The winner is Cynthia!
Better luck next time, everyone else.
Musings on Jane Hervey’s Vain Shadow & a Giveaway
Last fall, after a trip to the Persephone store, I read Jane Hervey’s Vain Shadow. I did not take notes, because I was at a Costa Coffee at Trafalgar Square, slightly distracted by a German couple’s argument about “geld,” i.e., money. (I sympathized, because they were buying big, expensive coffee drinks. COFFEE ADDICT’S TIP: stick with the black brew or you go broke.)
Vain Shadow, written in the ’50s and published in 1963, is the story of a family funeral. The prose is spare and lean, and the story goes at a rapid clip. At first I was uneasy with the truly horrible characters. Four members of the Winthorpe family have slept through the night, leaving Colonel Winthorpe to die upstairs alone with a nurse. Does it seem heartless? Yes, because they knew he was dying.
Upjohn, the maid, brings Mrs. Winthorpe the news of her husband’s “peaceful” death along with the morning tea tray. He died in his sleep at 2:30 a.m. Mrs. Winthorpe is relieved she’ll never have to kiss him again.
She tells Upjohn: “And you’d better tell Mr. and Mrs. Jack and Mr. Harry when you call them…that it’s all over.”
Good God! I had never heard of anything quite like that, though there is usually some ugliness and bad behavior before a death. Even in dysfunctional families, somebody usually keeps watch on the dying, or at least personally breaks the news to relatives. (Of course, my family being what it is, they e-mail.)
Jack is the oldest son, an artist who was threatened with disinheritance by the crusty colonel. He is irritated by the maid’s use of the phrase “passed away,” and wonders why women can’t say “died.” His much younger, lower-class former actress wife Laurine was terrified of “Father” and is relieved he’s dead. She is naively sure that Jack will be a rich man and they will be able to afford a maid and a car.
A younger son, Harry, who seems slightly OCD, is a stay-at-home bachelor who loves to crochet. He takes charge of the funeral, and he knows he’ll be getting money. But their brother Brian, whom they delay calling, is furious, not because he wasn’t telephoned right away, but “because they had all gone trooping off to bed, calmly and obliviously sleeping while the Old Man died. And if that was not bad enough, they had actually not even allowed themselves to be disturbed by having the news broken to him that he had died.”
As you can imagine, Brian is one of my favorites, because he is at least human. And he takes over the funeral, being the only one who knew their father wanted to be cremated.
Jane Hervey
But the most truly sympathetic character is Joanna, the rebellious granddaughter who is determined to leave her psychologically abusive husband, Tony, for a man she loves. She realizes her cruel grandfather twisted her notions of love, and that’s how she ended up with Tony. Harry admires Tony, who is charming on the surface and has come whining about Joanna’s affair. Harry hopes to tie Joanna to Tony by tightly controlling the money left in trust for her. The colonel’s twisted authority may continue.
This harsh comedy portrays the ugliness of a death in a family where most are focused on money. It is starker than appalling but comic scenes you’ve probably read, like the quarrel in War and Peace over Count Bezúkhov’s will (two women tug at a portfolio in angry silence) or the rage in Middlemarch over Mr. Pennyworth’s will. Vain Shadow is a desperate black comedy–desperately realistic and horrendous.
Much as I admired this very solid, well-written little book, I will not reread it. Hervey is quietly effective, but nowhere in the class of Isobel English, whose stunning Every Eye I also purchased at Persephone and read last fall. (I wrote about it here.)
And so I am giving away my copy of Vain Shadow. If you would like it, leave a comment or email me at mirabiledictu.org@gmail.com
The Typewriter vs. the Computer
Anais Nin with her Olympia typewriter, 1963
WordPress stats tell me how many readers I have at Mirabile Dictu and whence they hail, mostly from the U.S., UK, and Canada. The stats are not invasive, as they are at some blog platforms: they refrain from recording every move your readers make and give you more privacy. I assure you, I have no idea who you are.
That’s because most of the stats pertain to my own writing. I idly looked at them tonight: I have written 872 posts in three years. Oh, dear, I was startled by that stat. Surely I could have written a book in that time.
Why don’t bloggers write books? Look at Ree Drummond at the Pioneer Woman: her blog is fun, she writes cookbooks, and she has her own cooking show. But her chatty style works better at her blog than in her humorous memoir, The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels–a Love Story. The humor at the blog, complemented by glossy pictures of the ranch in Oklahoma, her husband (Marlboro Man), children (homeschooled,) and dogs, seems more natural..
I’m not Pioneer Woman; I’m a city gal! I’m not that amusing. I’m not looking at cows, I’m not photographing my beagles, I don’t have any beagles, and I’m in the house playing string with the cats. String is the only game they’ll play now. I’ve rolled their “busy balls” (plastic balls with little bells inside) across the floor and tossed their small stuffed animals in vain. They lie on their sides and watch ME play. Most embarrassing.
Essentially this is a book journal, not a collection of reviews. I jot my impressions of books and bookish subjects. Occasionally posts are review-ish, but not reviews. I type some notes, I revise a little, and then I post the same day.
But I do wonder if I shouldn’t have been working on something else. Do you ever feel that you were better on paper? In school my notes were intercepted by a teacher who laughed and read them aloud. She said she thought I could be a journalist. (And I did that for a while.) I switched from writing by hand to a typewriter when I got a Smith Corona for my birthday. I typed on manual typewriters and, later, electric typewriters until I was forced to abandon my Luddite ways for work.
Vintage typing image.
I loved my typewriter so much I took it on vacation. Like everyone else, I worked on a novel. I finished it, but never tried to publish it, because it wasn’t good enough, though I could probably have cobbled it into what was then called chick lit. But I stayed in the hotel and read and wrote –by Day Two I was into vacation reading form–and I remember how annoyed I was when I got home and discovered I had missed an assignment for an airline magazine. That was before cell phones and computers and constant checking of messages. On vacation we were more or less on vacation.
Here’s what I think when I go back and look at my early stuff: my prose was cleaner and crisper. Even the wordy typing exercise “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was leaner than much of what’s on the net.
Our local newspaper now looks like a blog. They fired all the senior writers or gave them early retirement and have hired young writers who turn in lists and photographs instead of articles. Their degrees are in something called Communication. I don’t know if their editor has any experience in journalism. Is there such a thing as journalism? Often the front page of the features section is one huge picture with a couple of very silly paragraphs beneath. And the real feature writers are publishing on the front page, presumably because there are no reporters left.
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell work together on a story in “His Girl Friday.”
And so I miss typewriters and the days of The Front Page and My Girl Friday. Even though, I must admit, you’re in danger of losing your soul if you’re a journalist, because you write the same kind of stories over and over and then You Think You Know Human Nature. (You don’t.) My old typewriter is in the basement. Should I get it out? At least I’m not on the internet if I’m writing on a typewriter.
Naturally, I’m not the only typewriter aficionado. (N.B. I’m not adding hyperlinks below, because I’m pretending I’m on a typewriter. You’ll just have to hyperlink yourself. ) The award-winning writer Stephen Dixon, who uses a manual typewriter, told the Baltimore Sun that he typed only once on a word processor and hated it. “I don’t like to work on anything electric. I feel creative on a manual. I love the keyboard action. It’s like playing the piano.”
Will Self said in an interview at Shortlist that he went back to using a manual typewriter. “I think the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head.”
And what do I say? If I can find a working typewriter in the basement, I will experiment with writing the first draft of my blog on it. Will there be a difference? Who knows?
TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPE TYPE TATTA-TAT-TAT-TATTA-TAT-TAT
Quotation of the Week: Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis
I recently read the Canadian writer André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, a poignant, witty novel that won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize last year. I picked it up because I am fond of novels about talking dogs.
Do you ever wonder why books about dogs are sad? (Novels about cats are not.) And there are a surprising number of books about talking dogs, among them Clifford D. Simak’s science fiction classic, City, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet satire, Heart of a Dog, and Carolyn Parkhurst’s fantasy The Dogs of Babel.
Fifteen Dogs starts as a comedy. Greek gods are unpredictable, as everyone knows, and in the opening chapter, Hermes and Apollo are out for a drink in Toronto. Hermes wonders what animals would be like with human intelligence, and Apollo bets him a year’s servitude that any animal–any animal of his choice–would be unhappier with intelligence than humans are.
And so they randomly give the gift of intelligence to fifteen dogs in the kennel in the back of a veterinary clinic. With their new intelligence, the dogs break out of the clinic and run through the streets of Toronto, forming a pack. But their new senses and language are confusing. Prince, a mutt, loves it: like Homer, he composes oral poetry. Atticus, the leader, starts an anti-language movement: he wants everyone to shut up and go back to being a dog. But Majnoun, a brilliant black poodle capable of enormous love and loyalty, tells Atticus that Prince thinks beautifully.
Majnoun struggled with the question and struggled with the thoughts within him. All sometimes seemed so hopelessly muddled. He wondered if Atticus wasn’t right, in the end. Perhaps it was best to be a dog as dogs had always been: not separated from others by thinking but part of the collective. Perhaps anything else was futile or, worse, an illusion to take you away from the good. But although their new way of thinking was bothersome –a torment at times –it was now an aspect of them. Why should they turn their backs on themselves?
–Someday, said Majnoun, we may know where the sky ends.
–Yes, said Atticus, someday or someday not.
Parts are humorous, parts are poetic–and parts are extremely sad. Of course I cried. Beautiful language.
A Catch-Up Post: Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman & Anthony Powell’s What’s Become of Waring
I’m behind on writing about my reading, so this is a two-in-one. I recently reread Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman, a brilliant novel about an English professor with an untenured job at a midwestern university, and a first read of Anthony Powell’s What’s Become of Waring, a satire of the publishing industry.
1. Gail Godwin, a Southern-born writer who won the Award from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1981, has been nominated three times for the National Book Award. She should have won for her brilliant novel, A Mother and Two Daughters, a women’s classic which has never quite gotten its dues.
The Odd Woman, published in 1974, in many ways lays the groundwork for A Mother and Two Daughters. The Odd Woman explores a woman’s academic and personal life: Godwin, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and taught at Vassar and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer, knows about balance. Her sympathetic portrayal of a bookish heroine, Jane Clifford, a visiting English professor whose teaching contract is soon to expire, is utterly realistic. But what can Jane do? Hers is the plight of thousands of instructors with Ph.Ds.
Born in the South, Jane is an odd woman at the midwestern college, single and in her thirties. Her married friend Sonia, a tenured professor, is in her corner, but there are no openings at the college. And the rest of her close relationships are long-distance. Her flamboyant best friend, Gerda, who publishes a radical feminist newspaper in her basement in Chicago, is impatient with Jane’s reserve and loneliness. And Jane’s married lover Gabriel, an ineffectual art history professor who lives in the next state and does endless research (he is like Casaubon in Middlemarch, Jane eventually realizes) but never completes his book about the Pre-Raphaelites, is so timid that he insists she have a separate hotel room on a trip to New York in case one of his colleagues figures out he is having an affair . And Gerda says that is typical of Jane, to fall in love with a guy with his head in the clouds who hides even in huge New York City.
Jane is in a state of stasis. Can Jane change? She is terrified of change. Reading is her life. She was happiest while holed up one winter 12 hours a day in a university library writing her dissertation on George Eliot. Everything seemed white that winter, everything seemed pure. What does that say about her? Jane wonders. Even her relationship with Gabriel started with a letter. Then her grandmother’s death and a visit to her mother, who has for years been happily married to an unintellectual construction contractor, forces her to examine the shape of her life and that of her mother and grandmother, wh0 raised her to be strong. Preparing to teach George Gissing’s novel about single women, The Odd Women, for a women’s studies class, also puts her life in context. One of the reasons I enjoy this novel is that I love Gissing. Every word Godwin writes is brilliant, even Jane’s notes on this classic.
Slowly and thoughtfully, she underscored “COMPROMISE-REBELLION AGAINST ONE’S OWN COMPROMISE-DEATH.” Then she wrote quickly in the margin, beside Monica’s fate: “Theme of literally dozens of 19th century novels–the ‘Emma Bovary’ syndrome. Literature’s graveyard positively choked with women who chose–rather, let themselves be chosen by–this syndrome; also with their ‘cousins’–who ‘get in trouble’ (commit adultery, have sex without marriage, think of committing adultery, or having sex without marriage) and thus, according to the literary convention of the time, must die.
This is a great book, especially for fans of 19th century novels.
2 As a teacher at a prep school in the 1980s in a city I didn’t know, I divided my free time between running 10K races (there went Saturday morning) and browsing at bookstores (often on the same day, in the same clothes). I’d never heard of Anthony Powell when I found a 12-volume paperback set of A Dance to the Music of Time at a used bookstore in Maryland. I bought it for the charming covers, and read the whole thing addictively over the course of a week, laughing aloud at Powell’s wit. I’ve gone back to it many times.
Although I had never come across Powell’s other novels, I recently added What’s Become of Waring to my never-ending TBR list when it was mentioned in D.J. Taylor’s brilliant history of English literary culture, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (which I wrote about here). Waring is a satire of the publishing industry, from the point of view of a detached narrator who works as an editor for a small publishing firm.
I started chortling on the first page of Waring. It opens at a wedding.
As the parson was approaching the end of his discourse something flicked through the air and landed in my hat resting brim upwards on the pew beside me. On examination the object turned out to be a page torn from the service paper, folded several times and inscribed in pencil: Put all your money under the seat or I’ll drill a hole through you. It was signed, Red-Handed Mike above a skull-and-crossbones.
It turns out to be his old friend Eustace Bromwich, back from traveling in the Near East. We learn that the narrator used to work in advertising but is now at the publisher Judkins & Judkins. The witty repartee never stops.
“Whom do you prefer? Judkins? Or Judkins?”
“Judkins, emphatically.”
The best-known writer at Judkins & Judkins is T. T. Waring, a best-selling travel writer whose addictive style and thrilling adventures keep the firm afloat. The amusing Eustace, who has also traveled in the Far East, tells the narrator he despises Waring’s books, but whether or not Waring is literary, his absent person is the catalyst for the ensuing comedy of errors. When it is reported that Waring has died, Judkins & Judkins is up a creek, because they don’t have his last manuscript in hand and were depending on it. They also want to publish a biography of Waring, but have never met Waring and don’t even know where he lived. Then bold Roberta, a freelance writer who hopes to hustle the publication of a book of her journalism at Judkins & Judkins, admits she was briefly engaged to him in France. (And she does get her book.) Another friend of the narrator, Captain Hudson, who is a fan of Waring, is assigned to write Waring’s biography. The book proceeds at a rapidfire pace, as Powell explores problems of identity, spirtutalism, seances, plagiarism, selling out, romance, and travel.
The books is very, very witty and comical, and I like the Waughish aloofness of the narrator. There’s something about books about books.
I thought of giving it away, but I’ll probably want to reread it.
A fun novel!
Can This Little Free Library Be Saved?
Can this Little Free Library be saved?
It’s so-o-o-o cute. Why does it need saving?
Because the book selection is awful!
I love pop culture. I read mysteries and watch sitcoms. But why go to the trouble of putting a Little Free Library bookcase-on-a-stick in your front yard if the best you can offer is Carl Hiassen, Jonathan Kellerman, or V. C. Andrews?
So this is what people read, we say as we inspect the LFLs we so admired when they started.
The populist LFL trend began in 2009 in Hudson, Wisconsin. Todd Bol built a small bookcase in the shape of a one-room schoolhouse and stuck it in his yard with a sign saying “Free Book Exchange.” People loved it and built their own and there are, according to the LFL website, as of January 2016, 36,000 Little Free Libraries registered in the U.S. and in 40 other countries.
A very nice LFL!
But is it really a movement? No, it’s one of those things people put in their yard and forget about. But why not use it to raise the level of reading? Book clubs, literacy organizations, and political discussion groups could sponsor LFLs. Liberal hipsters formed co-ops and groups in the ’60s and ’70s to discuss and promote collective knowledge: our non-physical LFLs contained Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest books, Thoreau’s Walden, The Diaries of Anais Nin, Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Population Bomb, Brecht, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sexual Politics, books on Dadaism, and Dune. Today, everybody has a voice and a Facebook page (she says, while blogging), but the internet absurdly has promoted the concept that all literature is equal. When Jackie Collins died, our library had a display of her books. The Library of Congress classifies Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as fantasy and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries as a mystery. (That’s where you’ll find them at our public library.) The few remaining newspaper book pages pander to the masses with interviews with Danielle Steel and reviews of rock memoirs. And by the way, rock memoirs are ghosted, are they not, so why review them? The few I’ve skimmed set the bar for bad writing.
In a stunning article in The Millions, “The Open Refrigerator,” Gerald Howard, an editor at Doubleday, discusses the changes in the now corporate culture of publishing. He writes about the history of the publication and decline of sales of Thomas Mann’s books in the U.S.
Sadly, The Magic Mountain, once a fixture of every middlebrow household’s bookshelf, has fallen off sharply in its sales and cultural currency, as has the rest of Mann’s oeuvre. He and it are too forbidding, demanding, and German for contemporary tastes.
It’s true. Foreign language departments are closing, the LFLS display bad books, God knows what Book Page editors are up to these days…
If I’m sounding like Carrie Matheson in Homeland, it’s because I just watched Season 4 on DVD!
To be honest, the LFLs do not do a brisk job in moving books, so why do I care?
A Posthumous Novel: The Theoretical Foot by MFK Fisher
MFK Fisher
I love MFK Fisher’s elegant essays on food and travel, collected in books with unforgettable titles like How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me.
But it is her posthumous novel, The Theoretical Foot, just published by Counterpoint, that has taken my breath away.
Written in 1939, this gracefully-written autobiographical novel was not published in her lifetime due to family objections. The typescript was found in a box after Fisher’s agent Robert Lescher died in 2012.
It closely mirrors the events of the pre-war summer of 1938, when Fisher and her second husband, the illustrator Dillwyn Parrish, entertained friends and relatives, including Dillwyn’s sister Anne Parrish, a best-selling writer, and her friend Mary, on a farm in Switzerland. In September, Dillwyn suffered excruciating pains in his leg and was diagnosed with Buerger’s disease, culminating in the amputation of his leg two weeks later. In Switzerland they were able to procure a pain killer, but back in California, they could not afford it, even with Anne’s financial help.
Though scenes of shattering illness are interwoven with the narrative, The Theoretical Foot is for the most part a house party novel. Set in Switzerland on a farm called Le Prairie in 1938, it revolves around Sara Porter, the beautiful, charming American hostess, always cooking delectable food. Sara and her lover, Tim Garton, who are separated from their spouses and unable to marry yet, have a kind of magical attraction for their guests. Only one of the guests, Lucy, an artist with a closeted lesbian crush on Tim’s sister, Nan, strongly disapproves of the unmarried couple living together. But their shimmering love has nothing to do with marriage, in the eyes of the others.
Although Sara is at the center, we see her only through others’ observations. The novel alternates the points of view of the other characters. Joe, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, is half in love with Sara, but hopes she will help him break up with his American girlfriend, Susan, with whom he has been hitchhiking in Europe. Tiny, pretty Susan, a student at an American university, is afraid of Sara.
She was wondering as she went along how this woman managed to scare her so thoroughly. The several times she’d seen Sara before, in America, she’d been quiet and kind and–in her own detached way–seemed honestly interested in what Susan was doing and what and where she was studying. Sue and Joe had gone to her house twice for dinner and had eaten and drunk and talked well into the night; rather, Joe had. Sue still remembered the agonies of her own shyness that had almost conquered her before each visit and the awkwardness that conspired to make her clumsily drop glasses and trip over rugs and stutter as she never had since grammar school.
Very soon, Susan, too, wants to confide about her worries about Joe.
Sara’s siblings, Honor, who is in love with a Jewish man who is probably incarcerated in a concentration camp in Germany, and Daniel, a student madly in love with the much older Nan , are drawn to Sara and want her approval, but her perfect confidence, beauty, and seductiveness annoy them. They are inhibited by her.
Fisher’s novel is interspersed with sections in italics that tell a different story. They describe a man in a hospital suffering from pain in his leg, and then phantom pain after the amputation in his “theoretical foot.” They also describe the suffering of his wife.
Fisher’s sister-in-law, the writer Anne Parrish, objected to the book’s publication, because characters and situation were barely disguised. I think it is a great pity this was not published at the time, but it certainly is not a flattering portrait of Anne Parrish’s friend Mary. Anne wrote in a letter that if Fisher ever decided to publish it, it should be under a pseudonym. “Not for my sake, not even for Mary’s…but to spare you and Dillwyn embarrassment.”
in 1941 Dillwyn committed suicide. After that, Fisher seems to have forgotten about the novel.
What a magnificent book! There are occasional awkward bits at the beginning, but it is a small classic.
This will be one of my favorite books of 2016.
Quotation of the Week: Angela Thirkell on the Greeks
It’s a new segment: Quotation of the Week!
Why? Because it’s easier to post a quote than actually write about a book.
I just reread Angela Thirkell’s hilarious novel, August Folly, a hectic comedy in which a bossy village matriarch is directing a summer production of Hippolytus in her barn. Mrs. Palmer corrals friends, neighbors, relatives, servants, and station-masters to act, sew costumes, and train the chorus. I burst out laughing when her neighbor Mr. Tebben learns that, thank God, he will not have to play Theseus. Here is his quirky response.
“I am relieved to hear about Theseus. Nothing would have induced me to act, but I had no wish to argue with Mrs. Palmer. Greek plays! I have always felt that the Greeks were easily amused. A stone seat under a burning sun, with a bitter wind that so often accompanies it, four or five people in preposterous boots and masks, plays with whose plots everyone had been familiar with from childhood, and there they would sit for days and days. Now the Vikings…”
Very, very funny.
An Interview With Sarah Vincent, Author of The Testament of Vida Tremayne
Sarah Vincent
Sarah Vincent, the author of the compelling novel, The Testament of Vida Tremayne, has kindly agreed to an interview here. I became hooked on her gracefully-written book while browsing at Amazon!
First, a few words about the book.
It centers on the relationship between Vida, a blocked writer, and her resentful daughter Dory, a real estate agent. But the twist is the intrusion of a charming fan, Rhiannon, who has insinuated herself into Vida’s life. After Dory finds Vida collapsed in the kitchen unable to speak, her mother is hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder. Dory realizes she must stay for a while at her mother’s country house, named “The Gingerbread House” after the title of Vida’s first novel. She is startled to meet Rhiannon, a stranger who seems to have moved in. What is the relationship between the women? But Rhiannon, who identifies herself as a creative counselor, seems so sympathetic. Told partly in the form of Vida’s journal and partly in a third-person narrative from Dory’s point of view, this psychological thriller is a riveting read.
The Interview
Mirabile Dictu: What inspired you to conceive of such a sinister situation and unusual triangle of characters?
Sarah Vincent: Firstly, thank you for the kind words, and for having me on your blog, Kat, it’s an honour to be in such fine company.
I wish I could say I had a blinding flash of inspiration while ironing the tea towels or walking the dog. I envy those writers who find the plot and characters arrive all neatly packaged in their heads. It doesn’t work like that for me. And I hate the idea of too much pre-planning with charts and so on. For me, it’s more a case of setting out to sea without a compass. I never know what I want to write until I’ve written it.
This novel evolved slowly. I work as an editor, so it had to be fitted in between clients, scribbled in fragments. I had no idea of how those fragments would fit together. All I knew was that I wanted to explore the creative process. Where does it come from? Does it falter, dry up with the menopause? The mother-daughter relationship is also a theme I keep returning to in my short fiction.
Originally I just had the two main characters, mother and daughter, Vida and Dory. Somewhere along the line, Rhiannon turned up. It was as if she’d just invited herself into the story. Rhiannon is clearly an archetype. She surfaced from my unconscious as I wrote, and then it seemed she’d always been there. The same thing happened with the creature, who pads through the pages, although I’d better not give too much away here.
Mirabile Dictu: Was it difficult to alternate voices and create this complicated structure?
Sarah Vincent: Again, while it does appear quite complex, the structure came about mainly by accident. It was tricky getting the dates right in the final edits! That said, the alternate voices felt natural. It can get a little dull writing from a single perspective, so the dual narrative suits me. Vida is dreamy and introspective, so it was good to offset that with Dory’s acerbic, worldlier voice.
Mirabile Dictu: Did any writers influence you in the writing of The Testament of Vida Tremayne?
Sarah Vincent: In a word, no. Not for this novel anyway. Countless writers have influenced me over the years, but perhaps more in terms of style or approach than in subject matter.
Mirabile Dictu: Would you tell us about your other books and writing under two names?
Sarah Vincent: My short stories and the Y/A trilogy are all published under my own name, Susan Davis. The short fiction has been widely published in anthologies and magazines, and been short-listed for awards including the Asham. Some stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. I love this form, because it allows more artistic freedom than a novel. It’s strange how the stories seem to divide into two distinct types: there are the socially realistic stories and the supernatural or magic-realist ones. The latter will be coming out shortly in a new collection. ‘The Gingerbread Wife’, picks up on Vida’s novel within the novel of ‘The Gingerbread House.’ It should be published this April.
The Y/A trilogy was published by Random House back in the early noughties: The Henry Game, Delilah and the Dark Stuff, and Mad, Bad and Totally Dangerous. That was a magical period. They were huge fun to write and practically wrote themselves. Wish I could pull off that trick more often!
That said, writing adult fiction is my preference. When I discovered I’d written a psychological thriller, I needed a pseudonym. Sarah Vincent now feels more ‘me’ than Susan does.
Mirabile Dictu: What are you reading now and who are your favorite authors?
Sarah Vincent: Oh dear – how long have we got? I love unreliable narrators, and Jane Harris’s ‘Gillespie and I’ is one of my top ten favourites. Sarah Waters rarely disappoints, especially when she ventures into the supernatural. ‘The Little Stranger’ is impeccable, so much more than just another ghost story, it explores consciousness itself. Then there are writers like the late Elizabeth Taylor who was a genius. She wrote the kind of exquisite prose that makes other writers sigh. ‘Angel’ her classic about the writer Marie Corelli is a favourite, as is ‘Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.’ I also love Barbara Comyns: a quirky original voice with a touch of magic. My favourite of hers would have to be ‘The Vet’s Daughter.’ I’ve definitely got a leaning towards gothic. I’ve just finished ‘The Loney’ by Andrew Michael Hurley. It’s that rare thing, a truly beautiful literary page-turner. Finally, I can’t leave out the obvious suspects: Angela Carter, Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood, Nabokov, Alice Monro…I could go on.
Generally, I look out for something a little different in my reading, the kind of books that are hard to categorize like Scarlett Thomas’s brilliant, ‘The End of Mr.Y.’
I’d better stop there! Thank you for having me, Kat.
Mirabile Dictu: Thank you so much for the interview! I look forward to reading “The Gingerbread House.”
Sarah lives in the South Shropshire countryside with her husband and her Jack Russell terrier, Beryl. She writes in a converted coal shed at the back of the house. You can read more about her at her website:
http://www.sarahkvincent.co.uk
And I posted about The Testament of Vida Tremayne here.
I’d Rather Stay at the Fishing Lodge: Camping vs. Camping Lit
A fishing lodge in Wisconsin
Somewhere on the planet is a couple who want to take a vacation. That is, the same vacation.
The rest of us flunked the one-question travel compatibility test: “Do you prefer to spend your vacation (a) on a primitive camping trip, or (b) in a luxury hotel on an island?
If this were the 1950s and I were Jean Kerr, I’d write columns for women’s magazines about the challenges of outdoorsy vacations. My spouse relishes 100-mile bicycle rides, long walks on muddy forest trails that suck the shoes right off our feet, and heating up a can of Dinty Moore stew on a one-burner Primus stove before retiring to the tent. Meanwhile, I lobby for a cabin or a lodge with an en suite bathroom. As the years go by, you realize that sleeping under a roof makes all the difference.
And so I wonder what other couples do. I am always fascinated when I hear President Obama and Michelle are spending a weekend at Camp David, because I am assured of the fact they are not literally camping. Barack does not turn to Michelle and say, “Let’s pitch a tent!” Michelle does not turn to Barack and say, “Can we take that moosehead off the wall?” And, trust me, all lodges have animal heads on the walls.
We have, apparently, camped in Iowa, Michigan, Canada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania. I can’t verify this, because the camp sites are so similar. Massive deer flies swarm as you walk from the campsite to the shower. You can only read two pages of your book before a herd of mosquitoes drives you into the tent. Shivering in front of a waterfall, I have remarked, “I adore Ontario!,” only to find I am at Letchworth State Park in New York. If you’re getting ready to sleep under the stars this summer, and I fear you are, here are some fine books to prepare you for what lies ahead.
1. We Took to the Woods by Louise Rich. In this delightful memoir (1942), Rich wittily describes her family’s life in a rustic fishing camp in the backwoods of Maine in the 1930s. She and her husband, both writers, left the city for a simpler life in the woods, and, with their son Rufus, befriend lumberjacks and laugh at tourists. Okay, the life would be far too “simple” for me, but if you don’t mind chopping wood, gardening, snowshoeing, and training huskies to pull a dog sled, you’re in. I loved this book!
2. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In Faulkner’s poor-white-trash camping tour de force, Addie Bundred is still breathing when her son noisily builds the coffin right outside her window. After her death, they embark with her unembalmed corpse on a nine-day wagon trip to Jefferson, where she wants to be buried. The coffin falls out of the wagon as they cross a flooded river, catches fire in a barn, and the corpse arrives stinking in Jeffrerson. This is a Southern Gothic classic, but reading it made me remember why I seldom read Faulkner.
3. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. In what must have been a very trying phase of childhood, I wore a “Frodo Lives” button and begged my mother to take us camping so I could recreate some of the hobbits’ finer moments. She refused: she did not care to venture into a space where more than five trees congregated, and felt that watching my brother play Little League baseball was more than enough time outdoors. I still adore the adventures of Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Strider (with whom I was in love), etc.. If you don’t know the plot, well…they take a long, long, long journey to destroy a Ring of Power that will destroy the world if it isn’t destroyed, and are often shivering in rainstorms under sopping wet capes. Yes, that’s camping for you!
3. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Set in a post-Arthurian mythic post-war England, this gorgeous novel is the story of Britons and Saxons living in a mist of forgetfulness. The two protagonists, Axl and Beatrice, an elderly married couple, cannot remember what happened yesterdays, let alone during the wars in King Arthur’s time. On a journey to find their son, they discover the causes of their amnesic culture. And, let me tell you, they don’t have Triple A or five-star hotels. They sleep wherever they find themselves, and not always under a roof.
4. Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. I laughed and laughed over Bryson’s account of his hike on the Appalachian Trail with his friend Katz. Nuff said.
5 .Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Caravaners. In this charming comic novel, a young woman blooms during a caravan trip in England. Edelgarde has persuaded her much older husband, the narrator, Baron Otto von Ottringe, that the trip will be cheap and healthy. He has envisioned himself sitting cozily inside the caravan, but it rains all the time, and he must tramp in the muddy road beside the horse, guide it through narrow gateways, and hold umbrellas over cooking pots. The way I look at it: at least they’re under a roof at night!
What are your favorite camping/travel books?
mirabile dictu 