Ali Smith at the Wapping Project

By CATHARINE MORRIS

The Wapping Project, “an idea consistently in transition”, was founded by Jules Wright, formerly a resident director at the Royal Court Theatre and co-founder of the Women’s Playhouse Trust (WTP). It takes its name from its first home, the disused Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London E1, where the WTP started mounting productions in 1993. The building was converted – in such a way as to retain its industrial glamour, and some of its machinery – into a versatile arts venue and restaurant.

In 2009, Wright opened a photographic gallery next to Tate Modern, which has now moved to the sumptuous Ely House in Dover Street. The Wapping Project retains its broad interest in the arts (I’m rather taken with the new residency it offers in Berlin: the successful candidate is not allowed to do any work); and on Thursday I went to the first of its “Skylight Soirées” presented in association with the New Statesman, and curated and chaired by Erica Wagner. The event featured Ali Smith; “I was thinking I might move in”, she told us as we gathered in a cream-carpeted, warmly lit room, surrounded by wood panelling and arresting photographs of Iran by Abbas Kowsari. “Nobody would notice.”

In the TLS of September 19, 2014, Kate Webb described How to Be Both as Smith’s “most thorough exploration of the art of fiction to date”. One half focuses on Francesco del Cossa, a real-life artist born in the 1430s who painted some of the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara; and the other on George, a teenage girl living in modern-day Cambridge who is coming to terms with the sudden death of her mother. (As Webb explained, there are two versions of the novel – in one, George’s half comes first, and in the other, it is Francesco’s; when you pick up a copy in a bookshop, you don’t know which you’re going to get.)

Smith read out a passage in which George is watching porn videos on her iPad out of curiosity, and feeling a profound sympathy for one actress in particular (“the uncomplaining smallness of the girl alongside her evident discomfort and the way she looked both there and absent . . . changed something in the structures of George’s brain and heart”). She then read another in which Francesco visits a brothel, where he (or in fact she: in the world Smith has created, Francesco is a woman who cross-dresses in order to live as an artist) politely refuses the services on offer and draws one of the prostitutes instead. 

It was Tom Stoppard, Smith told us afterwards, who gave her the courage to write about the Renaissance period (she is not a specialist); she happened to be sitting next to him at a dinner, and he offered the metaphor of a letter sitting in front of you on the table: “only lift the corner of the envelope and peek in”. There is very little written about del Cossa; the only reason we know he existed at all is that he once wrote a letter to his employer (a duke), asserting his worth and asking for more money. At the beginning of Francesco’s half of How to Be Both, he is very physically ripped from his own time and brought into George’s: “Ho this is a mighty twisting thing fast as a / fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook . . . ” (that forward slash is necessary, I think: the text of the passage is itself set like a twisting thing, as you can see here). When a member of the audience confessed that she had found that passage difficult, Smith replied that it provided above all “a voice from elsewhere”. And it is a voice with some basis in reality: Smith studied del Cossa’s letter to the duke and used its rhythms and idiosyncrasies (one of them being its punctuation – he used a lot of colons) to build a whole person.

Smith described del Cossa’s frescoes as “so mysterious and yet familiar to us . . . . Something about them radiates meaning but we don’t know what the meaning is any more”. This was during a multi-faceted discussion about art and death that took in Hannah Arendt, whose introduction to Illuminations by Walter Benjamin provides one of How to Be Both’s epigraphs (“Although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization . . . ”) and Benjamin himself. It was a discussion facilitated by some wonderfully high-end questions and comments from the audience: one took us briskly from Wordsworth’s “spots of time” to Blake’s “Echoing Green”, and on to Lacan.

Minutes before the end of the evening, Smith was asked, in relation to her interest in narrative and its possibilities, whether there was somebody in particular who had inspired her. The answer she gave was not only amusing but also quietly revelatory:

“Probably my mother . . . I’m about five or six . . . and she would bath me and then sit me on her knee and then she would simply become another character . . . . she was just a master of imagination . . . . The characters ranged from two old witches called Gertie and Bella . . . [to] this hard put-upon character from the Hebridean islands called Morag . . . : ‘I’ve got the hens to feed . . . Oh dearie me’ . . . . And I . . . knew immediately at that point that it wasn’t about story in the same way as it was about voice, or the shift of voice, the movement of voice . . . the way in which we are all filled with the multitude of voices that exist or can exist – the ways in which a story will simply fall out of a voice . . . . I think it was something like that.”