Books & Poetry

‘It was a completely new way of working too. Because the other books were so heavily plotted, I had them all worked out in advance and actually writing them was like painting by numbers – lots of fun. But with this, God it was hard… It was so much about juxtaposing scenes, continually rereading sections to see how they worked alongside each other. Quite troublesome and disheartening, really.’

The research alone took Waters months. She visited an eccentric ambulance museum in Essex, paced Fitzrovia in search of locations and listened to archive recordings of ’40s Londoners so that her dialogue would ring true. She also immersed herself in the literature of the period. Orwell was a key reference point; so too Graham Greene, Henry Green, Anthony Powell, Elizabeths Bowen and Taylor and less well known diarists like Denton Welch (on whom Duncan is partly based) and Bryher, lesbian lover of the poet HD, whose ‘Days of Mars’ is a memoir of life in the city during the war. ‘I read it years ago when I was doing my PhD, but it stuck in my head; this image she has of London covered in the dust of centuries past, literally blown apart by war so that all the cellars and foundations were exposed. Walking around the city during the Blitz must have been very upsetting, but also fascinating; to get these glimpses inside other people’s houses. There was a huge opening up of everything, and that extended to gay life as well.’ Feature continues

Setting a novel in a ‘historical’ period still within living memory is fraught with difficulties. Get the tiniest detail wrong and the whole edifice crumbles. ‘You could set something in the 1860s and do more or less what you wanted,’ Waters concedes. ‘Here, though, I couldn’t have bombs dropping if they weren’t dropping in real life.’ The need to avoid WWII kitsch was also pressing. ‘I was determined not to have women drawing lines up the backs of their legs, or any talk of GIs and silk stockings. I mean, I’m sure women were preoccupied with stockings but sometimes with historical fiction you have to be slightly inauthentic to seem more authentic. ’

Sarah Waters was born in 1966 in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. Her father was an oil engineer, her mother ‘what we used to call a housewife’. It wasn’t a particularly bookish household, and Waters had no childhood ambition to be a writer, never felt the vocation to which other novelists lay claim. Only after studying for a PhD on gay and lesbian fiction did she decide to have a go at writing some herself; ‘I thought: I can do better than this!’ Having given up teaching, she wrote the music hall picaresque ‘Tipping the Velvet’ on the dole in the tower block council flat in Brixton where she lived until recently. (She’s since moved to a more salubrious flat in Kennington, conveniently close to the Imperial War Museum.)

Unconvinced that there was a market for faux-Victorian lesbian erotica, every publisher to which Waters sent her manuscript rejected it, including her current home, Virago, though they reconsidered when the agent she’d acquired in the interim submitted it a second time.

No fan of literary schmoozing, Waters keeps her life simple and private. An ideal weekend might involve hanging out with close friends, watching old black-and-white movies on TCM (she’s a connoisseur of slightly bonkers ‘women’s films’ of the ’40s like ‘Waterloo Bridge’ and ‘Random Harvest’) and scouring markets for vintage postcards (‘my nerdy hobby’). One thing you won’t catch her doing, though, is cooking: ‘an evil waste of time’.

From the start, Waters had the devoted lesbian following you’d expect. That straight readers caught up with her so quickly is, in some senses, surprising. Is it because her characters’ sexuality is at once central and, in the broader dramatic scheme of things, incidental; so neatly integrated that it’s effectively normalised? Do straights get so caught up in the frantic plots that they forget to find the lesbian emphasis alienating? Or is it cruder and more obvious than that? Perhaps Andrew Davies gave the hetero game away when he promised gleefully that his adaptation of ‘Tipping the Velvet’ would be ‘absolutely filthy’, as if there were no other adequate way to describe lesbian sexual practices.

Waters says she no longer gives the matter much thought but does feel that ‘apart from “Tipping the Velvet”, the books aren’t “about” lesbian sexuality’. Rather, lesbianism is ‘part of a landscape which also includes intrigue, love, loss and sadness, just as it is in my own life’.

‘I was in France doing press for “Fingersmith”,’ she remembers, ‘and this very cool French journalist – a straight woman – asked me if I was surprised [by its success among straights] and I said yes, and she said, “What? Do you mean that lesbian books can’t be mainstream successes?” I said, “No, of course not.” But I realised at that point that it wasn’t so much about the subject matter, it was about me. My ambitions for my writing had always been so small-scale.'

The lonely not-quite-love triangle of Helen, Kay and Julia is at the heart of ‘The Night Watch’, yet the book also contains a strong straight male character in Viv’s lover Reggie and Waters’ first heterosexual sex scenes. ‘I had to make my agent swear to tell me if I’d slipped up in some way,’ she laughs. ‘But in the end it seemed to me that one sex scene was pretty much like another. I have to say, I found it hard to write about a man without it sounding really naff. Eroticising women is easy for anyone to do because our culture is so used to it but it’s difficult for someone like me to say what might be attractive and desirable in a man.’ She pauses, thinking. ‘All my other novels have had first-person narrators. And one funny thing I learned from “The Night Watch”, which doesn’t, is that it’s quite hard to write a lesbian sex scene in the third person. It’s all “she” and “she”: “She did this. She lifted her arm.” Nightmare!’

‘The Night Watch’ (Virago £16.99).

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