Richard Gordon

Tags

Anaesthetists, Doctors, Hospitals, Richard Gordon, Soup, Walking the dog

Today’s obituary in the Times of Richard Gordon, the author of the comic Doctor novels, records his writing routine thus: in the morning he would write; a tin of soup would be his lunch; in the afternoon he’d walk the dog, dictating as he went any ideas that came to him; he’d then put in another couple of hours writing (except during the cricket season).

He’d given up his job as an anaesthetist (which he said he chose as he didn’t like patients, so here was a medical job where they were all asleep) when his writing started to progress. His wife (also an anaesthetist) supported him until the Doctor books became so successful. I hadn’t realised how much else he wrote, novels and non-fiction.

He said, “I have had a jolly easy life doing nothing, because writing is nothing, really, it’s dead easy.” Well, he was a writer of fiction …

He made a lot of people laugh.  RIP.

‘The Glass Room’ (re)visited

Tags

'The Glass Room', Architecture, Brno, Czechoslovakia, Mies van der Rohe, Simon Mawer, The Velvet Divorce, Václav Klaus, Villa Tugendhat, Vladimír Mečiar

My wife and I were both so taken with The Glass Room by Simon Mawer that on our visit to the Czech Republic this month we made a point of visiting the Villa Tugendhat, the location (and indeed the centrepiece) of that fine novel. (See https://ninevoices.wordpress.com//?s=Glass+Room)

The Villa Tugendhat was a ground-breaking design in its time, the work of Mies van der Rohe in 1929–1930, and it’s a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. It’s in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic. Mies van der Rohe was given an unlimited budget! Of which he took full advantage …

The description of the Villa Landauer – and of its creation – in the novel seem to be exactly those of the Villa Tugendhat. We marvelled at the onyx wall, the wall of glass and its mechanism for being moved up and down, and the wonderful views through it of Brno’s Castle – all of which feature prominently in the novel. Mies van der Rohe forbade the house’s first occupants from putting anything on the walls, as does the novel’s architect, Rainer von Abt, as ornament was a crime: our guide gleefully showed us the room where the Tugendhats hid their pictures when Mies van der Rohe came to visit.

Simon Mawer has thus written his novel about the real house: it’s even set on the Villa’s actual street, Černopolní. The stories of the occupants are rather more fictionalised, though not always drastically so. So, writers, this is what you can do with location!

Our guide told us that in real life the house has played its own part in the recent history of Central Europe. She told us that it was under a tree in the garden that in 1992 the Czech Premier Václav Klaus and the Slovak Premier Vladimír Mečiar met to discuss their opposing views on the way forward for newly free Czechoslovakia, and ended by deciding to split the country into two! That tree, apparently, died not long after …

My wife and I were thrilled by our visit to the Villa. The novel had inspired us to go, and our visit made the novel even more memorable for us. You can visit the Villa but you are advised to book at least two months in advance (see http://www.tugendhat.eu/en/). Guided tours in English are available, and well worth it. The young lady who took us round was clearly in love with the building herself!

Thanks, Simon.

The History Boys and a Thomas Hardy poem

It is thirteen years since Alan Bennett’s The History Boys premiered at the National Theatre – and I’ve finally got around to seeing the film adaptation. I was bewitched and bedazzled for much of it.  Its depiction of a group of 1980s sixth-formers preparing to take their Oxbridge entrance exams was immensely watchable. But – and at the risk of sounding like ‘one of those picky-ass readers who apparently live to tell writers that they messed up’ (as Stephen King calls them) – there was a moment that stood out for me, and I don’t think it was intended to.

The students’ maverick English teacher Hector – who wants them to learn poetry for its own sake, not in order to pass exams – should surely be a master of his subject. Admittedly, he is described by his own creator as ‘not an ideal teacher … he is sloppy and quotes stuff almost at random.’  But even if Alan Bennett wants to show us that the boys ‘know more than any of the teachers,’ Hector’s USP is that he believes that ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest use,’ so why make him the mouthpiece for the wrong interpretation of a poem?  He says of Thomas Hardy’s elegiac war poem Drummer Hodge that ‘the important thing is that he [Hodge] has a name’ because ‘… these were the first campaigns when … common soldiers … were commemorated, the names of the dead recorded and inscribed on war memorials.’ But Hardy did not intend the reader to understand ‘Hodge’ as the boy’s real name. It is in fact society’s pejorative nickname for the peasant class to which he belongs. Which makes him indistinguishable from its other members – the reverse of Hector’s point.  The fact that Drummer Hodge’s bones will not, as in previous times, be ground up with those of his fellow lowly soldiers into fertiliser doesn’t change that.

When Hector says ‘So, thrown into a common grave though he may be, he is still Hodge the drummer.  Lost boy though he is on the other side of the world, he still has a name,’ he is, in my view, missing some of the vital pathos of the poem.  Drummer Hodge has made the ultimate sacrifice for his country but in death, as in life, he is treated neither with respect nor as an individual.  Victorian society is snobbish to the end.  It has always tended to lump such people together as ‘Hodges’.  And a Hodge is, as Hardy explains in Longman’s Magazine in 1883, ‘a degraded being of uncouth manner and aspect, stolid understanding, and snail-like movement.’ Hardy’s lifelong mission was to show that this is a deeply unhelpful caricature, and that individuality shone out among the labourers of his native Dorset just as much as among the so-called higher classes of London.

It’s interesting, too, that Alan Bennett gives the sport-loving son of a former Oxford college servant – a student who, in the Head’s disparaging words, ‘might get in at Loughborough in a bad year’ – the name Rudge. Maybe this is a nod to Dickens’ simple but goodhearted eponymous hero Barnaby.  But the name is inescapably similar to that of ‘Hodge’.  When Rudge is unexpectedly offered a place by his interviewers at Christ Church, Oxford – he doesn’t have to wait for a letter like his peers – it is a telling moment.  Rudge represents a type that they want – ‘college servant’s son, now an undergraduate, evidence of how far they had come, wheel come full circle and that’.  He is not, therefore, valued as an individual – and he knows it.  And although he trots out his party piece that Stalin was a ‘sweetie’ and Wilfred Owen a ‘wuss’, we know the dons are not deceived because they say, wittily if cynically, that he is ‘plainly someone who thought for himself and just what the college rugger team needed.’

It seems to me that the correct reading of Drummer Hodge earlier would have enhanced this moment.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest!

 

‘Catching the Wind’

Tags

espionage, Kent, Melanie Dobson, Secrets, World War Two, Writing discipline

Delighted to have my copy of Catching the Wind, the latest novel by Melanie Dobson, the author who impressed me so much last year with her discipline of 2,000 words a day (see https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/2000-words-a-day/). Much looking forward to reading it – it’s in split time: it’s partly in WW2, partly now, partly in between; there’s espionage, secrets deep in the past, betrayal, a man’s search for the Brigitte from whom he was separated over 70 years before – and locations round here where I live in Kent. Thanks, Melanie.

(https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/shadows-of-ladenbrooke-manor/ described my enjoyment of another of her novels with a British setting. Catching the Wind looks as good …)

Old Woman, Crazy to Write…

Tags

British Museum, Hokusai

Recently, Elizabeth and I visited the Hokusai Exhibition at the British Museum.

Widely regarded as one of Japan’s most famous and influential artists, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) produced work of astonishing quality right up until his death at ninety. Indeed, he believed that the older he got, the greater his art would become, considering that he hadn’t painted ‘anything useful‘ until he was seventy. He even added his age as part of his signature: the self-styled Old Man Crazy to Paint: Gakyo Rojin.

The Exhibition displays his work from the iconic Great Wave, to the delicacy of a minuscule frog hiding among the leaves of a flower. And being accompanied by a lady who lived in Japan, speaks the language, and was able to give me her own insights as we walked round was an added delight.

I am enthused by Hokusai’s conviction that age can be an advantage in creative efforts. Writing has parallels with painting, surely? Which means that I have decades ahead in which to keep up my pursuit of that elusive agent…

Tickets to the Exhibition are selling out fast, but if you aren’t able to snaffle one BBC4 is showing a programme on Hokusai TONIGHT, at nine o’clock. Well worth watching, or recording.

Anglican Women Novelists: a treat in store

Tags

Anglican Women Novelists, Barbara Pym Society, P D James, spinsters

The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18th September by Miss Emily Wharton, a 65-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthews in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged 10, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.

This, the irresistible opening sentence of A Taste for Death by P. D. James, was among the excerpts in the handout at a scintillating lecture given by Professor Alison Shell entitled ‘Anglicanism and Women Novelists: A Special Relationship’ at the Barbara Pym Society meeting in London on 7th May.

Crime and humour: these seem to be the predominant threads in Anglican fiction. Spinsters loom large … we were treated to excerpts from Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and of course Barbara Pym.

Professor Alison Shell  is currently co-editing with Judith Maltby Anglican Women Novelists which includes essays on P. D. James, Rose Macauley, Barbara Pym and others from Charlotte Bronte onwards. The good news is that it’s being published by Bloomsbury early next year, so there’s not long to wait for what sounds like a fascinating study.

Lessons from the life class

Tags

life drawing, portraits, show don't tell rule

 

 

‘I don’t want to see anybody continuing to draw when the model has stopped posing,’ warned the art tutor. ‘Take a break and when you come back you will see your work – and all its mistakes –  with fresh eyes.’

Some anxious members of the class took no notice and went on fiddling, adding little details, trying to ‘finish the picture’, only to become muddled and wish they hadn’t.

‘You don’t need to draw every outline; the eye of the person looking at your drawing will automatically fill in the gap, will see what is suggested for themselves.’

More advice from the art tutor which tallies with writing: we can leave the reader to work something out rather than over-explaining it. What is left unsaid or barely hinted at might be as effective as what is said.

All this is probably part of the show not tell ‘rule’ which creative writing tutors are always going on about – often tediously and over-dogmatically – but it does seem to relate to visual art as well.

The third useful thing I took away from the portrait and life drawing class happened when I had to be the model. Being confronted with how other people see you might be very good for you but it is not always a confidence-boosting experience! Do I really look as grumpy/worried/distracted as that? It reminded me that what we think we are conveying in our writing may not be what other people are hearing. We can be curiously unaware of the mismatch. Have we left too many of those important gaps? This is why we are thankful if we can rely on a far-seeing and fearless critique group to point out the truth, however unpalatable it may be. Unstinting flattery in a portrait or praise for a piece of writing is very nice but it won’t help us in the long run. Look what it did for poor Anne of Cleves.

 

You’ve got to put in the hours

Tags

hard work, pub raconteurs, Val McDermid

In her gripping psychological thriller Trick of the Dark Val McDermid puts the following into the mouth of one of the main characters, a most successful businesswoman:

“It always amazes me that so many people think it’s just enough to have an idea, without doing any work to underpin it. …  It’s the difference between being a good pub raconteur and a bestselling novelist. That difference is hard work.”

So says Val McDermid, author of over 30 books which have sold over 10 million copies (see http://www.valmcdermid.com/).  She should know!

‘The President’s Hat’

Tags

Antoine Laurain, food, France, Francois Mitterand, hats, Paris, perfumes

An ingenious way of combining short stories together to make a novel: I’ve much enjoyed The President’s Hat, by Antoine Laurain (first published in France in 2012, and in translation in England in 2013).

The book tells the stories of the various unrelated people who one way or another come into possession of a hat: in each case, after they do their lives change. Spoiler alert: what follows does reveal some of the action.

Disgruntled accountant Daniel Mercier is treating himself to a seafood platter in a crowded Paris brasserie, when he is asked whether he would mind three newcomers taking the spare places at his table. He agrees and then, to his amazement, President François Mitterand (no less) and two companions sit down, eat and talk amongst themselves. Daniel subsequently finds that whenever he eats an oyster he hears the words “As I was saying to Helmut Kohl last week …” When they leave, Daniel finds that the President has left his hat behind. He takes it. His life changes for the better.

Short story writer (hurrah!) Fanny Marquant is the next owner, after Daniel accidentally leaves the hat on a train. A problem in her love life is resolved, and she is inspired to write a prizewinning story (hurrah again!).

Perfumier Pierre Aslan [sic] is the next wearer of the hat. This brings us extraordinary descriptions of scents of all descriptions, and of the perfume-making process. How the hat affects Pierre, or how it itself gives rise to a new scent, I’ll leave you to find out.

Upper-class Bernard Lavallière is next, and here we move between his conservative, rich milieu and Paris’s trendier, lefty artistic community. In the course of his story we attend a ghastly dinner party in the first world and an equally awful reception in the second.

The stories are sewn together by Daniel Mercier’s efforts to locate and retrieve the hat. And just when we think it’s all over, we get a bizarre twist in the epilogue.

I found this book great fun. And very French: I can’t recall any novel in English revelling to anything like this extent, over and again, in the sheer pleasure of eating good food. And the settings and the sense of Parisian life seem so true.

The translator is named just as ‘Gallic Books’. Well, my congratulations to the she, he or they whose identity/ies lie behind that. And my thanks to my sister who gave me this book as she liked it a lot and thought I would too.

So if you have some short stories that might add up to a novel, see whether you can come up with an ingenious linking-up idea like this.

Gallic Books, RRP £8-99, ISBN 978-1-908313-47-8

 

A Writer’s Friend

Tags

Horses

I hope you will forgive me if I share this photo of my greatest aid to writing, enjoying an afternoon treat of a banana. (Yes, he does have strange tastes, I had a struggle to stop him snatching the banana skin from my hand!)

Tomorrow morning, Co-Co will occupy my husband happily for hours, while I continue to work on my book.