BookBlast interview with Lawrence Scott, author. He is a prize-winning novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago in the Caribbean.
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born on Petit Morne Estate, a sugarcane estate in southern Trinidad which my father managed for the Usine Sainte Madeleine Sugar Company owned at one time by Tate & Lyle. I went to primary school in the nearby town of San Fernando. I went north into the mountains for my secondary school with the Benedictine monks of Mount Saint Benedict. Before leaving Trinidad, I had been in a Junior Seminary from the age of fifteen. I left Trinidad at nineteen to go to England to join the Benedictine Abbey at Prinknash in Gloucestershire.
What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
My father read books like The Ascent of Everest by John Hunt. He had been educated in England at Shrewsbury Public School and was very attached to that story, especially as Hunt was himself from Shropshire. My mother was educated by nuns in Port of Spain and was a pillar of the Catholic Church; however, she read Graham Greene and loved to discuss the controversies over his writing. She particularly loved Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. She was aware of the fiction of the 1940s and 1950s and a great storyteller herself.
Why do you write? Your advice to new writers just starting out?
I began writing a journal when I was a young Benedictine Monk at Prinknash Abbey, and then I also wrote poetry and read fiction extensively. I studied philosophy and theology and enjoyed the brilliant monastic library. I was introduced to art and psychology, reading Freud and Jung. Introduced to D.H. Lawrence, I had never realized what literature could do before reading The Rainbow, which I read at nineteen, though I had had the experience of reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss eight times as a teenager. The monastic community had a very interesting number of monks like Dom Bede Griffiths, who was taught by C.S. Lewis. He left to go to India to found a Christian Ashram. There was Dom Sylvester Houedard, who was a concrete poet of the 1960s. He introduced many of us to the work of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets. Interest in Dom Sylvester’s work has recently been revived.
I wrote to express my ideas and feelings at this time. I really only began to write seriously for publication once I returned to Trinidad in the late 1970s and found there the territory for my writing with the island’s history, literature, and music. The accumulative experience of this return is what has been the continuing stimulus for my writing. I was fortunate to befriend the novelist Earl Lovelace and to work in the theatre with Derek Walcott in Trinidad. These encounters inspired me.
I would say to young writers: be true to yourself and go for what is deeply meaningful for you. Ask yourself over and over: What do I want to say? Be as authentic to yourself and your subject as you can be. Write every day.
Are there any other writers in your family?
No. But my wife, Jenny Green, is my first reader and has written a memoir of her parents, Somewhere Round the Corner.
How do you choose your subjects?
I chose to write about my birthplace, Trinidad, situated off the east coast of Venezuela with its extraordinary landscape, history, and cultural mix created by African enslavement, Indian indentured labor, and European conquest. It is a world where Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and contemporary secularism coexist with some tensions, but in comparative harmony.
How do you move from research to writing; is it difficult to begin?
I tend to start writing early, perhaps too early, and then I begin to search for what I need for periods I am exploring. But once I have found my voice, my tone, my point of view, I am off. I research and write simultaneously during the first draft, and then real writing begins in the re-writing, then more re-writing till it all begins to settle down, or not, and then there is more reshaping. It is an organic approach. I have a plan always, but it changes. I then need new maps along the way.
As an author, what are you most proud (or embarrassed) of writing? Your views on success?
I have been lucky to have had everything published that I wanted to publish. I feel quite honestly that I have written as well as I can, as well as I could at each particular stage with each book. Success? There are different kinds. My greatest pleasure is being understood, seeing that understanding expressed in an informed piece of writing by a critic, student, or another author, and then, of course, the responses by readers.
I valued and was moved by significant letters I received after the publication of Aelred’s Sin. One of my loveliest pleasures was the endorsement by Derek Walcott for my last collection of short stories, Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater, which he found “a delight,” and he had noticed my development and now found me “accomplished.” I value that hugely. I doubt that I could have written in the way that I have without his work inspiring me over the years. Likewise, the endorsement of my friend and mentor Earl Lovelace has been most encouraging.
When you look back at the books you have written, is there a favourite?
I love them all in different ways for different reasons. I think I have tried to be brave and to go for what I wanted, and I have been lucky that I have found editors and publishers to work with me to facilitate what I wanted to write rather than telling me to write something else.
Do you write every day; what is your writing process? Do you do many drafts?
I try to write every day. How I allocate time depends on where I am in a particular novel. Poems get written in between, and sometimes short stories as well. Each feeds off the other — many drafts, many, many. It all comes together in the rewriting.
What are you working on now?
A novel set in the eighteenth century.
Your views on book publishing?
It is so important to be able to have a close working relationship with an editor who knows exactly where you are coming from, who can be critical but also loves what you are trying to do, knows the world out of which you are writing, and knows then how to access and build a readership.
Your views on how new technology has (or has not) changed your writing life? Do you enjoy reading e-books?
No, I don’t read e-books. I am happy to have my work published in that format. The new technology helps with advertising. I think it is word of mouth that works best.
Your views on social media?
I prefer to leave that to publishers and publicists rather than do any of that myself. I do not want the interaction with readers except at readings.
If you could go anywhere in time for one day, where would you go and why?
I am happy where I am in my back room in North London.
Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?
I like best my friends I have made over years, like family, friends with a history of being friends.
Which characters in history do you like the most?
I am intrigued by Emily Dickinson.
Your heroes in fiction? And in real life?
I admire great poets: Constantine Cavafy, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, W.H. Auden.
Your chief characteristic?
Checking on things.
Your chief fault?
Not thorough enough about technical practical things.
Your bedside reading?
Right now, Alice Oswald’s Memorial; His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet.
Your motto?
Don’t regret.
BookBlast Review of Witchbroom considered to be a classic of Caribbean literature
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