On the other side of the pearl earring
Award-winning author Tracy Chevalier talks to Helen Citron about finding the literature in visual art and why writing should be for the reader, not the writer.
“I love it,” Tracy Chevalier cries when I ask her what she thinks of York. “There is a tremendous sense of history here but the city wears it very lightly.” Her enthusiasm is just as well; she has just been appointed ‘Writer in Residence’ at York City Art Gallery and in taking up the role is setting a precedent – this is the first time a writer has taken a residency at a UK art gallery.
“My work has engaged itself with art in two main ways,” she explains. “There’s the art itself, and then there’s the creation of the art.” It is, of course, for her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, or just “Girl” as Chevalier refers to it throughout the interview, that she is most renowned. Inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting, the book offers a fictional interpretation of who the mysterious girl in the painting is and how she came to be painted. Chevalier says that she tried to recreate in prose the painting style for which Vermeer is revered. “I wanted it to be a simple story, simply told, and to imitate with words what Vermeer was doing with paint: simple lines, simple compositions, no clutter, no unnecessary characters.” Although not all of her novels have found their inspiration in art, medieval tapestries, the poetry and paintings of William Blake, and even gravestones have provided the basis for her most successful works.
Meeting Chevalier is a refreshing experience. On her website I was struck by the lengths she went to to explain the origins of her work and her creative processes. She tells us what she’s reading that month, how she is progressing with her current novel and even records her thoughts about her father’s death. Given the hype and extensive PR that surrounds the book trade, the cynic in me speculated that, despite this apparent openness and keenness to engage with her readership, Chevalier would have a specific agenda to pursue, and would perhaps be cautious about monitoring her public image. Instead, she quickly puts me at ease; chatting about her days as an English Literature student before stopping herself and saying “Go ahead, ask me anything you want.”
I begin with the question of readership. What is her attitude towards those who buy and read her novels? With an energy that demonstrates her aptitude for storytelling, she begins to tell me a lively anecdote about a fellow pupil at UEA, where she took an MA in Creative Writing. “There was this Irish guy who wrote quite Joyceian, stream-of-consciousness stuff – very experimental – and I remember somebody saying to him in class, ‘I don’t quite understand what’s going on here’, and he always said, ‘That’s your problem, not mine’. I was too timid at the time, but now I’d just give him a good smack across the face and say that of course the reader matters… you want to be published!”
Chevalier clearly relishes communication and feedback from her public. “I get lots of emails from people who have read Girl with a Pearl Earring and Lady and the Unicorn, and some of the other books where I engage directly with art and the making of art, saying, ‘I look at art differently now that I’ve read this book,’ and I love hearing that.” She goes on to stress how important an audience is to her in terms of literary creativity: “I always think a book, or any piece of writing, is not complete until somebody has read it and said, ‘I understand or I feel something about this.’ You could say the same about a gallery actually. What’s the point of putting up an exhibition if no one comes to look at it? Or what’s the point of painting a painting if you just leave it in your studio? Yes, you can do it just for yourself, but I just don’t think that’s enough.”
It is this attitude, she tells me, that will inform her approach to her role at the art gallery. “If I can help people to have a more fulfilling experience in front of a painting, as opposed to just feeling flat, then I’ll feel that I’ve done my job.” Her novels are a testament to this desire to bring art to life through narrative, a skill she will be demonstrating as part of several ‘Writer in Session’ events in which she will choose paintings from the gallery’s collections, and, with the help of visitors, use them as a starting point from which to compose prose. She hopes these events will “give people a chance to see how writers work… how I make the leap from the visual to the verbal. I see something that inspires me and turn it into words.” She continues, “I just like the fact that I can be so public about writing. I think people aren’t going to know what to make of me and it’s going to be tricky to break down barriers and get people involved. You’re meant to be silent in art galleries and I’d really like to get around that somehow. I’m certainly not very quiet.”
She is keen to emphasise, however, that she is no expert. “I’m not an art historian and I’m not an artist,” she tells me. “I’m just Joe Public who happens to like art.” Aware of this, some have protested that referring to a book such as Girl with a Pearl Earring as a historical novel is misleading. Of her critics she says, “I think the concept behind my novels is pretty clear before you pick them up. If you don’t want to speculate about history or art, don’t read my books. I like mixing fact and fiction; it gives people something to hang on to.”
In any case, research is an important stage in Chevalier’s writing process. “I do quite bit of research before I write because I need to feel comfortable being in the time I’m in. You have to immerse yourself in the period and find out as much as you can, and then you’ll feel much easier writing about it and won’t have to keep looking things up.”
When I ask Chevalier if she would consider herself a historical novelist, she replies: “For want of a better phrase I guess I am.” She continues with characteristic pragmatism, “I’m always a little hesitant about labels because I find them limiting rather than helpful.” What, then, does she make of the suggestion that she is a feminist writer? “I write about women because I’m interested in women, and I am a woman so it’s easier. Also, because I write about women in the past I tend to be writing about young women who are going through change of some sort, or who come up against difficulties in their lives. There’s often conflict between them and the men who surround them… Writing about these things certainly doesn’t mean I’m trying to make a political statement, it’s just what I find most interesting.”
When the book was given the silver-screen treatment in 2003, Scarlett Johansson was famously cast as Griet, the titular girl with a pearl earring. Interestingly, although it seems almost the critical norm to presume that any film adaptation of a book is bound to be inferior to the literary work, Chevalier was very open to the idea, seeing it as “an amazing opportunity to see something that was in my head being made flesh. It was as if one art work had given birth to another.” This is not to say that she was entirely without her doubts. “When you’ve got to get US studio money on board they often want to change things… I think Hollywood is very blinkered and stupid. They’re obsessed by that 18 to 30 market, but there’s a huge population of people over 40 who want to see films which have relevance and appeal to them, and the big bosses just don’t seem to get that.” Although Chevalier had very little input into the film, she tells me that she did have a “really healthy” relationship with the British production company, Arthur Street Productions, and visited the set on several occasions. “I really trusted the company we eventually chose to produce the film… I had one request, which was that [the protagonists] not sleep together because the whole point of the book is that they don’t. If you’re not aware of that then you just don’t understand the story. Luckily, in the end, the producers found a studio that was sensitive to this.”
The film propelled Girl with a Pearl Earring to cult status and now Chevalier even has plans for a stage play based on the book. When I ask her who is behind the project, she is coy. “It’s only in the pipeline at the moment,” she says, “so I can’t say exactly who’s interested in it.” Nevertheless, Chevalier’s enthusiasm over the project is clear. “When they asked me about the stage play it just made so much sense.” Musing on the advantages of stage versus film, she seems positive about the potential of this undertaking: “I guess a disadvantage of the film was that it could have spun out of control. A play is a much smaller budget and you are a lot more limited with what you can do on a stage.” The only reservation Chevalier seems to have about the stage is whether it will be an adequate medium through which to convey the intensely visual nature of her writing. “The film’s cinematography was perfect, really excellent. The visual stuff will have to be thought out really thoroughly before it goes to stage.”
Chevalier is cagey on the subject of who may take the leading roles. “Their feeling about the casting is that they need to get Vermeer and then everything else will fall into place. That’s kind of opposite to the film where the question was: ‘Who’s the girl going to be?’ I think their assumption is that they’ll find an unknown actress for the girl, but as they won’t be able to rely on her to pull in the crowds they will need a well-known Vermeer… I think that the chemistry between the two principles is going to be really important. You have to get that right, because if you don’t it just won’t work at all, whereas with a film you can kind of fudge chemistry. Somebody can be looking passionate but they may not even be looking at the other person.”
Currently, the plan is for the play to start in London, before moving to Broadway in her native USA. “When I first became successful it was a real prodigal-daughter-come-home situation,” she laughs, “You know ‘Oh, Tracy… she’s out there in Europe kicking some butt!’ But that’s gradually turned into ‘Oh, right, another book set in Europe.’ Or, ‘William Blake? Who’s he?’ I can definitely feel a levelling off. But,” she adds almost apologetically, “the US made ‘Girl’ what it became, so I am very grateful.”
London, where she lives with her husband and young son, is clearly the place she calls home now. I ask about her new novel, Burning Bright. “It’s mainly set in London,” she tells me, “but the bits set in the country are all in Dorset… Actually, one of the reasons I accepted the residency is that I love the process of becoming acquainted with a new place, and York is somewhere I could really fall in love with.” So, I venture, now that she’s spending more time in York, can we expect to see a novel set here? She replies with the vague and mysterious admission that, “the temptation to set at least some of a novel here will be very strong.”
Walking back home past the Minster and through The Shambles, I am struck by how perfectly the city of York would lend itself to a Chevalier novel. I just know she won’t be able to resist.
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