"Why would anyone go to a play about an economist?’ Author E.J. Barnes, writing about 'The Standard of Living' at Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Introduced by Penny Dolan

As a young, naive London teen, I'd imagined a 'Bloomsbury' world where Virginia got on with her writing and Vanessa her painting, as their lives spread between London squares and that farmhouse with painted walls - and painted everything - in Sussex. Of course, I soon learned of the Stephen's sisters traumatic upbringings, how they both struggled with their work and various relationships.

Then, a few years ago, a shared interest in domestic history brought the author Emma J Barnes and myself together: we were both reading 'Mrs Woolf and the Servants' by Alison Light (Penguin 2007), a non-fiction account of everyday life in the home of the Woolf's and other 'Bloomsbury' names, and  about how they and their servants managed their own 'household economies'. 

 

Among the Bloomsbury Group,  Emma discovered, was John Maynard Keynes: economist, public intellectual, government adviser, financial speculator and connoisseur, and one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century, and whose finances and advice supported others within that set.

Emma, writing as E. J. Barnes, took Keynes as the inspiration for her two remarkable historical novels: MR KEYNES REVOLUTION and MR KEYNES DANCE. As a reader, I found both these novels fascinating and surprising.

                    


As today's date grew closer, I noticed that Keynes was the central character in THE STANDARD OF LIVING, a new play by James Curtis (Dear England) at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London. I was keen to know how the subject of economics worked on stage, as might other History Girls and blogpost readers. Even Rory Kinnear, as Maynard Keynes, as the beginning of the play, announces ‘Many of you are feeling daunted by this subject matter.’  

Knowing that Emma was seeing the play, I asked her to share her thoughts her today, both on her two adult novels, and on THE STANDARD OF LIVING play. 

Emma J Barnes wrote:

“I knew about Keynes’ ideas from studying economics, but nothing of his life story, and I soon fell down a rabbit hole of memoir and biography. As I gorged on the struggles of a lost world, I wondered: why had nobody made fiction out of Keynes? His life is significant, colourful and moving: not only did he set the foundations of the postwar order, revolutionise economic theory and transform capitalism, he also made and lost fortunes as a financial speculator, fell in love with a Russian ballerina – Lydia Lopokova – despite having previously lived as a gay man, hid Cezannes in hedges, hobnobbed with everyone who was anybody – including Churchill and Lloyd George, and outraged the establishment time and again while also ending up as Lord Keynes and a Director of the Bank of England. (And breathe.)




Yet nobody wrote about him. At least they did in the form of biographies and articles, but in the literary world of novels, plays and films, which has created almost an industry out of Woolf and Bloomsbury, he only ever appeared as a bit part. Yet he was the Bloomsbury member who actually did, if any of them did, change the world.

So I decided to seize the gauntlet. This was a rich and neglected story, and also one I could tell. I had studied economics, and worked briefly (like Keynes) as a graduate in the British civil service; I knew Cambridge (one of Keynes’ stomping grounds) quite well. Keynes-obsessed, I wrote a film script (a thing I’d always vowed never to do, so few get made), a TV pilot, a stage play, and two novels. I wouldn’t say I got zero interest from the literary gate-keepers, but it was mainly blank faces and unreturned emails, and with the pre-publicity for James Graham’s new play The Standard of Living, I now understand why: because ‘Why would anyone go to a play about an economist?’ was the message that came loud and clear from any journalist reporting on it.

I knew of course that I wouldn’t be the only writer ever to see Keynes’s appeal. In recent years there’s been several novels about Keynes and even a musical. I sometimes avoid others’ versions (I’m working, slowly, on a third Keynes novel) but it’s also at times irresistible to see how other writers tackle the same material, and despite feeling a bit proprietorial, I usually enjoy their versions a lot. James Graham is the celebrated writer of many political dramas, I’ve enjoyed and admired his plays. I bought my ticket and went to London. Here are some thoughts.

THE STANDARD OF LIVING: THE PLAY

I found lots to enjoy in The Standard of Living. Rory Kinnear’s Keynes brought out the humanity and vulnerability of the man wonderfully (maybe slightly less his intellectual firepower: Bertrand Russell said, “When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands”). Lydia Lopokova’s eccentricity can so easily lapse into caricature, I think – but here she was absolutely spot on and portrayed with great charm by an actual ballerina, Natalia Osipova. The about-turn of Keynes from gay man to her love-lorn suitor was deftly done and the warmth of their relationship beautifully conveyed. The dancing was lovely to watch (though I think there was a missed opportunity to make it more than decorative to which I’ll return) and there was some wonderful wit and humour. It presented a delightful version of Duncan Grant. It did try and get the economics across, with some success (I’ll come back to this). The contemporary photographs moved me, as they always do, in documenting the human catastrophe of the Great Depression. It checked off a lot of the key events of Keynes’ life, although in such a packed life it inevitably left a lot out.

Inevitably I had some reservations. It was a real whistle-stop tour for one thing, crowding thirty plus years into a two hour play. Blink and you miss the battle of the gold standard or Bretton Woods. In this rattling tour of Keynes’ Greatest Hits, Bloomsbury seemed too prominent. Did we really need Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant? Strachey was only significant in the early part of Keynes’ life, Carrington I doubt was significant at all, Woolf and Bell were but it doesn’t really come across in the play why. By contrast, Keynes’s life as statesman, City of London investor, political operator and Cambridge intellectual were underplayed. (And sorry, while those who worked with him may have disliked him, I don’t think they ever got his name wrong!)

There were so few scenes of Keynes thinking, writing or teaching – or smoking for that matter, the usual accompaniment to his intense intellectual work. (Tragically, as if turned out.) There’s no real sense of someone who was wrestling, as he saw it, to completely transform the whole system of economic thought.

“I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionise, not I suppose at once but in the course of the next ten years, the way the world thinks about economic problems.” Keynes in a letter to George Bernard Shaw, 1935.

One scene that jarred for me was when Keynes retreats to Cambridge in the 1930s (and he’d always been rooted in Cambridge, despite what the play implies) and Lydia and Duncan casually suggest that Keynes should write his own General Theory, a bit like Einstein. The title ht deliberately echo Einstein, but Keynes’ attempt to dismantle economic orthodoxy for his academic peers was no impulsive gesture or gimmick. And to suggest that the result was seen as a bit of damp squib compared to Hayek’s very different book, as the play perhaps inadvertently does, is a real distortion I think.
Keynes as Economist

One of the great challenges with fictionalising Keynes (as I know from experience) is how to handle the economics. This play does not sideline it. There’s a rather nice explanation of the multiplier but it’s mainly speech: surely the stage offers a chance to provide visual explanations of the ideas? And with all those lovely dancers!

Here’s how I tried to do this with Lydia’s dancing in Mr Keynes’ Dance.

“She gave him a surprised look then obliged. There, in the winter light from the windows, she lifted her right leg behind her and stretched out her left arm, her chest and head held high, and with the same graceful line proceeding from finger to toe. All was a smooth, poised curve.

Maynard said, ‘Richard, lift her left arm.’

Richard, after a startled second, obeyed. Lydia smoothly adjusted her position to remain still balanced, arms and leg still extended.

‘Now lower her leg.’

‘Go on,’ said Lydia kindly, and so he obediently pushed on an ankle and she readjusted effortlessly.

‘Now give her a good shove.’ And as Richard, taken aback, hesitated: ‘Go on!’

She smiled invitingly at him, so he gave her a push in the small of the back. With the most elegant of jumps she adjusted her position, and resumed her graceful, effortless arabesque. She looked like she could stay there all day.

‘Aha,’ said Maynard, pleased. ‘You see? Lydia is the economic system according to orthodox theory. Every jolt, every shock to the system, and she adjusts at once to reach a new equilibrium. This is the economic system we teach students. The system according to Classical or Neoclassical thinkers.

If Lydia were the economy, there would be no imbalances, no unemployment, no depressions. Richard, stand on one leg.’

‘Me?’

‘Go on! Indulge me.'

Feeling like a prize fool, Richard took Lydia’s place on the hearth rug, then clumsily adopted a version of an arabesque. He felt like an ungainly stork.

‘Lydia, give him a push.’

Very gently, Lydia pushed his raised foot. Richard immediately began to wobble. Unable to regain his balance, he staggered, then toppled onto the hearth.

I was also doubtful about using the conflict with Hayek as the main way of exploring the economic clash of theories. First, it’s not historical: yes, Keynes and Hayek did apparently sit on top of King’s College Chapel doing fire warden duties together during World War II, an irresistible dramatic scene, but I don’t think Keynes ever considered Hayek his key adversary; he was only one of many critical voices in the storm of controversy caused by Keynes’ ideas. Keynes himself seems to have taken a benevolent approach to the younger economist: when Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, he wrote kindly saying that he agreed with much of it.

Keynes, of course, did not know (as we do) that Hayek’s book, published at the end of Keynes’ life, would achieve an almost accidental fame and influence, becoming the the inspiration for the anti-Keynesian Thatcher/Reagan revolution. I say accidental, because what would have happened if it had not by strange quirk of chance been serialised in Reader’s Digest?

More importantly, by setting up Hayek – a young Austrian immigrant – as his opponent, the play obscures the way the economic orthodoxy Keynes attacked was deeply embedded in the British establishment and in the intellectual tradition he inherited. In my book, Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, is Keynes’ key adversary, along with Otto Niemeyer of the Treasury. Keynes was battling with the key beliefs and interest of the elites, and he did so at dinner parties with Churchill, hearings at the House of Commons, in the pages of the Liberal Party manifesto, in dining societies in the City of London, in the pages of The Times, and of course in his academic writing. He upset former collaborators and must have felt pangs about what he was doing to the legacy of his own mentor, Alfred Marshall. He was trying to show that not only was laissez-faire – what he called “the economic juggernaut” – inhumane, it was intellectually flawed and potentially disastrous.

There’s little in the play – other than some wonderful photos of the Great Depression – to bring home the people who were at the sharp end of these debates either: for example, the miners who were starved back to work in the 1920s, after Keynes’ advice on the gold standard was ignored. Lydia’s story could have been important here. She was exiled by the Russian Revolution, her brother persecuted by Stalin, her mother dying in the Siege of Leningrad. She was real, living breathing evidence of the suffering caused when a political and economic system collapses. It’s no wonder that she had no patience with those in her circle who flirted with Communism, and I’ve no doubt she strengthened Keynes’ resolve to try and create a more humane capitalism.

Which brings me to a final point: what is at stake in Keynes’ story. The plays says, several times, that Keynes’ primary question was “What is a good life?” Yes, Keynes did address this, notably in his famous essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, and I think Bloomsbury did provide him with his personal model of a “good life” based in friendship and art (perhaps a model that some seeing this play might think inadequate, and late in life he may have agreed).

But I don’t think that was the driving question for him, but a more existential question: How to save civilisation itself. Keynes saw the complacent but peaceful world of his youth destroyed in the Great War; at the Paris Peace Conference, he feared politicians would smash the remnants beyond repair. With the disaster of the Great Depression, and the rise of totalitarianism, there was no doubt civilisation was on the brink. It’s a more perilous picture than a search for the “good life”, and a more profound struggle.

The play, so immersed in Bloomsbury, inevitably underplays this. The Arts Council is not the culminating achievement of Keynes’ life, even if his artistic friends (or a modern West End audience) think so. In fairness, I doubt they did. (I’d add I received a major Arts Council award myself, once upon a time, for a novel that still languishes unloved. I’m very grateful but … well, perspective!) 

Yes, Keynes was humane and loved the arts. But both the social safety net of the Beveridge Report and the benevolence of the Arts Council (ensuring Merry England made merry in its own way, and death to Hollywood, as he disarmingly observed) were still side issues, compared to creating the tools that would keep the world economy from dysfunction and collapse.

But that’s my interpretation – and maybe my own projection?

CHASING GHOSTS

It’s a peculiar thing to rummage in somebody’s life and construct a version for one’s own purposes. Would Keynes have even approved? I’ve often (rather guiltily) asked myself this. He never gave interviews, and after his death his widow, Lydia, was even more private: she refused to engage with his biographers or attend events to aggrandise his memory. She was happy to let her own by-its-nature ephemeral stage career pass away unrecorded.

Yet Keynes was aware of the power of phantoms. “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” he wrote, and ideas don’t live on only in the pages of academic journals but in the stories of their originators. Whatever fictional version of Keynes is the most true to the man himself (and he was a man who changed his ideas like quicksilver: “when the facts change, I change my mind” he claimed . He wanted his ideas to have an impact on the world.

Recreating Keynes through the imagination, in myriad ways and forms, is one way of making that happen – and in times that are coming to seem as fragile as his own.

POSTSCRIPT
After I wrote this, I went to look at others’ reviews of the play. . . I notice that many reviewers think too much was crammed in: with which I agree. I seem to be alone, though, in disliking the emphasis on Hayek. I was also intrigued that Bloomsbury seemed to inspire quite so much disdain: I wonder if this is because Keynes’ story puts them in a particularly bad light (which it definitely does) or if their general appeal is waning? Exciting Bohemian progressives or just tiresome, self-absorbed snobs?

Finally I’d add that the first person to fictionalize Keynes seems to have been John Buchan, who knew Keynes and disliked him. I haven’t read those yet but I’m certainly looking forward to it!

E.J.BARNES


                        


This post, with full links, and earlier articles on other topics, appears on Substack

See : E.J.Barnes @ ejbarnes : Economical With Fiction. Interested in 1920's, 1930's, JMKeynes, Bloomsbury, political economy, 20th century writers, forgotten classis, science v religion, social history, kids books. Writer of Historical Fiction.

Thank you, Emma!

                                  THE MAYNARD KEYNES NOVELS by E.J.BARNES

 

        

MR KEYNES REVOLUTION
“Since the war, everything’s changed. The powers-that-be hold to the old mantras … but how far can you push people? Until they rise up and throw the government down?”

When the brilliant and mercurial Maynard Keynes walks out on the Paris Peace Conference, he seems destined for obscurity. But in the crisis-ridden 1920s, he soon finds himself back on the public stage. A man of fierce intelligence and hidden susceptibilities, he is not afraid to speak the truth to a political elite blindly determined to push the world to the brink of collapse.

Dancer Lydia Lopokova has fled revolution and is now seeking her own personal salvation. The last thing she expects is a life-changing encounter with a Bohemian economist. In a divided world where neither their Bloomsbury friends nor the powerful elites seem to realise the dangers, their encounter will have long-reaching consequences. (Longlisted for the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Novel Award/Bridport Prize.)

MR KEYNES DANCE

The sequel to the much-praised Mr Keynes’ Revolution follows Maynard and Lydia into the 1930s and the challenges of political turmoil and the Great Depression.

1926. Maynard Keynes has long been a thorn in the side of the British Establishment: an irritant to the Treasury, the Bank of England and his fellow academics alike. Rejected for his radical ideas, he has made an unlikely marriage to a Russian ballerina, her eccentricity charming him almost as much as it infuriates his highbrow Bloomsbury friends. But as the world around them changes, Maynard and Lydia cannot stay cocooned in their private refuge for long.

While Maynard frets about the ever-growing dole queues, and plans his route to power by way of the magnetic Lloyd George, Lydia is tormented by the thought of her family in Leningrad. Exiled by the Russian Revolution, she has found fame and fortune as the star dancer of Diaghilev’s celebrated Ballets Russes. Yet however demanding the role of stage celebrity, it is less challenging than that of the supposedly respectable and fortunate Mrs Keynes: the scrutiny of a crowded theatre less intense than from those convinced her marriage is heading for disaster. In truth for Lydia and Maynard, marriage was always a gamble, and their life a dance where nobody is ever quite sure of the steps.

Then comes the Wall Street Crash, followed by a depression the likes of which the world has never seen. In the turmoil of the 1930s, the intellectual Maynard finds that answers must be sought in the most unlikely places.

Set during some of the most momentous years of the twentieth century, this novel explores the lives of two figures at the heart of those economic and cultural upheavals: John Maynard Keynes, considered by many as the most important economist of all time, and one of Time Magazine’s most significant people of the twentieth century, and the celebrated and eccentric Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Beginning in the “roaring twenties”, with ever-growing unemployment queues and a General Strike that pitches the whole labouring class against the governing elite, their journey takes them from the heart of the Bohemian Bloomsbury Group in Sussex, to Leningrad in Soviet Russia, to New York in the grip of the Great Depression, to the quiet colleges courts of Cambridge. The supporting cast ranges from a Welsh kitchen maid to pioneering socialist Beatrice Webb, fascist leader Oswald Mosley, politician Winston Churchill and writer Virginia Woolf.

A sequel to Mr Keynes’ Revolution, which was much praised for the depth of its research, and the way it deftly interwove economic ideas and history into a story of personal relationships and romance, Mr Keynes’ Dance is another intellectually daring and page-turning historical novel, which continues the tumultuous and surprising story of Maynard and Lydia.

Thank you, Emma.  https://ejbarnesauthor.com/

Posted on the History Girls by Penny Dolan

An Ordinary War, by Sue Purkiss

  I have recently published - with Writers Review Publishing -  a book which has been a very long time in the making. It's a novel, not a factual account, inspired by the experiences of my father during the war. He was a member of the British Expeditionary Force which went out to France in 1939, but was routed during the German invasion in May 1940. Most of the force was famously evacuated at Dunkirk, but Dad was one of those who wasn't. He was captured on the way there, and was a prisoner of war for five years.

Like many - probably most - survivors of war, he didn't talk very much about his experiences. Eventually, as he grew older, he began to tell a few stories, mostly funny ones. Towards the end of the last century, I began to write some of them down. We would sit by the fire drinking whisky - me with ginger, him with water - and he would talk about things that happened in the forests of Poland more than sixty years before. Often, the stories were light-hearted, but sometimes his face would darken, and he would say something that hinted at grimmer truths. Once, we were talking about eating - he always ate hearty meals, but never snacked, never put on weight. He said something to the effect of: "Most people don't know what real hunger is. And you don't know what you're really capable of unless you've been properly hungry." And then he lapsed into silence, clearly remembering things that he wasn't going to talk about.

Some time after he died (in 2004), I decided I wanted to write a novel based on his experiences. Because the books I was writing were for children and young people, it seemed natural to aim it at young adults. I soon realised that there were massive gaps in my knowledge about what had happened to him, and I began to do research. I'm not a trained researcher, I'm not an academic - I have a degree, but it's in English, not history. So it was an exploration, perhaps, rather than an investigation.

It turned out to be fascinating, and immensely rewarding.

There was one particular incident that, if I was trying to be poetic, I could say fanned what had been merely a spark into a flame. It came about in this way.

I knew that at the end of the war, Dad had ended up in a camp called Fallingbostel, in north-western Germany, from which he was liberated and then repatriated. In a wonderful book called The Last Escape (by John Nichol and Tony Rennell), I came across a picture of several emaciated prisoners sitting on the ground, smiling and chatting. One of them looked very much like Dad. The photo was attributed to the Imperial War Museum, so I rang them up to see if they could tell me any more about the men in the picture.

They suggested I should make an appointment to go and see someone there, so I did.

They couldn't tell me any more about the identities of the men in the picture, but they did give me useful suggestions about other avenues I could follow. Their first suggestion was to go to the National Archives in Kew. Every prisoner who came home, they said, was supposed to fill in a form, detailing how they'd been treated, which prison camps they'd been in and so on - information which I didn't have. These forms were kept at Kew.

So off I trotted to Kew, and explained what I was after. The assistant warned me that the records were not complete: everyone was supposed to fill in a form, but not everyone did. My heart sank. A trait I shared with my father was a deep dislike of form filling. There wouldn't be one for him, I felt sure. He would somehow have managed to get out of it.

The assistant produced for me a large folder - I expect  that everything's online now, but that wasn't the case then - containing the forms for Dad's section of the alphabet. I turned the pages carefully, aware that this was a precious resource, not really expecting to find one for Dad.

But then, there it was. Reginald Bernard Course. I hadn't expected it to be in his handwriting, instantly recognisable from all the letters I'd received over the years - Dad was a great letter writer. And it wasn't just the handwriting. The answers were brief and to the point, and some were quite brusque. I could absolutely picture Dad, impatient with forms and pen-pushers, wanting to be away, wanting to go home, not interested in making a fuss about what had happened to him. I could almost hear his voice.  I stared at the form, and tears came. I wiped them away surreptitiously, and hoped that no-one had seen.

Brief as the form was, it gave me some answers. It told me where he'd been. It told me he'd tried to escape, three times, once with his old pal Shep, whom I'd taken him to see a few years before.

And it gave me the urge to carry on, to follow the trail, which eventually led to this book: An Ordinary War. I called it that because once, when we were chatting about a family friend called Harold, who regularly went to regimental reunions and loved telling stories about the war, I asked him why he clearly felt very differently about it.

"Ah well," he said. "Harold had a good war. I just had an ordinary war."

If you'd like to read the book, you can buy it here.

Also, I have a new Substack, called Telling Tales. Each Wednesday, I post a (very) short story there: these are all stories which have been, quite literally, written on the back of a postcard - an easy length to read over a cup of coffee! Do take a look - here - and subscribe if you'd like an email notification when a new one drops. It's free!

Taking my hat off to millinery: when an historical novelist puts the art at the heart of her new book - Michelle Lovric

One of Casanova’s famous anecdotes dates to his time in Turin, where a milliner was fatally obsessed with her lover, the Comte de la Perouse. When she lay dying, the priest arrived to administer the last rites. Rather than take the Eucharist, the milliner swallowed a miniature of la Perouse. Casanova was inspired to write two poems about this gothic extravagance of romance.

I too wrote a poem about her. It was published in my first novel, Carnevale.

So, 25 years ago, I already earmarked milliners as women of interest.

I like a woman who can weaponize silk, art, gesture and love.

For the last few years I’ve been writing a milliner in early 19^th century Venice. In doing so, I fell into my own obsession with hats and feathers. You won’t be beaten over the head with hats in my novel, The Puffin. But you won’t be able to finish the book without learning something about the historical millinery trade: its language, its tools, its colours, its creative and even military possibilities.

I have been lucky enough to have superb partner in this enterprise – Tina Giuntini, who is both a millinery historian and modern-day milliner. Tina and I met by chance – but meeting her changed my writing life. (Photo of Tina below right by Kelly Lemon). 

Where do I begin to thank her? For the lessons in millinery in person and in correspondence? For the antique and vintage millinery tools she lent me so I could feel their weight and simulate their work? For the lexicon of millinery – toliker, awl, egg iron and more.

Tina shared her image library and directed me to the books I needed to read. She has also made hats that substantiate the roles they play in my novel’s plot. She even created little hats for the puffin who is the catalyst of the story.  

She took a model puffin back to her studio in Seattle, where she photographed it with her historic forms and tools.

Forget AI; I had Tina in 3D. Best of all, I knew she was checking my invented milliner against her real self, and I felt that the works of my imagination were somehow verified.

In The Puffin, the hats, tools and feathers in the book are not just decorative; they are also plot mechanisms. They are used to thwart the vigilance of Venice’s Habsburg masters. My protagonist Alva is a brimstone milliner making combustible hats. But she can protect herself by trading on the notion that hats are the merest feminine frippery and that no one needs to give them a second glance – rather like milliners.  

POEMS FROM HATS AND TOWARDS HATS

I started work on this book by writing poems about hats, straw, feathers, feather-curlers (gleaned from their trade cards in the London Archives), female places of work, colour. I used poems to explore ideas about the language and geography of hats and about the women who created them. The character of Alva emerged from somewhere between the lines of this poetry. So did the excellence of her millinery. To protect her modesty, it became appropriate for the poet Tommaso to explain the enchantment cast by Alva’s hats. Here is one of his descriptions:

Poetry erupted out of Alva in hats. Her bonnets told stories and sang lyrics in an irresistible accent.        Like a storyteller, Alva threaded pace through image. Like a poet, she could evoke the mist around a     spice-ship’s mast, using just a coil of net. She could swoop joy into the contour of a brim. She’d     sometimes let me sit behind a screen in her studio to witness her recasting women’s biographies with her hats. Straw was the least thing Alva worked with. She worked with luminosity, awling holes through brims so light exploded like a blown dandelion on the skin. Like weather, she could make the air different under a hat. A writer and the weather must bend the knee to a milliner of Alva’s genius, for she also illustrated her tales in a whole lexicon of colours: Dust of Ruins, Pomona Green, Barbel Blue, Nankeen Yellow and a cavalcade of reds. She had texture. She had fantasy. What if everyone had their own flower? – that’s what Alva made happen: scooping worlds into a single face. Her hats could steal the breath of strangers. Isn’t that intimacy? Isn’t that poetry? Stolen, intaken breaths?

Alva has a more pragmatic view of her profession, partly because she has other things going on. She speaks thus of her studio in Cannaregio:

Once upon a time the Calle della Pegola was the street of the caulkers, the men who keep ships afloat, attending to the risk of leaks with tar and wooden pegs. When I was sixteen, it became my street, where I fashioned hats to set women at full sail, keeping them safe upon the salt-sweet sea of encroaching age and lovelessness that might otherwise engulf them.

So what else does Alva have going on apart from astonishing millinery? She is also a member of the sect of the Carbonari, a variant of freemasonry.  The Italian Carbonari plotted liberation from the Habsburg empire, which occupied Venice from the early 19^th century until 1866.

Alva hosts the  secret ‘baracca’ of the Venetian Carbonari in her studio. She is more than their landlady. In fact Alva is the ‘Mother Tongue’, the musa ispiratrice of the Venetian movement. She makes hats for fashionable women who love to talk – and are happily indiscreet in front of a mere milliner, a tradeswoman, a person who is socially invisible. Information is life-and-death for an outlawed sect. So Alva makes sure her client include Austrians and aristocratic Venetians. 

Her least favourite client is Portia Saukalt, the daughter of an Austrian banker.

I came to know her face as well as my own. La Sau’s features were crude, like an imprint in a stale pillow. Her hair was dulled by thirty Habsburg winters. Her voice grated. Portia Saukalt’s enormous ears needed to be hidden inside bonnets and turbans of intricate inner construction. A small thorough blue eye she had, with a great appearance of stoniness about it. Missing: any trace of empathy. Yet I’ll never know anyone to match Portia Saukalt for seeking out your glance and forcing it to stay on her. She confused you with her singular intensity; your aesthetic sense was destabilized by her.

With her small head and lumpen shoulders, my newest client was a story even my hats struggled to tell gracefully. She was from the start a constant trial to me, not least because a woman who wore a hat of mine should look like a woman who deserved to wear that hat. And it was precisely for this reason that la Sau made me rise to the highest expression of my art, that is, of composing hats to make you forget an ugly face. More, Portia Saukalt needed hats to intimidate the enemy and everyone was the enemy. 

As a woman, laughably, she also hunted admiration and lovers. My hats expounded on the structural differences between men and women, each of whom naturally craves what he or she is not and has not. The more I succeeded with her millinery, the more heat Portia Saukalt knew she could raise in men who wouldn’t understand they were actually falling in love with a hat.

WOMEN’S WORK

Writing Alva gave me a chance to look at women’s work … how it is persistently undervalued even to the point of being unseen. No one thinks that Alva could be a member of the revolutionary Carbonari movement, because her work has the ephemerality and triviality of fashion, and because it is to do with women. The plot shows how women and women’s work are underestimated … and not just by men. Women also underestimate each other. By the end of the story this is going to prove deadly to one of them.

There was a real-life example from the period for me to follow. Alva takes as her model the Colombian seamstress Policarpa Salavarietta (image from Wikimedia Commons). Poli (as she is still known) spied on Spanish aristocrats of Bogota while sewing their clothes, gleaning information that was used to fuel the fight for independence. None of her chattering high-born ladies suspected that Policarpa was working to destroy the Spanish hold on her country. In my novel, Alva reaches out to her heroine. But Policarpa was betrayed and executed by the Spaniards. It’s only at the end of The Puffin that Alva finds out what happened to the letter she sent to her sister in needles and revolution.

FEATHERS  & EMPIRE

Alva works with feathers obtained by her merchant brother at the famous London auctions. Here Favaloro secures exotic sought-after feathers such Quetzal tails from South America, which was at that time rising up to throw off the shackles of Spanish domination. So hats also gave me a path into my other chief theme of Empire. Feathers also worked for me in the exploration of the predatory, wasteful, misconceived relationships between humans (the word ‘humanity’ doesn’t work here) and birds –  and indeed between humans and all too many animals.

The novel’s eponymous bird comes from Norway where it was and still sometimes is a perilous thing to be a puffin. Norwegians not only eat puffins but also use their feathers for soft furnishings, their leather for shoes and even burn their oil in lamps. And a raw fresh puffin heart is apparently still considered a delicacy in some parts of Scandinavia. 

In my novel, the way people react to the puffin serves as a useful index of their humanity. 

The villain captures the puffin, exploits it for commercial gain and even imagines the profit in a stuffed puffin as a hat ornament.

At a key point in the book, Alva has a close encounter with the puffin. Lost in his eyes, she has an epiphany about her own place in the complex international business of murdering birds.

I try to be less human, more bird.

  … And that’s how I fall. That’s how I know.

In the puffin’s eyes I see dying ranks of egrets, their heads and shoulders meat-raw to the bone from feathers ripped out. I hear the slow, hoarse screams of ostriches as their throats are cut by Tuareg horsemen. Until now, the birds died invisibly. If their dying moments had crossed my mind, it was quickly and silently. I bethink my own stake – as a milliner – in the life of birds. Literally it’s a stake in their hearts.

 … How many birds have died so I could give the illusion of lightness to a heavy piece of womanflesh? Many, many. To lure the Contessa, I knowingly used the Barbary plume of an ostrich that was murdered for it.

 I think about the puffin-bellies in which Favaloro has always hidden our carboneria before tucking it between cod flesh and its skin. I tell myself those puffins were dead anyway; this way they too made their sacrifice for Venetian liberty. Yet, looking at this living puffin, I fail to believe myself. I despise my own sophistry. Guilt grows worms in my gut.

Still, there’s a road to goodness.

Palabra, my word on it – from this day forth, no bird on this whole earth shall be killed again so I may decorate a hat. Not even for a precious Barbary plume will another ostrich be hunted on my account.

I shall keep faith with feathers. It’s fitting that I do.

Alva’s solution: she stops using feathers and instead makes flowers from fish skins. (Thank you, of course, to Tina for alerting me to this practice.)

MILLINERY IMAGERY

The Puffin is a book built out of hat imagery.

The humble egg iron of the millinery trade is the novel's most visible murder weapon and is used in other ways too, including an attempt to rescue the puffin from captivity.

Perhaps the chief totemic object is a Barbary Plume –  a miraculous ostrich feather –  with a biography that Alva recounts. Both one of the characters (an enslaved boy) and that plume are brought to Venice from one of the famous Livornese feather traders in Tripoli.

A hatbox hides the liberated puffin. Even the milliner’s etui, an ostrich shell holder for sewing implements, comes into play. 

A dragonfly ornament on a hat warns people of a woman who is dangerous, relating to the Venetian superstition that the breath of the insect is fatal to humans. 

Finally, hats are the heroes of a climactic scene towards the end of the book when Venetians gather to watch a poet and his poetry go to the scaffold.

A TALKING HEAD

Another key millinery element is Alva’s marotte or tête à chapeau. A milliner spends a lot of time alone. It seemed to me natural that Alva – who has a lot to say but few who want to listen –  would have an intense relationship with her marotte. I’ll let Alva explain …

When Favaloro was away, I practised the lingua franca on my têtes à chapeau, the life-size busts on which I, like all the sister hood of milliners, displayed my wares. The têtes were modelled in painted cartapesta stuffed with horsehair. Ranked on hollow tree trunks fluttering with silk shawls, these neat bodiless ladies were my own little army. I added one more tête with each year of success, ordering them from Brussels. I myself animated and made singular their bland faces with watercolours, adding highlights to their eyes and character to their eyebrows.

Tommaso once observed that my favourite tête looked like me, with her small mouth, light eyebrows and narrow cheeks. After that, I kept a sharp eye on her pretensions to beauty. Her eyes were equally intent upon me and were not uncritical. It was to this tête that I addressed my most extravagant flights of the lingua franca. I knew what she was thinking. She called me ‘Mistress Tongue’ or, in sarcastic mode after Tommaso visited, ‘Glass of milk-water’ and ‘Afraid-of-your-own-heart.

I have owned an early marotte ever since I became interested in millinery.  I have been known to address a few words to her. She sat on my desk keeping company with the model puffin (and yes, also the skeleton of a puffin) all through the writing of the novel. As a novelist, you need to know what lies beneath ...

Noble ladies in Venice had marottes made in their own likeness. I was delighted to discover one in the background of several Pietro Longhi paintings in Ca’ Rezzonico. The one below is called ‘la scuola di lavoro’ – see the marotte top right . (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A HAT FOR A SHIPWRECKED MARRIAGE

Here is the exotic millinery that inspired my character Tommaso, the poet. He’s at the centre of two painful love triangles in the book. Although he is passionately loved by good people, he throws in his lot with one of the worst, a hypervigilant narcissist who reels him in and spits him out, as they do.

Tommaso becomes a beggar, a mendicant, in his relationship with his wife. She is deaf to his plea for heart-alms, so he wanders Venice by night with a crude model of ship on crammed on his head. He wants to show the world the shipwreck she has made of their marriage.

Tommaso, with his crutch and his ship, casts the shadow of a monster in the moonlight. In fact, there is a real monster on the  streets of Venice, an assassin called the Hyena. (The Hyena is my invention. Extrajudicial murders were not characteristic of the Habsburg regime, which was more focussed on order, censorship, paperwork and taxation).

For the image of the ship hat (courtesy of Wellcome Images)  I am indebted to a contemporary text, Vagabondiana of Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London. Vagabondiana includes a beggar named Joseph Johnson, once a seaman, who in later life walked with a crutch and carried a model of the HMS Nelson on his head to signal his service to this country. Smith characterises Joe Johnson as a creative and ingenious beggar, who knows how to catch the imagination and engage the sympathies of those who behold him.

And that’s the poet’s playbook too, of course.

LANGUAGE OF COLOUR

The Puffin is a book about several different languages – even the puffin has his own lexicon. Alva is obsessed with the lingua franca, the language of the free world, as she sees it – the language of equals as opposed to the pidgin that infantilizes the subjects of empire. Alva smelts brief, shattering poems from the lingua franca. (Who is the better poet, Alva or Tommaso? – the reader will decide).

Alva’s work as a milliner gave me access to another language too, namely the fashionable colours of the day. Again, Tina made me a felt colour chart of the kind Alva would show her customers.

As all researchers of this period know, these hues are codified in a wonderful book Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814) in which each fashionable Regency tint is aligned with incontrovertible values found in the colours of animals or minerals. To revivify those Regency colours in conjunction with the clothes that bore them, there’s Beatrice Knight’s Regency Color Compendium, a painstaking but joyful exercise in research.

I chose the colours in the book for their edible loveliness:

Pomona Green – apple & emerald with a touch of lemon

Drake’s Neck – a cerulean blue mixed with bottle green

Spanish Fly – a rich, blue-tinged green

Barbel Blue – the colour of a clement sky

Celestial Blue – an exalted cobalt

Maiden Blush – pale young flesh like the inside of a shell

Blossom or Rose Pompadour – a rosy pink

Aramanthine – a rich, purplish red

Pomegranate – a simmering terracotta

Coquelicot – poppy or puffin-beak red

Puce – a brownish purple made from blood-fed fleas

Parma Violet – a warm amethyst

Stifled Sigh – a faded despairing lavender

London Smoke – a pale choked grey

Skimmed Milk – the luminous white of the human eyeball

Isabelline – a dirtied cream

Oeil de Mouche – a slick sepia brown

Nankeen – a muddy wolfish yellow

Feuille Morte – a strident pumpkin-flesh amber

Orpiment – the orange of the neck ruff of the Golden Pheasant or the belly of the Warty Newt

Dust of Ruins (or camelopard) – a dull brassy gold

Jonquil – a fresh pure daffodil yellow

Habsburg Yellow – calamine and pus

REAL HATS FOR IMAGINED SCENES

Alva makes hats that carry secret maps and bullets in special compartments. She also makes the death caps for those who appear to have fallen foul of the Habsburgs: the anonymous drowned are rescued by the Company of Christ and the Good Death and given decent funerals. In the novel, the Company is part of the Carbonari conspiracy. 

While Alva is imagined, her most important client is a real woman who was implicated in the brief, disastrous Carbonari uprising that occurred on the Venetian mainland in 1818. Her name was Contessa Elena Cecilia Monti d’Arnaud. She was once lady-in-waiting to Marie-Louise, who was both Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife and also the daughter of the Habsburg Emperor Francis. Contessa Monti was devoted to her mistress even after she ceased service, speaking of her constantly. Arrested by the Austrians after the uprising was betrayed and suppressed, she was sent into exile but was found dead in Bologna not long afterwards under unexplained circumstances. (For information about Cecilia Monti, I am indebted to Christian Rossi, for his transcription of her interrogation in his doctoral thesis, MAGISTRATURA E GIUSTIZIA PENALE NEL VENETO DELLA RESTAURAZIONE (1813-1819).

Tina recreated two hats for Cecilia Monti that are particularly important in the plot.

The first is this bergère, a flat-brimmed straw hat featuring a very shallow, low crown and usually ornamented with flowers and ribbons. It can be worn a number of ways but this tilted view is traditional and flattering. This hat is woven from dense Leghorn straw, which is what Alva uses. The rim is sewn with old French lace. This one has knots in the ribbon round the brim. A musket ball could be concealed in each of those knots. And a map or letter could be rolled up and slotted into each of the stretches of ribbon in between the knots. The flowers are hand-folded. As traditional, the decoration is mostly on the right, and in this case designed to distract from the ‘loaded’ sections of the hat. 

The second hat is a pliable Milan straw. Its brim could be tipped upwards at the back to create a secret compartment for revolutionary matériel. Tina built a secret code into this hat. The colours of the ornaments are those of the Carbonari.

HATS & PUBLICATION

Tina and I have been enjoying ourselves on Instagram, doing a series of stories about our collaboration. Meanwhile, I have also been enjoying contact with the modern community of hat creators in London. I am looking forward to attending a Discovery Event in October as a guest of the 422-year-old Worshipful Company of Feltmakers.

I shall myself be talking about hats, feathers, puffins and revolution at an event at Southwark Cathedral on October 26^th:

Faith, Feathers & Human Skin: introducing The Puffin Tickets, Monday, October 26  •  6:30 PM - 8 PM | Eventbrite

See you there perhaps ...

Michelle Lovric’s website www.michellelovric.com

Instagram @apuffininvenice and @Bea-Evie

Other hattish links:

www.ballardmillinerystudio.com

Feltmakers Today & Our History – The Worshipful Company of Feltmakers of London

Ladakh: Travelling in memory through time and space ~ by Lesley Downer

When does history begin? When does the present slide through a looking glass and emerge as ‘history’? Is yesterday ‘history’? When I was in Kathmandu back in the last century (1971, to be precise), I felt as if I had travelled through time as well as space. I was in the Middle Ages. 

Here is a story of a visit to Ladakh which felt like a journey through time. 

Ladakh's surreal landscape 1981 painted by me 

Ladakh 1981 

In 1981 I travelled through Kashmir and across Zoji la, a Himalayan pass 11,575 feet (3528 metres) high, to Ladakh, on the back of a motorbike. The road was only wide enough for one vehicle so cars, trucks and buses went one way in the morning and vehicles going the other way had to wait till afternoon. 

But that didn’t apply to motorbikes. We’d pull off the road when a line of vehicles approached and wait till they’d passed, then continue on our way. 

The journey can be done in two days but we took our time, clambering up cliffs to explore remote monasteries and camping in fields beside the rivers. Once we woke to find water rising around us and had to pack up fast; we’d forgotten that the fields are irrigated at night. 

Ladakh 2013

We were riding through an otherworldly landscape of dark mauve mountains, pale turquoise rocks and grey green scree, between orange and lilac and pink and dark maroon sand dunes and rocks and hills and mountains. 

At one point I scrambled up a pink hill to have a look at the view from the top. All around were more pink hills, as far as the eye could see. There was no landmark, no village, no little house, nothing to indicate where I had come from or where my friend Chris and his motorbike were, no indication of north or south or east or west. I was completely disoriented. 

I found Chris and the motorbike again and we carried on through more maroon and mauve hills. Eventually we started to see rivers fringed with bright green barley fields and groves of apricot trees.

We passed through little towns of white-washed houses with bundles of hay on the roof and lines of prayer flags fluttering in the breeze. There were stupas - ‘chortens’ in Ladakhi and Tibetan - on the outcrops, white-washed or carved out of the wine-coloured rock, some as big as houses, others small, stretching in long rows. 

The palace at Leh 1981

Leh 

Finally we got to Leh, a small frontier town of Ladakhi and Tibetan people, where the women wore long dusty black dresses and long pigtails and tall stove pipe hats and everyone wore huge beaming welcoming smiles. Wherever you went you saw the palace, a smaller version of the Potala in Lhasa, rising high above the town, deserted and crumbling, virtually a ruin. 

I settled into an inn run by John Page, an Englishman who was installing solar heating in Ladakhi homes. Leh is 11,562 feet (3524 metres) above sea level and dry with very strong sunshine and very cold winters, so solar heating made perfect sense. John’s girlfriend was Helena Norberg-Hodge, the only westerner who could speak Ladakhi, a dialect of Tibetan. 

Besides me there was a young British couple staying there called Zee and Theresa. Ladakhi food was unappetizing, mainly dry tsampa (barley meal) with a little bit of curry. So we took over the cooking, using a primus stove and charcoal burner, and used our ingenuity to turn out all sorts of delights. 

News of our cooking spread around and every night an unpredictable but large number of Ladakhi intellectuals - monks, poets, professors, students - would show up at meal time. We’d sit around talking, with Helena interpreting where necessary, into the night. 

The palace at Leh
with prayer flags 2013

In the daytime I’d walk out of town, climb the pink hillside and sit on a rock, watching the women scything the barley fields far below with the sound of their whistling drifting up through the thin clear air. It was magical. 

Walking through Leh’s alleys I drew and painted pictures. 

Thiksey 

I also hitchhiked out to see some of Ladakh’s beautiful white-painted monasteries, which crown virtually every hill. Thiksey’s temples, sub-temples, libraries, monks’ quarters and stupas rambled across an entire hill like a medieval castle. They were dilapidated but I could see that the lower buildings were white-washed and the higher ones were brick red or yellow ochre. 

Little house in Leh 1981

At the time I spoke a little Tibetan and was (and still am) fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism. I could recognise many of the sages and Buddhas and benevolent and fierce deities portrayed in the wall paintings and thangkas. So while other tourists strolled in, took a quick look round and strolled on, I would chat to the monks. 

Then they would invite me round the back for butter tea. Butter tea is the national drink. It’s an acquired taste; it’s helpful to imagine that you’re drinking soup. The key thing was to be as enthusiastic as possible, to drink with gusto and to be even more enthusiastic when offered another cup. 

So while other tourists ‘did’ several temples in a day, I ended up spending all day in just one. 

In the end I spent two months there. I ended up going back by bus, which was a lot more frightening than going by motorbike. 

Little house in Leh 2013

Back to the Future 2013 

I went again in 2013, over an even higher pass, Taglang la, 17,480 feet (5328 metres), the second highest motorable pass in the world. (Mount Everest is 29,031 feet (8848 metres). 

Ladakh had changed but not as much as I’d feared. There were roads, traffic, hotels, restaurants and rows of shops offering thangkas, Tibetan jewellery and Pashmina shawls as well as markets where Tibetan refugees sold handicrafts. 

The palace was still there, brooding over the city, now cleaned up and restored. There were steps and a footpath up the rocks, even a motor road. And the food had miraculously improved. 

I was happy to be back and looked for the places I had painted in 1981 and took photographs. 

All paintings and photos are mine. 

Lesley Downer is a Japanophile and inveterate traveller. She had two books out in 2024: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland. She is now working on a history of Tokyo and plotting ways to get back to both Japan and India. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

The Development of Medicine in 17th Century Italy

 Deborah Swift

My fourth book in the Giulia Tofana series, The Cameo Keeper, focuses on medicine and healing in the 17th Century, a time of significant transformation in Italian medicine. As Europe shifted from the Renaissance towards the era of scientific exploration, Italy became a key centre for medical thought and innovation, blending ancient traditions of healing and herbalism with new discoveries. The old medicine and the new were less-than-happy bedfellows, and the advent of printing meant that men’s version of remedial medicine was more often promoted in written texts than the women’s traditional remedies. Men’s thought was widely disseminated in printed books, whereas women’s cures were left in the kitchen notebooks.

The Old Tradition

At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Italian medicine was still deeply rooted in the classical theories inherited from Greek and Roman scholars such as Galen and Hippocrates. Universities such as Padua, Bologna, and Pisa were renowned for their medical faculties, teaching aspiring physicians from these ancient texts. In my novel, Jacopo has studied at Padua University, but he is now intent on a career in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Medical education was still emphasising the balance of the four humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—as the foundation of health and disease.

Above: Early Italian Pharmacy

Below: Anatomy Theatre

But in the new age of medicine anatomical dissection became increasingly important, with doctors such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Marcello Malpighi leading the field. Malpighi, celebrated as the "father of microscopical anatomy" for his pioneering use of the microscope, was able to observe capillaries, organs, and tissues, thus advancing the study of physiology.

Surgeons were often required to show off their skills in public demonstrations, and anatomy theatres were popular entertainment for the rich. Some of these were experiments on the dead, but there were also ‘trials’ on the living. These took the form of ‘competitions’ or ‘trials’ where those competing for a surgeon’s position would have to demonstrate their abilities before a hospital board.


The 17th century was also marked by recurrent outbreaks of plague. The outbreak in Rome in 1656 led to stringent quarantine measures – isolating affected neighbourhoods and the fumigation or burning of infected items. City states established boards of health, enhancing the management of infectious diseases. Quarantine hospitals on city outskirts became a hallmark of the new Italian public health strategy, and in Rome one of the quarantine hospitals that features in The Cameo Keeper is one run by monks, and isolated on an island in the middle of the Tiber.

Herbalism and Pharmacy

During this period, women’s role in healing changed. The old tradition of herbal remedies persisted, but influenced by the new science of chemistry, apothecaries began incorporating chemicals and metals into their preparations. Paracelsian ideas, which promoted chemical remedies over traditional humours-based treatments, began to gain ground. Italian pharmacists and physicians experimented with compounds such as antimony and mercury. (see picture below)

Although women were largely excluded from formal medical education, they played crucial roles as midwives, herbalists, and caregivers. Some women, especially in religious orders, managed hospital wards and contributed to nursing and patient care.

The common people still relied on the cheaper, more available care from the women in their households, and care in hospital depended on how much you could afford to pay.

The seventeenth century in Italy was a time of great experimentation, with the three kinds of treatment offered intersecting - herbalism, pharmaceuticals and surgery. For the first time, documentation existed because of the invention of printing and the ability to disseminate the results of experiments more widely.

The Cameo Keeper takes this experimentation as one of its themes and I thoroughly enjoyed researching the 'new' medicine of the era.