Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy weekend, one and all.  I'm enjoying being down in Somerset, with beautiful Sherpa (oh, and Mum and Dad, of course) - and sometimes the internet stretches its reach as far as my bedroom.  Fingers crossed that I can get through writing this post without it crashing.

1.) The book - doesn't appear to be out yet (although they're saying early May on the website): it's a reprint of Richmal Crompton's wonderful novel Matty and the Dearingroydes, being brought out by Greyladies Books (who reprinted Leadon Hill a while ago.)  No cover image yet, but this is a wonderful novel with one of those eccentric, joyful, outgoing heroines whom I cherish.  I wrote a review of it in 2010, which you can read here - I'm glad there will soon be copies available easily!

2.) The blog - is a new one, called A Musical Feast.  Samantha emailed me and mentioned that she'd started up a blog, and I'm always delighted to see new faces in the blogosphere.  Go along and say hello!  Yes, the blog title sounds musical, and that is one of Samantha's interests - but the literary side is there, in the pun on Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.  Incidentally, Chris told me I must read Hemingway's novel a while ago.  I hadn't even heard of it, although I knew the quotation from the Book of Common Prayer.  I digress...

3.) The link - isn't remotely highbrow, but it'll give you a laugh, especially if you like puns... and American celebrities... but mostly puns.  Enjoy.

And Now the Book Store Reading (Stop Quivering, Voice!)

By Nancy Bilyeau

Among the assumptions made about the life of a debut novelist is that right around publication day you will be swept up in a glamorous book tour. When you’re not dancing on tables at the Algonquin or having two-hour-long lunches with Important Journalists, you will read from your own novel in a bookstore before audiences hanging on your every word.

The first thing that’s incorrect about this scenario is the role of the Algonquin. The hotel, scene of Dorothy Parker’s 1920s round-table carousing, has been closed for renovations since December 2011.

As for the grand tours, they, too, seem closed for renovations, particularly for debut novelists who do not yet have followings. In the age of social media, author time is more productively spent blogging, guest-posting and tweeting, most publishers seem to feel.

But book-store readings survive. They may not be as plentiful as in bygone days but they do happen and they are important. Last summer, when I met the publicity team from Touchstone Books, I was happy to learn that, soon after my book dropped on Jan. 10th, 2012, I was scheduled to do a reading from The Crown in a Barnes and Noble on Broadway, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I once lived in a rental apartment on West 84^th Street, quote close to that BN, in a time well before book writing—and marriage and motherhood, for that matter. It was a period when I managed a bit of carousing myself, so I was doubly delighted with the choice of locale.  Some fine memories.

But then something happened as the January 12^th Barnes and Noble date approached. I felt not just the customary jitters that every newbie experiences about a book coming out. The reading, scheduled from 7 pm to 8 pm on a Thursday, scared me. A lot. I confessed my fears to Jessica Roth, the super-capable publicist for Touchstone, and she said not to worry, there was someone she knew who could help.

If you expect me to here confess that I am a withdrawn writer who can’t put two words together in front of others, if only it were that simple. 

As a magazine editor I’ve been called upon to appear on television. I once went on Fox News—live—to talk about my interview of Laura Bush in Good Housekeeping. 

Sometimes I’m fine. But sometimes I’m not. 

This unpredictability began early. When I was 14 and trying out for the Pom-Pom team, I froze and mechanically thrust my white pom-poms in all directions, the routine forgotten, while the TV theme of “Hawaii 5-0” blared. But this same teenager scored a leading role in the spring play, L’il Abner: I was Mamie Yokum, chewing on a (fake) corncob pipe and bellowing songs onstage. And I loved every minute of it.

Much more recently, I volunteered to be the class mom at my son’s school, and at the end-of-the-year party I tried to give a speech for the teacher. But then I could not stop my voice from quivering, and I barely made it through a few words of tribute. (Well, it had been a rough year.) But then, when I left my job at InStylemagazine to focus on writing fiction, I held forth at my going-away party—I gave a full speech, I read an ode to the production editor, I even did imitations.

A friend says it’s because I’m a Gemini. Which is all well and good, but which one of my dual selves was going to show up at Barnes and Noble on Jan. 12^th?

Touchstone’s Jessica truly came to my rescue by hooking me up with Kim the media trainer from L.A. I spoke with her on the phone a few weeks before the BN reading. Kim has one of those Great Telephone Voices: warm and confident. She gave me a few pointers that reduced the panic, ones I have permission to share:

Set the table for the event. Kim told me that after thanking my hosts, it would be a great idea to let the audience know what to expect. And so I did. “First I’m going to read a bit from The Crown and I’ll talk about how I came to write it.  I’m happy to answer any questions you have, and then at the end I’ll sign some books.” Just as Kim predicted, I glimpsed a flicker of relief in the eyes of both friends and strangers who’d turned out for my event. There is a plan—yay!

Don’t read from your book for an hour.  Most writers read five minutes’ worth of their work (though according to my research others have been known to go on and on).  Kim told me that a successful reading can mean no actual words spoken from the book at all. She knew one author who entertained the audience through imaginative means, not least of which was songs. No, my Mammy Yokum days were far behind me. But again I took her advice to heart, and read three snippets of my novel, interspersed with background. Text reading time: five minutes. Discussion of process: about fifteen minutes, followed by Q&A.

Share your passion.“Make sure that people know how much you loved writing your book,” Kim said. This was the easiest part, because of how much I did love researching and writing my historical thriller. I told the audience what it was like to wake up at 5 am and drink Earl Gray tea while I tapped away at my computer at the kitchen table. I told them about workshopping a first novel. I shared the research thrills, such as how excited I was when a Tower of London curatorial intern emailed me a scanned 16^th century diet sheet of a prisoner held there before execution–finally, I knew what they ate in their cells!

So was I fearless that Thursday evening? No. While waiting to walk to the lectern, I swear I felt as frightened as Colin Firth before he takes the microphone in The King’s Speech. But I took a deep breath, looked down at my notes and my marked book, and I began. I do believe my voice quivered in the beginning. But afterward my friends told me they didn’t notice. And to my joy, it did go away.

To learn more about Nancy Bilyeau’s The Crown, go to www.nancybilyeau.com

Searching for Sylvia

It's a bit of Sylvia Townsend Warner themed week this week (I'll save writing about her diary for another day, I think) because today I drove off to Dorchester, to look at the Sylvia Townsend Warner archives.  I'd emailed the woman in charge beforehand, and she had warned me that there wouldn't be a huge amount for my area of interest - being Lolly Willowes.  Annoyingly for me, Warner only started her diary a year or two after Lolly Willowes was published, and there's not much in the letters either - but they did manage to provide some interesting items and I spent a happy 2.5 hours poring over various clippings, letters, and notes.  I haven't done a lot of archival work, because there isn't a lot out there for my authors, but it is easily the most absorbing part of my DPhil.

Anyway - as I was bidding farewell to the two women who'd shown me the materials, one mentioned that Chaldon Herring wasn't too far away, and that Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland were buried there.  Their cottage had been bombed during the war, but at least I could still see the memorial.

Well, it turned out not to be quite as close as I'd hoped - especially given the lengthy single-lane tracks that sat-nav decided to take me down.  (That was rather a feature of the day, actually - I don't know the area to the south-east of our village at all well, and sat-nav took me on a lot of tiny roads, coming back.  Not fun.)  However, having been through several other Chaldons, all of which seemed to amount to a farmhouse each, I came upon the relative metropolis of Chaldon Herring.  There must have been at least ten houses... Actually, looking at the village website, there are apparently 170 people, and there seems to be rather a lot going on - including cream teas and a writers' walk, 'learn about Chaldon's extraordinary literary past', later this week.  I assume that would be about Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett (who named his novel The Sailor's Return after the village's pub), and T.F. Powys, who lived there - and it sounds as though I should have waited a few days to go!  

My solitary, uninformed search was aided by a plan of graveyards in the church, and I managed to locate the place where Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland were buried.  Warner was herself rather anti-Christian, in quite a viciously closed-minded way which sadly colours a lot of her writing for me, but she would no doubt be delighted to have these views from her resting place (apologies for the poor weather - these must be stunning when it's sunny.)

It seems appropriate for an author who wrote so engagingly about nature, but without the townsman's fey illusions about the countryside.  Warner knew what village life was like - rarely pure and never simple, as my Mum says - but spent most of her life in rural areas, avoiding literary London.

Although the journey there was a little nerve-wracking, I'm delighted that Chaldon Herring was mentioned to me, and valued my little pilgrimage.

And, just because I'm at home, here's a new picture of gorgeous Sherpa... she's still tiny!

What Inspires?

by Brenda Remmes

                   Old poker table  from early 1900s still resides in the back room of the small town pharmacy.

Repeatedly, other writers tell me “get to know your character, put them in the proper place and your story will emerge.”  I don’t think I appreciated this fully until I was working on about the fifth draft of my novel and while there were multiple chapters I had written and discarded, it was in these discarded pages that we became friends.  There was too much background material to include in the novel, but enough for me to get a clear picture of the people I had created and where they lived.  They become real in my mind as I began to place them with their everyday families and jobs.  I have to remind myself that, like Lake Wobegon, they are all fictional.

In developing a character and the place, there is usually something that starts my juices flowing…someone who always wears pink, or a particular meeting place where the locals all go.  Once you notice a quirk, it’s a lot easier to embellish and move forward. How did that quirk evolve?  How do other people respond to it?  It’s kind of fun watching people and places shape up.  I spend a lot of time doing research, although I pale next to the likes of Anne Clinard Barnhill, Nancy Bilyeau, and Sophie Perinot who have taken on topics in foreign countries centuries ago. The extent of their research is impressive. My research has been focused on more mundane things like flying an airplane, sitting around a fire house discussing fires(if there had been an alarm, they would have taken me with them), learning how to shoot a Colt 45, or going to a free range turkey farm to watch them slaughter turkeys.  My research is focused on a small town in Eastern North Carolina eighty years ago, and the most fun I’ve had is talking to older folks about the way it was when they were kids.

I’ve lived in small towns most of my life, so I’m familiar with the rhythm.  They’ve changed a lot, just in the past twenty years.  The economy has taken its toll on once thriving little businesses.  Every town had a handful of stores you could depend on. One of those stores used to be a pharmacy.  Another was a local restaurant.  Both of these places are where much of the action occurs in my novel.  While the local mom and pop diners haven’t yet become extinct, the small town pharmacies are getting hit pretty hard.  When you take into account the chain-drug outlets and recognize anyone can get their prescriptions filled at most grocery stores and then add the online Medcos and Express Scripts  there’s not much room left for Shuckers Local Pharmacy on the corner.  Pharmacists now stand behind mega counters shuffling pills and plugging in insurance codes while supervising a half dozen pharm techs.

When I started writing about a small town pharmacy operating in 1992, I remembered a place where people helped themselves to a cup of coffee out of the pot that sat on the counter and you spent the first ten minutes catching up on the family before the pharmacist got up to fill your prescription.  Twenty years isn’t that long ago.  Seems like yesterday to me, and yet when I realize how much has changed since then, I am astonished at what no longer is.  When I wanted to find out how it was in 1932, I talked to Billy.

Billy walked me through the years he worked as a soda jerk when he was in high school. The soda counter sat at the front of the pharmacy. Ice cream and milk shakes were the order for the after-school crowd.  Seltzer water with a spurt of cola syrup or lemonade made from a jug of sugar water and two or three squirts of hand squeezed lemon juice were other favorites. In the morning there was a checker game going in the front room.   Billy was responsible for having all the orders off the table in the back by 3 pm in preparation for the daily poker game.  The poker table (pictured above) had ash trays set in each corner of the table for the cigarettes which kept the back room in a smoky haze that wafted into the front area of the store. A lot of those cigarettes didn’t make it into the ash trays as the game got hot, as evidenced by the circles of wood burns.

Certain customers were known to have their favorite drinks waiting.  A teaspoon of bromine in a coke could settle-your-nerves, and a squirt of ammonia in a coke was used for a pick-me-up.  The first sales of Coca-Cola began in a pharmacy, Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, on May 8, 1886, with an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass.  It was claimed to cure everything from headaches, heartburn, and depression to impotence.  The cocaine was removed in 1903 when the Stephan Company in Maywood, NJ, started using a cocaine-free coca leaf extract.  To this day it remains the only manufacturing company authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant.  

The particular pharmacy I knew in 1992 isn’t there anymore.  The owner died.  People either mail order their prescriptions or pick them up at a Wal-Mart thirty miles away.  A couple of independent pharmacies still hang-on in adjacent towns, and yet Americans are buying more drugs than ever before in our history.  Still, I write about how things were, (not so very long ago, really) not so much because I want to return to those days, but because some things are worth remembering.  The local pharmacy “where everyone knew your name,” is one of them.  As one grandchild asked, “Grandma, how did you get on the internet before computers?”  Come sit down, child, and let me read you a book.  Let the book tell the story.

Summer Will Show - Sylvia Townsend Warner

Yes, the excerpt yesterday was from Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1936 novel Summer Will Show.  STW has had quite a few mentions at Stuck-in-a-Book this year, since I've been researching a chapter of my thesis on her novel Lolly Willowes, and I read Summer Will Show for the same reason.  Well, it's very different.  Warner is renowned, in fact, for the disparity of her topics - which include a missionary on a desert island, a medieval convent, a woman becoming a witch, and, in this instance, the French Revolution.  The only tie between her novels is her striking prose and observational eye.

Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset.  Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn't seem particularly upset about it.  Indeed, it seems to be par for the course.  Warner expertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.

Sophia seems rather unfeeling at the outset - strict, rather than motherly, and without any noticeably emotional attachments.  Warner often summarises people's essential characters through seemingly incidental - and here is Sophia's sentence: 'She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling.  A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her.'

She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris - but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband's Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way.  Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better.  A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old; as old as Frederick or older - this was the woman who Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Ouch.  But doesn't Warner arrange an image well?

Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband - even with the obstacle of Minna.  She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners.  The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it's one of the things which makes Angela Young's accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) - Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se.  Here's another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much:

And with dusters tied on her feet she [Minna] made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird.  Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic convincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant - a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.

Indeed, Minna's personality is captured most effectively when we are told that 'she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery'.  Her dramatic nature captures Sophia's interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion...  The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here.

I enjoyed the first half of Summer Will Show.  Warner's prose is certainly dense here, not to be read speedily, but the dignity and spark of Sophia still came through strongly.  Her concerns about reputation in a judgemental aristocratic world were interesting and subtle; her relationship and re-encounter with her husband were vibrant and never slipped into the sort of unrealistic emotionalism seen in a lot of novels from the 1930s.  But... the second half dragged and dragged.

First edition (can be bought here)

Perhaps my main problem was that I'm not especially interested in the French Revolution - and I'm certainly not coming from the impassioned left-wing perspective with which Warner wrote this novel (although she later grew rather less zealous in later life.)  Understandably a lot of the action of revolutionary France takes centre stage later in the novel, and as the narrative wandered a little away from relationships, hurt, and pride - themes Warner explores rather masterfully - I lost interest.  And yet even in the first part of the novel, I admired more than I loved.  It was enjoyable, but I couldn't respond with the fervour with which I greeted Lolly Willowes.  The writing was so thick, so relentlessly beautiful, even, that I felt exhausted reading it.  That can hardly be labelled a criticism of Warner, but it prevented me loving the novel deeply.

I have heard Summer Will Show praised to the heights, and thus part of me thinks a re-read in a decade or so would be a good idea.  I don't thrill to the thought.  Harriet Devine has also recently struggled to love this novel, so at least I'm not aloe in my assessment.  For those more interested in historical fiction than I am (and it would hard to be less) maybe you'd get more from this than I did.  For the reader new to Warner, I would certainly suggest Lolly Willowes as the first novel - but I have grown increasingly to think that her greatest triumph is her letters.  I've heard people say the same thing of Virginia Woolf, about her letters and diaries, and thought the assessment rather silly - but, for Warner, the chief qualities of her fiction-writing (adeptness at unusual imagery; an eye for original perspectives) appear in her correspondences, without the flaws which creep into her novels.  The Element of Lavishness is still the best thing I've read by Warner, and Summer Will Show didn't come close to challenging the throne.

Minna and Sophia

Tomorrow I'm going to post a review of a 1936 novel (about which I am a bit ambivalent, but which definitely has its good aspects) but I noted down far too many quotations to put in one post.  So I thought I'd give you one today, as a taster, without any further information about the novel.   Some of you will be able to identify it from the characters' names, I'm sure, but for those of you who can't - here's a rare chance to encounter two characters without any back-knowledge.  It's rather a pivotal excerpt, too long to incorporate into my review, but quite beautiful and interesting - if only the whole novel had been at this level!

Minna was not beautiful, nor young.  Her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all.  Her character was a character of extremes: magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering.  Her speaking voice was exquisite and her talent of words exquisitely cultivated, but she frequently talked great nonsense.  Similarly, her wits were sharp and her artfulness consummate, and for all that she was maddeningly gullible.  She offered nothing that Sophia had been brought up to consider as love-worthy or estimable, for what good qualities she had must be accepted with their opposites, in an inconsequential pell-mell of wheat and tares.

Sophia had been brought up in a world policed by oughts.  One ought to venerate age, one ought to admire the beautiful.  One ought to love ugly Mary Thompson because she was so clean, God because He was so good, prating Mr. Scarby because he was so honest and paid all his son's debts, scolding cousin Arabella because she was so capable, Mamma because she was so kind, Frederick because he was her husband.  One ought to devote oneself to one's children because, if well brought up, they would be a comfort in one's old age.  Behind every love or respect stood a monitorial reason, and one's emotions were the expression of a bargaining between demand and supply, a sort of political economy.  At a stroke, Minna had freed her from all this.  Unbeautiful and middle-aged, unprincipled and not intellectual, vain, unreposeful, and with a complexion that could look greasy, she offered her one flower, liberty.  One could love her freely, unadmonished and unblackmailed by any merits of body or mind.  She made no more demands upon one's moral approval than a cat, she was not even a good mouser.  One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to.

If all goes well, someday you will hate your first born.

This week I wrapped up a draft of the sequel to The Midwife’s Tale, and have been doing a bit of reading. (I just finished The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and I listened to The Janissary Tree during a long drive. I recommend both very highly.) This combination of reading and writing has gotten me thinking about the arc of my career, from first book to last, and among my realizations was a simple but odd little fact:

If all goes well, The Midwife’s Tale – my first born! – will be among the worst books I write.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying the book is bad (though it might be), and please don’t forward this to my editor for a blurb, but I nevertheless hope that this is true. Let me explain.

I’ve only been writing fiction for a couple of years, so – in theory at least – I should get better with each book I write. I’m gaining important experience, I have a better sense of how to craft a story, I recognize (and excise) useless characters earlier, etc. So far, so good, right. Who doesn’t want to get better? And if I get better, won’t that mean my first book is worse? It seems to.

If that weren’t enough to convince me that my first book ought to be my worst, I reminded myself that this is better than the other extreme: What if The Midwife’s Tale is as good as it gets and from here on out I will get worse as a writer? With all due respect to J.D. Salinger, peaking with your first book doesn’t seem like much fun.

So I made my peace with the fact that I will someday look back on The Midwife’s Tale and think, “I wish it were better.” It’s not quite the same as knowing that you won’t love your first child as much as your second, but it’s an odd feeling all the same.

Then I ran in to Laura Lippman. Not literally, of course, though I would love to do so, but I read a review of Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere, and suddenly the question of getting better as a writer began to shape how I thought about my career trajectory. What do I want my sixth, seventh and eighth books to be like?

(And rather than bore you with that here, I’ll jump over to another blog, Bloody Good Read. If you’re interested, have a look!)