Michael Johnston's Blog, page 20

The Birth of Rembrandt

It all began for me in Carmel, more than thirty years ago, when an interesting change in career found me travelling frequently to America and having the opportunity, over a decade or so, to visit more states of the Union than many Americans manage in a lifetime.

I remember the airport in Phoenix, Arizona, and the offices of the Greyhound Bus Company where the rather dour purchasing manager had no room for design in any new seat covering. All he wanted to find was someone who could make what he presently purchased for less than anyone else. I remember the carpet fair in Atlanta in January where, one year, I nearly froze to death on the quarter-mile walk back to my hotel; colder in Georgia that day than at the North Pole. I remember the Art Institute in Chicago and standing in front of a Seurat that I had only known, or thought I had known, from reproductions but which was more rich and beautiful than I had ever imagined. I remember the Guggenheim in New York where I wanted to get my roller skates on and whizz past the paintings standing out from the walls of its snail shell spiral corridor.

There are many other memories but the one that eventually gave birth to my novel Rembrandt Sings was the house of an artist in Carmel. He had painted many of the walls of his house with very realistic copies of modern works of art. I was particularly struck by the Douanier Rousseau jungle scene in the bathroom. This was long before the days of digital cameras or smart phones small enough to slip in one’s pocket but, in my mind’s eye, I can still see these walls with the tiger staring out from behind the towel rail and the serpent slithering down the wall of the shower. My host told me a little of his life story and how, sadly, he had become spectacularly wealthy. Sadly? Yes, sadly; because he married her; it was a real love match; but he only discovered after she died, not much more than a year later, that she was an heiress and he was her sole surviving relative.

I started trying to work up the story into a novel around 25 years ago and its first draft was a real ‘baggy monster’, as they used to describe the three-volume novels popular in the late nineteenth century. Further drafts cut away the surplus fat and let the reader see the flesh and bones of the story but it was not until one prospective agent asked me to go away and think why anyone would want to read this story today that I cast the book in its present form. I had to find the hook that would pull the reader into the story before they had a chance to cling to the shore. Once I had them carried away with the flow, I could take readers to visit islands set in the past and to explore some of the creeks and tributaries. In a sense, the hook I devised, with the narrator finding his past catching up with him, pulled me in too. I found the story taking me over and new characters and sub-plots occurring spontaneously. It was the eleventh draft that finally went to the printer.

Rembrandt Sings was, for me, the proof of the truism that real writing only starts after the first draft and a reminder that falling in love with the first draft has killed off many a promising novel.

Greed and Fear

Why on earth should we buy lottery tickets? Some argue that buying a ticket for the National Lottery or the Euromillions allows one to believe that although the chances of winning tend towards zero that portion of our stake devoted to good causes is going to a variety of good homes and we can forget about the rest. And if we won, of course we would give a tidy whack to the charities of our choice. By contrast, others feel that the national, international, even global addiction to gambling is bad enough already it needs no feeding frenzy driven by the illusory chances of wealth beyond imagining.

They say you need to speculate to accumulate but the odds are stacked against the individual speculator, so much so that most of those who do it are hired hands paid to speculate with other people’s money. Solid and steady investment – in bricks and mortar, pension pots, education and training, fitness – may sound slightly boring but, over time, they have proved their worth as against those schemes which offer amazing rewards. Remember Bernie Madoff who made off with investors millions. There was even a reference in the last episode of Downton Abbey to the amazing profits offered by a certain Mr Ponzi after whom all subsequent ‘robbing Peter to pay Ponzi’ schemes are named. Does anyone out there remember the Dover Plan?

Coming off the fence, I admit to buying lottery tickets every other week on average; one lucky dip per draw. But I stand behind people in the queue and watch with amazement as they spend ten or twenty pounds on their chosen numbers. I do not step forward to point out that my lucky dip has an equal chance with each of their selections. So, returning to the original question, why do all of us do it? The answer, I fear, is what it always has been – greed and fear. The sum of over £122M that went unclaimed last Friday and that will have risen to nearer £150M by next Tuesday is so alluring that we succumb to the greedy feeling that we would like to have it and at the same time feel the dreadful fear that if we don’t buy a ticket then someone else will win all that money we could have done so much good with.

Learned economists who say that the two basic investment motives are greed and fear are absolutely right and I will not let the fact that I had two numbers in last Friday’s draw cloud my own sober judgement; well, not much anyway.

Of Thee I Sing!

My love-affair with America has lasted over sixty years and counting … I sailed through the Panama Canal in 1957 when the Zone, on both sides, was American controlled and then set off for Hawaii where, apart from hula-hula dancers, I saw colour TV for the first time. My appetite for things American had already been whetted when my parents returned from a 1949 business visit to New York with a tin of butterscotch sauce to heat up and pour over our Sunday lunch-time ice cream. I was not disappointed. In Honolulu I gobbled down mahi-mahi steak and, of course, ate hot dogs and hamburgers.

Over the years from 1959, I visited mainland America regularly and, during the late seventies and eighties, was able to travel to many different parts of the vast country, meeting Americans in Omaha, Nebraska, who asked me to describe the sea they had never seen except in movies. I was waylaid in upstate New York by a veteran who wanted me to stay on in America and not go back home (to Scotland). Asking him why, he said he had been to Europe during the war and knew what life was like over there. Where had he been? “Sicily!”

In one sense every town, city, metropolis is the same: Howard Johnson, Macdonald’s, H & R Block, Krispy Kreme Donuts. But looking beyond the frontages there is wide regional diversity. New York is completely different from New Mexico, Washington State from Washington DC, the Blue Ridge Mountains from Death Valley.

I was in New York in 1963 when the country, the world came to a shuddering stop as the news broke from Dallas. Going home that night, Grand Central Station was as silent as the cathedral it so resembles with everyone staring at the stark headlines.

Inevitably, on my travels, I found my way into many bookshops and can remember the literary delight I experienced in Taos NM where there is a bookshop with the best possible name above the door: Moby Dickens. I wish I’d thought of that. Chapter 1 of my new novel, Rembrandt Sings, takes the narrator to Carmel CA, a delightful place to visit.

American writers I greatly admire include Faulkner, Cheever, Roth, Updike, Auster, Bradbury and Philip K Dick and now I am embarking on Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy.

Radio Days

The opening up of the Alistair Cooke archive on the BBC Radio 4 website puts a treasure trove in our ears. My Sunday mornings, as far back as I can remember, involved being shushed so my parents could listen to his Letter from America. Over time, it made me quite a fan of America.

Radio was the only medium during the war and for many years afterwards. I was allowed to stay up on Thursdays to listen to ITMA with the Liverpudlian comedian Tommy Handley and would often try to stay up on Mondays for Ronnie Waldman’s ‘deliberate mistake’ which I never spotted. No late nights were involved with Children’s Hour with the lovable Uncle Mac and, in Glasgow, Auntie Kathleen. I was so smitten I went for an audition and, in 1950, I read a story on Children’s Hour. That led on to another audition in 1953 for the Younger Generation Programme which led on to flying with the Women’s Junior Air Corp (honorary membership) and, in 1955, the chance to interview Françoise Sagan, the teenage author of Bonjour Tristesse. The teenage interviewer was suitably impressed.

Listening ranged widely from The Goon Show to The Archers, going via the Paul Temple adventures and Take it from Here with a teenage (?) June Whitfield. Participation culminated in a drama-documentary about the possible romance between Princess Marthe Bibesco, the Romanian novelist and socialite, and Lord Thomson of Cardington, Ramsay Macdonald’s Secretary of State for Air. It ended with the crash of the airship R101 in 1930. In the programme, Janet Suzman played the Princess.

Nowadays, I start with Today and then switch to Radio 3 for Essential Classics and their daily brain teaser. I was even mentioned for saying I agreed with Herbie Goldberg, the regular teaser solver, although I had no idea myself.

Literary Trilogies I can recommend

Prompted by Hilary Mantel’s successes with the first two volumes of her projected trilogy on the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, and the possibility of laying a bet that she will win a third Booker Prize in two or three years time, I looked back over several of the literary trilogies I have enjoyed over the years.

Starting very seriously, Elias Canetti wrote his autobiography in three volumes. The first, The Tongue Set Free, came out in 1977 and painted a fascinating picture of his European childhood starting in an almost Oriental and medieval, pre-WW1 Bulgaria and roaming over Manchester, Vienna and Zurich between 1905 and 1921. Canetti inevitably became a polyglot as well as a polymath. His student days and early adult life are described with equal verve in The Torch in my Ear, the title being a passing reference to his fascination with the Viennese critic (of everything) Karl Kraus and his magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), every word of which Kraus wrote himself. The final volume, The Play of the Eyes, covering his years in Vienna from 1931 to 1937, was published in 1985. All Canetti senses were tuned up to let his tongue, his ears and his eyes record and report that tragic period where it seemed nothing could be (and certainly nothing was) done to avert the catastrophe that followed. He gives portraits drawn/written from life of friends and rivals such as Robert Musil, Alban Berg and Alma Mahler (to name only three). Already in 1981 Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and, of his fiction, I would strongly recommend Auto da Fé. In his latter years he was in Hampstead and our paths crossed one day there, while I was reading that novel. Alas, we did not speak.

Another ‘foreigner’ who wrote a trilogy I admire is Jean Paul Sartre. The three books are grouped together as Roads to Freedom and start with The Age of Reason set in Paris in the summer of 1938. It describes the events of only two days when the central character, Mathieu Delarue, is trying to raise money for an abortion for his partner of seven years. It skilfully conveys the ambiguity involved in making choices at a time when people were taking sides and expressing conflicting views on almost everything. The second volume, The Reprieve, takes the characters through September 1938 as the whole of Europe awaits the outcome of the Munich conference that might, just might, grant the continent a reprieve from the looming threat of another major war. Some cannot bear to look the future in the face. Sartre’s final book of the trilogy, Iron in the Soul, makes the characters face up to the reality of France’s defeat. Some of them simply shrugged and adapted. Some managed to run away. A few, like the central character, Mathieu, played (as did Sartre) an active part in the Resistance.

Both Canetti’s and Sartre’s trilogies are essential documents of the particular periods of the twentieth century they cover. The same maybe cannot be said of two trilogies by the Canadian Robertson Davies, who managed to write not just one but three trilogies. He seemed to be able to quarry longer at a seam of characters and plots than most writers and his total output is prodigious and very readable. He was a writer, playwright, actor and academic. I commend The Salterton Trilogy which deals with the lives of the good (and the bad) citizens of the fictional Salterton somewhere in Canada where, behind a façade of a dreamy old-world city, with its two cathedrals, its university and its seeming order, the men and women get on with the scheming and dealing that is the real life of the town. The three titles are Tempest Tost, Leaven of Malice, and A Mixture of Frailties.

A searing trilogy which uses fiction to underline vital truths about man’s inhumanity to man, is Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ novels: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. The final novel very deservedly won the 1995 Booker Prize reflecting its beautifully written conclusion of the story that blends fictionalised real characters like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Owen and the psychiatrist W H R Rivers who had the care of the two poets at one stage when they were in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh where officers who were traumatised by their time at the front were nursed back to a state of health just sufficient to allow them to be sent back again to fight the war to end all wars. The inexplicable paradox is that so many wanted to go back. They include the fictional Billy Prior, promoted from the ranks. While much of the three books narrate the story as seen from the interior perspectives of the characters, the final shift into third person narration is as powerful as the shift from C major to E in the closing bars of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. It is very satisfying to know that the books are well read in secondary school as well as studied in depth at university.

Lawrence Durrell does not qualify because he wrote both a quartet and a quincunx but do read The Alexandria Quartet which, in essence, tells the same story from four different points of view. Durrell felt the series could be extended indefinitely but I’m glad he stopped at four. However, the American novelist Richard Ford, whose latest book is Canada, has written three books covering the life around the end of the twentieth century of his American protagonist, the sportswriter Frank Bascombe. I have them on my desk as I write and they are my next reading project before meeting Ford next month at the Royal Society of Literature.

Have you any trilogies to recommend? Please tell me.

At the National Theatre

Standing in the queue at the Espresso coffee bar, I found myself beside Alan Bennett. We shook hands so I could tell my grandchildren. He asked what I had been writing lately and I complimented him on his latest work – in my dreams – the meeting was real, the handshake real but it was my friend Brian who told Alan he had taken part in a recent reading of “Marius” which I had translated from the French of Marcel Pagnol. You can see what kind of a fist I made of it under the heading “Plays” on thie website. Let me know what you think.

Throw the Booker at her!

There’s no doubt Hilary Mantel’s second Booker is well-deserved. I have to admit I was hoping Will Self would win. I am very much taken by his stimulating High Modernist style which puts “Umbrella” in my view a place on the same shelf as Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I will bet it is on many an MA or even BA degree syllabus within a year or two. Even so, it might be worth a modest bet on Hilary winning a third Booker with her third volume still to appear. If she does, she should get to keep it and we should call the prize the Woman Booker from then on, or until a male author wins three in a row.