Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 33
June 24, 2014
"What is Love but..." - review of "Novgorod The Great", by Andrew Drummond (Polygon)
Innkeeper Voronov regrets losing touch with his sons:
"What have they done," he concluded nervously, "but run off with the maids? What young man would not do the same, if he was kept in the same house with them […]?"
Mrs Voronova saw the justice of this observation and dried her eyes. "It is only natural," she admitted.
Her husband continued on this romantic vein of thought: "Until that night when, all being quiet, he slips on his boots and coat and-"
"A young man will always follow his-" judged the wife.
"-breeches," finished her husband, continuing to paint a simple picture of elopement, "and set off into the world with nothing but a knife in his-"
"-heart," she concluded.
"-pocket and a girl on his arm," Voronov sighed.
This conversation, its two tracks occasionally crossing, more often running alongside each other, is typical of a novel in which communication is constantly hampered by the fact that people are better at talking than listening. Even Horatio, infatuated with Ksenia, finds it hard, when she is telling him her story, to stop his mind wandering to inconsequential mental arithmetic. Most people in this novel have a story to tell, and since each is more interested in his or her own story than in any other, there are several of these two-track dialogues. Indeed there are two tracks to the novel itself; one concerning Horatio, who may be a merchant, and Ksenia, who may be a widow, who spend a night together in 1833 at the bedside of a dying man in Novgorod, and the other concerning the adventures of the Cochrane family, one of whom, the traveller John Dundas Cochrane, had been married to Ksenia, while his father Andrew had been a friend of the dying man, Major Sinclair. The novel's two strands, therefore, cross and interact from time to time; indeed Andrew's ghost occasionally turns up at Sinclair's bedside, along with a bookseller who appears to be a werewolf and a soldier who is an imerach (a human mirror, forced to reflect everything others say or do). The structure of the novel itself is reminiscent of the imerach: John Cochrane's fascination with arcane facts and measurements reflects Horatio's, while the way in which Ksenia mirrors the Major's dead love Amélie causes another conversation to go off at cross-purposes.
It will be seen, then, that as in Drummond's two earlier books An Abridged History (reviewed here) and A Hand-Book of Volapük (reviewed here), this one contains rich potential for comedy, and this does exist, not least in chapter headings such as "He took the only course open to an honourable man and fled to Europe" and "Degeneracy, rhubarb and millions of squirrels". But this strikes me as his most serious novel so far: its leitmotiv is a rhetorical question that keeps being asked, and variously answered, "What is Love but…." There are as many answers as there are questioners, and I don't think any one is meant to be definitive: the implication is more that the question needs to be constantly asked and considered.
Most of the main characters are historical personages, but while there is much in print by and about the Cochranes, far less has been written about Ksenia and Horatio. Strangely enough, it does seem to me that they and their strand of the novel come more alive than the Cochranes do, perhaps because their creator felt he had a freer hand with them.
Drummond has been quoted as saying that he writes novels because nobody else writes the kind of novel he wants to read. I can believe that, because he doesn't really write or sound quite like anyone else. I found his first novel in a cut-price Aberdeen bookshop and have been hunting down others ever since. I'm off now to read the one novel by him that I haven't caught up with yet.
June 8, 2014
Short Days, Long Shadows
So I haz a new collection of poems out. They were written, mostly, while I still had a base in both Cardiff and Shetland, and are very much about leaving one place and becoming at home in another. Sort of Cardiff to Shetland with occasional stops-off in Norway (holidays) and the sixteenth century (Francis Walsingham's spy operation rendered in sestinas). From Seren, here. As you would gather from the title, they're a bit mortality-haunted. Here's one:
Come and Go
He has chosen, far nearer the end
than the beginning, to live
where, every day, he can watch the land
come and go, each time gleaming as if
it were new made. Sandbars shoulder
into the sun, their whereabouts too brief
to map, never drying out. Under
its pulsing skin the sea echoes
sunlight, shadows the clouds, goes undercover
in mist. What it is to be bodiless,
boneless, to reshape, to fill
with yourself the moulds of coves and bays,
take yourself back. He walks mile
after mile, blanking aches, stays up late
in the blue half-light, resists the pull
of sleep while he can, while his sight
still serves him, before that jerry-build,
his body, can no longer house a spirit
still nowhere near done with the world.
May 31, 2014
Face to Face - why?
I'm a writer with a book on a WJEC Eng Lit AS-Level syllabus. When I lived on the mainland, therefore, I used to get asked to do a lot of school visits, and did, when I could, ie when the place concerned was accessible by train from Cardiff, where I lived (I don't have good enough eyesight to drive).
Even then, I did sometimes wonder if we weren't making a lot of unnecessary trouble for ourselves, the writers and schools alike, by not using modern technology. Within Wales, the Wales Arts Council would help with funding school visits; outside it, the school had to find fees and expenses. But Skype didn't really happen much then, and of course there was always the faint chance of selling a book or two, so I kept at it.
Now, though, I live in the Shetland Islands, which means (a) that travel is more of an effort, and sometimes unreliable due to weather conditions, and (b) that expenses are a damn sight higher. This doesn't deter some schools from still wanting visits, even when they realise the exes would be in 3 figures. It deters me though; there's a limit to the amount of time I want to spend on the road. So I always suggest doing a "visit" via Skype. I've got the facility at home; it works well and I could both read and do Q & A sessions with it.
At this point the teacher at the other end of the email generally says s/he'll look into it and that's the last I ever hear. They run a mile at the idea. I can credit that maybe some English teachers are uneasy with even this simplest of technology, but they've got a classful of teenagers who could sort it for them! It would be cheaper for them, less hassle for the writer and just the same as being there (easy enough to use a projector so that everyone can see the computer screen), but they won't have it. So the visit doesn't happen, either in person or electronically.
At least, being a poet, I don't have an agent. I gather life is even more complicated for those who do. A playwright who has just had a play produced is told she should be promoting herself by turning up on theatre doorsteps in London, where she doesn't live and can't afford to travel, to push her work. Theatres and agents, all of course London-based, invite writers to come for meetings in London. When the impoverished writers shell out for the enormous train fare and take time off any work they're lucky enough to have, it turns out that what is being discussed at the meeting could equally well have been done via email. The excuse, on the other side, is always "but I want to meet face to face". The playwright has offered Skype meetings, but gets the same "it's better face to face" line. What do they think Skype is? IT'S TWO PEOPLE FACE TO FACE, folks!
Seriously, this attitude on the part of agents, publishers, facilitators in general discriminates against any writer who lives outside London, who's on a low income, who's working and can't readily take time off (and most young writers need a proper job to live) and against any writer who's disabled and for whom travel is thus more onerous. Do you really want to be doing that? And in an age when we actually have perfectly good alternatives? When I worked in the civil service, and in higher education, it soon became clear that meetings, by and large, were not a way of working; they were a way of interrupting work and inconveniencing the maximum number of people for small return. I've no reason to believe they are any more productive in the arts. Get over this face to face fetish and find out how Skype, email and videoconferencing work, for heaven's sake.
Even then, I did sometimes wonder if we weren't making a lot of unnecessary trouble for ourselves, the writers and schools alike, by not using modern technology. Within Wales, the Wales Arts Council would help with funding school visits; outside it, the school had to find fees and expenses. But Skype didn't really happen much then, and of course there was always the faint chance of selling a book or two, so I kept at it.
Now, though, I live in the Shetland Islands, which means (a) that travel is more of an effort, and sometimes unreliable due to weather conditions, and (b) that expenses are a damn sight higher. This doesn't deter some schools from still wanting visits, even when they realise the exes would be in 3 figures. It deters me though; there's a limit to the amount of time I want to spend on the road. So I always suggest doing a "visit" via Skype. I've got the facility at home; it works well and I could both read and do Q & A sessions with it.
At this point the teacher at the other end of the email generally says s/he'll look into it and that's the last I ever hear. They run a mile at the idea. I can credit that maybe some English teachers are uneasy with even this simplest of technology, but they've got a classful of teenagers who could sort it for them! It would be cheaper for them, less hassle for the writer and just the same as being there (easy enough to use a projector so that everyone can see the computer screen), but they won't have it. So the visit doesn't happen, either in person or electronically.
At least, being a poet, I don't have an agent. I gather life is even more complicated for those who do. A playwright who has just had a play produced is told she should be promoting herself by turning up on theatre doorsteps in London, where she doesn't live and can't afford to travel, to push her work. Theatres and agents, all of course London-based, invite writers to come for meetings in London. When the impoverished writers shell out for the enormous train fare and take time off any work they're lucky enough to have, it turns out that what is being discussed at the meeting could equally well have been done via email. The excuse, on the other side, is always "but I want to meet face to face". The playwright has offered Skype meetings, but gets the same "it's better face to face" line. What do they think Skype is? IT'S TWO PEOPLE FACE TO FACE, folks!
Seriously, this attitude on the part of agents, publishers, facilitators in general discriminates against any writer who lives outside London, who's on a low income, who's working and can't readily take time off (and most young writers need a proper job to live) and against any writer who's disabled and for whom travel is thus more onerous. Do you really want to be doing that? And in an age when we actually have perfectly good alternatives? When I worked in the civil service, and in higher education, it soon became clear that meetings, by and large, were not a way of working; they were a way of interrupting work and inconveniencing the maximum number of people for small return. I've no reason to believe they are any more productive in the arts. Get over this face to face fetish and find out how Skype, email and videoconferencing work, for heaven's sake.
May 25, 2014
Whoops...
Just thought I had better post to apologise to anyone who might have sent me an LJ private message in the past few years.... I did vaguely know they existed but hadn't found out how to read them and never remembered to look. Have just accidentally done so and found messages dating back years... not much point replying now, but sorry, it wasn't intentional. There really is no point in trying to contact me that way, but Facebook is one place I do check, and my email's on my website. Sorry again!
May 18, 2014
Dazzling doubleness: review of "The Book of the Needle" by Matthew Francis, pub. Cinnamon
There are some cloths, said Mr Jones (snipping), where this difference is manifest, as satin where one face shines and the other is plain, or a twilled cloth like worsted where the weave shows and feels differently in the two faces, but there are others where the front and the back are identical in warp and woof and pattern and colour, in all their properties, and yet, Arise, to you as a tailor they can never be the same. For the front of the cloth is that which will appear to the world; it will be fair and smooth, or else embellished and embroidered, but the back will hold the raw workings of your stitches or a lining, and the moment the cloth lies upon your lap you must and will know which is which, for unless they are first different in your own mind they will never be so in reality. Such doubleness is a property of everything in the world, and of every person. We are not meant to see the threads and thrums of another’s soul, nor the plainness of their lining, but our own we feel familiarly rubbing against us whenever we move. In this a garment is like a man or a woman; how should it not be, made as it is in our image? Therefore when I teach you to sew, I am teaching you to ape your creator…
For all Mr Jones’s best efforts, young Arise Evans, his apprentice some time in the 1620s, never did become a master tailor. What he did learn from his master was this concept of “doubleness”. It appears in his fascination with etymology, with what Mr Jones used to call the words behind and beneath other words (Mr Jones was the master of false etymology, until his pupil surpassed him, and mistakenly seeing the word “Arise” behind his own given name of Rhys has a huge effect on Arise’s life). It appears also in Arise’s way of seeing the potential for imagery in everything around him, very much in the manner of his time, so that he cannot sew a seam nor consummate his marriage without reflecting on the cosmic significance of his actions. Above all, it is what underlies his practice as an author.
During the hectic period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, Arise had been a successful author of books of prophecy. Rather ungratefully, given that it was the upside-down nature of society at that time which had enabled a tailor to become respected as an author, Arise is an ardent royalist who foretells doom to the nation unless the monarchy is restored. When this comes about, of course, he finds himself at a loose end for what to write next – the future has happened and there is nothing left to prophesy. Hence The Book of The Needle, which starts out to be a tailoring manual but soon digresses into Arise’s personal memoirs.
What makes Arise's story engaging is partly the intrinsic fascination of the times and partly his own personality, reflected in his writing style. He can be very funny, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not - though very much a man of his own time, he also comes very close to us in his tendency to hapless incompetence in the face of minor but irritating tasks like threading a needle or re-folding a map. There is endless amusement to be had from the domestic by-play between Arise, his amateur herbalist wife Maud and their son Owen (a Puritan version of Lupin Pooter). But Arise’s life also has a serious side; he met the mighty of his day, including two kings and a Lord Protector, and there is nothing funny about his second encounter with the Earl of Essex, a man who once craved glory but is now haunted by his experiences of battle:
The bowels, he said, belong in the body, do they not? They were never intended by God to be seen. But I have seen them many times, at Newbury and other places. […] Several of the men fall over; they always look as if they are doing it on purpose. And only then do you notice that some of the other men are wearing the bowels of these fallen ones across their faces. They look like pieces of rag, Evans, bloody and befouled pieces of rag.
In one of the most powerful chapters, ”Remember”, Arise recalls the execution of the Presbyterian Christopher Love, which he witnessed, and, in the margins, reflects on that of Charles I, which he did not see. His son Owen, who also has ambitions to be an author, objects to this method and is discovered cutting the page:
You see, father, where I was cutting. I was trying to cut the narrative of the King away from that of Mr Love, and keep them separate.
    Why, Owen, they are intertwined.
    He frowns at the page in front of him, and his fingers move as if they were still wielding the scissors.
    They are intertwined, Owen, because the one story makes me think of the other, for thoughts do not pass through the mind singly but grow round each other like ivy round the trunk of an oak, and thus I wrote it as I thought it, interconnectedly. […]
    When I am an author, Owen says, looking with longing at the scissors lying on the desk next to his hand, I shall write only one thing at a time.
Owen is wrong, of course. Arise can no more tell a story in a straight line than Tristram Shandy can, but then neither life nor narrative goes in uncomplicated straight lines, and the interconnectedness, the doubleness, which Owen fails to appreciate is what gives this narrative its depth and lasting interest. The one thing I wish is that my paperback had rather stiffer covers, because I foresee that they will very soon be bent with much reading….
April 16, 2014
Review of Six Pounds Eight Ounces, by Rhian Elizabeth, Seren 2014
If the teachers liked teaching once, they definitely don’t any more. […] They trip up, we laugh. They cry, and it’s even funnier. […] We make fun of their twitches and the way they speak, that’s if we let them speak at all. […] Because this is war. […] Although when I say we, I don’t actually mean me and Jess. We always wear the right uniform and do our ties up properly. We bring our homework in on time and only ever talk in class with a teacher we’re not afraid of.
The way this passage subverts and undermines its original premise is typical of Rhian Elizabeth’s debut novel. Hannah, its narrator and protagonist, announces herself from the start as an unreliable narrator: a potential author of fiction, indeed. Having done so, she then proceeds to speak, for the most part, very openly and honestly, so you forget for long stretches that, apart from being a child, she also sees herself as a writer who embroiders and riffs on reality. She pulls this trick several times in the narrative, recounting something as if it had actually happened, before making it clear that this was in fact only one of several possible outcomes and not the one that actually came to pass.
“The truth”, whatever that may be, is a key theme of the novel; most of Hannah’s problems with adults are caused by their elastic definition of truth. They cannot tell childish fantasies from lies, yet themselves distort or ignore the truth when it does not suit them, like the grandmother evading a question about someone’s terminal illness by pretending her hearing aid is on the blink.
Hannah’s first-person narrative begins when she is aged five and ends when she is sixteen. First person in a very young voice is hard to pull off, especially when, as seems to be all but compulsory these days, the novel is in the present tense. If you write first person in past tense, you can have it both ways: write from the perspective of the child that was, but with the vocabulary of the adult you now are, and no reader thinks it odd – it is, after all, how most of the greatest child voices in literature were created. But with the present tense, we can only suppose it is All Happening as we read, and that is more problematic. When I came across the first age marker that told me Hannah was five, I was downright surprised; I had already been listening to her voice for two chapters and it wasn’t the voice of a five-year-old, even a clever one. She could think like that, but she couldn’t possibly formulate her thoughts in some of the ways this voice does.
This did cause me some problems near the start, though fewer than it might have done because the writing is extremely assured, quite unusually so for a first novel, and tends to carry you along with it. By the next time marker – going to comprehensive school at 11 - Hannah’s age has caught up with her voice and the problem disappears. The teenage argot and behaviour of Hannah and her best friend Jess are observed with forensic and often very funny accuracy; young readers (and this novel should appeal to both an adult and young-adult readership) will be cackling, while readers with teenagers of their own will be tearing their hair and longing, at intervals, to slap the pair of them. Though often infuriating, they are so basically bright and harmless that one cannot be indifferent to what happens to them, particularly when self-destructive urges seem to have taken them over. The downward spiral they get into is, again, very subtly observed, so that, for instance, the decline in their standards of personal hygiene hits us as forcibly as it does the young narrator in one of her more lucid moments.
Another instance of this subtlety in the writing struck me in the account of the school outing to a play in Cardiff. I know that this event, though not, thank heaven, its riotous outcome, is based on fact, because I saw that very production there myself. At first, it seemed odd that Hannah is not sorry to see the play interrupted; at this point she is very keen on English and, unlike most of her classmates, has read it. Only later did it occur to me that the play bears on her life and contains a character she might well wish to see silenced. There is absolutely no mention of this in the account of the incident; the reader is left to figure it out in a way many writers would not have had the confidence to do, especially at such an early stage of their career.
Here, the author has taken a real event and transmuted it into the material of fiction. As the novel ends, Hannah in unreliable-narrator mode challenges us to wonder if she will do so, or is already doing so:
It took me a while but I know now that words are nasty little things and I’m done with them. And it’s funny, isn’t it? I did warn you. I told you right from the start that I’m the girl who lies, so, really, you probably shouldn’t believe a single word I’ve said.I think this novel’s title does it less than justice. There is a reason for the clear reference to a birth weight, but as an attention-grabber, an incentive to pick up the book, I should say it was a non-starter – indeed to some it may signal “mum-lit”, which could not be less accurate (mother’s place, in this book, is firmly in the wrong). It deserved a more memorable, unusual title, perhaps with a dash of the humour that never deserts Hannah. The writing is confident, assured and doesn’t sound like anyone else I can think of offhand.
March 26, 2014
My ten favourite short stories
I could never do this with poems; there are too many and I change my mind too much. But stories... yes. Here they are, with links where possible.
1, Anton Chekhov: Easter Eve. Not an unaware narrator, but what you might call an unaware protagonist, who tells more than he means to, or even knows himself, with every word.
2. Anton Chekhov: Home. Look, Chekhov is the guvnor, right? Of course he gets more than one! This is a story about the difference between truth, lies and fiction.
3. Rudyard Kipling: They. I didn't know the real-life background to this story when I first read it. It didn't matter.
4. Tove Jansson: Taking Leave (from A Winter Book). A story about letting go of things. Immensely spare and moving.
5. George Eliot: Brother Jacob. Is it a long short story? A short novella? Whatever: it's laugh-out-loud funny and the only story I know about the evils of convenience food.
6. Marcel Aymé: Legend of Poldevia. It's an odd thing; most French writers aren't notable for humour but just now and then you get one like Tristan Corbière or Marcel Aymé who's a whizz at it. And humorists say the most profound things...
7. Ilse Aichinger: Spielgelgeschichte. First piece of prose I ever read that was written backwards; from the protagonist's death to her birth. A long time before Amis, too.
8. Rudyard Kipling: The Wish House. So Kipling's the deputy guvnor. Staggering ventriloquism, amongst other things.
9. Saki: Birds on the Western Front. What happens when a highly observant, sensitive, cynical funny-man goes to war.
10. Petronius: The Tale of the Widow of Ephesus. OK,. it's part of a novel but also a short story in its own right, and a lovely example of structure and the difference between writer and narrator.
1, Anton Chekhov: Easter Eve. Not an unaware narrator, but what you might call an unaware protagonist, who tells more than he means to, or even knows himself, with every word.
2. Anton Chekhov: Home. Look, Chekhov is the guvnor, right? Of course he gets more than one! This is a story about the difference between truth, lies and fiction.
3. Rudyard Kipling: They. I didn't know the real-life background to this story when I first read it. It didn't matter.
4. Tove Jansson: Taking Leave (from A Winter Book). A story about letting go of things. Immensely spare and moving.
5. George Eliot: Brother Jacob. Is it a long short story? A short novella? Whatever: it's laugh-out-loud funny and the only story I know about the evils of convenience food.
6. Marcel Aymé: Legend of Poldevia. It's an odd thing; most French writers aren't notable for humour but just now and then you get one like Tristan Corbière or Marcel Aymé who's a whizz at it. And humorists say the most profound things...
7. Ilse Aichinger: Spielgelgeschichte. First piece of prose I ever read that was written backwards; from the protagonist's death to her birth. A long time before Amis, too.
8. Rudyard Kipling: The Wish House. So Kipling's the deputy guvnor. Staggering ventriloquism, amongst other things.
9. Saki: Birds on the Western Front. What happens when a highly observant, sensitive, cynical funny-man goes to war.
10. Petronius: The Tale of the Widow of Ephesus. OK,. it's part of a novel but also a short story in its own right, and a lovely example of structure and the difference between writer and narrator.
March 21, 2014
Why my mother didn't become a poet
My mother was an infant-school teacher. She was extremely fond of poetry and music; she taught a great deal by means of them and when I was young, she seemed always to be singing or reciting something. It was why, as a child, I wanted to make poems myself; it was simply a way of imitating mother. (She never could be bothered much with housework, a trait which I have also imitated all my life.)
But she never made up her own, and this next step seemed so natural to me that I once asked her why; had she never made up poems? Once, she said, at school, when she was about 12. The class had been told to "write a poem" and she had written the following (at a guess, she must have been reading RLS at the time):
The teacher, wandering round checking progress, had thought this not unpromising (well, this was the 1930s; it scanned and rhymed and had a line of thought) and had encouraged her to go on with it. No, she said, it was finished; she'd said all she wanted to say. And nothing would persuade her to expand on it; indeed she couldn't see why the teacher should think this either necessary or possible. Well, said I, she probably wanted you to talk about those "other folk", imagine what they were like, draw some sort of comparison with your own life. Mother's reply to this was that any intelligent reader ought to be able to do that for themselves, once the idea had been planted in their head.
Needless to say I haven't followed her in this, because it would make all poetry except maybe epigrams and haiku fairly impossible. But the concept has always intrigued me: plant the idea and then let the readers write the poem themselves... I wonder how many lyric, as opposed to narrative, poems, if reduced to their first verses, would work like that?
But she never made up her own, and this next step seemed so natural to me that I once asked her why; had she never made up poems? Once, she said, at school, when she was about 12. The class had been told to "write a poem" and she had written the following (at a guess, she must have been reading RLS at the time):
I sit upon the shifting sands
And look far out to sea,
And think of all the other lands,
Where other folk might be.
The teacher, wandering round checking progress, had thought this not unpromising (well, this was the 1930s; it scanned and rhymed and had a line of thought) and had encouraged her to go on with it. No, she said, it was finished; she'd said all she wanted to say. And nothing would persuade her to expand on it; indeed she couldn't see why the teacher should think this either necessary or possible. Well, said I, she probably wanted you to talk about those "other folk", imagine what they were like, draw some sort of comparison with your own life. Mother's reply to this was that any intelligent reader ought to be able to do that for themselves, once the idea had been planted in their head.
Needless to say I haven't followed her in this, because it would make all poetry except maybe epigrams and haiku fairly impossible. But the concept has always intrigued me: plant the idea and then let the readers write the poem themselves... I wonder how many lyric, as opposed to narrative, poems, if reduced to their first verses, would work like that?
March 16, 2014
Notes on a place
The beach at Hoswick is a small half-moon, facing south. To east and west, it is bounded by low cliffs, hardly more than rocky hills, where fulmars nest. They are not really very safe from humans, should the humans choose to disturb them, but that never seems to happen. Behind the beach, to the north, is a scrubby field, with a path leading up a gentle slope to the village. Through this field the Hoswick burn runs down, across the beach to the sea. It is a peaty burn; in wet and windy weather the peat runs gold and brown in it, and tiger-stripes the sea itself.
The beach is stony. Little sand can be seen unless the tide is well out, when small sandbars and islets appear in unpredictable places. They seem to shift often; one will show at low tide for a month, then vanish or move along the beach. While they exist, it can be mildly hypnotic to stand on one and feel yourself cut off from land, surrounded by sea.
The stones come in all sizes, from pebbles to rocks, and most are abraded by the sea to a fantastic, translucent smoothness, as if they had been tumble-polished. Of the many colours, perhaps the most frequent are white and black. That sounds dull, but the white are of a bleached purity, sometimes veined with pink or red like fine marble, while the black are generally smooth, flat and obsidian. It is not the blue-black of a crow, but a fathomless, matt black that makes you understand why black is defined as the absence of colour. The black holes in space, that swallow matter for ever, must be that colour.
The sounds and smells of the beach, and indeed of the village, depend mostly on what the wind is doing. When it blows hard from the south, it brings waves crashing in on the stones; it also brings piles of seaweed with the acrid, faintly medicinal smell that always feels as if it must be good for the health. In a south wind, no other smells or sounds can make headway against seaweed and ocean on stones. Walking on a winter night in the village, with nothing visible beyond the lights of the lanes, you can hear only the nearby sea, moving restlessly in the dark.
In calmer weather, and when the wind comes from another quarter, different smells make themselves felt; in winter, mainly peat smoke from the village chimneys. This is acrid in a different way from the seaweed, less healthy, catching the back of the throat, but comforting too, on a cold day, since it speaks of lit stoves indoors. If the winter wind is from the east, it will bring also the sweet, slightly sickly smell of silage bales from Stove, up the road to the east.
In summer the pervading smell is far more subtle; the intense, insidious scent of the village's many honeysuckle hedges ambushing the passer-by. There are wild rose hedges too, and though these are mostly scentless, every so often you find a white one with a scent even more subtle than the honeysuckle's, but these you must go close up to, or you miss it.
As for the sounds of the village, you can tell when autumn has come because the calls of sheep give place to those of greylag geese; indeed by winter there are more geese in the fields than sheep. But winter or summer, there are bird calls: gulls and waders and the chattering starlings who live all year round in the small plantations of trees at the back of Cliff Cottage and the hotel. Trees are not common in Shetland, and Hoswick, sheltered by the steep hill to the west, has more than most Shetland villages. Hence it also has more birds, particularly birds of passage and, in the migration season, flocks of birders with woolly hats, binoculars and an intense expression, as though they had strained their eyes with overmuch peering.
I may be making the village sound too idyllic. It is not something off a chocolate box; there are many one-time fishermen's cottages decayed into sheds, and some of these in turn becoming uncared-for, even derelict. In winter, especially, most of the houses look as if they need a coat of paint or a re-render, for the weather is hard on them and nothing in the decorating line can be attempted until spring. The buildings of the small construction business that failed a couple of years ago stand empty in their yard, cluttered with unwanted materials, though these grow fewer all the time, because the villagers recycle most of them into maintaining their own sheds or houses. In late autumn the village feels unusually busy, as people race to finish outdoor tasks they’ve been putting off, and for which there is now little time in the rapidly diminishing hours of daylight.
Spring is probably the village’s best season, because there are a great many daffodils in the gardens and verges. They provide the year’s first real burst of colour, clear and rather cold – the celandines, which come a little later, are a warmer, more golden yellow. The prevailing colour is yellow for quite some time, until the lower-growing, unsuspected bluebells come into flower and suddenly there are lakes and drifts of blueness everywhere. It is in spring that the air smells least of other things, like seaweed or peat, and more of itself; there is a cleanness about it like that of mineral water and the same pleasing, metallic taste. It becomes a positive pleasure to breathe it in, not something you do automatically but something to stop and think about, to savour. Before I came here, I would never have thought breathing could be so enjoyable.
The beach is stony. Little sand can be seen unless the tide is well out, when small sandbars and islets appear in unpredictable places. They seem to shift often; one will show at low tide for a month, then vanish or move along the beach. While they exist, it can be mildly hypnotic to stand on one and feel yourself cut off from land, surrounded by sea.
The stones come in all sizes, from pebbles to rocks, and most are abraded by the sea to a fantastic, translucent smoothness, as if they had been tumble-polished. Of the many colours, perhaps the most frequent are white and black. That sounds dull, but the white are of a bleached purity, sometimes veined with pink or red like fine marble, while the black are generally smooth, flat and obsidian. It is not the blue-black of a crow, but a fathomless, matt black that makes you understand why black is defined as the absence of colour. The black holes in space, that swallow matter for ever, must be that colour.
The sounds and smells of the beach, and indeed of the village, depend mostly on what the wind is doing. When it blows hard from the south, it brings waves crashing in on the stones; it also brings piles of seaweed with the acrid, faintly medicinal smell that always feels as if it must be good for the health. In a south wind, no other smells or sounds can make headway against seaweed and ocean on stones. Walking on a winter night in the village, with nothing visible beyond the lights of the lanes, you can hear only the nearby sea, moving restlessly in the dark.
In calmer weather, and when the wind comes from another quarter, different smells make themselves felt; in winter, mainly peat smoke from the village chimneys. This is acrid in a different way from the seaweed, less healthy, catching the back of the throat, but comforting too, on a cold day, since it speaks of lit stoves indoors. If the winter wind is from the east, it will bring also the sweet, slightly sickly smell of silage bales from Stove, up the road to the east.
In summer the pervading smell is far more subtle; the intense, insidious scent of the village's many honeysuckle hedges ambushing the passer-by. There are wild rose hedges too, and though these are mostly scentless, every so often you find a white one with a scent even more subtle than the honeysuckle's, but these you must go close up to, or you miss it.
As for the sounds of the village, you can tell when autumn has come because the calls of sheep give place to those of greylag geese; indeed by winter there are more geese in the fields than sheep. But winter or summer, there are bird calls: gulls and waders and the chattering starlings who live all year round in the small plantations of trees at the back of Cliff Cottage and the hotel. Trees are not common in Shetland, and Hoswick, sheltered by the steep hill to the west, has more than most Shetland villages. Hence it also has more birds, particularly birds of passage and, in the migration season, flocks of birders with woolly hats, binoculars and an intense expression, as though they had strained their eyes with overmuch peering.
I may be making the village sound too idyllic. It is not something off a chocolate box; there are many one-time fishermen's cottages decayed into sheds, and some of these in turn becoming uncared-for, even derelict. In winter, especially, most of the houses look as if they need a coat of paint or a re-render, for the weather is hard on them and nothing in the decorating line can be attempted until spring. The buildings of the small construction business that failed a couple of years ago stand empty in their yard, cluttered with unwanted materials, though these grow fewer all the time, because the villagers recycle most of them into maintaining their own sheds or houses. In late autumn the village feels unusually busy, as people race to finish outdoor tasks they’ve been putting off, and for which there is now little time in the rapidly diminishing hours of daylight.
Spring is probably the village’s best season, because there are a great many daffodils in the gardens and verges. They provide the year’s first real burst of colour, clear and rather cold – the celandines, which come a little later, are a warmer, more golden yellow. The prevailing colour is yellow for quite some time, until the lower-growing, unsuspected bluebells come into flower and suddenly there are lakes and drifts of blueness everywhere. It is in spring that the air smells least of other things, like seaweed or peat, and more of itself; there is a cleanness about it like that of mineral water and the same pleasing, metallic taste. It becomes a positive pleasure to breathe it in, not something you do automatically but something to stop and think about, to savour. Before I came here, I would never have thought breathing could be so enjoyable.
March 12, 2014
Telling a story
I came across this workshop script on a old memory stick (maybe they should be forgettery sticks) and thought I'd post it here.
Narrative workshop
"Yes--oh dear yes--the novel tells a story" – E M Forster
I've used that quote often enough with students, mainly male ones, whose idea of a short story was one damn thing after another, incidents piling up faster than you could take them in and characters being killed off before you could learn their names, let alone what they were like. We wave Joyce's Dubliners at them, as proof that very little actually needs to happen in a story as long as something changes or develops, and of course that's true; a purely plot synopsis of "The Dead" might be something like "Gabriel attends a rather dull party at his aunts', goes home, and it snows".
But the Forster quote is one I am less sympathetic to now. It's been coming on for some time, but I first knew I'd altered when I read some short stories submitted to a Leaf competition.
They were considered, crafted pieces, very interested in character and motivation. People sifted their memories, analysed their relationships, attached enormous importance to tiny observations which you later realised were metaphors for their lives. It was like watching one of those award-winning French films where everyone sits around a table talking for two hours and nothing actually happens. After reading about 20 of them, I had mentally replaced Forster's quote with one from Sheridan's The Critic - commenting on a new play, someone says: "I think it wants incident". I would have killed for a story with incidents, a narrative line, above all the age-old hook of "what happens next".
Sure, I still wanted to get to know the characters, but it struck me that I could just as well do that while they were doing something interesting. I used to have a workshop exercise where I asked people to describe someone, but without using any adjectives, adverbs or abstract nouns. So you couldn't say a person was kind, or acted kindly, or displayed kindness. Your only option was to show him doing something that illustrated that quality. I thought at the time that I was encouraging students to write more vividly, to show rather than tell. But I wonder now if I wasn't just unconsciously missing the element of storytelling in writing.
This element is, after all, about the most ancient there is. Even now, there are cultures where people still come together in the café or marketplace to listen to a storyteller or ballad-singer, and it's where a great deal of classical Western literature came from. Of course The Odyssey, to cite one of the earliest novels, is more than a story; of course it says a great deal about the themes of home, of belonging, of finding oneself via journeying. But it keeps you reading principally by keeping you on tenterhooks as to how on earth Odysseus is going to get out of his latest difficulty. Nor does it ever have to take time out to draw his character, to tell you he is ruthless, resourceful, a survivor; he tells you that himself through everything he says and does.
The attitude implied in the Forster quote is that the narrative aspect of novels is, for the writer, a necessary but dull kind of journeyman work which gets in the way of the fancy writing he really wants to concentrate on, the big set-piece emotional scenes perhaps, or dialogue, or description. I'm not sure he did mean it quite like that, but in any event it strikes me as a terrible waste to regard incident like that, rather than as a potentially useful tool. Oddly enough I think it can be particularly useful in the kind of novel that wants to concentrate on the unravelling of character or the long explication of a theme, because these novels still need, somehow or other, to keep the reader's attention from wandering.
Two novels from the Glamorgan Masters in Writing course seem to me to illustrate that very well. Dan Rhodes's Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Canongate) had a narrative structure unusual for a modern novel, and I think a lot of reviewers didn't really get where it was coming from. For the first half it moved like a novel, charting the shifting pattern of relationship between three characters, two men and a dog. But in the second half, the dog is a long way off, trying to get back home. From then on, the novel shifts between men and dog, and the dog's half is a series of episodes connected only by how they move the dog closer to home – or sometimes not. Some critics took this to indicate that Dan was still at heart a short story writer who hadn't quite mastered the novel form yet, which only shows they hadn't read The Odyssey very recently. Each episode of Odysseus's journey highlights another aspect of him, and of the nature of journeying and homecoming. Timoleon Vieta's journey is an odyssey in love, and each episode shows another aspect of that troublesome emotion. They're all fascinating in themselves, but they are also stages on the dog's journey and, essentially, what happens to him next. And of course that aspect makes the novel remarkably hard to put down.
Another student's novel in progress concerns the long unravelling of a character's mental state, both in his own words and as observed by his sister. It has to be slow, by its very nature, and it also happens that these characters are modern-day students, which means, to be honest, that their daily lives are not full of riveting incident. This poses an obvious problem in keeping the reader interested when, unavoidably, not a lot is going on. The author's solution to this strikes me as really quite inspired: the siblings' mother was a teller of folk tales which the sister in particular recalls, and every so often, one of these tales is interpolated into the action. It's clear that they are a sort of metaphorical counterpoint to what is going on in her brother's head, but what they also are is a narrative fix for the reader. The author is very good at inventing and adapting the stuff of folk tale and whenever I read a chunk of this novel for the workshop I couldn't help mentally perking up whenever the familiar lexis appeared: "There was once a young man….."
This hunger for story is so basic to our nature that it would seem at the least unprofitable for writers to ignore or downplay it. I've heard it suggested, and to some extent I believe it, that the reason many adults today read children's books is to get the intense narrative fix that some literary fiction denies them. We have to write the themes that are nagging at us, but the clothes they wear are our choice, and if we can convey them partly via a cracking good story, it certainly isn't going to hurt their chances of popularity with readers. I do, by the way, think this can apply to poems too. Because of the condensed utterance of poems, poets are rightly worried about being over-narrative, of simply telling one damn thing after another. But the techniques of cinematography, of cutting between scenes rather than tracking, can help here, as can putting a lot of the action into back-story that is never more than partly explained. I think Rosie Shepperd's poems do this a lot, and the narrative line, however disguised and broken up, not only adds interest to the poems but allows the reader to get an initial handle on them and what they're about.
The only proper thing to do at this point is to read a story, and this is my favourite ever written. It's a fine illustration, apart from anything else, of how the very device of someone telling a story can be used to advantage. Where there is a narrative there is necessarily a narrator, and he isn't always the same person as the author, which gives said author the chance to do some amazing things with the dual perspective. This is a self-contained tale told in the course of a much longer book, the Satyricon of Petronius. The man who tells it, a character called Eumolpus, has already been established as a shallow, materialistic lecher. He tells the story in a misogynistic spirit, believing it reflects badly on women as faithless and sensual (very like himself), and frequently uses words like "loving wife" and "virtuous woman" in irony, no doubt with a huge wink.
But Eumolpus is not Petronius, and the further we get into the tale, the clearer it becomes that Petronius, lurking at his narrator's back, does not share his views. The ultimate irony is that the words Eumolpus uses in irony are true in fact: the woman is indeed loving, virtuous and honest, and a lot more so at the end of the tale than she was at the start.
THE TALE OF THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS
There was a married woman in Ephesus of such famous virtue that she drew women even from the neighboring states to gaze upon her.
So when she had buried her husband, the common fashion of following the procession with loose hair, and beating the naked breast in front of the crowd, did not satisfy her. She followed the dead man even to his resting place, and began to watch and weep night and day over the body, which was laid in an underground vault in the Greek fashion. Neither her parents nor her relations could divert her from thus torturing herself, and courting death by starvation. The officials were at last rebuffed and left her. Everyone mourned for her as a woman of unique character, and she was now passing her fifth day without food. A devoted maid sat by the failing woman, shed tears in sympathy with her woes, and at the same time filled up the lamp, which was placed in the tomb, whenever it sank.
There was but one opinion throughout the city, every class of person admitting this was the one true and brilliant example of chastity and love.
At this moment the governor of the province gave orders that some robbers should be crucified near the small building where the lady was bewailing her recent loss. So on the next night, when the soldier who was watching the crosses, to prevent anyone taking down a body for burial, observed a light shining plainly among the tombs, and heard a mourner's groans, a very human weakness made him curious to know who it was and what he was doing. So he went down into the vault, and on seeing a very beautiful woman, at first halted in confusion, as if he had seen a portent or some ghost from the world beneath. But afterwards noticing the dead man lying there, and watching the woman's tears and the marks of her nails on her face, he came to the correct conclusion, that she found her regret for the lost one unendurable.
He therefore brought his supper into the tomb, and began to urge the mourner not to persist in useless grief, and break her heart with unprofitable sobs: for all men made the same end and found the same resting place, and so on with the other platitudes which restore wounded spirits to health. But she took no notice of his sympathy, struck and tore her breast more violently than ever, pulled out her hair, and laid it on the dead body.
Still the soldier did not retire, but tried to give the poor woman food with similar encouragements, until the maid, who was no doubt seduced by the smell of his wine, first gave in herself, and put out her hand at his kindly invitation, and then, refreshed with food and drink, began to assail her mistress's obstinacy, and say, "What will you gain by all this, if you faint away with hunger, if you bury yourself alive, if you breathe out your undoomed soul before fate calls for it? Do you think the ashes of the dead can feel your pain? Will you not begin life afresh? Will you not shake off this womanish failing, and enjoy the blessings of the light so long as you are allowed? Your poor dead husband's body here ought to persuade you to keep alive."
People are always ready to listen when they are urged to take a meal or to keep alive. So the lady, being thirsty after several days' abstinence, allowed her resolution to be broken down, and filled herself with food as greedily as the maid, who had been the first to yield.
Well, you know which temptation generally assails a man on a full stomach. The soldier used the same insinuating phrases which had persuaded the lady to consent to live, to conduct an assault upon her virtue. Her modest eye saw in him a young man, handsome and eloquent.
The maid begged her to be gracious, and then said, "Wilt thou fight love even when love pleases thee?
I need hide the fact no longer. The lady ceased to hold out, and the conquering hero won her over entire. So they passed not only their wedding night together, but the next and a third, of course shutting the door of the vault, so that any friend or stranger who came to the tomb would imagine that this most virtuous lady had breathed the last over her husband's body. Well, the soldier was delighted with the woman's beauty, and his stolen pleasure. He bought up all the fine things his means permitted, and carried them to the tomb the moment darkness fell.
So the parents of one of the crucified, seeing that the watch was ill-kept, took their man down in the dark and administered the last rite to him. The soldier was eluded while he was off duty, and next day, seeing one of the crosses without its corpse, he was in terror of punishment, and explained to the lady what had happened. He declared that he would not wait for a court-martial, but would punish his own neglect with a thrust of his sword. So she had better get ready a place for a dying man, and let the gloomy vault enclose both her husband and her lover.
The lady's heart was tender as well as pure. "Heaven forbid," she replied, "that I should look at the same moment on the dead bodies of two men whom I love. No, I would rather make a dead man useful, than send a live man to death."
After this speech she ordered her husband's body to be taken out of the coffin and fixed up on the empty cross. The soldier availed himself of this far-seeing woman's device, and the people wondered the next day by what means the dead man had ascended the cross.
...
Now that story has a lot to say on a lot of themes. Honesty and self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that the widow achieves in the course of the story and that Eumolpus the narrator will never achieve. The overriding importance of being alive, the reason that reverence for the dead, though it has its place, can never be anywhere near as important as care for the living. The way people can make the world more tolerable for each other. But it conveys all this via one device: narrative. It makes a man tell a story, and in the process tell us more than he knows he is telling or meant to tell. Things happen: there is a very literal structure and movement, mainly of people between the tomb and the outside world so that in the end the dead are outside and the tomb has become a place of life and love. It also, of course, avails itself of narrative's other prime device: choosing where to end, in this case when the structure is satisfyingly complete and the parties have attained knowledge of who they are and what they want. If we think about it, we know something else must now happen; presumably the soldier and the widow must make a break for it some night and run away together. But we don't need to know how that happens; the story has got to the point where we could write the next bit ourselves.
Next time you feel "blocked", try telling yourself not that you have to write about such and such a theme, or develop character X, but that you have to tell a story. It's surprising how it concentrates the mind.
Narrative workshop
"Yes--oh dear yes--the novel tells a story" – E M Forster
I've used that quote often enough with students, mainly male ones, whose idea of a short story was one damn thing after another, incidents piling up faster than you could take them in and characters being killed off before you could learn their names, let alone what they were like. We wave Joyce's Dubliners at them, as proof that very little actually needs to happen in a story as long as something changes or develops, and of course that's true; a purely plot synopsis of "The Dead" might be something like "Gabriel attends a rather dull party at his aunts', goes home, and it snows".
But the Forster quote is one I am less sympathetic to now. It's been coming on for some time, but I first knew I'd altered when I read some short stories submitted to a Leaf competition.
They were considered, crafted pieces, very interested in character and motivation. People sifted their memories, analysed their relationships, attached enormous importance to tiny observations which you later realised were metaphors for their lives. It was like watching one of those award-winning French films where everyone sits around a table talking for two hours and nothing actually happens. After reading about 20 of them, I had mentally replaced Forster's quote with one from Sheridan's The Critic - commenting on a new play, someone says: "I think it wants incident". I would have killed for a story with incidents, a narrative line, above all the age-old hook of "what happens next".
Sure, I still wanted to get to know the characters, but it struck me that I could just as well do that while they were doing something interesting. I used to have a workshop exercise where I asked people to describe someone, but without using any adjectives, adverbs or abstract nouns. So you couldn't say a person was kind, or acted kindly, or displayed kindness. Your only option was to show him doing something that illustrated that quality. I thought at the time that I was encouraging students to write more vividly, to show rather than tell. But I wonder now if I wasn't just unconsciously missing the element of storytelling in writing.
This element is, after all, about the most ancient there is. Even now, there are cultures where people still come together in the café or marketplace to listen to a storyteller or ballad-singer, and it's where a great deal of classical Western literature came from. Of course The Odyssey, to cite one of the earliest novels, is more than a story; of course it says a great deal about the themes of home, of belonging, of finding oneself via journeying. But it keeps you reading principally by keeping you on tenterhooks as to how on earth Odysseus is going to get out of his latest difficulty. Nor does it ever have to take time out to draw his character, to tell you he is ruthless, resourceful, a survivor; he tells you that himself through everything he says and does.
The attitude implied in the Forster quote is that the narrative aspect of novels is, for the writer, a necessary but dull kind of journeyman work which gets in the way of the fancy writing he really wants to concentrate on, the big set-piece emotional scenes perhaps, or dialogue, or description. I'm not sure he did mean it quite like that, but in any event it strikes me as a terrible waste to regard incident like that, rather than as a potentially useful tool. Oddly enough I think it can be particularly useful in the kind of novel that wants to concentrate on the unravelling of character or the long explication of a theme, because these novels still need, somehow or other, to keep the reader's attention from wandering.
Two novels from the Glamorgan Masters in Writing course seem to me to illustrate that very well. Dan Rhodes's Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Canongate) had a narrative structure unusual for a modern novel, and I think a lot of reviewers didn't really get where it was coming from. For the first half it moved like a novel, charting the shifting pattern of relationship between three characters, two men and a dog. But in the second half, the dog is a long way off, trying to get back home. From then on, the novel shifts between men and dog, and the dog's half is a series of episodes connected only by how they move the dog closer to home – or sometimes not. Some critics took this to indicate that Dan was still at heart a short story writer who hadn't quite mastered the novel form yet, which only shows they hadn't read The Odyssey very recently. Each episode of Odysseus's journey highlights another aspect of him, and of the nature of journeying and homecoming. Timoleon Vieta's journey is an odyssey in love, and each episode shows another aspect of that troublesome emotion. They're all fascinating in themselves, but they are also stages on the dog's journey and, essentially, what happens to him next. And of course that aspect makes the novel remarkably hard to put down.
Another student's novel in progress concerns the long unravelling of a character's mental state, both in his own words and as observed by his sister. It has to be slow, by its very nature, and it also happens that these characters are modern-day students, which means, to be honest, that their daily lives are not full of riveting incident. This poses an obvious problem in keeping the reader interested when, unavoidably, not a lot is going on. The author's solution to this strikes me as really quite inspired: the siblings' mother was a teller of folk tales which the sister in particular recalls, and every so often, one of these tales is interpolated into the action. It's clear that they are a sort of metaphorical counterpoint to what is going on in her brother's head, but what they also are is a narrative fix for the reader. The author is very good at inventing and adapting the stuff of folk tale and whenever I read a chunk of this novel for the workshop I couldn't help mentally perking up whenever the familiar lexis appeared: "There was once a young man….."
This hunger for story is so basic to our nature that it would seem at the least unprofitable for writers to ignore or downplay it. I've heard it suggested, and to some extent I believe it, that the reason many adults today read children's books is to get the intense narrative fix that some literary fiction denies them. We have to write the themes that are nagging at us, but the clothes they wear are our choice, and if we can convey them partly via a cracking good story, it certainly isn't going to hurt their chances of popularity with readers. I do, by the way, think this can apply to poems too. Because of the condensed utterance of poems, poets are rightly worried about being over-narrative, of simply telling one damn thing after another. But the techniques of cinematography, of cutting between scenes rather than tracking, can help here, as can putting a lot of the action into back-story that is never more than partly explained. I think Rosie Shepperd's poems do this a lot, and the narrative line, however disguised and broken up, not only adds interest to the poems but allows the reader to get an initial handle on them and what they're about.
The only proper thing to do at this point is to read a story, and this is my favourite ever written. It's a fine illustration, apart from anything else, of how the very device of someone telling a story can be used to advantage. Where there is a narrative there is necessarily a narrator, and he isn't always the same person as the author, which gives said author the chance to do some amazing things with the dual perspective. This is a self-contained tale told in the course of a much longer book, the Satyricon of Petronius. The man who tells it, a character called Eumolpus, has already been established as a shallow, materialistic lecher. He tells the story in a misogynistic spirit, believing it reflects badly on women as faithless and sensual (very like himself), and frequently uses words like "loving wife" and "virtuous woman" in irony, no doubt with a huge wink.
But Eumolpus is not Petronius, and the further we get into the tale, the clearer it becomes that Petronius, lurking at his narrator's back, does not share his views. The ultimate irony is that the words Eumolpus uses in irony are true in fact: the woman is indeed loving, virtuous and honest, and a lot more so at the end of the tale than she was at the start.
THE TALE OF THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS
There was a married woman in Ephesus of such famous virtue that she drew women even from the neighboring states to gaze upon her.
So when she had buried her husband, the common fashion of following the procession with loose hair, and beating the naked breast in front of the crowd, did not satisfy her. She followed the dead man even to his resting place, and began to watch and weep night and day over the body, which was laid in an underground vault in the Greek fashion. Neither her parents nor her relations could divert her from thus torturing herself, and courting death by starvation. The officials were at last rebuffed and left her. Everyone mourned for her as a woman of unique character, and she was now passing her fifth day without food. A devoted maid sat by the failing woman, shed tears in sympathy with her woes, and at the same time filled up the lamp, which was placed in the tomb, whenever it sank.
There was but one opinion throughout the city, every class of person admitting this was the one true and brilliant example of chastity and love.
At this moment the governor of the province gave orders that some robbers should be crucified near the small building where the lady was bewailing her recent loss. So on the next night, when the soldier who was watching the crosses, to prevent anyone taking down a body for burial, observed a light shining plainly among the tombs, and heard a mourner's groans, a very human weakness made him curious to know who it was and what he was doing. So he went down into the vault, and on seeing a very beautiful woman, at first halted in confusion, as if he had seen a portent or some ghost from the world beneath. But afterwards noticing the dead man lying there, and watching the woman's tears and the marks of her nails on her face, he came to the correct conclusion, that she found her regret for the lost one unendurable.
He therefore brought his supper into the tomb, and began to urge the mourner not to persist in useless grief, and break her heart with unprofitable sobs: for all men made the same end and found the same resting place, and so on with the other platitudes which restore wounded spirits to health. But she took no notice of his sympathy, struck and tore her breast more violently than ever, pulled out her hair, and laid it on the dead body.
Still the soldier did not retire, but tried to give the poor woman food with similar encouragements, until the maid, who was no doubt seduced by the smell of his wine, first gave in herself, and put out her hand at his kindly invitation, and then, refreshed with food and drink, began to assail her mistress's obstinacy, and say, "What will you gain by all this, if you faint away with hunger, if you bury yourself alive, if you breathe out your undoomed soul before fate calls for it? Do you think the ashes of the dead can feel your pain? Will you not begin life afresh? Will you not shake off this womanish failing, and enjoy the blessings of the light so long as you are allowed? Your poor dead husband's body here ought to persuade you to keep alive."
People are always ready to listen when they are urged to take a meal or to keep alive. So the lady, being thirsty after several days' abstinence, allowed her resolution to be broken down, and filled herself with food as greedily as the maid, who had been the first to yield.
Well, you know which temptation generally assails a man on a full stomach. The soldier used the same insinuating phrases which had persuaded the lady to consent to live, to conduct an assault upon her virtue. Her modest eye saw in him a young man, handsome and eloquent.
The maid begged her to be gracious, and then said, "Wilt thou fight love even when love pleases thee?
I need hide the fact no longer. The lady ceased to hold out, and the conquering hero won her over entire. So they passed not only their wedding night together, but the next and a third, of course shutting the door of the vault, so that any friend or stranger who came to the tomb would imagine that this most virtuous lady had breathed the last over her husband's body. Well, the soldier was delighted with the woman's beauty, and his stolen pleasure. He bought up all the fine things his means permitted, and carried them to the tomb the moment darkness fell.
So the parents of one of the crucified, seeing that the watch was ill-kept, took their man down in the dark and administered the last rite to him. The soldier was eluded while he was off duty, and next day, seeing one of the crosses without its corpse, he was in terror of punishment, and explained to the lady what had happened. He declared that he would not wait for a court-martial, but would punish his own neglect with a thrust of his sword. So she had better get ready a place for a dying man, and let the gloomy vault enclose both her husband and her lover.
The lady's heart was tender as well as pure. "Heaven forbid," she replied, "that I should look at the same moment on the dead bodies of two men whom I love. No, I would rather make a dead man useful, than send a live man to death."
After this speech she ordered her husband's body to be taken out of the coffin and fixed up on the empty cross. The soldier availed himself of this far-seeing woman's device, and the people wondered the next day by what means the dead man had ascended the cross.
...
Now that story has a lot to say on a lot of themes. Honesty and self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that the widow achieves in the course of the story and that Eumolpus the narrator will never achieve. The overriding importance of being alive, the reason that reverence for the dead, though it has its place, can never be anywhere near as important as care for the living. The way people can make the world more tolerable for each other. But it conveys all this via one device: narrative. It makes a man tell a story, and in the process tell us more than he knows he is telling or meant to tell. Things happen: there is a very literal structure and movement, mainly of people between the tomb and the outside world so that in the end the dead are outside and the tomb has become a place of life and love. It also, of course, avails itself of narrative's other prime device: choosing where to end, in this case when the structure is satisfyingly complete and the parties have attained knowledge of who they are and what they want. If we think about it, we know something else must now happen; presumably the soldier and the widow must make a break for it some night and run away together. But we don't need to know how that happens; the story has got to the point where we could write the next bit ourselves.
Next time you feel "blocked", try telling yourself not that you have to write about such and such a theme, or develop character X, but that you have to tell a story. It's surprising how it concentrates the mind.
