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Dateline: 29th August, 2006
Wesker at the Book Festival David Chadderton reports on playwright Arnold Wesker's contribution to the Edinburgh International Book FestivalAfter nearly half a century as a playwright, Arnold Wesker was at the Book Festival this year to promote his first novel, Honey, which resurrects one of his most memorable characters, Beatie Bryant from his 1959 play Roots. Described by critic Kenneth Tynan as one of the "hairy men" - "heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights" - alongside John Osborne and John Arden (as opposed to the "smooth men" or "cool, apolitical stylists" Pinter, Orton, Hampton, Ayckbourn, Gray and Stoppard), Wesker has written for television, radio and film and has been translated and published in 18 languages. At the age of 73, he has now written his first novel. Since Roots he has often been asked what happened to Beatie Bryant after she found her own voice at the end of the play. Honey answers this question, moving on thirty years from the play to a 1980s world of capitalism, individualism and anti-semitism. He claims that it was not a conscious decision to set the novel at this time; he just found himself writing about Beatie in the 1980s. Wesker's wife, Dusty, on whom the character of Beatie was based (he says that Ronnie in the play was "cruelly" based on himself), has not read the novel but believes he has written a version of Beatie that he would have liked her to be. Although this is Wesker's first novel, he has always had intentions to write one. In fact he wrote one when he was twelve, and another after coming out of the Air Force, based on letters he had sent home while he was away, that ended up in a bottom drawer until it became material for his play Chips With Everything and since 1967 he has kept adding material to a box file labelled "notes towards a novel". He also keeps a file of titles and has a lot of first lines of novels that don't lead anywhere on his computer (he read a few of these out). The title of Honey came to him in a dream, where he saw the word as though it was written in lights, lighting up one letter at a time. In the novel, Wesker puts his character through a sequence of situations where she falls apart and has to keep putting herself back together, the worst of which is when she is raped. Some critics have made the claim that it is implied that Beatie enjoys being raped, which Wesker hotly denies and says can only be concluded by a very superficial reading. He says that she is brought to orgasm, but that does not mean that she enjoys being raped. In his research for his play Denial, he found that some women who are raped are brought to orgasm and feel great pangs of guilt for this afterwards, making the psychological effects of the attack more difficult to cope with. In writing the rape scene, he tried to find a way of making it shocking and condemnable without violence, as it would be easy to make it violent and he does not like to make things easy for himself. He believes that it is the duty of an artist to be politically incorrect. In Denial, which is about parental abuse and false memory syndrome, the sympathy is with the parent and not with the child. He wrote The Journalists for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but the actors refused to perform it and director Trevor Nunn sided with the actors; according to Wesker, this was because the RSC at the time (1971) was in the hands of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the play contained as characters a number of intelligent Tory ministers. In the near future he hopes to enter another area of published writing that he has not been involved in previously. He is selecting forty of his poems and has offered them to poetry publisher Carcanet for possible publication. He said he is dreading their response. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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