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Helen SimpsonHelen Simpson
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
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Biography
Helen Simpson was born in Bristol and grew up in London. She read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce, then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a freelance-writer, contributing articles to newspapers and magazines and publishing two cookery books.
Her first collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (1990), won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and a Somerset Maugham Award and she was chosen as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' in 1993. Further shot story collections include Dear George (1995); Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), a collection of loosely linked stories about modern women and motherhood, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 2001; and Constitutional (2005).
She also wrote the libretto for the jazz opera, Good Friday, 1663, screened on Channel 4 television, and the lyrics for Kate and Mike Westbrook's jazz suite Bar Utopia.
Helen Simpson lives in London. Her latest story collection is In-Flight Entertainment (2010).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Libretto, Non-fiction, Short stories, Song lyrics
Bibliography
Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories Heinemann, 1990
Unguarded Hours (two novellas including Helen Simpson's 'Flesh and Grass') Pandora, 1990
Dear George Heinemann, 1995
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life Cape, 2000
Constitutional Cape, 2005
The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea: The Art and Pleasures of Taking Tea Ebury, 2006
In-Flight Entertainment Cape, 2010
Prizes and awards
1991 Somerset Maugham Award Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories
1991 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories
2001 Hawthornden Prize Hey Yeah Right Get a Life
2002 E. M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters)
Critical Perspective
Reading any of the three collections of short stories published by Helen Simpson to date is like being swallowed up by a literary tidal wave and thrown into a sea of both bubbling, sensual urgency and witty, sometimes bitter poignancy. Her language is rich, inventive and luxurious, she uses words you are not even sure are in the dictionary: 'wealthy frondescence'; 'marble flittermice'; 'cerubimical lass'; 'he mousled and tousled me'. She also has a joyful ear for modern slang and shamelessly tosses before us words like 'cool' (in the sense of fashionable or admirable rather than cold), 'overkill', 'poleaxed', 'partying', 'hands-on' and 'rubbish' (used as an adjective, as in 'painted fingernails mean a rubbish mother').
She has an admirable way of condensing ideas into phrases that are short but breathtakingly dense in meaning and is particularly skilled in her use of simile. An over excited child is described as laughing 'hearty as a Tudor despot', another 'leaning on the bars of her cot like farmer Giles'. A visitor’s smile 'slid from her face like an omelette from a pan' when she saw a fellow guest she disliked; a nervous witness in court has eyes that are 'swivelling like whelks on a pin'; an exhausted mother lies 'like a flattened boxer in the ring trying to rise while the count is made'.
In her first book Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990) she skilfully transports us from modern Britain through a seventeenth century country village, via fourth century Lycia and the gelid coast of Norway, to a strange neo-medieval state of the future whose extremes smack of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. One of her main themes in this collection are the ups and downs (but mainly the downs) of marriage and relationships, recounted with tragic-comic irony in the splendid opening story, after which the collection is named, where a young wife escapes to her dreams every night to sleep with a succession of acquaintances, including her husband’s squash partner. In ‘What are Neighbours for’ Mrs Brumfitt, 'deeply dissatisfied' with her husband 'for the way he refused to eat spiced foods or go out and about', has been invited to a multi-ethnic tea party by her career-obsessed doctor-neighbour who is sizing the guests up as future baby sitters. Simpson lures us into one of her many guffaw-inducing moments when she describes how the narrator had spied Mr Brumfitt the day before 'perched up a ladder fixing the new plastic down-pipe while his wife yelled at him “You poxy old devil”. Or perhaps it had been “You foxy old devil”'.
More mirth-inducing moments can be found in another central theme: childbirth. In ‘An Interesting Condition’ Simpson regales us with a wonderful cast of perplexed but comic mothers-to-be in an antenatal class, one of whom proposes to wear a mask (no, not a surgical mask, a papier maché Venetian carnival mask) to avoid the embarrassment of being seen by students and doctors during the birth! In ‘Labour’, Simpson experiments with the five act play form, the Dramatis Personae including, with hilarious results, the prospective mother, the midwives, the uterus, the cervix etc.
In her second book Dear George (1995), the themes of imminent childbirth and whether or not it is a good thing to have children are still uppermost in the author’s preoccupations. In ‘When in Rome’ we see the triumph of a girl who finds she is not pregnant, in ‘To her Unruly Boyfriend’ we see Simpson experimenting playfully with a sort of inverted modern version of Marvell’s To his coy mistress, where a young woman tries to persuade her reluctant lover to have a child with her. In ‘Last Orders’ we meet an overdue mother like 'a bulbous bottle, unreliably stoppered' ruminating on what motherhood will be like as she shuffles down to the Indian restaurant with her husband and friend 'creeping along to keep her company, one on either side, like the ceremonial escort of an ancient monarch'. In ‘Heavy Weather’, childbirth has happened twice over to Frances and she is suffering the marital stress, the exhaustion, loneliness and social exclusion of her role. The responsibilities of wife- and motherhood press on her even in fleeting moments of rest: 'like Holland she lay, aware of a heavy ocean at her seawall, it’s weight poised to race across the low country'.
Simpson’s sharp eye for dialogue and social interaction come out again in the second book in marvellously comic stories like ‘Creative Writing’ and ‘Let nothing you dismay’, where few who have read it can forget the side-splitting scene of the socially inept boyfriend who nervously grabs a handful of snuff-coloured, pot-pourri rose petals and thrusts them into his mouth, 'imagining them to be some sort of posh crisps'.
Simpson’s taste for the comic ‘sting in the tail ending’ seen in the title story of the collection Dear George is reminiscent of Roald Dahl at his best, as is the sinister quality of ‘The Gourmet’ where we meet an elderly bon vivant trying to seduce a young girl with his culinary arts, where the cheerful, ebullient sensuality of the language belies the evidently paedophilic intentions of the entertainer: 'have you ever salivated wolfishly over some delicate noisette of milk-fed lamb?'
In her third collection of stories Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000) the author returns to the theme of having children – how it exhausts, bores and ruins relationships between friends and partners to the point in ‘Café Society’, where it is almost impossible to have any semblance of conversation if you have a child in tow. Despite the utter desperation of some of Simpson’s mothers ('she was shot to hell'), and the lack of empathy and selfishness of their partners, the author is still adept at describing those fleeting, intimate moments that make motherhood worthwhile: the heroine’s son 'climbed into bed and curled into her…gazed into her eyes and heaved a happy sigh. They lay looking at each other, breathing in each other’s sleepy scent; his eyes were guileless, unguarded and intent, and he gave a little occasional beatific smile'. Essentially, she seems to say, the rewards are numerous, and the climate (as at the end of ‘Heavy Weather’) can change at any moment from bad to good as much as from good to bad. Her outlook is, despite everything, optimistic and in the end, as she herself says, it’s only for five years.
Motherhood is not the only subject to come under Simpson’s scrutiny in Hey Yeah… In ‘Wurstigkeit’ we see her love for evoking an almost fairy-tale environment as she describes the clandestine visit of two businesswomen to a secret 'cavern of temptation' - a women’s clothes shop so exclusive that you need a password to get in. If the role of mother is not to be admired, that of the career woman is no better, and even if women can now 'make it to the top', sexism still abounds. We reflect on this as the successful businesswoman Nicola Beaumont sits through the bone-crushing boredom and chauvinistic dialogue of a 'mega-Burns Night' for a group of bankers she works with.
Simpson is firmly planted in her age by her use of language and her ambivalent attitude - held by many twenty-first century women - to childrearing and careers, but none of her stories are more rooted in the contemporary than ‘Millennium Blues’. Here Simpson shows her impatience with the trite end of the world prophesies that were so common in the late 1990s (there will be 'a tidal wave of computer crashes…it’ll be the El Nino of I.T….half these guys I see haven’t even started to address the Y2K problem', 'we’re talking global economic meltdown') by creating her own tongue-in-cheek mayhem of biblical proportions as a an air traffic controller has a heart attack, causing an air crash in south-west London where 'fire consumes the sky and falls to earth in flaming comets and limbs and molten fragments of fuselage, where for two days and nights it will devour flesh and grass and much else besides in a terrible and unnatural firestorm'.
Amanda Thursfield, 2002
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Jonathan Cape Ltd
Random House UK Ltd
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8539
Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0077
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/
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