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AmeriCymru: What inspired the concept for “The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum?”

Penny: It began with a footnote in a biography about the writer Bertolt Brecht, relating to his grandmother Karoline. She caused uproar when she struck up a friendship with a young woman cook and went off to the races with her. It was 1917 and she was behaving in a way that turned the strict social conventions of that time on their head. Karoline was 78 and she decided to party. I liked that. I’d already been thinking about the character of an anorexic chef and had written a short story about a clockmaker, inspired by some wonderful old clocks I’d seen in a museum. I began to wonder if these different elements could come together in some way.

AmeriCymru: What made you choose this period and place for your novel?

Penny: They chose me! When I was at art college I’d come across the work of German artists of the early 20th century and was quite simply inspired – artists like Kirchner, Dix and the brilliant satirist Grosz. The Dadaists in Berlin were amazing – their experimental approach to art, their creative panache and combative way with the world and its failings had me hooked from the off. I hardly needed an excuse to go back into the future, if you like. Look at Grosz’s satirical drawings condemning the fat cats of industry, or corrupt military leaders, of Dix’s powerful prints exposing the horrors of war and it’s hard to imagine you’re not looking at something still relevant and contemporary.

A statistic I’d read about life in Berlin in 1923 – the year of a terrible inflation which wrecked the lives of people from all walks of life – helped me find my starting point. This statistic claimed “less than 10% of Berlin’s families earned enough to maintain a decent standard of living.” What this meant in reality was terrible poverty, contrasting with conspicuous consumption by the few – a surprisingly familiar story if you look at news headlines today. I was also intrigued by the landmark buildings of the period, such as House of Aschinger, a four-storey restaurant which was open all hours. The management offered free bread rolls with bowls of pea soup to bring in the artists who provided colour and scandal. The pea soup was legendary – apparently, it was created by a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. In my story, it has a very different creator, or course.

AmeriCymru: You’ve discussed the role of food in this story, the importance it would have had for people in Germany at the time, was that concept the inspiration for your setting and how much did it affect your development of your characters and their relationships?

Penny: Originally my novel was going to interweave the stories of three different women, my chef Esther Rosenbaum, and two others, based on real people: actress Carola Neher, originally cast in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and playwright Marieluise Fleisser. Food was part of the storyline, but not the only ingredient. I was also interested in the theatre world of that time, and the dilemmas facing a young woman playwright and actress, both of whom were lovers of Brecht in the 1920s. It took a long while to work out the story I really wanted to write. The novelist Celia Brayfield helped me get on track when I went to Ty Newydd, the writer’s centre in North Wales, to work on an early draft. She asked me which of the three characters I really wanted to write about and it was, of course, Esther. I tore up a lot of pages (not for the first time!) and began all over again. The idea of the story recipes came along quite late in the process.

AmeriCymru: Esther cooks fantastic and marvellous food for other characters and starves herself. What inspired that in her character, did you create her whole with this in mind or did it develop with the story?

Penny: I’d had an idea of using an anorexic chef in a short story, before starting on this novel. So, yes, Esther was always going to have a problematic relationship with food. What interested me was the idea of a young woman using her appetite as her only means of exerting control over outside circumstances threatening her. That is a trait found in many anorexics. I’ve not been a full blown anorexic, but like many women I’ve had issues around food and eating. And yes, I have in the past controlled my eating to feel like I’m in control of something. Food is also a currency in this novel – it is Esther’s gift, and her way of forging connections and relationships. That is never lost, even when she gets ill.

AmeriCymru: Some of the book’s characters are historical figures, people who lived, some of them your own. How was it to write them and was there a difference? How much of how you wrote your characters was based on people you knew and how much was out of your imagination?

Penny: Historical figures are interesting to write about. They are “real” in the sense that they once lived, but without having ever met them – and all the historical characters in my novel died long before I was born – I had to imagine them anyway. I did do a lot of research over the 10 years it took me to write Banquet, but the trick I found with my historical characters was to try and bring them to life using a few telling details, rather than laboriously list all the known facts (or even sticking to them rigidly). For example, Thomas Tucholski is based on the real life kabarett artist Klabund, who was prosecuted for blasphemy and jailed in 1918. Klabund was “fiery and thin” – so is my character Thomas. But what gave me the real inspiration for creating his character was something I’d read by Kurt Tucholsky, a left wing journalist and a contemporary of Klabund: “Nothing is more difficult and nothing demands more character than to find oneself in open opposition to one’s time and to say loudly: no.” That, in essence, sums up Thomas Tucholski, a fervent anti-war campaigner. And that’s where I got his surname from – but I realised I had misspelt it when I went back over my research notes for this Q&A!

Grandmother Brecht is based (very loosely) on Karoline Brecht. Whilst researching in Germany, I ran out of money and was unable to go to see where she lived in the Black Forest. So, I moved her to Augsburg (where her grandson was brought up) and turned her into a sympathiser for the Spartacist movement. Bearing in mind her habit of ignoring social convention and the proprieties of the time, I felt that wasn’t such a huge step out of character.

I feel in many ways the city of Berlin is also a character in this book and I adopted a similar approach in trying to convey its atmosphere and appeal. House of Clocks is one of the few real places I found – in reality though it’s an art auctioneer’s called Villa Grisebach. Walking around Berlin in the late 1990s, I soon realised I wouldn’t succeed in finding concrete information of most of my settings, but would have to rely instead on suggestion and echo to suggest what once was. In the end, different scents and tastes became as important as bricks and mortar.

AmeriCymru: How much of Esther is you – your own feelings or realisations of coming on age?

Penny: I think all writing is autobiographical in the sense that you’re drawn to write about things that influence you, affect you, make you think, and so on. That doesn’t mean it’s a straight lift from life at all. As I said earlier, Banquet was a long time in the writing. It really began to come together the year several people I was close to died in quick succession. Rather than a rites of passage novel, shaped by my pre-adolescent experiences, it’s one influenced by months of grieving in my early thirties. It’s no coincidence Esther is an orphan. Losing someone you’ve been close to changes you in ways you can barely comprehend at the time. When I read Banquet, I see very clearly things that happened to me during that time of mourning, but of course filtered through another’s eyes and set in another period of time. It’s not a deliberate distancing on my part, or a cunning way of slotting me in to the book, but something I think is a lot more subtle and rewarding. I grew up a lot at that time, but I also spent a lot of time angry, drunk and behaving impossibly. It’s all there, and so are the good bits, like the lifeline suddenly held out by people I barely knew, or I knew but failed to understand in time could support me.

AmeriCymru: You’ve said in other interviews that particular artists and music inspired you writing this; did you immerse yourself in the art and music and everything else of that place and period to write?

Penny: Absolutely. Recordings of Lotte Lenya singing Kurt Weill; Pabst’s film of Pandora’s Box; photos of Jewish life by Roman Vishniac I came across unexpectedly in a London gallery one winter morning. But there were a lot of contemporary influences too, such as Tacita Dean’s Berlin Works and street graffiti in Berlin. And I ate a lot of fantastic cakes when I was there, all for the sake of research!

AmeriCymru: The real and the fantastical or magical elements in this narrative are so skilfully and subtly interwoven that the reader sometimes forgets that this is not a straightforward biographical narrative. There is no noisy crunching and grinding of gears as we change between registers. Did you aim for this “hypnotic” effect, or did it just emerge as the story developed?

Penny: If I’d aimed for the “hypnotic” effect you describe, I’d still be staring at a blank page! Seriously, I think the characters and the events that happen do help create that seamless tradition. I love books that nudge you into a surreal world, without losing sight of what is familiar, or maybe known historical fact. Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum springs to mind, so does Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, or Patrick Suskind’s Perfume.

AmeriCymru: What are your future plans? Are you working on another novel at the moment?

Penny: Alcemi are publishing my second novel in 2010. The Deer Wedding is a novel set in Croatia, spanning two generations, two brutal wars and the controversial histories of two very special works of art. The main character is an artist called Antun Fiskovic who experiences a sea-change in his fortunes as occupying forces take over the government of his country. Fifty years later, a young woman called Dagmar Petric begins a search for answers to her father’s suicide, a disgraced journalist in Tito’s Yugoslavia. I was in Croatia just after the 1990s war ended, working with a theatre company who were staging a version of The Tempest on an island beach. That partly provided the inspiration for the book, the rest came from meetings with extraordinary people I met out there and visiting evocative settings such as the Jewish Cemetery in Split and the Croatian sculptor Mestrovic’s gallery-home and chapel in Split.

AmeriCymru: The Welsh independent presses are proving very successful at supporting a new generation of writers. What is it like as a writer at the moment, living and working in Wales?

Penny: Would I be published, if I didn’t live in Wales? I have a feeling that the answer is probably a resounding “no.” I’d been approached by a few editors and agents from London before Banquet properly got underway, but nothing bore fruit until I met Welsh-based editor Gwen Davies. Gwen really helped me get the whole thing into something resembling a publishable manuscript. It’s rare to find someone prepared to commit to your work and to help you develop; so many larger publishers are either not taking on new writers, or you have to fit a certain mould, or genre. I can see why Banquet (and me) don’t really fit the bill, but that’s fine when you have a thriving independent sector. Just look at how many bands are coming through the web and social networking sites these days, rather than the big recording labels. I like that DIY approach. Over the past few years, I’ve also been supported by several writing awards made by organisations such as Academi and my “day job” at Welsh National Opera. It was a writing class run at Cardiff Library by my friend Jackie Aplin in the early 1990s that gave me the confidence to start writing. I think living in a bi-lingual country helps give a different perspective too. If you like words, you like languages. Wales has many interesting writers working in both languages; it’s also welcoming of “outsiders” like me trying to find their feet.

AmeriCymru: Any other message you’d like to pass on to AmeriCymru readers?

Penny: An invitation to take part in an event like Left Coast Eisteddfod is fantastic. The writing process is isolating, so the opportunity to meet readers (or potential readers) is always welcome. I’ve not been to the States before, so I’m really intrigued what to expect. It’s already surprised me to discover there’s a strong Welsh contingent in Portland (and further afield) which means I have no excuses not to practise my Welsh!

Penny Simpson on Amazon