April 1992
Graham Swift: "One writes fiction
because one doesn't want to write fact"
Interview by Adam Begley
Waterland, British author Graham Swift's third novel, shaped many expectations. It was his first book published in America, and when it appeared it seemed that a wonderfully mature novelist had been catapulted fully formed from across the Atlantic. The critics competed for the honor of heaping praise on the 35-year-old prodigy and his lyrical, intelligent and suspenseful novel. Reviewers couldn't decide what they liked best: the precise evocation of landscape, the dizzy play of ideas, or the complex, tightly constructed plot.
That was in 1984. Now Swift is 43 years old and he's had five books published in America, including a brand new novel, Ever After (Knopf, $21). Like Waterland, the new book weaves together strands from the present, the recent past and the historical past. Both novels incorporate events set in the 19th century and provide detailed historical information in a way that makes the arcane essential and the scholarly poetical.
In Ever After, the 19th-century element involves the terrible shock administered to Victorian pieties by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Swift has one of his Victorian characters come face to face with the fossilized remains of an ichthyosaurus. To read his novel one would think that Swift had plowed through numerous accounts of the impact of Darwinism and mastered the intricacies of paleontology.
And so when I talked to Swift recently, I expected to hear about his love of history and the many happy hours he spent sleuthing in the library. Instead he told me, "I find research very tedious. I try not to do research -- if I can get away with guesswork, I'll do that." He pauses as if to let this first confession sink in, then adds another: "I do it the wrong way around. If there's something factual that has got to go into the fictional context, I will, so far as I can, just leave a gap and do the missing part at the end."
Not ten minutes later, I was jumping to more conclusions. I assumed that because in Waterland he evokes with loving attention the Fens of East Anglia, he must have grown up there, or at least studied the region with care. Wrong again: Swift has lived all his life in London, except for a few years as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and a few more as a graduate student at York University (he studied literature -- not history). "I do very little on-the-spot geographical research," he adds.
To keep me from repeating the mistake of plucking biographical clues out of his novels, he says in as firm a tone as his gentle, kindly voice will allow, "I can't stress this enough: one writes fiction because one doesn't want to write fact. Fact is involved in fiction, but what drives you is the exercise of the imagination. There is a way in which you need to keep your subject matter distant from you. It has to be un-autobiographical, it has to be 'over there,' so your imagination can take flight to it." He considers this, then adds his judgment: "That's what's exciting, getting from what you know into what you don't know."
Swift explains that his novels spring from "rather fragmentary, incidental images." In the case of Ever After, it was the image of a boy watching through a window as ballerinas practice. "I had no idea who this boy was," says Swift. As it turned out, he is Swift's narrator, Bill Unwin, who grows up to marry an actress, and who never loses his love of rehearsal and performance.
"When I had Bill," Swift remembers, "I still wasn't sure I had an entire novel. That required a wholly different character in a wholly different world." Why? Because the book as it emerged is about two different ways to have the world fall apart. For Bill Unwin, the catastrophe is accidental and results in the death of his wife. Billšs counterpart -- a 19th-century ancestor whose harrowing journal records his gradual conversion to Darwinism -- destroys quite deliberately his own cherished domestic happiness.
Swift describes the first stages of his writing as "a strange mixture of having a plan and groping in the dark." He talks about knowing that his novel has to have a certain shape -- a shape he grasps only by intuition. "Oddly enough," he says, "writers -- who use words -- often start with wordlessness."
A simple balance between one kind of tragedy and another is an inadequate description of Swift's new novel. He weaves in perhaps a dozen strands of subplot, and fashions two very distinct narrative voices as well. The result is lively and engaging, like an intricate machine with an impossible number of moving parts. But the primary material, Bill Unwin's story and that of his ancestor, is somber if not always sad.
"There's a lot of death in Ever After," says Swift, "but I don't think it's a gloomy book. I think it's quite optimistic in the sense that real optimism only comes when you've looked at the darkness. There's lots of love in the novel, and lots of celebrated happiness, sheer wonderment, and tenderness. And all these things are there in spite of the strong emphasis on mortality."
Swift is uncomfortable suggesting how his books should be read. His modesty is apparent in the mild inflections of his accent and his self-deprecating humor. When he tries to describe the essential Swift subject matter, he suggests that it involves "an interest in how the past informs the present." After a rueful pause he admits, "that's sort of limp, isn't it?"
But he refuses to be modest about Ever After: "I do think it's my best book," he says with quiet satisfaction.
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