Deborah Levy: ‘A writer’s career is choppy – I was 50 when I found success’
Deborah Levy is a presence, entering a cafe in north London with slightly wild hair, a large brooch at her throat and a Lime bike parked across the street, ready to convey her back up the hill after our interview. At 65, she has an appeal that is both literary and popular, with an intensity matched only by the devotion of her readers. In the first moments of our interview, Levy whips out her phone to show me a photo of a woman she met in Italy who, to Levy’s delight, had a tattoo on her upper arm of the French writer Marguerite Duras. “I don’t think I’d do it,” she says thoughtfully of the tattoo, but it seems to me there are women out there for whom a tattoo of Levy wouldn’t be a gesture too far.
Levy has written about Duras in a new collection, The Position of Spoons, a series of short (in some cases, very short) pieces in which the title essay refers to a line delivered to Levy back in her 20s by a creepy, voyeuristic neighbour. She also writes of her early passion for Colette, a woman who “had a self-possessed kind of beauty” and, importantly for the teenage Levy, was “a writer who looked like a movie star”. She identifies with Duras as someone who “was a reckless thinker, an egomaniac, a bit preposterous really”, which is as close as Levy will get to sending herself up. There is a long, interesting piece about Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay on the Brontë sisters and an essay on Lee Miller. Most of the pieces are culled from book introductions or periodicals and journals, but there are a few new additions, and Levy is keen to make the case that, in collected form, these pieces offer a portrait of the artist, as well as a continuation of themes started elsewhere. “In the years I was writing and wasn’t being published,” she says, “my preoccupations weren’t the preoccupations of a generation of editors. So you just keep going! You are what you are.” The book is, she says, “a conversation with readers, and with myself”.
It is also Levy’s first volume of nonfiction to be published since her tremendous success with what she calls “living autobiographies”, a trilogy of indeterminate genre in which she passionately and fiercely invests the details of her life with a real and rare luminosity. Taken as a whole, these books – Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate – offer an outline of Levy’s life, from her childhood in South Africa as the daughter of an anti-apartheid activist father who went to jail, to the end of her marriage in north London. More broadly, they serve as a corrective to the dismissal of women’s lives in general and of middle-aged women in particular. Rightly, they have made Levy’s name, although one gets the impression she is rather bored of talking about them now. Levy has written nine novels, two of which have been shortlisted for the Booker prize, and is clearly of the view that fiction is the real art. Nonetheless, it is her nonfiction, or her sort-of-nonfiction, that has won her legions of fans, and no matter how firmly she insists that “they’re obsessed with the writing”, what I think they are obsessed with is the model she offers of someone who dares to take herself completely, utterly seriously.
What those readers will make of the new book may be a test of how far that fanship goes. All writers are permitted a water-treading volume after a big success, but the slightness of some of the pieces in The Position of Spoons gives an impression of Levy as casting about somewhat wildly for material. Shoes … what about shoes? Or shoes and socks? (“Sockless people have a kind of abandon in their body. They walk with zip.”) Or how about electricity pylons as a governing image for the transmission of thought? (“You stand like a dancer, like an ogre, like a shaman, like a child in a rage. You are certain of your gravity.”) These observations are intended to be playful, of course, but in spite of her relish for the avant garde, I suspect playfulness may not be Levy’s natural idiom.
But why shouldn’t Levy range up and down the creative spectrum? Those idols about whom she writes in the book have all made similar journeys, and Levy is at her most thrilling when defending their right, and the right of female artists more generally, to change direction without getting it in the neck. Take Lee Miller, the Vogue model turned war photographer recently depicted by Kate Winslet. Endless words have been spent trying to understand what Miller thought she was up to, and yet, says Levy, “you don’t really ask how Cocteau put himself together. Cocteau, who I’m very fond of as an artist, could be a director and a critic and a novelist and a film-maker and a poet and a visual artist and a designer. No one’s saying: Jean Cocteau, how did you fit together?”
Part of the writing journey is to escape from my mother – you have to become someone else
Or how about Federico Fellini? “Who’s asking how do we put Fellini together?” This question of limitations is one Levy herself has been plagued by and is why she gets so annoyed when people mistake the living autobiographies for nonfiction, pure and simple. Asked how she succeeds in transforming the e-bikes and garden sheds and pot plants of the trilogy into such vessels of emotional and literary meaning, she points to the double standard. “No one is asking Fellini about how he includes the everyday in his films, which he kind of does. And we have to remember that Virginia Woolf, when To the Lighthouse was first published in America, I think it was described as ‘domestic psychology’. So this idea that material space, spaces for living – we call them domestic spaces, but let’s call them living spaces – why would they not be important?” Under the blowtorch of Levy’s attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful.
Really, what Levy is writing about in this mode is delight and the joy contained within small things. The Cost of Living, for example, considers the possibility of creating “a utopia in a modest way. When you say that word utopia, it sounds so grand and unobtainable. But in the most modest living space, you know, you can put a table down, and place some chairs around it, and curate the table. Who are you going to invite to that table? And in this arrangement of space, you’re creating something like the life you want. No matter how modest. No matter how grand. The light’s coming in this way, the chairs are arranged this way. This is a small, utopian gesture. But because it’s supposed to be domestic – oh no!”
This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial. In her fiction, meanwhile, characters are inclined to undertake sudden, sometimes dizzying, often baffling changes of direction. In her 2012 Booker shortlisted novel, Swimming Home, this entailed Kitty Finch, a terrible driver, tearing around a bunch of hairpin bends while the man she is with clings on for dear life. Levy has always been bold, she says; there was no sudden midlife change in outlook. When she wrote her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, on a typewriter in the late 1980s, “I had a very particular black eyeliner, silver platform boots, a lot of mascara and a cigarette,” she says. “And there’s nothing that isn’t bold about that book. There’s even a long conversation with a llama in London zoo. That book is about a female banker who feels so powerful and invincible … It’s a kind of state of the nation book, written in the Thatcher years. And you could say that women weren’t allowed to write state of the nation books, and how that book was read then and how it might be read now is different.”
My brief was to write a play about contemporary anxiety. Well, I mean, how many do you want?
Levy’s self-belief had to be solid, given the years of obscurity and low income. “A writer’s career is always choppy. Not every writer, but most.” As a result, she says, it is important to make a distinction between stamina and endurance, the former a necessary characteristic for any writer in it for the long haul (“I’ve been writing since my 20s, and I was 50 when I had some commercial success and became better known”), the latter a reductive and unhelpful female aspiration. We talk about the Brontë sisters, whose plaque in Westminster Abbey is inscribed with the epigraph “With Courage to Endure”. Levy rolls her eyes. “I’m most against it,” she says. “Endurance, sacrifice, cheerful forbearance: it’s supposed to be a talent. Our talent. And we have so many other talents. I mean, the Brontës; what makes me so sad about that is what those Brontë women were really good at was writing. What about that feeling where you’ve finished a book, and you’ve gone far away to reach it? They would have had those feelings, that feeling of elation. Not just endurance.”
Among the best and most tender of Levy’s writing is Letter to a Stranger, a piece in the new collection in which she recalls visiting her mother in hospital during the last days of her life. Giving her mother a set of headphones and a radio programme to listen to about crows, Levy nestled beside her on the hospital bed. “I thought she would like it,” she says, of the radio programme. “It would take her out of the hospital bed where she had lots of tubes in her body. I wanted to take her right out into the woods. And there it was: crows.” In the piece, her mother turns to her daughter and says: “Crows have brains that are as big as a gorilla’s.” Levy smiles. “It was one of the happiest memories, really, of that terrible time. I’ve written quite a lot about my mother now. Who would have thought?”
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Why the surprise? “I suppose because part of the writing journey is to escape from my mother. You have to become someone else. Unless you’re going to be De Beauvoir and write Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.” She pauses. “We have to remember De Beauvoir’s really good statement from that book, something like: ‘Be loved, be admired, be necessary, be somebody.’”
None of Levy’s boldness has waned. Recently, she was commissioned to write a play for a theatre in Zurich. Her background as a writer is theatrical; in her 20s, Levy was a writer and director for the Man Act theatre company and she has written scores of plays. “My brief was to write a play about contemporary anxiety,” she says. “Well, I mean, how many do you want?” The first play she has written in 25 years, it is due to open in January next year. “Here’s the title – are you ready?: 50 Minutes, the War War Jaw Jaw Bunny Play.” It takes a moment to process this, and Levy revels in the confusion before explaining what it means. “Fifty minutes refers to the psychoanalytic hour, right? And war war jaw jaw speaks for itself. And the bunny play refers to the fact that this is a two-hander, a conversation between a Freud-like character and a rabbit.” Levy grins. “So this beautiful rabbit mask is being made in a workshop in Zurich as we speak. I very much enjoyed writing that.”
She found it empowering to put words into someone else’s mouth, she says. “Exhilarating.” She also loved having a chance to work on the fly. “During rehearsals, if you wrote a dud line and it died in the actor’s mouth, you quickly learned – oh, excuse me, let’s just change that now! I’d have the pencil in my hand and reshape it. And then it would work.”
It sounds like a great antidote to perfectionism, I suggest, and Levy looks fleetingly indignant. “It absolutely has to be perfect, but …”
OK: to preciousness, then. “Oh, yes. You’re not going to land a bad line. You just think: this poor skilled actor, this line isn’t good enough, so I’m a quite brutal editor.” Levy is, equally brutal as an editor of her prose, she says, “and honestly, I don’t know to this day if that’s a blessing or a flaw.” Perhaps, she wonders, she should unclench a bit. But it’s not really in Levy’s nature. “When it comes down to that final edit, I don’t want anything on the page that doesn’t need to be there. Editing is the most wonderful part of writing.” She looks ferocious with delight. “It begins to roar in the edit.”
• The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
