I swung by my desk to pick up my bag on leaving Julia’s office. Walking along the corridor, I took out my phone, googled ‘Helen Owen news’ and found the Guardian article at the top of the results. I’d started reading before I hit the lifts.
Books: A life in . . .
Helen Owen: A Path Through the Moral Minefield
Iesha Koury
Thurs 21 Sept 2015 06.50
As a new generation of women discovers her work, the author of The Uninvited Guest stops to ask, why?
London isn’t in the best humour on the morning I’ve arranged to meet literary lion Helen Owen for coffee. The heavens open as I emerge from Charing Cross Station. I dash across Trafalgar Square but am wet through by the time I reach the sanctuary of the National Gallery. It is ten past eleven before I look at my notes to discover I was meant to meet Helen outside the National Portrait Gallery. I rush around and find Helen in the foyer. She too has been caught in the rain. By the time we reach Pret A Manger across the road, we are both a bit of a mess.
With a mug of tea before Helen and a warm coffee in my hands we are soon chatting amiably enough. Helen shows some surprise when I let her know I’ve been reading her for years. She asks me my age and in the same breath says it is none of her business.
‘Twenty-four,’ I say, realising too late that perhaps Pret A Manger hadn’t been a great idea. Helen doesn’t look very comfortable. The rain is driving tourists in and the noise is building.
‘When I was your age I had a real terror of the old. But the elderly were different then.’
‘How so?’
‘They were the product of a culture that no longer existed. I was in my twenties in the sixties and the elderly in my life then had been born in the nineteenth century. Their formative years were largely spent in the pre-war era. The period someone like E.M. Forster writes about. I was surrounded by people who remembered that life. They’d lived it. And made judgements based on that experience. From Queen Victoria and the horse and carriage and on through two world wars, the general strike and all that. Lucy Honeychurch might have been my elderly neighbour. Forster himself died in 1970! What changes to see in one lifetime. They were an entirely alien generation. Refugees of a kind. Stateless. Where had their world gone? I was the product of a completely new world: TV, motorways, rock’n’roll music, Sputnik and the welfare state. I couldn’t even talk to the elderly. I suppose that generation might have been less frightening if my own grandparents had been alive. But all four had died young.’
As Helen speaks and warms to her subject, a light comes into her eyes, her whole face grows animated. She’s taller than I expected, and her frame larger, though she hasn’t an unwanted ounce of flesh on her. Her hand gestures remind me of my time in Italy. They echo her speech.
It becomes clear as we chat that Helen is genuinely surprised by my interest in her. Because I am a young woman. But on reading her early novels, I tell her, I am not struck by the differences between her female protagonists and myself, as much as I’m struck by the similarities. Their concerns – education, career, family and love – are mine. And the obstacles thrown in their path are the same as those thrown in mine – self-doubt, money, the patriarchy.
‘Which just goes to show that the optimism of the sixties and seventies was premature. Not enough has changed. My books should, if progress is being made, be as alien to you as the lives of Forster’s heroines were to me. Though a century apart, the novels of Forster and Austen have more in common than Forster and even, say, someone like Hemingway, who was his near contemporary. The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid change in nearly every facet of life. The second saw changes, but not so quickly, or profound. They were changes of outward appearances, largely.’
But there have been changes. Women in Western countries do have greater freedoms. And then there’s the internet. I ask her what effect the internet has had on her writing.
‘I don’t leave the house. I used to make trips to the library. There was always something I had to look into. The library was my second home. Especially when beginning a novel. Now I just google everything. The worst effect is an obsession with being absolutely correct in every detail. It slows me down, but also deadens my writing. Malcolm is always running red pencil through these passages in my writing. He bans me from the internet when I’m revising my work. He doesn’t appreciate how difficult this is for me. He is largely unplugged. Writes with a pencil. Which is probably the only thing he had in common with the late Jackie Collins.’
The ‘Malcolm’ she refers to often in her conversation is her husband, the writer and critic Malcolm Taylor. His 2014 book of essays on the modern London novel, The Knowledge, is seen as the new benchmark of modern literary criticism. Over the last twenty years, Malcolm and Helen have wielded great influence over English literature and over the new generation of writers. But Helen says recent talk of them being a power couple couldn’t be further from the truth.
‘Authors are the least powerful group in the book industry. A few may get to throw their weight around, because they’ve sold millions of copies, but they’re a rare breed. And they never throw their weight around in a way that benefits other authors. Most authors, at least the ones I’ve met, have no power and do as they’re told. Very few only write; most supplement their writing with other work. It’s a perilous existence with little financial reward.’
And yet, recent news would suggest otherwise. For Helen has been seduced away from her long-time publisher, Sandersons, by Morris and Robbins for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to run to seven figures.
She laughs when I repeat the sum. ‘If only! What publisher would take such a risk on a writer with one foot in the grave? I’ve had a reasonably successful career. But my editor says with each new novel my readership drops because they’re all dying off!’
Not all, I assure her. More and more young women are drawn to her writing.
‘I’ve been very fortunate. Many of my novels are still in print, and from time to time they include me in a set of modern classics. Not bad. But neither Malcolm nor I have ever sold in the US. So we’ve never hit the big time like our friend David.’ [David Cornwell, the author John le Carré.]
However, Helen and Malcolm recently moved from the three-bedroom flat they shared for the last fifty years in Brixton, and where, famously, they shared an office and wrote at desks facing each other, to a terrace in West London, so there might be some truth to the rumour after all.
I asked Helen whether she was proud of the work she had been able to produce over a long writing life.
‘Yes, very. I’m not going to be meek and mild at this late stage. I never set out with a plan. If a young person chose to read through my novels I’d hope they’d prove useful. They’re not going to help them put together a piece of IKEA furniture. But I’ve spent so long wandering in the moral minefield of modern life, I know many a safe passage through. And that can be helpful, I think. Why make mistakes you can avoid? What good is fiction if it doesn’t allow you to practise at living life?’
Not wanting to end our conversation, even though Helen is showing some small signs of impatience with our surroundings, I ask what she is currently working on.
‘The book for Morris and Robbins. To be frank, I’ve lost my way a bit. I’m in the dark with my arms stretched out taking tentative steps. Somewhere in the darkness is a story. I hope.’
* Postscript: Subsequent to this interview, German publishing titan, Seelenlos, bought Helen Owen’s new publisher, Morris and Robbins.
*
My confidence in being able to turn Helen to more commercial fiction had plummeted with the lift.
Now I was sitting on a lounge in the lobby of the building, staring at my phone.
I called Julia.
‘They gave Helen Owen a million fucking pounds?!’
There was silence on the other end.
‘Hello? Julia? Just tell me. It makes one hell of a difference.’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t a million. It was two million.’
‘Jesus! Why?’
‘That’s what I hope you’ll find out.’
‘Who knows you’re assigning her to me? Julia? Julia?!’
The phone call was over.