Rose Tremain

0:06Welcome 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 Rose Tremaine. Having written 17 novels and five collections of short stories over the last 50 years, she's one of Britain's most prolific and popular writers. She was one of only six women on the inaugural 1982 grant a list of best young British novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Sarman Rushdie and others. Her fifth novel, Restoration, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989.

0:44She won the Wet Bread Prize for Music and Silence in 1999 and was awarded the 2008 Orange Prize, the precursor to the Women's Prize for Fiction, for her novel The Road Home. Having already been made a CBE in 2007, she became Dame Rose Tremaine in 2020 for services to writing. Her most recent work is a short story called The Toy Car.

1:09Rose Stramane, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. Your first choice of creative influence for this programme that you've chosen is your father, Keith Thompson. He was a playwright, although from what I gather not a particularly successful one. What did he write about, first of all? I never read his plays because I was deemed too young to read them and he left my family when I was ten. So I've never read his plays, but they were called, I think, At that time, it's sort of drawing room comedies. And playwrights like my father were really wiped off the scene when writers like Arnold Wesker...

1:48John Osborne. ...dated story John Osborne. I mean, he didn't see it coming, bless him, but it did come. Well, the arrival of the angry young men. Yeah, and it was quite right that that happened. It was a sort of old-fashioned format that he was following. But nevertheless, he was a very hard worker, and I grew up for the time that he was in the family. My sister and I were always told, you know, be quiet, Dad's working, and we'd hear the tap, tap, tap of the typewriter. And all my life I've associated that with something good. So it's endeavour. That is a purpose. With an honourable endeavour.

2:24I sort of grew up with the idea that that was a miraculous thing to do and it was only later I understood that it had never really worked out for him. But I think that was a thing that I've carried forward into my whole life, really, that writers who sit in a room all day are doing something admirable, something honourable. That's really fascinating that you don't know what the work was like. You know... I have an awful suspicion that it wasn't marvellously good. Right. And do the plays not exist in print? Or have you not tried to look for them? My relationship with them has been so complicated, John.

2:59I haven't ever gone down that road. They probably do. I don't know, really. Did he talk about literature with you? Did he instill a love of reading? My sister and I used to read girly comics. School friend, I don't think that exists anymore. And he was really amused by those. We were kind of incarcerated in the nursery with a nanny. And he used to come up to the nursery and read comics. And they really amused him. But I don't remember him ever, ever reading stories to me. And I just know how important, I mean, I have a daughter and grandchildren now, reading stories to children is so important.

3:36I don't ever remember either him or my mother doing that. So at the time, even when you were growing up, the relationship with him was quite distant then? I think it just was in those days, you know. I've tried to be forgiving about my parents because they had been through the war. You know, he fought in the war, my father. He wasn't actually wounded, but I think he'd had a fairly terrible time. And I think by the time I was around, And the parents just, they just wanted to have a good time. They wanted to feel free. They wanted to feel that life was returning, that they could go where they want, do what they want.

4:13They had endless affairs with different people. It was almost like a sort of strange sort of musical beds going on, as I learned later. And the children, me and my sister, were just sort of in the way, really. They weren't focused on our needs in any way. They were focused on their own needs. And I think one has to be forgiving of them a bit, given that they'd come out of the war. And your father left the family home when you were, what, 10 years old? I was 10, yeah. And he remarried. Yes. Did you continue to see him? No, that was a huge sadness in my life, actually. I did see him once or twice as I was getting into my 20s.

4:55But he married again. he had four more children and I think as I understood it I think a very happy second marriage but it was a bit of a devastation in my life because I had rather adored him even though at a distance little girls and their dads I mean it happens, doesn't it? It's awful to say at the age of the dynamic that he remains an enigma I mean he represents from the way you describe him almost an absence he wasn't there but a sadness as well still? Yes, I think it was for many years a slightly neurotic sadness. But I really am of the belief that if those things we carry around from childhood, that if you're kind of strong enough in your own life, that there comes a moment where you can say, enough.

5:40You know, I've carried this weight. I've blamed them, if you like, for things that I've done or not done or sufferings that I shouldn't be undergoing. You can endlessly blame the parents. and I came to a moment I think in my 40s where I thought enough that's what happened in your childhood Rose and you've just got to get over it you've got to get over it it still I'm ashamed to say still sort of sometimes comes back as things do that you've experienced very strongly in childhood they come back don't they even you know however old you live they come back well you still obviously feel it very deeply and I'm really intrigued why you've chosen your father as this formative influence given that you didn't see him very much.

6:22He left when you were very young. You don't really know anything about his plays and yet it's what he represents in that room writing. So it's the idea of writing. It's the idea, absolutely the idea. And I think there was a sense as a little girl, I didn't know how I was going to go about doing it, but that that was where I would go. What about your mother? What was your relationship with her like? Well, again, I think she was not centred on the children. there was a rather strange moment because she sent both me and my sister Jo off to boarding school as soon as we were well I was sent at 11 and there was the goodbye moment at Liverpool Street Station she had a great friend called Pam McKenzie whose daughter was my great friend Jane McKenzie and Pam McKenzie and my mother came to see me and Jane off at Liverpool Street Station and kiss, kiss, goodbye, you know, us in our little grey uniforms, not wanting to leave really.

7:25And then I heard them turn around and say, oh, good, now we can get on with life. Like we were in the way it relates to them, feeling that they had come through a lot of suffering and that what they rode now was a period of calm and happiness for them. But they didn't really think about what we needed. Did you feel like an inconvenience at that point, do you think? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think that one of the sort of tragic human dilemmas is that we go on forgiving our parents, don't we? We keep forgiving them, trying to love them, trying to make them love us. And sometimes it really, you have to sort of say, well, this isn't working.

8:08But no, I think when you're that age, when I was 10, 11, I think you just accept what is. And looking back at that time and that lack of parental interest or affection, what do you think that did for your creative imagination at that age? If you're already sort of formulating ideas of creativity, of writing specifically. If you have parental neglect, you feel very lonely. and I discovered quite early on, I think in the sort of first few months at school, that actually writing, going into another world, was a miraculous way of curing loneliness. It was totally absorbing. And these little plays and stories that I wrote when I was at school absorbed me absolutely and utterly and I think were a huge kind of baffle against loneliness.

9:01Because you could create people around you. Other worlds. I mean, it's this other world thing, isn't it?

9:13Was there anybody in particular at school who encouraged that? There nearly always is behind a writer. There's nearly always some lovely forgotten person who doesn't get many mentions. But in my case, it was an English teacher called Ida Robinson, who was referred to as Robbie. There's a wonderful image that I have held all my life of her. She was very thin and she'd been at Oxford. We're talking about the 1950s here. And this wonderful image I have of her was that it was so cold in the school and there was just no money, I think, for heating the classrooms. So in winter she used to teach wearing a fur coat.

9:52It was a slightly ratty coat. It was so cold in those rooms that we used to wear fingerless gloves. This is in rural Hertfordshire, isn't it? Rural Hertfordshire. What was it, an old manor house or something? Yeah, it was a very beautiful Jacobean house, actually, which had been turned into a school and I think is now a golf course. But, yes, Ida Robinson, or Robbie as we called her, I think she understood all of us amazingly well. And she kept saying to me, you know, work on your stories. She was very keen on us doing pictures of the things we wrote. And I think, actually, this sounds like a small thing, but I think it's rather counted with me that being able to see really vividly the people that I'm trying to invent, being able to actually see them, I sort of get the feeling with some writers that they haven't seen their characters well enough and so they're not enabling me to see them.

10:46And I often wonder whether my ability to see characters sort of doesn't come with the idea that all through my childhood I was encouraged to do pictures of what I was writing. What were the academic ambitions at that time? Well, you know, this was a sadness to me because going back to Ida Robinson, Robbie, I think she saw that I was sort of clever and that she wanted for me what she had had. It was quite, even in the, we're talking about the late 50s now, quite rare for, you know, women from those little private schools to get to Oxford. She said, we'll put you on what you call the Oxford path, which would have entailed, obviously, staying on at school, you know, doing A-levels.

11:30She said, I was amazingly happy at Oxford. You will fit in very well there. You will learn so much. You will break away from your parents. So I went home and told my mother, who by then married somebody else, that I would work towards Oxford. And she said, oh, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. She mentioned the word blue-stocking. I don't want a blue stocking for a daughter so she wouldn't be budged on this she took me away from school when I was 16 sent me off to Switzerland finishing school finishing school, can you imagine? and how were you finished there? I made some good friends I made some wonderful friends and I learned French and French became very important in my life actually Well, you don't usually write directly about your life in your fiction, but one of the recurring settings is France and Paris in particular.

12:26And you studied at Sorbonne for a while. How had you got to the Sorbonne in the first place? Well, the place that I'd been sent to by my mother was a little glorified secondary finishing school called Mademoiselle Anita's for girls. but I had a wonderfully kind of anarchic friend who was at the Sorbonne called Miranda and Miranda said to me, oh, this is ridiculous, you shouldn't be there. Why don't you just discharge yourself? So I did this. I marvel at my own daring that I could just do this without telling my parents and I remember this was the autumn term and the minute I got to the Sorbonne, I thought I'm in heaven here, you know, student life and the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

13:16We're talking about 1960. Miranda and I had various lads used to go to jazz clubs and it was just a sort of blur of wonder, really. There was a sort of backdrop hum of Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour and Juliet Greco. I remember, you know, being dark. I thought, I want to look like Juliet Greco. With the eyeliner? Yeah, I've never given up the eyeliner, actually.

13:54Your next choice for this cultural life, Rose Tremaine, is going to the University of East Anglia and meeting the writer Angus Wilson, who taught there. So were you already an admirer of his work? Did you know his work? Yes, I did. His novels are very unfashionable now. They're almost like the way a 19th century novel is constructed. there's huge amounts of description and place setting and huge amounts of sort of throat clearing before the story happens. But I was in the early 60s, 1963, a great admirer of Angus Wilson then, and I read somewhere that he was teaching at the University of East Anglia.

14:32And I thought, you know, having missed the Oxford path, so-called, that I really needed to get to university and start again after the follies of Paris and sort of get myself on a path to work. I was broke, you know, apart from anything else. But my mother actually did pay. There were no fees for students in those days, but she gave me a little allowance which would enable me to be a student at UEA. So she was supporting you in a way, having discouraged your academic ambitions originally. And having gone to the Sorbonne, I presume that was a help in getting to University of East Anglia. Yes, I think it was.

15:11And these were early days at the University of East Anglia. It was very small. But yes, working with Angus Wilson was just wonderful. He was a wonderfully infectious, funny... Very flamboyant, wasn't he? Flamboyant. Wore very colourful clothes. Colourful clothes and bow ties, sometimes chaparelli pink bow ties. But he was a fantastically inspirational teacher. He was teaching the 19th century novel, mainly Dickens, particularly Dostoevsky. He adored crime and punishment. This is a novel which is absolutely deep in my heart from that moment of him bringing it so much alive. There's a terrible moment where one of the impoverished characters, the wife of a minor character called Mrs Marmoladoff, takes her children and she dances for money on the bridge, in the cold, in her rags.

16:00And Angus is reading this. He'd stop the seminar every now and then and read you this passage in his quite high-toned voice. And I can hear him reading this and then weeping. He thought, this is so tragic. This is terrible. This is how sad it gets. So it was sort of an osmosis thing that happened to me with Angus that I actually understood, I think, really deeply for the first time that literature was not sort of something out there that was just being done by other people. It was life. It was a way of talking about life. It was a way of understanding. And you could feel it. You could totally, totally feel it and see it.

16:42And it would do two sort of conflicting things, that it would take you out of your own life into the world of Mrs Marmoladoff. But the experience of reading, it would also inform how your life might change. So it's doing these two wonderful things. And I think I learned that in Angus Wilson's seminars. Was he only teaching about other people's writing or did you show him your writing? I mean, did he encourage you to write? I did. I thought, do I dare to actually, you know, the student who goes cringing up to the tutor? And for a long time I didn't dare. And I think friends said to me, oh, go on.

17:18He may not like it, but you'll get some feedback anyway and he might help you make it better. So I did. And he said, yes, dear. Yes, yes, good. You must keep on with this. And he did an amazingly generous thing when my first novel came out, which was quite a while later. 1976, he wrote a very praising puff on the cover of the novel. You know, he had no need to do this, but perhaps he was the first person who believed in me seriously. And so when I did manage a first novel, he was very pleased in a genuine way. This was your first novel, Sadler's Birthday, which was published in 1976. 76, yes. I've got a note of the cover blurb.

18:04He says Sadler's Birthday is as far from the stereotype of a young woman's first novel as it can be. What did he mean by that, do you think? I think what he meant is that I wasn't writing about my own life and this is how my career has gone on. It's taking lots of diverse subjects and most of them quite outside my experience. Sadler's Birthday is about a servant in a big country house who inherits the estate and then can't cope with all of the expectations and the responsibilities. Jack Sadler woke up in what had once been the Colonel's room. Now, like the rest of the big house, it was his. They'd had a wing each, the Colonel and his wife Madge.

18:46They'd like to meet at mealtimes in the dining room, listen to the news together, or play a game of gin rummy. But several doors divided them while they slept. Everything he could see from this window belonged to him. You're in his head all the time, And I think that's what impressed Angus. So he encouraged you at UEA to start writing. And the creative writing course then is now extremely famous for producing great writers. And people like Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are among the alumni. But in a way then, you were the precursor. You were the first student to be taught creative writing there in a way, weren't you?

19:24Well, yes. He's on record as saying that actually it was in response to the work that I'd shown him that he thought this was a good idea. He'd done a couple of semesters at Iowa in America where they were ahead of us in thinking that creative writing was something that could be taught. As you know, you can teach musicians, you can teach actors, and he was always thought, well, you can't teach writers, which indeed is true, but you can teach them to be better. I think he understood by the time I left that this might work in this country. And, of course, he was lucky enough to get Ian as his first student.

19:56There was no formal seminar room. I think they used to meet in the Maid's Head in Norwich. And then Ish, Kazuyo Shifuguro, he was the first one in a class. And the programme took off from there and then Mark and Bradbury joined it. And then you taught there later. You did some creative writing teaching there. Yes. And I think you've sort of answered the question already, but I was going to ask about that idea of whether creative writing can be taught or whether it's innate talent and then you draw that out from your student. I think that's right. I really do. You can't make a writer. from scratch?

20:30It's such a complicated question that isn't it because one of the things is that writer has got to want to be made I mean I taught there for 8 years so I had a lot of different kinds, types and quality of student there including some marvellous ones like Andrew Villa and Tracy Chevalier and some who were just never going to do it but I think that is right, it's not precisely teaching. The nearest I can get is that you become a really deeply thoughtful editor. Editors aren't always thoughtful, but you become one of the deeply thoughtful kind who really will spend the time delving into what this work is doing and how it could be better and where the weaknesses are and where the strengths are and what the strengths are.

21:21And is that what Angus Wilson had done for you? Yeah, very much so. So if he was the first person really to take you seriously as a writer and encourage that, and you were starting to take yourself seriously as a writer, did you ever send your father any of that work? Yeah, yeah. But it was really difficult. He couldn't respond to it.

21:46Couldn't or wouldn't? I don't know. I don't know. He just wouldn't, I think. I don't know. I mean, maybe he saw me actually starting to make a little headway in a career that had been so disappointing to him. I guess for any father-daughter, that's difficult. I mean, I do understand that. But no, he couldn't really get with it, which was sad. I mean, as I said to you, children go on wanting to please their parents. I went on sending in the books, and then eventually I didn't send them anymore. What did I hope for? I mean, what did I hope for? I don't know. Fatherly pride? Yeah. He was never going to give that.

22:36Never. Never. Do you think he was jealous?

22:44Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I can't say what he felt. Something strong, I think. But what it was, I don't know.

23:03Your next choice, Rose Tremaine, is reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, which you say directly influenced your bookish shortlisted 1989 novel, Restoration. Were you already planning a novel set in England in the reign of Charles II when you read the diaries? Yes, I was. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher. What I thought I wanted to write was a novel about materialism in our contemporary world from the kind of hippie socialism of my time in Paris that we'd manoeuvred ourselves into a position where everybody was kind of furious about making money and buying property. And, you know, it was a great sort of materialistic age.

23:44And I thought, that's what I want to write about. And then I understood a thing, which is that novels are very slow to write. and even slower to publish. So by the time you believe you've caught a sort of zeitgeist at the moment, the zeitgeist is long gone. And then I thought, I wonder if I looked around history for a moment where things change in a sort of in a clap of thunder like they changed, it seemed to me, when Thatcher came in. And I found the restoration of Charles II where, you know, all the previous years had been the interregnum and the emphasis on hard work, on duty, no show, no bling, everything kind of dark, severe, hard work, dedication, patriotism, all those things.

24:33And then when the king comes back, it's like everything kind of explodes. There's a great sort of clap of laughter. And back comes the theatre, back come the palaces. I also read that one of the things that King Charles II did was to select promising suitors for the various mistresses that he had at the time and pay them money or indeed give them estates, as happens to my man, Robert Merrivel. Which is your central premise of the story. The protagonist of Restoration, an invented character, Robert Merrivel. He's a kind of a bit of a self-deluded buffoon in a way, isn't he? Trying to extend he's a physician but arrives at court promising to, who is charged with curing the king's dog, has got some ailment, and he succeeds in doing that and gets the king's favour.

25:20Is there much of Pepys, Samuel Pepys himself, in the creation of Merrillville, do you think? Huge, absolutely huge. The Pepys diaries, I mean, they're wonderful as a kind of an absolute wraparound of what that age was like. January 23rd. To the king's house, and there saw the humorous lieutenant, A silly play, I think. Here, in a box above, we spied Mrs Pierce, and Nip took us all in and brought to us Nell Gwynne, a most pretty woman, who acted the great part Celia today, very fine, and did it pretty well. Because he's so honest in the diaries, there are many, many moments where he's sort of endeavouring to be serious, and he finds his thoughts wandering.

26:03I mean, like, he's in church, and he's not paying attention to the sermon because he's thinking about the decorations to his dining room. and the fact that he tells his diary about all his failings and his foibles and his lusts and his ambitions and his disappointments and his exceeding love of the king, which he knows is sort of vaguely inappropriate, but the Stuart King's not to be trusted. Yes, I think I could not have written Restoration without a great immersion in the Pepys diaries. I am, I discover, a very untidy man. Look at me. Without my peri-wig I am an affront to neatness. My hair, what is left of it, is the colour of sand and wiry as hog's bristles.