Tessa Hadley

Interview

TESSA HADLEY: ‘LONG MARRIAGES

ARE INTERESTING. YOU EITHER
HANG ON OR YOU DON'T'
Lisa Allardice
After secretly turning her hand to fiction in her forties,
Hadley is enjoying widespread acclaim. She talks about
happiness, motherhood and her four failed novels
Sat 9 Feb 2019

‘I was being my clever self, gradually coming out from

disguise’ … Tessa Hadley

Since finishing her latest novel, Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley
has been “in a real panic”. She was worried that the story – about
two long-married couples whose seemingly well ordered,
beautiful lives become messy after one of the husbands dies –
was too sad, “too glum”. “I thought it was going to be a disaster,”
she says. But the novel, her seventh, has just received early
reviews from the US, including one in the Washington Post that
begins by hailing her as “one of the greatest stylists alive”. We
meet the evening before she heads off on a two-week US book
tour. Many writers would grumble about this as a necessary evil
of modern publishing, but Hadley is looking forward to it,
especially her shared events with the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, “a
genius”, and the New Yorker critic James Wood. The whole thing
is “amazing”, she marvels.
Success is all the more gratifying to Hadley “because it
came later”. After 20 years of struggling to write, Accidents in
the Home, her first novel, was published when she was 46. Much
has been made of this late start but, as she points out, it’s hardly
as if she were Penelope Fitzgerald (who was 61 when her first
novel was published). In a long print dress and waistcoat, and
with her fine bone structure and expressive manner, Hadley, now
in her 60s, could be the elegant, sharply drawn heroine of one of
her own books (she is not, she insists, the quietly determined
painter Christine in Late in the Day, “but I felt very close to her”).
She speaks with the flowing, thoughtful intensity of her prose,
and says of the impending tour: “I’ve had my moments of
thinking ‘wouldn’t it have been fun to do this in my 30s? Wouldn’t
it have been wicked to do this in my 30s!’ But then I wouldn’t
change those strange, anonymous, quiet, private years of feeling
quite low sometimes because I so longed to write and I couldn’t
do it. Feeling like a real person, with friends and family, I
wouldn’t lose that, that seems part of everything to me. And,”
she reflects, sinking back into the armchair with her glass of
wine, “what a nice compensation for growing older. I’m so lucky.”
Reviews of Hadley’s work tend to sound like undergraduate
reading lists, comparing her to everyone from Elizabeth Bowen
to Virginia Woolf. She has a theory that if you mention writers
you admire in interviews, your work becomes associated with
them, and she is full of recommendations (it’s not often Polish
poet Zbigniew Herbert comes up in conversation). She is yet to
win one of the big literary prizes, perhaps because she is known
for “domestic fiction” and is often seen as Britain’s answer to
Alice Munro or Anne Tyler. Late in the Day, with its focus on the
enduring conflicts between marriage and freedom (infidelity),
motherhood and art, is hallmark Hadley, although, with its
serious, questing characters, it is in some ways more akin to the
now rather unfashionable novels of Iris Murdoch or Margaret
Drabble.

Her characters are burdened by conscience and

privilege, angsty and guilt-ridden, but impotent
to do anything about it

With this book, she wanted to write about long marriages,

in particular, because “they seem immensely interesting and
they are kind of new in a way … people just live so much longer.”
She recalls an image from a folktale that appears in the novel of
holding on to your lover as he goes through a series of
metamorphoses: a fairy, a dragon, a lion. “And it seems to me
marriage is a bit like that,” she says. “You either hang on or you
don’t.”
Hanging on or not is the starting point for much of Hadley’s
fiction and she is good on the nagging insistence of desire. “Yeah,
I am always writing about the power of that, not in detail, but
what a potent thing it is, and yet how hard it still is to talk about.”
The sex life of one of the couples in the book, Christine and Alex,
“is non-existent and quite inarticulate. You read all those
wonderful Guardian advice columns, saying: ‘You must talk to
each other’ and they aren’t and actually they can’t,” she says.
“There’s something about cohabiting that is a little bit numbing.
I have a perfectly happy marriage,” she adds, laughing.
As Anne Enright noted years ago, “Hadley, for all the felicity
of her prose style, is an immensely subversive writer.” But, set
in the comfortable, self-conscious world of London art dealers,
artists and poets, Late in the Dayhardly seems radical. In fact, in
subject matter, tone and location, it could be described as a
Hampstead novel for Fitbit-wearing fiftysomethings.
Apart from passing mentions of Facebook or Tinder, her
fiction has an Austen-like reticence about external events. But
Hadley, like her well-meaning, well-heeled characters, is acutely
aware of “this dangerous globalised world”, reading and worrying
about it all the time, wondering: “What am I doing wasting my
time on this, when the world is going to hell in a handcart?”
Her characters, like Chekhov’s, she says, are burdened by
conscience and privilege, angsty and guilt-ridden, but impotent
to do anything about it. “All a novelist can do is watch the people
thinking that.” But instead of the largely upper middle-class
groups of the north London novels of yore, she is interested in
the overlooked “much-mocked, Guardian-reading liberal
intelligentsia, who are so characteristic of now, with all their
comedy and all their sweetness and goodness”.
“Is it drawing to a close, do you think? Our bourgeois
sensibility … Our privilege of subtlety and irony is at an end,” one
character laments, without irony.
“It looks as if we have written about that for ever and ever,”
Hadley agrees. “But we haven’t done a catch-up on quite how
that feels now.” This, she says, is her true subject: “Not a huge
one, but here in this little Britain, now. This class of
conscientious, flawed, indulgent but self-searching people that is
my generation. It is slightly tragic, no, comic, the helplessness
of that conscientiousness,” she says carefully. “It’s a very
conscientious moment I think.”
Hadley grew up in “a very ordinary bourgeois
schoolteacher’s household in Bristol”. But it was a creative one:
her father was also a jazz trumpeter and her “stay at home mum”
– “a very beautiful, very sexy, very glamorous woman” – was a
dressmaker and artist, and her uncle is the playwright Peter
Nichols (best known for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg). Although
she was “quite clever”, she was “no good at formal education”,
and hated her girls’ grammar school in Bristol: “It was like a
prison to me ... the most unhappy time of my life.” At 14 she left
to join her brother (now an art historian) at the local
comprehensive, where she was much happier, and where an
English teacher encouraged her to apply to Cambridge. “Did I
enjoy it?” she asks herself. “I felt a bit of a fish out of water. It
was a club again. I’d been no good at Brownies. I longed to do
ballet. I longed to fit in at grammar school, but somehow I’m not
good at it. It was fine at Cambridge. But no, I didn’t love it.”
After Cambridge, she “had no plan, except to live”. She
trained to become a teacher, meeting her future husband, her
tutor Eric Hadley, and thereby fulfilling her mother’s prophecy
that she would “meet a lovely man, someone older, somebody in
authority”. And following a brief spell teaching (“I was
hopeless”), she “went off and had babies … What madness. I
blame DH Lawrence entirely.” (She is an unashamedly
passionate Lawrentian.)

My books were no good. That was agony. I was

trying to write in other people’s voices – faking it
in every sentence

Over the next 10 years she had three sons, and three
stepsons, who were “intimately part of our huge family”, and was
“busy making a life at home and all of that, like my mother had
done”. But she was seized with a “devouring, painful need to
write … pushed down with shame when I thought: ‘How dare I
think of it.’” Her fervent reading only increased her “hunger to
do it”. Once her boys were at school, she tried more seriously,
“in secret, not really making too much of it”, finishing four
novels. “But my books were no good. That was agony.” She was
“trying to write other people’s books in other people’s voices”;
Bertolt Brecht inspired one, Nadine Gordimer another, “but in all
of them I was faking it in every sentence”. She told herself to
give up because it was making her so miserable, “but the trouble
was, I couldn’t”. After each rejection letter she would
immediately start thinking about “the next novel and that I would
get this one right”.
In desperation, she enrolled in her late 30s on an MA in
creative writing, then quite new in the UK, at Bath College of
Higher Education, now Bath Spa University, despite her
misgivings – “Lawrence and Tolstoy didn’t do an MA course!” And
she loved it so much that she stayed on to do her PhD, on Henry
James. “I was being my clever self, gradually coming out from
disguise,” she says. She has taught creative writing there ever
since: “a joy to do”.
It was while working at the university that she got a call
from her newly acquired agent to say Accidents in the Home had
been bought by Jonathan Cape. In a scene that might come from
one of her novels, she called her best friend, who said simply,
“‘This changes everything.’ And it did!” she says, getting a little
weepy.
In fact, an excerpt from the novel had already appeared in
the New Yorker, “one of the miracles in my life”. She tells a good
story of how, some years earlier, she had “made a pilgrimage”
from Cardiff, where the family lived, to London to meet an agent
who had shown interest in her work. They recommended she try
placing some short stories. She naively suggested the New
Yorker, where she was reading Gordimer and Munro. “I saw the
agent and her assistant just glance at each other. Aaargh!” But
she had the last laugh and is now a regular in the magazine. She
credits Munro’s stories with giving her “a lovely sense of
permission” to write as herself at last and about the world she
knew: “I was thinking this is just life. I recognise this, its weave
is right, its sensibility.”
Today Hadley writes at a small desk in her bedroom in her
London flat, having moved from Cardiff once the boys left home.
“I do always feel that if I had a beautiful study lined with books,
with an exquisite desk and flowers and a view, I would think:
‘Who is that for?’ It would feel fraudulent.” After all those years
writing between the school run and doing the laundry, she
doesn’t have a strict regime: “The rule is, it’s not a rule, it’s for
pleasure, because I want to. So I write any day I can.”
One of the most satisfying aspects of Late in the Day for
Hadley is the character of Christine, who, when her marriage falls
apart, is sustained by her art. “I was thinking about how I feel
about work and its importance, and I was pouring that into
writing about her and her painting.” She recalls her great heroes,
the Elizabeths Bowen and Taylor, who responded to “the
gathering despair in western culture” in the mid 20th century “by
saying ‘I’m going to go on describing the everyday life of people
getting on with love and parenthood and despair, because I’ve
only just got this. I’m not going to give it up just out of angst
and existential despair.’”
So Hadley plans to continue writing about people just
getting on with the business of living. She’s already at work on
her next novel. “It’s slightly mad. I suppose it is because I started
late or something,” she says. “Now I’m loving it, why wouldn’t I
do it as much as I can?”

• Late in the Day is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To

order a copy go toguardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p
of £1.99.