Spotlight On Writers
Clive La Pensée
- Where do you originate from?
I grew up in Cheam, in South London, which means the English around me was close to Michael Caine’s accent. But Rotherhithe and Cheam sound different to connoisseurs of accents. My mother threatened my brother and me with elocution lessons if we spoke with London accents. We had no idea what that was but it sounded horrible, so we only speak mild versions of Michael although his accent didn’t harm his career.
My grandfather was French Canadian and made my grandmother his war bride. She travelled from Cheam to Liverpool, to Nova Scotia to Montreal in early 1918 to be with her man. How? The questions we never asked. My father was 3 months old and my aunt just two years. That journey must have taken about 3 weeks. How did she wash clothes, get food in?
My mother’s maiden name was Cattaneo, probably from Sicily, and the name came to England with two stonemason brothers around 1850.
I always expected to be multi-cultural and indeed have ancestors from the Low Countries so am perplexed that so many people get so agitated by immigrants. We all have an immigrant background.
- What do you cherish most about the place you call home?
I’m not sure where ‘home,’ is. I never go back to my childhood home but spend about 60% of my time in a beautiful but small market town in East Yorkshire, with stunning architecture and two remarkable churches, both around 800 years old. Almost every building has an oak beam with a thousand years of history and that is humbling.
The other 40% I spend in Berlin soaking up the buzz of a world city, concerts, theatre and above all political cabaret. Berlin is where I feel most comfortable, but my family is in the north of England, so that’s where my roots are.
Berlin has given me the most ideas for my writing and just for an extra challenge I’m now publishing in two languages.
- What ignites your creativity?
I know many people think art should be politically neutral but surely, the injustices in the world make us most creative. My first two novels are autobiographical for the first 500 words. I observed a scene and wondered how my protagonist got to be in that position. E.g. I was leaving an international airport and was approached by a young woman who wanted 3 euros for the subway. How can you manage to be that broke at an international airport? So, I imagined how she got there, why she had no money and what the rest of her story might be.
Nowadays, I concentrate on the hypocrisy of our current world – we are burning up, yet capitalism makes ever bigger cars and we go ahead and buy them, because the problem is for politicians. It’s their job to fix things without troubling us. I’m also worried by animal welfare. There is no realistic chance to feeding the world with meat protein, yet we strive to make beef bigger and cows give ever more milk. Why is sustainable so hard to write?
I’m trying.
- Do you have a favorite word and could you incorporate it into a poetic phrase?
I find the idea of time amazing. I’m fascinated by relativity and wish I were smart enough to understand its manifold implications. But I have had fun trying to write poetry about time.
The amazing metaphysical poet, Andrew Marvell was a local lad, born about 8 miles from where I live. His most famous work is ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ The narrator is urging his reluctant girlfriend to sleep with him as her beauty won’t be treated well by time.
Marvell wrote around 1650 –
‘But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near.’
I’ve borrowed his idea of time as a moving vehicle and turned it into:
Let time’s chariot draw near.
Clip its wings without fear.
That last shovel on earth
Celebrate like your birth.
- What is your pet peeve?
There is nothing clever in being obscure, yet in the world of poetry, one must almost apologise for a good rhyme or a clever line that can be understood.
A few years ago, I was given the 6 shortlisted Booker Prize novels. I’m guessing somewhere there was a warehouse full of them because it was a very cheap present. I found them all unreadable and pretentious but was prepared to accept the fault was in me. I offered them to my local lending library. The librarian laughed politely, and told me, ‘No one will read them. Have you tried?’
She was right, and so was I.
- How would you describe the essence of Clive La Pensée?
Honesty. No one manages it all the time, and I always regret any lapses. But what is anything worth if it has been gained on the back of deceit? – by hurting someone else?
I’m woke, so is the pope and we are proud of it. He is religious and I am not, so we encompass quite a spectrum.
What’s the point if we don’t care about our neighbour, or the world we are leaving for our grandchildren?
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