of justify it. The great line at the end, though, is when he says, no, wait a minute, let's go down together, because obviously the man's running away, as you would if you were about to marry your relative to this terrible man. But what's fascinating about it is the absolute assurance of the Duke that he did the right thing. Of course he killed her, because, you know, she smiled too much at other people.

21:13Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene 'er I passed her. But who passed without much the same smile? This grew. I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands, as if alive. Did the lightbulb go off in your head at that moment and think there's possibly a story in that. No, not at all. I just remember loving it. So at what point did that idea then become the novel? It was a long time later and I loved it. I loved all his dramatic monologues and I often reread Robert Browning's dramatic monologues. When I'm between novels, there's a certain stage right at the end when I'm just finishing a novel when I find that my head is too full in a sense.

21:59So I often read a lot of poetry then. And I do try and learn poetry by heart as a homage to Michael Donicky. Not as well as he did, of course. So I was rereading his dramatic monologues and I just remember thinking one day, I wonder if it was based on real people. And so I looked them up and within a minute or two I had this portrait by Angelo Bronzino of this young, young girl. She looks anxious. She looks quite worried. And she looks, to me, crucially, as if she has something she wants to say. This was her just before she died. It was commissioned by her parents just before she began her wedded life in Ferrara, her very short wedded life.

22:39Her husband is sitting down, not in his customary place at the opposite end, but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder should she wish. He is unfolding his napkin and straightening a knife and moving the candle towards them both when it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass has been put in front of her eyes or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her. I think it's really interesting the way you talk about the scaffolding of language and the choice of words and you've spoken and written in the past about having a stammer and employing verbal strategies to deal with it Poetry of course is all about choosing the right words and putting them in the right order Do you make any kind of link between your stammer and your choice of becoming a writer?

23:25Yes, I think definitely I don't think I would be a writer unless I had been a stammerer So I got stammer in childhood and really very profound stammer. There was a long time when I couldn't really speak with any kind of fluency at all. Was that linked to the illness? I don't remember. And I seem to remember it was before. And I even asked my parents and they couldn't remember either. And certainly I think there is a link definitely between a kind of the neurological damage, which I have very mildly, obviously, because things like I can't read out a phone number in sequence. There's a kind of I don't know my left, my right.

23:55But what we don't know is whether I didn't I didn't ever know it or whether it just came afterwards. but I do remember when I was a child I had the kind of classic repeated syllable all the time and I remember for a while when I was young thinking maybe no one else can hear that maybe it's just me and then of course somebody at school made fun of me and I thought oh okay no other people can't hear it and then when I was this adolescent because obviously you know adolescence is so agonizing anyway least of all when if you sound strange when you speak so I just kind of clamped down on it and I didn't really I it was more a kind of blockage that I had them so I never really used to answer questions in class never put my hand up because I couldn't and the thing that I found really heartbreaking was that I wasn't able to in English lessons which were always my favorite if we were reading I don't know say Macbeth and everybody got a part to read I could never say oh please can I read which was frustrating but I think the main reason I think well I think there are two things actually related to the writing is that the first one that it's hard to overestimate the absolute joy of writing, the physical act.

24:59As a stammerer, you look down at your hand and your hand is forming these loops and crosses and dashes of words and there's nothing to stop you. The words are flowing unimpeded. It seems like magic. There's nothing to stop you. But also, if you are, say, a child who has a problem speaking, there are always going to be problem sounds. Any stammerer has a kind of collection of problem sounds and you always know that you can't launch off or begin a sentence with these sounds. One of mine was M, which is problematic when your name is Maggie. So if people asked me what my name was, I couldn't say Maggie.

25:31I'd have to say something like, you can call me Maggie. I'd have to launch off with another sound. So you are performing, as a stammering child, this semantic gymnastics inside your head all the time. In any conversation, you're thinking ahead and you're editing yourself and re-editing yourself and rewriting within the blink of an eye. so you're already a writer inside your head. What does it do for the vocabulary? It must make it even bigger. Yes, because you have to come up with four or five synonyms to say one thing which you know is going to be difficult for you to say. You know, you flip a clause or you understand the elasticity of language, I think, probably more astutely than other people do.

26:11There's no hint of a stammer now when you're talking. Well, thank you. But I don't think you ever not have a stammer. You're always a recovered stammer. And I know that it's there. I do stammer sometimes. Something like making a telephone call is very helpful. I still get my husband to make things like dental appointments for me. Just because if I'm on the telephone and I can't see the other person and they suddenly ask me something I'm not expecting, then I might suddenly, my speech will close up. And there's always that fear that it will happen. And there's nothing worse. And do you still write poetry for yourself?