On Men Writing Women

For International Women's Day

This evening, right when this entry is posted, I’ll be speaking at MAST Mayflower in Southampton as part of an event organised by ArtfulScribe for International Women’s Day.

This is some of what I’ll say:

I am very aware of speaking in the context both of the climate and ecological emergency, which has and will have a greater impact upon women, and also the heartbreaking violence — male violence — in the Ukraine and Gaza, which the Palestinian people — and especially civilian women and children — are suffering at this moment.

I’m going to start at some distance from that, but it’s where I’ll finish up, and it runs beneath what I’m going to say.

The title I gave myself to speak on, when I was asked to programme this event, was ‘Men Writing Women’.

In this context, and with due hesitation, I’d like to speak a little about my collaboration with the composer Emily Hall on our 2010 song cycle, Life Cycle.  

I met Emily Hall in October 2006. She contacted me through Myspace (if you remember Myspace) because she was looking for a librettist. The first lyrics I sent her included stuff I’d written as far back as university but also a few very recent things that I’d imagined might work for Elizabeth Fraser, formerly of the Cocteau Twins. Together, in the years since, Emily and I have co-written around a hundred and twenty songs. Almost all of them have been written from a female perspective, and intended to be sung by female voices in a style that’s related to classical but also folk and pop. Our songs have been covered and recorded by Olivia Chaney, the folk group Lady Maisery, and The Hermes Experiment.

Our earliest songs were all love songs, and we gathered them together in a cycle that we called Love Songs. Emily’s website notes that quite a few of these were on the unrequited end of things, and that’s embarrassingly true.

Songwriting partnerships have to decide which name goes first. Would it be McCartney and Lennon or Lennon and McCartney? Emily and I were quite amused with how Litt/Hall sounded.

Fairly soon, we got together with the singer Mara Carlyle. (Mara recently composed the music for the series Everything I Know About Love.) We began to write with her very special, vulnerable voice in mind.

After writing love songs, we decided — or rather, Emily decided — that we should do our next song cycle from scratch. She also decided on the subject matter: motherhood. And that became the working title.

We were both, at this time, in the middle of starting or trying to start families. My partner Leigh had three miscarriages before, eventually, after several years of treatment and trying to conceive, our son was born in 2004. Our second son was born two years later. The experience of those miscarriages led, in 2005, to my novel Ghost Story.

The song cycle Emily and I ended up writing was called Life Cycle, and it told the story of a couple who have had a stillborn child but have conceived again — and who, over the course of the cycle, become parents. It’s sung from the point of view of the woman as she tries to deal with failing to become, and then becoming, a mother.

How did we go about this? Well, I’d like to say first of all that it was always a pleasure to write with Emily. But I’d also like to say that our collaboration was mainly done through the work itself, rather than talking about the work. Our method was usually this:

I wrote the words and then Emily wrote the music.

That simple.

After Emily was happy with what she’d written, she would demo it into a Zoom recorder on the piano in the living room of her house in Nunhead, then email the file to me.

I would then listen to it, again and again, often on my iPod, often on the number 68 bus, and make changes to the words, if I felt they weren’t singable enough or had the wrong meaning.

Sometimes Emily wouldn’t include this verse or that, for reasons she didn’t explain. And sometimes she rearranged the lines, leaving one out or repeating one. I accepted this.

We worked on a number of songs at once, then got together to plan some more.

At this point, I’d like to put in a plea for our kind of unspoken, tacit collaboration. I love to think that, whenever one of those songs is sung, Emily and I are together within it. They couldn’t have existed without the both of us. But the way in which they came into being was largely a matter of my sensing what was needed next. We existed in a shared intimacy of mood, partly created by Emily’s music, but mainly created by where we were in our lives, in our attempts to become a mother and a father, and in the elements of control and loss of control, bliss and terror, that entailed. Of course, there were conversations we had – over Emily’s very good coffee – where one of us would say, ‘Don’t we need a song about X?’ But what I remember most of the time was us getting on with the work within a basic set-up, one we both were comfortable with, and a basic understanding, largely unspoken.

That basic understanding was that the words were secondary to the music and that I was secondary to Emily. Although we ended up writing over a hundred songs, I probably wrote lyrics for double that. Silently, Emily wouldn’t set some of them – if she didn’t feel them, or they didn’t bring out any music within her.

I accepted that.

Occasionally I’d mention one of the lyrics that I’d been fond of. Emily would just shake her head or pass on to another subject. I couldn’t persuade her to anything. For her, the lyrics that worked were obvious. I came to trust her judgement and, if I liked the lyrics enough, I would give them to someone else to set – with Emily’s blessing.

Midway through the writing of Life Cycle, Emily got a commission from Opera North for us to have a residency, in which we could run through about half the songs.

As well as Mara Carlyle, we collaborated with a number of brilliant musicians – the pianist John Reid and the cellist Oliver Coates. You’ll hear them, in a moment, on a recording that was later released by Bedroom Community.

Truly, working with Emily has been one of the best things ever to happen to me. Her settings are treacherously simple — as the musicians who play them will all attest, they can catch you at any moment with hidden subtleties. They sound as inevitable as ‘Happy Birthday’ and as far-travelled as ‘The Water is Wide’. And they have a depth of lyricism and melancholy that is (dare I say it) a little bit Eric Satie, a little bit Schubert. I’m very lucky to have my words wrapped up in such music, and to have found such a strong but open collaborator.

What does this say about men writing women? If novelists aren’t able to write of experience other than their own, the novel form ceases to exist. If empathy is abandoned, and the possible creations of empathy, then I can’t see how that would do anything but increase antipathy and, following on from that, violence. Others will remain others, and will be mistrusted and demonized as such. And so I think men can and should be able to write female experience. Not when it occupies cultural space that would otherwise be taken up by the great diversity of women’s voices. But when it’s required or invited or can prove itself necessary and earn its right to exist through goodwill, integrity and being secondary. Some of this work will come through negotiation and analysis, but some must also come – as my collaboration with Emily did – through silent trust.

I would like to end with one of the songs from Life Cycle. Here is Mara Carlyle, stopping time, with ‘The Very Thought of Children Being Hurt’.

The lyrics I’ve written for Emily Hall are often the simplest, most honest expressions of very basic common human feelings. These, for this song, are no exception – especially today.

They end, ‘All violence must cease.’