FRANCES BINGHAM
About Frances Bingham
Frances Bingham has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry, most recently Journey from Winter (Carcanet, 2008) the biographical critical edition of Valentine Ackland’s poems. Frances has performed at literary festivals, read poetry live on Woman’s Hour, and contributed to the Radio 4 series From the Ban to the Booker. She is the daughter of the Scots historian and biographer Caroline Bingham, and now lives and works in London with her partner Liz Mathews.
See also http://francesbingham.pottersyard.co.uk/ and http://wordsincompany.wordpress.com/
Praise for The Principle of Camouflage
'A true work of the imagination transporting Prospero's island, and us, to wartime Britain on a shining wave of sea images. ' Maureen Duffy
An interview with Frances Bingham
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I began to write, as far as I could, in early childhood; even before I could actually write, I can remember pretending to, studiously scrawling imitation script in tiny notebooks. My mother, Caroline Bingham, was a writer; her first book The Making of a King: The early years of James VI and I was published when I was two or three years old. She wrote at home, I was an only child, I loved the stories she told (which were often from her books or research), and I think that writing seemed to me a natural yet magical process.
Aside from this formative storytelling, I was also fortunate in that my mother was a quoter, or reciter, and reader-aloud (as was my grandmother), so poetry was an early background for me – poetry of all sorts – contemporary, renaissance Scots, folk ballads, Shakespeare, Victorian ... I think this gave me the idea that literature, of whatever kind, is the way to interpret the world, to try and understand our place in it, to celebrate or lament or describe our human state. Although it seems too obvious to name Shakespeare as an inspiration to anyone writing in the same language, I do feel that – aside from the inevitable influence of that poetry – there is a specific inspiration for me there, especially in the pastoral plays.
I discovered Virginia Woolf very late. I’d read Orlando at school, but I couldn’t manage the others then and rather strangely didn’t study any at university. This was incredibly lucky, because the revelation came to me unmediated, quite independently. Now, after Shakespeare, I’d name Virgina Woolf as the author who has most inspired me, not only in the novels (especially Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves) but also A Writer’s Diary, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own …
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
The Tempest is of course the main inspiration behind The Principle of Camouflage, together with its Elizabethan sources (like Hakluyt) with their fantasies of ‘unpath’d waters, undreamed shores’. The Waves is also an important, though less obvious, influence – as the title acknowledges. There are many other literary echoes in the book, but these are the two works that signpost its imaginative landscape. I should also mention a couple of films, Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain and Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, which contributed to my visualisation of the period, as did many artworks of the Modernist/ neo-Romantic school of the 1930s and 40s.
What I wanted to achieve was the creation of another world, recognisable yet remote, a Prospero’s isle where the eternal dramas of love, loss, exile, homecoming, etc, etc, would seem fresh and strange. I hoped, by having several narrative perspectives, to build up a picture of the shifting nature of perception, the complex texture of life even at its simplest, that both conveys something about the experience of being alive, and something about the uniqueness of each individual consciousness, the state of bearing witness. The gender confusions, snatches of known stories which then unravel, references to myths or folktales which don’t quite work out as usual, are all part of that sense of dislocation. The characters puzzle away at their philosophies, their roles – accepted or rejected – the ironies and mercies of their various situations, and they change in the course of the book; those for whom the city, or the sea, are sacred are both equally seers, equally blindfolded. It’s an important key to it that the one who can’t speak is the most lyrical of the lot.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
This is the question, for me. My sort of writing is an act of ventriloquism, or impersonation, inhabiting the role so that the voice is authentic, convincing, different, capable of the words that will breathe life and soul into the character. Exactly how that’s done is something of a mystery, I think. Of course, there’s the craft or technique of the actual process, which just requires work and consideration, and then there’s the enormous amount of creative energy, raw thought, that needs to be released before the voice will sing. But beyond that, there’s the inspiration, the breath of fire, that can be invoked or summoned but has an uncontrollable element, and without which the other things won’t work.
How and when do you write?
I write with ink on foolscap paper, at an old kitchen table in the studio I share with my partner, surrounded by bookshelves and also many other kinds of paper (sometimes very large), more ink, paint, clay, driftwood, inventive outbursts of wax or salt. I feel incredibly lucky to have this quiet space in which to work, with a view of sky and trees, buses and brick walls. In the past, I have managed to write in far less propitious circumstances, through much interruption and noise, lacking time or space – so I appreciate this fertile ground. I aim to write every day, but the length of time varies from a few hours to many, depending what stage I’m at.
Aside from practical needs, there’s another aspect of being able to write: what Magda Szabo in The Door calls ‘being in a state of grace’. This is hard to define, but it’s easy to recognise the loss – by a sense of distraction and uncertainty, a troubled psyche, a lack of creative energy. There are circumstances which inevitably lead away from the state of grace, which – superstitiously – I won’t enumerate, and also there are ways to regain it; one of the best is to read.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I most enjoy reading lyrical, powerful fiction, with a strong tang of differentness; poetry is also an important solace. But I also find pleasure in all the many kinds of reading – history, nature, travel, lit.crit., biography, etc – that I can call ‘research’.
Virginia Woolf aside, some of the books I’ve most enjoyed and read (or re-read) recently are Rebecca West’s travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Sybille Bedford’s memoir Quicksands, and Maureen Duffy’s extraordinary novel Lovechild.
