Belief

A L Kennedy

18 March 2008

Q: Today I talk about belief with a writer whose every published word, it seems, has been garlanded with awards. From the Scottish Arts Council Book Awards for ‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ back in 1991 to the Costa Book of the Year for her fifth novel, ‘Day’ in 2008, taking in among others, the Somerset Maugham Award for ‘Looking for the Possible Dance’, a listing on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists - twice – and the Salon.com Award for ‘Original Bliss’. She is A. L. Kennedy. Awards aren’t everything. The reviews come thick and fast these days, many published and even mocked on her own website, for A. L. Kennedy is also a stand up comedian. Despite a fear of flying, she undertakes promotional tours for her books, and enjoys a substantial following among those who find her writing by turns wry and funny, stark and stoic, insightful and invigorating. We’ll come to the adjectives in a moment, Alison. But let’s look at the background to all of your writing life, which of course starts at home. Mother a teacher and a Methodist, father an atheist who played the organ (laughs) in church.

Kennedy Yes. I mean I w…I was in the strange position of having em English parents who had this different kind of Methodist chapel background. But then for quite a while till I was four or five, we were going to this church which was quite a ‘fire and brimstone, shouting at you’ type of Church of Scotland church, which seemed…I, I never associated it with religion or God or anything, it was just a quite peculiar musical event. Um, and of course I went to a school which at the time, I couldn’t have defined it as being Calvinist, but it was completely about em…all of the tenets of, of Calvinism. So just kind of oozed into you w…without it even being sort of overt.

Q: Sin, guilt?

Kennedy Yeah e…everything is wrong em, God is watching you, everybody else is watching you um…keep your head down, it won’t make any difference if you do. A strong sense that about twenty-four people were going to get into Heaven, and it had all been decided, and it didn’t matter what you did.

Q:Does it linger, that?

Kennedy Yeah, the kind of self-loathing um…er and insecurity, which at, at a certain level I think is good. I mean if it, if it, if it’s overwhelming, then it just, becomes paralysing. I mean I, I think being completely without guilt is fairly dreadful, and makes you actually quite dangerous. But er, er when the self-loathing turns out and it just becomes cantankerousness and...misanthropy, which you can, ‘cos the only person (sigh) you can loathe more than yourself is the person standing next to you in the queue. Um, I just find that very unattractive about me.

Q: And a loving God? Was, did He figure and bring pleasure, happiness, joy into your life?

Kennedy No, I find that very unconvincing. I still, still kinda um…

Q: You think He’s an angry God somewhere?

Kennedy There was a strong kind of idea that, that it was to do with wrath and vengeance. But very much an Old Testament thing so I had to do a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction from er kind of fourteen, fifteen onwards.

Q: Did you admire the language?

Kennedy Oh it’s fantastic, and I loved the, I loved, I loved the singing, I loved the Wesley hymns. When I went down um to Staffordshire to be with my m…maternal grandparents em, er I loved, I loved the feeling of er, the ecstatic feeling, and I mean the, the King James Bible. Er somebody from the Gideon’s came to our school and said y’know ‘Of course, we don’t actually expect you to read the Bible, but we’re going to give you this little, tiny New Testament. And of course I took that as a challenge and read the entire Bible a couple of times. Um Numbers is really dull. Um, but it, it, a lot of it was just…extraordinary language.

Q: (Laughs). Your family had a crisis when you were about eleven, and your parents separated and divorced.

Kennedy Mmm

Q: Eleven – eleven year old girl – it’s a bad time for parents to split, isn’t it, particularly, I would’ve thought?

Kennedy It’s not great – but then they, they were um, they just didn’t get on so it was this combination of er relief em, guilt at feeling relieved em, a huge amount of confusion, everybody being in their own, little box of their particular variety of despair. Em…so it kind of knocked quite a lot of the er, the comfortable padding off the edges for a while. I think we got into quite a besieged mindset for quite a while.

Q: You went to Warwick University – a time of turbulence. Student militancy, Warwick, Theatre Studies – I should think that was all rather invigorating, wasn’t it?

Kennedy Oh, it was just mad. Um, talking to chairs doing, really doing ‘white face’, wearing a leotard, mime, in car parks in Coventry. I…just cannot think why we weren’t beaten to death.

Q: What did you learn?

Kennedy I don’t…that I should never, ever, ever do that again! Um, physical sense of language – again the sort of ecstatic thing was, was great. But the idea of acting was not where it was going to go.

Q: But was it em, a time rich in ideas, and new ideas arriving, being examined, discarded, new ideas coming along, or…?

Kennedy I did have er an amazing lecturer, who, who gave this remarkable series of lectures – but one in particular. He, he, he, he specialised on, on The Enlightenment and his opening lecture was ‘By being here and by being who you are and by being a student, you are The Enlightenment. It, it, never went away – you are part of it now. That genuinely fired me – and I kind of believed that it would be theoretically possible for theatre to be a sort of alternative form of government. Um, that somehow acting things out could change them, so I, that I, I was quite fired up and I, y‘know I, I, I loved performing em, you had a huge amount of er access to facilities that you, you would never have again.

Q: But you saw The Arts as a sort of vehicle of, of a moral crusade, did you?

Kennedy I could see that they would, they would just release this enormous energy, and they allowed you to find who you were. And I was very kind of nervous again, being thrown into university – didn’t know anybody. I just stayed in my room for about three days with (wry laugh) no kind of protection at all. Er so I was in my little cell em, desperately trying to change from an English course to a Theatre Studies and Drama course and, and feeling very kind of disjointed and er within a performance, you, you only have to say what, what you know you have to say. And, and nothing unexpected w…will happen, other than in a, a good way, and you, you know how to move. And I discovered that I could dance – all I had to do was to, to pretend that I was somebody who could dance. And that was, y’know – and you could, you could go off and you could, you could em (sigh) say Marlowe, or, or be allowed to say Shakespeare. And this just, this enormous thing would happen to, to your body – and that was er very intoxicating.

Q: Do The Arts still give you that kind of exhilaration? Because the word you’ve already used twice is ‘ecstasy’.

Kennedy If they’re good yeah – I, I just am fantastically difficult to please. And I, I was kind of unfortunate in that I saw very early on em, y’know some remarkable I er, the, the King Lear performance with er Michael Gambon and Anthony Sher, before Anthony Sher was particularly known, which I think I saw three times and the, the third time, sitting next to this guy who was a skinhead, who’d come with a college course. And he was, he just didn’t want to be there, and he was fidgeting, and I knew I was gonna like it, but I wasn’t gonna like it if he was gonna fidget and sigh and not wanna be there. And you’re kind of contemplating, remonstrating with it - but he was very big. And he, he got quieter and quieter and quieter. And by the end of it, he just turned to me and em he was, he was crying.

Q: So you became a Community Arts worker – so you put your money where your mouth was – I mean you actually took, presumably quite small wages to go out there and spread the message about The Arts to people who initially didn’t want to hear it.

Kennedy Well it wasn’t a, a selfless a…act. I was completely (laughs) unemployable. Um it was really all I could do. Er but yes I mean I’ve, I, I fell into it em, literally, and then was working with (sigh) all kinds of people over em quite a number of years em, more and more often with people who, who were very em as they say now ‘excluded’. Er people with degenerative diseases or er, mental illnesses or er, er…different types, y’know the Cerebral Palsy or Down Syndrome. Er people in prisons, people in psycho-geriatric wards. So all, all of the people that everybody ignores and pretends to have wonderful plans to help.

Q: Why did you do this?

Kennedy I just got more and more outraged. Er…that tiny, simple things could make people’s lives better, tiny, simple, cheap things could make people’s lives better, and they almost never appear. One of the things that people want to do is just to tell you who they are. Particularly if you’re really, really ignored, or you’re in prison, or er, you’re in a de facto prison – you, you want to tell the story that‘s you to one other person.

Q: You see I’ve got the feeling that this is really all pinned to some very clear concept of why we’re here, or what we owe each other, or what’s possible. Do you ever articulate that?

Kennedy Er pr…it’s probably more worked out now. But at, at the time, I, it’s remarkable how I kind of ran away from working with language, ran away from working with narratives. Er my life up until my (sigh) at least mid twenties is the sort of…er amazing serendipity that I just ended up being forced into a particular corner.

Q: And earlier on, I think you tried out different religions didn’t you? Didn’t you go to a Hindu temple? You attended Quaker meetings. You were moving around, searching?

Kennedy Yeah I’ve always been interested in, in how people believe um, I think because my own childhood was quite confused and it was obvious that people did believe things, but they all believed in very different ways. My g…my grandmother was different from my grandfather, my mother was different from my father – they were all different. They all seemed to believe something. It was an issue. So I mean I, I, I attended the, y’know the Hindu mandir for em quite a while. Not intending to become a Hindu, but just trying to understand how, how they did it. And I have to say they were fantastically welcoming. It kind of made sense - at a certain level it makes more sense than a guy with a beard and a frock who’s wrathful and loving and vengeful and with chicks under his wing. And y’know if, if you split it all up into er y’know Hanuman does this and Shiva does that em, and plus it’s a three in one thing - and Brahma er unifies creation, preservation and destruction. The, the similarities between so many stories don’t seem to undermine it at, at a certain level. It all seems to be a way of making sense of something.

Q: But you’ve settled for not accepting a particular creed yourself.

Kennedy The closest I’ve come is the Quakers, because they generally don’t have words, so there’s nothing to disagree with.

Q: What a strange thing for a writer to accept (laughs).

Kennedy Well you become so picky about them, em and I, I, y'know I, I'm so likely to sit in the pew and just be in a huff er, and they have, they just have such a good social record, y’know. They, they really do 'put their money where their mouth is.'

Q: So your first book of short stories, your first published book, is when you’re twenty-five. It is a book of short stories, and this begins the serious involvement which has gone on ever since perpetually writing and dealing in words – either preparing or not. What makes you a writer?

Kennedy I think I just can’t help it. Em, I didn’t even f…in as far as I do feel like a writer, I didn’t feel like one until round about the second book the, y’know when the, when the novel had been published. Um er it’s, it’s always been a kind of 'Well I can’t do anything else so I’ll do this and it will at least, at least give me personal satisfaction.'

Q: And what is that satisfaction?

Kennedy I have no idea. Um…

Q: Does it feel good doing it?

Kennedy It does, it feels great – it’s a, it’s a kind of meditative thing. It’s like meditating with an enormously long mantra that you fiddle with endlessly. Em, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s an absence of self, it’s an absence of er, a sense of time passing. It’s a lack of awareness of your surroundings and your ego. And it kind of interrupts that dreadful, endless, bleating, whining, grumbling interior monologue that everybody has, more or less. It just makes that go away for a while.

Q: Well the rich (cough) richness of your imagination – and its very particularity is something um very clearly identified. I mean you couldn’t read a page of A. L. Kennedy without knowing it was you. Basically because it is both wry, and there’s always a funny twist somewhere. But the subject matter is amazingly grim. I mean men beating up women, women screaming, unhappy, wretched. So this conversation you’re having, is with this appalling level of human experience.

Kennedy Well it’s c…some of the motivation is…that I do…I just can’t stand being aware of the things we do. So many of them are so terrible that that’s, it seems slightly more pressing to talk about that than the, the things that we do that are right, ‘cos they seem to be self-propelling. And they’re also fantastically difficult to write about. Um…so it, it’s always, it…I, I don’t, I’m, I’m just drawn the directions that I’m drawn in. But you’re trying to somehow redeem that darkness and balance it somehow.

Q: And is it cathartic for you? After a, after a day spent with deep distress in the text, d’you feel (laughing) good at the end of the day?

Kennedy Um, it’s more that I’m not actually aware of it being deeply distressing.

Q: Mm

Kennedy I think I’m slightly oddly wired. I’m quite detached in certain ways. And I mean I…I’m not em, I don’t think that what I’m writing about is real. It’s, it’s, it er, it’s fiction. I’m trying to make it appear to be real, but em, there’s so much effort goes into that, that it will always seem less real than it would to a reader.

Q: One of your s…later stories, you speak of someone having a tattoo on their forehead that says ‘Person Woefully Unready For Adult Relationships.’ Does that refer to anything personal?

Kennedy Em indeed, although it actually came er f…a friend of mine always wanted to have a badge that said it, on a little lapel badge, so you could say y’know ‘I’m, I’m, I’m feeling quite confident at the moment’ or em ‘Leave me be.’ Yeah but I, I d…I mean I don’t think that’s unique to me. Um, I can’t remember the Freud quote but he s…y’know this kind of dreadful bewilderment with all there’s, there’s, there’s nothing like the bewilderment of being in love. Em I don’t think anybody’s all that great at it. I console myself with that thought.

Q: But you, but you try it from time to time, being in love?

Kennedy I tr…actually desperately try not to. Em…

Q: It comes into the lives of your characters enormously poignantly – and in immaculate detail, in that you feel for every nuance of the way one looks at the other’s mouth, or the way the voice turns and twitch…so you completely observed human beings almost clinically, interacting. Is it a, a rewarding examination? Do you feel human beings are…good people? Bad people?

Kennedy Both – they are, that’s the thing – they’re angels and monsters sometimes simultaneously. That’s why they remain interesting. I s…I s…I suppose I’m an observer – but be…beyond a certain point, you’re not observing, you’re kind of constructing and I suppose you’re checking back to observations that you remember. Um, but it, it, it’s kind of just continually making an imaginative leap so that you’re in somebody’s head, and then you look out through their eyes, or y’know just to try and make things real. Because the person who’s reading it has paid money and turned up and been in a book shop and they should have as much fun as possible. And I, I, I believe it is essentially en…enjoyable, whatever the thing is about – just to be somebody else, to be able to be somebody else – because it’s impossible.

Q: Let’s talk about your characters. I mean but they’re real to me when I read about them – so let’s just assume that they’re there. Do people need a purpose in life?

Kennedy I think yeah, although it, it makes them happier I think. People aren’t very happy if they have just a complete absence, if they don’t have something to believe in, if they don’t have some feeling that they’re useful. We seem to, to need that.

Q: In a later story – in ‘Original Bliss’ which is one of a book of short stories but is a long, is a novella in that book – it is about someone who has lost a belief in God and is very distressed by that. And she meets a guru figure and he’s a pr…professor, a rather strange and eerie character. Em one of the things he says to her is ‘You can’t have faith if you need evidence.’ And that’s one of the problems with faith, isn’t it? It has to float free of any evidence. You can’t go round saying ‘Prove to me that there was a miracle, prove to me that God redeems.’ That’s a, that’s the sort of dilemma that remains unresolved in the short story, and presumably in your own view?

Kennedy Yeah it’s, it’s, it’s always gonna be. I…either you have proof or you have faith. It’s, it’s difficult in a climate like the one that we have now, where it’s so difficult to ascertain the facts on, on, on anything. Because there’s not enough money to pay investigative journalists and there’s not enough time to put out the investigative television programmes that we used to have. And you now have journalist reports where people will genuinely say it could be this and could be that – who knows? It’s like ‘Well you should know! You’re a journalist – I haven’t got time to…Oh OK, I’ll go and find out.’ Which tends to leave us where just whoever believes the most intensely wins, no matter how bonkers what they believe is. And, and quite often if you believe something very bonkers you have to believe it intensely, because it’s the only way you can sustain it in the face of evidence. And that just becomes fantastically dangerous.

Q:And you’re, so presumably alarmed by the rise of extremism and fundamentalism in religious attitudes across the world.

Kennedy And, and in, in all other attitudes. I mean it, it, it can be anything – it can be a belief that you can fix your life by just buying gadgets endlessly, or eating continually, or other types of consuming or that you’re preying on other people is how you’ll – y’know. I mean there, there are all kinds of manifestations of it.

Q:Consumerism – deadly for the spirit?

Kennedy I think yeah, it just kind of clogs it – and it makes you very…it’s, it’s sold to you as being empowering - but it’s, it’s absolutely re…the reverse, as so many of these things are. It puts you totally at, at other people’s mercy.

Q: Now the extraordinary thing, and which is unique to you, is your, the harshness of the subject and the encounters between these re…often just wretched. I don’t mean ‘wretched’ in the terms of writing, but sad people – is redeemed by the humour of your style which is benign, but it’s li…it detaches you, doesn’t it from identifying with them quite. And gives us as readers a relief of not having to go through it quite with them. We’re just a little distance away. Is comedy…is comedy working on tragedy, d’you think, at all times, to relieve our, the burden?

Kennedy Well c…I mean comedy/tragedy – th…they are…they always say the, the, the only difference is time. Um they’re so close, and I mean all, all of the humour that I love is the kind of humour that y’know, comes out of being in the trenches, and you get the combined gas mask and mouth organ. And I mean that’s, a person in the trenches thought that. Y’know al…alternative humour has always been there – it, it didn’t just emerge in the ‘80s – it’s, continually has to kind of reinvent itself and re-declare itself. Um so you, y’know l’ve, I’ve, I’ve never been interested in humour that isn’t about things that are serious. But I mean it, it is a response a, a very normal response that, that, that people use (sigh) when you have to laugh or cry or y’know there’s like fight, flight or laugh. And if, if you cannot fight and, and you can’t flee, you’re either gonna go nuts, or you’re gonna somehow kinda pack yourself up in a, in a little bucket and lift yourself up by the handle and, and, and laugh for a minute and get through.

Q: Why did you want to become a stand up comedian?

Kennedy Em again I didn’t want to, but I just ended up em doing that, and then it, it is one of these things that’s a sort of heroin fix. Er probably like writing, although I did that so early that I…er y’know, I wouldn’t notice it as much. But you, once you start doing it you have to keep doing it.

Q: It’s addictive?

Kennedy Yeah, it’s a huge buzz.

Q: Standing up in front of the crowd, is that what’s nice? The laughter from people?

Kennedy It’s just an enormous energy and if you, if you spend a lot of time with people that you made up earlier who, who don’t exist em, doing something to which there will be a reaction in two years’ time, by which point you kind of really don’t care because you’re doing something else. And it, it’s y’know and anything positive that happens is so far away, that it isn’t actually all that positive. Um it’s, it’s so immediate and, and kind of alive. And again it’s just it’s, it’s, it, it’s language. You’re, it’s em…really interesting use of language.

Q:You hit a block in ’98 – there was a crisis in your life - you had writers’ block. And there’s a sort of rumoured story about some would-be attempted suicide and being distracted from it. Is this one of your tales, or is there some roots here in actually what happened?

Kennedy Er book, written in a book I y’know my contract with the reader is if I say a book is fiction it’s fiction, and if I say a book is, is factual, it’s factual. Em I find it hilarious that journalists have never believed the facts, and have always believed the fiction. I, it’s just perverse. Em…

Q: Well the story about you thinking of committing suis…

Kennedy Mm

Q: … jumping from a roof or something, and being distracted by the sound of your neighbour’s singing…

Kennedy Em well not my neigh…I, I never knew where it came from. Em, yeah there was just this…peculiar, badly amplified noise of Marie’s Wedding, which is just the most repulsive, horrible er pseudo folk song. And er, it’s just enough to make the whole thing seem…you suddenly realise how ridiculous you are em, and that it wouldn’t be worth murdering somebody for the difficulties you have. And just the fact that the somebody is you, there’s actually no difference.

Q: What, what brought you out of it?

Kennedy Um just gradually grinding on and I, I used comedy a lot, I, I’d, I…

Q: You mean work brought you out of it - just keeping going?

Kennedy Oh, just keeping going in a, inhaling and exhaling (wry laugh) um…and I, I watched a lot of comedy. Comedy and Science Fiction, in fact er – the two great escapes. Er lots of DVD boxed sets started to get purchased (laughs)

Q:And you’ve not been that low since?

Kennedy Em…yeah er, but not to the point of I, I think once you’ve worked out you can’t kill yourself, it, it just stops being…something you can take seriously.

Q: So you don’t go down that route in any way?

Kennedy I, I, I d…well I, I, for me I just I c…I can’t, because I know…

Q: You’re too busy…

Kennedy Well it’s either in you or it’s not. I mean I’ve been very, very low another one time since then em, but you just, you realise you can’t leave what…whatever your solution is, it isn’t gonna involve leaving. You have to stay until you go involuntarily – which is hilarious (laughs).

Q:You may laugh… Strangely enough, after that episode – whatever that reality was – you were asked to write a book about bullfighting.

Kennedy Mm-hm

Q: And you went and watched bulls being killed.

Kennedy I did indeed, in a haze of em painkillers, ‘cos my…I mean the big f…factor in wanting to kill myself as well was just being in er, intolerable, high-level pain for…what turned out to be about ten years, which just hugely alters who you are. I had a herniated disc in my back that wasn’t diagnosed for about six months, er s…by which time we had muscle wasting and all kinds of other difficulties. Um, and I went from being like a big size 12 to quite a modest size 8, over a course of three months – I mean it’s just craziness. Er, so yeah, then I was em suddenly, it seemed weirdly appropriate I’ve a…y’know I’ve always kind of (sigh) again, made an agreement with myself that if an idea is…er there for me, I shouldn’t torch it – I should find a way of doing it. And then when you’re dealing with matters of life and death, the only thing I could bring to it, ‘cos the only thing in my head was er pain and death and some kind of urge towards self-destruction. So it, er it weirdly kind of fitted that all of that should go into the book. But I did say when I handed the book over 'Look y’know I, this, this is it – this is the first draft, this is the last draft. If you don’t like it I’ll give you the money back. I’m not being stroppy, I just can’t re-write it. I don’t ever want to read the book myself, I’m not gonna do any readings. That’s it – that’s the book.

Q:You made a speech on the er evening of the winning the Costa Book of the Year Award…

Kennedy Mmm

Q:…in which you em appealed to the audience. You wanted them to do something, which was to keep language alive and to keep stories coming - a really strong message that. I mean d’you feel language, storytelling, im…is both important and under threat?

Kennedy It’s hugely fundamental, and er if you…disassemble your education system, you render your entire population powerless. They can’t understand laws, you don’t know when you’re being lied to, you don’t know when you’re being sold whatever you’re being sold - a pre-emptive war, a car that doesn’t work, whatever. Then you have libraries with no books. I know so many people who educated themselves and got round the problem of, of having had inadequate education at other times by going into a library and just reading it. You could do that – you can’t do that now. Things are just being taken away at so many levels. You read newspapers, if you read them back ten years, back another ten years, the standard just has plummeted. It’s, it’s, this, this is not imaginary – you can see it in black and white.

Q: And your attitude is really m…it’s still fired by a moral fervour, isn’t it? I feel it – I heard it.

Kennedy I think if we lose that, y’know there’s the arty-farty ivory tower thing, which people will always say, and this is how I make my living. And y’know I will continue to make my living by doing this. It’s, that’s I’m, I’m safe, really I could pull the ladder up after me. The difficulty is we, we, we run on narrative. You have an interior narrative which is ‘I am this kind of person’, and that makes you safe or makes you dangerous or makes you functional, or whatever. If we don’t have an idea of what’s human in our head, we make very strange decisions about how a human behaves. Em y’know you, you can be predatory er, you can, you can be pre-emptively aggressive because you’re terrified, because you don’t understand your surroundings, because you have no way of understanding them. If you can’t express your emotions verbally em you’re really hampered, so how, how, how do you express them? And er you’d, part of that is, is then about using language factually, which is usually important. But the idea of fiction is this idea of putting yourself in somebody else’s skin. And if, if you can do that, you’re practising on a daily basis understanding that other people are as precious and complicated and irreplaceable as you. Which makes it really hard to kill them. Er and the reverse becomes quite sociopathic. So it’s not this theoretical, airy-fairy, the Left think it’s a waste of time, the Right think it’s er not for the masses - well everybody thinks it’s not for the masses. Em, if you don’t let it be for everybody you live in a really dangerous er and depressing society. It’s just such a joyful thing. It makes you so un-alone and powerful and articulate in your own head. It’s like this personal stereo that you don’t have to pay for, you don’t have to download anything. It’s just there for use, this huge power within you. So course no politician wants you to have that…never will. No advertiser wants you to have that. But you can have it for nothing, er it’s like in-built – all you have to do is encourage it and put in a certain amount of effort.

Q: A. L. Kennedy, thank you.

Kennedy (Laughs) Thank you.