Festival preview: Tessa Hadley, novelist

TESSA Hadley knows why we read books. In a story entitled She’s the One, she wrote: “The act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment, she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity.”

This serves as a brilliant description of her own work, in which entire lifetimes are revealed in a sentence, emotions are precisely evoked and we encounter people so well-realised, and so familiar, that we feel certain they live just up the street.

A reviewer once said, “[Hadley] wants to tell you the important things about ordinary life.” I long for her to tell me the important things about the writing life, and how she always finds the exact, telling detail to bring each story into sharp focus.

From the moment she opens the door to the rented London flat where she’s spent the past year – she and her husband normally live in Cardiff – we barely pause for breath. Hadley’s conversation is as accessible as her prose.

Illusionism, she once said, went out of fashion in the late 20th century. But why? “It was a necessary  redress, I’m sure, to the naïvety in writing. There was a point when novelistic realism had become such a huge  machinery of credulity, and people so loved plunging into novels, whether they were good ones or less good ones, and losing themselves. Sceptical individuals, for all the right reasons, said, ‘Look! It’s only marks on a page … You’d have to be a fool to believe in that stuff. We have to write a kind of fiction that is clever enough, that can see round the back of the painting.’

“I think that was a crucial moment of renewal, but I also think that babies were let out with the bathwater. Even now in British literary culture – and I’m sure this is true in America – there is an anxiety about realism, about that proneness of the reader to believe and drop into the story. Yet in the end, that is as old as storytelling. When cave paintings came out of nowhere, the first thing they did was look like [real] things.”

Writers, I find, sometimes get so caught up in being clever that they forget the  fundamental value of a good story well told. “I think so,” she agrees. “You can pack all that knowingness away and decide you’re not going to toy with the reader. That to some extent, you can re-establish the old faith system, that you know it’s a story and I know it’s a story, and we’re collaboratively going to be in this other place that never was, and yet will seem more real than what’s around you and around me, as I write.

“It’s an extraordinary imaginative contract, and it seems to be very deep in our faculty of imagining other people. That’s an amazing thing.”

Not only do novels function as a filter through which I examine my own life, but sometimes I have to admit, I momentarily forget that I’m not actually the character I’ve been reading about. Nodding, Hadley says: “If you’re a reader, your head is populated by people from books, and they’re every bit as formative as the human beings one knows. Which is kind of alarming, depending on which books you read.

“I was very deeply influenced by DH Lawrence. I was a clever girl at university and got a First, and didn’t really think about going on to become an academic. But it was reading about Ursula [in Women in Love] going to college, and first of all being enchanted, and then seeing that it was a sham world, and wanting to be alive instead. It didn’t occur to me to look for a career. I just wanted to be alive. That was sort of dangerous and stupid, in a way. So how powerful books are! That book taught me how to live.”

For much of her life, Hadley taught a bit, and focussed her attention on raising a family. These days, though, she is an academic, teaching literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University, the same programme where she earned her MA. She’s a passionate defender ofcreative-writing programmes. “You do hear both sides so vehemently, but when it gets to a good level, I know it works as anapprenticeship system. Nobody can make somebody else talented. But it’s putting people, some of whom have real potential, into an environment that’s incredibly encouraging and supportive. It takes you out of your ordinary life and puts you somewhere where you’ve got lots of time and fellow writers. It’s amazing how often our students talk about [having] that permission to write.”

One’s teachers and fellow students become a critical audience that one aspires to please, and that, she says, ups everyone’s game. “You’re in a class with quite smart people with all sorts of experience and reading taste – they are all better readers than they are writers. That’s a fascinating fact of life, that one is first of all a good reader. So they are demanding, and you are writing for them every week. Quite unknowing of what is happening, you move up in a way that has to do with but isn’t purely competitive.”

Does she have a fantasy reader, and if so, is it the same reader for everything she writes – novels, short stories, and criticism? “Oh that’s a really good question. I definitely know I am pressing up against an audience, but I’m not sure that audience is personified. But this  audience is very demanding, and I’m very aware of things coming up by the audience being present as I write, questions like, ‘Is it clear?’ ‘Is it boring? Have they lost interest there?’ So there’s a demand of clarity and good communication. That pressure on you – is that good enough? Is that true? – seems to come from this imaginary audience as one writes.”

In full acolyte mode, I ask about those apt details that make stories feel utterly true. Does she wander around with notebook at the ready? She laughs at the image. “No, and I don’t think I’m terribly observant. Sometimes I do take notes of things, like beautiful effects of weather, because you won’t be able to recover them.

“One of the things I find I’m doing is when the scene comes to me, not just focussing on the central element, but there’ll be some detail that seems quite unimportant, and one’s naïve instinct as a writer would be to not even think about it.

“For instance, if someone’s wearing a heavy black coat. I don’t know why I’ve got him wearing it, it’s not relevant to the actual scene. But trust your mind, that it’s put  the heavy black coat there because in some way it builds the weight, the symbolism or the rhythm of the scene. Look in your own mind, in the dream that you’re having, and trust your unconscious that seemingly random bits and pieces are stuck to the story for a very important reason.”

Writing is beginning to sound like a game of tug of war. “There is a huge inertia in storytelling and in language. It retracts to a feeble default position. What one has to do is to push with all one’s huge effort against the innate inertia of language. I don’t think it’s an inertia of perception. I think one’s perception is what one has to use to push it out.”

Surely not everyone has equally good perceptions? “Who knows? People hide their true perceptions – including from themselves. I think a lot of people have good perceptions and can’t write. Making up fictions is an extraordinarily odd thing to do, and it doesn’t flow naturally from ordinary looking and seeing and feeling, or from ordinary transactional writing. It’s as specialised as painting or music.”

How does she set about finding her characters? Is it a hunting expedition, or does she lie in wait? “Lie in wait, I think. It’s not even quite like that, it’s like being in a state of hopeful expectancy.

“I usually have two or three stories in my notebook, but occasionally, when I’m feeling short of stories, I think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s the end. I haven’t got any more ideas. I’ll never be able to write again.’ And I have a few hot baths and let myself play mentally with ideas and stories and almost always somebody comes in, maybe from a side or back door. Maybe that’s more like hunting? You can’t make it happen, but you have to put yourself in the right place.

“As Henry James said, you have to become the person on whom nothing is wasted.”

• Tessa Hadley’s most recent book, Mar-ied Love, is out now. She is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today at 10:15, with Sarah Hall, and again at 3pm, speaking to Colm Toibin about his book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother. For information or tickets, visit www.edbookfest.co.uk