About Margot Livesey: A Profile
Perhaps it is so much transatlantic travel that has made Margot Livesey into an expert literary smuggler. In person, Livesey, born in Perth, Scotland, in 1953, and now living near Boston, is charming and agreeable. The same could be said, at first glance, for her fiction. Livesey's writing is eminently readable. You scarcely notice as you turn the pages how often her characters are behaving badly and how many moral dilemmas they are failing to resolve.
Livesey seems convinced that truths are hidden everywhere: below surfaces, in other dimensions. Not satisfied by getting to know her characters in the ordinary situations of their lives, she insists on putting them into extraordinary situations where their secret selves will rapidly be revealed. Her plots function like brilliant searchlights shone point-blank at her characters, also illuminating the worlds they inhabit.
That a hidden otherworld exists was a reasonable assumption in Livesey's life, both by virtue of history and landscape. Her mother died when she was two and a half, and from her earliest years, Livesey was aware of her shadowy presence. More tangible was the Scottish countryside where she grew up. Her father taught at a boys' private school on the edge of the Highlands. On her daily journey to a girls' school, Livesey passed the buried mound of a Roman fort, the old eighteenth-century drove roads, a track leading to a rock said to be the poet Ossian's cave. Not far away, a small village was rumored to disappear when no one was around. What happens to the villagers? Livesey asked, and was told that they, too, disappeared. Only years later did she recognize the legend of Brigadoon.
There was also, of course, the otherworld of books, though Livesey's relationship with reading got off to a rocky start. After the death of her mother, Livesey spent most of her waking hours at the house of their neighbors: Roger Sylvester, another teacher at the boys' school, and his wife, Merril. It was Merril who taught Livesey to read, or attempted to do so. Livesey remembers being made to stand in the corner because of her refusal to spell out a sentence. "After some fairly short period I emerged and read with gusto my first book about Percy the bad chick," Livesey says. "And after this initial struggle I fell in love with reading. Living way out in the country, there were few other reliable entertainments, and I can still remember the bindings (and the smells) of some of the first books I read:
Kidnapped, The Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows. My father had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and as far as I recall I could read whatever I could reach. Most of the lower shelves were filled with authors like Thucydides -- he had inherited the Latin and Greek library of his father, who was a minister -- but there was also Evelyn Waugh, Colette, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley."
Nearly all of Livesey's early ambitions came from books. "I wanted to be a nun after reading
The Nun's Story, to be a scientist after reading about Madame Curie. I was slow to realize that the person I wanted to be in a book was the author. In part this was because I knew no living authors -- we did not read them either at school or at the University of York, where I studied literature and philosophy -- and it didn't seem like a possible ambition. But the year after I left university I went traveling for a year in Europe and North Africa, and my boyfriend was writing a book, so I followed his example and wrote one, too."
It was not only a year of geographic exploration but also of passionate literary exploration. Livesey read, among others, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, García Márquez, Forster, Woolf, and Flaubert -- not one book, in her opinion, that was less than wonderful. Then at the end of the year she reread her own attempt at a novel, only to be startled by how bad it was and how utterly she had failed to have been influenced by her remarkable reading. That was when she got serious about writing. "I realized that in these books I loved, something was going on, something that was largely hidden from me as a reader, and I wanted to find out what this secret mechanism was and how it worked."
The craft of novel writing is something Livesey has pondered at length. She recently contributed an essay to an anthology edited by Frank Conroy in which she details her struggles to put her novels together. With lighthearted self-effacement, she writes: "I had spent many happy hours in the house of fiction, but I knew nothing about plumbing or wiring or putting up drywall." She goes on to share the elements of craft learned from her readings of Forster and James, and at the end of the essay suggests that one should "learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend."
After Livesey's year of travel it gradually dawned on her that she would have to earn a living. She went back and forth between London and Toronto, taking menial jobs in both cities: working in a dry cleaner's, working in a pharmaceutical factory, selling roses in nightclubs, managing a supermarket. Eventually she could work legally in Toronto, and she began first to waitress and then to manage a restaurant. She says, "I think that period is best characterized by Gurov in Chekhov's story 'The Lady with the Dog.' Like Gurov, I felt that I had a double life and that everything important in my life was hidden."
Luckily, her identity as a writer was soon exposed. She published
Learning by Heart, a collection of stories, in 1986, and then went on to produce four novels:
Homework (1990),
Criminals (1996),
The Missing World (2000), and
Eva Moves the Furniture (2001). The recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts, Livesey has been called a master of plot, but she shrugs that off and says that she has always considered herself rather plot-handicapped. Partly in response to that perception, she decided after her first novel,
Homework, that she really wanted plot to be the machinery that drove her next novel. "When I set out to write
Criminals, one thing at the top of my list was coming up with a plot that would carry the reader from one place to another, from one moral dilemma to another."
Moral dilemmas are of particular interest to Livesey, since they open windows onto that part of ourselves that we tend to keep concealed. She says, "I'm interested in what more or less ordinary people will do, given the right circumstances. I think people have a certain idea about themselves that sustains them in their daily lives, but who knows what they would do if they found a baby in a bathroom or if someone took all their money, or if a beloved person completely lost their memory." With equal measures of ruthlessness and care, these are the situations into which she puts her characters.
Livesey's writing process varies considerably from one fiction project to another.
Homework -- about an editor who goes to Scotland to escape a love affair, only to enter into another with a divorced man who has a disturbed nine-year-old daughter -- was inspired by a letter Livesey read in a newspaper. The book began as a short story, and it was only with deep reluctance that she admitted that the idea wouldn't fit into even a long story and that it required a novel.
The idea for
Criminals came to her while walking to teach one snowy evening at Emerson College. She saw a group of people standing at a bus stop holding up posters of babies. By the time she realized that it was Operation Rescue picketing an abortion clinic, she'd already decided to write a novel about someone who finds a baby at a bus station. She finished a draft of the novel in three weeks, devising -- as she had wanted -- a compelling plot: the man who finds the baby is a banker; his sister wants to keep the baby and not tell anyone; the baby's father, learning they have the child, decides to extort money from them.
The Missing World grew out of an article Livesey read in
People magazine at the dentist's office. There was an interview with a couple who were engaged for the second time. The first engagement had been broken off when the woman was in a car accident and, due to a head injury, entirely forgot her fiancé. The man had to court her all over again. "This got my attention," Livesey says. "It seemed a perfect vehicle for writing about various aspects of memory." Of course she added a little twist. In
The Missing World, a journalist experiences amnesia and becomes a virtual prisoner of her former lover, who neglects to tell her that she had, before her accident, left him.
On the other hand, Livesey's most recent novel,
Eva Moves the Furniture, took more than twelve years to bring to completion. She wrote a series of drafts and then put the novel aside; she couldn't quite get it right. But in between other projects, she kept sneaking back to
Eva, always pretending to herself to be doing something else. She has referred to the endeavor as seeming more like a drug addiction than a reasonable writing project. An understandable addiction, given the subject matter. When Livesey began
Eva, in 1987, she was struggling to imagine a life for her mother, Eva McEwen. "The amount I knew about my mother would fit on a postcard," she says. "And at first there was a big temptation to romanticize her. The process of turning her from a quasi-saint into an idiosyncratic, faulty individual took some time."
One of the things that Livesey knew about her mother was that she was fey, meaning that she was regularly visited by poltergeists and by beings who were not visible to most people. The initial impulse behind
Eva Moves the Furniture was a story told to Livesey by her guardian, Roger Sylvester. One day at the boys' boarding school where Roger taught and Eva was a nurse, he stopped into the sanatorium to use the telephone. Eva left him alone to make his call, and while he was talking, a woman in a raincoat came into the sitting room, nodded to him, walked across the room, and left by the other door. When Eva returned, Roger asked about the woman. "Oh, her," said Eva. "Go and try the door." He did, and found the door he had just seen open was nailed shut.
Her mother's matter-of-fact attitude about the supernatural was what interested Livesey. In the novel, the woman in the raincoat and a girl with grazed knees become Eva's lifelong, largely invisible companions, although her relationship with them, like any relationship in the human realm, is difficult to pin down. The companions have their own agendas and emotions, and Eva can't fully understand them any more than she can control where and when they show up. While they do provide friendship and even save Eva from being raped, they also sabotage other relationships in her life, thus abetting her loneliness:
The ambiguity was easier to contain because I never spoke of them aloud. When our Sunday school teacher explained that Jews did not utter the name Jehovah, I understood at once. I knew that feeling of leaving a blank, of missing a beat. If I could, even now, I would refer to them by a streak of colour, a note of music: the girl and the woman, blue and silver, D sharp and middle C.
Motherless, isolated, and visited regularly by supernatural companions, Eva is also growing up -- like every European child at the time of the novel -- in the shadow between the World Wars. Livesey's subtle hand makes this shadow palpable, even while her language expands and compresses time:
Even as a little girl I judged the landscape inferior to the one I knew from stories, the fierce, dour Highlands where my mother had spent her childhood. My father, who had never traveled north of Glasgow, felt the same. Into his accounts of her life he wove the old legends: stories of the valley where Agricola's lost legion held sway over the blue-faced Picts; of a glen, high in the Cromalt hills, where the dead carded and spun wool, gathered honey, and made mead and no one could distinguish them from the living. You might think such tales would have been rendered counterfeit by the barrage at Ypres and Armentieres, but in my childhood they were still common currency. Perhaps the weight of so many new dead could only be borne with the help of the old.
After twelve years of attempting to find a voice and a way of including the reader in the subject matter, Margot Livesey published
Eva Moves the Furniture to enthusiastic reception. "I've never received so many letters," she says. "I've come to realize that almost everyone over a certain age has lost someone -- through death or distance or some kind of emotional struggle -- whom they long to have back in their lives; they recognize that loss and longing in Eva."
By the time
Eva was released last fall, Livesey was already hard at work on a new novel, her fifth, a love story set between Britain and America. She won't say much else about it at this point, but who can blame her? Talking about it at this stage might inadvertently alert the characters or disturb the hidden machinery.
Jill Maio is a writer and visual artist living in Boston. Her 2001 interview with Margot Livesey appeared in Meridian.