Tessa Hadley started seriously writing later in her life.Berenice Bautista/The Associated Press
The British author Tessa Hadley, whose gaze is every bit as penetrating as it appears on her book jackets, and who has dressed for a day of teaching in a mustardy twill pinafore over a black turtleneck and hiking boots, is struggling to move a desk.
“Since we are a small group, I thought it might be more intimate if I moved myself in a bit.”
I am struggling not to swoon with excitement. Ever since being bowled over by Cecilia’s Awakening, one of Hadley’s masterful and glitteringly insightful short stories in The New Yorker, I have eagerly devoured my literary crush’s every written word – including her new novel, Late in the Day.
Funny, that title – the 63-year-old Hadley, an academic who turned to writing fiction once her three children had flown the nest, is having a moment. And yet there are only a lucky dozen of us gathered in the meeting room to hear from the high priestess of description herself about describing things.
On a whim, I flew to Reykjavik for the sixth annual Iceland Writers Retreat, where mere mortals can not only attend workshops led by the glitterati of the literary world (Chigozie Obioma, Ann Hood and Louis de Bernieres are some of the other bold names on this year’s faculty), but also, quite literally, rub shoulders with them at the hotel’s breakfast buffet.
And, talk shop over lunch by a geyser; chat with other writers in front of scenery straight out of Game of Thrones; soak in hot geothermal pools under the bracing chill of an Arctic wind; and toast the Northern lights with a bottle of single malt chilling in the snow.
One evening, all 150 of us are invited for cocktails at the President of Iceland’s austere 18th-century residence (Canadian-born Eliza Reid, the chief organizing force behind the Iceland Writers Retreat, is also that country’s first lady). To sum the whole deal up as “fun” would be egregious understatement. Then again, as Hadley reminds us, “the struggle with words is the fundamental struggle.”
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“The great old stories were made out of conventions and clichés. But the danger with resorting to this easy language is it sounds a little primary school. So the business of fiction has become the opposite – pushing against the ready thought, the immediate lumps of preformed language that come to us always, to find words that will create fresh, original life on the page.”
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for someone who teaches literature and fiction writing and wrote her doctoral thesis on Henry James, Hadley speaks to us the way she writes, in fully articulated thoughts and, yes, fresh and original language. She is also passionate and intense in her delivery and makes an effort to fully engage everyone in the room, having asked us to place ourselves on a little map, which she refers to when addressing each of us by name.
Referencing the German philologist and literary critic Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Hadley brings home her main point. “What fiction does is try to create the illusion of life on the page,” Hadley says. Which is why, in her view, the writer’s task of describing things is at the very heart of the art form.
“Description is should be as galvanizing, as thrilling to read as it is to encounter. Describing objects, stuff, material – forcing one’s mind to a fresh perception of the material world – that landscape, room-scape or noise-scape should be as alive and trembling on the page as people.”
Hadley’s work, while regularly praised for its keen observations of humanity and the unfathomable vagaries of human nature, has also been criticized for its adherence to somewhat classical, arguably 19th-century notions of what qualifies as “literature.” The novels and stories she writes are admittedly not particularly adventurous or groundbreaking in scope or structure. They are also largely about the people “we” know: comfortable, educated, Western white elites and their kitchen-sink struggles of infidelity, rivalry and misunderstanding, as well as the human challenges of mortality, growth and change.
But the larger point Hadley is making in this workshop – and, one can’t help but suspect, in her own work – as she hands us a vaguely exotic sort of coffee spoon and asks us to pass it around and describe it for someone who isn’t actually present, is that even the most mundane and everyday things in our lives are worthy of observation. Ergo, it is the writer’s task, just as it is every artist’s in any genre, to closely examine the world around them.
“We should pay this attention to everything we encounter,” instructs Hadley, as she records each of our verbal descriptions of the little spoon being passed around the room. “Reality is that thick.”
When Hadley reads back to us the notes she has taken of our descriptions with her plummy North London accent, our words sound suddenly important, like a poem. One of my classmates laughs that “it almost sounds metaphysical.”
Without skipping a beat, Hadley says, “looking is metaphysical when it’s done with concentration.” Adding, in closing, as we gather our belongings, “near-religious attention to things is what writing does to life.”
Later in the week, over various lunches and cocktail gatherings, I am unsurprised to learn that Hadley is a fan of the great Canadian chronicler of humanity, Alice Munro, as well as the Oscar-winning film, Roma.
“I love the director’s belief that every least tiny detail of his past ought to be saved, and savoured, and seen,” said Hadley, in what on reflection could also be an accurate description of her own work. “Finding the beauty hidden in the core of its ordinariness, and transforming all that daily detail into art.”
One-on-one with Hadley
You are very good at writing the inner lives of naughty girls and women being foolish. Do you see yourself as continuing in any literary or novelistic tradition here, or, do you see this as an area of observation that is perhaps underexplored in literature?
I think it’s a great 20th-century tradition that hasn’t run out of the steam in the 21st. When I think about it, I wonder if it begins with stories of childhood: We always love the little girl who tears her pinafore and gets her face dirty – and that goes all the way back to George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver in Mill on the Floss. But adult women in Victorian novels couldn’t really afford to be naughty or foolish; it was too dangerous, and it wasn’t funny.
Late in the Day centres around a lifelong friendship, another subject that seems not to appear very often in literature. Why do you think that is?
I’m afraid there’s another tradition at work here, too, the fear that your oldest friend may be the one to betray you. Friendship doesn’t have the same strong narrative arc as romantic love. So it’s always tempting to have one friend let the other down … But friendships are wonderfully rich to write, especially if you can carry them over from youth into adulthood, with all the changes time brings.
You came relatively late to this party, starting to write seriously only after raising a family and getting your PhD. Do you think this proved an advantage in any way?
It wasn’t a choice – I was actually trying to write in all that time and not succeeding in writing anything any good. So at the time it was awful. But looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t regret those years of struggling. I read a lot. I thought a lot. By the time I eventually did write something worth reading, I had something to say, or to show. I tell myself that it was like slow cooking.
You mentioned Alice Munro; did you learn anything in particular from reading her?
She seemed to put down in her stories a way of imagining women, marriage, motherhood, art, experience, which felt new, so exciting. It opened everything up. And also, for my own efforts to write, it was as if that lovely spacious imagination of hers – in which everything was possible, everything was interesting – flung a door wide open. So, these small private longings and fantasies (and foolishness, as mentioned above) were a subject for writing. And they were funny, you didn’t have to be solemn about them. The smallest domestic detail, in way Munro wrote it, was a part of a living tissue of awareness, irony, excitement.
You told me that you, too, loved the movie Roma. Can you remind me what you loved about it?
I suppose it’s something like what I tried to say above about Munro: and about realism, too. I love the sense of the tender modesty of the film, for all its bold ambition. I love the director’s belief that every least tiny detail of this past, which was his past, ought to be saved, and savoured, and seen: because it had once happened, and because there was a way of transforming all that daily detail, through the aesthetics of his cinema, into art; finding the beauty hidden in the core of its ordinariness.
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