Interview: Tracy Chevalier

Novelist Tracy Chevalier talks to Jonathan Doering about her writing and her Quakerism

Tracy Chevalier has woven together life and writing through a dazzling string of novels, from the acclaimed Girl with a Pearl Earring to the Quaker-inspired The Last Runaway, which tells the story of an English Quaker, Honor Bright, who is gradually drawn into the Underground Railroad in the American state of Ohio. An empathy with the marginalised runs through all her work, along with a fascination with crafts.

She was born in Washington DC and went on to graduate with a degree in English from Oberlin College. She moved to England in 1984 to work in publishing and in the early 1990s did a masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her tutors included the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain.

I met Tracy Chevalier on a blazing June day following her appearance with Philip Gross and Sheila Hancock at a Quaker discussion at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. Her taste for concrete, tangible metaphor recurred through our conversation, and it came as no surprise when, as we were finishing, Tracy mentioned that she would spend the afternoon gardening.

She talked happily of how she sees her neighbours more when ‘guerilla gardening’ at home and admitted: ‘Some of them lay theirs out much more carefully than me – my garden’s like my desk – creative chaos!’ It’s an eminently fitting pastime for such a writer: practical, hands-on, and with grit under the fingernails.

How did you find the Hay-on-Wye discussion?

Incredibly heartening. The audience was really engaged, and you can tell. People asked lots of intelligent, penetrating questions. We did ask at one point if there were Quakers in the audience. I’d say there were fifty raised hands, but there were 450 other people who were curious about Quakers. At the end we asked everybody to be silent for a few minutes, after which Philip read a poem about Quakers. It was a really healthy silence. Afterwards, there was a murmur and that lovely feeling. People came up to me the next day and said, ‘You know, I really think that I’m going to try going to a Quaker Meeting’, but weren’t sure of the expectations, so a lot of it was providing reassurance.

I’ve not always called myself a Quaker, and being asked to do this event has made me much more aware of how large a part of my life it is now. For me it was an affirmation that I’ll probably be going to Quaker Meeting for the rest of my life.

How do you feel when you’re in a Quaker Meeting?

It’s different every time, a little. There are some Sundays where I feel clearer afterwards, and others where I haven’t managed to focus. That feels normal. When I think of a typical Meeting for me, I spend the first fifteen, twenty minutes trying to clear my mind of everyday chatter. When you’re sitting there you become aware of all the junk! Eventually it clears. Some Meetings that happens, then I feel that I’m not thinking about anything and that feels healthy; that’s the place where I want to be. Then I can focus on what people are saying. But sometimes I’m tired or upset or whatever. So maybe tomorrow I might think, ‘Let yourself think about the [Donald Trump] election, it’s okay’, and sometimes by doing that it actually clears.

Have you experienced different Meetings?

Sometimes it’s really nice to go to different Meetings. I was in Keswick once for a wedding, and on Sunday morning I was free and went to Meeting there, and it was really small. I’m used to Hampstead Meeting, which is quite large, but what was wonderful was that it just felt the same.

When I was growing up I went to Florida Avenue Meeting House in Washington and that is really big, I mean that probably has a couple of hundred. But the feeling is the same wherever you go. I’ve been to Bridport, which is a tiny 300-year-old Meeting, and Jordan’s up in Buckinghamshire, also small, but it’s not about size. It feels the same and yet it’s different and the people are different. Sometimes it’s good to go to another Meeting to get a different perspective.

My sister, who is a Quaker in France, says that she likes to go to Westminster Meeting in St Martin’s Lane [in London] because it’s very transient, so you get lots of visitors, people from all over the world. You get the feeling that it’s not stagnant. I’m not suggesting that other Meetings are, but you know what I mean.

One of the really nice things about Hampstead is that they’ve got a really vital Children’s Meeting, and that last ten minutes when they come in, there’s a wonderful uplift. I’ve seen kids go from babies to toddlers, and it’s the babies who last the time, but toddlers can be impossible. I think it’s great that parents try with them, but usually they get to a point when they have to go out, but then they eventually get to four or five and they’re able to sit happily, and that’s great to see.

How did you get involved in Quakerism?

The tradition for American kids is to go to summer camp because we have long summer holidays, ten weeks. I have an older sister, and a Jewish friend of hers said, ‘I went to a wonderful summer camp, Catoctin Quaker camp’ [near Washington, DC where Tracy grew up]. So she went, then my brother added on, and when I was old enough I went. We all loved it. It was unlike some American summer camps that are really ritzy and have horseback riding and sailing and tennis and all that. This was a couple of lean-tos out in the woods, a murky lagoon, a ‘fire ring’ and Meeting for Worship every day for ten or fifteen minutes, forty minutes on a Sunday. It really grounded the place. We had a blast.

I went for six summers, then the next year I was a counsellor, then I stopped going because I had to work to pay for college, but I kept going to Meeting, maybe two or three times a year. My sister now lives in France and has set up a Meeting there, meeting once a month. When she visited me in London she would occasionally go to Hampstead Meeting and I’d go with her. Then I had the idea to write Runaway and that got me more reconnected.

In 2010 I was in Ohio at Oberlin College and Toni Morrison was unveiling a bench commemorating the Underground Railroad. As I listened to her, I thought, ‘This is exactly the kind of subject that I’d like to write about, ordinary people doing something amazing.’ I tucked that away and a couple of days later I was in Bethesda Meeting, idly turning it all over, and I thought, ‘Yeah, a lot of Quakers helped runaway slaves’. The two things clicked together like two jigsaw pieces.

The Last Runaway features both positive and negative aspects of Quakerism. How did you come to weave them together into the final story?

When I decided to write about Quakers and the Underground Railroad I knew I wanted to give a more rounded idea of Quaker conduct. Too often Quakers are thought of as pure and perfect, when actually we’re as flawed and irritating as everyone else! It was a difficult decision to help runaway slaves: you were breaking the law. Many wanted nothing to do with it. I was determined to capture that conflict.

When I learnt about the ‘non-white’ bench in a Philadelphia Meeting house I was pretty horrified! I had no idea that there was segregation in nineteenth century Meeting houses. But Quakers were practising the casual and systemic racism of the time. I’m not justifying it – just trying to understand where it came from.

When I decided that I’d write about Quakers and Honor as my main character, I started to go to Meeting a little more regularly. My husband and son are Jewish, so I have a foot in both worlds. I loved synagogue socially and culturally, but I craved the silence and so it fitted quite well that I’d go to Meeting and be quiet. After writing Runaway I just kept going. I don’t go every Sunday, but I go with regularity. I can safely say I’m an attender and I think the big sign is that I sit on a committee.

Which one?

Jordan’s Burial Ground Committee! Members of North West London Area Meeting have a right to be buried there. It’s the committee that oversees that. It makes me smile, because you think, ‘Just how much can you say about a burial ground?’ but actually you’d be amazed. I’d never really been to a Quaker committee; it’s run very differently. Decisions are arrived at without there really being disagreement.

How do you feel about that?

I think in the real world occasionally things are too fast for that sort of consensus, but I’ve learnt from it and I occasionally have to chair other meetings, not Quaker stuff. Sometimes there’ll be a difficult meeting coming up, and I find myself thinking: ‘How would a Quaker look at this?’ The thing I love about Quakers is that they don’t judge, it’s not confrontational, it’s about working together… It doesn’t have to be a fight. It can just be finding the way, and that has really helped, it’s calmed me down a lot. What seems like a difficult meeting ahead can seem less difficult.

As your husband and son are both Jewish, does Judaism feed into your work?

Not quite in the same way, partly because I was introduced to Quakerism at an early age. I’m never quite sure what I’m going to write about next but I find that I write about things that are not actively part of my life at the moment. So it may be that I write about Judaism in ten or twenty years’ time. The book I’m working on now is set in the early thirties at Winchester Cathedral and the backdrop is the rise of fascism. Inevitably Judaism will play a part, because of the period’s anti-Semitism. It’s not that I chose that time because I wanted to write about Judaism, it is just part of that backdrop.

Is it based on actual events?

In the Cathedral choir stalls there are these very colourful cushions, which were beautifully embroidered by volunteer women in the thirties. It’s about why they were made, the group’s petty politics, against the wider rise of fascism, when people start to understand that it’s a problem. Until the Nazis came to power in 1933, I think most people thought of them as nutters, like the BNP. Extreme, but they’d never get power. People never took them seriously.

Or they thought they could use right-wing extremists, whilst retaining their own power.

Mm, and when does the penny drop? There’s going to be a bit of that, but it’s not really a political novel. I’m still feeling my way through.

Do handicrafts inspire your writing generally?

Yes, in Runaway they didn’t buy quilts, they made them. I really liked that. They’re made for practical use but they’re very beautiful. It was a rare outlet for women to express beauty and creativity. When I write, I try to use metaphors and similes which are concrete. I like quilting, making things. It takes me to a nonverbal place in my brain that Meeting does too.

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that Honor’s bonnet was inspired by a special bowl that only you and your sister use and you referred to the balance between solidity and movement in that image.

The bowl is something very concrete from childhood. It has a crack in it and I don’t want to break it by using it too often, but knowing it’s there is enough. I don’t need to use it all the time.

Is that like God?

I tend not to use the ‘God’ word, because it’s got connotations with organised religions that have created such hurt, and is quite patriarchal. But we all have something that we do share. ‘The Inner Light’ is a better term for me. I think the Light is there, but I don’t always tap into it.

I don’t often minister, but the day after the London Bridge terrorist attack I did. I was struggling with feelings of rage and violence and that’s when you have to look for the feeling you have in Meeting and try to apply that. That thing that we share, whether we’re peaceful or enraged, it’s still there. There’s something comforting about that. I don’t tend to approach Quakerism through the Christian door… What’s great is that you can come at it from a different direction, that it can offer something to so many people.

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

Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel, New Boy, is published by Hogarth Press.

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