Interview

Deborah Moggach is perhaps best known for her novel “Tulip Fever” (1999) about a romance between an artist and his sitter in 17th century Holland. The idea for the book came one evening in 1998, when she took part in a panel discussion at the cinema where her long-term partner, the cartoonist Mel Calman, had died suddenly of a heart attack as they watched a film together four years before. At the end of the talk, she was asked what film she would make if given carte blanche, and she unexpectedly found herself saying that she would “walk into a Vermeer painting”. It was as if the idea that eventually became her most successful novel was Calman’s gift.

Her love affair with Dutch painting is evident as soon as you enter her Georgian house on the edge of London’s Hampstead Heath. The walls are hung with darkly atmospheric oils from the period. In the hall is God creating the birds and the beasts, with a touchingly wonky elephant. In a small sitting room at the back of the house is the enigmatic interior that inspired the novel, its central figure a woman whose blank face disguises hidden depths, its quotidian details – a straight-backed chair, a glint of pewter – holding a hint of mystery.

Domestic interiors fascinate Moggach – who loves Hogarth as much as Gerard ter Borch – and her house seems like a work of art in itself. On the table in the basement kitchen are a couple of real still-lives: a perfect cauliflour; a bowl of straw-strewn eggs, which were laid that morning by the hens whose ornamental coop sits next to the vegetable patch out the back. In this house, even the peeling paint on the stairs seems intentional. Moggach’s enormous and beautiful L-shaped bedroom which – despite containing a bathtub – is also a public space and is often used for functions such as friends’ book launches.

Moggach has written 16 novels, many screenplays (including the recent blockbuster “Pride and Prejudice”) , a couple of collections of short stories, as well as intermittent journalism, in a career that began when she was in her mid-20s. Born in 1948, she is the daughter of two professional writers. Her father, Richard Hough, a former fighter pilot and later a “Garricky” friend of Kingsley Amis, produced over 100 books; serious naval histories and biographies, as well as pseudonymously published Boys’ Own children’s fiction.

“He would write anything, even the bubbles for comics” Moggach remembers. “Early on he worked in publishing, and he set up the children’s lists at places like the Bodley Head, but he always wrote the first titles himself because he was so fast.” Her mother, Charlotte, also wrote and illustrated children’s books. Children’s fiction continues to delight Moggach, who lists Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” books as among her favourites. She remembers her parents sitting together on the veranda of the cottage outside Watford where she and her three sisters werr brought up, typewriters clacking “as the manuscripts thickened beside them”. Moggach’s admiration for prolific writerly professionalism is also expressed in her keen appreciation of the underrated 20th-century novelist Arnold Bennett, whose “The Old Wivies’ Tale” she is keen to adapt for television.

As a teenager, Moggach was not especially drawn to a literary career. “I wanted to be an landscape architect, but I trained to be a teacher. I worked in publishing, I was a waitress.” It was only after she married, and when her husband, who worked for Oxford University Press, was posted to Pakistan, that the writing gene began to show. In Karachi, she suddenly found the confidence to express herself. “All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.”

Her first novel, “You Must Be Sisters” (1978) – which she began in Pakistan, where she was “a memsahib with people to bring me gin and tonics”, and finished in London as the mother of a small child – was autobiographical. As was her second, “Close to Home” (1979), about a young mother in Camden Town. Moggach feels that she did not find her true voice until she abandoned using her own life as material. “A Quiet Drink” (1980) featured a purely invented protagonist, who worked for a cosmetics company, and, though it isn’t one of the novels she is most proud of, she regards as a watershed. “I felt liberated to step into the world of fiction. Now I was writing properly. It was not about the muddied people in my life, but my people who I’d created. You can be more intimate with your characters if they have no vestiges of real people.”

Moggach’s fiction depends upon strong narratives and characterization – though the latter, she advises creative writing students, always has to come first. “You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot, otherwise you’ll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.” She is also the sort of writer who has to know how the story is going to end before she starts. “In the beginning is the end. If you know that someone’s going to go to Antarctica or slit someone’s throat or become a lesbian or take up farming, that has to inform the very beginning of the novel.” She believes that the craft element of writing can be taught, and she reads John Updike’s “peerless prose” as a “limbering-up exercise”.

Her books also tend to have themes, or morals. A recent novel, “These Foolish Things”, (2004), began with a “sociological idea” – what is going to happen to our ageing population? – and turned into a funny, touching story of elderly Brits being outsourced to rest homes in India. “Stolen” (1990), which proved strangely prescient, was about the conflict between western and Islamic family values when a Pakistani father kidnaps his child after a marriage to an Englishwoman breaks down. “Porky” (1983), which tackled the theme of incest, was the only one of Moggach’s books that her father did not like; he was afraid readers might think it had elements of autobiography.

Given that her bedroom is a place for socialising, it is unsuprising that Moggach’s imagination is directed towards the outside world. “The traditional writer is a sensitive only child, asthmatic, who sits on the window seat watching the drops of rain slide down the pane, very introspective. I’m not inward-looking, I’d never go to a shrink. I don’t want to know what I’m thinking. I don’t really like discussions in my family. It may be an avoidance thing.” As the product of a writing family, she has chosen to identify with the professionalism of her parents rather than with her mother’s half-brother, Roger Roughton, a troubled poet (and friend to Auden and Isherwood and Dylan Thomas), who gassed himself in Ireland in 1940. “I’m quite an equable person. Not neurotic. Not like a lot of writers.”

One theme that surfaces again and again in her work is the loss of innocence and damage to children (her latest project is a screenplay for the BBC based on the diary of Anne Frank). “I’ve only noticed it after all these years, but it does recur – death, abduction, kidnapping, divorce, incest. It’s something that affects me most profoundly. If I think of the worst thing that can happen, I think of losing my children.”

Moggach’s children, now grown up, were six and eight when when she split up with their father and embarked on a relationship with Calman. “It was heartbreaking. I did it. I fell in love with somebody else. It’s the worst thing in the world to cause damage to people you love. I felt I’d murdered them.” Moggach and her ex-husband lived in adjacent streets, with the children moving between the houses. She and Calman never shared a domestic life, but they were “blissfully happy” in a relationship that she describes as being like a decade-long conversation.

A couple of years ago, she met a friend of a friend who happened to be a medium, who told her she had “a message from Mel”, who had been dead for more than 10 years – she should move away from the screenwriting that had been dominating her life and “settle down, close the doors and write another novel.”

The result, which Moggach wrote very quickly, is the just-published “In The Dark”, her only historical novel apart from “Tulip Fever”. Set during the First World War, it explores the effects of the conflicts on the home front. Its heroine, Eithne, runs a lodging house while her husband is on active service. His death from a sniper’s bullet prompts her remarriage to a profiteering butcher. Moggach charts the impact on the entire household, and especially onEithne’s sensitive son, Ralph.

Behind the novel is the story of Moggach’s own grandmother, a singer from a well-off family whose life changed from happiness to despair when her first husband was killed in the trenches. Courted by an insistent doctor, she remarried miserably, left the marriage within a year and took in lodgers to make ends meet. Then her son, Roger, committed suicide. Yet happiness did eventually return to her life. She was a fixture of Moggach’s childhood, finding fulfilment in helping to being up her grandchildren. Moggach treasures her grandmother’s scrapbooks, in which she recorded the story of her life.

From the back window of Moggach’s bedroom, it is possible to see the house in which her grandmother was brought up. It is the house in which Keats once lived, though he complained that the noise of building works distracted him from his writing. Under construction was the terrace of houses in which Moggach has made her home, and in which she has found the peace and quiet that eluded Keats. At the back, all you can hear is the occasional cluck from her hens.

(Lucasta Miller, The Guardian)

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