by Graham Swift
CP: [pause] Maybe.
GS: Did you have the end in mind even as you wrote the narrative?
CP: No. No. I think she grows. She has to make a journey which begins from the periphery of English society. I couldn’t have told this story from the point of view of a man. She was regarded, as most women of that time were regarded, as a ‘child of lesser growth’ when placed alongside her male contemporaries. She was on the margin of English society, and I suspect that one of the reasons I was able to key into her and to listen to what she had to say was the fact that, like her, I also grew up in England feeling very marginalized. She also made a journey to the Caribbean for the purpose of keeping body and soul together, which is a journey I made ten years ago. So in that sense, looking at it coldly now, through the prism of time, I can understand why I would have listened to somebody like her and why she would have entrusted me with her story. And through the process of writing … you are right, I did begin to feel a little warmer towards her. She rose above her racist attitudes.
GS: She became alive in her own right.
CP: Because she was courageous. It may be a small and somewhat unpleasant thing in the context of 1991 to find a woman expressing some warmth and affection for her black maid, but in the early nineteenth century it was remarkable that a woman, and particularly this woman, was able to confess to such emotions. A nineteenth-century man couldn’t have done this. Men have a larger capacity for bullshit and for self-deception, even when they are talking only to themselves. I’m not sure that I would have trusted the narrative of a nineteenth-century man engaged in the slave trade. The only time I read men’s narratives which seem to be lyrical is when the men, nineteenth-century or otherwise, are in prison.
GS: Emily, in a way, is about to be sold into a kind of slavery—her arranged marriage—which gives her a perspective on what she sees. Is that how you saw it?
CP: Yes. I didn’t want to push it too hard, for the two things are obviously only analogous in a minor key. However, an arranged marriage to a widower who possessed three kids and a guaranteed income was a form of bondage. Emily finds the strength, the wit, and the way out of this. I admire her for this. What makes her grow are a series of events which are particularly painful and distressing for her. As I’ve already stated, part of the magic of writing is that you cannot be too judgemental about a character. You have to find some kind of trust, some form of engagement. You attempt to breathe life into these people and if you’re lucky they breathe life into you. You love them with passion; then, at the end of two or three or four years, you abandon them and try and write another book.
GS: You said a moment ago that men could only become lyrical when they are in prison. The second part of Higher Ground actually consists of letters from prison in a very distinct male voice. In that novel generally you seem to depart from your previous work in using strong first-person voices. In Cambridge again there is an emphasis on first-person narratives. Was that a conscious decision or did it just happen?
CP: It was conscious. There are any number of stories to tell. You are populated with the potential for telling stories from now until doomsday; these things are circling around your head. But it seems to me that the real test of a writer’s ability is the degree to which a writer applies him- or herself to the conundrum of form, to the task of imposing a form on these undisciplined stories. I’d written two novels in the form of the third person and somehow I couldn’t address myself again to such a manner of telling a story. It was as though I had to find some way of expanding my repertoire. So the first part of Higher Ground is written in first-person present tense, the second part in a series of letters and the third part is in the third person, but with these rather strange flashbacks. Each segment of the novel demanded a different point of attack. It was a way of breaking out of what was becoming, to me, the straitjacket of the third person. We used to talk about this when you were writing Out of this World. I remember you saying there was an intimacy about the first person which you found attractive. Well, me too. And like you, I’m interested in history, in memory, in time, and in the failure of these three things. It seems to me, at this stage anyhow, that the first person gives me an intimate flexibility which I can’t find in the third person.
GS: Nine-tenths of Cambridge are written in a pastiche of nineteenth-century language. Certainly, the final few pages of it are in your language, the language of the twentieth century. This sense of a language that can talk about certain things suddenly bursting through Emily’s own language in which she can’t, is very volcanic, it’s a brilliant conclusion to a novel … I wonder if we could broaden things out and talk more generally about your writing. In your book of essays, The European Tribe, you say that you knew for certain you wanted to be a writer while sitting by the Pacific in California with the waves lapping around your ankles …
CP: All right, all right! The summer of my second year in college I travelled around America on a bus until my money ran out in California. And I went into this bookshop and bought this book, Native Son by Richard Wright. There weren’t many black people writing in England. So it never occurred to me that writing as a profession was a possibility. But when I was in the States I discovered such people as Jimmy Baldwin and Richard Wright and Toni Morrison.
GS: Do you think it was necessary to go to America to become a writer?
CP: I was slouching towards a writing career. Being in the States shifted me into fifth gear and out of the very slovenly third that I was stuck in.
GS: How old were you when you first went back to St Kitts?
CP: Twenty-two. I’d written a play, Strange Fruit, in 1980, which was done at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. And with the royalties from that, I went back to St Kitts with my mother, who had left in 1958 when she was twenty. It was strange, because I’d grown up without any overbearing sense of curiosity about the Caribbean. My mother hadn’t been back either. She held it in her memory. But when we arrived in St Kitts many of the things she remembered were no longer there: her school had burnt down, people that she knew had died, and someone she dearly wanted me to meet had long since emigrated to America. For her, it was like a ghost town. But for me, it fired my curiosity about myself, about England, about the Caribbean. Naturally, the ‘rediscovery’ confused and confounded me, but that was no bad thing, for, after all, writers are basically just people who are trying to organize their confusion.
GS: Your first two novels were very much about the Caribbean, coming from and going back to. How much was that actually paralleling your life and exorcizing your own feelings about the Caribbean?
CP: My first novel, The Final Passage, was published in 1985. I’d started some five years earlier, on the inter-island ferry between St Kitts and Nevis. I looked back at St Kitts and began to write some sentences down. I wanted to try to tell the story of the journey from the Caribbean to England, which seemed to me to be, in terms of fiction in this country, an untold story. People had written novels and stories about the journey, but not people of my generation. The second novel, A State of Independence, although not autobiographical, followed the emotional contours of my life in that it dealt with the problems of returning to the Caribbean and thinking, they are not sure if I am one of them, and yet feeling that I am not sure if I am one of them either. However, I have certainly not exorcized my feelings about the Caribbean. I have no desire to do so. The reason I write about the Caribbean is that the Caribbean contains both Europe and Africa. The Caribbean is an artificial society created by the massacre of its inhabitants, the Carib and Arawak Indians. It’s where Africa met Europe on somebody else’s soil. The history of the Caribbean is a bloody history. It’s a history which is older than the history of the United States of America. Columbus didn’t arrive in the United States. He arrived in the Caribbean. The Caribbean is Márquez’s territory. He always describes himself as a Caribbean writer. It’s Octavio Paz’s territory. It’s Fuentes’s territory. The Caribbean for many French- and Spanish-speaking writers
has provided more than enough emotional material for a whole career. For me, that juxtaposition of Africa and Europe in the Americas is very important.
GS: But now America has moved into your life. You are living in America now, teaching there. How do you feel about that?
CP: The reason I am living in America is because, like yourself, like many people, business occasionally takes me to the United States. When I’m not there, all I have to do is turn on the TV or open the papers and I’m bombarded with images of America. In other words, over the years I have come to think of myself as somebody who knows America because I have some kind of relationship with it. However, I’m not sure that anybody can seriously claim to ‘know’ a country as large and diverse as the United States. It seemed important, given the opportunity of spending a year or maybe two in the United States, to make a concerted effort to get to know a part of the country more intimately. That’s really why I’m living there. Furthermore, the Caribbean is now, to some extent, culturally, an extension of the Florida Keys, and I really want to understand a bit more about American people rather than simply imagining them all to be characters out of Dallas or a nation whose soul is reflected in the studio audience and guests of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
GS: I’ve one last question and it’s quite a big one. We always have a lot of fun together; whenever we meet we have some laughs. Yet your work doesn’t exactly glow with optimism. You are very hard on your characters; most of your central characters are lost people, they suffer. Pessimism seems to win through. Is that ultimately your view of the world?
CP: I’m always surprised that people think I’m a pessimist. Cambridge is, to some extent, optimistic. Emily grows. OK, she suffers greatly, but she still grows. It’s the price of the ticket, isn’t it? The displacement ticket. Displacement engenders a great deal of suffering, a great deal of confusion, a great deal of soul-searching. It would be hard for me to write a comedy about displacement. But there is courage. Emily has a great amount of courage. As does Cambridge. And in Higher Ground there is faith. I don’t necessarily mean faith with a religious gloss on it. I mean the ability actually to acknowledge the existence of something you believe in, something that helps you to make sense of your life. You are right when you say that the characters are often lost and that they suffer. But I would like to claim that the spirit and tenacity with which my characters fight to try and make sense of their often helplessly fated lives is itself optimistic. Nobody rolls over and dies. If they are to ‘go under’, it is only after a struggle in which they have hopefully won our respect.
In the Bamboo with Caz, 1986.
LOOKING FOR JIŘÍ WOLF
PRAGUE, 1989
In 1989 Europe underwent its most momentous succession of political changes since the end of the Second World War. In early December that year Bill Buford, then the editor of Granta, phoned me to ask if I’d be ready to pack a bag quickly and go to Prague to observe and write about what was happening there. Prague—and Czechoslovakia, as it then was—was in the midst of what was already being called a ‘gentle’ revolution and would later get even more cosily christened ‘the velvet revolution’. In fact, at the time of Bill’s call there was no real basis for believing that it would be such a mild affair, or even a successful revolution at all. I packed a bag and went.
I was almost completely unqualified for this mission, but Bill had a reason for selecting me. He’d heard that on a previous trip to Prague I’d taken an interest in the fate of an imprisoned dissident writer, Jiří Wolf, and he wondered if I might make it the object of my present visit to track him down and speak to him. Perhaps he’d now been released—that is, if he’d survived imprisonment.
I knew nothing about Wolf ’s current circumstances, next to nothing about Prague, and knew hardly anyone there. I thought the chances of my ever finding my man were virtually nil.
The piece was written back in London, in the last days before Christmas, with Bill eager for it to make, with an up-to-the-minute feel, the ‘New Europe’ edition of Granta that would appear in the new year. All the present-tense references that belong to the time of writing have been kept here. It’s the only piece of reportage I’ve done.
Looking for Jiří Wolf
At the beginning of December 1988, I visited Czechoslovakia for the first time. I knew then about the case of Jiří Wolf, though it was not the prime reason for my visit. A month before, I had been in Stockholm, where my publisher, Thomas von Vegesack, is president of the International PEN Writers in Prison Committee. I told him that I had been invited to Czechoslovakia for the publication of a Slovak translation of one of my books, and he reminded me that Jiří Wolf was a prisoner ‘adopted’ by both the Swedish and English Committees. Perhaps I could ask some discreet questions.
I got some information on Wolf from the PEN Committee in London and did indeed ask questions during my visit. I discovered, rapidly enough, that the opportunity to ask questions was limited by the general constraints on talking freely. Also, for most of my visit I was in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, while Wolf was a Czech from Bohemia. I spent just a couple of days in Prague. The fact remains that when I did ask questions, I got the same response: genuine, not simulated, ignorance. No one seemed to have heard of him.
My visit made a strong impression on me, in part because I had read the dossier on Wolf, and some of Wolf ’s own words, just before my departure. Frankly, the country depressed me. I encountered a great deal of individual kindness, above all from my Slovak translator, Igor, a reservedly humorous man and a good friend, but I felt that I was in a land that had gone into internal emigration. It was cut off from its own best resources, and even the things that could be simply admired, like the beautiful buildings of Prague, seemed false and irrelevant.
Much of this may be the standard Western reaction. I felt a mixture of gladness and guilt on returning home and for some while I was haunted by my impressions and in particular—though here I had only imagination to go on—by thoughts of Jiří Wolf. I wrote letters on his behalf. I heard from the British Embassy in Prague that his case had been raised during the Vienna meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, though to no apparent avail. It was only to be hoped that he would at least survive the remainder of his prison sentence, which was due to end during 1989.
I did not know if and when I might return to Czechoslovakia. I certainly felt, from my limited knowledge and from what I had picked up on the spot that, despite Gorbachev, the situation in the country was unlikely to improve. It might even worsen. A typical joke at the time of my first visit ran:
Karel: This perestroika is getting real bad.
Pavel: Yes, soon we Czechoslovaks will have to send tanks into Russia.
But we have all been surprised by the events of the last year. And, almost a year to the day after I had left it, I found myself returning to Prague in the grip of what was variously called, depending on your translator, a ‘smiling’, a ‘gentle’ or a ‘tender’ revolution. My chief purpose, with some five days to achieve it, was to find Jiří Wolf.
Wolf’s case may be as unexceptional as it is awful. His is a history of harassment, imprisonment and maltreatment which has been documented—largely self-documented—and which seized my interest. There are many other documented cases, and time has yet to reveal, if it ever will completely, the extent of undocumented cases. Prisons are often the last sections of society to be touched by political reform and though, as I write, Czechoslovakia has a new government, it would be a mistake to suppose that the country no longer has institutions and personnel accustomed to the regular abuse of human rights.
Wolf was born in 1952. The facts I knew of his life were these. An orphan, he was brought up in state homes. He is of Jewish origin, with no living relative save one half-sister. He married, has a son, but was divorced in 1978. He has worked in the uranium mines at Pribram, also as a driver and stoker. Apart from his writings in and about prison, he has written an autobiographical work, Mrtvá cesta (�
�Dead Journey’) and a novel, Cerné barety (‘Black Berets’). In 1977 he signed the Charter 77 declaration and in 1978 was arrested for possessing ‘anti-State’, ‘anti-Party’ and ‘anti-Socialist’ documents, and subsequently sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for ‘subversion of the Republic’. He was committed to Minkovice prison.
At his trial Wolf complained that he had been forced to admit guilt under physical and psychological pressure, and his sentence was extended by six months for ‘false accusations’. He was transferred from Minkovice to Valdice, a prison of the harshest category and perhaps the most notorious in Czechoslovakia. He was released in 1981. He remained active and was subject to harassment and arrest. In May 1983 he was charged with ‘subversion in collusion with foreign agents’ and ‘divulging official secrets’—for allegedly passing information to the Austrian Embassy about conditions in Minkovice. He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and in 1984 found himself again in Valdice.
Wolf’s prison writings, covering a ten-year period of imprisonment, are grim and harrowing. His ‘regime’ was one of terror, cold, hunger, isolation and deprivation. Prisoners are allowed one visit, of one hour only, and one parcel every ten months, though these minimal rights are often denied. They are exploited as cheap labour. They are denied clothing sent to them. They are subject to indiscriminate beatings, some of which prove fatal, and to medical neglect. They are forced to eat food off the floor, food which is in any case inadequate, as prisoners are known to cut their wrists in order to drink their blood. Or just cut their wrists. In 1988 Wolf was permitted a visit by two American doctors. They found him in poor shape but were not allowed to leave vitamins or medicines for ulcer treatment. Wolf told them he contemplated suicide.
