I began by asking about her current writing projects
MM. I’ve started work on a new autobiography, what
my publisher calls an intellectual autobiography, beginning in 1925, when I
first seemed to notice that there was such a thing as an intellectual! It starts where Memories of a Catholic Girlhood ended, more or less, but
it’s really nothing like Memories,
in style or content. I’ve approached the
early part from a different angle and used a lot of new material, especially
new portraits. The impulse to improvise – re-imagining conversations or
re-ordering events for dramatic impact and so on – is nowhere near as strong as
it was for Memories. Maybe the
greater distance of time has made me more particular in some ways, or at least
it’s reduced the urge to follow fictional conventions.
RL. On the topic of writing and recollection, how do
you respond to comments made by some reviewers of your early fiction, that it
was simply thinly disguised autobiography?
MM. In many of those early short stories,
fictionalizing events from my own life was, at least partly, I think, a kind of
distancing device for self-observation, making it easier for me to step back and
study my own feelings, under the camouflage of fiction. Most writers begin by
writing about themselves and, in that sense, I was certainly no exception.
Having said that – and going back to your question - I do so hate that sloppy assumption
which somehow labels The Company She
Keeps as ‘merely’ autobiographical, as though there were just this one-to
one connection between writer and character. I think it shows a lack
imagination, a lack of attention to the writing itself. Actually, it was only
after I’d written my third story that the idea of a heroine for a novel began
to take shape - which, in one sense for me, was really a kind of experiment in
perspective. But anyway, that sort of criticism is all the more irritating because
it overlooks the ideas I was really trying to consider.
RL. Did that include considering Meg Sargent as
somehow typical of her gender and era?
MM. It was never my aim to characterise Meg Sargent as
a woman of her times, though I think any serious writer will automatically reflect
the social values of their age, in one way or another. No, the idea of femininity,
as an identity, or as some sort of restraint or restriction, was not my
concern; neither was I particularly interested in examining ‘gender’. I was far
more interested in describing human affairs,
not just male-female, but the wider network of social ties and influences, in
relation to personal integrity and honesty, for instance, or power and justice.
The idea of surviving a particular kind of domination was obviously a concern in
a story like ‘Ghostly Father, I Confess’ which, as you probably know, had quite
a direct autobiographical source, growing out of period in my life when my
second husband (Edmund Wilson) had convinced me to see a psychiatrist – three
in fact, all very conservative, politically and professionally – in return for
a divorce and custody of my son, Reuel, who was then 4. In fact, it was really
a trick to stop me filing for separation - not a conspiracy as such, but they
all wanted me to go back to the marriage. As things turned out, once I’d
escaped from Wilson, it became perfectly clear that all my so-called
psychological problems were the inventions of the psychiatrists.
RL. In one particular story – ‘The Friend of the
Family’ – you make a clear connection between the decline of a marriage and the
rise of fascism. In drawing this parallel, were you developing the idea of
male-female relationships as political power struggles?
MM. The story was conceived on experimental lines,
in terms of making comparisons between politics and human relationships in
general, not just male/female. I don’t know how anyone could put a feminist
label on that, or on anything else I’ve written for that matter. Feminism is
simply not part of my generation’s way of looking at things - though obviously,
the politics of human affairs has always interested me. And, in that story for
example, it was a natural connection to make, between social behaviour and
political tyranny.
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