Mary Hamer's novel, Kipling & Trix, published this month, won The Virginia Prize For Fiction. The writing of Rudyard Kipling is known to millions but
what of the work of his talented younger sister, Trix? Mary Hamer's novel
explores dark episodes in the Kipling siblings’ childhood, and follows the
reverberations through their adult lives. Here she explains her life-long fascination with Rudyard, describes her search for Trix and reveals four key
things to consider when turning the facts of real lives into fiction
PJ: Why Rudyard
Kipling?
MH: As a child his stories meant so much me. When I was
seven or eight reading The Jungle Book opened the door to a richer world.
Later, I wanted to develop my connection and aimed to do a PhD on him but I was
discouraged.
PJ: Why the
Kipling siblings and why now?
MH: Timing, in a way. I’d just been writing a book about
damage and experience that does harm to children when, in search of a new
subject, I turned to Kipling, who I’d always meant to work on. I found I now had
a framework for understanding the ill-treatment the Kipling siblings endured as
children, seeing how long-lasting the effects might be. I decided to test my
theory against the evidence of their later lives. I thought I could see a
pattern that I wanted to highlight. Their early experience of loss, separation
and terror, disguised as religious instruction, was like a case study. You
could never set that dreadful sequence up as an experiment but tracing the
later lives of Kipling and Trix allows us to observe how this damage played
out.
PJ: Your research began in scholarship – why fiction?
MH: I wanted to tell the story from the inside and I didn’t
want to argue. I wanted to convince my readers by showing them, getting them to
experience what I thought I could see happening. I longed to get away from
footnotes but god knows bringing these two lives into chronological alignment,
getting those details right nearly killed me. Because I didn’t make a plan at
the outset I kept having to retrace my footsteps and recheck.
PJ: As an academic were there inhibitions about inhabiting
the emotional lives of these literary figures?
MH: For that I’m sure I drew on my month’s actor training
with Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts: I felt I had permission. It
was the scholar in me who insisted on fidelity to historical fact. I used those
facts, those situations, to generate the emotional lives I inhabited.
PJ: There must have been a wealth of material on Rudyard,
but how did you begin to inhabit Trix?
MH: I drew on the wobbliest parts of myself, particularly
for her struggles as a writer. When I was imagining her as a little girl, I
sort of bounced her off Ruddy. A girl would see things a boy couldn’t. And I
was interested in her confusion, bound to this nasty foster-mother for
emotional survival yet hating it. I suppose that was partly back-projection
from knowing that historically she kept rejecting her fiancé and then
relenting. Strands weaved back and forth between her childhood and what I
guessed or knew about her later life.
PJ: The childhood scenes are particularly compelling,
revealing how brother and sister, though dependents, were gradually becoming
rivals. You then track this dynamic through adulthood. Tell us more about the
process of keeping true to these inner lives and the historical record.
MH: I always started from the record. First, when they were
small, I just used what leaped out at me concerning their experience and their surroundings and imagined how ANY
children of their age would have been likely to respond in that situation. And
so I continued as their lives went on, really. Do you remember what DH Lawrence
said about creating character, based on the allotropes of carbon? “The ordinary novel would trace the history of the
diamond—but I say, ‘Diamond, what! This is carbon.’ And my diamond may be coal
or soot and my theme is carbon.”
Following DHL, I didn’t think of K& T as different from other
people.
From the historical record, and the literary texts, I’d pick
up a cue for a scene and then follow them into it. I never wrote in sequence,
by the way, just let my imagination lead the way. It meant there were gaps to
fill in. Trix tended to fall out of sight for too long, for instance. That’s
where I had to join up the dots, really the nature of the whole project.
PJ: Carrie, Rud’s American wife, is an interesting character – one
who seems to have always understood the damage in her husband. What research
allowed you to step into her shoes?
MH: I’ve spent over forty years as a wife! Seriously, I checked
out her back story. At twenty or so she had trekked out West with her brother
to the mining and lumber camps: she was bold. But also vulnerable. Her father had died when she was eight
and twenty years later the brother she adored died in her arms in spite of all
her nursing. You see the pattern. This was a woman determined her husband
should not die before his time, capable but vulnerable, asking too much of
herself.
PJ: The book is a rich collage of potent scenes – you shift
viewpoint and we see Rud and Trix through the eyes of many others. Tell us
about the process of structuring the book and keeping track of all the
characters, places etc.
MH: Thank you for that ‘rich’. From the first I knew I
wanted to see events from the point of view of each of my characters, even the
unattractive ones. I really worked at that, writing scenes I’d never use, in
order to get inside the life of the odious Mrs. Holloway, for instance. I
wasn’t very organised when it came to keeping track of date and places but relied
heavily on Andrew Lycett’s detailed biography of Kipling. The most difficult
thing was checking/working out where Trix was and what she was doing at the
points in her brother’s life that had caught my imagination—then vice versa, as
Trix came to take up more space in my thoughts. That meant a lot of primitive
and repetitive checking, which was the price I paid for keeping my options
open. I’d been afraid that if I made timelines etc before I’d got going with
the writing it would pre-empt my imaginative choices. I wanted to uncover a story I wasn’t consciously aware of, not impose
one.
Real structuring and organisation—creating the prologue,
breaking the work up into sections, all the work to help readers get my drift—came
right at the end, in the last six months to a year of working on it.
PJ: You clearly show the further damage done to Rud by the
death of his daughter and suggest that this explains his rather unattractive
behaviour in South Africa. How much is this a rescue of Kipling for those who have
written him off?
MH: Rather unattractive? He was more or less out-to-lunch.
It really is a matter of record that he madly idealised Rhodes, a monster, and
was brutally and uncharacteristically
indifferent to the welfare of Boer women and children. I believe Josephine’s
death didn’t so much damage him as bring back his early damage, drown him in
it. He was back looking at the world as an angry needy child. I think it’s so
much more interesting to ask why, what’s brought about this disturbed vision,
than to despise him and write him off. What I hope I’ve done is rescue a sense
of him as a private man, once a child, like the rest of us, while maybe
implying that this is not an isolated case. That private rage and distress
particularly in men, because they’re the ones with power, may underlie and find
their expression in public policies and opinions that are disastrous.
PJ: Do
you have another historical figure in mind for a fiction?
MH: To be honest, I’m still reeling from the sheer effort of
all the research I did for K&T and of
converting that into fiction. The reason I wrote about Kipling—I mean started
by writing just about him before realising Trix was an essential part of the
package—was that I had a sense of unfinished business with him. As I’ve said,
it dated right back to my childhood. I sort of owed Kipling, owed him the
attention. He did look a bit like my father and I suspect that had something to
do with it: I don’t think I ever did my father justice, as a man. No other
historical figure carries anything like that charge for me.
I did enjoy taking a ready-made story and bringing it to
life, and I love research, libraries and travelling to foreign settings,
travelling even down to Southsea, but I don’t want another enormous project. K&T spans about eighty years and it took me ten years to
write. If I ever wrote about another historical figure in the same way, I’d
plan to focus more tightly: perhaps on Jean Rhys in Paris. I do have a frail
link with her, for in those days, she typed up a thesis—very badly—for a dear
friend of mine, now dead.
PJ: Apart
from Kipling which writers have influenced you and inspired you to write
fiction?
MH: Language and writing itself, the power of story is the
real answer. It was the library that I loved as a child, the place with ALL the
books, so many doors out into a more vivid world. I think Jo March in Little
Women was the first writer I ever
encountered as a person, imagined or in the flesh. She was the sister with the
greatest appeal by miles. ( Did you ever read Jo’s Boys, by the way? I think my love-affair with America
began there.) I can’t say that other writers have been behind my own impulse to
write, though they’ve made me eager for books. Virginia Woolf alerted me to the
need to find the most precise language in order to know what I was experiencing
and Antony Trollope showed me how to trust that I understood what was going on
between people. But the urge to write came from inside, a drive to name what I
felt and knew. It took me a long while to get to that point, for years I wasn’t
brave enough to come out in the open and risk it but wrote academic books,
under cover, as it were, licensed to argue about serious topics, not simply
free to speak.
PJ: What
are you reading at the moment?
MH: I’m waiting to borrow Bring up the Bodies from my daughter. ( If you’re reading this, Emily,
turn those pages faster!) I’ve admired Hilary Mantel for many years; ever since
I came on Eight Months in Gazzah Street I knew she was extraordinary—painfully acute and how she’s roamed in
terms of subject! And now, what stamina, first the deep dark research, then
transmuting it into not one novel but three.
I recently read A Line in the Sand by James Barr which tells the story of the struggle
between France and Britain for control of the Middle East during the first half
of the twentieth century: serious history but told by means of hundreds of tiny narratives,
interactions, events, dug out by research and brought to life; exotic settings
and absurd goings on.
PJ: What
would you say to someone embarking on a novel based on the life of an
historical figure?
MH: Don’t do it my way! I had none of the disciplines of the
novelist—storyboards, timelines, character outlines—and it made my task more
repetitive and laborious in the end. That was because I wanted to keep very
close indeed, to shadow, the actual historical facts and recreate them
imaginatively. Now I know that if you’re going to do a lot of research and
stick to a framework of facts it’s a good idea to create a timeline at the very
least! It wasn’t just ignorance
and inexperience, though— I chose to write almost in free fall because I really
did want to experiment, step with my full weight onto the path of imagination
and see if that led anywhere. Would it just peter out? When I let imagination
do the selecting from the welter of fact, it took me into a world I seemed to
be discovering, reporting, rather than making up. Risky but it could work for
you too . . . other than that, there are four things I’d recommend:
1. Make the most of opportunities to explore the places
where your character lived, shadow them, so far as you can—I took the train up
from Cape Town to Bloemfontein, just as Kipling did in the course of the Boer
War and I did it at the same time of year. That made it specially exciting and
I valued every shift in the light and every sighting of butterflies. I kept
myself excited, stimulated, by physical reality, whether it was walking the
streets of Southsea where my characters lived as children, or handling Kipling’s
own copy of the Letts diary he kept notes in when he was twenty.
2. Read as many conflicting contemporary accounts of your
character, their issues and the events in their lives as you can: that’s the
way to get layers, to go beyond the limits of your initial sympathies.
3. As you get into the project, use your own moods as they
arise, attribute them to your character and write on from there: you’re very
connected now and it will take you forward.
4. And if there are letters, of course, that’s where you’ll
find your character’s voice. Notice its range and how it changes over time.
More on Mary Hamer and her previous books, here.
Buy a copy of Kipling & Trix, here
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