What You Can Get From Reading Writer Interviews: P.D. James #1

 The Paris Review released its interview with the late P.D. James, P. D. James, The Art of Fiction No. 141 (1995). I read a few of her detective novels. Murder at Pemberley, and The Children of Men. I recommend all of it.

So why this post? Ms. James says a few things about some classics which made my own reading feel more confident (hint: she is not so hot on Dickens).

INTERVIEWER

What in particular attracted you to Jane Austen?

JAMES

Her irony and control of structure. One’s response to literature is like one’s response to human beings—if you asked me what appeals to me in a certain person, I might say his courage, or humor, or intelligence. In Jane Austen it was her style and her irony, the way she creates so distinctive a world in which I feel at home. I called my second daughter after her. She was born during some of the worst bombing in London. I went from Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital to a basement flat in Hampstead because I thought it was safer being underground, and we could hear the flying bombs overhead and the guns trying to shoot them down, and I just read Jane Austen for the hundredth time!

I finally got to read Jane Austen in prison (where the library had all or close to all of her novels).  Austen, I think, might wear better now than the later Dickens, but this might also be my bias showing. She is much clearer-eyed about the central fact of modern life: money.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read George Eliot as well, and with the same relish?

JAMES

I came to her later. Like most people I believe Middlemarch to be one of the greatest English novels, but I don’t have the same affection for George Eliot as for Jane Austen. I read Dickens and recognized his genius, but he is not my favorite. I find many of his female characters unsuccessful—wonderful caricatures, wicked, odd, grotesque, evil, but not true. There isn’t the subtlety of characterization you get, say, in Trollope, whose understanding and description of women is astonishing. Jane Austen never described two men talking together if a woman was not present—she would have thought that was outside her experience. In Trollope, by contrast, you get continual conversations between women—for example Alice Vavasor and Lady Glencora Palliser in Can You Forgive Her—without a man there, and he gets it absolutely right. This plain, grumpy looking man had obviously an astonishing knowledge of women’s psychology.

I also read Middlemarch. It would have made me think the Victorian novel was capable of more than rampant sentimentality. See, again, my bias about Dickens. 

INTERVIEWER

Trollope has become a hero of the feminists, especially his The Way We Live Now in which he proclaims women’s rights before anyone else did.

JAMES

I tend not to think of books in terms of contemporary issues and passions; it diminishes them. But that particular book is a kind of contemporary novel. The main character was a sort of Robert Maxwell, a monster. Trollope describes women’s lives at a time when marriage was the only possibility for personal fulfillment.

Trollope is another find from prison. He may not be as brilliant as Dickens, or as hard-minded as Thomas Hardy, but his characters are somewhat between the two. They seem like people. Real people.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read foreign novelists, the great Russians, the French?

JAMES

I read the obvious ones: War and Peace, Anna Karenina. I didn’t have time to read enough writers of my own language as I went to work after school and kept working. I read some American novelists: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and the crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald. I think American crime writers have had a profound influence, not only on the genre but on the course of the novel as a whole.

INTERVIEWER

In what way?

JAMES

By the vigor of their language, its imaginative use—the wisecracks, the one-liners. It is a distinctive style that has influenced the mainstream American novel.

I like this shout-out out to us Americans. However, I wonder if what Ms. James and I grew up reading still has value in American writers. 

INTERVIEWER

This brings us to the genre you chose for yourself. Did you choose it because you were aware of having a talent for it?

JAMES

I don’t make a distinction between the so-called serious or literary novel and the crime novel. I suppose one could say mainstream novel. But I didn’t hesitate long before I decided to try to write a detective story, because I so much enjoyed reading them myself. And I thought I could probably do it successfully, and the detective story being a popular genre, it would have a better chance of being accepted for publication. I didn’t want to use the traumatic experiences of my own life in an autobiographical book, which would have been another option for a first attempt. But there were two other reasons. First, I like structured fiction, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like a novel to have narrative drive, pace, resolution, which a detective novel has. Second, I was setting out at last on the path of becoming a writer, which I had longed for all my life, and I thought writing a detective story would be a wonderful apprenticeship for a “serious” novelist, because a detective story is very easy to write badly but difficult to write well. There is so much you have to fit into eighty or ninety-thousand words—not just creating a puzzle, but an atmosphere, a setting, characters . . . Then when the first one worked, I continued, and I came to believe that it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live.

The following falls in line with something else I wrote today on here about changing my use of the third person for narration. The detective allows for commentary - right now, the idea of a chorus came to mine - and an actor. Not to mention - because I just thought of this - aiding the plot, which will keep people's eyes on the page.

INTERVIEWER

Alain Robbe-Grillet once quoted Borges saying that all great novels are detective stories from Crime and Punishment down to Robbe-Grillet’s own Jalousie. Do you agree?

JAMES

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now you mention it, I think there is some truth in that; it is an interesting observation. It is true because the novel is an artificial form and the detective novel especially so, as the writer has to select events and arrange them in a certain order, making use of his or her experience to reveal a view of reality. The problem solving, too, is characteristic of both genres. For example, Jane Austen’s Emma is a remarkable detective story in which the truth of human relationships are inserted into the narrative in a very cunning way—for instance, Frank Churchill arriving in Highbury already secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. She needs a piano and Frank goes to London to have his hair cut and a few days later a piano arrives. The novel is full of this kind of clue to the truth of relationships. There is no murder or death in the book, yet it is a novel of deceit and detection.

And which really comes down to read, read, read, Even if you are writing genre (and I would think even more so if you want to break any rules,)

INTERVIEWER

To go back to your work: which detective novelists did you relish most before you started writing?

JAMES

I read mostly women detective writers: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, well, the sisterhood. I don’t read many crime novels now, they are not my favorite reading.

INTERVIEWER

What about contemporaries like Ruth Rendell? And younger ones, of whom quite a few have achieved success?

JAMES

I like them. Ruth Rendell writes detective stories under her own name and crime novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. I admire and prefer the latter.

INTERVIEWER

You have already alluded to several predecessors—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Hammet, Chandler . . . I would like to ask you about two of the all time greats. Let us start with Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective.

JAMES

Every crime writer has been influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even if only subconsciously. He bequeathed to crime writing a respect for reason and a nonabstract intellectualism, the capacity to tell a story and the ability to create a specific and distinctive world. He is also, of course, the creator of one of the first and certainly the most famous of all amateur detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Probably his greatest contribution to crime writing was that he made the genre popular, a popularity that it was never subsequently to lose.

INTERVIEWER

And Georges Simenon? Did you read him much?

JAMES

I have a great admiration for his work; he is a very good novelist by any criteria, with a remarkable understanding of human psychology, particularly that of the criminal mind. He worked in what I think must be a unique way for the crime novelist in that he has told us that his books weren’t carefully plotted in advance. What he did was to choose the names of his characters from the international telephone directory and then put them in a certain situation and let them take over. This, of course, would not be a reasonable method of working for a detective novelist, since it isn’t really comparable with the careful clue-making that classical detection requires. Georges Simenon, in my view, was a crime writer and a very fine one, not primarily a writer of detective stories.

Here I leave you.

sch 9/22