Even the Ghosts are Reading Books - Emma Darwin

Everyone knows that writers are also readers, and by writers I don't (for once) just  mean novelists. We need books, and we need more books than we can afford or house, so we need libraries. But we also need books, as far as is possible, when we need them: not before (because working with too much research is like trying to catch a waterfall in a cup) and not after (because it can be hard to re-route a story which has gone off on mistaken rails). I have friends who almost live in the gorgeousness of the new British Library, which has moved out of the Victorian-neoclassical glories of the British Museum Reading Room to live next to the Victorian-gothic glories of St Pancras station. I have other friends who bring joy to their local librarian's heart by using every drop of all that professional expertise, but neither of those are quite what I need; the essence of my practice as a writer is that when I'm doing research, fact-checking is the least important part of it. The more important stuff is what I can't really know that I'm looking for, so certainly couldn't find in a catalogue.

One day back in the 1840s, the story goes, the great historian Thomas Carlyle was sitting in the British Museum, waiting for the books he'd ordered to be brought from the bookstacks. He waited for an hour and a half, unable to get any further with what he was working on, and when they arrived they were the wrong books. And because of how the Library worked and still does, even if he did re-order them, by the time they'd been retrieved and brought to him, most of the working day would be over. Up he got and walked out, and on his way home to Chelsea he vowed to found a library where scholars could go into the bookstacks for themselves, browse, find and retrieve what they wanted, and take it home.

The London Library began on the first floor of the Traveller's Club, in Pall Mall, and Thackeray was its first auditor. It grew fast, and soon moved to its current home round the corner in St James's Square; Eliot (George), Dickens and my own great-great-grandpapa were among its early members. Its current president is Tom Stoppard and you'll see many a face you recognise from a book jacket and many more that you don't, as you look up from where you're tucked in a corner in Science & Miscellaneous Quarto, digging among the early books about photography. (Why is Photography not in the Art Room? Well, the library was founded only four years after Fox Talbot patented the Calotype, so I'll forgive them.)

But it is, very emphatically, a working library not a social club: this blog entry gives you a better idea and more pictures than I possibly can. There is now very nice room tucked up in the eaves to have coffee and eat the sandwiches you brought with you, as there wasn't when A S Byatt set the first scene of Possession there, but that's about the only visible concession to modern habits. Oh, and the enormous e-library you can get at from home, the wifi, and the Twitter account: just follow @TheLondonLib. It's recently somehow found space in a very crowded corner of the world to enlarge itself considerably, mainly thanks to the success of another member's little book of comic poems about Cats: Eliot (T.S). Essentially, though, it's just the nicest place in London to work, and the library that best combines practicality (once you've got the hang of its idiosyncratic classification system) and scholarship, and that's why I and thousands of other writers of every kind are members.

But none of all these delights would be worth the membership fee if it didn't do what I want. A central tenet of the Library's philosophy is that knowledge grows, develops, shifts, but it is never outdated. And so, unlike public libraries they never get rid of a book. This is particularly useful for the historical novelist, because the pre-siftedness of a history book may well not tell me what I need to know.

So, in The Mathematics of Love Stephen and Lucy drive along the north coast of Spain, from San Sebastian to Bilbao. Google Earth and a cheap plane ticket could tell me about the physical geography, but what about the human geography? I only found the answer by kneeling on the iron-gridded floor of the bookstacks, in Topography>Spain: an 1860s guide to travelling in Northern Spain, complete with engravings by Honoré Daumier. There was an overloaded diligence staggering along those mountain roads, the costumes of market women, farmers, sailors, priests and nuns, evocations of crumbling villages and bustling towns, the usual English horror of Catholicism and the pity for the picturesque peasants that they weren't allowed to know any better... even a picture of the writer preaching Evangelical Protestantantism to a group of urchins on the beach. And most delightful for me, were observations of the lingering scars of the Peninsular War. Perhaps the innkeeper the author found more welcoming than most in San Sebastian was the son of the man who welcomed Stephen fifty years before. For A Secret Alchemy the formal history books were essential, of course, as I was dealing with real historical characters, so some of the time my booklist looked more like a historian's, even though I'd hesitate to show it to the really proper historians around me in the Reading Room.

And the Work in Progress? All I'll say now is that not only has that shelf of very early photography books been well-explored, but the one I have on my desk at home has patches of chemical stains. And since the science, like the art, of photography, is eternally restless, I can probably narrow down those stains to about twenty years or so. I wonder who put them there? It's not really essential to the novel that the 1913 Baedeker to Southern France, which is next to it on my desk, has pencil notes in the margin about mountains climbed and hotels stayed in. It has a list in the back, in the same hand, as the scholars say: Photographs, and a plan for the week. Who was it?

You'll have gathered by now that for this historical novelist, at least, part of the joy of the London Library is that I'm walking (kneeling, writing, longing for coffee) in the footsteps of my fellow-members of and in the past. They have their stories too, and since the Work in Progress has real historical people in it, and some of them were members of the London Library, maybe all I'll have to do is sit there, at one of the quiet single desks in some corner of the stacks, and listen for the whisk of petticoats or the harrumph of a handsome pair of whiskers. In the London Library even the ghosts are reading books.

CAUTION, NOVELISTS: historians at work - Emma Darwin

The other day I was talking to a writer friend about my current project, and she urged me to read a particular novel set in the same period, centred on the same sort of people. I made a polite but non-committal answer, because I can't tell you how certain I was that I'd do nothing of the kind.

The thing is, someone else's historical novel is their re-visioning and re-imagining of that time. How the novel is structured, how it's voiced, what historical material it uses, what it writes on the spaces between the facts, what it elaborates in the gaps in the record... all of those are the product of that writer's self. Their consciousness, their nature as a storyteller, is the creative engine and the organising principle, not mine. It's not just a question of not wanting to plagiarise unconsciously (and Heyer spotted Cartland's plagiarism in Cartland's taking things Heyer had invented as historical material). It's much more that while all writers of historical fiction are at one remove from the world they're trying to evoke, I don't want mine to be a third-hand world.

Charles Dickens' French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is not the same as Hilary Mantel's in A Place of Greater Safety, or Marge Piercy's contemporaneous City of Darkness, City of Light. Georgette Heyer's Waterloo is not Thackeray's (she was shocked by how wrong many of his facts are!), and I avoided both when I was writing The Mathematics of Love. From the moment when I realise I want to write about a period, I stop reading historical fiction set in it.

What's less obvious is that a similar problem exists with the history books. What a historian writes is also - to an extent that historians haven't always been willing to acknowledge - filtered through that historian's consciousness: not just their personality but the biases and discourses of their time. Carlyle's French Revolution is not the same as Simon Schama's, and both will leave things out - different things - that I need to know about.

Mind you, History, as a discipline, has changed. J H Elliott's classic short study, Imperial Spain, was first published in 1963, and has been on syllabuses and reading lists ever since. For the second, revised edition, which came out in 2002, he points out that a book of this kind written now would never have so little to say about the experience of women. In the meantime, Women's History has brought us treasure troves such as Marilyn Yalom's History of the Wife. As someone who writes battles and politics, but also childbirth and cooking, that's not the only kind of book I need, but it helps a lot.

But there's a more fundamental problem. History, as a discipline, is about finding the larger patterns and forces which shaped lives in the past. An honest historian may acknowledge some evidence which exists but has yet to be fitted in. But still, the project will be to synthesise things to explain the whole picture. And yet always, as a novelist, I'm aware that the opposite was probably also true. You know that plan of a medieval village you copied into your exercise book, aged around ten? No one village looks like that because they all have their quirks, but that plan is more true as History, beause it presents the essence of the matter. If you think round your friends I'd put money on every single one of them having several characteristics which don't fit the norm for their job/background/class/ethnicity/gender/nationality. The essence of gender history is that husbands batter wives, but that doesn't mean that no wife has ever battered her husband, and my characters are individuals, not essences. If I want to put a battered husband in my novel, I shall. I'll have to work harder to convince the reader, but that's never a bad thing for me as a writer, or for my reader. As I was talking about on my own blog a while ago, the expected thing slips past the reader too easily: it's the surprising, the off-beat, the taking-aback thing, done properly, which catches the reader and holds them long enough for the story to come alive.

Of course ordinary, individual lives aren't ignored by historians: history "from below" is big business. We've got more sophisticated, too: a book such as Judith Flanders' The Victorian House starts with the evidence of books about etiquette and household management, but then the much more complex and slippery reality needs a different kind of teasing out. Even the absence of evidence can now have shrewd insights read into it, which is something at which novelists might be able to teach historians a thing or two: apparently Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is on several undergraduate History syllabuses, not because it should be read as History, but as an example of the kind of imaginative effort that should be part of any historian's practice.

And you can go back to original sources. If you're trying to bring to life a real, historical character then with luck there will be plenty of those - though again, you have to be wary of the biases and discourses forming anything with more creative input than an account book or a warrant of execution. As Alison Weir describes, Eleanor of Aquitaine's contemporaries didn't find her day-to-day presence, ruling the kingdom for Henry II, worthy of record: women were only good for sex and procreation, so that's what was written down about Eleanor, and you need to go back to charters and Privy Council records to discover otherwise. Yet (as I found, similarly, when researching Elizabeth Woodville for A Secret Alchemy), later historians still didn't examine, let alone challenge, the version of the Queen that was handed down from her own time: the discourse of their times wasn't so different. What we think of as History is, much of the time, just someone else's version of it.

So original sources are no guarantee that your apprehension of your period hasn't been pre-sifted, limited, interfered with, and that's always supposing that you can find the sources. If your novel's about a fishwife in 12th century Cumberland, the original sources will all be in Welsh, except when they're in Norman French, and they're extremely unlikely to be in any such woman's own hand or voice (the same is true for, say, accounts of ordinary soldiers before the 19th century.) What's more, one particular, real fishwife's experience may not be at all what you want or can use, because your novel isn't about her, it's about someone else. So you might well be better off with more general accounts: a History of the Wife, and a History of the Medieval Cumbrian Fishing Industry, and any number of other histories of religion, food, textiles, architecture, transport, politics. And then you do the maths - the listening - the imagining - the dreaming - in the spaces between all that history. Historians are in the business of synthesising a general picture from particular experience. Novelists do it the other way round.

CROSSING OVER by Emma Darwin

In Tuesday's post, "Outside the Frame", A L Berridge was saying that while the physical presence that an old photograph records might be rather more historical-physical (smelly, sickly, unglamorous) than either writer or reader really fancy, a photograph can get a writer's mind going as few other things can.

I think one reason that photographs can be such a good jumping-off point for a story is that we know they are the product of a moment. Apart from trickery in the enlarger, on the re-touching table or now on a computer, a photograph is unmediated: the camera can only speak as it finds. And it's not only photographs - images - which get my writerly self dancing and thinking, it's photography itself.

Even if the sitter has carefully chosen to represent themselves in a certain way (and that, in itself, is revealing), another moment might have made them look very different - have you ever seen a handful of snaps of yourself up on someone's Facebook page after a party, and thought you almost looked like different people, depending on angle, light and so on? A portrait is painted in time and so it's a collection, a distillation, of the artist's conception of the sitter. But a photograph is a step out of time, and therefore - paradoxically - it speaks of Time, and how it moves, as few other artefacts can.

If you've ever stood in a church where your historical character stood (as I did with Elizabeth Woodville in A Secret Alchemy) or read a notice that said "George Washington slipped here", you'll know what I mean. There's a shiver you get when you realise that but for the thinnest possible veil of time the past is here with you or you've stepped into the past. And with photographs it does come down to physics. The controlled tarnishing of silver bromide (or silver chloride or one of the other silver halides) is all that actually records the image in the camera, even with colour photographs. Photons from the sun (or now from a flash) touched that real, actual person, and were reflected away to touch the photographic emulsion on the film or glass plate, and blacken it in proportion. Of course, we're most familiar with the negative/positive process, when the print in your hands may have been made any time from the next day, to a century later. But if it's a daguerreotype, or one of its descendants such as the tin-type beloved of fairground photographers in the 19th century, then the plate is the photograph, there, in your hands.
 
In The Mathematics of Love, my 1976 narrator, Anna, begins her story thus: 

It's an early daguerreotype, more than a hundred and fifty years old. That's a positive process, I usually explain, the plate exposed directly so that each is unique... If you tilt it towards the light, the image gleams and shimmers, so exact, so bright and so dark, that the moment of its taking seems to live inside the glass. The sun touches the pillars and chimneys of Kersey Hall and flickers among the dark, late-summer trees. Its light lies on the lawn, strokes the curve of the steps, slips through the half-open door to where a figure in a long dress stands. It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and other times before it was found again. One of those times was mine.

And later in the novel, although much earlier in Anna's life, veteran photographer Theo - who I modelled on Robert Capa - says this:

"...all photographs are about death, really, and time: about preserving a moment in silver and chemicals, when life itself is never preserved, when every cell of everything is already decaying, and being replaced, and decaying again. The subject and the image co-exist for the moment that the shutter opens and closes. And then the subject decays but the image lives on unchanged."

"It makes it sound like a ghost."

He grinned at me. "Oh, Anna, does the idea give you gooseflesh all over?... but a photograph does prevent something - somebody - from being laid to rest."

I moved a little, and felt the slight, hot roughness where my shoulders were newly brown. I looked down and saw that the image of the dark straps of my top was printed pale by the sun.

The Mathematics of Love is all about ghosts, without really being a ghost story. And if I told you what I mean by "not really" it would spoil things, but the more I thought about light and where it falls, the more places I found - such as Anna's sun-tan - where it's part of how we experience time and our selves. I don't believe in ghosts - hence my "not-really". But I think what ghosts embody and express about our sense of the past is endlessly fascinating - and not just the past, but the dead and the still living and the might-have-been. And in that way, a photograph is like a historical novel as much as it's a historical record; it embodies the dead quite literally, in silver halides, in a way which lives absolutely in our moment. As A L Berridge was saying, it therefore embodies the might-have-been, just outside the frame. It's more like holding a letter written by that person, than it's like looking at a portrait painted of them. Writing historical fiction is all about using imagination (rooted in research, of course) to cross over from the present into the past. With a photograph, the past crosses over into our present.

BLOODY BATTLES & PLEASURE PALACES by Emma Darwin

It was 2007, and I was whizzing along the A64 in North Yorkshire because in the novel that wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy one of my narrators whizzes along it. A small sign suddenly said TOWTON. I stamped on the brake and turned left, and the whole structure of the novel changed.

Modern-day Una Pryor drives the A64 because she's researching another of my narrators, Antony Wydvil, uncle and guardian of the Princes in the Tower. He rode this way to his death in 1483, but I hadn't realised till I got there that the road might take him into his own past: to 1461 and the Battle of Towton. It's the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, and it was Antony's first. Towton battlefield, I found, is high and open and eerily silent, and you can see how, when the two armies wheeled in the blinding snow on Palm Sunday, soldiers tumbled down the slope to drown in Cock Beck. It was said the water ran red for days.

So that became the shape of Antony's story: one, long, midsummer day's ride from the bleak, private Plantagenet stronghold of Sheriff Hutton, to the squat yellow muscle of the great administrative centre of Pontefract - and from it I strung his whole life. For him it was a pilgrimage, and Elysabeth his sister also tells her story as a series of stops on her life's journey through this glamorous and violent world. She was left a widow with two small sons when her husband was killed fighting for Henry VI. Edward Plantagenet's victory at Towton a couple of months later made him Edward IV, and caused the Wydvils to change their allegiance. What was it like for them, I'd wondered? The historical record is largely made by the Wydvil's enemies, but I wanted to understand them from the inside.

And then I realised that Una, too, makes a pilgrimage almost the length of England; she's looking for the Wydvils, but she also re-finds her own past, and thus her future. Una's pilgrimage through the book, therefore, became mine. And what I found was how late medieval politics is all about roads. Battles happen on the roads which lead from the great lords' powerbases to London and Westminster:  Barnet, Northampton, Tewkesbury and two at St Albans. If it's not battles, it's still about land. Elysabeth's first husband, Sir John Grey, lived at Groby, just up the A5 (Watling Street) from her childhood home at Grafton, and their wedding consolidated their fathers' local power. I've stood in the church at Ratby where they were married; I've seen his childhood home too; I've glimpsed the burnt-out shell of the manor house where their two sons were probably born. It was from the royal hunting lodge at Stony Stratford that Edward IV rode out secretly to woo the beautiful widow Elysabeth Grey; it was at Stony Stratford twenty years later that his brother Richard of Gloucester took control of their son Edward V, and sent Antony to his death; the stones of Bermondsey Abbey keep turning up as they build smart new flats there.

One of the pivotal events of the novel is the siege of the Tower of London, and I gave Una a house just along the riverbank in Narrow St. It's actually an agreeable pub, half-hanging above the dark grey waters of the Thames; I had lunch there. And several scenes are set at Eltham Palace, the beautiful little late-medieval pleasure palace now in South London, then handy for the royal dockyard - and the brothels - at Deptford. And necessity is sometimes the mother of inspiration. For dull reasons of chronology I had to set Una's narrative a few years back, but in 1990 Eltham - the 14th century palace and the Art Deco country house it became - was being restored by English Heritage. So Una goes to see what's being done to make it come alive, and the whole of A Secret Alchemy came to be about how restoring a historic house is like writing a historical novel.

How, in telling stories, can we - and can't we - bring the past alive? When you're restoring a house, says Mark in the novel, it's not enough just to tidy up what's left of the original. If you want to evoke the lives that once lived there, then leaving out everything which would have been there, but is no longer visible, would be another kind of lie. "You have to make the story whole." And one way I did so was to show how the separate strands are wound together into that whole: to make explicit what the whole novel is doing implicitly. Mark and Una are being shown round the restoration at Eltham:

The craftsmen and builders have gone for the day. ‘I was involved with excavating Bermondsey Abbey in the sixties,’ I say, and Charlie’s eyes light up. I tell him what I remember about the dig while we walk along a wide, curving, sleek-panelled corridor that wouldn’t look out of place in a grand ocean liner, and into the huge quiet of the Great Hall.

The space seems to hum against me. The windows are high in the walls and so big their stone mullions shimmer against the light, and a great hammerbeam roof of age-darkened oak lowers above and between them. Charlie says proudly it’s the original. He’s talking about the firebomb that came through it in 1940: the burn-marks are there, on the stones of the floor, and must be kept, for they’re part of the history too. Mark’s asking him about the masons’ marks and carpenters’ joints, and what the principle of restoration is.

'Well, in art restoration the rule is that the new work must be visible at two feet, and invisible at four,’ says Charlie. ‘That way you’re not pretending it’s real, but there’s a sense of realness. Obviously here it’s a bit different. We might darken a new wooden beam so it blends in with the originals, but we wouldn’t falsify. No fake wormholes or smoke-marks. On the other hand, where you have to conjure up from nothing, it works better to do something completely modern, not faux-historical. Clean glass and steel, or whatever: something good in itself. The Courtaulds’ architect in the twenties mostly knew that.’

I’m not thinking about the twenties, I’m thinking that here Elizabeth and Anthony danced, here ambassadors were given audience and wedding feasts were held, nobles drank and fenced, and the children ran riot on wet days, perhaps, with the dogs barking around them. Did they come here when Edward’s sister Margaret of York had been safely married off to the Duke of Burgundy? What did it smell like, then? Velvets and flower-water? Sweet herbs and banquets? Latrines and fly-blown meat? Sweat and fear? What did it sound like? The court was famous across Europe for its music, but how did they hear it? Did it creep into Elizabeth’s ears as it does mine, and make her want to laugh, and cry, and love? She wasn’t in love with either of her husbands, it’s a fair guess. But there’s nothing – not a single whisper in a court full of her enemies – that murmurs of anyone else. Did she ever love someone so much that she hurt for joy, so much that it seemed beyond reason? Did she regret that she never had? 

There’s ancient dust gritty under my feet and outside a last late chisel rings like a bell on the stone. If I strain my ears enough, perhaps I might hear them. If I could only peer hard enough through this time-thickened, time-thinned air, they might come before my eyes.