Pat Barker- In the Shadow of War

Zoë Fairbairns from New Books magazine asks the author about the influence of war on her novels

 This interview was first published in newbooks magazine

The first question I want to ask Pat Barker is, ‘What is it about you and the First World War?’

Of her 11 published novels, four are set in its shadow. All have been well received; two have won major awards. Regeneration, first published in 1991, was based on the true story of soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon who was confined to a psychiatric hospital in 1917 for protesting against the war. The Eye in the Door, (1993) lifted the stone of the war and examined the marginalised lives teeming beneath: munitions workers and conscientious objectors, prostitutes and their customers, spies and suffragettes. It won the Guardian fiction prize and the Northern Electric Special Arts Prize. Completing what has become known as ‘The Regeneration Trilogy’ was the Booker-prize winning The Ghost Road, which, published in 1995, stayed with some of the characters from the first two volumes, including real-life psychiatrist William Rivers who worked with shell-shocked servicemen.

And now here is Pat Barker’s new book, Life Class, which, published in paperback by Penguin in August, explores the lives of a group of young British artists during – you guessed it – the First World War. Barker had a grandfather who fought in the trenches, but for a person of her generation that is hardly unusual. Is there any other reason why she feels drawn as a writer to this already much chronicled conflict which ended 25 years before she was born?

Cosy
We meet for a lunch-time drink in a hotel bar in Durham, her home town. I’m concerned that I might not recognise her – the last time we were face-to-face was at a Feminist Book Week event in Sunderland in 1984 – but she hasn’t changed all that much. Or perhaps we’ve both changed at the same pace, and so have remained in step.

Before I can ask my First World War question, there is the matter of her clothes. One of the embarrassing things that can happen to you as an interviewer, and it happens to me often, is to spend an hour or two sitting opposite someone and then come away realising that you haven’t the faintest idea of what they were wearing. You ought to have made notes, of course, but what notes? I’m not a fashion correspondent – how am I supposed to know what fabric that is, or the proper name for a neckline or colour? I ask Pat to describe her own outfit. ‘It’s a sort of animal print top,’ she says, ‘which I like because it doesn’t need ironing, and sort of stone-coloured jeans with a very cosy elasticated waist.’ And her hair colour? Goldish? I venture. ‘Goldish,’ she agrees, increasingly tarnished with silver.’ There’s a brisk practicality about her, an air of no-nonsense cheerfulness, in spite of her difficult circumstances – she’s caring full-time for her husband who has heart disease – and despite the poignant tale she is about to tell in answer to my question about her continuing fascination with the First World War.

‘I don’t think it’s so much me and World War One, as me and war,’ she says, recalling her own origins in World War Two. ‘What happened, which I gradually pieced together over a long, long time, was that my mother fell in love with a young marine called Johnny, who was killed, and she was absolutely devastated. She was in the Wrens, in a big multi-service base in Scotland, and her girlfriends persuaded her to go out and have a drink. They were sick of her moping and being depressed and grief stricken, and she went out and she got drunk. This was out of character. She never had a head for drink. She was well away on two port-and-lemons. And she met a man, and again, thoroughly out of character, slept with him, and I was the result.’

Ruin
Our drinks arrive – no port-and-lemons for us, it’s the middle of the day so we stick virtuously to fruit juice. ‘I ruined my mother’s life,’ says Pat.

Does she really think that, or is it what she has been told? ‘It‘s a fact,’ she says. ‘My mother’s life deteriorated drastically. She had to leave the Wrens, which she loved, and return home to have me. She returned home to her mother and her stepfather, and it wasn’t much of a welcome, especially from my step-grandfather. They were terrified that she was going to go out with a man and get pregnant again, and produce another. So she lived a very restricted life for a long time.  ‘I think if it had been left to her, she might have had me adopted, and gone back into the Wrens, which would have been the best thing for her. But my grandmother was not going to give away her own flesh and blood. It is quite fascinating, that thing about women and war, and ownership of a child that is born in those circumstances. It’s very sad, but the way things were at the time – an illegitimate child very often did ruin the mother’s life.’

Born in Thornaby-on-Tees, Yorkshire, in 1943, Pat Barker had a working-class childhood. ‘Class is very subtle,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it is so subtle that it disappears into a cloud, and then you have to get back to “what did the main breadwinner earn?” My mother was a school cleaner all the time I was growing up. What my father was doing is irrelevant because I don’t know what he was doing. My stepfather was disabled and living on sickness benefit. He was originally a painter and decorator, but he injured his back. My grandparents, for the bulk of the time they were taking care of me, were retired, and living on national assistance. So I think you would have to say that was working class, although we did have  more distant relatives who were slightly posh.’

Her surname was different from that of other children in the family, and she knew that she was illegitimate. She was led to believe that her real father had died in the war, but guessed that this was not  true. ‘War, and the mystery of my own origins, are linked together. I think actually that is a likelier reason for my interest in war than my grandfather having fought in World War One and having a bayonet wound.’

Feminist
She attended the local primary school, passed the eleven-plus and went to a grammar school, then studied at the London School of Economics and Durham University. She started writing in her mid-twenties, at first without much success. ‘I was at that phase for quite a long time, of getting encouraging letters of rejection, which I think is the worst phase for a writer, because they say nice things so you can’t give up. They say, “do send us your next book”’ She laughs as she mimics her own reaction: ‘“Oh yes, I’ll knock off another one this weekend. Got nothing else on.”’ She was tutored and encouraged by the novelist Angela Carter whom Barker met on a residential writing course run by the Arvon Foundation. Carter introduced Barker to the feminist publishers Virago, who published Barker’s first novel, Union Street, in 1982. A series of linked stories about working-class women living in a northern town, it won the Fawcett Book Prize, for books which shed new light on women’s lives. Her next book, Blow Your House Down (1984), about prostitutes living under threat from a serial killer, was also published by Virago. ‘If it hadn’t been for Virago, I would have found it very hard to find a publisher,’ Barker says, ‘because everybody thought, “oh, working class. Went through all that in the fifties. Don’t want that any more.” And it was really Virago, and their interest in the lives of working women, that enabled me to be listened to at that early stage.’

Both her early books were seen as part of the feminist publishing boom of the time. How does she feel about that now? ‘I would hate,’ says Barker, ‘to be the kind of woman who says “I am not a feminist.” What I feel about it now, at this stage of my life – I would say my work is still informed by feminist values.
I don’t, to be honest, think a great deal about it, unless I encounter a particular injustice, in which case I get as fired up as I ever was.’

For example? ‘Oh, this extraordinary twisted-up thing about honour killings not being investigated as rigorously as they should be, because everybody is so frightened of being thought racist. This is an explosive topic. I do find it very strange, the emphasis that is placed on race. If you step right back and see it biologically, racial differences are fundamentally very, very trivial differences. They are minor adaptations to climate. That’s all they are. Whereas gender is the great organising principle of life. And yet you have this strange thing where, politically, racial issues are seen as extremely important, and indeed they are, of course. But along the way, gender issues somehow got dismissed as lifestyle choices, and sort of soft politics, and not very important.’

Class

Gender issues are always important in Barker’s work, as is social class. At the heart of her new book Life Class is the dilemma of the working class artist who believes that portrayals of the world they know, won’t find favour with genteel judges and gatekeepers. Paul Tarrant, a student at the Slade School of Art in London in 1914, has grown up in the shadow of a Middlesbrough ironworks, believing that art is somewhere else. His idea of art was ‘getting on a bike on Sunday morning and pedalling like hell as far away from Middlesbrough as his legs would carry him to set up his easel in a field somewhere and to paint trees and hawthorn blossom’. At the Slade he is disconcerted to encounter Kit Neville, a posh fellow student who, despite the wealth and comforts of his own southern English background, is painting ‘the landscape of Paul’s childhood’. Neville’s paintings, which Paul recognises as far superior to his own, are ‘the fruit of a trip up north to seek out the same smoking terraces and looming ironworks that Paul had turned his back on’. Language Paul is challenged by his teacher Professor Henry Tonks: ‘Most people who come here are bursting with something they want to say, and the trouble I have with some of them is that they can’t be bothered to learn the language to say it in.  Whereas with you it’s almost the opposite… You seem to have nothing to say.’

Is there an equivalent problem for writers?, I ask Pat – the danger of being all technique and  special effects, but having nothing to say? ‘I think there is,’ she acknowledges, ‘but with Paul it’s not so much having nothing to say, as trying to say the wrong things. Trying to say what you think people want to hear. His first artistic impulse is to turn his back on the industrial skyline, which is fantastically beautiful, but he doesn’t see it.’ She believes she may have made a similar mistake in her early years as a writer when, having gone to university and married an academic, she had, by her own definition, joined the middle class. ‘I didn’t see the life I came from as a fit subject for literature. I was writing these sort of attenuated, sensitive, middle-class novels which weren’t strikingly different from the world I was living in when I was trying to write them, but which were very different from the world that had actually given me my voice.’

Reconnect
What she needed to do, she says, and what she shows Paul doing in Life Class, is to ‘reconnect with that beginning, that industrial beginning, with men labouring in the shadow of machines that dwarfed them, and the lives of the women being entirely centred on the lives of the men, which are entirely centred on the factory or the steelworks. That actually is not totally different from the experiences he is going to have at the front. In dealing with the front, and what the machines do to the men there, Paul is in a sense being forced to reconnect with what should have been his subject matter as a young man.’

Rejected by the army for medical reasons, Paul goes to war as an orderly in a front line hospital in Belgium. He confronts not only the sufferings of the wounded – the sight, the sound, the stink – but also the surreal logic of combat. Resources must be conserved, which means not damaging uniforms, even when it is necessary to cut the fabric to expose wounds for treatment. A soldier who tries unsuccessfully to commit suicide must be kept alive in order that he may face a firing squad – suicide being officially classified as desertion.

Unease
Paul rents a room away from the hospital, and, on his days off, paints ’the worst aspects of his duties as an orderly: infusing hydrogen peroxide or carbolic acid into a gangrenous wound… No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain.’ Meanwhile his beloved fellow artist Elinor stays at home in England, partying, decorating teapots and going to classes at the now-almost-deserted Slade. Paul writes to her, suggesting she pop over to Ypres for a visit. What follows illustrates the truth of critic Amanda Thursfield’s comment, quoted on the British Council’s Contemporary Writers website:’ Whenever you read Barker, you get a strong feeling of unease. One of the reasons for this is that whereas many writers try to make excuses for negative moral behaviour… Barker does not let us off the hook so easily.’ Elinor’s behaviour is not so much negatively moral as completely amoral: having no strong feelings either for or against the war, she refuses to let it influence her work as an artist. ‘I don’t think it matters very much. I don’t think it’s important… I just don‘t think that‘s what art should be about. It‘s like painting a train crash.’ She boasts about her ‘iron frivolity’ and makes fun of her mother‘s bandaging class. She lies her way on to a troop ship, using fake documents and borrowed clothes to pass herself  off as a nurse, so that she can visit Paul. Faced with the reality of combat, her bravado slips: first whiff of shell fire and she picks up her skirts and flees. Not very admirable, is she?  ‘She’s not admirable,’ Barker agrees. ‘She is by no means a stupid girl. She is very talented but she is very visual. She says in one of her letters: “That’s the trouble, Paul. I don’t think. I only see”.’

Taste
Seeing is just part of it. In Life Class as in her other books, Barker specialises in disconcertingly intense sense-impressions which, sometimes made up of only a few words, hang around in your head long after you have put the book down: the second-hand taste of someone else‘s dinner when they are bestowing
an unwelcome kiss, the feel of the groove in the flesh of the finger of a married woman who has cast off her wedding ring, the odours of war: ‘Out there, the war stank of blood and gangrene,’ Paul reflects, on leave in London, and surrounded by young men in uniform. ‘Here it smelled of new clothes.’ Where does she find these resonant, telling details?
 
‘I didn’t find it anywhere,’ she says. ‘I just sort of thought, you know, all these new uniforms being bought and worn. They do smell, it’s like the smell of new carpets. It’s quite unmistakeable. What I sometimes do, if things are not coming to life in quite the way they should do, is, I work through the senses, and try always to include the sense of smell, the sense of taste, because it’s a more primitive sense than sight. With sight you can be quite distant, and with hearing you can be quite distant. Texture, taste, smell – you are immediately there. It’s the way a child experiences the world. And that is the way to bring something to life.’

Groups
We talk briefly about book groups: if she could eavesdrop on a meeting, what would she like to hear being said about her work? ‘I would like to hear them talking about these characters as if they are real people with real problems whom they have got to know,’ she says. ‘I know that is a very unsophisticated way of reading fiction, but I don’t care. For me it is about characters, in the end. That’s what you take away from a book when you’ve forgotten everything else. That’s why you re-read books where you know every detail of the plot, because the characters have become friends. And you just want to meet them again. There’s no suspense left. You just want to spend time in that person’s company.’
 
I’m not going to be able to spend much more time in hers because she has to get back to her sick husband. Is she managing to write at the moment? Barely, she says. ‘I can’t get a run at it. I wrote for a couple of hours about two days ago. It’s like that at the moment. I lie in in the morning. We have bad nights. I have a laptop by my bed, and he sleeps by my side, and I tap away on the laptop. He likes it actually because he’s always been very, very supportive. He says he finds the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard very soothing. He drifts off to sleep on that.’ And we drift, as we put on our coats, into one of those conversations which as a younger person you overhear older people having and swear you will never have yourself: about age-related illness in our loved ones, and the passage of the years. How does Pat deal with all that, I wonder? ‘I just breathe my way through it,’ she says, practical to the last. ‘I treat it exactly like a labour pain.’