Episode 19: Francis Spufford

Interview Date: 7 August 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Simon Machin.

Francis Spufford is a writer of non fiction and more recently of novels. He teaches at Goldsmiths College, London, where he is Professor of Creative Writing. His books include the Costa First Novel Award-winning Golden Hill, the memoir The Child That Books Built, and Unapologetic, possibly the sweariest ever work of Christian apologetics. He is married to the Anglican priest and writer Jessica Martin, his mother was the historian and spiritual writer Margaret Spufford, and his daughter shows every sign of becoming a writer too. His most recent novel Light Perpetual was published by Faber & Faber in February 2021.

Francis Spufford - Timed Interview Summary

0:00 - 31:23 “Everyone takes for granted their childhood landscape”

As he has described in his classic memoir of childhood reading, The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford grew up in a neat early 1960s staff house on the campus of a new university at Keele, in the midland Potteries area of England. The landscape is complicated, since the institutional concrete is built into the ruins of a grand eighteenth century garden, designed by Capability Brown. His young parents, Peter and Margaret are academic historians. It is a hopeful time, when the cultural consensus in rebuilding after the Second World War is to create a better fairer world with greater access to culture: Francis and Jason discuss secular pilgrimages to libraries. Francis’s parents are ideally suited to encourage his childhood reading, yet it is a flight into the world of the imagination to escape a family tragedy. Francis’s sister Bridget, three years younger than him, is born with cystonosis, a rare genetic disorder in which the amino acid cystine forms crystals in her tissue, instead of being flushed out, damaging her kidneys. When he is six, both Bridget and his mother disappear into hospital for a year. He realizes very early that life is fragile. Reflecting back, he sees that his parents were signalling to him that it was alright not to be okay about this. He now realizes that he would have found it difficult to get through to his young, sealed-off self. 

31:24 - 53:19 C S Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia

They aren’t the very first books that Francis reads but they become The Books for him, and he only reads other books because he cannot always be reading them. From age six going on seven to twelve going on thirteen, when he needs other things, they remain foundational to his reading of the world. They are uncannily marvellous books. Francis teaches himself to read during childhood mumps by tackling J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Books went from an unbreakable code to a portal. As to Narnia, Francis responds to it with the brakes still on, but he can feel that the stories want him to consent to a further transformation, whereas he only wants the settled shapes of the stories themselves.  This is not a resistance to the religious dimension of the novels, because his family are church-going, but he wants to stop “in the middle” and stay there.  Rereading Narnia is difficult because of the “fall of adulthood” where the social surface of the nineteen fifties is more apparent, although the wonders are still wonders. And it becomes apparent that in Narnia there is good and evil and no shades of grey. Francis does not identify with any of the characters but notes that C S Lewis identifies himself with Lucy. 

53:20 - 58:46 J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

The Hobbit is the book through which Francis learns to read. It does not go as deep for him as Narnia, although he likes the ordinariness in adventure, the mixture of the homely and the domestic, the sense of here is “averagely frightened you” who can deal with Gollum. It has a very rough and tumble narrative. He struggles with Lord of the Rings, skipping large chunks and not liking it to the same extent.

58:47 - 1:09:22 Schooling

Is sent to boarding school at the age of ten, partly because of the situation at home.  It is fairly solitary. He is getting that “traditional British upper crust treatment where your feelings recede beneath a layer of charm”. Reads even more, but does start to meet people he gets on with. Finds himself abandoning his childhood Christianity, regarding it, rather like a Dawkins New Atheist, as one of those childish things that one puts away.  Only finds his faith again much, much later. The wish for New Jerusalems in his teenage self is transported into utopian politics.

1:09:23 - 1:21:27 Cambridge University

Carried towards Cambridge University on an educational conveyor belt. It is almost completely wasted on him. A vast depressive sulk and he feels that someone else should have had his place who would have benefited from it. There are potential mentors around, but he prefers to be left alone. He reads English Literature and still with a great appetite and somewhat randomly, outside the syllabus, particularly liking Picador and King Penguin impressions. 

1:21:28 - 1:32:53 Publishing

An old-fashioned publisher, called Chatto and Windus, employs him as a reader. He is placed in an attic in central London, with a large typewriter. Through one hatch he is passed novels and through the other he passes reports on them. A childhood dream job, like a sweet factory. Francis starts to conceive the idea that he can write books himself. Eventually he proposes his own book and gets an advance in 1990, becoming a freelance writer. It is the beginning of the long-delayed reckoning with having run away from human emotion.   

1:32:54 – 1:38:54 I May Be Some Time

The book for which Francis obtains an advance is about ice and the English imagination. During random reading at Cambridge Francis had read The Worst Journey in the World about Captain Scott’s last expedition to Antarctica and is moved by its secular account of wonder and transcendence. He wants to write about the history of feeling that lay behind polar exploration. For Francis, it is the breadcrumb trail that leads out of the forest of repressed feeling into human responsibility. 

1:38:55 - 2:01:39 The Child That Books Built and Red Plenty

In between I May Be Some Time and Red Plenty, The Child That Books Built comes out, in 2002, Francis finding himself successful in anticipating the zeitgeist, in this case with Harry Potter. Red Plenty is another personal (and in Francis’s opinion, eccentric) book in which he can explore a lost world and bring it back to life again. It describes the brief time in the late 1950s when the Soviet system appeared to produce plenty. He tries to do journalistic research in Russia, but finds key individuals unwilling to talk openly, then realizes that he can tell the true story as if it is a novel. Readers took to Red Plenty’s originality. And Francis realised that he was in the process of producing fiction that was less personal than the supposedly factual books that he had been writing. The Child That Books Built – published in 2002 - was actually very personal, and told his own version of family history, whereas his mother Margaret had also told the story of the family and her own history of chronic pain in Celebration, which came out first in 1989. He is still working out where the boundaries are for private and writing selves. It has been his turn towards fiction which has given him a secure distinction between the personal and private, because fiction is quarried out of one’s own material but it is subjected to the discipline of making it the story of other people.

2:01:40 -  2:39:32 The move towards conversion: grace and mercy

He is unable to avoid coming face to face in his mid-thirties with an unflattering picture of himself. His successful books do not look much like consolation.  The café story described in his non-fictional book of Christian apologetics called Unapologetic is actually true: he sits miserably in a  café and the slow movement of Mozart’s clarinet concerto is played on a loop and something is communicated wordlessly to Francis. Something that does not have to be deserved.  The return to Christianity makes cultural sense and Unapologetic acknowledges this, but his period of privately visiting empty churches is related to something in them which is actually there. Unapologetic is written as a response to a feeling that the New Atheists are “at the wrong address” when they write about Christianity. C S Lewis had faced a similar problem when he was asked by the BBC to produce radio programmes about Christianity during the Second World War. But Francis has to address a world where the historic understanding of sin as a concept has been lost, so an alternative language of messing up has to be found in current colloquial speech. Francis also comes up with a term for the Church: the International League of the Guilty.  It helped tremendously in writing Unapologetic to be married now to a vicar, Jessica Martin, who was his major theological advisor, and through her weekly sermons, his major theological influence.  

 2:39:33 – 2:44:02 Light Perpetual

Set in London from 1944 onwards. A novel about South London. It starts with a German V2 bomb falling on a Woolworths store, killing many people including a number of children. The book is the reimagining of five lost lives. It applies William Blake’s statement that eternity is in love with the productions of time - and not explicitly religious.  

2:44:03 – 2:48:21 How Jesus has changed

Jesus was the aid in catastrophe but other things have been added. He is a pattern for storytelling. Now Francis is fifty-six, Jesus is no longer a man of thirty-three dying for a man who was then thirty-five, but a pattern of something steadily glowing in the world for the long haul of hope.