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Ali Smith interview
Olivia Wakefiled talks novels, short stories and unwanted fame with the Whitbread Award winner Ali Smith
Posted 4th June 2009 | Author: Olivia Wakefield
From Issue TT09 of Etcetera (Views: 215)
A few heads turn as Ali Smith wanders through the door of a sleepy west London cafe. It doesn’t surprise me given the sparkling success of her work so far; this unprecedented popularity has seen her become household name. Smith’s layered narrative and searing characterisation have stood her apart from other writers ever since the release of her first publication Free Love over a decade ago. It’s too bad she doesn’t enjoy the attention. Considering she is a self-confessed publicity-shy, “retiring” sort, I seize the opportunity to secure her for a quick chat. We sit down to sip Earl Grey and talk literature.
Smith is refreshingly unaffected for an author with such a wide spectrum of awards to her name. Given she’s been short-listed for the Booker Prize alongside winning the Scottish Arts Council book award and the Whitbread Prize for her acclaimed 2005 novel The Accidental, surely she must pay some attention to the hype? She insists that it’s “funny being called the champion of the short story”; an accolade of which she feels undeserving. Instead she lists a string of (“far better”) short-story writers who have notably influenced her. “Katherine Mansfield completely opened up the form, she is brilliant”. I wonder what attracts her to the short-story; publishers don’t often invest in them. She clarifies, “The story is an incredibly versatile form. You can do an awful lot with the short story and the story will hold its shape. It’s over fast but it has a much more lingering effect on the person writing them. The aftermath is harder than the aftermath of a novel.”
Her latest collection The First Person and Other Stories reads as a forensic dissection of the form itself. The first story True Short Story eavesdrops on a Wildean conversation between two men over the nuances of both the short story and the novel. The novel is disinherited as a “flabby old whore” whilst the short story trumps as a “nimble goddess, a slim nymph”. Smith however is keen to defend the novel. After all it was her novel The Accidental that received such critical acclaim. She tells me the opportunity to gestate characters is easier within the skeleton of a novel. I ask her about my particular favourite Astrid, the hardy, witty, teenager in The Accidental. “Astrid” she enthuses, “came absolutely full of attitude, full of hope, and full of possibility. I was excited by her, she was sassy. She was one of the most hopeful voices in The Accidental.”
Yet Smith suggests that the characters of her fiction must be confined to the pages they spring from, “We live in a time of terrible counter-personality” she sighs, “read a book because you want to read a story. Don’t read a book because you want to read about the person who wrote it”. So surely a biographical reading of her work is uncalled for? “Yes I think so” she muses, “You’ve got to remove the self. A self-presence gets in the way”. She laments that readers largely impose a biographical reading on Plath’s work, indeed she feels Plath is “saddled by her biography”. I suppose it explains Smith’s desire to avoid the limelight.
So should writers have a public stance or a social/political responsibility in their work at least? Again she disagrees. “No. Writers can’t afford to be political. Remember what Keats says, ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.’ I couldn’t sit down and write a strategically political book, the balance would be all wrong. As a writer your only allegiance is to the book”. And given her excellent work so far, it seems apt to say that that allegiance is very strong. The tide of heads turn again as we part and I can’t help but feel that very soon Ali Smith will be making an even bigger splash.
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