This was published 7 years ago
Novelist Anne Tyler updates the dusty sexual politics of Shakespeare's Shrew
Novelist Anne Tyler has always been fascinated by the watersheds of domestic life – and now she’s updated the dusty sexual politics of Shakespeare’s Shrew
By Tom Shone
Anne Tyler has a time-travel fantasy that helps her get to sleep. First, she has to figure out why they'd be asking a 75-year-old novelist into a time machine. "Because they have to have everything observed, not just in scientific terms, right?" she suggests over coffee at her home in Baltimore. "Naturally, they'd come to me."
Wearing a dark denim ankle-length skirt, her silver and grey hair in a bun, Tyler has a deceptively kindly gaze that doesn't miss much, and the smile of a cheeky boy – an old young face. We are sitting in the living room of her house in a well-to-do gated community on the outskirts of the city where she has lived since 2008. It has its own mall and cafes – a leafy, self-contained universe – although Tyler likes to walk two hours every morning to get her groceries before getting down to work, writing in longhand with the window open so she can hear what's going on
Author Anne Tyler at her home in Baltimore. "I'm still here, doing what I was doing when I was three."Credit: Melissa Golden/Redux/Headpress
She has a few favourite stop-offs in her time travel fantasy, she tells me. "I'd like to go to the part of human development when language first started emerging; caveman days, if that's what that was. I'd like to go to Jesus's time and see what was going on there. I'd like to go to Shakespeare's time and see him rehearse a play.
"Then I'd like to end up in 1910. I know this is total malarkey, but it was probably the ideal year to be alive, because no world wars had happened, I want hot and cold running water, and the clothes were nice, right?" She laughs. "Time is fascinating. Of course, it's the only plot device I have going for me, because everything that happens is totally because of time in my books."
Antique pocket watch on golden chain.Credit: Getty Images
Nearly all Tyler's novels are set in Baltimore and concern large families marking time with the usual watersheds of family life: courtship, weddings, children, college, deaths. Observing her characters' befuddled comings and goings with sympathy and dry humour, Tyler applies a little nudge here, a prompt there, letting out the occasional sigh of disappointment as someone's good intentions don't quite pan out as planned.
I have read her wise, warm-hearted work – including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer-winning Breathing Lessons – for 20 years, but I never thought we'd meet. Tyler isn't a recluse in the Salinger mould, exactly – her novels bustle with too much gossip and life to give any impression other than one of supreme embeddedness – but she didn't give an interview in 40 years. Then, in 2012, she did one in the US to promote her novel The Beginner's Goodbye. Others followed.
Something seemed to have shifted in Tylerland. Some personal perestroika? A deep tectonic movement in the psychic-creative forces that govern literary careers? A kind of settling up as she entered her eighth decade? Nothing of the sort, she says. Her editors just asked her and this time she thought, why not? "I often wonder what would happen if I had Tolstoy over for tea," she says gaily. "I'd probably have nothing to say to him." It's like hearing that Mikhail Gorbachev launched glasnost because he woke up one day and felt like a Coke. But that is very Tyleresque, the long groove of routine disrupted by a sudden burst of to-hell-with-it impetuosity.
A small dose of whimsy is detectable in late-period Tyler. Her latest book, Vinegar Girl – her 21st – is a retelling of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. It seems an odd play to pick, with its dusty sexual politics. Actresses have long stumbled over the final speech preaching submission to one's spouse. In Tyler's retelling, the famously shrewish Kate is a sharp-tongued preschool assistant who has somehow found herself looking after her widowed father, a scientist who is convinced his research will soon break through – if only he can hang on to his lab assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose visa is about to expire. So he asks his daughter to marry Pyotr. Thus is Shakespeare's shrill knockabout refitted with Tyler's characteristic humour and sympathy: the father one of those befuddled scientist figures familiar from her fiction; the sharp-tongued daughter, Kate, perhaps more of a stretch. The first time she realised she was enjoying herself was when she wrote the line: "Kate had nothing to say, so she said nothing."
"Women in general, we're sort of raised to smooth things over all the time, and to natter on if there's a silence and say nice things to people if they seem to need it. She's totally clueless and doesn't bother. I sort of liked that. I liked being rude to people, vicariously." She laughs. Perhaps therein lies the thrill: a chance to be rude for a novelist some critics have accused of playing a little too nicely with others, though "I had several people tell me it doesn't seem like she was much of a shrew in my version, so maybe I toned her down too much".
This, certainly, is the criticism of her work. In a literary-critical culture that often mistakes lack of charity towards one's characters for acuity of observation, the warmth of Tyler's novels renders her an easy target. In a 2004 Guardian review, Adam Mars-Jones compared Tyler's The Amateur Marriage unfavourably with Philip Roth's American Pastoral: "Alongside Roth's paroxysms of rage and understanding, his astonishing display of piss and vinegar, Tyler seems to be offering milk and cookies."
Tyler takes the criticism mildly, half-agreeing with it. "I have noticed, as a woman writer, that an event like war is considered a more real literary subject than just a wedding. I feel sort of, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I haven't been to war.' Then I think, no. What motivates me when I'm writing is that I'm awed over and over again just by how people manage to endure. Just that. They have nothing to look forward to, and some of them have hard and humdrum lives, and they go along. I mean, it's a miracle, if you think about it – that we're all putting one foot in front of another is a miracle. To walk down the street and practically every person walking towards me, for instance, has had a huge loss. You know? I'm just so interested that it's possible."
There is nothing blinkered in Tyler's brightness of heart. She has been visited by her share of loss: her husband, Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian-born child psychiatrist and author, died of lymphoma, aged 65, in 1997. "One of the things I miss most about him is that, after supper every night, I'd read aloud to him. His English was excellent, but he always said it was work to read in English. Towards the end of his life, I read him Anna Karenina, which he'd only read in Persian. At the end he was crying, because of what happened in Anna's life. That was very moving."
A poet friend of a friend years ago said, 'To be a poet, you have to have had rheumatic fever when you were a child.'
Tyler had an unusual upbringing on a Quaker commune in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains. Her father was a chemist and civil-rights activist who supported her and her three brothers on $500 a year: "A kind, patient, principled man. One of my brothers says he learnt to walk on a picket line." Her mother, a social worker and "an unpredictable, angry person", home-schooled Tyler until she was 11.
"It was right after World War II. My father had been a conscientious objector. Everybody was thinking the world had become a very bad place. He wanted to experiment with retreating to some place where people could live good lives, preferably off the land. There was a not-quiteone-room schoolhouse serving the valley. We had a goat farm and we raised our own everything. We bought sugar and coffee, and that was kind of it. To this day, I taste a glass of milk and say, 'Oh, cow's milk.' It's so funny how your childhood, which is such a short time, is huge in the pattern of your life. I always look at the world now from a little bit of an outsider's perspective.
"A poet friend of a friend years ago said, 'To be a poet, you have to have had rheumatic fever when you were a child.' That was my rheumatic fever. Just enough to put me over there."
For fans of her fiction, this account is fascinating. A cocooned, old-mannered world, standing slightly out of time, its idealism rubbing where it meets the real world, full of kindly, idealistic scientific men and unruly, impulsive women – what does that describe, if not her novels? "Every imaginable runaway, getaway, vanishing act is rehearsed: banishment, desertion, displacement, exodus, pilgrimage, exile, furlough and flight," John Leonard wrote of her work in The New York Times, "and still the fugitive or refugee returns, as if the prodigal stay-at-homes had somehow earned her in her absence."
Tyler's fiction, split between belonging and longing, would seem to mirror the twin impulses in Tyler herself, leaving her life in the mountains to study Russian literature at Duke University and marry an Iranian man, as if deliberately trying to widen the circle of her life. "Well, I guess so, yes. I was afraid I'd just get slotted into place. The funny thing is, now I don't seem to be thirsty for the broader world. I always thought, when I was a child, that I would travel. Then it turns out I'm kind of like the accidental tourist about travelling. I'll do it, I don't complain, but it's just I want my own bed at night. I had this brief spurt of adventurousness, then retreated."
Now she is so synonymous with Baltimore, they run Anne Tyler tours for visitors. When not writing, she hosts dinner parties and a movie group that is about to rewatch The Wire, set in the city, for the third time. "I'm conscious of living a quite restricted life. One of my great fears, when my daughters [she has two] left home, was that they brought the outside world in, and what do I do now? I really am in my shed in the woods, so to speak, but I keep trying."
Her state of perfect happiness is to find herself halfway through a novel having pushed off from shore, but not yet at the destination, suspended in a state of busy, humming anticipation. "Getting to 75 is to see your career going away from you. I'm not the hot new young thing.
"I used to be about the youngest novelist around; now I'm one of the oldest. It's like other people's sense of me as a writer is fading away but I'm still here, doing what I was doing when I was three, which is telling myself stories." So a time traveller of sorts, after all.