美国国家公共电台 NPR Penelope Lively Ponders Pompeii — And Other Stories — In 'The Purple Swamp Hen'

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

One of the world's most lauded 1 novelists has produced her first collection of short stories in decades. "The Purple Swamp Hen And Other Stories" is by Penelope Lively, the Man Booker Prize winner for "Moon Tiger" and the best-selling "How It All Began." It's a collection that looks at life in ancient Pompei and modern day Western metropolises 2.

The stories are short, even for short stories, and subtly simple, or if you prefer, deceptively nuanced. Penelope Lively, who was a dame 3 commander of the Order of the British Empire, joins us from London. Thanks so much for being with us.

PENELOPE LIVELY: It's a pleasure.

SIMON: What makes a great novelist turn to short stories?

LIVELY: Well, I always have written them, but they left me for a long time for about - I haven't written any, really, for, decades. And they suddenly came back. They're the most perverse 4 things, short stories, but they're wonderfully different from writing a novel which is hacking 5 at the rock face. A short story, the idea comes, and then you can get down to it. And it's not so much hacking at the rock face as sort of pursuing the idea.

SIMON: Help us understand that. I mean, so let's say - maybe I say this because you British are so famously keen on gardening - you're gardening, and then a short story comes into your head?

LIVELY: No. It's rather more things like something seen, something overheard. For instance, the title story which is called "The Purple Swamp Hen"...

SIMON: Yes.

LIVELY: ...Arose from - it was a wonderful exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago of a marvelous room with copies of the garden frescoes 6 from one of the buildings at Pompei. And I saw a bird on it. I couldn't recognize it. And I'm quite good at birds. I'm interested in birds. And I didn't know what it was, so I asked one of the curators. He said, oh, it's a purple swamphen.

So I went home and looked this up. And the Romans, in fact, kept them as sort of ornamental 7 birds, rather like small peacocks. And I thought, oh, there must have been a purple swamphen around on that day, on the day of Pompei. And I wondered what it was like for the purple swamphen, so the story arose from the point of view of the purple swamphen.

SIMON: And at the end of the story, without giving anything away, I know I find myself left with a sense of humility 8, thinking that we people are a very vulnerable lot compared to purple swamphens. And we always thought it was the other way around.

LIVELY: Well, you could say that, yes. And this one, you know, since has been given a voice by me.

SIMON: Yeah. A very strong story you have here called "The Weekend." Couple takes their daughter away for a country weekend. Girl doesn't look forward to it. Tell us about this story, if you could.

LIVELY: Well, I suppose it's a ghost story, really. And it's slightly sending up the kinds of people that these are. They're a couple who are going to stay with another couple who've got - who are very prosperous. And they've got this weekend place in the Cotswolds. And the little girl is a sort of silent observer.

She really - throughout the story, she never speaks. But you understand that initially 9 she hadn't wanted to go. And when she gets there, somehow she finds that actually it's fine. But you don't quite understand why until the end.

SIMON: And, of course, you - a thousand different questions roll all over the back of your mind then.

LIVELY: Yes. Well, that's what I always hope in any story, that it will kind of provoke, you know, people thinking about it at the end. What actually was all that about? Was it just a ghost story, or was there something a bit more to it than that? I think you can pack a lot into a short story. And I don't actually feel crucially a short story should tell a story and there must be a narrative 10 of some kind.

SIMON: Another story I want to ask about, "The Third Wife."

LIVELY: Yes.

SIMON: A wife discovers that her husband is a con 11 artist, and she lays a trap for him. How does a novelist develop a revenge fantasy?

LIVELY: (Laughter) Well, yes, it's rather a feminist 12 story that, isn't it? I hadn't quite thought of it like that but I suppose it is. I don't know. Again, the idea came into my head. And again, that was something to do with a beach. I'd been on a beach. And I saw a man pick up his towel and his things and walk off, leaving a female companion just sitting there.

And a sort of fantasy came into my head, you know, supposing he literally 13 is leaving her. He's abandoning her. And he's just going off which is the way in which the man in this story abandons one of his wives.

SIMON: So Dame Lively, to - if we were to follow you through a day, how many ideas for stories or novels or scenes would come to your mind?

LIVELY: Probably none at all at the moment.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: Old age I'm finding is - has been - I'm grateful it's been reasonably productive. I'm not sure I have any more short stories. I've got a feeling that that particular vein 14 has gone. I'm hoping to write another novel, a short novel, novella. I've finished a book about gardening, not a sort of how-to book.

I'm not as good a gardener as that, but a book that looks at the ways in which gardening and gardens have affected 15 people and the ways particularly in which writers have written about gardens and gardening. So that was a nice departure. I love writing nonfiction. It's so much easier than fiction.

SIMON: Dame Lively, you're in your 80s now.

LIVELY: Yes.

SIMON: Did you ever have a job that wasn't writing?

LIVELY: Very briefly 16 I had a job. I worked for - as a research assistant to a professor at Oxford 17 University. That's the only sort of paid employment I've ever had. I married very young. I had children very young and then kind of fell into writing. I almost feel sort of accidentally.

I think I'm one of those people for whom reading kind of became writing. I'd always been an absolutely obsessive 18 reader. And I have to say, actually, I've never known a writer who wasn't a fairly obsessive reader. And I think for me the reading somehow - I began to think, I wonder if I could do that, you know, could I have a go? That was how it all began.

SIMON: I have to ask you about one more story because, of course, I'm a James Bond fan, a young man of that vintage - your story "License 19 To Kill."

LIVELY: (Laughter) Yes.

SIMON: An elderly woman named Pauline. Her caregiver is an 18-year-old named Kelly who can be a little patronizing to the older woman. But then Kelly begins to discover Pauline is not who she thought she was.

LIVELY: (Laughter) Yes. Well, I'm not going to give away, in case anybody wants to read it.

SIMON: Yeah.

LIVELY: What I think it was - it was trying to make a point about the old and the young and about the gulf 20 between them which isn't necessarily a gulf. I'm a grandmother six times over. And I have four grandchildren in their 20s. And actually, I don't find that there is that much of a gulf. I think one of the interesting things about my generation is that we are much closer to our grandchildren than I - certainly than I was my grandparents.

But I just wanted to show that old people after all are not just what you're seeing now, they're what they have been before. So you look at an old person, and she is an old person. But you can forget is that she has many, many incarnations of all the things that she may have been that you don't know about. And so I was - that was what the story was about really.

SIMON: Penelope Lively. Her new book, "The Purple Swamp Hen And Other Stories." Dame Lively, thanks so much for being with us.

LIVELY: Thank you.