The winners of our June Competition are as follows:
Copies of The Quincunx go to
Marjorie
Lynne H.
Copies of the Timequake trilogy go to
Ruan
Linda
Please send me your land addresses to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so I can arrange for your books to be sent.
And Congratulations!
Showing posts with label Linda Buckley-Archer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linda Buckley-Archer. Show all posts
Monday, 8 July 2013
Sunday, 30 June 2013
June Competition - double opportunity!
Competitions are open to UK residents only
Because Charles Palliser's new novel, Rustication, has been postponed till November, we are offering instead two signed copies of The Quincunx to the first commenters to answer this question correctly:
"He out-Dickenses Dickens" says former History Girl Essie Fox. What is the connection between John Huffam, the protagonist of The Quincunx, and Charles Dickens?
(The Quincunx is a long book, so two copies are roughly the equivalent of ten novels!)
And as a bonus, Linda Buckley-Archer is generously donating two sets of her Timequake trilogy, about Gideon (the Cutpurse). Her question is:
"In the context of eighteenth-century criminality, what was the difference between a highwayman and a cutpurse?"
You have till 7th July to enter. Winners will be announced on 8th July. Good luck!
Because Charles Palliser's new novel, Rustication, has been postponed till November, we are offering instead two signed copies of The Quincunx to the first commenters to answer this question correctly:
"He out-Dickenses Dickens" says former History Girl Essie Fox. What is the connection between John Huffam, the protagonist of The Quincunx, and Charles Dickens?
(The Quincunx is a long book, so two copies are roughly the equivalent of ten novels!)
And as a bonus, Linda Buckley-Archer is generously donating two sets of her Timequake trilogy, about Gideon (the Cutpurse). Her question is:
"In the context of eighteenth-century criminality, what was the difference between a highwayman and a cutpurse?"
You have till 7th July to enter. Winners will be announced on 8th July. Good luck!
Saturday, 29 June 2013
Charles Palliser interviewed by Linda Buckley-Archer
We are delighted to welcome our June guest, Charles Palliser, whose best-known book so far is The Quincunx. It is also a pleasure to welcome back Linda Buckley-Archer to the blog, who was one of our original History Girls. Sit back and enjoy a real treat!
The quintessentially English Charles Palliser was, in fact, born in the USA, in Massachusetts, near Boston. He arrived in England at the age of three and lives here still, in North London. A former academic, he read English at Oxford and taught nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature at Strathclyde University in Glasgow prior to becoming a writer. He is best known for The Quincunx, an epic work of gothic Victorian fiction which sold over a million copies worldwide and won him numerous accolades and legions of devoted fans. Publishers Weekly (US) commented that while “quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb.” The Guardian dubbed him “our leading contemporary Victorian novelist.” Following on from The Sensationist, Betrayals and The Unburied (another densely plotted Victorian mystery), his fifth novel, Rustication will be published this November in the US and the UK by W. W. Norton & Company. In anticipation of this exciting event, Charles kindly agreed to talk about his work with erstwhile History Girl, Linda Buckley-Archer.
LBA: The news that you are about to publish a new novel after a break of over ten years, will delight your many fans. Could you give them a flavour of what to expect in terms of genre, story and setting?
CP: The novel is in the form of a diary written by Richard, a boy of seventeen, in late December and early January 1863-64 and so it covers just that month. He comes home in disgrace and finds his mother and older sister in crisis following the mysterious death of his father while he was at Cambridge. From a position of affluence as the family of a high-ranking Church dignitary, they have mysteriously become almost destitute. They are now living in a big but dilapidated old house in a remote village on the South Coast of England where they seem to be ostracised by their neighbours. Each of the three members of the family is lying to the others and concealing various things. They squabble with increasing bitterness as the winter closes in, trapping them in the house together.
Inserted into the diary is a series of obscene and threatening anonymous letters which are spreading terror in the isolated community and are accompanied by increasingly violent acts against livestock.
Suspicion falls on Richard and he is, indeed, a troubled young man. Tormented by sexual feelings he feels guilty about and by remorse for the offence which led to his suspension from University, he resorts to alcohol and drugs and his mental equilibrium is gradually destabilised.
He becomes obsessed by a succession of girls and women whom he stalks and terrifies. Meanwhile he sexually exploits his mother’s maid-servant of fourteen. All this time, as hints and fragments of evidence suggest, a cunning plan is being carried out to commit a murder and pin the blame on an innocent person.
LBA: Like The Quincunx, your latest novel has an intriguing title. For those of us who have not come across the word before, could you define ‘rustication’?
CP: The word “rustication” essentially means something like “being in the countryside”. It has long been used by Oxford and Cambridge Universities (as well as some of the older public-schools) to mean “suspension” from the institution. The origin of that is the idea that if one left Oxford or Cambridge one was, in theory, being sent into the countryside – even though one might be going to a big city. In the novel, my central character, Richard, is suspended/rusticated from Cambridge and returns to the house of his mother and sister which is in a very remote part of the country. So both meanings apply.
LBA: The world that you create is wholly convincing and I was interested to learn that certain aspects of the story have their roots in real-life events.
CP: Yes, there are two main real-life events behind the novel.
I grew up with a story told me by my grandmother and my mother. In the late 1930 my grandparents and mother were living in a remote village in North Wales when someone began sending vicious anonymous letters. The letters mainly accused people of sexual misconduct and my grandmother was particularly evasive about that. My mother thought that was because the letters possibly accused her father - my grandfather - of having an affair. She remembered elements of the story very differently from her mother, which was in itself fascinating. They both told me what a devastating effect the letters had on the community. Not only did nobody know who was writing them so that everybody was a suspect, but nobody knew what other people were being told about themselves. And, of course, the truth or otherwise of the accusations was known only to the victims.
The second is a notorious murder case about twenty-five years ago. The police became convinced that a certain man was the killer of a young woman and they managed to entice him into a lonely-hearts correspondence with a policewoman who, guided by a forensic psychologist, pretended to be turned on by sadistic fantasies and tried to lure him into boasting about violent acts he had committed. The hope was that he would confess to the murder. I read a book that quoted the correspondence and argued that it showed that the man was a psychopath. I formed the opposite opinion and thought he was trying very hard but completely unsuccessfully to imagine what it would be like to be sexually excited by sadistic acts. It turned out that I was right and the man was completely innocent. That episode gave me the idea of writing a novel that would put the reader in the position of reading two texts and trying to decide if the same individual had written both of them and if he was a man with violent and perverted impulses.
LBA: The fiction of the Victorian era clearly exerts a powerful pull on you. What aspects of the historical period and its literature appeal to you most? If The Quincunx which – to quote the History Girls’ own Essie Fox – “out-Dickensed Dickens”, to what extent did you set out to reference Victorian mystery writers (such as Wilkie Collins) in Rustication?
CP: I’m so immersed in that literature that I don’t even do it consciously. But it seems to me that one of the best ways to keep a reader interested is to do what Wilkie Collins, in particular, does so brilliantly: tease and mislead so that as much as possible is put in doubt until the end.
LBA: To which author (living or dead) would you say you owe the greatest debt?
CP: There are too many. The list would begin with Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Faulkner, James.
LBA: Rustication is a relatively slim volume (certainly compared to The Quincunx), although the first draft, which I read, was substantially longer. How do you approach creating and editing your fiction? Is it a long, drawn-out affair or do you take a disciplined and methodical approach? Dickens and Collins both wrote their novels in instalments and to tight deadlines. Is this something that might have appealed to you?
CP: I wish I could write to a deadline but I seem to have to take a long time and write far more than I should and then in the final phase cut the whole thing in half – as I did with this novel. It’s a very wasteful way to work.
LBA: The ‘envelope’ structure of the novel presents to the reader a journal – the Journal of Richard Shenstone, 12th of December 1863 to 13th of January 1864 – sandwiched between a contemporary foreword and afterword which is penned by a certain ‘CP’. From the reader’s point of view, one of the many pleasures of Rustication is the skilful unravelling of the plot from a tightly restricted narrative viewpoint. How did you set about finding Richard Shenstone’s voice and was it a process you enjoyed?
CP: Keeping to Richard’s point of view was the challenge that made me want to write the book and almost prevented me from doing so. On the other hand, I think I found Richard’s voice fairly quickly but what was more difficult was making it modulate in response to the dramatic events of that single month. He begins the journal as a callow, boastful adolescent. By the end, that voice has changed greatly.
LBA: How did you keep track of the intricacies of the plot? Did you hold it in your head? Were there post-it notes pinned to your walls?
CP: I held the outline in my head but the details of the chronology had to be worked out very carefully on sheets of paper. There are many strands in the novel which had to be woven together in a way that made sense and yet kept crucial facts concealed. Achieving that was frustrating but absorbing.
LBA: You are always very generous in promoting other authors’ work, for example in the regular talks you host at the Stoke Newington bookshop. Is the process of being published something which you personally enjoy?
CP: It’s wonderful to be published but the greatest pleasure is in writing the book.
LBA: Finally, do you have any new projects in mind which you are prepared to share with us?
CP: I work on several novels simultaneously – a dreadful habit! – and one of them is going particularly well. It’s set in eastern Europe under the Nazi Occupation and I’m dealing with the question of how and whether decent values can survive in such conditions.
Many thanks for talking with us!
The quintessentially English Charles Palliser was, in fact, born in the USA, in Massachusetts, near Boston. He arrived in England at the age of three and lives here still, in North London. A former academic, he read English at Oxford and taught nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature at Strathclyde University in Glasgow prior to becoming a writer. He is best known for The Quincunx, an epic work of gothic Victorian fiction which sold over a million copies worldwide and won him numerous accolades and legions of devoted fans. Publishers Weekly (US) commented that while “quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb.” The Guardian dubbed him “our leading contemporary Victorian novelist.” Following on from The Sensationist, Betrayals and The Unburied (another densely plotted Victorian mystery), his fifth novel, Rustication will be published this November in the US and the UK by W. W. Norton & Company. In anticipation of this exciting event, Charles kindly agreed to talk about his work with erstwhile History Girl, Linda Buckley-Archer.
LBA: The news that you are about to publish a new novel after a break of over ten years, will delight your many fans. Could you give them a flavour of what to expect in terms of genre, story and setting?
CP: The novel is in the form of a diary written by Richard, a boy of seventeen, in late December and early January 1863-64 and so it covers just that month. He comes home in disgrace and finds his mother and older sister in crisis following the mysterious death of his father while he was at Cambridge. From a position of affluence as the family of a high-ranking Church dignitary, they have mysteriously become almost destitute. They are now living in a big but dilapidated old house in a remote village on the South Coast of England where they seem to be ostracised by their neighbours. Each of the three members of the family is lying to the others and concealing various things. They squabble with increasing bitterness as the winter closes in, trapping them in the house together.
Inserted into the diary is a series of obscene and threatening anonymous letters which are spreading terror in the isolated community and are accompanied by increasingly violent acts against livestock.
Suspicion falls on Richard and he is, indeed, a troubled young man. Tormented by sexual feelings he feels guilty about and by remorse for the offence which led to his suspension from University, he resorts to alcohol and drugs and his mental equilibrium is gradually destabilised.
He becomes obsessed by a succession of girls and women whom he stalks and terrifies. Meanwhile he sexually exploits his mother’s maid-servant of fourteen. All this time, as hints and fragments of evidence suggest, a cunning plan is being carried out to commit a murder and pin the blame on an innocent person.
LBA: Like The Quincunx, your latest novel has an intriguing title. For those of us who have not come across the word before, could you define ‘rustication’?
CP: The word “rustication” essentially means something like “being in the countryside”. It has long been used by Oxford and Cambridge Universities (as well as some of the older public-schools) to mean “suspension” from the institution. The origin of that is the idea that if one left Oxford or Cambridge one was, in theory, being sent into the countryside – even though one might be going to a big city. In the novel, my central character, Richard, is suspended/rusticated from Cambridge and returns to the house of his mother and sister which is in a very remote part of the country. So both meanings apply.
LBA: The world that you create is wholly convincing and I was interested to learn that certain aspects of the story have their roots in real-life events.
CP: Yes, there are two main real-life events behind the novel.
I grew up with a story told me by my grandmother and my mother. In the late 1930 my grandparents and mother were living in a remote village in North Wales when someone began sending vicious anonymous letters. The letters mainly accused people of sexual misconduct and my grandmother was particularly evasive about that. My mother thought that was because the letters possibly accused her father - my grandfather - of having an affair. She remembered elements of the story very differently from her mother, which was in itself fascinating. They both told me what a devastating effect the letters had on the community. Not only did nobody know who was writing them so that everybody was a suspect, but nobody knew what other people were being told about themselves. And, of course, the truth or otherwise of the accusations was known only to the victims.
The second is a notorious murder case about twenty-five years ago. The police became convinced that a certain man was the killer of a young woman and they managed to entice him into a lonely-hearts correspondence with a policewoman who, guided by a forensic psychologist, pretended to be turned on by sadistic fantasies and tried to lure him into boasting about violent acts he had committed. The hope was that he would confess to the murder. I read a book that quoted the correspondence and argued that it showed that the man was a psychopath. I formed the opposite opinion and thought he was trying very hard but completely unsuccessfully to imagine what it would be like to be sexually excited by sadistic acts. It turned out that I was right and the man was completely innocent. That episode gave me the idea of writing a novel that would put the reader in the position of reading two texts and trying to decide if the same individual had written both of them and if he was a man with violent and perverted impulses.
 |
| I have met Charles and this picture does not do him justice! - Mary Hoffman (ed) |
LBA: The fiction of the Victorian era clearly exerts a powerful pull on you. What aspects of the historical period and its literature appeal to you most? If The Quincunx which – to quote the History Girls’ own Essie Fox – “out-Dickensed Dickens”, to what extent did you set out to reference Victorian mystery writers (such as Wilkie Collins) in Rustication?
CP: I’m so immersed in that literature that I don’t even do it consciously. But it seems to me that one of the best ways to keep a reader interested is to do what Wilkie Collins, in particular, does so brilliantly: tease and mislead so that as much as possible is put in doubt until the end.
LBA: To which author (living or dead) would you say you owe the greatest debt?
CP: There are too many. The list would begin with Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Faulkner, James.
LBA: Rustication is a relatively slim volume (certainly compared to The Quincunx), although the first draft, which I read, was substantially longer. How do you approach creating and editing your fiction? Is it a long, drawn-out affair or do you take a disciplined and methodical approach? Dickens and Collins both wrote their novels in instalments and to tight deadlines. Is this something that might have appealed to you?
CP: I wish I could write to a deadline but I seem to have to take a long time and write far more than I should and then in the final phase cut the whole thing in half – as I did with this novel. It’s a very wasteful way to work.
LBA: The ‘envelope’ structure of the novel presents to the reader a journal – the Journal of Richard Shenstone, 12th of December 1863 to 13th of January 1864 – sandwiched between a contemporary foreword and afterword which is penned by a certain ‘CP’. From the reader’s point of view, one of the many pleasures of Rustication is the skilful unravelling of the plot from a tightly restricted narrative viewpoint. How did you set about finding Richard Shenstone’s voice and was it a process you enjoyed?
CP: Keeping to Richard’s point of view was the challenge that made me want to write the book and almost prevented me from doing so. On the other hand, I think I found Richard’s voice fairly quickly but what was more difficult was making it modulate in response to the dramatic events of that single month. He begins the journal as a callow, boastful adolescent. By the end, that voice has changed greatly.
LBA: How did you keep track of the intricacies of the plot? Did you hold it in your head? Were there post-it notes pinned to your walls?
CP: I held the outline in my head but the details of the chronology had to be worked out very carefully on sheets of paper. There are many strands in the novel which had to be woven together in a way that made sense and yet kept crucial facts concealed. Achieving that was frustrating but absorbing.
LBA: You are always very generous in promoting other authors’ work, for example in the regular talks you host at the Stoke Newington bookshop. Is the process of being published something which you personally enjoy?
CP: It’s wonderful to be published but the greatest pleasure is in writing the book.
LBA: Finally, do you have any new projects in mind which you are prepared to share with us?
CP: I work on several novels simultaneously – a dreadful habit! – and one of them is going particularly well. It’s set in eastern Europe under the Nazi Occupation and I’m dealing with the question of how and whether decent values can survive in such conditions.
Many thanks for talking with us!
Thursday, 2 August 2012
The Affair of the Poisons Part II (with a preliminary digression on the Olympics)
Linda Buckley-Archer
 |
| The Men's Time Trials in Teddington |
For three days Olympic cycling has taken over Bushy Park and
the surrounding roads. Miles of
barriers and bunting and Olympic flagpoles. It’s been a festival atmosphere where we live, in
Teddington, and the roar of the crowds drifted over the park this afternoon as
‘Wiggo’, Bradley Wiggins, fresh from his Tour de France triumph, won gold. He flashed by me on Chestnut Avenue (conceived
by Sir Christopher Wren) en route to Hampton Court Palace and victory. The herds of deer that normally roam
the park have been keeping a very low profile. It was so good to see Henry VIII’s old residence as a
backdrop for the crowning of a British sporting hero.
 |
| Waiting for Wiggins: Chestnut Avenue in Bushy Park with the roof of Hampton Court Palace in the distance |
And what did you all think of the 2012 Opening Ceremony and
its historical agenda? I loved the
whole daring concept of the evening: the crowd-pleasing James Bond and Mr Bean
sketches, of course, but also the
idiosyncratic attempt to introduce the history of Britain into the
spectacle. It was probably mad to
try, but they pulled it off, and, oh, those chimneys and the smelting of the
Olympic rings! It was the dramatic
equivalent of rendering the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a
haiku. Thanks, I suspect, to
screenwriter and Carnegie medal-winning children’s writer Frank Cottrell Boyce,
who did the storyboard, not only British history but also children’s literature (and children) were celebrated in the spectacle.
It certainly raised a cheer from me.
Versailles and the Affair of the Poisons: Part II
 |
| The Palace of Versailles |
In June I wrote
a post about a 17th-century
French scandal involving poisoning and focused on one individual, the Marquise
de Brinvilliers, who was burned for her crime. As it turned out, the Brinvilliers case was only the tip of
the iceberg. Once La Reynie, Chief
of the Paris Police, started to dig about, and discovered the sheer scale of
the problem, he determined to stamp it out. It was not uncommon, it seemed, for people across the social classes, including the nobles at Versailles, to procure poison
from individuals masquerading as harmless ‘fortune-tellers’. The Chambre Ardente, a special tribunal, was set up in 1679. It was to meet in secret to investigate
the affair. One notorious purveyor
of love potions and poisons to high-ranking individuals at court was Madame
Voisin. The woman was arrested,
interrogated and tortured. She
talked...and talked. Every day the
names of more and more noble courtiers were dragged into the affair: the Duchesse d’Angouleme, the Princesse
de Tingry and even the maid and sister-in-law of Madame de Montespan, the
King’s mistress. The whole
of France talked of nothing else. “Men’s lives,” said the horrified La Reynie,
“ are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is everywhere – in
Paris, in the suburbs and in the provinces.” That persons
close to the King were implicated was especially worrying – partly on account
of the scandal, but more importantly on account of Louis’s safety.
 |
| La Reynie |
Despite La Reynie’s zeal, it was when witnesses started
testifying that the King’s mistress herself, Madame de Montespan, had had
regular dealings with Madame Voisin (an accusation which Voisin never
confirmed) that things started to fall apart. As far as the King was concerned it was unthinkable that she
should be tried and imprisoned. The
tribunal consequently collapsed.
In order to avoid Madame de Montespan’s involvement, all evidence
implicating her was to be suppressed by means of the lettre de cachet (detention without trial). Nancy Mitford (in The Sun King) notes the final tally of punishments meted out by the
Chambre Ardente:
[...]36 burnt to death
after torture; 4 sent to the galleys; 36
banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and 30 acquitted. The fortunate 81 who remained and who
benefited by lettres de cachet [insofar as they weren’t executed], were chained
up in dungeons all over France for the rest of their lies, in solitary
confinement. If they spoke to
their gaolers they were whipped – Mme de Montespan’s name must not be bandied
about the French prisons. Thirty-seven
years later some these people were still alive.
I first read about l’Affaire
des Poisons while doing some preliminary research at Versailles. I remember looking out on the exquisite
grounds and thinking how horribly deceptive appearances can be. But then, that’s why we invented
novelists and historians...
Happy Holidays!
Monday, 2 July 2012
My Favourite Historical Character: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown
The Genius of Place - or the Man
who would improve on Nature
Linda Buckley-Archer
I’m always drawn to his kind, quizzical eyes whenever
I visit the vine at Hampton Court - which I do, absurdly often. I don’t, however, know much at all about
the man. But what I do like – very
much – is his eye (to borrow Pope's phrase) for the genius of place.
‘Now
there’, said [‘Capability’ Brown], pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and
there’, pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make
a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view,
a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’
Lancelot Brown speaking about the grammar of
design in 1782.
_Brown_by_Nathaniel_Dance,_(later_Sir_Nathaniel_Dance-Holland,_Bt)_cropped.jpg) |
| Lancelot 'Capability' Brown |
The
wheel has turned full circle. From
being dragged around endless National Trust properties as a young child, I gradually
progressed from protesting, to acquiescing and, ultimately, to being the one doing the dragging. Our school holidays were punctuated
with trips that involved crunching up the long, dusty drives of the stately
homes of England in our old maroon Ford Consul. In its glove compartment, the well-thumbed book of National
Trust properties was always to hand.
All those picnics in grassy car parks, the bracing walks through the surrounding
countryside, the slower walks (oh, so slow) through walled kitchen gardens and
herbaceous borders. And all the
while my horticulturally-minded parents would admire varieties and (oh, the shame
of it) would occasionally secrete a choice leaf cutting into pocket or handbag.
If we were lucky, there was the
reward of a tub of ice cream at the end of it. It instilled in us children a certain idea of Englishness; I
suppose it brought to life for me certain aspects of England’s history.
Something
slowly accreted in my impressionable young brain during all those long summer
afternoons. What it was, I think,
was a kind of burgeoning, unthinking love of the English landscape. It was not the architectural jewel
rescued by the National Trust that affected me, but rather the land into which
it had been set. What I did not
appreciate until much, much later, was that what I took to be England’s lovely countryside
was often, in point of fact, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s idealised vision of
it. Unlike the geometric designs
typified by Le Notre’s plan for Versailles a century earlier, Brown turned his
back on formality, straight lines and symmetry, and took his inspiration, instead, from Nature. A good percentage of the beautiful ‘views’ I grew up admiring
were actually examples of his beautiful landscaping.
Writing
in the 40s, Brenda Colvin commented that “it was in the eighteenth century, in
England, that garden and landscape first came together and were seen to be in
relationship. The idea of
designing gardens as part of the wider landscape, and the wider landscape as a
garden, was new, and was not fully grasped even in the eighteenth
century.” It was this idea
that was embodied in Brown’s
designs. For him the garden was
inseparable from the landscape in which it was situated. Anything that smacked of artificiality Lancelot Brown
abhorred: formal planting,
hedgerows, fences were all torn out. Lawns were laid right up to the house to avoid the
division between garden and landscape. Earth was shifted (64,000 tons of it at
Petworth) to generate the perfect curve or sweep of land. Streams were damned to
form serpentine lakes and breathtaking cascades (he famously flooded Vanbrugh’s
bridge at Blenheim Palace in so doing). Majestic single specimens or clumps of trees were planted to
highlight and accent nature’s bounty.
For one of his designs Brown planted over 100,000 trees to create the
desired effect. Hugely influential
and widely copied, Brown’s designs still draw admirers from all over the
world.
Born
in Northumberland in 1716, Brown served a long apprenticeship under William
Kent at Stowe. In a career that
spanned five decades (he died in 1783), Brown travelled the length and breadth of the land, and was
nothing if not prolific. In his long
career he worked on upwards of 170 of the great gardens of England: these included Hampton Court, Petworth, Blenheim, Burghley, Longleat,
Wycombe Abbey, Syon House, Temple Newsam, Harewood House. Compton
Verney, Claremont, Stourhead and Warwick Castle. Whether you realise it or not, you will probably have seen
his labours. He also planted the Great Vine at Hampton Court in around 1768, and you
can still buy the grapes in season (which are delicious and have a lovely bloom
to them). I understand that you
can even acquire plants propagated from it. Around thirty of the gardens he designed are open to
the public. In this year of the 2012
London Olympics, whose opening ceremony will be celebrating England’s green and
pleasant land, I would like to propose a toast to the inimitable Lancelot
‘Capability’ Brown, a man of whom it can be truly said that he transformed the
English landscape.
If anyone is interested in finding out
more about the man and his work, may I recommend Dorothy Stroud’s classic biography
Capability Brown, as well as the more
recent The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot
‘Capability’ Brown by Jane Brown.
Linda Buckley-Archer’s Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon
& Schuster in the UK and the US.
Saturday, 2 June 2012
POISON! (Part 1)
Linda
Buckley-Archer
 |
| The Sun King |
When a spate of poisonings in the 1670s threatened to bring down some of the greatest in the land, the ‘Affaire des Poisons” as it became known, drew all eyes to the court of the Sun King at Versailles. Once the scale of the problem began to emerge, it was clear that something had to be done about the macabre fashion for getting rid of an unwanted relative with a touch of arsenic or antimony. This fascinating – and disturbing – episode is too involved for a single post so I have decided to split it into two.
I was first
alerted to the ‘Affair of the Poisons’ by this intriguing (and famous) description in a
letter written by the ever observant and witty Madame de Sévigné:
At length it is all over: La Brinvilliers is in the air; after her
execution her poor little body was thrown into a large fire, and her ashes
dispersed by the wind, so that whenever we breathe, we shall inhale some
particles of her, and by the communication of the minute spirits, we may be all
infected with the desire of poisoning, to our no small surprise.
 |
| La Marquise de la Brinvilliers on the day of her execution |
Madame de
Sévigné (whose abundant correspondence is a major source for historians of the
period) had just returned from what can only be described as a society
execution. Everyone who was anyone
was in attendance. Indeed, Madame
de S. was more than a little put out by the poor view her position in the
great crowd afforded her.
 |
| The Marquise confessed everything under torture |
The lady
whose remaining particles were floating in the air, the Marquise de la
Brinvilliers, was an unlikely murderess: the sort of nice, quiet woman who
liked to do good works and visit the sick in hospital. In fact, rumour had it
that it was on the sick that she had tried out her poisons before inflicting
them on those closer to home. La
Brinvilliers had taken a lover and, in order to inherit, had poisoned first her
father (it took him eight months to die an agonising death though she nursed
him conscientiously), and then started on her two brothers. She was finally brought to justice and,
under water torture, confessed everything.
Though she
quickly became a celebrity ‘poisoner’ (Alexandre Dumas Senior wrote about her,
and, later, an opera told her story), la Marquise de Brinvilliers was not alone
in looking to poison to sort out her home life. The Chief of the Paris Police, Daubray, was poisoned
by his wife, and some maintained that the death of ‘Madame’ (Henrietta, the
King’s sister-in-law) was also no accident. When Daubray was replaced by La
Reynie (who soon won respect for his policing of the city), the latter began to
suspect that poisoning was a lot more
common than he had thought. A priest from the cathedral of Notre
Dame came to the chief of police to confide something troubling to him. More and more, during confession,
people were admitting to the priest that they had poisoned their relatives. La Reynie listened, and believed him,
and became determined to tackle
this unpalatable epidemic. But neither La Reynie, nor the King, suspected the
true scale of the problem, nor who would be dragged into the Affair of the
Poisons.
Linda
Buckley-Archer’s Time Quake Trilogy
is published by Simon & Schuster.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
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...
Monday, 2 April 2012
An Historical Dictator by Linda Buckley-Archer
My contribution this month belongs to our ongoing series of ‘the-history-teacher-who-inspired-me’ posts. I do have a slight problem in fulfilling the requirement of the series in that I did not actually have a history teacher who inspired me. Not at school, at any rate. Any early curiosity I had for the past can be attributed to fiction rather than teachers: Rosemary Sutcliff, Roger Lancelyn Green and Cynthia Harnett. I found a typo in my first draft of this post: “ the history teacher who expired me” – a slip which says it all.
All recollection of GCSE History seems to have evaporated into the ether but I do remember A-Level History classes with some clarity. Every lesson followed precisely the same format: the teacher entered the classroom, perched on the edge of the desk, took out her notes and ... dictated. I was a new girl – my father had got a promotion and the move meant I had to enter the sixth form at the beginning of the spring term. At first I thought that my history teacher would presently get to the end of her notes, and then, perhaps, we could go on to discuss and debate – or at least have a break from the interminable dictation. But no. This was her pedagogic method, and it had more than a whiff of anaesthetic about it. Nothing sank in. English that is spoken slowly enough to be taken down in longhand, with added punctuation, quickly transforms into abstract sounds, the verbal equivalent of those lava lamps so fashionable at the time. King James, comma, anxious to placate Parliament, comma, turned, comma, inevitably, comma, to Robert C–E-C-I-L for advice, and make sure you’ve spelt advice with a ‘c’. As the school bell rang, the dictation would stop, and I would wake up, not quite sure where I’d been. The technique deadened my intellectual curiosity; it attacked the fierce belief in education my parents had tried to instil in me.
I was saved, on this, as on countless other occasions in my life, by L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E. A friend and I had conspired to study law together at university, but the night before I was due to hand in my completed UCAS form, I came out in a cold sweat. Was I condemning myself to a life of dry facts? Would studying law (the horror, the horror) be like history dictation? Why, oh why had I dropped Eng. Lit. for History? In a truly life- changing moment, I crossed out all the law degree courses and replaced them with French Lang. and Lit. And I am so glad that I did. Getting to know aspects of French culture has been one of the great pleasures of my life. What is more, I can trace my predilection for history to those literary texts which made me want to find out about the times that had formed them. So, Racine and Molière gave me a certain notion of the Sun King and Versailles, Camus informed me about the Franco-Algerian conflict, while my concept of 19th-century France is a rather bizarre mishmash shaped by my readings of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant, et al. It would be true to say that, in my youth, literature taught me about history, and I turned to history to get more out of literature.
There was one university teacher who, while she didn’t inspire in me a love of history per se, talked about the past in such a way that she made it vital and thrilling. Madame Thysse was a Frenchwoman close to retirement who taught us explication de texte. Once a week, using the rigorous, formal method she drummed into us, we dissected a page of literary French in a positively forensic manner. She had her favourite French stylists and her enthusiasm was infectious.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who died at the age of eighty-one in 1954, was, as far as Mme Thysse was concerned, the unsurpassed star of French prose, and by the end of the year I think she had persuaded us all. Colette would have belonged to Mme Thysse’s parents’ generation and, a Parisian herself, our teacher would make numerous, anecdotal asides about Paris during the Belle Epoque, during the First World War, and during the Nazi occupation. Fuelled with appropriate passages from Colette, those lessons were filled with images of Parisians dancing around kitchen tables in time to the rhythmic pounding of German guns, or hiding Jewish families in attics, or gleefully gathering up basketfuls of stunned fishes after Nazi bombs had exploded in the Seine.
I suspect I still confuse my teacher’s family anecdotes with Colette’s fiction and historical fact. But the great thing is that half a century of French history has always felt real. And, for that, I owe a debt to Mme Thysse.
Thinking back to History A-Level, I suppose that writing historical fiction has achieved what any amount of dictation never did: I now like and read history for its own sake. Despite still feeling a fraud blogging with ‘proper’ History Girls, at least nowadays, in amongst the pile of books dropped from my sleeping hand at the side of my bed, you are as likely to find Simon Schama as Andrew Miller, Antonia Fraser as Rose Tremain.
I’ll give the last word to the inspiring Colette. I’ve had her advice on my wall so long the ink has almost faded away: When you are capable of ensuring that today’s work is equal to yesterday’s you will have earned your stripes. For I am convinced that talent is nothing other than the possibility of resembling oneself from one day to the next whatever else might befall you.
The Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster (UK and US)
All recollection of GCSE History seems to have evaporated into the ether but I do remember A-Level History classes with some clarity. Every lesson followed precisely the same format: the teacher entered the classroom, perched on the edge of the desk, took out her notes and ... dictated. I was a new girl – my father had got a promotion and the move meant I had to enter the sixth form at the beginning of the spring term. At first I thought that my history teacher would presently get to the end of her notes, and then, perhaps, we could go on to discuss and debate – or at least have a break from the interminable dictation. But no. This was her pedagogic method, and it had more than a whiff of anaesthetic about it. Nothing sank in. English that is spoken slowly enough to be taken down in longhand, with added punctuation, quickly transforms into abstract sounds, the verbal equivalent of those lava lamps so fashionable at the time. King James, comma, anxious to placate Parliament, comma, turned, comma, inevitably, comma, to Robert C–E-C-I-L for advice, and make sure you’ve spelt advice with a ‘c’. As the school bell rang, the dictation would stop, and I would wake up, not quite sure where I’d been. The technique deadened my intellectual curiosity; it attacked the fierce belief in education my parents had tried to instil in me.
I was saved, on this, as on countless other occasions in my life, by L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E. A friend and I had conspired to study law together at university, but the night before I was due to hand in my completed UCAS form, I came out in a cold sweat. Was I condemning myself to a life of dry facts? Would studying law (the horror, the horror) be like history dictation? Why, oh why had I dropped Eng. Lit. for History? In a truly life- changing moment, I crossed out all the law degree courses and replaced them with French Lang. and Lit. And I am so glad that I did. Getting to know aspects of French culture has been one of the great pleasures of my life. What is more, I can trace my predilection for history to those literary texts which made me want to find out about the times that had formed them. So, Racine and Molière gave me a certain notion of the Sun King and Versailles, Camus informed me about the Franco-Algerian conflict, while my concept of 19th-century France is a rather bizarre mishmash shaped by my readings of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant, et al. It would be true to say that, in my youth, literature taught me about history, and I turned to history to get more out of literature.
There was one university teacher who, while she didn’t inspire in me a love of history per se, talked about the past in such a way that she made it vital and thrilling. Madame Thysse was a Frenchwoman close to retirement who taught us explication de texte. Once a week, using the rigorous, formal method she drummed into us, we dissected a page of literary French in a positively forensic manner. She had her favourite French stylists and her enthusiasm was infectious.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who died at the age of eighty-one in 1954, was, as far as Mme Thysse was concerned, the unsurpassed star of French prose, and by the end of the year I think she had persuaded us all. Colette would have belonged to Mme Thysse’s parents’ generation and, a Parisian herself, our teacher would make numerous, anecdotal asides about Paris during the Belle Epoque, during the First World War, and during the Nazi occupation. Fuelled with appropriate passages from Colette, those lessons were filled with images of Parisians dancing around kitchen tables in time to the rhythmic pounding of German guns, or hiding Jewish families in attics, or gleefully gathering up basketfuls of stunned fishes after Nazi bombs had exploded in the Seine.
I suspect I still confuse my teacher’s family anecdotes with Colette’s fiction and historical fact. But the great thing is that half a century of French history has always felt real. And, for that, I owe a debt to Mme Thysse.
Thinking back to History A-Level, I suppose that writing historical fiction has achieved what any amount of dictation never did: I now like and read history for its own sake. Despite still feeling a fraud blogging with ‘proper’ History Girls, at least nowadays, in amongst the pile of books dropped from my sleeping hand at the side of my bed, you are as likely to find Simon Schama as Andrew Miller, Antonia Fraser as Rose Tremain.
I’ll give the last word to the inspiring Colette. I’ve had her advice on my wall so long the ink has almost faded away: When you are capable of ensuring that today’s work is equal to yesterday’s you will have earned your stripes. For I am convinced that talent is nothing other than the possibility of resembling oneself from one day to the next whatever else might befall you.
The Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster (UK and US)
Friday, 2 March 2012
Walking The Line: Culture Shock by Linda Buckley-Archer
One of the big thrills of discovering historical fiction as a child (in my case, the usual suspects: Sutcliff, Treece, Garfield) was the realisation that – even if these characters were long dead, and even if they wore different clothes and spoke a little strangely – fundamentally they thought, felt, feared, loved and hoped just like us. And, arguably, writers who deal with history and its relation to the present, within the context of fiction, have a vested interest in creating empathy. If readers can’t relate to the protagonist of a novel, the writer has a major problem.
But there’s the rub: our ancestors weren’t ‘just like us’: they were the product of another age, and another culture, and therein lies the interest. So it’s up to the novelist to walk that line between remaining true to the mindset of a period and creating a narrative that reaches out to a modern reader. Historian Robert Darnton, in his brilliant, The Great Cat Massacre, puts it this way:
We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock.
Without wishing to put you all off your breakfasts, Darnton (focusing primarily on eighteenth-century France), describes the widespread practice of cat torture and cat killings. In Semur, on the dimanche des brandons , children would tie cats to poles and roast them over the huge bonfires that celebrated the first Sunday of Lent. In Aix-en-Provence, at the Fête-Dieu, they played something called the jeu du chat which consisted of throwing cats high in the air and smashing them onto the ground. Darnton also tells the story of the printers who, in 1730s Paris, amused themselves by catching all the cats they could in the neighbourhood, giving them a mock trial and then proceeding to hang them. Darnton comments, fascinatingly, on the folklore and rich social symbolism that fed into this grotesque feline massacre. It is not easy, today, to countenance a sense of humour quite this Rabelaisian (Darnton’s epithet – I can think of a few more).
I note that Hilary Mantel, whose Bring up the Bodies we anxiously await, wrote on similar lines in the latest Royal Society of Literature Review. Outlining her approach to writing historical fiction, she comments:
Generally speaking, our ancestors were not tolerant, liberal or democratic. Your characters probably did not read the Guardian, and very likely believed in hellfire, beating children and hanging malefactors. Can you live with that?
Your immediate reaction to Hilary Mantel’s remark may well be, yes, if you can’t live with that you shouldn’t be a historical novelist. How many writers, though, would have the courage to pay more than lip service to a dictum that demands total adherence both to the letter and spirit of historical accuracy? Indeed, how many editors would not be making frantic pencil comments about losing readers in the margin of the first draft? I’m playing devil’s advocate, here, but, actually, it is no small thing. Eve Edwards wrote a thought-provoking post last month (entitled Censoring the Past), questioning whether we had the right to sanitise vocabulary from a less politically correct age, and I suppose I’m just extending that conversation. We all know how well children respond to the ‘yuk’ factor of history, particularly when it is presented in a darkly comic way. But in my capacity as a YA novelist, would I dare create a protagonist (and I don’t mean a villain) who believed (like his peers) that it was okay to beat his younger siblings, and to enjoy a good day out at a public hanging, and thought that it was acceptable to burn a cat alive and funny to hear its cries of agony? I suppose that my non-committal answer would be: I’m all for administering doses of culture shock but I’m also aware of the need for walking the line.
Ask yourself these questions. If you were writing about a child in 17th–century Burgundy, would you:
a) Include or omit the interesting historical detail about burning cats on the first Sunday of Lent?
b) Presuming that you did decide to include the detail, would you have your protagonist observe or actively participate in the cat burning?
c) If your protagonist observes only, would you allow your character to hoot with laughter along with everyone else as the wretched animal is incinerated, or would you have him or her turn mournfully away to camera and bemoan the cruelty of man?
Or, d) Would you tear the relevant page out of your notebook and conveniently forget you ever came across this disturbing historical detail. After all, your readers will never know...
Linda Buckley-Archer's Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster (US and UK)
Thursday, 2 February 2012
CHARACTER or THE LURE OF POINTY TREE GARDENS
by Linda Buckley-Archer
We’ve had some wonderfully historical and robustly technical posts over the last few days which have been fascinating and daunting in equal measure. So I’m devoting today’s post to something I feel more comfortable with: the art of make-believe. In particular, the process of creating, and responding to, characters in fiction. I put the blame for this choice firmly at Louis XIV’s door.
The more research I do on 17th-century Versailles (for a YA/crossover novel I’m in the midst of writing), the more I find myself getting sucked into the character of the Sun King. I have ‘made up’ the principal players and was going to avoid the distraction of bringing Louis himself to life with all that this would entail. I vowed that I would refuse him dialogue or any ‘close-ups’, and was going to restrict myself to third-hand information and an occasional ‘long-shot’ of Louis XIV wandering about what the National Theatre of Brent was pleased to call his ‘pointy tree garden’. But I’m conflicted, to say the least – and feel myself cracking.
Louis’s manners were impeccable, he would even lift his hat to a chamber maid, and he could be charming company. Contemporary accounts also reveal a man capable of acts of touching sensitivity and kindness. Love and hunting took up a lot of time. He adored witty, intelligent women and was devoted to his hunting dogs (see picture of Nonne, Ponne and Bonne) which he fed himself, in his private quarters, with biscuits specially prepared by his chef.
However, his courtiers were often reported to have literally quaked in the monarch’s presence - and for good reason. Louis had it in him to be hard and cruel. For example, when the mother of a workman who had been killed in a building accident at Versailles shouted at him from afar, the King had her taken away and flogged, despite pleas for leniency (her son had, after all, given his life for Louis XIV’s latest house extension). And then there was the notorious man in the iron mask affair: an anonymous ‘man of quality’ left to rot in solitary confinement for more than thirty years for an unnamed crime. So this Bourbon king, around whom revolved one of the most dazzling courts Europe has ever produced, is at once a character who is intriguing and psychologically complex and, for the novelist, a tempting figure to fictionalise. He also, apparently, had terribly good legs.
I have sketched out a few potential scenes and have written some halting lines of dialogue while attempting to mentally ‘inhabit’ this iconic figure. But my instincts are telling me to back off: the Sun King is too ‘big’; he may end up unbalancing my plot. Or it could be that, quite reasonably, I am intimidated at the thought of finding his ‘voice’, and of filling in factual holes with fictional putty (or, I suppose, vice versa) in order to make my narrative work. In any case, my difficulty with Louis XIV has forced me to focus, in recent days, on the function and creation of the purely fictional character.
In praising My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, in a post last week, Catherine Johnson reminded us what a bizarre and wonderful process is the peopling of a novel, and the subsequent interaction of those characters with the world outside the author’s head. Catherine commented that she had to stop reading the novel as soon as she suspected something awful was going to happen to Nadine and Riley. “How old am I?” Catherine asked. “Too old to care that much about fictional characters surely.” Those of us who have not grown out of fiction know exactly what she means.
The fictional character is a powerful creation, and a great one can enter the reader’s psyche as efficiently as a virus can breach a cell wall. I suspect that I do ‘care’ about Jane Austen’s Emma, William Boyd’s Logan Mountstuart (Any Human Heart), Jane Gardam’s Betty (The Man in the Wooden Hat) or Tolkien’s Frodo (T.L.O.T.R.) more than I do about many flesh-and-bloods. Though I’m not sure how healthy this is. If I were absolutely forced to choose between saving an anonymous mortal life and pressing a button that would destroy all traces of Philip Pullman’s Lyra and her daemon for eternity, I’d do the right thing – of course – but with a heavy heart.
These ‘made-up’ characters have been woven into the warp and weft of our lives, and it’s easy to forget that someone else’s imagination gave birth to them. Even stranger, for an author, is when readers insist that your characters wouldn’t behave in a certain way (how dare they?). Yet, given that fiction only properly ‘happens’ in the mind of the reader, who, in the end should have the last word on a character’s inner life?
Characters, even when they portray ‘real’ people are not real, and the language they use, when compared to a transcript of ‘real’ dialogue, is not real. We understand this, and yet, among the most compelling aspects of reading (and writing) are those encounters with fictional characters who truly speak to us. So, as readers we become practiced in the art of suspending our disbelief, and as writers we become practiced in the art of concocting fictional details so that the reader can be persuaded to fulfil their side of the fictional bargain.
Characters need to have the semblance, at least, of ‘completeness’. Readers don’t need to know everything about them (as ever, good writing is all about the telling detail, synecdoche, the part standing for the whole) but they do, arguably, need to feel they understand them. And it is particularly important that - like real people – they can surprise us. It is the curious ‘autonomy’ of the fictional character, this capacity for ‘freedom’, which makes the writer want to go on writing and the reader want to go on reading. If we sense, as readers, that a character is the writer’s puppet, the novel ceases to be a shared journey and starts, instead, to feel like a mechanical exercise. So, to go back to Catherine’s point, the idea that ‘fictional constructs’ have free will and a unique identity, and that when readers encounter them – as so many words on a page - they may actually begin to care about them, is simultaneously absurd and, for many, the raison d’être of the novel: that is, to know, or to imagine that you know, what it is like to be another human being.
Monday, 2 January 2012
Writing on Baltasar Gracián’s Wall
Linda Buckley-Archer
On New Year’s Day Mary Hoffman blogged about the two-faced Janus, a god who looks both forwards and backwards and, at this resolution-making dawn of 2012, I suppose that this post does the same, provoked in part by mild guilt about avoiding invitations to join Facebook and in part by a 17th century Jesuit’s advice on how to conduct one’s life.
A French friend of mine has just got to the age of sixty without ever having owned a television; another dear friend still refuses to have a dishwasher (the horror, the horror) so I guess, in comparison, a pocket of Facebook resistance isn’t so extreme. Can it really be true that there are over 30 million users in the U.K. alone? But when, as I witnessed last week in London, an elderly lady steps onto a train and calls out to the equally elderly friend seeing her off: Facebook me! it’s pretty clear which way the tide is turning. So I have a suspicion that I am in danger of being left high and dry. While I like the way it works as a verb, I don’t, in fact, facebook. I did dip my toe in the water for a week or two a couple of years ago and took it out again pretty quickly. This is not a King Canutish thing. It is simply that my procrastination quota is already well provided for with other daily habits. I have a novel to finish and it’s taking me far too long already. The History Girls blogspot is perhaps not the most appropriate forum to discuss the pros and cons of Facebook but feel free to comment and tell me that I’m wrong, that the extra time spent in front of my computer screen is worth it, and that it will enrich my life more than I know.
The link between Facebook and the 17th-century Jesuit I mentioned earlier is a 21st-century novel that the reading group to which I have belonged for the last twelve years has just elected to read. Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer prize-winning Middlesex has been perched on the upper reaches of my reading mountain for an inexcusably long time. It is still there (I have good intentions) but we are all now reading his third novel, The Marriage Plot. Just for the record, I am half-way through and am both hooked on its premise and enamoured of Eugenides’s prose. It starts with a killer quote: People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about. This intriguing assertion is one of Francois de la Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, penned during the reign of Louis XIV. Eugenides’s novel elegantly extemporises on this theme, juxtaposing the notion of love as a social construct with the visceral and agonising reality of love as experienced by his heroine.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
However, it is on account of de la Rochefoucauld’s Maximes that I mention The Marriage Plot in today’s post. At this time of year, when we are apt to cast an eye over the balance sheet of our lives, La Rochefoucauld’s brilliant, trenchant and often caustic insights into human nature seem particularly appropriate. His maxims are mostly condensed into one or two lines, concentrated like a good stock, and are as relevant today as ever they were. That our actions are mostly driven by self-interest has certainly not changed in the last three and a half centuries. Here are a couple of my personal favourites:
Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés.
(Our virtues are mostly only our vices in disguise.)
and
Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui.
We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)
The court of the Sun King at Versailles, this goldfish bowl society, where wit was more often than not the weapon of choice, lapped up de la Rochefoucauld’s fiercely perceptive observations. While researching this period for my current novel I wanted to find someone whose teachings, or whose world view, my protagonist could look to when reflecting on how to survive at court. I was very tempted by the Maximes but, in the end, was drawn to a precursor of de la Rochefoucauld, a Spanish Jesuit, Baltasar Gracián. Gracián’s writings were translated and widely read in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Marquise de Sablé, for instance, whose salon de la Rochefoucauld attended, had certainly read his aphorisms in the original Spanish. In comparison to de la Rochefoucauld, Baltasar Gracián arguably aimed less to dazzle than to advise his reader how to survive the vicissitudes of life. Gracián himself had a troubled career. He repeatedly disobeyed his superiors – publishing without their permission – and was ultimately sent into exile by the Jesuits where he was forbidden to write and where, presumably, he followed his own good advice.
I am grateful to the historian Anthony Grafton who, during the course of a recent interview, introduced me to Gracián’s work. He told me the story of a German left-wing intellectual and Gracián scholar, Werner Krauss, who was incarcerated by the Nazis during WW2. Apparently Krauss used the teachings of Gracián to help him resist cracking under torture. Don’t reveal what you are thinking. Don’t reveal what you are feeling. Be hard and rigid, like a billiard ball so that you will bounce off other people. Cultivate prudence, good sense, self-mastery, coolness.
Poetic and powerful, the 300 aphorisms that make up The Art of Worldly Wisdom (as translated by Joseph Jacobs) are a revelation. If, like me, you are new to them, take a look at them and see just how relevant and contemporary they feel. Some of the aphorisms certainly constitute a manual for social success. Make people depend on you, he advises. Avoid outshining your superiors; possess the art of conversation; don’t expose your weaknesses; learn how to deflect trouble onto someone else; don’t waste favours. Other aphorisms are profoundly moving. He writes of the art of letting things alone, the importance of recognising unlucky days and how there is no desert like that of living without friends.
How wonderful it is that a 17th-century Jesuit can reach forward to our time and speak to us with such clarity. And how sad that we can’t reciprocate. But wait – perhaps we can! Which brings me back to Facebook. Because actually, having just googled him, it appears that Baltasar Gracián is on Facebook. You can poke him. You can write on his wall. It’s almost worth breaking a New Year’s resolution and capitulating under the sheer weight of Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site. For as Gracián himself advises: “Have friends. A friend is a second self. Every friend is good and wise for his friend; between them everything turns to good.”
A Very Happy New Year to One and All.
Friday, 2 December 2011
A Trip to the Sir John Soane’s Museum
by Linda Buckley-Archer
Our excuse was a group visit to the home of architect Sir John Soane – which has been preserved and renovated to appear as it would have done at the time of his death – and it is my personal take on the museum which is the subject of today’s post.
Ten years ago I told a friend that I was starting work on a children’s novel set in eighteenth-century London. She immediately said: I will take you to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – you will LOVE it. So she did, and I did, and I have done ever since. In fact, the dates didn’t quite fit in with my fictional narrative but Lincoln’s Inn Fields itself became a setting which I returned to in all three volumes of The Gideon Trilogy. When I subsequently found both a literary agent and a publisher within minutes walk of the museum, visits to the S.J.S.M. became a regular event and it won a firm place in my subjective London atlas. As a novelist rather than an historian, it is less the detail (and heaven knows there’s enough detail here to satisfy anyone) than the spirit of the place that keeps drawing me back. It is a unique space, a London gem, a step back into the home and mind of a great English architect and inveterate collector of artefacts.
As far as I am concerned, London is a never-ending source of wormholes to the past: to walk this city’s streets is to be part of an historical continuum that in varying degrees fascinates, illuminates, humbles and occasionally disappoints (though, as that great biographer of the capital, Peter Ackroyd, asserts, London always survives). So, in the midst of such riches, why should you divert from your path in order to visit the Sir John Soane’s Museum? In no particular order, here are some of the reasons why I suggest that you should: its perfect situation, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the iconic yellow drawing room with its delightful views over the square; the astonishing folding Picture Room (Soane’s ingenious solution to running out of space for his paintings was to insert some extra ‘walls’ and put them on hinges); Soane’s collection of Hogarths (The Rake’s Progress and The Election) and his Canalettos (views of Venice); the Crypt crammed with treasures from the ancient world; Soane’s use of glass, of convex mirrors, and his opening up of dark spaces in order to create effects with light; the juxtaposition of the domestic with the astonishing, cluttered legacy of one of the world’s great collectors of artefacts, ancient and modern. The house is such a tardis: so packed with fascinating objects you always leave vowing to come back, yet it is small enough for you to appreciate properly in one visit. Here is a link to the museum’s website which will give you a taste of the delights contained within its walls – although is absolutely no substitute for going there in person:
Photograph of Lincoln's Inn Fields by Stephen Craven for the Geograph project.
This benign and kindly face belongs to Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Apprenticed to the architect George Dance, he studied architecture at the Royal Academy and won a travelling scholarship that allowed him to spend two years in Italy which engendered his lifelong appetite for collecting all things classical. His commissions included the Bank of England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Holy Trinity Church at Marylebone. Over the course of his lifetime he acquired and rebuilt three adjacent houses, 12,13 and 14 (in 1792, 1813 and 1823 respectively), and constantly reworked his home and reconceived his displays of artefacts. Before his death he established his home as a museum by Act of Parliament. As Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, he used his displays to teach and test his pupils’ knowledge of classical art and design.
Aside from the extensive collections which Sir John Soane amassed (Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, terracotta and bronze artefacts, reliefs, stucco fragments, sculpture, death masks, paintings, sketch books, etc, etc, etc – pity the poor archivist), the museum gives a wonderful insight into domestic life at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the early nineteenth century. Susan Palmer, of the museum, has written an excellent account of this in her book: The Soanes at Home (a volume to which I have turned in my research and would highly recommend). Drawing on and reproducing original documentation from the museum archives, it is a wonderful source for understanding just how a house was run at this period: the servants, the plumbing, the heating, the cooking, the laundry, mealtimes, the delivery of coal and milk, and so on. (Incidentally, for younger visitors, Fanny, Mrs Soane’s dog, gives a charmingly illustrated account of life at numbers 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in her book, The Journal of Mrs Soane’s Dog Fanny, by Herself, written by Mirabel Cecil and illustrated by Francesca Martin. Both books are available from the museum.)
Scaffolding currently envelops Sir John Soane’s home and this is because the museum is undertaking a major project – due to be completed in 2014 – which will restore the entire 2nd floor of no. 13. Visitors will be able to view Soane’s private apartments: bedroom, bathroom, oratory, Mrs Soane’s morning room and her husband’s architectural models room. These exciting renovations will cost £7M. £6.5M has already been raised. If anyone would like to help with the remaining £0.5M, follow the link:
http://www.soane.org/opening_up_the_soane/donate_to_outs/
You can visit the museum in the evening, by candlelight, on the first Tuesday of the month, and, for a princely sum, you can also hire the museum for events. I must admit that my ultimate venue for a book launch has long been Sir John Soane’s dining room and library by candlelight. Future publishers kindly take note...
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