A Conversation with A. S. Byatt
Lewis Burke Frumkes
Distinguished British novelist and literary critic A. S. BYATT established herself as a fiction writer of note with her first novel, The Shadow of A Sun. Her major success in the United States came with the publication of her novel, Possession (Random House, 1991) and recently with Babel Tower (1996).
Lewis Frumkes: One of England's most distinguished writers, A. S. Byatt, won the Booker Prize for her novel Possession, and she has written a number of other novels, as well as criticism. Her latest work, The Matisse Stories, published in the United States by Random House, won high critical acclaim. Let me begin by asking A. S. Byatt to talk a little about The Matisse Stories. What prompted them, and what makes them different from your other stories?
A. S. Byatt: I didn't have the idea of writing a book called The Matisse Stories. I've come to realize that it's quite important to say that. The idea of putting these three stories together under this title actually belongs to my French translator, who said to me a couple of years ago, "I think I'll translate your three stories that have Matisse in them." So, it wasn't a commercial or technical decision for me to write three stories on this theme. It was more that I am totally obsessed with Matisse. He sort of gets into everything I do. He's my touchstone for art, the importance of art, as opposed to anything else, in its purest, most uncompromising state. The third of the three stories, "The Chinese Lobster," is one of my favorites of anything I've ever written. You know, every now and then, you do something that comes out right. I think that one goes rather deep and does come out right.
LF: You work with words the way Matisse works with tints and colors. Do you have favorite words that recur, or words you have a fondness for?
ASB: They tend to be color words. At the moment, I am very keen on vermilion and emerald, which I think are very beautiful words. I like words that go running along, like Shakespeare saying, "the multitude in an incarnadine sea making the green one red." I like the one thing the English can do well, setting one of those very long words next to a very short word. I like what I learned at school about putting long Latin words next to very short Anglo-Saxon words. Really, I like almost all words.
LF: You've read a lot of Iris Murdoch's work, haven't you?
ASB: Yes. When I was a post-graduate student I was really looking for a kind of novel to write that wasn't full of macho, lower-middle-class or lower-class British people beating up on girls. I discovered Iris Murdoch and felt her novels had a kind of thinking tension. They were actually trying to work out what life was about, and at the same time, they were funny. They moved fast. They were elegant and passionate. I thought, "This is it."
Then, I wrote a small book about her work. I have admired her for a long time. She believes that beauty and goodness are the same thing. She has a sort of frightening idea that all art except the very greatest is conciliation.
LF: Who were your literary heroes, heroines, and models when you were young?
ASB: Coleridge, that kind of strange world of Kubla Khan, and The Ancient Mariner... I read all of Jane Austen, most of Dickens, and a lot of Walter Scott, when I was a little girl, as I think children did in those days, because there was no television.
LF: And as you grew older?
ASB: George Eliot, whom I now greatly admire. Willa Cather is a very recent hero. She is my latest discovery, and she has somehow changed the way I write. Moby Dick is wonderful. I think Wallace Stevens is the greatest modern poet. He also has an obsession with color.
LF: When did you start writing?