‘Deep into a person’s soul’: An interview with Caryl Phillips on novel writing

By Z. W. Price

I first read Caryl “Caz” Phillips by way of his introduction to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Then it happened again: while reading Samuel Selvon’s The Housing Lark, there was a foreword by Phillips, himself an award-winning novelist from across the pond. So I met Caz as a teacher of transformative literature before I ever learned from him in a Yale classroom. I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior year reading his novels and plays. His characters—in the lineage of the voice-driven, polyphonic narrative style of those storied Black diasporic writers he publicly admired and that he is counted among—offer us a kind of relational cartography. From Cambridge to his most recent novel, Phillips’ characters confront each other, sometimes entangled in history or spurred by curiosity, which provide greater depths of understanding. In Another Man in the Street, he transfigures the richness of these private relations across a backdrop of a new cosmopolitan world order: the rush of Caribbean migrants into London in the 1960s.

For the meticulous reader, there is much in his fiction to be studied. While reading Another Man in the Street, I was again struck by how he crafts a language free from any gaze or expectation. I find Phillips to be a multi-genre writer whose fiction unearths truths about his characters, which in turn reflect truths about humanity. He kindly agreed to speak with the Washington Square Review about his latest novel, artistic solitude, and his approach to character discovery given his success in multiple literary forms.

Zaporah Price: Back in 2015, you called characters “the real engine room of a book.” Tacked above my writing desk is a similar reminder: a marginal note from your feedback on one of my undergraduate short stories. You wrote: “Stop thinking about themes. Get the characters right.” Which character from Another Man in the Street did you meet first? Was it Victor, or perhaps Lorna?

Caryl Phillips: Yes, get the characters right. Who did I meet first? Hard to remember now, but I suspect Lorna – who is a ‘spurned wife’. But the main characters showed a little of themselves … in sequence. First, I could see a bit of this one, then another one popped into view, while the first one receded. And so on. There was no real ‘organizational’ clarity to the way in which the characters revealed themselves. I was just happy that they eventually chose to stick around and share something of their lives with me.

ZP: In the opening pages of the novel, as Victor makes his passage, he is adamant that he will not become his father. Throughout the novel we see him triumph and fail in this pursuit. His backstory is defined by this divide, and the pressures of being a first-generation immigrant in England. Were you thinking about the generational clashes and communication gaps between those who choose to stay and those who are determined to leave while writing this novel?

CP: I’m always thinking about those who choose to stay and those who choose to leave. These decisions have affected my own familial relationships and friendships across many years. Where one is positioned generationally can also increase the pressure on a person’s life, and inform decisions as to whether one should ‘stay’ or ‘go’. 

ZP: The segregation and renaming that Victor undergoes in 1960s London seemed to me to echo the racism occurring in the United States during the same period. As your novels often explore the movement of people and ideas across borders, how did these historical parallels influence Victor’s arc, if at all? What does it mean that Victor’s mistreatment is both unique to his identity as a Caribbean immigrant in London and reflective of racial tensions abroad?

CP: I’m not sure that this character, Victor, is too aware of the racial tensions in the United States. In the third section of the novel, his friend makes reference to how black people are treated in the United States by employers who choose to just seat such individuals in the metaphorical ‘window’ in order that the employer might claim some kind of liberal credentials. But this aside, there’s not too much evidence of Victor being too concerned with the historical parallels.

ZP: I was particularly drawn to “The Boy Under the Bridge,” the only chapter written in second person narration. It details Lorna’s life in St. Kitts and eventual migration. I really felt her plight—she has been promised something by England and by Victor. The stakes for Lorna feel radically different than they do for Victor, another Kittian immigrant. As you wrote that chapter, how did you untangle the intricacies of her migration through the lens of gender and womanhood?

CP:  Ah ha. See question one. Stop thinking about ‘themes’. I don’t think about gender and womanhood. I think about who Lorna is and what she’s feeling. I already know that she’s a woman. Her experience is not only going to be different from that of a man, it’s also going to be different from that of another woman.

ZP: It is a feeling! Are there ways you tune out the outside world to get to that?

CP:  I tune out the world by going to hotel rooms and isolating myself. I’ve done this from the very beginning of my writing life. The only thing that has changed is that the hotels have got fancier, and more geographically distant. I wrote the final draft of my first novel driving around Tenerife in the Canary Islands. I stayed in very cheap hotels, or slept in the back of the rental car. These days I tend to go to Japan, Thailand or Hong Kong. Places where I don’t know anybody, but there are nice hotels with room service. My body clock doesn’t mind that I’m often sleeping in the day and working at night.

ZP: How meaningful is solitude for a novelist?

CP: Well, it’s hard to think with any clarity in a noisy room. But I don’t think I’d do so well on a desert island. There has to be some kind of balance.

ZP: This novel comes after several years, what was the writing and revision process like?

CP: The same as it always is. Sometimes tedious, sometimes forensic, sometimes joyful, but I have yet to find any shortcuts. Discovering people and shaping language is not subject to the pressures of any time and motion study. You learn to wait. You learn to push. You learn to wait.

ZP: Discovering people is no simple task. Do you think your published work in other genres—from documentary filmmaking in your early twenties to award-winning radio plays—has opened up how you approach discovery in the novel form?

CP: Working in other forms helped me to realize how important it is to be able to ‘explain’ who the characters are … to myself. In collaborative art forms somebody (actors, directors, producers) are always asking you who the people are, what they mean when they say this or that etc. I was ‘trained’ in having to answer these questions. When I’m writing a novel, I still answer these questions - even though I’m the one asking the questions!

ZP: What can novels do that no other genre, or discipline, achieve?

CP: The novel can take us uncomfortably deep into a person’s soul. We can eavesdrop as people find the words to explain to themselves all sorts of betrayals and anxieties.

ZP: When we are talking themes, you've said before that home might be the most complicated subject for a writer. Home and place are central issues in previous novels like Crossing the River and in your nonfiction work, most recently in your essay collection Colour Me English. Have your thoughts on home and on place-based writing evolved over the course of your career?

CP: Well, it’s possible that home is the most complicated subject for this writer, but I’m sure that some other writers are able to cohabit more easily with the word. In terms of evolution; yes, my thoughts about home have changed a little – it would be strange if, after so many years writing around the subject, I still felt exactly the same way. However, I leave it to others to figure out how exactly things have evolved. What I can say is that the idea of home continues to occupy my mind. I have no conclusions!

ZP: What is a piece of advice you give to writers similarly grappling with questions of home, identity, and migration?

CP: I’m not sure I would offer advice. I would, however, suggest to them that they have a lifetime of work right there in there in front of them. As such, they are fortunate to have found themselves bedevilled by such potent subject-matter.