Deborah Levy reflects on life, footwear and the power of imagination
CBC Radio | Posted: November 26, 2024 2:16 PM | Last Updated: November 26
Deborah Levy spoke to The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing about her latest book
There's a kind of alchemy with books where the personal becomes the universal. A writer pours their personal obsessions and idiosyncrasies into a book, and when we read it, even though we don't share those fixations, we still find ourselves there in their work.
Deborah Levy is a novelist, poet, playwright and one of the most celebrated writers of her generation. Her latest book is called The Positions of Spoons: And Other Intimacies. It's about her creative compulsions.
Each piece is an invitation to her deep engagement with artists, their art, imagination, memory and heartache.
Levy was born in South Africa in 1959, to parents who were active in the anti-apartheid movement. After her father's release from prison, the family relocated to England, an experience she writes about in the first volume of her "living autobiography," Things I Don't Want to Know. The second volume, The Cost of Living, was published to critical acclaim in 2018. Levy has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for her novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk.
Deborah Levy spoke to The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing about reflecting on the people, places and things that inspired her latest book.
I want to talk about your creative fixations, but first a bit about your footwear fixations. What are brothel creepers? And why did you love them so much?
Oh wow, in Britain they were called brothel creepers or Teddy Boy shoes and we're talking really late-seventies early-eighties. But they probably went right back to the fifties and they were pointy, often suede shoes. They had a pointed toe and a thick crepe sole.
I felt that when I put them on, I was destined for a glamorous life away from the London suburbs and that some of my dreams might come true. - Deborah Levy
And I got my first pair in leopard skin, and I felt that when I put them on, I was destined for a glamorous life away from the London suburbs and that some of my dreams might come true.
And how old were you when you got your first pair?
I think I was around 15-16, something like that. But I kept them for years. I mean, I didn't wear them for years, but I kept them as kind of museum objects.
At one point you say, "To not wear socks is to pretend that love is forever." And I also remember your novel Hot Milk, where the mother, Rose, at one point says, "I think better with shoes, with shoes with laces," if I remember correctly. You seem to load a lot of emotion and symbolism around shoes.
I like to bring the body into my writing. It's sort of sometimes left out. I mean, how we breathe when we're angry, when we're upset, when we're in love — little things like that. I think better in shoes with a very small heel. I like that a lot. I like the way they flip along. They kind of give me a bit of energy — these irrational things, things that aren't so explainable, if you like.
But everybody has them. Everybody has their own private magic, personal magic in so many ways, and these things really interest me and I don't see why they shouldn't be in literature.
Now you write about the past and there's several times in this book where it reoccurs — this idea of the past. When you look back at that young woman that discovered brothel creepers, what do you see now?
When I look back, I see someone who was trying to work out, we'd use that word identity now, but it wasn't a word that was sort of around in — it wasn't in my consciousness. I was born in South Africa. I'd left with my family, left when I was nine and we'd come to Britain. I was now six years into living in London.
So I was a bit from here, a bit from there — I was kind of putting myself together. There's this great quote from Andy Warhol that I love, and it goes something like, "I can't fall apart because I've never fallen together."
When I look back, I see someone who was trying to work out, we'd use that word identity now, but it wasn't a word that was sort of around in — it wasn't in my consciousness. - Deborah Levy
But that's the old writer looking back on a young writer in the making. So I was just trying things out.
You mentioned Colette, and one of the beautiful things about this book is when, as we're reading it, we meet so many artists that you love and we get to see them through your eyes. Can you tell us a little bit about why you fell in love with her?
She was a writer who kind of had one foot in one foot out of the bourgeois French line of her era. And that made her very interesting to me. I loved the way she wrote honestly about conflicting emotions, things sort of quite awkward and shameful things to feel being rejected or humiliated or treating someone else. Not so well. She was very good at that.
But mostly I loved the way she wrote about animals and plants. I still have images in my mind of a lot in the south of France, some of the orange trees she describes — some chicken cooking with the smell of orange flowers in the garden and things like that.
She's a deceptive writer because she doesn't really write romances. She writes about human relations. She doesn't really take a moral position either. She's not judging anyone. And so it was a kind of writing that was really interesting to me in my teens and much older.
One writer that you give a lot of serious thought to in this book is someone you call England's greatest literary futurist, J.G. Ballard. You quote him — and it really beautifully says, "I believe in the beauty of women, in the treachery of their imagination." What is it that he offered to you as a young female writer?
He always described himself as an imaginative writer. I think the imagination is seen as something quite old fashioned now, maybe because of the 24/7 media, maybe because auto-fiction is sort of coming through as something that writers like to write.
I'm a great believer in imagination because the books that I love have imagined something really true and real for me. - Deborah Levy
But I'm a great believer in imagination because the books that I love have imagined something really true and real for me. And I think it's the most advanced technology we have. You can shut your eyes and you can be somewhere else.
Violette Leduc's words sum it up best, where she says to write and to love freely was her hope. And I'm going to ask you, looking back, how do you feel you've done in this regard?
I do my best and pray for rain. I think I've gone quite far down that road. I'm not sure whether we ever get there or where there is. We're just on the train. In all my books, I've made a space for protagonists, often female protagonists, who are immensely powerful and immensely vulnerable.
I've made a space for protagonists, often female protagonists, who are immensely powerful and immensely vulnerable. - Deborah Levy
And these coexist together because there is this idea that you are either one or the other. But that's not how it rolls in my book, because I don't believe that's true. So that's the register of all my writing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.