Interview: Philip Gross

Poet Philip Gross talks to Jonathan Doering about his work and his Quakerism

My wife and I decide to make my visit to Penarth to interview Philip Gross part of our holiday. We drive over the day before my appointment and that evening we visit the beach and watch our son Noah. It seems an apt image of playful innocence engaging with and experiencing the greater power of Nature.

The work of Quaker, poet, novelist, playwright and academic Philip Gross is filled with such open playfulness to the world. Through a prolific and award-winning career he has produced a rich and thoughtful textual tapestry.

From sparky children’s poetry in Manifold Manor, through enigmatic collaborations such as with Sylvia Kantaris in The Air Mines of Mistila, unsettling psycho-drama in the novel The Storm Garden, to his TS Eliot Award-winning poetry collection The Water Table and the recent collection A Bright Acoustic, there is an open-mindedness and willingness to accept the strange, shocking but sometimes superb gifts of life – signs of a ‘listening attentiveness’.

There is a constant sense of curiosity, collaboration and inquiry throughout our conversation, as we discuss Quakerism, creativity, and what truth might be. Later, we visit the dingle which features prominently in A Bright Acoustic. I am left with a seamless, satisfying sense of a roving poet working with his immediate surroundings as much as broad concepts and images.

Could we begin with A Bright Acoustic?

That is the latest thing – in print, at least. I could open up my desk and there’d be a whole slew of things, which might be the next book or might be nothing or might be more than one book. Occasionally pieces that have never found their place suddenly do, years later. I’m very interested in those outliers. They might not fit now, but you don’t discard them; they might turn out to be the seed of something you need. If we only keep what we think we want now, how impoverished will we be in the future? In the same way, I’m trusting that what will happen when we talk… is better than anything…

…that we can actually plan?

Yes.

There is ‘the space between’ and what emerges from it?

I think that applies to conversation, too. ‘And when we sit in worship in a Quaker Meeting, with that sense of being ‘gathered’, then the space we hold between us physically, quite visibly when we sit in a circle or square, is anything but empty. You can see where the old Quaker image of ‘the Presence in the Midst’ came from. That space, that quietness, is the most alive thing in the room.

That leads me to ask about the importance of dreams and the subconscious in your work. You’ve talked about how poetry ‘condenses out of a cloud… always on the verge of seeming to be wrong’. Quaker faith & practice 21.32 talks about how ‘along the paths of the imagination the artist and the mystic make contact’. What are your thoughts on this?

I rarely use any material from dreams. But we might have a kind of metaphor there. I am interested in how much goes on outside the relatively small lamplit circle of consciousness. I think every writer who trusts writing as a process sometimes has the experience of being given gifts. I don’t mean necessarily the kind you want. Any cat owner knows how your cat comes with the most exquisitely disemboweled mouse for you, and you’ve got to say yes.

There are associations going on where we can’t see them, becoming more complex, more whole if we have the patience to listen and wait. I suddenly realise that the Quaker word that’s offering itself there is… discernment. Theories and ideologies, however noble, are fixed. We need something more fluid and responsive. I can’t think of better words for that than ‘constant discernment’.

How important is nature in your work?

By now [in the conversation] you would expect me to ask ‘What do you mean by “nature”?’ in the way I do about many important words. I’m certainly not going to reify ‘nature’ as a single thing. Rather, it is many processes, going about their business. When I write about the dingle at the end of our road, it’s a kind of dialogue; the place is a completely human-made accident to which nature responds in ways we can see and hear. It’s very resonant – by no means empty.

My interest is not so much in nature for its own sake as a fascination with the spaces between things, spaces being shaped and given this energy. There’s this fine texture of life going on around us. We can catch glimpses, but really, we have no idea.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background and roots – and how you came to the Religious Society of Friends?

I was brought up by an agnostic/atheist scientist father and Anglican mother. My spiritual instincts come from my father’s science: the wonder, humility and perspective. In my teens I tried to find the awe and wonder within the Anglican Church, and was confirmed.

Two years later I noticed that what I was mentally pencilling in the margins of the weekly service was much larger than the text… which meant I should not be in the church.

By eighteen or nineteen I was a young Trotskyist. It corresponded to something I naturally felt about the big process of power around me. Five years after that I was part of the broad peace movement with my Marxist comrades, but gradually noticed many being steadily burnt out, from within, by their almost obligatory anger.

Meanwhile I began to notice people who were working equally hard but seemed to be tender, calm, responsive, running on different fuel. Often I found out they were Quakers.

The first Meeting I attended, I would say literally that I sneaked off to it. I told my wife, and told myself, that I was just going for a walk. I came back and said: ‘You’ll never guess where I’ve been for the last hour: in a Quaker Meeting!’

How did she react?

Well, a couple of weeks later, she did the same thing: ‘I’m just going for a walk…’ After that it was natural that we would be attending as a family. That was thirty-three, thirty-four years ago, and through many shifts and more than one marriage.

Meeting has continued to be a space in which I have got recourse to something necessary.

It’s only in a certain sense ‘faith’; it’s a way of sitting with the world and the universe, in a spirit which I can very happily associate with the word ‘God’. I’m a Quaker who has welcomed the careful, tactical invention of the word ‘nontheist’, carefully distinguished from ‘atheist’, enlarging how we understand ourselves as Quakers.

That reminds me of the comment about there being two types of atheist. One says: ‘There is no God, therefore I can do as I like’; the other: ‘There is no God, but I ought to behave as if there were. The world will be better and happier if I behave like that, but on my own terms.’

I’m very happy to go a long way with the words ‘as if’. Earlier we used the words ‘the space between’. Imagine the most creative and appropriate living space between us and all the stuff of the universe… and it comes very close to what I mean when I say ‘God’.

That idea of interrelationships makes me think that crossing boundaries seems important in your work.

I find that very interesting. I don’t idealise the ‘Outsider’. in a way that lots of artists and writers have done. I don’t think there is any greater truth in being excluded or at odds with the world, still less in being what you might call mad. People who find themselves living in marginalised situations are often bound by something obsessive or addictive, which is the very opposite of creative, free life.

What I meant was that you seem to have an accepting, watching and observing attitude.

Accepting, yes, but that’s not to say it should be easy. Maybe that’s why we need stories – with fiction or other art we can embrace forces that are genuinely really hard to integrate in ordinary life.

As for silence… there are many kinds, some harmful or oppressive. Sometimes, though, we can cooperate to create a silence which is a rare and lovely and accurate thing, a kind of listening quietness rather than ‘silence’, because when it’s there, there can be all kinds of sounds. But that listening attentiveness which we loosely call ‘silence’ is still holding us. I’m quite happy to think of that as being seen and held in the eye of God. I say that as a paid-up nontheist, and I say it faithfully.

That idea of ministry as words erupting and emerging, is that a Quakerly approach to writing, or is that how you would work anyway?

I don’t think they’re identical, though there is a kind of resonance between them. In each case it’s suddenly apparent that there is something that needs to be said, either because of others’ ministry, your own preoccupations, or simply your awareness of the world – when those things click into a resonance with each other. There is a similarity between moments when that happens during both writing and Meeting.

Early Quakers were uncomfortable with the creative arts, but there is something ‘refreshingly simple’ about plain early Quaker production. Are you working out of a similar space, albeit within a modern, inclusive framework?

Early Friends’ response to the arts had good reason, because they were living in a period when the arts seemed to be the property of wealth and power, a way of establishing status. Even then, it would have been good if Quakers had been able to see folk song as equally artistic, rather than the arts being confined to London theatres or at Court. That was a particularly bad moment, really. We’re in a different time historically: the arts are available, in various ways, to all. Even so, the urge to plainness, such as saying things as lucidly as possible, is very real and I absolutely agree with it…as long as we recognise some truths’ complexity. False simplification is neither plain nor true.

Would you say that the truth is never a finished concept? Is your work a response to that idea?

The word ‘truth’ clearly matters, but I handle it with tongs and when it gets a capital ‘T’ I usually drop it, because it’s too heavy to be what it really is – truth emerging. The problem I have with ‘truth’ is it’s a noun, and I want it to be a verb. It is a creative process – what we experience is the moment of arriving at or being near it, catching glimpses of it – you could say ‘discernment’ – as it moves on.

In your writing and in conversation, I seem to hear you questioning almost every word you use…

Absolutely. Maybe that’s a particular job assigned to poets – never to take words for granted. I don’t mean the kind of corrosive distrust you find these days in politics and, in a different way, in academic theory. Poets are loving sceptics about language. We relish it, swim and surf and paddle in the tides of it… and also know that it’s made by us humans. It twists and shifts, eddies and flows. It is provisional. There is no such thing as a last word on a subject.

At the Hay Festival event with Tracy Chevalier, Sheila Hancock and yourself, you closed the proceedings with a poem…

Even that was not the last word. Everything I said or read at that event gives me twinges of esprit d’escalier, the feeling (too late!) that it could have been much better said. The one thing I feel sure of was the silence we held, and the audience held with us, at the end. What mattered wasn’t so much the meaning of the lines I read after it as the fact that it was poetry… that is, the way that words pay due respect to silence.

Philip Gross’ latest collections of poems, A Bright Acoustic, is published by Bloodaxe Books.

This is the second in a series in which Jonathan Doering talks to Quakers working in the arts.

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