Lawrence Norfolk

Lawrence Norfolk may be the most obliging interviewee ever: whilst he is making me a cup of tea in his kitchen in Chiswick and pretty much before I’ve sat down, he has me rapt.  I had been asking him something banal about Chicago, where he used to live when he says, ‘Alan Hollinghurst, who’s a mate, came to visit me there.  He’s an architecture buff and he wanted to go and look at these buildings that were rather odd copies of Oxford and Cambridge colleges erected by the University of Chicago, whose campus takes up most of Hyde Park, on the South Side.  We didn’t realise that this was something people didn’t do, they didn’t just go on a walk round there, it wasn’t safe.  We were walking along this deserted street.  Ahead of us was this line and behind the line was this manicured lawn, with these security guards patrolling.  And this guy fell in step beside me and said [here he adopts a threatening whisper] “Man, your shoes squeak real loud.” The worst thing was that my shoes made no sound.’

This story sums up various things about Norfolk: his intrepidness; his desire to tell a story well and not least, that he calls Alan Hollinghurst a mate.  A certain sheen of celebrity does indeed cling to him and later, he tells me that he couldn’t live in Germany because, whilst he could walk down the street, at any kind of artistic event, ‘I would just have too many people coming up to me.’  I’m slightly baffled: I was twelve when his bestselling novel, Lemprière’s Dictionary, was published and embarrassingly, had no idea that it caused such a stir.  I dumbly ask, ‘Why, because you were so famous?’  Norfolk nods – there is not a trace of false modesty about him.  I’ve certainly never met another writer who is so assured of his own abilities – he wears even his professional insecurities lightly.

He explains how he wrote his first book: ‘I had a great sense of urgency.  It actually worked to the book’s advantage because it gallops off at this great pace with no sense of anything holding it back and then gradually this sort of claw of plot tightens round the whole book.  And the plot works perfectly because I worked it all out but normally now if you do that the book tends to die because everything’s decided from the outset, it’s a bit dead.  You lose something.  But because I didn’t know to do that, it goes off in a kind of organic natural way, it doesn’t feel mechanical but the plot does work so it was the best of both worlds.  But it was high risk and at a certain point I thought I can’t do this, it doesn’t work.  It wasn’t true, though.’

I mumble a kind of cod analysis about this kind of chaos freeing him as a writer and he says, ‘There’s something about propriety and preparedness which is inimical to art, actually. There’s a sense that there should be some risk, there should be something at stake, you should have something to lose.  When people encounter art, they do that to be themselves and they do it in order not to conform, in order to find a part of themselves refracted which is not on display to everyone else. The parts of people which are not conventional, which are not the compromises we make in order to get on with everyone else, the things that you perhaps wouldn’t want other people to know, or there is no particular forum for discussing those particular parts of you even with your closest friends, those are the parts of you that art responds to best.  All good art is intimate.’

‘You choose to write about something which you don’t fully understand.  I think Nabokov was getting at this but he concealed it when he said he wrote Lolita to get rid of it.  But I don’t think that was quite true, I think it was to explore that part of him, to find those parts of him that he wasn’t particularly aware of and then lay them out.  It wasn’t to get rid of it.  That’s just what he said but what he meant was to find these bits of yourself which are not completely known to you.  When you’re writing and it’s going well you can sense that there is something that you are going after and that you are on the right track but you don’t know what it is.  All you can sense is that this is the right direction, I know that I’m going the right way and then you follow that and of course you might be wrong because you can’t see the direction.  Of course you might be wrong but that risk is important.’

I’m surprised by this answer which seems so personal, not least because his fiction seems to be about people who are so different from himself.  Norfolk says ‘Every book I’ve ever written, I’ve begun with the firm conviction that I was writing about a world radically different from this one and about people within it who were not me and were not people I knew.  And every time I’ve been wrong.  There’s been these correspondences in all the books I’ve written to some degree, some more than others.  This latest one I got almost all the way through before I realised that it was autobiographical at a deep level.’

I’m not sure what he means, given that the hero of John Saturnall’s Feast is a seventeenth century kitchen boy.  He explains, ‘I didn’t really understand the significance of the cooking for a long time.  I mean, I cook.  I’m an okay cook, I’m not a great cook but I was fascinated by the cooking.  I’m fascinated by the processes and something behind it.  And what it is of course is that it is a way of talking about art.  It’s an art, cookery, and I was talking about things that I’ve done and things that have happened to me.  It was not a coded way of talking about that but that’s the reality for me that lay beyond it.  But for anyone reading the book, there are these activities that you pursue and you pour into them more care and effort and love than they appear to merit.  Everyone has a set of activities like that, or at least I hope they do, and it’s that part of your life that the cookery speaks to.  The cookery is a metaphor for that.  But when I was writing the book I wasn’t really aware of that at all.’

‘Everyone’s worked in kitchens.  My first paid employment other than a paper round was washing up in a kitchen in Bath and you did it by hand.  It was horrendous and ended one night when the management went home early and left me and my friend to it.  It got to two o’clock and there was still this vast amount of stuff.  We gathered it all up in this huge tablecloth, tied it up and took it to the top of the stairwell of this six storey building and just dropped it. That’s where the washing up in the book came from, that night.’

I ask him about Lucretia, the highly-strung daughter of the lord of Buckland Manor, the estate where John Saturnall works.  She is betrothed to a man she doesn’t love and is on hunger strike.   Norfolk says, ‘Before I actually knew any girls, or really knew them, when I was seven or eight, Lucretia was how I looked at girls.  In my primary school there were only two boys who ever spoke to any girls, this was the early seventies and it was absolutely, sharply gender-divided.  You’d be there absolutely cheek by jowl but you wouldn’t have anything to do with each other.  There were these girls and they were different from me but I didn’t really understand the difference so Lucretia starts from that point.  The process of understanding her – I was concerned that it should be slow, not fast.  There’s no sudden “and with a bound they were cognitively free!”  It’s incremental steps – her and John, they’re both difficult people, more difficult than I wanted them to be for the purpose of the story. 

‘Lucretia starts as a mystery.  John I knew everything about as soon as I started writing him but Lucretia I didn’t know anything about and it took me a long time to get to know her.  Lucretia won’t eat.  I didn’t know how explicit to be about this but, it was sort of hinted at in the sources that the physical invasion that was sort of concomitant on an arranged marriage must have weighed heavily on people’s minds. Literally, a piercing of the body… and the boundary of the body is very important in this book.’

Norfolk tells me he wrote pages about an earlier love interest of John Saturnall’s that he will never use.  ‘What’s not in any book, particularly historical novels, is like the dark matter of the universe.  You can’t measure it, we can’t see it, we don’t know what it is exactly but we know it makes up the mass of about ninety seven per cent of the universe.  Stuff that doesn’t make it into the book is like that and it somehow adds to the heft of the book that is left behind.’

‘I do plot out the back stories of the minor characters.  The mules that carry John down the hill at the beginning of the book… they all had names, different sizes, colours, ages.  As I was planning this, I knew I wouldn’t write it – they would just be a line of mules.  But in my mind, they all had different characteristics and that goes for just about everyone and everything in the book… I can’t write any other way.  I wish I could write more efficiently… Flaubert wrote this letter to Louise Collet.  She had asked him this naïve yet brilliant question, something like “How on earth do you write such novels, Monsieur Flaubert?”  He wrote back, and I’m paraphrasing, that all you have to do is know everything about all of your characters and what they might do and what they have done and everything about the world in which they inhabit and then you just write the story.’ We both start laughing; Norfolk shrugs and says, ‘So thanks very much for that, Gustave!’

I turn my tape recorder off and he signs my copy of John Saturnall’s Feast.  As I leave his house, he shouts ‘Be lucky Alex!’ after me.  I walk back towards Chiswick High Street with Lawrence Norfolk’s merry laughter still ringing in my ears.