Disappointing Artists with Hannah Regel
Thea McLachlan speaks to Hannah Regel about effort, archives, and Regel’s debut novel, The Last Sane Woman.
INTERVIEW BY THEA MCLACHLAN
In Oliver Reed (Montez Press, 2020), the first poetry collection from London writer Hannah Regel, she writes: “I want my life to change but / I am not brave / and I speak from the throat not the belly like I should.” That collection, with a “bratty petulance”, is about ambition, disappointment and, ultimately, the desire to be seen.
In her debut novel The Last Sane Woman published in July this year by Verso she reflects further, with, as she puts it, more earnestness, on some of those issues. The Last Sane Woman follows Nicola Long, a fine arts graduate who is working at a nursery to pay for this expensive London life. In the Feminist Assembly archive she discovers Donna Dreeman, a potter in 80s London who is now deceased, and she reads the letters Donna wrote to her friend Susan. Nothing is known about Donna and none of her pots appear to have been conserved. The novel shifts between Nicola’s, Donna’s and Susan’s perspectives, each offering a fractured image of Donna’s own life and art. Nicola becomes absorbed by Donna, reading the letters closely, almost frantically, wanting to know what happens to her, seeing in Donna–projecting onto her–her own life and hopes.
Donna and Nicola are both artists who want recognition, but it’s not clear if they are stars or even emerging ones. Regel builds characters with determination and resolve but who remain steadfastly, for much of the novel, disappointed with themselves and their lives. The Last Sane Woman is about that disappointment and how it sits alongside ambition, fate and fame. It takes place in the collision between women who have “the vibrating personality of matter in turmoil” and a life that progresses, that marches on “as if it were an opera”. It reminds me of Sharon Olds’ poem Morning Aria, 6,000 Feet, where she writes, “I am lying down my ambition—to disguise that I am a creature of narcissus. … I am asking to learn to like this large awkward being.”
I spoke with Regel in her home—a light filled apartment on an estate in London, which she shares with her husband. She sat compactly at her kitchen table wearing a jumper that knots in on itself, reflecting with caution and modesty on the issues that seep through her novel. We talk about effort, the sublime and dread. At the start of our interview, she smiles: “I’m going to be graceful.”
Thea McLachlan: One of my favourite quotes in The Last Sane Woman is when you write: “I feel like I’m all determination and no potential.” It captured to me what the novel grapples with a lot: disappointment.
Hannah Regel: With all these things like art or writing, you have to just do it on your own, you have to propel yourself all the time, you have to have so much determination even if the potential is not immediately apparent or doesn’t feel forthcoming. You do just have to push on. And maybe the nice thing [about the novel] is that [Donna’s] artworks are lost and Nicola’s stopped making them. It’s more about the determination.
How have you found that artistic disappointment?
It feels important to write about that kind of disappointment. There’s lots of literature about romantic disappointment where as, from my experience anyway, making art can actually break your heart just as much.
The sorrows I’ve had in my life have come from making art. They’ve shaped my life more than a romance or break up.
They’re just as real.
One of my favourite lines in Oliver Reed is, “I've given up on being interesting,” which resonated with me.
I don’t know if I’ve given up on being interesting.
Fine, suit yourself [laughter].
I think maybe the difference between Oliver Reed and the Last Sane Woman is that Oliver Reed has this kind of bratty petulance to it. Like, if I can’t win the game, I'll throw the board on the floor. Whereas this is maybe slightly more earnest: If I can’t win the game, I’ll just keep trying.
What do you do then? How do you keep playing the game if you’re so uninspired by it?
I think it’s more that it doesn’t love you back. But I can’t answer that. I don’t know. I think you have to be a bit mad. You can’t be sane.
When you were constructing the characters of Nicola and Donna, one in the 80s and one in the present, how were you thinking about how they lived in the world?
Nicola has a very watchful, expectant way of being in the world. She wants things to come to her but she isn’t that forthcoming about seeking them out. She’s very happy to just watch and gather. Donna is constantly moving house and building furniture and carting her belongings around and she has to be a bit more forthright. Nicola romanticises that way of living. I don’t think it’s a comment on whether one mode of being is of the past and one is of the present, but as a narrative construct, it works.
Are they all romanticising each other?
Yeah and I guess the way the book propels itself forward are these constant miscommunications and misinterpretations. Someone will view one event, or be told of an event in a letter and just completely misinterpret it.
I felt like the novel has a Girl Moves to the Big City feel to it.
Yeah it’s—maybe not coming of age—but, what’s the word, a künstlerroman, but maybe in reverse because it starts after it’s already gone wrong. Which is also what archives are. Even though you know how it’s going to end, you still want to know how. There’s a suspension of belief.
Because you want to know exactly how it ends. It’s why people still watch documentaries on Diana.
We want to see inside the car. It’s morbid, it really is. You know that Nicola really wants [to know about Donna’s] death. But she obviously can’t and I don’t think she realises that until she gets to the end.
There are three archives in the novel. There’s Susan and Nicola’s private archives – how they interpret the letters and what they draw from them. Then there’s this public archive where the letters become objects that anyone can read. What do you think that says about communication?
With archives or any kind of historical ephemera, it is shaped by who handles it.
Things just get thrown open to interpretation in such a wild way, that the personal gets so confused. There’s so much space for these parasocial relationships to develop.
At one point [Donna’s] talking about ceramics and she’s like: “But, of course, once you fire something it’s fixed.” I think something similar happens with archives where, once it’s fired, it's fixed. Whereas actually, while someone’s alive they are full of contradictions and present different selves to different people. People are very slippery. But as they’re living and moving around in the world, they hold those contradictions within them and you can understand them better. Then as soon as they’re gone and all you have are these contradictions, whatever you read into that becomes who they were. They become all of the slippages because you have to make it all line up. So those holes become the things you focus on.
And not only when people die, but like, I don’t know if you’ve ever had an ex but like …
Well yeah, that’s what the internet does, right? Like that’s how we look at other people’s lives, with these gaps and then we fill it all in. This person’s having so much fun and is so successful. Or this person doesn’t love me anymore.
And you can’t talk to them again!
You need more information. You need to fill in all the holes and the gaps. You need to see the death. You need to see the body.
What interested you in ceramics? It’s such a ripe metaphor.
Well, precisely. It’s the earth. It has to go into fire. And then it’s permanent. You can’t take it back once you’ve done it. You can break it but they’re pretty hardy things. There’s a lot of quite interesting literature about ceramics, written by ceramicists, that are all about the potter as a way of life. Being a potter is all encompassing. It’s a lifestyle. There’s a lot of writing about how they’ve tried to construct the perfect or the right or the honourable life.
There’s also that interesting interchange between whether they are craftspeople or artists and how they want to be considered.
Under Thatcherism, the 80s was quite a pivotal point for the Arts and Crafts movement. It was being superseded by fine art and becoming suddenly untrendy. People used to make a living off their work [as a potter] which was also part of an ethos on how to make a life that is alternative and interesting. Then that very quickly became more about the individual. It stopped being this communal project about how to live interestingly in the world and became more about artistic genius.
And that was a response to the pressures of living under Thatcher?
Yeah and cuts to arts funding. It just wasn’t possible to just be on the dole and live as an artist.
Which permeates into Nicola’s life too: so much of it is about her being tired.
Yeah and poor old Nicola, so much of it is. She is just not allowed to live in the way that she wants to live. She has to work in a nursery. She is structurally barred from having an interesting life.
One quality of the novel is how it is playing with these different notions of peoples’ public and private selves. What were you thinking about when you were doing that dance?
I guess, yeah, it is a dance. Also this is all material, like Nicola’s main pitfall is that you know these [letters] were written and they were never meant to be public, right. She reads into them with a sort of grander narrative that’s romantic and she wants to have an exhibition and put them up. She sees them as somehow connected to the artwork when they were never intended to be. There’s a muddying of the two.
Correspondence between two people is always so intimate. Then, as a reader of the novel and in the archives, you get this very distorted perception of intimacy.
I would also argue that maybe it’s not that intimate. There’s lots of points in the letters where Donna is showing a side of herself that is not quite what happened. It’s a little bit braver or more sure. It’s almost the opposite of intimacy. It’s a vehicle of presenting yourself as how you’d like to be seen and actually the intimate thing is completely left out.
Sometimes it’s lovely to watch people interact in that way and sometimes it’s frightening to see someone behave differently around someone else and you feel like reality crumbles, especially with friends. But it can also be lovely. Sometimes there are those weird slippages where you see someone like others would see them.
I want to talk about the sublime now because that comes up in your novel. What you call the “steel wall of the sublime.” Tell me what the sublime means to you and how it operates in the novel.
So I think it’s purposefully a misuse of the term. It’s from Nicola’s point of view, she’s thinking about suicide and tragedy and profound sadness. Which I think some figures in history do carry and it surrounds them like an aura, which is something like the sublime because it makes them untouchable. They’re so tragic because they’ve suffered so much. But it's also a complete misinterpretation of that on Nicola’s part because she decides Wouldn’t it be easier for me if people thought of me as a tragic figure? because then she’d be let off the hook.
There’s so much ennui in the novel. It’s a struggle, where Donna and Nicola are both disappointed and not getting the recognition they deserve. But by the end of the book, there’s this wonderful sense of hope that Nicola has, in her state of struggle and boredom and depression, because she sees herself as Donna.
I agree. I think because she is so tied to Donna and there’s so much dread and when she finishes the letters, you don’t know what happens in her life next, but
I hope that once that illusion shatters she realises that maybe she’s not so hopeless and maybe it’s just a point in her life and maybe she has to go through this wallowing and maybe the end is the point where she’s the least misguided because she’s going to get on with her life.
Thea is a writer living in London.
Hannah Regel is a writer based in London. She has two published collections of poetry, WHEN I WAS ALIVE and OLIVER REED (Montez Press, 2017 and 2020). OLIVER REED was listed as one of The White Review's books of the year, 2020 and excerpted in Granta magazine. THE LAST SANE WOMAN is her debut novel, the manuscript was a recipient of the K Blundell Trust award.
