She originally planned to visit New York for the American publication this month of her fifth novel, The Sea House, but Esther Freud has "a very nice reason" for staying home in England, she explains via transatlantic telephone. Freud and her husband, actor David Morrissey, are expecting their third child, and the author decided that traveling in the seventh month of pregnancy at age 40 would be too taxing. "I told Ecco Press as soon as I knew to see if they could change the date, but these things are planned so far in advance, they couldn't," she says. "I feel I could do it now [in early March]. I just came back from a trip to Italy doing research for a new book, and the pleasure of those things is very great when you know they're not going to be possible for a while. It's a big difference, two to three children—people aren't entirely positive about it," she adds with a laugh, "but it's something I've always wanted to do."
Family life, especially in its more unconventional forms, is a central concern in all of Freud's meticulously observed, emotionally resonant novels. Her first two draw fairly directly on her own experiences: the five-year-old narrator of Hideous Kinky (1992) describes travels through North Africa with a bohemian Mum similar to the author's adventures there in the late 1960s, and Peerless Flats (1993) portrays a teenage acting student adrift in 1970s London, where Freud herself attended the Drama Centre. Summer at Gaglow (1998) is broader in scope but still linked to personal history; inspired by a memoir written by her great-grandmother, it connects the saga of a wealthy German-Jewish family suffering through World War I with the modern drama of their descendant, a young woman having her first child (as Freud did while working on the book) and fascinated by her links to these relatives who have hardly ever been mentioned by her father, a painter with at least surface similarities to the author's own progenitor, British artist Lucian Freud.
The Sea House is an even more impressive and ambitious demonstration of Freud's ability to use building blocks of factual material to construct a fictional edifice of her own distinctive design. As in Summer at Gaglow, she interweaves a historical and a contemporary story: the poignant tale of Max Meyer, a middle-aged German refugee who comes to the English seaside village of Steerborough in the summer of 1953 and falls in love with the wife of another expatriate, prominent architect Klaus Lehmann, and the chronicle of an equally transforming visit to the same town 50 years later by architecture student Lily Brannan, who discovers while reading Lehmann's letters to his wife some uncomfortable parallels to her own relationship with a rising young London architect. Also seamlessly integrated into the text are the letters Max preserved as cherished reminders of his correspondence course with an English artist in the late 1920s, before he gave up painting. They reveal Max's early struggles with a vocation that's finally fulfilled in Steerborough, where he paints a scroll that unfurls to reveal the village's every house, lane and hedgerow.
Both sets of letters are based on actual correspondence; the village is a real place in England; the scroll exists. (Ecco used a portion of it on the cover.) But Freud bends these sources to her artistic will, transforming them to further the narrative's development and to illuminate the lives of wholly imaginary characters.
"I had a lot of different ideas for this book, almost more than I could use," she says. "I wanted to set a book in Suffolk, in this village my family has been going to ever since my grandparents came to England in 1933. It's a magical place that I've fallen in love with over the years. I heard about the scroll, and when I saw it I felt as if I had some link to the man who had made it. When I found out more about him, there was really nothing I could relate to—he was a middle-class British clerk—but I used his character and combined it with this amazing memoir someone had sent me about his childhood in a rather grand house outside Hamburg. I wove the idea of these two people together and created Max." She used fragments from the correspondence course taken by Max's real-life inspiration with an actual English painter, "because I couldn't have made up some of the things he tells this budding artist."
The correspondence of her grandfather Ernst Freud (Sigmund's son), which served as a starting point for Klaus Lehmann's letters to his wife, also prompted reflections that inform the modern sections of The Sea House. "When I was reading his letters," Esther Freud says, "I was impressed with how married these people were, how committed to each other. That made me wonder about my relationship with my husband, and my friends' relationships, and how we live in an age of such independence that to be totally committed isn't necessarily what you expect from your friends or yourself. I gave those feelings to Lily."
But how would all these disparate pieces fit together? "It came to me in a flash," says Freud. "Suddenly I thought, I can have the character of a young woman doing research on Klaus in this village and somehow bring all the other things into it. There's always a danger with having two time spans, that the readers will feel resentful at being yanked from one to the other. I was helped by the letters, because they take you from one time to the other."
This process might sound arduous, but Freud finds writing "a sheer luxury after the horrors of being an actress!" She had a reasonable amount of success in theater and television, she says, "but when I was about 26 I suddenly found the waiting between jobs completely unbearable. I had always written, but without ambition, just for pleasure. I decided to seriously discipline myself to do three hours of writing every morning. After six months I had written a really substantial amount, and when I was offered an acting job, I found myself thinking, 'I don't really want it.' That was so liberating, to know I had something else I preferred doing that I actually had control over. I never really looked back."
The resulting book, Hideous Kinky, was praised for its flawless rendering of a child's voice, though some reviewers were disconcerted by the narrator's (and the author's) neutral attitude toward a mother carting her kids across North Africa with little concern for such trifles as schooling and regular meals. "I think people wanted more judgment," Freud says, "and the whole point for me, setting it from such a small child's point of view, was that children do not judge their parents when they're that little. I wouldn't say I had regrets, but I had complicated feelings when reviewers harshly judged my mother and I felt I'd brought that upon her."
How did her mother feel? "She was delighted that I was doing something creative, but she felt quite exposed, because there she was, just doing what she was doing, and suddenly it was in the public domain. So she was divided, but she tried really hard to stick to what she most wanted to feel, which was that she was really proud of her daughter."
The father is absent from Hideous Kinky, as Lucian Freud mostly was from his daughter's childhood. "We didn't grow up with him," she says, "but I sat for him [as a model] a lot in my teens and early 20s, and that had a big impact on me. Just to see how hard someone can work and how patient they can be and how much they can achieve through that, it made me think, 'Well, however difficult writing might seem, one day if I keep doing it, something will come,' because that's what I saw my father doing."
Both parents were taken aback by Peerless Flats, with its matter-of-fact portrayal of a teenage girl unable to get a grip on her life, taking drugs and having sex though neither seemed to give her much pleasure. "They were totally ashen, saying, 'Oh my God, we had no idea,' " Freud recalls. "I had to remind them that I'd had happy times, too! When you use a lot of things in your life but leave out others, it's quite confusing to the people who know you." In fact, she says, despite its bleak tone, her second novel was written in five months "on a sheer high" right after Hamish Hamilton accepted Hideous Kinky for publication. "It gave me the most unbelievable adrenaline rush, nothing that great had happened to me probably ever. [Writing Peerless Flats] was a funny juxtaposition of feeling so happy in my own life and then going to a place where I could draw on experiences that were really difficult. I had my typical second book crisis with my third book instead."
Summer at Gaglow took several agonizing years to complete. "When I was sitting for my father, he told me some snippets of stories about his past; he had spent the first 10 years of his life in Berlin. I was fascinated and felt these stories would just disappear if someone didn't find out more about them. I discovered that one cousin of my father's had a memoir written by my great-grandmother, who had led this very luxurious and pampered life at the turn of the 20th century. I tracked it down in New York, but it was only 12 pages long. I had already decided that I wanted to use this material, so I did a lot of research, and then I just created the Belgard family and let the story make itself up. It was a very difficult book to write, because I never felt that I knew enough. But out of that came the ease with which I wrote The Sea House, because I found out so much about Jewish life in Germany, about these people who left their lives and came to England and had a completely different life."
Summer at Gaglow connected Freud with Dan Halpern, who bought the American rights for Ecco Press and also published new paperback editions of Hideous Kinky and Peerless Flats, both originally released here by Harcourt. "Dan probably edits me more closely than my English editor," Freud says. "I'm grateful for that. I don't necessarily agree with everything, but it's nice to get a lot of great feedback."
She was disappointed when Halpern passed on her next novel, The Wild, a dark tale about the disastrous joining of two single-parent families that remains unpublished in the United States. "It was strange," Freud muses. "Here it had a really good reception, people said it was my best book, but nobody in America responded to it. At first I thought it was Dan, he just didn't get it, but it was the same with everyone. I had to accept that different cultures respond in different ways."
"The book was so British and had so many references to the time frame in the U.K., I didn't see how Americans would relate to it," Halpern explains. "Like everything she does, it was beautifully written, but I thought it would not be well reviewed here. We were really trying to build her, and I didn't see how to make this book work. It seemed better to wait for the next book and continue to grow her in America."
Freud continues growing herself as she waits for the arrival of her baby. "I'm quite well into the writing of the new novel," she says. "I have that pregnancy feeling of, get as much done now as you can, because you'll never have time to work again."
