Unopened Letters

"Oh she’s a lovely lyrical poet. And she’s not confessional, so it’s not exactly clear that she’s talking about adultery. You can make that assumption. She’s talking about transgression and about guilt. It’s not a novel and its certainly not a memoir, so it’s quite elliptical. She talks about “a woman with no boundaries” and a woman with no boundaries can do anything. That’s what’s so seductive about all these stories is that they hinge on people who will do anything. None of the characters have boundaries. Zisquit explores that idea and writes poetry about the inevitable loss. Whenever there’s love it will lead to the loss of that love and the only question is how long and when. You’d never say that about marriage. Marriage is very stable. It’s there, it’s enduring – one hopes. You don’t think about the end of the marriage from the very moment it begins. But with these love affairs you think there’s inevitably going to be an end. So how long is it going to take? But always the conflict between the loneliness and the affinity. A really catastrophic sense of identification and awareness and understanding of the other person. But you never know the other person and Zisquit gets that very specifically. But you still have the obsession of wanting to know everything about them, in every possible way. Graham Green’s character, Bendix – that’s his obsession. He wants to know every little thing about Sarah Miles and he’s completely shocked when he discovers that he’s misunderstood her totally. He thinks she’s having lots of affairs whereas in fact she’s just been completely consumed by her love of God – or what she hopes will be her love for God. So he’s completely misinterpreted her. In a way, yes. But the question is, which way does the conversion go? To the ordinary, corrupt life of human beings, or to the divine? St Paul supposedly said that “to the pure all things are pure” and I think that’s what a lot of these writers are saying, in terms of the sexuality. Certainly Salter is. That the more licentious it is, the purer it is, because the characters themselves are pure. The characters in Julia Paradise aside, nobody is evil. These are good people. (laughs) She lives in Israel. She’s been there for maybe thirty or forty years. She has five children and they’ve all been in the Israeli army. But her poems are set in the Israeli landscape. They’re not political, they’re very private – you have this sense always that she’s talking in this very intimate way to you. She’s saying, you’re the only person I’m talking to. She’s telling you things that should be hidden, the cost of the love. And at the same time she’s telling you about a life deeply rooted in the very mundane aspects of Israel; in being the mother of five children. So there’s a poem that begins with a woman lying on the bed of her lover’s wife, but she has to go home early and make Shabbat dinner before sundown. There’s marketing and food and vegetables and at the same time she’s just left the bed of the wife of the lover. She talks about children and her own parents and her husband. But again it’s not confessional, so nothing is specific."