Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, originally published in 1982 and reissued this year by New York Review Books, opens with its young heroine, Katherine, reading the preface of a book written by her beloved professor, Jacob Goldman:
I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife for helpful comments on the manuscript, patient reading of drafts or corrections to proofs, because Jane did none of these things … Going by the lavish thanks to wives which I find in the prefaces to other men’s books, I deem myself uniquely injudicious in having married a woman who refuses to double as a high-grade editorial assistant. Since custom requires me to thank her for something, I thank her instead for the agreeable fact of her continuing presence which in twenty years I have never presumed to expect.
“There is no doubt,” says Katherine, that the preface—the marriage it speaks of and the world it hints at—“influenced the paths that I chose to tread.” There are many people who would probably say the same of Brother of the More Famous Jack. I read it for the first time when I was sixteen; now, decades later, I find it nearly impossible to disentangle some of my own tastes and preferences from those expressed in the novel. Do I think that having revolting handwriting is glamorous because of Brother of the More Famous Jack, or would I have gotten there on my own? Do I think wearing an all-white outfit to play amateur tennis is embarrassing because of the novel, or does that kind of thing become obvious to all adults eventually? I began rereading the novel in preparation for this interview and realized almost immediately that I didn’t need to: I had the whole thing more or less off by heart.
It is a novel about how to live, or how to be: how to be happy, how to be sad, how to fall in love, how to collapse in a heap when love doesn’t work out. Also: what to wear, what to cook, and what to buy an overconfident but ultimately appealing sixteen-year-old boy for his birthday (a bicycle bell).
The novel begins with Katherine, a nice, conventionally brought-up, middle-class girl, falling in with her professor’s family, so different from her own. There is such a great number of them, to begin with. There is Jacob, the Marxist professor with the ridiculously hairy chest, and Jane, his beautiful, posh wife, who both loves and resents being the mother of six wild children. There are the six wild children, particularly the two eldest boys, Roger and Jonathan, who play different but almost equally significant roles in Katherine’s sentimental education. She is dazzled by the whole family, who are loud and combative and madly sophisticated without being pompous about it or even seeming to set much store by it (“ ‘I’ll tell you something you’ll hate, shall I?’ I said to him. ‘You’re cultured … You always were,’ ” gives some idea of the attitude). Books and music and politics and sex and money are all discussed at maximum volume over dinner. It stops Katherine in her suburban tracks. Her life is never the same.
I spoke to Trapido about Brother of the More Famous Jack at her house, in Oxford. I was thrilled to discover that she speaks exactly like one of her characters: when making me lunch, she asked if I would like “some dear little tomatoes.” We spoke about structuring a novel, hearing someone say “fuck” for the first time, and being taken for Doris Lessing.
INTERVIEWER
Could you picture the shape of the book before you started writing it?
BARBARA TRAPIDO
No. You see, I saw no shape. The book is entirely character-based. It progresses via vivid dialogue. Story-wise, it’s simply one episode after another. I began to write it because a friend goaded me. I was chattering out some anecdote and she said, “Tell you what gets on my nerves about you. You dissipate your talent by just talking out stories.” I was a bit stung by this because I thought I’d already been working quite hard, schlepping on two buses, from Durham to the Sunderland Docklands, where I worked and taught. She suggested that I write a story for the Guardian short-story competition. In the end I said I’d give it a go.
Having dreamt up the Goldman family, I couldn’t get enough of them. I kept being drawn back in. I was wanting all the people in my life to go away and get on. I’d wait till the middle of the night and then creep into this little hide. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. My husband, Stanley, believed I was finishing my thesis on the Pre-Raphaelite poets and instead I was getting high on inventing dialogue. So no, I didn’t see any shape for it. I just thought, Well, today they can go to the beach and then they can go to the cinema. I played around with the dialogue and made it shorter and tighter and even sometimes made shapes on the page with it. I had no idea what I was writing, though I quickly realized it wasn’t a short story.
After a while, I recalled that it was something I used to do in childhood—invent people, sometimes write little stories, and think, This is just playing and it’s the best fun. I couldn’t stop doing it. It was only once I’d written quite a bit of it that I thought, Is this a soap opera? What am I doing, and has it got any shape? What’s going to happen to these people? That led to a sort of shape. In hindsight, I realized—and the writing was all entirely intuitive, I didn’t plan any of it—that I’d made a few linking threads of imagery to compensate. The repeating references to Monteverdi, the “Hamlet hat,” the older Goldman boy’s initials, appearing and re-appearing in upper case, the embroidered butterfly, the falsetto singing—threads of imagery to weave the novel together. What drives it forward is the energy of its quick-fire dialogue and the wish to keep company with the characters. That is what makes it readable. I’m surprised if people think that it has much in the way of a shape.
Where does the character of Katherine come from? Where does Jacob come from?
TRAPIDO
All the characters came out of the back of my head. None of them are based on real-life people. I find in general that any characters in my books who are real-life people, usually walk-on parts, come out two-dimensional, unlike the imaginary ones. With Katherine, I recalled from my own youth that heady feeling of leaving one’s school days behind, anticipating university, the freedom of being a grown-up.
Jacob and Jane are both wholly unlike anyone I knew. But from my own parents I had a blueprint for a cross-cultural marriage. My dad was more dominant, having gotten where he was via his brain. He grew up dirt-poor and went to Leiden University, in the Netherlands, on one of only eight scholarships that I believe existed at the time. My mum had come from a rather sheltered, calm, bourgeois Berlin household, with holiday homes and skiing in the mountains and a boat on the Wannsee. Her family led sweet, quiet, uneventful lives. They watched the coming of Germany’s fascist dictator with great unease and lost everything as a result of the Second World War. She was very timid and not remotely like Jane, except that she played the piano. Both of my parents were “displaced foreigners” in Cape Town, you might say.
In general, the characters in Jack are all imagined, archetypal. I suppose I invented them because I wanted some exciting pretend friends. I think I enjoyed their shoutiness. Katherine’s sewing and obsession with clothes was totally me at that age, forever at the sewing machine with those Vogue “Paris Original” patterns, and getting corrugations in my skull from sleeping in rollers every night to achieve the right undulations in my dead-straight hair.
I’d like to ask you about the preface to Jacob’s book, which appears at the start of the novel.
I so enjoyed inventing that. In fact, I was one of those bloody wives who edited and annotated, not only for my husband, but for quite a few academic types who tend to write in paragraph-long sentences.
Katherine says that this preface influenced the paths that she chooses to tread. How do you see that happening in the novel?
She learns a whole different way of negotiating family life. In a way, the book reads like a seventies pamphlet on progressive child-rearing. And it’s very liberated in that it involves interactions between people with less inhibition about being respectable and tidy. It’s also a bit of an examination of social class, the different pockets of middle-class life … And of course, I am an outsider, which makes one a bit more of an anthropologist in the way she looks at society.
How do you think that comes through in the novel, your being anthropological?
There’s quite an awareness of social class. I think, in general, I’m completely politically obsessed, addicted to newsprint, like Jake.
We once had a lovely lodger who played the piano, a librarian at the Bodleian Library, a rather effete boy called James, who managed to wedge a small grand piano into our little basement studio flat. This was at the time when the Labour Party was trying to supplant Ken Livingstone and impose poor old Frank Dobson in his place as the mayoral candidate—big news day-to-day at the time. “Who’s Ken Livingstone?” James asked me one day, during one of my rants. I thought, I am so envious of you. You don’t have to waste your days fretting about what’s going on, whether it’s the German election or the Labour Party. You are free to think about Dutch landscape paintings and playing the piano.
Do you think Katherine’s political?
I think she probably becomes so as a result of the Goldmans. Jane says that Jacob’s so obsessed with newsprint that if he’s away from his copy of the Guardian, he’ll look through old chest drawers to see if they’ve been lined with two-year-old issues of the Hampstead and Highgate Gazette.
I suppose it’s interesting how quite a lot of English graduates are totally unaware of social class and socioeconomic context. I remember an English fellow, a graduate student, saying, “But it’s got nothing to do with Wordsworth.” And I thought, But of course it has! The socioeconomic context in which these people grow up and survive—you need to know that in order to appreciate the way that the verse kind of explodes. The times through which these people were living impinges on the way they think and write.
Did you show the novel to your husband or did you keep it to yourself?
No. I read bits to my teenage daughter, who relished it. I gave Stan the completed proof copy only after it was accepted. I read him the first chapter and he said, “Hey, this is good!” All throughout my secret scribblings, he’d say, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but why don’t you finish your thesis?” Which thankfully ended up turning into papier-mâché in a cardboard box.
The book is very talky. I do like that. I read everything aloud. I write it up by hand. Then I think, Oh God, that’s terrible. I do massive scribbled amendments, read it aloud again—and again. Then I tape-record it and I play it back to myself and I talk some more into the mirror. It’s a sort of staging. And, rather than plotting, what I do is a kind of choreography. I’ll think, Okay, there’s a dining table, this person’s sitting here, and that person’s sitting there. I’ll move myself around, changing chairs, doing dialogue. I’ll be this person, then that person.
As in, you’ll move from one side of the table to the other?
Yeah. Or on a train, I’ll determine which way they’re facing. It’s quite hard working out chronology and such things as, Is the season right for them to be eating this or that? Can I get this person on a train from one place to another place before closing time? All that can be a bit of a headache.
But the book is quite polished, because I’d been working it more than for a decade, playing with it. Then one of my friends who was typesetting for Gollancz suggested I submit it. I thought, Oh yeah, Gollancz published all those left book-club books that Jake’s shelves were full of. Maybe they’d like mine. They wrote back within the week saying, “We love your novel. We’d like to publish it. Tell us who you are.” Doris Lessing had just conned a publisher by sending in a manuscript under another name. They thought maybe I was someone a bit experienced who was wanting to make an idiot of them. Well, it was a ten-years-being-polished first novel, so in a sense maybe I was quite “experienced.”
My editor changed nothing except for my spelling of righteous—and she added three commas. I remember this very nice posh girl editor phoning me one day, saying, “Barbara, shouldn’t it be, ‘Fuck off’ comma ‘you old cow?’ ” I remember the very first time somebody said fuck in front of me …
How old were you?
I was about twenty-one. It was a Dutch poet who had come to stay.
Does Katherine …
She doesn’t. And neither does Jane. They don’t use bad language. But the boys do.
Yes.
One woman who reviewed my book said, “This is a book in which the women smile and knit and the men have all the good lines.”
I don’t think that’s true.
I think, actually, it is, because the women are more confident, in a way. They don’t need to be shouting and showing off. Though Katherine as the storyteller has some good lines.
Who did you think of as an influence when you were writing?
I wasn’t conscious of anybody, really. And I do get so tired of the way nearly every woman writer says, “Oh, Jane Austen was my influence.” I think the one thing I maybe got from Jane Austen is the energy, the way the dialogue dances and sparkles. The first thing one of my friends who read it said was, “You don’t waste any time on the scenery, do you?” Maybe I got that from Jane Austen, the way that she’ll just bounce into, “My dear Mr. Bennet …” I remembered, as a child, how I quite often just skipped bits that you thought of as “description.” With Jack, I evidently just dispensed with the description.
One novel that I suppose was buried in the back of my mind was Iris Murdoch’s first, Under the Net, which I came across when I was sixteen. It’s so theatrical. It ends with a film set that’s collapsing and these two guys who’ve lost their rental and are wandering about London, not knowing quite what to do. They sort of map London, walking around, over Vauxhall Bridge, visiting this person and that. When I read it, I just thought, I love these people. I want to join them. These are my people. I want to be with them crossing Vauxhall Bridge.
Another is a book that my school friend Sue flung at me when I was a bit older, probably eighteen—The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy.
You wrote Brother of the More Famous Jack when you were forty. Did you always think you’d end up writing books?
I don’t think I ever had any clear ambitions, being a dreamy, dozy, unmotivated younger sister. Though, thinking back, all through my childhood and adolescence I wrote stories—for my mother, for friends’ children. I didn’t think of it as something I could “market.” With Brother of the More Famous Jack, I rewrote and edited madly at around age forty, but I’d started it a decade earlier. When we left Durham for Oxford, in 1970, I’d put it in a box and forgotten about it, then was pretty preoccupied for the next decade with childcare and part-time teaching. I hauled the box out of the attic when triggered by one of my son’s playgroup friends’ mothers around 1980 and finished it as a sort of serial for her. I rediscovered it as that same blissful sort of playing I mentioned earlier. I couldn’t stop. I never thought of it as something I’d publish.
Rosa Lyster is a writer who lives in London. She previously interviewed the author Laura B. McGrath for our website.
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