"Words and utterance and magic and power, all tied into one centuries-old knot."
An Interview with Ali Smith
Since her first story collection Free Love and Other Stories, Ali Smith has consistently earned critical acclaim for her layered, beguiling wordplay and texts that experiment with the boundaries of form and genre. Her latest novel, the Booker Prize-nominated How to Be Both, comes out in the U.S. today.
How to be Both functions as a diptych: depending on your edition of the text, the reader may first encounter Francesco del Cossa, a gender-nonconforming Renaissance artist in Ferrara, Italy, or George, a teenage girl in the contemporary U.K. who has recently lost her mother. In The Guardian, Smith stated that she hopes the book âgestures to all the ways to read that are possible.â
Cossaâs story moves from poetry, prose, and across the adventurous landscape between the two; Georgeâs narrative is more conventional, though no less dazzling. The two narratives intertwine and complement each other; images accumulate meaning and then skillfully contort. Duality is at the core of the storiesâdead and living, man and woman, past and present.
I conducted this interview via email over several months. Smithâs interest in simultaneity was immediately reflected in our correspondence, enthusiastically veering into parentheticals and conversational fragments separated by asterisks. I read the title of the novel, fittingly, as both a statement and a question. And if there is an question posed, perhaps the answer is: joyfully.
I. UNDERSHADOWS OR UNDERSTORIES
THE BELIEVER: I read in your 2012 interview with The Quietus that you said, âForm will tell you everything about where [people] live and what shape theyâre in.â Can you speak to how form functions in How to be Both?Â
ALI SMITH:Â I came at this novel with form foremost in mind. I wanted to write something that would gesture to fresco structure. Iâd been reading about Renaissance frescos and fresco technique after having traveled down in the bowels of San Clemente in Rome, a place where several different layers of the building (which has, upstairs in its surface-level church, a glorious set of frescoes depicting the martyrdom of St. Catherine opposite the Popeship of St. Ambroseâa gender lesson in itself) sift, as it were, downward, literally through time and belief systems, and end, several levels below, in a bit of ancient Roman street and an underground spring. Â
Iâd gotten excited about a particular physical conceit: how fresco restorationâwhich begins with the painstaking removal of the layer of the wall into the original wet plaster of which the fresco had been painted all the centuries agoâinvariably reveals the underdrawing, or sinopia, under the surface: the first work of the artist, which has been under there all this time invisible. And these underdrawings, the original designs for the work on the surface, sometimes differed wildly from, sometimes differed a tiny little bit from, and sometimes were exactly related to, that surface work. I began to think about how this is like story structure. Iâve always believed that all stories (all utterances, all language constructs) travel with the undershadows or understories of themselves.
Iâd simultaneously been worrying at something Saramago says in his novel The Stone Raft, where he part comically, part seriously, laments that narrative being by nature sequential, canât ever really do simultaneity. Like him, I think we live our lives in a dimensional meld of communal and individual and what might be called historical simultaneities. How to express this? Especially in the novel, the most societally sensitive and time-tied of the literary forms.
Someone else, a proper critic, will be able to tell you what this means about where we live and what shape weâre in, I canât critique my own forms. I know I wanted to find one which would not just graft together the seeming disparate, and reveal that theyâre not disparate at all but part of the same branch, same tree, and honor the ways in which, we contradict ourselves. A form which would make visible the things invisible to us if we stay on the surface.
I know I love and am drawn to the places where the arts cross over into each other, and love the soaring-over of all the visible and invisible borders. The novel comes in two separate parts that act as the opposite of division. They donât just hold the keys to but crucially engage and are delivered by the imaginations of each other. Â
I hope.
BLVR: Do you feel like youâve become more interested in the âundershadowsâ of stories as youâve matured as a writer?
AS: No, I think I always have. The first novel I wrote told an untold unsaid understory. I donât know how it relates to character portrayal. Maybe itâs simply that we know a great deal more about character from silence or minimality, rather than from whatâs said.
BLVR: That reminds me of (admittedly my favorite) line from Faulknerâs The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin says, âDo you want me to say it do you think that if I say it it wonât beââthe idea that, once words are used to express something, the words inherently transform the thing into something else.Â
AS: Words and utterance and magic and power, all tied into one centuries-old knot. Which is why artâin all its forms but especially the writtenâgoes one further and is almost always about both: the said and the not said, the apparent and the invisible, the expressed and the inarticulable. Because whateverâs said, as well as working its own magic and laying down its seemingly evident rule of itself, carries the simultaneity of whatâs not being said.
 Francesco Del Cossa, from the Griffoni Altar, 1473.
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