Swing Through England

I love places where you can't guess what year you're walking into. So I love The Sun Hotel & Bar in Lancaster, near the edge of the Irish Sea. It's where I stayed the night before I defended my PhD at the University of Lancaster. Now, I'm staying in the same lucky room again, Room 16, before my publication reading at the University of Lancaster.
At the delicious Sun Cafe, I order "Black and Blue Mushrooms." It's mushrooms sautéed in olive oil with blue cheese and Lancaster Black stout. Online (where a luxury provisioner will whisk a bottle to the US for 28 pounds), I see the following: "Lancaster Black is a British stout for the connoisseur. Jet black in colour, it is a complex traditional dark brew with subtle hints of coffee and dark chocolate." Why the enthusiasm? Try the mushrooms and see. Then try the incredible fish and chips (cod).

The reading at Lancaster is a fantastic homecoming. It's a beautiful campus with 13,000 students. How great it is to see the talented Dr. George Green (I highly recommend his novels Hawk and Hound (about the Hound of Ulster).

Literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, author of The Dialogic Imagination, says that there's real time and "epic" or "great" time. For me, The Sun Hotel & Bar and Lancaster University exist in great time.

* * * * *

It's Pecha Kucha Night at the Huddersfield Literary Festival. They've asked me to take my 300-page story and present it in the Pecha Kucha style: 20 slides, 20 seconds. Oh, and the venue will serve alcohol while all of this is going on. Did we mention that fruit is encouraged to be thrown? Shades of the Globe Theatre. Gulp. But it's a blast. What's most surprising is, the captions themselves are a very visual way of presenting the story. The title of my Pecha Kucha piece, responding to Huddersfield's request that we honor the theme of ten (because it's the festival's 10th year) is:

10 Forms of Castration & the Devils Behind Them
(captions follow)

At a dinner party, a friend who died last year of M.S. but always kept her naughty sense of humor, even in paraplegia, rabbit punched me with, Must everything be a joke to you? in her usual Teutonic clip. Okay. I deal with uncomfortable subjects with lame humor. So it was time to write this novel I’d been pondering on sexual identification, gender & beauty issues, style, and death, The Boston Castrato.

Naples, Italy, 1906. You’re just six years old. Your mother dies. You’re left to fend for yourself. So what do you do? You sing at the train station for coins. Devil #1, a mad priest, snatches you with the lure of a full belly. And singing lessons.

He whispers he’ll make you a star in exchange for agreeing to the slightest of alterations. You won’t feel a thing. "Just one snip, and you will be asked to sing in the greatest basilicas and opera houses in the world. Your fans will shower you with gifts and praise. You’ll sound like an angel. Forever."

But nothing is forever. The devil takes many forms. The very Church that told you your voice is beautiful now deems it repulsive, embarrassing. Not good PR to brutalize children in the line of beauty. Speaking for the Vatican, a cardinal in red gives you the violent hook: "We're out of the monster business." We’re EXILING you to America. Out of sight, out of mind.

Because style is not forever. It’s the 20th century. There’s always a new sound, the next new thing.

Speaking of style, in the transgender 1920s, anything (as long it doesn’t have to do with your decision) goes. In a complete denunciation of the hourglass figure, suddenly every woman wants to look like a little boy. Flat chests, bowl cuts, angled elbows, and the new tanning (thanks, Coco Chanel)–are all the rage.

Landing in Boston, you’re unmanned and unmoored, working in a snooty hotel. And let’s get this straight, Mr. Latin Waiter. You’re in the serving class. As an immigrant, it’s hard to imagine anything but. If you’re not a six-foot white male Protestant, there isn’t much room at the table. But you can serve the table.

You meet a fellow sufferer, Victor. Born into one of Boston's wealthiest families, the supremely talented Victor is labeled a bastard and scorned by his boss (and half brother). He’s relegated to sleeping in the basement because (scandal alert) he’s mixed-race. And blind.

But wealth doesn't keep you safe. Fat-shaming is nothing new. Gifted poet Amy Lowell, heir to the Boston Brahmin Lowell family, is persecuted for her looks & sexual orientation and branded with the Scarlet L. She thought she’d found her tribe in the literati but is betrayed and humiliated by her ‘friends,’ including…

Ezra Pound, who took her money but skewered her at Dieudonne Hotel when she showed up in London with her lover, actress Ada Russell, to join the Imagists. She was dismissed as flaunting when she shipped over her maroon Pierce Arrow and booked an entire floor at the Berkeley Hotel. Nothing Kanye West wouldn’t do today. Newsmen piled on: “From left to right: Amy Lowell.”

All artists are made irrelevant by taste; self-doubt is more corrosive. You meet the painter John Singer Sargent, extremely popular until he was replaced by the Cubists. His painting Gassed is in the British War Museum. Talk about riding high in April, shot down in May. He didn’t live to see this new June, where he’s being recast as a red-hot early Modernist.

Another devil is the self-described tastemaker, the reviewer-critic Royal Cortissoz, who alternates between fawning and sniping. As a provocateur, he puts jealousy to pen and jabs at sensitive spots. Amy Lowell and John Singer Sargent are two of his targets.

But devils don't come in just one gender. Raffi's nemesis at the Parker House, Addison Saltonstall, has his own devil at home in the form of his beautiful but deadly-strong wife, who, sensing weakness in his character, takes delight in humiliating him. So on target is she that he participates.

Sexual predators catch you at your weakest and steal the last of your powers by posing as your “comforter and benefactor.” Gangster Frank Morelli guarantees he’s going to send luck (and a steady paycheck) to devastated Dorotea.

Marginalization by race and ethnicity destroys dreams. If you’re trapped with a label, you have a devil of a time getting out from under it. In the 1920s, Boston teems with new citizens from all over the world that lay bare old resentments. But that, of course, couldn’t ever happen today.

The Allure of Modernity in 1922–so illusory. Sun-tan machine: Melanoma for a nickel. The new canning technology will surely prevent any possibility of spoilage. When a child is born slightly ‘different,’ the kindly devil surgeon imperiously evokes Science when he flashes a scalpel to decide a child must be one of two genders. Period.

Mass Marketing explodes. Suddenly you’re hawked a solution for a problem you never knew you had. Raffi is offered a second chance at celebrity: He’s packaged as the quintessential Underwood Devil who answers your every social need in a family friendly form—because he has no package.

Bootleggers, politicians, and mobsters–all devils bent on beating New York in a race to build the first major East Coast airport. It’s easy to be smug in a new century when you don’t know what your mistakes are going to be. Raffi is witness to a murder and reconnects to a very old devil.

But this isn’t the end for Raffi. Gender is not in the genitals. Sexual orientation is not in the sex organs. The most significant erogenous zone is the mind. Can a clairvoyant castrato find love? Raffi discovers his way to sing a genuine love song.

In 1922, séances are the social medium. You can have 23,000 followers, and none of them has to be alive! The ultimate castration is, we’re out of time!

* * * * * * * *

I stop at the University of York for a cappuccino with Professor Helen Hills, organizer of the Neapolitan Network and the academic conference "Exoticizing Vesuvius." The "Neapolitan Network exists to connect scholars of Naples from around the world and across disciplines in order to facilitate lively intellectual exchange and research collaboration... The Neapolitan Network will continue to build up a database of Neapolitanist scholars and their scholarship."

I'm here because Vesuvius, with its puff of smoke above the curve of the Bay of Naples, looms in Raffi's psychic geography. It leans into windows to eavesdrop on him: "As long as he could remember, the slow blue slope had followed him–an attentive audience. It roamed with him through the city, into Virgil’s Tomb where he sold daguerreotypes to sightseers, down sooty alleys where the dustbins stood, rich with treasures, disappearing and reappearing at the end of sunlit squares to whisper, ‘I’ve got my eye on you.’"

* * * *

Next stop, the University of Hull, with a dream reading at the Philip Larkin Centre. I have admired Larkin's work since High Windows came out. This is a real honor in a gorgeous setting, and the moderator has read the novel and asks questions that are so insightful that the story lifts into the air and starts to swirl.

The next day, it's lunch at The George Hotel in Hull. Yorkshire Pudding and Shepherds' Pie. I learn a disturbing story, one to keep you up at night. During World War II, if a German plane hadn't used all its bombs over London, on the return flight it was directed to release what bombs were left over on Hull before crossing the Channel.