MUSING ON MUSES – Elizabeth Fremantle

My latest novel Watch the Lady is about a celebrated Elizabethan muse. Lady Rich was the inspiration behind Sir Philip Sidney's groundbreaking sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella, a heartrending account of Sidney's adoration, longing and bitter jealousy for a woman who slipped through his fingers and was married to another man.

We tend to think of the artist's muse as a passive symbol but when I began to look into the life of Lady Rich I discovered this was far from the case. I was drawn to consider the role of the literary muse in a more general way finding that muses come in all forms all inspiring in completely unique ways. Here are some of my favourites:

Holiday's rendition of Dante's encounter with Beatrice 

BEATRICE

Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri was utterly captivated by a girl named Beatrice when he met her aged only nine and she eight. Though he only encountered her one further time and she was married to another, he tirelessly wrote poetry in praise of her, which collected together became La Vita Nuova a work that would form the paradigm for love poetry for centuries. Beatrice’s role as the pure object of an unrequited yet transcendent love conformed to the expectations of the courtly love tradition. Her early death, aged twenty-four only increased her power to inspire Dante and she appeared in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy as his heavenly guide.

LADY RICH 
Penelope Devereux was forced to marry the fantastically wealthy and aptly named Lord Rich as a

Lady Rich

means to replenish the coffers of her noble but impoverished family. Prior to her marriage she had caught the eye of the man to whom she had been betrothed as a child, the soldier and poet Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney wrote Astrophel and Stella, a sequence of sonnets and songs telling of his profound devastation and jealousy provoked by her marriage to Rich. Though Penelope was disguised as Stella in the poems, Sidney made frequent plays on the word ‘rich’ which made her identity easily decoded, suggesting that his love for her was common knowledge in the court circles where the poems would have been circulated. Astrophel and Stella was only published after Sidney’s tragic early death on the battlefield.

THE DARK LADY AND THE FAIR YOUTH
Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence subverted convention, as it was inspired by more than one muse. Indeed, many of the poems are addressed to a ‘fair youth’, described as the poet’s ‘master mistress,’ giving rise to a belief that he might have been homosexual. Other poems in the sequence, though, praise a dark lady, whose features were entirely at odds with contemporary notions of beauty. The identity of the bard’s muses has remained a mystery and puzzled Shakespeare scholars for centuries.

Fanny Brawne

FANNY BRAWNE

Romantic poet Keats was struck by the sixteen-year-old Fanny Brawne, describing her in a letter to his brother as a, ‘minx.’ But he was soon deeply enamoured with her, as his biographer Richardson put it, she became, ‘the reconciliation between real life and his poetic quest.’ During the time they were betrothed Keats was at his most prolific but he was to contract consumption and die in Italy before they were ever able to marry.

JEANNE DUVAL

French poet Charles Beaudelaire met the mixed race Jeanne Duval in 1842 and they spent two turbulent decades as lovers. He called her his ‘Venus Noire’ and dedicated many poems to her dangerous beauty, depicting himself as entrapped and helpless in his love for her, as in these lines from Le Balcon: The night was growing dense like an encircling wall,/My eyes in the darkness felt the fire of your gaze/And I drank in your breath, O sweetness, O poison!

VITA SACKVILLE WEST

Virginia Woolf’s gender morphing hero/heroine Orlando was inspired by Vita Sackville West, a woman with whom she had a long love affair and a longer friendship. Woolf was fascinated by Sackville West’s aristocratic heritage as she wrote in her diary, ‘I trace her passions – 500 years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.’ With Orlando Woolf sought to address the injustice of Sackville West’s gender, which barred her from inheriting of her beloved ancestral home, Knole, that went to a male cousin.

Vita Sackville West

  

ZELDA SAYRE

Zelda was the emblem of the Jazz Age and was described by her author husband, F Scott Fitzgerald, as ‘the first American flapper.’ He was utterly captivated by her wild spirit but their heavy drinking and mad partying took a terrible toll on Zelda and she ended up in an asylum. Zelda was also an author but never found a way to emerge from her husband’s shadow. Elements of Zelda can be found in many of the women of Fitzgerald’s novels but it is Nicole Diver, the tragic heroine of Tender is the Night who most greatly and poignantly embodies her.

NEAL CASSADY

Neal Cassady grew up in the slums of Denver but was determined to make something of himself and though he lacked education he had a soaring intellect and made a profound impression on the young author Jack Kerouac. Neal became the inspiration for both Dean Moriarty in Beat Generation bible On the Road and Cody Pomeray in Kerouac’s later work and is credited with helping the author develop the spontaneous style that made his voice so original.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Watch the Lady is published by Penguin

 

Old Sport and That Hat: The Great Gatsby - Eve Edwards

Have you seen the Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby?  I went last week with some trepidation as the critics had been cool and found I enjoyed it more than I expected.  I had spent some of last year re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, including his short stories, and found the Luhrmann hyper-real version of his novel a convincing cinematic take, if not a perfect adaptation.  I've seen many critics bemoaning that it is an unfilmable book - surely something that can be said of any novel that has something to say on prose style as well as plot?  My cinema experience was in the spirit of a story like 'A Diamond as big as the Ritz' with its ludicrous little kingdom and improbable diamond so I wasn't disappointed.  Some of Fitzgerald's fictional worlds were every bit as bizarre as Luhrmann's imagination.

I suppose a mark of a good film is that you continue thinking about it afterwards.  One of the aspects that I've been pondering is the use of contemporary music.  I'm not a fan of rap but it did make me wonder if the Jazz voices of the era had something of the same shock factor.  If you are interested in the mash up approach, the will-i-am track Bang Bang is a good place to start as it mixes the Charleston with his style, making old new and new old.  The soundtrack also drove both of my teenagers to see it so that's no bad result for the director.

But perhaps the star of the film for me was the hat worn by Jordan Baker.  Thanks to copyright I can't drop in a photo, but if you've seen it, you probably know the one I mean.  That hat was a statement, curving round her face like a semi-colon.  Only pop stars who make dressing an extreme sport, such as Lady Gaga and Madonna, get away with that kind of approach to headgear these days.  Poor old Beatrix and Eugene were treated like the ugly sisters at Cinderella's ball for daring to go wild on wedding hats.  They weren't to my taste, but, your royal highnesses, in the 1920s you'd have pulled it off, no problem.

If you enjoy the world of the early decades of the twentieth century, may I put in a plug here for my new book, just out this month.  Dusk is a story for young adults (and older) set in 1914 to 1916, published by Penguin.  It follows the fortunes of a young half-German nurse trainee and a student at the Slade School of Art.

Tolstoy, Dickens and Woolf go to the Pictures

Linda Buckley-Archer

Leslie Wilson’s post on War and Peace last month set me thinking about adaptations and the historical connections between film and the novel.  I think several contributors to this blog write or have written in different media, and I wonder if they, like me, have gained insights about one medium through working in another.  I’ve heard Helen Dunmore talk about how poetry has helped her pace her novels and the poet Kate Clanchy has spoken of her short stories benefiting from the dialogue skills she gained in writing radio drama.  As for me, I have attended many scriptwriting courses, but have often found what I learned relevant and highly valuable in relation to novel-writing.   As a consequence, I am very drawn to the relationship between film and the novel.

Of course, the history of film has been linked to the novel from the start, even though, as renowned ‘script doctor’ Linda Seger points out, literature tends to resist film during the adaptation process.  Likewise, George Bluestone (I love his name) – an early writer on adaptation – talked about “the fitful relationship” between the word and the image, and memorably declared the film and the novel to be “overtly compatible” but “secretly hostile.”

Writing novels, clearly, is a one-person cottage industry, whereas  film is collaborative and produced on an industrial scale.  Even in the 1930s Erwin Panovsky was likening the process of making a film to that of building a medieval cathedral.  But what links them is stories.  Once the film-going public got used to seeing moving pictures (early audiences were perfectly happy to watch depictions of galloping horses or railway engines or simple street scenes), and once film’s potential as a story-telling vehicle became evident, the search for narratives began in earnest.

And where did they look for their stories?  To the novel, of course.  Virginia Woolf was a regular cinema-goer, and was scathing about the manner in which cinema had appropriated narratives from, predominantly, the nineteenth-century novel.  She wrote (Woolf did scathing terribly well): “The cinema fell upon is prey with immense rapacity and to this moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim.” 

Unsurprisingly, the work of Dickens, in particular, was seized upon as suitable material: around one hundred different adaptations of his novels were produced in the era of silent film.   And not only did Dickens’s stories inspire the early filmmakers, his writerly techniques, too, were influential.  As any film students will tell you, Sergei Eisenstein, in a seminal essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” describes how Dickens’s prose fiction was the inspiration behind early director D. W. Griffith’s attempts to create the basics of a film grammar:  parallel montage,  the close-up, the dissolve, the panning shot, and so on.

Virginia Woolf remained distinctly underwhelmed by the early language of film and compared it to the subtle poetic imagery at the novelist’s disposal. In film, she complained, “A smashed chair is jealousy.  A grin is happiness.  Death is a hearse.’  Other aspects of cinema, though, clearly attracted her.  “The most fantastic contrasts,” she wrote, “could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain.”   And, after labouring all week on writing an action scene that would take fifteen seconds to watch on film and (dare I say it?) would probably be more effective in that medium (though obviously the novel trumps film in many other respects), I have to agree. I’ve also seen it argued, at least, that Woolf’s own experimental writing might have been influenced by cinema – montage and the shifting of camera angles and distances.

Coming back to Leslie’s post on War and Peace, I was fascinated to come across Leo Tolstoy’s 1908 take on cinema.  He is impressively positive and forward-looking about the birth of a rival art form:

“[…] it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed.  It is closer to life.  In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane.  The cinema has divined the mystery of motion.  And that is its greatness.”

Some great novelists have turned to the cinema to make a living in at various points: F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, did a stint Hollywood, though not very successfully; William Faulkner fared better and worked with Howard Hawks on The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not.  Graham Greene famously wrote the screenplay for the The Third Man.  Nowadays, with cinema an established, if not dominant, art form, few novelists would be trusted to put their inky fingers on a screenplay, and it is most likely to be through buying the film rights that the film industry pays for the novelist’s bacon (if she’s lucky!). Although there are exceptions:  Deborah Moggach springs to mind, and William Boyd.  But I should have loved to have seen what innovative thing Virginia Woolf might have come with up for the big screen.  Art house cinema without a doubt.   And as for Leo Tolstoy – what might the author of War and Peace have done with a long-running political drama for television?  Such a shame you can’t commission dead writers.  Now there’s an idea for a movie...