Carole Burns in Conversation with Vesna Goldsworthy

Introduced by Carole Burns

It is always a pleasure to read Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries.  In this memoir that encompasses Goldsworthy’s upbringing in Belgrade, her move to the U.K., her adventures in love, her diagnosis of cancer, and her various careers, what we really read about is her relationship with her own history – where she came from, who she was, who she is now.

We talk a lot about the structure and style of her book in our interview.  Goldsworthy tells her story un-chronogically, and we, as readers, fly around Goldsworthy’s life like bees, not in a straight path but circling round and round, stopping on one flower to savor its nectar, then meandering over to the next.  This creates for us our own memory of her life.  We read how her mother waved good-bye to her as she left Belgrade, wearing one of the flowered dresses that Vesna had left behind – this alone is a touching image.  One paragraph and fourteen years later, Goldsworhty is giving birth to her son, and when she sees her mother wearing that same dress, it’s our memory, too.

I realize now that we didn’t talk enough, perhaps, about the language itself – the images, the tone, the sentences.  This is another joy in reading the book.  How on weekday mornings as a child, her mother left before everyone else, and Goldsworthy would “see her small footprints like rows of hurried exclamation marks in untouched snow.”  When her she and her infant son leave the hospital, “I am driven home, less than a mile away, all milk and blood.”  She writes in English, “although – after twenty years in this country – I still can’t quite control my English.  Like a fast new car, it takes wide swings around unfamiliar corners and leaves me vulnerable but exhilirated.”

Chernobyl Strawberries was originally published by Atlantic in 2005, when it was serialised in the (London) Times and on BBC Radio Four. It was widely translated and became a bestseller in a number of European countries. The German edition was reprinted twelve times in the first twelve months. The book hasn’t had an American edition.

Chernobyl Strawberries has been analyzed for how it combines memory and history in the context of war-torn former Yugoslavia (one American editor who rejected it found  Goldsworthy’s story “too European to be of interest to the American readership”).  Yet what I admire about it most is how it makes vivid a human life.    – Carole Burns

Carole Burns:  Vesna, one of the most compelling aspects of Chernobyl Strawberries for me is its structure — each chapter pursuing a leitmotif (beginnings, fathers, mothers), whisking us around your life as you bounce from memory to image to idea… and yet, it holds together.  You address this directly in your afterword, but can you talk about how the structure came about, and why it is so meaningful to you?

Vesna Goldsworthy: I began with the idea that I should present my life as a linear story, for clarity’s sake, but soon realised that it was an impossible project. I had a lot of trouble finding the right beginning and kept wanting to go further back in my family history, yet I also wanted to write a relatively short book: I did not want to run out of time.

And for you this was quite literal:  you’d been diagnosed with cancer, and at one point, it looked un-treatable.

Yes, and I felt I needed to write in order, literally, to keep myself sane. The idea of the memoir came from two different sources. The first was a long letter to my then two-year-old son, about his mother and the world she came from, the second a set of notes for my husband. I called the latter a “life manual.” It contained practical instructions: how to set the washing machine, the video, where to locate my paltry bank accounts and my minuscule pension schemes (the testament of my fragmented career). I realised that, before then, he and I had run the house like a U-Boat crew, quietly. We shared the chores without wasting time on explaining what the other was up to. My writing surprised me with humour rather than pathos. Many people with young children feel the need to write something down for the future in that situation. I faced the added complication in the fact that I came from a vanished country and a different language (my son’s “mother tongue” is English). As my prospects improved, I found myself relishing the challenge of seeing what happens when you try to impose a literary form on a lifetime of disparate moments, and decided to make a book of it.

What were the problems you had to solve?

The idea that a life is “bookended” by two events which one can never write about from experience, i.e. in first person – birth and death – is banal, but in narrative terms frustrating. These are literally the moments which you cannot account for. If I am telling my life story, why would I begin with something passed-down, second-hand, with other people’s memories of me? Then, if I am soon to die – as I thought I was – when do I put the pen down, where do I leave the reader? There was this compulsion to tell the story of my life before it gets too late – a narcissistic project, to be sure–but there was also the idea that any beginning and ending I choose are provisional and could be undone.

The idea of starting “bang in the middle” – with 1986, the year of Chernobyl explosion and the year of my move to England — imposed itself as a solution. These two lives I led – my “Eastern European” one and my “Western European” one – were, as I began to write, almost of equal length, twenty odd years on each side of the continent.

So then how did you deal with these two halves?

I decided to tell the earlier one in flashback, the later in a more or less linear way, but weaving them in a kind of disciplined patchwork, creating clusters of memories around particular themes which became a kind of obsession to me: moments of decision-making which gain significance in hindsight, sequences of forks in the road which create a life’s pattern.

I’ve always thought that the “radioactive” strawberry jam with which you begin the book also plays with the question of another beginning – where did the cancer begin? the kind of unanswerable question that leaves us grasping at straws – and another essential question — how one becomes the person one is.

Oh, yes. I can’t honestly say that Chernobyl harmed me. Whatever predisposed me to cancer may have been lurking in there for years. It wasn’t, to my knowledge, genetic. I remembered the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and I recalled that I picked these wonderful strawberries amid the nuclear fallout, and that my mother made strawberry jam and wanted me to take some to England.  The strawberries were, from the start, a metaphor: for the East European world I come from, beautiful but also so polluted, and poisoned by ideology from within; for my body which I also saw as a poisoned fruit – unchanged on the surface yet rotting inside. However, cancer may have been a trigger which made me write the story, but it is not its theme. I joked that the last thing I wanted is to be remembered as “the English Patient”!

That has always been one of my favorite aspects of the book: while you allude to your cancer, this is not at all an illness memoir.  What do you think of the “misery memoir,” as they’re sometimes called?  Were you consciously avoiding it, or did it just not come up for you?  The phrase clearly doesn’t apply to a book such as Primo Levi’s If This Were a Man (in U.S., Survival at Auschwitz) so a “misery memoir” might be something to avoid.

The book was always intended to be about memory rather than the painful present, which I refused to dwell on. In fact, my experience of cancer was in many ways that of denial – not so much of not accepting that I was ill, but of refusing to give illness any space. There are very few advantages of cancer in comparison to dropping dead over your keyboard with a heart-attack (as one of my close university friends did last week), but one of them is the opportunity for the “long good-bye”. I did not wish to waste mine.

The “misery memoir” seems to me to share something with those medieval accounts of martyrdom and sainthood, redemption through suffering. In some ways it is also about commercialisation of catharsis in our post-religious age. It appeals to the reader’s sense of empathy while in some ways being contrary to it (that “Ain’t I lucky by comparison” moment).

I was much more preoccupied with my past selves than my illness. I wanted to understand myself and my time, the reasons why I lived the life I did live. More than anything else, I was trying to compose something beautiful, to use the wordsmith’s talent that I have, such as it is, before it became too late, because I had so often frittered it on inconsequential things.

I know that Nabokov’s Speak, Memory was an important influence for you.  A few quotes from it come to mind when I read your book.  Nabokov tells an anecdote about being shown a trick with matches by a general visiting his father.  Years later, his father, sneaking across the border at night, is asked by a peasant for a light: he lights a match, and recognizes the general.  Nabokov writes: “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”

This is wonderful, thank you for this question. Nabokov is my favourite writer, yet I read much of his work so long ago and in different languages (Serbian, Russian, French) that the influence is negotiated by the tricks my memory plays.  I find myself thinking that Nabokov wrote this or that and then can’t locate the places in the copies of his work in English which I now possess and which seem both familiar and brand new. Of course, these places may objectively not be there, as he rewrote his work in different languages too.

The reason I love this quote is that I found that the process of writing my autobiography was also a process of finding patterns, of learning, by writing them down, to love the things I used to think of as setbacks, sometimes wilfully created: abandoned jobs, unfinished projects, restlessness driven by boredom and curiosity. I had sometimes berated myself for not being more single-mindedly devoted to a particular career, for example, but, in the shadow of death, I relished the experience of all the different things I’ve done, my stints in publishing, my goes at journalism, my teaching jobs, my writing projects, my travels. Again, the accumulation did not lend itself to a linear narrative structure.

Your book so much follows Nabokov’s rationale that I wondered if the idea inspired how you wrote the book.  Is it truly, then, coincidental?

Well, it is and it isn’t. I was writing “like a woman possessed,” hurrying myself along, while also having, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, the luxury of time. Except for the doctor’s appointments, my diary was empty, there were no deadlines to meet (but for the possible final one!). I was slacking on the home front, allowing the moths the full reign in my wardrobe, letting other people do the cooking. I had a lifetime of reading in my head, including Nabokov, of course, but I was primarily thinking of composition in terms of how it would reflect my personality. Believing that my son would grow up to be like me, I wanted, selfishly, to write the kind of book I would like to read. A bookish book. A prose poem with a gripping plot. (laughs) A book which would force my creative demons to shut up and enable me never to have to write a line again. Funnily enough, the only writer I thought of once or twice was Viktor Shklovsky – he of the formalist theory– and his novel, Zoo, or Not about Love, written in exile in Berlin, which I adored as teenager. However, since my much underlined copy of it is still in my childhood home in Belgrade – this was again much more about my memory of that book.  But this probably sounds like Nabokov too…

In a way, then, what many find is a problem with memoirs – the unreliability of memory – was, for you, a blessing.

Yes, in some ways. I wanted it to be like those stories we tell friends about ourselves late at night, blurred and impressionistic rather than choked with dates and names. This is not a story of suppression of memory (as it may be with Paul De Man or Gunther Grass, for example). I haven’t got any dark skeletons in my cupboard and I am an unimportant cog in the wheel of European history. I do feel, however, that – just as you asked me about “misery memoirs” in relation to my cancer — as someone coming from the Balkans, a “troubled” part of the world, I am expected to account for the historical trauma and upheaval, to provide answers to great political questions. Our writing is often marketed as witness to history. I did not want my book to be another guide for what the Germans call Katastrophentourismus – catastrophy-tourism for those interested in former Yugoslavia.

The other Nabokov quote is: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” Obviously you’re folding your magic carpet.

Ha, ha! How very Volodya. I don’t believe in time either: it’s a useful concept for orientation purposes, but not really there — like the meridians. As you write your life story you find that the reality of memory is very different from the stately progression of time. There are years which I remember vividly, and there are stretches which blend and merge indistinctly. I found that 1984, for example, when I first met my future husband – I can still account for, almost day by day, whereas the 1990s had blended into something rather indistinct. And it is not as easy as saying that some years are important and others not. I remember the external realities well – the onset of war in Yugoslavia for example and its gradual and bloody disintegration – but I don’t remember what I did and where I went in 1992 or 1997 other than in a slightly chaotic way (“Did I go to Pakistan in 1994? Or was it 1996? “When exactly did I get that job?”). It was more important to convey the imprint of unreliable memory – of myself –  than to research my own past in order to fill the gaps with something recovered. I leave that to important people, like President Clinton, who feel they have a duty towards history.

Do you care if visitors trip?

Well, I hope they fly too, so that the trip is worth it. Of course, it would be great if every “visitor” was exactly on my wavelength and no one tripped. My book would sell millions of copies, and I’d sit in the shade of a tree somewhere, eating chilled watermelon and reading Proust, ha, ha. However, I’ve learned by trial and error, and a lot of wasted effort, that I can’t write against myself, just because I think something is a great idea. I can only finish a project if it keeps wanting to be written, if it makes something in me catch fire.

A lot of my students who read your book decide that because it reads as if it’s extemporaneous thought—your ideas as they occurred to you—they think it was written that way.  Can you finally put into print for me that this is not true?

It is most definitely not true, although I wanted the book to read like that. One critic described it as “a wonderful, slightly drunken tete-a-tete with a new friend.” As is the case with drawing, some of the lines which seem the simplest, almost random, were the most difficult to accomplish. It is easier, in some ways, to engage in elaborate “fine writing” than to convey the sound of your own voice, which is what I wanted. I developed this idea that what I was composing was a “fugue” – a flight – like the musical form, where you hold onto the main themes, but you also keep running away from them. There were many things I wanted to say, but also many which I was on the run from. The project was healing, and perhaps literally so, because it enabled me not to think about death, about my body and the ravages it underwent, while also holding the bloody ghosts of my origins – my disintegrating country and its wars – at an arm’s length.

Leitmotifs, fugues and voice – do you think of yourself as a writer inspired by music?

Yes. When I think about structure, I tend to think about in terms of musical composition – movement, tempo, keys. This is not to say that I am a musical expert. The idea of “composing,” as you would a musical piece, helps me to discipline myself as a writer, to know how far I can digress from the main theme without losing the melody overall.

There are many themes that trace you being divided – either from someone or something you love (your family, your country) or within yourself (you’re being British/Yugoslav, a poet/an academic). Does the book, in exploring those divisions, also fuse the disparate parts together?

I believe it does. In a way that is where the musical analogy, the use of different keys, also helped. I started from that half-way point in life, soon after my graduation, because it also seemed an undivided moment, charged with every possibility. The divisions and separations started soon afterwards. Some of them – such as my move to England – were a matter of choice; others – such as the disintegration of my homeland  – a tragedy which forced me to redefine the ways I think about myself. To be sure, that tragedy befell millions of others much more brutally than me. One consequence of writing the book was to realise how profoundly lucky I was. That sense was perhaps something produced by cancer, the shadow of which rendered the colours more vivid. It was a challenge to write about contentment which I found as I put the pieces of the mosaic together … I normally “do” melancholy much better.

One of my firmest (and most favorite) beliefs about good writing of any sort is that style (voice, language, structure) fits the book– its themes, its reason for being– as opposed to something tacked on for effect, “style” in the worst sense.   I do think that’s true with yours.

Well, thank you for that! I wanted the book to be a “self-portrait”, to carry my own voice. That sounds easy enough, but it is not. You know how when the lens of the camera turns towards you, you stiffen, and when the photographer asks you to say “cheese” you produce a smile that is not at all yours. In some ways writing about yourself is similar. You say “cheese” and you offer a big toothy grin of false intimacy, or you stiffen and turn self important and pompous. I remember all these false starts, and then, at one point, just writing down that sentence which opens the book — “I have tasted Chernobyl strawberries” — and gliding into the description of Belgrade of my youth…knowing that I caught the sound, finally, that it was going to be OK from that point on.

Read an excerpt from Chernobyl Strawberries.