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Discuss this article (0 Comments)A tale of one woman
by This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it on Thursday, 09 April 2009
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Kat Slowe catches up with Penny Vincenzi at the Emirates International Festival of Literature.
"Surely looking after children is more important, more fulfilling, than anything else?" Edward Fallon asks.
"I don't agree with you at all, I'm afraid," Cassia says. "I'd be a doctor first and a mother second. My husband would just have to recognise that."
- From the novel Windfall
Penny Vincenzi sits, all in white, a strand of pearls encircling her throat. Her hair is cut in a precise bob, her air almost prim - she looks as if she should be playing croquet on a parish lawn in Surrey, England.
She seems nothing like the bold and brazen feminist her creations - the many ambitious, empowered women in her books - might suggest.
And there is a reason for this. She is not. Though she wrote Cassia's words in her book, Windfall, over a decade ago, Vincenzi has never believed them.
"I hate this trend of mothers not being with their children when they're really small," she says. "I think that's a great shame... I'm not a rabid feminist. I don't go stomping around demanding women's rights. If someone wrote an article about me and said I was a feminist I would really not like it. I don't like labels."
This sounds strange coming from Vincenzi, the epitome of a successful woman; a famous author, who has written thirteen best selling novels and sold over four million copies since 1989. Her new novel, The Best of Times, which comes out this May, is already tipped to be a sensation.
But Vincenzi's attitude makes more sense when one considers that she was married in the sixties, having been raised by her mother in the image of a fifties' wife. "I was brought up to believe you should look after your man," she explains, levelly.
And in many ways it is this traditional upbringing, as opposed to any feminist label, which Vincenzi has found the hardest to escape: "I have four daughters and they all have these wonderful husbands or partners who come home and cook, and look after the children.
"I find it all very difficult to cope with and I say things like: ‘Simon, I'll do that.' And Sophie says: ‘mother, just stop it. I've been working all day as well.'
"But I used to work all day and do it as well," Vincenzi explains.
It is perhaps because of this that Vincenzi identifies so closely with Lady Celia Lytton; a powerful, married woman of huge contradictions and a character from Vincenzi's Spoils of Time trilogy:
"She is like me," Vincenzi says. "She would not be labelled. She's very complex. She is good and she is bad. She is a feminist and yet she is helplessly in love. She is a working mother, but she frets about it... she is very bossy and I'm quite bossy."
"She was the biggest thing in my life for five years - I guess she did get more and more like me. It was a terrible day in my life, when Lady Celia died."
Vincenzi was not always an author, but she always wished to write. This has little to do with her upbringing. "My father was a banker and my mother a wife," she says.
But Vincenzi started writing while still at junior school, where a few times a term she would write a magazine on her mother's typewriter, which she would take to school and attempt to sell.
"Not with great success," she admits laughingly. "But even then I knew about page turning - every single story was a serial... I was obviously getting ready for the great things I was going to do."
Vincenzi's career started at the age of nineteen, as a junior secretary for Vogue magazine. She obtained the job upon the completion of a secretarial course: "one of those smart ones," Vincenzi assures me. "I learnt to type to Victor Silvester (an English ballroom orchestra conductor)."
She claims everyone mistakenly thinks her first job was working in Harrods library, but discloses this was only a part-time summer position. And her first part time job, she admits, was actually walking donkeys on Paignton beach in Devon.
"I hated it," Vincenzi says, describing Vogue. "It was absolutely horrible. I was a very unsophisticated nineteen year old and it was full of very sophisticated women.
"In those days they all wore hats at their desks. We weren't allowed to go out without gloves, and you were not allowed to work in fashion unless you had a private income. This is because they paid so badly that you couldn't dress how they wanted you to dress, unless you had a rich daddy or a rich husband.
She adds diffidently: "I was only a secretary, so that was different."
But while sitting on the inside of the glitz and glamour at Vogue, Vincenzi did have the opportunity to meet some iconic personalities.
"It was the Barbara Goalen era," she says. "Alisa Garland was editor. There was also a nervous new photographer - a chap called David Bailey - who was most famous for making the models cry.
"All these girls would traipse up there (to the photography studio on the fifth floor) terribly excited and they would come back down two hours later weeping."
The models, Vincenzi divulges, would receive ₤4 ($5.68) an hour for editorial shots, ₤5 ($7.10) an hour for advertising, and only ₤2 ($2.84) an hour for Vogue, which was considered to be an honour.
Becoming an author was for Vincenzi a rather easy transition. By the time the offer came up, she had worked her way up to be a freelance journalist and was writing for British national papers The Times, The Sun and the Daily Mail, among others.
"Anyone could pay me," she says. "I loved it. The thing about being a journalist is that you can meet anybody if you put your mind to it. A very famous editor of the day said: ‘If you want to meet the Pope, your only hope is to be a cardinal or a journalist.' It's absolutely true."
One of Vincenzi's more notable interviewees was Peter Cook, whom she describes as ‘just wonderful.' He did a turn for her over the lunch table, where he became El Wisty, the enduring comic character whom he played in Granada Television's Braden Beat. But her unequivocal favourite was notorious comedian Barry Humphries, who played the stage act Dame Edna.
"He came in wearing very dark heavy tweed," she reminisces, "so he looked most unlike Dame Edna. He was really late and he dumped his bags down.
"He said: ‘I had to go photocopy something. The Dame was going to go and at the last moment she refused, so I had to go.' He talked about her as if she was another person altogether. It was fascinating."
Vincenzi watched him later turn into his stage persona for the Royal Variety Performance, riveted by the change in his personality that occurred as he placed on his wig; "It was the wig that did it," she explains. Vincenzi was shocked by the tantrum he had when he discovered Cilla Black (a British singer) was wearing the same colour dress - he insisted on changing.
It was as she was working as a journalist towards the end of the eighties that Vincenzi was made an offer to write a book, a common phenomenon at the time for a ‘lady journalist,' she says. It had never previously occurred to her to become an author.
But she had an idea and so decided she would ‘give it a go.'
She signed on with the legendary publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott, whose contact details she obtained through Jilly Cooper. But, before she had a time to call him, he rang her. Jilly, as it happened, had already been in touch. Desmond Elliott successfully sold the synopsis and first three chapters of Vincenzi's first book for ₤100,000 ($142,860).
"I always cite that as an example of what a really nice person Jilly is," Vincenzi says.
"The first novel, I think, is the easiest," Vincenzi asserts, as she remembers how she then had to write the remainder of the book. The second, she claims, is usually the worst, as authors seek - often unsuccessfully - to live up to the promise of their first.
But this, it appears, has not been a problem for Vincenzi. In fact, it is her latest novel, The Best of Times, that she complains has been the most difficult she has ever had to write. Always writing primarily to entertain, Vincenzi was worried to see the story take an ugly twist:
"One of the things that happened with the book I have just finished was that it took a dark turn, and that is not right for me. And I realised it had all gone wrong.
"It was such a hard book to write," she explains. "I don't want to say too much about it yet, because it is not out. But it was an absolute horror. I was in complete despair and I was nearer to giving up, and starting to tear it up, than I have ever been in my life.
"I just sat down and talked to my youngest daughters about it and said: ‘oh, it's urrm eeerrrrrrrr,'" she groans dramatically.
They sat with Vincenzi for hours, helping her to see how she could make the book work. She intends to dedicate the book to them: "I owe them a lot," she says.
Vincenzi's four daughters all read her novels and like them. Though, she adds, they will usually skip over the amorous bits. "They don't like those bits," she says. "They turn the pages over very quickly because, actually, you don't want your mother writing about stuff like that."
Vincenzi describes her latest book - despite, or perhaps because of all the trauma involved in writing it - as having ‘a very strong idea:' "I didn't think it was one of my best, but in fact everyone who has read it likes it much more than I expected.
But it is certainly very frightening publishing a book. If you ever do it, which I am sure you will, it is a lamb to the slaughter really."
The best selling author says she does not believe people who claim that they do not read their own reviews, admitting that hers are often awful.
While she admits this can be upsetting, she argues that she would rather have happy readers than happy critics.
"I am not the sort of author who gets good reviews. I am not a literary author. I am a popular one, so I get a lot of sort of dismissive reviews."
Vincenzi suddenly looks distracted. Her husband has turned up and is wondering how long she is planning to take. She calls him ‘love' and is still clearly infatuated. Vincenzi married young at 21, and only waited that long because the marriage took place against the wishes of her father, and girls, she explains, did not disobey their fathers in those days.
"Well, he didn't like him (her husband) and I was 21," she declares. "More or less you did what you father told you. I know that sounds very Dickensian, but the pressure was very strong."
Despite her disavowal of extreme feminism, Vincenzi clearly admires strong women who take control of their lives - much as she, herself, has done:
"Actually, I kind of admire Mrs Thatcher. I will probably have hate mail."
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