Love and Friendship

Back in the 1990s, when I began to work for the Royal Society of Literature, I suddenly found myself surrounded by writers I’d admired for years, but never dreamt I’d meet – Sybille Bedford, John Mortimer, Hilary Mantel, Victoria Glendinning, Penelope Fitzgerald. I can’t remember the exact occasion on which I was first introduced to Rose Tremain, but I do remember feeling a little apprehensive. Not only was she a novelist whose work I loved, she was also very beautiful. I needn’t have worried. She was, from the start, friendly, natural, wickedly good-humoured and warm – such good company, in fact, that I was, at first, a little disappointed that she wanted to conduct this interview by email. Then I realized that this was an act of generosity. ‘It’s much more possible for me to get really interesting ideas and explorations going,’ she explained, ‘if I can write them down.’

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One summer’s evening, at the age of 13 or 14, Rose Tremain had what she describes as ‘an epiphany’. She had been playing tennis with friends at school, but was alone, when she was overcome with the certainty that writing was ‘the only thing I wanted to do’; that her life would be half-lived if not devoted to words. It would be quite a while before she was able to live out this conviction – when her first novel was published she was in her early thirties – but in the fullness of time Rose Tremain was to become one of the most prolific and best-loved novelists of her generation, winner of a host of prizes, including the Orange, the Whitbread and the James Tait Black. ‘She’s a true stylist,’ Ian McEwan says of her. ‘A writer who cares about her novels at the level of the sentence.’ Her subjects are sometimes contemporary, even prescient. In Sacred Country (1992) she explored, well ahead of its time, transgender life, while in The Road Home (2007) she considered the economic lot of the migrant. But she is perhaps best known as a historical novelist. The historian Niall Ferguson has said that historical fiction ‘contaminates historical understanding’. What is her response to this? Ferguson can be right, she replies. Historical fiction that reimagines the lives of real characters gives her what she calls ‘biographical unease’ – ‘you keep wanting to say, “Is this true or isn’t it?”, and rush back to the history books’. So, if real historical figures are to play parts in her novels, she insists that they are seen ‘ONLY through the eyes of the invented people’. Perhaps the invented character who has most haunted Rose Tremain, and her readers, is Robert Merivel, a courtier to King Charles II, a joyful, wanton, blundering, yearning man constantly thrown back by the king’s displeasure on his friendship with an austere Quaker doctor, John Pearce. Merivel is impossible not to love, making us laugh over one page and weep over the next. When she first introduced him in Restoration (1989) her aim was to reflect the climate of materialism and excess under Margaret Thatcher. She was searching for ‘a mirror age’ in which similar radical change came very fast. The return of Charles II in 1660, ‘bringing colour and noise and selfish, showy abandon back into a society so long clad in puritan black’, seemed the perfect historical moment. From the first page of the novel readers have a powerful sense of being immersed in the mid-seventeenth century; yet whatever research has gone into it is lightly worn. ‘Research should never show up as data,’ says Rose. ‘It should just be quietly there, behind the scenes, giving the reader confidence that the author knows the territory Rose Tremain wrote Restoration at a difficult time in her life, when she was ‘in a fragile emotional state’, about to go through a bitter divorce. She cried a lot while she worked on it. But she thinks, looking back, that ‘feeling vulnerable and frightened was perfect for this piece of work, which explores human frailty and folly. Merivel’s life is always poised on the cliff edge of disaster, as mine was poised on the precipice of separation and change.’ As a reader, I felt bereft at turning the last page of this romp-cum-tragedy, and Rose ‘missed him like mad’ when she finished the novel – though it wasn’t until years later that she decided to return to him in Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012). Romantic love is a magnet for novelists. But Rose is at least equally fascinated by ‘love’s quieter relation – friendship’. Friendship, she has written, ‘is a formative and precious thing, able to influence our moral positioning in the world, teach us the rules of kindness and generosity, and anchor us to sanity when times are bad’. In The Gustav Sonata (2016) she traces an intense and often painful friendship between two men, Gustav Perle and Anton Zwiebel, that lasts for sixty years, beginning when they meet at primary school in Switzerland, just after the end of the Second World War. The Switzerland the boys grow up in is not one filled with the ‘plainchant of cowbells’, but a dull place where Gustav’s mother, Emilie, works in a cheese factory. A penurious widow, Emilie treats Gustav cruelly, slapping his knuckles with a ruler, squashing his hopes and desires. But Gustav’s love for Anton – a gifted, highly strung musician – is unshakable. On holiday near Davos, the boys find a derelict sanatorium, and among the ghosts of the dead play at doctor and patient. An innocent game mingles with stirrings of adolescence and they exchange a lingering kiss. It’s the most powerful moment in the book, and the most ‘strangely beautiful’ in Gustav’s life. Rose has compared The Gustav Sonata to a Swiss watch. The novel is deceptively easy to read, ‘just as the faces of Swiss watches are clear and easy to read. They appear to do a very simple job, which in fact is not simple at all, but the product of sophisticated knowledge and engineering work.’ The language is simple and unadorned, while the story being told is actually very carefully and minutely assembled. Like Merivel, though in a very different way, Gustav is a character easy to love. Given how much he suffers, I wonder how it was possible to make him so sympathetic without sentimentalizing him? ‘The core thing about Gustav is that he never indulges in self-pity. Thus, the reader is free to pity him as much or as little as he/she feels inclined to, but he never sentimentalizes his sufferings, never specifically cajoles the reader into feeling sorry for him. Even as a man, when Anton goes away to Geneva and all seems lost, Gustav just gets on with his day-to-day life. In the end, I think this is what moves us – his famous “self-mastery”.’ Much of Gustav’s suffering has its roots in his troubled relationship with his mother, and I wonder whether Emilie Perle has similarities to Rose’s own mother, Jane? Yes and no. Jane, Rose says, ‘was a snob and self-deluding and Emilie Perle is neither of these’. But Emilie does know, as Rose’s mother did, how to put her child down. Even when Gustav has some success in setting up and running a hotel, Emilie can’t appreciate what he’s done or praise him, and this was very much Rose’s experience with her mother. She died in 2001, but nothing Rose had achieved as a writer up to that time, including a Booker shortlisting, ‘was ever considered worthy of any serious attention by Jane Thomson’. Rose has written that ‘knowledge is a powerful thing, and knowing when to keep it secret is an art which every serious writer needs to perfect’. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that it’s only relatively recently – and prompted by a conversation with her daughter, Eleanor – that she has chosen to share the story of her childhood in a memoir, Rosie (2018). It makes for much unhappy, and even sometimes shocking, reading. While Rose and her sister, Jo, lacked for nothing materially – in one memorable scene she describes her grandparents’ butler serving them lemonade from a silver salver in their tree-house – they were neglected, and then abandoned, by their father, and treated by their mother with a cool indifference that sometimes shaded into cruelty. Reproduced in Rosie is a glowing school report, in which the headmistress writes that Rose is ‘an exceptionally gifted girl’. The only less-than-perfect note is struck by the gym mistress, who says she needs to work harder. ‘Ha! Ha!’ her mother has scrawled next to this. But for the unwavering love of her nanny, Vera Sturt, to whom the book is dedicated, Rose might have been emotionally crippled for life. In periods of suffering, she has always found solace in writing fiction. But writing a memoir was different. ‘While I’ve always been able to keep a fruitful distance between myself and my invented characters, in order to see them honestly and clearly and to ward off sentimentality, the distance between Rose and “Rosie” was not wider than the chambers of my heart. In order to write about Rosie I had to recover Rosie deep inside myself and make her breathe again.’ Rose had hoped that writing about her ‘loveless parents’ might enable her to forgive them, but this did not happen: she felt no forgiveness at all. ‘The deeper I went into an evocation of the past, the more I realized how little they had ever understood me or tried to help me towards a fruitful life.’ How amazed her mother would have been – and how irked – if she’d known just how fruitful Rose’s life would be. Quite apart from her success as a writer, she is happily married to Richard Holmes, one of the great biographers of all time, and is a doting grandmother. Just as you can make decisions to change your external landscape, she believes, you can make decisions to change your internal landscape too. But is there any danger that contentment might make her writing bland – that happiness might begin to ‘write white’? Not at all, she insists. ‘Joyful moments full of laughter can engage all one’s writerly energy and be very powerful on the page.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64 © Maggie Fergusson 2019