Talking to Jan Mark by Neil Philip, March 1983 (TES Interview)
I have very much enjoyed reading Mark's work over the past three years, first the short stories, then then a slow read of Handles, but for #JanMARKuary this year, I wanted to explore her thinking a bit more and how it evidences itself in her writing. So, each day in January this year will highlight a sentence or two from her TES interview with Neil Philip (it's available on Jon Appleton's treasure trove site here: https://janmark.net/talking-to-jan-mark-neil-philip-march-1983/). I won't be setting any particular prompts; I will simply be interested to see how the quotations resonate with other readers. My own responses will be recorded here.
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January 1st 2023
I want to do an adult novel. I mean one that can’t possibly be published as a children’s novel.
Forty years have passed since Jan Mark spoke those words. Arguably, she never wrote an adult novel, before or since that interview, so I'm interested in why she wanted to write one at all; and what even was an 'adult novel' to her mind?
From my (limited) reading of her work, she always writes for young people but from a very sharply established adult viewpoint. JM returns time and again to that one big thing that truly matters to children, that of finding ones own place in the world. She understands acutely, whether it's a very young boy rewriting the status quo (in William's Version) or a teenage girl (in Handles) excited, curious, confused by the rules of the impending passage into adulthood.
Do adults have that same sense (or drive) of 'finding themselves' that young people do…?
January 2nd 2023:
I don’t think you can get much wider a public than you can as a children’s writer.
JM here, I think, is talking about children as her public. I could be wrong, but I don't think she was considering adults being part of that (unless, like her, they were teachers). Her stories, wide-ranging as they are, match her young audience and there is that sense in her words here of the possibilities of growing children; how in a moment they are one thing and then transform in the blink of an eye, allegiances changed, interests morphed. It is, when taken seriously, the widest public imaginable indeed.
January 3rd 2023:
The books that JM wrote were never 'long', certainly not in the league of those weighty trilogies, quartets, sequences that flurried into bookshops in the early 2000s (perhaps influenced by the increasing lengths - up to 2003 anyway - of the Harry Potter books) - she says what she has to say and then moves on. It is that sharply exacting quality that makes her writing so enviable and, in this way, it doesn't surprise me to read this from her:
Once I’ve finished a book that’s all I wanted to say about those people in that situation, I might, I very often do wish I’d written it differently, but I never want to write more.
There's no fat with her writing, no spilling over into other books, no ends untied. Certainly there's no prequel/sequel stuff going on - even though in books like Man in Motion or Handles, there's a line that cuts through the narrative at the end and there's a feeling of stuff carrying on, beyond the last words. This may be one key to her success, her leaving us wanting more.
I also suspect that the words, 'I very often do wish I'd written it differently' hints at what she actually did do, which was to look at similar (or the same) subjects and themes through different eyes. Do it again, but better maybe? And dodge about a bit too, Jan: throw us off the scent...!
January 5th 2023:
"[...] there is an overriding theme: the uses of friendship."
While there has been a fair bit of talk this #JanMARKuary about the differences between grown-up and children's literature, I am interested that this quote points to an almost-ubiquitous theme of children's books in general: how friendship changes, how it stands unyielding, how it carries us as children through the world outside of our families. Adult literature isn't quite so taken up with this theme, the one of C.S. Lewis' Four Loves - Philia - that becomes the Cinderella of the quartet once we have grown up.
Today's quote comes from Neil Philip. I find his word 'uses' a particularly sharp bump, but absolutely right in the case of Jan Mark. There's a kind of knowingness, not-quite-cynicism, there: how Friendship in a child's heart and mind is not quite as altruistic as it will, generally speaking, become. JM's books do dance between the lives of the very young and the just-adult and as such never fall exclusively into any particular tropes associated with the literature of either group. Thunder and Lightnings, for instance, is a joyous, but slightly prickly, celebration of Philia, whose scenes steer clear of what might have easily become inauthentic expressions of what a grown-up believes representative of children's friendships.
Philia is most definitely a huge (and hugely complex) theme in JM's work; she doesn't lecture her readers about it, or moralise. She tells the truth, as unpalatable at times - and necessary always - as that may be.
January 6th 2023:
"There's too much emphasis on how to use [literature in the classroom], I think."
Reading books in the classroom can be the making or breaking of readers. (Fortunately, the breaking of a reader in this way isn't irreversible as there is another book, or way of looking at a book rather, around the corner!) What any teacher must do, I believe, is to think very carefully before selecting a class book to 'use'.
There is one vital question to answer and hold in mind first: why does any author write their books in the first place? Any successful text will have something to say; of the author, of its time, its society, its characters...anything really; but it will say something and that something will resonate with its readers. Sadly, as JM notes, the 'emphasis on how to use' books can very easily overgrow teachers' thinking about bringing particular books into the classroom. Their somethings can so easily be snuffed out. But if they do manage to be identified, a book that has its true purpose explored, questioned, discussed and considered within the classroom, by a community of readers freely sharing their thoughts, experiences and feelings with dignity and respect, untrammelled by curriculum constraints, is a wonderful thing. When it properly speaks to that 'classroom audience', it is a true marvel.
Life-changing, in fact, as the best education (and reading) should be.
January 11th 2023:
“I wanted to try and write science fiction, because I used to like reading it[...]”
JM wasn't alone in feeling the urge to create something that she enjoyed reading: one of the things that has inspired me most about Pullman's thinking about his writing was that he writes for himself.
I'm writing for me - I write for all the "me's" that have been.
- Philip Pullman, Writing Tips (2017)
It's an unusual way to think about writing in some ways because what is writing for other than to communicate to an audience...and what is one communicating, though, if the audience is yourself? It goes beyond the pleasurable aspect of reading, the enjoyment of reading something because you've chosen to read it. JM's reading of science fiction prompted her writing of it. The 'what ifs' of those books she read developed dimensionally into the what ifs of her writing: 'What if I could do this? What if I tried that?' Experiment, in fact, seems to me to be one of the major tones of JM's work; each story, each novel asking questions of its characters while the plot explores the answers...or at least the possibilities.
January 13th 2023:
"[...] you must be as intimately acquainted with your imaginary world as with the real world"
I read Gill Lewis' forthcoming book, Moonflight, in December and have been writing about it in a blog to celebrate publication. I note that 'going inward' is something that connects some writers in their process and here is JM saying something, if not quite the same, then certainly tangential: the real (outside) world becomes less and less of a 'thing' than the one that is being created in the writer's mind.
In reading, I have had this experience where I emerge blinking from the pages surprised to find myself in a different place to the one I was just a moment before: an intimate 'being' in another world entirely. It's very rare for this to happen (though wonderfully it is a regular experience for me at the moment reading Louise Welsh's new novel, The Second Cut). The disciplines of writing and reading of course being two sides of the same coin, I can see how in the cases of authors who authentically feel what goes on in their imagination - as I would describe how JM must have lived and worked - that sensing this in our own reading of them is testament to that 'intimate acquaintance' alluded to above.
January 19th 2023
“I always have the impression I read a lot, but I’m not sure I did. I read continuously almost, but it tended to be the same books[...]"
This makes me think of Isaiah Berlin's essay that claims: "the fox knows many things but the hedgehog just one big thing" and thereby draws a distinction between the habits of the pluralist (fox) and the monist (hedgehog).
Jan Mark's reading in childhood (the most potent kind of reading we can ever enjoy) was, she says, 'a lot' but 'the same'. The seeds of her own writing (as with so many writers) are buried somewhere here, it seems. I was digging around in the box of all my JM books this week and two things came to mind:
1) Crumbs, I have more books by Jan Mark than any other writer;
2) Every one of these books is so different.
Quantity. Variety.
In regards the foxy plurality, it would appear that from 'Fun' and 'Out of the Oven' through to 'Handles' and 'The Dead Letterbox', every move she made pointed in a new direction; but isn't this just the surface, is she disguising her true workings? Because each time I read one of her books, I can sense the same 'Big Thing' being explored through a slightly different tilt of the kaleidoscopic (hedgehoggish) lens. Whatever that Big Thing might be, it's something in her voice rather than the characters or plot.
Is it a step too far to invert her statement - “I always have the impression I write a lot [...] I write continuously almost, [and] it tends to be the same books[...]"? I mean not to be critical, but complimentary: despite a huge and widely varied output, she returns again and again to the same central concern...and finds new facets to shine their light and dazzle the reader.
January 21st 2023
"[...] you can’t cope with fear till you’ve learned to identify it."
Two or three years before she said this, Jan Mark had published her collection 'Nothing To Be Afraid Of', the title story of which deals exactly with this same examination of fear. When I read this story as I child, I remember most vividly the cover of the book (the paperback version) - the weird, leering face in the bushes grown to horrible size, bearing down on the boy. I remember the girl's refashioning of the everyday walk home into something quite terrifying.
As an adult I love horror writing, especially that which twists normality into darkness ("Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" is the ultimate for me, though Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith do particularly horrible things in their exceptional stories, too). But as a child, I was scared of lots of stuff - one of my first blogs was about Usborne's 'Ghosts' which disturbs me still, forty years on.
JM is quite right about fear.
January 26th 2023
"You need to be able to refer authoritatively to anything, as you would in real life, so it’s got to be accounted for mentally, even if it never gets into the book."
In my own reading, I try very hard not to give up on a book. There's one main reason why I would, though, and that is because it has been badly researched. Books about music that are actually well-researched are particularly rare and I became very annoyed with a novel about Mozart once for just that reason.
I don't see why a fantasy novel should be any different: just because the place and the people don't exist in real life shouldn't indulge any less sharp an eye and mind in the creator.
January 29th 2023
It was the first book I’d ever read where you got some idea of this is how people might talk, a family with in-jokes, unfinished sentences, people speaking at the same time – tremendous vitality in it.
This weekend, I have enjoyed Hilary's McKay's Saffy's Angel, the first in the 'Casson Chronicles' each of which I'll be reading over the next six months. JM's stylistic thumbprints are all over it, especially in the dialogue; once I 'heard' the talking, the connection fell into place.
While both develop plot, there is an unmistakeable sense that it would be nothing if not for the voices. It's not even character; it's how they speak and think that moves things forward. The vitality that JM writes about above gives both writers a buoyancy that whisks the narrative along, and makes the reading of these books a pleasure and quite compulsive. Being in their company (do I mean the two writers or their characters...?!), and sometimes their heads, feels warmly inclusive: a very real family, in fact.
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