Curriculum Vitae

"Until “…I go on my way rejoicing.” No! She was a completely unsentimental person. Women should use her as a role model. She had tough times. She’d been very hard up. She’d been ill. She’d not been well off. But I think she just thought it was part of the struggle. In her mind, she always knew that all this experience was good experience, bad or good. Her marriage is a case in point. On a personal level it was a disaster from the point of view of a novelist it was priceless experience. I think she didn’t know how she would use it, because until she wrote The Comforters in 1957, she regarded herself as a poet. I think what changed that was winning The Observer short story competition, which she talks about in Curriculum Vitae , and the fact that you could earn a living writing prose. Also, and this will hurt most novelists who read this, she found it comparatively easy to write novels. She was surprised by how easy it was. She probably thought, I can go on writing novels like this, no trouble at all, and I’ll still be able to write poetry. To stop these lies hopping about “like fleas.” She was continually irritated by people who’d write biographies, say, of other people, and she would have a small part in it. She would read the little paragraphs or so and find them completely riddled with errors. And when she complained to the writers of these biographies, they would say, ‘what does it matter?’ That would just drive her insane with anger. Because it did matter. Get it right, if you can. God knows, we all make mistakes, but the motivation should be to get it right to begin with. She wanted to write about her upbringing and childhood in Edinburgh, because again, we have a very odd view of the past. It’s very difficult to capture it, so she approached it in a Proustian manner – through memory and objects and food – and tried to recreate it. But even then, it’s almost impossible to do. I love Curriculum Vitae , and think it’s much more pungent than many critics thought it was. It’s laced with wonderful stuff. “On a personal level the marriage was a disaster, but for a novelist it was priceless experience” From what I’ve learned about Edinburgh in those years, especially among the Jewish community of Edinburgh, it was a pretty dark, hard, poverty-stricken place. Her family wasn’t the most poverty stricken, but they weren’t far from it. That was undoubtedly true. When I was growing up in Edinburgh, in my late teens or early twenties, it was quite a different place. And that’s not so long ago. I worked in the Central Library’s reference department, and I could leave the library at night, walk all the way down The Mound, and smell the breweries and the smoke in the air, a pewter coloured sky, there’d be no traffic, no people, and I’d go to the Abbotsford bar and sit there with Norman MacCaig for an hour and a half, and we might be the only two people there. That’s impossible now, at any hour of the day! I remember Edinburgh nights, when you’d leave the library when it had been snowing, and it was just absolutely magical. What a gorgeous, beautiful city. I think so. If you think back – how would she have made a living here? I don’t think even avid readers could name many female poets and novelists in Scotland in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. It was a very male dominated profession. At the same time, there weren’t the number of magazines where you could write and make a living that way. Publishing was in the doldrums, so if you wanted to be published you had to go to a London publishing house, as they were the only ones who could sell your books outside Scotland. I think that’s the sort of thing people say when they have nothing to say. Of course she was a person. You might not like that person, or think that’s a person you should be wary of, but it’s a person who seems incredibly honest, who knew her own worth, who had a real wit – that line that she said about Marie Stopes, for example: “I used to think it was a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control,” that’s pretty tart. Is that a persona? No!"