{"id":27200,"date":"2012-02-28T08:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=27200"},"modified":"2013-04-12T14:39:41","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:39:41","slug":"helen-simpson-on-%e2%80%98in-flight-entertainment%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/28\/helen-simpson-on-%e2%80%98in-flight-entertainment%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Simpson on \u2018In-Flight Entertainment\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Helen Simpson. Photo by Derek Thomson.<\/p><\/div>\n

I met Helen Simpson for a genial pub lunch near Dartmouth Park in North London on the day she received the American edition of <\/em>In-Flight Entertainment: Stories<\/a>. She was evidently quite pleased by the book\u2019s spare but elegant design, which looks through an airplane window onto a locket of cerulean sky. I\u2019m tempted to draw comparisons to her stories, many of which peek at other people\u2019s blitheness, or cruelty, or dreams of escape. But nothing in Simpson\u2019s fiction is quite as peaceful as that glimpse of blue. She is perhaps best known for the characterization of contemporary motherhood in her collections<\/em>, but many of the stories in <\/em>In-Flight Entertainment confront the prospect of climate change. <\/em><\/p>\n

Your collections are never quite themed, but they do feel very painstakingly designed. Was that true for In-Flight Entertainment<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In-Flight Entertainment <\/em>is my little climate-change suite, I suppose. But there are fifteen stories in it, and only five are about climate change. My only rule is to write about what\u2019s interesting to me at the time. It\u2019s a great subject, but it\u2019s very hard to dramatize or to make particular, and not to hector, not to moralize.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of experts in these stories. There\u2019s Jeremy in the title story as well as amateur researchers like Angelika in \u201cThe Tipping Point\u201d and G in \u201cDiary of an Interesting Year.\u201d They don\u2019t seem to benefit from their knowledge. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, it alienates people from them. That\u2019s the trouble. Did you ever watch that episode of The Simpsons <\/em>shortly after Al Gore\u2019s An Inconvenient Truth <\/em>came out?\u00a0 It is spoofed as An Irritating Truth<\/em>. It is<\/em> an irritating truth and no one wants to hear someone sounding off about it, and particularly not when they\u2019re about to go on holiday.<\/p>\n

Stories are good for uncomfortable things, for uncomfortable subjects. They\u2019re not generally relaxing. Novels are more relaxing. You just give up to the novel, you go into its bath, you submit to it. You don\u2019t with a story. You\u2019re more alert as a reader, and more critical. If it doesn\u2019t grab you by the second sentence, it\u2019s done. Whereas with a novel, people will give it a couple of chapters before they abandon it. <\/p>\n

The experience of transit seems to serve you well.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Car journeys are particularly good for stories. Journeys are, generally. You\u2019ve got the confined space, and you\u2019ve got the way that thoughts tend to work while you\u2019re in transit\u2014they\u2019re all over the place. You generally have reflection time. If you ask people when they read, it\u2019s always, Two weeks a year, when I\u2019m on holiday, or, Well, I\u2019m too tired at night, but, ah! When I\u2019m commuting \u2026 When you\u2019re on a train, and when you\u2019re driving, unless you blast music out incredibly loudly, you think. That\u2019s your dreaming time.<\/p>\n

How much research do you usually do for your stories? It\u2019s not just the data on climate change. There\u2019s a lot of history, geology, and medical science here, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stories are incredibly wasteful to write\u2014the way I do them, anyway. The amount of work I do for a story is ridiculous. For every story, I\u2019ve got a thick file. I read and think around it for ages.<\/p>\n

The other thing that\u2019s wasteful about these stories is that they\u2019re not all about the same subject. I know it would be easier to sell, but I don\u2019t think you can coldheartedly decide to do a collection on a particular theme. I let the subject choose me. That\u2019s the only way I\u2019ve ever done it. I didn\u2019t know I was going to do five stories on climate change. But I just kept going back to it, because I hadn\u2019t finished. I kept trying different angles, so by the end, I\u2019d done a monologue, a satirical dialogue, a diary, a love story, and a sales pitch.<\/p>\n

Does writing short stories allow you a certain intellectual scope?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s very compacted. You can get everything about the history and politics of somewhere into a short story if you think of it as a geologic\u00a0core sample. That\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to do.<\/p>\n

And you can stay ambivalent. Chekhov has this great letter where he says, Your business is to present what\u2019s there, but not to put your thumb on the scales.\u00a0Yes!<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to ask the question that all short story writers get, which is \u201cwhere\u2019s the novel?\u201d I can see why one might ask Alice Munro \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

She\u2019s amazing. She writes novels with all the boring bits cut out. Her way with time\u2014she plays ducks and drakes with the decades. That\u2019s the only thing you\u2019re missing with a story. You\u2019re not spending hours with the reader. You\u2019re spending twenty minutes, or half an hour, usually.<\/p>\n

I can make it last longer! But with your writing, there\u2019s a different kind of temporal rigor. It\u2019s almost Aristotelian, in the sense of there being a unity of time and place.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I did write one story deliberately following the Aristotelian unities\u2014\u201cLabour,\u201d which is about a woman having a baby\u2014and I did it in blank verse. That was in my first collection. I think I was eight months pregnant at the time with my first baby, and I turned it into something with spirit and play.<\/p>\n

I get the feeling that you devise new time schemes for yourself, and that you look for patterns in daily experience. I\u2019m thinking of routines like the hospital treatments in \u201cScan,\u201d or driving your kids to school, as in \u201cEarly One Morning,\u201d from In the Driver’s Seat<\/em><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s absolutely right. Once you start seeing those patterns, various things that seem boring you can make interesting. It\u2019s like the Burns Dinner in \u201cBurns and the Bankers.\u201d Those dinners have a particular structure. Then I have the walk on Hampstead Heath in \u201cConstitutional,\u201d which I wanted to be a circle. I like shapes in stories, and that one was very difficult to do, because that was about time and memory, and the weaving in and out, the circular pattern, like a wreath, was the only way to do it.<\/p>\n

Does retrospection pose especially difficult challenges?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you what you can\u2019t do with a story that you can with a novel\u2014character developing in time.<\/p>\n

In your previous collections, you have revisited characters. For example, characters make more than one appearance in Getting a Life<\/em><\/a>. They form a little community of mothers, in an almost Altmanesque way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a narrower focus in that collection because I think life was narrower at the time. But it gave the collection a certain power.<\/p>\n

This reminds me of your essay on Angela Carter<\/a>, where you quote her remark about how the story should not be minimal but rococo.<\/strong><\/p>\n

She thought of novels as symphonies, and stories as chamber music.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to see how little you can make a good, deep story out of. It\u2019s almost like an acrobatic circus turn. Can you do it with just an egg, an ashtray, and a stick? \u201cIf I\u2019m Spared,\u201d the smoking story from my previous collection, was sparked by reading something about Chekhov. Someone had asked him where he got his ideas from, and he said, Give me an ashtray, and I\u2019ll give you a story the next day. And I thought, Yes, that\u2019s how it should be. If you\u2019ve been given an object and if you\u2019ve got that cast of mind, you should be able to come up with something.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve taken up the piano again recently. I was playing one of the mazurkas by Chopin. That gave me another image for the short story actually, because the mazurka lurches from elation and triumph into absolute despair within the space of an instant. It goes from melancholy to bliss! That\u2019s what you can do in a story. I\u2019m coming more and more to thinking that it\u2019s tragicomic.<\/p>\n

Your stories are often structured around metaphysical conceits, and this seeps into the language, the vocabulary. It also imparts a slightly fantastical quality to the writing. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Have you read Stendhal\u2019s On Love<\/em>? It\u2019s all his thoughts on love, in a strange sort of list. I read it when I was a teenager. There\u2019s a lovely image in it. He goes down a salt mine in Salzburg, and finds a twig someone brought down earlier, and it\u2019s covered in all these salt crystals. Anyway, he finds it and he says, \u201cIsn\u2019t it the most beautiful object?\u201d He used it as an image for falling in love, but that\u2019s what happens when you write fiction, too. It\u2019s not falsifying\u2014it\u2019s what happens when you fall in love. It\u2019s what your imagination does.<\/p>\n

When you pitch yourself against minimalism, as you do in the Carter essay, and as I think you do in your stories, you seem to be running counter to literary fashion. I feel there\u2019s almost an ethical concern about prose. Writers are expected to be abstemious, in much the same way that your carbon coach from \u201cAhead of the Pack\u201d wants us all to embrace austerity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pleasure in language is one thing I want from any reading I\u2019m doing. It can come from that plain, transparent prose. But you can also get a lot of very boring prose which is just flat and tin-eared. Anyway, who are these puritanical types who come up with rules like, You can\u2019t use adverbs? I\u2019ll use adverbs if I want to!<\/p>\n

What does Chekhovian mean? <\/strong><\/p>\n

People quite often use it in a disparaging way. Galsworthy said of Chekhov that he was like a tortoise, all middle. It\u2019s nonsense, of course, because he starts and ends beautifully. Chekhovian<\/em> gets used when you\u2019re not doing that sort of party-trick twist-in-the-tale ending.<\/p>\n

Chekhov has an interesting and very complicated history with English letters. I\u2019ve been reading William Gerhardi recently, who was similar to Ford but modeled himself on Chekhov and was criticized for importing dangerous examples from Russian literature into English. <\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s Katherine Mansfield, too. She got a lot of flack for taking one of his stories and just using it. She didn\u2019t acknowledge she\u2019d lifted the whole plot from Chekhov. It\u2019s called \u201cSleepy Head.\u201d It\u2019s plagiarism. But she idolized him. I think many people must have come to Chekhov through her.<\/p>\n

I had a crush on her, completely, as a teenager. I read the journals, filtered through Middleton Murry at first, and then I read the biographies. She was a wonderful writer and died so young. Thirty-four! But she kept talking about Chekhov. The\u00a0Modern Library did three different volumes of the stories, and, for a while, I\u2019d just read one a day.<\/p>\n

What are you working on now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just been asked to do a Selected Stories<\/em> by my publisher here and to write an introduction. Reading through everything in one go is a bit weird, especially when it\u2019s your own stuff.\u00a0I\u2019ve called it A Bunch of Fives <\/em>because I\u2019ve written five collections, I\u2019ve taken five stories from each of them, and they each took five years to write. But that\u2019s not by design. I call it the coral-reef school of writing, which is my approach, where you build up slowly. It\u2019s accretive.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t think of a way into the introduction. Either you go for self-flagellation or conceit. I looked at the various ways other people had done it\u2014Lorrie Moore did it in the third person. In the end I hit on the form of a hostile interview\u2014\u201cWhy are you so slow?\u201d \u201cWhy only every five years?\u201d \u201cAre you a man-hating feminist?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I met Helen Simpson for a genial pub lunch near Dartmouth Park in North London on the day she received the American edition of In-Flight Entertainment: Stories. She was evidently quite pleased by the book\u2019s spare but elegant design, which looks through an airplane window onto a locket of cerulean sky. I\u2019m tempted to draw 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