UNTIL today, Thom Gunn and Beryl Bainbridge had not met. Last week Gunn
started reading Bainbridge's critically hailed novel about Dr Johnson, According
to Queeney, which he finds "immensely impressive", while
Bainbridge is working her way through his Collected Poems. Now, on
a warm spring morning, I am sitting in Bainbridge's living room with the
first joint winners of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. A fire
burns in the grate.
BB I'm immensely chuffed to be sharing the prize with a poet.
It's better to be chosen with a poet -
TG Than with the gasman. (Laughs).
BB Than with another novelist.
TT Why?
BB Poetry's on a higher plane, I think. Poetry is much more
difficult than prose, particularly the good stuff. This goes back partly to
the way I was brought up. Anyone can read books, anyone can write them come
to that, but not everyone can write poetry. Not good poetry. When I was
younger the schooling system was so different. They were just interested in
learning by rote when I was younger.
TG We had bad teachers. I was ten at the beginning of World
War Two and 14 by the end, and so I got all these dreadful old teachers who
were too old to teach. My English teacher was terrible, a slovenly man. In
winter, at the time of getting a cold, he would dry his handkerchiefs on the
radiators. It was disgusting.
BB What?! He didn't wash 'em first?
TG No, there was drying snot, steaming on the radiators.
BB I was only good at English and Art. The English teacher
was the only one who defended me when I was expelled for the limerick.
TG You were expelled for a limerick?
BB Yes. I didn't write it. My mother found it in my pocket
and passed it to my headmistress.
"It's only human nature after all to take a little girl behind the wall,
To pull down her protection and plug in main connection, It's only human
nature after all."
TG We had these funny dialogues:
"To the woods."
"But I'm only 13."
"I'm not superstitious."
TT Did you read a lot as children?
TG My house was full of books. I learnt more from my mother
about literature than I did from my English teacher. Through her I started
reading Jane Austen, E.M. Forster.
BB I had the opposite of that.
TG You read to get away from what was happening at home?
BB Not so much that. We had a small bookcase filled with
nicely bound books. But it was locked and the key had gone. Books were seen
as untidy.
TG I had friends in school whose parents had locked bookcases
but inside those were sexual books by sexologists like Dr Magnus Hirschfeld.
BB Oh yes.
TG But it turned out a lot of the sons had keys and we'd take
out these books with titles like Sexual Anomalies and Perversions.
My mother had smuggled a copy of
Ulysses into England in her knickers before the Second World War.
TT You've said you had a very affectionate childhood.
TG My mother and father met when they were both journalists
working on the Kent Messenger. She gave up work to have a family.
They divorced when I was seven. But my brother and I were happy. She was a
good influence. She would have been very pleased that I became a writer.
TT But when you were 14 ..?
TG Well, she killed herself.
BB How did she do it?
TG She gassed herself.
BB Did she want to be found in time?
TG She didn't want to be found by us. But my brother, Ander,
and I, enterprising and inquisitive, worked our way in through a barred door.
BB (gasping): She had barred the door?
TG With a bureau. I could only write about it 40 years after
the event. She'd been separated from her second husband and that wasn't
working.
BB How old were you?
TG I was 14 and my brother was 12.
BB Oh, oh.
TG It was quite difficult, but maybe it makes you a writer, I
dunno.
BB Oh, I'm quite convinced that the more peculiar the
childhood, the much more creative it makes you.
TT Did she ever show her unhappiness?
TG She was very considerate in keeping it ... About my father
she once said: "Of all the bad things about him, at least we never had
quarrels in front of the children."
BB She is a woman, Thom.
TG She certainly was a woman.
BB I'd be slightly angry because the idea of doing that to
one's children. Maybe boys are more forgiving.
TG I've been forgiving her for many years. My father's second
wife was about to have their first child. God it was a mess. My brother and
I were split up: he went to live with my father, I stayed with a family
friend.
BB It was complete displacement: home, house, everything.
TG Yeah, well ... Everybody has a hard childhood in some way
or another.
TT But it took you those 40 years to write about it?
TG You write about everything that affects you eventually, in
some way or another, don't you think? But for a long time, you don't know
how to do it - to write about the things that affected you the most.
BB I came to writing quite late, in my thirties. If I hadn't
I would have been in a terrible state. I put in the plots an awful lot of
that angst from my childhood and it just went. Evaporated. Mine was nothing
as dreadful as yours, Thom - just the usual. Dreadful marriage and shoutings
all the time. Locked in a tiny house, bitterness and secrets from the past
coming out.
About 15 years ago, I was asked to write something about having a fire and I
remembered, from my childhood, my mother and father sitting on either side
of the fire, with their feet on a chair between them. And then something
would go wrong and they would start pushing at each other's feet until
someone's foot dropped from the chair. I loathed my father. Then, at 15, I
suddenly realised it wasn't all on one side.
TG Yes, they don't stop to tell you that.
BB So I sort of made friends with my father before he died
but he made our lives so dark. He never laid a finger on her or us. But the
violent rages - anything could set it off. It was wartime and my mother
wasn't a very good cook and we would have things like sardines and chips.
That would start a fight. Or he'd lose a stud for his shirt and that would
start another one.
TT Was your mother scared?
BB My mother would just go very white and stop putting
make-up on and go and take her library books to read in the station
waiting-room because it had a fire. There would be a period of peace and he
would buy her something - a piece of jewellery - and things would be all
right again. I actually wrote a novel when I was about 12 or 13 and
illustrated it.
TG So did I.
BB What was yours called?
TG The Flirt. It was about families breaking up. I've still
got it. I went to a boarding school during the Blitz and I said to my mother "What
do you want for your birthday?" and she said "Why don't you write
me a novel?" Every day I would write a chapter and ended up with about
50 chapters, each one a page or less. I still have it. It was very funny,
very naive. The heroine becomes a prostitute and dies of starvation outside
Lyons Corner House.
BB Mine was called The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle and
Rupert Bickerstaff. It was dedicated to the Chinese opium war. It began:
"Dear reader, when you see the drunken people lying in the streets do not
blame them."
Thom, do you think that memory has a big part to play - that some people have
better memories than others? That writers have better memories?
TG I think writers have good memories because they think
about things that have happened to them - we hope accurately. Do you?
BB Well, my memory isn't as good as it used to be. I forget
names a lot. But I didn't wait 40 years like you to write ...
TG That was only one thing I took 40 years to write about.
BB Yes, but I sort of think that the only things that were
real happened in the past that far back. The middle period - marriage,
children growing up, that sort of thing - is not it. The real years that
formed your imagination were from seven years of age to when you were 20.
TG I loved university. I was happy, I was reading, I started
to write, people started to like what I was doing, I made friends I still
have. I wrote poems for my first book. I fell in love [with American partner
Mike Kitay].
TT How did you meet?
BB Across a crowded room?
TG Yes, at a party. We've been together ever since. He had to
go into the Airforce after university so I went to America and eventually I
lived with him off the base in San Antonio, Texas, a horrible place.
TT And a difficult time to have a gay lover in the
military? This was the Fifties.
TG It was hard, I was duplicitous, I lied where I needed to.
Things have changed so much. When I first started teaching at the University
of California at Berkeley in 1958, I would never have got the job if they'd
known I was queer. By the time I retired in 1999, they were proud to have a
queer professor teaching. It was a feather in their cap.
BB I'm glad you said queers. I've always called gay people
queers but they don't like it any more.
TG It's fashionable again.
BB Darn, just when I got used to "gay".
TG "Queer" was always good enough for me.
BB All I wanted to do was to get married and have lots of
children. I'd have always written but I didn't expect to get published. I
didn't mind if I got published.
TG I wanted to get published, I just didn't write anything
worth publishing. I had a great mentor in Christopher Isherwood. He was
kind. I met him in California. I was 25. He was 50. I thought "This is
exactly how I want to be at that age." I met him at 20th Century Fox.
He took me to the canteen where there were various, extremely famous people
- Cary Grant on the next table. Chris had a way of giving himself entirely
to person he was talking to.
BB I don't think you ever do it on your own. You need people
behind you, supporting you. Maybe it's different for men. But for women ...
oh, this will cause problems but if one didn't write one would have a happy,
normal life. It's not a sensible way of making a living. Most male writers
have a wife and the wife looks after everybody, the children, brings the
coffee in, whereas for me - and I'm glad about this - I had to write when
the children were asleep or something.
TT Thom, what were your first books about?
TG My feelings of lust, probably.
TT Were you having lots of sex?
TG No, I was writing instead (laughs). You are probably
horniest in your twenties and you're having the most sex then.
BB Do you think that sex is the thing that makes one write?
TG No, it's one of many things.
BB I don't mean having sex. But I think the creative urge is
sexual, surely. When you're young it's the biggest controlling factor of
your life, more than anything else. Maybe that's what makes you able to
create more - though nothing you could write home about to your mother.
TT Have you and Mike been monogamous, Thom?
TG That's a very personal question.
BB And not about his poetry...
TT Yes it is. The Man With Night Sweats and Boss
Cupid are both very much about sex - as well as love, death and desire.
TG Read the poems, draw your own conclusions. What do you
want me to say? That this is true? Well, yes. I've lost a great many friends
to AIDS and it has been immensely shocking. The first of those poems, The
Man With Night Sweats, is about me, waking up with a night sweat and
thinking "Oh, it must be Aids". It wasn't. I thought I'd be bound
to get it. But I didn't. Maybe I've been careful or maybe I've been, I
think, lucky, more than anything else. It was very melancholy - going to
visit friends in hospital all the time. Reagan wouldn't mention the word.
BB I was thinking how lucky how one was that Aids didn't
appear much earlier.
TG Yes, we had some fun!
BB In those days it was venereal disease and notices on the
back of toilet walls warning you.
TT Thom, your first poem was an anti-war poem.
TG It wasn't very good. It begins: "Yours is the
brightness of orchards of bullets ..."
BB Oh, I like "orchards", you could take out "bullets".
TT What do you both think of the current situation?
TG A disaster. Bush was determined to have his war and no one
else wanted it. Half of America is opposed to him; it's not very popular
over there.
BB And it's not going so well. I keep watching it, even into
the night. There's a very nice chap, an Iraqi minister, I think, who's very
strong. There's no keeping back his feelings. "We were writing poetry
and making music when George Bush's grandfather was crawling around in a
cave," he said. He was so pleased with it, he went on a bit more then
repeated it at the end. You wouldn't think he was speaking in a foreign
language. It's amazing.
TT Has writing become easier as you've got older?
BB Harder, no question. You set yourself higher and higher
standards. At the beginning every word seems wonderful. Later on in your
career, you change and revise every word. I don't know if in America it's
like here. When you get successful you have to do all this stuff - the
publicity, readings.
TG Poetry doesn't sell that much. Being a poet is not the
same as a being a novelist - not as many people read you.
BB People ask me, "Who are you writing for?" Well,
anyone who'll pick my books up!
TG Drink and drugs: that's what worked for me. Not that I
ever wrote under the influence. When I get drunk on liquor I tend to grope
straight people. They're understanding sometimes, but I'd prefer not to do
it.
BB When I get drunk I just pass out.
There is a pause.
TG I must go. I have a lunch date.
BB And I've suddenly remembered my son is going to drill a
hole into my garden today. (To TT) You haven't asked me what I'm
going to spend my prize money on.
TT Well ..?
BB Myself. Living.
The David Cohen
THE David Cohen British Literature Prize was launched in 1992. It is worth
£30,000 to the winner, and is
given every two years to a writer for a lifetime's achievement.
The first author to be awarded the prize was V.S. Naipaul, who won it in
1993. Since then, it has been given to Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark, William
Trevor and Doris Lessing. A further £10,000 is given to a young writer or
literary institution that is nominated by the winner.
Dr David Cohen, after whom the prize is named, is a remarkable man. He was
born in 1930, the son of a successful property developer, and studied Middle
Eastern languages at Oxford. However, he then decided that he wanted to
become a doctor. He went on to Westminster Hospital Medical School, and has
worked as a GP all his life until his recent retirement.
In 1980 he and his wife Veronica set up the David Cohen Family Charitable
Trust to help composers, choreographers, dancers, actors, playwrights and
poets. Since then the trust has made substantial donations to many arts
organisations, such as the Royal Ballet, the English National Opera and the
British Museum.
But in 1992 he decided that his trust should do more for literature. He
remarked that literature was the Cinderella of arts sponsorship, and that "writers
by whom our era will be remembered and judged often pay a high price in
loneliness and isolation".
So began the David Cohen Prize. Co-sponsors are Coutts Bank and the Arts
Council, which administers the prize. It has maintained a very high standard
over the course of its six awards, with a large and distinguished panel of
judges. They are chaired strictly by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. David
Cohen judges do not leak like the Booker judges do.
Last night's jollifications surrounding the award of the 2003 prize took
place, as they have done since the beginning, in the august halls of Coutts
Bank in the Strand. Beryl Bainbridge chose to donate her share of the extra
£10,000 to the King's Lynn Literature Festival; Thom Gunn's £5,000 will go
to the Arvon Foundation for aspiring writers.
Derwent May
