Camilla Grudova on Sentimentality, Short Forms and Being Gross
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The story is much older than the novel. It emerges from an oral culture, a culture of fairytales and fables, and historically it has left us with a moral, something usable. I find your stories are haunted by a lack of moral. They give us all the signposting of a fairytale moral, but unsettlingly and troublingly, refuse to give us one. What draws you to the ambivalence of the short story?
What really draws me to fairytale stories is their bluntness, which I find really ambivalent, and how twentieth-century writers adopted this ambivalence, like Leonora Carrington or Barbara Comyns, or even Angela Carter to an extent. And I think, yeah, it’s turning those old tales on their heads that did have these morals, and maybe even questioning if those morals were there in the first place. But I think I’m really attracted to a kind of ambiguity or a lack of morality because we’re living through a moral age. There’s an obsession with the idea that writing makes you a better person, it almost reminds me of the very sentimental literature of the nineteenth century. And I think we have a lot of sentimentality, which I find quite dangerous. I was rereading Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature the other day, in which he dismisses Dostoevsky for being a sentimentalist. And he says there’s sensitive people versus sentimentalists, and sentimentalists are actually brutes. I feel like what he was saying in the early twentieth century could be said about many writers today.
That seems to be a preoccupation of yours. Your stories are absolutely not sentimental, but the characters in the stories are – mostly about their objects. You have these recurring motifs: tinned food and custard and Greek books and dolls. They reverberate throughout each of the collections. I wonder if you could talk a bit about materiality and sentimentality?
I find material objects very interesting in that they hold a lot. And the simple fact that they’ll be around when we’re not; they’ll outlive us all. They have a remembrance of things from people we don’t even know or remember ourselves. We are such materialist creatures, and I’m interested in people’s sentimental relationships with objects and each other. I try to look at that from the outside: it’s a goal to stand outside humanity and look in as much as I can, rather than seeing myself within the human project. Maybe in that way, I relate to objects as well.
They have that psychic bluntness that you were talking about earlier. Clothes, especially, are mentioned so lovingly and obsessively throughout your collections, and I was wondering if there are any instances of written garments in books that in some way influence the way you write them.
Yeah, definitely, older books especially, when you get a lot of people sewing their own clothes, when that was the norm. In A Touch of Mistletoe by Barbara Comyns there’s a wonderful description of the narrator and her sister sewing these dresses that they think are just fantastic, but they’re sewing indoors, and they don’t realise how bright they are, and they’re kind of ghastly, like orange and blue and red. And then they go out and a bunch of people start saying to them, ‘Oh, is that your national costume?’, thinking that they’re from Spain. It’s just the idea that they had these really vivid interior worlds, and then when they made them exterior, people were mocking them, and I thought, Oh, that’s a good analogy for a woman artist.
I’m always wary of naming time and place. It seems like a bit of a curse.
I also just go through obsessions with different items or objects and researching them. In each book I can see my obsession with this certain thing, and some of them I still have. Like, tinned foods I find endlessly fascinating: they’re like a sarcophagus. I was really obsessed with movies too, but not so anymore, and I’ve gone on to other obsessions now, like the English Civil War. It’s just a constant movement towards interests. Sometimes it can feel like the books are almost accidental to my interests and research. Sometimes I do lots of research on a topic, and a book doesn’t end up appearing. That happened to me when I went through an obsession with the eighteenth century and their obsession with the classical world, but no novel ended up coming out of that.
I wonder if you could actually talk a bit about the temporality of the stories; it feels like in your most recent short story collection, The Coiled Serpent, there’s much more of an eagerness to engage with modernity than in The Doll’s Alphabet. You have that story ‘The Meat Eater’, in which the main character, who kills a Philosophy student she has a crush on, is following the Jordan Peterson diet. And despite this, all your stories are heavily saturated with an atmospheric pastness.
I’m always wary of naming time and place. It seems like a bit of a curse. I keep trying to write a novel set in Edinburgh, and then keep getting frightened; I think there’s some bad juju here that will get me if I name it. And I think Muriel Spark knew that. She didn’t write The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie until she left Edinburgh and was kind of looking back on it.
But yeah, the Jordan Peterson story was the most contemporary one in The Coiled Serpent. And that was definitely a wacky lockdown story, where I thought I would try the Jordan Peterson diet just to see if I could get a story out of it. And I do think it is the weakest story in the collection, maybe because of all the swearing and stuff. But it was good for me to go outside of my comfort zone, which is writing about the past. When you’re writing about the present, there’s stuff we can’t understand, and maybe it’s easier to understand it if we use the materials and tools of the past, or old technologies, to defamiliarise our relationship with the technology we have.
I’m thinking of the machine in your story ‘Agata’s Machine’ that generates these hallucinatory images of Pierrots and angels. You can only really recognise it as a piece of technology because it’s aestheticised and distanced.
That story reminds me of something else I wanted to ask; you’ve frequently been given this accolade ‘gross’. I’m interested in how your ‘grossness’ is connected to a lot of the humour in your stories. I’m thinking about ‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’, that has so many footnotes, and they get grosser and grosser, and really delight in their own gratuitousness. Where does your sense of humour come from?
I think a writer should always keep some sense of the childish about them and that kind of humour, because if you completely dismiss it, then you’re in danger of becoming ridiculous. Some very serious works are unintentionally ridiculous, and that’s a much worse fate than being gross.
I’m really attracted to grossness. I think we’re in a particular moment in time where people are extremely offended by that. And I think it’s related to a big, scary issue we have to face, which is our relationship to our waste. People now are creating more waste than any kind of civilisation has in the past. And at the same time, we’re so offended by it, whereas, you know, if you look at Greek or Roman literature, there’s lots of humour and grossness. Or even nineteenth-century or Edwardian literature, which we think of as so mannered and polite. I’ve been reading a lot of Henry James recently, and everyone’s always like, ‘Oh, I have dyspepsia’, which means farting and burping. And so even then people were more open about it. And then, of course, in James Joyce, there’s a lot of visceral grossness there. And maybe people are more accepting of it in books from the past, because they think, oh, that’s part of the past; the past was quite gross and dirty. But I think we’re actually much grosser and much dirtier now than we’ve ever been as a species. And so I kind of want to confront people with that. I think it’s a political thing and then also an aesthetic thing as well, and those two are combined.
What’s brought about this sudden cleanliness?
It’s perhaps related to our increasing sense of morality and this mode we’re in where we’re seeing literature as redemptive, or something that makes us better people. I think if you talk about the gross or dark parts of humanity, then people think that goes against the project of saving people through literature. Which doesn’t work, if we look at the massively declining rates in reading. Obviously that’s related to the smartphone and TikTok or whatever, but I do think the publishing industry plays a role in that, by imposing the ‘eat-your-broccoli’ approach to literature, especially towards men, and wanting to make men better. ‘If only they would read this book, they would be better people.’ And I’m like, have you ever met a literary man?
God. Yeah.
I was reading Caroline Blackwood’s The Stepdaughter the other day, which must have been written in the 80s or 70s. And there are all these scenes describing the woman’s stepdaughter, eating loads of instant cakes from mixes she makes, and then, like, clogging the toilet with her massive poos and not flushing them. And the woman gets so angry at the presence of this girl in her life and her own inability to flush her out, through this toilet metaphor. That’s probably so shocking to contemporary readers, but actually, I don’t think it was much of a shock in the 70s. There’s a wonderful quote from an Angela Carter story, in which one character says to another, ‘Bowels are a great leveller’. And I think that’s true.
Talking about contemporary reading taste and grossness, I’m thinking about that Substack article you wrote about the dream you had where Claire-Louise Bennett visits you and tells you you’ve got to write a biography of smelly poets. How do you approach writing about writers?
The Coiled Serpent has two stories in it that are both, like, T. S. Eliot fanfiction, which I’m surprised no one picked up on. Like, oh, a banker’s having a mental breakdown, and he’s gone to Margate, and everyone’s like, who is this contemporary man? But yeah, I like writing about writers, because I love to read biographies; they’re always really juicy and gossipy. So I get a lot of details from those, but I like to write about the stuff that doesn’t relate to their writing at all. I think the most boring thing is if someone writes, ‘oh, and he sat down with his quill…’, you know? With poets especially, there’s all these grotesque details in their lives, which I quite like. And I like the idea, too, of T. S. Eliot being a kind of occult, cult figure. Muriel Spark had all these delusions where she thought that he was, like, washing her windows and sending secret messages to her. Or even Donna Tartt’s The Secret History has so much of Eliot in it. So I thought, okay, here’s this history of women writers who are haunted by T. S. Eliot. I want to have a bit of that, too, because I find him very alluring. He’s one of my favourite poets, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot about writing short stories from his poetry. I’d like to write some Philip Larkin fiction next, because everyone hates him.
AI is very sentimental and smarmy. That’s why it really repulses me.
Do you think the emergence of platforms like that speak to any renewed interest in short writing forms?
I wonder. I enjoy doing it, writing to people and connecting with people in that way, and doing it as a sort of diary, but at the same time, I’m extremely worried for the future of legacy media and that kind of sustainability. What I noticed on Substack now is that there’s so many people posting stuff about how you need to spend less time on the internet and read more, and then they’re all like liking each other’s posts. They’re not, like, reading Hegel by candlelight. So at some points it feels absurd that you just get a lot of people reiterating that to each other. It feels like a place where there’s a lot of people criticising the internet, and it’s a good space for that, but at the same time, the real criticism would be just to not be online.
I think you’re so right in noticing that there’s a heavy didacticism to most Substack articles, which, as we discussed, is not present in other short forms, like the story.
That’s interesting, yeah. And I think it’s definitely getting overtaken by AI. And, going back to what I think of as the dangers of sentimentality, AI is very sentimental and smarmy. That’s why it really repulses me. But I think that’s what attracts other people to it.
The final question I had was about Britishness; writers like Angela Carter and Muriel Spark are real touchstones for you. I wonder what your relationship to female British writers is.
Growing up, the line between British and Canadian was quite vague. I didn’t strongly relate to Canadian writers I found, whether it be, like, Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro. I do love a lot of Alice Munro’s writings, despite her being the Thomas Mann of now, but I wasn’t like, oh, this is what I want to do, or this is what I want to write. So I think I always wanted to model myself after people like Doris Lessing, or colonial women writers who then went to Britain and established themselves.
Following that narrative maybe comes from a sort of discomfort, of being from a colony. Because the history of colonisation is so incredibly sinister in Canada. I have a difficult relationship with it, even though my family came much later to the country as refugees. I still felt implicit in it in some way. I think I felt maybe a family connection to Britain as well, because my grandparents from my mother’s side came over after the war and were first in London before they moved to Canada. So it felt like there was some sort of spiritual connection.
I really love that post-war Polishness that you find in A Far Cry From Kensington, where there’s the paranoid Polish seamstress in it. That really reminded me of my grandmother, who was exactly that. And I love going to this really old Polish restaurant in Kensington, because that used to be the area of immigrants back in the 50s. I’d love to live in Kensington in the 50s; it was full of interesting immigrant communities, rather than it being the posh place it is now. Ironically, in Toronto, there’s an area called Kensington, and it’s an immigrant-heavy area. They’ve preserved it, in a way, against too much gentrification.
I guess because my mom was quite an anglophile, and my family had this connection, and thankfulness, towards Britain, which is maybe twisted in its own way, but yes, because of that, I grew up quite an anglophile in terms of the books I was reading, lots of Victorian children’s books. I always felt immersed in that. I always had it in my mind to be a British writer.
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Camilla Grudova is the author of The Doll’s Alphabet, Children of Paradise and The Coiled Serpent. In 2023 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
Devki Panchmatia is a poet from London. She recently completed her MPhil in Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin.
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