25 May

In Praise of Dangerous Women: An Interview with Tanith Lee
by Mary O'Keefe and Liz Wiliams

Excerpt of a transcript originally done for Scheherazade Magazine #27, edited by Liz and Deirdre Counihan. Printed by permission.

Mary O'Keefe: Did you come from a writing family?

TANITH: My father and my mother both wrote. My mother had one book published but this was after I had been published. My father was never published unfortunately, because he was an excellent writer. My mother wrote hilarious fairy stories. Everything gets switched round--the prince marries the witch. My father wrote an autobiographical novel which I think is one of the best--it's not because he's my father--it's a damn good book, one of the best novels of its kind that I've ever come across. It's about growing up in the back ways of London in a very poor immigrant family, about surviving and getting through it. It's also screamingly funny. It's rather Dickensian--very good stuff. My father came from a Russian Jewish family. My mother was English Irish with a touch of French. I'm a very strange mixture and very proud of all of it. My father's name was originally Levine and he changed it because there was an awful lot of racial prejudice.

Mary O'Keefe: Did you have any brothers and sisters?

TANITH: No, I was an only child.

Mary O'Keefe: Did they or you tell stories?

TANITH: My mother told me stories. And before I could read I used to tell myself stories. I used to have what my mother called imagination pictures. When I lay down at night I would imagine adventures in which I took part, of course, as a fully fledged adult. These were great fun.

Mary O'Keefe: What did you read, listen to, watch as a child?

TANITH: I read lots of different things. I tended to read the children's books when I was older. For instance I read the Narnia books when I was in my twenties, rather liked them but enjoyed them much more when I was in my early fifties. I realised how spiritual they were. I read Winnie the Pooh when I was about sixteen but when I was just starting to read I read things like The King Must Die by Mary Renault which was also an enormous influence on me. I think I've read virtually everything she wrote many, many times. And Rider Haggard's novels, particularly the first one I ever read, Cleopatra, and I remember bringing it home proudly to my mother and saying, "Look what I've found in the library." And she looked at it and said, "Yes, he's wonderful!" I tended to read things that were thought to be older than my age range and the things that were for my age range then I read when I was much older.

Mary O'Keefe: Mary Renault's not that easy, I would have thought.

TANITH: I found it totally easy. I understood it on some level completely. The writing's so beautiful and so atmospheric and you were there! That's what I always want. I want those imagination pictures, that cinema in my head.

I used to listen intensely and endlessly to the Third Programme, which used to have the most amazing plays by people like Louis MacNeice. Indeed The Dark Tower was one of the great influences on my life. I didn't understand it then. I'm not sure I would understand it now. There was also an adaptation I heard of The Lord of the Flies which terrified me and thrilled me and also became a great influence. I was six. I used to sit up in bed and listen to these plays and my parents allowed me to do these things. I think they didn't want to disallow something you wanted to do that was harmless.

Mary O'Keefe: Did you hear The Lord of the Rings on Radio 3?

TANITH: Yes I did--well it was the Third Programme then. I was about six or seven I guess. So I heard a lot of music and had a lot of stories told to me and heard a lot of very good radio. And we went to the cinema although we were incredibly poor--no money at all. I'm not joking. We spent a lot of my childhood living in rooms of other peoples' flats because this is all we could manage. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is one I remember with the monsters by Harry Harryhausen. I couldn't believe it. It was so much what was already going on in my head. I saw so many films. I remember Ben Hur with Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd, when I was eleven/twelve. And when I came out of the cinema not only had I fallen in love with Stephen Boyd--the villain, and would have followed Charlton Heston into battle, I also knew I was a charioteer! I remained obsessed with this idea for years. I used to stand on the platform on the bus--they had platforms then--and I would balance on this rocking floor to get this feeling. The thing I missed was having the reins round my waist and two arms holding the team. It was a source of great annoyance to me when I gradually realised I would never have been able to hold a team!

Mary O'Keefe:When did you start writing?

TANITH: When I was nine. I learned to read one year and was writing the next.

Mary O'Keefe: Were the first stories you wrote in the fantasy/fairy tale mode?

TANITH: The first story I ever wrote was about a cat, "The Story of Twinklepaws," who was abducted to a circus but escaped and became a very famous cat in some other strange way...er, I suppose you could call it a contemporary story...

If I found a book or a film had inspired me I would start writing things that were offshoots, not ripoffs, but there were a few homages in there on the quiet! I didn't observe the proper barriers. I mean I was fascinated by history so I should have done lots of research and written historical novels but I would just write an historical novel. I wrote one called "Saxon Flaxen" when I was about fifteen. It was because I was inspired, or rather, annoyed by the Norman Conquest. I was madly in love with Harold at the time... I went on my feelings rather than historical accuracy. In the end I found I was writing fantasy. I didn't know there was such a thing as fantasy. I didn't know you were allowed to write it. And the time I suddenly realised it was when I read Jane Gaskell. And I thought--my God--here is this incredible, beautifully written, funny, accurate, psychologically astute book, which is this thing they call fantasy. And I'm not doing the same kind of thing but I'm doing something in that area.

Mary O'Keefe: Were you particularly good at English or other subjects at school?

TANITH: Once I learned to read I was very, very good. I loved English--books--Shakespeare. I was good at things which I found interesting and that I knew I could do, history, religious knowledge. I would have adored to be taught about other religions--fascinating. And I quite liked geography. I quite liked chemistry but we had a mad teacher who was always blowing us up. We got evacuated from the lab because of some huge explosion...

Mary O'Keefe: What did your family think of your being a writer?

TANITH: They encouraged it. My father got panic-stricken when I was in my late teens. I think he thought I was going to be someone who couldn't cope with life because all I wanted to do was write. He didn't try to discourage me from writing but he tried to impress upon me how impossible it was to do such a thing but of course, thank god, it didn't make any difference. My father, however, was the one who taught me to read, the schools having failed to do so.

Mary O'Keefe: Any idea why?

TANITH: I realise I was slightly dyslexic--at that time nobody knew anything about it. And also my parents taught dancing and went where the jobs were. I went to a number of very, very rough schools where I was bullied and frightened. That's what I learned--to be bullied and frightened. I was the only child in the class who couldn't read. Again my father got panic-stricken and I think he taught me in about three weeks! I went from being the only child in the class who couldn't read to being the one who read best in the school.

Liz Williams: You were one of those writers who was producing cross-genre work before the term was invented. There's a great temptation with critics in particular to label people. I wondered whether you felt you had a particular affiliation to writing science fiction, fantasy, or science fantasy or whether you are just anti label.

TANITH: I'm completely anti label. I can remember going to Sweden and seeing that everything was filed under author not under category, everybody rubbing shoulders with everybody else. I mean a good book's a good book and a bad book's a bad book. I just cross genres. If I want to write about something then I write about it and if I want to bring something else in I'll bring it in. There shouldn't be rules.

Liz Williams: I notice you write in a variety of very different voices, from the breeziest adolescent to something more sombre--an extremely wide range, wider than most people. When you begin a novel do you actually hear that voice? And I wondered about your views on writing in the male voice?

TANITH: I know now that I have to get the voice before I can start. Sometimes I can start slightly and then the voice comes but usually I get the voice and then I know. I know that the syntax is there ready to come. Occasionally I have a problem and I have to fiddle. For example there are some children's books I've done fairly recently. I had assumed with the first book that I was going to write it third person because the heroine was seventeen and I very stupidly, because I should know myself by now, thought, you're in your fifties, you're not going to be able to do somebody who is seventeen--not properly. I couldn't get the book to come. I was in a terrible state for about three days, which is a long time for me. Finally I thought she wants to come first person. The moment I started her on first person --she was there. I couldn't stop. The floodgates opened. It was wonderful! I was taking dictation from this incredible teenage girl.

That then brings me to writing as a male. I don't know if I get it right or not but it feels right. To me it's completely natural. When I am writing as a man I am taking my dictation from a man. The dictation is so absolutely there, as it is with all of them when the books are coming, that I am not dissociated from that man. I have written about a number of things, particularly in the male voice, when I have read them through subsequently I have been horrified, but at the time they seemed perfectly reasonable! I must admit that one of my favourites was a short story called Draco Draco which is written by a middle-aged apothecary in the dark ages in Britain, who is a male. I enjoyed writing as him and was very comfortable writing as him and when I read him I liked him. It's unnerving if you've written as somebody and then you read it through and you think, oh my god, I don't like you much! But at the time it's like acting--you're acting. Your face just happens to be made of paper.

Mary O'Keefe: When you first start a story, or a novel, what actually comes first? It can't always be the voice as you've sometimes got that wrong to start with...

TANITH: It varies. Sometimes it's an image. For The Birthgrave I saw a woman, blindingly white, lying under an erupting red volcano. That was the image and it haunted me. Sometimes it's just one line. Sometimes you've got the virtually whole story. I almost never have the whole story. Sometimes I think I have and I get a surprise, which is wonderful. They all come in different voices and they all want different things. But it isn't me. Where I can do it is where I can ... let it through. Obviously I use some of my experiences, dreams, things I've read and thought about, music I've heard, but even so, it is, or is like, something that is coming extraneously and it's coming through me and it has any voice it needs.

Liz Williams: A lot of your work relates to different explorations of the feminine and you say in Women as Demons, "It was and is the glamour of the wicked lady that endears her to me." And I wonder what you thought that glamour consists of, because it leads into questions about the personification of Death in the female form?

TANITH: Well, of course, to the male you have the anima, which is female, so that is his dark side; and with the woman you have the animus, which is male. But I have to say that I think some of the thing with the wicked lady springs from my mother. Both my parents were extremely--frighteningly--good looking. Kids used to think they were film stars and didn't believe they were my parents! But she said to me, and I remember it very clearly, that heroines are often very boring--it's the villainess who's interesting. So she put me on the scent of that idea. When I was growing up, the sort of heroines I saw, particularly in the cinema, may have been very beautiful but they were also rather irritatingly obeying the rules, whereas the wicked ones did other things. I'm always fascinated by intriguers and con-artists, for example Bette Davis--a gorgeous, elegant, frog-eyed woman, who was an intriguer and a Jezebel--in a most fascinating early film. I see it as strength. In a world where women have to intrigue and lie and cheat in order to have any sort of life or any sort of status or even survival the wicked woman was going to do better.

Mary O'Keefe: And there's also the apparently evil man who is actually the saviour, as in your Dark Prince in the Flat Earth series.

TANITH: Well--l'homme fatale as well as femme fatale...

Liz Williams: Do you have any particular male heroes or villains in literature that you think are particularly wicked?

TANITH: Richard III! I hesitate to say this--I don't belong to it but I'm spiritually a member of The White Boar Society. I do not believe Richard III was the villain he was painted. I think he was quite a just and courageous and wise ruler. But I have to say, having seen it at a very early age, I'm absolutely hooked, on Olivier's Richard III--a very great influence. He's irredeemably wicked and dreadful and appalling but anyone with a wit like that....

I always tend to feel sorry for the wicked ones, if they're done right with that correct air of melancholy. One example would be the wonderful Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner--that combination of psychopathic sadism and desperate melancholia, which he catches so exquisitely.

Mary O'Keefe: We were talking about aspects of the feminine, and I wanted to ask you about a novel I particularly liked, White as Snow, which you wrote for a series of retold fairytales. I was interested in the origin of the particular mythology you used.

TANITH: You had terrific freedom to write as you liked as long as it was a retold fairy story. I gather White as Snow didn't do very well as it didn't fit in with some of the other books in the series. The mythology was Greek of course, but also from the area that would have been Yugoslavia and would have been part of the Ancient Greek world. It was the very rough end of the legend of Demeter and Persephone, which to me has very strong parallels with Snow White. My head is a rag-bag. My mother used to tell me all the Greek myths and all the Egyptian myths and I went on to read lots more. I dig into all this stuff as and when it seems appropriate.

Liz Williams: Do you feel that you have a personal myth? I have this descent to the underworld thing that I seem to return to again and again. Do you get entranced by particular thematic material?

TANITH: Yes, I think so. I've used that one, or bits of it, a number of times. I'm particularly fascinated by Demeter and Core/Persephone. I'm also very fascinated by the Labyrinth which I have not done a great deal with. I'm also very connected to Dionysius, the god supposedly only of wine, but he's not, he's the god of psychic and spiritual and intellectual release, which is why he's also the god of madness and is called "the Breaker of Chains".

Mary O'Keefe: Your family was Jewish on one side and possibly Catholic on the other?

TANITH: I grew up in a completely a-religious household. I had basic Christian education when I was at school, which I do not regret because I was able to see this fascinating vista of biblical marvels. I find all the great religions are wonderful, but I didn't grow up with any particular religion at all.

Mary O'Keefe: There is clearly a basis to what you write--it's not just fabulation. Do you have a personal set of beliefs?

TANITH: I think I'm probably an agnostic in the truest sense, because I don't know. But while I don't know, I have very strong suspicions that certain things are true. One of my strongest feelings is that all the religions are right if you go back to the original teaching. Once it gets into the hands of people who mess it about or misunderstand it then you lose that basic and wonderful truth which is there in all of them, or so it seems to be. If anything, I believe in reincarnation.