High Profile
True to Life
Interview by Steve Turner
Witty, wry – and undeniably popular – Wendy
Cope is one of the
most quoted poets of our day. Third Way got the
measure of her
at her publisher’s office in Bloomsbury.
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Your new collection of poetry is entitled Family Values,1
and it’s evident that you don’t like them. What do you understand
by that term?
That everybody’s supposed to put their family first.
I was alone for a long time, without a partner, and I didn’t have
any relatives that I got on with, and I found it quite painful when
politicians talked about family values, because I thought: What
about people like me? Some people don’t have families and some have
horrible families, and that’s never acknowledged, really.
Your long poem ‘The Teacher’s Tale’, published in 2001,2 tells
the story of a boy whose life is damaged by his parents’
strictness. Is it really about you?
I would say it draws on my experience of life. The central
character is not me but he is a bit like me, yes.
Were your parents unusually strict even for their day?
Yes. I mean, my mother had a lot of problems. I think she was
pretty depressed most of her life. Her father had died when she was
nine and she had a difficult life; but she dealt with her problems
by manipulating people to behave in ways that made her feel
OK.
She was quite nasty about my first book…3
When she died in 2004, was that a liberating –
Yeah.
Did you go to her funeral?
Oh, yes. Oh, I was good to her. I went to see her a lot, you
know, in the closing years of her life; I did most of what I ought
to have done. But it was tough, really.
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Did she realise that you thought she had damaged you?
No, I don’t think so. And she had dementia anyway.
When I was younger, I used to have rows with her sometimes,
because she was so much her own worst enemy in the way she treated
other people. You know, I did love her and that made it very
difficult. In the end I gave up, because there was really no point
– she wasn’t going to change.
She was a Christian, wasn’t she?
She was a fervent evangelical Christian. She was born as a
Baptist but became an Anglican in her teens – but she was never a
very Anglican Anglican. You know, she never really had much time
for bishops or any of that.
My father was a very sort of old-fashioned, middle-of-the-road
Anglican: he was a believer but he didn’t think it was that
important to go to church. In that respect he wasn’t at all like
my mother.
Did you go to Sunday school?
Well, I was made to. When I was a little girl of three or
four, my mother said to me, ‘Would you like to go to school? Would
you like to go to school today?’ and I said, ‘Yes, please!’ – so
she trotted me off to Sunday school. I knew it wasn’t proper
school. I knew that was a cheat.
Then I went to a boarding school where we went to chapel twice a
day. I enjoyed that, actually, because of the music. There was a
wonderful choir and it was the best day of my school life when I
got into it. The head
of music was very charismatic.
Did you enjoy any religious poetry as a youngster?
Not really. I liked hymns, though. Hymns have had a big
influence.
You have said that teaching in primary school was the first
stage on your journey to becoming a poet yourself. And you also
taught creative writing, is that right?
Yes, that certainly was one of the things that got me
going – you could see what needed to be done to improve [a
pupil’s] poem and you’d think: Maybe I could do this myself. But my
big thing as a teacher was music, because I could sing and play
the piano, the guitar and the recorder and people like that were
gold dust in primary schools in those days. I loved doing it, so I
went on lots of courses where they got teachers to create their own
music in groups, and that, really more than anything, was what woke
up the creative side of me. Before that, I thought of myself as a
brainy person but not creative.
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The next stage of that journey was psychoanalysis. Did you
just decide that you needed help?
I was very depressed – I think I’d been depressed all my
life, actually – and then my father died and it got worse. Life was
a real struggle and I just thought: I’ve got to get some help. I
was really afraid I was going to end up being a bag lady.
It obviously worked for you…
It certainly helped, yes.
You lie on a couch and you free-associate. It’s really very
interesting, because I realised that when someone asked me, ‘How do
you feel?’, I would look for a plausible answer. But that’s what
you think you feel, or what you think you ought to feel, and I
realised that actually I didn’t know where to look for what I
really felt. And in psychoanalysis where you look is, you know,
dreams, slips, accidents, all those clues. So, I got in touch with
some powerful feelings I hadn’t been aware of…
A very common dialogue in the early stages of analysis is the
analyst saying, ‘You’re angry with me’ and the patient saying, ‘No,
I’m not. Why would I be angry with you?’ And what you realise is
that there’s no reason why you should be – but you are anyway. You
may have feelings that are completely irrational and unfair, but
they are still there. And you don’t have to act on them but you
have to acknowledge them.
It was one of the reasons I started writing, because I needed
something to do with these feelings.
And the third factor, you’ve said, was living on your
own.
Yes. My nice flatmates had got married and I was fed up with
the ones I was living with, so I went and lived on my own. And that
was really hard. There was no one at home to talk to and that was
certainly a factor in getting me writing. Even now, I am more
likely to write a poem if my partner’s away.
What is the function of poetry, do you think?
I don’t really think of it as having to have a function. It
just is. Some people enjoy writing poems and some people enjoy
reading them. I would quote Dr Johnson: ‘The only end of writing is
to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure
it.’ But that’s not the reason I write – I write because I feel
like writing.
As a poet, your impulse seems to be to communicate clearly. No
one has to read your poems 10 times to make sense of them. Where
does that impulse come from?
It’s just the way I write. I think that the biggest mistake
people make about poetry is this idea that poets have intentions.
You know? Poets just get an idea, some words in their head, and
they sit down and write the poem. My poems come out the way they do
for all kinds of reasons to do with the person I am. I think I’d
find it very difficult to write something that was
incomprehensible.
What is your greatest strength as a poet?
That’s a very dangerous question, really. You’d have to ask
my readers. I don’t know. I’m not going to answer a question that
encourages me to boast or make claims.
What has sometimes been said about my poems is that what is good
about them is that they’re true. And that’s the best thing anyone
could say. I’m sometimes asked, ‘What’s the best bit of advice
you’ve ever been given?’ and I quote George Herbert in ‘The Church
Porch’: ‘Dare to be true.’ I try to tell the truth.
There’s a slight air of disappointment in your poems, as
though life is not quite what you’d expected it to be.
Is there? I think my unhappiest book was Serious
Concerns4 – I mean, one reviewer said it was written out of
deep despair and I thought, ‘That’s right.’ But I would say I’m
pretty contented with life at the moment.
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Is contentment sometimes the enemy of art? Do
you find that you need some kind of stress to write a poem?
I hope not. I mean, people used to say to me sometimes when
my love life went wrong yet again, ‘Oh, you’ll get some good poems
out of it,’ and I felt like kicking them, because I’d much rather
be happy. And I think this may be my great limitation, that I do
think life matters more than art. You know, a lot of male great
artists have been appallingly selfish people – you hear of families
where everything revolves around the great artist’s art.
Didn’t Yeats say we are ‘forced to choose perfection -‘
‘Of the life, or of the work’. He did, he did. I certainly
don’t have a perfect life but I don’t think that my happiness or
the happiness of people close to me matters less than my
work.
And anyway I live with another poet, so there is no way that our
life is going to revolve around my work.
In one interview you referred to ‘my difficult relationship
with the poetry world’. What did you mean by that?
My first book got a lot of publicity and sold very well and
that caused a great deal of hostility among other poets. Not
everybody – I mean, there are some who’ve been very supportive all
along. But there was this thing which still occasionally happens,
where I’m introduced to some poet I’ve never met before and they
sort of have this look on their face as if they’re being asked to
shake hands with Hitler.
What would you put that down to? That they would have loved to
be selling much more of their own work?
I think some of them may genuinely have thought my poems
weren’t any good and resented the fact that I was getting so much
publicity. One or two people have admitted to me that they had
formed a very strong prejudice against me without having read the
book, but then, having got to know me and having read it, said:
‘Gosh! You’re a good poet.’
It hasn’t often happened that a poet’s first book has had the
sales and the attention that mine had, although there have always
been poets who were popular in their lifetime, as well as lots who
were more or less ignored. None of us knows who’s going to be read
in a hundred years’ time. If you go to Poets’ Corner [in
Westminster Abbey] you see memorials to all sorts of poets that
nobody ever reads nowadays.
People complain that poetry isn’t as popular as it should be,
and then complain when poets become too popular.
Exactly.
But Tennyson was enormously popular in his day, wasn’t he?
As was Kipling.
Yes, yes. I don’t know if other poets minded that.
I mean, all I ask people to acknowledge is that being popular does
not mean you’re any good but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re
not.
You moved in with Lachlan Mackinnon in 1994. Is it hard for
two poets to live together?
Well, I sometimes think it’s difficult for him, because I’ve
achieved more recognition than he has – but I was already an
established poet when we met.
It’s easy to imagine you sitting at home, both lost in silent
introspection.
No, no, it’s not like that. What’s good about it is that we
have a lot in common that we can talk about. We manage on the whole
not to be too competitive about writing poetry – we seem to reserve
our competitiveness for things like who is the best singer.
And who is?
Me.
Why don’t you marry him? Are you against –
What we would like is to have a civil partnership, and we’re
really annoyed that heterosexual couples are not allowed to in this
country. In France, people have the choice and everyone’s going for
civil partnership. Of course, the [Church of England] doesn’t want
that.
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What’s the difference?
At a civil-partnership ceremony, you do not have to promise
to stay together and love each other until one of you dies. You
know, since Lachlan and I have been together, so many people we
know have got married with great hooha and expense, and we all have
to give up a day of our lives for it, you know – and then they have
got divorced! I think it’s a very bad thing for society that
people make these solemn promises so lightly – they think they
don’t really matter.
Would you rather have no promises made at all?
I was asked to write a poem about vows for the
Guardian (because of the royal wedding) and I thought:
‘Say I was marrying Lachlan, what could I honestly promise?’ Most
of the poem is about what I can’t promise, but the last lines
are:
I love you and I want to make you happy.
I promise I will do my very best.5
Which just seems to be all anyone can promise.
But we probably will end up getting married – and if it’s up to
him, it’ll be in a church. And I think it is very likely that we’ll
stay together until one of us dies.
I get the sense that the religion you were brought up in has
never really left you.
I think that if you had a religious upbringing, it leaves a
religion-shaped hole. I think I’ve had other religions since then.
I think psychoanalysis was my religion for a while, and then
poetry. I’m not sure what my religion is now. That’s an interesting
question I’m asking myself.
Given her strong beliefs, was there a sense in which your
mother and God became confused in your mind?
Oh, yes. I think, very much so.
When I went to university, she got in touch with the Christian
Union and said, ‘I think my daughter might be interested in
joining.’ I don’t know if you know about university Christian
unions, but they’re ghastly. I mean, they’re the unacceptable face
of student religion. And so they came to my door and collected me
and my first Saturday evening in Oxford was spent at a Bible study,
which was not really what I wanted to be doing.
Would you have said you were a Christian in those days?
Oh yes. Yes.
And then on Sunday afternoons they went visiting hospitals. Well,
I didn’t have any problem with singing a few hymns in the ward, but
they tried to convert people in their hospital beds. I remember one
time we had special prayers for a don’s wife. She had told them she
was an atheist, so they had a special go at her. I thought it was
terrible.
Another thing was, there were some undergraduates at my college
who were Roman Catholic nuns and one day we were asked to pray for
them to see the error of their ways. And I thought, really, I
couldn’t be doing with this. With all the evil there is in the
world, to be praying for nuns to see the error of their ways!
So, I stopped going – and after that I wouldn’t have anything to
do with any kind of religion for a long, long time. I mean, we’d
have these late-night arguments about the existence of God, as
students do, and it became clear to me that you really couldn’t
prove it one way or the other and I decided that for an
experimental period I would assume that God didn’t exist. And that
went on for about 30 years.
And what happened then?
I moved to Winchester after I met my partner and I began
going to the cathedral to listen to the music and sort of fell in
love with the Church of England. It was wonderful that there it
was, all waiting for me, and I already belonged to it. It wasn’t
just the music but also the words of the Prayer Book – I just
thought the whole thing was wonderful. I started going to church a
lot – and almost convinced myself that I believed it all.
I am sympathetic to Larkin’s lines [in ‘Aubade’]:
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die
That’s pretty much what I think, too. But it’s a very beautiful
brocade, and very inspiring. I’m very pro the Church of England.
I’ve got quite a few friends who are priests – and I think the
Archbishop of Canterbury is wonderful!
And he likes your poetry, doesn’t he?
He does. I was thrilled when he was asked to pick out [six or
seven] things he liked for the Poetry Archive and he picked out
me.6
Are you still trying to believe?
Not really, no. I described myself on the radio the other day
as ‘an Anglican atheist’, though maybe I should have said
‘agnostic’. I mean, I love Jesus, I think that being a Christian is
a good way to live, I think that Christians do an awful lot of good
in the world; I just don’t believe in the supernatural bits and in
life after death – which seems to me to be fairly crucial.
Would you like it all to be true?
I’m not sure. I’m really not sure. I mean, my partner is a
believer – he doesn’t go to church very much, but he absolutely
believes in it all – and I’m glad for his sake that he does,
because I think it makes it much easier to die. And if you believe
in life after death, you’re never going to find out that you’re
wrong, are you? You’re never going to find out you’re wrong.
Wendy Cope was talking to Steve Turner
1 Published by Faber and Faber in April 2011
2 In If I Don’t Know (Faber and Faber)
3 Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber and Faber,
1986)
4 Faber and Faber, 1992
5 From ‘A Vow’
6 Rowan
Williams chose ‘Strugnell’s Haiku’ from her first collection
and observed: ‘Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of
contemporary English poets, and says a lot of extremely serious
things.’
