“I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again like I throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.”
When people find out I’m a writer (and if those people are not writers themselves), then, nine times out of ten, their next question will be about where I get my ideas. At one stage, this became a running joke with a writer friend of mine, as neither of us ever seemed to be able to come up with a good answer to this question. It may have been truthful to say “From everywhere!”, but this never seemed to satisfy our questioners, so we invented a lot of really silly responses that we were never brave (or rude) enough to use in real life. The problem was that I was assuming that everyone had a mind that worked in a similar way to mine – that is, that given an old photograph, a piece of historical trivia, an anagram, an unusual occupation or even an oddly shaped cloud, anyone’s mind would instantly use that to spin off into half a dozen questions, some jokes and, given enough time, a novel-length story. Working on that assumption, asking where writers get their ideas was, to me, like asking most people how they managed to breathe. Why would you require an explanation of something so obvious and instinctive?
Of course, people’s minds don’t all work in the same way, which is a good thing, because we need a variety of human skills and talents to make society interesting and productive. I remember having a conversation with a very intelligent, articulate and polite teenager who asked me ‘Where do you get ideas for writing?’ with genuine bemusement and some anxiety, because her curriculum required her to do lots of ‘creative writing’ and she was finding it a struggle. I think part of the struggle was due to the poor girl being forced to produce pieces of writing following strict guidelines, in a limited amount of time, in the hope of pleasing her teacher, in order to attain a good assessment mark, which would count towards her final Higher School Certificate score, which would define her ENTIRE FUTURE1. However, I suspect it was also because she had the sort of mind that did not instinctively and incessantly ask questions such as, “Are there really only two options here? Can I do both? Or neither? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do this? What would happen if . . .?” That is, she did not have a mind that was constantly flying off at (possibly unproductive) tangents. Or perhaps she had once possessed that sort of mind, but ten years of formal education had trained it out of her.
I don’t mean to suggest that only writers have minds that constantly ask “What if . . .?” Research scientists, for example, are brilliant at asking those sort of questions. Anyone who has a job that involves identifying and solving problems needs to be able to think this way. And I don’t mean to suggest that having an enquiring, imaginative mind is the only quality needed to produce, say, a hundred-thousand-word novel. You also need organisational skills, persistence, self-confidence, an ability to ignore distractions when necessary, time, money and a lot of other things that may not be easy to acquire. But I do think that most writers, of fiction or non-fiction, are especially attuned to those tiny details in everyday life – things that are slightly odd or amusing or mysterious – that have the potential to be transformed into a poem, a story or a book (or a blog post).
For example, on Saturday, I was browsing the pages of the weekend edition of The Sydney Morning Herald when I came across an article intriguingly entitled Cemetery Calls in the Goatbusters, with an even more intriguing photo of some blurry white goats posing on some tombstones. It appears that four “white Boer goats” have been spotted in the Jewish section of Rookwood Necropolis2, Sydney’s largest cemetery, and they are now stubbornly avoiding capture. Fiona Heslop, the cemetery’s chief executive officer, was quoted as saying,
“I have looked out of my office on numerous occasions to see the goats leaning against headstones, only to look back a moment later to find they are no longer there.”
Ms Heslop added (possibly in ominous tones),
“They are not doing any harm at this stage, but they do show up in the strangest places at the strangest times.”
Surely even the most unimaginative reader would be wondering by now about how the authorities managed to identify the exact number and breed of the goats, if the goats are so amazingly elusive. CLEARLY THE AUTHORITIES ARE HIDING SOMETHING FROM US. (The idea of animals living at Rookwood, on the other hand, is not all that mysterious, given that Rookwood Necropolis consists of three hundred hectares of mostly untamed bush, including a entire ironbark forest. It would not surprise me to learn that somewhere in the depths of Rookwood, there’s an elephant that escaped from a circus in the 1970s, or a couple of Tasmanian tigers, or a flock of pterodactyls.) But what are the goats doing there? As I read the article, several possibilities immediately sprang to mind:
1. They are highly trained lawn-mowers, being used by the authorities to keep the grass under control after budget cuts forced the redundancies of most of the human gardeners. (Then why would the authorities claim to be trying to catch the goats? Well, obviously, some cemetery visitor saw them and made an official complaint, so the authorities now have to pretend to round up the goats. Then, whenever the RSPCA inspectors arrive, the gatekeeper blows a warning whistle and the goats sprint off to the café, where they don aprons and caps and pretend to be waitresses until the coast is clear.) 2. They are patrolling the cemetery with webcams strapped to their horns, because the authorities are worried that modern-day bodysnatchers might be using the cemetery to supply the anatomy labs at Cumberland College of Health Sciences, which is right across the road from Rookwood. 3. They are the descendants of the original scapegoat, which was unfairly burdened with the sins of humans and banished to the wilderness by a long-ago Jewish high priest, and now these modern-day goats are hanging round the Jewish section of Rookwood in order to have their revenge, by pushing over a rabbi in the dust or some such nefarious action.
Feel free to leave your own theories in the comments. It is obvious the goats are up to something, anyway. Goats are always up to something. You only have to look into their eyes to see that they’re very suspicious characters. Or maybe it’s only people with overly vivid imaginations writerly minds who think that way.
Portrait of a goat. Creative Commons Licensed image by 4028mdk09
For any senior high school students reading this, I’d like to emphasise that the success or failure of your life does NOT depend on the marks you achieve in the HSC or VCE or whatever exams you have to do at the end of high school. I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true. I am speaking from experience here. ↩
In keeping with this blog’s everything-is-related-to-books theme, I should point out here that Dorothy Porter wrote a Young Adult novel called Rookwood, set in this cemetery. Unfortunately, the book’s not very good, so I can’t recommend it, but she did write some really interesting verse novels for adults. ↩
Working my way through my towers of 1960s research books last week, I finally had an ‘Aha!’ moment – one of those moments when I come across a reference (often a fleeting one, sometimes a mere footnote) to a fascinating real-life event that seems to fit perfectly into my planned story. “Aha!” I cried, clapping my hands in great excitement.1 Ideally, an ‘Aha!’ historical event will involve some bizarre element but not be widely known, because I like the idea of my readers saying to themselves while reading, “I never knew about that! Did that really happen?” On the other hand, it’s helpful (for both me and inquisitive novel readers who want to learn more) if there’s a fair amount of information available about the event. This particular event I’ve discovered appears to fulfil all these conditions, which makes me very happy.
The historical novelist may need to read a LOT of books before an ‘Aha!’ moment arrives . . .
Of course, there’s the possibility that this will turn into an ‘Oh no . . .’ moment, which occurs when I dig further into the research, unearth an inconvenient fact and realise that the event is not actually going to fit into my story the way I’d hoped. Sometimes the dates don’t match my planned story; sometimes there’s a complicated backstory to the event that will lead my story somewhere I don’t want it to go. Here are three scenes that didn’t appear in my Montmaray Journals trilogy, due to ‘Oh no . . .’ moments:
1. Fascists Storm the British Embassy in Madrid!
I came across this thrilling tale in the memoirs of Sir Samuel Hoare, Viscount Templewood. Hoare was a fervent appeaser of Mussolini and Hitler in the years before the Second World War2, and so, not surprisingly, lost his ministerial job when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. Churchill sent Hoare to Spain to keep him out of the way, figuring Hoare couldn’t do too much damage there and might even get along quite well with Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator – maybe even persuade Franco to renounce Hitler. Of course, Franco paid no attention to Hoare whatsoever and continued to co-operate with the Nazis whenever it was in his interests to do so, turning a blind eye when his Falangist supporters, with the help of Nazi agents, attacked the British Embassy:
“The attack had in all respects been methodically planned in the true German manner. It was to begin with the burning of the British staff cars standing outside the Embassy. It was at this point that Spanish forgetfulness frustrated German efficiency. Matches were then very scarce in Madrid, and either no one had a match or no one wished to sacrifice one in a street battle. The cars, therefore, escaped burning though several were seriously damaged by stones.
The next move was an attempt to break into the Embassy. At this point we [Embassy staff] were in a strong position. For not only were we protected by our regular force of British guards, but we had within the precincts sixteen of our escaped prisoners of war who were burning for the chance of a battle with the enemy . . .”
Wouldn’t it be great, I thought to myself, if Toby FitzOsborne, recently escaped from Nazi-occupied France, could be one of those men in the Embassy battling the Fascist invaders! With Veronica fighting beside him, knocking out a few Falangists with a well-aimed chair! Alas, the dates just didn’t work out. The Embassy attack occurred in June, 1941, when Toby was still flying in combat as an RAF fighter pilot and Veronica was working in the Foreign Office in London. Anyway, Hoare was not exactly a reliable memoirist, so I suspect the British response during the Embassy siege was a lot less brave and glorious than he described.
2. Sophie FitzOsborne, Lady War Correspondent
I carefully added some references to Sophie writing newspaper articles in the second Montmaray book, so that once war broke out, I’d be able to turn her into a newspaper reporter and send her overseas, in order to describe lots of important battles. But when I started researching the lives of actual war correspondents such as Martha Gellhorn3, I realised this was never going to work. Sophie just wasn’t tough or experienced enough – no British newspaper editor would ever employ her as a reporter, not even to report on the London Blitz. It wasn’t even likely she’d get a job as a women’s columnist – British newspapers were severely curtailed during the war, as a result of both paper shortages and official censorship, with only essential news being printed. In the end, I decided I preferred her to have a humdrum job during the war, to emphasise that war, for most participants, is the exact opposite of a noble, exhilarating experience. And Sophie did get to write some Food Facts, which were published to help housewives cope with rationing. Also, did you know that Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s wife, worked at the Ministry of Food during the war? I tried to arrange a friendship between Sophie and Eileen, so that Sophie could have a discussion about totalitarianism with Orwell, but unfortunately, the two women worked in different departments.
3. The Spy, The Cryptographer and The Poet
During the war, the Special Operations Executive sent Allied agents into occupied Europe, with the agents communicating using codes that were initially based on well-known poems. Unfortunately, these poem ciphers were very easy for the Nazis to break. Leo Marks, a British cryptographer in charge of SOE agent codes, made a number of changes to ensure the codes were more secure, including using original poems. Aha! I thought. Maybe Sophie and her friend Rupert, with their flair for poetry, could meet to write poems for Leo Marks! Unfortunately, introducing another real-life character and his complicated backstory would have made my book even longer than it already was (that is, far too long), so that plot line was dropped. However, I did manage to sneak in a reference to Leo Marks – the Colonel mentions an anonymous friend who is “one of our best cryptographers” but has failed to decipher a sample of Kernetin, the FitzOsborne family code.
Incidentally, Leo Marks was the son of Ben Marks, one of the owners of Marks and Co, the famous bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road – and an employee of that bookshop just happens to be related, in a very tangential way, to that exciting thing I discovered in my 1960s research. Aha! The plot thickens . . .
_____
Probably only historical novelists would describe this sort of discovery as ‘greatly exciting’. ↩
For example, in March, 1939, after the Nazis had invaded Czechoslovakia, Hoare stated that he remained optimistic that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin would become “eternal benefactors of the human race”. ↩
I was also tempted to have Veronica meet Martha Gellhorn’s close friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, during the First Lady’s visit to England in 1942, because I figured those two would have a very interesting discussion. But there were just too many other events going on in the plot at that time. ↩
The cover of my edition of ‘Smith’s London Journal’ is very boring, so here is the poster from the 1951 film of ‘Rhubarb’My apologies for the lack of blog posts recently, but I’ve been reading ALL THE BOOKS and haven’t had time to write about them till now. Next in my Adventures in Research comes Smith’s London Journal by H. Allen Smith, an American journalist who seems to have been the Bill Bryson of the 1940s and 1950s, selling “millions of copies” of his humorous books. Among Smith’s best-selling books were (I am not making these titles up) Lo, the Former Egyptian!, Larks in the Popcorn and Life in a Putty Knife Factory, with his novel Rhubarb being turned into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Ray Milland and Orangey the cat.
Smith’s London Journal describes his visit to England in the autumn of 1951. His trip was partly for the purpose of attending the British premiere of Rhubarb, but also to study the “English character”, which he’d heard was the most admirable in the world. He sails over on the Queen Elizabeth, taking careful notes on the manners and accents of his fellow passengers, including the (mostly unintelligible) Rt. Hon. Anthony Eden (clearly, this was pre-Suez crisis, because Eden is described as “one of the world’s most skilful diplomatists”). On arrival in London, life becomes even more confusing for Mr Smith, but he does his best to cope with English money (“thrupnys and sixpuntses and arf crowns and bobs and double bobs”), English vocabulary (“A saloon is a sedan. Thus it is possible to be arrested in England for driving while drunk in a saloon.”) and English club etiquette (strictly no women allowed, not even Queen Mary). He happily follows in the footsteps of Boswell and Johnson and Pepys; pores over English newspapers; watches a cricket match, a snooker tournament and the dog races; attends a session at the Bow Street Courts and an election candidate’s campaign meeting; buys a “weatherproof” from Burberry’s and tries to purchase the tie of the National Playing Fields Association because it’s the favourite of the Duke of Edinburgh; attempts to master the art of talking Cockney and asks how to address Lords and Ladies (as the only other titled people he’d previously met were “Grand Dragon Wimble of the Klan and Miss America of 1937”). Meanwhile, his wife Nelle visits historical sites, tries to start up a conversation with a King’s Guardsman (“CAN YOU TALK TO PEOPLE?”) and gets into arguments with monarchists (“I still say that the kind of adulation and worship you give to those people over in Buckingham Palace ought to be given to someone who has accomplished something”).
Mr Smith, unlike Nelle, is full of admiration for nearly all aspects of English life, although he does struggle with the meals, which tend to consist of either Dover sole or “flat chicken” (“apparently the poultry chef takes the meat and gristle from a chicken and flogs it with a mallet before cooking; either that or the British chicken is unlike any fowl in my country – a sort of feathered saucer walking around on chicken feet”). He fails in his quest to convince his new English friends that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford (this theory is based on “an accumulation of knowledge in recent decades”, although it’s “most unfortunate that the man who did this enormous job of research and then wrote the book has the surname of Looney, so I didn’t mention that fact and was happy no one asked about it”). However, he does achieve his long-held ambition to visit Jeremy Bentham at University College1. Smith’s London Journal not only provided me with a lot of (possibly useful) facts about London, it made me laugh and laugh. Highly recommended, if you happen to share my sense of humour.
Less ridiculous, but still entertaining, is Here’s England by Ruth McKenney and Richard Bransten. This is another American-tourists-in-1950s-England guidebook, but this one ranges a bit further than London, travelling as far south as Cornwall and north to Yorkshire. The authors believe England is “the most beautiful, wonderful, exciting country in Europe”, but they caution their fellow Americans:
“There is a mistaken notion . . . that just because we speak the language (or some approximation of same) and are brought up on Dickens, Keats and Shakespeare, England is therefore easy. On the contrary, England is complicated, more obscure and difficult than Brazil or Abyssinia . . . Alas, a standard sight in the English summer-time is the harried American tourist, dismally trotting about the Tower of London or old St Bartholomew’s, afraid to ask what is Perpendicular, when was the Dissolution, and what happened for the eight hundred odd years after 1066?”
Accordingly, for each historical site, the authors not only tell readers how to get there and what to look for when they arrive, but also provide excellent potted histories of the events and people associated with the site, as well as clear explanations of architectural styles. There are also descriptions of various aspects of English life (an entire chapter on cricket, for example), all written in an engaging, informative manner. In addition, there are maps, a family tree for “The Kings of England”2, a chart of notable dates in English history, a glossary of architectural terms and a lot of charming illustrations by Osbert Lancaster (see below). I haven’t finished reading this one yet (I’ve been distracted by my piles of library books), but so far, Here’s England gets two thumbs up. (If my opinion has changed by the end of it, I’ll come back and edit this post.)
_____
Mr Bentham, author of Auto-Icon, or the Uses of the Dead to the Living, died in 1832, but provided very specific instructions in his will regarding how his body was to be preserved. ↩
Although they do include The Queens of England. I noticed they fail to acknowledge Lady Jane Grey as a Tudor Queen, presumably because she didn’t last long in the job and didn’t have a coronation, but then, neither did Edward VIII, and he’s in there. I am willing to overlook this because lots of other writers follow their reasoning about poor Jane and the rest of the book is so carefully researched. ↩
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
Doris Lessing in her 1972 Preface to The Golden Notebook
Less ridiculous, but still entertaining, is Here’s England by Ruth McKenney and Richard Bransten. This is another American-tourists-in-1950s-England guidebook, but this one ranges a bit further than London, travelling as far south as Cornwall and north to Yorkshire. The authors believe England is “the most beautiful, wonderful, exciting country in Europe”, but they caution their fellow Americans:
