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Mavis
Cheek interview
This interview with Mavis Cheek was conducted by
Kevin Patrick Mahoney in June 2005 in Pitshanger Bookshop.
KPM: A lot of reviewers say that your novels are quite
autobiographical. Have you taken anything in “Patrick Parker's Progress” from
your own life?
Mavis Cheek: No, absolutely not. That's one of the things I
should have said tonight. Actually it's one of those books that is written as
total invention. The other thing... the reason I did that was that it was a
reaction to “The Sex Life of my Aunt”, because in the previous book until the
heroine is 19... that is exactly my life. So it was quite nice to get away from
me. So nothing autobiographical in
“Patrick Parker's Progress”. At the age of 19 I was asked by a very wealthy
lovely lawyer to marry him, but in the book ('Sex life') I turn it around...
Yes, you could what would have happened if you had gone for the ('white goods')
rather than bohemian carelessness. No, Patrick Parker is actually pretty... I
mean, I think I've drawn on things that (people have written about their
lives), but my life has no parallel at all.
KPM: I've a heard a Woman's Hour interview on the
internet where you say that you used bridge building as analogy for the art
world. Do you think women artists have made enough progress since the 60s?
Mavis Cheek: It's coming. I mean, I'm not a fan of Tracey
(Emin) at all. But I do think that people like Cornelia Parker and Sam
Taylor-Wood and various other women are extremely good and focused, and they
are doing interesting work. I think some of that Brit Art stuff was (a)
one-shot joke. I mean Sarah Lucas who did fried egg on the back of a chair -
that was really funny - and the cucumber, but that was a very one-shot joke.
Art's bigger than that, I think.
KPM: Several reviewers say that you as an author are
quite distant from your characters. Why do you think this is so?
Mavis Cheek: I know what they mean, (because) I do a lot of
manipulative stuff with them. But I'm not distant in emotional terms, but I
really have to know them, I really have to like them. If I don't like them, I
have to understand them, so I have to be quite clever. But I do like to be
boss. I think that's probably what they mean. You know, 'I'm boss, you're
slave'...
KPM: It feels like some characters come alive...
Mavis Cheek: They wouldn't be there if they weren't living
their own lives. They'll come to me, like Dave the Bread did and I'll let them
(from “Mrs Fytton's Country Life”). But sometimes you have to be really fascist
and say, 'No - no good for the whole book, you can't be like that'. I think to
say 'distant' is the wrong word, it's 'in charge'.
KPM: You're famed for putting a lot of quotations into
your novels, and I was wondering if that had affected the naming of the novel?
Mavis Cheek: Well, actually not, no. “Patrick Parker's
Progress” - I had a real problem with the title of that, and its working title,
whilst I was writing it, was “Little Bridges”. Because I thought Audrey builds
little bridges, which is what women do. I mean women are constantly making
bridges metaphorically in life - family and emotionally. But it wasn't strong
enough and my editor said to me 'I think we've got to think about the title'...
Then I thought of “Pilgrim's Progress”... (Patrick) is totally the antithesis
of that, he is entirely good, and Patrick is entirely bad... And I like the
alliteration of the title 'P P P'.
KPM: I believe you moved out of London a couple of
years ago. How has living outside the big smoke affected your writing?
Mavis Cheek: Well, I do less because I've been so involved in
the house. It's the first time I've ever had a house where I've been able to
make it mine. I've actually had the money to do nice things to it and make it
nice to live in, so I've been doing that a bit. I'm now ruthless with the fact
with whatever else I do I have to write a thousand words a day. I've never
worked like that before, but I wrote “Yesterday's Houses” entirely with the
house being pulled apart around me, in a tiny little sort of catacomb
somewhere, with builders all around me. And the only way that I could sustain
writing was to say 'I have to do at least a thousand words a day'.
KPM: What are you working on now?
Mavis Cheek: The new book, not the one that's coming out in
January (“Yesterday's Houses”), the new one... Well, I'm very interested in
Anne of Cleves... A). because she was rejected for her looks, and I think we're
in a very lookist age, and it was probably one of the biggest rejections for
looks in the world ever. I'm fascinated by the art of it, the Holbein portrait
of her. And also the fact that she was reportedly dull, manic, boring, (but)
she was actually clever. She came from a very dull little neck of the woods in
Cleves, got the most wonderful settlement from Henry and led the life of Riley
before she died. She wasn't allowed to marry, which she probably did see as a
great drawback, because I think she would have wanted children, but apart from
that, she lived it up. (Henry VIII) was rather fond of her in the end. So I'm trying
to marry the discovery of her with a contemporary heroine, but not too on the
nose - it wouldn't want make great parallels. It's very hard. I wanted to do an
historical novel, but it was far too presumptuous to put words into the mouth
of a real person. I couldn't do it... because it seems to me wrong. So I read
about 302 books on Anne Cleves and I'm now going to do it through... Any words
that are made up will be done through the mind of my heroine, my contemporary.
That's my way around it. That's the theory. At the moment, my heroine is a
recent widow, and although I wanted her to really rather upset about it, (she)
isn't. Which is causing… some problems, on the grounds that I'm not quite sure
how sympathetic she'll be to my readers, if she's quite so cavalier about her
husband who's popped his clogs. I think there's an analogy there, which... you
often find this in writing that you don't quite know why you're doing
something, and it's only later, more or less when the book's finished, when you
see the themes that have always been there, that you've been working through
somehow with a vague idea. I think that's one of the exciting bits about
writing when you discover parallels you didn't know you knew. Like the Brunel
thing where my character in “Patrick Parker” dumps one woman for a better type
of wife for him. Which is exactly what Brunel, Patrick's great hero, did.
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Visit our Mavis Cheek page
for a Mavis Cheek biography, bibliography, articles and interviews |
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