Recently I wrote some answers to 10 questions posed by an undergraduate.
This was one of the questions:
Is the audience a participant of the work? Are they active/passive, and is that good/bad?
I answered,
‘Yes, of course they are part of the work. They are up close, involved and I feel them. I see and smell them as much as they see and smell me. I wear Chanel 19. I factor in smell. I refer a lot to chemistry. I sometimes joke with an audience that they are to blame if I can’t do something because I rely on their energy for the duende. If you don’t know the word look it up. It’s Spanish and has no translation. It means a lot to me as does Lorca, his life and works.’
Last year I got a mention in El Pais as a person to whom Joe Strummer had explained the meaning of duende and who he had told that that there was no translation into English.
I made such a point in my square opening speech in Granada last May. I mentioned the deceased in carefully chosen glowing terms and made the point about duende all by myself. Lorca gave me the meaning of the term and flamenco of course.
My husband said it was typical for credit to go to the legendary one. Who’s he telling? I have had more than my fair share of words swiped fresh out of my mouth.
Oh well, the words keep on coming so I guess they’re up for grabs, going spare…
I have often been warned.
‘ A little literary constipation wouldn’t go amiss’ a tutor remarked when I was an undergraduate.
It was such a roundabout way to say I had the lit. squits. It hurt, especially when she said I could get a job on ‘The Daily Express’.
Recently ‘here’ I recalled David English, then editor of The Daily Mail, visiting my (good) school and greeting us girls as his future readers. He never even mentioned ‘The Express’ in his classist, sexist list of British newspapers and their readership.
But he might have added ‘The Express is read by the cleaners of those who run the country’. The right wing rag full of sensational and salacious gossip was devoured by my bipolar Aunt.
The aunt who knew what best to do with memories did not read ‘The Express’.
I look back now at looking back at the gifted young academic who chastised my runny prose. She was brilliant, beautiful and loved by a handsome husband, who resembled Alfred Jarry, and all the poets and writers alive in seventies London.
Her uncle was a famous explorer and she was a socialist who lived in a marvellous house. I wondered why I couldn’t be more like her, no one would have ever called her a little bourgeois.
I remember looking at the divine Sarah, as she was known, and thinking how proud my aunt would be if I were to be writing for her favourite newspaper. I winced deeply but didn’t let on, ‘my aunt reads The Express’ I quipped as if I was in on the joke…
Shortly afterwards I got a more suitable tutor whose father was a vicar. He understood why I favoured Beckett over Brecht.
I had a dream in the early nineties in which I ran to Stanley Kubrick to ask him to help a friend who had got tangled up in his garden. He said he couldn’t help, adding ‘down with the creepy crawlies the failed vicars’ daughters go’.