Graham Swift

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Ramona Koval: Graham Swift, the title story, Making an Elephant, refers to a toy elephant you made as a boy for your father. Can you talk a little bit about why that's in the book and what happened in that story?

Graham Swift: It's a toy elephant, or rather it was, although I still have it, and it was an elephant made of wood by myself when I was very small, sort of under the supervision of my father. My dad, he died many years ago now, but when he died I always knew that I was going to have to write about him because I'm a writer. It took, I should think, ten years before the piece got written, and its central little story is about the making of this elephant.

My father was a very practical man, you might even have said he was rather unimaginative, but I think actually he had a lot of imagination, and he was very good at anything around the house involving woodwork, anything mechanical, car engines, all the things that I've always been hopeless at. I'm a head-in-the-clouds novelist. But there was this moment when...I don't know why and, as I say, I was very small, but I felt I had to pay some little tribute to my father's handiwork skills, and I made this elephant. There was a little final twist to this episode which, looking back, it seemed to encapsulate a lot of my relationship with my dad and to sort of turn around my standard perception of it.

But perhaps I should explain...when my father died back in the early '90s, one thing I did almost immediately was to go and see if I could find the house in South London where he had been a boy and had grown up, and I found it. It was in the terribly inspiring place called Lower Sydenham and it was just a very ordinary two-up, two-down terraced house, it was like thousands of other houses, but it was distinguished, if you can say this, by the fact that in front of the house...you couldn't really call it a garden, in the space in front of the house there were these two jammed-together derelict cars, and they'd obviously been there for ages, they were rusting, there was ivy growing up around them. I thought, well, had my dad seen this he would either have found it a tremendous joke or he would have been quite horrified. But it was this vision of my father's former home with these cars in front of it that formed the starting point of this piece.

The piece is actually mainly about my father before I knew him. That is to say, during WWII he was in the navy, he was a fighter pilot in the navy. He flew off of aircraft carriers most of the time, but there was a period, because of the chances of war, when he was stationed in Africa inland in what was then called Kenya, and that's actually how elephants crept into this piece again. Perhaps I should read a little passage.

[reading from A small incident stands out... to ...that I'd painted it pink.]

Ramona Koval: And, as you said, you've still got this elephant.

Graham Swift: Yes, I have.

Ramona Koval: And is it on your desk or near it?

Graham Swift: I should have brought it with me actually. It's very small and very grey, but I still have it yes, it's a very treasured object.

Ramona Koval: And when you look at it, what do you tell yourself about it? Is it a reminder to 'think pink'?

Graham Swift: It is partly that, but I think what I feel when I look at it is, my God, I once actually made an elephant! If somebody said to me now, 'Here's some wood, make a toy elephant,' or whatever, I couldn't do it, it's something I've lost.

Ramona Koval: You say you didn't think you were a natural writer, but that you had to make yourself one. How do you mean you weren't a natural writer? We're talking about when you were quite young, so what did you expect a natural writer was?

Graham Swift: This goes back to my father in a way again, certainly the circumstances into which I was born, which if you have to classify it I suppose it would be lower middle class suburban. I come originally from a semidetached house right on the edges of the London suburbs in the 1950s, and that really meant that I came off the conveyor belt of that time. Families like the one I was born into were really being turned out by their thousands. I think what they all wanted then was in a way to be like each other, they wanted to conform, they wanted to be conventional, they wanted security, safety, after all, there'd just been a war, and my father certainly knew all about that, and they wanted the opposite.

So I was really born into circumstances which would not have led anyone to the somewhat insecure prospect of becoming a writer. There was no writer figure in my family, no-one to point me in the direction of writing, so somehow or other it just came form me, that's what I have to conclude. And I think it started at a very early age, and the only external stimulus would have been reading. Back in the early '50s at home you listened to the radio or the wireless or you read, and I think as a kid I read a lot. I think at some point I would have picked up a book, whatever it was, and been enchanted by what was inside the covers.

But I would also have done the extra thing which not every boy or girl would have done and said to myself, well, wouldn't it be wonderful to become one of the people who can create this magic inside the covers of a book. And of course at that point that was nothing more than a fantasy, a dream. I had no sense that I had any talent at writing. But somehow or other it clearly was something which stuck, it became an ambition, it became a real desire, it became something I got very determined about, and eventually I made myself a writer, and I made this little dream that I had come true.

And I have always felt that sense of having no particular ticket of admission to the world of writing, of being an outsider, of not belonging, and so having to look for ways into this world of writing. That still is with me, and I don't think it's a bad thing because I'm not sure that it's a good thing for writers to feel that they belong anywhere, you go your own way. And part of this was a feeling that maybe I was never a real writer. To come back to your question about the natural writer, I had this feeling that there were some writers who were just born writers and they could do it standing on their head, as it were. I wasn't like that, I could only do it by finding the writer inside me and by a lot of work.

Ramona Koval: The way you're describing it, it almost sounds like you're shaping the elephant again from the block of wood, you're finding the writerly animal.

Graham Swift: Yes, maybe the elephant in a way was me. But I now feel quite strongly that the natural writer is really a bit of a myth. All writers can make themselves appear natural but they do that by a lot of work. In the book there is quite a long piece, partly about Greece where I lived for a while, but about one writer who was very important to me. For a long time I had never met a writer, I had never met anyone who had to do with writing. The only writers I could meet and in a sense did meet were writers I read, and one writer who was very important to me was a Russian writer called Isaac Babel who I happened to read for the first time in Greece when I was travelling around very roughly before I went to university.

He made a big impression on me and that impression was partly to do with a realisation that he was not a natural writer and that he had the same fear in a way that I was experiencing at that time, I was only about 18. But the people I met who were important for my writing, for a long time, were...they weren't real meetings, they were meetings through reading, but they had the force for me of real and important personal encounters. I could never have met Isaac Babel because, like many Russian writers, he'd disappeared and died under Stalin in the late '30s, early '40s...

Ramona Koval: You're talking about Red Cavalry, that collection of his short stories, some of them very short, like a paragraph or two.

Graham Swift: Extremely short, extremely strong, sometimes violent, very powerful writing and sometimes very lyrical writing.

Ramona Koval: I think there's one, he tells a story of being a young boy and being in Odessa and there's a Russian fisherman or somebody he's talking to on a pier who is saying, 'If you want to write, you can't write in Yiddish, you've got to write in Russian because Russian is the language for writing and Yiddish doesn't have enough interesting words about trees and landscape.' So did that appeal to you, that idea that he even had to find a language to write in?

Graham Swift: Yes, he had to find a language. He also rather extraordinarily had to find a whole extreme experience to fire his writing. He was actually a pretty intellectual figure, he was Jewish, from Odessa, but during the post revolutionary wars in the early '20s he found himself serving with a regiment of Cossack cavalry in Poland, and this was something almost unheard of. It produced these stories called Red Cavalry and they are, in a way, the result of an extreme experience, absolutely nothing like I've ever undergone.

Ramona Koval: I was going to ask, did you feel that you had to put yourself in these kind of extreme places?

Graham Swift: No, I didn't, but I felt a rapport with this man who, as I've learnt more about him, clearly felt that he was not a natural, that's what I think drew me. I mean, his path to becoming a writer was obviously extremely different from mine, but there was a real connection.

Ramona Koval: Here Graham Swift talks about mentors, literary friendships and a particularly kind editor, Alan Ross.

Graham Swift: Alan Ross, who is no longer with us, sadly, but he was for a long time the editor of a magazine called London Magazine, going back now to the 1970s when I was still this aspiring writer. I'd never had anything published, and at that time I was only writing short stories. I thought I would just be a short story writer. How you wrote a novel, I just didn't know. And I was sending off short stories to this place or that place, and I sent quite a lot to Alan at London Magazine, and I got a lot of rejection slips back, but somehow his rejection slips always carried a little note of hope about them because he would write...I can see his handwriting, he would say 'Almost this time', 'Not quite', 'Nearly'. He was like someone gradually pulling me in, and I felt, oddly, that I knew him before I met him.

And then the magic moment came where he said 'Yes, I'd like to publish this story.' And I did meet him, he said 'Come and have lunch.' I had never met anyone like Alan Ross before. He was a writer himself, he was a poet, he was a journalist, he privately collected paintings, he just moved in a world that was not my world at all, I was a boy from South Croydon, he lived in South Kensington.

And I went to see him and I describe all this in the book but it was a wonderful combination of, as I think I put it, being both let in to a world and being let out. I was being let in in the sense of I knew I was no longer alone as a writer, I had a home, I was meeting someone who was a real friend, certainly to my writing. And I was being let out in the sense that for years up to this point...and I'm no exception, I think this is true for any struggling writer, it's as though you're in a box and you need letting out, and that box can almost start to feel like you're under a stone and you're going to stay there forever. And it's only at the moment that you get published that that lid, that stone gets lifted, and Alan sort of lifted the lid at the same time as he said, 'Come in.'

And, as you say, I associate him always with a particular drink known as a Negroni, which I'd certainly never drunk before I met Alan, and it's a lovely little pink rosy-coloured cocktail, quite powerful, and I always associate that with Alan but I always associate it with the moment where I entered this world which I dared to think I belonged to but I had not entered it before. It was a really wonderful moment.

Ramona Koval: Do you feel like you belong to it now?

Graham Swift: As I said, sort of half-and-half still. Some people might say of me that I'm a quite established writer.

Ramona Koval: I think everybody would say that.

Graham Swift: A somewhat ghastly phrase, isn't it, 'an established writer'. But there's certainly a creature inside who doesn't feel that at all, who is always, as it were, trying to establish itself, and I don't think that feeling will go away. It's what you get with everything you write, you are trying to achieve some position which you haven't achieved yet, that's how I think it is. I suppose in a way all writers, all artists are terribly insecure people, and maybe I'm just talking about general insecurities, but the feeling of really belonging is not something I have 100%, even now.

Ramona Koval: You write about friendships and I wanted to talk to you about that now because you have a piece of you interviewing Kazuo Ishiguro and you write of Caryl Phillips, of Salman Rushdie, of Patrick McGrath. Tell me how important these friendships are to you. Is it possible to have a really good friendship with another writer?

Graham Swift: Oh yes, I hope I've proved that, and I hope the friends I have would reciprocate that feeling. This is rather odd again because I've just been saying there was a long time in my life I never met another writer, and I now have several good writer friends. I don't necessarily see them often because some of them don't even live in this country. And this is one of many things I could never had imagined when I set out to be writer, that I would mingle with other writers and it's one of the ways in which I think I've been very fortunate.

Probably my oldest writer friend is Kazuo Ishiguro who I would have met...this is about 1982, there was a thing called 'The Best of Young British Novelists' and there have been several of these exercises since but this was the very first one. And in order to qualify as 'young' you had to be under 40 (quite generous!), and there were 20 of us. And they included some now well known names, including Kazuo Ishiguro. I think I had met him before but the thing I remember was we all had our group photograph taken by Lord Snowdon in some loft in Chelsea, we all felt very uncomfortable, I can see us looking very nervous about this process. But it actually did us all a power of good. It was...I don't know what to call it, a promotion, I don't know.

It was actually very successful, and people even today remember this, if they're old enough they remember it. And I made contact through that with two or three other writers, including Kazuo Ishiguro. The thing is that when we meet we don't necessarily want to talk about writing. This is a very interesting paradox. I'm quite open to talking about writing with another writer, in fact I value it when it happens but I don't expect it and I think the same is true vice versa. Writers often need to get away from writing and so when they're with another writer there's a sort of recognition, oh yes, we do that thing by ourselves, but we don't want to talk about that now, let's have a drink, let's talk about anything else. It's a strangely paradoxical, ambiguous relationship, one with another writer.

But I certainly have had and continue to have some very good ones. I was lucky to meet Ted Hughes, and I knew Ted through fishing, not through writing. And when we were together I don't think we had a single conversation about literature, about either novels or poetry. It was just taken for granted, and we went fishing, and that was very refreshing. It was actually a wonderful way to meet someone who does the same thing as you through doing something different.

Ramona Koval: So when a friend publishes a book that you think isn't their best, how do you manage it?

Graham Swift: A slightly unfair question, that!

Ramona Koval: Why is it unfair? I wouldn't want to ask you unfair questions, explain why you think it's unfair.

Graham Swift: Well, because you are referring to what is often a very real situation, so it's not unfair at all. The situation feels unfair is perhaps more the point, because if you are good friends with a writer you certainly read their latest book, and I think a certain amount of honest criticism of it, if needed, if that's what you feel, is fine. But basically if another writer has finished a book...to be honest, my principal instinct is to want to give them a big hug for doing simply that because I know from the inside that to write a novel is an enormous undertaking, and when you actually achieve it, it's an achievement. In the sense whether it's good, bad or indifferent to the outside world, merely to have done this thing, to have got this thing from inside you and put it on the pages is a rather staggering achievement. So when I know that this has happened with one of my writer friends I really do feel 'come here', you know. And thus I don't particularly want to say that I had this or that reservation about such-and-such, it can be rather a tricky situation, it's true.

Ramona Koval: Do you show your friends your manuscripts before? Do you get their opinion?

Graham Swift: No, I don't do that. I don't really do that at all, I'm not the kind of writer who shares anything before I feel the whole thing is there, almost not until I get to a point where I feel...well, effectively it's finished, I've done as much as I can do with it now. Some comment would be certainly very helpful but there's nothing more I can do, so it has to be shown to other people. My wife is the first person it will always be shown to, and she can be my toughest critic. But I'm not the kind of writer...I know there are many writers who are the opposite of this, who like to say, 'I'm going to read you what I've written today,' and I think, what a ghastly thing to do. Apart from anything else, it's a terrible imposition on your wife or the person close to you who has to listen to this stuff. I think you have to spare people that. But I know a lot of writers are more than happy to share work in progress. I keep it to myself, and then when it's almost there I feel I can let it go.

Ramona Koval: Here Graham Swift concludes our discussion, talking about his friendship with Salman Rushdie.

Graham Swift: I knew Salman Rushdie a little, I met him before that extraordinary phase in his life where he suddenly had to go into hiding. But strangely I got to know him much more, even quite closely, during that period of ten years or so when he had to live this extraordinary life. And he was often in my home with these policemen with guns and stuff like that, and I was not alone by any means in being in that situation. I write in this book about a little ritual that grew up that my wife and I would always spend Christmas with Salman and his wife, sometimes with some other people, either in our house or in a house which even now I cannot say anything about, I still want to keep it a secret.

Salman is a very prodigious character. He's not always at his best in the situation which he most wants to be in. That is to say, he is a man who wants the biggest audience in the world, and when he has the biggest audience in the world I don't think you always see him, in a way, for the real human being he is. But those Christmases were very small-scale, intimate and secret occasions, and so I was privileged to get to know him and recognise that whatever people say about him, he was a real human being in those days and still is, and he has great warmth and he was very good company.

And given the situation that he was in at that time he kept his sense of humour amazingly, so I actually had a lot of fun with him and with others. And he became...this is really the gist of the piece...he actually became a sort of Father Christmas figure because he would turn up with his entourage of Special Branch policemen who all brought their bit of turkey and Christmas pudding. He's turn up in disguise anyway and I started to feel, you know, it's Christmas morning, we're waiting for this man, surely this is Father Christmas. So, bizarrely in this strange period of his life (I've never told him this) he turned into the nearest thing to a real-life Father Christmas.

Ramona Koval: There are some fantastic illustrations in this book that I wanted to talk to you about, but also some poems, and I want you to read a poem and talk about...when did the poems come in this life of writing novels and other kinds of pieces?

Graham Swift: You're quite right, this book contains actually quite a long section of poems which is definitely something new, certainly in publishing terms, for me. And they all really derive from one rather strange period when I'd finished a novel, it was called The Light of Day, so I'm going back a few years. And when I finish a novel I seldom have the germ of a next novel and, in any case, I feel exhausted, so there's a way in which I don't particularly want to do anything after finishing a novel.

But for some reason after finishing this book, it was either some sort of overflow or I somehow felt I had to keep my juices running, I wrote a poem, very quickly, and I wrote another poem and then another, and for months I was writing just poetry, actually quite prolifically I suppose. And then it all came to a halt as strangely as it began, and it's maybe because by then I had an idea for another novel.

Anyway, I had all these poems, I shoved them to one side, and I don't think I had any notion of publishing. But when the idea for Making an Elephant, of a collection of pieces started to evolve, I thought, well, if you're ever going to publish them, this is the opportunity, so I made a selection and they're in the book. But I'd hesitate to call myself a poet, but I have always felt that poetry isn't just a matter of verse. I think the novel can have a poetic element, and if people say of my novels, as they sometimes have, that there's some sort of poetry involved in them, either in local language or in some larger structural sense, then I'm glad.

Ramona Koval: Would you like to read one?

Graham Swift: Yes. This one is called Allotments.

[reading from I used to tease out the word... to ...among all the others.]

Ramona Koval: I did like that one. And also I just want to show the audience this other lovely little illustration here at the back, it's fishing flies, and then when I look very, very closely it's got 'GS 1994' I think. This is another kind of artistry. They are beautiful.

Graham Swift: You see, I don't just make elephants.

Ramona Koval: This looks like very skilled, practical handiwork to me.

Graham Swift: You can make a mystique of it but it's not as difficult as it looks. Yes, one thing I do apart from writing is occasionally go fishing. One thing you can do as a fisherman, even if you're not actually by the water, is to tie these flies, fly fishing. They are absolutely charming little objects by themselves and perhaps particularly flies for salmon because they can be larger and they can be extremely colourful in some cases. No-one knows, by the way, why a salmon takes a fly, and it's much more important that the salmon is there and the fly is very near the salmon than what the actual fly looks like.

But you can have a lot of fun tying up these special patterns, and it's something I do from time to time. You can have a little kit and a little vice and various tools, and you make them from wonderful confections of feathers, bits of fur, bits of tinsel, bits of silk, and you wrap them around the hook, and if you're lucky something comes out which might even catch you a fish. But you were very sharp to see that little...I don't think it's advertised in the book that those flies are actually ones that I tied, whenever it was, 1994.

Ramona Koval: Please thank him for being with us this morning.

English novelist, poet and, as you heard, keen fisherman, Graham Swift in conversation with me at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. His book is called Making an Elephant, Writing from Within, and it's published by Picador.

Publications

Title: Making an Elephant, Writing from Within

Author: Graham Swift

Publisher: Picador