By Hannah Nepilová
It is amazing, says Patrick Gale, “how many professional writers hate writing”. Gale does not suffer from that particular problem. The Cornwall-based author seems to find writing as addictive as his novels are to read, grappling with topics of deeply personal, often autobiographical, significance. In Notes from an Exhibition, his 2007 Richard and Judy bestseller, he explored the impact of mental illness, drawing on experiences with his own family. In his 2015 historical epic A Place Called Winter, he spotlit gay love in an era when homosexuality was socially impossible. And practically every one of his novels excavates the complexities of family dynamics. “I go very deep into myself when I’m writing,” says Gale, and he insists that the process is overall a pleasure.
Yet, as he prepares to release Love Lane, a 20th novel that picks up where A Place Called Winter left off, Gale admits that it is a pleasure of a bittersweet kind. “While I love writing, I don’t always love what it does to me. Each novel is like, ‘Oh God, here we go again.’ I have to go into this obsessive, dark space and become probably quite hard to live with.” It’s lucky, says Gale, “that my fantastic sculptor husband is similarly quite secretive and goes off into his studio on the other side of the garden while I go into mine. Then we both come up for air at suppertime.”
It is lucky, too, that Gale has a life raft to carry him out of his “dark place”: music. A skilled cellist since his childhood, Gale performs with the Penzance Orchestral Society as well as various chamber groups in Cornwall. He also owns a Baroque cello, which he calls “the Richard and Judy cello” because it was paid for by his Richard and Judy success, and he plays it regularly with an ensemble of Baroque musicians. “Writers are very lonely animals, especially if we don’t have families. Music is one of the main things that stops me from becoming a mad little hermit.” He continues: “I always say to people that if they’re struggling with their writing they need time away from it. Gardening and cookery, for example, are very good things to do because they keep your hands busy and allow your brain to tinker without obsessing over the text. Similarly, music gives me a sort of space in which I can unplug and think about other things.”
Growing up in South London, where his father held a post as a prison governor, Gale discovered his musical talent with the help of a school teacher: “He took my mother to one side and said, ‘Patrick can sing. Have you thought about this? Because you could weaponise it.’” At seven, Gale won a choristership to The Pilgrims’ School in Winchester, which required him to board. What was that like? “If you send a seven-year-old to boarding school, it will be traumatic,” he says. “But I think it really saved me because it gave me a distance on my parents, helped me see that they were humans and fallible, and stopped me expecting very much of them emotionally. Which sounds sad, but actually, it just meant I treated them as grown-ups and stopped being childish with them.”
Boarding school, says Gale, offered a kind of refuge, particularly around the age of ten, when one of Gale’s three siblings suffered a breakdown and his mother almost died in a car accident that left her brain-damaged. As a chorister, Gale had cello and piano lessons free of charge, giving him an outlet for complex, unspoken emotions. “Music provided me with a safety valve; it allowed me to let off pressure. This then segued quite naturally into me writing more and more.” Later he studied with the legendary cello pedagogue Jane Cowan—who also taught the cellist Steven Isserlis—and seriously considered becoming a professional musician. What changed his mind? “I realised I wasn’t going to be good enough. I could have been a cello teacher. But what I really wanted to do was to play in a quartet or an orchestra. And I realised I was a better writer than I was a cellist.”
“It’s a very cheap political trick to say, ‘Oh that’s elitist.’”
Even in his writing, however, Gale continues to channel his inner musician. Take Nothing With You—his 2018 coming-of-age novel—explicitly draws on Gale’s experience as a cellist, telling of a boy whose life is transformed when his mother signs him up for cello lessons with a glamorous and bohemian teacher. Elsewhere in Gale’s writing, the musical influence is more subtle. “I’ve got something akin to synaesthesia where, if I make a point of listening to the same set of musical pieces while working on a novel, it gives my brain a way back into [the mood of the text].” Such as? “While writing A Place Called Winter, I listened to a lot of Shostakovich’s String Quartets—it probably made me think about bitter cold and snow.” His latest novel, Love Lane, was written to the accompaniment of Sibelius, for reasons that Gale finds hard to place, but that might have something to do with a sense of haunting introspection. “Love Lane is an adagio. It’s not slow, but it has a sort of thread of sadness running through it.”
He believes that public figures would do well to think of spoken text almost as a piece of music, enhanced by an awareness of breath control and cadence: “It’s amazing how many people do not know how to speak. Even when listening to politicians, I often think: ‘For heaven’s sake, take a breath.’ They haven’t been taught [how to do it] as children and it shows.” This ties in with a general sense of frustration about the status of music education in the UK: “A few years ago, I decided to stage a community production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde in Penzance and I found there wasn’t a single school in the area out of about 20 schools where anyone played the recorder. So instead our recorder band was made up of people who would have been children back in Britten’s day in the 1950s: a white-haired recorder band. It was desperately poignant.”
Part of the trouble, he says, is a fundamental misconception about classical music. “It’s a very cheap political trick to say, ‘Oh, that’s elitist.’ It’s just like the iniquitous [trend] that has [set into political discourse] of mistrusting intellectuals as being somehow elitist. They’re not elitist. They’re just clever. They put in the time and they did their homework.” He does not claim to have the solution, but he does believe that it would help to recognise the many transferable benefits of a musical education: “I’m not naturally a very disciplined person. My brain goes all over the place. But there is something about the discipline of that childhood training—the daily practice, scales, arpeggios and so on— that can be applied very effectively to any creative form.” He concludes: “As Jane Cowan taught us, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t good enough to be a professional musician. What matters is the music itself. So keep it up and it can carry on being this magical thing in your life.”