Elizabeth Cook

Elizabeth Cook is a poet, fiction writer and scholar. She is the editor of John Keats: The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 1990), and has lectured in English literature. She wrote the libretto for Francis Grier’s oratorio The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth (2006). Her poetry collection Bowl was published by Worple Press (2006) and reprinted in 2013 (the title poem was a Poem on the Underground). Her poetry, reviews, and other writing have appeared in journals including Poetry London and The London Review of Books. She has translated Seneca’s Thyestes, a work whose keen urgency appeals. She is the author of Achilles (Methuen Press 2002), a fiction that also has a continuing performance life at a variety of venues (it won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival and was performed by Greg Hicks at the National Theatre).  She is nearing completion of a novel, Lux, set in the reign of King David and in sixteenth century England. Currently she is Writer in Residence at St Edmundsbury Cathedral. This conversation between Elena Theodorakopoulos and Elizabeth Cook took place at Cook’s home in London on 6 December 2012.

• A PDF version of this interview is also available.

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ET:  I thought we'd start off by talking a bit about education and your early experiences with Classics, learning Greek and Latin...

EC:  I think my early experiences with Greek mythology were probably founded on Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales which I absolutely loved as a child and I went back to even when I was working on Achilles. I go back to it for pleasure still. It has very old-fashioned illustrations as well - they caught my imagination very young and the stories felt like some sort of explanation of the world to me. I loved the story of the dragon's teeth being sown, and that seems to me something to do with the beginning of language. It just feels like an incredibly potent myth. That and the story of Jason and the Argonauts and Medusa as well and the terrifying story of Persephone.  All of those were very early parts of my reading and as a child one reads the same thing again, again, again: "I want this experience again today", so that was very strong. And also Mary Renault, The King Must Die, someone gave me a copy of that for something like my ninth birthday and I remember adults tut-tutting, thinking: ‘This is not the book that a nine year old girl should be reading’. Which of course made it really, really tasty; made it much more exciting. I only re-read that about three years ago and I was quite shocked by how much I had drawn on it.  I hadn't realised what a powerful book it had been for my whole life but when I re-read it I thought: "Oh gosh. Aha! That's been with me all this time". So those two I suppose...

ET:  Rather than formal schooling in Classics?

EC:  I learnt Latin. I found Latin incredibly difficult when I was at school. At my primary school, I remember getting quite ill, and Latin syntax used to really bother me. I remember getting very ill with something and in my delirium all these visions of Latin verbs kind of rising up from the trenches around my bed. It was really frightening and it was like I couldn't see my way around a Latin sentence, I couldn't see my way through it and it was actively quite a menacing thing. So I couldn't say I loved Latin at all. Although when I did O-Level Latin I had a wonderful teacher at my secondary school who loved it very much. We did Martial and Catullus and then I did begin to...and Pliny, I liked Pliny's letters...and so it began to get some human warmth for me and it was less, it was somehow less aggressive. But I didn't learn Greek. I wish I had. My mother wanted me to learn Greek and I stupidly chose to learn German. I could have learnt Greek at my school and I chose to learn German and didn't like it, so it was a bad mistake. I subsequently tried to learn some Classical Greek at the City Lit [City Literary Institute, London] when I was an adult.

ET:  And how did that go?

EC:  I loved it, absolutely loved it. I like it much more than Latin. We did it through a course called 'Greek Through Reading'. There was a really good teacher there called Elizabeth Teller who I think has  been influential in a lot of people's lives, teaching adults. And 'Greek Through Reading' made it  like the active learning of a current language. It was learning through immersion. The very first sentence was ‘to ploion pleei’. And I thought: ‘Oh gosh, this is wonderful - the ship ships it’, the verb is sort of tugged out of the noun and I thought: ‘I love this language. It's so plastic’. It just made imaginative sense to me in a way that Latin never really had although I had tried again.  I had started translating Seneca's Thyestes so I had begun to reengage with Latin and I had my Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer next to me and my very big Lewis and Short. I felt more friendly towards Latin by then.

ET:  It's a strange decision though to do Seneca's Thyestes rather than a Greek play, if Greek is what has, sort of, drawn you...

EC:  Yes, it was odd. I think the Thyestes... I was teaching Renaissance Drama when I was lecturing at Leeds University and I read the Thyestes for that. I read the Seneca plays in translation and there was something... it was that Chorus in Thyestes where he says: ‘Are we the ones who are singularly privileged to see the end?’ and it was one of those many moments in the twentieth century when it felt like that was our dubious privilege: to be witnessing the end of time, in a way. So it resonated with my bleak feelings at the time.

ET:  And what happened to the play, to the translation?

EC:  Not enough really. It was workshopped at the National Theatre Studio about eight years ago and it didn't quite work and - without wishing to be a bad workman blaming my tools - I don't think I was given the right director. I'd made some comment about wanting a director who has some sense of comedy - because I think there's a lot of black comedy in it - and then I was given a director who specialised in musical comedy and she didn't quite get it. Some of the actors did and I would love...I would still love to see it performed, I really would. I think it's a fantastic play.

ET:  There's quite a lot of thinking about translation in the 'Relay' chapter of Achilles...

EC:  And that's about what happens in translation and I think the impulse to translate is you want...you want to write this actually, you actually want to make it your own, though it's never going to be the same and you can't, in a way, want it to be the same  - but you want to have that experience of writing that thing. It's one step on from the act of copying a piece of another's writing in your own hand. And I think translation can take you to a different place than maybe your own language can take you. Certainly Walter Benjamin talks about how it creates a sort of new language almost when you do it. I think that is the experience somehow - you create a new space in your own, in the host language, and that can nudge it on in some way. But I haven't done it very much. I translated a poem by Montale, just one poem, ("Dissipa tu se lo vuoi") which oddly contains the word thyrsus ('tirso' in Italian) so there's a bit of a classical take... it's curious.

ET:  But I think some of Achilles is almost a translation, in ways. Even when you're not... I mean in 'Relay' I think you talk about translation but there are parts of it, such as the meeting between Achilles and Priam I'm thinking...

EC:  I think that's probably the closest, the Priam one, and that's where it all began anyway, that's where the writing of it began. So in a way it's a more obedient section than the later ones because I think I'm finding my voice in that section. It was the first one I wrote. And 'Quicken' is in some ways quite close to the Ovid, isn't it, don't you think? Certainly the sort of logic of the transformations, I had to find my own sense of there being a logic in it, that it wasn't an arbitrary sequence.

ET:  No, well it doesn't feel arbitrary, the way you've done it at all.

EC:  It felt like a real evolution going on. But I didn't...but I also felt free to pull from any part of the built-up mythology around Achilles, not to stick with a single version.

ET:  But partly...I just wonder whether that's something that you can do... as a translator in the widest sense of the word is that you are working not only with that one source text but also with all the...I don't think accretions is the right word...all the other layers...

EC:  Yes, it is very, very layered isn't it?

ET:  And any translator who comes at the end of a particular tradition will be looking at the original text through all the other layers, sort of building them in to...

EC:  Although there isn't an original text. I mean there are original texts but there isn't a single one. Although I suppose the Iliad...

ET:  You could say this is your Iliad.

EC:  I suppose the Iliad, of all the texts, is the one which is the most, sort of, foundational but quite a lot of the stories in Achilles aren't in the Iliad. And obviously it starts off with the Odyssey...the best book in the Odyssey as far as I'm concerned.

ET:  I just wondered how that came about, the Achilles project?

EC:  It was a very slow evolution. I'd just left Leeds University where I was teaching because I wanted to not be an academic anymore. I just sort of held my nose and jumped really and an agent knew that I liked the classical world and had heard that a publisher wanted someone to retell the Iliad and theOdyssey and the Aeneid, as a sort of blockbusting, fat book for people who felt they should know the stories and didn't  - and even though it was probably a really impossible project it was very nice to get my first commission as a writer and to just immerse myself in those for a while. And I wrote some sample stories. I did a story with Cyclops... I can't remember what else I did.. a Circe story I think... but I did the Priam section and it was that one that really caught fire for me. It was a strange thing: people often talk about a writer finding their voice and when I wrote that I thought: ‘Oh, that's what I sound like. This is it. This is the heart of it somehow’. Not that story but somehow it was just like touching some really nourishing ground and it was almost a kind of physical pleasure to write it.

ET:  Well it's very physical writing, of course. I'm just very struck and I think a lot of readers are struck by the - I don't know if realism is the right word, but the sort of physicality of it and some of the detail which is... it's not like a historical novel in any way but it has that sort of vividness of drawing you into a world.

EC:  I suppose I just had to imagine something step by step quite literally as a kind of physical experience. I know I used the phrase: 'what would it be like', probably more than once but I think that's what I'm always asking myself. You know - what was it like, what was it like, what was it like? What would it feel like? Sometimes I rather doggedly see that through. But I wrote that section and had the feeling I would like to write more but wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with it. I thought I wanted to write a 'Life of Achilles' but I couldn't think of how to do it. I thought a novel about Achilles would be something really ridiculous because novels are such - it's such a social genre and involves a kind of social interaction and a sense of the economics of a society and all the kind of busyness of... thickness of life in a way that I didn't think was appropriate to Achilles and I also think of Achilles as really unselfconscious. And so again, I couldn't imagine – I certainly couldn't do a first person, you know, that would be absurd. I just couldn't think of a way of doing it and it was only when I met Greg Hicks, the actor, who's done a lot of work with Greek mythology, that I first glimpsed a way. I think I first saw him as Orestes in the Oresteia or maybe it was as Aufidius in Coriolanus against Ian McKellen. He's very, very strong in classical roles and has a great affinity with that world and when I met him I had this strange compulsion to tell him about...it wasn't that strange, I suppose...but we didn't meet in a context where I wouldn't naturally say: ‘I've just written this thing about Achilles, may I show it to you?’, but I did say that after I got to know him a bit. And he read it and his immediate reaction was: ‘Can we make a recording of it?’. So he came here and we got out my little tape recorder and we led into it with a wonderful Thracian chant which I'd recorded from Radio Three - a wonderful, wonderful, yearning call, still the most wonderful sound, very, very short - from Bulgaria I think it was.  And from that, the whole idea of building it up into a performance piece came and we worked on it very slowly. I would write a section and then Greg and I would get together and we would take it through the voice.

ET:  So it's very much written with him in mind...

EC:  I wouldn't say...I would say with embodiment in mind and the way I write anyway, if I'm writing a poem - if I'm writing anything - I speak it out loud as I'm writing. I test everything on the voice which is a bodily thing. It's not a disembodied voice, it's a physical voice and that's how I can work out whether it sounds alright or not, or whether it works. So it wasn't specifically for Greg but nevertheless he was absolutely instrumental in it happening, building... And it was a slow evolution over a few years. The whole thing, I think, was about ten years from when I first wrote the 'Hector returns to Troy' and having the first performance - certainly all of ten years for it to get published. It was at least ten years. But Greg and I would  meet up at some place we'd hired or in a theatre where he was working and do all sorts of funny things - like I collected stones from Lulworth Cove and we put the stones down and we'd work out different ways of moving around them; but really it centred on the voice, very much, and not being too illustrative. In the end it just worked much more pared down.

ET:  It has that sort of sparseness, doesn't it? It's not the busy world of a novel, at all.

EC:  I didn't want it to be. And I also think very, very influential on me was Christopher Logue's wonderful War Music. I remember being really thrilled when I first attended a performance of Christopher Logue and Alan Howard speaking it at the Almeida.  It was like being in on the birth of drama because the Almeida theatre is a really, really nice theatre. It's quite intimate and not completely in the round but you are surrounding the stage and there were just these two actors, no props, sitting on chairs with books, no pretence of acting, they were just speaking and it all became real in our imaginations in response to the language and it was so thrilling. I'm a huge admirer of Logue's work on Homer. And I think it showed me something that could be done, you know, without illustrative performing.

ET:  When I saw you perform Achilles yourself what I found very exciting was the tension between your voice as an author and your own embodiment on the one hand and on the other hand voicing this sort of super-humanly masculine, very physical character. And I thought that a lot of the excitement of your performance came from the tension between you and what you were reading. And it seemed to me that you were able to say some very interesting things about subjectivity I suppose. I just wondered whether you experience the text differently when you read it yourself...

EC:  I think when I'm performing it I always feel the better for it. It's very invigorating because it does feel in touch with something enlivening, I think. And I think the Iliad is a great source, it's an unfailing source really. So it's very nice plugging into it and letting those words come through and yes, I think when I'm speaking, when I'm performing it, it's a different experience than when I'm simply reading it or performing it internally in my head. And it is different when male actors have done it. At least two male actors have done it, both very well and in slightly different ways. But yes, that tension isn't there, there'll be different tensions, possibly more martial; it’s more illustrative perhaps, inevitably.

ET:  One other place where physicality and embodiment become very acutely interesting features is in your Peleus and Thetis episode.  In a recent seminar session on this we had a very long discussion with the students about rape, seduction, what is going on here, about the violence of it and the eroticism. And I wondered at the time whether seeing you read would make a difference. I still can't really decide, because I think the ambiguity is in the writing...

EC:  It is ambivalent I think, and it’s shifting all the time.

ET:  And it's quite interesting because Carol Ann Duffy's written a poem about this as well and Jo Shapcott has too and both of those, I feel, are much more unambiguously, let's say condemnatory of what Peleus does and they're a lot about empowering Thetis in a more, if you like, obvious way. Which you don't do...

EC:  No, that's true and it's interesting, you've just helped me to make a connection between the fiction I'm writing now. One of the two periods it involves is, again, first millennium BC but Old Testament, so a different world entirely from Achilles' world. I'm writing about David and Bathsheba. And I realise there, in the initial encounter, there is the question of is it a rape or is it not? There I have Bathsheba both angry and in retrospect choosing not to accuse David of rape, kind of acknowledging her own choice, her own decision in the end. I hadn't made that connection before but I think it's interesting - I'm not quite sure what to make of it, maybe it is something like the way to make your fate, your choice, is to choose it - rather than to be a victim, to say: ‘Ok, this is my decision and I'll go with it’. I think there is also a moment in the Peleus and Thetis where it does change and suddenly he can't get away from her and I think that's interesting about, you know, the complication of sex actually and I just wanted to have that there.

ET:  And it fits very well with the whole shape- shifting pattern of it and I suppose in that I think it's very different from what you make of Helen.

EC:  Yes, she was entirely a victim in that sense, although I think Helen is a powerful figure but certainly yes, the rape of her by Theseus when she was a child is unambiguously an offence. But again, there's that awful complication of the child's body nevertheless responding and the miserable, unhappy sense of excitement which I think is something very, very present in...it's part of the shame of abused people, you know, because children’s bodies respond and it creates a huge complication thereafter. But there's absolutely no sense as there was in the Thetis section of: ‘Ok, I'm going for this’ at all. It's just confusion, miserable, unhappy confusion.

ET:  And similarly, I think, a very brief passage with Cassandra as well, I thought where that was fairly unambiguous and then on the other hand there's Penthesileia who is another sort of character, a bit like Thetis, who sort of seems to be on the knife edge between...

EC:  Yes, and that whole sequence, I mean it was quite a long time before I decided what was going to happen, who was going to kill whom. Because there are various stories there...

ET:  And they don't seem to be able to make up their mind. But it was an interesting decision to include that in the story...

EC:  There were several narratives I thought about including and which then just didn't work. I was going to have, at one point, possibly more about Achilles and Polyxena and then I just couldn't get that to work. And then I toyed with the idea of Achilles marrying Helen in the Afterworld, you know...but it was tosh really, so I threw it away. But that's one of the versions isn't it: that they will be united forever on the Island of Leuke.

ET:  But there's all this weird stuff about Helen anyway and I think you do sort of allude a little bit to this notion of Helen as a cipher.

EC:  That's right. And it's interesting isn't it that she was known to be a great mimic, I mean she was a wonderful mimic and that's possibly part of that, how people put their impressions on her, she's been plastered with impressions.

ET:  Yes and you pick up on that story from the Odyssey which Menelaus tells in the Odyssey doesn’t he, about how she did that thing with the voices.  And she has another story, they have two conflicting stories, she and Menelaus...

EC:  Yes, which one do you listen to...

ET:  So I suppose that leads us on to the whole question of how there are a lot of new, feminist or women's reworkings of classical myth and that women writers or feminist writers are picking up on the stories that hadn't been told. Perhaps one might say the way that you tell the Helen story might plug into that. In Laughing with Medusa, I think Vanda Zajko says that she sees you as part of this feminist tradition and we just wondered whether you thought of yourself as being part of this, whether it’s a useful category.

EC:  I don't know, I mean I think it might be useful for other people thinking about it. I can't say I self-consciously decided to enter that line but I'm a woman and I'm a feminist but it's not for me a deliberate agenda; it's not something to  select as a particular separable item. I suppose my feminism is just part of who I am, over many years and if it... It's very hard to talk about it actually.

ET:  I think lots of people find it hard to, lots of women writers that we've spoken to find it very hard to see themselves categorised as a 'feminist writer' because, as you say, it's....

EC:  ...it's not about polemic...

ET:  One is a feminist and one is a woman and so ...

EC:  ...this is what comes out perhaps and this is some of the elements that are there. But I also believe that the imagination can enter other ways of being and that's one of the values of the imagination, so you can enter the other gender, you can enter other sexualities, you can enter other races, other creatures possibly. You may not do it very well but that's one of the things the imagination really revels in doing and I think is one of the values of the imagination.

ET:  And I think that may be the thing that differentiates Achilles from say, something more overtly feminist such as the Margaret Atwood Penelopiad for instance. Because I think one of things you do is, as you say, you go inside Achilles or even Chiron, who isn't even human. It seems to me that what you do is not as overtly part of that tradition of reclaiming or recovering the female voice as what Margaret Atwood does in the Penelopiad, very successfully, or say, The World's Wife...

EC:  Yes, I think that had a programme and I don't think I set out with a programme really. So it's more like saying: ‘Oh, that's what it looks like, I wonder how that is, how does that add up?’.  But going back to the gender thing, one of the things I found appealing about Achilles is that he has a fluidity of gender and so is in touch with human experience - not just male experience - and I found that really interesting about him.

ET:  And I wondered whether the Iphigenia story, which was in Laughing with Medusa, was more overtly programmatic?

EC:  It was written especially, in a way, for Laughing with Medusa but I'd been interested in that story  already. Really it was something sort of left over from Achilles in a different way from the narrative about Polyxena or Helen and Achilles, it was something that I just felt was there somehow. And it is curious, I mean doesn't Calasso say that Achilles loves all women, especially when they're dead - that he especially loves a dead woman? Which has some truth in it unfortunately but I did feel there was a sort of integrity to Iphigenia which was terribly... which made her equal to Achilles in some fascinating way and I was very moved by her and so wanted to write about her.

ET:  She peaks up a couple of times in Achilles, doesn't she? Quite tantalisingly.

EC:  I think she haunts him, so that was where it came from.

ET:  I suppose the only other thing that troubles me and I think many of us, is that as we work on this project on women's writing is, you know, can we...is there such a category as 'women's writing', does it make a difference if you write as a woman, or if you're a woman writing?

EC:  It's a really difficult thing to work out isn't it because I think it is different, I think it's really different, and personally as a poet in particular there's something, there's an excitement I find in reading women poets which is slightly different from the excitement I find in reading men poets and it's not because they're women, I don't think it's that. I think the first contemporary woman  poet I was really conscious of was Adrienne Rich, when I was a student back in the seventies and there was a thrill... there was a poem she wrote in memory of some Russian women climbers ['Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev'] and she used an image of the blue sky stitched (they perished on a climbing expedition) and she used an image from quilting with the blue sky, how they stitched the blue of the sky like a quilt and... I should be able to quote it accurately and I'm not quoting it properly but there was something in that image which was extraordinary to me and it was the combination of the wild outside world and a celebration of female courage and the domestic. But it seems to me to be about more than reference, more than subject matter and that's why it's quite hard to get a handle on it. I love Eavan Boland's book Object Lessons, I don't know if you've read that, it's marvellous isn't it? Where she talks about growing up as a woman poet and realising that traditionally the woman has always been the muse and always been the object.

ET:  I mean because of your interest in the voice I just wondered whether that's something we can bring to this...

EC:  I think with any...particularly with any poet and I mean obviously creative language exists on a kind of continuum, so a lot of prose writing has this too - but one talks much more about the voice of a poet than of a prose writer I think. And it is, it's a sort of cliché in a way, but there really is a moment I think when I writer finds their voice, and even though... Jenny Joseph says somewhere that you're stuck with the kind of poetry you write like you're stuck with your face, which I think is really good because it's true. It may be really annoying, you think: ‘I wish I wrote that kind of poetry but I don't, this is what comes out’. And even though it may be always evolving and changing there's a continuity which is the continuity of your own voice, and maybe what is attractive about reading other women poets is that sense of what that voice holds or contains, which is much more than a matter of reference. It may be a matter of history and still written against the backdrop of the predominance of male poets. So there is that sort of excitement of finding a voice that's true and confident and different - but I don't think I'm getting there quite, I'm still trying to work it out, why it is...But so many of the poets I want to read are women: Eavan Boland, Penelope Shuttle, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt;  you know - just wonderful, wonderful poets.

ET:  And we keep finding with our work on classical reception that so many more of the authors who are currently thinking about or working with classical material are women than ever before.

EC:  That's interesting isn't it? It is curious isn't it? I'm just thinking of something else as we speak: There's a tradition in which (it seems to be a male tradition), by which poetry is written for personal immortality and admiration and to pull the girls. That's a sort of cliché but I've met quite a few men poets who actually buy into that and think that's what it's about. I don't think women poets do think it's about that. At all! So there's a real difference and that somehow shows on the page and in the voice and creates a greater fullness, I think.

ET:  Yes and I suppose if immortality and glory and so on are one of the reasons why men write then I suppose that also makes, again I talk as a classicist really, but makes the relationship maybe with the classical material quite different. If there is a sense in which, say, a poet such as Ted Hughes sees himself as one in a line, one in a continuum of gloriously immortal poets and when he writes his Oresteia it's a different agenda perhaps.

EC:  I wonder if it's the case. I don't have an answer to that because I don't want to denigrate so many fantastic male poets but there is nevertheless this 'fame is the spur’ cliché which continues I think and I just don't think it's the case for women poets - for whom poetry's far more a way of knowing, a way of attending, it's far more  about that. But of course, there's also a laying of oneself open to experience which is true across the genders in the process of making poetry. So it's a tricky one and I wonder if it'll ever become a redundant question. It certainly isn't at the moment.

ET:  It isn't yet, is it? Certainly we found as far as a sort of canon of things that Classics students who are engaged with the classical reception are reading it is still very much a male dominated list. And that despite the frequency with which women are now constantly contributing.

EC:  And are they not put on the reading lists?

ET:  No. But I suppose new things tend not to be put on, to be fair.

EC:  Not Tony Harrison either or Ted Hughes?

ET:  No it's all Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney...

EC:  Michael Longley?

ET:  Of course, yes, sorry I'd left him out.

EC:  There's a quality in his writing which I think is so extraordinary and delicate...

ET:  Yes, I wouldn't for one minute criticise... And I suppose sometimes it is to do with the fact that if there is an overt feminist agenda, such as perhaps there is let's say in The World's Wife, for example, or the Penelopiad, it seems too much of a niche interest?

EC:  I do think agendas get in the way of most writing, actually. They just make it instrumental  and however much, you know...if someone says ‘could you write an ecological poem’, well you might try immediately to do it but I think it'd be less of a poem than if you were to write your own poem with the whole of your nature which may include quite a lot of thoughts about ecology. But there's something so deliberate about writing with an agenda which I think limits the result. If, subsequently, people apply agendas that's fine; that doesn't hurt anything.