Interview with Vanora Bennett
by Karolina Małkiewicz
Vanora Bennett is a British journalist
and writer, the author of "Portrait of an Unknown Woman", "The People's
Queen", "Figures in Silk", "Blood Royal", "The White Russian and Midnight
in St. Petersburg".
Karolina Małkiewicz: Vanora, you have written two novels set in Russia or about Russians, four
English historical novels and two non-fiction books about your experiences as a
journalist. What inspired you to write these books?
Vanora Bennett: I
have always loved writing, and started my career as a journalist working in Russia just
after the Soviet collapse in 1991, so a preoccupation with things Russian and a
fascination with how the past affects the present came naturally. Luckily for
me, I'd started to learn Russian even before university, since a French teacher
at my school was from a White Russian family and had chosen to teach me her
first language, so I'd been exposed to that melancholy emigre way of thinking
from very early on.
KM: "The People's Queen",
"Figures in Silk", "Blood Royal" and "The Portrait of
an Unknown Woman": your books tell about the time of the Plantagenets and
Tudors – why did you decide to choose this part of English history?
VB: At first by complete coincidence! While I was working in Moscow in the early 1990s, I retuned to London for a weekend and went to an
exhibition of drawings by the German artist Hans Holbein, who painted at the
English court of Henry VIII in the mid-1500s. His portraits of the Tudor-era
new rich – big unrefined men with great slabs of red-meat face and calculating
eyes – reminded me so much of the Moscow new rich I was seeing emerge all
around me that I bought the catalogue and read every word of it on the plane
back to Russia. And there, somewhere in the small print, was a mention of a
fascinating and far-fetched theory about a secret story that was hinted at in
one of the pictures. I did what I could to find out more, and began to wonder
how that story would look if it had really happened that way... and before I
knew where I was it was turning into a book. It was really "about"
the religious wars of the time, Protestants vs Catholics, which I discovered
were absolutely absorbing history – but it also had a love triangle, a new and
less positive view of an English hero, the Catholic Sir Thomas More, and a
portrait of Holbein.
It was such fun to write that I decided to go on. The
great soap-opera moment of English history is Henry VIII's change of wives and
decision to take England out of the Church of
Rome, and my first book was set then, but I was a little scared of going
straight for that iconic moment and found I preferred the untold stories of
people further from the centre stage. And I found myself very interested by
questions of reputation and power change – how one political narrative wins
support and power, while another is doomed and fades away (again not unnatural
after my time reporting in Russia, where such apparently dramatic change had
come so fast) – and it was easy to find examples writing about the Middle Ages,
when there were so many changes of regime. So I went backwards through time. It
wasn't all that easy – life in the Middle Ages was very different from modern
life! – and my technique for being able to think my way into a time was to
always have a character with an artistic reputation and a body of work you
could look at for another perspective. it made it easier to work your way into
seeing people's personalities. So I had William Caxton the printer in one book,
and Geoffrey Chaucer the great comic poet in another, and Christine de Pizan,
the first French professional woman writer, in a third. Especially with the
Chaucer book, the People's Queen, it was a tremendous help to have this other
less historical viewpoint through which to examine my characters. But it was
inevitable that, sooner or later, I'd go back to thinking and writing about Russia...
KM: "The White
Russian" and "Midnight in St. Petersburg" – why did you
decide to write about Russia and Russians in exile?
What fascinated you in this country and these people?
VB: So my most recent two novels have been set in early 20th-century Russia,
which has given me a chance to revisit the Revolution, and Rasputin, and
wartime Petrograd, which I had stayed in a lot several generations later both
when it was called Leningrad and St Petersburg, and whose writers and artists I
loved – a way to explore both my love of that side of Russian life and my
scepticism about the hierarchical and autocratic way Russian politics and
policing seem to be.
As a journalist I spent a lot of time covering the
first 1990s war in Chechnya, and came away from Russia with quite negative
views about the Russian state's attitude to smaller peoples and minorities and
generally to anyone who veers away from the expected norm. Making the heroine
of Midnight in St Petersburg a Jewish girl in 1917,
and a refugee from violence in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in southern Russia, someone viewed with
suspicion because of her dark looks and foreign-sounding name, was a way of
telling the same story I'd encountered in real life through my modern Chechen
friends' experiences.
As for writing about exiles, it's kind of the same
thing. My musician parents had a very international friendship group, so,
growing up, I met many, many, central and eastern European and Jewish exiles
from one kind of bad history or another, each with more memories than they felt
comfortable with it and no way home. So I felt right at home in the world I
chose to write about in The White Russian – the Russian emigre circles of Paris
in the 1930s, poverty-stricken and paranoid, and, with the second world war
coming, genuinely penetrated and infiltrated by Stalinist agents waiting to do
more damage.
I think all the drama of novel writing comes from
putting characters into a situation where they face conflict and showing how
they deal with it and grow – and these are all not just conflict situations par
excellence but also ones I felt relatively familiar with.
KM: What is the most
interesting or maybe surprising fact you came across in your research for your
books?
VB: Well, I learned to make a violin myself while writing about my Jewish
heroine Inna becoming a violin maker in St Petersburg – and now have a violin
to play on, a fact that still surprises me! I went to a workshop in Cambridge for about 3 years and finally
finished the violin last year...
KM: Why did you choose this
kind of literature? It must be very difficult because of doing detailed
historical research. How do you do your research for your books? Which genre is
more difficult: historical fiction or non-fiction?
VB: In many ways the research is the most fascinating
thing you can do. it can be hard to leave the library and actually start
writing... Also, I started by wanting a factual framework to write within,
because I came from journalism and was scared of writing about people and their
feelings without any facts! But In the end I came to agree that it was hard
researching the minutiae of daily life at a time when everything was so
different. It was a relief to return to Russia in the age of electric light and
the phone...
KM: Are there any other areas of the history
you would like to write about in your future novels?
VB: I'm not sure – I am writing a non-fiction book about an aspect of
Russian history at about the time of the Revolution now, and have thought I
might like to try my hand at something contemporary next, perhaps about, or
featuring, the many Russians living in London now. So I'll have to see how
things develop and whether I get a new historical idea I feel excited about...
 |
This is the Polish cover of
"Portrait of an Unknown Woman"
Published by ŚWIAT KSIĄŻKI
Warsaw 2009
Translated by Joanna Puchalska |
KM: Which character of your novels you like the most and why?
VB: My favourite character by a long way is Holbein, in my first
novel, PORTRAIT. He sort of wrote himself – big and rough and workmanlike, on
the surface, but with a genuine greatness of spirit and intellectual finesse
too. I loved the way he soaked up knowledge, and the passion he brought to his
work, and the passion with which he fell in love, too.
KM: Which of your book was more difficult to create? Why?
VB: The hardest book to write was the third of the English stories,
about Henry V's French wife – I think I underestimated how hard it was going to
be to find out about the medieval French history of the period (since France
was defeated there is surprisingly little written about it in France)... and it
was a dark story about loss and madness which it felt hard to put a shape to. I
originally envisaged it more as the story of three women in wartime – a
princess, an artist, and the fighter Joan of Arc – each having different
responses to danger. But perhaps not unnaturally my publisher was most
interested in the princess! So I had to think it out again in an attempt to
rebalance things. I hope it worked out OK in the end!
KM: How did you become a journalist?
VB: Again, by accident – I heard as I was finishing my university
degree (and wondering what on earth I could do as a job when all I could
do was Russian) that Reuters news agency wanted to hire Russian speakers. It
turned out to be true, so even though I had done no journalism they sent me to
journalism school for a year and trained me. Once I started work, they sent me,
not to Moscow, but to Paris, and then to Asia,
and then to Africa! But by then I was up and running.
KM: If you could go back in time and become any historical
figures, who would it be and why?
VB: Oh, so many people! Probably a man, though that is hard to imagine
from my female point of view – Gandhi or Nelson Mandela? I think I would enjoy
being an explorer – I had a great-great-great-grandfather who was a botanist in
Imperial India and our family legend says he was the first to import
rhododendrons into Britain (by wrapping them in brown sugar and
putting them on board ship to England) and that he
recognised that you could make tea from India tea plants...
KM: How do you think whether any of the
modern women could become a character of the novel? Which one and why?
VB: It would be quite hard I think as modern women have expectations
(thank God) that they can have so much power over their own lives, while in the
past they had to work within the framework set down by their men. I think the
reason that Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, has become so popular among
modern readers is that she followed her own ambition so ruthlessly – but she
was incredibly rare for her time. I suspect if that modern women found themselves
in a historical novel, they would very soon also find themselves being
suspected for their independent mindedness, and probably end up being burned as
witches, so there would not be a good outcome!
KM: When did you start writing? When did you realize that you
wanted to start writing?
VB: I wrote stories and poems, the usual children's
things... I think I realised I wanted to write more than news stories for
Reuters when I was working in Africa, where frankly I was a
little bored and lonely and had time on my hands. I started to try and write a
long magazine-cum-book version of a trip I'd been on, got obsessed, and
realised time was passing very quickly as I got absorbed in my project and that
I must be enjoying myself a lot!
KM: How does your ordinary day look?
VB: Chaotic – I do try to keep to a timetable and write a regular
amount every day, but I also have two children and an ancient house and a
part-time job and a thousand calls on my time, so it often doesn't work out
exactly as I planned.
KM: Do you have any unusual writing habits?
VB: None, except gallons of black coffee.
KM: What kind of books do you like reading? Do you have a
favourite author or a book? Whose prose do you feel closest to?
VB: I love big stories – whether it is Dickens or
Emily Bronte or Tolstoy or Bulgakov. I have recently gone back a lot to Tolstoy
– Anna Karenina having been my favourite book as a child, not, I hasten to add,
because I loved or even was very interested in Vronsky, but mostly because I
though the idealistic and sensitive Levin a most extraordinary character.
KM: Have you ever been to Poland?
What do you associate with Poland?
VB: Ooh, yes, I have! And I loved it. I went for a week on a Polish
government trip for four journalists, and saw – Warsaw, Krakow, and Mazuria, which I
thought especially fascinating and beautiful and have indulged a fantasy for
years since of going to live by the side of a beautiful lake there. Several
years ago I shared a flat with an English girl who had fallen in love with all
things Polish, which fed my interest in Poland. Through
her I met several very interesting people including the writer Pawel Huelle and
the film maker Pawel Pawlikowski – my friend, whose name is Antonia
Lloyd-Jones, has since become the leading literary translator in England from
Polish, including of a biography of the journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski who was
my absolute hero for many years while I was a young journalist going to some of
the same very remote places. I imagine Poland being full of pianists playing
Chopin in parks, and when I was visited was delighted to discover this wasn't
quite just a romantic fantasy, as we heard exactly this during a visit to one
of Warsaw's beautiful
parks.
KM: I must ask you: what do you think what happened to the
Princes in the Tower? Did king Richard murder his two nephews? If it wasn't
him, then who did?
VB: I see you're saving the best if hardest question for last,
Karolina! I suppose logic does dictate that king Richard killed them... but my
heart wants to believe he didn't. There is a wonderful book by Josephine They
called The Daughter of Time which rehearses the case for the boys being killed
not by King Richard but by the next King of England, Henry VII. It is a good
and compelling case. I read it as a child and it made a huge impression on me. I
fictionalise one of the many other conspiracy theories that still exist about
this historical mystery in PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, and in my second novel
FIGURES IN SILK/QUEEN OF SILKS have Richard III as a minor character - but
leave the door open. Perhaps the real attraction of thinking about this
historical mystery is that it will never be solved for good – and will go on
being exciting to hypothesise about.
If you want to read this interview in Polish, please click here.
