Deborah Levy: Playwright turned novelist

Deborah Levy began her creative career as a playwright in 1981 when she left the Darlington College of Arts to write plays including Pax, Call Blue Jane, Shiny Nylon and Heresies: Eva and Moses, which was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987.

While her plays were acclaimed for their “intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination”, she decided to try her hand at novel writing, releasing her first novel Beautiful Mutants in 1986.

Exhilarated by “experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret” she kept on writing, releasing a number of other novels including Swallowing Geography (1993), Billy and Girl (1999) and her latest book, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Swimming Home in 2011.

We sat down with Deborah to discuss her busy and varied writing life.

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Running time: 9.55

Transcript

* Please note these transcripts have been edited for readability

Danielle:
Hi, I’m Danielle Williams from the Australian Writers’ Centre. I’m at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and I’m about to chat to Deborah Levy. She’s a playwright, novelist and also publishes short stories. Welcome, Deborah.

Deborah:
Thank you.

Danielle:
First I’ll ask you about the novel Swimming Home, because that was short-listed last year in the Booker. Just tell us a bit about that one.

Deborah:
Swimming Home is the story of a fragile young woman in her 20s, she’s called Kitty Finch. She stalks a famous British male poet to his holiday in the south of France, he’s there with his family, and asks him to read her poem. On one level it’s about a sunny holiday that goes wrong, on another level it asks all sorts of questions about the depression, about how we live with madness in ourselves and in our families. It gives parents a bit of an airing, and children, the relationship between daughters and fathers a bit of an airing. So, those are some of its things.

Danielle:
You have actually published quite a few collections of short stories, why did you choose to focus on this one as a novel?

Deborah:
There was more to do in Swimming Home. It’s quite a sly book because it appears to be slender, it’s under 200 pages, but it packs a lot in. And the short story as a form is completely different because strangely in the short stories that I like not very much happens, but you have to have enough to happen to keep the readers on the bus. But Swimming Home just had the reach of a novel.

Danielle:
You say the short stories that you like not a lot happens, is that the case with the short stories you write?

Deborah:
Sometimes, although in my anthology Black Vodka I have to say quite a lot does happen. The leading story is about a hunchback in an advertising firm who notices when he’s giving a pitch to launch Black Vodka that there’s a young woman in the audience drawing a picture of him, and she’s labelling every organ of his body and he becomes intrigued and he asks her for a date. And this woman is an anthropologist and he doesn't quite know whether she’s interested in him, or interested in the bone structure of his hunch. So, where I got that from is Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I've always wanted to give him a modern spin, give him some status in life, put him in a suit, give him a girlfriend and take him out on a date.

Danielle:
Shifting again to the memoir, tell us about that and why you decided to write a memoir now.

Deborah:
It’s an essay, it is a memoir, it’s hitching a ride on an essay George Orwell wrote in 1946 called Why I Write. Orwell identified four headings to sum up his drive to pound the typewriter: political purpose, historical impulse, atheistic enthusiasm, and sheer egoism. I thought they were really good and I have hitched a ride on his four headings and given them a spin from a female writer’s point of view. So this is just out now, published by Notting Hill Editions, which is called The Home of the Essay. Penguin will publish in paperback next year.

Danielle:
We'll definitely keep an eye out for that. There’s just so much to ask you, because you’re a playwright as well and you make switching between the novel, the short story, the play seem so easy. But is it really?

Deborah:
Well, my training was in the theatre, my training was to be a playwright and it was how I made my name, writing plays. But strangely enough I always had switched between the two, and when I was a theatre student I was supposed to be swatting up for my essays, I was writing short stories, and short stories that I was cutting my teeth as a writer on, when I was a theatre student, well much later it became my first collection of stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, published by Cape. I think that it’s not so much that I’m looking for a form as the form finds me, so it’s always very obvious to me when something is for the theatre because I hear it differently. If something is just mostly made up of dialogue rather than going across the page in prose, it’s a play.

Danielle:
Yeah. At what point does this come to you, is it the idea? Or when you start writing it down that you figure out what form it’s going to take?

Deborah:
It changes from project to project. For example, a play that I'm starting to write now takes its inspiration from a true story, a really wonderful and bizarre story of a 19th century Bavarian princess, and she was discovered by her parents walking in a really strange way down the corridors of the royal palace. She was sort of walking around furniture and taking tiny steps. And, when they asked her why she was walking like that she told them that she’d swallowed a grand piano made from glass, and if she bumped into anything it would shatter inside of her. It was such a strange story and a sad story about a delusion that nothing would stop her from this belief.

Now, that’s a play because the physicality of it, because an actress can really embody that idea of having swallowed something and not bump – that care she needs to take not to bump into anything. So, that appeals to me. I don’t think I could write that quite the same way as a novel, but the theatre is obviously the place to express all of the complexities that are in that story.

Danielle:
I mean, do you keep your projects quite separate, or are you able to work on the novel and the play at the same time?

Deborah:
Well, a novel requires ruthless attention – I can’t really write very much else when I'm writing a novel. And, then sometimes there’s moments when you’re just stuck and you don’t have to move it on, and if you've been writing for a while you know that you need to give it a rest, not for too long, otherwise you lose the momentum. And, then I might just start to write down a bit of dialogue for the play, see what it sounds like, begin to map it, and after a while I return to the novel, and usually things have jogged on a bit.

Danielle:
We just have one final question, what’s the one piece of advice you would give to writers, new writers?

Deborah:
Well, I reckon that writing is such a sort of unhealthy activity, if you like, it’s much healthier to go out for a swim or a walk. So, when you are writing and there’s all this advice about having the right chair and sitting in the right position and all of the rest of it, but how you know it’s going really well is when you've stopped feeling your feet and you've been couched over your keyboard in a terrible position and you’re going to get an agonising backache the next day, that’s when you know you’re really flowing with the work.

Danielle:
And maybe you should take up yoga.

Deborah:
Yeah.

Danielle:
Thank you very much, Deborah. Enjoy the festival.

Deborah:
Thank you.