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to listen to Melvyn Bragg talk candidly to Peter Kemp
Few would guess how hard-won Melvyn Bragg’s successful stability is. His CV
suggests a master of the balancing act: highly regarded author and respected
broadcaster, veteran radio presenter for the BBC and controller of arts for
LWT, equally at home in the House of Lords and working-class Cumbria, where
he was born in 1939 and still has a frequently visited cottage. Yet, as he
talks to me over coffee in the conservatory kitchen of his Hampstead house,
he soon reveals that, behind this assured-seeming public equilibrium, there
has been nightmarish private turmoil.
We are meeting prior to the publication of Remember Me..., a novel that
resurrects the most devastating event of his life: the suicide of his first
wife, the French artist and writer Lisa Roche. It’s a book about which he is
giving just this one newspaper interview, and the significance of which he
is eager to stress from the start: “I knew that if I didn’t write this book,
I could never write any more fiction. It was as simple as that. It was like
something that had to be done, faced, whatever word you want to use.” He
recalls a friend remarking, “‘This is a book you’ve been working up to for
about 35 years’”, and adds: “He was right. It wasn’t so much putting it off
- I didn’t think I could ever write it.”
Writing it, he emphasises, has not brought a feeling of release. Leaning
forward and tapping on the table to drive home his point, he says: “The idea
of something like this being therapy is absolute rubbish. It just makes
things worse. It’s stirred up stuff, so that I’ve thought again and again,
‘Why didn’t you just leave it alone? You were managing. You’d got it down
there. You were wounded by it on all sorts of little occasions and big
occasions - you just see a photograph or go to a place or something is
mentioned, and it’s just like a bang on the funny bone, except that it’s
worse than anything, and you’re knocked back 30 years and there’s a sickness
of remorse – but you live with it.’
“And, all of a sudden, I find I’m mired in it again – and I couldn’t get out
of it. I thought, ‘I’ll finish the book and it’ll be all right.’ I was
consoled by the prospect. It was a really serious consolation. But it’s just
stirred the whole thing up, and I’ve been much worse over the past few years
– certainly the past two or three years, when I knew I had to drive it
through – than I’ve been for years.
“I don’t wish I hadn’t written the book, but it’s sort of muddied up something
I was keeping suppressed. I think it has made my life, and the lives of
other people, a lot more difficult.” All this comes from Bragg’s decision to
continue his acclaimed fictional version of his Cumbrian boyhood, The
Soldier’s Return (1999), through a sequence of autobiographical novels. A
Son of War (2001) chronicled the adolescence (and teenage breakdown) of his
alter-ego character, Joe Richardson. Crossing the Lines (2003) recorded the
repercussions of Joe’s leaving a northern working-class community for
Oxford. Then, Bragg recollects: “I was moving towards the next thing, and I
thought, ‘I’m in real trouble here.’”
A crucial anxiety was how his and Lisa’s daughter, Marie-Elsa, six when her
mother died, would respond to a book about her suicide. When he told her,
“I’m doing this novel, and it’s going to be about my life in the 1960s and
when I married your mother, when she took her own life”, he also said, “I’m
going to write it, but I don’t have to publish it. If you in the slightest
bit demur, or if I think it might hurt you in any way, I just won’t publish
it. I’ll bind it up and send it to a few of our friends and leave it at
that.” She agreed.
After five years of “writing and rewriting and rewriting, and working at it
harder than I’ve ever worked at anything”, he handed her his “seventh or
eighth draft”. Though Marie-Elsa, an Anglican vicar then living in Oxford,
rang back with an enthusiastic response, he guessed that she had skimmed,
not read, the novel, and was “with the greatest affection in the world,
being really nice to me”. He wouldn’t proceed, he said, until he was
convinced that she had read it and was willing for it to be published. A
couple of weeks later, she rang again, this time “in turmoil”. “She’d just
finished it, and she said, ‘Thank God you’ve written it.’ Because her mother
died when she was six years old, she’d had a big block-out for a lot of her
life, and this had prompted memories. She came round immediately and we just
talked and talked – one of those things that people say, but it doesn’t
happen very often, in my life anyway. We just sat and talked for hours.”
Did anything in the book cause her problems, I ask. “There were two or three
things that she didn’t like and didn’t want in,” he says. “And I cut them.
The nice thing is, they were all fiction. There are degrees of fiction in
the book, but these were things that I’d made up for plot reasons.” Why, I
wonder, did he choose fiction, rather than straight memoir, for these books
about his past? Given that he read history at Oxford, he grants, this might
seem curious. “But it never occurred to me to go in that direction. I’d have
been jittery the entire time. I’d have thought, ‘I’m walking on broken glass
here. What dare I say? What can I put in? What can I miss out?’”
In addition, Bragg distrusts memory as patchy and unreliable. Talking to his
mother about a key scene in The Soldier’s Return, the arrival home from
Burma of his father after the war, he discovered that his recollection of it
(which he didn’t use in the book) was completely wrong, even though “it must
have been the greatest day of my life, aged 6½”.
Instead, he aims to sharpen and supplement memory by imagining scenes and
incidents necessary for the books’ fictional purposes and reimagining others
whose outlines have lingered in his mind. “As time goes by,” he observes,
“if the books last, my autobiography will drop away and the fiction, one
hopes, will remain.” Although Remember Me ... diverges from actuality in
some ways (Joe is, for instance, far less involved in politics than Bragg
was), it follows the “trajectory” of his life with Lisa: their first meeting
at a preChristmas party outside Oxford; their courtship and wedding during
his final year as an undergraduate; their move to 1960s London, where their
marriage eventually buckled under external and individual pressures.
Among the latter was the fact that Lisa had a history of depression and
suicidal tendencies. From “dabs of hints” given by one of her French
friends, Bragg gathered that her childhood had been traumatically unhappy,
but never discovered why: “The ferocity of her hatred for what had happened
in her childhood was unfathomable, really.” He regrets not having inquired
more (“One of the things I didn’t do was ask enough obvious questions”), but
feels it would have been futile, as she “clammed up about her background”.
That she came from a rather grand aristocratic family was something he found
out only “late on”. “You’d never have known. She didn’t want anyone to know.
She more than despised it. She ignored it.”
In his own past was the breakdown A Son of War depicts. “I remember it coming
on a bit,” he says, “and getting worse and worse and worse, then becoming
intolerable. And one of the intolerable things about it was you were kind of
sealed off from everybody. There was not a single person you could even
intimate to that this was happening to you. I hadn’t the language. I hadn’t
the confidence. I hadn’t the culture. There was no way I could talk to
anyone. With people who have mental problems, that factor becomes an extra
negative: the nontalking, the isolation. You’re just on your own, trying to
sort it out.”
It’s something that casts an interesting light on his subsequent career as one
of our keenest communicators, just as his commitment to literature can be
traced back to his years as an only child, left alone as his parents worked
in the family pub. He was “a tumultuous reader”, he says. “Writers became my
heroes. And you want to be like your heroes.”
In Kew, where he and Lisa had a congenial circle of friends, he tried to
settle down to write, but the din of low-flying planes ripped at his
increasingly raw nerves. Was this really as bad as the novel presents, I
ask. “Oh, terrible,” he answers, raising his voice vehemently. “It
absolutely drove me mad. I was going insane – and not just a little bit
insane. There were about 600 planes going over a day. It nearly tore my
scalp off. I was in no great health anyway. I’d had a breakdown and, as I
didn’t know, was already heading for another.”
By moving to Hampstead (into a run-down street, now “poshed up”), he and Lisa
escaped the screaming aircraft, but not personal and marital turbulence.
Lisa went into therapy, which was disastrously disrupted when her analyst
(Anne Darquier, the daughter of a Nazi collaborator, who features in the
biography Bad Faith, by another of her patients, Carmen Callil) took an
overdose.
Before this, she had urged that, to help Lisa’s recovery, her husband should
also undergo therapy. “I was scared stiff and incandescently – and I mean
incandescently – furious,” he says. Giving in because Lisa wanted it so
much, he found the results catastrophic. He began to have panic attacks.
“They were awful. I hope I have described it properly, because I want people
to know what that’s like. I daren’t go into the circle at theatres – I had
to be in the stalls – because I thought I’d throw myself over the front. And
it had to be at the end of the stalls. And it just got more and more
‘couldn’t do this’, ‘couldn’t do that’, ‘couldn’t do the other’. But
particularly the Tube. I still get flutterings on the Tube, still stand
close to the wall and to an entrance – or rather,” he corrects himself
sardonically, “an exit. There was this business of feeling pulled, as if you
were an iron filing and this magnet of the train was actually pulling you. I
remember at Shepherd’s Bush station, I can see myself now, not letting it
pull me.”
As the novel recounts, he began a new relationship (with Cate Haste, the
writer who has been his wife for the past 35 years). He and Lisa agreed on a
separation. Divorce proceedings started. Then, in 1971, on an evening when
he postponed going round to see her, she killed herself, with their daughter
in the house. “It was an incredible rupture,” Bragg says bleakly. “It was a
rupture because she went, it was a rupture because I had a crack-up, it was
a rupture because of the analysis, it was a rupture because one’s whole life
spiralled out of control. And there was such pain. And the death of Lisa
just never stops.”
Work has been a way of coping. Raised in a community where people grafted, he
has always had another job or jobs besides his vocation, writing. (Remember
Me... is his 20th novel; he has published more than 10 nonfiction works.) He
assures me: “It was just a fluke I got into the BBC – it was the best fluke
of my life, but it was just a fluke.” And he jokily passes on the story that
he got the job of presenting Start the Week because Russell Harty, on sick
leave, was worried it would otherwise go to Esther Rantzen or Michael
Parkin-son. (“They’re too bloody good. I won’t get my job back. I want you
to do it because you’re not very good. And you’re a pal.”) Yet
it’s clear he brings a near-workaholic industriousness (“Sometimes I feel
I’m doing too much, but I’m only doing too much of what I like doing”) to
his undertakings.
When becoming a Labour peer ended his 10-year stint on Start the Week, which
he’d turned into a Radio 4 flagship, Bragg launched In Our Time, with its
academic experts talking, without dumbing-down, about anything from
preSocratic philosophy to the frontiers of contemporary physics. He thought
it would probably last “about six months”. Instead, it has become a
benchmark of quality broadcasting. “It enables me to do indiscriminate
reading every week and then talk to people who know about it,” he says.
“That’s a treat. Also, I feel a bit up for exams every Thursday. I’m up at
five doing my final swotting before I go in. That refreshes you. That keeps
you going.
“I always thought that work was the way through,” he insists. “You could rely
on work. It would take your mind somewhere else.”
Another trait instilled by Bragg’s background is the belief – necessary in a
tight-knit community, he points out – that “You mustn’t pry into people’s
private life”. Stressing that he was “brought up to think like that”, he
adds: “That’s maybe why The South Bank Show doesn’t ask personal questions,
but is about people’s work.”
After that, you feel doubly appreciative – of his forthrightness about the
origins of his remarkable new novel and of the way it sets reticence aside
to such telling effect.
Melvyn Bragg talks to Peter Kemp at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary
Festival on Saturday. Remember Me... (Sceptre £17.99) is available at the
Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £16.19 (including p&p) on 0870 165
8585
Visit Times Online’s Oxford Literary Festival site: www.timesonline.co.uk/oxford
