“Language is the big adventure of my life,” Deborah Levy tells me over the phone. “I like complicated relationships that are full of contradictions.”
Levy’s latest book is certainly a contradictory mash-up of 34 essays, stories and short texts. It includes a taut telegram to an electricity pylon, her admiration of the ovoid quality of lemons and eggs and an A-Z of celebrity car crashes. “The Position of Spoons was a brave book to publish,” Levy confirms. “Collected writing has become sanitised and uniform. I didn’t want five shining essays—although that’s a good thing, too. I wanted something that wasn’t uniform, wasn’t corporate culture. So, what about just one page on Lee Miller? Or a letter to my mother, and a poem to Méret Oppenheim?”
Levy’s often uncanny canon of plays, poetry, novels, short stories and a graphic novel explore myth, psychoanalysis, literary theory, feminism. “I’m drawn to precise, spare sentences that have a punch.” Levy’s specific brand of pared-down luminosity means she has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I suggest to Levy that her prose looks like water yet tastes like gin. “I wouldn’t want to be intoxicated,” she says dryly.
Of her literary lineage, she is transparent; in The Position of Spoons she writes; “All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of JG Ballard’s prose.” “Eerie poetry” sounds like an adroit description of Levy’s own literary DNA. “True. But I might write a book that requires something else altogether…”
Levy and I last met in 2019, by Hampstead Heath. Levy is a keen swimmer and had been in the women’s pond (“I feel tight if I don’t swim”). I was on the cusp of motherhood; we were all on the cusp of Covid. Since that meeting, Levy has continued apace, receiving the Prix Femina étranger for the first two of her celebrated “living autobiographies” trilogy, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living. Its final act, Real Estate (2021), was followed by the novel August Blue (2023). Now Levy is working on a new novel and a book about Gertrude Stein, largely from a studio in Paris, “although I don’t like to talk about my books”. Understandably, she is happier talking about published works. With Levy’s interest in the unconscious, I wonder if any of her characters haunt her own?
“For a few years after, I was very haunted by Kitty,” she says, citing the provocateur of Swimming Home, her 2012 novel which bled the Holocaust through its spare pages to devastating effect. “When that happens, the writer in me steps in and wonders, ‘why is that—has she fully spoken?’ Kitty was the haunting idea of this clever young woman who was so fragile. Now I realise the book is absolutely completed. Kitty is all of us, in the sense she is a close reader of [Polish émigré poet] Jozef’s work and can see the death wish in his lines.”
Beginnings or endings, what’s better? “Beginnings are interesting,” Levy muses. “A novel starts with an image, something concrete. The first 12 pages of a novel will take me longer than the rest. But the end is an incredible thing. You put your full stop in. At the close of a novel, the world must become bigger, not smaller. It has to extend, rather than resolve.”
“The point of art is to have a kind of afterlife in your mind and body,” she says. “If it doesn’t, maybe it’s something else. Advertising.”
Our own conversation is drawing to a close. I enquire about the number of lemons currently in Levy’s fruit bowl. She laughs. “Let’s see what’s going on in my bowl.” There’s a brief pause. “I have two red apples, no lemons. I don’t have lemons all the time, but they are very beautiful objects. They remind me of South Africa. I’d quite like to write about honey too, but let’s see where we go.”
