The taxi driver says that the West End of Glasgow is where people with money live. It's the gracious-living part of Glasgow. You'll find the University there, the glass domes of the Botanic Gardens, restaurants where the parmesan comes in shavings, not powder. Graceful, sun-dappled Victorian terraces hewn from Scottish sandstone line the tree-shaded streets. It's a world away from architecturally tricksy, arty, revisionist, haute Glasgow, and it's also a quiet reserved, retreat from working-class, vernacular Glasgow.
Three years ago, at the intersection of at least two of these worlds, sat Alison Kennedy. She dangled her bare feet from her cramped roof window, the golden sandstone rubbing her heels, and she thought to jump. Following the British publication of Everything You Need (Knopf, Forecasts, June 11) writing creatively had become an impossibility because of the death of a friend and the break-up of a relationship with a man who, she concedes, was the love of her life. Enter the vernacular. From street-level below, she heard a man's voice singing a ditty, a sub-Burnsian, hootenanny, debased version of the Scots ballad. It was so teeth-grittingly awful in every respect that Kennedy realized she could not and would not die to its accompaniment. There were, demonstrably, worse things than being a writer who couldn't write.
Thus, Kennedy lives. She opens the door to her attic flat and following the briefest of greetings, flees up a final set of stairs. She disappears from view at a fluid trot like a very lithe but wary fox. Gasping, and beaded with sweat, stair-hating, nicotine-addicted PW finds Kennedy buried deep in the furthest recesses of a sofa, in the room with that window. We look at each other with not a little wariness. Despite combing the Web, it has proven impossible to find an interview of any length with A.L. Kennedy. PW suspects Kennedy of being a reluctant interviewee. Furthermore, PW fears that questions will be dodged or worse, examined and thrown back as useless. At 35, Kennedy is clear-eyed, clear-skinned, observant. She's got the kind of self-contained cool which could be seen as hostile and off-hand. But, as it turns out, the cussedness is merely a way of refusing to play the game; her personal life will not be on the table as barter in exchange for book sales. She will not be drawn into myth-making. Her integrity is both bracing and admirable in these times of Faustian deals.
Minutes into the interview the doorbell rings and Kennedy is off down four flights to answer it. A glance around gives a little insight into the tastes of this unconventional author. You won't find china shepherdesses on her mantle piece, nor photographs of her collecting prizes or posed alongside grinning notables. A tidy row of antique glass eyeballs, in every iris color, prettily bedeck her mantle. Her favorite, it emerges, is a gray with a slightly bloodshot cornea, which she points out, could be popped in when its owner was enduring a hangover. Later in another room, four homely-looking tools sit neatly and precisely placed on a bookcase. They are, she says, two bone chisels, one trocar and a curette. All antique and, she hastens to add, "I don't use any of them."
If you enter the title of Kennedy's third and latest novel Everything You Need into any web-based book search you will find an array of titles referring to a multitude of topics from car maintenance to job finding to animal husbandry. It's serendipitous then, that this whopping 559-page novel is indeed a guide of sorts to everything one might need to know about the creative process. Set largely in a writer's colony on an island off Wales, the novel follows the progress of Nathan Staples, a writer struggling to recapture his authentic voice following a career trapped in despised genre fiction. Staples has destroyed his life in pursuance of his dreams and now in middle age attempts redemption by arranging to have his long lost daughter Mary join the colony as a neophyte. Meek Mary Lamb believes her father to be dead and much of the novel's tension derives from Nathan's efforts to mentor his daughter without damaging her soul or squelching her zest to write. He waits and waits for the right moment to reveal his true identity, as seven years go by; meanwhile Mary finds her feet and her voice and learns how to maintain equilibrium in the midst of both love and loss. As if this were not enough, within the bounds of this huge novel Kennedy also produces one of the most swinging critical examinations of the mores of modern publishing to be found in contemporary writing.
Since the publication of her first collection of short stories Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains in Edinburgh in 1990, Kennedy has always used the gender-neutral author name A.L. Kennedy and it was a surprise somehow to find that the A stood for Alison; the kind of name a girl might get were she destined to Laura Ashley dresses and unceasing pleasantness. But maybe that's exactly what her parents had in mind when she was born in 1965 in Dundee. She says of her psychology lecturer father and remedial teacher mother, "My mother taught me to read and I could go off and read by myself by the time I was four. But I had no desire to be a writer, ever. I wanted to be a dentist for a while. My parents were both working class people who had educated themselves up to being middle class and their expectations would have been that I would also do something professional and wouldn't slide back." But even then Kennedy was learning to dig her heels in. "I wanted my parents to get divorced from about the age of six, because you work out that your parents don't like each other and it didn't happen. Then when I was 11 it did happen and it was shit and so you've spent your life with shit happening that you can't control. If [later] there is anything you can control then you do. And I care about books and I care about writing and I care about theatre and I care about language. You spend a huge amount of time in interviews being told 'X' is true and you know it isn't." She didn't feel destined to be a writer and the outsiderism necessary for the role is dismissed as a trait shared by "schizophrenics and alcoholics, and doesn't really mean anything."
Her chief early passion was theatre. With money scrimped and saved in the now single income household, Kennedy from about the age of 13 would go to London on an overnight bus, see a matinee and an evening show and catch another overnight bus back to Dundee. In her later teens she would go to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform in the summer week when the full repertoire was running. Shakespeare was, and is, an abiding passion. Not only was she not held back by archaic language as a youngster, but later, when it came to the research phase of her novel So I Am Glad (Knopf, 2000), in which the 17th century French writer Cyrano de Bergerac features as a character, she doggedly taught herself French by reading, dictionary in hand, from primary sources at the Bibliothèque Nationale Française in Paris.
When it came to a university education, Kennedy ignored parental longings for her to attend Oxbridge and instead chose Theatre Studies at Warwick University. There she discovered the delights of acting ("ideal if you're shy"). But she felt that acting was a "little bit to the left of what I wanted, so I ended up directing and writing and acting which is effectively being in a novel instead of writing it." But then as now, it was impossible to raise funding for groundbreaking, experimental theater and thus she moved toward prose fiction, although she still writes for theater, film and television. Nevertheless, the discipline of closely scrutinizing words and analyzing them for weight and meaning was better than any creative writing course and led her toward the meticulous, buffed, immaculate style she has made her own. The move to short stories was seamless in that she was "writing monologues for auditions and most of my short stories were and are monologues, if you want to be technical."
Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains brought her immediate critical acclaim. She was singled out as one of the most promising voices of her generation and the collection was awarded the Scottish Saltire Book of the Year Award. In fact, she is usually referred to as a "prize-winning writer" (having won the Somerset Maugham and Encore Awards too) but for all that, she has an unusually palsied view of literary prizes following her own experience of sitting on the Booker judging panel.
In Everything You Need, Jack, the literary editor, refers to various prizes as the Crapbutpromising Award and the Provincial Underdog's Consolation Award. The Booker, Kennedy says, "is a pile of crooked nonsense. I mistakenly thought it was not as deeply corrupt as it is." This, she says, is not a result of undue influence from the big publishing conglomerates but rather a matter of the more informal power of "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, who's turn is it. I read the 300 novels and no other bastard [on the panel] did." Though she now believes that most literary prizes have a debased currency, she has once again agreed to sit on a panel, but this time for a prize for new writers sponsored by Britain's Guardian newspaper, for which she is a columnist.
Still fighting the demons that stopped her writing in 1998, and still battling an upper back problem (the twin presences in her nonfiction work On Bullfighting, Anchor, 2001), Kennedy is presently writing short stories. For her the emotional commitment needed for fiction writing is difficult to summon up now. She says, "You have to come to a place where you're completely emotionally vulnerable and you have to create a space in which it's safe to do it again. But now I can only do it for the length of a short story. I would love to enjoy what I feel most alive doing again. I worry that I won't ever enjoy it again. It's probably not possible for me to not do it because it becomes psychologically necessary." Her tentativeness about starting another novel is understandable when Alison explains the dangers as she sees them. She says, "If you are welding you have to remember to have a face mask. The occupational hazard of my job is that it alters my psychology and can damage my character. We [writers] are fantastically hungry people because the emotional intensity when we're writing is like being in the middle of the beginning of an affair all the time."
Kennedy doesn't have a writing day, she has a writing night: she works between the hours of 10 p.m. and three a.m., though this could stretch to five a.m. It's a habit she formed early in her career. The value of these ungodly hours is that "this is the time of night when you would naturally dream. The time when you would usually be asleep is the time that you don't at all self-censor." Feeling jet-lagged all the time is seemingly worth it because "if you've really tied one on the night before and have just written a big chunk you wake up and feel really exhausted and rattled and abused and you think God, yes I did something last night."
The late hours also fit with her views on inspiration and the writing process itself. In the course of writing So I Am Glad (Knopf, 2000), she had a dream. In it, she saw a high, hot, blue sky bordered by billowing poplar leaves, viewed as if she were lying down. She says that the dream seemed odd and not her own. Later when she went to France to research the life of de Bergerac for her novel, she visited the site where the graveyard containing his grave used to be (now over-built) at Sannois and there looked up and saw the dream made real. This is the clearest illustration possible of her technique, which involves a kind of channeling, as well as an active process of creating or making. When it's put to her that this must seem like a particular gift she says, "Well the whole thing is a gift. There's this whole concept of the writer being in control but it's a daily process of picking up stuff that you're given by chance or that you're looking for because you're in a state of mind that makes it more visible. But after a while you're aware that you're sort of surfing and that most of what you're surfing on you're not providing. You just have to keep your balance."
