Desert Islands and Prison Life : Two Posts in One…

(Later…)

The Event seemed to go very well. The room was full of interested people and Durham City Arts Director Alison Redshaw – vision in her clothes of many colours – had everything in hand. The Durham Book Festival has started with a bang and our event was one cracker of the evening.

Librarian Charlie Darby Villis talked eloquently about the potent and dynamic role of books and reading in prison life. In fact without his hard work this year none of this would have happened)

Avril Joy talked passionately about her commitment to the women and her deep understanding of the social and political dilemma of women in prison. Then she read from her ne novel Bad Girl. (She had read from it yesterday in prison and the women loved it).

Then Richard Walker Hardwick gave his take on teaching original writing to the men in a high security prison. He read from his novel, Kicked Out which emerged from his work in shelters and hostels for homeless young people. The way he catches the voice of his young protagonist is uncanny.

Then me! I mostly stuck to my proposed script (below) and read from Knives and The Woman Who Drew Buildings (Extracts below here…)

Then Derek Sanders, Head of Learning and Skills gave his views on the technology of literacy and learning provision inside Low Newton.

The highlight of the evening was the interlinking performance, by professional actresses Zoe Lambert and Libby Davison (directed by Tess Denman Cleaver), mostly sampling some of the excellent work in the book we produced inside The Self Revealed. Through these two actresses the voices of the women we were all talking about came eerily into this studio theatre in the middle of the city of Durham.

Afterwards there were some interesting questions – not excluding the question from one gentlemen about the ‘bad’ language used both in the women’s writing and our own. It was a very interesting question, though to debate this crucial issue of authenticity, self, mutual respect and the link between fact and fiction would have taken a whole other meeting…

Earlier: What I thought I would say at a talk given as part of a panel at the Gala Theatre at the Durham Book Festival 2009:

‘Being a writer in Residence in any prison is to walk and work on the margins of society and the esoteric margins within the prison environment. We are outsiders who can only achieve anything if empathise with the prisoners in an environment where over-empathising with prisoners can be seen as perverse.

We experience - as do permanent staff - the borderland between freedom and incarceration. The fact that we come through the gates at the end of the day does not obviate the fact that for six or more hours we have not been free to act intuitively; to speak off the top of our heads; to hug a person who has made us laugh; to swap gossip about our history, our homes, our lovers and our children.

In this environment we have to create a desert island of personal freedom and invite the people we meet – staff as well as prisoners – to join us there. The treasures on my island include great books to read and the opportunity to write out of one’s boots, to write hot, and write well. The nice thing is that all you need is a pen and a notebook and you can take them back to your pad.

I think that inside or outside prison everyone can learn how to write well, and will certainly write better if they write a lot, with a waiting audience and a willing collaborator in mind.

In my residency totalling five years ( a stretch of three and a stretch of two) there emerged hundreds of pieces of writing from a wide range of women, a selection of which survive in dozens of pamphlets and leaflets culminating in two books Why Am I Running? And The Self Revealed. These are permanent records of what can seem an ephemeral sometimes unaccountable experience. Paradoxically this very free activity ticks many boxes in a box-ticking society.

During that time as well as the books we wrote a radio play. One woman, now safely back in China, wrote a short story that was broadcast by the BBC. One woman used her writing collection to illustrate her state of mind which helped to secure more appropriate sentencing. We participated in the international Changing Lives Through Literature Project. We invented the first Litfest Inside, where the women worked with seven published writers in fourteen days. We had two performances of women’s work to insiders and outsiders. We initiated a shadow Orange Project where women, read discussed and reviewed the shortlisted books for the Orange Prize. And so on.

The most wonderful thing was that for a few hours a day we could inhabit our Desert Island and remind ourselves of our unique humanity and remember we were citizens of the world…’

Extracts Read From Knives Short Story Collection

‘…So lets get back to this screaming of brakes. This noise of traffic in my ear. The lions roaring like people. The people growling like lions. And this girl! Her hand was digging in my shoulder. I could hardly see her through the haze, but she I knew from the very scent of her she was young. What was she saying? …

2 Extract from The Woman Who Drew Buildings:  

‘… But prison had succeeded where Sam with all his cocky charm had failed. Inside prison, smoking tobacco was the least-worst thing you could do to numb the pain, to while away the time….Of course prison had been a shock, terrifying. But in the end it was not so hard as Adam first feared. The worst thing was being warehoused and moved around like an object, with no sovereignty over your body, your possessions, or your daily routines. The fear inside those places was not about what happened but about what might happen: that something bad might happen even when in the end it didn’t. Dark tales and myths about what had happened to others in this same place flew about the place like black moths. Being suspended in such uncertainty could twang the steadiest of nerves and in the end he learned that a smoke could steady the nerves…’

The Girl Who Was Punished For Reading

When I was young, for reasons clear to regular readers of these posts, I was a book worm. Well, not so much a book-worm as a book-dragon. Once I discovered that it was possible to escape into a book I was hooked.

What was I escaping from? Well, start with a drab house, a stressed mother, bullying at school, arms and face too long, hands too big, hand-me-down clothes, sparse meals…

From such a place I could escape to a ranch in Canada, a long treck in China, a Scottish farm, a Spanish hacienda, a Danish castle, a house called Manderlay, a sailing boat, or a boarding school in Surrey. Adventure, colour, drama, comedy and tragedy were at my finger tips at the turn of a page. It was fan-tastic. On reflection, my life then could define the term escapism.

Nowadays there is a school of thought that disadvantaged children should be offered literature that validates and reflects their own environment.* There are good examples of this. We have novels like those of David Almond or Alan Garner that might do this in a way sufficiently complex and multilayered to be of interest right across - and up and down- the snakes-and-ladder board of class and culture.You may have your own favourites that fit this bill.

In those days, though, I did not look in literature for what I already knew; I looked for what I could wonder about: sumptuous rooms, tea on the table and a smiling mother, picnics in the dorm, trekking in the wastes of Canada, murderous wives and predatory widowers, love beneath the oleander tree, walking with a hundred Chinese children to safety, delivering lambs on a Scottish hillside, assassinating kings and sailing with my comrades down Coniston Lake

So far, so escapist. But in so escaping I discovered for myself the universals of emotional, political and social life far beyond the confines of that small house in that small town. I now feel certain that this level of escapism ensures that - in tune with the Bronte sisters - though one’s domestic life might be contained, the spirit can roam free and the soul is never parochial.

However, being a book-dragon was not without drawbacks. One day at school, escaping the dining hall clatter of plates and voices onto Crusoe’s Desert Island, I was pulled up by my red-haired German teacher.

‘What are you doing there, Wendy?’

‘Reading, Miss.’

‘Two hundred lines! I must not read at the dinner table.’

I must not read at the dinner table

I must not read at the dinner table

I must not read at the dinner table

I do now…

wxx

* (Afterthought. Of course there was all of D H Lawrence in which I did recognise aspects of my own life. And I did encounter The Family From One End Street written and illustrated by Eve Garnett, a charming and romanticised version of working class life which no more resembled my own than did The Forsyte Saga… )

Boody, Gaudi, and The Drowned Land

I was nine years old when I came to the North to live and it was like coming onto a different planet. People were hard to understand. It was not just the accent or dialect, it was attitudes and assumptions. People were difficult to read. The confusion must have been mutual because my older brother was beaten at school, harassed because of his ‘poncy’ southern accent, and sensibly reverted to the local lingo in weeks. I didn’t suffer because I was frozen with confusion and possibly dumb with grief at my father’s recent death. I spoke very little.

The domestic arrangements took some adjusting to. We stayed at first in my relative’s spotless house where the bath was tin and lived on a hook in the yard and the toilet was across the public back lane. I soon discovered that this toilet  was a place of escape, of silence. I could sit on the high throne and read, eat stolen sweets, or just muse about how terrible my life was.

One day I was sitting there and my eye moved upwards to a high shelf above the door. On it were two large, glass jam jars.  I clambered up to snatch ne so I could see it properly. Someone had filled it with shards of coloured glass,  bright stones, broken, patterned pottery, and seashells.   Holding it up in the beam of light streaming through a crack in the wooden door, I thought it was beautiful.

Later I asked my cousin what the jars were.

He looked annoyed. ‘Yeh shouldn’a looked,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I said with unusual persistence.

‘’S’a secret.’

‘What is it for?’ I said.

‘It’s not for anything,’ he said scornfully. ‘It’s boody. It just is. And it’s a secret. It’s always secret. Yeh have ter hide it.’ He punched my arm. ‘Yeh tell nobody!’ Then he ran off to kick a hard leather ball with his friends.

The boody jars were a great resource for me in the following difficult months of adjustment. I would take them down and hold them up in the stream of light and feel comforted. I never questioned the name. Boody jars were boody jars.

Years later I started to reflect on them. The name, I decided, could come from two sources. Boody could be a childish name for beautiful. It also called up the notion of booty – war chest items seized by force or looting on land, or by piracy by sea. Come to think of it, that fits the tradition of secrecy - hiding the haul.

I think now that because the boody jars consoled me at a difficult time of my life the image  of them has stayed with me. I even have my own boody jar on a shelf in my upstairs, inside toilet. It’s not a jam jar, just an old glass vase that was hanging around.

When I was in Barcelona some years ago and saw the Gaudi wall in the Parc Gruell, I instantly thought of the boody jars. These gorgeous curving walls are faced with a mosaic of broken pottery tesselated into intricate, almost random, patterns. I was told that the workmen were given the pottery shards and they improvised the patterns, but I don’t know whether that it’s true. I like the idea of the democracy of artists and that explanation might explain the walls’ childlike appeal.

Then this June I visited the Abbaye de Valmagne in the Languedoc.  Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries this Cistercian edifice was one of the richest abbeys in South of France. Here, as well as acquiring fine church artefacts and church based gold  the monks  grew plants to feed themselves, to cure illness and  flowers to decorate the altar of the Virgin Mary altar.

Then in 1875 the Huguenots sacked the abbey and killed the monks.  All the stained glass of the roses and clerestories were shattered.

The abbey was slowly restored, but after the Revolution in 1789  it was ransacked again, this time by revolutionaries. The last five monks fled and the church was sold off as a wine store.  Paradoxically  the huge vats that were lodged  the nave and side chapels, saved the fabric of this great building from destruction.  As in England, deserted abbeys were commonly used as stone quarries to build houses and more mundane buildings..

Fast forward  to 1988,   1998, 1999, 2002, 2003 and 2005 when there was serious flooding in the Gard and Hérault  regions of France. The French use the word inondation which has a very biblical feel about it.

Anyway, during these floods very fine fragments of  the Abbey’s first medieval shattered glass began to come to the surface. Over the years an artist collected them until he had sufficient to make this beautiful glass panel which, back lit, allows us to see through that same exquisite glass as did those early medieval monks.

And now I wonder if - through the years, as he slowly collected his bits of glass –  the artist kept them in boody jars, colour coded. 

"Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it." -
                                                                  Confucius

The Myths of Writer’s Block and ‘Daily Pages’

Writers’ pathways are interesting. Accounts of the writer’s lives in Writer’s Magazines and Sunday Supplements are compelling reading for interested readers and for those on a similar pathway towards publication or merely towards coherent and public self expression.

The inspiration, the daily writing habits, the search for a voice, the accidental meetings that make a difference, the early struggles … one could go on. Bedded in there are myths that are hard to shake off. Roald Dahl and Daphne du Maurier in their respective garden huts; JKRowling in relative poverty sitting writing in a café: these can inspire notions that ‘… if I have a a garden hut, if I write in cafés I too could produce, James and the Giant Peach, or Rebecca or Harry Potter…’ Dreaming of course. But it’s very proper for a writer to dream.

Another myth (or anti-myth?) is that of writer’s block – written about robust charm recently by 60 Going on 16. I’m known among my friends for believing that writer’s blocks are self derived myths based on physical or mental exhaustion, dearth of ideas, not enough reading, writing being given a low priority in a writer’s life or a writer’s deep lack of enjoyment in the writing process itself.

I have to admit, though, that in this last week this idea has given me pause for thought as for some scary days I have not been able to get to my day job – writing this new novel. To other writers I airily say Don’t worry, it’s not writer’s block – it’s a fallow time! your subconscious is working on it! your brain is shrieking for a rest! Not an easy thing to say to yourself , when you imagine you have literally lost the plot.

But yesterday to my great relief I got back to my story to discover the time had been fallow, the soil had enriched itself, my subconscious had been working on it, my brain had enjoyed its overdue rest. The plot was found again.

The other myth that abounds out there in Writingworld is the myth of ‘daily pages’, generated with honest intent by writing gurus such as Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. In this world, writing a few pages of anything each day is a panacea for all writers ills - ‘writer’s block’, lack of ideas, lack of self belief …

In fact it is a good idea gone wild. At it’s best it can bed down a habit of broaching your subconscious, and is a useful beginning down the writer’s road. At its worst it can be a compensatory activity which is self-limiting: the shell without the grit of discipline, structure, and purposeful imagination that can produce decent writing.

What it is, is a good idea to be used rather than to be a place of rest, as though your randomised internal language is a cosy arm chair where you can doze instead of waking to the original writer that you can be.

My own favourite guru source is Dorothea Brande’s 1933 book On Becoming A Writer. I discovered this through the recommendation of John Braine in the introduction to one of his novels. I managed to obtain a copy of her book (though it was out of print…) , to be transfixed by its contents. I must have been part of a turning tide, as it was reissued in the next year and remains popular.

On Becoming a Writer is a simple two or three hour read, inspirational in tone, American in style, which makes you immediately was to get out your notebook and write. She advocates writing early in the morning when you are still in the sleep-wake mode; she says writing anything that comes to your head for half an hour, even if it is only I don’t want to be sitting here writing I don’t want to be setting here writing. It works. And from this concept - borrowed effectively by Goldberg, Cameron et al - comes the concept, now widespread, of ‘daily pages’.

But the best part of the Dorothea B concept - her twenty one day exercise – is often smudged to the sidelines.

Here is my version of the Twenty One Day Exercise

• write a single daily page for twenty one days. It’s important that you do not look back to yesterday’s page. Forge on.
• For twenty one days you write on a fresh page and do not look back.
• After twenty one days you make an hour or so at any time of day and read through what you have written with respect, as though your were reading someone else’s work.
• Then you read through again and make notes, because here you will find clues to - the kind of writer - the subject matter that preoccupies you - your normal vocabulary - your fundamental style.
• Take three paragraphs or sets of twenty lines from your daily pages and develop them into three separate pieces of writing. Could be a short story, first chapter of a novel, or a poem.
• Now work on these to some kind of conclusion for the next twenty one days.
• Work on. Return to the twenty one day cycle every now and then to refresh your inspiration.
• Don’t get into an eternal habit of daily pages that taps off all your inspiration and motivation and stops you writing for real.

If I hadn’t ‘found the plot’ again, I’d have turned back to Dorothea B ….

I have seen this method turn tentative writers into proper writers and existing writers into more honest, original writers.

Give it a go. You never know where it may lead….

wx

Hélène Cixous on Writing and Reading

Loving all things - well, most things - French, my eye was caught by Hélène Cixous’s book Rootprints, Memory and Lifewriting, a perceptive treatise on her ideas, her fiction and her essays. The book is in translation (Mireille Calle-Gruber) with whom there is a (very) long interview. As well as this the ideas are grounded in philosophical thought, so it is a hard read. But buried in there are some great gems – food for thought for writers and readers alike.

(NB The quaint syntax is possibly down to the translation, possibly not…)

Hélène Cixous on

The position of writing

The initial position is a leaving oneself go, leaving oneself sink to the bottom of the now. This presupposes a conscious belief in something, a force and materiality that will come, manifest itself, an ocean, a current that is always there, that will rise and carry me. It is very physical.

Where I begin to write, that’s what it is, it is physical…

As for reading: reading feels to me like a making love, the string element in reading is the ‘leaving oneself (be) read’, to be read by the text…

I was tempted to transliterate it into my kind of English but its very strangeness is arresting, makes one concentrate on untangling what she really means.

Just a thought

wx

The Semi-Colon, Knives and Collectable Books

Jeremy rang one day to say he was enjoying my short story collection Knives* ‘… and I wanted to ask you, Wendy , about a novel by R C Hutchinson that’s mentioned in one of the short stories.’

This short story, Married Life? is a forensic, possibly comic, examination of the long marriage between Imogen and her husband Freddie. Submissive wife Imogen has finally broken out, visited India and made new friends.

…Imogen's new friends considered her very special and treated her tenderly. After six weeks she came back with a notebook full of contact addresses all over the world and some wonderful photographs. Freddie barely glanced at them. He was not interested in these wonders. After all he had not been there. And anyway he’d just acquired a first edition R C Hutchinson in an Edinburgh Oxfam shop. He gloated about it to Imogen. Now that he had every edition of every one of Hutchinson's masterpieces, he could relax…

On the phone Jeremy said he himself had a book by R C Hutchinson and didn’t realise they were collectable.

In fact, many years ago, I actually did know a man who collected RC Hutchinson and had all his first editions. This man even gave me his spares and I now have many – not all – R C Hutchinsons and a few first editions.

Who is this writer? you say. In his time Ray Coryton Hutchinson (1907-1975), was a best selling novelist in the class of post-Edwardian novelists such as H E Bates. He became a fellow of the Royal Society Of Literature, won the WHSmith Literary award in 1966, and was on the Booker shortlist for his posthumously published novel A Child Possessed.

Only connect! Just yesterday I saw that Faber’s inspired new print-on-demand initiative, Faber Finds, is including on their list R C Hutchinson’s Testament, first published in 1939. Set in Russia, the story is structured around the evolving relationship of two very different men - on street corners, on the battlefield, in Russian salons and in prison camps. According to the Faber pitch ‘it is a novel steeped with political ideals, with philosophical truths, and with personal heroism.’ According to me, it’s a well researched, rollicking read with great characters, from a great craftsman. It also looks good in this restrained, handsome edition.

So, in the afternoon I was lurking by my bookshelves and my hand fell on Hutchinson’s novel Elephant and Castle, (A novel set in London; I love London-set novels.) The acknowledgement list alone is a quirky rendering of R C Hutchinson’s London in 1948, the time of writing of this novel.

The opening lines of chapter one of Elephant and Castle - which would never survive the counter-pedantic eagle eye of front line editors in today’s publishing - is a miracle of grammar and syntax which could be an exemplar for any aspiring writer who is confused about semi-colons or punctuation in general. (Many are…)

A beginning writer, journalist, or reviewer could also learn much from the substance of the paragraph.

What do you think?

‘…In the strictest sense, it is impossible to give facts uncoloured by opinion. When a man says ‘We had dirty weather’ you know that he disliked it; another would have said ‘It was fresh and exhilarating, though there was a good deal of rain.’ No one can relate all the circumstances, and those which a man selects, deliberately or not, will owe their inclusion at least a little to his prejudices, as well as his habits in observation and memory. But remember too, that your own prejudices operate all the time. Whatever comes to your mind comes through your own screen of intricate associations: the memory of something said in a schoolmaster’s sarcastic voice; the loneliness of a foreign city; a soldier’s kindness in a railway carriage when the first light was revealing frosted fields; defections and disillusionments. The phrase ‘What I should have done …’ marks, as a rule, a misunderstanding of the nature of things. The largest mistake about truth is to imagine it is simple…’ From The Elephant & Castle by RC Hutchinson

Wx

Afternote: Jeremy is not alone. Knives is enjoying positive reactions from all over the place. And my friend Charlie says it’s in big demand in prison.

************

* My mother Barbara used to say that self praise was no recommendation, but here’s what publisher Peter Mortimer wrote to accompany the review copies of KNIVES:

‘Some of the short stories were published in magazines, newspapers and anthologies; one has, surreally, been transformed into a Manga comic. They are collected in book form for the first time and bring together a dozen tales inspired, as the author herself puts it ‘by the consummate experts on the darker side of experience.’
Novelist Wendy Robertson spent three years working with female prisoners, and though these resulting stories may be dark on one level, on other levels they reflect the author’s take on the recoverability of the human spirit, plus the qualities of stoicism, wit and irony. From plunging cat burglars, hallucinating old
ladies, gender bender confessions, and women seeking fleshpot escapes, these short stories expand Robertson’s already considerable reputation. First book of short stories from one of
the country’s best selling novelists.’

IRON Press
0191 253 1901
ironpress@blueyonder.co.uk
www.ironpress.co.uk
5 Marden Terrace
Cullercoats, North Shields
NE30 4PD

http://www.ironpress.co.uk/

Erica’s New Year and The Leaping Dolphin

The night before last we had a great wind. Around the house the trees were bending and swaying in a wild dance of their own. The next day the wind still raged. A. went off to play rugby with his fan club and I stayed here, a restless victim of the wind, watching the drying leaves being torn from the branches and lying on the grass like a neap tides on the lawn. Ah yes! The first quarter of the the moon.

I tried to work – to write, to read, to draw – to no avail. And though the day was bright, the raging wind forbade me outside pleasures. My own restlessness in the wind reminds me of when I was teaching small children who were wild as feral kittens on windy days. I thought this was my notion until I read that it is a documented fact that children are harder to control on windy days. On wet and cold days they welcome the warm fug of the classroom, but on windy days they are reminded of their hidden wildness and act up to it.

Then at last my windy day was brightened by an email from my writer friend Erica, about an edit she was doing on her novel. She says blithely, Autumn is my New Year, when I want to spring clean and create and produce new ideas. So I can set to work…

Autumn has always been a powerful signal in the year for me. The cycle from school child to college student, and then schoolteacher to college lecturer always started with that emotional see-saw of September - half full of fear, half drenched with excited anticipation: a new arena for stress, balanced by a pristine, clean slate. And then I experienced these feelings at one remove as my children joined this same cycle. New uniforms, new protractors, new backpacks and new misgivings: I remember it too well.

In more recent years the swashbuckling freedom of a more free-lance working life has had its own pleasures, its own stresses and its own dynamic cycles of production: its own planting season, its own harvest. And yet I still run my working life on a September to September academic diary and still talk about ‘having lunch with my friend Judith once a term’.

But at least Autumn – windy or not - sets running like a hare in my mind one of the few poems I have off by heart:

That Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run….

John Keats’ poem Ode to Autumn is as skilfully engineered as a key in a well oiled lock, as organically perfect as a leaping dolphin: he continues to be a challenge to all poets who have followed him.

Wasn’t it Keats who wrote to his brother, saying … the great beauty of poetry is that it makes every place interesting? And this reminds me of Mrs Wood, my art tutor, who told me once you can draw, Miss Wetherill, you will never be bored.

So, even with the wind, there is mellow fruitfulness about.

Wx

Jane Yolen, June Tabor, and the Third Twin

How great to see that fine American writer Jane Yolen is to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s World Fantasy Awards.

Getting to know and like writers across a wide range of literature, as I do, is a bit like the Genesis … and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; / And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and….

I came across the Award Winning Writer Jane Yolen through the songs of folk singer June Tabor. When I was writing my novel Family Ties, along with other music, I listened to tapes of Tabor’s songs, playing too often the song called the King of Rome, a hauntingly lyrical song about an heroic racing pigeon.

Then, in the album Against The Streams, I came across a song called Beauty and The Beast. This turned out to be a poem by the eminent Jane Yolen, of whom I knew nothing at that point. Inspired by the fairy story The Beauty and The Beast, the poem presents us with this same couple on a late anniversary. Its inspired lines tell of their lives together now, when the Beast ‘… is graying around the muzzle/ and I have silver combs/ to match my hair…’. The poem ends in a dying fall ‘…what sounds children/might have made/ running across the marble halls…’

Wonderful.

At the time, listening to June Tabor sing those extraordinary lines filled me with tears about beauty and disguise and time passing, themes which already undercut the narrative of Family Ties.

This story roams backwards and forwards across the intensely experienced life of Rosa, a writer of children’s stories, a teacher, a daughter, a mother and a grandmother. At the core is a very strange phenomenon, described to me many years before, by a man who was telling me tales of his village.

‘Yeah, that was Lilly Sell. You know Lilly Sell?’

‘No. I don’t know Lilly Sell.’

‘Well she was the third twin.’

‘Third twin?’

‘Yeah. Midwife was delivering twins. Then the third twin came, tangled in the afterbirth. That was Lilly. Seventy three and still going strong now …’

Family Ties is not about Lilly Sell, but without her the novel would not exist. And without June Tabor and Jane Yolen, Family Ties would not feel like the same novel.

The story is told in many voices. Here is Rosa’s daughter Bronwen, a mature student in her thirties who loves her learning:

Long ago I used to walk these streets hand in hand with my mother, Rosa. I grew up with that soft murmuring voice in my ear. Just look at the size of those stones, Bron! Think how many years it took for the masons to get it right…Imagine the monks in their hoods walking round the chilly cloisters. And just think of the great nave without the rows of seats and but with dozens of mean campfires keeping those poor Scottish prisoners warm. Just think, Bron!

Always the teacher , my mother.

When I was much older, one afternoon during the Winter of Discontent I was alone in the cathedral at four o’clock in the afternoon when the electricity went off. The nave was plunged into Medieval darkness and I could see the monks standing in the shadows, arms clasped in their sleeves to ward off the coal. I stood there in the dark silence, grateful suddenly to all those strikers and short-time workers for delivering me that eerie vision…

Re-reading this novel again recently I realised how closely and unknowingly I’ve imprinted myself here. Very strange. Even weird. That thing about begetting. I was just checking the album where June Tabor sang Jane Yolen’s poem and I came across information that she’s performing near me in November. I wouldn’t have known this, had I not been writing this post.

Wx

It’s on Amazon and available to order in shops if you fancy a read. Cover’s a bit too sweet* for my liking but the inside is suitably dark and complicated.

* Don’t get me started about covers! Maybe I’ll post that one day.

A Study in Bafflement and The Magic of John Fowles

A month ago I was asked by superweblogger Norman Geras to write a piece about a novel that had affected me. I wrote a piece for him and because at the moment I am thinking about time and shape-shifting now here it is for you::

Some thoughts on John Fowles’ novel ‘The Magus’.*
‘… it must substantially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent. My only plea is that all artists have to range the full extent of their private lives freely. The rest of the world can censor and bury their private past. We cannot…’ John Fowles, in his introduction to the revised 1977 edition of The Magus.

Of the hundreds – even thousands – of novels I have read in the last forty years The Magus is one of only two novels - the other is Alan Garner's Owl Service - which I read to the end and then turned straight back to the beginning to read it again to find out what the heck it was about.

My bafflement is not unique: many people emerge from reading this long novel with a feeling of floundering, of not-quite-knowing. John Fowles wrote to one schoolgirl, ‘What one writes is one’s own explanation, you see, and if it’s baffling then the explanation is baffling…The Magus is trying to suggest that reality, human experience is infinitely baffling…’

The Magus tells us the story of Nicholas Urfe, a kind of mid-century intellectual everyman touched by post-world-war-blues and the edges of existentialism, shot through with heavily-worn learning and the cynical naiveté of personal, sexual and political inexperience. Nicholas is a fool rushing in where only magicians and shapeshifters tread.

Fowles tells us elsewhere that as a child, being short-tongued, he used to call the ‘earth’ ‘urf’ and perhaps that’s where Nicholas’s surname comes from. Occasionally, as I re-read the novel to write this piece, I wondered whether Nicholas Oaf might provide a better clue to this intriguing character.

The young, intelligent, self absorbed Nicholas goes to the Greek island of Phraxos to teach in a high school, just as John Fowles himself did as a young man on the real island of Spetsai.

On Phraxos, bored with the school and the teaching, Nicholas falls in love with the light, the landscape and the natural environment of the island – as did Fowles in his diary:

‘I walked through a small brake, and a woodcock flew off from under my feet. A lizard scuttled away. It was very warm, airy; I struck off the road and came to a cliff facing westwards. I sat on the edge of it, on a rock, and the world was at my feet. I have never had so vividly the sense of standing on the world; the world below me.’

Fowles obsesses about the light, writing again in his diary - ‘It and its absence are life and death. It reveals everything and spares nothing. It can be both achingly beautiful and consoling; it can be terrifyingly ugly.’ – and simply all of this is all reflected in the novel in the way the Island weaves its spell on the young Englishman Nicholas Urfe.

The spell is personified in Conchis, a millionaire resident who lives in an exquisite villa on a headland. Using beautiful identical twins as bate, he lures Nicholas into his world in which nothing is what it seems and reality changes according to Conchis’s whim and will. To unleash this magic, Conchis tells Nicholas fantastic stories which change form and meaning; he uses masques and staged scenarios masterminded by himself, playing mind games with Nicholas – and of course with the reader, who is driven to identify with Nicholas’ fear and angry bewilderment, in order to hang onto the crazy course of the novel.

It strikes me that The Magus is a narrative of mind and meaning that can only exist in novel form. There was a disastrous – even laughable - attempt at a film which focused ridiculously on sado-masochistic sequences which are only one illusory element in the series of games which Conchis plays on Nicholas Urfe. The more successful filming of his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman had a screenplay by Harold Pinter who cleverly tackled the job by treating the screenplay as a kind of metaphor for the novel.

But we need no esoteric knowledge to relish this novel. It works on so many levels – it works as a quest novel; a novel of adolescent rites of passage; a novel of place and the natural world; a novel shot through magic realism, (meeting Matthew Strecher’s definition - what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something 'too strange to believe.
This novel can be all things to each reader. Perhaps it is this all-encompassing nature – so full of adolescent energy, firing on all cylinders – which is baffling for the kind of reader who wants a safe journey, a sure narrative and a distinct - more or less predictable – ending. She or her needs this to take him or her through a novel.

I read The Magus twice: in its first edition in 1967; then I read his revised edition in 1977. How odd, you would think, to revise your novel and put it out there again! At the very least this showed that The Magus, for John Fowles, was clearly unfinished, highly personal, business. (There is another discussion there…)

But for me there is no doubt that The Magus is John Fowles’ masterpiece. It is an historic novel of the mid twentieth century - trailing the smoke of D H Lawrence, Alain-Fournier, James Joyce, Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, but marked by its own distinctive signature of intensity, its sense of magic, its confusions, its challenges to the reader, all of which are entirely unique to John Fowles.

Rereading the novel yet again I was worried in case I would find less in The Magus to relish. But in fact there is more. Since I last read it I've written a good number of novels myself. So now, as well as still appreciating all the other elements, I am reflecting on the courage, the originality, the riskiness of the writing and the structure of the novel. And, strangely, I am now in the middle of writing a novel myself which is set in an ancient magical place and involves unexplainable time illusions that may baffle the reader.
This has been a bit of a risky departure for me, but re-reading The Magus has been inspiring. It is as though John Fowles (who tends to scatter Frenchisms in his prose) is shouting across the ether. ‘Courage mon brave!’

If you liked it then, you will like it now. Worth a second or third read for anybody ...

WX

The Imagination and Starr in Trouble

Work in Progress.

Following on my theme of The Imagination as a tool for the writer, here's an extract from At The Maison d'Estella where Starr, who is in deep trouble, contemplates her situation and 'remembers the future'.

(From the chapter called The Fox...)

I crouch here in the smallest of spaces. I think I've been in this poky stinking space for two days and two nights. There's a slit high in the wall and in daytime it fills the room with grim grey light; at night the room is pitch black. I've made marks in the hard earth floor with my heel: one for each night. I thought straight away that keeping track of time would be a useful thing to do

I have to use the corner of the room as a latrine and I survive on water thrust through a hole in the door every few hours. For two nights I have not even seen the night sky. At first the darkness by night and the dimness by day is all engulfing. But this forces me inwards, makes me contemplate this dream I'm inhabiting or which is inhabiting me - I don't know which.

Every hour or so I deliberately bring Modeste’s face before me. And then I call up Tib’s honest, wise stare. I've been bringing into my mind the day I saw them both in Agde, the town they now call Good Fortune. I think of them on the canal boat – Modeste with his book and the boy swimming in the water, racing the boat. I remind myself of Modeste in the guise of Louis, the twenty first century scholar with a mission.

I remember lying on the roof of my house, Olga by my side, looking up at the night sky for Virgo.

I remember Madame Patrice in the café with Misou her little dog. And I conjure up the vision of Tib’s mother Serina who - in her deep soul - is also Madame Patrice and also loves Misou. And in these two dark days how many times have I conjured up that backward glance of the Empress which contains so much of my Siri in its bright gaze?

This is all very hard but I have to make this painful effort to to remember the future, to give myself some distance from this stinking room where I am forced to use the corner as a latrine.

Only a glimpse, but I hope you like it.

Wx

Imagination 3: Down The Rabbit Hole

Curiouser & curioser.

Or It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. Lewis Carroll

What a great novel is Alice - a world where a girl tumbles through time and space by means of a rabbit's burrow or that very mysterious and terrifying thing - a mirror; where a cat's smile becomes its own whole self; where being suddenly small or suddenly large is thrust upon you without your willing it; where a queen can be a devil and irrational executions are the norm; where bad and good and strange and comical dreams tumble over each other and assault the senses.

Lewis Carroll, a mathematician, is an example of one of those scientists to explore the creative vision, whom I mentioned in my last post (Below). For an expert in that most rational discipline of mathematics to create Alice's successive strange worlds is a wonderful illustration of the notion discussed there.

Interestingly, few people recall Carroll's mathematical papers these days whereas Alice is thoroughly embedded in our national, if not our international, subconscious.

When I recently was reminded of Carroll's notion that 'it's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards', my bones shivered with agreement because I often think that I remember the future.

There is a crazy logic to this, if you take on board the notion - as I have - that time is not linear. Rather it is like a spinning top or a whirling dervish, where one gets glimpses of things past and things future by the accident of the spin. If you catch glimpses of places and people in the past or the future, they - by definition - can catch a glimpse of you. It may follow that you can glimpse yourself in another time, another place: in the past or in the future. Hence 'remembering' your future. The why and how of all this are inaccessible to conventional logic. It is a matter if intuition and insight.

So far, so unscientific. Or, as some might say: so far, so crazy.

But is seems to me that the only way we can express this concept is to weave it into fictional stories that are seen as surreal, magical, or perhaps coded psychological metaphor. Look at Lewis Carroll's Alice novels. Look at Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (Carroll? Carol? There we go!) Look at Henry James' Turn of The Screw...

Curiouser and curiouser...

A propos, my next post will be a passage from the novel I am currently writing (At The Maison d'Estella) where I am trying to loop together some of the mad stuff above into my own narrative of strange events in the life of Starr, my central character.

wx

Alice Afternote. Curiously, just now on Australian Al's interesting blog there is this wonderful photograph of a river forcing its way through a man-made tunnel (part if a lovely gold rush story...) In the photograph you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This made my mind leap straight to Alice as she made her way down the rabbit hole.

Only connect!

w

Imagination 2: You are not the only one

You may say you’re a dreamer, but you’re not the only one… John Lennon.

I used to think that the imagination was like the soul. You knew it was there but you could never find it in any physical form.

But a few years ago I was asked by novelist/psychologist Charles Fernyhaugh* to join a conversation about a possible research project investigating what happens in writers’ brains when they write – which parts of the brain becomes active, which remains blank. The project didn’t materialise, probably because of the prohibitive cost of the machinery involved and the lack of funding. I have to admit that it was fun for a while thinking of us writers as highly informed lab-rats. It would have made good copy for a novel.

It was one example, however, of scientists making an imaginative leap to further knowledge. Developments in science and technology are littered with Eureka! moments of high imagination, where unlike elements are put together to propose a new truth, a new concept, a new way of looking at things. Often these are come upon by scientists prepared to take a creative risk, or artists who take on the disciplines of science. Think Leonardo da Vinci. Probably some keen academic is busy making a list of such perfectly rounded people as we speak.

I was nine when my father died but in my imagination he was just such a man. A gentle soul, he was a skilled electrician who loved to read. In our cellar in Lancaster he put things together that made new sense. He invented his version the ballpoint pen. He used brown wrapping paper to make up books of cartoons with sewn spines. Later, after he had died, one member of my family called him a dreamer in a disparaging tone.

Perhaps it is genetic. In my early years I was called Dilly Day Dream. I remember one day trying out the idea of walking the mile home from school backwards. Half way there I got sick of doing it and turned round, only to smash into a lamp-post.

I used to read books that were far out of my league in terms of context and experience and imagined my way into those exotic worlds. I wrote stories which I myself made into little books with sewn spines. And hid them. It was a very private world.

I talked to people who weren’t there. I rehearsed conversations that didn’t happen. I lay in a high place in our local park and watched the people far below, small as bees, and made up scenarios of their lives. Without knowing it I was creating my own apprenticeship as a writer, developing my imagination muscle to the point where it has become a professional tool.

But I was doing something else. I was escaping what was - for a time - a hard, dreary and colourless life: a life that involved estrangement and bullying. My inner life was my protection.

Similarly this inner imaginative life can contribute to the survival of people who are confined. The poetry and writing of prisoners is an escape into their imagination, away from the depersonalising routine of incarceration. One woman I worked with in prison wrote ‘I remember the time I was living with my Grandmother in Jamaica and the good time we all have together when I was growing up. I look up at the blue skies and the sunset is the most beautiful. I remember lots of moonlight and the green grass and the trees. And that time my grandmother said to me, ‘Shirley you must remember this all your life...’

In life, as in prison, dreaming and imagining are crucial survival skills.

wx
* His site

(Painting of Pale Street by Fiona Naughton http://www.fionanaughtonartworks.com/)

Imagination and The Wisdom of Others

I wanted to write something here about the potency of the imagination not only for writers, but for everyone and anyone. So - as is my custom - I gathered lots of quotations to mull over. But I was so floored by the wisdom of others that I thought I'd leave a selection here for you to enjoy on their own. I'll write my own take on the potency of the imagination in my post tomorrow.

Here we go:

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world. Blaise Pascal

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. Albert Einstein

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination. Lin Yutang.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. Lewis Carroll

The man who has no imagination has no wings. Muhammed Ali

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. Ursula K le Guin.

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. Stephen Leacock.

... and finally the inimitable Emily Dickinson:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

The one the other will absorb—

As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—

For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—

And they will differ—if they do—

As Syllable from Sound—

**********

Glorious food for thought... Wx

(Painting of Tyne Bridge Floating by Fiona Naughton www.fionanaughtonartworks.com)

I know, lets have this big party…

Welcome to my At Home party, where I am launching The Woman Who Drew Buildings. At first I think it will be casual evening, where people will drift in and out of the rooms and we we will talk writing, novels, books, inspiration, Poland, publishing and possibly the state of the nation.

Not a bit of it! By seven o’clock more than seventy people are through the door – chatting, talking and filling the rooms and the hallway with wonderful life.

It’s been a busy week, a hectic few days and today has been truly mad. G has worked his socks off making sure everything in the house is right and he and the lovely T have made sure that the tree is lit by fairy lights. And, thanks to B, G, and my good friends Avril and Gillian of Room To Write – I am still sane and the party looks set to go.

(Here are Tony and Penny from WHSmiths who brought the books and kept smiling…)

Here is my friend Gillian in the kitchen with A, (The Boy Who Likes Chocolate), and Lynn, who is off soon to Australia. A and his stepbrother C play a blinder, pouring drinks, chatting and charming the socks off strangers. The food is fantastic: I’m allowed to say that, because I only did the humble things like charcuterie, boiled eggs with paprika, and cheese. But my friend, chef Anton did the proper dishes – Polish meatballs with sour cream dip, Polish* fresh plum cake, and Polish cherry dumplings. He has researched them especially for me and they are fantastic. We catered for masses and I wonder if we have gone well over the top and will be eating leftovers for a week. But no – the food vanishes in double quick time, so that must be thumbs up for Anton’s wonderful food.

Gillian (a chartered librarian, writer and literary Good Egg who reads my manuscripts last, before the publisher sees them) holds the fort brilliantly in the kitchen while I hold fort in the rest of the house trying to greet and talk to everyone. My friend Avril talks to many people, not least the wonderful writers from our group project in Easington.

Then, at seven o’clock, I get to say my few words my study. It’s very, very, crowded and unfortunately not everyone can squeeze in. Still, I know they’ll get the message as I float around between the rooms as the evening progresses.

The few words are of course about the The Woman Who Drew Buildings and also about the wonderful Mary Davies who was the inspiration for the novel. I tell them that my secret mission is to take this opportunity to celebrate twenty one years as a published writer. (I ask B how many words that is and he says, ‘Oh! About two million.’ Well here’s to the next million, then…)

Gillian McKay has helped me dream up this party. She’ s in command of marketing for Headline Publishing for York To Aberdeen. (I think that’s right…)

She’s an apparently quiet, small Scottish dynamo of a woman who is both supportive and protective of her writers and will always go the extra mile (often literally…) to help them. She loves bookshops and writers in equal measure and is secretly formidably efficient.

She arrives at five and never stops smiling, working, talking, helping, pouring wine, reassuring me right through the evening. She has this lovely smile and really looks as though she is enjoying herself, which she assures my she is. B – a hard worker himself – thinks she’s marvellous.

Apart from everything else, Gillian’s special mission tonight is to take care of Tony and Penny who have brought the books from WHSmiths.

They are great – so helpful and interested. Tony tells me he has just finished the new Dan Brown and takes an interest in my display of my back-list novels on the bookshelves. He asks about my novel called Self Made Woman - set in Russia in 1991 - but, alas, out of print unless you can find one on good old Amazon. I’m thinking maybe someone should bring that one out again…

(Note here my battered 35 year old desk that I bought at an auction for two pounds. That desk has seen a few manuscripts.)

I would love to list simply everyone who came but the list would flutter out of the window and up into cyberspace. Still, Terry from next door caught a few guests with his camera. So I’ll try to name at least these:

Here above are Elaine and Janet from the library and Eileen and her sister Marion. And the backs of the heads of Linda and Mary, very keen writers.

Here are flowers brought by my good writer friends Pat, (whose back you see below) and Liz and Fadia.

Here is Jackie, writer and business woman, who came with her creative daughter & Fred with whom I used to teach & Sheila who worked at the University Library

And how nice that David Shapiro, of WHSmiths at the MetroCentre, Gateshead turns up with his wife Susan. (Centre here) They are both great readers and Susan reads my novels and likes them. Hooray!

Another David from Easington is there (with glasses), as is Bill Gates (facing).

I meet his wife, my friend Judith every time they are in England to continue our decades-long conversation. Alas, they are off to back to America again soon.

With her back to us, writer Norma - whom I always want to call Marilyn - and Sheilagh, in the green dress, who brought a triple layer chocolate cake and her blessing from Lourdes. Just inside the door is John, Avril’s husband, who likes writers.

And here is Lynn again, with Steffa who has just retired from running a primary school with a very fine reputation. And below Jane and Jeannie who always seem to be laughing

G and the lovely T keeping an eye on things.

Talking to Pat after signing Lynn’s copy. You can see my little writer’s doll sitting on the library steps…

And here are the flowers sent from London by my very special Debora and Sean to underpin a terrific day.

As with all parties , this one was simply made by the people who came. And thank you also for coming to my party…. wx

Looking out at the tree with fairy lights and looking forward to the next party …wx

* To those not yet in the know, Poland in 1981 is a central theme in The Woman Who Drew Buildings.