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this is why somedays i think maybe i'm just not cut out for this country:
INTERVIEWER
Your first job was with the Manchester Guardian. What was it like?
MICHAEL FRAYN
It was wonderful, because the Guardian was a very informal place: They used to take two graduates a year, one from Oxford and one from Cambridge—we are going back to elitist times. They didn't give you any training, you just started writing. If you could do it you stayed, and if you couldn't you were chucked out. Of course you began by doing small jobs around the office, but very soon you were sent out to do what they called “color pieces”—usually a personal essay about some Northern folkway, the last hand-loom weaver in Bolton, or the last lock maker in Westhoughton. One of their favorite subjects was sheepdog trials. A friend of mine, Dick West, was sent out to cover his seventeenth sheepdog trial and he had the idea of writing it from the standpoint of the sheep. The Guardian took exception to it; they thought that all that they held most dear was being mocked, and they sacked him, or tried to. But he ignored the letter of dismissal and, the Guardian being the Guardian, nobody liked to raise the subject again.
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Michael Frayn
The Art of Theater XV
Interviewed by Shusha Guppy
Issue 168
Winter, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Issue
Interviews
Andrea Barrett
Michael Frayn
Poetry
Eliza Griswold
Daniel Lewis
Daniel Tobin
Charles Harper Webb
Mark Wunderlich
From the Archives
Interviews
Iris Murdoch
Patrick O'Brian
Features
Malcolm Lowry
Poetry
Adam Kirsch
Tom McKinley Ball
John Ashbery
Miles Becker
Sidney Wade
NOW AVAILABLE
LIMITED EDITION
PARIS REVIEW PRINT BY
HELEN FRANKENTHALER
Click for details.
Michael Frayn works in an office around the corner from his house in north London. It is an apartment on a modern block, light and airy. His quiet study overlooks a communal park, an old canal that has been drained and planted with trees and shrubs. It is sparsely furnished, with a huge desk, a couple of armchairs, and some bookshelves. Opposite the desk on a low shelf is a row of bronze statuettes, the prizes he has won for several of his plays—the Olivier, the Evening Standard, the Tony. Frayn and his wife, the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin, have just bought a large house by the river near Richmond, where there is enough room for both to have offices at home.
Frayn grew up in south London. His father, who was deaf, worked as an asbestos salesman and his mother was a violinist who gave up a promising professional future to supplement the family income as a shop assistant. She died when Frayn was twelve, and that early loss has left a deep scar that shows up in touches of bittersweet wistfulness, even in his most hilarious comedies. He was educated at Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge, where he read French and Russian and philosophy, and began to write. His first piece for the theater was a sketch for the student revue Footlights. After university he worked as a journalist at the Manchester Guardian and the Observer, then left for full-time writing.
Over the years Frayn has produced an oeuvre as substantial as it is varied—from Noises Off, one of the funniest English farces, to Copenhagen, a worldwide hit about the meeting in 1941 between two giants of atomic physics; through a dozen plays, among them Alphabetical Order, Make and Break, and Benefactors; and as many novels, including The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, and Headlong; a collection of philosophical aphorisms, Constructions; selections of his journalism, and translations of Chekhov's major plays. Frayn's deep intelligence, comic genius, and humane values have made him one of Britain's best-loved authors. Despite a certain aloofness, he is warm, generous, and always of impeccable courtesy.
INTERVIEWER
There are authors who go on mining the same terrain book after book, while every work of yours is a new departure. Take the recent novels: Headlong is based on the discovery of a Brueghel painting that has been missing for centuries and contains a good deal of research and art history, while A Landing on the Sun is almost a spy thriller, and The Trick of It is about the nature of creativity and writing. In between you write plays, which are equally varied. Do you deliberately set out to surprise and be new every time?
MICHAEL FRAYN
Let me say for a start that I don't think it is a very good idea to write different sorts of things. If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say: "Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it. It takes some time, but if you do it often enough, finally people will get the hang of it, and get familiar with it, and they'll like it. Then you go on producing a consistent product and you'll have a market for it." Because the consumer of books or plays, including myself, very reasonably wants to know or have some idea in advance what the book or the play is going to be like. It is the same as buying breakfast cereal: If you buy a packet of cornflakes, you want to be sure it will contain cornflakes and not muesli. It is very irritating if the packet doesn't contain what you expected it to contain. Similarly it is a reasonable demand from the theatergoer or novel reader that he should get a constant product, which is identified by the author's brand name.
If I could have done this, I would have. But I don't have much control over what I produce. All I can do is to write the stories that come to me. And what a story is, is in part the way of telling it. A story is not an event in the outside world—it consists in the telling. It is only when you think that you have found a way of telling the story that you can start writing it. Different stories naturally suggest different ways of telling them. If I had been better organized as a writer, I would have gone beyond the stories' dictates and imposed my own central imprint on everything.
INTERVIEWER
But everything does bear your imprint. It's the form that changes.
FRAYN
That is like saying that a criminal commits different sorts of crimes—sometimes he does bank robberies, sometimes he murders people, sometimes he forges pension books—but on all of them he leaves the same fingerprints. He can't help it. I don't think there is anything deeper in it than that. That is what consistency is—you have these intellectual fingerprints, and you can't help leaving them on things.
INTERVIEWER
You once said that you started writing novels because your first attempt at theater, a revue for Footlights at Cambridge, was a complete flop. Then you went back to writing for the theater when you lost your voice as novelist, and now you alternate between the two. What dictates the form?
FRAYN
First of all, I don't think it is strange to be both novelist and playwright. I wonder why others don't do both. I think the great difference is that in a novel it is possible for the writer to be inside the head of at least one of the characters. He doesn't have to be, but if you think of most of the novels you've read, the author has known what all the characters' thoughts and feelings and intentions were. If you read: "She felt bitter resentment about what he had said"; "He intended to set off for Birmingham, but he changed his mind"; "She realized that he had not understood what she had said, " et cetera—all these things seem absolutely natural, you don't even notice that is the way most novels are written. In fact it is quite odd, because it implies that the author has absolute knowledge of what's going on inside the head of his characters. Sometimes the author chooses not to exercise that right, and sometimes he exercises it in the case of one or two characters but not all. But it is the natural mode for the storyteller to know what's happening inside his characters' heads.
By contrast, in the play it is impossible to indicate directly what is going on inside people's heads. All we know when we watch a play is what the characters are saying and what they are doing. Of course characters can say: "I'm thinking so and so," or "I'm feeling such and such," but this is not the same as knowing directly. You have to trust that the character is speaking truthfully, that he can understand himself—because characters often don't.
Now, some stories require that you know what people are thinking, and some stories require that you don't. In Copenhagen the whole point of the play is trying to find out what Heisenberg was thinking, and what his intentions were, in going to Copenhagen to see Niels Bohr. If I tried to write it as a novel the whole story would be told in one paragraph. I'd say: "Heisenberg decided to go to Copenhagen in 1941 in order to talk to Niels Bohr about such and such, because he hoped that Bohr would say so and so . . . " But I wanted to look at the difficulty of knowing that exists in life. So it seemed natural to be outside Heisenberg's head and have to work out what was going on inside it.
INTERVIEWER
When you got the story, did you know at once it would be a play rather than a novel?
FRAYN
Yes. Because that was what it was about—the difficulty of understanding people's intentions, even one's own intentions.
INTERVIEWER
So it is the story that chooses the form, not you, the author?
FRAYN
Absolutely. In Headlong, for instance, it seemed that we needed to know all the time what Martin Clay—the art historian protagonist—was thinking and feeling, because a lot of the story depends on his misunderstanding the situation, and misunderstanding his own feelings and intentions. We need to know what he thinks he is up to, then stand back as readers to say: “Hold on! He is not being honest with himself here. His motives are much more mixed than he is saying.”
INTERVIEWER
How do the stories come to you? Headlong, for example.
FRAYN
Well, the stories come in different ways. I can't remember exactly where most of them came from, I can only remember them growing in my head. But I can recall the precise moment when I thought of the idea of Headlong. I was in Vienna with Claire, and we had gone to visit Georg Eisler, a painter friend who was ill in hospital, and also to see an exhibition of his work. He was too ill to see us for long and we had time on our hands, and of course we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I had often been there before, and every time I go I look at the Brueghels—they have about a third of the world's extant Brueghels.
As always I spent a long time gazing at The Hunters in the Snow, which I think is one of the most wonderful paintings in the world. Then I looked at the picture next to it, The Return of the Herd, and then the next one after that, The Gloomy Day, and for some reason I read the sign on the wall. Now, I'd never read the sign on the wall in all the years that I had been to the museum and looked at those pictures, never read what it actually said, which is: “These three pictures are part of a series of six that Brueghel painted to illustrate the seasons; three are in Vienna, one is in Prague, one is in the Metropolitan in New York, and one is missing.” Even as I read the sign I thought: Well, if you thought you'd found the missing picture, what would you do? It would present a lot of difficulties, because plainly it wouldn't be identified as Brueghel or it wouldn't be missing, and it wouldn't be in a museum, some art historian would have looked at it and identified it. So it would have to be in a place where art historians don't much go, probably belonging to somebody who didn't know what it was, and the difficulty would arise as to what you would say to the owner. Would you simply say: “I think you've got the missing Brueghel on the wall there”? What if you thought that the owner was an unscrupulous man in desperate need of money, who would certainly sell the picture to the highest bidder? The highest bidder is unlikely to be the National Gallery in London, because it doesn't have any money. So it is quite likely that the buyer would be an investment trust, which buys the picture purely as investment, does not put it on display but locks it up in some vault, and no one would ever see it. So you might say you have a public duty for altruistic reasons to be a little devious, and to acquire the picture first, and then identify it as the missing Brueghel. But of course if you do that, you also make your reputation as an art historian, as well as lots of money. So you have mixed motives, and mixed motives are always interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Do you invent your characters as you go along? Or is the cast all there when you begin?
FRAYN
They come into your head slowly. When I start I like to know in advance where the story is going, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the story before I begin writing it. Some writers claim that they start not knowing where the story is going to go. Muriel Spark says that she starts with nothing in her head except the title. This is very dramatic—and she has very good titles. One of my predecessors as a reporter at the Manchester Guardian was Howard Spring, not remembered now but an immensely successful popular novelist in his day. Well, he says in his memoirs that his book, called Shabby Tiger, began simply with the first sentence: “The woman flamed along the road like a macaw.” So he wrote it down, and then other sentences followed and so on to the end of the novel. I can't work like that. I do have to know where I think the story is going to go. However, then complications arise. It is like an industrialist setting up a new industry: He has this idea for a wonderful new product he wants to produce and it's going to be of great value to the world, and all he has to do is build a factory, take on the staff and things will be fine. Then as soon as he starts to build the building, and as soon as he starts taking on the staff, problems arise: They make difficulties, they bring in the union, and so on. As soon as you involve other people in your schemes you get into difficulties. It's like that with the characters. It sounds a bit whimsical but it does feel like that; as soon as characters come into the story, they begin to take on a life of their own, and they don't always want to work the plot that you've so laboriously provided for them. It irritates me that they are so ungrateful! One has given them life, existence, and they won't fall in with one's plans. And just as in life the factory owner has to negotiate with the striker, and say, Alright I'll pay you more if you do this or change your practices on that, so you have to negotiate with your characters, go along with some of their ideas hoping that they'll go along with some of yours. And the whole story begins to change.
INTERVIEWER
Your latest novel, Spies, is about two children during the war who get entangled in the complicated world of adults. It is the only one of your works that has a whiff of autobiography about it. How did that story come about?
FRAYN
I find it difficult to remember when it started. I had been thinking about that part of my childhood for twenty-five years, thinking about the way children see the world, the way they see it through the stories they tell about it, the stories they've heard about it. This is true of adults too—we all make sense of the world by seeing it in terms of the stories we've heard. It is easier for us adults to see this happening in children, because they're distanced from us. I thought about it in this way and in that way and couldn't see how to do it. And then one day about fifteen years ago we were staying in the south of France and we went for a walk in the woods around Vence. I remembered that I had a great friend when I was a child who was a very dominant personality. He was the leader in all the games we played. If we were playing cowboys and Indians, he was the chief cowboy, and if we were playing something with policemen he was the chief constable. It was fair, because he always invented the games, he had the imagination and I didn't have any imagination at all as a child. So he was always thinking up new fantasies that we became part of, and he took the leading role. As I thought about this I remembered that at some point—and this would be in the middle of the Second World War—he said to me out of the blue, "My mother is a German spy." I didn't say, "I don't believe you, I don't think she is a German spy, have you got any evidence for it?" I thought it was an exciting idea, and I believe we followed her around for a couple of hours; she didn't try to break into an ammunition factory or get in touch with the German High Command though, so we got bored and gave up. Now, walking in the woods above Vence, I thought: What if we had been persistent and had followed her around for a couple of weeks, what would we have made of her life? If we, as children, had seriously looked at an adult's life, what would we have understood of it? Well, we would probably have seen it in terms of the stories we were familiar with, the stories we invented and acted out, and sooner or later we would have discovered some anomaly. Although she was charming and straightforward, an honest and honorable member of the community, I imagine there would have been some anomalies in her life, because everybody has some anomalies in their lives, not criminal activities but things that don't quite fit in with the rest of their personality and that normally we pass over in silence. So that was the point of departure for Spies. After that it was all fiction.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing?
FRAYN
Some of the earliest things I wrote were for my own puppet theater. I needed some material for the puppets to perform. I can't remember anything about them now—I don't believe any great masterpieces have been lost. When I was a child I read children's stories. I passionately enjoyed Arthur Ransome and the Just William stories. It wasn't until I was fifteen or sixteen that I began to read serious literature, but then it was above all poetry, particularly the Romantics, Shelley and Keats. I was passionate about Shelley, I suppose because of his radicalism. I still think Shelley is an underestimated poet. I wrote reams of poetry myself, devoid of any virtues whatsoever. I didn't consciously give up poetry, I just gradually wrote more and more prose.
INTERVIEWER
Who else did you read who might have been influential?
FRAYN
Goethe as soon as my German was good enough. Vanity Fair, Thomas Love Peacock, Evelyn Waugh, of course, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green. As soon as my French was good enough, Mauriac, Gide, Sartre—particularly Les Chemins de la liberté, Malraux—and a wonderful romantic novel of Provençal life which probably isn't considered by anyone now, but which had a great and lasting effect on me: Henri Bosco's Le Mas théotime. The obvious classics I didn't get round to until later, when I was a student, insofar as I ever read them at all, and my Russian wasn't good enough to read anything in Russian until then.
INTERVIEWER
You started studying French and Russian at Cambridge, but after a year switched to philosophy. Why?
FRAYN
I learned French at school and Russian in the army. I switched to philosophy because the language course consisted of a lot of academic work and a certain amount of literature. I enjoyed the language course very much but I was baffled by the literature, didn't have the faintest idea how to answer literary questions. In part two of the tripos it was all literature, and I couldn't face the prospect of spending two years writing essays about literary topics.
INTERVIEWER
This was in the mid-fifties. What was the philosophy course like then at Cambridge? Was it not dominated by Wittgenstein?
FRAYN
Absolutely. He died in 1951 and I arrived in 1954, but he had been a professor at Cambridge. He was one of the world's greatest philosophers but he was also a terrible human being, an appalling bully, who terrified everyone on the faculty, in the way that some scholars do. Almost everyone was in awe of him. I was passionately interested in Wittgenstein, and I had the great good fortune to be taught in my last year by almost the only person who was not. He was a young New Zealander called Jonathan Bennett, who had just arrived and who, at that stage, had no interest in Wittgenstein at all and resisted all his ideas. Jonathan Bennett loved arguing. He would not accept anything I said about Wittgenstein and I had to argue every step of the way. It was exhausting but a very good way of learning philosophy.
INTERVIEWER
Were you very radical in your youth?
FRAYN
Oh yes! I described myself as a communist.
INTERVIEWER
When did you stop being a communist?
FRAYN
Oh, very quickly. By the time I left school. If I had any lingering sympathies for the Soviet Union they vanished in 1956, when I and four friends at Cambridge who all spoke Russian organized an unofficial exchange with the Soviet Union, and that was an eye-opener.
INTERVIEWER
Let's move on to the beginning of your career, as a budding reporter. You once told me that any good writer should have a stint as a journalist. Chekhov thought it was a dreadful profession. Evelyn Waugh, too, said that journalism is inimical to creative writing. By contrast Graham Greene needed reporting for his novels. Can you say why you recommend journalism?
FRAYN
I always wanted to be a journalist, from the age of eight onwards. Wanting to be a journalist was the public expression of wanting to be a writer. But I did also want to be a journalist for its own sake. I had a girlfriend at Cambridge and I told her that my ambition was to be the editor of the Observer at thirty. That was a misunderstanding of the nature of the newspaper industry. I didn't realize that the Observer was owned by its editor, David Astor, and that to be the editor of the Observer you had to be very rich. I also misunderstood the nature of my own talents—I could never be an editor. But journalism is like everything else; there is good journalism and bad journalism. Trying to describe what is in front of your eyes, trying to understand a real situation, is very difficult and very demanding, and when it is done well it is just as important and good as any fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Who were the journalists you particularly admired?
FRAYN
I suppose when I was young I idolized reporters who were cool. At Cambridge being cool, being relaxed, being detached and apparently undisturbed by the world was the admired attitude.
INTERVIEWER
Your first job was with the Manchester Guardian. What was it like?
FRAYN
It was wonderful, because the Guardian was a very informal place: They used to take two graduates a year, one from Oxford and one from Cambridge—we are going back to elitist times. They didn't give you any training, you just started writing. If you could do it you stayed, and if you couldn't you were chucked out. Of course you began by doing small jobs around the office, but very soon you were sent out to do what they called “color pieces”—usually a personal essay about some Northern folkway, the last hand-loom weaver in Bolton, or the last lock maker in Westhoughton. One of their favorite subjects was sheepdog trials. A friend of mine, Dick West, was sent out to cover his seventeenth sheepdog trial and he had the idea of writing it from the standpoint of the sheep. The Guardian took exception to it; they thought that all that they held most dear was being mocked, and they sacked him, or tried to. But he ignored the letter of dismissal and, the Guardian being the Guardian, nobody liked to raise the subject again.
<a href="
Michael Frayn
The Art of Theater XV
Interviewed by Shusha Guppy
Issue 168
Winter, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Issue
Interviews
Andrea Barrett
Michael Frayn
Poetry
Eliza Griswold
Daniel Lewis
Daniel Tobin
Charles Harper Webb
Mark Wunderlich
From the Archives
Interviews
Iris Murdoch
Patrick O'Brian
Features
Malcolm Lowry
Poetry
Adam Kirsch
Tom McKinley Ball
John Ashbery
Miles Becker
Sidney Wade
NOW AVAILABLE
LIMITED EDITION
PARIS REVIEW PRINT BY
HELEN FRANKENTHALER
Click for details.
Michael Frayn works in an office around the corner from his house in north London. It is an apartment on a modern block, light and airy. His quiet study overlooks a communal park, an old canal that has been drained and planted with trees and shrubs. It is sparsely furnished, with a huge desk, a couple of armchairs, and some bookshelves. Opposite the desk on a low shelf is a row of bronze statuettes, the prizes he has won for several of his plays—the Olivier, the Evening Standard, the Tony. Frayn and his wife, the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin, have just bought a large house by the river near Richmond, where there is enough room for both to have offices at home.
Frayn grew up in south London. His father, who was deaf, worked as an asbestos salesman and his mother was a violinist who gave up a promising professional future to supplement the family income as a shop assistant. She died when Frayn was twelve, and that early loss has left a deep scar that shows up in touches of bittersweet wistfulness, even in his most hilarious comedies. He was educated at Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge, where he read French and Russian and philosophy, and began to write. His first piece for the theater was a sketch for the student revue Footlights. After university he worked as a journalist at the Manchester Guardian and the Observer, then left for full-time writing.
Over the years Frayn has produced an oeuvre as substantial as it is varied—from Noises Off, one of the funniest English farces, to Copenhagen, a worldwide hit about the meeting in 1941 between two giants of atomic physics; through a dozen plays, among them Alphabetical Order, Make and Break, and Benefactors; and as many novels, including The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, and Headlong; a collection of philosophical aphorisms, Constructions; selections of his journalism, and translations of Chekhov's major plays. Frayn's deep intelligence, comic genius, and humane values have made him one of Britain's best-loved authors. Despite a certain aloofness, he is warm, generous, and always of impeccable courtesy.
INTERVIEWER
There are authors who go on mining the same terrain book after book, while every work of yours is a new departure. Take the recent novels: Headlong is based on the discovery of a Brueghel painting that has been missing for centuries and contains a good deal of research and art history, while A Landing on the Sun is almost a spy thriller, and The Trick of It is about the nature of creativity and writing. In between you write plays, which are equally varied. Do you deliberately set out to surprise and be new every time?
MICHAEL FRAYN
Let me say for a start that I don't think it is a very good idea to write different sorts of things. If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say: "Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it. It takes some time, but if you do it often enough, finally people will get the hang of it, and get familiar with it, and they'll like it. Then you go on producing a consistent product and you'll have a market for it." Because the consumer of books or plays, including myself, very reasonably wants to know or have some idea in advance what the book or the play is going to be like. It is the same as buying breakfast cereal: If you buy a packet of cornflakes, you want to be sure it will contain cornflakes and not muesli. It is very irritating if the packet doesn't contain what you expected it to contain. Similarly it is a reasonable demand from the theatergoer or novel reader that he should get a constant product, which is identified by the author's brand name.
If I could have done this, I would have. But I don't have much control over what I produce. All I can do is to write the stories that come to me. And what a story is, is in part the way of telling it. A story is not an event in the outside world—it consists in the telling. It is only when you think that you have found a way of telling the story that you can start writing it. Different stories naturally suggest different ways of telling them. If I had been better organized as a writer, I would have gone beyond the stories' dictates and imposed my own central imprint on everything.
INTERVIEWER
But everything does bear your imprint. It's the form that changes.
FRAYN
That is like saying that a criminal commits different sorts of crimes—sometimes he does bank robberies, sometimes he murders people, sometimes he forges pension books—but on all of them he leaves the same fingerprints. He can't help it. I don't think there is anything deeper in it than that. That is what consistency is—you have these intellectual fingerprints, and you can't help leaving them on things.
INTERVIEWER
You once said that you started writing novels because your first attempt at theater, a revue for Footlights at Cambridge, was a complete flop. Then you went back to writing for the theater when you lost your voice as novelist, and now you alternate between the two. What dictates the form?
FRAYN
First of all, I don't think it is strange to be both novelist and playwright. I wonder why others don't do both. I think the great difference is that in a novel it is possible for the writer to be inside the head of at least one of the characters. He doesn't have to be, but if you think of most of the novels you've read, the author has known what all the characters' thoughts and feelings and intentions were. If you read: "She felt bitter resentment about what he had said"; "He intended to set off for Birmingham, but he changed his mind"; "She realized that he had not understood what she had said, " et cetera—all these things seem absolutely natural, you don't even notice that is the way most novels are written. In fact it is quite odd, because it implies that the author has absolute knowledge of what's going on inside the head of his characters. Sometimes the author chooses not to exercise that right, and sometimes he exercises it in the case of one or two characters but not all. But it is the natural mode for the storyteller to know what's happening inside his characters' heads.
By contrast, in the play it is impossible to indicate directly what is going on inside people's heads. All we know when we watch a play is what the characters are saying and what they are doing. Of course characters can say: "I'm thinking so and so," or "I'm feeling such and such," but this is not the same as knowing directly. You have to trust that the character is speaking truthfully, that he can understand himself—because characters often don't.
Now, some stories require that you know what people are thinking, and some stories require that you don't. In Copenhagen the whole point of the play is trying to find out what Heisenberg was thinking, and what his intentions were, in going to Copenhagen to see Niels Bohr. If I tried to write it as a novel the whole story would be told in one paragraph. I'd say: "Heisenberg decided to go to Copenhagen in 1941 in order to talk to Niels Bohr about such and such, because he hoped that Bohr would say so and so . . . " But I wanted to look at the difficulty of knowing that exists in life. So it seemed natural to be outside Heisenberg's head and have to work out what was going on inside it.
INTERVIEWER
When you got the story, did you know at once it would be a play rather than a novel?
FRAYN
Yes. Because that was what it was about—the difficulty of understanding people's intentions, even one's own intentions.
INTERVIEWER
So it is the story that chooses the form, not you, the author?
FRAYN
Absolutely. In Headlong, for instance, it seemed that we needed to know all the time what Martin Clay—the art historian protagonist—was thinking and feeling, because a lot of the story depends on his misunderstanding the situation, and misunderstanding his own feelings and intentions. We need to know what he thinks he is up to, then stand back as readers to say: “Hold on! He is not being honest with himself here. His motives are much more mixed than he is saying.”
INTERVIEWER
How do the stories come to you? Headlong, for example.
FRAYN
Well, the stories come in different ways. I can't remember exactly where most of them came from, I can only remember them growing in my head. But I can recall the precise moment when I thought of the idea of Headlong. I was in Vienna with Claire, and we had gone to visit Georg Eisler, a painter friend who was ill in hospital, and also to see an exhibition of his work. He was too ill to see us for long and we had time on our hands, and of course we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I had often been there before, and every time I go I look at the Brueghels—they have about a third of the world's extant Brueghels.
As always I spent a long time gazing at The Hunters in the Snow, which I think is one of the most wonderful paintings in the world. Then I looked at the picture next to it, The Return of the Herd, and then the next one after that, The Gloomy Day, and for some reason I read the sign on the wall. Now, I'd never read the sign on the wall in all the years that I had been to the museum and looked at those pictures, never read what it actually said, which is: “These three pictures are part of a series of six that Brueghel painted to illustrate the seasons; three are in Vienna, one is in Prague, one is in the Metropolitan in New York, and one is missing.” Even as I read the sign I thought: Well, if you thought you'd found the missing picture, what would you do? It would present a lot of difficulties, because plainly it wouldn't be identified as Brueghel or it wouldn't be missing, and it wouldn't be in a museum, some art historian would have looked at it and identified it. So it would have to be in a place where art historians don't much go, probably belonging to somebody who didn't know what it was, and the difficulty would arise as to what you would say to the owner. Would you simply say: “I think you've got the missing Brueghel on the wall there”? What if you thought that the owner was an unscrupulous man in desperate need of money, who would certainly sell the picture to the highest bidder? The highest bidder is unlikely to be the National Gallery in London, because it doesn't have any money. So it is quite likely that the buyer would be an investment trust, which buys the picture purely as investment, does not put it on display but locks it up in some vault, and no one would ever see it. So you might say you have a public duty for altruistic reasons to be a little devious, and to acquire the picture first, and then identify it as the missing Brueghel. But of course if you do that, you also make your reputation as an art historian, as well as lots of money. So you have mixed motives, and mixed motives are always interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Do you invent your characters as you go along? Or is the cast all there when you begin?
FRAYN
They come into your head slowly. When I start I like to know in advance where the story is going, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the story before I begin writing it. Some writers claim that they start not knowing where the story is going to go. Muriel Spark says that she starts with nothing in her head except the title. This is very dramatic—and she has very good titles. One of my predecessors as a reporter at the Manchester Guardian was Howard Spring, not remembered now but an immensely successful popular novelist in his day. Well, he says in his memoirs that his book, called Shabby Tiger, began simply with the first sentence: “The woman flamed along the road like a macaw.” So he wrote it down, and then other sentences followed and so on to the end of the novel. I can't work like that. I do have to know where I think the story is going to go. However, then complications arise. It is like an industrialist setting up a new industry: He has this idea for a wonderful new product he wants to produce and it's going to be of great value to the world, and all he has to do is build a factory, take on the staff and things will be fine. Then as soon as he starts to build the building, and as soon as he starts taking on the staff, problems arise: They make difficulties, they bring in the union, and so on. As soon as you involve other people in your schemes you get into difficulties. It's like that with the characters. It sounds a bit whimsical but it does feel like that; as soon as characters come into the story, they begin to take on a life of their own, and they don't always want to work the plot that you've so laboriously provided for them. It irritates me that they are so ungrateful! One has given them life, existence, and they won't fall in with one's plans. And just as in life the factory owner has to negotiate with the striker, and say, Alright I'll pay you more if you do this or change your practices on that, so you have to negotiate with your characters, go along with some of their ideas hoping that they'll go along with some of yours. And the whole story begins to change.
INTERVIEWER
Your latest novel, Spies, is about two children during the war who get entangled in the complicated world of adults. It is the only one of your works that has a whiff of autobiography about it. How did that story come about?
FRAYN
I find it difficult to remember when it started. I had been thinking about that part of my childhood for twenty-five years, thinking about the way children see the world, the way they see it through the stories they tell about it, the stories they've heard about it. This is true of adults too—we all make sense of the world by seeing it in terms of the stories we've heard. It is easier for us adults to see this happening in children, because they're distanced from us. I thought about it in this way and in that way and couldn't see how to do it. And then one day about fifteen years ago we were staying in the south of France and we went for a walk in the woods around Vence. I remembered that I had a great friend when I was a child who was a very dominant personality. He was the leader in all the games we played. If we were playing cowboys and Indians, he was the chief cowboy, and if we were playing something with policemen he was the chief constable. It was fair, because he always invented the games, he had the imagination and I didn't have any imagination at all as a child. So he was always thinking up new fantasies that we became part of, and he took the leading role. As I thought about this I remembered that at some point—and this would be in the middle of the Second World War—he said to me out of the blue, "My mother is a German spy." I didn't say, "I don't believe you, I don't think she is a German spy, have you got any evidence for it?" I thought it was an exciting idea, and I believe we followed her around for a couple of hours; she didn't try to break into an ammunition factory or get in touch with the German High Command though, so we got bored and gave up. Now, walking in the woods above Vence, I thought: What if we had been persistent and had followed her around for a couple of weeks, what would we have made of her life? If we, as children, had seriously looked at an adult's life, what would we have understood of it? Well, we would probably have seen it in terms of the stories we were familiar with, the stories we invented and acted out, and sooner or later we would have discovered some anomaly. Although she was charming and straightforward, an honest and honorable member of the community, I imagine there would have been some anomalies in her life, because everybody has some anomalies in their lives, not criminal activities but things that don't quite fit in with the rest of their personality and that normally we pass over in silence. So that was the point of departure for Spies. After that it was all fiction.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing?
FRAYN
Some of the earliest things I wrote were for my own puppet theater. I needed some material for the puppets to perform. I can't remember anything about them now—I don't believe any great masterpieces have been lost. When I was a child I read children's stories. I passionately enjoyed Arthur Ransome and the Just William stories. It wasn't until I was fifteen or sixteen that I began to read serious literature, but then it was above all poetry, particularly the Romantics, Shelley and Keats. I was passionate about Shelley, I suppose because of his radicalism. I still think Shelley is an underestimated poet. I wrote reams of poetry myself, devoid of any virtues whatsoever. I didn't consciously give up poetry, I just gradually wrote more and more prose.
INTERVIEWER
Who else did you read who might have been influential?
FRAYN
Goethe as soon as my German was good enough. Vanity Fair, Thomas Love Peacock, Evelyn Waugh, of course, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green. As soon as my French was good enough, Mauriac, Gide, Sartre—particularly Les Chemins de la liberté, Malraux—and a wonderful romantic novel of Provençal life which probably isn't considered by anyone now, but which had a great and lasting effect on me: Henri Bosco's Le Mas théotime. The obvious classics I didn't get round to until later, when I was a student, insofar as I ever read them at all, and my Russian wasn't good enough to read anything in Russian until then.
INTERVIEWER
You started studying French and Russian at Cambridge, but after a year switched to philosophy. Why?
FRAYN
I learned French at school and Russian in the army. I switched to philosophy because the language course consisted of a lot of academic work and a certain amount of literature. I enjoyed the language course very much but I was baffled by the literature, didn't have the faintest idea how to answer literary questions. In part two of the tripos it was all literature, and I couldn't face the prospect of spending two years writing essays about literary topics.
INTERVIEWER
This was in the mid-fifties. What was the philosophy course like then at Cambridge? Was it not dominated by Wittgenstein?
FRAYN
Absolutely. He died in 1951 and I arrived in 1954, but he had been a professor at Cambridge. He was one of the world's greatest philosophers but he was also a terrible human being, an appalling bully, who terrified everyone on the faculty, in the way that some scholars do. Almost everyone was in awe of him. I was passionately interested in Wittgenstein, and I had the great good fortune to be taught in my last year by almost the only person who was not. He was a young New Zealander called Jonathan Bennett, who had just arrived and who, at that stage, had no interest in Wittgenstein at all and resisted all his ideas. Jonathan Bennett loved arguing. He would not accept anything I said about Wittgenstein and I had to argue every step of the way. It was exhausting but a very good way of learning philosophy.
INTERVIEWER
Were you very radical in your youth?
FRAYN
Oh yes! I described myself as a communist.
INTERVIEWER
When did you stop being a communist?
FRAYN
Oh, very quickly. By the time I left school. If I had any lingering sympathies for the Soviet Union they vanished in 1956, when I and four friends at Cambridge who all spoke Russian organized an unofficial exchange with the Soviet Union, and that was an eye-opener.
INTERVIEWER
Let's move on to the beginning of your career, as a budding reporter. You once told me that any good writer should have a stint as a journalist. Chekhov thought it was a dreadful profession. Evelyn Waugh, too, said that journalism is inimical to creative writing. By contrast Graham Greene needed reporting for his novels. Can you say why you recommend journalism?
FRAYN
I always wanted to be a journalist, from the age of eight onwards. Wanting to be a journalist was the public expression of wanting to be a writer. But I did also want to be a journalist for its own sake. I had a girlfriend at Cambridge and I told her that my ambition was to be the editor of the Observer at thirty. That was a misunderstanding of the nature of the newspaper industry. I didn't realize that the Observer was owned by its editor, David Astor, and that to be the editor of the Observer you had to be very rich. I also misunderstood the nature of my own talents—I could never be an editor. But journalism is like everything else; there is good journalism and bad journalism. Trying to describe what is in front of your eyes, trying to understand a real situation, is very difficult and very demanding, and when it is done well it is just as important and good as any fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Who were the journalists you particularly admired?
FRAYN
I suppose when I was young I idolized reporters who were cool. At Cambridge being cool, being relaxed, being detached and apparently undisturbed by the world was the admired attitude.
INTERVIEWER
Your first job was with the Manchester Guardian. What was it like?
FRAYN
It was wonderful, because the Guardian was a very informal place: They used to take two graduates a year, one from Oxford and one from Cambridge—we are going back to elitist times. They didn't give you any training, you just started writing. If you could do it you stayed, and if you couldn't you were chucked out. Of course you began by doing small jobs around the office, but very soon you were sent out to do what they called “color pieces”—usually a personal essay about some Northern folkway, the last hand-loom weaver in Bolton, or the last lock maker in Westhoughton. One of their favorite subjects was sheepdog trials. A friend of mine, Dick West, was sent out to cover his seventeenth sheepdog trial and he had the idea of writing it from the standpoint of the sheep. The Guardian took exception to it; they thought that all that they held most dear was being mocked, and they sacked him, or tried to. But he ignored the letter of dismissal and, the Guardian being the Guardian, nobody liked to raise the subject again.
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thoughtful
drunk
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