Gail Benick, author of The Girl Who Was Born That Way, writes about British writer Rose Tremain: her works, her insights, and her struggles.
Highly regarded in Great Britain, the writer Rose Tremain has yet to achieve literary stardom in North America. How odd! She typically earns accolades for her fiction on this side of the Atlantic. In The New York Times review of The Gustav Sonata — Tremain’s most recent novel published in 2016 — the reviewer writes that Tremain is “one of those few writers you trust completely when she goes to any unfamiliar territory, historical or emotional.” Yet Tremain lacks the name recognition garnered in recent years by British authors, such as Kate Atkinson or Rachel Cusk. That’s unfortunate because Tremain, now in her seventies with fourteen novels to her credit, is a writer of great depth and wisdom. She deliberately seeks out subjects that have been considered strange, even unknowable, and invests them with a new clarity.*
Take, for example, Tremain’s novel Sacred Country, published in 1992 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It explores the lifelong striving of an English girl to change her sex. In 1950s, when she is still a child, Mary Ward, the daughter of a poor farming family in Suffolk, experiences an epiphany. ‘I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I’m a boy.’ This realization is the beginning of Mary’s struggle to become Martin. Along the way, she is brutalized by her father and abandoned by her mentally fragile mother. But she manages to create an eccentric community of support which includes her grandfather, a teacher, and the village butcher, all of whom seem to understand that “we are all something else on the inside.” As one of Mary/Martin’s supporters observes, “everyone needs a map.” And no one, Tremain maintains in this novel, should trespass on another’s sacred country.
What made it possible for Tremain to write the story of a transgender character with such compassion and insight? The author has famously advised budding writers to ignore the old adage ‘write about what you know.’ Instead she tells them to write about what you don’t know. Tremain herself demonstrates a remarkable imaginative range in her fiction, assuming the voices of a diverse cast of characters — male and female, old and young, historical and contemporary. She attributes her versatility to the shattering demise of her comfortable and secure English life at age ten when Tremain’s father abandoned her mother for a younger woman. Rosie, as she was then called, and her sister were packed off to a private boarding school. Rosie soon discovered that her imagination enabled her to cope with the family upheaval. She began to write about lands and people beyond the boundaries of her own experience. She invented plays and stories about animals, dark woods, mermaids and clowns, all of them, unlike herself. It didn’t take long for Rosie to realize that evoking alternative worlds in stories or plays was an efficient antidote to homesickness and self-pity. When she was writing, she was completely happy, happier than she had ever been in her earlier years.
Yet, Tremain was not encouraged to become a writer, at least not by her mother who sent her to a finishing school in Switzerland which prepared girls for secretarial work or her absentee father who was always indifferent to everything she did. In Switzerland, Rosie learned to type. She did no writing there. Not one poem, play or story. Nothing. Perhaps that’s why Tremain puzzles over the question she is often asked: How did you become a writer? Are writers born or do they rebirth themselves in this new guise? In her memoir, Tremain acknowledges that the origins of our writing selves are all different. But Tremain traces her transformation to a rebellion against her mother’s limited ambitions for her daughter. After finishing school in Switzerland, Tremain enrolled herself at the Sorbonne against her mother’s wishes. There she studied French literature, history and philosophy. She also began to write again. Like Mary/Martin in Sacred Country, Tremain changed her name from Rosie to Rose. In so doing, the writer Tremain laid claim to the sacred country of her imagination.
*For a full review of The Gustav Sonata, go to http://www.gailbenick.com/2019/01/06/the-gustav-sonata-by-rose-tremain/
— Gail Benick, author of The Girl Who Was Born That Way (Inanna, 2015)